20

MJ Lenderman – Wristwatch

The year’s breakout indie star, Jake Lenderman has a voice like the last roll of the die. On his fourth album, Manning Fireworks, he uses it to portray a series of sad-sack men reaching for Eric Clapton records and cool gadgets to assert their virility, filled with the weary, palpably desperate sense that maybe, just maybe, their day has finally come. It’s the type of figure that in comedian Tim Robinson’s hands would be an absurdist nightmare (he will honk if he’s horny), but in Lenderman’s, they reek with a very specific kind of pathos: the protagonist of Wristwatch has a techy new timepiece that’s a compass, a cell phone, a pocketknife and a megaphone … that also “tells me I’m on my own”. The hangdog tumble of electric guitar and pedal steel – like a more earth-bound Magnolia Electric Co – shifts between sounding crushed and bright, neither tragedy nor hope ever quite winning out. But Lenderman’s unique voice prevails: who else this year would have come up with the line: “I got a houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome”? Laura Snapes

19

Clairo – Sexy to Someone

Clairo’s album Charm was that word made manifest, and Sexy to Someone was perhaps the most charming moment of all. Made with Dap-Kings and Lee Fields collaborator Leon Michel, gently insistent vintage soul is the backdrop for a robustly funny and wry song about putting hotness at the top of one’s hierarchy of needs: “Sexy to somebody, it would help me out / Oh, I need a reason to get out of the house.” Ben Beaumont-Thomas

18

Lady Gaga – Disease

After the flop of Joker: Folie à Deux and her accompanying album of big band standards, Gaga swept the embarrassment away as if with a swish of a meat dress, in this triumphant return to her core electro-pop sound. The malevolent beat could have been made by Gesaffelstein or Justice (actually it involves Cirkut, who had a big hand in Charli xcx’s Brat); lurching forward like a horny Frankenstein’s monster, the track is perfect for Gaga’s histrionically camp series of psychosexual illness metaphors. BBT

17

Yaeji – Booboo

The Korean-American producer broke through in 2017 with Raingurl, an underground club smash animated by her skipping-chant vocals. She then went on to massively expand her sound into progressive electronic pop, but returned to her roots with Booboo. With a satisfyingly stripped-back Jersey club beat, it’s a song both for and about the club, where she is “headbanging all night … find me at the front right”. But it’s not all abandon – she interpolates Raingurl as she considers the growing pains between her two dance hits. BBT

16

Beyoncé – Texas Hold ’Em

Shaboozey’s A Bar Song (Tipsy) and Post Malone and Morgan Wallen’s I Had Some Help may have cantered past it to become the pop-country crossovers of the year, but Beyoncé was first out the gate, with Texas Hold ’Em becoming her first UK No 1 since 2008. With banjos and a muffled beat like a cowboy boot stomping on a dusty floor, it’s authentically rootsy, and for all her star wattage there’s something almost homely about her relaxed, conversational singing style. BBT

15

Kassie Krut – Reckless

There are few cooler moves than launching with a manifesto song, and even if you didn’t know Eve Alpert and Kasra Kurt from their former band, Philly math-rockers Palm (now joined by their producer Matt Anderegg), they make a compelling pitch to get with the picture fast. Alpert’s chanted vocals about being fast, free, best and mean hit somewhere between Coco & Clair Clair and Charli xcx; the brute drum beat, industrial shudder and off-kilter pop sensibility vaults back to Peaches and early Micachu and the Shapes. It’s the hypnotic nonchalance of Alpert’s vocals amid the discordance that makes Reckless so seductive: she sounds untouchable, but that won’t stop you from trying to get close. “Never look back,” she sings. “There’s a runner in me.” LS

14

Ariana Grande – We Can’t Be Friends (Wait for Your Love)

This was easily the biggest hit from Grande’s album Eternal Sunshine, and while it didn’t have the compositional originality elsewhere – such as The Boy Is Mine with its exquisite time-stretched chorus – it makes up for that with intense melancholy. Clearly indebted to Robyn’s electro-pop heartbreak anthems but given a softer sheen, Grande said she wanted “people to make of it what they will”. It could be about an almost-romance, but the more interesting reading is that it’s about Grande’s relationship with the media and public perception: “But I don’t wanna feed this monstrous fire / Just wanna let this story die … Me and my truth, we sit in silence.” BBT

13

Waxahatchee – Right Back to It (ft MJ Lenderman)

Right Back to It may be the most perfect portrait of what it is to be the stubborn half of a relationship, the one prone to self-sabotage by second-guessing and refusing help. Katie Crutchfield sings that she’s “blunter than a bullseye”, always “bracing for a bombshell” that never comes, while her partner has their “love written on a blank check” and bears the ease of “a song with no end”. It’s partially a lament about the parts of one’s nature you wish you could overcome, though really it plays more like a love letter to difference, and to the kind of partner who gives you the space to learn how to go easy on yourself (you can imagine this soundtracking many first dances). Crutchfield has that ease licked in one respect, anyway: the song’s intermittently interlocking guitar and banjo, coupled with her conversational phrasing, are a total balm. LS

