Despite unexpected and disruptive circumstances in 2020, artists were able to create innovative and groundbreaking music. Here are 10 of the best albums from the past year.

     1. Fiona Apple – Fetch The Bolt Cutters

     Fiona Apple’s fifth album, ‘Fetch the Bolt Cutters,’  is unbound. A wild symphony of daily life and unyielding masterpiece. The LP follows the percussive thread of ‘The Idler Wheel is Wiser…’ of 2012, which features self-directed songs that pick up with elemental rhythms created, in part, by handclaps, floor stomps, and furniture-banging. ‘Fetch The Bolt Cutters’ receives the same treatment, with Apple recording the album both in and with her home in Venice Beach, banging on its walls and stomping on its floors. The raw energy of Apple’s voice is the life force of the album, and the subjects of her messages are not mistaken. Apple’s early music had too much to do with the grand betrayals of incompetent men and the patriarchal world, and represents what many of us go through. Apple has been writing music since the mid ‘90s, changing her style as well as the message of her music with each album. She’s a master at taking a theme and presenting it in a comprehensive musical fashion. “Fetch The Bolt Cutters” offers a look into an event that happens to most of us: the realization that life is not going to follow a straight line on the road towards fulfillment. Life spirals instead. The game is rigged, power corrupts, and in her words, “the world is bullsh*t.” Apple proves that art can reveal lies and created a musical masterpiece that is completely and unabashedly unique. In ‘Fetch the Bolt Cutters,’ Apple is releasing herself from a mental prison which was created by others and unwittingly strengthened by herself. 

     2. Phoebe Bridgers – Punisher 

     Phoebe Bridgers writes music for “faithless burnouts who still wish to believe and for times when things fall apart.” She describes her songwriting on her second album as candid, multi-dimensional, cunningly psychedelic, and full of heart. On “Garden Song,” where the arrangement blooms and burbles, thumping slowly like a stroll home in crisp night air, the wintry decay that initially clouds the album disintegrates. ‘Punisher’’ is just her second full-length set as a solo artist, but she has already formed a distinct worldview. Bridgers is the first to criticize allowing one emotion to overtake her, which is why she infuses a banal detail with songs like “Moon Song”. She deadpans, “Yeah, I guess the end is here,” in the two halves of “I Know the End” as she tethers the fear of leaving home to a dramatic representation of an actual apocalypse: lightning strikes, fire rises, and people weep.

     3. Perfume Genius – Set My Heart on Fire Immediately 

     Under the alias Perfume Genius, Mike Hadreas is singing about loneliness and disconnection, about how he feels unrecognizable while throwing open doors to the dusty rooms where we’ve all been lurking inside ourselves in ‘Set My Heart on Fire Immediately.’ The impact – made all the more fascinating by his agile vocal range – is sprawling and dynamic, and the texture of the record is complex with layers of silt and grit. Featuring violin beams and twinkling keys, “Leave” beautifully marries these two methods to create a complex and backlit tone. Directed in collaboration with the diligent work of producer Blake Mills and an expert musicians’ troupe, this three-dimensional, dust-blown world, which is cinematic in its grandeur and intimate in its inspection of the human form, is Hadreas’ best work to date.

     4. Yves Tumor – Heaven to a Tortured Mind

     The most recent album by Yves Tumor is a carnal rock record called ‘Heaven to a Troubled Soul.’ Traditional structures melt into long vamps, as in the tormented psychedelic ballad “Kerosene!”, for a gratifying and intense record as the artist moves to a plush and magisterial kind of rock music. After their transformation into a charismatic bandleader and howling vocalist on ‘Safe in the Hands of Love,’ Tumor’s next project was learning to be a rock star. The latest album blends Tumor’s roguish style with their rock star bona fides. In collaboration with singer-songwriter Diana Gordon, hell-bent and infatuated howls accompany Tumor on “Kerosene!”, bringing the them both closer to the brink of oblivion with Tumor’s raspy pleas. 

