The 250 Greatest Songs of the 21st Century So Far

It makes sense that, before he rose to notoriety, Frank Ocean cultivated a rapt audience on Tumblr where he’d share snippets and diary entries written with a literary flair. His breakthrough single “Novacane” is a case study in his penchant for storytelling — the woman he sings about hands him an “ice blue” bong before telling him of her aspirations in dentistry. Heartache, like in many of Frank’s best songs, exists in the firmament of the world he creates. Here, a past love for whom this new encounter can only help him feel numb gives the song its emotional texture. What’s more, he managed to infuse a radio-ready hit with his distinctive headiness. —J.I.

The Hives burst out of Sweden in matching tuxedos worried they’d be dismissed as garage rock’s answer to ZZ Top. Instead, “Hate to Say I Told You So” — two minutes of bratty brilliance built around what guitarist Nik Arson called a “striking gold” riff — conjured comparisons that caught the band off guard. “People started comparing us to bands we had never heard of,” frontman Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist explained. “We couldn’t afford to know about every band. It feels surreal that we had never heard the Stooges and the MC5 until people compared us to them.” When they heard their supposed influences, it all made sense: the repetition, the riffs, the attitude. “We became the band that we should be with Veni Vidi Vicious.” —S.G.

Every good country song needs a bit of drama, and a dose of campy excess doesn’t hurt, either. Carrie Underwood serves both in abundance in “Before He Cheats,” the single that took her from promising American Idol winner to legit superstar. A ferocious, funny saga of a woman taking revenge on her unfaithful boyfriend, “Before He Cheats” was penned by two dudes (Chris Tompkins and Josh Kear) who combined an eerie melody with an instantly memorable hook about a “pretty little souped-up four-wheel-drive” that gets beat to hell. Underwood sings it like she’s on dark-Ann-Wilson mode, a tornado of deliciously petty destruction. It’s an anthem perfect for girls’ night, gays’ night, and karaoke night. —J.F.

Heaven is a place on Earth with Lana Del Rey. Without “Video Games,” Lizzy Grant wouldn’t have become the enigmatic pop star that she is today. Her first breakthrough, “Video Games” laid the blueprint for her landmark debut, Born to Die, and built the foundation for her as the cult star who would go on to inspire a generation of fans and artists alike, including Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo. Blending touches of jazz and rap production, Del Rey croons to a boy too busy with his controller to look up and notice, delivering lines like “It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you” with a haunting yearning that no one has ever been able to imitate. —T.M.

“I don’t know why people want to be small,” My Chem’s Gerard Way declared in 2006. That was not a problem on the band’s landmark “death-rock Sgt. Pepper” opus Welcome to the Black Parade, or it’s massive title track. Producer Rob Cavallo’s piano chords open the floodgates from confession to catharsis. Horns blaze, choruses soar, and guitars cascade until “We’ll carry on” transforms from lyric to liturgy. Way understood kids coming of age in post-9/11 America needed spectacle scaled to their particular apocalypse. That’s how these New Jersey goths were the ones to hand down rock’s oldest truth: that the best cure for feeling small is acting impossibly large. —S.G.

It was thrilling to see so many of the 21st century’s R&B innovations coming from West Africa — after all, the style’s deepest rootstock reaches back to the region. Burna Boy is head of the Afrobeats class, and this jam may be his best. With its Brazilian-tinged beats and West Indian-tinged flow, it mixes English, Yoruba, and Nigerian pidgin slang in a way that feels irresistible, expanding pop’s vernacular musically and lyrically. The highlight of his 2022 Love, Damiani LP, it’s an anthem of heartbroken struggle that topped Billboard’s newly christened U.S. Afrobeats chart with a universal, time-tested prescription: spark some igbo, raise a cuppa shayo, and dance the pain away. —W.H.

There’s no rulebook for how to write a pop smash, but Dua Lipa’s method sounds close: Get your best friends in a room (helpful if they’re ace songwriters Clarence Coffee Jr., Sarah Hudson, and Stephen Kozmeniuk), scarf doughnuts, pull tarot cards, and aim for Prince. “We were literally levitating from the sugar rush,” said Lipa. “This is about me exploring happy songs and doing something that’s not ‘dance crying’ … It’s about having fun and meeting someone and falling in love.” Released in the spring of 2020 as lockdowns killed nightlife, “Levitating” couldn’t serve its club destiny — which made it more essential, not less. A disco bliss-bomb for dark times, it ruled charts for 77 weeks. No one knew when normal life would return, but it seemed, as the song goes, we met her at the perfect time. —S.G.

