While it might’ve stuck out on Caribou’s 2020 album, Suddenly, “You Can Do It” perfectly met its moment. Z.M.Īs Caribou’s mastermind Dan Snaith put it to Billboard in November, “You Can Do It” is the work of a “naive optimist.” Produced in response to the excitement Snaith felt about the COVID-19 vaccine then released in August, with the world tentatively opening up again, the song combines lush synth chords with a gleeful vocal refrain that never pauses for breath. Remixes from Flava D and 12th Planet bring the bass back for those who missed it, but even in its original form, this track is house perfection in under three minutes. Perhaps it’s the influence of singer/songwriter Kate Wild, but on their first release for Tiësto’s Musical Freedom label, DJ/producers Bleu Clair and AC Slater deliver the catchiest club track of their discographies to date. When two bass music producers collaborate, we don’t typically expect a piano house bop. Bleu Clair, AC Slater, Kate Wild, “Green Light”.DJ/producer Austin Millz is poised to change that: after boosting his profile with remixes for artists like Louis the Child and Grouplove, Millz drafted Aluna for the resplendent hip-house/soul jam, “Gold.” A studio savant, Millz keeps the genre-bending fresh, aligning himself with a century of culture remixing that itself is quintessentially Harlem. While many New York City neighborhoods are synonymous with various subgenres of dance and electronic music, Harlem hasn’t traditionally been one of them. The dance scene was particularly wild about high-profile sampling this year, with artists like Chris Lorenzo and Jamie Jones scoring hits via heavy lifts from The Mamas & The Papas and Soft Cell, respectively, but this year no sample “did it” more successfully than this bouncy and utterly undeniable jam. One of the biggest dance hits of the year was built on the 2006 Cherish R&B single of the same name, as New York producer ACRAZE broke out with the concise two minute and 37-second dance tutorial (“Bounce with it, pop with it, lean with it, rock with it”). Here are Billboard‘s picks for the 40 best dance/electronic songs of 2021, presented in alphabetical order by artist. While the function of dance music in 2021 was largely personal, the freedom and catharsis inherent to this genre remained available, even if we were dancing on our own.

In 2021, this question was answered in a thousand ways: the energetic lift you felt when blasting a new track through your headphones, the sense of joy inherent in playing music really loud in your car, the connection you felt when passing a song to your friends, those moments during your work-from-home day when you realized you were nodding your head to the beat. For many in the dance scene, the question remained: what was music intended to make large groups of people dance together really for, when that music cannot be played in its natural habitat? Despite this return of live music, the fact remained that during much of 2021, gathering en masse was still often taboo - an existential challenge that persists as we once again survey shutdowns with the rise of COVID-19 infection rates. For the second year in a row, the shutdown and stop/start reopening of the global dance scene made us consider the function of dance music itself.Ĭertainly the genre’s most traditional mode of consumption is through massive speakers at clubs and festivals, and - finally - that did type of consumption did happen this year, as venues cautiously welcomed back fans after going dark during the pandemic.

Best dancing line music offset