100 Songs That Define Our Decade So Far

When the five of us started dreaming up Hearing Things earlier this year, we decided to take on a project that was both intimidating and second-nature: a list of 100 songs that represent what the 2020s mean to us so far. As former writers and editors at many music publications, including Pitchfork, we’ve had plenty of experience putting together “best of” lists. But our aim here is more personal. We’re not trying to juice our web search stats or suggest that this is the absolute be-all, end-all tally of the best tracks of the 2020s. No one forced us to make this list, and we didn’t rank it. We went to bat for our favorites, and after weeks of discussion, each Hearing Things founder—Andy Cush, Ryan Dombal, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, Dylan Green, and Jill Mapes—penned small paeans to 20 tracks apiece.

We’re using our decades of collective experience as music journalists to guide you through the artists, songs, and styles that mean so much to us—from rap iconoclasts to reggaetoneros, leftfield pop stars to experimental legends in the making, spoken-word indie rockers to freeform jazz pros. These are the songs that never got old to us, no matter how many times we listened in hopes of tapping into just a little bit more of their life-giving force. And like any worthwhile music list, this one will make you think, help you discover new faves, and maybe even rile you up enough to sound off in the comments.

Some self-imposed ground rules: Because ranking art can be tedious and arbitrary, this list is presented alphabetically by artist. Each artist was limited to one song on the list (a few people show up twice thanks to feature appearances). And we generally aimed to highlight people who are doing their best work this decade and pushing music forward. We’re trying to push it all forward, too. 

Read more about Hearing Things and our mission here.

Listen to 100 Songs That Define Our Decade So Far on Apple Music or Spotify. Or, better yet, actually buy the music on this list! At Hearing Things, we take our editorial independence seriously, and our favor can not be bought; when you make a purchase through our links, we may earn a commission.

100 Gecs: “Frog on the Floor”

This just might be the Gecs-iest 100 Gecs song to date. It’s meme-y. It’s irreverent. It’s ska. It’s jam-packed with ribbit noises. It’s about a freaking frog who does a keg stand at a house party. (You haven’t fully experienced this song until you see it live, with the pogoing crowd tossing around stuffed frogs to and fro.) For all its ridiculousness, though, there’s a surprising strain of pathos running through “Frog on the Floor.” The way Dylan Brady and Laura Les sing about the slimy green guy—let’s call him Ralph—makes him sound like any other outsider just trying to make it through a world that could never hope to understand him. Gecs aren’t goofing on Ralph as much as they’re empathizing with his awkwardness: They want to give him space so he can chomp on flies without feeling weird about it. It’s a heartening gesture—because, if we’re being honest, there’s a little bit of Ralph in all of us. –Ryan Dombal

Buy 100 Gecs’ 10,000 Gecs

454: “Stitch + Lilo”

454 hails from Orlando, but his music might as well be piped in from Mario Kart’s Rainbow Road. The rapper-producer loves colorful beats that are often as chirpy as his pitch-shifted vocals. The bounce of Florida rap grounds his work, but everything else about it is as saccharine and sharp as Jolly Rancher shards. His writing is equally impressive, occasionally offering a no-nonsense counterpart to all that sweetness. Take “Stitch + Lilo,” from 2022’s Fast Trax 3, where synth washes, 808s, and soft vocals speed along as 454 jumps from subject to subject like a popcorn kernel: new money, trips to see family across the country, summertime flings, friendships strained by distance or death. “The way that life go…/You might need a gun, you might not need nothin’,” he says bluntly near the song’s end, mirroring the ups and downs that define his music. –Dylan Green

Amaarae: “Angels in Tibet” 

Amaarae has the cure for what ails everybody: sex and rest. It’s an ethos ripped straight from “Angels in Tibet,” off the Ghanaian American singer-songwriter’s splash of a 2023 album, Fountain Baby, and just one reason why the song still lands like a firecracker every time I press play. “Angels in Tibet” is proof of Amaarae’s agility as a vocalist, her high falsetto bouncing between 808s, violins, and tabla taps as she sings about her favorite way to decompress. Fountain Baby deals with issues of the heart—but the joy and spectacle of a fling, the core of so many of its songs, is most potent on this track and its lavish video. It’s perky and irresistible, the steamy passion of a summer hookup you think about for years distilled into just under two-and-a-half minutes. –DG

Buy Amaarae’s Fountain Baby

Angel Bat Dawid & Tha Brothahood: “Black Family (Live)” 

On the live version of “Black Family,” Chicago free-jazz auteur Angel Bat Dawid switches freely between voice and clarinet, careening between various extreme emotional registers—rage, grief, celebration—as her band grooves with coiled energy behind her. She had good reason to be angry during her 2019 performance at JazzFest Berlin, where this rendition was recorded: She was protesting the festival onstage, in part because of European jazz festivals’ historically fraught relationship with the Black American music they showcase, and in part because of several racist incidents she personally experienced while in town.

Over nearly 10 minutes, her conversations with the sound engineer and the audience become a part of the music, fodder for more unbridled vocal improvisation: A request to turn up the bass transforms into a rapped invocation, and an encouragement to the crowd to sing along to the refrain—“The black family is the strongest institution in the world”—takes on powerful notes of pain and indignation when they don’t join in. She seems intent on rattling everyone in the room out of complacent self-satisfaction, an effect that remains powerful even when you’re listening at home. –Andy Cush

Buy Angel Bat Dawid & Tha Brothahood’s Live!

Armand Hammer: “Stonefruit”

As Armand Hammer, Billy Woods and Elucid trade verses that are equally pessimistic and hilarious, twirling the surreal around reality like flames slowly enveloping a tree. “Stonefruit,” the closer to their Alchemist-produced 2021 album HARAM, brings a sense of triumph rarely seen from the New York duo, even as things crumble around them. “I walk through doors, my name’s on no list,” Elucid howls at the start of his verse, before unleashing thoughts of diving into melted polar ice caps and banging congas into oblivion. Woods follows with the story of a deteriorating relationship that starts with a grudge and ends with a lover fucking his dead body and making jewelry and a bedframe out of his bones and teeth. As they ride the beat’s synth drone and proggy sway, Woods and Elucid sound like twin cannonballs, heavy enough to smash through the unknown. –DG

Buy Armand Hammer and the Alchemist’s Haram

Arooj Aftab: “Mohabbat” 

Here we have an unlikely candidate for American pop culture canonization: an interpretation of a roughly century-old song originally written by a Pakistani poet that’s sung in the original Urdu and stretches out patiently across nearly eight minutes. Such is the power of Arooj Aftab’s voice, conveying so richly the deep emotion of the source material across whatever language barrier a listener may encounter, that “Mohabbat” became the sort of song that wins a Grammy and ends up on Barack Obama’s annual summer playlist. 

Aftab and her band scrupulously avoid any easy climaxes, instead keeping the music at a simmer, every so often nudging up the heat before bringing it down again. The lyrics of “Mohabbat” tap into an intense longing: In one line, the narrator says that even if they someday end up together with the object of their desire, they will remain consumed with sadness for all the days the two once spent apart. The restraint of Aftab’s performance, then, is another way of remaining faithful to the material—always circling a satisfaction that is forever out of reach. –AC

Buy Arooj Aftab’s Vulture Prince

Asake: “Amapiano” (ft. Olamide)

Naming your song after South Africa's most globally ascendant modern subgenre is a bold move, but Asake earned his stake with this massive chune from his second album, Work of Art, marking his swift superstar reign alongside hip-hop and Afrobeats star Olamide. On the track, he encapsulates the transcendent vibes of amapiano, the genre, with a concise and confident lyric: “the gal-dem know.” Peppered with perfect staccato log drums and a breezy whiff of saxophone—and nominated in 2023 for the first-ever Grammy for African Music Performance—“Amapiano” solidified Asake’s place as the leader of the new class of Nigerian musicians. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Buy Asake’s Work of Art

Babytron: “Extra Butter”

If you’re committed to rapping almost entirely in punchlines, they’d better be funny. Thankfully, this is not a problem for Babytron, who has spent the last six years building a reputation for fast-paced, stone-faced jokes and flexes over breakneck beats with outrageous samples. “Extra Butter” checks all the boxes for a great Babytron song. The deadpan Detroiter lets off one-liners about flings whose lips could use some Carmex, the fancy places he loses phone service, and Russian guns that hit harder than Ivan Drago over a zany flip of The Bernie Mac Show theme song. The lines that aren’t flexes about “lava-stepping” in red bottom shoes are just a barrage of puns, metaphors, and similes doled out with expert nonchalance. With diabolical put-downs aimed at fake scammers, Backwoods smokers, and people pushing 30 who still don’t own a car, Babytron is ready to take a spot onstage at the next great celebrity roast. –DG

Bad Bunny: “Safaera” (ft. Jowell and Randy and Nñego Flow)

In the decade’s first half alone, Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio dropped four studio albums, most of them packed with at least 20 tracks, plus a raft of one-offs and collaborations that exhibited his voracious musical appetite. But it was pure, libertine reggaetón that pushed Bad Bunny past the wider public consciousness and into the collective unconscious: a deliciously chaotic collaboration with three Puerto Rican heroes and vets of the genre, produced by a beatmaking icon (Taíny) and one of Benito’s best friends (DJ Orma). “Safaera” transports listeners to the golden era of the 2000s, flipping between samples like scanning through stations on an FM dial, and proves that the crooner Conejo has old-school chops from a lifetime of study. –JES

Buy Bad Bunny’s YHLQMDLG

Bandmanrill: “I Am Newark”

When club rap exploded in popularity in the early 2020s, Newark, New Jersey’s Badmanrill was one of its first emissaries. Compared to the more bubbly stylings of Cookiee Kawaii or the house-leaning vibes of DJ Uniiqu3, Bandman’s breathless approach to the trademark triplet thumps blends the samples and pace of club with the hardened edge of drill. It’s easy to hear a song like “I Am Newark” and imagine a dance circle in the middle of a bar: sweaty patrons shredding their ankles to keep up with the exhausting pace set by the song’s producers, Rrodney and McVertt. But Bandman zips across their flip of Madcon’s “Beggin’” like a man on a mission, rocketing through gun and drug raps with a silver tongue. It’s an athletic feat that plants a flag for the legacy of Jersey club music, reminding the world how potent it is when pulled directly from the source. –DG

Beatrice Dillon: “Workaround 2”

“Dry” is the word musicians and producers use to talk about sounds without reverb, the echo effect that can give a recording the sense of existing in a particular space, whether small and subtle or big and bombastic. It’s a value-neutral descriptor, but leaving sounds dry in the technical sense does run the risk of a final mix that feels dry in the sense of academic papers or televised golf. The music can get boring quickly. 

So when London electronic experimentalist Beatrice Dillon made a rule to avoid reverb on Workaround, her debut album, she charted a challenging path for herself. Without the emotional shorthand the effect offers—the right reverb can impart even the Seinfeld theme with a sense of gauzy mystery—Dillon draws your focus to her rhythms: the pensive gap between two handclaps; the playful way a hi-hat stutters across the bar. On “Workaround 2,” she combines the pinprick precision of her electronic sounds with more openly expressive flourishes of pedal steel guitar, saxophone, and vocals from fellow sonic explorer Laurel Halo. The music’s dryness makes it so that it doesn’t envelop you with feeling, but instead invites your attention as an active participant. If you’re willing to meet it halfway, you’ll find that even its silences have something to say. –AC

Buy Beatrice Dillon’s Workaround

Beyoncé: “Heated”

“Heated” is perhaps the lowest-key song off Beyoncé’s world-dominating, culture-shifting dance album Renaissance, but it serves as its thesis statement: Both a confident monologue for a woman of her stature and status, and a coquettish come-hither in the air conditioning—“I’m just as petty as you are,” she croons. There’s not a drop of sweat on her, but she fans herself for dramatic effect before jumping in the deep end of pitch-perfect ballroom commentating, her mewls transforming to growls about Coco Chanel and Uncle Johnny with a Kevin Jz Prodigy guide-track no doubt hovering like a Motherly ghost. In a single song, she unites her Afro-diasporic leanings, honors the queer culture that Renaissance set out to reflect, and flexes the infallibility of her chops, whether lavish and languid or coming in chop-hot. –JES

Buy Beyoncé’s Renaissance

Björk: “Ancestress”

With her tenth studio LP, Fossora, mother Björk gave us a glimpse into her life as a caretaking daughter, forced to confront the impermanence of her own mother, who passed away in 2018 following an extended illness. We all know that our parents will die someday, and yet it comes as a brutal blow to suddenly reside in that reality. The week of Fossora’s release, my own mother, then recently diagnosed with stage-four cancer, fought for her life after going septic and having emergency surgery. She was in and out of hospitals for months, and in the lowest moments I’d imagine the eulogy I will eventually write, where even certain flaws take on a glow. “Ancestress” is Björk doing that, and it brought me immense comfort to hear someone honoring their matriarch with both queen-level reverence and blunt honesty (“Did you punish us for leaving? Are you sure we hurt you? Was it just not ‘living’?”). Her mother’s idiosyncrasies and the questions left unasked form a towering tribute that’s as glimmering and off-kilter as the daughter she molded. –Jill Mapes

Buy Björk’s Fossora

Big Thief: “Certainty”

On “Certainty,” Adrianne Lenker looks closely at her own love and finds that it isn’t so steady. The first verse sketches a romantic scene—a late-night drive together with the radio on—and ends on a note of foreboding: “Why do I string you along?” One minute she’s sure they’ll be together forever, the next she’s sure she needs to leave. Her bandmates sway gently as one of the sharpest songwriters of her generation tries to make peace with her lot in the middle, mixing self-recrimination with genuine tenderness and the occasional stray observation about a TV show or a blade of grass. Like many of Big Thief’s best songs, “Certainty” embodies F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous dictum that a first-rate mind can hold two opposed ideas at the same time, offering a few minutes of comfort to anyone who’s ever stood accused of being wishy-washy. If nothing else, “My certainty is wild and weaving” has a much nicer ring to it than “I can’t commit.” –AC

Buy Big Thief’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You

Blake Mills: “Skeleton Is Walking”

Over the past decade, Blake Mills has produced incredible records (Alabama Shakes’ Sound & Color, Perfume Genius’ No Shape) and played guitar with the greats (Dylan, Joni, Fiona), but from the first time I heard 2014’s “Don’t Tell Our Friends About Me” I knew he could also stop time with his own songs. “Skeleton Is Walking,” off last year’s Jelly Road, re-upped my faith in Mills’ songwriting in a big way. 

