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The 25 Best Singles of 2013

The year’s biggest singles took the pleasure principle to reckless new, solipsistic heights.

The 25 Best Singles of 2013
Photo: XL

Last year’s biggest hits heralded the return of good times unto perpetuity, eternal youth and the enduring pleasure of receiving your first phone call from the set of washboard abs next door. Perhaps taking a cue from Britney Spears’s prescriptive “Till the World Ends,” maybe just drunk on borrowed time, 2013’s biggest singles took the pleasure principle to reckless new, solipsistic heights. It was the sort of year when the real-life counterpart to Mike Seaver could slick his thick hair up and let the devil horns sprout, betting the farm that nothing unlocks a good girl faster than “agreeing” with her with a wink in your eye that lets you both know you’re lying. It was the sort of year when Justin Timberlake could spend minutes on end publicly looking at himself in a mirror and MTV would respond by inviting him to self-coronate for…well, we’ll let you know when he finishes. It was the sort of year where the freshly legal daughter of a well-worn mullet could feed herself to the lions and nary a soul would be willing to rescue her (we all know at whom she’s really sticking that tongue out), leaving her no choice but to straddle a cultural wrecking ball herself.

Not every artist was fiddling away like Nero or crashing their cars into a bridge and loving it in 2013, but only in the context of a severely degraded business model could a secondhand flow as janky as Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s proudly threadbare “Thrift Shop” not just reach an audience, but legitimately speak to them. Dance apocalyptic, indeed. Still, the year’s best tracks invariably stared down the lies of the moment and opted instead for sincerity and honesty. And the truth often hurts. Rhye’s “The Fall” sonically embraced the listener even as its lyrics suggested a romance about to fall apart. Kendrick Lamar ruthlessly prioritized his vibe. And the Pet Shop Boys absolved themselves of the fantasy altogether in “Love Is a Bourgeois Construct.” This embittered sincerity gave listeners a whole new set of hashtags to test out in the hope that, next year, everybody will be dancing and be doin’ it right. Eric Henderson

Editor’s Note: Listen to the full playlist at The House Next Door.


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25. Justin Timberlake, “Mirrors”

Much of Justin Timberlake’s The 20/20 Experience and its sequel failed to materially push the singer-actor’s sound forward, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge current pop trends or admit that any time at all had passed since 2006’s FutureSex/LoveSounds. Thus, the project’s second single, “Mirrors,” comes on like an old friend, with the familiar mix of beatboxing, synthesized handclaps, string stabs, and durable melodies we’ve come to expect from JT and partner-in-crime Timbaland. If you’re going to stick to formula, you’d better own it, and the eight-minute “Mirrors,” which will likely emerge as the sole enduring hit from the project, succeeds wildly as a reminder of the magic these two maestros can make with just a little smoke and mirrors. Sal Cinquemani


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24. FKA Twigs, “Water Me”

By far the strongest offering on the solid but relatively unheralded EP2, “Water Me” is a throbbing trip-hop ballad that borrows subtlety from FKA twigs’s British peers. The track’s bird-like melodies and queasy synths are themselves hat-tips to neo-soul minimalists like the xx and Mount Kimbie, while the fitful percussion that bubbles up below them is just foreboding enough to have been crafted by Aphex Twin. But it’s the singer’s balance of the seductive and the combative that lingers above all else. “I promise I can grow tall, when making love is free,” is her answer to a would-be lover’s rebuke, imbuing the track with a playful sense of tragedy. Kevin Liedel

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23. The National, “Demons”

The National’s Matt Berninger curates conspiracy like a stalker on “Demons,” the second single from the band’s Trouble Will Find Me: “I am secretly in love with/Everyone that I grew up with” Amid such oblique angst, and drowning friends, sewer alligators, and patient buzzards, Berninger’s confession that “I stayed down with my demons” is almost comforting, a self-aware nod to the band’s reputation as sad-sack rockers. Driven by Bryan Devendorf’s drums rolling in 7/8 time, the midtempo track refuses any cathartic climax, but Aaron and Bryce Dessner play their shimmering guitars with such spare grace that Berninger’s deep baritone sounds, finally, lifted. Caleb Caldwell


