The 100 Best Songs of 2024

As we put this list together, we thought about the rise of a new pop class, the return of some longtime favorites, regional rap bangers, country crossovers, the year of sexy drill, and more. All the while, it was hard to ignore the scathing summer smash that changed pop culture forever—you know the one.

Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2024 wrap-up coverage here.

Church Chords: “Warriors of Playtime”

The name of Church Chords’ debut album from this year is elvis, he was Schlager. If you find yourself provoked or humored or confused by that, then you’ll want to stroll through its gates to experience the panoplied psychedelic sound that producer Stephen Buono has assembled; it’s a real treat for the heads. A who’s-who of improvisational wizards show up all over the record, including this highlight that features a scorching tremolo-crazy solo from Jeff Parker, the guitarist around whom so much of this “jazz not jazz” world orbits. With a serene topline melody from Brazilian singer and actress Thalma de Freitas, the song locks into a warm pop-Kosmische embrace with just the right amount of edge. –Jeremy D. Larson

Listen: Church Chords, “Warriors of Playtime”

more eaze: “a(nother) cadence”

Something completely different: Seven minutes of rock-scrambling violin, a melodic motif frantic as a seismograph line, a bolt from the blue that bursts out of more eaze’s lacuna and parlor and up to the rafters, circling impatiently to be set free. Open a window! Or open a tab and play it as two overlaid tracks at once, or three, or four. No beat-matching and no way to go wrong—just stretch out and let Mari Maurice’s bowing wrap you up in ambient-orchestral spiderweb. –Anna Gaca

Listen: more eaze, “a(nother) cadence”

Body Meat: “High Beams”

Chris Taylor is, first and foremost, a designer of worlds. Starchris, his debut album as Body Meat, doubles as a player’s-choice, action-adventure video game. On “High Beams,” his protagonist is a game developer who attempts to instantiate himself from into one of his games. Due to his sloppy coding, his virtual copy begins to hunt him. If this storyline feels ambitious within the confines of a four-minute song, Taylor’s production is at least equally so. The beat is Opium-level rage, but a techno track slips in early like the cross-channel bleed of an overweening radio station. Later, said track explodes into a pounding, frantic fantasy, the perfect soundtrack to an epic chase that culminates in a boss battle to the death. –Raphael Helfand

Listen: Body Meat, “High Beams”

414BigFrank: “Eat Her Up”

There’s this dance all over Milwaukee—if you’re on TikTok, you know the one—somewhere between a twerk and an Ethopian Eskita, all unnatural jerks and dramatic shoulder pumps. What really sells it, though, is the smile: You can’t do it without a big smirk. No song embodies that dance more perfectly than 414BigFrank’s party-starter “Eat Her Up,” a low-end club smash with a jokester’s spirit. Even amid the commanding metronomic pulse and a thick coat of Auto-Tune, Frank’s comedian impulses peak through the track’s robotic facade. You can hear the grin. –Evan Rytlewski

Listen: 414BigFrank, “Eat Her Up”

Tashi Dorji: “begin from here”

Tashi Dorji, the Bhutanese guitarist based in Asheville, North Carolina, uses his instrument as a vehicle for the fury of living through the bleakness of our political moment—and for the determination to continue to exist despite. He channels this energy into his vigorous strums, deconstructing melodies into raw, rhythmic patterns. His album, We will be wherever the fires are lit, explicitly calls attention to the need to continue and “begin from here,” its opening track, exemplifies the need to live and to fight. Dorji plays a looped pattern in which a short, prickly pulse leads into a long, howling one. As he repeats it, his strums get a little louder and a little stronger, carrying with them a bristling, kinetic energy that’s sparked by each finger as it hits the strings. This music sounds how perseverance feels. –Vanessa Ague

Listen: Tashi Dorji, “begin from here”

Porter Robinson: “Cheerleader”

Despite living in the swamp of unchecked toxicity that is the stan era, few songs actually care to dive into the increasingly knotty dynamic between fan and artist. Porter Robinson’s emo-EDM track “Cheerleader” is a bittersweet, anthemic tribute to that hugely specific kind of toxic partnership, and it manages to find equal empathy for voracious fans and artists like Robinson, who have spoken about struggles with mental health and a desire to take periods away from the spotlight. Amazingly, it’s also simple and a blast, driven by a piquant synth riff that feels like a firework whizzing through the air. Navigating work/life balance never sounded so sweet. –Shaad D’Souza

Listen: Porter Robinson, “Cheerleader”

Star Bandz: “Yea Yea”

Breaking out as a 16-year-old rapper presents different challenges for Star Bandz than it did for previous Chicagoans. Now there’s too much competition on social media feeds to be merely gifted; you need to grab attention in seconds, and then keep it. “Yea Yea” is a two-minute sprint that’s as unruly as any viral song assembled on BandLab, but Star doesn’t break a sweat or need a second take. She seizes her moment and stays nonchalant, commanding space over the most chaotic jazz-looping beat she can find and convincing you that nothing fazes her. Every bar and sword-slice sound effect is optimized. Hit the ballot box and “vote SB for Mayor”—you know she’s qualified. –H.D. Angel

Listen: Star Bandz, “Yea Yea”

JADE: “Angel of My Dreams”

“Angel of My Dreams” is a musical Frankenstein, an unholy amalgam of girl group parts sewn together in all of the wrong places. Like Mary Shelley’s monster, the song’s beating heart is sweetly, wretchedly human, with JADE playing up the pathos of a singer who’s realized her dreams of pop stardom and immediately had them hijacked by men in suits. The song is grotesquely eager to please, and JADE gleefully deploys every trick in her arsenal to do so: strutting, pitch-shifted choruses, sinus-bursting melisma, and the most overblown, mock-emotional bridge this year. It’s a distorted self-portrait of a woman warping herself to cohere to a pop ideal and finally becoming her own artist. –Harry Tafoya

Listen: JADE, “Angel of My Dreams”

Shabaka: “I’ll Do Whatever You Want” [ft. Floating Points & Laraaji]

Much of the power of jazz comes from its commentary on structure. Humans yearn for form—it’s safe, predictable—but to truly transcend, you must accept that all that is built will crumble. “I’ll Do Whatever You Want,” the centerpiece of Shabaka’s masterful ambient jazz offering, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, begins with a grainy synthesizer sequence courtesy of Sam Shepherd, a.k.a. Floating Points. Shabaka’s flute finds its way into the spaces between the synth notes, and for a few spellbinding moments, the sounds weave into a rhythmic lattice. But over the course of the next seven minutes, Shabaka’s ensemble, which includes André 3000, Carlos Niño, and Laraaji, stretches every motif until it pulls apart. It ends in a completely different place, as everything always does. –Dash Lewis

Listen: Shabaka, “I’ll Do Whatever You Want” [ft. Floating Points & Laraaji]

Jeff Parker ETA IVtet: “Freakadelic”

Guitarist Jeff Parker, saxophonist Josh Johnson, bassist Anna Butterss, and drummer Jay Bellerose are trying to stay in line. At varying intervals throughout the 24-minute, improvised “Freakadelic”—which reminds me alternately of acoustic Can, the hypnosis of Natural Information Society, and chopped-and-screwed Moroccan Gnawa music—someone steps out with a riff, then hops back in formation. It goes on like this, little deviations from the swaggy martial left-right-left rhythm, until slowly, almost imperceptibly, the quartet destabilizes and disperses. What a way for the ETA IVtet to begin their latest album, The Way Out of Easy. Around the 18-minute mark, you hear a little vocal ad-lib—“Come on!”—shouted, almost incredulously, by Butterss. They’re right: The whole thing’s pretty unbelievable. –Jeremy D. Larson

Listen: Jeff Parker ETA IVtet, “Freakadelic”

NLE Choppa: “SLUT ME OUT 2”

“SLUT ME OUT 2,” NLE Choppa’s visceral sex anthem, is so over-the-top explicit that it’s hard for any one line to stand out as particularly shocking or meaningful. Nevertheless, Choppa pausing to exclaim, “Mmm… smell like badussy,” never fails to make me scream. (I’ll let him explain what that one means.) Choppa is an indefatigable, irreverent marketing savant, known as much for his earnest health advice as he is for performing at gay pride events and his NSFW selfies. He nonetheless outdid himself with the Jersey club–inflected “SLUT ME OUT 2,” whose most provocative element is its infectious, gender-inverting chorus: “If I was a bad bitch,” Choppa chants, “I’d wanna fuck me too!” A wealth of female rappers—from Trina and Khia to Sexyy Red and Megan Thee Stallion—have been lapping men for decades when it comes to rapping about sex. But, with a single song, NLE Choppa has a strong argument to join their ranks. –Jackson Howard

Listen: NLE Choppa, “SLUT ME OUT 2”

Shaboozey: “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”

There is no question why this track has spent 18 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard charts: it is an elite American drinking song. Forget about how transformative a year 2024 has been for country music, forget about how American politics have split this country in half—Shaboozey made an anthem that has convinced citizens from Alaska to New York to buy that extra shot of liquor and shoot it with a smile on their face. Play this at the club, the honky tonk, or outside a boomer’s toolshed, and someone is bound to fill a glass. Temporary unity by way of a killer chorus, a crying fiddle, and an interpolation of St. Louis rapper J-Kwon’s 2004 track “Tipsy.” The only thing not to like is how overplayed it’ll be for years to come. –Millan Verma

Listen: Shaboozey, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”

Jane Paknia / Hagop Tchaparian: “Alice in Orchidverse”

Welcome to Club Orchid, trippiest of the flowers. Hagop Tchaparian and Jane Paknia roll the deep-dark psychedelic sea over Paknia’s original song “Orchid Underneath,” transforming it into a four-on-the-floor blacklight banger full of hothouse steam, swirling Pucci patterns, and mutant, exposed sensuality. “What does the future smell like?” Funk as in sex and obsession. –Anna Gaca

Listen: Jane Paknia / Hagop Tchaparian, “Alice in Orchidverse”

YT / Lancey Foux: “Black & Tan”

