“Bad Girls” by M.I.A.

"Bad Girls" landed on 31 January 2012 as the lead single for Matangi, M.I.A.'s fourth album, which wouldn't arrive until 2013, and it was her first release on Interscope after she left XL in 2011. A shorter version had already appeared on her 2010 mixtape Vicki Leekx. She wrote it with Marcella Araica and Danja, who produced it, and Araica engineered and mixed.

It's a midtempo hip-hop strut with Middle Eastern flavors, bits of worldbeat and dancehall and syncopated drums, M.I.A. half-rapping, half-singing, all haughty, about sexual prowess and female power. Romain Gavras shot the video in Ouarzazate, Morocco, in solidarity with the Women to Drive movement, and Pitchfork later named it the 27th best song of the 2010s.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.