“Honey Badger” - Eprom (Rwina, 2012)
Where do I even start with this one? Maybe a demand that it should be experienced with headphones at full volume. Portland DJ Eprom came through in 2012 with Metahuman, a sonic playground which contains some of the most whacked-out bangers of the decade. “Honey Badger” is the perfect opener, kicking things off with ASMR-inducing waves of watery drips, so close you can feel each one striking your eardrums. The track evolves into a stuttering hip-hop beat but never leaves this feeling of tactility and WETNESS behind. It’s an absolute treat for the ears. Something to test new audio gear out with, but also something to bop your head to. The experimentation within still feels fresh nearly 8 years later. - BR
“House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls” - The Weeknd (XO, 2011)
Siouxsie and the Banshees' "Happy House" was one of the more paranoid cuts the band provided to the UK Top 40 during their wildly impressive run in the '80s, and it was a song that was dripping with irony: we're happy, right? It's a happy house, right? Everyone's goddamn pleased and pleasant, right?! In a yuppified '80s, fake smiles hid the churn of truly dark emotions, and, to put it simply, it makes for a hell of a sample use.
In the hands of Abel Tesfaye (along with Illangelo & Doc McKinney), "Happy House" provides the perfect soundtrack for the centerpiece of The Weeknd's House of Balloons, giving ample paranoia and self-doubt to a journey where it "Hurts to breathe / Open a window / Your mind wants to leave / But you can't go." Given that a long-running theme through Tesfaye's work is numbing yourself to avoid the pain (be it with sex, drugs, or ... OK, mainly those two things), the shift to the song's second portion, "Glass Table Girls", is striking. As if broadcast directly from the bottom of a K-hole, "Glass Table Girls" is every paranoid fantasy come true at once, of losing your sense of self, of losing your sense of time, of losing everything you know about what makes you--you. "But I'm a nice dude / With some nice dreams," he argues, unconvincingly, at the end of the track, but by that point we're already too far into the song to break away: in reaching this sad new high, Tesfaye ends up describing what we all want to feel during this tumultuous decade: anesthetized indifference to the horrors all around us. - ES
“House of Woodcock” – Jonny Greenwood (Nonesuch, 2018)
With his score to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread(2017), Jonny Greenwood made impressionism cool again. There’s a Debussy-like quality to the gentle piano on “House of Woodcock,” the central piece of the Phantom Threadscore. Anderson’s film, an oddball case study of twisted love in Merchant Ivory clothing, would be much less the work it is were it not for Greenwood’s clever compositions. Out of context, “House of Woodcock” sounds like a sketch toward a warm nocturne; in context, it heightens the incongruity between the genteel surface of Phantom Thread’s characters and their underlying angst. Like all great film music composers Greenwood penned a song that’s unextractable from its context, yet can still stand ably on its own. - BE
“The House that Heaven Built” - Japandroids (Polyvinyl, 2012)
It’s one thing to make your “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Despite the massive chorus, that’s the anthem of alienation, a vision of never being played outside of tearsoaked bedrooms, even as it evolved into a generational icon. That has to be by accident. But if you’re aiming for “Born to Run,” “Seven Nation Army,” “Gloria,” “Let’s Go Crazy,” you can’t just see it being blasted across a stadium, you’ve got to feel it in your bones.
And “The House that Heaven Built” is that song. Japandroids’ love of Springsteen and The Clash made them create furious punk that hollered to the heavens, demanding God come down and explain himself. At some point, this song had only been played in a garage, two guys, one guitar one drum kit, and an earth-shattering howl rushing out in some suburb of Vancouver. What did that feel like? Did Japandroids know in that moment they had something definitive? Something legendary pulsing out of their amps? “When they love you and they will/ Tell them all to love in my shadow/ When they try to slow you down/ Tell them all to go to hell” goes the chorus that Brian King doesn’t even have to sing live. Even if you’ve never heard it before, the swell is impossible to ignore, the history of rock flowing through every ragged note. - NS
“I Need a Forest Fire” - James Blake (Polydor, 2016)
A sparse, haunting creation of James Blake and the similarly-crooning Justin Vernon (of indie-folk behemoth Bon Iver), “I Need A Forest Fire” is a paean for the wanting, for the desire of something new. As bass-soaked, heartbeat-like synths ground the track in a uniquely James Blake darkness, the voices of Blake and Vernon dance atop it, each line a dreamlike request for cleansing.
