The 50 Best Albums of 2020

Live Forever is Bartees Strange’s long overdue arrival onto the scene, preceded by the Say Goodbye to Pretty Boy EP, in which he made complete genre transformations out of his favorite songs from the National. Strange applies the same chameleonic quality to his own work, weaving together hip-hop cadences and pop-punk guitars to create something that sounds entirely brand new — and considering that everyone from Halsey to Lil Uzi Vert has been trying out the same combo, that’s no small feat. C.S.

When the pandemic scuttled Wilco’s tour this spring, Jeff Tweedy shrugged and got to work on a new solo album with his sons, Spencer and Sammy, on drums and backing vocals. Lucky us: It’s some of his finest work with or without a band, with sly, easeful country lopes (“Opaline”), genuinely sweet declarations of love (“Even I Can See”), and his zingiest Midwestern-Neil guitar leads since 2004’s A Ghost Is Born. “Gwendolyn” is a rocker you’d give your left arm to see him stretch out in concert; “Bad Day Lately” is a consolation for the fact that you won’t be able to for a long while. Here’s to silver linings. —S.V.L.

Growth opens with “Take Me Higher,” a breathing, grooving house jam about our relationship to drugs: “All these substances are doing is tapping into these chemicals … that God already created within us.” This attention to what’s natural, to what’s within, courses throughout Kareem Ali’s music. He’s released captivating house tracks at an unfathomable pace over the past year, his grooves seeming to flow out of his head like language, and it’s all there on the sprawling Growth. Songs like “The Pain Inside,” “Changed My Life,” and “Growth” marry intelligent, layered build and propulsions that come off effortless, showcasing the casual expertise of someone who’s just getting started. —E.B.

One of America’s greatest living songwriters, Lucinda Williams dissects political, societal, and personal dysfunction on this focused, rock-forward record. Setting aside the blues detours of past efforts, she turns up the amps and gets down to business, eviscerating a now-loser president on “Man Without a Soul,” taking 2020 to task in “Bad News Blues,” and threatening a perennial “thorn in my side” in the ferocious “Bone of Contention.” The performances are all vibrant and intense — a cover of Greg Garing’s “Down Past the Bottom” is simply terrifying — putting Williams’ famously breathy voice right in your ear. She reunited with co-producer Ray Kennedy for the first time since the 1998 watershed Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. It was worth the wait. —J.H.

Boldy James is quietly becoming an expert at eliciting emotion without betraying any — his tone is flinty and unwavering as he raps about a world where “friends came and went, but most of them was murder victims” and “everything you ever love you lost to the gun.” “Giant Slide” and “Scrape the Bowl” are similarly chilling tales delivered with all the flash of a morning commute. The relentlessly even-keeled tone heightens the focus on James’ underworld tales and the Alchemist’s calmly riveting production on The Price of Tea in China. “My witness ain’t show up to court, the judge, he had to weigh the trial,” James raps. “They say I got a morbid sense of humor, but that made me smile.” From his voice, you’d never know it. —E.L.

Aside from a few flourishes — the sleek riffing on opening track “Realize,” a poignant Brian Johnson hook on “Through the Mists of Time” — AC/DC’s 17th studio LP traded in exactly the same swaggering, arena-ready hard rock that Angus Young and Co. perfected 40 years ago on Back in Black. As with that record, a death-defying triumph following the loss of original singer Bon Scott, this one showed that recent hardships including the passing of co-founder/mastermind Malcolm Young and Johnson’s temporary exit due to hearing issues haven’t left as much as a dent. Standout tracks like “Shot in the Dark” and “Witch’s Spell” delivered that old AC/DC thrill — and drove home yet again that no other rock band has ever done more with less. —H.S.

The country troubadour’s last release — the 2017 two-album set From A Room — was ambitious but unwieldy. On the aptly titled Starting Over, Chris Stapleton distills what he does best over 14 tracks. There’s blues (“Devil Always Made Me Think Twice”), rock (“Watch You Burn”), R&B (“You Should Probably Leave”), and, on the title track, the old-school country he’s been credited with helping revive. Stapleton also benefits from the addition of a pair of rock legends: Heartbreakers-for-life Benmont Tench and Mike Campbell pop up throughout, adding a classic-rock vibe to the record, specifically on the roadhouse barnburner “Arkansas.” —J.H.

With some of the best songs of her career, her band Gravy at her side, and producer Butch Walker behind the console, Nashville singer-songwriter Elizabeth Cook headed to L.A. to make a banger of an album. While it may be more West Coast shine than Tennessee dirt, the country livin’ in the lyrics is unmistakable. She writes of playing loose with the truth in “Two Chords and a Lie,” drops redneck bon mots like “Don’t go selling crazy/We’re stocked up here” in “These Days,” and puts you right in the room with her and her ailing father in “Daddy I Got Love for You.” Egged on by Walker in brawny tracks like “Bones,” Cook even reveals her inner rock goddess. The results are glorious. —J.H.

Thirty years evaporate like sweat in the mosh pit with L.A. punk legends X’s first album since 1985 with their OG lineup. Seamlessly stitching together great new recordings of older tracks like “Delta 88 Nightmare,” “Cyrano de Berger’s Back,” and “I Gotta Fever” with new cuts, the band deftly bridges the gap between the Eighties and 2020 with plenty of full-body yelps from frontwoman Exene Cervenka, rollicking guitar solos from Billy Zoom, and heart-attack drums from D.J. Bonebrake. A record that feels like a punk show, it’s all over in less than 30 minutes, leaving listeners exhausted and grinning. —B.E.

Making music is a lot like possession, a concept Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz took literally with her second solo release as Sad13, Haunted Painting. A horror story written with a glittery gel pen, the album traverses themes as diverse as cancel culture and comedians (“Hysterical”), isolation (“Ghost (of a Good Time”)), and a right-wing coup d’état that overthrew Argentina’s government in 1976 (“Into the Catacombs”). Dupuis, who is also a published poet, has the uncanny ability to make the sacred profane and the profane sacred; an album that could have been a spooky pastiche in a lesser writer’s hands is just as uniquely haunting as its title promises. —B.E.

Restless in lockdown, Paul McCartney started visiting his U.K. studio and getting to work. Without a band, McCartney had to lean on himself: playing drums, guitar, bass, piano, and more, even layering the tracks himself. The result is his most adventurous solo album since 2005’s Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. McCartney channels the back-porch charm of 1970’s McCartney on “The Kiss of Venus” (which he wrote after browsing through a book about constellations) and “Lavatory Lil,” a rowdy blues stomper that follows in the literary tradition of “Polythene Pam” and “Mean Mr. Mustard.” At 78, McCartney still sounds vital and comfortable taking new chances, especially on “Deep Deep Feeling”; he twists knobs and layers tape loops to create a psychedelic epic. —P.D.

Bea Kristi, a.k.a. Beabadoobee, was still in her teens when she made this delightful guitar rom-com, the sound of a self-assured bedroom-pop singer-songwriter navigating her way into the outside world. The London Filipina just turned 20, but tunes like “I Wish I Was Stephen Malkmus” won her fans (including Malkmus), with her fresh Gen Z take on Pavement-style guitar hooks. Fake It Flowers is full of flannel hooks and Sassy-era sarcasm: There’s even a straightforward love song where she muses, “You are the smell of pavement after the rain/You are the last empty seat on a train.” —R.S.

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.