The 50 Best Albums of 2020 So Far

For longtime fans who are expectantly, perhaps giddily, steeling themselves for another brutal LP from Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters will not disappoint. Released with little warning nearly a decade after 2012’s The Idler Wheel…, the album sees the now-42-year-old songwriter proving that she’s still more than capable of telling off partners, detractors, and others who have done her wrong, all while picking apart the inner workings of her frantic mind. But what sets Bolt Cutters apart from its predecessors is that for the first time, the scales tip more toward resilience than agony. C.S. 

Manic is Halsey’s raw autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young mess, craving her share of love and tenderness in a hostile world. Yet Halsey’s Ashley Frangipane is a mess who’s a hungrily ambitious artist seeing herself as a mirror for her entire generation. As she told Rolling Stone last summer, Manic is “hip-hop, rock, country, fucking everything.” Who else but Halsey would get stellar guest shots from Alanis Morissette and Suga from BTS on the same album? R.S. 

Given how publicly and privately painful Selena Gomez’s last few years have been — worsening struggles with lupus, a kidney transplant, stays in mental-health treatment centers, high-profile breakups — Rare is shockingly, and beautifully, upbeat. Gomez told us she would learn to take better care of herself on 2015’s Revival. On Rare, she puts that promise into action. Her third solo album is an act of divine ruthlessness: She dances out the toxins weighing her down and breathes in loads of post-Lizzo “Fuck you, I love me” energy. B.S. 

Eternal Atake is Lil Uzi Vert’s best album yet, with a cohesiveness, slick concept, and performance that justifies every ounce of hype. He’s still melodically minded — note the almost melismatic flourish of “Got a model/With vitiligo” on “Prices” — but Eternal Atake sometimes feels like a return to 2013, when he was a nobody in Philly serving the kinetic, drill-adjacent, rapid-fire street raps that inspired his name. Eternal Atake contains some of the best rapping moments of his career, a development foreshadowed by the 2019 G Herbo-sampling loose single “Free Uzi,” as well as the snippets leaked and shared in the interminable run-up to the album’s release. D.S. 

By the fourth installment, most pop-culture franchises can start to seem pretty tired. Not El-P and Killer Mike: On RTJ4, the duo deliver their agit-rap gospel with the spry fire of a band making its debut. RTJ4, which the band rush-released a few days ahead of schedule, is laser-focused, as if Mike and El-P are trying to outrun the apocalypse. Mike unloads on racist cops, systemic poverty, corporate media, and other eternal enemies. But the album never feels preachy, because the music bounces as much as it brays, with an elastic flow and deep history. J.D. 

Future Nostalgia is a breathtakingly fun, cohesive, and ambitious attempt to find a place for disco in 2020. Incredibly, Dua Lipa is successful: The upbeat album that she decided to release a week earlier than planned is the perfect balm for a stressful time. “Future Nostalgia” is like a neon “Welcome” sign. Its camp, Daft Punk-ian robot funk accents silly, full-of-nonsensical-but-smartly-delivered one-liners like “I can’t teach your man how to wear his pants.” The album’s lead single, “Don’t Start Now,” has become a megahit for a good reason. It’s the type of big, Robyn-esque breakup, dance-pop anthem that every pop star is due to attempt at least once. B.S. 

Another apocalypse, another side of Bob Dylan. The man really knows how to pick his moments. Dylan has brilliantly timed his new masterwork for a summer when the hard rain is falling all over the nation: a plague, a quarantine, revolutionary action in the streets, cities on fire, phones out of order. Rough and Rowdy Ways is his first batch of new songs in eight years, and it’s an absolute classic — it has the bleak majesty of latter-day Dylan albums like Modern Times and Tempest, yet it goes beyond them, tapping even deeper into cosmic American mysteries. R.S.

During the past two years, Bad Bunny has left no box unchecked en route to attaining global crossover superstardom. On his sophomore solo release, he’s trying something even more ambitious: asking us to cross over to him. An artist of his merit might try to further stretch his clout by recruiting even more maximalist pop stars and producers, guaranteed to win mainstream ubiquity the world over. Instead, YHLQMDLG (the abbreviated version of the album’s full title, Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana) convenes a family reunion of his favorite rappers and reggaetoneros to produce a genre-promiscuous work of reggaeton a la marquesina: a more street-savvy form of reggaeton once deemed so risqué that it was criminalized and relegated to garage parties across Puerto Rico throughout the Nineties. S.E. 