Last year, while studying philosophy and French literature at Oxford University, YT found his true calling: making swaggy jerk rap in the vein of xaviersobased and Nettspend. And so “Black & Tan,” his breakout collab with Lancey Foux, skillfully absorbs some of their youthful energy for a hit that’d smoothly slot into any underground DJ set. But the way they talk about swag is different, channeling the worldliness of London culture and luxury. YT takes trips to Lagos and Montréal for “J-J-J-J-Jound.” Lancey considers going upper-class homeless like Ye. Beneath all the frequent flyer miles, the duo sound determined to plant their flag as the leaders of the new school of UK rap. –Mano Sundaresan

Listen: YT / Lancey Foux, “Black & Tan”

Xavi: “La Diabla”

Xavi’s career almost ended before it even started. Shortly after signing with Interscope at 17, he nearly died in a car accident and was told he might never sing again. Two years later, he’s Latin music’s newest heavy-hitter with the success of “La Diabla,” a cheeky single that shot him to the top of the charts early this year. But Xavi is more than a great comeback story—the fresh-faced crooner adds a refreshing dash of earnestness to the corridos tumbados genre. On the viral hit, Xavi serenades una tóxica who can’t help but fall for the bad boys. His raspy voice and requinto riff are timeless, lifting the song above and beyond the screenagers. –Maria Eberhart

Listen: Xavi, “La Diabla”

Adeline Hotel: “Whodunnit”

I appreciate how much ink the Brooklyn singer-songwriter Dan Knishkowy spills into the page here. He presents this long, soft title track from his latest Adeline Hotel album in this beautiful unscrolling ABABB rhyme scheme, and it’s utterly hypnotic until you notice there’s blood dripping out from under his sleeve. He threads heartfelt longing, bodily surrealism, and metaphysical depression into an unabridged statement of purpose as an artist, a warm light coming from the keyhole into his metropolitan folk world. –Jeremy D. Larson

Listen: Adeline Hotel, “Whodunnit”

Baby Osama: “I DONT MEAN IT”

It is simply a joy to hear Baby Osama air out an ex, in one deep exhale, over a sample drill flip of “Feel It in the Air.” Just like that, the towel-to-forehead nervousness of Beanie Sigel’s source material is replaced by pure shade from the Bronx’s coolest new rapper. She even asks her for all of her clothes back—not just because she wants them, but because she doesn’t want you to have them. If there’s one thing Baby Osama has taught us, it’s that you can’t steal her swag. –Mano Sundaresan

Listen: Baby Osama, “I DONT MEAN IT”

Los Campesinos!: “0898 HEARTACHE”

“Cavalcade through antemortem/Terminal suburban boredom”—if Gareth David hasn’t captured the meaning of life in the first words of “0898 HEARTACHE,” he’s at least described the experience of it for both the creators and consumers of Los Campesinos! music, a steady cymbal-tap of anxiety punctuated by drinking for sport, wrestling promos, embarrassing lust, and crippling depression. Typical stuff for this band, yet as the crescendo of a self-financed, self-produced, self-released, and career-defining album, “0898 HEARTACHE” is their breakout hit, surging through all of the needless barriers that prevent artists from asking listeners what they owe each other. Short answer: everything. –Ian Cohen

Listen: Los Campesinos!, “0898 HEARTACHE”

Jaeychino / SlimeGetEm: “Me vs Me”

As the DMV’s so-called “free car” sound, defined by kick-forward production and a lyrical fixation on carjacking, has fallen out of fashion in favor of angst-riddled cloud rap, rapper Jaeychino and his preferred beatmaker SJR are determined to mold the region’s sound in their own, hyper-online image. Though Jaeychino shares a ruminative writing style with Maryland’s Nino Paid, his experimentation with the glitchy, IDM-adjacent sounds popularized by NYC-based collectives like 1c34 and Surf Gang uniquely emphasizes the wrinkles in his introspection. On “Me vs Me,” he and SlimeGetEm represent each side of the divide between the meditative new wave and the sinister mania of free car, trading verses over a low-bit synth-pop instrumental reminiscent of early How to Dress Well. As moody pads crumble into pixels, Jaeychino looks back on past trauma through the lens of a tragic hero: “Got love for the youth, man, they call me the hope.” –Jude Noel

Listen: Jaeychino / SlimeGetEm, “Me vs Me”

The Hard Quartet: “Hey”

Stephen Malkmus has so thoroughly mastered the arch observation and the bitchy retort you forget that when he calms down he can knock you over with a feather. The queasy, drawn-out exhale “Hey” is the most striking song from the Hard Quartet’s rollicking debut because it’s disarmingly tender—the guitars creak and groan like bedsprings forming a cradle as a light splash of cymbals imparts a gentle mist. As Malkmus lands upon yet another perfect melody and sings in a whisper about a kiss that feels like a quaalude, you can’t help but lean in and listen close. –Mark Richardson

Listen: The Hard Quartet, “Hey”

Gillian Welch / David Rawlings: “Hashtag”

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings have forever hidden the blade of the present in the folds of the past, cloaking worlds of worry in tender and familiar folk forms. Still, a song called “Hashtag” felt like potential folly, the pair trying to enter some discourse they’ve always floated above. Actually, they do that here, too. A eulogy for their mentor Guy Clark, the perspicacious Texas songwriter whose outsized wit matched his nurturing heart, “Hashtag” scoffs at the fleeting news that a minor star’s death may generate. Instead, it treasures the way their works and deeds endure inside people navigating their own lives—“In the truck stops, in the parking lots, and the cheap motels.” Relevance, Rawlings and Welch realize in rapture, doesn’t disappear with time, even death; it simply helps someone else find their way forward. –Grayson Haver Currin

Listen: Gillian Welch / David Rawlings, “Hashtag”

Zach Bryan: “Pink Skies”

“Pink Skies” has the obvious markers of a great song: diaristic details, a heavy, relatable topic, a shout-along chorus. So what makes it one of Zach Bryan’s best songs and not just a mess of weepy cliches? It’s the way the Oklahoman sings like he’s exhausted, barely able to get out his story of a family funeral if not for his rootsy band giving him the strength to burst out, “I bet God heard you comin’!” “Pink Skies” plays out with a scream and a sigh, a slice of home made for the stadium. –Matthew Strauss

Listen: Zach Bryan, “Pink Skies”

Yaya Bey: “eric adams in the club”

What is Eric Adams’ favorite A$AP Rocky song? Is he a “Peso” or “Fukk Sleep” guy? Does he include Yams Day on his official city calendar? Yaya Bey doesn’t ask these questions on her foggy dance cut “eric adams in the club,” but they’re on the tip of her tongue. Tired of seeing the indicted mayor stepping out with celebrities but not stepping up to lead the city, the Queens singer depicts him as the patron saint of civic neglect. She chants the title like she’s in the club with Adams and cheering as he gets sturdy. If the mayor is going to let the city burn, she and her girls might as well make a night of it. –Stephen Kearse

Listen: Yaya Bey, “eric adams in the club”

LAZER DIM 700: “Asian Rock”

Following plugg music online feels like monitoring a petri dish: Hyper-specific offshoots of barely-established sounds emerge and die off weekly, competing for scraps of attention. While the genre’s shifting nature attracts an obsessive, hyper-online audience, Atlanta’s LAZER DIM 700 has risen above over the past year by treating plugg as a monolith, approaching all beats under the umbrella with the same feverish intensity, no matter the sound. On “Asian Rock,” named for the guitar-laden pluggnb style developed by producer BenjiCold, Lazer wonders aloud what these microgenre distinctions even mean as he tears through a series of major-7th chords. The track consists of little more than a 60-second slice-of-life verse about the weirdness of online fame and trips to the corner store, but it loops almost perfectly, with that opening lead guitar lick begging for just one more spin. –Jude Noel

Listen: LAZER DIM 700, “Asian Rock”

Ekko Astral: “Head Empty Blues”

The horrors of the male gaze persist, but so does Ekko Astral. On “Head Empty Blues,” the D.C.-based punks turn all the yikes that accompany daily existence as a member of a marginalized community into a brash noise-punk onslaught that rhymes “bubblegum vodka” with “lol Kafka.” Their rattled-off list of fears—stalkers, knife fights, death—are a bleak but comforting reminder that you’re not the only one riddled with daily anxiety for your personal safety. As the album opener concludes, the band offers one final reminder that when life gets to be too much, you always have found community, “Internet brain rot” and jokes about “Bone Iver” to get lost in. –Lauren Rearick

Listen: Ekko Astral, “Head Empty Blues”

Nídia & Valentina: “Rapido”

Valentina Magaletti is a drummer from London’s arty underground; Nídia the first international star of Lisbon’s batida scene. “Rapido” lives where their worlds overlap. Its moody atmospherics and thunderous drumming are made for a rock club, that rattling bass and those persistent handclaps belong on the dancefloor, yet here they find glorious, rump-shaking common cause. But a sample of a woman moaning, deployed over and over again, telegraphs the track’s real message: it’s exciting when different scenes come together, but it’s even better when people do. –Matthew Blackwell

Listen: Nídia & Valentina, “Rapido”

Wolfacejoeyy: “finsta (sexy liar)”

Wolfacejoeyy’s music already feels like scrolling through Instagram, so a song with this subject matter comes naturally. It’s got that hyperreal gloss that keeps reality at a distance, since you know all the fun might be played up for the cameras. Being sexual (as in “sexy drill”) in a social-media world is easy; being truly romantic takes skill. Flirty lines like, “Put me on your Close Friends/Show me what you never show them,” land with a precision that’s almost too practiced, but Joey sounds so slick and sweet that you believe him when he says he wants something real. “She like, ‘Mista/I wanna be your bestie, can I be your twinsta?’”—you can tell he giggled when he wrote that, as much as you do when you sing along or post it on your Story. It’s corny, vulnerable, and self-assured, as cute as a well-staged promposal. –H.D. Angel

Listen: Wolfacejoeyy, “finsta (sexy liar)”

Dummy: “Blue Dada”

