Once again, we're taking this week to count down the best albums and songs of the year. So far our year in music coverage has included The Year in Photos, The Best of Pitchfork.tv, The Worst Album Covers, and The Top Music Videos.
The list below has been updated to include the full list of our Top 50 Tracks of 2011. Here is what is coming later this week. If you like, you can jump to No. 50.
Wednesday: Albums, Honorable Mention: 20 great records that didn't make our Top 50
Thursday: Top 50 Albums of 2011, #50-21
Friday: Top 50 Albums of 2011, #20-1
In the two weeks following, we'll take a break from publishing record reviews. During this time, our coverage will continue with Guest List: Best of 2011, The Year in News, The Pitchfork Guide to New Year's Eve, and additional features and updates. January 2 is a national holiday, so we'll resume our regular coverage on January 3.
We've built a Spotify playlist with our Top 100 songs of the year, and it's now complete.
100. Thundercat
"For Love (I Come Your Friend)"
[Brainfeeder]
Ideally, a debut single should showcase an artist's aesthetic and influences while holding just enough back to make them seem new. Thundercat managed to do just that with this cover of a 70s fusion jazz track by George Duke. It was an unorthodox way to introduce a bassist in a Native American headdress who hails from South L.A., but who needs a roadmap when you have Flying Lotus production, a celestial falsetto, belt-unbuckling bass, swirling harps, and the ashram float of Alice Coltrane. Like the best jazz (and the Brainfeeder imprint itself), "For Love (I Come Your Friend)" is exceptionally patient. There is no desire for the quick fix or the quack remedy. Duke's version is faster, pointing towards the dawn of disco, while Thundercat travels deeper into a primordial imagination. The lyrics invoke earth, time, and sand, and so does the atmosphere. --Jeff Weiss
99. Ill Blu
"Meltdown"
[Numbers]
"Here come the drums!" That rallying cry of the jungle generation comes roaring through every second of "Meltdown", but the track is no throwback. Instead, Ill Blu condense 20 years of British dance music's biggest obsession-- building tracks out of (almost) nothing but rhythm-- into four tighter-than-tightly wound minutes that could have only come from 2011.
The drums on "Meltdown" roll out at an adrenaline-jacking tempo that's perfectly suited to 3 a.m. raving-- and not just because of the trance-inflected melody that tries to offer some small relief from the drum assault. It's what the machines might play to celebrate when they finally overthrow humanity. --Jess Harvell
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98. Unknown Mortal Orchestra
"Ffunny Ffrends"
[Fat Possum]
The drum sample on "Ffunny Ffrends", lifted from the Pointer Sisters' disco classic "Yes We Can", should indicate that Unknown Mortal Orchestra are a welcoming bunch. When you dig into "Ffunny Ffrends", it's not hard to come away with feelings of acceptance and inclusion. At times it feels as if you're being beckoned into a sing-along at the chilliest campsite on the planet, with singer Ruban Nielson gleefully leading everyone down the road to frostbite. If the song teaches us anything, it's that there's still plenty of crushed beauty to be extracted from the kind of lo-fi roots Unknown Mortal Orchestra are sourcing for inspiration. And like the best examples of that genre (Guided by Voices, Smog, early Beck), it's the love of pop ingenuity and craft that give this song its emotional weight. --Nick Neyland
97. Fever Ray
"The Wolf"
[Watertower]
Remember Catherine Hardwicke's revisionist fairy tale film Red Riding Hood? Neither does anyone else. But while Hardwicke failed at crafting a horror blockbuster, she did get one thing right: If you want to scare the shit out of people, get this lady to sing them a song. Like pretty much everything Karin Dreijer Andersson has done since the Knife's Silent Shout, "The Wolf" is deliciously terrifying. It's all tension and menace and something terrible happening just offscreen, the threat of unknown danger seeping in through droning synthesizers and hollow drums. And then there's Andersson's lustful voice, breathing heavily and erupting in primal yowls that mimic the song's namesake. It's the perfect soundtrack for a tale as old as time that also just happens to be a parable about the perils of female sexual awakening. My, what big teeth you have, Fever Ray. --Amy Phillips
96. Peaking Lights
"All the Sun That Shines"
[Not Not Fun]
A love song for the cavemen, "All the Sun That Shines" is the first big pop move from the post-Excepter school of psychedelic seekers (Sun Araw, Eternal Tapestry, et al). The rippling highlight of Peaking Lights' album 936, this track finds Aaron Coyes and Indra Dunis in full-on devotional mode, chanting its single-line mantra skyward over a mesmeric wriggle of synths and snaking guitar. It's a hypnotic performance, with Coyes and Dunis' voices meeting in odd places as they attack the song's central statement from all angles. "All the Sun That Shines" is so melodically generous that it seems made for sharing, the soundtrack for your next sun salutation or couples' mud bath. --Paul Thompson
95. Kendrick Lamar
"A.D.H.D."
[Top Dawg]
On "A.D.H.D." we find Kendrick Lamar, one of the most uniquely socially aware MCs in rap, out of place and out of mind at some typical house party. He walks around sulking, sipping cough syrup, bummed out over his generation's disaffection. He meets a girl, they go back to his apartment and make out, get interrupted by an offer to smoke up, and they oblige. If that sounds like a Drake song, you're not too far off. But where Drake meditates on how he collides head-on with girls, friends, and family at the intersections of his pre- and post-fame existences, Lamar self-medicates-- it helps him cope with his discontent over the treatment of the American underclass since the Reagan era. Part of the brilliance of "A.D.H.D." is that instead of directly using politics to make an overt statement, he weaves his observations into the storyline where they hover like a dark cloud and influences the characters' decisions in organic and unavoidable ways. And if that sounds familiar, well, "A.D.H.D." just may end up being the calling card of a poet laureate. --Jordan Sargent
94. Sepalcure
"Pencil Pimp"
[Hotflush]
As Sepalcure, Travis Stewart and Praveen Sharma slid in right before the whistle to remind us that electronic music devices can do more than evocatively sputter and fritz. "Pencil Pimp" whirls on a machine-lathed spindle of Chicago footwork, capturing a feeling of curtailed tension and lurking danger with its soulful vocal clips and warm synth pads. There are no gestures of rebellion or subversion, only an argument for well-made music at a time when it might seem besieged. "Pencil Pimp" demonstrates why we feel so comfortable breaking the mold: We know someone will come along who feels passionate enough to cast it again, tempered even stronger. --Brian Howe
"Romance" is Wild Flag's statement of intent; an album-opening barrage of expertly crafted and playfully rendered hooks that instantly establishes the band as a natural progression from frontwoman Carrie Brownstein's work with Sleater-Kinney. In interviews, Brownstein has cited the radio hits of Beyoncé and Rihanna as inspiration for the relentlessly catchy structures of Wild Flag's tunes. You can really hear that influence in "Romance", which bears no stylistic resemblance to such songs, but shares a density of direct, instantly memorable hooks. And though there are many, many songs about the magic and power of music, there's a desperation in these verses ("You were my maker, my re-creator, my reason to live") that adds poignancy and urgency to the tune's ecstatic lines. "We've got an ear for what's romance," they sing in the chorus, sounding like the world's leading authorities on the topic. --Matthew Perpetua
92. Jacques Greene
"Another Girl"
[LuckyMe]
2011 was a banner year for R&B appearing in unexpected places, but few instances sounded as euphoric as in Jacques Greene's "Another Girl". Like its 2010 predecessor, Girl Unit's "Wut", "Another Girl" twists and turns on single-syllable eruptions of joy. Here the primary motif is a Ciara sample from her song "Deuces": "You got me feeling like a…" Greene builds from it slowly, allowing those smaller samples to skirt around each other alongside a synth line that restlessly moves left and right. Sometimes you're asked how you feel and you don't quite have words to respond; depending on the day, a spin through "Another Girl" could be the answer. --Hari Ashurst
91. Thee Oh Sees
"The Dream"
[In the Red]
Ever since Thee Oh Sees turned the corner from psych-folk sit downs to full-blast garage rock, the band's founder and frontman, John Dwyer, has been itching to get more percussion into his band. In 2008, they penned a song called "Two Drummers Disappear", which was driven by dueling kits. A year later, the "Quaddro-Spazzed '09" single found drummer Mike Shoun indulging in an Iron Butterfly-worthy solo. Still, it wasn't quite enough. "It's great to watch if there are two drummers-- there's not enough of that," Dwyer explained in a 2010 interview. As it turns out, he was right. Fleshed out with a full-time second kit courtesy of the Intelligence's Lars Finberg, "The Dream", from Thee Oh Sees' second album of the year, Carrion Crawler / The Dream, finds common ground between Can's hypnotic rhythms, the Misfits' punk gristle, and James Brown's ability to milk a vamp for all it's worth. --Aaron Leitko
90. Grimes
"Vanessa"
[Hippos in Tanks/Arbutus]
On last year's debut Geidi Primes cassette, 23-year-old Montreal artist Claire Boucher (aka Grimes) secured her spot as a standout among a web-bred generation of eerie bedroom-pop recorders. On "Vanessa", from 2011's Darkbloom, she took her songwriting to the next level. The high pitch of her angelic falsetto soars and swirls over hi-hat hits and lush synths, bringing to mind bewitched versions of 90s pop divas from whom Boucher draws inspiration. She is a self-described "post-internet" musician, and this track provides an antidote to 2011's persistent Retromania, proving that in an era of distracted listening and hyper-stimulation it's still possible to take familiar influences and create something that feels wholly new. --Jenn Pelly
89. SBTRKT
"Wildfire [ft. Little Dragon]"
[Young Turks]
If you wake up one day to find that your genre of choice has been suddenly co-opted by bandwagoneering rock-bros, there are a couple of good ways to shrug it off: Network with people who share your ability to imbue music with shapeshifting versatility, take it to somewhere it hasn't been, and slap the prefix post- onto it. SBTRKT does just that, and "Wildfire", the first single from his self-titled debut, is a savvy lure. Little Dragon's Yukimi Nagano drops a vocal in full diva mode, wrapping her sultry voice around words that sound romantic until you catch the underlying threats. And what she's given to work with is a track that winds its way through a couple different satellites of landmark R&B, a slinky slow-jam 80s drum machine holding the door open for fat synths that draw a path of lineage from dubstep all the way back to "Pony". --Nate Patrin
88. Cities Aviv
"Coastin'"
[Fat Sandwich]
Until recently, Memphis was mostly known to casual rap fans for Three-Six Mafia, MJG, and Hustle & Flow. Cities Aviv (born Gavin Mays) is a key part of a new rap renaissance in the Bluff City. He released an excellent full-length debut, Digital Lows, but had the temerity to hold back his best track for a 7" single: On "Coastin'", he expertly lays out the difference between himself and his hometown, fashioning a subtle, but hardly soft, critique of current hip-hop conventions. "I find it kinda hard to call Memphis home," he raps in a desperate, staccato flow. "If everybody here wanna be Wayne or Three-Six, I guess I don't fit within the AutoZone." Digital Lows proved Mays is adventurous and deeply knowledgeable with his samples, but "Coastin'" achieves much more: orchestration pulled from Shirley Bassey's "Easy to Be Hard" lends Mays' riveting self-examination a sense of drama, even majesty. When he says, "By the time I'm 25, yeah the world is mine," you believe him. --Stephen Deusner
87. Zoo Kid
"Out Getting Ribs"
[House Anxiety]
It's hard to discuss "Out Getting Ribs" without referencing its striking video; where aspiring artists often resort to elaborate treadmill-choreography gimmicks or painstaking stop-motion trickery to rise above the YouTube tide, the video for "Out Getting Ribs" has transfixed over half a million viewers precisely because it's every bit as raw, flawed and disarmingly intimate as the song itself. Teen angst is the lifeblood of rock'n'roll, but it's usually communicated by young adults several years removed from the adolescent experience. Coming from 17-year-old Archy Marshall, this plea for love and cry of loneliness sounds downright apocalyptic-- opening lines don't get much more brazen than "Hate runs through my blood."
