20. Jessie Ware – What’s Your Pleasure?
Seemingly out of nowhere, 2020 has managed to be one of the best years in recent memory for Dance-Pop and Nu-Disco in the spotlight. While not the first major release in the genre this year, it’s hard not to see Jessie Ware’s What’s Your Pleasure? as the harbinger of this new, incredibly fun trend. Receiving massive amounts of praise right from the get-go there are few albums more widely loved this year than this one, and who am I to disagree? With lush and vibrant instrumentals driven by bouncy bass and crisp drumlines, What’s Your Pleasure? sets the stage for some of the catchiest songs of the year, as well as the most innately passionate. Ware’s vocals are breathy and soft, standing out cleanly from the at times eccentric instrumentation and giving a personal touch to the music. There’s a clear understanding of what made those classics tick in their day, and a clean rendition of those traits in a way that makes them feel modern and applicable all these years later. This is in no small part due to the killer grooves on this record which, suffice to say, are one of the most essential elements to crafting a Disco track that grabs an audience and holds interest consistently. There’s very little to complain about here, and in a year with such an obvious need for positivity, Jessie Ware’s album is simply a delight.
Favorite Tracks: What’s Your Pleasure? | Step Into My Life | Spotlight
19. Jeff Rosenstock – NO DREAM
With some of the most energetic, fun, and fiery instrumentation of the year, Jeff Rosenstock bombards the listener with some of the best politically conscious punk I’ve heard since his 2016 album WORRY, all without sacrificing an ounce of the fun factor essential to the genre. Frenetic vocals dominate the record with lyrics that are both memorable and insightful, as critiques of war, capitalism, and state violence are presented in a way that is not only emotionally poignant but musically satisfying. From start to finish the record is wholly invigorating with fast and intricate drums, melodic yet harsh guitar performances, and a direct call to action nearly impossible to ignore. NO DREAM is about abandoning complacency and putting your irritations and anger towards something positive, and its message has resonated with me more than most this year.
Favorite Tracks: N O D R E A M | Old Crap | Scram!
18. Adrianne Lenker – songs
More famously known as the vocalist for Indie-Folk band Big Thief, Adrianne Lenker has made something of a name for herself in recent years as a solo artist, composing and performing gorgeous Contemporary Folk music with unparalleled instrumentation. Her latest record, songs, shows its hand right away as her best project yet, with sparse acoustics and a lush, focused sound nakedly displaying her melancholic and intricate songwriting. What songs excels at primarily is reading a dreamlike state in the listener, stealing up all of your attention and letting the outside world fall away. This makes it incredibly easy to listen to uninterrupted, but the downside is that I find it difficult to properly identify and articulate the things that make this album tick, as every time I put it on I’m transported to another world of turbulent emotion and wistful serenity, Lenker’s whispered vocals softly enveloping my psyche as the acoustic guitars and light ambience spiral down to my core. It’s a sound that on multiple occasions has brought me closer to tears than I would normally like to admit, and while it’s not as technically unique as some of the other records on this list, I’d be doing a disservice to say that it wasn’t enormously impactful in a way that others have hardly even approached.
Favorite Tracks: ingydar | not a lot, just forever | forwards backwards rebound
17. Poppy – I Disagree
YouTube and beauty sensation Poppy has never allowed her music to be restricted to just one genre. From her hyperpop-influenced Poppy.Computer to her ambient project I C U (Music to Read To) there’s never been a singular idea she’s allowed herself to linger on for too long. That’s never been so obvious as on her latest record I Disagree, where she fuses her more cutesy and poppier aesthetics with some absolutely crushing Alternative Metal and even Power Electronics. From just the first track ‘Concrete’ we get a glimpse at the many places the record will go tonally, with whiplash-inducing clashes between eerie ambience, massive Metalcore guitars, bubblegum pop, and even baroque pop a la Beach Boys. From there the tracklist maintains that diversity, albeit with far more focus in the tracks, giving each of those sounds far more time to shine without growing stale. Nearly every sound attempted on the record is done to an extremely high level of quality that even when the clashes are slightly more jarring than I’d like it’s never any less than an extremely enjoyable experience, and while I doubt that she’ll be revisiting this sound any time in the near future, this is absolutely a breakthrough moment for her sound and popularity that has stuck with me since January.
