The 115 Best Songs Of 2016

Maybe “Sex With Me” was too backward-looking for ANTI, the album built to reflect Rihanna’s personal growth. Co-written by PARTYNEXTDOOR and only released as a deluxe edition bonus cut, it presents Rihanna as more fantasy than human, just as we’d known her before. But I’m glad it was eventually pushed as a single anyway, because there’s no disputing: sex with Rihanna is amazing, and that she says so is no less revolutionary than Beyoncé’s proclamation that she woke up like that. Women are pure, wet temptation. We do all this hard work, and there’s no vacation from it.

On “Sex With Me,” Rihanna hits an impressive array of flows. The beat holds slow, for partner dancing; it’s as luxuriously pulpy as a spa robe. To be honest, I’ve loved this song, but I wouldn’t have asked it to stand in for the whole year until recently. But now that things have gone hella wrong, may we all remember: pussy made the world go round. And it still does. — NAOMI ZEICHNER

Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles” sauntered into the collective consciousness this fall with a stoked, smoked-out air. Undoubtedly the year’s most rewarding sleeper hit, it was released as the third single from SremmLife 2 in early September, but only climbed to the Billboard No. 1 spot two months later. Much analysis of “Black Beatles” has laid its success at the feet of the Mannequin Challenge, and there’s no doubt that the viral video craze gave it a boost. But there’s something so inherently joyful at its core that it’s easy to imagine why kids and adults alike would desire to be suspended in its moment, one way or another.

Mike WiLL Made-It’s economical beat creates a wide open stage for the brothers Sremm to wild out on, their successes and excesses as casually slung as their Gucci jackets. The song’s cultural reclamation — rock has its roots in black music — even caught the affection of 74-year-old Beatles founder Paul McCartney, an “old geezer” who knows music royalty when he sees it. At a time when there’s very little to feel good about, “Black Beatles” is an island of optimistic energy; a space in which to shrug off haters, spend generously, and have plenty of sex. No wonder we all keep hitting play. — RUTH SAXELBY

Forget, if you can, Kanye’s capacity for not just saying the wrong things, but the worst things — because he speaks before he thinks; because he’s stubborn in the belief that adoration and fame will shield him; because he’s thin-skinned and full of demons. For all Kanye’s godhead self-regard, it’s surprising how generous of a collaborator he continues to be, attuned to the splendor around him. “Ultralight Beam” is canonical Kanye because it’s magnificent and overblown, the type of song nobody else would ever contemplate making. It’s also a song propelled by the drama of others: The-Dream, shaken and wandering, casting about for faith. “So why send oppression not blessings?” Kelly Price wonders, resounding and truthful, before lifting her head and looking to the light. There’s Chance The Rapper, all gracious purity; Kirk Franklin extending a hand to all who feel “too messed up”; the choir, shading in Franklin’s words, a glorious reminder that we are weaker alone.

Kanye’s on the side of the stage, admiring his creation. It’s impossible to bracket his failings, for they have become the primary engine for his music. Perhaps it’s the depth of those flaws that compel him to try and make something so large — he’d have you believe this was the case, that it’s the war of desires, the tension between sin and salvation, fame and the scrutiny that comes with it, long-ago aspiration and today’s achievements, that compel him to lunge toward “a God dream.” What makes “Ultralight Beam” divine isn’t the sermonizing, those smears of heavenly synths, the potential rags-to-redemption TV mini-series tucked in those verses. Its spirituality is in its vast field of vision, the fact that it remains a humble gift from an arrogant soul, with a sense of scale and sublime faith that dwarfs even its own creator. — HUA HSU