12

Kim Gordon – Bye Bye

Bye Bye is essentially a very high-end packing list incanted with Kim Gordon’s typically alluring hauteur: designer clothes, homeopathic remedies, “pyjamas – silk”. But the muscular industrial roil and sharp, stabbing squeaks underpinning her suitcase inventory imply that she’s less bound for a luxury resort than some sort of bunk or heist, evoking the heroines of Play It as It Lays, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More, Thelma and Louise or, more darkly, A Woman Under the Influence. Wherever she’s going, take it as read that you can’t come. LS

11

The Cure – Alone

The lead single from the album Songs of a Lost World was the Cure’s first new music in 16 years, and it made an appropriately grand and stately entrance. Unlike pop songs that tease the chorus in the opening seconds so you don’t press skip, Robert Smith’s vocals don’t even come in for three and a half minutes as the band generate a symphonic, slowly stuttering groove. Smith then raises a toast to endings: of art, of nature, of idealism, of the children we used to be. This song acknowledges that our world is dying, or at least our version of it – and yet its determined beauty reminds us that we can still make something meaningful. BBT

10

Kendrick Lamar – Not Like Us

Forget Gladiator II – the entertainment industry’s greatest man-to-man combat of the year came between Kendrick Lamar and Drake in their remarkably heated multi-track beef this spring. The kill shot was Not Like Us – not only did it have a DJ Mustard beat that made it the rare diss track you could dance to, Lamar’s framing of Drake as a cultural leech had real credence, while the allegations of involvement with young girls were what everyone wanted to believe: “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minor” became the most quotable line in the whole debacle. Drake denied the allegations: “Only fuckin’ with Whitneys, not Millie Bobby Browns / I’d never look twice at no teenager” was actually an impressively reference-packed retort, but by then he’d been backed into a corner and Lamar didn’t have to bother with a reply. BBT

9

Nick León and Erika de Casier – Bikini

After a couple of edits and co-productions, the Miami DJ and Portuguese-Danish producer finally teamed up proper with a beachy-minded track debuted, fittingly, at Primavera festival in Barcelona. This trancey dembow thumper intensifies in tandem with the single-minded crush de Casier outlines in a distant voice, one that suggests a gaze fixed on the limits of the horizon, waiting for her paramour to appear. The chorus – “Meet me at the beach / It’s me in the bikini” – is an earworm; the balance of sad and sexy almost comically on point. LS

8

Addison Rae – Diet Pepsi

It’s been a tricky year for the American fast food industry. Such simple pleasures as caffeinated drinks and cheese-larded pizzas have been turned into wanton metaphors for activities of a sexual nature by some of the nation’s most brazen young pop stars. Chappell Roan wants to “get it hot like Papa John”. Sabrina Carpenter intends to “Mountain Dew it for ya”. And while one-time TikTok dancer Addison Rae actually claims that she wants to refresh herself with some Diet Pepsi – which has barely recovered from the besmirching Lana Del Rey gave it 12 years ago – she stipulates that she’ll be “sitting on his lap” as she does so. Coupled with an extremely breathy, addictively trappy slow jam that evokes Lana gasping for oxygen, you rather get the impression that this great American refreshment might actually be some sort of horny hors d’oeuvre. Deary me! Great key change though. LS

7

Nilüfer Yanya – Like I Say (I Runaway)

It’s hard to pick a standout song from Nilüfer Yanya’s third album, My Method Actor, the whole thing is such a heated, fractious mood. But Like I Say (I Runaway) is a great example of what an idiosyncratic songwriter the always-brilliant Yanya has become. The third song on this list about making a break for it (alongside Kassie Krut and Kim Gordon), it takes an elusive approach to the subject: the cool verses mingling the spectre of trip-hop and Radiohead’s heavy-thumbed acoustics as Yanya outlines her self-protective MO. The writhing, staticky wallop of the chorus crashes down with the weight of the feelings and uncertainty she’s running from, powering a captivatingly desperate vocal performance. LS

6

Fontaines DC – Starburster / Favourite

Korn were the unlikely touchstone for Starburster, the return single by Ireland’s finest, and they nailed both sides of the rap-rock equation. The drums hit like a boom-bap beat, and Grian Chatten has the relentless flow of a battle-hardened MC, spitting surrealist brags (“I got a shadow like a .58 calibre / I wanna move like a new salamander”) and inhaling hard in a song inspired by a panic attack. The rest of the band give him the space he needs, providing spaghetti western twangs and a strange, dreamy middle-eight that’s like the sudden return of clarity – only for chaos to crash back in. Plenty of our writers also voted for Favourite, their 80s-indie anthem whose warmth and poignancy felt heroic after the nervy Starburster. BBT