What elevates "Out Getting Ribs" above solipsistic misery is the beautifully tranquil guitar lines that help soothe the marks left by Marshall's cutting sentiments, yet are still as raw as the emotions he's grappling with. The song is a bracing introduction to a wise-beyond-his-years artist who's managed to channel the uninhibited indignation of a young Billy Bragg by way of Bradford Cox's homespun experimentation; even more remarkable is the fact that, in light of his recent name change and embrace of more sophisticated songcraft, this song already feels like a time capsule just a year after its release. --Stuart Berman
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86. Blawan
"Getting Me Down"
[self-released]
Blawan first drew attention with tracks that wielded wild drums like a toddler banging on household objects, but his most powerful moment this year came when he reined in those tendencies for a straightforward house thumper. A lot of the impact in "Getting Me Down" comes from that Brandy vocal, squeezed and wedged into a galloping beat that recontextualizes the R&B slow-jam original as a sugary, hyped-up rush that's dangerously contagious. Released discreetly after months of dubplate domination, the track's landing was titanic: it was impossible to walk around record stores in London in May without hearing it blaring from speakers, or go to a club night without it being rinsed at least once. For the first half of the year, "Getting Me Down" was an event, and listening back to it at year's end, it's easy to see why. So few tracks combined candyfloss rave, UK garage hysteria, and dubby dread (check the growling basslines) into something that sounded so universal yet so subversive, helping to kick off a new impulse in the bass music world that was all about house. --Andrew Ryce
85. Junior Boys
"Banana Ripple"
[Domino]
"Banana Ripple" is the latest entry in Junior Boys' one-an-album series of odes to lust ("Bellona", "In the Morning", "Hazel"), but it's also the longest song that Jeremy Greenspan and Matt Didemus have written. The song's genius lies in its 50/50 split of pure pleasures: The first half is an easy-walking, occasionally brassy plea for affection (a subject that practically defines Greenspan's silky voice at this point), while "Banana Ripple"'s incredible back half blooms with Jam & Lewis synth squiggles and melodic ecstasy. It makes sense that the track was chosen to close out It's All True-- can you imagine having to follow it? --Larry Fitzmaurice
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84. Iceage
"You're Blessed"
[What's Your Rupture?]
"You're Blessed" closes Iceage's debut album, New Brigade, with an appropriate roar, and it offers a bracing summary of everything the upstart Danish quartet does best. Iceage transcend formula through their youthful exuberance and sheer force of conviction-- even when their choppy English lyrics make it hard to identify exactly what those convictions are. During the chorus, frontman Elias Rønnenfelt sings almost wistfully of holding himself together while the slashing, Wire-like guitars and jittery rhythms suggest that his efforts to do so are futile. The song's hardcore velocity and sudden mood shifts leave the band little room for error, and in the finest punk tradition it sounds as if Iceage are playing right up to the limits of their technical abilities. As a result, the threat of imminent collapse hovers over the track, giving the performance an anxious, heightened edge that needs no translation. --Matthew Murphy
83. Tiger & Woods
"Gin Nation"
[Running Back]
"Gin Nation" has been floating around on DJ mixes and white labels for some time, but it finally saw official release in 2011. This was also the year that the song prompted questions such as, "Can Imagination's incredible slow-disco cut 'Music & Lights' conceivably be improved upon?", "Is this what Theo Parrish would sound like if he'd attended a state school?" and, "Can I singlehandedly get #ginnation trending on Twitter on a given Friday night?" (Answer key: debatable, leaning yes; probably; and sadly no.) It's too easy to over-complicate an edit like this, and "Gin Nation" succeeds as the year's finest "this isn't rocket science" jam, haughty and old-school enough to look lesser party jams in the eye and laugh. --Andrew Gaerig
82. John Maus
"Believer"
[Ribbon/Upset the Rhythm]
In interviews, John Maus makes efforts to articulate the complex intellectual framework that guides his songwriting, frequently dropping Heidegger and Adorno references to scribes who just wanted to chat about chillwave. But these heavy ideas shouldn't obscure the simpler truth that "Believer"-- the closing tune from his album We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves-- is appealing in part because the keyboards are cranked up really, really loud. Garish arpeggios and synthesized starwipes cascade over an anemic drum machine pulse, pounding pop melodies into a tuneful, but mushy pulp. Because he makes use of old-school synthesizers and Falco-worthy chord progressions, Maus' music is sometimes saddled with an 80s retro tag, but you'd be hard-pressed to find anything quite like it from the Reagan era. With its thrift-shop keys dialed up to the max, "Believer" conjures nostalgia for a phony but still familiar yesteryear that's eerier than anything the Human League ever dared put to tape. --Aaron Leitko
81. Yuck
"Get Away"
[Fat Possum]
Yuck are sweet kids with grime under their nails who, with "Get Away", bashed out some of 2011's best romantically frustrated pop-punk. As a bonus, the track doubled as one of the year's best tributes to lo-fi 90s indie rock. Despite the fact that Yuck were still teething when bands like Sebadoh were doing van tours, these UK-based youngsters nail period details with an eerie accuracy. They sound like they've just discovered that loud guitars can help mend a broken heart; throw on "Get Away", and you're back in high school, headphones on in study hall, pissed at the world, breaking pencils as you use your desk for a drum. Or maybe you're in still in high school reading this, in which case you should pull out that Bic and start scribbling "YUCK" on your Converse soles right now. --Jess Harvell
80. Fucked Up
"Queen of Hearts"
[Matador]
If you grew up identifying with punk, you probably thought of musicals and rock operas as the enemy. But when you hear "Queen of Hearts", the opening scene of Fucked Up's full-blown concept album David Comes to Life, it somehow makes sense: the band manages to retain the intensity of their earlier days while creating something character-driven and musically ambitious. The guitars windmill in rock'n'roll gestures big and unabashed enough to bury the band's snarling hardcore roots, Damian Abraham's gruff barking vocals are sweetened by a duet with Madeline Follin of Cults, and the chorus is so damnably catchy that the fact that it's basically two people introducing themselves won't stop you from singing, "Hello, you must be David/ I am Ver-on-i-ca." Even before you hear the rest of the album or read its ambitious lyrics sheet, all the weight and scope is promised in these lines: "Let's be together/ 'Til the water swallows us." The song might serve as the introduction of the album's main characters, but it's an anthem in its own right. --Eric Grandy
79. Kelly Rowland [ft. Lil Wayne]
"Motivation"
[Universal Motown]
What made Kelly Rowland's "Motivation" so much sexier than everything else on R&B radio in 2011? The pacing. In a year when a high-tempo, bastardized form of house dominated charts, this Jim Jonsin-produced number stood out by being the slowest of slow jams. His Houston-speed backing track is stripped virtually naked, down to a few steely synth groans and a syrupy drum clap, and it moves forward only by lurching. Sometimes the beat drops out for 10 seconds at a time. It oozes. That leaves Rowland, who lacks the star power of her former bandmate Beyoncé, to let her guard down and go for it vocally. She coos. She moans. Her lyrics don't bother with innuendo, in fact they're almost hilariously literal. ("Go longer", "Push harder, you're almost there now.") It's over-the-top, but it works because the production calls for it. Oh, and then there's Weezy, who swings by for an economical but spot-on guest verse. He drops a few vaguely raunchy metaphors and then gets out of the way, understanding that, on this one, the beat is the star. --Joe Colly
78. Sandro Perri
"Changes"
[Constellation]
You'd need a big piece of paper to make a Venn diagram of 2011's interwoven trends, and even then, you'd have to leave a little room in the corner for one lone circle: There's no accounting for Sandro Perri. Leaving behind the techno-based dilettantism of Polmo Polpo, "Changes" charges into a world of impromptu invention. I mean, what is it? Disjointed Afrobeat? Homespun glam? Some kind of kraut-pop mutant? Yep. At times, "Changes" seems to be made of nothing but sutures, a song that bursts forth as if discovering itself bar by bar. So many changes, how does it never go wrong? --Brian Howe
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77. Cults
"Abducted"
[Columbia/In the Name Of]
When Cults showed up early last year with little more to their name than a Bandcamp page and a couple of catchy songs, folks rightly wondered where they might go next. Their first single, "Go Outside", was a killer slice of psych-inflected indie pop, with buoyant beats, xylophone leads, and sprightly boy/girl vocals. Could the duo stretch out this simple, if effective, aesthetic to fill an entire LP? And could they, like, write an actual chorus? Those questions are quickly answered on the opening track of their debut self-titled album, when an exploding bass throb cuts through the strumming guitar and Madeline Follin's tin-can vocals. "Abducted" is an indie pop punch to the gut, with Follin and Brian Oblivion trading off lyrics that alternate between heartbroken and casually resigned. Follin's impassioned vocals expertly foil the track's upbeat, C86 jangle, and "Abducted" provided an affirmative answer to anyone who doubted whether Cults had it in them. --Tyler Grisham
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76. Julianna Barwick
"Prizewinning"
[Asthmatic Kitty]
Julianna Barwick's music is all about breath, and her looped vocal arrangements layer gossamer "oohs" and "ahhs" until they take on an oddly spiritual power. But "Prizewinning" kicks her formula up a notch. Her usually omnipresent voice sits out the first minute of the track, instead drawing us in with a faint, rhythmic pulse. Barwick's celestial vocals gradually flood the track, confirming that there is indeed reverb in heaven. But the true surprise comes three minutes from the end, when the pulse strengthens to a marching, parade-like beat and the song raises its voice louder than you'd ever expected, and the percussion takes on the quality of celebratory banging on pots and pans. Barwick's music has a way of sounding both transcendent and handmade, which, like "Prizewinning"'s joyful conclusion, is some kind of magic. --Lindsay Zoladz
75. Washed Out
"Amor Fati"
[Sub Pop]
In Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, French philosopher Jacques Maritain described "a kind of musical stir, of unformulated song, with no words, no sounds... audible only to the heart." Washed Out's quiet mastermind, Ernest Greene, has mentioned the book as an influence on sophomore album Within and Without, and the reference is especially appropriate for the record's second single, "Amor Fati". Titled after a Latin phrase about accepting one's fate, the song could've been distant and impenetrable: Greene's reverb-thick phrasing remains so indistinct that for months I half-thought he was reassuring us "you'll be all right on the internet," which, well, never mind. On an emotional level, though, the track's slow-driving continental synths, freestyle-ready electronic beats, and evocatively layered, lugubrious vocals communicate a sense of mellow grace that precedes and transcends literal meaning. It's the most immediately striking song on a lushly physical LP. Before you understand it-- in fact, almost before you really hear it-- you feel it. --Marc Hogan
74. Dum Dum Girls
"Wrong Feels Right"
[Sub Pop]
This year, Dum Dum Girls emerged from the murky facade of 2010's I Will Be to establish a more distinctive voice. "Wrong Feels Right" was the opening track from the He Gets Me High EP, and it signaled a new direction: The guitars sounded cleaner, the drums were no longer muddied by reverb and Kristin "Dee Dee" Gundred's vocals showed a newfound confidence and boisterousness. That confidence bleeds into her lyrics. Older songs like "Jail La La" and "Rest of Our Lives" painted evocative pictures, but tended to leave a lot unsaid; "Wrong Feels Right" is more direct-- it goes for the gut. There's not much in the way of mystery here, as the band illustrates the excitement of falling in love, and Dee Dee sounds euphoric and ready to take on the world. --Evan Minsker
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73. tUnE-yArDs
"Powa"
[4AD]
For an artist so devoted to making rock songs in ways they've never been made before, Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs is exceptionally clever about connecting her work to the music of the past. "Powa" is a song about sex as release from everything else but it reaches out to grasp bits of older songs about intense feeling. Garbus makes a joke of her penchant for phonetic spellings here: In practice, she pronounces "power" with one syllable, as in hymns ("Your pow'r inside/ It rocks me like a lullaby" could nearly be a gospel line). She calls her lover "rebel rebel," which calls up David Bowie's conflation of political and erotic radicalism. She yodels the word "love" like she's channeling Robert Plant circa "Whole Lotta Love". Her birdlike whoops of bliss at the end of the song call back to Minnie Riperton's "Loving You". Then there's the song's stocky bass-and-drum pulse, and the echo-chamber shudder that surfaces every few lines and overtakes the recording at its end. This is a very modern, very North American song, but its slow urgency comes from 1970s Jamaican dub. --Douglas Wolk
72. Britney Spears [ft. Nicki Minaj & Ke$ha]
"Till the World Ends (The Femme Fatale Remix)"
[Jive]
"Till the World Ends" was already the best Britney single since "Toxic", an ecstatic Euroclub floor-filler about wanting to dance until the world ends and other important matters. Then they added the Nicki Minaj verse. In her 45-second evisceration, Nicki manages to squeeze in chicken noises and the words "poultry," "Epsom salt," and "Ricki Lake"-- not to mention the immortal diss "Sniff, sniff, criiiies/ I done slayed your entire fucking liiiiife." (Fact: In 2011, pretty much any song in the world could be made infinitely better by the addition of a Nicki Minaj verse.) Sprinkle a little bit of Ke$ha, the song's co-writer, on the chorus, and you've got a three-headed diva Hydra that sums up the recent changing of the femme pop guard from airbrushed and perfect to (relatively) weird and chaotic. It's the year's greatest quickie cash-in remix created to boost the chart position of a floundering single. Considering the ubiquity of the practice, that's saying something. --Amy Phillips
71. The Men
"Bataille"
[Sacred Bones]
Slobbery yelps over raging guitars is an indie noise-rock formula that's practically three decades old at this point. Yet Brooklyn's The Men found a little crack of originality somewhere in that approach's battered veneer. On "Bataille" they honor their sloppy forefathers by keeping it simple and stupid. The song's big drunk chords and talk/yell/scream desperation hurtle forward like an old motorcycle whose engine remains powerful but whose body has a few screws loose. The riffs are thick and heavy, but that's not what makes them feel like they're sticking your veins in an open wall socket. It's the persistence, the way the band bangs their head against the song's brick wall, bleeding all over the stereo spectrum. Maybe "Bataille" is actually trickier than it seems. At first, the music sounds like it has one level, but by the end everything has bounced and slammed around so much, the riffs sound like a 3-D mosh pit, all color and flash. --Marc Masters
