Submissions are presented in the order they were received. Click here to see last year’s songs.
Rod Lee – Dance My Pain Away
A highlight of my year was getting to DJ with my pal Alix at the closing night of Cairde Festival in Sligo on a bill with Fun Protestants and Taitliu. The night itself was acres of fun but also I loved the preparation. There are few things better than swapping and listening to tunes and talking about music with a good friend. This track was part of our set. It’s a Baltimore club classic that I first heard back in 2012. It’s about keeping on keeping on and a banger, so I thought it would be a good way to kick this off.
Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra Led by Horace Tapscott – Motherless Child
Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra was and is an extraordinary project; an open and ongoing vessel for visionary, communal music. This archival recording of a 1971 concert performed in a high school is a must listen from front to back, so it was difficult to pick a tune. I settled on this one, where they take an evergreen folk standard and turn it into a free wheeling and deeply moving epic of sorrow, love and rage.
Rún – Caoineadh
Rún is a band consisting of three of Ireland’s most gifted and imaginative musicians. This is from their first record, which is a fantastic synthesis of doom, folk, a little funk and avant garde freakout and collage. This final track is an utterly vitalistic song about death. The sound of a door closing and another opening.
Enjoy and for 2026, love, peace and decolonisation under the one sky,
Ruairí
João Gilberto – Bahia com H
I think the film I watched the most this year was a short by Rogério Sganzerla entitled, Brasil, which is soundtracked by the album by João Gilberto, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil & Maria Bethânia. I remember first watching it in January and seeing the translation of the lyric: As the poet said, there’s no prettier place / It comes from the days when you would write “Bahia” with an “H” (Ah! Já disse um poeta Que terra mais linda não há / Isso é velho e do tempo que a gente escrevia Bahía com H!) and thinking, “gee, what an idea, what a way to express how it used to be.” This is language so succinctly put, I think this lyric is a marvel.
Glen Campbell – By the Time I Get to Phoenix
Glen Campbell has been an obsession of the past few years that I’ve been able to share with a lot of friends. This one is particularly emotional, the first note strikes emotion and from there the song holds me in a powerful dream state.
D’Angelo – Send it On
I could go with almost every single D’Angelo song in this spot, but I went with the one that has one of the strongest grooves, one of the deepest pockets, and most creative bridges in all of funk.
Cheers from Macedonia – Liam Kenny
Steve Reich – Come Out
Mesmerizing minimalist composition that transmogrified from archival footage of the Harlem Six. Sounds mostly like something a sinister cult would play to hypnotize or disarm their victims, but I for one consider myself blessed to have been disarmed by this.
Gios4ma – THERVLTION
Angry, pensive, unapologetically experimental. Plenty of sound bytes (i.e. Gil Scott-Heron), remixing, audio of gunfire and air-raid sirens, spoken-word poetry. Burn it all the fuck down.
The Beaches – Jocelyn
One of the best bridges in recent memory. Plain and simple.
Low – Words
Melancholy winter vibes from 1990s’ Minnesota.
Trabant – Kész az egész
The sublimely heartbreaking song from Béla Tarr’s Damnation, here sung by its composer, Mihály Víg.
Księżyc – Kapkowa
An otherworldly and out-of-time sound from Warsaw.
Kim Kwang Suk and the Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble – 천리마 달린다 (Chollima on the Wing)
Nothing like patriotic North Korean pop to motivate in the morning.
Yoshiko Sai – Kuraitabi Dark Journey 佐井好子 暗い旅
Opening song of Yumeno Kyusaku’s Girl Hell (1977), great soundtrack for lesbian yearning.
Yoon Do Hyun – 광야에서 (In the Wilderness)
My mother’s favourite version of the song that was popular during the student movement in 1980s South Korea. She went to a pro-democracy protest once and ran away when the police started firing tear gas. I like to think that she still harbours some revolutionary spirit while listening to this.
Risco Connection — Ain’t No Stopping Us Now
This incredible hook got me through many long days at work this year.