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22. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, “Mermaids”

Nick Cave has mellowed with age, the strident menace of his younger days settling into a relaxed, weird-uncle sedateness, but there’s always the threat of it flaring up again, exhibiting the sort of snarl put forth on his recent Grinderman project. That tension informs all of the songs on Push the Sky Away, giving ostensibly solemn music ominous bite. A dreamy, glittering track with a wistful mythological bent, “Mermaids” is the kind of material that Kate Bush might have once recorded, aside from the inclusion of a few choice, nasty lines. Cave uses it as an occasion to craft a melancholic tale of loss that’s made even deeper by the weariness of his voice, ocean-tide imagery invoking the exhausting, incessant changes of life. Jesse Cataldo


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21. Neko Case, “Man”

Neko Case stomps all over “dipshits drunk on pink perfume” on “Man,” a loud, squalling alt-country rocker. Over rattling snare, delightful honky-tonk harpsichord, and periodic bursts of distorted power chords, Case brings her ferocious pipes to bear on reductive gender norms, sardonically donning the pants only to kick some serious butt, whether it be that of a misogynist boyfriend or a pandering pop star. M. Ward matches her attitude with three gnarled guitar solos, resulting in a kind of call-and-response to Case’s provocatively delivered verses. It’s all a lot of fun, but she’s also dead-serious: “You didn’t know what a man was until I showed you” That’s gonna leave a mark. Caldwell


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20. Daft Punk, “Doin’ It Right”

“Get Lucky” may have burnt up dance floors from Anchorage to Zagreb, but the hedonistic charms of Daft Punk’s galactically famous ode to good times (and “Good Times”) were eclipsed by the more soulful “Doin’ It Right” The track finds erstwhile Animal Collective noise-maker Panda Bear enlisted to sing lead on a luscious late-night jam, which, in a just world, would be the last dance at every prom until the end of time. Conjuring up the perfect feeling of out-of-body euphoria that great parties can create at their peak, “Doin’ It Right” is the true heir to the French duo’s “One More Time,” evoking the simultaneous feelings of ecstasy and melancholy that Daft Punk’s greatest moment encapsulated so perfectly. Mark Collett

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19. Kendrick Lamar, “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe”

Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City may have been released late last year, but 2013 was the year of his ascendancy, flitting from one impressive guest verse to another, peaking with his ridiculous, uncontested takeover of Big Sean’s “Control” Yet, for the purest example of Lamar’s artistry, it’s best to consider the last single to trickle out from his own album, a seemingly shallow party track that ends up pushing much deeper than expected. Playing off the brusque insolence of the title, “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” ends up displaying the rapper’s characteristic thoughtful ambivalence while incorporating repeated tempo shifts, dizzyingly lush production, and dense wordplay, another bit of vivid, resonant music from perhaps the most talented young rapper working today. Cataldo


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18. Pet Shop Boys, “Love Isa a Bourgeois Construct”

Produced by Stuart Price, the third single from the Pet Shop Boys’ latest disco opus, Electric, is like the little sister to Madonna’s “Hung Up,” complete with rumbling bassline, galloping backbeat, and the melody from Michael Nyman’s “Chasing Sheep Is Best Left to Shepherds” by way of Daft Punk’s “Veridis Quo” standing in for the ABBA sample. But while the liberal use of the word “bourgeoisie” begs comparison to yet another Madonna classic (“Music”), Neil Tennant does the queen one better by seamlessly and convincingly employing the term “schadenfreude” into his rejection of the capitalist notion of love. Cinquemani


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17. The Juan Maclean, “You Are My Destiny”

Discerning between posturing and sincerity in modern dance music is a loser’s game. None of you have seen me dance, but trust me when I say I’m that loser. And my hips, which stayed firmly in place whenever the sterling but somewhat hypothetical piano-pounding loops of the Juan Maclean’s rubber-stamped indie-dance smash “Happy House” seized control of all corners of four-on-the-floor in the late aughts, happily lose their wits whenever LCD Soundsystem’s Nancy Whang metallically belts out the titular refrain of Maclean’s “You Are My Destiny” against those clattering, reverberating, hot-magenta synth throbs. (Which is often.) As with baking, great house music is built on the exactness of its ingredients, and this time around, Maclean got the recipe oh so real. Henderson


