The Top 100 Tracks of 2013

by Pitchfork Staff

Dec. 16, 2013

Presenting our Top 100 Tracks of 2013, as voted by our writers and editors. Any track that was released in 2013 or had its greatest impact in the U.S. this year was eligible.

“Fall Back”

100

Nik Colk Void’s vocal takes are usually subsumed by the music, with the band giving them no more or less importance than any other instrument. “Fall Back” is one of the rare exceptions to that rule on Factory Floor, with Void's deadpan delivery sounding more assertive than it does elsewhere. It’s a change that suits them, giving the sound a pop edge that harks back to the feel of the pre-album 2011 single “R E A L L O V E” . It’s also the closest the album gets to the band’s face-shredding live shows, where the constant shudder of their electronic backing hits as hard as a cold punch to the stomach. “Fall Back” finds a way to make distance a virtue, actively alienating and antagonizing Factory Floor’s audience by building stern barriers to entry. —Nick Neyland

Factory Floor: "Fall Back" (via SoundCloud)

“Toe Cutter - Thumb Buster”

99

Thee Oh Sees have proven that they’re capable of delivering a motorik burner or two. Floating Coffin has a couple, but with “Toe Cutter / Thumb Buster”, John Dwyer and the band show some restraint. The vocals are quiet and falsetto, and the tempo is steady. Even when they’re singing in a relative whisper, it’s deceptive—they’re mumbling a murderous narrative about “sounds from far below” and “blood upon the ground” and “silence all around.” Even the smallest sonic elements read as ominous if you focus on them for long enough, like the shaker, which scrapes persistently in the back of the mix. Thee Oh Sees have dozens of songs from albums, split 7”s, and flexi-discs that are full of muscle and power. This one’s strength comes from its simplicity: One repetitive, hypnotizing, buoyant riff, some sweet voices, a dark story. —Evan Minsker

Thee Oh Sees: "Toe Cutter - Thumb Buster"

“Metal Swing”

98

Looking at James Hinton's biography, you'd assume we were talking about a wacky new neighbor on "The Big Bang Theory" and not one of the most slyly gratifying electronic musicians to come along this year. The Brown University grad majored in physics, has a self-professed love for math and cosmology, and spends too much time on YouTube. And though little of this specifically informs "Metal Swing", the final track on his first album as the Range, it does show how well Hinton works with contradictions. So while his pedigree might be low-key geek, "Metal Swing" is anything but eggheaded, leading with its gut instead of its brain. Built around a cyclical piano-based melody and a tip-toeing bass line, its internal rhythm feels almost tidal: Cautious, hypnotic, a little uneasy. And then, all of a sudden: "Why's this guy threatening?" The voice belongs to an unidentified, Cockney-accented UK rapper spewing puffed-chested and carefully calculated bluster. There's very little about "Metal Swing" that feels threatening—to have empty schoolyard barbs anchor the track seems almost counterintuitive. But therein lies the subtle but risky mechanics at the heart of "Metal Swing", a demonstration of how incongruent shapes can create a strange, rewarding harmony. —Zach Kelly

The Range: "Metal Swing" (via SoundCloud)

“No Destruction”

97

You might have listened to Foxygen’s “No Destruction" a dozen times, but only really heard that one line. The one where singer Sam France bluntly states his East Coast vs. West Coast preferences. “You don’t need to be an asshole/ You’re not in Brooklyn anymore,” he blurts while the band channels the loose and free-wheelin’ sounds of Loaded-era Velvet Underground. “No Destruction” is not a tirade against Williamsburg, gentrification, or hipsterdom, though. Actually, it’s not immediately clear what it’s about. It starts off as a breakup tune with a living-well-is-the-best-revenge slant, but France quickly abandons this linear narrative for a series of stoney stream-of-consciousness couplets (“I know they’re gonna try to take away my big mouse/ Take the panels off my greenhouse”). If you pay attention, you can get the gist of his dilemma: It’s over. She’s gone. It's all in the past. But France's grasp on the past sounds a bit unreliable. And there is nobody left to burn one in the subway with. "No Destruction" is goofy, but it's not necessarily a joke. It finds a sweet spot that balances snark and sentiment, that touches on 60s rock nostalgia while never taking itself too seriously. —Aaron Leitko

Foxygen: "No Destruction" (via SoundCloud)

“Sleeper”

96

Though Sleeper is a gentler record than any other in Ty Segall’s catalogue, the title track does have a specific precursor: 2011’s “Goodbye Bread”, another album opener, was an annunciation of sorts, a broadening of the range we’d come to expect from one of California’s leading garage rockers. It was the prettiest thing Segall had done up to that point, and the saddest. And with “Sleeper”, he makes good on that promise of depth, channeling pain and anger into one of his most poignant songs. Segall both writes and plays with a sincerity that never devolves into sentimentality, but his voice is strained, his guitar is heavy and loose, and there’s a subtle otherworldliness, an ethereal lilting feedback buried within that’s only revealed once the song’s reached its end. —Jonah Bromwich

“Dust in the Gold Sack”

95

Much of what is written about fuzz-pop outfit Swearin’ finds a way of mentioning that frontwoman Allison Crutchfield is the twin sister of Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield. The connection is useful in highlighting the siblings' aptitude for guitar-driven melody, as the Crutchfield sisters churn out indie rock like Beyoncé churns out hair flips, and on “Dust in the Gold Sack”, the band makes it look easy, assembling tangled riffage and crashing cymbals. But for all that expertise, "Dust in the Gold Sack" is every bit as raw as it is cathartic, a place where “booze overnighted” and “grudges unrequited” loom large and then evaporate in the same exhale. —Molly Beauchemin

Swearin': "Dust in the Gold Sack" (via SoundCloud)

“Need U (100%)” [ft. AME]

94

London producer and DJ Duke Dumont, a Switch mentee who’s been spinning since he was 15, knows his way around hypnotically straightforward dance music. “Need U (100%)” helped jump-start the recent house music revival along with artists like Rudimental and Disclosure and shortly after its release, Dumont told FACT he almost didn’t work with a guest vocalist at all, debating whether to cut in an a cappella track instead. What a shame that would have been. The song’s clap-happy beat and whiplash breakdown need little adornment, but 18-year-old singer AME adds a pulse-resuscitating vocal jolt that was noticeably absent from the Debbie Deb and Monifah samples on Dumont’s 2007 Regality EP. “Give me one hundred/ Need you one hundred percent,” she sings (or rather demands) with the same “Yeah, what are you going to give me for it?” teasing of her own breakout single, “Play the Game Boy.” Except this time they’re both playing, and everyone on the dance floor is a winner. —Harley Brown

Duke Dumont: "Need U" (via SoundCloud)

“Love Is Lost (Hello Steve Reich Mix by James Murphy)”

93

David Bowie announced the release of The Next Day, the album he’d spent three years shaping in secrecy, on his 66th birthday, only two weeks into this year. The record’s continued rollout throughout 2013 suggested that, despite his age, Bowie was an old legend interested in new tricks. Chief among them was a 3xCD collector’s version. It followed much later in the year, keying on new songs and, most saliently, a 10-minute remix of The Next Day’s coming-of-age terror tale, “Love Is Lost”, by Bowie acolyte James Murphy. With the single and its edit, Bowie effectively joined the remix and YouTube masses.

Murphy’s longest remix in a decade, his rendering is both reverent and revisionist. (He references composer Steve Reich in the title, largely because he turns the sound of a crowd clapping into a rhythm that shifts in phase against the rest of the music at the start. That idea comes from the minimalist’s own “Clapping Music”). He uses every verse and refrain here, and he repurposes the tune’s anxious organ. But Bowie’s rock original gives way to Murphy’s vivified disco, as he rearranges the song’s order entirely and leans more heavily on its central lament than its actual narrative: “Oh what have you done?” he implores Bowie to repeat above colorful keyboard splashes and a springy beat that builds up only for its own comedown. It’s posed less as a question of blame and less as one of general despair: What are you going to leave behind, exactly? —Grayson Haver Currin

David Bowie: "Love Is Lost (Hello Steve Reich Mix By James Murphy)"

“Dis Ain't What U Want”

92

One of the fascinating things about Chicago's drill music movement is how insular it’s remained, even in light of the massive hype and controversy that has surrounded it. For better or worse, its participants have mostly stayed their creative course, rapping in a vacuum, disengaged from the hand-wringing and concern-trolling that’s surrounded their work and community. Lil Durk's "Dis Ain't What U Want" is the type of line-drive street banger that the 21-year-old’s gotten incredibly efficient at producing, but it also stands out as perhaps the first of the drill records to make eye contact with those outsiders and onlookers. The hook inverts Keef's "I Don't Like" thesis to place the impetus of disgust on the audience instead. Durk's message is similarly blunt—"Fuck TMZ, fuck Breaking News and ABC/ I can't do no shows 'cause I terrify my city/ They say I terrify my city"—but maybe it needs to be. Much like fellow Southsider Chance the Rapper's baiting line "I know you're scared, you should ask us if we scared too," "Dis Ain't Want U Want" forces the listener to engage the artists directly, not as totems of a damaged system, but as actual breathing human beings with feelings and fears of their own. —Andrew Nosnitsky

Lil Durk: "Dis Ain't What U Want"

“Thor's Stone”

91

Flickering "Thor's Stone" is an instrumental that evokes an image of hand-carved pan pipes or some ancient villager blowing through a conch shell. Its texture seems essentially primitive, an invocation meant to summon an unseen spirit. (I suspect this element prompted Lee “Scratch” Perry to spend much of his remix of the song gabbling about “evil energy.”) Balanced within Matthew Barnes’ personalized hybrid of skeletal dub, emotive drones, and shuddering beats, these primitive tones meet the modern in a way that enables “Thor’s Stone” to feel at once ageless, out-of-time, and wholly unique. —Matt Murphy

Forest Swords: "Thor's Stone" (via SoundCloud)

“Ohm”

90

High-profile rock bands rarely thrive for long, and it’s nothing short of astonishing that Yo La Tengo is still batting over .300 nearly 30 years into their existence. On “Ohm”, they sound up-to-date but ready to walk away for the simplest reason: 'cause it’s been fun. There’s always been a push-and-pull in their output between still lifes and splattered abstractions, and they’ve been unafraid to wander as far as necessary in either direction. “Ohm” has them occupying the center, its circular riff unfolding over a soft, rustling rhythm before Ira Kaplan’s familiar guitar fuzz both curdles into sludge and cuts through the dissonance. Where it’s usually easy to tell who’s singing what, here Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew’s voices are braided into a hushed mantra of inner tranquility. “Nothing ever stays the same, nothing’s explained,” check; “sometimes the good guys lose,” check; “the harder we go, the longer we pry,” check. It makes more sense the more they repeat it. —Jeremy Gordon

Yo la Tengo: "Ohm"

“Picacho”

89

Pokémon, I'm told, are grouped by type: grass, fire, water, electric, "normal." Atlanta's Young Thug may have saddled himself with rap's most generic moniker, but don't mistake the guy for a normal-type anything. Case in point: "Picacho", four minutes of unchecked eccentricity named for that yellowest of Pokémon. Or, sort of, anyway; as Jay Neutron's beat Jigglypuffs around him, Thug walks through the club, decked out in diamonds so sparkly, they "just peek at you." "Picacho" is overloaded with Thug's not-normal cadences, what-in-the-world metaphors, and peculiar—and peculiarly catchy—way with melody, coming off something like Auto-Tune-era Lil Wayne attempting to out-oddball any-era Lil B. Like his 1017 label boss Gucci Mane in his glory days, Thug flips the almost-titular Pokémon's name every which way he can, serving up one of the year's most unlikely earworms in the process. Thug's otherworldly sing-raps float right over "Picacho" in a manner that makes better-known space-cases like Future sound positively earthbound. It's a deliriously inventive, break-the-mold performance by one of rap's fastest-rising weirdos. —Paul Thompson

Young Thug: "Picacho" [ft. Maceo]

“Vital”

88

"Vital" is one of the most crushing Grouper tracks to date: we hear dim guitar strums echo under Liz Harris’ somber, inaudible self-harmonizing, and, in the distance, ambient tape hiss hits like crashing waves. There are hints of vocal melodies, like little hymns humming under the wreckage, but the words are warbled and distant, eventually disappearing without explanation. These are moments that serve as a reminder of the ways music about death can bring out the most subtly, eerily gorgeous dichotomies: it's haunting but calming, confusing but meditative. "Vital" comes off like Liz Harris is trying and failing. It's devastating, vulnerable, and real. —Liz Pelly

Grouper: "Vital" (via SoundCloud)

“Pink Rabbits”

87

The closer the National inch toward "boring"—or at least the cartoon version of "boring" that their detractors paint over them—the better, more powerful, more complex, more human, their music grows. On Trouble Will Find Me, Matt Berninger's husky murmur was at its most subdued, the tempos reined-in to their most stately, and the heat dialed down to a one-bubble-every-hour kind of simmer. Everything important they have to say about humanity occurs at this temperature—from this vantage point, they have the ability see things that others don't. Things like the "white girl in a crowd of white girls in the park" that Berninger picks out astutely on "Pink Rabbits", Trouble Will Find Me's emotional centerpiece and maybe the most resonant song the band's ever made. The song has almost no rhythmic motion—the drum rolls are mournful little stutters punctuating a falling sigh. It's the first National song one could credibly imagine being sung by, say, Elton John, and in fact, there is a conspicuous trace of  "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" in its DNA. It's their grandest, warmest expression of Berninger's brand of wry empathy, one that recognizes the banality of our daily heartbreak and treats it with tenderness. "You didn't see me, I was falling apart," Berninger sings. But this song sees you. —Jayson Greene

The National: "Sea of Love"

“Paranoid” [ft. Joe Moses]

86

So, Ty Dolla $ign has a problem. I'll let him tell it: "I see two of my bitches in the club, and I know they know about each other." His lilting drawl indicates not dread but a perverse excitement. As he lets us know later—"Both my bitches drive Range Rovers/ None of my bitches can stay over"—it's not like this is going to follow him home, anyway. The 28-year-old brat is R&B's most brazen player and this is his Jerry Springer moment, trapped in a love triangle of his own construction with DJ Mustard's slippery organs and rattlesnake hi-hats playing the role of host nudging the trio towards the explosive final act. Except "Paranoid" has no conclusion. Was Ty being set up or was he just paranoid? Did the girls—in the same red bottoms and fragrance—even see each other? My guess is that in Ty Dolla $ign's world this is such a frequent occurrence that the resolution isn't even worth mentioning—if he even sought one out in the first place. —Jordan Sargent

Ty Dolla $ign: “Paranoid” [ft. Joe Moses] (via SoundCloud)

“Q.U.E.E.N.” [ft. Erykah Badu]

85

A common criticism of Janelle Monáe is that the idea of her music outstrips the reality, and in this case that's completely true. "Q.U.E.E.N.", the early advance track from her sophomore album The Electric Lady, was also her first single since a low-key guest turn on 2011's Grammy-winning fun. chart-topper "We Are Young". Like that song, "Q.U.E.E.N." has a subtle but crucial cameo, here by fellow grand soul-funk-pop starship trooper Erykah Badu, and its message of follow-your-arrow transcendence came as label brass were pitching the album as the one that would get Monáe over on mainstream radio. Her outsider's anthem was supposed to help make her an insider.

