My favorite albums of 2020

pop, indie, hip-hop, and Chromatica Oreos

Hello, friends. Here’s your first of three B-Side Collection entries for the week. First up: my favorite albums of 2020.

18. Dogleg - Melee

Punk rock couldn’t exist for me in 2020, for obvious reasons—this is maybe the least punk-informed end-of-year list I’ve ever assembled—but I played this Dogleg album enough times when it came out early this year that I think it deserves a mention. “Fox” speaks the same language as “Your Graduation,” albeit with some gravel in its vocal chords. “Kawasaki Backflip” manages to stand out in a year full of incredible album openers. I worry all the time that my passion for punk rock died with my early twenties, and I’m still not convinced that’s not the case, but there are traces of a sound here that remind me of the way the floor used to shake at the old Asbury Lanes.

17. Bartees Strange - Live Forever

Live Forever isn’t perfect. I listened to this album dozens of times in the first few weeks of its release, and now, as I look over the tracklist, I struggle to remember what a few of these songs in the back half sound like. I grew tired of The Will Yip Sound some time around 2016 and I think the world would be a better, more equitable place if at least one or two emo bands decided to ask someone else to illustrate their album artwork for once (both for the fact that they all look identical and because the illustrator in question has hitched his horse to the Pinegrove money train, which I think sucks). All of this is forgiven for the fact that I’ve had the chorus to “Boomer” stuck in my head since the first time I heard it. Warts and all, Live Forever is easily the most exciting debut of 2020, and I am certain that Bartees Strange’s next LP will be the big one.

16. 21 Savage & Metro Boomin - Savage Mode II

Savage Mode II isn’t what I expected it to be—I hoped for a spiritual successor to the dark, horror-flick-inspired sound that defined the first tape— but at the most crucial crossroads in both 21 Savage’s and Metro Boomin’s careers, it somehow delivers. For the first time since “Mask Off,” Metro sounds inspired, each beat immediately distinct from the one that came before it, but holding tight to a sonic palate that makes sense as a complete work. I really thought 21 Savage would take a J Cole-esque turn toward corny moralizing after the last album (which I liked, but definitely felt post-2014 Forest Hills Drive in a few ways that worried me), but he’s doing his thing here, proving that he can occupy a few lanes at once. I feel like the consensus turned away from this one almost immediately (and yeah that Drake verse is pretty indefensible) but I still come back to it fairly often.

15. Miley Cyrus - Plastic Hearts

I have always liked Miley Cyrus’ music despite the common criticism that she sometimes cares more about the costume she’s wearing than the songs she’s singing. I can’t defend the choices she’s made in the past—Bangerz clearly exploits Black culture to signal a “bad girl” heel-turn away from Disney, I tend think she was a bit more lucid during the “I’m a hippie now” Dead Pets era than she wanted us to think, and Malibu is just boring trash in a cowboy hat— but I also think that criticism misses full story. I think Miley is always telling herself that her new album is her real, genuine self. I don’t think she was happy at Disney and used Bangerz to re-reveal herself as a person who cared way more about getting fucked up and looking hot than she was ever allowed to let on; the album with Wayne Coyne was a re-tooling of that image that focused in on the getting fucked up part, the heart of it all.

The hope for Plastic Hearts was that this bar-rock album, informed largely by her live covers of songs by Pink Floyd, Blondie, and The Cranberries, would be the authentic Miley, free from costume, self-actualizing before us. It’s not quite that—it’s more like watching one of your friends randomly kill it at karaoke. But if Dead Pets served to re-tool the image set by Bangerz, Plastic Hearts sure makes me excited for what comes next.

14. Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemist - Alfredo

Freddie Gibbs is very good at rapping about selling cocaine, and Alfredo is yet another very good Freddie Gibbs album on the subject. There is nothing surprising here; if coke rap is your thing, you probably already like Alfredo. Here is a video of Gibbs freestyling on Power 106 while holding his son, who seems completely uninterested in his father’s raw display of talent happening just above his head.

