best album of the year

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. What if the most innovative mainstream Nashville performer was also the most reverent of tradition? A complex and macabre cantata, the 35-minute work stars the ghostly figure of death who dances, in turn, with all strata of society, from the pope on down to an innocent infant. 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. The whole album is a masterpiece. The agitators. Seamlessly shifting gears from flow to breathless flow, “Eternal Atake” is a breakneck joy ride through the cosmos of Uzi’s own brain. (Read the review. Like a distant planet unhurried in its orbit, Fiona Apple returns every seven or eight years to present whatever wisdom she’s gleaned from another trip around the sun. In fact, his intimate sharing about the warping of pivotal relationships in his life abounds in a thoroughly earthy kind of profundity. Really cool combination of different musical genres. The anarcho-futurist comfort takers. Here are the 50 best albums of a year unlike any we can remember. Music, that is. Now that it's mostly in our rear view, can a retrospective give a shape to that swarm of weeks and months? By weaving spoken-word interludes with fully developed songs, SAULT ensures listeners are feeling every possible level of the revolutionary messaging embedded in the project. —Tom Huizenga, When folk ask me what it was like covering Atlanta hip-hop in the last decade, it ain't the get-it-out-the-mud trap originators or the city's second-gen innovators that come to mind. Amazing piece of art! Victory is not assured. In its mission to cover the gamut of emotions that come with the Black experience in 2020, SAULT runs wild sonically; in some places, you'll find lo-fi hip-hop ("Stop Dem"), in others, moving soul ("Wildfires") or spaced-out electro funk ("Bow"). ), On “Folklore,” Taylor Swift puts away childish things like pure pop clarity and scoring easy points. Dancing nimbly between complex, jazzlike arrangements and the crude beauty of playground chants, Apple narrates a vivid journey about confronting and finally transcending past trauma — the schoolyard bullies of “Shameika”; the music-industry gaslighting described on the title track; the sexual assault addressed so searingly on the unforgettable “Newspaper” and “For Her.” Apple’s voice is a muscular instrument, heaving and surging under the weight of all she’s excavating before fluttering away, light as a butterfly. —Isabella Gomez Sarmiento, This extraordinary album, which features the Boston Symphony Orchestra in debut recordings of an effervescent piano concerto and a dark, massive work for voices and orchestra, represents for me, the joy and horror of its late February release date. However, it has certainly underlined the importance of music and the role it has to play to unite us, heal us and make the hard times more bearable. Asbury Park Press. (Read the interview; read the review. The 50 best albums of 2020. ), Mortality looms on “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” but it only makes Bob Dylan, 79, more ornery. —Stefanie Fernández. But he has never been the thing he is in fact best suited to, which is a singer of dewy R&B. The general tone is thoughtful and consonant but with jittery undercurrents, fitting for a year of quarantine. Best Song: âAll Rivers at Onceâ 8. âRTJ4â by Run the Jewels â Rappers Killer Mike and El-P reunited this year for their fourth and best collaborative album under the Run the Jewels name. The puffed chests. View Comments. (Read the review. He tries to summon a moral compass and enough faith to overcome wholesale confusion, lies and fear. Spillage Village is the spiritual inheritance of that era's most valuable prayers. 4. 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 â¦ Fetch the Bolt Cutters arrived without too much warning in mid-April and startled listeners into instant adoration. (Read the round table; hear the Popcast. The Concerto for Piano, with its intoxicating joie de vivre, might be the most delightful such work so far this century. Throughout, Punisher is a rich, roiling stunner. What if careful, syllable-by-syllable songwriting held hands with clever concepts and intuitive, sticky melodies? 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. “If I could love you unconditionally,” she sings to herself in her charred Alabama twang, “I could iron out the edges of the darkest sky.” Written after Crutchfield decided to quit drinking, the songs of “Saint Cloud” are unflinchingly cleareyed, their arrangements as loose and broken-in as an old favorite shirt. “It’s not a dream, it’s not a dream!” he hollers at himself with increasing ferocity on the title track, screaming guitars and unrelenting drumming providing the sonic equivalent of cold water to the face. What if the guy who wrote great, smart party songs also excelled at devastating heartbreak anthems? News-induced emotional whiplash became a daily affliction; equally profound was the common experience, in isolation, of people continually startling themselves. SAULT, an enigmatic collective that shrouds itself in mystery, produced the year's most viscerally direct album at the exact moment it was needed. Five albums into her visionary career, Apple remained deeply committed to pushing herself lyrically and vocally. The 21-year-old Chicago rapper has delivered the best album of 2020. Pimienta's subversion of pageantry is always accompanied by a deep sense of its costs. The beautiful album brought endless moments of quiet bliss during this relentlessly chaotic year. The 50 Best Albums Of 2020: 50-41 / 40-31 / 30-21 / 20-11 / 10-1 “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. Watch videos, view photos more at GRAMMY.com The songs avenge and exorcise all sorts of slights and traumas, distant and recent, mixing spite with amusement. ), That howl heard ’round quarantine was the return of Fiona Apple, making a righteous, rowdy rumble right when the world was holding its breath. The harpsichord-kissed “Jason” is a gently heartbreaking tale of a man’s hesitant exploration and ultimate rejection of his own desires (“clumsy, shakily, he ran his hands up me”), while the melody to the upbeat, yearning “On the Floor” has a retro-60s feel. But from the beginning, Bridgers' sensibility has been instantly identifiable: dark, swirling, interior, morbid but playful, unnervingly specific in its narrative details. 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. It was a good year for the most personal, idiosyncratic statements. 