Listen to Paste ’s Best Songs of 2021 playlist on Spotify here. These were the 2021 tracks that held our ears, the moments that created memories-the seeds planted during a chaotic couple of years that, in spite of everything, grew tall. We’ve done our utmost to capture why the 50 tracks below struck us as this year’s best, but at the core of every song, there’s something ineffable, whispering to us in a language we can’t understand. Whereas albums play out across, say, 45 minutes, a song operates within a mere fraction of that time, forging its connection with your brain from moment to moment, rather than minute to minute-this is where the rubber meets the road, where songwriters make their magic. But you cannot have the latter without the former, and every year, this list is our opportunity to zoom in on the trees that stood tallest in the abundant forest planted over the past 365-some-odd days.
It’s the lone towering tree, rooted alongside another, then another, and so on, that eventually constitutes a forest. Somewhere along the line, we all agreed that full-length LPs were the gold standard by which musicians should be judged-forgetting the fact that songs were what we fell in love with in the first place. Albums are the traditional measure by which great artists earn that title.
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