That didn't quite happen. "Q.U.E.E.N." failed to crack Billboard's Hot 100, and Monáe was shut out of this year's Grammy nominations, but it's the insiders' loss. The success of Lorde's similarly convention-critiquing, sovereignty-themed smash drives home the audacity of this one's concept. Come on: A Prince-ly (and, later, Prince-remixed) celebration of difference that segues via classic Badu-ism "the booty don't lie" to a collective-conscious-rap outro? No wonder radio was confused. But even if Monáe/Badu's ode to freakiness made others uncomfortable, it enjoyed a built-in audience of alone-dancers and mirror-twerkers who love it for what it is, not what it might've been. These two women could only ever be royals. They just happen to rule their own galaxy. —Marc Hogan

Janelle Monáe: “Q.U.E.E.N.” [ft. Erykah Badu] (via SoundCloud)

“Recover”

84

There’s nothing particularly complicated about Chvrches' formula: the 1980s synth-pop palette buffed to a contemporary shine; the wide-eyed vocal, courtesy of Lauren Mayberry, that falls to just the right side of hysteria; the occasional shouty "oh" refrain. What makes it so good is the conviction with which it’s delivered—not to mention the ruthless efficiency with which this Scottish trio hits the emotional bullseye time and time again. “Recover” certainly doesn’t hang around: we’re launched into the anthemic stratosphere within 25 seconds of that first steroidal snare hit, and there we remain pretty much for the duration. Personal drama—in this case, a relationship hanging in the balance—is presented in heart-burstingly epic terms. With these sorts of high theatrics, there’s always a risk of overshooting and landing on something absurdly overblown. But Chvrches’ aim proved to be unerring. —Angus Finlayson

Chvrches: "Recover"

“New You”

83

My Bloody Valentine’s comeback after a 22-year lapse in albums, mbv, was both a surprise and a complete lack of one. That dichotomy is embodied by “New You”, an mbv cut that suggests the past two decades may just have been a daydream trapped in a spiral in mastermind Kevin Shields’ inner ear. Tethered to the loopy funk that underpinned much of 1991’s epochal Loveless, “New You” lopes along hypnotically as singer-guitarist Bilinda Butcher exhales notes like lungfuls of fog. It isn’t the most immediately catchy or tinnitus-inducing moment of dream-pop bombast on mbv, but “New You” marks the moment where the album, and My Bloody Valentine as a whole, slips back into a confident gear. Every watermark of the band’s classic work is still at play, but here there’s a soft, haunting nuance to the melodic bends and sweetly stuttering tremolo that feels only as new as mbv needed to be. —Jason Heller

My Bloody Valentine: "New You"

“Open Eye Signal”

82

Sometimes it seems like electronic music has two primary molds: austere minimalism and extreme party-starting maximalism. Neither is more valid than the other, and there's plenty of middle ground between, but it's rare that an artist manages to take elements of both and meld them successfully. Enter Jon Hopkins, or rather, shift your gaze to Jon Hopkins, who has been on the periphery of music for awhile: collaborating with Imogen Heap, Brian Eno, and Coldplay, releasing a good-not-great solo album in 2009, and then bursting forward this year with "Open Eye Signal", an exceptional song that never collapses under the weight of its crunchy synths. It also never really commits to a full-on drop. Instead, it's nearly eight minutes of carefully constructed bliss that weaves ambient howls between pulsing synths that stack on top of each other until they disappear completely, giving way to the track's final two minutes of warped percussion. —Sam Hockley-Smith

Jon Hopkins: "Open Eye Signal" (via SoundCloud)

“Help Me Lose My Mind” [ft. London Grammar]

81

There were a number of human voices featured on Settle, the staggering debut album from the English duo Disclosure. Surfacing amid Guy and Howard Lawrence’s muscular house productions, they ranged from hip-hop preacher Eric Thomas to Friendly Fires’ Edward Macfarlane to Jessie Ware, while album highlights introduced fellow up-and-comers like Sam Smith and AlunaGeorge. But they saved the most heart-arresting vocal turn for last. Introducing London Grammar’s Hannah Reid to the world on album closer “Help Me Lose My Mind,” Disclosure slowed their tempo down to 110, coupled a closed hi-hat beat to a rattle that swelled and receded like cicadas, and created a track that sounds like a lost 90s classic. Reid’s voice falls somewhere between Everything But the Girl’s Tracey Thorn or Beth Orton on those early Chemical Brothers’ productions. When she confesses at the chorus “You help me lose my mind/ And you believe something I can’t define,” it makes for one of the year’s ineffable moments. —Andy Beta

Disclosure: "Help Me Lose My Mind" [ft. London Grammar]

“Karate Chop” [ft. Casino]

80

There’s no widespread consensus as to whether Future’s strangely mournful Auto-Tuned croak qualifies him as a singer, a rapper, or some wholly new species of vocalist, but whatever it is, fans could probably listen to him do it while reading from a software manual and still be happy. He put this theory to a test with “Karate Chop”, where his staccato-fied rhymes, supremely druggy performance, and computer-assisted warble reduce his verses to a jumble of phonemes that you have to squint at to recognize as actual words. Combined with a beat by wunderkind producer Metro Boomin’ that pairs a Hendrix-y synthesized guitar lick with blaring Inception-style horns, the song announced his new push into updating 60s psychedelia for the digital age—which would become clearer when he and his Freeband Gang released the Black Woodstock mixtape a few months later. “Karate Chop” was one of two Future/Lil Wayne collaborations to chart this year (“Love Me” was the other), as well as one of two Future-featuring songs (along with Rocko’s “U.O.E.N.O.”) to have its success derailed by a rapper’s stupidly offensive lyrics. But the facepalm-worthiness of Lil Wayne’s line about Emmett Till in the official remix does little to take away from the purity of the track’s Future-ness. —Miles Raymer

Future: "Karate Chop" [ft. Casino]

“Wenu Wenu”

79

"Wenu Wenu" makes a pretty convincing case that a forty-something wedding singer could, in fact, be the world's coolest dude. The leadoff track to the Four Tet-produced album of the same name—Souleyman's 500th, give or take—does what just about every dabke song before it does, trading off between cooly ecstatic vocals and writhing synth lines (courtesy of Souleyman's longtime keyboardist Rizan Sa'id) over an insistent thump. But the synth's gone neon, and the beat's transformed into a club-conquering monster, leaving everything about "Wenu Wenu" a little brighter, a little livelier, a little more joyful. In the middle of it all is Omar, calling for his "precious beloved" between bursts of rapturous keys. Souleyman's mastery of the dabke form was never in question; "Wenu Wenu", with an assist from Four Tet's crackling, crystalline production, just dials up the brilliance.—Paul Thompson

Omar Souleyman: “Wenu Wenu” (via SoundCloud)

“#Beautiful” [ft. Miguel]

78

Amidst the continuing onslaught of reflexively anthemic club-R&B stompers, the carefree laziness of #Beautiful could almost be considered polemical, except that its makers are too fully immersed in the execution to ever come across as calculating. Still, you have to wonder at the combination of the arrangement’s casually lurching summer-funk raunch with Miguel’s opening offer to let you “hop on the back of my bike…”, something like the musical equivalent of a Ryan Gosling “Hey Girl” gif. You have to wonder, too, at the patience with which Mariah waits to make her proper entrance on a song billed to her, but of course she knows exactly what she is doing. Her eruption of harmonies in the second verse shifts the song from the realm of the deeply satisfying to that of the unexpectedly thrilling. If there is a strategy behind all of this, it’s simply to explore the pleasures afforded by the meeting of minds of two pros, artists so intimately attuned to their craft that they can knock off what already feels like a songbook standard without ever seeming to try. —Tim Finney

Mariah Carey: "#Beautiful" [ft. Miguel]

“Hello Stranger”

77

Barbara Lewis’ original version of “Hello Stranger”, her 1963 hit that describes a chance encounter with an old friend or former love, is imbued with a spirit of easy-going tranquility. For her version of “Hello Stranger”, Julia Holter magnifies this odd sense of peace into a near total stillness, as if the outside world has ceased all noise and movement around the two characters within the song. Musically, she reduces it almost entirely down to her voice and a patient swell of droning strings, allowing herself the space to deliver one of her most expressive vocal performances to date. Especially in its context at the center of Holter's kinetic Loud City Song album, “Hello Stranger” comes across as a dream-like interlude. With wisps of Lewis’ familiar melody moving through like an apparition, the listener is left to wonder whether the song’s chance encounter is real or simply a wishful fantasy of its narrator. Either way, Holter delivers the song with a warmth and easy grace that suggests a calm acceptance in the face of possible romantic loss, finding enough pleasure in the interlude to reward the risk. —Matt Murphy

“Brainfreeze”

76

The 2012 London Olympics overlooked the 10-minute songs and four-letter words to include Fuck Buttons in their opening ceremonies, though judging from “Brainfreeze”, the Bristol duo shouldn’t expect a call from Rio officials. The leadoff track from their juggernaut third LP Slow Focus still abides to the “faster, higher, stronger” ideal of “Olympians”, but there’s no way it would ever pledge allegiance to some flag. That sort of sappy sentimentality is completely foreign to the merciless mercenary Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power have created here, which never lets emotion get in the way of following commands and completing a mission. Whereas Street Horrrsing sought to burrow to the earth’s core and Tarot Sport broke the ozone layer, “Brainfreeze” plows forward without remorse, taking eight minutes of marching orders from brutalized war drums and flattening everything in its path, the shrieking synths and grinding gears making an example of anything that refused to get out of the way. It’s a ballad for the universal soldier, one that doesn’t understand god or country, only progress and industry. —Ian Cohen

Fuck Buttons: "Brainfreeze" (edit) (via SoundCloud)

“Mute”

75

There’s an ambition to “Mute” that made it clear Trevor Powers had increased the scope for his Youth Lagoon project in the couple of years since it debuted. The song covers so much ground, taking so many turns along the way, that it’s a surprise it only lasts for six minutes. When it reaches the full-of-stars guitar line that closes out the song, it feels like a beginning, not an end. There’s something distinctly childlike about Powers’ vocal, which is pitched close to the innocence and wonder of Mercury Rev’s Jonathan Donahue. Like much of that band’s Deserter's Songs, “Mute” feels like a song that’s been around forever, waiting for someone to discover it. —Nick Neyland

Youth Lagoon: "Mute" (via SoundCloud)

“Come Walk With Me”

74

M.I.A. “Bad Girls” was a standout in its year because it was so undeniable, even for skeptics. “Come Walk With Me” is the opposite, noting every bit of hating the haters have got and driving a drone straight through them. The first half, a languid, sunsick take on a girl-group ballad, is everything said haters found grating about M.I.A. deliberately stretched to the limits: a singsong-to-the-point-of-apathy melody that rewrites government surveillance into mash notes and love songs into YOLO parlance.“It’s cool, it takes two, so I’m gonna still fux with you,” Maya sings.

Then she pulls out the Switch switch-up: right after saying she's kinda over throwing her hands in the air, there's a hands-high dance break made of self-samples (“Bamboo Banga”, the baby from Switch’s “Bad Girls” mix); right after clowning the gadgetry/social-media panopticon, the sounds from two different Apple products (Macbook’s volume crank-up, Photobook’s selfie timer) arrange into galloping trance, like chiptunes without the retromania. It’s exhilarating and undeniable after all: quotable as a tweet (most Favstar-worthy: “can you give me some of what you went and gave them,” like dialogue from The Circle if it were a romance novel), yet weirdly poignant. In a year in which the zeitgeist was endlessly fascinated with the imagined courtship habits of millennials, it turns out M.I.A. might have written the year’s best digital love song. —Katherine St. Asaph

M.I.A.: "Come Walk With Me"

“Control (HOF)” [ft. Kendrick Lamar and Jay Electronica]

73

Con · trolled – verb

Definition: The act of decimating rivals to inflict public humiliation. Characterized by exhibition of no mercy or sympathy for perceived weaknesses in an opponent.

