Heartache With Hard Work

Music has been so important this year, given how we have lost so many of the intimate connections of friends and family that bring us peace and stability. Music can’t replace those things, but it’s something. A warm fire on a dark night, a promise that love and connection is still out there, just over the horizon.

I think those feelings help explain why some kinds of music spoke more to me this year. I often found myself looking for something contemplative, quiet, comforting. That led me to a lot more ambient and instrumental music. But it also meant that I really wanted to spend the most time with records that put empathy front and center. I didn’t reflexively shy away from anything that was difficult or dark, but if I let myself drift, it generally wasn’t in that direction.

So my usual caveat applies: this is a list of my favorites, not an attempt to categorize what is objectively ‘the best.’ But it’s even more true this year than usual. I can’t say whether these are all Great albums. I just know they meant a lot to me.

One other note: I’ve only listed 15, in part due to a lack of time to write up my thoughts. The ten honorable mentions were all great, and I wish I had the bandwidth to give them a full discussion.

I’ve created a Spotify list, but Spotify pays artists effectively nothing so please if you like the music, click the links and go buy it. Bandcamp is great, and even includes some artists who you can’t find on Spotify.

15. Andrew Wasylyk – Fugitive Light and Themes of Consolation

An instrumental investigation of the Scottish coastline, built around the idea of fugitive light. You hear the interplay of ocean and fog, the tentative warmth of sun rays cutting through a cold spring morning, the sense of separation between past and present. This is probably best understood as a jazz record, but there are strong currents of 60s pop, classical baroque music, ambient found sound, even old western film scores.

Highlights: Black Bay Dream Minor, Last Sunbeams of Childhood, Fugitive Light Restless Water, Everywhere Something Sublime

14. The War on Drugs – LIVE DRUGS

I’m always hesitant to include live albums on these lists. But The War on Drugs are one of the tightest live bands in the world right now, and Adam Granduciel has written some absolutely world class songs in recent years. So while this record doesn’t do much to surprise, it still manages to punch hard enough to justify a place on the list. It’s inessential if you aren’t already inclined to like the band, but is a very pleasant way to spend an hour if you’re already on the bandwagon. My only real regret is the performance of An Ocean Between the Waves. When I saw them back in 2014 on the Lost in the Dream tour, that song was absolutely electric. This take sadly didn’t fully capture that energy.

Highlights: Not the best songs of the bunch, but the best performances relative to their studio versions: Buenos Aires Beach, Pain, Strangest Place, Thinking of a Place, and the nice cover of Zevon’s Accidentally Like A Martyr

13. The Beths – Jump Rope Gazers

In its best moments, this record blends winsomeness and dreamy chord progressions with just enough cutting edge to stay sharp. The middle third of the record—from the title track to Out of Sight—manage this balance extremely well. Outside of that run, some tracks dip a bit too heavily into the sugar bag while others push the 70s power pop buttons a little too heavily. There certainly aren’t any bad songs here; I just wish they could have sustained the strength of that middle stretch over the whole record.

Highlights: Out of Sight, Jump Rope Gazers, Do You Want Me Now, Just Shy of Sure

12. snarls – Burst

The line between present life and nostalgia and has never felt thinner to me. Maybe it’s a function of the terminally online social media world we all inhabit. Maybe it’s the pandemic. Maybe it’s just my own age. But a record like this really gets me thinking about the forever-life of fuzzed out rock and roll. snarls certainly haven’t done anything to reinvent the genre, but if you can produce perfect songs like this, there’s absolutely no need to expand the range just for the sake of doing so. More than enough to blend monster hooks, jangly chords, dreamy interludes, and long arcs of shoegaze noise.

Highlights: Walk in the Woods, Falling, Marbles, Burst

11. The Day – Soon I Will Forget

I said above that I’m generally hesitant to rank live albums. And this isn’t even really an album; it’s just four songs selected from a live performance in June during lockdown. But it makes the list anyways because that livestream will forever be a shining memory when I think back on this terrible year.

At the time, I had spent three months in a tiny bubble, with just Caroline and our dog as company. No friends, no events. I literally didn’t step inside a building that wasn’t my own home for seven straight weeks at one point. But I was able to sign into a stream and watch one of my favorite bands together in a big empty room, playing their music, opening their hearts to the world. I spent the whole week floating on a cloud, just remembering what it felt like to connect with other people, taking joy together from our shared experience of something beautiful.

10. Goran Geto – Aтмосфера Два

A blend of ambient elements with driving house beats. It’s deeply meditative, but still active, driving, engaging. The mix is full of sounds from field recordings—mountain streams, birds, wind—which balance the electronic textures nicely to communicate the lived experience of human beings interacting with the natural world.

