best album of the year

Clockwise from left: Rina Sawayama, Fiona Apple, Moses Sumney and Sufjan Stevens. Really cool combination of different musical genres. —Jewly Hight (WNXP 91.ONE), Few make rapping sound as purely fun as Lil Uzi Vert. The beautiful album brought endless moments of quiet bliss during this relentlessly chaotic year. (Read the review; hear the Popcast.). "Up until now in a rush to prove," she chanted, "but now I only move to move." On duets like the soaring “Kerosene!” and the slinky “Strawberry Privilege,” masculine and feminine energies mingle and detach from their earthbound bodies, their eventual combustion giving way to plenty more interesting byproducts. Dua Lipa, ‘Future Nostalgia’. We will rise." He tries to summon a moral compass and enough faith to overcome wholesale confusion, lies and fear. Five albums into her visionary career, Apple remained deeply committed to pushing herself lyrically and vocally. Her performance on the album is hale, unequivocally self-assured and she has an effortless hookup with her band, whether they're working in a horizon-scanning post-bop mode or hunkering down with dub rhythm. 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. ), Yves Tumor struts and slithers like the most famous rock star on an as-yet-undiscovered planet. The grinning-all-the-while anxiety makers. ), Every song on the Long Island punk lifer Jeff Rosenstock’s pummeling “No Dream” goes to 11, and then somehow finds a 12. Her unexpected quarantine-era alliance with Aaron Dessner of the National deliberately and gorgeously blurs the crisp contours of her past songwriting. Instead, I think of a wild bunch of hometown heroes whose fame almost never stretched past I-285. Lili Trifilio’s voice unifies Beach Bunny’s songs. (Read the round table; hear the Popcast. "It don't matter how high," a singer reassures us in "Miracles," an album highlight. The most sumptuous offering from a year accidentally obsessed with disco (Dua Lipa’s sleek “Future Nostalgia,” Róisín Murphy’s bold “Róisín Machine,” and Lady Gaga’s otherworldly “Chromatica” being the runners-up), the British singer and songwriter Jessie Ware’s “What’s Your Pleasure?” is a lusty feat of dance-floor escapism — an affable podcaster and happily married mother of two Cinderella-ing herself into a club vixen for a night. News-induced emotional whiplash became a daily affliction; equally profound was the common experience, in isolation, of people continually startling themselves. And it’s a welcome and frankly astonishing bonus that Jay-Z is riding shotgun on most of these songs, invigorating his 1990s flows with 2020 perspective. She remakes Charles Mingus, the earthiest jazz avant-gardist, on a few tracks, nodding toward an inspiration. 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. The Strokes – The New Abnormal Music, that is. ), The third album by the English songwriter Lianne La Havas cycles through a failed romance — starting and ending with a break — in songs brimming with poised musicality. Like white light refracted through a prism to reveal an array of colors, ordinary … Whatever your taste, the best 50 albums from this year have something for everyone. 'Cause Spilligion is just that: A vaccine for lost souls living through the pandemic long before coronavirus hit. “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. Fleet Foxes, Shore. Yet moment to moment in Autechre’s algorithmic realm, anything can happen. Here are the 50 best albums of a year unlike any we can remember. By Jon Pareles, Jon Caramanica and Lindsay Zoladz. The bitter, furious single he released soon after nonviolent anti-corruption protesters were killed by soldiers, “20 10 20,” made a compelling postscript. Seattle’s Fleet Foxes make gorgeous, rustic folk designed to lift the listener up … To be eligible, it has to have at least five new full songs and be 15 minutes long or be 30 … 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. (Read the review.). Asbury Park Press. Bridgers’s previous work showed promise, but “Punisher” finds her blooming into her full potential as a voice-of-a-generation songwriter. Read this list. "I will rise. ), 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. It wasn't until the grim statistics of the pandemic began piling up that the Totentanz (Dance of Death) came knocking. This is perfection. 50. (Read the review. The Grammy Award for Album of the Year is presented by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States to "honor artistic achievement, technical proficiency and overall excellence in the recording industry, without regard to album sales, chart position, or critical reception." His first album of 2020, … “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. Our annual list of favourite new albums is a reflection of the last 12 months within the Rough Trade community. If you don’t know Polo G, we suggest you correct the situation immediately. 