Fifteen years ago, on the title track to Extraordinary Machine, Fiona Apple declared, “I still only travel by foot, and by foot, it’s a slow climb.” She worked her way up to the clear heights of Fetch the Bolt Cutters over the course of the last half-decade or so, largely at her L.A. home alongside trusted bandmates and friends and a small shelter’s worth of barking dogs.
From her early punk recordings alongside sister Allison to her quietly devastating solo albums, Katie Crutchfield is always steadfast in her truth. With Saint Cloud, Crutchfield’s fifth album as Waxahatchee, she climbs to solid ground, emerging from the storm self-assured. The album reflects her newfound ease, all big skies, wide open spaces, and Americana twang.
The first half of græ, Moses Sumney’s tour de force sophomore album, came out just before lockdown; the second was released a few months later, after its audience had been humbled by the soft brutality of isolation, the brutal clarity of wandering our own inner landscapes day after day. If only we could make like Sumney and turn self-interrogation into a singular kind of art.
Phoebe Bridgers will tweet about eating ass with one hand and crush your heart with the other. The droll, phantom-like singer writes music for faithless burnouts who still want to believe: lost souls clinging to astrology and fucked-up intimacy, striving to get by in a brutal universe with no pre-ordained meaning.
In a year of isolation and unattainable intimacies, Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas is our poet laureate of constant longing. Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, his fifth album, celebrates the endless possibility and vulnerability of the body without losing sight of the fundamental absurdity of the human ordeal.
If nothing else, Bob Dylan’s 39th studio album should forever put to rest the idea that the storied songwriter is losing his voice. 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.
If 2018’s soul-affirming Safe in the Hands of Love established Yves Tumor as a preeminent experimentalist, then the pleasure-seeking and approachable Heaven to a Tortured Mind is the sound of them strutting into the role of a rock god. 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.
Three songs into Haim’s sharpest album yet, Danielle is behind the wheel in her beloved Los Angeles with a Joni Mitchell classic on the stereo, “screaming every word to ‘Both Sides Now.’” How lost must one feel to shout “I really don’t know life at all” alone in the car first thing in the morning? That’s the precise kind of biting honesty that Alana, Este, and Danielle brilliantly amplify on Women in Music Pt. III.
On her fourth studio album, UK singer-songwriter Jessie Ware conjures the erotic frisson of the cruisy dancefloors we aren’t permitted to congregrate on while the global pandemic rages on.
On YHLQMDLG, aka Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana or I Do Whatever I Want, Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny honors his home island’s past of sweaty marquesina throwdowns with a score of perreo bangers for the new age. His nostalgia for reggaetón’s mixtape-era reaches its peak on “Safaera,” a crowning jewel of a record featuring elder statesmen Jowell & Randy and Ñengo Flow, with Bad Bunny’s subterranean voice bridging the past and present.
When Big Thief scrapped their international tour this year, Adrianne Lenker found a world of her own in a cabin near the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. A pair of albums that work as a brilliant whole, songs and instrumentals capture the ambiance of the woods, the anguish of a breakup, and an autumn’s harvest of keen-eyed musings, at once lofty and visceral. She wants to hear a lover blinking; she sees a horse’s eyes rotting.
On Eternal Atake, Lil Uzi Vert employs an extraterrestrial concept that should be kitschy—in the album’s trailer, he’s jetted into the cosmos in a saucer the size of a city block by a humanoid cult—but instead lends the LP an intergalactic sheen. 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.
On Microphones in 2020, Phil Elverum revived his earliest moniker to ponder his formative years across a single, wistful, 45-minute song. In the companion short film, he accompanies his thoughts by flipping through hundreds of old photos, adding bittersweet visual cues to the rambling narrative. 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.
It was an album that was rumored to be rap’s next opus before it even materialized. When a slightly unfinished version of Jay Electronica’s Act II appeared this October, it had been a little over a decade after its initial slated release, and most fans had given up hope on it ever actually coming out. Somehow the record doesn’t suffer from the delay, if anything the often drumless production—heavy on somber piano melodies and lush samples—is timeless.
From the opening disco swagger of “4 American Dollars,” U.S. Girls’ Heavy Light crackles with kinetic energy. 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. Poignant collages of interviews split the album into sections; the speakers’ recollections of hurtful memories and childhood bedrooms suffuse the music with empathy.
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? Well, yes. It is. Righteous anger pointed at society’s rulers flows throughout RTJ4, which was released at the start of June amid nationwide protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd.
Dua Lipa, Jessie Ware, and Kylie Minogue all sashayed back to the disco podium in 2020, but none captured the paradox of the genre—its hedonism and heartbreak, its pain dunked in prosecco—quite like Róisín Murphy. Twirling in the fog of producer DJ Parrot’s near-industrial spin on 12” disco, Murphy lets us into her wildest dreams and wrongest desires (“Ten lovers in my bed / But I want something more,” she sings on “Something More”).