Highlights: Rtanj (Original Mix), Tornik (Original Mix), Rudnik (Mechanist Retexture)

9. Lawrence Arms – Skeleton Coast

I’m pretty sure that there’s never going to be a Brendan Kelly record I don’t enjoy. This one is certainly no exception. Even if it doesn’t quite match up with the band’s best work. Unlike 2014’s Metropole, which took some steps toward more classic pop forms, this one falls back in their wheelhouse of fast-paced punk rock. At times, the metaphors are laid on a little thick, but with 14 songs spread over just 34 minutes, none ever have enough time to truly wear out their welcome.

Highlights: PTA, Goblin Foxhunt, Pigeons and Spies, Last Last Words, Lose Control

8. Taylor Swift – Folklore

There was absolutely nothing surprising about Taylor Swift releasing a record full of mostly acoustic songs with quiet reflections on youth and lost love. Nor was there anything surprising about critics lauding the more mature turn in her music. Of course that was the next step in her career progression. But while it may have all been inevitable, the context of COVID kept it from feeling overdetermined. And it’s to the credit of the music critic community that there was far less navel-gazing about Taylor and the epistemology of authenticity than I’d have expected. Mostly, people just focused on the songs themselves. And that’s nice, because this is a great collection of songs.

Mirrorball shimmers in the pale light. Betty is a sun-drenched exercise in radical empathy. The Last Great American Dynasty is a joyful romp. Exile is the Bon Iver/Taylor Swift duet that we all obviously needed. Epiphany is the leisurely piano ballad that brings us home at the end of the night. Does it all add up to her best record? Maybe, or maybe not. But it’s certainly the best record she could have released in 2020.

(For what it’s worth, I haven’t had the time to spend with Evermore to really judge it yet, but on first listen it feels significantly inferior to Folklore. If the sense of looseness made the first record feel free and untrammeled, on Evermore it just feels…unedited)

Highlights: Mirrorball, Betty, Exile, Epiphany, The 1, The Last Great American Dynasty

7. Six Organs Of Admittance – Sleep Tones

While designed as music to help you sleep, for me it’s been even more important during the hour before sleep. It’s a time for laying back, reading by candlelight, letting the day soak away. There’s something meditative about it, but it’s not the work of true meditation, just the quiet restoration that comes from relaxed attentiveness. These tracks are almost impossibly sparse in terms of melody—literally just a couple notes worth of movement spread out of twenty minutes. But the sensation is as comforting as the ebb and flow of the tides as they lap up against the distant shore.

Highlights: They are all lovely in their own way, but Alnitak is one of the most beautiful pieces of ambient music I’ve heard in years

6. Katie Pruitt – Expectations

This is a truly comfortable record. But not comfort in the sense of lightness or superficiality. It’s that comfortable feeling that comes from being outside on a cool autumn evening, all wrapped up in a fluffy sweater. The chill nips as you a bit, but that only makes you feel a little more alive. And a little more thankful at the warmth. The title Expectations structures the whole record, which is a true bildungsroman about the pain of growing up. Specifically, the pain of growing up queer in a world that seems to provide no place for you.

“What’s it like to be normal” she muses, before turning to that oh-so-common reply to expectations: “If I could be normal, then trust me, I would.” Of course, it’s not really true. The difference hurts. It’s hurts terribly. But it would hurt even more to shut up that true part of yourself.

Those themes come through most powerfully on the heartfelt Georgia, about the home state that she felt would never accept her. But this is also where the ending is happiest. Now in her mid-20s, putting the finishing touches on this beautiful record, she sent a recording of the song to her mother. Some might have heard it as an accusation, but the thing about expectations is that all of us are still learning how to manage them.

It’s not exactly a happy ending, all smiles with everything tied up in bows. But there’s hope. And that’s enough for now.

Highlights: Georgia, Normal, My Mind’s A Ship (That’s Going Down), Expectations, Grace Has A Gun

5. Hum – Inlet

Hum released two perfect space rock albums in the mid 90s, and then effectively disappeared. It’s always a shame when a band shuffles off the stage while they’re still producing at the highest level. But there’s almost something worse about the bands who keep releasing increasingly inessential work until the initial creative spark is completely smothered. So I didn’t lament too much. I mean, You’d Prefer an Astronaut literally closed with a track called Songs Of Farewell And Departure. It seemed like these guys knew when it was time to drift into the mist. And after all, they’d left us with two shining stars hanging in the sky.

And yet, here we are. A new Hum record in 2020. And defying all the odds, it’s really really good. Just listening to that opening riff on Waves. These guys are not messing around.

