2020
Deftones – Ohms
Deftones definitely didn’t miss with their last album, 2016’s Gore, but they just keep doing this thing they do where every year ending in a 0 brings an album that they knock out of the fuckin’ park. Ohms is obviously no exception. This album sees them getting back to heavier stuff than they’ve done in a while. The opener is straight up metal, save for Chino Moreno‘s clean and floaty vocals over most of the chorus (“I finally achieve…Approaching a delayed…“) which are just quintessential Deftones. Songs like “Urantia” and “Radiant City” have this insanely infectious gallop to them that is hard to find nowadays, they groove but they’re still brutal. That’s definitely aided by guitarist Stephen Carpenter keeping up his string inflation, landing on a nine-string after previously utilizing six, seven, and eight. He said in 2022 that he was more of a rhythm player than a lead, and I feel like he’s figured out that role better than ever on this album. You can hear influences from hip-hop and djent in his playing on this album, which feels like an odd combo but isn’t at all in practice. Steph plays with a kind of power that can lock the air in your lungs and has a crazy ear for rhythms, making the notes he’s playing almost insignificant compared to the energy and the tight timing with Sergio Vega‘s bass and Abe Cunningham‘s drums. Sergio feels more comfortable than ever here, taking the lead at times and rounding out the sonics with finesse, which kinda sucks because this would be his last album with the band, getting fired in 2021. Abe is one of the most criminally underrated drummers of all time in my book, drawing from trip-hop and heavy metal and never doing too much or not enough on a song. All this, along with scattered but important keyboards and textures from Frank Delgado, leads to an all-killer-no-filler forty-six minutes of greatness. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the average age of the band is hovering around 50, the songs feel more intentional, more careful, tighter, mature maybe, than ever before. It’s hard to argue any album to be their definitive best, but this is pretty easily their best curation job. No wasted motion and no low points.
Run the Jewels – Run the Jewels 4
RTJ3 felt like a fitting response to the world when it came out, but Run the Jewels 4 feels like a necessary one. Killer Mike and El-P, along with perennial coproducers Little Shalimar and Wilder Zoby, are at their most incisive on this album, and it’s never felt like the climate was more ready for it than it was in 2020. This feels like the proper cap and gown graduation ceremony for Mike and El from the idea of anarchy as burning down buildings and stealing cop cars to the idea of anarchism as a societal sea change for the future. The philosophy is all about dismantling hierarchies and tearing down oppressive governmental structures and state-sanctioned violence. You could always hear elements of this in their music, even before their first linkup in 2012, but this feels like they did the reading and the legwork to tighten up their thinking. It’s not about acting out for the sake of it anymore, it’s about destroying that which seeks to destroy us. The song “walking in the snow” is the best possible example of that, and features what could very well go down as the two greatest rap verses of the decade. El-P opens the song by setting his sights on the “death machine” of the United States, dropping intricate tongue twisters about the cages we’ve built for children and marginalized groups and how as soon as one extermination is finished, the next one starts just a rung up the ladder. We’re greasing a wheel that’s rolling right toward us, and doing these heinous acts in the name of Christian values and other lies we’ve been sold by the powers that be. We barely even get a second to digest what’s been dropped on us before Killer Mike comes in and gives us more, the best verse of his entire career. He takes a different approach to a similar topic, looking at oppression through the lens of the school-to-prison pipeline. He laments how one can only truly be free as a small child before they enter the school system to be racialized, othered, and conditioned to accept society as it’s been built. Rather than teach things we need to learn or even the critical thinking we need to be able to do that learning, the system is built on generic standardized tests and the furthering of the status quo. This all disadvantages those from poorer backgrounds and those who have been historically forced onto the outskirts of American life, and Mike notes that they often just happen to “look like” him. The loss of opportunity created by low scores on these tests functions to push people into resorting to crime and entering the dark cycles of the prison-industrial complex, where slave labor is legal and recidivism is good for the bottom line. The fact that black people and poor people are born into and forced into these predicaments at a higher rate than anyone else leads to the perception of these people as inherently criminal, and as Mike points out, that then leads to people being so numb as to not even care when the police murder a man as he whispers “I can’t breathe.” The most harrowing part of that line is that it came out the month after George Floyd’s murder, and it was seen as a response to that, but it wasn’t. It was written with the murder of Eric Garner in mind, reinforced by the murders of Manuel Ellis, and Byron Williams, and John