//

The 25 Best Singles of 2017

The resilience of retroism was, this year, tinged with the irony of watching those not knowing the past being doomed to repeat it.

The 25 Best Singles of 2017
Photo: Glassnote Records

The urge to whistle past the graveyard was unavoidable in 2017. No news was good news in a year that plunged every non-deplorable soul deeper and deeper into the abyss of despair with each passing tweet. Lil Uzi Vert’s chilling refrain “All my friends are dead” just about cuts to the feeling we all shared while those more optimistic than us kneeled, praying along with the now dollar sign-shorn Kesha. Well, more accurately, fantasizing about those who ought to be praying when the sowing turns into reaping.

Prayers come cheap, however, when the powerless find themselves with no other weapons on hand other than self-immolation. Father John Misty’s mordantly offered lament for the passing of the torch in a TL;DR era finds him wryly musing: “What he’d give for one more day to rate and analyze the world made in his image as of yet/To realize what a mess to leave behind.” He and the rest of us, Father. Or, as a certain champion of her own debased reputation put it, look what you made us do.

Even the resilience of retroism was, this year, tinged with the irony of watching those not knowing the past being doomed to repeat it. But in a grasping-at-straws moment, grim reality checks, bubblicious-pop contraptions, stripped-down folk-soul, and, yes, Old Music 2.0 seemed to coexist on a playlist sending signals of life from the Upside Down, or at least one designed to help us feel some type of way. So even though, as our list of the year’s top singles reveals, we more often than not had to travel all the way to Japan and England to satisfy our memories of hip-thrusting better days that we may never see return, the pleasure of the perfect three- or four-minute escape will never be quashed. Though we’re at the point where even Katy Perry knows we’re all metaphorically in chains. Eric Henderson


YouTube video

25. Hercules and Love Affair, “Rejoice”

The connection between gay dance music and African-American gospel goes back a long way, to the disco era and beyond. It’s a connection that clearly isn’t lost on Andy Butler, the DJ behind American-Belgian house project Hercules and Love Affair. With “Rejoice,” Butler recasts the dance floor as a sweaty, secular alternative church, offering salvation not in the spiritual afterlife, but in a life lived “with joy.” Like any good gospel song, it’s propulsive and transportive, as guest vocalist Rouge Mary howls out her testimony with a ragged, punkish edge: “Rejoice from this very day/Rejoice, don’t let life pass you by.” Butler, meanwhile, turns up the distortion on the bassline for an almost industrial undertone. “Rejoice” won’t sound radically new to anyone who’s listened to house music before, but then, that’s the point: Like any ritual, songs of praise find power in familiarity, and “Rejoice” is nothing if not powerful. Zachary Hoskins


YouTube video

24. SZA, “Drew Barrymore”

A not-quite-love song attuned to the everyday rhythms of attraction rather than its soaring dramatic glories, “Drew Barrymore” reflects the unsteady tenor of modern relationships, in which statuses are often up in the air. Befitting this approach, the track uses a low-stakes scenario as the impetus to explore feelings of abandonment, loss, and diminished self-worth. “Why’s it so hard to accept the party is over?” SZA intones in her signature clipped-but-precise delivery. Detailing a casual group hangout in which an old flame makes an appearance, “Drew Barrymore” functions as a survey of wreckage, both personal and cultural. Accompanied by a plaintive underwater guitar strum, the narrator undergoes a crisis of confidence that swells into a listing of personal failings, a piercing note of nostalgia bringing up sorrow and regret. Rather than build to any concrete resolution, the song instead hands things over to the warm burble of a circular, self-validating chorus, just another bout of feelings subsumed in the hazy afterglow of a routine night out. Jesse Cataldo

