The Best Albums of 2020

Craig Jenkins Dec. 9, 2020

Stuck inside indefinitely, musicians did what

they do best: make art to help get us through
the day.
By

Best of 2020
The best entertainment of 2020, as chosen by Vulture’s critics. Click here to
see selections for every subject and more.

Photo-Illustration: Vulture and Courtesy of the label

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 It’s been a long and terrible year, and everyone is coming out of it with a
little less than what they came in with. In music, we lost legendary
artists and dedicated alt-weeklies and beloved nightlife venues and the
very ability to commune together at live shows. Yet, stuck inside
indefinitely, musicians did what they do best: make art to help get us
through the day, at a time when each day has felt more endless than the
one before it. Below, a list of the highlights in music, from a year in
which there were frankly too many to count, just when it looked like the
whole industry might shut down.

10. Roc Marciano, Mt. Marci

Hempstead, Long Island, producer and rhymer Roc Marciano makes
lurid action flicks in miniature, using compact story songs to concoct
elaborate and bloody drug-trafficking narratives. “These feel like scenes
written by Guy Ritchie,” he says on “Wicked Days,” a compelling cut
from November’s Mt. Marci, his ninth album in just ten years. Mt. Marci’s
really more of an Italian giallo film, obsessed with violence, color, and
excess, seedy and sexy. At the end of a flurry of powerful threats in the
Schoolboy Q collaboration “Covid Cough,” Roc finds himself “in the
pussy doing the Stanky Leg.” Work hard, play hard.

9. TIE: Lil Uzi Vert, Eternal Atake / LUV vs. the

World 2 and Gunna, Wunna
Eternal Atake, the long-awaited sophomore album from Philly rapper Lil
Uzi Vert, was one of the year’s best rap albums out the gate. In flawless
rhyme workouts like “POP” and emotional moments like “Bust Me” and
“Chrome Heart Tags,” Uzi proved he contained multitudes as a rapper
and as a writer. The deluxe edition, which came out a week after the
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 original Atake release in March, piled a whole new album on top of that:
Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World 2. Where Atake is mostly a solo affair, Lil Uzi
Vert vs. the World 2 showcases Uzi’s incredible chemistry with peers.
“Yessirskiii” features a shockingly animated 21 Savage; on “Strawberry
Peels,” Uzi, Gunna, and Young Thug show out. There are also batshit-
brilliant solo songs like “Moon Relate” and haughty swag raps like
“Come This Way.” The result is the sound of a rapper spitballing and
almost always hitting the mark.

The same is true of Atlanta rapper Gunna’s Wunna. The breakout star of
Young Thug’s YSL Records has a great ear for beats, cadences, and
melodies. His sophomore album is an effortless glide between short,
moody cuts, produced in large part by Tennessee trap maestro Wheezy.
The deluxe edition haphazardly dumps eight more into the mix and
jumbles the original sequencing without destroying the flow or
diminishing quality. It’s a trick a lot of anxious artists will try — and fail
— to repeat next year.

8. Thundercat, It Is What It Is
Thundercat is a trickster. The first thing that strikes you in songs like
“Them Changes” or “Hard Times” is the unique and beautiful chord
progression. Lean in and catch the lyrics and you realize he is often
using these gorgeous instrumentals to work out intense feelings of fear
and anxiety. The juxtaposition of playful music and much darker
messaging is the cornerstone of the Los Angeles singer–songwriter and
session player’s -catalogue — particularly on It Is What It Is, his fourth
album, which is full of heady love songs and peppered by moments like
“Black Qualls,” “Existential Dread,” and “Unrequited Love,” where he’s
coming to terms with feeling like the life he wants maybe isn’t quite the
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 life he has. The quest to get to a place of comfort is at the root of these
songs; his elegant, jazzy, psychedelic compositions wear this message
sweetly.

7. Chris Stapleton, Starting Over

On his first new album in three years, country superstar Chris Stapleton
cycles through life’s phases and stages, stressing out about turning 40 in
“When I’m With You,” celebrating lifelong companionship in “Joy of My
Life,” and memorializing the family dog in “Maggie’s Song.” In the
album’s more personal moments, there is the sense that, having made it
to the top of the mountain, he’s committed now to protecting and
appreciating the people and the places that he loves. Because Stapleton
is a songwriter’s songwriter, literally a graduate from the Nashville
songwriting circuit, these personal reflections are offset by intense story
songs about hard living and well-chosen covers. Holding Starting Over
together is the sense that we’re all now weathering changes we didn’t
plan on. Stapleton’s pained vocals and expressive guitar playing are
every bit as potent as his pen.