Etymology: The verb first came to usage on August 12, 2013, when G.O.O.D. Music stocking stuffer Big Sean dropped “Control” on Twitter. The seven-and-a-half minute song featured the ghost of Jay Electronica and Kendrick Lamar, with the latter name-checking his peers with the scorched earth purism of Edward Snowden.

Within three hours of it leaking, edits had been made to expunge any trace of Sean or Electronica. Within several days, Tumblr had been converted into an infinite “Control” meme. Kendrick’s “King of New York” line prompted responses from New York rappers as futile as attacking Gozer with blades of grass. It sparked a beef between Kendrick and Drake, “the soft rapper he tucked into his pajama clothes.” LeBron James tweeted: "This is real hip hop at his best! We going crazy over here people!!” Phil Jackson even took a break from meditating atop a totem pole to gently lecture about the value of mentorship.

This wasn’t the best Kendrick Lamar-featured song of 2013. That would be “Jealous” with Fredo Santana or “Nosetalgia” with Pusha T. But it had the most impact—effectively ending the rap “Super Friends” era and ensuring that being “Controlled” replaced “Renegaded” and “Ethered” in the lexicon of verbs of mass destruction. You can’t inherit the rap throne; it’s something you have to usurp. And this was the sound of King Kendrick annexing new lands, sticking his flag into the hearts of men. —Jeff Weiss

“The Only Shrine I've Seen”

72

Darkside (Nicolas Jaar and guitarist Dave Harrington) break real rules—”The Only Shrine I’ve Seen” isn’t elongated or exaggerated pop or the build and burn of traditional dance. It is warped, weird, living in fits and starts, loose rattling paving the way for a full-scale global disco breakdown that dissipates soon after its entrance, leaving the track to live on an uneven use of space. The lyrics are cryptic, the vocals messy, with overdubs all over the place. But all eight minutes of “The Only Shrine I’ve Seen” is executed with such grace that you forget just how strange it really is. On “Shrine,” Jaar and Harrington commit musical blasphemy and make that freedom sound sacred. —Jonah Bromwich

“Do I Wanna Know?”

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Despite the guitars, the greaser comb-backs, and the breathless U.K. indie-hype hope a decade ago, Alex Turner isn't just being contrary when he shrugs off the current rock scene. His Arctic Monkeys are huge festival headliners in an era where, Nine Inch Nails and AM collaborator Josh Homme's Queens of the Stone Age aside, huge festival headliners don't swagger—Mumford & Sons, anyone? Applying the cocksure lessons of last year's glam-disco-R&B watershed "R U Mine?", "Do I Wanna Know?" adroitly establishes a fresh set of peers. See it in soulful singer Sam Smith's simmering rendition, or in how Turner downplays comparisons to Drake but then faithfully covers "Hold On, We're Going Home". Picture Turner spilling drinks on his settee listening to "Marvins Room": "There's this tune I've found that makes me think of you somehow,” Turner sings. Is this it? Some questions are best left rhetorical. —Marc Hogan

Arctic Monkeys: "Do I Wanna Know?"

“Man”

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“Show, don’t tell” is common advice, but hell, why not do both if you’re really out to make a point? This was Neko Case’s strategy with “Man”, the lead single from her sixth album, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight… First of all, it’s garage-rock riffs and pulsating percussion like a pack of galloping horses, no respite for three-and-a-half minutes. Part of what makes “Man” such a revelation is that on previous releases, Case had seemingly told everyone else’s stories in haunting detail except her own. (I mean, c’mon, she’s known for having written songs from a tornado’s perspective.) But "Man” would still convey strength musically even if its lyrics didn’t roar quite so loudly (having an actual guitar solo helps with that). It’s proof that when you’re dealing with a subject as sticky as traditional gender roles, leaving little up to interpretation can make all the difference. —Jillian Mapes

Neko Case: "Man"

“Feds Watching” [ft. Pharrell]

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"Feds Watching" dovetailing with Edward Snowden's NSA leaks was one of the most delightful accidents in pop culture this year. Of course, the song has nothing to do with those feds, and it doesn't have much to do with the feds that merely spy via binoculars, either. 2 Chainz achieved solo stardom late—he’s only two albums deep into his career at age 36, and in listening to his new album B.O.A.T.S II: Me Time, you get the feeling that he fears waking up one day only to find it all gone. So this is a late bloomer's YOLO anthem over a screeching Pharrell beat, a call to enjoy it while you've got it even if doing the head bop in your drop top doesn't help you escape your existential dread. In that sense it might be a year late, but better that than never. —Jordan Sargent

2 Chainz: "Feds Watching" [ft. Pharrell]

“Goldtone”

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Though it clocks in at 10 minutes, “Goldtone” isn't so much the grand finale of Kurt Vile’s Wakin on a Pretty Daze as the comedown that you never want to come down from. The song very much feels like the promised-land destination Vile has been inching toward throughout his ragged and intermittently glorious five-year solo career, with an instantly mesmerizing mélange of serene Sunday-afternoon acoustic strums, churchly organ hum, Casiotone maracas, and angelic harmonies that really make you wish Side D of Daze’s vinyl edition came with a locked groove. Vile may not be in the War on Drugs anymore, but amid the song’s honey-slide haze, he wages his own private one: “Sometimes, when, I get in my zone, you’d think I was stoned/ But I never, as they say, touch the stuff.” However, Vile’s slackadasical drawl suggests he wouldn’t frown upon others for using his music for such purposes. All of this makes “Goldtone” this year’s gold standard for not taking drugs to make music to take drugs to. —Stuart Berman

“Doin' It Right” [ft. Panda Bear]

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Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories succeeded because it was both a little bit of everything and a unified album statement. They picked up Paul Williams for theatrical bombast ("Touch"), Julian Casablancas for robo-cool ("Instant Crush"), and Todd Edwards for yacht rock ("Fragments of Time"). To get some indie pop into the mix they called upon Animal Collective’s Panda Bear, whose previous guest spots usually sounded much better in concept than execution. Not this time, though. The track Daft Punk built around him plays perfectly to his strengths, taking his genius with short, catchy, and repetitive melodic phrases and building a hooky mid-tempo electro-pop tune out of them. A little bit of joy, a little bit of yearning, a whole lot of simplicity: night, right, magic, and everybody’s dancing. "Doin’ It Right" is the album’s best example of machine precision grafted onto gentle human warmth. —Mark Richardson

“Chain Smoker”

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Chance the Rapper is this year's musical zeitgeist personified, and Acid Rap is this year's indie success story. His resolve to be independent has as much to do with his age-—the major label music industry has been in decline almost as long as he has been alive—as it has to do with him being an MC born of Chicago. Chance got up by being the city's charismatic teenage mayor, his independence both a matter of necessity and ingenuity. "Chain Smoker" is his sweetest thesis, an artistic topography wrapped up in electric piano and melancholy. In the span of an 18-bar verse, he lays it out: He's not that good boy (mistakenly press-posited against Keef's bad), he's our flawed Chi-savior, "rappin', trappin', trippin'" but trying to stay in this life. His brags are humble; Chance knows much of his appeal is based on his proximity to the ground, that his life and perspective is just barely removed from Southside sophomores that give him dap on the street. He's an emissary from true life. —Jessica Hopper

Chance the Rapper: "Chain Smoker"

“Blurred Lines” [ft. T.I. and Pharrell]

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I still love "Blurred Lines”, and have since the first time I heard it. Now that it's transformed into a song you maybe don't admit to loving in polite company, I like to think back to March, when it felt destined to be just another one of Robin Thicke's cult hits. It emerged unannounced in the shadow of "Get Lucky”, which was our parents' funk rolled out as what the marketing industry calls a pivot. "Blurred Lines" felt like a quirk—something stupid and fun and unconcerned with whatever might exist beyond the moment (like, say, lawsuits.) Where "Get Lucky"—the two songs will be intertwined for decades—was laid down over 200 times so that it came out just right, "Blurred Lines" was written and recorded in a few hours. That ethos permeates a track that was merely supposed to spark the night's fire, to loosen the limbs and ease the mind. That it then played continuously for the entire summer, an entire different sort of fantasy. —Jordan Sargent

Robin Thicke: "Blurred Lines" [ft. T.I. and Pharrell]

“You Show Great Spirit”

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During the last 15 years, Dominick Fernow has been unfathomably prolific. The head of Hospital Productions and the producer behind Prurient, he’s become a principal contributor to the metastasis of power electronics, harsh noise and, really, all things unapologetically forceful. He’s run a record store, launched a new label, pushed Cold Cave toward goth-pop indulgence, anchored a black metal band and as Vatican Shadow, mined wartime propaganda for scattershot techno lurch.

Especially given Prurient’s shifts from tortured noise to synthesizer wobble and, more recently, aggressive electronica, drawing any single through-line between Fernow’s output seems impossible. But “You Show Great Spirit”, the 10-minute closer of Prurient’s only 2013 full-length, comes close. Lurid synthesizers, anxious rhythms and caustic vocals shape the start, a vaguely pretty prelude that lures the listener toward the horizon-line pulse. Those sounds serve as the window dressing for the house beat that eventually arrives, a succession of hits that transfer Fernow’s previous aggression from the head directly to the body. But what elevates “You Show Great Spirit” is what has slipped between those booms without notice: subtly damaged sheets of sound that are noxious, malignant, and hidden like carbon monoxide. Fernow pulls the poison forward in the mix toward the end, but by then, the damage has been done, the trick executed: All along, you’ve been dancing to Prurient—yes, the harsh noise dude. —Grayson Haver Currin

Prurient: “You Show Great Spirit” (via SoundCloud)

“Pretty Boy (Peaking Lights Remix)”

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What if everything awesome lasted for two-and-a-half more minutes of awesomeness? This is the utopia envisioned by Peaking Lights’ blissed-out remix of Young Galaxy’s already buoyant “Pretty Boy”. Maybe it’s because Peaking Lights and Young Galaxy are both married couples, but the level of love explored here goes beyond romance and into the realm of spiritual connection. Over a New Order-goes-to-the-beach groove enhanced by Peaking Lights’ bubble bath of hand percussion, Catherine McCandless sings lyrics inspired by Patti Smith’s Just Kids and the Smith-Mapplethorpe ideal of creative soulmates. But you don’t have to be a starving artist trying to scrape by in the big city to relate to lines like “When we were lost / We found each other” and “We were each other’s only family.” Who doesn’t want the kind of partnership that protects against isolation, “disbelievers,” and the uncertain future? For six-and-a-half minutes, this song makes it seem possible for anyone and everyone. —Amy Phillips

Young Galaxy: "Pretty Boy (Peaking Lights Remix)" (via SoundCloud)

“Ya Hey”

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Nearly four minutes into “Ya Hey”, Ezra Koenig finally finds grace: a chill creeping in with the terror of twilight, a moment of solitude amongst thousands of people, a perfect transition from Desmond Dekker into the Rolling Stones. It does not come easily. “Ya Hey” lands with a thud befitting its thematic density; it finds a brilliant, bold band asking questions that typically fall outside the purview of even the most ambitious pop songs. Religion is shot through the prisms of fanaticism and sin: one party looks to zealotry and atheism and finds the grey area between the two untenable, and another transgresses by dim light, only to worry about forgiveness in the next breath. And in between, a simple question about belief: who could ever live that way?

The song itself offers an answer, or at least a way out. Unpronounceable names chopped up into warped, wordless exaltation, an arrangement that’s a model of restraint until it explodes into ecstasy, the sort of deft lyrical touch that sends other songwriters scrambling for their notepads. “Ya Hey” is full of tiny windows into the sort of grace Koenig can only stumble upon by chance one night on the festival grounds. This is Vampire Weekend’s gift to us: they suffer the darkness, and in doing so grant us glimpses of light. —Jamieson Cox

Vampire Weekend: "Ya Hey"

“You (Ha Ha Ha)”

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Beautiful songs about heartbreak are a dime a dozen, but jumping-on-the-bed levels of jubilance inspired by botched love? Now we’re talking. With True Romance single “You (Ha Ha Ha)”, Charli XCX takes great pleasure in proclaiming, “I was right,” merges it with “boys are stupid” undertones, throws in a dash of “you’ll be sorry” and actually laughs at the poor sod. This dark joy is matched musically by a substantial Gold Panda sample that could even make Tumblr’s weird pop elite attempt a shimmy. There’s also a mysterious undercurrent of production effects: the way it builds and builds to dizzying levels, stops except for a single beat and Charli spitting nostalgic lines, and crescendos all over again. Maybe it’s a metaphor for how the lies we tell ourselves about the ones we love can spiral out of control until we finally make it stop, or maybe it’s just an impeccably-produced piece of pop perfectly engineered to toy with our emotions. Either way, it’s enough to lose yourself in, hypnotized by the avalanche of “you you you you” and “me me me me” that won’t let up.—Jillian Mapes

Charli XCX: “You (Ha Ha Ha)” (via SoundCloud)

“Heartbreaks + Setbacks”

