Music has been so important this year, given how we have lost so many of the intimate connections of friends and family that bring us peace and stability. Music can’t replace those things, but it’s something. A warm fire on a dark night, a promise that love and connection is still out there, just over the horizon.
I think those feelings help explain why some kinds of music spoke more to me this year. I often found myself looking for something contemplative, quiet, comforting. That led me to a lot more ambient and instrumental music. But it also meant that I really wanted to spend the most time with records that put empathy front and center. I didn’t reflexively shy away from anything that was difficult or dark, but if I let myself drift, it generally wasn’t in that direction.
So my usual caveat applies: this is a list of my favorites, not an attempt to categorize what is objectively ‘the best.’ But it’s even more true this year than usual. I can’t say whether these are all Great albums. I just know they meant a lot to me.
One other note: I’ve only listed 15, in part due to a lack of time to write up my thoughts. The ten honorable mentions were all great, and I wish I had the bandwidth to give them a full discussion.
I’ve created a Spotify list, but Spotify pays artists effectively nothing so please if you like the music, click the links and go buy it. Bandcamp is great, and even includes some artists who you can’t find on Spotify.
15. Andrew Wasylyk – Fugitive Light and Themes of Consolation
An instrumental investigation of the Scottish coastline, built around the idea of fugitive light. You hear the interplay of ocean and fog, the tentative warmth of sun rays cutting through a cold spring morning, the sense of separation between past and present. This is probably best understood as a jazz record, but there are strong currents of 60s pop, classical baroque music, ambient found sound, even old western film scores.
Highlights: Black Bay Dream Minor, Last Sunbeams of Childhood, Fugitive Light Restless Water, Everywhere Something Sublime
14. The War on Drugs – LIVE DRUGS
I’m always hesitant to include live albums on these lists. But The War on Drugs are one of the tightest live bands in the world right now, and Adam Granduciel has written some absolutely world class songs in recent years. So while this record doesn’t do much to surprise, it still manages to punch hard enough to justify a place on the list. It’s inessential if you aren’t already inclined to like the band, but is a very pleasant way to spend an hour if you’re already on the bandwagon. My only real regret is the performance of An Ocean Between the Waves. When I saw them back in 2014 on the Lost in the Dream tour, that song was absolutely electric. This take sadly didn’t fully capture that energy.
Highlights: Not the best songs of the bunch, but the best performances relative to their studio versions: Buenos Aires Beach, Pain, Strangest Place, Thinking of a Place, and the nice cover of Zevon’s Accidentally Like A Martyr
13. The Beths – Jump Rope Gazers
In its best moments, this record blends winsomeness and dreamy chord progressions with just enough cutting edge to stay sharp. The middle third of the record—from the title track to Out of Sight—manage this balance extremely well. Outside of that run, some tracks dip a bit too heavily into the sugar bag while others push the 70s power pop buttons a little too heavily. There certainly aren’t any bad songs here; I just wish they could have sustained the strength of that middle stretch over the whole record.
Highlights: Out of Sight, Jump Rope Gazers, Do You Want Me Now, Just Shy of Sure
12. snarls – Burst
The line between present life and nostalgia and has never felt thinner to me. Maybe it’s a function of the terminally online social media world we all inhabit. Maybe it’s the pandemic. Maybe it’s just my own age. But a record like this really gets me thinking about the forever-life of fuzzed out rock and roll. snarls certainly haven’t done anything to reinvent the genre, but if you can produce perfect songs like this, there’s absolutely no need to expand the range just for the sake of doing so. More than enough to blend monster hooks, jangly chords, dreamy interludes, and long arcs of shoegaze noise.
Highlights: Walk in the Woods, Falling, Marbles, Burst
11. The Day – Soon I Will Forget
I said above that I’m generally hesitant to rank live albums. And this isn’t even really an album; it’s just four songs selected from a live performance in June during lockdown. But it makes the list anyways because that livestream will forever be a shining memory when I think back on this terrible year.
At the time, I had spent three months in a tiny bubble, with just Caroline and our dog as company. No friends, no events. I literally didn’t step inside a building that wasn’t my own home for seven straight weeks at one point. But I was able to sign into a stream and watch one of my favorite bands together in a big empty room, playing their music, opening their hearts to the world. I spent the whole week floating on a cloud, just remembering what it felt like to connect with other people, taking joy together from our shared experience of something beautiful.
10. Goran Geto – Aтмосфера Два
A blend of ambient elements with driving house beats. It’s deeply meditative, but still active, driving, engaging. The mix is full of sounds from field recordings—mountain streams, birds, wind—which balance the electronic textures nicely to communicate the lived experience of human beings interacting with the natural world.