Favorite Tracks: BLOODMONEY | Fill the Crown | Sick of the Sun
16. Dua Lipa – Future Nostalgia
Remember earlier when I said that 2020 was a great year for Disco and Nu-Disco music? This is what I’m talking about. On just her sophomore album Dua Lipa has come through as one of the most confident voices in pop this year, with stellar songwriting, at-times incredible production, prominent and detailed instrumentation, and a tracklist practically overflowing with potential hits, with every track seeming to have received just as much love and attention as any other. With shining hooks, impressive attention to detail, and a surprising amount of passion, Dua Lipa gives her all simultaneously emulating and pushing forward the sounds of 80s (and 80s-inspired) Dance music. With a tracklist so close to watertight it’d be easy for a project like this to have a somewhat jagged flow between tracks, but that couldn’t be further from the case, with high energy bangers like ‘Hallucinate’ and ‘Physical’ being broken up with slower jams like ‘Cool’ and ‘Love Again,’ diversifying the tracklist for a seamless listening experience from front to back. Despite being so early in her career, there’s a sense that Dua Lipa has already found her sound, and I’ll be waiting excitedly to see her master it.
Favorite Tracks: Physical | Love Again | Hallucinate
15. Gorillaz – Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez
It’s no secret that Gorillaz are one of the most influential and beloved bands of the 00s, with their first two records breaking down barriers in Art Pop and giving us some of the best singles of the era. It’s also no secret that the 2010s were a rather turbulent time for the band, with the stellar Plastic Beach being outweighed by the three disappointing records that followed. With the start of the new decade the band had more to prove than ever, and with their old formula no longer sufficing they tried a whole new concept for the record. Rather than releasing as a one-time project, Strange Times was put out as a piece-meal series of EPs that, once they were all released, would add up to a full release album. I didn’t think much of it at first, choosing to wait for the whole record to be released before forming an opinion of any of the tracks, but the difference is actually kind of staggering. With every track essentially being released as a single, the level of polish throughout the tracklist is immediately noticeable, with not a single piece of filler left behind. Through sheer brute force the tracklist is made all the more invigorating, and with top-of-the-line features on literally every single song it’s hard to see this as anything less than an epic comeback from one of the most influential groups of the past twenty years. If the naming convention is anything to go off, it shouldn’t be long before we see another season of Song Machine, and after this year’s offering that couldn’t be a more enticing idea.
Favorite Tracks: MLS | Momentary Bliss | Aries
14. Boris – NO
From the opening moments, NO differentiates itself from most of Boris’ catalogue up to this point. Rather than an epic and shapeless monolith of droning guitars and feedback, this album opts to take a more riffy, Thrash Metal/Crust Punk inspired route with blistering guitars shrieking and riffing over blown-out drums and some of the most unrelenting vocals I’ve heard this year. The energy on display here is contagious, even when the band slows it down or gets a little more ambient. Whether it’s the absolutely disgusting riffage on ‘Kikinoue,’ the Doom Metal-esque sludge on ‘Zerkalo,’ or the descent into white noise on ‘HxCxHxC’ there’s never a shortage of kinetic energy being blasted off every wall of the studio and out of the speakers. With the band’s change of pace and detour into somewhat more played-out sounds one might expect that Boris’ signature eclecticism and overall weirdness might be less apparent here, but that couldn’t be further from the case, with backdrops of sheer feedback distortion and riffs that play outside the niche that hardcore music has occasionally settled into, NO appeals to both the “shut-your-brain-off-and-mosh” crowd as well as the attuned listener. As one of my favorite groups out of Japan, there was little chance that I’d be disappointed with their output this year, but NO goes above and beyond providing a listening experience practically unrivalled by any hardcore music this year.
Favorite Tracks: Zerkalo | Loveless | Kikinoue
13. Denzel Curry x Kenny Beats – UNLOCKED
I’ve already spoken at length about this record in my full review earlier this year, and it’s not very long at only 17 minutes so I won’t add much more here, but if there’s one thing I will say that I don’t know if I articulated properly last time it’s that, if this record were just three or four tracks longer it could have been the modern-day Madvillainy. Everything here is fantastic, the collaboration between Denzel and Kenny is awesome and at times mindblowing, the album flows perfectly and has hardly a single dull moment, I just find myself wishing that I could have a little bit more meat to chew on. If this album was about ten minutes longer and maintained the level of quality here it would be a practically flawless record for me, but as is it’s still easily one of the best projects of the year.