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Feelings don’t come easy on the Brainfeeder label. The name “Heartbreaks + Setbacks” should be a big indicator of the song’s primary concerns, but with Thundercat the bass god, it’s rarely a direct path. Stephen Bruner fights with his words the way the beat fights with that zig-zagging funk, co-written by Brainfeeder associate Mono/Poly. Under the co-production auspices of Flying Lotus, the track fills out with celestial textures, hybrid R&B moments, and a fluttering bassline that could very well have been some long-lost deep cut on a 70s fusion record. Thundercat has never been one to shy away from his chops, but here he restrains himself, simply aligning with the pop-lock rhythm and singing “Love, love, love, love” as his voice enters his falsetto. It all builds to the bass solo outro, which is the proggiest thing you'll hear this side of a Victor Wooten solo record. Thundercat makes the five-string bass sound like it's got soul, and that is no less than a monumental feat.—Jeremy D. Larson

Thundercat: "Heartbreaks + Setbacks" (via SoundCloud)

“Bugs Don't Buzz”

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Live, you forget that Montreal singer-songwriter Devon Welsh has a bandmate, producer Matthew Otto, just as you forget you're surrounded by other people in the room, and that he's not just reading to you from his diary. Welsh sings serious songs that are sweet but painful, universal but highly specific, and "Bugs Don't Buzz" exemplifies his approach. The song, featuring Welsh over basic piano notes, is directed at a person he can imagine dying with in "slimy wet darkness," as he whispers thoughts like: "Bugs don't buzz when their time approaches/ We'll be just like the roaches, my love." When death does approach, we all want a few more minutes, and the end can be horrible, loud, and messy. Welsh knows this, it seems, and he shifts the opening notion that "the cheesiest songs all end with a smile/ this won't end with a smile" to "the happiest songs all end with a smile/ this might end with a smile." While death is inevitable, finding someone to wait it out with you isn't; that he has someone in mind makes "Bugs Don't Buzz" deeply optimistic. —Brandon Stosuy

Majical Cloudz: "Bugs Don't Buzz"

“Nobody Asked Me (If I Was OK)”

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Much of the talk surrounding Sky Ferreira's long-awaited debut full-length, Night Time, My Time, focused on Gaspar Noé's cover photo, which depicted Ferreira nude, and seemingly scared, in the shower. Instead of figuring out how the imagery might tie into the record's themes, or listening to Ferreira’s own explanations, people came up with their own theories. This sort of underestimating seems to have inspired the sentiments of a few of Night Time’s strongest tracks, including dark pop gem "Nobody Asked Me If I Was Okay". The song addresses a lover, but the fuzzed-out four minutes offer the perfect karaoke choice in any life situation for anyone who’s felt like they wanted to be heard and weren’t. Strong observations ("Everyday people tell me something else that I know") float around in producer Ariel Rechtshaid's swirling morass, but the real keeper is the booming chorus—"Nobody asked me if I was okay/ No no no no no no no"—words that even sound good shouted by those of us who can’t sing. —Brandon Stosuy

“All You're Waiting For” [ft. Nancy Whang]

57

Nancy Whang has carved out an interesting niche as a sort of Loleatta Holloway figure for the DFA era. The connection isn't in the timbre of her voice—in the spotlight, she's a little too coolly aloof to fit the classic definition of disco diva status—but rather as a name that suggests a given dance song will be excellent just by association. What she did for top-notch Juan MacLean tracks like “Happy House” and “Feel So Good” gets another turn here, a simmering lead vocal that feints at detached reserve but puts too much gusto in the feeling of getting into the groove to keep that emotion hid. And while there's no unfamiliar startlement to the squiggly electropop/ house concoction Classixx build up—analog bass, handclaps, glimmering descending spaceship glory shining multicolored lasers everywhere, all that good stuff—it suggests that this strain of dance music is still alive with possibility. —Nate Patrin

Classixx: "All You're Waiting For" [ft. Nancy Whang] (via SoundCloud)

“Citgo”

56

Chief Keef’s major label debut Finally Rich was a blast of hooky, bratty youth revolt charged with real life fatalism, bleak dispatches from a kid who discovered the fragility of life much too soon. But if you stayed around for the credits, you got a reprieve. Finally Rich’s deluxe edition chased the album proper with the bonus cut “Citgo”, which drew Keef’s tuneful abandon out of the drill scene bluster of “I Don’t Like” and “3Hunna” and plunked it down on greener pastures. Young Ravisu’s beat (which Keef found by searching his album's title on YouTube—very internet) sounds like a shimmering snatch of early ambient period Brian Eno bombed out with overly anxious drums. And ad libs on top of ad libs: Keef’s every line passes through a carnival funhouse’s allotment of croaks, giggles and barks on the sidelines. Stripped of drill music’s attendant double-coat of palpable danger for once, Keef gets to sound like a guy just dicking around in the studio with friends, and the fun they’re having on “Citgo” is positively infectious. —Craig Jenkins

Chief Keef: "Citgo"

“Mirrors”

55

In a year in which we hit the Justin Timberlake saturation point in about August—almost a full month before his quarter-cooked The 20/20 Experience, 2 of 2 would fill the end-of-aisle displays at your local Target—Timberlake’s multi-chambered pop opus “Mirrors” stands up as the purest artifact from the Experience. It’s the crowned-jewel love song on an album of love songs, an ode to marriage, both his own and his grandparents’, that will have even the staunchest of bachelors shopping for rings on their lunch break. (As long as there is enough money left over to continue purchasing Bud Light Platinum and enjoying it responsibly).

Despite its epic scale—eight minutes of Timbaland-and J-Roc-engineered swirl that errs on the side of “maximal”—Timberlake’s performance is built of simple elements and universal hooks. It’s a song that’s hard to get tired of, even though every a cappella group on your local college campus has likely already seized the opportunity. (So many beatboxing parts!). It’s the Timberlake return to form we were promised. And in the end, “Mirrors” is the lovelorn status update we never saw coming. —Corban Goble

Justin Timberlake: "Mirrors"

“Type of Way”

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Atlanta pumped out quite a few of the year's biggest rap anthems—Young Dro's "F.D.B." and Migos' "Versace" to name two from this year—and then and to round the year off comes "Type of Way". Rich Homie Quan sounds deadly serious over a beat that blares out like a Mike WiLL Made It remix of the "Cops" theme. He barks out line after line in a warbly lilt, mangling syllables in a manner that evokes dancehall's feverish rush. It's the kind of song where you rap along before you even know all the words. It also cinched one of 2013's most encouraging trends: big tunes bubbling up from the underground rather than being rooted entirely in major label money. Coupled with an endearingly low-budget video, Rich Homie Quan's breakout has all the trappings of a DIY anthem: a killer beat from a relatively unsung producer, a hook so obvious that it makes you wonder how it's never been done before, and several mixtapes' worth of personality in just four minutes. Songs like this launch careers. —Andrew Ryce

Rich Homie Quan: “Type of Way” (via SoundCloud)

“Monomania”

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The title track of an album named after single-minded focus turned out to be a magicianly exercise in distraction. When Deerhunter debuted "Monomania" on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, the sleight of hand was almost literal: Wigged frontman Bradford Cox's fingers were disturbingly bandaged, and the camera followed him as he walked offstage, snatched someone's water, and waited for an elevator rather than finish out his vocals. On Monomania, too, the insistent repetitions, white noise, and motorcycle sound effects at the end of the song could turn attention away from the rest of its Bible-belted longing, ostensibly for another man. And just what was Cox being so monomaniacal about, anyway? Wasn't this a sloppy, tossed-off return to some garage-punk ideal?

True enough, the song has a scabrous bloodthirstiness not heard from the Atlanta band since 2009 bonus album Weird Era Cont. But often overlooked is how it carries out that record's vision of a "cassette cathedral." Not your fact-checking older cuz's lo-fi, "Monomania" epitomizes the way Deerhunter "strung together a bunch of eight-tracks so they were like microphones" for Monomania, building a magnificently detailed sonic edifice without losing that grainy demo-lover's aesthetic. Pals the Black Keys called this approach "transcend-fi," but that too potentially distracts. And that's just it: Refusing to distinguish romantic obsession from musical fixation, provocation from hooks, and finally ("mono, monomania...") sense from nonsense, "Monomania" is where Deerhunter make a junkyard-art point so undeniable they had to point away from it for it to be understood. —Marc Hogan

Deerhunter: "Monomania"

“Crawling on Bruised Knees”

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“Crawling on Bruised Knees” is the last track on Abandon, from Margaret Chardiet's noise project Pharmakon, and even in the context of the rest of the album, it's the most unsettling. The metal-on-metal rhythm that drives the track is a prime example of noise using industrialization against itself, using machines to exhume feeling lost by technocracy. The thunderous beat hits deeper than any other drum pattern this year-- extreme music groups should sample it wholeheartedly. Chardiet's warbling voice sounds like a distress call from an alien world, and the reinforcements aren't around to hear it. She convinces you, at least for the song's duration, that there is no return. Her dystopia becomes yours. There is no great catharsis; disease looms over long after the album's ceased. Wolf Eyes' John Olson recently proclaimed noise to be dead; “Knees” proves it isn't so. —Andy O'Connor

Pharmakon: "Crawling on Bruised Knees" (via SoundCloud)

“Afterlife”

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Never mind all the high-concept pre-release hijinks that they engaged in this year: at their core, Arcade Fire are ruthless creatures of habit. Since 2004's Funeral, they've saved the (arguably) best song for (almost) last, with the five-minutes-and-change hands-across-Montreal moment squeezed in the penultimate slot on each of their albums. So here we are with "Afterlife", the latest and perhaps greatest entry in this tradition, and its placement is especially crucial on the sprawling, ambitious Reflektor. Appearing at the tail end of the album's dense, almost suffocatingly maudlin second disc, the effervescent, radiant shuffle of "Afterlife" is a very necessary cold glass of water to the face, with an earwormy wordless chorus that closely resembles Howie Day's Alexandra Patsavas-core smash "Collide".

Bucking Reflektor's fixation on societal alienation and fear of technological dependency, "Afterlife" dials back the hand-wringing to address the one force that, try all you might, you can't fight: death itself. Lyrically, Win Butler drops his megaphone and his guard, cursing the notion of even considering what happens after we pass our expiration dates before trying, in vain, to take a stab at knowing the unknown. And it all leads up to a pleading chorus so ebulliently undeniable that Butler cuts the third verse in half, just to get to it sooner. Throughout 2013, Arcade Fire spent a lot of time, musically and otherwise, making sure we know they exist. But their most sincerely affecting move came when they took a moment to consider: What happens when we don't? —Larry Fitzmaurice

Arcade Fire: "Afterlife"

“Song for Zula”

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"Song for Zula" is a haunted, rueful tune that wears its gravity lightly. Matthew Houck's lyrics portray the post-traumatic stress of a soured relationship ("I saw love disfigure me/ Into something I am not recognizing"; "I will not open myself up this way again") and the narrator's attempts to will himself out of his funk. But the music itself—a four-chord bass-and-drum-machine vamp topped with swirling strings—never loses its cool. There's no chorus, no sense of resolution, just mounting desperation. The futility of the protagonist's struggle plays out anew in each verse: Houck's voice will rise to a gorgeously fragile peak, only to dissipate into a wounded mumble. When he sings the final line—"I could kill you with my bare hands if I was free"—it's clear that "if" is the operative word. For now, our narrator is powerless, imprisoned in this eerily placid nightmare of a love song. —Hank Shteamer

Phosphorescent: “Song for Zula” (via SoundCloud)

“Avant Gardener”

49

Courtney Barnett might want to try working backward more often. The 25-year-old Australian's most immediately remarkable gift is in her lyrics, razor-detailed narratives that can be wittily rambling and self-deprecating. That's where her songwriting process generally starts. "Avant Gardener", she has said, was different—the music, an archetypal slacker-rock rumble that tops bone-simple bass with psych-scraping twang-squall, came first. Maybe that's what makes it such a natural backdrop for her deadpan, spoken-sung tale.