My love for this song was recently put to the test by my musician partner, who practiced it on electric guitar every day for three weeks; you know a song is good when you still want to listen to it on loop after that. The funny thing is, “Skeleton Is Walking” is kind of like one big loop itself—the same satisfying fingerpicked guitar figure on repeat all the way through the sublime solo, a feat of feedback and control. The imagistic lines that accompany Mills’ deadpan utterance of the song’s title paint a picture of an endless slog amid climate change and late-stage capitalism, just a bunch of bones sleep-walking through the horrors of modern life on its way to mail a letter. –JM

Buy Blake Mills’ Jelly Road

Boldy James: “Carruth” 

Boldy James has been grinding since the early 2010s, but his career hit a new stride this decade, when he began releasing music at a rate that would force lesser artists into autopilot. 2020’s The Price of Tea in China, the Alchemist collaboration that announced this second act, already has the feeling of a modern classic, and its opening track “Carruth” is as good an introduction as any to the Detroit rapper’s steely gravitas and eye for details that can convey entire stories on their own. 

Over a stripped-back soul loop, he delivers a single continuous verse featuring an arresting new image in nearly every bar: one passage has young Boldy’s grandmother admonishing him to stop selling drugs unless he’s willing to cut her in on the profits; another collapses the decades between childhood idle time and adult debauchery with one quick rhyme of ColecoVision and “three hoes kissin’.” If “Carruth” is about any one thing, it’s how the cutthroat Detroit of Boldy’s childhood molded him as a man, an upbringing about which he seems both proud and profoundly conflicted. Alchemist’s production brings out that tension, its cyclical piano chords sounding mournful and quietly uplifting at once. Boldy’s subject matter is often bleak, but he writes about it with such precision that his songs can end up feeling strangely joyous: chronicles of strife that also serve as testaments to the indomitable human spirit. –AC

Cardi B: “WAP” (ft. Megan Thee Stallion)

“WAP,” which if you forgot is an acronym for “Wet Ass Pussy,” marked a lot of firsts: Cardi’s first collab with Megan, Megan’s first song after being shot by Tory Lanez, the first U.S. lawsuit litigating copyright on the phrase “pussy so wet” (it was dismissed)—and, perhaps most resonant to the larger world, the first song that made loads of folks feel alive again during that first pandemic summer. Would it have hit so hard if millions of people weren’t cooped up and antsy, desperate for some—any—excitement? Probably, but all that certainly helped, as did its technicolor, star-studded video—replete with titty water fountains and live anacondas—which dropped in an era when many peoples’ only connection to the outside world was via screens. (One YouTube commenter: “We all going to hell.”) Women rapping this filthily is usually a fun time, but this is the only song to forever alter the simple act of boiling a box of Kraft in a saucepan. –JES

Caroline Polachek: “Pretty in Possible”

While singles like “Bunny Is a Rider” and “Billions” reached cult-classic status, pop slow-burner Caroline Polachek called “Pretty in Possible” her favorite song from 2023’s Desire, I Want to Turn Into You. Maybe that’s because it’s the one where she throws the rulebook out the window. As she told me last year, her idea was to “just flow” with this loose composition driven by a simple synth line, plus slinky beats and a casually virtuosic vocal performance. Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner”comes to mind; similarly,“Pretty in Possible” is a Manhattan-flavored slice of stream of consciousness, with Polacheck observing a world that’s moving fast. But her string of evocative phrases hits like a daydream about one’s own artistic potential, imagined while in constant motion. It’s a semi-nonsensical song about shifting perspectives—I like to read the title as “pretty ‘n’ possible,” versus “pretty impossible”—and its unconventional structure is a testament to Polachek’s killer creative instincts. –JM

Buy Caroline Polachek’s Desire, I Want to Turn Into You

Cash Cobain and Chow Lee: “JHoliday 2”

Cash Cobain and Chow Lee have 2020s rap-game bacchanalia on smash. Their 2022 collab album 2 Slizzy 2 Sexy is a joyride through the candy-colored, sample-heavy sexy drill movement they helped spearhead in New York, and no song encapsulates that more than “JHoliday 2.” They each bring a playful flair to bars that pop like flashbangs on concrete. Cobain, his voice a little lower and cushioned with a slight lisp, is the loverboy with money to burn (“She want a nigga with money, but I’m already Cash”) and a desire for jatties that borders on the tender. Lee’s approach is a bit messier—he’s not afraid to match his lady’s freak on her cheap blowup bed or fess up to asking for a threesome because her “friend is the baddest.” Their tag-team is equal parts funny, horny, and romantic, all delivered over Cash’s blood-rushing flip of R&B group the Whispers’s “Living Together (In Sun).” New New York has never sounded slizzier. –DG

Cassandra Jenkins: “Hard Drive”

Even though it never says the city’s name, Cassandra Jenkins’ breakthrough 2021 single exhibits the kind of open curiosity and casual grit that I associate with living in New York. Maybe it’s because the Manhattanite talks about getting her license at 35 and essentially rebounding from a panic attack in this roving, grief-stricken song, as what could be a busker’s sax twirls in the background. 

Jenkins likes to record conversations and overheard chatter in public (she has a special headphone-recorder for it, in fact), and here she introduces us to a security guard at The Met who opines on humanity’s connection with nature in a thick Queens accent. With her NPR spoken-word coolness, Jenkins may seem like the narrator of these interactions with strangers and loved ones alike, but she is doing something more complex: collecting moments and observing them without judgment, while navigating her own tender moments. She will sort through the footage later, looking for the parts that remind her that the world is vast and perhaps hopeful. The mind, after all, is just another hard drive. –JM

Buy Cassandra Jenkins’ An Overview on Phenomenal Nature

Chappell Roan: “Good Luck, Babe!”

Dating straight dudes is kind of like getting a dog: You find something in the right size range, with suitable levels of cuteness, aggression, and intelligence; you train them to behave and learn which treats they like best. (There is a reason golden-retriever-boyfriend discourse exists.) No offense to men or whatever, but dating women is a bit trickier. Woman to woman, queer person to queer person, our emotional connections have the potential to go much deeper. I think Chappell Roan would appreciate my casual misandry, seeing as “Good Luck, Babe!” is steeped in it. 

Chappell may possess Gaga levels of theater-kid camp and a Swiftian penchant for turning pettiness into hits, but she’s the people’s current pop princess—the only one who’s dated and fucked as a civilian this decade. It makes her particularly good at writing revenge songs about sticky situationships and romantic schadenfreude, a microgenre made into a melancholic monument by “Good Luck, Babe!”. The song is both timeless and a fluke: a fever-dream of a hit made possible by the “Running Up That Hill” frenzy of 2022, with an addictive chorus in an octave hardly anyone can reach, that could have been released anytime in the last four decades if it weren’t for its blatant sapphic longing. Chappell haunts and taunts a female ex-lover for denying her own queerness; make out with all the boys you want, the singer insists, but you’ll never match this intensity. Name another top 10 hit that uses “wife” as a slur and treats heterosexuality like an illness. I’ll wait. –JM

Buy the “Good Luck, Babe!” 7-inch

Charli XCX: “Girl, So Confusing” (ft. Lorde)

Pop’s 2010s empowerment era didn't exactly eradicate girl-on-girl fighting, and in recent years stan groups have intensified the mentality that there can only be one queen. You can understand why this environment would be extremely toxic for the artists themselves, and how it might seem scary to fully trust “the competition.” This is the backdrop for Charli XCX’s “Girl, So Confusing” version with Lorde, a thumping club-pop collab that sparks a genuine dialogue between two stars and friends who are unsure where they stand. Listening to them work it out is a lesson in therapeutic reconciliation. They both cautiously remove their pop-star masks and see that there’s nothing to fear, just respect and a shared hell between them. 

Lorde starts her verse with the most attention-grabbing line of her career—“‘You walk like a bitch’/When I was 10, someone said that”—and by making a point about projection: act a certain way, and people might just believe you are that bitch. “Inside the icon is still a young girl from Essex,” she continues, connecting it back to feeling intimidated by Charli. 

Madonna once asked: Do you know what it feels like for a girl? Here Charli and Lorde name that bad, messy, character-building feeling and ether the concept of frenemies while they’re at it. “Girl, So Confusing” is more than a song—it’s playful shorthand for women having vulnerable conversations with each other. Hell, it even sparked a chat between the two women co-founders of this website, providing an impetus for us to acknowledge past awkward interactions and big-up each other for staying in the game. Just hit her with a “girl, so confusing lol” and you know it’s nothing but love, baby. –JM

Buy Charli XCX’s Brat and It’s the Same But There’s Three More Songs So It’s Not

Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul: “Haha” 

Not to spoil it, but “Haha” is just peals of laughter for two-and-a-half minutes. But not “just” peals of laughter—this is like world-championship-level laughing, we’re talking movie-villain-who-lost-their-mind cackle (think Nicholson or Ledger as the Joker). Charlotte Adigéry, one half of this cheeky Belgian dance duo, cracked herself up and recorded it; you can practically see the tears running down her cheeks. Her giggle was spliced and rejiggered to make beats that perfectly accompany the uncontrollable howling. It’s great fun, one of those songs I’ll put on when I don’t feel like laughing, sort of like how they say you should force a smile when you feel sad (speaking of Joker behavior). But in the context of Adigéry and Bolis Pupul’s 2022 LP, Topical Dancer, the track hits a little different: After chronicling the casual racism, xenophobia, and exoticism they encounter in everyday life with comedic aplomb, the duo sometimes need to have a laugh to deal with the maddening absurdity of it all. –JM

Buy Charlotte Adigery and Bolis Pupul’s Topical Dancer

Cindy Lee: “Always Dreaming” 

At a time when the term “lo-fi” is often applied to music produced in Pro Tools and tinkered with until it sounds vaguely old-fashioned, the genuine scuzz that envelops this song might be the first thing that strikes you about it. Or maybe it’s the fact that you had to venture beyond the streaming ecosystem to hear it: “Always Dreaming” is a standout from the album Diamond Jubilee, which was released only as a digital download from Cindy Lee’s website, not on the big DSPs or even Bandcamp. But try to forget about all that for a moment. Focus instead on the grandeur of the instrumental hook, which could soundtrack the entrance of some legendary nightclub singer to the stage, or the craft of the guitar solo, which is delicate and swaggering at once, as finely and patiently worked out as the mix seems slapped together. 

Cindy Lee, the drag performer alias of former Women guitarist Patrick Flegel, may draw from familiar elements—’60s girl-group songwriting, ’90s indie-rock sonics, David Lynch’s fixation on nightmares and repressed memories—but their combination in songs like “Always Dreaming” belongs distinctly to Flegel. Their greatest work often invokes and then dissolves old rock’n’roll dichotomies: between toughness and melancholy, detached cool and unbridled emotion, between the ramblers and rebels on one side and the lonely souls who pine after them on the other. “Always Dreaming” inhabits both archetypes, offering a model for how to carry oneself with dignity in a world full of heartbreak. –AC

Buy Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee

Cole Pulice: “If I Don’t See You in the Future, I’ll See You in the Pasture”

According to chronoception scientists, memories measure time, and you can make your life feel longer by avoiding routine and pursuing novelty. In other words, just replaying the same records you loved in college could make your existence seem like a blip—while luxuriating in something sui generis, like this 22-minute odyssey from the experimental saxophonist Cole Pulice, could basically make you live forever.

