The Guardian's 20 Best Songs of the Year

The votes of The Guardian’s music writers have been added up to find the 20 best songs of the year. I’ll be honest, I’ve not heard most of these. I’ll be more honest, I haven’t heard of most of these. It’s been a weird year and I do feel very disconnected from music right now. So I thought it would be an interesting exercise for me to listen to this list and see what I think. I will say I went into it with open ears; that is, I decided to try to defy middle-age grumpiness and go into it expecting and wanting to like this list. I’m pleased to say I pretty much succeeded. This is a very likeable, unexpectedly eccentric and quirky selection of songs.

Overall, two things seem to me screamingly obvious from this list and they are Covid and #MeToo. Covid is less obvious perhaps, but most of these songs sound very like they were put together on ProTools and not by a band playing together (yes, I know that’s a false binary) but there is something airlessly digital about almost everything here (I expand on this point later on). More obvious is that a huge number of these songs are about men behaving like shits. And quite right too. In some ways the two coincide because alongside that airlessly tight digital sound is a frequent vocal style of slacker, affectless tonality which seems like an emotional withdrawal from the world as if the world is virally and sexually dangerous to approach. Anyway, here are my thoughts on The Guardian’s list. Please note, I’ve embedded the videos but I haven’t watched most of them so watch at your own risk! Anyways here we go.

20. Take My Breath – The Weeknd

So this is a good start. I like the whole feel of this. It’s exhilarating. It’s very clear from listening to the whole list that 70s disco has been the sound of 2021. I guess it’s the influence of Uptown Funk and Get Lucky (I can particularly hear the latter in this). The lyric is curious; it sounds like it’s about a woman wanting to be choked during sex. In fact ‘make it last forever’ sounds like she wants to be murdered. The stomping glam disco sound overrides that but it does, nonetheless, mark the early appearance of a theme throughout this selection of really fucked up relations between men and women.

19. Leave the Door Open – Silk Sonic

To me, this just feels like pastiche and I never really liked the sickly-sweet Philly Soul Gamble & Huff sound, so for both of those reasons I find it hard to love this. But the vocals and arrangement are beautiful and the thing is clearly done with real affection rather than out of arch smugness, so hell why not? 

18. Don’t Shut Me Down – ABBA 

It’s lovely how completely continuous this feels with their past. This just sounds like something off a follow-up to The Visitors from 1983 or something. I hear lots of ‘Under Attack’ and ‘The Day Before You Came’ in this. The voices are slightly aged, but not much. It’s got everything you hope for in an ABBA song. ‘I have learned to cope / And love and hope / Is why I am here now’ is such a Benny/Björn lyric it almost feels like parody but it’s also a great lyric.

17. Only for Tonight – Pearl Charles 

More disco and in fact this would be the ABBAest thing in the list if it weren’t for actual ABBA. One thing I’m very struck by is that women’s voices in this list are either slacker/alienated/affectless or they are swooning disco diva (of course Agnetha manages to do both simultaneously). It does feel like a sign of some emotional upheaval where emotion must either be withdrawn or rendered ironically. I wonder if this is the effect of #MeToo and everything that’s followed. I think that particularly here because just as The Weeknd’s is a disco song about sexual suicide, this seems to be a swooning disco floor-filler about the dissatisfactions of having sex to men’s rules. I’m struck that both The Weeknd and Pearl Charles use the idea of making something last forever bleakly ironic.

16. How Can I Make It OK? – Wolf Alice 

Very Smithsy vibe on this early on, though the backing is in the more cheesy synth world. I like the contrast between the shimmering guitars/washes of synth/floaty vocals and the rigid drum. Again, I feel we are in a world of sexual discontent (‘How can I make it okay? / Nothing else is as important as that to me / Oh’) It’s not clear to me who the song is addressed to. A recalcitrant male lover? Or a bruised female friend? I like this one a lot; it’s doing something very haunting. 

15. Skater’s World – Parris (feat. Eden Samara) 

Wolf Alice are the first British entry on this list and Parris is the second, he being a cult DJ. I find this song both thrilling and irritating, but I think the latter is deliberate. The beats are very playful; it reminds me somehow of Janet Jackson, though with a kind of sugar baby vocal that sits sweetly on top. There’s an instrumental version around which I enjoyed in some ways a bit more because you can focus on the invention in the music, its niggling little hooks and cuts, given and withdrawn. I can’t see myself coming back to this but it’s inventive and interesting and not pastiche.

