Spillage Village is the spiritual inheritance of that era's most valuable prayers. The 56-minute album plays like a mixtape, moving from track to track with an urgent, yet free-flowing momentum. Many voices, with many stories to tell. He tries to summon a moral compass and enough faith to overcome wholesale confusion, lies and fear. It wasn't until the grim statistics of the pandemic began piling up that the Totentanz (Dance of Death) came knocking. (Read the profile; hear the Popcast.). Post Malone, The Weeknd & More Early Front-Runners for Album of the Year at the 2021 Grammys Perhaps you want a rap album like Lil Uzi Vert 's ⦠—Stephen Thompson, "Welcome to Miss Colombia: quinceañera," Lido Pimienta announces as an introduction to her Tiny Desk (home) concert. Bob Dylan: âRough and Rowdy Waysâ On his 39th studio album, the 79 year old Dylan conjures a sense of dark vaudeville â dreamscape songs of mortality, love and broken faith. Over several years, she'd invited a small inventive band into her home to bang on walls and pots and her dead dog's bones. “Folklore” isn’t a perfect album (though to be fair, neither was “Red”), nor is it Swift’s best (which is “Red”), but its focus on craft and emotional world-building feels like a perfect move for her right now — an eternally sharp songwriter returning to the whetstone. —Jewly Hight (WNXP 91.ONE), Few make rapping sound as purely fun as Lil Uzi Vert. Sometimes art breaks through. It's an album steeped in nostalgia for the garage-party-perreo of the early-aughts, but with a modernity that forecasts a bright future for urbano — even one that may find Bad Bunny (if you believe the album title) permanently tapping out. Apple doesn’t forget or forgive; she just moves ahead. Weird tics and rashes shook the confidence of the casually healthy. What if the most innovative mainstream Nashville performer was also the most reverent of tradition? On “Mama, You Can Bet!,” she created the music by herself — playing or looping all the instruments, overdubbing her vocals in rich harmonies — yet somehow simulates the spontaneous interplay of a live jazz group. The Strokes, âThe New Abnormalâ. The anarcho-futurist comfort takers. (Read the review; hear the Popcast.). (Read the review. For a year that teetered much of the time on the verge of total shutdown, 2020 saw the release of a lot of very good music. YHLQMDLG is an homage to the reggaeton bangers that raised Bunny, complete with collabs from some of the greatest vets in the game, including Daddy Yankee, Ñengo Flow and Jowell & Randy. And they mutate as they go, mingling spoken words and melody and drawing at whim on rock, jazz, show tunes, choir harmonies, chants and cheers. Read this list. She fronts Beach Bunny, a Chicago band that toys with flickers of garage rock, pop-punk and indie rock. More ⦠What if careful, syllable-by-syllable songwriting held hands with clever concepts and intuitive, sticky melodies? ), The Nigerian songwriter Burna Boy calls his music Afro-fusion, not the more specifically Nigerian term Afrobeats, and “Twice as Tall” lives up to that broader mandate with a profusion of sleek, diverse, constantly inventive grooves that traverse Africa and its diaspora. “Heaven to a Tortured Mind,” the most straightforwardly tuneful album from the Knoxville, Tenn.-raised art-rocker, combines the glam sneer of Marc Bolan with the forward-thinking shape-shifting of Tricky, plus a bit of Yves Tumor’s own special sparkle. Sure, there are timely allusions to stir-crazy anxiety (“Anthems”) and video chatting (“in real life, could the club even handle us?” she wonders on the corrosive opener “Pink Diamond”), but these circumstances have also made Charli extra attuned to her emotions, lending the depth of genuine introspection to many of these songs. 1. A year of cancelled tour dates allowed Swift to make an album without having to consider the nosebleed seats. If you donât know Polo G, we suggest you correct the situation immediately. As she affirms on the tectonic "Eso Que Tu Haces," her work is a ceremony that names violence so that it can not call itself love. But even the emotional and aesthetic derring-do of her four previous albums could not prepare listeners for the shock of “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” an achievement of bracing intensity recorded over several years, mostly in the seclusion of her Los Angeles home. “The Steps” and “Gasoline” are stomping rockers worthy of vintage Sheryl Crow, “3 AM” recasts the Haim sisters as a sassy R&B girl group, the rootsy “I’ve Been Down” would have killed as an encore at Lilith Fair. (Read the review. With Underneath, the Pittsburgh juggernaut roared back with more of everything. ), “Grae” demands to be heard as a rhapsodic whole, a suite of songs and fragments continually dissolving and rematerializing around Moses Sumney’s otherworldly voice. Victory is not assured. Just like other artists, Bad Bunny ended up releasing multiple albums this year, showing that his genius truly has no end. Any time you try to lock her in to any one genre, narrative or state of being, you can already feel her eyeing her toolbox. Carried by these noisy grooves, Apple could say even more than she'd ever said before, about putting up with bad men, romantic abjection and self-abandonment; about being bullied by girls and being taught to hate other women; about living with depression and nearly dying from the hunger for love. Intensely personal work swelled into large-scale statements this year, and women often led the way, revealing scars left by different kinds of emotional and political skirmishes, and reinforcing that their voices must be heard. Bad Bunny glances at the past on “YHLQMDLG.”. 