Music that made us happy and disappointed in 2018

Performers discussed

Coin

Liza Gyrdymova from Yekaterinburg began recording simple songs to the accompaniment of a piano back in 2015, but in 2018 she really turned around: she recorded a hit album, took part in many major festivals and skated a big tour with sold-outs. It seems that at a certain moment everyone started talking about Monetochka, regardless of age and musical preferences. Let's cross our fingers and get ready to be surprised in 2019 - the spring fuse of Coloring Pages for Adults will not be enough for the coming year.

What to listen to at Monetochka →

Face

Ivan Dryomin appeared on radars even before 2018, primarily due to the uncompromising and beautiful in its disgusting lyrics, read on swinging trap beats. In the past year, he decided, excuse me, to turn the game around and release an album with serious, acutely social lyrics. The plan didn't work. Either the listener did not believe the abstract protest directed nowhere, or the new aspirations of the author of "Burger" were simply not taken seriously, but the results are as follows: a disrupted tour and a modest time for discussing the release, which barely reached the weekly mark.

At the end of the year, Face changed his shoes again in flight and recorded the provocative track "Zemfira" with obscenities and traditional insults at the invisible enemy. And it seems that in this role the rapper sounds much more convincing. What's next - 2019 will show.

Husky

Everything that Husky has done in his career as a rap artist has a million questions. Doubtful political views, in 2018 - secondary musical ideas and awkward attempts to grow into an actionist, in which the meaning of each performance was explained by the author right down to the comma. But he became the hero of our collection not because of his creativity, although the already blocked clip "Judas" was good in all respects and even got into our subjective top of spring videos.

People, obviously having some kind of power, decided to use it in relation to a number of artists, sometimes completely harmless. Husky became an unofficial martyr and the main victim of all this November madness, and after the arrest of the artist Bast, Oxxxymiron and Noize MC even staged an emergency concert "I will sing my music" in support of him. Thanks to the wide publicity, the rapper was quickly rescued from captivity, but that was not the end of it. The concerts of the rather harmless IC3PEAK, not the most serious Aljay and the very plush Yegor Creed, were disrupted. And this is one of the most terrible trends, the development of which can strike, apparently, on any musicians in 2019. Let's hope this doesn't happen.

Clips that became memes

Childish Gambino - This Is America

A clip with an unexpected twist at the beginning and a bunch of mesmerizing dances and non-obvious meanings after. On our side of the ocean, it is not customary to think seriously about the problems of African Americans, but the video keeps attention until the last second and without decrypting the references. This is not Glover's only cool video in 2018: the video for the song Feels Like Summer was released in the fall. There, his hero walks through the fictional city of hip-hop artists - include and count those you recognize.

Kanye West & Lil Pump ft. Adele Givens - I Love It

A clip by the main musician of our century Kanye West and the relative young rapper Lil Pump, in which the performers walk down the corridor in giant copies of Yeezy costumes. The track, Kanye's facial expressions, Pump readings - everything worked. The hit became the reason for a bunch of parodies, including from Philip Kirkorov with Nikolai Baskov.

Clips of the music studio of Alexander Gudkov

The Vecherny Urgant team shot a video for Dima Bilan's "Drunken Love", two videos for Philip Kirkorov and Nikolai Baskov, as well as a video for the terribly clinging "The color of the mood is blue." Almost everything turned out funny and interesting, but the video for Kirkorov's hit with a bunch of stars in the frame was perhaps the most important. He proved that self-irony is not alien to many pop artists, and actual humor is not alien to TV broadcasts.

Performers who disappointed

imagine Dragons

Not that the absolutely stadium music of Imagine Dragons claimed to be especially valuable earlier, but the full-length Origins disappointed even those who liked the band. Uncompromising lack of ideology, precise accuracy of every step, sickening perfection of every note and an unprecedented lack of mischief - these are the reasons why the group deserves the title of "Nickelback of our time". And the 2018 album only emphasized this once again.

Muse

Muse has written itself an endless credit of trust with the first albums - one Origin of Symmetry from 2001 and now will give odds to most alternative rock guitar releases. New Born, Plug In Baby, Bliss, Muscle Museum, Hysteria - all of these are already classics. These songs make every Muse album feel like a must-see after release.

But Matthew Bellamy is obviously not happy with this situation: since the beginning of the 2010s, things have gone wrong for the group, and with each release the situation only gets worse. In 2018, Muse was completely stunned by releasing a Blade Runner-style retrowave album and completely depriving him of hits or even any interesting songs. An attempt to grasp at long-gone trends could be forgiven to anyone, but obviously not to the main innovators of guitar music of the early 2000s. Very sorry.

Justin Timberlake

Once a popular and, of course, a talented musician, whom you want not to blame for anything, but rather just to regret. The singles from Timberlake's latest album Man of the Woods started coming out last winter, and then a disturbing feeling crept in: it seems that Justin is not the same.

Not long before that, one track of the musician did shoot out - it was the same stupid and non-binding, but nevertheless excellent strong hit Can't Stop The Feeling from Trolls. Unfortunately, since then, apart from Justin's failures like performing at the Super Bowl, there is nothing to remember. Man of the Woods turned out to be really faded. At least for one of the most important pop artists of the 2000s.

Musicians who died

In 2018, rappers XXXTentacion and Mac Miller, The Cranberries' vocalist Dolores O'Riordan, DJ Tim Bergling, better known as Avicii, opera singer Montserrat Caballe and French chansonnier Charles Aznavour were gone.

Listen to a selection of songs of The Cranberries →

Listen to a selection of songs by Avicii →

Listen to a selection of songs by Charles Aznavour →

Freshmen we will hear about in 2019

Or maybe we won't. One way or another, the artists from our selection have shot quite recently, are on the wave and, it seems, do not plan to stop.

Big baby tape

Many people associate the appearance of Big Baby Tape on music radars with the mention of his name Feduk in an interview with Dud, but the rapper himself says that this did not bring him much hype. There is every reason to believe that his musical, correctly "copied" from Western hip-hop is working on its own, from the second release of Dragonborn for sure.

Big Baby Tape has no clips, and the attached video is a rapper's frivolous freestyle on the Fast Food Music channel, where you can learn more about flow, but you shouldn't draw conclusions about the artist's work.

GONE. Fludd

It's difficult to call GONE. Fludd a newcomer: the history of Alexander Buse as a musician dates back to 2009, and his debut album was released in 2015. But it was in 2018 that the breakthrough album Boys Don’t Cry was released, and then the second full-length album “Superchuits”, as well as the attributes of a modern domestic star - halls of thousands, an interview with Dud and a performance in “Evening Urgant”. GONE. Fludd's music is a pleasant and non-trivial hip-hop, in which reading alternates with tunes, and trap beats complement simple and close to teenagers, and not only to them, lyrics.

Alyona alyona

Alena Savranenko works as a teacher in a rural kindergarten and reads rap in Ukrainian. An unusual background for a rap artist, bright flow, swinging near-gram beats and viral videos - thanks to all this, Alyona Alyona was talked about after the first track was released. Now there are three of them, two of which are definitely hits. We are waiting for a full-length album and new videos in 2019 - we are sure that it will be more interesting ahead.

In the coming year, we will continue to make monthly and thematic music selections in streaming services, share the best news of the week in our Instagram Stories and collect weekly playlists in the VKontakte group.

What did you listen to in 2018? Who did you love, who did you hate, whose songs were you going to work with, and which album did you play before going to bed? Leave your answer in the comments - this way we will make the selection more useful together.