I was in Montreal when A Seat At The Table came out. The opening hustle of percussion on “Cranes In The Sky” brings to mind the tawny autumn sun illuminating that city’s curious mix of historic and contemporary architecture, flooding my friend’s massive flat with light, and silhouetting Mount Royal in the evenings. Like Solange sings, in Montreal I tried: to drink it away and put one in the air, to dance it away, work it away, sleep it away, sex it away, and read it away. I ran my credit card bill up, bought a new dress, and — weeks later, back at home in Toronto — I even changed my hair. I’ve always been reluctant to leave home, but “Cranes” unlocked a deeper pain with the city — and myself — that’s been fermenting. Over the last decade Torontonians have lived under more ‘metal clouds’ than city-dwellers across North America. Montreal isn’t impervious to capitalism, but it offered a relatively unobstructed perspective, and so it was my escape. “Cranes In The Sky” isn’t brilliant because Solange does that genius songwriter thing of articulating and soothing a billion individual expressions of ennui, but because she chronicles how racial and gender identity, money, materialism, the body, travel, and gentrification are intersecting, corroborating factors in modern disillusionment. It is perhaps the first pop record about millennials inheriting tenuous adulthood. Under that weight, distraction is the most accessible of coping mechanisms and for a while, in Montreal, I indulged, while humming along to “Cranes In The Sky.” — ANUPA MISTRY

After unwittingly catching a straight-up transcendent live performance on Valentine’s Day, I spent a lot of 2016 telling anyone who'd listen to check out Deja Carr, the bass-playing 19-year-old from Massachusetts who records bluesy folk songs as Mal Devisa. I drove to her neck of the woods over the summer to report a story about Dark World, the eccentric all-boys collective with whom she occasionally collaborates. They spoke of her highly but vaguely; she seems to be a bit of an enigma, even to her pals. Her powerful solo music, homemade and self-released, is just as full of magic and mystery. She’s got a once-in-a-lifetime voice, rich and unpredictable and heartbreakingly huge. On “Sea of Limbs,” a gospel-tinged highlight off her extremely promising 2016 full-length, she uses that instrument to devastating effect. When the chorus hits, there will be goosebumps. — PATRICK D. MCDERMOTT

Frank Ocean’s Blonde sounds like the end of the night feels: tipsy, half-high, a little lost. “Self-Control,” a last-call love song about two people who are all wrong for each other, exemplifies this beautifully. It’s a tearjerker in the truest sense, a gorgeously-sung tribute to the ones who got away. “Wish we’d grown up on the same advice/ And our time was right,” Frank sings on the first verse, his glassy voice careening over waterlogged guitar work by Alex G, a Philadelphia songwriter whose homemade rock songs possess a similarly intoxicating outsiderness. The song’s atmosphere is cavernous, all pitch-warped hooks and shadowy background croons. Later, muffled wolf-like howls give way to a world-swallowing outro, which might be Blonde’s single most arresting passage. Despite early theories that the section featured guest vocals from infamous boy-genius Yung Lean, new credits indicate the singing is all Frank, his hymn-like self-harmonizing making the case that grappling with a broken heart can be akin to a religious experience. — PATRICK D. MCDERMOTT

What does it mean to be an “American,” and who gets to claim that identity? This question permeates the music of the New York-based Mitski Miyawaki, who is half Japanese and grew up across several continents, especially on “Your Best American Girl.” A standout from her newest album of punk-hearted folk, the song begins with languid strumming and Mitski yearning to fit into the life of an all-American “big spoon.” In real time, she turns a pained confession — that she’s tried to conform herself, and can’t be exactly what someone else wants her to be — into a triumph. The way she was raised, which she used to see as a burden, is now a crucial perspective worth celebrating. “Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me/ But I do,” she cries in her forceful vibrato, “I finally do.” The realization, backed by a glorious crescendo of electric guitars, is one of the year’s most cathartic music moments, and will hit home for anyone who’s ever felt like they don’t fit into a mold. — PAULA MEJIA

