Let’s face it: listening to new music wasn’t exactly easy this year. Amidst the neverending whirlwind of 2020, it was tempting to crawl into a cocoon of nostalgic favorites and never come out. But the best albums of 2020 proved that incredible new music will always make their way to our ears, even in the toughest of times. From albums years and years in the making (Jay Electronica, Fiona Apple, Lil Uzi Vert) to those recorded during quarantine-induced bursts of creativity (Charli XCX, Taylor Swift, Adrianne Lenker), here are the 50 releases that made 2020 a little better.
Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist.
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2020 wrap-up coverage here.
(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)
Mary Lattimore: Silver Ladders
Listening to Mary Lattimore’s Silver Ladders feels like blinking awake on New Year’s Day: There’s some melancholy over what has passed mixed with buzzing wonder at what lies ahead. The harpist’s ambient compositions are somber but whimsical, submerging her careful plucks in murky pools of reverb and synth. She recorded the album with Slowdive’s Neil Halstead at his studio in the coastal English county of Cornwall, and cites the quiet minutiae of seaside life—cream tea, a pub quiz, the Sunday roast—as inspiration for the music. In turn, each twinkling note relays the bittersweet tranquility of memories gone by. –Vrinda Jagota
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Yaeji: What We Drew
While the Korean-American producer Yaeji has anchored her previous work in strobe-lit beats and floor-shaking bass, her first full-length mixtape captures the anxious, aching throb of the morning after a night out. What We Drew burbles between frenetic drum patterns and hip-hop cadences, glossy electro beats and sinister synths. Within these entrancing soundscapes, stray ruminations float to the surface. “Why doesn’t it feel the same when I’m in the air?” she murmurs on “In the Mirror.” “My life is in a weird place,” she raps in Korean on “Free Interlude.” But she finds clarity, and joy, in examining it nonetheless. –Dani Blum
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Charli XCX: how i’m feeling now
Cut off from her usual muses—her crew and the club—Charli XCX needed a different kind of community space to inspire her this year. So she built one via her fourth album, how i’m feeling now. Recording it over a few short weeks at the onset of the pandemic, Charli escaped isolation’s creative doldrums by opening up a feedback loop with her fans, sharing real-time updates and allowing them a hand in her process. The resulting songs pierce her party girl persona with something more sentimental—and sometimes quotidian—but, true to form, she buoyed the vibe with sugar-rush hooks and blowout beats. Never before has eating cereal sounded like such a riot. –Olivia Horn
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Lil Baby: My Turn (Deluxe)
It’s taken time for Lil Baby’s My Turn to grow into the beautiful, sprawling mess that it is. In February, it was a memorable yet conventional 20-track Atlanta rap album. But with the addition of six songs on the deluxe edition in May, the record kicked dirt on the arbitrary and outdated rules of rap albums. Instantly, it felt more like an unfocused, loose, and chaotic mid-aughts Lil Wayne mixtape with memorable tracks like “All In,” where the flexes are brilliantly batshit (Lil Baby threatens to wreck his Lambo truck just to prove, to no one in particular, that it’s not rented). The final addendum came in June: the protest anthem “The Bigger Picture” is a jarring inclusion on an album that isn’t overtly political—and that also makes it perfect. Baby can jump from whining about middle-school crushes to name-dropping denim brands to attempting to encapsulate one of the most tense and unjust moments of our lifetimes. –Alphonse Pierre
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Burna Boy: Twice as Tall
Twentieth-century listeners imagined the music of the next millennium as a harsh, mechanistic grind or a frenzy of twitchy glitches. Afrobeats is a prime example of the future-pop that actually transpired, a hyper-digital sound far easier and oozier on the ear. As befits an artist obsessed with being a superhero, Burna Boy’s music is thoroughly posthuman: much of its succulence comes from how the singer’s lilting cadences mesh with Auto-Tune.
