But lead singer Mana isn’t about to accept her fate as a prisoner to the beauty industry: “Someone’s trend, it’s a shame!/Someone’s rules, it’s a shame!” she shouts in Japanese, transforming “Fashionista” from a lip-glossed pop jam into a revolutionary cry to stomp on your compacts in 4/4 time. –Stephen Deusner, Big Thief’s most resonant music keys into a sweeping modern dread—namely, that tech expansion and the ecological crisis have orphaned us from nature, maybe from part of our soul. Vaults to No. –Noah Yoo, Listen: Young Thug, “What’s the Move” [ft. Lil Uzi Vert], Black midi traffic in beautiful convulsions, spazzing between rhythms, textures, and keys with a dexterity that’s so precise it’s dazzling, so fluid it’s showy. When he delivers the chorus—which features the word “running” repeated eight times—it feels like a meditation of gratitude. Best when he’s blustery, he took the raring energy of his early singles and channeled it into an extended brag concurrent with the vibe of the dance that inspired him. “Lover,” the title track from her most recent blockbuster LP, is a reminder of how effortlessly she can translate specific gestures and moments into universal expressions of romance. Nudy is a perfect sidekick, Carti is a born star, and Bourne is the most daring rap producer working now. EAT SHIT!” Carter screams. “If it’s needed,” he told the New York Times, “it will find you.” Perhaps it’s telling that, on the solo album ANIMA, Yorke appears to confront his loss on a song called “Dawn Chorus.” It’s a title (if not the same composition) that fluttered around Radiohead lore for years. On “Daylight Matters,” from her delightfully eccentric fifth album Reward, she spins repetitive, circuitous speech patterns into delicate bridges and euphoric choruses. In the frail centerpiece of the band’s Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, he simply prods at the multiple ways humans give up, decay, and vanish. He’s a full showman here, his bits polished, his delivery smooth. Skeevy and giddy, he makes the gutter sound like a theme park. In this pair’s hands, love is an infinitely unruly concept, however concise their words and simple their musical arrangement, which doesn’t thicken much beyond the yawn of an organ and some distorted guitar. With a keening croak and hearty 12-string, Adrianne Lenker traverses this liminal space in great strides, implicating beauty, fear, plant life, and human death in a vast spiritual conspiracy. The band’s ambition clearly shines through. She sounds positively serene. On the first single from his sequel to the 2008 Mount Eerie album Lost Wisdom, he and collaborator Julie Doiron zoom out from the everyday minutiae of grief, excavating a broader-reaching poetics from blunt observation. Backed by an orchestra that sounds plucked from Hollywood’s Golden Age, she sings with compassion and grace to a lover she likens to a bird she’s releasing from its cage. Together with her fellow riot-starter Dylan Brady, Les crunches steel-wool bass and styrofoam guitars into something wonderful. The funky bass riff and disco drums mock her distress, setting the scene for a dance where our heroine has no partner: “I ran to you and you know why,” she shouts at the empty barstool next to her. 1 on Billboard Hot 100", "Ariana Grande's '7 Rings' Spends Second Week Atop Billboard Hot 100, J. Cole's 'Middle Child' Charges to Top Five", "Ariana Grande Claims Nos. Yet over four fearless albums, his physicality has occupied an ever-greater part of his work. 1 on Billboard Hot 100, Post Malone's 'Wow.' Here, she effortlessly flips the specter of colossal menace into a warm embrace. Because that album aspires to abstraction through repetitive loops and vocals, when you listen to the tracks sequentially, “Binz” feels like a respite. –Madison Bloom, On Western Stars, a Springsteen album full of character studies, the protagonist of “Hello Sunshine” may be the one who most resembles the man himself. Megan Thee Stallion and DaBaby—both witty Southerners with distinct if borderline-conventional rap styles—seize the Lil Ju beat as a stage. When she performs the song live, she strafes around the stage, microphone in hand, like she’s searching the crowd for someone, until she finally finds her younger self among them and delivers the coup de grâce: “Afraid that you’ll be just like me.” How she invokes time, self, youth, guilt, and forgiveness with just one line reveals the masterful craft of Van Etten on one of her greatest songs yet. 1 On Hot 100 With Biggest Streaming Week Ever For a