The Best Songs of 2019

ISSUE #85

We're all burnt out on lists, I'm sure, but I just have to share my favorite songs of the year. I loved this year, musically—the last time I had a batch of songs this good was maybe 2016. I’m supremely impressed by all of these tracks, and most have been in full rotation for months.

I have to introduce next week’s issue because it will be a collaborative playlist. For the fifth year in a row, I'd like to ask my followers (those who are inclined) to pick their top ten favorite songs of the year and upload them to a provided playlist so we can all listen to a huge library of good music during our holiday travels. I'll let you know more next week, but I wanted to give everyone who wanted to participate the time to put together a list. Don't worry if your picks show up on this list, I'll only be including my top ten, and duplicates are welcome, they keep the lists healthy.

These are from #25 to #1, backwards order, to build suspense. You know the drill. Let's go!

25. YUMI ZOUMA | Bruise
This is an energetic step toward the club for Yumi Zouma. Chunky and smooth at the same time, it moves like an ICEE through a straw, and hits you like a blast of A/C in the dog days of summer. It sounds like a lost Nelly Furtado/Timbaland cut.

24. TRENT REZNOR & ATTICUS ROSS | OBJECTS IN MIRROR (ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR)
Great year for Reznor: between being sampled for "Old Town Road," Miley repurposing "Head Like a Hole" for Black Mirror, that Nine Inch Nails cameo in Captain Marvel, and the stellar score for Watchmen, he's come a long way from waxing floors in Cleveland. This is the kind of churning chase song he and Ross are so good at, simple in melody yet fascinating in timbre and tone—proof that things can be simple as long as they sound fucking nuts.

23. TYLER, THE CREATOR | PUPPET (feat. Kanye West)
Tyler is at peak playfulness here (see: dropping everything to pop a spoken "a hug?" into the verse). He blends precision and breeziness, spits like he's swerving in and out of traffic on roller blades, joins up with Kanye, passes a fire truck—all the while keeping pace with those "Imperial March" snares.

22. JESSIE BUCKLEY | Glasgow (No Place Like Home)
This song is all about the story: Oscar winner Mary Steenburgen woke up from routine surgery in 2009 and found her brain was filled with music. Weeks went by and it would not go away—she had to write down the melodies just to quiet her mind. She sold a few to Nashville, and ten years later, a filmmaker unearthed "Glasgow" for the climax of his singer-songwriter drama. Now she's one of the greatest songwriters of the year, and there's proof our minds have music resting somewhere beneath the folds.

21. FAYE WEBSTER | Room Temperature
Faye can make the inside of your head feel like a beach, but it's no dream destination—this is like getting dumped right before vacation, daiquiri-drunk and full of self-pity. If you've ever been bummed out abroad, you know how easily paradise can turn sour. It's all in that half-step descent in the chorus.

20. ALDOUS HARDING | The Barrel
This song is inscrutable, a labyrinth of finger-picking. You're always turning corners and winding up where you began. The backing vocals in the chorus strike me as sarcastic, and it bemuses; it nonplusses; it mystifies. "The Barrel" sounds to me like Groundhog Day, Sisyphean repetition with delicious results.

19. BIG THIEF | Not
In each verse, most of the measure remains silent. Lenker waits three beats to come in, the effect of scanning a room for time to think, avoiding eye contact, noticing the drapes, the shapes of lamps for the first time. You start defining things by what they're not, by way of contrast—which is, you notice, the way we learned "alive" from "dead."

18. JESSIE WARE | Adore You
It's so nice to have a luxurious love song. This came out on Valentine's Day, vibrant and delicate—it captures how it feels to drive to someone's house after midnight just so you can jump in bed, your heartbeat while you sit through all those blinking stoplights.

17. CARLY RAE JEPSEN | Want You in my Room
Carly Rae is our Cyndi Lauper, the sincerest of pop stars, dedicated to dedication, unafraid of the sappy stuff, a wellspring of positive emotion. This song is playfully alluring ("I got you covered, under covers," "I wanna do bad things to you,") because that's the queendom she rules. It's why we gave her a sword.

16. CHARLY BLISS | Capacity
Eva Hendricks sings like she gulped down a helium balloon and started nailing a full karaoke session of The Killers and Weezer. They were opening for Death Cab when I saw them, and plenty of yuppies couldn't handle it. They're wrong. Her voice to me is a monument to peculiarity, the unique heart in all of us, our capacity for self and the melodies that pour from us like ancient cave paintings.

15. JULIA JACKLIN | Pressure to Party
When a relationship ends, friends split into two camps—"you gotta take some time!" and "you gotta get back out there!"—which is exhausting because, shit, all I ever want to do is die. Trying to love again both feeds us and terrifies us every second of heartbreak. The magic trick Jacklin pulls off is taking a song about anxious paralysis and wrapping it in a rhythm that makes me want to run out the door.

14. FIELD MEDIC | henna tattoo
This one is like sleeping in your old room after a night at that bar everyone goes to when they're back in town for the holidays. It's recorded on a four-track using a boombox drum machine—the true test of a song's sturdy skeleton—ranking up there with the best of both Bright Eyes and Pedro the Lion.

13. JAI PAUL | He
"He" is unpredictable. There's no structure, and the result is exhilarating. It feels mashed together from sounds of VH1's I Love the 80s, but never feels nostalgic or purposely retro, nor as cold or futuristic as that decade's sci-fi obsession. This is soul, pure and simple, as in the one human quality we cannot define and cannot extricate with words.