     5. Bad Bunny – YHLQMDLG

     Under the alias Bad Bunny, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio has long rode the Latin trap wave, crooning over beats made with 808 drums. ‘YHLQMDLG’ is a series of Puerto Rican party beats that pay tribute to the past and future of reggaeton. Ocasio stated, “It’s a party record made by a young star with nothing to prove.” The album plays like a mixtape for a San Juan marquesina, the underground garage parties alluded to by Bad Bunny on “Cuando Perriabas.” The highlights are abundant and diverse, as the early singles “Vete” and “Ignorantes” occupy the suave sadboi lane for which he is best known, while “Yo Perreo Sola” is a rock raw, stripped-down reggaeton beats evocative of the “Gasolina” era of the genre. The artist says believing in himself is the road to redemption, and with that, he can do whatever he wants, and pull it off with swagger. Atop a morose, Casiotoned version “Girl From Ipanema,” “Si Veo a Tu Mamá” builds a unique bossa nova melody. It might seem more suited for an elevator of a Florida nursing home than a club, but it is also firmly associated with the album’s ethos.

     6. Waxahatchee – Saint Cloud

     Spring came with Katie Crutchfield’s fifth solo release. All of the lilacs and creek beds, Memphis skylines and Manhattan subways became Saint Cloud. It’s the sound of a dear songwriter thawing out under the light. It’s made up of basic blues rhythms and nothing-fancy chords. The album never chugs or lurches into a rock groove and sounds like you’re in possession of a family heirloom. After getting sober in 2018, ‘Saint Cloud’ was the first album she recorded, an album that encapsulates the thrall of Americana and the country music of her youth in Birmingham, Alabama. Crutchfield says she lives inside a world that drapes over her like the sky-blue dress she wears on the cover of the album. With production contributions from Brad Cook, Bon Iver, and Hiss Golden Messenger, the record leaves listeners with a pleasantly warm and deft touch.

     7. Jessie Ware – What’s Your Pleasure?

     Jessie Ware describes her newest album ‘What’s Your Pleasure?’ as a celebration of her flourishing confidence. The strutting chorus of “Read My Lips” doubles down on the oral innuendo of the song with kissy sound effects. The “Ooh La La” rubberized bass jam is a riot of saucy ad libs and tooting car horns. The album has less soul-searching than Ware’s previous album ‘Glasshouse’, but zooms in on a lighter aspect of her personality. “Soul Control” offers a frothy, Jellybean-esque center with the lovely embellishment “We touch and it feels like: Woo!”

     8. Lil Uzi Vert – Eternal Atake

     Lil Uzi Vert has never rapped this well. His best album to date is ‘Eternal Atake’. It is a scope-defying hour-long epic that nobody else could make. The album consists of 18 songs about money, the luxury that money buys, the luxury that attracts girls, and the heartache that those girls bring about. His specifics, this time, are finer. Uzi doesn’t just compile a list of brands; he paints vivid scenes down to his Air Forces’ specificity or a sticker on his beanie. The artist knows the patterns of hip-hop, but spreads them to unimaginable areas. Otherworldly were the hopes and somehow Uzi met those standards. It was a high-stakes accomplishment, achieved with the Philly production group Working On Dying through an innovative link. With every spaced-out sample and essential, animated punchline, Lil Uzi Vert is in a league of his own with ‘Eternal Atake’.

     9. The Microphones – Microphones in 2020

     Jeff Elverum’s Mount Eerie has often addressed complicated trains of thought. On a celestial scale, his music seemed to do so, looking at the natural world for significance. He turned away from these wide-eyed impulses after the death of his wife, the multi-disciplinary artist Geneviève Castrée, in 2016. ‘Microphones in 2020’ is a 45-minute song touching on themes of art creation, self-mythologizing, and what it means to bear witness to one’s own life and transformations. His solid compositions of recent years recall the tragedy with a skeletal two-chord melody punctuated by bursts of analog noise, calling back to earlier experiments. He sings here, “If there have to be words, they could just be ‘now only’ and ‘there’s no end.” The song bears the weight of every experience he has had since, saying, “Every song I’ve ever sung is about the same thing: standing on the ground looking around, basically.” He continues, “When you’re younger every single thing vibrates with significance.”

      10. Moses Sumney – Grae

     The lyrics on ‘Grae’ are a withering send-up of toxic masculinity’s pointlessness. Similar to Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas, Sumney combines intellectual with carnal, eroticism with disgust. His voice is an instrument of pure perfection, a falsetto so stunning that with one syllable he might shatter a glass. On “Virile,” Sumney belts, “And I realize none of this matters ‘cause I will return to dust and matter.” Like a private-press 1970s new age vinyl remastered, the music video is a bold contrast with the formless abstraction of the song. From his album covers to the art direction of his videos, he manages every element of his craft and his music arrives “seemingly whole and untouched from a different universe.”