The Best Albums of 2020
Written by Nathan Evans
The first year of the 20s has felt like the entire decade. As civilisation as we knew it was put in a state of purgatory, the ensuing months morphed into one enforced hibernation. Music itself seemed doomed, as A-list artists rumoured to release pulled out for the year (think Frank Ocean headlining Coachella, which I’m still rueing to this day). However, some merely delayed their records until the summer, others changed their albums in light of the shut-down, and an exception few created entire records in response and in retribution to the pandemic. Here are the 25 best from a year that makes 2016 look saintly.
As a disclaimer, the first 5 entries will be honourable mentions, leading into the top 20 which will have an in-depth description for each. Going back on what was said in the Best Songs list, some albums here will be tied into the real-world events of this year, as some were salient reflections on the mood of the times, as is an artist’s job. Call it double standards, but it’s different for longer, deeper releases than for in-the-moment singles.
25. KeiyaA - Forever, Ya Girl
24. Joji - Nectar
23. Shabaka and the Ancestors - We Are Sent Here By History
22. Thundercat - It Is What It Is
21. Dua Lipa & The Blessed Madonna - Club Future Nostalgia
After years lending beats to the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Anderson .Paak and Action Bronson, 1988 is Knxwledge’s most substantial solo offering yet - a beat tape that brings a larger concept than a wide amount of penned hip-hop projects. That every title pairs with its respective beat through feeling or vocal excerpt is clever, but the entire tracklist pieces together into a larger message that is equal parts sentimental as it is aloof. Musically flowing like a road trip through Knxwledge’s mind, his distinct style carries the baton from the likes of J Dilla and Madlib, just with a much more pronounced soul influence that borrows neo-soul artists who Lib and Dilla would have called contemporaries 20 years ago. 1988 gives off the feeling of a day in a record store from that year, excitedly skimming through a miscellaneous stack of singles and taking home every one.
UK jazz is creating shockwaves in the genre right now, and drummer Moses Boyd is at the epicenter of it all. Above all else, Dark Matter is a showcase for the stoic style that London is creating with its gulley of influences, but above all else, it’s a showcase for Boyd himself as a leader. It’s rare for a drummer to lead a band, but he adopts the role with a flair for the dramatic, from the head-twirling rhythms of ‘Y.O.Y.O’, to the luxuriously art-deco funk of ‘BTB’. Boyd welcomes a flock of fellow-Londoner guests that includes Obongjayar, Poppy Ajudha and Joe Armon-Jones, and he manages to be generous to each one in the meantime of planting his syncopated imprint. His debut album rounds up as a fitting ode to the thriving culture that courses through his city of London.
Read KEYMAG’s review of Moses Boyd’s Dark Matter here.
Nigerian Afrobeats is forwarding a rapid insurgence onto the US and Europe with artists like Burna Boy, and with any luck Odunsi the Engine is next in line to take hold of the West’s attention. Blending Nigerian Alté (alternative) and Afropop with the psychedelic trap sounds coming out of the US, Odunsi does so sporting a refreshingly modern and high-gloss livery. It should be a testament to EVERYTHING YOU HEARD IS TRUE’s magnetism that stands as one of the notable projects of the year in just seven tracks and 14 minutes, his high-res production and efficiency in ideas keeps the hook wedged in your memory. Though a condensed project, one is never swallowed in an onslaught of ideas at once nor left with blue balls from wasted potential. Instead, Odunsi simmers an endlessly-loopable vibe that doesn’t just keep you ticking over, but leaves you wanting to clock in right away.
When Nicolas Jaar anonymously released 2012-2017 under the moniker Against All Logic, the world slowly cottoned on to one of the best house music albums in aeons. Foolproof and sprightly, it’s the polar opposite to its sequel, 2017-2019. Jaar being as musically progressive as they come likely saw the interest in the A.A.L name as an opportunity to lead people into more nuanced worlds, doing so with a harsher, after-dark setting of industrial techno, IDM and microhouse. Frosty in tone, these nine tracks represent the cold, closed-in reality of 2020 like no other dance record, but the banquet-feed of new styles in such a minimalistic package is commendable. Though more suited to headphones than club-speakers, Jaar’s first of three records in 2020 throws a storm of mechanical rage that dissipates into a ground for hope.
