Róisín Murphy, 'CooCool'

I remember the exact moment I stopped thinking of as a merely "good" musician and began to view her as genuinely heroic. At the height of lockdown, the Irish of her single "Murphy's Law" to YouTube. The song is about small town claustrophobia, and how fate and force of habit seem to ensure that everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Now that the pandemic had proven just that, Murphy strained against the cramped limits of reality rather than succumbing to them; shouting, "Keep on!" while high-kicking in a ball gown in her living room. In doing so, she reminded why she's been one of the most remarkable pop musicians of the past 25 years: her ability to make the most fraught emotions feel dazzlingly danceable and glam possibility seem completely within reach.