Rhythmically, Burna’s Afro-fusion sound connects homebase Lagos to Kingston, Atlanta, and London. The historical sweep of the music is equally broad, not simply focused on this-minute sounds but spanning decades of influences and collaborators—the latter ranging here from ancestral icon Youssou N’Dour to nineties legends like Timbaland and Diddy, to recent stars like Stormzy. Lyrically, Burna muses on fame, destiny, and, on “Monsters You Made,” the legacy of colonialism in Nigeria. But these Fela-like or Marley-esque moments tend to melt into the glide-and-glisten of the sound. “I no be politician/Me no like no politics,” Burna insists—and that rings true. Twice as Tall triumphs not so much for its substance but as a shimmering surface, a landslide victory for the politics of pleasure. –Simon Reynolds
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Lyra Pramuk: Fountain
The opening notes of Lyra Pramuk’s debut album, Fountain, are like a slow tracking shot through the gates of a musical Atlantis. Using only her transmuted and multi-layered vocals, the Berlin-based composer creates a dense architecture where choral music and meditative techno meet. While some vocal lines emulate pulsing bass and celestial synth, the prevailing current is a surging chorus of near-language, struck through with the unmistakable trembles and notches of a human voice. Rather than muddling her meaning, this single instrument’s ambiguity—of feeling, timbre, gender, even species—suggests a state of perpetual transformation. Look, Pramuk seems to declare, at how much we contain. –Jazz Monroe
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Freddie Gibbs / The Alchemist: Alfredo
“My execution might be televised.” That line and others from Freddie Gibbs’ “Scottie Beam” appeared in black marker on handmade signs this summer, held aloft in cities across the country during what may have been the largest wave of civil-rights protests in American history. Eventually, they were shared on Instagram by Gibbs himself, completing an utterly contemporary loop of art and life. Alfredo, the dexterous 38-year-old MC’s collaboration with beloved producer the Alchemist, is by turns heavy and light—his “Beam” verse ends with a rude kiss off to an ex in the form of Jordan-Pippen wordplay: “without me the bitch wouldn’t have got a ring.” More than a time capsule, Alfredo is an unruly feast of language. The napkins might be white linen but nobody’s using them. –Ross Scarano
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Megan Thee Stallion: Good News
Megan Thee Stallion’s official debut album is a triumphant joyride that more than fulfills the promise of its title. After steamrolling detractors over classic Biggie on withering opener “Shots Fired,” the reigning Hot Girl shifts her focus to more pressing concerns, namely flexing and sexing. The album soars when Megan nods to the greats of rap and R&B, from a jolly rework of Juvenile to the Jazmine Sullivan-indebted bad bitch anthem “Circles.” More than anything, these songs remind us that even when the worst comes to pass, good times might be right around the corner. –Jessica Kariisa
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Kate NV: Room for the Moon
Room for the Moon feels like a safe place to hide from mounting anxiety. Moscow artist Kate Shilonosova’s third full-length is an engrossing collection of kaleidoscopic avant-pop in which each song unspools into a fantastic world inspired by everything from Sailor Moon to surrealist René Magritte to the Russian Mary Poppins. The album is always enchanting and full of small surprises: the particularly cartoonish warble of a synth on “Sayonara,” the intimate binaural hums on the meandering “Marafon 15,” the burst of laughter answering the lure of a saxophone on the cosmos-traversing “Plans.” New details peek out on every listen, like elements of wonder waiting to be discovered. –NM Mashurov
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Rina Sawayama: SAWAYAMA
Rina Sawayama’s debut album is unafraid to present all of her paradoxes. The British-Japanese singer’s triumphant songs, which meld the fabulosity of Y2K-era Britney Spears with Korn-inspired nu-metal and campy stadium rock, invite sing-alongs and stylish TikTok choreography. But they’re also jam-packed with sharp, critical observations about growing up with dual identities, the Orientalist gaze, and the trappings of femininity. So as she thrashes between anti-capitalist bops and introspective anthems, Sawayama assumes the role of both pop diva and pop rebel, subverting expectations of what the genre could and should stand for. –Michelle Kim
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Arca: KiCk i
In February, electronic experimentalist Arca dropped @@@@@, a 62-minute song framed as a pirate-radio broadcast from a post-singularity future that begins with whispers of a “diva constructed.” KiCk i, released four months later, is the Barcelona-based musician’s more straightforward take on diva-hood. Bullet casings fall to the floor on opener “Nonbinary,” but Arca isn’t under attack: “I do what I wanna do when I wanna do it,” she deadpans, and then proceeds to prove it by remaking herself with each track. KiCk i is her first record to prominently feature several guest singers, with Björk, Rosalía, SOPHIE, and Shygirl all present to witness her various metamorphoses. She turns liquid on the synth-sheathed “Time,” raps on the chaotic “Riquiquí,” and glitches with her voice pitched high on “Rip the Slit.” Presented as the first of four eventual albums, KiCk i shares all the promise of becoming, in both its pain and its joy. –Colin Lodewick
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Dehd: Flower of Devotion
