Looking for very good and very new music? Would you settle for the hottest tracks of the entire year? The cream of 2018 features notes of soft wisdom, hard superficiality, transcendence, and lots of real life. Â Listen, learn, discern, and enjoy.
Lounar by Tobi Lou
Spotify:Â https://open.spotify.com/track/4AFGAXKRA8XpLnWJBlDCkC
YouTube:Â Â https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sSja2ZrlY0
Soft playful hip hop that bounces along with causal emotional insight and melancholy weightlessness.
Dreamy Dragon by Alison Wonderland and Chief Keef
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/7qEsrWCvoL31GYdzLkBQzm?si=ibtofbmORVqauB8nd24rSA
YouTube:Â https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aB7L3ADXbM
Emptiness-chic EDM collides with melodic tough guy rap to create a surprising and impeccably cool track that is well-characterized by it’s confrontational yet vague opening lines: “Oh you want me to be good for you?/But you gotta be bad for me?” It’s hard to parse what it means. Something? Anything? We may never know, but it’s very 2018 to take to take an appealing sensual/aesthetic experience completely at face value and just leave it at that.
PROM/KING by Saba
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/5cZpwmXGzDvBDX9Iv6wXzx?si=3oPtZHM9TuappIaRqYhXKw
YouTube:Â https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6ZsSWlcEDo
Complex personal narrative rap track that twists and turns from wry to anxious to angry to ecstatic to desperate and ends in tragedy. Bears close and multiple listens.
Immaterial by SOPHIE
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/02Mkz55cCAHabqlxwSP6X0?si=aLtMcfk9QNCOPD1UuU_YDg
YouTube:Â https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbsNInbydGQ
Hot future pop jam is insistently danceable and nicely captures the feeling of wanting to rip your skin off in search of something outside of constraints and categorization, which is also very 2018.
Afraid by Toni Romiti
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/track/348rDug0b4o2Fe5EVGmGm5?si=rmOyZyW6TF6PCpgk1vpjJw
YouTube:Â https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQys7eLBn6w
There are plenty of songs these days about women needing to get away from men, but very few take that line of thought as far as the potential outcome of actually being alone for some serious amount of time/forever. Toni Romiti, a leading truth teller in the field of existential r&b, tells a cautionary tale with some basic good advice (“Love yourself before you a love a boy”) but saves the taboo breaking declaration for the final bars (“I’m not afraid to be alone/I like it better by myself”).
Hear anything you liked? There’s oh so much more, spiralling into infinity – find all the past and future AHR Hot Trackz playlists here: