So here we are. After 815 songs and 6,174 blurbs, we’ve come to the end of our year of coverage. Now presenting your 2016 Jukebox Champions, Beyoncé and the Dixie Chicks:

We will be on hiatus until the 3rd of January. Until then, you can catch up on our coverage via our archives. Additionally, our own John Seroff put together a massive Spotify playlist of all the tracks we covered this year (songs not available on Spotify but on YouTube can be found here).

As some of you have noticed, this has been our highest scoring year to date, with our top 10 all rated above [8.10] (here’s a YouTube playlist of our top 50). It seems appropriate; for a year that was tough on so many people, a year that at so many turns hurt marginalized communities, there was amazing music to help us get by, to feel empowered, to heal. Whether it was Beyoncé’s and Solange’s powerful affirmations of Black womanhood, Alex Anwandter’s celebration of queer spaces, Jamala’s pertinent reflection on xenophobia, and so much more, there was music that spoke to the experience of people whom the year otherwise ignored.

There’s always uncertainty in facing the new year, and 2017 will no doubt have its challenges. One thing we do know, however, is that music will still be there, and we will be too, celebrating it and lifting it up together. See you then.

It’s been a very long and very bad year, so let’s end with a very long and very good song. See y’all in 2017!

[Video][Website]
[7.71]

Ian Mathers: Coming on the heels of his amazing noise-goes-to-the-club record Dumb Flesh, it’s not surprising that Benjamin Power’s newest work as Blanck Mass has such a relentless beat, one that Power surrounds with lushly industrialized walls of noise, then adding a vocal-esque element chopped past the point of inscrutability and scrambled into something queasily compelling, and finally briefly soaring into the abyss on suitably synthetic orchestra sounds. You can definitely dance to it, but it’s just as fitting an accompaniment to high-speed transit, competitive-level brooding, or indeed what the gentlemen in the accompanying video is doing. 
[9]

Alfred Soto: Its momentum, stutters, scratches, and orchestral pretensions are not cool now, thank god. Rather than an oatmeal-voiced white man with the shakes at the mike, “D7-D5” expresses itself as pure aural sensation. 
[7]

Iain Mew: For an eight minute electro rock thing, this is weirdly… low-key? Genteel? Close to providing an answer to the unasked question “what if Kasabian were interesting but not, you know, too interesting?” It takes me on a journey and I don’t feel cheated out of my time at all, it just doesn’t achieve much for me past that.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: Perfect music for driving at 100 miles an hour through a sort of post apocalyptic wasteland. Sadly, there’s a higher chance that we will have all-out civilisation destroying war than my ever getting my driver’s licence, but at least I can be glad for this song’s hypnotic and menacing throb.
[8]

Will Adams: It takes its sweet time laying out its tricks, from the bass slowly filtering from growl to gurgle, the frenetic vocal chops, and the dramatic string melody that acts as a chorus of sorts. A radio edit might earn more repeat plays from me, but there’s plenty good in “D7-D5.”
[6]

Ramzi Awn: Blanck Mass’ Garbage-inspired chopped-up Victoria’s Secret ad is worth the eight minutes. It trembles and builds aggressively with ominous chords and quality sampling. For as loud as it is, “D7-D5” is pretty subtle.
[8]

Brad Shoup: I’m on the back patio of my neighborhood coffeeshop. Facing away from the door, I can see the man-high chainlink, with barbed wire looping largely atop. There’s a black mesh over me, and an electric pole staring down; the mesh is splitting the light into a saltire, like the flag of the Confederacy. It is, apparently, the first day of winter. It’s dark when I leave work, it’s dark when my son cries in the morning. It was dark when I crossed the parking lot here, turning to watch two cars weave and honk because one cut the other off. For a second, I was sure someone would shoot. That’s how this starts: muffled bangs and roars, like a massacre caught on a camcorder. But the real horror is the constant dark progress: the tide that’s only comprehensible once you’ve been swallowed. Voices rise up; they break forth and collide, they cancel each other without outside help. I spent a whole week holding our son, wandering from room to room. I talked to my sister about the flood. I listened to this song, focusing on how the ghastly synths shriek even louder in the final minute, the warning of a judgment passed. The title is a play on Manuel Göttsching’s seminal album E2-E4, itself named for a popular opening move in chess. D7 to D5, if my research is right, would be another opener: the Queen’s Gambit, a famous start with the short-term possibility of a pawn’s sacrifice. But it’s impossible. D7 is a black position, and white moves first. So where does that leave this? How far could this bleakness stretch? Is it real? Is any of this?
[10]

If you like spare and haunting and tortured, here’s 7 minutes of it (spoiler: we do, we do and we do).

