–Olivia Horn, Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal, Quality Control / Wolfpack Global / Motown / Capitol, It’s taken time for Lil Baby’s My Turn to grow into the beautiful, sprawling mess that it is. All rights reserved. Lead vocalist and songwriter Dana Margolin is incisive in her observations, and she often points them inward. The album reflects her newfound ease, all big skies, wide open spaces, and Americana twang. On Fantasize Your Ghost, the Chicago band further explores this craggy terrain, with detours into noisenik squalls, Krautrock grooves, and chamber-pop delicacy. (a totally deserving choice) I feel like if the current Pitchfork and their staff re-did that list that song would be at like #63 and instead #1 would be like Backstreet Boys or Mariah Carey or Tupac. Ignorance - The Weather Station. –Allison Hussey, It was an album that was rumored to be rap’s next opus before it even materialized. Page navigation. Bartees Strange - Live Forever. 88. “You girls mean business,” he bellows to two “fleet-footed guides from the underworld” on the swaggering “False Prophet.” “And I do too.” –Andy Cush, Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal, Mixing gritty rock with high drama, in arrangements packed with organ, guitar, and soaring tenor sax, Letter to You feels more like a classic-era E Street Band record than anything Bruce Springsteen has released in at least a decade. Rock, in its purest form, is predicated on a group of people gathered in a room. –Evan Minsker, Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify, Debut albums rarely come as worn-in and weathered as Country Westerns. Standout track “On My Own” is a huge, glittery anthem, and one of the most immediate songs in his catalog. Contributing Writer; Rap; January 17 2020 . This covers (nearly) all Pitchfork reviews in the year to date and is ranked by Pitchfork score then alphabetical on artist (first name). leader’s latest solo album, a collection of pure pop melodies smuggled into strident, feisty punk songs. 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. 全部 (50) 按添加顺序查看. His 2020 album of original compositions is a radically different proposition: a 43-minute ambient suite meant to counter fascism’s global spread with joy rather than despair. His 2020 solo album Coatcheck made a similar attempt to shed light on invisible labor, weaving field recordings captured during his job … On his first collection of original material in eight years, he sounds unusually attuned to the suggestive power of his craggy instrument, using small changes of inflection to convey wry self-mockery, roaring prowess, and a certain uneasy nostalgia. Songwriter and bandleader Meg Remy reckons with alienation and injustice, drawing on a palette of pop, rock, and experimental sounds to convey the anxiety of the era. It’s both the country album she was destined to make and an acknowledgment that self-acceptance is hard-won; Saint Cloud reckons with addiction, sobriety, imperfect romance, trauma, and trying to navigate it all. But the album isn’t just a grievance. Ungodly Hour is a collection of low-key tracks that demonstrated true mastery of their intricate harmonies over slinky, charismatic production. We’re left to sit alone and imagine what these songs should be doing. Share on Facebook; Share on Twitter; Open share drawer; The first posthumous album from Mac Miller plays like a compan From albums … One day after Pitchfork published their list of the top 100 songs of 2020, they've shared their list of the 50 best albums of the year. “I no be politician/Me no like no politics,” Burna insists—and that rings true. The Latest Juice December 31, 2020 December 31, 2020. Singer-songwriter Alex Stoitsiadis was supposed to be hollering his hooks over melodic post-hardcore guitars in roiling 250-cap clubs, and the scenes of heartbreak he described were supposed to be playing out for listeners in real life. The result is some of the finest songwriting of Swift’s career, vivid storytelling both personal and fictional (and somewhere in between), stuffed with more Easter eggs than a Marvel movie. Eventually, they were shared on Instagram by Gibbs himself, completing an utterly contemporary loop of art and life. Heaven flirts with familiar rock motifs as often as it subverts them, morphing into something unrecognizable. Pitchfork: The 50 Best Albums of 2020. Death and apocalypse lurk in every corner of Punisher—lightning flashes, sirens wail, a Giants fan gets killed at Dodger