6. Mac Miller, Circles

Circles, the last piece (for now?) of Mac Miller’s increasingly
accomplished catalogue, is a daring creative left turn that answers some
questions about where the late Pittsburgh singer-songwriter, multi-
instrumentalist, and producer was headed musically before his death in
2018 as well as raising a few more. Mac’s growing taste for classic rock
bears fruit in the lush, inviting orchestral pop of the title track and
“Everybody,” his cover of a song by Arthur Lee of the Los Angeles psych-
rock outfit Love. His rap skills show up in the tight rhyme schemes of “I
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 Can See” and “Blue World.” Songs like “Complicated” and “Woods”
suggest that the disparate musical ideas he’d been batting around in the
years before his death — his dabbling in R&B on 2016’s The Divine
Feminine and disco and funk on 2018’s Swimming — were merely
waiting to be threaded together in a more concise body of work. Was this
a detour or the beginning of a bold new era? It hurts to have it end here,
but it’s comforting to see that he was approaching the heights of the
legendary songwriters he looked up to.

5. Phoebe Bridgers, Punisher

Los Angeles singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers writes winsome, quiet
songs that harken back to the tail end of second-wave emo, when artists
like Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes), David Bazan (Pedro the Lion), and Chris
Carrabba (Dashboard Confessional) built sturdy careers blurring the
lines between rock and folk, diary entries and song lyrics. Bridgers’s
sophomore solo album, Punisher, is a millennial answer to the classics
that shares their penchant for seeking profundity in the seemingly
mundane and understanding through oversharing. The title track
imagines getting to meet the late Elliott Smith and catastrophically
failing to play it cool; “Kyoto” is about how you can’t lose your problems
by changing time zones. The dark cloud following the protagonists of
Bridgers’s songs in spite of their attempts to change up routines and
scenery makes Punisher one of the year’s best and most relatable
depression albums.

4. The Weeknd, After Hours

The Weeknd’s career is a long tug of war between the thick, syrupy
sound of his mixtape trilogy and the sleek dance-pop he pursues in
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 singles like “Starboy” and “I Can’t Feel My Face.” The imbalance between
the hits and the deep cuts could throw an album like Starboy out of
whack, but on the 2018 EP My Dear Melancholy, Weeknd realized that
with the right mix of hip-hop and electronic producers, he could play
both sounds off each other within the confines of the same song. That
breakthrough is the foundation on which this year’s After Hours is built:
Longtime collaborators Illangelo and DaHeala stick around to keep
production layered and weird, while Max Martin and Oneohtrix Point
Never bring stark, icy synth textures. The mix brings the best out of the
singer, who shines through big ballads, ’80s New Wave exercises, dance-
floor killers, and trap bangers. This is the music Abel Tesfaye was born to
make.

3. Bob Dylan, Rough and Rowdy Ways

Bob Dylan spent the last decade touring extensively and fixating on the
music of the early-20th century, so much so that it seemed he had gone
the way of Michael McDonald and Rod Stewart — notable rock singers
whose 21st-century output focused more on heartwarming karaoke than
flexing their considerable skills as writers. Rough and Rowdy Ways,
Dylan’s first collection of original material in nearly eight years, tells
another story, zipping around tight spots in history and giving the
listener hope that we’ll make it through this one. Rowdy is a timely
rumination on death and doom and facing uncertainty bravely, the fruit
of all the wisdom the 79-year-old has picked up through his travels (and
his lifelong studies of world history and American music), as well as a
function of maintaining a well-trained backing band. The arrangements
are airy and delicate, grooves swaying like trees in a breeze — the better
to spotlight Dylan’s weathered voice and perspective, which was old
beyond its years in his 1960s and ’70s heyday and, this year, feels right
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 on time.

