I know it’s only early November, but in a pre-emptive attempt to make sense of the year so far, we spent 2 hours playing some of our tracks of the year earlier. I was joined by DiS reviews editor Andrzej Lukowski (who agrees with me that ‘4 Degrees’ is the track o the year!) and DiS podcast co-host Danielle Perry… Did we pick any of your favourite tracks of the year?
If you missed it, our tracks of the year show featuring everything from GoGo Penguin to Gaga is now available to stream on demand. We’ll be back next month with an albums of the year special.
Tracklisting:
Shearwater ‘Radio Silence’
Junior Boys ‘Over It’
The Kills ‘Doing It To Death’
Warpaint ‘New Song’
Garbage ‘Even Though Our Love Is Doomed’
Guy Andrews ‘Paganism’
Marissa Nadler ‘Janie In Love’
Jambinai ‘Echo of Creation’
Innerspace Orchestra ‘One Way Glass’
Savages ‘Adore’
Preoccupations ‘Memory’
Loscil ‘Weeds’
Michael C. Hall ‘Lazarus’
Fiona Brice ‘Koh Yoa Noi’
Iggy Pop ‘American Valhalla’
ANOHNI ‘4 Degrees’
Leonard Cohen ‘You Want It Darker’
Nick Cave & The Badseeds ‘Distant Sky’
Jenny Hval ‘Female Vampire’
Lady Gaga ‘Dancin’ In Circles’
GoGo Penguin ‘Branches Break’
Amber Arcades ‘Fading Lines’
Primal Scream ‘Where The Lights Get In’ (feat. Sky Ferreira)
Mitski’s album Puberty 2 is another brilliant album that deserves to but may not make many publications top 50 albums even. The tracks Your Best American Girl and I Bet On Losing Dogs are stunning. Even better that they’re next to each other on the track listing. At least one of those two tracks should make someone’s top 50 songs of the year.
Just picked music I liked. My guests liked. And our writers liked. It wasn’t meant to be anything but a few tunes we’re into. Interesting that people reach to call you a racist, but wouldn’t call someone sexist if this was a wall to wall willy fest.
I’m not saying you or the other writers are racist Sean but it’s strange that there’s no artists of colour there. There’s not a single hip-hop song on that list, or an R’n’B song either.
I also think that if the list was predominantly male then you would be called out on it too, so don’t presume anything.
We have acts from Norway, the Netherlands, France, Australia, and South Korea on there. A jazz band. A pop megastar. An 82 year old Canadian. And a transgender artist with a polemic about climate change.
Tracks that I had cued up that we didn’t fit in the time we had included Dilla’s version of Cars (‘Trucks’ - possibly the most wonderfully ridiculous song I’ve heard this year), Frank Ocean, Anderson Paak (although I realised on the way to the studio that the lyrics on the song I had cued up weren’t exactly radio friendly - the N-bomb just isn’t something I feel comfortable playing… and yes, I played a Gaga track about masturbating…) and there were some more staff picks like Kanye, and Solange, but I didn’t personally like the choices of tunes. I had about 8 hours of music I wanted to try to fit in.
This 2 hour show, compiled in far less time than that, wasn’t aimed to be ‘definitive’ or representative of anything more than some of the music that some of us liked this year. Personally I haven’t really clicked with any hip-hop albums this year - mostly because many of the releases seem fine to carry on all the misogynist tropes and I lose interest. Rather than complaints, I’d rather be schooled in what I should be listening to.