I’ve been doing these top ten lists for five years now, and the music lists are always the most consistent. By that, I’m not referring to the content of said lists. They usually differ in terms of the ratio of hip hop to not hip hop, and then you have to account for whatever weirdo thing I got into in any given year. Rather, when I say “consistent,” I’m talking about overall quality.

Some years, the movies are great, and sometimes they’re bad until the end of the year when the good shit starts coming out. TV’s usually great, but there were some years that I wasn’t as inspired by it because everything I loved was a returning series, and I always find it disheartening when new shows don’t succeed or don’t happen. Video games can have outright bad years and unbelievably great ones with little rhyme or reason.

Music, however, is always great no matter what.

But here’s the thing. Of all the industries put in peril by COVID that I write about, the music industry might be the one that’s in the most trouble. Sure, vinyl’s doing well, and there’s always Spotify, provided you know how to make that work well enough that you can rely on it for a living (or you’re incredibly famous and you don’t need to hustle that hard to get people to stream your music in the first place). But no live gigs means no tour money, and I can’t imagine how that’s hitting the artists, and that’s to say nothing for the venue owners or anyone else whose revenues have dried up.

Add on top of that the overall shitshow that was 2020, and yeah, it was important to me, and probably for a lot of other people, that music was good this year. And goddamn did 2020 deliver.

I don’t want to belabor the point. I listened to a lot of comforting stuff this year, most of which was very on brand if you know me. In other words, a lot of hip hop and a lot soul, and even most of the non hip hop and soul I listened to this year was hip hop and soul adjacent.

Long story short, I had a fantastic music year, and there’s two reasons I know how. The first reason is that the honorable mentions section is exceptionally lengthy this year. The second and more important of the two is that this list was an absolute monster to put together.

It’s easy to say fuck 2020. But at least it had a good soundtrack.

Runner-Up: The Koreatown Oddity, Little Dominiques Nosebleed

I’ve lived in Los Angeles since the end of 2014, and I’ve lived in Koreatown since the end of 2016.

All in all, I like Koreatown. It’s got a wide palette of restaurants that deliver, the place that cuts my hair moved within walking distance of my apartment, and Korean BBQ is always fun. More importantly though, it’s one of the few places in Los Angeles that resembles an actual city. Or the very least, it doesn’t just feel like sprawl. Businesses at street level. Apartments and offices above them. Trees that delineate what is street and what is sidewalk. Hell, we even got a few metro stops, a true rarity for Los Angeles as a whole. I can walk to whatever I need, including my mechanic and my grocery store. Another rarity for Los Angeles.

It gets even more strange when you consider the particulars of my specific neighborhood. Leave my apartment and exit my building. Walk right for a few blocks and you’ll find yourself on a typical major Los Angeles street. Beauty salons and hole-in-the-wall restaurants and massage parlors and stuff like that. Walk left for a few blocks and you’ll be in an incredibly wealthy neighborhood with houses easily in the seven figure range and above. This area’s not technically Koreatown, but you get my point.

There’ve been multiple shootings within walking distance of my apartment. But also within walking distance of my apartment is the Getty House, where the mayor of Los Angeles lives. Koreatown’s a weird place.

The point is this: Because Koreatown actually resembles a city, it stands out as a bit of an (*sigh*) oddity in Los Angeles. A major piece of the puzzle that doesn’t quite fit in with the whole. Even if The Koreatown Oddity’s name wasn’t The Koreatown Oddity, and he didn’t make a biographical album about growing up in Koreatown, I can imagine a reality where I’d be able to guess that he’s been here for much longer than I have.

Like Koreatown itself, The Koreatown Oddity stands out as a bit of an oddity in hip hop, be it mainstream rap or underground. (I don’t outline these, and I’m sticking with the “oddity” bit. I apologize.) He doesn’t quite fit. His rapping style’s a bit mercurial, as is his production. The narrative he weaves about the multiple car accidents he was in as a kid and the life he’s led since is at once incredibly specific and sprawling. It sounds like an underground rap album, but not so underground that you’ll want to roll your eyes at him. (If you listen to enough underground hip hop, you may know what I’m talking about.)