5

Billie Eilish – Birds of a Feather / Lunch

There was the faint sense that Eilish’s star might be waning after her fame-jaded second album Happier Than Ever, but that was entirely extinguished by the success of follow-up Hit Me Hard and Soft, with Birds of a Feather becoming a massive global hit. Eilish makes bald declarations of love over a tender beat as soft as snow – but this romance is fraught, as her lover wavers and Eilish’s patience snaps: “You’re so full of shit / Tell me it’s a bit / Say you don’t see it, your mind’s polluted / Say you wanna quit, don’t be stupid.” There were also lots of votes for Lunch, her spry, ska-tinged ode to a very particular kind of nutrition, which put an adult spin on the troublemaking sound she broke out with. BBT

4

Jade – Angel of My Dreams

Girls Aloud production geniuses Xenomania only worked with the girl band’s successors Little Mix once, but their wild Frankensteinian style (often creating songs from the remnants of various other tracks) feels like the mutant blood pumping through former Mixer Jade Thirlwall’s debut solo single. The lurch from massive Mariah chorus to snarling bloghouse verses and another, helium-voiced sped-up chorus feels as far from focus-grouped pop as humanly possible; closer to a head-spinning night out with your most captivatingly chaotic friend in all its ecstasy and freefall. LS

3

Charli xcx – The Girl, So Confusing Version With Lorde / Von Dutch / Guess (ft Billie Eilish) / 360

360 is about right: the vast array of Brat – and remixed Brat and It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat – tracks that our writers voted for reflected Charli xcx’s wild range in a year that was often oversimplified to a single shade of acid green. “I set the tone, it’s my design” she taunted, presciently, on our lowest-charting song, 360; the Guess redux with Billie was raunchy; Von Dutch unapologetically bitchy. But our top Brat song, The Girl, So Confusing Version With Lorde, spanned its own entire world of emotional terrain, turning Charli’s original song about her fears of a frenemy’s intentions into a crazily moving moment of resolution between two singers who not only have the same hair, it turns out, but a whole lot of self-doubt and mutual admiration in common. She’s your favourite reference, baby – but no one did it like her this year. LS

2

Sabrina Carpenter – Espresso

From Tinashe’s “can somebody match my freak” to Charli’s “bumpin’ that”, smart lyricists now have one eye on the potential memes – and no one did it better than Sabrina Carpenter, whose ridiculously quotable chorus line “that’s that me espresso” enraged syntax purists and enchanted everyone else. In fact, the lyrics throughout are a delight – “walked in and dream-came-trued it for ya”, “I can’t relate to desperation / My give-a-fucks are on vacation” – though their airy confidence needed a singer to match. They had one in Carpenter, who oh-so-casually strutted through the song like someone who is so used to turning heads that they’ve stopped even noticing. And following wave after wave of often stiff disco revivalism, the languorous funk licks made it really swing. It ends up being less caffeine hit, more cocktail buzz. BBT

1

Chappell Roan – Good Luck, Babe!

Once you hear it you can’t unhear it: the opening synths of Good Luck, Babe! sound a bit like Wham!’s Last Christmas – and like George Michael, Chappell Roan understands intimately that denying your true self is a fool’s errand. Before she was Chappell Roan, she was Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, a closeted sad-girl singer-songwriter who ultimately got dropped just as she was coming into her sound. The song that led her there was Pink Pony Club, a sleeper hit that wedded a truly Freddie-worthy “mama!” to a yarn about finding herself – ie the Roan persona – at a Hollywood queer club. It became the first of many deeply camp, nothing-left-to-lose tracks Roan and producer Daniel Nigro made for her debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, released last September. That was another sleeper hit, its fuse properly lit this spring by increasingly viral footage of Roan’s riotous live shows and this new, non-album single about a futile affair with a girl who protests that she’s straight.

There are other clear influences in Good Luck, Babe! Roan has the rough-hewn vocal ribaldry of Cyndi Lauper, the stentorian command of Hounds of Love-era Kate Bush, the high-goth drama of Shakespears Sister, a cabaret swoon so perfect you can picture the fake tear glued to the corner of her eye – but it’s also entirely her own creation, a towering layer cake of frustration, festivity and fury that rewards a million repeat plays. In the verse, she’s the despondent fool letting herself be played, but by the chorus, she’s warning her intended that, try as she might, she’ll never manage to Sisyphus desire, backed by a full, heavenly choir that suggests the angels are absolutely on Roan’s side. Her sheer existence – and total domination of pop this year – are proof that she knows exactly what she’s talking about. “You know I hate to say, but: I told you so!” she roars in the middle eight. I don’t think she hates to say it at all. LS