2. Adrianne Lenker, songs/instrumentals

When the early spread of COVID-19 cut touring short for Brooklyn indie
rock quartet Big Thief in the spring, lead singer Adrianne Lenker
retreated to a one-room cabin in western Massachusetts. She intended to
take a much-needed break from music after a recent breakup and six
years of juggling band engagements and solo projects. Instead, she found
inspiration in her rustic solitude and began to channel her feelings and
the wooded ambience into two new albums. songs is born out of both
pain and newfound repose, a batch of impossibly pretty acoustic
ruminations on passing darkness made all the more intimate by the
nature sounds that bleed into the mix: the pitter-patter of a light rain in
“come,” the chirping birds and shimmering wind chimes of “zombie girl.”
instrumentals, its companion album, retreats even further into
atmospherics, delivering two long guitar improvisations that harken back
to American primitive guitarists of the 1960s and ’70s such as Leo Kottke
and Robbie Basho, whereas songs takes after the darker, sadder wing of
folk-rock heroes such as Neil Young and Bob Dylan. Like magic, songs
and instrumentals feel both effortless and painstakingly thought through,
a little bit cast-off yet also very refined.

1. Fiona Apple, Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Fiona Apple labors at a sculptor’s pace, having crafted only five studio
albums since unveiling her debut, Tidal, in 1996. That amounts to a rate
of one, or maybe two, fully realized works per decade. There’s footage of
her testing out “I Want You to Love Me” — the stunning opener to Fetch
the Bolt Cutters, album No. 5 — at live shows as early as 2013. Recording
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 began in earnest in 2015. It would take time for Apple and her band to
realize that her raw songs about managing mental illness and navigating
stuffy, patriarchal social circles didn’t need a formal studio. Much of Bolt
Cutters was recorded in the singer’s Los Angeles home, which makes the
autobiographical elements of songs like “Shameika,” “Heavy Balloon,”
and the title track all the more personal; a particularly excited stretch of
music might get her friend’s dog to bark, and a random household item
might get repurposed as a percussion instrument. Apple’s classical
training and creative playing make this a tour de force. The further she
strays from the pop-oriented sound of Tidal, the more she comes into
focus as one of one. No one else would think to make this album. No one
else could.

Other 2020 Album Highlights

Throughout 2020, Craig Jenkins maintained a “Best Albums of the Year
(So Far)” list. Many of those selections appear above in his top 10 picks.
Below are the rest of the albums that stood out to Jenkins this year, in
alphabetical order:

Big Sean, Detroit 2

Big Sean was a punch-line rapper for so long that a lot of people started
to take him for a joke, but his art has gotten a little smarter and tighter
every year. Albums that had a few highlights slowly became albums full
of highlights. This summer’s Detroit 2, the sequel to the Motor City
rapper’s 2012 ode to his hometown, is the result of time spent improving
himself as a rapper and as a human being. His timing is better, and his
verses are more personal. He might give you a trap jam extolling the
virtues of Zen philosophy; he might tell a story about the heart condition
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 that almost took him out before he turned 20. Sean is far from perfect,
but Detroit 2 is about coming to peace with his strengths and limitations.
His next album will be even better.

Bill Fay, Countless Branches

British singer-songwriter Bill Fay wrote a chillingly great but criminally
underappreciated folk-rock concept album about the New Testament
apocalypse in 1971’s Time of the Last Persecution that summarily got him
dropped from his label, ushering in a long period of recording music he
didn’t release until a critical reappraisal happened in the 21st century,
thanks in part to famous admirers like Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy. Bill Fay is still
a force in his 70s. This year’s Countless Branches is a selection of brief but
breathtaking piano ballads and stark folk songs about appreciating small
joys and remembering forgotten people, feelings he knows too well as a
tremendous talent who waited 30 years for the rest of the world to catch
up with him.

Charli XCX, How I’m Feeling Now

Faced with an unexpected abundance of time at home as COVID-19
forced people into quarantine from L.A. to London, pop futurist Charli
XCX took matters into her own hands. How I’m Feeling Now is the first
major label studio album completely conceived in quarantine and an
open-arm embrace of the noisy, glitchy electronics of Charli’s pals in PC
Music and 100 gecs. It’s both sweet and abrasive, a little bit rosy and a
little bit thorny. When the other pop girls get here in a few years’ time, as
many glommed onto the sleek synthpop of her 2014 album True
Romance across the mid-2010s, remember who was first at bat.