Chromatica is a return to form, and a return to the dance floor for Lady Gaga. The singles “Stupid Love” and “Rain on Me” have the pop sensibilities of her early hits, and the music throws back to house, disco, and even New Wave, but it still feels like a progression as Gaga sings about rising above past bad romances and her hope for the future. She kept the guest list tight this time, so when Ariana Grande offers up breathy verses, Blackpink rhyme Gaga’s English lyrics in Korean, and Elton John does his best Rocketman on a song about, surprisingly, sine waves, it’s never too distracting. Gaga has crafted a potent antidote to the quarantine blues. K.G. 

On her latest album, Saint Cloud, 31-year old songwriter Katie Crutchfield trades in the indie-rock neurosis of her previous work for a mellower, twangy sound that nods toward her roots in Birmingham, Alabama. But her piercing observations have only grown sharper with time. The sun-kissed compositions match her words perfectly. Produced with Brad Cook, they recall one of Crutchfield’s heroes, Lucinda Williams, along with the melodic storytelling from folk songwriters like Patty Griffin. You can hear these songs playing out of car speakers on a daytime road trip, or by a summer bonfire once it starts to die down. C.S. 

High Off Life is the first Future album since January 2019 — an eternity by his standards. It’s been a rare breather for the hardest-working rapper in the solar system, the Atlanta trap legend with a voice full of the Auto-Tune blues and a head full of astronaut status. High Off Life is Future at his most optimistic, as the man from Pluto decides to send out a positive message. But it’s still got the spaced-out melancholy that always fills his sound, as he clocks some serious demon hours in the late-night druggy strip-club haze of his soul. R.S. 

Before he died of an accidental drug overdose in September 2018, at age 26, Miller put out the two most complete albums of his career: The Divine Feminine, an ornate jazz-rap record, and Swimming, a profoundly bittersweet portrayal of his attempts to come to terms with depression and heartbreak. Circles doesn’t build on Swimming so much as riff off it. It’s not a fresh chapter that gestures toward Miller’s untold future, but rather a genuine companion piece, a time capsule to be placed alongside Swimming. D.S. 

A pop savant whose vision keeps getting more all-encompassing as he keeps making records, Mike Hadreas (a.k.a. Perfume Genius) has delivered his most ambitious music yet on his fifth LP. Hadreas’ sound mixes a loving sense of pop history and a blithe disregard for stylistic boundaries, causally traversing goth, glam, synth-pop, soul, and indie-rock, collapsing decades into his music. “Describe” beautifies Nineties guitar sludge, feeling at once like a subversion and a love letter. “On the Floor” plays gracefully with Eighties R&B, evoking Tina Turner via Erasure. J.D. 

There’s a reason Jason Isbell chose to open Reunions, his seventh album, with the image of someone up late alone, plagued and comforted by the past. In addition to being his most crisply produced, sleek recording yet, Isbell’s latest is also his most haunted and ruminative (the word “ghost’ appears no less than five times). As such, Reunions feels meaningfully, if subtly, removed from the trilogy of post-sobriety records the Nashville-via-North Alabama songwriter has written over the past decade. J. Bernstein 

Detroit producer Moodymann excels at making house music with unshakeable links to a treasure trove of R&B from the the late Sixties and Seventies; his catalog, which reaches back more than 25 years, includes indelible tracks indebted to Marvin Gaye, Chic, and Syl Johnson, among others. Moodymann’s latest album, Taken Away, is no different — the opening track finds him singing against excerpts of Al Green’s “Love and Happiness.” That’s almost too easy for this producer, so stick around for the title track, an undeniable mixture of sludgy bass groove and wistful soul that’s shattered in the middle by an unnerving police siren. “Slow Down” might be even better, an elegant pileup of stirring vocal snippets and chunky rhythm. E.L. 

The Slow Rush is Tame Impala’s first album since their 2015 breakout, Currents. Kevin Parker still sings like a Bee Gee with the soul of Bowie’s Major Tom, floating above his thick disco, funk, and trip-hop beats, beautifully manicured synth textures, and easeful yacht-soul melodies. Even when songs wander off into diffuse eddies, or when he crams several distinct micro-movements into the same tune, everything seems obsessively considered, as if he spends more time perfecting the high-hat clicks than most artists take making their whole record. J.D. 

Born to a Dominican immigrant mom, Shake grew up on Lauryn Hill and My Chemical Romance. The flows come hard and soft, in English and Spanish, with verses suggesting a fierce, strong, proud, brave, spiritual being who’s also hungry, searching, scared, self-loathing, and self-destructive — just like plenty of humans, especially in their early twenties. Shake’s enveloping debut LP, Modus Vivendi, charts desire and space — outer and inner. It’s an emo-rap Dark Side of the Moon. W.H. 

