The 50 Best Songs of 2020

Heavy-breathing Brit-pop sex poet and fashion icon Jarvis Cocker returns, 25 years after he became a legend yelping the Pulp classic “Common People.” Jarvis Cocker sings about claustrophobia in “House Music All Night Long,” from his excellent Beyond the Pale. But it accidentally turns out to be the ultimate quarantine anthem — an ode to listening to disco alone in your kitchen, trapped inside at home when you’d rather be out in the clubs. All too timely — as Cocker sings, it’s “one nation under a roof.” —R.S.

Lo-fi troubadour Bill Callahan begins “Pigeons,” from 2020’s Gold Record, with a greeting: “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” He signs off, “Sincerely, L. Cohen.” Sandwiching his own work between the names of two musical luminaries might seem the height of hubris — if Callahan weren’t such a damn good songwriter himself. Mingling Leonard Cohen’s smooth-voiced, talky delivery with Cash’s impeccable storytelling, he captures the excitement of new love and the worn-in comfort of marriage in this song about a pair of newlyweds and a wise cab driver. —J.D.

Quarantining with your significant other is all fun and games until it isn’t, and Charli XCX’s “Claws” — recorded as part of her How I’m Feeling Now isolation project — seems to teeter right on the edge of things going sour. Charli’s rapid-fire lyrics are full of romance and devotion toward her other half, while the screeching synths behind her sound like a love-sick robot in the middle of short-circuiting. —C.S.

Former LVL Up singer-guitarist Dave Benton was responsible for one of the year’s most thrilling left-field releases, Lost in the Country, which blended dreamy War on Drugs riffs with homespun folk rock and daring bedroom pop. The title track offers a more honest take on life-on-the-road blues: Benton commiserates with a fellow musician, who catches him shedding tears as he scrolls through emails on his phone, before the song simmers into several minutes of folksy indie-rock gold. —J. Bernstein

Doja Cat’s “Say So” was a high-gloss bit of Chic-biting retro disco, light and evanescent like the sun glistening off the ocean. But it got a welcome dose of zip when Doja brought on Minaj for a remix this year, and the song became a Number One hit. When Minaj raps, “Every time I take a break, the game be so boring/Pretty like Naomi, Cassie, plus Lauryn,” it’s like running into an old friend at a club who’s just a little too rich for either of you. —J.D.

J Balvin has always had a gift for easygoing hooks; his deceptively relaxed delivery often camouflages ruthless earworms. This is definitely the case in “Azul,” an ode to a woman who likes to party the night away, where Balvin makes a tongue-twisting obstacle course of a chorus sound like a leisurely stroll on the beach. He composed “Azul” with help from Justin Quiles, an ace writer with his own slew of solo hits, and the Haitian artist-producer Michael Brun, among others. “It built up in the course of a couple minutes,” Brun tells Rolling Stone. “That hook is massive.” —E.L.

The loss of Prine to Covid-19 was heartbreaking. At 82, he was one of American music’s most treasured songwriters, still making wonderful records like his most recent one, 2018’s Tree of Forgiveness. Prine had already begun working on a new album, and this is the first song he recorded for it, an almost impossibly poignant acoustic reflection on a life happily lived, from tiny details (a blade of grass, an old guitar) to transcendent moments (“the way you turned and smiled on me/On the night that we first met”), fully aware that experience and loss go hand in hand and that “sometimes a little tenderness was the best that I could do.” It’s one last bit of wisdom, before he headed out the door. —J.D.

Decades ago, Chrissie Hynde learned to sing by shutting herself in a closet and belting R&B hits by Jackie Moore and Candi Staton. And though the Pretenders have indulged a few soulful moments, Hynde’s inner Lou Rawls has never shone as brightly as it does on the bruised-love number “You Can’t Hurt a Fool,” which, like every great soul song, comes with a well-earned pearl of wisdom: “Genuine fools don’t play by the rules.” Hynde knows there are two sides to a broken heart. —K.G.

In the hands of a less-adept producer (that is to say, most of them), “Boy-U” would fall apart, buckle under its own massive weight. Fennec packs so much into his house tune that it seems about ready to burst at the seams, yet it moves nimbly. An orchestra of soul samples leap over one another like they’re in Footlight Parade, kinetic energy spurts out every which way but grooves smoothly forward to a disco beat. It’s a head-rush, but an intelligent one. —E.B.

Matty Healy’s ode to acting horny over video chat wasn’t written with the Covid-19 pandemic in mind, but, man, did the timing work out on that one. “If You’re Too Shy” appeared on a sprawling, 80-minute album that took many departures from the usual 1975 sound, which makes the song’s pure 1975-ness even more appealing: It’s a little funny, a little sleazy, a little Eighties – OK, a lot Eighties. But above all, it’s a hell of a good time. —C.S.

