"Wild God" by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

MG:

Lately, I've been really into (pop) physics. It's an outgrowth of Ancient Aliens and grief and the curiosity that guides me through life. What is life? As embarrassing as it is to wonder, I do. One going concern is a supposed theory of everything, a way to unite the forces of nature (listen, I'm not an expert, but can you believe that, like, electromagnetism and weak and strong nuclear force make basic sense together but conflict completely with gravity?) and make sense of the universe and its existence. I bring this up to say that, in his own way, Nick Cave is also searching for that theory of everything, attempting to unify his catalog under his latest release. "Wild God" refers directly back to "Jubilee Street," it ties itself up in the ecclesiastical robes of Abattoir Blues, it smears across its face the schmaltz of Nocturama. It's kind of, you know, a Taylor Swift song? It's kind of fanservice of the highest order. What "Wild God" lacks is the desperate desire to prove itself that shaded the bulk of Cave's catalog, as well as the challenging creative partnerships that have been lost along the way. As a critic, I think "Wild God" is a bad song, but as a fan and as a human being more generally, it does have some irresistible charm. It's good to hear Nick Cave is doing so well; it's clear that whether or not I'd rather hear it performed on sawing guitars, he remains the consummate conductor of the ecstatic breakdown.

DV:

It's weirdly endearing the way Nick Cave is making corniness an increasing part of his thing as he ages. And if I'm being honest obviously we've both gotten older; maybe it's my own tolerance for it that's increased. But I still remember the first time I heard "No Pussy Blues" in 2007 and thinking 50-year-old Nick was a little old for it, and man if there's a side of himself he had to lean into we're probably better off having it be this one. "Wild God" is treacle, but it's the kind of treacle Cave has always excelled at - dirty and a bit rambling, and building to the kind of epiphany that aims to erase any questions in a wave of emotion. The one time I saw Nick Cave perform, he climbed off the stage and stalked across the chairs in the theater, picking his way through the audience like a giant preaching spider. Since then whenever I hear a new Nick Cave song I think, could he credibly sing this while straddling two rows of auditorium chairs? "Wild God" seems designed for it.

"superglue (live in little rock)" by joan

DV:

Why am I being drowned in articles about an alleged second wave of shoegaze when there's a Grey's Anatomy-core revival happening right now? "superglue" could be Howie Day with those guitars or Snow Patrol with those guitars, and I'm not sure how old the duo behind joan are but for all I know they hit LiteFM and Delilah at exactly the right age for that era of glurge-pop to be formative. I was old enough to recoil a little bit, but not so old that it didn't get into my veins when I was working as a (bad) line cook in a kitchen where the radio was permanently tuned to the Adult Alternative station. I never planned to know all the words to either "Hey There Delilah" or "Boulevard of Broken Dreams", and yet I do, and those songs also run together in my head sometimes even though it's been a lifetime since then. And when they run together, as all those Greys-core songs do, they sound something like "superglue." This is especially true in its "live" incarnation, where "superglue" has got to be one of the least live live songs I've heard in decades, bigger and wider than reality, truer to the more-is-more ethos of the mid-2000s than any pure studio recording ever could be. It's massive and heartrending, the perfect song to hear in between snippets of tough relationship advice.

MG:

I think (I'm pretty sure) this is Christian rock (as was a lot of that gorgeous, blissful, lightspun 00s guitar!) but here's the thing about music that's attempting to seduce you into a system of belief -- it's serious about its persuasion! "superglue" is lovely, as sticky as its title suggests, and soothing and comforting, too. After a lot of here and there, I decidedly do not believe in God, but I continue to find the ritual and community of value and that's where something like "superglue" fits. The "tough relationship advice" (or devastating sorrow, profoundly wounding loss, inherent and entrenched uncaring nature of existence -- take your pick) will come for you whether you are out there doing some smiling carpe diem or whether you have velcroed yourself to the walls of your mind. joan attempt to offer some relief, some balm for the wound we are all born from and, yes, it's musical morphine, but no, that's not so bad.

"summer after senior year" by Sarah Kang ft. Michael Carreon

DV:

As half of a web site that has a complicated relationship with nostalgia, and also as someone fully into middle age at this point, I'm fascinated by how my relationship to the idea of freedom has changed as I've gotten older. Was there a time in my life when the summer after senior year of high school felt like the most free I'd ever been? I don't actually think so - but there was a time when I thought that about having been in college itself, and then a time when I felt it about the year I was waiting tables and cooking and getting high, and then a time when I felt it about having lived around the corner from a music venue and spending nights filling garbage bags with four loko cans, and then and then. Maybe someday that wheel will stop turning! But I listen to Sarah Kang sing, "But we'll never be as free/ As the summer after senior year" and this feels like a particularly aged reaction but I want to say, "Just give it a couple years." You were always freer than you thought, and freedom works on a sliding scale, and maybe it's better to not romanticize a time when you didn't have money or needed to get your kicks by driving a little too fast. There are better things, freer things, just around the corner. It does sound catchy as hell though, which is a credit to Kang. For a moment there I was back listening to Radiohead on a cassette tape adapter plugged into a walkman, driving around the south side of Chicago trying to find something to do, and then I remembered that unloading trucks at a toy store for minimum wage really fucking sucked.

