Staff Mixes

It was a weird year in American life. It was a weird year in hip-hop, too. Much of mainstream rap descended into a dark pharmacological haze that was alternately illuminating and horrifying; few embodied those twin impulses like the dead-eyed, flat-voiced rapper 21 Savage. Every major chart hit seemed to include Migos, or one of its members. Most rappers spent more time singing and harmonizing than actually rapping, whether it was Future, Lil Uzi Vert, or Kendrick Lamar. Drake entered his Aerosmith/rock-dinosaur phase—likeable enough, still one of the biggest stars, but no longer generating the kind of critical excitement and discourse he once did. And the top newcomer of the year (though technically her debut mixtape dropped last year) was Cardi B, a former Bronx exotic-dancer-turned-reality-TV-star-turned-social-media-darling who may not be a technically proficient rapper, but made up for it with a delightful mix of personality and panache.Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. was arguably the year’s best album, but it also seemed purposely muted and focused on addressing past triumphs, personal failings, and searching for a path ahead. Its defining quality may have been a surplus of hooky, memorable tunes that didn’t overwhelm intellectually like his past work. By contrast, Vince Staples’ Big Fish Theory delved into fame, disappointment, and UK beat culture in vivid yet perplexing fashion. Migos’ Culture simply offered a cavalcade of hits. Its magnificently scattershot quality was akin to a Stephen Curry highlight reel: Even the best shooters in the NBA merely average over 50 per cent makes. Playboi Carti’s self-titled debut was wonderfully ephemeral. Nothing felt like a genre-shifting achievement on the scale of last year’s Coloring Book, or 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly and DS2. But in a year when optimism about the world around us was in dangerously dwindling supply, modest artistic breakthroughs felt like small yet important steps forward.

The overall unsteadiness of 2017 stretched to pop, which seemed plagued by an existential crisis that could be chalked up to the still-developing sea legs of streaming-music discovery, the panic of radio programmers looking over their collective shoulders at the looming threats posed by Spotifys Rap Caviar and Apples A-Lists, or just overall exhaustion. (It was a trying year.) The best pure pop pleasures of the year came largely from those artists who decided to cast formula to the wind and instead veer off in their own direction.Carly Rae Jepsens "Cut to the Feeling" (a holdover from the E•MO•TION era that proved how her cast-offs pack more punch than even the most precision-grade Max Martin concoction) led the charge, its call for letting it all out urged along by a squad of synths clapping; Paramore distracted from the heartache at the core of After Laughter by eclipsing it with laserbeam guitars and Hayley Williams height-scaling vocals; Miguel threw himself into his vocals as well on War & Leisure, singing like it was the only thing keeping him from certain doom. Radio wasnt without its pleasures; DJ Khaleds seemingly improbable Santana interpolation got life from Rihannas dead-serious flirtations on "Wild Thoughts," while Camila Cabellos slinky "Havana" felt like a trap-pop update of the "Smooth" formula, only with Young Thugs tongue-twisting rhymes standing in for Carlos licks.Kelly Clarkson and Kesha announced their liberation from pops mathematicians with albums that felt more like their live presences, electric and whipsawing through genres and giggling at the fun of it all. Ne-Yo, trapped in the purgatory of vocal features and top-down label uncertainty over the "marketability" of R&B for so long, put out "Another Love Song," a suited-up return to his Year of the Gentleman era that also stood out for actually expressing romantic pleasure. It aided a resurgent year for the genre on multiple levels: younger artists like Khalid, SZA, and Jordan Bratton used their soul-side-ready voices as a jumping-off point into modern textures; the sibling duo Chloe x Halle twinned and looped their ghostly voices into next-generation gold on The Two of Us; Luke James triple-dipped with his star turn as Johnny Gill in BETs outrageous New Edition biopic, the woozily coital "Drip," and a recurring role (complete with weekly singles releases) on Foxs girl-group musical soap Star; and Michigans Curtis Harding threw it back to the hot-buttered era on the stunning, sumptuous Face Your Fear. Pops best moments provided a metaphor for the year—the noisy mainstream might have its ever-more-fleeting moments, but the really satisfying moments lurked within more hidden corners.