Prior to a disappointing lapse in judgment that got him booted from a primo Saturday Night Live booking (they eventually had him on a few weeks later), Morgan Wallen was clearly bound for country stardom. Songs like “7 Summers” were precisely why — its shimmering guitars and unusual melodic turns had more to do with Fleetwood Mac than Garth Brooks, and Wallen’s rough-edged vocals gave his reminiscence of an old flame some of the bite that’s usually missing from mawkishly nostalgic country tunes. “Does it ever make you sad to know, that was 7 summers ago?” he asks, knowing there’s not an answer that would make him feel any better. —J.F.

“Lil Cease” serves as a fearsome showcase for Armani Caesar, the first woman to join rapper Westside Gunn’s Griselda Records. The beat, courtesy of JR Swiftz, clinks and rattles like a particularly menacing set of wind chimes, and Caesar raps with casual swagger, shouting out Puff Daddy while her tone can evoke classic Lil Kim: “Like Britney Spears, oops, I did it again/Shittin’ on the very ones that ain’t want me to win.” —E.L.

Capping off an album of instrumental string-band tunes, the swaying waltz “Long Violent History” was one of talented songwriter Tyler Childers’ most astonishing feats to date. The Kentucky native spoke directly to his Appalachian brethren here, pleading for empathy for black Americans fighting for their right to exist. “How many boys could they haul off this mountain/Shoot full of holes, cuffed and laying in the streets/‘Til we come into town in a stark raving anger/Looking for answers and armed to the teeth?” he asks, knowing that if his people were subjected to similar treatment, they’d be every bit as outraged. Where many white Southerners stayed silent, Childers had the courage and wits to confront them all. —J.F.

Released at the tale end of 2019, the Compton rapper’s debut megasmash kept us boxed in all year long. Roddy Ricch chirped and squeaked and squirked and squeated and stretched his vowels beyond the horizon and back again, like so much absurd surrealist Silly Putty, assuring us he wasn’t going to sell his soul before bothering to learn whether or not we gave a shit who he was. His big debut was a genuinely weird moment of chart-topping absurdism. —J.D.

It’s an archetypal 2020 success story: a rapper (24KGoldn), a singer (Iann Dior), and two producers (Omer and KBeaZy) are hanging out playing Call of Duty and decide to write a song; it turns out pretty great so they tease it on Instagram, promote it on TikTok, and pretty soon they’ve got the most streamed song on the planet. “Mood,” their dreamy evocation of a hard-to-read girl, deserves its success, marinading in the sweet spot between emo and pop rap, at once amiably whiny, undeniably breezy, and brain-breakingly catchy. —J.D.

“I feel my story is still untold/But I make my own happy ending,” Irish singer Róisín Murphy intones at the top of “Murphy’s Law,” a track from her album, Róisín Machine. Built around a lushly funky disco groove and decorated with cascading synths, “Murphy’s Law” borrows the old adage (conveniently the same as her own name) to show how stubborn a broken heart can be: “It’s Murphy’s law, I’m gonna meet you tonight/Just one match could relight the flame,” she purrs in a throaty alto. Risks be damned, Murphy keeps on trying to write that happy ending, exhorting herself to “Keep on, keep on” by the end of the song. —J.F.

Halsey sings about making it through one of those nights: The kind where you spill out of the bar too long after midnight, leaving behind your credit card and your self-esteem. So you scroll through your phone looking for the next number to drunk dial. For Halsey, in “3am,” that’s the closest she’s getting to love tonight. As she confesses, “I need it digital/Because, baby, when it’s physical/I end up alone.” But she keeps hanging on the line. —R.S.

RMR, a mysterious Atlanta singer, went viral in February with this out-of-nowhere country-rap provocation that made “Old Town Road” feel innocuous. This sparse piano ballad transformed Rascal Flatts’ syrupy 1994 power ballad “Bless the Broken Road” into an operatic treatise on drug dealing with a simple refrain that only became more resonant during the summer of nationwide protests against police brutality that began just months after the song’s February release: “Fuck 12.” —J. Bernstein 

Moodymann, the Detroit house-music stalwart, reliably finds ways to fill dance floors; even in a year when clubs were all closed, it’s easy to imagine dancers responding enthusiastically to the sludgy, insistent bass line and a neo-Motown march of “Taken Away.” But Moodymann keeps destabilizing his own creation, adding a jolt of modern menace in the form of a siren just as the vocals intone, “Lord, if you take him away/I don’t want to live.” The groove returns, the dancers resume, but the reminder of police brutality lingers. —E.L.