MG:

Wow, this song is awful! Setting aside any memories I might share as a counterpoint to "Summer After Senior Year" what, I ask you Sarah Kang and Michael Carreon, what the fuck is up with all the references to money and banking? This song opens with the line "never thought about taxes" and also works in $5, 401ks, and the, I believe false, admission that the writer "never stepped foot inside of a bank." This song is as much about these ideas as it is about how free it is to drive down the interstate with the wind in your hair and the radio turned up loud. And I find that on the bad side of weird, way too weird to be catchy. Anyway, I turned 25 in 2010, so I am almost a decade older than the song's narrator, but we're both in our 30s at this point. I had, in fact, set foot in a bank before graduating high school! I got my first job in the summer between my junior and senior year and, you won't believe this, I needed a bank account to cash my paychecks (if I didn't want to pay a vig to the payday loan store, but you better believe there were weeks where I did that, too!) I thought about taxes a lot because if I had precisely $10.21 and a tube of lipstick cost $8.49, would I have enough to pay the tax on that tube of lipstick (or would I steal it?) I agree that $5 was about the cost of a school lunch, but my parents paid for that and when they didn't, the school district gave me a peanut butter sandwich for free. I will concede that I did not know anything about a 401k -- embarrassingly, but honestly, I still don't know anything about a 401k.

I think these song lyrics were AI generated. They are almost like real song lyrics, almost.

"Texas Hold 'Em" by Beyoncé

DV:

Conceptually I love the idea of Beyoncé making a country album - it's seemed like one was just around the corner ever since her CMAs performance with The Chicks eight(!) years ago. And making this Act II of the Renaissance project, reclaiming country music as Black music, makes perfect sense. I just wish the songs themselves didn't leave me so underwhelmed. "Texas Hold 'Em" is cute, don't get me wrong! It's catchy and memorable and fantastically produced - immaculate without being overpolished. It features some incredible artists who have been in the country/Americana space for years and deserve the bigger spotlight. I like it. But I also remember the first time I heard both "Break My Soul" and "Formation", and how both of those songs sounded like absolute revelations - lightning bolts in pop wrappers. "Texas Hold 'Em" sounds like a country song and feels like a country song, which is not an easy thing to pull off. But that's about as far as it goes - and it's not really fair to Bey, but I was expecting something more. I'm curious to see where the rest of the album lands, and I'm even more curious to see how country radio treats this - "Daddy Lessons" didn't even appear on the airplay charts.

MG:

The fact that "Texas Hold 'Em" was preceded by the return of Beyoncé's silly side via a Verizon Super Bowl commercial was, I think, a big clue about where along the spectrum of radio friendliness this first country single would fall. Before that commercial I, too, expected a more searing, rootsy, and avant-electronic exploration of the genre -- the kind of single that makes a case for Gil Scott Heron as a country artist. But I have to say, I'm actually delighted she swerved and I think it's classic Beyoncé to upend our desires, to challenge us in this way. As the introduction to the second act of Renaissance, "Texas Hold 'Em" clarifies the project's purpose a step further: it's an exploration of dance music foremost. This means it's not high concept art, not a history lesson, and not an autobiography even as it continues to use those creative lenses. On the Monday post-Super Bowl DV lamented to me that this song isn't forward enough, that it was written six years ago and it sounds like it, that it isn't breaking new ground in country music. This is all true, and I think it's the best criticism of this single, but neither then nor now is the charting country music suitable for line dancing. "Texas Hold 'Em" with its driving rhythm and bouncy swing just about demands you rock on your boot heel or slap your knee at the bar counter. The premise is uncomplicated and Beyoncé delivers -- whether or not "Texas Hold 'Em" gets airplay is kind of irrelevant, this is a song that belongs on the dancefloor.

"Gift Horse" by IDLES

MG:

When I was about 12 years old I discovered I was angry. It might have been puberty back then but I never outgrew it, I'm still so fucking angry. I think it's the anger that gave me my incredible tolerance for loud music that goes nowhere, a low end that thuds around like a body farting out meat byproduct, a flourishing vocal where the full, ruffled skirt bottom sweeps from milky menacing to glass-eyed violence across the ballroom floor. I'm not familiar with IDLES outside of this album cycle (but I read the internet, I know the fans aren't happy, and, whatever, they're wrong) yet I'm delighted to hear the course correction they've done on Franz Ferdinand's debut. "Gift Horse" is as camp and silly, as imbued with the restless tension of dance music, but without the slick frippery and boyish hairdos. It's too angry to be cute! And yet it is kind of cute that this otherwise blandly well regarded post-punk troupe went for it, let it be explosive and meaningless and fun.

DV:

I wouldn't call this fun so much as bracing, but then in 2024 is there really all that much difference? It's a gust of wind off Lake Michigan that stings your face enough that you remember you're alive. The anger tells you that you can still feel, the howling guitars and hoarsely reverbed vocals and staccato drum fills reinforce the lesson. If "Gift Horse" has more to say beyond sound, it escapes me. And I do kinda wish it had something to offer beyond "look at him go" and a bridge that sure seems to allude to a bunch of things I have no real context for. But I appreciate what's here. It's January in Chicago so we've seamlessly transitioned from the coldest days of the year to the greyest and rainiest; sometimes you need a catchy burst of wild noise hitting you in the face when you turn the corner.

