fbpx

Year In ReView: 16 of our most favorite Boston songs of 2016

Choosing our favorite 16 Boston songs of the year is like choosing your favorite child -- if you were the Duggars or some other family with a few hundred kids. While mainstream pop continued to die a slow painful death, it was another bang-up year of music coming out of the isolated Boston music scene. What we have in our region are legions of musicians making music on their terms and their own way, and the result is a fantastically eclectic batch of new tunes that proved this year was one of the best around town. The selections below, listen alphabetically, aren't any sort of ultimate Best Of, though they do reflect what we've enjoyed the most, what we've hyped on these digital pages, and what we had spun on VanyaRadio. If you read this website on the regular, you should be quite familiar; if not, then dive in and hear something new and exciting.

Prev8 of 16Next
Swipe or use your ← → (arrow) keys

Latrell James, “Break The Rules”

Boston’s hip-hop scene blew the fuck up in 2016, and the best part about it is the feeling that the best is yet to come. The finest effort of this past year, in our opinion, was Latrell James’ inner-burn banger “Break The Rules.” It had us asking “Who the fuck are you” to pretty much everyone who crossed our path. “The whole idea behind this song is myself rebelling and refusing to conform to any label of judgment one may try to pin on me,” James writes. “Breaking rules is when you can’t afford studio time so you watch YouTube videos until you can mix and master your own records. Breaking rules is being self efficient. I just wanted to create a song that questions the traditional process of how we are supposed to live life.” And when you break the rules, you win the game on your own terms.

Prev8 of 16Next
Swipe or use your ← → (arrow) keys