Neville, and Christopher Lowe, and Derrick Scott, and, sickeningly, so many others that were executed without a trial by agents of the state while begging for air and mercy. Mike doesnt even ask for it to stop, he knows it won’t, he just asks that we feel something more than nothing about it. We’ve been numbed to this kind of evil, and these people deserve so much more. We all do. He ends off by linking his verse to El’s, calling back to the line about Jesus’ teachings by reminding us that he too was killed by a government scared of his teachings and grassroots support. Anyone who believes in him can’t honestly reconcile that with support of the police, the state, or anything else used to keep certain people down. The song finishes up with a much less heavy verse where Mike and El go back and forth with more standard self-aggrandizement, then a little joke from recurring collaborator Gangsta Boo, may she rest in peace, about how since they’re a black and white duo, you can’t dislike them without being racist one way or another. And I think that’s more than just a mood lightener; I think it serves to remind us that often lost in all the well-earned adoration for their topicality and surgically accurate skewering of the machines is the fun and bounciness of Run the Jewels. They never go to zero-substance levels like a late-stage Fast and Furious movie, but songs like “ooh la la” and “out of sight,” along with the cinematic opener “yankee and the brave (ep. 4),” are fully aux cord ready and round out the third dimension of RTJ’s unique style. This dynamic duo is built on the interplay between their raps, the futuristic production vision of El-P, and the lyrical content being able to switch from the weighty to the nonchalant without missing a beat. Even on the rare occasion when the jewel runners don’t have much to say, they still manage to say it in a way that feels important to hear. And when they are saying something with meaning behind it, you can’t help but take notice and feel the rhyme bouncing around off the hard-edged percussion and grinding synthesizers. If the case for best two-man rap crew wasn’t already made for RTJ (and I think it was), this has cemented it.
Sweeping Promises – Hunger for a Way Out
Written and recorded before COVID-19 fully upended the world, Hunger for a Way Out still sometimes sounds like someone that’s seen the future and is trying to warn us, frantic and urgent, prescient of the problems to come. Sweeping Promises don’t sound like a debuting duo at all. Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug combine to sound like an effort from more than two people and more than a first album. They have a timeless sound, with their lo-fi recording quality and utter lack of shiny production tricks or anything that would possibly date their songs. If you’d told me this was some lost album from any time between the 1970s and now, I’d fully believe it. Their influences are too many to list, from the Kinks to Blondie to Talking Heads, and although they never once rip off or outwardly ape anyone’s style, they still manage to give you a little elbow nudge to let you know “hey, we listen to them too.” If they remind me of any group most of all, though, it’d be the Strokes, although it might take a few listens to see how. The intentionally cheap, muffled, garage rock aesthetic is the natural devolution of what they built on Is This It. The solo on “Cross Me Out” could be from the Angles era, but the vocal pattern that introduces the song feel unique. The riff on “Blue” could be from Albert Hammond, Jr.’s solo work, but the rest of the instrumental feels like an early ’80s groove banger. More than anything else, the singing always stands out. Lira has an incredible voice and control over it, using it to build atmosphere or just tell you some things. She does some quirky things at times that feel at home in the rest of the 2010s-2020s wave of woman-fronted rock band revival, but she also does some straightforward and powerful stuff like on the title track, and there’s some classic ’80s-reminiscent vocals on the absolute throwback “Safe Now” that just makes you wanna choreograph your own Flashdance routine. The album never goes in a direction that feels too safe or predictable, though: there’s moments where you think a song is gonna zig but it zags. “Falling Forward” opens with a rhythmic bass line that might call to mind Jimmy Eat World, and you’d expect the lead guitar to come in and follow it with some traditional rock drums, but it just doesn’t. The guitar hits you with some sparse jabs while the drums come in hot with double the snares before settling into a more standard beat. Not content to rest with one subversion, the chorus throws all that out right as soon you’ve accepted it, centering around Lira’s jovial Byrne-esque delivery of the title phrase, changing with every repetition. The bass on “An Appetite” is utterly unique to me in that I think it’s fulfilling three different parts of a song simultaneously, at least until the rest of the song kicks in. It’s at once anchoring the low end, sufficiently percussive to replace a drum track, and functioning as a lead melody on its own. It doesn’t dwell on its own impressiveness, but it really deserves mention for how perfectly it’s executed. This album is under a half hour but doesn’t leave you needing more, although I certainly want more. It comes in and lives up to its unspoken mission statement and doesn’t overstay its welcome, not that I think it possibly could have.
