100.Halsey: “I am not a woman, I’m a god”
More than any other track on Halsey’s career-best LP If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power, “I am not a woman, I’m a god” embodies the bitter resignation of the album’s title: detachment as a mask for self-loathing. Taking the come-closer-go-away themes of previous songs like “Alone” and turning them post-apocalyptic, Halsey likens themself to a distant sort of god, an alt-pop Doctor Manhattan surveying their emotional wasteland of botched connections and might-have-been selves and finding nothing savable. Producers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross deliver their late-career coldest: an implacable sequence line, a metronomic beat, and a synth riff that prickles like a crown of thorns. Halsey vocalizes like they’re trying to outrun the thing they’re singing about, until the final chorus: a desperate belt with an abrupt end, the sounds their last few remaining feelings make before they’re soldered over. –Katherine St. Asaph
（封面电脑端不好处理不带了）

99.Smerz: “Believer”

Smerz, the electronic project of Norwegian songwriters Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg, released its debut full-length, Believer, early this year. The album’s cold, creeping title track is among the duo’s finest work: The song teeters on jagged synths and rattling polyrhythms, while strings surge from behind at gale force. Stoltenberg’s voice is small and slightly processed, a mechanical purr that somehow feels both vulnerable and detached. Her clipped dispatches on love are pragmatic and icy, but beguiling enough to lure you through each disorienting curve. –Madison Bloom

98.Mandy, Indiana: “Bottle Episode”
“Bottle Episode” is repetition weaponized. The single by the Manchester-based Mandy, Indiana marches brusquely from pocket to pocket, its pacing urgent, its drums military. But it’s Valentine Caulfield’s lyrics that form the most compelling loops—the ones that upend the song’s tone. Each short verse ends with a single repeating line; some, when read straight, would be too grim to maintain the song’s relentless groove (“Sous le feu et sous les balles/Les hommes dansent quasiment,” roughly translated: “As the bullets hit them/The men dance, almost”). Yet Caulfield infuses them with a perverse playfulness, allowing you to imagine, against your better judgment, how that choreography might look. –Paul Thompson

97.beabadoobee: “Last Day on Earth”
Bea Kristi wrote “Last Day on Earth” soon after COVID-19 lockdowns began by imagining how she would’ve spent her last “normal” day. It sounds like a rom-com writing prompt, with music to match: irresistible guitar-pop jangle, a giddy wordless hook, soft backing vocals from the 1975’s Matty Healy. But the song’s sweet self-referentiality takes it someplace unexpected. Instead of looking for love or throwing a rager, Bea wanders around her house naked and alone, obsessing over a song that’s “so fucking sick” even as she’s too drunk to finish the lyrics. That’s where the hook comes in: When you have a golden riff and a perfect melody, there's nothing wrong with singing shoop-do-badoo and calling it a day. –Jamieson Cox

96.Kay Flock: “Being Honest”
Bronx teenager Kay Flock has the voice of a much older man, suitable for projecting menace and hinting at relentless pain. It’s reminiscent of G Herbo, when the Chicago rapper was pioneering drill nearly a decade ago. Herbo solidified this connection by showing up on a remix of “Being Honest,” but it’s the original, solo version of the track that gives Kay Flock the most space to express his tormented worldview. The song’s verses are stark, filled with loneliness and missed calls and death, all atop a sample of the late XXXTentacion’s “changes” made to sound as if it were an unearthed pop relic from the ’60s. In a year when New York’s mutation of drill seemed to be stagnating, Kay Flock injected it with new life. –Paul A. Thompson

95.Doss: “Look”
A girl walks home alone at night: There are horror films written about the sheer anxiety that scenario evokes. But on her effervescent single “Look,” Doss subverts the threat. Defiant in her confident solitude, she dares us to, well, look. “You see me, on my own,” she sings in a robotic register, before a rubbery, slightly sinister synth counters. “Look” is grimy and grotesque, with wobbly basslines and EDM-style drops. Like a rave in a funhouse mirror, its rhythms are as disorienting as they are danceable. Her lyrics share that shifting perspective, transferring power between the observer and the observed. “I can do it on my own,” she insists, over and over again. By the end, it’s impossible to tell if the dip in her voice is out of fear or excitement, but either way, we’re transfixed. –Arielle Gordon

