The 50 Best Albums of 2020

Welsh electronic producer Kelly Lee Owens is a master of mixing soft things and hard things. Her voice whispers in your ear and her beats ricochet in your head, coming together to form electronic music that makes you feel, makes you move, makes you think. Never has all this sounded so beautiful than on Owens’ sophomore album, Inner Song. Songs that start inward, about heartbreak (“On”) or the trap of the internet (“Wake-up”), end in an outward-facing euphoria, whether in the form of throbbing dance-floor beats or the cries of strings and arpeggiated synth. Even at their hardest (“Jeanette,” “Night,” “Melt!” ) the emotions are just as instant, the release just as cathartic. —E.B.

Nashville-born indie rocker Sophie Allison reaches deep inside herself with her second album, Color Theory, building on the emotional honesty of her 2018 breakthrough, Clean. Born in 1997, Allison is a proudly Nineties-fueled songwriter, with a little Liz Phair in her guitar and just a touch of R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe in her vocals. (Not to mention the way she sings about “Night Swimming.”) Color Theory has some of the year’s loneliest songs, taking on depression, insecurity, and illness — as she admits in “Royal Screw-Up,” “I am ‘fake it till you make it’ in a can.” Yet she always keeps you rooting for her to make it. —R.S.

To call Stephen Malkmus’ Traditional Techniques an “acoustic record” wouldn’t be inaccurate, but it doesn’t quite capture the sonic expanse of this midcareer gem. “ACC Kirtan,” “Xian Man,” and “Brainwashed” unfurl into psychedelic sprawl, while elsewhere Malkmus takes his 12-string toward country-rock, or classic folk, or surrounds it with woodwinds, drums, and string instruments from Africa and the Middle East. Traditional Techniques revels in the gray space between frank and enigmatic, whether exploring love and friendship, or in yarns about propane smugglers or the extremely online. “May the word be spread via cracked emoji,” Malkmus sings on “Shadowbanned” — it’s unclear what exactly that may mean, but like the best, inscrutable Malkmus lines, it rings true. —J. Blistein

Toots Hibbert, one of the most beloved and revered voices in the history of Jamaican music, died this year at age 77, but he left us the marvelous Got to Be Tough, his first LP in over a decade. Co-produced by Zak Starkey, with contributions from Ziggy Marley, Jamacain rhythm king Sly Dunbar, Meters drummer Cyril Neville, and Starkey’s dad, Ringo Starr, it’s a perfect distillation of Toots’ signature mix of reggae, soul, and funk, insurrectionary spirit, and bighearted down-home grit. “Just Brutal” makes resistance feel like a party, while “Freedom Train” travels from from Kingston to Memphis, gathering revolutionary energy along the way, and “Three Little Birds,” with Ziggy Marley, turns Bob Marley’s beloved melodic gem into a horn-driven barnburner. Though not intended as such, Got to Be Tough is a moving farewell to one of reggae’s true fathers. —J.D. 

Adam Weiner, Philly’s patron saint of ass-shakers, let his ambitions run wild on his band’s Private Lives, a 17-song double album that somehow doesn’t drag. Like Low Cut Connie‘s live shows, it’s a sweaty — Weiner would say “schvitzin’” — listen, full of cathartic anthems (“Help Me”), gritty character studies (“Charyse”), and red-faced songs about fucking (“The Fuckin You Get for the Fuckin You Got”). The title track, a raucous collection of dirty secrets, and the piano ballad “Look What They Did” stand as the record’s yin and yang, with Weiner celebrating lovable freaks in the former and lamenting the abandonment of kids in the latter. —J.H.

In a world full of bands straining to be good enough, Fontaines D.C. aim for the skies — these Dublin punk lads flat-out want to be your favorite band, nothing less. Result: The year’s most full-throated, stouthearted, old-school-guitar rabble-rousing. Irish to the core (the “D.C.” stands for “Dublin City”), they rush through their second album, A Hero’s Death, with a Clash-y spirit, a slashing Gang of Four guitar attack, and Pogues-worthy humor. When Grian Chatten snarls “I Was Not Born,” he’s throwing down the gauntlet to challenge all other bands on both sides of the Atlantic. —R.S. 