Woman", "Mariah Carey Becomes First Artist at No. And truly, Uzi is the only rapper that could confess on record to being a loyal viewer of The Big Bang Theory and still have it slap. His talky flows scan as bar-heavy despite most of his raps being filler, simply because their ferocity can raze beats to cinders. It is the sort of music about fucking that you make when your very right to fuck is under attack: Brownstein and bandmate Corin Tucker sing about sex as a desperate leap into disembodiment. –Evan Minsker, Listen: Deerhunter, “What Happens to People?”, For their latest warning about the end of the human race, relentlessly self-aware genre agnostics the 1975 turn to a style that many—including the band itself—have deemed extinct: rock’n’roll. At the end of one year, and looking ahead to the next decade, here are the tracks we believe will stand the test of time. The words might sound unsettled and unspecific—something about waiting outside, going into a room, learning the truth—but he’s always made a virtue out of impressionistic lyrics. On “bmbmbm” (pronounced “boom boom boom”), they are puckish and aloof, stacking oblique lyrics and a warped sample of a wailing woman over a calm bass riff and steady drumming. 1 on Hot 100, Eminem & 5SOS New to Top 10", "Drake Rules Billboard Hot 100 for Fifth Week With 'In My Feelings,' Travis Scott Debuts Two Songs in Top 10". Wouldn’t that feel like cash printed on demand? It turns out the woman who built a career on fairy tales and scorched-earth breakup songs is just as deft with the simple and soulful. “Binz” is a banger, a sunny break from the self-serious mood of When I Get Home. “Flexin’ on these haters,” Uzi jeers, after rattling off all the designer labels on his person. But in June of this year, Paul re-emerged, releasing an official version of the leak and two new songs: “He” and “Do You Love Her Now.” “He” begins with fast strokes like “Bootylicious” before Paul’s signature funky guitar and pillowy whole notes emerge. The South Korean producer Peggy Gou’s “Starry Night” summons revellers around a familiar gathering point: bright, bold piano chords, the tentpoles of summertime house classics ever since the music migrated from Chicago basements to Balearic terraces. There's contentment in her voice as it floats over Jack Antonoff's sour guitar chords and soft keys, as if she’s savoring her just desserts. By Pitchfor k. December 9, 2019 . She’s had a ball, but as she flips through the photo album, she concedes that the culture is a little too lit, that the heat is making her breath feel heavy. It’s a cinematic country ballad about being left alone with your loneliness, still roaming the empty streets but now searching for hope there. Bleibt up to date und seht als erstes die offiziellen deutschen Charts. “Don’t you see that I’m expensive?” he spits in Spanish, voicing the indignance of anyone who’s been made to feel undeserving because of what they wear or who they love. Normani breezed through the track, co-written by Ariana Grande, with the confidence of an artist who knows her worth, and further stamped her star power with the stunningly gymnastic choreography in its video. –Ryan Dombal, You know it’s been a rough year when the man behind “Uptown Funk” makes an album of breakup songs. Saweetie’s raucous energy falls in line with another generation of women in rap: Three 6 Mafia’s Gangsta Boo and Crime Mob’s Diamond and Princess, who were exhilarating to listen to because they weren’t meek, pleasant, or well-mannered. in May, Big Thief seemed content to spend 2019 suspended above Earth. –Olivia Horn, Teenage Atlanta rapper Duwap Kaine has been releasing lo-fi bedroom recordings on SoundCloud for about three years with little fanfare, and his music feels almost yawned out, dotted with Chief Keef-inspired Auto-Tune melodies, mumbled punchlines, and featherlight beats. –Cat Zhang, Listen: Black Belt Eagle Scout, “At the Party”, One of the most consistent sources of joy on Instagram in the past year has been Lil Uzi Vert’s feed, which serves as a running catalog of the rapper’s outfits. As the folksy pop melody swirls, her words descend like so many colorful blocks on a screen. –Anupa Mistry, 2 Chainz’ Rap or Go to the League unpacks a long-held belief: The only two ways for some kids to make it out of the hood are to rap or play ball. What started out forbidding and impenetrable becomes a bubble you live inside. False starts while scanning a playlist, tinny snares from passing headphones, auto-play in all of your feeds: In 2019, sound is primarily experienced as fleeting. Released on the label of the powerful and enigmatic producer Don Jazzy, who also helped establish Afropop powerhouses like Tiwa Savage, Rema’s self-titled EP was composed of four tracks, each with a different sound—Juice WRLD-style trap, Young Thug-influenced melodies, and Afropop love ballads. The single edit trims the song a bit; the best version appears on Georgia’s forthcoming album Seeking Thrills, out in January, and gives room for her staggering intro to poke through the gleaming synths and stereo laser sprays. The tracks that defined the year, starring Billie Eilish, Thom Yorke, Normani, Bad Bunny, and more. Party? 