The 100 Best Songs of the 2020s So Far

When I joined Pitchfork a couple months ago as its new editor, we got to work on what you’re reading now, the Best Songs of the 2020s So Far, our first big list of the year. On the surface, there’s something a little trivial about the “Best of the 2020s So Far” as a concept. Like really? Five years? Why not just thug it out the full decade? But then I realized that not only are slightly arbitrary lists fun to make, but holy shit so much has happened in five years!

Those lockdown records sound entirely like a different era, yet feel inseparable from the shape of music right now. From rap getting brasher and noisier, to online scenes blossoming during quarantine, to entire subcultures of music being shot to the moon and stripped for parts by TikTok, music as we know it fundamentally shifted this half-decade. Listening through hundreds of songs and whittling down these lists with the Pitchfork staff has been full of laughter and bewilderment and tough debates. But it was mostly about remembering all the little moments of musical joy and wonder from earlier phases of our lives, some of which were actually that special in hindsight, and some of which were definitely not.

Today is songs, tomorrow is albums, and then we’ve got some smart essays from critics on how they’ve heard the 2020s so far. –Mano Sundaresan

Lil Yachty: “Poland” (2022)

A huge percentage of rap this decade, on major labels and deep in underground crevices, can be understood as driving toward or branching from Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red. With “Poland,” a snippet that leaked and was wisely left untouched for its official release, Lil Yachty reimagines that white-hot sound palette as an environment for something awfully close to mourning. “Poland” has only an eight-bar verse; the point is the chorus, an oddly wistful statement about slipping codeine cough syrup past customs officers in central Europe. It’s a barely half-formed thought in gorgeously realized harmony, a distillation of a longing you never knew you had. –Paul A. Thompson

Listen: Lil Yachty, “Poland”

Grace Ives: “Shelly” (2022)

So diverse and exceptional is Grace Ives’ 2022 indie-pop album, Janky Star, that it’s almost impossible to pick one delegate to represent it. But the power-pop of “Shelly” captures a particularly unique part of the heart and soul of the young singer-songwriter, like a more flip and queer Ric Ocasek. Ives wrote the song about a hot bartender she ogled while working coat check at a venue in Brooklyn. It’s a flattering portrait dotted with specks of drool falling out of her mouth. She wants to put her in her rider; she wants to buy her amaryllis. “Wonder what she wants for her dinner/She’s really got me looking inward,” Ives sings with a wink. Such a small song for such a big crush. –Jeremy D. Larson

Listen: Grace Ives, “Shelly”

Tinashe: “Nasty” (2024)

Plato believed humans once had two heads, two pairs of legs, and hands, but their power frightened Zeus enough to cleave them in half. Because of that fateful day, Tinashe was cursed to desperately search for that second half who could match her freak. “Nasty,” her 2024 song of the summer contender, is a siren song for sexually liberated folk, notably a bespectacled Brit whose fan-edited dance routine contributed to the virality of the track. “I’ve been a nasty girl,” Tinashe repeats in the hypnotizing refrain. It might take a lifetime but she’s on a mission to maximize her joint freak: “I got stamina, they say I’m a athlete.” Godspeed, Tinashe. –Heven Haile

Listen: Tinashe, “Nasty”

Purelink: “Maintain the Bliss” (2021)

When the three members of Purelink set up in Chicago’s Soapbox Music studios for two days, in 2021, they may also have opened up a portal in time. Because “Maintain the Bliss,” the A-side of the trio’s debut EP, feels like it could easily be a transmission from a quarter-century before. While it may well play like a rediscovered artifact from the 1990s’ dub-techno scene, “Maintain the Bliss” is remarkably verdant. The track’s flickering hi-hats and rosy chords evoke sprinklers sweeping across the lawn at daybreak—quite a contrast from the graphite hues and brushed-steel textures of the genre’s touchstones. It’s an unusually blissful update to the darkly meditative sound. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Purelink, “Maintain the Bliss”

DJ Arana: “AQUELA MINA DE VERMELHO” (2022)

While it is impossible to attribute the rise of Brazilian funk to a single artist, one of its most stalwart innovators has been DJ Arana, a teenager from São Paulo who went from learning how to make music on his phone as a child to becoming one of Brazil’s most recognizable stars. “AQUELA MINA DE VERMELHO” encapsulates everything about the young magician, a surreal four-on-the-floor funk hymn whose menacingly thin and tinny “tuin” noises could send a dancefloor of dead fish into flopping hysterics. It feels like you’re stumbling through the club in an intoxicated fog with its cursed tones ringing endlessly over MCs casting spells. You’ll be leaving the baile with a huge smile and blood trickling down your ears. –Tyler Linares

Listen: DJ Arana, “AQUELA MINA DE VERMELHO”

Blake Mills: “Skeleton Is Walking” (2023)

You ever rip a solo? Man, I bet that feels so good. Fuck. Songwriter, studio geek, and guitarist Blake Mills rips a big solo on “Skeleton Is Walking,” the peak of his otherwise austere 2023 album Jelly Road. He absolutely shreds, but it’s his signature kind of mahogany shredding. You imagine he ripped this solo deep in a leather recliner surrounded by the kind of expensive analog gear off of which Steely Dan used to do lines. Sometimes it’s just about ripping a solo. –Jeremy D. Larson

Listen: Blake Mills, “Skeleton Is Walking”

Rostam: “4Runner” (2021)

Through the fuzz of the car radio or else an iPod through the tape deck, “4Runner”’s cozy chords and harmonica honks unfold a road trip fantasy romance. So what to make of these details—the stolen plates, the knife in the door compartment—that sound more like the couple on the cover of Sonic Youth’s Goo (you know, “Within a week we killed my parents and hit the road”)? That’s how I came to understand “4Runner” as tragedy, or the moment just before tragedy, these two mixed-up queer kids out on the highway somewhere, scoring dope, sleeping in the Toyota. Now I imagine Rostam’s silent companion, riding shotgun, singing “Fast Car.” Nothing AM gold can stay. –Anna Gaca

Listen: Rostam, “4Runner”

MUNA: “Silk Chiffon” [ft. Phoebe Bridgers] (2022)

They say falling in love makes you feel like a teenager again and so does “Silk Chiffon,” the shout-it-to-the-heavens hit that granted MUNA indie-pop icon status (with a little help from new label boss Phoebe Bridgers). A ready-made anthem for every queer who took up rollersports in the pandemic, “Silk Chiffon” pairs the foaming excitement of a crush with the quieter thrill of heading downtown on your own. Remember that first taste of independence? –Anna Gaca

Listen: MUNA, “Silk Chiffon” [ft. Phoebe Bridgers]

Billie Eilish: “Happier Than Ever” (2021)

Billie Eilish’s colossal breakup track barrels through the stages of letting go. She starts off with sweet guitar strums and casually cutting assessments, dead-eyed and humming along. But minutes in, the facade cracks. Eilish cannot contain her anger, and with five words—“I don’t relate to you”—she crashes through the gauzy romance she built up in her head. She howls over a torrent of drums, like she’s reframing the relationship in real time: She was just a kid, she was just embarrassed, she was locked out of enjoying her own life. The song doesn’t crescendo as much as it crashes; in this space, gut reactions are the greatest truths. –Dani Blum

Listen: Billie Eilish, “Happier Than Ever”

Bear1boss: “Xan!” (2020)

Atlanta’s rap scene this decade has been defined by extremes. Take the demented horror-core of recent star Baby Kia, or its inverse—the frenetic fun of Bear1boss. In 2020, he synced up with Ziti, whose beats are as unorthodox and versatile as Bear1’s cadences. The first song they recorded together was “Xan!,” a kinetic, celestial track that has since become a staple in underground Atlanta. The magic lies in how Bear1boss fills space in the airy beat: He lays down a mesmeric melody and scatters sharp, animated ad-libs all around it. “Xan!” helped cement his chaotic trademark sound, which he has since built a dense, equally sporadic catalog around. –Millan Verma

Listen: Bear1boss, “Xan!”

PinkPantheress: “Pain” (2021)

It’s wild that the queen of ASMR’n’b almost never ascended to her feather-soft throne. Wanting “closure” for a few lo-fi drafts recorded in her dorm at 3 a.m. languishing on the hard drive, she decided to post them on TikTok. Within a few months, she became the face of introspective, terminally online zoomer pop. Maybe her simplest and best song to date, “Pain” captures everything alluring about her music: the hushed, dreamlike aura of her shy voice; the way she makes stilted romance sound bizarrely blissful, like she’s absent-mindedly trilling la-la-la in the clouds. It samples Sweet Female Attitude’s 2000 UK garage classic “Flowers,” which in turn takes its poignant melody from Erik Satie’s 1888 composition “Gymnopedie No. 1.” The result collapses time periods and twisted emotions into a deliciously hazy blur, a tickly drizzle of sweet sadness. It came at the perfect time in early 2021, just as lockdown restrictions eased up and the worst of the pandemic seemed to be over. It soundtracked a dizzyingly hopeful spring. –Kieran Press-Reynolds

Listen: PinkPantheress, “Pain”

Liv.e: “Wild Animals” (2022)

The very first words on Liv.e’s experimental R&B album Girl in the Half Pearl are “Oh no.” She wrote the album to cope with a painful, all-consuming relationship that kept pulling her back in. And, yet, halfway through the project, she delivers “Wild Animals,” a warm jazz-pop song that unspools as easily as a satin sleeve slipping off your shoulder. Above gentle drums and lilting keys, Liv.e recounts an interaction with a man who flirts with her despite having a girlfriend. She coolly rejects him and dismisses his behavior—men will always crave attention, she asserts, don’t take any of it too seriously. It’s a shining moment of insight that serves as a lodestar for the rest of the album. When she repeats the line, “I hope that girl make the choice to leave him,” Liv.e is addressing the man’s girlfriend but also singing to the version of herself who needed to hear the same message. –Vrinda Jagota

Listen: Liv.e, “Wild Animals”

Astrid Sonne: “Do you wanna” (2023)

Modern pop songs are about desire and need, the fierce yearning for pleasure or revenge, an epic night out, a bong rip the size of Mount Vesuvius, satisfying a lust that pounds inside you like a thousand jackhammers. So when Astrid Sonne asks, very frankly, “Do you wanna have a baby?” it’s not the question that makes her song so radical, but her answer. “I really don’t know,” the Danish musician sings. “Do you wanna bring people into this world?” You get the feeling, baby or otherwise, that her ambivalence is not going to change. She’s singing of war, climate change, disease, depression, pain, and struggle—the challenges inherent in being alive that any human being can and will face—and weighing that against the very real yen to make a family. It’s something you cannot decide upon without considering mortality, ethics, economics, time, and passion. It’s a lot!

