2020: The Year in Music

In one of the worst years in history, music guided us through it — from Taylor Swift’s cathartic intimacy to Dua Lipa’s disco escapism and Bad Bunny’s revolutionary reggaeton

In one of the worst years in history, music guided us through it all — from Taylor Swift to Dua Lipa to Bad Bunny.

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 1 Taylor Swift FOLKLORE

HOW DID TAYLOR SWIFT spend her quarantine? Completely reinventing her sound with this quietly audacious masterpiece. Folklore is Swift stripping her music down to its acoustic essence, reveling in goth-folk beauty and painterly narrative possibility. Without the pressure of having to write radio hits, Swift dug deep and shed the über-pop trappings of her previous album, 2019’s Lover, for a project that put her once-in-a-generation songwriting talent front and center like never before, with assists from collaborators like Jack Antonoff, Aaron Dessner of the National, and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. Her scope could be as grand as the ruling-class dissection “The Last Great American Dynasty” or as gruelingly intimate as the last-ditch emotional unburdening of “This Is Me Trying.” At the heart of Folklore are songs like “August” and “Betty,” instant classics that render the bedrock Swiftian theme of elegiac romantic intrigue with new levels of detail, urgency, and empathy. The result was music that provided catharsis and solace just when we needed it.

2 FIONA APPLE FETCH THE BOLT CUTTERS

FIONA APPLE has spent her career defying expectations. But few were prepared for the audacity of her first album in nearly a decade. Bolt Cutters is as uncompromising and unpredictable as Apple’s previous run of craftily chaotic alt-pop operettas, whether she’s punctuating her vocals with barks and meows on the title track or mustering orchestras of drums to drive home her stories of vengeful epiphany and underdog resilience. But along with her usual incisive individuality there’s a commitment to the sisterly community in songs like “Ladies” and “Shameika,” making this not just her most intense record, but her most affirming one, too.

3 Bad Bunny YHLQMDLG

THE PUERTO RICAN hitmaker could have stocked his second solo LP with bankable pop cameos. Instead, he made the world party on his terms with Yo Hago

Lo Que Me Da La Gana (a.k.a. I Do Whatever I Want). Bad Bunny doubled down on his eclectic reggaeton vision — from the chaotic club jam “Safaera” to the bossa nova trap of “Si Veo a Tu Mamá” to the heavy metal of “Hablamos Mañana.” He threatened to retire on the album-closing “<3,” but for an artist so on his game, slowing down doesn’t seem like an option.

4 Bob Dylan ROUGH AND ROWDY WAYS

BOB DYLAN’S first album of new songs in eight years is a lyrical tour de force teeming with outrageous jokes (“My Own Version of You”), playful boasts (“I Contain Multitudes”), and irreverent tributes to the greats (“Goodbye Jimmy Reed”). Underneath it all, there’s a sense of melancholy that peaks on the sublime end-of-theroad ballad “Key West.” These songs add up to Dylan’s funniest, most surprising, and richest album since Love and Theft.

5 DUA LIPA FUTURE NOSTALGIA

DUA LIPA’S second album would have been a magnificent disco trip even in the best of all possible years. But Future Nostalgia was crucial for a time when these beats were as close to the club as fans could possibly get. It’s a rush of uptempo dance glitz, with Lipa twirling the night away in the stilettos of queens like Madonna (“Hallucinate”) or Gloria Gaynor (“Don’t Start Now”) or Olivia Newton-John (“Physical”). “Baby, keep on dancing like you ain’t got a choice,” she commands in “Physical,” and as long as Future Nostalgia keeps playing, shutting down is the worst idea imaginable.