End of year list 2018: there were supposed to only be 25
Hey guys it’s the annual insight into the darker areas of my psychology that is my songs of the year.
When I say this is dark, I mean it is dark and it is personal. TW: mental health, childlessness (involuntary), as well as broader 2018 themes such as the total meltdown of everything and a distinct sense of there not being much future. Oh and at one point my tooth falls apart because like everyone else I have been having an extremely normal one.
- Every single end of year list, unless it acknowledges that it is entirely personal and subjective, is self-defeating bullshit designed to impress you. There is no ‘best of’ there is only ‘favourite’ or ‘most relentlessly hammered on one-song-repeat loop’ or ‘closest aligned to the events of this year as I can understand them even if I do not want to think about them’ or ‘best opiate to my particular pains real and imagined.’
- It’s mostly pop music of a particular sort because that’s what I enjoy listening to. This seems to surprise people because I work in motorsport as though the moment I first penned a race report I would have actually morphed into Jeremy Clarkson, which is curious as I have never seen him grafting his way around a media pen or standing four-foot-deep in snow to get a face full of rally gravel but whatever.
- There is a sort of spuriously-enforced rule about one song per artist, to stop it turning into that chart show where there were 17 Ed Sheeran songs in the top 10 except for Ed Sheeran read ‘Twin Shadow.’ There will be exactly 0 Ed Sheeran songs.
- Do not @ me.
Here is the accompanying playlist.
30. Liz Lawrence — Floors
Sorry to continuously bang on about Ed Sheeran but one event horizon for me this year was that I got into a very early morning taxi in snowy London, desperately hoping my flight to Dublin would take off so that I could then get a flight to Toronto and Mexico City. Actually, that itself was not the event horizon. The event horizon was when my taxi driver, who had been listening to KISS — my preferred taxi radio station — switched it to Capital Gold because some ageing white lady had boarded his vehicle and I felt my organs shrivel like a slug in salt.
Problem is, while I maintain the sort of healthy animosity towards Sheeran that anyone who was responsible for tweeting the chart during the abovementioned trying time would, I actually do listen to loads of ageing white person music now. I don’t know what I think about myself over it, probably because there is not much to think — the greying hair, the way I make ‘uhhhnnnnh’ noises when sitting down and standing up, the creeping interest in gardening: I am an ageing white person and perhaps this is just staying in my lane or something, given that I can’t pretend I still focus on the breadth and depth of music the same way I did when I was writing about it professionally.
I don’t know if Liz Lawrence considers her music in this category — probably not, I suspect it’s more artfully wistful indie or something — but this is the speed at which I am taking my reluctant acceptance of being an ageing white person. This reminds me of more experimental things like Polmo Polpo (that deep, breathy bassline) that I used to listen to before I started having no energy for being challenged. Every time I tweet something about my specialism, someone who’s read a Wikipedia entry tries to correct me about it — I am absolutely not here for music that steams in to tell me it’s smarter than my ears.
The end refrain, which kicks in at the middle like an admission — The floors are calling me/back again/the floors are calling me a shuddering breath of the atmosphere outside a basement club, walking through an area of town you’re not trendy enough to go out in. That wisp of cigarette smoke that tugs at a craving for something else. A brush up against your alternate universe self.
My most seismic shift this year was not in fact in the back of a cab to Heathrow, although it is definitely part of the ageing white person thing — I know I can’t have children, will struggle to prove myself eligible to adopt because of my unstable income and tendency to go and do very dangerous things abroad. If you’re not my age, that’s maybe an abstract thought but it was something that took me most of the year to understand enough to accept — and that I was willing to pursue my career over the chance of it.
It feels like a cheat, if I could carry a pregnancy I could just have a baby and no one could stop me just because I’m a journalist. But I can’t — repeat surgeries have torn up my insides trying to get out a cancer that’s decided to go for round two with me. At the end of the day, it turns out I am not a special exception to whom the rules still apply.
I keep desperately and hopelessly thinking about it though. Washing my hands, I think about how you should wash your hands before you touch your baby. Cooking food I think about how I’m never going to teach someone to cook like I do. My face is crumpling writing this — I am bereft, I wanted a baby.
I have different battles to fight. The time is long past and wishing is worth nothing.
But god my mind, left to wander, goes to that place — not a nightclub in Dalston but a maternity ward where they hand me a baby and tell me it’s real and that the grief was for nothing and perhaps. It’s difficult to let go of those floors. My mind walks them casually when I don’t pay full attention — lingers on baby clothes and the idea of doing things with my kids, of simply the idea of pregnancy, of being able to sustain something other than a repeat loss.
And I try, with increasingly habitual success, to steer myself elsewhere. But the mind pauses in a corridor, momentarily struck by something else. The alternate universe brushing, harshly, to push on the bruise.