14. Hard Drive – Cassandra Jenkins 

This is remarkable. It’s not the only virtually spoken-word song in this list, but it reminds me of Einstein on the Beach, that hyper-intellectual New York accent maybe. It’s more like a smart novel than a song, for a while, but the softly-sung but somehow also rousing chorus is moving and thrilling. There’s a rather brilliant ambiguity in the idea that the mind (or maybe life itself) is a hard drive...

13. Montero (Call Me By Your Name) – Lil Nas X

Queer hip hop, I guess that isn’t new (isn’t [NAME REDACTED] rumoured to be gay?), but he really makes it work in the fusion of hip hop’s aggressive assertion and the pop sensibility in the arrangement. He’s grabbed the title of the movie but he makes it do really interesting work in the paradoxical demand for a kind of narcissistic intimacy. This one repays a few listens.

12. Be Sweet – Japanese Breakfast

70s disco again, maybe a hint of early Madonna. I recently recorded a podcast talking about McCartney II, Macca’s 1980 ‘synthesiser’ album. I hated that when I first got it in 1984, probably because 4-year-old synths sound horribly dated; but by the late 90s when I listened again, they just sound period – and in fact those cheesy synths are all over this list. This is a driving synth pop swirl that sounds celebratory but once again we seem to be in a world of female dissatisfaction: ‘So come and get your woman / Pacify her rage / Take the time to undo your lies’. 

11. Butter – BTS 

Yeah, no, I’m too old for this. Deep breath. Okay, I can see that this is a well put-together single and there is a pleasing tension between the stop-start jerkiness of ‘smooth like butter’ and the more rhapsodic chorus. For me – and here I am of course showing my age – the mixture of sequencer, synth, and autotune just makes the thing feel completely airless and, for that reason, rather joyless. The off-the-peg lyrics do nothing for me either. In fact, I do note there’s a rather confined, unacoustic quality to most of this list, which almost certainly comes from the fact that these are performances that have been layered up on ProTools and there’s never really been a sense of two people finding out how to harmonise or two musicians figuring out a part together. I guess Covid is to blame for that: the complete disappearance of live performance in the music ecosphere. Yeah, I’m probably sounding like a hippy, but while I am very happy with studio-made albums (Abbey Road is one of my favourite albums, for God’s sake), parts of this list feel emotionally frigid at times. (Though, as you’ll see, I think emotional frigidity is one of the themes of this list in quite an interesting way.)

10. You Could Be – Anz (feat. George Riley) 

This is great, straightforward but infectiously confident electropop dance music with a bit of RnB in the mix. It’s straightforward because it’s a classic teen relationship song (‘I want you / But do you want me?’) and there are moments where it gets a bit more intense (Run away, I wouldn't like that / Ball and chain keep you coming back / On a leash, boy, like an animal’) but they don’t really interfere with the rush of summertime romance, led by George Riley’s apparently effortless vocals. 

9. Introvert – Little Simz 

Fantastic. Could not be a more dramatic opening. I do love it when hip hop samples in wildly unexpected ways. And then the lyrics kick in and they match the drama of the opening. This could easily seem like sheer pomposity but I just hear astonishing confidence and of course the title tells us something about how hard-won this confidence is. The drama of the music is personal as much as it is musical. There’s an influence of Stormzy here – the vocal style sounds more like Grime than anything more US-originated. It’s brilliantly judged. Just wonderful, I think. 

8. Tried to Tell You – The Weather Station 

Well, fucking hell, this is great isn’t it? The casual, uncommitted vocal disclosing an emotionally wrenching story, backed so delicately, even tentatively. And, sorry for being a stuck record, this is another wise and sorrowful lament for male failure. ‘This is what the songs are for / This is the dirt beneath the floor’. Afuckingmen.

7. Your Power – Billie Eilish 

Yes, it’s another song about abusive predatory male behaviour. I find the barely-above-a-murmur waiflike vocal style a bit grating but I quite like the song. The chorus has a mixture of soaring and uncertainty and takes a couple of nice unexpected turns. Generally, I feel like Billie Eilish is A Good Thing. The backing here is a bit nothingy, off-the-peg folky strumming, but maybe that’s part of her authenticity shtick.

