Pitchfork + NME Release Their Top 50 (5 each) Albums of 2020
From albums years and years in the making to those recorded during quarantine-induced bursts of creativity https://t.co/FRHk6LrDnn
- Pitchfork (@pitchfork) December 8, 2020
5. Perfume Genius, Set My Heart on Fire Immediately
Click to view[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 dusty rooms where we’ve all been lurking inside ourselves.
4. Phoebe Bridgers, Punisher
[write-up]Phoebe Bridgers will tweet about eating ass with one hand and crush your heart with the other. The droll, phantom-like singer writes music for faithless burnouts who still want to believe: lost souls clinging to astrology and fucked-up intimacy, striving to get by in a brutal universe with no pre-ordained meaning. 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. The wintry decay that initially clouds the album disintegrates on “Garden Song,” where the arrangement blooms and burbles, thumping steadily, like a walk home in crisp evening air. 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.
3. Moses Sumney, græ
[write-up]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. If only we could make like Sumney and turn self-interrogation into a singular kind of art. Where on his debut album Sumney lingered on lack and absence, on græ he delivers effulgence and multiplicity with a shapeshifting swagger. Dream-sequence strings float atop dissonant shudders; Sumney’s voice transfigures mid-run like a stage trick, his falsetto a sudden flapping dove; he sings about being between polarities of desire and identity as if to lay claim to both at the same time. Twenty tracks is long enough for græ to form a private cosmology of ambivalence and assertion-a map of Planet Sumney as it lay in 2020, with its blush tones and icy eruptions and violent rocky swirls.
2. Waxahatchee, Saint Cloud
[write-up]From her early punk recordings alongside sister Allison to her quietly devastating solo albums, Katie Crutchfield is always steadfast in her truth. With Saint Cloud, Crutchfield’s fifth album as Waxahatchee, she climbs to solid ground, emerging from the storm self-assured. The album reflects her newfound ease, all big skies, wide open spaces, and Americana twang. 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. Now, Crutchfield gazes into the mirror and doesn’t shy away from the reflection. “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.
1. Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters
[write-up]Fifteen years ago, on the title track to Extraordinary Machine, Fiona Apple declared, “I still only travel by foot, and by foot, it’s a slow climb.” She worked her way up to the clear heights of Fetch the Bolt Cutters over the course of the last half-decade or so, largely at her L.A. home alongside trusted bandmates and friends and a small shelter’s worth of barking dogs. The result was her truest, wildest record to date-the kind of album that borders on literature in its ability to convey nuances of the human condition. Equal parts meticulous and haphazard, the self-directed songs pick up on the percussive thread of 2012’s The Idler Wheel… with elemental rhythms formed, in part, by handclaps, floorstomps, and furniture-banging. But the raw energy of Apple’s voice is the album’s life force, and there’s no mistaking the subjects of her missives-be it the men who refuse to recognize their abusive behavior; the women who, like Apple, were conditioned to compete with other women; the mean girls and those who called their bullshit; the users and the silencers; the people she fears will leave her. “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. Fetch the Bolt Cutters is the sound of someone freeing themself from a mental prison built by others but unknowingly reinforced by the self. Consider the load sufficiently lightened; on she climbs.
We've collated our writers' 'best of' lists and crunched the numbers in a big old music ranking machine. Here are 50 of the best albums of 2020: https://t.co/oJiD0TDUAc pic.twitter.com/Nuh9G9z3BX
- NME (@NME) December 11, 2020
42. SAULT, Untitled (Black Is)
[write-up]In a nutshell: A stirring protest album that accompanied America’s summer of racial unrest
Anonymous British collective SAULT made two standout albums this year: [‘Untitled (Black Is) and, ‘Untitled (Rise Is)’]. The former - more a stomp-the-streets soundtrack than its dance-the-beats successor - was the group’s arresting address on Black identity. Released on Juneteenth, it excoriated police brutality with spoken-word slams and stunning soul numbers. CK
Key track: ‘Wildfires’
NME said: “The collective hold their cards out of view and keep the details private. For them, the music, always, does the talking.”
35. Soccer Mommy, Color Theory
[write-up]In a nutshell: Potent emotions put to paper through melodic ‘90s rock
Stretching Sophie Allison’s world-crafting abilities, ‘Color Theory’ told tales of melancholia through three colour-themed sections of emotional catharsis: blue as an MTV-emo depression, yellow for the meandering low-fi sound of sickness and grey as a stark, alt-pop encapsulation of loss. All three came together with remarkable coherence - this was a concept record in the most stirring sense. JW
Key track: ‘Circle The Drain’
NME said: “Allison is a master at painting vivid pictures with lyrics, coupling earworm melodies and warm instrumentation with shattering words that pack an emotional punch.”
25. Laura Marling, Song For Our Daughter
[write-up]In a nutshell: England’s finest folk songwriter strikes a reflective note on a seventh album drenched in pathos
If 2017’s ‘Semper Femina’ cast a backwards glance at femininity, its title adapted from some deep Virgilian wisdom, ‘Song For Our Daughter’ evoked hope for a future as yet untold - and the fictional child who might navigate their way through it. Bright-eyed and bold, it might just be her best work yet. MN
Key track: ‘Song For Our Daughter’
NME said: “Across 10 air-tight tracks, meticulously crafted and elegantly delivered, it’s an absolute triumph.”
8. HAIM, Women In Music Pt. III
[write-up]In a nutshell: The LA group gets personal on their melancholy third album
Here was the soundtrack to a thousand LA sunsets (‘Summer Girl’), late-night anxiety dreams (‘I Know Alone’) and relationship breakdowns (‘Don’t Wanna’). The sisters’ humour and vulnerability was evident in the acerbic album title alone. Haim embarked on a slight detour from the classic rock-inspired pop they were known for; a calculated risk. Instead they combined gloomy electronica and sleek ‘90s-indebted R&B to create perhaps their most introspective and cohesive albums to date. It is in these experimental quirks that the nuance and evolution of Haim’s songwriting truly shines. SP
Key track: ‘Man From The Magazine’
NME said: “[Haim] have produced a record that’s experimental, soothing and vulnerable; it’s a thing of great beauty.”
7. Rina Sawayama, SAWAYAMA
[write-up]In a nutshell: Alt-pop don makes nu-metal cool again
This debut album was long anticipated: Rina Sawayama released her first tune in 2013 (the louche ‘Sleeping and Waking’) and hustled as an independent artist until signing to ultra-cool label Dirty Hit last year. The record arrived as a genre explosion. Poignant country-laced balled ‘Family’ was an emotional tribute to the queer community; the bouncing ‘Comme des Garçons (Like The Boys)’ referenced the ‘00s dance tunes that made her feel confident when she was younger; and on ‘STFU!’ Sawayama rode brash nu-metal to rail against racist micro-aggressions. The singular ‘SAWAYAMA’ was a musical gut-punch. HM
Key track: ‘STFU!’
NME said: “Drawing on every aspect of her identity, Sawayama creates an expansive musical account of her personal history, all bolstered by her impressive experimental song-writing techniques.”
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What was your album of the year, ONTD, and why was it Women In Music Pt. III?
