For the twentieth time, I am here on a blog called Said the Gramophone to share my favourite songs of the year. (No, you didn't read that wrong--it's 20: twice ten, one score) Is it time to quit? It isn't time to quit. Is it time to listen to some music that'll rattle the room? Yes sir or ma'am. It is. Here's a gift, a giant fuckin' rattle. The 100 best songs of the year 2024, according to no one but me. Songs I love more than sundaes, sequels or re-elections.

If you appreciate this list (or the writing in it), I hope you'll consider making a gift of one of my books. The most recent is Do You Remember Being Born, a novel about a 75-year-old poet, Marian Ffarmer, who is hired by a Big Tech company to collaborate with their new poetry AI, Charlotte. Wired called it "the definitive novel about art in the age of AI." I also have two other books - one is a Cold War story about love, music and electricity; the other is magical heist novel about luck. Find out more at my website.

Said the Gramophone's a very old music-blog. See previous Best lists: 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. I follow just one arbitrary rule: that no primary artist may appear twice.

The best way to browse the proceeding is to click the little arrow beside each song and then to listen as you read. The things you like you can then download by right- or ctrl-clicking with your mouse.

You can also download the complete 100 songs in three parts:

• songs 1-33 (291mb)
• songs 34-66 (301mb)
• songs 67-100 (285mb)
(mirror: part 1 2 1 2 3 / please share any others)
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This list is my work—me, Sean, and not any of Said the Gramophone's past contributors. Don't blame them for my dubious, expiring taste.

If this is your first time here, don't hesitate to page through the archives. Papercuts await! You can also follow me on Bluesky.

Among the artists below, roughly 55 are American (the highest proportion ever - how boring!), 20 are Canadian, 18 are British, there are 2 Swedish artists, and 1 each from Brazil, Ireland, Nigeria and Switzerland. Next year, more international! 46 of the frontpeople/bandleaders are men, 46 identify as women (my first tie!), one is non-binary, and there are 7 mixed duos. This is the way it worked out; it certainly ain't perfect. Here are some charts of this and past lists' demographics.

My favourite songs of the year do not necessarily speak to my favourite albums of the year. Songs and LPs are really different; instrumental music, for example, which I spend a great deal of time with, is ill-suited to this "songs" list.

My favourite albums of 2024 were:

• Kahil El' Zabar's Ethnic Heritage Ensemble - Open Me, A Higher Consciousness of Sound and Spirit (alleyway, sky-swept, songbook / buy);
• King Hannah - Big Swimmer (midnight, electric, crazyhorse / buy);
• Being Dead - EELS (knock-knock, rock-band, who's there / buy);
• Adrianne Lenker - Bright Future (poems, steady-eyed, awake / buy);
• Erika Angell - The Obsession With Her Voice (empress, singer, scorpion / buy);
• Josh Johnson - Unusual Object (dizzy, lyrical, saxophone / buy;
• Jessica Pratt - Here in the Pitch (mischief, reverb, lilt / buy);
• Andrés Vial Percussion Ensemble - Spirit Takes Form (jazz, scaffolds, magnetism / buy);
• Phoebe Go - Marmalade (hearthbreak, radio, windwshield / buy); and
• Mk.gee - Two Star & The Dream Police (Fender, prism, blur / buy);

And now, without any more preamble, a tropical fruit salad of proudly mixed metaphors. And sentence fragments:

(original image source)

