The best songs of 2016: A 24-hour Spotify playlist

Kanye West may have offered 2016’s most loud, chaotic, and self-involved album—the perfect record to remember 2016 by—but no song was more heart-wrenching than Anohni’s “Drone Bomb Me.”

Produced by prodigious electronic hounds Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never, the song imagines a preteen girl in war-torn Afghanistan who’s given up on life and longs for death from above. As the citizens of Alleppo, Syria, posted bitter social media farewells this week amid a rising death toll—and a 7-year-old girl who put a human face on the casualties of war via Twitter—no other song was a more apt reminder that the human experience is suffering.

That’s where the 2016 Long Player begins, a five-years-running Daily Dot tradition of sticking 24 hours of the year’s best music on a Spotify playlist. Anohni is in a small cluster of artists here who appear more than once. (She’s joined by Angel Olsen, Chance the Rapper, Future, Gold Panda, Frank Ocean, A Tribe Called Quest, Rihanna, and Mitski as the acts who yielded more than one epic, can’t-miss track.)

This thing has been arranged with nerdy vigor and works as a fluid mixtape you can spin from morning to evening. But you’re welcome to skip around. You’ll find something critical and soaring.

Get in the pit and try to love someone: 

Thanks to mix contributors Joshua Bradshaw, Patrick Caldwell, Jim Hill, Kristen Hubby, Blake Hurtik, Andy O’Connor, Austin Powell, Jason Reed, Tara Seetharam, and Harrison Yeager.  

Check out past iterations of the year-end mix: 

2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015