Pitchfork's Best Electronic Albums of 2020. Still, without question, it’s Garcia’s performances and curatorial instincts that make this such a powerful statement of self. U.S. Somewhere in these melodic tantrums, drudgery becomes liberation. –Jillian Mapes, © 2021 Condé Nast. 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. Rosenstock surveys the debris, which doesn’t add up to much. Pitchfork was the only publication to have included the album on a 2007 end-of-the-year list, while over sixteen popular publications included the re-release on their 2008 lists. Twentieth-century listeners imagined the music of the next millennium as a harsh, mechanistic grind or a frenzy of twitchy glitches. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Your California Privacy Rights. Róisín Murphy: Róisín Machine 16. If nothing else, Bob Dylan’s 39th studio album should forever put to rest the idea that the storied songwriter is losing his voice. –Quinn Moreland, Like the modern conditions it reflects, No Home’s music holds unavoidable ugliness: Each song is an anxious, staticky shudder. Killer Mike’s verse on “walking in the snow” offers a particularly stop-you-in-your-tracks moment, as he raps, “And you so numb, you watch the cops choke out a man like me/Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, ‘I can’t breathe.’” Alongside production that subtly expands the Run the Jewels sound, the duo offer more insight into the modern American psyche than any cable news pundit could hope to muster. Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2020 wrap-up coverage here. Eventually, they were shared on Instagram by Gibbs himself, completing an utterly contemporary loop of art and life. –Jillian Mapes, New Orleans electro-punks Special Interest see catharsis in demolition. What’s Your Pleasure’s adrenalizing disco, electro-funk, and deep house are indebted to the pulsing eclecticism of defunct queer nightclubs like the Paradise Garage and the Saint: The title track recalls New Order’s early ’80s cyborg funk, while “Read My Lips” pays homage to R&B group Full Force’s muscular rhythm tracks of the same decade, and the sparkling arpeggios of “Save a Kiss” evoke Robyn’s yearning 21st-century electro-pop. We count down to number one, with entries from Soccer Mommy, Run The Jewels, HAIM and Moses Sumney . The music expresses the joy of wildness, with fast and burly songs set off by handclaps and harmonica solos. “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. –Jeremy D. Larson, The internet has plenty of playlists full of pillowy background noise, built for tuning out while you dig into the task at hand. One minute, he is at peace, nearly succumbing to whatever comes next; the next, he is spoiling for a fight, ready to wrestle death to the mat one last time. Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2020 wrap-up coverage here. leader’s latest solo album, a collection of pure pop melodies smuggled into strident, feisty punk songs. 1. Release Date: Feb 5, 2021. The final addendum came in June: the protest anthem “The Bigger Picture” is a jarring inclusion on an album that isn’t overtly political—and that also makes it perfect. But they’re also jam-packed with sharp, critical observations about growing up with dual identities, the Orientalist gaze, and the trappings of femininity. 83. The entries are listed in alphabetical order, and include several releases that also appear in our overall list of the year’s best albums. And in the past decade, the rooms have become markedly more luxurious, with sophisti-pop saxophone, synths, and strings giving new plushness to his formerly sparse songs. “If this is all that we get, so be it,” Kempf insists, a bit of wistful resignation that doubles as a mission statement for their proudly stripped-down approach. (a totally deserving choice) I feel like if the current Pitchfork and their staff re-did that list that song would be at like #63 and instead #1 would be like Backstreet Boys or Mariah Carey or Tupac. Highest of the Month. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Songwriter and bandleader Meg Remy reckons with alienation and injustice, drawing on a palette of pop, rock, and experimental sounds to convey the anxiety of the era. Within these entrancing soundscapes, stray ruminations float to the surface. Traditional structures melt into long vamps, as on the tormented psychedelic ballad “Kerosene!,” which distills the album’s beguiling agony. A married mom in her mid-30s, Ware is still able to capture one of nightlife’s great gifts—the exhilarating thrill of being single, looking out onto a packed dancefloor, and seeing the possibility of magnetic attraction. 