The best songs of 2021 … that you haven’t heard

Leslie Winer – Hold On Postcards

Leslie Winer’s mesmerising face – strong jaw, stern lips, graceful cheekbones – made her a muse to Jean-Paul Gaultier, a star of Dior and Valentino ads and a cover girl for Vogue, though girlish she wasn’t: her tough androgyny and power dressing was the perfect expression of an uncaring yet increasingly permissive 1980s. “I was a reluctant model for five junkie years,” she later said, “I’m also a former nasty alcoholic and former Tampax user, each for more than five years and with considerably more enthusiasm.” That career discarded, her next act was astonishing: music that delved into industrial, dub and – influentially – trip-hop, Winer issuing drawled monologues over the top with Gobi-arid humour.

Her work was reissued this year by Light in the Attic on the compilation When I Hit You – You’ll Feel It. Hold On Postcards is its sole unreleased track but maybe its very best. Slurring as if after a boozy nap on a sunbed, her vocal as fried as a bit of fritto misto, Winer slowly recites banal postcard observations from Europe: “Lovely weather, we go to the beach, I’ve been playing boules,” this last revelation with a funny note of astonishment as she stirs briefly out of total indolence. Slipping sunburned and omnipotent from Ajaccio to Nice to Guernsey and beyond, she conjures the listlessness of holidays, and of the wealthy, with a supernatural accuracy. With its piano motifs and sing-song backing vocals, there’s something lulling about this song, and yet a mistral of disquiet feels like it’s about to blow in. “Thinking of you all the time,” she admits amid aloof statements about how many new friends she’s making. Tellingly, her holiday ends – or at least her postcards do – at somewhere called the Hotel Nadir. Ben Beaumont-Thomas

PE – The Reason for My Love

One of the most unfairly overlooked songs of 2021 could just as easily have come out during the sooty New York summer of 1981. The Reason for My Love, by the young Brooklyn quintet PE, channels the fidgety, dark, and inescapably danceable sound of Mudd Club-era, underground bands like Bush Tetras, The Contortions and ESG. From the fractured, no-wave sax to its briskly undulating bass line to the haunted vocal of Veronica Torres, every sound in the song confronts and thrills. Like some avant-garde ear worm, the falling-apart sound in the song oddly coheres. More, it extends a mini-trend of young bands who have been refiguring New York’s aural history. Just as the debut album by the teenage Brooklyn group Geese recast the sound of local guitar bands like Television and The Feelies, PE’s song gives Manhattan’s underground club history its own dynamic twist. Jim Farber

Doss – Look

In less than three minutes and about five lines of lyrics, the mysterious New York/Baltimore producer (and sometime PC Music associate) Doss draws an addictive portrait of power, temptation and danger. “You see me on my own,” she chants, and depending on which way she limns the line, it’s either an invitation to approach or a warning to back away. She repeats her mantras of isolation – “not looking at my phone / Myself, on my own” – with the cadence of an expertly bounced basketball; around her, an intense bubblegum synth motif that contains strange echoes of Benny Benassi’s Satisfaction pings and bungees. It’s a tightly snatched, head-down burst that doubles as a defiant anthem for these past two lonely years. Laura Snapes

Jenna Esposito – The Other Side of Forever

It’s the heartbreak and hopefulness of a turbulent 2021 from the mind of a songwriter who knows them all too well. Ernie Rossi, owner of century-old gift and music shop E Rossi and Company in New York City’s Little Italy, was sidelined by health problems after reopening following the long city-mandated shutdown. Margaret, his wife of 51 years, knew the neighborhood icon might not stay afloat if doors closed once again and solely took over duties with the couple’s best friend, Freddy. Then this past spring, both Margaret and Freddy caught and died of Covid-19. In the wake of their consecutive deaths, Rossi wrote The Other Side of Forever, a heartfelt tribute to the bond the trio shared and the immense loss he feels. Recorded by the New York indie artist Jenna Esposito, the earworm ballad with a momentous opening and climatic finale was produced in the Italian folk style the store was known for being a chief importer of nearly 100 years ago. And today, Rossi is continuing his fight to stay in business. Rob LeDonne

DijahSB – New Harrison

“I’m not sure what to do, at this point I didn’t plan to survive,” DijahSB matter of factly spits on New Harrison, a standout from their latest album Head Above the Waters. Be it such commendably frank rhymes (along with social media posts) about mental health, or being an out-and-proud non-binary artist in a genre once notorious for its heteronormativity, the rising Canadian MC certainly is a trail blazer. But aside from breaking such ground, DijahSB is also a student of the game. Rather than chase trap-rap trends, they choose instrumentals that are both breezy and fresh but also frequently steeped in rap’s soulful old-school grooves. The mellow, melancholy yet cheeky beat for New Harrison is a prime example of DijahSB’s past-meets-future motif. That, along with the MC’s penchant for on-point NBA-inspired punchlines throughout the song’s three-and-a-half-minute runtime, make DijahSB’s potential to be an all-star in their own right abundantly clear. Kyle Mullin

Dylan Fraser – I’d Rather Be Here

There’s something horribly, embarrassingly familiar about the predicament at the centre of 20-year-old Scottish singer Dylan Fraser’s hair-raising track I’d Rather Be Here, released to quiet acclaim this past autumn. The song, which starts with a whisper for attention and ends with a cry for help, is about a specifically awful place to be: in love with someone who is detrimental to your mental health (“the top of these buildings used to feel so tall but maybe that’s ‘cause you made me feel so small”). While many songwriters would use this as a jump-off to celebrate the empowerment that comes attached to then taking flight, Fraser instead focuses in on something far messier: staying there because being with someone harmful is better than being without them. It’s slickly produced but Fraser’s alternately sad and furious desperation is nothing but heartbreakingly genuine. Benjamin Lee