13. Halsey - Manic

It’s kind of hard to believe that Manic came out this year—the period of January 1 2020-March 9, 2020 feels like a liminal dream space that can’t possibly exist as I remember it—but here’s one of my only pre-quarantine albums of the year.

Manic shows Halsey taking a stab at a pop-emo album, using the language of bands like The Wonder Years and The Story So Far to provide a proven avenue of emotional resonance for her sound. It works better than it should, and her usually-erratic voice is far more restrained here into melodies that grasp at the kind of heart-wrenching melodies those bands are capable of crafting at their best. “Ashely” opens the record with the type of soaring chorus that Taking Back Sunday perfected in 2001 (and I’d be remiss not to mention the completely misguided use of a Brand New sample on “Alanis’ Interlude,” which still gives me a bit of a stomachache). “929” concludes it with the pointed lyric-shouting made famous by skate-punk bands in the ‘90s.

I’ve spent a lot of my adulthood thinking about how the bands I liked in high school were really onto something, how that new wave of of pop-punk that rose with The Wonder Years and crashed sometime around Knuckle Puck was truly innovative in a way that proper alt-media outlets never acknowledged. To hear that sound again, translated several times through various eras and genres, and spit out again on Manic, makes me feel vindicated.

12. Jeff Rosenstock - NO DREAM

I’m gonna toss it to Chris Gethard, from the bio for Jeff Rosenstock’s WORRY. in 2016:

Jeff’s music, if you ask me, is for people who really and truly feel like they could change the world, if only they could muster up the strength to leave the fucking house. It’s for people who get into group situations and have every instinct inside their heads scream that the world is a fucked up and terrifying place and they should crumble up into a corner and wait to die, but who instead dance like idiots because what the fuck else is there to do? It’s music that makes me feel like maybe, just maybe, if I do things the right way I can help make the world a better place, while co-existing with the knowledge that I don’t fucking matter and there’s no reason not to give up, except maybe I shouldn’t because what if deep down people are actually beautiful, giving, and kind?

This analysis hits it square on the head. Jeff Rosenstock’s music proves that huge things come from small, unassuming places. It’s music that doesn’t just say, but illustrates, that a kick to the face can come from anywhere and hits twice as hard when it comes from left field.

NO DREAM veers closer to breezy, alt-rock, melody-focused Rosenstock, which happens to be my favorite Rosenstock lane. If WORRY. and POST- were the punk singer’s experiments in composing songs longer than two-minutes in length and concept-record writing, NO DREAM shows him applying those lessons in craft to the song and melody level. It’s like We Cool? through the lens of his subsequent concept records, and while I still think WORRY. is one of the greatest albums of the century so far and so clearly the peak of punk rock in the 2010s, NO DREAM is still top-tier Rosenstock.

11. Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters

To be honest, I haven’t read any major publication AOTY lists yet, but I’m fully assuming Fetch the Bolt Cutters will top nearly every one. How often does an album like this come around? I can’t think of a world-stopping album release like this, one so immediately doused in lavish critical acclaim, since Blonde, or Lemonade, or maybe even To Pimp A Butterfly. It’s in that conversation, and that much is clearly, immediately evident from the poem internal to “I Want You To Love Me,” as Apple looks you, the listener, in the eye and croons:

I move with the trees
In the breeze
I know that time is elastic
And I know when I go
All my particles disband and disperse
And I'll be back in the pulse
And I know none of this'll matter
In the long run
But I know a sound is still a sound
Around no-one
And while I'm in this body
I want somebody to want
And I want what I want
And I want
You
To love me
You.

This is once-in-a-lifetime work. This is literature. Furthermore, this is Literature.

10. Perfume Genius - Set My Heart On Fire Immediately

I’ve always liked Perfume Genius, but I think he finally arrived with this one. While Mike Hadreas’ wispy, ethereal voice floats through 2014’s Too Bright and 2017’s No Shape, Set My Heart On Fire Immediately injects some much-appreciated crunch and grit to the instrumental. This accomplishes two things: it shows through contrast just how magnificent Hadreas’ fragile, delicate voice is as he floats through “Jason” in falsetto, while simultaneously grounding these tracks in a full sonic range that distinguishes each song from the others. The glimpses at pop songwriting brilliance that showed up on No Shape take full form here, with Hadreas’ knack for ear worms developing fully into a cohesive album.

