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The pandemic did not stop
music
as it did with other cultural sectors in 2020. Even during the spring lockdown, hundreds of
wonderful
albums
were still coming out
, some of which are in this selection of
the best international albums of the year
.
Music made by musicians from the US and the UK, but also by others from Colombia, South Korea, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Mali, Brazil, Uganda and Ireland.
There is rock and there is trap, electronic, rap, pop, reggaeton, songwriting, punk, R&B and a Nobel Prize.
20. Ark: 'Kick i'
The fundamentalists of experimental music have not forgiven the
leap to pop of the prodigy of post-human electronics
, but fans of firecracker pop drool at this madness.
The Venezuelan transsexual artist indulges herself, even going to reggaeton with extreme digital productions and Björk reciting Antonio Machado in Spanish, the fabulous Shygirl getting off her shaft, Rosalía in her salsa and the inevitable SOPHIE, with whom she shares so much now.
Digital aesthetics pushed to the limit, syncopation to the point of exhaustion and a way of manipulating sound that is an extension of his fascination with computerized life and artificial intelligence.
19. Taylor Swift: 'Folklore'
Taylor Swift
is a shrewd, skilled songwriter who masters the devices of popular song, and can be original in her own way.
That had already been known for a decade, but his impeccable image of a mega-star for the whole family had overshadowed, for the most critical, the obvious: that his songs are based on a solid musicality underneath some harmless lyrics, his very white teeth and its manifestations even whiter.
Folklore
, a return to folk composed during confinement,
is a tremendous achievement that appeals to the craftsmanship of song
, but deliberately avoids the rustle of platitudes that made his early records seem so easy.
An eighth album in which the great narrative lyrics stand out (enhanced by melodic resources), the soft vocal interpretations that he applies like a balm and the key participation as co-producer and co-author of more than half of the songs by Aaron Dressner (The National ) and, to a lesser extent, Justin Vernon (Bon Iver).
A fairly worthy, though worse, discard album has recently come out called
Evermore
, and with all this Swift has claimed herself as an adult singer-songwriter, without closing the door to a return to superpop.
18. Moses Sumney: 'Grae'
R&B and neosoul
with dreamy atmospheres and fantasy instrumentation: we've been listening to it for decades and there's no end in sight.
It seems inexhaustible.
Moses Sumney, a 30-year-old musician protected from the heads of that sound like Solange and Devonté Hynes (Blood Orange), but also from emblems of experimental pop like St. Vincent, Dirty Projectors, Sufjan Stevens, Grizzly Bear and Dave Sitek (TV on the Radio), has made the best album of the year in this area, going three steps further: opening the panorama with a torrent of references, from psychedelia to jazz, from electronics to signature songs, from rock to funk.
He is a unique character who was born in California, spent part of his childhood and adolescence in Ghana, where his parents are from, and returned to the United States to study creative writing and make rare music in which he was determined not to give up. none of the music he likes, which is a lot.
The same is true of his role on this
ambitious double album of cathedral proportions
: he is a singer, songwriter, guitarist, bassist, drummer, saxophonist, keyboardist, arranger and producer.
A fantastic trip.
17. Blackpink: 'The album'
Creating
songs with artificial intelligence tools is the new frontier of experimental music.
In a much more prosaic way, there are globally successful products designed with the help of
algorithms
and the
study of big data
, songs and artists created from the most popular current trends and consumer projections, especially among young audiences.
The most refined, ruthless and effective
megahit
factory
is in Seoul, in the record corporations that have made
K-pop
a known brand throughout the world.
Among the hundreds of groups and soloists that this pop empire pumps out,
Blackpink
stands out
, a
girl band
whose debut album does not give a second of respite, all of him is an artifact of diabolical perfection.
It's only 24 minutes, more than enough for a roller coaster of winning tricks from EDM, hip hop, R&B and even trap with Asian nods in party pop songs.
That is, a guilty pleasure as God intended.
It seems easy, but neither Lady Gaga nor Charli xcx have done so well.
Bruce Springsteen: Letter to You
16. Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band: 'Letter to you'
Let's start with the obvious:
Bruce Springsteen's
twentieth album
is no better than any of the seven he recorded until
Born in the USA
in 1984. Anyone unaware of one or more of those glorious and perfectly complementary albums shouldn't waste a minute on it.
