The best songs of 2021

Tyler, The Creator - 'Lumberjack'

The first advance single from

Tyler's imperial album The Creator, was this outrageous.

Deranged, paranoid, chaotic and dislocated, 'Lumberjack' makes so much happen in just two minutes that, once the song is finished, the first impulse is to put it back on, because surely you've missed something.

Trotting to a single but industrious chord, Tyler reminds us that he was once a great rapper.

With a

based on trying hard to make it look like you're not trying the slightest bit, the former Odd Future component delivers another cut that's like a resume.

Below, noise, screams, parallel conversations and jokes to end.

A wonderful mess.

Sprints - 'How Does The Story Go?'

Regretting having been

and cursing everyone who

was

(and, above all, who you hung out with) has been one of the trends this year. And one, hearing all those stories of disappointment, frustration, impostation and lack of sex, one only hopes that those who broadcast them are happy enough not to tell all that only to convince themselves that they are now happier, better people, sex machines. , stars on and around Twitter, than in those dark times when we almost forever lose the concept of youth. Sprints is a young Irish combo that makes

abrasive

, with its grunge stamp, its bit of post-punk and a very fashionable touch for reciting its lyrics. Here on a

located right on the triple border where Breeders, Blur and Nirvana meet, they say that they are not well, that they are wasting time, that they want to go home, that ... who are all these people in the house?

It is a small hymn, one of those who matter a lot to very few people.

“I swear to God I'm the only asshole on this site who's not feeling well!” Karla Chubb screams in the chorus.

To be happy you don't have to be happy.

Simone Felice, frontman of The Felice Brothers.

The Felice Brothers - 'To-Do List'

They grew up in the Catskills Mountains in upstate New York, the same place The Band took refuge to record their first songs.

Some of that country and outlaw spirit must have remained in the DNA of The Felice Brothers, a band inheriting the legacy of that bastard and modest folk, which combines roots and primitive sounds with a

courage

.

After almost two decades of career, this year they have released an album that reaffirms them as one of the least known and most fascinating North American bands of the 21st century.

This song bears all its hallmarks: swampy guitars, choirs of train robbers and the desire to play as if it were the last day on earth.

Zahara - 'Merichane'

Puta,

the best album in Zahara's career and one of the great works of the Spanish musical year, had this preview song.

A bomb against the foundations of patriarchy, a vital first-person review with an open heart and a sonic ecstasy of industrial and dance pop, which elevated it to a new artistic dimension.

The dimension of a first-rate songwriter and singer, a reference for a generation.

As harsh as it is addictive, 'Merichane', the whore from Úbeda, is already a song that owns its time and a character that serves to reclaim the just and equal place proposed by the feminist struggle.

Robe - 'Second Movement: Philosophy Shit'

“Shit philosophy, I would go, I drown.

/ Tell me if you would come, and the day, and the hour ”.

After almost two years with the world walking on shaky legs, Robe Iniesta wanted to leave his manifesto of these unsettling times.

His third album,

arrived in April as a devastating 44-minute symphony connected by a philosophical cord with Extremoduro's great work,

from 2008. The album

It was sold as the second part of that album.

It is a work that must be heard for what it is: a unit.

But if you want a summary of it, it is best to hold on to this 'Second movement: philosophy shit'.

Today's progressive rock, furious and romantic at the same time.

A vibrant song unlike anything else.

From left to right, Diego Moreno, Antonio Carmona, C. Tangana, La Húngara, Israel Fernández and Nathy Peluso at the Latin Grammys in November 2021 in Las Vegas. Kevin Winter (Getty Images)

C. Tangana and Antonio Carmona - 'Kill me'

We realized the planetary dimension of Rosalía when we saw her at parties with the Kardashian clan.

C. Tangana's jump to world stardom was less bizarre: on a select program,

on the US public network NPR.

There he premiered this magical song, which brings a smile to your face as soon as you start and shows the good time that the Madrilenian is living.

An after-dinner party, with a bottle of anise and glasses in sight.

About fifteen people clapping their hands, pounding the table, singing, smiling.

Alizzz, Kiko Veneno, La Húngara and the Carmona clan (much more salutary than the Kardashian), with Antonio at the helm, at the service of a rumbita about the importance of being faithful to those who are always there.

The culmination of an artist who is modernizing music with Spanish roots.

Yves Tumor - 'Jackie'

It was summer when the American musician surprised with an eminently rock song (the weight of the electric guitar, the rocky textures, the

spirit

and, nevertheless, telluric and nothing nostalgic.

Is it because of the voice, treated and distant?

Or because Yves Tumor came from the future and then all his pieces already know what is to come?

'Jackie' reconciles many of us who were already into something else with guitars.

With the video clip, galactic forest and burgundy about the tragedy of a bad love ("I'm not sleeping / I refuse to eat," sings Tumor), one reaches the total climax.

Singer James Blake, on the cover of his new album, 'Friends That Break Your Heart'.

James Blake feat.