Sonne’s skill as a singer is really beside the point here—more affecting is that she’s an intimate singer, like the voice inside your head. But the song’s most important part may be before she even opens her mouth. The song’s drums are all you hear for the first 15 seconds. They sound like someone knocking at the door inside your brain. Open up: It’s Astrid Sonne, and she has something important she wants to ask. –Matthew Schnipper

Listen: Astrid Sonne, “Do you wanna”

NBA YoungBoy: “Nevada” (2021)

In under five years, NBA YoungBoy has dropped 20 projects; veered from sneering rage beats and scene-kid emo rap to erudite No Limit homage; collabed with Lil Nas X, Bktherula, iLoveMakonnen, Yeat, and appeared on a blockbuster Tyler, the Creator album. Beyond the genre exploration, his frantic method of recording and releasing music feels like a gradual process of tightening flows and perfecting turns of phrase and melody—as he does on “Nevada,” a devastating tune that feels like staring down the darkness of a long, empty highway. The woman of his dreams is somewhere at the end, and the stars dotting the sky are the ghosts of his friends. It draws the cleanest line to date from YoungBoy through Kevin Gates, all the way back to the bluesiest Boosie hymns. In relative isolation, YoungBoy somehow captures the biggest feelings. –Mano Sundaresan

Listen: NBA YoungBoy, “Nevada”

Two Shell: “home” (2021)

In their first-ever interview, elusive dance duo Two Shell explained why humor is so integral to their project: “It's kind of the fuel in our tank. Things have got so sensitive now, it really is a mind virus.” Fittingly, their breakthrough 2022 track “home” takes a dour, downbeat number from Danish bedroom-pop trio CHINAH and floods it with dopamine. Shimmering and stuttering at 160 BPM, it's the alien lovechild of hyperpop and techno, lighting up the high points of DJ sets from Four Tet, Jamie xx, and Avalon Emerson this decade. But its magic is its mixture of sour with sweet: the saccharine, pitched-up vocal wanders, melancholic, through a maze of trembling synths like a woozy-eyed raver having a private epiphany in the chaos of the club. It's not self-serious, but still full of sensitivity. –Aimee Cliff

Listen: Two Shell, “home”

Japanese Breakfast: “Be Sweet” (2021)

Michelle Zauner spent the better part of the 2010s floating in a bottomless well of grief. But while penning her way through the death of her mother, both in song and memoir, she also came to learn the life-changing magic of forgiveness. “Be Sweet” revels in this pivotal turn, which fueled much of her joyful third album as Japanese Breakfast, Jubilee. It’s a song of relief, where articulating what you need can help reclaim a happiness you once believed to be lost forever. “I wanna believe in you,” she coos, as much directed to a lover as to herself. Over euphoric ’80s synth-pop, her sugary pleas twirl and glide in a state of exoneration so sincere that not even a fictional videogame language could obscure its emotional high. –Nina Corcoran

Listen: Japanese Breakfast, “Be Sweet”

The 1975: “If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)” (2020)

Matthew Healy specializes in desperation, and “If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)” is among his crowning achievements. He and his 1975 bandmates make it sound effortless and even exhilarating to abandon life and obsess over an online paramour. That last part, of course, is how the song’s protagonist would like it to sound, because it’s more like he’s paying a stranger for a morsel of attention and affection. “If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)” is bubbly and irresistible while still lurid and icky, a juxtaposition that Healy loves to lay bare and accept. –Matthew Strauss

Listen: The 1975, “If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)”

Azealia Banks: “Fuck Him All Night” (2021)

It’s always the witching hour in “Fuck Him All Night,” Azealia Banks’ original slut-him-out soundtrack, built atop underground legend Galcher Lustwerk’s warehouse-capacity instrumental (sometimes size really is everything). It’s in her S, the way it keeps slipping into the curves—pussy, lips, visible. It’s her facility with dirty talk, but also that involuntarily little giggle, the one you make when you reach for the biggest, shiniest, most intimidating toy in the drawer. Pass the second towel. –Anna Gaca

Listen: Azealia Banks, “Fuck Him All Night”

Beatriz Ferreyra: “Echos” (2020)

Beatriz Ferreyra makes musical collages out of old magnetic tape, a type of musique concrète she developed at the influential French electronic music institute Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in the ’60s. She composed “Echos” in 1978 in honor of her niece, Mercedes Cornu, who was killed in a car accident, using tape of Cornu singing four Latin American folk songs as her source material. But Ferreyra’s manipulations leave the songs unrecognizable; she keeps just the syllables and the pulse of each breath between them. Cornu’s voice, too, sounds different: It’s almost inhuman, humming in a rhythmic and robotic pattern. But its timbre—or, metaphorically speaking, its spirit—remains, still singing from somewhere in the afterlife. –Vanessa Ague

Listen: Beatriz Ferreyra, “Echos”

Tems: “Free Mind” (2020)

What do you do when the voice in your head becomes your greatest obstacle? In “Free Mind,” Tems sings her way through this challenge with a delicate strength. “The noise in my mind wouldn’t leave me,” she confesses, offering no remedies, only the solace of shared experience. “I try to get by but I’m burning.” Her voice, as soothing as it is lucid, taps into the isolating pursuit of inner peace as the song begins to sound like a healing mantra. As Tems yearns for release, longing for the open sky, she finds herself falling deeper into herself. But maybe that’s where freedom lies. –Boutayna Chokrane

Listen: Tems, “Free Mind”

Jlin: “Embryo” (2021)

The power of “Embryo” is such that it takes four Grammy-winning percussionists working overtime to even match a fraction of it. Jlin’s studio composition unfolds like a three-dimensional fractal, squaring and cubing itself into an unquantifiable number of vertices. A whirring synth spins to life like a malfunctioning machine, backed by unpredictable polyrhythms that bend time as they scatter across the continuum. Her music is as difficult to move your body to as it is to perform, taking inspiration from footwork—particularly Chicago legends RP Boo and DJ Rashad—and forging her own strange path forward. The dancefloor isn’t even on her mind; Jlin is trying to reach frontiers no human has ever seen. –Shy Thompson

Listen: Jlin, “Embryo”

Hook: “Uber Therapy” (2021)

Rapping just about everywhere except where you’d expect to hear a syllable, Hook unspools a 70mm filmstrip of IMAX-size complaints on “Uber Therapy.” It’s all a ruse of course—as blunt and rude as her cerebral soliloquy might be, she’s studiously polite on the surface, declining to inform another rapper that their song is “just wack” and confessing her love to a boy she hopes “goes to hell.” Hook figures in a proud lineage of Californians from Suga Free to Blueface whose asymmetric pockets are targets of derision and delirium alike. And it all starts with a particularly chatty rideshare driver, whose small talk sticks in Hook’s craw like a grain of sand in an oyster, a tiny irritant crusted over by a hundred glimmering lines. –Vivian Medithi

Listen: Hook, “Uber Therapy”

Lankum: “Go Dig My Grave” (2023)

There have been few better album openers this decade than Lankum’s “Go Dig My Grave,” a deck-clearing, scene-setting rush of folk dread that doesn’t so much welcome you to the Irish band’s 2023 LP, False Lankum, as grab you by the arm and coldly demand that you stay. Everything is pitch perfect, from Radie Peat’s chillingly poised vocal, glistening with the menace of a freshly cleaned sword, to the nails-on-a-blackboard glissando of Cormac Mac Diarmada’s viola, to the unspecified percussive thump that hurries the listener into the song’s titular tomb, all played out to the deathly hum of an uilleann pipe drone. “Go Dig My Grave,” an adaptation of several ballads that date back to the early 17th century, sounds both old as the hills and evergreen, proof that real horror doesn’t die, it lives on in the bones, mutating. –Ben Cardew

Listen: Lankum, “Go Dig My Grave”

Hudson Mohawke / Nikki Nair: “Set the Roof” [feat. Tayla Parx] (2023)

A transgenerational collaboration between two of club music’s merriest pranksters sounds like a recipe for chaos. In practice, however, the title track on Hudson Mohawke and Nikki Nair’s Set the Roof EP is one of the most accessible, party-starting tracks that either DJ has produced. Built around vocal chops that skip like a rotted CD, the duo’s instrumentation is rubberized and slathered in Day-Glo. Gummy bass pulses and cute little flourishes of xylophone ricochet off of a loping, 2-step beat, reeling in HudMo’s kitschy sound design to emphasize Nair’s signature punch. The real fun, however, is in the song’s final stretch, when a gnarled saw wave starts rippling deep beneath the mix, wriggling in random, seemingly improvised patterns. Even at their most professional, Mohawke and Nair can’t curtail their mischief for long. –Jude Noel

Listen: Hudson Mohawke / Nikki Nair, “Set the Roof” [feat. Tayla Parx]

TisaKorean: “Backseat” (2022)

Whoever said that love letters couldn’t be a wee bit silly? Even within TisaKorean’s exemplary run of delirious, Soulja Boy-esque ideas and mutated snap-era jams, “Backseat” arrives out of left field in the best way possible. Over whirring synths and a cheerful drum beat that begs you to lean, dip, and snap, Tisa promises satisfaction and pleasure, all delivered from the back of an affordable midsize sedan (presumably). The way he pitches up and muffles his voice makes his crooned melodies feel like distant memories, drawing you in closer to parse through the warbling. And once Tisa’s image becomes perfectly clear, you’re left realizing that romance is alive and well, thriving under its new bard from Houston. –Matthew Ritchie

Listen: TisaKorean, “Backseat”

black midi: “John L” (2020)

“John L” is the portal that hurled black midi into their second phase. On the Cavalcade opener, the trio rumbles up a thundering ruckus while Geordie Greep, like a ’50s newscaster, portrays a captivating tyrant whose “gargling non-song whips throng into frenzy,” zigzagging along the border between surrealism and satire. No musical or lyrical detail makes a lot of sense in isolation; I feel the cumulative dread, the title character’s mesmerizing power, as a boulder sinking abstractly through my gut—then chuckle at how ridiculous it all sounds. Black midi may have descended on Earth for a good time, not a long time, but they crammed their crashed spacecraft with enough alien technology to keep us sifting through the wreckage for decades. –Jazz Monroe

Listen: black midi, “John L”

Chat Pile: “Why” (2022)

Raygun Busch knows there is nothing profound about the question that frames his tirade. Listen to the way the Chat Pile vocalist renders it after 50 seconds: “Why do people have to live outside?” he says of the houseless, his voice curling slightly upward with ponderous gaps between the words, like a kid finally wondering why the sky is blue. The query isn’t novel, he knows, but it’s basic humanity to ask. Likewise, there is nothing unheard about the jarring noise-rock around it, a David Yow-meets-Godflesh distillate that stings like rubbing alcohol. The song’s power, then, stems from the realization that this question must still exist, that music so fucking angry must still be made. The place with the world’s highest net worth has yet to solve what’s making Busch scream, that should make everyone scream. God’s country, indeed. –Grayson Haver Currin

Listen: Chat Pile, “Why”

AyooLii: “Shmackin Town” (2023)

Wherein AyooLii unilaterally rebrands his entire city over a sticky-sweet “Funkytown” sample: “Welcome to Milwaukee – shmackin town!” Even by the standards of AyooLii’s deliriously rowdy take on Milwaukee’s signature, clap-addled lowend rap, “Shmackin Town” is audacious. The beat is so hard, the sample is so blunt, the belief in itself is so unquestioning, and AyooLii presides over it all with the confidence of a wedding DJ, as if somehow this shambolic 90-second drop from a weirdo who films videos in his closet could become the next “Cupid Shuffle.” And still, when that bass hits, and AyooLii throws himself into that “ayyyyyyyyyyyyy” with such amplified conviction, you can suspend disbelief and imagine it. “Shmackin Town” is like trying to drop it to the floor and realizing there is no floor, the floor is the ceiling now, and gravity no longer exists. AyooLii conjures the kind of chaos that makes anything seem possible. –Evan Rytlewski