In terms of style, it picks right up from Downward is Heavenward, but with a couple decades worth of experience to enrich things on the margins. The surprising result: a deeper sense of optimism. These songs still communicate the grand sweep of time and space—the certainty that all things must pass. But they do so with a greater sensitivity for the time that remains.

Highlights: Waves, Step Into You, Folding, Cloud City, In the Den

4. Grimes – Miss Anthropocene

Each Grimes album is a project of Hegelian Becoming–following from, but also structured in opposition to, her previous record. In this case, Miss Anthropocene is primarily a sublation of Art Angels–extracting the pop elements, fracturing them into pieces, and then reassembling them in new forms. But you can also hear traces of Visions, and even of her more esoteric earlier works. This process of destruction and rebirth can be a little uneven, and that’s certainly true this time around. But there’s more than enough great stuff here to produce a top-class album.

Delete Forever is almost pure folk, poignant, and beautiful. You’ll Miss Me When I’m Not Around is a bit of perfect angular pop. Before the Fever is a quiet dance with fire. And every song has something to offer. But even after spending a year with this record, I still can’t quite make sense of it. There’s a slight bitterness to the final concoction which goes uncut. Then again, I’m not quite sure that’s a bad thing. After all, the world itself is falling apart so why shouldn’t our art represent that fact?

Highlights: You’ll Miss Me When I’m Not Around, Delete Forever, So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth, Before the Fever, 4ÆM

3. sea oleena – Weaving a Basket

Imagine Grouper covering a Stars of the Lid record and you’ll just about hit the mark. These songs are quiet, gossamer thin, and impossibly beautiful. The textures are almost entirely acoustic, but the atmosphere is broadened substantially with deft touches of feedback, double-tracking, tape loops, and other effects. Listen to it as background music and you’ll savor its wistfulness and peacefulness. Listen to it on headphones in a dark room and you’ll find your soul shattered into a million pieces and then put back together again.

Highlights: Horses, Calvisius, Carrying, Will I Know

2. Katie Malco – Failures

A pack of tightly-crafted pop songs built around chiming guitars, resolute drums, and heartfelt lyrics. The record as a whole feels tender, but there’s also a sense of desperation here, of deep loss. It comes from the perspective of someone who finally feels like she might understand what it means to face those fears.

I’ve spent a lot of time this year thinking about this record, and the feelings it evokes in me. And the thing I keep thinking about is this: Failures reminds me of everything that made me want to start a music blog, back in the heady days of the mid-aughts when ‘indie’ was suddenly trendy and the medium allowed us to all talk to each other. There was a joyfulness about finding yet another great artist making great music that you could share with the world. That’s how I feel about Katie Malco, and I’m just a little bit sad that the form isn’t really alive anymore. So all I can do include it here on my year-end list, and encourage everyone out there to listen.

Highlights: Animal, September, Brooklyn, Creatures, The First Snow

1. Gordi – Our Two Skins

By far my most-listened record of the year. I’m pretty sure you could cut the number of times I listened to it in half, it would still be first on the list.

These songs are highly specific to a particular moment, place, and person: a young woman in Australia in the 2010s, queer and just coming out to her family, a grandmother who has shaped her life on the verge of passing into the next world. But that specificity is precisely what makes it feel so universal. This is a record for anyone who experienced the love of family, the trauma of loss, the terror of exposing your true self to the world, the even deeper terror of exposing your true self to yourself.

Each track is brimming with warmth—from the effervescent Unready to the open-hearted Limits to the stubborn hopefulness of Hate the World. As always, her arrangements are impeccable but the studio effects have been dialed back a bit—enough to build a stage but still leaving plenty of room for the imagination to work. The result is something that feels grand in terms of its reach but also intimate in terms of its scale.

I would have loved this record no matter when it was released. But it felt particularly essential this year. It arrived in June, at a time when the drain of separation from friends and the social world was starting to feel like a new normal. Listening to it breathed life back into me, lifted me up, and helped me to find new reasons to feel hopeful. And for that I am endlessly thankful.

Highlights: Extraordinary Life, Unready, Volcanic, Sandwiches, Limits, Free Association

Honorable mentions:

• Recondite – Dwell
• Ólafur Arnalds – Some Kind of Peace
• Vanessa Peters – Mixtape
• Run the Jewels – RTJ4
• Dua Lipa – Future Nostalgia
• Beach Bunny – Honeymoon
• Hammock – Into the Blank / Madi
• Ratboys – Printer’s Devil
• Bxnjamin – Some Colour Us Mad (SCUM)
• Cloud Nothings – The Black Hole Understands

For me, the last few years have often felt like a process of constant motion. Travel has taken me all around the US, all around the world. I’ve spent countless hours on airplanes, on trains, in cars, on subways. So much of that time was spent listening to music. The songs that defined those periods therefore have an intense association with place and time.

