The Best Songs Of 2021 (So Far)
From New Zealand goth-rock crushers to angsty pop ballads.
If 2020 was the year of musical despair, then 2021 is the year of musical rebirth.
Emerging from the chaos of a still ongoing pandemic, artists have found new and original ways to promote themselves; to put their work out into the oversaturated culture and still be heard. The dust hasn’t settled, exactly, but there is a new optimism present — a sense that things might, somehow, work out alright.
That’s what unites the best singles of the year. Though they come from different genres, each song has its own trembling, barely-present sense of hope. Why else would you release music, after all, unless you thought that it might change something, even if that something was the mind of one single person, just for a moment?
— Joseph Earp
Torres — ‘Don’t Go Putting Wishes In My Head’
By her own admission, Mackenzie Scott, the artist who records under the name Torres, doesn’t usually write love songs. Her first few albums were doom-laden, furious affairs, full of tales of mothers losing their memories and whisker-curled marauders living in the woods. But something has changed for Scott. Her last record, Silver Tongue, sang hopefully and simply about the possibility of starting a new life with someone, and her new single, ‘Don’t Go Putting Wishes In My Head’, is filled with admissions of love and vulnerability.
Of course, because this is Torres, there is still darkness there. ‘Don’t Go Putting Wishes In My Head’ is, first and foremost, a song about the fragility of love — Scott sings about being warned off romance by her beloved’s friends, and there is something fragile and faltering undercutting that bombastic chorus. But still, despite it all — despite knowing that the future is unwritten — Scott goes on, washed over by a tide she has utterly submitted herself to.
Mermaidens — ‘Soft Energy’
There is no band currently making music as underrated as Mermaidens. The New Zealand band have spent the last few years carving out one of the most impressive niches in contemporary rock, fusing the hideous energy of doom metal with something softer; more humane. The result is a band that seem to be inventing new genre constraints rather than fulfilling them, and setting themselves aside from the pack with every new release.
‘Soft Energy’, their newest single, takes that experimentation even further. Sticking labels on the thing is like trying to cling-wrap a porcupine — it’s part goth rock, part doom, part folk — and each new tonal left turn leaves more questions than answers. It’s a song that points outwards, rather than within; that gestures at a horizon over which comes cresting a dark, dark sun.
Mountain Goats — ‘Dark In Here’
At this stage in their career, The Mountain Goats could be forgiven for phoning things in a bit. They’ve become cult heroes, amassing a considerable following over the course of a whopping 20 studio albums and countless DIY releases. There’s a Mountain Goats sound that is instantly recognisable — bands from all over the world have tried to imitate it — and the group are one of those rare musical acts that have created their own private, densely-populated universe.
The joy of ‘Dark In Here’, the lead single from the album of the same name, is the way that it expands that universe. Rather than sit on their laurels, the group have leaned harder into their gothic underpinnings, constructing a wind-blasted castle of a song, full of fire and fury, and curiously lacking a conclusion — the song is a slow progression upwards, out of the dark and into the near-dark. It’s a thrilling work by a band that have never once stopped thrilling.
Georgia Mulligan — ‘Singing Stripe’
Sydney’s own Georgia Mulligan is the very definition of a rising star, a young musician who has spent the last few years laying out her world precisely as she sees it. ‘Singing Stripe’, her newest work, takes that truth-telling to the next level — it is an astonishingly assured single, one in which Mulligan sings simply of being haunted by past relationships; of needing space; of struggling with the hard, essential work of being a human being in a complicated world.
The touchstones are clear — everyone from Sharon Van Etten to Julia Jacklin gets an auditory namecheck. But the genius of Mulligan’s work is the way that it can make the old seem fresh again, injecting new life into a now old genre simply by speaking in a firm, authoritative voice.
Olivia Rodrigo — ‘drivers license’
Olivia Rodrigo is far from an overnight sensation — she’s a Disney Channel star, having worked in the entertainment industry since the age most of us were still working out our ABCs. So consider it a sign of the considerable life and verve of ‘Driver’s Licence’ that the song feels like a work made by an outsider. It’s the pop machine creating something genuinely new, working outside the paramaters of the industry at large and creating something unusually heartfelt and reflective.
Consider that chorus, for instance, the one that’s been splashed over radio stations pretty much non-stop for the last few months; consider its warmth, its humanity. There’s been no pop single quite like it in a long time. Long live Olivia Rodrigo, and long live ‘drivers license’.
Sharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen — ‘Like I Used To’
Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen were made for each other. Both are deeply humane singer-songwriters with a taste for the operatic, a deep understanding of scale that infuses every song they’ve ever released. Now, in retrospect, it feels like only a matter of time that the two talents would pool together their skills, creating the impossibly huge ‘Like I Used To’, a quasi-break-up song as spacious as a midnight diner.
It’s Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood. It’s Whitney Huston. It’s a mammoth. Spend one evening with the thing, all by yourself, locked up away in headphones; you won’t regret it for a second.
Lana Del Rey — ‘Blue Banisters’
Lana Del Rey’s career can be divided into two sections — pre and post-Norman Fucking Rockwell. That album was a summa, an inventory of an entire way of telling stories, and probably the album that will be most frequently cited as her masterwork by future music historians.
But the fascinating thing about Del Rey is that she hasn’t hit a decline since releasing her magnum opus, as so many past pop heroes have done. Instead, she’s moved laterally, not downwards, experimenting in subtle, blink-and-you’ll-miss-them ways with her sound and her image. ‘Blue Banisters’ is clearly the work of the same person who released ‘Hope Is A Dangerous Thing For A Woman Like Me To Have — But I Have It’, but there are new textures here; a fresh sense of melancholy. It’s simple, quick and to-the-point, and yet unexpected, in its own quiet way; a razor blade hidden inside a wedding dress.
Skullcrusher — ‘Song For Nick Drake’
Skullcrusher is full of surprises. First there’s that name, a double-feint of sorts, establishing expectations that are shot down the moment you hear the music itself, which is soft, and gentle, and devoid of skull-crushing in any form. And then there’s a song like ‘Song For Nick Drake’, a gossamer-thin piece of songwriting that puts out whatever you bring to it.
Is it a break-up song? In its own way. A song of hope and rebirth? That too. A paean to a talented artist who sits at the centre of Skullcrusher’s musical universe? Yes and no, at once paying homage to the bright blue flame of Nick Drake without ever supplicating in front of an idol of him. Like all the best music, it’s both everything and nothing; an encyclopedia sung as a lullaby, over and over, until the words begin to bleed into each other and meaning slowly gets sapped away.
Arlo Parks — ‘Black Dog’
Of all Arlo Park’s considerable catalogue of skills, the one that is most frequently underrated is the clean, direct poetry of her lyrics. Who else would start a song with the line, “I’d lick the grief right off your lips,” and then end it with, “It’s so cruel/What your mind can do for no reason,” taking the listener on a journey from the outside world to the internal one; from the mess of other people’s lives to the quiet solitude of the chambers of the heart.
That’s ‘Black Dog’ for you — the direct mid-point between the searingly honest poetry of Ariana Reines and the understated musical genius of Joni Mitchell. It sounds like it’s been beamed in from another universe. Let it eat you up.
Tropical Fuck Storm — ‘G.A.F.F.’
Ennui is in the air: 18 months into a pandemic, the overriding feeling is one of boredom. Turns out that the novelty of the apocalypse can wear off somewhat, and what once would have seemed shocking and scary — sitting in a vaccine super-centre listening to whale noises, for instance — now is part of the norm.
‘G.A.F.F.’ by Tropical Fuck Storm takes that feeling of boredom to its natural endpoint, becoming a catalogue of different social issues and breaking them down into their deeply similar, deeply discomfiting parts. Left versus right, men versus women, the West versus the East — all these battles get rattled off by Gareth Liddiard in his characteristic drawl, reduced to items on a long, blood-stained list. Turns out that the revolution will be televised, and that we’ll probably all just collectively change the channel.
Genesis Owusu — ‘Gold Chains’
It seems somewhat perverse to pull apart Smiling With No Teeth, the extraordinary album by Genesis Owusu, into its discrete parts. The thing is a mosaic, best appreciated like a magic eye picture — by stepping backwards, and letting its dozens of sub-genres bleed into one another. So take ‘Gold Chains’ and its inclusion here as a kind of synecdoche, a small part that represents the whole big mess.
And mess is the key word. Smiling With No Teeth is a hyperactive piece, throwing tonal left turns over its shoulder and moving from idea to idea with a whizz kid’s ingenuity. Turns out the best way to respond to a fractured world is to also fracture the self.
Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Music Junkee. He Tweets @JosephOEarp.