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Year In ReView: Our favorite Boston-ish songs of 2017

It's December 21, and we're just finally getting around to our annual list of favorite songs to come out of Boston in 2017. Two conclusions can be drawn from this -- first, the year was so packed that our Year End obligations were pushed back to the very last minute, and secondly, we kind of hate these posts. Through our New Sounds features and pages of Boston News posts, it's virtually impossible to come up with a full portrait of Boston's year in music. We hope that our dedicated coverage from January to December acts as our compass of what's good around town; this list here can be best described as a loose collection of our "faves." It's in no order, it's by no preference; these tracks stuck with us over the course of the calendar, and if you missed one or two when released, perhaps it can help fill in some blanks. Because it was a crazy good year for Boston music, and 2018 feels as promising as ever.

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Haasan Barclay, “Secret Tape”

Haasan Barclay’s November EP 800 Fantasy Lane is a trip. The four-track record continues Barclay’s ability to shift genre perception and unseat expectation, blending seemingly distant styles like r&b and shoegaze with relative ease. The 75-second “Secret Tape” exemplifies this; it’s a liquidious guitar-led number that just scratches the surface of Barclay’s musical complexity, all part of the master plan for an artist who brushes aside genre limitation in favor of emotion. “I have a much stronger idea of who I am as an artist and a musician,” Barclay told Fresh out the Mint over the summer. “There’s a lot of comfort in that, but it means I’m looking for new ways to challenge myself and everybody listening.” There’s a bit of a Bad Rabbits vibe to “Secret Tape,” and that’s certainly something we can get down with.

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