The Best Songs of 2019

With no pretense of being exhaustive, and without trying to fully represent the editorial staff's rankings either, we thought we'd let you listen to the playlists that best capture each of our own personal ”musical year”. The songs that stood out within a particular genre, the signature songs of the year's breakout artists or of the old reliables who delivered once again – or, more simply, the songs that meant something to us as we listened to them.

Tommaso Benelli

The first idea that popped into my head for this playlist was to pair a song called “Summer Girl” with another called “Surf”, and to put them right at the start, one after the other. It doesn't matter that the first is a suave soft-rock tune and the other a thoroughly euphoric bit of trap: they sit well together, and that's enough. Moving on, you'll find other unlikely pairings, like Sharon Van Etten–Earl Sweatshirt or Giggs-Ariel Pink, to the point that for the closing trio I thought it was worth giving the selection some sense of purpose, at least at the very end. What came out of it is a sweet, melancholy farewell, entrusted to Bon Iver, (Sandy) Alex G and Lana Del Rey, three wildly different voices who are nonetheless among the most significant in American songwriting today.

Gabriele Benzing

We're all angry. Little Godzillas attacking our own personal Tokyo, as Andrew Bird sings amid the swirls of his “Archipelago”. Locked in a deadly grip with our enemies: an image that sums up the whole of 2019.

“Ceaseless feasts of Schadenfreude”, that is, the enemy's misfortune elevated to the ultimate satisfaction: another emblematic line from this year, taken from the farewell letter David Berman left us under the name Purple Mountains. His journey came to an end too soon, but we still have a chance.

So let's start again from the songs, from the ones that remind us who we really are. Let's follow our favorite whistler and tear up the script: let's turn our backs on the war of all against all, and leave our enemies with no one left to hate. After all, we fight each other precisely because we're the same. “No more excuses, no more apathy”. Let's make peace with reality, one playlist at a time.

Paolo Ciro

A 2019 truly rich in releases, with women leading the pack of the most worthwhile ones. In my personal ranking you'll find songs by at least four of them (Sharon Van Etten, Brittany Howard, Weyes Blood, Kelsey Lu), alongside colleagues behind equally successful projects (Big Thief, Sault, Boy Harsher), while the men are busy working the guitars, especially in Dublin (Fontaines DC, Murder Capital) and London (Black Midi, Fat White Family). In between, sure things reclaiming the shine of their best days (Wilco, These New Puritans), and one figure who every year lands in the top spots with some new creature of his, Shabaka Hutchings (in 2018 with Sons Of Kemet, this time with The Comet Is Coming).

I've distilled the experience into a twenty-song playlist meant to be the ideal travel companion, perhaps already for these early-year holidays, hoping it might also serve as a welcome to the new decade.

Giuliano Delli Paoli

2019 is pink, or thereabouts. A femininity that embraces every field: from the pastoral folk ballad of Weyes Blood, in the wake of Judee Sill, to the alien classicism of FKA twigs, passing through the soul-tinged electro-pop of Kelsey Lu, all the way to the arty nihilism of Aldous Harding and the soft songwriting of Rose Elinor Dougall. In between, there's the irresistible ethnic folk of Andriy Khayat and the all-encompassing neo-soul arrangements of Aaron Abernathy. All while Lana Del Rey delivers the psych-pop suite of the decade. The American muse embarks on a new journey. This time, the visual frame in which everything shifts and flees is the back seat of a car speeding down unspecified roads in an equally unspecified era. Roads that dissolve, embodying the swift, inexorable march of the clock, as a carpet of sinuous melodies and held-back hisses floods the scene, before the opening refrain returns in full force, passion and all, and the lyrics put the senses back where they'd been left, somewhere between the memory of a wound and that of a vanished America. It's the most dazzling gem of a candid, stylistically fluid 2019.

Claudio Fabretti

It's been the year of the vintage chanteuses: from the Hollywood sadcore triumph of Lana Del Rey on “Norman Fucking Rockwell!” to an astonishing orchestral Angel Olsen, from the dark-cabaret sublimation of Amanda Palmer to the acoustic return of that other dark muse, Chelsea Wolfe, all the way to the murky new musical liaison between Marissa Nadler and Stephen Brodsky, not to mention Bobby Gentry's lost gems, boldly revisited by Mercury Rev together with a handful of fearless vocalists (represented here by the wonderful Susanne Sundfør on “Tobacco Road”). But my 2019 was also marked by the new mournful chapter from Nick Cave, the posthumous record by Leonard Cohen, the rekindled spark of masters Joe Jackson and Andrew Bird, as well as the crowning of Michael Kiwanuka's soul talent. On top of that, the retro-futurist rock visions of Fat White Family and Black Midi, the welcome confirmations of the "new" Dream Syndicate and of Graham Coxon in soundtrack mode, and plenty of other gems (including Italian ones, from the electronics of Alessandro Cortini to the spoken word of Massimo Volume), giving full representation to a year packed with listening, revelations and rediscoveries.

Stefano Fiori

My 2019 was definitely marked by dreamy, muffled sounds that I found both among recent pop talents like Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish, and among institutions like Nick Cave or experimenters like Fka Twigs. I also appreciated the crossovers with creaking electronics, ethnic touches and more vintage atmospheres, which, running from Rosalía to Yeasayer, also won over Madonna and Divine Comedy. All without giving up the roundest, most songwriter-driven pop melody (Weyes Blood and Beck).

