It seems 2026 is the new 2016 – at least according to millions on the internet, where everyone is looking back on the year with rose-tinted lenses. It was the moment of great shifts: Trump, Brexit, the Snapchat dog gilter, Calvin Harris’s never-ending Summer, Beyoncé’s Lemonade, the neon ubiquity of Drake’s Hotline Bling, fidget spinners. The word of the year according to the Oxford Dictionary was “post-truth”.
The music world is leaning into nostalgia. Boardmasters festival in Cornwall has announced a lineup of Dizzee Rascal, James Arthur and Loyle Carner. If 2016 now feels like a lost golden hour, these five tracks show us why.
Listen to The Observer’s playlist of the week here.
You could build this entire playlist from Anti, Rihanna’s most recent and best album. Consideration is a triumph: a collaboration with SZA, sparse and slinking. Work and Desperado may have soundtracked a million parties, and Love on the Brain a million unwise attempts at karaoke. But Consideration revealed an artist entirely uninterested in pop’s usual demands.
Reviewing Carner in 2016, The Observer dubbed him “the sentimental face of grime”. But NO CD was his breakthrough, a spiky rap with Rebel Kleff sung by a freckly soft boy who always brought his mum to his gigs. By the following year he was a Mercury Prize nominee; today he’s a festival headliner. Here he is at the start: earnest, fun and unmistakable.
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Released just before Mitski’s wider breakout, this song captures the precise ache of longing to belong. Its sudden lurch from restraint to distortion mirrors the emotional whiplash of realising you can’t always be who you wish. A cult favourite in 2016, it now feels like a modern standard, proof that vulnerability, when sharpened, cuts deepest.
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The incomparable Frank Ocean released two albums in 2016 – the first, Endless, to fulfil his contract obligation to Def Jam. Then, the next day, freed from his label, he dropped his exquisite album Blonde. Every song is gorgeous, but White Ferrari is the most evocative of late summer melancholy.
British indie band Wolf Alice released their debut album My Love is Cool in 2016, and Bros – a song about friendship, youth and reckless devotion – stood out for its sweet naivety. Ellie Rowsell’s vocals are ethereal and infectious. I once watched a couple at a gig jump through this chorus before one of them dropped to their knees to propose. The song still feels capable of that kind of electricity.
Illustration by Charlotte Durance