Stadium—and Bridgers shuffles through this ominous fog, still alive, still growing taller. –Amy Phillips, Historically, there are two trajectories from sweetie childhood star to flawed adult: the bumpy one full of high-profile foibles or the one where they wind up as robots. Prior to his death, he … All rights reserved. This year, it felt like a serenity prayer. –Jillian Mapes, © 2021 Condé Nast. The album is the first project between only Gibbs and The Alchemist, as it also marks the second time they have collaborated on a full … These instrumentals lend a “sense of comic relief,” Allison says, “like when you joke with your friend about your unhealthy habits.” In a year when hundreds of thousands of Americans perished, we needed friends desperately—someone to make us laugh, and someone to sit with us at shiva. The album is always enchanting and full of small surprises: the particularly cartoonish warble of a synth on “Sayonara,” the intimate binaural hums on the meandering “Marafon 15,” the burst of laughter answering the lure of a saxophone on the cosmos-traversing “Plans.” New details peek out on every listen, like elements of wonder waiting to be discovered. Sundry Rock Song Stock, either the second or third album under the Yves Jarvis name (it’s complicated), is also the project’s first set of 10 conventional-length tracks. 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. ), “Genres keep us in our boxes,” Bartees Strange sing-raps on “Mossblerd,” a song that sounds like it’s falling apart even as he’s putting it together. Kempf and Balla trade yearning, hiccupy vocals across riffs that reverberate like heat waves off asphalt, as McGrady thuds away through the humid air. 8 reviews. Righteous anger pointed at society’s rulers flows throughout RTJ4, which was released at the start of June amid nationwide protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd. “Anxiety… anxiety… post-graduate anxiety,” they chant on “A B- in This Economy,” a wry accounting of the stress and poverty of student life. In the summer of 2011, Pitchfork noted Bon Iver's self-titled release as "Best New Music", and later chose the release as the best album of 2011. On their debut Speed Kills, they are unreformable carjackers, turnstile jumpers, switchblade wielders, and speed addicts, who get locked up, get out a few years later, and get back to stealing stuff. Recording it over a few short weeks at the onset of the pandemic, Charli escaped isolation’s creative doldrums by opening up a feedback loop with her fans, sharing real-time updates and allowing them a hand in her process. –Noah Yoo, Touché Amoré crafted one of the year’s best punk records using unusual tools, like pedal steel guitar, and riffs that may seem more suited to post-rock. Pitchfork's Best Ambient Albums of 2020. The song is accompanied by a short story about a woman, three cats, and the titular bush has shared a new song titled “rosebush.” The largely … The New England trio led by singer/guitarist Elisa Ambrogio has slowed down and tightened up considerably as of late. Letter to You’s familiar sound dovetails elegantly with its subject matter, in which every present moment carries the full weight of the past. It is a testament to Dylan’s spectral presence as a singer, and the sympathy of his accompanists, that the uptempo tunes often seem as misty and elusive as the slow ones. Gordon’s howls are hell-bent and infatuated, with Tumor’s raspy pleas pushing them both closer to the edge of oblivion. Heaven flirts with familiar rock motifs as often as it subverts them, morphing into something unrecognizable. By now, Drakeo has been released from jail, making GTL a testament to resourcefulness that will hopefully remain an anomaly in his catalog. Rough and Rowdy Ways can be approximately divided into two types of song: the ballads, which nearly evaporate as you listen, and the more conventionally rocking blues-based numbers. Mary Lattimore - Silver Ladders. But the best albums of 2020 proved that incredible new music will always make their way to our ears, even in the toughest of times. Her songwriting may be more openly topical than usual, but her sound hasn’t changed much. His deep familiarity with each of those touchstones—he prefaced Live Forever with an EP of National covers—allows him to explode them from within and rethink not just how but if they speak for him. Amidst the neverending whirlwind of 2020, it was tempting to crawl into a cocoon of nostalgic favorites and never come out. KiCk i