In 2019, Chicago indie rock trio Dehd released the sparse and scrappy album Water, with songs informed by the romantic breakup of bassist Emily Kempf and guitarist Jason Balla, accompanied by Eric McGrady’s one-tom, one-snare minimalism. For their exquisite follow-up Flower of Devotion, Dehd upgraded to a proper studio, refining their gritty alchemy without scrubbing it too clean. Kempf and Balla trade yearning, hiccupy vocals across riffs that reverberate like heat waves off asphalt, as McGrady thuds away through the humid air. “If this is all that we get, so be it,” Kempf insists, a bit of wistful resignation that doubles as a mission statement for their proudly stripped-down approach. –Marc Hogan
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Duval Timothy: Help
Duval Timothy is constantly dismantling to rebuild on Help, a gorgeous, crestfallen record about possession and healing. The pianist and multidisciplinary London artist’s work skirts conventional disciplines, tinkering with the very concepts of “jazz” and “club” music as it synthesizes a substitute. His songs can be layered and minimal, lingual and graphic, natural and mechanical—all coming together in a work that both registers the omnipotence of imperial history and documents an ongoing restoration process. –Sheldon Pearce
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Lomelda: Hannah
Hannah Read can make a melody out of anything. Throughout Hannah, her fifth album as Lomelda, her expressive warble blooms and shrinks into strange and beautiful phrasings, heightening their meaning. On the slow-burning “It’s Lomelda,” she croons off a list of her musical heroes and their work, from Yo La Tengo to Frank Ocean to Sufjan Stevens’ devastatingly spare “The Only Thing.” She turns a conversational bit of advice into a soaring mantra on “Wonder,” repeating the phrase “When you get it, give it all you got, you said” across vocal peaks and valleys. She sings like no one else in indie rock, as though she is guided by a golden energy from within. –Jillian Mapes
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Special Interest: The Passion Of
New Orleans electro-punks Special Interest see catharsis in demolition. Frontperson Alli Logout’s jagged vocals dissect poverty, love, and commodified dissent, making The Passion Of the rare contemporary punk album that is actually as revolutionary as it sets out to be. For all of the record’s industrial squall and techno blast beats, it doesn’t just inspire destruction—it asks what you’ll rebuild from the rubble. –Madison Bloom
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Ka: Descendants of Cain
Ka has spent his 40s laboring over how to animate the ghosts of his home. The title of the Brownsville rapper’s engrossing album frames his traumas as the product of his father’s sins cursing east Brooklyn’s soil. Putting that lens to the side, his stories about the ease of embracing hate (“Solitude of Enoch”) and post-prison families (“Unto the Dust”) are just as gripping and vivid. Descendants of Cain’s frosty tone evaporates in its final minutes: “I Love (Mimi, Moms, Kev)” is Ka’s dedication to the people who saved him. The song’s title sentiment is simply uttered on the hook—he’s wounded, yet hopeful that the sentiment’s warmth can be felt. –Brian Josephs
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Dogleg: Melee
A band’s impact shouldn’t be hypothetical, but here’s Dogleg, the debutants of Michigan emo, whose breakout year mostly took place in the imagination. Singer-songwriter Alex Stoitsiadis was supposed to be hollering his hooks over melodic post-hardcore guitars in roiling 250-cap clubs, and the scenes of heartbreak he described were supposed to be playing out for listeners in real life. The fact that Melee conjures a year so different from the one we got is part of why it leaves such a mark: The histrionics of emo aren’t just dramatic, they’re now science fiction. We’re left to sit alone and imagine what these songs should be doing. You air-drum the little hitch in “Fox” again and again across your steering wheel; you throw your chest forward in your home-office at all the perfectly executed half-time breakdowns; you do isometric lunges while Stoitsiadis sings about disintegrating. The old world that Dogleg wrote about sucks in its own way, but it’s the world they deserve. –Jeremy D. Larson
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Beatrice Dillon: Workaround
The internet has plenty of playlists full of pillowy background noise, built for tuning out while you dig into the task at hand. Workaround inverts that dynamic: By requiring sustained close attention to the thumps and shimmers in your headphones, it offers something truly meditative. To the casual listener, Beatrice Dillon’s avant electronic tracks might seem austere. They are mostly untitled, proceed according to a single tempo across the whole album, and feature a drastically limited instrumental palette. Rarely does a particular sound last longer than a single beat. There is almost no reverb. But if you listen closely, a universe might open in the split-second space between two hi-hats. Synth stabs that at first seem uniform take on entirely new shapes with every repetition. Each element, shorn of everything extraneous, glows with significance. –Andy Cush
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Drakeo the Ruler / JoogSzn: Thank You for Using GTL
Produced while Drakeo the Ruler was awaiting retrial in Los Angeles on a bogus gang charge, Thank You for Using GTL is punctuated with robotic warnings from the extortive inmate phone service over which it was recorded. GTL is a technical marvel as well as a creative one: producer JoogSzn’s beats retain their funk and low end while making space for Drakeo’s vocals, which come through impressively crisp. Across the record, the rapper uses singular rhythms and invented syntax to imagine his jewelry eliciting gasps from the juror box, chide police for snooping through his DMs, and laugh along with the inmates nodding their heads to his phone calls. By now, Drakeo has been released from jail, making GTL a testament to resourcefulness that will hopefully remain an anomaly in his catalog. –Paul A. Thompson
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The Soft Pink Truth: Shall We Go on Sinning So That Grace May Increase?