It can be the head-knocking backpacker indie rap album and it can be incredibly beautiful when it wants to be. It can be haunting, and it can be incredibly funny. You may want to try to classify it, but you can’t.

Also, it’s not on the main body of the list for dumb reasons we’ll get into in a second. You should listen to this album.

Favorite Songs: “Koreatown Oddity,” “Ginkabiloba,” “Lap of Luxury”

10. Denzel Curry & Kenny Beats, UNLOCKED

There are better albums that came out in 2020. There are also 2020 albums I personally liked more. (In my head, there’s a difference.) Besides Little Dominiques Nosebleed, there are a number of albums that should have this slot.

In fact, just for the hell of it, let’s list some of them!

The Avalanches, We Will Always Love You
Boldy James & Sterling Toles, Manger on McNichols
Gorillaz, Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez
Mourning [A] BLKstar, The Cycle
Pa Salieu, Send Them to Coventry
R.A.P. Ferreira, purple moonlight pages
Sault, Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise)

And there’s a few more. (Some of which we’ll be talking about later.) I spent more time with each of these albums, and some of them had much more of an emotional impact on me. purple moonlight pages and both the Sault albums were particularly brutal cuts for me.

But let’s go back a little bit. When the lockdowns were first announced, I was in the process of moving. I had a freakout the night they came down because I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to hire a moving crew. (I could.) On top of this, there’s the usual stress-filled fuckfest that is moving, the nightmare that was the political landscape in 2020, and having to wipe everything you own down with antibacterial wipes because you’re scared to death that you’re going to give your new roommate COVID. To put it lightly, it was not a fun time.

The move went well. Nobody got sick. After the internet was sorted out and all the addresses on all my accounts were changed and all the bullshit was washed away, finally, I got to sit down and listen to some music. The first album I listened to was UNLOCKED by Denzel Curry & Kenny Beats.

I was already a fan of both. Denzel starting with Imperial and Kenny for his work on Vince Staples’s FM!, an album that came damn close to making my list when it came out. (I was also a pretty big fan of Kenny’s Youtube series The Cave, something I miss gravely. Fucking COVID.)

There are some obvious knocks against UNLOCKED. Not that this really matters to me, but it’s definitely more of an EP than an album, with a length a little under twenty minutes. And to be honest, it’s not really an album that breaks the mold. It’s clearly influenced by a number of the sounds that have been prominent in the underground for years. Particularly, a lot of what has come from Stones Throw and a few other places.

That said, it’s bursting at the seams with energy, the production’s incredible, and Denzel delivers some of his best work to date. Listening to it was the first time I felt anywhere close to normal after the pandemic hit, and for that, I will be forever grateful to it and I love this album dearly.

This isn’t to say that I wouldn’t love it even if there weren’t the pandemic looming over all. I still would’ve. But it provided comfort and fun when I needed it the most, and it had to be on this list no matter what.

Favorite Songs: “Take_it_Back_v2,” “Pyro (leak 2019),” “So.Incredible.pkg”

9. Lianne La Havas, Lianne La Havas

I’ve been hunting for a reason to praise this album that makes me sound smart.

I had this idea that I was going to go after the state of a lot of R&B. Specifically, how R&B seems stuck in an endless loop of vibe-y tone deaf chillout music that’s meant to sound vaguely like Drake. Too much of it sounds like you can stick it in the background of as many kinds of social media posts as possible, and a lot of it is, above all else, really fucking boring.

However, I don’t feel like being a grumpy old man. And besides, I’m not above vibe-y tone deaf chillout music that’s meant to sound vaguely like Drake. After all, I spend a lot of time listening to it. I throw it out just as quickly, but I listen to it.

The truth is that in a year like 2020, I don’t need a good reason for liking anything when it comes to art. I just wanted to sound smart in this case because Lianne La Havas, someone I’ve been paying attention to since her great album Blood, deserves my best. However, the reason I love this album so much is really pretty simple.

