Your Top Songs 2017

One hundred tracks from my personal 2017 rotation — the Spotify-Wrapped-style year-end pull, but built from what was actually on rather than what the algorithm thinks I should have liked. The version of the year that lived in my apartment, on long drives, on the kitchen speaker, in the headphones during the long stretch of working from a coffee shop that I was doing back then.

Red Hot Chili Peppers anchor the alt-rock side of the year. The band had released “The Getaway” in 2016 and the touring cycle ran well into 2017 — “Dark Necessities” was the lead single but the deeper album cuts kept rotating through my listening for the better part of two years. Foo Fighters “Run” opens the playlist because that was the song that established what the year’s rock-radio rotation would be — Grohl shouting his way through a song that he himself probably knew was the band’s best single in years.

NoMBe “Freak Like Me” sits early in the rotation. The artist is German producer-singer Noah McBeth, and the catalog is the kind of streaming-era discovery that the year was full of — singles released without album-cycle context, working through Spotify recommendation engines into specific listeners’ rotations without ever crossing over into the broader cultural conversation. “Freak Like Me” specifically is the cut that the algorithm kept surfacing for me and that I eventually stopped resisting.

Erick Morillo with Eddie Thoneick and Angel Taylor “Lost In You” carries the dance-pop-radio pull. Morillo is one of the founding figures of the late-’90s tribal-house scene and his catalog had quietly been in a renaissance for a few years before he died in 2020. The Thoneick collaboration with Angel Taylor’s vocal is the cut that brought him into the broader dance-pop audience that his earlier catalog never quite reached.

Denitia and Sene “casanova.” is the alt-R&B anchor of the year. The duo’s catalog had been my favorite streaming discovery of the previous year and the singles that kept dropping through 2017 confirmed that the trajectory was real. The Killers “The Man” was the rock-radio-revival pull that I argued with myself about for months before deciding it deserved a slot. The song is half-self-parody and half-actual-banger and the band’s catalog has been navigating that contradiction for fifteen years.

DJ Khaled with Rihanna and Bryson Tiller “Wild Thoughts” was the song of the summer and the kind of cut that the year-end rotation absolutely has to honor even when it’s not a song I’d defend in a critical conversation. The Santana sample is the structural moment and the placement near the front-half peak is doing the work of letting the cut land where it actually landed in real life — inescapable from June through October.

RAIZA BIZA “Wassup” is the cross-Atlantic COLORS-show pull that I keep returning to. Berlin-based New Zealand rapper, single-color background, single-take performance, no edits — the COLORS aesthetic is the platform’s whole pitch and “Wassup” is one of the cuts that proves the platform’s worth.

Anti Lilly & Phoniks “Blue In Green” carries the underground-rap-with-jazz-samples weight. Phoniks’s productions are the kind of beats that the streaming-era’s algorithm doesn’t quite know what to do with — they’re not contemporary-rap-radio, they’re not boom-bap-revival, they sit in the specific space that mid-2010s underground-rap producers were carving out. The track is on here because it was on my rotation for half the year.

One hundred tracks. About six and a half hours. The right length for the year-end summary that I’d put on a single Saturday in late December and let run through the whole afternoon while writing year-end texts to the friend group and trying to remember what the year had actually felt like. Took a screenshot of the Spotify Wrapped page that December and saved it somewhere. The screenshot’s gone but the playlist is still here, which is probably the more useful record. The year as I lived it, in the actual order it accumulated. Yours was different. Both are right.

The year-end personal-rotation tape became the annual ritual that closed the year. The friend group developed the expectation that the year-end edition would be the tape that summarized the twelve months by example rather than by retrospective. Played on the final Saturday afternoon of every December for years. The 2017 edition still holds up.