is her first record to prominently feature several guest singers, with Björk, Rosalía, SOPHIE, and Shygirl all present to witness her various metamorphoses. The Microphones: Microphones in 2020 … Never before has eating cereal sounded like such a riot. The resulting songs pierce her party girl persona with something more sentimental—and sometimes quotidian—but, true to form, she buoyed the vibe with sugar-rush hooks and blowout beats. For all of the record’s industrial squall and techno blast beats, it doesn’t just inspire destruction—it asks what you’ll rebuild from the rubble. As is … As she glissades through disco synths on “Love Again,” talkbox funk on “Levitating,” and electronic dance rhythms on “Hallucinate,” the British singer effortlessly fuses styles without resorting to forced formulas. For each tart complaint (“I hate your mom”) or fatalist disclosure (“I’ve been playing dead my whole life”) is a glimmering prophecy that one day things might be just fine, even if that day comes at the very end of civilization. It is. What are those screenshots I can't Folklore being 568th best album of 2020. Rough and Rowdy Ways is the 39th studio album by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released on June 19, 2020 by Columbia Records.It is Dylan's first album of original songs since his 2012 album Tempest, following three releases, one a triple album, that covered traditional pop standards.. With no stadiums to fill, Swift could take risks that would have previously seemed unimaginable in a discography calibrated to reach the cheap seats: work with the National’s Aaron Dessner as her principal collaborator, duet with Bon Iver, make tracks that sound like Low and the Sundays, drop an s-bomb within the first 20 seconds of the first song. Over a buzzsaw guitar, mononymous vocalist Summer screams through her disgust for entitled dudes with backward hats and hair gel. The punk quartet mocks capitalism and the patriarchy across this 13-minute self-titled release, each brief song its own fierce declaration of autonomy. On his first album, Live Forever, there’s a righteous defiance to the way the D.C.-via-Oklahoma artist scrambles 2000s indie rock (the intimacy of Bon Iver, the bombast of the Arcade Fire) with hip-hop cadences, emo intensity, and punk catharsis, as though he’s working it all out in real time. With Saint Cloud, Crutchfield’s fifth album as Waxahatchee, she climbs to solid ground, emerging from the storm self-assured. Indie Rock. –Stephen M. Deusner, Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Bandcamp |  Spotify | Tidal, Recorded in secret in quarantine and unleashed upon the world with less than a day’s warning, folklore was the first Taylor Swift album untethered from the traditional expectations of a blockbuster release. Somewhere in these melodic tantrums, drudgery becomes liberation. So she built one via her fourth album, how i’m feeling now. As is usually the case, you can predict a lot of this list if you read their reviews throughout the year, but it never entirely mirrors Best New Music. Not every song is so topical, but all are similarly burdened by history. These instrumentals lend a “sense of comic relief,” Allison says, “like when you joke with your friend about your unhealthy habits.” In a year when hundreds of thousands of Americans perished, we needed friends desperately—someone to make us laugh, and someone to sit with us at shiva. III is themselves. But there’s something undeniably hardcore about the energy, earnestness, and intensity with which Lament comes roaring out of your speakers. “I grew up in the shoes they told me I could fill, shoes that were not made for running up that hill/And I need to run up that hill, I need to run up that hill/I will, I will, I will, I will, I will,” she insists on another title track doubling as a renewed mission statement. Consider The Angel You Don’t Know proof-of-concept of an alt-afropop offshoot, destined for a global audience without sacrificing its cultural roots. Sunday classic album reviews are excluded, as are big artist retrospectives and mass reissues (I'm looking at you, Talking Heads, The Zombies, Iggy Pop, Dire Straits, Sade and … –Jeremy D. Larson, The second album of soulful Americana from North Carolina songwriter H.C. McEntire begins with an early morning prayer and ends with a slow-burn Led Zeppelin cover. Where on his debut album Sumney lingered on lack and absence, on græ he delivers effulgence and multiplicity with a shapeshifting swagger. Above is Metacritic's list of the 40 best-reviewed albums of 2020, ranked by Metascore. 