Twelve years have passed since Nine Inch Nails released Ghosts I–IV, their brooding suite of instrumental bric-a-brac, and it’s interesting just how different their new Ghosts V: Together and Ghosts VI: Locusts sound compared to the predecessor. Of the two LPs, Locusts is the darkest and the most engrossing. “Around Every Corner” is atonal jazz with the type of dusky trumpet you hear in Philip Marlowe movies. “When It Happens (Don’t Mind Me)” vibrates with banging dulcimer chords, like some kind of Dead Can Dance nightmare. “Run Like Hell” combines trip-hop vibes with film-noir horns, and “Another Crashed Car” flirts with sounding “industrial” with its musique concrète phone bleeps. It makes for a complex, harrowing listen. K.G. 

Seasons change: Every Hot Girl Summer must turn into a Mad as Hell Winter. So Megan Thee Stallion chose the right moment to break free. Her nine-song EP Suga drops just as the Houston rap goddess goes to war with her label, 1501 Certified Entertainment. Suga is just a 24-minute taste of Megan’s new sound — but it’s definitely a state-of-the-Stallion report of the trouble on her mind. As she told Charles Holmes in her Rolling Stone cover story, Suga is her new persona, showing her “sensitive” side. “I want to cry a little bit,” she explained. “We going to cry, but I’m still doing bad-girl shit.” Suga might sound like a moodier big sister to Tina Snow or Hot Girl Meg. But as the new songs show, Megan at her most vulnerable is still as tough as a tank. R.S. 

The 28-year-old singer-songwriter-producer takes his arty R&B into strange and thrilling places on this double-album opus. His majestic falsetto stretches out across songs that are sprawling yet beautifully constructed, playing in the space between soul, jazz, and avant-garde rock, as he meditates on ideas of race, desire, discovery, and identity. The creative splurge that ensues can suggest the ambition of Prince’s Sign o’ the Times or A Seat at the Table, by Sumney’s pal Solange, though his shape-shifting vision is confrontationally all his own. J.D. 

The Chicago band’s full-length debut will be an immediate boon to fans of heart-on-sleeve indie groups like That Dog, Waxahatchee, Charli Bliss, and the Beths. They cover a lot of ground in the album’s nine songs — from the pop punk of “Promises” and “Cuffing” to the cuddle-core ballad “April” to the Paramore-like push-pull explosiveness of “Colorblind” to Lili Trifilio’s solo-organ-rumination “Racetrack,” which brings to mind the piano poetry of Joanna Newsom. Several songs effortlessly speed along into agile twin-guitar breaks that are almost like Congolese soukous in their liquid synergy. J.D. 

Map of the Soul: 7 is BTS’ most smashing album yet, showing off their mastery of different pop styles from rap bangers to slow-dance ballads to post-Swedish electro-disco to prog-style philosophizing. The seven members have been together seven years, and it’s inspired them to sum up where they’ve been even as they look ahead to their future. A few of the songs are already familiar from last year’s teaser EP, Map of the Soul: Persona — the thugged-out hip-hop bluster of “Dionysus,” the surprising Ed Sheeran co-write “Make It Right.” In “Intro: Persona,” RM drops the English word “superhero” into his Korean rap — he used to dream of being one, then he became one, but now he finds the work has just begun. R.S. 

The punk-rock icons sound refreshingly unburdened by legacy or accrued status on their latest LP. The glam-slam stomper “Oh Yeah!” summons Joan Jett’s version of “Do You Wanna Touch Me.” The speed-freak Merseybeat cheese of “Stab You in the Heart” is phony Beatlemania at its finest, right down to its screaming-girl crowd noise. A couple songs — the begging, pleading breakneck title track, the wonderful Dexy’s Midnight Runners-tinged mod swing of “Meet Me on the Roof” — play with echoes of Sixties soul. J.D. 

The fourth album from Alabama sibling duo the Secret Sisters is the stunning country-soul opus their talent has always promised. In 2017, the pair enlisted singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile to co-produce their third LP, You Don’t Own Me Anymore, helping them up their game in a set of songs about piloting life’s hardships, delivered with tender intimacy. Carlile is back for Saturn Return, a spare, gorgeous, relatably realistic set. The effortlessness with which the Secret Sisters articulate their musical ambitions places Saturn Return among recent country-roots gems from songwriters like Jason Isbell and Pistol Annies. J. Bernstein 

Stephen Malkmus has been on quite a creative roll as of late. In 2018, he released Sparkle Hard, one of his best albums to date with his backing band, the Jicks, and last year, he took a detour into synth-pop with Groove Denied. His latest solo LP is all-acoustic set, with Malkmus on 12-string guitar, playing the Sixties folk quester and jamming out with a casually refined hippie whimsy. Beautiful highlights like “Cash Up,” “Flowin’ Robes,” and “What Kind of Person” are easy entrants into the songwriting canon of an artist who seems possessed with an inexhaustible gift for golden melodies and diagonal epiphany. J.D. 

