In my 2020 country wrap-up, I wrote about how Eric Church always kicks off an album cycle with a song that kind of challenges country radio and then serves up something a little more commercially savvy. In the case of his forthcoming 7th album, he followed "Stick That In Your Country Song" with 5 more promo singles last year, all of which are good or great, and "Hell Of A View" very justifiably emerged as the radio hit. The first verse is one of Church's finest moments as a vocalist, the way he kind of scoops down for some unexpected phrasing on "when I smoked my bronco tires out of that town," and then he embraces the melody more in later verses. Here's the 2021 singles Spotify playlist that I'll be adding songs to every month this year. 

Bastille have really grown on me over the last few years, I'm increasingly impressed that they have a pretty different sound from one single to the next, and this one has this great crisp synth pop sound with these cool bursts of a distorted saxophone sample. The lyric might be a little on the nose but it's hard not to relate to it right now. 

I wasn't too into BeatKing's other big TikTok-driven hit "Then Leave," but this one is pretty goofy and catchy. 

There's something so inherently ludicrous about a major pop hit about 69ing that the only reason this song works is Ariana Grande leans into the silliness of it with the math joke and the Disney strings and the "that means I wanna 69 with ya, noooo shit" ad lib at the end. It really is just insanely catchy, though, gets stuck in my head a lot. 

"The Voice" has notoriously launched few major careers in pop music, but they've made a few singers into country stars and Koryn Hawthorne has become a fairly big star in the gospel world since placing 4th in one of the early seasons of the show. "Speak To Me" is kind of her first non-gospel single to get spins on secular R&B radio and it's really good, would love if she moved in this direction a little more. 

Sometimes when I hear this song I totally forget that it was the group that made "Trampoline," but given how that song crossed over it's probably smart for them to lean into a more pop sound, and this one has grown on me. 

I like the flex of H.E.R. having a feature credit but only playing a guitar solo on it and not singing, it's a good solo too. 

8. Shy Glizzy f/ Jeremih and Ty Dolla Sign - "Like That"  

I wish this song stayed on the R&B chart longer than it did but I was happy that the highlight of Young Jefe 3 got some spins, it's cool that Jeremih and Ty Dolla Sign have continued to work well together after MihTy. 

One of my favorite parts of my T.I. interview last year was how we got into his versatility and the way he uses different voices and different flows on every song, and this is a good example of that, he doesn't even sound that much like T.I. to me on the hook but it works. 

Colour Vision was one of albums I was most surprised to end up putting on my best of 2020 list, MAX really won me over with that one, and the collaboration with one of the members of BTS has been getting a little pop radio action lately. I think blueberries are kind of a weird thing to invoke to describe blue eyes, but MAX sings the song to his pregnant wife in the video and that helps make it very charming. 

It's kind of a shame how very little of Pop Smoke's big posthumous hits featured the Brooklyn drill sound he helped bring to the mainstream, and that sound is mainly being kept on the U.S. charts right now by this absolutely terrible song from Staten Island rapper CJ. It even peaked on the UK charts higher than any of Pop Smoke's songs. 

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