I’ve got much better at it — and as the song, I try to count my blessings instead, which are many. But tricksy, my mind strays off-course and I find I’ve sleptwalk into the home of a different life — the floors are calling me/back again.
29. Equinox — Bones
Yes, it is the Bulgarian Eurovision entry.
I genuinely like Eurovision and think when it’s taken seriously it’s produced some bangers even recently — this, performed by a set of bear-figure goths in a sort of understatedly hysterical way, is certainly one of them.
While I have been many things over the course of my life, ‘a goth’ has always been one of them. I absolutely, 100% appreciate the Baldur’s Gate-add-on directness of this — at absolutely no point does it try to do anything other than shove Depeche Mode onto a travelator and get them to understand hand luggage restrictions.
Its eastern leanings, of course, are genuine. Which helps.
28. Superorganism — Everybody Wants To Be Famous
This is, without question, the most actively annoying-sounding thing on my list. It sounds a little like a cross between the theme tune to Charlie Chalk and one of those post-Basement Jaxx dance acts that only exist for one single every summer festival cycle.
This year I have in some weird way tried to be famous. Actually, that is not true. But I have realised that the only way I can get people to read my writing about a semi-obscure section of an increasingly sidelined sport is to make them see it, which requires a level of at-least-infamy. It’s not exactly a desire to actually be a celebrity (god forbid, frankly — I have worked with enough of them to be turned off that) but that there’s no established path to getting published about Formula E. So I have to turn myself into one.
And I am hideously self-conscious about the whole thing because it is embarrassing as hell but this song makes it sound as ridiculous as it is. The whimsy absurdity of everybody wants and nobody’s ashamed being chanted, playground-style, over a series of squelches and bleeps that prove there is an onomatopoeic sound for claymation feels like the safe permission of going lightly insane that Douglas Adams was so good at.
There’s been so much shit this year — Brexit, for instance and in particular — where if you look at it too long you start to feel your grip on reality sliding because it isn’t possible to align with any form of facts. It’s like ordering an android phone and being sent an iPhone charger, then every news cycle is another iPhone charger turning up at your door while Samsung tell you if you just had a better attitude about it you’d see you could actually get by without using your phone and learn to get back to nature. And every time you see about 50% of the population, there’s a chance that someone is going to plug an iPhone charger into your phone and then tell you to stop being upset that it’s broken.
Except it’s not actually like that, it’s actually like waking up every day and looking at Twitter and being like ‘I don’t want to have to live through what’s coming’ not in a suicidal way, in a completely rational assessment that these are hard, brutal times you want no part of. Like discovering you’re being forced to do an assault course by some mad bastard of a PE teacher and even if you can, half the people you’re with won’t make it and the other half keep insisting that there’s no assault course as they stoically drown in a knee-high puddle.
And occasionally, it helps to spend five minutes deeply immersed in something absurd in an effort to stop yourself running around screaming about the things you’ve seen in the alternate dimension that’s taken over reality.
Squelch, squelch, squelch doesn’t matter the cost/cus/everybody wants to be famous.
27. Wet — Visitor
Oh god this is some melodramatic pap isn’t it? I nearly threw it off the list for being just dreadful but then I was standing on a rainy tube platform the other day and it managed to properly get me.
I’m a visitor, never anywhere — spend my days from stage to stage — ah, it is I, the international vagrant formerly of swamp-dwelling fame. This year I have been very slowly talked down from a feral animal hissing at the top of the book case to a mostly-domesticated person again by Will but it hasn’t stopped me going missing for two entire calendar months of the year and generally being a barely-rooted fly-by-night.
But this time last year I didn’t think there was a problem about spending 63 nights away from my bed because my bed was a rancid futon mattress on a leaky boat that I mostly used for storing copies of Autosport and half-empty bottles of airport grappa. And now I live in a real house like a normal person and routinely cook things in a kitchen rather than abstractly subsisting on supermarket meal deals.
I think maybe, maybe, I’ve had enough
I didn’t think I was especially soppy about the concept of home — as an adult I’ve very rarely moved less than once a year and while it would abstractly distress me that I owned about three bags of stuff, aged 31, I am more than capable of living out of my hand luggage for weeks. I hadn’t felt comfortably able to do things in my own home since 2014 and it has been a very slow process becoming so.
I know it’s because I’m a permanence-phobe and I fear stability much more than chaos because that just means you don’t know when things will start getting weird.
This song absolutely gets to me because it’s absolutely about that sad-ass drag to pretend you’re civilised enough for this, that you can live in a proper house long enough, that you could pretend to be some speed of normal consistently enough to be an anchor.
It’s too long because it trips over itself explaining, trying to say that this time it’s sincere. It’s clumsy and doleful and self-indulgent, it’s dropped its shoes in the hallway before it’s even really been shown in. It’s obnoxious and mopey, it’s an absolutely huge mood.