12. WEYES BLOOD | Movies
Titanic Rising is the year's best album title, and "Movies" sounds like you're underwater, like she wrote it while watching Jack sink to the bottom of the sea. With the spirit of Laurie Anderson and other experiments of the 70s, Natalie Mering isn't afraid to approach the darkness. She drowns us in it, mesmerizing us, just like that silver screen.

11. ALEX CAMERON | Miami Memory
This song is as sincere as it is funny, as gorgeous as it is gross, difficult to reconcile and yet undeniably whole. This is music as fiction: character-based, blending lust and humor and innocence and dirt, all unflinching. The earnestness of Cameron's character is key to selling outrageous lines like "eating your ass like an oyster." I'd call it some of our best outsider fiction, like Henry Miller meets Harmony Korine.

10. TEEBS | Studie (feat. Panda Bear)
Here's some music theory: this starts with the same chord as "henna tattoo"—you can hear it, we're swimming in that same pool—but instead of moving to the VI (the sixth, a minor chord) like Field Medic does, Teebs goes to IV (the fourth, a major chord). This makes everything sound warmer, gives us rain instead of snow, a tank top instead of a parka, the sun coming out to kiss our skin. Such a difference a small change in progression will make—like a new chapter in a book, or the dawning of a good day.

9. LAURA STEVENSON | Living Room, NY
This song is just a cello and a guitar—music's equivalent to peanut butter and jelly, coffee and cream. Stevenson's voice is cozy and worn, the sigh of an old staircase. Tech was built to bring us together, but it still does little to quell the anxiety of being apart. Missing someone is a condition we have yet to cure.

8. JPEGMAFIA | Free the Frail (feat. Helena Deland)
Did we all know that JPEGMAFIA has a masters degree? I know it means little or less, but it makes sense—there's a deconstructive aspect to his writing that seems furtively bookish. Here he sheds the pretense, giving a glimpse of the man behind the image, but he doesn't go so far as to lose his impish spirit. The end result sounds a little like Blood Orange guarding a pot of gold.

7. BETTER OBLIVION COMMUNITY CENTER | Dylan Thomas
These two. They fit so well together. Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers teaming up yielded an alchemy that's not quite Bright Eyes, not quite Phoebe, but a blend of both that transcends each. What more can you ask from a supergroup? Bless him for letting her voice take center stage; he provides texture for her confident croon. You have to see their Colbert performance.

6. FKA TWIGS | cellophane
It's been ages since we've had a powerful ballad in the tradition of "I Can't Make You Love Me," and "Nothing Compares 2 U." FKA twigs updates the form by bringing in balletic delicacy and techno-paranoia, like "Swan Lake" by way of Burial. It's expression of pain is stark, right down to beatbox percussion, and the poetry is not overwrought—it plumbs the depths of despair, but it's all so true, mapping the Mariana Trench you sink into when you're all alone and you can't breathe because you're thinking of everything at once. It deserves the universal acclaim.

5. BOBBY KRLIC | Fire Temple
Another year, another Ari Aster film built on the power of its finale. When this shows up in the last nine minutes of Midsommar, its emotional weight could sink an aircraft carrier. It's one of those songs that's structured as a full crescendo, like the slow dawning of comprehension, a suffusing surrender of will to the inevitable. Krlic slips some fraying dissonance into the upper strings, and Aster contrasts this glowing climax with shots of people thrashing in fits of cathartic energy. The whole thing ends with a smile.

4. BON IVER | Salem
This is my album of the year, and the best of his four so far. Bon Iver's evolution has been a constant improvement on itself, and Justin Vernon emerges in the new decade as a synthesis of all his former sounds. He picks up where he left off, in the stratosphere of 22, A Million, but soon he lands the ship on a foreign planet, opens the parachute and sticks the landing, returning to terrestrial instruments and finding strength in his real voice again. i,i is an act of terraforming, and this track is when the flowers finally bloom.

3. CLAIRO | Bags
I wake up with this in my head, the ultimate test of a truly catchy song. Laid on the table, there are only four ingredients: hook for verse, hook for chorus, change-up for second verse ("I don't wanna be forward, I don't wanna cut corners"), piano for bridge. It all fits perfectly, but something's off. Everything is layered with a slight discord. That's when it clicks—we're being left behind.

2. OPERATORS | Faithless
Comparisons to New Order may seem cheap, but I think with Operators they're earned, and hard to avoid. They make songs that feel like high-speed rail, a mix of Kraftwerk and Ferris Bueller. "Faithless" is a perpetual motion machine. You want to jump out of bed, snap-and-twist, dance in the mirror—all that corny shit you do when you lose your self-consciousness and feel things as they should be.

1. SHARON VAN ETTEN | Seventeen
My song of the year is no question. I tried to deny it in July with my halfway list, and "Hands" still rules, but this is clearly the pinnacle of Van Etten's songwriting so far. She's our version Patti Smith or Joan Jett, a new kind of rockstar for a new kind of era. She's a paragon of restraint until she goes Galadriel at the end, unleashing a lightning storm of angst and regret that refuses to be contained. Nostalgia is the killer of truth, but here is an unblemished look at what we were once like. Strange who we are when we're young.