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Archives : all posts by Sean
by Sean
Hi everyone! Can you believe it's been a year? It's been a year. You deserve a hug, a rest, a fruitcake. Here's some plain green tea, here's a priceless emerald, here are my 100 favourite songs of 2022: songs I love more than new kings, cold soup, or downloading my private data from an obsolescing social media network.
This was a good year for music. There was something encouraging about the weather: a sense that somehow despite all the economic forces stacked against them, musicians were up to stuff. Scenes were happening. New sounds were blowing in.
Said the Gramophone is an old blog and we publish rarely. For the past year or two, the place has been regularly, uh, hacked. Literally, hacked. I'd like to protect the ole' site by upgrading its (pretty big) archives from Movable Type to Wordpress; this requires some advanced stylesheet and javascript jiggery-pokery, and it's beyond my abilities. I don't really have any money to spend, but if you're a generous & experienced CSS wizard/WordPress mechanic, and think you might be able to oversee this, please get in touch. (I've already received some wonderful support from Anthony--thank you!)
What you'll find below is my 18th annual list of the best songs in a given 12-month period. See previously: 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021. I follow just one arbitrary rule: that no primary artist may appear twice.
The best way to browse the proceeding is to click the little arrow beside each song and then to listen as you read. The things you like you can then download by right- or ctrl-clicking with your mouse.
You can also download the complete 100 songs in three parts:
songs 1-33 (311mb)
songs 34-66 (241mb)
songs 67-100 (252mb)
(mirror: part 1 2 3 / 1 2 3 / please share any others)
If you have problems with pop-up ads I recommend installing uBlock Origin.
I have also created a Spotify playlist for these tunes (#30 is unavailable). Remember: pay for the music you enjoy, which is to say: buy albums on bandcamp, on vinyl, purchase merch at shows. Now more than ever, giving money to Spotify or Apple is insufficient.
This list is my work—me, Sean, and not any of Said the Gramophone's other past contributors. Don't blame them for my teetering taste.
If this is your first time at Said the Gramophone, please don't hesitate to page through the archives. Papercuts await! You can also follow me on Twitter or read my books: I'm the author of two novels—Us Conductors, from 2014, which reimagines the story of the theremin, and The Wagers, a novel about luck. My third book, Do You Remember Being Born? will be published in Fall 2023 with Astra House 🇺🇸 and Random House Canada 🇨🇦; it's the story of a poet who goes to California to write a poem with an AI. Learn more about these—or get the ebook/audiobook/French/Italian/Czech translations—via my author website.
Among the artists below, 36 are American (the lowest ever), 19 are Canadian, 18 are British, and there are seven Nigerian artists (the most ever), two each from Sweden, New Zealand, Australia and Japan, and one from each of Norway, Jamaica, Brazil, Ireland, France, Colombia, South Africa, Spain, the Congo, Denmark, Mexico, and Guatemala. 51 of the frontpeople/bandleaders are men, 48 are women, at least one identifies as non-binary, and there are 0 mixed duos. This is the way it worked out; it certainly ain't perfect. Here are some charts of this and past lists' demographics.
My favourite songs of the year do not necessarily speak to my favourite albums of the year. Songs and LPs are really different; this year especially, a lot of my favourite music can't rightly be recommended in the form of single 2-8 minute "tracks."
My favourite albums of 2022 were:
Big Thief - Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (listen/buy);
Caroline - s/t (listen/buy);
Branko Mataja - Over Fields And Mountains (listen/buy);
Lisa LeBlanc - Chiac Disco (listen/buy);
Daniel Villarreal - Panama '77 (listen/buy);
Fortunato Durutti Marinetti - Memory's Fool (listen/buy);
Oren Ambarchi / Johan Berthling / Andreas Werliin - Ghosted (listen/buy);
Shabason & Krgovich - At Scaramouche (listen/buy);
Vieux Farka Touré and Khruangbin - Ali (listen/buy);
Florist - s/t (listen/buy); and
Sam Gendel - blueblue (listen/buy).
I promise: all of these are tremendous, worthy of investing time.
And now, without any further rigamarole, a dirigible of proudly mixed metaphors:
(original artwork by Midjourney - gulp)
Harry Styles - "As It Was" [buy]
2022 was one of those years with a song. Not a song that encapsulates a feeling or represents a moment, but one that simply registers - a "that one pop-song" to have heard and possibly fallen for, like "Call It Maybe," "Paper Planes" or "Gangsta's Paradise" (rip). When I ask people what they've loved this year, "As It Was" is inevitably the one they say at the end - "and that Harry Styles song, of course" - and it's astonished me that so many of the year's Best Songs lists underrate it. Because - of course. Light-years better than anything else on Harry's House, light-years better than almost anything else on the radio - and among the longest-running #1 singles in Billboard history. "As It Was" was written by Styles and two other pop pros, but there are other artists' fingerprints all over it: the synth-pop influences of A-ha and the Weeknd, the bee-stung melancholy of Clairo and Rostam.
"As It Was" is a skimmer, not a millstone. It starts and stays airborne, bearing the listener with a magnetic, silvery force. There's no real catharsis, no real release - just the pleasure of a sorrow only lightly held, on the verge of being discarded. Keys glimmer and bells toll; drums dog-trot on, with a medallion swinging 'round their necks. Late in the song, Styles does his best John Lennon megaphone rant; you have the sense of a man who relishes the chance to represent his musical country, to stand up and do whatever's necessary for the tune.
Caroline - "Dark Blue" [buy]
I missed "Dark Blue" when it was first fired up into the sky, a lonely roman candle, almost three years ago. But credit the algorithm, Facebook's dark and malevolent magic, that offered Caroline up to me when they came to town this fall. In a matter of days, this sprawling English band had become my favourite discovery in years: a group of droning, noisy, wistful seekers that inhabit the spaces between Songs:Ohia, Mogwai and Maher Shalal Hash Baz. Their self-titled debut album became one of my most-played records of the year, its grooves nearly worn through, and I can't remember the last time I was more determined to attend a gig than the night they played La Sala Rossa. Throughout it all, "Dark Blue," Caroline's opening track, remained its rarest treasure: a song of longing that feels like it exists just on the verge of achieving; a song of veering fiddles, of weaving electric guitars, of bass-drum thump, that sounds like a wish not quite fulfilled.
Big Thief - "Change" [buy]
Big Thief's "Little Things" was my #1 tune of 2021; "Change" is the next best thing on Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You, a record which transformed the way I feel about this band, which catapulted them high into a gallery of folk-rock clairvoyants. It's the album's opening song, a tune as soft as a first touch - but it'll reach right into you, a hand through skin and sinew, lending a shimmer to the place your heart beats.
Chronixx - "Never Give Up" [buy]
Produced by Inflo, because everything great seems to be produced by Inflo, and galvanized by its delicious guitar and bass; but illuminated by Chronixx, the singer at its centre, whose reggae has that rare, beacon quality: it needs only flash at you, catch your eye the once, to make you change your course.
Shabason & Krgovich - "In the Middle of the Day" [buy]
Joseph Shabason's a friend of mine now, but Nicholas Krgovich is not - he's a singer I've followed for more than 20 years, since his days in P:ano and No Kids. So I hope he won't mind when I describe some of the lyrics on At Scaramouche as "lightly silly." Not, like, Monty Python silly - but Aki Kaurismäki silly, or Don Delillo silly, or Phife Dawg silly. It's an approach learned from hip-hop, I'm certain, even if Krgovich is applying it to a music more closely linked to dewy-eyed bedroom singers and the lo-fi indie rock of the Pacific NW. "In the Middle of the Day" is like a damp, sensuous revision of "Fools Gold." Krgovich croons carefully over breakbeats, keyboards and a surprisingly wakeful electric bass. Shabason provides synth flutes, scratched trumpets, and a squelch like sentient lichen. "Tempted to 'Rock Around The Clock,'" goes the slow-motion second verse, "and ignore what I can. / Lil' discomfort / a mild upset / swirl of dead leaves collect." Truly, there may never have been a pop song to so vividly bring to life the comfort and sag of a sprawling afternoon.
Rosalía - "SAOKO" [buy]
One of my dearest modern artists returns with a song which thrusts and stomps and constantly thwarts expectations. Yes, there's sway and gnash, the jut of a cocksure chin, but Rosalía is fearless with her song-structure and even "SAOKO"'s interjections: I still can't get over the jazz piano break that comes 90 seconds into the track.
more* - "I Believe In You" [website]
"I Believe In You" has the lope and longing of a classic 70s singer-songwriter tune, Jackson Browne or even Harry Nilsson, with a little filigree of fake-choir + and baroqueish fingerpicking. He's singing about making a choice - him or the other guy, you gotta pick - and honestly it's hard to imagine anyone picking somebody else, not with a song like this, the kind that lights candles with its gaze.
Bibi Club - "Femme-Lady" [buy]
Montreal's Bibi Club is a collaboration between the real-life couple of Adèle Trottier-Rivard and Nicolas Basque, who plays with Plants & Animals. Their debut, Le soleil et la mer, is a tribute to going out and also to staying in - a record that registers the rapture waiting even in your own living-room, dancing with the people you love. "Femme-Lady" is a nickname for a beloved family heirloom, a pineapple-shaped chandelier, and the song that bears this title shimmers with a similar sense of dearness and play. Inspired by Stereolab, Neu and Alice Coltrane, with the mingled voices of Trottier-Rivard's mother + sister and the filigreed curls of Basque's guitar. (Full disclosure: Earlier this year, I was paid by Bibi Club's label to write some marketing materials.)
Rahill - "Haenim" [buy]
"Haenim," by New York-based Rahill, is a cover of a 1973 single by the South Korean artist Kim Jung Mi. Rahill translated the original lyrics into Farsi, and she sings handsomely, in an undecorated voice - but the masterstroke is the way she reinforces the second, downward-rolling half of the main instrumental melody, with piano as well as guitar. This small change gives "Haenim" an even stronger sense of nostalgia and inevitability, a comforting solidity that makes it a perfect tonic for the end of a hard day, or the closing credits of an imaginary Wes Anderson film.
Thus Owls - "I Forget What I Remembered" [buy]
Imagine a naturalist standing in the grass at nightfall, a staff in one hand, a net in the other, watching the fireflies come out. Imagine a detective on the trail of a thief, six months into their investigation, at the moment the trail of footprints disappears. Imagine a musician lying on the floor, staring at a revolving ceiling fan. Erika Angell sings a set of interlocking questions, grasps at a set of interlocking answers: "How true can anything become / and how do we know the difference?" Saxophones lift and get lost; Simon Angell springs traps with his guitar; Sam Joly plays his drums as if eVeRyThIng's jUsT fIne, don't worry, we're almost there. (NB: Thus Owls are dear friends - and I wrote their bio.)
Carla Morrison - "Diamantes" [buy]
From Mexico. Measured and addictive, with a chorus that rises from troposphere into mesosphere, high enough to feel a meteor brush by.
Hikaru Utada - "Somewhere Near Marseilles" [buy]
A hard left turn for the long-time j-pop star, which follows last year's disclosure that they're non-binary. "Somewhere Near Marseilles" is spasming, technicolour acid house, with a sound that bends and dilates over its 12 minutes. Produced by none less than Floating Points (see last year's album with Pharoah Sanders), and it speaks to the producer's enduring breadth, and his ear for collaboration. Utada has conceived of something here that lives in a supple, yearning space between Beth Orton and Daft Punk.
Paul Dally - "Back of a Cab" [more]
Despite its singer's Merle Haggard-like tenor and the song's background twang, "Back of a Cab" is most closely aligned to an obsolete Manhattan anti-folk. Dally's drum machine patters; a cheap acoustic rings out; he repeats his sloppy, catchy supplications. It's like an ode to an unscratched itch and also the scratching of that itch, straightforward and nourishing.
Florist - "Sci-fi Silence" [buy]
A song that moves on moonbeams.
Tove Lo - "No One Dies From Love" [buy]
Tove Lo's become my favourite purveyor of trashy Scandi-pop: "trashy" because she always feels like that guest at the party who's trying a bit too hard, shouting out swear-words or stripping off her shirt. In that sense, "No One Dies From Love" shows surprising restraint: it's just Ebba Tove Elsa Nilsson singing that her break-up's going to kill her. "No one dies from love / Guess I'll be the first," she explains. "Will you remember us / or are the memories too stained with blood now?" Classy!
Fortunato Durutti Marinetti - "All Roads" [buy]
I love this low, slow album by Fortunato Durutti Marinetti, aka Daniel Colussi - a record that evokes, for me, Songs from a Room, Pink City and Chris Cohen's Overgrown Path. Colussi snatches from "Street Hassle" and "Astral Weeks" for the spirit of "Memory's Fool" - a sound that feels like onwards & upwards + also onwards & downwards, a reminder that moving into the future isn't only abandoning the past but discovering that it stays with you, stuck like a burr or perhaps like the sweat on your back, regret and tooth decay, the faint impression of a kiss. Singer-songwriters are a dime a dozen; I'd give Fortunato Durutti Marinetti a dollar, I'd give him ten.
Sleepy Hallow ft. 347aidan - "Die Young" [buy]
"Die Young"'s strange magic comes down to the involvement of 19-year-old 347aidan, aka Aidan Fuller, from Cambridge, Ontario. Maybe he lives in New York now, maybe he and Sleepy Hallow laid down tracks in a Flatbush studio, maybe 347aidan's drooping and generic, maybe he's already lost any of what set him apart. But on "Die Young" he still had it - a strange magic i said, strident and yet also somehow fumbling, world-weary and childlike, a looped sample that feels like a kid calling sadly down the hall, "I don't want to die young!" So don't, Aidan. Go to school, take care of yourself, be good.
Dry Cleaning - "Anna Calls from the Arctic" [buy]
Dry Cleaning make a case against invention. They use an old recipe: post-punk zig-zag, guitar labyrinth, a singer singing nonsense overtop. But they're refined it, reinvented it. Florence Shaw doesn't quite sound like anyone else. Her bandmates don't either. "Anna" gives a whiff of Baxter Dury or Life Without Buildings or Robert Wyatt, but what's a whiff? As the song goes on the weather comes in. Nothing feels settled or complacent. There's no invention, but the reinvention's rich: the words, the music, they glitter. It is excellent; this is sufficient. I mean, just listen:
Nothing works
everything's expensive
and opaque
and privatised.
My shoe organising thing arrived
I don't want to go on about it
but we're back in business.
The 1975 - "Wintering" [buy]
I do adore "Part of the Band," but the chorus (of all things!) is a weakness, and so my pick from Being Funny in a Foreign Language is this, a kind of Christmas carol - a manic end-of-movie everything-is-happening tribute to going home, and going mad, and how you can never really go home, not really, but you love your family, you love being alive, you love the snowflakes wheeling wildly on the grass. The 1975 and Rosalía are the only major contemporary artists I can imagine ever paying to go see in an arena, not just because they make good music but because of their appreciation for theatre, spectacle, and the braiding of meaning and affect.
Men I Trust - "Billie Toppy" [buy]
I like this twist for Montreal's Men I Trust - a turn toward what's noir and spidery, mysterious, like the car-case at the heart of a Murakami novel. And then the chorus: glittering like the interior of someone's Paula Abdul-themed jewelry box.
The Golden Dregs - "American Airlines" [pre-order]
In a pantheon of weird modern songwriters, the Golden Dregs' Benjamin Woods could pose on a pillar next to Aldous Harding, Cate Le Bon and Benjamin Clementine. He sings "American Airlines" like a Disney-animated St. Bernard - in a sloughy, genteel baritone that makes delicious contrast against his band's tasteful soul. There's a world contained within this song, one with different gravity and governments.
Brad Barr - "Two Hundred and Sixteen" [buy]
Solo guitar from one half of the Barr Brothers (i was hired to write his bio for this album) - a track that has stayed with me, a kind of haunting, the kind of music that feels as if you've always known it, like the lines on your hand.
The Nunnery - "Floating Garden" [buy]
"Your Woman," "Hide and Seek", "Fiya" - the long tradition of a one-person band making a mini bedroom masterpiece. "Floating Garden" sounds like spun gold and sturdy carpentry, Sarah Elstran's hand-hewn love dancing on the head of a pin.
Destroyer - "June" [buy]
This tune only truly reaches lift-off in its second half, with a (brilliant) knock-knee'd guitar solo and an extended spoken-word breakdown. Bejar steadily goes off the rails - or really just climbs onto narrower, faster, weirder rails, a monorail heading across the bay and into a tunnel, where shadows skew and loom, where animatronics stutter-stop, and pitch drifts, and a cow-bell comes roaring out of the dark. "Flippin' the pages of Chatelaine..." "Absent friends," he later asks - "Where'd you go?"
Rozi Plain - "Prove Your Good" [buy]
"Now the favourites are changing," Rozi Plain intones, on a song that balances its ominousness and its gift. You've been carrying something for a long, long time and you may finally put it down. Art-pop from England that flinches and settles in equal measure, unsettled and kind.
Congotronics International - "Super Duper Rescue Allstars" [buy]
Members of Konono No.1, Kasai Allstars, Wildbirds & Peacedrums (and many others) come together here to absolutely crash through Deerhoof's "Super Duper Rescue Allstars" - with help from Deerhoof themselves. It's noisy and messy and jubilant, like a paper dragon run through a shredder and fired up as confetti.
Sault - "Life We Rent But Love Is Rent Free" [buy]
Once, in a park in Kraków, I saw a small rock combo performing on a stage. All the performers were priests, actual priests - young ones - performing to a crowd of nuns. Toes were tapped, feedback was loosed, God was praised. Sault are from England, not Poland; they're one of the most gifted R&B acts int he world. (After releasing my favourite song of 2020 and another album in 2021, they released six LPs in 2022.) But I'm reminded of Kraków's holy racket listening to this dusty, lo-fi praise music; I'm even reminded of the grey light.
Zion & Lennox X Danny Ocean - "Brisa" [video]
Said the Gramophone regulars will have registered my affection for steelpans, however fake they may be. And "Brisa"'s panning certainly doesn't feel real: it feels studio-engineered, optimized, a Puerto Rican virus unleashed upon the world's parties. But every time the drums pause + the steelpans count down I'm ready for another drop, my fists are bunched and I'm grinning.
