My Thirty Favorite Albums of 2020

The artists who helped me navigate a lost plague year.
People and animals dancing and playing instruments around a gramophone.
Illustration by Min Heo

A lot of music released this year never had the opportunity to breathe—to fill a packed space, to trickle through a nearly empty one, to add texture to the symphony of everyday life. Songs that might have fuelled a festival crowd or spilled out of car windows simply couldn’t be experienced in the old way. A few of those songs took on new meaning during a summer of protests, others migrated to social platforms such as TikTok; some artists reimagined the live show for virtual audiences, but music remained at a cool distance. Often, it’s only after a song is heard live, in the open, at a barbecue, buzzed in the back seat of a cab, or when someone bombs at karaoke that it clicks into place and unlocks an artist. So much of the best music is truly revealed in motion—that is how music becomes the lifeblood that animates our days.

2020 in Review

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

When I think about the best music of 2020, I think first of the album, a medium that’s nearly at odds with streaming’s playlisting model yet one that deeply rewards close listening during a time of unprecedented idleness. I think second about context: which albums helped us navigate a lost plague year and which albums will transcend it? Or, rather, what music will forever be “pandemic music,” and what music will carry over with the best music of other years into the great historical record? That kind of forecasting is always an inexact science, but this year it feels even more like bone-casting. Who’s to say what music might suddenly resonate with many of us whenever we’ve finally awakened from a pandemic-induced fugue state? Listening to new music is hard, and it was harder still under distress. It is much easier to return to the familiar in a time of crisis. I was grateful for the chance to vote for Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” this summer, because it gave me a reason to retreat into music I already cherished—music that had already revealed itself to me and could act as a salve amid uncertainty.

Year-end lists are, more or less, about accumulation—the things that imprint upon us in the course of the given period. In 2020, it was difficult to feel connected to things, and, therefore, tougher than ever to do the requisite stockpiling and auditing required to make a truly thorough accounting of “bests.” Even so, there will always be music that manages to break through the fog, that grabs hold and shakes you and refuses to let you free of its grasp. These are the albums that stuck with me despite everything.


The Microphones, “Microphones in 2020”

The singer and multi-instrumentalist Phil Elverum yearns to understand the impulses that produced the heady music of his youth. “Microphones in 2020,” a return to his old Microphones moniker, after seventeen years as Mount Eerie, is a steady, gripping consideration of process, form, and identity—an undulating forty-five-minute guitar composition that surges and crashes against his recollections as a career indie musician. These are the naked, gorgeous musings of an introspective artist lost in thought.


Fiona Apple, “Fetch the Bolt Cutters”

Recorded in Apple’s Venice Beach home, with her piano and her dog, “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is about as organic and uninhibited as music gets. Constructed entirely out of sounds around the artist and composed entirely of biting lyrics that challenge any attempts to silence her, it’s an album made of jagged edges. Apple’s songs are intensely personal yet powerfully transparent. Clattering and cluttered but clearheaded and deliberate, this brilliant, brutal, unprecedented work feels like a transcendent artist assembling a new form of music from scratch.


Phoebe Bridgers, “Punisher”

The sophomore album of the twenty-six-year-old folk-rock musician Phoebe Bridgers is spectral and internal—a haunted, radiant collection of songs about managing personal turmoil in the periphery of a wider crisis. Her muted singing lends her songs about searching for feeling even greater depth. “I’ve been playing dead my whole life,” she sings on “ICU,” and, throughout the album, she seeks to reverse course and become alive again. Her sincere, almost blunt manner of writing is rich in its specificity, and there is a constant sense of resiliency in her sad songs, in which she never stops moving.


Moses Sumney, “græ”

A Californian born to Ghanian parents, Moses Sumney has often obsessed over division and betweenness. His sumptuous, two-part album “græ” delves further into this duality of being, exploring statelessness and displacement. These songs are about uncovering the self amid feelings of isolation and detachment, eventually settling in a space beyond definition or classification. The music is just as fluid—owing to a diverse host of collaborators such as Daniel Lopatin, Thundercat, James Blake, Tom Gallo, Jill Scott, Adult Jazz, and more—and spans every genre from indie rock and folk to electro soul and pop. But it’s Sumney’s overarching vision and cutting falsettos that give the album shape, texture, and dimension.


Bob Dylan, “Rough and Rowdy Ways”

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that, at seventy-nine and with a Nobel Prize to his name, Bob Dylan contains multitudes. But “Rough and Rowdy Ways” is a reminder of his range: it features the longest song in his catalog and his first No. 1 single, small-scale blues-rock arrangements with his touring band, and winding, thoughtful examinations of death so dense that they should be considered literature. These heavy considerations of Americana play like last-ditch attempts to uncover the soul of a nation, as a great bard imparts some of his twilight wisdom. “I’m first among equals / Second to none,” he proclaims on “False Prophet.” “The last of the best / You can bury the rest.”


