On the worst of days, it seemed like 2017 jeopardized just about everything that we know and love. Unthinkably, concerts were no exception. But it doesn't mean we should fear or (god forbid) sacrifice live shows, where that magical bond between artist and fan unfolds in real time.

These were just a few of the performances that restored our faith in the sanctity of venues this year, whether it involved weeping in Brooklyn temples or jockeying for a spot in the festival thicket.

Lorde at Bowery Ballroom, NYC // June 16

Not many artists would have the gall to shush a crowd of fans singing their song back to them, but that’s exactly what Lorde did at this small show celebrating the release of her album, Melodrama. The moment came during an a cappella encore of her kiss-off “Writer in the Dark.” She sang some lines into a microphone and others away from it, her voice utterly bare. Naturally, the devotees near the lip of the stage soon piped up to fill in the unamplified space. That’s when Lorde lifted her finger to her mouth, signaling quiet. The request may seem harsh but it was ultimately an act of generosity: A startling vocal performance followed, one that felt all the more exposed because of its desolation. Anyone can bask in adulation, yet only a select few can properly command it. –Ryan Dombal

Laurel Halo and Eli Keszler at Unsound Festival, Krakow, Poland // October 11

If Laurel Halo’s career has felt like a series of left turns until now, each record a right-angled swerve away from its predecessor, her live show at this year’s Unsound Festival was more like dissolving into a foggy world of non-Euclidean geometries: no straight lines, no flat surfaces, and all the textures as soft as melted candle wax. An unbroken hour of amorphous keyboards and cloudy ambience, with Halo’s own voice occasionally rising through the mix like a tendril of smoke, it sounded a little like prime 1980s ECM jazz being filtered through a vaporizer. On the opposite side of the stage, the drummer Eli Keszler sat coiled behind his kit, but instead of providing any kind of rhythmic tether, he merely coaxed shadows from his skins, his touch as slippery as the quicksilver pitch of Halo’s synths. It felt less like a concert than a waking dream. –Philip Sherburne

Mount Eerie at Murmrr, NYC // September 11

On September 11th, I saw Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum perform songs from his 2017 record, A Crow Looked at Me. I would not call this a concert. If anything, the evening more closely resembled a wake—a spiritual sensation that was amplified by the venue, a temple. We were gathered to hear a collection of profoundly heartbreaking songs about the death of Elverum’s late wife, Geneviève, and the immense pain and occasional joy that followed. I’m not sure how to qualify this experience, so instead I’ll mention the small landfill of Kleenex that filled my lap when the lights came back up, the way my friends’ shoulders shook as Elverum explained throwing away Geneviève’s bloody tissues, and the heavy gaps of silence between my friends and I as we walked home. “Death is real,” to quote Elverum, and there’s not much more to it. –Quinn Moreland

Moses Sumney at Icehouse, Minneapolis // October 3

People talk about pin-drop silence, but Moses Sumney’s sold-out show in Minneapolis brought out an entirely new level of reverence. As exaggerated as it sounds now, I didn’t want to breathe. (Thankfully, my lungs insisted otherwise.) The crowd wasn't afraid of making noise so much as held rapt by Sumney's magnetism. When he slid from Aromanticism standouts “Quarrel” and “Make Out in My Car” into Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” the room collectively exhaled. In Sumney's hands, the already starry-eyed song became seductive, his falsetto voice and agile guitar licks unfolding the classic more than covering it. –Amanda Wicks

Frank Ocean at Panorama Festival, NYC // July 28

Wearing a huge pair of isolation headphones, Frank Ocean seemed nervous in front of Panorama’s frenzied sea of festivalgoers, who were probably just excited to find out he wasn’t a hologram. His best moments arrived when he lost himself in the power of his songs, like when he crouched over his legless Wurlitzer and played a four-minute rendition of “Good Guy,” ad-libbing and stretching out all the emotion of the lyrics. Towards the end of his set, Ocean stopped to finally talk to the audience at length: Lips pressed against the microphone and his voice impossibly deep, he mumbled a handful of barely coherent sentences. He asked the audience if we had ever fallen in love, to which we cheered and applauded. He then asked if we’d ever had our hearts broken, to which we gave more somber applause.

Then, his voice clear and bright, Ocean launched into “Ivy,” and everyone in the crowd sang along: “I thought that I was dreaming when you said you loved me”—the roaring sound of thousands of people who had all known love and heartbreak. Earlier that day, I predicted I would cry when he performed that song, like I had done many times while listening to it alone. Instead, I found myself reciting every word, wearing a huge grin that I couldn’t suppress. –Michelle Kim

Boy Better Know at Glastonbury, Somerset, England // June 25

Glastonbury reigns as the single most overstimulated experience of my life. It is a place where you can climb a tower of ribbons to survey a spontaneous city of 175,000 beatniks; where Jarvis Cocker is DJing and still you’ll be derailed by 95 other enticements en route; where (to pick an entirely hypothetical example) you can lose your tent, spend an entire night trawling the rainy campgrounds like a Dickensian urchin, get two hours’ sleep amid a glut of tiny spiders, and still have one of the best weekends of your life.