I experienced this sensation acutely last year when I heard it for the first time on a bus traveling from New York City to the Catskills for a weekend escape. As the familiar gray concrete gave way to a smear of yellow and red leaves on the other side of the window, Pulice’s meditative tones felt like they were slowing the world down in real time. The musician’s work is fluid and slippery, knocking your brain pleasingly off-balance; here, they make their saxophone sound like a godly synthesizer while simultaneously playing sax-qua-sax riffs that can make every tiny hair on your body stand at attention. I’d never heard anything quite like it, and it’s stuck with me ever since. –RD

Buy “If I Don​’​t See You in the Future, I​’​ll See You in the Pasture”

Destroyer: “June”

Dan Bejar has been releasing magnificently crooked indie rock for nearly 30 years, but he’s never made the same album twice, and he’s never dreamed up a nightmare quite like “June.” It begins somewhat reasonably, with the Destroyer leader singing villainous bon mots like “a snow angel’s a fucking idiot somebody made in the snow” over sprightly instrumentation fit for a rainbow-colored children’s cartoon. Then things go haywire. 

Bejar switches to a spoken-word cadence that somehow nods to both A$AP Rocky and Jim Morrison, and for the next two-and-a-half minutes, we hear one of this century’s most daring lyricists spraying out images from his subconscious with Gatling-gun force. This is shit no one else would think, nevermind say in a song that anyone can hear: “a Ferris wheel on the run from the snow” and the mutterings of a fink and “psychotic passwords” and even a joke about Cubism. His voice is screwed down, sped up, and looped out during this entire hellride, like a slam-poetry robot on the fritz. What does it all mean? Bejar would almost definitely be insulted by such quotidian concerns. He’s still finding ways to explode expectations at an age when many of his onetime indie peers have moved on from music or retired to the reunion circuit. And for that we should all be grateful. –RD

Buy Destroyer’s Labyrinthitis

Dijon: “Big Mike’s (Live)” 

The opener from Dijon’s debut album, Absolutely, came out of the very first home-recording session he did with Mike Gordon, a fellow audacious singer, songwriter, and producer who has recently become a bona fide star (and low-key guitar god) in his own right under the name Mk.gee. It documents the beginning of one of the decade’s most promising musical alliances, two guys channeling their love of heroes like D’Angelo, Prince, and Bon Iver to dream up a raw new musical language. 

The album version is incredible; the official live video, filmed on a set made to look like a down-home dining room, is even better. If “Big Mike’s” is a bleary proposal to Dijon’s girlfriend—“I might drop to my knees, Joanna please,” he pleads—the video puts the singer’s musical bromance with Mk.gee front-and-center. Over seven minutes, they stare into each other’s eyes, harmonize, and trade vocal and guitar runs with goofy smiles plastered on their faces. The camaraderie is undeniable, leaping out of the speakers and off the screen. –RD

Buy Dijon’s Absolutely

Dry Cleaning: “Scratchcard Lanyard”

A droll Londonite talk-singing nonsense against melodic post-punk. I know what you’re thinking: How many times are we going to do this? I could tell you Dry Cleaning is different, mentioning that the singer, Florence Shaw, didn’t start off as a singer—she was a visual-art academic with interesting thoughts, a soothing speaking voice, and talented musician friends who pulled her in a few years back. I could praise the band for its gnarly riffs and knack for making indie rock sound heavy, dangerous, and sexy. 

But the strongest argument for Dry Cleaning is that Shaw’s collection of non-sequiturs—plucked out of context from online comment sections, advertisements, her own brain, anywhere and everywhere—clevely mirrors the constant overstimulation of being alive and online, lost in an endless scroll and slowly losing your mind. Have you ever memorized the cities represented by Instagram filters and incorporated them into free-verse poetry about bouncy balls? What about nicking a line like “do everything, feel nothing” from a Tampax slogan and using it for your own nihilistic means? That’s the stuff of “Scratchcard Lanyard,” the opener to Dry Cleaning’s powerhouse debut, New Long Leg—and that, my friends, is Flo mode. –JM

Buy Dry Cleaning’s New Long Leg

Duwap Kaine: “Fredo Bang”

For Duwap Kaine, vibes are an artform in and of themselves. So while it may not be clear exactly why one of his biggest songs is called “Earl Sweatshirt,” or why one of the five full-length projects he’s released in 2024 is called Family Guy, or why this breezy standout from his 2021 mixtape After the Storm is named after Baton Rouge rapper Fredo Bang, wading through his random references is half the fun. 

The Savannah, Georgia rapper switches between gritty and floaty but is always couched in sharp melodies and a faded stream of consciousness; imagine Chief Keef if he got in the booth immediately after binging one of those 24-hour Nickelodeon YouTube streams. Though he darts between everyday activities—falling in love, playing with a nephew, comparing yourself to Future and Gucci Mane—on “Fredo Bang,” Kaine’s twangy melodies blend with the track’s plinky keyboards enough to become one hypnotic blur. It’s the type of drone that gives silly punchlines (“I still eat McDonald’s—McLovin’”) and admissions of love the same kind of weightlessness. –DG 

El Alfa: “Un Selfie Con 3 Millones” (ft. Angel Dior)

El Alfa is the DR’s biggest contemporary star because of his infinite, chameleonic charisma. He releases singles and videos at a dizzying clip, and he’s gregarious about collaborating with seemingly anyone who asks, whether Kali Uchis or dembow hero Shelow Shaq or the Black Eyed freaking Peas. Choosing but one favorite in his dossier of 2020s tracks is nigh a fool’s errand, particularly because of his many hats: Does El Alfa the rap spitter, for instance, best El Alfa the baby-voiced imp? Is El Alfa the dirty dawg as good as El Alfa the street gawd? As he observes in “Un Selfie,” “En esta mierda yo soy el tatarabuelo”—he’s the great-great-grandfather of this shit—and here our hard-working gramps is bringing along his morro (rising star Angel Dior was 19 when this dropped last year). It proves that the common denominators in every El Alfa persona are humor and swagger, and that he’s made this decade his own through versatility and a near-constant grind. –JES

Ethel Cain: “A House in Nebraska”

After breaking away from her strict Southern Baptist upbringing as a teenager, Ethel Cain summoned a devout following all her own. This was readily apparent at a show over the summer, where more than 5,000 members of the Cult of Cain—many of them fully inhabiting their idol’s gothic, freezer-bride aesthetic—swayed and sang along to the 26-year-old’s operatic slowcore anthems in the middle of Central Park. During that concert, the singer paused her performance to point medics toward multiple fans spread across the crowd who had presumably fainted. It was a disconcerting moment, eerie in its synchronicity, that also felt weirdly apropos amid Cain’s uncanny universe.

No song epitomizes that realm more than “A House in Nebraska.” A sublime, slow-motion car crash of a power ballad that unfolds over nearly eight dramatic minutes, it tells the story of two doomed lovers stuck inside the memories of an abandoned home. Marked by immense piano chords that boom through the void, it feels like a hollowed-out version of Guns N’ Roses “November Rain,” complete with a climactic guitar solo that begs to be played in front of a decrepit building in the middle of a dust storm. The song stirs up an entire world, one where love, darkness, and desperation are forever knotted together. –RD

Fever Ray: “Shiver” 

The most recent era of Fever Ray concerns me—namely because I now find myself sexually attracted to a character resembling Riff Raff from Rocky Horror. Karin Dreijer’s rizz is just that strong. On 2023’s Radical Romantics, the Swedish electro-pop weirdo explored kink and their later-in-life queer awakening through scary-sexy sonic landscapes and horny cries into nothingness. “Shiver” is the album’s most intoxicating track. The synths slowly build tension in the background, and the guitar riff that runs through it sounds like it should come with its own windswept cliff. Dreijer’s sultry sentiments don’t exactly hurt, either. (Love it when they coo “thick thighs”—that’s it, that’s the whole line.) According to Dreijer’s calculations, there are at least three types of girls in bed: those who make you blush, those you wanna thrust, and the ones who make you shiver. In other words, “Shiver” is a switch anthem. –JM

Buy Fever Ray’s Radical Romantics

Fiona Apple: “I Want You to Love Me” 

Pop songs have this tidy ability to convey the romantic experience of longing for someone you haven’t met yet. “I Want You to Love Me,” the ground-shaking opener to Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters, starts off as a love song to a nonexistent person and grows until it encompasses a desire as vast as the universe and as subtle as a force of nature. Fiona’s piano-playing is elegant enough to soundtrack ballet and powerful enough to physically intimidate; her voice soars and scrapes against the walls, screeching wisdom like, “And I know none of this’ll matter in the long run/But I know a sound is still a sound around no one.” She ends it with high-pitched yelping—a timbre that she later realized was an imitation of her sister’s dead dog Ada. 

Love isn’t all that complicated for dogs, but the same can’t be said for us humans. My friend Jenn once asked Fiona if she still believes in romantic love, and she said yes, just probably not for herself. She has also said that this idea of being “back in the pulse,” which she sings about in “I Want You to Love Me,” was the result of a six-day meditation retreat where the throbbing in her head was replaced with a sudden awareness of the life and death cycle of everything and everyone. No one knows what happens after we die, but I hope it’s like Fiona says: your soul gets absorbed into the world and you feel both peaceful and part of a greater energy source. Anyway, play “I Want You to Love Me” at my funeral, right after “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” –JM

Buy Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Flagboy Giz: “Fell in Love at the Secondline” (ft. Kango Slim)

On its face, this glossy joint is a feel-good daydream about a burgeoning crush. But Flagboy Giz, devoted keeper of Mardi Gras Indian tradition, imbues all his music with lyrical specificity geared to and for Black New Orleans. He charts the growth of his love as the parade snakes through the city, demarking each new development as they pass second line clubs like the Lady Buckjumpers and the Money Wasters until—finally, triumphantly—he’s holding her hand. As a non-Louisianan, did I know what these clubs were without Googling? No, but I can’t help but have profound respect for the way Giz puts on for his city—and the way he functions as a regalia-clad griot, his music a highly intentional archiving of Black culture in NOLA amid its rapid post-Katrina gentrification. This level of locality is a lost art, especially when it’s accomplished with this much heart. –JES

Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra: “Movement 5”

Promises does not always sound like a jazz album, despite its status as the final recording by one of the genre’s towering figures from the late ’60s onward. The piece’s rhythmic pulse is more or less nonexistent, and its harmony is rooted in a single seven-note motif that repeats, with a brief silence between iterations, for 45 minutes. Even for Pharoah Sanders, a saxophonist who was especially adept at improvising for long stretches against a single static chord, this is minimal stuff. 

