"The best punk movies are stories that tap into the spirit of the time through imagined characters and invented situations. A biopic can’t help treating its protagonists as exceptional figures—stars commanding the stage of History—in a way that undercuts the iconoclastic, 'no more heroes' spirit of punk" - the Simon Reynolds writes introducing his best punk movies list, which goes from "the first punk movie" 'Jubilee' to 'We Are the Best!' by Lukas Moodysson.

YouTube music critic The Needle Drop also comes out with his selection of best albums of 2021. A really very versatile selection, covering genres such as death metal, classical music, rock, conceptual pop... The top 5 albums chosen by The Needle Drop: St. Vincent, Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders & The London Symphony Orchestra, Arca, Lingua Ignota, and Spelling.

Pitchfork is celebrating its 25th birthday with a selection of 200 most important artists who have made the biggest impact across Pitchfork’s lifetime so far. The list features "The Icons" as well as "The Essentials", listed alphabetically, from Aaliyah to Wilco.

Rolling Stone has reviewed its 2004 list of 500 greatest songs of all time. Nearly 4,000 songs received votes. Where the 2004 version of the list was dominated by early rock and soul, the new edition contains more hip-hop, modern country, indie rock, Latin pop, reggae, and R&B. More than half the songs here — 254 in all — weren’t present on the old list, including a third of the Top 100. The result is a more expansive, inclusive vision of pop, music that keeps rewriting its history with every beat - RS points out. The list starts at the number 500 with Kanye West's 'Stronger', and reaches the highpoint with Aretha Franklin's 'Respect'.

An interesting selection by the Stereogum of 50 best albums of the five months of 2021 that are behind us. The top 10 (not so expectedly) are:

10. The Armed - 'ULTRAPOP'

9. Matt Sweeney & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - 'Superwolves'

8. Home Is Where - 'i became birds'

7. Armand Hammer & The Alchemist - 'Haram'

6. Spirit Of The Beehive - 'ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH'

5. Cassandra Jenkins - 'An Overview On Phenomenal Nature'

4. Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders, & The London Symphony Orchestra - 'Promises'

3. serpentwithfeet - 'Deacon'

2. The Weather Station - 'Ignorance'

1. Fiddlehead - 'Between The Richness'

Author Oli Freke released his news book 'Synthesizer Evolution: From Analogue to Digital (and Back)', a written celebration of the impact of synths on music and culture. Freke offers a comprehensive and meticulously researched directory of every major synthesizer, drum machine and sampler made between 1963 and 1995. For Mix Mag, he chose the 10 most influential synthesizers.

Cinephiles Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Matt Sweeney, who recently released a collaborative album 'Superwolves', made a selection of the best music films for Vice. The boys chose 'Gene Vincent: The Rock And Roll Singer' (1970) - "a tough watch, but a revealing study of a rare talent", 'Cisco Pike' (1972) - "music-infused crime film has earned a sizeable cult following", 'Oulaya’s Wedding' (2017)  - "astonishingly familiar feelings and ripping tunes", 'Payday' (1973) - "down and dirty character study of a country star indulging every vice under the sun as he hurtles towards annihilation", 'The Decline Of Western Civilization' (1981) - "a documentary about energy that's so loaded with power that it will never die", and other films.

Iranian metalcore band Out of Nowhere made a selection of 10 best Middle Eastern metal bands (or, we can call it Near East, depending, probably, on where we are). So, the best in metal from the vast region are:

Calibre - melodic metal core, Iran

Chopstick Suicide - mathcore, Turkey

Coast of Arms - metalcore, UAE/Qatar

Creative Waste - grindcore, Saudi Arabia

Kimaera - doom/death, Lebanon

Mortem Atra - melodic doom / death metal, Cyprus

New Carnis - death metal, Iran

Phenomy - thrash metal, Lebanon

Scarab - death metal, Egypt

Smouldering in Forgotten - death/black, Bahrain

InsideHook offers a brief rundown of some of the best musician archives on the web, from indie superstars like Radiohead, Courtney Barnett, and Fugazi to icons like Neil Young, Johnny Cash, and the Dead, with some Def Leppard in between.