"CUT MY HEART OUT" by daine

DV:

At first I wondered why "CUT MY HEART OUT" sounded so Charli-esque, but looking at the producer credits clarified: Marcus Andersson worked with Rina Sawayama and Ashnikko; Casey MQ has done a bunch of songs with Dorian Electra. Of course this sounds like Charli - and specifically Charli's work with SOPHIE - because all the rest of them do too. It's been three years since SOPHIE's tragic death and you still can't miss the influence of the work SOPHIE left behind, solo but especially with Charli. And this makes sense! Their work was visionary and unmistakable; I may not have loved it but I respected it. But that means that when I hear second-wave echoes of it now, I wonder why these artists can't push themselves a little harder - it's been three years, surely there's gotta be some path forward. "CUT MY HEART OUT" is catchy as anything off the Vroom Vroom EP and daine is working to say something about heartbreak by using medical terminology, but the production means they mostly sound like they're spooning out someone else's leftovers.

MG:

Making "CUT MY HEART OUT" TikTok length means that the song is totally devoid of depth of any kind. It's got just enough runway to establish a metaphor and then it's gone, a dot on the horizon line. "CUT MY HEART OUT" is actively forgettable as it plays -- the production is a rote hyperpop mass manufacture complete with robotic drums and ersatz glitches and daine's voice is so pitch-shifted they could be literally anyone singing. The only even faint glimmer of something slightly more than lukewarm microwaved leftovers is the vaguely horrific hospital imagery of the second verse, but even there we'd be better served if yeule was the lyricist.

"Hades Moon" by Akenya

DV:

As I understand it this is about astrology, but I don't understand astrology and I do understand Greek mythology, so let's start there. It's always felt a bit like revisionism the way that Hades gets turned into a figure of negativity. We watch disney's Hercules movie and he's a catty villain aiming to overthrow his successful brother Zeus, a loving father and husband to his loving wife Hera, when like even the most cursory glance at an actual Greek myth shows both Zeus and Hera to be the worst (but especially Zeus) and Hades to be....also a piece of shit but kinda middle-of-the-pack as Olympians go. Probably not as bad as Athena, probably worse than Hephaestus. On "Hades Moon" Akenya doesn't treat him like a villain, which I appreciate. There's a complexity here, in the way that this will pass but at the same time isn't entirely unwelcome. It's mirrored by the depth in the production, a layered and pleasantly funky beat that reveals more detail the closer you listen. Akenya's vocals are similarly complex, at times backing up the synths and melting into the background, at others playing a part of the percussion, only to leap out for emphasis as a massed whole. Death is a transformation, as she reminds us in the extended outro. Why shouldn't a song invoking Hades adopt a similar approach?

MG:

As a proper dilettante, I know a little bit about both these things, but an internet search really helped. Hades moon -- it's the mother wound! This concept is not only astrology, not only Greek mythology, but also awash in modern psychology. Honestly, quite a feat considering that "Hades Moon," as I hear it, is mostly about surviving a doomed romance. Akenya's work here is as dense and multi-faceted as our complicated attempt at unpacking it might suggest; she touches on generational trauma in the song's opening turns but she also drapes the back half in luxurious, silky vamps that glow with sophistication, like an Hermes scarf placed over a table lamp. She's made something magnificent of her healing, stripping back the often ugly growth process inherent in transformation and revealing the alluring self submerged beneath the pain.

"The Precision of Infinity" by Jlin ft. Philip Glass

MG:

When I read that the upcoming Jlin release would feature Philip Glass my mind immediately skipped several more logical conclusions and jumped straight to "new Philip Glass composition on the Jlin album!" apparently mistaking "feature" for "collaboration." Alas, that is not the case, but she does sample my (and everyone's, I'm sure) favorite Philip Glass, the Metamorphosis suite from Solo Piano. The resulting track is something of a modern mash-up, Jlin's laser cut footwork production set against Glass's sumptuous, roiling piano. What the two unlikely track-mates share is their excess of energy. I believe I bought Solo Piano my senior year of high school because it was the only Philip Glass CD Borders had in stock and sometimes I would put it on to "relax" because it was one of the only pieces of instrumental music I owned. Unsurprisingly, I never felt even slightly soothed by this album -- it's a life cycle that completes in a little over 30 minutes. (The other piece of instrumental music I owned was Godspeed You! Black Emperor's Yanqui U.X.O. I don't think music really, like, can be relaxing for me, but that's another post.) Pairing this sort of warm, accelerated, organic process with cold, futuristic, hyperactive club rhythms feels like another permutation of the man machine. Jlin remains on the cutting edge of these experiments, unafraid to embrace the often alienating space of contemporary classical music and unyielding in her own vision.

DV:

I do think it's interesting how increasingly Jlin seems aligned with contemporary classical. This isn't new exactly - she was collaborating with William Basinski way back in 2017. But something like "The Precision of Infinity" and its near-bassless beauty seems designed more for seated appreciation than mass movement: I can imagine watching a performance of it while seated in an auditorium balcony much more easily than I can picture it being dropped in a sweaty basement rave. The beauty of Jlin's work is that it wouldn't be out of place in either setting, that even if she's leaning a bit further toward an audience that wouldn't know what to do with Smartbar if they stumbled in after a Cubs game, she's still making music that could be played there by a DJ who knew what they were doing. And maybe I'm not being entirely fair here. The concept for "The Precision of Infinity" is "dance music for people who like piano suites", but the execution is visceral enough to remind me that sometimes those are the same people who can hold it down on the dancefloor until after dawn.

