30. Angel Olsen - “Pops”

Raw beauty – that’s the only way to describe this track. Angel Olsen is a rock star. She shreds with the best, and yet here she displays another strength – her restraint. She’s a composer – an artist, or rather a curator. She swims and floats within the sounds directing and orchestrating them as she sees fit, finding the perfect balance between silence and reverb with the recognition that sometimes less is more.

There’s a frail strength to this track, a sort of gasping brokenness, as if everything superfluous has been worn and washed away and yet beneath it all lies a resiliency, a steel core that refuses to bow down and be defeated. She makes heartache tangible, and does it in a way that’s both extremely powerful and vulnerable. It’s as if were swimming within her emotion and feeling what she is feeling, merging souls to form some sort of empathic bond. From the two and a half minute mark on you want to both cry and celebrate. It’s a phoenix sensation – a rising from the ashes of destruction to find new life and meaning. It’s hitting rock bottom, finding who you are, and rebounding, building a better you based upon a foundation of experience as you crawl your way out of despair and up into the frontier of growth and progress.