A first-person account of guilt-driven Monday yardwork leading to anaphylactic shock would be unusual in any style. Barnett's recitation of specifics, at once matter-of-fact and punning, cleverly cultivates the similarity between a medical emergency's altered state of consciousness and the drug-induced kind—and that's even before she compares an inhaler to a bong. Crucially, Barnett also knows which particulars to leave out: A mention of "Uma Thurman post-overdosing kickstart" resonates without needing to name the movie, and for American ears, the use of Celsius rather than Fahrenheit, "triple 0" instead of 9-1-1, or "pseudoephedrine" instead of "pseudoephedrine" just make it all feel truer to an individual voice and perspective. Before Barnett has finished tending her personal garden, she zooms out to cover all human frailty — "I'm not that good at breathing in" is, sooner or later, a universal complaint. By transforming the humdrum into the sublime, her song roundaboutly lives up to its title. —Marc Hogan

Courtney Barnett: "Avant Gardener" (via SoundCloud)

“Numbers on the Boards”

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The rest of My Name Is My Name is more ambitious, more ornate, and more willing to bend radio rap sounds in Pusha T's own image instead of the other way around. But "Numbers on the Boards" is a lesson in exactitude. Distilling the considerable charms of Pusha's first solo album into a svelte two minutes and 44 seconds, each element is pared back to its absolute minimum. The production is Kanye (with the help of Don Cannon and 88-Keys) at his most RZA-esque, all droning bass and clattering percussion, and Pusha's scrunched-nose sneer hasn't sounded this locked in since Malice was rapping at his side. Pusha's greatest strength has always been his ability to flash his fangs with the kind of effortlessness that could be mistaken for disinterest—his menace is the kind that's scarier because you know he's not even breaking a sweat. "'88 Jordan leaping from the free throw," he boasts. "Numbers on the Boards" is one of the most efficient 50-point games in recent years. —Renato Pagnani

Pusha T: "Numbers on the Boards"

“Let It Go”

47

On this highlight from the Rollin EP released by the UK’s Hyperdub label back in the spring, Chicago producer DJ Rashad found the sweet spot between jungle and footwork. A place where the regulating rhythm of the "Amen" break and the erratic tempo of footwork made a new kind of sense together. The song is all transitions, from breakneck keys to lonely strings; there are oceans between each movement in terms of pace, yet in Rashad's hands they melt into one as if they were always meant to be together. In the title's simple refrain are a thousand permissions—to grieve, to accept, to forgive, to move on, to love-- each peeling away like onion to reveal a new skin with which to face the world afresh. Hugely potent, thick with loss and longing, "Let It Go" turned out to be symbolic of the journey footwork itself has taken from insular scene to global influence, mirroring the triumphant rise of Rashad himself.—Ruth Saxelby

“Hood Pope”

46

Things are looking bleak in the Trap Lord's dominion. Nothing but hooligans, little kids, and clowns running around this circus, oblivious to their need for nurturing. But is that sort of street-level engagement really within the job description of the Hood Pope? Sounds like A$AP Ferg is as familiar with the actual occupational requirements of the Pope as most of us are. As far as we know, the guy emerges from a poof of smoke to serve as a figurehead, a conduit to the divine draped in gaudy jewels, driving around in a bulletproof, customized vehicle that moves at the speed of this Veryrvre track. You want guidance? Sound advice? Go see your pastor, your gym teacher, Donnie McClurkin or something. “Hood Pope” is a mass blessing, a proclamation from on high to do as Ferg says, not as he does. So in the meantime, all he asks is if you feel this shit, motherfucker sing along. Praise the Lord. —Ian Cohen

A$AP Ferg: "Hood Pope" (via SoundCloud)

“Warm in the Winter”

45

Artists on the synth-disco label Italians Do It Better tend to present themselves as chilly, look-don’t-touch types too far removed from the tawdry realms of human concern to form basic connections with. Turns out that when they fall, they fall hard. Three chords and sprinkled with enough glitter to fill a factory’s worth of snowglobes, “Warm” is the kind of love song they never seemed capable of: Immediate, forthright, almost too close for comfort. For as much credit as house producer Johnny Jewel gets (and deserves), this moment belongs to singer Ida No, who delivers her lines with the cosmic giddiness of a motivational speaker or a close friend uncorked by psychedelics. “If you should ever look in the mirror and wonder who it is that you are, and wonder what it is that you came for,” she says during the song’s talking middle section, taking you by the shoulders and brushing the hair out of your eyes, “well, I know the answer. You’re beautiful. You came from heaven.” For seven minutes, believe her. —Mike Powell

Glass Candy: "Warm in the Winter"

“Stoned and Starving”

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On "Stoned and Starving", Andrew Savage is walking through Ridgewood, Queens—that much we can feel. The deadpan Parquet Courts singer often recalls Jonathan Richman circa the Modern Lovers, but here, as on "Borrowed Time", he and the band sound especially distinct. A buried motorik beat evokes the forward-moving rhythm of the city, while guitar clangor drones on and on like the buzz of the subway running overhead, as it does in this area of New York. Savage is an urban troubadour of the mind—he's flipping through magazines, high and hungry, deciding on peanuts or candy, exploring his terrain. With that, he makes a whole universe of a street corner, turning a tiny daily mundanity into the theater of the rock song. The guitar riffs throw themselves out, then reel back in slowly, conjuring the chemically-heightened anxiety of indecision. Parquet Courts understand the resonant power of geography; on "Stoned and Starving", they're a proper New York band not just in location but endearing smart-slacker character, one fixed to their own time. —Jenn Pelly

Parquet Courts: "Stoned and Starving" (via SoundCloud)

“Water Me”

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FKA twigs told an interviewer earlier this year that she dashed off the lyrics and melody to "Water Me", the eeriest ballad of 2013, "in about seven minutes," just double the length of the song itself. On one hand, this feat is totally comprehensible; plenty of iconic songs were written quickly, and "Water Me" is filled with cavernous space, thanks in large part to twigs' now-Yeezus-credentialed collaborator Arca. On the other, considering how potent the song's simple lyrics actually are, that she flung them on a page in just minutes seems almost too good to be true. Haunting and heartbroken, "Water Me" is abandonment embodied; it floats detached and orbiting in space, frozen, yet perpetually falling. The devastation is palpable, but so is the despairing realism, the one that made the song strike home this year, amidst myriad defeats concerning sexuality and rights: there is no vindication here, nor may there be tomorrow. Twigs' pain is small and guarded, but it is direct, and it echoes. In the song's video, she sheds a solitary thick, plasmic tear as she sings, "I promise I can grow tall/ When making love is free." Such a deeply rooted, elemental sentiment hints that perhaps "Water Me" wasn't such a difficult song to write after all. —Devon Maloney

FKA twigs: "Water Me"

“Strandbar (disko)”

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Norwegian DJ Todd Terje has the enviable skill of making the outside world melt away when he enters into one of his euphoric disco cuts. “Strandbar (disko)” is his latest anthem, an almost nine-minute club jam that somehow gets higher and higher with every turn it takes. There are subtle shifts in tone—some gloriously splodgy bass, a dip into piano house—all in service of a groove that cuts right through the center of the track. Terje is a master of the patient build, always knowing exactly when to add another layer, never over-egging his gorgeous palette of sounds despite the strong reliance on repetition. What’s most interesting about “Strandbar (disko)” is how it captures a moment—when golden rays of morning sun shoot into the eyes of ecstatic clubbers—but can also recreate that feeling in seemingly any time or space. It’s a portable piece of elation you can carry around in your pocket, ready to provide a bolt of energy that effortlessly outstrips any artificial stimulant. —Nick Neyland

Todd Terje: "Strandbar (disko)" (via SoundCloud)

“PrimeTime” [ft. Miguel]

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For all the up-front futurism Janelle Monáe has built into her image, she sure can make a song that feels like you’ve been living with it for years. Part of it is the way “PrimeTime” reveals itself in the context of The Electric Lady, floating in on the heels of a chattering skit with its ghostly backing vocals and muted guitar. More importantly, though, it’s that stunning chorus and the way that, even at such a slow tempo, the beat feels like it can’t stop as Monáe delivers one of her most impressive vocals and Miguel beams in from across the galaxy to supply his guest verse. Her music can get wrapped up in concepts and symbols, but here even the most obvious one, a Minneapolis-in-85 guitar solo, feels freighted with meaning. “PrimeTime” gives us a peek behind the persona at the beating, emotional heart inside the android, and it glistens like a cosmic disco ball. —Joe Tangari

Janelle Monáe: "PrimeTime" [ft. Miguel] (via SoundCloud)

“Bound 2”

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Just to fuck with you, Kanye West capped off the barbed-wire Yeezus with soulful outlier  “Bound 2”, a taste of what Yeezus could’ve been or maybe was at one point in time but now will never be. To make things worse, he then performed the song on "Jimmy Fallon" and took it into an even livelier place—what we thought was a single underground tunnel to sunlight might have actually been an entire underground network of fluorescent caves that not even James Turrell could dream up. But, because he’s never done, Yeezus then threw the eephus, gifting the world the bizarre and uncanny “Bound 2” video which, whatever you think of it, and thanks to a little outside help, is a lock to be the most memorable visual of this year or next.

On an album that takes itself awful seriously throughout, “Bound 2” is something that recontextualizes the entire affair, leaving more questions than answers. Is there a backlog of similarly-angled, soul-dappled B-sides sitting in a studio (or penthouse suite) somewhere? Is Charlie Wilson the secret weapon of the year? What would Jeromey Rome think? Did Kanye just make an album about his penis? “Bound 2” is Kanye’s last laugh. We ain’t got the answers. —Corban Goble

Kanye West: "Bound 2"

“Swan Dive”

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"Swan Dive"'s skeletal, lilting jangle is folk-punk 101, and the pattering, Buddy-Holly-heartbeat percussion taps against the guitar as elementally as a summer cloudburst. But when Waxahatchee singer-guitarist Katie Crutchfield sings lines like “I will grow out of all the empty bottles in my closet,” she wrings a quietly raging pathos out of the unrequited love song. For every line about “dark winter morning” and “a swan dive to the hard asphalt,” she gulps back all the unexpressed lusts and unsaid regrets that pave the road to pop absolution. Or at least she seems to be banking on that possibility, even as “Swan Dive” floats to its own graceful, half-hopeful halt. —Jason Heller

Waxahatchee: "Swan Dive" (via SoundCloud)

“Versace”

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You might think of Migos as an ultramodern triumph, a signpost in an era when the right hashtag-ready catchphrase can help an artist bypass conventional industry avenues and land a hit on the charts seemingly overnight. But to do so would be to overlook the circumstances under which Migos developed their signature style: good old-fashioned hunger and impatience. Like most of their songs, “Versace” sounds like it was recorded in a hurry—"Versace Versace Versace Versace Versace! Versace Versace Versace Versace Versace!"—because it was recorded in a hurry. “It should take you 15 minutes to make a song, and then get out of there,” Quavo told SPIN earlier this year, explaining that the trio are typically pressed to record their songs and get them in the hands of local Atlanta DJs. They just wanted to move out from under mom's roof, and maybe get a little famous in the process. The urgency of their process translated to the year’s most distinct style—a relentless frenzy of exuberance that made everyone from Drake to Justin Bieber to Donatella herself excited by words THAT!areSPOKEN!LikeTHIS! (SPOKENLIKETHIS? LikeTHISLikeTHIS!) How will Migos sound when they’re no longer compelled to rush? I can’t wait to find out. —Carrie Battan

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“I”

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You are passed a link to a Bandcamp page for a group called Perfect Pussy. You remember seeing that name in your Twitter feed a few times, something about gigs at a place you never go to. You think of all the indie bands with joke names that turned out to make joke music, how those names could be something to hide behind, an invitation not to care. You hit play on the Bandcamp and hear a song called "I" rattling in your headphones; you think of Times New Viking, of Hüsker Dü, of punk rock bands that have energy and anger and a glowing ember of warmth and inclusion deep inside the raging guitars. You listen to barked lyrics that you can’t understand but somehow you feel you get them anyway. Then you hear the whole thing explode in a glorious shouted refrain and you realize this band is going to be part of your life for the foreseeable future. —Mark Richardson

Perfect Pussy: "I"

“Open”

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Before anyone even knew the identity of L.A.'s Rhye, there were already multiple videos online for their song “Open”. In the first, a then-anonymous Mike Milosh sang a stripped-down version to his wife; the second soft-focused on couples having sex, as if showing us proof that his seduction tactic worked. But “Open” isn’t necessarily about getting some, or getting someone from a barely lit lounge to the bedroom. It’s a testament to unabashed intimacy and vulnerability in the face of “perversely sexualized” songs like, say, this one. Sexuality definitely finds its way into “Open” (“shake in your thighs” followed by “sound in your sighs” only means one thing in this case), but for Rhye it’s more about what isn’t said than what is. “He move in space with minimum waste and maximum joy,” sang Sade, a dead ringer for Milosh’s melting croon, and the same holds true for Robin Hannibal’s minimally arranged horns, strings, and finger snaps. By the end of the song he's joined Milosh in the spotlight, finishing "Open" with a bright, unresolved flare of a note, not unlike a sharp intake of breath. —Harley Brown

Rhye: "Open"

“Fuckin' Problems” [ft. 2 Chainz, Drake, and Kendrick Lamar]

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Featuring four of the most charismatic characters on the hip-hop landscape all working together, “Fuckin’ Problems” feels like a Top 40 reimagining of a cypher, where instead of one-upping each other with wordplay, the rappers try to outdo each other in pop appeal. Produced by Noah “40” Shebib and a pseudonymous Drake (working under his Instagram alias Champagne Papi), “Problems” is propelled by a buzzy, catchy synth-bass line that Rocky, Drake, and Kendrick go at using a wide arsenal of audience-charming tactics, including, but not limited to, references to decade-old pop-rap songs, groan-worthy puns, and dick jokes, in every case delivered with a cocky grin so blatantly manipulative that it’s hard to hate. (For his part, 2 Chainz basically wrote two lines that are so hilariously sing-along-able that it doesn’t matter that he just repeats them about a dozen times.) In the end it’s hard to say who came out on top—Rocky’s Keith Sweat reference, Drake’s Nelly quoting, and Kendrick’s “Halle Berry/ Hallelujah” line are all about equally entertaining, and 2 Chainz’s hook could probably stand fine on its own. But really everyone’s a winner: Aside from Drake, it was the highest charting single any of the four have had, while the rest of us got an earworm that never seems to get old. —Miles Raymer

A$AP Rocky: "Fuckin' Problems" [ft. 2 Chainz, Drake, and Kendrick Lamar] (via SoundCloud)

“Falling”

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In 2013, lots of well-established R&B dudes—Justin, Robin, Pharrell—pulled on their sequin socks and aimed squarely for 1983 Michael Jackson territory. But three twenty-something sisters from L.A. opened their debut album with one of the year's best takes on MJ’s lithe, dramatic funk-pop. “Falling” is a lot of great things, but best of all, it shows that the Haim sisters know, like Michael, how to carefully build tension and then gloriously release it. The sub-bass rumbles that start the song continue throughout the spacious first verse behind Danielle’s double-timed vocal spurts, “Billie Jean”-style breath puffs, and tip-toeing guitar licks. Then, what feels like release—a chorus that introduces a *Heaven or Las Vegas-*style goth tint to a Motown-disco melody, before dropping off into cavernous echo. The second verse introduces Este’s slap-bass, laying the groundwork for the return of the chorus, which just keeps ascending, transforming a lyric rich with indecision—when you’re stuck in the middle, and the pain is thunder—into a straight-up motivational anthem. —Eric Harvey

Haim: "Falling"

“Banana Clipper” [ft. Big Boi]

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El-P classified “Banana Clipper” so I don’t have to: This is "Chernobyl talk.” Tough-guy rap, in other words, delivered by two artistic soul-mates and Big Boi, accentuated by the hardest beat on Killer Mike and El-P’s late-career opus Run the Jewels. Big Boi’s verse doesn’t even sound like a feature; he fits in effortlessly, comfortable within the one rapper-one producer dynamic to which Mike and El have brought a renewed awareness. Punchlines don’t come predictably at the end of each bar, they’re bundled together in packs and served up with assonance, alliteration, internal rhyming, and good old fashioned insults. The tricks hit fast, hard and with no phoniness. That’s what Run the Jewels is all the way through and “Banana Clipper” is the quintessence. It shows that “throwback” has always been a crummy way to think about the current wave of boom bap. After all, tropes can be exhausted, but a well-executed style will always reign supreme. —Jonah Bromwich

Run the Jewels: "Banana Clipper" [ft. Big Boi]

“White Noise” [ft. Alunageorge]

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Aluna Francis has heard enough. "Lately, I've been thinking: if you want to get tough, then let's play rough," she asserts on "White Noise," a pointillist pop-house highlight from Disclosure's mighty Settle. "White Noise" finds Francis—she of AlunaGeorge—at the end of her rope, weary from too much romantic tug-of-war. "I'm hearing static," she informs her soon-to-be ex-overexplainer, "you're like an automatic—you just want to keep me on repeat and hear me crying." You can tell she means business. Francis' terse, ever-so-slightly sped up delivery makes it seem like she's singing through clenched teeth, fed up with being put down.