Alvvays - "Tom Verlaine" [buy]
Whether it's Molly Rankin's private heartache or an answer to Tom Verlaine's own tune, "Tom Verlaine" has a vividness that changes the afternoon + ripples the air. Rankin's voice is like the bluest end of the spectrum, a place where harmonies start to come apart.
Bandmanrill - "Don't Make Me Crash" [video]
"Don't Make Me Crash"'s unlicensed sample has swept it from the upstanding corners of the internet, but the world needs "Don't Make Me Crash" - it needs its lush assailing hunch, its sturdiness, its Honey I Shrunk The Kids approach to Miguel, with the singer transformed into a ululating mini-Grimes.
SCUDFM - "One Thing" [buy]
Jarvis Cocker and Sleaford Mods on the French Riviera, reclining in chaises longues, telling it how it is. Also: flute.
Carly Rae Jepsen - "Western Wind" [buy]
You're nearly there, just two more steps, the whole valley's going golden. Unhurried, peaceful, with a drumbeat tugging toward a future.
Wizkid ft. Skillibeng & Shenseea - "Slip N Slide" [buy]
When you pick up a nice new floaty and toss it into the pool, steadying yourself in the sunshine before you attempt to jump on top.
L7nnon and Os Hawaianos ft. DJ Bel da Cdd & DJ Biel do Furduncinho - "Desenrola Bate Joga de Ladin" [video]
I love this lurching, queasy tranche of Brazilian funk carioca, a track that sounds like a CD that's stuck and skipping. If at first it sounds broken, give it a moment to reset and start again: like the limp of an evil mastermind, the squint of a beauty. 129 million views and counting.
Alex G - "Runner" [buy]
A kind of bromance anthem, but sewn through with goodness and warmth and a sort of musical nobility. Despite Alex G's yowl, despite his promise of having done "a couple bad things," the band's all upstanding, ceremonious, like a gazebo.
Florence + the Machine - "Free" [buy]
A whirl-around-the-room kind of marvel, Florence Welch's luscious singing nailed in place by the tidy tick-tock beat.
Karol G - "Provenza"" [video]
Karol is unrelated, first of all, to Alex. A successor to Shakira, she is probably my favourite of the current slate of Latin American pop-stars, and "Provenza" was a worldwide hit - I discovered it browsing YouTube's global music chart (544m views!). Still, it's an unconventional hit, most easily comparable to Drake's "Passionfruit" (a mere 135m views): melancholy, understated, content to await your attention. But I have spent some hours listening to it on loop, listening and moving to its weather.
Mabe Fratti - "Esta Vez" [buy]
Fratti is a cellist living in Mexico City. Her forward-facing (mostly) acoustic music has a little of Duval Timothy to it, a little of Arthur Russell's oaken folk, but the structure of a song like "Este Vez" follows its own refreshing grammar. It's a song filled with entrances and only few exits: the accumulation of new forces, like winds swirling through a vestibule.
Cate Le Bon - "Moderation" [buy]
A birthday cake with tasty little pearls of antifreeze.
Future ft. Tems and Drake - "Wait For U" [buy]
Speaking of Aubrey, here he is with Future and the Nigerian singer Tems, gliding through shadows and flipping coins. I don't care about lyrics in a song like this - it's all vibes, wistful vibes, a hip-hop of receding protagonists.
Flock of Dimes - "Pure Love" [buy]
Lilt and squiggle with just the right amount of thump: Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner creates a New Wave tune with style, verve and real force. "All my loving," she sings - part-lover, part inter-dimensional siren - as if the Beatles' '63 single was left to grow in the heart of a star.
Another Michael - "Water Pressure" [buy]
Look at these likeable youths, listen to their likeable harmonies, a folk-rock of friendships and spearmint and sundown's orange light. "What am I gonna do? / Good water pressure could come through," sing Philly's Another Michael, as if a public utility is a moral good, as if you could fix the world by burning some CDs for your pals, slipping them into a padded envelope. Maybe so.
Zinoleesky & Tiwa Savage - "Jaiye Foreign" [video]
I don't rightly understand the meaning of the words "Jaiye Foreign," nor how a Black Nigerian man took up the nickname Zinoleesky. It doesn't necessarily matter: "Jaiye Foreign"'s weird ripple lets it skip all around a room, delighting the ear. The richness of contemporary afrobeats: a sound that feels like it could contain everything, like it's big enough to interpret the whole world.
Old Fire ft. Bill Callahan - "Corpus" [buy]
It starts out a little shaky, but by the mid-way point on "Corpus," I'm sitting contentedly in Bill Callahan's thrall. Old Fire cast a spell of guitars, strings and drones - they slow down the light until I can see each individual photon; until I can hear wavelets moving across the bay. Like a Serge Gainsbourg tune at half speed, and more beguiling than anything (for me) on Callahan's own 2022 release.
Nilüfer Yanya - "anotherlife" [buy]
The unreality of a break-up, captured in Nilüfer Yanya's lyrics but also the crystalline inventions of "anotherlife"'s sounds. The London singer sounds like she has one foot in today and another in tomorrow, she's forward-looking and also brooding, ready to move on just as soon as the stars change.
Evan J Cartwright - "and you've got nobuddy" [buy]
A little Calvin Johnson, a little Lester Young - lo-fi folk that dips and pivots like a skater in the bowl. A cherubic troubadour, backpack full of Dickinson.
Beirut - "Two Blue Eyes (BER-ABQ Version)" [buy]
This is the Berlin-Albuquerque version of "Two Blue Eyes," but it's not clear to me Beirut's ever released another version. In it, Zach Condon asks a question that many people have asked before: "Did I fall in love with you, or did I fall in love with California?" The implication, imho, is that it was probably California. That's OK, forgiveable. California's very nice. And, in general, this music's dulcet rhythm seems to lend agreement. It'll be all right, it seems to say. Everything will be fine.
Saba - "One Way or Every Ni**a With a Budget" [buy]
Saba raps and sings about being a little rich: not a blues but a blue-gold-greys, a mixture of pride and resolve and a crumb of trouble. Already he's developed a taste for sweetness, luxury, string sections. "One Way..." sounds good, like it was purchased at an expensive store; put it on your mantel.
Asake ft. Olamide - "Omo Ope" [buy]
Nigeria's answer to Bad Bunny, Asake is a man who knows how to stand and regale you, how to show off a watch. He and Olamide could start an ice-cream shop and just stand outside, talking about the ice-cream, never serving a single scoop. I can imagine the line.
Jenny Hval - "American Coffee" [buy]
Hval's astral soprano leads us from shimmering memory into a vivid, groovy present - a woman at the cinema with a painful UTI; a vision of alternate lives, paths not taken. It's electric and alive, the sort of art that stuns you with its imagination: a musician can do anything, make any sound, tell any story, do it however they want, imagine!
Caitlin Rose ft. Courtney Marie Andrews - "Nobody's Sweetheart" [buy]
A country-rock duet in dusty rose and black pepper. Rose and Andrews' voices meet at a kind of mirrored edge, the same knifey interval that gives the McGarrigle Sisters their savagery.
Widowspeak - "Everything Is Simple" [buy]
I'm not sure who Molly Hamilton is singing to or against - herself? an idol? an enemy? Singers tend to hide the truth, she breathes. What do you expect, it serves them well / to edit anything that's fit to tell. It's a song that feels like hypnosis: dark chords, a pendulum swing, the sense of falling into (or out of) a dream.
Cass McCombs - "Karaoke" [buy]
Cass McCombs makes his question thrillingly literal: are you, a karaoke singer, karaoke-ing me? Are you for real? The gift is the pleasure of it all, the tempo and arrangement - a reminder of all the times you've enjoyed a lie too much to call it out.
Pheelz ft. BNXN - "Finesse" [video]
More Nigerian R&B, occupied with the usual stuff: desire, decency, the decision whether or not to "Netflix and chill." This no fugazi, Pheelz sings, in the Sicilian sense, and although I don't quite believe him I'm delighted to hear him plead his case.
Nick Hakim - "Happen" [buy]
A song so drowsy it begins to come apart, its coupled molecules drifting out toward the Kuiper Belt.
Drake - "Sticky" [buy]
Never mind what Drake's going on about - just turn up the volume and pour yourself through the night, down the tunnel like a fast car, all the light unnatural.
Mon Doux Saigneur -"Art vivant" [buy]
Ringing, triumphant power-pop from Montreal's radiant & bloody Mon Doux Saigneur. A love song for a person you've not seen in forever - a promise that it would be a good time if you went out tonight. Listen to those guitar runs, the crash of the lovestruck cymbal.
Georgia Harmer - "Headrush" [buy]
There's a certain kind of rock'n'roll that doesn't feel as if it should need a dry space, electricity. You should be able to play it at the bend of a river, in the middle of a field, somewhere moss is growing and birds can land.
Beyoncé - "Break My Soul" [buy]
My ambivalence to house and disco makes Renaissance a bit of a tough sell, but whenever "Break My Soul" comes on, the whole room starts to bounce. More than anything, I admire Beyoncé's singing: she makes the choice to be present, alive, where a lesser star might content herself with a riderless horse.
Sylvan Esso - "Didn't Care" [buy]
Sylvan Esso's Amelia Meath writes a messy, deconstructed song about falling in love with someone she doesn't even like that much, whom she never dreamed about - even if now, well, she's "in awe." I love the tune, the wriggle of it, the hope (and the bass!), but tbh, Amelia, I'm not sure this is going to work out.
Jnr Choi ft. Gunna - "To The Moon (remix)" [video]
There's not much to this song besides Sam Tompkins' hook, but mood, mood, mood - moonlight piercing the night like a dagger, icy cold.
Flume ft. Caroline Polachek - "Sirens" [video]
The deadly kind of sirens, I figure, not the wet, French kind. Or maybe the kind that howls on the top of an ambulance - listen to Polachek's voice, oddly sweet underneath all that digital writhing. Mozart might have liked this kind of electronic music, at least after a mild concussion; imagine him in his Viennese bed, a wet cloth over his brow, waiting for the throbbing to subside.
Cash Cobain & Tata - "Back It Up" [video]
Reminds me of "Racks on Racks" with its ceaseless chatter - but Cash Cobain's much more friendly than Lil Pump, he seems like he'd buy you a drink, invite you to an escape room; like maybe he'd be good at pinball, at filleting fish, and at the end of the day he'd put on a good song. Yes, Cash and Tata would like some ladies to press their butts to their mid-sections, but the former at least understands he must issue an invitation, and maybe close with a handshake.
Dougie Poole - "High School Gym" [buy]
Dougie Poole's got a dream, a sour and golden one. It unfolds over four minutes of patient, vaguely psychedelic country, and the music perfectly captures the feeling fo the words: the glow of remembrance, the candlelight of it, even when the memory's not so nice. Sometimes remembering's about savouring, reliving; other times it's about revising: pretending you can roll the dice again.
Dunnie - "More (ko ko ko)" [buy]
There's a little of Brazilian "cucurrucucú" in this orange-slice of Nigerian pop - Dunnie pours a little sugar, pours a little more, until "More" can't bear any more, it's sweet enough to hurt your teeth. A serene honeytrap.
Yoko Ono and ANOHNI - "I Love You Earth (Thomas Bartlett remix)" [buy]
This too might have been too sweet, but Thomas Bartlett (fka Doveman) transfigures the collaboration between Yoko Ono and ANOHNI (fka Antony), rearranging its crescendo into a distorted, occasionally mournful arc. I love the juxtaposition of ANOHNI's polyphonic cybernetics against Ono's fragile, aging humanity. Bartlett's piano is just right, dark as a smoke-soaked night sky.
Frankie Cosmos - "Empty Head" [buy]
A song about spilling-over, the too-much inside, and also about stillness, silence, and maybe a love-song too, a song about the see-saw life, the way it is and isn't and therefore always is.
Charli XCX - "Lightning" [buy]
You can use the first minute of this song to lay out and sweep a checkerboard dance-floor, polish it to shining, so that when the song shifts gears - elevating in a series of assonant syllables, light/ning/light/nin' etc. - you're all set, ready to throw shapes and do the splits; I don't want anyone to get hurt.
Li'l Andy - "In a Gingham Dress (analog tape Version)" [buy]
For 2022, Montreal's Li'l Andy created an omnibus of an album: a 2XLP+novel imagining the story of a fictional country singer, Hezekiah Procter, who tramped through interwar North America with a band of like-minded fools. Andy recorded two versions of each song: one on ca. 1937 wire recorder, the other on a half-inch tape machine. This rendition of "In a Gingham Dress" comes from the second collection - and I love the glee of it, the rambunctious joy, as Andy + a fiddle + a banjo + an unfettered sousaphone clamour about a pretty girl and their Saturday-night plans. It's the kind of song you want to crowd into a cabin with, let it claw all over you like a cat.
Aldous Harding - "Leathery Whip" [buy]
Part-vixen, part-gremlin, New Zealand's Aldous Harding creates a music that's as tempting as it is discomfiting, unsettling the listener who dares to lay his head on her shoulder. I can't quite tell you what "Leathery Whip" is about, but it's hideous and mischievous and also a little exciting, like an imp who is occupying a section of your night-table. Harding plays with her voice, from sneering falsetto to sly cowboy drawl, with additional help from producer John Parish - whose tremoring harmony is wonderful, horrible (and perfect).
Julia Michaels - "Sorry To Me Too" [video]
I like the unblinking skip-skip-skip of this, Michaels' blubby ballad set to an arrangement that won't wait around, that's in a stupid hurry, as if sorrow can be rushed past if you only run fast enough.
JID ft. 21 Savage & Baby Tate - "Surround Sound" [video]
JID's flow just pure entertainment, a rat-a-tat of rhyme that twists and kinks around a "Ms. Booty" sample; then 21 Savage with his own dark-mirrored bid. The track resets at the half-way mark, offering a second solution to the same puzzle, extra instructions I'm not sure we need.
Dehd - "Window" [buy]
Like Phil Spector or the Jesus & Mary Chain, the kids in Dehd recognize the virtues of a kick-drum. "Window" is all electric guitar and hoarse throats and BOOM BOOM BOOM, a shining tumult meant to wash the glass clear.
Sha EK ft. PGF Nuk - "We Droppin'" [video]
The hardest song I loved in 2022, just ferocious, with a wobbling rhythm that feels like falling down Cooper's Hill.
070 Shake - "Cocoon" [buy]
Blackly rippling, with an oxycontin shiver, "Cocoon" is all tension and release, tension and release, as if a single EDM drop could be distributed into a complete stockade: an array of heart-plunging epiphanies, none of them really earned.
Casey MQ ft. Petal Supply - "Telephone Light" [buy]
Glistening, glorious hyperpop, made mighty not by its pitchshifts but by the verve of its original singing: the streeetch of the vocals, vowel-sounds bending, like fairies naming their pets.
CMAT - "Lonely" [buy]
Glorious, savvy, Irish country music, mildly evocative of (Englishwoman) Katy J Pearson's marvelous "Willie of Winsbury" from last year. CMAT is aka Dublin's Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson, with a voice as coppery as her hair. Small details - plucked banjo, lap steel, her own backing "ah-ah-ahs" - make the whole plaintive thing feel jeweled, a mournfulness like a bijou in your drawer.
Lewis Capaldi - "Forget Me" [buy]
I could not, despite my efforts, convince my partner about this song. Maybe that's to her credit. But I love the brash candour of Capaldi here: the relentless way he sings his affections, calls for love, like Phil Collins after a chocolate-strawberry energy drink.
The Beths - "Expert in a Dying Field" [buy]
"Expert..." makes an interesting triad with Tove Lo's #15 and Nilüfer Yanya's #45: three women's break-up songs, each one a different configuration of sadness, rage and resignation, each one illuminating a different corner of the ever-after. The Beths' spiky pop-punk is undercut by Elizabeth Stokes' mild sing-song, her level-headed analysis, but there's something pointed to that tension, too: the irony's aimed at someone, like a poisoned dart.
Spoon - "My Babe" [buy]
There's a ghost in the piano. As Britt Daniel sings to his darling, heat rising, eventually the thing's gonne have to be replaced. And only electric guitar will do.
Fontaines DC - "Jackie Down the Line" [buy]
There used to be a bar in downtown Montreal, around the corner from the HMV, where old dudes bought pig's-knuckle sandwiches and sat staring out the window, sipping from giant brown bottles of beer. I spent New Year's Eve there once, had an incredible time.
Two Shell - "home" [buy]
A little slip of gauze, stuck in a ventilation shaft.
Rema - "Oroma Baby" [buy]
Nigerian R&B with style and smarts. Give a prize to the little whirr in the periphery of this song, like a vibrating phone and a whooping crane; makes you want to buy a new appliance, get a bird, slide in next to Rema and see how he makes it work.
Gilli - "Baianá" [website]
The Danish rapper Gilli samples Barbatuques' riotous "Baianá" to impressive effect, tossing easygoing rhyme over jew's harp and gang vocals. A song at the intersection of Anderson.Paak and Le Mystère des voix bulgares, with a silly and contagious essence.
Pup - "Robot Writes A Love Song" [buy]
Pup pay tribute to Grandaddy, telling their own reedy story of a kind-hearted robot. It being Pup, the volume eventually arrives: a dazzling and extended chorus, worthy of a pogo-ing Toronto crowd.
Fresh Pepper - "Congee Around Me" [buy]
While Joseph Shabason perfumes the air, the Deadly Snakes' Andre Ethier and Bernice's Robin Dann sway and stir (rice porridge). Literally the greatest jam ever written about one of my favourite breakfasts. (Worth listening just for their "Mushrooooooms!")
Beth Orton - "Friday Night" [buy]
A song about staying in with a good book on Friday night. And of missing someone terribly, like a wound. And of love. Beth Orton was a foundational voice for me, one of those artists who widened the world of my imaginary. Hearing her here, like this, the years audible in her voice, the wisdom and acquired grace, makes me feel deeply content - and also sad, not for her but for me, at all the roads untravelled, the parallel futures that never came to be. Because you must choose one.
