The Best Songs of 2021

With no pretense of completeness, and none of giving full voice to the staff rankings either, we thought we'd let you listen to the playlists that best represent each of our own ”musical year”. The songs that stood out within a certain genre, the songs symbolic of breakout artists or of great returning names – or, more simply, the songs that meant something to those of us who listened to them.

2021 sucked for a lot of reasons, but at least it left us plenty of great films and songs like “Solar Power”, “Shelter Song” and “Vivo”, so there's always a reason to smile. Forgive the terseness, but I'm running low on rhetoric.

Gabriele Benzing

“The apocalypse is coming/ Only moving slow and unevenly”, proclaims Kyle Morton of Typhoon in his quivering voice. Meanwhile, in Dallas, a fringe of QAnon followers gathers to await the return of a resurrected John Kennedy. Is the end of times near? Or is it, rather, that we can no longer even agree on what we call reality?

It's hard to trust one another when our eyes no longer see the same things. Our long pandemic winter increasingly resembles the Antarctic outpost of “The Thing”: we cast suspicious glances at each other in search of the enemy, each day a little more exhausted than the last. And it's precisely by drawing on the imagery of John Carpenter's film that Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine remind us, over a whisper of piano, where the real point lies: “This is the thing about people/ You never really know what’s inside”. Starting over from the mystery of the other. From their irreducibility.

Of course, there's been more than enough talk of starting over this year. Pretending we can pick up right where we left off, as if nothing had happened. No, that's not possible. After wrestling all night, warn the intertwined voices of Low, you carry the marks forever. As with the biblical Jacob, it's those marks that say who we really are. It's those marks that show us the way.

Marco Bercella

This playlist is a selection of 20 songs – each taken from my favourite albums of 2021 – arranged as a compilation that's as coherent as possible (you know, “I'll make you a mixtape!”? Maybe not, but never mind). For the bigger names I'll point you to our writers' thorough reviews, while I'll spend a few words on those who – for various reasons – stayed in the background. Welcome comebacks come courtesy of the now-depleted Stranglers, who deliver an unexpected spark with “Dark Matters”, and the Blow Monkeys with “Journey To You”, both very much alive and kicking, and by no means to be dismissed as plasticky 80s cheesiness. Going back even further in time, we must flag the miracle of two American octogenarians-plus, Dion and David Crosby, since true class stays with you forever, even without trying too hard. In Italy the rule still holds that the further you stray from the official circuits, alternative or not, the more noteworthy records you find: so make a note of

the names of Blocco 24 under the heading of auteur electrowave, of Accauno under nostalgia-free prog, and of Paolo F. Bragaglia, with his admirable technotronic exercises.

Paolo Ciro

My favourites of 2021 are mostly old acquaintances. Not that it was a year without novelty, or without excellent debuts, but in the end the records that dominated my listening over these twelve months are largely confirmations. Let's start with Jacopo Incani, aka Iosonouncane, who managed to raise the bar of his work even higher with a fresco that's at once intimate, windswept and lush, the kind that only island-dwellers know how to conceive and translate into sound. To give you an idea, no Italian record had ever topped my year-end list before – there you go. As further proof of its worth, consider that its direct competitors were two acts who've been among critics' favourites for far longer, namely Arab Strap and Low. The former return after sixteen years of silence, and do so with such ease it's as if they'd never left. The latter are one of those treasures to be jealously guarded, the kind that give meaning to the very need to still make records today, and a completeness of scope that's nothing short of universal in the emotions they deliver. Much of that is thanks to BJ Burton too, the man behind the sonic centrifuge that's enveloped their songwriting for the past five years. Beyond the top-three elite, though, there are still plenty of records of absolute value. Some manage to push ever more deconstructed levels of darkness and commitment (Moor Mother, The Bug), others re-code elements of the past into a complexity that hasn't been heard in rock for a long time (Black Country, New Road and Black Midi). My playlist follows the order of the list, offering, rather predictably, one track per record. I hope it won't sound predictable to your ears

There are so many genres, so many scenes, both global and national, that one can follow today, and so many treasures each of these fields holds, that putting together a playlist that's both concise and satisfying gets harder every year.

The only way to tackle a mission like this is to impose strict rules on yourself. In my case, otherwise I'd never be done, I told myself “okay Michele, 2021, just 21 songs”. That's how this restless, uninhibited string of tracks came about, one that couldn't care less about genres or boundaries, held together only by the beauty and the “stickiness” of the songs; the ones, in fact, that I've come back to the most in this year of compulsive, voracious listening, and that I'll certainly carry with me.

Next year I promise I'll give you 22, and the year after that 23, and so on, until one day something stops me.

