The Top 10 Songs Of 2019, According To Everyone
BLAME IT ON THE OLD TOWN ROAD
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It's December, which means Best of 2019 lists are here. With so many lists out there, who has time to read all of them?

Turns out: We do. But because you probably don't, we rounded up all the Top 10 lists we could find, smashed 'em together in a big spreadsheet, and spit out overall Top 10 lists for the year's best albums, songs, books, TV shows and movies. You're welcome.

Methodology


The Best Songs Of 2019



10. 'Gone' — Charli XCX & Christine and the Queens

A high-octane bridge between the rave-ups of Charli XCX's past and the sleek robo-pop of her present, "Gone" is the best Charli of both worlds. The song's central tension is nothing new—being surrounded by people yet feeling so alone—but how she chooses to alleviate that pain is something special: with a bombastic, bulletproof synth-pop chorus that revels in the roiling chaos of social anxiety. Christine and the Queens' Héloïse Letissier is Charli's perfect foil, adding her own cryptic ruminations on self-isolation over spiky synth stabs and glittering, glitched-out effects. The titillating video for "Gone," with Charli and Chris chained to and then dancing atop a white sports car in the rain, only solidified the song's place as one of the most cathartic moments in pop this year.

[Pitchfork]

Listen: Spotify // Apple Music // Amazon



9. 'Harmony Hall' - Vampire Weekend

If the 18 songs on Vampire Weekend's Father of the Bride manage to display nearly everything Ezra Koenig has figured out how to do as he's built his onetime dorm room collaboration into a mature paragon of omnivorous pop-rock, "Harmony Hall" is the keystone. It connects Koenig's long-running fascination with the interior monologues of various worried minds with a rising awareness of responsibility to others; it marries his familiar winking wordiness with a new impulse to ride a groove; it's grounded deeply enough in the reality of bodily threats that he can credibly sing, "I don't wanna live like this, but I don't wanna die," before a wordless choir sends the song into the rafters.

[NPR]

Listen: Spotify // Apple Music // Amazon



8. 'Suge' - DaBaby

DaBaby's true breakout moment this year came when he dropped the song and video for "Suge." It was a bit prophetic in that DaBaby has been tested a couple of times by haters (each of which has resulted in the rapper knocking people out for the world to see): once in the mall, while trying to purchase some Louis Vuitton, and another time during a live show, when someone walked up on him while he was performing. This is what plays in someone's head when DaBaby and his bodyguard are chasing their ass down the street. What really makes "Suge" special, though, is even if you feel like you're getting tired of the song, the beat and hook are both so infectious, you can't stop bopping to it. Someone on Twitter said DaBaby makes Scooby-Doo chase music, and you know what? Whoever said that was absolutely right.

[Complex]

Listen: Spotify // Apple Music // Amazon



7. 'Not' - Big Thief

A masterpiece of indie rock with a savage truth at its heart. In a world besieged by lies, we can no longer say what we are, only what we're not. This comes out as a wry, poetic laundry list from Adrianne Lenker: "Not a ruse / Not heat / Not the fire lapping up the creek / Not food / That you eat." The matter-bending guitar solo has the ragged glory of Neil Young's finest.

[The Guardian]

Listen: Spotify // Apple Music // Amazon



6. 'Bags' - Clairo

The lead single off the 21-year-old pop wunderkind's Immunity, "Bags" is a tender, tentative song that sheds the lo-fi bedroom aesthetic that defined her earlier music. Working with superproducer Rostam will do that, but the song transcends even the loftiest expectations set for her. Over a gentle, infectious bass line, Clairo sings about the dissolution of an affair in a way that's both mature and a reminder that being young and in love can be really fucking hard. […] "Bags" fully inhabits the smallness of those moments, and the result is the biggest moment of her promising career.

[The Ringer]

Listen: Spotify // Apple Music // Amazon



5. 'Seventeen' - Sharon Van Etten

"Seventeen" is the soaring, sepia-toned first single from Sharon Van Etten's Remind Me Tomorrow. Simultaneously heartbreaking and hopeful, the song reads like an aural transcript of a visit to her old stomping grounds, and the discordant memories which can bubble to the surface when we survey our past. […] It's a pensive track that showcases her ability to flip between silky croons, desperate howls, and languid la-la-las with alacrity. […] With "Seventeen," Van Etten displays stellar, Springsteen-esque songcraft, and demonstrates that while she's unafraid to look backward, she's still rising to the height of her powers.

[FLOOD Magazine]

Listen: Spotify // Apple Music // Amazon



4. 'Cellophane' - FKA twigs

Behind the experimental production that has characterized so much of her music, FKA twigs has always been one of the best working writers of love songs. She captures the way love is both personally immediate but deeply alien to us, something visceral but hard to understand. That's more apparent than ever on "Cellophane." The way she sings "Why don't I do it for you?" makes you listen on repeat, ready to have your heart broken over and over again.

[GQ]

Listen: Spotify // Apple Music // Amazon



3. 'Juice' - Lizzo

"Juice" sounds like tequila shots with your best friends, or finding an outfit that makes you feel indestructible, or that moment when your favorite song (which may as well be "Juice") comes on at the party. Lizzo has enjoyed one hell of a year, between weeks of topping the charts and a bevy of Grammy nominations, and "Juice" encapsulates her 2019 success. Both cocky and infectiously effervescent, the song has risen as the self-confidence anthem of a year that has put us all through the ringer.

[Paste Magazine]

Listen: Spotify // Apple Music // Amazon



2. 'bad guy' - Billie Eilish

"bad guy" is a crawlspace of a track that feels like it's made of the same whispery fabric as Eilish's voice: clicks, whirrs, fingersnaps, and ear-tickling sounds that prompt ASMR tingles. Furtive and nimble, the beat moves just like her lines about "creeping around like no one knows," yet the bass, when it hits, has the dancefloor heft of trap. As for Eilish's jaded goth-pop schtick? Those who can only remember being teenage may smile at lines like "My soul? So cynical." But for the actual teens who've followed her rise to the top of the charts, Eilish captures the tender mess of being young and alive.

[Pitchfork]

Listen: Spotify // Apple Music // Amazon



1. 'Old Town Road' - Lil Nas X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus

In almost every way, 2019 could be best summed up by "Old Town Road," an indefinable two minutes and 30 seconds of genre blending and bucking born of a meme, a $30 beat sampling some old Nine Inch Nails banjos, and a whole stampede of controversy. Fitting that an endorsement from a fellow country pariah boosted the song to become one of the biggest modern history's ever seen. For all our historical insistence on categorization and status quo, "Old Town Road" and its success feels like cultural comeuppance.

[Vulture]

Listen: Spotify // Apple Music // Amazon

Listen to all the songs with four months of Amazon Music Unlimited for $0.99.


Honorable Mentions

If you've already seen the top 10, here are some other notable songs of the year, including even more Lizzo and some other unique, hard-slapping pop songs.

11. 'Lark' - Angel Olsen

12. 'Con Altura' - ROSALÍA & J. Balvin

13. 'Truth Hurts' - Lizzo

14. 'Shotta Flow' - NLE Choppa

Also This Week

Best TV Shows of 2019

Best Movies of 2019

Best Albums of 2019

Best Books of 2019


A Note On Methodology

We wish we could say there was a super fancy algorithm that combed the internet and did this for us. But the truth is that the entity doing the internet combing was a human Digg Editor, and calculations were performed by an Excel sheet that ingested and re-ranked all the lists we fed into it (briefly: #1 ranked items received 10 points, #2 ranked items got 9 points... down through #10 ranked items, which got 1 point; items on unranked lists all got 5.5 points).

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