Here is a playlist of the essential 100 (or so) tunes to come out of Scotland.

This best of Scottish soundtrack in this Covid-hit 2021 is an eclectic and subjective journey into hip hop, alternative, dance, house, electronica, indie, punk, post-grunge, post-rock, nu and old folk even jazz and often a combination of some or all. 

It's a mix of the known, little known and the unknown, immediate pop anthems and challenging left-field projects.

The final list painstakingly compiled over the year was whittled down from a not very shortlist of over 200.

Here is the next chapter.  Final top 25 drops tomorrow.

Top 100 Tunes from Scotland in 2021 Part 1 (100-76)

Top 100 Tunes from Scotland in 2021 Part 2 (75-51)

Part 3- 50-26

=50 Oakzy B - Corners

From the Calton area of Glasgow comes Rap Game UK finalist and an R Rated grittier edge and a slick production. "I'm not your typical Glasgow ned," he spits.   Too right.

=50 Lauren Sarah Hayes - Kill The Cop In Your Head

The Arizona-based Scots experimental electro musician and sound artist who is a member of the New BBC Radiophonic Workshop produces a startling and mischievous improvised soundscape that take dizzying glitch, noise and dissonance to a whole new sphere.  

 

49 Lomond Campbell - Otherly

The Scot spent his formative years making sound installations with his band and art collective FOUND, has won a BAFTA for creating a moody, narcissistic music machine called Cybraphon which now resides in the National Museum of Scotland.

Now, based in his own studio in the Highlands called The Lengths he created  LŪP, a mesmerising experimental electronic album of phase looping and phase experimentation of which this is a brain cell-bending, spacey electro-pulse booming, hyper-percussive highlight. 

LŪP is a custom tape-looper made orginally for prolific Fife-based independent singer-songwriter King Creosote.

48 Sarya - I'll Break My Heart (So You Don't Have To)

The Edinburgh-based Taiwanese-American singer-songwriter/poet who recorded my favourite Scots tune of last year, returned with another intoxicatingly melancholic and super-melodic slice of lo-fi indie, electronica and folk.

"For me, queer platonic relationships are just as important as romantic ones, and as someone on the ace spectrum, friendships are the foundation of the love I receive in my life," she says. "I'd rather quietly let my crush crackle away in the darkness so that I can let a friendship rise from its ashes, because I know it will last longer than most romantic connections that way. This is a song of acknowledgement, acceptance, and moving on, and having enough respect for yourself and your friend so that a deeper and longer-lasting love can develop where infatuation originally was. At the end of the day, I'm just happy to feel anything at all."

=47 Buffet Lunch - Orange Peel

Two years after making the Top 20 on this list while being total unknowns, this crazy four-piece Edinburgh DIY combo with a shared love of music on the Abba-to-Captain Beefeheart axis return with a mind-bending debut album The Power of Rocks and this highlight, a  Pavement-esque wonky-rock-with-a-smile delight.  

=47 Permo - Matryoshka

A corrosive post-punk explosion from the Falkirk trio about using a set of Russian nesting dolls as a metaphor of being full of yourself.  The band say it is a "blistering tirade aimed at the self-centred, egotistical members of our generation who insist on polluting good conversations with their one-upmanship and exaggerated anecdotes".

46 Kami-O - Yoddha

The Glasgow-based DJ & grime threads traditional instruments with electronic structures, East Asian mysticism, even a haunting string section in a captivatingly moody instrumental from his deeply impressive, experimental debut album Biren.

45 Magnus & The Saint - Pretty Woman

Insanely catchy explosion of manic hyper-house that sees the 23-year-old Orkney-born producer and singer-songwriter take his computer into new dance territories on this highlight from the debut House Party EP.

44 Stock Manager - Squire

The Glasgow three-piece produce a near three minute sensory overload with this masterful grunge mosher that would have made Kurt Cobain proud.

43 Mogwai - It's What I Want To Do, Mum

A soaring seven minute closing instrumental to their seminal As The Love Continues album that transports you into a wonderland of your interpretation and their making and the perfect ending to what is by far their most eclectic album of their career.