Honorable Mentions
2020 was the year of Taylor Swift in the mainstream world, and for good reason. I’ve always had my favorites from her catalog, but she took an incredible leap with this era. As July was coming to a close, Taylor surprised the world by announcing that she was putting an album out in just a few hours, and that was how we got folklore. No big rollout, no promo singles, just “here you go, here’s an album.” At 30 years old, I had a feeling she was capable of writing more mature songs than what she was known for, but I never thought we’d get it in such a concentrated and almost rebellious form. Swift hunkered down in her home studio and worked remotely with modern pop stalwart Jack Antonoff and one-fifth of the National, Aaron Dessner, to craft 17 of the most beautiful and compelling songs of her career. The stories are just that, stories, not reminiscence on her real life but genuine titular folklore. These aren’t stories about the people you see in the tabloids, they’re widow revenge stories, the relationship between “betty” and “James,” the Red Thread of Fate. The standout here for me is “exile,” a duet with Justin Vernon that features other members of his band Bon Iver. The structure of the song is genius, with both singers echoing each other in ways that recontextualize the same lines, voices overlapping to get their piece in before the next bar starts, it’s just beautiful. This album could have easily stood on its own as proof that Swift has the chops to hang with “real” music, not that she ever needed that, but she doesn’t do anything bare minimum. Just a few months later, she did it again. Mid-December, she surprised the world once again by announcing another album in another few hours. This time, we got evermore. The two collections are true sister albums; you could mix and match them into each other or make a big 34-song playlist that feels as though it were one sprawling mega-project. The level of quality is pretty identical. They weren’t made simultaneously, but this one was born out of what was learned making the other. The song that hit home for me in the same way that “exile” did was “no body, no crime,” this time featuring the voices of two-thirds of the Haim sisters. To me, this is the pinnacle of her storytelling, a masterful melding of country and pop and cinematic plot twists. It’s “Goodbye Earl” for the modern age, and it builds well enough on the formula to make itself necessary in the canon. These albums are so worth a listen even if you don’t know anything about Swift’s work or don’t like what you hear out in the wild. They’re a relatively radical departure from the seven albums that came before and worth all the praise they’ve been given.
The Strokes are back! It’s only been four years since the Future Present Past EP, but seven since the last full-length offering (2013‘s Comedown Machine). The New Abnormal was hailed as some sort of return to the great Strokes music of old, but I’m genuinely confused on how that became the critical consensus. The only album that could really qualify as departure from their trajectory was Angles, but that was a great album too. Their first two albums in the early 2000s were relatively similar, and the third was moving into new sonic directions that felt appropriate for the time, then Angles was comparatively every-song-a-genre, but that’s kinda the way it’s stayed since then. Comedown Machine was varied, the EP was varied, and this is varied. The songs do feel more intentional here, which they may have strayed away from a bit in the 2010s. The top songs on here are some of the best of the band’s career, with highlights including singles “The Adults Are Talking” and “Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus” along with closer “Ode to the Mets.” Julian Casablancas is using what he’s learned over the last ten or eleven years of Strokes and Voidz work to take his vocal control to a new level, Albert Hammond, Jr. and Nick Valensi are still elevating their game and the way their guitars interweave, and the reliable rhythm crew of Nikolai Fraiture and Fabrizio Moretti are still holding it down and providing perfect canvases for the three melody makers. It’s exciting to see that the group can still come together and make great music in between their solo ventures and side projects, and it leaves the rest of the 2020s in an interesting spot where we might conceivably get more total music from these guys than ever before.