Nostalgia has fueled a lot of great songs, but few artists have nailed the way a melody can sound like a memory like North Caroline country artist Eric Church on the breakout hit from his album Chief. With a spare guitar chug and illuminating piano that sound less like a Nashville product than a Wilco reverie (Church is a proud Jeff Tweedy fan), the song nails the way songs from your past (in his case classic Bruce Springsteen bangers) can unlock tattered-yearbook images of high school glory days — “the soundtrack to a July Saturday night” — echoing in your head forever. Deeply pretty and casually daring, “Springsteen” set the table for an ambitious run for Church that’s still going strong. —J.D.

Sean Paul’s “Get Busy” is arguably the most famous use of producer Steven “Lenky” Marsden’s Diwali Riddim, no small feat given that the dancehall beat inspired hundreds of tracks, including major pop hits by Rihanna (“Pon de Replay”), Lumidee (“Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh)”), and Wayne Wonder (“No Letting Go”). It topped the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks and remains one of those anthems that serve as a clarion call to the dance floor. “It’s the ignition of those butterflies,” Paul told The New York Times in 2023 when describing how the handclap percussion makes listeners feel, readying them for the excitement of the moment when Paul beckons, “It’s all good girl, turn me on, let’s get it on to the early morn.” —M.R.

You almost can’t talk about “Yonkers,” the gate-crashing single from Tyler, the Creator that solidified him as a cultural force for a generation, without talking about that music video. There he is, rendered a brooding black-and-white, seated at a stool as he raps about the dark torments of his mind. The second single from his album Goblin, “Yonkers,” solidified Tyler’s brand of both vulnerability and youthful provocation. “Threesomes with a fuckin’ triceratops Reptar,” he raps, namedropping a character from Rugrats.  Though, as Tyler tells it, he made the hype that Tyler and his Odd Future compatriots had built at the time would prove to be very much warranted, and “Yonkers” was just the start.–J.I.

The Toronto indie-rock collective Broken Social Scene was formed by Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning, with a rotating crew of friends and bandmates. When they made their 2002 breakthrough album, You Forgot It In People, they had a dozen comrades on board. “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” is their glorious psychedelic lullaby, with Metric singer Emily Haines chanting “Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me.” Haines described it as “that pain of having to let go when you’re growing up and you’re moving on from being someone that you were.” It’s lived on ever since, in soundtracks (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), memes, cover versions, and countless lovesick late-night texts. —R.S.

This eight-minute-long opus is two songs in one, both inseparable and adoring. Timberlake proved early in his career that he could do the sweet-talking, infatuated romance well. But after six years away, he’d grown into an artist with more interest in sophisticated sonic expanses where longing eclipses lust. Produced alongside J-Roc and Timbaland, “Mirrors” goes full maximalist with stacked layers of sweet melodies and a masterfully assembled orchestral string section. The first five minutes revel in divine declarations of immutable love. In the final three, through more sparse production with elevated, thumping percussion, he keeps it simple: “You are the love of my life.” The result is his ultimate grand gesture. —L.P.

It originated as a request: Madonna was working on a film (eventually unmade) with director Luc Besson: “Do you have anything that is like ABBA at Studio 54?” she asked British producer Stuart Price. Soon, Price remembered the heavily filtered edit he’d made of ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” for his DJ night in Liverpool, where the crowd went bananas whenever it came on. “I played her the track, she listened intently, then she just opened her mouth and sang: ‘Every little thing that you say or do, I’m hung up, I’m hung up on you.…’ It really happened that quickly.” —M.M.

This intoxicating country-soul ballad wasn’t released as a single, and Chris Stapleton (a revered Nashville songwriter) didn’t write it. But “Tennessee Whiskey” has become his most popular song, and signature hit, with nearly 1.3 billion streams on Spotify. The original was penned by Dean Dillon and Linda Hargrove in 1980, and since then everyone from George Jones to David Allen Coe to T-Pain and Carín Leon have covered it. “It makes you feel like a drug the first time you hear it,” Leon told Rolling Stone. That’s especially true of Stapleton’s now-definitive version, which borrows the melody from Etta James’ 1967 song “I’d Rather Go Blind.” It’s the perfect pairing of song and vocalist. —J.H.

“Vroom was like an assault,” Charli XCX said. “[It] was us trying not to appease anyone.” She nailed that spirit via a feverish creative partnership with U.K. underground alchemist Sophie. Instead of capitulating to the content beast, the duo followed the song’s titular metaphor and drove straight through it. Sophie approached sound like a sculpture, whittling and welding waveforms until they sounded like plastic, metal, and rubber, and then built an arrangement that revs, downshifts, and uses silence like a gear change. “I think people were confused,” Charli noted. In the process, they ingeniously lifted hyperpop from message boards to main stages. —S.G.