Note: This playlist follows a loose chronological structure reflecting when these songs were released during 2017—which I like to think provides a more accurate snapshot of the year as it was lived, as opposed to a ranked list based on totally unquantifiable criteria. The cruel irony of being a music critic in 2017 is that the very thing that makes the gig easier—i.e., plentiful, push-button access to practically the entire history of recorded sound—is also the very thing that threatens one’s sense of expertise. The truth is, the two cornerstones of the job description—a) being an authority in your field and b) staying current—are becoming mutually exclusive ideals, as your listening queue perpetually extends like an unchecked email account. Spending quality time with a given record means missing out on another 50 probably-amazing albums that came out this week. I’m at the point now where artists whose work I’ve loved for years, or even decades, will release a new record, and it takes me months to get around to giving it a cursory listen, if I don’t outright forget that it even exists. (Sorry, Liars!) These days, music writers essentially play the role of sommelier, giving records a momentary swish before spewing ’em out and moving onto the next one.It’s an especially pervasive condition in the perennially over-populated field we call indie rock—a term that now encompasses everyone from aspiring Bandcamp chancers to Grammy-winning arena acts. And in between those goalposts you have annual bumper crops of hotly tipped breakout artists, modestly successful mid-career acts still slogging it out, solo albums, side projects, and ‘90s veterans who decide to take a crack at the reunion circuit. And this is to say nothing of the stylistic variation that field covers. Forty years ago, you wouldnt deign to lump Bruce Springsteen, The Fall, William Onyeabor, Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye, and Hawkwind into the same genre category. Yet when you consider those artists contemporary spiritual offspring—Japandroids, Sleaford Mods, Pierre Kwenders, The Weather Station, Moses Sumney, and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard—theyre all huddled under the umbrella of indie.As such, there is no narrative through-line or overarching theme that could possibly connect the songs on this collection of my favorite indie-rock songs of 2017. (Well, other than it was an exceptionally good year for Australia!) Certainly, in this never-ending shit-show of a year, there was a need for music that could help us navigate these tumultuous times, be it Priests emotionally fraught dream-punk (“Nothing Feels Natural”), Algiers palace-storming soul stomps (“The Underside of Power”), or Weaves freak-flag rallying cries (“Scream”). But then, 2017 was so fucked up and draining on so many levels, you could forgive America’s fiercest rabble-rousers—Philly DIY heroes Sheer Mag, pictured above—for wanting to take a momentary break from the brick-tossing and seek solace in the discotheque (“Need to Feel Your Love”).At a time when the very fate of humanity felt more perilous and unknowable than at any point in our lifetime, you take comfort in the little things. Sometimes all I wanted was to escape into a fully realized fantasy of Stevie Nicks making a Cure album (Louise Burns’ “Storms”) or King Krule going Krautrock (via Mount Kimbie’s “Blue Train Lines”) or The Go-Betweens being brought back to life (Rolling Blackouts C.F.’s “The French Press”). In some instances, it was an especially outrageous lyric that provided levity (from Alex Cameron and Angel Olsen’s misfit-romance anthem “Stranger’s Kiss”: “I got shat on by an eagle, baby/ now I’m king of the neighbourhod/ and I guess that I could/ just tear the gym pants off a single mother”); in others, I was transfixed by an extended instrumental build-up (Thurston Moore’s gong-crashing “Exalted”) or a perfectly messy guitar solo (The National’s “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness,” The War on Drugs’ “Up All Night”). It was a year of being taken by surprise by bands I had taken for granted (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s “Ambulance Chaser,” Guided by Voices’ “Nothing Gets You Real”), awestruck by long-dormant artists who seemingly reemerged from out of nowhere (be it Land of Talk with the intensely aching “Heartcore” or former Only Ones frontman Peter Perrett’s winsome “Troika”), and blindsided by artists I had never heard before (noise-punk powerhouse Dasher’s “Go Rambo,” Montreal sound collagist Joni Void’s “Cinema Without People,” art-pop phenom Jay Som’s magisterial “For Light”).Of course, there is also a regional bias at play here. Even as it’s become the province of national late-night talk shows and destination mega-festivals, indie rock is still nothing without its local scenes, and this playlist inevitably reflects my roots in the Southern Ontario corridor. This year, several under-the-radar acts I’ve been fortunate enough to see come into their own over the past few years—stoner-prog titans Biblical, avant-pop activist Petra Glynt, the Slim Twig/U.S. Girls-led fuzz-boogie supergroup Darlene Shrugg, industrial-electro trio Odonis Odonis—all released excellent albums that effectively bottled up their onstage energy for the world to see.But mostly what you get on this playlist is a lot of great, seasoned, chronically under-appreciated artists doing what they do and continuing to do it very well, from Chain and the Gang’s anti-capitalist garage-punk manifesto “Devitalize” to British Sea Power’s crestfallen “Don’t Let the Sun Get in the Way” to The Dears’ triumphant “1998” to Pavement co-founder Spiral Stairs’ sweetly slack “Angel Eyes” (a touching tribute to his late drummer, Darius Minwalla). There are few rewards for consistency in life, and especially not in the incessant, feed-refreshing world of indie rock. But in a time of insatiable suck-it-up-and-spit-it-out musical consumption, these songs handily passed the swish test, and demanded to be savored.P.S.: Ty Segall’s Drag City catalog isn’t available on Spotify, otherwise I would’ve included his gonzo 10-minute "Cant You Hear Me Knocking"-scaled tour de force, “Freedom (Warm Hands).” Ditto for Boss Hog’s ace comeback album, Brood X, which just goes to show that getting featured in Baby Driver wasn’t the only great thing to happen to Jon Spencer this year.