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16. Arcade Fire, “Reflektor”

The calypso-funk beat and entwining French lyrics sung by Haitian-born Régine Chassagne give Win Butler’s technologically induced paranoia a post-colonial edge, a chance to break the national and personal solipsism that haunts Butler’s lyrics. Butler might lament social fragmentation and sing that he’s “alone on a stage, in the reflective age,” but plenty of people are dancing along. James Murphy makes a sleek disco-ball out of Arcade Fire’s bulky, Springsteen-esque indie rock, keeping the anthemic drive, but cranking up the reverb and electronic clatter for a nearly eight-minute dance-floor deconstruction. It’s arty, cerebral, and immanently listenable. Caldwell

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15. HAIM, “The Wire”

With “The Wire,” HAIM executes a sassy yet self-effacing kiss-off built around a propulsive handclap pattern reminiscent of John Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane,” a syncopated vocal performance that recalls Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way,” and a football metaphor (“I fumbled you when it came down to the wire”) that feels entirely their own. With a rich backdrop of two guitars, electric bass, and synthesized string chords, the sisters trade verses and add the occasional well-placed grunt to lend this breakup song an emotional tone that lands, appropriately, somewhere between liberated joy and wistful regret. For its clever lyrics and varied instrumental palette, “The Wire” is the most dynamic single off of Days Are Gone, a song to be danced to with equal glee at a sweaty outdoor festival or in the privacy of one’s bedroom. Annie Galvin


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14. Todd Terje, “Strandbar (Disko)”

“Inspector Norse” wasn’t just a tough act to follow for Norwegian dance-music wunderkind Todd Terje. The track was lightning in a bottle, a sparkling clean, minty-fresh dip in the hottest of springs. You can only get so clean before you submit to getting dirty once again, which is probably why Terje felt compelled to answer his harshest critics, who reportedly accused the DJ’s music of being too bright and pristine to be played anywhere other than tourist-trap beach bars (i.e. “strandbars” in Norwegian). Thus, “Strandbar (Disko)” rakishly accentuates everything—bouncy beats, tightly anchored piano-bassline byplay, racing BPMs—that cheesed off his critics in the first place. And everything that made “Inspector Norse” so awesome. It may have been conceived in a moment of punk pique, but that stunning key change washes away any bad blood. Henderson


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13. Volcano Choir, “Byegone”

As Bon Iver, Justin Vernon achieves grand things with rather humble sounds, but as a member of Volcano Choir, he often opts to just go big. Case in point, Repave’s “Byegone,” where Vernon and company attempt to apply his cryptic lyricism and pastoral tableaus into a stadium-scaling, sing-along anthem. What they accomplish is nothing less than rustic power pop, the song’s modest introduction—a quiet guitar being strummed like a rubber band—soon exploding into harrowing wails of “Set sail!,” perfectly straddling the line between a wonderfully cheesy Hallmark message and the bearded wanderlust that’s fast become Vernon’s calling card. Liedel


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12. Sky Ferreira, “You’re Not the One”

There’s nothing genuinely threatening or dangerous about Sky Ferreira, a former teen model who’s adopted a confrontational stance on her first album, Night Time, My Time, most clearly manifested in a revealing, forcefully unattractive cover photo and a faux-punk aesthetic. Yet these signifiers are useful in establishing the type of artist Ferreira wants to be: fearlessly self-possessed, sexual on her own terms, more focused on lacerating breakup songs than bubblegum love ballads. All these things come through on the intermittingly fierce, completely catchy “You’re Not the One,” its industrial drums and bittersweet vocals setting up another thick-skinned sendoff track from an artist intent on establishing her independence. Cataldo

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11. Yo La Tengo, “ohm”