Advertisement


YouTube video

23. Mondo Grosso, “ラビリンス” (“Labyrinth”)

The party’s over, but at least a few people are still dancing like there’s no tomorrow. (Conveniently so.) Back in 1993, Mondo Grosso’s acid-jazz-lite “Mondo Grosso” was transformed by Masters at Work into a four-on-the-floor house masterpiece, an immaculately produced tribute to the power of piano, bass, and kick drums. Mondo Grosso’s Shinichi Osawa has evidently taken MAW’s attention to detail to heart, because the sunny geniality of his new deep house cut “Labyrinth” fosters an immaculately classy high. Nothing feels remotely out of balance amid the tune’s fluffy little clouds, from the delicacy of Hikari Mitsushima’s vocals to the toy-train chug of its rhythm track. And if it all feels maybe a touch too ephemeral to stand the test of time, in this specific moment and in direct comparison to the spikiness of Japanese future funk, it sounds exactly like utopia. Henderson


YouTube video

22. Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit, “If We Were Vampires”

Jason Isbell is a man of versatile talents, having seamlessly evolved from a hell-raising guitar slinger in Drive-By Truckers into a tender-hearted messiah for latte-sipping NPR listeners. But as “If We Were Vampires” once again proves, by far his most prodigious gift—one virtually unequaled by either his peers or predecessors—is for writing moving love songs that truly capture what it means to devote oneself to a life partnership without ever succumbing to cliché. Given the sheer volume of love songs that exist, this seems impossible, but “If We Were Vampires,” like “Flagship” and “Cover Me Up” before it, is as quiet and pretty as it is emotionally devastating. Isbell’s gentle finger-picking provides a hymn-like atmosphere as he admits a thought that most of us try to push to the backs of our minds as quickly as possible: “Maybe we’ll get 40 years together/But one day I’ll be gone/Or one day you’ll be gone.” At times, the idea sounds like too much for Isbell to bear, his voice cracking as he delivers the song’s most heartbreaking line: “And give you every second I can find/And hope it isn’t me who’s left behind.” Jeremy Winograd


YouTube video

21. Hurray for the Riff Raff, “Living in the City”

“Living in the City” is a folk rock song about, well, living in the city, and with that in mind, the touchstones that Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Alynda Lee Segarra drew on to compose it are very evident. You can hear the ghost of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground in the scratchy lead guitar and the way Segarra’s vocals come tumbling out of her mouth in a conversational sneer. And you can hear early Bruce Springsteen in her gritty lyrics about streetwise, idealistic city kids with dumb nicknames like “Big Danny” and “Gypsy.” Segarra’s challenge wasn’t merely following in the footsteps of such titans. As the first full song on the concept album The Navigator, “Living in the City” needed to establish an entire world: a setting, its inhabitants, their lives. She succeeded completely in that, capturing the drugs, the leering men, the revelers that populate “Fourteen floors a’birthin/And 14 floors a’dying” (a reference to the apartment building where Segarra grew up in the Bronx). It’s because of this that, ultimately, only Segarra could have written this song. Winograd


YouTube video

20. Taylor Swift, “Look What You Made Me Do”

The similarly themed “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” whose bouncy pop beat and comical overtones recall those of past hits like “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and “Shake It Off,” might have made a safer choice to introduce the world to the New Taylor than “Look What You Made Me Do.” Which is exactly why this droll single—with its deceptively lush strings, pulsing hip-hop beat, and Right Said Fred-aping non-hook—will likely go down in pop history as Swift’s first bona fide misstep. It’s also what makes the track the boldest and, quite frankly, most authentic thing she’s released to date. Sal Cinquemani

Advertisement


YouTube video

19. Birds of Chicago, “American Flowers”

It was a strange year in America, without much respite from the daily onslaught of outrage-enducing breaking news. Birds of Chicago, a prodigiously soulful husband-wife folk duo, offered “American Flowers” as a blossom of resilience, an invitation to hope for better days to come. The song looks forward by looking backward: Over pristinely finger-plucked verses—featuring some acoustic guitar assistance from the Milk Carton Kids’s Kenneth Pattengale—singer J.T. Nero shares vignettes of mundane excellence, everyday grace; the climactic one finds him driving, John Prine on the radio, the golden dome of a mosque entering his field of vision. The juxtaposition suggests everything weird and wonderful about American life. He’s joined by Allison Russell on the chorus, a gentle kick in the ass for anyone despairing that this might be the end: “Do not fear the winter blowing/In the hearts of men/I have seen American flowers/They will bloom again.” They perform it at the volume of a whisper, but it makes you want to shout. Josh Hurst