Letter to you
.
And yet ... And yet, anyone who has those songs that are already part of the rock canon tattooed has felt a chill of emotion, and relief, upon hearing this great new album that stands with conviction, closeness and emotion.
It is, to begin with, an album that is not afraid of sounding
old
, an album that is not afraid of the past.
In fact, that's the driving force in a way: Springsteen, who turned 71 in September, reunites with the E Street Band to sing
about growing up and peering into death
in these classic-sounding songs avoiding the clichés.
15. Songhoy Blues: 'Optimisme'
Like the rest of the planet, Africa has been absorbing and interpreting the trends of Anglo-Saxon music for decades.
In today's music coming out of Nigeria, Ghana or South Africa, for example, the most common thing is to listen to rap and trap.
In fact, it is almost difficult to hear anything else.
Rock never made a significant mark in Africa, and that is why the torrential music of this Timbuktu quartet is doubly surprising.
With their
charred sound guitars curled in dizzying polyrhythms, they
represent today the most forceful sound of Tuareg rock, which has given us so much joy in the last decade, with that wonderful generation of guitarists led by Bombino.
Songhoy Blues title
their third album
Optimisme
as a wish for a country, and a continent, better, and that innocence has to do with the purity of their music, this powerful rock, almost hard rock in some songs, which arrives without irony or a trace of postmodernity.
14. Megan Thee Stallion: 'Good news'
Achieving female empowerment with
an arrogant and explicit sexuality
to the point of rudeness is the master plan of many female rappers in the United States, and among all of them
Megan Thee Stallion
has risen this year as the champion, in the space occupied in 2019 by the second album of Lizzo.
His debut album sounds hotter than a churrero's stick, with verses like "I made him eat me while I watch anime / The pussy like a wild fox", "I said, let's make a movie, / but it ran so fast that we did a story "and other dialectical pirouettes related to the exchange of fluids.
With no safety distance, this equal parts heir to Missy Elliott and Lil'Kim pumps out college party productions and
strobe-like
beats
for fun and awareness.
13. Céu: 'APKÁ'
The son of this singer and multi-instrumentalist from Sao Paulo was so crazy with joy one day that he condensed his fabulous state of mind into a made up word, a kind of ecstatic onomatopoeia.
"Apká!"
And that glee has inspired Céu to make a fifth album, which is also his way of saying "Apká!"
This does not necessarily translate into party songs, but in
an intimate search for satisfaction and beauty
with songs between the author song, the endless Brazilian tradition and an electronic pop production with hooks but without great effects, like a Tropical pseudo R&B, influenced by Nigerian music and that global sensibility of the so-called
global beats
that understand non-Anglo-Saxon music not as an exotic pastiche but as an alternative modernity.
Céu means heaven in Portuguese and it makes more sense than ever.
Yves Tumor: 'Heaven to a tortured man'
12. Yves Tumor: 'Heaven to a tortured man'
The fluid genre has found in pop music one of its great speakers since
David Bowie
adopted the character of Ziggy Stardust in the early 70s. Yves Tumor says his name is Sean Bowie by name, although everything about him is a mystery , also his music, of course.
Born in the USA but living in several European cities for years, he is an American singer, multi-instrumentalist and producer who until this fourth album devoted himself body and soul to making music so rare that the experimental adjective seemed short to all commentators, that they preferred more tremendous names like avant-garde.
Now he has made his album
easy
, which is not so easy, really, or at least not so obvious,
a rock between glam and funk with faded textures
.
In this unbridled music, he dispenses with solid pillars within the compositions to simply let himself go, creating impressions instead of looking for round songs.
Sexy music that is a manifesto of individual independence.
11. Phoebe Bridgers: 'Punisher'
Little by little the singer-songwriters have stopped telling us their vision of the world.
The cynicism of postmodernity was cornering the use of the song as a tool for protest and progressively spread the singer-songwriter who comes to tell us about his world, his most intimate life.
