Song of the Year Contenders

When Mitski turned to synth-pop on her last album, Laurel Hell, the worry had been that she’d lost her element of surprise while sanding down and polishing her edges. Thankfully, everything about her new single, “Bug Like an Angel,” is a surprise — like the timing, a mere year and a half after Laurel Hell, or the powerful choir that seems to materialize out of nowhere to echo her verses. Even with that full choir, economy is once again Mitski’s strong suit, as she spends most of the song strikingly vulnerable, singing the spare verses over just a guitar. She’s in a moment of searching, first for some connection in a bottle (“Sometimes a drink feels like family”) and later for some respite from the cycle of broken promises that “break you right back.” The choir isn’t there for spiritual authority but community, searching right alongside Mitski. And if she can’t find answers, at least she can find a bit of comfort in the divine: “I try to remember the wrath of the Devil / Was also given him by God.”

Jay Rock, the streets-hardened stalwart of L.A. hip-hop, isn’t really known as a party-starter — but “Too Fast (Pull Over)” makes it clear that he still knows how to set a vibe. Step one: Invite your most fun friends, in this case Anderson .Paak and Latto. Step two: Put on a good soundtrack, like Trina’s slut-rap opus “Pull Over.” Step three: Have fun, i.e., rap about hot girls, nice cars, and feeling yourself. Jay gets a few good bars in on “Too Fast” (“Put a pole dancer in a Mercedes / She wanna watch P-Valley and go half on a baby”) but mostly takes a back seat to Latto, who spits her best verse in a minute, and Anderson, who sets the song’s zero-to-60 energy in the hook and keeps it going throughout.

The Britpop crew’s first album in eight years is basically Blur CliffsNotes — a sprawling 42-minute trip through the best sprightly riffs, grungy alt-rock, and experimental electronic work the band has offered up since their founding in early-’90s Britain. Except the pop-leaning “Barbaric,” which is a slight outlier. Combining the radio-friendly elements of Gorillaz with the thudding bass lines and tight percussion of Blur — and throwing in one of the catchiest hooks in either catalogue — successfully bridges the work in the group that made front man Damon Albarn famous in England with that of the one that made him famous in the States.

Chris Stapleton has long boasted the makings of a rock star, from his dusty, commanding voice to his stadium-ready guitar chops. It’s about time he finally put them to use. “White Horse,” the lead single on Stapleton’s new album, Higher, is a barnstorming southern-rock anthem bursting with multiple guitar solos and a colossal chorus. Stapleton plays the maverick he’s always been in the country scene: “If you want a cowboy on a white horse / Ridin’ off into the sunset,” well, that’s not him, he warns. No, he’s a looser cannon — one who might have a whole album of fiery rock to come or may have just made the most ferocious song of his career on a whim.

With her poetic eye and warm melodies, Jamila Woods can spin profundity out of the simplest things. On its face, her single “Tiny Garden” is a love song, but it soon reveals itself as something more: a song about the everyday work that love takes. Woods sings about taking things slow and figuring out the uncertainties (“I put my flaws on display to scare you away / You put your feelings on hold”), making for something that feels much truer than the usual superlative metaphors for affection. Even so, the song feels welcoming and familiar complete with Duendita’s soft-spoken wisdom in the bridge. Like Woods sings, “It’s not gonna be a big production / It’s not butterflies and fireworks.” That doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful.

Rauw Alejandro has been making his name as reggaeton’s resident futurist. Ivy Queen is one of the genre’s original stars. And their past-meets-future team-up on Alejandro’s “Celebrando” has made for the song that needs to be blasting across beaches for the rest of the summer — a true celebration, as the title promises. Alejandro trades the space reggaeton of 2022’s Saturno for something more carnal and sun-soaked here while mostly making space for Ivy, who’s a commanding presence on the track from her first ad-lib.

Dependability is an underrated quality in a pop star. When the chips are down — when the same boring song has topped the charts for weeks on end and it seems like this year might just be a wash for new hits — can you count on them to shake things up with the perfect song? After a massively successful debut, will they come back with something that’s just new enough while still staying true to the sound everyone loved? As much as Olivia Rodrigo looked like a pop star after “drivers license” and Sour, “vampire” is the song that officially made her a “reliable hitmaker,” one of pop’s most important clichés. It’s nothing more than a new-and-improved Olivia breakup epic executed to perfection, and it’s sure to keep her around for a while longer.

