But you know what won’t let you down? Music about love — or the lack of it. So in the spirit of celebrating whatever you want, here are 13 songs to make this Valentine’s Day your best one yet, no matter what your relationship status.

1) “Turnin’ Me Up” by BJ the Chicago Kid

BJ the Chicago Kid, a — surprise! — Chicago rapper, has been making music since the mid-2000s. The Grammy-nominated artist has collaborated with Schoolboy Q, Kendrick Lamar, and Chance the Rapper to make his signature R&B hits. This song is smooth, happy, and full of affection, with a simple singalong chorus to groove to.

2) “With a Girl Like You” by the Troggs

Older love songs sometimes make clearer declarations of affection than modern ones do, which is why this Troggs tune from 1966 has an authentic “I’m in love!” feel. The Troggs are best known for their megahit “Wild Thing,” but this more toned-down song is ideal for declaring your fondness to the guy or gal you wanna dance with later tonight.

3) “Shut Up Kiss Me” by Angel Olsen

For anyone fed up with sappy love songs, Angel Olsen’s 2016 single “Shut Up Kiss Me” is an essential girl-in-love anthem. There’s nothing sweet on its surface: Olsen yells her lyrics, shreds her guitar, and crashes the drums. But underneath all of that is a singer in the throes of a crush: “This heart still beats for you, why can’t you see?”

4) “Gonna Make Time” by the Frightnrs

As a true testament to the excellence of the throwback Daptone record label, this track about making space in your life for a significant other sounds like it was plucked straight out of the 1960s. And this entire Frightnrs album is one to cherish: Just as the four-piece ensemble began recording in the summer of 2015, lead singer Dan Klein was diagnosed with ALS. He didn’t live to see the 2016 debut of Nothing More to Say, which makes the group’s slow-burn success all the more bittersweet.

For another top-notch, February 14–appropriate song, listen to their cover of Etta James’s “I’d Rather Go Blind.”

5) “Boy Problems” by Carly Rae Jepsen

You shouldn’t let this song’s straightforward title deceive you — it’s a track of many layers. At its core, it’s about female friendship. It’s also, according to Jia Tolentino at Jezebel, “a beautiful song of gay discovery.” And at the most basic level, it’s a straight-up “forget about your boy troubles” mandate. What more can you want on Valentine’s Day? Jepsen’s got you covered on all fronts with this A-plus pop jam. 

6) “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever” by Zayn and Taylor Swift

If you’ll be spending your Valentine’s Day in a movie theater with the new Fifty Shades of Grey movie, Fifty Shades Freed, more power to you. If you’ll be out in the open air doing just about anything else, you can still enjoy something good that came from the movie franchise without suffering through Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan’s awkward lack of chemistry. This Taylor Swift/Zayn collaboration from last year’s installment, Fifty Shades Darker, is smoldering pop at its finest, and it’s highly addictive. You’ve been warned.

7) “Valentine” by Esmé Patterson

Despite the name of this song, indie folk singer Esmé Patterson isn’t about to give her heart away. In “Valentine,” the performer asserts her independence — “Oh, valentine / Honey, there’s nothing that’s yours and mine” — instead of snuggling in with a significant other on this most sacred of couple-based days.

Of course, it’s no surprise Patterson took this cheeky route; on Woman to Woman, the 2013 album this track comes from, she reimagined famous pop songs from the woman’s perspective, and “Valentine” in particular is a response to Elvis Costello’s “Alison.” Check out the whole thing for Patterson’s takes on “Jolene,” “Eleanor Rigby,” and more.

8) “I Found Love” by the Free Design, Styrofoam, and Sarah Shannon

In the ’60s, the New York sunshine pop band the Free Design released a full stack of folky, soft-psych albums … to very little critical acclaim. The family band’s music was bubblegum sweet in an era when that style sold well (think the Beach Boys), but they didn’t see real success until they were blessed with an incredible 2005 remix. The FreeDesign: The Now Sound Redesign takes 19 of the band’s tracks and lets artists like Super Furry Animals, Belle and Sebastian, and Caribou lay their interpretations on top of the originals. 