Listen: AyooLii, “Shmackin Town”

boygenius: “Not Strong Enough” (2023)

At some point during the conception of their full-length debut The Record, boygenius realized this little side project of theirs didn’t have to be so little. With its gleaming bounty of twang, jangle, and anthemic thrust, “Not Strong Enough” is the song that most proudly announces the group’s reinvention from indie songwriting circle to chart-conquering, zeitgeist-dominating major label force. It’s also the song that best delivers on the promise of the trio’s Traveling Wilburys Voltron formation, with spotlight moments for Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus, each of whom perform their allotted showcases as if locked in friendly competition for the loudest cheers of an imagined arena. Powered not by its themes of doubt and resolve but by the group’s determination to stretch their collective vision into the widest tent possible, “Not Strong Enough” tests the limits of just how many big moments and applause lines can be packed within the seams of a compact pop gem. –Evan Rytlewski

Listen: boygenius, “Not Strong Enough”

Mandy, Indiana: “Pinking Shears” (2023)

Mandy, Indiana are so committed to the bludgeoning power of sound that they dragged all their gear into a cave to get the right acoustics on their debut album, i’ve seen a way. It might have run afoul of fire safety regulations, but it’s also the reason songs like “Pinking Shears” feel so big. Toms and snares ricochet off the cavernous rock, while the bass is processed to sound like an overactive mechanical bowel—a grounding force to all that supersized percussion. At the front, singer Valentine Caulfield issues breathless indictments of our “filthy society,” ready to leap into the flames. This world is burning, anyway. –Madison Bloom

Listen: Mandy, Indiana, “Pinking Shears”

Home Is Where: “Long Distance Conjoined Twins” (2021)

Home Is Where thrive on twisted imagery and trans allegories. On the emo staple “Long Distance Conjoined Twins,” singer Bea MacDonald proposes a series of increasingly surreal ideas to Samantha, their titular twin, as metaphors for the agony and exhilaration of gender transition. The song flashes through a series of humidity-soaked scenes in rural Florida—tipped-over cows, “preservative sun showers,” altar boys kicking a mall Santa—that capture a yearning for something more, all the while knowing it may be denied. Home Is Where’s homegrown blend of emo, folk, and punk is proudly scrappy and knock-kneed on I Became Birds, and the song’s roving harmonica bolsters MacDonald’s untamable resolve. Delivered like a final doomsday sermon, “Long Distance Conjoined Twins” turns delirium into a get-out scheme worth seeing through. –Nina Corcoran

Listen: Home Is Where, “Long Distance Conjoined Twins”

645AR: “4 Da Trap” (2021)

It was a move that sent shockwaves through the rap world, something that, for better or worse, expanded the barriers of the genre in under two minutes. 645AR, a once normal rapper from Cobb County, Georgia, decided to squeak. In a register closer to a mosquito than baby-voice Carti, he buzzes about keeping a gun on him at all times, never ratting, and turning rags to riches. “4 Da Trap” created a paradox that has since become a norm in underground rap—relatively common lyrics delivered with shock value intended to throttle the algorithm. Is it avant-garde or comedy? Meme or Machiavelli? –Millan Verma

Listen: 645AR, “4 Da Trap”

Burial: “Dreamfear” (2024)

After the languid, wintry stretches of the Antidawn and Streetlands EPs, Burial came home to club music. With “Dreamfear,” the UK producer thrashes at the surface of the murky water that for years he’d only gingerly stirred. Lines of video game dialogue, whisked out of their original context, loom large over frenzied hardcore beats; blissful singers cry out about ecstasy, and then a mean, nasally sample cuts in with the seed of a threat: “Back from the dead/Fucked up in the head.” Burial holds up the twin prongs of euphoria and paranoia like a pincer, squeezing the moment into a singularly adrenalized rush. –Sasha Geffen

Listen: Burial, “Dreamfear”

SZA: “Good Days” (2020)

When “Good Days” arrived on Christmas 2020—after being teased at the end of the “Hit Different” video a few months before—it bore the already-timeless quality of a grainy, sentimental photo. SZA’s stop-start patter has always captured the rhythm of an anxious mind. Here, as she finds ways to move past lost love, her singing is at its most weightless and free-associative, only grounded in a tentative pulse. Durutti Column-esque guitars and childlike field recordings ripple through the song’s compressed mix to suggest the comfort of private fantasy; Jacob Collier’s music-school harmonies come off just a little indulgent, but don’t we all need indulgence? “Good Days” captures the joy of getting wistful at your lowest, of convincing yourself, however put-on it might feel, that you can “await your armored fate with a smile.” When SZA compares herself to the biblical Job, who lost everything but maintained his faith, she’s almost bragging. –H.D. Angel

Listen: SZA, “Good Days”

Niontay: “THANK ALLAH” (2023)

As Niontay’s slippery flow sluices across the alien pulses of “THANK ALLAH,” you can detect a wry smile in his delivery. It’s a confounding song, taking bits of regional signifiers—the syncopated thud of Michigan rap, the blinking laser blips Mannie Fresh was fond of—and Frakensteining them into a bizarre, hypnotic whole. The Florida-raised, Brooklyn-based rapper is an unbothered chameleon, applying a Sunshine State flow to any beat that moves him. He’s become one of the driving forces behind an exciting, increasingly experimental New York underground, moving away from its classicist fixations into weirder, more internet-addled territory. On “THANK ALLAH,” he coolly issues barbed zingers comparing his demons with yours, and when the clicking drums finally kick in during the last 20 seconds, it’s a mic drop. Niontay lets them ride, knowing he had you in his palm, fully enraptured by his otherworldly aura. –Dash Lewis

Listen: Niontay, “THANK ALLAH”

Aldous Harding: “Fever” (2022)

“Fever,” like much of Aldous Harding’s oeuvre, is character work. One moment, she’s like a petulant Victorian lady running through the fields. The next, a brassy lounge singer. Of course, she doesn’t spell any of this out for you, as part of the delight of listening to Harding’s music is that it is intentionally opaque and confusing. Radically open to interpretation. All of the emotion, the turbulence, the frenetic energy, comes from Harding’s shape-shifting vocals. On “Fever,” she zig-zags from loud to soft, ecstatic to nearly afraid. She’s the mesmerizing protagonist in the center of it all. You certainly know her from all the movies, or do you? –Sophie Kemp

Listen: Aldous Harding, “Fever”

Christine and the Queens: “People, I’ve been sad” (2020)

“Sad” can be a tragic little word, trifling in its nonspecificity. But a word that small can also catch in the throat when you finally admit to it, the snag that brings on an overdue emotional unraveling. For Chris, the painful confession of “People, I’ve been sad” connects whatever rupture prompted him to write the song (he has been candid about the annihilating loss of his mother in April 2019) back to a solitary, painful adolescence—and how those feelings are even more intense today.

Yet the sublimity of the La Vita Nuova track is how Chris (who now performs as Rahim Redcar) turns these anguished dispatches into sacrosanct offerings. The verses unfold in repeated vocal crests and spirals, letting each line stand separately, as if he were walking among a room of marble sculptures. Even though the slumping bass and decaying splat of a beat suggest an unbearably heavy weight, the celestial strings and synths render his effort hymnal, and the punchy chorus reaches desperately for connection. Some of Chris’s later releases have grasped at grand concepts and epic scale in an attempt to expand on this persisting hurt. This featherlight track though, holds everything in a shrug and a tear. –Laura Snapes

Listen: Christine and the Queens, “People, I’ve been sad”

Playboi Carti: “@ MEH” (2020)

After “@ MEH,” the detour to the industrial harshness of Whole Lotta Red must have seemed imperative, lest Playboi Carti get stuck on a treadmill. Suddenly, after two years punctuated with leaks of unfinished drafts, “@ MEH” dropped, a diamond of nihilistic vocal twitters and candy tones. It was a declarative full stop to what Playboi Carti had been, the peak of the headrush he had been working towards, chirp by chirp, squeal by squeal, since he first appeared to confound, enrage and delight the rap world. Its minimalist music video flashes black and white stills timed to each toy xylophone twinkle, like jawbreakers tumbling through a gumball machine. Meanwhile, a thousand imitators tried to recreate the high, from SoundCloud nobodies and underground stalwarts to Drake’s producers. None of them could recreate the recipe, none of them could transgress so carelessly, and so rigorously. –Adlan Jackson

Listen: Playboi Carti, “@ MEH”

Erika de Casier: “Drama” (2021)

“Everybody says I’m so reasonable,” claims Erika de Casier, reigning queen of quiet storm R&B. So why does she keep cracking up in public, embarrassing herself in front of her S.O. and his friends? “Drama” is an anthem for anyone who's known the mad, bad, dangerous kind of love – the one that turns you into a different person, someone you're forced to disown the next morning. “Wish that I could rewind,” she sighs, “but I can't do that.”

Even by the demure Dane's exacting standards, “Drama” is a masterclass in millennial R&B revivalism—a most faithful take on the ’00s nostalgia that has ruled the 2020s so far: finger-picked guitar, stuttering beats, telephone-effect vocals, even a key change. But it's ambitious too, and slippery in its execution. Disorienting new elements appear every few bars—pillowy sub-bass, velveteen strings. By the end, we’ve traveled someplace else entirely and rewritten the story in our minds. What, last night? Who even was that girl? –Chal Ravens

Listen: Erika de Casier, “Drama”

Bullion: “Hula” (2020)

In 2017, Bullion’s Nathan Jenkins scored a minor novelty hit on leftfield dancefloors with “Blue Pedro,” a cover of the sea-shanty theme to an old BBC children’s TV show. When he finally returned at the beginning of 2020, he was still cutting carefree rugs: “Hula” flashes back to visions of giddy parties in Tokyo, Mexico, and Berlin, “dancing the hula hula.” But despite the outward display of joy, the song cradles a nostalgic sense of melancholy in its liquid synth-pop and Godley & Creme-inspired vocal wash. “Are people in pain where you are?” Jenkins asks at the song’s outset. “Do they stand up from the dead?” When the single first dropped, in late January, the line felt like a riddle. But just two months later, as the world gathered around bad-news chyrons and wondered when we’d ever dance again, it suddenly seemed mournfully prescient. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Bullion, “Hula”

Bandmanrill: “Heartbroken” (2021)

While club scholars will debate forever about the true genesis of rapping over club beats, many can agree that the moment that kickstarted the worldwide club rap boom was “Heartbroken,” a Newark spirit bomb from Jersey rapper-producer duo Bandmanrill and MCVertt. From the callback to Jersey legend DJ Jayhood to Bandman’s raw and unbridled rapping and MC’s river-dancing-on-your-head beat full of drama, it’s a tune that bleeds Jersey through and through. Fast forward just three years later, and it feels like everyone, from Jersey to Philly to the other side of the world has used those iconic triplets. Just don’t forget where it all began. –Tyler Linares

Listen: Bandmanrill, “Heartbroken”

Soccer Mommy: “circle the drain” (2020)

“Even when everything is fine,” is the key here. Producer Gabe Wax concocted a pitch-perfect ’90s radio pop rock facsimile, from the winding guitar lead to the sledgehammer acoustics, to the popcorn snares to the play-that-one-again “round and around and around” refrain. But the masterstroke on “circle the drain” was refusing to polish the nasal imperfections out of Sophie Allison’s voice, or make her back-of-the-notebook lyrics (“I think there’s a mold in my brain”) any less raw. It’s only with those contradictions that the gray dream of bed-rot depression becomes crystal clear, and Allison proves her diaries are ready to be read by the world. –Adlan Jackson

Listen: Soccer Mommy, “circle the drain”

Bladee: “Reality Surf” (2020)

Bladee’s kingdom is full of cold visions and ice-dancers, angel numbers and trash stars, mall-whores and McDonald’s “Sad Meals.” Perhaps no Drain-ism conveys the surreal slurry of his music better than “Reality Surf.” In bullshit self-help-speak, “reality surfing” means imagining there’s a multiverse of worlds, and pushing yourself to become the person you want to be through hardcore manifestation. For Bladee, reality surfing seems more like a drug he’s unable to resist, or a mad, Tourettian compulsion forcing him to twist words into freaky fragments. It also matches the way life today often feels like a brain-glazing sleepwalk across a sea of stimuli.