42 Hugh Kelly - Where To Start 

University of Glasgow music degree student who is now Edinburgh-based smothers his Bon Iver vibes on this smooth and catchy pop-soul which goes into overdrive with a smoulderingly cute self-harmony and a massive slice of big beat half way through.

41 Co-Accused - Psychonaut Society 

The title track from an EP from the Scots duo and long-standing resident DJs at the legendary underground venue Club 60, that lives up to their hype of providing "sonic grooves from another galaxy".  This is a massive acid house-infused techno-electro jam that makes the walls tremble.

40 Kobi Onyame -  Halleluyah

The Glasgow-based rap artist, producer, and songwriter has pulled the rabbit out of the hat with his latest 10-track album Don't Drink The Poison, and this, the fourth track is a celebration of cross cultural rhythms fusing rap, and African grooves and creating a vibrant spectacle.

39 Wojtek The Bear - Ferme La Bouche

The irresistible summery horns-a-plenty opener to the five-year-old Glasgow jangle-pop quintet's second proper album Heaven By The Back Door is a song about being in a toxic relationship and blaming yourself. 

“The first line about everyone having a plan till they get punched in the face isn’t necessarily meant to be taken at face value as it’s more a metaphor for how we invest so much hope and blind faith at the start of new relationships, because you just have to in order to believe they’re going to work, but when things invariably breakdown or hit a bump in the road we often don’t have a plan B or an idea of what to do next," says Tam Killean of the band.

38 TNGHT - Brick Figures 

Scots maverick producer Hudson Mohawke and Lunice released a dizzying almost industrial synth-heavy fascination with a spasm of metallic whirrs as part of Glasgow label LuckyMe’s annual Advent Calendar charity compilation.  One of the smart duo's best. 

Lunice said, "This is the kind of music Lego characters would be listening to on their own time."

=37 Colin Macleod - This Old Place

Lewis's Bruce Springsteen, previously championed on this list, returned with the Hold Fast album steeped in Americana and a couple of duets with Sheryl Crow, no less, and this passionate. country-tinged LP closing lover letter to home that gives me the shivers.

=37 Dvne - Towers 

A dramatic riff-pummelling, sometime brutal, sometimes gentle, textured monster from the Edinburgh five-piece progressive rock/metal band which shape-shifts with different tempos and moods, from screamo to melodic singing through all of its towering, inventive nine minutes from impressive second album Etemen Ænka.

36 Ouijan - Concave

Exciting and mysterious new R&B singer-songwriter-producer from Alloa who produces a haunting, unconventional and airy soul that will capture your heart.  The singer/songwriter/producer from Alloa (born in Glasgow) has  been in various bands in his youth but it wasn’t until January of last year that he began properly releasing self-produced music under this name.

35 SOPHIE - Unisil

This delicious, twisted, mangled experimental dance epic is a lost recording from the late  dance-electro innovator and pioneer who tragically died in January at the tender age of 34. 

This sparsely distributed track finally received a proper airing in 2021. The title is “a reference to the silicone production and curing process, and the hard, fast, and synthetic sound.”

34 Nightshift - Make Kin

The Glasgow experimental five-piece post-punkers are wilfully dissonent and off-kilter on this Pavement on loopy juice blast that takes in oblique clarinet, Eothen Stearn’s contemptuous half-spoken, sometime deliberate off-key vocals and pounding stacatto drums. 

They say it ruminates on "looking to kinship as a way of engaging with entangled environmental and reproductive issues... how a band is a bond".  This highlight from album Zöe will be loathed by some and adored for its impudent adventure by others, like me.

33 Arab Strap - Fable of the Urban Fox

Where Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton forge an epic tale and standout from As Days Get Dark referencing the hunting of "vermin" foxes in Britain, as an allegory for how we treat immigrants all allied to an intoxicating backdrop of Celtic folk, funky disco and even a huge orchestral blast.

