It was a good year for the most personal, idiosyncratic statements
Simmering emotions, louder explosions
In a year of distancing, anxiety, protests and polarization, musicianswere separated fromaudiences and, often, each other. Some 2020 albumswere already well underway before the pandemic; otherswere made under quarantine, with long-distance collaborations or none. On release, theywere heard privately. It was a good year for the most personal, idiosyncratic statements. Two of TheNewYork Times music critics pick their favorite albums of 2020.
— Jon Pareles
1. Sufjan Stevens, ‘The Ascension’
Phalanxes of synthesizers, programmed beats and sturdy pop melodies fortify Sufjan Stevens and his gentle voice as he contemplates America in turmoil. He tries to summon amoral compass and enough faith to overcome wholesale confusion, lies and fear. Victory is not assured.
2. Fiona Apple, ‘Fetch the BoltCutters’
A triumph of willfulness, “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” is Fiona Apple proclaiming she “won’t shut up” amid a percussive clatter she created at her home: banging on pots and pans, pushing her voice to extremes, letting her dog bark. The songs avenge and exorcise all sorts of slights and traumas, distant and recent, mixing spite with amusement. And they mutate as they go, mingling spokenwords and melody and drawing at whim on rock, jazz, show tunes, choir harmonies, chants and cheers. Apple doesn’t forget or forgive; she justmoves ahead.
3. Moses Sumney, ‘Grae’
“Grae” demands to be heard as a rhapsodic whole, a suite of songs and fragments continually dissolving and rematerializing aroundMoses Sumney’s otherworldly voice. The music touches down in slow-motion R&B, but moves toward abstractions— orchestral, jazzy, electronic— as Sumney ponders solitude and connection, masculinity and identity, self-doubt and self-realization, existence and transcendence.
4. Taylor Swift, ‘Folklore’
On “Folklore,” Taylor Swift puts away childish things like pure pop clarity and scoring easy points. Her unexpected quarantine-era alliance with Aaron Dessner of theNational deliberately and gorgeously blurs the crisp contours of her past songwriting. On “Folklore” she is swathed in acoustic instruments and minimalistic patterns within patterns. And when she sings about lost love, she nowadmits that she shares both blame and regrets.
5. Bob Dylan, ‘Rough andRowdyWays’
Mortality looms on “Rough and RowdyWays,” but it only makes Bob Dylan, 79, more ornery. The songs switch off between stoic ballads and late-night roadhouse blues as he sings about history, legends, theology, art, gallowshumored paradoxes and, occasionally, his own cultural role. It’s autumnal, yet anything but mellow.
6. Lianne La Havas, ‘Lianne La Havas’
The third album by English songwriter Lianne LaHavas cycles through a failed romance — starting and ending with a break— in songs brimming with poised musicality. Graceful melodies, supple guitar syncopations, sophisticated harmonies and a voice that can sparkle with anticipation or cry out in pain capture all the hope and heartache of her narrative.
7. Burna Boy, ‘Twice as Tall’
Nigerian songwriter Burna Boy calls his music Afro-fusion, not the more specificallyNigerian term Afrobeats, and “Twice as Tall” lives up to that broader mandate with a profusion of sleek, diverse, constantly inventive grooves that traverse Africa and its diaspora. Through its 15 songs, Burna Boy is by turns exuberant, pensive, confessional and political. The bitter, furious single he released soon after nonviolent anti-corruption protesterswere killed by soldiers, “20 10 20,” made a compelling postscript.
8. Run the Jewels, ‘RTJ4’
Run the Jewels— Killer Mike and El-P— uphold aworthy, now-vintage style of hip-hop, with densely and aggressively produced tracks and rhymes that are declaimed rather than moaned, for songs that address broader issues between boasts. The momentum hardly ever lets up on “RTJ4”; the problems it targets have been all too vivid in 2020.
9. Jyoti, ‘Mama, You Can Bet!’
Songwriter and producer Georgia AnneMuldrowcalls herself Jyoti— a name bestowed on her by Alice Coltrane— for her forays into jazz. On “Mama, You Can Bet!” she created the music by herself— playing or looping all the instruments, overdubbing her vocals in rich harmonies— yet somehowsimulates the spontaneous interplay of a live jazz group. She remakes Charles Mingus, the earthiest jazz avantgardist, on a few tracks, nodding toward an inspiration.