If you’re looking for a home, then maybe I can be one
26. Let’s Eat Grandma — Whitewater
If the whole Let’s Eat Grandma album also sounded like glittering, putrid water gushing into broken porcelain baths in abandoned asylums I would have got along with it much more but this — the intro — really didn’t set up the rest. Still, a banger.
25. Fantastic Negrito — A Letter To Fear
It would be unfair to make a list of music from 2018 and exclude this. The way it references the past, lovingly crooning defiance, is an unblinking gaze into the cataract-creamy eyes of a civilisation it’s not for.
If you got through 2018 thinking there are still good and healthy elements of western politics — the US and UK in particular — if you managed to continue sipping at the tepid plantation beverage that told you that unpleasantness was all behind us then honestly I don’t know what you were reading but it wasn’t the same I was.
The sexy, growling power of this is playing a particular thing, a particular fear — and using it as a call to hope is as bluntly effective enough to be obvious even to me. Lord knows, it isn’t to be borrowed but the sentiment (whatever you say to me/I will carry on) has been fairly universal this year.
24. Fall Out Boy — HOLD ME TIGHT OR DON’T (White Panda remix)
Oh man, what an embarrassment putting this after that. Hi, I’m Hazel and I negotiated my teenage angst via the lyrics of Pete Wentz and like him, I’m now a thirty-something divorcee and I still love the ugly.
I took too many hits off this memory, I need to come down — ah, there are so many things I can’t think about. Either because I will be crushed by them or… no, it’s because they will pull me apart. Irreversible past is not worth dwelling on but isn’t possible to let go, you just carry it around like a box you know there’s no safe defusing and yes, I know this is an actual psychological condition but it’s not one with a simple fix.
I learnt to cut people out a little, this year. It took me much too long but especially career-wise, shutting myself off from people I do not want the energy of has been essential. You don’t have to be unable to be empathetic to someone to know they’re doing nothing good for you — and some substantial harm. If 2016 was we’re not friends then this is we were never friends.
23. Mr Probz — Space For Two (R3HAB remix)
This song is, I just want to clarify, completely problematic. It’s absolutely dreadful, what it is describing is the most dysfunctional r/relationships thread ever and I do not want to romanticise it.
But it is ok to enjoy problematic media — I don’t endorse the behaviour of anyone in The Thick Of It but I still really enjoy it as a TV programme, y’know. And god this is great; the sweetness and gentleness of the tune, the oddly cute gestures within the lyrics (if prison is a place then I hope they got space for two — ok, not 100% up on the penal system there, my dude) and the overall optimistic sincerity, nothing edgy about it.
Big in to things that manage to describe something screwed up without being edgy, this year. Not that I am in any way free from sin in this department but the whole world is full of takes and I’d rather someone explained something. Even if that thing is a relationship which would be considered problematic by the makers of a longrunning US sitcom.
22. Campsite Dream — Little Do You Know
I really like Canadian indie supergroup Stars and also, by coincidence, tropical house because I am a millennial who has an awful lot of stuff I need to not think about at any given time to stop the Screaming™️.
This has the Stars qualities of being a sad boy-girl song that is about thoroughly fucking up a relationship but the tropical house qualities of being soothing and jolly about that. It bears listening to while vaulting suitcases to barrel across Schipol airport between flights, it’s also quite good for being a little tipsy on the tube.
I feel like tropical house is largely misunderstood in that people seem to think it is for dancing, not staving off a panic attack — at the disco or otherwise.
21. So Below — Ruin
As we get further down the list you will realise that basically ‘slightly disco things in a dark register’ is very much my jam — on the offchance you haven’t read one of these before.
This has many admirable qualities within that, including a soothing sense of velocity. There’s a little bit of running-down-a-long-hallway with each doorway bursting open behind you and not looking back because you know there are unimaginable horrors within, that you’re all too familiar with.
And it’s got a bit of momentum. You could run down the corridor of nightmares, arrive at the top of a towering staircase and enter some sort of demonic rave sponsored by Stolichnaya, having dropped the skirt of your enormous, elaborate gown and take a glass — neat, no ice — to sip smoothly as you survey the room.
This is music for drama queens who don’t actually like drama. Messy bitches who have to put their fingers in their ears and close their eyes when people shout on the telly. People out on the pull who need no one to ever touch them.
20. Rita Ora — Anywhere
I am absolutely obsessed with the first line of this song. Time flies by when the night is young/daylight shines on an undisclosed location.
Undisclosed? What, like New Zealand? Where is it night? I guess that would give it away. Is it both night and daylight, are you in Norils’k? That would definitely fit the definition of ‘anywhere,’ and also over the hills, far away and a million miles from LA. Also it technically remains a militarised and thus undisclosed city, as well as the most polluted place on earth.
