The Best Songs of the 2010s: #40–#21

ISSUE #82

A lot of us find the abundance of end of the decade lists hard to stomach; I admit I'm already a little sick of my own. I'm wondering now if that was the point of this curse, that ■■■■■■ is simply waiting out there in the fog, counting on me to fail with the impossibility of my task so he can snatch up my soul as well.

A large chunk of the Top 40 are love songs, a thing I guess I'm just obsessed with. With music being the most directly emotional art, it's natural that this medium best explores these weird heart feelings. Some things I wonder about: are all these interpretations too heteronormative? How much should we rethink conventions of love? Are these images and stories coming from inner truth, or are they distorted through years of retelling the same old myths? We're a century out from the birth of cinema and its pernicious influence, half a century out from the obsession with nuclear family, and a quarter from the mind-altering rise of the internet. Now is the era of emotional labor, of sexual reckoning, of trying to right our wrongs. What are we looking for? What does it mean to find it? What happens when the one you love is lost, or, say, transformed into a tree against their will?

You'll find that the cover of today's playlist is from Interstellar, my second favorite movie of the decade. I love all the corn and dust and space love and space grief. It's not perfect, but it's perfect for me.

For catch-up, here are links to #100–#81, #80–#61, and #60–#41. Let's hit it.

40. TRENT REZNOR & ATTICUS ROSS | Hand Covers Bruise
The Social Network starts with a break up: "You're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd [...] that won't be true. It'll be because you're an asshole." With that, Zuckerberg zips up his hoodie and steps into a gloomy night as the needle drops on "Hand Covers Bruise." Piano notes fall over a buzzing so full of dread it sounds like his hatred scraping against your brain. David Sims sums up the moment's impact: "Fincher + Sorkin framing the creation of Facebook as the vengeful act of an angry young man who will soon be showered with money by venture capitalists...the 2010s!"

39. LORDE | Royals
Got to give Lorde credit for smuggling a minimalist song about the wealth gap onto the pop charts. She unfortunately lists gold teeth and Cristal as enemies instead of tax evasion and generational privilege, but it's easy to mistake symptoms for the disease at that age. At its best, it rejects everything that's fed to us as status propaganda. Not playing that game can be an act of resistance, if you can afford to abstain.

38. KANYE WEST | Devil in a Blue Dress (feat. Rick Ross)
It got more difficult to talk Kanye as the decade wore on. There's only so much goodwill and patience I can throw around. It's also difficult to overstate how all-powerful My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy was when it came out. Remember when Pitchfork gave it a perfect ten? Wild. Kanye was king, and "Devil in a Blue Dress" was emblematic of Fantasy's manic melodrama. It feels like rolling up to the party in slow motion, in a tux, on a jet ski.

37. ST. VINCENT | Teenage Talk
The most emotional of St. Vincent's catalogue, "Teenage Talk" is both wistful and sweet, like melting ice cream. The lyrical snapshots—rolling cars down the driveway, throwing up in the azaleas—strike me as more teenaged than all those things only 90s kids would get. For example: our classmate Jake once tried to burn the letter "J" into his bicep, but the hot iron had been carved backwards. He's branded now, but with a backwards "J." An albatross smoldering on the shoulder, like warped initials carved into a tree.

36. ROBYN | Dancing on My Own
When you're listening, you're in the middle of a whirlwind of catharsis. The sheer force of that bass, and the control of Robyn's voice. She hits the high notes, but she never strains and never breaks. She's a paragon of the self-containment we go through when the night takes a turn for the worse, when your arboreal wife loses her November leaves, and you can only watch, wishing she could be human again.

35. LANA DEL REY | Video Games
Is it satire or misguided devotion? Lana toes the line. The high drama makes you hear it as sincerity, but then the lyrics are just so absurd. It's clear she's in on the joke that is male desire, but it's fascinating how much she sells it, never winking or cracking a smile. The warped temptation she drops on the term "video games" makes my skin crawl with horror. It's as cutting as watching The Love Witch, a ruthless and incisive depiction of maleness that highlights the fucked up needs we've gleaned from our cultural images.

34. BEYONCÉ | All Night
There aren't that many songs about forgiveness. Anger, jealousy, love—those are things to sing about. Forgiveness is less sexy. Could be that the whole Jay-Z affair was just P.R. to sell records, but damn if there isn't something to this song anyway. When she dips into the double-time of "all I wanna, ain't no other," you can really feel it: alone on the dance floor, tangoing at home, or dancing down the wooded path to that old and curséd glade. Forgiveness has an active power, and love is only true with this crucial piece. It's easy when the chips are up, but could you forgive if your love had failed to save you, doomed you to your eternal sylvan fate?

33. JULIE BYRNE | I Live Now as a Singer
This is the perfect airplane song, a sonic vista that stretches for miles. In fact, it only took two Bloody Mary's and this song to make me cry on the plane on my way to Brussels to meet with the world's top parabotanist / demonologist. It's the last track on an album that's all about traveling alone, reflecting on the solipsism of your journeys, and the necessity of sharing them with others. Do people even go on adventures if they can't tell anyone about them? Even with the purest wanderlust, bottling things up can make you feel like a silent tree falling in a for—oh god. I'm running out of time.

32. FUTURE ISLANDS | Seasons (Waiting on You)
One of the hardest things you can do is wait for someone, pray for them to come back to you, come back to human form, coarse bark morphing back into soft, loving skin, each branch shrinking, each leaf falling away. There's a chance they'll never be the same again. Things peel away from memory like wet tape. "They gain a piece, but they lose one too." The lyrics here are simple, but, like with "Golden Hour", they mean much more than florid prose when sung with such heart. I recommend watching their performance on Letterman—it's the best I've ever seen.