For years, Matmos’ Drew Daniel used his solo project the Soft Pink Truth to join his disparate interests, reimagining punk classics and black metal as squirrelly glitch techno. His 2020 album of original compositions is a radically different proposition: a 43-minute ambient suite meant to counter fascism’s global spread with joy rather than despair. Close friends and peers contributed voice, reeds, percussion, and piano; the album’s nine tracks shift from airy drones to richly rendered deep house, from lyrical etudes to propulsive classical minimalism. For all its gentleness, it is an album of deep resolve, unshakable in its commitment to the idea that a better world is possible. –Philip Sherburne
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Bartees Strange: Live Forever
“Genres keep us in our boxes,” Bartees Strange sing-raps on “Mossblerd,” a song that sounds like it’s falling apart even as he’s putting it together. No artist wants to be pigeonholed, but for Strange this resistance is crucial to the art he makes as a Black man working in a field most associated with white dudes. On his first album, Live Forever, there’s a righteous defiance to the way the D.C.-via-Oklahoma artist scrambles 2000s indie rock (the intimacy of Bon Iver, the bombast of the Arcade Fire) with hip-hop cadences, emo intensity, and punk catharsis, as though he’s working it all out in real time. His deep familiarity with each of those touchstones—he prefaced Live Forever with an EP of National covers—allows him to explode them from within and rethink not just how but if they speak for him. It makes for a complex and personal statement about the nature and worth of Black creativity and labor. –Stephen M. Deusner
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Taylor Swift: folklore
Recorded in secret in quarantine and unleashed upon the world with less than a day’s warning, folklore was the first Taylor Swift album untethered from the traditional expectations of a blockbuster release. With no stadiums to fill, Swift could take risks that would have previously seemed unimaginable in a discography calibrated to reach the cheap seats: work with the National’s Aaron Dessner as her principal collaborator, duet with Bon Iver, make tracks that sound like Low and the Sundays, drop an s-bomb within the first 20 seconds of the first song. The result is some of the finest songwriting of Swift’s career, vivid storytelling both personal and fictional (and somewhere in between), stuffed with more Easter eggs than a Marvel movie. Infinite worlds are contained within the threads of that teal yogurt shop shirt and that infamous cardigan, carving a path for the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe to expand ever onward. –Amy Phillips
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Chloe x Halle: Ungodly Hour
Historically, there are two trajectories from sweetie childhood star to flawed adult: the bumpy one full of high-profile foibles or the one where they wind up as robots. Neither hot mess nor robot, sisters Chloe x Halle have chosen a different route, from YouTube sensations to Beyoncé protégées to grown women. On their pop- and R&B-bending second album Ungodly Hour, they’re figuratively slapping an ID card on a bar and saying, “Bartender, I need a drink.”
The Bailey sisters have quietly lost some of the wide-eyedness of the past and instead turned towards the flotsam and jetsam of twentysomething life. Ungodly Hour is a collection of low-key tracks that demonstrated true mastery of their intricate harmonies over slinky, charismatic production. It makes sense that the album gave them their biggest hit, the highly boppable “Do It.” While it feels like the duo shot up overnight and out of sight, their rise parallels the way the world has been living this year: inward and on an insomniac’s circadian rhythm. Hopefully, like Chloe x Halle, we reemerge into the real world, elegantly transformed by what happened in the wee hours of the morning. –Allison P. Davis
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Kelly Lee Owens: Inner Song
The followup to Kelly Lee Owens’ breakthrough self-titled LP is rooted in pain and loss—the shedding of a toxic relationship, the death of her grandmother, and the decay of the environment. Inner Song’s palette of pulsing basslines, swirling synths, and visceral found sounds draws influence from the practices of the sound-healing community: sound baths, shamanic drumming, and voice work. Owens wrote the lyrics in a depressive state following a trauma-release therapy session, transforming that cathartic expulsion of her pain into a record with healing properties of its own. Inner Song is club music at its most spiritual. It lies at the intersection of beats and ambience, where sounds are just vibrations entering and leaving the body, cleansing it of toxins. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz
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Soccer Mommy: color theory
Sophie Allison paints with the shades of a bruise on color theory. Her mother’s terminal illness and her own struggles with depression appear in a wintry synesthesia of yellow, blue, and gray. Much like Sufjan Stevens in the songs of Carrie & Lowell, Allison ventures into the tundra of her despair and emerges with an unsparing and unsentimental account of survival. She buoys her bleak lyrics with the bright melodies and buzzing guitars that soundtracked Beavis and Butt-Head’s bickering on MTV in the ’90s. These instrumentals lend a “sense of comic relief,” Allison says, “like when you joke with your friend about your unhealthy habits.” In a year when hundreds of thousands of Americans perished, we needed friends desperately—someone to make us laugh, and someone to sit with us at shiva. With this intimate hospice of a record, Allison gave us both. –Peyton Thomas
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Nubya Garcia: Source
London-based tenor saxophonist Nubya Garcia made her debut album Source with the goal of exploring her roots: both her heritage as a child of Guyanese and Trinidadian immigrants, and the things that ground her as a person. The record effortlessly weaves between reggae, cumbia, Ethio-jazz, and more, containing wild energy and profound chill. Garcia has worked with many other musicians in and around her city’s vibrant jazz scene over the last few years, and her collaborators on Source are crucial to its eclectic range of styles. Still, without question, it’s Garcia’s performances and curatorial instincts that make this such a powerful statement of self. –Evan Minsker