70. Holy Ghost!
"Jam For Jerry"
[DFA]
On "Jam For Jerry", Holy Ghost! concentrate New Order's grief-pop into five perfect minutes. Their spirited live shows usually end with this one, but this tribute to late drummer Jerry Fuchs (!!!, the Juan MacLean, Maserati) is placed in the middle of their self-titled debut, allowing the melancholy to reverberate through the second half of the album. In-the-moment details like "writing numbers on our hands, out of batteries" are tragically mundane, and even the awkward responsibilities that fall into your lap while mourning are observed here, making this guilt-ridden track lived-in and real.
Despite the song being absolutely devastating, there's also a stiff-upper-lip sensitivity that is its own kind of coping. "I get the feeling I've done something half wrong" confesses to that unfounded but unavoidable guilt one feels when someone you love is gone forever. A line like "you set the tempo, set the pace" turns music terminology into a touching epitaph. Note that the title is "Jam For Jerry" rather than the more ponderous "Song For Jerry". And the way that the song never quite explodes into catharsis speaks to the necessary (though only temporary) escapism dance provides. --Brandon Soderberg
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69. Neon Indian
"Polish Girl"
[Mom & Pop/Static Tongues]
Neon Indian's Alan Palomo has seen way too many sci-fi movies. Even if it weren't for the excellent video that accompanies "Polish Girl" -- a strange, touching tale of unrequited love in the time of near-singularity-- the track itself would be proof enough. So it's probably not a total coincidence that the same year we find out about a Blade Runner sequel, we're also offered this steamy hookup jam that's strictly for the cybernetic. Era Extraña, Neon Indian's sophomore effort, was a record with at least four or five songs that could've comfortably made this list, all future-leaning and surprisingly sultry. But "Polish Girl" remains the best-- worthy of lead-single honors and still the flat-out hookiest, it's light years away from the material on debut Psychic Chasms. There's a ton to like here-- Palomo's comely vocal, those raygun blurts, that body-rocking rhythm track-- but nothing stood up to that simple, impossible-to-get-out-of-your-head synth hook. With only a few key strokes, no one has so quickly and willingly outed themselves as a replicant as Palomo does here. --Zach Kelly
68. The Joy Formidable
"Whirring"
[Atlantic/Canvasback]
The Joy Formidable aren't headlining soccer stadiums quite yet, but you wouldn't know it from listening to "Whirring". An aerobic rush of a song that builds to the kind of explosive alt-rock chorus that would've blown the roof off of "120 Minutes" circa 1995, it's the kind of thing that gets you pumped to run up a steep hill, lift heavy objects, or defeat Bob Dole's Presidential run. Frontwoman Ritzy Bryan's sugary vocals hearken back to a time when Belly was on the cover of Rolling Stone, as her guitar chimes like church bells and the drums slap away at an unseen enemy. The album version adds a sprinting, satisfying three-minute noise coda that's as long as the song itself, cementing the Joy Formidable's status as prime purveyors of bubble-grunge nostalgia. --Amy Phillips
67. Rihanna [ft. Calvin Harris]
"We Found Love"
[Def Jam]
As much as Rihanna's highly publicized private struggles and darkly domineering performative persona have shaped her into a compelling pop figure, she still makes one hell of a cipher. Musically, the Calvin Harris-produced smash "We Found Love" is pure house hedonism, and it calls for a singer who can surrender herself in equal measure. But here's the thing: If it were just some no-name vocalist blissfully exhorting, "We found love in a hopeless place," ad nauseum, then it wouldn't be half as effective, because the surrender wouldn't mean anything to us; it wouldn't feel earned. She may not be as outsized a personality as Lady Gaga or Beyoncé, but right now Rihanna's making the entire pop world bend to her whims, and if this song is powerful enough to make her lose herself, then the rest of us don't stand a chance. --Josh Love
66. DJ Quik
"Killer Dope"
[Mad Science]
DJ Quik will spit in your eye and smile. That's what makes him so infuriating to his enemies and endearing to his fans. He doesn't diss, he taunts. Your hair is falling out; he's 41 and his is growing in. Plus, he still has his virtuosic chops. Cue the clichés about revenge and good living. David Blake understands that there's no more painful insult than the truth and he's always been an honest artist. It's bad enough that he can't lose. Should you cross him, he will ensure that you can't win.
"Killer Dope" is quintessential Quik: a warm bronze bath of horns and ivories, offset by lyrics that regurgitate the poisons that have coagulated inside "America'z Most Complete Artist." He's still throwing up signs to the hometown, shouting out South L.A.'s Carver Park and keeping it "Avenue." There's asphalt wisdom about how the "street never changes/ Only faces do." But notably, there are enough insults directed at his family to make Al Bundy blush. He'll simultaneously give all of his homies a blunt, while "getting high on his enemies' supply." "Killer Dope" summarizes The Book of David: For Quik, the sun is always shining and there are always enemies to put up on that summer jam screen. --Jeff Weiss
65. Fleet Foxes
"Grown Ocean"
[Sub Pop]
Fleet Foxes figured things out musically between their first and second albums: Helplessness Blues sounds as though they've grown into the big sound they created for themselves. In the process, though, they seem to have lost a sense of their place in the world. The album is full of questions, some too big to answer, some with no answers at all, and it all ends here on a completely unresolved note, one last a cappella verse tumbling out of the burbling instrumental rush and stepping toward the future with a certain unease. It almost hurts how up-in-the-air that final "always going" is. Placing this song at the end cuts against the grain. It's the most propulsive thing on the album, the one that does the least to put a neat little bow on anything. It starts a story instead of completing one. "Grown Ocean" is sort of optimistic in that way-- it's the starting point for the explorations to come, the first song of the rest of your life. --Joe Tangari
64. Toro Y Moi
"New Beat"
[Carpark]
For Chaz Bundick, a man whose legacy was at one point feared to be forever beholden to a tote bag, this song turned out to be a wonderfully weird blessing. Still working within the parameters of a sound he's spent the past few years carving out as Toro Y Moi, "New Beat" placed his music in a sparkling new light. It spoke to the same aesthetic as his earlier music but softly superimposed a big, beautiful disco ball against all those warped VHS pastels. "New Beat" is Studio 54 re-imagined as a rooftop party, but with Bagel Bites instead of caviar, and mushroom tea instead of coke. Maybe it's that squirrelly synth line that suggests there's something a little hammy going on here, but for a guy like Bundick, taking himself too seriously could've been a death sentence. I can't recall a time this year when there were more than three people in my apartment and this thing didn't get played. --Zach Kelly
63. Bon Iver
"Perth"
[Jagjaguwar/4AD]
Even before his debut album was finished, Justin Vernon was hard at work debunking the image that threatened to overshadow the genre-bounding music he was making. But even with his fondness for Auto-Tune, his collaborations with multi-hyphenate collectives like Gayngs and Volcano Choir, and his admittance into Kanye West's exclusive creative coterie, introducing his long-awaited follow-up with a track like "Perth" turned more than a few heads. Bon Iver's music has never lacked grand gestures, but they've rarely been made so overtly, with the martial drum roll that's featured throughout the track crashing into some purposeful guitar downstrokes to create the sort of epic maelstrom that's rarely been heard outside of a late-period Talk Talk album. But despite the big-budget pyrotechnics, Vernon still makes this song (and the album it's from) sound as intimate as a man playing a solitary guitar to an audience of one. --David Raposa
62. Liturgy
"Generation"
[Thrill Jockey]
There's a circus-act quality to "Generation". How long can Liturgy keep hammering at this high-speed cycle of riffs and beats before their eyes dilate and their arms and legs turn to mush? It's a feat similar to those in high-concentration minimalist loops like Steve Reich's "Drumming" or Rhys Chatham's "Guitar Trio". Trying to dissect what the band's doing while it's happening is like trying to fix a roller coaster while you're riding it. The fact that the riffs are so heavily metallic makes the song even more dizzying-- it's like sticking some great metal records in a blender, which is why it's also so similar to math-rock. As the clanging chords fly by, you might think you've heard all these sounds before, but you've never heard them this way. --Marc Masters
61. Eleanor Friedberger
"My Mistakes"
[Merge]
Eleanor Friedberger is a one-of-a-kind vocalist. She invented a new kind of phrasing, a blocky, percussive way of spitting lyrics that lets you know it's her before she's finished with the first syllable. "My Mistakes", a tune that mostly moves between two basic chords, turns out to be the ideal backdrop for her quirky diction. The ultra-simple and catchy structure grounds it and gives her opening to wild out on the melody, and she takes full advantage of it, breaking thoughts over multiple lines and stanzas ("I wore the same outfit on the day the Hasid followed me in his car along Park/ Not Avenue/ But the one in Brooklyn") without worrying where they will land. Great lines pile up ("I do my best thinking when I'm flying down the bridge," "He's ignoring me like it's 2001," "In tube top and shorts that Vice called 'pull-me-down; she's got kind of a native vibe' before that was so cool"), there's a ringtone-ready keyboard riff, and the shuffling beat feels like an invitation to do a goofball dance in place. All that and a great saxophone break-- can't ask for much more from a guitar pop song. --Mark Richardson
60. Adele
"Someone Like You"
[Columbia/XL]
"Someone Like You" straddled an interesting line in 2011. It's one of the biggest selling songs from the year's most commercially successful record, yet something about it feels intensely private, too. It's not a song to share with other people perhaps, but instead a song that taps into a potent wellspring of feelings that reside deep inside everybody. Its ubiquity this year also ensured that wherever you were-- on a bus, shopping for groceries, in a taxi-- this song was waiting right around the corner. It brought back memories, like a familiar whiff of perfume, the taste of certain meal, or the sound of a name, and as a break-up song, it felt definitive. --Hari Ashurst
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59. Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire [ft. Despot, Das Racist, Danny Brown, and El-P]
"The Last Huzzah! (Remix)"
[Mishka]
If you can measure a posse cut's merit by its number of quotables, Craig Mack's "Flava in Ya Ear Remix" was basically the boom-bap Bartlett's. "The Last Huzzah! (Remix)" is that robotic George Jetson futuristic shit come to life. Hip-hop for the "meta" era, inter-textual and absurd as an episode of Community. The video gently parodies the Puffy-led cut, with "Bad Boy" chants substituted for those of eXquire hollering "Breast Milk, you made my day." Despot weighs Lucky Charms on a scale and flings cereal aimlessly. A back-up dancer in a cop uniform lazily writhes like she got lost on the way to a Robert Palmer video shoot. Kool A.D. is "translating Don Killuminati into Spanish" and is "Immortal Technique" #obnoxious. Heems is "the worst rapper on the track, third coolest." Danny Brown jaws at competitors, his rhyme style highly evolved beyond the bob and weave jabs of '94. His jokes are practically hyperlinked. El-P essentially invented snarling skeptic rap, so he's in perfect stride, snapping about jangled numerologies and political references to the black smoke of riot-scarred London. While eXquire closes like Busta, grabbing a chunk of belly and bragging that he still "takes his shirt off like Nelly." This is how you do things when you want to be around next year. --Jeff Weiss
58. PJ Harvey
"The Words That Maketh Murder"
[Island Def Jam/Vagrant]
Polly Jean Harvey is playing Cassandra here, a mad prophetess whose forced jollity keeps leaping up into hysteria. She's bearing witness to the atrocities of war, singing in a shellshocked tone, thinking in circles that keep looping back to a few images of horror ("soldiers fell like lumps of meat"). For a while, she can't break away from a single pealing riff, even when the song's logic demands it. And when she does, she's joined by a chorus of strapping-sounding men, repeating their chants in lockstep. (Great line: "I've seen a corporal whose nerves were shot," evidently from lower-ranking soldiers being more corporeally shot.) Harvey and the guys spend the final minute of the song repeating "what if I take my problem to the United Nations"; that's a variation on a line from Eddie Cochran's much-covered rockabilly rant about youthful political impotence, "Summertime Blues". It's a way of saying: I can't do anything. Rock can't do anything. The United Nations can't do anything. And teenage boys are going to keep being made to slaughter each other. --Douglas Wolk
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57. The Weeknd
"House of Balloons"
[self-released]
This late in the year, after a mostly forgotten second mixtape and Drake's album and an apparent co-sign for the dubious rap career of one heir to the Tommy Hilfiger fortune, it can be easy to forget just how thrillingly out of nowhere a song like "House of Balloons" felt during the Weeknd's cryptic initial campaign. Not because Abel Tesfaye was among the first to cross-pollinate hazy indie sensibilities with R&B, but because of how all-consuming (to the point of suffocation) House of Balloons' voice and style and sense of mood could be. Its title track offered inroads via its wholesale Siouxsie and the Banshee's swipe-- the original "Happy House" guitar line slowed down to just a slightly more torturous crawl-- but even committed fans of R&B heard something unique here: a persuasive voice, a perfectly unlikeable persona, a distinctive hand with production. The track is Tesfaye at his best, emoting in an androgynous falsetto one minute, muttering unbelievable curses the next. It's messy, conflicted, and full of promise. --Eric Grandy
