“Let It Happen” by Tame Impala

"Let It Happen" was the opening shot from Currents, the third album by Tame Impala, the Australian project that is really just Kevin Parker, and in 2015 it showed up nearly eight minutes long, daring anyone to skip it. Parker wrote it, played it, recorded it, produced it and mixed it himself, working on it in places scattered around the globe.

It's a song about personal transition, and it moves like one: a glossy, restless groove that keeps opening onto new rooms. Halfway in, it seems to stick like a scratched CD, the words melt into gibberish, and Parker's voice returns robotic, bent through a keyboard sampler rather than a vocoder. Critics fell over themselves to praise it and stacked it onto their year-end lists, and it took Song of the Year at the 2016 APRA Music Awards.

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