The Black Woman was never meant to rise. Not in this America. She was fated a minimal existence: to serve, to stay in line, never to resist. But resistance, the poet Audre Lorde instructed, is its own parable of love. And because love is what the Black Woman knows how to do best, she has, for centuries now, refused to accept the world which closes in on her. Out of this uniquely American biography, Beyonce Knowles-Carter emerged with “Formation,” an insistent pop riot that is at once proclamation and pure phenomenon. It is flesh-and-bone black woman rhapsody — a delicious, irreproachable offering that is more than the sum of its parts, a song which could only have arrived at this fractured historical moment. The seesawing coils of its first inhales; the chorus’s unbowed collective force (“We gon’ slay, gon’ slay, OK”); the intransigent marching-band strut sowed into the beat’s backbone, itself a stamp of Mike WiLL Made-It’s shrewd production. And though its layers are many, the message of “Formation” is crystalline: history has not given me what is owed, so I am here to claim what is mine.

One of black feminism’s core principles has always concerned ownership. So when Beyoncé says, “I like my baby heir with baby hair and afros, I like my negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils,” she is not just taking ownership of herself, her daughter, and her husband, but of all that has come before her and all that will come after. It is a line that stretches back to Louisiana and Alabama and even further perhaps to the cooper shores of West Africa. Seismic and incandescent, “Formation”’s genius rests in its capacity to look back and forward, to resist as a form of love, to collectively gather the Black Woman across time and rise in uniform splendor. And by God, what a sight it is. — JASON PARHAM

For Chance The Rapper, summertime as a black boy in Chicago was liberating and cautious. That’s the message of “Summer Friends,” a wistful standout from his Grammy-nominated Coloring Book. Following a softly sung opening courtesy of Francis and The Lights, Chance digs up imagery that reminds me of my own childhood in Philadelphia, from jumping rope barefoot on the asphalt to playing hard until the streetlights came on. But for all its sun-soaked nostalgia, “Summer Friends” also reinforces that these moments are fleeting: it’s a time of the year that brings change and loss, too. Chance remembers the gun-violence “plague” as clearly as catching lightning bugs, and he sounds more somber than usual as he repeats the hook’s mantra: “Summer friends don’t stay.” This is a song that instructs you to be mindful of your surroundings, but to loosen up enough to have vibrant experiences — even if they end too soon, like those summers always seemed to. — LAKIN STARLING

A lot of people gave up this year, me included. For reasons both personal and political, it felt more difficult than usual to believe in the bounty of the universe, to expect that what you put into the world is what you’d receive in return. D.R.A.M., however, believed. When his runaway hit “Cha Cha” spawned an even bigger one in “Hotline Bling” last summer, he was introduced to much of the world and dismissed as a one-hit wonder in the same breath. But the Virginia rapper and singer remained steadfast, and then he made another smash this spring, with “Broccoli,” featuring Lil Yachty, whose sudden and unlikely rise this year feels similarly self-manifested. Instead of attempting to replicate the sound people clearly loved in “Cha Cha” — a cynical but all-too-common strategy employed in many early careers — D.R.A.M. went left, keeping only the heart-happiness that birthed it. If “Broccoli” is a stoner’s anthem, and it is, think of it as only a sativa, a happy weed. The song climbed to No. 5 on the Billboard charts, without a viral dance challenge to get it there — just a sunlight-bright piano chord, an insanely infectious hook, and a positive mental attitude. — RAWIYA KAMEIR

If Bobby Shmurda’s “Hot Nigga” provided a demarcation point for New York rap in the era of decentralized virality, then Young M.A’s “OOOUUU” stuck close to that line while also charting its own path forward. “OOOUUU,” which was nowhere and then everywhere this summer, is clearly the city’s first post-Shmurda hit. Its pitter-pat snares felt like an overt homage to the Lloyd Banks beat Shmurda jacked, and M.A even calls him out by name late in the track. But “OOOUUU” has none of the exuberance — naive, it would turn out — that dripped from “Hot Nigga.” Shmurda may have unshackled rap in the five boroughs, but in doing so he became a target of New York’s ruthless criminal justice system and paid the price for his fame. In turn, “OOOUUU” feels ominous and foreboding. It has its own sort of slithery groove, but it also broods and broils in a way that recalls nothing less than “Quiet Storm.” Still, M.A is a jokester, and her runaway hit works as something like gallows humor. An ode to cunnilinguis, essentially, it normalizes same-sex relationships within rap music like perhaps nothing that has ever come before it. But as importantly, it hinges on an indelible punchline — “Headphanieeeee” — so lovably stupid you can’t help but crack a smile. — JORDAN SARGENT