1. Jessica Pratt - "Life Is" [buy]
   I remember when I was a kid - the magnificent feeling of a friend who rushes over and presses something special & secret into your hand. The thrill of it, the privilege - but also the feeling of what an exciting thing it is to be alive, to have so much road unfurling before you. I might well have highlighted the closing track of Jessica Pratt's outstanding (and outstandingly succinct!) 2024 album, a swan-song called "This Year," but instead, here at the top of the list, I want to press into your hand something that's like a scribbled note or a smooth, perfect stone. A song that gestures forward, not back, with hope and a shivering, adamant hope.
2. Good Looks - "If It's Gone" [buy]
   Who can say why - but in this messy hairball of a year, what I wanted to listen to most was Indian classical and earnest indie alt-country, rippling rippers like this one and #88, (but this one most of all,) a splendid single for Austin's Good Looks, chugging and sincere and in its way aflame. Every time I hear it I want to hit repeat; I'd tattoo its five and a half minutes on my arm if I wasn't sure I'd regret it in the morning.
3. Clairo - "Sexy To Someone" [buy]
   Claire Elizabeth Cottrill with some of the most unambitious flirting I've ever heard. Clairo's somehow boasting and retreating at the same time / she's thirsting and demurring / she's dancing the sexy kind of shuffle that Belle & Sebastian once perfected - only instead of strum and fumble this is pulse and pose, a layering of chamber sounds that leads like a carpet from the front door to the bed. (Hat-tip to Thea.)
4. R.A.P. Ferreira & Fumitake Tamura ft. Hprizm - "begonias" [buy]
   "I've been both baskin' and robbin'," R.A.P. Ferreira r.a.p.s, and that's "begonias"' modus: it shines and relaxes, it steals your wallet. Tamura's beat is lazy until it isn't, reaching into your head to moan a suggestion. Hprizm calls-in with some sage advice: "My pops sat me down and said, 'Son, be a one of one.'" But the best of it is Ferreira's glimmering syllables, mischievous and good, the dice clicking and coming out sixes. In a year that had a lot of MF Doom kicking around, I appreciate the pleasure of a line that makes you go "mm," a lyricist who makes me think I should turn in my pen. (Thank you again to Thea.)
5. King Hannah - "Davey Says" [buy]
   One gem among many on one of the very best albums of the year: a tune that feels like consummation, coming together, a diffuse set of thoughts that finally find form. "Davey says you gotta take it slow / if you're gonna make it out of here," sing Hannah Merrick and Craig Whittle, and you have the sense that this one humble line became a source of great clarity: a fortune-cookie fortune shouted in your ear at a party, one that changes everything.
6. Hurray for the Riff Raff - "Colossus of Roads" [buy]
   Falling downhill into someone's arms.
7. The Hard Quartet - "Six Deaf Rats" [buy]
   I was surprised by how much I liked the Hard Quartet's debut record - like slipping on someone's else's coat and thinking, Huh! Not because I had doubts about this supergroup (Stephen Malkmus! My favourite drummer, Jim White! Matt Sweeney and Emmett Kelly!), but because their lead single left me so cold. I still don't think the thing the Hard Quartet want to do is the thing I want music to do, but the LP spent a lot of time on my speakers in 2024 - something beguiling about its janky, shaggy, juicy variety. And especially the earnest + off-tempo "Four Deaf Rats," which is spectacular: bewildered and adoring, nonsensical in structure, a three-pleat braid of Malkmus at his most sincere, boyish backing vocals, and drumming, by White, which is an arrogant disaster, a fervent joke.
8. Amber Mark - "Sink In" [video]
   In a surprisingly weak year for R&B, this was the clearest exception: a crossbow shot that hit me hard in the side. It isn't Mark's cool, sly delivery so much as the vicious magnetism of the production. Icy, forceful, knocking on the door like a stranger in distress; then, later, the rusty Bollywood violin, a gesture a third act yet to come.
9. Mount Eerie - "I Walk" [buy]
   "I Walk" begins as a watery (ok, windy) search - but when the drums kick in, after two and a half minutes, one is reminded that this is Phil Elverum near the peak of his powers: a man who knows so many of the ways to make a song; a man who's still working out new ways to tell the truth. How do you tell the story of stepping darkly into the sublime? How do you find words for the inexpressible? Mount Eerie's in the woods, full of wonder. He's feeling the starlight as heavy as an anvil.
10. Mk.gee - "Alesis" [buy]
    Put your heart in a cardboard box, kick it down the stairs.
11. Phoebe Go - "7 Up" [buy]
    There's a kind of song I've been hunting down, stashing away, since I heard Sarah Harmer's "Basement Apartment" when I was 18 (or maybe longer than that - when I was a kid breathing in Luscious Jackson and Sugar Ray by osmosis): scampering pop-rock with a nimble BPM; a little earnest, a little streetwise; with an appreciation for the way rhyme & longing can be laid across one another. More recently, there've been great records by Haim, Sam Lynch and Kacy Hill; Phoebe Go's Lemonade is the latest. It's Carly Rae Jepsen without the mania; it's the soundtrack to a movie about smart kids falling in and out of love. "7 Up" makes me wish I had somewhere to go in a hurry: someone I needed to run to, right now, to tell them something it's time they know.