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 dusty rooms where we’ve all been lurking inside ourselves. III. 50: Mary Lattimore – Silver Ladders 49: Yaeji – WHAT WE DREW 48: Chari XCX – how i'm feeling now 47: Lil Baby – My Turn 46: Burna Boy – Twice As Tall 45: Lyra Pramuk – Fountain 44: Freddie Gibbs / The Alchemist – Alfredo 43: Megan Thee Stallion – Good News 42: Kate NV – Room For The Moon 41: Rina Sawayama – SAWAYAMA 40: Arca – KiCK i 39: Dehd – Flower Of Devotion Wow! 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, incorporating the ‘90s Lilith rock of Sheryl Crow, the blue-skied strums of Wilco, and a groovy Lou Reed interpolation. One day after Pitchfork published their list of the top 100 songs of 2020, they've shared their list of the 50 best albums of the year. –Jillian Mapes, New Orleans electro-punks Special Interest see catharsis in demolition. Within these entrancing soundscapes, stray ruminations float to the surface. But the best albums of 2020 proved that incredible new music will always make their way to our ears, even in the toughest of times. –Allison P. Davis, The followup to Kelly Lee Owens’ breakthrough self-titled LP is rooted in pain and loss—the shedding of a toxic relationship, the death of her grandmother, and the decay of the environment. 关注. Music reviews, ratings, news and more. The album reflects her newfound ease, all big skies, wide open spaces, and Americana twang. –Marc Hogan, Duval Timothy is constantly dismantling to rebuild on Help, a gorgeous, crestfallen record about possession and healing. After steamrolling detractors over classic Biggie on withering opener “Shots Fired,” the reigning Hot Girl shifts her focus to more pressing concerns, namely flexing and sexing. Her fifth album’s title is a personification of the anthropocene, a theorized geological epoch in which civilization provokes its own destruction via climate crises. After 2018’s surprisingly zeitgeist-y Sparkle Hard and last year’s synthwave lark Groove Denied, Malkmus luxuriates in gorgeously recorded 12-string acoustic guitar, pedal steel, and non-Western instruments like the Afghani rabab and Nigerian udu—only to deadpan about online conspiracy nuts or stack up non-sequiturs about modern religion. By Olivia Ovenden. “I have a gift, I’ve been told, for seeing what’s there,” she sings on “The Eye,” and her perspective has never sounded so clear. As he smiles on “Young Man’s Game,” “I’ll be lying in my ocean of time.” –Cat Zhang, Ghanaian-American singer-songwriter-producer Amaarae assembles music that makes very little sense on paper. But rather than finding comfort in the anthropomorphic gesture, Grimes renders a bleak, if beautiful, portrait of nihilism. In summer 2018 he quit that role . The brilliance of Bartees’ debut is in how it carves out an expansive space within that loop. For all its gentleness, it is an album of deep resolve, unshakable in its commitment to the idea that a better world is possible. On their fourth album, Tumor is smoldering and romantic, expressing their appetite through squalling guitar solos, slinky basslines, and an ensemble of guest singers who match their lusty fervor beat for beat. Heaven to a Tortured Mind balances listeners on that knife point, declaring Tumor’s rock-star bona fides with roguish style. –Peyton Thomas, Soul Glo makes punk music with real stakes and a palpable sense of danger. Find all of those individual lists and 2020's consensus rankings inside. Getting to the precise meaning in English, she explained in an interview, required “some Korean etymology stuff”: “There are two different ways to say [‘Maladaptive’] in Korean. With this intimate hospice of a record, Allison gave us both. The most revelatory sound Haim make room for on Women in Music Pt. From the velvet-heavy chug of “Simulation” to the microdosed funk of “Shellfish Mademoiselle,” Róisín Machine knows what it means to disappear in the dry ice and come out feeling new. But even though she’s sick of the bullshit surrounding her, she doesn’t let it consume her being. –Simon Reynolds, Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal, The opening notes of Lyra Pramuk’s debut album, Fountain, are like a slow tracking shot through the gates of a musical Atlantis. –Chal Ravens, There was the ambient danger that El-P and Killer Mike would eventually begin to bore us with their roughneck brilliance—another bruising Run the Jewels album