With possibly the worst timing of all…time, Dua Lipa put out the album of the summer just before the first summer in over a hundred years to not be outside for it. Future Nostalgia is the perfect title for the album, enlisting musicians behind both modern and older pop classics like Andrew Watt, Jeff Bhasker, Chad Smith, Ali Tamposi, and Take a Daytrip in order to craft a project indebted to the past but also leaving it in the rearview. It’s one of the best dance pop albums I’ve ever heard, owing to its influences from the worlds of funk and rock and disco as well as the incredible voice of Dua Lipa, who has a really powerful low end whenever she wants to but sits comfortable in her range that’s a touch lower than other pop singers in a really pleasing way. Even the most jaded of listeners has to respect the infectious qualities of songs like “Break My Heart” (which might call to mind the riff from INXS’ “Need You Tonight“) or “Levitating.”
2021
Maisie Peters – You Signed Up for This
Maisie Peters writes with a beautifully oxymoronic sense of world-weary naïveté. You Signed Up for This is a debut album that sounds at once like a seasoned pop veteran crafting songs with intimate knowledge of what works, and like an innocent young teen experiencing heartache and mature joy for some of the first times ever. It reminds me of Surfin’ Safari from way back in 1962 in that regard, even though the sound couldn’t be more different. Both albums are of their time sonically, but in a way that won’t age poorly. Bangers like “Psycho” and “Boy” are radio-ready on first listen, while the more somber cuts like “Hollow” capture the sadness of loving and losing in a way that a boardroom at a major label could never. Established artists like Ed Sheeran (who signed Peters) and John McDaid pop up in the credits, but each and every lyric is clearly from the heart of the young girl that Peters either once was or is so adept at portraying.
JPEGMAFIA – LP!
One of the most eccentric rap albums to ever sniff the mainstream, JPEGMAFIA‘s LP! is a fever dream put to wax. It’s what your great-grandparents thought music would sound like in the 2020s. If you aren’t paying close attention, you’d be forgiven for not knowing where one song ends and another begins. The instrumentals are an assault on hip-hop orthodoxy, the rapping is varied and always engaging, the topics flow seamlessly from pro wrestling to music history to braggadocio to religion without feeling as disjointed as they inherently should. This is what appears to be the culmination of a strange and exciting career and it’s more than deserving of the praise it’s received.
2022
Red Hot Chili Peppers – Unlimited Love
The first album in six years from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the first to feature John Frusciante in sixteen, Unlimited Love is the most mature offering the California rockers have ever cooked up. Frusciante has almost completely retooled his approach to his instrument yet again, taking concepts from a much wider range of influences than his typical evolution on the sounds of Hendrix and Slovak. Almost as if he’s finding his voice again, he lays down more subtle, reverb-heavy, and angelic vocals than his last work with the band, where his voice was all over almost every track at one point or another. He takes center stage once or twice, most notably toward the end of the album with the instant classic choruses of “The Heavy Wing,” but also with the bonus Nirvana-inspired grunge foray “Nerve Flip.” Flea is building upon the role he carved out for himself during the band’s Klinghoffer era, leading songs from the bass guitar and playing the most active lines he ever has. Chad Smith continues to hold down the fort with his inimitable style that never goes out of time but never feels metronomic, throwing in more ghost notes than you could literally shake a stick at. Anthony Kiedis is still improving on his singing ability, an impressive evolution for someone who was once nothing more than a rapper and glorified hype man. He’s found himself a lot less nasally than on the last two albums, but still at times reliant on studio assistance (the pitch correction is especially noticeable on songs like “Whatchu Thinkin’,” where it just kinda gives up and turns him into a robot). His lyrics are still cryptic, evocative, and occasionally beautiful, with themes of love (obviously), loss, global affairs, and his beloved Golden State. This may not be the band’s best album, but it comfortably resides in the upper echelon and is easily my album of the year.