12. Adrianne Lenker - "Donut Seam" [buy]
    Adrianne Lenker is sitting in that pocket, these days - that Neil Young pocket, that Nick Drake place, releasing one excellent album after another, with Big Thief or on her own. Records full of tests, experiments, misfires, masterpieces, with a daringness that only comes when you're in that pocket place, flourishing. "Donut Seam" is a song about loving as the world ends, about being a human under climate catastrophe; it's got "Donut" in the title as a gag about "don't it seem"; and still it's magnificent, magnetic, she makes it seem so easy. "Don't it seem like a good time for swimming?" she asks, "Before all the water disappears?"
13. Cindy Lee - "Diamond Jubilee" [buy]
    One of the year's best stories: out of nowhere, the international music world goes crazy for Cindy Lee, aka Patrick Flegel, one of Canada's beloved and long-time indie journeypeople. Diamond Jubilee, given away for free and also by donation - and never made available on Spotify - is singular and dreamlike and 32 tracks long. It's also worthy of its acclaim (and should clearly have won this year's Polaris Prize). I don't know if its opening, title track is really the best thing here--there are arguments to be made for "Government Cheque", "Dracula", and others besides--but it caught me from the very first listen, grabbing talon-tight with the slow fade in, the Velvet Underground-like guitar sound, the Arthur Russell cello, the sense of overlapping dreams, a landscape strange and at the same time familiar. I hope Flegel is doing well & hitting the road again soon.
14. Fred again.. ft. Duskus, Four Tet, Joy Anonymous, Skrillex - "glow" [buy]
    One of those boxes of fireworks you light on one end and stand back and then don't know what's gonna happen, a little of everything, fizz and fire and astronomical arc. Your friends are nearby. They're shouting.
15. Erika Angell - "Up My Sleeve" [buy]
    Watching a fire come up, feeling the heat on your face, and then suddenly feeling other heats, breathing other smokes: all of them are present, all of them are constant, all of them are real and can't quite be translated. Thus Owls' Erika Angell and the extraordinary drumming of Mili Hong, leading a string section underground.
16. Speakers Corner Quartet ft. Tirzah - "This Is How We Walk On The Moon" [buy]
    Takes a lot to carry a cover song to #16, let alone a cover of one of Arthur Russell's great monuments. But the Speakers Corner Quartet (the in-house band for a London spoken-word night) have done something truly memorable here, enlisting one of the most interesting singers in the UK to reexplore Russell's limpid original. They retain the same (cello-based) circulatory system - but make the track's scaffolding clearer, more direct. They bring up the drums - choosing a clattering carpenter's production. And they help Tirzah find the sweet-spot between public and private, between diary-entry and performance: the song's an old spell made new, the magic still works.
17. Angela Autumn - "Waltz About Death" [insta]
    There's an Appalachian squeak & whistle to Angela Autumn's folk-country, but I detect a very different influence, too: the patient bedroom gaze of Lana Del Rey. Maybe there's a Florida connection, something swampy. Maybe not. But when Autumn sings, "He lingers on me like butter on bread"; when she sings of death and trouble; I hear a sisterhood there, an invisible thread that turns a single, unsettled song into a chorus.
18. Chappell Roan - "Good Luck, Babe!" [buy]
    What a gift to have Roan as a 2024 pop star, there on stage beside the fakes, the plants and the billionaires. For most of the year, whenever you turned on the radio (or wandered into an Old Navy), "Good Luck, Babe!" was waiting there as a balm. The ending's what I love most about this song - but also the sliding strings, the way the switch from verse to chorus sheds one sonic skin for another. And Roan's voice too: there's a whimper to it, a reach, that welds her Kate Bush flourishes to something real-felt & authentic.
19. Zsela - "Still Swing" [buy]
    If you're wondering what Zsela's singing, in her pendulous voice, it's that she had news. And it's not gonna be OK. No, wait - it is gonna be OK. Or maybe: both. Zsela is two women in a mirror; she's moving through dimensions, swinging across worlds. Prince, Sade, Mary Margaret O'Hara. Still.
20. Wild Pink - "The Fences of Stonehenge" [buy]
    "I'm still sick of all my shit," John Ross mutters, as Wild Pink launch into the first of this song's two lightning-scented choruses, zinging and ringing. This is barbed indie-country that feels almost as indebted to the Pixies as to the War on Drugs; but "The Fences of Stonehenge" stands tall on its own terms, a monument to Ross's own unique dreams, the things he sees falling from the sky.
21. MC Digu ft. MC Pipokinha - "Pensa Que É Dois" [buy]
