The 2020 end of year music lists thread

just chiming in to say that the slum of legs album is straight fire! I barely listen to indie(i mean 'indie' in the british broadest possible way) any more probably because it used to be p much all i ever listened to alongside hip hop. Now all I mostly listen to is kpop and whatever paolo posts on the grime thread, but listened to slum of legs and it was absolutely joyous. only complaint would be that it took me 45 mins to get past 'RUTHE14ME' cos i had to keep playing it over and over. Probably haven't so wholly enjoyed an album in this sorta genre since los campesinos.

sometimes wonder if people outside the emo thread regulars here would love the touché amoré record, feel like it really earns its placement on the stereogum list

feeling bad that this is the third year straight i haven't been tapped for pfork eoy blurbs but i certainly voted, god help us all

man not to be a bitch but both my albums this year got album of the week on steregum and there hasn't been 50 weeks in this year yet how is neither album in the top 50 albums is this because i said ur new website is hard to read im sorry my bad

— katie dey (@katie_dey) December 1, 2020

it's ok im grateful im grateful . shoutout phoebe bidges

— katie dey (@katie_dey) December 1, 2020

Brad, they need other people to say some Philadelphia band's record is "a beacon of connection in a year marked by isolation"

Here’s a snapshot (Dec. 1) of RYM’s top 50 albums of 2020:

1. The Microphones – Microphones in 2020
2. clipping. – Visions of Bodies Being Burned
3. Fiona Apple – Fetch the Bolt Cutters
4. Jessie Ware – What’s Your Pleasure?
5. Run the Jewels – RTJ4
6. Oranssi Pazuzu – Mestarin kynsi
7. Charli XCX – How I’m Feeling Now
8. Ulcerate – Stare Into Death and Be Still
9. Nobuo Uematsu / Masashi Hamauzu / Mitsuto Suzuki – Final Fantasy VII Remake Original Soundtrack
10. Paysage d’Hiver – Im Wald
11. Natalia Lafourcade – Un canto por México Vol. 1
12. Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemist – Alfredo
13. Phoebe Bridgers – Punisher
14. Adrianne Lenker – Songs
15. R.A.P. Ferreira – Purple Moonlight Pages
16. Aesop Rock – Spirit World Field Guide
17. Lianne La Havas – Lianne La Havas
18. Fleet Foxes – Shore
19. Mac Miller – Circles
20. Neptunian Maximalism – Éons
21. Yves Tumor – Heaven to a Tortured Mind
22. Jeff Rosenstock – NO DREAM
23. Protomartyr – Ultimate Success Today
24. Kaatayra – Toda história pela frente
25. Blu & Exile – Miles
26. The Strokes – The New Abnormal
27. Akhlys – Melinoë
28. Chuck Salamone & Mason Lindroth – Hylics 2 OST
29. Perfume Genius – Set My Heart on Fire Immediately
30. Kevin & the Bikes – Ironic Songs
31. Deftones – Ohms
32. Eternal Champion – Ravening Iron
33. Of Feather and Bone – Sulfuric Disintegration
34. Róisín Murphy – Róisín Machine
35. Against All Logic – 2017 - 2019
36. Boldy James & Sterling Toles – Manger on McNichols
37. Mick Gordon – Doom Eternal (Original Game Soundtrack)
38. Havukruunu – Uinuos syömein sota
39. Imperial Triumphant – Alphaville
40. Gustavo Santaolalla – The Last of Us Part II
41. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – K.G.
42. Rina Sawayama – Sawayama
43. Lunatic Soul – Through Shaded Woods
44. Wobbler – Dwellers of the Deep
45. The Ocean Collective – Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic / Cenozoic
46. Chris Stapleton – Starting Over
47. Esoctrilihum – Eternity of Shaog
48. Spectral Lore & Mare Cognitum – Wanderers: Astrology of the Nine
49. Kaatayra – Só quem viu o relâmpago à sua direita sabe
50. Mach-Hommy – Mach’s Hard Lemonade

obviously too much metal for most folks but really a pretty good list

the Natalia Lafourcade album is the business

the ff7r soundtrack in the rym top 10 is particularly baffling even by rym's standards of regularly highly rating vg soundtracks. also still don't get why they like that very mediocre strokes album so much, especially when they hated comedown machine which is probably the best thing the strokes ever did.

RYM list is p great (vmic ik)

I really *hated* the Microphones album but there’s a lot of excellent stuff in that top 50 (and beyond). I’m also a bit puzzled by the obsession with video game soundtracks, but pourquoi pas.

the ff7r soundtrack is just some perfunctory rearrangements of some of the original ff7 soundtrack + some pretty terrible new tracks. at no point when i was playing it did it really stand out as good to me, often the opposite. like there are plenty of vg soundtracks where i enjoyed them and understand why they've ended up highly rated on rym but this was really not one of them.

complaining about your own album's eoy list "snub" is a new low imo

katie dey is a wonderful internet presence how dare u

complaining about your own album's eoy list "snub" is a new low imo

complaining about your own album's eoy list "snub" is a new low imo

Thought that was directed at me for a minute. Tbh I think katie dey's response is more similar to mine than you might think - not angry b/c we thought we were entitled to placement, just a bit bummed out we didn't make it and finding somewhere to express that (me here, her on twitter). But I dunno, maybe she is an entitled cow. Maybe we both are!

just chiming in to say that the slum of legs album is straight fire! I barely listen to indie(i mean 'indie' in the british broadest possible way) any more probably because it used to be p much all i ever listened to alongside hip hop. Now all I mostly listen to is kpop and whatever paolo posts on the grime thread, but listened to slum of legs and it was absolutely joyous. only complaint would be that it took me 45 mins to get past 'RUTHE14ME' cos i had to keep playing it over and over. Probably haven't so wholly enjoyed an album in this sorta genre since los campesinos.

