The 200 Best Songs of the 2010s

In the 2010s, technology made creating, distributing, and listening to music easier than at any previous point in history. Producers and artists collaborated through the cloud, mixing styles like potions, from emo trap to EDM ballads to indie R&B to bedroom pop. A million modes of distribution meant you could hear those songs milliseconds after they were born. Artists started releasing music at an unprecedentedly rapid pace. The infinite scroll of social media made listeners insatiable. The result of all this was both a blessing and a curse: There was more great music out there than ever before, but it was nearly impossible to keep up. Here at Pitchfork, we sure tried. Here are our top 200 songs of the decade.

For more about how we put together this list, read this letter from our editor-in-chief Puja Patel. And check out all of Pitchfork’s 2010s wrap-up coverage here.

Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist.

Avicii: “Levels” (2011)

As sampled in Avicii’s “Levels,” Etta James’ relatively modest claim that “Oh, sometimes I get a good feeling” felt impossibly aspirational for a generation of entry-level millennials dumped into an indifferent economy. In 2011, good feelings were rare and expensive, but it was possible to get one for free via a sparkling EDM hook. “Levels,” with its monumental synths and jetstream whooshes, took that potential and conquered the world with it.

In hindsight, its sheer scale still feels staggering, but there’s a sinister undertone to it. Tim Bergling, who took his own life in 2018, at age 28, got his stage name from Avici, the hell-like realm in Buddhism where dead sinners are reborn. There is something punishing about “Levels,” which, like the office drone pushing a boulder up a mountain in its music video, seems to climb and climb without actually going anywhere, an illusion of transcendence that’s actually just plain old limbo. Electronic pop music of the early 2010s, from “Harlem Shake” to “Turn Down for What,” was punctuated by images of people in their boring jobs and dumpy apartments exploding into uncontrollable, spasmodic dancing—half joyful release, half exorcism. “Levels” is the sound of a generation hell-bent on having a good feeling, reality be damned. –Emily Yoshida

Listen: Avicii, “Levels”

Stormzy: “Big for Your Boots” (2017)

Before he was a world-famous MC, Stormzy got his start uploading DIY freestyle videos in which he spit nonstop bars over hard-edged grime beats in streets and parks near his South London home. So it makes sense that the knockout track from his eclectic debut album, Gang Signs & Prayer, simply showcases his high-octane rapping and palpable charisma over a jagged instrumental, proving that he deserves to take a seat next to grime greats like Dizzee Rascal and Wiley. On “Big for Your Boots,” Stormzy fires off a barrage of disses directed at his enemies and rap rivals. “You’re getting way too big for your boots/You’re never too big for my boot,” he raps in the chorus, emphasizing the last syllable with maniacal glee. Considering the fact that he’s 6-foot-5 and wears a size 12 shoe, any detractors would be wise to heed his warning. –Michelle Kim

Listen: Stormzy, “Big for Your Boots”

dvsn: “The Line” (2016)

It's not explicitly about God, but the debut single from singer Daniel Daley and producer Nineteen85—better known as dvsn—is some kind of gospel, particularly if you consider falling in love to be a religious experience. Arriving the year before mainstream hip-hop reclaimed gospel via Chance the Rapper's Coloring Book and Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam,” “The Line” has Daley showing off a preacher’s sense of mesmerizing repetition as he fills the song’s skeletal framework with melisma capable of stretching moments into eternities. By the time the choir hits about halfway into this epic slow jam, dvsn’s romantic redemption is secured. –Rich Juzwiak

Listen: dsvn, “The Line”

Icona Pop: “I Love It” [ft. Charli XCX] (2012)

Manic and apathetic at once, “I Love It” is a perfect display of post-breakup hedonism, written over a drop that keeps on dropping. Penned by then-upstart Charli XCX, it was delivered to Swedish twosome Icona Pop by the producer Patrik Berger, whose credits include Robyn’s similarly anthemic “Dancing on My Own”—though the duo differentiate their electropop catharsis by adding an edge of vengeance. Turn the bass up enough, Icona Pop suggest, and it can drown out the throbbing of your broken heart. –Olivia Horn

Listen: Icona Pop, “I Love It” [ft. Charli XCX]

John Maus: “Believer” (2011)

Like many of his lo-fi pop contemporaries in the early ’10s, reclusive Midwesterner John Maus pushed underground music forward by looking backward—rejecting digital studio techniques in favor of old drum machines and wonky synths, excavating the dramatic excesses of ’80s stadium pop and sentimental radio jingles as though they held clues to some hard-to-pinpoint generational subconscious. But his actual relationship to such sources could be hard to read: Was Maus poking fun at music’s power to manufacture an emotional response, like when we find ourselves crying in the middle of a commercial, or celebrating its potential to offer us a fleeting moment of ecstasy, a glimpse of a world that is better than our own? Arriving at the end of 2011’s We Must Be the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves with the cathartic finality of perfectly curated exit music, this song—with its glittering harpsichord arpeggios, briskly pulsing bass, and grandiose allusions to borderless love—is the closest Maus has ever come to being a true believer. –Emilie Friedlander

Listen: John Maus, “Believer”

Cloud Nothings: “I’m Not Part of Me” (2014)

Out of the glut of lo-fi pop-punkers who emerged at the turn of the decade, Cloud Nothings frontman Dylan Baldi was the only one who got nastier with age. At the dead center of the band’s catalog lies “I’m Not Part of Me,” a song where Baldi lets all of his seemingly unworkable contradictions fight themselves into an exhausted standstill while tossing out an album’s worth of hooks in less than five minutes. It’s an insular type of empowering breakup song: “I’m not, I’m not you/You’re a part of me,” Baldi howls, a compact mantra for giving up the character defects and trauma that people hold onto because they confuse it with their identity. Don’t look back in anger, says “I’m Not Part of Me”—let it guide you forward. –Ian Cohen

Listen: Cloud Nothings, “I’m Not Part of Me”

Lil B: “Wonton Soup” (2010)

Two true things: Lil B is a beatific vessel for galaxy-brain-level peace, love, and understanding. He also once tweeted “buttcheeks party grandma.” But spirituality need not bend to reason, and over this decade the Based God remained committed to his vision of untrammeled optimism and unbridled creative confidence, evolving from Bay Area blog savant into legitimate folk hero for the new school. “Wonton Soup” is the peak from this early period, when he first exploded into semi-mainstream consciousness. All his stylistic trademarks are on display: endless “woop” ad libs, hazy production, a monotone delivery that makes his absurd lyrics—he brags about being able to achieve orgasm “like 36 ways,” then compares himself to J.K. Rowling—sound like blissed-out Zen koans. It’s the best possible argument for BasedGodism, even better than a sermon. –Jeremy Gordon

Listen: Lil B, “Wonton Soup”

Nilüfer Yanya: “Baby Luv” (2017)

London upstart Nilüfer Yanya does a lot with a little on “Baby Luv.” The song spotlights her insistent guitar strums, her urgent vocals, and little else. Yanya makes the best of repetition, wielding certain words and phrases like blunt instruments. When she asks, “Do you like pain?” she follows the question with a single word—“again”—saying it over and over again until the word turns numb. It’s a great example of her restraint as a songwriter: Instead of spelling things out in bright red block letters, she selects a couple of choice words and blows them up for maximum impact. When she sings “call me sometime” in the song’s bridge, the familiar phrase assumes a new and menacing shape. –Madison Bloom

Listen: Nilüfer Yanya, “Baby Luv”

Tame Impala: “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” (2012)

Tame Impala’s music is often pegged as brain-melting sonic exploration, but mastermind Kevin Parker also has a pop star’s understanding of emotion. Stripped down to melody and lyrics, “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards,” from 2012’s Lonerism, is a crushing meditation on dashed hopes and rejection. But with its galloping bass and kaleidoscopic, ever-shifting textures, it seems wistfully nostalgic, if not downright celebratory. You can hear why Kendrick Lamar, fresh off the contradictory impulses of his hit “Swimming Pools (Drank),” was drawn to rap over the song. And you can hear how Parker, in the span of a decade, went from headphones auteur to Coachella headliner. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Tame Impala, “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards”

Rico Nasty: “Smack a Bitch” (2018)

Go to a Rico Nasty show and you’ll see a swirling mob of teenage girls thrashing and jumping along to her every word. In the spirit of Bikini Kill’s “girls to the front” rallying cry, the rapper always calls for a female-only mosh pit when she’s about to play her most unruly material, purposefully making space for other young women to share their rage, too.

This sense of uncontainable fury is what makes her breakout single, “Smack a Bitch,” so transfixing. Over a lurching, guitar-fueled instrumental produced by Kenny Beats, Rico yells, “Thank God, I ain’t have to smack a bitch today,” as if delivering blows is part of her normal routine. Pushing her delivery into near-psychotic territory, she declares, “Your ass is done,” before cackling maniacally. Rico takes absolutely no shit, and it’s refreshing to see. –Michelle Kim

Listen: Rico Nasty, “Smack a Bitch”

Ty Dolla $ign: “Paranoid” [ft. B.o.B] (2013)

Ty Dolla $ign’s biggest, best single was one of many hits in the early half of the decade to flaunt producer DJ Mustard’s minimalist touch, realigning R&B with house music. Still, “Paranoid” stands out, its spacious snap-and-pop production setting the stage for our narrator to hit the club only to encounter two girls he’s seeing, both of whom are wearing matching heels and “the same damn fragrance.” Ty wonders if it’s some sort of set-up or if it’s all just in his head. This internal debate is punctuated by his own quivering backing vocals, a Greek chorus commenting on a twisted spin through modern romance. –Jordan Sargent

Listen: Ty Dolla $ign, “Paranoid” [ft. B.o.B]

J Balvin / Willy William: “Mi Gente (Remix)” [ft. Beyoncé] (2017)

Much of what makes Colombian singer J Balvin’s “Mi Gente” sizzle—that audacious drumbeat, that insistent five-note vocal melody—is lifted from Mauritian-French singer Willy William’s 2017 track “Voodoo Song,” which itself reinterprets a sample from the Indian composer Akassh. No wonder “Mi Gente” was such a global, cross-culture sensation.

Balvin worked with William to reinvent the source material, adding Spanish lyrics, chants, and ferocious Latin percussion. His lines like “el mundo nos quiere” (“the world wants us”) transform the song into a universal call to the dancefloor, an embrace of solidarity and unification at a time of enormous worldwide polarization. Aided on the remix by Beyoncé, who audaciously tackles Spanish and ups the diva ante, “Mi Gente” became the first all-Spanish song to reach the top of Spotify’s Global Top 50 chart. It remains a testament to pop music’s ability to push back against growing neo-nationalist fervor—there was no border, no wall, that could keep people from coming together and loving this song. –Jason King

Listen: J Balvin / Willy William, “Mi Gente (Remix)” [ft. Beyoncé]

Future: “Incredible” (2017)

On “Incredible,” Future’s giddy ode to rebound romance, he and his new woman do hot yoga together and send each other “XO” texts. But he isn’t just intoxicated with this fresh love—his zeal for money and jewelry (and Vicodin) loom just as large in his lyrics. Meanwhile, the song’s hook is so simple and so instant—basically, an Auto-Tune hiccup of the title phrase—that it’s a wonder it hadn’t been done before. Producer Dre Moon frames the rapper’s warble in moonlit synths and limber bass for an effect as frothy as an island cocktail. There’s an extra glimmer of hope in hearing such unabashed exuberance from Future in light of his long history of zonked-out moroseness. “I’ma do whatever it’s gon’ take to keep my baby spoiled,” he vows happily, sounding like he truly means it. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Future, “Incredible”

Thom Yorke: “Dawn Chorus” (2019)

The death of Thom Yorke’s longtime partner, Rachel Owen, in late 2016 casts a shadow over “Dawn Chorus,” the emotional center of his solo album Anima. Though the pair had split about 18 months before her passing, it’s impossible to not feel like he’s reflecting, however obliquely, on his own loss. “I think I missed something, but I’m not sure what,” he says in a murmur that makes it seem like he’s dragging his voice across the floor reluctantly. “In the middle of the vortex the wind picked up/Shook up the soot from the chimney pot into spiral patterns of you my love.”

The term “dawn chorus” describes the sound birds make at sunrise during mating season. Nature lovers can’t get enough of it, but here, Yorke calls it a “bloody racket.” That seems off for him, to criticize the organic world. In a state of mourning, though, something that should be sweet can often turn sour. With this song, at least, Yorke makes it sound beautiful. –Matthew Schnipper

Listen: Thom Yorke, “Dawn Chorus”

Skepta: “Shutdown” (2015)

Skepta’s 2015 hit “Shutdown” serves as the decade’s ultimate London anthem: catchy enough to elevate slang to lexicon, hard enough to burst from the world’s weediest soundsystem, and worldly enough to shut down both the Arc de Triomphe and Central Park, as the rapper teases in the song. In a satirical mid-song skit, an unfeasibly posh woman laments the “intimidating” presence of men in hoodies on her TV, alluding to Kanye West’s grime takeover of the 2015 BRIT Awards, which featured Skepta alongside many of the genre’s stars. With this flourish, Skepta’s single rejects battle-rap showboating and zeroes in on the real bête-noire: the snoots who clutch pearls when black MCs breach the nation’s living rooms. The promise of a new, emancipatory grime wave has since resonated loud and clear, on the UK’s biggest stages and beyond. –Jazz Monroe

Listen: Skepta, “Shutdown”

Sharon Van Etten: “Seventeen” (2019)

Sharon Van Etten’s best songs are often marked by their restraint: There’s a feeling that her husky and wide-ranging voice, along with her roiling guitars, could run off the rails, but they’re held in place by her steadfast sense of control. “Seventeen,” from this year’s Remind Me Tomorrow, stretches this idea to the limit—and then careens right past it. The song is immaculately arranged, a lockstep keyboard-rock anthem that’s artfully mussed with synth wobbles and Van Etten’s quavering vocals. But then, as her ambivalent reflections on a youthful doppelgänger wind down, she unleashes a full-throated scream: “Afraid that you’ll be just like me,” she bellows, losing her cool but gaining something even fiercer. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Sharon Van Etten, “Seventeen”

Frank Ocean: “Chanel” (2017)

After releasing Blonde in 2016, Frank Ocean spent the next year trickling out a series of singles that built upon that album’s fluid confidence. “Chanel” is the first and best of them, capturing an artist in total command of his faculties as a singer, writer, and rapper. There isn’t much to it in terms of melody or structure. The piano chords are simple and translucent; the beat ambles casually. It’s all about Frank and the places his words can take you: a heated swimming pool in the hills, a Tokyo back alley, the first-class lounge at the Delta terminal. Listen closely, and “Chanel” also reveals itself to be a meditation on masculinity, one that alternately embraces it, subverts it, and points out its absurdity. Beneath it all, there’s a romantic ripple, too, as a relationship that seemed casual and disposable is revealed, almost shyly, to mean something more. This is Frank’s gift, the ability to build worlds of meaning and emotion into a song that has the casual grace of a freestyle. –Jamieson Cox

Listen: Frank Ocean, “Chanel”

Young M.A: “OOOUUU” (2016)

Young M.A’s breakthrough single oozes the kind of confidence you can’t fake. Against a loose, snare-heavy beat, she raps breezily about sex with other women—a rarity in hip-hop that she plays off nonchalantly amid lines about getting drunk and cracking jokes with friends. An out stud in an industry that’s still deciding how to digest queer musicians, M.A used “OOOUUU” to carve out a judgment-free zone where she can be herself and feel herself, where she isn’t an outsider but the queen of her own domain. The coyote howl of the title is both a tease and a triumph, the sound of finally feeling at home in your own skin and inviting others to play along with you. –Sasha Geffen

Listen: Young M.A, “OOOUUU”

Beyoncé: “XO” (2013)

“XO” is about more than the saccharine simplicity of dreamy hugs and kisses. It begins with a clip of the crew of the Challenger realizing the malfunction on their spaceship, giving the love story that follows an undercurrent of mortality. On the surface, the slow-building track is an airy breather after the erotic, liberatory journey of the rest of Beyoncé’s self-titled 2013 album; the synth drops, and so does the snare drum, creating a soundscape that draws from rock, reggae, and EDM. Meanwhile, Beyoncé’s voice is raw, almost growling, a sound we have never heard from her before. (Turns out she had a sinus infection during the recording.)

In the video, Beyoncé is at a carnival, flashing us one gorgeous smile after another. But carnivals themselves are a form of trickery: youthful joy on the surface, covering a shadowy underbelly. Like the spell of love and the threat it could end, “XO” deftly balances joy and sorrow; it’s a cautionary tale of beautiful things that sometimes head to untimely endings. –Samhita Mukhopadhyay

Listen: Beyoncé, “XO”

Migos: “Bad and Boujee” [ft. Lil Uzi Vert] (2016)

The runaway success of “Bad and Boujee” created its own pop culture ecosystem. The Migos became mainstream stars. “Rain drops, drop tops” became a catchphrase. Takeoff’s absence from the track became a memeable conspiracy theory. The song itself is a perfect distillation of everything that makes the Migos irresistible: a Gucci Mane-derived gift for quotables, a sizzling Metro Boomin beat, ad-libs for days, and an ear for perfectly placed guest stars—in this case, a before-he-was-huge Lil Uzi Vert, rapping about falling asleep in a jacuzzi. Soon enough, the Migos were matching chart feats once set by the Beatles, cementing their status as generational titans. –Jonah Bromwich

Listen: Migos, “Bad and Boujee” [ft. Lil Uzi Vert]

Sons of Kemet: “My Queen Is Harriet Tubman” (2018)

The U.S. Treasury Secretary continues to balk at the rollout of a new $20 bill featuring abolitionist Harriet Tubman. Meanwhile, do-it-yourself Tubman rubber stamps are perpetually out of stock, suggesting that many Americans might concur with Sons of Kemet and the British-born, Barbados-raised saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings’ bold declaration that “My Queen Is Harriet Tubman.” The unrelenting highlight of the band’s Impulse! debut, Your Queen Is a Reptile, “Harriet Tubman” unites African-American jazz and Afro-Caribbean soca. But UK sounds also bubble up on the track, from the punk sneer inherent in that title to the dubstep wobble in tuba player Theon Cross’ huffed frequencies. And then there’s Hutchings’ own breathless solo, his staccato shrieks matching the rapidfire flow of grime. Drawing on many musical heritages, “Harriet Tubman” also moves forward, its sound igniting the spirit of all future freedom fighters. –Andy Beta

Listen: Sons of Kemet, “My Queen Is Harriet Tubman”

Rich Kidz: “My Life” [ft. Waka Flocka Flame] (2012)

“My Life” feels like it came from a different century. The uncut bombast of Atlanta rap group Rich Kidz’ towering tune was laced by producer London on da Track, but its pure sonic overload was lovingly ripped from the gigantic sound popularized by Lex Luger, before a variety of issues drove him off the map for the rest of the decade. Waka Flocka Flame’s contributions to the song resemble a pack of sound effects played all at once, evoking the smoking-barrel chaos of his own 2010 masterpiece, Flockaveli, though the rapper’s career is currently mired in reality-TV purgatory. Even Rich Kidz’ Skooly and RK Kaelub are no longer making music together anymore. But no matter what’s happened since, “My Life” is still a Kool-Aid-colored diamond that hasn’t lost any of its blinding sparkle. –Larry Fitzmaurice

Listen: Rich Kidz, “My Life” [ft. Waka Flocka Flame]

The 1975: “The Sound” (2016)

“The Sound” has all the hallmarks of a great 1975 song: a sticky chorus, bouncing neon synths, Matty Healy name-dropping Greek philosophers and promptly calling himself a cliché. It’s fun and clever and anthemic while taking the piss out of big anthems at the same time. Above all the roaring maximalism, Healy is tuned to the sound of his many, many desires: for attention, sex, intellectual validation, intimacy, and, quite possibly, immortality. With this, he embodies a very millennial mindset: as eager to promote himself as he is to air all of his insecurities. –Matthew Strauss

Listen: The 1975, “The Sound”

A Tribe Called Quest: “The Space Program” (2016)

A Tribe Called Quest have never been conscious or woke in the way that so many of the best-intentioned rappers are. Instead, they adopt the playful, nihilistic tone of high cultural gatekeepers, turning it back onto those same gatekeepers over kick snare and hi-hat. So it was deeply satisfying to hear the group strike as strongly as ever after 18 years of downtime on “The Space Program,” where they chuckle at the idea that NASA is anything more than a segregated train car, meant to take the rich to space and leave everyone else right where we’re at. Over soft-touch keyboards and guitars that pick up where 1996’s Beats Rhymes and Life left off, the song opens up We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service, Tribe’s final album of tongue-in-cheek musings on the current state of the world and the weekend. “Let's make something happen,” is the mantra, one anybody with a pulse can feel. We got it from Here... is fossilized by the passing of Phife Dawg shortly after its release, and this track captures a group, a sound, and a spirit that fought to the last second to exist in a world that remained alien to it. –Matthew Trammell

Listen: A Tribe Called Quest, “The Space Program”

Sampha: “(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano” (2017)

When it came time for Sampha to write and record his debut album, the UK singer was in mourning. His mother, whom he’d lived with and cared for in London, had died of cancer. The resulting LP, Process, is a deeply personal look at the painful and, at times, transformative power of grief, and nowhere is that more apparent than on “(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano.” The ballad finds Sampha anthropomorphizing the piano in his mother’s home, which was purchased by his father, who passed away when Sampha was young. The instrument is likened to a childhood friend who helped him channel his despair into song. As Sampha narrates his coming of age, the hiss of room tone and the cooing of birds can be heard deep in the mix. The effect is one of intimacy, of being welcomed into a private moment of respite. –Gabriela Tully Claymore

Listen: Sampha, “(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano”

Nicki Minaj: “Come on a Cone” (2012)

Nicki Minaj may have become a star off of sugar-rush pop-rap anthems, but her status as one of the fiercest MCs of the decade was established by tracks like “Come on a Cone”: punchy, barb-laced polemics displaying crushing levels of pettiness and animus. Easily one of the most dynamic rap performances of the past 10 years, “Come on a Cone” is unswerving, deservedly smug, and incredibly funny. Nicki wields her flashy fashion show front-row status as a weapon that reinforces her power: “When I’m sittin’ with Anna/I’m really sittin’ with Anna/Ain’t a metaphor, punchline—I’m really sittin’ with Anna,” she barks. “Just admit that I’m winnin’,” she declares, and if you don’t, well... there’s a certain appendage Nicki would like to stick in your face. –Sheldon Pearce

Listen: Nicki Minaj, “Come on a Cone”

Florence and the Machine: “Shake It Out” (2011)

Take a look at the YouTube comments for Florence and the Machine’s “Shake It Out”: Eight years after its release, the song is still helping people get through breakups, depression, illness, and even a prison sentence. Such are the healing powers of Florence Welch’s gale-force vocals delivering a message of hope and perseverance over florid gospel-pop that sounds like the sun breaking through after a storm. Florence’s multi-platinum 2009 debut album Lungs introduced the London singer to the world stage, but it was “Shake It Out” and its accompanying album, 2011’s Ceremonials, that cemented her place as an arena and festival headliner—a position she maintains to this day. Few moments in pop this decade have delivered this level of ecstatic catharsis; only big rooms and big crowds can do it justice. –Amy Phillips

Listen: Florence and the Machine, “Shake It Out”

DJ Khaled: “I’m on One” [ft. Drake, Rick Ross, and Lil Wayne] (2011)

You’d be forgiven for wondering why the guy who does the ad-libs has top billing on this star-studded 2011 posse cut. But here, DJ Khaled shows his gift for executive production, assembling a showcase for three of hip-hop’s biggest artists. Everyone sounds laid-back and in their zone: Rick Ross leans into the fabulist drug kingpin fantasy he established on Teflon Don, and Lil Wayne is at his most casually confident (“You niggas on the bench like the bus coming”). But Drake steals the show, drowning in his double cup while taking shots at the throne, perfectly paired to a beat from fellow Canadians T-Minus, Nikhil S., and Noah “40” Shebib that’s laced with synthesizers that sing like sirens. Considering the hook is also lifted from Drake’s “Trust Issues,” this song is as much his as Khaled’s, a summer anthem that helped reinforce the hit-making status of all involved. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz

Listen: DJ Khaled, “I’m on One” [ft. Drake, Rick Ross, and Lil Wayne]

Sleep: “Marijuanaut’s Theme” (2018)

Doom metal trio Sleep became legends by doing a few simple things very well. They played slow. They played loud. They made smoking pot sound like an epic journey on par with Lord of the Rings. So when the band returned with their first new album in 15 years in 2018, the fact that their gnarly riffs sounded just as inspired as they did in the ’90s was worth celebrating.