Rita Ora’s dreamy holiday north of the Arctic circle has the slight mania of assuming you will survive six weeks of darkness without losing your entire mind so long as you can bone this one person and that is exactly the sort of intense crush energy I am interested in seeing represented in pop music.
No one writes a pop song about liking something a normal amount — be it heroin or making out. The siren-call assurance of this track, bouncily promising asylum from the whole sort of general everything, is the absolute definition of wanting something so much you start ignoring the practicalities. Which is the sort of thing survival is probably predicated on in the near future so let’s not
And if changing your name and moving to Siberia isn’t a large 2018 mood I don’t know what is.
19. Claptone — Stay The Night
Mmm, I like the whole Claptone album but the way this thrums, weird and close and in-your-ear the way Kylie does her vocals is just hairs-on-back-of-neck great shit. This is an Anne Rice vampire novel trying to chat you up on the dancefloor of an indie disco; it’s cringey, yes but also very well dressed for this dive.
I like that it’s a messy bitch, of course — I’m losing it — this is a desperate cling to an anchor not the strut it’s plugged into its bassline veins. It’s a meaningless, urgent connection about no-strings-attached but please-don’t-leave.
Which isn’t really an emotion I experience but it’s done so well. And anyway I understand getting lonely — being able to tolerate being alone is an essential part of travelling around the world without anyone else and I don’t
18. Mariah Carey — Caution
Oh, comparatively — this is very much an emotion I experience. Mariah here, warning off a potential beau; not quite the same growling way I would but nonetheless absolutely a hazard level threat.
Some of us know we’re a handful. I may not need cala lilies in every room but you’re going to have to put up with me being more often than not a pile of laundry and the click of a closed front door than someone you can rely on. And I am a sketchy motherfucker.
This reminds me, sonically, of the best of E=MC2 which is an absolutely mind-boggling, raw wound of an album about recovery.
17. Tamia — Leave It Smoking
The scene: rural Oxfordshire, 1998. 11-year-old me is listening to Trevor Nelson’s r’n’b chart and So Into You by Tamia comes on.
With very little regard for the effect on the music industry, 11-year-old me slams ‘record’ on my tape deck so hard it nearly falls off the chest of draws it lives on. I played it, rewinding again and again, until the tape disintegrated.
Ironically, this 2018 offering actually sounds more 1998 than the bouncing eagerness of So Into You, in some ways. But in any case, Tamia has lost none of her ability to evoke something particular — and something I particularly enjoy.
If So Into You was efferverscent this is purely for inhalation. The satisfying curl of smoke you find yourself watching, the space in between the plumes.
16. The Presets ft. DMA’s — Are You Here?
I wouldn’t say I typically like this sort of song, which is more evocative of Stone Roses-style baggy than anything else but I do like The Presets and it came on my Release Radar playlist during a commute a few months ago and absolutely blew my head off.
I’ve found commuting recently really miserable — a total loss of control and extreme loss of time, where I was both unable to do anything and constantly in trouble for lateness regardless of how early I left. Trying to do journalism either side of my working day was wiping me out beyond comprehension and leaving me distressed by all the time lost.
This sounds like kicking something’s arse. I’m not sure whose I was looking to kick other than, certainly, my own. Which this absolutely does — with all the electronic embroidery The Presets bring to it, it becomes more than a recreation of something into an updated assbeating for someone who’d probably listen to She Bangs The Drum just because I know the words by now.
15. Firefox AK — Heart Of Mine
I have to say, I was not expecting a Firefox AK record to make it into my end of year list for 2018. I used to listen to her but when I was at university and never really expected her to re-enter my musical experience but like an ex reconnecting on Facebook here we are.
Unlike an ex reconnecting on Facebook, I actually am definitely interested in hearing Heart Of Mine. Where Firefox AK’s work was reedy and small, a certain sort of delicate and temerous pop that scandinavia was producing at the time and which I liked but never loved, this is icily expansive, restless.
It’s not imperious and the song itself is warm but there’s a space for feeling numb here, which has been a big part of what I have needed to feel this year. A blank sense of scale to the planes it draws. I’ve kept returning to it, gladly, when I don’t know what I want to listen to or maybe even what to feel or do.
It’s big and blank and safe, like looking out over emptiness and none of those things are bad things. Needing space to think is something music can generously allow and this does so both gorgeously and kindly.
14. Empress Of — When I’m With Him
I didn’t quite get this the first time I heard it but it sort of somehow found its way into my ‘heavy rotation’ playlist anyway and then at some point on a nightmare tube journey it finally clicked and I had to listen to it 3000 times in a row immediately.
This is sweet and light and about completely losing your sense of self in a barely-there relationship. Surface listening makes it burble pleasantly, a superbly-produced sound but her vocal inflection drives you into the distress at its summery heart and let me tell you there are very few things I love more than corrupted saccharine.
