Here are the Billboard staff’s favorite hit singles and hidden gems of 2021. 🔥
Simone Joyner, Louis Browne, Marco Bertorello, Dimitrios Kambouris, Jason Koerner, Joseph Okpako, Rich Fury
The past and the future had something of a tug of war over pop music in 2021. In many ways, top 40 was pushed forward this year by artists who blended sounds and styles, expanding its center to include voices from areas of the globe too rarely represented in the stateside mainstream.
It certainly made for a robust pop present: a year in which the best songs and biggest hits could come from seemingly anywhere, in space or in time. Whether they were reinventing what had been or reimagining what could be, here were our staff’s 100 favorite songs that we’re still pretty sure were actually from 2021. (Songs were eligible if they either were released or peaked on the