You might remember the original version of this track about finding love in unexpected places from the first episode of the second season of Gilmore Girls, when Lorelai is walking around town handing out yellow daisies after Max Medina proposes to her. (Wait, that’s just me?)

9) “En Love” by Lizzo

Don’t be fooled by the first 30 seconds of this song: Lizzo isn’t about to start waxing poetic about some guy or girl she’s head over heels for. After a soaring intro, the beat drops, and Lizzo’s real purpose comes out: “I’m in love with myself,” she sings, grinding the melody into a banger with attitude and purpose. If you’re not dancing in front of your mirror at least once a week to this track, you might want to consider adding it to your self-care routine.

10) “Baby” by Donnie and Joe Emerson

This romantic slow jam is subtle, making it perfect background music for a romantic dinner for two. Its origin story makes interesting table conversation, too. After a crate digger in Spokane unearthed a 1970s record from these Washington-native teen brothers in 2008, Donnie and Joe Emerson became something of a 21st-century success story. Their eight-song LP took on a life of its own, with “Baby” getting the cover treatment from Ariel Pink, and Light in the Attic, a reissue label in Washington, rereleasing the entire LP in 2012.

11) “Since I Met You Baby” by Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears

This love song is a classic from the 1950s, covered a zillion times in the past half-century. But this particular version is special because it comes from Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears, an Austin, Texas, blues and soul band better known for alt-romantic songs like “Booty City” and “Bitch, I Love You.” 

While Lewis crushes a guitar solo, the Honeybears blast out backing brass; the combination of that musical prowess with the pure and sincere lyrics yields a perfectly reimagined love song.

12) “I’m Sprung” by T-Pain

We were first graced with the a cappella intro to the pure love song “I’m Sprung” in 2005, back when heavy autotune was a brand new thing. But it stands the test of time — it’s solid and sweet, sending you straight back to whomever you were crushing on 12 years ago. This 2014 New Yorker profile of T-Pain details his success and struggle with the voice manipulation software, but check out his Tiny Desk concert to see him crush a performance without it.

13) “You Sexy Thing” by Hot Chocolate

Sometimes there’s only one way to get over the awkwardness that is a holiday focused on love: Dive straight into the cheese. This song has been a longtime standard for wedding receptions and party playlists, but there’s no harm in queuing it up on this most lovey-dovey of days. Everyone knows the words, you can’t help but smile when the boppy beat comes in, and the lyrics, while supremely corny, aren’t incorrect. Even the band’s name is Valentine’s Day appropriate.

For your listening pleasure, here’s a Spotify playlist.

Tune-Yards’ last album, nikki nack, was released in 2014 — a year that feels eons away from our perch in 2018. Since then, there’s been a new president; a national spotlight on police violence against black people; and, most recently, a reckoning against sexual harassers in media, Hollywood, and government, and more. And through all of this, Tune-Yards singer and songwriter Merrill Garbus has been watching.

Her new pop record, I can feel you creep into my private life, out January 19, doesn’t dance around these cultural reckonings. On the album’s most striking song, “Colonizer,” Garbus sings with vitriol about her “white woman’s voice.” The record follows a similar theme: the world through the eyes of Garbus, a white woman from Connecticut who is painfully aware that her music draws from black and queer traditions.

The approach is simultaneously self-centered and self-aware, and Garbus says it’s the only viable route she sees to accurately representing her ingrained biases — and not misrepresenting anyone else. “As a white cisgendered woman in a heteronormative relationship, I’m pretty safe in this society,” she says. “Shouldn’t I be the one doing this work?”

Tune-Yards’s new album stretches their signature sound, both sonically and lyrically

Garbus’s music draws heavily from other influences: Haitian music, Afrobeat, Michael Jackson, ’80s pop, among others. Straddling the line between inspiration and cultural appropriation was a concern while making this record: “I’m a white woman taking music that comes from communities of color, queer communities, and I am — as so many musicians do — taking those influences and turning them into music that’s under my name.”