    Sometimes the virtue of a song is its what-is-this, its huh? This track, from Brazil, is one-such for 2024: a song that sounds like it was recorded inside a garbage can, or at the intersection of an anvil and a hamner. Hollow-bodied, DIY, flinching with enough energy to power an all-night rave, or a nervous breakdwon.
22. Nap Eyes -"Dark Mystery Enigma Bird" [buy]
    "I wish Nikolai Gogol had an indie-rock band!" you might say. "If only Goethe played the bass!" For those wound a certain way, Nap Eyes have long been there to provide solace, delight: a story-song like a roc perched atop a mountaintop, a phoenix gliding through the rain. Nigel Chapman sings his verses over an easy, glinting groove. Or, put another way, Nap Eye glint their groove over an easy, enchanting tale. You have the sense of musicians who have read the same book, seen the same Jim Henson movie, and are headed to the same location. They all know the ending, and they're the only ones.
23. Joshua Idehen - "Mum Does the Washing" [buy]
    In the gentle tones of your favourite high-school teacher, Joshua Idehen offers his analysis of this decade's major political ideologies. His analysis involves a lot of laundry. Not all of it is sophisticated, but this is not a thesis - it's a 120 bpm club track. And it sounds a little like if someone threw the Swingle Sisters down a well. What's not to like?
24. Jon Mckiel - "Hex" [buy]
    Sometimes the curse is a bangle you pick up yourself, push up your wrist. You just like the way it shines - darkly - when you hold it up into the light. Someone call the police, there's a saxophonist on the roof.
25. Two Shell - "₊˚⊹Gimmi It" [buy]
    Nodding, jabbering, skittering along - and yet this is a dance track I imagine as a mosaic, everything placed so tidily on the tile.
26. Waxahatchee ft. MJ Lenderman - "Right Back To It" [buy]
    Waxahatchee sings a love-song through the holes in the walls, the cracks in the floor. She sings it to herself, to the present and future - and also, perhaps most kindly, to the past.
27. La Force - "Protection" [buy]
    By its second half, this song arrives at a world so beautiful and tender, so safe, that I would stay there forever. It's Ariel Engle's voice; it's the amniotic wobble of guitars; it's absolutely the gorgeous bass playing. But mostly it's the assembly of all three, of everything: and the eye and ear that assemble these sounds and this intention, throwing a sunrise into the sky.
28. Kendrick Lamar - "Not Like Us" [video]
    Music isn't sports. I don't care about strategy; I don't give a shit about the final score. And I'm someone who appreciates the separate functions fulfilled by Drake and Kendrick Lamar's respective catalogues. For me, the appeal of "Not Like Us" isn't its impact, insights or technique. It's its poison-tipped delivery system: relentless and precise and, above all, unchanging. The repetition of these bars - in the recording, on the airwaves, at the concerts - turns it into its own kind of beat, a "Not Like Us"-shaped rhythm, a sandwalk 2024 taught us all to step.
29. Jennifer Castle - "Earthsong" [buy]
    The patience of the wish: how many times did Jennifer Castle play it, sing it, until she found the tempo that matches perfectly to the beat of a heart, the ripple of a river, the fumble of a sunbeam as it slides across the objects in your room (the plants, the books, the glass of water)? "Earthsong" is a prayer, in a way, but it's a prayer turned lovingly toward itself. "Forces gain good ground," she murmurs, "when light moves at the speed of sound." This is a blessing you can introduce into the world. You just have to set it loose in the air.
30. Temani Hill - "Clouds" [instagram]
    R&B that feels like a gemstone in constant revolution: reflections, reflections, shining reflections. Sometimes you catch your face in it; sometimes you catch a glimpse of the clouds. Before long you might be there standing beside it, revolving in place.
31. Peggy Lee & Cole Schmidt - "It Will Come Back" [buy]
    Peggy Lee (on cello) and Cole Schmidt (on guitars), accompanied by Dylan van der Schyff and Wayne Horvitz but especially by Sunny Kim, whose poem (delivered in Korean), conveys a purposefulness to this sumptuous, searching instrumental. Like #29, "It Will Come Back" feels like it grants something to the world: a hope, a reassurance. But I like the way doubt swirls inside it too, an unfinishedness that seems like part of the piece's perfection.
32. Nilüfer Yanya - "Like I Say (I runaway)" [buy]
    Not a fuzz or a blub or a buzz but a bluzz - a bluzz of warm distortion as London's Nilüfer Yanya sings her hook. "I feel like my friends / they don't read my mind," she calls. "The minute I'm not in control / I'm tearing up inside." And for all its shaggy fretwork you can hear the song's sense of control: in the woodblock click of percussion, the upright bass, the kick. "Like I Say" is a tug of war between keeping order and breaking loose - a downward slide that keeps regaining its footing.
33. MOMO. ft. Jessica Lauren - "Pára" [buy]
    An agile samba from Rio de Janeiro via London, assisted by light touches of keyboard (by Jessica Lauren) and some surprisingly hefty horns. Still, the master of ceremonies is clearly MOMO himself, whose Portuguese sounds half-way between lordly and dumbfounded.
34. Madi Diaz & Kacey Musgraves - "Don't Do Me Good" [buy]
