Top 30 Albums of 2020!!

We made it!!!!

I say that both after having made it through this ridiculous year and after having just finished writing this ridiculous list. The scope of this post is a lot larger than I ever intended when I had that tragic thought in the middle of November, "I should sit down and write out my favorite albums of the year!" I was only going to do a write-up on my top 10, but I just love all of these albums so much that I decided to write a blurb about all of them. 

So, here's some good bathroom reading for you for the next month and a half! Or feel free to skim through to the artists/album art that interests you and check out what stands out. It was a crappy year in many respects, but, with all of these bored artists sitting on all this creative energy, it ended up being an awesome year for music. 

Like my favorite YouTube drink chugger Badlands Chugs would say, "Enough talk..."

LET'S DO THIS.

30. Code Orange - Underneath

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On Underneath, Code Orange pushes the boundaries of metal to their extremes, without breaching the surface tension of the genre and becoming "experimental." Traditional metal song structures and metalcore riffs are run through a gauntlet of glitchy studio trickery until they come out the other end wholly unique. It was one of the most fun metal listens of the year, especially when they really go hard, like on "You and You Alone" and "Erasure Scan," and one that feels like a real moment for the scene, but one which, at the end of the day, does still feel largely like the same stuff we've heard for a decade plus (including some of the most questionable aspects of 00s radio metal), but dressed up with some entertaining and undeniably novel bells and whistles.

29. tricot - 真っ黒 (Makkuro)

Photo cred: https://albumreviews.blog/2020/03/10/makkuro-%E7%9C%9F%E3%81%A3%E9%BB%92-tricot-new-music-review/

A really solid offering from these Kyoto-based math rockers. First thing's first: "あふれる" is a near perfect rock song. Memorable riffs for days, great momentum from front to back, and top notch songwriting, especially the way the understated pre-chorus in the first half of the song is brilliantly flipped into an explosive post-chorus at the end. The rest of the album has flashes of this brilliance, namely on opener "混ぜるな危険" and on "順風満帆" though the album does feel about two songs too long. But if you're looking for some rock of the sunnier, mathier variety to get you through the winter of the genre's discontent, give this a go.

28. Conway the Machine - From King to a GOD

Ooooh shiny gif album art!
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"Solid" is also the word that primarily comes to mind with From King to a GOD. It isn't a life-changing or super emotionally impactful hip hop album (except for maybe "Front Lines," in which Conway fervently offers his take on racial injustice). Rather, From King to a GOD offers some very solid East Coast gangsta rap full of tons of charisma, some witty bars, slick production, and memorable features (especially Method Man's verse on "Lemon"). And that's all that it really needed to do, in order to be a nice addition to the portfolio of strong albums that the Griselda collective (the creative alliance between Conway, Westside Gunn, and Benny the Butcher) has been rapidly building for itself this year. All of that isn't to say that there aren't some truly great standout cuts like the Avengers-esque "Spurs 3" and "Juvenile Hell," which is guaranteed to instantly make the listener feel ridiculously cool.

27. Lianne La Havas - Lianne La Havas

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Lianne La Havas poured herself into her appropriately titled self-titled album to create one of the best R&B records of the year. For one, she handled most of the production herself for the first time, crafting gorgeous, lush soundscapes like "Bittersweet" and an ascendant cover of Radiohead's "Weird Fishes." More than that, though, the album is a conceptual work, documenting a cyclical personal rise, fall, and rise again using the imagery of flowers and plants. As she described it, "A flower has to dry up and die in order to be reborn. You have to get to the rock bottom to rebuild yourself." While not every song turns out as arresting as the concept behind them, it was a beautiful, memorable journey to go on with her.

26. Dope Body - Home Body

Photo cred: https://dopebody.bandcamp.com/album/home-body

One of the best surprises of the year was learning that these noise rocking dudes had reformed after a four year break up to bless us with some new music. And they gave us not one but two LPs, Home Body in May and Crack a Light at the end of October, the former being my favorite of the two. It's a pretty scatterbrained album, stumbling between scuzzed-out, psychedelic garage punk ragers and hazy, formless interludes. But the highs on this record make for some of my favorite Dope Body tunes ever, like "Hermit King" with its clattering, primal kitchen percussion over agoraphobic chants; cheery and synthy "Sour Apple"; and the infectious hooks the lead guitar blares out on "No Scene."

25. Westside Gunn - Pray for Paris

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Of all the six projects put out by the hip hop collective Griselda this year, my two favorites are Pray for Paris and Conway's From King to a GOD. And it's a close toss-up between those two, but Paris takes the cake for a couple of reasons. First off, the features are nothing short of magical. Between "327" with Tyler and Joey, "$500 Ounces" with Freddie and Roc, and even "French Toast" with Wale, Pray for Paris' feature game is next level. Heck, if I'm being honest, I even liked Conway's verse on this album's first Griselda posse cut, "George Bondo," better than any individual verse on From King to a GOD. I don't know what it is, but Westside seems to have this way of bringing out the best in his collaborators.

Second, I just love Gunn's voice and flow. It effervesces character and charisma as he spits about material excess and swagger, drawing inspiration from a rather life-changing trip to Paris that he took earlier this year. Even though he always maintains his cool, smooth demeanor, there's an unmistakable joy evident in his rhyming, like he's having the time of his life doing it.