YouTube video

18. Father John Misty, “Ballad of the Dying Man”

Among the many portentous treatises on societal plagues that appear on Josh Tillman’s third album as Father John Misty, Pure Comedy, “Ballad of the Dying Man” is a tonal outlier. It seems pretty flippant, verging on a novelty song about a pompous social media crusader who spends his final moments on Earth lamenting “all of the pretentious, ignorant voices that will go unchecked” without him around. But as a lyricist, Tillman is at his best when he’s feeling mischievous and glib, and “Ballad of the Dying Man” features some of his wittiest one-liners: “The homophobes, hipsters, and 1%/The false feminists he’d managed to detect/Oh, who will critique them once he’s left?” But for all of Tillman’s chuckle-worthy quips, he still manages to make a resonant point about how fleeting and disposable the Dying Man’s modern methods of communication are. “And it occurs to him a little late in the game/We leave as clueless as we came,” he observes. When he switches to his super-suave falsetto on the choruses, Tillman sounds genuinely chagrined about the poor guy’s fate. Winograd


YouTube video

17. HAIM, “Little of Your Love”

HAIM’s Something to Tell You sounds less like a proper studio collection and more like a greatest-hits anthology, so perfectly sculpted is each and every track. In an alternate universe, any of the album’s songs could have been massive radio hits, with “Little of Your Love” the first among equals. The chorus is effervescent, instantly memorable—as if the band tried cramming as much explosive joy into it as they could. And the devil, as always, is in the details, and beneath its pristine pop sheen, the song boasts some weird sonic effects. It opens with an odd, garbled vocal—“Give me just a little of your love!”—and booms with programmed drums that could have been taken out of an old Prince song. For all these studio flourishes, though, HAIM never sounds like anything but a working, touring band: The sisterly harmonies make the song sound sweet, but it’s the savage electric guitar solo that gives it its sting. Hurst


YouTube video

16. Cardi B, “Bodak Yellow”

Cardi B’s underdog story is a feel-good one, as the vivacious, Bronx-bred stripper turned Instagram celebrity turned Love & Hip Hop cast member improbably delivered on her ambitions as a rapper and ended up riding the wave all the way to the top of the Hot 100 with “Bodak Yellow.” Her outsized personality is the engine for her success. That and her knack for making lines that stick: “These expensive, these is red bottoms/These is bloody shoes.” As always with viral successes, it remains an open question whether this particular bolt of lightning can strike twice, but in 2017, at least, Cardi B was the boss and we were all just worker bitches. Hoskins

Advertisement


YouTube video

15. Rodney Crowell, “It Ain’t Over Yet”

An award-winning memoirist, Rodney Crowell knows full well the implicit power of autobiography—and he’s never wielded it more compellingly than on “It Aint’s Over Yet,” the standout single from his based-on-a-true-story collection Close Ties. His verses feel like pure confession: He bemoans his “rickety old legs and watery eyes” over a spunky, ramshackle beat. He admits that his mind is a mess. He looks back over a long and varied career and wonders where it all went. He sees his relevance slipping away—but just in the nick of time, John Paul White swoops in with the defiant chorus: “I don’t care what you think you heard/You’re still learning how to fly.” The ultimate grace note is when Crowell reflects on the woman who tried to save him and whom he pushed away—only to have his ex-wife, Rosanne Cash, appear for a wise, supportive verse of her own. The song ends with the light dawning and a realization that maybe the glory days don’t have to be over. Hurst