Garbus has transformed these influences into a sound that’s her own, though. Since the band’s inception, Tune-Yards’ sonic signature has been using playful pop/dance sounds as a backdrop for more serious topics. And on this album, they stretch themselves even further, both sonically and lyrically.

Private life is the band’s poppiest album, with more straightforward lyrics. Songs like “Heart Attack” and “Honesty” are designed for dancing; even slower songs like “Coast to Coast” have a more contemporary pop feel than previous records, which were filled with ukulele and metallic tings and pings. The songs are tight and intricate, still full of the mesmerizing sounds only Tune-Yards can create.

Garbus purposefully used more Autotune and voice manipulation here than on any previous album. She wanted to make her voice sound more mechanical, a “sonic metaphor for the human experience in our age,” she says. Manipulated or not, her voice — startling in its range, confident, loud — lends power to lyrics that weave their way through sensitive topics focused mostly on race and gender, but also touching on climate change and sexual harassment.

“ABC 123,” the record’s second single, features Garbus interrogating herself and her interactions with others: “I want so badly to be liked / I ask myself, ‘Why was I nice?’ / I ask myself, ‘What should I do?’ / But all I know is white centrality.” On the same song she ends a verse with a line about California’s deadly fires that simmers into an almost a cappella finish: “California’s burning down / Sitting in the middle of the sixth extinction / Silently suggesting the investment in a generator.”

“Now as Then” examines how a white woman can feel comfortable everywhere, except the select spaces she never visits (“Oh the relaxation I feel most everywhere / Except the places I don’t go”); “Honesty” is about institutionalized racism (“This river runs so deep … Ugly and blind, what will you find? / Hold the sickening silt in your heart and your mind”).

But the centerpiece of the record is “Colonizer,” whose title sets the tone for a track that plumbs the depths of Garbus’s white guilt:

I use my white woman’s voice to interpret my travels with African men / I turn on my white woman’s voice to contextualize acts of my white women friends / I cry my white woman tears carving grooves in my cheeks to display what I meant / I smell the blood in my voice

“Writing that song was disgusting,” Garbus says. “It was really hard for me to sing those lyrics and hear myself say them.”

Writing the rest of the record was “a tricky thing,” too, she says. “On a lot of these songs it is like, ‘Here, this is what felt like the thing to say.’ I am very conscious of my white woman’s voice. … Don’t forget that this is who I am; don’t forget that this is the perspective that you’re hearing this from.”

Garbus wants to examine the implications of her own whiteness in a racist society

Private life is a first-person record: You can hear Garbus exploring her innermost anxieties out loud, and most of them revolve around her status as a white woman living in a world in many ways defined by its institutionalized racism. “I think it’s really important to see how I’m implicated in racism, in cultural appropriation, and really look at it,” she says.

That self-examination began before the recording of private life, when Garbus learned to DJ, spinning super-poppy dance records at a local amateur night in Oakland, California. At the same time, she dug deep into the history of house and techno, and how the music was essential to “people of color, a lot of queer communities, gay communities, people who are finding solace in a musical community that felt safe when other places did not feel safe.”

She speaks about how, in “big DJ culture,” this history often gets erased, and the respect for the history is lost — as is the original DIY nature of vinyl looping available to DJs of the past.

Private life, as Garbus acknowledges, draws heavily from this DJ culture that’s different from her own — and pulls from her time spent learning Haitian drumming techniques and her own preferences for African music, among other influences. 

“There’s a lot of feedback that I get which is like, ‘It’s okay because all musicians do this … but there’s a different power dynamic when a white woman from the United States who grew up in suburban Connecticut is taking these sounds,” she says. “They’re being filtered through my experience.”

Whether Garbus’s self-centered approach on this record is “okay” or not is hard to answer, but she believes it’s the only way to be true to herself and her intentions. When I asked her if she considered bringing perspectives from people of color or different viewpoints into the record, she told me about how she regretted doing this incorrectly in the past. (One can guess which songs she’s referencing: For example, “Jamaican,” from Tune-Yards’ first record Bird-Brains, tries to dig into similar themes with less success — “She’s all white, she’s not black, she doesn’t have any soul … She’s not Jamaican, she’s got total control,” the lyrics say.)