And third, BRRRRRRRRR.

24. Alpha Wolf - A Quiet Place to Die

Photo cred: https://alphawolfcvlt.bandcamp.com/album/a-quiet-place-to-die

My favorite album of metalcore/deathcore this year. These Aussie dudes just have a penchant for writing killer riffs, injecting them with tons of dynamics, interesting rhythmic motifs, and technical flourishes that really add to the brutality of the breakdowns. The one-two punch of "Akudama" followed by "Acid Romance" is a masterclass in writing riffs strong enough to carry an entire song. Other highlights include the great production that really drives home the tectonic weight of these tech-deathmatches and the vocals of John Arnold which are equally expressive and punishing.

Sure, these guys aren't making the most ground-breaking musical statement nor is every song on here the most memorable metal tune you'll hear this year. But with A Quiet Place to Die, Alpha Wolf have separated themselves from the pack (eh? eh?), and in a genre as oversaturated as hardcore, that is certainly a feat to be celebrated.

23. Rina Sawayama - Sawayama

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Pop bangers that fearlessly paint with a more colorful sonic pallet than any of her contemporaries? Yes pleaseeeee. On her full-length debut, Sawayama, the 30-year-old songwriter showcases an incredible amount of talent and creative energy, calling upon her upbringing as a Japanese immigrant in the UK and her love of disparate musical styles like hard rock and late 90s R&B to bring us one of the best pop albums of the last 5 years. 

It's rare to see an artist in 2020 who so unabashedly wears her late 90s/early 00s pop influences on her sleeve; I'm eagerly awaiting the time that 2000s nostalgia gets its time in the mainstream sun, like 80s nostalgia has enjoyed this decade. But I'm here for Rina (and, random side note, Hulu's PEN15 which is fantastic) paving the way for that, throwing in honest-to-goodness final chorus key changes and sax solos into her pop ragers that otherwise sound completely at home in any (pre-pandemic) club in 2020. And sometimes she throws it all together in one song, like on "Paradisin'," and when it does it's nothing short of bliss. I am excitedly watching how her career takes off from here.

22. Mr. Bungle - The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny Demo

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I think if we're being honest, all of us Mr. Bungle fans, to one degree or another, had to deal with the disappointment that the first Bungle album in 20 years was this... straightforward. I am constantly on the lookout for new music that scratches the same itch that Mr. Bungle's flawless 90s discography does -- something that brings that same kind of virtuosic, attention-deficit mania to my ears. So, naturally, if anyone was going to give me more of that, surely Mr. Bungle would when they reformed, right?

Well, turns out the band wasn't trying to do that. In Mike Patton's words, they were just trying to do a band reunion that "didn't suck"; that subverted audience expectations (which, again, were astronomically high) while making something that was artistically fulfilling to them. And so remaking their first demo tape from 1986, that they originally made as 17 and 18 year old kids, to bring the world some well-produced speed metal dripping with unbelievable talent and juvenile humor was the most Bungle move they could've possibly made. 

And once you accept the shocking straightforwardness of it, the joys of being relentlessly pummeled by the band's blisteringly fast assaults of tremolo picking and double kick artillery are yours. Between Mike Patton, Dave Lombardo, Scott Ian, Trevor Dunn, and Trey Spruance, you could make a very, very good argument that this album features THE best vocalist, bassist, guitarists, and drummer alive in metal today, and it's really a rare privilege to watch them combine their powers, let their mullets grow back out a bit, and have some good, dirty fun.

21. Denzel Curry x Kenny Beats - Unlocked

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So typically I reserve these AOTY lists for LPs and I just realized this is an EP... But screw it. This was one of my favorite hip hop releases of the year, and its brevity was certainly a welcome respite from the current trend in hip hop of overly bloated projects. Unlocked is a project that exemplifies quality over quantity (while also being a conceptual work: it was released alongside a short film in which our heroes, Denzel and Kenny, travel through animated cyberspace to retrieve the files for these tracks from all sorts of thieving creatures). It contains some of Denzel's hardest bars yet and some sick, sample-heavy production from Kenny Beats, which kind of sampling I'm a huge sucker for. Something about recontextualized educational films or bulldozer safety videos in hip hop really makes me smile, especially when they're bumping under bars like on "Pyro (leak 2019)" where Denzel says his girl is "bad like battle rappers that make albums with no outcome / X the middleman, no Malcolm / Where's the talcum powder, when I smack n****s / Palm itchin', napalms, we bomb business."

And while Denzel's verses are as good as ever, his hook game was really on fire with this project: the choruses on "Lay_Up.m4a," "Cosmic.m4a," "Take_it_Back_v2".... really all of the songs that had them were all as dope as they were catchy. "DIET_," in particular, has Denzel flying off the handle with that amazing, aggro flow of his, getting some strong distortion in his voice as he proverbially puffs out his chest and spits at his would-be competitors to get on his level. Denzel is right to be jealous of this rapidly growing empire of his, as conceptualized in that accompanying short film: few MCs as young as him have ever proven to be this consistent at dropping heat. 