It’s good to have Caribou back. Six mighty long years after Can’t Do Without You, Suddenly is another wondrous snapshot of his oft-imitated, never-mastered indie-tronic pool. He softly nods to straight house music, such ‘Never Come Back’ and ‘Ravi’, and it’s leaned on for thrills so joyous, it makes his previous record seem mournful by comparison. Then there’s ‘Home’, one of the best singles of the year, and the star pupil in a class of highlights that breeze by and dish out good tummy feelings like meals in a soup kitchen. Though not without its ripples along the way, Suddenly is just like its accompanying artwork - sharply coloured and affectingly buoyant.
Read KEYMAG’s review of Caribou’s Suddenly here.
What does your youth sound like? No, what did it sound like, when everything was made of plastic and wood before you got the privilege of using metal and glass? It most likely sounded like Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters. Delightfully mischievous piano; a recording style that welcomes every piece of sonic rubble and inconsistency; incidental animal noises - her fifth record crafts an organic instrumental make-up for an equally primitive stage of life. We get insight to Apple as a sprog before she relates it to her today as an adult, her disruptive behaviour a throughline that sees her lament the evil she sees and feels obliged to speak on. Truth is, we’re all pretty childish as adults, and a lot of the lessons we are taught as children don’t reflect reality. Look at how doing the opposite of being nice can even get you a four-year presidency (not an eight-year one though :))))) ). Fetch the Bolt Cutters is defiance personified, of nudging one's way into the conversation until people start to get it.
What HAIM conducts on Women In Music, Pt. III is similar to what the Alabama Shakes did on their Sound & Color LP. A guttering of the boundaries and dams that has clogged up guitar music for so long, the trio wrote with freedom and fluidity, in turn creating something that gleefully picks from reggae, jazz, country and whatever else is in the cupboards. Every track feels like it has some weird experiment going on underneath, like the jumpy R&B chords of ‘3am’, or the spiky mix of the fiercest cut here, ‘The Steps’. None of this rhetoric is even required to enjoy this album, honestly. Even the bonus tracks are worth sticking around for, particularly the spotlit country ballad ‘Hallelujah’, a song where each sister lays bare their most sentimental thoughts.
After becoming the successor to the Grateful Dead and Red Hot Chilli Peppers as the sound of the West Coast with 2015’s Currents, Australian outfit Tame Impala returns with another hour of poptimistic neo-psychedelia. The Slow Rush evaporates the melancholic loneliness of previous albums, likely due to mastermind Kevin Parker getting married and settling down in LA, but new worries crop up to replace it. Be it tossing and turning over his relevancy on ‘It Might Be Time’, or facing up to the death of his father and the impact of their relationship on ‘Posthumous Forgiveness’, Parker is much more wise-eyed in his songwriting. Yet, all this is an optional accessory to the listener, as one can simply enjoy his most instrumentally expansive record ever.
It’s high time to start addressing Freddie Gibbs amongst the great rappers of our time. The Indiana marauder has been steadily releasing projects that weaponise his dextrous flows and increasingly searing lyricism, and in teaming up with legendary producer The Alchemist, he enjoys the fruits of his labour in drinks-globe luxury. For an immersive 35 minutes, Gibbs raps with a mobster’s mentality, tackling Alchemist’s soulful-yet-tricky beats spitting razor-sharp vocal patterns and swirling a wine glass in one hand. Moments such as the slow inebriation of ‘Look At Me’, the black-and-white glamour of ‘Scottie Beam’ featuring Rick Ross are casually brilliant, as if its creators never had to lift a finger up from their 50-foot, silk-covered dining table. If Alfredo were a scene, it would be Gibbs rapping in an armchair next to a fireplace, his perished enemies hanging on the wall as taxidermy.
Porridge Radio has shaped into the year’s obscurist’s pick for the next big indie darling, perhaps because of how they can paint mental turmoil in a refreshing and relatable way. Eccentric frontwoman Dana Margolin fosters a ghoulish character that inspires curiosity, performed with such vigour that when she asks a question to a nameless character, you feel compelled to answer. The Brighton four-piece always leave something below the surface, an underlying feeling, like the regurgitating denial of sanity on ‘Born Confused’, or the dead-inside vocal delivery that drains ‘Don’t Ask Me Twice’. At the back end of Every Bad, Porridge Radio out themselves as admirers of art-rock with more challenging, metaphysical material, landing the album in a completely new and enticing place after the storm of catharsis it had to go through.
Read KEYMAG’s review of Porridge Radio’s Every Bad here.