At first listen, “You Don’t Even Know Me Anymore” sounds like a fitting title for Charly Bliss’ first single in four years. The onetime garage-pop upstart is now making unabashed pop music, pulling out skittering programmed drums and echoey, effect-laden vocals within the song’s first minute. (It did seem inevitable after their previous pop-rock masterwork, Young Enough.) Eva Hendricks’s lyrics, though — always the primary draw of a Charly Bliss song — are still sharp as ever. She opens the second verse with one of her more subtle gut punches: “I read the letters that I wrote to you way back when / They’re so sad, you had me convinced I could still save you then.”

Faye Webster is scared of committing on her new single “But Not Kiss.” Yes, there’s the matter of the lover whose arms she wants to sleep in but doesn’t want to kiss. But more interestingly, there’s the type of song she wants to make. At the gently strummed outset, “But Not Kiss” sounds like the latest entry to Webster’s impeccably chill canon — before the song collapses on itself into a cascade of piano. All the usual hallmarks of Webster’s songs are still there, from her soft-spoken delivery to that sighing lap steel, just shaken up and rearranged into a song full of (and about) quiet thrills.

It’s been a good summer for buzzy DJ-producer Peggy Gou, who signed to tastemaking label XL and released what has turned into the seasonal club burner on the same day this past June. “Nanana” is a throwback, built on muddy drums, plinky ’90s raver chords, and that insatiable pitch-bending effect that was on every radio-friendly house hit 30 years ago. The lyrics are mostly nonsense — love is hard to describe, so you have to say … “na-na-na” instead, or something — and beside the point. This is bouncy, silly time-capsule music and a hopeful taste of what’s to come from Gou.

“I am not afraid to finally say shit with my chest,” Doja Cat raps in the middle of her tour-de-force return single, “Attention.” And she’s really not, sounding off on her social-media trolls, owning her sexuality, and owning her success. After her rise over the past few years, Doja knows everyone else is going to talk, so “Attention” is her trying to start, and own, the conversation instead. That starts with the sound of the song, a dexterous, delicate rap outing for Doja to prove that, yes, she does belong in hip-hop. Her confidence is almost nonchalant as she tosses off capital-B bars nearly every other line. “Why she think she Nicki M. / She think she hot shit?” Doja asks, parroting a fan. Then her answer: “Of course you bitches comparin’ Doja to who the hottest.”

Amaarae’s feather-light falsetto can shine over pretty much anything. In “Angels in Tibet,” it slides above baile-funk percussion and sumptuous strings as the Ghanaian artist sings of sex and luxury and clubbing with abandon: “Touch me where you need to / I can give you more / Bodies on the floor.” The way she seamlessly moves up half an octave on the hook and coos around the bridge’s lingering percussion gives it the aura of a magic trick.

Glaive songs aren’t usually pretty. One of the only constants in Ash Gutierrez’s career, whether he’s making dissonant hyperpop, glitchy hip-hop, or ’90s-inspired emo-pop, has been his ability to find catharsis in loud, discordant music. (The better for his often starkly self-hating lyrics.) So as full as glaive’s catalogue is, there’s not much competition for his most beautiful song — but “all i do is try my best” still earns the title outright. It’s entrancing from the first moments, centered around swirling strings that expand like a kaleidoscope in the chorus; the song manages to somehow recall American Football and big-tent pop-EDM. Glaive’s teenage viewpoint is still intact — “First year that I gotta pay my taxes / When I heard the number, thought ’bout killin’ myself,” he opens — but he’s a bit wiser here. “As I get older, I realize / Too much of anything makes you hate it,” he coos in one of his best vocal performances yet. Yes, that even goes for making impossibly pretty songs.

Alicia Bognanno’s “All I Do” cuts straight to the bone. Her vocals are raw and scratchy and stubborn, which is exactly the kind of performance you want on a song about quitting drinking. “I’ve been ready to leave, but it’s hard to go / If it ain’t the right choice, I don’t wanna know,” she screams, somehow sounding both content and apprehensive about leaving a time in her life she once knew. By the bridge — “Heavy memories sink in / I’ll never get fucked up again” — she’s confident she has made the right choice.

After two heavy albums confronting death and systemic violence, “hue_man nature” is a much-needed moment of letting loose for the Chicago rapper Saba. (That’s even where the song gets its title: “I was going through it, human nature,” he raps in the hook.) And who better to do it with than the rap producer No ID, a Chicago hero himself. The pair’s second collaboration is just undeniably fun, from that infectiously slinky funk beat to Saba’s dozens of references to basketball players and actors. (“Young Lisa Bonet, Sanaa Lathan / If looks kill, shit, she gotta be dangerous,” he raps with a childish smirk.) For someone rapping about how “nobody could see the vision” when he was younger, Saba’s found the partner he needs right now in No ID.