20. IDLES - Ultra Mono

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For one reason or another, the pressure of The Follow-Up Album loomed larger over IDLES than it did over other bands in a similar situation this year. I think a big part of that was how intensely 2018's Joy As an Act of Resistance tackled topics like racism, sexism, and xenophobia and we were all wondering if they'd be able to meet the moment again when that moment had grown even larger and more heated in the past two years. While a couple moments missed the mark -- "Ne Touche Pas Moi," in particular, is a pretty heavy-handed, uncreative way of preaching to the choir about consent -- overall, IDLES more than succeeded in giving us more quotable, effective, bite-sized social anthems. 

"Carcinogenic" powerfully highlights the dangers, both physical and intellectual, that are posed by the kind of work- and housing-related stressors that so many hundreds of millions of us felt so strongly this year. "Mr. Motivator" is full of great quotables as vocalist Joe Talbot seeks to channel the likes of "[martial artist] Conor McGregor with a samurai sword on rollerblades" and "Kathleen Hanna with bear claws grabbing Trump by the p****." And "Model Village" successfully clowns all those who seek their privileged status quo above all else -- a prescient message for the privileged in America like myself as we move into Biden's presidency.

In addition to these victories on the lyrical front, I think Ultra Mono strikes a perfect balance between the noise rock and punk rock poles that the band has always teetered between. Where Joy's one weakness was its musical homogeneity in the last leg as it leaned too hard into punk songwriting clichés, Ultra Mono never fails to find creative melodic or rhythmic nuggets on which to build songs. All in all, a great offering from one of the UK's finest.

19. Jeff Rosenstock - In the Key of the Creek

Photo cred: https://www.amazon.com/Key-Creek-Craig-Musical/dp/B089R31NN5

Okay, I know you might look at this album and its placement above so many other great albums on the list and balk. But hear me out. As a parent during COVID, this album was incredibly meaningful to me and my family. It's a whole episode of the fantastic Cartoon Network series Craig of the Creek told via song -- a first for the series -- and in it Jeff Rosenstock and the show's writers tell the story of a rainy day for Craig and his friends which keeps them from being able to play together at their beloved local creek and the imagined adventure he embarks on in order to feel close to his friends, even when they're apart. 

Sound relatable? My daughter is only two, but the lockdown has taken a toll on her emotionally, with her being unable to play with the neighbor friends she's made. But the central message of In the Key of the Creek is designed to speak to kids even as young as her: nothing, neither rain nor pandemic, can quell the power of imagination and the joys of childhood. "I know I'm gonna be just fine going on adventures in my mind," Craig sings before the triumphant chorus on "The Creek Is Everywhere!!!" It's a powerful and much-needed message that is being presented to kids on cable television and one that I've tried to help Poppy learn. And to top it all off, the message comes wrapped in these great, bite-sized tunes that feature Jeff's signature genre-hopping, high-energy, dopamine-pumping punk rock. It's fun for the whole family!!!

18. Poppy - I Disagree

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One of the big trends we're seeing in metal in 2020, which I'm 100% here for, is the resurgence of nu-metal and alternative metal, with bands like Code Orange, Architects, Fever 333, and Bring Me the Horizon all putting out ridiculously popular material that would've felt very at home at Ozzfest '98. Of all the music in this movement released this year, Poppy's I Disagree really stood out to me as the best and brightest. 

While these songs are quintessentially catchy, being built off of her strengths as the first pop artist to ever make a metal album, these songs weren't just pop songs that she ran through a metal filter. This was truly one of the more interesting and manic releases I heard this year -- and that includes the new Mr. Bungle album. In the first song, "Concrete," Poppy casually glides from Slipknot-tastic air raid sirens, breakbeats, and gain-burning lead guitars, to metalcore breakdowns, to a bridge that sounds like we accidentally stepped into Brian Wilson's Smile sessions, and then lands on a celestial chorus that harmoniously marries sunshine pop and power metal. Yeah, it's nuts. 

Throughout the record, she oscillates between these extremes: cold, industrial metal and warm, sugary pop. "Fill the Crown" sounds, during its verses, like a straight-up Rammstein and Marilyn Manson mashup, while "Sick of the Sun" is one of the best acoustic pop ballads of the year. The record was intended to be, and succeeded in being, a big middle finger to the music industry which is still trying to pin her down, which she insists on the title track must be "burnt down" so we can be "safe and sound."

17. Aesop Rock - Spirit World Field Guide

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There has been a huge increase in skepticism toward and derision of the "lyrical miracle" in rap in recent years, and that's a whole discussion for another day. But let me be one of many voices to assure you: Aesop Rock remains the real deal. His rhymes are absurdly dense and verbose -- objectively more so than anyone else in the game, famously -- that, even for seasoned fans of his, it takes some adjustment to penetrate the outer layers of his music. But, unlike many super fast rappers who work very hard to create a pretense of big-brainedness but who fall apart upon closer inspection, Aesop Rock on Spirit World Field Guide once again proves that he has bite behind his bark.

Peep "The Gates," where, in the first ten seconds, Aes describes himself as a demon, a martian, and a terracotta Chia Pet head to convey his disarrayed mental state, while also finding room to throw in a slick reference to my favorite Adventure Time episode. Or "Marble Cake," in which in the hook he finds three distinct but equally effective ways of describing how little his death matters to him compared to his time alive. Or the stream-of-consciousness verbal excursion through Peru that is "Pizza Alley", with these freaking bars: "Shaman opt to zombify undocumented expats / High and writing Ayahuasca letters back to Melmac: / 'Dear friends / Send help yesterday / Yours true, condor, puma, serpiente.'" Like... who writes like this?? In a world and a year where so many worked so hard to create convincing facades of authenticity, it's nice to know there are artists out here who actually have it and are instead expending their energy where it matters.

