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


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7 minutes ago, ATRL Username said:

95. Look by Doss

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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!

Bump onto new page x

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get into it (yuh) :clap3: 

 

the other tracks look intriguing  

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Look bops. Get Into It (Yuh), huh? It's better than Ain't Shit that's for sure.

Took a listen to Time Travel since it's the only song idk here and I liked it.

Little Deer is the song that got me into Spellling so glad it's here.

 

Quote

 ballad for the ghosted, by the ghosted

nickiminaj-crying.gif

 

 

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I was shocked as fuck when Get Into It (Yuh) came in when i first listened to the album. One of my most polarizing song at the time and now become one of my favorite songs of her thank you nicki :jonny5:

 

I haven't listen to Snoh Aalegra new album yet but "ugh those feels again" is still excellent fo me wow

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12 hours ago, ATRL Username said:

If I Can’t Have Love, I Optate Puissance

:deadbanana2:

6 hours ago, ATRL Username said:

94. Get Into It (Yuh) by Doja Cat

I loved it at first, but it gets tiring thanks to all these tiktok vids :rip: 

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get into it (yuh) :heart:

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The expose :oh: I guess this isn't ATRL Username's Best of 2021 after all!

 

i am not a woman, i'm a god is just okay & there's way better on the album

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My favorite off the last set is Little Deer. :smiley:

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90. All Futures by the Armed

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“All Futures” introduced ULTRAPOP as the Armed’s fourth album, and withal as a one-band genre: a deliberate endeavor to fashion post-hardcore’s most extremist tendencies into something thrillingly accessible. In a live-performance video that has become the song’s definitive version, the band flexed the results of the absurd pabulum and exercise regimen they’d followed for the antecedent year, a marginally conceptual stunt aimed at visually matching the maxed-out heroism of the music. Absolutely ripped, dwarfing their instruments, they pummel out massive hooks amid organized chaos. These facets are inseparable for the Armed, a band that has dedicated its confounding esse to highbrow myth-making on one hand, and on the other, shit that immediately sounds and looks fucking awe-inspiring.

 

89. Boing Beat by Danny L Harle

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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 homogeneous to 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 musical compositions better capture the feeling of desperately straining for an ecstatic experience that’s just out of reach.

 

88. Many Times by Dijon

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If “Many Times” is a musical composition about needing space, Dijon manages to utilize 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 an ebullient piano outro lending a glimmer of hope.

 

87. better by Joy Orbison ft. Léa Sen

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Presented as a mixtape, Jubilance Orbison’s long-awaited debut full-length, Still Slipping Vol. 1, is denoted to be consumed as a consummate, luscious whole, but album highlight “better” resplendently encapsulates the UK producer’s timeless brand of post-dubstep street soul. Dreamily drifting along the edge of the dancefloor, the track reposes atop a bed of plush deep house that recalls the pillow-susurrations of Larry Auricularly discerned; its silky, dimly lit groove centers the R&B-infused vocals of fellow Londoner Léa Sen, who distributes a heart-convoluting tale of tardy-night longing.

 

86. 2 You by Mariah the Scientist

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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 doter who drifted away, about how the only thing she regrets more than letting this one go was not leaving sooner. “But visually examine what we made/Sure was comely,” she sings, voice soaring up from a well of emotions cumbersomely hefty as gravity, a heaping stack of harmonies to tell you how her heart went threadbare. After all this time, she still can’t quite explicate it: “Whenever they play our musical composition/Don’t ken why I feel ignominious.”

 

85. Twerkulator by City Girls

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“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 opportune release for a year—but it withal virtually ensured its potency. “Pop that pussy on some Luke shit,” Yung Miami injuctively authorizes on the musical composition, offering another nod to raunchy rap pioneer Uncle Luke. Even with this amalgam of references, the City Girls’ stamp still rings loud and clear.

 

84. Michelle Pfeiffer by Ethel Cain ft. lil aaron

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Hayden Anhedönia’s music as Ethel Cain depicts a woman scorned by love and by society, to startlingly vulnerably susceptible, often perturbing 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 authentically transpires,” and the melodramatic “Pfeiffer” co-subsists on Inbred with tracks about intergenerational trauma and abuse. Those musical compositions thrive on pent-up aggression and tension; “Pfeiffer” is all release, pristine unhinged gothic resplendency.

 

83. Damaged by Leo Bhanji

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Leo Bhanji doesn’t indite musical compositions so much as assemble musical Frankenstein’s monsters—malformed skeletal archetypes whose guts and wiring he does not endeavor to polish or obnubilate. “Damaged” is willfully oblique in its collage of lo-fi pop, R&B, hip-hop, church music, and UK dance, with sounds that mutate in replication to Bhanji’s stream-of-consciousness vocals. As the London artist's voice shifts between King Krule mumble and Auto-Tuned croon, the beat shifts with him—capturing both the apprehensiveness and the acceptance of an intimate tardy-night epiphany.

 

82. Rare to Wake by Shannon Lay

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“I’m longing to grow,” sings L.A. folkie Shannon Lay on “Rare to Wake,” a ballad that traces the hinge between trepidation of personal transformation and excitation for it. Lay’s multi-tracked harmonies fall at soft angles over finger-picked acoustic guitar and meandering electric piano, until a dynamic swell promulgates a transition that never comes. The arrangement, like the musical composition itself, seems to fidget with anticipation, finding comeliness at a skeptical precipice.

 

81. Gët Busy by Yeat

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“This musical composition already was turnt but here’s a bell,” Yeat raps about halfway through this track, afore firing off a massive gonging sound that’s become the Portland artist’s trademark. Zoom out from that moment, though, and there’s a lot more to relish here: mini vocal freakouts profuse of garbled drug concoctions; Dr. Seuss references; twizzies, tizzies, and Lizzies. Cutting his teeth in the influential online rap collective Slayworld over the last few years, Yeat was always a little stranger than his peers, and consequently cast as a minor figure. But in 2021, his surrealist bent became his superpower.

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Previous Picks: Little Deer, Get Into It Yuh and Snoh Aalegra is great, just didn’t get to her album yet.

 

Many Times was fun for a week or so.

2 of You :clap3:

 

Have to check the rest out.

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Hi all. I was trying to just ignore the criticism and haters but because it has been brought up multiple times: any similarities to other year-end lists are purely coincidental. These are my personal favorite songs of the year. I can provide last.fm receipts if needed. 

 

I do not represent Pitchfork or its subsidiaries. #80-71 will be posted tomorrow. Thank you for tuning in!

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Keep going king :heart2: Don't let your detractors win!

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2 minutes ago, Hikari said:

Keep going king :heart2: Don't let your detractors win!

Thank you for your support! I really appreciate the community we have built within the Best Of subforum. <3 I will be seeing this to completion!

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