[Video][Website]
[6.88]

Ian Mathers: I spent an embarrassingly long time on first listen assuming this was just an ambient intro before the ‘song’ proper kicked in (why? I listen to plenty of stuff that sounds like this, I guess the context of the Jukebox just had me primed for something less spectral, less sparely harrowing). In a way that made the song even better, the slow realization that even though I’d been expecting this to go away in favour of something more conventional or immediate I didn’t want it to. And that’s before her voice comes in, and it’s a very good voice.
[8]

Tim de Reuse: Lu spends four minutes building up an aching drone out of looped cello, and then another few hitting breathy high notes over it while a tense, two-note pluck hits half-steps below her, never resolving. The song is stripped bare in nearly every aspect — no tonal resolution, no sudden movements, no twists and turns, and even the lyrics are straightforward and full of repeats. In this way, it feels distinctly unfriendly to the listener, or at least indifferent to the listener’s presence; sitting through its full seven-and-a-half minutes is like briefly tuning in to some cosmic process that doesn’t exist for your benefit. It’s a strong effect, and Lu’s voice is drop-dead gorgeous enough that it didn’t need to be smothered with accompaniment. With all that in mind — am I missing the point if I say that the stubborn, uncompromising lack of musical content left me hungry? Was that the intended effect, even if I wish it’d maybe done something else? If it had a few more tricks up its sleeve, would that ruin its raison d’être? Not sure — but the fact that I’m having such a reaction to it at all proves it’s worth a listen, I guess!
[7]

Alfred Soto: It gets away with it: a seven-minute piece anchored by Kelsey Lu’s cello reminiscent at first of Eno’s efforts in sustained minimalism. Repeating the title to create the effect of insinuation, Lu sounds appropriately tense and nightmarish. I can’t imagine wanting to listen to it again.
[6]

Juana Giaimo: As Kelsey Lu’s piercing voice appears, we discover a new atmosphere of lonely yearnings, where the abstract gets mixed with everyday life. Her voice is strong and catches the listener’s attention, even when the melody lacks focus. But with that long introduction, “Dreams” may be too aimless and lacking content.
[5]

Jonathan Bogart: Formless, patience-testing moaning; everything, from the composed-entirely-from-fragments-of-other-songs lyric to the pendulous throb of the rhythm to the affected edge-of-the-throat phrasing, lifted from better-executed (if not any better in conception) doomy narcissist-pop that 2016 is goddamn drowning in. The one thing it had going for it, extended atonal instrumental scraping and keening, turns out to be just moody horror-trailer atmospherics rather than posing any actual challenge to Western musical conventions. Not if I see you first.
[4]

Ramzi Awn: Seven minutes sound awfully short on Kelsey Lu’s “Dreams,” a sonic ode to sitting on an Adirondack chair in the mountains. The vision behind Kelsey’s voice is searing and uncomplicated, a testament to her standards and to her understanding of a sonic industry.
[8]

Brad Shoup: I think it is a charming little tone poem about that thinkpiece classic: finding and losing yourself in a big-ass city. It starts off clear-headed and only gets foggier. Like a Steven R. Smith passage, the flute and violin drift through a hole in the ceiling; Lu’s cello — first drawn, then plucked — makes things thicker. Out of this delicate abstraction steps the boy.
[7]

Josh Winters: Vivid yet vague in its titular essence, “Dreams” finds Kelsey Lu out in the open brushing broad strokes with her mighty bow, releasing them into the air as they swirl and swarm overhead like cranes in the sky. The plodding pizzicato shakes the ground from under her feet, and it compels Lu to exorcise the emotions that have held a heavy burden on her shoulders. She’s brought to her knees from the confession of her conflicted craving, her tortured soul stretched thin between the heights of heaven and the hollows of hell. There’s deliverance to be derived from confronting such self-imposed suffering, but a single admission of one’s masochistic pleasures doesn’t necessarily set you free, especially when you find yourself coming back time and time again.
[10]

Let’s play a game or a song…

[Video][Website]
[7.00]

Iain Mew: This year Japanese video game developers Atlus, who have touched on idol culture previously in Persona 4 and its spin-offs, took things to a new level with Tokyo Mirage Sessions. Despite being a crossover with Nintendo’s medieval fantasy war series Fire Emblem, Tokyo Mirage Sessions features a cast of trainee idols who gain new battle moves via releasing new pop songs, supported by a vocal software character and a blatant Marty Friedman analogue. I loved it. It uses the music industry as a handy hook for the usual RPG themes of friendship and belief and progression, but it also puts its music at its centre, providing many of its biggest story payoffs. It pastiches everything from Vocaloid to traditional ballads with clear knowledge and love, and listening to impressively strong songs sung by characters you’ve spent hours with is a good way to increase their impact. Yet I was still unprepared to be knocked back as much as I was by “Dream☆Catcher.” The identity of Its source material is as obvious as many, but it draws really effectively on a range of Yasutaka Nakata productions, mixing the electro chaos of “Invader Invader” with more refined Perfume grace. And producer KOH and vocalists Ayane Sakura and Inori Minase help it to do much more than replicate, filling an ode to an unattainable moon with yearning emotion that seeps through all of its bouncier moments. Perhaps the fact that the singers are voice actors with half a music career between them helps the precarious vulnerability, the sense of just clinging onto happiness. Perhaps it’s the worlds colliding coincidence of the kind of game I love getting such a specific music I love so right, but my first time seeing the music video in-game I could only react to with disbelieving wonder.
[9]

Katie Gill: Coming soon to a DDR arcade near you! I’m honestly surprised that Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE is a single-player RPG because this song has “rhythm game” written all over it…which isn’t surprising, as Yoshiaki Fujisawa (the composer) also did Love Live. That SHOWS. “Dream☆Catcher” is still a good song but it suffers from the fact that as someone who used to play Love Live religiously, I feel like I’ve heard it before.
[7]

