2016: Favorite Cover Art

We celebrate the end of the year the only way we know how: through lists, essays, and mixes. Join us as we explore the music that helped define the year. More from this series

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2016 was fucking grim. A series of catastrophic reversals punctuated by obituaries and scandal. The illuminati aren’t just at the gates, they’re on your timeline, messing with your preferences and compromising your history. Any minute now, they could autoplay into song, and music — final form of fashion in an age of noise, icon generator, always more than music — becomes another means of normalization, hard-limiting subjectivity, and sidechaining choice.

The cover artist’s response: sometimes static, sometimes fluid. A little ironic, but not as much as you’d think. An incision into life. A mute commentary that sniggers with echo. A confused ecstasy that comes from living in worlds beyond the reach of our icons and our experts, our snowflakes and our followed. Something so absurd it makes sense of our failure, glorifying it without dignity, framing it within elegant, anxious networks of ambiguity and falsehood. Something alien, distant, opulent, and inconsolate.

A matter of texture and transcription. A matter of laughter in the face of hope. A matter of woke excess. A matter for this list to organize, in fact.

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We celebrate the end of the year the only way we know how: through lists, essays, and mixes. Join us as we explore the music that helped define the year. More from this series

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