The Top 100 Songs Of 2021
From Industry Giants Like Taylor Swift, Genre Busting Show Stoppers By Lil Nas X, Captivating Horrors From Yves Tumor, And Career Bests From Spirit Of The Beehive And The War On Drugs, These Were The Songs That Made A Perpetually Destabilizing Year Something Worth Celebrating
Tristan Young @talltristan
It didn’t use to be such an accomplishment to have simply made it through the year, but have you, *gestures broadly at everything* looked around lately? Delta variants, Omicron emergence, heat domes, atmospheric rivers, never ending filibuster inanity- if this all sounds like the lyrics to a Death Grips song, oh wow is that ever not the rhetorical ecosystem you want to compare our literal reality to. 2021 has been a shit show. The dystopian ambience that edged further along the peripheries of everyday life last year has become a main stay. We expect the worst as much as we fear it. Pick your poison between the precipitous decent into climate change ruination or despotic autocracy, or just take one of each. The year was nothing if not generous in its inundation of macroscopic trauma. However! What a year of music. The intangible sense of anxious dread that seems so endemic of the year was rendered oddly palbable by the likes of JPEGMAFIA or Koreless. The mixture of nihilistic abandon by way of insolent defiance was captured brilliantly by Illuminati Hotties. Genre barriers were obliterated by the iconoclastic glamor of Lil Nas X. Tyler, The Creater proved once and for all he’s one of the best storytellers (and hopeless romantics) of a generation. Sprit Of The Beehive wrote the most stunning, mournful lyrics of the year and hid them behind something commensurately intimidating. The War On Drugs, against considerable odds, suggested that there is something beyond all of this. The dazzling array of standout songs in 2021 is one of the few contexts in which this year can be looked back fondly upon. We’ve collected what we think are the 100 best songs of the year and made a playlist of them. The list is ranked starting at 100 and working its way to our take on the best song of 2021. You can find the playlist on Apple Music or Spotify, or listen right here. What songs did we miss? What should have been number one? Let us know in the comments and better luck to us all next year.