16. Envy - The Fallen Crimson

Photo cred: https://envy.bandcamp.com/album/the-fallen-crimson

As I go down this list, I'm realizing that interesting genre combinations were a defining part of my music enjoyment this year: Code Orange's glitchy metalcore, Poppy's sunshine pop meets 00s alt metal, The Garden's breakbeat slacker rock, and, here, Envy's juxtaposition of post-rock and screamo. Envy have been a major creative force in the underground, not only in their native Japan but throughout the scene (you like Deafheaven? Thank Envy), for over 20 years now, and they have reached another creative peak on The Fallen Crimson. Where much of their late 00s/early 10s work fell prey to the overwrought clichés of post-rock, they leaned harder into the screamo/post-hardcore side of things this time around, really letting fly the sparks from that friction between genres, and that shower of sparks is simply magic. 

Some highlights for me were "Swaying leaves and scattering breath," which might be the most purely triumphant song of the year; fiery "Fingerprint mark"; and "Statement of freedom" which honestly felt like just that for me this year, offering up defiance, desperation, and hope like rising embers from a flame on a cold night. 

I must say, this album is one where I feel particularly aware of the language barrier in a saddening way, especially because so much the songs' dynamics take place vocally, alternating between hushed spoken word and tear-jerking screams, none of which I understand at all, since I don't speak Japanese. But who knows, maybe some day I'll learn it and fall in love with this album again in a completely new way.

15. Freddie Gibbs & the Alchemist - Alfredo

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Freddie Gibbs is one of those artists whose music I have a hard time describing because he does what he does so well. It's like trying to describe the nuances in sound of a running motor in a BMW. It's the sound of a well-oiled machine doing exactly what it was designed to do. And in Freddie's case, that purpose is to take the beats he's given, whoever they're from, Madlib, Kenny Beats, or here the Alchemist, and MURDER THEM. It's to spin stories of trapping that are as slick and startling as a Scorsese film over the finest production he can get his hands on. He did it on Piñata in 2014, he did it on last year's Bandana, and he seemingly effortlessly did it again this year. And like that fine motor that was built to last, there's no sign of that ever slowing down.

And let me make sure to make explicit just how much the Alchemist kills it, too, on these beats. These lush, smooth, dare I say sexy jazz rap beats are an absolute treat to listen to. Let's just say I'm very, very glad that they released the instrumentals a bit after this album dropped. If you're a hip hop fan and somehow haven't checked out either of these guys yet, start with "Something to Rap About," then "All Glass," then the rest of the album, then dive backward into the rest of their discographies.

14. Osees - Protean Threat

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Osees (fka Oh Sees, fka Thee Oh Sees, fka The OCs, probably next known as Theo Seize or some other silly name) have historically been a 7/10 band for me. They're one of my favorite current rock bands, but, until this year, they've only released albums that I'd rate a 7 out of 10. They have songs that are straight 10s, to be sure, like "The Dream" and "Keys to the Castle", but their albums usually hit a patch of weaker ideas or molasses-slow momentum, keeping them from feeling really great to me from front to back. Well, Protean Threat finally changed that. 

Back to back to back bangers on this album! Creativity for days! Riffs and funky little motifs and interesting vocal passages positively flowing out of this thing! It's nothing particularly new for the band -- I can trace most of these creative ideas back to other songs and albums of theirs -- but they just have never this consistently offered up this many great ideas on a single album. For the first time in their discography, I could seriously go song by song into what I love. Opener "Scramble Suit II" is concise, blown-out and has this brilliant ABA structure. "Dreary Nonsense" is like they shoved one of their songs into an episode of Tom and Jerry and pulled it out again. "If I Had My Way" is like one of my favorite Osees songs, "Tidal Wave," but... better in every way?? And "Terminal Jape," man. It's aggressive, catchy, and makes me scrunch my face up and slam my head up and down.

The only thing holding this record back is that it, again, isn't really forging new territory for the band or especially for the genre at large. And maybe "Toadstool" is the one track I could take or leave. But even still, I can certainly enjoy it when it comes on. Overall, Protean Threat is very lacking in problems. Easily one of the best rock albums of the year.

13. Oranssi Pazuzu - Mestarin kynsi

Photo cred: https://oranssipazuzu.bandcamp.com/album/mestarin-kynsi

During some of my darkest, most pissed-off, and confused moments of this hellish year, this album of psychedelic avant-garde black metal especially resonated with me. My biggest hurdle in connecting with this LP (it being my first venture with Oranssi Pazuzu) were the vocals, which are really just cartoonishly villainous, like some kind of half-crow, half-human shaman muttering and/or screeching incantations at you from the murky, bloody cells of its Lich lord's castle. But once I got accustomed to them, I really fell head over heels in love with this album.

Oranssi Pazuzu has a fantastically unique approach to heavy, scary music, slowly building up rich arrangements of guitar, drums, synthesizer, and often things like flutes or strings over several minutes that then mutate into visceral climaxes. It's all very cinematic. And even though all the pieces on here follow that same, rough outline on a macro level, you really never know what on Earth is going to hit you from moment to moment. 