    Just a fine, shining break-up ballad. The songwriting's the first thing, but spare a thought for Diaz or Musgraves or whoever arranged the duet: they exchange the lead and share it, singing together like a pair of birds on the wing.
35. Andre Ethier - "Four Short Plays" [buy]
    God I love this cool, dubby, rainy-day shuffle. Its crooked posture, its twee endearments, its sax. And, above all, that recurring piano motif: gentle, faintly dissonant, like Fauré sitting in on a Scrabble game.
36. MJ Lenderman - "She's Leaving You" [buy]
    Bright, original rock'n'roll, bristling and sincere: "It gets dark, we all got work to do." Put it in wrapping paper, send it to your pal who's mainlining Rogan.
37. Katie Gavin - "Aftertaste" [buy]
    MUNA's Katie Gavin with her self-described "Lilith Fair-core": soft rock that pleads and shimmers and begs to be sung from behind a steering wheel as you drive through your hometown.
38. Blunt Chunks - "Limbo" [buy]
    When you turn on "Limbo," pay attention to the tambourine and what it presages: transformation. Caitlin Woelfle-O'Brien has written a song that persists, insists and refuses, drawing its richness from very simple ingredients. It's folk-r&b from Toronto, but it evokes for me the London scene of Sault and Cleo Sol: musicians who know how to take a rhythm and blues combo and paint a whole, irresistible world.
39. Trace Mountains - "In A Dream" [buy]
    This is what the War on Drugs hath wrought: plaintive, shiny longing over a dusty indie beat; peanut butter and chocolate; a chorus hook you'll hold out for, breath half-held, without realizing what you're doing. "Like a drEeEeam--" a heart that overflows, all that splendour heading downstream.
40. ANOHNI - "Breaking" [buy]
    Something new and exciting to ANOHNI's beat-poetic delivery here - hiccuped, bending. "Breaking" ripples out toward forever but then hangs there closeby. It's loyal. It refuses to abandon.
41. Andrew Bird & Madison Cunningham - "Crying in the Night" [buy]
    Bird and Cunningham do their own version of Buckingham Nicks: a sinuous, stately cover of the song from '73. When they sing a warning "that she's gonna leave you crying in the night," there's not a moment of worry or wrath: there's pure delight, like they've each plucked some candies from a bowl.
42. Myriam Gendron - "Berceuse" [buy]
    A lullaby that progresses line by line, strum by strum, blink by sleepy blink, until it comes apart in a starburst comet-blazing free-jazz solo by tenor saxophonist Zoh Amba.
43. Porches - "Bread Believer" [buy]
    I couldn't tell you what it means to be a "bread believer," but neither could its songwriter: the lyrics' function is "trance-like," he says, "like staring at yourself in the mirror for too long." It has a bruised 90s sound, like alt-rock with a tummy-ache - and yet a childlike drive to it, like a boy who's resolved to do the thing he cannot do, swim the laps he cannot swim, expressing the disappointment (or maybe the ambition) he was once willing to suppress.
44. Katseye - "Touch" [video]
    Sparkly (American-made) Korean pop from a reality-TV-recruited girl-group. It's all highs, no lows, like a butterfly that's doomed to die before it lands.
45. half•alive - "Sophie's House" [buy]
    Fuzzy-headed bait for dummies like me - just a prancing, midtempo pop-song, half-tanned and tipsy. Let it play on a loop in every movie-theatre lobby in the nation.
46. SUUNS - "Fish on a String" [buy]
    Ben Shemie says he knows he's a fish on a string. He says he knows just what he means. But when the first synthpad lifts, and the rest of the band joins in, there's the sense the singer's not alone here. There are others too, looking on. Maybe the rest of SUUNS don't mean what Shemie means. Maybe they're not dangling: maybe they're watching him as he swings. Maybe they're judging, or they're counting him out, or they're waiting for him to find another way. Imagine if Jonathan Richman were cast in a John Waters film, but hadn't seen the part yet. "I can't wait," he says, as he sits around the aquarium-tank with his friends. "I can't wait." His pals aren't so sure.
47. Katy J Pearson - "Maybe" [buy]
    A girl upon a horse - dusky eyeliner (the girl), braids (the horse), sequins (both). They don't gallop - they canter. Up a dune and down it. Along a ridge. Into the sunset and out of it. Pearson's an old hand now: she knows how to use her spurs; she knows how to take the reins. A pop-country song for the cowgirls as they arrive at the nightclub, each of them checking their hats & jackets.
48. SZA - "Saturn" [video]
    Despite its "Mr Sandman" opening, SZA's "Saturn"'s more asteroid than stardust, tearing through space & time & heartbreak. She's got a chorus of angels with her, some sparkly synth harps, but don't be deceived: the track's burning up, everything's on fire, it's all going down while she dreams of somewhere else.
49. Wood Andrews - "Trying to Conquer Me" [buy]
    Puckish singer-songwriter Andrew Wood (Napster Vertigo) pays excellent tribute to rocksteady singer Delroy Williams, reimagining his 1968 single as a fiddle-lined country tune. He sounds like a cowpoke who would resist tyranny and mesmerism, but maybe not the allure of a coquettish wink.
50. Floating Points "Birth4000" [buy]