In the album’s first stretch, Sanders often hangs back, allowing the icy motif to take the lead in music that explores the extremity of patience: You can imagine his collaborator Sam Shepherd, aka the British electronic producer Floating Points, with his eyes closed, twisting a single knob on a synthesizer as slowly as his fingers will allow. Then, with “Movement 5,” the entrance of a warm electric piano into the mix opens something up for Sanders, who stops playing Promises like a meditation and starts playing it like a ballad. Even without a central melody to work from, his lines are richly lyrical. At times, his note choices hint at sweeping, emotional chord changes that aren’t actually there. If the heavenly quality of Promises’ pristine arrangement can sometimes lead the music to feeling strangely disembodied, “Movement 5” is when Pharoah brings it back to earth. –AC

Buy Floating Points & Pharoah Sanders’ Promises

Flo Milli: “Beef FloMix”

Flo Milli likes to deliver the most savage shanks with a smile. So when the Alabama dynamo unleashes the lines “Who got beef?/I’m tryna find something to eat” with casual sweetness on “Beef FloMix,” her next bar—“If she the opp, then bring her to me”—lands with a sinister edge. And when she punctuates cheeky lyrics like, “If it don’t go my way I get moody/Nigga flexin’ on you is my duty/I’m the big dawg my nickname is Scooby/Who got beef with me?” with sunny-sounding adlibs, your first instinct is to indulge in her cheeriness—and then duck, just in case. You can picture her perched upon the Iron Throne, ready to Dracarys her next meal (of haters). Though Flo first dropped this track to impressive internet virality in 2018, its jaunty veneer was a hallmark of her breakout 2020 mixtape, Ho, Why Is You Here?, and its controlled chaos brought a necessary zestiness to the gloomy beginning of the pandemic—she was all patient and rowdy, like a pretty rattlesnake prepping to strike. –JES

GloRilla: “Tomorrow 2”(ft. Cardi B)

GloRilla’s voice, anchored by her high tenor and thick Memphis drawl, bounces off eardrums like unopened beer cans off a brick wall. Though 2022’s Hitkidd collab “F.N.F. (Let’s Go)” was her breakout single, “Tomorrow 2” is the real proof of her ability to generate a side-splitting earworm out of being a sidepiece (“I can’t be up in her face, I took her nigga down before”) without losing her agency (“Thinkin’ that she got one up on me, she got my hand-me-downs”)—all while being grateful for every day she’s able to breathe over producer Cheese’s thumping piano keys and 808s. “Tomorrow 2” would be impressive enough for how well Glo holds her own against Cardi B (“Both you bitches pussy, I think y’all should scissor” would be a fatality against anyone else), but that punchy Memphis energy is all but undeniable. For a rapper who was once ashamed of her deep voice, it’s everything to hear her lean fully into it. –DG

Hagop Tchaparian: “Right to Riot”

Where much electronic music in the 2020s is dressed up in unbroken digital surfaces, Hagop Tchaparian’s work wears its seams proudly. The British-Armenian producer and DJ apparently works in Ableton, but he might as well be welding together spare sheet metal in some dingy garage on the outskirts of town. “Right to Riot,” with its clattering percussion, diesel-engine bass, and chopped-up field recordings of Armenian folk instruments, brings to mind all manner of real and fictional post-industrial bricolage: Waterworld, Watts Towers, Twisted Metal, an improvised soundsystem on a carnival parade float. Even under a different title, its drum lines and sirens would convey collective urgency. There is power, this song suggests, in resisting our era’s pressure to systematize cultural production and classify its output in categories that are easily legible by corporate recommendation engines. Instead, follow Tchaparian’s example, and make something unwieldy and beautiful with whatever tools are at hand. –AC

Buy Hagop Tchaparian’s Bolts

Ice Spice: “Munch (Feelin’ U)”

Where were you when you first saw Ice Spice posted on top of a basketball hoop in the “Munch” video? No matter your social media platform of choice in 2022, clips of the Bronx rapper dangling from the net or hanging in front of the deli with her homegirls were inescapable. But it wasn’t just the madcap video or her Little Orphan Annie-orange puff of hair that made the song a viral hit. Ice and her producer RiotUSA popped out with a song that leaned into a playful, bubbly take on the normally dark and brooding edge of New York drill. 

Counterprogramming aside, the verses are packed with earworms galore—you probably hummed “You thought I was feelin’ you?” to yourself when you saw the title of this blurb. She drops bars about eaters and entrancing folks with boob jewelry with the nonchalance of an afternoon pedicure, and it’s never short of delightful. “Munch” is a star-making turn that helped redefine drill for the baddies with the jatties. –DG

Buy Ice Spice’s Like..?

iLe and Flor de Toloache: “A la Deriva”

A collaboration between the Puerto Rican singer iLe and the New York-based, pan-Latine, all-woman mariachi band Flor de Toloache, “A la Deriva” sounds like floating through a dream about fleeting love. The opener to iLe’s third album, Nacarile—which explores feminine stereotypes, flirts with the feminist divine, and embodies iLe’s reflections during the pandemic—this oasis of a song beckons with a swoon of theremin and arpeggiating synth, the women drifting weightlessly upon the raft of their harmonies. Its classicism and timelessness are augmented by a kind of melancholy that invokes the future—a future where, perhaps, an eternal Puerto Rico itself is solidly free rather than, as the song puts it, “soñando a la deriva.”  –JES

Buy iLe’s Nacarile

Indigo De Souza: “Hold U”

In July 2021, deaths from COVID were at their lowest point since the beginning of the pandemic, millions of people were newly vaccinated, and there was a sense that all of humanity was peeking its head out of a cave following a harrowing hibernation. Indigo De Souza offered a sympathetic soundtrack to this tentative moment of hope with “Hold U.” Over an easy Sunday-morning disco groove, the North Carolina indie rocker sings about the unconditional solace found in love, friendship, and community. Listening to the song is like getting a slightly teary bear hug from someone you’ve missed for too long. “I’m not the only body/I’m not the only one,” she belts at the song’s crest, emphasizing the limits of individualism. The indelible “Hold U” video doubles down on this communal elation, featuring a cast of confidants spilling over each other on a couch before they hit the dance floor in all their body-glittered glory. It showcased a humble kind of utopia at a time when such collective visions felt especially necessary. –RD

Buy Indigo De Souza’s Any Shape You Take

Injury Reserve: “Knees” 

Injury Reserve’s second and final album, By the Time I Get to Phoenix, blends rap, post-rock, and electronic music into a package that could soundtrack footage of a collapsing star. From producer Parker Corey’s swirl of jagged guitar riffs and drum claps to rappers Ritchie and Stepa J. Groggs grappling with the pros and cons of aging, lead single “Knees” cradles bittersweet truths in proggy blasts that smear against the eardrum. Groggs’ verses always toe the line between humor and pathos—this one reconciles struggles with alcoholism with delight that his dreads are growing longer—but his turn on “Knees” hits particularly hard since he passed away just before Phoenix’s release. There’s a moment near the end where Ritchie tags Groggs in to sing the back half of the song’s hook, and what was once an innocent flash of brotherly love now doubles as an all-too-brief transmission from the beyond. –DG

Buy Injury Reserve’s By the Time I Get to Phoenix

Iwaata: “Clip Tall”

Kingston, Jamaica-born dancehall DJ Iwaata truly broke out with 2023's bad-gal banger “Tun Di Ada Way,” but his imperturbable minimalism was forged with this underground 2020 hit about fucking around and finding out. Atop the icy Deadman Riddim (made by his label head and frequent collaborator Deth), Iwaata is mesmerizing in the way he administers warnings about crossing his crew, mingling dispassionate reservation with an impassioned rasp. And in this one song—its simplicity, its coldness—you can see the future of dancehall unfurl; in just a few short years, its progression is already bearing fruit. –JES

J Hus: “Who Told You” (ft. Drake)

J Hus has spent the decade making good on the promise he sparked with “Dem Boy Paigon,” the genre-shifting track he dropped in 2015, when he was 19. The style that he pioneered—a gleaming blend of Afrobeats, dancehall, grime, UK drill, and a tinge of stateside rap—was a reflection of his Ghanaian heritage as much as his East London upbringing. As a new wave of first-generation Brits has grown up, the sounds he drew on from the jump are now decisively mainstream. 

Still, J Hus has remained creatively abundant even while spiriting his scrappy impulses into successive UK No. 1s. “Who Told You,” from third album Beautiful and Brutal Yard, is but one example: His voice is charming and lush on producer P2J’s cool breeze of an Afrobeats track, as he dispels a common myth (“Who told yuh bad man don’t dance?”) and displays the calm logic of the horny (“Yuh got a fat pum-pum, I got a long Johnson”). His dulcet, syncopated voice puts a punctuation mark on the fact that he’s still the king of this singing-rap shit. Drake is here too but he sounds like an overzealous dad crashing a cool basement party, so you may prefer one of the many Drake-less edits. It’s a testament to J Hus’ rich tones, though, that even the 69 God can’t overshadow him. –JES

Buy J Hus’ Beautiful and Brutal Yard

Jaimie Branch: “Take Over the World” 

Jaimie Branch, a trumpeter and composer who became a galvanizing central figure of the jazz scenes in both Chicago and New York in her brief lifetime, was about to finish a new album when she died in 2022. The music, which her family and bandmates worked together to release a year later, is not solemn or reflective, but joyously and furiously energetic—a fitting final document of a musician who was always moving forward. 

On “Take Over the World,” Branch hardly touches her trumpet, instead delivering staccato shouted mantras about liberating the world from property ownership as her band plays a thunderous dembow-like groove. The middle section sounds like nothing else: Cellist Lester St. Louis bows a dreamy two-note figure just behind the beat, while Branch’s electronics turn her voice into something liquidy and iridescent. After two straight minutes of a single hypnotic chord, the harmony abruptly ascends by a major second, giving a feeling of weightlessness. This track, and the rest of Branch’s final album, feels less like a swan song than a document of exploration still very much in progress. It’s hard not to wonder where she would have gone next. –AC

Buy Jaimie Branch’s Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((World War))

James Brandon Lewis: “Within You Are Answers” 

No single recording could capture the breadth of James Brandon Lewis’ recent output. The 41-year-old’s reputation as one of his generation’s greatest saxophonists solidified during the post-pandemic years, though he’d been releasing music for nearly a decade before that. He can be funky and avant-garde at once, or lyrical and pugnacious; his catalog includes intellectually probing concept albums and exuberant jazz-punk throwdowns. What unites these divergent strains is Lewis’ unfailing curiosity and reverence: a sense that there is equal beauty to be found in a simple folk melody or a dissonant squall, as long as you’re willing to give both your close attention.

“Within You Are Answers” showcases him at his most tender and generously melodic, backed only by cello and drums. He has spoken about treating individual notes like filmic images—with foregrounds, backgrounds, and compositions of color and light—an idea that the stripped-down trio setup gives him wide berth to explore, lingering on each note of the melody with a tone that is blurred softly at the edges. Max Jaffe’s drums keep the music in conversation with the present moment, their half-time triplet groove subtly redolent of dubstep. As “Within You Are Answers” goes on, the interplay between Lewis’ stately cool and Jaffe’s quiet agitation becomes increasingly complex, an exchange between musicians that also seems to span eras, entwining past and future in a single sound. –AC

Buy James Brandon Lewis’ Eye of I

Jane Remover: “Flash in the Pan”

From scrambled hyperpop brain-benders to electro-shock emo anthems to smeared grunge dirges, Jane Remover’s music has evolved at a staggering clip this decade, all of it laced with the unmistakable thrill of the new. The young New Jersey singer, songwriter, and producer hit yet another peak with this summer’s “Flash in the Pan,” which funnels all of the styles she has explored thus far—plus some fresh flourishes—into one concentrated burst. 

There are billowing guitars Billy Corgan could appreciate, a skewed groove worthy of prime-era Neptunes, and a part where she sings about being “trashy for a bitch with no credentials” in a lilting cadence that would make perfect sense on a Destiny’s Child hit. Alternately brash and neurotic, it’s a song about how fame and fandom can warp one’s ideas of love, and about navigating a relationship that could be a one-hit wonder rather than something more lasting. It might be called “Flash in the Pan,” but everything about this song makes it abundantly clear that Jane Remover is here to stay. –RD

Jayda G: “Both of Us”

When I first watched the video for this piano-house marvel by the DJ and producer Jayda G, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of bodily longing—specifically during the song’s immaculate breakdown, as the clip cut to a packed dance club doused in red light, with everyone’s hands held aloft in anticipatory bliss. It was the spring of 2020, when the pandemic broke down the entire live music industry, and people were rightfully scared to step into any room with a bunch of strangers. “Both of Us” barrelled through that void with the force of a sparkling rainbow bursting out of a Care Bear’s chest. That moment in its video felt like the closest I was going to get to any sort of club euphoria for a while. This ache was underlined by the song’s climactic lyric: “I just want to be with you!” pleads Jayda, making the most of her debut as a vocalist. Three years later, I finally got to experience “Both of Us” as the dance gods intended, when Fred Again.., who co-wrote and co-produced the track, let it ring out at a sold-out Madison Square Garden rave. It was worth the wait. –RD

Buy “Both of Us”

Jazmine Sullivan: “Pick Up Your Feelings” 

On Jazmine Sullivan’s “Pick Up Your Feelings,” the singer flips a switch and kicks her cheating man off the lease and out of her life real quick. It’s a matter of practicality: See her thick ass in those tight jeans? No room for his baggage. See that box in the corner? Take it and spare her the tears. Sullivan’s 2020 album Heaux Tales—a full-length meditation on love, sex, money, and feminine intuition—was a turning point in her career, led by this too-little-too-late anthem that positioned her generational voice in a more modern context. As far as R&B singers with a rap flow go, Sullivan gives even SZA a run for her money here. She moves between modes, from tongue-twisting verses to vocal runs to hero notes edged with pain, in a casually next-level way that only someone as seasoned as Sullivan could. Her performance takes a good song and transforms it into an unforgettable kiss-off to man-children everywhere. –JM

Kali Uchis: “Diosa”

Kali Uchis’ vocals are often layered into iridescence, by which I mean that her voice, placed via production to harmonize with itself, has the glimmering, viscous quality of an oil slick. “Diosa” is the strongest example of this from her career-best 2024 album Orquídeas: a dreamy song about her goddess status on an amapiano-influenced confection of a beat made in part by British Afrobeats king P2J. It brings out the lushness of the Colombian American Cali queen—her R&B influence, her bilinguality, her dignified stance, her contemporary borderlessness. Kali Uchis knows how to boast, to be sure, but here her unbothered perspective is a foregone conclusion: “La reina, la diva, la diosa/Me respalda el universo,” she coos on the chorus, her posture taut but soft. Her man honors her but so does the infinite universe—she has the surety of someone who’s getting back what she puts in. –JES

Buy Kali Uchis’ Orquídeas

Kara Jackson: “Dickhead Blues”

An asshole is an asshole: dumb, bummy, irredeemable. Dickheads are trickier. They can work their way inside your psyche, insidiously making you question your sanity and your worth. Combining age-old folk traditions with a modern, deadpan sensibility, singer-songwriter Kara Jackson curses all those annoying little pests who pick away at her sense of self on “Dickhead Blues.” The onetime National Youth Poet Laureate uses similes like Ginsu knives, like when she compares a particular subspecies of dickhead to “coyotes in culottes clawin’ for coffee in open-toed shoes.” (Just try coming back from that.) By the end of the song, having vanquished the dicks and the doubts, she is redeemed. “I’m use-ful,” she sings, stretching the word out to fully savor it. –RD

Buy Kara Jackson’s Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?