We all hate Instagram now. Instagram is terrible for all of us because it shows us all these glossy happy people with perfect bikini waxes giving themselves wedgies hashtagged #workpaysoff and we all sit there staring, miserable amongst our sagginess and normally distributed bodyhair.
For every thinkpiece about how Instagram makes us all hate ourselves and our lives and the way we look and everything we’ve ever done and how insufficient everything is there is at least another one saying “ok, so this Instagram butt influencer DID try to sell laxatives to pre-schoolers via a mom-spon post BUT this no make up selfie admitting her own anxiety is the powerful message we need.” Every single one of them is as rubbish as the articles saying we all obsessively thirst-despise ourselves because of an app and not because the entire mammalian life cycle has been disrupted by meaningless work and a sense of impending doom but we’re definitely hopelessly addicted to these takes.
This isn’t nearly editorially crappy enough to be any of those. But it is a fucked-up love song for the Instagram era, a skewed filter more than a cracked facade and hell yes that’s something you can hook directly into my veins because we all have trash relationships — to other people, to ourselves, to work, to food, to self-care, to whatever and ever, amen.
13. Ariana Grande — No More Tears Left To Cry
What on earth could I say about this song that hasn’t been said? Her first track after a horrible tragedy and it isn’t meek cowedness or a strength and learning ballad performed for other people’s approval, it is a deeply personal young woman’s song full of joy and love and determination. It’s about trauma and recovery and that state of mind you know perfectly well you can’t permanently maintain but is a step of the way to something, a place to try to return to.
It’s beautiful and chromatic and it invites you along. I doubt there’s any song so generous released this year, so determined to roll you up with it in a katamari of survival. Sorry to keep going on about how 2018 has been trying really sincerely to kill us all but it really has — and to come out with something like this is incredible.
Ariana Grande’s been forced into taking what she does several thousand times more seriously than most people in politics and being pilloried regardless. This is a beautiful, gracious piece. It got me home from Germany after I lost my passport, it took me to New York with nothing left and I’m not even who it’s for. What a masterpiece of a song.
12. Chromatics — Black Walls
This is a massively sinister song for having large emotions, numbly, travelling through another date line.
11. LANY — Thru These Tears
I found out what LANY look like earlier this year via a press release and I’ve never been more disappointed. I don’t know what I was hoping for — some perfectly-preserved chubby MySpace evacuees who’d come to the queer-friendly pop nights I prefer, I assume. Anyway, turns out they’re any other band-type men which is disappointing.
However, this clearly doesn’t stop them writing sad bangers that would absolutely rock it at the queer-friendly pop nights I prefer. This is about being a melodramatic tool about a breakup because you can’t stop having feelings but in an older and wiser way than the sadly-now-not-so-enjoyable-due-to-inevitably-the-singer’s-behaviour Brand New.
This isn’t quite as brutal (or not in a way that personally resonates, at least) as WHERE THE HELL ARE MY FRIENDS, which really still provides a safe testing environment for The Absolute Worst Feelings. But Thru These Tears absolutely still goes off for a quick cry in the work toilets five times in three hours.
10. D/R/U/G/S — New Born Love
I can’t even remember which flight I listened to this relentlessly on. Mexico, I think. I loop songs relentlessly on flights because it’s the only way — for me — to deal with the need to not think about how much time has elapsed, how much must yet be elapsed.
Longhaul travel is a proper brain-snapper. It is useless time; I finally learnt that I am not going to work on the plane, this year or at least, there’s no point pretending I’m going to be able to use a laptop and all that space gives you so much time for great ideas that you can’t realise, like one eleven-hour episode of waking from a dream filled with brilliance and assuming you’ll remember it by the time you reach a point you could do anything about it at.
This plays to the sad old euphoric dance fan in me, while also placating the bit that profoundly enjoys layering and looping. It’s almost a lullaby, if it didn’t have that gentle spark of encouragement to it, that little urge that you will make it eventually. It rolls into itself perfectly and timelessly like a steadying hand.
9. Loud Luxury, Brando — Body
As much as I enjoy disappearing into my own head during something akin to the death panic at 5,000 feet, I also do have an innate enthusiasm for going fucking mental on the dancefloor.
That’s increasingly embarrassing due to the old white person problems but has not led to me seeking to get into jazz — if anything, it has made the things that make me want to get rascally on pinot grigio and lose my shoes somewhere even blunter and more obvious. This song is as blunt and obvious as they get.
There’s a pre-chorus you can jump up and down to, a chorus with a bassline that virtually does the dancing for you, you can virtually feel the sudden sweatiness from a body surprised by movement, that dampness at the base of your skull that says you don’t go out dancing often enough, these days.
It slaps, is what I am telling you.
8. Dawn Richard, Mumdance — Guardian Angel
Dawn Richard has released several really interesting things this year, as most years. This is the one that’s stuck with me most.