I imagine that every top ten album list has something the writer returned to often when the news was getting too hectic or the absurdity of the times was getting too much to bear. For many people, I imagine it was vibe-y tone deaf chillout music that’s meant to sound vaguely like Drake. (Yet another reason not to go after it.) For some people I know, it was blissed-out acoustic folk. For others, it was emo revival or reggaeton or any number of sounds in between.

For me, it was Lianne La Havas.

I listened to this album all throughout the summer, I listened to it throughout the fall, and I’ve been listening throughout the winter. I’ll probably be listening to it well throughout 2021, and beyond that as well.

I wish I had a complex reason to give you as to what this album does for me. But I don’t. It’s soothing. Intoxicatingly so. Every minute of it.

Favorite Songs: “Bittersweet,” “Green Papaya,” “Courage”

8. Conway the Machine, From King to a GOD

I was particularly looking forward to working the album list this year. Of course, all these albums are great and music is great and many more music related nouns are great and great is great and yadda yadda yadda. But that’s not the exciting part. The exciting part is that it’s finally happened. I finally get to talk about a Griselda album on one of my top ten articles.

You see, this has been a long time coming for me. I first found out about Griselda back in 2015 when Big Ghost started tweeting about Hitler Wears Hermes III. I gave it a shot, and I’ve been on board ever since. It’s impossible to say if I’ve listened to every Griselda release. There are, by my count, a billion mixtapes, be it one off collaborations with relatively unknown producers or joint albums they’ve done with each other or releases only available from obscure European record labels and official debut releases and everything in between. But I can comfortably say that I’ve listened to the majority of them. In fact, I can probably count the ones I haven’t listened to on one hand.

Many of these releases are fantastic. There’s been a Griselda release in the honorable mentions of each list I’ve made, and some have come pretty damn close to making it. However, none have until now. Sometimes it’s simply because there were ten or eleven albums I liked more. A lot of the times, however, it’s because their releases lack a certain creative spark. Some like that the Griselda rappers keep it consistent. That they stay with their recognizable gritty sound and their recognizable hard-hitting flows and their recognizable criminal subject matter. I don’t.

Put it another way: Westside Gunn, Conway the Machine, and Benny the Butcher. One of them was going to release an album that could arguably be called a “classic.” (At least in terms of the loose way many a hip hop fan throws that word around.) In fact, all three will probably do so sooner rather than later. However, for years, in my head, I was wondering which one was going get there first. It was clear to me that it was only a matter of time before one of them was going to do it, and it could’ve been any of them. And it was also clear that whoever did it first would get there because they did something different.

Turns out it was Conway.

The sound is different, but not that different. The flow is also different, but Conway’s the one in the group that’s the most likely to switch it up anyway. It was the subject mater that changed.

Of course, there’s coke raps. Sweet sweet coke raps. But there’s also material that’s unusually personal and emotional. The struggles of living black in America and the memories of those who are now gone. Much like his ability to switch flows, Conway’s also gone to a more personal place a few times. But here, it’s different. It feels like the whole album, not just a song or a verse.

In truth, all three members put out list worthy work this year. But thanks to this album, I feel like I know Conway the most of all the Griselda now, and because of this, the standard’s higher now. And it was already incredibly high for Griselda.

Favorite Songs: “Fear of God,” “Seen Everything but Jesus,” “Forever Droppin Tears”

7. Rina Sawayama, SAWAYAMA

A lot of my 2020, music wise, was defined by pop. Energetic hyperpop, like Dorian Electra’s My Agenda or Charli XCX’s how i’m feeling now. Soulful retro pop, like Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia or Jessie Ware’s What’s Your Pleasure?. (For the record, the Jessie Ware album was the last one I cut.) There was Roísín Murphy’s Roísín Machine, Kali Uchis’s Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞, Carley Rae Jepson’s underrated Dedicated Side B. Danceable pop. Slow, moody pop. Pop, pop, pop. (Also, there’s another one a little later on. Specifically in the number one slot.)

So, of all the pop albums of 2020, why Rina Sawayama?

