Stranger Fiction’s 35 favourite albums of 2020
2020 has been a challenging year in much the same way that Will Smith and Martin Lawrence acted in the Challenging Boys film series. One of the things that makes challenging times like these easier is the music that gets you through. In that spirit, here are my 35 favourite albums from 2020.
Here’s a Spotify playlist with my favourite songs from the year.
1. Ichiko Aoba — Windswept Adan: Most songs in this album are just the ethereal voice of Aoba against the backdrop of a pad / strings plus one other analog instrument (usu. the guitar). Its song structures are also usually easy to define: a gentle stream-of-conscious meandering from a starting point to an end point. But this simplicity hides three deeper truths.
2. Kelly Lee Owens — Inner Song: For me, there’s two things Inner Song gets on point, leading it to ace the distractingly good test(TM) for good music in the Age Of Distraction. One is the textures of its instruments and how they evolve, the second is the answers it gives for the age-old question of popular music: how to write a good hook?
3. Yaeji — What We Drew 우리가 그려왔: Each short track is a hazy journey into the self. The percussions: diffuse kick-drums, muted snares, acid-drenched hi-hats. The voice: alternating between being used as an instrument (always a favourite) often feather-light and glitchy, and occasionally as percussive vocal track, alternating seamlessly between Korean and English in both these roles. The bass: shiting intelligently and without care.
4. The Soft Pink Truth - Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase: Does it pass the distractingly good test(TM)? In the Age Of Distraction, good music is music that refuses to just play in the background, and that’s a good thing. Does it force you to pay attention? This is a particularly important question, I’ve found, to ask of ambient music, which is a genre that’s built on the idea of ambience, and therefore particularly prone to being in the background and forgettable.
5. Waxahatchee — Saint Cloud: After a few listens, I'm happy to report this album is wonderful, and reminded biased old me of Summerteeth. It reminded me that I need to reconsider my country bias, at least up to the point of alt-country.
6. Run The Jewels — RTJ4: RTJ4, Run the Jewel’s fourth album, is a hip-hop album made for this particular moment in history, by two rappers who’ve been rapping about issues of race and police violence throughout their careers, including in their first three albums as Run The Jewels. It’s an evocative listen.
7. The Avalanches — We Will Always Love You: Featuring Vashti Bunyan, the Clash’s Mick Jones, the Smiths’ (and Modest Mouse’s) Johnny Marr, and others, We Will Always Love You, turns the dial down on hip-hop and turns the dial up on disco, funk, and dance-pop. Imagine midnight at a place with disco balls and tiled floors slippery with spilled cocktails and sweat.
8. Laura Marling — Song For Our Daughter: A gentle folk opus from one of the best to do gentle folk music in this decade. I often talk about the importance of beauty of simple music done well. Rarely has it been done better than in this album
9. Klô Pelgag — Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs: Just like the Klô Pelgag’s description of the island after which the album’s named, Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs is an album that’s replete with poignant imagery. Rémora nearly brought me to tears, À l'ombre des cyprès did too. There are countless profound moments scattered throughout the album.
10. Amaarae — THE ANGEL YOU DON’T KNOW: This album conjures images of airy dance spaces with great music, slow-motion montages of dancing and looking beautiful against a backdrop of out-of-focus string lights hanging from parapet walls: wooden roofs, salty sea breeze.
11. Thiago Nassif — Mente: There’s something really beautiful about the destruction of dichotomies. I think most great music straddles that thin line between avant-garde and pop. Great music is often at once both experimental and accessible. Both underground and mainstream.
12. Ichiko Aoba - "gift" at Sogetsu Hall (Live): The second Ichiko Aoba album on this list. This album is so beautiful it can sometimes feel overwhelming. This is 78 minutes of straight-out bliss mistakenly labeled an album. The thing that’s get me most about it is its simplicity: one woman playing an acoustic guitar and singing, that’s it.
13. Jyoti — Mama, You Can Bet!: This album feels so complete and all-encompassing, musically, emotionally, lyrically. There’s not a lot of jazz on this list, but this is some of the most evocative jazz I’ve heard in recent years.
14. Nicolas Jaar — Cenizas: Ambient music often struggles to capture the zeitgeist. It often does well to underscore what one might currently be experiencing, but rarely is an ambient album of the here and now, topical. Nicolas Jaar’s work is an exception, and this is part of the reason why I consider him the best among the current purveyors of electronic music.
15. The Strokes — The New Abnormal: The first Strokes album since their second album I’ve enjoyed as much as I did the first, despite always obediently giving each of them a spin once they come out. Their sound continues to evolve in an interesting direction.
16. Taylor Swift — evermore and folklore: Treating the two Taylor Swift releases as a single one. Her evolution from sentimental confessionalist to a teller of stories about other people with a certain emotional distance is highly unusual for her pre-2020 discography.