Ian Mathers: I’ll admit to liking the concept of the game more than the reality of this particular song, which is fine — it’s a pleasantly gentle bosh, if you know what I mean. Maybe I’m just too stuck on the notion that pop songs with supernatural effects ought to be more overtly dramatic, explosive, etc.
[6]

Juana Giaimo: It always seemed to me that the music of video games could fully transport you to another galaxy, and make you forget that you are sitting down in a chair in your room. But in “Dream☆Catcher,” that galaxy is detached from the game. It stands by itself with its upbeat and fast beat, and childish vocals that have a certain lightness, as if they were flying between the moon and the stars.
[7]

Brad Shoup: I think I like the text best — dreamscape as a vast galactic playground — but to be fair, the wish to stay asleep is so strongly rendered that it’s fine that the track isn’t dreamy. Instead, it mirrors the singers’ will to avoid, kicking furiously against sunrise. (Literally kicking, in the case of that cod-filter house bridge.)
[7]

Ramzi Awn: The straightforwardness of this single is a squeaky clean take on familiar synths and polka dot melodies.  
[6]

Edward Okulicz: There are days when I think Capsule’s “Step on the Floor” is the greatest thing ever, and other days when I think it, and much of Yasutaka Nakata’s work is too busy, too buzzy, too twitchy. For those latter days, pop this clean, uncluttered and frisky sounds like everything I could ever want — music I’d be too embarrassed to dance to in public but could bop around to while playing video games. For that mood, I want something lean and hooky and bouncy, and something drawing on my love of 90s happy hardcore and rave-pop as much as J-pop, which are all the things I listened to while playing console games in the 90s anyway. Which makes this 100% fit for purpose and pretty damn catchy. Its tricks are obvious and cheap but it’s fast and flicks from upbeat melody to upbeat melody to not feel like a bore at more than 4 minutes.
[8]

Adaora Ede: In recent times, I’ve realized that I’m way too lazy to actively search for new music. In my desperation, I am assuaged in the recapitulation that is rhythm game soundtracks (although I lack the dexterity to even play them, seriously I can’t even keep Sims alive long enough), tracks that thump along happily, but don’t fare too well when it comes to straying from an exact pattern. “Dream Catcher” makes a grand introduction as a possible polka house banger (with instrumentation that reminds me strangely of The Fame Monster) but rapidly dissipates into shredded synth pop/chiptune. The breaks are legendary in the line of the familiar axiom “DROPS IS LIFE” and at the end of this journey from the grasps of late nougties weeb hell, you end up with shimmery, unreasoned fast paced fun. I’d expect nothing less.
[6]

Nice product placement there, Charl.

[Video][Website]
[5.43]

Will Rivitz: This is the ultimate PC Music song. The lyrics are more aggressively inane than anything Hannah Diamond has ever brought to the table (“All my friends are princesses, we keep it whipped and creamy / Ice cubes on our tongues because we like to keep it freezy”). The 808s in the verses are about twenty times as present as they need to be, accentuated grotesquely by a mid-range percussion sound that has no analog equivalent save for maybe a particularly clean car crash. The chorus channels every great/terrible early-decade trance #banger, somehow huge to the point of oversaturation despite consisting entirely of one synth, chimes, and offbeat snaps. In other words, “Vroom Vroom” is way, way, way too much, but if anything’s consistently held true about PC Music since its inception (aside from a good portion of critics’ disdain, a sentiment that is unfortunately way overrepresented on this particular site), it’s that bigger is always better. There is no overkill, and Charli XCX and SOPHIE understand that better than almost anybody else in their camps. Everything comes together with the force of an atom bomb, and the resulting fallout is the best song of the year.
[10]

Claire Biddles: The charm of Charli XCX is that as super trendy Tumblr teen-friendly as her look is, everything she does comes from a place of warmth and genuine enthusiasm for pure pop thrills. SOPHIE and PC Music don’t care about pop of course, and so their presence on “Vroom Vroom” acts as a vacuum for anything sincere — the overjoyed playground staccato chant of “Boom Clap” is diluted into “bitches in bikinis looking super cool and freaky”, an empty sort-of rap that could be by anyone. Charli becomes a symbol, becomes part of a system of post-ironic posturing that I can’t bring myself to care about. I don’t even hate it; I just want to ignore it.
[2]

Iain Mew: Early in Fernando Alonso’s career in Formula One racing, his talent was very apparent and he soon didn’t have much left to prove, topping the driver championship charts twice. After that he had another (flawed but impressive) close run, but then made a series of unfortunate career decisions on who to work with, and was landed with a series of underpowered vehicles. As he has become more marginal, he has continued to offer professional and exceptional performances, but has increasingly taken on a sardonic sense of detachment, almost futility. Anyway, I find it interesting that of all of the fast drivers Charli could have chosen to reference in this song (Kimi Räikkönen would have been a better fit for both Ferraris and parties), it’s Alonso she went for.
[4]

Alfred Soto: The production goes zoom-zoom-zoom-zoom and a boom-boom while Charli does her best L’Trimm impression, but the beats are rather tame for a car song, not when Kesha’s “Gold Trans Am” raised the stakes. Charli hears the vroom-vroom coming from a Honda.
[5]