Kendrick Lamar: “Not Like Us”

Kendrick Lamar doesn’t often act out of spite. But when he does, you get a track like “Not Like Us,” his deathblow Drake diss. The not-so-playful jab Kendrick took at the 6 God on Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That” turned a decade-long rap cold war red hot, igniting a public spat that charted new lows in misogyny and homophobia as it reached high levels of scorching bars. No one in their right mind would want to be caught dead with any of the titles Kendrick bestows upon Drizzy here—rap colonizer, homewrecker, dweeb, uh, pedophile—but “Not Like Us” doesn’t endure just because it stained Drake’s legacy. It’s a catchy, nasty bit of California pop-rap that helped unite an entire coast. It also works as a meticulous deconstruction of a pop icon well into his second decade of chart domination. Kendrick’s been called a rap boogeyman before, but “Not Like Us” proves he’s more like the Babadook—a dark, lingering presence that can never be shaken off. –DG

L’Rain: “Find It”

Read most writing about L’Rain and you’ll find mentions of a half-dozen different styles—combinations of experimental, psych, jazz, and musique concrète—trying to nail down the project’s precise magic. Simultaneously, the bandleader at the heart of L’Rain, Brooklyn native Taja Cheek, is all-too-aware of the genre boxes in which the music industry places Black women, and actively resists such categorization. Maintaining a sense of abstraction is a stated goal of hers, and Cheek’s music features all sorts of field recordings, loops, goofs, and samples, like a mixed-media art project translated through headphones. 

Her collage-like approach is particularly apt for exploring the theme of processing grief—Cheek lost her mother Lorraine, for whom the project is named, in 2016—because it embraces the fractured nature of loss. “Find It,” from 2021’s Fatigue, is a striking example of this. The comforting whirl of vocal loops moves in and out of the soundscape, while Cheek repeats her mother’s words—“make a way out of no way”—as a mantra. Blaring sax set against a babbling brook devolves into hushed screams and audio, recorded at a family friend’s funeral, of a singer absolutely destroying the gospel song “I Won’t Complain.” There’s no logic to grief, no way to tell when a pang might hit or what might comfort you, a real “two steps forward one step back” situation—a feeling I hear echoed in this song’s initial blitz of polyrhythmic propulsion and its eventual slowdown. –JM

Buy L’Rain’s Fatigue

Lana Del Rey: “A&W”

Only Lana Del Rey would namecheck the Ramada and rhyme it with “it doesn’t really matter,” or use the Americana of A&W drive-ins as a shorthand for “American Whore” on a song that mentions rape. Then again, “A&W” is a song only Lana would—could—make. It’s the best of what she does, a culmination of all the Lanas she’s been: the timeless singer-songwriter of the last half-decade, who creates entire worlds out of her tales, her piano, and her acoustic; the OG Lana who casually raps, dates cops, and gives off the energy of a Florida Woman; the Lana who wears her other-woman status as both a cross to bear and a badge of honor, misunderstood and tired of explaining herself but doing it anyway. 

Lana’s disparate personas are represented by the two halves of “A&W,” which are patched together with a Trent Reznor-ass electronic interlude, while that sidepiece flavor is sprinkled throughout, adding another twist to this wild ride. The emotional climax comes fairly early, when she sings the following: “I mean, look at my hair/Look at the length of it and the shape of my body/If I told you that I was raped/Do you really think that anybody would think I didn’t ask for it?/I didn’t ask for it/I won't testify, I already fucked up my story.” Some of the rawest poetry and sharpest commentary of Lana’s career, these lines knock me back every time. –JM

Buy Lana Del Rey’s Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd

Lido Pimienta: “Resisto y Ya”

“Resisto y Ya” is the penultimate track of Colombian Canadian musician Lido Pimienta’s exquisite Miss Colombia, and a pitch-perfect closing note for its exploration of injustice, racism, betrayal, and her birth country. The album uses traditional and indigenous rhythms as a ground floor for blowing up Pimienta’s musical palette and then collaging it back together, mirroring her artistic and personal growth—a document of the power in womanhood and the subjectivity of identity. So when “Resisto y Ya” lands with its deeply felt sweetness as a denouement, the clarity of her intent hits harder. It’s a song for strength, a song that reminds you that standing up to injustice is really cut and dried—you simply do it and that’s it, as the chorus goes. Delivered through her heavenly soprano in a synthy bullerengue—a music of Afro-Colombian resistance—she also reframes protest, often cast in the U.S. and Canada as the province of the destructive and unwashed masses, as beautiful. –JES

Buy Lido Pimienta’s Miss Colombia

Lil Baby: “Emotionally Scarred”

When Lil Baby released his debut studio album, My Turn, in 2020, he had all of rap in a chokehold. Here was this kid from Atlanta who went from selling drugs at Quality Control Records sessions to being personally mentored by Young Thug and feeding the streets with hard-hitting tape after hard-hitting tape. His writing jumps from flexes to confession on a dime, as his flows and melodies turn verses and hooks alike into earworms. 

To this day, few Lil Baby songs stick to my ribs the way “Emotionally Scarred” does. Even with all of his success and celebrity, the pain of his past gnaws at his heels: Melodies can’t fully mask his melancholy, as thoughts of drive-bys and memories of selling weed in front of his high school run through his mind. “I’m tired of being tired of being tired/That part of me done died,” he says over guitar plunks and jumpy drums. On “Emotionally Scarred,” Lil Baby takes a victory lap and grapples with survivor’s remorse, the kind that no amount of newfound privilege can erase. –DG 

Buy Lil Baby’s My Turn

Liv.e: “Wild Animals”

As Liv.e, Olivia Williams has amassed a swerving catalog of outré R&B over the last five years, drawing inspiration from the wormhole funk of George Clinton, the third-eye freestyles of Erykah Badu, and even Ariel Pink’s haunted doom. “Wild Animals” is an off-kilter highlight from the Dallas-raised singer’s remarkable 2023 album Girl in the Half Pearl in which she sings breathy put-downs over a beat that sounds like something Dilla could have chopped up on a smoked-out Sunday afternoon. The song’s message: Men are dogs. But she’s not complaining about these basic beings as much as she’s simply over their slobbering behavior, like an expert dog trainer looking down upon a hapless pup. “I’ma be that bitch to tell you personally/That most of these dogs donʼt deserve a meal,” she notes atop a twinkling piano line fit for a 1940s jazz club, advising exasperated women everywhere to stop putting up with dudes’ bullshit. With her nose up and her hand on her hip, Liv.e isn’t mad, just disappointed. –RD

Buy Liv.e’s Girl in the Half Pearl

Lomelda: “Wonder”

Texas singer-songwriter Lomelda’s style of indie rock is just built different. Songs might be 45 seconds of blurry shoegaze, Death Cab-style “emo” meets post-rock, piano folk meant for a fireside cabin, or impossibly slow dirges with Frank Ocean and Frankie Cosmos namechecks. But all the best Lomelda songs feel really good in your body to sing. It’s the healthy sustainment and repetition of phrases, led by Hannah Read’s warm voice, but also the good intentions behind what she sings about—“Hannah do no harm,” from “Hannah Sun,” or “When you get it, give it all, you got, you said,” which is pretty much the only line in “Wonder.” For music that most people would describe as “sad,” there’s quite a lot of hope in these songs. “Wonder” in particular shows this, with the forcefulness of Read’s guitar-strumming and the way she works up to a full-on belt with this one motivational phrase. I like the idea that a song can be anything—even a sticky note to yourself. –JM

Buy Lomelda’s Hannah

Low: “Don’t Walk Away”

Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker first wrapped their voices around each other at age 15, while covering Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” one day after school. In their 20s, the pair married and started Low, which became one of the most restless and rewarding indie rock bands ever across a nearly 30-year career. As their sound morphed and bulged, from slow and spare to tight and punchy to blown-out beyond recognition, Sparhawk and Parker’s harmonizing remained a grounding force. Her singing floated above his, as if she were looking down with an angelic understanding. 

“Don’t Walk Away,” from Low’s 13th and final album, 2021’s Hey What, is a simple, haunting hymn, like an Elvis Presley ballad coming through a staticky radio following a nuclear holocaust. “I have slept beside you now/For what seems a thousand years,” Sparhawk and Parker sing atop a shroud of ambient tones, turning their bond into myth. “The shadow in your night/The whisper in your ear.” Though Hey What was nearly complete when Parker was first diagnosed with cancer at the end of 2020, the song will always be heard in the context of her 2022 passing, at 55. In the face of inevitable endings, it’s a simple plea for eternity. –RD

Buy Low’s Hey What

Lyra Pramuk: “Witness”

Lyra Pramuk’s experimental compositions stretch, warp, and expand the very possibilities of the human voice. She grew up singing in her church’s choir in rural Pennsylvania before attending music school in New York and then communing with Berlin’s electronic scene. Her work is both exacting and improvisatory, masterful and free. Fountain, her towering 2020 debut, is exclusively made up of her own vocals—but don’t expect any college a cappella groups to attempt these songs anytime soon. “Witness” serves as the album’s wide-eyed invitation, a seven-and-a-half-minute epic in which Pramuk unfurls wordless runs reminiscent of Meredith Monk or Björk over manipulated samples of her voice that blip, pulse, and drone. If a Gregorian choir from a thousand years ago were remixed by a godly being a thousand years from now, it might sound as primal and futuristic as this. –RD

Buy Lyra Pramuk’s Fountain

Mach-Hommy: “Wooden Nickels”

Mach-Hommy may keep his true identity under wraps, but you can suss out a lot about him from his music: Old-school rap slang and specific tri-state area references dot his verses, and he’s as likely to rap and sing in Haitian kreyol or Jamaican patois as he is in English. And on songs like “Wooden Nickels,” his writing gets blisteringly personal while still keeping listeners at arm’s length. 

The mood is soft and contemplative, as he pays tribute to his family tree with lines about his grandfather’s drive and conviction. There’s a vulnerability to “Wooden Nickels” not normally heard in Mach-Hommy songs, like when his father’s passing leads to debts—but not favors—being transferred to him. “They call you selfish anyway/Might as well be that way from the gate,” he says with a sigh. There are no specific names mentioned in the song, but Mach’s eye for detail brings you right to his family’s doorstep. –DG

Makaya McCraven: “This Place That Place” 

The Chicago drummer Makaya McCraven, who makes albums by recording his band’s improvisations and then sampling and rearranging them, has played a major role in shaping the coolly beat-driven strain of jazz that has helped open the genre to fans of electronic music, rap, R&B, and indie rock in recent years. His vision as a producer can make it easy to overlook his chops as a player, but no one would make that mistake while listening to “This Place That Place.” 

At times, it recalls “Nefertiti,” the landmark Wayne Shorter composition that opens the 1968 Miles Davis album of the same name, in the way it inverts the traditional jazz hierarchy: The melodic instruments don’t improvise much, sticking instead to repeating the theme, which frees the drummer to go absolutely nuts. That theme is played mostly staccato, with long and irregular gaps between notes, each like an exclamation point to punctuate and emphasize McCraven’s blazing rhythms. Or maybe they’re more like billboards alongside the winding road of his playing, each one painted with a giant rhetorical question: Did you just hear that shit? –AC

Buy Makaya McCraven’s In These Times

Mavi: “Reason!”

