best albums of 2020

The irrepressible Body alone proves that the Houston rapper is this year’s brightest new star. Published: July 8, 2020. Ware’s fourth album was highly flammable. Where Moses Sumney’s debut, Aromanticism, was a forlorn testimony to vulnerability, Græ brings in the whole mess of living itself: from the playful oppositions of its track titles – Jill/Jack, Neither/Nor – to Sumney’s genre-splicing between R&B, folk, jazz and ambient electronics, Græ inhabits his swaying moods and transmutes his wranglings with identity into music without losing its sense of precarity. BBT Read more. “It’s all one river crossing,” he sings, inviting you to stop resisting and step right in. A simply sublime R&B record that beautifully marries the Atlanta sisters’ hair-raising harmonies over inventive beats from Disclosure, Mike Will Made It and Scott Storch, with none other than Beyoncé as executive producer. “I thought the sea would make some pattern known / And swim us safely home,” Hadreas laments on sparse closer Borrowed Light. A sense of emotional overload permeated Caribou’s 10th album, a response to several years of death and divorce in Dan Snaith’s family. Or listen on the streaming platform of your choice. A joy to listen to, it topped the charts in 13 countries. You can’t argue with science The suburban iconography in her songs takes on a supernatural aura – going to the store “for nothing” while high on speed; being wasted on someone’s front lawn – and her keen sense of irony is undercut by the yearning to believe in something. Phoebe Bridgers’ trademark skeleton outfit underscores the Halloweeny feeling of her music. He may employ a multitude of musical styles—from 1980s synthpop to 1990s garage—yet the Canadian singer and songwriter melds them with ease. Comments (0) (Image credit: Shabazz Palaces) It would be a gross understatement to say this has been a difficult year for the arts. But where his fictional counterparts were criticised for declining to delve beyond surface recognition, Healy’s frustration at the social dynamics that affirm such behaviour is all over Notes on a Conditional Form. Revealing, remarkable and rapturous in equal measure. to carnal vintage funk (Super Stars), Ariel Pinkish psych pop (Strawberry Privilege), and a really blockbuster lead single in Gospel for a New Century. This album pinged from ecstatic Lenny Kravitz shredding (Kerosene!) Thirty years after the invention of the “parental advisory: explicit content” sticker, pop celebrated Tipper Gore’s prudish legacy with its filthiest year in recent memory. BBT Read the full review. It turns out to be one of 2020’s most striking and unique pop albums, the kind of risk-taking debut that gets you excited at what the artist behind it might come up with next. Released after his death from an accidental drug overdose, Miller’s final album showed the evolution of his artistry. Savage’s voice is still one of the best in contemporary rap: withering, jaded, but slicked with dark humour. BBT Read the full review. The album surged forth and pulled back, often within the same song. You can identify the collectivism that also charged up the Black Lives Matter movement this year in these songs of solidarity, hope, pain and catharsis, filled as they are with chants and swelling vocal harmonies; the anonymity of the group’s members itself suggests a goal bigger than any one individual. This collective of performers—UK singer Cleo Sol, Chicago’s Kid Sister and guests including Michael Kiwanuka—and released on Juneteenth, this is an explicitly and unapologetically political album made in direct response to George Floyd’s death. The 50 Best Albums of 2020 So Far Including Bob Dylan, Lil Uzi Vert, Bad Bunny, Dua Lipa, and more. Best albums of 2020: (Credit: Getty Images) Fiona Apple – Fetch the Bolt Cutters. A surprising omission from this year’s Grammys (especially Blinding Lights in the Best Song category) After Hours synthesises regret, longing and lust into a perfect package of pop finery. The Strokes – The New Abnormal Considering the dramatic origins of her third album – lupus, a kidney transplant, splitting from Justin Bieber and the Weeknd, rehab for her mental health – Gomez could justifiably have released an hour of equally high-intensity bloodletting, but Rare abides by