Bartees Strange - Live Forever. The droll, phantom-like singer writes music for faithless burnouts who still want to believe: lost souls clinging to astrology and fucked-up intimacy, striving to get by in a brutal universe with no pre-ordained meaning. 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. Her howled words and the music’s occasionally sharp edges are both caustic and restorative forces. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission. 281k members in the popheads community. Getting to the precise meaning in English, she explained in an interview, required “some Korean etymology stuff”: “There are two different ways to say [‘Maladaptive’] in Korean. 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. The results are consistently stunning, from the barn-burning opener “Come Heroine,” to the masterful heel-turn of “Limelight,” which lands somewhere between a Cranberries anthem and a campfire sing-along. 10 reviews. –Amy Phillips, Historically, there are two trajectories from sweetie childhood star to flawed adult: the bumpy one full of high-profile foibles or the one where they wind up as robots. –Marc Hogan, Ironically, Kevin Parker became one of today’s most influential rock stars by sidelining the scruffy guitar riffs of early Tame Impala records. With this intimate hospice of a record, Allison gave us both. –Dani Blum, Cut off from her usual muses—her crew and the club—Charli XCX needed a different kind of community space to inspire her this year. October 2, 2020. For their exquisite follow-up Flower of Devotion, Dehd upgraded to a proper studio, refining their gritty alchemy without scrubbing it too clean. –Alphonse Pierre. Heaven to a Tortured Mind balances listeners on that knife point, declaring Tumor’s rock-star bona fides with roguish style. There’s no doubt it has suffered in the era of coronavirus. –Eric Torres. –Marc Hogan, 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. –Quinn Moreland, Fifteen years ago, on the title track to Extraordinary Machine, Fiona Apple declared, “I still only travel by foot, and by foot, it’s a slow climb.” She worked her way up to the clear heights of Fetch the Bolt Cutters over the course of the last half-decade or so, largely at her L.A. home alongside trusted bandmates and friends and a small shelter’s worth of barking dogs. She sings like no one else in indie rock, as though she is guided by a golden energy from within. In February, it was a memorable yet conventional 20-track Atlanta rap album. Ungodly Hour is a collection of low-key tracks that demonstrated true mastery of their intricate harmonies over slinky, charismatic production. They make frequent diversions from their fast and chaotic signature sound, including the noise-rap sex jam “2K,” which arrives unexpectedly in the middle of the EP. largest wave of civil-rights protests in American history. Rosenstock surveys the debris, which doesn’t add up to much. Alfredo is a collaborative studio album by American rapper Freddie Gibbs and American hip hop producer The Alchemist.It was released on May 29, 2020, through Gibbs' own record label ESGN Records, as well as ALC Records and Empire Distribution.. Consider the load sufficiently lightened; on she climbs. To the casual listener, Beatrice Dillon’s avant electronic tracks might seem austere. Good Woman - The Staves. “Last Man Standing” describes a musician packing up his instrument alone onstage at the end of the night, a poignant metaphor for the twilight of a performer’s career. “Inside myself is where I belong.” –Quinn Moreland, Shopping crafts dancefloor bops that make railing against consumerist capitalism sound like fun. III. Traditional structures melt into long vamps, as on the tormented psychedelic ballad “Kerosene!,” which distills the album’s beguiling agony. Highest of the Month. She buoys her bleak lyrics with the bright melodies and buzzing guitars that soundtracked Beavis and Butt-Head’s bickering on MTV in the ’90s. In between, the Mount Moriah vocalist gives a breakthrough performance as a bandleader, using her searing voice and imagistic songwriting to set a dusky, autumnal mood. –Philip Sherburne, Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify, “Genres keep us in our boxes,” Bartees Strange sing-raps on “Mossblerd,” a song that sounds like it’s falling apart even as he’s putting it together. But he’s anything but dreary in his delivery, using loud guitars, louder drums, and his own brash and unwieldy voice to set scenes of filthy rental cars and beer-can pyramids. The Microphones: Microphones in 2020 … It makes sense that the album gave them their biggest hit, the highly boppable “Do It.” While it feels like the duo shot up overnight and out of sight, their rise parallels the way the world has been living this year: inward and on an insomniac’s circadian rhythm. –NM Mashurov, Rina Sawayama’s debut album is unafraid to present all of her paradoxes. Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2020 wrap-up coverage here. They’d been playing together informally for awhile, and they decided to make an album only after some encouragement from the late David Berman, who’d witnessed Plunkett and Kotzur’s earliest practices as a duo. –Jillian Mapes, Lucinda Williams drew on a new but all-too-familiar well of inspiration for her 14th studio album: the anger and frustration she felt over the poisonous turn of recent American politics. Her songwriting may be more openly topical than usual, but her sound hasn’t changed much. Amidst the neverending whirlwind of 2020, it was tempting to crawl into a cocoon of nostalgic favorites and never come out. But bands persevered. –Olivia Horn, Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal, Quality Control / Wolfpack Global / Motown / Capitol, It’s taken time for Lil Baby’s My Turn to grow into the beautiful, sprawling mess that it is. –Jenn Pelly, 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. Above is Metacritic's list of the 40 best-reviewed albums of 2020, ranked by Metascore. –Sam Sodomsky, 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. Their first album in seven years is their most finely honed, though it is still rumpled in all the right places. –Marc Hogan, Phoebe Bridgers will tweet about eating ass with one hand and crush your heart with the other. With Saint Cloud, Crutchfield’s fifth album as Waxahatchee, she climbs to solid ground, emerging from the storm self-assured. 