25 records seems like it’s, once again, the arbitrary number of records I chose to rank as the year’s best/my favourites. Let’s go.
25. Run the Jewels — RTJ4
It’s kind of a shame that RTJ are gaining a rep for being ‘hip hop white guys listen to’. Even though — like most reductive stereotypes — there’s a grain of truth to it, RTJ are (and have been for years) two veterans at the top of their games. With each record they’re refining their already razor-sharp repartee, and somehow making their production even more thunderous.
24. Dehd — Flower of Devotion
The spirit of 80s emo/new wave lives on in the sincerity, lush production and, yes, jangly guitars of Flower of Devotion. After years and years of letting the protective shield of irony keep us at a remove from our feelings, it’s heartening to see earnestness make a comeback outside of Drake using it to get laid.
23. Thundercat — It Is What It Is
There’s a punkish ethos to Thundercat. I saw him live once and every time one of his songs got into a groove that set the crowd dancing, his wildly virtuosic band immediately flipped the switch to aggressively improvised jazz freakouts, noticeably upsetting the audience who came along expecting the bouncy funk of his records. But if you listen closely, it was always there — It Is What It Is never lets itself settle into its hooks for long, and if it does, songs tend to find themselves cut short. It’s nice to be kept on your toes by music that makes you move.
22. Porridge Radio — Every Bad
On “Sweet”, the lead single from Every Bad, Porridge Radio’s thrilling vocalist Dana Margolin constantly resists the urge to turn the song — basically a youthfully angsty lashing out at her mum — into her own literal screaming, despite her bountiful capacity to do so. Instead, where the verses could easily swing into melodrama, the band lets the guitars do the screaming. It’s that understanding of their strengths, and when to flex them, that makes Every Bad a winner.
21. Blake Mills — Mutable Set
Blake Mills has an impressive production career, with bands that aren’t short of bombast when it’s called for (Perfume Genius, Alabama Shakes, Sky Ferreira, Fiona Apple), but his delightful second solo album is a gentle, even muted, affair where he consistently sublimates his considerable talents in service of the music.
20. Jyoti — Mama You Can Bet
Georgia Anne Mulrow has long been known for her avant-r’n’b records, but this was the one that got me onto her side hustle: jazz. I’m not going to pontificate on the importance of Black Music this year, as it would be overwrought and not really my place, but Jyoti’s reaching back into the history of black music is both exhilarating and very much of its time.
19. Julianna Barwick — Healing Is A Miracle
It’s hard to know how much the pandemic and associated lockdowns affected how I listened to music this year. But it’s certain — at least to me — that a record this beautiful and soothing found a welcome home during a year of tense, upsetting boredom.
18. SAULT — Untitled (Rise)
There hasn’t been a good anonymous underground UK artist since Burial, so my belated discovery of SAULT (who also released the excellent Untitled (Black Is) this year) filled a gap I didn’t know was there. Borrowing liberally from US pop and r’n’b, Untitled (Rise) felt liberatory in 2020, merging fierce anger and a determination to stay upright in the face of awful things, even beaming, defiant.
17. Fleet Foxes — Shore
They’re not the It Band anymore, but taking the spotlight off Fleet Foxes seems only to compel them to keep finding new highs. After shaking off their shackles with the stunning left turn Crack Up three years ago, Shore is a return to the warmer sounds of their debut. Also, if Crack Up’s elegiac tone presaged the dramas of the subsequent years, we can only hope this record’s vibrancy, warmth and optimism have a similar prescience.
16. Medhane — Cold Water
Powerful, tight and understated.
15. Nubya Garcia — SOURCE
It was a great year for jazz in 2020, and Garcia’s tenor sax, having featured on Makaya McRaven and Sons of Kemet records recently, made its debut in stellar fashion here, borrowing from recognisable vintage tropes and sending them hurtling into a vivid, UK-US-Afrobeat hybridised future.
14. Jeff Parker — Suite for Max Brown
Speaking of pushing jazz into the future, Suite for Max Brown is such an ambitious work that you could make the case that it’s not even jazz in a strict sense. The veteran guitarist picks up any number of instruments and turns them to unexpected purposes to ravishing effect.
13. Chubby and the Gang — Speed Kills
Medhane made a killer rap record by focusing on concision, and it reminded me that sometimes what you need in your life is Short, Fast and Loud. There’s a punkish energy to Speed Kills, but this is not a punk record — it’s old-timey Britrock at 1.5x. When the handclaps kick in on “All Along the Uxbridge Road” it may as well be a pop song.
12. Bartees Strange — Live Forever
They say it takes forty years to write your first novel, pouring a lifetime of experiences into one work. Debuts like Live Forever have a similar feel; Bartees Strange shifts wildly from rock to hip hop to quasi-balladry, without ever losing grip on what makes the record his own. I have a feeling we’ll be hearing more from him.
11. US Girls — Heavy Light
As US Girls, Meg Remy likes to play around with the conventions of pop music, veering into modes of funk(ish), rock(ish) songcraft. There’s almost always a comment — implicit or explicit on the nature of pop music, capitalism and feminism, and it’s never been quite so overt as on Heavy Light, literalised by the cover art of, well, two US Girls. While toying with questions of heavyness and lightness, she also produces some of the straight-up catchiest numbers of her career.
