Singles of the year: The critics’ top three

“Get Lucky”

Daft Punk

The biggest hit Daft Punk ever recorded is also “as close to magic as pop comes,” said Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker. Like the summer’s other ubiquitous song—Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines”—it harked back to 1970s disco as Daft Punk even enlisted Nile Rodgers to provide the airy, sparkling rhythm-guitar figure at the track’s core. Lead vocalist Pharrell Williams doesn’t have a virtuoso’s pipes, but his silky-smooth alto is “wonderfully unpretentious”—and the perfect complement to that immaculate guitar.

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“Royals”

Lorde

“The production is spare and haunting,” and the vocals are “simultaneously vulnerable and imperious,” said Duncan Greive in The Guardian (U.K.). But the words made this song a phenomenon, as its 16-year-old singer-songwriter pushed back against global consumer culture by insisting that there are paths to joy that don’t involve Maybachs and Cristal champagne. The New Zealand teen wasn’t rejecting pop music itself, but the song’s success owed partly to its “shape-shifting ability to reflect the assumptions of the listener.”

“New Slaves”

Kanye West

The standout single from West’s latest was “a showstopper in its stunning starkness,” said Andrew Unterberger in PopDust.com. “An eerily plink-plonking synth riff and a threatening bass rumble” provide virtually the entire backdrop as the rapper unleashes a blistering rant about racism, luxury culture, and the prison-industrial complex. We’re given no choice but to listen to every word, and he spits out the rhymes as if this might be the most important rap of his 10-year career. In truth, “it very well might be.”