6. Good 4 U – Olivia Rodrigo 

Well, I love this. Olivia Rodrigo has been throwing out a string of glorious power pop singles this year (‘Brutal’, ‘Driver’s License’ etc.). Like Britney and Christina Aguilera, she’s another former member of the Mickey Mouse Club (what the hell happened there?). What’s it about? Let me surprise you: it’s another blast at poor behaviour by men in relationships. This feels really powerful to me, the self-pity transformed into righteous, withering anger (‘Well, good for you, you look happy and healthy / Not me, if you ever cared to ask’). The production is a bit airless (see my moan at No. 11) but in some ways the ‘loudness wars’ production kind of works in its favour, making the song feel like a jet engine of poppy rage.

5. Silk Chiffon – MUNA (feat. Phoebe Bridgers)

A rather lovely lesbian pop song, which means it’s one of the few songs not about male predators (but then Phoebe Bridgers has already called out Ryan Adams for that IRL). I must admit, the first couple of times I heard this, I assumed that ‘Life’s so fun, life’s so fun’ must be in some way ironic and that there was a manic, perhaps traumatised, determination to look for the positive, and maybe there is a sense of relief in the song that suggests previous darkness (‘Life’s so fun / Don’t need to worry about no one’ hints at a backstory), but mostly this is just sunshine, love and light (like silk chiffon).

4. Bunny is a Rider – Caroline Polachek 

This is great. A lovely simple idea, this mysterious unavailable (maybe sexually free?) woman, looked at admiringly and enviously by the singer (who is ‘so non-physical’). The jerky awkwardness of the melody line, such as it is, conveys that affective confusion really smartly. The bass line is fucking magnificent, I think, and the production is spare and clever. In the 70s, when currencies began to free float (after Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard) they used to describe currencies free-floating but with lower and upper limits ‘the snake in the tunnel’; I’m reminded of the way the audible human voice is caught by the autotune here at the margins, giving a sense of someone confined in a persona somehow.

3. Like I Used To – Sharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen 

Strong eighties vibe to this. There’s a touch of Take-My-Breath-Away power ballad, but alsol it sounds vaguely like a much-slowed-down Somewhere In My Heart. But there’s other stuff in the mix, a bit of country in the vocal, a bit of Spector girl group in the arrangement. All of which is fine by me. It kind of works I think. There’s an epic quality to it that I find quite affecting and I think it manages to avoid the ‘stadium rock’ deathtrap. It’s a fond song about memory (‘Lighting one up like I used to / Dancing all alone like I used to’) which makes me wonder what’s happening in the present to prompt that look backwards. I’ve taken a look at the lyrics and I’m none the wiser; they feel like dummy lyrics that have been left in. So I feel the effect is slightly limited by that, but I like it well enough.

2. Chaise Longue – Wet Leg 

I mean, this is so completely my sort of thing, it’s ridiculous. It chugs along briskly, the lyrics witty, foxy and dumb, the slacker vocals funny, the rhythmic permutations of the title absurdly hooky. It feels like a bit of The Ramones, a bit Sleater-Kinney. What’s not to like? (Actually, if I’m being picky, the ‘Excuse me?/What’ exchange feels very clunky on headphones.) It probably doesn’t mean that much, though the general feel of alienation, the confused directionless life and the dazed affectless relationships hinted here suggest (as so many of these songs do) a traumatised withdrawal from the world, but I may be reading the rest of this list into this song. But this is a perfect three-minute pop single and while it’s probably not the best song on the list, it’s probably the one I enjoy the most.

1. I Do This All the Time – Self Esteem

The second largely spoken word track in this list, which made me initially feel there wasn’t all that much ’song’ for something that’s topped the Guardian’s ‘Best Songs of the Year’ list, but actually the more I listen to it, the more musical it feels. The chorus, if it’s a chorus, flirts with self-help banality but the key it’s in and the chord structure touch it with melancholy, as if she knows she and we will never learn these lessons. The verse, if it’s a verse, is a wittily-observed series of self-reproaches that turn into ferocious reproaches to an ex (‘It was really rather miserable trying to love you’). (So we are once again in that painful territory.) It vaguely reminds me of Kate Nash, though in a northern accent. I love that the song doesn’t end, it stops.

So, a pretty strong list of songs. I have a slight gripe about using ‘songs’ when sometimes they clearly just mean ‘tracks’ - yeah, this is old-fashioned of me, but I think of a song as something separate from its performance. It’s hard to imagine ‘Skater’s World’ having any existence apart from this version of it. But hey I’m a writer not a performer. I would say I genuinely liked 15 or 16 of this twenty and that’s a pretty good strike rate.