Although gatekeepers often want to tell us what jazz is and what it isn’t, the music has always thrived and developed by ignoring any strict definition. That openness can lead to vigorous debate, a dialogue that can underlines the music’s ongoing vitality and richness. When improvisation remains at the core of jazz practice, the actual context for the performance can go all over the map, as you can hear on these 50 emblematic tracks of jazz in 2017.There are those who still love to swing, whether it’s cornetist Kirk Knuffke lovingly surveying the compositions of the great Don Cherry (“Art Deco”), the quartet Hush Point updating west-coast verities (“Rhythm Method”), or Mike Reed’s Flesh & Bone summoning the spirit of Charles Mingus (“I Want to Be Small”). But the rhythmic thrust of jazz has embraced a huge variety of approaches, from the fusion of dance music and rock by the hard-hitting Kneebody (“Drum Battle), the loose funkiness in the atmospheric landscapes of guitarist Matthew Stevens (“Cocoon”), or the throbbing post-no-wave improvisation of guitarist James Blood Ulmer’s scintillating collaboration with Scandinavian heavies The Thing (“Baby Talk”).Few genres allow its elders to maintain both broad listenership and artistic relevance like jazz. Art Ensemble of Chicago founder Roscoe Mitchell continued to collide adventurous currents in spontaneity with a rigorous compositional ethos (“Panoply”), while his old Chicago neighbor drummer Jack DeJohnette tackled some rock favorites created in the Hudson Valley with collaborators John Scofield, Larry Grenadier, and John Medeski (“Up on Cripple Creek”). Supported by a fiery young band, masterful hard-bop drummer Louis Hayes saluted his early employer Horace Silver (“Señor Blues”), while the soulful singer Gregory Porter celebrated one of his key mentors, Nat King Cole, in lush surroundings (“Pick Yourself Up”). And though the US will always be the birthplace of jazz, a complement of European explorers like Cortex, Kaja Draksler, and Silke Eberhard prove it belongs to the world now.

These days, metal’s eclecticism runs pretty deep, and in a climate where so much unrest is bubbling up to the surface, its gratifying to have all this music provide a place of refuge for those who want/need to look away from the news. Metal has always possessed a degree of defiance and attitude, serving as a counterpoint to a mainstream thinking. And now its added more ambience and a broader range of emotion. Its thought-provoking, ability-defying, and at times just a pure exorcism of rage—totally fitting for 2017.Check out the right-on-point sheer aggression of Full Of Hells "Deluminate," the interstellar sound of Mastodon soaring even higher on "Sultans Curse," and the continuing rise of Power Trip on "Executioners Tax (Swing of the Axe)." Our 2017 survey also includes buzzed-about up-and-comers like Code Orange, hardcore revivalists like Higher Power and Trapped Under Ice, heralded mainstays like Pallbearer, the oft mentioned (and must-hear) 83-minute opus by Bell Witch (pictured above), as well as smouldering southern crew Royal Thunder, and total wrenches in the machine like the spastic Pyrrhon. And those are just some of the many far corners metal stretched into this year. We also saw comebacks from Godflesh and Glassjaw, polarizing Grammy recognition for August Burns Red, and then glimpses of future releases from Windhand, Turnstile, Old Wounds, and Gatecreeper. Theyre all here in our round-up of this years best metal.

Im not sure if Duran Duran were a minor band disguised as a major one, or vice versa, but they did have a handful of really catchy songs, and playing a saxophone on a raft is a boss move. One thing is certain though: Metro UK is a pretty minor publication, and ranking "Ordinary World" over "Rio" is complete bullshit. Still, here are a few great tracks from this these 80s kings.