Lyrically, "White Noise" is a declaration of independence, but the track feels like true collaboration, nailing a perfect midpoint between AlunaGeorge's future-pop and Disclosure's technicolor house revivalism. The track's lithe and punchy, and the hook sports one of the fiercely cool Francis' best performances to date. With "White Noise," Disclosure and AlunaGeorge sneak one of the year's finest pop songs onto what might be 2013's greatest electronic album. —Paul Thompson

Disclosure: "White Noise" [ft. AlunaGeorge]

“Royals”

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Familiarity may breed contempt, but even factoring its ubiquity in the back half of the year, the amount of vitriol that's been hurled at "Royals" has been remarkable. Much of that bad feeling no doubt comes by the accusation that the song's "anti-hip-hop," stemming from a misreading of the lyrics so flagrant that it seems almost deliberate. Behind signifiers like Cristal and gold teeth (which haven't been specific to hip-hop for a while now, as anyone familiar with Ke$ha and Katy Perry is well aware), it's a song about a bunch of broke kids in the middle of nowhere who think they have it all figured out and resent society pressuring them to conform their desires to someone else's priorities— in other words, pretty much the same story as every piece of art about teenagers that's ever been created. There’s also the fact that it’s actually a decent rap song, at least as judged by the definition of rap songs that pop-minded artists like Drake (an acknowledged influence on all of Lorde’s Pure Heroine) have been radically expanding. Whatever the song is and what it’s about, it’s a radically strange and aesthetically daring composition to have spent so much of the year atop the Hot 100. —Miles Raymer

Lorde: "Royals"

“Touch”

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“Touch” is everything people used to think Daft Punk wasn’t: sappy, long-winded, obsessed with the past and invested above all in the power of things only humans are capable of. But remember that this is the same group who met their first label contact at Euro Disney and once performed on top of a pyramid made of lasers—musical theater has always been right around the corner. Led by Paul Williams—a songwriter most famous for “Rainbow Connection”—the song spends eight minutes piling on Moog filigree, trumpet solos, children’s choirs, and two-hundred some-odd other things in Pro Tools only to contract to the sound of Williams’ voice and some lonely piano chords ripped from the encore of a lounge singer’s routine. Clever as ever, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo hedge their bets: “If love is the answer,” the choir sings, “you’re home.” And what if it isn’t? If they know, they’re keeping it under their helmets. —Mike Powell

“She Will”

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Savages appeared fully grown, like four battle-ready Athenas from the head of Zeus, with a nuanced manifesto that rejected apathy, misogyny, and cell phones at concerts, and they commanded disciples immediately. Their quick emergence is perhaps not the most remarkable thing about the London-based four-piece, whose dark post-punk thrives on its agonizing discontent and refusal to compromise, but it certainly speaks to the power of their conviction.

"She Will" was not their debut album's lead single—that honor went to "Husbands"—nor is it the most distinctive Savages song, thematically speaking, on debut Silence Yourself. (That's probably opener "Shut Up"). What makes "She Will" transcendent is its forceful simplicity, the easy way it conveys the sadness and anger that birthed Savages, in such a quick yet subcutaneously complex portrait. Frontwoman Jehnny Beth depicts the life of the song's purposeful subject, a sexually, spiritually free woman eventually stifled by norms and expectations, as a cold list of facts, totally free of sentiment. Drummer Fay Milton beats a crash cymbal with barbaric intensity and systematic exactitude. The song builds with perfect balance, its creators maintaining its concise gallop with a militant control. Even the title of the song is unrelenting and austere. From the first lick to Beth's final, orgasmic yelp, "She Will" is a compact tragedy belonging unmistakably to our time, delivering passion through a dispassionate lens, passing responsibility for its ending, ultimately, to us. —Devon Maloney

Savages: "She Will"

“Bank Head” [ft. Kelela]

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Kelela and Kingdom’s attempts at R&B—together and separately—tend to be deconstructed, purposefully ungainly affairs, the wreckage of skyscrapers endlessly pounded with wrecking balls. “Bank Head”, by contrast, plugs into the science of surfaces that’s always been R&B’s calling card. Specifically, it calls to mind Janet Jackson’s peerless 1997 percussive ballad “Empty”, through both its luxuriant, tantric expanse and its balance of pillowy softness with taut rhythmic rigor, the echoing claps and rippling kicks creating a delicate web of tension and release. In keeping with the vibe, Kelela offers her most Janet-like performance, singing in a high, whispery coo that is more tactile and intimate for its fragility, as if she’s succumbing to the groove’s temptation right alongside you. “Like kickin’ an old bad habit”, she muses as “Bank Head” begins, but if anything the effect is the reverse: right, there’s that familiar feeling, let it in, let it rush over you. —Tim Finney

Kingdom: "Bank Head" [ft. Kelela] (via SoundCloud)

“The Mother We Share”

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“The Mother We Share” pulls off a tricky alchemy. It's simultaneously difficult to pin down but very easy to fall in love with. Widescreen yet intimate. Sonically bright yet thematically dark. Menacing yet comforting. As precise as assembly-line EDM, yet as sweeping as an epic romance story’s movie trailer. The lyrics refuse to cohere into a single straightforward emotion, instead seesawing between love and hate and devotion and betrayal. Is it about siblings? Lovers? God? Mother Earth? Singer Lauren Mayberry never shows her hand. It’s a mystery that can’t be solved. But perhaps the most impressive trick of all is that over a year after the song’s release, with Chvrches having been through the buzz-band wringer of countless remixes, interviews, on-air performances, and blog chatter, “The Mother We Share” still sounds fresh, exciting, and defiantly Now. —Amy Phillips

Chvrches: "The Mother We Share"

“Only Tomorrow”

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“Only Tomorrow” has a celebratory air to it, mostly manifested in the giant whoosh of sound that scoops up everything around it at key points in the song. Listening to My Bloody Valentine can be a reflective experience (“To Here Knows When”, “Cigarette in Your Bed”), but it’s often strangely visceral, too (“Soon”, “You Made Me Realise”). Here, they bridge both those inclinations, with Kevin Shields trailing slug-like guitar lines across the song's dynamic frame, and Bilinda Butcher delivering a heavy-hearted vocal that still lacks any recognizable peer. They flexed the boundaries of their sound to a greater extent elsewhere on mbv, leaving tracks like “Only Tomorrow” to work as a stark reminder of how effective they are at coating candied pop moments with an almost suffocating density. There are few clues as to when this was recorded or how old the song might be, but “Only Tomorrow” carries the unmistakable sound of a band caught up in a moment, excited to be out there making music again. —Nick Neyland

My Bloody Valentine: "Only Tomorrow"

“Kush Coma”

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“Kush Coma” was the first single released prior to Danny Brown's album Old, and in retrospect, that's given it a strange double life. The dazed robot-funk hook is enough to make it an obvious lead single. Its all-build beat vibes off the peak-is-everything ethos of EDM while grounding its 808s in pure club hip-hop. And then there's the excess of Danny's “blunt after blunt” lifestyle, which scans on first read like a celebratory mania (“Nuggets the size of Rakim rings/ Got my head looking like a fatality screen”), backed up by the stoner-goon clobber of A$AP Rocky's guest verse.

But the song, which arrives late on Old's deceptive “hedonist” second half, isn't so much a break from the album’s bleak poverty-to-hustle first half as it is the end result of how Danny's chosen to self-medicate the PTSD that haunts him and informs some of his best work. Whether it's the weed or the pills, what matters isn't just that Danny’s walking on clouds barefoot, it's that he feels something besides stress and anxiety. If the side effects mean “my forehead's sweaty, my eyelids heavy, feeling like I ain't goin' make it,” so be it. He's escaped worse. —Nate Patrin

Danny Brown: "Kush Coma" (via SoundCloud)

“Str8 Outta Mumbai”

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Thanks to the peculiar case of Jai Paul and the release of 16 demos said to be the ever-elusive UK producer/ singer's debut album, most of us first knew "Str8 Outta Mumbai" simply as "Track 2". But "Str8 Outta Mumbai" turned out to be a near-perfect title in context. It's not the first breakthrough moment we've had with Paul, but rather the first breakout moment. And it's a big-sounding one at that: laser flashes, spangled percussion, that loopy little earworm melody that you catch yourself whistling while waiting for the bus. For anyone who doubted that the guy who brought us the sultry mope of "Jasmine" and "BTSU" wasn't capable of dropping a blooming, summery quasi-banger, here's your proof. It sounded like the product of being stuck between two stations, frequency disruption and all: on one, there was ebullient vintage Bollywood pop, on the other, Velvet Rope-era Janet. The pirate radio jam of the year. —Zach Kelly

“Shabba” [ft. A$AP Rocky]

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You know how things go: one strong gimmick in a hook, and suddenly it might as well be laid over a goofy photograph in Impact font. “...Like I'm Sha, Shabbaarrr Ranks” is the mode in which a lot of people decided they were doing things once Ferg floated the idea, and if that means more young’ins infatuated with all things A$AP sought out some classic dancehall to up their status, that should all balance out in the end, right?

So with the mimetic aspect of this song out of the way, let's contend with what a monster it is: Ferg's rubberband flow tauntingly flossing about making raw-dogging his key to relationship trust, rocking gear like it's Mortal Kombat couture, and running with a crew that he immortalizes in a mere five lines – Twelvy and Illz as kush supply/demand, Ty Beats as producer-murking phenom, Ty Nast as the other half of a mutual girlfriend-theft team. Even with all the punchlines, it's a performance driven almost entirely by charisma – factory-line machinery beats assembling a disco-lit 25-foot riser for Ferg and Rocky to ascend, their Morse code stutter-step voices slipping into a semi-patois flow so catchy it could get away with saying less than it actually does. —Nate Patrin

A$AP Ferg: "Shabba" [ft. A$AP Rocky] (via SoundCloud)

“Childhood's End”

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Some songs are chilling, and then there’s “Childhood’s End”. A single gunshot leads to a single casualty in the song’s opening lines, but the rest of the song is all implication.  “It’s weighing down, weighing down, weighing down on me,” sings Devon Welsh, without pinpointing where the pressure’s coming from. He stretches the pronoun as far as his sonorous voice can take it, however, and that goes a long way. The phrase dangles there until you are forced to interpret it for yourself.

Unlike most songs on Impersonator, “Childhood’s End” moves relatively briskly, thanks to busy drum programming moving underneath Matthew Otto’s minimalist synth waft. There’s a clear middle eight to go with that hook and the conservative remaining structure, but otherwise, “Childhood’s End” is a place of wintry desolation. No other song on Impersonator managed to communicate so much—overwhelming dread, terror, isolation—with so little. —Mike Madden

Majical Cloudz: "Childhood's End" (via SoundCloud)

“Retrograde”

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James Blake has spent much of his career burrowing into the crevices of sadness, exploring the particulars of loneliness with a worrisome tenacity. Is he all right? Will he ever really be all right? Now that he's in love, you'd think the answer would be an easy yes, but like every other emotional conundrum in his songs, it's a bit more complicated than that. "Retrograde" will go down as the exact moment when he exited his hermetic cave of existential, world-weary grief and found a way to make being in love sound…actually about as lonely as not being in love. It's complicated. Or complicated enough that even though he's clearly made a connection, he still wants to go deeper, not that it'll solve anything. In the world Blake's created on "Retrograde," isolation is something that is incurable and deeply rooted. When he croons "You're on your own in a world you've grown" over blurry synths and the hiss and snap of synthetic handclaps, he could be singing to himself or he could be singing to his partner. Either way, they're now alone together. Life could be worse. —Sam Hockley-Smith

James Blake: "Retrograde"

“Wakin on a Pretty Day”

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There are plenty of heavy lessons tucked throughout Wakin on a Pretty Daze, but “Wakin on a Pretty Day”, its nearly-10-minute opening track, is a paean only to ecstatic oblivion, to living low, low, low: “Don’t worry about a thing/ It’s only dying,” Vile sings in his gentle drawl. It might be a sleepy kind of truth, but there’s still something spectacularly freeing about it, especially when paired with Vile’s spacious guitar riffs, which unfurl like prayer flags in the forest—soft and easy. All he wants is for everyone and everything to slow down a little: let your phone ring, think up some good jokes, be fried. The worst thing that can happen, he intimates, is that it all ends, and there’s not much we can do to change that anyway. In our hyper-accelerated times, there’s something subversive about Vile’s live-and-let-live vibe. It’s been awhile since submission sounded this good. —Amanda Petrusich

“Full of Fire”

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There’s a Margaret Atwood poem that goes: “You fit into me like a hook into an eye—a fish hook, an open eye.” The Knife, who named two interludes on Shaking the Habitual after Atwood works, share a thought or two on hookiness. Comeback single “Full of Fire” doesn't adhere to the comparatively compact sounds of 2006's Silent Shout or the crowd of cheerily synthy, proudly Knife-loving acts that followed, yet it is undeniably catchy—like a trap for prey, perhaps—as it careens through nine-plus minutes like a tilt-a-whirl hitched to a tower of terror. It’s among the group’s most sonically inventive, even playful, songs—there is a dick joke in there—but everything the Knife throw in, which is a considerable amount, is repurposed into a weapon. This includes Karin Dreijer-Andersson’s vocals, gender-bent as usual and pitch-screwed into an exhausted fry; here, they almost work as call-and-response, each mode weary of the last.