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. (Read the feature. Until this year, rapper Dave was a singles artist â he managed 11 before his debut album was released â but Black marked a sea change: serious, reflective and grown-up. "It don't matter how high," a singer reassures us in "Miracles," an album highlight. Anxiety and rage ran a red line through daily experience. Untitled is made to comfort and empower Black people, and to unsettle anyone who's against their liberation. Best collaboration of the worst year! On “Folklore” she is swathed in acoustic instruments and Minimalistic patterns within patterns. ), 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. (Read the review. ), 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. 50. Green Day - Father Of All Motherfuckers. Dua Lipa, âFuture Nostalgiaâ. Run the Jewels, âRTJ4â. “Picture me in the trees, before I learned civility,” she invites on the memory-scape “Seven,” a sophisticated piano bringing gravitas to the childlike playfulness of her lyrics. —Briana Younger, The justly celebrated major-label debut by tenor saxophonist Nubya Garcia is more than a statement of arrival from across the pond. In a nutshell: You can describe 2020 in a number of ways, but the most appropriate word for the last 12 months is perhaps ... 2. 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. —Stephen Thompson, "Welcome to Miss Colombia: quinceañera," Lido Pimienta announces as an introduction to her Tiny Desk (home) concert. This new release was all about the beat: Like Joni Mitchell with Hejira or Kate Bush on The Dreaming, throughout Bolt Cutters Apple explored and refined her relationship to rhythm, bolstering her poetic expressiveness. “No Dream” is a frayed manual for how to be an independently thinking and not-completely-jaded person in a world of faceless sans-serif corporations (exemplary song title: “***BNB”), anesthetizing bad news and all manner of everyday late-capitalist insanity. Lili Trifilio writes chirpy songs about awful sadness. 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? Better to think of the best music of 2020 as an urgent cacophony of distinct voices rather than a chorus with a single melody. As a result, her songs feel like transmissions from a ruefully funny friend; they're warm and inviting, even when she's reflecting on hospital traffic and serial killers. (Read the review. ), “When you are young they assume you know nothing,” quoth Taylor Swift, age 31. In a year of distancing, anxiety, protests and polarization, musicians were separated from audiences and, often, each other. —Jewly Hight (WNXP 91.ONE), Few make rapping sound as purely fun as Lil Uzi Vert. It wasn't until the grim statistics of the pandemic began piling up that the Totentanz (Dance of Death) came knocking. “What if I told you I feel like I know you, but we never met?” she wonders on the flickering title track. Ware revels in the textures of the producer James Ferraro’s showroom of vintage synths, conjuring the no-wave cool of ESG as deftly as the glimmer of Minneapolis funk. —Kiana Fitzgerald, NPR's 50 Best Albums Of 2020 50-41 | 40-31 | 30-21 | 20-11 | 10-1. El Conejo is, for the most part, done missing his ex jeva for now — instead he's dressing up as his female alter ego to call out creeps at the club, de-stigmatizing a particular romantic pursuit on a perreo-fueled symphony, and rocking out to his own success on an emo-trap anthem. He does what he wants, and he gets away with it, too. Through its 15 songs, Burna Boy is by turns exuberant, pensive, confessional and political. With time on our hands, we all discovered the damnedest things inside our brains – squashed demons, inappropriate desires. Lili Trifilio’s voice unifies Beach Bunny’s songs. The bitter, furious single he released soon after nonviolent anti-corruption protesters were killed by soldiers, “20 10 20,” made a compelling postscript. (Read the review; hear the Popcast. On their previous albums, Este, Danielle and Alana Haim could sometimes feel hemmed in by their pristine, showy chops. 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. The Best Albums of 2020 This year was highlighted by projects from artists like the Weeknd, 21 Savage, and Megan Thee Stallion. Kavtinaa (Shona Das) “WIMP III” has freed them up to experiment, embrace imperfection and discover promising new corners of their evolving sound. Weird tics and rashes shook the confidence of the casually healthy. Chris Stapleton’s roar isn’t designed to scare you off. The songwriter and producer Georgia Anne Muldrow calls herself Jyoti — a name bestowed on her by Alice Coltrane — for her forays into jazz. Drew Anthony Smith for The New York Times. 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. (Read the round table; hear the Popcast. Phoebe Bridgersâ¦ (Read the feature.). These songs are fresh-air triumphs of the downtrodden. By Jon Pareles, Jon Caramanica and Lindsay Zoladz. Yet moment to moment in Autechre’s algorithmic realm, anything can happen. (Find our 100 Best Songs of 2020 list here.) Hereâs our unranked rundown of the yearâs most noteworthy releases. (Read the feature. It’s not uncommon for music superstars, after decades atop their scenes, to try to demonstrate fluency in the music of prior generations to bolster their claims to contemporary authority. But the sturdiness of Powfu’s singing and rapping (and sing-rapping) telegraphs the depths of his perseverance and resilience. Apple faced it all. Or church. (Read the review. When he chants "Balenci" enough times to void it of any meaning on "POP" or when he spits out a multibar hook that skirts repetition altogether (or, really, any qualities that usually make up a hook) as on "Homecoming," it's the chutzpah, but it's also the musicality of it all, the way the melodies are both instrument and a vehicle for lyrics. Here are the 50 best albums of a year unlike any we can remember. The Strokes, âThe New Abnormalâ. Powfu’s debut major-label EP pulses with hopelessness. Big Thief: U.F.O.F. As its title implies, Source is also a nod to Garcia's heritage — her parents came to London from Trinidad and Guyana — and an acknowledgment of the root systems behind the musical tradition she embraces as her own. The debut album from the Alabama rapper Flo Milli is a fusillade of bratty taunts and bratty flirts over beats so ornery and wobbly they sound like they’ve been assembled from Tinkertoys. 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