Listen: Troye Sivan, “Rush”
Dead Oceans
8.
Wednesday: “Chosen to Deserve”
The love of your life is a dirtbag who skipped school, pissed in the street, and bummed around with dumbass friends who chugged Benadryl like PBRs—and she’s perfect, baby. Part down-home devotional, part miscreant’s statement of purpose, Wednesday’s “Chosen to Deserve” is a country-rock slammer where frontwoman Karly Hartzman confesses her unsavory past to her partner, proceeding with faith that when the story’s over, he’ll still be smiling. “We always started by tellin’ all our best stories first/So now that it's been awhile, I'll get around/To tellin’ you all my worst,” she begins. A casually observant Jewish girl raised in the Bible thumping South, Hartzman appropriates the language of predestination to deliver one of the most romantic tributes of the year, a wide-open love song that proves that everyone, no matter how f*cked up, is a miracle to someone. –Cat Zhang
Further Reading: “Wednesday’s Curdled Beauty”
Listen: Wednesday, “Chosen to Deserve”
ADOR
7.
NewJeans: “Super Shy”
Zero-to-hero anthem “Super Shy” is the daydream wafting through the mind of an overlooked heroine while she eyes the most popular boy in school. Minji, Hanni, Danielle, Haerin, and Hyein exude quiet confidence as they plot to catch a cutie by surprise. Built around a riff on the Powerpuff Girls theme and a bass drum like a hiccuping heartbeat, the song was co-written by Erika de Casier, who expertly guides the group towards a soft, sensitive take on drum’n’bass. Embedded in its message of demure power is a sliver of meta-commentary on NewJeans’ approach: More sonically understated than many of their K-pop contemporaries, they have quickly become chart titans nonetheless. “You don’t even know my name, do you?” the girls ask impishly on the hook. The “but you will” is implied. –Olivia Horn
Listen: NewJeans, “Super Shy”
Top Dawg Entertainment / RCA
6.
SZA: “Kill Bill”
With her wrenching self-examination, SZA’s songwriting encourages the kind of deep emotional inquiry that, as with all the greats, helps us understand ourselves better. Not so much (one hopes) on the murderous “Kill Bill.” At the start of SOS’s fierce stylistic melange, this inescapable boom-bap thriller instantly revealed the singer’s morbid humor and the range of her pen; it’s SZA gone full auteur. Playing the villain, she crafts her allegorical single in the spirit of murder ballads and action films, fantasizing, in the uncannily cool-headed chorus, about the most extreme revenge imaginable against a boyfriend who’s moved on. Her hard-boiled extravagance and acute psychological attunement might just kill the ex living in your head. Yet it’s her drolly disarming boasts—“I got me a therapist,” “I did all of this sober”—that suggest what really drives the song’s deathly fiction: SZA’s own bid for self-preservation. –Jenn Pelly
Further Listening: “All the Best Kiss-Offs, Jokes, and Wisdom on SZA’s SOS”
Listen: SZA, “Kill Bill”
Geffen
5.
Olivia Rodrigo: “get him back!”
One way or another, Olivia Rodrigo is gonna get ya. On the deliriously fun third single from her second album GUTS, she rattles off an ex’s red flags with an amused detachment that channels the Waitresses’ Patty Donahue and Blondie’s Debbie Harry. Over a fuzzy three-chord melody, Rodrigo waxes vindictive on the song title’s double meaning, conjuring alternately violent and reconciliatory fantasies that her therapist father (who gets a shout-out!) might attribute to “anxious attachment.” “get him back!” quite literally sounds like the contrasting highs and lows of Rodrigo’s warring impulses, her voice taking on the quality of a school bully on the song’s rapped verses and a bubbly cheerleader on its exuberant choruses. The quiet-loud dynamic culminates in a final whispered bridge, which sends the frenetic peak of the song’s last chorus into orbit. From its false start to Rodrigo’s devilish final laugh, “get him back!” is as messy, flawed, and ultimately freeing as a breakup feels. –Arielle Gordon
Further Listening: “The Nostalgic, Messy Fun of Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS”
Listen: Olivia Rodrigo, “get him back!”
Self-released
4.
Noname: “Namesake”
Noname isn’t afraid to delve into the messiness of making art with a global consciousness while toiling within a capitalist economy. On “Namesake,” she laments the pervasiveness of complacency, admits we’re all complicit, and rails against war crimes from inside a cloud of blunt smoke. Over a percolating funk beat, Noname calmly eviscerates the very concept of sacred cows, adopting a faux-cheerleader lilt as she connects the dots between Super Bowl headliners Beyoncé, Kendrick, and Rihanna, and the NFL’s longtime association with the military industrial complex. In the next breath, she calls out the woman in the mirror for playing Coachella after she said she wouldn’t. “Namesake” is a ruthless song about accountability from which no one is safe—not even Noname. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz
Further Reading: “Noname’s Fearless Complexity”
Listen: Noname, “Namesake”
Asthmatic Kitty
3.
Sufjan Stevens: “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?”
The question at the center of this song is the same one Sufjan Stevens has been asking in his music for the last 20 years, though he’s never been quite this direct about it. It’s easy to understand why: His trembling whisper of a voice and the way he can make the pluck of an acoustic guitar ring out like the loneliest sound ever created are instantly devastating on their own, so cutting them with poetic storytelling and elaborate arrangements can feel both merciful and necessary. But “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” is pure, undiluted, raw—the kind of song that makes your face crinkle up before a single word is sung.