The staff of The Verge recommend their favorite music straming services:

Radio Dismuke, a little-known streaming service with a constant diet of pop and jazz from the early part of the last century

Soma FM - has tons of different genre stations

YouTube Music - incomparable catalog

8tracks - lets users upload playlists of at least eight songs, possible to get three skips per playlist per hour

KEXP - consistently excellent music selection by the public radio station based in Seattle

Aux Live - a music-focused service with a range of live concerts and documentaries

Qobuz - a place with higher-resolution music

Spotify - a nice user interface and compatibility with almost every piece of streaming hardware on the market

Apple Music - does a great job of syncing all of the music across devices

Live Music Archive - over 200,000 concerts in lossless audio quality for free

"Even if you’ve heard them a million times or come across them in a dozen movie soundtracks, classics like 'My Girl', 'Come See About Me', or 'The Tracks of My Tears' still sound almost impossibly fresh, just as the radical spirit of 'What’s Going On' or 'Living for the City' resonates perfectly in our present political moment. And amid all the hits, there are still lesser-known gems to be discovered" - Rolling Stone writes introducing the 100 greatest Motown songs list, 60 years after label's first Number One hit, 'Please Mr. Postman', by the Marvelettes.

Daft Punk announced their split via an 8-minute video, so it's quite fitting to look back at their career through the lens of music videos. Pitchfork picks out their best videos, going from 1996's 'Da Funk' to 'Get Lucky' from 2013.

"Born of the internet on dark mode, hyperpop is all the sugary sweet appeal of mainstream pop but soaked in steroids – a garish reflection of the all-you-can-eat hunger of the material world... Too much is never enough" - The Forty-Five says in their introduction of an impossible task - ranking hyperpop's 45 best tracks. The list ends with Danny L Harle, starts with Sophie, with 100 Gecs, Charlie XCX, Slayyyter, and many more in between.

A great thread by Music REDEF covering all the music released by an artist ranked from worst to best. There are Beyonce, Bruce Springsteen, Yes, Jay-Z, Van Halen, Taylor Swift, Nirvana, Iron Maiden, Schubert, and plenty more. Good stuff...

PopMatters found another batch of 20 great jazz albums from last year including: Dave Douglas' 'Marching Music' - "a mixture of heavy and luminescent"; Rob Mazurek's 'Dimensional Stardust' - "new jazz at its best, with complex composition easing seamlessly into improvising, classical notions slipping into jazz and hip-hop/electronics"; Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah's 'Axiom' - "a great band"; Matthew Shipp's 'The Unidentifiable' and 'Live in Nuremberg' - "whew and wow and WONDERful. Musician of the year, ladies and gentlemen"; Immanuel Wilkins' 'Omega' - "new jazz of hip-hop rhythmic inclinations, complex time experiments, and compositional complexity".

Guardian has a suggestion to turn our living-rooms into clubs with a selection of the 10 best remixes that reach as far as 1982. The list starts with Donna Summer's motor-disco 'I Feel Love' expanded to 15 minutes of techno psychedelia by Patrick Cowley, and finishes with Prince's 'I Wanna Be Your Lover' tweaked by Dimitri from Paris to part-live part-club disco-bomb.

The flute is one of humanity’s oldest ways of producing a beautiful sound, and it is based on the most fundamental sign of life: breath - New York Times writes in their introduction of a selection of the best classical compositions written for the flute.

The year was great, judging from the perspective of music released in 2020, proving nothing can turn off the creative spark. In an attempt to remember the year by its virtues, we substitute the usual bad-news-chronology of a year with the best albums list ordered chronologically (by the date they were released). So, THIS was the year.

Music REDEF's chief Jason Hirschhorn tweeted a thread of music business documentaries, including docs about the Rolling Stones, Bad Boy Records, Clive Davis, David Geffen etc.