Abel Tesfaye is at best when he follows his moody impulses through sleek sounds, and he did that brilliantly on his 2020 synth-pop smash “Blinding Lights.” The rest of After Hours is his best version yet of his go-to lachrymose lushness, splitting the difference between glowering self-indulgence and Top 40 smoothness on post-breakup purges like “Hardest to Love” and “Too Late,” as well as the Elton John-interpolating “Scared to Live,” and his vocal flexes throughout the LP prove once again that he’s one of the most gifted R&B crooners to hit the radio this century. Hard to love? Perhaps. But on After Hours, he’s never been easier to like. —J.D.

Hayley Williams has been an emo-pop elder statesman for years now. Her solo debut (built from three EPs released throughout the spring) bursts with ideas. You can her band Paramore’s hungry-hearted neo-New Wave sparkle here, but she takes her sound to new places, from Bjorkian dreaminess to Eighties R&B and jagged art pop à la Tune-Yards, without leaving behind sharp hooks and big-chorus payoffs she gets so naturally. “Got a lot inside of me,” she sings on the Janet Jackson-esque “Watch Me While I Bloom,” one of many moments here where experimentation, freedom, and fun all blossom at once. —J.D.

Four Tet collapses the distance between hard-charging floor-fillers and languid, hypermelodic electronics on Sixteen Oceans. The album opens by encouraging movement: “School” is high-stepping house with a glassy instrumental hook, and “Baby” is zippy even as it stutters forward, slicing and dicing an Ellie Goulding vocal. On the other end of the spectrum is “Harpsichord,” a drumless, serene beauty, and “Romantics,” which sounds like the mating call of a Sonar machine. The routes are different, but they both lead to the same beatific ending. —E.L.

Shamir called this his “most commercial-sounding” album since his 2015 debut, but whatever mainstream leanings it might have did not compromise how vibrant or creative he could get. The 25-year-old singer-songwriter performs synth-pop, Gun Club country punk, and shoegaze all with the same confidence and charisma, in a voice that can transform any anxious misgivings into reassurance. “I prefer to be alone, but you can join if you like/I’ll stay strong for you ’cause I don’t want to be seen when I cry,” he sings on “Running,” speaking as much to his audience as he is to himself. —C.S.

Isbell continued to stake his claim as Nashville’s most empathetic wordsmith with his seventh album. A slightly more subdued production than 2018’s stormy The Nashville Sound, the LP still cuts deep lyrically with ballads like “Only Children” and “Dreamsicle” — “New sneakers on a high school court/And you swore you’d be there,” he sings in the latter. The impassioned “Be Afraid” takes aim at silence in the wake of injustice, with Isbell proclaiming, “If your words add up to nothing, then you’re making a choice.” Isbell’s keen self-awareness has always been a core component of his work, and like the hard-fought sobriety he chronicled in “It Gets Easier,” he doesn’t always have the answers. On Reunions, he is willing to keep pushing forward anyway. —J.F.

Megan went from a rising rapper reveling in her own endless hot-girl summer to a superstar and powerful voice for social justice. After being shot in the foot, she confronted misogynist violence, became a New York Times op-ed columnist, and proudly displayed a “Protect Black Women” sign on SNL. She topped off her year bringing us Good News, demanding justice for Breonna Taylor, flowing effortlessly over booty-bouncing tracks, and celebrating her own awesomeness with lines like, “If I wasn’t me and I would’ve seen myself/I would have bought me a drink/Took me home, did me long, ate it with the panties on.” Hard to argue with that logic. —J.D.

