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[Nickie Koskinen]

Notethe semantic shift: Unlike this list's equivalent in previous years, for 2006 we extended the candidate pool beyond the confines of singledom-- basically any song released or covered in 2006, whether a single or not, was eligible for this list.

Finally, you might think us crazy for not including a certain ubiquitous Gnarls Barkley song, but enough of us heard it last year to vault it into 2005's singles pantheon; thus, it didn't qualify for 2006.

When it comes to tokenism, we could have done much worse. Either I continually underrated dubstep for the past few years or this was the year it finally got good, but Burial's mix of UK garage's skip, dubstep's low-end whump, and a haunted dancehall vibe of frozen rain and isolationist static is the genre's best stuff yet. And though Burial's album contains spookier moments, little of it bumps as hard as this early single. If too much "dancefloor" dubstep sounds like a sparse (or fucking boring) syncopated nothingness, Burial's mournful South London alleyways and highrises are flush with enough eerie sights and sounds to keep us dilettantes happy. --Jess Harvell

Neil Hannon is best when he plays down his typical pomp and focuses on a story, and depending on your socio-economic rung, the story this song tells could be either sad or vindicating. With warmth and incisive wit, Hannon details the loneliness of a late-in-life English aristocrat whose kids are distant, whose dead husband willed the summer home to his French mistress, and who has finally had to give up chasing the sun around the French Riviera and settle into an affordable flat. Was it a fun life? Yeah, but an empty one, too, and it's much too late to change now. --Joe Tangari

Radio Slave (aka Rekids label proprietor Matt Edwards) had a banner year, turning out two underground club hits ("My Bleep" and "Secret Base") as well as a solid album (as Rekid) and mindbending remixes for M.A.N.D.Y. vs. Booka Shade, Trentemller, and more. This blinder from January is an overlooked triumph of utter warehouse madness, its siren-like glissandi and dagger-sharp rave stabs carrying its punishing intensity higher and higher in an unremitting build-up. Chelonis R. Jones' soulful vocals become a crossing guard's scary rant as rushing bass and Dopplerized car horns lay waste to the dance floor like it's a six-lane highway, leaving clubbers all but roadkill. --Philip Sherburne

After the pale fire of their Flaming Lipsy debut failed to set the world alight in 2004, few expected Texan psych-pop conceptualists Midlake to return with a single like "Roscoe"-- a tune that sounds something like a Music From Big Pink outtake if it'd been recorded by Fleetwood Mac on the banks of Walden Pond. Out of step with anything else released in 2006, "Roscoe" fabricated a backwoods world that nobody had quite yet fathomed, conjuring all the dogged integrity those creamy CSN&Y harmonies yearned for. --Stephen Trouss

Statistically, the debut single from Oxford Collapse's Remember the Night Parties isn't all that impressive: one riff, three nearly-identical verses, and four choruses. But the focus and repetition of "Please Visit Your National Parks" propel the song into a kind of frenetic, suspended animation trance that hasn't been done this well since Cap'n Jazz. Michael Pace's dynamic, Meat Puppets-style guitar playing keeps things at a constant peak as the song careens towards the only conclusion this kind of indie rock knows: a half-minute cooldown outro. Perfect. --Matt LeMay

This squeaky teen diva has the courage to ride the entirety of "Tainted Love". Necromantic sacrilege or pop justice? Well, the Soft Cell hit was already a cover of an old Northern Soul favorite first made famous by Gloria Jones. In other words, this was already a soul floorburner before it became an untouchable 80s synthpop chestnut, so here it comes full circle. Rihanna wears the beat well, cranks up the drama, and has enough fuck-all attitude to pull it off. Somebody tell Ciara to bite "Sex Dwarf" next. --Drew Daniel

Mew really played the angles well here. There's the interwoven, spaghetti instrumental parts for you prog-rockers, the oh-so-gooey chorus for the card-carrying indie pop fan, the classic rock highs and lows-- and best of all, it's wrapped in a chilling Euro other-worldliness that gives it the personality so many monotone indie bands sorely lack. Still, "The Zookeeper's Boy" evades any cross-analysis with its contemporaries, working toward some model of perfection that's completely mindless of current trends. It's a sui generis "Bohemian Rhapsody", full of big words, big sounds, and most memorably, a big heart. --Adam Moerder

You know, hats off to a track that, in 2006, is proud to be this unabashedly disco. "Starlight" doesn't just open the time capsule, it defrosts cryogenically frozen 70s strings and a vintage four-on-the-floor pulse, only to find them both-- unlike John Travolta-- still attractively thin. The almost catatonic chorus ("Staaaar-light") stays true to classic disco's time-tested formula, but the song has enough clever ideas to soar beyond simple emulation. There's no fat that needs trimming here, no gloating over the 1970s' inferior production technology with digitized bleeps and bloops, just disco for disco's sake, and why not? --Adam Moerder

