The Best Songs of 2018 So Far

ISSUE #11

Welcome to the very first Earwyrms Countdywn!

Follow the link above or the button below to listen to my favorite songs of the past six months, so you can enjoy them before the summer is over. I wrote about them below in classic backwards-list order, and the playlist mirrors it. I had it the other way at first, but I think it's more engaging to know that the next song is always going to be better than the last, rather than vice versa. Some people have strong opinions about this. To that, I say, Be Best.

There's a lot of writing to come, so you might have to click "View Entire Message" at the bottom. I just got a little excited with this one. I'd like to thank you for listening, and without further ado, here's the list:

#16. "Nice for What" / Drake

Look, I think Drake is pretty messy. For being one of pop music's biggest brand names, he hasn't had a great track record lately: first the ghostwriting accusations, then Views bombed, and now Pusha T is roasting him. His albums are way too long, and his singles are pretty hit or miss. This year, though, he released his biggest "on the other hand" since Take Care. "Nice for What" is the brightest and bounciest song he's ever released. This song is like the forty prettiest people you've ever met on roller blades, parading down your avenue in June. This energy has been lacking from the Top 100 for months. We need to have something to celebrate in 2018, at least we have this. Don't even get me started on the video.

#15. "Charity" / Courtney Barnett

Nobody's really out here making mid-tempo guitar songs except Courtney Barnett anymore, so I'm glad she's perfected it. She's the only one wielding that guitar tone as it's meant to be used, not to scorch the earth, but to slowly bake it till it fits that Australian drawl. She doesn't need anything fancier than a solid groove, and something to sing about. She's Joan Jett, but tired. She sounds like a talking muscle tee.

#14. "In My View" / Young Fathers

There's no concise way to describe Young Fathers, because nobody really sounds like them right now. The closest they get is a kind of spiritual successor to TV on the Radio. They sound like echoes of an ancient earth, one where civilizations were once at peace, before some astronomical disaster came to bury it all. They've found a way to broadcast to us all, appalled at our wasteful lifestyles, and they're bringing their furious politics to try to show us the error of our ways.

#13. "I'll Make You Sorry" / Screaming Females

The moment that gives me shivers is just before the guitar solo, where Marissa Paternoster finally puts her full strength behind that voice with the building "I'll make you sorry" refrain. As it climbs, she unleashes her signature warble, a war cry that could find the resonant frequency of the Chrysler building. And then, she shreds. Nobody can tear the skin off your face like Marissa. I saw them live once, and the way she played that guitar was like she was ushering a demon to back to earth.

#12. "Torches" / Half Waif

This song is like staring at a candle in the middle of a power outage. There's a storm out there, and sometimes there's nothing you can do but wait it out. Nandi Rose Plunkett knows the rampant loneliness of a wandering mind, and she knows how it alienates us from others: "I fly through your life like an acrobat / I feed off the night and I'm afraid of that." I think we're always orienting ourselves to the undying coast; the infinite is always present somewhere in our minds, and we're drawn to it like we can smell the salt of the sea. We're desperate to get back to it.

#11. "Erasure" / Superchunk

In 2017, two things helped me experience a realization that ever so slightly brightened a dark year. With The Last Jedi and Phantom Thread, I cracked open my concept of the future, and stood in awe that at any point, an artist can put out the best work of their career, no matter how long they've been around. Superchunk is like that today, putting out their best and most urgent album a full nineteen years into their career. Mac McCaughan didn't have to do this - he owns Merge Records, he could've retired on Aeroplane royalties alone. But he's our punk-ass dad, our shining light, and sometimes Papa's gotta go out to the yard to flip someone off.

Of course, that's Waxahatchee on back-up vocals here, so I was predisposed to love this one. But Superchunk has always had sovereignty over sweeping verses and power chords, the godfathers of everyone from Motion City Soundtrack to Wavves. Now, they get political, and "Erasure" is like hearing your tribe hit the streets to have your back. "Hate so gracless and so cavalier / We don't just disappear / Shifting shapes, you're just an auctioneer / But we're still here." I saw McCaughan in a banana-yellow office shirt and boat shoes at Riot Fest in 2014, shredding to death, and there he was my last Jedi.

#10. "This is America" / Childish Gambino

There's something I always have to wrestle with in Donald Glover. I know what it means, as a corny white boy, whenever I put hip hop on a list, and I know what it means when I leave it off. I'm either co-opting or erasing, and it's especially prevalent with Glover's tenuous past in Atlanta and hip hop culture, and how painfully aware he's always been of white gatekeepers.

I avoided the song for a long time, because I missed it when the video dropped, and when everyone started throwing around the word "genius," I knew I needed to take some time. Society is having trouble with that word, and since it's become public how dangerous power can be in the hands of men, it's become a dangerous word as well. You shouldn't be able to be a genius and a monster at the same time - that's a paradox in definition, and cognitive dissonance at its finest.

But Glover never asked for us to pin all this on him, and from what I can tell, he's no monster. I eventually got around to the song, and it's undeniable. You couldn't skip it if you tried. The grating part of his older Gambino albums was always the adolescent nasal voice he used, and his bizarre lyrical fascinations, but on this one he goes so low and affectless that I almost didn't recognize him with the song drops. Even "Redbone" didn't do it for me like this does.