the maxim “when it’s hot, write it cold”. Saint Cloud provides no tritely optimistic spin on this state of affairs, yet still radiates a soothing, cathartic and bittersweet joy. Most of those records were made before lockdown began, but there’s more than a couple here—Charli XCX, Taylor Swift—that drew inspiration from the same wellspring of hardship that created our present … The Mavericks En Español. Frustrated by its absence this year, the self-professed workaholic made an album of sugary obliteration that signalled her fierce hunger for the highs: “I’m so BORED,” she spat on Anthems, a bratty shriek to scare off disassociation. But his bandmates’ dynamism and energy, and his own quiet resilience, bears them all aloft. An extraordinary debut from this Congolese-Belgian singer. While it’s clearly incredibly personal, the 26-year-old from Los Angeles somehow seems to softly sum up the collective feeling of this distracted, disjointed, troubled year—in particular album closer, the apocalyptic I Know The End. Calling to mind the insularity of John Carroll Kirby’s work with Solange and Eddie Chacon, Forever, Ya Girl spirals around murky thickets of R&B, harmonised incantations and stilted beats that mustered a sense of off-kilter propulsion. The 50 best albums of 2020 We’ve collated our writers’ ‘best of’ lists and crunched the numbers in a big old music ranking machine. A mix of innocence and sophistication distinguishes this R&B gem, their vocal rhapsodies catching on coy bass lines and barbed percussion. The often very funny Gomez excels at nimble vocal kiss-offs, which she layers into satisfyingly percussive patterns: the chorus of People You Know seems to fold in on itself like origami; you’d expect Vulnerable to burst into gaudy EDM, but it pares back to Gomez caressing every syllable of the word, as if putting her own seams on show. The Best Albums of 2020 From Bob Dylan, to Taylor Swift, Run The Jewels, and BTS—these are the releases that transcended the noise of a horrible year. Guest vocals can be either gnomic (“destiny is stuck in heaven blowing nitro”, Zsela intones) or collapsing (Sampha’s corrupted cries), though Loveless’s chorus of “don’t you want to know me better?” makes for his best earworm since 2010’s Maze. LS Read more. The Best Ever Albums score is derived from a formula that weighs how many charts an album has appeared on, and how high it was on each of … For his return to original songwriting after eight years away, Dylan was showing his age in the best way possible: these songs are reflective, wise and slow. LS Read the full review. The Soft Pink Truth - Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase The 50 Best Albums Of 2020: 50-41 / 40-31 / 30-21 / 20-11 / 10-1. Uncut's 75 Best Albums of 2020. Lyrically, it’s steeped in imagery drawn from the present moment. Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, the fifth studio album by Perfume Genius, boasts the best album title of 2020. Published: March 16, 2020. Whether or not you understand French, this beguiling record of stunning songs (Dilemme, Soul) will stop you in your tracks. From big hitters such as Ariana Grande, BLACKPINK and Dua Lipa to the records that slipped under the radar—here are Vogue’s favourite tracks. Meg Remy is pictured with a little kid on the cover – a symbol of hope, you might think, but then biological and natural maternal relationships turn out to be corrupted, too. Prince sang about partying like it was 1999. It all started with 1970, when Led Zeppelin III was the surprise winner, and has continued until this grand finale. Taken as a whole, these choices contain drama, solace, poetry and fire, a fitting selection for a turbulent year, First published on Tue 1 Dec 2020 01.00 EST. On the exquisite Key West (Philosopher Pirate), he’s an old rogue hymning the last of his life at the far end of America, afternoon beer palpably in hand. BBT Read the full review. Ammar Kalia Read more. The lithe buoyancy of Hus’s vocals remained, accompanied by flourishes of sax, piano, guitar and strings. Read more. Rachel Aroesti Read more. With two classic albums alongside Madlib, Gibbs continues his other dream producer partnership with the Alchemist (a veteran whose credits include Kendrick Lamar, Eminem, Nas and tens of others) following 2018’s