Metal played at torpid speed often seems to invoke the apocalypse, and a colossal solo from guitarist Matt Pike in “Marijuanaut’s Theme” certainly suggests some kind of destruction. But Sleep’s new music was remarkable for sounding equally combustive and comfortable in its freefall through space. Close your eyes, they seem to say, There is a band playing in your head, and they are getting high. –Sam Sodomsky

Listen: Sleep, “Marijuanaut’s Theme”

Adele: “Rolling in the Deep” (2011)

In the first line of “Rolling in the Deep,” Adele warns us of a coming fire, then she burns everything to the ground. The lead single from the mega-selling breakup album 21 transformed her into a global star, and she has hardly made anything like it since. The lyrics quickly abandon hell-hath-no-fury cliché: By the pre-chorus, the boiling anger has cooled into sadness, revealing protruding scars. The music follows suit—Adele once described the song as “dark bluesy gospel disco,” which feels like the made-up sub-genre she was born to sing. Her vocal control, the way she allows melisma to curl around the edges of her voice, is like a superpower that needed this song to reveal it. –Rich Juzwiak

Listen: Adele, “Rolling in the Deep”

Lil Peep: “Kiss” (2016)

Lil Peep’s “Kiss” sounds like two or three songs staggering home together. The sampled guitars might be from a Modern Baseball song, or maybe another Lil Peep song entirely, and the first voices on the track are a half-buried sample of the California pop-punk band Better Luck Next Time; the echoes run together the same way that incoming headlights smear into one beam when you squint. Produced by Smokeasac, Peep’s closest and most intimate creative partner, the song begins pickled in that signature Peep weariness, but then a second song seems to yawn and wake up inside the first one. This is a cautiously exultant one, a rare Peep anthem of bashful hope instead of despair: “One more chance, baby give me a kiss/Ya got one more chance for a night like this,” he sings. It has the lifespan of a soap bubble, this fleeting burst of euphoria. You feel the urge to protect it. –Jayson Greene

Listen: Lil Peep, “Kiss”

St. Vincent: “New York” (2017)

Surrounded by hypersexual synth workouts and fuzzed-to-all-hell basslines, this bare piano ballad is the heartrending centerpiece of MASSEDUCTION, Annie Clark’s fifth album as St. Vincent. The song’s intimate verses, cribbed from Clark’s own text messages to old friends, honor people and places who may have drifted away but will never be completely out-of-mind. “You’re the only motherfucker in the city who can stand me,” she sings. The chorus, meanwhile, zooms out into the cosmos, as she pays homage to fallen musical heroes like David Bowie and Prince. It’s a song about living, loving, and losing in the big city—and not regretting any of it. –Noah Yoo

Listen: St. Vincent, “New York”

King Krule: “Dum Surfer” (2017)

On “Dum Surfer,” King Krule’s Archy Marshall showed that, aside from his beatmaking prowess and lounge-lizard loucheness, he could also pen a terse rocker. Singing with the affect of a boxer with a plugged nose, he veers between emotional extremes, calling out a band as “fucking trash” while sounding miserably convinced of his own fallibility. A snaking baritone sax and smoky dub effects blur the song’s edges until even the name-calling title subtly shifts to a gentle adage: “Don’t suffer.” Had it come a few generations before, it might have made Krule into alternative rock royalty alongside the Pixies or Sonic Youth. Instead, it made fans of everyone from weirdo-jazz ensemble Standing on the Corner to Beyoncé. –Andy Beta

Listen: King Krule, “Dum Surfer”

Tinashe: “2 On” [ft. Schoolboy Q] (2014)

Produced by L.A. hitmaker DJ Mustard, “2 On” is widescreen and intricately sculpted: Its curling, high-toned bassline seems to whir and chime, and its descending roll of pizzicato synth-drums are so ear-catching that they compete with the gorgeous vocal melody. “2 On” is Tinashe’s term for being too high—intoxication chased to the edge of oblivion. Her lyrics ripple with references to liquor and smoke, and the song’s forthright celebration of “getting faded till we trip” may well have contributed to it only reaching No. 24 on the Hot 100. (“Live fast, die young, that’s my choice” does sound nihilistic, admittedly.) But Tinashe’s sensuous, slurred lingering over the chorus “I luuuuu to get 2 on” is joyous and life-affirming, a million miles from the deadened hedonism of so much trap. Dissolution has never sounded so delicious. –Simon Reynolds

Listen: Tinashe, “2 On” [ft. Schoolboy Q]

Bad Bunny: “Caro” (2018)

Bad Bunny was already one of the biggest acts in música urbana when his knockout debut LP X 100PRE dropped in 2018, and the album’s fourth single, “Caro,” offered the clearest picture of his brilliance. It’s the perfect vessel for his suave sadboi aesthetic: laid-back yet full of bounce, draped in woozy synths and atmospheric coos that ground his nimble flow. It’s romantic yet political in its expression of the universal human desire to live one’s truth freely: “¿En qué te hago daño a ti?/Y solamente soy feliz,” he croons (“How have I hurt you?/I’m just happy”).

“Caro” became a defining moment for Bad Bunny: In the wake of a homophobic backlash to his whimsical sartorial choices and predilection for freshly manicured nails, its video doubled down with a rejection of traditional gender roles and toxic masculinity. The stunning clip includes a female Bad Bunny stand-in and a drag queen working the runway, and, during the song’s incandescent bridge featuring none other than Ricky Martin, Bad Bunny himself is seen receiving kisses from both a man and a woman. With “Caro,” the Puerto Rican star flipped a few scripts that badly needed it. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz

Listen: Bad Bunny, “Caro”

Jessica Pratt: “Back, Baby” (2014)

Like waiting out a snowstorm indoors, Jessica Pratt’s sophomore album On Your Own Love Again has an isolating power. Amid its hazier material, “Back, Baby” is its clearest transmission, with a melody as familiar as an oldies radio standard. And yet Pratt’s delivery—strange, sad, slightly off-kilter—gives the sense of someone more interested in drowning out the world than inviting it in. Alongside strums of a nylon string guitar, she cycles through the song’s bobbing refrains and wordless choruses, her voice sewn through with an intensity that belies its understated presentation. “Sometimes I pray for the rain,” she sings as the sun peeks through the blinds. But even at her most upbeat, there’s a tinge of sadness, knowing all storms must pass. –Sam Sodomsky

Listen: Jessica Pratt, “Back, Baby”

Andrés: “New for U” (2012)

Saying there’s not much to Andrés’ “New for U” might not be wrong, but it misses the point. Simple tools are almost always the most effective, as the Detroit DJ proves here. Using a lovely little string melody as its main flourish, “New for U” straddles the line between symphonic disco and house music. With its occasionally washed out vibe, it has the feel of being prewritten to play the way a great DJ would deploy it, teasing out its peaks. Once the DJ for the Motor City rap group Slum Village, Andrés released a considerable amount of music this decade, but nothing competed with this track’s restrained power. –Matthew Schnipper

Listen: Andrés, “New for U”

Davido: “Fall” (2017)

Prior to 2017, Nigerian Afropop singer Davido had already established himself as one of Africa’s premier artists, but “Fall” turned him into a star the world over. Who can blame everyone for falling in love with the song’s soft melody and Davido’s tricky charisma? Every line is uttered with both mesmerizing cockiness and vulnerability. “I don’t wanna be a player no more,” he pleads, raising his pitch. In the back half of the 2010s, Afropop exploded in popularity, with countless artists attempting to hop on the trend. “Fall” was instrumental in continuing to widen the influence of Nigeria’s music on Western culture, becoming an international anthem along the way. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: Davido, “Fall”

Chance the Rapper: “No Problem” [ft. 2 Chainz and Lil Wayne] (2016)

The most maximalist single from Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book, “No Problem” drapes layered gospel samples from every corner, like streamers bedecking a birthday party. The song bursts with childlike joy, from Chance’s raspy laughs in the hook to the dizzying turns by its superstar guests. 2 Chainz comes in with swift, blunt punches, while Weezy takes his time, delivering the best flex of the entire track: “Fuck the watch, I buy a new arm.” But all those bells and whistles can’t conceal the sharp knives these MCs have tucked behind their backs. “If one more label try to stop me,” Chance barks, “It’s gon’ be some dread head niggas in ya lobby.” It’s a threat uttered through a smile, making this jubilant ode to independence sound that much more determined. –Madison Bloom

Listen: Chance the Rapper, “No Problem” [ft. 2 Chainz and Lil Wayne]

Vybz Kartel: “Clarks” [ft. Popcaan and Gaza Slim] (2010)

Months after squashing a bitter rivalry with fellow dancehall icon Mavado that involved a dizzying stretch of singles, a peace concert, and a summit shepherded by Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding, Vybz Kartel dialed things back to deliver a fashion anthem that paid homage to that most classic of song topics: simply keeping the ’fit straight and the kicks clean. Kartel is both light-hearted and funny over the “Mad Collab” riddim, giving his pops fashion daps (“Mi pattern mi daddy from mi was a youngster”), explaining proper Wallabees hygiene (“Toothbrush get out the dust fast”), and styling a whole look (“Real badman no model inna shorts”). He also allowed his protégé, a young upstart named Popcaan, to bless the track with a verse that includes the line “the queen fi England haffi love off Yardie,” honoring a Jamaican predilection for the British footwear brand Uptown Yardie that reflects Jamaican migration to England. But more than anything, “Clarks” offers Kartel a chance to rep his own shoe rack. As he told The Guardian in 2010, “I personally have more than 50 pair of Clarks. I have more than there are states in America.” –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Listen: Vybz Kartel, “Clarks” [ft. Popcaan and Gaza Slim]

Odd Future: “Oldie” (2012)

“Oldie” is a Russian nesting doll where the prize at the center is the first Earl Sweatshirt appearance following his fabled exile in Samoa. Though the last song on The OF Tape Vol. 2 features the whole crew—even Frank—taking turns rapping, the whole point is that one verse. It’s a knotty, 40-bar exercise that confirmed what those who’d waded through Tumblr to find his early work already knew: bar for bar, Earl is a generational talent, impervious to hype. A few years later, on his album I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, Earl plainly stated what had been true all along: “If I’m on the track, these niggas skip to me.” –Paul A. Thompson

Listen: Odd Future, “Oldie”

Katy B: “Katy on a Mission” (2010)

“Katy on a Mission” began as “Man on a Mission,” a dubstep cut by producer Benga. But then Katy B’s remake went Top 5 in the UK, decisively punting out the titular “Man,” and making the young London singer not just the face of underground dance music, but a mirror for dance-pop at large too. Katy is neither a belter nor a cooing soubrette but an everygirl, imbuing her vocals with relatable frankness and yearning. On “Katy on a Mission,” she’s both a poised singer—her vocal tenses and slacks alongside Benga’s track effortlessly—and an audience surrogate. She moves back and forth between cool confidence and total surrender at the speed of a strobe light flicker, taking listeners along like a hand pulling them onto the dancefloor. –Katherine St. Asaph

Listen: Katy B, “Katy on a Mission”

Waka Flocka Flame: “Hard in da Paint” (2010)

Waka Flocka Flame worked hard to conjure an image of out-and-out raucousness, but his debut record, 2010’s Flockaveli, is sneakily varied: He slides slickly into pockets, at turns vicious or playful; he revels in whatever material goods are right in front of him while still lamenting the way life might have gone better. His booming, Lex Luger-produced warning shot, “Hard in da Paint,” contains all of these well-trodden modes while feeling totally singular. At first he brags about having not only a main bitch, but a girlfriend and a mistress; by the end he’s admitting, “When my little brother died, I said ‘fuck school.’” This is not a “dichotomy of man” thing, where the point is to feel the tension between warring impulses. The point is that this is all happening, all at once. –Paul A. Thompson

Listen: Waka Flocka Flame, “Hard in da Paint”

Beyoncé: “1+1” (2011)

When Beyoncé performs “1+1” live, she often kneels. It’s a fitting posture for a ballad about the divine nature of love. On the recording, her voice is sparingly framed with a handful of elements—a Prince-esque guitar line, gospel organ, and the shimmer of chimes—so when Bey conjures up a primal growl before launching back into a tender falsetto, there’s little to distract from the sheer force of her vocals.

The song’s structure is simple: Beyoncé admits that she doesn’t know about something—be it math, guns, or war—and then quickly pivots back to her devotion to her partner, finding reassurance in his strength and permanence. The resulting message is one that’s beautiful in its near-spiritual wisdom: trust in love, and it will anchor and guide you through all of life’s uncertainties. –Michelle Kim

Listen: Beyoncé, “1+1”

Girl Unit: “Wut” (2010)

What makes “Wut” such a propulsive blast of energy is both its dexterous manipulation of tension and release, and its seemingly hyperdimensional use of texture. Drawing on the dynamics of 808-fueled rap instrumentals, and replete with a mischievous vocal sample, wobbly synths, and well-timed use of an airhorn, “Wut” is one of the cheekiest peak-time tracks to emerge from the transatlantic club scene this decade. It’s one of those impossible-not-to-move-to tunes, a crystallization of the club’s love affair with hip-hop. –Ruth Saxelby

Listen: Girl Unit, “Wut”

Kanye West: “Blood on the Leaves” (2013)

“Blood on the Leaves” is a microcosm of what made Kanye both great and awful this decade; it was because of everything he did so beautifully that we endured everything else he did poorly. The beat: a 2 Fast 2 Furious-style collision of Nina Simone’s “Strange Fruit” and TNGHT’s “R U Ready” that’s about as tasteful as a 10-car pileup. The vocal: a mangled Auto-Tune yelp about paternity paranoia, cheating, and child support that includes a comparison between serial infidelity and apartheid. The song is about as ugly a piece of music as was made this decade, and yet it was leeringly ugly, purposefully so. The music Kanye was cooking up to feed his overheated imagination was so lurid and tactile that, for this blazing moment and others, it held everything together. –Jayson Greene

Listen: Kanye West, “Blood on the Leaves”

Japanese Breakfast: “Everybody Wants to Love You” (2016)

In “Everybody Wants to Love You,” Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner offers a vision of romance that is gloriously unrestrained. She lets her imagination run wild as she outlines the course of a hypothetical relationship, jumping from the quiet intimacy of a shared toothbrush to impromptu marriage. “Can I get your number?/Can I get you into bed?” she coyly asks over a celestial synthesizer. “When we wake up in the morning/Will you give me lots of head?”

Featuring a jangly guitar solo and propulsive backing vocals, the song is deliriously catchy—but with repeated listens, its upbeat surface begins to crack. Is Zauner singing about a new relationship, or is she desperately trying to breathe life into one that has grown stale? Is the repeated title phrase a genuine celebration of attraction, or a mockery of romantic idolization? Like love itself, “Everybody Wants to Love You” is more complex than it first appears. –Quinn Moreland

Listen: Japanese Breakfast, “Everybody Wants to Love You”

Danny Brown: “30” (2011)

More rap careers end at age 30 than begin at age 30. In 2011, Danny Brown was acutely aware of this fact, as he said goodbye to his 20s and made his final push towards rap stardom after spending years trapped in the industry spin cycle. The frantic “30” is imbued with the desperation of a man with his eye on the hourglass, realizing his last best hope is slipping away. What begins as absurdist punchline rap quickly devolves into a catalog of personal chaos. Producer Skywlkr’s horns sound like an accordion, wheezing and deflating cartoonishly, as Brown is terrorized by an alternate future where his lifelong calling goes unrealized. He has visions of OD’ing without knowing his daughter, of dying unloved and unfulfilled. “The last 10 years I been so fucking stressed/Tears in my eyes let me get this off my chest/The thought of no success got a nigga chasing death,” he cries out. Even listening to the song now, in the wake of eight years of triumphs for the Detroit MC, it still devastates. –Sheldon Pearce

Listen: Danny Brown, “30”

Miley Cyrus: “Wrecking Ball” (2013)

August 25, 2013: During her performance at the VMAs, Miley Cyrus mimes anilingus on another woman, pleasures herself with a foam finger, and twerks all over Robin Thicke. She instantly destroys any remnants of her purity-ring-wearing Hannah Montana image, transforming from America’s Sweetheart into America’s Nightmare in a matter of minutes. That same day, she releases “Wrecking Ball,” the song that ensures she’ll still have a career when the dust settles.

A perfect vehicle for Miley’s burnt-cigarette voice, “Wrecking Ball” spectacularly captures the agony of losing a love after coming on too strong. It’s one of the great torch songs of the 21st century, destined to be wailed by the drunk and heartsick at karaoke bars until the end of time. The video, in which a tearful Miley fellates a sledgehammer and gyrates naked on top of a wrecking ball, will likely be used in highlight reels to evoke “the 2010s” for decades to come, too. Unfortunately, the legacy of both the song and video are tainted by associations with two of the #MeToo era’s biggest villains, producer Dr. Luke and photographer/director Terry Richardson (not to mention Miley’s own myriad controversies). But when that chorus hits like a you-know-what, it’s impossible not to sing along at the top of your lungs. –Amy Phillips

Listen: Miley Cyrus, “Wrecking Ball”

Gang Gang Dance: “Glass Jar” (2011)

Grown from the same New York art-noise ooze that produced Animal Collective and Yeah Yeahs Yeahs, Gang Gang Dance blurred lines, participating in the Whitney Biennial en route to a global stage. Opening 2011’s Eye Contact, the band’s nearly 11-and-a-half minute “Glass Jar” is prelude, overture, and banger all at once. The song is one of their many continuing tributes to late bandmate Nathan Maddox, who was struck by lightning on a Chinatown rooftop in 2002, and a door to the next phase of their career. First comes a slow shift from spoken-word drift to full-on groove; then, synths that rain down with a classical sense of drama. The drums don’t coalesce into a steady rhythm until slightly more than halfway through. Samples, references, and arty details abound on “Glass Jar,” but the destination is a Brooklyn-style drop, recognized on dancefloors the world over. –Jesse Jarnow

Listen: Gang Gang Dance, “Glass Jar”

Nicki Minaj: “Beez in the Trap” [ft. 2 Chainz] (2012)

In 2012, Nicki Minaj was at the center of a burning debate about rap, pop, and credibility. Onstage at New York rap station Hot 97’s Summer Jam concert that June, blowhard DJ Peter Rosenberg blasted her frothy hit “Starships” as the antithesis of “real hip-hop,” adding that it was for “chicks.” It was a small-minded, chauvinist argument—Nicki’s very strength was always about how her wily versatility took rap to unprecedented places—but the concurrent success of “Beez in the Trap” was also a perfect retort. You want “real hip-hop”? Here was Nicki flipping bars over an alien beat as thrilling as the rapper herself, filled with synths and drums that buzz and bang and bubble. That “Starships” and “Beez in the Trap” were from the same album, and hits at the same time, showed precisely who Minaj was: a woman in possession of a strange and singular talent who could appeal to seemingly everyone, from tweens to twinks to rap obsessives. –Alex Frank

Listen: Nicki Minaj, “Beez in the Trap” [ft. 2 Chainz]

Björk: “Stonemilker” (2015)

Björk spent the decade increasingly entangled in complex experiments involving VR and bitcoin, with each new album presented as part of a wider technological narrative. It felt quietly ironic, then, that her best song of the era would plug into an emotional well older than time: heartbreak. “Stonemilker,” the first track to be taken from Björk’s eighth studio album, Vulnicura, was inspired by her separation from artist Matthew Barney, her raw feelings splattered all across the lyrics. “Show me emotional respect,” she demands on the hook, while volcanic beats pound and strings dive around her. In the future, the song’s VR video will seem as charmingly antiquated as a silent film reel, but its message of fierceness in the face of heartache will remain state-of-the-art. –Ben Cardew

Listen: Björk, “Stonemilker”

GoldLink: “Crew” [ft. Brent Faiyaz and Shy Glizzy] (2017)

Long after the summer breezes by, its anthems live on. Hear a song like “Crew,” and everything about the summer of 2017—relationships, moments, the weather on that one Friday you cut out early—comes rushing back in vivid detail. At its core, “Crew” was destined to be a song that put on for GoldLink’s native DMV, but it became so much more. Link’s rapid delivery, Shy Glizzy’s conversational bars, and Brent Faiyaz’s silky throwback melody each feed into each other seamlessly. Together, the trio turned out a track as catchy as it is charming, one that should go down as a memorable addition into the backyard barbecue canon. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: GoldLink, “Crew” [ft. Brent Faiyaz and Shy Glizzy]