To Love Is to Live starts and ends the same way, with Jehnny Beth declaring her vulnerability, as she sings, “I am naked all the time.” Beth, who is best known as the powerful singer for the art-punk group Savages, explores the dusky corners of her id throughout the record, questioning her sexuality, gender, religion, and her own fragility in a way that recalls both Nine Inch Nails and PJ Harvey. The violent “I’m the Man” convulses with electro-shock synths, while the ballad “French Countryside” shows rare tenderness as she sings lyrics she wrote on a flight she thought was crashing. It’s like a self-portrait in which layer after layer disintegrates until you see which ingredients make Beth the artist she is. —K.G.

Halsey has no inhibitions when it comes to getting raw emotionally — and Manic is her most fearless move yet. She chases her darkest anxieties all over the spectrum, from hip-hop to rock to country, in hits like “Without You” and “Graveyard” — the kind of album where you can find Alanis Morissette, Suga from BTS, Jennifer’s Body samples or a voicemail pep talk from John Mayer. Halsey has the too-much too-young celebrity blues: as she sings, “I remember the names of every single kid I’ve met/But I forget half the people I’ve gotten in bed.” Yet she wrestles with her issues in her own unmistakably real voice. —R.S.

It’s been five years since Selena Gomez dropped Revival, one of the past decade’s sharpest breakup albums. On Rare, she goes even harder with a more acerbic adult perspective, raging about all the hours of her youth she wasted babysitting for emotional parasites. (Surely fictional, of course.) Even in playful kiss-offs like “Cut You Off” or “Rare,” it’s cathartic to hear Gomez dump out the bad years like they’re just burned toast. Rare was just one of her 2020 highlights — she became a Julia Child for our time with her quarantine cooking show, Selena + Chef. —R.S.

Cyrus has gone through more career changes before she turns 30 than most artists do in a lifetime. Her latest new moment is her finest, a splashy swerve into glammy throwback rock that’s more fun than anything she’s ever done. As her many much-beloved covers have long attested, the singer’s powerhouse chops can fit pretty much any style, from serpentine industrial disco grind to rhinestone-cowgirl Seventies balladry to Steve Nicks-nicking synth grandeur. But this is more than just a fun night of karaoke; Cyrus breathes her own story into these songs, making for a more personal album than any of her previous reinventions. —J.D.

Remember when Ariana Grande appeared in her “God Is a Woman” video as a benevolent deity, sexually fingering the Earth? Positions is the album this goddess made when she looked down and saw the planet was in even more pitiful shape. It’s Grande’s R&B concept album about having rampant round-the-clock sex, to the point where it makes her other records sound tame by comparison — she knew the world needed it. She throws down with Doja Cat, the Weeknd, and Ty Dolla Sign, but she hits her peak in “34+35,” where she lays it right on the line: “If I put it quite plainly/Just gimme them babies.” —R.S.

Emo garage-rock becomes thrillingly new on this Chicago band’s debut, driven by the bracingly real songwriting of singer-guitarist Lili Trifilio. Pop-punk torpedoes like “Promises” and “Colorblind” power through self-doubt in a way that makes post-teen romantic angst seem at once archetypal yet wholly original; Beach Bunny are college-age kids who’ve been playing together for years, so there’s a surprisingly amount of songwriting chops and musical precision here, and when Trifilio gets what she deserves on “Cloud 9,” singing “I don’t want to seem the way I do/but I’m confident when I’m with you,” you can’t help but want to jump up and high-five her. —J.D.

Never Will was this year’s most adventurous mainstream country album, drawing on everything from old-timey mountain music (“Velvet Red”) and storming country rock (“Martha Divine”) to the Fleetwood Mac-indebted glimmer of the title track. On “Voodoo Doll” and “One Night Standards,” McBryde firmly establishes herself as a razor-sharp chronicler of forbidden pleasure and hardboiled lust. “You’d think a girl on fire,” she sings, “would stay away from gasoline.” Never Will is an extraordinary document that chronicles — with empathy, grace, and humor — what happens when men and women pour gasoline onto their own bad decisions. —J. Bernstein

This flawless R&B gem comes from the sister duo of Chloe and Halle Bailey, born in Atlanta in the summer of 1998 and the spring of 2000. Ungodly Hour is way past the teen vibe of their debut, The Kids Are Alright — the sisters show off as sophisticated writers, producers, and (most of all) singers. Chloe x Halle seem to worship Southern Nineties R&B, yet you can hear jazz, techno, indie rock, even doo-wop in their game. They team up with the U.K. house duo Disclosure for the gorgeously kaleidoscopic title ballad, while testifying to their twentysomething grit with the world-beating confidence of “Do It” and “Baby Girl.” —R.S.