“Hope when I get into heaven, God hand me a blunt/And it’s some runtz,” Mavi says with a smirk on “Reason!”. It’s an opening bar that’s both cynical and hopeful, and one that neatly sums up the intentions of his sophomore album, Laughing So Hard, It Hurts. The Charlotte, North Carolina native has quickly made a career out of translating heavy emotions into songs that can be both springy and thick as molasses, and that omnivorous range—inspired by Future one minute, MF Doom the next—keeps him firmly on the pulse. On “Reason!” he floats complaints about shitty contracts fucking him out of show money next to lines about communist ideals and hearbreak, backed by jaunty keys and drums from producer Ovrkast. This is a somber song fueled by a peppy beat, a bold example of how Mavi can express as many feelings as he wants, all at the same time. –DG

Mdou Moctar: “Afrique Victime” 

In 2017, the Washington Post proclaimed the death of the electric guitar, a claim that must have come as a surprise to the Forbes columnist who pronounced it dead four years earlier, to say nothing of the various prognosticators who believed that synthesizers would kill it back in the ’70s and ’80s. But “Afrique Victime,” the pyrotechnic climax of Mdou Moctar’s 2021 album of the same name, provides more than enough evidence to quell the rumors of the instrument’s untimely passing. 

Moctar, a member of the nomadic Tuareg people of Saharan Africa, blends traditional Tuareg music with Western hard rock and punk: Across the seven-and-a-half minutes of “Afrique Victime,” he sometimes sounds like a Tuareg tehardent player, or like Jimi Hendrix or Sonny Sharrock. In typical Moctar fashion, the song nearly doubles in tempo as it progresses, from a stately and relaxed 100 beats per minute to a certifiably insane 175. As the speed increases, so does the frenzied energy of his guitar, moving from lyrical melodic lines to explosions of pure sound. –AC

Buy Mdou Moctar’s Afrique Victime

Megan Thee Stallion: “Thot Shit”

Megan’s ferocious freestyle-turned-chart-topper is not exactly a descendant of “I Am Woman,” the second-wave feminist anthem, but with her millennial intersectionality and reclaimative intention, you could make a case for it being that song’s ass-shaking stepchild. Surely the only hit ever written with far-right blowhard and sex-fearer Ben Shapiro at least partly in mind, “Thot Shit” was inspired by the vapid pearl-clutching around “WAP,” Meg’s sex-power hit with Cardi B. It also aims to take the term “thot” back from sexists. For this, the versatile Houstonian trots out her after-hours alter ego Tina Snow, whose rappin-ass rap is upended only by her liberated desires: “Hoes takin’ shots, but they ain’t in my caliber,” she says over a sneaky thump of sub-bass, before making room in her schedule for self-care: “Booked, but I squeeze a lil’ head in my calendar.”

The video, which depicts a sexually repressed, elderly, white legislator being titillated by Megan (and her diverse band of thotties in pum-pum shorts and domme Pleasers) while trying to oppress women overall, seemed to stop the world: A slap to the face of respectability politics, Meg utilizes the supposedly fearsome power of her sexual agency to terrorize the hypocrites. In the end, she flips it all into a body-horror punchline, gross and provocative, but with a useful thought experiment: Would these politicians act this way if their mouths were vaginas? Let’s, Meg posits with a feline smile, find out. –JES

Mike, Wiki, and the Alchemist: “Mayors a Cop”

If he ever gets tired of rapping, Wiki should apply for a job at New York City’s Office of Management and Budget. The 30-year-old underground hip-hop hero begins “Mayors a Cop,” his collaborative track with Bronx indie heavyweight Mike, with a heartfelt critique of Mayor Eric Adams’ fiscal policy—the former police captain’s budgets have continued to funnel billions to the NYPD, including more than $100 million toward police misconduct settlements just last year, while short-changing community services like libraries and parks. Damningly, “Mayors a Cop” could go down as the most trenchant song alluding to the much-loathed Adams, whose legacy will be defined by his alleged crimes and packed nightclub schedule more than any kind of meaningful legislation. 

But you don’t need to be dialed into City Hall to appreciate this track. On the whole, it’s a woozily philosophical statement of purpose that connects generations of New York rap. Mike, who’s arguably done more to foster a sense of artistic community than any other local rapper across the last seven years, and Wiki trade verses throughout, offering deep introspection while rallying all sides of the city’s scene. Veteran producer the Alchemist—known for his work with NYC icons like Nas, Mobb Deep, and Ghostface—offers up a dreamy boom-bap beat led by a horn line that ascends like smoke from a manhole. This is independent New York rap in the 2020s: heady, weary, defiant. –RD

Buy Mike, Wiki, and the Alchemist’s Faith Is a Rock

Mk.gee: “Are You Looking Up”

No less of an authority than Eric Clapton recently ranked Mk.gee as one of his favorite living guitarists. Bedroom covers of “Are You Looking Up” have quickly become a staple of Sensitive Dude With a Guitar TikTok. And a YouTube video attempting to decipher exactly how Mk.gee achieves his elusive tone—which morphs, slides, and prickles across his debut album, Two Star & the Dream Police, as if it’s being controlled by a restless spirit—has attracted around 400,000 head-scratching disciples. The best part: All this fascination is actually justified. 

New Jersey native Mike Gordon makes music that’s at once familiar and alien; “Are You Looking Up” can sound like an unearthed demo by the Band that’s been collecting dust in a crawlspace for the last 50 years, but then stray laser blips and crashing noises take things to a more mysterious dimension entirely. His vocals work similarly: You may not be able to make out every line, but the desperation behind his wails is all too recognizable. –RD

Buy Mk.gee’s Two Star & The Dream Police

ML Buch: “Fleshless Hand”

As humanity continues to upload itself to the cloud, ML Buch is soundtracking this disintegration with the equanimity of an immortal being. The Danish art-pop wanderer is drawn to sounds and textures that make the uncanny valley seem like a nice place to sit down, have a picnic, and contemplate the ever-fuzzier line between organic and artificial worlds. On “Fleshless Hand,” she calmly holds on to corporeality over instrumentation that brings to mind a deconstructed Police song, with guitars that shimmer with the splendor of an ocean aflame. Like a double-major in biology and poetics, she sings of nerves that clatter, gurgle, and shriek, and eyes that smile back. “And you hold my fleshless hand/I’m all hollow organs,” she croons, turning our evaporation into a very modern kind of romance. –RD

Buy ML Buch’s Suntub

Navy Blue: “Ritual”

When he’s rapping and producing as Navy Blue, Sage Elsesser gets to clear all the cobwebs from his mind. His music is rife with trauma, turmoil, and anxiety, but there’s some comfort to be found at each song’s core—the peace of mind that comes from accepting a lifelong struggle. “Ritual,” a highlight from his 2021 album Navy’s Reprise, skews more victorious than most, with producer Playa Haze’s sirens and steady drum march matching the highs and lows of Sage’s intricate purging. Alongside references to soccer stars and Alice Coltrane are reminiscences on comfort food and his parents’ legacies, all of it part of a personal mission statement of perseverance. For Sage, as a rapper and a Black man in America, fighting back is just a fact of life. It’s a battle he’s facing head-on. –DG

Nia Archives: “Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against Tha Wall”

British producer Nia Archives is too young to have lived through the early-’90s heyday of jungle’s first wave, but that era’s rebel heart is intrinsic to her music. “Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against Tha Wall,” the title track to her 2022 EP, imbues her impeccable breakbeat-making with an offbeat melancholy. Repeating the titular phrase in her reedy alto, Nia captures the moment of gripping the woofer at a rave’s most heightened moment and then emerging from the warehouse, sweaty and addled but with a rejuvenated soul. Soft static, a swirl of piano chords, a nail-gun spatter of toms, and field samples of laughing friends transform an aggressively overdriven track into a visceral jumble of memories. The song was a guidepath towards her next moves, including this year’s brilliant Silence Is Loud, full of the kind of soulful experimentation that’s made her one of the UK’s brightest new stars. –JES

Buy the “Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against The Wall” 12-inch

Nikki Nair and Hudson Mohawke: “Set the Roof” (ft. Tayla Parx)

For club music, as much of the culture, the emergence from peak pandemic times brought a turn toward brashness and hedonism. Fast tempos, shameless pop edits: People wanted to have fun, tasteful restraint be damned. Nikki Nair, an omnivorous producer and DJ from Atlanta, is one of this era’s most intriguing new names, in part because he tempers his Dionysian impulse with deft technique and deep respect for tradition. He and Hudson Mohawke, a relative veteran who knows a thing or two about gleeful ostentatiousness, teamed up for “Set the Roof,” one of the decade’s finest floor-fillers. 

For its opening stretch, it’s a spectacularly funky piece of 2-step, with skittering drums and a bass line as shiny and distended as a balloon animal. Then comes Tayla Parx’s euphoric vocal hook to blow the whole thing up to Jeff Koons proportions. It’s so satisfying and anthemic that the producers must have been tempted to let it ride forever. But instead they pull it back after only a minute or so, electrifying the rest of the track with the possibility of a return that only ever comes in teased snippets. Turns out restraint still has its place. –AC

Buy Hudson Mohawke and Nikki Nair’s Set The Roof EP

Niontay: “Thank Allah”

What does the intersection of New York, Milwaukee, and Florida rap sound like? Listen to Niontay and find out. This nexus is at the core of “Thank Allah,” the simmering highlight from his 2022 mixtape Dontay’s Inferno. Tay’s delivery, wrapped in a thick Florida accent, is somewhere between a croak and a yawn, but his words crackle with technical skill and turns of phrase hard enough to cause whiplash. “I got demons like you/Difference is, mine’s gang, mine’s squad, mine’s cool,” he says, double-dutching across hellish synth lines like he’s walking through a wall of fire. With “Thank Allah,” Niontay turns the bounciness of Milwaukee, the smooth grooves of Florida, and the hard-nosed edge of New York into a style all his own. –DG 

Buy Niontay’s Dontay’s Inferno

Noname: “Namesake”

Noname spent several years during and after the pandemic nurturing her brainier tendencies—starting an eponymous book club, setting up a Radical Hood Library, and generally being about the politics she professed. But the magnanimous Southside Chicagoan’s main claim to fame is rapping her ass off, and with 2023’s Sundial, she calmly removed her gloves to wield her mic. 

Sundial is full of intelligent bangers, but the rollicking, bass guitar-and-breakbeat-hinged “Namesake” is the one that got people talking. First, because she calls out a few of her “activist”-capitalist peers by name for performing at the Super Bowl (“Go, Kendrick, go!”), and then she explains the politics behind her taunt: “War machine gets glamorized/We play the game to pass the time.” It’s an artist’s statement about the disappointment of living under capitalism and wanting more from both the world and herself, while daring to dream about something bigger: “I wanna smile tonight,” the song’s most soul-baring sentiment goes. “I only got one lap around the sun.” –JES

Buy Noname’s Sundial

Nourished by Time: “Hell of a Ride” 

Nourished by Time could have taken it easy for a while after last year’s Erotic Probiotic 2, the debut album whose sharp songwriting and perfectly dialed production—glistening and slightly wobbly, like you’re viewing it at the bottom of sunlit swimming pool—turned him into a rising star in the crowded field of left-of-center pop auteurs. Instead, he followed it up quickly with an even bigger swing. 

“Hell of a Ride,” the opening track from this spring’s Catching Chickens EP, pulls his signature sound out from under the water, rendering every triumphant synth line and wistful guitar figure in the crispy fidelity of prime-era Prince. First rapping, then singing, he delivers his verses as if from atop a table in the middle of a house party, weaving together lyrics about saying goodbye to an ex with others about bidding farewell to America itself as it collapses. It’s an ambitious concept that could have easily lapsed into corniness with more didactic writing, but Nourished by Time wisely avoids straining to draw literal connections between the two very different breakups, keeping things light and mysterious. The question of what it all means becomes part of the song’s power. If you find yourself throwing a rager to mark the inglorious end of the U.S.A. sometime soon, put this one on the playlist. –AC

Buy Nourished by Time’s Chasing Chickens EP

Olivia Rodrigo: “Bad Idea Right?”

Based on the timing of her fame alone, Olivia Rodrigo will always be seen as a defining pop star of the 2020s. She went from just another cog in the Disney Channel machine to cultural dominance in a flash near the very start of the decade, when “Drivers License” went nuclear in 2021. And she’s only gotten better since then, sharpening her songwriting and arena-filling chops. Her appeal spans generations too—she gives teenagers a smart new idol to translate their innermost feelings and their parents an excuse to revisit their own adolescence through music that often sounds like the neon-pink center of a Hot Topic circa 1998.