 "When I wrote the lyrics for this in 2019, I was hoping its obvious allegorical message might not be relevant by the time it came out, but sadly it seems the lack of humanity in government and influence of rightwing media continues to prevail," says Moffat.

32 ONR - It Gets To A Point

This list has always embraced Robert Shields, the man behind his dark-pop incarnation OMR. He is one of Scotland's most underrated tunesmiths and former frontman with the underrated Dumfriesshire combo Finding Albert. 

This is a killer dark-synth pop blast which he says "is about the meeting of absolutes, hitting breaking point, a disbelief that things can get so far and go so crazy without intervention…those moments in life that everyone feels when you just can't quite believe you're having to deal with as much as you are." 

31 Tommy Ashby & Lydia Clowes - Happy Just To Know 

The soulful Borders-based singer-songwriter with a PhD in psychoacoustics who has previously featured on this list with Blood Wolf Moon collaborates hits the spot with this unpretentious, smiley indie-folk gem, duetting with the Bad Honey singer Lydia Clowes.

It has been chosen by Dutch supermarket PLUS for a major television advertising campaign. "I wanted to write a song about finding a true connection with someone and how that feeling evolves over time … I also wanted to draw reference to the changing of seasons along the way."

30 Pictish Trail - Natural Successor (Django Django Fazed and Confused Remix)

Isle of Eigg's finest electro-pop artist Johnny Lynch produces a fascinating apocalyptic paen over nature's revenge on humanity supported by an enticing baggy, fuzzy makeover.

"The production and vocals are really great so it was a joy to delve into the parts, I hope we’ve done it justice," say the Djangos. "We’ve known Johnny a long time... so it was great to work together on something at last!” 

29 Hamish Hawk -  The Mauritian Badminton Doubles Champion, 1973

First discovered by Fife underground folk legend King Creosote and mentored by Idlewild’s Rod Jones, the Edinburgh artist comes over like a Scots Morrissey in its poetry and the jangling guitar dynamic on this swaggering nugget of a highlight from his third album Heavy Elevator,

 "The initial idea for the song came to me when I was standing on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral in London," he says. "I’d previously failed to notice just how colossal a structure it really is. For Christopher Wren to have designed it, and for him to have seen its construction finished in his lifetime, the thought just staggered me.  I suppose it got me thinking: if I were to fashion a legacy for myself, it might well be a song. I imagined what it would sound like, and in turn, the song became a wider rumination on matters of life, family, marriage, and ultimately, death. It was a song I knew I had in me; all it took was Andy Pearson's beautiful guitar line to squeeze the blood out the stone. It’s one of my favourites on the album, and very close to my heart."

28 Hyyts - Kinda Need You Here Tonight

 

A huge earworm of a pure pop sparkler plucked from the Glasgow duo's helluvatime EP. Adam and Sam, had careers before their artistic career took off, with the former having worked as a music therapist across prisons in Scotland and the latter having built up his reputation as underground curator and promoter in Edinburgh.  "This is the proudest we’ve ever been of anything," they said of the EP.

27 Swiss Portrait - Cassette

The Edinburgh-based dream-popster places ladles of killer hooks and melancholy to the fore on this insatiably melodic standout from his debut album Familiar Patterns which sounds like New Order force fed early 90s shoegaze.

"The song is about dealing with my anxieties of been left alone. But obviously the author's intended meaning shouldn’t take away from what people find in it," he says.

26 Chvrches ft Robert Smith - How Not To Drown

A collaborative single between Glasgow's electrpop overlords and rock legend Robert Smith couldn't surely disappoint. And it certainly doesn't, marrying introspection, with the band's expected punch-the-air hooks.

Chvrches’ Martin Doherty said the song’s release marked the “proudest moment of [his] life in music”, having worked with his musical idol.  The song is inspired by a period of depression Doherty experienced that almost led him to quit the band. 

 

Top 100 Tunes from Scotland in 2020 Part 1 (100-76)

Top 100 Tunes from Scotland in 2021 Part 2 (75-51)