An outward-looking year, marked by surprises like the last three singles from Mitski Miyawaki, now further than ever from the riot-grrrl kid with the Liz Phair poster on her bedroom wall. Three new songs that bode well for the forthcoming album, among which “Working for the Knife” stands out, epic and just elusive enough to elegantly mark out her new path. Then there's Lana Del Rey, who as if that weren't enough strings together two more wildly inspired records in a row, containing gems like “Violets for Roses”, an instant classic on first listen. Rounding out the all-female podium is the introverted Natalie Jane Hill, Texan singer-songwriter and genuine hidden gem of folk songwriting, somewhere between Nick Drake and Sandy Denny. Next comes the Arabic pop of Egyptian artist Hamza Namira, with an exquisitely refined ballad featuring oud and kawala, Israeli artist Bar Tzabary and his muzika mizrahit rich in multiple layers, evergreen favorites Bilderbuch (they never seem to write a bad song), the timeless signature style of Cate Le Bon, the orchestral rap of McKinley Dixon, the eternal Kanye West and the ambitious baroque pop of the promising Spellling.

Claudio Fabretti

In this other strange, pandemic-shaped year, musical surprises certainly weren't lacking. Who would have imagined, for instance, that an Italian indie songwriter like Iosonouncane, who I usually considered a bit too tied to that particular scene, would pull out of his hat a monumental album like “Ira“?

And in the year that just went by, there was no shortage of new discoveries, as far as I'm concerned, from Israeli artist Bar Tzabary to the surprising – though only up to a point – success of the Silk Sonic duo, formed for the occasion by two seasoned black music veterans, Bruno Mars and Anderson Paak.

Then, of course, there were also the confirmations. Like those from an indie powerhouse called Godspeed You! Black Emperor (“G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!“), but also from young, now-seasoned acts of the new post-punk scene like Idles with “Crawler” and Iceage with “Seek Shelter“, from (almost) minimal-wave veterans like Xeno & Oaklander, (“Vi/deo“), from ever-wonderful singer-songwriters like Lisa Gerrard (“Burn“), Marissa Nadler (“The Path Of The Clouds“), Chelsea Wolfe (alongside Converge on “Bloomoon: I“), Lana Del Rey (the double whammy of “Blue Banisters“ and “Chemtrails Over The Country Club“) or the very young Billie Eilish, by now an absolute mainstream pop certainty, as confirmed by her “Happier Than Ever“. But Italy gave me plenty of satisfaction too, from the Extraliscio surprise to the welcome (and convincing) return of Carmen Consoli.

Valerio D’Onofrio

Even this year there's no escaping the 80s alive, and thank goodness for that! Whether it's the sumptuous version rediscovered by the Van Etten-Olsen pairing, or the more synth-pop take revisited by Bieber and The Kid Laroi, or by Dua Lipa, the “most frivolous decade” keeps handing out ideas to today's pop scene, to the point that even a rapper like Lil Nas X manages to sound credible offering his own take on new wave, holding his own alongside the very artists who made that era great in the first place (the resurgent Duran and Tears For Fears). Softening the edges, a touch of feminine sultry smoothness (Del Rey, St. Vincent and Eilish) that never hurts.

Fabio Guastalla

Francesco Pandini

A senseless year, a year stolen and lost. Or maybe not, but at least that's how it felt.

Federico Romagnoli

My favorite songs of 2021, coming from every corner of the world, from Egypt to Cambodia, from Taiwan to Spain. The first part features tracks taken from loose singles or albums I still need to dig into properly, while the second part draws from records I've already voted for in the dedicated section.

Marco Sgrignoli

I wanted to split my playlist into two clear-cut parts. The first, which I could call "songs", brings together the twelve catchiest and most "sing-along" tracks that kept me company this year: it includes songs from albums I loved and in some cases reviewed (San Salvador, Baiuca, Stick In The Wheel), but also successful pop numbers that won me over regardless of the albums they came from, which were at times disappointing (Killers, Tom Grennan). Stylistically it ranges widely, with plenty of progressive pop and reworkings of traditional folk, but there's also room for much more besides.

The next ten tracks, fewer in number but longer in duration, should be called "tracks" rather than "songs". These are the pieces that best filled the many moments when I wasn't in the mood for proper songs, and instead looked to music for a less attention-grabbing companion. That's where my other great passions of recent years come through: nu jazz in its various forms (STUFF., Apifera, Ola Kvernberg), the sounds of the other Mediterranean (Daniel Herskedal, Naïssam Jalal), the legacies of post-rock, progressive and jazz-rock (Francesca Remigi, Really From), and that electronic territory once known as deconstructed club and now who knows what to call it (Giant Claw, Fatima Al Qadiri). The section opens and closes with two tracks that straddle categories: an instrumental piece more melodically captivating than many a sung song, and a fully-fledged song in which the voice is just one instrument among many, not necessarily the most prominent.

Ride the wave of great music

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03/12/2025