If there was ever a case for Dawn Richard writing film soundtrack songs, this would be it. But also it’s just a masterfully crafted bit of drama, which doesn’t fall into theatrics due to Dawn’s vocal — which isn’t limited — being deliberately tight and only exploding into a reasonable range. The sort of difference between Amy Winehouse-dramatic and Mariah Carey-dramatic in terms of vocal noodling.
Dawn’s done a lot of less electronic work this year (and some electronic work, I don’t think she’s gone acoustic) and this is part of that, a track that plays with dynamics really fearsomely. It is also a big, femme hero track — a huge, passionate cry about how she will rescue and protect you, some threat to the concept of angel (Dawn’s work deals a lot with biblical metaphor so you can bet it’s one of the ones with all the eyes) but ultimately about how fiercely she will take you in.
I doubt anyone has got through 2018 without wanting to howl into the void about how they’ll protect someone they love and wishing the void didn’t send them a colossal, eldritch-slimey middle finger back. Fantasies can be empowering.
7. Joe Goddard — So Much
Joe Goddard is one of the most consistently good producer/artists in the last however long, is my largely uncontroversial opinion. Also an almost uniquely talented genius in the field of ‘really long bangers.’
Nearly every song of his I like is well over nine minutes long and this is no exception, a journey across planes of fuzzy static and the dancefloor clarity that made Hot Chip the best they are at their best. But given space to roam it turns into a generous, expansive thing — the warmth of something a little shy inviting you in, rather than the grandiose of an extended prog spag-out.
Most long songs are arrogant, demanding the listener’s full attention to their intricacy. Joe Goddard takes them on like a bath as opposed to a shower; lovely, clever and delicate things happen, muscles untwist and steam drifts in curlicues, things feel if not easier to handle then distantly and safely the other side of a locked door.
So Much is the most overtly Hot Chip of his I’ve heard for ages and I am not the kind of person about to pretend I don’t really like Hot Chip. Given more space, the song breathes like clean bed sheets in endless, achey pleasure.
6. Blood Orange — Charcoal Baby
Anyone who thinks Blood Orange recently became political is obviously not very good at listening to lyrics but like last year’s Hands Up, this does a particularly good job of being intensely musically pleasurable on a very uncomfortable theme.
I’m not a black American and I’m not going to attempt to awkwardly fumble around the importance of this track like a white man frantically writing a ‘This Is America — Meaning Explained!’ piece but this is heartfelt, gentle thing that tells the fury of existing as a black American in 2018 in the same way Blood Orange used to (sometimes) negotiate getting high and screwing.
You’d have to be supremely blinkered to not understand the wrongness of what’s happening to non-white people in the US and particularly to black people. If it doesn’t make you furious and outraged then you’d have to think it’s right, which would be supremely fucked up of you. The news cycle is a merciless, horrifying list of atrocities from Flint’s water to California’s wildfire fighters being forced prison labour to the ticking counter of black trans women murdered to police shooting after police shooting before you even get to the inhumanity of cops called on people standing at bus stops for the colour of their skin.
It’s fucked up and it’s so vast and so horrible that it’s important not to just look at it in that cycle or it’s as dehumanising as a Fox News invective. Nothing but endless, distant, seemingly untreatable pain — like a chronic illness, the news cycle hammers out the ability to feel more outrage. How angry are you this week? How high can the scale go?
Which is why, more than ever, it’s important to listen to black artists, to queer artists, to engage with work and writing and voices and experiences rather than just headlines. Blood Orange is an archetype of my taste in any case but Negro Swan (this year’s album) builds on Freetown Sound to take the pain of facing this to an artistic point it almost feels rude for me to intrude on with my whiteness and distance.
So yeah, I will not write you a contextualised essay or talk about my feelings here. But if like me you are far from this by skin or country and this track isn’t your thing, find artists that are — don’t use genre as an excuse, there’s always going to be someone telling this story in a way you could be listening to because like that news cycle, the numbers are too mortifyingly enormous to ignore.
5. Twin Shadow — When You’re Wrong
If sometimes I like goth disco, sometimes I like emo: have you heard about goths getting emo at the disco? I don’t mean Panic, whose new stuff I am at best lukewarm about but how about Twin Shadow absolutely losing it on the dancefloor out of some fine-cut wagyu heartbreak and the possibility of still having sex?
When You’re Wrong is the standout moment of Caer, to me. There’s loads of good bits and I’ve gone through stages of obsession with lots of it but When You’re Wrong is an unashamedly gunky bassline sticking to the floor of its local sad-sack vocal and it’s only the beat that’s going to get it an Uber later.
It’s nasty and it’s basic and it does what it does incredibly directly. Nothing about it is especially artful and it doesn’t need to be and that’s sort of the art here — in the way that allegedly some simple indie guitar hook can grab you, When You’re Wrong takes the dancefloor screwup genre by the balls, forces it to drink a shot of tequila and ties it to a lamp post until it coalesces into empathetic strut.