7.4. by Sheldon Pearce. When he does allow himself some of the stereotypical earnestness of the folk-singer mode, on the moving and tender “What Kind of Person,” it’s with the deft misdirection of a veteran magician. The most revelatory sound Haim make room for on Women in Music Pt. Deradoorian is quietly self-possessed, nearly beatific, in her movements through these environs, distinguishing herself with a rare quality among her psychedelic cohort: restraint. Skip to content . And check out all of our end-of-year wrap-up coverage here . Over the next month, we'll be collecting year-end top 10 album lists from over 200 music critics, publications, record stores, and other sources. Live Forever argues that life is not some march toward a peak, but a closed loop—one that’s tighter if you’re Black. These instrumentals lend a “sense of comic relief,” Allison says, “like when you joke with your friend about your unhealthy habits.” In a year when hundreds of thousands of Americans perished, we needed friends desperately—someone to make us laugh, and someone to sit with us at shiva. In the warm thrum of “Describe,” the oceanic splash of “Without You,” and the barnstorming buildup of “Some Dream,” Set My Heart on Fire Immediately throws open doors to the dusty rooms where we’ve all been lurking inside ourselves. Bullet casings fall to the floor on opener “Nonbinary,” but Arca isn’t under attack: “I do what I wanna do when I wanna do it,” she deadpans, and then proceeds to prove it by remaking herself with each track. Never before has eating cereal sounded like such a riot. There is almost no reverb. The harpist’s ambient compositions are somber but whimsical, submerging her careful plucks in murky pools of reverb and synth. 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. 070 Shake’s captivating feature on “Ghost Town,” off Kanye West’s ye, was easily the best part of that bedeviled album.Now, after a … She buoys her bleak lyrics with the bright melodies and buzzing guitars that soundtracked Beavis and Butt-Head’s bickering on MTV in the ’90s. –Stephen M. Deusner, Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal, The opening track of Ben Seretan’s Youth Pastoral builds from a gentle flutter of flutes and fingerpicked guitar into increasingly knotty layers, bursting with exuberance as Seretan sings about feeling “free to be.” In the eight songs that follow, the New York-via-California singer-songwriter reckons with the Christian faith of his childhood and the growing pains of leaving the church. Across the record, the rapper uses singular rhythms and invented syntax to imagine his jewelry eliciting gasps from the juror box, chide police for snooping through his DMs, and laugh along with the inmates nodding their heads to his phone calls. You air-drum the little hitch in “Fox” again and again across your steering wheel; you throw your chest forward in your home-office at all the perfectly executed half-time breakdowns; you do isometric lunges while Stoitsiadis sings about disintegrating. Much like Sufjan Stevens in the songs of Carrie & Lowell, Allison ventures into the tundra of her despair and emerges with an unsparing and unsentimental account of survival. “You girls mean business,” he bellows to two “fleet-footed guides from the underworld” on the swaggering “False Prophet.” “And I do too.” –Andy Cush, In a year of isolation and unattainable intimacies, Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas is our poet laureate of constant longing. III is themselves. It’s both the country album she was destined to make and an acknowledgment that self-acceptance is hard-won; Saint Cloud reckons with addiction, sobriety, imperfect romance, trauma, and trying to navigate it all. No artist wants to be pigeonholed, but for Strange this resistance is crucial to the art he makes as a Black man working in a field most associated with white dudes. • 2020. The droll, phantom-like singer writes music for faithless burnouts who still want to believe: lost souls clinging to astrology and fucked-up intimacy, striving to get by in a brutal universe with no pre-ordained meaning. 80. Have We Met leaves you to wonder: Is Bejar the cagey proprietor of this dream world or the disoriented guest? Standout track “On My Own” is a huge, glittery anthem, and one of the most immediate songs in his catalog. As on 2017’s No Shape, producer Blake Mills reveals the music with startling clarity and subtlety, bringing out lifelike strings and trembling synths through sound design as much as conventional production. Frontperson Alli Logout’s jagged vocals dissect poverty, love, and commodified dissent, making The Passion Of the rare contemporary punk album that is actually as revolutionary as it sets out to be. By now, Drakeo has been released from jail, making GTL a testament to resourcefulness that will hopefully remain an anomaly in his catalog. Artists like Soccer Mommy and Porridge Radio expressed a distinctly 2020 sense of isolation in prescient albums recorded before the … Shore is the fourth studio album by American folk band Fleet Foxes.It was announced one day in advance of its release, and was intentionally released exactly at the autumnal equinox on September 22, 2020. Her mother’s terminal illness and her own struggles with depression appear in a wintry synesthesia of yellow, blue, and gray. “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, 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. The old world that Dogleg wrote about sucks in its own way, but it’s the world they deserve. Now, Crutchfield gazes into the mirror and doesn’t shy away from the reflection. But the raw energy of Apple’s voice is the album’s life force, and there’s no mistaking the subjects of her missives—be it the men who refuse to recognize their abusive behavior; the women who, like Apple, were conditioned to compete with other women; the mean girls and those who called their bullshit; the users and the silencers; the people she fears will leave her. Pierce Jordan’s screamed vocals are often nearly unintelligible, but the lyric sheet reveals incisive observations about money, power, and race in America. On his first collection of original material in eight years, he sounds unusually attuned to the suggestive power of his craggy instrument, using small changes of inflection to convey wry self-mockery, roaring prowess, and a certain uneasy nostalgia. It is a testament to Dylan’s spectral presence as a singer, and the sympathy of his accompanists, that the uptempo tunes often seem as misty and elusive as the slow ones. Heaven to a Tortured Mind balances listeners on that knife point, declaring Tumor’s rock-star bona fides with roguish style.