    Floating Points takes Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" and follows it to its cybernetic conclusion: down the birth canal and into the 21st century, where there's more flinch, more worry, and a quicker, slightly delirious pace. Makes you want to have a baby and immediately send it away on an intricate, city-spanning conveyor belt.
51. gglum - "Eating Rust" [buy]
    Like the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood," but with footstomps instead of sitar, Ella Smoker instead of John Lennon, and instead of setting a fire herself, gglum's the one sitting in the ashes.
52. The Bug Club - "We Don't Care About That" [buy]
    The funniest song of the year - bratty, lackadaisical, like the snottiest snot-nosed kids making trouble at the dinner table. They're sick of their mum, they're bored of their dad, they're only interested in "young guy stuff," such as "street magic and unrequited love." Soon you'll be like me, hearing someone say something silly and then squawking, in a Welsh accent, "Are you mad?!!!" (Thank you, Thea!)
53. Scott Orr - "Clear (as Day)" [buy]
    Like a tune by Phil Collins or Peter Gabriel - but cooked down, distilled. Boiled until all that's left is esssence, like a chypre or a fougere. Listening to "Clear (as Day)" feels like wandering through a cloud, some place perfect but obscure; and Orr, quiet like a ghost, is as aptly named as ever.
54. Kacy Hill ft. Nourished By Time - "My Day Off" [buy]
    Just a great little love-song, with a vibe that makes me imagine a cartoon pair of sunglasses with a giant dopey smile - the immaculate contentment of a summer crush.
55. Charli XCX - "360" [buy]
    Finally, an interesting reason to wear Kangols.
56. Rosali - "On Tonight" [buy]
    So you're head over heels for a snake-eyed lover... But oh! keep on singing about it. Just sng the right way and - surely - only happy endings ahead.
57. Tierra Whack - "SHOWER SONG" [buy]
    "I FEEL GREAT!" A song like a vest covered in badges, buttons. A song like bad make-up that still makes you look fabulous. A song like a bathroom full of steam, someone doing Whitney Houston in the stall. A song like a wolf howling lovingly at a balloon-animal. A song like a bouquet of hotdogs. "I SOUND GREAT! ... Soap and water give me powers." One for the ages; keep in your navel for when it's needed.
58. Dehd - "Light On" [buy]
    Get out of bed, pull on your clothes, part of a complete breakfast.
59. Medium Build - "Knowing U Exist" [buy]
    Everything the Post Malone country album should have been: foul-mouthed and earnest, with strings like whiskey in your glass.
60. Pa Salieu - "Allergy" [buy]
    Pa Salieu didn't waste any time - released from prison in September, new album in November, here we are in December. "Allergy" is thrilling, kinetic, more tingling skin than anaphylactic shock. The British MC's raps are well-engineered, sturdy, but boast a mischief I adore - varying tone and intensity that further electrify an already electric beat, like Afrobeats rattling around in a Cuban club.
61. Dora Jar - "She Loves Me" [buy]
    Dora Jar making indie-pop that sounds like someone scrambling around on their duvet, gnashing and arching and "looking like a crumpled up napkin." One-sided desire, eager and wry.
62. Unessential Oils - "Distrust the Magician" [buy]
    Plants & Animal's Warren Spicer with an absolutely crack band - including Sade percussionist Martin Dicham. A song that's nearly six minutes of sorcery - a ritual unfolding in sections, bar by bar, as if the right groove can summon an angel, or a shade.
63. Sabrina Carpenter - "Taste" [video]
    From the year's best pure pop LP, Carpenter offers up a poisoned oyster of a tune - horny and vengeful. I'm a big fan of Carpenter's slyness, but also of the fun that suffuses tracks like this: a hundred squiggles, spasms and easter eggs in what is essentially astroturf. A record that helped redeem the year's radio.
64. Being Dead - "Rock n' Roll Hurts" [buy]
    Austin's Being Dead are a band I find hard to describe. There's some of the Unicorns to them, some of the Pixies and the Supremes and maybe even Sparks. They play a self-sabotaging indie-rock, veering between stone-faced and silly, thrusting joy-buzzers and ice-cubes into the hands of faithful fans. Listening to "Rock n' Roll Hurts" is like being lectured by a very bad (however genius) lecturer, like being seduced by Pee Wee Herman. It's completely insensible, I love it.
65. Maggie Rogers - "It Was Coming All Along" [buy]
    Notice the contrast here between the tidy appeal of the music - pop-rock of the cleanest commercial variety - and Rogers' luscious, expressive singing... Like watching a new car zoom by, trailing tinsel.
66. Cola - "Pulling Quotes" [buy]
    Quantum entanglement, they say, is when particles remain connected over even vast distances. Two guitars, say, answering each other without knowing they're answering. Or a singer and a band: imagine each party walking in the opposite direction, like North- and South-Going Zaxes. When the singer calls out the ridiculous ("My outlook is restrained!"), the other, wherever they are, feels a tremor in the air. "Pulling Quotes" feels like distance and closeness tied up together, tempestuous, outstanding, messy.
67. Jorja Smith - "High" [video]