Ella Mai: “Boo’d Up” (2018)

Ella Mai’s breakout single “Boo’d Up” is a luxurious track unconcerned with the passing of time, with a glistening instrumental by DJ Mustard and a vocal that moves through the melody like falling into someone’s arms. It’s also an exceedingly unlikely Top 10 hit. So many factors worked against “Boo’d Up”: the fact that Ella Mai was largely an unknown; that women in R&B, once the genre’s heart, had become the genre’s outsiders throughout the 2010s; that the song’s languid pace, unassuming sound, and besotten emotional clarity weren’t particularly marketable. And then people heard it, and all those factors floated away, irrelevant. –Katherine St. Asaph

Listen: Ella Mai, “Boo’d Up”

Gunna: “Sold Out Dates” [ft. Lil Baby] (2018)

So many collaborations lean on clichéd narratives about two artists rising to some grand occasion of shared interest. Atlanta rappers Gunna and Lil Baby, it seems, just want to make a run of impossibly fun songs and enjoy each other’s company. Out of their many team-ups, “Sold Out Dates” is the most infectious—the one where their voices blend to seamless heights, until it’s unclear where one ends and the other takes over. The constantly unfurling chorus leaps across the song’s electric guitar riff, finding one soft landing spot after another. If there is a sports analogy to be made, it is less Stockton and Malone, and more Stockton and Stockton: Gunna and Baby find each other in perfect position, then pass out of it, to an even more perfect position. Their dynamic has the same feel as Watch the Throne-era Kanye and Jay, not trying to make a mark by outdoing each other, just ruminating on the ever-evolving idea of hedonism, and emerging with no answers. –Hanif Abdurraqib

Listen: Gunna, “Sold Out Dates” [ft. Lil Baby]

Charli XCX: “Gone” [ft. Christine and the Queens] (2019)

After nearly a decade of branding herself as a rave-happy club kid who parties until five in the morning, Charli XCX’s facade cracked. On “Gone,” she feels adrift at an event and spirals into despair. “I feel so unstable/Fucking hate these people,” Charli sings over an ’80s funk-pop beat. These lines about unbelonging also double as a metaphor for the constrictions she faces as a major-label artist who is expected to churn out chart hits but prefers to tweak and deconstruct them instead. Joining the rampage is fellow pop rule-breaker Héloïse Letissier of Christine and the Queens, who descends into paranoia, posing some truly mystifying questions about whether she’s “the smoke” or “the sun.” The madness escalates into a breakdown of glitching vocal chops, metallic clanking, and dramatic power-synth fills. It’s the soundtrack to a mental breakdown, the kind that ensues right before you come back even stronger. –Michelle Kim

Listen: Charli XCX, “Gone” [ft. Christine and the Queens]

Spoon: “Inside Out” (2014)

A Spoon song is typically defined by what you can’t hear as much as what you can: They are stripped and reduced to their elements, allowing the band to build music with visible architecture and plenty of open space. All this matters because “Inside Out” is quite possibly the most lush Spoon song ever written. Built on a rigid rhythm that acts as a backbone for a harp solo—not exactly their signature sound—and frontman Britt Daniel’s raspy lyrics about how life can be pretty simple if you know what you want and avoid getting dragged down by everything else, it’s not quite Spoon gone new age, but it also doesn’t sound a whole lot like any other Spoon song. The greatness of “Inside Out” lies not just in its unexpected softness, but in Daniel’s ability to be wise and brash at the same time. Earned wisdom is a part of getting older; rarely does it sound this accomplished. –Sam Hockley-Smith

Listen: Spoon, “Inside Out”

Rick Ross: “B.M.F. (Blowin’ Money Fast)” [ft. Styles P] (2010)

You know those old monster movies, the ones where an almighty beast lumbers through a terrified city, toppling buildings and swatting planes out of the sky as bullets bounce off his torso? At some point, Rick Ross must have leaned forward in his leather chair and thought to himself, What would it sound like if that monster were rapping right now? Ross channeled that energy on “B.M.F.,” his quaking collaboration with producer Lex Luger. For four minutes, the rapper takes the form of an all-powerful, coke-fueled leviathan laughing with maniacal disdain as he demolishes any obstacle standing between him and his bottom line. You can’t stop him. You can’t negotiate with him. All you can do is build a statue in his honor and marvel at the merciless efficiency of his wrath. –Evan Rytlewski

Listen: Rick Ross, “B.M.F. (Blowin’ Money Fast)” [ft. Styles P]

Rihanna: “Needed Me” (2016)

“Needed Me” offered a clear crystallization of Rihanna as a well-traveled, yeehaw-pioneering outlaw: People needed her, and she needed no one. It should feel normal, but it was thrilling to witness a woman governed only by her own rules, acting like a man. On the other hand, “Needed Me” is tender and sadly wise, a song about someone who is capable of being strong in a relationship and has learned they can’t expect to rely on anyone. And why bother? Put to music with radio heavy-hitters DJ Mustard, Frank Dukes, and Starrah, the song is sexy and savage, a way for Rihanna to flex her unique ability to inhabit the tastes and feelings of both Gen Z and Gen X. It resonated massively but quietly, becoming her longest-charting hit without ever hitting the Top 5. –Naomi Zeichner

Listen: Rihanna, “Needed Me”

Gil Scott-Heron: “New York Is Killing Me” (2010)

Gil Scott-Heron had a love-hate relationship with the city he called home for most of his life. In the mid ’70s, not long after President Ford told the city to drop dead, Scott-Heron wrote a love letter simply called “New York City” extolling the place as beautiful and benignly energetic. Thirty-five years later, when JAY-Z and Alicia Keys were still riding high on their local anthem “Empire State of Mind,” Scott-Heron presented a different, much darker depiction of the city.

“New York Is Killing Me” portrays a place sapped of all promise and opportunity, defined by an alienation and isolation that Scott-Heron suggests is fatal. The production, courtesy of XL Recordings owner Richard Russell, is constricting, as if it’s been breathing exhaust fumes all day. The music is busy yet austere, prodding and cajoling Scott-Heron with jump-rope rhythms, disruptive clatter, and a bassline that pulsates like the jarring rumble of a subway car. “Eight million people, and I didn’t have a single friend,” he sang, his voice heavy with worry and regret. The past tense hurt when the song was released in 2010, and it only stung more when he died a year later. –Stephen Deusner

Listen: Gil Scott-Heron, “New York Is Killing Me”

Rae Sremmurd: “No Type” (2014)

In 2014, Rae Sremmurd stepped into the spotlight with the infectious “No Flex Zone,” backed by Mike WiLL Made-It at the height of his superproducer powers. The two baby-faced brothers had a club anthem on their hands, though many were skeptical about their ability as rappers and wrote them off. But within months they topped their first hit with “No Type,” which elevated Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi from predicted one-hit wonders into bona fide stars. At the song’s irresistible core is Swae’s gliding chorus, but “No Type” is more than just a catchy hook: It established the duo’s yin-yang balance of sparkling melody and raucous energy. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: Rae Sremmurd, “No Type”

Iceage: “The Lord’s Favorite” (2014)

Iceage mellowed the hardcore chaos and angst of their first two records in favor of tightly-strung cowpunk with “The Lord’s Favorite.” The song finds frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt playing the part of a lovesick megalomaniac intoxicated by the allure of expensive wine, cheap makeup, and five-inch heels. In the darkness of a seedy club, these gaudy vices spur Rønnenfelt’s sloshed barfly to proselytize about his divine privilege. “After all I think it’s evident that I am God’s favorite one/And now is the time I should have whatever I desire,” he moans, letting that last word ooze from his lips. As the Danish band kicked up a rockabilly storm, they showed that they have more to offer than clenched-fist angst. –Quinn Moreland

Listen: Iceage, “The Lord’s Favorite”

Drake: “Hotline Bling” (2015)

A pastiche artist of the social media age, Drake seamlessly exchanges music and cultural references like a Tumblr teen mashing up Spongebob GIFs—and this is the song that solidified his status as hip-hop’s supreme memelord. Drake first conceived of it as a remix to DRAM’s “Cha Cha,” with producer Nineteen85 flipping Timmy Thomas’ 1972 soul classic “Why Can't We Live Together” onto an impossibly catchy syncopated drum sequence. DRAM and Drake bickered over credit as “Hotline Bling” blew up, largely thanks to a music video that cribbed visual artist James Turrell’s 2013 installation “Breathing Light” and its Instagram-ready rooms bathed in neon pastel tones. Within months, the high priestess of neo-soul, Erykah Badu, made an entire mixtape riffing on the “hotline” concept, expanding it into a treatise on the role of phones in modern society (featuring bars from a Drake soundalike named Aubrey, no less). A veritable human centipede of modern art, the most lasting legacy of “Hotline Bling” may just be the inextricable ties to the work it inspired and was inspired by. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz

Listen: Drake, “Hotline Bling”

Yaeji: “Drink I’m Sippin On” (2017)

One of Brooklyn’s most exciting young electronic artists began with deliberate secrecy: Yaeji initially sang in Korean because she didn’t want others to understand her, then came to love those arch, elegant syllables with new ears. Her breakthrough single is clear in that affection; she roves over narcotic synths and trap drums with icy vocal tones, her gently libertine words delivered in an unhurried rap cadence. A bit of English peeps into the bridge—more as an aside than an accommodation—after she’s just murmured the line “That’s not it” in Korean several times, a lovely and winking moment of benign miscommunication. That elastic bass drop, though, can’t be mistaken. –Stacey Anderson

Listen: Yaeji, “Drink I’m Sippin On”

CupcakKe: “Duck Duck Goose” (2018)

Sending nudes of such high quality that the recipient uses up all their data. Comparing a dick to the Statue of Liberty. The lines, “Coochie guaranteed to put you to sleep so damn soon/Ridin’ on that dick, I’m readin’ Goodnight Moon.” These are some of CupcakKe’s tamer moments on “Duck Duck Goose.” The Chicago rapper’s salacious humor is on full display here, in an endless barrage of X-rated jokes. The track also shows that she can spit better than anyone in the room, and is able to lace her verses with the wit, puns, and vivid imagery of an elite songwriter. CupcakKe delivers it all over an instrumental ready for an overstuffed, sweaty club—the perfect place to experience her brilliance. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: CupcakKe, “Duck Duck Goose”

Robyn: “Honey” (2018)

“Honey” is one of Robyn’s filthier tunes—a 3 a.m. booty call set to a pulsing house beat. The song flows slowly, picking up rattling hi-hats and strobing synthesizer as it oozes along the dancefloor. Meanwhile, the Swedish star allows plenty of space for her visuals to bloom—the “strands of saliva” laced with glitter, the emeralds glinting on pavement. Each syllable is drawn out like taffy, and her voice hovers just above a whisper, as if she wants you to lean in a little closer. But her message is so clear there’s no need to shout it: A decade after she danced alone, Robyn made a triumphant return to the discotheque. But this time, she won’t be leaving solo. –Madison Bloom

Listen: Robyn, “Honey”

Kamasi Washington: “Truth” (2017)

Kamasi Washington is an artist who needs room to meditate, sculpt, engineer. His songs, each their own island of brewing affect, are where his ideas find pulse, where they’re outfitted with all the sensory trademarks that accent his catalog. “Truth” is the finest, and perhaps most-psalm-like, of the saxophonist’s musical regions—the wet bass, the godly orchestral wails, the intoxication and pure-cut adrenaline reminiscent of master architect Phraroah Sanders. It’s Washington’s very own Odyssey—only funkier, Afro’d, and regaled in a Senegalese dashiki. You know, king shit.

Originally composed for an exhibit at the 2017 Whitney Biennial and later packaged as the closer on Washington’s Harmony of Difference EP, “Truth” is about journeys: spiritual, musical, human. It’s a track so complexly layered in its artistic command that it places him alongside historians who’ve mined the folkways of Black Los Angeles in their work, from poet Wanda Coleman and director John Singleton to visual artist Betye Saar and producer DJ Quik. Listen closely and you’ll hear the tension and swoop of life, the emotional velocity of love, the drama of drawn breath. –Jason Parham

Listen: Kamasi Washington, “Truth”

Future: “Mask Off” (2017)

Future’s music constantly dramatizes the tragedy of excess and indulgence by celebrating those very things. The strategy should be nearly impossible to pull off, and yet the Atlanta star is one of the most gifted stylists in contemporary rap. “Mask Off,” his highest-charting single, should be an over-the-top breaking point—he repeats the words “molly” and “Percocet” in the chorus more than he does the title. But still he rises to the occasion by plumbing the depths of drug abuse. Future offers his chilling description of lean in two words—“my guillotine”—while a flute sample of “Prison Song,” from the 1978 musical Selma, a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, snakes around his vocals. “Cold chills, prison cells,” the screwed vocals from “Prison Song” intone at the outro. “Mask Off” is one of Future's most cartoonish songs, but perhaps that’s the best way to encapsulate a reality that’s careening dangerously into the unreal. –Ross Scarano

Listen: Future, “Mask Off”

Kurt Vile: “Baby’s Arms” (2011)

“Baby’s Arms” is the sound of Kurt Vile’s slacker-Zen persona snapping suddenly into focus. The opening track of 2011’s Smoke Ring for My Halo felt like a reintroduction for the Philadelphia songwriter, who had previously hidden behind a curtain of reverb. Working with his band the Violators, producer John Agnello, and an expanded cast, Vile replaced the bleary atmosphere of his earliest releases with crystalline finger-picking, and the mumbled aphorisms with odes to his loved one. “Baby’s Arms” is cool and sweet, intimate and resonant. It sounds full while barely rising above a whisper. –Jesse Jarnow

Listen: Kurt Vile, “Baby’s Arms”

Chromatics: “Kill for Love” (2012)

Johnny Jewel takes a lot of flack for perfectionism, but listen to a song like “Kill for Love” and the infamously exacting Chromatics ringleader looks a lot more rational. The title track from the group’s 2012 album is their mission in miniature: the sound of ennui in search of bliss. Ruth Radelet’s deceptively blasé vocal performance articulates the craving for novelty lurking within habit: “I drank the water and I felt all right/I took a pill almost every night/In my mind, I was waiting for change.” The fractured synth stabs are sharp enough to split geodes; the guitars dizzy and sentimental, melty and echoing; the cymbal rattles nonstop. Under the anxiety and damage are the same elemental urges, where every momentary escape holds the promise of nothing, now and forever. –Anna Gaca

Listen: Chromatics, “Kill for Love”

A$AP Rocky: “Peso” (2011)

Did any rap song this decade open with five words more immediately iconic than “I be that pretty motherfucker”? From the moment “Peso” broke, it was clear that it was going to vault A$AP Rocky to a stardom built atop sounds from Memphis and Houston, but presented as the New Yorker’s alchemic birthright. In the video, he mugged with diamond teeth and coiled-up charisma—shirtless, venomous. The money started rolling in, followed soon after by the jokes: Can you believe he’s named after Rakim but he raps like this? And true, nothing about Rocky’s music is as intricate, groundbreaking, or downright mean as the great stars of New York’s past. But you can’t tell him he isn’t pretty. –Paul A. Thompson

Listen: A$AP Rocky, “Peso”

Lorde: “Royals” (2013)

At the start of the decade, pop music taught teenagers what their desires were, not the other way around. According to the radio, teen dreams were filled with earth-shattering parties and unconscionable excess tracked to wall-of-sound synth production best suited for football stadiums. And then New Zealand’s 16-year-old Lorde strolled into the charts like a supremely over-it exchange student, singing her chilly, nearly a capella manifesto about just how tired she was of songs about tigers and jet planes and Cadillacs.

While “Royals”’ pillory of rap-video tropes attracted accusations of racism, the song propelled Lorde to stardom and transformed pop in the process. In the years since, the genre has grown bleaker, replacing maximalist odes to excess with bummed-out songs stressing isolation and anxiety. And a new generation of artists who speak to the same sense of teen ennui—Halsey and Clairo and Billie Eilish—have proliferated, working to override the industry’s male gaze instead of playing into it. As it introduced a new kind of pop star, “Royals” challenged the world’s biggest artists to be not just enviable, but relatable. –Hazel Cills

Listen: Lorde, “Royals”

Young Thug: “Danny Glover” (2013)

In 2013, Young Thug descended from an unknown planet equipped with a language that everyone was dying to learn and a melody that reshaped what we thought we knew about rappers who sing. For many outside of Atlanta, “Danny Glover” was their introduction to this otherworldly persona. Thug raps fast and coos punchlines that stick: “I don’t like using profanity, but the Young Thugger will gut you.” He has quirks on top of quirks, but they’re all coddled inside go-to producer Southside’s signature trunk-rattling hi-hats and 808s. When “Danny Glover” arrived, Thug sounded like no one else; now it’s hard to imagine what rap would sound like without him. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: Young Thug, “Danny Glover”

James Blake: “CMYK” (2010)

James Blake charted the next step in bass music’s evolution with “CMYK.” Sampling both Kelis and Aaliyah, the song looked backward to late-’90s R&B, whose ribbon-like vocals and plush harmonies would become hallmarks of the young British producer’s music. More important was what he did with those vocals: chopping, re-pitching, and layering them with his own processed voice, creating a strange, hybrid call-and-response that floated, web-like, over synths as spongy as marshland. It was the sound of a new world coming into focus, and it would guide his music for years to come. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: James Blake, “CMYK”

Ciara: “Ride” [ft. Ludacris] (2010)

In her video for “Ride,” Ciara shows off her remarkable dance skills and sheer athleticism. She also straddles a mechanical bull while wearing a drenched undershirt. BET reportedly banned the sultry clip from its airwaves—a decision Ciara called “very unfortunate” and refused to back down from, never making a toned-down version for them. She didn’t need their cosign. On “Ride,” the Atlanta singer flaunts her artistic command, meeting the track’s distorted beat with an almost-clipped vocal performance that underscores her confidence. Not even an audaciously horny Ludacris feature can derail Ciara’s show: She makes no concessions. –Matthew Strauss

Listen: Ciara, “Ride” [ft. Ludacris]

Lykke Li: “I Follow Rivers” (2011)

Lykke Li once compared the overwhelming desire that ignited “I Follow Rivers” to a “nature force,” one in which you’re at the mercy of another person so completely that “you almost have no voice.” She expresses that cataclysmic metaphor in a storm of stomping girl-group drums, dissonant organ, and stuttering vocals. The song signaled an about-face from the more delicate, hushed tracks she first broke out with, affording her a deeper layer of darkness that she’d then yet to unearth. She may have been simply trying to satisfy some serious thirst on “I Follow Rivers,” but her pained, lusty delivery gives her yearning a cosmic pull. –Eric Torres

Listen: Lykke Li, “I Follow Rivers”

Nicki Minaj: “Super Bass” (2010)

One of the reasons “Super Bass” is such a banger is its emotional depth: Just take a close listen to the mournful chords that run beneath the verses, providing contrast and context for the track’s hot-blooded desire, as well as its siren call to party. Having shared a male-gaze-flipping list of what she finds attractive in a man, Nicki Minaj’s quickfire bars race the beat to the chorus, which “boom badoom boom” bursts like a rainbow after a downpour. A trance-y bridge with digital strings seals the deal on this masterclass in contemporary pop. –Ruth Saxelby

Listen: Nicki Minaj, “Super Bass”

Clairo: “Bags” (2019)

Clairo’s Claire Cottrill had uploaded plenty of relatable and catchy bedroom pop songs before “Bags”—including her viral hit “Pretty Girl,” which lamented the unfair sacrifices women often make in their romantic relationships—though they ultimately felt slight, like she was holding something back. The lead single of her debut album, Immunity, reintroduced her with new vigor and undeniable shine. Co-produced with Rostam, “Bags” leaves her lo-fi origins firmly in the past. The song is a flurry of action as drums shimmy, synths whirr like insect wings, and keys clamor drunkenly, yet Cottrill’s voice is composed and calm as she recalls her love walking out on her. It vividly captures the tremendous effort that goes into maintaining a cool façade after the door slams shut. –Vrinda Jagota

Listen: Clairo, “Bags”

Playboi Carti: “Magnolia” (2017)

There are album artists and singles artists, and then there’s Playboi Carti, a rapper whose work is most ravenously devoured via compressed-to-hell snippets ripped from Instagram. Hailing from the most anarchic corners of the social internet (but also Atlanta), Carti is someone whose promise will always outpace his official output, and that is by design. “Magnolia” is the rare moment when all his significant skills are put to use in the same direction: It’s a sinister song with an instantly quotable hook that otherwise functions mostly as an extended ad-lib. The hit also served as producer Pi’erre Bourne’s national introduction, launching him from relative obscurity to rap production’s A-list. “Magnolia” is the single best distillation of Carti and Pi’erre’s chemistry, which, amid rap’s rapidly moving generational drift, has already spawned its own legion of pounding, skeletal imitations. –Paul A. Thompson

Listen: Playboi Carti, “Magnolia”

DJ Rashad: “Feelin” [ft. DJ Spinn and Taso] (2013)

Footwork’s relationship to time has a lot to do with a kind of musical sleight-of-hand. Some of the genre’s sonic elements run at triple-time while others dawdle, yet a sense of urgency remains consistent. And no one has ever wielded that energy as fluidly as DJ Rashad. “Feelin,” from 2013’s Double Cup, the only album he released before his death the following year, pivots off a languid sax riff from Roy Ayers’ “Brand New Feeling” and distills soul singer Merry Clayton’s formidable vocal into animated squiggles that ride atop Rashad’s frenzied beat. (It’s worth noting that members of Rashad’s Teklife crew, DJs Spinn and Taso, joined the producer in fleshing out “Feelin” from an earlier version he released in 2012.) Ayers’ original is about the transformative power of the first flush of love. Rashad’s take is more a rumination on the everyday search to feel something—anything—amid the frantic pace of life. –Ruth Saxelby

Listen: DJ Rashad, “Feelin” [ft. Spinn and Taso]

Justin Bieber: “Sorry” (2015)