10. Autechre, ‘SIGN’
The ever cryptic, ever exploratory electronic duo Autechre greeted 2020 with something approaching moderation and introspection, releasing a single CD(as opposed to the marathon “NTS Sessions” from2018) with 11 tracks that usually accept the regularity of a beat. The general tone is thoughtful and consonant but with jittery undercurrents, fitting for a year of quarantine. Yet moment to moment in Autechre’s algorithmic realm, anything can happen. And less than twoweeks after “SIGN” appeared, Autechre suddenly released another hour of music on the more aggressively disorienting “PLUS.”
Rebel yells of passion and fury
Intensely personalwork swelled into large-scale statements this year, andwomen often led theway, revealing scars left by different kinds of emotional and political skirmishes, and reinforcing that their voices must be heard.
— Lindsay Zoladz
1. Fiona Apple, ‘Fetch the BoltCutters’
Like a distant planet unhurried in its orbit, Fiona Apple returns every seven or eight years to present whatever wisdom she’s gleaned fromanother trip around the sun. But even the emotional and aesthetic derring-do of her four previous albums could not prepare listeners for the shock of “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” an achievement of bracing intensity recorded over several years, mostly in the seclusion of her Los Angeles home. Dancing nimbly between complex, jazzlike arrangements and the crude beauty of playground chants, Apple narrates a vivid journey about confronting and finally transcending past trauma— the schoolyard bullies of “Shameika”; the music-industry gaslighting described on the title track; the sexual assault addressed so searingly on the unforgettable “Newspaper” and “ForHer.” Apple’s voice is a muscular instrument, heaving and surging under the weight of all she’s excavating before fluttering away, light as a butterfly. Any time you try to lock her in to any one genre, narrative or state of being, you can already feel her eyeing her toolbox.
2. Phoebe Bridgers, ‘Punisher’
“Someday, I’m gonna look up frommy phone and seemy life,” Phoebe Bridgers vows wryly on “Garden Song.” A few tracks later, she tries it out and remains unimpressed: “Iwant to believe, instead I look to the sky and feel nothing.” But oh, the miracles she’s able to mine fromthe vast space between those two extremes: amemory of sneaking behind a truck’s wheel as a child; a heartfelt hallucination of a conversation with her musical hero Elliott Smith; a final, fearless stare into the face of the apocalypse. Bridgers’ previouswork showed promise, but “Punisher” finds her blooming into her full potential as a voice-of-a-generation songwriter. “What if I told you I feel like I knowyou, butwe never met?” shewonders on the flickering title track. Her listeners will understand.
3. Waxahatchee, ‘Saint Cloud’
The song titles onWaxahatchee’s “Saint Cloud” are stark, blunt, almost elemental:“War,” “Hell,” “Fire,” “Witches,” “Oxbow.” Katie Crutchfield is not interested in mincingwords or couching ideas in superfluous metaphors— these songs are about rolling up your sleeves and getting down to the hard, direct work of personal introspection.
“If I could love you unconditionally,” she sings to herself in her charred Alabama twang, “I could iron out the edges of the darkest sky.” Written after Crutchfield decided to quit drinking, the songs of “Saint Cloud” are unflinchingly clear-eyed, their arrangements as loose and brokenin as an old favorite shirt.
4. Haim, ‘Womenin Music Pt. III’
Haim’s playfully acronym-ed “WIMP III” feels like a trip through the radio dial during one of those fleeting years in the mid’90s when— by some sort of clerical error or rip in the spacetime continuum— the airwaves were dominated by an eclectic variety of female musicians. “The Steps” and “Gasoline” are stomping rockersworthy of vintage Sheryl Crow, “3AM” recasts the Haim sisters as a sassy R&B girl group, the rootsy “I’ve Been Down” would have killed as an encore at Lilith Fair. On their previous albums, Este, Danielle and AlanaHaim could sometimes feel hemmed in by their pristine, showy chops. “WIMP III” has freed them up to experiment, embrace imperfection and discover promising new corners of their evolving sound.
5. Yves Tumor, ‘Heaven to a Tortured Mind’
Yves Tumor struts and slithers like the most famous rock star on an as-yet-undiscovered planet. “Heaven to a Tortured Mind,” the most straightforwardly tuneful album fromthe Knoxville, Tennessee-raised art-rocker, combines the glam sneer ofMarc Bolan with the forward-thinking shape-shifting of Tricky, plus a bit of Yves Tumor’s own special sparkle. (Their real name, appropriately enough: Sean Bowie.) On duets like the soaring “Kerosene!” and the slinky “Strawberry Privilege,” masculine and feminine energies mingle and detach from their earthbound bodies, their eventual combustion givingway to plenty more interesting byproducts.
