1. (3-way tie) A.G. Cook — Keri Baby (feat. Hannah Diamond) / A.G. Cook — “Beautiful” / Hannah Diamond — “Attachment”

The PC Music camp is changing everything. You could write a dissertation on this stuff. Flat out, this is the future of pop music. It’s just that very few people realize it right now. Compulsively listenable, manic, global, DIY, like an unholy crossbreed of ARK Music, 90s rompler, Kyary avant-kawaii, vaporwave and Hatsune Miku. Metacute pop monstrosities. Schoolgirl crushes and neon ableton lasers. Here’s what Pigeons & Planes says about it: “PC Music is an independent music label that started last year whose output, at this point, resembles an online art exhibit. Headed by A.G. Cook, a London producer in his early twenties, PC is developing a stable of artists and sounds to provide a manic vision of modern pop that comes out like our best guesses at what the status quo could be in 2025. The music is bright and inane, intoxicating and dumb, catchy and bizarre—considered together as a vision of what’s to come, this combination seems both futuristic and vitally current at the same time. The label’s driving sound is ostensibly pop, several steps sideways from what has dominated the Top 40 for the past twenty-odd years and deconstructed, melted down into something unrecognizable and captivating. It’s as if someone tried describing what pop music sounded like to an alien—major chords, catchy hooks, danceable rhythms, young women singing about love or sex—and then told that alien to try to make a song. PC Music tracks largely follow the same rules as a Britney Spears or Katy Perry song, but the results are utterly divorced from what we hear on the radio.”

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2. Wussy — “Teenage Wasteland”

When’s the last time a rock’n’roll band felt really meaningful to you, struck you in your heart? High school? That’s what Wussy is capable of, still, even to thirty-somethings and forty-somethings, or especially to us. This is a song about The Who’s “Baba O’Riley”, and it’s a miniature 33 1/3 book in song form. It’s also a song about Wussy, about Ohio cornfields, about human connection, about the power of rock and roll to create something worth believing in and something to hang your hat on and even die for. I bet you’re cynical and I bet you didn’t think that was even possible in 2014. It is. It’s not being blogged about. People aren’t writing Medium posts about it. Myself, I didn’t even really catch on to this song until I saw the band live, tearing their guts out, putting on an aching 100% performance to a crowd of maybe two dozen people on a Wednesday night. It’s there. Wussy. People are finally getting turned on to this band, don’t sleep. They’re at their best right now.

3. Mike Adams At His Honest Weight — “I’m Worried”

Here’s another humble, working midwest rock band that is capable of making you believe. Again, no one’s writing about them. They’re from Indiana. You probably haven’t heard of them. But they put out one of the finest records of the year. This is my favorite cut from it. It’s an upbeat song that masks a deep darkness and anxiety. Mike Adams’s newborn son required emergency heart surgeries immediately after birth. This is about that. It’s also about everything surrounding that, and love, and friends, and support. Reconfiguring The Cure: “Show me show me show me how you do that trick that keeps you calm.” This is a salve of a song, for dark times. No one’s listening to this record on repeat, and that’s just not right.

4. Kyary Pamyu Pamyu — “Yumeno Hajima Ring Ring”

“Goodbye teacher, my friend / Time to go, heart is pounding / Sour candy on my lips / Expectation in the unknown city”

You can dissect this song in a few ways. I think it’s about Kyary branching out from the amazing producer Yasutaka Nakata (CAPSULE, Perfume), her teacher and producer for the past few years, the one who started her career and rocketed her to J-Pop stardom when she was barely 18. She’s in the middle of working with SOPHIE of “Bipp” fame, a collaboration which stands a chance of exploding the entire universe with its forward-thinking insanity. So I think that’s the subtext here. It’s sort of a sequel to “Furisodeshon”, her song about graduation and adulthood. Her previous album was about growing up and learning how to keep childlike energy while moving on to becoming an adult. This song is very much in the same vein, but shows a bittersweet resolution and maturity which we haven’t quite heard from her up until now. The new record coming out in July stands a good chance of being AOTY material.

5. George & Jonathan — “Hurtful Things”

Please don’t call this chiptune. It’s the sound engine that was created for Cave Story and it seems to place itself somewhere in between high-end AdLib / Soundblaster soundcards from the 90s, and sample-based lo-fi console music from somewhere ambiguous, maybe around the Sega CD era, with some Commodore 64 and demo scene thrown in for good measure. In other words, way more involved and complex than your usual 8-bit plugin nerdcore or whatever. These are also banger pop tunes, with great songcraft. They’re unabashedly summer jams. These are the right months for this album. Sip some radler and fucking vibe.

6. Lust For Youth — “Epoetin Alfa”

Here’s the exact polar opposite of the previous song. This is music for thawing out your car in January. It’s actually a relief to hear Swedish synthpop that’s not tropical Balearic bliss — this is chilly as it gets. It’s also goddamn beautiful. A slab of glacial magnificence. This is a huge step up for Lust For Youth — this is a stab at the big leagues, and I hope people are paying attention. I’m looking forward to seeing them soon. “Time, design, persistence.”

7. Boris — “Heavy Rain”

This may be the most immaculately produced, most astonishing thing that Boris has done. A lot of attention is being paid to the 18-minute epic “Angel” for good reason, but this is the track that has me floored. HUGE doomy riffs, enormous stacked guitars reaching skyward and hellward, and Wata’s voice at the center of the storm, stitching it all together — melancholic and ecstatic all at once, yearning for something impossible. I have no idea what she’s saying. It really, really doesn’t matter. The track keeps building in intensity until it’s almost unbearable. This is the very best of an amazing band. It’s best to stop this list here, because you should just be sitting in silence in a dark room after this track ends, thinking about your life, thinking about everything. God bless.