YouTube video

14. Lil Uzi Vert, “XO Tour Llif3”

In which the punchline-first title of one of those children’s books of the “Go the Fuck to Sleep” breed is milked for every last ounce of post-millennial malaise that it’s worth. That rare post-apocalyptic dank-fest that eschews maximalism in favor of the sonic approximation of what’s left when there’s genuinely nothing left, “XO Tour Llif3” is no prank. When Lil Uzi Vert’s vocals climb to the higher register, and both his psyche and producer TM88’s drone plummet to the lowest subbasement, words just start falling apart in his cheek, and you’d almost feel embarrassed to be listening were we not all collectively, like him, being pushed to the edge. When was the last time something this despondent reached the highest reaches of the Billboard Hot 100? Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally)”? Henderson


YouTube video

13. Future, “mask off”

As much a meme as it is a single, “Mask Off” inspired a social media trend challenging fans to perform their own renditions of the earworm flute hook. But the song would have been a jam even without the internet’s help, just for producer Metro Boomin’s inspired pairing of that hook—sampled from an obscure recording of “Prison Song” from Selma: The Musical—with a standard trap beat. And if Future’s lyrics don’t stray far from his usual preoccupations with paper-chasing and prescription drug abuse, there’s an undeniable power in the sheer staccato economy with which he spits them out. “Mask on, fuck it, mask off” is a line for the ages, and until Future and young Metro bless us with their next banger, this is the cream of the crop. Hoskins


YouTube video

12. Craig Finn, “God in Chicago”

If Hold Steady songs are awash in the euphoric glow of long nights filled with killer parties, Craig Finn’s solo work is bathed in the sobering, regretful light of the morning after. “God in Chicago” is Finn’s masterwork in this often bleak slice-of-life style. In what is essentially a short story told almost entirely in spoken word over tolling piano chords, Finn squeezes a screenplay’s worth of character detail into four and a half minutes as he recounts a friend’s death leading to a mundane drug deal and ultimately a starry-eyed tryst in the titular city with the deceased’s sister. There’s a ton to unpack, and even more left intriguingly unsaid. But what sets “God in Chicago” apart among Finn’s considerable backlog of stories about partiers, deadbeats, and weirdos is the sheer breadth of the emotional journey it takes its characters on. We get the awkward beauty of an unexpected night on the town and its almost spiritual significance—“I felt God in the buildings”—followed by a heartbreaking return to reality. Winograd

Advertisement


YouTube video

11. Katy” perry, “chained to the rhythm”

The lead single from Katy Perry’s first album in four years is a strikingly subtle piece of Caribbean-inflected protest pop. The breezy track isn’t just a slow burner, but its message—that we’re all living in bubbles, “happily numb”—is also decidedly bipartisan. Whether the song, co-written by Sia and produced by longtime Perry collaborator Max Martin, is an endorsement of self-care or a critique of escapism in times of political upheaval is up for interpretation. What is certain is that a track with a hook that implores listeners to “Come on, turn it up/Keep it on repeat” had better deliver the goods, and this one most definitely does. Cinquemani


YouTube video

10. Luke James, “Drip”

With a falsetto vocal that goes from aching to ecstatic and a wah-wah guitar lead that channels vintage Ernie Isley, New Orleans singer-songwriter Luke James’s “Drip,” the first single from his forthcoming sophomore effort, sounds like it could have fallen out of heaven, or at least the early 1970s. The only real clue to its 2017 origins are the lyrics, which don’t even try to pretend that the title isn’t about what you think it’s about. In a year when contemporary R&B at large was blander and more samey-sounding than ever, “Drip” was a breath of Afro-Sheen-scented fresh air. If every neo-neo-soul track can be this good, then sign us up for the revival of the revival. Hoskins