Her songs so far roughly break down into three categories: Dramatic Enough to Win an Oscar (“Vampire”), Sad Enough to Make a Weightlifter Weep (“Favorite Crime”), and Fun Enough to Make Your Worst Romantic Blunder Seem Like a Great Big Joke (“Get Him Back!”). Naturally, most of her best tracks fall into that latter category, and none hit harder than “Bad Idea Right?”. It’s an update of ’60s girl-group anthems and ’90s pop-punk attitude, with Rodrigo lusting after an ex while acknowledging that it’s generally an unwise thing to do. “Yes I know that he’s my ex/But can’t two people reconnect?” she asks coyly, rationalizing her fuckups as she gleefully fucks everything up anyway. –RD

Buy Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts

PinkPantheress: “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2” (ft. Ice Spice)

Both Ice Spice and PinkPantheress first went viral on TikTok in 2021, but for very different types of videos: The Bronx rapper broke through the infinite scroll with her take on the drop-it-low Buss It Challenge, while the UK singer and producer was decidedly more coy, peeking out from behind walls and big text boxes as snippets of her DIY dance-pop tracks played in the background. Their smash team-up balances out their complementary personalities: PinkPantheress is the introvert fretting about a guy who doesn’t properly respect her, and Ice Spice is the extrovert showing her friend how to kick two-timing scrubs to the curb. The video—playful and pink—underscores their easy chemistry: After building their audiences while playing to their camera phones, they trade knowing looks as they mug for yet another shiny lens. –RD

Buy PinkPantheress’ Heaven Knows

Rosalía: “Bizcochito”

Motomami was the first album where Rosalía, nosaltres reina de la cigarreta, sounded like she was having a truly fun time—as in, the kind of fun where you’re a barely-30 feminist and you’ve become a global pop star largely off the strength of an album that translated a 13th-century text about domestic violence into contemporized flamenco. After all that intensity, wouldn’t you kind of want to get a little wild too? 

Amid a collection of genre-bending, culture-upending tracks, “Bizcochito” might be the most fun—its own little feminist statement in under two minutes, buoyed by the staccato, requisitely plinky sound of electro-champeta and the punch of a dembow riddim. Adopting a sing-song timbre that’s the sound of sass in one’s face, she leans into the irony of the hyper-femme to shit on haters and underestimators, not to mention chauvinists and objectifiers: She will not be your little bizcochito, and furthermore, “hasta to mamá lo tararea.” Ya mama loves her music, so what now? –JES

Buy Rosalía’s Motomami

RxkNephew: “American Tterroristt” 

The cover of Rochester, New York rapper RXKNephew’s 2020 project Crack Therapy 3 features Neph thrusting a stack of bills toward the camera alongside flying doves and what looks like a mountain of drugs. Standout track “American Tterroristt” channels this unhinged energy for its nearly 10-minute runtime, each line landing like an edict from God himself—or maybe just a drunk cousin who’s spent too much time in YouTube conspiracy holes. 

Neph’s rigid flow grinds against his tangential writing style in hilarious and uncomfortable ways as he muses on beating up biblical figures and doubts whether Benjamin Franklin actually discovered electricity. Is Neph trolling us when he says vaccines are mutating humanity or mentions his Jehovah’s Witness grandmother thinking high school algebra is made up? It’s hard to tell when you’re laughing so hard. “American Tterroristt” goes beyond stream of consciousness: It’s unfiltered rap brainrot at its finest. –DG

Sexyy Red: “Hellcats SRTs”

Sexyy Red can make a trip to the passport office sound like a good time. Whether she’s alone dancing on the hood of a car or with a grip of people in the middle of a club, fun and excitement aren’t far behind. That’s what made her 2023 breakout Hood Hottest Princess such a breezy listen: The St. Louis rapper, who got her start penning a diss track to an ain’t-shit ex, brings that bravado to every song she drops, and “Hellcats SRTs” makes a great case for Sexyy at her finest. 

She takes the bite out of producer Shawn Ferrari’s menacing synths with bars about being turned on by cars and showing off a back arch sharper than the one towering over her hometown. It’s as bouncy, infectious, and effortlessly fun as any song from a descendant of Gucci Mane or Chief Keef can be. “Hellcats SRTs” is like hurtling between different sections of a trampoline park at top speed; you’ll break a bone if you’re not careful, but you’ll never be this amped again. –DG

$ilkmoney: “A Visit From the Giant Portal Wizard Snake”

If I had to choose one word to describe Virginia rapper $ilkmoney’s flow and perspective, it’d be: breathless. And not just because he can cram dozens of syllables into the space it takes for an average person to breathe a single breath. Each of his verses is as expansive as a DMT trip, rocketing from petty squabbles and jokes about SNL actors in blackface to tributes to floating space rocks from another galaxy (seriously). “A Visit From the Giant Portal Wizard Snake,” the centerpiece of his 2022 opus I Don’t Give a Fuck About This Rap Shit, Imma Just Drop Until I Don’t Feel Like It Anymore, turns a wavy beat into a bed for condemnations of nuclear warfare, middle fingers to Uncle Toms, and drug-fueled conversations with snakes. It’s gonzo but grounded, as hypertechnical and uninhibited as the very best streams of consciousness. –DG

Skee Mask: “Testo BC Mashup” 

You could spend a lifetime trying to decode Skee Mask’s drum patterns. Each bar of “Testo BC Mashup” is like a sculpture of maddeningly intricate abstract design: knifelike hi-hats jutting out at inconceivable angles, snares arranged into geodesic patterns, bass hits so distorted they seem to take on bulbous physical dimension. As soon as you’re starting to get your mind wrapped around the German producer’s rhythms, another arrives to knock it out of the frame. There’s a clear link to ’90s IDM, but the track’s nimble physicality keeps it from feeling either like a self-conscious throwback or an exercise in nerdy virtuosity. “Testo BC Mashup” may confound the mind, but it relates more straightforwardly to the body. For all his music’s fractal twists and turns, Skee Mask is not some ponytailed disciple of Squarepusher and Venetian Snares. He wants to make you move. –AC

Buy Skee Mask’s Pool

Sofia Kourtesis: “Habla Con Ella”

Madres, the first LP from Peruvian dance producer Sofia Kourtesis, is a wildly beautiful document of her mother’s battle with cancer (which she won, thanks to Kourtesis using social media to seek out a neurosurgeon she later honored on the record). The album’s glittering aurora of house music is packed with big ideas: love, joy, the meaning of life, the nature of time passing, death. In interviews, Kourtesis often cites her filmmaking aspirations, and her music similarly follows the highs and lows of a narrative arc, where life-in-motion field recordings merge with sweeping synth melodies. 

On “Habla Con Ella,” she interrogates the measures of online success, inherently forcing us to think about what is worth our finite time on this weird Earth. It begins with gleaming piano chords as her vocals unfurl: “Oh God… all the glory belongs to you…” she sings serenely, a deep-house diva mid-prayer. “You are holy… oh God.” The syncopated shakers and hand-claps start to rise up like a tide and then—wow, plot twist—Kourtesis beseeches us to “like, share, and subscribe.” Is YouTube the God of which she speaks? Is she telling us to look at our lives and then log the hell off? Like the best arthouse movies, the intent is subjective, and we’re not getting a denouement; it’s the beauty of the journey, the fact of having gone on it, that’s most meaningful. –JES

Buy Sofia Kourtesis’ Madres

Soul Glo: “Gold Chain Punk (Whogonbeatmyass?)”

First, “Gold Chain Punk” comes across like a hardcore take on the Walkmen: The guitars are shiny and anthemic, and the lead screamer sounds determined to sprout a few new vocal cord polyps before the song’s four minutes are up. That initial contrast between slick and gnarly would have been satisfying enough to sustain things on its own, but Philly punks Soul Glo just keep downshifting into slower and heavier modes. Just when you think that’s the brutal breakdown you were waiting for, there’s another one, and one more after that. 

The lyrics are filled with hilarious asides about dealing with one’s dark side: “I hit the dab pen on the Megabus,” “Is it really possible for a n**** to piss off his therapist?/I’m just asking for a friend/Try not to read too much into it.” Frontman Pierce Jordan addresses this stuff with refreshing frankness, refusing nihilism on one side and schlocky self-help platitudes on the other, squaring with the possibility that anger may never leave him but recognizing the need to keep it in check. There are two refrains—“Can I live?” and “Who the fuck gon’ beat my ass?”—that begin to feel like the same question: If you conduct your life in such a way that your therapist never once has cause for concern, are you really living at all? –AC

Buy Soul Glo’s Diaspora Problems

Special Interest: “Midnight Legend” (ft. Mykki Blanco)

I used to listen to NOLA dance-punks Special Interest to cope with the horror of seeing my mom’s insides. This was the fall of 2022, when I went back to small-town Northeast Ohio for four months to help take care of my cancer-patient mother (who is alive and well today, the beast that she is). My childhood home was infiltrated with gnats, so there were bowls of vinegar and dish soap everywhere, along with medical supplies and pill bottles. It smelled of shit and piss from constantly emptying colostomy bags and bedside toilets. We were angry all the time: How could a person this sick—an RN for 40 years, mind you—have like five different doctors and still be failed by the healthcare system?

Cue the anti-capitalist industrial music. My escape was taking walks around the wooded area on my parents’ secluded block with Special Interest’s Endure in my headphones and a spliff in my hand, trying not to be seen by the neighbors. I often skipped right to “Foul”—one of the hardest songs on the album, where they group-shout about dirty bosses, UTIs, and failing appendages—to really lean into the disgusting mood. But “Midnight Legend” would always pull me back from the grimy edge and plop me outside the disco, cough-laughing from a strong joint. Vocalist Alli Logout does it for the misunderstood club girls, offering them a shoulder to cry on after hours. It’s all thumping bass and sinewy riffage, genuine concern dressed up in sequins and cunty raps. The soundtrack to a much-needed smoke break. –JM

Buy Special Interest’s Endure

Sudan Archives: “Home Maker”

For a song about nesting, Sudan Archives’ “Home Maker” takes me to another place altogether. The drone-y opening sounds like a service elevator passing different floors playing jazz and hip-hop en route to an underground bunker where the stations merge. The doors open, and somehow there’s the plant-filled cottage that Sudan describes, her oasis to hide from the world and make a life with her beloved. So when the L.A.-based R&B experimentalist coos “I’m a home maker” in the chorus, she’s talking about domestic vibe-setting and getting back to the love bubble while dealing with distance. 

The whole affair is cheeky and nuanced—hand-claps as beats, vulnerable admittances of jealousy, Sudan in the video dancing sexily with fine-ass men in a sad furniture store (temptation much?). As is often the case with Sudan Archives songs, the most impressive thing is her submersion into so many different sonic worlds, from G-funk and club music to African-inspired group vocals and the artist’s own visionary take on the violin. Just one small piece of her Natural Brown Prom Queen universe exploring Black womanhood, “Home Maker” is an ode to coziness in the face of chaos. –JM

Buy Sudan Archives’ Natural Brown Prom Queen

SZA: “Smoking on My Ex Pack”

On SOS, a career-defining album where SZA proved she could flex with the best in any style—from R&B to pop-punk to emo-folk—perhaps most thrilling was hearing this specific rap tumbling out, smooth and agile. “I got your favorite rapper blocked/I heard the dick was wack” is a line for the ages, but it also represents the idea that SZA, an ethereal Scorpio, is better at rapping than your favorite rapper, too—and maybe it’s not just one male rapper, but all of them.

Over a sped-up sample of Webster Lewis’ baby-oil-soft “Open Up Your Eyes,” she sloughs off the burdens of a relationship and the wider expectations put upon her. Her clear-eyed rasp is the sound of honestly appraising exactly what’s in front of you. “Them hoe accusations weak/Them bitch accusations true,” she raps matter-of-factly, before going for her secret weapon: a plaintive warble singing some of the tenderest, sincerest words on the album. You can trust in me. Only SZA could figure out how to utterly roast ya mans by embracing him with loving kindness. –JES

Buy SZA’s SOS

Tems: “Avoid Things” 

The beauty of “Avoid Things” is in its plainspokenness: both of Tems’ vocal delivery, which has the even tenor of someone who can have a heated conversation without ever raising her voice, and of her writing, which addresses a relationship’s communication breakdowns in language that feels real. The Nigerian singer doesn’t strain for elaborate metaphors or virtuosic vocal displays, just tells it how it is. The production, with weightless keyboard arpeggios drifting over a chunky bass line, reminds me of South African jazz and R&B singer Letta Mbulu’s “Nomalizo,” a classic from 1983 that’s a secret weapon for plenty of DJs and still sounds utterly fresh today. In its low-key way, “Avoid Things” is conversant with an earlier era of pop music, both from the African continent and its diaspora, without ever feeling self-consciously retro. It’s easy to imagine a DJ pulling it out a few decades from now and inspiring a floor full of dancers to pull each other a little closer, finding new intimacy in its honest storytelling and timeless rhythm. –AC

Tiera Kennedy: “Jesus, My Mama, My Therapist”

On “Jesus, My Mama, My Therapist,” zoomer “R&B country” singer Tiera Kennedy delivers her rhapsody for the complications of small-town living with triple-watt charm and a bit of mischief. Clutching her diary for dear life, Kennedy paints a vivid motif of nosy archetypes (“Sally at the beauty shop’ll tell every blonde in town”), and confesses that she keeps her crush a secret by spilling it only to God and two other people, one of whom “contractually can’t talk about all that.” 