Kendrick Lamar - "United in Grief" [buy]
I will not pretend to be the biggest Kendrick Lamar fan: my brain's too crummy to lyrics, and the elastic of his rhymes don't always twang into my ears. But I love here the energy generated whenever "United in Grief" moves from open piano chords to compressed drums, like a companion that keeps changing shape, he can be whatever you need, fox or raven or magic sword.
Kate Bollinger - "Running" [buy]
Despite its title, despite its lines about hurrying, striving, trying, "Running" is delivered in slow motion: a blossoming at petal speed, subtle and restive, with some of the loveliest guitar-playing in the year 2022.
Haim - "Lost Track" [video]
A miniature, an ornament, throwing light around the room.
Tyla - "To Last" [video]
R&B in a play of textures: verses so soft they could almost come apart, punctuated by lacquer-hard instrumentals, wordless almost, after every chorus. It makes the whole experience tactile, more touched than heard.
Julia Jacklin - "Just To Be A Part" [buy]
Julia Jacklin's cover of the Bill Fay song takes a once-mighty devotion and slowly, purposefully dismantles it. A lover mourning the barest remainder: nothing left than the wish to have been a part of the other person's life. (Thank you, V.C. McCabe)
Kwesta ft. Kabza De Small, Masterpiece YVK & Papta Mancane - "Mrholo Wayizolo" [official]
The South African rapper Kwesta first caught my ear with "'Ngud," one of my favourite tracks from 2016. He has this deep voice - so cavernous it feels like it would have stalactites. On "Mrholo Wayizolo," he teams with Kabza De Small, who is among the leading producers of amapiano, and their sounds make for a fascinating mix. "Mrholo Wayizolo" is an ear-massage operating at multiple frequencies - close-up and distant, subterranean and squeaky. It's so effective that it feels nearly purifying, like a week at a Cape Town spa.
Lydia Képinski - "Vacances-travail" [buy]
There's a kind of road-trip that takes place at a turning-point in a relationship, a crease, and the plainest details acquire a nearly psychedelic force - like eating a too-hot pepper, the way the candles on the table gain a halo. Over subterranean bass, jolly simulated marimba, Képinski sings the dry sweetness of a journey like this: when everything might be changing, or nothing is, and a rest-stop's automatic doors gasp open.
Braxe + Falcon ft. Panda Bear - "Step By Step" [buy]
There's a tactic for giving instructions to a ca. 2022 artificial intelligence: you ask it to take things "step by step". This helps the system to think logically, or at least to seem like it does. This song, featuring Animal Collective's Panda Bear, has nothing to do with this one weird A.I. trick - but at the same time it does, maybe, in that Braxe + Falcon's celestial disco uses plain lyrics and stately drums to short-circuit the frontal lobe of my brain, giving me an immediate sense of comfort and even control.
Hotkid - "Star" [buy]
Steady Nigerian pop, with a phalanx of unusual, oddly sympathetic support-sounds: wooden xylophone, African choir, wheezy synth, and a faint, vaguely Nashville fiddle. I like how matter-of-fact Hotkid sounds, as if he's explaining how he's going to plaster my wall.
The Weeknd - "How Do I Make You Love Me?" [buy]
I love what The Weeknd did with Dawn FM - creating a pop album that's odd and idiosyncratic, its vision deeply understood, never pandering. I suspect it will outlive most of his other work - not for its (ever-dodgy) lyrics, or its singles, but for its clarity. It has such a clear sound: TRON synths; sequenced drums; phased, plaintive hooks. "How Do I Make You Love Me?" might be here for its drum programming alone: a pattern of beats that jumps into my bones, moves through my body like the jolt of fresh calories.
Anaïs Mitchell - "On Your Way (Felix Song)" [buy]
A heart-breaking tribute to Mitchell's friend Felix McTeigue, a songwriter who died in 2020. She sings it breathlessly, as if she's building up the head of steam to carry these words past the border, into the afterlife, but her meaning's constantly skipping back and forward from bittersweet memory to metaphysical hope. "You get one take" is an old, worn metaphor: but Mitchell earns it here, gives it grace. (Thank you Peter and Charlotte.)
GOAT - "Under No Nation (Radio Edit)" [buy]
When the woman lays the necklace around your neck, she tells you not to ever, under any circumstances, eat the blossoms. And yet, of course, you do. You slide a beautiful flower into your mouth. Somewhere nearby, a queen bee watches you from the mouth of the hive.
Lil Yachty - "Poland" [video]
The year's most bewildering rap single - a tribute to pierogies? eastern europe? a long-shot World Cup contender? (No.) Whatever the point of it, I love the plain sway of Yachty's vocoded hook - a reminder of the virtues of simply writing a curious string of words and giving them a catchy tune.
And that's 100 songs, if my counting's correct. Thank you for reading and listening. Sorry for any broken links, please pay for the music you love. (Invest in what's important or we're done for.)
Leave a comment if you like? Tell a friend?
And see you in 12 months!
7:09 AM on Dec 7, 2022.
Show comments (28) »
thank you as always Sean
by cliffdogg, Dec 7, 2022
The only EOY list that matters. Thanks Sean - can't wait to buy the new book!
by Taylor B, Dec 7, 2022
by Fredd, Dec 7, 2022
Thanks again, Sean. I love this list every year. I think it might have been you that got me into Nigerian stuff. Still spinning "This Year" by Zlatan every time I need a lift.
by James, Dec 7, 2022
Thank you. Brilliant as ever.
by Paul, Dec 7, 2022
Kept checking each day in December in hopes this would pop up. Christmas came early! Thank you Sean. Even if it's just once a year, this is the best.
by Brayden, Dec 7, 2022
Thank you for this! Always good to read and listen and know the holidays are on the way! Keep doing what you do :)
by Ben, Dec 7, 2022
your end of year list is such a consistent joy. started reading over a decade ago now and even though the music sphere/internet/everything has changed so much and the blogs not so active anymore, i'm so glad you still do these. i always discover something wonderful
by Fiona, Dec 7, 2022
Thank you so much, Sean! I eagerly look forward to this list every year and appreciate the work you put into it.
by rgsc, Dec 7, 2022
So very good! I love reading your words.
by Janice, Dec 7, 2022
Thank you so much my "old friend" !!! An holydays season without your yearly gift would not be complete. Julien
by Julien, Dec 8, 2022
hooray! thank you. i've been following along for years now; always my favorite end-of-year tradition. i have no particular website experience but please let us know if there's any other way we can support you.
by Nick, Dec 8, 2022
Truly wonderful list this year. Love you, Sean. As others have commented, I would love to help out with any site migration needs.
by Anne, Dec 8, 2022
Echoing the gratitude - for the words, for the music, and for the care that you put into it. Whenever I see you ask for music on Twitter at this time of year, I feel a mix of hope and relief that a list is coming! It's also my birthday this week, and digging into the list always feels like part of my gifts. All my best to you & yours.
by Michelle, Dec 9, 2022
You always introduce me to new music and you always help me rehear, and enjoy more, something I'd previously skimmed over - this time Rosalia and the jazz piano break. Thank you emoji!
by Jen, Dec 9, 2022
Yay! Thank you as always!!
by bankbryan, Dec 11, 2022
by Carcarah, Dec 13, 2022
A seasonal highlight. Thanks for making the time. SMR
by Sheilagh, Dec 16, 2022
what a list! thank you as always
by robbi bobbi, Dec 18, 2022
Thank you so much, I check in to download and listen to your list every year.
One small note: " a "that one pop-song" to have heard and possibly fallen for, like "Call It Maybe," "Paper Planes" or "Gangsta's Paradise" (rip)."
Should it not be "Call Me Maybe"?
by PH, Dec 19, 2022
Thanks so much. This is always a treat.
by Matt, Dec 19, 2022
Been checking and hoping for several days....and now it's here!
FYI I found out in a post on whole lotta nothing
https://a.wholelottanothing.org/2022/12/13/said-the-gramophones-best-music-of-2022-is-out/
One good blog again knows another. Now I'm gonna go thru the list.
Happy Holidays, and thanks, Sean!
by J, Dec 19, 2022
Thank you so much for this amazing list! I've been reading the blog since high school (2008!) and downloading this list has been my favorite winter tradition.
by Em, Dec 21, 2022
my favorite winter tradition too!
although i am shocked & saddened ice spice did not find a place on the list this year. how dare you sir!
by mandrew, Dec 23, 2022
Thank you for another list, from another in the choir that looks forward to it! I looked back to see if I ever posted to say so before, and it seems that I'm delinquent many times over...like over a decade...so thank you x13!! Always at least a few gems that I wouldn't have heard otherwise, always appreciated. See you next year?
by kat, Dec 24, 2022
As always, thank you so much for keeping this yearly list going. Even if the rest of the blog has slowed to a crawl...this is more than enough to keep me coming back now and again. Every new year, I have a hundred new meticulously-selected songs to try out. It's always a balm during an otherwise dismal time of year.
by Patrick, Jan 2, 2023
The gift at the bottom of my Christmas stocking every year. Text and music as always such a pleasure. Many thanks.
by Richard, Jan 9, 2023
Thank you so much, Sean! I look forward to this list every year and can't wait to hear the new music.
by Sharon, Jan 9, 2023
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Hello world! We're still standing. Here are my 100 favourite songs of 2021: songs I love more than sand-worms, insurrections, and successfully traversing the Suez Canal.
Said the Gramophone is an old blog and we publish rarely. Writing about these songs is a tradition now almost two decades old and at this point it feels deeply seasonal -- at the end of November I start feeling like I imagine pumpkins must feel in August; or bears as the first frosts appear. I have something to do now. A habit that's made its way into my bones.
In 2021, I listened to as much or more music than in any year I can remember. I listened from home—because attending concerts was, for a while there, plausibly lethal. Still, I bought a ticket to see Michael Feuerstack and David-Ivar Herman Düne in September, in a basement up the road, and as I whispered along I felt like I was finally waking up from something. That's because I was. And we'll all go on waking.
This year I feel more out of sync with the singles charts than at any other time I can remember. Many of 2021's most popular tunes still don't make any sense to my ears. Perhaps I'm getting old. Perhaps people clung to flimsy sounds. But you know where to find that other stuff if you want to.
What you'll find below is the 17th such list at Said the Gramophone: see 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. I follow just one arbitrary rule: that no primary artist may appear twice.
(mirror: part 1 2 3 / please share any others)
I have also created a Spotify playlist for these tunes (#18 and #62 are missing). (Update: Here it is on Apple Music, with the same absences. Thanks Joey!) Remember: pay for the music you enjoy. Now more than ever. Giving money to Spotify is truly insufficient.
This list is my work—me, Sean, and not any of Said the Gramophone's other contributors. Don't blame them for my unfortunate taste.
If this is your first time at Said the Gramophone, please don't hesitate to page through the dusty archives. You can also follow me on Twitter or read my books: I'm the author of two novels—Us Conductors, from 2014, which reimagines the story of the theremin, and The Wagers, a novel about luck, which the Globe & Mail described as "a literary fireworks display, an explosion of joke-filled energy that manages to be a novel of ideas, but one delivered as if it were a caper story." Learn more—or get the ebook/audiobook/French/Italian/Czech translations via my author website.
Among the artists below, 47 are American, 20 are British (the highest ever), 16 are Canadian (the lowest ever), and there are five Australian, three Swedish, two French, two Nigerian, two Dominican, one Belgian, one Brazilian, one Colombian, one German, one Ghanaian, one Guinean, one Japanese, one Pakistani, one Senegalese, one South African, one Spanish and one Kiwi artist(s). 41 of the frontpeople/bandleaders are men, 56 are women (the most ever?), 0 identify as non-binary, and three are mixed duos. This is the way it worked out; it certainly ain't perfect. Here are some charts of this and past lists' demographics.
My favourite songs of the year do not necessarily speak to my favourite albums of the year. Songs and LPs are entirely different creatures.
Floating Points and Pharaoh Sanders - Promises (listen/buy);
JJJJerome Ellis - The Clearing (listen/buy);
Kacy Hill - Simple, Sweet, and Smiling (buy);
Whitney K - Two Years (listen/buy);
Muito Kaballa Power Ensemble - Mamari (listen/buy);
Lucy Dacus - Home Video (listen/buy);
Mustafa - When Smoke Rises (listen/buy);
Little Simz - Sometimes I Might Be Introvert (listen/buy);
Jason Sharp - The Turning Centre of a Still World (listen/buy);
Myriam Gendron - Ma délire - Songs of love, lost & found (listen/buy);
Low - HEY WHAT (listen/buy);
Weather Station - Ignorance (listen/buy); and
all of Sam Gendel's insane run of records, especially Fresh Bread and Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar More Songs.
I promise: all of these are fantastic, and are worthy of many hours of listening.
And now, without any further rigamarole, a mountain of proudly mixed metaphors:
(original artwork by Eric Metcalfe; photo by Vancouver ArtGallery)
Big Thief - "Little Things" [buy]
The thing I love about this song (incidentally the first Big Thief song I've ever truly adored, with that rose-red shimmer in yr chest) is its press. There's nothing much to it but that press—the ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring of a guitar. Adrienne Lenker murmurs; the drums fall down and get up again; another guitar darts at the periphery; but mostly ring-ring-ring-ring-ring, a hammer that won't stop. Hammer on heart, gold on silver, relentless and shining—this life, this awful splendid life, and its ravish.
Low - "White Horses" [buy]
A song like a ruinous glitch—like a chasm that's unsealed beneath your household, your city, underneath the whole world. Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker sing in stately harmony while the everything around them seethes, shudders, and yet still stands.
Mia Doi Todd ft. Jeff Parker and Money Mark - "Music Life" [buy]
There can be majesty to something natural, intuitive, true. A tune by Mia Doi Todd was one of the first songs I ever reviewed; 20 years later, the gifted singer turns her attention to the years lived in between: the rewards and disappointments of a life given over to music.
Chances are you've got a few friends
who burned the candle at both ends
And every day was a weekend
until the dark night came for them
in a hotel or hospital room
And now you'll be seeing them soon
in dreams and memories bittersweet
And in songs sung so beautifully
Songs sung so beautifully
Life lived so fully.
If you give your life to music.
Jeff Parker's guitar and Money Mark's piano crowd in like so many memories—noisy enough to put the edge on, to keep the sugar from settling, to keep the sparks all suspended in the air.
Indigo de Souza - "Hold U" [buy]
Not to be confused with Masta Ace's 2011 classic (previously), nor Gyptian's "Hold You" (#33 on my Best of 2010), this breakthrough single by the North Carolina musician Indigo de Souza plays in a joyous, nourishing space between stability and lift. It's indie-pop rich in skip and skitter, the lo-fi soar of its choruses. But the undergirding is serious, low and almost mournful—a sequence of organ notes that you could build a foundation on, or a home.
Chlöe - "Have Mercy" [video]
By far my favourite pop (or R&B) song of the year—a cheeky, sinuous debut by Chloe Bailey, one half of Chloe x Halle. Although it stumbled on the charts, I find its allure self-evident, undeniable: the contrast of (frisky) melody and (steely) delivery; Chlöe's charisma; and a production devoted to playfulness, constantly tickling the ear. A tremendous coming-out.
Kacy Hill - "So Loud" [buy]
A supple, golden-hour ballad, trained on Cyndi Lauper, Haim, and the drum breakdown from "In the Air Tonight." From one of my favourite records of the year.
Ben LaMar Gay ft Ohmme - "Sometimes I Forget How Summer Looks On You" [buy]
A birthday-cake-coloured swirl of melody, harmony, and something nearly nauseating. It's easy to imagine "Sometimes I Forget..." as two or three (or five or six) different songs, tea-time soul and spiritual jazz and Flaming Lips'-like churn, but LaMar Gay's command of musical arrangement lets it all work together as one—triumphant, emotional, absolutely unreplicable. A tour de force of tune.
Skiifall ft. Knucks - "Ting Tun Up pt. II" [video]
This is the second version of "Ting Tun Up," but I missed the first (nobody's pefect). The best song by a Montreal rapper... ever? Gleaming in a way that's hard to put into words, illuminated both by YAMA//SATO's rhodes beat and by Skiifall's rolling flow. A sound I want to settle in and dwell inside, like landscape.
Tonstartssbandht - "What Has Happened" [buy]
Like a long joke, like a heartache, like a message rolled up and hidden in a tulip shell. Hard to explain who Tonstarssbandht are, what they do, except to say that "What Has Happened" isn't shaped like anything else you'll ever hear; you've never heard this particular shade of grey.
Ali Sethi & Nicolas Jaar - "Yakjehti Mein" [video]
As much as I loved Nicolas Jaar's latest record with Darkside ("The Limit" might easily have made this list), the rarest treasure of his 2021 is "Yakjehti Mein," a luminous collaboration with the Pakistani singer Ali Sethi. A pair of poems—"Hum dekhenge" and "Aaj bazar mein pa bajola chalo"—written by the great poet Faiz and now set to music in a call for Palestinian liberation. Sethi's voice seems to vibrate at two frequencies—patient and consoling, urgent and plaintive—and Jaar's electronics move around it like jewelled clockwork. Simply extraordinary—and from a rumoured long-player still in the works.
Myriam Gendron - "Shenandoah (II)" [buy]
My son used to attend the same daycare as Myriam Gendron's children and I'd often see her outside on the street, each of us bundling and cajoling and wrangling with the stuff of parenthood. We rarely spoke. Her first record, a transfiguration of poems by Dorothy Parker, was one of my favourite folk releases of the past 25 years. Shyness then, from both of us. But also, I think, a tacit recognition of the work we were each undertaking: the wordless solidarity of our effort and our love. The American traditional "Shenandoah" is probably the keystone of Gendron's second album, Ma délire. It appears twice, as an instrumental and then again like this, translated into French. Gendron's "Shenandoah (II)" is low-fidelity, slow-motion, an expression of love and longing that seems to transcend place and time, from colonial Missouri to post-colonial Montreal; but the singer also makes a subtle shift to its lyrics, lifting the song away from the Rocky Mountains and into an expression of devotion that stretches far further, beyond any measure, to the very ends of the Earth ("jusqu'au bout de la terre").