For 25 years, Dan Bejar has come across as the smartest absinthe-sipping aesthete in the room. 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. On Have We Met, the Vancouver-based Destroyer maestro slips into another velvet interior, only to find it's a sort of Black Lodge.
Ghanaian-American singer-songwriter-producer Amaarae assembles music that makes very little sense on paper. Her glittering debut, The Angel You Don’t Know, features waist-winding afropop rhythms; bouncy, avant-pop melodies; experimental modulated vocals; and playful lyrics as Instagram-ready as any artist this side of Drake. (“Percy Miller, ‘bout it ‘bout it, ‘bout the dough/Macarena to the money after shows,” she sings on single “Fancy.
The warm, gracious folk on Shore seems to materialize from an alternate universe where there are no storm clouds or push notifications. According to bandleader Robin Pecknold, Fleet Foxes’ fourth album carries the mission to live “fully and vibrantly” in celebration of lost heroes like Arthur Russell and John Prine, an especially poetic resolution in the grey hours of the present.
Dua Lipa’s second studio album is anchored by popular sounds of the past, but it’s less attached to a memory than the promise of a feeling. Equal parts retro and fresh, Future Nostalgia is redolent of elements from the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, nodding to the work of artists like Blondie, Chic, Kylie Minogue, Nile Rodgers, Prince, Madonna, and Daft Punk.
KeiyaA is simply over it all on her debut album, Forever, Ya Girl. “I can’t wait to be alone, to be one with my blackest fire,” she exhales on “Nu World Burdens,” over a twinkling melody and drums warm enough to make your heart flutter. But even though she’s sick of the bullshit surrounding her, she doesn’t let it consume her being.
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. Over airy guitars on the somber “Pop Song,” she exposes her least flattering attributes: a rotten core, a bitter disposition. But instead of corroding Margolin further, this music uplifts her, more like an exorcism of destructive thoughts than a platform for them.
Grimes embodies the unhuman on Miss Anthropocene. Her fifth album’s title is a personification of the anthropocene, a theorized geological epoch in which civilization provokes its own destruction via climate crises. But rather than finding comfort in the anthropomorphic gesture, Grimes renders a bleak, if beautiful, portrait of nihilism. “Imminent annihilation sounds so dope,” she sings on “My Name Is Dark,” a prescient picture of doomsday raving.
London-based tenor saxophonist Nubya Garcia made her debut album Source with the goal of exploring her roots: both her heritage as a child of Guyanese and Trinidadian immigrants, and the things that ground her as a person. The record effortlessly weaves between reggae, cumbia, Ethio-jazz, and more, containing wild energy and profound chill.
Sophie Allison paints with the shades of a bruise on color theory. Her mother’s terminal illness and her own struggles with depression appear in a wintry synesthesia of yellow, blue, and gray. Much like Sufjan Stevens in the songs of Carrie & Lowell, Allison ventures into the tundra of her despair and emerges with an unsparing and unsentimental account of survival.
The followup to Kelly Lee Owens’ breakthrough self-titled LP is rooted in pain and loss—the shedding of a toxic relationship, the death of her grandmother, and the decay of the environment. Inner Song’s palette of pulsing basslines, swirling synths, and visceral found sounds draws influence from the practices of the sound-healing community: sound baths, shamanic drumming, and voice work.
Historically, there are two trajectories from sweetie childhood star to flawed adult: the bumpy one full of high-profile foibles or the one where they wind up as robots. Neither hot mess nor robot, sisters Chloe x Halle have chosen a different route, from YouTube sensations to Beyoncé protégées to grown women. On their pop- and R&B-bending second album Ungodly Hour, they’re figuratively slapping an ID card on a bar and saying, “Bartender, I need a drink.
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.
“Genres keep us in our boxes,” Bartees Strange sing-raps on “Mossblerd,” a song that sounds like it’s falling apart even as he’s putting it together. 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. On his first album, Live Forever, there’s a righteous defiance to the way the D.C.
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. His 2020 album of original compositions is a radically different proposition: a 43-minute ambient suite meant to counter fascism’s global spread with joy rather than despair.
Produced while Drakeo the Ruler was awaiting retrial in Los Angeles on a bogus gang charge, Thank You for Using GTL is punctuated with robotic warnings from the extortive inmate phone service over which it was recorded. GTL is a technical marvel as well as a creative one: producer JoogSZN’s beats retain their funk and low end while making space for Drakeo’s vocals, which come through impressively crisp.
The internet has plenty of playlists full of pillowy background noise, built for tuning out while you dig into the task at hand. Workaround inverts that dynamic: By requiring sustained close attention to the thumps and shimmers in your headphones, it offers something truly meditative. To the casual listener, Beatrice Dillon’s avant electronic tracks might seem austere.
A band’s impact shouldn’t be hypothetical, but here’s Dogleg, the debutants of Michigan emo, whose breakout year mostly took place in the imagination. Singer-songwriter Alex Stoitsiadis was supposed to be hollering his hooks over melodic post-hardcore guitars in roiling 250-cap clubs, and the scenes of heartbreak he described were supposed to be playing out for listeners in real life.
