Where do you find new music? People—often closer to forty-five than twenty-two—sometimes ask me this, and I never know what to say, since the answer is everywhere. In the foreground of a bar, in the background of a viral video, through recommendations of friends and strangers, in hour-long doses on twenty-four-hour Web radio stations. Music is everywhere, simultaneously delighting and ambushing us. I’ve never been systematic at keeping notes on what I’m hearing, and it’s been years—closer to when I was twenty-two than my current age—since I presumed that my yearly favorites were worth recommending as the year’s best. The most endearing thing I saw this year was watching two members of the Brooklyn band Earth Dad interpret nineties alternative rock classics in a loose, ambient style. (Full disclosure: I put them up to it, as the openers for a book party I was throwing.) I have rarely been so delighted as when I reencountered these old Soundgarden or Smashing Pumpkins songs—hits that were once ubiquitous to the point of annoyance—reimagined as spaced-out, sometimes quirky instrumentals. It didn’t matter whether this music was new or old; the performance was singular.
So there are the year’s best songs, and the ones that you remember. Loving music, for me, is about the experience of infatuation, the feelings that accrue as you listen to things over and over—sometimes because you are caught in the same wave as everyone else, other times because you are trying to escape the torrent. What follows are some pieces of music, new and old, I returned to often this year.
Benzz, “Je M’appelle”
A mask and a hoodie obscure the West London teen-ager’s face, but throughout the video for Benzz’s breakout hit, “Je M’appelle,” you see his whole world: friends hanging from balconies, egging him on, giving rides on the back of a scooter, the artist’s verses punctuated by his inner circle waving a Moroccan flag as he points to the star on the back of his tracksuit. This track first made the rounds in snippet form, ubiquitous among soccer highlight TikToks this past spring. (This is another answer I offer when people ask where I find new music: soccer reels.) “Je M’appelle” plucks the sax blare from “Calabria,” a 2003 club hit by the Danish producer Rune, and squishes it into a festive U.K. drill anthem. The original “Calabria” was remixed and repurposed into at least two different aughts anthems, signifying a kind of cheesy-glam, party-bus excess. Here, the producer Lucid coils it into something delirious and faintly menacing, making Benzz’s pro-forma boasts crack like fireworks. The sample is instantly familiar, but as soon as you remember where it’s from, Benzz and the rest of his party are already onto the next one.
Tim Bernardes, “Nascer, Viver, Morrer”
“Nascer, Viver, Morrer” is possibly the breeziest song ever made about the cycle of birth, life, and death. Bernardes, a thirty-one-year-old Brazilian songwriter, sings, sighs, hums, winces, and arches his way through a fluttering bit of campfire folk. He yearns but never sounds vexed, his voice tumbling from high to low, chasing the mysteries of existence. He exudes a kind of calm that feels like a model for getting through life: you want to imagine taking it all in stride, the way he does here.
Low, “Stay”
I used to go see the indie-rock band Low a lot in the mid-nineties. The band was anchored by the drummer Mimi Parker and the guitarist Alan Sparhawk, and their shows were sometimes so quiet that murmuring audience members threatened to drown them out. It felt so brave to me, watching Parker and Sparhawk, creative partners but also a married couple, singing these gentle hymns over minimal instrumentation. Over time, Low got louder, but never in a way that seemed a deviation: they felt more like themselves. In November, Parker passed away from ovarian cancer at the age of fifty-five. I’ve always preferred Low’s older stuff because that experience of stillness is stamped into my teen-age consciousness, but in the days after Parker’s death, I found myself listening to their 2013 cover of Rihanna’s “Stay.” Solemn yet joyful, Sparhawk and Parker sharing in a moment of devotion, and suddenly the notion of staying a bit longer meant something more.
FLO, “Cardboard Box”
The acoustic guitar twirl signifies late-nineties R. & B., and the stuttering, dancehall-lite pop-radio rhythms evoke the decades that follow. But the notion of throwing out an ex-lover’s things—putting their “shit in a cardboard box,” changing your number, changing your locks? This is timeless. The London trio of Stella Quaresma, Jorja Douglas, and Renée Downer take turns telling their boys off, offering one another backup when necessary, admitting that they “never liked your momma” in the first place. It’s assured and triumphant—they sound completely unfazed, utterly over it, if they were ever that into you in the first place.