"Oikeamielisten sali" is a great example of this, starting with a softer, brooding section that almost sounds Middle Eastern with its loping rhythm and sour-moded strings, but then a freaking nightmare creature bursts from its chest at about the 3-minute mark and it becomes something terrifying and new. And after all, isn't the best horror built around monstrous transformation? The build and release of my album fave "Uusi teknokratia" is a more anxious one, rocking back and forth on the same few notes when the drums suddenly catch hold of it and carry it off into twisting, dark, craggy recesses of the mind. 

12. The Garden - Kiss My Super Bowl Ring

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As I mentioned with Mr. Bungle earlier, I have this certain musical thirst inside me that is very strong and that can only be quenched by the wacky, the kooky, the attention-deficit, and the genre dysphoric. 100 gecs quenched that thirst in 2019 (and, heck, still this year, with their Tree of Clues remix album) and The Garden is taking it further for me in 2020. I was thoroughly enthralled by their oddball combination of breakbeat, art punk, hip hop, and, like... lo-fi metalcore?, combined with this sort of Eric Andre-like twisted self-assurance that whatever strange, combative thing enters their head is worth spitting out on record. The whole thing combines into this infectiously charismatic but impossible to pin down character oozing from the pores of this album.

"Hit Eject" makes vague but catchy threats about people who "deserve to die, but probably never will" over 90's rave beats before dissolving into mumble rap. "Lowrider Slug," which finds the group sluffing it up with none other than Ariel Pink, seesaws between Pavementian slacker rock and digital hardcore. And I don't even know how to describe my album favorite, "Sneaky Devil." Rate Your Music calls it neurofunk and jungle? It's an album that reduces me to name-dropping genres like that, because that's really the easiest way to make sense of the chaos. No matter what scholars will determine in the papers written on this album in 2056, I know Kiss My Super Bowl Ring was an album I could not stop returning to this year.

11. Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters

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Fiona Apple is one of my favorite modern singer/songwriters, her 2012 album The Idler Wheel... in particular having deeply resonated with me and my tangle of emotions as a young adult. While her album this year, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, found her again covering a wide range of emotions and subgenres of emotion, the feeling that rung out loudest to me this time was anger. Some of you may have read my post from the end of 2018, "Joy As an Act of Resistance," about dealing with anger, but if not, a short recap is just that the trauma of my daughter's premature birth triggered chronic bouts of intense anger at certain people who could've helped inside me that I had never felt before. I'm still dealing with that to this day, to a significant degree. And the exact kind of anger that I get hung up on is the same one Fiona expertly expresses throughout this album: the incredibly sticky indignation where you know you're 100% justified in feeling the way you do, but you can't do anything about it.

She addresses it brilliantly on "Relay," with acapella vocals playfully chanting over sparse, homemade percussion: "Evil is a relay sport when the one who's burned turns to pass the torch." That lyric definitely hit me. She channels it into IDGAF energy against her abuser on "Under the Table," goading him simply by possessing unbreakable autonomy (her quote on the Genius page for this song is amazing). "Fetch the Bolt Cutters" kicks back against the toxic music media of the 90s that damaged her early career (again, I relate to that feeling of needing to fight back against slights long in the past) and "Rack of His" superbly flips misogynist tropes. 

The real stand-out piece of the whole record to me is "Newspaper," where she again eschews the comfort of her piano in favor of clattering, ominous percussion to address another woman who was abused by the same gaslighting douchebag as her. "You and I didn't get a witness / We're the only ones who know." I hear her, see her shaking with rage in the words, "I wanna stand between you / But it's not what I'm supposed to do / I watch him walk over you, talk over you, be mean to you / And it makes me feel close to you." While of course her experiences are incredibly different from mine, when I listen to this album I feel that same, strange camaraderie that grows from this kind of pain. It doesn't fix what happened, but it does wonders to speak your mind and know that there are people who deeply understand.

10. Adrianne Lenker - songs

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A songwriter's merit lies in their ability to connect with the human soul.

One night recently, when my daughter couldn't sleep, I buckled her into her car seat along with her comfort blankie and sippy cup and we just went for a drive. The hum of the engine and wheels on asphalt put her to sleep within a few minutes, and I was left alone with my thoughts and this album. I drove through side streets, then to the freeway, and then exited off into an old neighborhood where my wife and I lived in 2016. "anything" had been playing, and I thought of my wife at home, who would greet me when I got back with a kiss, warm and casual. "I don't want to talk about anything, I don't want to talk about anything / I want to kiss, kiss your eyes again."

I pulled into the apartment complex where we lived and looked up at the window of our old place while Adrianne Lenker's delicate, wisp voice and virtuosic acoustic picking continued to fill the heater-warmed car. I thought about all the pain we'd felt in this apartment because of my struggles with anxiety, where I'd break into panic attacks and fits of sobbing, and I heard Adrianne sing, "Over the Dead Sea / Keeping you company / Thinking 'I'm not afraid of you now / 'I'm not afraid of you now." 

My daughter slumbered on, I drove on, and "not a lot, just forever" came on, and it made me tear up thinking of her. "Through your eyes I see / A smile you bring to me." How could I have known, how could I have appreciated that, in the throes of that mental chaos, that someone so purely beautiful and wonderful was waiting for me on the other side if I just pressed on? I drove home, feeling full again, my head full of my angels.