Chloe x Halle, Ungodly Hour

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 As breakout stars of Beyoncé’s Parkwood Entertainment collective,
Atlanta sisters Chloe and Halle Bailey enjoy fantastic beats, videos, and
promotion the same way signees to artists’ imprints like John Legend
have always made the most of resources trickling down from talented
benefactors. Chloe x Halle deserve it; they’re great performers and solid
actresses, as anyone who listened to 2018’s The Kids Are Alright or
watches Grownish can attest. On the surface, this year’s Ungodly Hour is
a textbook “all grown up now” sophomore album from an act we met
when they were teenagers. But that tag undersells the effortless
smoothness of the album and the buoyancy of the grooves, which carry a
whiff of Yonce’s progressive, often operatic approach to soul and
otherwise evoke great forward-thinking groups through R&B history.

The Deftones, Ohms

Sacramento metal vets the Deftones march into each new decade with
batteries fully charged. 2000 was the year of White Pony, a crowning
achievement of the rap-rock era. 2010’s Diamond Eyes fused metal and
shoegaze sounds into an exquisite attack. Ohms repeats the trick with
bright and catchy hooks, but its guitars are thick and crunchy. Songs are
snaking, unpredictable beasts; a ripping math-metal riff might explode
into a perfect alt-rock chorus. A loud song might shock you by winding
down to a moment of unexpected quiet. Twenty-five years after their
1995 debut, Adrenaline, it seems this band is still finding new tricks.

Drive-By Truckers, The Unraveling

Georgia country-rockers the Drive-By Truckers are poets of American
disorder, from 2001’s Southern Rock Opera, which used the rise and fall
of Lynyrd Skynyrd in the ’70s as a window into a difficult time in the
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 history of the South, to 2016’s American Band, which spoke similarly to
modern ills. This year’s The Unraveling catches us four years later, still
trying to put the pieces back together. Scathing political commentary
from chief songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley is whittled to a
sharp point on the rock tunes and bolstered by emotive musicianship on
the folk and blues tunes. “Heroin Again” is a rock historian’s furious
realization that the bad drugs that killed the legends are back in
circulation. “Thoughts and Prayers” rages against the gun lobby, while
“Babies in Cages” presents the nightmare at the nation’s southern border
as a betrayal of our stated ideals. This band was born ready for this
moment in history.

Fleet Foxes, Shore

Seattle’s Fleet Foxes make gorgeous, rustic folk designed to lift the
listener up out of whatever place and time they’re settled in and drop
them off in a world of misty mountains and windy plains. Announced
and released abruptly at September’s autumn equinox, Shore, the fourth
Fleet Foxes album, is feel-good music for feel-bad times, from the sunny
opening invocation of “Wading in Waist-Deep Water” on through the
bustling rock and roll of “Can I Believe You,” all of it guided by singer-
songwriter and principal studio musician Robin Pecknold, whose lyrics
strike a delicate balance between poetry and mystery, and whose vast
skill set imbues each Fleet Foxes release with the awe-struck excitement
of a trip to a new country.

Flo Milli, Ho, Why Is You Here?

Alabama rapper Flo Milli grew up watching stars like Nicki Minaj on TV
and dreaming of a rap career of her own. The 20-year-old’s debut
mixtape, Ho, Why Is You Here?, is a strong start and a half-hour blast of
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 youthful exuberance and white-hot trash talk, from the role-reversed
love song “Weak,” which samples the SWV hit of the same name as Milli
runs through a list of emotional suitors nagging her for attention, to
“Scuse Me,” which sounds like a fight in a crowded club set to music. Ho,
Why’s gift is minimalism. Beats get by on sparse drum patterns and a
sliver of melody, and the flows are tight but never stuffy or showy.

Fontaines D.C., A Hero’s Death

Irish post-punk quintet Fontaines D.C.’s sophomore album A Hero’s
Death lifts its title from The Hostage, a play by Dublin author Brendan
Behan about an IRA unit’s plot to free a jailed compatriot by kidnapping
a British solider. Like Behan, Fontaines is trying to make the most out of
a sticky situation in songs like “I Was Not Born” and “I Don’t Belong,”
both rejections of the weight of others’ expectations, or “Televised Mind,”
which seems to poke fun at a world too glued to phone, TV, and
computer screens to feel anything. Fontaines’ sound is slippery, all catchy
grooves that reference ’70s punk, ’90s lad rock, aughts post-punk
revivalism, and modern indie-rock without ever coming across as
unoriginal.