1 on Billboard Hot 100 With Record-Shattering Streams", "Lil Nas X's 'Old Town Road' Leads Billboard Hot 100 for Third Week; Sam Smith & Normani, BTS & Halsey Hit Top 10", "Lil Nas X's 'Old Town Road' Rules Billboard Hot 100 For Fourth Week, Khalid's 'Talk' Hits Top 10", "Lil Nas X's 'Old Town Road' Tops Billboard Hot 100 for Ninth Week, the Most This Year, & DaBaby's 'Suge' Hits Top 10", "Lil Nas X's 'Old Town Road' Tops Billboard Hot 100 For Fifth Week, Taylor Swift's 'Me!' While Grande’s refrain of “I’m a star, I’ma need space” verges on cutesy, the delicate harmonies and airy production of “NASA” make its blown-out bass and trap drums feel weightless. –Quinn Moreland. –Jeremy D. Larson, When the concept of self-love has been commodified by hucksters selling $500 infrared sauna blankets, it can be tempting to toss all of your belongings into a dumpster and welcome a life of self-loathing instead. The rapper pays tribute to his father on “RICKY,” handing down paternal pillars of advice—trust no one but your family, stick up for your day-ones, respect women like you would your mother—to his followers, some of whom started out doubting him. It’s that sugary delivery and his control that elevates the track into a standout in a city that has no shortage of hits. The titular vocal sample, chopped into oblivion, is a suitable mantra: Nate returned to footwork while recovering from an injury that left him temporarily paralyzed from the waist down, a particularly cruel irony in a scene defined by movement. “Love you, I love you, I love you, I love you,” she sings, her wistful voice foreshadowing the twist: “But you’re not here.” The lilting vocal gives off the impression of talking to yourself, the sort of compulsive self-soothing that springs up in seclusion. Bedouine’s heroine stares wistfully at the night into which her bird has flown off, the echoes of their final words implied by avian flute trills. It’s tempting to take the quartet’s audacity as a challenge—to pop sensibilities, to listener patience—but it’s more rewarding to embrace their constant sense of wonder. It's a song perfect for 2019, but with a rock backbone that would go just as hard in any year. Interpolating the “doo doo doo”s of Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side,” “Summer Girl” never builds to one solid chorus or drop, instead swaying into a sketch of a season’s magic hour, rolling on and on into the sunset. “Juice” wasn’t the hit that landed her at No. –Sam Sodomsky, Listen: Lana Del Rey, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but i have it”, In the Brothers Grimm fairytale “Hansel and Gretel,” a young brother and sister are lured into a house made of sweets by a child-eating witch. I’m just happy.” It’s a startlingly vulnerable moment, one that makes this anthem of acceptance that much more invincible. The Irish dance-pop vet is ready to move, happy to feel wanted and free, even boasting that she’s never had a broken heart. With all of its juxtapositions, “Gretel” is a small study in reworking age-old concepts to fit into our troubling present. When “Not” finally crescendos into a scorched-earth guitar solo, it feels more like an exorcism than an exhale. Their sound is shamelessly opulent and sumptuous with rot, like fruit losing its color but deepening in scent. The fragmented story that unfolds against crisp, quiet hi-hats and warm piano chords has a nostalgic quality, though it’s hard to know if Lange is acknowledging someone from his past, present, or future. He recounts awkward drug sales, a hookup in a Burger King bathroom, and two encounters with a stripper: as a client and as a fellow patron at a laundromat. –Alphonse Pierre. On its glassy surface, the mournful lyrics are typically inscrutable. –Jesse Dorris. –Evan Rytlewski, An airplane is a breeding ground for epiphanies—you’re floating above Earth and awed by the expanse, but you