25. TV Girl - “Like We Planned (Feat. Madison Acid)”

If TV Girl releases something over the course of the year, chances are it will find its way onto this list. It’s like a law of nature, and try as I might, I’m powerless against it. This year was no different.

TV Girl has always created their own sample-heavy amalgamation of Glo-fi and Chillwave, a sort of lovechild between Electronic music and Rock music that has continuously flirted with Hip-Hop without ever fully diving into it. Now this song still doesn’t completely submerge itself, but it gets closer than any of their past tracks, wading out waist deep into the churning samples and percussive currents of Hip-Hop. In part this is owed to the addition of Madison Acid’s apathy-laced flow, but it’s also the due to the perfect skittering chillness of the beat. It’s a simple enough beat, yet it’s almost like the beat itself doesn’t know what it is, floating in one place only to shake itself off and hurry along when it feels like it’s growing too complacent.

It melds together my favourite aspects of music and then delivers it in a relatable fashion. It’s a white-washed bravado, appropriating the topics of Hip-Hop and confining them to the parochial world of a millennial, possessing the tongue in cheek listlessness and apathetic wit that characterizes our generation. The endemic brand of forlorn hedonism, fatalistic and existential, repeatedly insisting that everything is pointless even while doggedly pursuing it. It’s a world of contradiction, desiring complete control yet relinquishing all responsibility. It’s full of confusion, real and raw, sorting through life as you push it away.