From Taylor Swift’s Folklore to Phoebe Bridgers’s Punisher, these are the best album of 2020 give us power to go through the chaotic moments.
2020 has been an incredible challenge year for the music world. Luckily, in this hard year, we still had the best album of 2020 with high-quality released to prove that even in the severe adversity, artist and the music industry will not surrender.
Phoebe Bridgers – Punisher
After Phoebe Bridgers released 2018’s Boygenius with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker and 2019’s Better Oblivion Community Center with Conor Oberst, the anticipation was high for the indie singer-songwriter’s second full-length album. She delivered more, and then some. Every track sparks an emotional charge, as her sharp songwriting spins tales of nautical-themed birthday parties (“Moon Song”), shedding crocodile tears in a car (“Savior Complex”), and feeling, well, nothing (“Chinese Satellite”). Only Bridgers would place a stunning folk song like “Graceland Too” next to the epic Wizard of Oz tornado that is “I Know the End,” but that kind of mad genius energy is her hallmark.
Album Link:
https://open.spotify.com/album/2xECuqnvvmVktV7UO8Dd3s?si=fj9ExzQoT8-dg2uwqK1Dqw
Jessie Ware – What’s Your Pleasure
This fantastic dance-pop record came out when none of us could make it to the club, but no matter — that’s what bedrooms are for. On her fourth album, the London singer cranked up the Studio 54 glamour while making sure everyone would be permitted beyond the velvet rope. The first three tracks alone act like a suite best heard late at night, one disco-ball stunner after another: the lovestruck “Spotlight,” the synth-heavy title track, and the highly enjoyable “Ooh La La,” which kicks off with a car honking. If there’s anything we want for album of year 2020 in 2021, it’s for Ware to release this gem on gold vinyl.
Album Link:
https://open.spotify.com/album/1CTm3ARqDETSm7GfvNYNJp?si=6G7bs6lwQPiYiaVxRY7ffw
Lil Uzi Vert – Eternal Atake
The Philadelphia rapper’s hugely anticipated second LP is shattering one moment and slippery the next, a place where a jarringly saccharine sample of the Backstreet Boys’ 1999 hit “I Want It That Way” coexists with a jittery track built around the music from Microsoft Windows’ videogame Space Cadet 3D Pinball. Few artists can match Lil Uzi Vert’s steamrolling force — “Homecoming” channels the skeletal pugnacity of late-Eighties hip-hop, and “Lo Mein” has all the frills of a battering ram. Impressively, the rapper brings the same brick-through-the-window energy to ballads like “I’m Sorry,” a contrite track that apologizes for “everything I ever said.”
Album link:
https://open.spotify.com/album/7IyoGB8J31fvQDwGtHAq9m?si=–Dhin68Re6jBEMpnXXT_g
Waxahatchee – Saint Cloud
Run the Jewels – RTJ4
Run the Jewels have long been Public Enemy’s heirs apparent, making deft jams out of left-leaning politics, zany tangents, and iconoclastic hip-hop production. But the connection has never been more evident than on RTJ4, released at the height of the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd. In between sharp rhymes about disadvantaged black youth and racist cops (“Walking in the Snow”) and “silly guys” like Trump on Twitter (“Goonies vs. E.T.”), Killer Mike and El-P crafted a soundtrack for a revolution. On nearly every track, the duo speak perfectly to the most turbulent year in living memory, reassuring listeners along the way that if they can make it, you can too.
Album link:
https://open.spotify.com/album/6cx4GVNs03Pu4ZczRnWiLd?si=56mR0mXrQiyMPpQ0cowrYg
Dua Lipa – Future Nostalgia
Lipa’s second album would have been a magnificent disco trip, even in the best of all possible years. But Future Nostalgia was crucial for a year when these beats were as close to the club as fans could get. It’s a rush of uptempo dance glitz, with Lipa twirling the night away in the stilettos of queens like Madonna (“Hallucinate”) or Gloria Gaynor (“Don’t Start Now”) or Olivia Newton-John (“Physical”). “Baby, keep on dancing like you ain’t got a choice,” she commands in “Physical,” and as long as Future Nostalgia keeps playing, you can’t even imagine slowing down.