This is about going out with your crew, where your crew is a series of complex and intersecting mental health issues.
4. Nite Jewel — On Your Own
I will be 100% honest with you all and tell you: I spent most of this year mistaking this for Robyn’s Missing U. Not because the two songs sound alike but because this is such a staggeringly massive sad banger that I just assumed it must be Robyn from that Royksopp hook and the fact it’s so obviously about having a screaming meltdown at your ex outside the kebab shop, turned tuneful.
It starts slow, which causes me to nearly skip it every time it comes on but if you get past the first twenty seconds not only are they fully contextualised but you are rewarded with a certified Big Sad Anthem so enormous it’s absurd it’s not been blasted on every tube station platform after 11:30pm at night for the past two months. Certainly every night bus stop.
Honestly this song is just an extraordinarily brilliant piece of pop and it hasn’t had the love it deserves, can’t tell you enough how it will improve being on a train or a bus in the dark watching the landscape fly by.
3. Amy Shark — I Said Hi
This is where the disco ends. Not because I don’t love disco or think it should reach the highest echelons of my list but because if we flash back to this summer where I’ve blocked my bank from calling my phone and am trying very, very hard not to panic as the sweat pools between my thighs and I wonder if I am ever going to earn any real money again.
A lot of this year has been an exercise in nerve-holding. I made some consciously risky choices regarding throwing myself and every last penny I had at Formula E and it has, eventually, paid off to the point of being (in a good month) able to scrape by.
But there was the bleak, hot summer of not being able to afford to go and get wrecked at a queer-friendly pop night even though I had hit the grade of sadness absolutely only possible to be processed in those terms. Some of that involved endlessly looping the sort of mildly sexual disco that simulates dancefloor anonymity and rose-wine-induced, sticky-fever-sweat interest but that will, I regret to say, not get you through every article about battery electrolyte.
I love the whole Amy Shark album, it’s absolutely mall goth pop for grown up goth problems with too much anxiety to go to anywhere that crowded. That’s not a backhanded compliment, I mean that it’s detailedly, grimly relatable even for those of us who know we’ve gone past the event horizon where you should bring up your issues in polite company, while packing belting tunes. That’s pop as art right there.
I loved Adore, last year but I don’t know if I ever got round to writing about it. It’s a song about being a fool to yourself over someone you want the chance to flirt with, perfectly phrased for the modern era — all my money is spent on these nights so we can hang out.
This is even more painful, not just doing something you know is pointlessly near-obsessive to your detriment but going endless rounds in the ring with the question of whether you can fix yourself or anything around you. A lot of us are used to getting up and bloodymindedly coming back after a knockback
Over the summer there was a day when my bank phoned me to discuss going bankrupt. I had been, with increasingly flayed fingertips, holding my nerve about the situation because I’d always managed to come up with something before but at the same time the situation spiralled, I found myself falling over mental trip wires. I dealt quite well with having my handbag and passport violently stolen in Berlin, I dealt very poorly with the aftermath of having had to throw money I didn’t have at the problem to get home.
One of the days after the bankruptcy call, when I’d had to ask for money to avoid certain annihilation and with the full awareness it could only ever bridge the hole, I was meant to be going out. It was for someone else’s thing and I knew I ought to go, that I had enough for Oyster and it was the right thing to do. I sat down to eat something beforehand and was suddenly horrified to find something crunchy in my mouth, one of my teeth literally crumbling from clenching my jaw for weeks on end, waking myself up every night grinding up enamel with anxiety.
I didn’t go out much more. I saw almost no one apart from the cat and Will, who was at work during the day and it was so difficult to do anything other than numbly attempt to cope moment-to-moment by trying not to think or maybe exist. Not permanently, just to briefly opt out of having to be someone trying to do anything, especially anything on my own. I often seem to have infinite capacity and this summer it just ran out and I stopped functioning and there wasn’t a choice but to try and continue to pretend I was, somehow.
Anyway. Money sucks. My brain sucks. But I actually really did think that might be the moment I couldn’t dig myself out of — like, when things get so bad stress dreams about bad stuff happening are just casually occurring while you’re trying to chew a salad then perhaps it is time to dial shit back. Or, alternatively, listen to I Said Hi by Amy Shark 50 times a day for three months until you finally crack out of your brain’s own, poisoned cocoon.
This song is very blunt, in an almost Alanis Morissette way, about what it is about. I stand in the corner, like a tired boxer/one hand on my cheekbone, one hand on the rope. Huge mood, of course, absolutely vast but also it’s got, musically, stylings of the turn of the millennium. Of pop princesses working up alternative images via a vest and board shorts (and why not) and when threats were more to do with grounding and less to do with existential-grade threats from every possible direction.