Released in two parts throughout the first half of 2020, this double-LP opus from North Carolina singer-songwriter Moses Sumney was a bold exploration of the murky middle spaces: between rootsy plainspokenness and deconstructed futurism, pop melody and experimentation, minimalism and maximalism. Along the way, Sumney littered his second album with dark humor and his sharpest singles to date — from the folksy “Polly” to the naked torch song “Me in 20 Years” to his BDSM-tinged homage to Aretha Franklin, “Cut Me.” Grae is the type of conceptual work as untailored to streaming-era attention spans as it is endlessly rewarding for those willing to spend the time reveling in its multitudes. —J. Bernstein 

Robin Pecknold spent a long time struggling to make Fleet Foxes’ latest, before convening a few indie-rock buddies to create a pandemic-steeped meditation on the search for community, meaning, and beauty amid turmoil and change. It may be the prettiest version yet of his finely wrought soft-rock pastoralism — from the sky-kissing sweep of “Young Man’s Game” to the sublime acoustic tune “I’m Not My Season.” The most moving moments pay tribute to departed musical heroes, from David Berman of the Silver Jews to Nick Drake and Otis Redding, and time and again Shore believably connects Pecknold’s own musical vision with the eternal. —J.D. 

Seven years on top of the world, and yet BTS still make it all sound like they’ve only just begun to shine. The South Korean pop kings didn’t water down their style (or language) to conquer America — they just won the audience on their own terms. On Map of the Soul: 7, their most complex and personal album yet, they keep pursuing their loftiest creative ambitions. Map lives up to its title with heartfelt individual confessions like Suga’s rap-star space fantasy “Interlude: Shadow.” But the high point is “Moon,” Jin’s wonderstruck love song to the audience, where he pledges his devotion over jangling guitars. —R.S.

Flo Milli’s first full-length mixtape is almost Ramones-ian in its brash efficiency: 12 songs, 30 minutes, zero filler or guest spots. Milli is a 20-year-old from Alabama whose rise was aided by TikTok, but here she shows she’s mastered the needling taunts of classic East Coast rap. Her targets — dudes who won’t stop texting her, haters of all kinds, other unfortunate souls — are dismissed with casual glee. (“Actin like we got beef/I didn’t know that you exist” is the hip-hop version of Don Draper’s “I don’t think about you at all.”) Along the way, she proves a dexterous rhymer, compares herself to an Obama daughter, and makes good use of an SWV song from well before she was born. It all adds up to one of the most fun albums in a year sorely lacking in good times. —C.H.

Vivid pop satisfaction and razor-sharp songwriting are packed into every square inch of Women in Music Pt. III, the pointedly titled third album from L.A.’s Haim sisters. Here, you’ll find Haim’s trademark sonic throwbacks to Fleetwood Mac and Nineties R&B, but weirder and more daring than they’ve ever been before, thanks to Rostam’s innovative production and Haim’s ability to seemingly master any musical instrument or pop-rock style. What really takes center stage is a newfound emotional and artistic maturity, with songs that tackle the complexities of depression (“I Know Alone”), codependency (“FUBT”), and sisterly friendship (“Hallelujah”). —C.S.

“Enough is enough, bitch/City Girls with the fuck shit,” Yung Miami of City Girls informs us on the duo’s audacious second LP. Over forehead-rattling South Florida beats, she and her pal JT crush their enemies and fend off unworthy men, delivering every snap with authoritative glee, whether they’re celebrating their success on “Winnin” or partying with Doja Cat on “Pussy Talk.” Along with the body-slamming sense of command, there’s struggle here, too. “I really used to sleep on pallets/Now I’m sittin’ in the condo like it’s a palace,” JT raps, and that sense of sisterly resilience makes the record hit even harder. —J.D.