“Sorry” is a strange creature. By grafting a fashionably clipped pop melody over a retro, Shabba Ranks-inspired Caribbean fusion beat, producers Skrillex and BloodPop created one of the best tropical house hits of the decade. The ethereal hook, crafted from Justin Bieber’s pitched and manipulated vocal, squares off against a synth horn line and a surging drop. But what truly elevates “Sorry” are its witty lyrics: “I know you know that I made those mistakes maybe once or twice/By once or twice, I mean maybe a couple of hundred times,” Bieber coos, managing to sound pensive, subdued, and even a little sexy at the same time. That this fallen teen idol, the decade’s emblem of white male petulance and bad-boy behavior, was crooning for redemption and second chances in an age of #BlackLivesMatter protests—especially in the context of his enduring appropriation of urban culture—shouldn’t be lost on anyone. –Jason King

Listen: Justin Bieber, “Sorry”

Fleet Foxes: “Helplessness Blues” (2011)

Here is an anthem for anyone who has felt adrift, abandoned, unsure of their purpose in the world. The title track to Fleet Foxes’ impressionistic second album revealed a more intriguing side of frontman Robin Pecknold; something dark and complex had lurked beneath the songwriter’s soaring harmonies from the beginning, and “Helplessness Blues” represented all of his neuroses writ large. In the verses, he contemplates what it means to be useful, to others and to yourself, before the song’s passionate strumming rips open to reveal miles of wide-open drum fills and dreams of a simpler life in (where else?) the country. “Someday I’ll be like the man on the screen,” Pecknold claims in the song’s closing seconds. It’s a line that’s just ambiguous enough to drive home how frequently his generation has caught a glimpse at a different life and, for a brief moment, pondered the worth of the tools we’ve been given. –Larry Fitzmaurice

Listen: Fleet Foxes, “Helplessness Blues”

Travis Scott: “Sicko Mode” [ft. Drake] (2018)

By any conventional wisdom, a five-minute, three-part suite of a song should have never become a phenomenon in a climate where dwindling attention spans are leading to shorter and shorter hits. But “Sicko Mode” is fueled by the power of Travis Scott and Drake, two of the era’s defining rappers, operating at an energized high. The song’s first part is a short Drake verse that cuts off abruptly—a tease that only makes you want more. Once the funky second beat hits, you forget about Drake as Travis takes center stage with some of the best rapping of his career. The gradual build meets a grand finale, where Travis and the Toronto icon fuse for one of the decade’s signature back-and-forths. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: Travis Scott, “Sicko Mode” [ft. Drake]

Usher: “Climax” (2012)

Usher once ruled R&B so decisively that the music industry spent over a decade churning out clones of him. But by 2010, he was reduced to guesting on anonymous Max Martin and will.i.am tracks, just another pop singer. Then came “Climax,” which single-handedly rescued his critical reputation from lyrics like, “Honey got some boobies like wow, oh wow.” Co-produced by an uncharacteristically restrained Diplo, the 2012 hit was quickly compared to alt-R&B newcomers like James Blake and the Weeknd. But instead of conveying intense feelings with a chilly shrug, Usher is clearly pained as he eulogizes a failing relationship in a lonely falsetto. The verses try to build, don’t, try again, don’t again. At one point, Usher abruptly turns the whole thing into what seems like a final roaring emotional plea, a would-be climax, but it isn’t enough, and the track recedes again. As a match of song to message, it’s brilliant. As a microcosm of Usher’s career, it’s sadly prophetic: He would spend the rest of the decade trying to recapture “Climax”’s highs. –Katherine St. Asaph

Listen: Usher, “Climax”

Burial: “Kindred” (2012)

Agonizingly, Burial never gave us a proper follow-up to his classic 2007 album Untrue this decade, instead resorting to intermittent singles and EPs. But this strategy still resulted in tracks that lived up to the mysterious producer’s lofty legacy, none more so than “Kindred.” While still rooted in his lifelong obsession with the feral jungle choons of his youth, the song sunk even deeper into the turbidity of our modern world, embracing decay and loss much like William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops did a decade prior. “Kindred” feels haunted, its errant noises both disrupting the flow and somehow cohering everything into a jaw-dropping, 12-minute opus. It’s a corrupted symphony of a dozen open YouTube tabs, the sound of the flames burning all around us. –Andy Beta

Listen: Burial, “Kindred”

The Weeknd: “The Morning” (2011)

Here is the pop American Psycho, a work that sums up all that’s decadent and a little disgusting about our era. It’s also the greatest song the Weeknd, that dark knight of R&B, ever made. Ostensibly a druggy party track, it’s called “The Morning” as if to dare us to look at the bacchanal in the glare of day, when the abandoned Solo cups are spilled onto the carpet. It was Abel Tesfaye’s first big statement to the world, so resonant it would make him famous: There are strippers and codeine and money atop a hungover tempo that feels like a symbol of generational malaise. “The Morning” might even qualify as horror, as Tesfaye refers to himself and his friends as “zombies of the night”—a pretty terrifying way to characterize a bar crawl. The song made the Weeknd an unlikely yet unflinching chronicler of fucked-up times, the man we’ll put on the stereo when we want to remember exactly how good and terrible it all felt. –Alex Frank

Listen: The Weeknd, “The Morning”

Daft Punk: “Get Lucky” [ft. Pharrell] (2013)

“Get Lucky” debuted as a four-bar loop in a commercial, which Daft Punk’s obsessive fans promptly re-looped and re-looped until it lasted 10 hours. When the full song finally arrived, the instrumentation was pretty much just those four bars over and over, and it was still engrossing. That’s the thing about this song: It’s so simple someone made a chintzy MIDI version of it, but so sinuous that it’s also inspired debates by music-theory journals about what key it’s in. It’s clearly a ’70s pastiche, but it also sounds immediate, even before the robo beeps and boops come in.

Daft Punk take the right parts of this song either incredibly seriously or not seriously at all. The disco groove is an immaculate, unironic homage to Nile Rodgers’ Chic, produced alongside the man himself, who plays guitar on the song. The irony is saved for the lyrics, where Pharrell does not even remotely try to keep a straight face while singing his lines about “the legend of the phoenix.” After four lines, he gives up the philosophizing and focuses on the task at hand: getting lucky. But unlike the other huge disco-funk hit of 2013, “Blurred Lines,” this song doesn’t come off too sleazy—there just isn’t enough there. Within those four bars, it’s hard to hear anything but precisely executed joy. –Katherine St. Asaph

Listen: Daft Punk, “Get Lucky” [ft. Pharrell]

Jenny Hval: “Conceptual Romance” (2016)

In theory, the Norwegian artist Jenny Hval set out to create an experimental pop album about period blood and vampires with 2016’s Blood Bitch. Really, the record was a deeply accomplished inquiry into the possibility of a feminine sound that gravitated towards the grotesque. At its emotional core is “Conceptual Romance,” a song that floats like a cloud, its hazy procession tempered by the rigor of Hval’s lyrics. A self-described love letter to Chris Kraus’ 1997 novel I Love Dick, which helped shape a generation of feminist artists and intellectuals, “Conceptual Romance” is about the mind-altering power of infatuation. “My heartbreak is too sentimental for you,” Hval croons, slyly chipping back at emotionless masculinity. Between each dreamlike note, “Conceptual Romance” acknowledges thinking and feeling as equally consequential pillars of our lives. –Jenn Pelly

Listen: Jenny Hval, “Conceptual Romance”

Paramore: “Ain’t It Fun” (2013)

After three albums of careening mall-punk thrills, Paramore reinvented themselves with “Ain’t It Fun.” Still their highest-charting single, the song brought groove and soul to their sugar-rushing sound—not to mention a gospel choir and real-world resilience. “It’s easy to ignore trouble/When you’re living in a bubble,” Hayley Williams sings, but this is the sound of the bubble of youth freshly burst, of beginning to smash your rose-tinted glasses, of not looking back. Williams has never sounded more monumental or self-possessed. “Ain’t It Fun” proved Paramore to be a legitimate pop force, authors of a new, genre-blurring paradigm of what Top 40 guitar-rock could sound like in the 2010s. They may have made their name on rollercoaster hooks fit for Warped Tour—influencing the likes of Snail Mail, Princess Nokia, and Lil Uzi Vert in the process—but here they grew into themselves, anticipating the influence of blown-up Hot Topic emo in the unlikeliest of places. –Jenn Pelly

Listen: Paramore, “Ain’t It Fun”

A$AP Ferg: “Shabba” [ft. A$AP Rocky] (2013)

“We were always weirdos,” Ferg once said of his A$AP cohort, and the proof is this song, which remains a New York party staple six years later. There’s nothing formulaic about pairing a menacing sample from a twisted ’60s horror flick about a family scalping business with lavish praise for Jamaican dancehall king Shabba Ranks—which makes it perfectly appropriate for Ferg and his crew. Along the way, there are bizarre, ear-twisting moments like Ferg’s full-bodied “Master Bruce!” yell and the unsettling, falling-down-a-mineshaft ad-lib that comes immediately after. The real Shabba Ranks makes a cameo in the video, and the gold jewelry enumerated in the chorus is true to his powerful life, but the strange details—the guts of the song—are Ferg’s alone. –Ross Scarano

Listen: A$AP Ferg, “Shabba” [ft. A$AP Rocky]

Chairlift: “I Belong in Your Arms” (2012)

Brooklyn synth-pop aesthetes Chairlift were a sneakily influential act right up until their split in 2016. Along with fellow blog-era Columbia signees Passion Pit and MGMT, their off-kilter approach to pop songwriting resonated throughout the music industry; dig through the roster of any major label at the start of this decade and you’d find a few acts who were trying to replicate Caroline Polachek and Patrick Wimberly’s approach, albeit without the duo’s left-of-center weirdness. “I Belong in Your Arms” is the crown jewel of their strongest album, 2012’s Something. Polachek delivers lyrics as if she’s gasping for air, spitting stream-of-consciousness non-sequiturs (“Banana split/Honestly/You’re my remote controller”) amid drum machines and synths so perpetually ascendant that they touch the sun. What comes through is the giddy sensation of falling so deeply in love that nothing quite makes sense except a warm embrace. Giving so much of yourself to someone else is always a risky proposition, but for three and a half minutes, Chairlift make the act of devotion sound worth it. –Larry Fitzmaurice

Listen: Chairlift, “I Belong in Your Arms”

Drake: “Nice for What” (2018)

Aubrey Graham took a confident leap of faith in himself by rapping on a sample of Lauryn Hill’s bad-boyfriend soul classic “Ex-Factor” in “Nice for What,” a track that stepped out brazenly on a bounce beat with extra vocals from NOLA icon Big Freedia. But Drake’s message landed like a grown man’s mea culpa for the dog gospel he’s spread for much of the decade—a twerking devotional to all the Insta queens who’ve been wronged by rudely emotional, blame-denying men like Drake. As often as he’s been dismissed as making “music for girls,” the rapper really did so in good faith with “Nice for What,” a celebration of self-sustaining women who keep it moving—“had a man last year, life goes on”—and prefer glowing up alongside their crew to mollifying sweet-talking dudes. The song’s video had director Karena Evans female-gazing upon a cast of accomplished women—Misty Copeland, Tracee Ellis Ross, Olivia Wilde, Tiffany Haddish—making Drake’s magnanimity seem that much more legit. Fatherhood matured him, maybe; perhaps he’s even graduated from the Supreme rug and basketball hoop in his bedroom. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Listen: Drake, “Nice for What”

Girlpool: “Before the World Was Big” (2015)

The title track from Philadelphia duo Girlpool’s debut album, Before the World Was Big, distilled the anxieties Harmony Tividad and Cleo Tucker faced as their little band took off, painting an honest portrait of what it means to come of age in the 21st century. The song starts with the amateurish tinkling of a xylophone, the type you might find on the floor of a child’s bedroom. Its delicate notes are pierced by a prickly guitar before Tividad and Tucker launch in, singing in tandem. Together, they reminisce about how easy life felt when they were childhood friends, when reality confined itself to the surrounding neighborhood and the complexities of life had not yet made themselves known. Together, they stand on the precipice of adulthood and eulogize a time when the future was just another question waiting to be answered. –Gabriela Tully Claymore

Listen: Girlpool, “Before the World Was Big”

Fetty Wap: “Trap Queen” (2014)

On its face, Fetty Wap’s “Trap Queen” is as straightforward as its opening line: “I’m like, ‘Hey, what’s up, hello?’” Made up of only a handful of rhyme schemes, it’s a pop-rap song designed to burrow into your head and never escape, complete with glittering trap production and a drug-pushing, Bonnie-and-Clyde-type love story. What prevents it from being overly repetitive, though, is the New Jersey rapper’s irregular voice; his electronically enhanced vibrato is so deep and tremulous, it welcomed comparisons to yodeling. But like Roger Troutman of Zapp and other funk pioneers of the past, Fetty used effects not to sanitize or correct his voice, but to inject even more emotion into it. So every time he sings, “Baby, yeahhhh,” each slightly mechanical crack and quiver rings with extra devotion. –Michelle Kim

Listen: Fetty Wap, “Trap Queen”

Christine and the Queens: “Tilted” (2015)

When chart-dominating acts like Ed Sheeran have fashioned superstardom from a corny outsider narrative, where does that leave the real weirdos—the ones who don’t even fit the basic binary of high glamour and humdrum convention? Christine and the Queens’ “Tilted” elegantly articulates that liminal territory, and, more elegantly still, avoids commodifying it with a hashtagable definition. (That satisfying slipperiness may be a quirk of the French singer’s impressionistic approach to writing in English.) “Tilted” makes room for all manner of imbalance as it advocates for neutrality rather than ticker-tape positivity: When she sings “actually” in the line “I am actually good,” the word shrugs off the idea that self-loathing should be a natural state. And when the synths in the verses lurch like warm blood rushes of adrenaline, or arousal, Chris conveys a real-time sense of being overcome by acceptance for the first time. –Laura Snapes

Listen: Christine and the Queens, “Tilted”

Kendrick Lamar: “DNA.” (2017)

It’s a rapper’s true test to not only string together rhyming lyrics but to frame them, couching in themes and smoothing big ideas into mantras. It’s why word-soup rap enjoys a cult following but falls on deaf ears to everyday audiences; “keep it simple” is a motto many lyricists can’t hold to. In this way, Kendrick Lamar is an anomaly: As dense as his lyrics can be, he zooms out onto big ideas that are resonant and impactful to the masses. He does this on “DNA.,” a blistering personal statement from 2017’s DAMN. that digs back generations and stamps a moment of collective tensing among Black Americans. In the face of a growing, grinning wave of genocidal hate-speech delivered with the presidential seal of approval, Lamar shouts forth the steely confidence of a people ready to bark and bite back, standing on roots that run centuries deep. The song’s riotous second half lets the final battle wage in all its chaos, as Lamar lets off a breathless stanza that even brought the Pulitzer committee to a hush. –Matthew Trammell

Listen: Kendrick Lamar, “DNA.”

Amen Dunes: “Miki Dora” (2018)

In the primordial ’60s of yore, Californian surfer Miki Dora was a counterculture icon, a lawless criminal, and the distillation of American masculinity—the stuff of Tom Wolfe books and Dennis Hopper flicks. In 2018, he lived on as one of the subjects of Amen Dunes’ fifth album, Freedom. Here, Dora’s life is a mirror to indie rock songwriter Damon McMahon’s own. “Miki Dora” is about the surfer, but it’s also about the end of McMahon’s youth, and what it means for him to grapple with maleness. Those big West Coast waves that Dora surfed half a century ago are rendered endless in the mesmerizing rhythm of the song. Eventually the guitar gets a bit roomier, and McMahon’s perma-stoned vocals rise ever so slightly, but there are no riptides in “Miki Dora,” only surf, sun, and pearl-white flotsam. –Sophie Kemp

Listen: Amen Dunes, “Miki Dora”

Erykah Badu: “Hello” [ft. André 3000] (2015)

Erykah Badu’s 2015 mixtape But You Caint Use My Phone reimagined other artists’ telephone-based songs to delve into the nature of long-distance communication; landlines connected people, she mused, while smartphones more often create distance. The tape’s origin may have been a “Hotline Bling” thought experiment, but its logical endpoint is “Hello,” a dreamy Isley Brothers interpolation (by way of Todd Rundgren) that musically reunites Badu with André 3000, the father of her eldest child. She coos sweet salutations into the receiver, he untangles verses about the terrors of opening up—be it the digital fear of unlocking your phone for a snoopy lover or the analog fear of sitting by, waiting, and having to bear your soul when the phone is finally answered. It feels like two people figuring things out. Roughly half of American households don’t have landlines anymore. But here, the joys and anxieties of twirling a cord around your finger while sinking into a lengthy call aren’t yet antiquated. –Sheldon Pearce

Listen: Erykah Badu, “Hello” [ft. André 3000]

Katy Perry: “Teenage Dream” (2010)

In the context of Katy Perry’s cartoonish early hits, the “Teenage Dream” music video is downright stark. No pyrotechnic breasts, psychedelic candy landscapes, or glow-in-the-dark alien abductions: just Katy, her ripped beau, and some similarly photogenic pals on a sepia-toned drive along the beach. The track is similarly svelte and irresistible: a sunny, major-key melody that shares a lineage with Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer,” New Radicals’ “You Get What You Give,” and other pop hits that arrived pre-loaded with nostalgia and widescreen emotions.

At the time Perry recorded it, she was attempting to become more than a pop novelty. As if realizing her ambitions mid-sentence, she once explained in an interview, “I want people to… think of me as that pin-up poster in their room—or hopefully I can invade their dreams and be their teenage dream.” And just like that, her music turned bold and sweeping, owing more to the ’80s pop stars with whom she’d soon share chart milestones. Meanwhile, she was midway through her 20s, about to get married, and entering a decade where her propensity for unsubtle gestures of positivity would fall in and out of fashion. But as she gazed toward the camera from the passenger seat in this song’s video, she seemed to have it all figured out. –Sam Sodomsky

Listen: Katy Perry, “Teenage Dream”

TNGHT: “Higher Ground” (2012)

Listening to “Higher Ground” is like getting hit by a freight truck while chugging a liter of cold brew. The track had TNGHT producers Hudson Mohawke and Lunice bridging the gap between Lex Luger’s dirty South production and modern dance music, preluding (and arguably helping birth) the EDM-trap craze. Its guttural brass line, ferocious breakdown, and vocal sample lifted from Julie McKnight’s 2002 club anthem “Home” combine to erect an imposing electronic music monument. The popularity of the track led its makers to recoil from the spotlight and quietly switch off the TNGHT signal, which is fair enough. In its sheer sonic magnitude, “Higher Ground” is essentially insurmountable. –Noah Yoo

Listen: TNGHT, “Higher Ground”

Jamie xx: “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)” [ft. Young Thug and Popcaan] (2015)

Who knew the shy producer from whispery indie rock trio the xx could also throw a great party? Dancehall star Popcaan, trap royal Young Thug, and the sampled voices of ’70s a cappella group the Persuasions meet in “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times),” a snare-rolling standout from Jamie xx’s 2015 solo debut, In Colour. Popcaan’s deft sing-song amplifies the Caribbean roots of Jamie xx’s steel drums, while Thug giddily squeals through the song’s empty space: When he declares, “I’ma ride in that pussy like a stroller,” his glee is contagious. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Jamie xx, “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)” [ft. Young Thug and Popcaan]

Mac DeMarco: “Ode to Viceroy” (2012)

A heartfelt tribute to a notoriously terrible brand of cigarettes became a career-making moment for Mac DeMarco. With his inaugural solo mini-album Rock and Roll Night Club, the Canadian singer established himself as a weirdo skeez with a shit-eating grin—a guy whose songs showed tons of promise if you pierced through the thick coats of deep-voiced, slow-motion gimmickry. On “Ode to Viceroy,” he sings tenderly about his unforgiving tobacco addiction and frequent trips to the bodega to buy another pack. “Don’t let me see you cryin’,” he croons. Again, he’s singing to a pack of cigarettes, but any inherent absurdity barely registers. The unlikely love song ends with the sound of him lighting up, inhaling, and collapsing into a fit of echoing coughs. –Evan Minsker

Listen: Mac DeMarco, “Ode to Viceroy”

D’Angelo & the Vanguard: “Really Love” (2014)

D’Angelo is such a naturalist that you can almost overlook his eccentricity. “Really Love” evokes the rapture of deep love, the blissful sensation of falling into orbit around the object of your affection. D’Angelo’s honeyed coo, “I’m in really love with you,” is disarming in its sincerity and in its faint aberration—“really” is used oddly, as an adjective rather than an adverb. It sounds off at first, but as the strings quiver and the unquantized drums tick along, every instance of the word becomes a knowing wink, a flash of intimacy.