Jay Electronica, “Act II: The Patents of Nobility (The Turn)”

After going ten years without releasing his début album, the enigmatic rapper Jay Electronica released two in ten months. The first, “A Written Testimony,” was a treatise on the power of faith amid struggle and self-doubt, with his label boss and mentor Jay-Z shadowing him in support. But that exceptional unveiling may be remembered most for paving the way for the long-awaited “Act II: The Patents of Nobility (The Turn),” his original shelved début, which was officially released only after it was leaked online. There is a near-alchemic quality to his raps that makes ordinary phrases seem sacred.


Bad Bunny, “YHLQMDLG”

Having already established himself as a Latin trap star with the robust and innovative album “X 100pre,” from 2018, Bad Bunny drastically changed his approach, erecting a monument to his forebears on “YHLQMDLG”—an abbreviation of a Spanish phrase that translates to “I Do Whatever I Want.” The album eschews trap and prioritizes vibrant turn-of-the-millenium reggaetón. This relaxed, twenty-track sampler is also a full-on immersion into the modern history of Latin music, highlighting its most important players (Daddy Yankee, Jowell & Randy, etc.), and ushering in the next generation.


Jyoti, “Mama, You Can Bet!”

The forward-thinking Los Angeles musician Georgia Anne Muldrow makes some of her most referential music as Jyoti—a name given to her by family friend Alice Coltrane—but that music can also be deeply personal. “Mama, You Can Bet!,” which she describes as a vocal document of her inner feelings, is full of wondrous arrangements, riffing on ideas from jazz titans. Taken together, the tracks begin to form a self-portrait. But the most powerful moments of expression place her soloing in context: honoring her progenitors or celebrating her mother and single Black motherhood.


Perfume Genius, “Set My Heart on Fire Immediately”

Mike Hadreas’s fifth album as Perfume Genius, and second alongside the producer Blake Mills, is easily his best. Recorded with a full band to give it a grand, full-bodied sound, “Set My Heart on Fire Immediately,” written about connections real and imagined, balances vastness and intimacy. Filled with Hadreas’s takes on the classic ballad, the album has a sweeping sense of romance and an innate simplicity in the way that Hadreas expresses the heat of passion. The body is still Hadreas’s primary vessel of interest, but here he is much more fixated on the way his body responds to those around him.


Adrianne Lenker, “songs” and “instrumentals”

As the front person for the band Big Thief, Adrianne Lenker often functions as the beating heart of a flowing organism. What happens when that heart breaks? Setting off on her own for a bit, Lenker has created a mesmerizing two-part piece called “songs” and “instrumentals”—split (obviously) between song-based music and more free-form compositions—which isolates her stinging songwriting and stunning guitar playing. The music is bare and insular, acoustic and detailed, written largely in a one-room cabin in the woods and recorded straight to tape. The songs she made there, in a space that reminded her of the inside of her instrument, are raw with grief.


Soccer Mommy, “color theory”

After two breakout albums of smaller, lo-fi recordings, the twenty-three-year-old singer-songwriter Sophie Allison shored up her sound on “color theory.” The bigger setup, prompted by her signing with Loma Vista Recordings, made her songs richer, brighter, more layered, and more focussed. Using colors to represent various states of personal distress, the album is dynamic and altogether bewitching, finding a middle ground between euphoria and trauma, at once quiet and bold, gorgeous and devastating.


Rina Sawayama, “SAWAYAMA”

As pop music becomes more experimental, the fringe-pop of the Japanese-British artist Rina Sawayama dares to be so encompassing that it verges on kitsch. Her début album, “SAWAYAMA,” is like a time capsule scanned through a 3-D printer, a Y2K rewind that spans “TRL” nostalgia, nu metal, fembot sadness, Final Fantasy fanfare, and the hyperkinetics of DDR soundtracks, all in service of a personal pop tribute that often doubles as the artist’s scrapbook. At a time when so much new music wants to sound like the future, “SAWAYAMA” reaches gleefully for the comforts of the past.


Drakeo the Ruler, “Thank You For Using GTL”

Drakeo the Ruler rapped all of “Thank You For Using GTL” from inside the L.A. County’s Men’s Central Jail, prosecuted a second time in connection to a crime that he had been acquitted of in 2019. Albums recorded in prison are often dour affairs—the sound quality is poor and the setting sucks the life out of the performer. Neither could stop Drakeo from making the most gripping music of his career and setting the new standard for jailhouse rap. In the album, recorded and produced by the collaborator JoogSzn and spit entirely through a muffled phone receiver, each and every swaggering bar feels like an affront to the district attorney’s office. Drakeo’s off-kilter verses lurch out of pockets but are never off beat, despite the conditions. Drakeo is free now, and the album is a testament to his commitment to craft in unjust circumstances.