94.Doja Cat: “Get Into It (Yuh)”
The best Doja Cat singles work their way into your brain, and then, when you least expect it, involuntarily funnel back out through your vocal cords. On “Get Into It (Yuh),” it’s the way she bends her voice on the hook, going from a croaky whisper to a sweet-sounding chant. Then there’s the light, dreamy melody that’s perfect to whistle along to. The only problem is, when you sing it back to yourself, it won’t sound nearly as good. –Alphonse Pierre

前排恭喜雷打姐

前排恭喜光明***

89.Danny L Harle: “Boing Beat”
MC Boing, the pitched-up voice on Danny L Harle’s post-trance rave-up “Boing Beat,” is a blobby blue cartoon character that looks like a cross between Crazy Frog and a character from a Red Bull commercial. Such absurd imagery suits the song’s delirious swirl of internet-addled Eurodance refractions and pitched-up sugar-rush rapping, which is credited to the animated avatar. The euphoric, otherworldly track arrived in January, while clubs across the world were still shuttered and the long nights out that “never, never, never end” were still a distant dream. Though dancefloors have filled back up, the music’s yearning is still palpable—few songs better capture the feeling of desperately straining for an ecstatic experience that’s just out of reach. –Colin Joyce

88.Dijon: “Many Times”
If “Many Times” is a song about needing space, Dijon manages to use every available inch. It unfolds in the moments after a breakup, leaving the R&B-inflected singer-songwriter grasping at straws, his multi-tracked vocals growing progressively more agitated across two verses. A series of structural pivots—claustrophobic percussion giving way to a roomier chorus—mirror the narrative’s emotional trajectory, with a lively piano outro lending a glimmer of hope. –Pete Tosiello

86.Mariah the Scientist: “2 You”
The heartbreak Mariah the Scientist sings about in “2 You” is the kind that doesn’t fade for years. Against a dreamy mosaic of a cappella fragments, she reminisces about a lover who drifted away, about how the only thing she regrets more than letting this one go was not leaving sooner. “But look at what we made/Sure was beautiful,” she sings, voice soaring up from a well of emotions heavy as gravity, a heaping stack of harmonies to tell you how her heart went threadbare. After all this time, she still can’t quite explain it: “Whenever they play our song/Don’t know why I feel ashamed.” –Anna Gaca

85.City Girls: “Twerkulator”
“Twerkulator” fuses regions, eras, and sounds, weaving samples from Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force’s foundational 1982 electro-rap record “Planet Rock” and Cajmere’s 1992 house touchstone “The Percolator” into a beat that throws back to the blunt minimalism of Miami bass music. Incorporating all that history made it tougher to put out—after a leaked version went viral on TikTok in 2020, sample clearance issues delayed its proper release for a year—but it also practically guaranteed its power. “Pop that pussy on some Luke shit,” Yung Miami instructs on the song, offering another nod to raunchy rap pioneer Uncle Luke. Even with this amalgam of references, the City Girls’ stamp still rings loud and clear. –Ivie Ani

84.Ethel Cain: “Michelle Pfeiffer” [ft. lil aaron]
Hayden Anhedönia’s music as Ethel Cain depicts a woman scorned by love and by society, to startlingly vulnerable, often disturbing effect. On “Michelle Pfeiffer,” the first single from her breakout EP Inbred, Anhedonia recasts Cain as Florence + The Ketamine: blurry, bleary-eyed, but colossal, the L.A.-inspired breakup anthem plays like an on-stage meltdown at the Hollywood Bowl. Anhedönia told Pitchfork earlier this year that she wants to “write about what really happens,” and the melodramatic “Pfeiffer” co-exists on Inbred with tracks about intergenerational trauma and abuse. Those songs thrive on pent-up aggression and tension; “Pfeiffer” is all release, pure unhinged gothic beauty. –Hannah Jocelyn