The song includes a spoken word intro in Spanish, along with violin, viola, contrabass, sitar, multiple guitars, horns, synths—even a Curtis Mayfield sample. (It shouldn’t be surprising that D’Angelo plays many of these parts.) When “Really Love” was released as the single to Black Messiah in 2014, its richness felt like a statement: D’Angelo had been largely out of sight for 14 years, but he’d never been idle. –Stephen Kearse

Listen: D’Angelo & the Vanguard, “Really Love”

Snail Mail: “Pristine” (2018)

Uplifted by chugging guitars and crashing drums, Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan mourns a relationship that’s crashing to the ground on “Pristine.” The young indie rock musician leans into the grandiosity of her pain, layering anguished thought over anguished thought. Any one line from the song—“I know myself and I’ll never love anyone else,” “Don’t you like me for me?” “I’ll still see you in everything, tomorrow and all the time”—distills the exquisite, all-consuming pain of teenage heartache. With these words, Jordan builds a scarecrow outline of her relationship just to torch it all to the ground. “Pristine” burns and burns, fueled by an urge to create one last beautiful spectacle out of failed romance. –Vrinda Jagota

Listen: Snail Mail, “Pristine”

Thundercat: “Them Changes” (2015)

For a virtuoso whose music explores the outer reaches of funk, yacht rock, and astral jazz, Thundercat has always shown a sensitive undercurrent. In his first two solo albums, he slowed down a George Duke love anthem, sang adoringly about his cat, and composed a heart-wrenching tribute to a late friend. “Them Changes,” from his 2015 EP The Beyond/Where the Giants Roam, pairs this vulnerability with one of his best grooves. It’s a burbling stomp about being emotionally and literally destroyed, about how his heart has been ripped from his chest and his floor is covered in blood. (It’s worth noting that this man has a well-documented love of samurai films.) Thundercat seems dazed and panicked here, unable to process what’s happened as he begs for help. Then, in an interlude, his trusty bass falls away and he sings some ethereal oooohs, pinpointing a sweet spot between boldness and fragility. –Evan Minsker

Listen: Thundercat, “Them Changes”

Rihanna: “Bitch Better Have My Money” (2015)

This was the music video that launched a thousand pearl-clutching critiques, along with about as many think pieces about its radical significance. In it, Rihanna nonchalantly threatens her accountant with a phrase often wielded by men. In the process, she kidnaps and tortures his wife, before taking a chainsaw to his neck. There are umteen ways to read into the politics of this video: What kind of violence are we sensitized to, and what makes us squirm? What does it look like for a woman to be powerful and angry while also being feminine? How are white women complicit in and benefitting from the bad behavior of white men? But ultimately, determining whether this video is Good and Feminist or Bad and Cancelled is futile; what freedom looks like for any woman cannot be simplified into one set of rules. This is for certain though: “Bitch Better Have My Money” is a song and video about Rihanna putting herself—her money, her friends, her revenge—first. –Vrinda Jagota

Listen: Rihanna, “Bitch Better Have My Money”

Hurray for the Riff Raff: “Pa’lante” (2017)

In his 1973 poem “Puerto Rican Obituary,” the Nuyorican poet Pedro Pietri urged his people onward toward self-knowledge and self-love. More than 40 years later, Alynda Segarra, the singer-songwriter behind Hurray for the Riff Raff, used the poem as fuel for “Pa’lante,” the penultimate track from her band’s 2017 album, The Navigator. The record found Segarra staking a new claim to her Puerto Rican identity, after a lifetime of “finding most of my heroes in white men.” But this song didn’t find its ultimate purpose until later that year, when Hurricane Maria arrived. Since the storm hit, Segarra continuously tried to find her way back to her ravaged ancestral homeland in a way that would allow her to give without taking. She finally made it in December 2018. While there, playing “Pa’lante” for her people, she fully understood its time-warped origin. As she told Billboard: “It felt like I didn’t write the song—we wrote the song.” –Jonah Bromwich

Listen: Hurray for the Riff Raff, “Pa’lante”

Radiohead: “True Love Waits” (2016)

Until it resurfaced as the last track on A Moon Shaped Pool, “True Love Waits” was best known among Radiohead fans as the earnest acoustic ballad that got away. Written more than 30 years earlier and unsuccessfully retooled for each of the band’s peak-era masterpieces, the song was squandered at the bottom of the 2001 live album I Might Be Wrong. But Yorke never abandoned the studio version, eventually forgoing the experimental synthesizers and Rhodes piano he kept trying to make work in favor of soft piano chords. In its final form, “True Love Waits” remains obliquely romantic, but instead of begging and pleading with his partner, Yorke sounds resigned to a more solitary fate. In the context of the band’s—and the song’s—long-term trajectory, this shift in tone shift feels major: Yorke and co. know that the older you get, the more you realize how little is in your control. –Jillian Mapes

Listen: Radiohead, “True Love Waits”

Meek Mill: “Dreams and Nightmares (Intro)” (2012)

When posterity whittles an artist’s music career down to a few ripe seconds (and it will), they are lucky to be left with a single drum crack or a yelped ad lib to testify that they once existed. Meek Mill had a turbulent decade, but with “Dreams and Nightmares,” he notched 200 glorious, uninterrupted seconds onto hip-hop’s wall. You cannot abridge the intro to his album of the same name; “Dreams and Nightmares” has to be taken in full or not at all.

May the gods protect the DJ who cut away from the weepy grand pianos before the beat change—that switch-up is the point, the gas pedal. This song’s so goddamn potent, it spawned a subgenre: From Tee Grizzley’s “First Day Out” to Cardi B’s “Get Up 10,” the ensuing years were littered with tracks directly mimicking its lush intro/pummeling coda structure. None of them came close to matching Meek Mill’s blood-curdling intensity. –Jayson Greene

Listen: Meek Mill, “Dreams and Nightmares (Intro)”

Haim: “The Wire” (2013)

“The Wire” is the most locked-in groove from Haim’s debut album Days Are Gone—a record not exactly lacking in locked-in grooves. The song has the group’s three sisters, who up to that point had spent a literal lifetime honing session chops while mastering a soft rock-meets-’90s R&B sound infused with Laurel Canyon vibes, reaching maximum vocal synchronicity as they glide over hand-clap melodies and airy lyrics about giving a bruised lover the brush-off. They are technically the ones apologizing—“You know I’m bad at communication, it’s the hardest thing for me to do”—but anyone who sounds this unbothered while saying sorry clearly has the upper hand, and always will. –Jeremy Gordon

Listen: Haim, “The Wire”

Blawan: “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?” (2012)

Blawan’s “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?” just might be the most cheerfully mean-spirited song of the decade—an evil, glowering spirit that barrels ahead like a bull on a rampage. Over a punishing drum groove of hammered anvils and sharpening knives, the UK producer flips a Fugees sample into what sounds like a serial killer’s accidental confession. Then, for extra horror-core effect, he adds a blood-curdling scream every few bars. It’s a song so ludicrous in its malevolence that even Skrillex started playing it in his sets, bringing the techno underground together with EDM’s fuzzy-boots set by way of a good, old-fashioned murder fantasy. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Blawan, “Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage?”

Frank Ocean: “Pyramids” (2012)

In the middle of 2012, Frank Ocean was still the shadowy Odd Future affiliate who put out a charming mixtape of skewed R&B, or the guy who guested on JAY-Z and Kanye’s Watch the Throne and wrote a song with Beyoncé. He was not yet an icon, and the world hadn’t really seen all that he could do. Then came “Pyramids,” and the ground beneath us shifted. The three-part, 10-minute hyperspace cruise through time, styles, and cool-eyed character observations offered monumental proof that he was capable of miracles. Egyptian pharaohs, Las Vegas sex workers, uncredited John Mayer guitar solos—somehow, he made all of it sound like it belonged. Most impressively, the result was light and catchy enough not to collapse under the weight of Ocean’s vast ambition. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Frank Ocean, “Pyramids”

Japandroids: “Younger Us” (2010)

“Younger Us” is a self-fulfilling rock’n’roll prophecy. When Japandroids frontman Brian King graduated college, he watched his friends from small town British Columbia, Canada quickly settle into normalcy—weddings, mortgages, babies—and thought, Well, fuck that. So he started a band with drummer Dave Prowse and dreamed up a song about teenage abandon, blooming lust, and jumping out of bed to grab a beer with your best friend. “Younger Us” was written during the sessions for Japandroids’ breakthrough album, 2009’s Post-Nothing, when the duo were essentially making music for themselves. So its manic nostalgia, driven by King’s gushing distortion and Prowse’s incessant cymbal crashes, looks backward and forward at the same time: The song doesn’t lament lost youth so much as it’s hellbent on recapturing it. By the time “Younger Us” was released in 2010, Japandroids were drinking through sunrises en route to the next sold-out gig, far from home. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: Japandroids, “Younger Us”

Rich Gang: “Lifestyle” (2014)

In 2014, Cash Money Records co-founder Birdman, one of the keenest A&R men in rap history, brought together two buzzing Atlanta artists—infectious eccentric Young Thug and malleable crooner Rich Homie Quan—for a feel-good jam of perfect synergy. On “Lifestyle,” their Auto-Tuned warbles sounded as lush as the manners of living they envisioned in song: Thug bursting at the seams, puffing on clouds from the top of a mountain, Quan reclining with commas in every bank. It marked Thug and Quan’s biggest hit to date, and the trio would birth an exceptional mixtape together, Rich Gang: Tha Tour Pt. 1. But the alliance that had seemed to foreshadow many more seasons of Cash Money primacy instead dissolved rather quickly, and all three artists have feuded with each other on and off ever since. “Lifestyle” remains a snapshot of what could have been, a look inside a dynasty before it was irreparably broken. –Sheldon Pearce

Listen: Rich Gang, “Lifestyle”

Destroyer: “Chinatown” (2011)

The opening track on Destroyer’s Kaputt unfurls like a waking dream. Everything in it feels simultaneously vivid and unreal; the blurry saxophone seems to beckon from beyond the song itself, while Dan Bejar’s vocals sound plucked from a metaphysical overheard conversation: “You can’t believe/The way the wind’s talking to the sea,” he marvels. You might not know what he means, exactly, but those windswept waves are indelible once he’s pointed them out to you. “I can’t walk away,” he repeats, sounding more obsessed than trapped. Whatever “Chinatown” means to Bejar’s narrator, it’s somewhere deliciously inescapable—a state of mind forever disappearing over the horizon. –Madison Bloom

Listen: Destroyer, “Chinatown”

Charli XCX: “Track 10” (2017)

Charli XCX is sonic science fiction. Delightfully robotic and whimsically spacy, she got the best grasp of where she was going, and could go, on 2017’s Pop 2 mixtape. Tucked at the end is “Track 10,” which, after a production swap and a Lizzo feature, became her blaring 2019 single “Blame It On Your Love.” But in its relatively spare original form, the song relies not on bass drops but rather a heavily accumulating chorus that loops and loops, burrowing its way deeper into the mind and limbs with each rotation. At her best, which she is here, Charli XCX cracks a key pop music code: doing as much with as little language as possible. The chorus of “Track 10” consumes and consumes, until it ends, and the listener can’t remember living in a world before they heard it. –Hanif Abdurraqib

Listen: Charli XCX, “Track 10”

Kelela: “Bank Head” (2013)

Released six years ago, Kelela’s “Bank Head” is a proof-of-concept that’s still recouping. Today, an R&B vocalist pairing with electronic producers is a familiar idea; during the more wide-eyed summer of 2013, though, Kelela and Kingdom’s mp3 demos sounded like a future the club kids and R&B purists had both intuited, where the black queer underground got its just due as cultural alchemists. Kelela was an easy sell as an underground icon: Her vocals flexed with all the acrobatic skill her generation had learned from Janet, Brandy, and Mariah, while her style whet the palates of the ultramodern Opening Ceremony devotees who run the fashion world. The beats did the rest: The handclaps that drive the track forward are a call-to-action for hips and tongues across genres, from Miami bass to baile-funk to house, drenched in a synth-bed that sounds like a sunrise let-out from a Bed-Stuy afterhours club. “Time goes by really slow,” Kelela sings here, but it feels like it was just yesterday when she was sketching out the sounds of tomorrow. –Matthew Trammell

Listen: Kelela, “Bank Head”

Deerhunter: “Desire Lines” (2010)

Unlike most of Deerhunter’s catalog, “Desire Lines” has little to do with frontman Bradford Cox. Sung instead by guitarist Lockett Pundt, the highlight of their fifth album, Halcyon Digest, found Deerhunter at their nocturnal best: Two screeching guitar riffs hurtle around each other for a few frenzied minutes and collapse, while the band hammers at the tune over and over again, just to check that it’s dead. You’d be forgiven for thinking you were listening to Arcade Fire at first—“Desire Lines” opens with the same anguished chug as 2004’s “Rebellion (Lies)”—though Deerhunter wield a sharper edge, paring down the tune’s raw materials into a darker and more elegant shape. –Jo Livingstone

Listen: Deerhunter, “Desire Lines”

Dej Loaf: “Try Me” (2014)

2019 rap enjoys subverting gender norms at both ends. At one are pipsqueak-pitched brats racing to see who can sound the most infantile and coy while spouting hyper-masculine, R-rated lyrics; it’s easy to picture that Looney Tunes cigar-smoking baby when listening to the latest verses from Playboi Carti or Lil Uzi Vert. On the other end are pencil-sharp female rappers dragging the genre to new edges from behind cat-eye makeup. They aren't concerned with celebrating femininity, or anything else for that matter—they simply grab for your throat, no matter how you identify. One could argue that a touchstone for both styles was Dej Loaf’s “Try Me,” the shimmering street anthem that took 2014 by storm from a Detroit front porch. With her unisex wardrobe, buttersoft voice, and vows to turn her enemies into pasta, she carved out space for female rappers to be sour and sweet while giving dudes some lessons in melody: A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, for one, must know he owes his radio-ready flow to Dej Loaf’s pioneering style. –Matthew Trammell

Listen: Dej Loaf, “Try Me”

Cass McCombs: “County Line” (2011)

By the time Cass McCombs released this pillow-soft meditation on the ache of loneliness, he’d already established himself as a slippery figure in American folk-rock, with a penchant for cryptic, out-of-time songs. Casting his feathery falsetto front and center, “County Line” is the rare McCombs track that sees him fully resisting the urge to obfuscate his best melodic instincts in bizarre chord changes and jarring industrial sounds, opting for a comforting backdrop of ambrosial organ, wispy drums, and twangy guitar licks. Its power resides in the way it offsets all that beauty with the wretched, delicious pain of its subject matter, elevating a highway marker into a metaphor for the invisible boundaries we cross and recoil from as we move in and out of each other’s lives. And yet, with McCombs, even a lyric as naked as “You never even tried to love me” is never straightforward—to understand why, just look at the “County Line” music video, which features footage of a line of cars awaiting passage at the U.S.-Mexico border. –Emilie Friedlander

Listen: Cass McCombs, “County Line”

Blood Orange: “You’re Not Good Enough” (2013)

It’s a cliche for an artist to say that their music is their therapy, but Dev Hynes really does share things in his music that most of us would only say inside patient-doctor confidentiality. “You’re Not Good Enough,” from his breakthrough as Blood Orange, Cupid Deluxe, is not a pleasant thing to say, to sing, or to even think while breaking up with someone—but why, if its so cruel, does it sound so good? Perhaps it’s Hynes’ Prince-lite funk orchestration and the delicate vocal interplay between him and his then-girlfriend, Samantha Urbani; perhaps it’s how we’ve all thought something similar at some point about someone who disappoints us. But even more so, it’s probably the sheer wonder of enjoying an artist who’s so open that even his darkest ideas become ours. That’s who Hynes has been to a generation: the sensitive, vulnerable, sometimes-sour poet of emotional contradictions, the singer of our thoughts, both clean and otherwise. –Alex Frank

Listen: Blood Orange, “You’re Not Good Enough”

Lana Del Rey: “The greatest” (2019)

On “The greatest,” Lana Del Rey’s world is aflame. Carefree nights have been poisoned by the constant threat of nuclear warfare; her beloved Malibu is ravaged by monstrous wildfires; nothing feels like it used to, and holding onto hope no longer seems plausible. “The culture is lit, and if this is it, I had a ball/I guess that I’m burned-out after all,” she concludes over a noir swell of strings and keys. Despite its tongue-in-cheek fatalism, “The greatest” doesn’t submit to nihilism; it feels like the logical apex of Del Rey’s ever-present nostalgia. Surfing on a languid ’70s guitar wave, her blasé murmur wraps each turbulent image in a gauze of comforting warmth. The end of the world has never felt so assured. –Quinn Moreland

Listen: Lana Del Rey, “The greatest”

Jeremih: “Oui” (2015)

Is there a contemporary R&B singer more selfless than Jeremih? Between his sporadic solo projects, the Chicago serenader has doubled as one of the industry’s most overqualified session musicians, lending his silken falsetto to tracks from dozens of rap and R&B’s biggest names—and plenty of smaller ones, too, often without so much as a feature credit in return. When you've been gifted with a voice like this, it’d be cruel not to spread it around.

After his 2009 breakout “Birthday Sex,” most of Jeremih's singles saddled him with rap features that rarely added much, but “Oui” was a reminder of how transcendent he could sound when given the chance to carry a track on his own. For four heavenly minutes, the song suspends gravity, accompanying Jeremih with production as weightless as his voice: plinking pianos, gentle swooshes, and helium-infused trap drums that float toward blue sky like a bouquet of heart-shaped balloons. Jeremih isn’t just singing about bliss. He’s creating it. –Evan Rytlewski

Listen: Jeremih, “Oui”

Kanye West: “Ultralight Beam” (2016)

Given the kaleidoscope of egomania and petty grievances that make up Kanye West’s world, the most immediately surprising thing about “Ultralight Beam” is that he barely appears on it. Yes, he’s there, hobbled by Auto-Tune, a pilgrim in rags ascending the mountain. But the Life of Pablo opener is a group effort: an imperiled Kelly Price, an ecstatic Chance the Rapper, a reverential Kirk Franklin, a gale-force choir. See? West seems to say. I know when to shut up.

As uplifting as the song’s message is, the music here is pretty leaden: The trudging drums, the vast silences, the choir struggling against the inertia of it all. But that’s the song’s power: Instead of capturing triumph or even reprieve, it fixates morbidly on burden. And yet Kanye is there, his friends are there, he fucks up and asks forgiveness, the seasons turn. If West continues to seem sympathetic, it’s in part because no matter how much he achieves, he still manages to make himself look like he’s climbing—steadily, painfully, an avatar for the possibility that one can be both weak enough to buckle and strong enough to go on. As for whether or not he deserves the redemption he’s asking for, well, if you really believe in God, you know that even assholes deserve to stand in His light. –Mike Powell

Listen: Kanye West, “Ultralight Beam”

The National: “Bloodbuzz Ohio” (2010)

The National are very good at making buttoned-up music about weariness and despair, and the time they’ve spent perfecting such downcast moodiness makes their explosive moments hit that much harder. “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” from their 2010 album High Violet, is one of their finest anthems, a slow-building roar that gathers momentum with every measure. Bryan Devendorf’s drums, halfway between a backbeat and a fill, give the song its relentless forward motion, and his rhythm seems to shove each additional instrument into place and send it on its way by sheer force of will. Singer Matt Berninger offers typically cryptic lines about “owing money to the money” and being carried to Ohio by a swarm of bees, but the true meaning of his words comes from the way he sings them—resigned, a little bewildered, somehow still hopeful in spite of it all. –Mark Richardson

Listen: The National, “Bloodbuzz Ohio”

DJ Koze: “Pick Up” (2018)

Impervious to trends, DJ Koze’s specialty is creating warmly funky tracks coated with light psychedelic mist, tracks that braid together yearning, hope, and sadness into a fundamentally human ache. “Pick Up,” a towering highlight from his 2018 album Knock Knock, condenses his fundamental Koze-ness into six and a half minutes of shimmering disco bliss. That the song is built around a vocal sample from a Gladys Knight & the Pips ballad is perfect, reminding us that Koze is as much a listener as he is a creator. We hear what he heard in Knight’s voice, and then we follow him as he takes that feeling someplace all his own. –Mark Richardson

Listen: DJ Koze, “Pick Up”

Jack Ü: “Where Are Ü Now” [ft. Justin Bieber] (2015)

What a difference a perfect pop song can make. In the couple of years before Justin Bieber’s “Where Are Ü Now,” produced by Skrillex and Diplo under their Jack Ü moniker, the baby-faced star was in the middle of an awkward transition from tween-pop hairball to tattoo-covered fuckboi, his countless transgressions splashed across TMZ on what seemed to be an hourly basis. When he wasn’t pissing in a mop bucket in the kitchen of a restaurant, he was throwing eggs at his neighbor’s house, or visiting the Anne Frank House only to write how he hoped the tragic Holocaust victim “would have been a belieber” in the guestbook. For a moment, he was the most hated man-child on Earth.

