The Best Songs of 2021 So Far

ISSUE #161

This is the year of our reclaimed youth: I’ve loved more skate pop and power emo this year than I have since Earwyrms began. Last year around this time, music’s big players were coping with the pandemic by dropping albums early or cashing in on nostalgia while young bands waited in the wings and prayed there’d be a future to play through. Well, the year of legacy is over. With tours starting up and young people vaccinated, the most vital songs are once again coming from youth who have a lot to exorcise. Nature is healing; long live the brokenhearted:

20. MARSFADE | Do U Know What I Mean
Marley Ferguson struck chillwave’s perfect balance: a texture bright and mild as a Michigan summer. The strum pattern is simple, but the popcorn drum machine is what makes it so buoyant—the spring in its icy step surrounds that buzzing bass like a chest freezer full of popsicles. The pleasure comes from cracking it open on a hot July day.

19. REMO DRIVE / SAMIA | Fit N Full – Remo Drive Version
The past few years have sparked a renewed interest in the cover song. From Spotify Singles to charity compilations to complete album reworks like this one, I suspect this new slew of covers is a symptom of the search bar: type in the song you're looking for and you’ll find every version beneath the original, songs which then might enter the queue or expose you to artists you might not have known. Such is the way streaming alters convention. Not that I’m complaining—covers are essential and the best reveal contours in the bedrock of the original. Remo Dive pushes the chug of Samia’s version into an out-and-out rockabye swing, until a different “Fit N Full” emerges feeling just as bombastic as Sam’s Town-era Killers.

18. ERIKA DE CASIER | Acceptance – intermezzo
Can’t I include short song on a Best Of list? The intermission is no less part of the show than any of the acts. At least it’s not watching the Super Bowl for the ads! You know who else played with dimensions of form? Michelangelo when he decided to make a roof his canvas. Besides, it takes such little time to fall apart.

17. HOME IS WHERE | Long Distance Conjoined Twins
A new wave of music nerds are here and they wield the full power of the internet. In interviews they sometimes sound less like a band and more like a music encyclopedia, the type of fifth-wave emo acts that references The Hotelier and memeified American Football. What sets them apart is a Southern surrealism—“Long Distance Conjoined Twins” is “King of Carrot Flowers” reimagined as a sea shanty, with a galloping double-kick and harmonica like a train whistle. Replace Anne Frank in In the Aeroplane with trans rights metaphors like exorcism and harakiri and you just might get I Became Birds, a brilliant album of the terrors of anatomy.

16. DOSS | Strawberry
Frost pop is what I call Super Monkey Ball music, this hyperpop-cum-shoegaze that’s cold as basement A/C. Hissing from a vent in the Arctic Ocean, “Strawberry” is Björkcore at the highest level. A few things comes to mind: the undulating Jóga video; earth that mirrors the folds in our brains; glimmering icicles hanging from the Matrix; how air gets thinner the higher you go.

15. COLD CAVE | Night Light
It’s hard to make goth that sounds great today, but Cold Cave’s Wesley Eisold really puts his back into it. Sometimes it sounds like he opened a time rift and ripped his songs straight from the golden years. This year’s album—his first in ten years—was written and recorded with his wife Amy Lee and deals with how to get through the long night of sober life. The best goth songs are those with some levity, like the laughter that once echoed through the halls of Hill House. To sleep through the night you have to surrender, but no harm in keeping a splinter of light.

14. KATY KIRBY | Juniper
A juniper bush used to stretch its spindles to the siding of my grandmother’s house. I would squat on tiny legs to pluck its berries, frozen blue.  These were some of my earliest walks, unstructured roams through the yard that my mother allowed as she talked with her own. It’s a memory I hold sacred, distinctly Midwestern, brought to mind perfectly by this song—like the kiss of green nettles on my ankle or knowing the weather so well I forgive it.

13. ARLO PARKS | Hope
Coffee shop songs are mid-tempo for a reason: they can’t be too fast or they’ll agitate, but they can’t be so slow they put you to sleep. They run the risk of anodyne lyrics, designed to be inoffensive as possible. It’s a testament to Arlo Parks’ skill that Collapsed in Sunbeams can be put on to relax despite being largely a portrait of pain. She uses the trite to her advantage by showing how common it is to hurt. Her voice lends truth to such well-worn words, and songs like “Hope” can keep us going.

12. JAPANESE BREAKFAST | Be Sweet
”Be Sweet” is akin to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” and Michelle Zauner’s not far from our Debbie Harry, a woman who played CBGB and stadiums with ease. I was shocked when I learned that this song is in D Minor—a certifiable dance hit in music’s saddest key—but time with the lyrics gave me clarity. We’ve all been squeezed into the jambs of time, the past and future stretching fore and aft like halls of memory. Too often in love we gaze down one or the other, instead of staying here and looking in each other’s eyes: “Recognize your mistakes and I'll let you back in / Realize, not too late, love you always.”

11. SAULT feat. LITTLE SIMZ | You from London
SAULT is putting out masterpieces at such an alarming rate that I imagine it’s what it felt like watching Jordan get six rings. After two albums last year that spoke directly to the protests, this album changes lanes to cover Black life in Britain. Over an instrumental that sounds like the hum of a streetlight, Little Simz sits perfectly still from a velvet divan with smoke searing the edges. She changes her voice with ease, a mirage. This is post-lounge music, like Disco Elysium, like MF Doom from late Empire.