CHVRCHES - "Asking for a Friend" [buy]
The opening track from Screen Violence—synth-pop that quivers and slams, silver-glassy, red light flashing everywhere.
Wau Wau Collectif - "Mouhamodou Lo and His Children" [buy]
A tune like the best kind of fairy tale, tender and magical, ancient and youthful, visited by a saxophone and a flying saucer. Wau Wau Collectif is a collaboration between the Swedish musician Karl Jonas Winqvist, Senegalese engineer Arouna Kane, and an array of West African and North European partners. Mouhamoudou Lo may well be the name of the main male voice; the children might be his children; I don't know, I just close my eyes and imagine them, peaceful and playful, bathed in a cosmic folk music.
Katy J Pearson and Maudlin - "Willie of Winsbury" [buy]
For six months I've been smitten, unreasonably smitten, by this bizarre, cross-pollinated rendition of "Willie of Winsbury"—a British traditional dating back to 1775. Katy J Pearson's from Bristol; Maudlin's from not-sure-where; and from an instrumental perspective they give the tune all appropriate pomp and filigree. But Pearson's more Dolly Parton than Sandy Denny—instead of singing it flat and windy, she gives the tune a shrill, urgent tremolo. The country-folk inversion is strange and sour and faintly science-fiction, as if it comes from a universe with different maps.
A1 x J1 - "Latest Trends" [buy]
A1's 15, J1's 17, they made this song for Houseparty, then TikTok, then Spotify, Youtube, worlds beyond. It's not clear how any of these platforms allow A1 or J1 to actually earn a living, however this is evidently their goal—pounds sterling, or USD$ at the minimum. "You wouldn't know this, but my heart is cold like my home is," A1 explains in the chorus. "I can't have a bitch, 'cause I'd probably lose focus." They're cold 🥶 hard capitalists singing as sweetly as lovers, K-Ci & JoJo reinvented for the gig economy.
Lucy Dacus - "VBS" [buy]
"In the summer of '07 I was sure I'd go to Heaven / but I was hedging my bets / at VBS." So begins this song about adolescence and bible school—it goes basically the way you'd think. But Dacus has the songwriter's gift of saying a lot with a little, and her doubled vocals (think Andy Shauf or Elliott Smith) lend tenderness to "VBS"' luckless, lonely, lovely thump. A song like a crucifix uncertainly worn.
Amyl and the Sniffers - "Guided by Angels" [buy]
Punk-rock from Australia: Amy Taylor snarls her salvation, pogo-ing in place as divine light pours from her nipples, her nostrils, the points of her middle-fingertips.
Sault - "Bitter Streets" [more]
Sault, the winners of 2020, didn't rise to the same heights in 2021, but they probably made more money: the group's bandleader, Inflo, produced three tracks on the new Adele record (not to mention two much better albums by Cleo Sol and Little Simz). Still, the London-based R&B collective remains one of the most compelling, prolific and consistent bands in the world. In June they released Nine, their fifth album in 25 months, and "Bitter Streets" was the highlight: an uncanny, groovy ballad; a little Gladys Knight and a little Connan Mockasin; a classic sound made contemporary, all its light dispersed.
Charlotte Cardin - "Daddy" [buy]
I'm not usually susceptible to the idea of a guilty pleasure but this song is called daddy, and it's not a tune about Cardin's father. I find the phrase inane, vaguely odious—so imagine my surprise (and reluctance): "Daddy" is by far my favourite recording of the Montreal singer's career. Never mind the lyrics, or try your best: listen instead to the melody's drift and flutter; to the band's quick, scrupulous groove. Possibly the easiest listen of the year (assuming you don't understand English).
Mustafa - "The Hearse" [buy]
Mustafa the Poet's magisterial debut album invents a new kind of sound: soft-textured folk music about street violence and its collateral damage, informed by hip-hop but only scarcely, like a common weather. "The Hearse" skirts the grandiosity of much of his other work, casting its tragedy in a pulsing, playful light. It's neither a love song nor a war song, it's a lament cast in ecstasy—the dangerous pleasure of a common fate.
Goodbye Honolulu - "Cut Off" [buy]
Full disclosure: Goodbye Honolulu's drummer is my cousin. But the family connection made me hold this song to a higher standard, frankly. "Cut Off" bounces with the ping of the Ramones, the pong of the Strokes—the kind of rock'n'roll that makes you think of drunk kisses, brickwork, and running through the streets on a rainy night. Nervy and electric with just enough sweetness, especially in its closing bars, to bring a happy ending to life.
Flock of Dimes - "Two" [buy]
Flock of Dimes remains the solo project of Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner and "Two" is the locket swinging around Head of Roses' neck. The video plays with mirrors, doubling, but the song's as much about separation as togetherness: a flower-soft synth-pop tune asking what love is if it doesn't involve subsubming the other, swallowing them up.
Tokischa & Rosalía - "Linda" [video]
My favourite Spanish pop-star lends her persuasive phonetics to Tokishcha, a Dominican rapper whose affect brings to mind an extremely intelligent little sister. "Linda" feels like double-dutch and playing catch and like putting yourself in a position where at any time a boulder might smash you to smithereens.
Coldplay - "Higher Power" [video]
I like Coldplay—except when they're terrible, which is increasingly often, but not here, on a tune co-written by Max Martin, a song that's breathless, kinetic, alive with a sincere and expansive joy.
Tierra Whack - "Stand Up" [buy]
A bone-dry beat. A rapper with one obsidian eye and one opal. Something faintly Yorgos Lanthimos about her—and not just the Favorite-inspired video. A couple decades after Missy, Whack rhymes like no one else can or would: "I am like the mayor / I am not the mayor." Someone give her a chain of office.
Lisa LeBlanc - "Entre toi pi moi pi la corde de bois" [buy]
I was quickly taken with his teaser-track from LeBlanc's upcoming Chiac Disco (the title's an allusion to the singer's distinctive strain of Acadian French and, um, the popular 1970s dance craze). Over burbling keys and strings as smooth as sucre à la crème, LeBlanc sings a lean, catchy tune about hanging around the cottage & doing jack shit.
Leo Bhanji - "Damaged" [buy]
A song like a sort of incantation—bedroom musings mumbled and deconstructed alongside samples from past, present, future: Dilla? The Noviciat des Soeurs Missionnaires de Notre-Dame d'Afrique? Metal Gear Solid? I adore the shimmer of it, the simultaneous thinness and presence, like smoke hanging in the air.
Martha Wainwright - "Love Will be Reborn" [buy]
Martha recorded her last record just up the street from me, in her own tiny venue, with musicians from the supernatural music group Bernice. There's a little of 1985 in it; and a little of 2085; but this tune is simply a song about love and its rebirth, that uncounted-on redemption; and she sings the hell out of it.
Doja Cat ft. SZA - "Kiss Me More" [buy]
Love a raunchy R&B song that begins with the words, "We hug and kiss". Love a song like the soundtrack to a mellow amusement-park ride. Love Doja Cat's alternating flows, the way she uses a change of cadence to electrify a verse. "Kiss Me More" basks in its Christmas-light glow—the kind of fun that's rare + sugared, but still essentially wholesome.
Little Simz ft. Obongjayar - "Point and Kill" [buy]
Little Simz executes this song with a clear conscience, an even stare. Her new record, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, is a massive leap forward—it lifts Little Simz to the ranks of my favourite rappers working today. Here, the 27-year-old Londoner is assisted by the Nigerian singer Obongjayar, by Inflo's clink & bass & horns, as well as by a memory of M.I.A.—sweeping like a pendulum across her flow. But the centre is hers, bright and mighty, true to itself as fruit on a tree.
Falle Nioke & sir Was - "Wonama yo ema" [buy]
This collaboration between Falle Nioke, who was born in Guinea, and sir Was, from Gothenburg, is a weightless marvel, like a waft of bergamot and clary sage. Nioke's vocals interweave across synths, woodwinds, and traditional African instruments; each repetition feels like a subtle rearrangement of the air.
Ethel Cain - "Crush" [buy]
Swathed in Floridian sunlight, draped in the flannel of the Jesus and Mary Chain, the songwriter Ethel Cain drifts in and out of phase—ghost and portent. "Crush" is either a lighting-up or a snuffing-out.
Holly Humberstone - "Please Don't Leave Just Yet" [buy]
A rainy, achey, reluctant long song, gleaming like streetlights, co-written and co-produced by Matt Healy of The 1975.
Gayance - "Fruta Gogoia" [buy]
Montreal's Gayance transforms Gal Costa's performance of "Fruta Gogoia" from something sober and nearly morose into a site of (eerie) play—a sound that's upbeat, funky, yet at the same time weirdly haunted, like a dancefloor inherited in a will.
Taylor Swift - "Holy Ground (Taylor's version)" [buy]
Taylor Swift re-recorded all of her 2012 album Red because she doesn't control the masters of the original version. This was a matter either of principle, pique, stubbornness or greed. (If it was principle, I'd encourage the singer to do more to change this practice industry-wide.) Whatever the motivation, some of the re-recorded versions are better and some of them are worse: "Holy Ground" is improved, kicked up another notch, a little of the twang swapped-out for raw stomp. I'm not sure this song benefits from a wiser singer: some mistakes ring truer when they're newer. But I hear more pleasure in Swift's voice here—she knows even better the preciousness of a song like this and its singing.
Pino Palladino & Blake Mills - "Ekuté" [buy]
A nervy, scrumptious instrumental by Blake Mills (Fiona Apple, Alabama Shakes) and Pino Palladino (one of the greatest session bassists of all time). This track features Marcus Strickland's horns, Chris Dave on drums, and none other than Andrew Bird on violin. If it were a calendar it'd be lunar; if it was a clock, it'd cuckoo.
The Kid LAROI ft. Justin Bieber - "Stay" [buy]
Like getting a tattoo of your ex on the itchiest part of your body.
Madi Diaz - "Nervous" [buy]
The buzz of a headache, the buzz of a guitar-string, the buzz of a crush and its occasionally ill-effects. Madi Diaz's voice dips and crests like a swallow that can't quit its mate, like a ball on a string just waiting to get whapped.
Abstract Mindstate - "A Wise Tale" [stream]
One of this year's oddly slept-on stories was Abstract Mindstate, an early-2000s hip-hop duo resurrected by the interest of—and production by—Kanye West. With a smart, conscious style that's leagues away from West's recent escapades, the Chicago MCs delivered a strong album filled with the kind of soul samples that made a certain bygone rap era feel so agreeable. "A Wise Tale" was the lead single and the LP's highlight—a mea culpa with a grin on its face, the sort of warning you'd ignore just to hear it repeated again.
Selena Gomez & Camilo - "999" [video]
A sparkling Spanish-language tune from Gomez (who normally performs in English) and the Colombian pop singer Camilo. Lithe and lilting, with a rhythm like the click and crackle of ice in a highball.
Black Country, New Road - "Track X" [buy]
At disparate moments cozy or skeletal, at home or alienated, horns & guitar & coos & recrimination from a British band that feels like Nick Cave crossed with Xiu Xiu.
Natalie Bergman - "Talk to the Lord" [buy]
Crooked kitchen-sink gospel, where that crookedness is the thing that gives it life. Like the twinkle of a clean plate on a dirty dish-rack, profane proof for the existence of God.
Sweeping Promises - "Pain Without a Touch" [buy]
That first riff like a stab in the back; then they keep coming, one after another, and you turn toward the knife, happy as a clam. Everything about this garage-rock tune is braided around the chorus, the title, with Lira Mondal singing like a breathless, alpine Neko Case.
Anna Fox Rochinski - "Cherry" [buy]
Quilt's Anna Fox Rochinski rides a rainbow road of twanging guitars and Mariah Carey mini-runs on the way to "Cherry"'s steady, chiming ruby of a chorus.
The Goon Sax - "In the Stone" [buy]
A call & answer in alto and baritone, happily sombre, as a guitar chugs. A song of (emotional) vampires, the way we're all hiding sets of fangs.
Katy Kirby - "Traffic!" [buy]
Katy Kirby's Cool Dry Place was one of the highlights of my end-of-year—an aching, breaking record for when the weather turned. At times just gentle singer-songwritery, almost straight-ahead, but with moments of slight refraction—whether it's autotune, twang or a swell of synthetic angels.
The Limiñanas and Laurent Garnier - "Saul" [buy]
My favourite French psych group collaborates with the French producer Laurent Garnier for a record that feels like Serge Gainsbourg crossed with Blade Runner—"Saul" uncoils with libidinous menace, lustrous trouble. "Il y a de la cruauté dans l'air (there's cruelty in the air) / à l'école (at school) / au village (in the village)..."
Illuminati Hotties - "Pool Hopping" [buy]
Like Bejar, Malkmus or Mark E Smith, Illuminati Hotties' Sarah Tudzin has a gift for phrases like gumdrops—the kind of things you just want to pop into your mouth. "Stealth makeout / breakfast take-out," she squawks. Or, later: "All rip'rs / No more skip'rs!" But the music's a long way from Destroyer, Pavement or The Fall—an indie rock much more methodical, engineered, less like an oil-painting and more like a shiny, possibly over-elaborate jet.
Cleo Sol - "Spirit" [buy]
The singer of my favourite and fifth-favourite songs of last year returns with a more serene, quietened record (the title is Mother); "Spirit" is one of its serene, slightly-less-quiet treasures. An unfolding of drums & piano and eventually horns & choir—Sol responds to loss with open-hearted, nearly lavish, abundance.
Billie Eilish - "I Didn't Change My Number" [buy]
I really like this grimly swinging Billie Eilish tune—it's a kiss-off and a threat, but most of the violence is tucked inside the chords and synth patches, like a cheerful greeting-card scratched in poison ink.
Springtime - "Will to Power" [buy]
Springtime's a six-legged supergroup featuring Tropical Fuck Storm's Gareth Lillard, The Necks' Chris Abraham, and Dirty White's Jim White (aka my favourite drummer of all time). Isolate just the piano part and "Will to Power"'s anemic, almost rinkydink—but that's like ignoring the heat as you hurtle into a star: Lillard howls like a villain at the end of a Bond movie, spittle flying, roaring about what he's done and what he's due.
Third Eye Blind - "Box of Bones" [buy]
This is my list, I don't need to apologize for anything.
Sun-EL Musician ft. Simmy - "Higher" [buy]
A South African sunrise.
LUMP - "Animal" [buy]
LUMP is a team-up between singer-songwriter Laura Marling and Mike Lindsay, who has a long-time folktronica project called Tunng. But "Animal" (and the record it's from, Animal) avoid the stale safeness that a description like that might suggest. There's instead something probiotic to this music: twitchy, alive, with a slightly carbonated tang.
Wet Leg - "Chaise Longue" [pre-order]
Powered by cute girls, a cool video, and this excellent, double-entendre-crammed single, I can't decide if Wet Leg are the next Yeah Yeah Yeahs or the next Right Said Fred. But there's no getting away from "Chaise Longue"'s sleek, sealskin appeal: a ticking clock, catchy riffs, and Rhian Teasdale's stern purr about "buttered muffins" and her lover's Brobdingnagian D.
Piers Faccini - "Dunya" [buy]
"Dunya" is a collaboration between Faccini, who lives in France, and the Algerian musician Malik Ziad. Lashed with strings and excellent, specific drumming by Simone Prattico, it's a sombre mixture of Faccini's agile, occasionally soppy, songcraft and a heavier North African influence—the sort of outstanding fusion that Faccini's label, NØ FØRMAT, has come to reliably produce.
Ayra Starr - "Bloody Samaritan" [video]
From Nigeria, a shot against the bow that ripples and pulses yet is suffused with a melancholy, nearly crestfallen, spirit.
Lil Nas X ft. Doja Cat - "SCOOP" [buy]
Clearly the best pop star in the world right now—and "SCOOP" is a gold-and-chocolate confection, a song that feels like a highly useful verb.
Rostam - "Bio18" [buy]
He credits Debussy and Ravel, but I hear the mighty Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou in the DNA of this song—an influence ne plus ultra, if you ask me. "Bio18"'s languid beauty is even and unobtrusive, rooted in Rostam's piano as well as some excellent percussion and a marvelous sax part by Henry Solomon.
Wolf Alice - "How Can I Make It OK?" [buy]
The kind of track that makes me nostalgic for heartache—makes me wish I could rent it at the store, take it as a date to the movies. Wolf Alice are one of the world's best bands, with a command of sound that is occasionally almost too much—leaves me longing for a little more fumble or flop.
Jose Gonzalez - "Tjomme (DJ Koze remix)" [buy]
There are a couple of tunes I love on Local Valley, Gonzalez's latest ("Lilla J" and "El Invento" especially), but I just can't resist the way DJ Koze remade "Tjomme," folding and unfolding it, leaving creases all over, different ways to arrange it, to hear it, each repetition like a day or a week or a month or a year, take 2, take 3, take 10, you still have time to change the final cast.
Le Mav ft. Tay Iwar - "Supersonic" [more]
Silky Nigerian pop that waits almost an entire minute before showing its hand: that's when the knock comes, brrup tup, a call anyone in their right mind would answer.
Julien Sagot - "Cendre et descendre" [buy]
A song like one of those "cartoons for grown-ups" where someone walks along a grey, night-lit street while flames gutter and flare from the stormgrates. Vive les bandits, vive les bandits! A lament and a weary joke for this land and all its greed.
Sofia Kourtesis - "La Perla" [buy]
Techno in white, off-white, eggshell, ivory, linen, alabaster, porcelain, cream, seashell. A prayer, a holiday, a clean set of sheets.
Aldous Harding - "Old Peel" [buy]
A song that's there for the taking, for the misinterpretation. Sheets of Easter, feats of Easter—hot clown and the creek is turning. It might be a spell and it might be a memoir—a Canterbury Tales for a woman who has seen too much, who learned sorcery from a one-legged lecher. (And a final thump from a blackjack down upon your head.)