#9. Prior Things / Hop Along

Five years ago, if you'd told me that Hop Along would be critical darlings, I'd have asked if I could get a side of free tuition as well. I figured I'd spend my life be putting them on lists for everybody to skip over. It's a testament to Frances Quinlan's outsider sense of songwriting that she's just been winning more and more people over with each album. On this one, they've started to embrace rhythm in a much more prominent way than their old records. Quinlan used to riff over meandering guitars, the two passing each other but never seeming to acknowledge the other, but now they lock into a groove on each song. She still has that voice too, that golden voice. The goosebumps never fail to come over me whenever she lets it fray a little, like when she goes in on "I'm still in my prime." Well, if she is, maybe I am too.

#8. Feel Like a Fool / Kali Uchis

This is the Song of the Summer, right here. That lumbering piano on the low-end makes this perfect to blare at a red light while you sun your shoulders. It's hard not to hear the Winehouse in her, and maybe I'm being nostalgic, but Kali earns the comparison. You can really just let her voice carry you anywhere. This song is a cruise around the neighborhood with no cops in sight, where every face can't help but turn with you as you pass, because they know that it's you who is, in fact, doing you.

#7. "Space Cowboy" / Kacey Musgraves

Musgraves is such a treasure, though I'll admit I didn't really get her until this album. Now, I will protect her with my life. She's seemingly been shut out from Nashville because she's alluded to queerness in the past, so she needs all the indie help she can get, and we listen to her as an act of solidarity and resistance. Of course, she also just writes an immaculate song. Singing it feels like you're switching from your head to your heart. Even more impressive is the way she commands the most iconic use of a pause in phrasing since The Commodores brought our attention to that brick house.

#6. "Woo" / Beach House

Beach House is so elemental that it's almost impossible to write about them. They're back with an album that's better than ever, and I can only compare listening to this song to one other sensation.

#5. "Reborn" / Colin Stetson

I'm convinced Hereditary would lose a whole star rating if it weren't for its deployment of this song. The fact that the movie sticks the landing at all is entirely due to the ending, and the ending owes everything to the fact that Stetson changes the mood of the entire score from classic horror movie, with its screeching violins and quavering cellos, to an army of oboes and wind chimes. It sounds like a thundercloud opening its maw to allow an enormous seraph to descend on a thousand onlookers. It's a screeching paean to all things divine, but devotion itself is scary. What is holy to some is a horror to another.

#4 "Make Me Feel" / Janelle Monáe

Prince personally helped create some of the sounds you hear on this track. It's also the only song on the list by someone who starred in a film that won an Oscar for Best Picture. I think you can hear aspects of both in the perfection of the final product.

#3 "Moon River" / Frank Ocean

It might be because I'm in love, but I refuse to be sorry about it.

#2. "For the Hungry Boy" / Jonny Greenwood

Emily Yoshida, one of my favorite film critics, once said she thought Paul Thomas Anderson was our most romantic filmmaker. Between Punch Drunk Love and Phantom Thread, there's nothing quite like the love he puts on screen. Instead of a paper mache of platitudes and hand-me-down scenarios, he portrays love as complex and gnarled, gorgeous and uneasy, two characters learning not only what attracts them to each other, but what repels them as well. Since P.T.A. frequently cuts his films to match the score of his collaborator, it may be transitive that Greenwood is our most romantic composer. I don't have the classical training to properly criticize the score, but it can transform the mundane into the luscious and fulfilling, turning your commute into an ice ballet. When I first saw Phantom Thread, I thought they were taking the score straight from the classical canon, some Chopin or Schubert I didn't know, not commissioning it from guitarist from Radiohead. I'm glad they did. He's composed the only song I put on to do dishes anymore.

#1. "Night Shift" / Lucy Dacus

Lucy Dacus is one of two artists younger than me that make me want to stave off my jealousy to praise them, the other being Timothée Chalamet. Dacus is undeniable not only for how commanding her voice is, but for the vivid poetic pictures she paints as well. Here, she explores scheduling that coffee date with your ex. Everybody's had that coffee date. Why do we do that coffee date? The hell is wrong with us? You can't do anything, you can't win them back, you can't even brag. There's no real closure. Going through a break up with like living in a world where the moon has gone missing, this massive thing that controls the tides has been gone for months, and all you can think is, "Am I ever gonna see the moon again?" Of course you want to have coffee with the moon again. But you shouldn't. It will overwhelm you.

Then something in the song changes, and you realize you're been strapped into a rocket heading straight to blow up that moon. "Oh shit, I'm gonna barrel straight into it," you think. "This is gonna fuck up all those emotions I need but never wanted to feel." When you listen to this song, you're going to take that person who hurt you, and you're going to send them through the maelstrom. Send them to Lucy, she'll go angry Galadriel on them, where everything buzzes ghostly static white, and then chills come in. It's a catharsis if there ever was one. It's a full-fledged experience. The only other thing I can say about this song is that it was written by someone the same age as my younger brother. I love it.

Thanks for listening guys, I'll leave it at that. Tune in next week!