Rob Sheffield’s Top 25 Songs of 2014

What a year for songs — songs about love and underwear and mixtapes and lipstick. There were more killer songs this year than anyone could absorb, more than this list can hold. (Some gems are over on my albums list, to avoid duplicating all the same artists.) These are my 25 favorites of 2014, including but not limited to: hits, obscurities, punk rockers, glam rappers, cheese-pop divas, slow jams, karaoke disasters, disco infernos. And “Turn Down For What,” obviously.

1. 5 Seconds of Summer, “She Looks So Perfect”
One of the weirdest things about music, besides “everything,” is you never know where your next favorite song is coming from. Case in point: in 2014 it’s these four Australian teen-pop punk boys yelling, “You look so perfect standing there in my American Apparel underwear.” Their breakthrough hit is a blast of big-hearted girl worship, all guitars and pheromones: “I made a mixtape straight out of ’94/I got your ripped skinny jeans lying on my floor.” 5SoS played this at MetLife in August when they were opening for One Direction, in front of 80,000 screaming girls, the drummer wearing a Sonic Youth Confusion Is Sex T-shirt under a MIXTAPE ’94 backdrop. Not a thing about that moment or this song makes sense. It’s real punk because it’s real pop, it’s real pop because it’s real punk, yet it’s real anything only because it’s faux everything. Underwear song of the year. Mixtape song of the century. Underwear-and-mixtape combo of all time. And I know now that I’m so down.

2. Taylor Swift, “New Romantics”
“We show off our different scarlet letters/Trust me, mine is better” is the sharpest couplet Taylor has ever written, except maybe the others in this song. I have no idea why she left a song this urgent and glittery and perfect off her album (it’s a bonus track), but geniuses are weird. “New Romantics” is where she really indulges all that Eighties synth-pop she warned us about, with a mascara-smudged nod to the New Romantic scene that gave us Duran Duran and Adam Ant. (Does Tay own Visage records? She can have mine.) It’s the best song the Pet Shop Boys never wrote — it could have been the fourth-best song on Actually, or third-best on Behavior. She plays it cool vocally — she even sings “We’re all bored,” when boredom is maybe the least Tay of emotions. But then that chorus hits and she’s inside the mirror ball, on a floor where the lights and boys are blinding and playing cool won’t cut it anymore. I thought I was Taylor’s hugest fan, but I never imagined she had a tune like this in her.

3. Vic Mensa, “Down On My Luck”
The 21-year-old Chicago rapper skates over the glossy beats of vintage Detroit techno, prowling the city in search of that good life. Along with producer Stefan Ponce, Mensa really hits a sense of spaced-out metropolitan loneliness, like when you’re face to face with glass buildings that reflect how empty you feel, so you just hide behind your eyes. “I can take you with me wandering if you wanna go there,” wherever there is.

4. Cloud Nothings, “I’m Not Part of Me”
This year’s most durable “today sucked until I put this song on” song. Dylan Baldi gives himself a good talking-to, gulping, “I focus on what I can do myself,” even if all he can do himself is write songs about how he can’t get a damn thing done. The drummer races him to the finish line. Over the course of the year I’ve been amazed at this song’s power to turn a rotten day into one with a fighting chance. What more could you ask from a song?

5. Nicki Minaj and Ariana Grande, “Get on Your Knees”
Nyquil Minaj grabs America’s most doe-eyed pop moppet by the ponytail and drags her into an ode to getting brain. I love how when Ariana gets sensitive and sings about her feelings, you can’t understand a word she says (“the hands of a broken heart”? “become who I really are”?) but when it comes to this topic, she has no trouble getting to the point. Nicki rhymes merkin, twerkin’ and Jane Birkin, just because she can.