Pitchfork’s Top 100 Tracks of 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Jai Paul – “Str8 Outta Mumbai”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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