The lyrics are half-gasped and clipped, like a stream of omnidirectional weariness: toward men, powerful men, men’s stories, powerful men with women’s stories, and everyone who gave that list a smarmy nod. “Liberals giving me a nerve itch” is like a pre-emptive strike against all the lazy social-justice plaudits Shaking the Habitual would receive, while its most “accessible” line, “let’s talk about gender, baby,” is tacked on like an afterthought and twisted into a sneer. Dreijer-Andersson sings questions that trail off with a sickly trill, leaving the answers inside the dystopian music. There’s nothing about gender on Shaking the Habitual that isn’t best expressed when it sounds like neurons shaking themselves into panic. —Katherine St. Asaph

The Knife: "Full of Fire"

“Worst Behavior”

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Everyone has their own brand of worst behavior. For some, it means taking a shit with the bathroom door open. For others, it's about telling a parent that their child resembles a cartoon character. It could involve stunting down some stairs, eating in a pool, or perhaps getting "drunk enough for everyone who has a birthday this week." In a way, we are defined by our worst behavior—even (especially?) when such behavior takes the form of pudding farts.

Drake's worst has him flexing, ogling the zeroes on his checks, and defeating a handicapped Serena Williams on the tennis court. But "Worst Behavior" isn't so much about the what as much as the why—it's powered by a blinding sense of indignation that's spring-loaded for maximum comeuppance upon any and all who have ever doubted this middle-class Canadian child star. The song begins with what sounds like a flying saucer landing, as if the rapper rented a UFO from Area 51 and flew it to a poor old hater's backyard just so he could tell them to fuck off. Drake's Tourette's flow matches the beat's halting clatter, each incensed shout—remember?!... muhfucka?!—hitting like a bomb in the dark. Yet for all of the track's brutal vengeance and YOLO 2.0 recklessness, the wounds at its core place it beyond bluster; to get to #MadDrake, you still need #SadDrake. So this one's also for those who were told they'd never amount to much, who couldn't do anything right, whose mom never came to pick them up. Remember? How could you forget. —Ryan Dombal

Drake: "Worst Behavior"

“Bipp”

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“Bipp” is one of those alien transmissions that seems designed to flaunt how little it sounds like anything else. Its roots are in freestyle—a strain of chipper, mid-80s dance-pop brought to the mainstream by artists like Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam—but its execution is deliberately warped, turning what might’ve once been just a regular old party into one of those parties where you suddenly see a stranger in a goat mask flash through your periphery.

Call it inspiring, call it perverse, but there’s a glee here, a devilish razzle-dazzle that puts Sophie in a line of antagonists from the Residents to Aphex Twin. It doesn’t help that the beat threatens to drop but never does, suspending the track in moments of hot, awkward silence. “I can make you feel better,” the singer chirps, maybe a woman, maybe a man, either way screwed-up on digital helium. What “better” means in this case may require some preliminary discussion. —Mike Powell

SOPHIE: "Bipp" (via SoundCloud)

“You're Not Good Enough” [ft. Samantha Urbani]

16

Part of the appeal of Blood Orange's Cupid Deluxe is that it sounds familiar from the instant you first put it on, which in turn adds resonance to its tales of loneliness. "You're Not Good Enough" is a prime example: the lockstep funk guitar and drum machines recall prime-era Prince, but they're more robust and sanguine than the Purple One's skeletal funk. Where most of the record is practically dripping with pathos in all its pastel-hued John Hughes glory, however, Dev Hynes' intent is a little more layered here.

Listen carelessly and "You're Not Good Enough" could be a feel-good ditty. But in reality it's a straight-up fuck-you, one loaded with insecurity and indecision. The chorus—"I never was in love/ You know that you were never good enough"—is almost taunting when sung in such cheery, sing-songy cadences, and its follow-up line ("fall asleep right next to me") implies the kind of resentment that festers in an unhappy relationship. The simple development from one line to the next makes for a devastating impact, transforming the song from a bitter kiss-off into something fraught with inner conflict and turmoil. Meanwhile, the music continues to spring along, like a depressed person putting on a good face. —Andrew Ryce

Blood Orange: “You're Not Good Enough” [ft. Samantha Urbani] (via SoundCloud)

“Small Plane”

15

Seven of the eight songs on Bill Callahan’s Dream River come peppered with flute, fiddle, or piano. During “Summer Painter,” for instance, the woodwinds—and, then, the lack thereof—help mark the move between the halcyon and a hurricane. But “Small Plane” is just a reverie of electric guitar, a trickle of percussion, and a trace of bass. It’s so spare that the baseline hiss of the microphones in the studio becomes an unnamed fourth instrument.

This musical simplicity suits a song where so many things seem to go unsaid, where as many questions are raised as answered. Ostensibly, “Small Plane” is about love and faith, in which an emblem of domestic life and a cession of self-sovereignty suggest that Callahan has finally found the person who will be by his side when he dies. But he is riding high only on the belief that this won’t end in a nose-down crash and a fit of flames. “Danger/ I never think of danger,” he sings, his oaken baritone set broadly in the mix, his temptation of fate almost tragically funny. “I really am a lucky man.”

Callahan teases with the truth, opening in the past tense—“You used to take me up,” he sings, so as to foretell the imminent end—and ending with a surprise shift away from his own dub-like dream, as he looks ahead for signs of trouble. There’s just one tick between the past and the future, one miss between heartbreak and happiness, one decision between forever and never. On “Small Plane,” Callahan explores both sides of those binaries without landing on either. He’s a veteran of restraint now wise enough to leave metaphorical space for each listener to touch down or crash on their own. These flights, after all, are chances we’ve all taken. —Grayson Haver Currin

“Step”

14

Vampire Weekend have always steeped their songs in cultural minutiae, and this one reads like a line-by-line love letter to the musical universe they’ve molded into their catchy, knowing catalogue: Souls of Mischief, Jandek, Modest Mouse, Talking Heads, YZ, Bread, Grover Washington, Jr., Run-D.M.C., Rakim. Taken at its word, “Step” ruminates on a departed lover and makes a tender plea for domesticity not dissimilar to what Animal Collective asked for five years ago in “My Girls”. But Vampire Weekend aren’t admitting what they want, but what they need: "I can't do it alone," admits Ezra Koenig, before laying out a litany of life lessons that make it sound like he's old enough to know what he’s talking about. He’s no longer aiming at a strawman of the culturally appropriating college bourgeoisie, but rather everyone giving it a shot. “Step” is smaller in detail and yet bigger than anything Vampire Weekend have ever done—bigger than girls, music, or love itself. It’s as big as the world we live in. —Jeremy Gordon

Vampire Weekend: "Step"

“Sunday” [ft. Frank Ocean]

13

"Sunday" is stained with the conflicted ambivalence that characterizes much of Earl Sweatshirt's major-label debut, Doris. On the track, he apologizes to his girlfriend for his absence, and it sounds like we're being let in on a quiet argument. Even though only one side is given voice, it's the kind of disarmingly human interaction in which egos get bruised even as both parties attempt to make amends. Earl doesn't paint himself as a saint either, ending up half-drunk and stumbling by the end of the scene and even getting defensive at one point. ("I'm fucking famous if you forgot/ I'm faithful despite all what's in my face and my pocket.") Even so, there's tenderness to be found, even if it's fleeting: "I know the dark isn't coming… for the moment, if I can hold it."

Then Frank Ocean arrives and hijacks the track (something he's done before). It's a guest spot that doesn't rely on the novelty of "Frank rapping" but rather achieves its takeover through the kind of impressively dense verse that keeps revealing anew. "Sunday" could've slotted onto last year's Channel Orange and felt right at home, fitting in with that album's L.A. languor. Along with "Super Rich Kids", we've got two classics from this pairing now. It's easy to imagine many more. —Renato Pagnani

Earl Sweatshirt: "Sunday" [ft. Frank Ocean] (via SoundCloud)

“I Blame Myself”

12

"I feel like I have to shout to get my point across because people don't listen to me," Sky Ferreira told New York magazine this year. The 21-year-old pop singer has been fighting the major-label machine for her own voice for some time now, and "I Blame Myself" lays out the emotional core of her long-winded journey to a debut record. It's about being strongly misunderstood. "How could you know what it feels like to fight the hounds of hell?" Sky shouts in bouncing lines full of urgency, resisting detractors who have only a superficial sense of who she is. "You think you know me so well."

These words are fit to be both shouted in karaoke bars and scrawled in private notebooks—rendered in all-caps— because it's deeply empowering to let them flow through and out of your system. It's not hard to see Sky as a pop icon for bullied high school weirdos. She wraps her troubles up into a confession, claiming responsibility for the baggage of a past life in the face of a new one. It makes her a very likable character, one who empathizes with her own critics on the titular refrain: "I know it's not your fault/ That you don't understand/ I blame myself," she sings, direct and bold, as if she's finally focused the camera on her biggest idea. —Jenn Pelly

“Blood on the Leaves”

11

On Yeezus, Kanye West milled down brutal images of black power, oppression, and decadence into a volatile powder, then packed it into clangorous electro shell casings and shook them until they blew up in his hands. "Blood on the Leaves" could be its most dangerous payload as it welds together—seemingly at random—TNGHT’s “R U Ready” and a bizarrely elided sample of Nina Simone singing “Strange Fruit”. A conceptual enigma, the track doubles as a bright and open-hearted moment of release on a dank, tense record.

Skin is ultimately what’s at issue here. On the surface, “Blood on the Leaves” is just an anthemic breakup tantrum. Kanye recriminates about legal proceedings and yearns to return to the start, “When you tried your first Molly/ And came out of your body.” The surging horns illustrate the memory's ecstatic intensity, and a full-throttle vocal performance blasts through the pitch correction. But that lyric takes on a more dire connotation in the context of the sample, evoking lifeblood itself pouring out of black bodies. It’s the subtlest of many high-contrast juxtapositions of racially charged glamour and squalor Kanye forges on Yeezus, which could all be traced back to the way that “Strange Fruit” bracingly counterpoised idyllic images of the rural South and artfully shocking ones of lynchings.

Through what at first seems an edgy non sequitur, Kanye has drawn a long and visionary line from modern images of success to historical ones of degradation. Against a backdrop of emotional turmoil, icons of status are invoked with a sense of anger and betrayal. In intimate personal relationships and mass political systems alike, the weight of the past bears down on the individual. But only Kanye would dare make that correlation explicit, equating the bitter harvest of divorce to that of American slavery. That’s what makes him our most genuinely iconoclastic pop star. “Blood on the Leaves”, more than anything else on Yeezus, melds repulsive content and magnetic music into a strike that leaves the taste of real blood in your mouth. —Brian Howe

“Play by Play”

10

"Play By Play" is the epitome of desperation. From the opening pleas of "ba-a-a-by" through the concluding, frantic ad libs, the song is a little nonsensical and completely soulful, as mastermind Arthur Ashin stumbles gracefully through vocal hook after hook over an array of glistening 80s synths. Catchy as it is, "Play by Play" is made up of a series of unintuitive zig-zags, the antithesis of modern R&B's earworm silkiness; it takes all of two minutes to even get to the first chorus, but the verses are too giddy for that to matter. It's not the kind of giddiness that comes from excitement, but rather from a relentless pounding in your stomach. Ashin twists and yelps like he's trying to escape his own body. Every slip into falsetto is more wrenching than rousing.

It represents the conflict at the heart of Anxiety, an album obsessed with need, self-torment and dependence, and Ashin makes these subjects palatable through sheer force of will. "I just called you up to get that play by play by play/ Don't ever leave me alone" is not a couplet that lands lightly, and his character wouldn't be a sympathetic one if he didn't sound so goddamn earnest. Autre Ne Veut's upfront, heart-and-entrails-on-sleeve quality can be divisive, but such rawness quickly becomes endearing due to the deepness of each cut. You could call it accidental, unwieldy brilliance, but something tells me every second of Ashin's glittering self-loathing is deliberate. —Andrew Ryce

Autre Ne Veut: “Play by Play” (via SoundCloud)

“Dreamhouse”

9

Many have taken stabs at making extreme metal that's meant to exalt and transcend. And while spirituality isn’t something San Francisco’s Deafheaven explicitly traffics in, there’s a sense of ritual—and of reaching higher—that lifts its sophomore album, Sunbather, and especially its opening barrage, “Dreamhouse”. Over nine minutes in length, the song ditches any attempt at a delicate, drawn-out intro—a convention that both its primary forebears, black metal and shoegaze, rely on—and instead hurls itself into the teeth of chaos. Only it isn’t chaotic at all; within moments, the blur of blastbeats, distortion, and screams resolves itself into a sculpture of shattered glass.