As is custom with Blake’s songwriting, “I Need A Forest Fire”is not subtle. “Burn it like cedar / I request another dream / I need a forest fire” wails Vernon, over a repeating loop of Blake’s voice. The forest fire is the cleansing, the act of harm upon the self that brings about a stage of growth. Who wants for a forest fire other than those in need of a rebirth? - DD
“Ice Cream” - Battles (Warp, 2011)
A decade on, Battles’ “Ice Cream” is still like no other song I have ever heard. It is essentially a nonsense song, with Matias Aguayo’s vocals serving as hypeman to the band’s emboldened instrumental phrasing and peculiar chord progressions. There’s syncopation galore, as well as a couple of hilarious math rock breakdowns and a sort-of guitar solo. It’s nuts. I don’t know what’s happening. Go listen to it. And watch the music video. - HM
“If We Were Vampires” - Jason Isbell (Sub Pop, 2012)
In so many ways, Americana is a supernatural concept, dotted with myths that surround a legacy of pain and suffering. The 2010s were the years of a bleak confrontation with an apocalyptic future. Climate change, social upheaval, wildfire summers raging across the landscape. Americana, as we had come to know it, in all its legends & cover-ups, was a dying beast. Jason Isbell might be its strongest voice still singing.
It’s this sense of hardship and reclamation that suffuses Isbell’s writing on “If We Were Vampires,” a simple song of love and monsters. Vampirism is treated with a weight that belies it being referenced as a corny offhand reference, but a sentence that would rob life of meaning. It’s the limited nature, the temporary-ness, of life that makes love dear.Over a melody that feels simple & painful all at once, Isbell weaves an entire lifetime of devotion into a few short verses. A fleeting glimpse at a lover’s embrace in the dark, a vision of another world of eternal life dotted between Isbell’s trademark Western imagery.
“If We Were Vampires” is about the contrast, about the length & the brief, about the eternal and the endings. A song that fits a generation of listeners afraid of both the finality & the chaos of the modern era, shot through by visions of a simple past. There won’t be an eternal life for any of us, but that only makes what good we can find so much sweeter. - DD
“iHeard” - Young Fathers (Anticon, 2013)
Preeminent Scottish boy band hip-hop-crooners Young Fathers came through with five massive projects this decade and even won themselves a Mercury Prize for their breakout album Dead. But their first and possibly most haunting masterpiece, from all the way back in 2013, was “I Heard.” It opens the Fathers’ second tape, fittingly titled Tape Two, with the sonic dynamics that we’ve come to expect from the Edinburgh trio — hushed rap verses, gospel-tinged group vocals, and rumbling, ascendant production that feels as indebted to ChilledCow as it does to Massive Attack (or the Dust Brothers, from whom the track’s main sample was lifted). Of course, “I Heard” is a pleasure to listen to: the cryptic lyrics (“Inside I’m feeling dirty / It’s only cuz I’m hurting”) give way to the three boys’ gorgeous voices and together create something soothingly familiar yet terribly alien, like if the Bee Gees listened to too much Destiny’s Child or the BYU Men’s Choir was thinking about covering a bunch of TLC. The song is a classic, a milestone in the path of an already-storied group that doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. By the time the beat threatens to collapse on itself around the three-minute mark, YF’s one-of-a-kind destructo-pop has entranced us and shown us the future. - HM
“In Kind” - Braids (Arbutus, 2013)
“Lost my conscious in quotations/ Say just what they want me to.”
Flourish // Perish is an album of battling, burbling voices. A thousand of them seem to fly from the rafters, invading Raphaelle Standell-Preston’s thoughts and every inch of Taylor Smith’s wonked electronics and Austin Tufts’ clattering drums. There are moments of clarity, moments of insanity, then “In Kind” reaches a miraculous equilibrium between the two. Split into three parts over nearly eight minutes, the closing track is undoubtably the most ambitious and holds all the anxious weight of the rest of the album, using it as a propulsive momentum. The opening segment is a calming meditation, soon unspooling into a churning mash of drums and cooed vocals.
That’s all before Tufts decides to just go bananas on the drums, rushing everything forward, forcing the song to break from its cozy cocoon into ever more beautiful, thrilling, hostile territories. Standell-Preston’s vocal gymnastics become incomprehensible, leading to a full screaming match with herself. “In Kind” stands on its own as a progressive feat of electronic and analogue fusion, but with a full album’s worth of struggle, those last screams she leaves us with are transcendent, freely inviting tears and ascension. - NS
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“Inside the Deku Tree” - Leon Vynehall (Downtempo, 2014)
When you name your track after a cut from the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time soundtrack, you better not be fucking around. Luckily, Leon Vynehall knows what he’s doing. This isn’t a cover, but is clearly inspired by the serene, magical soundscapes of Koji Kondo’s compositions for the seminal Nintendo 64 game. The track begins with the sound of a tape deck firing up, giving the impression that these sounds were not created, but discovered in some forgotten box, covered in dust. As a lone hi-hat pops in, a shuffling house groove emerges in between the sighing strings. Synth pads rise up from behind, setting a lush backdrop for a lead melody that plays off of the strings and hi-hat to deliver a euphoric sense of movement. Near the end, the strings are left on their own to wave in the breeze like leaves.
Essentially, Vynehall has achieved house perfection without even touching the mainstays of the genre: kick drums and bass. It’s an enveloping and infectious piece of work. I remember chuckling at YouTube comments below the song: “where’s the bass??” and “can someone PLEASE make a remix with some fat drums underneath?”. Sometimes, the bread tastes so good that it doesn’t need butter. - BR