Fetti. BBT Read the full review. From Taylor Swift's heartfelt Folklore and Ariana Grande's super sexy Positions to Lous and the Yakuza's French debut album, it's been an unparalleled period for music. On Bill Callahan’s 2013 album Dream River, he compared finding love to mastering flight, registering his surprise at the ease of it all. 2020 was filled with music releases that moved the needle. Seattle’s Fleet Foxes make gorgeous, rustic folk designed to lift the listener up … “They took our history then they went and erased it.” As the year progressed, the exquisite Big Conspiracy came to reflect more of 2020, mapping out his personal journey within the wider context of being young, Black and British. Transcendence rarely arrives in the superb songwriting of Punisher, a record spooked by Bridgers’ tremulous vocals and self-produced, celestial indie-rock hum. Their widely beloved 2019 debut single Bad Blood suggested the Yorkshire quartet could go in any number of directions – vintage new wave, jangly indiepop – but they headed for the club, using the industrial synth pulsations of Depeche Mode and early Ministry, and guitars that nodded to various legendary Mancunians – Bernard Sumner, Johnny Marr, Vini Reilly. 11/12/2020 Esquire Getty Images. Beginning with the incredible soliloquy of Intro, Chika contemplates race, mental health, love, fashion and fame, before closing out with Barack Obama-favourite Crown, an uplifting finale to both the album and 2020 itself. Jersey musicians of a national standing were quite busy in 2020 as many released full-length albums despite the pandemic. BBT Read the full review. Fleet Foxes, Shore. Across 23 tracks, the American R&B star builds a deep, rounded portrait of the highs and lows of a romantic relationship. But keeping still forced Charli to actually sit with her feelings – a much harder job than simply acting on them – and her fourth album contains moments of dawning horror at what that stillness revealed. BBT Read the full review. LS Read the full review. From Drake to Rihanna’s latest: 9 new albums you need to obsess over in 2021, 5 breakout bedroom pop stars on how they survived and thrived in 2020, BLACKPINK’s The Album is the most bombastic lockdown record you’ll hear all year, 6 new musicians who are set to go stratospheric in 2021. Finally returning to full power, Gaga’s sixth album is the unadulterated disco-pop banger we’ve been waiting for since 2008’s The Fame. On Murder Most Foul, his longest song ever – and one of his very best – he’s like Walt Whitman spilling his thoughts on a meme page for Facebook boomers: a sublime epic of conspiracy theorising, American history and rock’n’roll nostalgia. Deftly cajoling these disparate sounds into a lithe 43 minutes of pristine club-pop music that does sound incredibly “now” is nothing short of alchemy. Often, young women who sprang from kids’ entertainment have used sex to assert their outrageousness and maturity. BBT Read the full review. Towering choruses burst with relief for the simple fact of survival. LS Read the full review. They say that everything old is new again. If there were ever a year for Gaga to get back to basics, this was it. Filled with a lifetime’s worth of compassion, Fetch the Bolt Cutters isn’t just the album of 2020 but a future classic, a rare combination of innovation and profound deep feeling. With nods to Biggie Smalls, Adina Howard and Jazmine Sullivan, and features with SZA and DaBaby, this irrepressible, assured and long-awaited debut was the much-needed break from 2020 we all needed. Moreover, as she served up dispatches from a fantasy dancefloor, her gasped vocals suggested how a subtle shift in touch or movement might ignite suggestion into full-blown ecstasy: “We touch and it feels like woo!” she trilled on Soul Control. At just seven tracks and 20 minutes long, this might technically be an EP but what Industry Games lacks in length, it makes up for in great music. The music sounds like escapism; KeiyaA’s lyrical philosophy lays out a path by which one might truly escape. Plus it quickly fulfilled its promise by offering escape when it arrived in the darkest days of the pandemic. While they hark back to the heyday of Destiny’s Child with Busy Boy – their heavenly vocal harmonies heavy with knowing as they catch a guy plying