Spotify says I listened to 58,000 minutes of music this year, not including all those 8-hour loops of fragments from the Blade Runner soundtrack mixed with rain. Here are the 10 artists who released my favourite albums of 2020. Starting with the best…
1 Phoebe Bridgers – Punisher
Maybe I listened to this too much back in June. A friend said it was exactly the kind of album the Spotify algorithm pushes onto people, and that may be true, but it’s beautiful all the same. Like Grouper with a backbone. Kurt Vile minus the weed. Shearwater only without the need to create pathos by screaming until your throat is raw. Perfect music for when an acquaintance comes over and you don’t have much to say to each other because neither of you did anything this year except complete HBO and become average at Call of Duty: Warzone.
Highlight: Kyoto
2 IDLES – Ultra Mono
Imagine if you could snarl like Joe Talbot. You could turn the word ‘motherfucker’ into poetry and charm the shit out of people even as you’re insulting them. I guess this album could potentially be criticised for continuing where Brutalism and Joy as an Act of Resistance left off rather than building something new, but I don’t care. It’s rare enough for bands these days to release three albums in four years, and even rarer to maintain the same balance of aggression and humour on each. Please make sure IDLES are among the first to get the vaccine.
Highlight: Ne Touche Pas Moi (though it’s a little sad to hear Jehnny Beth on this and recall how Savages fell apart)
3 Protomartyr – Ultimate Success Today
I couldn’t properly get into The Agent Intellect or Relatives In Descent, but this one works like a charm. It’s Nick Cave meets a beefed-up Wipers, all jagged guitars and cryptic vocals, and the apocalyptic, sitting-around-the-fire-we’ve-made-out-of-human-bones vibe was timed to perfection. They also manage to work in a few poppy hooks, like on Modern Business Hymns, which kind of sounds like The Lightning Seeds if The Lightning Seeds was super into J.G. Ballard.
Highlight: Processed by the Boys
4 Lyra Pramuk – Fountain
I was lucky enough to take photos of Lyra at a gig in Berlin once maybe six years ago. The music from then compared to the tracks on Fountain is like putting Pablo Honey alongside Kid A. When it came out back in March, in the week everything shut down, it was a cooling salve to my overstimulated mind. Not in its entirety: songs like Xeno are more like a soundtrack to a nightmare directed by David Lynch. But for the most part it’s a vocal waterfall that drowns you in the nicest way possible. I like it that one website I visited optimistically labelled it ‘ambient pop’; it’s not.
Highlight: Witness
5 Klô Pelgag – Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs
Pure sweet pretentious art rock en français. I want to say “they don’t make albums like this anymore”, but that would make me sound a. old and b. out of touch, because maybe ‘they’ do still make albums like this and I’m just not finding them. Perfect for when I want to listen to Hounds of Love but also need a Gallic shrug to keep my rosbif tendencies in check.
Highlight: Rémora
6 Yves Tumor – Heaven to a Tortured Mind
I don’t know how Yves Tumor comes up with this stuff. It sounds like music beamed to us directly from the future. I’m also unsure how to categorise it: drunken art rock, playful post-industrial, manic-depressive psychedelic soul, broken robot funk? I guess it doesn’t matter. Imagine if Ariel Pink was consistent – this is probably what it would sound like.
Highlight: Gospel For A New Century
7 Slift – Ummon
There’s a fine line between stoner rock that turns your mind inside out and wears it like a glove and plodding, heard-it-before, drop-D riffage. Ummon works by virtue of leaning more toward space rock than pure stoner: the guitars shimmer, the bass does somersaults and the vocals float somewhere in the troposphere. Sometimes it sounds like Spacemen 3 on amphetamine, other times it channels the 500-mg psychedelia of Hawkwind and the Ozrics. One thing a lot of stoner albums lack is well-structured guitar solos, but this shoves them down you. It’s a little long, but then the days are a little long this year, so what else are you gonna do?
Highlight: Thousand Helmets of Gold
8 Run the Jewels – RTJ4
I wish Zach de la Rocha was the third member of RTJ so he could be on every track, spitting bars about the factory doors closing and being too rude for ya rudiments. Maybe that’s missing the point of Run the Jewels (it is); it’s more about tracks like Walking in the Snow, which was grim listening after George Floyd in May and still has an impact seven months later. But it’s also about aggressively not giving a fuck and doing whatever they want, which I appreciate. And sometimes Killer Mike sounds like Clay Davis from The Wire.
Highlight: JU$T
9 Yukika – Soul Lady
“Want to listen to something that sounds like the lost Janet Jackson album between Control and Rhythm Nation, only it’s by a Japanese woman who sings in Korean?”
Yes obviously, is the answer to that.
Highlight: Soul Lady
10 Thurston Moore – By the Fire
Sometimes, when things are uncertain, we just want oddly tuned, tricked-out guitars and the bored tones of a lanky 62-year-old man in a hoodie to sweep us up in a sonic bear hug for 16 minutes and 48 seconds at a time and tell us it’s gonna be okay. Not literally, obviously, but it’s comforting to know Thurston Moore is still out there with his Jazzmaster and an abused whammy bar, rocking like he’s forever 17 years old.
Highlight: Hashish
Honourable mention: Neptunian Maximalism – Éons
I read a review on Rate Your Music that simply said, “This is the final boss of music”, and I’m inclined to agree. I only listened to it once back in July, but I’m still elated at having made it through all three discs.
Be sure to tune in again next year when this website is probably defunct.