In Hinduism, the “ohm” is a sacred, meditative sound made by believers attempting to communicate the total oneness of all things and contemplate the infinity of creation. Yo La Tengo’s “Ohm” shares some of those mystical qualities: It’s a quiet roar of a song, propelled by a humming drone that loops and cycles and folds on top of itself for seven minutes, but which feels like forever. As Ira Kaplan intones that “nothing ever stays the same, nothing’s explained,” it becomes easy to lose yourself in the band’s hazy mist of ringing guitars and throbbing bass. It’s a noise like a forest sighing, transcending the hushed intimacy of the previous triumphs like “Our Way to Fall” to touch something cosmic. Collett


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10. Janelle Monáe, “Dance Apocalyptic”

This guitar-driven rave-up is the closest Monáe will come to recording “Hey Ya”—all swirl, swagger, and pop-soul melody that no number of Q-tips will dislodge from your ear canal. Monáe continues to muddle distinctions: between man and machine, radio pop and R&B revivalism, and especially sexuality. Her line here about “kissing friends” in the bathroom stall is but one of the many winks on The Electric Lady toward bi-curiosity. (To be fair, if you had her lashes, you’d probably wink a lot too.) The slyness of the track is that everyone’s dancing too hard to hear that lyric about the “zombie in the front yard” The message: Hard boogie is our best protection against, and solace from, the techno-apocalypse. When Armageddon comes, we could all do worse than going extinct while the song plays on repeat. Chalangalangalang. Ted Scheinman


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9. Robin Thicke ft/ T.I. & pharrell, “Blurred Lines”

“What a pleasure it is to degrade a woman,” Robin Thicke marveled in an interview about his controversial video for last summer’s über-hit “Blurred Lines” Thicke drew rightful heat for the comment, while his single continued to dominate pop radio and beach playlists. What’s the song about? For one thing, it’s about those blurred lines of the old virgin/whore dichotomy; it’s about T.I. vowing to cleave a woman’s backside in half; it’s about how effectively Thicke and Pharrell can repurpose Marvin Gaye’s back catalogue to mammoth success. It’s the highest ratio of style to substance outside of Selena Gomez’s oeuvre. It’s this year’s “Call Me Maybe” except with fewer complete sentences and more hashtags. Scheinman


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8. Autre Ne Veut, “Play by Play”

Arthur Ashin’s mellifluous voice is an instrument that veritably quivers with exquisite pain and lust, and its bruised textures are draped across a chaise longue of indulgent synths and artificial drum sounds on this luxurious ode to frantic, obsessive infatuation. Three minutes of foreplay followed by a two-minute climax, “Play By Play” reaches “Total Eclipse of the Heart”-level critical mass halfway through, but the track is rescued from histrionics by the glimpses of real anguish that flash in Ashin’s vocals. “Play By Play” is that rare beast, a song about sex that’s neither lascivious nor awkward, but instead pulses with tactile sensuality. Collett

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7. J. Cole ft. TLC, “Crooked Smile”

J. Cole is that rapper who can take the simplest moment—a sip of apple juice, the snatch of a song heard on the radio—and go all Rachmaninoff, spinning theme and variations until, as though by simple power of word association, he arrives at a mic-dropping moral pronouncement. “Crooked Smile” is the Cole playbook in a nutshell. Its three verses build carefully on one another, until bad orthodonture starts telling us things about self-esteem in the black community, systemic injustice, chemical escapism, and how to game the prison system. Meanwhile, one of the best bass figures of the year bounces off every drawled bit of wisdom, and TLC swoops in to offer a virtuosic hook of positive reinforcement. Yes, Cole’s a post-Weezy rapper who sports an ungilded “twisted grill” Does that make him realer than the rest of them? It’s a question Cole is humble enough to ask, even if he doesn’t enunciate it. Scheinman


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6. Rhye, “The Fall”

Sunday morning music for people who go to bed early on Saturday night, Rhye’s “The Fall” is the most refined and delicate come-on of the year, not anonymous in the slightest, but rather one of the most intimate seduction suites to be found this side of Al Green. Mike Milosh’s flawless falsetto vocals, so reminiscent of Sade in their perfectly rounded form, are the gender-bending inverse of Antony Hegarty’s almost confrontational feminism. With passive sighs, Milosh sings not on behalf of a revolutionary eradication of masculinity, but instead contemplating the comforting stasis of Downy-soft domestic bliss. There aren’t many romantic songs that resolve the tensions of heartbreak as convincingly as this, and fewer still get as close to bridging the gap between significant others. Henderson


