Sounds like? The best songs from 2018 ... that you didn't hear

From electro-punk to pop-soul, Guardian writers have picked their favourite underappreciated songs of the year

Check out a Spotify playlist of all the tracks here

Ssion – Big As I Can Dream/Comeback

On his first release in seven years, multimedia madman Cody Critcheloe (AKA Ssion) created his own hilarious answer song to Bohemian Rhapsody.

A seven and a half minute opus, Big As I Can Dream/Comeback lurches from a dreamy ballad to an 80s club banger to an electro-punk mental breakdown. If that’s not enough, Ssion (pronounced Shun) threw in wry allusions to Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd – not the most obvious soul-mates to the song’s other sonic sources, which range from Prince to Pet Shop Boys to Peaches.

It’s both the craziest, and the most danceable, song of the year, with an accompanying video that must be seen to be believed. JF

Rüfüs Du Sol – Lost in My Mind

From the Eagles to U2 to Iggy Pop to Warpaint to the Glitch Mob, loads of bands have made music inspired by their time in the mythically mystic high desert enclave of Joshua Tree. For the Australian-bred, now Los Angeles-based live electronic trio Rüfüs Du Sol, this trek to the desert is captured in Lost In My Mind, a darkly moody slow-build assembled from complex percussion, tribal chant vocal samples and hypnotic crescendo that suggests whatever these guys found out there in the dunes did their minds right.

The track comes from October’s Solace, Rüfüs’s third LP, and first album they’ve released since relocating to Venice Beach and becoming heroes of the LA underground. The band just wrapped a largely sold-out North American tour and return to the road early next year. In the meantime, Lost In My Mind and the sexy, sophisticated – and wholly appropriate for at-home/in-car listening – album from which it comes will warm you up like the desert sun during these long winter nights. KB

Okudaxij – Rock Bottom

For a song that clocks in at just over a minute and a half, I’ve managed to bleed this track dry when it comes to shouting about it all year. But this standout moment from the second LP (titled Bless You) by LA singer-songwriter Eric Radloff (Okudaxij is a word he has fabricated) is worthy of the exposure. Over a grungy acoustic chord progression, Radloff exerts barely any effort as he captures an exhaustive malaise that’s hung low over the horizon in 2018. It’s the apathy that develops when you’re tired of the incessant consumption. There’s too much news, too much information, too many vices, too much drama. “I’m over secrets, endless cigarettes and regrets,” he sings. “I’m over all of it.” Surrounded by the never-ending humdrum of life he makes a connection between constant stimuli and desolate isolation. “If you’re lonely then you’re just like me,” he repeats, with a blip of hope. My only complaint is that it’s not triple the length. EB

Thirdstory – Still in Love

While this one might be somewhat less obscure, and definitely slicker, than the other tracks on the list, it’s still not had quite the impact one would expect, given the pedigree.

A three-man collective of singer-songwriters, Thirdstory gained viral fame with YouTube covers of songs from Adele and Taylor Swift before encountering their widest physical audience with Chance the Rapper, not as support but as members of his band. Stepping to the front of the stage, they released an album this year that felt tinged by Chance’s gospel-rap-soul hybridisation and it didn’t exactly sink but it failed to fly particularly high. The standout track Still in Love is a big, confident pop-soul ode to the struggle to get over a past love. The music is deceptively upbeat but the melancholic lyrics are focused on lingering heartache and the accompanying video is a poignant time-jumping tale of a couple falling in and out of love. It’s a song that climbs high while digging deep and in a just world, this would have been a radioplay smash. BL

Georgia – Started Out

London producer Georgia’s 2015 debut was a grab-bag of influences gleaned from capering around the capital, picking up qawwali mixtapes from cab drivers and exploring the murky promise of ambient music after a revelatory Oneohtrix Point Never gig. It was, by nature, a mixed bag. But three years later, the first single from her forthcoming second album was a masterclass in focus: bassline sidling like a Mr Fingers cut, anchoring the kind of adrenaline-high beat made for soundtracking Rocky boxing montages. There’s a flash of Hot Chip dazzle to the synths, and the endearing vulnerability of Tegan and Sara in Georgia’s vocals, but a joyful spirit – in keeping with her determination to “be wicked and bold now” – that’s all her own. LS

Tirzah – Devotion

The title track of UK singer-songwriter Tirzah’s debut album embodies the adage “less is more”, with frank lyrics written around a simple, almost skeletal piano and drum loop. “I just want your attention,” she says. “I just want you to listen.”

Teaming up with her friend and collaborator Mica Levi – who composed the harrowing score for Jonathan Glaser’s 2014 film Under the Skin, and the Oscar-nominated score for Jackie – Tirzah’s first full-length is at times willfully muted, creating a sensation of invasive intimacy that’s most persuasive when the 30-year-old adorns Levi’s lush, lean beats with bruisingly honest poetry. Our contemporary moment is not one for subtlety, but Devotion, the song and the record, bucks prevailing pop trends in favor of a certain stillness, a contract between musician and listener that’s refreshingly devoid of guile. Tirzah nails this delicate balance on each of the album’s 11 songs, particularly Fine Again, Basic Need and Say When. JN

Hen Ogledd – Problem Child

Richard Dawson’s last album, Peasant, saw him take listeners back to a medieval northern Britain. A grand concept album, its songs bellowed and grew, with Dawson creating a mad, bad and compelling world over the course of one of 2017’s best albums. This side project with harpist Rhodri Davies, Dawn Bothwell and Sally Pilkington – features equally ambitious empire building, albeit of an intergalactic rather than historical nature.

Problem Child sees the group decamp to an alien planet with Dawson’s muddy bassline providing the backdrop to a song about a space traveller who becomes a “heavenly instrument” for his inquisitive new hosts. Closer to a metal song than the psychedelic folk he’s usually associated with, it feels like a songwriter who is enjoying time in a new sandbox and sees the Hen Ogledd project, he originally started with Davies, evolve into something closer to pop than the avant garde experiment it started as. LB

The Lemon Twigs – The Fire

The centrepiece of Go To School, the year’s best – and, you have to assume, only – rock opera about a chimpanzee called Shane who attends a human educational establishment, The Fire manages to condense everything that’s great about the alarmingly young glam revivalists into a six-minute prog-country epic, one that culminates in Shane burning down the school and killing 100 of his classmates. As with all the Twigs’ output, it’s bananas, naturally, but also strangely moving and intensely hummable. GM