SZA - 'Coming Back'

The problem with songs in foreign languages ​​is that when listening, part of the grace is lost: the meaning becomes significant.

With this song, part of Blake's return in 2021 with a remarkable fifth album, it is convenient to do the exercise of delving into the lyrics: the verses, which fit smoothly into a catchy melody, tell that true feelings are houses that one freely decides to inhabit. or rent to return to them later.

To hold such transcendence, a luminous piano and heartfelt performances by Blake and SZA suffice.

A joy.

Chill Mafia - 'Gazte Arruntaren Koplak'

In the seventies, the singer-songwriter Xabier Lete published 'Gizon arruntaren koplak', or 'The verses of the common man', a song that described a day of an anonymous man.

In the eighties, Hertzainak, pioneers of Basque radical rock, seemed to be inspired by him for the homonymous song in which they performed.

And this year, Chill Mafia, a rag- but-band from Pamplona as revolutionary in substance and form as the singer-songwriters and RRV were at the time, transformed it into 'Gazte Arruntaren Koplak', or 'Las verses of the young current'.

A version that produces the exciting sensation that something great is cooking in the north.

Damon Locks & Black Monument Ensemble - 'The Body Is Electric'

The song begins as a conversation about the importance of being aware of the here and now, a place from which to better understand the past and project the future in a more responsible way.

From the collective.

And from there a choral dialogue is built between musicians and voices, which sounds almost like a plea, situated between improvised jazz,

and the will to believe in that common future.

"The body is electric, it is alive with life," says the song.

Everything is movement.

Moor Mother, during a concert at the Primavera Club festival (Barcelona), in 2019 Dani Canto

Moor Mother - 'Made a Circle'

There is less explicit violence in the sound of Moor Mother's new work than in previous installments.

However, his album

reaches the same levels of intensity from a rest that at first becomes strange and then sinks deep.

It is a concrete and abstract hip hop album, where the

and the contemporary coexist without complexes.

And a good account of this is given here by Moor Mother herself along with Nappy Nina, Maassai, Antonia Gabriela and Orion Sun.

With five voices, they build one of the most sober cuts on the album, with

unstoppable

and undeniable message.

But will we listen?

/ We do not listen".

Cristian de Moret - 'Meteoro'

How much can a flamenco cante be twisted - let's say nothing less than a toná de trilla - without ceasing to be so?

This false paradox of sorites (whose solution mobilizes more sociological than musicological tools) Cristian de Moret has launched into one of the most unique songs on his extraordinary album

a toná accompanied on piano under a jazz ballad scheme with a Harmony that melodically mutates the toná, blurring some of its features but maintaining those others that allow the tension and functional sense of cante to be maintained.

Quite a find.

James Brandon Lewis - 'Jesup Wagon'

In the title track of one of the great albums of the year, Lewis and his extraordinary Red Lily Quintet look to the past from the future, and vice versa: blues, New Orleans rhythms or

come together in a vibrant theme that flourishes from the African-American tradition, but that sounds totally contemporary.

If jazz has a future, it is driven by its own history.

After several years being a promise in the making, the saxophonist achieves his first masterpiece with 'Jesup Wagon' and becomes, now, an essential voice of his generation.

Mexican singer Natalia Lafourcade, in June 2021. Maureen M. Evans

Natalia Lafourcade with Rubén Blades and Mare Warning - 'You do know how to love me'

In 2017, in the excellent album

Natalia Lafourcade included 'Tú si saberme', a beautiful jarocho son whose lyrics are, in the words of its author, a tribute to brave and free love.

In 2021, Lafourcade has taken up that vibrant piece to re-record it with his compatriot Mare Warning, rapper, feminist and social activist, and with Rubén Blades, king of all sauces.

With such joyous accompaniment, the song has crossed borders and styles in a unique encounter of searches and discoveries.

Céline Banza - 'Départ'

"And even if you leave, I'll get back on my way / It's not what I want, but I'm not afraid to try."

Congolese Céline Banza sings like this in this composition from her debut,

.

Performed in Ngbandi, the mother tongue of its author, the song participates in the French counterpoint provided by rapper Youssoupha.

'Départ' is not part of the hectic world of the

, but rather follows a path in which African echoes are entangled with folk, blues and soul.

After all, Banza moves on the same sound wave as Lokua Kanza.

Sharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen - 'Like I Used To'

Going back to sleep late. Back to dancing alone. Fall in love again. That's what the verses of the second collaboration between Van Etten and Olsen invite after their version of 'Femme Fatale'. It was published in May and, more than as an ode to the struggling rebirth that usually comes after heartbreak, it ended up sounding like the ideal soundtrack for the return to normality in the post-pandemic world, which we wanted definitive then. It will have been the female duo of the year, with permission of Taylor Swift and Phoebe Bridgers in 'Nothing New'. It contains good taste squared, the epic of a

that has the elegance of not exploding and the dirty realism of Bruce Springsteen: in the distance, you can even hear the echoes of his 'Born to Run'. They were born to go slower, but at an increasingly steady pace.

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