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56. M83 [ft. Zola Jesus]
"Intro"
[Mute]
M83 have been opening their shows with this one, and it's possible that there will never be a suitable replacement for the rest of the project's existence. The first hit of whispers and oscillating synths on "Intro" are announcement enough for any momentous event, Anthony Gonzalez's impassioned howls are wind-tunnel strong, and the vocal turn by Zola Jesus' Nika Roza Danilova stirs up some real meteorological mischief, showing how well she does Big in a year where Small seemed to be her own band's M.O. As with many songs on Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, most of "Intro"'s lyrics are unintelligible-- with M83, it's all about feeling, anyway-- but one particular phrase stands out: "Carry on." Will do. --Larry Fitzmaurice
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55. Destroyer
"Chinatown"
[Merge]
The 1980s have been fertile territory for so many young indie bands in recent years, but few have scoured darker corners than Destroyer, whose ninth record lays claim to critically devalued soft-pop from the early years of that decade. From the peculiar fade-in and drum clicks of opener "Chinatown", it's clear Dan Bejar's intent isn't simply nostalgic: the song doesn't merely revisit the period (3 a.m. in 1981) or the place (any empty midtown Manhattan street), but transforms hoary conventions into a palette for early-2000s experimentation. "Chinatown" bustles with smears of distorted trumpet and pleading saxophone, jostling against clockwork synths and a rigid drumbeat. Bejar presides over it all with an especially conspiratorial vocal, turning the refrain ("I can't walk away, you can't walk away") into a special contract between artist and audience. On first listen, it can be a disorienting experience, but the immediately immersive "Chinatown" simply asks you to erase any preconceptions you might have about Destroyer-- or about the early 80s, or about saxophones-- and give this precisely evoked world a chance to surprise and seduce you. --Stephen Deusner
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54. Jamie xx / Gil Scott-Heron
"I'll Take Care of U"
[XL/Young Turks]
It'd be a misnomer to call Gil Scott-Heron's exceptional 2010 release, I'm New Here, a "comeback"-- the word implies a certain celebratory vigor, whereas I'm New Here's weighty industrialized blues yielded vividly grim dispatches from a hard life that wasn't getting any easier. So Jamie xx's remix project We're New Here represented something more than just a ploy to repackage the work of a hip-hop godfather for a new generation of hipsters; it was an opportunity to recontextualize the long-suffering Scott-Heron's words in more forgiving conditions, a mission that took on added resonance when he passed away three months after the project's release.
In this light, the deep-house redux of "I'll Take Care of U" functions both as the album's emotional climax and a farewell address from Scott-Heron, its silken piano line and incessant throb undercut by a melancholic guitar refrain that provides the album's most pertinent sonic connection to Smith's day job. In its original form, Scott-Heron's version of Brook Benton's "I'll Take Care of You" was a bittersweet pledge of commitment from a man whose troubled life often left him without the means or wherewithal to provide. But thanks to Smith's efforts-- and, in particular, his reuse of this track on one of the biggest hip-hop albums of the year-- we can hope Scott-Heron's loved ones will indeed be taken care of. --Stuart Berman
53. Real Estate
"Green Aisles"
[Domino]
"Green Aisles" slipped out just ahead of the release of Days, serving as an early signpost of the new maturity in Real Estate's work. There's an autumnal feel to much of their material, but nowhere more so than on this track. It's all crushed brown leaves crinkling underfoot and collars being pulled up in the face of brisk winds. That it surfaced toward the end of September was a masterstroke of marketing. But it's unlikely that the unassuming members of Real Estate care much for that-- this is the archetypal group just out there doing their thing, with little care for the whims of the industry. "Green Aisles" is their most nostalgic song to date, perfectly nailing the feeling of looking back to youthful excesses without regret. Everything delicately falls into place around singer Martin Courtney's small-town reminisces, including one of the most tasteful guitar non-solos heard all year. That's one of Real Estate's greatest assets-- their sense of creating space by knowing exactly when not to play, helping songs like this to feel like a refreshing gulp of air. --Nick Neyland
52. Action Bronson
"Larry Csonka"
[Fine Fabric Delegates]
It came to my attention in 2011 that a disturbingly large number of people don't even know who fucking Larry Csonka is. Unfortunately for them, the Action Bronson song of the same name didn't provide any clues. Csonka, the bruising Miami Dolphins fullback with the Burt Reynolds mustache and that weird cyclops facemask, doesn't even appear until the last line of this song, and for no real reason other than it's fun as hell to say his name. While the footballer in question had a reputation as tough guy in the 1970s, the Queens-bred rapper evoking him comes over like a lovable goofball. Action Bronson is far more convincing when talking about food (cracked pepper, handmade crust, prosciutto, and olives from Tunisia all make an appearance here) and weed than he is about about kicking ass or picking up women. But he knows how to laugh at himself (he takes a break mid-song because he's "straight out of surgery") and the staccato horn-punch beat gives him room to spread his undeniably derivative (hard not to hear Ghostface, especially when he says "style") but exceedingly likable flow. --Mark Richardson
51. Todd Terje
"Snooze 4 Love"
[Running Back]
I recently noticed that the running time of the mp3 of Todd Terje's "Snooze 4 Love" in my iTunes is 8:08. Surely the reference wasn't intentional, but the happy accident nonetheless highlights what makes the Norwegian space-disco wonder's touch so special. His work's filled with surprises that take a while to sink in. Ace single "Snooze 4 Love" is a steam-operated study in the power of addition and subtraction-- some pronounced bass here, a hypnotic synth riff there, now here comes a time-stands-still break. The key to it all is his patience. Terje is always willing to take the the scenic route, and "Snooze 4 Love" is one of his most deliciously rewarding journeys. --Larry Fitzmaurice
50. Atlas Sound
"Mona Lisa"
[4AD]
"Mona Lisa" is the tranquil center of Parallax, an album otherwise focused on expressions of profound disconnection and unrequited longing. The lyrics are as ambiguous as the smile in its namesake painting, but the music is jangling folk-rock bliss, echoing the understated harmonic complexity of early R.E.M. and the spacey strum of George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord". It may be the most overtly pop song of Bradford Cox's career thus far, but he can't help but to spike its mellow vibes with foreboding. Since so many of Cox's songs deal with anxieties about vulnerability and passivity, his phrasing on the song's bridge-- "your baby's sleeping, sleeping"-- makes him sound vaguely concerned for that baby's safety. For now, though, the panic is only fleeting. --Matthew Perpetua
49. Katy B
"Broken Record"
[Columbia/Rinse]
Few artists of this or any other year have managed to marry dance music's avant-garde to pure pop propulsion the way Katy B did in 2011. Over producers Geeneus & Zinc's swift, changeable beat-- flitting confidently between the dynamism of UK funky and the clatter of drum'n'bass-- she chops through the urban jungle of "Broken Record" with a lithe confidence that makes most American popsters' recent dubstep turns seem demure. Caught between sweet dream and a beautiful nightmare, the words of a would-be paramour leave her sleepless, gloriously conflicted; Katy seems to spend "Broken Record" sorting out the contents of her own head, her stiff-lipped delivery on the verses gives way to a desperation on the bridge, turning just a touch unhinged on that circuital cry of a chorus. "You're holding every breath I take," she sings, and it's one of those lines that means nothing outside the song but absolutely everything in it. A lesser singer might get swallowed up amidst the bob and weave of "Broken Record," but here as elsewhere, she's charting a course all her own, dodging bass wobble, hurdling a swarm of snares. --Paul Thompson
48. Kreayshawn
"Gucci Gucci"
[Columbia]
It's been seven months since we first heard Kreayshawn's divisive breakout track, but YouTube commenters are still grappling over its door-kicking video. Some choice quotes from the last 10 minutes alone: "Ok i was able to watch 3:11 of a white girl rly trying to be something she isnt what do I win," and "I know this is shit, yet I'm incredibly drawn to it..." The debate rages on for good reason. Kreayshawn's grand entrance is both a face-to-palm sociological mindfuck and a hunk of youthful and infectious DIY pop-rap perfection, the pinnacle of what purists might insist on writing off as guilty pleasure. But memes matter, so whether you're scoffing or grinning, there's no denying that "Gucci Gucci" and its ensuing mayhem (27 million YouTube views, a record deal said to be worth a million dollars, unending streams of thinkpieces and GIF-based fan Tumblrs) is one of the least boring things that happened in music all year. And for that, even the most stalwart naysayers owe Kreayshawn a little love. --Carrie Battan
47. Battles [ft. Matias Aguayo]
"Ice Cream"
[Warp]
In the video for "Ice Cream", when Ian Williams first plays that carnival-ready riff on his odd-angled keyboard, there's a cocky look on his face, like he found something so great he just has to brag about it. You can't blame him. His pumping chords are definitely killer, cutting through the song's swirl of spastic drums, reflecting guitars, and echoing vocals from guest Matias Aguayo. And since the keyboard part is so sturdy, the rest of the band can basically jam around it, creating a joyous mix that sounds sharp and free in equal measure. In this band's hands, a few choppy chords can be the seeds of an ever-sprouting tune. --Marc Masters
46. Ty Segall
"Goodbye Bread"
[Drag City]
Monday is definitely the least punk rock day we've got, which explains why even Ty Segall, perhaps the reigning king of the garage, sounds subdued and defeated on this anthem for the start of the workweek. The wild animal of last year's "Girlfriend" has been tamed, forced to wash his hair and wear a suit, as the song creeps along at a plodding tempo and only allows time for one brief fuzz-pedal solo at lunch break. Peeling back the distortion is always a risky move for anyone who made his name at full throttle, but "Goodbye Bread" confirms that Segall cleans up nicely, with a surprisingly capable upper register and a melodic gift that remains intact even under the unforgiving glare of naked production. As the initial noisy blast of the San Francisco garage-psych scene starts to fade, bands will have to prove they're capable of surviving without constantly needling the red. Here, Segall shows he's comfortable even with the volume knob a few clicks to the left. --Rob Mitchum
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45. Drake
"Headlines"
[Cash Money/Young Money/Universal Motown]
Bombast hasn't always fit Drake comfortably. On "Over", the lead-up single to last year's Thank Me Later, he dropped fame-weary, grocery-bagged braggadocio over a Frankenstein fusion of orchestral bluster and slick head-knock. That was then, though. Drake's grown a bit, so on "Headlines", the attitude's more modest and subdued. Greatly utilizing his trademark sing-song vocal style, he cycles through thought after fresh thought, allowing us to eavesdrop on his unfiltered inner monologue. All sides of Toronto's boy-ish wonder are showcased here: the egotist, the regretful/regrettable lothario, the goofy punchline kid, the eager-to-impress self-doubter. It goes over Boi-1da/Noah "40" Shebib's team-up beat, a punchy build-up with tantalizingly little actual payoff, which makes sense since "Headlines" is about promising what's to come, while questioning whether all that great shit will ever really arrive. --Larry Fitzmaurice
44. Nicolas Jaar
"Space Is Only Noise If You Can See"
[Circus Company]
Nicolas Jaar may run his own label, come aggressively hyped in certain dance music circles, and enjoy a bohemian Chilean background that leaves him only one degree of separation from homegrown techno god Ricardo Villalobos, but you sure wouldn't know it from "Space Is Only Noise If You Can See". With its squelching bassline and dada stonerisms, the title track from Jaar's pleasingly confounding breakout LP sounds like the work of someone more familiar with names like Falco, Taco, and Yazoo than Hawtin, Voigt, and Mills. "Grab a calculator and fix yourself," he advises in deadpan, while unleashing a garden variety of wet reverbs and sawtooth filters on an otherwise minimal groove. For a record so lauded by serious techno nerds, Space Is Only Noise was not without its kitschy and oddball detours, and none was more memorable than this. --Mark Pytlik
43. Panda Bear
"Last Night at the Jetty"
[Paw Tracks]
I imagine "Last Night at the Jetty" is what doo-wop would sound like if sung by monks: It's got doo-wop's drifting rhythms and yearning melodies, but immediacy has been replaced by something lonely, meditative, and almost processional. Doo-wop ballads were designed for nostalgia: friends say goodnight, lovers leave, we lose something and mourn the time we had it. A lot of the music we covered this year invoked the 1950s in ways that were more deliberate-- Girls, Dirty Beaches, and Lana Del Rey, for starters. Noah Lennox is not the pompadour type. Instead of building his world out from a specific reference, he takes the reference, strips it back to its essence, and covers it with the tumbling synthesizers and limitless reverb that make his music what it is: The sound of simplicity nudged toward sacredness. --Mike Powell
42. Jay-Z / Kanye West
"Otis"
[Roc-a-Fella/Island Def Jam]
The moral that Kanye and Jay-Z extracted here from Otis Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness" has little to do with the content of that classic, the singer's musical legacy, or anything else of consequence-- it basically boils down to, "Wow, I'm rich."
