Following yesterday's launch of the What's Good newsletter, coverage of the year's best music to date continues today with the second part of this three-part feature. It kicked off with the best in dance and rock; today, we explore pop and hip-hop; and tomorrow, we'll conclude with R&B and experimental music. Feel free to listen along by following The Year's Best playlist on Spotify and Apple Music, too, and tune in again Wednesday, September 15 for the proper launch of weekly new music coverage.
THE YEAR’S BEST POP
The Sugababes’ “Same Old Story” wasn’t considered single material when it was released in 2001 on the group’s breakout debut album, One Touch, and until this summer, its star hadn’t risen much since. For two decades straight, it languished as an unsung album track. The original, produced by UK beatmaker Matt Rowe (the man behind several of the Spice Girls’ prime hits), was buoyed by plucked strings, skittering vocals, and a drum groove that recalled early Destiny’s Child and present-day Burial in equal measure. But Blood Orange saw its potential and dropped a remix that kept the song’s vintage Y2K beat locked, swapping its candy-raver accoutrements for a gorgeous piano-driven melody that expertly reframed the song’s energy, and turned it into a period-perfect club hit that’d slide effortlessly into a set of Mya, 702, and Nivea floor-fillers.
Three newcomers also wowed with singles that showcased a natural aptitude for songwriting tricks and techniques to deliver maximum impact: Portugal’s Nana Lourdes dropped “BKGW,” with a truly infectious chorus that pauses an extra measure before kicking in, delivering a knockout left hook; Mette, a Minnesota-born dancer whose resumé includes a lead role in N.E.R.D. and Rihanna’s “Lemon” video and a role in Cats (!), emerged as a full-formed post-pop icon with the absolutely stunning “Petrified;” and, while their 2018 album HEATWAVE showed promise, New York six-piece Michelle made a big splash with “FYO,” a song in which light, spacious melodies bely cutting lyrics that grapple with social prejudices. Speaking to Euphoria, the band’s Jamee Lockard said, “Cultural dissonance is something I’ve felt my whole life… ‘FYO’ was written at a point in my life when I was finally able to articulate my thoughts and feelings about being a mixed-race minority in the US.”
A decade after her 2011 breakout single, “Running,” Jessie Ware is now a celebrated disco dynamo, one Dua Lipa collab away from Stateside stardom. Her great year is due in part to What's Your Pleasure (The Platinum Pleasure Edition), a deluxe version of her 2020 smash featuring another solid EP’s worth of bonus bangers, with “Please” not least among them. In a similar vein, indie darlings Molly Burch and Wild Nothing came together on my very first favorite song of the year, released in week one of 2021: “Emotion” blends the filter-swept chillwave of Wild Nothing’s past with a four-on-the-floor beat, lending a disco pulse to back Burch’s lush soprano.
It’s hard to get more online than Magdalena Bay, what with their TikToks and music videos like this year’s “Secrets (Your Fire)” that feature them sitting at retro computers watching their own music videos that feature them dancing against the grassy fields of the original Windows XP default wallpaper. But their synth-heavy jams and general neon aesthetic hits a pleasure center that I truly cannot resist, especially on “Chaeri,” the first single from their forthcoming album, Mercurial World (out October 8).
Speaking of charming indie pop groups, Kero Kero Bonito returned in 2021 with a delightfully spastic EP on Polyvinyl titled Civilisation II. The London-based group toys with K-pop-inspired melodies but infuses the style with a catharsis that lends a sharper edge. Backed by 8-bit effects and 808s, “The Princess and the Clock”— their best single yet— makes clear just how far the genre’s come since its mid-’00s heyday.
Most recently, I found myself unable to stop playing “Undo (Back To My Heart),” a surprising non-single (as least thus far) from Tinashe’s new album, 333. Just as addictive as the lead single “Bouncin’,” it opens on a slow-jam verse with a melody that subtly calls back to Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack,” then blasts through walls with an explosive chorus built for packed dancefloors. Whether or not these latest efforts result in the kind of numbers Tinashe was able to put up with her epic 2018-19 run remains to be seen, but these songs are easily among the most rewarding of her career to date.
THE YEAR’S BEST HIP-HOP
The first part of 2021 seemed to tear the genre apart at the seams in favor of reinventions and loosely defined outer limits. Wherever you stand on Tyler, the Creator these days, his decision to stop rapping on 2019’s IGOR, oddly enough, managed to fulfill his destiny as a megastar, making him a household name whose every move has a way of dominating culture. So, when he returned to rap this year with CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST, and even invited DJ Drama to host it like a mixtape, it became one of the most talked about moments in music this year— at least until Kanye holed up in that Georgia stadium to “finish” the underwhelming DONDA. As Tyler reminds us on album highlight “LUMBERJACK,” he, too, has sold out Madison Square Garden. For bonus points, the track samples Prince Paul and RZA’s horrorcore crew Gravediggaz, effectively bringing an earlier conversation full circle: a younger Tyler once professed ignorance of that comically violent rap group to which Odd Future’s early work was frequently compared.