YouTube video

9. Kelela, “LMK”

Kicking off in the club and resolving in the gauzy ether of a potential meaningless hookup, Kelela’s “LMK” sounds both ominous and alluring, an aloof seduction condensed to three and a half minutes. In its delivery, the singer turns the standard come-hither suggestiveness of so much female-fronted pop on its head, abandoning intimations of virginal purity or masculine power transfer for cold transactional consumption, all cards immediately laid out on the table. By removing desire entirely from the equation, she reduces the procedural essence of the mating ritual to its barest elements, within a track that pulls off a similar musical process, stripped down to Jam City’s slim ambient production and the singer’s silky, expressive voice. Slinky and soothing despite its aggressive tone, blending plainspoken confidence with low-key virtuosity, “LMK” represents the finest qualities of Kelela’s sumptuous debut, concentrated into a sui generis amendment of pop sexual politics. Cataldo


YouTube video

8. Kendrick Lamar, “Humble”

Kendrick Lamar’s slim, curated catalogue has been defined by precision and control, complex rhymes unspooling over jazz fusion-inspired beats, always entertaining a slight suggestion of menace. On “Humble,” that equation gets flipped, which is fitting for the lead single off an album in which rougher songs surround introspective wordplay with short-fused intensity. Here in particular the menace appears front and center, Lamar’s growl rumbling over the rudimentary minor-chord piano stomp of Mike Will Made It’s crudely effective production, laced with scratchy electric guitar and trilling electronic pulses. Breaking up dense lyrical torrents with a repetitive, hectoring chorus, the track’s confrontational approach is complicated by the fact that, as with much of Lamar’s material, he’s talking just as much about himself as any imagined, nameless foes. By finding personal reflections in these shadowy hater figures, Lamar both complicates the message and sharpens the barb. Cataldo

Advertisement


YouTube video

7. Sheer Mag, “Need to Feel Your Love”

With no more new-wave swag than it needs, and no more direct lyrical context either, Sheer Mag’s “Need to Feel Your Love” is an omnivorous pop play in the finest sense. With delicately twangy, heavily flanged guitars and lead vocalist Tina Halladay’s snarling, distorted vocals always on the verge of tearing through the song’s midtempo groove like a sai through wet tissue paper, it’s an emotional contradiction. In true state-of-emergency style, the air gets awfully thin “thinking ‘bout times that we had, the good times and the bad.” If ever there was a moment for a wistful but adamant call for do-over to erase the juvenile mistakes of the recent past, this is it, and the truce between rock and disco that forms the soaring backbone of “Need to Feel Your Love” suggests the thrill of retroactive resolution. Henderson


YouTube video

6. St. Vincent, “Los Ageless”

It’s possible that there’s never been a St. Vincent song as propulsive as “Los Ageless,” which grooves to a gleaming stainless-steel beat, Annie Clark’s electric guitar purring on top. It’s a pop song so perfect—so sleek and so addictive in its new-wave pulse—that it only makes sense that Jack Antonoff served as producer. He brings a formal control to the track, but it never blocks out the roiling desire buried just below the surface. A multi-tracked vocal refrain comes in after each slinky verse, playing the role of the Greek chorus: “How could anybody have you and lose you/And not lose their minds too?” The singer is torn apart by longing and loss—and on the song’s bridge, both she and the song lose their composure altogether, that perfect gleaming surface breaking up into pops and static. “I’m a monster!” Clark wails—but it’s just a moment before she’s got everything locked under perfect pop control once more. Hurst


YouTube video

5. Kendrick Lamar, “DNA”

The swaggering anthem of self-reliance has long been a calling card of rap, so it’s no great surprise that on Damn—an album that finds Kendrick Lamar reconnecting with the lean, classicist spirit of 1990s hip-hop—he offers his own onslaught of self-confidence. Nothing’s ever quite what it seems with Kendrick, though, and “DNA” manages to be both an utterly braggadocios track as well as a ruthless self-interrogation. He’s not too proud to call out the “sucker shit” in rival rappers, but it’s only after he fesses up to the mark of original sin on his own troublesome heart: “I got dark, I got evil, that rot inside my DNA.” He’s at the top of the heap but never too confident of what his hands have wrought. As ever, Kendrick Lamar contains multitudes. Hurst