It's called "Otis" to make sure everyone recognizes the expensive sample, which is played for a minute at the beginning, before being sliced down to one gruff, pouncing cut, and drowned in gloss. The duo fashions a cosmopolitan Candyland, a place where it's somehow possible to ride in multiple vehicles at once and where you count your passports at the Mercer Hotel while sipping complimentary champagne. "Sophisticated ignorance" is touted as Kanye takes a moment to secure his own soul. Then, for no reason mere mortals can discern, Jay heads to Cuba to smoke a cigar with Castro. In wealth-conscious 2011, it was hard to ethically justify this Robin Leach shtick, but the irresistible panache and merry absurdity with which it came across made me feel like Ye when he found out about blood diamonds: How can something so wrong make me feel so right? --Brian Howe
41. Frank Ocean
"Novacane"
[self-released]
For a song that goes a long way in trying to establish a dispassionate distance, "Novacane" is seriously obsessed with scene-setting details. And it's not just that Frank Ocean notes the "cocaine for breakfast" (yikes) or the Coachella chick that's paying for her dentistry degree by doing porn, but that he does so with a bemused detachment that's not really all that detached. He might be fronting like the Drakes and post-808s Kanyes of the world, but there's too much self-effacement happening for Ocean not to realize the inherent humor in his own drama. If Ocean really is on that visionary Kubrick shit like he claims, then "Novacane" could very well be his Dr. Strangelove. --David Raposa
40. Burial
"Street Halo"
[Hyperdub]
"I love [club] music, but I can't make that sort of stuff," said Burial in a 2009 FACT interview. "But I can try and make the afterglow of that music." With its non-syncopated gulps of bass, head-down pulse, and smeared subs, "Street Halo" is the closest Burial has come to trading his characteristic afterglow for straight-up glow. The track's roiling heaves are all but ready to boom alongside house, techno, whatever. Granted, this is still a Burial tune. Which means grit instead of gloss, vinyl cracks in place of space, loneliness more than collective ecstasy. There's that wood block knock again. And those distant vocals that signal an event that's already occurred rather than the here-and-now. While pioneering electronic acts are often known for their fickleness and addiction to innovation, it's become increasingly clear that Burial is more than happy to stay in his lane, slowly adding new bits and bobs along the way. Thanks to a release strategy that puts quality over quantity and a looseness that speaks soul to power, this single-minded path isn't repetitive as much as comforting in its reliability. --Ryan Dombal
39. Shabazz Palaces
"Swerve... the reeping of all that is worthwhile (Noir not withstanding)"
[Sub Pop]
"Black is you, black is me, black is us, black is free," Ishmael Butler chants for an interstitial minute at the end of "Swerve...", a highlight from his excellent Black Up LP. A lyrical reference to the Herbie Hancock-sampling Digable Planets track "Escapism (Gettin' Free)", this is one of the very few moments where the ex-DP rapper nods explicitly toward his early-90s backpack roots. Repeatedly listen to "Swerve" and "Escapism" in succession, and you'll begin to notice more common threads; the cadence of the verses and the timing of the beats are strikingly similar. Both exude the same groove. In refusing to speak openly about what makes Shabazz Palaces tick, Butler invites us to listen carefully and lets the music speak for itself, spinning hidden histories all the while. --Carrie Battan
38. Purity Ring
"Ungirthed"
[self-released]
Canadian electro-pop duo Purity Ring were one of several 2011 acts to gain blog-wide notice on the strength of just a couple of songs. Such attention can act as a springboard, or it can cripple. Yet each time I revisit "Ungirthed", I grow more eager to hear the duo's first full-length, and increasingly grateful that the torrent of hype hasn't diminished the power of anything they've done so far. The song is filled with contemporary elements that typically make for cold, alienating songs-- an MPC stutter; deep, echoing background vocals; lyrical references to teeth, knuckles, and piles of bones; hints of dubstep wobble. Still, the thrust of this song is warm, immediately accessible electro-pop confection, largely because Megan James' girlish vocals are airtight and sit high in the mix. It's an alluring contrast, one that's been able to keep them on the promising end of the internet speculation spectrum heading into 2012. --Carrie Battan
37. A$AP Rocky
"Peso"
[RCA/Polo Grounds]
On the surface, the phrase "internet rapper" is an easy way to slam social-media-savvy, 2.0-driven MCs who don't have a presence in the brick-and-mortar world. But A$AP Rocky has proven to be a symptom of a web-borne phenomenon in a more important way: Just as it's no longer a big deal to have breezy conversations with people in other hemispheres, adherence to a regional musical style is no longer a given. Sonically defining himself by Southern/Midwestern hip-hop rather than the sounds of his NYC homebase is a ballsy maneuver, especially when he redraws the map with "Peso"'s opening line: "I be that pretty motherfucker/ Harlem is what I'm reppin,'" drawled over a twinkling syrup-swoon throb. But beneath the borderline-minimalist simplicity is the hospitable arrogance of an artist so comfortable in his element that Who beats Where a hundred times over. --Nate Patrin
36. Jamie xx
"Far Nearer"
[Numbers]
No one expected maximalism from Jamie Smith-- his beatwork for the xx is basically indie rock cast into black lace-- but the bright, winding grooves of solo track "Far Nearer" realign our expectations for his capabilities. In three short years, he has shown not just fantastic taste but enviable range, too. Steel drums are this song's predominant element, recalling the warm-climes blissouts of John Talabot and the wannabe-warm-climes blissouts of the Tough Alliance. The drums are bright and airy enough to lift the underlying electric pianos out of their minor-key ghetto. And the positive-vibe momentum is such that the main, tuned-up vocal sample never settles into default bluesy bluster-- imagine dubstep's rhythms being air-lifted out of London by brightly colored animal balloons. --Andrew Gaerig
35. Charli XCX
"Stay Away"
[This Is Music]
As far as gloom-popper Charli XCX's "Stay Away" is concerned, love isn't just a battlefield -- it's all-out nuclear war. Percussive hits take on the drama of bombs in slow motion as the UK teen utters every line like a dying breath, making the track's mood feel positively apocalyptic. Charli's performance sounds wizened beyond her years ("Never learn/ Never learn/ Never learn" she chastises herself), but she also captures that eternally youthful feeling of heartbreak-as-catastrophe. Thanks to luscious, 80s-flecked production courtesy of increasingly go-to producer Ariel Rechtshaid (Glasser, Cass McCombs), the song amounts to much more than a collage of retro-chic signifiers. "Stay Away" creates its own devoutly anguished emotional universe, one that leaves us forever grateful that Charli's crush didn't heed her titular request. --Lindsay Zoladz
34. Cut Copy
"Need You Now"
[Modular]
At this year's Pitchfork Music Festival, there was a moment in Cut Copy's set when the band invited the whole crowd to "go crazy"-- pretty obligatory festival fare. But what was less-than-typical was the astronomical level of the crowd's exploding reaction. It was kind of overwhelming if you were caught in the middle, and demonstrative of exactly the kind of feeling that Cut Copy specialize in: the weightless uplift, the rush of euphoria, all effortlessly rising out of their currents of cool, gently gliding Balearic pop. And no song from Zonoscope did that upward mood shift better than "Need You Now". Six minutes long, it doesn't really open up until it nears the five minute mark, when singer Dan Whitford ratchets his alternately deep and sighing voice and a drum machine roll leads into synths flashing all over each other like so many rave lights. It's a moment worth waiting-- and going crazy-- for. --Eric Grandy
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33. AraabMuzik
"Streetz Tonight"
[Duke]
It's just an edit, really. The Dipset-affiliated producer simply loads up his MPC with a prog-house track from three years ago (Adam K & Soha's remix of Kaskade's "4 AM"), fiddles with the pitch a little, shifts the breakdowns, underpins it with his own snares, and comes out with something approximating an anthemic take on neo-hip-house. Seems easy enough-- so why is it so transcendent?