I usually don’t think too hard about my favorite songs of the year—I just don’t think about music that way—but if I did, “Jason” might top the list.

9. Dua Lipa - Future Nostalgia

It’s hard to remember how exciting Future Nostalgia was earlier this year, before “Don’t Start Now” and “Break My Heart” took over the radio and filled every second top 40 time not already taken up by “Blinding Lights” or one of a handful of Harry Styles songs. But I still remember pressing play, hearing Dua Lipa’s talk-singing “You want a timeless song, I wanna change the game / Like modern architecture, John Lautner coming your way” into that disco chorus and immediately knowing she nailed it.

There is an immense pressure on young pop stars to reinvent themselves entirely with each release. It’s what puts Taylor Swift, pop icon, in the woods for her indie album photoshoot. It explains Joanne, The Emancipation of MiMi, Blackout, and why Dedication was a let-down (sorry). Frankly, it’s a problem; the industry has trained its fans to expect that new = different, where evolution of a sound is a letdown and failure to completely re-author the self reads as lazy. I wonder if this Olivia Newton John-owing turn toward workout-disco was Dua Lipa’s idea, or if some man in charge of a label told her she had to find a winning aesthetic if she wanted to survive another album cycle. Regardless, it worked, and Future Nostalgia is the clear winner of the pop wars in 2020.

I haven’t listened to this one in a while, due largely to the fact that I think Chromatica outclasses it for my purposes, and because I’ve heard the two aforementioned radio smashes about 100 times too many each. Still, it’s still clearly an achievement, a memorable moment from early-COVID-era that defined what is, in all likelihood, the new biggest pop girl.

8. Soccer Mommy - Color Theory

Here’s the only other pre-COVID album on my list this year. Again, all of my memories of this record are shrouded by the haze of whatever happened to my brain when I realized it was already June and still stuck inside for the foreseeable future. I think I had to tape over February in my memory of this year, but my time with Color Theory shines through.

I never got around to spending much time with Soccer Mommy’s 2018 debut, Clean (I meant to get around to it after my month-long obsession with her dazzling sophomore record but some time around March, I suddenly had a lot of other shit to deal with) so maybe this isn’t unique to this album, but Color Theory reads as the winning combination of David Bazan and Julien Baker. Guitar tones dripping with post-processing effects loop while Sophia Allison sings as though she’s pushing out one long sentence, laying track as the train runs away. I love how each line of “royal screw up” starts halfway through a sentence, how Allison manages to make this square peg of a long thought fit through the round hole of a clean vocal melody.

7. Lady Gaga - Chromatica

I can’t think of a single album that deserved more than Chromatica. Lady Gaga’s choice to release a house-pop album—and, at that, a long-awaited return to dance music—in 2020 clearly didn’t work out the way she hoped it would. In a year with any sense of justice, Chromatica would have been the club banger of the summer season, a triumphant slice of evidence that Gaga is eternal.

Instead, I mostly listened to Chromatica at a reasonable volume through my car stereo, or in my headphones on a run down the boardwalk. Still, each song resonates, from the straightforward pop perfection that is “Rain on Me” (easily the best Ariana Grande song of the year) to the insane, lavish, theatricality of “Sine From Above,” in which Sir Elton John’s voice is laid bare over the album’s most ludicrously club-centric synthpop instrumental. I am desperate for the tour next year almost as much as I am anticipating Chromatica Oreos.

6. Illuminati Hotties - FREE IH: This Is Not The One You’ve Been Waiting For

You can probably most closely compare FREE IH to Drake’s 2015 mixtape If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, another short, fun, straight-forward album designed mostly for the purpose of legally exiting a recording contract before the real album comes. And much like IYRTITL moved culture in a way that Views mostly failed to, I’m certain that FREE IH will overshadow the album that Illuminati Hotties claim is The One We’ve Been Waiting For.