Freddie Gibbs, Alfredo

Freddie Gibbs raps are hearty and sinewy, tough chunks of protein best
served alongside something light and hydrous. His best work links him
with producers that let his perfect timing play metronome, focusing on
luxurious melodies instead of crowding him with loud drums. Following
last year’s exquisite Bandana, his second team-up with West Coast beat
legend Madlib, Gibbs dropped Alfredo, a ten-song collaboration with
boom bap icon the Alchemist, king of quiet drums and elaborate sample
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 loops. Like the pasta dish on the cover art, Alfredo is a satisfying no-
brainer of a pairing; guest appearances from Rick Ross, Tyler, the
Creator, and members of Griselda Records add flavor without
overpowering the main ingredients.

Haim, Women in Music Pt. III

Haim’s sticky, anachronistic guitar-pop pulls inspiration from disparate
corners of rock and roll history and reassembles the pieces into new
structures that are referential but rarely unoriginal. The trio’s 2013
debut album Days Are Gone drew comparisons to pop-rock acts like
Fleetwood Mac and Pat Benatar; the 2017 followup Something to Tell
You brought more of the same. This summer’s new Women in Music, Pt.
III is a wistful batch of versatile tunes. “The Steps” imagines what
might’ve gone down if George Harrison had played slide on Sheryl
Crow’s roots-pop bangers, while “Up from a Dream” tries on the guttural
glam-rock grooves of T. Rex’s “Jeepster. “3 AM” dabbles in ‘90s R&B; “I
Know Alone” is a perfect indietronica throwback. With help from Rostam
Batmanglij and Ariel Rechtshaid, the Haim sisters have crafted the
breakthrough album they’ve been headed toward all along. Like Vampire
Weekend’s Father of the Bride, Women in Music, Pt. III lures you into a
world of prickly, intense feelings with big, carefree hooks.

Hayley Williams, Petals for Armor

Paramore vocalist Hayley Williams’s debut solo album Petals for Armor is
a break from the slick, tropical pop-rock the Tennessee band discovered
with 2013’s self-titled album and 2017’s After Laughter. Petals is, by
turns, brooding, quiet, sunny, and celebratory in its chronicle of the
singer-songwriter’s journey out of a bad headspace in the wake of the
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 end of her marriage. The range it displays shatters the listener’s sense of
what Hayley’s capable of, the same way Paramore did. Petals is an
adventurous gumbo piling funk, disco, indie rock, and easy listening
sounds into the same bowl, serving a surprise in every bite.

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Reunions

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit’s Reunions is an album about growing
pains and the many different strains of heartbreak you encounter along
the pathway to adulthood. From the jarring juxtaposition of childhood
innocence and family turmoil in “Dreamsicle” to the heartbreaking loss
of a friend to drug use detailed in “Only Children” to the father-daughter
powwow of “Letting You Go” and the relationship ups and downs of
“Running with Our Eyes Closed,” the Alabama singer-songwriter and
guitarist and his band explore life’s sharp turns and disorienting twists
through lush, emotive Americana tunes and tender folk-rock ballads.

Jay Electronica, A Written Testimony

Over a decade after the first promise of a Jay Electronica studio album, it
finally materialized, not with the big splash we envisioned a decade ago,
but with a suitably biblical early February announcement that the man
had holed up for 40 days and nights since December and finished his
long-awaited debut. A Written Testimony is the best-case scenario for a
work people have been waiting a decade to hear. The marquee artist’s
skills haven’t rusted since “Exhibit C” first called its shot. He’s aided by
Jay-Z, who appears in the same capacity Ghostface Killah did on
Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, as an elite lyricist who provides
support and occasionally steals the show. Much has been made of the
quality of Jay-Z’s raps here, for good reason. He’s back on the wise,
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 bemused, conceited bars that helped put his Beyoncé
collaboration Everything Is Love over the top, this time with a spiritual
twist. You don’t get him in philosopher mode without a push; Elec is the
rare rap scribe and mystic sharp enough to get the Roc Nation titan out
of his comfort zone.