There's a vivid shift when the peak-and-peak-and-peak dynamics of arena trance are retrofitted to adhere to the more consistently emphatic structure of a hip-hop instrumental. And while the way "Streetz Tonight" snaps from yearning slow-glide fluorescence to strobe-light euphoria is a good jolt, the way it switches back is what really hits. All the pressure and melancholy hidden beneath the surface closes in and reforms into something transfixing. AraabMuzik could toy with those dynamics forever, but he doesn't: The song wraps up by slickly segueing into the Jam & Spoon sugar buzz of "Golden Touch", and the abrupt silence that hits after this last moment of exhilarated high acts as its own emotional exclamation point. --Nate Patrin
32. Cold Cave
"The Great Pan Is Dead"
[Matador]
"This song," wrote Cold Cave frontman Wesley Eisold on the band's Tumblr, "is about magic, preservation, youth, and movement." It's also about being smacked in the face by a brick made of crushed Big Country CDs. The same hyper-compression that made their Cherish The Light Years album exhausting as a unit made Cold Cave's music exultant in smaller doses-- drum machines and keyboards hammering at heart-attack speeds, making this song surge and flex while Eisold battles to ride it out. A bunch of acts, from the Horrors to M83, drew from widescreen 80s pop in 2011, but nobody channeled its absurd, romantic sense of mission as well as Cold Cave did here. Eisold's unstoppable "I WILL come running," shouted into the teeth of his music's storm, is only the most joyous moment in a song that's as unashamedly huge and heroic as possible. --Tom Ewing
31. The Field
"Then It's White"
[Kompakt]
The name of the Field's third album, Looping State of Mind, might be a sign that producer Axel Willner realizes he's known for a specific kind of trick. But "Then It's White" doesn't really fit the pattern. Even in a discography that's definitely not lacking for haunting or meditative moments, "White" is especially notable for how soothing and inviting it is. The track unfolds in a gradual, naturalistic fashion across eight minutes, elegant piano gliding into minimal drums gliding into panning voices. It's music for people who find the sound of clattering airport boards too jarring, and offers listeners the type of comedown they never realized they needed. --David Raposa
30. Clams Casino
"Motivation"
[self-released]
Listen to New Jersey hip-hop producer Clams Casino's "Motivation", with its disembodied moans and craggy atmospheres, and you might envision an extremely fertile, smoked-out cipher taking place in some abandoned funhouse. It's evocative. The beat was originally heard backing up an impassioned Lil B but, on its own, "Motivation" takes on new life, its giant drums and cymbal spikes crushing down unencumbered. Though it sounds like an especially welcoming invitation for any rapper, this instrumental tells its bombastically somber tale perfectly well without accompaniment. --Zach Kelly
29. Jai Paul
"BTSTU (Edit)"
[XL]
"Don't fuck with me," warns Londoner Jai Paul at the top of his breakout track. On paper, it sounds pretty tough. On record, though, Paul sings the line in a fragile falsetto that makes Chris Martin seem downright manly in comparison. The juxtaposition between message and delivery was intriguing enough for Drake to sample on his internet track "Dreams Money Can Buy". Soon after, Beyoncé also took a snippet of "BTSTU" for her song "End of Time". Meanwhile, all sorts of dancers-- hip-hop, experimental, hilariously amateur-- have uploaded "BTSTU" routines on YouTube. A lot of people, it seems, are fucking with this guy.
After originally gaining notice as a demo in 2010-- so long ago that we once linked to it on something called MySpace-- "BTSTU" was granted official release by XL in April. Anticipation is high for Paul's forthcoming LP, and it's all based on this song, an off-kilter pop tune that's automatically raw, bright, new. The palm-slap beat is a little dirty and drunk as it recalls the unmistakable lope of one J Dilla. Video game sounds bloop about before horns come in and fade out entirely too soon. Though he has yet to offer any sort of follow-up, this song's hook could explain his absence: "I know I've been gone a long time, but I'm back and I want what is mine." It'd be foolish to doubt him. --Ryan Dombal
28. Danny Brown
"Monopoly"
[Fool's Gold]
Even in a rap environment so accepting of weirdos and outsiders, 30-year-old Danny Brown still cuts an odd shape. His haircut would be at home at a Panic! at the Disco concert circa 2006, and his jeans, as is slowly becoming legend, are so tight that they allegedly cost him a deal with 50 Cent's G-Unit. But Brown has lived his whole life poor in Detroit, where bare truth pushes "survival of the fittest" beyond cliché. Despite his anti-masculinity, Brown still comes off as one of the hardest, baddest rap dudes in the game, and "Monopoly" is his hardest, baddest song. Squawking and growling over a beat that gurgles sub bass synths, Brown talks some high-grade shit, peppering his verses with hilarious insults as cutting as they are idiosyncratic. Like when he compares a record label to an overbearing pageant mom: "Guess who's the little bitch? That's you." --Jordan Sargent
27. The Rapture
"How Deep Is Your Love?"
[DFA]
If you were nervous about the Rapture's comeback, well, you weren't alone. After their lukewarm third album, Pieces of the People We Love, the Brooklyn-based dance punks vanished into the major-label ether, rematerializing only at random intervals to treat audiences in Europe or Australia to an encore performance of "House of Jealous Lovers". And the new material that did leak out during the interim-- like "No Sex For Ben", squirreled away on the Grand Theft Auto IV soundtrack -- was not auspicious. But "How Deep Is Your Love?", the first single from In the Grace of Your Love, turned out to be a fine reintroduction, smoothing post-punk angst into gospel yearning. It's a song about grappling with loss-- not casual betrayal or bruised feelings, but a heavier adult loneliness. For the first time in ages, the band seemed confident that its music could be a vessel for something more profound than bumping and grinding, even if it still made you want to bump and grind. --Aaron Leitko
Following Beyoncé's work on "1+1" is like a journey to the center of her craft, a stripping away of every distraction until all that's left is her voice. Without it, "1+1" would be a muted ballad: Its simple guitar line and stardust-sprinkled strings serve no purpose other than to evoke a sense of familiar romantic intimacy, and then to elegantly step aside while Beyoncé delivers one of her most wonderfully impassioned performances ever.
"1+1" possesses that slightly scary intensity that has been R&B's worst-kept secret weapon since Whitney Houston's "I Have Nothing", but it also demonstrates perfectly how Beyoncé stands apart from every other big-chested diva getting her Whitney on. She lets the song sing through her with a clarity that is never clinical, a strength that never sabotages, and an expressiveness that is precisely as sentimental as its subject matter requires. Beyoncé is R&B's field marshal, demanding of her listeners and herself an absolute fidelity to the music's emotional possibilities, with a perfectly modulated vehemence that is as captivating as it is tyrannical. "Pull me in close and don't let me go," she commands, but here it's her own grasp that is thrillingly assured. --Tim Finney
25. Soulja Boy
"Zan With That Lean"
[S.O.D. Money Gang]
Young star gets rich, grows up, and takes drugs: It's a showbiz story about as old as time, and in rap music right now, seemingly no young star is taking as many drugs as Soulja Boy. Weed, syrup, pills, and who knows what else are his muses, and this year he's found a woozy place where life seems perpetually submerged in a Styrofoam cup. The slow-mo re-work of "Zan With That Lean" gives you the full double-cup treatment, but it's on the original where Soulja finds bliss in pure pop.
The song features him rattling off disconnected images from the life of a modern day Richie Rich in a delivery so carefree that he may have just stepped in the booth and rapped about what he did that afternoon. But it's the chorus, sung by underling Kwony Cash, that drops the laid-back pretense for outright exuberance, getting to the heart of what it must feel like to have more money than you know what to do with. When Cash sings, "I keep the hammer on me/ I ain't worried 'bout a thing," his delivery lilts just a tad, and instead of coming off as an absurd display of misplaced testosterone, it feels like the truest expression of emotion from kids whose big decisions include which stores to hit up at Lenox Square Mall. --Jordan Sargent
24. Kurt Vile
"Jesus Fever"
[Matador]
Kurt Vile offers his fair share of dour material on Smoke Ring For My Halo, but "Jesus Fever" initially sounds like it's going to buck that trend. Sonically, it's probably the breeziest song on the album; the central riff is light and optimistic, and Vile's tone is vaguely hopeful. But alongside the freewheeling acoustic guitar, Kurt's singing about inevitability: No matter what, we're all going to go, and hey, maybe believing in something makes that a little easier to cope with. With lines like, "If it wasn't taped you could escape this song, but I'm already gone," it's almost like he's addressing us from the grave. Heavy stuff. Fittingly, the ebullient melody makes that message a lot easier to face. --Evan Minsker
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23. Adele
"Rolling in the Deep"
[Columbia/XL]
Few songs this year were as frequently, thoroughly, or enthusiastically slaughtered as "Rolling in the Deep". I heard it belted inexpertly from more passing car windows than I recall hearing "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" in 2006. Adele's voice has that effect-- a full-throated, window-rattling holler, rounded and creamy at the center, alluringly pock-marked at the edges, it is the kind of singing voice that bids you to join in before good sense intervenes. The kind of voice you listen to just to hear what it can do.
But "Rolling in the Deep" isn't an empty exercise in vocal calisthenics, or some cheap singing-competition bait. From its thumping, elemental opening, where Adele growls some classic pop scorned-woman stuff ("don't underestimate the things that I will do") through its wistful bridge, where she softens slightly amid some distinctly Carole King piano, to the howl of that chorus, the track is a songwriting master class in gathering drama. You caterwaul along to it because its payoff is so huge, so liberating. --Jayson Greene
22. Bill Callahan
"Riding For the Feeling"
[Drag City]
In his third decade of recording, Bill Callahan is in the prime of his career-- unless, as he's done for years, he just keeps getting better. For now, though, "Riding For the Feeling" establishes a new outline of why Callahan's best songs touch deeper and deeper nerves.
Deceptively simple, "Riding" eschews complexity both musically and lyrically, with plain language and images and a band that circles around and sidles behind a languid acoustic guitar shuffle. The focus at first sits with his perfect baritone, handing out a common refrain on departures-- "It's never easy to say goodbye"-- with patience as steady as the tune itself. With each successive verse, though, the scope of Callahan's concerns expands; he's restless not with a lover but with himself, his art, his audience, and his need to say something profound. And so he arrives at the title's mantra, an axiom of intentional ambiguity that he repeats almost playfully. After more than 20 years, Callahan's music still feels uncomfortably personal, as if writing and singing allow him to tease though his troubles on tape. --Grayson Currin
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21. Drake
"Marvins Room"
[Young Money/Cash Money/Universal Motown]
From the start, Aubrey Drake Graham has never confined himself to rapping. Before Toronto cohort the Weeknd was sampling Siouxsie and Beach House, Drake was crooning on Lykke Li remixes and trading verses with Bun B over Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl". Clearly, this guy was interested in something bigger than rap stardom-- or at the very least, something different. That's even before being Jewish, Canadian, and a former child actor enters the equation.
Since he first broke, we've had no shortage of signs that Drake wants to be not just the Best Rapper Alive but the Best Pop Star Alive, or the Realest Pop Star Alive, or whatever-- and the pinnacle of Drake's exquisite weirdness so far is "Marvins Room". His decision to leak such a moody, downbeat track before the album's release rather than a more typical radio single was bold, and the fact that stations played it again and again anyway spoke to his current game-changing status.
So, OK: "Are you drunk right now?" That's the voice on the other end of the phone, and it belongs to one woman Drake can't have. The answer, of course, is yes-- and how. Producer Noah "40" Shebib keeps the accompaniment low-key and otherworldly, with woozy tones and minimal beats better suited for late-night headphones listens than club blast-offs. Not that you'd want to go shouting these lyrics anyway, as Drake's confessional come-ons grow increasingly explicit and pathetic ("I hope no one heard that"). That it all ends with the sort of delicately pretty piano playing you used to be able to hear in fancy department stores is ridiculous, yet strangely appropriate. Though Kanye West was the first pop star to toast himself as a "douchebag" in song, Drake luxuriates in the role here-- and somehow makes it seem attractive. Self-loathing has rarely sounded so sublime. --Marc Hogan
Photo by Brian DeRan
20. Gang Gang Dance: "Glass Jar" [4AD]
Is this the peak of Gang Gang Dance's slow-burn evolution? All the elements of "Glass Jar" were present at various points on GGD's earlier records. Some of the sounds here first appeared in 2004, when the band dropped the far more unstable Revival of the Shittest, the kind of record that suggested a band on the verge of musical disintegration rather than any sort of longevity. (Listening to the spacey mix and smooth instrumental surfaces of "Glass Jar", it's almost hard to remember that GGD were correctly tagged as a noise act in their earliest days.) But those elements have never been combined in such an assured way and to such epic ends, moving from peak to peak so gracefully that you can't sense the seams, even though the track starts and finishes in two very different worlds.
The song's free-form approach calls to mind the intros to improvised jazz records and the Boredoms' sun-chasing prog. The beatific keyboards draw equally from new age and 80s art-rock and deep house. The chintzy synth fanfares are gleaned from grime. Fake steel drums are swiped from a dancehall single. A motorik pulse keeps breaking into all sorts of ethnic percussion flourishes. The vocals suggest an anime pixie covering all your post-punk favorites. None of these pieces seem like they should fit together-- and eight years ago, GGD themselves probably wouldn't have found a way to meld them into 11 perpetually climaxing minutes. Wherever the pressure's coming from, bands are a lot less likely to experiment in public while sticking to what they love best the way this band has. "Glass Jar" may or may not turn out to be GGD's apex, but it's a testament to what can happen when a group feels free enough to develop at its own pace, audience expectations be damned. --Jess Harvell
Photo by Erez Avissar
19. Lana Del Rey: "Video Games" [Stranger]
Lana Del Rey is an extremely unlikely indie fave, but that's OK-- it doesn't look like the rest of the world knows what to do with her, either. It's not often that you come across a breakout artist who so thoroughly disguises her own level of awareness or intent. Listening to "Video Games" for the first time, hearing those chords paired with that voice, was a true WTF moment. Literally: "What the fuck am I hearing right now? Who is this person and where did she come from?"