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Grimes: Miss Anthropocene
Grimes embodies the unhuman on Miss Anthropocene. Her fifth album’s title is a personification of the anthropocene, a theorized geological epoch in which civilization provokes its own destruction via climate crises. But rather than finding comfort in the anthropomorphic gesture, Grimes renders a bleak, if beautiful, portrait of nihilism. “Imminent annihilation sounds so dope,” she sings on “My Name Is Dark,” a prescient picture of doomsday raving. But in her instrumentation, she reaches for organic matter, sometimes painstakingly: Grimes meticulously tweaked acoustic guitar loops on “Delete Forever,” layering actual violins and banjo until they recall a post-apocalyptic campfire song. Grimes once treated lyrics as meaningless sound, but here, she’s shockingly honest about the pain of posh isolation: “I’ll tie my feet to rocks and drown/You’ll miss me when I’m not around.” –Arielle Gordon
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Porridge Radio: Every Bad
On Every Bad, Brighton indie rock four-piece Porridge Radio make a strong case for curative self-scrutiny. Lead vocalist and songwriter Dana Margolin is incisive in her observations, and she often points them inward. Over airy guitars on the somber “Pop Song,” she exposes her least flattering attributes: a rotten core, a bitter disposition. But instead of corroding Margolin further, this music uplifts her, more like an exorcism of destructive thoughts than a platform for them. Her howled words and the music’s occasionally sharp edges are both caustic and restorative forces. –Madison Bloom
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KeiyaA: Forever, Ya Girl
KeiyaA is simply over it all on her debut album, Forever, Ya Girl. “I can’t wait to be alone, to be one with my blackest fire,” she exhales on “Nu World Burdens,” over a twinkling melody and drums warm enough to make your heart flutter. But even though she’s sick of the bullshit surrounding her, she doesn’t let it consume her being. Whether she’s fighting the urge to retreat back to bed or striving to permanently block a negative relationship, the 28-year-old singer and producer powers through with an impressively unbothered focus on growth amid the chaos. –Alphonse Pierre
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Dua Lipa: Future Nostalgia
Dua Lipa’s second studio album is anchored by popular sounds of the past, but it’s less attached to a memory than the promise of a feeling. Equal parts retro and fresh, Future Nostalgia is redolent of elements from the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, nodding to the work of artists like Blondie, Chic, Kylie Minogue, Nile Rodgers, Prince, Madonna, and Daft Punk. As she glissades through disco synths on “Love Again,” talkbox funk on “Levitating,” and electronic dance rhythms on “Hallucinate,” the British singer effortlessly fuses styles without resorting to forced formulas. Alive with the kind of freedom that 2020 mostly failed to deliver, Lipa’s vision of future-pop pairs classic themes of love with enough hope to carry us to a new year. –Ivie Ani
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Fleet Foxes: Shore
The warm, gracious folk on Shore seems to materialize from an alternate universe where there are no storm clouds or push notifications. According to bandleader Robin Pecknold, Fleet Foxes’ fourth album carries the mission to live “fully and vibrantly” in celebration of lost heroes like Arthur Russell and John Prine, an especially poetic resolution in the grey hours of the present. This music invites friends to wade in its relief, conjuring an aura of lush abundance amid solitude: Shore’s opening moments are ceded to 21-year-old newcomer Uwade Akhere, who murmurs about summer passing into fall, and loving with a violent passion; later on, over 400 recorded voices, solicited by Pecknold over Instagram, swell in the chorus of “Can I Believe You.” As Pecknold reaches his mid-30s, he leaves behind the fidgeting anxiety of youth. As he smiles on “Young Man’s Game,” “I’ll be lying in my ocean of time.” –Cat Zhang
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Amaarae: The Angel You Don’t Know
Ghanaian-American singer-songwriter-producer Amaarae assembles music that makes very little sense on paper. Her glittering debut, The Angel You Don’t Know, features waist-winding afropop rhythms; bouncy, avant-pop melodies; experimental modulated vocals; and playful lyrics as Instagram-ready as any artist this side of Drake. (“Percy Miller, ‘bout it ‘bout it, ‘bout the dough/Macarena to the money after shows,” she sings on single “Fancy.”) And yet, maybe improbably, she synthesizes wide-ranging references into a genreless style that could very well be predictive of a post-Spotify moment. Consider The Angel You Don’t Know proof-of-concept of an alt-afropop offshoot, destined for a global audience without sacrificing its cultural roots. –Rawiya Kameir
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Destroyer: Have We Met
For 25 years, Dan Bejar has come across as the smartest absinthe-sipping aesthete in the room. And in the past decade, the rooms have become markedly more luxurious, with sophisti-pop saxophone, synths, and strings giving new plushness to his formerly sparse songs. On Have We Met, the Vancouver-based Destroyer maestro slips into another velvet interior, only to find it's a sort of Black Lodge. Slap bass intrudes, his gnomic utterances fold in on themselves, and his clenched voice disappears completely amid ambient guitar and unholy noise. Have We Met leaves you to wonder: Is Bejar the cagey proprietor of this dream world or the disoriented guest? –Marc Hogan
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Róisín Murphy: Róisín Machine
