“I inhale, there's something else out there
I want to know what it feels like”

“Is this a far off future dream beyond the Anthropocene?
I love my machine, I love my machine.”

“Me laying low, wit' you near me. Stuck in between, you and my dreams.”

“If you got what I like, you can hit it every night.”

“I’m on (Don’t act like I’m average, come on).”

“Bunny is a rider
Satellite can't find her.”

“I ain't ashamed in the fact that I'm sensitive
I believe that it is the perfect adjective.”

“Nigga play me like a square, I spin the block like it's a Rubik’s.”

“Left school, then my dad and I had a face-to-face in Atlanta
He said, ‘It’s one in a million chance, son,’
I told him, ‘Daddy, I am that one-uh, uh-uh.’”

"Do I need this affection?
Do you need this confusion?"

If Doja Cat lays claim to any superpower, it’s crafting the kind of earworms that work their way from intrigue to obsession. On “Get Into It (Yuh),” Doja bounds over the track’s twinkling production, contorting her voice from fast-paced rasp to all-out chant by the time the hook shows up. It’s a testament to Doja’s versatility as a pop-rap maven. — Sajae Elder

Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License” is is a perfect pop disruption, a raw and melodramatic recount of romantic loss. She makes this heartbreak story feel present and real, filling each line with vivid details and crushing realizations. “Red lights, stop signs,” she sings on the song’s captivating bridge. “I still see your face in the white cars, front yards / Can't drive past the places we used to go to / 'Cause I still fuckin' love you, babe.” It’s enough to convince you that her pain still hasn’t dulled. — LP

The Old Hollywood glamour, the icy blonde hair, the soulful and low-key advance singles: they were all part of an elaborate feint. Happier Than Ever, Billie Eilish’s second album, is her most goth look yet, a slow-burn of a record that builds to an atomic bomb of a finale. In the final minutes of “Happier Than Ever,” the album’s penultimate title track, Eilish lets it rip, unleashing all the anger and pain that’s been simmering for the past hour. “I could talk about every time that you showed up on time / But I’d have an empty line, ‘cos you never did,” she scream-sings, replacing the fantastical horror images of her debut with genuine heartbreak. It’s a blowout that was worth the wait. — SD

“Cash Under Your Bed” ebbs and flows: the second single by Liv Jansz, aka Punko, it captures the one-step-forward, two-steps-back unease of leaving an abusive relationship with steely clarity. Rhythmic and softly propulsive, it reminds me a lot of Amen Dunes, who, like Jansz, can lull you into submission through the use of looping rhythms while writing about unfathomably dark topics. When you least expect it, Jansz can land a fatal blow: “You pulled me deep, deep down / I thought that’s what lovers do.” — SD

This one’s an Afro-fusion anthem for ambitious women everywhere. “I feel like there’s nothing in my way,” Amaarae affirms sweetly in the opening verse. “All this money on me, it feels amazing.” The production by Yinka Bernie is a layered dreamscape of steady percussion and bass with cascading keys, a magical backdrop for lyrics that speak to the art of manifesting. Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis turns up the boss babe vibes with Latin flair on the remix, giving listeners a confident yet airy delivery communicating the thrill of owning your power as a woman. — AI

For his genre-bending breakthrough LP El Madrileño, Spanish rapper C. Tangana teamed up with artists across Latin America and Spain, and "Cambia!" is the record’s greatest success. C. Tangana slides into the world of the Mexican corrido with Mexican crooner Carin Leon and Chicano singer Adriel Favela. The trio reflected on how life's hard knocks shaped them as men. Together, they roll with the punches — offering a ballad of perseverance for a world that always needs reasons to carry on. — LV

Canadian house producer Jayda G’s “All I Need” is three minutes and 40 seconds of irrepressible nostalgia. Built around a dreamy, looping beat and a wispy vocal about how “nothing has changed” — paired in the track’s video with archival footage from raves of a bygone era — the track is a dream of better days, when communion and connection felt a little easier to access. When Jayda G sings “All I need is you to heal me,” it’s clear that this is a love song for the dancefloor as much as it is for another person — a song in praise of the feelings that a long night out could open a person up to. It’s a reminder that the club can still save you, if you let it. — DR

The first ironmaster of the Colebrook Furnace in Appalachian Pennsylvania threw his dogs into the flames after a bad hunt. He saw them charging toward him in his final moments, and they haunt the stone structure to this day, their howls penetrating the woods around it. On “PENNSYLVANIA FURNACE,” Kristin Hayter, a.k.a. Lingua Ignota, uses the local legend to illustrate incurable guilt and brutal retribution from above. “Me and the dog, we die together,” she opens over a piano dirge. “All that I’ve learned is everything burns.” Facing eternal damnation, she offers up a desperate prayer — “I fear your voice above all others” — as the hellhounds swarm. — RH

