The 50 Best Albums of 2020

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Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Bandcamp |  Spotify | Tidal

24.

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

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

23.

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

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Bandcamp |  Spotify | Tidal

22.

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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21.

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

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

20.

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

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

19.

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

Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

18.

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

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Bandcamp |  Spotify | Tidal

17.

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

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

16.

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

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

15.

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

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

14.

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

13.

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

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Tidal

12.

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

Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

11.

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

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

10.

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

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Bandcamp |  Spotify | Tidal

9.

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

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

8.

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

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

7.

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