21 Savage and Metro Boomin, “Savage Mode II”; Benny the Butcher, “Burden of Proof”; Natanael Cano, “Trap Tumbado”; The Chicks, “Gaslighter”; City Girls, “City on Lock”; Code Orange, “Underneath”; Conway the Machine, “From King to a God”; Drake, “Dark Lane Demo Tapes”; Freddie Gibbs and the Alchemist, “Alfredo”; Ariana Grande, “Positions”; Hardy, “A Rock”; Haux, “Violence in a Quiet Mind”; Ian Isiah, “Auntie”; Junior H, “Atrapado en un Sueño”; King Von, “Levon James”; Lil Durk, “Just Cause Y’all Waited 2”; Lauren Mascitti, “God Made a Woman”; John Moreland, “LP5”; Jessie Reyez, “Before Love Came to Kill Us”; Dua Saleh, “Rosetta”; Sunday Service Choir, “Jesus Is Born”; Myke Towers, “Easy Money Baby”; Jessie Ware, “What’s Your Pleasure?”; Waxahatchee, “Saint Cloud”; The Weeknd, “After Hours”; Hailey Whitters, “The Dream”; YoungBoy Never Broke Again, “Top”. The songs switch off between stoic ballads and late-night roadhouse blues as he sings about history, legends, theology, art, gallows-humored paradoxes and, occasionally, his own cultural role. ), Pop Smoke, who was killed in February, was moving away from drill music toward a sound that was melodic but still gruff, long the winning formula for New York rappers with big dreams. The heaviness of the very need for the album is countered by an outpouring of motivational words and mantras. Graceful melodies, supple guitar syncopations, sophisticated harmonies and a voice that can sparkle with anticipation or cry out in pain capture all the hope and heartache of her narrative. (Read the round table; hear the Popcast. —Nate Chinen (WBGO), From the moment Bad Bunny's sophomore album begins, over a synthesized interpolation of bossa nova staple "The Girl From Ipanema," the Puerto Rican superstar leans heavily on past classics to breathe new life into Latin trap. The international symbol for the year 2020 was the surprise emoji. Her unexpected steps form a new path for any listener to follow toward self-awareness. Our annual list of favourite new albums is a reflection of the last 12 months within the Rough Trade community. On “Folklore” she is swathed in acoustic instruments and Minimalistic patterns within patterns. The songs traffic in abundant imagination — words and syllables are deconstructed and restacked to form breathless cadences that explode across beats as funky as they are futuristic. Lili Trifilio writes chirpy songs about awful sadness. Lili Trifilio’s voice unifies Beach Bunny’s songs. Throughout, Punisher is a rich, roiling stunner. Her record Out in the Storm, which we named one of the best albums of that year, displayed a whole new side of the singer. And less than two weeks after “SIGN” appeared, Autechre suddenly released another hour of music on the more aggressively disorienting “PLUS.” (Read the interview.). ), “Someday, I’m gonna look up from my phone and see my life,” Phoebe Bridgers vows wryly on “Garden Song.” A few tracks later, she tries it out and remains unimpressed: “I want to believe, instead I look to the sky and feel nothing.” But oh, the miracles she’s able to mine from the vast space between those two extremes: a memory of sneaking behind a truck’s wheel as a child; a heartfelt hallucination of a conversation with her musical hero Elliott Smith; a final, fearless stare into the face of the apocalypse. Sometimes it’s been bigger than his songs, but on this, his fourth album, the thrill is back. From his gusts of ruefulness during "High Horse" — about his father's death preventing a reckoning — to his elegant pining during the orchestrated pop tune "Old Blue Eyes" — for a companion he lost to shared addiction — and his terse but deeply felt desperation during the churning country-blues of "All the Trouble," his range as a personalized storyteller is riveting. Lil Uzi Vert’s “Eternal Atake” is a statement that could only have come from his unique creative mind. (Read the feature. Fiona Apple returned with “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” her first album since 2012. But the unifier is Trifilio’s voice: sweetly pleading, sweetly exasperated, sweetly resigned, sweetly vengeful. Fleet Foxes, Shore. Phalanxes of synthesizers, programmed beats and sturdy pop melodies fortify Sufjan Stevens and his gentle voice as he contemplates America in turmoil. (Read the interview; read the review. His second album, Eternal Atake, arrived on the heels of a nearly three-year label dispute, yet it still sounds unburdened. Her performance on the album is hale, unequivocally self-assured and she has an effortless hookup with her band, whether they're working in a horizon-scanning post-bop mode or hunkering down with dub rhythm. The best albums of 2020 include top albums from BTS, BLACKPINK, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande and more artists and singers. 2020 hasnât been an ideal year, but it still produced exemplary new albums, so check out our ranking of the yearâs best below. Perhaps a year of isolation made two particular kinds of albums more appealing: ones that were deeply steeped in the past, and ones that sounded like a person working on no one’s calendar but their own. Pimienta's subversion of pageantry is always accompanied by a deep sense of its costs. The 50 Best Albums Of 2020: 50-41 / 40-31 / 30-21 / 20-11 / 10-1 Can we make sense of layer upon layer of fear, anger, frustration, confusion, exhilaration and exhaustion that piled up like soil falling over our heads? The diligent duo that never rests. View Comments. Bookended by orchestral "transcriptions," Miss Colombia records the non-linear natures of healing and belonging as they inform the fluid edges of a self when nationality is constantly weaponized against Black and Indigenous womanhood. Green Day - Father Of All Motherfuckers. The puffed chests. ), Yves Tumor struts and slithers like the most famous rock star on an as-yet-undiscovered planet. The bitter, furious single he released soon after nonviolent anti-corruption protesters were killed by soldiers, “20 10 20,” made a compelling postscript. Pimienta's performance is often playful, and here, she is the emcee of her own quinceañera, a celebration she was never able to celebrate with her mother in her youth. 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