17. Rival Consoles — Articulation: Rival Consoles’ arrangements are particularly fresh, a consequence of an idiosyncratic method of composition he used for this album, involving pen and paper and graphical representations of different sections of each track. Some have alleged that these methods have robbed the music of its emotion, but I absolutely haven’t found that. The album is heady, not brainy. There’s plenty of emotional quality to the music
18. Nation of Language — Introduction, Presence: The eighties are a sound — synths, strong snare sounds, precise kicks, reverb-drenched deep male vocals, pronounced British accents. Multiple music acts from the Anglophone world have made a killing in the past couple of decades mimicking the sound, to the point where there’s very little new ground to break. The only way for a band to stand out in this crowded field is to be so good at what they do that it warrants attention. With Introduction, Presence, Nation of Language does just that.
19. Lianne La Havas — Lianne La Havas: This album is a heady mix of neo-soul and R&B. It toys with the formula enough to be truly idiosyncratic of this British singer-songwriter, while also being one of the most intensely listenable albums of the year.
20. Fontaines D.C. — A Hero's Death: A super-competent follow-up to one of post-punk’s best debut albums in years, Dogrel. This is amore polished record than Dogrel, and one that dishes out plenty of interesting lyrics and catchy hooks.
21. Gorillaz — Song Machine, Season One, Strange Timez: In 2020, an eight-episode TV-show type release just makes so much sense. It makes so much sense to release albums either wholly or partially as AV bundles like the Gorillaz have done. Or like the Microphones with their latest album, Microphones in 2020. What’s better is, Gorillaz seem perfectly poised to make the most of this melding of media, what with their very basis in being a combined audiovisual project all those many years ago.
22. Murthovic — Antariksha Sanchar: Transmissions in Space, Vol. 1: The two Antariksha Sanchar albums by Murthovic are splendid heady mix of electronic music and Carnatic classical music. Through collaborations with incredibly talented instrumentalists and producers, the album traverses through such a rich variety of sounds, while managing to create two coherent opuses of moody downtempo.
23. Clams Casino - Instrumental Relics: A new compilation of old favourites by vaporous hippity-hop producer behind the first albums of Lil B and A$AP Rocky. Nostalgia-filled listening session of smoky parties with old friends. Vibe-heavy instrumentals 👌👌👌
24. DJ Python — Mas Amable: From Oye Mi Canto through Daddy Yankee and Gasolina to one of the pre-pandemic world’s most infectious viruses, Despacito, every pub has played some version of reggaeton’s dembow beat for a not insignificant part of each of the previous couple of decades. While it’s true that the genre has never been a favourite of mine, it’s also true that I’ve never found something as inventive and attention-grabbing centered on the reggaeton beat as DJ Python’s music.
25. GoGo Penguin — GoGo Penguin: I think the album cover is among the most perfect I’ve seen for this sort of instrumental album. It matches perfectly the sort of image that forms in my mind when I’m listening to this particular set of instrumental musings by this English piano-and-upright-bass-kind-of-but-not-quite-jazz band.
26. Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs — Viscerals: This is a rough-around-the-edges desert rock / sludge metal hybrid that is exactly what the album title promises it would be: visceral.
27. Bully — SUGAREGG: Both sonically and lyrically, the album is fairly straightforward: SUGAREGG continues the rich tradition of solipsistic punk-inspired grungy garage rock shout-alongs pioneered by Nirvana, the OGs not only of grunge, but also of the subgenre of the emotional shout-along.
28. Aesop Rock — Spirit World Field Guide: I’d say Aesop Rock’s latest offering, Spirit World Field Guide, is more of exactly what you'd expect from him. Sometimes an artist perfects a sound and spends a few records just delivering that fine-tuned experience without straying too far from a time-tested formula.
29. Boof — Rebirth of Gerberdaisy: Straightforward world-travelled house music arranged with great dexterity and a certain degree of abandon.
30. KennyHoopla — how will i rest in peace if i’m buried by a highway?//: Some future version of 23-year-old KennyHoopla will become quite huge, likely in the short to medium term. I’m basing this off of how will i rest in peace if i’m buried by a highway?//, his really good post-punk inspired electro-rock EP.
31. Helena Deland — Someone New: Perhaps it's because my rabid love of music coincided with my discovery of post-punk, but I'm always blown away by simple evocative music
32. REASON — New Beginnings: Keepin hip-hop’s double standards in mind, this is a good hip-hop album. Personally, I can’t make it past track 5 of this album despite knowing it does the craft of hip-hop well. Make of this what you will. Oddly, this probably means I’m featuring an album that I myself will not be listening to much (or at all).
33. Seasonal Affected Beats — 2°: Is is cheating to include an EP on this list? Well I don’t think so.
34. Neil Cicierega — Mouth Dreams: Cicierega’s music is comical, dripping with references to (American) pop culture, and always surprising. In Times Like These (TM), it feels good to have a few laughs and listen to happy-happy music.
35. Akhil Srivatsan — my people are… (lol)