Duval Timothy, “Meeting with a Judas Tree”
Duval Timothy is a pianist and artist who splits his time between London, England, and Freetown, Sierra Leone. In the past, he’s collaborated with the dance music producer Mr. Mitch, the singer Rosie Lowe, and the rapper Kendrick Lamar, generating an astounding volume of gorgeous, hypnotic lines for their embellishment. Timothy conjures the ecstasy and melancholy of dance music, the skeletal funk of a pop hit, yet plays it all according to his own, deliberate tempos. “Judas Tree” is one of my favorite albums of the year, an absorbing, affirming collection of piano recordings that you want to live inside. It sounds like Timothy is exploring his melodies, not just basking in them. Sometimes, he repeats patterns until their brightness recedes into a mournful haze; other times, he takes his songs apart and playfully puts them back together. But listen closely, underneath the piano, and the layers draw you in: field recordings from his garden, hazy little textures nicked from dance tunes, voice memos from friends and family, allsnippets of the worlds that align in his music.
Lil Yachty, “Poland”
Sometimes it’s best not to overthink things. “I took the wooooock to Poland,” the jolly Atlanta rapper sings, referring to the pharmaceutical-grade cough syrup that goes into lean, and it’s enough to make the song one of the year’s most bizarre hits. A joke of a track about smuggling contraband across national borders, a beat that sounds like an eighties video-game start-up screen, a self-imposed challenge to write something ridiculous about a plastic bottle of water, lyrics so weird as to make you rethink the purpose of language—sometimes the best ideas are the first ones.
Lee Tracy and Isaac Manning, “Is it What You Want”
In the eighties and early nineties, two men from Nashville named Isaac Manning and Lee Tracy began recording their own singular, spaced-out takes on soul music. Manning exhausted the technological possibilities of his synthesizers and drum machines, drenching everything in echo and reverb; the unfazed Tracy sang with all the conviction of a superstar waiting to be discovered. Their lone stab at courting the public was a 1989 single featuring a cover of Whitney Houston’s “Saving All My Love for You” that pulses with off-kilter desperation. Tracy and Manning’s songs were recorded straight to cassette, and they are woozy, psychedelic, masterpieces of low-budget futurism. This new release collages together the highlights from hundreds of hours of unreleased home tapes, teasing a glimpse of two friends making radiant, gleeful music that we still aren’t ready for.
Turbo Sonidero, “Lowrider Kumbias”
Lowrider culture dates to the nineteen-forties, when young Mexican Americans in Los Angeles began lowering their cars to cruise in style. Starting in the sixties and seventies, the sound for these slow, styled-out crawls through the city was the oldie, whether it was the blissful harmonies of soul music or doo-wop. “Lowrider Kumbias” is the San Jose producer Turbo Sonidero’s contemporary tribute to the music he heard while growing up. Just as his forebears tinkered with the hydraulics of their classic American cars, he retrofits classics like Gene Chandler’s “Duke of Earl” or Brenton Wood’s “Baby You Got It” with modern parts, in this case electro-Cumbia riddims. His work is cross-generational take on pride, what it means to have soul, and what it means to bounce.
Real Lies, “Lad Ash”
The London duo of Kevin Lee Kharas and Patrick King makes music about the dreams and disappointments of going out, the friendships sowed in flashes of blitzed merriment, the friends you lose along the way. Kharas and King are fully immersed in club culture, writing catchy pop songs that approximate the build and release of the best dance-floor drugs. Although this formula calls to mind the heyday of New Order or the Happy Mondays, their lyrics have more in common with those of Pulp or Suede, telling stories of misfits wandering in search of new peaks. “Lad Ash” is a fantastic collection of London night-life sketches, by equal turns hopeful and haunted. Despite the rollicking beats, acid squelches, and euphoric synths, Kharas is a gentle, almost meek narrator. He sings about the solitude that compels many of us into the night. These are small ecstasies, as on the excellent “Boss Trick,” when he tries to hold onto a fleeting moment when “I felt like I was a part of something.”
Jaimie Branch on Dada Strain
Dada Strain is Piotr Orlov’s occasional radio show about rhythm, improvisation, and community, and it always compels me to hear old music in new ways, noting the resonances between, say, Detroit techno and free jazz. In February, the Brooklyn-based trumpeter Jaimie Branch came by Orlov’s set at the Lot Radio and played atop his house and jazz records, her spritely blasts of horn smeared across his selections in a collision of different interpretations of what freedom sounds like. Branch passed away in August. As tribute, Orlov put together “Bird Songs for Breezy,” a show in her honor, weaving together her compositions with fragmentary memories from her friends, family, and former teachers—not a playlist or d.j. set so much as an ode. Branch was a local hero in Brooklyn. My only memory of her is being introduced to her at a show. She shook my hand, and then heard something in the air, took out her trumpet, and danced off into the crowd, blowing soul. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