Olivia Rafferty: I honestly hope this is the beginning of more pop princess x PC Music collaborations. Charli XCX perfectly emulates the brattish voice that PC Music has built a lot of its sound on (mainly with Hannah Diamond). It’s a cross between a Bad Bitch and an English Rose, and feels safely nostalgic. When I hear the simplistic, sickly sweet rhymes of the verses, I get transported back to the days of peeling a free lipgloss sample of the cover of Mizz magazine. Add a super-slick, R&B bridge with that airy voice, and we’ve just grown up in a half-second. This song bounces up and down between gorgeous and the gorgeously immature. I’m waiting for the next big collab.
[8]

Katie Gill: Charli’s got a great voice, I have no idea why half of the song is some sort of spoken word “Pretty Girls” nonsense. Anyway, this is obnoxious as hell and I can’t imagine it’ll score well but look, I have no taste, I’m a little bit endeared by this. The minimalist backing for the majority of the song is actually a smart idea because oh man. This sounds amazingly awful. Highlights include that “beep beep,” the way Charli XCX says “right siiiiiide” and “partaaaaay” and the most obnoxious opening fifteen seconds to a song I’ve heard in ages.
[6]

Crystal Leww: I’ve been a vocal opponent of PC Music, their associated acts, and their aesthetic, which I find to be condescendingly meta towards pop music. I usually have no idea what is going on with Charli XCX’s career — her constant career reinvention makes her the poster child of what the olds envision millenials to be: fickle and uncertain and constantly changing their minds. A singular vision is not interesting by itself, but when they are executed well, the end result is extremely compelling. I am surprised by how much I’ve responded to the Vroom Vroom EP. This EP is for bratty moshing by girls who don’t give a fuck, meant to be played in no more than minute long snippets in tiny, sweaty little rooms with massive soundsystems. The title track squeaks and plods and booms and creeps in such a weirdly entrancing way, like the sinister break before the DJ bumps it back up to 160 bpm again. This is so weird and cool and different and still great.
[8]

Ian Mathers: I always think this is going to be the time where Charli XCX loses me, where her consistently shifting sound hits a patch where it doesn’t work to my ears. Honestly, on first play “Vroom Vroom” left me thinking that moment had finally come. As with so many things that I wind up loving (songs and otherwise), plenty of things that stuck out as annoying came to be the exact things I found most endearing; SOPHIE’s production (that little tires-squealing blip!), Charli’s rather stylized enunciation of certain words, the bit where the track downshifts right when I thought a new level of chorus was going to explode instead (of course that’s the best bit), the way the whole thing seems almost schematically pop in a way even Sucker didn’t. Ultimately as with most pop there’s really only two questions to figure out whether this is okay, good, great, whatever: How often did it get stuck in my head, and did I mind when it did? A: all the goddamn time, and not even little. Beep beep!
[9]

Edward Okulicz: Every so often there are musicians so in love with pop and so in thrall to its possibilities that they can’t help but enhance it with everything they do — sometimes by being grotesque, sometimes seeming dismissive or condescending about other pop by acting as if they know better than the crap that fills our charts. Yet at all times they contribute bracing, vital tunes that justify the cult that worships them. But enough about The KLF. PC Music are dreadful and they’ve turned Charli XCX into a combination of Nadia Oh and Iggy Azalea. If you pitch-shifted the whole song downwards, there’s a sort of nifty mid-00s R&B-pop-ballad pastiche in there that would be cute, at least.
[2]

Will Adams: At the risk of being actually’d about the true meaning of Christmas PC Music or who is really affiliated with PC Music or whatever when I inevitably trash this, let me return to my original thesis: this sounds terrible. For every half-decent idea SOPHIE has, there are hundreds of bad ones. Generally it’s trebly mixing and canned percussion samples; for “Vroom Vroom” specifically, it’s that plus digitized banshee shrieks; a leaden trance breakdown tacked on to the end; and worst of all: pulling Charli XCX further and further away from what made her interesting in favor of another party-starting non-starter that sounds like lo-res “Hollaback Girl.” Based on the brief amount of time since the Vroom Vroom EP, this foray may have been a quick diversion. But given the alternative is “After the Afterparty,” I’m not sure where to even go from here.
[2]

Brad Shoup: Maybe you’d think the title’s also the hook. Psych — there’s no hook! Sharp-edged filth trades off with high-pitched, crystalline pop, like a scrapyard with an ice cream shop next door. Charli’s strong enough to nearly get the rippity-rap over.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: When we reviewed CL’s “Lifted” earlier this year, I suggested one of the reasons it was so awful was that CL sounded as if she didn’t understand that the slang she was singing had actual meaning, that those words were more than signifiers of hipness to be deployed stripped of context. Charli XCX has a similar problem on “Vroom Vroom,” grasping at indicators of style with the same desperation Fergie has, but at least Fergie never suggests she has the mental capacity to seem less than completely committed. In Charli’s case, however, her awkward references to bitches, her suggestions that she likes to “keep it creamy” (or “freezy”), her celebration of wealth in the form of brand names and luxury cars all add up to a lazy and inept attempt at replicating hip-hop cool with just enough plausible deniability to pretend people like me who protest are making too much of it. I think this is meant to be clever, but it’s not actually satirizing anything so much as pantomiming wit in the hope that it could be confused for insight. It’s drab and cynical and stupid, and the redeeming edge compounds the noxiousness: on the hook, Charli still sounds capable of verve and joy.
[2]