Well, first of all, back in the 2017 list, the only reason I didn’t include her EP RINA was because it was an EP. I still listen to RINA on a fairly regular basis, and every time “Ordinary Superstar” comes on, I feel like an idiot for not including it. (I also realize I think about top ten lists too much and I need a therapist to explain to me why I have to quantify all the art I love.)

Second of all, it’s a really fuckin’ great album.

Now, a little bit of a primer on Rina Sawayama. Think of all the music that was popular around the year 2000 and the years after. The hyper sugary boy/girl groups. The aggressive nu-metal and other assorted rap rock. The slow R&B ballads and the bubbglegum and the deep cuts you’ll only hear if you buy soundtracks. Take all these sounds, and channel them into modern day pop music.

But don’t just do that. Imagine you were channeling this sound, and you’ve been studying pop music for twenty years. You know why it works. You know why it worked then, you know why it works now, and you have the talent to pull it off.

This, in a nutshell, is Rina Sawayama.

As far as this album, it’s basically RINA, but more. And not just in length either. More exploration of sounds of the late ‘90s and early 2000s. (In this case, slow ballads, nu-metal, and Timbaland style R&B. I picked out some of those examples from above for a reason.) An expansion of the Janet Jackson style pop from RINA. More just… good.

There are albums I spent more time listening to this year. But SAWAYAMA was pretty damn high up there. Give me Rina and Clarence Clarity and I’ll be there every time.

Favorite Songs: “XS,” “Akasaka Sad”, “Paradisin’”

6. Run the Jewels, Run the Jewels 4

Last time Run the Jewels released an album, Trump just got elected, and we were all still reeling. If I recall correctly, it was released a few days early for free on their website, right on Christmas Eve. A Christmas fucking miracle, all to help us cope. Or at least that’s what I like to believe.

This time, protests were sparking all across the country after the police murdered George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and countless others. They released it a few days early, for free, all to help us cope. And I didn’t have to hope this time. They said so themselves.

“Fuck it, why wait. The world is infested with bullshit so here's something raw to listen to while you deal with it all. We hope it brings you some joy. Stay safe and hopeful out there and thank you for giving 2 friends the chance to be heard and do what they love. With sincere love and gratitude, Jaime + Mike”

The point is that Run the Jewels can wait four years to drop an album and still be right on time. And as much as I love Run the Jewels, and have ever since R.A.P. Music (assuming you think that counts), I can’t help but find that incredibly depressing. But I’m grateful they’re around.

So, In the interest of not belaboring the point, once again, here’s Killer Mike’s verse from “Walking in the Snow.”

“The way I see it, you're probably freest from the ages one to four
Around the age of five you're shipped away for your body to be stored
They promise education, but really they give you tests and scores
And they predicting prison population by who scoring the lowest
And usually the lowest scores the poorest and they look like me
And every day on the evening news, they feed you fear for free
And you so numb, you watch the cops choke out a man like me
Until my voice goes from a shriek to whisper, "I can't breathe"
And you sit there in the house on couch and watch it on TV
The most you give's a Twitter rant and call it a tragedy
But truly the travesty, you've been robbed of your empathy
Replaced it with apathy, I wish I could magically
Fast forward the future so then you can face it
And see how fucked up it'll be
I promise I'm honest
They coming for you the day after they comin' for me
I'm readin' Chomsky, I read Bukowski, I'm layin' low for a week
I said somethin' on behalf of my people and I popped up in Wikileaks
Thank God that I'm covered, the devil come smothered
And you know the evil don't sleep
Dick Gregory told me a couple of secrets before he laid down in his grave
All of us serve the same masters, all of us nothin' but slaves
Never forget in the story of Jesus, the hero, was killed by the state”

Also, from best to “worst” (they haven’t made a bad album so I should’ve found a different word): Run the Jewels 2, Run the Jewels 4, Run the Jewels, and Run the Jewels 3.