Indie-rock singer-songwriter Frances Quinlan’s songs are like miniature mysteries you never quite get to the bottom of, and that’s a huge part of what makes them so fun — whether she’s fronting the excellent Philadelphia indie-rock band Hop Along or on fantastic solo moments like this. In “No Reply,” some notes in the margin of a novel scrawled by a previous reader lead to a search for answers that only leads to more ambiguity. Sound recondite? Nope. Quinlan carefully stuffs her lyrics into a buoyant parlor-pop tune that sort of evokes Sandy Denny via Elvis Costello, reveling in the strange pleasure of missed connections and ends that stay open. —J.D.

Jhené Aiko drops a spiritual and sexual lullaby, from her acclaimed R&B poetic breakthrough Chilombo. “PU$$Y Fairy (OTW)” starts off as a Stevie Wonder-worthy soul ballad where she sings that even though you might be lonely for her, hang on tight, because the “pussy fairy’s on the way.” When the lovers finally get to their destination, she lets the sexual healing begin, whispering, “Close your eyes, and let your feels go.” —R.S.

Of all the singles that broke off TikTok in 2020, this one might be the best — an off-the-cuff, beach-party-ready slab of pop rap that distantly echoes the Whispers’ “And the Beat Goes On.” Waters packed the track full of throwback references — the Notorious B.I.G., McLovin from Superbad, Buffy the Vampire Slayer — but took a hypermodern approach to self-promotion, posting a laid-back, appealingly shabby “Stunnin” dance routine with his brother on TikTok. After it picked up hundreds of thousands of views overnight, the hook of “Stunnin” became a self-fulfilling prophecy: “Ice on my neck, that’s incoming.” —E.L.

The Nashville singer-songwriter’s tale of a chance encounter with an older woman is a classic in the tradition of “advice songs” (Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man,” Jason Isbell’s “Outfit”) that paint a rich picture of a knowing elder through the worldly life lessons they impart on a song’s protagonist. Whitters’ version, which bears the unmistakable folksy stamp of co-writer Lori McKenna, is full of homespun details (“eats sardines by the can”) that add up to a gut-punch chorus full of wise words to live by. —J. Bernstein 

Life may suck on planet Earth, but on Planet Drake it’s all “Heart is still beating/My niggas still eating/Backyard, it look like the garden of Eden.” With its swaying brass and wily verse from Chicago drill star Lil Durk (“Bring Drake to the hood, surround Drake around Dracs”), this has tided us over nicely while we wait for the Toronto rapper’s next LP, due early next year. Even when Drake sings about a block that feels like a ghost town, the song’s smooth ease feels like a warm breeze. —J.D.

There are no words wasted here — “Away” is composed of just two four-line verses, a pair of lovely prehooks consisting of two repeated couplets, and a chorus made up of one word: “away.” When merged with a sunny beat from Spax, all springy bass and splintered guitar, the result is a miracle of economy, not to mention highly danceable. Nigerian singer Oxlade allows just two indulgences — a pretty vocal arc before the repetitive rush of the chorus, plus a succinct guitar solo during the outro — and both are welcome. —E.L.

Caribou’s Dan Snaith has been making sweet electronic music for years, and this might be his most lovely moment, a New Wave-tinged meditation on grief that glistens as it broods. “You were always with me,” Snaith sings, lamenting the loss of a loved one; the song follows the fitful logic of processing pain, going from smooth, reflective Corey Hart “Sunglasses at Night” vibes to chipmunk-vocal electro convulsion, arriving at futurist pop with a uniquely real human vulnerability. —J.D.

This posthumous single drops you right inside Miller’s brain, which was sometimes a tough place to be. Miller, who struggled with drugs and depression and died of an accidental overdose in 2018, raps in an impossibly weary drawl, going around the cul-de-sac of negative thinking that can keep you in bed despite your better intentions: “I wish that I could just get out my goddamn way/What is there to say?/There ain’t a better time than today. But maybe I’ll lay down for a little, yeah.” But there’s warmth here — both in the sweetly chugging groove, and in Miller’s delivery — and hints of optimism, too. You get the sense Miller would have found a way out of the darkness, sooner or later, which makes this hit even harder. —C.H.

One of the year’s most compelling rising stars, Rina Sawayama was born in Japan and raised in England, and her sound is equally influenced by Nineties R&B, TRL-era teen pop, and early 2000s nu-metal — making for music that evokes a Y2K high school party that suddenly gets crashed by Korn. And she really goes off on this highlight from her self-titled debut, telling some sucker, “Have you ever thought about taping your big mouth shut?” as the music explodes around her. —J.D.