Album link:
https://open.spotify.com/album/7fJJK56U9fHixgO0HQkhtI?si=po1xby5VR-WH8PDLAQiI9Q
Bob Dylan – Rough and Rowdy Ways
When Dylan returned from the shadow realms this year, nearly a decade had gone by since his last album of original songs (2012’s cantankerous Tempest). During that time, he’d crooned some sweet pop nothings, won a Nobel Prize, and sharpened his blade. Rough and Rowdy Ways is a lyrical tour-de-force, teeming with outrageous jokes (“My Own Version of You”), playful boasts (“I Contain Multitudes”), and irreverent tributes to the greats who came before him (“Goodbye Jimmy Reed”). He’s haunted by the ghosts of the 20th century and hopped up on the absurdity of surviving into the 21st. Underneath it all, there’s a sense of melancholy that peaks on the sublime end-of-the-road ballad “Key West.” Stunners in themselves, these songs add up to Dylan’s funniest, most surprising, and most multidimensional album since Love and Theft.
Album link:
https://open.spotify.com/album/1Qht64MPvWTWa0aMsqxegB?si=41rEmYFVQWGr_lrBLmME9Q
Bad Bunny – YHLQMDLG
Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana is both more varied and more focused than Bad Bunny’s excellent 2018 debut album, X 100pre, with reckless stylistic shifts — the many-songs-in-one “Safaera,” the hard-rock swerve on “Hablamos Mañana” — next to some of his sharpest, most insistent hits. “La Santa” merges a handsome, elegiac melody, Bad Bunny’s shout-at-the-heavens vocals, and a stern, clipped reggaeton beat to great effect, while the star coaxes the seldom-heard reggaeton veteran Yaviah into delivering a spine-stiffening verse on “Bichiyal.” Bad Bunny released two more albums in 2020, but neither outdid YHLQMDLG‘s relentless firepower.
Album link:
https://open.spotify.com/album/5lJqux7orBlA1QzyiBGti1?si=F45ZjMhkRkaanPd3KgufLg
Fiona Apple – Fetch the Bolt Cutter
Fiona Apple has always thrived on defying expectations, from telling pop stans that the world was bullshit to taking years (and years) to perfect her alt-rock operettas. But no one could have expected the audacity of Fetch the Bolt Cutters or the way Apple expresses her independent spirit over an orchestra of drums, percussion, barks, and meows. She leaps ahead of the “VIPs, PYTs, and wannabes” on the title track (“I’ve always been too smart for that”), seeks friendship with a woman dating her ex (“Ladies”), and reflects on how one person telling her she had potential was the spark she needed as a kid (“Shameika”). When she sings, “Kick me under the table all you want, I won’t shut up,” on “Under the Table,” she means it, because this is potential fulfilled.
Album link:
https://open.spotify.com/album/0fO1KemWL2uCCQmM22iKlj?si=IkYp4xl4TpGkDl6emKNA_g
Taylor Swift – Folklore
It’s not a stretch to say that Taylor Swift’s Folklore may go down in history as the definitive quarantine album, and not just because of the record’s homespun, folksy presentation. Without the pressure of having to write radio hits or build up her usual prolonged album-release schedule — full of music videos, Easter eggs, and Good Morning America performances — Swift shed the über-pop trappings of her previous album, Lover, for a project that put her once-in-a-generation songwriting talent front and center. Regardless of what you think of the album’s “indie” cred, with contributions from the National’s Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Folklore’s 16 tales of lost love, coming-of-age, and redemption provided us with solace and catharsis just when we needed it most. Songs like “August” and “Mirrorball” will persevere long after this pandemic is over — and so, evidently, will Taylor Swift.
Album link:
https://open.spotify.com/album/2fenSS68JI1h4Fo296JfGr?si=rs7J4BdtRFulMdvT-2GMJA
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