I still think they'll regret choosing that bandname in a few years (if they don't already), but give these boys a little fuzz guitar and you won't care what they're called. "There's only music so that there's new ringtones" is such a funny indictment that its place in a larger narrative-- about living in a small town among the chavs-- feels like a bonus. Of course, the Arctic Monkeys place themselves inside this world, but you get the feeling that the bands there could never come up with an arrangement as clever and subtly varied as this one. You get rolling surf drums, crunching riffs, and affable chime in about the space of 30 seconds, and the neo-ska bass and guitar parts are a perfect complement to the proudly working class accents that put it all together. --Joe Tangari

You've got to wonder about Annuals frontman Adam Baker, a 19-year-old who sounds like he can't stop having ideas long enough to sort through them: The first 110 seconds of "Brother" are all intricacy-- cricket samples, a gentle acoustic guitar, and Baker's multi-tracked vocals creaking over an electronic bed. And then, it explodes, his sextet perpetually cresting on a two-minute crescendo-turned-coda. Guitars crunch, drums march, and he sings, "Now I've grown, bold and lonely/ I should have stayed with dear brother at home." If this is what undergraduate angst from hyper-creative kids sounds like in 2006, it could hardly be better. --Grayson Currin

Truth: I wrote off Show Your Bones at first and not for a very good reason: I didn't like the first single, "Gold Lion". But this follow-up does all the things that great Yeah Yeah Yeahs song do: Ripcord solos from Nick Zinner, a breezy melody that spirals into freakish yelping from Karen O, and sky-bomb crescendos throughout. Nobody locks in and out of momentum like this band when they're flying, and "Cheated Hearts", while never as sticky or grand as "Maps", marks a rare accomplishment in 2006: A top-line, major-label alternative rock band with a hit and a heart. --Sean Fennessey

Spank Rock was 2006's most successful act from a burgeoning hip-hop movement that emerged out of neither traditional rap circles nor high-minded backpacker ciphers. Working alongside fellow Philadelphians Plastic Little and Amanda Blank, he had the album that sold best, and for that, we can give him-- and especially his producer XXXChange-- a whole lot of credit. "Sweet Talk" sums up the equation: Spank Rock's syncopated vocals are but one puzzle-piece in XXXChange's playfully cluttered tapestry, which loops a guitar-lick and a wicked catchy female chant into filthy good times. --Zach Baron

So many questions! Why does the other girl get everything Beyonc owns if Beyonc lets this guy go? Did she not sign a pre-nup? (Is she secretly married?) If the other girl's rocking of chinchilla coats and VVS stones hinges on Beyonc's letting him go, why doesn't she just, you know, not let him go? And why would anyone cheat on someone as hot and awesome as Beyonc to begin with? Is it 'cause she goes a little crazy sometimes? --Amy Phillips

The heavy shoegaze anomaly on an otherwise hard-charging metal record, "Farewell" opened Pink and closed out Boris' live shows. It was from the gossamer calm of this song, one sensed, that Boris got in the mood to be Boris. The wind-tunnel vocals and deferential cymbal crashes, the single sustained chords and drawn-out three-note runs; this was the gradually building sound of a band settling into their headspace and preparing to lay waste. It felt like either a demonstration of their private dynamic or the slow application of their public face: Either way, it was one of the heaviest metal tracks of the year that couldn't rightly be termed "metal" at all. --Zach Baron

Mediocre musicians, shitty dressers, all the glamour of a sweat stain: CSS have a lot going against them. But "Alala" was CSS at their over-the-shoulder ash-flick coolest, so nonchalant even while begging; implying filthy things ("I wanna be that dirtyfinger") without saying them ("alala"). Brazil's sleaziest export is all about image, so it's funny that their best song is about not measuring up. "You're so cool/ Can I be your friend?" asks Lovefoxxx coyly, over smarting, jagged keyboard lines. It's hard to know who she's submitting to, but the synth grinding away in the foreground elicits satisfied groans, like it's her own music sending her over the edge. Call it narcissism or harmless self-love-- it makes a great single. --Jessica Suarez

I'm testing a theory that it's impossible to be genuinely upset about anything while this song is playing. Something about the unflinching 808 beat and surgically clean synthesizers seem to ask, "Is it really that big a deal?" Of course, a disarmingly fun and sassy vocal performance from Antony-- a guy who managed to eke self-aware humor out of a song called "Hitler in My Heart"-- doesn't hurt. "One More Try" embraces its own superficiality with restraint and simplicity, and in doing so becomes a powerful prophylactic against all things anguished and complicated. --Matt LeMay

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