Selena unloads her emotional baggage in “Cut You Off,” a highlight from her comeback Rare. On one level, she sings about a break-up haircut, but that’s just her clever metaphor for finally letting go of the dead weight of a bad romance she’s been dragging around for years, or “1,460 days.” Her voice goes lower than ever, as she lays it out, all calm and collected, over a spare Seventies rock-drum thump. —R.S.

It’s no easy task conjuring the void in music, turning that vast expanse of nothingness into sound. But that’s the feat Perfume Genius achieves on “Describe.” Anchoring the song is a trudge of sludgy guitars and drums that’s pure pitch-black mire. It’s enough to swallow a person whole, but Mike Hadreas’ voice is the guiding light, one that may be flickering, but refusing to go out as he sings, “Can you just find him for me?/Can you describe them for me?” —J. Blistein

2020’s breakout indie-rock singer-songwriter delivers a masterpiece of majestic indecision and bare-knuckled honesty from her album Punisher. Bridgers sings about traveling overseas, missing out on arcade trips with her band, visiting dull places of worship, and having unpleasant chats on pay phones with someone she’d rather forget. It was originally written as a ballad, but Bridgers sped it up and added the chaotic instrumentation, entering the biting line “I’m gonna kill you/If you don’t beat me to it” into the canon of great rock & roll kiss-offs. —A.M.

It’s been years since Lady Gaga largely gave up on big dumb splashy pop songs, as she wended her way through art-pop experiments, Tony Bennett loungeapaloozas, and star-is-born torch songs, so “Stupid Love” — from her album Chromatica — felt like something of a homecoming. From the stuttering vocal that opens the song to the “All I ever wanted was love” prechorus, she offers up one bright, candy-colored hook after another, and she sounds like she’s genuinely having fun again. Finally, a star is reborn. —K.G.

“Safaera” is a shape-shifting club wrecker from YHLQMDLG, a barrage of ferocious, pummeling textures — from the brassy, martial opening to the irresistible sample of Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” to the curt, headlong rapping of Bad Bunny’s collaborators, Jowell x Randy and Ñengo Flow. “There were a bunch of tracks that had that vibe when we were growing up,” the producer Tainy told Rolling Stone. “To people from home, from Puerto Rico, if you go to a house party over there, that’s what you’re gonna listen to.” —E.L.

This opens as a rags-to-riches flex from two of rap’s hottest young stars, with a guitar-heavy track to heighten the “rock” in “Rockstar.” Then the song becomes a poignantly moody reflection on the up-from-the-bottom pain that drives their success: “PTSD, I’m always waking up in cold sweats like I got the flu/My daughter a G, she saw me kill a nigga in front of her before the age of two,” DaBaby raps. The theme hit home even harder after the song got a BLM remix. —J.D.

The Korean girl-group queens make their power move on the American airwaves, with a big assist from Selena Gomez and co-writer Ariana Grande. It’s a libidinal boombox boast built to jump like a playground chant, rolling out an ice cream truck’s worth of sexually charged dessert metaphors. It’s in the grand tradition of “I Want Candy” or “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” with the ladies bragging, “Coldest with the kiss so he call me ice cream!” —R.S.

“Savage” was already a standout from Megan Thee Stallion’s gate-crashing early-2020 mixtape Suga. The remix with Beyoncé takes it to a dominating new level. “Talkin’ to myself in the mirror like/’Bitch, you my boo,’” Bey notes resplendently, making this a true torch-passing moment with her fellow Houston native. They turn celebrating their “classy, bougie, ratchet” greatness into an unstoppable empowerment anthem. —J.D.

At just 28 years old, Cyrus has gone through a career worth of reinventions. With the release of Plastic Hearts, her latest bad-self may be her best. “Midnight Sky” basks in an Eighties stadium-pop glory the singer is more than at home in, paying loving homage to Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen” as she sings about being born to run and not belonging to anyone, making that vintage glitz her own. And Nicks honored Cyrus’ debt when she hopped on the excellent remix “Edge of Midnight.” —J.D.

The Chicks blasted back this year with the best jerk-torching anthem they’ve given us since the glory days of “Goodbye Earl,” back in the late-Nineties. The target this time around was at once scathingly personal and vividly universal, as Natlie Maines turned the wreckage of her  D-I-V-O-R-C-E into the launchpad for a glorious evisceration of gaslighting fools everywhere — including the one who just got booted out of the White House. —J.D.