Young Bruces of old mingle freely with the modern-day icon on the introspective Letter to You, a particularly revealing record for Springsteen that finds him hopscotching around key eras of his career. He fronts the ghost of his teenage rock group the Castiles in the elegiac “Last Man Standing,” leads a long-gone version of the E Street Band on the lost Seventies track “Janey Needs a Shooter,” and confronts the autumn of his years — he’s 71 now — on the throttling “Ghosts.” But this isn’t Springsteen powering down — it’s a letter of intent to keep on rocking, as long as the spirit in the night is able. —J.H.

A callback of sorts to Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” origins, Chromatica nimbly and reverently touched on sleek house and electro-pop grooves, packing the songs full of delectable hooks in “Stupid Love,” “Enigma,” and “Rain on Me,” the latter a winning duet with Ariana Grande. The angular “911” swerved into chilly Italo disco territory, while K-pop stars Blackpink rode a deep house riff on “Sour Candy.” Running through the album was a thread of struggle, resilience, and healing, culminating in the euphoric, trance-influenced numbers “Sine From Above” (featuring Elton John) and “1000 Doves.” It was a message many of us needed to hear on repeat throughout 2020. —J.F.

After Phoebe Bridgers released 2018’s Boygenius with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker and 2019’s Better Oblivion Community Center with Conor Oberst, the anticipation was high for the indie singer-songwriter’s second full-length album. She delivered more, and then some. Every track sparks an emotional charge, as her sharp songwriting spins tales of nautical-themed birthday parties (“Moon Song”), shedding crocodile tears in a car (“Savior Complex”), and feeling, well, nothing (“Chinese Satellite”). Only Bridgers would place a stunning folk song like “Graceland Too” next to the epic Wizard of Oz tornado that is “I Know the End,” but that kind of mad genius energy is her hallmark. —A.M.

This fantastic dance-pop record came out when none of us could make it to the club, but no matter — that’s what bedrooms are for. On her fourth album, the London singer cranked up the Studio 54 glamour while making sure everyone would be permitted beyond the velvet rope. The first three tracks alone act like a suite best heard late at night, one disco-ball stunner after another: the lovestruck “Spotlight,” the synth-heavy title track, and the highly enjoyable “Ooh La La,” which kicks off with a car honking. If there’s anything we want in 2021, it’s for Ware to release this gem on gold vinyl. —A.M.

The Philadelphia rapper’s hugely anticipated second LP is shattering one moment and slippery the next, a place where a jarringly saccharine sample of the Backstreet Boys’ 1999 hit “I Want It That Way” coexists with a jittery track built around the music from Microsoft Windows’ videogame Space Cadet 3D Pinball. Few artists can match Lil Uzi Vert’s steamrolling force — “Homecoming” channels the skeletal pugnacity of late-Eighties hip-hop, and “Lo Mein” has all the frills of a battering ram. Impressively, the rapper brings the same brick-through-the-window energy to ballads like “I’m Sorry,” a contrite track that apologizes for “everything I ever said.” —E.L.

On Saint Cloud, singer-songwriter Katie Crutchfield delved into her Alabama roots to create a stripped-back Americana sound, drawing on influences like Lucinda Williams and Emmylou Harris. (Just look at the album cover of Crutchfield perched on a pickup truck with red roses in its bed, and you’ll get the idea.) Newly sober, Crutchfield’s songwriting is pure and hits you like a gut punch — whether she’s likening love to honey on a spoon (“Can’t Do Much”) or reflecting on picked flowers in a Topo Chico bottle (“Lilacs”). Released the month the pandemic was declared a national emergency, it’s the kind of country comfort we didn’t know we’d need so badly. —A.M.