08 December 2020 Pitchfork: The 50 Best Albums of 2020 [see also 2010s, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011] Fiona Apple — Fetch the Bolt Cutters; Waxahatchee — Saint Cloud; Moses Sumney — Græ; Phoebe Bridgers — Punisher; Perfume Genius — Set My Heart on Fire Immediately; Bob Dylan — Rough … 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. Girls on the Absurdist Meme, Anti-Colonial History, and Soul Records That Inspired, Phil Elverum on the Song He Wishes He Wrote, A Day in the Life of Bad Bunny, Introverted Superstar, Jessie Ware Explains Why This Smoldering Alicia Keys Ballad Is Her Personal Anthem, Phoebe Bridgers on the 10 Things That Influenced, Moses Sumney Is Ready to Claim His Spotlight, Fiona Apple on How She Broke Free and Made the Album of the Year. 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. But bands persevered. October 2, 2020. But the album isn’t just a grievance. Traditional structures melt into long vamps, as on the tormented psychedelic ballad “Kerosene!,” which distills the album’s beguiling agony. It is the follow-up to their 2017 album Crack-Up and is the band's first release on Anti- Records.It is the band's second album since regrouping in 2016 … 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. 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. On their fourth album, Tumor is smoldering and romantic, expressing their appetite through squalling guitar solos, slinky basslines, and an ensemble of guest singers who match their lusty fervor beat for beat. The Sunlight Mound - Psychedelic Porn … Search query All Results. –Eric Torres. –Stephen M. Deusner, Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Bandcamp |  Spotify | Tidal, Recorded in secret in quarantine and unleashed upon the world with less than a day’s warning, folklore was the first Taylor Swift album untethered from the traditional expectations of a blockbuster release. The punk quartet mocks capitalism and the patriarchy across this 13-minute self-titled release, each brief song its own fierce declaration of autonomy. Language has been central to Angus Finlayson’s work in music. Live Forever argues that life is not some march toward a peak, but a closed loop—one that’s tighter if you’re Black. • 2020. Death and apocalypse lurk in every corner of Punisher—lightning flashes, sirens wail, a Giants fan gets killed at Dodger Stadium—and Bridgers shuffles through this ominous fog, still alive, still growing taller. Find all of those individual lists and 2020's consensus rankings inside. But rather than finding comfort in the anthropomorphic gesture, Grimes renders a bleak, if beautiful, portrait of nihilism. “I don’t owe you or you or you,” Summer growls at one point. A list of Pitchfork's best music of 2020. –Ross Scarano, Megan Thee Stallion’s official debut album is a triumphant joyride that more than fulfills the promise of its title. Pitchfork's Best Ambient Albums of 2020. –Chal Ravens, There was the ambient danger that El-P and Killer Mike would eventually begin to bore us with their roughneck brilliance—another bruising Run the Jewels album to add to the pile, is it? Heaven flirts with familiar rock motifs as often as it subverts them, morphing into something unrecognizable. And then: “You don’t get this persona for free.” Fucking Hell plays with the distorted abstraction of no wave, the destabilizing aggression of Suicide, the deadpan howl of Kim Gordon. Critic Score. “I have a gift, I’ve been told, for seeing what’s there,” she sings on “The Eye,” and her perspective has never sounded so clear. And check out all of our end-of-year wrap-up coverage here . Putting that lens to the side, his stories about the ease of embracing hate (“Solitude of Enoch”) and post-prison families (“Unto the Dust”) are just as gripping and vivid. The historical sweep of the music is equally broad, not simply focused on this-minute sounds but spanning decades of influences and collaborators—the latter ranging here from ancestral icon Youssou N’Dour to nineties legends like Timbaland and Diddy, to recent stars like Stormzy. 184 votes, 142 comments. “I have a gift, I’ve been told, for seeing what’s there,” she sings on “The Eye,” and her perspective has never sounded so clear. Across the hour-long odyssey, Uzi hops between kaleidoscopic new worlds: one where it sounds like he’s skipping across a Sega Genesis circuit board, another where he’s hosting an ethereal party alongside a turnt choir. 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. It’s furious music that dares you to feel the same way, and unleash a few screams—or bombs—of your own. Girls on the Absurdist Meme, Anti-Colonial History, and Soul Records That Inspired. All rights reserved. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission. 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. So as she thrashes between anti-capitalist bops and introspective anthems, Sawayama assumes the role of both pop diva and pop rebel, subverting expectations of what the genre could and should stand for. 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. Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2020 wrap-up coverage here . Amaarae: The Angel You Don’t Know 18. Garcia has worked with many other musicians in and around her city’s vibrant jazz scene over the last few years, and her collaborators on Source are crucial to its eclectic range of styles. Despite physical concerts and touring being thrust into futility, 2020 will still go down as a stellar year for music as acts like Taylor Swift and Fiona Apple made their mark with career-best projects. Release Date: Feb 5, 2021; 79. Melkbelly rarely stays in one place for long, whiplashing from one fractured groove to the next, always finding new ways to shift from quiet to explosive. Grimes once treated lyrics as meaningless sound, but here, she’s shockingly honest about the pain of posh isolation: “I’ll tie my feet to rocks and drown/You’ll miss me when I’m not around.” –Arielle Gordon, On Every Bad, Brighton indie rock four-piece Porridge Radio make a strong case for curative self-scrutiny. Lead vocalist and songwriter Dana Margolin is incisive in her observations, and she often points them inward. –Jazz Monroe, Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal, “My execution might be televised.” That line and others from Freddie Gibbs’ “Scottie Beam” appeared in black marker on handmade signs this summer, held aloft in cities across the country during what may have been the largest wave of civil-rights protests in American history. Like all of Touché Amoré’s best work, Lament has a therapeutic quality, sublimating even the knottiest emotions into glorious catharsis. One day after Pitchfork published their list of the top 100 songs of 2020, they've shared their list of the 50 best albums of the year. 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. But the best albums of 2020 proved that incredible new music will always make their way to our ears, even in the toughest of times. Over airy guitars on the somber “Pop Song,” she exposes her least flattering attributes: a rotten core, a bitter disposition. The vibe is calm and bittersweet, as Navy Blue sinks deep into the recesses of his mind. The title of the Brownsville rapper’s engrossing album frames his traumas as the product of his father’s sins cursing east Brooklyn’s soil. (All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. –Madison Bloom, Hannah Read can make a melody out of anything. Pitchfork's 50 Best Albums of 2020. Bartees Strange - Live Forever. Well, yes. Hopefully, like Chloe x Halle, we reemerge into the real world, elegantly transformed by what happened in the wee hours of the morning. –Paul A. Thompson, For years, Matmos’ Drew Daniel used his solo project the Soft Pink Truth to join his disparate interests, reimagining punk classics and black metal as squirrelly glitch techno. On Have We Met, the Vancouver-based Destroyer maestro slips into another velvet interior, only to find it's a sort of Black Lodge. Synth stabs that at first seem uniform take on entirely new shapes with every repetition. In turn, each twinkling note relays the bittersweet tranquility of memories gone by. Fourth album The Slow Rush pushes the approach even further, towards canons previously unexplored. So she built one via her fourth album, how i’m feeling now. Rather than muddling her meaning, this single instrument’s ambiguity—of feeling, timbre, gender, even species—suggests a state of perpetual transformation. With Slowdive’s Neil Halstead in the producer’s chair, the Los Angeles harpist swells her gentle ambience with a more strident sound but remains as transporting as … –Mehan Jayasuriya, There is no greater proof of the universe’s cruelty than embarking on a long, clarifying hike, then receiving an email about a 20%-off sale at Macys to interrupt your peace of mind. The record effortlessly weaves between reggae, cumbia, Ethio-jazz, and more, containing wild energy and profound chill. He sounds possessed here, supercharged by something supernatural—even when he’s just shouting a luxury brand’s name into the ether 15 times in a row. Prior to his death, he … 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. Songwriter and bandleader Meg Remy reckons with alienation and injustice, drawing on a palette of