Ka, Descendants of Cain

Like a real life hip-hop superhero, Brooklyn rapper Ka is a firefighter by
day and a talented rhymer and producer by night. He works wonders
with a dearth of sounds; every note and every word is charged with
purpose. Songs unfold like mythic poems. His last release,
2018’s Orpheus vs. the Sirens, was a concept album that drew parallels
between Greek mythology and New York City street life. This spring’s
surprise album Descendants of Cain uses minimalist beats and terse,
expressive lines to trace the roots of modern inner-city violence back to
the biblical story of Cain and Abel, asking why we always hurt the ones
closest to us.

KeiyaA, Forever, Ya Girl

KeiyaA is a singer and producer from Brooklyn via Chicago whose debut
album, Forever, Ya Girl, deals in deep introspection, abstract melodies,
and soulful grooves that split the difference between the fractious
sampling of modern independent rap and the syrupy instrumentation
and vocalization of neo-soul. The blend is versatile. On “Hvnli,” she soars
over lowly braying synths; her cover of Prince’s darkly peppy ’80s B-side
“Do Yourself a Favor” serves the breakup tune over soothing keys and
bass. There’s a homespun, personal feel thanks in part to the fact
that Forever, Ya Girl is in large part a solo effort, with KeiyaA writing,
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 singing, playing, and producing everything with a few assists from Bronx
rapper/producer MIKE. The album feels like a world unto itself where
the dominant sounds of this one don’t necessarily exist.

The Killers, Imploding the Mirage

The Killers broke through among the early aughts dance-rock wave and
the overarching post-punk revival, but the Las Vegas quartet always
seemed like a band out of time, particularly on records like 2006’s Sam’s
Town, which carried more than a hint of the bombast of Bruce
Springsteen. On Imploding the Mirage, the Killers’ sixth album, lead
singer Brandon Flowers & Co. stand strongly in their time-displaced
rock-and-roll excellence, penning tunes that pull from new wave, synth-
pop, and heartland rock alongside a list of esteemed guests that includes
former Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, the War on Drugs’
Adam Granduciel, pop and country hybridist k.d. lang, and indie folk
luminary Weyes Blood. Mirage is the strongest batch of Killers tunes in
many moons; it’s a delight to see the group’s nostalgic interests
buttressed by writing as consistently strong as the band’s sound is
stylish.

King Krule, Man Alive!

As King Krule, British singer-songwriter, producer, and guitarist Archy
Marshall makes songs about love and danger and the infinite possibilities
of cities, where it’s possible to walk down a street and find either death
or lifetime companionship and not know which until it meets you. Man
Alive!, the third Krule album, carries this duality in its title; it’s an
exclamation we use when we’re mortified and a word about Marshall
finding new joy in life as a father. The music lives along the same fault
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 line. There’s coarse punk rock and gritty sludge on one end and
weightless songs about drifting and flying on the other. Life, it seems to
say, is the time we spend between the gutter and the stars.

The Microphones, Microphones in 2020

Microphones in 2020, Seattle singer-songwriter and Mount
Eerie ringleader Phil Elverum’s first album under the moniker since the
2003 Microphones album called Mount Eerie — confusing, yes — is a
long, winding memoir taking the form of a single 45-minute song.
There’s a lot of ground to cover. Elverum is a Northwest indie-rock
legend who had a rough couple of years after his first wife and longtime
collaborator Geneviève Castrée succumbed to cancer, and he split with
his second wife, actress Michelle Williams, last spring. Like the recent
Eerie albums, Microphones in 2020 is honest to an almost unnerving
degree; like the Microphones classics, breezy acoustic passages are
punctuated by unexpected blasts of electric guitar. The constant is
Elverum’s plaintive vocal and diaristic lyrics about perseverance: “I will
never stop singing this song / It goes on forever / I started when I was a
kid, and I still want to hold it lightly.”

Run the Jewels, RTJ4

Run the Jewels is like if the Alien sequels kept getting slowly and
progressively better instead of going the other way around. The
Brooklyn/Atlanta duo’s quadrilogy of self-titled full lengths starts out
smart, grim, and ultraviolent and continues at each turn to get a little
purer in its expression of the original idea. RTJ4 opens to the same scene
as RTJs 1-3: America’s selling people a dream of prosperity 80 percent of
them can’t attain, and former Def Jux founder El-P and Dungeon Family
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 alum Killer Mike are here to protest the lie with chilly, post-genre, post-
generational boom bap. Love is the message; haters can snack on
grenades. Come for El and Mike’s advice for these divided times and stay
for 2 Chainz, Zack De La Rocha, Gangsta Boo, and Pharrell.

