thought we'd take advantage of us having some kind of internet presence, and share with y'all our picks for the best 20 songs of this year. it was tricky, and took a fair bit of deliberation, but here follows our faves from 2015 (side note - although we're very proud of it, treeman on fire will not be making an appearance as we aren't yet that narcissistic). enjoy, and if there are any songs here you haven't checked out yet then do so mayne xox
THE song of the summer. this may have been a huge club bxnger, but we personally heard it first blaring impossibly loud out of the speakers of cocktail cocktail (or double cock, as we affectionately called it) @ leeds fest 2015. let me tell you, nothing keeps you awake like coors lite, vodka and deafening house pop.
19. Father John Misty - True Affection
fabuloso little song from his equally fabuloso album. while pretty much every other song on the record is acoustic and romantically lavish, this tune takes the techno grooves of a mid-80s new order and mellows them out with beautiful cooing vocals and a gorgeously honest sentiment that had us weak at the knees and questioning our sexuality.
18. Alabama Shakes - Don't Wanna Fight
easily one of the catchiest choruses of the year - as jamie will certainly testify. in fact, the only reason it isn't higher in the list is that he's been singing the chorus virtually non stop for the last 6 months and it's really annoying. despite his ruination though the song holds up very nicely, with juddering guitar harms and raspy bluesy vocals - much better than anything jamie can do.
17. Courtney Barnett - Deprestoncourtney barnett's album was a pleasant surprise when it dropped, and we over here (me and jamie at least) were very very fond of it. this song is imho the best on the record, just because it's soft, grooving and old courtney's voice has never sounded sweeter. beautiful little ditty, it be. once again, courtney manages to sum up the universal experience of driving to a house in preston, australia, and how preston is really dull and depressing - you get the feeling she's never been to wakefield.
16. Juan Wauters - I'm All Wrong
awwwwwwwww juan. he's a cutie. we had the pleasure of supporting him in september at the brude, and it was honestly (from a punter's perspective, and nothing to do with us) one of my favourite gigs of the year. he played this song 3 times at ben's request, and you can see why. it's a sweet little acoustic song, with some of the greatest lyricism of our time - "like a movie that is good, you require my attention" will always be a classic. like we said in our previous blog about juan, he's uruguay's finest.
15. Dutch Uncles - Upsilonfantastic song from a fantastic album. dutch uncles have always been able to write a banger or two, and this is the latest - and possibly the greatest of all of them. it's got this unrelenting marimba hook which underpins the entire song, and a chorus built around driving backing vocals, percussion and stringy synth, as all good choruses should be. while there were several other songs from o shudder which we could have put here - babymaking, in n out, decided knowledge to name a few, this is the one that makes me happiest when i listen to it. that's what pop music is meant to do, right? make you happy.
14. Lethal Bizzle - Fester Skank
while lethal bizzle has made himself a bit of a laughing stock in recent years with his... interesting forays into lad pop, this tune when it dropped was undoubtedly FIRE. while it can't be called grime as bizzle would probably like it to be referred to, fester skank is a fantastic pop song. the lyrics are hilarious as well - lines such as "it's me and diztortion, ending careers - abortion" providing some of the greatest rhymes since rihanna rhymed "resilient" with "brilliant" on hard back in 2009. i suppose, being a disciple of his snapchat (@denchchat if you don't know it), i am biased - but, for all his narcissism and ladness, bizzle can still make bangers like this.
13. Dr Dre ft. Kendrick Lamar - Genocide
who expected dre to come back in 2015? more yet - who expected dre to come back with a soundtrack album with a million collaborations on it? i didn't, which is why compton was such a massive record when it came out over the summer. this song is my personal fave - a classic hip hop bassline, verses from dr dre and kendrick, and a sample so obscure you can't even tell when you're listening to the original. also, the production is absolutely killer - but you expect nothing less from the king himself.
12. Slaves - Cheer Up London
slaves' album may have been a bit shite, but this single from it was definitely not. it was less than 3 minutes long, the lyrics had no depth at all and the riff was childishly simple, but that's what made slaves great for the 6 month period that they were good. the chorus is one of my favourites of the year, and a classic to shout along to on the train. "YOU'RE DEAD ALREADY, DEAD DEAD ALREADY-READY". the video was also pretty good, one of those one-shot-wonder things, with a load of balloons and people and impossible, madonna-esque costume changes.
11. JME ft. Giggs - Man Don't Carethis is a proper grime tune. skepta might have stolen the spotlight this year with shutdown (he even stole a higher spot on this list), but with jme releasing bangers like this he was impossible to ignore in 2015. this song in particular had a filthy organ sample (better than the sample from shutdown, imho), a feature from grime don giggs (who wore a fetching star wars hat in the video (which is great by the way)) and a verse from jme which had the traditional insane bars that he drops on pretty much all his tracks. i think it was pitchfork that said that "you'll get box in the eye with the fob i use to log into my hsbc" is the most british threat of 2015, which is a fantastic piece of journalism. but yeah, gr8 gr8 song. i'm just sad it couldn't be put higher on the list, but jme probably won't care.