The first Strokes album in seven years picks up pretty much where the last one, 2013’s Comedown Machine, left off — another study in what LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy once called “borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered Eighties.” Most encouragingly, the New Order-indebted “Bad Decisions” fondly transports us back to the concise neo-New Wave charge of the band’s classic era, showing just how easy it might be for the Strokes to make a pretty, sweet Strokes record if they felt like it. Even if that song is the only moment that openly sops to the band’s glory days, The New Abnormal still manages to find a fresh, albeit more low-key, way into the woozy late-night grandeur they’ve always been so skilled at evoking. J.D. 

Sam Hunt has taken more than a few knocks for his progressive approach to country music. So it’s a bit of a surprise to hear Hunt begin his long-awaited follow-up, Southside, with an acoustic guitar and the line “I put the whiskey back in the bottle/Put the smoke back in the joint.” Classic gestures are all over Southside, though Hunt thankfully has no interest in doing something so straightforward. His current single “Hard to Forget” flips a Webb Pierce vocal sample into a new iteration of a country-drinking song that gleefully mixes up hip-hop beats and banjo. Elsewhere, he shows off an admirable amount of sensitivity. J.F. 

After months of buzz and colorful, evocative singles unspooling diasporic disillusionment and the burdens of womanhood, Polaris Prize-winning artist Lido Pimienta has finally unleashed her long-awaited third full-length, Miss Colombia. Lead singles “No Pude” and “Eso Que Tu Haces” explore this thesis further as breakup songs, wherein Pimienta laments a relationship turned toxic — aiming feelings of heartbreak and disappointment toward her ancestral home, soured by racism, machismo, and institutional corruption. Though the tone of Miss Colombia is cutting throughout, Pimienta exhibits flashes of love and resilience, paying endearing tribute to her Afro-indigenous heritage in songs like “Quiero Que Me Salves” and “Pelo Cucu.” R.V. 

Sophie Allison is just two years into her twenties, but she sounds as if she’s been navigating early adulthood for decades, wading through the waters of depression and sadness while fighting a few demons along the way. Some of her sophomore album’s tracks share the same titles as songs from the Nineties and early aughts (“Night Swimming,” “Crawling in My Skin”), and it’s hardly unintentional: Allison, who was born in 1997, aimed to make Color Theory sound like her childhood — a time when teens had translucent iMacs and Tamagotchis instead of TikTok. A.M. 

The Japan-born, U.K.-raised singer-model’s debut album, Sawayama, is a thrilling musical adventure, expertly referencing the chaos of Top 40 at the turn of the century without getting too hung up on the nostalgia of it all. Combining crunchy nu-metal guitar riffs with a penchant for early-aughts R&B-pop production in the vein of Aaliyah and ‘NSync, Sawayama sounds like Britney Spears’ Blackout by way of Korn — and it inexplicably works. Incredibly, each song on Sawayama sounds like the type of music you dream of hearing at an unbearably cool party, meticulously unique and fun from second to second. B.S. 

On the first record Pearl Jam has mustered during the Trump administration, the group has blended the miasmic angst of “Jeremy” and “Alive” with a sense of tenderness and even flashes of hope. Although Trump is not the sole focus of the record, Eddie Vedder gives the president (“a tragedy of errors,” in EdVed’s words) plenty of airtime. Yet where the Vedder of 20 years ago might have hollered (or hooted) his blues, he mostly keeps his cool on Gigaton. Album opener “Who Ever Said” doubles as his mantra for hope, as he sings, “Whoever said, ‘It’s all been said,’ gave up on satisfaction,” between Pete Townshend-inspired licks and a New Wave-style guitar solo. K.G. 

On High Road, Kesha wants to have it both ways — she sings about her therapist and tarot readings and her aura, but she’s also back to clubbing with a vengeance. She recently said, “To quote one of my favorite songs of all time, I’ve decided to ‘fight for my right to party!’” “Tonight” begins as an earnest hymn, with Elton John-style piano and 2010-vintage AutoTune. (It sounds a nostalgic trick at this point, like John Lennon using his “Elvis echo” to resemble his Fifties rockabilly heroes.) Then Kesha turns down the piano, cranks up the beatbox, and starts to rap: “I don’t give a fuck ‘cause I am so high/Me and all my girls are looking so fly.” Damn, it’s good to have this Kesha back. We missed her, right? R.S. 

