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The 25 Best Singles of 2011

This was the year everyone seemed to agree that Gaga chose the wrong singles from her album.

The 25 Best Singles of 2011
Photo: Interscope

All of the writers who contributed to this list declined my invitation to write an introduction for the piece. I chalk it up to, perhaps, the lack of an obvious angle. There are admittedly few trends or takeaways to be discovered in our list—at least at first glance. A fetish for the past might have been a good thematic point of reference: Adele and Lana Del Rey peddled a brand of vintage that seemed surprisingly fresh; the pop divas (Lady Gaga, Robyn, Beth Ditto, Beyoncé, Patrick Wolf) all lovingly and non-ironically paid homage to the decade in which most of them were born; even the ’90s got a nod thanks to EMA’s “California.” And notably, a holdover from last year, officially released as a single in January, emerged as our favorite with points to spare. But aside from our top pick, there was a surprising lack of consensus in the rankings. Adele’s ubiquitous “Rolling in the Deep” got the broadest support from the Slant staff, but few were enthusiastic enough about it to propel it above two provocative but highly respected rappers’ big singles. This was the year everyone seemed to agree that Gaga chose the wrong singles from her album, and yet they all made at least one appearance across our individual lists. So maybe that’s the best angle to take when looking at the figurative and literal hits of 2011. From hip-hop to K-pop, the year’s best singles were an eclectic bunch. Even the King of Pop made an appearance. Sal Cinquemani


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25. Battles featuring Matias Aguayo, “Ice Cream”

Battles have already proven that they’re able to turn their muscular brand of math rock into a catchy single, but “Ice Cream” makes that move even more deliberate than “Atlas” did. Here, Battles selectively and effectively edit themselves, confining their proggy impulses to the song’s pick-up-the-pace intro and its phase-shifted, bass-dropping outro. What happens in the interim is straight-up pop—a beefy melodic hook and Matias Aguayo’s looped vocal tics building to an exuberant climax that, like its title suggests, is sticky, sweet, and perfect for summer. Jonathan Keefe


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24. Beyoncé, “Love on Top”

With merely respectable sales and a paltry two Grammy nominations (when, just last year, she was bestowed a second nomination for the same track she’d been nominated for a year earlier), Beyoncé’s 4 has languished long enough that it’s no doubt going to emerge someday as her great, underappreciated masterpiece, her Fulfillingness’ First Finale. Even if it doesn’t, somewhere between the disc’s copious ballads and its few, hyperventilating dance tracks, Beyoncé strikes a perfect balance with this breezy midtempo tribute to the 1980s (even though she can’t resist throwing in about 17 key changes). The video’s NKOTB choreography puts the icing on top. Eric Henderson


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23. St. Vincent, “Cruel”

Annie Clark became more than just a critical darling this year; she also bloomed into a full-on axe goddess, as so ably demonstrated on Strange Mercy and, in particular, the barbed guitar hooks of “Cruel” Keeping in line with the increasingly bizarre progression of its accompanying Wes Anderson-like video, the track starts out flowery and beguiling, but leaps rather quickly into some of the crunchiest dynamics ever recorded. By the time “Cruel” reaches its climax, the song’s cyclic beats are overwhelmed by a raspy, brassy dissonance far more celebratory than its harshness suggests. As Clark’s laments are flooded with jagged distortion and the dueling tones of “Cruel” come crashing together in one noisy, glorious conclusion, listeners are reminded once again why the heaps of critical praise are so well-earned. Kevin Liedel


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22. Patrick Wolf, “The City”

Though the song is awash in cool, synth-y undertones and pitched-down backing vocals, the bright, shiny piano, horn arrangement, and unabashed major key of Patrick Wolf’s “The City” at first make it seem like a retread of “The Magic Position” from a few years back. If that single was an ecstatic, awe-induced celebration of newfound love, though, “The City” finds Wolf jubilantly defiant: “Won’t let the city destroy our love,” he declares during the chorus. And about those “debts you made, the car we never had, the house we never owned,” he offers, “Darling, don’t look so sad” The perfect boyfriend for love in the time of economic collapse. Cinquemani

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21. 2NE1, “I Am the Best”

One of 2011’s best developments was that the Western world finally discovered the unmitigated joy of K-pop. Even within a music scene characterized by its fearless appropriation of pop, hip-hop, and dance styles, 2NE1’s “I Am the Best” is a jaw-dropping, vibrant triumph of pure swagger and verve. Really, who’s going to argue with logic like “Even if you were me/You’d be envious of this body” or stand in the crosshairs for 2NE1’s machine-gun “rah-tah-tah” hook? It ain’t bragging if it’s true, and 2NE1’s “I Am the Best” makes its case airtight. Keefe