also feel distant and isolated and ultimately alone. To call it an “interstitial” is to acknowledge its place in how we listen to music in this day and age. –Alphonse Pierre, Ari Lennox had to fight to put “New Apartment” on Shea Butter Baby because, she said, Dreamville label head J. Cole didn’t quite “understand” it. Rather than using boyfriends, endless work, or other people’s desires as a distraction, Hendricks decides to finally celebrate herself. It rolls like a boulder down a mile-long hill, pushed by a synth-rock snare and a seething, roaming performance from Van Etten as she feels every single word. They give "I Need You" the feeling of being suspended between two planes, its knees planted on the ground as its spirit drifts to the sky like a prayer. Thank goodness that sample cleared. If you’re going to scam, at least make a catchy song about it. “I was just a placeholder, a lesson never learned,” they sing and sigh, like someone who’s grown all too accustomed to getting that “I think we should just be friends” text. –Abby Jones, The core of DaBaby’s gauntlet-throwing year, “Suge” is one of 2019’s most fun and infectious hip-hop songs, putting on display the rapper’s signature bounce and his almost goofy, browbeating nature. –Anupa Mistry, The first half of this 10-minute track from DJ/producer Maya Bouldry-Morrison, aka Octo Octa, is rooted in gritted, lo-fi breaks, with vocals that drift on a reverbed vapor trail. 2", "Post Malone's 'Psycho' Hits No. –Ian Cohen, Brooklyn synth-pop band Charly Bliss introduced their second album, Young Enough, with a glimmering, radioactive song that delights in blowing everything up. 1?! –Sheldon Pearce, Listen: Brittany Howard, “13th Century Metal”, Perhaps the biggest shock on Klein’s latest album, Lifetime, is the appearance of a halfway conventional beat. Yet it’s featherlight: Hval’s euphoria and divine hooks transform scholarly thought into pure pop. The hyper-specific details—he makes it sound so easy that credit scams probably quintupled in the wake of this song—are what makes his music both seedy and improbably exciting. She arranges the song—a standout on her third album, the folk-pop gem Designer—so it builds gradually, adding new elements that subtly reshape its flow. 1 as 'Thank U, Next' Debuts on Top", "Ariana Grande's 'Thank U, Next' Returns to No. Then, six minutes in, the song finds its emotional anchor, as Bouldry-Morrison reads a buoyant note to her friends, her family, her listeners: “I love you! –Jillian Mapes, As a joint thesis statement from two of rap’s biggest breakout stars, “Cash Shit” is almost suspiciously on-the-nose. –Ben Cardew, If “Thinkin Bout You” is any indication, even after three years of marriage to her football-star husband, Ciara is still in the honeymoon stage. Until three minutes in, it’s a wiggly little thing, its cha-cha beat working double-time as frontman Ezra Koenig coos like a sexy villain. –Sheldon Pearce, At first, Powder’s “New Tribe” looms ominously. How do you savor intimacy when you can foresee its failure in vivid detail? The images are breathtaking in their simplicity and beauty. By conjuring a past he never experienced, “Home” once again takes Snaith somewhere he’s never been before. That intention shines and crackles through “One Sick Plan,” the centerpiece of his third and best record, Basking in the Glow. On “It’s Up Freestyle,” Keed perfects his high-pitched delivery, screeching and harmonizing over a beat from JetsonMade that sounds ready for a dystopian sci-fi movie. Add it to your library now. It’s a powerful moment: one of the most influential musicians of the 21st century stripping everything away so he can sing directly to you. Famous to fans for its incompletion, it may, to Yorke, have symbolized refuge and endurance. A potent juxtaposition of crashing noise music and pure ideals, “13th Century Metal” feels unconquerable, a maelstrom settling into place. The song’s straightforward production matches the force of her emotions; little more than a simple beat, bassline, and backing vocals elevate her voice. Selena Gomez, Ozuna & Cardi B) - Single. In addition to all the new names, established artists like Lana Del Rey and Vampire Weekend redefined themselves and reset the trajectories of their careers. –Cat Zhang, Even without an official release, “Pissy Pamper” was irrepressible. Years from now, when time has laid waste to my body, I will still whisper my personal Rosebud: “Wrangler on my booty.” –Matthew Schnipper, David Berman was a peerless songwriter and poet with a gift for