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.
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”