Run the Jewels have long been Public Enemy’s heirs apparent, making deft jams out of left-leaning politics, zany tangents, and iconoclastic hip-hop production. But the connection has never been more evident than on RTJ4, released at the height of the protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd. In between sharp rhymes about disadvantaged black youth and racist cops (“Walking in the Snow”) and “silly guys” like Trump on Twitter (“Goonies vs. E.T.”), Killer Mike and El-P crafted a soundtrack for a revolution. On nearly every track, the duo speak perfectly to the most turbulent year in living memory, reassuring listeners along the way that if they can make it, you can too. —K.G.

Lipa’s second album would have been a magnificent disco trip, even in the best of all possible years. But Future Nostalgia was crucial for a year when these beats were as close to the club as fans could get. It’s a rush of uptempo dance glitz, with Lipa twirling the night away in the stilettos of queens like Madonna (“Hallucinate”) or Gloria Gaynor (“Don’t Start Now”) or Olivia Newton-John (“Physical”). “Baby, keep on dancing like you ain’t got a choice,” she commands in “Physical,” and as long as Future Nostalgia keeps playing, you can’t even imagine slowing down. —R.S.

When Dylan returned from the shadow realms this year, nearly a decade had gone by since his last album of original songs (2012’s cantankerous Tempest). During that time, he’d crooned some sweet pop nothings, won a Nobel Prize, and sharpened his blade. Rough and Rowdy Ways is a lyrical tour-de-force, teeming with outrageous jokes (“My Own Version of You”), playful boasts (“I Contain Multitudes”), and irreverent tributes to the greats who came before him (“Goodbye Jimmy Reed”). He’s haunted by the ghosts of the 20th century and hopped up on the absurdity of surviving into the 21st. Underneath it all, there’s a sense of melancholy that peaks on the sublime end-of-the-road ballad “Key West.” Stunners in themselves, these songs add up to Dylan’s funniest, most surprising, and most multidimensional album since Love and Theft. —S.V.L.

Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana is both more varied and more focused than Bad Bunny’s excellent 2018 debut album, X 100pre, with reckless stylistic shifts — the many-songs-in-one “Safaera,” the hard-rock swerve on “Hablamos Mañana” — next to some of his sharpest, most insistent hits. “La Santa” merges a handsome, elegiac melody, Bad Bunny’s shout-at-the-heavens vocals, and a stern, clipped reggaeton beat to great effect, while the star coaxes the seldom-heard reggaeton veteran Yaviah into delivering a spine-stiffening verse on “Bichiyal.” Bad Bunny released two more albums in 2020, but neither outdid YHLQMDLG‘s relentless firepower. —E.L.

Fiona Apple has always thrived on defying expectations, from telling pop stans that the world was bullshit to taking years (and years) to perfect her alt-rock operettas. But no one could have expected the audacity of Fetch the Bolt Cutters, or the way Apple expresses her independent spirit over an orchestra of drums, percussion, barks, and meows. She leaps ahead of the “VIPs, PYTs, and wannabes” on the title track (“I’ve always been too smart for that”), seeks friendship with a woman dating her ex (“Ladies”), and reflects on how one person telling her she had potential was the spark she needed as a kid (“Shameika”). When she sings, “Kick me under the table all you want, I won’t shut up,” on “Under the Table,” she means it, because this is potential fulfilled. —K.G.

It’s not a stretch to say that Taylor Swift’s Folklore may go down in history as the definitive quarantine album, and not just because of the record’s homespun, folksy presentation. Without the pressure of having to write radio hits or build up her usual prolonged album-release schedule — full of music videos, Easter eggs, and Good Morning America performances — Swift shed the über-pop trappings of her previous album, Lover, for a project that put her once-in-a-generation songwriting talent front and center. Regardless of what you think of the album’s “indie” cred, with contributions from the National’s Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Folklore’s 16 tales of lost love, coming-of-age, and redemption provided us with solace and catharsis just when we needed it most. Songs like “August” and “Mirrorball” will persevere long after this pandemic is over — and so, evidently, will Taylor Swift. —C.S.