The best albums of the year you haven't heard of

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The lists of the best albums of the year published by the specialized headers at this time have always been good material for people to investigate and buy different things -or add them to their Spotify lists, there is no denying the anemia of the market-, but also so that he can crack openly and catch

like the ones that, it is said, came to Loquillo when he read a certain Spanish magazine, which led him to exclaim that

.

A quick flyby above the orderly flood of best albums in publications like

,

,

or

gives a glimpse of well-known artists - they

to be made. major, as well as the last albums of Nick Cave, Lana del Rey, Billie Eilish or the rapper Tyler, The Creator; even C. Tangana comes in at No. 9 on

- but sometimes, even on the top rung, there are newcomers or artists from the underground layers of the industry that the general public has not heard of.

Examples Why does a band called Turnstyle appear on so many charts? ¿

crowning ranking

? And most importantly: if we take the Metacritic meter as a reference, the most consistent average of the year -9 out of 10 taking all the reviews published in the Anglo-Saxon world, at least until mid-December- has it

, second album by Nigerian-born British rapper Little Simz.

.

Why, as Mourinho would say? In large part, because Little Simz connects with

, and taking over from heterodox divas of contemporary black music like Janelle Monáe - and, to a lesser extent, Beyoncé -, it concocts an

ambitious,

for the conservative times in pop music, and brimming with historical connections - classic hip hop,

, 70s soul - and social reflections. Little Simz transmits the mood of year two of the pandemic:

, added to the determination to be strong in a turbulent time.

The albums by Arlo Parks (

), and Jazmine Sullivan (

) share that same intention: the first, British, is a kind of Tracey Chapman for this century, a

that nurtures her pieces - intimate and fearful of a turbulent reality- with

productions

, as if seeking

. His is, one would say, a perfect quarantine record. Jazmine Sullivan's is more agitated and synthetic, but just as confessional, the testimony of

.

The frontiers and limits of black music take up a lot of space on those charts that encourage weirdness: another well-positioned album is that of rapper Lil Nas X, who in the purest Kanye West style -

-

is marked by

an exercise in heterodox and even psychedelic trap that could be the Yankee and

equivalent

of

. If we go to the experimental extreme, there stand out the producer Madlib -

is a perfect instrumental hip hop exercise, connected with the free spirit of funk- and the amazing hybrid exercise of London's Floating Points, which he has joined in

to the mythical cosmic saxophonist Pharoah Sanders with the London Symphony Orchestra to put together a

of

that makes no secret of his obsession with

Coltrane's

.

The

quota is made up of

a

, Turnstyle - in

on they seem to re

update

mythical figures from the alternative 90s like Fugazi-, and three composers in a state of grace like

- better known as Snail Mail; her second album,

, is classic indie-rock well done- Michelle Zauner -who has once again convinced with the psychedelic pop of her adventure in front of Japanese Breakfast; the

record

has been described as

- and Tamara Lindeman, who in

, their fifth album as The Weather Station, speaks with the same language as the great folk-rock masters of the 70s. As you can see, there is a lot of retro, but also the weight of a job well done.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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