9. Open Mike Eagle - Anime, Trauma, and Divorce

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Perhaps the most succinct and hefty praise I can give this album is that I'm really not into anime and I still loved the crap out of this. Yes, references to Death Parade, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and especially JoJo's Bizarre Adventure are woven into just about every song on this album, but it's not an album about anime. It's about trauma and the very human reflex of retreating into what's comfortable in the face of it, and using that comfortable space to work through that tangle of searingly painful emotions. And that was definitely relatable for me this year. I know I buried myself under more video games, sugary drinks, and hot baths this year than most others, trying to eek out a bit more serotonin from the ol' noggin. 

Open Mike's version of this can be seen in "Bucciarati," where he tries to channel the Jojo character of the same name (who has the power to put a zipper on anything), meditating on his wish to do the same thing with his life in the wake of his recent divorce. Just zip everything back to the way it used to be. But he says he's "broken the zip again, trying to hold it in." And on "I'm a Joestar," Open Mike insists "It's my turn, it's my saga / A special edition of Open Mike's manga" and then introduces us to his stand, Black Magic, in a literal power fantasy that feels simultaneously triumphant and bittersweet. 

Open Mike also reaches to things like "self-care" (whatever that is) and good old fashioned pontification (producing the absolutely year-defining line "It's October and I'm tired" on "Everything Ends Last Year). 

But most of all, it seems, Mike finds comfort in his son, Asa. After all of this pain and searching and healing, the album ends with a heart-warming live performance of him and his son rapping together about this one time snorkeling together. It was a perfect way to wrap together this powerful, emotionally naked, and often hilarious record that captured so beautifully the gauntlet of emotions that I think we all had a brush with this year.

8. Jeff Rosenstock - N O  D R E A M

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I've long said that Jeff Rosenstock is a songwriter first and a punk artist second. It's clear from his work that his main priority is to craft well-written songs into which he puts a piece of himself in all its messy glory and then it just so happens that those core song ideas are (often) manifested in the language of punk rock. Other times they're manifested into something closer to folk or chiptune or singer/songwriter music. But all of it is bound together by this deep, genuine heart of his, propelled by the hope that music can change the messes he sees in the world and himself.

That was as true as ever on N O  D R E A M, where Jeff somehow sounded more pissed off and ready to take on the world than ever, rejecting the scraps given to him by the powerful on "Scram!"; taking on the government in the title track, screaming, "The only framework capitalism can thrive in is dystopia. ...Hold accountable the architects of hopelessness and never-ending violence!"; and, as he is wont to do, taking on himself and his own privilege and hypocritical moments on "Nikes (Alt)." The second half of the record waxes more personal and less indignant, with songs like the beautifully wistful "State Lines" and "Honeymoon Ashtray," a touching portrait of a couple holding tight to each other through the dystopian chaos that is 2020. 

Between this and In the Key of the Creek, Jeff's music really did a lot of work to get me through this year. He is just one of those artists who consistently, deeply connects with me, and I count myself lucky to be alive in 2020 if only to be around for this amazing career of his.

 7. Run the Jewels - RTJ4

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Few albums this year felt like such a moment as Run the Jewels' fourth album. Released on June 3, right smack in the middle of the police brutality protests that followed the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, RTJ4 felt like -- no, scratch that -- it literally was a rallying cry to everyone either marching on the front lines or doing what they could at home to have courage and keep fighting the good fighting. In that respect, Killer Mike's masterpiece of a verse on "walking in the snow" served as the album's centerpiece, slamming police brutality, the school-to-prison pipeline, and virtue signaling people on social media whose real-world apathy fuels the continuation of the system, lip service notwithstanding. It was a striking call to action, as were tracks like "JU$T," which featured a fiery performance by Zack de la Rocha, and especially "pulling the pin," with a showstopping verse from El-P, alongside great performances by Mavis Staples and Josh Homme. 

The other most striking facet of RTJ4 is its absolutely impeccable, top-tier production. Seriously, El-P gave me some of the slickest, most flawless beats I've heard in a minute and some of his best work in RTJ, period. Listen to this album on headphones and phone speakers if you must, but you have to listen to this thing on high quality speakers at least once. It comes right out the gate with that snare-hammering beat on "yankee and the brave (ep. 4)" and it just does not. let. up.This album was truly a landmark point of the year for many, many people, and for very good reason.

6. Mamaleek - Come & See

Photo cred: https://mamaleek.bandcamp.com/album/come-and-see

Probably the most widely underrated album you'll find on my list. (For real, this was on NO ONE's AOTY lists, which is a real shame.) Maybe people just didn't give it enough time, 'cause Mamaleek's avant garde jazz rock/black metal opus Come & See is the textbook definition of a grower. It is ugly. Not brutal or disgusting like some grind album, but ugly. That's just the best word to describe it on initial listens. The production is murky and blown-out, the guitars sound like they're melting, and passages of blast beats and/or dissonant alto saxophone honking are liable to attack you at a moment's notice, with the ugliest thing being the voice of the singer (the identity of whom, like the rest of the band, is kept strictly anonymous). He snarls, screams, whines, wails his way through this thing in the most abrasive and unprincipled way possible. 

