The 250 Greatest Songs of the 21st Century So Far

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.

In the 2000s, Pharrell was in a creative zone that few producers could comprehend. Just cue up “Ride Around Shining,” from the Clipse’s second album, Hell Hath No Fury. The beat is immersive yet minimalist, resting on a cascading synth and punchy drums. Pusha is the slickest-talking scumbag you know, rhyming, “Fuckin’ with college bitches with innocent looks like Mya/Corrupt they mind, turn ’em to liars,” while Malice is wearing “canary yellow diamonds size of yield signs.” Clipse have proved that “all they rap about is drugs” is cap, but even if that were true, no one talks about the lifestyle with the specificity they do. —A. Gee

In the early 2000s, loads of hipsters were digging into Eighties music, usually post-punk and synth-pop, but only this Canadian collective had the ambition to go for the kind of arms-aloft anthem that could’ve soundtracked a pivotal scene in a John Hughes movie. With its surging bass line, slamming dance-rock beat, beacon-like keyboards, and the band’s impassioned group vocals, “Rebellion (Lies)” sold old-school heroic-rock bombast to a generation that often seemed skeptical of earnest, sweeping gestures. Fittingly, Arcade Fire were soon opening shows for their new fans U2. —J.D.

An elder stateswoman nowadays, Miranda Lambert has built not just a tremendous career, but a gang-plank for a generation of kindred women who want to make smart mainstream country music without pandering to the culture’s systemic sexism. And while she’d had hits before, this was the song that really built her — an aching ode to the house she grew up in that, like a lot of her work, takes a borderline-corny theme and locates its beating heart. Her first Number One on the Hot Country charts, it would be named both the CMA Song of the Year and the ACM Song of the Year; it also earned her a Grammy and, at last check, was four-times platinum. Even more impressive, given her catalog of great songs, is the fact that this is probably her greatest. —W.H.

For any millennial who lived through the peak of ‘NSync, it’s hard to not have a Pavlovian response to the string crescendo that tees up Justin Timberlake’s “Hey, hey” at the beginning of this song. “Bye Bye Bye” was the peak of boy-band mountain, a megahit in an era dominated by groups of cute-but-buff groups of three to five twentysomething guys. Written by Kristian Lundin, Jack Schulze, and Andreas Carlsson, it was the ultimate big-pop breakup song. But the quintet had an edge in their delivery, probably chalked up to their very public and messy separation from pop Svengali Lou Pearlman and label RCA. Add in choreography kids would watch MTV for hours to learn, and ‘NSync had just spun pop gold. —B.S.

Recruiting jazz-guitar maestro Nels Cline into the band was the greatest call Jeff Tweedy ever made, stabilizing Wilco’s lineup after a decade of changes and instantly elevating their sound. There’s no better example of Cline’s impact on the band than this 2007 cut, where Tweedy’s cryptic musings are just the pretext for Cline’s magic-carpet-ride of a solo. “Impossible Germany” has been a live highlight at practically every show Wilco have played since its release, and after each one you’ll find fans comparing notes on how hard Cline hit the breakdown and how far he soared into psychedelic space before that. “I don’t think anybody in the band could have predicted, even for a second, that it would have this kind of resonance,” Cline said. —S.V.L.

One way to frame Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” is as the knockout punch in the Compton rapper’s titanic war of words with rival Drake. Another is to observe that the Pulitzer Prize-winning laureate wouldn’t have written his biggest hit to date without the crucible of a career-altering competition. Either way, “Not Like Us” is a rarity in a fractured media landscape where monoculture seems nearly extinct: the type of rap hit that gets played at family cookouts and Juneteenth festivals as well as in the club and on pop radio. In the summer of 2024, it was so omnipresent that folks like Stephen Curry admitted they were sick of hearing it. By 2025, Lamar had the Caesars Superdome chanting “Not Like Us” during the Super Bowl. It was the true definition of an inescapable bop.–M.R.

It was a matter of when, not if: Música mexicana was always poised to become an international sensation on the strength of its lush melodic richness and inordinate amounts of soul. But it was the generation of Peso Pluma — equally comfortable with the corridos of Los Tigres del Norte and the wounded mystique of Drake — that went viral by remaining true to its sound, and “Ella Baila Sola” became the ubiquitous sierreño hymn of the entire movement. It’s snappy, epic, and intoxicating, with Peso displaying his nasal vocal swagger anchored on Eslabon Armado’s wall of sound — a raucous feast of requintos and trombones. —E.L.

