The Top 10 Albums Of 2020, According To Everyone
It s December, which means Best of 2020 lists are here. With so many lists out there, who has time to read all of them?
Turns out: We do. But because you probably don t, we rounded up all the Top 10 lists we could find, smashed em together in a big spreadsheet, and spit out overall Top 10 lists for the year s best albums, songs, books, TV shows, movies and video games. You re welcome.
10. Haim,
Women In Music Pt. III
Writing with more personality and candor than ever about a range of difficult themes depression, loss, misogyny, the complications of loving on one s own terms they ve also loosened their taut pop rock just enough to breathe more life into it.
The 50 best albums of 2020, No 1: Fiona Apple – Fetch the Bolt Cutters Laura Snapes
Once the dust had settled on the UK lockdown in spring, you started to hear a cautious kind of optimism. Maybe, on the other side of all this, a better world might be possible – less capitalist, kinder and more humane. Until then, there was Fetch the Bolt Cutters.
When Fiona Apple released her fifth album in April, its title quickly became a meme for those feeling suffocated by their own four walls and wanting out. Apple had a different kind of freedom in mind. She had pretty much quit public life years earlier to live in Venice, California, with her housemate and their dogs, mostly leaving the house for walks on the beach at dawn. Isolation gave her the distance to observe the world’s workings and propose something better.
Pitchfork + NME Release Their Top 50 (5 each) Albums of 2020
5. Perfume Genius,
[
write up]In a year of isolation and unattainable intimacies, Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas is our poet laureate of constant longing. Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, his fifth album, celebrates the endless possibility and vulnerability of the body without losing sight of the fundamental absurdity of the human ordeal. Hadreas sings about misery and disconnection, about feeling unrecognizable to himself, about shepherding an inexperienced lover through his first gay encounter and picking his pockets afterwards. As on 2017’s No Shape, producer Blake Mills reveals the music with startling clarity and subtlety, bringing out lifelike strings and trembling synths through sound design as much as conventional production. In the warm thrum of “Describe,” the oceanic splash of “Without You,” and the barnstorming buildup of “Some Dream,” Set My Heart on Fire Immediately throws open doors to the
Since her first album, 2016’s
Midwest Farmer’s Daughter, Margo Price has often been positioned in outlaw country, flanked by comparisons to Bobbie Gentry and Loretta Lynn. But on her third LP,
That’s How Rumors Get Started, Price veers closer to classic rock and away from the honky-tonk that once echoed through the Nashville songwriter’s music. While her debut was charged with drinking tropes and her sophomore effort (2017’s
All American Made)
steeped in political consciousness,
Rumors focuses on the more vulnerable stories of touring life: being away from home, surviving relationships and the anxiety of stillness. Price is at her most stunning on the gospel-tinged confessional “Prisoner of the Highway,” in which she reflects on the cost of being an artist on the road while in love and starting a family. The same goes for power ballad “I’d Die For You,” where she parallels a soaring Stevie Nicks. A little bit of Nashville and Southern rock seems to ha