Your Top Songs 2019
One hundred and thirty-nine tracks of 2019, the year-end rotation pull. The year was strong enough that the standard hundred-track cut couldn’t quite hold it — too many singles deserved the slot — so the rotation pushed past the round number into the catalog territory. Some years deserve the discipline. 2019 didn’t.
Foo Fighters anchor the legacy-rock rotation across the year. The band had been deep into the touring cycle and the singles kept rotating through alt-radio. Bruno Mars with Cardi B “Finesse” — the Remix — opens because that was the song that effectively established what the year’s pop-radio rotation would be. The Cardi B verse is the structural moment of the track and the song became inescapable from January through May.
Maroon 5 with Cardi B “Girls Like You” — the Cardi B Version — sits in the front quarter. The original album version is on a different tape; the Cardi B Version is what’s on this year-end review because the remix is what actually lived on the radio. The cut had been at the top of the rotation since the previous summer and was still in heavy rotation through 2019, which is one of those reminders about how the streaming-era song-decay curve has flattened.
benny blanco with Halsey and Khalid “Eastside” is the slick-pop-radio bridge that ran through the year. The track had been at the top of the rotation since late 2018 and stayed there through the first half of 2019. Halsey was having the best year of her career.
Silk City with Dua Lipa, Mark Ronson, and Diplo “Electricity” is the deliberate sequencing into the late-2010s house-revival pop crossover. The Silk City project was Ronson and Diplo’s collaboration, and “Electricity” was the lead single that effectively predicted the disco-revival peak that would arrive in 2020 with Lipa’s “Future Nostalgia.”
Post Malone “Circles” anchors the back half. The song had dropped in August and was still climbing through year’s end. The placement at the back-half is honest about when the cut actually peaked — late in the year, not at the year’s outset. Marshmello with Bastille “Happier” was the slick-melancholy-pop pull that the year’s afternoon rotation absolutely committed to.
Bazzi with Camila Cabello “Beautiful” carries the deliberate-saccharine pop-radio block. The Bazzi catalog had been on rotation since “Mine” the previous year, and the Cabello feature is the cut where Bazzi crossed into the broader audience. Ariana Grande “thank u, next” is the cultural-anchor track of the year. The song effectively rewrote how to construct a confessional pop single — sparse production, vocal carrying the track, the hook absorbed into the year’s social-media context and amplified.
Mid-rotation pulls in the year’s other peaks. Billie Eilish’s full “WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP” album cycle dominates a stretch of about fifteen tracks — her catalog was the year’s most important album-level achievement, and the year-end review has to honor that. Lizzo’s “Cuz I Love You” cuts crossed over from the cult-following catalog into broader rotation and “Truth Hurts” specifically became inescapable from spring onward. Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” complete with the seven-and-a-half-month Billboard Hot 100 record run that the song produced is on here in both the original and the Billy Ray Cyrus remix because both versions were on heavy rotation.
The back half leans into the year’s deeper-rotation pulls. Tame Impala’s “Patience” and “Borderline” singles from the year that preceded “The Slow Rush.” James Blake’s “Assume Form” tracks — the album that should have won the year’s Mercury Prize and didn’t. The Mac Miller posthumous album “Circles” cuts that the year’s deeper rap rotation absolutely committed to. The MF DOOM-Madlib reissue that Stones Throw put out in November was the catalog event of the year and a couple of those cuts made the year-end review because they were on heavy rotation through December.
One hundred and thirty-nine tracks lands at about nine hours. The right length for a year-end retrospective playback that runs across an entire Saturday in late December — coffee in the morning, lunch in the kitchen, dinner with the family, late-evening winding down. Built for the friend group who’d lived through the standing-Friday editions with me. The annual ritual that closes the year. Final-Friday-of-the-year was the playback. Took the whole evening.
View the full playlist on YouTube →
Tracks (139)
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