Highlights: Rtanj (Original Mix), Tornik (Original Mix), Rudnik (Mechanist Retexture)
9. Lawrence Arms – Skeleton Coast
I’m pretty sure that there’s never going to be a Brendan Kelly record I don’t enjoy. This one is certainly no exception. Even if it doesn’t quite match up with the band’s best work. Unlike 2014’s Metropole, which took some steps toward more classic pop forms, this one falls back in their wheelhouse of fast-paced punk rock. At times, the metaphors are laid on a little thick, but with 14 songs spread over just 34 minutes, none ever have enough time to truly wear out their welcome.
Highlights: PTA, Goblin Foxhunt, Pigeons and Spies, Last Last Words, Lose Control
8. Taylor Swift – Folklore
There was absolutely nothing surprising about Taylor Swift releasing a record full of mostly acoustic songs with quiet reflections on youth and lost love. Nor was there anything surprising about critics lauding the more mature turn in her music. Of course that was the next step in her career progression. But while it may have all been inevitable, the context of COVID kept it from feeling overdetermined. And it’s to the credit of the music critic community that there was far less navel-gazing about Taylor and the epistemology of authenticity than I’d have expected. Mostly, people just focused on the songs themselves. And that’s nice, because this is a great collection of songs.
Mirrorball shimmers in the pale light. Betty is a sun-drenched exercise in radical empathy. The Last Great American Dynasty is a joyful romp. Exile is the Bon Iver/Taylor Swift duet that we all obviously needed. Epiphany is the leisurely piano ballad that brings us home at the end of the night. Does it all add up to her best record? Maybe, or maybe not. But it’s certainly the best record she could have released in 2020.
(For what it’s worth, I haven’t had the time to spend with Evermore to really judge it yet, but on first listen it feels significantly inferior to Folklore. If the sense of looseness made the first record feel free and untrammeled, on Evermore it just feels…unedited)
Highlights: Mirrorball, Betty, Exile, Epiphany, The 1, The Last Great American Dynasty
7. Six Organs Of Admittance – Sleep Tones
While designed as music to help you sleep, for me it’s been even more important during the hour before sleep. It’s a time for laying back, reading by candlelight, letting the day soak away. There’s something meditative about it, but it’s not the work of true meditation, just the quiet restoration that comes from relaxed attentiveness. These tracks are almost impossibly sparse in terms of melody—literally just a couple notes worth of movement spread out of twenty minutes. But the sensation is as comforting as the ebb and flow of the tides as they lap up against the distant shore.
Highlights: They are all lovely in their own way, but Alnitak is one of the most beautiful pieces of ambient music I’ve heard in years
6. Katie Pruitt – Expectations
This is a truly comfortable record. But not comfort in the sense of lightness or superficiality. It’s that comfortable feeling that comes from being outside on a cool autumn evening, all wrapped up in a fluffy sweater. The chill nips as you a bit, but that only makes you feel a little more alive. And a little more thankful at the warmth. The title Expectations structures the whole record, which is a true bildungsroman about the pain of growing up. Specifically, the pain of growing up queer in a world that seems to provide no place for you.
“What’s it like to be normal” she muses, before turning to that oh-so-common reply to expectations: “If I could be normal, then trust me, I would.” Of course, it’s not really true. The difference hurts. It’s hurts terribly. But it would hurt even more to shut up that true part of yourself.
Those themes come through most powerfully on the heartfelt Georgia, about the home state that she felt would never accept her. But this is also where the ending is happiest. Now in her mid-20s, putting the finishing touches on this beautiful record, she sent a recording of the song to her mother. Some might have heard it as an accusation, but the thing about expectations is that all of us are still learning how to manage them.
It’s not exactly a happy ending, all smiles with everything tied up in bows. But there’s hope. And that’s enough for now.
Highlights: Georgia, Normal, My Mind’s A Ship (That’s Going Down), Expectations, Grace Has A Gun
5. Hum – Inlet
Hum released two perfect space rock albums in the mid 90s, and then effectively disappeared. It’s always a shame when a band shuffles off the stage while they’re still producing at the highest level. But there’s almost something worse about the bands who keep releasing increasingly inessential work until the initial creative spark is completely smothered. So I didn’t lament too much. I mean, You’d Prefer an Astronaut literally closed with a track called Songs Of Farewell And Departure. It seemed like these guys knew when it was time to drift into the mist. And after all, they’d left us with two shining stars hanging in the sky.
And yet, here we are. A new Hum record in 2020. And defying all the odds, it’s really really good. Just listening to that opening riff on Waves. These guys are not messing around.
