–Jayson Greene, There were so very few reasons to break out in ecstatic dance this year, but Jayda G offered a sublime exception. Launched in 2003, Best New Music is Pitchfork’s way of highlighting the finest music of the current moment. The best songs feel more like conversations rather than artworks to be hung on the wall and admired from several paces away. Our writers, editors, and more share the music that brought them comfort, the shows they long to see, and the 2020 losses that hit the hardest. After years of playing in emo bands and releasing candy-coated electropop, Ela Minus splits the difference on “dominique.” The standout from her debut LP, acts of rebellion, is a depressive ode to sleeping all day and never leaving the house set to bright, buoyant melodies. The video even features the superstar donning the chains, latex, and thigh-high boots of the song’s narrator, as he exhibits a genuine desire to play with gender expression in a genre often catered to the male gaze. She swats him away handily, the diss track equivalent of receiving a long text and dismissing it with a “K.” Its opening line, delivered in her characteristic hush, reflects decades of Black radical feminist critique: “I see a demon on my shoulder, it’s looking like patriarchy.” After coolly ethering Cole—over a cascading Madlib beat, no less—Noname busies herself with more important things: eulogizing murdered activist Toyin Salau, highlighting the crisis of violence against trans women, name-checking George Floyd, and calling for a break up of Amazon. –Noah Yoo, Listen: Yves Tumor, “Gospel for a New Century”. “Masochistic kisses are how I thrive,” he croons, staking a position as someone who revels in pain because they’re otherwise not long for this world. “It’s all the same shit.” To accompany the voyage, he commands a small band in his head—“Bring in the drums/Cue fake drums,” he sighs—but the actual accompaniment refuses to follow his orders. While her earlier releases were sometimes marked by nearly impenetrable abstractions, KiCK i feels just accessible enough to draw listeners into its maelstrom of chaos. But he doesn’t do away with those trademarks on “The Ascension”; he uses them as a mirror for even deeper self-investigation. by: Pitchfork. His voice, dexterous as Prince’s, does the most in a full range of light and shade. The song is a groggy anthem for those days when counting the spots on your ceiling can feel like too much work. With a bit more prodding to open up, maybe you’d land on: I’ve been falling apart these days. Sung over the simplest of orchestral accompaniments, his words spill out and burn like a fever dream, as if they were bestowed unto him—or maybe he’s just associating as he goes. It feels like looking up at the stars on the way back home when you’re 16 and missing your friends; Peter Gabriel is on the radio and the new issue of Heavy Metal awaits you in your bedroom. 2010-2014/15 was dominated by indie rock and folk, with a focus on DIY aesthetic. –Leah Mandel, Listen: Oneohtrix Point Never, “Long Road Home”, While Helado Negro’s Roberto Carlos Lange has been exploring experimental sounds and textures for more than a decade, his more recent work adopts more pleasant frequencies in service of space-age lullabies and healing spells. With “Murder Most Foul,” Dylan turns to a defining event of the 20th century to reveal that history is always happening right in front of our eyes, bringing with it everything that’s come before and everything that will soon be. She has forged through lust, betrayal, and heartbreak to reach this beginning—to ask, in the plainest terms, to be loved. The book is broken down into 9 chronological periods, each period beginning with a description of the music scene before the featured artists, and how those artists changed the music scene. He marvels that his mother “showed me love when all I seen was hate.” His typically labyrinthine verses straighten out, as though the page itself had become unburdened. But instead of aiming for the sugar rush of Swift’s early work or the arena grandeur of 1989, it stands as one of folklore’s subtlest moments. “I’ve never been a natural,” she sings over dreamy electric guitars and a lapping drumbeat that sounds buried under several layers of comforters. In 2020, it’s all tears, all the time. But the water she sings of on “Lilacs,” a stunning highlight from this spring’s Saint Cloud, comes in a bottle: Her flowers drink Topo Chico, a sparkling mineral water sourced from an inactive Mexican volcano with purported healing qualities. “Straight bars,” he announces at the top of “POP,” before making good on that promise with the kind of stream-of-consciousness spree we haven’t heard since Lil Wayne’s mixtape heyday. And while moments of glimmering contentment emerge from the fog, eventually reality seeps in: the garden she’s cultivated will forever be haunted. They offered a comforting shoulder to cry on, a lit match to long-simmering rage, and a temporary substitute for the dancefloors and mosh pits the pandemic stole from us. Featuring Cardi and Meg, Bad Bunny, Perfume Genius, Christine and the Queens, and more. But on “The Neverending Story,” he raps over Alchemist’s pensive Litto Nebbia loop about the wonder he still sees in the world—a motorcycle ride to the desert, the gold teeth that make his smile shine like a Frankie Beverly song. –Natalie Weiner, Arca’s music has always challenged listeners to free themselves from the constructs of pop, embrace bedlam, and find melodies in the noise. –Alfred Soto, Following detours into Tony Bennett-style crooning, lightly country-fried rock, and Oscar-winning melodrama, Lady Gaga made her ferocious return to the club with the all-bangers-no-ballads Chromatica. From Lorde’s ecstatic emotional cleansing to Frank Ocean’s ode to cycling to Cardi B’s rampaging banger of bangers, these are our picks for the best songs of the year. As the song builds, despair is tempered by a burst of energy that hints at survival. It's by far the best single release of his career: It's more melodic and more focused; fiercer and more playful; funnier and sadder. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. The instrumental break following an unexpected chord change lurches like a luxury liner in choppy water; melodic lines become queasily detuned. 3. She confronts her guilt for fading out of a friend’s life, chronicling the memories of intimacy—sweaty karaoke singalongs, summer nights in the city—and the quiet corrosion of falling out of touch. A torch song from Mars, “Long Road Home” is OPN with his romance meter at full gauge: romance of the very far away, romance of a car at night with a long way to go, romance of reuniting after isolation. This year saw the release of not only his long-lost debut—precipitated by a targeted leak—but also a replacement record, a restart of sorts, which paired him with Jay-Z. Eventually, he emerges from the wreckage into a clearing, holding still in the soft glow of the final minutes. By the end she recognizes there’s hope in the dark, too. But then, what is a chill-out room if not a sensory deprivation tank with beanbags? –Philip Sherburne, Drakeo the Ruler has long been unfazeable, but on his latest LP, Thank You for Using GTL, recorded on a payphone from the Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles County, ice water flows through his veins. See which albums are sitting at the top of this year's charts. She’s said that this song is the story of her life, and while she’s right that things go wrong no matter what, the lyrics also pose a reasonable question for the rest of us: what have you got to lose? There is goodness on the other side, but he can’t make out its shape. One moment the Punisher closer is a hushed acoustic ballad, the next it’s a swelling mid-tempo strummer, and then it explodes into an orchestral fanfare, and each section has its own emotional arc. “Hit Different” is misted with heady sluggishness, dragging drums, and Ty Dolla $ign’s honeyed voice, soft with the truth of a late-night realization. With sky-high synths and a girl-group chorus, “4 American Dollars” drapes her daggers in velvetine funk. Few tracks exemplify this duality as well as “Mequetrefe,” an ode to self-expression sans shame. It serves as the grand finale to an especially intimate folk song, hinting at the virtuosic talent he often keeps behind the scenes. “Funny how they think us naive when we’re on the brink,” she sings in a high, crystalline coo. Can you blame yourself for ruthlessness if you were never given a choice? In 2016, the 45th president all but ruined the word, but now with the end of his reign, pussy can spend the rest of the 2020s