Spotify
Previously:
100-91,
90-81,
80-71,
70-61,
60-51,
50-41,
40-31,
30-21,
20-11
10. Grimes - Flesh without Blood
A lot of music this year signaled changes in direction for a bunch of artists - City and Colour, Lower Dens, Tallest Man on Earth to name a few just on this list - but none seemed to take a departure that was as immediately stunning as Claire Boucher, who went and ripped through some wild pop ideas and terraformed them to still somehow make sense in her slightly weird atmosphere. This, the first single released from
Art Angels, is true maximalist pop, with a dance floor beat and sugarplum guitars peddled just the right way to sound like they're taking being happy-go-lucky very seriously. On its face, lyrically, it could come across like a breakup song; more specifically, it feels directed toward those who might look on this new sound side-eyed and saying "take it or leave it." Whether this version of Boucher is here to stay in this post-
Art Angels era is for her to decide, but this track both announced and solidified this incarnation's indelible mark in the year's musical landscape.
9. White Reaper - Make Me Wanna Die
When a group seems so effortlessly snotty - in the sweaty, mosh pit way, not the Beverly Hills way - it just feels like there's a certain amount of awe we should gift them for it. These guys are rough around almost every edge, and sometimes I feel like I'm imagining myself crashing against other people as everything just plows forward. To call the energy "abundant" here would be a pretty large undersell; this song has gotten me out of bed on more days than I can count, put an extra lift in my step as I'm walking and made me want to try to flip my bolted-into-a-brick-wall desk on a couple occasions. It's not angry, despite the title, it's just
alive (ironically), and there might not have been a track that makes my heart swell like the start of these drums and guitar since
Celebration Rock. The link above jumps to the start of the song, but there's a minute of story lead-in where the Grim Reaper quits his job and goes on a bender. There might not be a more perfect plot to fit the tone of this track.
8. Everything Everything - Regret
"Maybe you're the coldest if you never felt it / Maybe you're the luckiest if you never did it," Jonathan Higgs muses about the titular (h/t Scott Aukerman) regret, both as noun and verb. Everyone tried to avoid regret, and countless ink has been spent on motivational posters encouraging life without it, but sometimes it's just unavoidable if we're to remain human. It's the less pretty side to staying emotionally rounded, and it jives with a lesson I learned this year. Avoidance of things - be they regret or any other dark cloud you feel looming above - can sometimes briefly empower us, but these things rarely dissipate on their own. There's a balance to strike: We can know that regretting is to be human, but we should find a way to deal with these things and leave them in the past, properly dealt with and filed. (Not on Spotify)
7. Tame Impala - Reality in Motion
If you've read these lists in past years - or just a few of the groups before this one - you know that a strong chorus can power its way into my heart and overwrite the shortcomings of any potentially subpar verses that come before it. So, what happens when a killer chorus hook gets matched up with verses styled in this neo-Tame Impala psychpop oeuvre? This wonderful thing, which demands to be played loudly without a care in the world. It sounds completely blissed out, Kevin Parker's gentle John Lennon-less delicately echoed as he describes a scene that doesn't seem completely unlike
the one from "Big Fish" when Ewan MacGregor first sees Alison Lohman. Parker's psyching himself up: Stay moving, don't freeze, this is your shot. Simple words made powerful by belief.
6. Julien Baker - Go Home
When was the last time you felt lost? Do you remember where you were, the scene around you, the encroaching unease as you felt control of your situation slip? There are few ways to put to paper the way all of those combine to make us feel when we feel lost, whether we're in a strange land or just adrift in the expansive sea we have to travel to get from the start to the end. Baker's lyrics have some crushing personal history in them, medications and alcohol and who knows what else; tough sledding for anyone, much less someone who's been through the ringer by age 19. The piano is the only instrument used, and you can almost envision Baker sitting there, slowly unraveling a dark chapter of her past for us to hear and experience along with her. It's crushing, moreso when you find that one moment from your own past that lets you connect with her message. The song ends with the piano played above a crackly, looped recording of a pastor delivering a sermon; it's not meant to impart religious belief (and was, in fact, a coincidental recording as Baker played the piano) but rather symbolize something collective, a gathering of people who might just be as lost and want to be found.