“Reality Surf” is the Swede at his delirious, blissed-out best. He whispers and whimpers melodies that delicately caress the ears, over a chiptune beat and “oh-oh”s that have the angelic shimmer of a church choir. "Put a concept on that feeling/Take a word and change the meaning,” he moans. As language collapses around us and “reality” has gone AWOL, Bladee makes mental chaos sound eerily idyllic. –Kieran Press-Reynolds

Listen: Bladee, “Reality Surf”

Mannequin Pussy: “I Got Heaven” (2023)

To listen to Marisa Dabice sing is to get whiplash. It is the feeling of throwing your whole body at a wall. It is the feeling of having someone shoot an arrow at your head, and then you pull it out, walk away, and wink at your captivated audience. “I Got Heaven,” the title track of Mannequin Pussy’s fourth album, is a joyful burst of punk rock, a Coke-and-Pepsi bottle rocket pointed at the sky. The guitars are a snarl. The drums are a tidal wave. And when Dabice sings, she is laughing and yelling at the same time. She is being diabolical. She is being spiteful. She is being sweet. She doesn’t want to be a dog; she already is. And she is asking big and important questions: “What if Jesus himself ate my fucking snatch?” she screams, “What if I’m an angel?” –Sophie Kemp

Listen: Mannequin Pussy, “I Got Heaven”

Rachika Nayar: “Heaven Comes Crashing” [ft. Maria BC] (2022)

Rachika Nayar’s music is best heard intimately—through a good pair of headphones or amid the smoke-machine sensory deprivation of her live shows. On “Heaven Come Crashing,” from her 2022 album of the same name, she partners with fellow ambient dream weaver Maria BC to build layers of washed synths and ethereal vocals that sound like a chorus of wood nymphs whispering the secrets of the universe. But the song holds another secret: At its midpoint, the synths fade from view and a pummeling breakbeat takes hold, transforming into a dancefloor banger that’s no less intricate and delicate for its exuberance. On “Heaven Come Crashing,” Nayar coaxes the listener to lean in, knowing the beat drops even harder up close. –Arielle Gordon

Listen: Rachika Nayar, “Heaven Comes Crashing” [ft. Maria BC]

Doss: “Look” (2021)

If the euphoric beat that corkscrews through Doss’ “Look” doesn’t make you move, you must be missing a pulse. A brisk highlight from her no-skips 2021 EP 4 New Hit Songs, “Look” finds the New York DJ and producer dialing into an ecstatic, pumped-up sweet spot by way of a delightfully anti-techno hook: She’s not looking at her phone while at the club, thank you very much. Throughout, Doss maintains a slippery, no-holds-barred surge that climbs and climbs, warping between staticky thumps and ping-ponging synths without mercy, like the galloping of blood during an exceptional high. You won’t be busy looking at your phone while listening to this, either. –Eric Torres

Listen: Doss, “Look”

DJ Python: “Angel” (2022)

According to New York DJ and producer Brian Piñyero, the best songs and DJ sets feel like being let in on a secret; he told Pitchfork in 2020 that “it’s like a curtain being pulled back a little bit and showing you what the truth is.” This transcendental understanding of dance music clearly informs “Angel,” the 11-minute epic that opens his 2022 EP Club Sentimientos, Vol. 2. Piñyero’s gestures across the track are appropriately celestial—flickering synthesizer washes drift in and out of the mix, cutting through clouds of percussion like a lens flare in a Terrence Malick film. Its rhythms are patient and contemplative, but he packs the track full of dizzying details to explore and rabbit trails to follow, each of which might lead with their own little epiphanies. –Colin Joyce

Listen: DJ Python, “Angel”

Dua Lipa: “Don’t Start Now” (2019)

Dua Lipa could well have remained in the Bebe Rexha B-tier of palatable pop were it not for her shimmering kiss-off “Don’t Start Now” and the sleek, savvy disco direction it announced. Its chorus follows the paint-by-numbers pop structure of her first big hit, “New Rules,” but “Don’t Start Now” shines when it swerves off-course. There’s a half-second pause before she purrs “mayyybe” in response to whether a breakup has changed her; it sounds like she’s really thinking it over. There’s the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cowbell that clatters through the chorus. There’s that weird squiggle of bass under the chorus, like it’s hiccuping after one too many vodka sodas. All this gives the track texture: “Don’t Start Now” is a shiny anthem that’s sturdy enough to hold onto. The song drags you onto the dancefloor, then keeps you awake in the car home from the club. –Dani Blum

Listen: Dua Lipa, “Don’t Start Now”

Young Slo-Be: “Unforgivable” [ft. Drakeo the Ruler] (2021)

Young Slo-Be and Drakeo the Ruler had plenty of things in common. Both Californians rapped in run-on sentences and labyrinthine slang, bending language and meter to comic or sinister ends. Slo-Be observed the way Drakeo had turned the grid system of South Central Los Angeles into an Alice in Wonderland chess board and mutated, in his own verses, his hometown of Stockton in kind. The similarities, tragically, continued: Neither man, a father at the forefront of his city’s artistic vanguard, would live to be 30 years old. “Unforgivable,” therefore, is the rare opportunity to hear micro-generational shifts within the confines of a single song, with Slo-Be softening Drakeo’s vocal fry and melting his staccato provocations into something more laconic. But the commonalities—of form, of temperament, of promise for a new vision of California rap—remain. –Paul A. Thompson

Listen: Young Slo-Be, “Unforgivable” [ft. Drakeo the Ruler]

Tyla: “Water” (2023)

Keep your steak dinners, love letters, and trips to Ibiza, Tyla is looking for a man who can bend the elements. Her tropical track “Water” brought amapiano to the mainstream, combining the feel-good energy of Rihanna’s “Pon De Replay” with the seductiveness of Ciara’s “Goodies.” On it, Tyla is on the prowl. Normally she’s chill, she admits, but someone’s pheromones have her acting a bit rabid. Whoever among you can turn the nightclub into a sauna, the bedroom into a Richter scale-breaking earthquake, a pair of lungs into deflated sacs, and a 5’ 3” Joburg girl into a puddle, report to the dance floor. –Heven Haile

Listen: Tyla, “Water”

Charlotte Adigéry / Bolis Pupul: “It Hit Me” (2022)

When that two-note whistle of lust pierces the air for the first time, there’s a second of confusion before you realize what it is: a catcall. On their queasy dance single “It Hit Me,” Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul recount intimate stories of violating, embarrassing sexualization, swapping tales on every verse: a 13-year-old Adigéry harassed after field hockey practice by grown men, a spiraling Pupul examining himself in the mirror after a love letter. The Belgian artists use a lurching beat, gurgling synths, and a high-pitched chime that verges on sonar ping to reclaim their authority in the present day. Everything falls away during the chorus in a moment of clarity until a catcall whistle brings the beat back, as if to say: Yeah, it’s inescapable, so you might as well dance to it. –Nina Corcoran

Listen: Charlotte Adigéry / Bolis Pupul, “It Hit Me”

Troye Sivan: “Rush” (2023)

In an interview that ran a few weeks after the release of “Rush,” Troye Sivan explicitly announced that he is not a bottom, despite having written and performed a song about bottoming (“Bloom”). While there are few things less bottom-y than invoking the best-known brand of poppers in one’s song title, the chorus of “Rush” indeed suggests something more versatile: A call and response between a bro-ish bellow (“I feel the rush/Addicted to your touch”) and an ecstatic, falsetto (“It’s so good, it’s so good”). Floating over a pop-house throb and piano so muted it could be coming from the next room over, Sivan coos, "Breathe one, two, three, take all of me, so good,” a come-on as fit for a sex partner as it is a pop consumer. He’s never sounded so seductive. –Rich Juzwiak

Listen: Troye Sivan, “Rush”

Avalon Emerson: “Dreamliner” (2023)

If Laurie Anderson had any interest in dancefloor cred, she might sound like “Dreamliner.” At once meditative and kinetic, Avalon Emerson’s insistent soother is the closest & the Charm comes to her bangers of yore. While the synths shimmer like Christmas lights, the San Francisco-born producer talk-whispers something inaudible with the giggly intimacy of an old friend getting asked to deliver a toast. The three-note keyboard solo that interrupts its amble demonstrates Emerson’s command of dynamics: not only did we need it, we didn’t know we needed it. Zone out or get down as the situation requires. –Alfred Soto

Listen: Avalon Emerson, “Dreamliner”

Nourished by Time: “Daddy” (2023)

Why does this upbeat dance song feel so crushingly lonely? It might be the lingering hurt in producer and singer-songwriter Marcus Brown’s luxuriant baritone, or the ghostly overlay of the production, redolent of the sunlit late-’80s and early-’90s R&B (Brown has called SWV’s 1992 album It’s About Time his “North Star”). It might be the growling and harmonically ambiguous bassline that Brown layers beneath the bright synth pads. But however you hear Brown’s enigmatic pledge in the chorus—“I’ll never be alone, daddy”—you never once, for a moment, feel he believes it. The song’s exuberant climax happens somewhere off to the narrator’s side, while they remain lost in the groove, locked into their private conviction that no one could truly ever love them. –Jayson Greene

Listen: Nourished by Time, “Daddy”

The Smile: “Bending Hectic” (2023)

Thom Yorke has spent his career turning his anxiety about driving and cars into art. So, of course, as he dashed off the lyrics to “Bending Hectic,” minutes before the Smile first performed it at Montreux Jazz Festival, he was still haunted by the possibility of wrecking. As Jonny Greenwood finger-picks, sending clustered notes tumbling like gravel, Yorke imagines a car catapulting off a cliffside in slow motion, suspended in place as he begins to embrace the perverse tranquility of the moment. Droning strings and engine-rattle percussion gradually coalesce in preparation for a triumphant post-metal coda. The fear remains, but Yorke’s made peace with the possibility of crashing. He ultimately chooses to swerve, now calmly gripping the wheel. –Jude Noel