Then came this song, and everything changed. It started off as an affectingly whiny Bieber demo before the vocals were sent to Diplo and Skrillex, who tweaked and distorted and pitch-shifted them to match their future-pop dreams. “Where Are Ü Now” was released in 2015, when EDM’s trademark drops had all but lost their adrenaline-spiking effectiveness. Sensing this shift, the one time drop-mongers inverted their own style here: Instead of concocting a hands-in-the-air buildup to a blaring hook, Diplo and Skrillex sucked out all of the track’s air at its peak, like an astronaut suddenly floating in space. The result was discombobulating to the point of deliriousness—a reimagining of what Justin Bieber could be, and what a Top 10 hit could sound like. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: Jack Ü, “Where Are Ü Now” [ft. Justin Bieber]

Perfume Genius: “Queen” (2014)

Over his first two albums, Mike Hadreas’ hollowed-out music as Perfume Genius relied on waterlogged recordings and funereal vocals befitting pitch-black subject matter: desperation, addiction, abuse. But with “Queen,” he cleared away the reverb to deliver his most assertive beam of clarity yet. He used the showy elements of glam rock to swan triumphantly against gay panic: “No family is safe when I sashay,” he cried over a crash of cymbals and guttural vocals, ushering in a brash sound for Perfume Genius that went hand in hand with a newly unambiguous lyrical approach. A full year before the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage across the U.S., Hadreas was locking horns with those who clutched their pearls at the faintest whiff of homosexuality—the same kind of bigoted personalities that now populate some of America’s highest offices. Let “Queen” be the rallying cry against them, ad infinitum. –Eric Torres

Listen: Perfume Genius, “Queen”

Tyler, the Creator: “Yonkers” (2011)

“Yonkers” is like an indoctrination—before you know it, Tyler, the Creator has swept you up in his breakneck realm. And as Tyler’s first release on a proper label, the song served as the catalyst for the Odd Future movement, bringing the L.A. kids off the internet and onto Jimmy Fallon’s back. It begins abruptly with its sickly, skittish beat that sticks like a broken delete key. Just as swiftly, the rapper starts dropping names of then-mysterious figures—Anwar, Jasper, Syd—as he inverts rap cliches into menacing quips. There’s nowhere to sit, nowhere to hide. You just want to follow this guy wherever he goes, even when he eats a cockroach in the video. –Matthew Strauss

Listen: Tyler, the Creator, “Yonkers”

Adele: “Someone Like You” (2011)

Be sure to stretch before putting on 21: It’s still a marathon of human misery. Adele didn’t just languish in the agony of sudden heartbreak on her second album, she found the glory in surviving it—of turning her scratchy soul belt into a conduit for bewilderment and betrayal. After fixating, fantasizing, and hypothesizing her way through the record, Adele showed just how far she had come with its closing track, “Someone Like You.” The ballad is an atom bomb of yearning, but it’s not permitted to freewheel into self-pity. Singing with hoarse gravity, Adele holds every note like a steely challenge to move forward even as she looks back, rarely flickering into melisma as the piano arpeggios churn below. Listen to “Someone Like You” in the depths of despair, and it’s a lifeline; listen to it from the other side, and it’s a medal for a battle well fought. –Stacey Anderson

Listen: Adele, “Someone Like You”

Beach House: “Zebra” (2010)

Beach House singer Victoria Legrand listened to her bandmate Alex Scally’s instrumental demo, with its pendulum riffs and dramatic crash cymbals, and thought of zebras. “It was what I was seeing,” she told KEXP recently, “patterns crossing.” So she wrote a song about that striped animal running among horses, simultaneously distinguished and camouflaged by its markings. It became the lead-off track to Beach House’s third album, Teen Dream, and a pivotal moment for the duo. On its surface, “Zebra” sounds like a song about deception—perhaps a prelude to the breakup album that follows. But it also gets at something much deeper: “Patterns crossing” may be the most apt description of the Beach House sound, which thrives on the contrast between textures and feelings, between Scally’s stoic guitar and Legrand’s soulful vocals. “Zebra” expresses something about how they create together, how they use their stripes to capture ineffable feelings, and how they’ve managed to remain so mysterious for so long. –Stephen Deusner

Listen: Beach House, “Zebra”

Caribou: “Can’t Do Without You” (2014)

“Can’t Do Without You” initially scans as a relatively straightforward love song. In it, Caribou’s Dan Snaith and a sampled Marvin Gaye sing the titular phrase over a simmering nü-disco beat that swells into a euphoric banger. But any sweetness inherent to those few words eventually gets smothered by the claustrophobic nature of how they’re delivered: It’s about love, for sure, but it also starts to sting as a reflection on obsession and codependency. So by the end of the track, it’s hard to shake the feeling that you’re basking in the rapturous glow of a relationship that’s become dysfunctionally intertwined. –Evan Minsker

Listen: Caribou, “Can’t Do Without You”

FKA twigs: “Two Weeks” (2014)

A lot has been made of the sexually explicit lyrical content of “Two Weeks” (such as: “My thighs are apart for when you’re ready to breathe in”), but less has been said about how much of an orgasm the song is musically. There are all these elongated sounds—slowly arching snares, spilt treacle synths, vocals that stretch into the horizon—that act as lines of tension, gently bracing themselves for the inevitable. There’s even what appears to be a cracked whip just after the one-minute mark. When the drop finally comes (again and again), it carries twigs’ voice off into the abyss. While there’s plenty to savor in the artist’s clit-sure lyricism, what makes her tale of desire and release a keeper is how its sound embodies the rise and fall of our protagonist’s thirst for her would-be lover; a death and a rebirth, swallowing one another whole. –Ruth Saxelby

Listen: FKA twigs, “Two Weeks”

Kacey Musgraves: “Slow Burn” (2018)

By picking up on narrative threads of past country rebels, from Loretta Lynn’s sexual frankness to Willie Nelson’s penchant for mind-expanding flora, Kacey Musgraves’ lyrics have been defiant and open-minded, even when her music has sounded more traditional. But on Golden Hour, her third album, it’s the arrangements that catch your attention. Its opening track, “Slow Burn,” begins by evoking sunny Laurel Canyon soft rock as much as it does country, with a serene melody and gently strummed acoustic guitar. But midway, after the introduction of a drumbeat and bassline, it takes on shades of trip-hop, as though filtering Patsy Cline through a Portishead prism. “Slow Burn” is not so much a genre crossover as an open-ended journey, like the acid trip in the desert that inspired Musgraves to write the song. Rather than leaving country behind, the songwriter has chosen to explore the limits of its territory, and to expand them. –Shuja Haider

Listen: Kacey Musgraves, “Slow Burn”

King Krule: “Out Getting Ribs” (2010)

It’s still a bit shocking to hear that voice coming from that body in the DIY video for “Out Getting Ribs,” Archy Marshall’s breakout song. He was just 15 years old when he posted the clip, but his weathered warble suggested someone several decades older—as do the lyrics, which had Marshall pulling from his adolescence while also transcending the simple angst typical of such an age. He touched up “Out Getting Ribs” for his 2013 debut album as King Krule, 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, taking out some reverb and cleaning up the guitar and bass. But the original version, rough and raw and bracing, stands up best. –Matthew Strauss

Listen: King Krule, “Out Getting Ribs”

Drake: “Worst Behavior” (2013)

In 2013, we were introduced to Tough Drake. Nothing Was the Same was his coming-out party, and “Worst Behavior” was his anthem. If young Drake strained awkwardly to make his points, Tough Drake romanticized his misbehavior with ease, burning time just yelling “Remember?! Motherfucker?!” Years before he became the world’s most-streamed act, “Worst Behavior” was Drake’s chest-beating play for pop’s center, even with its gloriously rattled, oblong beat (which producer DJ Dahi once called “literally, like, a mistake”). Drake was 26 then, and Tough Drake felt like a costume he’d eventually take off. But it wasn’t a phase. Six years later, Drake still isn’t in a forgiving mood. He still hasn’t settled down, and maybe he never will. (He’s not the only one who thinks permanently coupling up might actually make you lonelier.) When you have everything, do you stay on your worst behavior forever? –Naomi Zeichner

Listen: Drake, “Worst Behavior”

Phoebe Bridgers: “Motion Sickness” (2017)

The lyrics to “Motion Sickness,” a highlight from Phoebe Bridgers’ slow-burning debut Stranger in the Alps, eulogize a toxic relationship. “I hate you for what you did/And I miss you like a little kid,” she sings softly over layers of echoing guitars and an insistent rhythm. In the climax, she offers a particularly damning line—“You were in a band when I was born”—and holds out the last syllable like a primal howl. It’s a lyric that now feels inextricable from a New York Times article from earlier this year in which Bridgers and other musicians alleged abuse at the hands of Ryan Adams. But for all its first-person directness and lingering questions, “Motion Sickness” is the beginning of a story, not an ending: Its steady rise of adrenaline sounds like a vow to keep moving. –Sam Sodomsky

Listen: Phoebe Bridgers, “Motion Sickness”

Bobby Shmurda: “Hot Nigga” (2014)

New York needed something fresh. It was 2014 and the city was less than a year removed from famed Compton, California native Kendrick Lamar claiming he was the “King of New York” on record. Then, in March, Bobby Shmurda released the music video for “Hot Nigga” on YouTube. It began as a New York street-rap hit; the city fell in love with Bobby’s Brooklyn cockiness and the song’s booming Jahlil Beats production. The hook could be heard playing out of cars across all five boroughs, while the rapper’s “Shmoney Dance” found its way into schools and, eventually, Vine. Looking back, it’s unreal that “Hot Nigga” was ever more than a local phenomenon, especially since the NYPD cut Bobby’s career short before he got a chance to benefit from his success. But for a moment, his energy and personality brought New York hip-hop back into the spotlight. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: Bobby Shmurda, “Hot Nigga”

Rihanna: “We Found Love” [ft. Calvin Harris] (2011)

Hopelessness is not a common thing to find in a pop song. Sadness? Sure. Heartbreak? Of course. But the word “hopeless” implies a sense of disrepair that’s hard to face directly, let alone dance to. Yet somehow, it took less than a minute for Rihanna and Calvin Harris to lodge the idea into the radio’s vocabulary with their glittering collaboration “We Found Love.” While her words gesture toward the world’s darkest corners, the warmly insistent, lite-house thump suggests starry skies, packed dancefloors, human touch. Like a lot of things concerning Rihanna, “We Found Love” inserted itself into popular culture with idiomatic ease, and the generational gravity of its message only adds to its appeal. Lately, Rihanna has used her platform to speak out for a number of prominent causes: for reproductive rights, for Colin Kaepernick, against the president. She’s at that point in her career where every move she makes suggests a feeling of invincibility: Just because she found what she’s looking for doesn’t mean she’s done searching. –Sam Sodomsky

Listen: Rihanna, “We Found Love” [ft. Calvin Harris]

EMA: “California” (2011)

“California,” the droning centerpiece of Erika M. Anderson’s first album as EMA, is a gospel song at heart—an invitation to surrender in the face of impossible odds, to lay down one’s burden at the feet of a force more powerful than the self. Beatless, ceaseless, the track sounds more like weather than music, a storm from which Anderson can’t quite find refuge. The catharsis of “California” isn’t so much that the storm passes but that she surrenders to it, and in doing so, gives herself a shot at starting over.

As the song reaches its peak, Anderson quotes “Camptown Races,” an old minstrel tune about playing the horses: “I bet my money on the bob-tailed nag/Somebody bet on the bay.” Historically, it was presented as comedy, the story of an enterprising young guy getting ready to try his luck. Then there’s Anderson, 150 years later, detoxing from manifest destiny at the edge of America with nothing to show for it but the knowledge of what it means to have failed. –Mike Powell

Listen: EMA, “California”

Future: “March Madness” (2015)

The bulk of “March Madness” found Future detailing his lavish lifestyle. Especially at the time, this rang very true. The Atlanta rapper had an enormous year in 2015, with the release of his Drake collaboration What a Time to Be Alive along with one of his best albums, Dirty Sprite 2. He’d reached hip-hop’s A-list, and “March Madness” offered a view from the top. Yes, it’s a song about getting fucked up and driving too fast in an expensive car, but it’s also a song where Future reveals that he’s not insulated from the outside world. “All these cops shootin’ niggas, tragic,” he sang, months after the deaths of Michael Brown and Laquan McDonald. Over ethereal synth arpeggios, digital bells, and 808s, Future’s vocal acrobatics amplify the tension that plays out in his lyrics—the highs of luxury butting against the violence that’s brought upon the unarmed and unprotected. –Evan Minsker

Listen: Future, “March Madness”

David Bowie: “Blackstar” (2015)

“I’m not a pop star,” Bowie insists in this mercurial, nearly 10-minute amble of woodwind jazz bleats, group moans, and tinny vocal shearing. Having reinvented himself so many times, his last musical effort was to bid farewell with that same grace and eternal curiosity. The title track of Blackstar, his 25th album, set this tone immediately; its surreal lines about nonchalant executions and bright, heavenly bodies—beautiful in their doomed infernos—are sung with comforting humanity, an empathy that overpowers the song’s proggy grandeur. Its skittish, multi-act structure and glacial sax tones resist easy resolution; the most catharsis we are offered comes in the poetically macabre music video, in which the lonely corpse of Major Tom is exhumed and, with him, all Bowie’s spectacular former guises are laid to rest. Then all that remains is the man, staring straight into the unfathomable and having the wisdom to offer no answers. –Stacey Anderson

Listen: David Bowie, “Blackstar”

Miguel: “Adorn” (2012)

In 2012, R&B was in the midst of an identity crisis. Even the genre’s brightest talents found themselves shut out of Top 40 radio, and the few that managed to infiltrate its playlists did so by surrendering to the overblown EDM of the moment. But on his inventive run of early ’10s singles, Miguel posited another way forward. “Adorn” was one of the year’s few crossover R&B hits that still felt like R&B. It was also a wild studio experiment: an ’80s Marvin Gaye/Lionel Richie homage that sounded like it was recorded in a racquetball court. All throbbing synths and bubbling bass, “Adorn” freed Miguel to roam the song’s alien terrain, exploring how his desirous falsetto bounces off its oblique angles. He cartwheeled through the track, singing in swooning howls, and in the process coining an inimitable sound that bottled the sensation of ecstatic liberation: whawp! –Evan Rytlewski

Listen: Miguel, “Adorn”

Taylor Swift: “All Too Well” (2012)

“All Too Well,” the hidden gem of Taylor Swift’s Red, captures everything that makes her a world-class songwriter: her emotional intelligence, her candor, her economy of words, her ability to find beauty in vulnerability. Swift tells a big story by freezing time and honing in on small details, the kind that could seem like background noise to others: the scarf that her ex (reportedly, Jake Gyllenhaal) kept as a memento, the refrigerator light that illuminated midnight dance parties. All these hyper-specifics, rigorously chronicled, protect Swift’s pain so she can tend to it; when she sings, “It was rare/I was there,” she asserts her own experience against those who would trivialize it. As the song builds, its initially mild-mannered guitar gains energy, cymbals begin to crash, and Swift’s voice steadily rises. But she doesn’t really need volume to convey the magnitude of the damage. It’s the quietest moments that serve this story best—they make you lean in close enough to see every tiny fissure in her broken heart. –Olivia Horn

Listen: Taylor Swift, “All Too Well”

Vince Staples: “Norf Norf” (2015)

If you were to compile a map of the United States as told by rappers, no locale would be rendered as crisply as Vince Staples’ Long Beach. On the norf side, Yankee hats are in style, snitches are hunted to extinction, and the shotgun that offed Boyz n the Hood’s Ricky Baker remains at large. As Staples slides from parties to shootouts, danger is courted and eluded. Death is defied and embraced. Gangster rap is disparaged; gangsters endure.

Though every detail is in 4K, the screen flickers. Obama’s promises of hope and change remain unfulfilled; Vince’s family sticks around, yet so do his gun-toting rivals. Embodying that relentless tension, Clams Casino’s production is a twitchy fusillade. The bass quakes and smolders; the synths blare and pulse; the claps tingle. Proud of his home, Staples is at ease within this discord, but he doesn’t shy away from its costs. Because he sees his city so clearly, he has no illusions: No one can run forever. –Stephen Kearse

Listen: Vince Staples, “Norf Norf”

Bat for Lashes: “Laura” (2012)

The title character of “Laura” is a dreamer in crisis, a partied-out socialite left behind by the crowds. Only Natasha Khan remains by her side, and in her sweetest and deadliest ballad, she dedicates every ounce of her formidable self herself to propping up her lost friend. We all yearn for someone like Khan to swoop in and declaim our innate superheroism to the world, and “Laura” isn’t just a tribute; it’s a devotional, a monument. “You’ll be famous for longer than them/Your name is tattooed on every boy’s skin,” Khan wails. Laura may have been overlooked but, within the aura of Khan’s belief, we know her glory. –Jazz Monroe

Listen: Bat for Lashes, “Laura”

Disclosure: “Latch” [ft. Sam Smith] (2012)

With “Latch,” Disclosure managed to land a rare one-two punch: Not only did the UK duo become dance music heavies in their own right, they practically minted an entirely new pop star to boot. As the song slowly made its way toward ubiquity, eventually peaking at No. 7 in America two years after its initial release, it wooed an EDM audience that was tiring of 12-ton drops and dudes screaming at crowds to put their hands in the air. As a refreshing alternative, Guy and Howard Lawrence created a track bound to an indestructible house beat and filled with the types of chord extensions more commonly found in jazz (or Steely Dan albums) than standard chart fare, allowing for Sam Smith to unleash their jaw-dropping vocals. Today, the song remains a testament to a brave new world of democratized production, one where two brothers, a laptop, and an unknown superstar can move the world. –Noah Yoo

Listen: Disclosure, “Latch” [ft. Sam Smith]

Solange: “Losing You” (2012)

“Losing You” was the conclusion of a love story, but it was also the beginning of a new Solange. The song was released between two pivotal projects: four years after her album Sol-Angel and the Hadley Street Dreams, an almost quaint love letter to Motown, and four years before her culture-shifting political purge, A Seat at the Table. Produced and co-written with Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes, both “Losing You” and its parent EP, True, turned Solange into an indie R&B darling with a clear vision that was destined to be refined. As breakup ballads go, this one’s deceptively cheerful. Disoriented by the end of something irreconcilable, she sees her relationship devolve from all-night makeout sessions to total static. The melody lags, at odds with the backdrop’s retro claps and squeals, but perhaps it’s a sign that the loss is actually a gain. –Clover Hope

Listen: Solange, “Losing You”

Camp Cope: “The Opener” (2017)

Since the dawn of time, women have been fed up with the patronizing antics of men in music. And with “The Opener,” Melbourne-based punk trio Camp Cope use the misogynistic injustices they have faced over the years as creative jet fuel as they crush industry bros who use feminism for their own self image, bookers convinced that the band can’t sell out a room, and bored stoner dudes who treat women like meat sacks. Over Georgia Maq’s nervy alto, a driving bassline, and grunge-of-center percussion, the band presents a withering critique that does not hold back even a little. Near the end of the song, when Maq yelps, “Now look how far we’ve come not listening to you!” she cements Camp Cope’s place as a no-bullshit punk band that will be emblazoned on denim jacket patches in perpetuity. –Sophie Kemp

Listen: Camp Cope, “The Opener”

Kendrick Lamar: “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” (2012)

In 2012, newfound fame was weighing on Kendrick Lamar. He was surrounded by people he didn’t know, while adapting to life as the new voice of Compton. On “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe,” he took a break from the reflective coming-of-age story he narrated throughout good kid, m.A.A.d city to address keeping his musical virtues intact amid so much change. “I’m tryin’ to keep it alive/And not compromise the feeling we love,” he rapped. But he also acknowledged, in the song’s lingering opening line, “I am a sinner who’s probably gonna sin again.” Despite the heavy content, the Sounwave-produced track sounds like a jazzy backseat ride through Cali, with Kendrick’s vocals cycling through nasal-voiced singing, smooth-talk flows, and rapid-fire sprints. He delivered the message that Compton—and everyone else—could put their faith in him. He hasn’t let us down yet. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: Kendrick Lamar, “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe”

Arcade Fire: “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” (2010)

“Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” served as the climax of 2010’s The Suburbs—as well as of everything Arcade Fire had done up to that point. It’s about a very particular archetype: the artsy misfit, the daydreamer trapped in a place that stifles creativity and smothers dreams. The character fits into the band’s past, with its dark anthems about kid-level conspiracies—brothers bitten by vampires, secret cities where no cars go—but this song adds a new urgency. Régine Chassagne sings her exurban angst with big-hearted wonder, adding nobility to the tired concept of escaping the concrete jungle for more bucolic landscapes, as the rest of the group’s pearly dance-pop avoids any note of bitterness or pessimism. Listening to “Sprawl II,” it feels clear that the song’s heroine got out of whatever grey hell she was in, and found her kind. –Stephen Deusner

Listen: Arcade Fire, “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)”

Gyptian: “Hold Yuh” (2010)

Everyone wants a song of the summer, but few people realize the song that defines a summer doesn’t necessarily arrive as the season is fully blossoming. There are tracks like “Hold Yuh” that poke their heads Stateside in the spring, before getting played in clubs or on the radio until the melody affixes itself to a moment, then an entire season—and maybe even a whole half-decade worth of seasons. Gyptian had been flourishing on the Jamaican dancehall charts for over five years with songs like “Serious Times” before “Hold Yuh” became a crossover success. It is almost unfair how irresistibly danceable this song is, how it articulates a desire for closeness while laid over the kind of sparse but infectious beat that practically demands bodies shifting together. –Hanif Abdurraqib

Listen: Gyptian, “Hold Yuh”

Ariana Grande: “thank u, next” (2018)

Navigating romance publicly comes with being a public figure—which can be good when it is good, and agonizing when it is agonizing. Ariana Grande has had to do this through several iterations of her career, in ways that have sometimes felt unfair. All this came to a head in the fall of 2018, when she was mourning both the death of her ex-boyfriend Mac Miller and a broken-off engagement to Pete Davidson. “thank u, next” was her response, the polished product of bouncing back from many heartbreaks.

The song itself works against the somewhat dismissive sentiment of the title: The twinkling chorus is steeped in a kind of corny but joyful gratitude, for the past but also for the present self. Crooning angelically, Grande reminds the masses that we choose to love people for a reason, even if that love is brief. “thank u, next” might even be considered a little bit of a troll because of how it challenges the voyeurism of her situation: It would have been salacious to air an ex out for the world to see, but it is more fascinating to draw an eager audience close before offering what is merely a small token of gratitude. –Hanif Abdurraqib

Listen: Ariana Grande, “thank u, next”

Tame Impala: “Let It Happen” (2015)

If you can’t understand a damn thing Kevin Parker sings during the bridge of “Let It Happen,” you’re not alone. The vocals are complete gibberish, placeholder words given emotional heft by his performance and vocoders time-tested by ’80s icons and French robots alike. It doesn’t matter that he’s singing raw syllables, though, because you can feel the wistful acceptance in every note. It’s the most affecting part of this nearly eight-minute-long song, which opened 2015’s Currents and introduced a new era of Tame Impala. No more trivial accusations of retrofetishism or John Lennon idol worship; with this heavy slab of space disco, Parker decidedly broke free of any preconceived notions about his abilities. The riff—a simple, octave-leaping groove—stands alone, but the punchy drums and elaborate synth arrangements throughout cleared the stage for Tame Impala to claim their place as true psych-rock originals. –Noah Yoo

Listen: Tame Impala, “Let It Happen”

The Knife: “Full of Fire” (2013)

There’s an alternate reality in which the Knife never stopped sounding like the sunny electro-pop band who inspired that one José González song at the turn of the century, thereby ending up in the third-biggest font size on the Electric Daisy Carnival poster and probably collaborating with Marshmello once or twice. But in our actual reality, Karin and Olof Dreijer got dark with their 2006 classic Silent Shout before making their grand return seven years later by inhaling radical theory and fully metamorphosing into their namesake—something steely, cutting, dangerous when necessary. “Full of Fire,” the first single from 2013’s Shaking the Habitual, is a nasty patchwork of sawtooth synths, hissed vocals, and guttural drum patterns, perennially teetering on the brink of manic collapse. It primes you to leave it all on the dancefloor before waking up ready to throw a brick through the patriarchy. –Jeremy Gordon

Listen: The Knife, “Full of Fire”

Robyn: “Call Your Girlfriend” (2010)

Only Robyn, the Swedish teen-pop phenom turned self-directed superstar, could shimmy through a scenario as thorny as the one in “Call Your Girlfriend.” In it, she plays a woman who’s been covertly seeing someone who’s already paired off with someone else. But her character shows no bitterness for the girlfriend in question. Instead, she gently coaches her lover through breaking up with the other woman, urging him to spare her feelings. The klaxon call of the chorus makes “Call Your Girlfriend” a dance-pop triumph, one of many Robyn songs to arc toward euphoric release. But the glittery production only deepens the sinister lyrical narrative: “Now it’s gonna be me and you,” Robyn concludes, having successfully manipulated her man into her arms. Maybe she’s scheming, but it’s impossible not to celebrate along with her. –Sasha Geffen

Listen: Robyn, “Call Your Girlfriend”

Big Thief: “Mary” (2017)

“Mary,” the emotional center of Big Thief’s breakthrough album Capacity, takes the form of a late-night reverie. Band leader Adrianne Lenker’s voice is hushed and hesitant, as though she’s trying not to wake anyone as she sifts through a box full of private memories, their outlines turned silvery and strange with time. Over a reassuring backdrop of organ and piano, her voice gathers strength as she is swept away in a flood of images, words so vivid you can feel them beating in your hand like small, frightened birds. It is a nostalgic song, shot through with a sense of loss, but it is ecstatic in its synesthetic rush, its sublime sense of everything coming on at once. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Big Thief, “Mary”