"Can't Take It Slow" by Citizen

DV:

We spent so much time recently talking about how it's "such a good time for guitars" and "guitars are so back" et cetera that it's a little refreshing to come across "Can't Take It Slow" and realize oh wait, I was just hearing the good guitar songs. Just to be clear: this isn't the world's worst song, a travesty that makes me question whether I've ever liked a guitar in my life. But it is so aggressively mediocre that it suggests landfill indie or whatever we called it in this country has fully resurrected itself for a new generation. "Can't Take It Slow" manages the feat of being shrill and yet instantly forgettable, a combination of weak production and repetitive hooks. Maybe the loudness wars are back too, or maybe they never really left. There's a bass guitar playing throughout this song, according to the video! You'd never know it.

MG:

Ok, I brought this to the GNJ workbench and I don't disagree with anything DV wrote, but what follows will be a little context as to why this song is defining our critical boundaries in the year 2024. While certain aspects of SiriusXMU have grown on me over the years (shout out to Josiah, I used to laugh at him for crying over Radiohead records at family gatherings but now I welcome his persistent sunniness and try a bit too hard to guess his opinions on Big Thief!) others have grown mold and those others are the artist bumpers they play before singles in heavy rotation. (If you aren't familiar, these are basically like little 15 second ads for the song that follows, recorded by the artist and nominally explaining what the song is about or how it came to be.) Citizen isn't even the worst offender here, though they have little insight into their own work beyond what sits right on the surface. (The worst is Wednesday's "Quarry.") But the combination of "this song is about what it's about" and then chugging bar rock with little puffs of wiry DEVO guitars like Citizen is trying to perfume away the smell of stale cigarette smoke is headache inducing. Frankly, "Can't Take It Slow" would be better if it were the worst, instead it's simply another in a long line of songs that get on my nerves. Because Citizen are not bad, they should respect their own time foremost and try to make a song about what's beneath the experience of lopsided friendships and if they find that maybe a wider array of instruments and production styles would suit that deeper excavation, so much the better.

1 / 50

"dazies" by yeule

DV:

Layered and allusive, "dazies" is one of the densest songs - on one of the most intense and elaborate albums - that I heard all year. It's a song concerned with trans identity and physicality and cannibalism (among other things.) These are, coincidentally and unintentionally, qualities it shares with last year's #1 song, Ethel Cain's "American Teenager", something that only registered for me about halfway through writing this year's posts but which is impossible to ignore now that I have. What is going on with transness and cannibalism in the 2020s? And what does it mean that these two artists - not frequently mentioned together - have both made that connection and both delivered the most unforgettable visions of the past two years? I am almost certainly not the person most qualified to answer these questions! But since as far as I can tell I'm the only one asking them, here we go: I would say that the current ascension of fascism and accompanying anti-trans movement has created a sort of pressure cooker environment that's intensifying connections that might otherwise be subtextual. So we're seeing similar themes bubble up more frequently than they otherwise might; Ethel Cain joked, "Funny, I never considered myself tough" and now yeule coos, "Violently biting off the flesh/ Of your own/ Of your own/ Body."

This is not exactly the same, to be clear: one of these characters has been murdered and the other is eating themselves alive. Both are fucked but consent and bodily autonomy only apply to the second. Conceptually, though, they're operating on the same frequency, delving in the same vein of ore. They're about the body as fuel, as substance and sustenance. And to be fair, all humans are worm food in the end! But transness - the sense that on whatever level our physical or perceived self isn't right - puts this fact on the surface; trans people are both the worms and the wormfood, consuming the self to become it. And this must happen within an era where the world - and more specifically, the people with power - hate trans people, and where trans people must try to simply exist knowing this fact, hating that they know it, and either letting it consume them or consuming themselves first. Violence is a form of control, and the threat of violence is one which trans people must carve out an existence under, and violence toward the self is one of the last refuges when nothing else feels controllable. (This feels uncomfortably pro-self-harm or pro-ana so let me caveat that there is a difference between bad things and good ones, and trans affirmation is firmly in the latter category.)

The self must perish so that it can be remade, and as we know, destruction is just another form of creation. So if consumption is destruction then self-consumption is simply self-creation. This post is starting to both spiral into itself and get away from me, so let's consider it a rough draft to be rewritten if this theme continues to find a home in future songs; destruction and creation never end; the point is that "daizies" was the richest and most rewarding and enveloping song I heard all year. Anyway. When yeule sings, "Violently biting off the flesh of your own/ Of your own/ Body" I'm pretty sure they mean something like all of this. And when those guitars howl and shriek I'm pretty sure that's what it feels like, too.