Ramzi Awn: In a classic example of too little, too late, Charli buries her vocal talent beneath a cheer squad of one bleep too many. Didn’t she do something about not caring? And now she wants to ride in a Lamborghini? 
[3]

Natasha Genet Avery: Pop at its purest: when I’m blasting “Vroom Vroom” and careening down the freeway, my baby blue Prius feels as fly as a lavender Lamborghini.
[9]

Hello Eurovision, my old friend…

[Video][Website]
[6.10]

Edward Okulicz: Having seen four performances of this song live on the Eurovision stage, I won’t deny that it was a triumph — hearing that massive voice out of a small girl on a large plinth (making her seem even smaller) was shocking, even if I’d seen plenty of Im on Australian X-Factor. Her ad-libs each night were also extraordinary, and imbued the song with what seemed like lived-in feeling. The studio version, which I’d always thought boring before seeing it live, doesn’t benefit in hindsight. It twinkles but it doesn’t sparkle, the beat is clean and monotonous, and without the ad-libs the chorus in particular is dangerously repetitive. It comes across as sterile and meaningless, like most pieces written by Australian production house DNA Songs. Im’s sterling showing in Stockholm is down to her, not them.
[5]

Will Adams: A worthy runner-up to “1944,” “Sound of Silence” offers that modern take on a power ballad — high drama sculpted by additional production flourishes –that Eurovision seems to crave. What sells it is Dami Im, whose conviction even lets me forgive the repetitive chorus. Her performance is in par with the pyrotechnics behind her, and it was only improved on stage.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: I watched Eurovision this year squeezed into a packed pub in Paris, and among that crowd at least, “Sound of Silence” was a unifying favorite. There are plenty of reasons why Australia should not be a part of Eurovision, but I did feel a twinge of patriotic pride during that final moment, exulting with strangers from Serbia and Finland and, yes, also Perth, in which Dami Im looked as if she had won the whole thing; we might have beaten Europe on their own turf, and with a Korean-Australian performer too, representative of the multicultural society I know. It helped that the song is excellent, glimmering and finely wrought. Indicative of the fine emotional line it walks is that the technological branding shoehorned into “Trying to feel your love through FaceTime” sounds honest, not gimmicky.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Welp, I suppose I heard it wrong. Had she sung “FaceTime” — and for sure, she did — it’d be an unshowy, grounding element on a track that throws so many ribbons at the ceiling. Im cradles the word “silence” in several ways, all very nice. And I’ll always love those whole-note piano jabs. But I think she forgot a bridge.
[5]

Alfred Soto: I can imagine admiring it if Suede had written and covered it. In its current form “Sound of Silence” has the blowzy conviction of a Ryan Tedder empowerment anthem.
[4]

Anthony Easton: I love how she gives up the blankness in the beginning and fully commits to a post-Céline melodrama of a heartbreak whose bodily incarnation is a keenly overwhelming voice trying to emote over something close to a kick drum. Extra point for the claustrophobic production.
[7]

Hannah Jocelyn: It’s not quite worthy of the near-namesake, or the Disturbed cover of said near-namesake, but the idiosyncratic phrasing (“the sOUND of siLEEENCCE”) and swathes of reverb make it work.
[6]

Ramzi Awn: Dami Im breathes new life into the word “calling,” but ultimately, “Sound of Silence” is a heavy hitter without the chops to back it up. The track takes itself too seriously for its lyrics, and while it is an imposing anthem, it wears out its welcome.
[5]

Lauren Gilbert: I’m beginning to wonder if Australia didn’t get the memo about the inherent ludicrousness of Eurovision; this is a power ballad that would stand out on the radio. Dami is a compelling performer, and while there’s nothing here that changes the game, it’s well-executed and girl can rock a gauntlet.
[7]

Claire Biddles: About two years after I met my best friend we made a promise that to celebrate our ten-year anniversary of meeting each other, we’d go to Eurovision. We both love Eurovision, and every year since meeting we’ve either watched it together or frantically texted each other running commentary while watching it from different ends of the country. Our ten-year anniversary was this year, so in May we met in Stockholm, tried to get tickets and failed, and ended up watching the final on a big screen in a lesbian bar. My favourite song was the Bulgarian entry, but “Sound of Silence” was the soundtrack of the weekend — the one that followed us around on loudspeakers in bars and the foyer of the ABBA museum; the one we sang while we were putting our makeup on to go out. We yelled along to it in the lesbian bar, drunkenly grasping hands after three bottles of wine. After we got back and returned to our cities at the opposite ends of the country, we both listened to it a lot, but in the wistfully nostalgic way that everyone revisits a song they heard on holiday. We texted each other whenever we listened to it. I only really paid attention to the lyrics recently and discovered that the song was describing our long-distance friendship — sure, it’s not very serendipitous to find that a pop song is about missing someone, but lyrics like “trying to feel your love through FaceTime” feel so specific and surprising in the context of a pretty trad Eurovision ballad. Shortly after our trip to Sweden, my best friend moved from London to Manchester, a little closer to me. I still text him every time I listen to “Sound of Silence.”
[8]