Listen: The Smile, “Bending Hectic”

Glorilla / Hitkidd: “F.N.F. (Let’s Go)” (2022)

You couldn’t dream of reaching the levels of “outside” achieved by Glorilla and her crew with “F.N.F (Let’s Go).” The type of freedom that only exists in the best parts of childhood, with the pre-performance hype circle to shake off their nerves mixing with drawn-out celebratory shouts and shrieks. Honoring crunk’s tenets of claustrophobic production and sinister vocals, Glorilla barrels over the beat with unbridled intensity. She somehow manages to toe the line between joyous and menacing, dispelling promises to enjoy life to the fullest and handle any haters at the drop of a hat. Where stoic posturing and haughty disdain rule the rap landscape, Glorilla’s euphoria in dismissing wastemen and useless exes became a ubiquitous presence at every popping function. –Matthew Ritchie

Listen: Glorilla / Hitkidd, “F.N.F. (Let’s Go)”

Big Thief: “Vampire Empire” (2023)

Adrianne Lenker can make a song about potatoes sound like the word of God, so it is no surprise that she stretches even her breakup songs wide enough to let in a glimpse of paradise. “Vampire Empire,” a rare loosie from the group she fronts and the presiding masters of the album format, alights upon not only an ending but also the bliss, lust, fights, fears, sex, denial, and refusal that led there. So this is a love song, too, its verses swaddled in ranch domesticity as Lenker’s milk and dreams curdle. Then here she comes in the chorus, Dolores O’Riordan in moccasins, a voice so raw-to-the-bone that her climax feels like a collapse. It reminds us that, for all the attention paid to their telepathic intuition and intra-band synergy, Big Thief rule the roost because they nail the Big Feelings. –Jazz Monroe

Listen: Big Thief, “Vampire Empire”

Jessica Pratt: “Life Is” (2024)

Jessica Pratt is a sorceress of time whose records induce an uneasily pleasurable feeling of dissociation and drift. “Life Is,” the scene-setting opener from her 2024 album Here in the Pitch, serves as a kind of dare, asking that you forget everything you knew about the ultra-spare folk of her earlier records and give yourself over to uncanny pop from the spaces in between. It’s also a kind of summation, compressing the spectral beauty of her dozen-year recording career into a compact, endlessly replayable form. Here, she plays the listener’s memory like an instrument, nudging loose sounds stored in your subconscious long ago—a fragment of “Be My Baby” rhythm, the reverb-drenched percussion of exotica, a hypnotic melody you swear you’ve heard before but can’t quite place—and arranging them into a dream that’s both colorfully psychedelic and dark as the ocean floor. “Time is time and time and time again,” she sings. Sounds right. –Mark Richardson

Listen: Jessica Pratt, “Life Is”

Chappell Roan: “Good Luck, Babe!” (2024)

“Good Luck, Babe!” was not just a coronation for Chappell Roan, but the culmination of a decade’s worth of sapphic music that paved the way for a lesbian star to break audience records at Lollapalooza. In it, you can hear the best traits of her immediate predecessors—the sharp writing of MUNA, the heartfelt storytelling of boygenius, and the frankness of King Princess—all distilled into a single, near-perfect pop song. Roan is undeniably skilled at frothy anthems, but her breakthrough came from her messiest song yet: a heartbreaking new-wave track about an ex-girlfriend who would rather return to the closet than commit. By the time Roan cries, “I told you so,” her anguish doesn’t just stem from the ex, but the suffocating pressures of heteronormativity itself. “Babe” is a bittersweet song, and its success unfortunately came with bittersweet consequences for its artist. But even the entitled behavior of stans couldn’t take away the song’s success: The titular “babe” may wake up miserable in the middle of the night, but she has nothing on the Atlantic executive that dropped Roan from her old label, just before her meteoric rise. –Hannah Jocelyn

Listen: Chappell Roan, “Good Luck, Babe!”

Ice Spice: “Munch (Feelin’ U)” (2022)

The video for “Munch (Feelin’ U),” Ice Spice’s breakout single, from 2022, opens with a shot of the then-22-year-old rapper against a blank background, as if she’s auditioning for a role. It’s a rare moment of anonymity, because, throughout the rest of the clip, as on the record itself, she seems positively, chemically unable to pose as anyone but herself; the iconography that follows—the seafoam green top, the orange hair, the young star perched on the rim of a basketball hoop—proves as much. What also distinguishes “Munch” among the flood of drill records that emerged from Brooklyn and the Bronx this decade is its restraint: Ice Spice raps as if walking an older coworker through the company software system for the nth time, her stoic delivery wobbling only as far as “exasperated” and “slightly swaggering.” In the years since, as Ice Spice has become ubiquitous, “Munch” has proved to be that rarest of rap artifacts—a blueprint for crossover stardom without compromise. –Paul A. Thompson

Listen: Ice Spice, “Munch (Feelin’ U)”

MJ Lenderman: “Knockin” (2023)

When John Daly, the 1991 PGA Champion, sang “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” at the 2011 Thailand Golf Championship, he wore a boxy American flag blazer. To MJ Lenderman, Daly’s performance—sagging and slumped over, a man well past his prime and patriotic the whole way down—is as poignant as anything Bob Dylan himself could do. Lenderman writes odes to fatally flawed heroes just like Daly, the has-beens and never-weres who can’t get out of bed, much less out of their own way. On “Knockin,” released first as a fuzzy home recording in 2021, and then as a proper studio version in 2023, he traces his own romantic desperation through the crevices left by Dylan and Daly before transcending his forebears, howling about taking flight. As his vocals give way and his guitar takes over in the song’s final third, it seems, for a moment, like he might just make it to the pearly gates. –Arielle Gordon

Listen: MJ Lenderman, “Knockin”

Mitski: “Working for the Knife” (2022)

In the summer of 2019, Mitski announced she was taking an indefinite break from performing to step away from the “constant churn” of the music industry. She feared her self-worth might become too dependent on it. By this time, Mitski had already built a small canon of songs about the utter agony of being dedicated to her craft—and when she returned from her hiatus, it was with a striking new addition. “Working for the Knife,” an intense, tightly coiled song is by turns about self-recrimination and helplessness in the face of a muse. It’s a cautionary tale about how the dream of making art can also be a story of thankless work; it’s also a magnificent, unique testament to what happens when Mitski keeps doing it anyway. –Marissa Lorusso

Listen: Mitski, “Working for the Knife”

Adrianne Lenker: “anything” (2020)

“anything,” the centerpiece of Adrianne Lenker’s 2020 album songs / instrumentals, might be a breakup song; it might also be a broken mirror. Every couplet is a shard tilted back at a different day, every verse a jagged map of fragmented memories. Mango juice dripping from her lover’s mouth. A dog’s teeth slicing through her fist. Stupid fights in the grocery aisle. Being scared to say “I love you.” The bad outweighs the good, but still—letting go is unbearable. “I don’t wanna talk about anything,” she pleads in the chorus, imagining a state of heightened intimacy so intense, she can hear her lover blinking. Lenker has rarely sounded more plaintive. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Adrianne Lenker, “anything”

Sexyy Red: “SkeeYee” (2023)

Among the various pickup lines in Sexyy Red’s twerktacular repertoire, “SkeeYee” probably has the widest radius, capable of signaling sexual fitness to the freakiest eaters within 100-plus yards. Minor key Memphis loops undulate over vulcanized flubber 808s as Red swerves various vehicles so “NASCAR” she makes “the engine fart” and slams other women’s boyfriends into the mattress “off the yerkyyyyy.” Predictably cocksure, Sexyy Red knows she looks good, from the clanking crystals on her wrist to the “stupid butt” squeezed into her leather hot pants—that 125-decibel “Skeee-YEEEEE” is just her way of making sure you know it too. –Vivian Medithi

Listen: Sexyy Red, “SkeeYee”

Cole Pulice: “If I Don’t See You in the Future, I’ll See You in the Pasture” (2023)

A spun-out saxophone drone might heal you. At the very least, “If I Don’t See You in the Future, I’ll See You in the Pasture” will try. Cole Pulice, a California-based saxophonist, improviser, and composer draws on spiritual jazz and ambient, using just their saxophone and pedals to make meditative sprawl. As such, for much of the 22 minutes of “If I Don’t See You,” their saxophone sounds like a cosmic, otherworldly being. More tension builds with the entrance of each long, fuzzy note, until unfiltered saxophone emerges with a floating melody and a hint of overblown crunch. When it disappears into the pouring rain and a final moment of rest, you remember that sometimes it does feel this good to let go. –Vanessa Ague

Listen: Cole Pulice, “If I Don’t See You in the Future, I’ll See You in the Pasture”

U.S. Girls: “4 American Dollars” (2020)

“Do you remember the bills you have to pay?” David Bowie asked on 1975’s “Young Americans.” On “4 American Dollars”—like the Thin White Duke’s tune, an ersatz soul single released during a recession—Meg Remy can hardly remember anything else. The previous LP from the transplanted Torontonian’s U.S. Girls project (2018’s In a Poem Unlimited) was rife with sharp, danceable critiques of commodity. But “4 American Dollars” plunks Remy’s unwitting narrator into the capitalist maelstrom, watching her flex and flail like her budget-balling pop ancestors. Over a melancholy disco lope, Remy keeps recalculating her relationship with cash: clutching it like a life preserver, giving it out like mercy, disavowing it entirely. All the while, the backing singers chirp, “You can do a lot with four American dollars,” like a fast-food chain targeting zoomers, or Spotify cutting a royalty check. –Brad Shoup

Listen: U.S. Girls, “4 American Dollars”

Turnstile: “MYSTERY” (2021)

For a Turnstile single that nearly wasn’t, “Mystery” ended up playing a massive role in the Baltimore band’s introduction to the masses. Originally written by frontman Brendan Yates as a toss-away interlude unintended for the band, “Mystery” became Glow On’s lead single and the album opener. It’s a brief glimpse into the dynamics of the record ahead, incorporating a synth-filled beginning with pummeling guitars and a massive chorus that became a staple at Turnstile performances. “Mystery” helped spur an evolution in hardcore, an experiment on what would become a massively commercially successful hardcore album opened the spotlight up to an entire scene of genre-benders. –Lauren Rearick

Listen: Turnstile, “MYSTERY”

Alan Braxe / DJ Falcon: “Step by Step” [ft. Panda Bear] (2022)

Noah Lennox may not be what you would call a house diva, but his collaboration with French touch legends Alan Braxe and DJ Falcon should make him a staple of Balearic sets and chillout rooms the world over. The production sounds like a hovercraft cruising on a beach at sunset. The melody of the hook of the song floats back down to the ground like watching fireworks on mute. The whole song exists in the afterglow of the opening revelation: “There is some kind of poison in disorder.” Quantized beats, deliberate repetition, keeping the rhythm. Sometimes getting your life right means staying on the grid. –Jeremy D. Larson

Listen: Alan Braxe / DJ Falcon, “Step by Step” [ft. Panda Bear]

Sufjan Stevens: “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” (2023)

God, grief, love, the universe. These are the essentials to understanding the folklore of Sufjan Stevens. With “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” he takes these ingredients, arranges them ornately, and delivers a career-defining reckoning. On the devastating Javelin cut—enlivened with guitalin, piano, and electronic beats—Stevens pleads from the end, beaten down, but not enough to stop him from asking, “Will anybody ever love me, for good reasons, without grievance, not for sport?” one final time.

“Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” becomes all the more unbearable when you learn that it lives in the shadows of Stevens’ only public declaration of his queerness, as Javelin is dedicated to his late partner, Evans Richardson. Suddenly, the lyrics, the pain, are even more visceral, as a famously private storyteller presents his unbridled thoughts during his most public grief. Stevens searches tenaciously for answers, knowing they may be impossible to accept. –Gio Santiago

Listen: Sufjan Stevens, “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?”

Wet Leg: “Chaise Longue” (2021)

The Isle of Wight, in the English Channel, isn’t terribly large, but it has a storied history: It was once home to Queen Victoria and the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Charles Dickens vacationed there while writing David Copperfield. Add to its list of notable residents the indie-rock duo Wet Leg, who immediately transcended their local scene on the strength of their debut single, “Chaise Longue.” Rhian Teasdale, like any good post-punk revivalist, sings with an alluring, disaffected deadpan, but she cuts through the pretense with a winking embrace of the deeply unserious, namely her on-the-nose sexual innuendos, including one straight from Mean Girls. A snappy, nonsensical hook cements “Chaise Longue” as delightfully dumb and instantly unforgettable. Teasdale and bandmate Hester Chambers claim they started Wet Leg on a lark and they don’t take their songs too seriously—an approach that, like their island home, turned out to be an assuming front hiding surprisingly fertile creative ground. –Marissa Lorusso

Listen: Wet Leg, “Chaise Longue”

Sabrina Carpenter: “Espresso” (2024)

Every supposedly wrong decision Sabrina Carpenter makes during “Espresso” turns out to be the right one. She begins, for instance, with the chorus and not a verse, immediately telling us about some “he” with a whispery nonchalance that suggests we already know his deal. There’s the double “that,” the endless entendre of being “Mountain Dewed,” a string of similes and metaphors so ceaseless it’s hard to keep track of her shifting status as a Nintendo Switch, an amorous angiosperm, and an expert barista. The way she bounces to and from the coffee concept like she has the caffeinated jitters: They make you feel like the boy in the song, the addict who needs to run it back. When Carpenter calls herself stupid at last verse’s end, well… you might chuckle and nod.

All this, though, is the grit above a beat that’s as smooth as a single-origin shot, the things that catch and hold attention. Just as Carpenter is taunting the dude she treated so well but isn’t rushing to call back, she’s teasing us by speaking in winks, smiles, and linguistic pretzels, never wanting us to know exactly what she means or plans to do. That’s not stupid at all; that’s the smarts of seduction. –Grayson Haver Currin

Listen: Sabrina Carpenter, “Espresso”

Ethel Cain: “American Teenager” (2022)

War, whiskey, Jesus, football, NASCAR, Journey, the First Amendment: “American Teenager,” Ethel Cain’s closest brush with pop’s mainstream, scoops up morsels of Americana like penny candies from a bin. The song is stitched with threads of the singer’s biography—small-town upbringing, God-fearing family—and her most effervescent songwriting impulses. It’s Bruce Springsteen’s populism and the ethereal incantations of Cain’s idol Florence Welch, packaged in shimmering, reverb-drenched arena-pop. But the specters of death, addiction, and isolation show up in the verses, mucking up the song’s sheen. A whiff of the guitar solo from “Don’t Stop Believin’” ties an ironic bow around this ode to disillusionment—a fist-pumping anthem of solidarity for all the young people that the American dream leaves behind. –Olivia Horn

Listen: Ethel Cain, “American Teenager”

Olivia Rodrigo: “good 4 u” (2021)

No track on Sour seethes with as much female rage as “good 4 u.” The song starts at a simmer, with Rodrigo’s voice over a staccato bassline, before boiling over into an explosive pop-punk anthem. Where “drivers license” and “deja vu” framed the former Disney Channel star as a heartbroken Swiftian balladeer, “good 4 u” marks an emo turn, authenticating Rodrigo’s range as an artist. But it’s not just the thrashing drums and teen spirit that enthralls; it’s also Rodrigo’s sharp tongue, as she lashes out at an ex who moved on too fast. Channeling the spite of John Tucker Must Die with the snark of Mean Girls, she turns her pain into a weapon. “Maybe I’m too emotional,” she sneers, with a scorned bitterness that recalls Alanis Morissette. “Or maybe you never cared at all.” Even the happiest lovebirds belt along as if they’ve just been dumped. –Boutayna Chokrane

Listen: Olivia Rodrigo, “good 4 u”

quinn: “ok im cool” (2020)

If a panel of the four or so music critics obsessed with the quarantine-era strand of online rap known as “digicore” ever assembled to debate a canon for the scene, “ok im cool” would snatch the top slot. Buried underneath bitcrushed breakbeats and desperate synths, quinn is anything but cool, wildly whizzing between paranoid confessions. Friends blindside her constantly; she’s being sexted against her will; she’s trapped in her head, daydreaming to protect against the flood of concerns. It’s viscerally glum yet manic in a way that makes it work as both an anthem for bedridden cry sessions and cathartic moshing. Born in Discord’s underground trenches but bittersweet enough to soundtrack anyone going through it, this song is a jewel in quinn’s peripatetic catalog. –Kieran Press-Reynolds

Listen: quinn, “ok im cool”

Destroyer: “June” (2022)

Dan Bejar pulls off a death-defying compositional move on “June,” the coked-out disco apex of his 2022 album Labyrinthitis. After declaring definitively that a snow angel is just “a fucking idiot someone made in the snow,” the song shifts and concludes with two minutes of spoken-word over sweaty guitars, drums where four is absolutely on the floor, Tower of Terror vocal pitch shifting, bass drops, and French touch synths. His vision becomes apocalyptic, dadaist. Cubist judges speak from cubist jail. A hydrogen bomb explodes. It is so hot out that it can only be described as parrot weather. “June,” is absurd in the way that a Donald Barthelme story is absurd, packed with chaos and meaning and emotional resonance. Like seeing your body, defamiliarized and then remarking: Ah, fuck I feel like a discovery someone once saw. –Sophie Kemp

Listen: Destroyer, “June”

Charli XCX / Lorde: “The girl, so confusing version with lorde” (2024)

As a shot at repairing a wobbly friendship, “Girl, so confusing” could have gone horribly wrong. You write a song laying out your complicated feelings about a peer you worry might hate you. Then you voice note them about it the night before it gets released to a terminally online fanbase who will decipher its subject in microseconds and likely interpret it as a diss track, no matter how obviously subjective its anxieties. Charli threw up a wild volley. Lorde spiked it supernaturally.

“We talk about making music/But I don’t know if it’s honest,” Charli had sung on the original BRAT version, a trace of despair entering her brusque account of their misunderstandings. Lorde dispels the young girl from Essex’s fears by delivering supreme candor, revealing previously hidden experiences with disordered eating, self-hatred, and envy, and coming to terms with how the self-defensive exterior she had cultivated since childhood inspired Charli’s feelings of insecurity. For a remix put together in a matter of days, the track contains a ridiculous amount of immediately iconic lines that you doubtless don’t need reminding of. But more simply, those repeat stabs of “girl” seem like the crux of the matter, repeated like an emphatic ugh throughout; A. G. Cook’s beat slurps and chomps along, chasing an antsy synth line that seems to itch with agitation at the tedious stew of insecurity, comparison, and confected drama that sometimes feel endemic to girlhood. Assuming the worst about someone can easily backfire. “The girl, so confusing version with lorde” is the rare case that brought out the very best in both parties. –Laura Snapes

Listen: Charli XCX / Lorde, “The girl, so confusing version with lorde”

Beyoncé: “ALIEN SUPERSTAR” (2022)

The ballroom tradition is one of serving fantasy, of projecting an extraterrestrial level of realness—an entire universe carved out by Black and brown queer and trans people who felt the crushing weight of marginalization but still knew they could beat the straight world at its own game any day. This is the tradition from which Beyoncé drew much of the inspiration for her dance music opus RENAISSANCE, and this is the energy that pulses throughout “ALIEN SUPERSTAR,” her homage to ballroom scenes. “ALIEN SUPERSTAR” epitomizes the maximalist splendor that defines much of the album: production credits from house legend Honey Dijon, stacked vocals, fierce rapping, and a bevy of samples ranging from visionary writer and director Barbara Ann Teer, founder of the National Black Theatre, to Right Said Fred. It all adds up to a master class in attitude and self-celebration, Bey’s main vocal line demurely perched above the music like a showcase of the kind of restrained femme elegance embodied by the most iconic ballroom performers. Tens across the board. –Marissa Lorusso

Listen: Beyoncé, “ALIEN SUPERSTAR”

Waxahatchee: “Fire” (2020)

When Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield set out to write “Fire,” she was thinking about unconditional love. What would it mean to offer it to those around her; more pressingly, what would it mean to offer it to herself? At the time, Crutchfield was in the early stages of getting sober, an experience that would inform her brilliant, career-high album Saint Cloud—and that album’s first single, “Fire,” sounds like a curtain opening on an entirely new phase of Crutchfield’s life and work. Warm, gentle, and lush, with twangy guitar, subtle percussion, and resonant piano, it radiates with possibility. “If I could love you unconditionally,” she promises, “I could iron out the edges of the darkest sky.” “Fire,” with its slow-burning grace, is not a song that guarantees an easy path forward, but it offers an intention: One day at a time, we can each become, in Crutchfield’s words, “wiser and slow and attuned.” –Marissa Lorusso

Listen: Waxahatchee, “Fire”

Cardi B: “WAP” [ft. Megan Thee Stallion] (2020)

“WAP” is the song that sparked a thousand thinkpieces, divided the world, and even had one politician wildly declaring it a representation of “what happens when children are raised without God and without a strong father figure.” But beyond the controversy, “WAP” loudly signaled a larger movement toward solidarity among women in rap. By then, Megan had established herself as the biggest mouth in the South; Bronx-bred Cardi was the big sister tagging in the Houston rapper for a chef d’oeuvre of sexual innuendos that sound like Godzilla and King Kong (literally) smashing their way through the city.