Dua Lipa, Jessie Ware, and Kylie Minogue all sashayed back to the disco podium in 2020, but none captured the paradox of the genre—its hedonism and heartbreak, its pain dunked in prosecco—quite like Róisín Murphy. Twirling in the fog of producer DJ Parrot’s near-industrial spin on 12” disco, Murphy lets us into her wildest dreams and wrongest desires (“Ten lovers in my bed / But I want something more,” she sings on “Something More”). From the velvet-heavy chug of “Simulation” to the microdosed funk of “Shellfish Mademoiselle,” Róisín Machine knows what it means to disappear in the dry ice and come out feeling new. –Chal Ravens
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Run the Jewels: RTJ4
There was the ambient danger that El-P and Killer Mike would eventually begin to bore us with their roughneck brilliance—another bruising Run the Jewels album to add to the pile, is it? Well, yes. It is. Righteous anger pointed at society’s rulers flows throughout RTJ4, which was released at the start of June amid nationwide protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd. Killer Mike’s verse on “walking in the snow” offers a particularly stop-you-in-your-tracks moment, as he raps, “And you so numb, you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, ‘I can’t breathe.’” Alongside production that subtly expands the Run the Jewels sound, the duo offer more insight into the modern American psyche than any cable news pundit could hope to muster. –Dean Van Nguyen
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U.S. Girls: Heavy Light
From the opening disco swagger of “4 American Dollars,” U.S. Girls’ Heavy Light crackles with kinetic energy. Songwriter and bandleader Meg Remy reckons with alienation and injustice, drawing on a palette of pop, rock, and experimental sounds to convey the anxiety of the era. Poignant collages of interviews split the album into sections; the speakers’ recollections of hurtful memories and childhood bedrooms suffuse the music with empathy. Heavy Light is filled with existential dread, but it aspires to a gentler world, one where the burden of being isn’t so leaden. –Allison Hussey
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Jay Electronica: Act II: The Patents of Nobility (The Turn)
It was an album that was rumored to be rap’s next opus before it even materialized. When a slightly unfinished version of Jay Electronica’s Act II appeared this October, it had been a little over a decade after its initial slated release, and most fans had given up hope on it ever actually coming out. Somehow the record doesn’t suffer from the delay, if anything the often drumless production—heavy on somber piano melodies and lush samples—is timeless. Jay’s lines are clever and self-reflective, and his references are evergreen: “Fuck Bill O’Reilly and Rudy Giuliani,” he passionately raps on “New Illuminati.” It’s rewarding to be swept up in his aura, and to feel the magnitude of every strategically placed interlude, every space where the beat rides endlessly, and every roughly mixed verse. Jay’s strange sense of humor appears regularly, like when he builds a perfect woman who “had an ass like Rosa Acosta” and “smelled like strawberries” on “Rough Love,” or when he’s absorbed by the flaws of Western civilization on “Run and Hide.” The rumors have been justified. –Alphonse Pierre
The Microphones: Microphones in 2020
On Microphones in 2020, Phil Elverum revived his earliest moniker to ponder his formative years across a single, wistful, 45-minute song. In the companion short film, he accompanies his thoughts by flipping through hundreds of old photos, adding bittersweet visual cues to the rambling narrative. He isn’t pining for the good old days; he is reacclimating himself in the present, poking holes in the very idea of nostalgia and showing how memories live on. “I will never stop singing this song,” he acknowledges, 40 minutes in. As his acoustic guitar pulses forward and the details pile up, Elverum gestures toward a deeper, universal history: Look long enough, and you might see yourself in the photos. –Sam Sodomsky
Lil Uzi Vert: Eternal Atake
On Eternal Atake, Lil Uzi Vert employs an extraterrestrial concept that should be kitschy—in the album’s trailer, he’s jetted into the cosmos in a saucer the size of a city block by a humanoid cult—but instead lends the LP an intergalactic sheen. Across the hour-long odyssey, Uzi hops between kaleidoscopic new worlds: one where it sounds like he’s skipping across a Sega Genesis circuit board, another where he’s hosting an ethereal party alongside a turnt choir. He sounds possessed here, supercharged by something supernatural—even when he’s just shouting a luxury brand’s name into the ether 15 times in a row. –Mankaprr Conteh
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Adrianne Lenker: songs / instrumentals
When Big Thief scrapped their international tour this year, Adrianne Lenker found a world of her own in a cabin near the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. A pair of albums that work as a brilliant whole, songs and instrumentals capture the ambiance of the woods, the anguish of a breakup, and an autumn’s harvest of keen-eyed musings, at once lofty and visceral. She wants to hear a lover blinking; she sees a horse’s eyes rotting. “Oh, emptiness/Tell me about your nature,” she sings on “zombie girl.” While songs mostly consists of Lenker’s silvery vocals and brambled acoustic guitar, and instrumentals turns toward fingerpicked meditations and wind-chime drones, both sound like nothing so much as the rustic abode that Lenker has likened to “the inside of an acoustic guitar.” These records put you right inside that hollow. –Marc Hogan
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Bad Bunny: YHLQMDLG
On YHLQMDLG, aka Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana or I Do Whatever I Want, Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny honors his home island’s past of sweaty marquesina throwdowns with a score of perreo bangers for the new age. His nostalgia for reggaetón’s mixtape-era reaches its peak on “Safaera,” a crowning jewel of a record featuring elder statesmen Jowell & Randy and Ñengo Flow, with Bad Bunny’s subterranean voice bridging the past and present. He does a lot more of whatever he wants throughout the rest of the record—from sad boi trap to acoustic rap balladry to emocore—but not without first celebrating those who made it all possible. –Jenzia Burgos
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Jessie Ware: What’s Your Pleasure?