Tion Wayne - "Wow" [buy]
Brutal, bounding drill music—a tune that bounces like the recoil from a pistol or a hammer.
Hand Habits - "Aquamarine" [buy]
Dusky synth-pop about the heaviest things—deception, suicide, parenthood—but glittering here, skittering, a singer who has learned to make candles come back to life just by pointing at them.
Arooj Aftab - "Mohabbat" [buy]
Glittering Persian folk-music—the production's at times too glittering in fact, like trying to see into a sequin room. But Aftab's voice is supple and steady, a bearer of feelings more complex than mere shine.
Spinabenz ft. Whoppa Wit Da Choppa, Yungeen Ace & FastMoney Goon - "Who I Smoke" [video]
For me, the most disturbing song of this year—but a tune I also kept returning to, studying like a pearl under a loupe. Yes: a celebration of gang killings built atop a sparkly "Thousand Miles" sample. It's certainly not the most gruesome tune I've ever loved, but the mixture of violence, delight and something like "sincerity" is genuinely unsettling. (Vanessa Carlton, for the record, has no problem with it.)
Fiver - "June Like A Bug" [buy]
Mystical folk-country that takes the month of June and rolls it in iridescent butterfly parts, fly parts, grasshopper parts. Sorrow and fury, acceptance and resistance, the pinch of a pin as it pierces the fabric of your shirt.
TDA - "Présence" [buy]
A clamorous industrial pop-song, like a Christmas tree made of scrap metal and gloom.
Karine Polwart & Dave Milligan - "The Old Men of the Shells" [buy]
Something seized me, and held me, in this performance of a Scottish traditional. It's the arrowlike trajectory of Polwart's voice but also, and maybe especially, the cool plainness of Milligan's piano. A song not washed in suds and flowerpetals but swept by wind.
Barrie - "Dig" [buy]
A weird northwestern grit-of-teeth—angry, needy, nearly tropical (!). Like a Peter Doig painting of a Casiotone song.
Julie Doiron - "The Letters We Sent" [buy]
A flaming arrow from Julie Doiron, one of my favourite songwriters in the world. A song of finding your heart has broken (open); of letters you may or may not decide to burn. Daniel Romano's closing guitar solo sets the end of the song alight, makes it all into tinder, filling the sky with smoke. Neil Young in cotton pyjamas.
Worlasi - "Fkn Guy" [buy]
Wry and lighthearted pop about the infuriating allure of... boys. From Ghana.
Fake Fruit - "No Mutuals" [buy]
From Oakland, California—a singer with an excellent, blunted punk shout; a band with growl and grin in their guitars; and a message to a fool who's making trouble.
Big Red Machine ft. La Force - "8:22am" [buy]
Bon Iver and Aaron Dessner and friends—or at least one friend, La Force's incandescent Ariel Engle—perform a song of moments, of impressionistic glimpses, glances, the chill of dawn and the black of night, the way a memory ties a gold cord around your heart and stays there, tightening, loosening, tightening again.
Damien Jurado - "Johnny Caravella" [buy]
The most profound, heartbreaking, thunderous song ever written about a character from WKRP in Cincinnati.
El Alfa, Busta Rhymes & Anitta ft. Wisin, CJ and El Cherry Scom - "La Mamá De La Mamá (Remix)" [video]
A transnational party track, with Busta Rhymes setting the tone up front: heavy, purposeful, playful. Not that they needed him: the mostly Spanish-language original was already a smash (110 million views), anchored by El Alfa's ejaculations and that relentless 4/4 beat.
Tirzah - "Send Me" [buy]
Like Sam Cooke crossed with an industrial-grade printing press: somewhere that's blasted twice a day with compressed air, its components sprayed down with bleach. Tirzah allows her wanting to sound rudimentary, nearly childlike—but she combines these stripped-down vocals with a clockmaker's vision, specific and meticulous, selecting whatever gear will make the song shiver.
Waxahatchee - "Streets of Philadelphia" [buy]
Waxahatchee's Saint Cloud, released last year, is one of those records that's still gaining power over me—that's looming larger & larger in the back-catalogue of my life. Katie Crutchfield released an expanded version this year, with a few covers—including this take on Bruce Springsteen's classic, a favourite tune from my teenage years, which I heard first during a classmate's oral presentation. (Her name was Ramona; thanks, Ramona!) Either Crutchfield's voice fits your heart like a key, I suppose, or else it doesn't; but I'm a flimsy cabinet.
Perfume Genius - "Borrowed Light (Katie Dey remix)" [buy]
Katie Dey shatters "Borrowed Light" and reassembles the shards—faces skew in the mirror, loom, pixellate. Tenderness remains.
Ada Lea - "Damn" [buy]
A proud addition to the tradition of songs that take place when you're having a bad time at a party. "Damn" plays like a short film; it gathers force as its chorus montages repeat. "I've had it with this place / we've all gone insane," Alexandra Levy sings—a statement we've all lived through this year, climbing the walls of our own small lives.
H.E.R. ft Thundercat - "Back of my Mind" [buy]
One of those rare places where the guest bassist really does refine the song: H.E.R.'s plaintive R&B is granted a permanence, maybe even a grace, by Thundercat's roaming counterpoint. Together they make a sound that feels like it could endure, lending itself to future trouble.
Kacey Musgraves - "Justified" [buy]
Like a pastel convertible through a West Texas evening.
Wet - "Larabar" [buy]
A melting, lonely tune, falling apart at the seams. (Every era learns a different way to come apart.)
Tristen - "Complex" [buy]
I just love the way Tristen rhymes complex with complex, the repetition fitting itself like a set of red solo cups. Tristen's Tristen Gaspadarek; she's a Nashville songwriter with a band keeping pace beside her—all of them on horses, cantering through the morning, not yet thinking about lunch.
Josie Dunne - "Cooped Up" [video]
The pop singer Josie Dunne has been rebooting her career with a year-long series of songs & videos called Tennis. Each of them offers a different flavour of Carly Rae Jepsenesque delights, and "Cooped Up" is my favourite of the bunch: eager, breezy, happy as a bluebird with its particular quarantine situation.
Yuma Abe - "Omaemo" [buy]
Sun-kissed Japanese folk, like Mac DeMarco after 10 years of office work—finally over himself, alert to his good fortune, staring happily at the flowers in the window.
Ed Dowie - "Dear Florence" [buy]
If the Gates of Heaven opened up in an en-suite kitchen.
Dntel - "Fall in Love" [buy]
For The Seas Trees See, the long-time electronica-maker (and Postal Service co-founder) known as Dntel turned his sights to traditional folk music, borrowing acapellas such as Kate Wolf's "The Lilac and the Apple Tree" and warming them, bending them, twisting them back on themselves. I couldn't work out where he got the pieces for "Fall In Love," but I love the weird, burred thing he made with them—turning a clear-voiced tune cloudy, making plainsong feel alien.
Rozi Plain - "Silent Fan" [buy]
An unsettling admiration. On this Adult Swim single, the English singer-songwriter takes the notion of the "fan," the admirer, and turns it in the light, exploring its facets, the shadow it leaves upon the velvet. There's a peacefulness to "Silent Fan," a wary readiness—the sense that Plain is up to the task—but at the same time a tremor underneath: from saxophone and even weirder things, worrying at the edges.
Tuns - "My Memories" [buy]
I suspect that almost everyone who has watched Get Back has asked themselves, "Shouldn't everyone make music like this?" The answer is no: not everyone should make music like the Beatles. But thank god Tuns do—the only Canadian indie supergroup devoted to repaving Nathan Phillips Square with a dappled Strawberry Field. "Memories" is honey-sweet and strafed with harmonies; it catches the light like a crossing-guard's gold tooth.
Le Ren - "I Already Love You" [buy]
Le Ren is steady in her heartache and bright-eyed in her wishing, her ears attuned to Nashville and to Fife (even though she lives in Montreal). Her music is clean. It's unhurried. It will hang in the air, sad and old-souled, until whenever it is it's needed.
Dry Cleaning - "Every Day Carry" [buy]
Make it to the far side of the canyon in the second half of "Every Day Carry" and you will feel like you have gulped down gasoline, the fancy kind of gasoline, Ultra Super-essence of whatever it's called, the sort of thing that makes your muscles go wiry and your eyes glow red. "I just want to put something positive into the world but it's hard because I'm so full of poisonous rage," Florence Cleopatra Shaw explains. "I just can't creep comfortably." This band—and this singer—move about like shadow people, they can slip through walls.
Cate Le Bon - "Running Away" [buy]
Imagine a Medieval tapestry. Soaking wet, because someone dipped it in the moat. Fragrantly perfumed, because somebody sprayed it with oud. And when you hold your ear up close to it? You hear the Benny Goodman Band.
Twin Shadow - "Johnny & Jonnie" [buy]
There's something fondly "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" about "Johnny & Jonnie," enough so that you wonder if it's a joke. But the lyrics say otherwise—lines about gay lovers fleeing Texas in the 70s, taking refuge in New Orleans. Maybe the joke's what they find there: a series of pratfalls and punchlines, happy disasters, true love sputtering while dub reverb fires.
Liars - "Sekwar" [buy]
The sinister squelch of an asshole ascendant: but Angus Andrew tastes his trouble; he knows what he's got isn't good for him. "All the substance seeping out / from the storeroom of my mind," he growls. "All the colours that I wanted to hold." A sound like doomed rock'n'roll.
Quivers - "Radio Song" [buy]
Maybe I shouldn't be so passionate about a cover of a 30-year-old R.E.M. song, but Melbourne's Quivers redeem it with such subtle finesse: slowing the whole thing down, infusing it with power, amputating the (many) bad bits. In their care, "Radio" becomes not just hopeful but noble somehow: "The world is collapsing / around our ears / I turned up the radio. / [Now] I can't hear it."
Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul - "Thank You" [buy]
It's not often you get a dance track so dripping with sarcasm. But "Thank You" somehow balances pleasure and contempt, shimmying backward across the room even as it rolls its eyes. The title of Adigéry and Pupul's upcoming LP seems apt: Topical Dancer. But there's nothing tedious about Adigéry's anti-patriarchal/anti-colonial techno: like with Marie Davidson, I'd listen to her renew a driver's license.
And that's 100 songs, if my counting's correct. Thank you for reading! Thank you for listening! Sorry for any broken links, please pay for the music you love. (Invest in what's important or it will go away.) Don't be strangers.
And see you next year.
Sean, you're right - this feels like a holiday tradition at this point. Christmas lights, apple cider, Said the Gramophone
by Taylor Bauer, Dec 8, 2021
Real ones know that this is the only year-end list that matters. Thank you, Sean & co.!
YAY! Now that STG is largely dormant I start feeling a free floating anxiety around the end of every November: Will this be the year we don't get one?
The arc of the internet bends towards sucking. Good things go away, or are hoovered up by larger entities and made bad. A handful of companies are remorselessly trying to funnel us into sanitized, Disneyfied walled gardens where anything goes turns into nothing remains. Nothing worth bothering with, anyway.
Your year-end lists are a dispatch from an earlier age: a chaotic frontier called the World Wide Web that no one really had a grip on but anyone could stake out a little piece of land on.
The invitation arrives in my RSS reader - here's some highlights of the year; download and listen; support the artists and buy their music. Thank you, Sean.
by Dan, Dec 8, 2021
Thank you for keeping this tradition alive.
by Jason, Dec 8, 2021
Hi -- just FYI, Arooj Aftaab's music isn't Persian -- she uses lyrics from some Iranian poets, like Rumi, but she's Pakistani and her mother tongue is Urdu, not Farsi. Great list otherwise!
by Kayte, Dec 9, 2021
Thank you, Sean - I was expecting to see L'Rain on this year's list, but it's always a thrill to find so much I'm unfamiliar with as you never fail to unveil a few songs that become my favourites of the year. Seasons greetings, hope to hear from you again in 2022.
by Chris Broughton, Dec 9, 2021
Thank you so much again for your 100. One thing though, I can not download the folders on zippyshare. All i've got are fishy adds. Anything you can do ?
by Julien Jonchère, Dec 9, 2021
Thank you for keeping tradition going. It is the one list I still look forward to reading/listening to each year.
by Kate , Dec 9, 2021
Hey --its December. Time to hope and look and see and Merry fucking Xmas, its another 100!
From the comments it looks like its a bunch of regulars fulfilling their longing, so Thanks Sean!
Several finds in the first pass thru.
And if yer a newbie, browse the archives.
Where else will you ever read a review like "Either Crutchfield's voice fits your heart like a key, I suppose, or else it doesn't; but I'm a flimsy cabinet"? This guy has taste well beyond the good horizon, and the words to make it even better.
by J, Dec 9, 2021
Always look forward to this list; hours of great listening and many artists that are new to me. Thank you!
by Kerry, Dec 9, 2021
so many tracks (and artists) i don't recognize (what is happening to me ?) - but deep diving on this selection of curated tracks is doing my soul good, thanks so much for sharing
by tery, Dec 10, 2021
Thank you Sean. Happy to see this list once again.
by Brayden, Dec 10, 2021
I literally make it a big part of December to run to this blog every year. Thank you for another year of great tunes!
by Amber, Dec 11, 2021
Like that melting snowman Campbell soup commercial…it just wouldn't be the holidays without this list. Thank you.
by HomebredBacchus , Dec 13, 2021
One of my favorite things about this time of year. Thank you so much :)
by Bryan, Dec 13, 2021
big thanks for this, Sean. it's not the holidays without this ❤
by Carrie, Dec 14, 2021
This is always a highlight, and always a revelation of so many great things that i would never had found on my own. Thank you@
by chapman, Dec 14, 2021
Thank you Sean, this list is always a joy this time of year. Some gorgeous tracks there!
by shane, Dec 15, 2021
"Julia's Garland" (fr. Guirlande de Julie)
by Keypadawnz, Dec 16, 2021
Huzzah! Also, an inconsequential heads-up: it's Ed Dowie, not Downie! Though I'd like to imagine him being a distant cousin of Gord.
by bb, Dec 17, 2021
Thank you, Sean! I look forward to this list every year.
by Lizzy, Dec 17, 2021
Thank you, as ever, Sean for this seasonal treat. I enjoy seeing a handful of my own favourites in the list, and enjoy discovering new favourites from the rest.
(fwiw, the zippyshare links didn't work for me (403 Forbidden) but, while the mediafire ones showed an error at first, a few more tries resulted in success.)
by Phil Gyford, Dec 18, 2021
One of the highlights to the end of my year each year. I always discover some new gems I love and this year was no exception. Thank you!!!
by Justin, Dec 20, 2021
Thanks, Sean! It's always such a treat to dig through your list and read your writing. I truly appreciate the effort!
by DS, Dec 22, 2021
BLESS THIS LIST. Been a STG list lover since 2008! Keep on doin' the good work.
by Lisa, Dec 22, 2021
the most wonderfulest time of the year. thanks sean. i appreciate you!
not usually a blog-commenter but wanted to thank you for another amazing list!
by Michael, Dec 26, 2021
So glad to see the list for 2021 - thank you for sharing! Always a highlight of December.
by Stephen, Dec 27, 2021
The best traditions are ones that sneak up on you. This 100 song portal is one of the highlights of my holiday season. I don't put up a stocking anymore, but I look forward to this playlist the same way I looked forward to a stuffed sock every Christmas as a kid. Thanks for a gift that keeps on giving Sean!
by Rich, Jan 5, 2022
Thank you ! Always waiting for your list. Love from Mexico.
by Futura Futurama, Jan 13, 2022
Thank you, Sean, for this year's list and also for previous year's lists. I always come away with awesome new music. All the best from Bavaria.
by Sascha, Jan 21, 2022
These are my 100 favourite songs of 2020: songs I love more than solitude, take-out and the immune-responses of bats.
What a hell year. What a nightmare. What an endless shit parade. 2020 was a fuckin Grand Canyon of Wretchedness and yet, and yet, it was also suffused with a sense of resilience: the sense of coming-through. We have lived inside an avalanche. We have sunk to the bottom of the sea. We have survived isolation and deprivation and loneliness and loss; we have ordered deliveries; we have strived; we have applied alcohol to our hands. We have come this far and promise me we will keep on going somehow, in kindness and in solidarity, with songs on our lips.
Said the Gramophone is an old blog and we publish rarely. Early in this year's pandemic, as monotony and worry unfurled, I began posting again. Then I stopped. I am OK, I'm writing, I'm caring for myself and everyone I can. But life got very small and it's going to stay small, I suspect, for a little while.
Except in music: in music, as in dream, there is no such thing as quarantine.
This here is the 16th list like this at Said the Gramophone: see 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019. I follow just one arbitrary rule: that no primary artist may appear twice.
I have also created a Spotify playlist for these tunes. (Update: And Apple Music. Thanks Joey!) However, please pay for the music you enjoy. Giving money to Spotify is insufficient; Bandcamp is much better.
This list is the work of me, Sean, and not any of Said the Gramophone's other contributors. Don't blame them for my questionable taste.
If this is your first time at Said the Gramophone, I hope you'll bookmark us or subscribe via RSS. You can also follow me on Twitter.
Please read my books! I'm the author of two novels—Us Conductors, from 2014, which reimagines the story of the theremin, and The Wagers, a novel about luck, which was recently optioned by Hulu. The Globe & Mail called The Wagers "a literary fireworks display, an explosion of joke-filled energy that manages to be a novel of ideas, but one delivered as if it were a caper story." You can learn about both of these books (and get them in print/ebook/audiobook form) at my author website.
Among the 100 acts below, 39 are generally American, 27 are Canadian, 14 are British and there are five Nigerian, four South African, three Australian, two Norwegian, one German, one Tanzanian, one Argentinian, one Portuguese, one Danish and one Kiwi artist. 51 of the frontpeople/bandleaders are men, 48 are women, and at least one artist is non-binary. This is the way it worked out; it certainly ain't perfect. Here are some charts of this and past lists' demographics.