reclaiming its identity. Their debut album, Thunder, Lightning, Strike, is a hazy blend of nostalgia, evoking that period through a melange of action hero theme songs, early hip-hop (from 1979-82, … Yes, when he opens his mouth it still feels like being trampled by clowns. –Sheldon Pearce, Listen: Bad Bunny, “Safaera” [ft. Jowell & Randy and Ñengo Flow], The “Savage Remix” leak hit in April like an intravenous drip of caffeine and glitter, lifting the masses out of their doldrums, if only for four minutes. –Stefanie Fernández, No man is a whole movement. New releases to look forward to in the coming months, from SZA, Drake, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, and others. Girls on the Absurdist Meme, Anti-Colonial History, and Soul Records That Inspired, Moses Sumney Is Ready to Claim His Spotlight, Lady Gaga Producer BURNS Breaks Down His Favorite Dance Music. “Me ah go put you pon lockdown,” Koffee insists, the clever wordplay spelling out a shamelessly jubilant love story in the age of ’rona. That he would cut a record full of the same kind of lyrics being used against him in a sham court proceeding is more than just chutzpah. "The Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s" Track Info. –Ryan Dombal, “If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)” is the 1975 incarnate. The London-based producer-songwriter is taciturn as a lyricist and a singer, but such off-center musical moments help to fill in the blanks, suggesting that holidays and hula dancing offered only partial reprieve from some looming anxiety. It opens with percussion that sounds like a rapping at the door, a wake-up call. Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of 2010. 25. –Noah Yoo, The best part of the video for “Don Dada”—a cocky, bouncy, sexy slice of hip-house courtesy of New York rapper Cakes Da Killa and producer Proper Villains—is when Cakes, in an ice-white tennis skirt, steals the focus from a leonine model by shaking his ass in triple-time. to present an airtight case in favor of women expressing full-bodied lust. So on its lead single, “Garden Song,” Bridgers is dissecting her dreams again, delving into her subconscious to understand what she wants and what it feels like to actually get it. The 200 Best Songs of the 1970s Pitchfork. –Jessica Kariisa, Ana Roxanne makes even silence sound vivid. –Jonah Bromwich, British singer-songwriter Lianne La Havas would be forgiven for simply coasting on her rich voice and its impossibly slow vibrato. Porridge Radio frontwoman Dana Margolin sings as if her insides are aflame, delivering lines with nearly feral bravado. “Onyeka (Baby)” is an indestructibly sweet, sunny moment amid a colossal album of dancehall, Afrobeats, and pop, another of Burna’s Sisyphean efforts to compress the breadth of pan-Africanism into his person. “Maybe if I drank enough/I’ll make my way over to ya,” she thinks out loud. The vocal melody encompasses a range you could find under one hand on the piano, just a few notes, while her fingerpicking works its familiar, comforting magic. –Emma Madden, Listen: Ana Roxanne, “Suite pour l’invisible”, Restless experimentalist Moor Mother couples her searing spoken-word delivery with New York rapper billy woods’ oblique rhymes to mesmerizing effect on this one-off collaborative single. Not since Fela Kuti has one artist blended the contradictions, agonies, and triumphs of the continent with so much muscle. Warm, lo-fi keys and a loosely strummed guitar cushion the restlessness of self-work and sobriety, as she plainly states that she’ll “put on a good show for you.” Her voice crackles as she wrestles with the precarity of declaring acceptance—what it means to give it to yourself, to others—and the nerves of speaking a truth in shared company. “WAP” is so decisively absent of shame that it’s now positioned alongside similar anthems by the likes of Khia, Lil’ Kim, and Trina. The moody bassline delivers a melody to curl up in and brood, while the uptempo beat towards the end is a reminder that even loneliness ends. But something feels off. –Jamieson Cox, Sometimes, trying to find a path forward after someone’s depleted you can feel like building a house of cards with a wet deck. The real magic is the winking humility of the image in the mirror: a woman criticized endlessly for being too rich and too gauche who