Listening to Free Energy, the second album from L.A. quartet Dummy, feels a lot like flipping through the racks of a cool record store circa 1992, where the bins are stocked with all the requisite shoegaze and Madchester staples, early post-rock oddities, rave 12"s, and every record on Too Pure that you can’t afford to buy on import. But the album’s exhilarating centerpiece, “Blue Dada,” filters those venerable Brit-indie aesthetics through a very modern mode of impulsive music listening, where vibes can instantly shift with a quick finger tap. After spending its first 1:45 cooly staking the common ground between dream-pop and the dancefloor, Dummy effectively execute the mid-song equivalent of a record-scratch interruption, like someone who got tired of zoning out to My Bloody Valentine’s “Soon” for the thousandth time and opts to lose themselves in the adrenalized drone-punk rush of Stereolab’s Peng instead. If you’re always feeling like there’s never enough money in the bank or hours in the day, “Blue Dada” presents a two-songs-for-the-price-of-one deal you can’t refuse. –Stuart Berman

Listen: Dummy, “Blue Dada”

evilgiane: “40” [ft. xaviersobased & Nettspend]

Evilgiane’s January single “40” is a fitting introduction to Xaviersobased and Nettspend, two of underground internet rap’s most undeniable young talents. The song is a sucker punch to the back of the head, a minute-long warning shot that lofts Xavier and Nett from weirdo SoundCloud kids to potential stars-in-waiting. Over a signature Giane beat of squiggly synths, blown-out 808, and digi-drill drums, the two deliver aggressively nonchalant flows and trade bars about toting TECs and skipping school. While Xavier and Nett’s solo releases often float in a haze of stoner experimentalism, “40” proves they can make hits while remaining unapologetically themselves. –Brady Brickner-Wood

Listen: evilgiane, “40” [ft. xaviersobased & Nettspend]

d.silvestre: “Taka Fogo em Kiksilver”

As a young teenager, Brazil’s Douglas Silvestre would hole up in his bedroom and record cozy, Alex G-inspired song sketches to his phone. That all changed when he attended his first bailes as a 16-year-old, realizing that the blown-out, DIY aggression of funk was “more rock than the rock [he] was making.” Since then, he’s developed a distinctly noisy, brutalist production style, exemplified by “Taka Fogo em Kiksilver.” The track’s instrumental consists of little more than kicks and congas, boosted, then layered until they form an infernal wall of sound. MC MTOODIO, MC LELE 011, and MC DENADAI match its energy, conjuring images of psychosexual anxiety and Quiksilver jackets set ablaze. –Jude Noel

Listen: d.silvestre, “Taka Fogo em Kiksilver”

che: “Pizza Time”

Of all the teen rap albums this year, 18-year-old che’s Sayso Says was one of the most consistently fun, erupting with crazed stimuli like a high school sleepover at nightcore speed. But the Atlantan’s top tune of 2024, “Pizza Time,” is wilder and weirder. His cursive voice sounds almost made to slink and bunny-hop across Prettifun’s psychotic slot machine of a beat. The video is equally surreal and slapstick, cramming a Discord channel’s worth of fried memes into two minutes. It’s a level-up for che, who's evolved from one-hit TikTok-wonder status and Chief Keef and Lil Uzi Vert cosplays to become one of the most electric stylists in the underground. –Kieran Press-Reynolds

Listen: che, “Pizza Time”

Tommy Richman: “MILLION DOLLAR BABY”

With “Million Dollar Baby,” the Woodbridge, Virginia native Tommy Richman laid bare the subtext of so many pop songs, not to mention videos on TikTok: “I wanna make it so badly.” He’d end up going viral on the platform with this earworm, a scrappy assemblage of blown-out drums, an intermittent 808 clink, a juicy bassline, and falsetto vocals so echoey they could have been recorded in a dying mall. If it all sounds a little wrong, that might be the point. Instead of introducing himself with bravado, Richman weaves an underdog narrative, claiming the title “million dollar baby,” an insult Sonny Liston flung at Muhammad Ali before their 1964 bout. But everyone loves an underdog, and, given how big this song got, Richman’s earnestness is plain savvy. –Rich Juzwiak

Listen: Tommy Richman, “MILLION DOLLAR BABY”

Verraco: “Godspeed >”

Verraco’s “Escándaloo” bored a hole through 2023’s club landscape, fueled by a powerhouse bassline that ranked among the year’s most electrifyingly audacious sounds. The Medellín producer extended his iconoclastic run with this year’s aggressively unconventional Breathe​.​.​. Godspeed EP. In the record’s peak-time centerpiece, “Godspeed >,” a lurching dembow groove pocks the ground while cowbells clatter, spectral voices cackle, and midrange synths are smeared willy-nilly across the stereo field. A bit like Alien’s corrosive xenomorph mouth goo, the noxious bass patch from “Escándaloo” is back and still burning through steel. Yet rather than suggesting that he’s repeating himself, the return of that all-devouring bassline sounds like he’s driving his point home. Every one of his releases is part of a master plan: to develop tools that lay waste to every last hoary shred of club convention. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Verraco, “Godspeed >”

A. G. Cook: “Silver Thread Golden Needle”

Maybe A. G. Cook is crazy for testing the attention span of his chronically online audience with a 10-minute album intro. Or maybe “Silver Thread Golden Needle,” the bionic opener to Cook’s Britpop, is scintillating enough to stay fixated on. The song refracts like a prism at high noon, filled with stuttering blips that shapeshift at each turn. And the merry-go-round of yelps and vocal chops at its core gleam like Christmas morning. A. G. Cook’s electronic epic is everything popular music has become: digital, synthetic, amorphous—ultimately just a WAV file in some sticker-laden Macbook. Well, it’s everything but concise. But there’s no trouble sitting through this one. –Olivier Lafontant

Listen: A. G. Cook, “Silver Thread Golden Needle”

The Softies: “I Said What I Said”

The first single in 24 years from twee lifers Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia, the Softies’ “I Said What I Said,” is a masterclass in making an immaculate indie-pop song that’s as complete and clean as it needs to be, no more, no less. The melody follows the gentle, accessible contours of a folk song from a Rise Up Singing book, and Melberg and Sbragia’s harmonies are the humble conduits of indie-pop nostalgia, subtly mixed and sung with the lightest possible hint of twang. The lyrics are simple, befitting a level-headed breakup song that’s perfectly fine leaving the messier feelings unsaid. –Katherine St. Asaph

Listen: The Softies, “I Said What I Said”

Melt-Banana: “Code”

It figures that Melt-Banana—Japan’s finest export of hyperactive, mathy noise-rock—would return from an 11-year absence by further teasing out the anticipation. “Code” opens with a single blink-and-you-miss-it note, before a few more plunks follow, like the first drops of rain before a storm. It’s uncharacteristically quiet. Ichirou Agata slowly begins mutilating his guitar and Yasuko Onuki warms up with sharp yelps. Then, when the beat finally arrives, the two pummel you with overstimulation: heart-racing drumming, untraceable guitar effects, and the type of pitch-shifted Minnie Mouse vocals that make your dog go crazy. It’s a delirious sugar rush where half the high is in that build-up alone. –Nina Corcoran

Listen: Melt-Banana, “Code”

Cindy Lee: “Dracula”

If you were to take one song off of Diamond Jubilee, press it to a 12"—maybe give it a dubby remix on the B-side—and play it out at a haze-filled lounge, it would have to be “Dracula,” the slinky one-chord wonder just past the half-way point of Cindy Lee’s marathon double album. It’s the longest track on the record, which doesn’t make it the best, but it does make it a unique proposition on an album otherwise adorned with more compact fragments of dream-pop. An overdriven guitar stomps through psychedelic synth swells as Patrick Flegel sings about wandering the cold Toronto streets in the pre-dawn hours of winter with a heart made of stone. It’s an icy mood with a backbeat and bassline hot enough to melt it down into a puddle. –Jeremy D. Larson

Listen: Cindy Lee, “Dracula”

Rema: “Ozeba”

After making his name with the lush and lovey-dovey sensibilities of Afrobeats, Rema is far more sinister, menacing, and intense across his sophomore effort, HEIS. Gone are the flowery epics about pursuing a tryst; instead, prepare for some good ol’ fashioned shit-talking, especially on “Ozeba.” On the album’s centerpiece, Rema unloads a barrage of goads and taunts over a pulsating roll of drums that will raise your heart rate faster than a merciless round of HIIT. Time to cause some trouble. –Serge Selenou

Listen: Rema, “Ozeba”

Mustafa: “SNL”

Some scientists think lullabies are so comforting because they mimic sounds heard in the womb, evoking a bond so intrinsic it existed before words. It’s this kind of love that Mustafa honors on his gorgeous folk song “SNL.” The track, off his album Dunya, is a lullaby for the friends he grew up with in the Toronto neighborhood of Regent Park. Over an ambling, finger-picked guitar, he recounts glowing memories—a friend showering him in perfume, the image of their face in dim light—while also naming the more grating realities they experienced together: the relentless construction, the realization that “good guys die first.”

