This list was really hard this year! Because for the first time in a couple years, I actually spent a lot of time listening to new music and successfully sought out new-to-me stuff that I ended up loving! I don’t want to love Spotify as much as I do, but without it I would be much less musically educated.
5. Clara Rockmore, “Air”
This is probably the weirdest song that will ever make it on a Totally Top Five list from me, but if you can’t be weird on the internet, what the hell is the internet for?! I knew about the theremin prior to Google’s Clara Rockmore doodle, but I hadn’t heard of her. And like a lot of people, I ended up listening to the Lost Theremin Album on repeat for weeks afterward. It’s so beautiful and so unsettling and other-worldly and weirdly vocal without having vocals. It was great music for the office not only because it wasn’t distracting, but because it would freak people out a little bit and make them leave me alone.
4. A Tribe Called Red, “Sisters (featuring Northern Voice)”
I LOVE A TRIBE CALLED RED. And this song is so so so sooooooo good. And the video is so fun and charming and TO BE FRANK, if it were full of white people, it would have been HUGELY popular which is some bullshit. The beat is so good and so danceable and I have yet to ever skip it when it has come up on shuffle. If you don’t know A Tribe Called Red, remedy that immediately. I’m particularly fond of “Electric Pow Wow Drum” and “Suplex” and “Burn Your Village to the Ground” which has been my Thanksgiving anthem for the last two years.
3. AWOLNATION, “Hollow Moon (Bad Wolf)”
Like everyone else on the planet, I was extremely obsessed with “Sail” waybackwhen and was bummed when the rest of the album didn’t at all live up to the single, but I feel like “Hollow Moon” and the rest of Run was worth waiting for. I have scream-sung “Motherfucker, I’ll be back from the dead soon” far more often and far more passionately than I should probably admit to, but it’s, like, strangely empowering? It’s also just a really solid song from beginning to end. I also love “Run” aka that song everyone was using to make Vines for like a long time and “Woman Woman” and “Fat Face” and “Like People, Like Plastic” and “I Am” and “Drinking Lightning” and “Jailbreak”. SOLID ALBUM.
2. CL x Diplo x Riff Raff x OG Maco, “Doctor Pepper”
THIS SONG IS SO DUMB AND SO GOOD. I don’t know how to explain my attraction and devotion to this song, but it is very much this year’s “Hood Go Crazy” because I could NOT stop listening to it and all I wanted to do was blare it in the car with my windows down as loudly and as often as possible. It has also frequently made me “dance” uncontrollably. This is the purest, most wonderful kind of jam because I can’t explain what the hell is going on in it and I don’t care AT ALL. It’s just GOOD.
1. The 1975, “Love Me”
This was by far my most listened-to song this year and I still think it’s as good as I did the very first time I heard it after Sonia put it on a playlist and changed my life forever. There is Bowie in this song. There is great 80s synth in this. There is Steven Tyler in this song. There is Talking Heads in this song. There is “Love Stinks” in this song! This is one of those songs that immediately makes you go and dig through the artist’s entire library, but there isn’t anything in The 1975’s catalog that comes anywhere NEAR this one. Bands with amazing one-offs are LIFE-RUINERS, but what a great way to go.
DISCLAIMER: I am posting these videos with the disclaimer that I haven’t watched any of them in full except A Tribe Called Red. Apologies if they’re NSFW/problematic/generally terrible.
