Yet it’s hard to imagine “CORSO” as anything but the solo outing that properly introduces us to alter-ego Tyler Baudelaire in all his complexities. The first proper song on Tyler, the Creator’s latest opus CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST was supposed to feature A$AP Rocky at one point. “I deserve that life!” she declares a few lines later, her voice stretching. “I just wanna be taken care of / ‘Cause I’ve worked enough,” she pleads, fighting against a wall of a dizzying drum beat. But Sullivan is as deft of a writer as she is a vocalist, making her narrator someone you root for - especially once the dam breaks in the bridge, and everything that woman’s been holding back finally comes through.
The best of those moments on her fourth album, Heaux Tales, comes on the climax to the entire project, “The Other Side.” The album is a concept about different women’s relationships to love and sex, and on “The Other Side,” Sullivan returns to a familiar character from her previous effort, Reality Show: you might call her a gold digger. It earns the descriptor of explosive, building toward moments of full-bodied catharsis. On “Easier Than Lying,” their domain is endless. Later on the album, Halsey declares that they’re not a woman, but a god. There’s meaning behind that venomous delivery, too: clever Biblical allusions (“If you’re a hater, then hate the creator / It’s in your image I’m made”) and poetic turns of phrase (their heart is “a permanent part of me, that innocent artery”). Just listen to them scream and snarl the chorus, overpowering shredded guitars and pounded drums. It isn’t a coincidence that the best of these songs, “Easier Than Lying,” is also the heaviest - it’s Halsey fully giving into the experiment, to spectacular results. Then there was Halsey, turning away from pop stardom to work with their heroes Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and make the most unique rock statement of the year in the process, If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power. Many of the songs that resulted gave us reason to do the same, when we desperately needed it most.Īs rock music has returned to the top of the charts over the past few years, some trends have coalesced: a revival of 2000s pop-punk, rappers building songs from guitar samples. This year, musicians collaborated and cross-pollinated, they experimented within and outside their genres, and - especially compared to the songs that captured the unease of 2020 - many of them loosened up and had some fun.
Maybe you noticed it in the best songs of 2021 too, which also felt like signs of new life. Restaurants, bars, and crucially, concerts, buzzed once again even if you still didn’t feel up to any of that, you could notice the shift in energy just walking down a city street. Thanks to the miracle of COVID-19 vaccines, this year became one when many people, at least in the U.S., could reconnect with old friends and feasibly make new ones. Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photos by Getty Images
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