Favorite Tracks: DIET_ | So.Incredible.pkg | Take_It_Back_v2
12. Spectral Lore & Mare Cognitum – Wanderers: Astrology of the Nine
I’m not quite sure when or why it happened, but at some point in 2020 Black Metal finally clicked for me. The eggshell finally cracked and I was suddenly more than ready to embrace the desolate soundscapes of its harsher tones. One record that helped me with that was this collaboration between two artists whom I had appreciated from a distance in the past, but could never get into myself. This year, though, something caught my eye: the theme of the record. See, I’ve always had an innate fascination with space and the universe. If you remember my list from last year you’ll know that my favorite Metal record of 2019 was also space themed, and that’s far from a coincidence. On Wanderers: Astrology of the Nine Spectral Lore and Mare Cognitum trade off individual songs, each one focused on one planet, and theme their music around the characteristics — both physical and theological — of said planet.
‘Mercury (The Virtuous) opens the record at its most blisteringly hot, with the instrumentation being practically drowned out by the sun’s flames. ‘Mars (The Warrior)’ on the other hand is a terrifyingly alien and hostile track, with harsh, violent, and dissonant guitars culminating in a truly cacophonous solo at the end. ‘Jupiter (The Giant)’ truly lives up to its name with massive, devastating guitars underpinned by throttling drums and an overall production that sells its unimaginable scale, and ‘Earth (The Mother)’ gravely represents the solemn nature of our planet’s purity and capability for life, while painfully depicting the destruction it could see at the hands of the life it spawned. The major highlight, however, is the 24-minute two-part epic of ‘Pluto (The Gatekeeper.)’ With ‘Exodus Though the Frozen Wastes’ playing an ambient wasteland devoid of the raw instrumentation and crushing heft of previous tracks, a desolate soundscape only broken by Part II: ‘The Astral Bridge.’ At the end of our galaxy we’ve reached the fold that releases us into the wider universe, a terrifying place imminently dangerous, represented by some of the most devastating riffs and crushing production on the record, a beautiful end to our journey, and to my favorite metal record of the year.
Favorite Tracks: Pluto (The Gatekeeper) Part II: The Astral Bridge | Earth (The Mother) | Jupiter (The Giant)
11. 100 gecs – 1000 gecs and the Tree of Clues
If there’s one thing I’d change about both my top 10 of 2019 and top 50 of the decade lists I published earlier in the year, it’d be my ranking of 100 gecs’ debut record on both. In the year since I first heard it it has grown on me so exponentially that the band is now my most-listened artist on Spotify, and probably by a fair margin. The addictive quality of its hyper-compartmentalized nature alongside the bullshit fun that is clearly being had has been absolutely intoxicating to me this year, and while I wonder how long the band will be able to remain relevant going forward, the band clearly has the spotlight right now. Recognizing this, the duo fueled their popularity with a remix album that may well go down as one of the best of all time, and certainly the most unique.
On this compilation you’ll find a frankly absurd number and variety of collaborators from the PC Music and new Hyperpop wave of musicians essentially doing to 100 gecs songs what 100 gecs did to popular music last year. Whether that means straight-up remixing the track like on umru’s rendition of ‘ringtone,’ covering the tracks like on ‘hand crushed by a mallet’ with Fall Out Boy, Craig Owens, and Nicole Dollanganger, or just bending and breaking the tracks to make their own songs like on Injury Reserve’s ‘745 sticky’ remix. While few of these surpass the originals, all of them are fun to listen to, and some of them are legitimately mindblowing (see also: gecgecgec with Lil West and Tony Velour.) The record doesn’t maintain the incredibly small and tight package of the original, clocking in at double the length, but with so many varied and fun sounds I hardly notice, and I’m just left glad that we get to hear even more gecs so soon after the incredible debut. Despite never reaching the heights of the first record, Tree of Clues has solidified 100 gecs as a moment in music culture, and now we can only wait to see how long it lasts, and how far it goes.
Favorite Tracks: ringtone (Charli XCX, Kero Kero Bonito, Rico Nasty) | gecgecgec (Lil West, Tony Velour) | xXXi_wud_nvrstøp_ÜXXx (Tommy Cash, Hannah Diamond)
Writing About Music and Games Sometimes 