“Do I Wanna Know?” almost single-handedly redefined what Arctic Monkeys could do. The Sheffield, England, wunderkinds had been steadily subverting expectations ever since their frenetic, rambunctious debut, but 2013’s AM was still staggering in its originality. The lead riff on “Do I Wanna Know?” epitomized everything about this new Arctic Monkeys era: Seductive, hypnotic, exhilarating, just a tiny bit evil. Accompanying this mighty sonic leap is Alex Turner’s own evolution a showman. The vocal performance is pure self-assured lothario, but the lyrics are downright devastatingly bad and wracked with self-consciousness. It’s a spiral into the abyss of desire, and anyone who’s yearned knows how terrifying a question “Do I wanna know, if this feeling flows both ways?” really is. —J. Blistein

Bieber’s 2015 album, Purpose, transformed the singer from teenybopper to adult hitmaker. But it was “Sorry,” a song Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter co-wrote in little more than an hour, that defined his remade image and cemented Bieber’s “tropical house” sound as a dance-floor fixture. “Sorry” was classic mid-2010’s post-EDM boom pop record-making, with Skrillex, who provided the breezy drop, pitching up Michaels’ demo vocal to create the vocal riff that kicks off the song. But it was Bieber himself who drove the perfect production home with his smooth-as-silk delivery of his apology: “I don’t really know Justin,” Michaels said when recounting writing the song for him, “but I know that he’s a very emotional person.” —J. Bernstein

The greatest LCD Soundsystem song not actually by LCD Soundsystem, cowbell and all, this pulsing indie-dance masterpiece will, for a microgeneration or two, forever conjure certain regrettable nighttime decisions, outfits, and hairstyle choices. Co-producer James Murphy, teamed here with DFA partner Tim Goldsworthy, went on to take its frantic fusion of squawky guitars and dance beats even further with LCD. But like a smaller-scale “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “House of Jealous Lovers” was ground zero for a whole era of music, kicking the doors open for bands from Franz Ferdinand to Bloc Party. The track still sounds fresh and dizzying, a musical vein that still hasn’t been fully tapped, the Dare’s recent efforts aside. —B.H.

“Hey Ya!” was OutKast’s big pop moment, the kind of hit that inspired aunties and schoolchildren around the world to sing along to Andre 3000’s riffs on Polaroid pictures and “Lucy Loos.” Initially conceived for an uncompleted romance movie set in Paris, Andre’s performance encompasses a multitude of emotions, from the irrepressible joy of navigating life’s changes to the melancholy of ending a relationship that isn’t quite working. “Why, oh, why, oh, why, oh/Are we so in denial when we know we’re not happy here?” he sings. “I’m talking about being an entertainer,” he told The Fader in 2003 when discussing the politics of the music industry. “There’s nothing wrong with that, but I’ve just never fit into that.” —M.R.

Once again, Bad Bunny achieved the seemingly impossible: In 2025, he positioned a salsa tune well on its way to 1 billion Spotify streams. Better yet, the self-penned track — about a past romance so powerful that it lingers in his soul as the one, unforgettable dance — is as authentic to the genre’s Caribbean roots as the photo of the white plastic chairs on the cover of Debí Tirar Más Fotos. At six minutes, “Baile Inolvidable” enlists an old-school salsa orchestra, complete with chocolaty trombone riffs and the kind of jazzy piano solo that would make El Gran Combo proud. In his new role as tropical crooner, Benito channels the soft, bitter nostalgia of salsa romántica icons Frankie Ruiz and Víctor Manuelle. —E.L.

It’s hard to think of a stronger thesis for a great indie-rock hit than this confession: “I don’t know why I am the way I am.” And all three members of boygenius — Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus — get the chance to sing that line on their own during the Grammy-nominated “Not Strong Enough,” the rocking standout of their 2023 album the record. It might be one of the trio’s more jangly upbeat tracks, but there’s a teeming tension in the lyricism as they sing about mental illness and dysfunction in relationships over a propulsive track. Still, it’s a perfect song for weaving through city sidewalks or headbanging with the windows down — just like the band did in the music video. —Leah Lu

It took Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump only 10 minutes to write the melody to one of the catchiest, poppiest emo anthems, a song that would catapult the genre into the mainstream. With the relentless, raucous “Sugar, We’re Going Down,” Fall Out Boy owned the summer of 2005, cracking the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 and topping TRL. It didn’t even matter that listeners often misheard the wordy lyrics Pete Wentz wrote for Stump to sing. In 2006, Stump told Rolling Stone he meant to garble the chorus. “I saw those lyrics and just kind of barked them out. But there was something about the rhythm of it, where I was like, ‘That actually might be too good for just a shitty punk song.’” —M.G.

