Blurring the boundaries between genres and traditional concepts of high and low art, turning the construct of world music inside out as popular forms suffuse only to be reanimated by life on the margins, the best songs of 2021 were inspired by Sufi mysticism and Southern Baptism twice removed, or ran the gamut between Salford drill, Chicago footwork, Saharan desert rock, and contemporary classical. Some of the most experimental sounds fit snugly inside the template of the three-minute pop song, while roots music might move with an epic sweep and the crackle and hum of an old school radio station.
On an album which drew from Sufi devotionals and odes to separation or unrequited love, with ‘Mohabbat’ the Brooklyn-based Pakistani composer Arooj Aftab offered her take on a famous ghazal by the Urdu poet Hafeez Hoshiarpuri. Serving as the stalled centrepiece of Vulture Prince following the moonlit romance and reggae skank of ‘Last Night’, in rhyming couplets Aftab laments a consuming passion with a note of defiance as the singer refuses to become one in a multitude of lovers. The plaintive guitar of Gyan Riley, bubbling percussion of Jamey Haddad, and shimmering harp of Maeve Gilchrist all add to the sense of meditative longing.
Converted out of an old garage, over the past five years The White Hotel in Salford has come to serve as a breeding ground for experimental artists like Space Afrika, Blackhaine, and aya who launched her acclaimed Hyperdub debut im hole at the venue back in November. On ‘Hotel’ however, the second song from the producer and choreographer’s extended play And Salford Falls Apart, collaborative spaces give way to transactional ruins where spiceheads roam and loveless suitors cede to nameless trysts. ‘Only reason that I stay here cos I can’t give you pain’ his voice reiterates over images of cut glass and spiralling shards of synths, as bodies in rigor mortis reanimate for a lights-out rave.
Sitting at the bar in his red Adidas tracksuit and pork pie hat, Bruiser Wolf cuts a figure almost as striking as his delivery on a song that melds the soulful production of Raphy with no-frills boom bap rap. The opening lines set the scene as the artist explains, ‘Bottles of champagne, some shots, a few beers / I treat my dogs better than white people do theirs / I’m in the drop, like a tear / But the engine sound like a pick-up’. The breakout member of the Bruiser Brigade boasts a helium wheeze which can sound like a stutter, covering familiar rap themes like drugs and hookers or referencing hoops and nineties television series with a casual wit that cuts him out from the pack.
Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion – ‘Other Song’
An impromptu recording by a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and an experimental percussive ensemble might not sound like ripe ground for the most breathtakingly romantic song of the year. Yet when Dawn Upshaw, Gilbert Kalish, and Sō Percussion wrapped work on Narrow Sea, it was Caroline Shaw who stepped into the fray for her solo vocal debut in the form of ‘Other Song’, an abstract reduction with a verse-chorus structure and an incandescent bridge. ‘If I let you go, behind the glare is what I know’ Shaw begins amid a swirl of marimba and steel drum over achingly sustained keys, finally arriving at one indelible truth as ‘I go where you go’ becomes a rhapsodic statement of intent.
Charli XCX – ‘New Shapes’ (feat. Christine and the Queens & Caroline Polachek)
‘Rip hyperpop?’ Charli XCX pondered at the height of summer, alongside a frame from the Cronenberg cult classic Videodrome which read ‘To become the new flesh, you first have to kill the old flesh’. As the accompanying image of hands bound at the nails might suggest, hyperpop and synth-pop have always shared a materiality and a maximalist tendency, but it was the eighties which the singer-songwriter veered towards alongside Christine and the Queens and Caroline Polachek on ‘New Shapes’. Over saturated synths, thick snares, and gated reverb, the trio lamented fleeting romance and the cold light of morning, as Charli XCX mastered the art of turning the other cheek.
Ethel Cain – ‘God’s Country’ (feat. Wicca Phase Springs Eternal)
It took Ethel Cain six months to write ‘God’s Country’, the aching centrepiece of the Inbred extended play, with ten versions of the song compiled and then scrapped as dreams of love gave way to the disquiet of the summer. Like the accompanying video, ‘God’s Country’ finds Cain in the midst of her first journey way out west, a lapsed road song that languors and hollows in the change of direction. Over the warblings of a church organ, Cain mixes metaphors and blurs the boundaries between steely self-reliance and helplessness in the hands of a collective fate, before Wicca Phase Springs Eternal loads up on Southern Gothic imagery, revving the engines of a forestalled state of grace.
G Perico – ‘Welcome to the Land’
One of the most prolific West Coast rappers of 2021, the Los Angeles native G Perico styles his sound with an old school sensibility and a slinky nasal sneer. Among other highlights over the course of the year were ‘Spazz’ with the viral breakout Remble, and ‘The Interview’ where Perico elevated a form also utilised by Benny the Butcher and Charli XCX with staccato beats and rippling acrostics. The self-described spokesman for South Central heralded the start of the year with the widescreen vision of ‘Welcome to the Land’, dwelling while the inaugural poets gestured towards the scope of the United States on the trench warfare and social media spats endemic to life in America.
Between live sets for the Met, contemporary dance commissions, and remixes for the likes of Steve Lehman, Marie Davidson, and Galya Bisengalieva the Indiana producer Jlin returned with her first solo work in three years, a means of staying afloat amid the testing times of the pandemic. Originally written for the Chicago-based new music ensemble Third Coast Percussion, the title track from her third extended play cut a swathe through the Midwest with its terminally shifting blend of Detroit techno and waxy footwork. Funky and futuristic with a wobble that manages to subsume the thick beats and juddering synths, ‘Embryo’ is a sketch that fully commits to the act of realisation.