Only 23 minutes in length, FREE IH feels like it was written in a day, recorded in an hour, and put out on the internet before it could be second-guessed at all. Most of the songs here revolve around one line or a short melody-ette in the chorus, which then gets blown up into a full song, immaculately produced by Illuminati Hotties mastermind Sarah Tudzin. Take for instance standout track “Content//Bedtime,” which boils down to just a simple refrain over a kooky riff and a chant at the end: “T-E-E-E, V-E-E-E, double-you double-you dot illuminati hotties.” Does it mean anything? Probably not! But it is unbelievably catchy and feels snotty enough about, I don’t know, media saturation maybe, that it feels punk. Four minutes in length, “Content//Bedtime” is twice as long as anything else on FREE IH. The record is over by the time you can overthink it.

I wish every band would challenge themselves like Illuminati Hotties did here. So few emo bands take risks like this, let alone sound like they’re having fun doing it. Also, come on, please let someone else do your album cover! We’re tired of the same album cover over and over again!

5. The Chicks - Gaslighter

I’ve been looking forward to Gaslighter for literal years. I remember the first rumors of an Antonoff-produced Dixie Chicks reunion album in the fall of 2018, how brazenly bizarre that sounded at the time. At the time, I figured the producer behind both Bleachers and Melodrama could do no wrong, and figured eh, why not. But last year’s one-two of Lover and Norman Fucking Rockwell proved to me that Antonoff can do anything, and my excitement for his sound in collaboration with country music’s most controversial act grew.

I didn’t quite get a country album, though Gaslighter isn’t much of a pop record either. It’s somewhere in between, while still also avoiding categorization as a pop-country album. Instead, it’s something wholly new, the rare reunion record that adds to the band’s sound rather than feels like a cheap emulation (which is to say that I love Gaslighter for the same reason I love Sleater-Kinney’s No Cities To Love). While the hits are here—how did “Sleep at Night” miss radio entirely? The world may never know—the star of the show is “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” a sobering reflection on Natalie Maines’ decades-long marriage and the bitter divorce that led to the album’s creation. Maine’s voice manages to tread the perfect line between biting anger and forlorn sadness with just a dash of pure catharsis that cuts like a knife through my heart as she sings: “Strangest thing not havin' you here with me / Then I realized / That I prefer my own company / To yours anytime.”

While I’m here: there’s a lot of talk about all of the Grammy snubs this year. I have a newsletter on this very topic dropping this weekend. But! This one is the big one for me.

4. Taylor Swift - folklore (EDIT: and maybe the other new Taylor Swift album that comes out tonight, which I haven’t heard yet, but let’s be honest, probably not)

(lol at the fact that Taylor changed every single one of her thumbnails on youtube to a promotional image for the new single, you absolutely have to respect the hustle)

With last year’s stellar Lover, my 2019 album of the year, Taylor Swift proved she could rebound from the (please read this next word closely) relative miss that was reputation. That record claimed to be all about love, but really signaled her final step into the maturity she’d been signaling at since Red, with tracks that showed her mostly just relaxed, happy, unconcerned with her public image for the first time in her career.

It makes perfect sense then that the follow-up album finds Taylor doing what she has probably wanted to do for a long time: make an album free from the confines of pop radio, arena tours, and the several narratives that has surrounded her private life for years. All of the energy that at one point in Swift’s career went into double-entendres about Kanye West’s stage design instead go into well-crafted fiction, songs about young lovers walking the cobblestone streets in the East Village or meeting up at the mall. The masterpiece here is the trilogy of “cardigan,” “august,” and “betty,” which collectively tell three sides of the story of a teenage love triangle, each image of a high school dance in a gym and a sad ex-boyfriend showing up uninvited at a house party perfectly rendered. Taylor uses her strongest talents here to make something that is simultaneously new and familiar, as she steps into uncharted sonic territory while recalling the skillset that brought about her fame way back with Fearless.