Among other things, "Video Games" is Del Rey's withering critique of the dehumanizing desires and stunted emotional capacities of men, and it would be powerful enough even if she were just momentarily putting on the guise of a tragic sex kitten in order to make her point. The fact that her overarching persona is more or less inextricable from that cartoonish bombshell, however, adds another fascinating, unnerving layer to the performance. The song's net effect was a mixture of that opening sense of mystery tempered with what we learned (or didn't learn) about a woman once known as Lizzy Grant. As a song, it should be too over-the-top to work-- the stereotypical tastefulness of the music, the breathiness of Del Rey's vocals, the utter sadness and desperation so blatantly present in the lyrics. But it clicks because she never winks, not even when the tape stops rolling and the cameras are turned off. --Josh Love
Photo by Tina Tyrell
18. St. Vincent: "Cruel" [4AD]
About a minute and a half into "Cruel", Annie Clark uncorks what might be the most demented mini-guitar solo of the year. It sounds positively alien, as if someone has physically cut the song open with a primitive tool and roughly inserted her playing inside of it. But despite the thick layer of knotty scuzz on the guitar and Clark's rubbery phrasing, the thing is shiny and neat enough to fit.
Clark has always done ugly beautifully, but she one-ups herself on "Cruel", a song built around bloody clashes. Its main guitar fanfare is celebratory but brittle-- it could break if you leaned too hard on it. And she sounds almost joyful repeating the word "cruel," building it into a whole chorus, stretching it out, bending it around the riff. Most impressively, she wrestles all these hard and soft components into a pretty breathtaking and actually sort of danceable pop song. It's a special talent, and one that Clark has made her signature. She makes it all sound so effortless that sometimes you have to listen for the strangeness in order to hear it. --Joe Tangari
17. Oneohtrix Point Never: "Replica" [Mexican Summer/Software]
In 2011, we spent a lot of time fishing coins from the well of childhood memory and worked hard to convince ourselves that they still glowed brightly. But on "Replica", Daniel Lopatin showed us the tarnished undersides of those coins. Absent the giddy sugar-rush of candy-colored nostalgia, he did it with sheer sonic craft cast in the mold of tragedy.
"Replica" is a slow, new-age apocalypse anchored by a gracefully drooping piano figure, glistening on top but hollow underneath. The phrase never unfolds in quite the same way twice, but one thing about it is always roughly the same: It begins on a note of desperate hope and closes on a note of slumping despair. The drifting, repetitive, melancholy, cartoon imagery of its video attaches a substance to the tragic sensibility; memories of childhood that feel more like lost innocence than happy reverie. Lopatin, previously known for his sun-streaked synth arpeggios, has perfectly captured nostalgia's dusk. There are some things-- innocence high among them-- we just can't get back. Instead, we produce flawed copies, each a subtle deformation of the last, like a piano figure played over and over with a trembling hand. --Brian Howe
Photo by Erez Avissar
16. Tyler, the Creator: "Yonkers" [XL]
On "Yonkers", Tyler, the Creator's repellence and magnetism coexist in their purest forms, and the song somehow scans as daring pop music despite having no chorus and strong ties to some of the most abrasive indie rap of a decade prior. But we have to acknowledge the impact of its pitch perfect video, one of the few moments from this year that felt like a true, capital-E Event in hip-hop. It consummated an unholy union of sound and vision that heralded Tyler's introduction to the exo-Tumblr populace. You remember where you were when you first saw it.
When I listen to "Yonkers", it really can be February 10, 2011 all over again. When Tyler spits, "I'm a fucking walking paradox/ No, I'm not," I can forget the shitstorm of thinkpieces that Goblin inspired as well as the disappointment seemingly suffered by everyone except the 150,000 people who actually bought it. Hearing those creaking machine noises and that sickly bassline, I can forget Odd Future's Adult Swim version of Jackass and their own jackass behavior. As he signs off barking, "Actions speak louder than words/ Let me try this shit," and swings from a noose, I can forget the stupendously unfunny "Bitch Suck Dick" and its equally lame video. And then "Yonkers" ends, and I'm back in the present once again, reminiscing on the last time Tyler, the Creator rose to the occasion, and hoping it really isn't the last time. --Ian Cohen
15. The Weeknd: "The Morning" [self-released]
On their two polished and carefully marketed releases this year, Toronto R&B enigmas the Weeknd-- singer Abel Tesfaye and producers Doc McKinney and Illangelo-- told stories about the most depraved kind of nightlife, parties you'd never want to attend. Participants were drug-addicted, morally defunct, sad, or some combination of the three. But while the content was bleak, the sounds were often gorgeous. Nowhere does that contrast come together better than "The Morning", the soaring centerpiece of their out-of-nowhere debut mixtape, House of Balloons.
The song succeeds in part by fucking with your expectations of how R&B tracks usually function. The production is so large and rich-- whining guitars and sparkling synths hinting at a massive refrain-- that you expect the vocal to match it. Instead, Tesfaye sings softly, almost dejected. There's beauty and pain in the way his falsetto aches, but at the same time he's singing about "pussy ass niggas" and "a house full of hoes." When that chorus finally opens up, you expect redemption that never comes: "All that money, the money is the motive," Tesfaye croons. Whether he's talking about himself or the people around him, it doesn't matter: Everyone at this party is compromised. --Joe Colly
Photo by Sandy Kim
14. Girls: "Vomit" [True Panther]
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The story here is straightforward enough. "Nights I spend alone/ I spend 'em runnin' 'round lookin' for you, baby," Christopher Owens gargles, his voice cracked like dry skin stretched across an overworked knuckle. But "Vomit" is a proper romantic odyssey, with all attendant twists and disclosures, calamities and redemptions. Which is to say: It's not that simple.
The song starts as a slow, desperate dirge, a sinister lope down a bleak city street. You can practically see the orange-red tip of Owens' lit cigarette, the way his hands are crammed in his jacket pockets, the yellow pallor his skin takes under a streetlight. There's the Lloyd Dobler, sad-sack archetype-- the heartbroken boy outside your window-- and then there's Owens, a more complicated suitor, nearly angry, possibly menacing, and at least as volatile as that craggy, psych-aping guitar. "Looking for love" is a noble mission, though, and as the song progresses through its six-and-a-half minutes, Owens becomes more knowable, and "Vomit" more anthemic-- a "November Rain" for listeners prone to long, lonely walks. Eventually, there's a rousing gospel choir, and an earnest imploration: "Come into my heart," Owens begs.
There's a bruised quality to all of Girls' best songs, and it's especially palpable on "Vomit"-- even the title evokes a particular kind of desperation, a sense that your body is rejecting its circumstances. Find the person you love or risk turning yourself inside out. --Amanda Petrusich
Photo by Anna M. Campbell
13. tUnE-yArDs: "Bizness" [4AD]
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As the first track released from this year's w h o k i l l, "Bizness" was a winning thesis statement, and for tUnE-yArDs' Merrill Garbus, it had an unprecedented urgency. The track's playful vocal flutters and fearless howls accompanied a barrage of saxophone climbs and skittering beats, as Garbus constructed a powerhouse of sound.
So it's no small feat that the track's triumphant sound is only one part of the equation. "People need to feel heard," Garbus told me in a 2009 interview, "and that's part of what I do." She's a musician with a strong social conscience, and her lyrics bear weight. "Bizness" finds Garbus perpetually speaking up for the oppressed ("I'm a victim, yeah!"), which makes this a song of liberation in the most literal sense, no doubt emphasized by her empowered female stance. Throughout, Garbus draws conceptual parallels to one of her most interesting and oft-cited influences: Woody Guthrie. "[He] was out in the people," Garbus told me. "He was talking to people about their problems. I don't want to be an artist who's not connected with people and their lives."
Like Guthrie, Garbus has a knack for writing simple lyrics that become brilliant with repeat listens. Here, she chants, "don't take my life away," more than 20 times, a defiantly personal plea that could easily act as a collective rallying cry in these times of global economic strife. "Bizness" is that rare mode of folk that's politically charged and highly listenable without taking any shortcuts. It's an eccentric reminder of the rewards that come when music has an indomitable social foundation. And like Garbus herself, "Bizness" is ultimately dedicated to freedom. --Jenn Pelly
12. Jay-Z / Kanye West: "Niggas in Paris" [Def Jam/Roc-a-Fella/Roc Nation]
"Got my niggas in Paris and they goin' gorillas, hah?!" There it is: hah?! Go ahead. Say it. Out loud. It's fun. And there's nothing that summarizes the wonderfully obnoxious platinum-crusted one-percent-ness of Watch the Throne better than Kanye West's go-to ad lib. Hah?! is funny, memorable, annoying, dumb, genius, earth, water, sky-- it's the entire known universe in one impossibly indignant syllable. Nobody knows what it means because it means everything.
Kanye actually says hah?! in "Niggas in Paris", but this instant new stadium-rap blueprint is also the closest Mr. West and Jay-Z came to translating hah?! into song form on Watch the Throne. It is essentially one long hah?! The raps are on super-stunt, always. This is one of those tracks where a mere mention-- Olsen twins, Margiela jackets, Audemar watches, motherfucking fish fillet sandwiches-- is akin to being knighted with relevance both actual and meme-based. Co-producer Hit-Boy's instrumental isn't shy either as it hurdles asteroids upon some tranced space-invader shit handed down from Bambaataa's "Planet Rock". On a scale of hah? to hah! the beat is HAH! No question.
And while the song is a highlight on record, it took on new life live. On the first night of the Watch the Throne tour, Jay stopped it right after a particularly spirited Kanye hah?! and demanded a rewind. Based on priceless YouTubes ("Niggas in Paris" is so good it might sound better when experienced via blown-out fan bootlegs), it was a genuinely unexpected and ecstatic moment in the middle of a megawatt arena gig. Since then, they've been forced to up their own ante, bringing the track back nine times in Chicago, turning it into a surreal competition with no discernable endpoint. Welcome to the Throne. --Ryan Dombal
11. James Blake: "The Wilhelm Scream" [A&M/Atlas]
A year ago, writers were falling over ourselves to anoint James Blake the next in a long line of saviors of electronic music, the heir apparent to Burial's oblong dubstep innovations, if not the impossible shapes of Richard D. James. But, as Blake proved with multiple varied releases throughout 2011, he's not going to fall into any predetermined role, however complimentary it may be. "The Wilhelm Scream", a standout from Blake's song-centric long-player, is a ballad like so many ballads before it: just a smattering of lines, a hushed, pleading voice going for gut-wallop. But set this one next to Adele or Coldplay, and you'll realize not just how much is missing, but how much is gained in leaving it out.
Digging into an obscure tune from his father's all-but-forgotten band, Blake confesses uncertainty ("I don't know about my dreams"), then resignation ("might as well fall"), as the track-- just a couple of synth gurgles, a few weird creaks and bangs-- transforms itself slowly. It's the sound of Blake's uneasy mind eventually emptied onto tape. His voice is lovely running up and down the side of the track, but without the flourishes that billow into the room in its second half, "Wilhelm" is barely a husk of a song. As it runs, "Wilhelm" gradually reveals a much darker, more conflicted song than its first bars would suggest: a pop song from a bygone era, deconstructed, wiped clean, then reconfigured into something strange and new. Perched between the experimentation Blake made a reputation on and his more recent explorations of odd-angled pop, "Wilhelm" deftly balances both. --Paul Thompson
10. DJ Khaled [ft. Drake, Rick Ross, and Lil Wayne]: "I'm on One"
[We the Best/Cash Money]
It was the year's most ubiquitous mixtape beat, dominating radio and bringing together three of hip-hop's biggest stars. The instrumental, with its atmospheric texture wedded to a memorable, addictive, slashing melodic loop, is a masterpiece of subtle confidence and understated strength that sustains through implied gesture rather than obvious show of skill. It frames some of the more evocative lyrics of the year, the best of which come from Rick Ross' middle verse, from the purple flowers burning his chest to his supremely over-the-top sexual conquests in London. But it's Drake's chorus that really gives the song its power and spurs its hedonistic internal logic. As the beat's melancholy drifts along, the 25-year-old rapper mixes his past, present, and future into a heady brew: "I don't really give a fuck, and my excuse is that I'm young/ And I'm only getting older, somebody should have told you...." --David Drake
Photo by Matt Barnes
09. Azealia Banks: "212" [self-released]
It's quite an achievement at this stage in the game to get noticed via dirty talk, but the first time you hear "212" that's what sticks with you. Azealia Banks' perfectly timed, sweet-voiced threat as the track drops out ("Imma ruin you, cunt") is the song's hotline to virality, its VIP pass to buzz.