PopMatters made a very good selection of the 15 best hip-hop albums released this year, arguing that the "best records of the year served as rallying cries and made us reconsider the very genre itself". So, the PM's 15:

15. Megan Thee Stallion – 'Good News'

14. Pa Salieu – 'Send Them to Coventry'

13. Riz Ahmed – 'The Long Goodbye'

12. Denzel Curry/Kenny Beats - 'Unlocked'

11. Elzhi – 'Seven Times Down Eight Times Up'

10. Flohio – 'No Panic No Pain'

9. R.A.P. Ferreira – 'Purple Moonlight Pages'

8. Sa-Roc – 'The Sharecropper's Daughter'

7. Jay Electronica – 'A Written Testimony'

6. Spillage Village - 'Spilligion'

5. Run the Jewels – 'Run the Jewels 4'

4. Growing Concerns Poetry Collective - 'BIG DARK BRIGHT FUTURE'

3. Aesop Rock – 'Spirit World Field Guide'

2. Serengeti and Kenny Segal – 'Ajai'

1. Black Thought – 'Streams of Thought, Vol. 3: Cane & Able'

PopMatters made a selection of new artists who are expected to brake quite big quite soon (for some it had actually already started to happen). Among the selected there are: Polaris music award winner Backxwash; indie-rock foursome Porridge Radio; critically highly acclaimed Sault; Moscow all-female prog/post-punk girls Lucidvox; genre-defying Bartees Strange.

Brooklyn Vegan's Indie Basement placed 40 indie-rock albums from 2020 in its cellar - it's an interesting selection, covering the best, and some unexpected albums. The top 20 are:

20. Doves - 'The Universal Want'

19. Working Men's Club - 'Working Men's Club'

18. Stephen Malkmus - 'Traditional Techniques'

17. Activity - 'Unmask Whoever'

16. The Innocence Mission - 'See You Tomorrow'

15. Drab City - 'Good Songs for Bad People'

14. Dougie Poole - 'The Freelancer's Blues'

13. Public Practice - 'Gentle Grip'

12. Billy Nomates - 'Billy Nomates'

11. The Flaming Lips - 'American Head'

10. Cindy Lee - 'What's Tonight to Eternity?'

9. Sweeping Promises - 'Hunger for a Way Out'

8. Crack Cloud - 'Pain Olympics'

7. Cut Worms - 'Nobody Lives Here Anymore'

6. Sault - 'Untitled (Black Is)' / 'Untitled (Rise)'

5. Caribou - 'Suddenly'

4. Loma - 'Don't Shy Away'

3. JARV IS… - 'Beyond the Pale'

2. Roisin Murphy - 'Roisin Machine'

1. Porridge Radio - 'Every Bad'

Guardian took "the essentials of pop and disco to distil an alchemic cocktail of club euphoria" for their 50 best albums of the year list, with Fiona Apple on top.

The top 20 are:

20. Grimes – 'Miss Anthropocene'

19. Lady Gaga – 'Chromatica'

18. Run the Jewels – 'RTJ4'

17. Fontaines DC – 'A Hero’s Death'

16. Phoebe Bridgers – 'Punisher'

15. Jay Electronica – 'A Written Testimony'

14. Jessie Ware – 'What’s Your Pleasure?'

13. Bob Dylan – 'Rough and Rowdy Ways'

12. Chloe x Halle – 'Ungodly Hour'

11. Róisín Murphy – 'Róisín Machine'

10. Moses Sumney – 'Græ'

9. Taylor Swift – 'Folklore'

8. J Hus – 'Big Conspiracy'

7. Haim – 'Women in Music Pt III'

6. Waxahatchee – 'Saint Cloud'

5. Sault – 'Untitled (Black Is)'

4. Perfume Genius – 'Set My Heart on Fire Immediately'

3. Rina Sawayama – 'Sawayama'

2. Dua Lipa – 'Future Nostalgia'

1. Fiona Apple – 'Fetch the Bolt Cutters'

"It's an album of contrast and tension as tracks veer between extremes as if constantly searching for some kind of indefinable resolution" - PopMatters writes about Ital Tek's 'Outland', their choice for the best album of the year. The full list:

20. Lee Jones - 'Down Into Light'

19. TENGGER - 'Nomad'

18. Die Wilde Jagd - 'Haut'

17. Squarepusher - 'Be Up a Hello'

16. Pantha Du Prince - 'Conference of Trees'

15. Drab City - 'Good Songs for Bad People'

14. Actress - 'Karma & Desire'

13. Amnesia Scanner - 'Tearless'

12. The Soft Pink Truth - 'Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?'

11. Four Tet - 'Sixteen Oceans'

10. DJ Python - 'Mas Amable'

9. Rival Consoles - 'Articulation'

8. Tristan Perich - 'Drift Multiply'

7. Nicolas Bougaïeff - 'The Upward Spiral'

6. Nahash - 'Flowers of the Revolution'

5. Ghetto Kumbé - 'Ghetto Kumbé'

4. CS + Kreme - 'Snoopy'

3. Beatrice Dillon - 'Workaround'

2. Kelly Lee Owens - 'Inner Song'

1. Ital Tek - 'Outland'

The soundtrack fountain has been flowing plentifully this year - the Quietus writes in its introduction of their selection of the best movie scores of 2020. There's Robert Glasper, Warren Ellis, Terence Blanchard, Brian Eno, Blanck Mass...

Brooklyn Vegan made a selection of best 45 albums of 2020, with the authority on indie music putting Jeff Rosenstock's 'No Dream' on the top. There are also some expected ones on the list, like Touche Amore and Stay Inside, as well some borderline punk albums like Infant Island and Envy. The top ten are: 10. Teenage Halloween - 'Teenage Halloween'

9. Kill Lincoln - 'Can't Complain'

8. Higher Power - '27 Miles Underwater'

7. Touche Amore - 'Lament'

6. Record Setter - 'I Owe You Nothing'

5. Gulch - 'Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress'

4. Strike Anywhere - 'Nightmares of the West'

3. Stay Inside - 'Viewing'

2. Infant Island - 'Beneath'

1. Jeff Rosenstock - 'NO DREAM'

Several publications - PopMatters, Stereogum, JazzWise, and Bandcamp - have published lists of best jazz albums of 2020. All of the above differ in perspective - modern, classical, crossover jazz - but a few albums do appear on several lists, like Ambrose Akinmusire's 'On The Tender Spot Of Every Calloused Moment', Matthew Shipp's 'The Piano Equation', or Irreversible Entanglements' 'Who Sent You?'.

A very good selection of the best books covering musical topics released this year, picked out by the Rolling Stone. Sasha Geffen presents an interesting idea in 'Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary' - that "popular music has always been powered by transgressive ideas about identity". Mark Lanegan's 'Sing 'Backwards and Weep: A Memoir' is "one of the most compelling and revealing rock memoirs ever". 'The Baddest Bitch in the Room: A Memoir' by the marketing specialist Sophia Chang is about, well, the character in the title.

"One of the main vehicles helping us during this time is music. Heavy, experimental, interesting you name it. And from that perspective, it has been an excellent year! ... Experimentalism is thankfully on the rise, as boundaries are still pushed and new realms are explored" - PopMatters says about this year in metal music. Their top 20 in the genre:

20. Black Curse - 'Endless Wound'

19. Megaton Sword - 'Blood Hails Steel'

18. Kevel - 'Mutatis, Mutandis'

17. Spirit Adrift - 'Enlightened in Eternity'

16. Spirit Adrift - 'Enlightened in Eternity'

15. Wake - 'Devouring Ruin'

14. Pyrrhon - 'Abscess Time'

13. Haken - 'Virus'

12. Thou and Emma Ruth Rundle - 'May Our Chambers Be Full'

11. Faceless Burial - 'Speciation'

10. Wayfarer - 'A Romance With Violence'

9. Oranssi Pazuzu - 'Mestarin kynsi'

8. Expander - 'Neuropunk Boostergang'

7. Old Man Gloom - 'Seminar VIII: Light of Meaning/Seminar IX: Darkness of Being'

6. Neptunian Maximalism - 'Éons'

5. Ulthar - 'Providence'

4. Duma - 'Duma'

3. Paysage d’Hiver - 'Im Wald'

2. SUMAC - 'May You Be Held'

1. Imperial Triumphant 'Alphaville'

CI's list of 75 albums of 2020 starts with both Sault's albums released this year, but then it becomes different, offering a wealth of lesser-known albums by artists such as Moses Boyd, Moor Mother, Irreversible Entanglements, Sauce and Dogs...