10. Jacco Gardner - Find Yourself
forget anything off currents. forget whatever shit the flaming lips put out this year. this song is THE out and out psych song of the year (unless you count the pond song we've put at 7 to be a psych song, but whatever). it's got a great keyboard melody, it's got great vocals, it's got a great bassline, it's got everything you need for a nodheady psych banger. it sounds vintage and warm, but at the same time otherworldly, futuristic and KILLER. tame impala may have lead the psych revival of recent years, but they seem to have gone off on a funk tangent and moved away from the guitars and organs that this song brings back. it's glamorous, it's silly, it's blissful, it probably sounds fantastic when you're high.
9. Stealing Sheep - Not Real
stealing sheep are a band i've only recently discovered, which is odd because i've known about them for at least two years. they're on the same label as temples, toy and the wytches, but sound completely different to all of them. they aren't wimpy revivalists like temples, they aren't mascara clad scenesters in tight jeans and polo necks like toy, and they aren't a kinda shitty rock band like the wytches. instead they're a 3 piece who play music which sits somewhere between metronomy and warpaint. if you listen to this song, you get a prime example. it sounds essentially like what would happen if warpaint had written an album like the english riviera. considering that warpaint are an incredible band and the english riviera is an incredible album, you can see how this is so good.
8. GUM - Anaesthetized Lesson
kevin parker gets a lot of the attention for being the best songwriter in tame impala, but a lot has to be said for his (fit) keyboardist jay watson. you'd think that a man who's in both tame impala and pond would have enough music in his life to keep himself busy, but apparently not. his first album as GUM had some decent tracks on it, but nothing as catchy and sick as this. in fact, nothing tame impala or pond have ever written is as catchy as this. it's psych-funk at it's best, proper cheesy 80s keyboards and a falsetto vocal hook which has been in my head for months. jay is fitter than kevin parker and nick albrook, and as it turns out just as talented a pop writer. it might not be anything too removed from his tame and pond stuff, but when it's this good who cares (not me).
7. Pond - Sitting Up On Our Crane
you might think it's a bit hypocritical to say that anaesthitized lesson is a catchier song than this, then put it lower in the list - but hear me out. this song is completely different to gum's, although jay does sing on both. where the last song was a funk banger, this is for the most part a chilled out piece of electro psych which dealt with that relatable feeling where you climb up a massive crane with your friends and then want to commit suicide. it's cheery, really. also the outro is sick as fuckkk. possibly my favourite moment in music this year is the drop in this song - it's magnificent, and chilled, and druggy, and builds in grandiosity with arpeggios and classic oooooh backing vocals and strings and oh wow, it's great. trust.
6. Absent Parachute - Trip
we had to put ONE absent parachute song in here, c'mon. and why not put the best one. we know ben, arch and oli don't like their ep but we still do, and trip is surely one of the greatest indie tunes to come out this year yo. it may not have taken the charts by storm, but 30 years from now when the bbc does a documentary on the great underground indie bands of the '10s, this song will be considered one of the best. and everyone will be really disappointed that they didn't come and have a go on the trip when they were asked. ben morgan has never written better lyrics than the ones here (which is saying something because he writes great lyrics and is basically the next lennon).
5. Kendrick Lamar - The Blacker The Berry
WOAH. damn, this song went hard when it dropped. i had no idea kendrick had so much anger to spew out, but this showed the world that he had the potential to make a real difference to the hip hop game. out of the context of to pimp a butterfly, it seemed a little brash at first, but once you got to the third verse you understood exactly what he was trying to say. needless to say, once he dropped the line "so why did i weep when trayvon martin was in the street, when gangbanging made me kill a nigga blacker than me?" you were in the fukking zone, man. to pimp a butterfly is a seminal rap record, and it's all centred on this incredible track, which calls out the hypocrisy of race relations and black violence on both sides of the argument. you only need to look at the gifs in the comment section on rapgenius to see how good this song was as a piece of writing. musically too, it's pretty hard to beat. the chorus in unintelligible, but still fantastic, and the beat behind it all is one of the best to come out of hip hop's back pocket in the last decade. there's no argument of drake vs. kendrick really - we all know this beats the shit out of hotline bling.
4. Death Grips - Inanimate Sensation"ererherherEHREreRIIIIIEIREIEIEIEIEIEIEIIIIIIII"
that right there is the greatest song opening of two thousand fifteen. it'll make no sense right now unless you've already heard the song, but once you go across to our spotify playlist you'll get it straight away. death grips are one of the most important bands in the world right now, and songs like this make them top of whatever game they're playing. it's equal parts baffling and accessible, volatile and strangely poppy. it kinda sounds like a grime tune, just with more revvy synths and vocals from ride that are literally just shouting. genius. it was hard to choose between this and on GP, the HEAVY suicide song that we covered at AP's launch party back in april, but based on accessibility and on how much both songs bang, and also the fact that for a long time this was all the death grips we had to listen to while waiting for jenny death to drop, inanimate sensation just about edges it.