Favorite Songs: “Holy Calamafuck,” “Walking in the Snow,” “A Few Words for the Firing Squad (Radiation)”

5. Slauson Malone, Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Crater Speak)

Crater Speak, which is how we’ll be referring to it from now on because Slauson Malone loves coming up with names that seem designed to fuck with people like me who want to write about his work or recommend it to others, is, arguably, a remix album of his last release, A Quiet Farwell, 2016-2018.

It doesn’t present itself as such. The only hints you get are the album cover, which is A Quiet Farwell’s cover tattooed on a fan’s skin, some interpolations and samples from the previous album, and some references to the previous release in some of the track names.

But it’s the tattoo I want to focus on.

A Quiet Farwell’s cover is a drawing. A creation by a human being you can’t immediately see for an artist you can’t immediately see either, made to represent or sell a certain feeling of the album you’re about to listen to. You’d only know who made it if you bother to look at the credits. (It was made by Bolade Banjo.) The Crater Speak cover is a photo of the same image tattooed on flesh. You can’t see who made it and you can’t see Slauson. But you see an actual human being, even if only a small part of one.

To me, that’s the difference between this project and the last.

A Quiet Farwell is a glitchy sample heavy experiment. A statement on the world around Slauson and how it’s changing in front of him. Or at least that’s what I think his statement on the album on the Bandcamp page means. Crater Speak is about Slauson himself. Who he is and how he feels. Some of the samples are still there, but it’s much more grounded. It’s slower and richer, with a backing band and a more soulful sound. As a result, I feel like I know the man behind these works a lot better.

Like anything Slauson does, it’s a bit hard to explain. I know I’ve been vague. But all you need to know is that I found this album profoundly beautiful. And also that I’d recommend listening to it all as one piece as opposed to any individual song.

Favorite Songs: “Smile #6 (see page 198 and 158),” “My feet’s tired (see page 108),” “The Wake Pt. 3 & 2 (see page 87, 58, and 48)”

4. Klô Pelgag, Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs

Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs is an album I found in early July one day while screwing around on Rate Your Music. I was scrolling through the charts and something about the cover art and the name stopped me. I knew that notre dame means “our lady,” but that was the extent of my ability to translate. So assuming Klô was from France, I clicked on it and I did some digging.

Turns out, Klô’s from Quebec, and Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs means “Our Lady of Seven Sorrows,” a municipality about two hours north of Quebec City. I looked at some pictures of it on Google Images and Tripadvisor. To put it simply, it looks exceptionally gorgeous.

To put it in American terms, it reminds me a lot of Cap Cod. Or at least it has a similar aesthetic. The kind of area where temperate deciduous forests meet the ocean, straight out of an Edward Hopper painting, minus the occasional Americana. The only difference is that it appears to be a lot less populated than the image of Cape Cod I’ve probably put in your head. In fact, if you look at pictures of the area, very few of them have another living soul.

It’s a stunningly beautiful place. Yet given the apparent sparseness and its foreboding name, one wouldn’t be silly to think of the place as a little haunted. Not haunted in a literal way, mind you, but haunted in the sense that sometimes you encounter a place or an object with a lot of history attached to it, and you can’t quite shake that history off. A specific beauty only a certain kind of oldness can really possess.

Wikipedia informs me that Klô Pelgag is only a year older than me. Yet despite the synths and the chamber pop arrangements and all the elements that scream modernity, I can’t help but get a similar feeling when I listen to this album.

Most, if not all of the lyrics are sung in french, and as someone who cheated his way through french class all throughout middle and high school, there was only so much I could catch. I suppose there’s a good translation out there, but I didn’t really care about finding it because I was imagining that she was singing about the kinds of things you think about when you see pictures of Notre-Dame-des-Sept-Douleurs. Beauty and nature and love, but also sorrow and heartbreak and endings.

In other words, if you look at the place, then listen to the album, it just makes a certain kind of sense.

Favorite Songs: “J’aurai les cheveux longs,” “À l’ombre des cyprès,” “Où vas-tu quand tu dors?”

3. Backxwash, God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It

Everyone needed an album to soothe themselves in 2020. And everyone also needed something to help them scream out in anger. In 2020, we got two great examples. The first was Run the Jewels 4, and the other was God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It by Backxwash.