Waxahatchee - St Cloud (listen);
The Microphones - Microphones in 2020 (listen);
This Is The Kit - Off Off On (listen);
Alabaster dePlume - To Cy and Lee Instrumentals Vol. 1 (listen);
Max de Wardener - Music for Detuned Pianos (listen);
Cleo Sol - Rose in the Dark (listen);
P'tit Belliveau - Greatest Hits Vol 1 (listen);
Jeff Parker & The New Breed - Suite For Max Brown (listen);
Crack Cloud - Pain Olympics (listen); and
Pa Salieu - Send Them to Coventry (listen).
I promise: all of these are fantastic.
Now, without any more rigamarole, lots of proudly mixed metaphors:
(original image by Shanti Shea An)
Sault - "Wildfires" [buy]
The central flaw—the only flaw?—of my favourite song of the year is that ends after 3 minutes and 27 seconds: that it does not last forever, an unbroken groove. "I will always care," intones the unnamed singer (understood to be the artist on this list's #5 track); the irony is that "Wildfires" is a song striving for an ending—to police violence, anti-Black racism. White supremacy seems able to survive anything, from war to protest to a worldwide pandemic. Yet the force of this track, the vow at its heart, is the promise of undoing. A dagger wrapped in velvet, a voice and a bassline, Cleo Sol's pledge that she "will always rise"—as all her numberless companions nod along.
Waxahatchee - "Fire" [buy]
From one fire to another, this one less rampant: the scorch of a river in sunset, a heart in revision. Katie Crutchfield's voice cuts through and crosses lines, vivid in ways other voices cannot be. And a groove that's so simple, just a couple of branches and a chemical reaction—watch it burst into flame. The part of this song that most gets me, the alchemy in it, is a moment around 2:14, when the drums and guitar Crutchfield's voice all seem to collide, overlapping, not quite in order, unfastening my locks like a skeleton key.
Max de Wardener - "The Sky Has A Film" [buy]
I don't know if you heard, but all this crazy shit happened this year. None of the old piano repertoire seemed sufficient—I didn't really turn to Bach or Brahms or Guèbrou. All that stuff made too much sense. Instead I listened to Kyle Gann and Max de Wardener: pieces ful of im/patience and stirring and wrong (right) notes, music like refracted light, or broken pixels, too long staring at the screen.
Weather Station - "The Robber" [buy]
The lead single from Tamara Lindeman's lustrous new album (full disclosure: i wrote the bio) is infused with a sinister, shadow-edged desire. There are shades of Talk Talk, and even Serge Gainsbourg, but Lindeman is as patient as a ruby, unburdened by the anxiety of influence. She sings in a slow, low vocal, aware of how easily her voice can hug the strings' or bassline's curve—aware of how little it takes to be tugged along, complicit, or how small a spark can catch on dry tinder and ignite.
Cleo Sol - "Why Don't You" [buy]
The year's best R&B album was by Cleo Sol, who records with the band Sault. (Judging from the name of that very secretive group, she was one of its founders.) Between Sault and her own debut, the London singer has released five albums since the beginning of 2019; an astonishing run, and while "Wildfires" was at 2020's summit, I found myself turning more often to her solo record. Rose in the Dark is tender and personal, aptly named—and "Why Don't You" shivers with feeling, a complicated feeling, closer to an Alice Munro short story than to an Usher ballad. Through strings and woodwinds, Sol narrates a relationship's worries and pitfalls, its risks and its fruit. "Remember on the weekend / I said I'd make some changes," she sings. "And you said you'd do the same thing." Plainspoken and faithful.
Perfume Genius - "Describe" [buy]
Set My Heart On Fire Immediately is like portal after portal—each song seems to contain sounds I've never heard, combinations I've never imagined, like a rewiring of human sensuality. "Describe" fizzes and reverberates like the Cocteau Twins in negative, those astral notes gone seismic and underground.
Phoebe Bridgers - "Garden Song" [buy]
The sadnesses of 2020 helped the world recognize Phoebe Bridgers—hailing her as one of the USA's great young songwriters. God knows I listened to a lot of Bridgers this year, although mostly from her last record, and I know I wasn't alone. People don't say enough about her qualities as a singer—a trusty plaintiveness that reminds me of Julie Doiron. No matter Bridgers' sorrows, no one could ever blow her away; she won't budge, she's not a pushover. She'll stand all day in the rain. And yet she imbues her voice with kindness, warmth—as if it'll all turn out OK, those wounds will heal, she'll text you on your birthday and maybe even call.
This Is The Kit - "Started Again" [buy]
Folk music that glitters like polished wood, aluminium foil, the inside of a hadron collider. "Camouflage yourself chameleon," Kate Stables sings, over iridescent horns and ticking guitars, part-Bedhead and part-Fotheringjay, before the song reaches a cliff's-edge and tumbles, head rolling over heels.
Haim - "Don't Wanna" [buy]
In a sense it's a song of forgiveness: someone's done wrong and she's willing to take them back. But it won't be easy. "I don't wanna give up on you," Danielle Haim admits. "I don't want to have to." This ain't an oath, it ain't even a pledge: it's an open window, that's all, on a brisk spring day.
Mac Miller - "Circles" [buy]
There is an unexpected flavour to Mac Miller's final album, released a little over a year after his accidental overdose death. Jon Brion—who had been working with the rapper—completed it posthumously, and the producer's fingerprints are all over the songs: Circles sounds as much like Aimee Mann's Bachelor No. 2 or Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine (both of which Brion produced) as it does Miller's prior work. Apparently these were Miller's wishes—that his sixth LP feel more Gen X than Gen Y—and to be honest, particularly in this elegiac light, it mostly works. For me, the title track is the clear standout: pensive and hopeful, the dryness of Miller's voice counterbalancing the sweetness of Brion's arrangement.
Buddy Ross ft. Gabriel Delicious - "Bored Again!" [buy]
An exultant, elastic pop song from Frank Ocean's longtime keyboardist—"Bored Again" bounces and bounces and eventually hits a chrome set of (mono)rails, powered by saxophone, moxie and additional vocals by Bon Iver.
Beyoncé - "Black Parade" [buy]
Beyoncé as orchestrator extraordinaire, marshalling brass band and gospel choir and a Timbaland-worthy beat (she and Derek Dixie are credited as producers). What I most admire here isn't the tapestry of the arrangement nor the exactitude of Beyoncé's raps—it isn't even the lilting heights of the melody: it's the play Beyoncé wove through "Black Parade," all the games and rhymes and diversions twisted through the tune.
DJ Stokie ft. Loxion Deep & Kabza De Small) - "Senorita" [buy]
Amapiano from South Africa, released at the very end of 2019. Beautifully arrayed with flute and percussion, with a gleaming house-music heart: and yet wound tight, taut throughout, the pleasures doled out with precision.
Marie Pierre Arthur - "Dans tes rêves" [buy]
I love this weird, cracked pop song. Like a bashed-up tape by an 80s chansonnière, its magnetic band semi-disintegrated. I first heard it on the radio last winter and I felt like I was having a seizure, the most petit of mals—the universe folding and unfolding, winking at us through the sky.
Anderson .Paak - "Lockdown" [video]
COVID-19 and the George Floyd protests have finally produced the kind of political music we've been promised since the 2016 US election—not just timely but frequently excellent, and gratefully received not because I Like Being Entertained (although I do) but because it's a fucking relief, maybe even a respite, to receive a song that can answer the call of the moment. It's a way for one's heart to be kept company. .Paak is dry-eyed here but his rhymes are supple, with stings hidden in their tails, and the whole song feels like work, good work, when it's getting done: check, yup, no problem—what's next?
Good Sad Happy Bad - "Shades" [buy]
What begins as a mournful dose of ambient noise emerges unexpectedly into a nearly conventional midtempo rock song. I say nearly because Good Sad Happy Bad are the newly rechristened Micachu & the Shapes—one of the most inventive bands in all of indie rock. While there's something of the Velvet Underground or Squeeze to "Shades," that would only be true if Squeeze were melting wax figures, if Velvet Underground were being reconstituted from their elemental particles. Jaunty at moments, even supersonic, there are other times when this song feels just a few degrees shy of falling apart.
Antoine Corriveau - "Les sangs mélangés" [buy]
Inspired by a text by novelist Éric Plamondon, and featuring a breathtaking English-language verse by Erika Angell, "Les sangs mélangés" feels like the closing credits of a latter-day David Lynch movie. Sinister and dreamlike, but Corriveau's fixed his gimlet eye on something literally close to him: the fucked-up relationship between Settlers and Indigenous people. "En Amérique," he sings, "On a tous du sang indien / Si c'est pas dans les veines / c'est sur les mains": "In America, we all have Indian blood; if it isn't in our veins, it's on our hands." And then as the groove staggers on, noise rolling, Angell's blazing lines—a performance that had me literally scrabbling for the liner notes, imagining it might be a rejuvenated Mary Margaret O'Hara.
Charli XCX - "Enemy" [buy]
Charli XCX's full-length How I'm Feeling Now, recorded during lockdown, was one of the few COVID albums to truly capture the feelings—the tedium and the malaise—of those earliest pandemic days. Sure, most of us are still feeling tedium and/or malaise: but there was a particular blue-black colour to March, April and May, and that hex-code is smeared across "Enemy": a bloom of sickness despite its synthpop swoon, the certainty that Something'Is Wrong.
Future Islands - "Thrill" [buy]
A ballad as slow as spring thaw. Samuel Herring sings a rueful love-song to himself, a prayer or a promise, an affirmation, his rough voice making way for the majesty of "Thrill"'s chords.
Against All Logic - "If Loving You Is Wrong" [buy]
Nicolas Jaar's music takes so many shapes—supple electronica, crushing techno, soundtracks for extra-terrestrial love stories and minerals. "If Loving You Is Wrong," released under his Against All Logic moniker, feels threaded somewhere in-between: intimate and human yet intermittently mechanized, violent even, a life that has come of age under capitalism.
Mr Eazi ft King Promise - "Baby I'm Jealous" [buy]
Nigeria's Mr Eazi writes his own "Jealous Guy": solicitous, caressing, much more sweet than bitter-.
Jason Molina - "Old Worry" [buy]
From Molina's posthumous album Eight Gates, recorded in London more than a decade ago and released earlier this summer, "Old Worry" is scarcely there—just two minutes of guitar, viola, organ and a gunshot-like drum/guitar effect. But Molina's voice is as luminous as ever, a magnolia in the night, and his lyricism is at its height: there's no other songwriter whose words feel so easily, instantly eternal.
P'tit Belliveau - "Les bateaux dans la baie" [buy]
God I love this record from this winking Acadian ne'er-do-well—whose music gambols and lurches like a mixture of Mac DeMarco, Beck and the McGarrigle Sisters. It's a twanging, cheerful, synthy lo-fi folk: weird and brilliant and utterly itself.
Crack Cloud - "Something's Gotta Give" [buy]
One of the year's most beguiling debuts was Pain Olympics, from the Vancouver-based collective Crack Cloud. Contemporary post-punk that seems so adamant, that seems to know itself so well, that you can imagine the record trembling on the turntable. "Something's Gotta Give" feels at once tender and combustible—bowed strings and cooed whispers wrapped like a garotte around Iggy Pop's neck.
Camille Delean - "Idle Fever Out Of Tune" [buy]
The Roches' "Hammond Song" is sour and perfect; this tune's sweet and burled. But both seem to extend toward a similar sky—endless and monochromatic, rippling with everything you long for or regret. An absolutely stunning tune from one of Montreal's most intriguing songwriters. "Threat of fire in a spark / Threat of dawn in the dark / Threat of fever in every room." (And whether deliberate or not, there's some of thee mightee "Safe Inside the Day" to it, too.)
Prince Kaybee ft. Black Motion, Shimza, Ami Faku - "Uwrongo" [stream]
More South African afro-house, throbbing under the ripple of Ami Faku's voice and a simple, particular guitar figure. (Here's Prince Kaybee's investment advice.)
Gillian Welch - "Picasso" [buy]
Gillian Welch's amazing Lost Songs sets—three discs of unreleased home recordings laid down to meet a publishing deadline—are full of treasures. Foremost among them is this, a simple tune of guitars + harmonica + two unhurried singers—and an utterly remarkable lyric, celebrating and bemoaning the power of art. Forget Dylan, frankly—those words! She makes it sound so easy.
Pa Salieu ft Mahalia - "Energy" [buy]
The English MC Pa Salieu is among my very favourite new rappers—a guy whom I would listen to reciting the phone book, although there are no phone books, so instead perhaps the daily COVID statistics or, much preferably, this lovely tune with Mahalia, by far the warmest moment on Send Them To Coventry, which I like to imagine as a very hard man's endorsement of self-care.
Sam Lynch - "Keeping Time" [buy]
I love the way this song unveils itself: restful, patient, like a box full of objects examined one by one. By the end you're crying, I'm crying, everyone's crying, as drums & strings & Sam Lynch's voice all do their good work. Startlingly great music by a singer-songwriter from BC.
Alabaster dePlume - "Not My Ask" [buy]
One of my very favourite albums of the year was an oddity by a London musician for whom instrumental jazz is not standard fare. Yet To Cy & Lee is a quiet marvel: miniatures with just enough scrape and skronk, just enough din, to keep away the maudlin. This is work that does for me what Satie does, at times, or Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou: calms the body, paints pictures in the air.
The 1975 - "The Birthday Party" [buy]
Although Notes on a Conditional Form was a disappointment, the 1975 are still for my money the most interesting big commercial rock band in the world. My favourite tune on the record was this—a kindly, dopey ballad, nostalgic and confessional, like if Knausgaard wrote a song for Lorde.
Lido Pimienta - "Te Queria" [buy]
It's the steel drums that get me on this one, or the joyous crossfire in the song's second half, basking in the ease of Polaris Prize-winning!, Grammy-nominated! Lido Pimienta.
The Strokes - "The Adults are Talking" [buy]
It was a great and abiding reassurance in 2020 to find that the Strokes still got exactly the same and undeviating it.
Omah Lay - "Lo Lo" [buy]
The sun-kissed ease of "Lo Lo," the loll of it, makes it seem like a time-traveler: a song not born of this year. Maybe Omah Lay's been sitting on it—waiting until it was needed.
Yves Jarvis - "Semula" [buy]
I feel like Yves Jarvis makes folk songs, or bedroom pop songs, and then gradually takes away the components. Like a game of new age Jenga: block after block after block and yet still somehow standing at the end, those little pieces of wood, gleaming in the sun.
Coriky - "Clean Kill" [buy]
I have a deep soft spot for Ian MacKaye's sweet & stubborn post-Fugazi projects, like The Evens and now Coriky. This is punk rock turned down from 11 or 3, its emotions written not in sweat + tears but pencil-scratch + breath.
Land of Talk - "Diaphonous" [buy]
I adore the cascading, fragmented grace of this song—like a wish reassembled from its fragments, memory + vision + brass + voice + electric guitar.
Austra - "Risk It" [buy]
It's been a long time since Katie Stelmanis was primarily known for her gigantic pipe-organ of a voice. With Austra, the singer's lungs became less central to her work: theirs is a music of interplay, voice/electronics, timbre/harmony, instead of pure volleying wow. I'm not sure that this has ever been clearer for me than on "Risk It"—as drum'n'bass skitters, synth-horns blurt, and Stelmanis hangs her hook on a squidged up, silken chipmunk squeak.
Bad Bunny ft Sech - "Ignorantes" [buy]
Today I played with my son in the living-room, a game of pigs and yeti, scampering over mountaintops, and as I did so I listened to Bad Bunny, because I have taken to listening to new music while we play, these days, because I can't listen to music the ways I normally do. ... At a certain point I was listening to "Ignorantes" for the fifth time in a row, like a tonic, like drinking a healthful tonic, another dose of quinine and orange juice.
Plants and Animals - "Love That Boy" [buy]
Plants and Animals play a song of peace and love but you can still hear it—the fraying nerves, the strain, everything that nags at the edges.
Dagny - "Somebody" [buy]
Dagny made what was arguably the year's best straight pop record—skittering Scandinavian synths with great drums and soaring, silver-sewn melodies. Cut from the same cloth as Robyn's Body Talk era but boy could you do worse.
Braids - "Here 4 U" [buy]
A song of bright synthpop colour, high blue sweetness and grave gold feeling, but Raphaelle Standell-Preston sings as if she's undecorated, nude: the woman at the heart of the vortex, standing before a plate of clear glass.
Gil Scott-Heron and Makaya McCraven - "Me and the Devil" [buy]
Chicago jazz man Makaya McCraven is the second artist in the past decade to release an entire record of Gil Scott-Heron remixes—a fact that speaks as much to the singer's estate as it does to his lasting influence. But whereas Jamie XX transformed Scott-Heron's final LP into a work of chill and echo, like an after-hours club, McCraven reasserts the album's downtown tumult: he makes a song like "Me and the Devil" feel pinned to the city, inseparable from it, as if its groove and brio are pouring through the streets. (While we're on the topic, McCraven's 2018 double-LP, Universal Beings, is unquestionably among my favourite jazz releases of the decade.)
Astrid S - "It's Ok If You Forget Me" [buy]
This is my list and I can include whatever I want, including a fluffy acoustic ballad from a 24-year-old Norwegian pop-star. I'm bewitched by the chorus—it's absolutely straight-ahead, even rote, but there's this slant to Astrid's singing, five degrees of flaw, which allow it to slip like an arrow through all my armour.
Caribou - "Sunny's Time" [buy]
A wriggling piano and a burnt-chesnut voice, but also that drooping sax, those levitating synths, and above all Dan Snaith's hand upon his mouse, snip/cut/crop, manipulating the tape like Glenn Gould in deepest studio, scissors in his hand.
Fontaines D.C. - "Televised Mind" [buy]
Everything's fine.
Kurt Vile and John Prine - "How Lucky" [buy]
In a year that ripped John Prine away from us, at least we have this: he and Kurt Vile singing an old song about fortune and contentedness.
