The song decade. More one word answers than anywhere else in the game.
The 2010s is the most song-dominated decade in Cryptune, and the gap is the widest in the game. Streaming is the reason. When the playlist replaces the record as the way most people encounter music, the song becomes the thing that gets remembered and the album becomes a container again, which is roughly where the 1960s came in.
Titles reached their shortest here. Happy. Hello. Single words, frequently single emotions, functioning almost as labels. There is a commercial logic to it, since a one-word title is a searchable title and a shareable one, but there is also something genuinely appealing about the confidence of calling a record Hello and expecting everyone to know which one you mean.
The decade also produced the most conversational titles in popular music. Call Me Maybe is a sentence somebody might text you. That register, casual and unpunctuated, is new, and it clues beautifully, because casual English is made of exactly the small ordinary words that cryptic clues love.
The dominant figures here are dominant in a way that would have been impossible earlier, when charts were regional and formats were physical. A handful of acts appear repeatedly in this section, and that concentration is a real fact about the decade rather than an artefact of the puzzle list.
Albums did not stop mattering, and the ones that appear here tended to be events rather than releases. When an album is a moment, its title gets remembered, and those are the ones that made it into the game.
The 2010s accounts for 85 puzzles in Cryptune, split 54 songs to 31 albums. The average puzzle from this decade has 2.1 tiles, and 29 of them are single tile puzzles, meaning the whole answer is one word.
The longest answer from the decade is Random Access Memories, at 3 words. The most common clue types across those puzzles are synonym with 131, direct with 26 and opposites with 19.
The acts appearing most often from this decade are Drake (8), Taylor Swift (7), The Weeknd (4), Adele (3) and Ed Sheeran (3).
One tile is the signature shape of this decade. There are more single-tile puzzles here than in any other section, which means the whole puzzle rests on one clue and there is nothing to triangulate with. Revealing that tile ends the game, so it is worth sitting with a 2010s one-tile clue considerably longer than you would elsewhere.
On a single-tile puzzle, use the label before anything else. One word plus Artist is a very different search from one word plus Song, and it is free information sitting at the top of the screen.
Conversational titles mean the small words are load-bearing. Maybe, just, all, still. These carry no meaning on their own but they are the difference between a title you recognise and a phrase you do not, so decode them properly rather than assuming they are padding.
The 85 puzzles from this decade cover 84 different titles, listed alphabetically with the act responsible. A handful appear twice in the game, once as a song and once as an album, and are listed once here. Puzzle dates are not shown, so this tells you what is in the game without telling you what is coming tomorrow.
Want to know how the clues themselves are built? The clue school takes each clue type in turn. Or go back to all decades.