10. DOMINIC FIKE / PAUL MCCARTNEY | The Kiss of Venus (Dominic Fike)
Another case study in the cover album phenomenon comes from an obscure elder statesman giving a leg up to the little guys. It’s nice—not often you can cover a Beatles song without all the baggage. Fike proves he’s a worthy heir to King Paul, sounding just as playful as Ram or McCartney II. Fike jumps back and forth between lanes with ease, never losing his playful cool, less phase-shifting and more like tuxedo antics. With instruments from toy pianos to that Frank Ocean pitch-step, its two-and-a-half minutes make you wonder whether the next weirdest Beatle might just come from swampy Florida.

9. LUCY DACUS | Hot & Heavy
Every word has its own discrete weight—melancholy is a feather and memory a stone. Dacus knows how to balance them all and remains one of our greatest living lyricists because of it. She measures each line like cups of flour or shots of strychnine. Lucy so often hides her point in plain sight, a storyteller whose structure bucks the norm and exposes the pretenders, flipping a phrase to put the power of each line at the end: “When I went away, it was the only option,” or “The best thing I could offer was to miss your calls.” Some people write lyrics as means to a song’s end, but with Dacus, it’s the magic trick itself.

8. ILLUMINATI HOTTIES | Pool Hopping
Now this is what I’ve been waiting for—a prime-time kick-flip skate-pop split-lip make-out arm-sling slap-fight summer anthem. Sarah Tudzin has more hooks in her than a cenobite’s victim. I wouldn’t be surprised if this retroactively materialized on Tony Hawk Pro Skater soundtracks like a past we fixed in Back to the Future. I’m happy to say we have a new Splash Pop classic.

7. FAYE WEBSTER | I Know I’m Funny haha
On the flip side of the summertime, pop shove-it style sits Faye, the master of bummer rock. A Webster album stretches time and slows it to a crawl, like the friends who tell a sad story so well it never gets you down. Though her Atlanta roots surely influenced me, I find in her a wellspring of surprising humor—I still chew over some turns of phrase, plus that slide guitar like wafting flowers through a humid breeze.

6. REMEMBER SPORTS | Sentimentality
”Don’t let it harden your heart,” my mom said after one of my college break ups, but in the years since, I’ve learned that I am most receptive to the world’s bounty of love when I’m alone. In the depths of relationships, I forget heartbreak exists, and sentimentality becomes a chore. The lyrics of this Remember Sports song articulate this in a way I never could, pairing it perfectly with a jangle and hook. This is one of the year’s best albums, better with every listen, and when they crank it ever-so-slightly in that final chorus, I can feel the swell of my heart’s tide brimming, on the knife’s-edge of tears at any moment.

5. BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD | Sunglasses
Where SAULT’s Nine is an album about being Black in Britain, For the first time by Black Country, New Road examines exactly how post-Empire life has curdled the island’s whites. In “Sunglasses,” Isaac Wood, with his wry and bitter voice, assumes the character of an aging Yuppie and maps how fathers become fascists. Like Mary Gaitskill or Easton Ellis, the lyrics illuminate everything that feeds prejudice: fear of youth, sexual frustration, materialist shields like sunglasses and blue light. Like any good epic, it runs the gamut of emotions, cathartic as a back-breaking run. Pitch-black songs make me feel better when I hear them, like how it takes fire to cauterize a wound. You can’t really sing along, but you can laugh and dance, sulk and rage.

4. JAPANESE BREAKFAST | Savage Good Boy
Wanting the means to protect the ones you love is as universal as its inevitable failure, but I would never deny us our fantasies—here, Zauner paints a joyous one about building a bunker for herself and her beloved. The best love songs are playful, and this production by Alex G whirls from Pac-Man sounds to a plunking piano so resonant it sound like it’s stuck in the cellar. If I had the money, I’d fund the bunker—not something I can say about everyone.

3. INDIGO DE SOUZA | Kill Me
This is a love song to the devil himself, the only true love in the end, mirroring one of Dickinson’s greatest works: “Because I could not stop for Death – / He kindly stopped for me.” Emotions are not discrete, they are a heady brew that swirls and churns like a cistern of intrusive thoughts. Fun, death, sex, love—all are colors in the same sunset, all species of the same tree.

2. JULIEN BAKER | Song in E
Simplicity begets elegance—the sonnet exposes the beauty in verse and the piano tells the story of each distinct chord. It’d been a long time before “Song in E" that I’d heard a composition of piano and voice that struck me at first listen. The title obscures its master stroke: the changing of G# from minor to major, which strays from convention to create a secondary dominant. E is the key, the tonic, the self; G#, the secondary, the dominant, the beheld. Baker’s simple lyrics floored me that day—the screw turns, a bass comes in, and then she’s on the carpet, refusing all sympathy. An encounter with grace can sometimes be more painful than sin.

1. JAPANESE BREAKFAST | Posing in Bondage
To love is to tie yourself up in ropes. Silence hangs in the air like gauze when you’re waiting for someone to come home. Seconds streak by like headlights, the heart a chambered drum. Pain divides humanity just as love splits our attention—“Those who have felt pain and those who have yet to.” You feel the difference in every knot. That which is dangerous about naked need is also what makes it so beautiful—you’re holding their hand because you can’t fly, soaring thanks to nothing but trust, praying your hands don’t start to sweat, praying that they don’t choose to let go.