Blackmill – Fortune Soul

1.5k shares share tweet sms send email By: and | December 16, 2015 8:00 am This week we’re taking a look at the best of 2015, both in culture, sports, and a whole lot more. Here are our 25 favorite songs of the year, and 25. Action Bronson – Actin Crazy Actin Crazy is Action Bronson’s ode to his dear mother, letting her know that while he may be going nuts out in the world, he’s “still your little baby.” Clever, funny, smart, and with a video that will make you giggle uncontrollably, it was the highlight of a prolific and controversial year for the rapper. — NS 24. Waxahatchee – La Loose Waxahatchee’s first two albums, American Weekend and Cerulean Salt, were intimate, acoustic affairs that made you feel like you wandered into a quiet room in an old house and happened upon a young woman and her acoustic guitar. Which is why on La Loose, off this year’s Ivy Tripp, it was such a wonderful surprise to hear a drum machine. This was bouncing. This was fun. It wasn’t what I was expecting,but I’m not complaining. — NS 23. Skepta — Nasty Nasty seemed to mark a renewed American interest in grime. Skepta hijacked a Wiley beat from 2005 and delivered a scathing diss to this other guy named Devilman, as part of that reminded me what the landscape of rap music looks like when some of its most prominent acts have no love for each other and no more patience to pretend otherwise. There’s not a single wasted line on Nasty. Skepta goes directly for the jugular, referencing (read: ‘snitched on’) a bunch of his friends. He then delivers the killing stroke by mocking Devilman’s penchant for rapping Chinese bars. (Which, what?) The best part? . At its core, was anticlimactic. It was like watching Mayweather bide his time, play great defense, and win by unanimous decision. This beef between Skepta, Devilman, and a grip of other grime artists was like watching two heavyweights go toe-to-toe in the middle of the ring for a few rounds, trading haymakers, but then all of a sudden someonein the crowd grabbed a folding chair, said to hell with the rules, and joined the fray. — MP 22. The Districts – 4th and Roebling The Districts hail from rural Pennsylvania and their geography is apparent in their sound — they’re rustic but not country, and will supplant a bluegrass lick with a monster indie rock guitar that crashes down on top of it. 4th and Roebling is their best yet, a song that starts sultry and then gets blown wide open, with lead singer Rob Grote working himself up into a fury by the end of the thing. — NS 21. Tyler, The Creator – Smuckers Cherry Bomb was sunnier than Tyler, The Creator’s previous 2013 effort (which was also excellent) Wolf. The hues were deeper, the colors were brighter, and the outlook was more upbeat. He was in a better place than he was two years ago, and it showed. The brightest spot on the album was Smuckers, on which Tyler somehow managed to pull close-to-prime-era verses out of both Kanye West and Lil Wayne. — MP 20. Alessia Cara – Here19-year-old Canadian songstress Alessia Cara made the anti-party anthem of the year and I’m all for those, because let’s be totally honest: parties kind of suck. As she sings (rather beautifully) about some guy who can’t handle his liquor throwing up in the corner, it begins to dawn on you: isn’t it weird and kind of stupid that sometimes you’re expected to show up and kick it with a bunch of people you don’t even like when you’re sober and talk at length about things you don’t care about? You’re right Alessia. The whole aura of this place is plexi glass.  — MP 19. Zak Abel – Say Sumthin I still don’t know a lot about Zak Abel, the 20-year-old artist from North London who seemed to spring out of the ether this year. What I do know is that his song, Say Sumthin, is the only song that I heard randomly this year that made me stop what I was doing, grab my friend who put it on the car stereo, and ask: “Who the hell is this?” Abel’s voice, a moody baritone, is worth the price of admissionalone, but that beat. Good lord, that beat! — NS 18. Tame Impala – Love / Paranoia With their third LP Currents, Tame Impala disabused themselves of the notion that they’re anything more than Kevin Parker’s voice, a bunch of interchangeable instruments, and a liberal use of a modulation pedal. There’s plenty of proof of that being a good thing on Currents, including a , but Love/Paranoia is where it’s at. Over a waterbed of synths you can sink into, Parker wonders aloud: I could just be paranoid, doesn’t quell the desire to know / what was really going on, does it really [expletive] matter? — MP 17. Young Thug – Check Nate made a few months back without consulting me and Young Thug’s mixtape-that-was-actually-an-album Barter 6 was not on it. Since I am a good person with great moral clarity that has donated blood multiple times and once nursed a bird with a broken wing back to health, I have since forgiven him, but I have not forgotten about it. Barter 6 caught flack for missing acertain something, possibly Rich Homie Quan’s mellowed lows to balance out Thugger’s frenzied highs, but to me, the album was perfect. And Check is the best song on it. Thugger said cops pull up, I put that brack in my brack, and it made