UPDATE: According to Taylor Swift’s twitter account this morning, a “sister album” to folklore, titled evermore, drops tonight. I’m not going to push this list back just to listen to it, but here’s my prediction: like every other “sister” album in history (The 20/20 Experience Part 2, E-MO-TION Side B), it will be disappointing, and we’ll promptly chalk it up to a B-sides collection. I hesitate to call my shot here at the risk of egg on my face, but it features a track called “‘Tis The Damn Season,” so I feel like this is a safe bet at this point. You heard it here first!

3. Waxahatchee - Saint Cloud

At the start of every year, I feel like I have a pretty good sense for what my album of the year will be based on which artists I know are putting out music. Then, without fail, something I couldn’t have seen coming comes along and smacks me across the face. It happened with The Hotelier’s Home, Like Noplace is There in 2014, The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die’s Harmlessness in 2015, Bellows’ Fist & Palm in 2016, and Spanish Love Songs’ Schmaltz in 2018. This year, that album is Saint Cloud.

Katie Crutchfield sounds like a seasoned professional here. Like Joni Mitchell or Janis Joplin, her sense for space within the track is astounding, and her remarkable voice is the focal point. How many indie rock songs can claim to center their composition around their vocal melodies like “Fire” can? How did no one write a song as perfect, as immediately classic as “Hell” already? In fact, so many of the songs on Saint Cloud sound like standards, like songs your parents played in the car when you were a kid, songs that you don’t remember the name of but activate a part of your memory that you’ve long tucked away.

Even as a person who liked the Crutchfields’ music before 2020, Saint Cloud is undoubtedly the surprise of the year for me. Waxahatchee clearly deserves indie rock royalty, and if her next album even touches Saint Cloud in quality, she’ll certainly be ordained.

2. Phoebe Bridgers - Punisher

I wrote a full newsletter about Punisher, my most-played album of the year. I’ll just link it here. It’s extremely good.

1. Told Slant - Point the Flashlight and Walk

Last night, my dad called me. He wanted to tell me about a magazine article he had recently read that reminded him of me. He also asked how I’ve been holding up lately.

“Not too well,” I told him, trying to hide the truth a bit behind a faux sense of resolution. “But the end of the semester’s almost here, so you know. Just a few more days.”

“Well, you’re almost there,” he said. “The other day we took Scoutie for a walk in the woods, and the leaves were still up on the trees in the park. It was really gorgeous. So make sure you look around you. It’s not all bad.”

I rolled my eyes. I think, I look around myself all the time. It’s all bad. The world is bad and leaves won’t change that.

I always know my album of the year by the way its lyrics float around my head, how I turn them over and examine them as small truths that were written just for me. The lyric I can’t get out of my head lately is “No backpack on / you swing the front door open / your leather jacket on / with the angled zipper,” from Told Slant’s “No Backpack.” Before that, it was “And I like you, / crooked glasses leaning, / or when you clean them with your t-shirt, / ‘cause that’s like seeing you completely” from “Run Around The School." For weeks, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about these two songs. I repeat them over and over, like little prayers. Your leather jacket on, with the angled zipper. And I like you, crooked glasses leaning.

It’s less about the meaning and more the delivery that does it to me. Point the Flashlight and Walk is the rare album that cuts me open and looks inside me. It’s the kind of album that makes me feel young, discovering music for the first time again, in awe of the range of what was available to me on the internet, liking every new album more than the last one. I loved music more when I was younger and I organized my life around music, when every song I listened to defined me, made up the tiny pieces of my life, built a sculpture that looked like me. Now, at 25, I listen to songs I loved as a teenager and they don’t mean much to me. Most of the time, I feel like I’ve changed, grown older and less able to see music the way I used to. When an album like Point the Flashlight and Walk comes out, I find potential in myself again.

When my dad tells me that I need to appreciate the leaves more, that the world isn’t so bad, maybe he means that for him, the leaves on the trees, holding on for dear life in mid-December resemble the way the harp sounds in “Family Still,” or the gentle click of percussion that comes in about halfway through “Flashlight On.” It’s the way those sounds lull me into a sense that, yeah, maybe I’ll be okay. Maybe everything will.

Thanks for sticking with B-Side Collection through the fall of 2020. I’ll be releasing a few make-up newsletters each week for the next few weeks as I work to get caught up and back on schedule.