When discussing Dunya, which was written in the wake of heartache, his brother’s murder, and the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people, Mustafa often explains what the music is not: It’s not a work of forgiveness, nor is it a eulogy. It’s not an apology or even a means of connecting with listeners he doesn’t know. But “SNL” provides the clearest example of that it is, a document of love tested and true, familial yet chosen, and a means of nurturing it at all costs. –Vrinda Jagota

Listen: Mustafa, “SNL”

ANOHNI and the Johnsons: “Breaking”

There are few voices in recorded history that howl and pulverize with the force of ANOHNI’s. To call her timbre “dynamic” is like referring to a hurricane as “wet”; it’s an entity that lurches from the depths of her and grips the audience in a rattling embrace. So it was especially intriguing when ANOHNI, along with her reunited band, the Johnsons, released the gently pulsing “Breaking,” a session remnant from their last album. Guitar and clarinet—the song’s sole instruments—undulate like saltwater lightly lapping the shore, and even ANOHNI’s voice is mellowed as she conjures images of a white doe, a blowing willow, a felled forest. Only in the final measures does ANOHNI hint at the rapture welling in her lungs: “It’s really something to be/Breaking,” she belts, layering harmonies like shafts of wheat tangled in a storm. It’s within this wreckage she finds the fortitude to raise her voice. –Madison Bloom

Listen: ANOHNI and the Johnsons, “Breaking”

J.P.: “Bad Bitty”

“Hey, huh, bow”—J.P. really spun one of the stickiest hooks of the year out of the first three syllables that popped into his head. On the biggest Milwaukee rap hit in a generation, J.P. croons them as if into a dictaphone while whipping up a sandwich with whatever he could find in the back of the fridge. That nonchalance, combined with its humble, blown-speaker production, gives “Bad Bitty” the air of a novelty song, but it can’t disguise all the grace at work here. In J.P.’s hands, a horndog ditty becomes an ageless hymn. –Evan Rytlewski

Listen: J.P., “Bad Bitty”

Hovvdy: “Bad News”

Over the past decade, Hovvdy have specialized in “porch music”: laidback tempos, pedal steel, cozy camaraderie, and “fraternal” (complimentary). This is how their self-titled double LP spends most of its time, but, by the penultimate “Bad News,” everyone who had to wake up early has gone home and those remaining have gathered in the kitchen to drink and dance and turn a get-together into an actual party. “Bad News” rides a dizzying dance beat that has no precedent in the Austin indie-rock duo’s catalog, an exhale of pure release from two guys who otherwise work in deep, satisfied sighs. Whether it’s a glimpse of Hovvdy’s future or a one-off departure, “Bad News” validates the emotional scrapbooking they’ve done since day one, capturing a mundane moment that, with the passage of time, will become an indelible memory. –Ian Cohen

Listen: Hovvdy, “Bad News”

Laura Marling: “Patterns”

Playing her own guitar and bass and backed beautifully by a miniature orchestra of violin, viola, cello, and horns, Laura Marling sings of an entire lifetime like it’s a bedtime story, presenting childhood, motherhood, and birth as little moments of joy in our cosmic journey, bound to repeat and repeat and repeat. Each line is filled with love and wisdom, and Marling is sentimental and clear-eyed, almost workmanlike in how steady she is in sharing all she knows to be true. Someone once said it’s strange to be anything at all, and Laura Marling may agree that it’s a miracle we get to share it. –Matthew Strauss

Listen: Laura Marling, “Patterns“

Two Shell: “Round” [ft. Sugababes]

Two Shell pushed it this year—to some extent in their music, but more so with their antics. One moment, they were making AI-generated deepfakes; the next, they were selling “boring rocks” containing hidden USBs with corrupted music files. For many fans outside of their die-hard base, their constant trolling got old, and people were leaving the proverbial chat. Enter: “Round.” With a beat as serious as its makers are not, “Round” finds the duo chopping up British girl group Sugababes’ 2002 hit “Round Round,” reworking it into a UK garage club banger with hyperpop inflections. Unlike its past unofficial versions, the official release scales back the hi-hats, juices up the bass, and features re-recorded vocals from the original Sugababes. The track goes—and so do we, ’round and ’round, on Two Shell’s carousel of hijinks and hits. –Minna Zhou

Listen: Two Shell, “Round” [ft. Sugababes]

Father John Misty: “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All”

When Father John Misty debuted “I Guess Time Makes Fools of Us All” in 2019, it sounded like Various Positions Leonard Cohen. When he released it this year as the lone “new” song on a greatest-hits compilation, it sounded like Death of a Ladies’ Man Leonard Cohen—and a lot better. It’s as if he spent the half-decade gestation period internalizing the song’s sinister meaning, transforming it from something synthy and devotional into a funky, rocking, paranoid behemoth. The finished product is classic Father John Misty, in that it is obsessed with the decay of man and the mirrors we stare at as the world around us crumbles. Of course it needs saxophones, bongos, Hammond organ, and a vocal performance that would make Phil Spector stash away his guns. –Matthew Strauss

Listen: Father John Misty, “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All”

Floating Points: “Key103”

Sam Shepherd spent the past few years working with and celebrating the life of Pharoah Sanders. It’s both an honor and a burden to carry on the late jazz master’s legacy, and Shepherd has found solace through an old, reliable love: EDM. “Key103,” a highlight on his Floating Points album Cascade, is at once a celebration of dance and life. It begins with a bass drum that resembles a heartbeat. From there, the groove thickens, as does the atmosphere—dashing, dancing, jittering. Shepherd delights in stacking his arrangement with more and more elements—a pinging metallic riff, coin-operated arcade game sounds—before paring it all back, pulling his listener around like they’re on a string. “Key103” is equally suitable for a subterranean dancefloor or post-club comedown, as Shepherd knows that both are where life is often most sharply felt. –Dean Van Nguyen

Listen: Floating Points, “Key103”

Nia Archives: “Silence Is Loud”

The self-titled opening track of Nia Archives’ long-awaited debut LP is a mission statement for her “emotional junglism:” frantic drum’n’bass meets soaring, main-character Britpop. Rather than diluting either influence, the British producer has made a new kind of UK arena pop, and the heavily distorted screams that kick off the song sound like she’s raising the alarm: You cannot, and will not, ignore me. If Cool Britannia really did come back in 2024, “Silence Is Loud” marks the moment when she reclaimed the Union Jack for her generation. –Brady Gerber

Listen: Nia Archives, “Silence Is Loud”

Brittany Howard: “Red Flags”

We laud the stars of house music, but, in many cases, the most poignant singers depend on blankness; they could be me or you. The former Alabama Shakes frontperson Brittany Howard is hardly anonymous, and “Red Flags” isn’t house, but it shares the genre’s fascination with the ghosts that haunt and give meaning to our present. Composing this unexpected thumper as if she had spent an afternoon spinning old Todd Terry remixes, Howard unleashes an epicene baritone over rattling percussion, ghostly synths, and harmonies that draw as much from TV on the Radio as they do Sylvester. “I ran right through them red flags,” she confesses, and who among us hasn’t gone and done likewise? It turns out “Red Flags,” as title is self-fulfilling: Howard’s range of interests continually impresses, and it’s her commitment to risks breaking red flags over her knee that keeps her so fascinating. –Alfred Soto

Listen: Brittany Howard, “Red Flags”

Moses Sumney: “Vintage”

Moses Sumney is a real yearner, and “Vintage” finds him pining for the past: 1993, to be exact, the year when Björk released Debut and Michael Jackson moonwalked at the Super Bowl. On the Sophcore single, produced alongside quickly, quickly and Meridian, Sumney goes all-in on classic ’90s R&B, with steady, echoing drums and his ever-so-reliable falsetto runs, updating the tradition a little with spiraling synths piercing through the mix. Musing on someone who haunts him like a ghost, Sumney pleads to rewind the clock, and, in turn, creates a song that is both nostalgic and pushing forward into his future. Could spraying Afro Sheen preserve this moment in situ? If I lock this sweater in a vault, will it still smell like you? Sumney thinks it’s worth it, just to make the memory last an instant longer. –Jaeden Pinder

Listen: Moses Sumney, “Vintage”

Four Tet: “Loved”

Like homemade phở or a Mondrian painting, downtempo music sounds like one of those things that seems easy but requires time and touch to make it work. Kieran Hebden has both, and he takes a break from making club hits in 15 minutes lying on his bed and returns to his sampledelic Rounds days with a textured, threnodic song that’s less “these are the breaks” and more “them’s the breaks.” The beat is humble, groovy, and mysterious, and it’s elevated by a silvery melody played on Soma TERRA, a “highly conceptual” microtonal polyphonic synthesizer encased in wood. You could say that’s beside the point, but that’s literally the Four Tet touch. –Jeremy D. Larson

Listen: Four Tet, “Loved”

Beyoncé: “II HANDS II HEAVEN”

Beyoncé albums are exercises in control, but “II HANDS II HEAVEN” sinks into surrender. With whiskey in hand, Beyoncé wobbles between doubt and faith—not just in God, but in the man she calls a “summer fling,” seeping into her dreams in the sticky heat. The track teems with wildlife—stallions, wolves, “carnivores”—a not-so-subtle metaphor as she negotiates just how much freedom she’s willing to give up. Her verses dribble from one to the next over a skittering drum beat that thuds like each of the 10,000 steps she sings about. All attempts at hope are equal here: feet splayed on the dashboard are as holy as the echo of wine she tastes in another’s mouth, as pure as the urge to pray for forgiveness. On Cowboy Carter, every gallop is a gambit, but it’s the choice to hang up her spurs and slink back to bed that terrifies her the most. –Dani Blum

Listen: Beyoncé, “II HANDS II HEAVEN”

TisaKorean: “lEgs In tHe aIr”

The Auto-Tune on “lEgs In tHe aIr” sounds like TisaKorean dusted off his old iPod Touch and booted up the “I Am T-Pain” app. Nothing new for him; reshaping chintzy, turn-of-the-aughts textures into new forms is his bread and butter. The Texas rapper makes the song all his own with just how raunchy he gets, sing-rapping about sex like he’s a filmmaker directing his actors through highly intricate scenarios. With Tisa's impish vocal effect caked on everything, “lEgs In tHe aIr” takes horny rap to another dimension. –Mano Sundaresan

Listen: TisaKorean, “lEgs In tHe aIr”

Joy Orbison: “Flight FM”

Inspiration can strike like lightning, especially when all it takes to make a track is a laptop and some headphones. Joy Orbison made “Flight FM”—a floaty UK garage beat and bassline that repeats deliriously, more deranged with each new pass—while waiting for a ride to Lost Village, and then he played it during his set. It was clearly designed for a festival, all audio pyrotechnics and gratuitous edging, and, honestly, it also sounds like it was made quickly—first thought, best thought. “Flight FM” doesn’t even have a drop, but it doesn’t need one. Here, the anticipation comes with waiting for the next pass of the roller coaster loop-de-loop, a pleasure that repeats infinitely. After making so many club anthems—“Ellpisis,” “Hyph Mngo”—Joy Orbison knows a thing or two about dance-music fundamentals, and “Flight FM” is nothing more than the bare bones of a banger. It’s so perfect in its simplicity that even big-tent stars can’t make it more massive. –Andrew Ryce