68. Kelly Lee Owens - "Higher" [video]
    Two takes on euphoria, each in its own octave. Synths, drums, voice - are you looking for an escort to accompany you up? Or an engine for getting there?
69. Sharp Pins - "Is It Better?" [buy]
    Noise-pop shouting back from the edge of beyond, urging you to make a best friend - now! before it's too late! - and to dare to keep them close.
70. Donnie & Joe Emerson - "Searching" [buy]
    Three decades after "Baby," the Emerson brothers returned with this: a song that feels handmade, pleading, at once an act of nostalgia and of rattling nowness, just some guys in a garage.
71. Tove Lo and SG Lewis - "HEAT" [video]
    A sweaty, cascading slab of eurohouse, Tove Lo's constant rejoinder ("you already knooOow") like an umbrella swinging on my wrist.
72. Ducks Ltd. - "The Main Thing" [buy]
    Organic, free-range jangle and some turret-mounted drums, the only things you need to operate a new farm.
73. Roc Marciano - "Gold Crossbow" [buy]
    Mumbles in a control room: Target locked. Deploy. The boss is cool; he doesn't fuck around. You can trust him. Don't let him see you flinch. Hip-hop for the bottom of the chessboard, the part no one sees.
74. Pearl & the Oysters - "Side Quest" [buy]
    A funky, synthpop approximation of exactly what it says in the title. Not 8-bit chiptunes but 16-bit, 64-bit, 256- - and Pearl herself (aka Juliette Davis) singing about her video-game-like mission, trapped in the wrong dimension and hunting in vain for the portal back.
75. Bibi Club - "Parc de Beauvoir" [buy]
    Sitting in the park as the sky goes dark, as the shadows seem to shake free from the trees.
76. Chris Cohen - "Night or Day" [buy]
    Just a tidy bit of business, Chris Cohen's voice and his guitar, his pals with bass & drumkit (& shaker), painting a room in warm acrylics, layer upon layer, clear lines, nice movement, sunlight and shadow, until gradually the cloud moves in, the day's tarnished lining, the frailty of all those sterling good intentions.
77. Wet - "Double" [video]
    Maybe a shimmer's not a ripple of the light - it's a stutter, a shiver, a staggering force. (Wet are a hyperpop band from Brooklyn.)
78. P:ano - "poco trail" [buy]
    Can you believe it?! P:ano are back - 23 years after When It's Dark and It's Summer, a masterpiece that happens to be one of the first albums I was ever sent to review. They're still soft and wakeful and playing with the light, finding new ways to split sunbeams into colours. "Poco Trail" is pleasant and jaunty, scaffolded with strings and trumpet, but P:ano are unafraid of secrets. They'll dive into pits, chase down ghouls, skip coolly toward wherever it is they're needed.
79. Oxlade ft. Fally Ipupa - "IFA" [video]
    Oxlade, a Nigerian pop star, and the Ipupa, the Congolese "Prince of Rumba," join forces for this fantastic, floating single. Oxlade finds just the right register - jumping from line to line like a guy who's crossing a river - but it's Ipupa that helps the song find another level, singing his verses with a slow and almost cantorial poise.
80. Avec pas d'casque - "D'autres messages suivront" [buy]
    So grateful for the return of Avec pas d'casque - one of Montreal's great bands. "D'autres messages suivront" is dry as tinder, and just as generous: you can hear it biding its time, patient, ready at any moment to be engulfed into flame.
81. Casey MQ - "Words for Love" [buy]
    I like to imagine that "the green room" in Casey MQ's song is "the Green Room" (former bar, burned down). I like to imagine that the love-story that plays out here, soft as snow, is one that took place in the same streets I walk in today - where there's winter on the pavement, old lovers in their homes.
82. Kate Stephenson - "Texas Wide" [video]
    Sometimes a banjo's just the thing, no matter what ails ya. "Texas Wide" is a road-trip tune in falsetto and strum - no drums, just hard quick chords, a rhythm like the tread of tires over asphalt. You can't miss what's before you.
83. Dina Ögon - "Det Läcker" [buy]
    Sparkling Swedish art-pop that conceals a lot of subtle pieces under its sashaying, dance-floor twinkle. No matter how often the groove circles back, there's a human wobble at its heart - a gravity that keeps anything from feeling robotic, a ghost in the routine.
84. Mount Kimbie ft. King Krule - "Empty and Silent" [buy]
    Somehow Mount Kimbie convince King Krule's Archy Marshall to drop his veil and just sing a little sing-song, a story in transparent verses. No sleight of hand, no obfuscation. Did Marshall convince Mount Kimbie of anything? To treat him fairly - with scrappiness, creativity, vision. This song feels like a private secret and also like a party, like a diary-entry written in watercolour, all the entries bleeding through.

