Note: this is Part 2. Find the first 25 on Part 1, here.

When listening to music is part of your career, the creative shifts in the field become less seismic, and if you’re doing your job right you begin to see the tide that’s guiding the sea changes. So for awhile, we struggled with how many songs to include in this list. 100 might give a broader picture, but 50 presents us with a challenge. It forces us to whittle it down, to purge nostalgia, to make every song say something special about the year it came from, and to leave a special record. Here’s the songs we’ll pull up on our computers at work next year when we want to remember 2012. Here they are, in no particular order…

Kendrick Lamar – “Swimming Pools (Drank)”

Sharon Van Etten – “Warsaw”

Usher – “Climax”

Majical Cloudz – “Turns Turns Turns”

Death Grips – “Lock your doors”

TNGHT – “Higher Ground”

Dear Prudence – “Valentine” (Blood Diamonds remix)

Tomas Barfod – “Broken Glass”

Willis Earl Beal – “Evening’s Kiss”

Savages – “Husbands”

Angel Haze – “Cleaning Out My Closet”

Angel Olsen – “Acrobat”

Jesse Ware – “Wildest Moments”

Night Works – “I Tried So Hard”

Frank Ocean – “Bad Religion”

Earl Sweatshirt – “Chum”

Andy Stott – “Lost And Found”

Danny Brown – “Molly Ringwald” (prod. AraabMuzik)

Chromatics – “Kill For Love”

CFCF – “Exercise 5 (September)”

Twerps – “Work It Out”

Julia Holter – “In The Same Room”

Hype Williams – “Galice”

Ariel Pink – “Only In My Dreams”

Gunplay – “Rap Sheet”

View Part 1