MG:

"dazies" (and all of tortured, beautiful softscars) is best homage to the Smashing Pumpkins we got this year, maybe ever! As someone who grew up relating hard to the original, what made the Pumpkins (and Billy, specifically -- I won’t apologize for him except to say that everything he does, everything, makes sense when you read the story of his life) so special was that they were openly hurting. It wasn’t under a slick veneer, it wasn’t intellectual, it wasn’t cool at all. It was just sobbing and screaming at the same time, and often there was a lot of prettiness in this painful offering. It's what made them acutely embarrassing, as well. I bought and sold Siamese Dream more times than I can remember; as soon as I accepted that I liked that record and that, yeah, I felt those ways and did those things and always cried to “Mayonnaise” I immediately felt a whiplash effect of self-rejection. Those were bad feelings, bad things, stop crying about wanting to be you. And it goes on! That psychic rubble falls to dust in the background of my mind but I no longer pretend to be someone who doesn’t love Siamese Dream. And I think yeule, and the broader acceptance and promotion of yeule as, like, not a joke, not something where we say “despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage HA HA HA,” you know, laughing at someone’s pain, suggests that no one has to pretend to not love Siamese Dream anymore. I think that’s great, that’s really beautiful. I hope that wave of acceptance extends and swells and begins to encompass the meaningful and not just the petty differences of taste and opinion.

yeule sings of “cries and cries and cries,” of hurting their body as a proxy for joy, of their “sick heart, sick mind” and it feels like some cycle is complete. The ouroboros is also an example of self-consumption and completed cycles, but this particular ouroboros feels more like running out of thread in a weaving, another piece is carefully attached and the project continues. The snake of unbearable sadness coils atop itself instead of taking its tail in its mouth. The old stories end and the new ones are joined to their endings through recognition of ourselves in the other. Today the kids can take comfort in yeule, a more perfect avatar for not being ok.

2 / 50

"Not Strong Enough" by boygenius

MG:

Writing about boygenius, at this point, feels impossible. I have an urge to defend them, to shout down some anonymous but not entirely imagined comment section* (it felt like everywhere I turned on the internet just fucking hated this group and it always always always boiled down to some projected misogyny) and a world that just couldn’t…quite…admit this was the greatest song of the year. Even in the places where boygenius unequivocally ruled there was this little whiff of embarrassment like they’re great but, ok, not that great. Well, they are that great! They don’t have to do something wholly original or reflect everyone’s personal identity back to them to be great! 

But we don’t need more of that, it’s a stupid feedback loop, I have to be the change I want to see in the world and that change is to write about this song without defending it! To do that, however, would not be entirely honest because, to be entirely honest, I was very much that person I outlined above for most of the year. I put “A&W” at the top of my dopey playlist and felt very vibey about it and even had a period where I got into Father John Misty a little bit because that made sense. And then when it got closer to calling it, as I was listening through that playlist a whole bunch to make cuts and remember things I’d forgotten, I listened to “Not Strong Enough” for the first time on headphones and it fucking ripped. It ripped my brain right open! This song is gorgeously produced, full of rich instrumentation that colors neatly in-between the wavy lines of the storytelling. It’s the kind of thing I want to choreograph a dance to, I want it to soundtrack a movie about an aimless, broken person who surrenders to life’s enduring beauty and awakens to their own possibility, I want to watch a music video where boygenius play in a barn with vaulted ceilings. Every detail of this song feels so specific and fully realized that I can’t help but play along. It speaks to some half-remembered, half-imagined past but it’s also coming to, in the front seat, still happening, still going somewhere. 

I get it, what I said about Chappell Roan, about being unlikable and thus lovable, applies here, too. I can’t make you like this song, it is unlikable and it got better every time I heard it (a lot, it was blessed and highly favored by Sirius XMU, who chose to make Mitski’s TikTok hit “My Love, Mine All Mine” their song of the year) and I love “Not Strong Enough.” It is my favorite song of the year.

*(To my complete and total amusement, shortly after I finished my first draft of this post, the comment section I was thinking of voted "Not Strong Enough" their song of the year. I'm not sure if there's a significant disconnect between commenting members and voting members or if I'm a woman of the people, charting the course of lukewarm acceptance to full on wholehearted embrace of this song. But, either way, good for all of us!)

DV:

Wow it's really tough to talk about "Not Strong Enough" without talking about boygenius and parasociality and fandom in 2023, huh? This may also be true of a lot of this year's list, but with the rest of the lot it's relatively easy to find other angles into the song. With boygenius the angles all lead back to the band, their dynamic, their process, their relationships. It's a little gauche isn't it? I don't feel like boygenius meant for the story of their 2023 to be about themselves but here they are at the end of the year where they went viral for Halloween costumes and they're winning gendered awards like Ron Swanson from Parks & Recreation, and we just have to hope things age better in reality than in fiction. But also, boygenius made "Not Strong Enough", which some days felt like it might actually be my favorite song of the year (a distinction shared by many others on this list, but one this song got more than most.) It's a song built out of climaxes, rolling and building, with hooks to spare and a secret weapon in the drummer, whose name is weirdly difficult to find but whose fills do more to make the song than even the jangliest guitar. So on one hand, I know more about this band's lore than I do about any other artist who I can't name a second song by. But on the other: "Not Strong Enough" is straightforwardly a gorgeous, propulsive power pop banger, delivered beautifully. When you have a Lucy Dacus and can hold her in reserve for a climax like this one, taking fully a minute and a half but never losing momentum, you're simply operating at a level that few other artists are capable of.

