Soft rock’s poet laureate returned with one of his strongest sets … His lyrics are surrealism of the kind André Breton originally intended for the movement back in 1924, “an absolute reality, a super-reality”: bizarre imagery that nevertheless feels true to life, and in thrall to it. YOUR TOP 10. Not only have I been a Hip Hop fan for years, but I have also been part of the movement since the ’80s. Bob Boilen's Top 10 Albums Of 2020 : All Songs Considered Isolation and the disappearance of live music changed the All Songs Considered host's listening habits drastically in 2020. Top-ten albums. But when they sing together, delighted and free to be themselves, it sounds like some kind of healing.—RB, The first track on Fetch the Bolt Cutters is titled “I Want You To Love Me.” But Apple, it turns out, has ditched any desire for public approval. The Kerrang! On Gaslighter, the beloved trio of musicians returned with a vengeance. The peak is the ecstatic chaos of Flux Capacitor and its use of Rihanna at full tilt. (Yes, really.) Ranging from rock to rap to pop, here is the music that we couldn't stop listening to during a difficult year. For the most part, the Beyoncé proteges don’t rely too heavily on their voices, instead focusing on crafting a modern and cohesive brand of R&B that borrows from the best aspects of several eras of the genre. BBT Read more. So truthfully, if I were to pick a number one on my top 10 list that I was most excited about in the 2020 year, It would be the PJ Harvey reissues on vinyl. Here are the 50 best albums of a year unlike any we can remember. CVLT Nation’s Top 10 Albums of 2020 #10 THEY / LIVE Ablation I … The stakes become entirely her own. Making few references to the lockdown that brought about its existence, Folklore expands Swift’s focus from her personal relationships to imagined characters, widening the emotional and narrative range of her already considerable songwriting. The suburban iconography in her songs takes on a supernatural aura – going to the store “for nothing” while high on speed; being wasted on someone’s front lawn – and her keen sense of irony is undercut by the yearning to believe in something. “Let it drift and wash away,” he sings on Whole Life. Yet absolution prompts a tug of war, and the spectre of shame looms, although it’s now dressed in the rollicking chug of On the Floor, the poppiest Hadreas has ever sounded. CVLT Nation’s Top 10 HIP HOP Albums of 2020. Insider ranked the 20 best albums of 2020, weighing factors like critical acclaim, cultural impact, and listenability. This is clearest on “Delete Forever,” the closest she comes to a ballad, a sweet rock ‘n’ roll lullaby about addiction. It was bleak, touching on addiction and death, yet carried a sense of triumph. Top 10 Albums of the Year 2020. The best music of 2020. In collaboration with a supreme court of rap producers including The-Dream, the Alchemist, Hit-Boy and No ID (plus curveballs James Blake and Khruangbin), Jay’s production is astounding, with dial-scrolling samples from Vashti Bunyan, Robert Fripp and Brian Eno, John Williams’ Valley of the Dolls soundtrack and Louis Farrakhan. If you were forced to describe Rina Sawayama’s debut as succinctly as possible, you’d probably opt for a pop/R&B/nu-metal hybrid with a dose of stadium-rock bombast, which sounds like the most appalling generic fusion in musical history. A veteran of the American, British and Nigerian music industries, Savage has an innate understanding of how various strains of music from the Black diaspora fit together, so R&B, rap, Afrobeats, and global pop coalesce seamlessly on the record. And Crutchfield’s acceptance of the inevitable seems spookily prescient given that she made the album last year. The group’s music oscillates to all corners of Black culture’s past: from defiant breakbeats and spoken word to high-life guitar lines and mutated gospel. Transcendence rarely arrives in the superb songwriting of Punisher, a record spooked by Bridgers’ tremulous vocals and self-produced, celestial indie-rock hum. The concept of Chromatica was unusually light for her: a planet of kindness punks? Wähle hier deine Charts aus: Album-Charts. The UK's Top 100 biggest artist albums of the week is compiled by the Official Charts Company, based on sales of CDs, downloads, vinyl and weighted audio streams. Here are the best albums of the strangest year in recent times. We count down to number one, with entries from Soccer Mommy, Run The Jewels, HAIM and Moses Sumney. In contrast to that dreamlike haze was KeiyaA’s clarity of thought. Top 10 Best Selling Albums of 2020. BBT Read the full review. This album pinged from ecstatic Lenny Kravitz shredding (Kerosene!) on December 01, 2020, 10:30am. 10. Its plush disco setting evoked the era’s velvet, feathers and static-crackled polyester – cinders at the drop of a lit Vogue. The album surged forth and pulled back, often within the same song. Stephen Bruner’s fourth album caught some flak for lacking the finesse of his earlier work: spattered with sub-two-minute ideas that seemed to constrict and slacken his six-stringed bass excursions; his louche falsetto barely concealing his existential anxiety and fear of loss. Copy link. by Drew Howard . LS Read the full review. A voracious hunger seethes through Murphy’s most club-facing record. The 50 Best Albums of 2020: Staff Picks. #AreYouKiffing 00:48 Samthing Soweto - Lotto (f/ Mlindo The Vocalist, DJ Maphorisa & Kabza De Small) 03:51 Major League & Focalistic - … Buy it