In other pleasant surprises, Freddie Gibbs got nominated for a Grammy and parlayed that success into his second major label deal. Based on early returns, this latest go-round is bound to improve upon his turbulent early run as an employee of Jeezy’s CTE label back in 2011-12. “Gang Sign,” featuring Schoolboy Q, finds Gibbs in a near-melodic rap style with a seriously magnetic hook.
Following a couple of promising but not-quite-there releases, now-officially-fierce-as-fuck UK rapper Little Simz is finally living up to the co-sign Kendrick Lamar gave her just three months after the release of To Pimp a Butterfly. Her just-released album, Sometimes I Might Be an Introvert, is a first-rate breakout— serious album-of-the-year material that should make her a certified underground rap sensation.
Also on the UK tip, London’s Greentea Peng emerged as the rare major label rap upstart capable of maintaining full originality; she’s got bars but buries that prowess beneath a polymath’s mind for song structure. “Nah It Ain’t the Same” puffs a thick cloud of 90s hip-hop nostalgia, like a lost Digable Planets cut finding its way onto an Erykah Badu record.
Meanwhile, slowthai’s “terms,” from his second album, Tyron, strips away the grimy realism he established on his debut, recruiting Dominic Fike and Denzel Curry to croon an emotional chorus. His verses touch on his childhood, filled with details of pitbulls and bloodstained jeans, while the dichotomy between his hyper-realistic bars and Mount Kimbie’s downtempo beat proves a powerful contrast.
For the old heads, Madlib returned with a project curated and produced by Four Tet. Both of these guys have always been wildly prolific, but this partnership yields Madlib’s best long-player since the middle volumes of his Medicine Show series. Among numerous standout cuts, “Road of the Lonely Ones” provides a glimpse of the inspired sampling on display: The beat came off Blue Note soul-jazz legend Lou Donaldson’s 1967 vamp on Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe,” while the super-sweet falsetto vocals were drawn from “Lost in a Lonely World,” a deep cut from the even deeper-cut Philly soul group, the Ethics.
As mentioned in Vegyn’s entry on yesterday’s dance coverage, Londoner John Glacier established herself with force on her stunning debut LP, SHILOH: Lost For Words. The record blends punk poetry with grimy lo-fi raps, landing her somewhere between the hazy gauze of New York’s underground and the defiant politics of Moor Mother. Produced by Vegyn, Glacier creates an entirely unique world on singles like “If Anything,” which moves with the force of a steam-powered locomotive slamming on the brakes.
In certain indie rap circles, Bruiser Brigade’s Bruiser Wolf stole the show in the first part of 2021. The artist on Danny Brown’s label plays into the stereotype of a Detroit pimp, but his gruff voice and playful flow lands somewhere between E-40 and a NuYorican poet. On the heartbreaking closer, “Momma Was a Dopefiend,” he balances the tragedy of his mother’s story with an empathy we don’t often hear: “I was addicted to selling; she was addicted to using.” Bruiser Wolf knows how to have a blast, but his visceral storytelling is second to none.
Rochester’s favorite son Rx Nephew is so prolific it’s hard to keep track of his features, tapes, and singles, but the collected accumulation of his work is staggering in scope and consistency. Slitherman Activated is an ideal place to start, and at the center of that record is the chaotic, charming, and certifiably insane “Early Age Death.” The track is filled with threats of self-harm, jutting against the occasional glow-up moment, like when he raps, “Every time I jump out, I’m fresh as shit.” The rest of the rapid-fire cut flits between murderous moments and odes to Percocet, all rhymed (and sometimes not) over a beat that lands between Baltimore club music and 90s acid house. It’s a thoroughly brain-melting sprint.
Compton rap duo Paris Texas aren’t going to draw many comparisons to Wim Wenders’ 1984 road trip classic (quite possibly my favorite movie) with their snot-nosed punk raps, but their art-house bonafides are nonetheless solidified on “HEAVY METAL,” taken from their debut LP BOY ANONYMOUS. The self-produced cut lands, oddly, between Death Grips and Sleigh Bells, fueled by crash cymbals that sound like they could have been played by Animal on an old Muppets Show episode.
Elsewhere, Chicago hip-hop torchbearers Smino and Saba also joined forced on “Plead the .45th,” the tongue-twisting opening cut from the excellent Judas and the Black Messiah soundtrack— which also featured H.E.R.’s Academy Award-winning jam, “Fight for You,” another track that made The Year’s Best.
None of which is to mention what a year it’s been for killer underground rap full-lengths. Among those that that didn’t clock singles here: Armand Hammer’s Harem, Boldy James & The Alchemist’s Bo Jackson, Mach-Hommy’s Pray for Haiti, Benny the Butcher’s The Plugs I Met 2, Pink Siifu’s ‘Gumbo, and L’Orange & Namir Blade’s Imaginary Everything, to name but a few.
Want to know about the rest of the year's best music? Scope the best rock and pop here, and tune in tomorrow for my entry on R&B and experimental music. Don't forget to subscribe to this newsletter and come back Wednesday, September 15 for weekly new music coverage!