3 / 50

"She's On My Mind" by Romy

DV:

When Robyn released her Body Talk project in 2010, she set the template for almost a decade of dance pop that followed, an impossible feat for anyone to follow. Including Robyn. 2018's Honey is five years old, her best album yet, and almost imperceptible in the modern pop landscape. Unless, that is, you heard Romy's solo debut this year, and found a dance album with a variety of pop singles mixed into a coherent whole and an idiosyncratic guest spot and a narrative arc that traces a vague line from a disconnected beginning to a triumphant, love-struck ending. Romy's making post-Honey pop in the best possible way; "She's On My Mind" takes an emotional core and a beat and builds a story around it, just like Robyn might. But Romy could never be mistaken for Robyn: her vocal is too calm, the production too warm. And unlike Robyn, Romy is writing an explicitly queer narrative into her dance pop. As we move further into a reactionary backlash against the delicate progress queer people have made in recent decades, it's worth noting the complicated way that the climactic punchline of "Think I'm in love/ With you" lands here. It wasn't that long ago that gay marriage was illegal in Romy's UK (and our US); that particular, limited right is younger than Body Talk. There's a sense where "She's On My Mind" ends as simply as any friends-to-lovers romance - which could be climax enough! - but also a sense where it's the story of two people coming out, to themselves and to the world, and that remains as relevant and powerful an occurrence now as it has been in decades past. We all deserve an ending as carefree and glorious as Romy's repeated, cathartic, "Don't care anymore."

MG:

I am not sure if this is so much a triumphant ending as it is a hopeful gesture, an optimistic smile. The album, after all, is called Mid Air, so I read “She’s On My Mind” as less of an ending of any kind and more of a snapshot, a moment in time, surrounded by past and future. But it absolutely strikes a buoyant contrast to the subdued anguish of album opener “Loveher,” a classically sad coming out ballad (here, with a beat) that does care who is watching. I don’t hear a straightforward this, then this, and finally that narrative on this album, it’s all jumbled up and in flux, in a really lovely and honest way. Despite that, the opener and closer are undeniable bookends, taking the same experience of dancing with the woman she loves and looking at it through very different lenses. So, I have to begrudgingly admire Romy’s decision to release the sadder of the two as the lead single. “She’s On My Mind” is so much more fun – the joy of all involved, including Fred Again.., Avalon Emerson, and Stuart Price, touches every aspect of this song – but you have to earn that fun, you have to bum out first. Unless it's a dreary late December day in a dreary but unusually warm winter and your back hurts and you think the plant on your desk might be dying (or something like that, you know) then you can cut right to the chase, pop this song on and chase bliss.

4 / 50

"Entombed in Ice" by Avalon Emerson

DV:

If there's one thing I love about pop music above all else, more than singalong choruses and emotionally-wrenching details in the second verse and even synths themselves, it's nonsense words. Put "Da Doo Ron Ron" on my grave. So while MG and I both loved Avalon Emerson & the Charm's album, and we nearly put "Sandrail Silhouette," (which has a second verse where Emerson calls her friends' daughters "a reason for an optimistic view," an incredible line) on this list, that song was fundamentally outmatched when up against "Entombed in Ice" and its "Ba da da-da-da-duh." This song addresses someone, a former friend, maybe an ex-lover, fondly but without remorse for what once was. And it gives them direction, if not directions. This is a post-breakup song, maybe the year's great anomaly, full of love but not in love. It's a harsh message delivered in the gentlest way possible. "There are some things you can do for yourself now," repeats Emerson, leaving the things up to our imaginations. But only a little: "rotten hearts will decay" is where the first verse starts, and the blanks are easy to fill in. This song's subject has some shit to work through. But maybe they can! The bridge's "Ba da da-da-da-duh" echoes like freedom. It's possibility, not condemnation. Avalon Emerson stretches to the top of her range, echoing and melting into a short guitar solo, unencumbered by words and saying so much without them. We all have something we can do for ourselves; those syllables sound like they believe.

MG:

Avalon Emerson’s Soundcloud DJ sets are a staple of my household – like toilet paper, iced coffee, or a bed, she is both a necessity and a presence. But also! We only even made acquaintance with her work at the beginning of this very year via both Four Tet and Gorilla Vs. Bear putting “Sandrail Silhouette” on their playlists. I had no idea who she was but it felt like when I first got Napster and I’d search for something and only one, single user had uploaded it – you just know this thing that you haven’t even heard yet is cool. And yes, Avalon Emerson is very cool, so if that’s your criterion, please, stop here and make friends with the whole of & The Charm immediately. I wish I could be like “but if you must know why she’s cool, read on” but some of it eludes me to this day! Not in the emperor’s new clothes way where there’s no cool but I want to project cool on to her so badly that I’m making shit up, but in the way where you start scratching at the surface of a piece of art and it just starts yielding all these layers, some dense and some flaky and some immediately understood and some fleeting wisps of recognition. I continue to be stuck on this interview she gave to Pitchfork where she says (and I will quote the whole thing, not just the part relevant to me):

Since I’ve been involved in dance music, there’s been this arms race toward harder and faster, and it’s not really something that I identify with. This cathartic release that people seek when they go out clubbing, I get it and I respect it, and I participate in it as a DJ. But when I’m listening to music, my idea of a perfect record is a Cocteau Twins record, things that are soft and beautiful. I wanted to make this a soft, pretty record, but lyrically, the things on my mind are dark and sad, and very black-pilled at times. That juxtaposition is important, because something beautiful can also be coming from a place of pain. I think that’s where most good art lies, to be honest.