Self-titled releases are usually reserved for the debut, as a nominative tool to indicate that the record is their sound, distilled. Others take their time, and are less bold as to declare their definitive sound until they have bodies of work on their back. Lianne La Havas waited until project number three, and no other album of hers is better suited. Arriving a half-decade since her last, Lianne La Havas is a redefinition of who she is as an artist, fully embracing the deep influences from urban Brazilian MPB (Música Popular Brasileira) and soul music of almost every era. Set to a detailed story following a relationship from beginning to end, her resplendent performances guide the intricate compositions like a shaman on a cohesive, cyclical tour through heartbreak.
Circles was always going to be a special album. The late Mac Miller’s posthumous final album was pitched as the more song-focused companion album to 2018’s Swimming, left in a state of incompletion until producer Jon Brion was asked to finish the record. But what Circles unearths is an astounding musical breadth Miller never fully showed during his lifetime, realised by one of film and music’s most established composers. Assured in his endearingly stuffy singing voice, he plaits together light-hearted neo-soul, chopped-up hip-hop, indie-folk, Lennon-inspired pop and more, but the album is never cordoned off into one sonic territory. What is more distinct, however, is the push and pull rippling the songs here, between the readable, child-like joy Miller had during these sessions, and the underlying darkness that reminds us that his battle with inner suffering ended too soon. Passing through this album - coming into contact with his spectre - is like being at the end of an adventure movie where the character says goodbye to his journey with a new appreciation for every little thing in life.
Knowing the history and prowess of the names attached to this collaborative mini-LP - jazzmasters Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington and Robert Glasper, all of whom were pivotal to the sound of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, plus legendary hip-hop producer 9th Wonder - many would have thought these minds together would have created a grand, unapproachable epic. Instead, they reach out to something more accessible, lacing masterful soul beats with a tasteful amount of jazz impulses. Landing naturally at seven tracks, it’s reported that the project is based entirely off the seven beats that Wonder provided, and Dinner Party indeed rolls like a pack of top-class musicians taking leisure in spicing up a set of instrumentals to a higher level with horns, piano, sax, guitar and talkbox. Adding in Chicago singer Phoelix to croon about love and politics only makes the batch sweeter.
To word Fleet Foxes’ fourth record just right is a fruitless task, because frontman Robin Pecknold has done so already. Not to fangirl, but Pecknold is such a studied individual (once putting the band on hiatus to get a degree at Columbia University), and also defies statistical probability with his discography-wide consistency. Shore is another picturesque installment of that bright indie-folk housed in autumnal, dewy air, and this time, the Foxes light the landscape with a particularly humanistic streak. First track proper ‘Sunblind’ finds salvation in the great songwriters that were taken too soon, plus the presence of voices across the record is brazenly apparent; over 400 were used for the make-shift choral section on the anthemic ‘Can I Believe You’. Deeper inside lies the revelatory-sounding ‘Maestranza’, whose verses “ache for the sight of friends”. Shore is a calm retaliation to the worldwide grounding that took place this year - celebrating life in the face of death, people in a time of isolation, and optimism in a whirlwind of despair.
Imagine watching a gang of stars from the worlds of 2000s pop, Eurodance, EDM and bubblegum bass music brawling each other like that one scene from Anchorman 2. And also eating each other. how i’m feeling now is precisely that image. Dropping just 36 days after being announced on an Instagram livestream, the record has the almost-reactionary spontaneity that comes from such a time constraint. Its rapid, spontaneous recording has led to unrepressed pop so sugary that excessive consumption could lead to fear of rotten teeth and deficient insulin, but thankfully only bubbles with the same frustration of not seeing friends and loved ones as we all experienced. Not to call her the new Florence Nightingale or anything, but Charli XCX made lockdown easier in her own way, through a knee-jerk care package that tapped into what we are all feeling now.
Change comes from crowds in the centres, noise and picket signs aimed towards those in power. In light of the Black Lives Matter re-emergence this year, the music on Sault’s Untitled (Black Is) is the metaphorical feet on the ground. A London neo-soul group that likes to keep their distance, the music is far more effecting than any personal insight to individual members, and is the embodiment of the ‘power in numbers’ philosophy. The genius in Sault’s craft here is their wide reach into the past that forms a throughline that takes the listener back to D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, to Public Enemy’s original run, to the traditional funk from Africa. All the while, Untitled (Black Is) paints the landscape of a great systemic revolt from the perspective of the people. As what will likely be the biggest political discourse this decade continues, the record will only grow in significance.