Sam Hunt, Southside

People treat country and hip-hop like water and sodium metal, a mixture
liable to reward your efforts to combine the two with a hot plume of fire
to the face. Really, they’re more like pretzels and chocolate, different
flavors that complement each other in the hands of the right auteur. Sam
Hunt is that guy. His debut album Montevallo, along with Lil Nas X’s “Old
Town Road,” is one of the high-water marks of the dalliance between
pop-country and rap music in the 2010s. This spring’s Southside raises
the stakes a little, introducing trap drums to “Let It Down” and “Hard to
Forget,” tightening up pure country foundations on “2016,” and blending
both sides beautifully on “Kinfolks,” “Young Once,” and “Drinking Too
Much.”

Soccer Mommy, Color Theory

On her brilliant second studio full-length as Soccer Mommy, singer-
songwriter Sophia Allison traverses stress and family illness, closely
capturing the bleak hollowness of depression through weaponized
slacker rock. Color Theory is both impossibly catchy and deceptively
downcast. “Bloodstream” and “Circle the Drain” are summery tunes
about the elusiveness of happiness and the knuckle-busting difficulty of
putting up a strong front in the face of adversity. At 22, Allison is sort of
like the alt-rock songbook made flesh. You hear shades of the neat,
autumnal sadness of early Death Cab for Cutie, the rawness of peak Lou
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 Barlow, and the fearless adventurousness of Blur, but even though the
touchstones can feel familiar, the writing is always original, personal,
and tuneful. This isn’t rock and roll revivalism; it’s proof the real thing
can never die.

Tame Impala, The Slow Rush

In the five years following 2015’s Currents, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker
became a festival headliner and a husband. This year’s The Slow
Rush imparts wisdom learned in both endeavors. The music retools
Tame’s kitchen-sink psych-rock as booming dance music, leaning
confidently into the sprightly step of Currents opener “Let It Happen”
without coming off like an artist trying to bottle lightning in trippy tracks
like “One More Year” and “Breathe Deep.” On “Instant Destiny” and “It
Might Be Time,” Parker speaks to aging gracefully and shacking up, to
knowing exactly when to duck out of the party and head home. It’s the
rare album about maturity that doesn’t make it sound like giving up, the
rare follow-up to a commercial breakthrough structured to bowl over
stadium crowds at no cost to what made the band a blast before the
masses came around.

Taylor Swift, folklore

In her pure pop phase, Taylor Swift made brash, cluttered songs that
seemed anxious to close the gap between hip-hop, R&B, dance music,
and mainstream pop, once daring to schedule Ed Sheeran and Future for
the same track and succeeding against everyone’s better judgment. But
busier tunes crowded her natural abilities as a melodicist and a writer of
biting lyrics. This summer’s surprise-released folklore strips away the
gloss and the chipper mood of last year’s Lover and, taking inspiration
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 from Swift’s ’90s alt-pop precursors, nods graciously to Hope Sandoval
and the Cranberries in its gossamer unpacking of bad times and moods.
A wealth of great music has been made during quarantine, but the
wistful, sighing sadness of folklore actually feels like it.

Teyana Taylor, The Album

Harlem singer-songwriter, dancer, mom, wife, and sometime reality TV
star Teyana Taylor’s 2018 album K.T.S.E. released in the overwhelming
rush of G.O.O.D. Music albums made during Kanye’s Wyoming sessions
and perhaps got overlooked in the fray, which is unfortunate, since it
telegraphed the current old school revivalism in new R&B, a trend Taylor
embraces on her excellent followup, matter-of-factly titled The
Album. The Album breathes in ways the Wyoming experiment’s
constrictive seven-song limit didn’t allow. It’s brimming with ideas,
melodies, guests, and familiar samples. “Lowkey” samples a Baduizm cut,
then summons Queen Erykah herself. “Boomin” invokes Blaque’s “808,”
calling Future and Missy Elliott in to bounce vocals off Taylor’s lead. The
Album invites and invokes the legends, and these introspective hooks
and verses are more than worth it.
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