ILM's Top 77 Tracks of 2019

Which sense of 'nonplussed' are you mobilizing here?

Yet to read the top 30 rollout beyond the placements, but thanks for all your toil pollrunners!

If we are blocking repeat appearances, "This World is Drunk" wouldn't have been in the countdown

IOW congrats Danny Brown

bounce the other Charlie XCX song, too; welcome to the party, Blick Bassy

xxxp the original meaning pom

i still don't really get "balloon" and "jogging" is certainly way too high but those results are pretty great overall (apart from the lack of rap overall)

i'd also completely forgotten about "i need you" in favour of the octo octa album this year and i'm really glad to rediscover it

“I Need You” is on such a different but equally awesome vibe to the album.

Just listened to Balloon for the first time. I guess this Lemme Smang It without the funny

well yeah but Smang It should've placed #1 as well

Hey! Thank you everybody! I wont be home until next week and as usual I messed up the info on one of our tracks by Octo Octa! It will get properly corrected and fixed for future reference as soon as I get home.

I couldn’t get my two cents in for the top 20 but I’ll just say that even though only 5 of my votes made it into the top 77 I personally found the results very intriguing compared to every other eoy I saw in the past month.Lots of songs I didn’t know, some I don’t really get at all but I still like what we got.

Maybe the results weren’t as crazy as promised but I hope they were at least as enjoyable and as diverse as democratically possible so everyone - safe from saer :( - got at least one or two of their votes represented.

thank you to my fellow pollrunners for all the help. You rock.

Thanks to the pollrunners for running this crazy rollout so magnificently!
Moka, gracias once again for the outstanding visuals, forks, thank you for providing us with that cliffhanging climax, and seandalai, this one’s for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuHMBze2B84
This song that you posted on some ILM thread basically set the Afropop ball rolling for me eight years ago, so merci beaucoup!

Thanks to all who worked on this - also the graphics are excellent. Looking forward to discovering lots of new things.

Many thanks, pollrunners!

been out. only just taken a look at the results but I am SO FUCKING HAPPY about this top 3. And wow on the number 1. Well done ILM and thank you poll runners. Made my day

Since this is poll season, don't forget to vote for your favourite metal and heavy music albums of 2019:

2019 Metal ’n’ Heavy Rock Poll: VOTING & CAMPAIGNING thread (open until the 21st of February)

great job poll runners! and it's been said already, but Moka's designs are a wonderful gift, it's sincerely touching how much effort you put into this.

Balloon being #1 is amazing and dissolves my reservations
― rob, donderdag 30 januari 2020 20:48

posts that make you very happy

― breastcrawl, Thursday, January 30, 2020 3:18 PM (two hours ago)

yeah I was all set to be annoyed that the 8-yr EOY dancehall drought was ended by an obscure album track with zero profile outside of ILM, but it placing first is totally absurd and delightful

Thanks Moka & Forks, brilliant work!

Here is the youtube playlist, sorry for the delay, http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgY-EgZm23_JMleMrv5Pq42eYRaWrPeVK

This song that you posted on some ILM thread basically set the Afropop ball rolling for me eight years ago, so merci beaucoup!

― breastcrawl, Thursday, 30 January 2020 22:17 (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈🎈

Is Balloon just an ILM phenomenon? 18k views on Youtube.

― jmm, Friday, January 31, 2020 6:52 AM (fifty-five minutes ago)

over 19k now, the lurkers are massive

thanks and praise to sean, forks and Moka for the poll, and to all voters

I dunno about lurkers I must be several thousand of those views

I think it would be reductive to dismiss “Balloon” as a novelty, even a very good one; a lot of its appeal to me is how much it resembles the kind of manic, bug-eyed (and frequently very silly) dancehall that I fell for so hard in the early 00s, and which is still present but much more faintly in contemporary dancehall.

One reason I suspect dancehall does not otherwise appear in these polls much is that these days so much of it competing in roughly the same sonic and emotional territory as African (particularly Nigerian) pop (sweet, uptempo, party-friendly and sexually charged but still at least somewhat romantic) but on average the best African material just seems to own this space much more effectively.

rooting for zero gecs

― culture of mayordom (voodoo chili), Thursday, January 30, 2020 7:16 AM (yesterday)

^ talks a big game for someone with such a small truck imo

Gecs still suck.