Owen Pallett - "A Bloody Morning" [buy]
A literal song of shipwreck: a man named Lewis, drunken at the tiller, til the schooner hits a reef. But Owen takes us past the cataclysm into the bloody morning after—and all its sun-traced forgiveness. / A chiaroscuro of orchestral rock—gasping and seething, sumptuously arranged, with a near perfect video and a thousand tiny details. (I live for the pleading whistle at 4:00.)
Tierra Whack - "Feel Good" [video]
One minute and twenty five seconds wherein the visionary rapper Tierra Whack feels really bummed out.
Fiona Apple - "Heavy Balloon" [buy]
Apple's been holed up with her dogs, her diaries, and (in my imagination) the first Tune-Yards album. "Heavy Balloon"—and all of Fetch the Bolt Cutters—creeps and thrashes, teased on by all of Apple's crashing and the ferrous force of her voice.
Shabason, Krgovich & Harris - "Open Beauty" [buy]
You know the controls on photo software—exposure, saturation, hue? Or on recording apps—volume, gain? Imagine being able to twist each of those knobs to skew the life before you—the daylight, the evening, dream. Nick Krgovich sings in a murmur over warble and hoot; a keyboard sings a circle; a piano promises that when the ending comes it will be gentle.
Adrianne Lenker - "Anything" [buy]
Even unaccompanied, the Big Thief frontwoman is unafraid of the smallness of her voice: she lets it be as it is, strident and mouselike, sharing hopes and worries, murmuring wishes; a girl casting stones at a window.
Bob Dylan - "I Contain Multitudes" [buy]
The $300 Million Man obviously knows how to turn a phrase: but I found myself deeply charmed by "Multitudes," the way he rhymes nudes, dudes and preludes, that deadbeat grin at the end of his lips.
Still House Plants - "Shy Song" [buy]
A song that literally sounds like two songs playing at once, and indeed probably is—but the two-songs are in conversation, affinity, shining back and forth like worn-out semaphore. A band that's aptly named, with music that seems to operate along invisible lines, impossible paths.
Dirty Projectors - "No Studying" [buy]
Dirty Projectors have spent the year(s ?) releasing experiments, and this is my favourite among them: a track that brings together one part chugging garburator guitar and another part wistful acoustic sing-song. It's as if Wes Anderson were to collaborate on a project with Animal, each of them tugging for the camera.
Maeta ft Buddy & Kaytranada - "Teen Scene" [buy]
Sultry, woozy, cherry-red: imperturbable R&B over a deliciously off-centre Kaytranada beat.
Marlaena Moore - "I Miss You" [buy]
A whistling, clattering wanting—high-flying rock'n'roll produced by Chad VanGaalen.
Ball Park Music - "Cherub" [buy]
There's a little of The Shins to this tender, tart guitar ballad—that is until the ending, when the Australian musicians furrow their brows and step on their pedals and blow out all the windows for miles. (Thank you, Vinny—more of his picks here.)
Sylvan Esso - "Rooftop Dancing" [buy]
A private dance, perhaps; as gusts of sounds flutter through, scraps of whim.
Madeline Kenney - "Cut the Real" [buy]
If "Cut the Real" hadn't been recorded before 2020 it would have had to be invented: a slowly pulsing song of "bright light ... [and] mess," of quarantining with the dull voice inside your head. Kenney has a beautiful way of making an incoherent world feel more coherent, as if the fractures are part of the design.
Thanya Iyer - "Always, Be Together" [buy]
Iyer has been making music for years in Montreal, tapping a rich vein between deconstructed folk and naturalistic R&B. Her latest album, Kind, is a triumph and a culmination—it feels less like a piece of music and more like a home I want to live inside. "Always, Be Together" rustles and creaks, thrums, echoes; it's filled with solace, love and sunlight.
Kathleen Edwards - "Fools Ride" [buy]
The song's called "Fools Ride." A present-tense sentence, but the tune's about being caught out, tricked: taken for a fool's ride, possessive form. Edwards with a tale of blind love and shady business—a "red flag flying in the shit parade / a warning sign that I ignored"—yet the song gains its texture from her' choice to share the blame. Fuck this guy, this unkind swindler, but she never lets herself off the hook. The villain's gone now: the protagonist is her.
ShooterGang Kony - "Jungle" [video]
Over a flinching beat—is that Tracy Chapman? or just some synth-squirt?—Sacramento's Kony makes a case for his authority. He menaces his enemies and congratulates himself, willing always to make a joke at his own expense: "Had to earn my stripes, bitch / I'm a tube sock."
James Blake - "Summer of Now" [buy]
As someone who prefers Blake's early electronic work to his latterday ballads, I love the way "Summer of Now" gathers force: splintering from a man and his memories to something less steady, more subdivided. The present is the sum of forgiveness plus regret; we're right to fear the calculation.
TOPS - "I Feel Alive" [buy]
Title track from the Montreal band's new one—a sunny guitar-swept song whose serenity is almost, almost, almost, almost, almost convincing.
Burna Boy ft Naughty By Nature - "Naughty By Nature" [buy]
Yes, it's that Naughty By Nature, invited back by Nigerian superhero Burna Boy—for whom NbN were an early influence, a polestar. Now he gets to return the favour, letting Vin Rock and Treach cast their smiling lines over a radiant, afrobeat production.
Widowspeak - "The Good Ones" [buy]
There are those old stories of the Evil Eye—that all it takes for a curse is a compliment. I can't tell if this dark, dusty tune is a blessing or a hex, a malediction cooed through thin lips.
Kiesza - "When Boys Cry" [buy]
A lean little tune for dancing to—fingersnaps and plainsong, the nervy pleasure one-and-a-half note guitar-line.
Tropical Fuck Storm - "Legal Ghost" [buy]
Bristling, sidling slacker rock that treats its chorus as a queue: time to get your shit together, put your house in order, haunt a better town.
Jennifer Castle - "Broken Hearted" [buy]
Monarch Season's coda feels like such a gift: something placed tenderly in your hands, without any need for thanks. Just Castle's windy voice, her little guitar. A song of moonbeams coming through.
Loma - "Breaking Waves Like A Stone" [buy]
The outstanding and underrated Loma make music in the tradition of Spirit of Eden and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot: fathom-deep songs in tiny reflecting pools, all echo and evocation. With piano, woodwinds and percussion, "Breaking Waves Like A Stone" shines under Emily Cross's voice, a lustre that shrugs off any shadow.
Jeff Rosenstock - "NO DREAM" [buy]
A song of the "great" American dream—in the Ta-Nehisi Coates sense, the one the USA needs to wake the fuck up from—and Rosenstock does his best to make that clamour, to raise that alarm, to rouse the sleepers with shout and crash and even a slice of straight punk hardcore. He's furious and impatient and kind and hopeful and fuckin' right as rain. (Thank you Jeff.)
Marika Hackman - "Playground Love" [buy]
I love Marika Hackman's sleepy Covers record, but I was surprised to find my personal highlight wasn't either of the Grimes or Sharon Van Etten tunes, or even "Between the Bars": it was this, a drowsy reimagining of Air's ubiquitous 2000 hit. Hackman's "Playground Love" would have never fit on The Virgin Suicides: it's too sultry, too embodied, a reminder that love is sometimes thick and sticky, not thin as wine.
Nap Eyes - "Fool Thinking Ways" [buy]
One of my favourite bands invites us on a trip to epiphany. While the verses feel dreary, like clouds are collecting above your head, each chorus is like a sunburst: bright, unmistakeable, like May in England (or maybe, in Nap Eyes' case, Halifax).
Frances Quinlan - "Your Reply" [buy]
Pure and ringing clamour from Hop Along's Frances Quinlan, whose debut solo album soundtracked much of my February, before the curtain fell. When it comes to this song I am admittedly biased: it is rare, as a novelist, to hear a song about reading a novel, but that is where "Your Reply" begins: marginalia, and a paragraph about a dead horse. Within moments, Quinlan is singing the word "website" with the genius and patience of somebody who has been doing this long enough to know all the rules and how to break them—who can sing whatever the fuck she wants, sing whatever the fuck into being, pow, zip, like a sorceress in black jeans.
Agnes Obel - "Island of Doom" [buy]
Just a light little number about watching a loved one get lowered into the ground. The Danish songwriter knows how to use her most trusted tools—glacial arrangements of piano, synths and strings; her monumental voice—but she has other tricks too: an eerie chorus effect she applies to the latter, and also a satinnier register, smooth and almost droll, that reminds me of Roy Orbison.
Nas - "The Cure" [buy]
Not sure who Nas is rapping to, here—himself, I guess, but I like to imagine it as something he texts to any other hip-hop luminary who occasionally express ennui. "The markets see you as a old-ass artist ... They just want you to switch your lanes up / so they can hate on your ass." Whenever Jay or Tip put this on, its regal trudge bluetoothing to their airpods, I hope they'll be as struck as me: by this legend's craft, his unflagging brio.
Yumi Zouma - "Lie Like You Want Me Back (alternate version)" [buy]
With this version of "Lie Like You Want Me Back," Yumi Zouma's shimmering tune gets pleasantly discombobulated: a crisscross of voices, just a dash of vinegar, in what is otherwise too sweet.
Mthandazo Gatya ft. DJ Manzo SA, Comado - "Senzeni" [buy]
There's a lot of what's called afro-house on this list, especially the South African sub-genre amapiano. This surprises me—I'm not someone who listens to much house music generally—and it speaks perhaps to this year's trouble (and its remedies). But it also comes down to the breadth and depth of this genre: a huge community of producers, beatmakers, musicians and singers who seem to take every single track as a challenge to somehow make something even prettier. My affection for the genre was carried in on the back of Sun-El Musician's (brilliant) "Akanamali," in 2017, but at this point Sun-El's just one more DJ in a "gauzy beauty" arms race, and here's the producer Mthandazo Gatya with yet another salvo: "Senzeni"'s weightless, light as air, and still it keeps its shape.
Jazmine Sullivan - "Lost One" [stream]
Five years after her last solo album, Sullivan returns with a quivering, lonely tune. It's a song full of failure, built atop a simple guitar loop, but Sullivan answers and confronts and calls out to herself throughout—as if she's finally found a way to bring herself the antidote.
Muzz - "Bad Feeling" [buy]
A song that bides is time, sitting in its stew, 'til the glory of the closing seconds, when finally the fanfare breaks through.
Lina_Raül Refree - "A Mulher que já foi tua" [buy]
From Portugal, Lina's unadorned fado music and Raül Refree's simple, consummate reconfiguration. I understand it to be true that if you stand on your tip-toes all day, your highest tip-toes, then tomorrow you will be taller. And if tomorrow you stand on your tip-toes, your highest tip-toes, then you will be even taller the next day. ... I understand it to be true that if you are safe today, all day, then tomorrow we will be safer. And if tomorrow you remain safe, then the next day safer, and the next and the next, on and on, until the day when it is impossible for any of us to be safer. We will be as safe as we can be.
Taylor Swift - "marjorie" [buy]
With a relentless forward movement, a tick like telephone poles through a traincar window, my favourite of Taylor Swift's occasionally glutinous 2020 material is this beautiful ode to her late grandmother. Nimble, confident and deeply felt.
Roki Fernandez - "Nuevo Amor" [buy]
A Spanish synth cover of David Bowie's "Modern Love"—shiny as a soap-bubble, ready to pop.
The Killers - "Caution" [buy]
With the Killers, in general, I just can't help it. It's their coyote grins, and gallop.
Baba Levo ft Rayvanny - "Ngongingo" [video]
The Swahili-English dictionary doesn't have a translation of "ngongingo," but says "ngongongo" means either "on purpose" on "freight train." Elsewhere, a relatively unreliable translation proposes "You're not alone." Listening to this magnificent, thudding tune, any of these will do—that is, as a song of reassurance or intention or barrelling high-speed transport. Baba Levo and Rayvanny's voices both seem almost fluorescent, cutting right through everything: and the everything is irrepressible, on the move, marching like a legion wherever the hell it wants.
Angie McMahon ft Leif Vollebekk - "If You Call" [buy]
One of my favourite Montreal artists joins Australian songwriter Angie McMahon for an iceflow-slow rendition of her tune "If You Call." It's a song about the afterwards of a relationship, or an afterwards, a time that tends to feel either worthless or sacred. McMahon reaches there with her voice—and there's the wurlitzer wishing too, and a little bit of whistling—as the darkness hunkers down. (Thank you, Arnulf.)
Helena Deland - "Comfort, Edge" [buy]
"You'll never make a fool of me," sings the Montreal songwriter, but it's never quite clear to me if this to the person she's wishing for or to the one she'd never choose. "Give me comfort, give me edge," she asks over studded organ and electric guitar. We all know she can't have both.
Olamide ft Omah Lay - "Infinity" [buy]
A song whose spirit is not that unlike the other Omah Lay appearance on this list (at #34): free-moving, weightless. But whereas "Lo Lo" seemed sunlit, "Infinity" is all starlight: darker, gentler, a milder reassurance.
Baby Keem - "hooligan" [stream]
"Hooligan" is darkly catchy, rooted in a sped-up piano round and an infrequent whistle hook. At certain times playful, at others times dour—and in equal parts proud and self-hating—the erratic Baby Keem is never more fascinating than when he's sullenly blurting the chorus, "Fa-fa-fa, fa-fa-fa."
Lomelda - "Hannah Sun" [buy]
Lomelda's own name is Hannah and here she's thanking and searching and shining, sun-like, over shuffle and strum, a small and kind and faithful demonstration of what a hope is worth.
Keleketla! - "Shepherd Song" [buy]
It's with the bass that this song gets me—a tumbling Western/African collaboration overseen by Coldcut and featuring artists such as Afla Sackey, Antibalas, Gally Ngoveni, Nono Nkoane, Sibusile Xaba, Thabang Tabane & no less than the great Tony Allen. The bassline isn't always there, hiding for a time under rattle and folksong and rubbery synth stabs, but my ear longs for it, goes searching, for the gentle-hearted languor at the centre of the day. (Thank you Jeff.)
Jon McKiel - "Deeper Shade" [buy]
Hop on board the loop, ride it to the terminus. Jon McKiel has a flair that reminds me of Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, but Owen Ashworth would have never allowed this track's closing acoustic guitar section—glittering and wishful, unsentimental, the promise of a happy ending just around the bend. A lo-fi love-song that doesn't show its hand.
Masha Qrella - "Geister" [buy]
This is, Arnulf tells me (thanks, Arnulf!), of the German musical genre known as "Spröder Pop." Spröde meaning brittle, like a clean sheet of ice or my nerves in November. Masha Qrella has been at this forever—Jordan first wrote about her here in 2004. With age comes wisdom, a level-headed singing style that endows this flickering cybersong with a grown-up sense of scale and distance.
Wizkid - "True Love" [buy]
Compared to the trouble of "Smoke" (see #96), Wizkid's "True Love" seems like pure untroubled ease. The Nigerian singer has mild promises to make - plus the silkiest saxophone, a chorus like a sunbeam on the bedsheets, the smell of jasmine on the air.
Joy Oladokun - "Smoke" [buy]
Despite the hopeful rise of "Smoke"'s chorus, its strength—by far—is its verses, where this young American songwriter demonstrates clarity and specificity in a way that reminds me of early music by The Streets. Joy Oladokun has the kind of forward-pushing energy that makes one root for her, imagine her triumphs.
Max García Conover - "Handsome Suit" [buy]
Sturdy old chords and even a sturdy old melody—but Max García Conover has a gift for consonant and rhyme, the click of two lines as they meet. Folk-songs don't always need much filigree: it's as simple as some images, some wisdom, the metaphor of the real world made to sing. "Crazy lady shoveling the whole damn road / 3 gold deer in the hip high snow." (Thank you, Matthew!)
The Weeknd ft Rosalía - "Blinding Lights (remix)" [video]
There's an obvious lustre to "Blinding Lights," but to me the original feels paint-by-numbers. With Rosalía at least, singing in Spanish, more sparkle gets blown all over—the slightest bright disorder. If anything it's still too clean—the melody measured, each bar neatly counted—but I suspect any one of us can lend it a little mess.
Bullion - "We Had a Good Time" [buy]
Docile, futuristic pop from British producer Nathan Jenkins, co-written with Gramo-fave Diego Herrera (aka Suzanne Kraft). Jenkins' voice recalls the Beta Band or Westerman, and the bend of his melody reminds me of Connan Mockasin. Despite its burble and thunderclap, this song is all comedown—a balm, a salve, at the end of an abominable annum.
The Dears - "Play Dead" [buy]
Playing dead isn't the worst advice in 2020. Murray Lightburn didn't know that when he wrote this, when he sang it into an old microphone—but I like to imagine he knew it as he loosed it into the world, knew this advice would unfurl with a little more resonance. "Play Dead" is itself a very quiet anthem, like a power-ballad recorded in a broom closet, warmed by melody and purpose and the guitar's flickering fire. A song that's willing to take your hand, willing to break all the rules, just to lay with you.
Fin, for another year.
Thanks for reading, sorry for the broken links, please support these artists with your money. (Invest in what's important or it will go away.) Be kind to each other, take care, be brave, undo what harm you can. Whenever you're sad, my smallest advice is: let some music into the air.
8:08 AM on Dec 14, 2020.
Yes! What a pleasant surprise to wake up to. Can't wait to start listening. Thank you Sean for continuing this tradition and sharing with us all the music that you love. If not for this annual list my music tastes would have remained anything prior to 2000 as I'm not so adventurous these days. Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, Happy New year and stay safe!
by Budman, Dec 14, 2020
Just realized that due to some personal organizational peculiarities (it was in my "work" folder!), I forgot to include one of my absolute favourites of 2020:
Basia Bulat's "Love Is at the End of the World".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA920rjU674
https://open.spotify.com/album/1qn64Ce1nAksES6KVbnxYf
by Sean, Dec 14, 2020
by Paul, Dec 14, 2020
Thank you Sean.
Thanks Sean, excited to listen through everything.
Ps. Had no idea The Wagers had been optioned! Great book, read earlier this year and loved it.
by Taylor, Dec 14, 2020
So stoked to listen to all of these.