When the world around you sucks, one way to feel better is by finding solace in a completely different one. For me, Lil Uzi Vert’s imagination, as presented on April’s Lil Uzi Vert Vs. The World tape, provided an escape from this year. Uzi’s is a free, fantastical, videogame-like dreamscape comprised of fast wheels, long money, pastel colors, and the on-again, off-again love of his life, Brittany. The soundtrack is his signature ad-lib-punched rap-singing, paired with stretchy synths, space-like melodies, and the occasional bagpipe harmony.

But 2016 wasn’t all ups for Uzi, and he’s real enough to know he’s not perfect. That much is made clear on “You Was Right,” his hypnotic Metro Boomin-produced apology song. Uzi chronicles the aftermath of being caught cheating — especially significant because the couple has been very open about their love IRL (after one recent break-up, we cheered for their relationship like we knew them personally). “Yeah, alright, alright, alright/ You was right, I was wrong/ Yeah, I should’ve never ever took her home,” he drawls on the infectious hook. The pain is palpable, and the remorse feels honest. The fullest and most authentic version of Lil Uzi Vert’s world, it turns out, is the real one. — NAZUK KOCHHAR

For a long time, Sampha was faceless. For a long time, all we knew was his voice. A powerful, emotionally precise machine, it would land on top tracks by SBTRKT and Drake and promptly, graciously, yank us into greatness, then disappear again. This year, though, Sampha took the whole stage, and revealed his story, and on his own songs — proper, solo songs! — made what he had once hinted at abundantly clear.

Take “Blood On Me,” where we find Sampha mid-nightmare. The growling hounds are in pursuit. The dead-eyed creeps are closing in. We do not know if it’s paranoia, or the true, long-dreaded knock on the door in the dead of night. But it is exactly in that askew — in what must be a bad dream — where life these days feels most real. Operating there, Sampha somehow makes the inevitability of violence sound beautiful. It’s Borges, and it bangs. — AMOS BARSHAD

There were plenty of other indications that Kodak Black had ascended to mainstream visibility before the video for “Lockjaw” came into our lives. But this — this was special. Just years earlier, in his “Project Baby” clip, a skin-and-bones 16-year-old Kodak ran around his Pompano Beach projects in basketball shorts and an Italia jersey, jumping through windows, hanging at the store. Now French Montana was here, at the very same housing projects. This was the industry meeting the phenom on his terms — literally, on his doorstep. Over Ben Billions’s airy vocal samples and driving drum pattern, Kodak and French sound world-weary even when they’re trading flex lines. The song is a summer slap about grinding your teeth off on ecstasy — on its own, a bit of brilliance. But in our year of anxiety, it becomes an anthem for any number of jaw-clenching reasons.