In 2018, Arkansas native Ashley McBryde released one of the most striking country LPs in recent memory with Girl Going Nowhere; her music honored Townes Van Zandt and John Mellencamp, and she sang with plainspoken vulnerability about everyday stuff, like her platonic roommate, or the folks back home who told her she’d never make a living from her art, delivering each song with a conviction that felt mythically down-to-earth. McBryde’s second major-label release, Never Will, is just as daring and deep, sometimes deceptively so. J. Bernstein 

Released in three parts over the course of this spring, Petals for Armor can be viewed as a trilogy of five songs each, where Hayley Williams explores her changing coping mechanisms in the midst of hardship. Her path leads through seething rage, spontaneous revelation, and, eventually, new romance. Sonically, there are hints of the disco-funk grooves explored on Paramore’s last album, 2017’s After Laughter, which paired Williams’ musings on anxiety and depression with a twinkling Eighties pastiche. But whereas After Laughter was a geyser of anthemic choruses and bright emotionalism, Petals for Armor’s moodiness stays just below the surface. It’s murkier, more eclectic, and much less predictable. C.S. 

After spending the better part of the past decade gravitating toward a state of pop auteurism, Claire Boucher’s climate-change-themed album finds her returning to primordial, nu-metal ooze. Poisoned smog seeps through the air on tracks like the stunning six-minute opener, “So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth.” While Boucher’s vocals soar above the stratosphere, a handful of well-placed rumbling synths bring her sinking back down into the Earth’s core. The album wallows in this dread of imminent destruction before learning to embrace it and, eventually, become one with it. C.S.

Ed O’Brien has been an underappreciated but crucial part of Radiohead ever since the band formed in 1985. It’s taken some time, but O’Brien has finally stepped out from the shadows with the release of his exceptional solo debut, under the moniker EOB. He’s noted in interviews that he felt he had to release the record, that part of him would “die” if he didn’t. That sense of urgency is felt all over Earth.  The opener, “Shangri-La,” is a triumphant scorcher sprinkled with percussion as O’Brien acknowledges feelings he didn’t realize he had before finding the song’s titular mystical harmonious place. Never has his voice sounded so prominent — so recognizable — until now. A.M. 

On their excellent 2018 debut LP, Hope Downs, these Australian guitar romantics proved themselves to be must-hear masters of Eighties college-rock scholarship. They’ve upped their game even further on Sideways to New Italy, and the result is a perfect summertime indie-rock record. With three guitarists who all write songs, Rolling Blackouts’ music could feel cluttered or disconnected, but it never does. The band is in love with the hypnotic rush of a nice sunny jangle, but they never settle for catchy drones, and no matter which genre they touch on, it’s always done at its brightest and most optimistic-sounding. J.D. 

The Pittsburgh hardcore band give their melodic bark more bite in the glitchy horror thrash of Underneath. It’s an all-out assault on the panopticon that is the internet: Augmented with creeping electro-tremors by Eric “Shade” Balderose, “Swallowing the Rabbit Hole” sees drummer-vocalist Jami Morgan step to the fore, slamming naysayers emboldened by the shelter of anonymity. If you hear echoes of Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, it’s no coincidence — Nine Inch Nails alumnus Chris Vrenna serves as co-programmer on Underneath, passing the torch to Code Orange as they forge an industrial-metal renaissance. S.E. 

It Is What It Is is daring in its musical reach — and in its pairing of goofy and gutting. The record finds bass-player-singer-songwriter-producer Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner continuing to parse the existential crises of everyday life, especially the void left by the death of his friend Mac Miller. With Thundercat once again working with psychedelic-minded beatmaker Flying Lotus, It Is What It Is finds its groove in headier spaces. Thundercat’s bass anchors and propels his sonic fancies, beating a head-spinning pulse on “I Love Louis Cole” and “How Sway,” tracks that add a dash of eight-bit video-game delirium to the fusion stew. J. Blistein 

Over the years, Lucinda Williams’ drawl has thickened, making every vowel its own sumptuously rolling river to cross and lending her songs a heavier tug of sensual hunger, which is saying something for someone whose been writing almost impossibly intense tracks of love (and other afflictions) for decades. On Good Souls Better Angels, that couples powerfully with a visceral urgency that seems striking even for her: the defiant, stomping political rocker “You Can’t Rule Me,” the scathing “Wakin’ Up,” a tumultuous song about moving past a violent relationship, or more tender moments like the lovely, empathetic “When the Way Gets Dark.” J.D.