to add to the pile, is it? Original Source → Comments (8) Sort. As ever with late-period Dylan albums, death lurks in every corner: as a prompt for bloody, Frankenstein-ish experiments in “My Own Version of You,” a red river to be traversed in “Crossing the Rubicon,” a body who shares his bed in “I Contain Multitudes,” a nameless rival in “Black Rider.” The gravity of Dylan’s voice and the clarity of his vision allow him to address these wraiths as an equal, one with intimate knowledge of the darkness they inhabit. –Marc Hogan, Phoebe Bridgers will tweet about eating ass with one hand and crush your heart with the other. Now, Crutchfield gazes into the mirror and doesn’t shy away from the reflection. “Last Man Standing” describes a musician packing up his instrument alone onstage at the end of the night, a poignant metaphor for the twilight of a performer’s career. Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2020 wrap-up coverage here. Songs to Yeet at the Sun brings all these qualities into focus in the space of an EP, packing an album’s worth of twists into 12 searing minutes. “I feel it in my bones,” he proclaims. 83. Best of 2020: The Year's Best Albums; Best of 2020: Top Debut Albums; More articles » Highs and Lows. –Cat Zhang, The first half of græ, Moses Sumney’s tour de force sophomore album, came out just before lockdown; the second was released a few months later, after its audience had been humbled by the soft brutality of isolation, the brutal clarity of wandering our own inner landscapes day after day. The old world that Dogleg wrote about sucks in its own way, but it’s the world they deserve. But the Philadelphia hardcore band is hardly self-serious: they can be loose, irreverent, and downright funny. –Eric Torres, © 2021 Condé Nast. One minute, he is at peace, nearly succumbing to whatever comes next; the next, he is spoiling for a fight, ready to wrestle death to the mat one last time. The British-Japanese singer’s triumphant songs, which meld the fabulosity of Y2K-era Britney Spears with Korn-inspired nu-metal and campy stadium rock, invite sing-alongs and stylish TikTok choreography. Girls on the Absurdist Meme, Anti-Colonial History, and Soul Records That Inspired. Each element, shorn of everything extraneous, glows with significance. Somehow the record doesn’t suffer from the delay, if anything the often drumless production—heavy on somber piano melodies and lush samples—is timeless. Album centerpiece “For Your Pleasure” is a treatise on hedonism set to retrofuturist synthesizers and artificial handclaps; perhaps too frantic for the ’70s discotechques Shopping has conjured in the past, it would sound right at home in the cocaine ’80s. She buoys her bleak lyrics with the bright melodies and buzzing guitars that soundtracked Beavis and Butt-Head’s bickering on MTV in the ’90s. His nostalgia for reggaetón’s mixtape-era reaches its peak on “Safaera,” a crowning jewel of a record featuring elder statesmen Jowell & Randy and Ñengo Flow, with Bad Bunny’s subterranean voice bridging the past and present. –Jason King, Three songs into Haim’s sharpest album yet, Danielle is behind the wheel in her beloved Los Angeles with a Joni Mitchell classic on the stereo, “screaming every word to ‘Both Sides Now.’” How lost must one feel to shout “I really don’t know life at all” alone in the car first thing in the morning? Whether she’s fighting the urge to retreat back to bed or striving to permanently block a negative relationship, the 28-year-old singer and producer powers through with an impressively unbothered focus on growth amid the chaos. Music reviews, ratings, news and more. ), Listening to Mary Lattimore’s Silver Ladders feels like blinking awake on New Year’s Day: There’s some melancholy over what has passed mixed with buzzing wonder at what lies ahead. There is almost no reverb. No artist wants to be pigeonholed, but for Strange this resistance is crucial to the art he makes as a Black man working in a field most associated with white dudes. On Have We Met, the Vancouver-based Destroyer maestro slips into another velvet interior, only to find it's a sort of Black Lodge. Fourth album The Slow Rush pushes the approach even further, towards canons previously unexplored. (“Percy Miller, ‘bout it ‘bout it, ‘bout the dough/Macarena to the money after shows,” she sings on single “Fancy.”) And yet, maybe improbably, she synthesizes wide-ranging references into a genreless style that could very well be predictive of a post-Spotify moment.