Fleet Foxes, “Shore”

Amber energy courses through “Shore,” the bracing fourth album from the Seattle band Fleet Foxes, released to coincide with the autumnal equinox. The gorgeous record found tonal balance through the mayhem of recent months, when the project suddenly seemed inconsequential to its creators and, therefore, more like a refuge. Its glistening arrangements are reflective of the unburdening that collaboration and reflection can foster: there are more voices and ideas present than on any previous Fleet Foxes album, and you can sense a veil of anxiety lifting as the front man, Robin Pecknold, realizes that he is not on his own.


Open Mike Eagle, “Anime, Trauma and Divorce”

The indie rapper Open Mike Eagle’s “Anime, Trauma and Divorce” strikes a precise balance between imaginative and realistic. Triggered by a cascading series of losses that include the end of a fourteen-year marriage, O.M.E. has turned post-separation anxiety into a semi-comedic set of artful, occasionally singsong observations, and its many bits—anime as a Black-power fantasy, reevaluating priorities like the late-career Spider-Man from “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” his eleven-year-old son playing hype man—spiral outward from the heartbreaking considerations of the dissolution of the rapper’s personal and professional life, and of how he didn’t end up back at square one for lack of trying.


Yaeji, “What We Drew”

The Korean-American producer, singer, and sometime rapper Yaeji released two EPs of undeniably soothing yet beaming dance music in 2017, her tracks flitting between English and Korean as she externalized her deepest thoughts. On “What We Drew,” her exceedingly chill brand of house music becomes a tonic for everyday anxieties. Her poppy production is subtly stimulating, and the mixtape, with its many collaborations and odes to friendship, encourages being sociable. These are wondrous cuts about being exposed to the perils of adulting but deciding to thrive nonetheless.


Grimes, “Miss Anthropocene”

On this dark electro-pop odyssey that wades into the chaos of industrial music, the singer and producer Grimes plays an anthropomorphic goddess of climate change and tries to unravel villainy as a concept, in turn flipping her perceived media portrayal—as celebrity fiend—into an artistic pursuit. She doesn’t quite make the climate crisis “fun,” as she hoped, but she does offer up a dream world that is fascinating despite its absurdity. Her international taste in pop and her curatorial skills are still bracing. Even when embodying the horrors of human extinction, Grimes can’t help but delight.


Blake Mills, “Mutable Set”

After refining the sounds of artists like Alabama Shakes and Perfume Genius, and functioning as an ace guitarist for Randy Newman and Bob Dylan, the singer-songwriter Blake Mills makes good on both skills on his solo album. Anchored by his modest, aching voice, “Mutable Set” is subtle yet intricate, stealthily virtuosic and splendid. These songs sound unadorned on first pass, but they are actually shifty; their sense of quietude is merely a misdirection from how precise the delicate arrangements are.


Run the Jewels, “RTJ4”

The fourth installment in the Run the Jewels saga is about balance: keeping things fresh while honoring classic hip-hop values—part homage, part reintroduction. Meanwhile, the take-no-prisoners tag team of crusader Killer Mike and conspirer El-P has never been more comfortable in tandem. The fun-loving verses aren’t as spliced together as on previous albums, but the partners are confident in their roles and enjoying each other’s company. It’s their commitment to the bit, to rap history, and to each other that keeps this sequel from losing punch.


Fireboy DML, “APOLLO”

The next-gen Nigerian star Fireboy DML settles into his newfound celebrity on “APOLLO.” His “Afro-life” sound, which reimagines more traditional African elements with smoothed-down edges of contemporary R. & B. and the glossy sheen of pop, has put him near the front of the pack of young artists redefining the local music scene, and in these songs he embraces the call of stardom. His celebrations of idol ambition and his lover-boy come-ons are elevated by a lustrous voice so polished that it’s nearly translucent.


Liv.e, “Couldn’t Wait to Tell You . . .”

Written like a series of interconnected thought bubbles, “Couldn’t Wait to Tell You . . .,” the warm breakout record for lo-fi performer Liv.e, brims with restless energy. Her beat-music-inspired R. &. B. songs understand that romance is often idle, and she presents little moments of writhing anticipation. The songs are loose, free-form observations that lose or maintain shape as the singer zones out and regains focus. The project seems to epitomize the dizzying, paralyzing head rush of early courtship.