If anything, I find the way she describes her own ideas here reductive. But the part about it being a contrast to the “harder and faster” of club music is what’s relevant to me. I think “Entombed In Ice,” composed as it is of fragmented thoughts and ideas and sounds and bits that wander in and do their thing and dissolve into vapor or fade into the wallpaper, is a contrast to that club sound but it also does the thing that club music does, it provides a “cathartic release.” To talk back to Avalon Emerson, I’d say that as a culture we’re very hung up on this idea of catharsis as a WHOOSH or a BANG and then silence, nothingness, ending. But I think since we all keep going afterwards, since catharsis is an ending but not the ending, we must also listen quietly for those fragments and appreciate their soft approach and disappearance because that very gentle, loping cycle is also cathartic and we need little catharsis as much as big catharsis. Now back to you, reader. You have to keep listening to “Entombed In Ice,” you won’t get all it has to offer once through. That’s part of what’s cool about it, but just a part.

5 / 50

"Cobra" by Megan Thee Stallion

MG:

There’s a lot to be said about turning your trauma into art, and I did say some of it while thinking about Lana Del Rey’s “A&W.” Megan Thee Stallion is about a decade younger (than both Lana and me) and her work is still fiery with recrimination and transformation. If she must suffer, then the suffering can be empowering, she can pry open the eyeballs of the world and force them to look, to see how she was wronged. And not to sound too much like I majored in English here, though I certainly did – it’s, you know, intriguing that she paired all this with killer snake imagery! Generally (but far from exclusively) this is a woman’s artistic domain. It’s Beyoncé’s Lemonade, it’s Fiona Apple’s Tidal, it’s Dolly Parton’s Coat of Many Colors – these albums speak directly to women about their pain and humbling and about how fragile the life we construct really is. Whether you’re born in poverty or you’re the world’s foremost superstar, to exist is to hurt. Megan Thee Stallion is hurting, all her open wounds are documented on “Cobra,” but she’s also very in touch with her anger and that’s what makes this song epic. Beyond what she’s doing, the legacies she’s tapping into, “Cobra” is fantastic and compulsively listenable, winning over popheads, metalheads, and everyone in between. Megan Thee Stallion’s winking self-acceptance of her demons and Van Halen style guitar solo fade out sound like driving off a cliff and taking flight; may she fly free forever. 

DV:

Megan making a claim for control of her narrative and "shedding her past" by airing it out in song is a bold move on its own, as MG notes above. Structurally it's even bolder: Megan Thee Stallion would have every reason to turn these experiences into a "serious" track, Grammy bait, something confessional and ballad-esque. It would almost certainly work in that format! This is a dark story, bits of which I've run into on social media and bits of which were new, at least to me. It would require very little to make it into the kind of song that tugs at your heartstrings, and there would be absolutely nothing wrong with taking that path. But instead, stunningly, Megan chose to turn this harrowing story into an unconventional banger, a bop where the chorus hinges on a lyric that's unmistakably "This pussy depressed." There's no escaping either side of this song, no way to embrace the beat and ignore the lyrics or the other way around. "Cobra" has its cake and devours it too: it's unavoidably both things at once, capped off by my personal pick for most unexpected, and best, guitar solo of the year.

6 / 50

"Wonderful" by Baaba J

DV:

Have I mentioned this was a strong year for love songs? Once or twice? The one I listened to most of all was by Baaba J, a new-to-me singer-songwriter from Ghana, whose "Wonderful" is so sweet and casual and gorgeous it made basically everyone else look like amateurs. "Wonderful" draws from Ghanaian highlife and American pop, burbling on picked guitar and clacking polyrhythms with a violin countermelody that floats just low enough in the mix to avoid overpowering. But all that really is just a showcase for Baaba J, an adept vocalist who's able to deliver a line as cute as "I'll be there in five/ Fuck that I'll be there in one" or as sappy as "You're my purpose everyday" with both conviction and deftness. And that balance, between the bubbly track and the humor and passion of the lyric, is where "Wonderful" lives, and shines. This is a song where Baaba J sings, "And every day since I've been down" and look, writing it out is almost useless, lyrics are almost useless, because it's the way she sings it, with the kind of conviction that makes me think of my own relationship. And it makes me tear up whenever I listen. My partner and I have been together over a decade at this point, and there's just something about realizing that holy shit, that's a time span that I never could have conceived of when we first met, and here we are and every day I look at her and I am down. Which is corny, and it's wonderful, and Baaba J says it better than I could.

MG:

There are times when a song’s lyrics are so indelible, so critical to my understanding of art and myself that they come to me without being called, floating up through the detritus of my consciousness, there are times I find a song’s lyrics are like that truism “water always meets its level” and the instrumentation and words are so well blended that it’s all just water to my ears, and there are times I wish songs didn’t have lyrics. “Wonderful” is a song that I wish did not have lyrics. However, the rich sound of “Wonderful” is more than enough, so let’s, again, dispense with the pesky words. The sense of wonderful is one that is a bit remote to me. I can’t recall often or maybe ever feeling wonderful (which is not to say I’ve had no good times, wonderful is like awestruck – I’ve never stood at the edge of a cliff, I’ve never even climbed a tree, so my understanding is conceptual rather than experiential) but I recognize it in the honeyed warmth of this song. Everything is sunlit, content, and expansive, there’s a collective sound rather than an auteur’s breath at the helm of “Wonderful.” I think that’s the feeling, it’s sitting in a circle, facing everyone but at the center of nothing, open and receptive and connected – that’s wonderful.