Paramore knows that it’s usually the mundane moments in relationships, not the grand gestures, that stand the test of time. The band didn’t set out to enact a striking pivot from emo to pop with “Still Into You,” it just happened that way — just like how the first “I love you” slipped out during a late-night drive home in the song’s second verse, or how Hayley Williams’ voice masterfully crescendos on its impassioned bridge. Its vibrant rhythm, all thick bass and thunderous drums, communicates every word left unsaid (and in the process avoids cheesy wedding-ballad purgatory). Enthralled listeners immediately took — and still take — Paramore’s breakout hit to be a timeless, whole-bodied model of effervescent endearment. —L.P.

Written eight years prior to its release during a period of reflection about Solange’s relationship with the father of her child, “Cranes in the Sky” still resonates as an introspective, elegant, and haunting meditation on pain and escapism. The title’s imagery emerged from watching cranes rise over Miami during a real estate boom — symbols of upheaval that mirrored Solange’s inner turmoil and America’s deeper structural issues. “It felt so indicative of what was going on in my life,” she told her sister Beyoncé for Interview Magazine in 2017 of the Raphael Saadiq co-production. “Eight years later … here we are again, not seeing what’s happening in our country, not wanting to put into perspective all of these ugly things that are staring us in the face.” —J.J.

Three decades after writing “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” for Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Bob Dylan was asked by director Curtis Hanson to write another song for a movie about a man on the verge of losing everything, The Wonder Boys. In the film, Michael Douglas plays a college professor unable to finish a book who gets entangled with a troubled student. Dylan cut right to the emotional core of the movie with “Things Have Changed,” even though it never refers to the action onscreen. “I’ve been trying to get as far away from myself as I can,” he sings. “Some things are too hot to touch/The human mind can only stand so much.” It won an Oscar for Song of the Year, beating out recent offerings by Randy Newman, Björk, and Sting. —A. Greene

The second single from Tha Carter III transforms a Phife Dawg snippet from a “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo” remix into the never-ending vocal bedrock to one of the rapper’s most enduring songs. “That record did something I didn’t know it could. It took on a life of its own,” the song’s producer, Bangladesh, said in 2022. “I don’t think [Wayne] knew what the record was.” What was initially supposed to be just an album interlude featuring other rappers became, as the rapper himself would say later, his “GOAT song.” “‘A Milli’ is just Weezy solo,” Rolling Stone wrote when putting the track on our 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list, “blacking out in the booth and dazzling everyone who hears him.” —J.N.

“Motion Sickness,” the breakthrough song from Phoebe Bridgers’ celebrated 2017 debut, Stranger in the Alps, is a masterpiece breakup song that encapsulates all of her generational songwriting talents. It’s part polemic, part eulogy, rendered with dry humor, plainspoken heartache, and biting fury as she plumbs the turbulent contradictions that defined her time with an older, manipulative man (confirmed to be Ryan Adams). The steady alt-country groove “Motion Sickness” finds can’t ease the queasiness of lines like “I hate you for what you did/And I miss you like a little kid.” But there’s something approaching catharsis when Bridgers twists the knife: “You said when you met me, you were bored/And you, you were in a band when I was born.” —J. Blistein

The gargantuan bass drops of mid-2010s EDM trap upped the ante on getting crunk, matching mosh-pit energy with chest-caving visceral sensation. Thusly, French producer DJ Snake and crunk ambassador Lil Jon were natural collaborators in the expanding field of spilling drinks on things. Snake sent him a version where he wanted the venom-throated club punk to rerecord a Redman sample, but Lil Jon took it upon himself to update the song for the “turn up” era. The song’s legacy would go far beyond its hit catchphrase: The directors of its bonkers, butt-busting music video would go on to win seven Academy Awards for their maximalist masterstroke Everything Everywhere All at Once. —C.W.