“I think in the past I maybe have been flawed in my attempt to try to speak for anybody else,” Garbus said. “That also felt like, ‘Oh, that is not my job.’ … This can’t be me reflecting on, like, ‘Oh, well I read these things that some brilliant women of color wrote, and here is my interpretation of what they’re saying,’” she argues. “It needs to be, ‘And this is how I take this in as a white person. This is where my white fragility kicks in and I get defensive, or this is where I get sucked into a shame spiral and I can’t get out.’”

Garbus says she doesn’t want this music to “be just for white listeners.” And it doesn’t have to be: Plumbing personal experience for album themes is as common as writing a straightforward love song. But something about examining your whiteness in such a public setting still feels taboo.

Garbus, aware of her social privilege, presents this album as both a confessional and a conversation piece: These are her sins as a white person in the world, and she’s working to be better. All the other white people out there can at least start by acknowledging their whiteness and talking about it, she thinks — and what better way to spark that conversation than through music?

This was the year of women’s anger, as Vox’s Constance Grady put it. 2017 started with the women’s march, with women across the world gathering to protest sexual violence and demonstrate for equal rights; in the fall, women across the world used the hashtag #MeToo to self-identify as victims and survivors of sexual abuse; and the year closed out with an all-out reckoning in Hollywood, government, media, and other industries against men accused of sexual harassment and assault.

The emotions around this upheaval are fraught: rage, sadness, vindication — they run the gamut. Thankfully, women have been making music all year to tackle just about every feeling, positive and negative, that’s bubbled up from this tumultuous 2017. From pop-star power anthems to country ballads, women made enough powerful music to get us through this year — and on to the next.

Kesha’s “Praying” is a personal triumph

If there’s one woman in music whose voice has stood out amid a resounding chorus of #MeToo this year, it’s Kesha. After being locked in a legal battle with her producer Dr. Luke since 2014, whom she says “sexually, physically, and verbally” abused her, Kesha turned her struggle into triumphant, cathartic music with her album Rainbow.

The first single off that album, the power ballad “Praying,” is about “coming to feel empathy for someone else even if they hurt you or scare you,” Kesha said in Lenny Letter. More pointedly, it’s also about moving on to create something new for yourself out of that pain, an especially resonant idea to revisit at the end of a painful year.

Rhiannon Giddens finds painful inspiration in the past

Rhiannon Giddens, formerly of the traditional folk band Carolina Chocolate Drops, released Freedom Highway this year, an album whose themes cover black lives from America’s beginnings to the present. The album’s chilling opening song, “At the Purchaser’s Option,” is a heady, string-based track about an enslaved woman impregnated by her rapist-owner.

In an interview with Terry Gross, Giddens explains how a historical ad for the sale of an enslaved person inspired the song: “I just started thinking about what this young woman — what her life was really like … not having any agency over any part of her life.” The track digs into that feeling with a plodding bassline that feels almost stuck in place.

Your official relationship rules, from Dua Lipa

“New Rules” should be on every friend group’s power playlist this year. Never before has someone so succinctly doled out relationship advice telling you to DTMFA, and especially not in a catchy pop song. Dua Lipa has a list of rules to follow to finally shake off someone who’s bad for you — which, let’s be honest, we all need to hear from time to time. The essential part of this song is how it’s built around support from friends: Without our networks, where would we be?

A bleak look at America from a clear country voice

From a sitting president who faces up to 15 allegations of sexual assault and claimed he wanted to “grab [women] by the pussy,” to bubbling sexual harassment allegations in Congress, disillusionment with government institutions became a mainstay for women in 2017. Nashville singer-songwriter Margo Price, in a delicate, humble song, captures that.

“All American Made” examines a decline in the idyllic America often depicted in country songs, painting a dark portrait of crumbling banks and sleepless presidents. It gets at a nagging feeling that everything that once seemed solid might be starting to slip away, crumbling from the top down.