Listen: Joy Orbison, “Flight FM”

Sexyy Red: “Get It Sexyy”

Every Tay Keith beat feels like a revelation, and Sexyy Red ensures that “Get It Sexyy”—one of the hardest drill singles of the year—is no exception. The track is bold and brash, like much of In Sexxy We Trust, with the same relentless adlib that dominated last year’s “Bow Bow Bow (F My Baby Dad).” Through it all, the St. Louis icon stays feeling herself, dropping it low on the dancefloor and driving recklessly in her Benz. The club and the car are perfect places to blast the single, if you’re feeling reckless. –Rob Arcand

Listen: Sexyy Red, “Get It Sexyy”

SZA: “Saturn”

The agony of an earthly existence has SZA envisioning a better world—even on a planet said to experience diamond rain. She’s heartbroken and anxious, but when the starburst chorus of ooh-oohs hits on “Saturn,” all of her tension gets released into the cosmos. SZA’s voice never stays still; it trembles, yelps, and warbles as she goes through the gamut of emotions. On “Saturn,” SZA cries lonely teardrops, one person alone in the universe, singing magnificently through the anguish. –Dean Van Nguyen

Listen: SZA, “Saturn”

Magdalena Bay: “Death & Romance”

Magdalena Bay shine brightest on slow-burning songs of anguish and longing. “Death & Romance,” a highlight from Imaginal Disk, pulls on the same thematic thread as 2021’s “Chaeri,” an anxious synth freakout about a friendship on the rocks. But on “Death & Romance,” the duo never reaches a point of combustion. Instead, the track shrinks and swells, with skittering hi-hats and looping piano bubbling under Mica Tenenbaum’s voice, as she sends a signal to her lover on a red star 26 light years away: No matter what, I want you to know I’m here; I’m waiting; and I love you. It’s this push and pull between painful desperation and eternal love, delivered with Madchester euphoria, that makes “Death & Romance” so hypnotic. –Jaeden Pinder

Listen: Magdalena Bay, “Death & Romance”

Mach-Hommy: “#RICHAXXHAITIAN” [ft. Kaytranada & 03 Greedo]

“#RICHAXXHAITIAN” is one of the most straightforward tracks in Mach-Hommy’s catalog. Instead of a grainy loop, he raps over a house track from Kaytranada, who flips a jolly Afrobeat song into a muggy thumper. And the Haitian American rapper taps 03 Greedo for a wavy hook that toasts real estate and luxury cars. But a Mach-Hommy club cut is still an off-kilter affair. His jagged flows carve through and glide over the beat like skates on ice, and his internal rhymes and breath control are plainly impressive. “#RICHAXXHAITIAN” is a dispatch from the VIP room, Mach-Hommy stepping out while maintaining his private air. –Stephen Kearse

Listen: Mach-Hommy, “#RICHAXXHAITIAN” [ft. KAYTRANADA & 03 Greedo]

Julia Holter: “Spinning”

Love, as Julia Holter tells it, is omniscient, delicious, and yummy. On “Spinning,” an early single from Something in the Room She Moves, Holter presents love as an absurdist text, something frightening and bombastic. The drums get buoyant and synths take on animalistic qualities: buzzing, mewing, screeching, yelping. When Holter sings, she sounds like she is gasping for air between each word, plainly breathless, because that’s what this love—unsure, unsteady, dizzying love—will do to you. It will make you breathless. –Sophie Kemp

Listen: Julia Holter, “Spinning”

Olof Dreijer: “Coral”

Olof Dreijer’s signatures are unmistakable on “Coral.” The single takes Dreijer’s fascinations with roving melodies and Global South percussive textures and lets them drift toward a more ambient destination. A piano—left in Dreijer’s apartment by a previous tenant, then muted with felt and duct tape—provides the watercolor lead melody, which battles with a pitch-bending synth figure that surges overhead. Against this panoramic wash of sound, Dreijer’s needling, bric-a-brac beat, inspired by the playful lilt of Angolan kuduro, feels refreshingly affectionate: It’s a bit like someone coaxing you off the sand into the ocean, dunking you under the surf, and ruffling your hair. The track’s ebb-and-flow engages all your senses until you want to just float away. –H.D. Angel

Listen: Olof Dreijer, “Coral”

Mdou Moctar: “Sousoume Tamacheq”

Funeral for Justice is Nigerien guitar virtuoso Mdou Moctar’s most directly political album yet, pointing a finger at leaders in Africa and the West for their complicity in the many tragedies besetting his homeland. Yet, despite its subject matter—and title—there’s nothing funereal about Moctar and his band’s pyrotechnic desert blues. “Sousume Tamacheq” opens with a burst of guitar feedback, ululating like a full-throated war cry, and Moctar lays down his meaty, frenetic guitar licks over a blistering rhythm section. It’s a boisterous, insistent rallying cry for unity among the Tamasheq people, and a warning to anyone who thrives on division and injustice. –Bhanuj Kappal

Listen: Mdou Moctar, “Sousoume Tamacheq”

Empress Of: “Lorelei”

Jealousy, anger, and grief over an unfaithful partner are emotions that tend to thrive in shadow, flowing inward until their bearer implodes. With “Lorelei”’s slippery, buoyant beat, Empress Of sluices all those ugly feelings down another channel. In a dizzying character study, Lorely Rodriguez imagines herself as a woman sleeping with a cheating boyfriend—but sings from the perspective of the girlfriend who’s just found a strange pair of earrings on the sheets. In a cheeky turn, the song’s narrator is more interested in getting her feelings across to the other woman than she is in lashing out at her cheating partner, who’s barely a character in this drama. She begs her boyfriend to speak Lorelei’s name, wants Lorelei to know just how much her transgression hurts, wants to fold her into the intimacy of her betrayal. A love song of a different stripe, “Lorelei” bursts with a desire for connection as fervent and electric as any crush. –Sasha Geffen

Listen: Empress Of, “Lorelei”

Yaeji: “booboo”

Much is said of dancefloor liberation, but less is said of dancefloor introspection. “Booboo” captures the rare moment when the two coalesce. Where Yaeji’s debut full-length With a Hammer confronted years of suppressed rage, and “easy breezy” was its meditative epilogue, “booboo” feels like the turn-up to a new beginning. After an extended break from clubbing, Yaeji is back outside with her boos, pogo-sticking under strobe lights. On the track, as in the club, past mingles with present, and she duets with her younger self, interpolating snippets from her 2017 breakthrough, “raingurl.” The truth starts in her body before it reaches her head: Against all odds, here she is, happy. –Minna Zhou

Listen: Yaeji, “booboo”

GloRilla: “TGIF”

GloRilla has been busy turning up, and “TGIF” is like her Cinderella ball, just if the Disney princess went for all the free drinks and not to find a man. Glo’s proclamation of “I ain’t got no nigga and no nigga ain’t got me” will make you want to end a decade-long, loving marriage where you share a beautiful home, children, and two golden retrievers. The single with its cinematic trap beat, replete with menacing synths, is the perfect soundtrack to the GloNaissance. –Heven Haile

Listen: GloRilla, “TGIF”

Caroline Polachek: “Coma”

On “Coma,” Caroline Polachek taps into an uncanny state of bliss. A finely calibrated reworking of a 2019 Default Genders deep cut, the song oscillates between gentle heart-monitor beeps and clattering breaks, meeting in the middle around Polachek’s roving vocal performance. Here, her riffing high notes go into freefall, giving everything a breathy weightlessness that intensifies the track’s heartsick, wistful motif: “It feels like I’m in a coma/It feels like I’m in a dream.” Polachek’s deluxe edition of 2023’s Desire I Want to Turn Into You already felt like a deserved victory lap, but, with songs like “Coma” in the chamber, she simply made a great album even better. –Eric Torres

Listen: Caroline Polachek, “Coma”

Hurricane Wisdom: “Giannis”

It’s all in the cadence. Yes, the R&B-ish beat, by producers Kjay and Bino, is smooth, and lines like, “I wasn’t too good at math/On God, I run with problem solvers,” are bound to rattle around your head, but the way Havana, Florida, upstart Hurricane Wisdom raps with a calm whimper is what steals the show. It sounds like he loses his voice, finds it, then loses it again with each bar. Pair that with two minutes of laidback flexes and a hook that rhymes “Giannis” with “Giannis,” and you’ve got one of the best rap songs of the year. –Millan Verma

Listen: Hurricane Wisdom, “Giannis”

Camila Cabello: “I LUV IT” [ft. Playboi Carti]

In a world of therapy-pop lousy with half-baked ruminations on astrology and self-care, sometimes you gotta bleach your hair, watch Spring Breakers a few times, and reinvent yourself as hyperpop just as the trend’s gone bust. “I LUV IT” is a simulacrum of a cutting-edge pop song, brazen enough to dispense with any doubt as to its sources. You could read it as the unfurling of a freak flag, or perhaps a practical joke—is it a parody of a Charli XCX song, or a botched copy? In any case, it’s a reminder that there are more important things in life than “authenticity,” like dangling from the passenger window of a speeding car, valiantly trying to have the craziest night of your life. –Meaghan Garvey

Listen: Camila Cabello, “I LUV IT” [ft. Playboi Carti]

julie: “clairbourne practice”

In the world of shoegaze, burying vocals is an art form. The Los Angeles trio julie honor that age-old process while pushing it further. On “clairbourne practice,” they slather fuzz-washed guitars over Alexandria Elizabeth and Keyan Pourzand’s harmonies, only to, moments later, scale it back so their even-keeled voices are unobscured. In the song’s outro, someone tries to get out a message about “troubled students” through a vintage speaker, but the audio is too crackly and distorted to comprehend initially. More than just a my anti-aircraft friend highlight, “clairbourne practice” is an exercise in methodology without sacrificing craft. –Nina Corcoran

Listen: julie, “clairbourne practice”

Tinashe: “Nasty”