Kae Tempest (feat. Kevin Abstract) — More Pressure
Goosebumps on the Ubahn. “More abundance, more reflection / Less instruction, more comprehension”
Algernon Cadwallader — World of Difference
“It makes me feel like singing A-C-A-B / One day you’ll get what’s coming”
Los Thuthanaka – Salay “Titi Ch’iri Siqititi”
Lata Mangeshkar – Haa Jab Tak Hai Jaan (from Sholay (1975))
Soul Central – Strings of Life (Danny Krivit Re-Edit)
Britney Spears – Get Naked (I Got a Plan)
Britney: Unchained (if only that had actually been the case when Blackout dropped). A song that, somehow, lives up to that legendary title.
Yoko Ono – Hard Times Are Over
Arrived at the right time for me.
John Cale – Emily
Embarrassed to say that “House featuring John Cale” brought me here (but not embarrassed to say that song also rules). This one is simply gorgeous. “Maybe we’ll love again…”
Gwenifer Raymond – Bonfire of the Billionaires
Gwenifer Raymond’s ferocious fingerpicking recalls why Fahey’s style was dubbed “American primitive” in the first place—that mysterious, ancient-feeling, string-rattling tension shared by country blues, mountain folk, and Hindustani classical. Last Night I Heard the Dog Star Bark is my favorite new album from 2025, and this song’s title best sums up the recreational activities I hope for in 2026.
Maurice Louca – Benhayyi Al-Baghbaghan (Salute the Parrot)
I’ve been thinking a lot this year about how art, daily life, and the apocalyptic political conditions looming over the world are inseparable from one another, and how I’m most interested in art that expressed that inseparability. Basma al-Sharif’s film Morgenkreis is the best example of that I’ve encountered this year, I’ve seen it a bunch of times as I reviewed it and later interviewed her, and this song is key to the film in a way that makes the two inseparable. It’s been stuck in my head for months and I’ve been listening to Louca’s album. Basma uses different parts of the song in different parts of her film in a way that makes it unclear there in fact the same song, that the whirlwind of sound and images spanning from the disasters we see on our streets or our screens to our intimacy with loved ones and the violent intrusions of each into other are one long and irresolvable progression. But also, the song is just a banger.
Brooks & Dunn – Boot Scootin’ Boogie
What can I say? I grew up in Tennessee in the 90s. This songs gets me through every year.
I do not wish to belabour the selection of these songs with my own emotional-ladden writing on the enlightenment that they brought to me this year. Instead, I will just pull-quote a lyric from each one that etched itself into my brain and became a mantra for me to “pull through” each day of what felt like a rather wretched year.
Tori Amos – Smokey Joe
Standout lyric: The annihilating feminine/ Does not need civilizing
Chelsea Wolfe – House of Self-Undoing
Standout lyric: Yearning to be left unbound / Joy thief this human heart
Rosalía – Porcelana
Standout lyric: Ego sum nihil / Ego sum lux mundi
Cairokee – Telk Qadeya كايروكي – تلك قضية
If I were in power, I would have the lyrics to this song taught in schools.
ينقذ في سلاحف بحرية
يقتل حيوانات بشرية
تلك قضية وتلك قضية
[They save sea turtles
They kill human animals
But this is one issue, and that’s another]
Armando Trovajoli – Che vuole questa musica stasera (From Profumo di donna (1974))
A company to melancholic love & hate journeys with an Italian fever. I came across the soundtrack first and then watched the film, “Profumo di Donna” (Scent of a Woman), the 1972 Italian original version of “Scent of a Woman” (1992).
If there’s a musical definition of the impossibility of loving and longing!
Googoosh – Pol گوگوش – پل
I couldn’t let it go without a Persian song, something that suits both crying and dancing in the moments of homesickness!
Wish all our loved ones be safe in 2026!
Men I Trust – The Landkeeper
Big Thief – Promise Is a Pendulum
Giacomo Puccini – “Madama Butterfly”, SC 74, Act Il: Orchestral Prelude
MaWhoo, GL Ceejay & Thukuthela – Bengicela
Hamid El Shari – Ouda
Donny Hathaway – Love, Love, Love
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