A blue-moon instance of a blockbuster also being one of the best of the year, the prince of darkness’ first album since 2016 exudes a mind-blowing grandiosity that few artists have the budget for. Creating a rich world, he campaigned the album like a method actor, with news concepts and additions to the story at every music video and TV performance. It speaks to how deeply integrated the material here is with its larger concept. Everything is dressed in a ribboned electronic decor, from the hulking hip-hop of ‘Heartless’ (and its softer cousin ‘Snowchild’), to the sinister, haunting R&B on ‘Alone Again’ and the title track, to even shots of electrifying 80s pop that sparks ‘Blinding Lights’ and ‘In Your Eyes’. The Weeknd delivered an absolute popcorn-churner.
Yves Tumor’s fourth full-length is nothing like his third. Off the success of his 2018 album Safe in the Hands of Love, Sean Bowie is taking his heady psychedelia back in time to the height of glam rock and funk, turning both experimental and freakishly sensual. Tumor adds effects and sonic turbulence to make instruments sound completely androgynous - try and decipher the trumpet on ‘Gospel For a New Century’ or the car-crash punk guitar on ‘Medicine Burn’. The more spacious cuts such as ‘Hasdellen Lights’ and ‘Strawberry Privilege’ bring a pensive ying to the chaotic yang, and the five-minute ‘Kerosene!’ is classic Prince all the way. It’s a mystery how Bowie managed to adopt the stance of such an icon, but it’s a spirit that filters through the entire work. Heaven to a Tortured Mind is perverse yet enthralling, like spectating a shotgun wedding.
Moses Sumney is running head-first towards icon status, armed with an acrobat’s dexterity, a philosopher's mindset, and a voice like no other soul. While his lofty vocal frequencies have set him apart so far, græ uses that to consolidate its butterfly fragility into a twin-LP of biophonous art-pop. Disobedient to its title by presenting Sumney’s most colourful material to date, over 40 musicians - Oneohtrix Point Never to James Blake to Thundercat, to name a few - take part, yet barely make a whisper. Rather, they are used as garnish over the lead artist’s vision of simply getting to know Moses, as intense as may sometimes be. The central purpose mirrors Björk’s Post, another follow-up to a promising debut that fleshes out the artist’s character, and the job on græ begins with a sprawling, theatrical first disc and moves towards a more down-to-Earth second disc. To bring such a classic album to mind is hardly a bad thing, and what’s scary is that Sumney isn’t operating at maximum capacity yet.
Read KEYMAG’s review of Moses Sumney’s græ here.
Phoebe Bridgers knows how people work underneath the surface. A songwriter that first became a critical darling in 2017 off the back of her debut album Strangers In The Alps, her second has rightfully snowballed into even more fervour for her placating folk music. Though she visibly adores Elliott Smith and Conor Oberst, she probably never thought she would carry their torch for this generation.
Fans of Smith and Oberst’s Bright Eyes will hear their influence once you lean in to hear her shy voice, in just how much dejection her tunes can carry, but the real kicker is her bold words that talk about the human qualities that are lodged inside all of us until life throws curveballs. The magnified anguish of her lyrics reveal scars attained from dealing with oneself, faulty relationships and reduced physical states. Wading around in the non-essential, she’s observant of the most minute of details that stay circling around your head, before she hits devastating lines like the end of verse one on ‘Chinese Satellite’ (“Hum along 'til the feeling's gone forever”). On “Halloween”, she uses the holiday as a broad spin-off point on how obsession can turn dark and how wildly people can change to facilitate it, while others set a tale up, her hyper-specificity leading the way in tender and relatable fashion (“You couldn’t have stuck your tongue down the throat of someone who loves you more”). Punisher’s first act is new for Bridgers, getting some sunlight with the straight indie rock ‘Kyoto’, but once the title track plays, she returns to her usual chamber, now with subtle new tweaks that turn vocals voxxed and guitars watery. Nonetheless these instrumental flourishes play second fiddle to the lead artist in the grand scheme, save for the thunderstorm finale ‘I Know The End’.
Punisher is a record that removes all inhibitions. The world seemed to gather around the record more and more as the year went on, looking for the same thing that the dog with a bird in its mouth - a potent image of desperate pleading Bridgers recurs back to repeatedly - is seeking. We’ve all gotten to know ourselves better this year, and for showing compassion to the weird bends and folds hidden inside us, it’s the most emotionally-revealing songbook of 2020.