pop, rock, and experimental sounds to convey the anxiety of the era. Ungodly Hour is a collection of low-key tracks that demonstrated true mastery of their intricate harmonies over slinky, charismatic production. The fact that Melee conjures a year so different from the one we got is part of why it leaves such a mark: The histrionics of emo aren’t just dramatic, they’re now science fiction. Dream-sequence strings float atop dissonant shudders; Sumney’s voice transfigures mid-run like a stage trick, his falsetto a sudden flapping dove; he sings about being between polarities of desire and identity as if to lay claim to both at the same time. Home; News; Reviews; Best … Fetch the Bolt Cutters is the sound of someone freeing themself from a mental prison built by others but unknowingly reinforced by the self. Mary Lattimore - Silver Ladders. Top 50 Albums Release Date: Feb 5, 2021. 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. They are mostly untitled, proceed according to a single tempo across the whole album, and feature a drastically limited instrumental palette. 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. On standout track “THC,” the band slowly cranks up the tension until it erupts into an onslaught of guitar fuzz. The album is always enchanting and full of small surprises: the particularly cartoonish warble of a synth on “Sayonara,” the intimate binaural hums on the meandering “Marafon 15,” the burst of laughter answering the lure of a saxophone on the cosmos-traversing “Plans.” New details peek out on every listen, like elements of wonder waiting to be discovered. 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. 关注. Ambient. Infinite worlds are contained within the threads of that teal yogurt shop shirt and that infamous cardigan, carving a path for the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe to expand ever onward. As befits an artist obsessed with being a superhero, Burna Boy’s music is thoroughly posthuman: much of its succulence comes from how the singer’s lilting cadences mesh with Auto-Tune. The album was preceded by the singles "Murder Most Foul", "I … With Saint Cloud, Crutchfield’s fifth album as Waxahatchee, she climbs to solid ground, emerging from the storm self-assured. His songs can be layered and minimal, lingual and graphic, natural and mechanical—all coming together in a work that both registers the omnipotence of imperial history and documents an ongoing restoration process. largest wave of civil-rights protests in American history. After a decade as one of the most revered bands in their genre, the L.A. group recorded Lament with heavy music legend Ross Robinson and an abundance of songwriting ambition. 7.4. by Sheldon Pearce. Close friends and peers contributed voice, reeds, percussion, and piano; the album’s nine tracks shift from airy drones to richly rendered deep house, from lyrical etudes to propulsive classical minimalism. 281k members in the popheads community. –Madison Bloom, From “Gold Soundz”-era Pavement to his last two decades solo and with the Jicks, Stephen Malkmus has written songs like jokes you laugh at before you’re sure you get them—sometimes before you’re even sure they’re jokes. Alfredo, the dexterous 38-year-old MC’s collaboration with beloved producer the Alchemist, is by turns heavy and light—his “Beam” verse ends with a rude kiss off to an ex in the form of Jordan-Pippen wordplay: “without me the bitch wouldn’t have got a ring.” More than a time capsule, Alfredo is an unruly feast of language. –Madison Bloom, Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Bandcamp |  Spotify | Tidal, Before Se So Neon settled on Nonadaptation as the English title of its second EP (비적응 in the original Korean), frontwoman Hwang So-yoon referred to it as Maladaptive. He isn’t pining for the good old days; he is reacclimating himself in the present, poking holes in the very idea of nostalgia and showing how memories live on. From albums … Despite physical concerts and touring being thrust into futility, 2020 will still go down as a stellar year for music as acts like Taylor Swift and Fiona Apple made their mark with career-best projects. 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. –Evan Minsker, Sophie Allison paints with the shades of a bruise on color theory. Songs to Yeet at the Sun brings all these qualities into focus in the space of an EP, packing an album’s worth of twists into 12 searing minutes. 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. From Chubby and the Gang’s debut to Bob Dylan’s comeback, Bartees Strange’s genre-bending to Country Westerns’ classicism, these were the rock albums we loved most this year.