The 100 Best Songs Of 2018
During a turbulent year rife with personal and political trauma, the most memorable songs pulled no punches in the pursuit of pop. They also arrived from all directions: emerging from longtime partnerships and unlikely collaborations, from fertile local scenes and solitary experiments. In the case of many — including our No. 1 song — they were actually videos, tethered to images we've been unable to shake since. These are the 100 best songs of 2018, as selected by the staff of NPR Music and our partner stations. If you want more of the year's best music, check out our 50 best albums of the year or All Songs Considered's podcast discussion of the year in music.
60.
CHVRCHES
"Graffiti"
"Graffiti" announces its gigantic central hook in its opening seconds, only to deepen quickly into a meditation on regret at a romance's end. If this were merely a relentless pop banger — and it certainly qualifies as such — it'd be one of the year's most irresistible songs. But CHVRCHES singer Lauren Mayberry also infuses the song's reminiscences and recriminations with a mix of ache and nostalgia, leaning especially hard into a perfectly wistful couplet about lost youth and abandon: "We wrote our names along the bathroom walls / Graffitiin' our hearts across the stalls." —Stephen Thompson
♫ LISTEN: "Graffiti"
59.
Carrie Underwood
"Cry Pretty"
During the first dozen-plus years of her reign as modern country's blockbuster-delivering diva, Carrie Underwood chose to avoid anything that felt too acutely confessional or personally revealing —