In terms of style, it picks right up from Downward is Heavenward, but with a couple decades worth of experience to enrich things on the margins. The surprising result: a deeper sense of optimism. These songs still communicate the grand sweep of time and space—the certainty that all things must pass. But they do so with a greater sensitivity for the time that remains.
Highlights: Waves, Step Into You, Folding, Cloud City, In the Den
4. Grimes – Miss Anthropocene
Each Grimes album is a project of Hegelian Becoming–following from, but also structured in opposition to, her previous record. In this case, Miss Anthropocene is primarily a sublation of Art Angels–extracting the pop elements, fracturing them into pieces, and then reassembling them in new forms. But you can also hear traces of Visions, and even of her more esoteric earlier works. This process of destruction and rebirth can be a little uneven, and that’s certainly true this time around. But there’s more than enough great stuff here to produce a top-class album.
Delete Forever is almost pure folk, poignant, and beautiful. You’ll Miss Me When I’m Not Around is a bit of perfect angular pop. Before the Fever is a quiet dance with fire. And every song has something to offer. But even after spending a year with this record, I still can’t quite make sense of it. There’s a slight bitterness to the final concoction which goes uncut. Then again, I’m not quite sure that’s a bad thing. After all, the world itself is falling apart so why shouldn’t our art represent that fact?
Highlights: You’ll Miss Me When I’m Not Around, Delete Forever, So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth, Before the Fever, 4ÆM
3. sea oleena – Weaving a Basket
Imagine Grouper covering a Stars of the Lid record and you’ll just about hit the mark. These songs are quiet, gossamer thin, and impossibly beautiful. The textures are almost entirely acoustic, but the atmosphere is broadened substantially with deft touches of feedback, double-tracking, tape loops, and other effects. Listen to it as background music and you’ll savor its wistfulness and peacefulness. Listen to it on headphones in a dark room and you’ll find your soul shattered into a million pieces and then put back together again.
Highlights: Horses, Calvisius, Carrying, Will I Know
2. Katie Malco – Failures
A pack of tightly-crafted pop songs built around chiming guitars, resolute drums, and heartfelt lyrics. The record as a whole feels tender, but there’s also a sense of desperation here, of deep loss. It comes from the perspective of someone who finally feels like she might understand what it means to face those fears.
I’ve spent a lot of time this year thinking about this record, and the feelings it evokes in me. And the thing I keep thinking about is this: Failures reminds me of everything that made me want to start a music blog, back in the heady days of the mid-aughts when ‘indie’ was suddenly trendy and the medium allowed us to all talk to each other. There was a joyfulness about finding yet another great artist making great music that you could share with the world. That’s how I feel about Katie Malco, and I’m just a little bit sad that the form isn’t really alive anymore. So all I can do include it here on my year-end list, and encourage everyone out there to listen.
Highlights: Animal, September, Brooklyn, Creatures, The First Snow
1. Gordi – Our Two Skins
By far my most-listened record of the year. I’m pretty sure you could cut the number of times I listened to it in half, it would still be first on the list.
These songs are highly specific to a particular moment, place, and person: a young woman in Australia in the 2010s, queer and just coming out to her family, a grandmother who has shaped her life on the verge of passing into the next world. But that specificity is precisely what makes it feel so universal. This is a record for anyone who experienced the love of family, the trauma of loss, the terror of exposing your true self to the world, the even deeper terror of exposing your true self to yourself.
Each track is brimming with warmth—from the effervescent Unready to the open-hearted Limits to the stubborn hopefulness of Hate the World. As always, her arrangements are impeccable but the studio effects have been dialed back a bit—enough to build a stage but still leaving plenty of room for the imagination to work. The result is something that feels grand in terms of its reach but also intimate in terms of its scale.
I would have loved this record no matter when it was released. But it felt particularly essential this year. It arrived in June, at a time when the drain of separation from friends and the social world was starting to feel like a new normal. Listening to it breathed life back into me, lifted me up, and helped me to find new reasons to feel hopeful. And for that I am endlessly thankful.
Highlights: Extraordinary Life, Unready, Volcanic, Sandwiches, Limits, Free Association
Honorable mentions:
- Recondite – Dwell
- Ólafur Arnalds – Some Kind of Peace
- Vanessa Peters – Mixtape
- Run the Jewels – RTJ4
- Dua Lipa – Future Nostalgia
- Beach Bunny – Honeymoon
- Hammock – Into the Blank / Madi
- Ratboys – Printer’s Devil
- Bxnjamin – Some Colour Us Mad (SCUM)
- Cloud Nothings – The Black Hole Understands
handwritten by the author.