All this unfolds over a colossal loop of Baltimore legend Frank Ski’s thumping “Whores in This House,” with Cardi and Megan flipping the epithet into the backbone of an epic pleasure quest. Together, they find at least 37 (I counted) specific ways to say, “This is how I want it,” with “spit in my mouth” somehow being among the tamest. Is it hypersexual? Pure lust? Over-analyzed? Yes, to all of the above. –Clover Hope

Listen: Cardi B, “WAP” [ft. Megan Thee Stallion]

Yves Tumor: “Gospel for a New Century” (2020)

With “Gospel for a New Century,” Yves Tumor takes horns and starves them of air. The Korean funk sample that plays at the top of the song clips away almost as soon as it starts, as if it’s been accidentally paused. In their earlier ambient work, Tumor wove silence as a thread through fields of sound, but on “Gospel,” silence hits like a snare: a beat snapping you to attention within seconds, before you’ve even had a chance to settle into a groove. The initial vacancies only prime you to squirm under the chorus’ sensory overload, which still ranks among the most gripping moments in all of Tumor’s work. “Gospel” might have become a perfectly digestible pop song if everything didn’t go so irresistibly wrong: the bass tone punched up so tightly it’s boxing you, horns suddenly gulping and expelling so much air they cause a weather event, Tumor’s overdubbed whine pinching the whole scene into a single directive: “Come and light my fire.” You can already hear the explosion that’s promised when you do. –Sasha Geffen

Listen: Yves Tumor, “Gospel for a New Century”

Earl Sweatshirt: “Making the Band (Danity Kane)” (2023)

If Earl Sweatshirt’s discography is a cave system of dank memories and murky confessions, “Making the Band (Danity Kane)” is the sound of a geyser blasting through the darkness into open air. Earl spends the track jigging through Evilgiane and Clams Casino’s scherzo beat with supreme nonchalance. He’s an enemy of the state like Gene Hackman; he’s Bruce Banner, handling the rage; he’s making bands like Diddy. (He’d probably walk that last one back like Kesha, given the chance.) He’s always been a precise writer, but his loose delivery brings out the playfulness that typically lurks beneath his probing and insular music. Sometimes, even troglodytes gotta pop out. –Stephen Kearse

Listen: Earl Sweatshirt, “Making the Band (Danity Kane)”

Fever Ray: “Shiver” (2023)

Radical Romantics’ standout single “Shiver” is about a common enough situation—anticipating a first date—but Karin Dreijer approaches the subject with a cavernous want and vulnerability that there’s no insipid Hinge quip for. They’re extremely horny—Dreijer said thick thighs save lives!—but also thunderstruck, annihilated by the “one million lumens” of their prospective lover. They want to shiver, and whether they mean shivering in orgasm or trembling in awe is beside the point; here, the feelings are the same. Their lyrics are unadorned and vulnerable—“Can I trust you?”—but even more vulnerable are the parts that are wordless. As it goes on, “Shiver” abandons words entirely for a dense, idiosyncratic mating call of mewling synths, operatic cadences distorted and pinched to sound uncanny, carefree whoops.

Underlying this is a constant sense of tension, personified here by an undulating, ominous drone—the influence of Karin’s Knife bandmate Olof, who rejoins them on production. The sound recalls the desolate landscapes of 2009’s Fever Ray, but where that record was arid, “Shiver” pulses with life. It’s as if something wild and wanting is clawing its way out of the lonesome drone, flinging their full self in all of its strange hyperspecificities toward whoever awaits in the void. –Katherine St. Asaph

Listen: Fever Ray, “Shiver”

Hikaru Utada: “Somewhere Near Marseilles” (2022)

If the citizens of Marseille are looking for someone to blame for the fact that every Cafe Triste customer and their tiny dog seemed to be crowding the Calanques this past summer, they should look no further than Hikaru Utada. Their song “Somewhere Near Marseilles” imagines the Côte d’Azur as a place where true love is healing, every sexual escapade lasts from dusk ’til dawn (’til dusk), and a single drink can wash all your problems away. The 12-minute finale of the J-pop legend’s career-invigorating 2022 album Bad Mode, “Somewhere Near Marseilles” is sad, sensual, romantic, and lovelorn—a potent, ambrosian emotional cocktail.

And it's a total heater—produced by Floating Points, “Somewhere Near Marseilles” combines houses both acid and Balearic and lands on a sound that’s simultaneously forceful and weightless. Sam Shepherd has infrequently, if ever, worked with vocalists on his songs, but “Somewhere Near Marseilles” makes a strong case for the Floating Points diva house album, his wormy synth lines molding to Utada’s melodies like that Coperni spray-on dress. It’s a divine combination, a song so lush and effortlessly sexy it can make any 12 minutes feel like a perfect romantic rendezvous. Atout France only wishes it could make an ad so compelling. –Shaad D’Souza

Listen: Hikaru Utada, “Somewhere Near Marseilles”

Bad Bunny / Jowell & Randy / Ñengo Flow: “Safaera” (2020)

The ultimate reggaeton odyssey. In its quest to find the best ass, best perreo, and richest references across multiple lineages, “Safaera” earns Bad Bunny the title of reggaeton’s most exemplary student. He makes a five-minute track sound endless, and in his delivery, timeless. Maybe that’s because across eight samples (which sparked great controversy) and five generations of party producers, “Safaera” passes a nearly impossible test: produce a radio mix in one song worthy of mainstream domination. Each section rumbles onto the next like a pack of tíos vying for the title of nastiest orator. As global genres continuously shape where we put our money, students of the craft and marquesina veterans alike will shout “Aquí llegó tu tiburón!” for decades to come. –Gio Santiago

Listen: Bad Bunny / Jowell & Randy / Ñengo Flow, “Safaera”

Jazmine Sullivan: “Pick Up Your Feelings” (2020)

The chaos of a crumbling relationship can feel like a jolt of dopamine. But when it’s finally over, you just know. Eventually, you reach the point that your friends, your therapist and your gut saw coming from a mile (and a few thesis-length texts) away. Jazmine Sullivan crystallizes that moment of clarity with equal parts rage, frustration, and vulnerability on “Pick Up Your Feelings,” the second single from her tragically relatable EP Heaux Tales. Her delivery is sharp, unflinching, and almost gleeful—it’s clear this is the end. But underneath that cold exterior, there’s something deeper. It’s not just what she says, but how she layers her emotions with grief. Even as she sings, “Memories, all that shit, you can keep it,” the cracks in her voice hint at the hurt left behind once her ex finally grabs his keys and leaves. –Clover Hope

Listen: Jazmine Sullivan, “Pick Up Your Feelings”

Alvvays: “Belinda Says” (2022)

The cover art of Alvvays’ Blue Rev is a photo of frontwoman Molly Rankin as a kid in a rain jacket, cowering away from the camera flash with wild eyes while her parents look on. “Belinda Says,” the album’s emotional heart, captures a similar snapshot of the precipice of adulthood; sprained ankles, blue dresses, and malt liquor swigged by the ice rink give way to serious phone calls and the possibility of striking out on your own. And that’s only in the first minute.

As with the rest of Blue Rev, the song’s production knocks you off your feet, careening between screaming guitar chords that evoke swerving off a highway and a bittersweet keyboard melody that wouldn’t be out of place on a carousel. As the song hits a jaw-dropping key change, the band’s stratospheric noise makes the presence of Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” sound more monumental than the sky—a fitting tribute to those moments where teenage hope and pop music escapism collide. –Claire Shaffer

Listen: Alvvays, “Belinda Says”

Wednesday: “Chosen to Deserve” (2023)

“Chosen to Deserve” opens with a premise worthy of a Tammy Wynette or Garth Brooks classic: If relationships begin with couples exchanging their most flattering stories, Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman reasons, eventually you’ve got to get around to sharing the ugly ones, too. And, so, for five minutes, Hartzman lays it all out, dishing on a wild youth spent killing time in reckless ways: blacking out drunk on school nights, intoxicatedly breaking into the neighborhood pool and pissing in public, having risky sex in the back of SUVs.

Hartzman is an absolute master of life’s lurid details, and she platforms her past proudly against the song’s slamming guitars and exhilarating twang. Still, there’s the suggestion of unresolved traumas that may prove tricky down the road, should her lucky soulmate choose to accept their shared future. Hartzman frames the song as a warning, but her sweet, unfiltered honesty makes it feel more like an invitation. –Evan Rytlewski

Listen: Wednesday, “Chosen to Deserve”

NewJeans: “Super Shy” (2023)

K-pop has always been home to audacious genre-blending, but NewJeans feel revelatory in their decorum, draping their dance music in hushed atmospheres. “Super Shy” is their most effortless masterstroke: The drum ’n’ bass and Jersey club production doesn’t pop so much as drift, providing a breezy foundation for a wistful hook. “You don’t even know my name, do ya?” might as well be a rallying cry—it captures the giddiness of possibility and then stays there. NewJeans invite you to relish the fantasy, all the members singing as if letting out a daydreamer’s sigh. In making no moves, the group avoids the terror of difficult vulnerability, and all that remains is the pleasure of potential. A crush can brighten your day—best not to ruin a good thing. –Joshua Minsoo Kim

Listen: NewJeans, “Super Shy”

Cassandra Jenkins: “Hard Drive” (2021)

The chorus—“The mind is just a hard drive”—sounds like the kind of thing a Silicon Valley tech bro might tell you seconds before replacing your job with an algorithm. For Cassandra Jenkins, it’s a defense of the unknowable mystery of the human condition. Over a backdrop of jazz-inflected yacht rock, the New York singer-songwriter unspools a series of spoken-word vignettes—chance meetings with a pink-lipsticked museum guard, a new age bookkeeper, a jewel-eyed psychic—whose subtexts and non-sequiturs a language model could never begin to parse. The cumulative wisdom of these anecdotes lies precisely in the ways they don’t add up, but merely slide sideways, like a snowball made of hope, toward something approaching wholeness. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Cassandra Jenkins, “Hard Drive”

Bfb Da Packman: “Free Joe Exotic” [ft. Sada Baby] (2020)

To make the filthiest, most deranged, most out-of-pocket Michigan rap marathon of the 2020s is like making the sleaziest crime movie of the ’70s. But Flint’s Bfb Da Packman and Detroit’s Sada Baby did it, and, without forgetting that if you’re going to be edgelords that shit better be funny, too. Packman tests the ethical boundaries, shooting out as many self-deprecating, no-holds-barred jokes as he possibly can, all about the build of his body which he compares to Patrick Star, the unhealthy diet that’s made his cum unswallowable, and his average dick size: “She said she can feel it in her stomach, stop cappin’/Ol’ lyin’ ass bitch my dick ain’t that big.” His delivery has the exaggerated, conversational tinge of Patrice O’Neal reciting a story onstage, which makes the bars that much more ridiculous and singular. But if you want to take the experience to another level, fire up the video. Sada is gyrating shirtless and Packman is rolling around on the ground in a bright orange hoodie that reads “Still HIV Positive” for no other reason than he’s out of his mind. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: Bfb Da Packman, “Free Joe Exotic” [ft. Sada Baby]

Xaviersobased: “crisp dubs” (2021)

Like the very best rap songs, “crisp dubs” introduces a whole new way of communicating emotion and meaning. There’s the titular phrase, Xaviersobased’s sick way of describing fresh $20 bills. And as the song ratchets between BPMs, stops, starts, and spins back, like xav is button-mashing a DJ controller, you’re beamed into rap’s gorgeous, androgynous, data-overloaded future being defined by the prodigious New York rapper. Vocals wafting across soft Michigan drums and the prickly guitar of Russian pop group Hi-Fi (famously the background music for the Meet ‘n’ Fuck games on the website Newgrounds) Xaviersobased chirps and coos about Forgiato rims and all-white fits, channeling Black Kray, A$AP Rocky, and Hi-C in the same breath. Like Lil B, Xaviersobased asks us to escape from the age of information using its very tools. “crisp dubs” is the oasis at the end of brain-rot. –Mano Sundaresan

Listen: Xaviersobased, “crisp dubs”

Fiona Apple: “I Want You to Love Me” (2020)

Fiona Apple has yearned, pleaded, spilled her guts, and bluntly told men she’d no longer absorb the “hot piss that comes through your mouth.” But none of these ideas sound as immediately important as the all-consuming feeling she captures on “I Want You to Love Me.” Released during the earliest days of the pandemic, the Fetch the Bolt Cutters opener addresses nothing less than the meaning of life. Its weepy piano melody swells alongside homemade percussion with some of the most intense, weird, and pulsating vocals her singular alto has ever offered. Her truths are universal and breathtaking: she knows a sound is still a sound around no one, time is elastic, but most importantly, that none of this matters in the end—love keeps the bloodstream warm.

