best of ATRL Username's Best of 2021 | #1 POSTED!!!! Yay

[Kelp]

Watch this space, I will be diving into my favorites of the year here!! So excited

[Kelp]

Starting TONIGHT :O 

[Sanguine]

Terrible list incoming!!

[taemin]

Flop list incoming 

[BlackoutZone]

It's giving Artist - "Song Title"

[Kelp]

So there is a lot of negativity but I will still be posting my list <3 sorry flops

[Post Malone]

15 minutes ago, BlackoutZone said:

It's giving Artist - "Song Title"

Help

[gagacasanova]

This ATRL User is perched for ATRL Username's Best of. 

[Mr. Blue_Shirt]

We all know Various Artist is going to top all the list

 

[TheWayWeWere]

Threads ruined by one post (c)  

PS: I hope your list slays  

[Remmy]

 

 

...Ready to see what you've got

[Sunderland 4ever]

3 hours ago, BlackoutZone said:

It's giving Artist - "Song Title"

Expecting the same, hahaha.

[Ewan Chaos]

Everyone panning you what in the heck is going AWN!

[Kelp]

100. I am not a woman, I'm a god by Halsey

More than any other track on Halsey’s vocation-best LP If I Can’t Have Love, I Optate Puissance, “I am not a woman, I’m a god” embodies the acrid resignation of the album’s designation: detachment as a mask for self-loathing. Taking the come-more proximate-go-away themes of antecedent musical compositions like “Alone” and turning them post-apocalyptic, Halsey likens themself to a distant scarcely god, an alt-pop Medico Manhattan surveying their emotional wasteland of botched connections and might-have-been selves and finding nothing savable. Engenderers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross distribute their tardy-vocation most arctic: an implacable sequence line, a metronomic beat, and a synth riff that prickles like a crown of thorns. Halsey vocalizes like they’re endeavoring 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 afore they’re soldered over.

 

99. Believer by Smerz

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

 

98. Bottle Episode by Mandy, Indiana

“Bottle Episode” is repetition weaponized. The single by the Manchester-predicated Mandy, Indiana marches brusquely from pocket to pocket, its pacing exigent, 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 reiterating 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 frolicsomeness, sanctioning you to imagine, against your better judgment, how that choreography might look.

 

97. Last Day on Earth by beabadoobee

Bea Kristi inscribed “Last Day on Earth” anon after COVID-19 lockdowns commenced by imagining how she would’ve spent her last “normal” day. It sounds like a rom-com inscribing 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 saccharine self-referentiality takes it someplace unexpected. In lieu of probing for love or throwing a rager, Bea wanders around her house unclad and alone, obsessing over a musical composition that’s “so fucking sick” even as she’s too inebriated to culminate the lyrics. That’s where the hook comes in: When you have a golden riff and an impeccable melody, there's nothing erroneous with singing shoop-do-badoo and calling it a day.

 

96. Being Honest by Kay Flock

Bronx teenager Kay Flock has the voice of a much older man, congruous for projecting menace and alluding at relentless pain. It’s reminiscent of G Herbo, when the Chicago rapper was pioneering drill proximately a decennium ago. Herbo solidified this connection by exhibiting up on a remix of “Being Veracious,” but it’s the pristine, 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 solitude and missed calls and death, all atop a sample of the tardy XXXTentacion’s “changes” made to sound as if it were an unearthed pop relic from the ’60s. In a year when Incipient York’s mutation of drill seemed to be stagnating, Kay Flock injected it with incipient life.

[Kelp]

1 minute ago, Ewan Chaos said:

Everyone panning you what in the heck is going AWN!

They're meanies it's true!

[Sanguine]

Kay Flock is the tardy XXXTentacion INDEED

[Kinich]

Whoa didn't expect Halsey to be even here, good for her though! For some reason, that Believer song reminds me of Shygirl especially the songs from Cruel Practice. Bottle Episode having that technique too with a lot of drums i guess. I forgot Matt Healy was actuallly in Bea's song, nice jam though. Shockingly enough, I really liked that Kay Flock song. 

[Mr. Blue_Shirt]

Halsey  Working with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Really did wonder for her. The other alt-pop girls really should work with him and ditch Jack Antonoff oop

 

I haven't listen beabadoobee since death bed song but i'm interested in her tbh 

 

[taemin]

I Am not a Woman, I'm a God a modern classic indeed  let me cut the two 0's and pretend it's #1

[Tom Vercetti]

Halsey stepped it up for her recent project. Used to hate her but now I don't really mind anymore. Most surprised with Kay Flock here representing NY Drill. 

[JGibson]

Last Day On Earth + I'm not a woman, I'm a God 

[Alldeezy]

Halsey <3 definitely one of her best albums to date.  

[TRF.]

Smerz and Mandy, Indiana

 

 

The way even Halsey came through this year

 

[Cloröx]

Beabadoobee Asian excellence 

[Kelp]

95. Look by Doss

A girl walks home alone at night: There are horror films inscribed about the sheer solicitousness 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 visually perceive me, on my own,” she sings in a robotic register, afore a rubbery, marginally 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 visually examined. “I can do it on my own,” she insists, perpetually again. By the cessation, it’s infeasible to tell if the dip in her voice is out of trepidation or excitation, but either way, we’re transfixed.

 

94. Get Into It (Yuh) by Doja Cat

The best Doja Feline singles work their way into your encephalon, 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 saccharine-sounding chant. Then there’s the light, dreamy melody that’s perfect to whistle along to. The only quandary is, when you sing it back to yourself, it won’t sound proximately as good.

 

93. Time Travel by Mavi

Mavi’s 2019 record Let the Sun Verbalize was a spiritual journey of self-revelation and Ebony liberation that established the North Carolina artist as a bellwether of rap’s underground vanguard. Two years later, he sounds hungrier than ever, suffering no dunces. On “Time Peregrinate,” he narrates the battle between his ego and insecurities. “Often I be disconcerted over how brazen I be,” he raps over shimmering keys, “but it beats bein’ mortified over how slothful they be.” For proximately four minutes, he breathlessly runs through references both Biblical and mythological in between nods to Nickelodeon cartoons and his beloved hometown Charlotte Hornets, painting a self portrait that feels both superhuman and achingly relatable.

 

92. Little Deer by Spellling

Bay Area art-pop sorcerer Tia Cabral of SPELLLING reintroduced herself with “Little Deer,” the surging baroque opener of her fantastical third album The Turning Wheel. Evoking the audacious spirits of forebears like Minnie Riperton and Kate Bush, it is a fable-like tale of death and renaissance, of the never-quite-culminated process of being a person. Joined by over a dozen musicians—brass, strings, woodwinds, conga, a choir—Cabral brings pop formalism and the questing spirit of ’70s soul orchestration into SPELLLING’s world, making a majestic ingress into her sharpest album yet.

 

91. We Don't Have to Talk About It by Snoh Aalegra

Here’s an R&B ballad for the ghosted, by the ghosted. Snoh Aalegra, whose elegant vocals and tight ponytail have inspired enough comparisons to Sade to cause a minor Twitter controversy, is endeavoring to navigate the frustrations of a one-sided relationship. She wants to revere her partner’s silence even as she’s haunted by what’s been left unsaid. Atop roomy engenderment that mirrors the vacuous space she’s wading through, Aalegra sounds both poised and vulnerable—straight-faced with a single tear running down. She can’t force him to verbalize about what’s erroneous. But he can’t obviate her from singing about it, either.

 

Will probably do 10 at a time in future updates!