YouTube video

4. Carly Rae Jepsen, “Cut to the Feeling”

Carly Rae Jepsen’s best single since “Call Me Maybe” was almost never released. Reportedly one of over 250 songs written for 2015’s Emotion, “Cut to the Feeling” was inexplicably left off that album—as well last year’s Emotion: Side B—because it was reportedly deemed too “theatrical.” (The track finally saw the light of day via the soundtrack to the animated film Leap!) Produced by Sir Nolan, “Cut to the Feeling” begins with what sounds like a sample of the opening synth strains of Madonna’s “Lucky Star,” after which Jepsen delivers breathless, syncopated vocals over a measured handclap beat before the whole thing erupts into a euphoric hook. And that’s just the first 30 seconds. Jepsen’s voice breaks in her ecstatic admission that “I’ve been denying how I feel,” and she dons an almost British affectation during the bridge when she sings, “Show me devotion/And take me all the way,” atop some “Edge of Seventeen”-style guitar riffing. Cinquemani

Advertisement


YouTube video

3. Thundercat, “Show You the Way”

As forward-thinking as Kendrick Lamar remains, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that nearly every one of his most cunning collaborators, from the sound of it, are more conversant with the legacies of, say, Jaco Pastorius, Al Jarreau, David Sanborn, the Mizell Brothers, and those patron saints of egghead craft, Steely Dan. Thundercat, the Brainfeeder bass impresario whose affinity for the cushier contours of vintage jazz-funk fusion has spiked tracks as frenetic as Flying Lotus’s “Never Catch Me” and as chill as his own lumbering heartbreak anthem “Them Changes,” doesn’t mince notes with “Show You the Way.” No, here he invites two of the whitest paragons of blue-eyed soul, Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald, to kumbaya all over “Yah Mo B There.” The Fender Rhodes on this croon choon is drizzled with enough subtlety to choke a horse, all while Thundercat’s swarthy guests harmonize like a car-trunk CD changer playing all six discs simultaneously. “Show You the Way” is flatly the Justice League of neo-dad rock. Henderson


YouTube video

2. Lorde, “Green Light”

Lorde’s music has never exactly been subtle, and her transition from moody teen chanteuse to assured adult singer-songwriter has managed to preserve her work’s provocative mix of obviousness and honesty. Bolstered by a brash use of theatrical maximalism, with a blowout hook laid over a pounding 4/4 beat, “Green Light” fully sells material that in lesser hands might land as cheap schlock. Operating off a mixed metaphor, replete with handclaps and all other manner of gaudy window dressing, the song parallels the manic insistence of its narrator, charging through the early stages of a breakup while refusing to shed her fondness for the caddish object of her affection. As an album opener, it announces that things will be different from Lorde’s comparatively spare debut, while also assuring that her distinctive voice and yearning, youthful urgency remain fixed in place. Cataldo


YouTube video

1. Childish Gambino, “Redbone”

The feather in the cap of rap caviar wokeness, hyper-hyphenate Donald Glover’s side project took center stage with “Redbone,” not only on college and college-derivative radio stations, but within something like the counter-cultural resistance’s central consciousness. The song, a creepin’ tribute to the pre-quiet-storm R&B characterized by the Delfonics and the Floaters, as well as an implicit remake of Bootsy Collins’s P-Funk ballad “I’d Rather Be with You,” lingered on the fringes of chart success until after its prominent position in the exposition of Get Out. Just as Jordan Peele’s film tapped into America’s racial zeitgeist with a remarkably sermon-free fury, “Redbone” itself playfully dissects the tensions and paranoia of sleeping with the ally who, as it turns out, is also the enemy. And throughout, writer-producer Ludwig Göransson’s Thundercat-worthy popping bassline and Glover’s own insistent glockenspiel diddling strike the appropriate mocking tone. Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple memorably cued up Timmy Thomas’s spare “Why Can’t We Live Together” to accompany images of the carefree children who would soon meet their end, and someday, “Redbone” will serve a similar function for a documentary explanation for our current nightmare. Henderson

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.