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20. Frank Ocean, “Novacane”

Odd Future’s elder statesman and resident crooner was also the group’s biggest surprise this year, the only member to release something resembling a cohesive, sustained album. Nostalgia/Ultra may only be a mixtape, but “Novocane,” its undeniable highlight, felt like a lead single, a status proven by its release as such from the Def Jam-issued Nostalgia/Lite EP. An icy track that mixes insistent melancholy with dentistry metaphors, settling in a zone of strangely remote numbness, the song helped establish Ocean as a corollary to the similarly deconstructionist the Weeknd, helping push R&B in a bizarre new direction. Jesse Cataldo


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19. Girls, “Vomit”

Girls’ consummate craftsmanship—in songwriting, recording, and production—makes them nearly anachronistic among contemporary rock acts, and “Vomit” is a prodigious vindication of their approach. Structured like “Stairway to Heaven,” but sounding—thanks to its harmonies, wailing organs, and blown-out guitar leads—like the most epic song the Rolling Stones didn’t write in 1969, “Vomit” gathers and expels force like a storm while Christopher Owens bids the listener “come into my heart” There isn’t a misstep in over six minutes, but the touch that really makes the song is the backup singer’s total commitment: the best gospel-siren show-stealer since Merry Clayton on “Gimme Shelter” Matthew Cole


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18. Lykke Li, “I Follow Rivers”

This song of gorgeous, at once fevered and languorous, simplicity suggests a rebuke to the cringe-inducing metaphor of Madonna’s similarly themed “Swim” Of course, where Madonna must take to water for the escape and renewal she thirsts, Lykke Li already inhabits our world’s rivers and oceans, very much one with the thing she desires. Floating atop tribal-infused beats that sound as if they’re resonating from deep within the ocean one moment, the furthest reaches of space the next, the song’s sentiments may sound almost jejune, but the singer’s gift for shorthand is such that what at first sounds like a description of place becomes a term of endearment. Ed Gonzalez

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17. SBTRKT featuring Yukimi Nagano, “Wildfire”

It’s appropriate that Little Dragon’s Yukimi Nagano lends her slinky, flirtatious voice to the seductive dubstep-meets-soul odyssey that is “Wildfire” The track is nothing less than a slow-paced come-on, delivering SBTRKT’s delicious brand of funk with oscillating basslines, sauntering beats, and the wobbly vibration of some incredibly drenched synths. True to the track’s porno soundscape, instrumentation smacks together like wet limbs in a steamy shower, all while Nagano’s observations grow more and more orgasmic. “You’re like a wildfire,” she coolly gasps on the wailing chorus, “You got me rising high” If SBTRKT’s throbbing, sultry aesthetic truly is the future of electronic music, then pull your hot pants on and up, it’s going to be a very sexy ride. Liedel


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16. Britney Spears, “Till the World Ends”

A Britney Spears triumph is as rare as a total solar eclipse, which may as well be the backdrop for “Till the World Ends” Co-written by Fredric Jameson friend and connoisseur Ke$ha, this highlight from Femme Fatale is, yes, just another celebration of kickin’ it on the dance floor, but something happens on the gorgeous bridge just after Britney unleashes her second torrent of ecstatic whoah-oh-oh’s: Are these really party-happening people dancing until dawn or survivors of an apocalypse? When those whoah-oh-oh’s land, they do so with the force of a nuclear bomb, and Britney and her posse, like zombies, rise from an amazingly muffled void to assert their will to dance again. This song eats my brains. Gonzalez


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15. EMA, “California”

Against a backdrop of scraping industrial noise that sounds simultaneously lush and desolate, like Phil Spector for a post-nuclear age, Erika M. Anderson delivers a scathing mixture of sermon and autobiography. Its proximity is intense and uncomfortable: The song is close-up shot of Anderson picking scabs, offering refracted ruminations on her upbringing and her sexuality in a litany of proper names and strange allusions that are not always decipherable but are nonetheless crushingly dense with meaning. One moment she’s desperate to be understood (“Wasted away alone on the planes/What’s it like to be small town and gay?”), the next she’s resigned (“Fuck it, baby, I know you’ll never change”). Cole


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14. Lana Del Rey, “Blue Jeans”