Simmering with frustration, “I Need All That” sees KA both reminisce on a tough childhood and demand that culture vultures offer recompense for decades of appropriation. The wordplay is clever and the worldview sober, but what rings most clearly is the hurt: the gap between the haves and have nots, witnessed by KA both from the street level and through serving as a firefighter, is finally too much for KA to bear. Freed to speak his mind, he unloads without ever losing the quiet, restrained dignity that defines his rhyming. — SR

In May 2020, a snippet of “Look At The Sky” premiered at the end of Porter Robinson’s livestreamed Secret Sky performance. The taste of this expansive electro-pop song, released in full this year on Robinson’s Nurture (our album of the year), became a balm I’d revisit to soothe my overheated heart in subsequent months. “Look at the sky, I’m still here / I’ll be alive next year” Robinson sings on the hook, his voice writing out the words like a sparkler. It’s not defiance that animates “Look At The Sky” but hope: that we can recognize the best parts of ourselves in this moment, then carry that knowledge into the next. — JD

Most people in the United States heard Black Sherif for the first time when clips from the video to "Second Sermon," which involved some machete-brandishing — and faced backlash from a few critics back in the 19-year-old’s home country of Ghana — found their way onto social media. But whatever controversy the video might have generated was immediately subsumed by the relentless power of Sherif’s music, a blend of highlife and trap full of left-field flows that won’t let up for three breathless minutes. It was tough to pick just one of his songs for this list — “First Sermon" and "Money" both had a shout. Another year like that and Sherif will get the truly global attention his incendiary sound deserves. — ARR

WILLOW’s anthemic “transparent soul” was her first foray into pop-punk. But the itchy paranoia that informs the lyrics (“I don't fucking know if it’s a lie or it's a fact,” she sings) and the muscular percussion from Blink-182 drummer and busy collaborator Travis Barker made it feel like she was meant to be spilling her heart over brittle power chords her whole life. WILLOW is one of pop-punk’s true believers; the conviction in her soaring, searing vocals suggests she could turn herself into one of its stars. — LP

Puerto Rican hit-maker Tainy has always demonstrated himself to be a voracious listener and fearless stylist. But on "Lo Siento BB:/," his collaboration with Mexican alternative artist Julieta Venegas and fellow Boricua star Bad Bunny, he functions as a bridge between vastly different musical worlds. Venegas opens the song, accompanied only by a stark piano line, singing about an out-of-this-world romance. Following her moment of bliss, Tainy drops the reggaeton beats and unleashes a moody Bad Bunny, who questions the idea of love altogether. The angsty, alt-rock-influenced take on reggaeton is an appropriate soundtrack for one of the year’s most vivid depictions of emotional devastation. — LV

Morgan Wade has a voice like a jagged blade, sharp enough to draw blood but lustrous under the light. Just about every song on her debut, Reckless — the year’s best country-pop record, unquestionably — has a hook most of her peers would kill for. "Wilder Days," a right-person-wrong-time love song that oozes regret, doesn't need any flair to get its melancholy across, just a four-note guitar solo and an endlessly replayable chorus. There are echoes of Tom Petty and Jason Isbell here (Sadler Vaden, who co-produced Reckless, plays guitar in The 400 Unit). But the clearest sound here is that of Wade establishing herself as a crossover star-in-waiting. — ARR

The opening track from Dijon’s Absolutely has the feel of a vibrant jam session, its overdriven guitar licks and muddy percussion growing and making space for organs, clarinets, and a warbly slide guitar. But the instrument that really anchors everything is Dijon’s voice, smoldering in parts and explosive in others, when he asks “Will you take me?” in the chorus. Maybe he’s addressing another person — it has all the hallmarks of a love song — but get swept up in “Big Mike’s” enough times and he’ll start to sound like he’s inviting another instrument to the mix. — SE

Holed up in a 19th-century church in rural Indiana in the dead of winter, Hayden Anhedönia — the Florida-born songwriter behind the moniker Ethel Cain — wrote “Crush” in 20 minutes. It sounds like songwriting myth-making, the sort of detail that emerges in a documentary about a forgotten artist decades later. But it makes sense for Anhedönia, who seems so intimately connected to the darkness at the edges of the American Dream that these sorts of songs spill out of her unbidden. “Crush” is a love song for a bad boy, but it also functions as a catalog of all the specters that haunt life at the margins in America: addiction, gun violence, senseless crime. Still, harmonies swirling, it’s clear that Anhedönia sees some light in all the darkness — the warmth of a hand to hold in the cold Indiana winter. — CJ