Bless.
by McKinley Leonard-Scott, Dec 14, 2020
Thank you! I always enjoy exploring your list in the final weeks of each year.
by Robin, Dec 14, 2020
Been following this blog since 2007. Always look forward to these. Thank you.
by Joe, Dec 15, 2020
Is it just me, or are all the links broken?
by Blair Millen, Dec 15, 2020
Blair, which links? The songs I tested all seem fine.
Merci. For the music, and your words, always. Good thing to grow old together with the blog and your offerings, makes it a touch lighter, even in this bleary year.
by ELSIE, Dec 15, 2020
Thank you for this. I've not listened yet, but I look forward to these every year. I was starting to worry about the site. Hope it continues for a long time.
by Tony the Cool Guy, Dec 15, 2020
Blair, I had trouble downloading the zip files using the original (zippyshare) links. (Lots of redirects to ads, but never a download.) I had a lot better luck using the mirror (mediafire) links.
by echawkes, Dec 15, 2020
I look forward to this every year :-)
by paul g, Dec 15, 2020
Thank you! This is always my favorite year end list and I've found so many songs and albums that I love through it.
by Patrick, Dec 15, 2020
by esteban, Dec 16, 2020
Thanks for another great list! Take care
Sorry, I was meaning the little triangle links to play the music. When I click them (in Firefox and Google Chrome) they do nothing. I checked the JavaScript console in the web developer tools and there's a bunch of warnings and errors... can't just be me though?
I've just had a thought that my browser ad-blocker may have been the cause, but disabled that, and they still don't work :-(
I'll do some more digging when I have some time.
by Blair, Dec 16, 2020
Blair, thanks for continuing to investigate! I'm on Mac/Chrome and the triangles do work fine. Strange!
Cheers, made a few great discoveries thanks to you.
Here is a link of the playlist on Tidal:
https://tidal.com/browse/playlist/c35d5703-f868-417c-aa85-cb1b936baab3
by pierre, Dec 17, 2020
I look forward to hearing Sean's excellent picks every year, but am very glad to have them this year in particular, to temper the loneliness of a holiday season away from friends and family. many thanks.
by Kate, Dec 17, 2020
Thanks Sean! I'd been wondering if you'd make one this year. I'm 90% of the way through so far, and so many are brand new to me, and gems. You are so right about those Norweg ian pop bangers!
I made a Youtube playlist if anyone wants to listen that way, just search 'Said the Gramophone 2020'. Be well one and all...
by Dain, Dec 17, 2020
One of my favourite holiday traditions is going into headphones mode with this list and something warm. :*)
by AhFrig, Dec 17, 2020
Please never stop doing these.
by Moka, Dec 17, 2020
Merci Sean. Fabulous !
by Emmanuel Delaplanche, Dec 17, 2020
I had been refreshing my link daily in anticipation... to page 2 of the blog. Your list is a joy and treasure every year. I wish you (and all of your die-hard list lovers) a gentler 2021.
by Michelle, Dec 17, 2020
thanks for doing this again! i've been listening to these since 2013 and look forward to it every year. certainly can be hit and miss for me, but i always seem to find gems that shine for years in my ears! cheers from humboldt, ca
by Scurvy Louse, Dec 18, 2020
I look forward to this post every year, but I think I need it more than usual as we wade through this "endless shit parade". Thank you thank you thank you for bringing light into my life.
by Peter, Dec 21, 2020
When was the last time I commented on a blog? Far too long. I miss you lots Sean and reading this list reminds me how we became friends in the first place. Your incredible talent at writing about music is second to none.
by Julia Caron, Dec 21, 2020
Thank you for continuing to do this every year. I really needed it for this one
by Laura Ferguson, Dec 26, 2020
aw man i forgot about this site and it recently got linked to on hypem.com - dang, i miss this blog. glad to see y'all are still around.
by j'ronimo, Dec 28, 2020
Thank you! ❤ as always!
by Locke Berkebile, Jan 1, 2021
Really glad you are still doing this. Thanks and all the best for 2021.
by Barry Stephen, Jan 3, 2021
Belated Thanks, Sean. At first run thru, at least a dozen of these went straight to my old ipod!
And "Us Conductors" is now on my shopping list.
Have a great 2021.
by J, Feb 3, 2021
I've been following this blog on and off from 2005. A lot has changed and so did my taste in music, but I always keep coming back. I've discovered so many great artists and wonderful songs through your posts. This site feels like coming home.
All I can say is thank you and keep up the great work.
Love from Croatia
by Dunja, Apr 6, 2021
Merci Sean !
Your 100 is a dear old friend.
So happy to "see" him again early december !
Yes, something's coming. 💯
12:23 PM on Dec 7, 2020.
Whoa. I clicked my StG bookmark for the first time in months 3 minutes after this was posted. Something's coming.
by AhFrig, Dec 7, 2020
a perennial highlight, thank you...
by D'Arcy, Dec 7, 2020
Ha! I just checked today for the first time in months, too. That time of the year. Can't wait.
by jjjonesss, Dec 7, 2020
Even though I know it's way too early, as soon as Thanksgiving hits, I visit this page every day it seems.
Bright news on this Monday - you are incredible.
by ADS, Dec 7, 2020
Most wonderful time of the year!
by Josh, Dec 7, 2020
Yes! Beyond thrilled.
can't wait. thank you for this perennial gift.
by lynn, Dec 7, 2020
Waiting from France. Thanks.
by Emmanuel Delaplanche, Dec 7, 2020
Yes! I come back to this each year. Can't wait.
by Justin, Dec 7, 2020
So happy to read this, you're 100 is an annual pleasure since a long, long time.
Julien (France)
I still believe in Santa!
by Piper, Dec 8, 2020
Just checked in to find out what time 'something' arrived last year. Tip-top, Christmas just wouldn't be the same, etc.
by Benjamin, Dec 8, 2020
Oh that just really brightens things. Thank you Sean.
by Ted, Dec 8, 2020
Eagerly anticipated!
by Matthew, Dec 8, 2020
I'm so glad! I look forward to it every year.
by Bryan, Dec 8, 2020
I love this list every year. Always find some hidden gems. Thanks for doing it.
by Ben Spurr, Dec 8, 2020
Just another show of love for this annual treat! Fuels my heart and ears for the year. Thanks for doing it.
by Matt, Dec 8, 2020
Waiting from high atop a mountain in Washington State. A highlight. Thank you!
by Joseph, Dec 8, 2020
Hooray! I've looked forward to this for over thirteen years...
by Chris, Dec 8, 2020
Nothing better than new music. Thanks for all the songs over the years
by Scott, Dec 8, 2020
YES I was hoping for this
by Lyntonn, Dec 8, 2020
Yes, please! Waiting for you and your list. Thank you for coming back.
by Brianna, Dec 9, 2020
by S, Dec 9, 2020
Oh thank goodness
by Kristen, Dec 9, 2020
Yes! My favorite December tradition is eagerly checking for your list every 17.5 minutes
by Sam, Dec 9, 2020
Woke up on Monday thinking "Will Sean release his 'best of' this year? Checked here... and am happy :) If this is indeed a teaser for your annual list, then no better way to end a crappy 2020 than on a high note!
by Budman, Dec 9, 2020
Hurray! Thank you ❤
by John Bu, Dec 9, 2020
Thank you in advance, StG. Such a great thing.
by Johnny, Dec 9, 2020
Blimey so loving this news
love Jules
by mr j s badenoch, Dec 9, 2020
Good to see. Always a fantastic list, many gems, v good, etc etc
by Will, Dec 10, 2020
Oh god, it's happening! One of the few pleasures of lockdowned life has been taking long strolls around the park, headphones in, lost inside myself outside. Which is to say that the StG 100 could not come at a better time for pure focused listening :)
by KC, Dec 10, 2020
by mr j s badenoch, Dec 10, 2020
So looking forward to this.
by Rogue Scribe, Dec 11, 2020
My favorite internet day of the year is coming!
by Jeff, Dec 11, 2020
Thank you so much for continuing to do this, it really is something I look forward to every year!
by Patrick Singer, Dec 11, 2020
Great news! Looking forward to listening...
by Aimee, Dec 11, 2020
Hurrah! Best-of-worst-year-ever coming soon. Making my Friday happy....
by Amir, Dec 11, 2020
so excited!
by Amy, Dec 11, 2020
Yay! :)
Headline: Top Songs List thrown into turmoil by late TSwift entry!
by metin, Dec 12, 2020
Thank you, Sean!¡
by Haz, Dec 12, 2020
Woooohooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!
by Conor Flynn, Dec 12, 2020
LET'S GOOOOO
by Tim, Dec 12, 2020
Cannot wait. Miss and love STG!
by Jenna, Dec 12, 2020
YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
by Emma, Dec 12, 2020
Hooray! What a treat, thanks!
by Jo H , Dec 12, 2020
That's a beacon from an old friend.
by BMR, Dec 12, 2020
So so excited for this. Been a highlight of the end of the year for as long as I can remember! (We're all old.)
by Travis, Dec 12, 2020
My heart! I have found so many of my favorite albums through these. I can't wait!! Thank you as always. Bless your soul.
by Mark Edward Kowgier, Dec 12, 2020
A time-honoured tradition. Can't wait
by Chris Boden, Dec 12, 2020
Hard to overstate how much I appreciate what you do here. Can't wait to see what's coming.
by Russell Wallace, Dec 13, 2020
I am, as ever, looking forward to this.
I also loved reading all these comments - I wish we could all be together in a dark but friendly venue, drinks in hand, waiting for Sean to play us his tunes of the year.
ooohhh... can't wait! This year specially.
by Maryam, Dec 13, 2020
oh, this makes me so happy!
really looking forward to it.
by Luci, Dec 13, 2020
I look forward to this every year! So thrilled to read and listen to all the hidden gems!
by Simon Brooke, Dec 13, 2020
Can't wait! 2020, you're not all bad.
by Rob, Dec 14, 2020
Yay Sean
by Brendan, Dec 16, 2020
CUE SYNTHESIZER
Eleanor Friedberger - "The River (Destroyer cover)" [buy on bandcamp]
Tougher times, these days. There's something circadian about it - you're up, you're down, eventually you're up again.
"There's something circadian about it!" I've shouted this now: shouted it in an alley, at a friend six-and-a-half feet away. What a world.
"You study your braille / you listen to the hail outside," Eleanor Friedberger sings. When Dan Bejar recorded this it was shiny, sturdy, blasted by cloud-coloured light. Here now it's a doomed demo, a recording never finished or properly released. Here now it feels like a coronavirus tune, a dirge for this comedy, this tragedy, these 224 spilling seconds.
I thought I could handle repetition. I thought I flourished in repetition. Scheduled days, habit. But tonight these groundhog days are wearing me out. Not loss, grief, worry: just the ache of a groove worn down. I'm nearly a broken record.
It hailed yesterday. Why didn't I register it as a splendour? Why was it just one more thing?
You're living, you're breathing
You try to believe in, but you don't believe
I'd like it to hail inside the house.
(painting by jim holland)
9:12 PM on Apr 22, 2020.
Show comments (7) »
Purchased, thank you for the tip!
by Bryan, Apr 25, 2020
I just wanted to say thank you for continuing to make these posts and put effort into this publication! It was a huge part of my adolescent life :)
by Francisco, May 8, 2020
been visiting since 2008/9. thanks so much for still updating.
by Kristopher, May 15, 2020
sean come back I need you
by moka, Jul 30, 2020
Long time listener, first time commenter...I have been a looooong time reader of your blog and it has introduced me to so much wonderful music. I hadn't checked in for a long time, figuring it was done updating (understandably). I instinctively came back today while feeling the need for new music and I was thrilled to discover the 2020 posts. Thank you so much for all of your past work and whatever future bits we may get.
by Megan, Aug 28, 2020
Hope your OK....
by Conor, Dec 4, 2020
Have been checking this blog every year since 2011 for the top songs of the year, and each of my Decembers this past decade has been defined by not just the songs but the writing you've done on each. I checked again today hoping for the end of year list, and realize eventually it will have to stop, so wanted to at least let you know how much I've loved those (and other) posts! Thank you for all you've done
by RS, Dec 6, 2020
THE ICEMAN RUNNETH
Bad Bunny ft Sech - "Ignorantes".
Today I played with my son in the living-room, a game of pigs and yeti, scampering over mountaintops, and as I did so I listened to Bad Bunny, because I have taken to listening to new music while we play, these days, because I can't listen to music the ways I normally do. The reason I was listening to Bad Bunny was because I like what I've already heard by him, but mostly because Nat likes him, and I trust her taste (with the exception of Berlioz, ai ai ai), but at a certain point I was listening not because of Nat, not because of anyone else besides Bad Bunny himself: I was listening to "Ignorantes" for the fifth time in a row, like a tonic, like drinking a healthful tonic, another dose of quinine and orange juice. This sad song was glinting in the afternoon's grey light, it was lifting my heart, it was soundtracking the swine and the snowman and the endless avalanches. I thought about the strangeness of the way a song can travel; in that way it's not like a novel, a novel can't serve so many functions. When Sech and Bad Bunny sat down to write "Ignorantes" - with their feelings heavy in their chests, heartbroken or pretending, lost in memory - they could not have guessed their song would come here to pandemic-stricken Montreal; that it would to be a comfort, a tonic, floating over mountaintops in a cloud-tinted living-room, where son and father play.
I hope it does you some good, too.
7:45 PM on Apr 2, 2020.
What a treasure to come back after a few months of chaos and nothingness and to find not one, but several posts I haven't read and songs I haven't heard yet. Thank you!
by Luci, Jul 17, 2020
WHO'S ZOOMIN WHO
Shotgun Jimmie - "Skype Date".
A child is shrieking through the wall. Every morning someone practices their saxophone. "When have I ever been shaggier?" Joni asks herself. She is undyed and lonely. She has worn her fur coat for the past three days because "why not?" She wonders how long it will be before she can send it for dry cleaning. She wonders how you know when a grapefruit is inedible. She wonders what she would do if her computer died - "buy a new one?" she guesses. It's raining outside. Joni considers sitting and just watching it. Until 5pm. Until Paul calls at 5pm. She wants to be ready when he calls at 5pm. They barely know each other but Joni will take what she can. She is thinking of singing for him, because that would impress him. That would be something to do. [buy]
every zoom discussion during online school pic.twitter.com/0LtkQy8gOm
— liva worst (@realchoppedliva) March 31, 2020
8:13 PM on Mar 31, 2020.
There's lots more in the archives:
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about said the gramophone
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Said the Gramophone launched in March 2003, and added songs in November of that year. It was one of the world's first mp3blogs.
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"And I shall watch the ferry-boats / and they'll get high on a bluer ocean / against tomorrow's sky / and I will never grow so old again."
Sean Michaels is the founder of Said the Gramophone. He is a writer, critic and author of the theremin novel Us Conductors. Follow him on Twitter or reach him by email here. Click here to browse his posts.
Emma Healey writes poems and essays in Toronto. She joined Said the Gramophone in 2015. This is her website and email her here.
Jeff Miller is a Montreal-based writer and zinemaker. He is the author of Ghost Pine: All Stories True and a bunch of other stories. He joined Said the Gramophone in 2015. Say hello on Twitter or email.
Mitz Takahashi is originally from Osaka, Japan who now lives and works as a furniture designer/maker in Montreal. English is not his first language so please forgive his glamour grammar mistakes. He is trying. He joined Said the Gramophone in 2015. Reach him by email here.
Site design and header typography by Neale McDavitt-Van Fleet. The header graphic is randomized: this one is by Daria Tessler.
Dan Beirne wrote regularly for Said the Gramophone from August 2004 to December 2014. He is an actor and writer living in Toronto. Any claim he makes about his life on here is probably untrue. Click here to browse his posts. Email him here.
Jordan Himelfarb wrote for Said the Gramophone from November 2004 to March 2012. He lives in Toronto. He is an opinion editor at the Toronto Star. Click here to browse his posts. Email him here.
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our favourite blogs
(◊ means they write about music)
Back to the World
La Blogothèque ◊
Weird Canada ◊
Destination: Out ◊
Endless Banquet
A Grammar (Nitsuh Abebe) ◊
Ill Doctrine ◊
A London Salmagundi
Dau.pe ◊
Words and Music ◊
Petites planètes ◊
Gorilla vs Bear ◊
Herohill ◊
Silent Shout ◊
Clouds of Evil ◊
The Dolby Apposition ◊
Awesome Tapes from Africa ◊
Molars ◊
Daytrotter ◊
Matana Roberts ◊
Pitchfork Reviews Reviews ◊
i like you [podcast]
Musicophilia ◊
Anagramatron
Nicola Meighan ◊
Fluxblog ◊
radiolab [podcast]
CKUT Music ◊
plethoric pundrigrions
Wattled Smoky Honeyeater ◊
The Clear-Minded Creative
Torture Garden ◊
LPWTF? ◊
Passion of the Weiss ◊
Juan and Only ◊
Horses Think
White Hotel
Then Play Long (Marcello Carlin) ◊
Uno Moralez
Coming Up For Air (Matt Forsythe)
ftrain
my love for you is a stampede of horses
Marathonpacks ◊
Song, by Toad ◊
AMASS BLOG
Waxy
WTF [podcast]
Masalacism ◊
The Rest is Noise (Alex Ross) ◊
Goldkicks ◊
My Daguerreotype Boyfriend
The Hood Internet ◊
things we like in Montreal
st-viateur bagel
café olimpico
Euro-Deli Batory
le pick up
kem coba
le couteau
mamie clafoutis
tourtière australienne
chez boris
alati caserta
vices & versa
+ paltoquet, cocoa locale, idée fixe, patati patata, the sparrow, pho tay ho, qin hua dumplings, café italia, hung phat banh mi, caffé san simeon, meu-meu, pho lien, romodos, patisserie guillaume, patisserie rhubarbe, kazu, lallouz, maison du nord, cuisine szechuan &c
drawn + quarterly
+ bottines &c
shows:
casa + sala + the hotel
blue skies turn black
montreal improv theatre
passovah productions
le cagibi
cinema du parc
pop pmontreal
yoga teacher Thea Metcalfe
(maga)zines
Cult Montreal
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