31. SZA | Prom
She's casually confessional, never alienating, horny with a clear head, the perfect poet for today. This is what I needed in high school, something I wish I'd heard in the back of my parent's car while thinking about my first crushes. SZA sings like she's searching—Ctrl is for finding yourself in relation to others, for getting dressed up to go out just to end up in those woods again, just to check on her one more time. The coda is so nice, too.

30. BLOOD ORANGE | Champagne Coast
Every instrument sounds like it's coming from the other side of a waterfall. Then there's those sonic bugs in the background, scattering before the entrance of a lip-biting guitar riff. It's a mood that wraps around you: that foggy 2 a.m. drive through the city, greasy from your closing shift, and getting to climb in bed and wrap your arms around someone. You only have a few hours before you have to go to work again, but at least she's here for now—but that was the night of the lightning strike, the missing time. You're up, and she's gone. The dresser's on fire. There's rustling in the dark. There's always rustling in the dark now.

29. NICHOLAS BRITELL | Agape
This song is healing, a salve for the brain, a full-bodied love song without any lyrics. Each woodwind is played so gently, like they're blowing on a paper boat in a bathtub. The trumpets sound just like butterflies in the stomach. If anyone's listening who can help, you can find me in that clearing at midnight most nights. I'm at the foot of his wooden altar, watching over her; just follow the sound of this song.

28. MAJICAL CLOUDZ | Downtown
This is another song that moves like you're cruising at 70 mph, holding hands in the back of the car, despite being slow as a sleeping heartbeat. Devon Welsh gave us a clear-eyed way to sing about love, not burning or longing, but how fun it is just getting to go out on the town with your best friend.

27. JAY SOM | Lipstick Stains
I went to a party. I wasn't expected anything; it's been long enough, I'm comfortable being alone. Sometimes, though, the kindling is laid, the spark goes out, and before long I'm back in bed with the cold light of dawn pouring through my muslin curtains, cutting a gash across my wall. My posters looks different with someone laying next to me. Even my goldfish seems happier. This song speaks to that kind of presence. Melina Duterte's drags out her whispered delivery, just like a slow inhale, like noticing the faint smell of someone on the pillow even after they've left. Now all I smell is pine.

26. HOP ALONG | How Simple
Simply no better voice than Frances Quinlan's. She tells stories like she's around a campfire—Hop Along songs are collections of passionate moments, each track split into chapters, and each one as good as the next because there's a part you want to get to in all of them. Every instrument is constantly swirling, like stars seen from a speeding car. I picked this one because there's nothing better than a breakup song you can dance to, shutting off the brain that may have fooled us.

25. RADIATOR HOSPITAL | Our Song
It started before she disappeared, as much as I hate to admit it. I should've read the signs when she was gone every morning. She'd go out for a run and come back with hair full of twigs and brambles, burrs coming out of her shoes. One morning, nothing would hit my lips when I went to finish her coffee. I checked the mug and found a slow trickle of sap crawl toward the brim. A faint rustling, and I turned to see her frozen on the porch, eyes closed and unmoving, arms suspended like some fossilized rosary. She was turned to the sun, and she was smiling. It was the first smile in weeks. The lyrics are what puts this at #25.

24. CAYETANA | Dirty Laundry
Cayetana is one of the decade's underrated bands, always vying for position as my very favorite. The formula is simple: inject a New Order bassline into "Just Like Heaven" and you have my attention forever. Augusta Koch's voice is a marvel, fraying with feeling and able to squeeze all the emotion out of lines like "I wanna see you on your bad days" and "I want you in the worst ways."

23. RADIOHEAD | True Love Waits
This song was technically written in '95, but 2016 was the year they finally pressed it to vinyl, and the simplicity of this version makes the wait all the more powerful. It took so long because the band couldn't decide how to arrange it; finally, they just miked the piano so close that you can hear the keys drag against each other. Like "Hand Covers Bruise," the sporadic notes plinking in the background undermine any sense of calm that instrument usually bestows. It's the fear lurking beneath every love.

22. FATHER JOHN MISTY | I Went to the Store One Day
This song is stupid—the knowing kind of stupid, the same that makes us walk eagerly into a situation that will, someday, break our hearts wide open. It's also one of my favorite love songs. Tillman eschews snark for the sake of snark for once, and instead uses his self-awareness to put everything out on the table. "Listen, it feels like I'm going crazy," he says, when falling in love is akin to the "I don't like this" of the climbing of a roller coaster. It's a weird urge that propels us to open our lives to a stranger, but we get on that ride anyway, even knowing that it could end badly, knowing that one of you could end up in the Forest of Lost Souls while the other would do anything to get you back.

21. JONNY GREENWOOD | For the Hungry Boy
I've decided I must destroy him. I will go into the forest under the light of the moon, beyond the glade, beyond the altar, further than I've ever gone before to find the one who did this—to finally find ■■■■■■. I couldn't live if this happened again to anyone else. I'll write the rest of these on the road. This song always gives me strength. When the aching bass comes in, it sturdies my legs, and makes me remember what she loved about me in the first place. I have to be brave. The demon must perish. Be brave.

If you'd like to listen to #21–#100 in top-down order, I have a playlist that will update as we go along.

Next week, finally, you'll have #20–#1, and, maybe, I'll get her back.