6. CharliXCX, ‘HowI’m FeelingNow’
Theweirdo-pop futurist Charli XCXgot to the quarantine album before it became a cliché, and elevated it to something far more expansive and searching than thematic gimmickry. Sure, there are timely allusions to stir-crazy anxiety (“Anthems”) and video chatting (“in real life, could the
club even handle us?” shewonders on the corrosive opener “Pink Diamond”), but these circumstances have also made Charli extra attuned to her emotions, lending the depth of genuine introspection to many of these songs. Featuring winning collaborations with such avant-trash producers as A.G. Cook of PC Music and Dylan Brady of 100 gecs, “HowI’m FeelingNow” is hyper-carbonated pop of the highest order— like a can of seltzer that’s so stingingly fizzy it makes you tear up a little on the way down.
7. JessieWare, ‘What’sYour Pleasure?’
The most sumptuous offering from a year accidentally obsessed with disco (Dua Lipa’s sleek “FutureNostalgia,” RóisínMurphy’s bold “RóisínMachine,” and Lady Gaga’s otherworldly “Chromatica” being the runners-up), British singer and songwriter JessieWare’s “What’s Your Pleasure?” is a lusty feat of dance-floor escapism— an affable podcaster and happily married mother of two Cinderella-ing herself into a club vixen for a night. Ware revels in the textures of the producer James Ferraro’s showroom of vintage synths, conjuring the no-wave cool of ESG as deftly as the glimmer of Minneapolis funk.
8. LilUziVert, ‘EternalAtake’
The alien-abduction skits are redundant: Fromthe opening notes of the bouncing “Baby Pluto” we’ve been transported directly toUzi’s universe. If the sticky-icky hooks of the 2017 album “Luv Is Rage 2” established LilUzi Vert as a melodically savvy hip-hop crooner, the long-gestating “Eternal Atake” is a sharp assertion of his skills as a rapper— combining the influences of his forebears Chief Keef and Future (both of whom he also collaborated with this year) into a unique style that could be mistaken for no one else. Seamlessly shifting gears from flowto breathless flow, “Eternal Atake” is a breakneck joy ride through the cosmos ofUzi’s own brain.
9. Jeff Rosenstock, ‘No Dream’
Every song on Long Island punk lifer Jeff Rosenstock’s pummeling “NoDream” goes to 11, and then somehowfinds a 12. “It’s not a dream, it’s not a dream!” he hollers at himself with increasing ferocity on the title track, scream
ing guitars and unrelenting drumming providing the sonic equivalent of coldwater to the face. “No Dream” is a frayed manual for howto be an independently thinking and not- completelyjaded person in aworld of faceless sans-serif corporations (exemplary song title: “***BNB”), anesthetizing bad news and all manner of everyday late-capitalist insanity. So unsparing is his inquiry, though, that Rosenstock’s occasional flashes of tenderness feel refreshingly (if obscenely) hopeful. “All these other [expletive] can bite me,” he concludes at the end of the record, “‘cause you’re the only person that Iwanted to likeme.”
10. Perfume Genius, ‘SetMy Heart on Fire Immediately’
MikeHadreas continues his decadelong hot streak on “SetMy Heart on Fire Immediately,” a record that places baroque-pop frames around the sort of emotions, experiences and people not traditionally honored in baroquepop songs. The harpsichordkissed “Jason” is a gently heartbreaking tale of a man’s hesitant exploration and ultimate rejection of his own desires (“clumsy, shakily, he ran his hands up me”), while the melody to the upbeat, yearning “On the Floor” has a retro-’60s feel. Sometimes Hadreas and his producer Blake Mills seem to be updating the earthy rumbles of ’80s goth rock; at other times, their layered arrangements queer theWall of Sound.
11. Taylor Swift, ‘Folklore’
“When you are young they assume you knownothing,” quoth Taylor Swift, age 31. What follows, on “Folklore,” is a lyrical exploration of that culturally denigrated commodity that is young-girl wisdom, this time viewed through the artful distance of Swift’s adulthood. “Pictureme in the trees, before I learned civility,” she invites on the memory-scape “Seven,” a sophisticated piano bringing gravitas to the childlike playfulness of her lyrics. “Folklore” isn’t a perfect album (though to be fair, neither was “Red”), nor is it Swift’s best (which is “Red”), but its focus on craft and emotionalworld-building feels like a perfectmove for her right now— an eternally sharp songwriter returning to the whetstone. “I knew everything when Iwas young,” Swift sings. The exciting thing to think about is howyoung she still is.