On “Scapegoat,” Anohni and her band the Johnsons shine a white-hot light on transphobia, telling a story from the perspective of an individual ready and willing to commit violence. “You’re so killable / Disappearable / This one we need not protect,” she sings in her unmistakable, guttural croon. By speaking plainly about the threats women and men like Anohni face every day, “Scapegoat” becomes both prayer and plight — a blunt assessment of our current world and a hope that its bigotry will eventually end.

It feels like every other pop song right now is interpolating an older piece of music. The latest from Róisín Murphy and DJ Koze, two of electronic music’s most mischievous figures, technically falls into that trend. But they take a cheekier approach. Following an interlude that sounds like a Real Housewives outtake, about a sunset boat trip gone awry, Murphy starts singing, “Row, row, row your boat.” It’s both a breath of fresh air and a joyously stupid moment that fits right into Koze’s lighthearted groove, on a song that captures the leisurely essence of summer. —Justin Curto

Judging by its first single, Doom Singer is a great name for Chris Farren’s new album. In the chorus, Farren screams like he’s exorcizing a demon — it’s guttural and deafening, a literal far cry from the joyful pop-punk sing-alongs he’s usually yelling. “Change your heart / Wait your turn,” he roars over thundering guitars that fall in instantly. Farren has said the song is about the push and pull of “the urge to romanticize the past,” but it’s definitely not stuck there. (The song is the first product of a new collaboration with drummer Frankie Impastato and producer Melinda Duterte, a.k.a. Jay Som, which Farren says revitalized him creatively.) He then ends the hook with a plea for connection: “I need more time with you.” The sound of “Cosmic Leash” is him finding it anew. —J.C.

At times on their splashy debut album, Low Era, GEESE could sound too practiced — like they’d listened to too much Parquet Courts and spent too much time playing Brooklyn basements. The band’s follow-up, 3D Country, is the welcome sound of them not just loosening up, but at times, leaning into chaos. Take the combustible, messy highlight “Mysterious Love.” The flailing guitars jostle the song without warning, like the car crash described in the opening lines. (It’s just as odd of a love song: “This love is my only window,” singer Cameron Winter wails. “I will be the airbag / 20 pounds of glass in my eye.”) There’s an interlude of arena-rock splendor in there too, before Winter goes from crooning to screeching and brings the band to one final, unruly coup de grâce. It’s GEESE in all their three-dimensional wonder.

Indie stalwart billy woods is one of the few artists who can pull off a song about rapper-branded weed without making it sound like a frat-boy parody. Through a mix of New York City drug lore, daily frustrations (What’s with all the bad flower endorsed by famous people?), and oddball humor (“Weed lube, weed butter / Don’t get ’em confused, whatever you do / I wasn’t rude, but green eggs and ham, I had to refuse”), he turns what should be a rote idea into a heady take on greenery in ’23. —Alex Suskind

Where did the guitar bands go? the wistful Gen-Xer grumbles to himself. To which I say (a) Buddy, it never left. And (b) Relax, the Hives are back. The Swedish quintet has followed in the footsteps of indie-sleaze brethren the Walkmen, reemerging after a decade of hibernation. The first single off the forthcoming The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons feels like classic Hives: a good old-fashioned rock stomper stacked with guitar feedback and treble-y vocals and an earworm-y riff. “My motive’s so handy / Nothing but bogus operandi,” screeches front man Pelle Almqvist with some Meet Me in the Bathroom–era venom. Even his statement accompanying the release feels like a throwback: “There’s no maturity or anything like that bullshit, because who the fuck wants mature rock and roll.” For the Walkmen, it’s not “everything old is new,” it’s “old never left in the first place.” —A.S.

Kesha spoke with God and then wrote “Eat the Acid,” the lead single from her new album, Gag Order. Based on an “intense spiritual-awakening experience” she had, along with the advice her mother once gave her (to wit: don’t drop psychedelics because “you don’t want to be changed like it changed me,” as the song’s refrain goes), “Acid” is about undergoing a sacred transformation. “I searched for answers all my life / Dead in the dark I saw a light / I am the one that I’ve been fighting the whole time,” she sings through a phaser, the kind of sonic touch that harks back to the start of her career, when she’d feed her voice through a variety of vocal effects. Drugs might not have changed Kesha (she still hasn’t taken acid), but something else did; now she’s ready to survey the aftermath. —A.S.

“Just Relax” is the sound of a former indie artist finally getting their shot after years of grinding it out on the industry’s ground floor. “Bitches think they it, all that shit is cap,” says a cocky Lola Brooke — and she should be cocky: The Bed-Stuy rapper recently signed to a major label, has received cosigns from longtime heroes Lil Kim and Meek Mill, and is coming off a buzzy Coachella cameo. She’s also one of the rare few current MCs successfully bridging the generational gap by name-dropping golden-age MCs and rapping over beats that flip bygone classics (this one samples the Black Sheep cut “The Choice Is Yours”). For those who doubt her staying power: “I’m getting busy with these hands / I let a bitch have it.” —A.S.

