Rob Sheffield’s Top 20 Albums of 2020

Hannah Read follows her instincts as a songwriter, on her fifth and finest album as Lomelda — there’s always something breathily off-kilter about her confessions. She’s also got some of the year’s funniest guitar solos, especially the would-be theme song “It’s Lomelda.” At the end of “Hannah Sun,” she reaches her toughest truth — “I didn’t know how to be closer to you” — and stretches that last word until it rips a hole in her heart.

BTS hit historic heights all year. The South Korean pop superheroes finally topped the U.S. charts with “Dynamite” — you know the year isn’t a total loss when BTS sing a hook from Bob Dylan in a Number One hit, the same summer Dylan comes back with his own hit record. (“Rolling on like a rolling stone,” indeed.) They ended the year strong with Be, with the timely self-esteem pep talk “Dis-Ease.” But Map of the Soul: 7 set the pace for their year, their most musically and conceptually ambitious work yet, from Suga’s space-rap “Interlude: Shadow” to Jin’s “Moon” to J-Hope’s “Outro: Ego.” It’s a supremely confident blockbuster from a group ready to conquer the world on their own terms, but without compromising a thing.

Malkmus has a funny habit of dropping perfect summer albums in the winter, so naturally he released this winter pageant just in time for summer. He gets acoustic on Traditional Techniques, turning into the hippie-minstrel folk rogue of his dreams. “Brainwashed” is up there with “Middle America” and “Share the Red” among his most beautiful tunes, a rueful ballad about when you realize it’s not too late to wipe the slate clean and start fresh. (“I am ready to bail into a new modality/If it’s available.”) And for a chaser, there’s his November loosie “Juliefuckingette.” The album rolls with a bratty insouciance that’s one of his trademarks, but given that Mr. Fight This Generation has clocked 30 years of excellence without a single forced or phony moment—one of the most consistently inspired runs anywhere in pop-muzik history — the possibility that he might give a shit cannot be dismissed.

Like Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who directed the excellent “Savior Complex” video, Phoebe Bridgers is a master at turning the messiest emotions into dark comedy. Punisher is full of bad romance (“You pushed me in and now my feet can’t touch the bottom of you”), family trauma, road fatigue, and the apocalypse. She re-teams with her Boygenius mates Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker for “Graceland Too,” asking if Elvis believed “songs can come true,” already knowing for a fact he did. But “Garden Song” is the showstopper — it’s the calm in her voice that makes it so scary, as one bad dream dissolves into the next, and the grass grows out of her skinhead neighbor’s grave.

A double-album autobiography from the Carolina poet Moses Sumney, meditating on erotic isolation. As he sings, “I fell in love with the in-between.” He peaks in “Polly,” where he dreams about being cotton candy in somebody’s mouth, dissolving on his lover’s tongue, overdubbing himself into a soul choir, somewhere between Thom Yorke and Prince. At the end, his falsetto seems to take off and float free in the sky.

Miley’s Eighties synth-rock neon-nightmare rebel-yell bombastigasm is pretty much perfect. In fact, Plastic Hearts got me thinking, “This would be the third-best Billy Idol album ever” — and that was before Billy himself showed up in their duet “Night Crawling,” adding a little flesh to her fantasy. Stevie Nicks, Dua Lipa, and Joan Jett put the pastel frosting on this sleaziest of cakes. The only flaw is Miley didn’t add her great “Doll Parts” cover to go with her “Heart of Glass” and “Zombie.” In the midnight hour, she wants more, more, more, and she gets it all.

Uzi made it worth the wait for this one. The adventures of a hip-hop space cadet, floating through outer space, rising above the dystopian nocturnal haze, as if he’s using AutoTune to talk to sensual aliens.

Whatever “New Rules” you brought into 2020, they didn’t take you very far. But Dua responds with the disco glitz of Future Nostalgia, bending a knee to Olivia Newton-John (“Physical”) or Gloria Gaynor (“Don’t Start Now”) or Madonna (“Hallucinate”). She dances through these songs with a pocketful of honey, and her eyes on a tomorrow where we might even look back with future nostalgia for right now. Bonus points for the viral video of Dua and Bernie Sanders discussing health care. I’d love to hear Bernie sing, “I can’t teach your man how to wear his pants.”

Like Winston Churchill during the Blitz, except a slightly better dancer, Jarvis rose to the crisis with the leadership we needed. The Britpop poet laureate returned with a new album of scathingly empathetic satires, Beyond the Pale, 25 years on from the Pulp classic Different Class. When his tour got axed, he took to social media to DJ his Domestic Disco parties and read bedtime stories. “House Music All Night Long” became an accidentally perfect lockdown anthem, a cabin-fever banger about sitting in the basement listening to disco (“Goddamn this claustrophobia/I should be disrobin’ ya”) when you’d rather be out on the floor, with the party chant, “One nation under a roof.”

The old-school live album made a huge comeback this year, filling the cosmic void in a 2020 when live music went 2112. 75 Dollar Bill recorded this show in early March, an ordinary night in the Hudson Valley, when nobody knew it was all about to crash; they put it up on Bandcamp in May, when nobody knew how long this would last. It’s a festive gig: power-drone guitar, plywood-crate percussion, friends sitting in on sax, bass, viola. The room crackles with energy, for modal trance grooves that stretch into double-digit minutes. You can lose yourself in this album, then return to the world recharged, maybe even a little less lonesome. Not the same as being there, but as close as we can get for now.

“I hope you can’t see what’s burning in me” is such a quietly effective line to sum up such a tempestuous album. It’s almost exactly 10 years since Katie Crutchfield wrote and recorded her first Waxahatchee album, American Weekend, a kid snowed in at her folks’ house in Alabama during a January 2011 blizzard. On Saint Cloud, she moves on down the road, as she ponders the passing of time, watches the lilacs drink the water, makes herself vows she can’t keep, and stumbles into moments of newfound clarity. Sad but true: “Real love don’t follow a straight line/It breaks your neck, it builds you a delicate shrine.”

Can you take me back where I came from? Brother, can you take me back? Paul McCartney wasn’t planning to cut an album this year, but he got stranded like the rest of us, quarantining on the farm, strumming his guitar to the sheep and chickens, until McCartney III spilled out. Made in lockdown — or “rockdown,” a very Paul thing to call it — it’s not as ambitious as his evergreen 2018 opus Egypt Station. (“Dominoes,” damn.) These songs are moments in time, captured to keep them from slipping away, because when you’re Paul, nothing redeems a lost day like singing a lazy song beneath the sun. Imagine being so in love with music you could write “The Kiss of Venus” with the same fingers you used to write “Blackbird,” 53 years later. Maybe even on the same guitar? An inspiration to us all.