Everyone brings his A game for the Pazz and Jop issue.

“True to its name, Contra focused on what divides us—from global anxieties to interpersonal insufficiencies—while daring us to feel comfortable in our own Sperrys. The album launch was a virally circulated Polaroid of a girl in a popped Polo, and the band smirked as the Internet used her as a dartboard for its cultural assumptions about class, race, and privilege. (Then she filed a lawsuit.) Like the first-wave punk and post–Golden Era rap that molds their aesthetic outlook, VW doubled down on their 2008 debut’s unapologetic pose, biting the hands that re-Tweeted them by academically ‘longing’ for the days when your social status was determined by your last name, instead of your choice of organic toothpaste. They summoned the sardonic anger of Joe Strummer (an actual ‘Diplomat’s Son’) to chronicle a generation Lost in the Whole Foods, leading off an album about our aesthetic preferences with a song about the literal taste of a trendy beverage. They wore powdered wigs and/or played ping-pong with RZA in their videos. Frontman Ezra Koenig sang passionately about the social anxieties of being caught with a fake Philly Cheesesteak. While Auto-Tuned.”