I’m not gonna sugar coat this for you — compiling and arranging the “best” songs of the year is inevitably a messy, upsetting, confusing, infuriating business, and I hate it. There never feels to be a truly right answer, and the process of convincing yourself there is one…well, it lends itself to sadness and over-indulgence. With albums, you can identify certain bodies of work that create a beautiful, lively, devastating, jovial, game-changing whole. Songs, though… songs are the wildcard. Singles, EPs, b-sides, hidden tracks, 7” record store day limited-edition pressings. There’s simply too much to wrap your head around and not enough time to truly explore the breadth of offerings each year — and that’s particularly true given the clusterfuck that was 2016.

So, with that in mind, we give you our list of top songs. The tracks that got us through the more difficult days and kept us going on long nights. The songs that weave incredible stories, break our hearts and elevate our moods. We probably missed a lot of your favorite songs, so please comment below with what you’d have added. Hope you enjoy, and happy end of 2016! Thanks to Isabella Bersellini for contributing the album artwork for this playlist.