Lorde: “The Louvre” (2017)

Lorde is a sneering romantic: She’ll dissect love like it’s a frog in biology class while still falling under its spell. That’s the mode in which she operates on “The Louvre,” narrating a whirlwind summer romance that’s lighting her from within even as she’s rolling her eyes at the whole thing. As the song begins, she could be working out a sketch in her childhood bedroom, her voice just above a whisper and hung over rumbling, muted chords. An intensely physical connection settles into something deeper, and you can hear her fighting off love until her facade starts to crack. When she drops her guard to embrace love in all of its supernatural glory, it feels as bracing as a dip in a frozen lake. “The Louvre” isn’t the most readily melodic or explosive song on her 2017 opus Melodrama, but it’s the one that best conveys Lorde’s preternatural skills. She can take a feeling everyone knows and transform it into something fresh, as if you’re experiencing it for the first time. –Jamieson Cox

Listen: Lorde, “The Louvre”

SZA: “The Weekend” (2017)

SZA baited a new lovestruck generation by presenting herself as a work-in-progress, shamelessly hooked on rash decisions. “The Weekend,” from her debut album CTRL, is an imagined agreement between partners, sung from the perspective of the Other Woman who isn’t fully in charge. While the girlfriend spends the mundane hours of the week with the man, SZA’s character gets to absorb his stress, be in command, and “make him lose his mind” on the weekends. SZA’s singing conveys all the euphoria and uncertainty of this arrangement: She presents desire as a transaction between multiple people, singing with the confidence of a person who loves to indulge but who realizes the idea of possession in relationships is slippery. The shades of acceptance, sadness, and hope in her voice, slung over a moody, slow-drip tempo, give “The Weekend” its sober dimension—there’s a sense that performing the feel-good service of satisfaction is a thankless act, and that she knows she wants more. –Clover Hope

Listen: SZA, “The Weekend”

Courtney Barnett: “Avant Gardener” (2013)

The song that made Courtney Barnett an indie rock star involves a startlingly detailed narrative about the tension of literally being unable to breathe. In it, she sets out to garden, and after some small talk about vegetables with a neighbor, she pulls her first weed and quickly has an asthmatic episode. “Avant Gardener” is a languid song, and Barnett’s delivery is deadpan, but her anxiety in every observation gives the whole thing a nail-biting intensity. Someone calls an ambulance, and her first thought is about how much this shit is going to cost. She gets a shot of adrenaline and instantly conjures Uma Thurman’s near-death scene in Pulp Fiction. As she watches her day go off the rails, she always grounds the song in a seven-word chorus that is as simple as it is profound: “I’m not that good at breathing in.” –Evan Minsker

Listen: Courtney Barnett, “Avant Gardener”

Frank Ocean: “Nights” (2016)

On “Nights,” the space-bending centerpiece of Blonde, Frank Ocean distorts and collapses all sense of time. It begins with him singing over sunny guitars about an ex-lover, taking bitter swipes at their character. Then, after about three minutes, the track starts to descend into a frenzy of distorted guitars, frantically circling through arpeggios like it’s bracing for a crash landing. As the track switches into a woozy trap beat, Frank plunges back into the past. He tells how he first met his ex by flashing a series of small images that transports you back to the scene: his family’s old Acura, going to the Southern restaurant chain Shoney’s, transferring colleges from New Orleans to Texas after Hurricane Katrina. Throughout “Nights,” Frank establishes an ultra-thin line between past and present, day and night, and nostalgia and regret, effortlessly dancing between each binary. –Michelle Kim

Listen: Frank Ocean, “Nights”

SOPHIE: “Bipp” (2013)

Before there was SOPHIE the transgressive pop icon, there was SOPHIE the divisive electronic music producer, and “Bipp” was her calling card. Like all the best future-thinking pop music, “Bipp” caused equal parts delight and bemusement when it was released in 2013, thanks to its combination of pitch-shifted vocals, elastic synths, and nonchalant percussive hits that seemed to roll around like a raver on an endlessly pitching deck, nauseous but giddily excited. “Bipp” skirted musical genres, from rave to R&B, UK garage to EDM, in a way that frustrated purists and confused the hell out of commentators, straining at the leash of electronic music’s tightly patrolled genre borders. And yet the track proved to be SOPHIE’s breakthrough, its envelope-mangling, sugar-rush energy paving the way for collaborations with everyone from Madonna to Vince Staples—a day-glo warning shot that indicated just how wonderfully weird pop was going to get in the years that followed. –Ben Cardew

Listen: SOPHIE, “Bipp”

Kanye West: “Monster” [ft. Justin Vernon, Rick Ross, JAY-Z, and Nicki Minaj] (2010)

“Monster” packs enough objectively insane moments to fill an entire episode of Scooby-Doo: Kanye hiking up his high-waters to quote Napoleon Dynamite, JAY-Z moaning “looooooove” like a mummified Heathcliff on the moors, Rick Ross using a chunk of his 10-second prologue of a verse to refer to himself as a “fat motherfucker.” Yet the decade’s most opulent posse cut ends up far greater than the sum of its ridiculous parts. Over yawning synths and brusque, almost-industrial bass, these hip-hop hellions offer a quick peek into the vulnerabilities of the super rich and famous while allowing us to ride the wave of their incomprehensibly lofty egos. Of course, “Monster” is remembered most for the burgeoning star it made inarguable: Nicki Minaj, still a month away from releasing her debut album, slaughtering everyone in her path with 32 bars of demented Barbie BDE. Consider our brains eaten. –Stacey Anderson

Listen: Kanye West, “Monster” [ft. Justin Vernon, Rick Ross, JAY-Z, and Nicki Minaj]

Jai Paul: “BTSTU (edit)” (2011)

Though Jai Paul’s first single wears its influences on its sleeve—the wonky rhythms of J Dilla, the menacing sweetness of Prince—and though it would go on to influence the borderless sound of pop in years to come, “BTSTU (edit)” still sounds like nothing else. At first, the falsetto murmur of “don’t fuck with me” that runs through the track is disorienting. By the time it’s been buried under woozy synth combustion, it’s clear that the disorientation is the point. “BTSTU” works because it sounds like the biggest piece of bedroom pop ever, because it is club music designed to be heard by one person at a time. –Sam Hockley-Smith

Listen: Jai Paul, “BTSTU (edit)”

Carly Rae Jepsen: “Run Away With Me” (2015)

The proposal is simple and familiar: escape, hand-in-hand, from reality. Still, Carly Rae Jepsen sells it with invigorating conviction on “Run Away With Me.” She’s high on romantic possibility, and her infatuation feels so unstoppable that the only logical solution is to let it carry her away completely. Fueled by a yearning saxophone riff and colossal drums, Jepsen gleefully repeats her heartfelt invitation until the rest of the world melts away. “Over the weekend, we could turn the world to gold,” she murmurs with a quiet devotion, letting the image of two gilded lovers linger in the air. –Quinn Moreland

Listen: Carly Rae Jepsen, “Run Away With Me”

Rae Sremmurd: “Black Beatles” [ft. Gucci Mane] (2016)

Calling yourself a rock star became a rap norm this decade—it simultaneously affirmed hip-hop’s centrality in the culture, laid claim to an inheritance of artistic grandiosity, and turned decadence into an aspirational ideal. Despite strong bids from Kanye and Future, despite Post Malone chanting it into numbing cliché, Rae Sremmurd own the idea for all time thanks to “Black Beatles.”

Propelled to No. 1 off the back of the “mannequin challenge” meme, it truly deserved the top spot for its unusual sound and magical, mystical mood. Producer Mike WiLL Made-It’s loping beat and haunting synth conjure a feeling of floaty suspension that pairs perfectly with the song’s lyrics about stepping through the looking glass into a dreamworld of super-fame. There’s something strangely pure-hearted about the fey, sighing way Swae Lee murmurs lines like “quick release the cash, watch it fall slowly”—as though Rae Sremmurd have somehow gone through the excess of lust and ego and now levitate serenely above it all. In a song crammed with great lines, Slim Jxmmi sees off Lee and guest Gucci Mane with his kicker: “me and Paul McCartney related!” The impudence is adorable, the hubris hilarious—and yet, at its core, “Black Beatles” really is a psychedelic pearl as radiant as “Rain.” –Simon Reynolds

Listen: Rae Sremmurd, “Black Beatles” [ft. Gucci Mane]

Future Islands: “Seasons (Waiting on You)” (2014)

Years before their network television debut, Future Islands earned a reputation for playing raucous shows at small clubs. So when the Baltimore band brought that same energy to play “Seasons (Waiting on You)” on The Late Show With David Letterman, frontman Samuel T. Herring’s unabashedly earnest performance went viral. Channeling the bravado of a Broadway actor, Herring sang to the studio audience as if it were his last chance. His gamble endeared the band to a new legion of fans and made “Seasons” a hit.

Even without the visual, the song is still a triumph. It’s arena-ready synth pop that mourns the end of a relationship, a dissolution as predictable as summer turning into winter. The muscular new wave beat softens under Herring’s croon, his delivery shifting from rugged to wounded from one verse to the next. He sings of losing love as if it were an apocalyptic reckoning, and “Seasons” is the resilient epic written in the aftermath. –Gabriela Tully Claymore

Listen: Future Islands, “Seasons (Waiting on You)”

LCD Soundsystem: “Dance Yrself Clean” (2010)

James Murphy has always seemed unusually aware of time’s passing. From LCD Soundsystem’s very first single, the kids were coming up from behind. By “Dance Yrself Clean,” the opener to 2010’s This Is Happening, Murphy was staring at the clock like someone awaiting final judgment: “Everybody’s getting younger,” he moaned. “It’s the end of an era, it’s true.” But this song doesn’t offer a way of beating back the advancing years, or of marking them; it’s a cleansing fire, momentarily releasing us from time’s grip. Simmering in nervous funk before boiling over into thudding synth-pop, “Dance Yrself Clean” is a nine-minute jam about Marxism, divorce, and generalized misanthropy that could serve as the collective freak-out moment at a wedding reception. It’s a stomping, screaming last call of sorts, an invitation to get it all out before the opportunity disappears. –Marc Hogan

Listen: LCD Soundsystem, “Dance Yrself Clean”

Fiona Apple: “Every Single Night” (2012)

After seven years away, Fiona Apple returned to a world that better understood her, and she did it with music that seemed to better understand itself, too. On her fourth album, The Idler Wheel..., Fiona charged not just her lyrics but each raw, blistering note with her spirit of defiance, resilience, and fury. “Every Single Night,” the opener, is a surreal lullaby about constantly fighting with your mind. Fiona’s metaphysical lyrics trace the psychosomatic impact of mental struggle, charting the “butterflies in my brain” as they “percolate the mind,” “trickle down the spine,” “swarm the belly,” “swell into a blaze.” She has always been an artist aware of her body, but “Every Single Night” feels like a step further. You can hear clenched teeth, whitened knuckles, and a throat about to be shred. It’s so breathtakingly, quintessentially Fiona: romancing omnipresent internal frictions for three-and-a-half minutes as a method of survival. “I just want to feel everything,” she trills, illuminating the truest theme of all her work: hard-earned aliveness. –Jenn Pelly

Listen: Fiona Apple, “Every Single Night”

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti: “Round and Round” (2010)

If you squint, Ariel Pink’s “Round and Round” starts to resemble Beck’s “Loser.” Both were generational anthems that made no literal sense, made by inveterate L.A. weirdos who rode the line between sincerity and irony until it seemed to crumble. Both reinvented what was considered “cool,” too. Pink’s reference points were like no one else’s—AM radio, commercial jingles, Steely Dan. Countless chillwave, vaporwave, and whatever-else-wave artists followed his lead, but few of them proved capable of the magnificent pop architecture of “Round and Round.” It may be inseparable from its moment, an odd interlude between the peak-indie 2000s and a decade where indie and pop became unashamedly inseparable. But if there’s any coherent message behind “Round and Round,” it’s that pop songs, trends, and life itself are a constant cycle of death and renewal. –Ian Cohen

Listen: Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, “Round and Round”

Cardi B: “Bodak Yellow” (2017)

In early 2017, a few of Cardi B’s songs had landed well enough to lock in BET Awards nominations and a magazine cover, but she needed more music by summer to take full advantage of those looks. So she went to work and came back with a hit that made thoughtful use of its key elements: action-movie intensity, a proven flow courtesy of Florida rapper Kodak Black, and a bottomless array of bars that were easy to parrot and pre-baked for captions. Like Meek Mill’s famously instigating “Dreams and Nightmares (Intro),” it got people going; DJs loved it, and influencers did too.

It was released in June with little initial promotion, while Cardi showed up for culture’s early adopters, at queer parties and Southern clubs. By July, it was in radio rotation. By August, all kinds of fans knew the words. And in September, it was a verified smash, unseating Taylor Swift at No. 1 on the Hot 100, making Cardi B the first woman solo rapper to hit that peak in 19 years. Her victory was genuinely ground-up and people-driven. That it was possible—or inevitable, and a precursor for more success to come—still feels triumphant. –Naomi Zeichner

Listen: Cardi B, “Bodak Yellow”

Joanna Newsom: “Good Intentions Paving Co.” (2010)

“Good Intentions Paving Co.” is the story of two journeys, one literal and one figurative. There’s a road trip to a concert through an unfamiliar countryside, under stars that shyly emerge in a pastel sky. Then the drive exposes a second, inner tale, of a relationship paved with good intentions but now fraught with misgivings and anxieties. With her lover behind the wheel, Newsom addresses some regrets that haunt the romance, namely her own confusion. “How I said to you, ‘Honey just open your heart’/When I’ve got trouble even opening a honey jar,” she chirps apologetically. Nodding to Joni Mitchell, Newsom’s piano arrangement follows the idiosyncratic rhymes of her inner monologue, twisting and turning to the tenor of her puzzled soul. Though she is at her most musically ambitious on this seven-minute opus, the heart of “Good Intentions Paving Co.” is painfully simple: She just wants to be led away from her own indecision. –Quinn Moreland

Listen: Joanna Newsom, “Good Intentions Paving Co.”

Beyoncé: “Countdown” (2011)

If being in love has a sound, it’s the euphoric vocal run that opens Beyoncé’s “Countdown.” The song quickly gives way to steady snare-drum taps and staccato horn bleats that match the singer’s heartbeat, as she and songwriter The-Dream carefully mix the best sounds across genres—funk, reggae, dancehall, and R&B (that’s a Boys II Men sample)—into one stutter-stepping, ecstatic, instant classic. The premise of “Countdown” has Beyoncé running down all the ways she loves her man, using a lot of clever wordplay that culminates in a tip-your-head-back, shout-it-in-the-club chorus. At the time, she had been with her husband, JAY-Z, for almost a decade; ever the old soul, she isn’t singing about new love, or one-night-stand love, or ephemeral love. This is an effusive ode to her broken-in, ride-or-die, monogamous romance and a swaggy reminder of exactly what will happen to him if he ever messes around. “Countdown” walked so Lemonade could enter couples therapy and run. –Allison P. Davis

Listen: Beyoncé, “Countdown”

M.I.A.: “Bad Girls” (2010)

In the decade since M.I.A. originally released “Bad Girls” on her Vicki Leekz mixtape, the cultural concept of “badass” women has evolved into a meaningless capitalist construct. Now children are reading books about “rebel girls,” aka complex women from history smoothed down by cutesy illustrations and aspirational rhetoric. “Bad Girls” maintains the case for defiance through spikiness: Maya Arulpragasam’s rapping is a blunt and effectively indolent instrument; that clipped, Middle Eastern-inspired synth commands attention like a siren igniting a neighborhood; the S.O.S. signal buried in producer Danja’s beat needles incessantly about the global imperative for women to defy repressive norms (and/or fuck in cars until the windows steam up and the dashboard caves in).

Crucially, “Bad Girls” is no manifesto. M.I.A. reclaims rebelling without a cause from the white, male cult hero, her track’s stubborn swagger an incitement to fecklessness. Proof of concept: The single version of “Bad Girls” came out five days before she flipped the bird at the Super Bowl, a powerfully petulant display that showed up America’s prudish hypocrisy and earned her years of legal strife. “My life, but I broke it,” indeed. –Laura Snapes

Listen: M.I.A., “Bad Girls”

Bon Iver: “Holocene” (2011)

“Holocene” is the magical realism centerpiece of 2011’s Bon Iver, transforming ordinary life into a beautiful kingdom soaked in cosmic meaning. Justin Vernon’s inscrutable falsetto is your shepherd through the wilderness, soft and reaching for the sky. His sonic landscapes on “Holocene” are composed of rolling drums, keyboards, and humming horns, grounded by one looping, acoustic guitar lick. It’s vast yet simple, and can feel almost too sentimental to be sincere. How can this guy be this seriously existential—reflecting on magnificence and the hallways of his life—when he hardly seems to be saying anything at all? “Holocene” is about letting go, imagining the place where you gain clarity, and basking in the feeling. –Matthew Strauss

Listen: Bon Iver, “Holocene”

FKA twigs: “Cellophane” (2019)

In 2018, after three years without a major release, FKA twigs shared a note on her absence: six fibroid tumors had grown in her uterus, causing massive swelling and excruciating pain. For a performer whose force lies in mastery of the self, the medical crisis posed an existential threat: Where to go when the body becomes a site of conflict? “Cellophane” and its surreal video begin inside the question and end somewhere beyond it, plunging the singer into a new phase of self-invention—even as the lyrics fret over romantic inadequacy. Where earlier productions contrasted fragility with strength, “Cellophane” is all transcendent vulnerability. Beneath her vocal acrobatics, the lullaby piano warps and degrades without ever changing key, and its three-and-a-half minutes occupy and stretch out the brief tremor we experience when something cherished threatens to break. –Jazz Monroe

Listen: FKA twigs, “Cellophane”

Todd Terje: “Inspector Norse” (2012)

On “Inspector Norse,” Todd Terje nails his signature trick: a dancefloor classic that’s somehow both coy and preposterous. From the mothership-landing intro to the laser-gun synth pings, you know straight off he has something up his sleeve—yet when he beckons towards the trapdoor, you can’t help but follow. I have what you want, the elastic bassline promises. But you need to come a little closer. To seal the false sense of security, the Norwegian producer layers up familiar ingredients—a kitschy snare, some fog-machine sighs, a little synth calligraphy, all sounds one might hear in moderation at the IKEA café. He preserves the air of cocktail-bar elegance until the last moment, when a distant siren whooshes into the periphery. By then it’s too late. A coil of otherworldly tension, a sensational swing into ecstasy, and we’re plunged into Todd’s magic box.

Some bliss-out tunes adapt easily to your surroundings, scaling down to soundtrack housework or a morning commute. But listening to “Inspector Norse” on a minor occasion feels scandalous, like hanging a Rembrandt in the bathroom. Then again, that’d be another classic Terje prank. Smuggling mystery into the mundane on neon-lit dancefloors, he shows us that nothing’s as plain as daylight would have us believe. –Jazz Monroe

Listen: Todd Terje, “Inspector Norse”

Rosalía: “Malamente (Cap.1: Augurio)” (2018)

“Malamente” marked the arrival of one of the decade’s most remarkable—and unexpected—talents. Even Rosalía’s early fans could hardly have seen it coming: Before “Malamente,” the young Catalan singer was known only for the stripped-down flamenco of her debut album, Los Ángeles, a spine-tingling affair of acoustic guitar and voice. “Malamente” seemed to come from a different universe entirely. The song’s age-old flamenco roots were audible in its fluttering handclaps and in Rosalía’s vocal trills, but every other element—the lurching beat, luminous keys, hiccupping ad-libs, and samples of breaking glass—was unmistakably contemporary. The song’s video filled out that hybrid vision by twisting Spanish iconography old and new (Catholic penitents, bullfighters, tattooed truckers) into a dizzying set of images. “Malamente” jacked into a heretofore undiscovered matrix of possibilities, and a whole new world flashed into being. –Philip Sherburne

Listen: Rosalía, “Malamente (Cap.1: Augurio)”

ANOHNI: “Drone Bomb Me” (2016)

The horror of drone warfare is that it has no constraints. Operated remotely, designed for stealth, and unburdened by national borders or human rights, drones can deliver war at any time, to any place. On “Drone Bomb Me,” ANOHNI channels all that dread and horrible potential by invoking drones as objects of affection. “Blow me from the mountain/And into the sea,” she sings with sweet resignation. It’s a desperate, masochistic request; drones are gods, essentially, and her narrator has chosen to embrace their limitless power.