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5. Phosphorescent, “Song for Zula”

The idea to write a breakup song riffing on Bette Midler’s piano ballad “The Rose” could have resulted in a lame bit of ironic self-indulgence, yet Phosphorescent’s “Song for Zula” updates the former song’s plaintive melody and metaphor-upon-metaphor structure to produce a far bleaker, even sinister rumination on how love sometimes isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Unfolding gradually inside an echo chamber of fiddle arpeggios and drum-n’-bass loops, the song asserts that love is not “a burning thing,” but rather a cage that entraps and displays the lover to be mocked by passersby. Matthew Houck’s tortured yet measured delivery remains tightly coiled for most of the song, imbuing lines like “I could kill you with my bare hands if I was free” with spine-tingling iciness. “Song for Zula” is many things at once: vulnerable and aggressive, individuated and universal—a song about heartbreak that transcends the details of any one relationship. Galvin


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4. Kanye West, “Black Skinhead”

The career-long nervous breakdown for the strangest superstar on Earth continues with this paranoid glam-hop version of “Power,” slinking along like a toe-tapping, finger-snapping cocaine psychosis. Whether narcotics were actually a hands-on collaborator is a matter of conjecture better suited to finger-wagging potentates with better lawyers than ours, but based on the evidence here, Mr. West might want to check his iPod in for an extended stay at Promises. “Black Skinhead” exists in a seamy alternate universe where Bret Eason Ellis, Gary Glitter, and Nine Inch Nails are still the vanguard of cool. It’s big, bombastic, and more than a little ridiculous. It’s also the most defiant, willfully perverse and awe-inducing three minutes to gatecrash the Billboard charts this year. Blue Sullivan

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3. Vampire Weekend, “Diane Young”

Vampire Weekend has never delivered a shot of pure adrenaline like “Diane Young” before, nothing so precision-engineered to drag listeners out of their seats and onto the dance floor, nothing quite so likely to inspire spontaneous bouts of Lindy Hopping. Like Buddy Holly stretched in one of Willy Wonka’s machines, Ezra Koenig squeals and yelps and croons with thrilling elasticity, while Rostam Batmanglij funnels a rockabilly hoedown through Auto-Tune to exhilarating effect. Few songs in 2013 have made me want to go out and torch a Saab like a pile of leaves as much as this one. Collett


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2. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Sacrilege”

In the first verse of “Sacrilege,” Karen O invites an angel into her bed, halo and all, and thus begins a torrid four minutes of a maenadic performance that oscillates between the sacred and profane. Guitarist Nick Zinner makes like a funkier version of the Edge, while the singer herself alternates between Shirley Manson-style sultriness and gutsy, overdriven yawps of despair that feel sampled from 2003’s Fever to Tell. From the slinky intro, sporadic guitar stabs indicate darkness on the horizon, and the song morphs from a ballad to an anthem of sex-as-death-and-resurrection, complete with the chilling vibrato of a choir arrangement on loan from Carl Orff. And we thought “Jesus Walks” was spooky. Scheinman


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1. Lorde, “Royals”

Given its somewhat condescending stance toward the industry that Lorde is currently in the process of conquering, “Royals” manages to avoid holier-than-thou snootiness because of its playful lyrical twists and understated yet infectious two-step, bass-heavy, finger-snapping beat. Although the song asserts that Lorde’s posse remains immune to the seductions of “diamonds in the flesh” and the license to trash hotel rooms, the singer also confesses her desire to “rule” and “live that fantasy” in her own way. She channels the similarly disaffected Lana Del Rey in her straightforward, sanguine delivery, and the four-part harmonic layering over the clause “I’ll rule” suggests that Lorde is equally well-versed in both retro girl groups and self-deprecating satirists. “Royals” exudes a youthful sense of defiance as well as the wisdom of an old soul, hovering suggestively between the poles of innocence and experience that Lorde is just beginning to navigate. Galvin

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