Anyway, the whole thing is a great bit of doesn’t-even-count-as-retro-but-distinctly-of-a-certain-time pop but the middle eight breakdown (the finest part of many superb pop songs) is where it really knocks it out of the park with a plastered-to-the-mattress mantra:
Lying on my side, watching time fly by and I bet the whole world thought that I would give up today.
It repeats into a crescendo, starting doleful and defeated and building into a snarl. Pop songs can’t fix your brain but repeating a rosary you can use them as something to hold onto, a borrowed thought when yours are all intruded on. And god, I really hammered this, even by my standards and if there’s ever a cinematic version of this summer it will be a montage of sitting foetal on the carpet, eyes closed, mumbling along to this in the hope I can come up with a comeback.
Sometimes it does not matter what you did so long as it wasn’t giving up. And I survived, so tell them all I said fuck off.
2. Lucius — Right Down The Line
Lucius are one of my favourite bands, Nudes is probably my runner-up for album of the year. This is a standout track, perfectly capturing a tender vulnerability that it has been hard to feel in 2018 for fear of being annihilated through a single armour-chink.
Right Down The Line is bruised and battered and not what it was — or what it wants to be and maybe never will get there but it’s also awkwardly full of love. I know it’s a Gerry Rafferty cover — and maybe doesn’t deserve its place here, especially so high, in a year where so many original songs were clamouring for spots — but its as divorced from the original as it could be.
I am very keen on taking even the best songs — especially the best songs — by men about women and turning them into songs sung by women about women. But beyond that — the original of this is pleasant, there’s nothing bad about it and it’s one of Rafferty’s best-beloved tracks but it flows gently and loves sweetly, unlike this.
Lucius’ version is run through with the exhaustion and steely determination of the heart necessary to love anyone in 2018. Can you honestly, in good conscience, open not just yourself to worrying about someone else that much but letting them worry about you in return? Are the stakes simply too high for commitment now?
I mean, yes probably if you’re a statistician but the heart is not rational and its needs are not measurable against safety metrics. It is understated, not stripped down but swept back — that scene with the guy from Love Actually and his signs but the genuine emotion not the performative Moonpig.com version thereof.
Generally I don’t like throwing a song slower and acoustic and saying that makes it more meaningful but this doesn’t do what acoustic covers can, which is divorce the song from its original sense of rhythm and remove all structure from it just to try to drag weight from the lyrics. This is an intensely-controlled tightness, no noodly wandering, making the original not smaller but more cinematic.
If it’s a stripped-down version then it’s the song as it would be over the last, guttering candle at the end of the world. Except more hopeful and fond than that. This song is a struggle, an honest admission that things weren’t and aren’t and won’t be easy but with the daft gleam of hope we get from love. Not the glint on a blade but a well-worn reflection, the comforting rush of speed you get when you know the way home from sight.
It’s about knowing yourself and your mind and who you love and if any of us survived 2018 with those intact or found them along the way then that
1. St Lucia — Next To You
I think this is the most 2018 song written this year. It is absolutely apocalypso soft jazz to watch the world finally burn to, the sound of ballroom dancing on a sinking ship. It’s also very sweet and has a grim honesty about love to it — in the reasonably unlikely event I ever get married again, I would like it as the first dance.
Saying things gently lets you say more, occasionally, fears whispered in the dark, when someone rolls over to ask why you’re awake at 4am. There have been so many reasons, this year — and I’ve also spent two entire calendar months not in my own bed, which has made me understandably soppy about it.
It makes me cry if I loop it too much — a sad, self-indulgent song about watching things go wrong from a position of enormous privilege. Being the people dancing at the last night, not even the ones serving drinks let alone the charred corpses outside; the gentility of it is dark and self-aware as it selfishly hopes for romance in a sea of shit.
My favourite line is the end of the second verse, where that fictional safety, the idea any of us can get out of here heroic, is shaken at its foundations with a cruel glance to camera two: can’t we build a skyscraper twenty miles thick/and fill it up with all the shit/that we bought, at the president’s impeachment sale?
It’s very much Strangelove-by-gentrification, this overwhelming feeling of desperately wanting not to have to do whatever is going to happen in the next few years because some of us have always been able to avoid so much of the unpleasantness. Why me, why now?
Well, it’s happening. And this song softly bossa nova presets its way to reminding you that, if you’re anything like me, your bourgeois complaints are at the absolute back of the list if we’re to rebuild anything in the right order. It’s funny and it’s a little mean to itself and it’s still a love song.
I don’t do or say this stuff very well but in every late night breathless panic attack wake up and bone-tired jet-grimy stumble home and every morning I’ve not remembered how I got there, this year, it has been very good to have companionship and love. I hope you do too — or that you find it; if a woman who spent 2017 waking up most often to a bucket full of rancid bilgewater sliding on the pillow again can then you can. And you deserve it.