5. Lady Lamb the Beekeeper - Penny Licks
For someone who won;t tower over you physically, Aly Spaltro's voice makes you think she can topple a skyscraper if she wanted to. This song may not take the gymnastics that "Spat Out Spit" requires, but it feels deeper, more fortified; it also feels like you embark on a journey with her along the song's course. It feels like it takes three or four distinctive shapes, the final act being its most impressive. The build up is fantastic, leading to some call-and-response with a cavalcade of instruments that just sound overjoyed to be there. Once again, Spaltro's rhymes are sparse, so despite the changes in pacing, each line feels connected to the last as the melody never wavers.
4. Sufjan Stevens - The Only Thing
I can't say I've ever been in the mental place that Sufjan-as-narrator details here. There is a feeling of emptiness that vacuums the wonder out of a series of images that Stevens details in the first verse, a contemplation of suicide in the second. It, like every other song on
Carrie & Lowell, is impossibly beautiful and incredibly difficult to listen to all at once. It's that monolithic beauty, though, that makes the track classic. The swell of guitars at 2:40 and the layering of his vocals in close harmony before fitfully resting with some tortured falsetto provides one of the most tremendous emotional rides of any track this year or the ones that preceded it, bested only by a select few.
3. Grimes - Kill V. Maim
I will fault no one for a single second if this song does nothing for you. It's divisive, like much of the rest of the record it inhabits, and I happen to fall on the side of finding it fucking arresting. It's a little insane, a little brilliant, a lot of loud and a lot of bewildering, especially on the first pass. I still have little idea what's happening in the pre-choruses or the choruses themselves but I don't care. I'm swept up in them
every single time and sometimes feel like I'm on a ship at sea in a storm, without a seat in a padded room in steerage. This song bounces me all over the place, and when the waves settle and I can leave the room, I might be a little bruised, but I don't even feel the pain beneath the unmitigated adrenaline rush.
2. Tame Impala - The Moment
In assembling the latter half of this list, I found it impossible to separate a few artists into different groups of 10. Some of the songs I just enjoyed too much to allow any slight bias to spread things out a bit more evenly. Case in point, as Grimes just came back for seconds above, we have another repeat entry. I did not play any song more than this one in 2015, my last.fm saying it's been around 250 listens. That does not make it an automatic No. 1, as one measure does not necessarily a ranking make, but it is an easy No. 2. I talked above for "Reality in Motion" how a powerful chorus can just run my brain roughshod and let a song bully its way into the forefront. The bass lick there is
perfect, the chime-y keys and crisp drums create this enormous sound and sense of space that at once seems boundless and filled in. And, as I've found to be true on so many days, irresistibly easy to play on repeat.
1. Sufjan Stevens - Fourth of July
I've had a lot of time this year to try and process a lot of music. Tracks that I enjoy, I try to listen to with a critical ear at some point, to make sure I
actually like what I'm hearing, and to try and get closer to a song; in the end, I want to feel like I know it. In all the time I've taken this year to try and process what I hear whenever this song plays, all I feel is that closeness. I feel consumed by it, enveloped in it, like laying beneath the sky in a field on a clear night. This song feels like the emptiness of space and the beauty of its star and planet inhabitants in one. It feels like the mourning of a loved one's passing and a muted celebration of their life, and of life itself. It's the solemn acknowledgment of mortality without despair. Its quiet devastation may take you by surprise, but its sentiments will feel universal and familiar. I can never listen to it without feeling moved; it takes over my headphones and dominates all of my senses. It is, in short, one of the most poignant, most beautiful songs I've ever heard. It is, while being less than a year old, already one of my favorite songs ever, and will always hold a dedicated place in my heart.