Next up, a Mexican-American artist last seen in 2015…

[Video][Website]
[7.14]

Josh Langhoff: Whether because 40 is gliding toward me like a drop-top Brougham or simply because my taste has improved, I’ve lately been listening to a lot of urban AC radio. This means twice in a week my son and I got to hear Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day,” which I’m glad to report is still great — even greater than it used to be — and undiminished in its ability to speak horror and pleasure in the same words, to sound utterly chill about a life that’s utterly precarious. I don’t think my boy picked up on any of that, and why should he, wrapped in his fifth grade cocoon of Cub Scouts and Pokemon? We’ve had the post-Trump talks with him: We’ll probably be OK, but some of your friends might not, and you need to look out for them and help them, even as our voices fade into helplessness. And then here comes Alfredo Ríos: like Ice Cube a lover of women and mind-altering substances, packing a cuerno, acutely aware of every authoritarian eyeball tracking his whereabouts. Like Ice Cube he does himself no political favors with this song, bragging about his shipments from Bogotá. But “El Mexico Americano” has stormed U.S. Regional Mexican radio, a good chunk of whose audience feels as precarious as young black men in South Central. The Komander band’s tuba/accordion blats and howling high harmonies deliver a “fuck you” every bit as exuberant as “Good Day,” or “Move That Dope,” or Jay-Z mewling the cop’s eternal line, “Are you carrying a weapon on you, I know a lot of you are?” 
[9]

Brad Shoup: So many thrilling moments when all the percussion hits: the kit, thumbs on strings, the clacking of accordion buttons. From these thunderstorms emerges El Komander, a little rough in the cords but otherwise unscathed. He sways from America to Colombia, rocking on some no doubt highly tailored heels.
[7]

Alfred Soto: The star is the strumming beneath the horn chart and the accordion; the charm is in El Komander chilling in the backyard, cold beer in hand, with cousins and friends. Call it the norteño version of a Brad Paisley or good Jason Aldean number.
[6]

Iain Mew: I bet this would totally slay on Accordion Hero.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: The accordion skitters and wheels with Hendrixian, nay with Hazelian virtuosity, but it’s the rock-solid rhythm section that allows it to take its flights. And the excuse for the flights in the first place, the singer and his song? It’s a telegraphic hard-as-nails first-person portrait of a border-crosser who misses his Sinaloa home but won’t let sentiment get in the way of Colombian business. (I’ve been reading Robert Browning lately, and the same kind of communication by inference and significant silences is at work here.) El Komander’s performance is as dry and without flourishes as the border desert. The often-made comparison between corridos alterados and gangsta rap should have as much to do with the striking contrast between the joyously virtuosic DJs/bandas and the pared-down, emotionally uninflected MCs/corrideros as it does the subject matter.
[7]

Ramzi Awn: For all the fascinating frills the instrumentation takes on, the songwriting is stress-free. The single pulses with joy, the levels are on point, and the vocals are mixed expertly.  
[8]

Anthony Easton: I don’t speak Spanish so the narrative is a little cryptic, though it seems to be mostly about guns and girls, but this matters less than the rollicking brass and keys. It’s of a form, but a very good example of it.
[7]

If your thoughts are already turning to next month…

[Video][Website]
[7.56]

William John: Most of the time, Australian hip hop barely manages to clamber above the “listenable” bar; when someone thrilling like Tkay Maidza comes along, we are wont to advocate with atypical fervour, but mostly our jowly vowels are unsuited to the genre. The A. B. Original project is about so much more than sonics, however; a national holiday on the day which marks the commencement of more than two hundred years of systematic oppression and genocide is untenable, and essentially, I support the amplification of this message. Also, Dan Sultan can still get it.
[9]