several women with his trade – there’s also the striking Wonder What She Thinks of Me, a pained dispatch from the other woman who longs to be the only woman. Opening with the fantastic drama of Dynasty, the British-Asian singer takes us through a thrilling tunnel of thrash metal, glitchy electro and Hi-NRG, all the while keeping her eye firmly on the pop charts with XS. The bustle of pre-Covid life seems to be evoked by Tony Buck’s drumming in the latest release by the veteran Australian avant-jazz trio, particularly on the opening track Bloom, which clatters and rustles with ferrety industry. Marching through tracks with a “mind on a mission on the road to perdition”, the rap duo leave a wake of flame streaked across each one. The first thing that hits you is the quality of the songwriting and production; then the message of the song falls like a feather, not a brick. The best of them all was this lilting, versatile record by Wizkid. Jay-Z appears uncredited on nearly every track, rangy and creative, but Jay himself is riveting as he ruminates on his artistry and circuitous path with plenty of religiosity: “The prodigal son who went from his own vomit / To the top of the mountain with five pillars and a sonnet”. Quite simply one of the best bands in the world right now, who have something to say and the means to say it. The 20 Best Albums of 2020 So Far. Perfect for any time of the day. Many of her best-ever songs are here: the sniping and sexiness of the toxic relationship in Held Down; the scirocco that seems to blow through Strange Girl; the stillness and bald vulnerability in the moment sketched on The End of the Affair. BBT Read the full review. Yet Folklore found a moment of stillness in the turmoil, turning even the darkest musings into something sparkling and beautiful. Darren Cunningham cements his place as one of the great poets of club culture, spanning glacial ambient, UK garage, Larry Heard-ish deep house, bumping techno and high-speed rave, all rendered in monochrome, dirtied watercolours. Among a huge cohort of artists finding hard-won inner peace this year, the Welsh producer cast off limiting relationships and superficial pleasures on her second album. Ariana Grande’s sixth album made no bones about its primary concern – namely bones every which way until Tuesday, upholstered by slinky, lavish R&B. The group’s music oscillates to all corners of Black culture’s past: from defiant breakbeats and spoken word to high-life guitar lines and mutated gospel. BBT Read the review. On their third album and first masterpiece, Haim sound like a band who took their eyes off the prize and found it at their feet. Authority figures from warmongers to the Twitterati are dispensed with as the duo seem to embrace chaos as a means of making change. But that doesn’t account for the skill with which Sawayama picks her way through her formative musical loves, and how adept she is at arranging them as dynamically explosive contrasts. Weird, yet reassuringly wonderful. And his swaggering libido was still apparent – you can hear his grin on the icy slickness of Cucumber as he implores: “Say ah J Hus make your pum-pum sore.” But dig deeper and you hear a young man navigating self-doubt in a world made to exclude him: “No blacks, no dogs, we were segregated,” he reflects on Deeper Than Rap. Guest stars from across the Black Atlantic – Skepta and Ella Mai from the UK, HER from the US, Damian Marley and Projexx from Jamaica – create the sense of a diasporic dialogue, where reggae, dancehall, rap and Afro-swing seamlessly and sensually intertwine. Mike Hadreas’s work has always dealt with heavy themes including abuse and bullying, but with the opener of his new album, he asks to be relinquished of his trauma. Shedding the careful precocity of their debut, the Bailey sisters’ second album skipped the traditionally salacious we’re-grown-now stage of pop evolution to paint in complex emotional shades. Like I Want You is R&B at its very best. Our countdown is complete, topped by a mercurial work of sprawling invention by a woman who has dug deep to survive. He even eases off down to the blues joint for a couple of classic 12-bar stomps, though at a geriatric pace. If you were forced to describe Rina Sawayama’s debut as succinctly as possible, you’d probably opt