Breakout star SZA examines all aspects of love

SZA’s 2017 album Ctrl is full of tracks that speak to women navigating the tricky paths of independence, love, and dating. “Love Galore” takes a maybe-relationship with someone she’s seeing and looks at it from every angle: Why is she hanging out with this guy? Is he treating her right? And is she treating herself right, too? What’s the point of it all, anyway?

It’s these questions that keep us up at night, and while SZA might not have all the answers, the questions she’s asking are spot on.

Lorde’s music is a balm in troubling times

Within Lorde’s jam of an album Melodrama are a few quiet, vulnerable spots. “Liability” is one of them: The song is about doubting yourself, and feeling a little too intense for the world you’re living in. The crush of information we’ve received this year about sexual misconduct is staggering — enough to knock anyone off their feet; sinking into a song like Lorde’s when you’re feeling defeated or unmoored is one way to cope.

Ibeyi’s “Deathless” reassures that life goes on, no matter what

Ibeyi, the duo of French-Cuban twin sisters Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Diaz, wrote “Deathless” after French police wrongfully arrested Lisa at age 16. The track, released on Ibeyi’s second album, Ash, is semi-autobiographical, speaking to the arrest experience, and also an “anthem for everybody,” says Lisa, about the enduring power of women in the face of “whatever happens.”

The accompanying music video is mesmerizing: As one sister lies on the ground, the other sister, digitally miniaturized, crawls out from under her dress in a matching outfit, over and over again, as they chant, “We are deathless.”

Jen Cloher finds strength in anger

The #MeToo movement happened globally, with women across the world sharing their stories of sexual assault or abuse with a hashtag. And international women musicians responded too. This track from Australian singer-songwriter Jen Cloher is full of deserved rage and angst, all about staying full of strength in a world built against you.

The chorus is too perfect not to transcribe in full: “This world, it wasn’t made for women / You know even before you’re bleeding / I’m sorry, can’t you hear me speaking? / How is it now, now that I’m screaming?”

Lizzo doesn’t have time for anyone’s BS

“Why men great ’til they gotta be great?” the opening line to this song asks. Great question. Lizzo, known for her empowering, women-focused songs, says no to being played in “Truth Hurts,” shutting down any man who might come at her with anything less than quality and care. There’s no reason to accept less than what you know you deserve, and Lizzo is here to remind you of that.

Here’s a playlist of all the songs above.

Sharon Jones’s final album is a bittersweet close to her career

When singer Sharon Jones died of pancreatic cancer in November 2016, she left behind a legacy of soul music and a full discography for fans to keep returning to. Now, a little over a year after her death, her final album, Soul of a Woman, is out. Supported by her band, the indomitable Dap Kings, Jones recorded the album amid chemo treatments and a last round of live shows.

It doesn’t miss a beat. Soul of a Woman is a standard SJ&TDK mix of slower tracks (“Pass Me By”) and groovier ones that you can just picture Jones dancing to onstage (“Rumors”). Jones wrote the last song on the record, “Call on God,” for her church choir years ago, long before she started her career with the Dap Kings. With her playing the keys, the song relaxes into a hymn about giving up your suffering to God. It’s a perfect end to both the album and to Jones’s musical legacy.

Rihanna and Pharrell teamed up to release a new earworm

After about a seven-year hiatus, N.E.R.D., a funk/rap/rock group from Pharrell Williams, Chad Hugo, Shay Haley, is back with a new single — one that features a hefty dose of Rihanna. On “Lemon,” Pharrell and Rihanna trade rap verses, and it’s hard to decide which one of them delivers their lines better. (Rihanna, obviously.)

And don’t miss the song’s music video. In it, Rihanna shaves the head of Mette Towley, a member of Pharrell’s dance crew since 2014, before Towley spends the rest of the song dancing to both rappers’ verses. It’s even better once you know how excited Towley was to lose her locks.