knows that living well is still the best revenge. On the track, the L.A. virtuoso best known for his imaginative bass lines and staggering fretwork embarks on a quixotic quest to woo a love interest with his speckled headwear. He also wrote “Dragonball Durag,” a strange and glorious ball of fuzz that, like his best songs, threatens to flutter away at any moment. Set to walls of guitar and synth hooks, his lyrics contain a nod to the music that inspired him as a Black teenager interested in punk and indie, and to the unfulfilling jobs he worked for years to pay the bills before quitting to focus on performing and producing. But “Yo Perreo Sola” also repeated reggaetón’s long-standing pattern of relegating female vocalists to anonymity; Puerto Rican rapper Nesi, who delivers its chorus with a passionate drawl, was uncredited upon the song’s release. –Evan Minsker, Earl Sweatshirt and Maxo have both made their homes in the rain-blurred realm where raps feel like unspoken thoughts, where beats resemble humming machinery a block away—a world of smudged loops, two or three notes long, punctured by diaristic jottings that flash like lightning. Throughout “Mustang,” Strange offers intimate confessions like, “It's nice to think that folks are near/Waking up was hard this year,” but the song is unapologetically loud enough to get anyone out of bed. It’s something like Phoebe Bridgers’ version of Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush,” in which fear and bombed-out desolation are buoyed by an undercurrent of defiance. But SZA is buoyant as she sings about her inconsistent love. And with “Yo Perreo Sola,” Bad Bunny offers a consent-driven treatise centering a woman’s independence on the dancefloor. Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield is driving with her partner through a Memphis sunset when a realization strikes, and on its face, “Fire” is a piercing love song that chases after the brief brilliance of the day right as it settles into sleep. On Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Fiona Apple skewers romantic orthodoxy with such flair that you might wonder why anyone ever bothers with it to begin with. All you can do is bask in the power of Flo Milli shit. Pitchfork may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. You can practically feel a distance being bridged between her voice and the microphone, and between despondent fans across the globe. There’s a built-in reverb grounding Crutchfield’s falsetto, and it sounds like an unexpectedly early thaw, like the comforting promise that when flowers wilt and eventually die, it’s because they will soon bloom anew. –Quinn Moreland, Saweetie builds contemporary hits out of ’00s hip-hop anthems, consistently inverting their masculine attitudes to make them her own. The music builds excitedly behind her, with flashes of synth joining the jittery acoustic guitar pulse. Olsen’s elegiac melody gives weight to her words, offering a troubled tribute to maintaining your sanity when everything else seems to be falling apart. –Sam Sodomsky, With “Mustang,” Bartees Strange took everything he knew about indie rock and put it into one massive song. Despite the blatant A Deeper Understanding fanfic, the Killers aren’t trying to copy the War on Drugs on “Caution” so much as paying the same kind of homage to them as Journey once did to Bruce Springsteen. Pitchfork's Top 25 Songs of 2019. Dry, papery beats, synchronized claps, and muffled chit-chat lend the atmosphere of a packed, pulsing nightclub—and the molasses-slow breakdown offers one of the best beat-drop payoffs of the year. –Mano Sundaresan, After eulogizing his late mother on 2015’s startlingly bare Carrie & Lowell, Sufjan Stevens is now grappling with the death of his own ego. “Angel” is sad but happy, alluring yet absurd, expressing the simple things we struggle to define. –Eric Torres, Like any superhero team-up or buddy comedy, the formula for an RTJ song is carved in stone by now: Killer Mike the swaggering priest and El-P sardonic philosopher, threatening R-rated violence and revolutionary action over sounds rescued from hip-hop’s golden era and retrofitted for pre-pandemic festival stages. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Your California Privacy Rights. The five-minute song is an all-consuming aesthetic maelstrom that is continually transforming; each beat change connects another link in a chain of references, establishing a masterful reggaetón timeline. Graphic by Drew Litowitz, photos via Getty Images. Music reviews, ratings, news and more. Angel Olsen: “All Mirrors”. Tamara Lindeman sketches out a villain—the titular thief, silent and cool—before lifting the veil on larger forces at work: laws, banks, a rotten system that forces people to act in their own self-interest. –Isabelia HerreraListen: Drake, “Laugh Now Cry Later” [ft. Lil Durk], You might consider this as kind of like one of those pop-punk covers of turn-of-the-millennium hits gone spectacularly right. “I can’t understand why you don’t understand me, baby,” Danielle complains. Like passing through a space inhabited by the spirits of lost loved ones, “QADIR” is both comforting and unsettling. The song ends with a crunching loop of distortion, sonic rubble from which to once again become whole. The historical gravity of his words are balanced with a pat rhyme scheme and self-reflexive lines like, “I’m just a patsy like Patsy Cline.” The poetry and loaded allusions come with levity. Their rich, fluttering harmonies pirouette over trap snares, finger snaps, and wobbling bass, all the while painting a portrait of a perfectly unbothered night out with friends. As with all must-see serialized dramas, the guest stars are just as impressive as the main cast. “Bittersweet,” the opener of her eponymous third LP, envelopes La Havas’ heart-wrenching ache with production that’s as warm and inviting as a crackling bonfire. Megan Thee Stallion had only grown as a beacon of that-bitch-ism since 2019, but joined by one of the 21st century’s greatest entertainers, she became bolder. In the chorus, anxiety stirs and a half bar sinkholes like a lost summer; in the lyrics, Apple is radically direct, like the master painter whose final act is to draw a simple straight line. –Alphonse Pierre, Listen: Bfb Da Packman, “Free Joe Exotic” [ft. Sada Baby], Nick Hakim’s tribute to a deceased childhood friend shines in the details. In the track’s most tender moments, the maxed-out vocal effects are toned down to center Rico’s melodic pleas for affection, capturing the unique angst of chasing love behind a screen. The difference between independence and loneliness, Dehd suggest, is your relationship with yourself. –Clover Hope, Adrianne Lenker’s music feels like a whisper even when her band screams behind her, and on her solo music, that whisper is pinpoint-accurate; listening to her sing feels like a tap on the shoulder. The London-based producer dropped her bubbly single “Both of Us” mid-summer, and it felt like being rescued by a party barge while lost at sea. 2. David Bowie – "Life on Mars?" Pitchfork's Top 200 songs of the 2010s features Kendrick Lamar, Grimes, Kanye West, Bon Iver, and pop songs of all kinds, and each song brings back memories of the past decade. Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist. Ela Minus Makes Techno-Pop for Everyday Rebellion, 1010 Benja SL Makes Strange Soul Music to Match His Unbelievable Life, Meet Jockstrap, an Uncanny Electro-Pop Duo From the Retro Future, Lomelda’s Hannah Read Is Forever Searching for Connection, Kehlani on the Meaning of Her New Album’s Apocalyptic Artwork, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker Breaks Down His Favorite Drum Sounds, Cakes Da Killa / Proper Villains, “Don Dada”, The Music That Made Beverly Glenn-Copeland. Beneath the lackadaisical surface, however, is a distinct lack of joie de vivre. The Supremes – You Can't Hurry Love (1966) The Rolling Stones – Paint It Black (1966) The Beatles – I Am the Walrus (1967) The Velvet Underground – I'm Waiting For The Man (1967) Take chances, live life, and dance as much as possible. Sure, the remix unites two iconic wailers of the 2000s Alternative Press set—Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump and Chiodos’ Craig Owens—for arresting vocal turns that transport you back about 15 years. –Jillian Mapes, Listen: 100 gecs, “hand crushed by a mallet (remix)” [ft. Fall Out Boy, Craig Owens, and Nicole Dollanganger], “Robber” unfurls like a cerebral crime drama, the kind that lures you in with a moody pilot and leaves you glued to your couch until you figure out whodunnit. Enter Pharrell, reciting a mantra about the circular clutches