Five years after leaving her contract with RCA, Tinashe was handed precisely the kind of viral success that her former label had courted since “2 On.” A decade removed from the breakthrough single, “Nasty” became the down-bad song of the summer practically overnight, as well as the artist’s highest charting single since 2014. Like all great R&B songs, the track lives in the space between “sexy” and “needy,” recognizing that the most honest erotic expressions are born from a more general desire to be cared for. This spirit is evident in the song’s most quoted lyric, a coy one-liner that conceals a deeper loneliness. In a growing canon of songs for the situationship era, “Nasty” makes desperation sound completely divine. –Rob Arcand

Listen: Tinashe, “Nasty”

Burial: “Dreamfear”

Of the dozens and dozens of vocal samples Burial has used throughout his nearly two-decade career, the repeated squelch of the juvenile taunt “Back from the dead, fucked up in the head” on his track “Dreamfear” is probably the funniest. It includes some signature Burial sounds—the threatening synth stabs, the pitched-up vocals, the rainy crinkles for texture—but raises the intensity while lowering the introspection. Instead of feeling like a comment on rave music, “Dreamfear” is rave music, a hardcore take on the sounds Burial was so influenced by but which his productions ultimately inverted. Running a dozen minutes, the track operates like a mini-mix, with various movements taking their turn walloping you with amen breaks. It’s a real puttanesca of hardcore. “I am the lord of ecstasy,” goes one of the other lighthearted vocal samples. Maybe it’s about a drug dealer, maybe not. If Burial is talking about himself, it’s a well-deserved humblebrag. –Matthew Schnipper

Listen: Burial, “Dreamfear”

Bossman Dlow: “Get in With Me”

Previous generations of hustle culture had Wolf of Wall Street posters and soundbites from Ben Affleck’s Boiler Room speech. This one has Bossman Dlow. Have you ever listened to his anthemic “Get in With Me” and not thought about getting a tall stack of bills and hitting a money spread? The Florida ad-lib king’s ode to reckless spending and not giving a fuck has lasted all year because there’s nothing better than a song that makes it feel like you’ve just made a small fortune. Over a powerful, Michigan-inspired beat that can now simply be described as “Bossman Dlow–core,” he’s being so proudly stupid with his money (shopping sprees; burnin’ rubber in his Bentley) that the only natural response is to get even stupider with yours. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: Bossman Dlow, “Get in With Me”

Mica Levi: “slob air”

Mica Levi is almost perversely unpredictable. Who would attribute the claustrophobic Zone of Interest soundtrack to the producer of Tirzah’s lovelorn R&B, or the avant-rock of Good Sad Happy Bad to the lo-fi stylist behind Ruff Dog? With “slob air,” Levi subverts any expectations we may still have harbored. A dream pop epic, their first single for Hyperdub glides like a skater on a long downhill slant, propelled only by an unchanging drum figure across its 12 minutes. Layers of strings hover and dive, and a chorus of voices chants just beyond the limits of intelligibility. That’s all there is to the track, yet slight variations make “slob air” endlessly, joyfully repeatable. This is a sound that Levi could coast on for as long as they want—until, inevitably, they decide to change lanes once again. –Matthew Blackwell

Listen: Mica Levi, “slob air”

Bon Iver: “S P E Y S I D E”

In the vein of the best Bon Iver music, “S P E Y S I D E” camouflages its inventiveness with a feeling of familiarity. That this is a new song feels impossible: The big, boxy strums and fireside finger picks are as comforting as a two-decade-old cardigan. Yet Justin Vernon betrays the traditional folk feel by rejecting a verse-chorus structure for short, biting lyrics that speak of regret and sorrow, his voice floating and fragile. “Nothing’s really happened like I thought it would,” he laments, a man who believes he can be destroyed and rebuilt. –Dean Van Nguyen

Listen: Bon Iver, “S P E Y S I D E”

Beth Gibbons: “Floating on a Moment”

It took 16 years for Beth Gibbons to follow up Portishead’s last album with a work all her own. From the sound of its aching lead single, she was ambivalent about the comeback. “Floating on a Moment” is pure psyche-out maximalism. And despite the lack of her old band’s funk, it’s a shimmering showcase for Gibbons’ voice, craggy as ever, bummed out, determined. “Honestly, it’s not that I don’t want to return,” she sings. “It just reminds us that all we have… is here and now.” The world she returns to is especially awful this year, but then she’s always been the pure bard of bleak. –Jesse Dorris

Listen: Beth Gibbons, “Floating on a Moment”

Billie Eilish: “BIRDS OF A FEATHER”

On her 2019 debut, Billie Eilish’s squirrelly talk-singing scaled her brother Finneas’ microbeats as if they were cliffs. She scored hits. In a flex move intended to woo the fan equivalent of swing voters, “Birds of a Feather” is a power ballad in the tradition of “Heaven” or “Save the Best for Last” in which the show of confusion registers as a strength; she method-acts the hell out of the scenario. The synthesizers act like a shimmering glide path on which Eilish soars. The skies open the moment she belts, “I’ll love you till the day that I die!” as a middle finger to common sense. She and her beloved might be birds of a feather, but she’s the only one headed south. –Alfred Soto

Listen: Billie Eilish, “BIRDS OF A FEATHER”

Mello Buckzz: “Move”

Baseball and rock’n’roll have their halls of fame, so it’s only fair that there should be an institution to recognize another great American tradition: the twerk anthem. And, getting in on the first ballot? That would be Mello Buckzz’s “Move,” a jittery, hyperactive banger where the Chicago native blends her city’s drill foolery with the intensity of New Orleans bounce. It’s always fun to hear rappers lean into their regional dance music, and Mello embraces her roots by rapping over a classic Chicago juke beat. She’s a dance-rap natural, dishing out raunchy orders and warning shots as the restless beat keeps on finding the next gear of snaps, pops, and ass claps. A great addition to the canon. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: Mello Buckzz, “Move”

Adrianne Lenker: “Sadness as a Gift”

Without the violin, “Sadness as a Gift” would sound sad, all right, but not necessarily as a gift. Like Rusty Kershaw’s fiddle on Neil Young’s On the Beach, Josefen Runsteen gives this folk ditty a lilting rhythm that complements Adrianne Lenker’s creaky-as-a-comfortable-chair quaver and turns her observations into verities. Sadness is a gift, not an end; it toughens happiness, and happiness is strongest as a memory. The use of the past tense gives it away. A lyric like “And you showed me a place/I’ll find even when I'm old” celebrates an attachment no less powerful for taking root and flowering in the imagination. Lenker says “when,” not “if.” That’s confidence. –Alfred Soto

Listen: Adrianne Lenker, “Sadness as a Gift”

Playboi Carti: “H00DBYAIR”

After years of shrieks and squeaks, it’s easy to forget that Playboi Carti can really spit when he wants to—and he really wants to on “H00DBYAIR.” With deep-voiced chants, flexes, and threats, he tosses his biters’ bodies in coffins and icy tundras over a Cardo Got Wings beat that sounds like a demonic orchestra’s grand symphony. It’s an electrifying performance of supervillain grandeur. As the song closes, after three minutes of manic chaos, Carti shouts out his kids, the sun, and the moon: “Now I can finally sleep,” he warbles. But he’s clearly not done yet. –Kieran Press-Reynolds

Listen: Playboi Carti, “H00DBYAIR”

Objekt: “Ganzfeld (Djrum Remix)”

When Objekt created his 2014 track “Ganzfeld,” the Berlin-based producer flouted many of the era’s dancefloor conventions, from the song’s tempo (far faster than normal) to its structure (nominally linear but sneakily antic) to its bassline (squirrelly as hell). Ten years later, Djrum’s remix takes a similarly maverick spirit to even more unpredictable extremes. More than 10 minutes long, the remix flips Objekt’s idiosyncratic anthem into a miniature suite: It begins with a contemplative ambient sketch, moves into flickering atmospheric jungle, then slips backward into a half-speed electro stomp with industrial-dub leanings—and that’s all before so much as reaching the halfway mark. (Still to come: woozy jazz-funk, jittery techstep, Amen-smashing jungle; no two bars are alike.) For all the liberties Djrum takes, though, he keeps the original’s unforgettable bass riff intact, underscoring Objekt’s vision in making the whole thing possible. It’s a remarkable homage to a song that predicted club music’s iconoclastic future. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Objekt, “Ganzfeld (Djrum Remix)”

FKA twigs: “Eusexua”

Putting the “trance” in transcendent, on “Eusexua,” FKA twigs sounds utterly at home after passing into the realm of hardcore dance. The song (and forthcoming album that will bear it) is named after a word twigs made up to describe “when everything moves out the way, everything in your mind is completely blank and your mind is elevated,” as when out dancing. The video’s postscript adds that eusexua is “the pinnacle of human experience.” What begins as a minimal pulsing with an interlocking whoosh—like butterfly wings and the wind they move—opens up to a warehouse-filler, layer by layer, the way Björk’s work sometimes has. The gut punch comes when the track breaks down to little more than a piano and twigs’ autotuned voice: “People always told me that I take my love too far/Then refused to help me.” She moves your ass, and then she comes for your soul. –Rich Juzwiak

Listen: FKA twigs, “Eusexua”

HiTech: “SPANK!”

Detroit trio HiTech have spent the last two years staking a firm claim as dance music’s most reliable avatars of hedonism. They meld the electric sensuality of ghettotech with a feather-light melodic touch, weaving their toplines seamlessly into the nooks of their pounding club beats. “SPANK!,” their first release after a contentious split from their former label, picks up where the id-fueled haze of DÉTWAT left off, enlisting guest artist GDMRW for a high-octane paean to the innumerable pleasures of booty. The track sparks like a struck match, faded synth chords propelling a ballistic assault of kicks, cymbals, hand claps and jittery tabla drums. GDMRW handles the song’s stuttering, lustful chorus, while King Milo slinks through a series of increasingly wicked come-ons with the glee of a carnival barker. Here, indulgence isn’t so much a lifestyle as it is a rule of law. –Maxie Younger

Listen: HiTech, “SPANK!”