― oscar bravo

On the other hand, after a drainingly shit day today, this was so so nice to read and made me crazy emotional. Thank you, oscar bravo.

Tbc I otm’d re: Katie Dey, not you, emil.y.

Oh yeah, I realised it wasn't aimed at me after a moment, unless bsj was aiming for us both! I think "snub" is the operative factor, it definitely makes you sound like you think someone's deliberately taking away what's rightfully yours, just to be spiteful.

shoutout phoebe bidges

people really liked that fleet foxes album, huh

barcode gets it

I adore the Slum Of Legs album and had no idea you were involved, emil.y <3

Also: unless you've yourself put out an album, spent a year promoting it (touring it when it's not 2020), done interviews, received nothing but superlative response, only for the end of year to roll around and see that the mechanism of list-aggregation has elected to erase your years of work from the history books, and that at best your work may been retrospectively deemed "slept on" or "underrated", please don't shit on the fact that EoY lists are a shitty thing, psychologically, for 99% of working musicians out there and some of us just are better at directing our bitterness toward private venues

Fair enough, fgti. I understand the bitterness and it can be genuinely justified in some cases, but I also hate Twitter drama, and here the latter feeling prevailed.

I'm genuinely not trying to argue with you fgti, since that is an extremely good point and worth keeping in mind, but at the same time an argument could be made about all of those artists that did all the same toil with their blood, sweat and tears and never even got reviewed by the "right" publications in the first place. Some might say an artist in 2020 should consider themselves extremely fortunate to rise up above the glut enough to even get that fleeting "record of the week" stamp from an outlet like Stereogum in the first place.

Ted Gioia's list is up:
http://tedgioia.com/bestalbumsof2020.html

That's always a great list to read, thanks jaymc. I've heard a whopping five of his top 100 this year!

I’ve heard 7, heh. The Cyrillus Kreek and Lina_Raül Refree are essential listening imo.

Ha, I was just about to post that. One of about three lists I pay attention to.

It’s a great list if we go by those tiny blurbs alone.

I see your point, jon, and don't disagree-- but my first- and second-hand experiences have shown me that the acts of list-making and "putting numbers on the art" create uniformly negative psychological effects on the content creators regardless of the placement or perceived success of the sorted work

Ted's list is great, excellent new classical choices in there :)

I wasn't too hot on that Field Music album, after liking basically all the previous ones

Love that Louise Bock album on the Ted Gioia list, will almost certainly make my list too. Very intrigued by Lina_Raül Refree - "Contemporary Fado with Synthesizers" sounds awesome.

Also <3 to fgti

Premiere Recording of Ravi Shankar's Only Opera

This is intriguing.

that lina raul refree record is awesome, and lives up to the capsule description

lists are bad and bum me out yet i cant stop clicking on this thread

is this the first time one of gioia's favorites was nominated for the album of the year grammy?

To Pimp a Butterfly made his list in 2015, for a start.

lists are bad and bum me out yet i cant stop clicking on this thread

Do you think he meant to use this image?

http://tedgioia.com/sitebuilder/images/boltcutters-149x150.jpg

Not sure why that didn't embed. The Fiona Apple album.

Gioia annoys me often, but I admire him for doing a 100-entry alphabetical list with no regard for genre. (And yeah, another vote for the Lina_Raül Refree record. I interviewed them both way back in January.)

I guess it depends on what you take out of EOY lists?

Personally speaking I don’t really care about ranked lists (but they’re pretty useful to know if you’ll care for the rest of the list or to get an idea of the styles pushed throughout the year in that site) and I mostly glance EOY lists to listens to things out of my comfort zone. The lists where I’ve only listened to two or three albums are my favorites each year and I’ve found some of my favorite albums of all time by reading those.

From the more “pop-oriented” singles list/ I do find it fun to read the reasoning on why something like “Rain on Me” or “WAP” or whatever are the songs of the year.

I’ll say that I enjoy that there has been an increasing shift on consensus picks from the major publications. There was a couple of years where it was immensely boring seeing the same albums and singles in every list.

Yes and yet Fiona Apple seems destined to be the consensus pick this year (already #1 for COS, Paste, and Stereogum, and #2 for Mojo and Uproxx), and the perhaps cynical / overly-generous-to-their-influence question I have is: Would that consensus have emerged as clearly without the Pitchfork 10.0?

No music has ever sounded quite like it tbf.

hmm

Combing through that Gioia list one split minute at a time has made me realize that at least 3/4 of it is Not For Me (too many comfortably positive vibes tbh) but I’ll definitely be checking out: Bab L’ Bluz, Karuna Trio, Louise Bock, Max de Wardener and Yukihiro Atsumi.

I already mentioned the Cyrillus Kreek and Lina_Raül Refree but the John Luther Adams and Kitgut Quartet are quite good as well. Am struck also by the high quotient of ECM-affiliated artists who released their material via other labels this year – a conscious bias on Gioia’s part?

I have no problem with Fiona Apple being the consensus pick this year. In my ears it sounds as if it was recorded at home, during cabin fever. It almost sounds like a live recording, very rough around the edges which works so well in this particular set of songs.

Re: Gorilla vs. Bear, Helena Deland reminds me of Men I Trust a bit, another Montreal act I shouldn’t like on paper but enjoy anyway, mostly because of the melancholy undertow.

Hehe GvB also loves Men I Trust and I think their song Tailwhip was in his top 20 of the 2010s (completely on board with that pick)

I adore that palm mute bass sound they use