on vinyl. BBT Read the full review. It … In the former camp was Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, flying essentially solo on the group’s fourth album. Beatrice Dillon is another, whose sense of rhythm is so trim, balletic and playful. This was the biggest and best statement yet from the sort of irreverent, box-resistant talent that makes pop culture truly pop. Yet this is not weary resignation: for an artist who has been in constant metamorphosis, such acceptance feels revelatory. (The album’s title is a knowing wink at gender relations and politics.) Bob Boilen's top 10 albums of 2020. Humanity, for example, is “a room of pit ponies / Drowning forever in a sea of love”. The beats feel a part with classic hip-hop, but churn with cyberpunk heaviness. Photo illustration: Courtesy of the artists / Renee Klahr / NPR. But Grande’s horniness has been part of her artistic identity for years – on Positions, it offered a safe retreat from headlines about heartbreak and tragedy. She also shows off an alluring chemistry with an array of artists, from Sam Smith to Davido to Naira Marley. Left alone by a departed friend or lover (“I wish you’d’ve taken me with you wherever you went”) on the funny, phantasmagoric My Own Version of You, a truculent nursing home inmate cobbles together a companion like Frankenstein. Offizielle Album Top 100. Clyde Shelton - Spending Spirit 9. Rapper Daveed Diggs is best known for playing Jefferson and Lafayette in Hamilton, surveying the violent chaos at the outset of the US – here, he seems to survey the same thing at its end. 2020. It should be underlined that the sororal US trio’s first two albums, Days Are Gone (2013) and Something to Tell You (2017) are very good: slick without smoothing too much over. In the brand new issue of Metal Hammer, we run down the Top 50 metal albums of 2020 as voted for by the magazine’s staff and writers. Music reviews, ratings, news and more. He even eases off down to the blues joint for a couple of classic 12-bar stomps, though at a geriatric pace. Every live performance that the sister act Chloe x Halle delivered this summer was wholly unique, but the source material—songs from their album Ungodly Hour—was uniformly strong. Luckily during these turbulent times some exceptional music has been made. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. There’s not much between the 1975’s Matty Healy and the creations of Naoise Dolan and Sally Rooney: across the band’s fourth album, Healy is acutely aware of his flaws, satirising and shrugging at his ego, his horniness, his political flakiness – and, yes, his overwhelming self-awareness. Feel free to share the image below wherever you want, and if you're feeling generous, donations would be greatly appreciated! Now on his fourth album, Perfume Genius has always nodded at the pain of self-discovery in his music, mining identity for art. Top 10 Nigerian albums in 2020. BBT Read the full review. "Folkore" by Taylor Swift took the top spot. To choose a single year, click the year (e.g. The freedom she’s unlocked is potent—as is her rage, targeted here at the people and structures that made her life as a celebrity untenable and her experience of womanhood punishing. The title of Charli XCX’s lockdown album might be read as business as usual: she is, after all, our most hyper-present and reactive pop star, one obsessed with stimulation. Lanre Bakare Read more. Top 50 Albums of 2020 These are the records we leaned on during what's been the strangest year in our lifetimes . The result is wistful, romantic and adorned with entrancing melodies. Moreover, as she served up dispatches from a fantasy dancefloor, her gasped vocals suggested how a subtle shift in touch or movement might ignite suggestion into full-blown ecstasy: “We touch and it feels like woo!” she trilled on Soul Control. by CoS Staff. The Midnight - Monsters 4. 2020s. LS Read the full review. LS Read the full review. El-P fills his lyrics with funny Burroughsian grot and non sequiturs that somehow make perfect sense, while Killer Mike dispenses scorn like ticker tape on some of his most proficient bars yet. CVLT Nation’s Top 10 DEATH METAL Albums of 2020. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our. Another album I would put in my top 10 that I don’t think is appropriate for the More Fuzz list, is Neil Young’s Homegrown album. His take on pop is ethereal but grounded, whether in the gritty pseudo-punk of “Describe” or haunting synth twangs of “Jason.” He even veers into glam rock, as on the operatic “Nothing At All,” burnishing its intensity with whisper-light vocals. Twelve weeks on from one classic Sault album, Untitled (Black Is), came another, winnowing classic Black musical forms into one another: psychedelic soul, Afrobeat, electro-funk, performance poetry, trip-hop, jazz and more. These artists brought in major sales and even more streams in 2020. They’re all the more beautiful for their complexity. This list is drawn from votes by Guardian music critics – each critic votes for their top 20 albums, with points allocated for each placing, and those points tallied to create this order. The music sounds like escapism; KeiyaA’s lyrical philosophy lays out a path by which one might truly escape. Guest stars from across the Black Atlantic – Skepta and Ella Mai from the UK, HER from the US, Damian Marley and Projexx from Jamaica – create the sense of a diasporic dialogue, where reggae, dancehall, rap and Afro-swing seamlessly and sensually intertwine.