Tems: “Love Me JeJe”

On the sun-kissed “Love Me JeJe,” Tems’ voice reminds us that yearning should be playful and unburdened by any insecurities or apprehensions. Interpolating Seyi Sodimu’s ’90s Nigerian pop hit of the same name, Tems “Love Me JeJe” builds on the recent trend of artists collapsing elements of R&B and Afrobeat. Producers GuiltyBeatz and Spax sound more focused on rhythm than melody, using even the guitars as conduits for Tems to lightly slip and slide between pockets. That candid moment near the end, where Tems giggles with a friend, encapsulates the song’s essence. Her demands for love are lighthearted and unbothered. –Rae-Aila Crumble

Listen: Tems, “Love Me JeJe”

Fontaines D.C.: “Starburster”

If the last five years or so have felt like a panic attack happening in slow motion, then Grian Chatten can relate. Clutching for breath, his furious, stream-of-consciousness manifesto “Starburster” unfurls like the opening monologue from Trainspotting—only if the protagonists were dropping acid and reading poems, not shooting smack and crawling the walls of abandoned tenement flats. The song’s atmospherics and melodrama unfold like a supernova watched from 20 million lightyears away.

“Starburster” is exactly the sort of thing a band should do after steadily building through the kind of impervious career arc that Fontaines D.C. have managed. After a kick-the-door-down debut album, then the polished, matured, second outing, and a third that perfected the offering and tweaked the sonics to stadium size, the only good direction left is weird. Make three albums about Ireland, then blast yourselves into space on a bridge and see what people have to say about that. Bold doesn’t begin to describe it. –Will Pritchard

Listen: Fontaines D.C., “Starburster”

Tyla: “Truth or Dare”

Perhaps the greatest feat of Tyla’s self-titled debut is that it succeeds as a genre triumph rather than a mere gateway drug. With its choppy, foregrounded drums, “Truth or Dare” proceeds with amapiano looseness, an easy syncopation that translates on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet the tripartite chorus evinces painstaking structure, with harmonies growing more emphatic in each successive movement. Where the background vocals lent “Water” its rapturous effect, on “Truth or Dare” they engender a sense of foreboding, bolstering Tyla’s lead vocal with a warning and a plea. –Pete Tosiello

Listen: Tyla, “Truth or Dare”

Cash Cobain / Bay Swag: “Fisherrr”

For the past nine months, the hypnotic “sexy drill” template created by Bronx rapper/producer Cash Cobain has soundtracked darties, soirées, and everything in between. Somehow, he subverted the tense dynamic of traditional New York drill for racy fun so irresistible it could pull the most standoffish guy out of the corner at functions. The seismic hit to kick it off was “Fisherrr.” Cash Cobain and Bay Swag’s ping-pong of salacious quips treads the line between puppy-eyed love and carnal lust in all the right (and wrong) ways. With a spare hi-hat pattern and tender keyboard melody, Cash proved that, even in a sea of imitators, his signature style would always draw us back to him. –Serge Selenou

Listen: Cash Cobain / Bay Swag, “Fisherrr”

Kassie Krut: “Reckless”

Who said all the fun dies once you’re married? Recently betrothed couple Kasra Kurt and Eve Alpert, plus their friend Matt Anderegg, made one of the most thrilling, addictive, sugary, scary, seductive singles of the year in “Reckless,” a schoolyard chant that feels like M.I.A. getting in a cage fight with Sleigh Bells. While Alpert’s sweetly taunting vocals are what draw you in at first listen, it’s really Kassie Krut's ingenious clash of strange live percussion and digital noise that makes “Reckless” feel so vital—a match made in heaven (or, more likely, hell). –Shaad D’Souza

Listen: Kassie Krut, “Reckless”

The Cure: “Alone”

Real Cure heads know that their best songs take a while to get going. But “Alone,” the opener from the band’s first new album in 16 years, takes this to a new extreme—there’s a luxurious three minutes and 20 seconds before Robert Smith even opens his mouth. This introduction, with Mellotron-style strings, piano, and Songs of a Lost World’s crunchy guitar and bass combo, moves like the procession of a long-time ruler who knows his days are numbered. Birds fall from the sky, the fire has burned out, “Hopes and dreams are gone.” It’s almost self-parody, but Robert Smith, now of retirement age, sells it with a comforting familiarity. He sounds genuinely glum, but with a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, like he’s proud of his own gothic grandeur. Smith and company sound more exquisite than ever, reapplying for the job of best goth band in the world and realizing they never gave up the title in the first place. –Andrew Ryce

Listen: The Cure, “Alone”

Nourished by Time: “Hell of a Ride”

Here is a song about endings and beginnings, eternal recurrences and once-in-a-lifetime feelings. “Hell of a Ride” collapses the death of a relationship, of a nation, of a world, into three-and-a-half minutes of prismatic pop—a moonlit carnival soundtracked by Bruce Hornsby-style keys and Prince-era guitar glam. It’s not some fiery vision; it’s just the way it is. That Marcus Brown, the polymath musician behind Nourished by Time, manages to deploy the phrase “third place” without sounding like a scolding academic is just one of this track’s many delights.

The world has been ending, though. Apocalypse is tired, and part of the fun of “Hell of a Ride” is that it sort of understands that. We partied like it was 1999 and here we still are. “Still call my ex girl when I go half crazy,” belts Brown. In times like these, who wouldn’t? –Will Gottsegen

Listen: Nourished by Time, “Hell of a Ride”

Addison Rae: “Diet Pepsi”

The cultural idea of a Lana Del Rey song—sexy baby, American flag, rap-lite beat—hasn’t really aligned with the kind of music Lana actually makes for nearly a decade now. Thank god, then, that Addison Rae sped into 2024 armed with “Diet Pepsi,” a Lana-type-beat that's as laconic, seductive, and conceptually mind-boggling as the real deal. The core elements of the sound are all there—cheeks that are “red like cherries in the spring,” product-placement-as-Americana, a dinky sense of poeticism pushing up against genuine, heart-rending yearning—but Rae juices things a little with shimmering chillwave synths and the kind of startling, almighty key change that's been missing from pop for years now. It's a confluence of brilliance and ridiculousness that made “Diet Pepsi,” and the idea of Rae as a genuine ascendant pop star, impossible to ignore this year. A good star would play this song off with a wink; a great one, like Rae, plays it straight. –Shaad D’Souza

Listen: Addison Rae, “Diet Pepsi”

Nick León / Erika de Casier: “Bikini”

Listening to “Bikini” feels like sipping a frothy French 95 while taking in a gorgeous last-day-of-vacation sunset. The slinky collaboration between Miami dance producer Nick León and Danish R&B experimentalist Erika de Casier conjures up its sun-dappled scene through walloping bass, hyaline synth melodies, and a sprightly pace to match the song’s sunkissed lyrics, complete with a deliciously memorable invitation of a hook: “Meet me at the beach/It’s me in the bikini/The one I always wear/Find me daydreaming,” de Casier coos, just before León pitch-shifts her words down into a frantic, intoxicating demand. Who could possibly say no? –Eric Torres

Listen: Nick León / Erika de Casier, “Bikini”

Geordie Greep: “Holy, Holy”

The newest Broadway production of Jesus Christ Superstar stars Geordie Greep as SATAN, fresh out of Hell in time for happy hour at LOCAL BAR, where his transferable skills from centuries of soul-snatching—seduction, manipulation, general wickedness—meet their match in UNNAMED WOMAN, the silent object of his desperate monologuing. Satan, it turns out, is quite lonely in Hell, which is why his pathetic pleas for banal connection are backed by a sprawling jazz-fusion ensemble. As his musings grow increasingly delusional, the stage musicians tumble down a slippery slope beginning with Boz Scaggs and ending with a scorched-earth take on Return to Forever’s Where Have I Known You Before. “We understand that this sounds batshit crazy on paper,” executives involved with the production said in a statement, “which is why we are pleased to inform you that it sounds even more batshit crazy on stereo.” Simultaneous face-scrunching, moral questioning, foot-tapping, and appreciation for complex jazz chords, or your money back, guaranteed. –Sam Hyland

Listen: Geordie Greep, “Holy, Holy”

Jane Remover: “Magic I Want U”

Jane Remover was a couple years ahead of the recent wave of “internet artists” reaching back into the tactile world, approaching guitar music with a producer’s instinct. On the euphoric “Magic I Want U,” the best of the four singles the 21-year-old put out this year, she transcends past niches (glitchy emo, fuzzy shoegaze, freaky mash-ups) and simply gives us a hit. Here it feels like sleight of hand the way sludgy guitar, skittering breakbeats, echoes of Miami bass and the odd Trapaholics drop combine to feel timeless and weightless. (Perhaps she took her cues from her great monthly NTS show, where songs by Mk.gee, Britney Spears, and Quad City DJs blur into a seamless, reckless whole.)

Are the things that happen in your phone as real as the “real world?” If you’ve been stricken by obsession with someone far away, you know the answer. With crush psychosis as her muse, Jane falls headfirst into dreams: She wants to be your missing piece, your thinkpiece, your groupie. (No, not you. You.) It’s electric when they’re near, but the magic’s in the absence. “I build a world from every vision,” she yelps from her bedroom, sending out a message through the ether: “Can you feel that?” –Meaghan Garvey

Listen: Jane Remover, “Magic I Want U”

Charli XCX: “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde”

“Girl, so confusing,” like much of BRAT, is all about trying to construct an identity out of the projections of the people around you. Charli XCX addresses a woman who seems lukewarm about their friendship. She recognizes the similarities between them—they have the same hair, they make similar art—but agonizes over whether or not they’re actually connecting. Underlying all the angst is an existential worry: “Who am I, really, if this powerful, talented woman doesn’t like me?”