In Rebel Without a Cause, when Jim looks at Judy’s house and asks if she lives there, she replies with one of the film’s greatest lines: “Who lives?” Her coyness, her sad, very-teenage sense of not-being, seems shared by Lana Del Rey, née Elizabeth Grant, aficionado of all things old, from cars to Hollywood starlets. “Blue Jeans” is, on the surface, just another love song, of a girl pleading, hoping for her man to stay, and yet this living, breathing anachronism’s vampy, sometimes weary, voice gives all her pining an eerie sense of timelessness, trailing away into a haunting oblivion during the song’s immaculate chorus. Though Del Rey may sing of gangsters and bitches throughout, you feel as if her song was written a million years ago before such labels existed. Gonzalez

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13. Florence and the Machine, “Shake It Out”

If lyrics about freedom, overcoming regrets that have been collected “like old friends here to relive your darkest moments,” and the simple truth that it’s hard to dance with a devil on your back doesn’t move you, then perhaps the final 60 seconds of “Shake It Out” will, which forsakes language altogether and builds to a cacophony of bone-rattling organ, tribal percussion, and intersecting vocal parts that find Florence Welch finally succumbing to her demons and having drinks in the dark at the end of the road with the rest of us. Cinquemani


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12. Gotye featuring Kimbra, “Somebody That I Used to Know”

Basically a retelling of Dizzee Rascal’s landmark “I Luv U” for the indie-pop set, Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” captures the peculiar give-and-take between someone who views himself as a nice, sensitive guy who has been repeatedly slighted in the aftermath of a breakup and his ex (given powerful voice by Kimbra) who isn’t about to let him off the hook so easily or delude himself so thoroughly. What makes the single so structurally brilliant is its use of dynamics (that final chorus is a full-on bloodletting) to reflect its narrative’s he-said/she-said drama, turning a thesis on contemporary gender politics into a captivating, leftfield pop hit. Keefe


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11. Das Racist, “Michael Jackson”

Despite the banger status and simplistic bluster of this maximalist track, Das Racist’s recent appearance on Conan showed where their head is really at: screwing with everyone else’s. The group had flirted with bluster and excess before this year’s full-length debut, across two similarly themed mixtapes, but nothing was quite up to the tenor of “Michael Jackson,” a forcefully dumb statement that works on several levels at once: as a mindless party track, an impossibly dense referential catalogue, and a snide comment on standard hip-hop mores. Cataldo


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10. Azealia Banks featuring Lazy Jay, “212”

“I been that bitch since the Pamper,” Ms. Banks snaps, and then I can’t really repeat most of the rest of what follows. I’d pity the target(s), but Azealia Banks spits some of the most witheringly funny diss-topian wordplay in recent memory that it would be an honor to be in her crosshairs. (Why yes, Azealia, that is what’s caught up in my doo-rag too.) Skittering syllables like paradiddles over a Jaxxian groove from Lazy Jay’s “Float My Boat,” the chick who’d dare dismiss Nicki Minaj as a hipster-kowtowing Lil’ Kim floats like a new Queen Bee, leaving no orifice unturned in what has to be considered the most unforgettable debutante debut of the season. Henderson

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9. Beth Ditto, “I Wrote the Book”

Simple semantics kept Gossip siren Beth Ditto’s EP off our list of the best albums of the year. Good thing she saw fit to release one of its four equally fantastic tracks as an official single, the sleazy-sounding but pure-hearted “I Wrote the Book” Ditto uses her lilting voice as a red herring, tricking her second-person account out with the same sort of psycho-sexual omniscience that, in EP’s me-or-her anthem “Do You Need Someone,” is an albatross around her lovelorn neck. Only here she lulls her dallying intended into a false sense of security before patronizingly reminding, “I see right through you” And that’s what really kills me. Henderson


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8. Lady Gaga, “The Edge of Glory”

It’s a long and synth overdrive-overloaded road to get there, but Lady Gaga’s expansive, go-for-broke Born This Way ends on a note of ’80s power pop that unifies a huge album’s every last conquistador concern, and wraps it up in a bow of saxophone blastula. A complete inversion of its LP-capping partner “Yoü and I,” which turns a simple tune into country-fried fireworks, “The Edge of Glory” is a study in radical contrast that, once you sift aside its deliberately dated effects and the legacy of the late Clarence Clemons, is deep down an incredibly delicate ballad. Yes, everyone expects Gaga to make her confessions on the dance floor, but who knew she could make her shouts whisper? Henderson


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7. Fleet Foxes, “Helplessness Blues”

There are a whole lot of ways to like a song, but “Helplessness Blues” struck me in a way that only two or three other songs ever have, nearly bypassing my whole sense of having an opinion about it and confronting me with the recognition that the song was true. When I try to reflect about where I’m at right now in the ongoing attenuation between my ambitions and my real prospects, I can see the push and pull of the forces that Robin Pecknold so lyrically evokes. The gorgeous harmonies are what put the equivocal song decisively on the side of hope as Fleet Foxes offer comfort and perspective to anyone torn between their sense of purpose and their fear of failure. Cole