21 Savage and Metro Boomin, “Savage Mode II”; Benny the Butcher, “Burden of Proof”; Natanael Cano, “Trap Tumbado”; The Chicks, “Gaslighter”; City Girls, “City on Lock”; Code Orange, “Underneath”; Conway the Machine, “From King to a God”; Drake, “Dark Lane Demo Tapes”; Freddie Gibbs and the Alchemist, “Alfredo”; Ariana Grande, “Positions”; Hardy, “A Rock”; Haux, “Violence in a Quiet Mind”; Ian Isiah, “Auntie”; Junior H, “Atrapado en un Sueño”; King Von, “Levon James”; Lil Durk, “Just Cause Y’all Waited 2”; Lauren Mascitti, “God Made a Woman”; John Moreland, “LP5”; Jessie Reyez, “Before Love Came to Kill Us”; Dua Saleh, “Rosetta”; Sunday Service Choir, “Jesus Is Born”; Myke Towers, “Easy Money Baby”; Jessie Ware, “What’s Your Pleasure?”; Waxahatchee, “Saint Cloud”; The Weeknd, “After Hours”; Hailey Whitters, “The Dream”; YoungBoy Never Broke Again, “Top”. The year’s most audacious pop statement is ecstatic, knowing, wry and arch, an album that is somehow both a sendup of excess and also a commitment to the most excessive approach imaginable. But the unifier is Trifilio’s voice: sweetly pleading, sweetly exasperated, sweetly resigned, sweetly vengeful. ), Run the Jewels — Killer Mike and El-P — uphold a worthy, now-vintage style of hip-hop, with densely and aggressively produced tracks and rhymes that are declaimed rather than moaned, for songs that address broader issues between boasts. ), Haim’s playfully acronym-ed “WIMP III” feels like a trip through the radio dial during one of those fleeting years in the mid-90s when — by some sort of clerical error or rip in the space-time continuum — the airwaves were dominated by an eclectic variety of female musicians. 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. 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. "After a while / You went quiet / And I got mean." “All these other [expletive] can bite me,” he concludes at the end of the record, “’cause you’re the only person that I wanted to like me.”, Mike Hadreas continues his decade-long hot streak on “Set My Heart on Fire Immediately,” a record that places baroque-pop frames around the sort of emotions, experiences and people not traditionally honored in baroque-pop songs. 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? Or church. Her fifth album is loose and uproarious, veering from reverent art-pop to tone poetry to cabaret to scream therapy. Lili Trifilio writes chirpy songs about awful sadness. ), That howl heard ’round quarantine was the return of Fiona Apple, making a righteous, rowdy rumble right when the world was holding its breath. Historically, Mary Magdalene is a conflicted character: vilified, sanctified, … Bad Bunny only waited about four years. Big Thief: U.F.O.F. Watch videos, view photos more at GRAMMY.com Best Albums of 2020. What if careful, syllable-by-syllable songwriting held hands with clever concepts and intuitive, sticky melodies? Graceful melodies, supple guitar syncopations, sophisticated harmonies and a voice that can sparkle with anticipation or cry out in pain capture all the hope and heartache of her narrative. The 50 Best Albums of 2020 The albums that got us through this chaotic year, featuring Fiona Apple, Bad Bunny, Lil Uzi Vert, Phoebe Bridgers, and more By Pitchfor k (Find our 100 Best Songs of 2020 list here.) —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. Charli XCX was one of the first pop musicians to make an album entirely in quarantine. Created in the midst of a global reckoning, and released on Juneteenth, Untitled (Black Is) was intentionally made to uplift Black people during a calamitous period, one marked by jarring recurrences of police brutality, and the unveiling of deeply entrenched systemic racism. In fact, his intimate sharing about the warping of pivotal relationships in his life abounds in a thoroughly earthy kind of profundity. —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. The collective — consisting of the duo EarthGang, J.I.D., 6lack, Mereba, Jurdan Bryant and producers Hollywood JB and Benji — hunkered down in a crib on the city's westside and went to work. Any time you try to lock her in to any one genre, narrative or state of being, you can already feel her eyeing her toolbox. Pimienta's performance is often playful, and here, she is the emcee of her own quinceañera, a celebration she was never able to celebrate with her mother in her youth. Phalanxes of synthesizers, programmed beats and sturdy pop melodies fortify Sufjan Stevens and his gentle voice as he contemplates America in turmoil. 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