Every line of Jess Williamson’s slide guitar–laden country ballad cuts deeper than the last. “Are my love songs lies now that the love is gone?” she asks at the outset, before writing a specific song off with a devastating “or whatever.” She then caps it off with the worst possible burn one singer-songwriter can say to another: “The difference between us is when I sing it, I really mean it.” Williamson definitely means it here — it’s in the jagged edges of her voice and the strength she uses to reach for a note. —J.C.

About six months ago, Dawn Richard was singing over Spencer Zahn’s amorphous soundscapes for their ethereal odd coupling. Those left turns are half the excitement of Richard; the other half is watching her snap right back into place like nothing happened. On “Bubblegum,” her first solo single since 2021’s Second Line, she continues her project of pulling pop and R&B apart and piecing the genres back together the way she wants. The jittery house-pop song goes broader than Second Line’s New Orleans tribute, choosing to name-check Beyoncé and Prince around a hook where Richard promises to “pop that thing like bubblegum.” It’s the most mainstream Richard has felt since her Diddy-Dirty Money days, but it also doesn’t quite sound like anything else today. —J.C.

Jorja’s single finds its strength in repetition: those surround-sound drums, that insatiable plucked guitar riff, her teasing threats, all drilled into your head until you get the message. The British singer’s lyrics here are a sleight of hand — what might sound like the end of a relationship is actually about her experience as an artist in the public eye, having to consistently put her own views and emotions out for the world to judge. “I’ve changed? There’s only been one thing that I’ve changed / Nothin’ is ever enough,” she croons like someone who’s had to deal with asinine debates over whether she has the range. But Jorja is staying above the fray: “Go ’head try me / ’Cause I’m safe behind these walls.” —A.S.

I tried to figure out what time signature Yaeji’s “Passed Me By” starts in and got dizzy. 6/8? 5/4? 13/5? Pinning it down is like catching a cloud. Maybe that’s the point; this single off her debut album is all about growth and the slipperiness of time. Even the lyrical delivery is tapped in with slice-of-life moments about handling your own mood swings uttered in an almost free-association cadence: “I like flip-ping the pages and feeling the physi-cal weight of how much time has / Passed me by.” There’s something mantralike about the singer-producer’s approach here (“Anything that touches me will evaporate and fly higher and higher”). In blending English and Korean lyrics, Yaeji seems to be in a much-needed dialogue with herself. We’re just here to eavesdrop. —A.S.

The acoustic beginning of “The Devil I Know” sounds like Ashley McBryde is continuing in the gentle direction of her new album’s soft-spoken first single, “Light on in the Kitchen.” Then, at the first chorus, the whole band comes in at once with explosive force. That fake-out is just the latest reminder of how special a mainstream country star McBryde is, after last year’s imaginative collaboration album, Lindeville. On “Devil,” McBryde still hasn’t lost her edge, showing off the country-rock chops that, if this industry were fair, would lead her to play this song in arenas just like fellow mavericks Chris Stapleton and Eric Church. Strip away all of the rocking, though, and you’re still left with a vivid song and an instant-classic chorus: “Mama says get my ass to church / Daddy says get my ass to work / Doctor says I gotta give up on these smokes.” McBryde’s better off listening to herself. —J.C.

Credit to Mahalia — and co-writer–producer Raye — for being the first singer to flip the bland title of a legal document at the bottom of every website into a sexy R&B jam about boundaries. “If you want my love, then let’s discuss the man you’re required to be,” she sings over a deceptively simple drum sequence and atmospheric synths. “And if you tell me lies, you get three strikes; there’s no coming back; boy, please.” In a world of toxic love tracks, “Terms and Conditions” is the necessary counterweight.

Finally, the world gets to hear Tyler, the Creator and Vince Staples, longtime friends and two of the West Coast’s best working rappers, go toe to toe on a track. “Stuntman,” off the deluxe version of 2021’s Call Me If You Get Lost, flips from bouncy flex track to full-on riot once Staples raps, “No you can’t be my girl, bitch, are you dumb?” punctuated by DJ Drama ad-libbing for dramatic effect. That first minute, where the song slips and slides between the two, is a thrilling introduction, before Tyler takes over and delivers two breathless verses packed with flexes and quips. (“I’m watchin’ Queen’s Gambit, lookin’ like an extra / Different colored chess pieces hangin’ from my necklace.”) Here’s hoping whatever he has up his sleeve after Call Me is this much fun, too. — J.C.