You go left when you lace Roc Marciano. You give him beats full of analog fuzz and maybe a searing psych rock guitar sample, sometimes missing drums. See Alchemist’s “The Turning Point.”
Gensu Dean went left of left (further left? left-er?). “Ball of Yarn” has crisp electronic keys and strings that make for a rich entry in the Roc canon. The only real rule for making a song with Roc Marciano is that you have to shatter expectations.
We can all agree that 2016 has been a truly terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year. Really, the only redeeming thing this year has done for us is produce new albums from Rihanna, The Knowles Sisters™, Kanye (we’ll ignore the last month), Frank Ocean, and Chance. That’s nothing to bat an eye at but…
[record scratch]
[freeze frame]
We’re not even going to talk about them. This year we’re here to celebrate the low-key bangers. The songs we found while we were waiting for Frank to finally drop that album. The songs we discovered in the deep dark recesses of Spotify. The songs that made us scramble to ask Siri who it was… and not even Siri could tell us. These are the best songs of 2016 that you haven’t heard. It won’t quite make up for the dumpster fire of 2016 but it’s the least we could do.