7 / 50

"Fairlies" by Grian Chatten

MG:

In an embarrassing way that I can’t quite specify but recognize as very “me,” I don’t like really anything by the very well regarded Fontaines D.C., but I love frontman Grian Chatten’s debut solo album, which appears to be making this year end list and this year end list only. While I find Fontaines a depressing, predictable listen, “Fairlies” was an instant yes. Chatten’s voice is intoxicating – thick, heavy, and always threatening to go flat. The verses sound as if they’re being sung right into your ear from behind your shoulder, spine-tingling and vaguely threatening. The verses make a sharp aboutface, bleated and almost childish in their insistence of “no fair!” “Fairlies” rouses the spirit and the senses, it slinks into stillness and then whirls frantically out of control. I feel that Chatten would probably not be impressed with my love of just about anything with a ton of fiddle on it, and I get that impression from just how ancillary the fiddle is here. It saws around the song like a foregone conclusion but it’s never as much of an instrument as his voice is. This was a truly surprising standout record (the whole of Chaos for the Fly hangs together as a coherent project but no two songs sound alike or capture the same sentiment twice) from an unlikely source and I look very forward to the rest of what Chatten does. Hopefully I will live long enough to hear the full Gaelic folk album!

DV:

One of the biggest struggles modern parents like myself have is, how do you teach your children that fairies are not to be trusted? We're on generation four raised with cute, clumsy, disneyfied fae like those found in Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, and generation two who know Tinkerbell (one of disney's rare intentionally-problematic characters) mainly via solo movies where she's adventurous and loyal and voiced by Mae Whitman. Will our children cut down thorn trees without thinking twice? Will they see a fairy ring and assume it's somewhere to explore instead of avoid? We're very lucky that the current generation isn't already all bewitched and living under the local hills. So as someone who grew up with a healthy respect for fairies, in the sense that I read enough old stories to know I should never take them at their word or disturb their places, albeit not enough to ever stop secretly wishing I might meet one anyway, I am concerned for today's youth, including my own. Grian Chatten is not going to teach them for me, but can anyone actually counter the cultural juggernaut that is the disney industrial complex? I doubt it, which means I'm just happy to encounter the occasional pushback, however small, even if it's in a song like "Fairlies" that mostly has other things to do but takes a line or two to connect fairies to danger. The kids have to learn somehow. How else can we teach them if not with the oldest ways, with song?

8 / 50

"Dumbest Girl Alive" by 100 gecs

DV:

Obviously it's inadvisable to universalize the trans experience in 2023, even if we are all staring down the same existential threat to some degree. Having said that, if there was any song every trans person I know mentioned at least once it was "Dumbest Girl Alive," and they were all correct, critical devotion to first single "Hollywood Baby" (a fine song (derogatory)) be damned. "Dumbest Girl Alive" is a trans coming out anthem that also works as a celebration of the bad life choices we've all made, general enough to be universal but in context built around a highly specific experience. The chorus sounds centered on the moment of realization: "I'm the dumbest girl alive," Laura Les howls, and the key word there is girl, is the universal trans experience of discovering your assumed gender is not your actual one. And of feeling overwhelmingly stupid for not realizing or admitting it to yourself sooner. And finally of acceptance, even relief, that you have made this leap without letting it kill you: maybe you're the dumbest girl, or dumbest boy, or dumbest person, but at least you are actually alive, right? It's a victory cry just as much as it's self-flagellating. 100 gecs celebrate that moment in the silliest way possible, which feels about right: by lighting thousands of dollars on fire to license the THX note and fading it into a "Sicko Mode"-sampling jock jam that will be taken way too seriously by a tiny percentage of their audience and way too lightly by everyone else.

MG:

The other thing that I’ve gotten very into this year, and it feels like something of an extension of Ancient Aliens, is the video game Civilization 6. I am very, extremely, new to video games. The first one I played on my own was Animal Crossing, at the beginning of lockdown in 2020. Since then I’ve dipped my toes into some light Mario (can do: Kart, but I’m only good for a lap, Party, Golf, and Tennis, if I have a partner; can’t do: all the others) and that’s it until Civ. Anyway, the meaningful part here is that around the midway point of the (very long) game you can unlock the “Archaeologist” and move it to a tile with an “artifact” and “excavate” it. The game then tells you which civilization it belongs to and you put it in a museum. Often that civilization is yours and when that happens enough it starts to dawn on you, “Oh, this is my garbage from 100 turns ago.” In the distant future, whatever is left of humanity on Earth will be digging up our Coca Cola cans and putting them on display. Or maybe, since we have so much garbage, they will be digging themselves up and putting themselves on display. It’s this latter idea that the gecs seem to be forever in conversation with. Trash is their aesthetic, trash is what they love, trash is what they are, and through trash they become art. They are silly, ridiculous, and absolutely fascinating; the aural embodiment of the cool S. But they are also everything written after that S – your school notes, your friendship notes, your diary entries, your fan fic. They are every contradiction in existence, seized and destroyed and laughed at and beloved.