Fabio Guastalla

Vassilios Karagiannis

With no pretense of completeness, a playlist meant to illustrate a different side of 2019 than the one that shaped my listening on the long-form format, a collection of tracks from the four corners of the world, wide-ranging in style and aesthetic, with no genre restrictions whatsoever. Enjoy!

Claudio Lancia

Something important is happening in Dublin!

My listening this year was dominated by the architected sound of the new Irish bands, first and foremost Girl Band, Fontaines D.C. and Murder Capital. But the track that pleasantly caught me off guard the most in recent months was “Near DT, MI” from the debut by Black Midi.

My favorite listens of this year also run through the rehab tales of DIIV, the guitar-driven drifts of Big Thief, the sumptuous union between The Comet Is Coming and Kate Tempest, the never-banal pop of Sharon Von Etten and Lana Del Rey, and the black-inflected rhythms of Little Simz.

Here follow my bonus tracks of 2019: Stormzy, Thee Oh Sees, Black Mountain, TOY, National, Kim Gordon, Lorelle Meets The Obsolete, Wilco, Thom Yorke, and yet another deeply melancholic track from Tindersticks closing out the playlist.

Enjoy the listen…

Alessandro Mattedi

Francesco Pandini

This year confirms a trend running through the whole decade: my favorite strands of global pop are increasingly branching out from the old “peripheries” of the English-speaking Empire. Very few English-language songs from 2019 managed to leave a mark on me: mostly in funk (the surprising “Juice” by Lizzo) and house (the grand comeback of Years&Years with “Play”). Italy has benefited from this global tendency running through pop and the latest trap output, and this year more than ever it’s been a constant presence in my listening. From Mahmood to Livio Cori, via the britpop turn taken by Achille Lauro, for once a breath of fresh air blew across the peninsula straight from the Sanremo Festival. The rest of the playlist ranges across Poland, Africa, Japan, Latin America, Turkey, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Russia, favoring worthy songs that didn’t make it onto the albums I picked for the site’s top 10.

Federico Romagnoli

Like all lists, this one too is subject to two variables that make it incomplete and chaotic: the discoveries made by whoever compiles it, and their mood at the time. I’ve chosen ten tracks that aren’t from the albums I included in my personal list, which then fed into OndaRock’s year-end chart, so as to give space here to artists who didn’t release an album this year (or whose album I simply didn’t get to hear in time).

Fisz Emade Tworzywo – Dwa ognie (Poland, January 10); Cairokee – Ya abyad ya eswed (Egypt, March 21); Tat Ming Pair – Wui jik jau dzoey (Hong Kong, May 30); Gesu no Kiwami Otome – Toumeina arashi (Japan, July 30); Mahmood – Barrio (Italy, August 30); Dean – Sometimes I Hear Howlin’ In My Head (South Korea, September 6); Franco Battiato – Torneremo ancora (Italy, October 17); Billie Eilish – Everything I Wanted (United States, November 13); Tatsuro Yamashita – Recipe (Japan, November 26); Holland – Loved You Better (South Korea, December 11).

Maria Teresa Soldani

Massimiliano Speri

Valerio D’Onofrio

Gioele Sforza

At a time when streaming platforms are dangerously eroding the long-form listening experience, it’s the individual songs that are taking on a whole new centrality. Whether they’re the tracks you instinctively return to again and again, or the ones some algorithm decided might represent you, sifting through what I listened to most this year has never been as tricky as in 2019. These are songs that, even stripped from the albums they belong to, shine with their own light – a crash course in genres, styles and languages that inevitably don’t cohere, fragmented as they are, but which for that very reason offer a truer reflection of what this year meant to me musically.

Francesco Nunziata

My musical 2019 was a year I'd dare call schizophrenic, one that never settled on a single genre or fixed home, jumping from punk to Lana Del Rey, from Mark Ronson to Nick Cave, from America to Spain, from Ukraine to the Far East.

I couldn't not start with the song of the year (a "Venice Bitch" that's a place of the soul, listless and damp, sticky, reluctant yet enticing, a portrait of the present crystallized in ancient amber), followed by an excerpt from what I instead consider the album of the year ("Dogrel" by Fontaines D.C.), an anthem lit in Dublin that exploded everywhere.

Next come another seventeen songs, plus another ten that are a bit less "songs" and more longer tracks, sometimes less immediate or in any case marked by some less accessible sophistication, leaning toward metal, spatial avant-garde or uncompromising electronic music.

Giulia Quaranta

My playlist borrows its title from a line of the song that opens it, "Hypocrite" by Frozen Plasma, which moves between futurepop, trance and distant echoes of eurodance, submerged in harsh, painful words you wouldn't expect from a song like this. Here and there are the usual nods to Ypsigrock, the Sicilian festival that steals my heart every year: from the electropop of I'm Not a Blonde to the funereal solemnity of the splendid Whispering Sons, taking in David August's baroque-noir project and the naïf tensions of Let's Eat Gradma along the way. There's also room for two of my favourite bands: Italy's own Soviet Soviet, who recently released an EP, "Ghost", and Editors, who instead put out a Best Of. Naturally there's no leaving out DIIV, who claimed the top spot in my yearly ranking; I'm certain "Deceiver" is an album we'll remember for years to come. A little spot is also claimed by Lana Del Rey and Nick Cave, who both released two perfect gems, as well as by Boy Harsher, Bitw, Toy and Four Tet.

Although I'm coming off a positive year full of significant personal changes, the music that accompanies me continues to be mostly dark and outrageous, capable of leading my imagination astray and giving new life to my neuroses.

Ride the wave of great music

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17/11/2025