Ka has spent his 40s laboring over how to animate the ghosts of his home. 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. 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.
New Orleans electro-punks Special Interest see catharsis in demolition. Frontperson Alli Logout’s jagged vocals dissect poverty, love, and commodified dissent, making The Passion Of the rare contemporary punk album that is actually as revolutionary as it sets out to be. For all of the record’s industrial squall and techno blast beats, it doesn’t just inspire destruction—it asks what you’ll rebuild from the rubble.
Hannah Read can make a melody out of anything. Throughout Hannah, her fifth album as Lomelda, her expressive warble blooms and shrinks into strange and beautiful phrasings, heightening their meaning. On the slow-burning “It’s Lomelda,” she croons off a list of her musical heroes and their work, from Yo La Tengo to Frank Ocean to Sufjan Stevens’ devastatingly spare “The Only Thing.
Duval Timothy is constantly dismantling to rebuild on Help, a gorgeous, crestfallen record about possession and healing. The pianist and multidisciplinary London artist’s work skirts conventional disciplines, tinkering with the very concepts of “jazz” and “club” music as it synthesizes a substitute.
In 2019, Chicago indie rock trio Dehd released the sparse and scrappy album Water, with songs informed by the romantic breakup of bassist Emily Kempf and guitarist Jason Balla, accompanied by Eric McGrady’s one-tom, one-snare minimalism. For their exquisite follow-up Flower of Devotion, Dehd upgraded to a proper studio, refining their gritty alchemy without scrubbing it too clean.
In February, electronic experimentalist Arca dropped @@@@@, a 62-minute song framed as a pirate-radio broadcast from a post-singularity future that begins with whispers of a “diva constructed.” KiCk i, released four months later, is the Barcelona-based musician’s more straightforward take on diva-hood.
Rina Sawayama’s debut album is unafraid to present all of her paradoxes. The British-Japanese singer’s triumphant songs, which meld the fabulosity of Y2K-era Britney Spears with Korn-inspired nu-metal and campy stadium rock, invite sing-alongs and stylish TikTok choreography. But they’re also jam-packed with sharp, critical observations about growing up with dual identities, the Orientalist gaze, and the trappings of femininity.
Room for the Moon feels like a safe place to hide from mounting anxiety. Moscow artist Kate Shilonosova’s third full-length is an engrossing collection of kaleidoscopic avant-pop in which each song unspools into a fantastic world inspired by everything from Sailor Moon to surrealist René Magritte to the Russian Mary Poppins.
Megan Thee Stallion’s official debut album is a triumphant joyride that more than fulfills the promise of its title. After steamrolling detractors over classic Biggie on withering opener “Shots Fired,” the reigning Hot Girl shifts her focus to more pressing concerns, namely flexing and sexing. The album soars when Megan nods to the greats of rap and R&B, from a jolly rework of Juvenile to the Jazmine Sullivan-indebted bad bitch anthem “Circles.
“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. Eventually, they were shared on Instagram by Gibbs himself, completing an utterly contemporary loop of art and life.
The opening notes of Lyra Pramuk’s debut album, Fountain, are like a slow tracking shot through the gates of a musical Atlantis. Using only her transmuted and multi-layered vocals, the Berlin-based composer creates a dense architecture where choral music and meditative techno meet. While some vocal lines emulate pulsing bass and celestial synth, the prevailing current is a surging chorus of near-language, struck through with the unmistakable trembles and notches of a human voice.
Twentieth-century listeners imagined the music of the next millennium as a harsh, mechanistic grind or a frenzy of twitchy glitches. Afrobeats is a prime example of the future-pop that actually transpired, a hyper-digital sound far easier and oozier on the ear. 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.
It’s taken time for Lil Baby’s My Turn to grow into the beautiful, sprawling mess that it is. In February, it was a memorable yet conventional 20-track Atlanta rap album. But with the addition of six songs on the deluxe edition in May, the record kicked dirt on the arbitrary and outdated rules of rap albums.
Cut off from her usual muses—her crew and the club—Charli XCX needed a different kind of community space to inspire her this year. So she built one via her fourth album, how i’m feeling now. Recording it over a few short weeks at the onset of the pandemic, Charli escaped isolation’s creative doldrums by opening up a feedback loop with her fans, sharing real-time updates and allowing them a hand in her process.
While the Korean-American producer Yaeji has anchored her previous work in strobe-lit beats and floor-shaking bass, her first full-length mixtape captures the anxious, aching throb of the morning after a night out. What We Drew burbles between frenetic drum patterns and hip-hop cadences, glossy electro beats and sinister synths. Within these entrancing soundscapes, stray ruminations float to the surface. “Why doesn’t it feel the same when I’m in the air?” she murmurs on “In the Mirror.
Listening to Mary Lattimore’s Silver Ladders feels like blinking awake on New Year’s Day: There’s some melancholy over what has passed mixed with buzzing wonder at what lies ahead. The harpist’s ambient compositions are somber but whimsical, submerging her careful plucks in murky pools of reverb and synth.