Edward Okulicz: January 26 is Australia Day, our “national day,” but increasingly younger Australians tend to reject the date not as a day to party, but to reflect on the ills of colonialism in an age of gross jingoism. “Invasion Day,” some have taken to calling it, myself included. Doing so feels good, it’s one in the eye of Anglo privilege, and it really peeves off crying manbabies who think any encouragement to self-reflection is an attack on everything they hold dear, like the idea that the colonising English weren’t a pack of genocidal cunts who built an empire off raping, robbing, enserfing and enslaving their conquests. “January 26” is a very sharp, angry poke indeed — it lays out with a little flair, some humour and a lot of confidence what the day means to many Indigenous people. This sort of political track is a hard balance to get right — one must confront and encourage people to confront their own thoughts and prejudices, but you don’t want to come across as confronting. I think Briggs and Trial thread the needle very well here, and the very 90s production is a decent party-starter as much as the lyrics would be a barbecue-stopper if you said them in certain quarters. Like any political pop song I like, it strokes my sense of moral correctness, but where’s the harm? Dan Sultan’s chorus sounds like Patrick Stump too, which makes it fun to be angry to.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: I’ve been critical of Australian hip-hop in the past, and with good cause: of the form’s many sins as manifested locally, one of the most injurious has been its unremitting whiteness. Even though, since its inception, local artists of colour — from Curse Ov Dialect to 1200 Techniques — have been making rap music, as a cultural and commercial force, Australian rap has been predominantly Anglo. MCs here took the racial marginalisation that underpins American hip-hop’s power as an oppositional force and reconfigured it on to frameworks of implicitly white class conflict. Sensitive to accusations of inauthenticity, they embraced community fealty and ascetic adherence to deracialised cultural codes — the “four elements” — as proof of realness. Even though the Australian MC was nominally progressive, he also defined himself in reactive terms to the perceived performativity of hegemonic American culture, meaning he was not flamboyant, not boastful, and — it is usually unspoken — not black. Australia had already covered the territory between Macklemore and Mac Miller before either picked up a microphone. This is an awful lot of discussion about white people for a song by two Aboriginal men, but whiteness plays a big role in “January 26”: the complacent and incurious whiteness that celebrates national pride by commemorating the invasion and attempted destruction of a 40,000-year-old culture, and tries to play off those two centuries since as ancient history. Briggs and Trials are not constrained by the defensive sense of trespass and guilt that shaped white Australian MCs into stiff, reflexively studied rhymers, and each explores timbre and expression in ways that immediately distinguish them from the likes of, say, 360 or Pez. Briggs, whose humour never detracts from his resolve, allows his weighty tones to fall nimbly into the rhythm in the same way Biggie used to, even if he lacks Big’s talent for densely layered wordplay. Instead he favors forceful staccato declarations, like the barrage of plosives in the scene-setting opener, “Hey Briggs, pick a date.” Trials is rangier, rendering colonialism not just immoral but gauche: “That’s the date for them suckers doing that sucker shit/That’s that land-taking, flag-waving attitude.” Who needs it; Briggs and Trials have the better party anyway. As they exit, they skewer nationalism to the tune of “California Love”: “wave that, wave that flaggy.”
[9]

Alfred Soto: Infatuated with the whistles and percussion breaks of The Chronic, this Australian hip hop duo see no point in “celebrating days made of misery.” We know what you mean, man.
[6]

Ramzi Awn: “Flaggy” is a word I haven’t heard before, and I don’t hate it. Good fodder for radio filler, A.B. Original deftly delivers a humorous joint with a catchy vocal. 
[6]

Brad Shoup: G-funk sproing with hyphy’s sense of dead-serious play. So the form follows the function. Like “The Magic Clap,” the history is incontrovertible, the injustice clear, and the fists pound.
[8]

Anthony Easton: Hip-hop has always been an act of post-colonial resistance; it is a welcome gift how international it has become among indigenous peoples. A bouncy funk beat and a solid flow lifts a righteously furious narrative, with some solid one liners. The politics are as moral as the music is tight.
[8]

Josh Langhoff: I’m such a sucker for West Coast Dreity I’m still flirting with the notion that the Daz-N-Snoop album isn’t terrible. So this is marvelous: righteous protest rap that creates dance moves (the “Captain Cook dance,” plus one where you wave the flag and eat it) and lands couplets stinging in their hilarity. And it’s not just the rappers; producer Trials has excellent comic timing, as when he kicks the beat in on Briggs’s bright-eyed “How ’bout March 8?” Please supply every resistance movement with lead synth squeals and flexatones.
[9]

Will Adams: As an American whose scope might be somewhat closed off from the rest of the world, I’d love to hear more about political issues in Australia and the perspectives of their marginalized groups. As an American whose radio offerings might be restricted to Top 40 and Hot AC, I’d love to hear less of discount Adam Levine singing hooks.
[5]

Guitars from all over the world!

[Video][Website]
[6.78]

Alfred Soto: Cool drums and backing vocal loop, hence the name, I suppose. The Norwegian singer is one of those who confuses shouting with enthusiasm.
[5]

Olivia Rafferty: Snappy and feelgood: a decent variation of the indie-dude, guitar and handclap genre. Mainly because it’s not some indie-dude in a white T-shirt. Dagny sings in her own English accent, but not in an affected way. It’s fresh and honest, and she’s wonderfully likeable.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Focused too tightly on the interlocking rhythms to worry about rhyme, “Backbeat” is an aerobic pop-rock wonder. Her words come out in a rush; I find myself singing to cadence, not words. Dagny’s working with similar processing as a Casablancas or a Flowers. It stretches well over guitarwork they’d both nod at.
[9]

Ryo Miyauchi: Boom-clap percussion, glam riffs and a call to dance some more. I’ve heard this kind of infatuation pop hundreds of times, and every time I encounter another, I remind myself how much I won’t fall for its tricks again. Dagny’s dance moves are not so different as those that has come before; she even lets out a “whoop!” like them too. But I once again come to the same conclusion Dagny does here to a buzz she’s feeling well familiar with: “feeling like I kid myself, kid myself again.” I’m never gonna be tired of this.
[7]

Will Adams: Good pop-rock propulsion is an easy sell for me, but there’s not much else to “Backbeat” besides a lot of repeated chorus.
[6]

Ramzi Awn: The canned filter on the vocals does little for the largely unimportant tune on “Backbeat.” The song features strong chords to distinguish itself, and that’s about all. Mostly, it reads like a watered-down Sleater-Kinney.  
[4]