Danger Mouse & Black Thought – Cheat Codes
Black Thought has long been one of the few greatest rappers to ever do it, but he’s lacked a single project that you could point to as evidence. It’s hard to direct someone to the best of the Roots’ discography, which was more often a showcase of the rest of the über-talented band than it was for the MC. His features on other rappers’ projects stole the show more times than they didn’t, but loose verses aren’t enough. In teaming with the equally legendary Danger Mouse, he’s finally done it. Cheat Codes is an apt title for this album; as you listen through it, you wonder if both men haven’t cracked the system and figured out how to effortlessly stay at the top of their respective crafts for song after song. Danger has always been a killer producer, and he’s learning new tricks even as an old dog on this one. More vocal samples than ever, more chopping to go with his perfection of finding loops, more variance between light and dark sounds. He’s putting together elements of other greats like Dilla and Madlib and fusing them with his own style to put forth what might be his strongest production ever. Black Thought is just a god with the pen and the microphone, dropping insane bars that no one else could come up with but everyone wishes they did. No one can even hang with him for a verse on this thing save for DOOM and El-P, two other all-time greats. It’s hard to even describe how he puts each element of emceeing together perfectly. He has the presence, the voice, the breath control, the rhyme schemes, the references, the personality, everything. He’s more complete than anyone that’s ever done it. He flexes his intelligence without getting pretentious, he sends a message without preaching, he boasts without coming off cocky. He flows over these beats in the only way anyone ever should, but in a way few ever could. This album is a masterclass in how to exceed in every element of hip-hop.
$ilkMoney – I Don’t Give a Fuck About This Rap Shit, I’mma Just Drop Until I Don’t Feel Like It Anymore
$ilkMoney is a name I was wholly unaware of before this year, and that’s lost time I need to make up for. His latest offering is called I Don’t Give a Fuck About This Rap Shit, I’mma Just Drop Until I Don’t Feel Like It Anymore. It’s a bold title, but it’s a misleading one. $ilkMoney very clearly gives a fuck about rap, and it shines through in his delivery and his content. In between trippy, metaphysical, drug-fueled sidebars, he delivers raw and venomous attacks on institutional and interpersonal racism, other rappers who don’t have the skills he does, the trappings of success in the music industry, historic and modern colonialism, cyclical violence, and so much more. There’s a tangible sense of trauma and paranoia here, and it’s one that feels understandable yet foreign to me in the best sort of way, like getting a glimpse at something you shouldn’t be seeing. At times you might be made genuinely uncomfortable, with these voyeuristic peeks into a justified freakout, but you never regret that. It’s a feeling that feels important to have. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard an album like this, and I don’t know that anyone could do this any better or bring something different to this concept and approach. The anger, the relatively lighthearted reprieves, the off-the-wall references, the expansive vocabulary, this is a singular vision and it’s masterful. It’s so singular that at first I assumed it was a solo, self-produced project, which it’s not. The album’s amazingly weird production comes courtesy of Kahlil Blu, who is another name I’m not familiar with but really need to be. This is one of a kind and so worth the half hour or so it demands you give it.
Honorable Mentions
The Red Hot Chili Peppers could have stopped at one, but they finished the year adding two double albums to their résumé. Return of the Dream Canteen is an amazing album in its own right, with “Bella” being a particular standout as maybe the best song of this entire year and one of the best in their discography. It suffers a bit from coming out later, as some of the same ideas are retread from Unlimited Love, but it’s still incredible on its own.
Another album deserving of much more praise than it got is the latest from Tears for Fears, The Tipping Point. Over seventeen years removed from their Happy Ending reunion and after many false starts, the duo managed to put together their most seasoned and at times darkest album yet. Pop acts almost never age this well as a rule, but then Tears for Fears was never just a run-of-the-mill pop act. Their technical ability and voices are as sharp as ever, even live, and their backing band and production team is one of the most solid and complete in all of music.
Greg Dulli was always the first to admit that he’s not a natural singer, but How Do You Burn? is the album where he finally feels and sounds comfortable in the role. The Afghan Whigs‘ bandleader has found his voice, and he uses it in ways he never has before on songs like “Catch a Colt” and “Jyja.” The record is a natural evolution from their 2010s works, showing a level of growth and introspection that was missing but not missed in their ’90s masterpieces. The themes are all familiar, relationships and personal failings and struggles with every aspect of life, but they’re approached from angles that only could come from a group that’s already tried the head-on approach on albums like Gentlemen and Congregation. There’s more subtlety, more grace, and more of a journey than ever before.