By the time “I Want You to Love Me” reaches its final chorus, Apple begins to tear down its walls and it all begins to sound like a fever dream; its experimental tendons spasm like an uncanny spell, turning love into something queer and undiscovered. Apple has always been a truth teller, but on “I Want You to Love Me” she transforms into the rare seer, articulating our deepest desires for connection with a wisdom so analog it could break some of the strongest curses of this decade. –Gio Santiago

Listen: Fiona Apple, “I Want You to Love Me”

Bob Dylan: “Murder Most Foul” (2020)

Since releasing Rough and Rowdy Ways in the early days of the pandemic, Bob Dylan has played over 100 shows and made a concert film. He’s sang countless covers, dug into the depths of his catalog, and kept beat with a wrench, but he’s never performed “Murder Most Foul,” the 17-minute epic that kicked off his new era of octogenarian prolificity. Practically speaking, it is hard to play one song for more than a quarter of an hour, but it’s almost like “Murder Most Foul” is too powerful and foreboding to deliver to an audience. Its messages are ultimately mysterious, as Dylan plunges a just-assassinated John F. Kennedy into the depths of hell, only to continue on with a roll-call of American recordings, but it is unmistakably violent, insidious, and beautiful. That’s about as close as you can get to universal truth, and maybe too much to share in good company. –Matthew Strauss

Listen: Bob Dylan, “Murder Most Foul”

Alex G: “Runner” (2022)

Recent ethnographic studies suggest that humans evolved to run great lengths in order to slowly wear down their prey, using endurance as a weapon. You wonder what today’s long-distance athletes are running for, or maybe what they are running from? On “Runner,” noted admirer of animals and athletes Alex G sketches two characters who attempt to outrun their secrets. One eludes the law with drugs in tow, while the other is plagued by guilt, screaming a confession that they’ve “done a couple bad things” until their voice cracks and sputters. Compared to his recent work, it’s one of his most texturally conservative songs, easing up on the surreal vocal processing and strings. But it’s the bonus flourishes that make it into the mix, like the verse’s gently laid piano chords or Alex G’s impatient palm-muting on the intro, that suggest a refuge from the existential dread that lies just out of reach. Keep running, though, and maybe you’ll get there. –Jude Noel

Listen: Alex G, “Runner”

ANOHNI and the Johnsons: “It Must Change” (2023)

ANOHNI’s 2023 album My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross resuscitated her band the Johnsons to reflect on the fractious mood of the time. “It Must Change,” the album’s opening jaw-dropper, underlines the moral and emotional valencies of that anxious post-COVID moment: an encroaching sense of loss where hatred so often outflanks love—even as those opposing poles of light and dark, as she says, are “just an idea that someone told you.” It casts about for humanism through a brew of soulful guitar, mellow percussion, and that singular, panoptic voice. She gains strength with each quavering, escalating verse as she mines a deep well of sadness at her lyrics’ core. Here, however, ANOHNI’s inclination toward truth and beauty in the face of darkness wins out. Things must change, she insists, like a prophetess from another, better future. –Eric Torres

Listen: ANOHNI and the Johnsons, “It Must Change”

Low: “Days Like These” (2021)

For nearly the entire first minute of “Days Like These,” Alan Sparhawk and the late Mimi Parker sing a cappella. The air evaporates around their words like warm breath in the winter night. A few angelic guitar strums from Sparhawk float downward. Then, suddenly, and without a hint, a deafening wall of distortion and guitar bulldozes everything, the volume so overblown that the song’s audio crackles and fizzes from the sheer loudness. You might even check to see if your headphones are damaged.

The power of “Days Like These” is in its extremes. Low reach a point of being so beaten down that they’ve come to terms with how it can play out: “You’re never gonna feel complete/No, you’re never gonna be released.” But don’t mistake that for a defeatist attitude. As the noise sputters and fades, exposing waves of soothing vocal harmonies and Parker’s quiet, thudding kick drum—a human pulse, a sign to carry on—Sparhawk and Parker repeatedly murmur the word “again.” The flicker of hope is still there. –Nina Corcoran

Listen: Low, “Days Like These”

Caroline Polachek: “Bunny Is a Rider” (2021)

A good pop star is everywhere. She’s posting enviable but artfully messy photos on Instagram; she’s going viral on TikTok; she’s topping the charts; she’s sold out her tour. How delicious, then, for Caroline Polachek—freaky futurist, vocal acrobat, avant-pop innovator—to release a self-described “summer jam” where the protagonist is simply, purposefully unavailable. The title character of “Bunny Is a Rider” is slippery, untraceable, intriguing; her sex appeal rests on a profound ability to not give a shit. Bunny will show up to the party whenever she wants. She will leave without saying goodbye. She will not call; she will not text. She is too busy having the time of her life.

Alongside producer Danny L Harle, Polachek crafted a track that’s embodied and self-assured: a propulsive bassline, pinging percussion, an enticing whistle, even a sample of Harle’s giggling baby all under the spell of Polachek’s sensual and cyborgian voice. The character of Bunny is meant to be an aspiration, available to anyone—so perhaps Polachek herself is not Bunny, despite her slip into the first person in the song’s chorus. But when she released “Bunny Is a Rider,” Polachek established herself as a pop auteur in a class all her own. –Marissa Lorusso

Listen: Caroline Polachek, “Bunny Is a Rider”

Kendrick Lamar: “Not Like Us” (2024)

If you have a pulse, you probably heard that Kendrick Lamar and Drake got into a little spat that culminated with one making a countrywide anthem and the other putting out an unhinged rant listing all the reasons why they couldn’t possibly be a pedophile. Yeah, things got all the way messed up. The main reason for that hellishness was the venom of Kendrick Lamar, who, with “Not Like Us,” nabbed the type of zeitgeist-shifting smash that would normally be Drake’s bread and butter. A palate cleanser after Kendrick channeled Hannibal Lecter on the queasy and hysterically overboard “Meet the Grahams,” “Not Like Us” is an L.A. party song produced by Mustard that has a euphoric hook and builds to a few shocking moments. Specifically when Kenny goes, “Certified Lover Boy? Certified pedophiles,” calling out the OVO crew for all their alleged dirt. It might be the defining lyric of the decade so far, in ways that are unsettling and amazing and troubling and funny.

Having contradicting feelings about Kendrick Lamar music isn’t anything new (hello, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers), but “Not Like Us” feels like one of the most complicated rap songs ever. No matter what you say about it, you will be a hypocrite in some way. Forcing you to consider your listening habits, like barely any Billboard chart toppers have before. And like To Pimp a Butterfly’s “Alright” on steroids, the phrase in the title of “Not Like Us” was quickly commodified and absorbed into the cultural lexicon, turning what was initially Kendrick’s celebration of hip-hop culture and ousting of Drake from it into a branding opportunity chauffeuring Kendrick to the Super Bowl half-time show. That has gone on to soften the impact of “Not Like Us;” one of the final nails in the coffin was Kendrick doing the track five times in a row on an Amazon stream. For that reason, giving it any larger cultural significance feels icky, though it will live on as the kind of omnipresent rap banger that doesn’t come along too often anymore. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: Kendrick Lamar, “Not Like Us”

RXK Nephew: “American tterroristt” (2020)

If you asked a young, online person 15 years ago what “based” meant, they’d probably mention the rapper Lil B’s obscure positivity gospel. Ask the same question to a young, online person today and you’ll get another cryptic answer, only this time with vaguely edgelord-y implications. At the center of this weird Venn diagram is RXK Nephew’s “American tterroristt,” a nine-minute jeremiad for the post-truth era from a guy who’s probed life’s mysteries deeper than you have. The Rochester rapper, who between 2019 and 2022 released at least one song each day, became a conspiracy scholar during one particular prison stint, pondering UFOs, weather control, and Biblical lies with his bunkie all day. Years later, half blacked out off Hennessy on his couch, he recorded his magnum opus, looping the beat three times to riff with enviable abandon on Adam and Eve, Santa Claus, Christopher Columbus, SpongeBob SquarePants.

If it’s true that insanity is the only sane response to an insane society, surely Neph is the most cogent rapper of the present epoch, or at least the most emblematic—so much so that the schizzed-out, red-pilled aura of “American tterroristt” tends to eclipse how effortless it all sounds, how much it makes you think. Beyond the thrill of provocation wages a battle of man versus fate. (“What I did to deserve to go through this? Let me get this right—this because of Eve?” he wonders of his own misfortunes.) Since Neph posted the song to YouTube in December 2020, the world has grown bizarre to the point where garden variety conspiracy theorists often seem to lack imagination. “American tterroristt” still sparks wonder at our strange world full of strange people. –Meaghan Garvey

Listen: Rxk Nephew, “American tterroristt”

Lana Del Rey: “A&W” (2023)

Lana Del Rey dropped “A&W” eight months after the Supreme Court handed down Dobbs v. Jackson, as tradwifery was gaining traction in online corners and the politics of sex and femininity in America seemed fated for a precipitous backslide. The song is both a staggering work of self-mythology and a first-person treatise on the national state of womanhood, tacked up by its central declaration: “This is the experience of being an American whore.”

It’s sneaky, though—more probing than polemic. Jack Antonoff’s production, built around somber broken piano chords and dry guitar strums, seems innocuous enough, at first. Lana’s most explosive lyrics—cataloguing the impossible standards set for victims of sexual violence, the stigma around expressing sexuality as you age—are diffused by her vaporous whisper. Patriarchy is loud, flagrant; Lana’s rejoinder is harder to pin down.

Then the radical switch-up in the song’s second half introduces a thunderous beat, a slew of references to Lana’s own back catalog, and a more impish persona. Behind the whiplash and psychedelia of it all is the impression of a woman pushed over the edge. “Look at me,” she sang earlier, the demand of someone all too familiar with the forces that conspire to make complicated women invisible. Here, she makes it impossible to look away. –Olivia Horn

Listen: Lana Del Rey, “A&W”

Listen to the Best Songs of the 2020s So Far on our Spotify and Apple Music playlists.