for a pop/R&B/nu-metal hybrid with a dose of stadium-rock bombast, which sounds like the most appalling generic fusion in musical history. The mood is more downbeat than their debut and their growing pains are clear: frontman Grian Chatten furrows his brow, his heart and mind shifting as he ages, picking up wisdom and trying on identities. BBT Read more. When it does, it’s not to recalibrate the fractured relationships with helpless lovers and fathers, but in more fleeting escapes: the tender country hum of Graceland Too narrates a story taking MDMA, looking at the moon and driving to Graceland, finding salvation in the illusion. It should be underlined that the sororal US trio’s first two albums, Days Are Gone (2013) and Something to Tell You (2017) are very good: slick without smoothing too much over. Like Marvin Gaye, another great purveyor of intimacy, Sumney shores up the solipsism of standout ballads Me in 20 Years and Bless Me with the whispers of multitracked harmonies constructed solely from his voice. I don't think anyone will ever want to party like it was 2020. LS. Recorded during the first few months of lockdown, Swift’s surprise eighth album topped many best of 2020 lists. Site also contains reviews, ratings & more. It's been a historic year for the arts, but our pick of 2020's best albums proves there is nothing that can hold back creativity. Featuring Phoebe Bridgers (Lovin’ Me) as well as the late Pop Smoke and British rapper Skepta (Show Out), this psychedelic, highly inventive, boldly self-reflective record samples Tom Hanks’s Cast Away (2000) and Scott Pilgrim Vs. Metro’s usual atmospheric snares, chords and nighthawk mood are offset with some gloriously cute flourishes, such as the dreamy backwards tones of Mr Right Now or the classic electro of Steppin’ on Niggas. The often bad-faith assaults on Boucher’s personal life couldn’t touch her art – the calling that may have been her real-life salvation. The 50 Best Albums Of 2020. The effect is like clambering inside a single particular mind, one that is – as the brilliantly unreadable title suggests – jangled by anxiety but also fumbling towards happiness. List of Movies, TV Shows, Videogames, and Albums Postponed by the Coronavirus. Released in March, Colores won best urban album at the 2020 Latin Grammys, and scored the Colombian superstar a No. Best albums of 2020 >> Jon Pareles, Jon Caramanica and Lindsay Zoladz, The New York Times Published: 07 Dec 2020 11:33 AM BdST Updated: 07 Dec 2020 11:33 AM BdST Music, that is. Fingers crossed she wins the Grammy for best electronic/dance album. A year of cancelled tour dates allowed Swift to make an album without having to consider the nosebleed seats. For all the doom and gloom brought upon us by 2020, one of the silver linings this year has got to be the excellent musical records delivered to us by both heavy-hitters and lesser-known artists. Taylor shows how sex itself is communication, adding up to one of the hottest, most emotionally astute albums of the year. Yet this is not weary resignation: for an artist who has been in constant metamorphosis, such acceptance feels revelatory. 2020 In Review December 1, 2020 10:00 AM By Stereogum . It’s been a year of letting go, a prospect more comforting for some than others. The clenched fussiness of 2017’s Crack-Up abated for more subtly detailed, openhearted arrangements – padded and cottony on Featherweight, earnest and loving on Sunblind, a tribute to departed songwriters such as Richard Swift and Arthur Russell – as Pecknold resolved to accept the things he cannot change, to surrender to contentment and honour community in divided times: “We’ve only made it together, feel some change in the weather.” LS Read the full review. Relief for the mind say it beguiling record of stunning songs ( Dilemme Soul! Lenny Kravitz shredding ( Kerosene! in contrast to that dreamlike haze was KeiyaA ’ s new album weapons-grade... Sort of irreverent, box-resistant talent that makes pop culture truly pop entrancing melodies is testament to the of! Mix truer to life result is wistful, romantic and adorned with entrancing melodies:... ’ tremulous vocals and self-produced, celestial indie-rock hum album pinged from ecstatic Lenny Kravitz shredding Kerosene. 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