But, after repeated listens, and after initially turning my nose up at how much this album sounds like the color grayish-brown, this record just grabbed me and would not let go. Bit by bit, I began to appreciate the album's incredible, raw, cathartic power, especially on the first two songs, "Eating Unblessed Meat" and "Cabrini-Green," which both are loosely themed around the physical and psychic impacts of post-war public housing. It might be nerdy, but the best comparison that comes to mind is that these two tracks are like levels in Dark Souls: challenging, even oppressive, but unbelievably satisfying once you master them, especially once you see how their winding passages circle back to themselves at just the right spots. 

The best example of what I'm talking about is on "Eating Unblessed Meat," when they build up these harrowing black metal blasts in the middle of the track, then release that kinetic energy into a dissonant, head-banging breakdown, followed by a brief silence before crashing back in with the song's intro riff. *chef's kiss*

5. Imperial Triumphant - Alphaville

Photo cred: https://metalinjection.net/reviews/imperial-triumphant-alphaville

Upon the release of Imperial Triumphant's 2018 album, Vile Luxury, the New York City-based band offered this explanation for the suffocating darkness of their sound: "Our city is like the corpse of a giant. What was once so bright, grand and spectacular, is now filled with greedy maggots writhing towards their share of ‘success’. We don’t support it nor are we against. We only play the sounds of the New York City as we hear them." That hellishly dystopian urban atmosphere that they conjure with their mix of jazz, black metal, and death metal has only grown stronger and more technical on Alphaville and, in hellishly dystopian 2020, it has never felt more relevant.

While this album's initial pull for me was how well it sonically captured the brutality of the virus and the hopelessness it was rousing in me this summer, I kept coming back to Alphaville over and over because this is simply some of the best metal I've heard in years. Each player on this album is just bursting with technical proficiency, starting with guitarists Zachary Ilya Ezrin and Amarok Myrvandr, whose work is musically like my favorite kind of poetry: never resorting to clichés or overwrought ideas, instead constantly pushing the medium to previously unheard places. "Atomic Age" contains some of their craziest work on here, with this impossible, serpentine rhythm that then leaps up and down with terrifying top of the neck calisthenics. "Excelsior" and "Transmission to Mercury" are among the jazzier pieces on the record and feature phenomenal drumming. 

And "Alphaville" is the imposing pinnacle of the whole ordeal, where all of the ideas musically and lyrically come together in a showstopping finale that features Ezrin finally going off the rails as he screams incessantly, "état de contrôle, état de contrôle." Even after the darkest days of this pandemic have passed for me, I am still completely in love with this record and I can't recommend it enough to all my metalhead readers.

4. Jason Isbell & the 400 Unit - Reunions

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This is a landmark album for me, because it's the first time I've ever loved a modern country album enough to put it in the top 4 of an AOTY list. But make no mistake, Reunions isn't getting this lofty spot on my list as some kind of novelty for me personally. Jason Isbell made one of the most thoughtful and gorgeous albums I heard all year and I am hear to shout it from the rooftops. 

The instrumentals across this record are top-notch; varied and expertly performed and produced. We've got country rock ragers, Petty-ish heartland rock, classic country, and a tender ballad for the closer. But while the instrumentals he and his band provide certainly make up a large chunk of the appeal, the thing that really stopped me in my tracks are Jason's lyrics. Man alive, his lyrics. Like so many great songwriters before him, he's able to make the most insightful observations about and paint poignant pictures of everyday living that it makes you start to look at the world differently, too. 

He details his battles with alcoholism on "It Gets Easier," arrestingly recounting, "Last night I let myself remember / Times I forgot a woman's name / Blacking out behind the wheel / How tight the handcuffs feel / My daughter's eyes when she's ashamed." He recounts the loss of a childhood friend to an overdose on "Only Children" ("Hydrocodone in your backpack / Maybe these words will hold the beast back"). He takes himself and his privilege to task on "What've I Done to Help." "Letting You Go" is a tear-jerking ballad about his daughter's coming-of-age... I was consistently stopped dead in my tracks by some of the lines in these songs. In a year that was so complicated and full of reasons to grow cold, this album was a much-needed reminder of the beauty in simplicity, of the warmth in the mundane and familial, and that joy can come from the most unexpected places. 

3. Quelle Chris & Chris Keys - Innocent Country 2

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As high as my praise is for RTJ4, and as much as that record kind of seems like the chad vs. the virgin in this situation, I found myself emotionally magnetized to Innocent Country 2 more than any other hip hop album this year. If RTJ4 was a broadcast from the commander at HQ, Innocent Country 2 is a well-worn diary kept by an everyman on the frontlines. Rather than going the route of being explicitly sociopolitical and calculated for war, Quelle Chris made a moving statement on Black excellence by crafting an incredibly personal, complex, dense, and often funny portrait of the Black artist as an American, accompanied by some equally fantastic, quirky and evocative jazz instrumentation from Chris Keys.

2016's Innocent Country (which, as you might surmise, this is the sequel to) was an album that was decidedly preoccupied with a nervous and somewhat bleak outlook on the future. This album, in contrast, as made explicit on the pair's Bandcamp page, "offers soothing light in a bleak timeline. A hopeful record in a hopeless moment, precisely when it's needed most." And that was written one month before the historic social unrest that erupted this year. In the warmth of this soothing light, you'll find stories of love, which usually grow cold and painful ("Outro / Honest" and "Graphic Bleed Outs"). You'll find prayers ("Ritual"). You'll find pontification on the fragility of life ("Sudden Death"). In the same track, you'll find cynical rumination on the bootstraps narrative plus hilarious self-deprecation ("Grease from the Elbows"). Each feels like a little piece of a heart, making up a whole, complete human being.