Harry Styles released his wildly imaginative Fine Line in the last couple weeks of 2019 — yet it became one of this year’s defining pop blockbusters, giving up hit after hit. “Adore You” became a long-running radio soundtrack — it stayed on the charts for every week of 2020. (The only other hit to manage that feat: the Weekend’s “Blinding Lights.”) “Adore You” is a sleek sliver of psychedelic soul, where Styles dreams up a “strawberry lipstick state of mind,” and then offers you an irresistible invitation to join him there. —R.S.

Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters was a career triumph in many ways, and nowhere is that more apparent than on “Ladies,” an imaginary love letter to an ex’s “revolving door” of new girlfriends. It’s a heart-to-heart that is as sincere as it is wryly funny: Apple has never sounded more sure of herself than when she lists off all the leftover baggage, literally and figuratively, that she’s left behind for her old flame’s new love. —C.S.

The Bulletproof Boy Scouts make a little more history with their first U.S. Number One — a new milestone for K-pop — as well as their first English-language hit. Yet it’s unmistakably the sound of BTS, tapping into the spirit of Eighties disco. They zoom through the stars in “Dynamite.” All seven of them show off, though Jungkook takes the spotlight when he yells, “Cup of milk, let’s rock and roll/King Kong, kick the drum/Rolling on like a Rolling Stone!” —R.S.

It’s not the first sound you hear, but the impossibly plump and agile bass on “Don’t Start Now” is the one that sticks around longest. Crashing Studio 54 into 2020, “Don’t Stop Now” encapsulates the sonic and metaphysical essence of Future Nostalgia — pure, uncut timelessness. It’s perfect for any era, even this one: A song that yearns to be bumped in a packed club, that still boasts a hook that actually made for a perfect Covid quarantine meme: “Don’t show up/Don’t come out.” —J. Blistein

It’s hard to pick the greatest lines from this Folklore highlight: “August sipped away/Like a bottle of wine” or “Cancel plans just in case you’d call/And say, ‘Meet me behind the mall.’” Either way, “August” depicts a beachy summer fling gone wrong. It’s part of the teenage love triangle trilogy at the heart of Folklore that includes “Betty” and “Cardigan,” each told from different perspectives, sort of like St. Elmo’s Fire without the cheesy saxophone. Swift’s lithely vocals soar across string instrumentation as she tells the story from the side of the “other” woman. One thing is for certain: Don’t trust Inez. —A.M.

With its fuzzy synths and hopscotching drum-machine line, “Blinding Lights” is the best New Wave song this side of Duran Duran. In just three minutes, the Weeknd checks off any number of Eighties pop-song signposts — unanswered phone calls, driving fast just to feel something, lights representing loneliness — but the real magic is how his voice and the song’s chiming keyboard line lingers in your head well after he injects new life into the greatest Eighties-steeped lyrical cliché of them all: “I can’t sleep until I feel your touch.” —K.G.

Between lockdowns and mandatory quarantines, 2020 has been a year of unprecedented loneliness, and “People, I’ve Been Sad” is its anthem. With sparse synths and a voice on the verge of tears, Christine and the Queens captured the universal moment with words in English and French about missing out, disappearing, and falling apart. But when Chris sings, “You know the feeling,” she brilliantly breaks the fourth wall. Indeed, we all know the feeling, and we can all feel lonely and sad together — and maybe a little better, too, with a song this good to help pull us through. —K.G.

A brand-new classic Dylan ballad — not the only one on Rough and Rowdy Ways, but the one that casts the deepest, darkest spell. In the nine-minute “Key West (Philosophical Pirate),” he’s adrift in Florida, murmuring the Sunshine State blues over a ghostly accordion, as he growls, “Key West is the place to be if you’re looking for immortality.” But even in this palm-tree paradise, he’s got Desolation Row in his heart, and this outlaw still keeps his eye out, looking for the next chance to make his getaway. —R.S.

In the darkest depths of Covid lockdown — at a moment in history when leaving your house could literally get you killed — Cardi B and Megan delivered the perfect instructions on how to beat the quarantine blues: “Gobble me, swallow me, drip down the side of me/Quick, jump out ‘fore you let it get inside of me.” “WAP” was just the escapist raunch America needed in 2020, the sound of two of the strongest women in music defiantly putting the pleasure principle front and center in a moment when fun and joy seemed dead. Its NSFW video was brilliant since most people weren’t at work anyway (or at least weren’t in a traditional, buttoned-up office environment), and Cardi’s Bronx fire mixed with Megan’s bodacious flow to make for one of rap’s greatest mic-passing buddy comedies of all time. The result was a hot-girl summit for the ages. —J.D.