By the end of the 1990s, it seemed as if U2 had lost interest in the grand rock gestures of their Joshua Tree era. But when the Edge played the guitar part he’d written for what became “Beautiful Day,” the band’s collective response was, as Bono relayed later, “Oh, my God, that sounds like U2.” Teaming up with their golden-age producers Daniel Lanois, Brian Eno, and Steve Lillywhite, the band reignited its signature mix of soaring studio atmospherics, the Edge’s turbo-charged guitar, and Bono’s vaulting vocal heroism to create an uplifting anthem about pushing past personal entropy by grounding yourself in the elemental joys of life. The result is one of the most exciting return-to-form moments any major band has pulled off. —J.D.

Shakira took a daring swing with her English crossover Laundry Service, but even after it’s boundary-breaking success, she didn’t sit still for long. She quickly dove into what would become her double album Fijacion Oral, and one of the record’s many turns brought her into the studio with the gritty-voiced Spanish crooner Alejandro Sanz. The unlikely pair radiated endless steam and chemistry that seared itself into “La Tortura,” a heated tug-of-war between a fed-up lover and her cheating ex that’s still full of provocation and longing. All of the action unspools over a magnetic blend of flamenco, reggaeton, and pop as Shakira and Sanz go back and forth, tensing each other up and setting the standard for star-powered collabs in Latin music. —J.L.

Katy Perry and co-lyricist Bonnie McKee didn’t know much about what type of song they were about to write when they sat down to compose the lyrics to the title track of her mega-blockbuster 2010 album. “We wanted to do something kind of nostalgic and romantic like ‘new love, young love,’” said McKee, “but we just didn’t have the right words for it.” What they, alongside a team of co-writers lead by Max Martin, came up with was a pop song so perfectly constructed that Canadian composer Owen Pallett would later pen an essay celebrating its use of syncopation and “perfect balance of tension and release.” —J. Bernstein

This omnipresent party anthem was the climax following a crescendo of hype formed around the Queens rapper. “In Da Club” would be not just a huge rap record, but also the biggest pop single of 2003. The track emerged from the very first session that the mixtape sensation had with producer Dr. Dre and co-producer Mike Elizando. Upon hearing the thunderous beat, 50 wrote the entire thing in under an hour and recorded it that night. The celebratory intro “Go shorty, it’s your birthday” has helped make “In Da Club” one of rap’s most enduring songs, officially certified diamond in 2023. “Everyday it’s someone’s birthday,” 50 told HiphopDX. “The song’s relevant all over every day.” —C.W.

Nicki Minaj and 2 Chainz brought some of their best flows and most enviable attitudes to what now feels like an anthem of 2010s pop rap. From Minaj’s candy-coated chorus, where it becomes a matter of fact that “Bitches ain’t shit and they ain’t saying nothin’/A hundred mothafuckas can’t tell me nothin,’” and her roof-rattling cadence about how she moves bars like a kingpin, to 2 Chainz’s impeccable wordplay where he calls his brand new Lexus a “do-hicky” and offers to drop the top of his convertible “so you can see what I been thinkin’,” it’s two of rap’s most cunning innovators at their most fun. —M.C.

In the early 2000s, indie guitar bands set out to boldly go to the last place anyone expected: the dance floor. The tight-trousered Glasgow mod boys of Franz Ferdinand declared they were out to make “music for girls to dance to” — a radical rock agenda at the time, in the aftermath of grunge and nu metal. But they got there with the irresistible global smash “Take Me Out,” mixing glam-punk guitars and disco flash. These handsome devils knew how to work a cheekbone, becoming hipster pinups. Kanye West called them “white crunk music”; later generations dubbed them “indie sleaze.” But “Take Me Out” captures the vibe of a late-night club full of seductive strangers with guns stashed in their garters — a song that explodes with hormonal energy. —R.S.

U.K. electronic duo Disclosure sunk their teeth in deep on “Latch,” their euphoric dance-pop dream starring the then-unknown vocalist Sam Smith. The record is entrancing from the very first second, when a sample of Zed Bias and Jenna G’s “Fairplay” rings out. Smith’s audacious yearning roots itself in their soulful pleas with indomitable romance. When they croon, “I feel we’re close enough, I wanna lock in your love,” a deep tension builds like heat trapped between bodies on a dance floor. Anticipation lingers in the breathing room between its twinkling chorus and sweltering verses, and infatuation has never sounded so intoxicating. —L.P.