Amidst the subdued bravado of the song, Kodak reminded us, as he often does, that his 19 years of life have been filled with trauma. At the end of November, he was released from jail in St. Lucie County, Florida, where he spent most of the fall locked up for misdemeanor drug charges. He was turned over to authorities in South Carolina, where he will face sexual battery charges stemming back to an arrest at the beginning of the year. Kodak could face up to 30 years in prison. If he’s found guilty, we’ll likely stop rooting for him, and he’ll become exactly what he’s always told us he is. “I been tryna change my life/ But the monkey on my back,” he raps here, openly, before locking his jaw once again. — BEN DANDRIDGE-LEMCO

Every time I hear “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1,” I know my weary shoulders will slacken — if only for the song’s brief two minutes and 16 seconds. Every time I hear the sample from Pastor T.L. Barrett’s “Do Not Pass Me By,” I think about how, at parties, the bumpy bass line relaxes bodies into a sway. And every time I hear the Future-voiced drop — “If young Metro don’t trust you, I’m gon’ shoot,” he says, sounding as if he’s lost in space — I remember the good side of the internet, which turned a catchphrase about a remarkable come-up into one of the year’s best memes. It is impossible not to feel something about “Pt. 1” because it’s Kanye at his best: an indelible soul sample, religious zeal, a parable about love and lust and ignorance. In July, I drove across the tiny, dusty island of Majorca with The Life of Pablo on blast, giddily aware that Kanye’s dubious, banging gospel was forcing an internal commotion on my companion, a staunch atheist. Kanye got this lapsed Hindu to be his witness and, though I firmly disavow associating masculinity with godliness, in 2016 he nudged me closer to a divinity I forgot I needed. — ANUPA MISTRY

Drake’s sometimes unruly dabbles in dancehall have earned him no small amount of ire. But when two songs from Views leaked in March, weeks ahead of the album’s release, it was dancehall star Popcaan who stole Drake’s shine with a feature on “Controlla.” “Gyal yuh body good and yuh special to me,” he crooned on the song’s intro. “Wan mek yuh mi lady officially.” It was impossibly sexy, a track that demanded its place in the bashment rotation, the sultry slow wine to “Work”’s bubble. It insisted you hold a corner, and Popcaan’s sensuously elongated vowels dared you to risk it all. Not for the first time, Drake’s verses took a backseat: with dated, saccharine sound-bites that have undergirded his career, his chorus evoked ’90s R&B to almost comical effect: “I think I’d lie for you/ I think I’d die for you/ Jodeci cry for you.”

When the official version dropped in April with Popcaan scrubbed from the track, fans were justifiably outraged. Even the final breaths of the song — a sample of Beenie Man’s “Tear Off Mi Garment” — couldn’t mask Drake’s inability to hold the riddim without Poppy. The leaked version signals what Views as a project went on to prove: Drake is at his best when he gets out of his own way. — HANNAH GIORGIS

This year women used music to expand the definition of “work” beyond mere physical and professional drudgery. Both Rihanna and Toronto singer-songwriter Charlotte Day Wilson released tracks titled “Work,” the former a jaded love song turned liberating dancefloor directive, the latter a call to persevere through the hard work of emotional labor. But Fifth Harmony’s toy-synthed tease, “Work From Home,” felt particularly resonant in a year when I spent a lot of time, well, working from home. “Work From Home” feels like a millennial anthem — a song for young hustlers who have inherited the big dreams and economic failures of prior generations. For them, home is no longer merely a site of comfort; it’s the new workplace. — ANUPA MISTRY

If influencing is the ultimate millennial profession, then it makes sense that in 2016 Drake fully blurred the line between rapper and curator. And if “One Dance” was the final phase of this initiative — a dastardly ingenious culmination of his flirtations with dancehall that grafts his own rubbery patois and the mumbles of the Nigerian artist Wizkid onto a slow-mo rework of a British funky house classic — then “For Free,” a three-minute one-off for DJ Khaled’s post-celebrity album Major Key, whips by like a fleeting breeze. Less weighed down by the burden of legacy, the song could have fit perfectly into the meaty midsection of Views. But Drake gifting it to Khaled carried the implication that he was one-upping the professional curator himself, as if he wanted to make sure that the best song actually made it into the mix. It also happens to be so good that nobody seemed to care that the chorus is an uncrackable logic puzzle, or that Drake spends roughly three percent of the song’s runtime quoting Too $hort. — JORDAN SARGENT