Bartees Strange, “Live Forever”

An indie-rock record for a hip-hop world, “Live Forever,” the breakthrough album by the D.C.-based multi-instrumentalist Bartees Cox, Jr., who performs as Bartees Strange, is remarkable in its ability to ignore musical orthodoxy. His flows are indebted to rap, but his sound skips from punk and folk to experimental and pop music. “Genres / Keep us in our boxes / Keep us from our commas,” he mutters on “Mossblerd.” “Keep us niggas hopeless / Keep us from our options.” He refuses to be limited by outside expectations.


Flo Milli, “Ho, why is you here?”

The flamboyant Alabama smart-mouth Flo Milli emerged as one of rap’s most unavoidable new voices after snippets of her songs went viral on TikTok. Her cheeky début mixtape, “Ho, why is you here?,” maintains the quick-hitting sass of those early teases while also proving her a capable repeat puncher: each bar lands with a snap. She thrives in space, maximizing every opportunity to get a jab in, and there’s never an instant in which she isn’t in full command of her inflatable bounce house.


Sault, “Untitled (Black Is)”

The secretive alternative-soul group Sault surfaced in a moment desperate for resistance music. Released on Juneteenth, “Untitled (Black Is),” the first of the band’s two albums in 2020, weaponizes Black music in the war for Black survival. The songs effortlessly dip into funk, R. & B., and even spoken word, sounding from across generations as acts of protest. The lyrics explicitly call for an end to state-sanctioned violence against Black Americans, but the album is about more than suffering—it’s about the undying Black spirit, too.


Porridge Radio, “Every Bad”

The Brighton singer-songwriter Dana Margolin will utter the same phrase over and over until it morphs from mantra to cross-examination, sharpening her lyrics into a double-edged sword. The more she repeats the phrase, the further the meaning gets distorted. On the new album, “Every Bad,” her band, Porridge Radio, continues to develop around her, burgeoning from a slight-ish indie-rock sound to full-fledged post-punk thrashing. In these songs, noise is a means to detonate all conceptions of self.


Ka, “Descendants of Cain”

Few rappers are steadier than the Brownsville native Ka, who raps with the cynicism and unshakability of a seen-it-all hustler. His verses have never been shrewder or more parable-filled than on “Descendants of Cain,” the largely self-produced album that makes big-city crime a thing of Biblical proportions. Declaiming over hushed, hollowed-out beats with minimal drums, Ka delivers the insights of a world-weary survivor with a gruff yet worn-out voice, and his deft wordplay feels like an accumulation of hard labor. These songs epitomize the hard lessons learned in living by any means necessary.


Taylor Swift, “folklore”

Perhaps stimulated by the isolation of recording at home during a pandemic, Taylor Swift’s ambient pop fantasy “folklore” makes space for oral history—for the everyday stories that are shared within communities. Her dramatic turn toward indie music, with artful co-writing and co-production from the National’s Aaron Dessner, isn’t much of a departure from her most lyrical and intuitive work. Instead, the beauty of Swift’s transition to a quieter, intimate sound is in how it unburdens her.


J Hus, “Big Conspiracy”

The Stratford polymath J Hus has been putting his omnivorous musical knowledge—in Afro-pop, road rap, reggae, and all the sounds in between—on display since 2014, but on “Big Conspiracy” he puts it all together, blending and tracing genres in the form of a genealogical survey. The album is a coming-of-age tale in which a playboy and gangsta digs deeper, revealing himself to be more than a scourge of the local government: he is a displaced son of Africa, a young Black man trying to find his sense of self far from his ancestral home.


Yves Tumor, “Heaven to a Tortured Mind”

Since 2015, the innovative producer Sean Bowie, who performs as Yves Tumor, has tested the constraints of genre, veering sharply between free jazz, soul, indie music, and club music. The artist followed the daring noise-pop experiment “Safe in the Hands of Love,” from 2018, with this year’s “Heaven to a Tortured Mind,” a future-funk opus that is far more centered. Tumor’s extravagant, oddball orchestrations have never been more accessible—or more entertaining.


Julianna Barwick, “Healing Is a Miracle”

It took breaking her cycle to get the loop artist Juliana Barwick back on track. Moving from New York to Los Angeles and distancing herself from the “ghosts” of failed relationships produced the electronic musician’s most moving album. Her one-woman choir expands to include the Sigur Rós singer Jónsi Birgisson and the harpist Mary Lattimore, creating fleshed-out and probing songs. Warmed by the comforts of finding renewed faith in her surroundings, Barwick glows softly like mood lighting. Her echoing voice carries out into a spatial rift and doubles back stronger than before.


2020 in Review