On her fourth studio album, UK singer-songwriter Jessie Ware conjures the erotic frisson of the cruisy dancefloors we aren’t permitted to congregrate on while the global pandemic rages on. What’s Your Pleasure’s adrenalizing disco, electro-funk, and deep house are indebted to the pulsing eclecticism of defunct queer nightclubs like the Paradise Garage and the Saint: The title track recalls New Order’s early ’80s cyborg funk, while “Read My Lips” pays homage to R&B group Full Force’s muscular rhythm tracks of the same decade, and the sparkling arpeggios of “Save a Kiss” evoke Robyn’s yearning 21st-century electro-pop. A married mom in her mid-30s, Ware is still able to capture one of nightlife’s great gifts—the exhilarating thrill of being single, looking out onto a packed dancefloor, and seeing the possibility of magnetic attraction. –Jason King
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Haim: Women in Music Pt. III
Three songs into Haim’s sharpest album yet, Danielle is behind the wheel in her beloved Los Angeles with a Joni Mitchell classic on the stereo, “screaming every word to ‘Both Sides Now.’” How lost must one feel to shout “I really don’t know life at all” alone in the car first thing in the morning? That’s the precise kind of biting honesty that Alana, Este, and Danielle brilliantly amplify on Women in Music Pt. III. Writing with more personality and candor than ever about a range of difficult themes—depression, loss, misogyny, the complications of loving on one’s own terms—they’ve also loosened their taut pop rock just enough to breathe more life into it, incorporating the ‘90s Lilith rock of Sheryl Crow, the blue-skied strums of Wilco, and a groovy Lou Reed interpolation. Through it all, clearer-than-ever proof emerges not just of a great band in stride, but a cultural fact: women continue making the most vital rock music now. The most revelatory sound Haim make room for on Women in Music Pt. III is themselves. –Jenn Pelly
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Yves Tumor: Heaven to a Tortured Mind
If 2018’s soul-affirming Safe in the Hands of Love established Yves Tumor as a preeminent experimentalist, then the pleasure-seeking and approachable Heaven to a Tortured Mind is the sound of them strutting into the role of a rock god. On their fourth album, Tumor is smoldering and romantic, expressing their appetite through squalling guitar solos, slinky basslines, and an ensemble of guest singers who match their lusty fervor beat for beat. Heaven flirts with familiar rock motifs as often as it subverts them, morphing into something unrecognizable. Traditional structures melt into long vamps, as on the tormented psychedelic ballad “Kerosene!,” which distills the album’s beguiling agony. Led by a keening riff lifted from Uriah Heep’s “Weep in Silence,” Tumor and singer-songwriter Diana Gordon supplicate to a lover over walls of electric guitar and pummeling drums. Gordon’s howls are hell-bent and infatuated, with Tumor’s raspy pleas pushing them both closer to the edge of oblivion. Heaven to a Tortured Mind balances listeners on that knife point, declaring Tumor’s rock-star bona fides with roguish style. –Eric Torres
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Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Ways
If nothing else, Bob Dylan’s 39th studio album should forever put to rest the idea that the storied songwriter is losing his voice. On his first collection of original material in eight years, he sounds unusually attuned to the suggestive power of his craggy instrument, using small changes of inflection to convey wry self-mockery, roaring prowess, and a certain uneasy nostalgia. Rough and Rowdy Ways can be approximately divided into two types of song: the ballads, which nearly evaporate as you listen, and the more conventionally rocking blues-based numbers. It is a testament to Dylan’s spectral presence as a singer, and the sympathy of his accompanists, that the uptempo tunes often seem as misty and elusive as the slow ones.