This song, which wormed itself in my brain until it became the only thing I sang in the shower for six months, represents the best of pop-country in that it’s got an undeniable hook and down-home swing but isn’t over-produced to unrecognizable oblivion (it’s not surprising to learn that Shania Twain has mentored Kennedy in the past). Last year was a whirlwind for the singer, who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama: Around the time she got dropped by her label Big Machine, Beyoncé came calling for guest vocals on Cowboy Carter's “Blackbird” and “Tyrant.” It reaffirmed her talent and ratcheted up anticipation for her imminent debut album, but in my house she’s already a superstar. –JES

Tinashe: “Nasty”

Sometime in the very near future, the question “Is somebody gonna match my freak?” will hit like the phrase “big dick energy.” It already burns too bright in the cultural lexicon, soundtracks too many memes, and captures something feral deep within too many of us (read: very online horny people). It’s forever tied to 2024’s weird, hot, and yes, brat summer. I wouldn’t want it any other way, though—Tinashe, pop’s perpetual bridesmaid, was overdue for a proper moment. That the song’s opening question went viral on TikTok almost seemed like a bonus at first, since the sparse, alien-like R&B track is built around Tinashe going full sexy-robot: “I’ve been a nasty girl.” But then to be blessed with a cover by the original “Nasty” girl, Ms. Jackson? Further proof that “Nasty” will be the gift that keeps on giving. –JM

Buy Tinashe’s Quantum Baby

Two Shell: “Home”

Two Shell’s aesthetic may be playful, coloring steely breakbeats and techno with the pixelated splatter of hyperpop, but they aren’t just joking around. “Home,” the original production that closed out their infamous Boiler Room appearance—where they showed up in masks and pretended to DJ while a prerecorded set played over the speakers—is earnest verging on sentimental. Its vocal line could have been taken from a lost Eurotrance anthem, digitally scrambled and repitched so extremely that a sense of deep yearning is all that remains. The music is like drum’n’bass without much bass, so that beats that might be thunderous instead land like raindrops in a sunshower. With its post-PC Music palette of uncanny wiggles and pings, and a hook that hits like a headful of poppers, “Home” is emblematic of a whole raft of 2020s music that blurs the line between the club and the internet, two places where the self can seem to dissolve. –AC

Tyla: “Water”

African music’s global takeover went into hyperdrive this decade, with Nigerian stars like Burna Boy and Asake filling up arenas all over the world, and upstarts like Rema and Tems making their way to the top of the charts. But no one song epitomizes the power of this movement better than Tyla’s “Water,” which puts an irresistible pop spin on South Africa’s amapiano dance subgenre. The track dominated TikTok, fueled by a viral challenge involving jiggling one’s butt in time with its bassy log drums. It went platinum from New Zealand to Canada to freaking Switzerland. And Tyla, a 22-year-old from Johannesburg, became the first artist from her country to claim a spot on the Billboard Hot 100 since jazz legend Hugh Masekela, whose “Grazing in the Grass” hit No. 1 all the way back in 1968. That cookout classic is famous for its beatific horns; “Water” is plenty horny too, with Tyla telling a yappy guy to shut his trap and make her sweat already. Backed by minor chords and a featherlight rhythm, her come-ons are delivered with the low-key confidence of a woman who is ready to dominate. –RD

Buy Tyla’s self-titled LP

Veeze: “Weekend”

Flint, Michigan maverick Veeze is so consistent, it’s hard to pick my favorite song by him. But “Weekend,” from his fantastic 2023 album Ganger, fully clicked when a homie threw it on the aux during an impromptu midnight Lyft ride. As we floated atop the highway, Veeze’s creaking voice meshed with the track’s breezy guitars and keys, and we felt on top of the world. 

Veeze may sound lethargic, but his bars are filled with jokes, stories, and jewels galore: Lines about having pink and blue money like Easter eggs or how the lean in a cup is as dark as dancehall icon Beenie Man are there if you’re willing to dig for them. “Rich off the fuckin’ mumble rap, ‘Veeze, speak up,’” he says mockingly at the top of the song’s second verse, summing up the casually cool vibes. There’s always something to laugh at, gasp at, or think about on any Veeze song, but “Weekend” will always take me back to that midnight moment when I heard it while whippin’ down a Chicago freeway. –DG

Victoria Monét: “On My Mama”

R&B all-star Victoria Monét wrote “On My Mama” in response to her own postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter Haze—it’s a multigenerational self-esteem check that prodded herself, and us, to remember to feel ourselves. An impressively chill homage to mid-2000s Atlanta, when The A was establishing its cultural dominance in the mainstream, Monét slinks over a sample of Chali Boy’s snap-music anthem “I Look Good,” which also inspires her chorus, unwavering and self-assured, on a trunk-rattling sub-bass that summons the sticky heat of a Georgia summer. She was 20 years old when that song dropped, and it’s clear that Monét—who shares the throne with Normani as the best dancer in pop since Ciara—was practicing her counts and angles.

In the bombastic video, Monét smooth-glides through a welcome roster of throwback moves, and choreographer Sean Bankhead even sneaks a choice millennial meme in there for sazón. It reminds those of us who fondly remember the mid-2000s that we are aging (gracefully!), but Monét gives us a shout out there, too: “I’m so deep in my bag,” she sings, “like a grandma with a peppermint.” Finally, the old-ass, big-purse-having, buffet-biscuits-in-a-napkin-wrapping among us (me) truly feel seen. –JES

Buy Victoria Monét’s Jaguar II

Water From Your Eyes: “Barley”

This NYC noise-pop duo tends to take the circuitous path to a point—that is, if Rachel Brown and Nate Amos even have one in the first place. The fun of Water From Your Eyes lies in the abstraction and the meta mischief-making, how songs often start with a weirdly bored affect from Brown’s mumbling, only to interrupt it with musical jump scares that yield moments of actual terror. Sometimes when I’m listening to Everyone’s Crushed, their 2023 breakthrough, I get an image of a Rube Goldberg machine in my head. The keys trigger Brown, who counts off the drums—now cue the whirring synth, the wiry riff, the Deerhoof-esque vocals, on and on until the soundscape is stuffed. I’ve basically mapped out the Mouse Trap version of Water From Your Eyes’ “Barley.” It’s duct-taped virtuosity, a fun-house take on Stereolab-style pop that’ll leave you perfectly disoriented. –JM

Buy Water From Your Eyes’ Everyone’s Crushed

Waxahatchee: “Fire”

You could call Waxahatchee’s fifth album, Saint Cloud, self-improvement indie rock: Katie Crutchfield’s best record in years was the result of the Kansas City singer-songwriter slowing down, ditching booze, and taking better care of herself. Arriving at the top of the pandemic, the country-tinged LP was a gentle reminder to move easy and be kind to the face in the mirror, and nowhere is that more apparent than on “Fire.”

“I love the idea of writing a song that feels like a traditional song to a romantic partner, but then having that other person be me,” Crutchfield has said of the track. With lines like, “If I could love you unconditionally/I could iron out the edges of the darkest sky,” “Fire” is proof that we needn’t reserve our sweetest poetry for others. But in the hands of someone as grounded as Crutchfield, self-love doesn’t mean self-indulgence. When she sings, “It’s not as if we cry a river, call it rain,” my mind goes to the Ojibwe saying that Tony Soprano loved to repeat following his near-death experience: “Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky.” No spoilers, but I have a feeling things turn out better for Katie. –JM

Buy Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud

The Weather Station: “Tried to Tell You” 

“I feel as useless as a tree in a city park/Standing as a symbol of what we have blown apart” is as sad and beautiful a simile as any English-language songwriter has put down in the last five years. Tamara Lindeman of the Weather Station delivers it in the final verse of “Tried to Tell You,” a song about encouraging someone, perhaps in vain, to shed their stubborn hardness and let love in. The consequences of failing to do so, these two humble lines suggest, may reverberate far beyond whatever relationship trouble the person on the receiving end of Lindeman’s protestations might have been going through at the time. 

The lyric is emblematic of the quiet ways in which this Toronto songwriter connects interpersonal and global crises in her songwriting: Ignorance, the album with “Tried to Tell You” on it, is as much about love as it is about climate apocalypse. Some writers of Lindeman’s caliber have trouble with the other aspects of putting a song together, or else they just don’t care as much about them as they do about the words on the page. She doesn’t have that problem. “Tried to Tell You,” with its propulsive rhythm, supple twists of melody, and call-and-response hook, might blow you away even if you didn’t understand a word. –AC

Buy the Weather Station’s Ignorance

Wednesday: “Bull Believer”

The eight-and-a-half-minute centerpiece of Wednesday’s breakthrough LP Rat Saw God is the kind of ramshackle masterpiece that would fall apart in the hands of less talented folks. The alt-country shoegazers (including shredder du jour MJ Lenderman) patch up a duo of woozy songs with a tempo change, stringing together snatches of small-town desperation, Christian imagery, and pop-culture references to show someone grappling with their faith. 

When frontperson Karly Hartzman sings, “God make me good but not quite yet,” you get the sense that she’s in the middle of a solo journey, stuck at the weigh station between traumatic youth and considered adulthood. Everything comes to a head at a New Year’s party where Hartzman’s watching someone play Mortal Kombat, bored enough to scream. And scream she does—a ragged screech that hurts my voice and leaves me breathless when I try to recreate its angst. “Finish him” is all she sings—sometimes mangled beyond recognition, sometimes in a ghostly wheeze—and while someone else might spot the Mortal Kombat callback and move on, I have never gotten over this detail. Is she killing her doubt, or her faith? No single moment better illustrates the feral rage and disarming tenderness that makes Wednesday one of the best new indie rock bands of the decade. –JM

Buy Wednesday’s Rat Saw God

Weyes Blood: “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody” 

The celestial piano ballad that opens Weyes Blood’s fifth album works in two phases. First, it’s about remembering, from the depths of loneliness and alienation, that other people are also going through it. It’s not just me, it’s everybody. Then, it’s about using that realization to remedy the condition that prompted it: If we both feel like we’re on our own, that’s something we have in common, a small but powerful reason to stop feeling that way. 

After the collective trauma of the pandemic, the 2020s have had no shortage of music and art that speak the language of therapy and wellness. Though often benign, the trend can also fortify a sense of social disconnection by emphasizing one’s responsibility for one’s own betterment as a putative top priority. “It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody,” released into a world freshly emerged from isolation, offers a way out of self-help solipsism: The only way to get better, it suggests, is to help someone else to do the same. –AC

Buy Weyes Blood’s And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow

Yaya Bey: “Keisha”

Hooks don’t get much better than this: “Yeah, the pussy is so, so good/And you still don’t love me.” Brash and vulnerable. Candid and universal. As funny as a limp dick and as serious as a 3 a.m. breakup call. New York R&B realist Yaya Bey squeezes a lifetime of romantic disappointment and misogynoir into 13 perfect words on “Keisha,” an unforgettable kiss-off from her breakout 2022 album Remember Your North Star. Following in the footsteps of hip-hop-inspired songwriters like Jill Scott and Monica, Bey can’t help but roll her eyes when dumb guys try to crack that confidence as she glides over the rich, self-produced beat with a rapper’s swagger. At the same time, her brand of empowerment is too sly to be a hashtag, too blunt to fit into an after-school special. The video, in which Bey poses and struts in a variety of barely-there outfits, makes the message even clearer: Whoever he is, he’s missing out. –RD

Buy Yaya Bey’s Remember Your North Star

Yeule: “Software Update”

If you asked an A.I. music generator to make an Avril Lavigne ballad about a cyborg who is grappling with the tenuous boundaries between their digital and physical selves, it would probably sound a hell of a lot like “Software Update.” Leave it to Yeule, a shapeshifting pop oracle who grew up online, to give us a song so bleeding-edge that it leaves behind its own scar tissue. “Software Update” doesn’t treat rapidly advancing technology as a scourge against humanity as much as a fact of life, something as fraught and complicated as grief or heartbreak. It’s poised to stand as an especially timely document—an imagined conversation with a wholly empathetic A.I. when such a thing still seemed just out of reach. –RD

Buy Yeule’s Softscars