of modern capitalism in the laconic tone he once used to brag about his Gandalf hat; enter Zack de la Rocha, erstwhile Rage Against the Machine frontman, incendiary and conspiratorial about wanting to rip those systems apart. –Jazz Monroe, Listen: Fiona Apple, “I Want You to Love Me”, Plenty of languages have a word for the nostalgic longing that comes with grief: in Portuguese, “saudade” articulates it while romanticizing the pain of absence. –Noah Yoo, Dua Lipa’s “Physical” is pure adrenaline: a stand-up-the-second-you-hear-it masterpiece of power pop that can transform a dancefloor into something feral, or at least help you eke out one last push-up. A former student of Mills College’s acclaimed experimental-music program and current member of the Kranky Records roster, which includes the likes of Grouper and Tim Hecker, Roxanne draws inspiration from classical Hindustani singing and sacred choral music in her ambient soundscapes. The best under-the-radar finds in hip-hop, rock, dance, and more, New releases to look forward to in the coming months. It’s the sound of the self turned into an atmosphere. It’s not a testimonial; it’s a fragile meditation on lost innocence, surrender, and the contradictions of trauma. Maines’ admissions of vulnerability only further root her battle cries in her humanity, speaking to a righteous channel of rage, sorrow, and bewilderment at the hurt of a relationship gone to hell. For the most part, though, quality lacked. The Jackson 5 – I Want You Back 3. 1. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. The California artist had a breakthrough year lending his touch to albums by Bob Dylan, Phoebe Bridgers, and Perfume Genius, but on his own record, Mutable Set, he explored an elegant quiet that’s entirely his own. On “Lost One,” a crackly ballad that concedes to the slipperiness of time, she confesses into an abyss about the sting of falling short in a partnership. Apple shakes off the burden of expectations and demarcates her own growth, building toward a Kate Bush-worthy insistence that she’ll make it up her hill. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz, The jarring dissonance between a four-on-the-floor acid-house beat and the burden of having a body makes electronic duo Pale Blue’s “I Walk Alone With Acid” more incisive than your average dance banger. Synths briefly wail alongside her, suggesting an undercurrent of rage. The meaning of it all is right there in plain sight. Against a spare acoustic guitar backdrop, in his own increasingly fatherly baritone, Bill Callahan tells a faintly supernatural story of parents and children, life and death, and the profound closeness and distance that can coexist between people. The tracks that defined this bizarre year, featuring Megan Thee Stallion, the Weeknd, Christine and the Queens, Noname, Waxahatchee, and more. Steady yet anxious congas, a gentle flute, and bright keys meld into an affectingly soulful plea for a kinder world. Over a tick-tock electro beat, the bleary synth production grows in intensity as hard-panned stereo effects become more disorienting. –Jackson Howard, Thundercat has Dragon Ball Z tattoos all over his body. Even though “Sunblind” is an ode to the departed, it never succumbs to melancholy. Kendrick Lamar. Best New Music. The unrelenting drums are a perfect match for the field recordings of glacial melt that Owens sprinkles in for ambience and texture, her shuffling hi-hats pinging across the tundra. All rights reserved. The album’s first 10 songs are a litany of bullets, scars, and endless striving, but the mood shifts with the closing “I Love (Mimi, Moms, Kev),” a tribute to his wife, mother, and late friend. And given that the artists responsible are gecs, one of the slipperiest, most brilliant-dumb acts going, it’s both more and less complicated than that. Anguish turns to grief as Sullivan’s hoarse, fragile vocals retreat into a guitar that sounds as hollow as her defenses, landing somewhere between gospel and otherworldly. The songwriting is airborne and graceful, using lyrics about hushed conversations, burning discos, and “shimmering beautiful” visions as melodic cues. The song is a standout from Heavy Light, her sauntering, sensuous seventh album as the frontwoman of U.S. (All Playlists) Weird Era (ca.
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