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6. Robyn, “Call Your Girlfriend”

“Call Your Girlfriend” certainly isn’t the first song to be sung from the homewrecker’s point of view, but Robyn’s character ends up being unlike any other woman in pop. Always hyper-attuned to emotional detail, she focuses on the neglected side of the love triangle that connects the one who gets left with the one for whom they’re left. Robyn’s not naïve enough to think that no one will get hurt, but in the interest of minimizing harm, she walks her suitor through his breakup, navigating him past some of the avoidable land mines with a sensitivity that suggests she’s seen them detonate before. “Don’t you tell her that I give you something that you never even knew you missed,” she warns. “And then you let her down easy” Cole

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5. Lady Gaga, “Born This Way”

Few singles have ever been as hotly anticipated as “Born This Way,” and in that sense, the song may have become a victim of its own excess. Though it was unleashed last February to stunningly fast digital sales, it was also welcomed with an unmistakable undercurrent of critical disappointment. Yes, it borrows liberally from Madge’s Shep Pettibone-era blueprint. Yes, it’s lyrically beyond presumptuous for Gaga to be speaking on our behalf. Yes, it’s as subtle as a hot-pink dildo affixed to a chainsaw. It’s still an unmistakable landmark pop-cultural moment, a post-irony, post-metaphor, pansexual celebration, aimed squarely at the audience that probably needs it the most. Simple, elegant, better. “Born This Way” doesn’t just make a lot of noise. It is a lot of noise. And hell no, it won’t go. Henderson


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4. Lana Del Rey, “Video Games”

Lana Del Rey’s wistful, blasé voice casts “Video Games” through all kinds of conflicting prisms. Is her beau an insensitive, manhandling misogynist or an adorable rogue? She might be dazzled by his love, but it’s entirely possible that she’s just exasperated over his half-assed attempts at romance. The line “This is my idea of fun” is either a sincere, starry-eyed revelation or an unimpressed, sarcastic invective. With Del Rey’s delivery and the grandly tragic and triumphant turns the song takes, these riddles hang in the air over the ’60s-tinged “Video Games” like a cloud of Pall Mall smoke. The song has since come to represent Del Rey’s own persona: a fascinating contrast of styles and ideas that’s easy to both dismiss and worship, hate and love. Whether Del Rey is a bad girl with a good girl’s heart or vice versa, “Video Games” distills her contradictory nature into five minutes of immaculate indie-pop bliss. Liedel


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3. Adele, “Rolling in the Deep”

We’re all thinking it: Thank goodness Adele got dumped. Without her dysfunctional breakup, the world wouldn’t have 21, which, in turn, would have robbed us of “Rolling in the Deep,” a fiery, almost sermonic soul-pop missive promising doom, pain, and woe on its unfortunate target. “Unfortunate,” of course, because listeners can’t help but feel sorry for the guy after hearing the kind of damning rage Adele levels at him, using the full force of her cosmic voice and the song’s fierce gospel to pound at his guilty conscience. Even the track’s unrelenting foot stomps sound as though they’re being aimed squarely at her victim’s noncommittal ass. Which is why “Rolling in the Deep” is such a good pop song: Far from a passive lament on the barbs of love, it’s a weapon Adele uses with deadly precision to display virtuoso control over both her ex-lover and her craft. Liedel


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2. Tyler, the Creator, “Yonkers”

Tyler, the Creator’s second album, Goblin, functions as a microcosm of the entire Odd Future explosion that played out early this year: a distended, confused mess with glimmers of surprising brilliance. Its high point is “Yonkers,” a masterfully alluring lead single that distills all the latent menace and charm of the group’s high-socked ringleader. Balanced atop a creeping haunted-house beat, produced by the rapper himself, he preens, boasts, and threatens in a style that’s downright ominous, but he’s also somehow fragile, possessed with a greater sense of self-awareness than many rappers twice his age. Cataldo

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1. Kanye West, “All of the Lights”

A holdover from last year’s epochal My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, “All of the Lights” beats the pulp out of nearly everything released this year. It’s also perhaps the most acute example of Kanye West’s pitched mania for theatrical expressions of manic-depressive instability, his mixture of self-destruction and self-love, sentiments which carried over to this year’s Watch the Throne, albeit muted by Jay-Z’s magisterial arrogance, which is more static and less interesting. Beyond the canned horn fanfare and the unhinged breakbeats, the song’s chorus ranks as one of the most brilliantly purposeful wastes of big-name talent ever: transport 20 pop stars to Hawaii, record them, hit blend. Cataldo

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