3. Everything Everything - No Reptilesi could have chosen any one of the songs on get to heaven to put in this top 20 (apart from regret because that's a bit naff rlly isn't it), but this one is the best. again, it addresses a very relatable subject matter - in this case, feeling like a fat child in a pushchair, and how that's alright. it is seriously a song that connects with you though, and the lyrics and music both build together perfectly and create a song that's really more of an experience than pretty much everything i've heard this year. it's a psychological dissection of loners, which strikes a real chord with loners like me. one of my highlights of leeds fest this summer was singing along to this as loud as i could, surrounded in the nme tent by thousands of silent catfish and the bottlemen fans (twats). and now, if i could for a moment pretend that i'm writing for noisey or some shite: on an album which talks poetically about the strange state of the world in 2015, this song is a more personal perspective - and in the light of recent terrorist attacks such as at the bataclan in november and charleston in june, as well as others all over the world, lines such as "i'm going to kill a stranger, so don't you be a stranger" are eerily powerful.
2. Skepta - Shutdowni know i said earlier that jme's man don't care has a better sample than shutdown, but i could certainly never deny (and i definitely won't) that shutdown is the bigger b@nger. this song has been EVERYWHERE since it dropped, to the degree where i don't think there's a single person in the uk (or even the US if you've seen the top boy documentary) who doesn't yet know the chorus. 2015 was the year that grime properly blew up and became international, and skepta is at the top of the game yo. this has also (unfortunately) become the year that suburban teenage girls with a moderate twitter following have taken to buying late-noughties adidas caps and sweatshirts and reciting the lyrics to shutdown every few minutes, but hey ho. every hyped artists spawns a shitty fanbase - just look at peace / mac demarco etc. bbk at leeds fest was absolute mayhem, and when this came on... i've never seen so much shit being lost at one single time. the chorus also contains enough references to other skepta tunez to please the die-hard fans, and provided the rest of us with homework. it's my goal to eventually be able to understand every reference in the chorus, and then and only then will i be able to call myself a skepta fan. britain has never produced a bigger or better rockstar than skepta, and never a song more massive than this.
1. Ought - Beautiful Blue Skyamerica, on the other hand... britain may be proud of our musical heritage, and there will always be those who say that the americans are just copying us. listening to ought will bring up similar criticism - because let's face it, they do sound a fair bit like the fall - but who cares. the beatles sounded like every other band that was around in the early 60s. tame impala sound like dungen. every band that followed the arctic monkeys sounded like the arctic monkeys. ought may have some fairly obvious influences, but that doesn't stop them being one of the best young bands in the damn world. their first record only came out in 2014, and their latest dropped earlier this year. that's nothing if not prolific. and the great thing is - both albums have some absolutely class songs on. the weather song from the first is a certified TUNE, as is men for miles from the latest. and no song released this year was better than beautiful blue sky. it builds beautifully on a sweet bassline and driving drums, which are brilliant in their simplicity, with mucky guitars and smooth organ chucked on top for good measure. the reason this song is amazing, though, is the vocals. tim darcy gives us a performance that's unlike anything indie music has heard in years, if ever... as strange as it is brilliant. the chorus is in-CREDIBLE, and the lyrics are both funny as hell and incredibly poignant:
"how's the family? how's the family? how's the family?
beautiful weather today, beautiful weather today, beautiful weather today, beautiful weather today,
fancy seeing you here, fancy seeing you here, fancy seeing you here, fancy seeing you here,
it's all that we have, it's all that we have,
just that and the big, beautiful blue sky,
i'm no longer afraid to die"
as rapgenius so elegantly summarises, "this song grabs the mundane and stares at it with its whole heart. it recognizes the extraordinary mundanity of its content, of the topics it considers, as an attempt to salvage authenticity from out modern society, which has become in many ways a constructed spectacle. though so much of the life is filled with bullshit, there is still the big beautiful blue sky - the human actor, though perhaps primarily at the behest of the world around him or her, is still human and can appreciate the big beautiful blue sky."
pretty elegant thought for such a young band. philosophy manifested in music, and the result is oh so sweet. a little more hard hitting than anything bieber's put out this year, anyway.
AND THERE ARE OUR OPINIONS.
we made a spotify playlist of the top 20, which you can listen to here
the only songs we couldn't get on there were trip by AP, because they don't have spotify (like taylor swift, artistic integrity, that sort of thing). so here's a link to trip, and we've replaced both songs on spotify with honourable mentions that didn't quite make the cut but were still great yo.
stick around for the next few days if you've enjoyed this, we'll be putting up a similar list for out albums of the year in the next couple of days xox