In the US they have never stopped coming out,
always one step away from indie pop
, and in recent years in particular an endless number of girls with a lot of truth to tell: Lucy Dacus, Margaret Glapsy, Soccer Mommy, Julia Jacklin or Adrienne Linker and Waxahatchee, who have made two great albums this 2020. Was Phoebe Bridgers' second album better?
Well, it was the biggest leap forward, at least.
A second album of
cascading confessions
: failures, insecurity, anxiety, memories, longings ... An inner tornado where melancholy and confusion are shown without great drama or great plans, awakening empathy without asking for it.
10. Nadine Shah: 'Kitchen sink'
A Year Without PJ Harvey has provided us with the comfort of this intense and dramatic album, in the theatrical sense, which is all atmosphere and all suggestion and mystery and power.
A very cool album.
Nadine Shah is a British rock artist here who explores her place in the world as a thirty-year-old who enters adult life without a compass, unwilling to satisfy what society may expect of her.
That is manifested in
an angular sound and sharp instrumentation in
the style of Nick Cave's Bad Seeds, and a tension that sprouts every two by three.
9. Nihiloxica: 'Kaloli'
Fans of psychedelia through trance music have had a valhalla for years at
Nyege Nyege, the Ugandan record company and festival
that for several years has not stopped producing brutal music, in every way.
Its catalog highlights Nihiloxica, the alliance of a Kampala percussion group with English producers Spooky-J and pq.
That kind of union is nothing new;
For more than 20 years, European and US producers have brought electronic music to traditional African music and call it modernizing.
Others call it cultural appropriation.
The truth is that sometimes really interesting music has come out of those experiences.
Nihiloxica's case is different.
This music is not a remix,
it is not electronic varnished folklore
, it is not a later digital edition.
It is music that sprouts from its origin with this sharp texture like a Hattori Hanzo sword, and dizzying, and super intense, and ambiguous, because in general they are long instrumental pieces.
Vibrant, strong music.
And, yes, groundbreaking.
But what is more important than all this: it is fabulous music.
Bob Dylan: 'Rough and rowdy days'
8. Bob Dylan: 'Rough and rowdy days'
This is the book that a writer makes after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Rough and rowdy days
, Bob Dylan's 39th studio album, his first in eight years, is
literature with music
.
Little music, fair, beautifully played music, sepia rock and roll, clubhouse rhythm and blues, skinless blues, but music as a tool for the Zimmerman that Dylan put on for Thomas three world wars ago.
There are 70 minutes in 10 songs, material for very coffee growers, in which it reminds us: I am not a troubadour nor am I a bard, I do not come to tell you stories, I do not come to explain the world, I am a poet, another type of poet, I am many things,
"I contain multitudes"
.
As an album it is a triumph in itself, even greater understood in the context of a monstrously great career and after such important and controversial recognition.
7. Run The Jewels: 'RTJ4'
The best rap record of the year
is a hammer against an anvil beating the songs
on every
beat
and every rhyme.
It is the soundtrack of the riots in the US after the death of George Floyd, on May 25, caused by a Minneapolis policeman.
It is the Death Star of hip hop productions,
the rhythms cut like diamonds
, each
breakbeat
a bang, a bombastic production neither too futuristic, nor too orthodox, nor too protagonist.
It's a sprawl of collaborations, with the usual Zach de la Rocha (Rage Against The Machine), Pharrell Williams, Josh Homme (Queens Of The Stone Age), DJ Premier (ex Gang Starr), Greg Nice, 2 Chainz and Mavis Staples.
It is a vindication of rap, of the essence of rap, as a vehicle for awareness and a tool for reporting.
It's such a, so, so tremendous record.
6. Bad Bunny: 'Yhlqmdlg'
The Puerto Rican singer was determined to seize his opportunity in 2020 and has squeezed it with three long albums in one year.
There are 46 songs in total, almost one per week, which he has published in this year of consecration, whose summit has been this
Yhlqmdlg
:
'I do what I want'
.
Bad Bunny
has been the most listened to artist on Spotify in the world (with 8,300 million reproductions) and the symbol of the global success of Latin urban music.
Hesitant, sentimental, much more versatile and inventive than his music may appear on the surface, with a dazzling melodic talent that sets him apart from his contemporaries, Benito transcends the corsets of trap and reggaeton to reach modern Latin pop.