Lost At Last Vol. 1 lets Langhorne Slim tap into old-time Americana

Americana singer Langhorne Slim — a.k.a. Sean Scolnick, whose stage name is taken from his birthplace of Langhorne, Pennsylvania — is no stranger to the world of country-Americana music. The songwriter has been making records since the early 2000s; Lost At Last. Vol. 1 is his newest entry.

The album’s songs have a down-home, old-timey feel, with a little bit of tongue-in-cheek attitude mixed in. (See “Zombie,” where Slim laments an unrequited love in this fashion: “She had an old suitcase/Full of skulls/She kissed my lips/My blood ran cold.”) Other tracks, like “House Of My Soul,” are more traditional, with slight twinges of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes’ signature theatricality. If you’re looking for something to listen to while driving toward holiday vacations, this is it.

Utopia digs deeper into the magical world of Björk

The cover of Björk’s Utopia is only the first striking thing about the album. It presents the Icelandic singer (full name: Björk Guðmundsdóttir) in an alien-flower hybrid mask that dazzles even despite the fact that the singer is known for her extremely artful fashion statements.

The second striking thing, of course, is the music. Björk has been writing and singing for her whole life; her first solo record came out in 1993, with Debut. Her style is, to say the least, eclectic — shuffle a Björk discography and you’ll hear everything from jazz to electronica to avant-garde a cappella tracks.

Utopia is her 10th album, and it’s safe to say she’s ascended to true icon status. This record is more elaborate than melodic. Many songs feature flutes and fluttery synths, while lead single “The Gate” is a darker track about the exchange of giving and receiving love in a relationship. And “Paradisia” cuts out Björk’s voice entirely in favor of a fairy tale-like woodwind orchestra.

Angel Olsen ties up loose ends in her new album, Phases

On singer-songwriter Angel Olsen’s fourth full-length LP, she pauses for a moment to take stock of her musical career so far. Phases is a collection of songs spanning her whole career that hadn’t previously found a home: demos, covers, and B-sides, all swept up now into one new album.

Phases is quieter than Olsen’s 2016 album My Woman — a record that was full of simmering anger and electric guitar. Here, Olsen’s beautiful, old-fashioned voice is front and center, especially on acoustic tracks like “All Right Now” and “May as Well” (my personal favorite). “Sweet Dreams” and “California” are true standouts; both are lifted from a 2013 EP called Sleepwalker. And “Special,” her first single, features a video shot by Olsen herself during a visit from a friend.

Sia takes on Christmas in her newest album

I’m not sure if Everyday Is Christmas is destined to become a holiday classic à la Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” but Sia’s giving it her best shot. It’s a gift box full of poppy Christmas songs, wrapped up in the literal bow around her red and green hair on the album cover — and all of them are unmistakably Sia in tone and style.

Half of them start with melancholy adjacent piano chords and flow into the singer’s raspy, strong voice (see the swooning, and similarly titled, tracks “Underneath the Christmas Lights” and “Underneath the Mistletoe”). The other half are all jingle and tinsel (see: “Ho Ho Ho” or “Puppies are Forever”). The best song is “Santa’s Coming for Us” — put that one on while you’re hosting gift exchanges with your pals, commiserating about how so little good Christmas music has been produced in the past decade.

D.R.A.M. has the best sleeper holiday hit of the season

For a more traditional take on holiday tunes, check out D.R.A.M.’s surprise release: #1HappyHoliday. D.R.A.M. stands for Does Real Ass Music, a pseudonym for rapper Shelley Marshaun Massenburg-Smith, whose song “Broccoli” was everywhere last year. With this short Christmas EP, he presents just three songs: “Silver Bells,” which features his mom (under the moniker “Big Baby Mom”) as the lead vocal; “The Christmas Song,” and an original, the title track.

D.R.A.M.’s voice is sweet, and when he breaks into his signature almost-out-of-tune style, it adds something extra special. The rapper sticks to a pretty traditional interpretation of his covers, but “#1HappyHoliday” sounds like a standard D.R.A.M. offering, with the singer crooning about cozying up to a lover while it’s cold outside.

Here’s a Spotify playlist of all the songs above.