After breaking into the mainstream with strangely euphoric “astronaut” hits like “Turn Out the Lights” and Rihanna’s “Loveeeeeee Song,” Atlanta rapper Future found his career at an impasse and in danger of being dismissed as a novelty act. His response was a trio of mixtapes, 2014’s Monster and 2015’s Beast Mode and 56 Nights, that almost single-handedly shifted the course of mainstream rap toward a pungent, melodic, and pharmaceutically debauched sound. “March Madness,” a breakout track from 56 Nights, has grown into a touchstone for this memorable, career-defining run. Produced by Southside, it’s a haunting flurry of internet bleeps and trap drums, and Future celebrates his lavish life even as he rues “All these cops shootin’ niggas, it’s tragic.” —M.R.

Folk rock’s golden era was the 1960s and ’70s, but trad styles still power pop hits. Witness the breakout single by Rosalía Vila Tobella, a 25-year-old Barcelona-based prodigy of flamenco, the Arabic-tinged folkloric music of Andalusía. Amping up the style’s signature handclap rhythms and ad libs, with dubby beats and a woozy electric-keyboard melody, she maintains the style’s feverish soul in a fusion that still feels totally fresh. The opening track of El Mal Querer, an album based on a 13th-century novel, Romance of Flamenca, the song signified just fine in the 21st, winning two Latin Grammys (Best Alternative Song and Best Urban Fusion/Performance) and launching an international pop star. ¡Tra tra! —W.H.

Montero Hill was about as far from being a pop star as one can get — literally, he was sleeping on his sister’s couch — when he had the lightning-strike moment of inspiration that created this country-rap breakthrough. Building off a track by an essentially unknown Dutch producer called YoungKio that was based around a banjo sample from a Nine Inch Nails track, he wrote an inescapably catchy hick-hop tune. “Old Town Road” went Number One (as did a remix with country star Billy Ray Cyrus) and became the longest running Number One single of all time — a record tied five years later by Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” which was itself very much an echo of Lil Nas X’s paradigm-shifting 1:53 smash. —J.D.

A spiritual rap that took over secular radio, Kanye West made a hip-hop masterpiece by exploring his faith, combining the personal and the political with his most grandiose production effort to that point. West and co-producer Rhymefest borrowed much of the track from a performance by the Addicts Rehabilitation Center Choir, a Harlem-based a capella group composed of musicians in recovery. Serving as both a criticism and a dare to radio — “So here go my single, dawg, radio needs this/They say you can rap about anything except for Jesus” — the track ended up a Top 20 smash, a Grammy winner, and a staple song that West has performed with gospel choirs, marching bands, string ensembles, and Mavis Staples. —C.W.

Only David Bowie could seemingly herald his own death with an opus of a song that is as equal parts gorgeous and strange as “Blackstar.” Mixing and mingling nods and winks to Elvis Presley, Major Tom, and his own mortality (“When a man sees his black star, he knows his time … has come”), the lead single from his final album defied genre, in true Bowie style. Throughout his life, the Thin White Duke refused to stop evolving, and, in the end, it was only his passing that halted that trajectory. Luckily, we are left with a eulogy that was more fantastical than funereal — a star man shining even after cosmic death. —B.E.

“Every bitch that I don’t like came to my head,” Cardi B said of recording the lead single to her genre-shifting debut album, Invasion of Privacy. “And I was picturing me rapping it to them.” Her negative mental imaging summoned lines like, “Said, ‘Lil bitch, you can’t fuck with me if you wanted to’/These expensive, these is red bottoms, these is bloody shoes.” J. White Did It cooks up the most ominous beat of the decade to perfectly complement Cardi’s über-confident leveling up of her new life, with a title and flow nodding to Kodak Black’s “No Flockin’.” “I’m in a good place in my life right now,” she said of the song, “and I want to stunt.” —Jason Newman

It’s difficult to overstate the impact of Justin Vernon’s probably rash decision to hole himself up in a Wisconsin cabin in 2007 to write one of the greatest heartbreak songs of his era. “Skinny Love,” with its dejected acoustic guitar strums and doubled vocals, may have become slightly meme-ified over the years, but there’s no denying that an entire generation of somber singer-songwriters were summoned in the track’s wake. The opening lines of the song are the most recognizably iconic, but its true staying power sits in the unflinching earnestness of the final ones: “Who will love you? Who will fight? Who will fall far behind?” —L.L.

The biggest song of 2022 was danceable synth-pop with a sparkling exterior and a heartsick core. Harry Styles’ lyrics feel intensely personal, but the song’s sense of loss and nostalgia was pretty damn universal, especially coming out of a pandemic that reshaped the world. The result was something bittersweet, catchy, and just huge, a track that struck a nerve and captured a moment. Styles himself got a clue just how huge after he delivered an encore performance of the song on Long Island shortly after its release, witnessing a reaction from the crowd unlike any he’d seen. ““We came offstage, and I went into my dressing room and just wanted to sit by myself for a minute,” he told Rolling Stone’s Brittany Spanos. “Just that the energy felt insane.” —C.H.