85. Laura Marling - "Patterns" [buy]
    Laura Marling with a finger-picked meditation on children, inheritance - those uncanny "patterns in repeat." Handsome and hushed; unfussy, like a hand resting on the back of a little boy's head.
86. Charly Bliss - "Calling You Out" [buy]
    "Picking a fight but even I don't know why!" shouts Eva Hendricks. But the singer's self-excoriation doesn't add much darkness to this scorching, thumping pop-punk tune. It's full of playful moments, darts of melody, and a sense of slow, inevitable triumph. Hang in there.
87. Meridian Brothers - "En el Caribe estoy triste" [buy]
    In the Caribbean, the Meridian Brothers complain, I am sad. But their sorrows are expressed in little pea-sized coos, like they're gremlins glum and loafing inside a great machine. Still the soukous goes on and on, cheerful and precise, a guitar like sunlight on the bay.
88. Share - "County Lines" [buy]
    A snarl of roar-y country-rock - the guitarists flinging themselves around, the drummer hitting as hard as they can, the singer trying to figure out the right intensity for his drawl. Throw this on and then throw back your hair, wipe your brow. Throw on your shirt, go outside. Throw down your gloves, time for a fight.
89. HiTech ft. GDMRW - "SPANK!" [buy]
    A club banger that feels like maybe it's missing something. There's hand-drums and drum machine, plinky piano, laser guns, a low-voiced maniac... What's it missing? Pal, it's missing you.
90. Alena Spanger - "Steady Song" [buy]
    Drum and harp and voice, crooked in their lope. The crookedness is perfect, just wrongly right, as Spanger tells us that she tells her friends "this is how I am - only the highs and the lows." I think of a marionette - brought down, brought up, brought down, brown up again, elegant as a dancer in the correct pair of hands.
91. Salute ft. なかむらみなみ - "Go!" [buy]
    She's billed as a guest, but Japanese rapper なかむらみなみ (aka Nakamura Minami) takes command of this dance-pop track - jumping the fence, scaling the wall, leading it across the roofs with the speed and confidence of a master parkouriste. The synths underneath her flinch, dissolve and fall to pieces, but she doesn't hang around waiting for them to coalesce. She's on the move again, leaving neon streaks to trail behind.
92. Floating Action - "Sunlight" [buy others]
    Floating Action's Seth Kauffman reaches back through his catalogue to resurrect this old song, a sitar-led tangle that reminds me less of Sixties exotica (or classical ragas) than of Beck's One Foot in the Grave. You have the impression of a man throwing a party inside his apartment and inviting no one at all, except for maybe the mice.
93. Gorgeous - "Natural High" [buy]
    High and piping art-pop, like a smoothed-down, degaussed version of Cocteau Twins. Gorgeous sing their "Natural High," but it could just as easily be Natural High singing their "Gorgeous," the whole thing very pretty, trebly and un-self-conscious.
94. Zach Bryan ft. Watchhouse - "Pink Skies" [buy]
    Bryan shows off his command of melody, dynamics and harmonica-playing (?) on this new-school country song. Finely made, well sung, no matter the social media drama.
95. Billie Eilish - "LUNCH" [buy]
    There's something fascinating to this year's big Billie Eilish single, and it's not the (i am shocked!) Sapphic storyline. Instead, it's the curious synthesis of influences, references: syrupy rave wobble; guitar reverb worthy of Cindy Lee; and then a certain kind of 90s radio-rock that's dry and nearly lifeless, the stuff of landfill used CD bins. These are all deliberate signifiers, put together by young people who adore pop music: I've never forgotten Eilish's late-breaking love for Cake.
96. Shabaka ft. Eska Mtungwazi - "Living" [buy]
    Whenever someone (Thea) puts on this song, Shabaka's flute starts shooting just everywhere, in unpredictable lines. Up, down, right, left, following none of the laws of light or kinetics: it's not an arrow or a laser-beam; it's a song; it's pure invention, a roaming dialectic, Dionysian but chaste, loving and insistent, moving not in harmony with Mtungwazi's voice, or even with Shabaka's pocket string-section, but almost in spite of it, like the bird's gone free and it's this freedom that matters most of all.
97. Dev Lemons - "Why Did I Laugh Anyway?" [video]
    A ghost of a song, closer (at moments) to an unearthed Sibylle Baier single than to the Eilish/100 gecs universe that characterizes a lot of Dev Lemons' other work. I appreciate the way Lemons expresses her anxiety not just in the weary worry of her lyrics but in the track's unpredictable sonics - slipping from warmth into chill, lullaby into noise, verse and chorus into a broken-down bridge.
98. Horsegirl - "2468" [buy]
    Chicago's Horsegirl with a tune like a bag of Bridge Mixture, chocolatey and various. Produced by Cate Le Bon and appropriately vivacious, sawing and skipping and sprightly and bright-eyed, what the hell is this music?, art-rock that's neither very arty nor very rock'n'roll, just a playground full of love-sick abstract expressionists.
99. Omar Apollo - "Spite" [buy]
    A stylish casanova singing sullen R&B. Dump the bouquet, spill out the water, smash the vase into a million gleaming shards.
100. Fontaines D.C. - "Favourite" [buy]
     This song isn't here because Fontaines D.C. keep the "u" in "Favourite," but honestly it doesn't hurt - like a red star in a sky full of gold ones, like an open window in a skyscraper's side, like a coin in a sack full of oats. The Irish post-punk group surfing an uncharacteristic high. Happy and hopeful, alive, pointing at someone across a room and seeing their eyes answer back.

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It'll be 2025 soon. As they say here in Montreal: bon courage. Happy holidays.