Lana Del Rey – ‘White Dress’
Flying her flag with a more carefree flutter, Chemtrails over the Country Club and Blue Banisters introduced a looser version of Lana Del Rey, with ‘White Dress’ serving as the misty origin story. While other songs mastered the composition of place and luxuriated in a freewheeling vision of Americana, the swirling piano ballad conjured its atmosphere from a handful of elements, including a white waitressing dress and an Orlando-based ‘men in music business conference’ which the fledgling singer attended at the age of nineteen, crashing together the runaway syllables in a whispering falsetto, an elegy for a moment in time on a track that bristles with spectral portent.
Mdou Moctar – ‘Afrique Victime’
Soaring over the Sahara with a searing fusion of rock and blues, the Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar was already leading the charge on behalf of an adventurous brand of desert music before the release of his acclaimed sixth studio album Afrique Victime. The title track from the album, which the band described as their take on ‘Van Halen meets Black Flag meets Black Uhuru’, starts off as a Tamasheq lament for the crimes perpetrated against and in the name of Africa, before a unison of chants and the runaway tempo gives way to sinuous and strapping, defiant and ultimately exultant layers of solo guitar, roiling drums, and incendiary feedback.
‘Waly Waly’ or ‘The Water Is Wide’ is a folk song of Scottish origin which birthed a family of lyrics under a familiar tune. Consolidated by the song collector Cecil Sharp in 1906, the piece remains one of the most covered in the folk canon, from an arrangement by Benjamin Britten to renditions by genre stalwarts like Maura O’Connell, Pete Seeger, and June Tabor. On Ma délire – Songs of love, lost & found the Montreal singer Myriam Gendron traced the inward trajectory of a Canadian version of the song over stripped-back and sonorous guitar, from wide waters, laden ships, and the tumult of fledgling romance to a love which ‘grows old and waxes cold, and fades away like morning dew’.
Nicole Dollanganger – ‘Whispering Glades’
One of the canniest and craftiest lyricists of the contemporary landscape returned with a song whose wilting grandeur perfectly encapsulated the withered underbelly of Hollywood. Inspired by the Evelyn Waugh novel The Loved One – whose Whispering Glades were based on the Forest Lawn Memorial Park cemetery in California, and which was adapted by Terry Southern and Christopher Isherwood into a 1965 film – Dollanganger eschews embalming techniques for a wispy and shifting melody over clip-clop percussion and queasy Wurlitzer keys, as she unfolds a minor grotesquerie about an arrogant and rapacious lech and the grim fate that awaits.
Oneohtrix Point Never & ROSALÍA – ‘Nothing’s Special’
The closing track from Magic Oneohtrix Point Never played out like a subversion of the experimental folk of Mount Eerie, winding up down a similar path in the same sort of clearing while swapping a tremulous and sometimes downcast sense of wonder for a more downbeat and frazzled slice of existential dread. Transported by the same willowing synth line with a little less crackle and hum, the single version of ‘Nothing’s Special’ finds ROSALÍA at the helm as her lithe mezzo-soprano replaces Lopatin’s vocoder. The clean contours of her Spanish add a celestial shiver to the dark grandeur and pensive sorrow of the song, turning nothingness into something languishing and decadent.
‘Windy city weather was kind’ rolls wickedly off the tongue in the opening bars of ‘Bye Honey’, as Penelope Antena mixes etched moments with winsome laments adding ‘we made up, we made out, I broke a mirror. Seven years of bad luck for you and me’. The daughter of the French electro-samba pioneer Isabelle Antena and grandaughter of the Belgian jazz pianist Marc Moulin, on her sophomore album Antena expands on her signature vocal manipulations for an unusually warm blend of hyper-pop, gospel, and ramshackle folk. The grace of the song and her gifts as a writer give space to some humorous imagery, as the singer remarks on a fateful trip to a Chicago dappled in sunlight.
The opening track from Fresia Magdalena bubbles up with a soothing blend of Balearic house and murmuring dream pop. Based in Berlin but returning home to Peru, where work on the extended play began with a series of field recordings captured around Lima, for ‘La Perla’ the producer Sofia Kourtesis embraced her own voice while conjuring the sights and sounds of the sea as a form of soft meditation. Her father died of leukemia around the time she wrote the track, whose lyrics speak of loneliness and change or willful forgetting. On ‘La Perla’ however Kourtesis cedes the fight, as the buoyant percussion and whistling melodies give way to the perpetual flow of the music.
Tinashe – ‘Pasadena’ (feat. Buddy)
On the lead single from her fifth studio album, Tinashe leaned into summertime vibes and penthouse views, eschewing grand gestures and the pretence of so much hard work, content instead to carve out her own space in her own corner of the world. Recorded out of her home studio in Los Angeles, the song ‘Pasadena’ featuring the Compton rapper Buddy bursts forth with all of the vim and vigour of life. Boasting an upbeat tempo, handclap percussion, and a cheerleading chorus, the dance-oriented track feels at once implausibly taut and dizzily carefree, the confident tone of Tinashe keeping everything neatly tethered inside a message of breezy do-it-yourself positivity.