What makes “Drone Bomb Me” so potent is that this fatalism is not weakness. ANOHNI’s voice is full and resonant even as she solicits a grisly death. Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never’s production is defiantly colorful despite the grim backdrop: The synths swell and twinkle, the drum programming chitters and slaps. It’s jarring for such warmth and personality to be invoked in the context of the cold, mechanical nature of drone warfare, and that’s the point. Lost within those body counts, mission logs, and intelligence reports are real people. For ANOHNI, they may be beyond saving, but they can always be recognized. –Stephen Kearse

Listen: ANOHNI, “Drone Bomb Me”

Drake: “Hold On, We’re Going Home” [ft. Majid Jordan] (2013)

In later years, tinkering with global sounds and codes, Drake would cement himself as one of the decade’s preeminent pop maximalists. Before that, though, there was Aubrey Graham at the horizon, hungry and eager to prove his prowess. In the fall of 2013, Drake released Nothing Was the Same, which found him at the summit of his powers. The album’s biggest single, “Hold On, We’re Going Home,” may very well be the Toronto rapper’s most timeless artifact. It’s raw seduction, a disco-reminiscent ballad that borrows from Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing.” In an interview from that year, Drake said “Hold On” was not the typical fare fans had come to expect, explaining that he wanted the song to be played at weddings and bar mitzvahs in the decades ahead. That sense of legacy is what you hear, cushioned by R&B duo Majid Jordan’s dim coos, and satin-soft production from Noah “40” Shebib and Nineteen85. “Hold On” is not consumed with the moment, as Drake songs routinely are, but with forever. –Jason Parham

Listen: Drake, “Hold On, We’re Going Home” [ft. Majid Jordan]

M83: “Midnight City” (2011)

With “Midnight City,” a whole new generation of teenagers were handed a testament to the life-affirming power of synthesizers. The track catapulted Anthony Gonzalez’s band M83 from beloved indie act to global festival stalwarts through a sublime mix of dream pop, new wave, and neon-lit nostalgia. (There’s also an argument to be made that the pealing outro single-handedly brought saxophones back from the brink.) By now, it’s clear that the song has transcended all of the ’80s tropes that serve as its backbone—if anything, its filtered keyboards and massive, pitched-up hook served as something of a blueprint for countless EDM drops to come. –Noah Yoo

Listen: M83, “Midnight City”

Vampire Weekend: “Hannah Hunt” (2013)

In 1968, Simon & Garfunkel released “America,” a road-trip song about love, ennui, and the search for a country’s soul. “Hannah Hunt,” a patient, folky standout from Vampire Weekend's third album, is built from the same musical and narrative bones, and feels like a worthy update of that boomer touchstone. But where Simon & Garfunkel ultimately grasped for unity amid the tumult of the ’60s—“They’ve all come to look for America,” goes their full-throated finale —Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, a weary millennial, focuses his faith. At the climax of “Hannah Hunt,” snares crack like fireworks, a stately piano enters, and his voice leaps from a croon to a cry as he pledges allegiance to just one person. “If I can’t trust you then damn it, Hannah/There’s no future, there’s no answer,” he yelps. It's the most desperately human Koenig has ever sounded, as he clings to the only thing he can still believe in. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: Vampire Weekend, “Hannah Hunt”

Kanye West: “Runaway” [ft. Pusha T] (2010)

In 2010, Kanye West was just starting to lean into his heel turn. A year after rushing the VMAs stage to defend Beyoncé’s honor—a stunt that still ripples across pop culture, or at least Taylor Swift’s psyche—West released his great redemption, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Its second single was a self-aware, if not quite repentant, exploration of what it means to be a chronic dickhead. Anchored by a cavernous beat and a 16-note piano line ready to soundtrack a movie about a haunted 18th-century doll, “Runaway” is an exquisite piece of music. But the song’s enduring legacy is in its hook: Once West started toasting the douchebags and the assholes, he couldn’t stop. His unbridled, unapologetic id became the governing force of not only his increasingly dodgy career decisions but of the nation, too, so steadily we barely even noticed. –Steve Kandell

Listen: Kanye West, “Runaway” [ft. Pusha T]

Jamie xx: “Gosh” (2015)

“Gosh” opens Jamie xx’s In Colour on a brutal, post-human note: a stripped-down flurry of clattering percussion, a bassline like the emergency alert system on a spaceship about to self-destruct. At the time, the producer said that his album’s copious samples—pulled from old pirate radio snippets, documentaries on early UK garage, and, in the case of “Gosh,” a never-aired pilot for the BBC Radio 1 show One in the Jungle—were all from sources that reminded him of London when he got homesick touring for months at a time. Jamie, like many of his listeners, was barely walking in that era, much less raving. But this isn’t merely borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered ’90s; it’s active and interpretive and alive. “Gosh” feels like the transmission of a memory, the transformation of an old bootleg or VHS recording from inert data into something that flourishes in a whole new era. There’s something cosmically optimistic about the track, and when its melody finally emerges, swooping down from the ceiling and careening around in loop-de-loops, it fully transcends space and time. –Emily Yoshida

Listen: Jamie xx, “Gosh”

The 1975: “Love It If We Made It” (2018)

If any song summarizes this decade—literally—it’s “Love It If We Made It.” According to 1975 singer Matty Healy, for all its promises of progress, “modernity has failed us,” and he’s got the receipts. Over gigantic drums and gleaming synthesizers, he unleashes a torrent of horrors pulled straight from the headlines, including but not limited to: police brutality against black people, fake news, the Syrian refugee crisis, the prison industrial complex, and the opioid epidemic. Had he delivered these realities as a long, sober list, the track would have been too grim, too exhausting. But the 1975 pair this “We Didn’t Start the Fire”-style litany with a technicolor chorus that offers hope in the face of darkness. “And I’d love it if we made it,” Healy bellows over and over with increasing fervor, both a plea and an avowal to make a difference. –Quinn Moreland

Listen: The 1975, “Love It If We Made It”

Rihanna: “Work” [ft. Drake] (2016)

On “Work,” Boi-1da’s gleaming dancehall beat provides an unlikely home for Rihanna’s vulnerable portrayal of the whiplash of a complex love, of being between heartbreak, longing, and self-assurance. The rolling patois of songwriter PARTYNEXTDOOR’s reference track is left intact on the final version, though in Rihanna’s hands, “Work” loses its tempestuousness and gains perpetual-song-of-summer status. Released in the midst of pop radio’s renewed interest in “tropical” sounds, this No. 1 hit was not the Bajan singer’s first foray into the music of her culture but, perhaps until the arrival of her long-rumored reggae album, it is her most complete. –Rawiya Kameir

Listen: Rihanna, “Work” [ft. Drake]

Angel Olsen: “Shut Up Kiss Me” (2016)

An aching rave-up and a frenzy of desire, “Shut Up Kiss Me” anchored My Woman, Angel Olsen’s vibrant, wide-screen third album. The song enters a long line of kissability anthems—part girl-group yearning à la the Shangri-Las’ “Give Him a Great Big Kiss,” part Lucinda Williams sass à la “Passionate Kisses.” Olsen steps up with deceptively cool-headed intentions: “We could still be having some sweet memories,” she wagers, but as each word becomes a staccatoed punch, she lets herself fly. When she hollers “I’m still young!” it is a full-body grasp at life itself. “Shut Up Kiss Me” is a glitter-bomb testament to the mania of longing, a fight song for the human heart in all its exhausting complexity. –Jenn Pelly

Listen: Angel Olsen, “Shut Up Kiss Me”

Chief Keef: “I Don’t Like” [ft. Lil Reese] (2012)

In the early 2010s, Chief Keef was a True Religion jeans-wearing teenager whose main concern was escaping house arrest. He released “I Don’t Like” in an effort to solidify his local Chicago fame, but he ended up stumbling into virality and worldwide renown. With its harsh, gut-wrenching street talk over a Young Chop production that incorporated thudding drums, tinny chimes, and horror-film melodies, the song established drill music as a legitimate hip-hop subgenre. Kanye West would even tap Keef for a remix of the track, which landed on G.O.O.D. Music’s Cruel Summer compilation. At the time, hip-hop didn’t know how to respond to this rugged teen; the industry couldn’t account for the level of internet and street popularity Keef had achieved. Years later, it’s still trying to catch up. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: Chief Keef, “I Don’t Like” [ft. Lil Reese]

Sky Ferreira: “Everything Is Embarrassing” (2012)

There is no more perfect way to describe life than as embarrassing. Painful? Sure. Fun? Sometimes. Weird? If you’re lucky. But embarrassing? Always. This song, written by Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes, is nominally a breakup song. But when Sky Ferreira sings, “You know I’m trying, I was always trying,” she may as well be outlining a thesis on how best to live in the face of daily humiliation. What could be more mortifying than living earnestly in a world determined to make a joke out of everything? Ferreira, an L.A. singer with a husky voice and a difficult past, has a flair for making the dramatic seem commonplace (and vice versa), especially in contrast with Hynes signature funk-lite guitar strutting. It all turns “Everything Is Embarrassing” into a quirky, ’80s-tinged anthem for anyone flinching through their days. –Matthew Schnipper

Listen: Sky Ferreira, “Everything Is Embarrassing”

Bill Callahan: “Riding for the Feeling” (2011)

Bill Callahan has become a master of portraying isolation throughout his three-decade career, but few of his songs do so more acutely than “Riding for the Feeling.” It’s sung by a man perpetually exiting crowded rooms—a freeze-frame on desolation that offers no solutions, just invisible companionship. The song’s arrangement is sparse but stirring—brushed snare and twangs of electric guitar neither overpower nor dissolve under Callahan’s weighty baritone. At one point, he describes the final exchange between a longing crowd and a reticent performer. “I asked the room if I’d said enough/No one really answered,” Callahan deadpans. “They just said, ‘Don't go, don't go…’” A picture of outstretched arms comes into focus, but it’s clear that their reach provides no comfort. Later, he finds himself on a hotel bed, tuned in to a muted television. That scrap of information sets an entire scene; you get the sense that the hotel isn’t a very nice one, and the TV, though silent, emits just enough light to make it feel a little less lonely. –Madison Bloom

Listen: Bill Callahan, “Riding for the Feeling”

Lil Uzi Vert: “XO TOUR Llif3” (2017)

Lil Uzi Vert’s “XO TOUR Lif3” was never supposed to be a hit. The single was included as part of a throwaway four-track EP that was meant to fill time leading up to the Philadelphia rapper’s major label debut, Luv Is Rage 2. But as soon as the track was uploaded to SoundCloud, gloomy lyrics like “Push me to the edge, all my friends are dead” and “Xanny help the pain” went viral; so did Uzi’s delivery, which made him sound like a pop-punk prince. Even the instrumental, which producer TM88 recorded using an old computer and a Beats Pill, is irresistible. For a while, few took Uzi seriously as a hitmaker. But as “XO TOUR Llif3” wormed its way toward ubiquity, becoming the SoundCloud generation’s most influential song, it established Uzi as one of hip-hop’s most distinctive voices. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen: Lil Uzi Vert, “XO TOUR Llif3”

Lana Del Rey: “Video Games” (2011)

When Lana Del Rey first arrived, she was bored and glamorous, looking by turns like a queen of Old Hollywood and like she was too young to be smoking. Her makeshift visual for “Video Games” confronted the incongruity without shame: The retro-gazing torch singer uploading webcam footage to YouTube, the beautiful pop star acquiescing to feeling ignored. The most familiar version of “Video Games” is actually the rough mix, a working draft built over live vocals and piano. It’s not quite polished, and like the grain on a photograph, that’s part of its charm. Tolling church bells, harp arpeggios, and chilly gasps of electric air swirl around submerged 808 hits, as Lana, low and smooth, sounds self-assured or desperate or even sarcastic. “They say that the world was built for two/Only worth living if somebody is loving you,” she sang, pining after a man-shaped vacancy, as if self-sacrifice could make her any less alone. It was outright depressing, and she made it look good. –Anna Gaca

Listen: Lana Del Rey, “Video Games”

Solange: “Cranes in the Sky” (2016)

Solange dropped A Seat at the Table less than six weeks before America elected Donald Trump as its 45th president. For people who had been listening to the album on repeat during that time, putting on “Cranes in the Sky,” its most moving track, was like popping an Emergen-C for a flu we didn’t even know we were in danger of contracting.

“Cranes” is a soft-power anthem for frightening times, noncoercive yet still inspiring. It’s the product of Solange working through the trauma, sadness, and disappointment of being a black woman in this society. It’s the song you hear when you break through to the other side—when you are stepping firmly into joy and identity—and it’s musically structured to mimic the journey: airy and peaceful and ponderous, sometimes a little bit fragile, but bold in its choices. There’s so much space around Solange’s calm, and the song’s jazzy, soulful rhythms are carefully selected to evoke a whole history of black musicians, black culture, and black spirituality. It’s notable that Solange never belts, and the climax of “Cranes” isn’t a noisy ascension but a quiet one, right at the end: her voice, delicately scaling the mountain to reach Minnie Ripperton heights.

At a time when power is something loud and dangerous and brash, “Cranes in the Sky” is an atypical song of revolution. It will be played endlessly, hopefully in less toxic times—not during rallies, or when a candidate walks onstage, but in quiet moments when we need to reflect, recharge, and rediscover our own beauty. –Allison P. Davis

Listen: Solange, “Cranes in the Sky”

Mitski: “Your Best American Girl” (2016)

Sometimes, love isn’t enough. On “Your Best American Girl,” despite how Mitski strives and stretches to fit into the world of her “all-American boy,” it doesn’t quite work. The Japanese-American indie rocker feels the pull of her heritage and the traditions her parents raised her with, and must accept they are incompatible with his.

Puberty 2, Mitski’s fourth album, runs deep with such moments of questioning, as she navigates themes of loneliness, depression, and lust. Love isn’t the deus ex machina to solve any of them; that’s the stuff of blonder romantic heroines onscreen. Instead, she offers rougher truths, and none wiser than in this song: Over grandly ringing arena guitars and the kind of distortion that can drown out saner thoughts, Mitski elegantly releases her love, in a sad yet prideful push, valuing herself above tempting conformity. How did her Captain America take this? Did he object? We’ll never know, because his voice and thoughts are not heard. This song is not about his experience. It’s about hers. –Stacey Anderson

Listen: Mitski, “Your Best American Girl”

Azealia Banks: “212” (2011)

“212” launched the force that is Azealia Banks by way of the sweet-voiced theater nerd’s sneer of, “I’ma ruin you, cunt.” It’s a ratatat MC in the Harlem tradition, twisting her claymation cadences around a frothy house beat. It’s a New Yorker’s goodbye to New York, an overdue star’s coming-out party, and a warning to herself. (It was also a YouTube smash before the industry knew what to do with those.) Flipping a previously obscure Belgian dance track, Azealia Banks was one of the decade’s first to recognize that the sound of vogue culture would reverberate far beyond the city. Celebrated French-Canadian producers Lunice and Jacques Greene make cameos in the unforgettable black-and-white video, but only cameos: “212” felt like pure Banks, the unfiltered arrival of a fiery new voice. And although her personal controversies have largely overshadowed her music by now, this singular track can still raze anything that dares get in its way. –Marc Hogan

Listen: Azealia Banks, “212”

Frank Ocean: “Thinkin Bout You” (2012)

On December 27th, 2011, in the thin air of a commercial airliner flying back to Los Angeles, Frank Ocean typed a few hundred words that slowly darkened the glow of a laptop screen. They told the story of his first love—a man—and that nameless summer longing that whistles through us all. He kept his thoughts private for awhile, and instead posted a cryptic message on his Tumblr: “fuck. that was hard to write.” When he did publish his writing, an open letter, it was on July 4th the following year, still three years before the U.S. Supreme Court would strike down the ban on same-sex marriage, but just days before he surprise-released his official debut, Channel Orange. “I feel like a free man,” Ocean concluded in the letter. “If I listen closely.. I can hear the sky falling, too.” What an unprecedented act of bravery in the history of black music, of queer music, of all music; he opened the door so that we could at once pour ourselves into his light. It was the lens through which we listened to Channel Orange, and no song echoes the love, the glow, the tectonic impact of Frank Ocean more than “Thinkin Bout You.”

Call it R&B, or nü-doo-wop, or the music from the guy in Odd Future who sings, whatever you want, “Thinkin Bout You” belongs in a delirious world of its own. The song’s direct address is shaded with nostalgia and fabulism, its vision so wide it takes cues from ’70s songwriter Albert Hammond, Prince’s Sign “O” the Times, and country legend George Strait. Every single moment, from the tornado to Southern California to the beach house in Idaho, feels like Ocean is flying at the ceiling unlimited: when the snare eighth-notes lock-in with Ocean’s vocals, when he leaps out of nowhere to the falsetto in the chorus, when he sings, “Yes, of course I remember/How could I forget how you feel?” For Ocean, it’s a foregone conclusion—yes, of course—that those endless days and nights feeling that “new feel” will last forever. We all have that one summer, that one love that altered the course of our lives. This was Frank Ocean’s, and he graciously let it be ours, too. –Jeremy D. Larson

Listen: Frank Ocean, “Thinkin Bout You”

Beyoncé: “Formation” (2016)

The day after Trayvon Martin’s birthday, Beyoncé unceremoniously uploaded “Formation” onto her website. The tension of the song was immediate from the siren of Mike WiLL’s hypnotic two-note opening: It felt viscerally reactive to the moment, a response to the murder of black people at the hands of the police, a reminder—via the opening voice of Messy Mya from beyond the grave—that the cyclical nature of violence is heightened among communities forgotten by the government. It reminded me of the story behind Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn,” a furious song Simone wrote in 1964 as an antidote to internal anger, delivered with the pep of a show tune, that reflected on the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers and a white-supremacist attack on an Alabama church that killed four young girls. Simone once said, “We will shape and mold this country or it will not be molded and shaped at all anymore.” When Beyoncé performed “Formation” at the 2016 Super Bowl halftime show, the day after its release, wearing the bandoliers of the Black Panthers, it felt like she was ready to take the reins and be seen doing so.

In the unforgettable video, Beyoncé crouches on a cop car submerged alongside houses in New Orleans devastated by natural disaster, the scene interspersed with images of people dancing in the dark—it’s the no-fucks vibrancy of a culture that persists when the systems surrounding them have been sucked into the muck and left to languish. Beyoncé celebrates the Southern black vernacular and Southern black culture: marching bands, cowboys, step squads, Mardi Gras, and bounce queens appear in the video, and in the song, she flaunts her “baby hair and afros” and her “negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils.”

Though the song was thoroughly and specifically for and about black women and their unseen labor, the whole world was quick to rally behind another Bey hit. Hillary Clinton, hot on the campaign trail, would mention she had hot sauce in her bag on an interview with long-running hip-hop radio show, “The Breakfast Club,” Etsy would commodify her language and iconography, so that women of every race could get in formation. The next year, “Formation” would lose two Grammys to Adele’s “Hello,” but the phrase “OK ladies, now let’s get in formation” would appear across signs at the Women’s March and in allyship alongside the #MeToo movement, reinvigorated from a decade’s existence by the Weinstein allegations. The song’s initial appeal was an awakening for a country in crisis. But it will live on as a reminder of the slow, persistent, daily work of organizing and the power of resilience and protest—the importance of holding grief, anger, hope, and pride side by side. –Puja Patel

Listen: Beyoncé, “Formation”

Robyn: “Dancing on My Own” (2010)

New York City’s subway system is typically associated with maddening delays, twitchy vermin, and, occasionally, traces of the bubonic plague. It is a place where you strap on headphones like armor and try to block out humanity. But everything changed for a few minutes on the night of March 8, 2019. That’s when a hundred-strong gaggle of Robyn fans, clinging to the thrill of just having seen their hero onstage at Madison Square Garden, began singing, jumping, and goofily smiling along with a song about stomping through heartbreak, turning a filthy subway platform in the middle of Manhattan into an ecstatic summit. Such is the power of “Dancing on My Own.”

A month after that impromptu party, the bubbling anthem, which first hit the internet in the spring of 2010, was finally certified platinum in America—cosmic justice for a song that never touched the Billboard Hot 100 but still served as a lodestar for so much of this decade’s pop. With “Dancing on My Own,” from her defining album Body Talk, Robyn took the euphoric ache of classic house and disco, spiked it with her own obsessive brand of vulnerability, and set a blueprint for everyone from Lorde to St. Vincent to Taylor Swift to worshipfully follow.

At its core, the song is an exploration of contradictions: between the mechanized backbeat and Robyn’s all-too-human vocals; between a dancefloor’s collective catharsis and the isolation of being trapped inside your own skin; between the despair of the heart and the resilience of the body. “I’m right over here, why can’t you see me?” Robyn pleads to an oblivious ex making out with someone new across the club. For all of its invisible voyeurism, though, “Dancing on My Own” has a regenerative ability to make anyone who hears it feel hopelessly, resolutely seen. –Ryan Dombal

Listen: Robyn, “Dancing on My Own”

Grimes: “Oblivion” (2012)

In the seven years since Grimes released her breakout hit, increasingly outlandish cycles of outrage have engulfed the Canadian singer, songwriter, and producer born Claire Boucher. Most recently, it was her loyalty to a future A.I. dictatorship that got people wondering whether she was some kind of techno-fascist. But what Grimes’ critics fail to realize is that she has always looked to what’s next in order to soothe her present. You can hear it on “Oblivion,” with its gargled bass line that still sounds tailor-made for the exact moment when aliens lower their drawbridge onto Earth.

Boucher wrote the Visions single after experiencing an assault she described as “one of the most shattering experiences of my life,” the kind that leaves you on the back foot in perpetuity. “And now I’m left behind, all the time,” she sang, a devastating sentiment rendered in succubus sing-song, and a setback transcended by the track’s forward-thinking production. Ultimately, “Oblivion” galvanized Boucher’s pain into a complex anthem of vulnerability and nihilism that defiantly eludes a clear reading—a reminder to never stop searching for nuance as you look ahead. –Laura Snapes

Listen: Grimes, “Oblivion”

Kendrick Lamar: “Alright” (2015)

It’s not every day, or even every decade, that a song will become platinum certified, Grammy recognized, street ratified, activist endorsed, and a new nominee for Black National Anthem; that it’ll be just as effective performed before a massive festival audience or chanted on the front lines at protests; that it’ll serve as a war cry against police brutality, against Trump, for the survival of the disenfranchised. Inspired by a trip to South Africa, Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” bears a message of unbreakable optimism in the face of hardship: “We gon’ be alright!” repeats Pharrell, who helped write and produce the song. Endurance, it assures, will ensure a more positive tomorrow. “Alls my life I’ve had to fight, nigga!” Kendrick howls, echoing writer and activist Alice Walker on the black American experience. Fighting is the only way we know forward.

The centerpiece of Kendrick’s most ambitious opus, To Pimp a Butterfly, “Alright” permeated the collective consciousness in the spring and summer of 2015. It was around the time people became tragically familiar with names like Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland, and when nine black people were shot and killed inside of a historic church in Charleston, South Carolina. As a cornerstone of the #BlackLivesMatter canon, the song seemed like a beacon of light ushering us away from terror. You could argue that things are worse now than they were then, that its hope was misplaced. But “Alright” isn’t promising a better world, just that we’ll find a way to survive the one we have. It is a defense mechanism, pining for an aspirational future—maybe even a nonexistent one—as it helps us cope with our chaotic present.

For the entire 2010s, from Section.80’s survivalist stories of the post-Reagan hood to good kid, m.A.A.d. city’s autobiographical cinema on the futile fight to escape the quicksand of street life, Kendrick’s work has often dealt with persisting under perilous circumstances. To Pimp a Butterfly considers oppression’s sprawling impact, from colorism to survivor’s guilt, longing for a way we could all make it out together. To that end, “Alright” serves as a thesis statement of sorts: that the path through life’s trials begins with striving for more, for better. You can imagine the characters who cycle in and out of his songs whispering “We gon’ be alright” to themselves, or reassuring loved ones between sighs, trying to make it through the next day. Here, as horns wail and drums snap, there is a sense that the “we” is actually unfathomable, a force that can overcome anything when banded as one. –Sheldon Pearce

Listen: Kendrick Lamar, “Alright”