5. Fontaines DC: 'A hero's death'
Guys don't want to play in a rock group anymore.
That makes playing in a rock group even more meaningful if you're a guy who wants to use that language to show your
anger
and
frustration
at what the world has to offer.
The heroic aspect of rebellion is doubled if it is a lost cause.
They are banal reflections that divert attention from what is really important here: the Dublin quintet Fontaines DC is
the best punk-rock group that exists right now
, and this is demonstrated by this second album, dark, melancholic, busted on the inside, like the embers of a fire that is consumed without remedy, sometimes defeated, sometimes incandescent.
Sound without filters, of course, just drums, bass and two natural electric guitars, and the voice as the epitome of a wonderful generation of British punk-rock groups that emerged with Brexit and that, with their songs about claustrophobia and anguish, so well they have explained 2020.
Lido Pimienta: Miss Colombia
4. Lido Pimienta: 'Miss Colombia'
There is a lot of new music made by artists who have emigrated and who define their sound in relation to that identity emanating from two or more places, cultures and traditions.
What is the folklore of the emigrant?
Lido Pimienta is 34 years old, she is originally from Barranquilla, she has lived in Canada since she was 19 and in her own way is creating her own folklore, the folk with which she defines her own complexity.
His songs are rooted in the rich Colombian musical tradition, both that of indigenous origin and that of African origin.
Pop songs that is also popular music.
Contemporary production (more or less modern, more or less electronic) maximizes the virtues of these wonderfully unique compositions, so original, so fresh.
A
triumph
that must be understood in context: Pimienta had won by surprise in 2016 the most important award in Canadian music, the Polaris, with his previous album,
La Papessa
.
In other words, this new work was going to be safely scrutinized.
The bet could not be more determined, courageous and full of charisma.
3. Sault: 'Untitled (Rise)'
It is not an album, it is
a tremendous journey through modern black music
, long songs in constant movement, songs that blend into each other gently crossing valleys and mountains, with dozens of instruments and production details coming and going, such a wide sound and deep as the wealth of references with which it is made, especially funk, disco music, house, classic hip hop production and Brazilian percussion.
Music in cinemascope to dance with a smile under the bright eyes.
When it came out in September it was their
fourth album in 16 months
, which is tremendous because the previous three are also fabulous.
Of course, do not look for photos or information on their authors: they keep their identity secret and it is only known about them that it is a British collective.
And that they are great.
2. Dua Lipa: 'Future Nostalgia'
Even
the best pop album of the year is based
on nostalgia, a hegemonic concept in other areas, but which in pop is usually identified with something conservative, it seems a contradiction with the apparently groundbreaking nature of pop, no matter how much Daft Punk, for example , turn nostalgia into champagne bubbles that tickle under your skin and make you feel at the center of the universe.
The second album by the English singer Dua Lipa, this
Future Nostalgia
, is a wonderful disco-pop fantasy with a current sound but
full of nods to party music from the last 45 years
, from disco to the new wave, electro, synth-pop, house, italo, electroclash, UK garage, R&B and funk, and dance-pop.
Feminine empowerment and independence lyrics, finger snaps, rubber bottoms, cowbells and neon sticks.
It never seemed so amazing to be a chick.
Fiona Apple: 'Fetch the Bolt Cutters'
1. Fiona Apple: 'Fetch the Bolt Cutters'
Composing with the piano tends to give pop songs much greater formal freedom than those created with guitar chords, they come to breathe more original voice melodies, less corseted internal structures ... Fiona Apple's fifth album suggests those things,
as easy as a dancer improvising with a blank mind
.
Is she a flamboyant singer-songwriter or a popular singer improvising?
Is he reciting, rapping, or is he talking too much about flow?
And those little screams?
Is everything, perhaps, jazz !?
No obvious stanzas or refrains, just a torrent of emotions and reflections on breaking free from psychological traps and getting ahead and being a woman and being angry and feeling powerful and feeling a rare moment of euphoria, clairvoyance and fulfillment.
Recorded in a homemade way with rudimentary percussions, basses that could be danced and without guitars, it was the album of confinement and has ended up being
the album that best defines this rare year
.
(Although, really, any of the top eight on this list could be the best of the year, depending on when it's heard.)
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