As ever with late-period Dylan albums, death lurks in every corner: as a prompt for bloody, Frankenstein-ish experiments in “My Own Version of You,” a red river to be traversed in “Crossing the Rubicon,” a body who shares his bed in “I Contain Multitudes,” a nameless rival in “Black Rider.” The gravity of Dylan’s voice and the clarity of his vision allow him to address these wraiths as an equal, one with intimate knowledge of the darkness they inhabit. One minute, he is at peace, nearly succumbing to whatever comes next; the next, he is spoiling for a fight, ready to wrestle death to the mat one last time. “You girls mean business,” he bellows to two “fleet-footed guides from the underworld” on the swaggering “False Prophet.” “And I do too.” –Andy Cush
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Perfume Genius: Set My Heart on Fire Immediately
In a year of isolation and unattainable intimacies, Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas is our poet laureate of constant longing. Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, his fifth album, celebrates the endless possibility and vulnerability of the body without losing sight of the fundamental absurdity of the human ordeal. Hadreas sings about misery and disconnection, about feeling unrecognizable to himself, about shepherding an inexperienced lover through his first gay encounter and picking his pockets afterwards. As on 2017’s No Shape, producer Blake Mills reveals the music with startling clarity and subtlety, bringing out lifelike strings and trembling synths through sound design as much as conventional production. In the warm thrum of “Describe,” the oceanic splash of “Without You,” and the barnstorming buildup of “Some Dream,” Set My Heart on Fire Immediately throws open doors to the dusty rooms where we’ve all been lurking inside ourselves. –Anna Gaca
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Phoebe Bridgers: Punisher
Phoebe Bridgers will tweet about eating ass with one hand and crush your heart with the other. The droll, phantom-like singer writes music for faithless burnouts who still want to believe: lost souls clinging to astrology and fucked-up intimacy, striving to get by in a brutal universe with no pre-ordained meaning. Death and apocalypse lurk in every corner of Punisher—lightning flashes, sirens wail, a Giants fan gets killed at Dodger Stadium—and Bridgers shuffles through this ominous fog, still alive, still growing taller. The wintry decay that initially clouds the album disintegrates on “Garden Song,” where the arrangement blooms and burbles, thumping steadily, like a walk home in crisp evening air. For each tart complaint (“I hate your mom”) or fatalist disclosure (“I’ve been playing dead my whole life”) is a glimmering prophecy that one day things might be just fine, even if that day comes at the very end of civilization. –Cat Zhang
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Moses Sumney: græ
The first half of græ, Moses Sumney’s tour de force sophomore album, came out just before lockdown; the second was released a few months later, after its audience had been humbled by the soft brutality of isolation, the brutal clarity of wandering our own inner landscapes day after day. If only we could make like Sumney and turn self-interrogation into a singular kind of art. Where on his debut album Sumney lingered on lack and absence, on græ he delivers effulgence and multiplicity with a shapeshifting swagger. Dream-sequence strings float atop dissonant shudders; Sumney’s voice transfigures mid-run like a stage trick, his falsetto a sudden flapping dove; he sings about being between polarities of desire and identity as if to lay claim to both at the same time. Twenty tracks is long enough for græ to form a private cosmology of ambivalence and assertion—a map of Planet Sumney as it lay in 2020, with its blush tones and icy eruptions and violent rocky swirls. –Jia Tolentino
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Waxahatchee: Saint Cloud
From her early punk recordings alongside sister Allison to her quietly devastating solo albums, Katie Crutchfield is always steadfast in her truth. With Saint Cloud, Crutchfield’s fifth album as Waxahatchee, she climbs to solid ground, emerging from the storm self-assured. The album reflects her newfound ease, all big skies, wide open spaces, and Americana twang. It’s both the country album she was destined to make and an acknowledgment that self-acceptance is hard-won; Saint Cloud reckons with addiction, sobriety, imperfect romance, trauma, and trying to navigate it all. Now, Crutchfield gazes into the mirror and doesn’t shy away from the reflection. “I have a gift, I’ve been told, for seeing what’s there,” she sings on “The Eye,” and her perspective has never sounded so clear. –Quinn Moreland
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Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters
Fifteen years ago, on the title track to Extraordinary Machine, Fiona Apple declared, “I still only travel by foot, and by foot, it’s a slow climb.” She worked her way up to the clear heights of Fetch the Bolt Cutters over the course of the last half-decade or so, largely at her L.A. home alongside trusted bandmates and friends and a small shelter’s worth of barking dogs. The result was her truest, wildest record to date—the kind of album that borders on literature in its ability to convey nuances of the human condition. Equal parts meticulous and haphazard, the self-directed songs pick up on the percussive thread of 2012’s The Idler Wheel… with elemental rhythms formed, in part, by handclaps, floorstomps, and furniture-banging. But the raw energy of Apple’s voice is the album’s life force, and there’s no mistaking the subjects of her missives—be it the men who refuse to recognize their abusive behavior; the women who, like Apple, were conditioned to compete with other women; the mean girls and those who called their bullshit; the users and the silencers; the people she fears will leave her. “I grew up in the shoes they told me I could fill, shoes that were not made for running up that hill/And I need to run up that hill, I need to run up that hill/I will, I will, I will, I will, I will,” she insists on another title track doubling as a renewed mission statement. Fetch the Bolt Cutters is the sound of someone freeing themself from a mental prison built by others but unknowingly reinforced by the self. Consider the load sufficiently lightened; on she climbs. –Jillian Mapes
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