In Run the Jewels 4, the anger is expressed through sheer bravado. Two rappers who know they’re at the top of their game crashing through wall with a cloud of weed smoke, ready to punch each and every one of their enemies in the face. Confidence. Arrogance. Righteousness. Everything we’ve been coming to Run the Jewels for for years.

Backxwash, on the other hand, is a different story and a different sound.

Run the Jewels is an established brand known by a broad spectrum of people. Backxwash came to me, at least, out of nowhere. (Assuming you count Fantano dropping a high review for an artist you’ve never heard of out of nowhere as “out of nowhere.”) Run the Jewels communicates anger through machismo and braggadocio. Backxwash does it through metal, rock samples, and pure uncut despair. She is, after all, a black trans rapper living in North America.

I’ll never know what it means to be two of the three of those things, and if the listening experience of this album is any indication, I’d never be able to handle it.

Of course, there’s lot of righteous points to be made about the politics of this album. Though these points shouldn’t be political as everyone should be able to live the lives they feel like they were meant to live so long as they’re not harming anyone in the process, they are certainly there to be made, and I hope to god someone is out there making them. There’s also points to be made on religion and the arc of the album and so on and so forth.

But to me, it had a more visceral appeal that triumphed over everything else, including all things intellectual.

It’s been said a billion times. In fact, it’s been said so many times that I’m genuinely sick of hearing it. But I’ll say it again. 2020 was a nightmare the likes of which I never thought I’d ever have to see. Nobody did a better job of channeling the shear anguish of it than Backxwash.

Favorite Songs: “Black Magic,” “Into The Void,” “Redemption”

2. Blu & Exile, Miles

Though Below the Heavens came out in the summer of 2007, it sat in my iTunes library until my freshman year of college, which was in 2010. If there’s an MP3 equivalent of listening to something so many times that the tape begins to degrade, that’s what my friend and I did with Below the Heavens all freshman year long, and a good deal into sophomore year as well.

Exile then went on to produce a high number of songs and albums I listened to over the years. Blu, on the other hand, fell completely off my radar.

Well, that’s mostly true. I’ve acquired fuck knows how many Blu projects over the years. The Piece Talks, Johnson&Jonson, Her Favorite Colo(u)r, Jesus, York (I have it in my computer as NoYork!), and a few more. Other than a few guests verses and A Long Red Hot Los Angeles Summer Night, I’ve listened to none of them. Not even Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them, the second Blu & Exile album.

Let me assure you that it has nothing to do with quality. I’ve heard Blu spit a ton of verses, and rarely have I heard a bad bar, if at all. In fact, I wish I had a reason to give you as to why I didn’t listen these albums other than sometimes I make bad decisions.

Then Miles came out. “An hour and half!? Fuck that!” thought I as I threw it on the pile. Then every music reviewer I pay attention to lost their complete and total shit over it and I reluctantly gave it a listen.

Earlier in this list, I talked about albums that acted as a balm for the insanity of 2020. Your Lianne La Havases and your Rina Sawayamas and what have you. I also talked about albums that went in the opposite direction. The swagger of Run the Jewels and the fury and torment of Backxwash. Miles is, more or less, the perfect balance of the two.

It is, at once, an album of furious black righteousness. A sprawling expression of blackness not only in America, but all across the world. And yet, despite all the stories of trials and tribulations, it’s also an album of pure joy and hope. Not even qualified joy and hope either. Everlasting bliss that most music, let alone most hip hop, never really taps into.

And even if it wasn’t the hip hop album we needed the most in 2020, it’s still just a goddamn great album. Don’t worry about the length.

Favorite Songs: “Miles Davis,” “You Ain’t Never Been Blue,” “Roots of Blue,”

1. Amaarae, THE ANGEL YOU DON’T KNOW

It’ll be hard to talk about any work of art from 2020 without the rot that is 2020 itself all over it. Of course, this is unavoidable. We were, and still are, in the process of being collectively traumatized. However, I can’t help but feel like that’s a bit of a shame. A lot of what came from 2020 deserves more, especially the music that helped me get through it all. That’s especially true for THE ANGEL YOU DON’T KNOW.