The genius of the song is in the remix’s feature: In her deftest songwriting since 2017’s Melodrama, Lorde reveals that she is the woman in question. She also divulges that her aloofness was its own performance, a way of protecting herself when she felt vulnerable, and when Charli’s life seemed comparatively carefree. The song reveals the level of performance ingrained in women since childhood—we are constantly compared and therefore constantly comparing, assumed to exist in the service of others from birth. And yet, in revealing the way two women misunderstand each other based on their own insecurities, the song also charts a path forward. It exemplifies the empathy and learning that can accompany a transition from girlhood into womanhood. –Vrinda Jagota

Listen: Charli XCX, “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde”

MJ Lenderman: “Wristwatch”

On the final single from his album Manning Fireworks, MJ Lenderman sketches a character study of a man so preoccupied with superfluous status symbols that he finds himself totally isolated from the world. The Asheville musician captures the tragic irony in contemporary manhood, outlining the traps set by “manosphere” influencers like Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan that preach consumption, narcissism, and self-destruction with religious devotion. The protagonist of “Wristwatch” might have a lakefront property up in Buffalo, but he’d give it all up for “your amazing grace.” It’s a song about realizing that all the men’s rights podcasts in the world won’t bring the little green dot on Find My Friends any closer. It’s a song that says, “Look at my shit!” only to turn around and realize no one is watching. Perhaps it’s only fair that, sensing the song’s existential bleakness, Lenderman leaves us with a laugh and a guitar solo, saluting the Himbo Dome as it sinks into the sea. –Arielle Gordon

Listen: MJ Lenderman, “Wristwatch”

Sabrina Carpenter: “Espresso”

Welcome to Café Carpenter. My name’s Sabrina, I’ll be your server. Can I get you started with something to drink? I recommend the blonde roast, with notes of droll seduction and hot-girl nonchalance. Extra sweetener? I’ll bring that right out for you.

The love-as-drug trope is among the most overused in the songwriters’ playbook; Sabrina Carpenter’s refreshing twist—love as caffeine—rightfully pulled her to the top of pop’s pecking order after a decade toiling in its underclass. The ubiquitous, career-making hit “Espresso” is all hook and no filler, a wafty disco concoction with a head-spinning succession of linguistic tricks that may or may not stand up to scrutiny, but certainly tickle the ear. Carpenter channeled the grammar-agnosticism of a certain Swedish hitmaker and the tomfoolery of her own countless “Nonsense” outros to get to this very special place—where Mountain Dew (Do?) is a verb and also a come-on. In a pop landscape that prizes earnestness, the unseriousness of “Espresso” makes it stand out. May we all be so blissfully unburdened of our give-a-fucks. –Olivia Horn

Listen: Sabrina Carpenter, “Espresso”

skaiwater: “rain”

The drop on “rain” is a mindfuck every time I hear it. For about the first minute, skaiwater’s self-produced (with help from T.Y. Jake) twinkling ballad is so wistful and lovelorn, their sung melodies melding the moodiness of Lil Uzi on Luv Is Rage 2 with the pitch-shifting experimentation of early 2024 Carti. Then, all of a sudden, the blown-out 808s erupt, sounding more like an earthquake splitting cement than the trendy, bass-boosted noise of underground producers like tdf and perc40. The first time I heard the British rapper-producer’s audio explosion, I clicked over to another streaming service to make sure I wasn’t listening to a cracked version. It’s really that gravelly and off-the-wall, and skaiwater finds a sweet spot in the chaos to swag out and rage and go through some shit. Every rapper who likes Rick and can explain their SoundCloud Mount Rushmore in extreme detail has been trying to unearth this song from their soul for an entire microgeneration. And skaiwater just did it effortlessly. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: skaiwater, “rain”

Still House Plants: “M M M”

Still House Plants’ rock music is a series of ingenious proposals: slowcore R&B, free-improvised post-hardcore, a deconstructed afternoon jam session. Their latest album—If I don’t make it, I love u—drapes these ideas with lush production, and it’s “M M M” that delivers its glorious thesis. The Glaswegian trio finds an uncanny middle ground between the slippery and metronomic, every down-strummed guitar and emphatic drum beat in a scrappy tug-of-war between figure and ground. Vocalist Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach’s dreamy alto constantly wavers, every repeated line turning into simple mantras: “I just want my friends to get me, I just want to be seen right.” These words don’t sound like self-loathing so much as vulnerable pleas for connection. And then halfway through the song, when everything slows down and starts up again, the same lyrics begin to feel urgent, like there isn’t much time left to love and be loved. Still House Plants are expert purveyors of slipshod cool, but “M M M” finds its rudder in a heady mixture of anxiety and hope. –Joshua Minsoo Kim

Listen: Still House Plants, “M M M”

Jessica Pratt: “Life Is”

Some self-consciously retro music is obviously trying, often much too hard, to beat a path to the past; Jessica Pratt’s “Life Is,” on the other hand, is notable for its effortlessness. It sounds like a pocket of yesteryear that’s opened up before your very ears, a song you’ve known forever even if you’re hearing it for the first time. Every detail is meant to evoke the sounds of a bygone era: the natural reverb, the tube-warmed strum, the blocky bongos, the midrange boost to her voice, as though the extremes of bass and treble had both been sanded down with an emery board. Behind every careful nuance lurks an even subtler detail—a splash of Wurlizter, a Christmassy bell—as though each element were competing to be quieter than the rest. No matter how many times you’ve listened to the song, you find yourself hearing new details, discovering new dimensions in her music’s luminous time capsule. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Jessica Pratt, “Life Is”

Chappell Roan: “Good Luck, Babe!”

Many great breakup songs are content to make art out of wounded pride. How, the wallowing singer asks, could you say no to me? Chappell Roan’s send-off to a closeted, sapphic lover swaps that melodrama for righteous indignation: Here is a heartbreak that feels like a monumental injustice because, well, it actually is one. Released four years after Roan was haplessly dropped by Atlantic, “Good Luck, Babe!” was an improbable pop landmark: a devastatingly candid assessment of compulsory heterosexuality that became a rallying cry for the romantically dispossessed—and made its author a phenomenon in the process.

You can put that down to the masterful construction—a perfectly deployed falsetto, a bridge so exquisite it belongs in a travel guide—but Roan’s genius is in her tonal poise, her perfection of the sympathetic eye-roll. In clumsier hands, her “hate to say I told you so” chants (and the title’s deliciously ironic exclamation mark) would come off as the snark of a scorned lover. But Roan laments her paramour’s drab suburban fate with genuine regret. There is no self-pity behind the pose, nor a trace of empowerment pop’s artless pandering. Instead, “Good Luck, Babe!” takes the promise of queer art and literature—that a world of profound, transgressive thrills awaits those who dare pursue it—and turns it into a triumphant taunt: How could you say no to life? –Jazz Monroe

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

Waxahatchee: “Right Back to It” [ft. MJ Lenderman]

Much has been made of Katie Crutchfield’s embrace of the modern country music that helped frame her Alabama childhood. Starting just before 2020’s masterful Saint Cloud, Crutchfield began leaning into those cadences and textures, letting her twang curl above songs that might have fit Wynonna Judd or Faith Hill in an alternate universe. A keen and unflinching writer, Crutchfield knows that those love songs were at worst lies and at best fables, aspirational tales that painted romance as a fantastic diorama in lavish Nashville fashion. “Right Back to It” is her perfect rejoinder: a love song that trades fantasy for the truth but has all the magnetism of those songs of her youth. In unflinching detail, she portrays herself as the flighty and doubting one, always waiting for the worst news or the exit sign. But she marvels at good fortune, at the patience of a partner whose devotion is “written on a blank check.” The best country love songs sport brutal B-sides, but Crutchfield writes from a more rarified place—the reality in the middle. –Grayson Haver Currin

Listen: Waxahatchee, “Right Back to It” [ft. MJ Lenderman]

Kendrick Lamar: “Not Like Us”

On May 3, 2024, Drake dropped “Family Matters,” a sprawling, seven-and-a-half-minute diss track that dragged his long-simmering beef with Kendrick Lamar into starkly ugly territory. Drake accused Kendrick of beating his longtime romantic partner and paying to have the incident covered up; he accused said partner of secretly having a child with Kendrick’s business partner. Kendrick was evidently expecting this. Within the hour, he uploaded a song called “Meet the Grahams” to his YouTube channel. “Dear Adonis,” it began, “I’m sorry that that man is your father.”

“Grahams” more or less neutralized “Family Matters,” but there was a sense that each rapper was lunging so desperately to land a deathblow that all this had ceased to be fun, that loved ones—children—had become collateral damage in low-midtempo character assassination. So, less than 24 hours after “Family Matters” and “Meet the Grahams,” Kendrick corrected course. Sort of.

Even before “Not Like Us” would become Kendrick’s biggest crossover single (it debuted at No. 1 on the Hot 100 and became the longest-running No. 1 in the history of Billboard’s rap chart), it spoke the language of a hit: buoyant, swaggering, epigrammatic. Mustard’s beat, complete with those chopped-up strings that sound eerily like the ones from “Ether,” synthesizes a decade-plus of L.A. rap production: the quiet snaps that stretch back to the jerkin’ era, the rattle of the ratchet music he helped codify in the early 2010s, the careening freneticism borrowed from the nervous music that came later. Kendrick—borrowing cadences from that last West Coast school of rappers—tap dances across the beat, as nimble as he’s sounded since he signed to Interscope. The looseness, the ease, is underlined by a chorus in which the vocals aren’t doubled or processed, but sound instead like they’re being laid off the cuff, as you listen.

All of which obscures the fact that this is a song that says: YOU’RE A PEDOPHILE AND WHEN YOU GET TO OAKLAND THEY’RE GOING TO KILL YOU. There’s an argument to be made that “Not Like Us” dovetails, quite uncomfortably, with the reactionary impulse in American politics right now to see sex criminals around every corner, in every classroom. In this instance, though, Kendrick seems to be animated by a hate so specific that it becomes nearly impossible—or at least beside the point—to extrapolate outward from Drake and into a larger worldview. In the third verse, he casts Drake as a parasite who leeches off of younger, more inventive rappers in a quest for pyrrhic streaming statements. But by that point he’s already turned the biggest pop star on the planet into a punchline. Perhaps more impressively, he drilled deeper than ever into his hometown’s labyrinthine underground and struck something irrepressible, something universal. –Paul A. Thompson

Listen: Kendrick Lamar, “Not Like Us”

Listen to the Best Songs of 2024 on our Spotify and Apple Music playlists.