Jonathan Bradley: The carefully planted piano chords and “woah-oh-oh” introduction threaten to usher Dagny into anthemic terrain, by which I mean the kind of anthem played over footage of attractive young people road-tripping to a music festival as they share bottles of A Diet Soda Brand. (Adwave has evolved over the past five years.) But the nimble syllables on the hook — check out her hiccuping pronunciation of “I kid myself again” — and hint of reserve in the verses suggest “Backbeat” contains richer emotions in its contours. The production, which smooths too much out, does its best to conceal them — as does the worn imagery of “flying when I’m in your arms” — but the propulsive internal rhyme of “borderline, wasting time” and the insistent “burning up” counterbalance the clichéd moments.
[6]

Josh Langhoff: With Dagny’s endearing scratchiness on her high notes, and with a cool countermelody bearing a family resemblance to the synth wiggle from Pink Floyd’s “On the Run,” “Backbeat” belongs on the short list of exuberant tunes named for their rhythms. Such songs sound like they never want to end: think Wisin & Yandel’s “Dembow,” Bombay Bicycle Club’s “Shuffle,” Gramatik’s “Boom Bap Reinstated.” I’d say someone should make a playlist but the cumbias would quickly swallow everyone whole.
[7]

William John: Sometimes we come to the realisation that to avoid stagnancy and/or the invidious crush of emotional pain, we need to position ourself as the catalyst. Sometimes, when in pursuit of romance, furtive glances and posturing and wallflowering work as a form of endearment. Sometimes, by contrast, when shyness serves as a disguise for commitment-phobia and all that’s left is a brooding egoist, it fails. We meet Dagny, a Norwegian Spotify darling, mid-self-actualisation in “Backbeat.” She, rather unfortunately, has one of these dreadful so-and-sos in her sight line, who has her tied up in knots with second guesses. Ultimately, she knows she’s kidding herself; not everything is supposed to be eternal, and nor can it be simple, which are two notions often distressing to grasp. In lieu of wallowing, Dagny embraces the ephemera and greets it with a holler, an unwavering topline, self-deprecation and guitars that rush like blood to the head of a cartwheeler. This isn’t so much “tears at the disco” as “dancing triumphantly through a hurricane of gloom.”
[10]

You thought we were joking…

[Video][Website]
[8.12]

Juana Giaimo: What a year this has been. Months passed by, leaving frozen images of the seasons, and now that December brought the hot weather to the southern hemisphere, all that is left is ice cream and sunscreen melting down and dripping on my hand as I stand still. The past, present and future tense is all the same as it is Spring, August or Autumn because it all gets confused. But I’ll be straightforward: I don’t know how my year would have turned out without Martha. I had many emotional downfalls and have been lost in the pit of myself. Listening to Martha was feeling that raw excitement in how their voices are taken to the extreme and how the guitars resonate in my headphones as I took the daily bus going to school, waiting anxiously for that extra-instant they linger on the next to last “I know.” I’m still shocked by the abrupt midway change and how the punkier second half can embrace hopelessness with such desperate energy — and I love that slight ironic tone of the music video with their theatrical faces, the fake smiles and loads of colorful flowers. And after so many listens, my heart is softened and crumbles down as I hear the most delicate tender voice about to break singing to me: “I know you wish for fireworks to light your July skies.” Yes, that is exactly what I’ve wanted all year, how did you know? 
[10]

Brad Shoup: Turns out they had a high gear: flowery pop-punk from the Middle Ages of twee. The second half is the same as the first, only tossed in the dryer; without the drums, it has the unshowy melodicism of prime Counting Crows. This kicks ass. 
[9]

Iain Mew: An explosion of emotions and guitars which sounds like Johnny Foreigner doing “Girl From Mars” — everything I want from indie pop in one tight pakcage, leading to my fastest “+ bandcamp” search ever.
[9]

Ryo Miyauchi: With the light acoustic strums, his observations of a sunburn remain a cute note jotted down in a private pocketbook after a nice day with a crush. Once the guitars kick in, that entry becomes a fantasy come to life. It feels fuzzy and larger than life like a dream; it ends quickly like one too.
[7]

Will Adams: It feels like so much happens in so little time, thanks to the explosive switch and sustained energy throughout. “Ice Cream and Sunscreen” is entirely dependent on that switch, but its opposing halves are endearing enough to look past its obviousness.
[6]

Alfred Soto: Every time I get tired of slow/fast slow/fast here comes a band showing how this dynamic can sound engaging when passion and craft meet in the studio. The quiet twists work: the boy sings the contemplative parts while the girl and the rest of the band sing the rousing punk moment.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: “I know you wish for fireworks to light your July sky/I’m the dampest box of matches you’d ever hope to find.” Martha explodes nevertheless, in beautiful heartbroken twee-punk glee, the lead vocalists wrestling like puppies over guitar clamor like Another Sunny Day or The Lucksmiths gone electric. Summer recedes from the song almost as soon as it has appeared, but Martha sounds like sunshine even in the gloom of November and disappointment.
[9]

A.J. Cohn:   Admittedly, my almost automatic reaction to jangly tales of longing and sweetly shambolic pop punk is a feeling of goodwill. But it speaks to Martha’s seriously above-average charms, that this track just about literally caused me to melt.
[8]