10. Moses Sumney — grae
It’s always been about his voice — one of the most powerful instruments in contemporary music — but on grae, Moses Sumney sets his sights to more ambitious heights than 2017’s Aromanticism. At over an hour long, and released in two chunks, grae is twice the length and with twice the aspirations of its predecessor, wielding That Voice with an authority that lends his often simple but never overbearing arrangements even more heft than they would have with a lesser vocalist.
9. Jay Electronica — A Written Testimony
After YEARS of building hype, it seemed impossible that Jay Electronica would be able to release a debut that could satisfy the salivating demands of fans. But the first minute of “Ghost of Soulja Slim” is the most exhilarating minute of the year, and the rest of the album never lets up.
8. Phoebe Bridgers — Punisher
Punisher is almost shockingly — for want of a better word — complete. It’s rare for such a young artist to have developed such an identifiable worldview, style, and aesthetic. Sardonic, unhurried and frequently gorgeous, Punisher has zero weak points, all the way through to closer “I Know the End”, arguably the year’s best final track.
7. Destroyer — Have We Met
Someone once said — I can’t remember who — that Destroyer’s songs have the sense that their author wandered into them unawares, and proceeds to haphazardly try to describe his surroundings. During “Cue Synthesiser”, Dan Bejar summons his best bandleader persona, exhorting “cue synthesiser”, “cue guitar”, “bring in the drums”, after which none of those instruments choose to join the woozy neon barroom accompaniment. The whole album carries the classic Bejarian vibe to completion, stretching the retro-but-new sound that he began on the stunning Kaputt to new places.
6. Fiona Apple — Fetch the Bolt Cutters
It was almost cheating to make a record entirely at home, using the various utensils at her disposal, to then be released during a pandemic when everyone was stuck at home. But beyond that almost-on-the-nose of-the-moment quality, Fetch the Bolt Cutters is a pretty stunning work. Apple’s lyrics have always been dense, and here she stretches herself even further, matched by a balletic cacophony of her standard piano/rhythm styles, backed by pots, pans, dogs, and various bodily noises. While it wasn’t my favourite record this year, I have a feeling it’s the one history will remind us of the most in years to come.
5. Bob Dylan — Rough and Rowdy Ways
I had a realisation recently. One of my favourite Dylan records (“Love and Theft”) was released in 2001 (on 9/11 no less), and it was the second album of his “late period” as it was called at the time. Well, 19 years into his “late period”, Dylan has somehow made a record on par with basically anything else he’s done, leaning further into his late-life love of the sounds from before his youth, infusing them with a nostalgic mirth that he appears to have truly mastered at 79. Sixteen-minute “Murder Most Foul” may stand as a genuine career highlight, in a career with more highlights than most.
4. Jessie Ware — What’s Your Pleasure?
In the darkest moments of a fairly bleak year, an unexpected left turn into disco from one of the pre-eminent r’n’b singers of the moment was precisely the prescription that I needed to play loud, and shimmy around the house with a smile on my face. Newly urgent, confident and, most importantly, fun, What’s Your Pleasure? probably took the crown as my most-played record of 2020.
3. Makaya McRaven and Gil Scott Heron — We’re New Again
I grappled with whether to consider We’re New Again a 2020 record. It says right there on the tin that it’s a “re-imagining” of Gil Scott Heron’s final album, We’re New Here, it resides in an <ahem> liminal space between new and old. But in the end, the vibrancy that McRaven brings to Scott Heron’s weathered poetry, without ever betraying the spirit of the original, is too strong to ignore.
2. Waxahatchee — Saint Cloud
Katie Crutchfield’s shift into warm, dappled Americana could not have been more welcome. After two strong outings that leaned more into a straight-up rock sound, Saint Cloud is instead more personal, more open, and more accessible in the best possible way. At various moments, Crutchfield unfurls a hook (or multiple hooks) that in different hands would feature on a #1 pop song, and guides them to softer, gentler places as she interrogates her discomfort with her strongest feelings, all with the feeling of sitting the warm roof of a pickup truck in the springtime sun.
- Perfume Genius — Set My Heart On Fire Immediately
Mike Hadreas’ music has always dealt, quite directly, with the corporeal; his body — and the bodies of others — has never been far from the centre of his work, but never like this. Displaying his ripped torso on the cover art, he announced his intentions immediately, and the album swings wildly, yet somehow seamlessly, from the sweaty and visceral to the lithe and sensual, as he continues to evolve and refine what was already one of the most fully-formed aesthetics in modern pop music. With Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, following up on three stunning preceding records, Perfume Genius has firmly established himself as an artist at the top of his game, and among the best artists currently working.
Some other cool songs
Against All Logic — If You Can’t Do It Good, Do It Hard
Caribou — You And I
Fenne Lily — Hypochondriac
Cable Ties — Hope
Laura Marling — Strange Girl
Jamie XX — idontknow
CHAI and Hinds — United Rock n Roll Girls Club
Yves Tumour — Gospel for a New Century
Cheers