I wish I had given this album a full proper review so I could spend more time and space going into some of my favorite instrumentals and lyrics. But one specific lyric in particular has stuck in my mind since I first heard it, as the defining question of the album. It's in the chorus of "Sacred Safe": "Are your hearts engaged?" The journey ahead is dark and deep, but make sure your hearts are engaged, for there are many miles before we sleep.

2. Chloe x Halle - Ungodly Hour

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Each of these albums at the top of my list got me through 2020 in significant ways, often by operating on some kind of complex, emotional level, but Chloe x Halle's Ungodly Hour did it in a unique way: by providing non-stop, wall-to-wall, essential, 100% certified BANGERS. Sure, it's nice to curl up with your emotions, some Ben & Jerrys, and Fetch the Bolt Cutters, as needed, or to smash some frickin' potatoes on the ground to Alphaville while digging philosophically into the darkness of the world. But sometimes music should just make you... idk, happy?? (Crazy, I know.) And Chloe and Halle Bailey wrote an album of 13 phenomenal R&B bops that did just that for me. 

There is not a skippable song on this entire album. Each one brings a unique and important idea to the table musically and lyrically. Even "Do It," which is probably my least favorite if I had to pick, is still the album's viral hit backbone of a single, and Ungodly Hour just wouldn't flow right without its bouncing understated beat and heavenly chorus. It's clear the sisters, who handled a majority of the production themselves and killed it, put an incredible amount of time and work into making each song able to stand on its own two feet, and it really paid off.

I'm really trying to not make these write ups into full-length reviews (though I'm not succeeding), so let me just shout out one more thing: the humor in this album. Humor is often an underrated and under-utilized tool in popular music, which can inject that elusive happiness directly into a song unexpectedly. "Busy Boy" is so witty and sarcastic and deadly in skewering this dude they're singing about that I can't help but smile the whole time it's on. And "Tipsy" especially had me cracking up, when the sisters take some pre-relationship warnings to a boy to the extreme: "I'll take you to the afterlife / Boy, if you ain't acting right ... Then I'll hunt down your family." 

And let me be clear: This isn't just some silly album of pop bubblegum. Elsewhere on Ungodly Hour, Chloe and Halle express tender encouragement to other women who are going through it, or steamy longing as the other woman in a relationship, or undying loyalty. But this kind of humor is somewhat rare in contemporary R&B and it really brought a great, refreshing dimension to the music. In short: LISTEN TO THISSSS.

Before we get to #1, some

Honorable Mentions

Phoebe Bridgers - Punisher
BLACKPINK - The Album
Clown Core - Van
Logic - No Pressure
and
Touche Amore - Lament

And finally...

1. Fleet Foxes - Shore

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As I mentioned throughout the post, this year, especially this summer, contained some of the most difficult periods of the past ten years for me. It was incredibly depressing for me to graduate from college into the hiring freeze and near-recession of the pandemic, and during the summer while I was looking for work, I started spiraling into despair. I was still bitter that a lot of the joy that was supposed to come with the birth of my daughter was taken away from me, and now the same thing had happened with graduation, and I was struggling to see the point of continuing to try if this was all that life would have in store for me. But each night, I would hold on to that little bit of hope and make myself apply for at least five jobs. After months and months of nothing, finally one of those random job postings worked and I got an amazing job, in the field I went to school for, at the end of August.

A few weeks later, on the autumnal equinox, Fleet Foxes released Shore. Now, two things fill my soul with joy more than almost anything in this world: fall and Fleet Foxes. Something about the music that Robin Pecknold's music has always touched me in ways that few artists consistently do; his music hums on the same frequency as my soul. So, a brand new album from them on the first day of fall of any year would've had me squealing like a BTS fan. But this year in particular, after the excruciating summer I had just been through, this autumnal blessing didn't just feel like a fun coincidence. It embodied to me, on a deep, spiritual level, that light of hope that I had held onto during those dark times. 

The second or third time I heard "Sunblind," when that chorus swelled that sounds exactly like the warmth of the sun, I just broke down crying from the sheer beauty of it. It was a moment that makes you grateful to be alive, to witness something so purely beautiful, like the symphony of a forest rainstorm or a tender "I love you" from my daughter. On Shore, Robin Pecknold channeled that pure bliss of the band's celestial sound into something a lot more mature than their 2008 self-titled and a lot more direct and relatable than 2017's Crack-Up, containing all of the gorgeous, lush arrangements you'd expect from the best chamber folk, but including, for the first time, to a catchy, groove-driven rhythm section. Maybe it's just because I'm a drummer, but this new version of their sound amplified that feeling of joy for me manifold.

This album hasn't quite beaten out Helplessness Blues as my favorite Fleet Foxes record; that album literally changed my life as a young man trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted from life. But this album certainly changed my year, providing meaning and context to all the darkness. And I hope that when dark times come again, this album will remind me how good it feels when and how inevitable it is that the sun will pierce the clouds.