― ooga booga-ing for the bourgeoisie (voodoo chili), Friday, January 31, 2020 6:55 AM (two hours ago)

^ talks a big game for someone with such a small truck imo

had seen the name 100 gecs but this is the first time hearing/seeing them...

friends of ilm this is very bad music

― omg what did you type to find this gif? (Spottie), Friday, January 31, 2020 6:57 AM (two hours ago)

^ talks a big game for someone with such a small truck imo

6: 100 Gecs – “Money Machine” – absolute fucking trash, even when viewed as novelty music

― pomenitul, Friday, January 31, 2020 7:34 AM (two hours ago)

^ talks a big game for someone with such a small truck imo

enjoying the idea of NV opening 1,000 separate tabs and letting balloonballoonbalbablaoobloonbl cascade for two hours to juke the stats

Have you ever used multiple tabs to make loops? It is awesome, I once did it with Fleetwood Mac's "Over and Over" for about an hour

sic otm there

this me when 100 gecs placed

https://13thdimension.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Planet-of-the-Apes-End-Scene.jpg

Who knew people were craving a Venetian Snares revival?

I like that Money Machine video

This is my first time hearing "Money Machine." It's garbage, but it does remind me that ILX was all over that equally horrible teen pregnancy reality star some years back.

YOU GOT A LOTTA

(Yes, I voted for "Money Machine," proudly.)

this is all very ironic because my truck is large

farrah abraham >>>> 100 gecs

i maintain that 100 gecs are kinda interesting but basically unlistenable

it's great how many of these tracks are so miserable and joyless while others offer much tuneless plodding.

100 Gecs makes me long for a hipsterrunoff revival analysis.

When I started preparing my tracks ballot, I had no idea I'd vote for Old Town Road, yet here we are. In all honesty I was probably voting for the video, which is ... perfect.

Money Machine sounded like Smoko + Taking Over the Dancefloor to me

Tim, I think you’re right about dancehall vs afrobeats on a broader pop scale (though dancehall is capable of mining other territory, eg., reality, poverty, sufferation) but not on ILM. Iirc until this year the last dancehall appearance was 2011 when Konshens, Nuh Pull It Up placed

man i thought i had this in my top 5 but its not on my ballot at all... must have deleted on accident when i was shuffling around. big fail.

― omg what did you type to find this gif? (Spottie), Thursday, January 30, 2020 4:02 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

It will live on in the top 5 of our hearts

That Konshens song made it because Tim singled it our in his end of year review.

Balloon making #1 is an excellent argument in favour of starting more threads on excellent individual songs, if it had just been chucked in rolling dancehall as a YouTube embed then no one would have noticed or cared.

Old Town Road still stands up hundreds of plays after the supposed novelty should have worn off.

Farrah Abraham and 100 gecs are both great.

smh at only four votes for Holly Herndon’s Frontier. One of the most extraordinary things I’ve heard in years, sounding simultaneously like it’s from 500 years in the past and 500 in the future.

Great work Moka, Sean & Forks!

From the comments on the OTHER YouTube for "Balloon", which has an additional 10K views - Alliance Boss with the vision:

Alliance Boss
5 months ago
International song will do very good overseas for fans 🇯🇲💯🔥🔥🔥

This has been a pretty good time, though maybe a little rough and rowdy - which, consider the tenor of the country anyway. But I'm more hype for the albums results (as usual), probably because for whatever reason it's easier to come up with 25 albums I feel strongly about, not so singles/tracks.

I was one of the Frontier voters, its like having an entire choir of robots singing at once.

I would have voted for it if I hadn't voted for SWIM instead

So in the broader world "Balloon" isn't even close to being Busy Signal's most popular recent track. Like, by several orders of magnitude seemingly. Bless.

really enjoyed reading this thread, thank you ulysses, moka, seandalai!

Busy is the god btw. For anyone who thinks Balloon is good, you should dig into his discography.

Listening to "Jogging." I don't get it.

It's like running but not as fast.