such perfect sense in the moment that I never stopped to think about what a ridiculous sentence that is. SHEESH. — MP 16. The Weeknd – Can’t Feel My Face In 2015, The Weeknd completed his metamorphosis and emerged from his cocoon of self-loathing and controlled substances a beautiful crossover pop butterfly. Can’t Feel My Face was his reintroduction as that crossover pop artist, and it absolutely dominated the charts. For awhile there it was impossible to go anywhere without hearing it. Tom Cruise lip-synced it. Tom Cruise lip-synced a Weeknd song. Which is a thing that would’ve been unfathomable back when House of Balloons came out in 2011. , and rightfully so; The Weeknd pushed his music toward the dancefloor, but managed to keep that airy-voiceddowny gloom that makes him, well, him. And it brought him enormous success. — MP 15. Kanye West – All Day All Day existed on the Internet as a clutch of what sounded like cellphone recordings of studio sessions spliced together for the better part of a year. We didn’t get to hear the real thing until Kanye West went to the 2015 BRIT Awards, and it could not have been more worth the wait. West turned up on stage with 50 dudes clad in ashy black sweats and combat boots, and performed the song by the light of two flamethrowers in a room full of people dressed in evening attire. This song has almost 40 writing and production credits, and if West wins a Grammy for it, he’s probably going to only thank God and his late mother in the acceptance speech. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Don’t you ever be humble, Kanye. Don’t you dare. — MP 14. Flume feat. Andrew Wyatt – Some Minds I think 2015 was the year that EDM artists realized that the genre had been carried to its logical conclusion. Thedrops had gotten so massive, so extravagant, that there was nowhere to go. You couldn’t make sounds any bigger without involving construction noises. So what to do? A lot of people tried to figure it out, but none better than Flume, whose drop on Some Minds made me reconsider the whole genre, a genre I was ready to cast aside as irrelevant. The drop happens after the 3-minute mark if you have no patience, but the whole song is perfect. — NS 13. Steven A. Clark – Can’t Have Steven A. Clark is like if Flock Of Seagulls was all one person that grew up on a steady musical diet that’s equal parts post-808’s Kanye West, Rumors-era Fleetwood Mac, with a little New World Order sprinkled in. Can’t Have was the lead single from his debut The Lonely Roller, and by a good margin its strongest song. It opens with this grand cinematic overture, and once the drums pick up, Clark begins to lay bare all of these feelings for a lost lover that he can’t do anything with. He remembers the good timesand thinks he wants her back, but knows he can’t or shouldn’t have her. It’s fun to think about until it isn’t, and in that moment it dawns on him that he is – truly and finally – alone. — MP 12. Leon Bridges — Coming Home For , he leaned heavily on Sam Cooke and Otis Redding, not only in his sound but dress, appearance, overall demeanor. He was a time machine to a sunny past, and his songs tapped into that nostalgic core that exists deep down within each of us. I’d knock him for being derivative, but whatever, man. If you’re going to crib people’s sounds, these are two awesome people to crib. — NS 11. Drake – Hotline Bling Yeah, Hotline Bling ripped off . It did. But what has always set apart Drake isn’t so much his originality but his ability to take something and put his maudlin spin on it, which accompanied by his rap sing-song has the ability to worm its way inside your brain and hang out there for a while. Hotline Bling was like a hurricane, starting out as a small force withCaribbean roots and then gaining strength in the warm weather, before blowing up into a massive, unavoidable storm. Right? Maybe? Excuse the extended metaphor, it’s been a long year. — NS 10. Beach Slang – Bad Art & Weirdo Ideas Beach Slang’s Bad Art & Weirdo Ideas sounds like if The Replacements got ahold of the lyric book of The Ataris and tried to make it work. If that previous sentence means anything at all to you, you will love this song. Beach Slang got a bad reputation this year for not putting on a great live show, but I don’t care. When the songs sound this good in my headphones, that’s enough for me. — NS 9. Diplo & Skrillex feat. Justin Bieber – Where Are Ü Now Skrillex and Justin Bieber needed to hit the reset button in 2015, as both were in danger of being pigeonholed, Skrillex with his flatulence-of-the-gods bass drops and Bieber with his saccharine pop. They needed to grow up, basically, and to do so they turned to Diplo, the producing chameleon with the worldly recordcollection and the good taste. (Say what you will about the bro-dom of Diplo, the dude knows a good sound when he hears it.) Their collaboration brought us Where Are Ü Now, a downbeat and off-kilter dance track that’s unlike anything Diplo or Skrillex has done before. It was refreshing, it was different, and it made you dance. Who knew the kids had it in them? — NS 8. Fetty Wap – Trap Queen Yeah, this premiered online last year, and yeah, I don’t care. Trap Queen was a song of 2015, perhaps the song of 2015, as it became a massive hit through nothing else than the sheer force of its catchiness. There was no marketing plan for Trap Queen. No radio DJs were nudged to play it. It started on the internet and, one by one, people fell in love with it. It’s the little single that could. — NS 7. Joanna Newsom – Sapokanikan No other song this year made me think like this one, a bubbling, gorgeous ode to death and the passing of time. Named after a tribe of Native Americans that used to inhabitManhattan Island, the song tracks a forgotten history of the people whose bones are buried beneath Times Square. “The cause is Ozymandian,” she sings, and we recall Shelley’s poem, applied to the land east of the Hudson. What a thing to imagine. — NS 6. Hop Along – The Knock Hop Along is a band from Pennsylvania that started as a freak folk acoustic project and is now more punk than anything, but I don’t feel like applying labels is constructive here. They simply are, you know? On The Knock, lead singer Frances Quinlan’s voice stars plaintive and pleading, but as the song progresses, she gets hoarser, angrier, more vicious. It ends with a rousing yell, and the guitars come booming, swirling around her. I have no idea if this is folk or bluegrass or punk or indie or what, but I do know that when those guitars drop, I want to pump my fist and scream.  –– NS 5. Miguel – waves Miguel’s single waves is a simple song, more or less, an R&B ode to sex, but it’s the joy that Miguel brings tothe song that sets it apart from other R&B works this year. While The Weeknd worked in the shadows, his erotic nihilism only existing in late night hotel parties, Miguel’s songs are out in the open, alive and full of love. His love is not secret, nor shameful, nor dark. He wants to ride that wave, and can you blame him? –– NS 4. Bully – Milkman Milkman first came out as a single at the end of 2014, but the song was also on a 2015 LP, and I don’t care, it’s going on this list. My favorite punk song of the year, Milkman is a surging two minutes and four seconds of aggression and ecstasy. The milkman serves as a metaphor for what lead singer Alicia Bognanno imagines she could be — regular, on-time, dependable. But a milkman is essentially a stranger, and also, you know, a dead profession that isn’t around anymore. What other options are there? Bognanno doesn’t know, but she does remember a time before: “I used to be a shark.” –– NS 3. Future – March Madness I (might) forgive you forthinking that Future’s March Madness is just some typical party turn-up nonsense. But then I’d have to double back and point out to you that March Madness isn’t really “party music,” per se. It’s a world-weary protest song, packaged with a vocoder, and stuffed into the back seat of one of those flying cars from Blade Runner. Let the striking video with clips of police brutality and the Nation of Islam tell it, Future can’t take it anymore. He’s paid such close attention to everything that he’s driven himself crazy and by God, he is going to medicate himself out of it. He’s going to get completely off of his face, and then he’s going to put the pedal through the floor and never look back. He doesn’t know where he’s going, but he can’t stay here. And you can’t make him, either. As a matter of fact, you can’t even touch him, and neither can these crooked police.  — MP 2. Majical Cloudz – Downtown In , Devon Welsh of Majical Cloudz talked about his affinity for Andy Kaufman, the latecomedian who would challenge audiences, provoke them, leave them questioning if what they were watching was real, sincere, or just a confusing, mean joke. People struggle the same way with Majical Cloudz. Is he kidding? Is the shmaltz, the sincerity, just an act? Welsh insists it isn’t, and on Downtown, he’s written a masterpiece, a love song that is adolescent and universal, simple yet staying. “If suddenly I die / I hope they will say / that he was obsessed / and it was OK,” he sings, as if reading out of a teenager’s diary. I don’t know if this song is having a laugh at my expense, but I don’t give a damn. It moved me. –– NS 1. Kendrick Lamar – Alright On Alright, Kendrick Lamar wonders aloud for answers that never seem to come about this reality we find ourselves confined to. It doesn’t seem real. It can’t be. But it is. America wasn’t built with black people in mind, and he’s had to come to terms with that by learning names he should’ve never had to know. You might be familiarwith a few: Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, Renisha McBride, Laquan McDonald. All Lamar wants is freedom, but freedom – true freedom, the kind that only shows up when fear is completely absent – doesn’t come at a price he can afford. He rails against those who continually tell him it’s sunny when it isn’t: I can see the evil, I can tell it, I know it’s illegal. Things are just as bad as they ever were, and nobody wants to even acknowledge it. Just as he’s about to throw up his hands in defeat and fall backward into hopelessness and despair, Pharrell drops in to pull him back from the ledge: We gon’ be alright. We gon’ be alright. And in that moment I think damn, we just might be. — MP Listen to the whole list here: , , , , ,