The Worst Albums of 2020
Written by Nathan Evans
2020 couldn’t find any more room for more bad news if we tried. A conga-line of delays and cancellations, it’s likely that several A-list artists postponed their album releases until next year. Others persevered and reaped the rewards of a captive audience, yet there was still room for dreck to drop into our laps. The disdain for the lacklustre never goes away, and a few special projects this year manage to flop embarrassingly.
To place a few parameters on this list, I never actively looked for bad music this year. Of course whatever the Black Eyed Peas were going to drop would smell like soggy bin juice, so I didn’t even entertain the idea that it wouldn’t be. In a sense, this would be better suited as ‘the biggest disappointments of the year’, but these records are still highly worthy of scorn.
A$AP Mob’s party machine Ferg used to be unequivocal, defiant in his hyped-up, hound dog-like tenacity. Steamers like ‘Plain Jane’ and ‘Shabba’ were some of the most essential party-rap tracks of the last decade, and after the disappointingly trend-hopping Always Strive and Prosper, his 2019 EP Floor Seats looked to switch back to that raw carnage. Its widescreen sequel, however, is bereft of spirit. Instead, you can find Ferg on a royalty-free drill beat with Lil Wayne, or trotting out tired performances with MadeinTYO.
Omar Apollo has made quite the name for himself in the absence of Frank Ocean, and part of me thinks that may just be the reason why. In a post-Blonde world, the floodgates opened for sensitive alternative R&B, and Apolonio is the asinine tipping point of that trend. The fusion of guitar and mellow trap drums has never sounded so uninspired, with drab hooks and lyrics that itch like an irritable tic that only gets worse the more you scratch. Apollo has made many friends very quickly if his collaborations are anything to go by, but based on the quality of his solo work, he’s an aching nobody.
Nick Hakim’s first album Green Twins was a stellar debut, but his 2020 release Will This Make Me Good sadly ends up as a cautionary tale on placing indulgence for aesthetics far, far before simplicity. Many of these songs are good at their core, and it’s clear to see how this was supposed to be a leap forward in psychedelics, but the effects, distortion and mixing are handled with all the subtlety and appropriateness of an erotic cake at a children’s birthday party. While there are great individual moments (‘QADIR’ being one of them), other tracks like the turbulent ‘WTMMG’ or the ear-splitting ‘DRUM THING’ are prime examples of Hakim’s instance on being obtuse weighing down a batch of potentially great songs. The record simmers down for the last quarter, but by then he’s working with the sketchiest of ideas. Hopefully, there’s a live or acoustic version released in the future, one that strips all the fuss back.
What makes a catastrophe out of The 1975’s Notes on a Conditional Form is its utter scale. Standing tall at 22 songs, the record is a total 80 minutes that attempts to piece together frontman Matty Healy’s complex and erratic mind. Even from the rollout, no album has forecasted such a clear bombsite mess, from the constant delays to ever-changing artwork. It calls to mind Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo in every regard, but at least Kanye made the breakdown of a man fun. Asking The 1975 to create a fun and interesting pop album in 2020 is like asking MC Escher what a staircase looks like.
An ode to the hubris of the modern artist, the journey is abhorrently scattered - 5 songs in, you’ll have encountered two interludes, a spoken-word intro, a screamo-punk track and garage-fusion cut. It would be less embarrassing if the album’s sequencing was delegated to the shuffle button. The insistence on variety produces an unpredictable mishmash of weak tribute, each new sound eliciting another eye roll as the band uses these styles like one would a movie reference, just a single idea to point out that they’re oh-so knowledgeable. It’s transparent in how they play dress-up as avant-garde artists throughout, or during the beyond-parody country diversion, which feels like the sonic equivalent of donning a straw hat, denim dungarees and a Texas accent for a fancy dress party. We’ve reached peak 1975, to a level in which every song is unbearably one-note once the adjustment to whatever new genre they cling onto kicks in. Healy is a caricature of himself on Notes, and when they reach their classic pop-rock sound on ‘Me & You Together Song’ and ‘If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)’, it ends up feeling like another pastiche they’re emulating. They’ve lost even themselves here.
PS - Shoutout to all the reviews that had to fight for compliments to give this album, every one mentions something along the lines of “at least it sounds good, it’s produced exceptionally”. Suicide Squad was also produced exceptionally but didn’t stop it from being a trainwreck.
Griselda is one of the biggest names in underground rap right now, and to find reason and logic behind this is next to impossible. The label is the conglomerate for Buffalo, New York rappers Benny the Butcher, Conway the Machine and Westside Gunn, between them unloading five projects in 2020, each one more boring and lethargic than the last. The most offensive one was Gunn’s big welcome, Pray For Paris, a record that solidifies their at-best sleepy, at-worst headache-inducing style. We’re talking obnoxious, meme-worthy ad-libs, lifeless beats and bars so frustratingly basic, it’s a mystery how anyone can feel like a gangster listening to this without a tremendously soft head. So many cuts seek to go beyond this threshold though, such as the horrid hell-crooning of ‘French Toast’. ‘327’ also suffers; to have both Joey Bada$$ and Tyler, the Creator on the same track is as self-fulfilling as a cow that shits beef burgers, but the end product is unforgivably lean, yet this isn’t even the most inexcusable point on the album. That dubious honour goes to ‘Allah Sent Me’, standing at nearly-five tortuous minutes, and sporting a hook more grating than a warehouse shop full of fire alarms taped to the microphone. Honestly, this was supposed to be in The 1975’s spot, but at the last minute, it seemed right to call it ‘the worst album of the year’ way more. There’s not a face mask in the world strong enough to go near this safely.