squeezing expressive scenes out of seemingly ordinary language. Her smoky croon does the heavy lifting: the way she draws out and sinks into the phrase “I’m doing wonderful, just fine, thank you” feels like the deep, full-body stretch that comes after a satisfying afternoon nap. The titillating video for “Gone,” with Charli and Chris chained to and then dancing atop a white sports car in the rain, only solidified the song’s place as one of the most cathartic moments in pop this year. Then the song fades away, leaving you a little lighter than before. She sings about a relationship that’s not healthy yet no longer up for reconsideration; around her, the strings swoop and keen as if they're racing to the ground, too. The rapper sounds at ease over this colorful backdrop, his laundry-themed wordplay as loose and entertaining as it is technical. Her virtuosity is in tone and texture: the delicious derision of “duh,” the way she smudges consonants and crumbles vowels in her mouth. He draws from the rollercoaster hooks and blown-out emotion of his early-’00s Nassau County forebears, but strives to write, in his words, more “conscious” lyrics. But soon, the song’s steady groove and bright handclaps underpin a growing skepticism, as her perfectly intact heart begins to strike her as its own worrisome condition. 3 on Billboard Hot 100, Ariana Grande's 'Next' Leads for Seventh Week", "Mariah Carey No. “Drømmen om Ø (Forever Mix ’19)” may hit like a shock of tropical color against a gray city exterior, but it takes the length of an early-morning dream to achieve its blissful effects. 1 on Billboard Hot 100, Maroon 5's 'Girls Like You' Leaps to Top Five", "Maroon 5 & Cardi B's 'Girls Like You' Hits No. The song made clear that DaBaby was wound up and raring to go before he exploded this year, and no one has stopped him yet. –Noah Yoo, In the debate over whether it’s better to burn out or fade away, Deerhunter leader Bradford Cox doesn’t take sides. –Eric Torres, Listen: Charli XCX / Christine and the Queens, “Gone”, The relationships in Clairo’s songs always teeter on the edge of chaos. It’s hard to put an entire year’s worth of music into focus, but 2019 had a few standout moments captured on our charts: Country-rap sensation Lil Nas X rode his horse to the “Old Town Road” and all the way to the top of the charts. –Sheldon Pearce, Listen: Purple Mountains, “Snow Is Falling in Manhattan”, To listen to Mannequin Pussy’s Marisa Dabice sneer, cry, wince, and roar her way through “Drunk II” is to step into her shattered psyche. But not all revelry equates with excess, even when the world is crumbling. While the verses move slow, with half-spoken lyrics shrugged into wide-open space, the choruses build like a panic attack, anguished and ferocious. On paper, Mendes is pining after the girl who got away with the obsessiveness of an Instagram stalker—and yet his effervescent delivery, and shameless cheesing in the video, make it clear that this winning rom-com of a song has a happy ending. –Alphonse Pierre, It may not have been intentional that Normani’s first solo single after the dissolution of Fifth Harmony shares the effervescence of Beyoncé’s 2005 bop “Check on It,” but it was definitely subliminal: Like her Houston sister, here was a former girl-grouper stepping out on her own, eager to show the world her talent after a half-decade of performing as a cog in that system. –Alphonse Pierre, In his instantly famous Genius “Verified” video for “Ransom,” teenage rapper Lil Tecca detailed what he made up while writing his not-so-humblebrag of a breakout hit: He has never gone to Europe, he doesn’t wear designer clothes, and he can’t mentally handle being a player. He has Crohn’s disease, and he’s repeatedly expressed the desire to transcend his own fleshy form. Hval threads it together with a trance pulse that buffets these ideas across the wake-sleep divide like marbles in a Newton’s cradle. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, On “Lark,” the opening track from All Mirrors, Angel Olsen once again surveys how men and women in love struggle to see each other clearly. –Michelle Kim, Yoshinori Mizutani’s cover photograph of vivid lime-green parakeets outside a drab urban building is ingeniously suited for Kasper Marott’s Forever Mix EP. His rework quickly made its way from DJ to DJ (as these unofficial edits tend to do), appearing in sets by Peggy Gou, Ben UFO, and others, before finally being officially released this March. “And this must be the light you saw/Before our eyes could disguise true meaning.” He is certain that we lose this vision in time, each year getting further from that light. The track, a jagged instrumental courtesy of twigs alongside producers Skrillex, Nicolas Jaar, Benny Blanco, and Noah Goldstein, fills in the space between these two modes of address—sweet entreaty, throaty self-recrimination. Over time, Vernon expanded Bon Iver to include a small town’s worth of musicians and even a dance troupe, and together they’ve created a rousing arena anthem suitable for the ambitious tour they launched earlier this year. “Room Temperature” exemplifies Webster’s lyrical specialty, that all-too-familiar summertime sadness, those late capitalism blues. It doesn’t matter—the song is light and loose enough to capture both. 4", "Lizzo's 'Truth Hurts' Tops Hot 100 for 7th Week, Tying for Longest Reign Ever for a Rap Song by a Female Artist", "Selena Gomez Scores First No. In July, she dropped “Time Flies,” a Dee B-produced loosie that appears on the Madden NFL 20 soundtrack. –Philip Sherburne, Alan Palomo floated onto the indie scene a decade ago as the avatar of a sun-baked, synth-based movement that everyone soon begrudgingly agreed to call “chillwave.” Over the next several years, his Neon Indian project grew from warped-cassette daydream to wide-screen dance party. The caretaker is a metaphor for Berman’s role as a singer, and he treats that responsibility with reverence. Philadelphia bedroom-pop hero (Sandy) Alex G’s abstract update of the story, a highlight from his album House of Sugar, is decidedly darker: Gretel leaves her brother behind and ends up consumed not by the misdeed, but by her own twisted desire to return to the candy-coated lair. The song is aptly named, with the Catalan singer and Colombian star J Balvin exchanging swaggering verses that name-drop the Porsche Panamera and the flamenco icon Camarón de la Isla over a watertight reggaeton beat. Though “What Happens to People?” was recorded before the death of former Deerhunter bassist Josh Fauver late last year, the loss can’t help but hang like a specter over this song about the inevitability of life’s end. –Sheldon Pearce, Listen: Young Nudy / Playboi Carti, “Pissy Pamper”, Brittany Howard doesn’t specify whether the buzz she seeks on “Stay High” is internal or external, whether she wants her effervescence from emotional intimacy or a fat joint. All of Uzi’s various flexes coalesce during his appearance on “What’s the Move,” a highlight from Young Thug’s album So Much Fun. Because there’s a livestream to watch. On “Ashes to Ashes,” she tills the sediments of sex, art, and mortality, dragging ash from a cigarette into a grave and equating penetrating fingers to the double-digit swipe of a phone screen to a frantic drowning kick. Anger Management, her collaborative project with the producer Kenny Beats, was released just as spring arrived, but by summer, Rico seemed to have gotten fight music out of her system. –Thea Ballard, Over the past two years, the young Jamaican artist Koffee has steadily risen through the ranks of the reggae-dancehall world thanks to the success of her pop-leaning single “Toast,” a track so massive it was recently performed by a Chinese military band to welcome the Prime Minister of Jamaica to Beijing. The video, however, looked more like a Y2K-era screensaver on a desktop computer: a steady, slightly pixelated flow of distant stars in an endless black sky. “Drømmen om Ø (Forever Mix ’19)” (the first part of the title translates to “The Dream of the Island”) is also a strange bird within Marott’s own Copenhagen techno scene. But a funny thing happens as the song continues its endless build: It pulls you in. With its rustic arrangement and domestic imagery, it sounds like a spiritual sequel to “New Year’s Day,” the acoustic cleansing that closes 2017’s divisive Reputation. But in this economy, it’s worker liberation Control Top is after. 100 gecs seem to ask, What if you took everything you hated about yourself—all your insecurities about not being good enough or whole enough—and melted them down, jammed your boots in the sticky pit, and headbanged about it? In 2019, Lana Del Rey doesn’t have to explain why she considers hope to be a dangerous thing, but what does she mean by “a woman like me?” How does one of the decade’s greatest pop music enigmas define herself? It’s a song about communion, an invocation of the very act of coming together, and an irresistible reminder of why we do. Maybe it’s just a “bloody racket,” as Yorke mutters, riffing on how one man’s symphony is another’s dirge.