So she's an internet novelty? Hardly. "212" works because its popcraft and its shock tactics are each other's Trojan horses-- concentrate on one and the other sneaks up on you. One reason "ruin you, cunt" feels like such a payoff is that Banks spends an entire verse of quick, unshowy rapping setting up its run of vowels. Banks uses the peaks, breakdowns, and drop-outs of Lazy Jay's bouncy "Float My Boat" to give her Minaj-style vocal-shifts some context: from sassy and chatty during the build ups to cartoon rage as the synths rear up around her at the song's end. If it were judged only on its visceral thrill, "212" would still be one of 2011's best, an unashamed banger in a mostly mid-tempo year. But the more you dig into the song, the more you can hear details and decisions that suggest a scary degree of pop talent. --Tom Ewing
08. Cass McCombs: "County Line" [Domino]
As a man who's gone on record requesting that his tombstone read "Home at Last," Cass McCombs is no stranger to travelling, and on "County Line", he sets the scene on the road straight away: "On my way to you, old county/ Hoping nothing's changed." A long drive is what comes to mind, and the slow chug of the music fits right in with a feeling of Zen-like zoning, watching headlights drift left and right around you. On any trip back to a place you once knew well, it can feel like every passing road sign rewinds another year in the spool, until everything becomes a little more familiar and intense. So too in "County Line", as McCombs' voice grows ever slightly more insistent along the way.
Where the song really burns is when McCombs slides into the lilting chorus, his voice swooning to his upper register and then back again. It's a tender hook, underpinned by the engine-like "woah, woah, woah, woah, woahs" in the background. But despite the song's gentle refrain, there's a bitter aftertaste here-- a sense that the journey, or return to wherever (or whoever) it is, is not exactly a welcome trip. There are no simple answers in McCombs' songs, and this one is no different. He once again leaves us ponderous, gently pushing forward yet always aware of what the past has done. --Hari Ashurst
07. Beyoncé: "Countdown" [Columbia]
The first Destiny's Child singles were broadsides backed up by joyful jitter-funk, kiss-offs aimed at bad boyfriends, lackluster lovers, and guys who just couldn't take a hint. Losers who creep around behind their trusting partners' backs, lames who flood inboxes with unwanted advances, frauds, and misers of all stripes. Beyoncé made telling them off, crushing their egos, and sending them home to mama sound like a total blast. As recently as "Irreplaceable", an older and wiser Ms. Knowles was finding empowerment in relationships gone wrong, sounding less aggrieved than emboldened by finally laying down the law. I mean, do I even need to bring up "Single Ladies"?
But Beyoncé's been enjoying domestic bliss for some time now, and on the evidence of "Countdown", Jay-Z has yet to get on her bad side. If anything, his devotion has ignited Queen B's most delirious hymn to being head-over-heels since "Crazy in Love". This track is a virtuoso performance from singer and producers alike, so giddy with the thrill of having someone have your back that it can't sit still. The tempo shifts are like a smitten lover trying to calm herself down only to start babbling about how awesome everything is all over again a moment later. "Countdown" can't stop spinning out new musical ideas every few seconds because maybe this zinging synth riff or this crazy orchestral percussion crescendo will help you catch the feeling, too. Beyoncé cycles breathlessly through every vocal trick at her command, from church choir ululating to fierce fast-rap, and somehow it's both overwhelming and infectious, coming off like the most emotionally affecting sound effects record ever recorded. Sure, we've all been in love. But it's doubtful we've ever sounded this damn excited about it. --Jess Harvell
06. Destroyer: "Kaputt" [Merge]
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Dan Bejar is sometimes knocked for his use of ironic humor, as though any trace of such a device instantly renders the music heartless. But while "Kaputt" may be clever in its references and lite-jazz affect, it's incredibly evocative on a gut level, with its swirl of woodwinds and synth-pop textures setting scenes as vivid in detail as old photographs and as vaguely defined but deeply felt as a dream.
At its core, "Kaputt" is a celebration of imperfect memories and the world of the past that we construct in our minds from bits of pop culture. In this case, it's a world built of stray lines from old music magazines: "Sounds, Smash Hits, Melody Maker, NME/ It all sounds like a dream to me." Only one of those publications still exists today; the back issues are mostly lost to time. But even if these snapshots of a particular era were meant to be disposable, their ideas linger on in the back of readers' minds as, say, biases against certain musical instruments. Like saxophones.
"Kaputt" almost entirely comprises sounds that were considered extremely uncool (if not outright taboo) by rock fans up until recently, but Bejar isn't trolling his audience. The listener's knowledge of fickle rock fashion is part of the song, and this context is essential to its poignancy: Every cultural moment eventually passes, and each will seem alternately ridiculous and romantic in hindsight. --Matthew Perpetua
05. Real Estate: "It's Real" [Domino]
Even Real Estate's most ardent supporters admitted that their 2009 self-titled album was a bit on the hazy, noncommittal side. (That was even part of the draw for a few of us.) On that record, the Ridgewood, New Jersey, natives were rocking the beach, fetching cans of Sprite and Budweiser from the cooler. Two years later, "It's Real" finds them scraping off tree bark to proclaim their love. As it turns out, clarity in both sound and emotion suits them well.
Propelled by an instantly memorable guitar lead from Matthew Mondanile that would make any Postcard Records band seethe with envy, the track has frontman Martin Courtney spouting an uncomplicated, addictive vocal melody that's plaintive without being apathetic, emotive but not cloying. The uncertainty in the first verse quickly falls away and is replaced by a confidence in his love. Before, not even a summertime poolside jaunt could quell the creeping dread of adulthood. Now, the brutal cold of a frozen-solid river evokes wistful romantic nostalgia. "It's Real" nails the feeling of when love goes from being The Great Intangible to something that settles in your bones. --Martin Douglas
04. Nicki Minaj: "Super Bass" [Cash Money]
Nicki Minaj's sea-parting verse on Kanye West's "Monster" dared you to imagine how much more twisted the game would be on her own turf. So it was a resounding bummer when her first proper album, Pink Friday, ended up so deferential to the strictures of pop radio; tepid tracks like "Your Love" and "Right Thru Me" curbed her boundless imagination in favor of easy hits.
Considering its ubiquity this year, it's easy to forget that the song that got Minaj back on track-- and what's become the most successful single by a female rapper since Missy Elliot's 2002 hit "Work It"-- wasn't even supposed to be a single. "Super Bass" was originally a Pink Friday bonus track and only later released as a single in the U.S. due to the demand of fans, including Taylor Swift. Unlike the softer cuts on Pink Friday, "Super Bass" reinvents the love song as something that's never mawkish but instead contagiously gleeful. The carbonated beat and Minaj's exuberant verses find the perfect alchemy of idiosyncrasy and pop appeal. The result is one of those impossible-not-to-love mega-hits-- even harder to find these days given the internet's tendency to help us all burrow into our respective niches-- that momentarily levels the ground between music critics and little girls in tutus: We're all just singing along. --Lindsay Zoladz
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03. EMA: "California" [Souterrain Transmissions]
If you crossed paths with Erika M. Anderson in 2011, chances are she made you uncomfortable. On "California", she throws out a litany of boasts disguised as confessions, seemingly attempting to agitate everyone within earshot. Unimpressed by the opening couplet, "Fuck California/ You made me boring?" Perhaps the next line, about selling her menstrual-blood-crusted red pants to a friend, will induce the desired squirming. No? How about the Bo Diddley-quoting, "I'm just 22/ I don't mind dying," sung like a psalm? Or, "I saw Joseph carrying the gun/ I saw Mary carrying the gun/ I saw grandma carrying the gun?"
Anderson speak-sings all of this in a fluid ramble that only slows to hit a melodic note every few bars, timed to one of the song's shimmering, tectonic-shift chord changes. It sounds like her thoughts are too scattered or overwhelming to adhere to the melody she's dreamt up for them, so you can listen dozens of times and still never guess the next phrase correctly. She never stops blind-siding you. The charismatic performance freeze-frames the worst, clammiest parts of brash youth-- the raw nerves masked by brittle swagger, the wadded-tissue carelessness with which you treat your body. It's a moment when you're screaming to be seen, and "California" sounds as magnetically cool as every fuck-up sounds in her own head. "I'm begging you please to look away," Anderson pleads. Not a chance. --Jayson Greene
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__Photo by D.L. Anderson
02. Bon Iver: "Holocene" [Jagjaguwar/4AD]
I had never knowingly heard a Bon Iver song until this past summer. I hadn't avoided Justin Vernon's music; I just never sought it out. I'd read about the cabin in the woods, and that was enough to suggest that it probably wasn't for me. Then, one night in July, driving around Portland, Oregon, shuttling another load of boxes between my mom's old house and her new assisted-living home, I found myself transfixed by an unfamiliar falsetto streaming from the speakers of my rental car, faltering and fumbling, a mirror of my own emotions.
"Holocene", the song that got me, has remained moving in the months since, in moods sunny and stoic as well as worn out and wrung dry. Beneath the surface beauty of the chiming guitars and close harmonies, far more ambivalent tensions are at play-- pedal steel sighing against muted vibraphones, weary handclaps, a quiet squall of clarinets. The rising and falling chord changes create a sense of motion that develops throughout the whole song, a tide-like ebb and flow that ends with an abrupt denouement, so swift it withholds almost as much pleasure as it yields.
It doesn't hurt that the lyrics are vague enough to lend themselves to open-ended interpretation. ("Hulled far from the highway aisle," I read, and feel none the wiser, even after trying out various homophones.) The way they're overdubbed, consonants garbling together at the edges of Vernon's fraught falsetto, only further smudges their intelligibility. Beyond the cryptic references presumably knowable only to Vernon and his intimates, we're left with a few boldly declarative statements: "At once I knew I was not magnificent," surely a universal feeling, at least outside the 1%; and "I could see for miles, miles, miles," a tweak on an old staple from the Who, but with the drama inverted, the horizon internalized and turned back upon itself. Anyone who's ever driven late at night towards an unknown destination will recognize this stretch of road. --Philip Sherburne
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__Photo by Anouck Bertin
01. M83: "Midnight City" [Mute]
The strange career arc of M83 has seen Anthony Gonzalez move from epic drones to futuristic bombast to romantic new wave. Though there are clear threads, it's been a process of zooming in, from expansive and open-ended drift to small, tightly-packed nuggets of pop emotion. And that long movement over the event horizon leads to "Midnight City", M83's most powerful and emotionally triumphant track.
Gonzalez has been comfortable in the realm of proper songwriting for a while, showing expertise in terms of fitting verses, choruses, and instrumental bridges into tracks you might play alone at a piano. But what's most striking about "Midnight City" at first is that a huge part of its story comes from sound alone: its four compressed minutes pack in propulsive beats, urgent layers of vocals, loads of catchy synths, an insistent rhythm loop, and a zeitgeist-y saxophone outro that lets it all unravel just when it gets to be too much.
Beyond the force of the sound, "Midnight City"'s code is tough to crack. You can listen to it a ridiculous number of times without needing to know what Gonzalez is even singing about. On one hand, it's simply an impressionistic ode to city life, but it also feels like his ultimate tribute to the music that brought him here. He's talked in interviews about the influence of the Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, and from one angle "Midnight City" comes off like Gonzalez's "1979". The parallels are there, from the instantly memorable riff to the gentle sense of longing, but "Midnight City" feels like a song destined to move and change as it continues into the future. Rather than tapping into our collective memory, it's a soundtrack for building new ones. --Brandon Stosuy