On the surface, this album doesn’t scream “number one.” It doesn’t have the scope of Miles or the context or emotional purge of God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It or the retro bliss of SAWAYAMA. In reality, THE ANGEL YOU DON’T KNOW is a fairly straightforward African pop album. An African pop album with elements of southern hip hop and alternative R&B, but an African pop album nonetheless.

Actually, a side note before we go any further. I’ve failed to connect with African pop until this album. I tried Davido and a few others, but none of them hit me for one reason or another. But I knew it was only a matter of time before something would connect with me, and here it is. I need to find more African pop. Now.

Anyway, on top of the genre, there’s some obstacles that might bar many from enjoying this album as much as I do. Mainly, Amaarae’s vocals. Though her style of singing is more or less in vogue now, what with the rise of singers like Beabadoobee and a few others, her style of high pitched low impact singing may test many a listener who expects strong power vocals all the time. Personally, I think her voice is perfect for the music she makes. But that’s just me.

So why is this album number one, and why do I love it as much as I do, and why will I not stop listening to it anytime soon? Simple. Aesthetics. All the other albums on this list kept me in this world, and they told me how to cope with it. Amaarae brought me somewhere else.

It’s hard to describe that place. Really, all I have are vague metaphors. It’s the album experience of driving down a coastal highway with the top down and the sun setting in the distance. It’s an album of endless ecstasy and pleasure. Of boundless leisure. It’s thirty-six minutes where your problems melt away in a fog of indulgence. It’s music that plays while you blow cigar smoke out in slow motion.

Or maybe I just think all that stuff because this album is, above all else, an escape. Talk about things we needed in 2020.

Favorite Songs: “FANCY,” “FEEL A WAY,” “CÉLINE”

Honorable Mentions

Adrianne Lenker, songs
Against All Logic, 2017-2019
The Avalanches, We Will Always Love You
Benny the Butcher, Burden of Proof
Boldy James & Sterling Toles, Manger on McNichols
Carly Rae Jepsen, Dedicated Side B
Charli XCX, how i’m feeling now
Chicka, INDUSTRY GAMES
clipping., Visions of Bodies Being Burned
Dan Deacon, Mystic Familiar
Dorian Electra, My Agenda
Dua Lipa, Future Nostalgia
Fiona Apple, Fetch The Bolt Cutters
Fleet Foxes, Shore
Fontaines D.C., A Hero’s Death
Gorillaz, Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez
Haru Nemuri, LOVETHEISM
HMLTD, West of Eden
Ichiko Aoba, Windswept Adan
IDLES, Ultra Mono
illuminati hotties, FREE I.H: This Is Not The One You’ve Been Waiting For
Jeff Rosenstock, NO DREAM
Jessie Ware, What’s Your Pleasure?
Jockstrap, Wicked City
JPEGMAFIA, EP!
Ka, Descendants of Cain
Kali Uchis, Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞
Lazerbeak, Penelope
Lido Pimienta, Miss Colombia
Mac Miller, Circles
Megan Thee Stallion, Good News
The Microphones, Microphones in 2020
MIKE, weight of the world
Moses Sumney, græ
Mourning [A] BLKstar, The Cycle
Natalia Lafourcade, Un Canto por México, Vol. 1
Navy Blue, Àdá Irin
Navy Blue, Song of Sage: Post Panic!
Pa Salieu, Send Them To Coventry
Phoebe Bridgers, Punisher
Quelle Chris & Chris Keys, Innocent Country 2
R.A.P. Ferreira, purple moonlight pages
Roísín Murphy, Roísín Machine
Sault, Untitled (Black Is)
Sault, Untitled (Rise)
Skyzoo, Milestones
Tkay Maidza, Last Year Was Weird (Vol. 2)
Thundercat, It Is What It Is
Westside Gunn, Flygod is an Awesome God II
Westside Gunn, Pray for Paris
Yves Tumor, Heaven to a Tortured Mind

Will Listen To Someday

I think I got everything, but who knows.