Usually, reuniting with family around the holiday season results in cousins coming up with poorly choreographed dance routines to show their family later on. These days, you might even end up with a poorly filmed TikTok for your troubles. But when you’re Baby Keem, and your cousin is Kendrick Lamar, you can craft Grammy-nominated hit with ease instead. “Family Ties” brought the hard-to-catch Lamar out of hiding for his first official feature appearance in three years. The pair spend four minutes exchanging heat with comfortable and confident camaraderie, the sort of easygoing atmosphere you can only end up with if you’re on a track with someone you love like family — or someone who is family. — LP

As Doss explains it, her first single in seven years was born out of an endlessly-stretching night horizon. “Driving back at 2 a.m. to Maryland, I was sort of parsing through how sweet and welcoming [an ex] had been, but how I knew that it would never be like it was before, and what to do with all of those feelings.” With each blitzing second of “Puppy,” something that was once so visible begins to shrink in the rearview mirror. It’s the tangle of tail lights blurring in the foreground, it’s the cold wind lapping against your face when you roll the window down, it’s the music.

This summer, Doss’s long-awaited reemergence entwined with the unceremonious reawakening of New York nightlife. Each of her 4 New Hit Songs became canonical additions to the queue, soundtracking the expanse everywhere from Ridgewood to Rockaway Beach. Many nights she was there, too, a leader to the kundled masses as we pretended we were the same people on the dancefloor as we were when we left it. We weren’t, of course. Marred by the trauma and loss of the past two years, our need for healing revealed itself as continually as the world morphed into a less accommodating space to do so. But “Puppy” holds on to the heart-racing chance that wherever we’re all heading — as far from what we’ve known as it may be — there will always be cause for dancing. — SM

Jenny Hval’s trains of thought are long and can wander from musings on linguistic development, to mundane anecdotes about annoying Jehovah’s witnesses, to daydreams of a collective conscious, all in a single song. On “Love, Lovers,” from her Menneskekollektivet album with Håvard Volden, she’s less verbose but more opaque. Her cold monotone speaking voice and repetitive lyrics here are enough to repel the unacquainted ear from finishing the track, but those who dedicate 15 minutes of their day to giving it a deep listen will not be disappointed. In the song’s first section, she commands listeners to do their job and listen, but it eventually becomes clear that the point isn’t to absorb Hval’s words and their ambiguous meanings. Instead the focus belongs on the sound of her voice and Volden’s underlying instrumentation, which remains sparse for most of the track but grows more urgent by the moment. “Untangle the word from the mind,” she orders. Follow her vocal track as it slowly opens into melody. Push past the ego and let Hval and Volden spirit you into their ecstatic waterfall of harmony and rhythm. Let go of language and lose yourself in sound. — RH

What do Ben Franklin, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Algebra, and Cardi B’s vocal inflections have in common? They all get roasted on “American tterroristt,” a nearly 10-minute masterpiece of extreme logorrhea and/or therapeutic free association from Rochester rapper RXKNephew. Questioning anything and everything, and dismissing the American education system and organized religion with extreme prejudice, the song is part Twitter rant, part street corner freakout and all attempt to get a rise out of the listener. From bar to bar, he’ll claim the T-Rex discovered electricity, tell you he cried when watching Will Smith’s I Am Legend, and call Spongebob Squarepants a bitch. For most, the initial reaction will be laughter. But RXKNephew is no clown: “American tterroristt” is lightning in a bottle, the rare artistic achievement that managed to capture the humor, pathos, and insanity of the past two years, and wrap it all in pop culture commentary and a trap beat. Plus, it’s the only song this on this list where the artist threatens to beat Santa with hammer. — SR

Rauw Alejandro has spent the last few years establishing himself as a force in Latin trap and reggaeton music, but on “Todo de Ti,” he proves he can be a pop star too. The Puerto Rican singer discards both of the genres with which he made his name. Instead he shoots for neon-streaked, disco-influenced funk, a fittingly groove-heavy sound for a star who’s put a heavy focus on his efforts as a dancer. It’s his most magnetic song yet, blending sunny ’70s pop with colorful ’80s synthscapes and dizzy harmonies that feel both refreshingly modern and uniquely his. He’s played up his smooth operator persona before, but rarely as energetically as he does here, when he compares a partner’s magnificence to the ocean and outer space. Breezy and bright, “Todo de Ti” will be a flirty summertime swagger for years to come. — LV

