The 50 Best Songs of 2020

Apparently lightning can strike twice. Out of all the craziness this year, no one saw in their crystal visions that “Dreams” would get a second life: a smash hit 43 years after Rumours was released. A TikTok video depicting user Nathan Apodaca lip-synching to the song while longboarding and sipping Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry juice went viral, kicking off a wave of imitators — even Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, and Lindsey Buckingham joined in on the fun. “Dreams” made it all the way to Number Two on the RS 100 this fall, and now we’re patiently waiting for Apodaca to rollerblade to “Silver Springs.” —A.M.

A highlight off formerly rootsy songwriter Rose’s synth-y fourth album, Superstar, riding a Prince groove wherever she wants it to take her, “Feel the Way I Want” sounds like a sweaty dance club well past midnight. Rose makes her stubborn insistence on independence (sonic, sexual, professional) sound a whole lot like liberation: “I’m so in love with myself,” she sings. “It’s so romantic.” Self-love never sounded so funky. —J. Bernstein. 

The latest earworm from Nashville’s pop provocateur began with a sonic concept as daring as it was irreverent: Hunt transformed a Fifties honky-tonk chorus from Webb Pierce’s classic song “There Stands the Glass” into a convincing hip-hop sample that anchored this playful ode to being in the throes of romantic rejection. “You’ve got a cold heart and the cold, hard truth,” he sings amid a swirl of wordplay in the Hank Williams-referencing chorus, “I got a bottle of whiskey, but I got no proof.” —J. Bernstein 

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.