It isn’t as if shoegaze hadn’t dealt with bleakness before, or black metal with brightness—or the two seemingly unrelated genres with each other. But “Dreamhouse” achieves the acrobatic paradox of being weightless and enslaved to gravity at once, emotionally as well as sonically. The group’s roots in hardcore help unlock the track’s mystique; a wrenching, desperate, destroy-to-create positivity bleeds from each of guitarist Kerry McCoy’s melodic updrafts and euphoric swells, and singer George Clarke’s incomprehensible shrieks bypass literal translation to instead rely on a kind of cancerous catharsis that’s evolved from a thousand shitty basement screamo shows. The details of this particular dream are either forgotten or impossible to contain in language; instead, Deafheaven assemble them into a monument, step inside, and light a match. —Jason Heller

“Get Lucky” [ft. Pharrell]

8

It's one of the great trojan horse operations in recent pop history: A reedy disco song about dancing and getting laid disguised as something of far more import. This is in part good marketing: Daft Punk's return could not feel trivial. But the idea that a song need address anything besides dancing and fucking is one of the core fallacies that contributed to disco's banishment in certain circles, a fate Daft Punk needed to avoid. So through some horseshit about a phoenix and a lot of stoopid repetition, Daft Punk ensure that their version feels bigger and more astral than it should. "Getting lucky" becomes a communal, zen-like state, not just an Art Basel after party that ended particularly well for Pharrell. Stave off sleep and your fortunes may take a cosmic leap.

The song's message, or refreshing lack thereof, is a red herring; Nile Rodgers' tickling guitar figure stimulates the track. It's an ineffable sound that functions as both rhythm and melody, peacekeeper and agitant. That constant flick of treble tempers Pharrell's endless bravado without dampening his enthusiasm, a true feat. It allows "Get Lucky"—a song that was rolled out in three separate stages—to be simple. To be dumb. People used to tease Sonic Youth, noting that as time went on, only half of their band name was still applicable. We could say the same about Daft Punk. They've left us the better half.—Andrew Gaerig

“Latch”

7

"Latch" is a song about love, possession, of wanting someone so badly and holding on so tight you never want to let go. Locking in. And the key to its appeal is the huge contrast between the verses and chorus, the way the former simmers and the latter pops. Young and heretofore obscure vocalist Sam Smith, who will be singing this one as an encore for the rest of his days, gets the dynamics just right, going from close mic’d croon to an otherworldly falsetto that made idiots of those who couldn’t help sing along but could never hope to hit those notes (guilty). The way the song wallows in the pleasure of electronic pop brings to mind early 80s new romantics, but the wobbly bass and hissing percussion situate it in a tremendously exciting present. It’s a mix of elements designed for endurance. Indeed, "Latch" actually extends back to October 2012, when it was released as a single in the UK, but hearing it in the context of Disclosure’s incredible debut Settle gave it a second life in 2013: On an album loaded with fantastic songs, this was the one that stood just a little higher, the one most likely to have me hitting the back button. —Mark Richardson

Disclosure: "Latch"

“The Wire”

6

"You know I'm bad at communication," Danielle Haim begins, and throughout the next four minutes of no-hashtag-required pop perfection, there are plenty of reasons to believe this is true: A chorus muttered so low that it has spawned all sorts of goofy mondegreens (personal favorite: "I fumbled a white gay man through the wire"), a vocabulary comprised solely of hahhhs and ooofps and chickah-ahs that is more cryptic and expressive than the whole emoji keypad, the word "retire" pronounced in the native accent of a country that I would have great difficulty pointing to on a map.

And yet somehow, like any great pop song, “The Wire” speaks a universal language: The fact that even your mom is now pronouncing this band's name correctly points to how rapidly and widely these three sisters conquered in 2013. Any sentient human being could find something to like about this glorious song, whether it’s the lithely odd Joni-esque vocal melody, the crisp, cheerleader-Don-Henley heartbeat, or that deliciously cheesy pocket-arena guitar fill at the very end. Oh, #PopPerfection isn’t your thing? Well guess what, Cool Guy: The demo rules too.

However one-size-fits-all it may be, though, “The Wire” is an anomaly. We tend to prefer our Female Empowerment Jams sung by a solitary woman who has already been knocked down, only to rise from the ash in a belted-out chorus of smoke-machine-ready grandeur. Plenty of songs did that trick to great, cathartic effect this year, but “The Wire” is something rarer and more humane: a break-up song without a villain. “I didn’t go and try to change my mind, not intentionally,” Danielle shrugs, pronouncing every line like a my bad instead of a fuck you. And anyway, as she hands off the lead vocals to Alana and then Este in the subsequent verses, we get the sense that she’s not going to be completely alone. That's the big-hearted brilliance of "The Wire", an arena-ready crowd-pleaser that still manages to feel like a shared secret between sisters. —Lindsay Zoladz

Haim: "The Wire"

“Body Party”

5

Ciara Princess Harris was just 10 years old when Ghost Town DJ's' "My Boo" was released on Jermaine Dupri's Atlanta-based So So Def Recordings in 1995. A mid-level radio hit, it received a low-slung "Quiet Storm Mix" courtesy of Jonathan Smith, who was still a few years away from ripping a "YEAAAHHHHH!"-sized hole through the fabric of mainstream pop as Lil Jon. Nine years later, Ciara scored her first #1 hit with the title track to her 2004 debut LP, Goodies, an intoxicating party anthem with production touches from Smith. Nearly a decade after that, a full-circle moment's arrived in the form of "Body Party", Ciara's own slowed-down reconfiguring of the enduring R&Bass classic that is "My Boo".

So while it's fair to refer to this song as 90s nostalgia—the video's overt True Lies striptease homage as well as its nods to "My Boo"'s original pool-house clip, certainly add fuel to that fire—there's something deeper going on here: "Body Party" is a tribute not only to the city of Atlanta but also a chunk of its considerable musical legacy. The track's major players—Ciara, her co-writer and boyfriend Future, and current hot-streak producer Mike WiLL Made It—all rep the A, and the song is the greatest achievement of the year for all three of them.

It doesn't take regional genuflection, though, to appreciate a track that brings together two of pop music's sometimes-sold-separately Big Issues—love and sex—with such ease. "Body Party"'s sonic layout is spare and ingeniously simple, but there's myriad details: the aqueous squish on every downbeat, Ciara's soft mimicking of Mike WiLL's signature drop, and Future's gorgeous coo that trickles down the chorus, an aviary call that gives a new meaning to the phrase "put a bird on it." Ciara concludes each verse with a wordless exclamation that conveys total, overwhelming ecstasy. She can't lie. —Larry Fitzmaurice

Ciara: "Body Party"

“Reflektor”

4

In 2007, music critic Sasha Frere-Jones famously declared Arcade Fire guilty of being white, by using the Montreal sextet as the exemplar of contemporary indie rock’s disavowal of syncopation, groove, and the sort of cross-cultural miscegenation that has traditionally fueled pop music’s greatest evolutions. His piece certainly got the band's attention: member Will Butler even sent Frere-Jones an mp3 containing bits of Arcade Fire songs that betray the direct influence of black music. But with the sultry bottom-end bump of “Reflektor”, Arcade Fire turn in the best possible retort—even if it's six years late.

As the first teaser of their powerhouse match-up with producer James Murphy, “Reflektor” feels no less momentous for sounding exactly like the LCD 12" remix of “Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)” that never happened. It’s hardly the first Arcade Fire song to rail against the sedentary, disassociative effects of computer-age technological dependency, but the critique is heard in the 4/4 funk as much as Win Butler’s lyrics: this band has gone disco not as an escapist antidote to modern malaise—and not just because their heroes in the Clash did the same thing on their fourth album—but to embrace dance music’s communal, connective, IRL qualities.

Like many of Murphy’s signature productions, the pulse builds and builds and builds—mixing in everything from piano-house rolls, to Colin Stetson’s sensuous sax lines, to Owen Pallett’s string arrangements, to a blink-and-miss-it David Bowie cameo—until it’s on the verge of collapse. Even Win’s repeated incantation of “reflectors,” “resurrectors,” and various other “-ectors” transform his words into a rhythmic device of their own, like a verbal cowbell. But then, chaos and ecstasy are not mutually exclusive ideals. You can’t build a disco ball without a thousand little pieces of broken glass—all the better if they're bits of your computer screen after you kick it in. —Stuart Berman

Arcade Fire: "Reflektor"

“Hannah Hunt”

3

In a parallel universe, Ezra Koenig might produce a great American novel, or at least the type of short stories to land him on The New Yorker's 20-Under-40 list. Consider the genesis of "Hannah Hunt": The flesh-and-blood woman behind the name of Modern Vampires of the City’s centerpiece was a college classmate. “We were in the same Buddhism class and we sat next to each other and stuff,” he explained to me nonchalantly. “I loved her name so much and thought it would be a great name for a song.” From those humble beginnings, Koenig crafted a devastating character that won’t leave you. Hannah Hunt is sharp but impulsive, destructively short-sighted in spite of her freakish perceptiveness. She’s nerve-wracking and slippery and large-hearted. She’s the one you want in the passenger’s seat on cross-country road trip, even if she’ll end up in tears at the beach. She won’t stop testing your limits, even when she means better; “If I can’t trust you, then dammit, Hannah!,” Koenig cries, his voice piercing the ballad’s meticulous baby’s-breath arrangement like an outburst at a pristine, Upper West Side dinner table. Hannah Hunt hasn’t won your trust yet, but you’ll give her another chance. —Carrie Battan

“New Slaves”

2

It's tough to remember now, but in the moments before Kanye West performed "Black Skinhead" and "New Slaves" on "Saturday Night Live", it seemed possible that the walls might finally be closing in around him, that the most inspiring pop culture run of the millennium might actually be tapering off. He was palling around with Big Sean on rap radio, picking through Kim's closet on reality television. His most recent project, the cluttered and uncooked label compilation Cruel Summer, was uncharacteristically careless. Maybe Kanye would recede slowly; it happened to everyone eventually. He'd had an inspiring run, after all.

From the first moments of those "SNL" performances, however, it became clear that we might not even be at the halfway point. The two songs he debuted felt alien, inchoate, possibly tuneless, and gave the immediate sense that a sleeper cell had been activated somewhere soft and vulnerable. "New Slaves" was the purest and most direct expression of Kanye's latest all-consuming message: You are going to let me in, and the further in you let me in, the more shit I am going to break.

"New Slaves" is the hardened cartilage of Yeezus, the leanest and grisliest piece of music on an album without a single yielding surface. There isn't a wasted breath or unnecessary word; every single thought cleaves through meat. "My mama was raised in the era when/ Clean water was only served to the fairer skin," he begins. Can you get closer to the point than that? You can: "I know that we the new slaves/ I see the blood on the leaves/ I see the blood on the leaves/ I see the blood on the leaves," he seethes, the hate and shame of systemic racism coming through more vividly with each repetition.

Yes, Kanye is a wealthy man, and yes, the particulars of his rage might be convoluted, involving his lack of access to the upper reaches of the fashion industry. But its source comes from an acute, unwavering awareness of a central fact: Even in the elite corridors of power where he now walks, some doors are still locked. On "New Slaves", he transforms into the hordes demanding entry. To paraphrase the words of his one-time mentor: The whole industry could hate him; he'll flail his way through. —Jayson Greene

“Hold On, We're Going Home” [ft. Majid Jordan]

1

It’s had a rough century, but things were looking up for the institution of marriage this year. Six more states legalized same-sex unions and beyond that, wedding DJs got an infusion of surefire new material—“Blurred Lines”, “Suit & Tie”, “Get Lucky”, amongst others—ubiquitous, charming songs by well-groomed, well-meaning men whose subject matter and rhythms won’t put anyone on the spot. “Hold On, We’re Going Home” also cracked those playlists, but while your grandfather can sing along to it without embarrassing himself and the light-stepping groove allows people to move without necessarily “dancing,” Drake expresses the kind of personal, ceremonial vows you hear at the altar rather than the after-party.

See, Drake’s never had a problem with intimacy, just commitment. Elsewhere on Nothing Was the Same, he makes life very difficult for Courtney from Hooters on Peachtree, Porscha from Treasures, and other women in his past that he hoped would be “the one.” Not the best he ever had, not the girl who can do better. "Hold On, We're Going Home" has him eyeing someone in the present with whom he can envision a future and let go of the past. What happens when they get home is left unsaid. They might make love, they might fall asleep on the couch. But either way, being together means they can be themselves.

That’s a feeling you can’t micromanage or overthink, and “Hold On” is delivered with necessary immediacy, its handful of crucial lyrics latching onto a cyclical melody. It’s a deceptively simple song that drew out instant covers from artists of all stripes—out of love, respect, and surely envy. They won’t be the last, because “Hold On” promises all we can ask for from a pop song (or another person): hot love and emotion, for richer or poorer, for better or worse, in sickness and in health. Endlessly. —Ian Cohen

Drake: "Hold On, We're Going Home" [ft. Majid Jordan]