It’s strange to think that Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen hadn’t collaborated together prior to “Like I Used To.” Few artists in their close-knit corner of the indie rock community write so vividly about doomed love, with gentle melodies flickering like the embers of a dying fire. Confident, yet clearly masking raw wounds, “Like I Used To” finds each artist pushing the other toward bold emotional peaks. The song is all Springsteen-scale anthemics, meant to be belted out in front of a dive bar karaoke machine at closing time. Van Etten and Olsen imbue everything with an aching remembrance, capturing how hard it can feel to find a fresh start when you’re trudging through life. Still, they press on. — DR

“Essence” may have been released on Wizkid’s Made In Lagos late last year, but it was the song of the summer in 2021. It’s warm and enveloping, a fusion of ’90s and ’00s R&B, UK Afroswing, and insistent keys over the joyful Afrobeats that’s turned Wizkid into a star already. His vibes are breezy here, and he shares the spotlight equally with Nigerian star Tems. Their voices contrast perfectly — Wizkid sounding effortlessly mellow, Tems punchy and insistent — which is the first rule for any song about a love affair. Tems’s hook (“You don’t need no other body,” she insists) is irresistible, the keys are a sun-kissed dream, little embellishments (sax trills in particular) sound expert. It’s set for many more summers of repeated airplay. — AI

Lucy Dacus had been playing her most devastating ballad live for three years before she finally released it this past spring. With each performance, the “panic” that she felt after writing “Thumbs” was diluted a little. “That’s why I was playing it live,” she told The FADER, “so that it would stop feeling so intense and I could just do it by muscle memory.” Maybe that’s why Dacus sounds so poised — so convincing — when she sings about committing murder on the studio version. The imagined victim is her friend’s absent father, a man who’s turned up out of the blue to send his daughter spiraling, and his proposed death is vivid: “I imagine my thumbs on the irises / Pressing in until they burst.” She sings that without wavering, backed only by muffled organ and some crescendoing white noise. But chilling though Dacus sounds there, “Thumbs” isn’t just a homicidal daydream. It’s a song about protecting a friend, choosing a family, and overcoming the trauma passed down by blood. “You don’t owe him shit even if he said you did,” Dacus sings after the fuzz cuts completely and she’s left alone. The furious clarity of her voice in that moment, after the dark fantasy subsides, suggests she’s working from much more than muscle memory. — ARR

“Ting Tun Up, Pt. 2” proves that “tropical pop” need not be a bland euphemism for watered-down dancehall. Instead, it has the potential to be a sugar-rush of a genre, connecting disparate global scenes through a common musical heritage. The original already had a perfect hook from Skiifall, the young Saint Vincent-via-Montreal vocalist, but the sequel takes things a step further. The verse from London rapper Knucks foregrounds the common stylistic DNA at the heart of not only hip-hop and R&B, but also dancehall, grime, drill, and even Afrobeats.

The track leans on skittering triplets, lightly Auto-Tuned melodies, and Caribbean slang with a dash of London swagger; it’s the kind of songs that can only come about organically, as the result of an adolescence spent vibing to a global selection of music. Skiifall emerges on the track fully formed, attacking it with the energy of a vital young rapper but also the nuanced songwriting of a studio pro, with neither side overshadowing the other. No wonder Drake is paying attention. — SR

PinkPantheress will conclude 2021 having amassed hundreds of millions of streams of her discerning revisitations of UK garage, as well as the TikTok videos they soundtrack. But she was a disrupting force beyond these numbers. Breakout songs like “Pain,” “I must apologise,” and “Break it off” were criticized for their “obvious” samples of underground hits, a cardinal sin in crate-digging circles. Whether PinkPantheress is a canny superfan or a skilled selector treating garage classics as riddims, she left her critics in the dust — even the most reloaded track she sampled sounds vibrant in her hands, newly charged with the possibilities of youth and the pleasures of the rave.

The considerable talent she displayed prior to “Just for me,” an original, sample-free song produced by Mura Masa, meant that her compositional skill was less revelation than affirmation. It’s not hard to imagine her sharp ear guiding the beat’s composition. The gentle plucked guitar and shuffling drums recall the 2-step duo Artful Dodger and evoke the kind of puppy love that lives in your chest and drifts, fluttering, into your stomach. PinkPantheress’s voice shares that same quality: light, wistful, and slightly dazed, she sings as though the memory of her crush is the only thing keeping her awake. “Just for me” is a love letter covered in creases from where PinkPantheress has been holding it deep in her pockets. It’s a veneration of past sounds, but it’s also a shining example of modern pop’s power. — JD