This year has obviously been different. When I hear these songs, I process them together, as the soundtrack to a tightly-wound experience of place and time. As I listen, the seasons slowly change, while I sit motionless. Waiting. Simply waiting.

There’s something lost in that process. And I do wonder how I will process these songs in coming years. Will they have etched themselves as deeply? Will I feel them with the same burning force? I hope so. Because these are wonderful tracks, from one to fifty. They’ve done a lot to brighten my year, when it has been sorely needed. I hope that sharing them will bring you some joy as well.

As always, these are just my favorites, not a claim about what was objectively the best. One song per artist.

I’ve created a Spotify list, but Spotify pays artists effectively nothing so please if you like the music, go buy it. Almost every artist here is available on Bandcamp–including a few who aren’t on Spotify at all.

50. There Is a Space in Between – Lucy Gooch
There’s something powerful about liminal spaces–between memory and forgetting, between the sacred and profane, between heaven and earth, between self and other. What do we make of them? What do they make of us?

49. Angel School Anthem – STAR
An early 90s throwback in terms of style–with the atmospherics of a lost My Bloody Valentine or Ride cut–but the sentiment is pretty 2020: “When they say everything’s okay, it’s time to panic.”

48. Partir dans la nuit – Carla Bruni
The title translates to ‘go into the night,’ and it speaks to the joy of quiet spaces, of setting yourself free and waking up fresh in a bright new world.

47. The Lure Follows The Line – Eerie Gaits
The slow wash of sounds is deeply soothing, like a warm summer breeze bringing you the smell of the ocean in the distance.

46. Living Life – Steady Holiday
One of the things I’ve desperately missed this year is the tiny interactions that come when you’re out in the world. Those moments that make you feel just a little bit closer our shared experience of humanity. Where we look at each other and share a little knowing smile, and then return to our own worlds.

45. Note To Self (ft. Empress Of) – Jim-E Stack
A simple vehicle of bits and bops, perfectly designed to lift up Lorely Rodriguez’s voice and let it shine.

44. Rain On Me (feat. Ariana Grande) – Lady Gaga
“I’d rather be dry, but at least I’m alive” seems like a pretty workable rallying cry for those of us who made it to the end of 2020.

43. GREYHOUND – Petite League
A grungy little song about love in dark times, or possibly about dark times in love. Reminds me a lot of Sebadoh, particularly in the guitar breakdown that comes about halfway through.

42. not a lot just forever – adrianne lenker
The delicate guitar picking, the wrenching vocals, the quiet desperation. An emotional hurricane.

41. The Beauty of the Universe (ft. Mimi Page) – Yuta Itani & ミミ ページ
A collaboration between Japanese ambient artist Yuta Itani and American composer and singer Mimi Page. It’s languid, soft, soothing. A moment of tranquility in a turbulent world.

40. The Ascension – Sufjan Stevens
An unrelentingly bleak song, rendered with such grace and awareness that it still feels holy. I can’t quite tell if that’s an example of Stevens’ genius overwhelming the intent, or whether it’s a perfectly intentional expression of the contradiction inherent in belief. Either way, it’s a majestic experience.

39. Skeleton Couch – Seablite
60s girl group vibes filtered through some 80s post-punk fuzz. What’s not to love?

38. When the Smoke Clears – Jasper Lotti
Self-described as dystopian pop, which is perfectly apt. When she sings “tell me the time and the place” it sounds equal parts tender and threatening.

37. Other Side of the Wheel – Nadia Reid
I love Nadia Reid for the sparseness of her songwriting, the way she takes empty spaces and makes them sing. So it’s a little surprising that my favorite song from this record was one of the most traditional. There are still touches of strangeness, but it’s really just a lovely little folk-inspired pop song. Which, fair enough.

36. Cursed – Kllo
Quiet, introspective electro-pop, with glitchy beats designed to unsettle you. Silky-smooth vocals to bring everything back home.

35. Sunlight – Radical Face
The chorus begins “Could you share a little piece of your sunlight?” and that feels like an appropriate mission statement for a song that begins in the dark night, with crickets chirping and the daylight far away and concludes in the warm light of dawn.

34. Scene Suspended – Jon Hopkins
Nothing but a piano and light touches from a violin. It’s the sound of a morning sunrise after a long night, and the promise of warmth that it brings.

33. Gap Tooth (On My Mind) – Best Ex
A sugary sweet synthpop song that’s actually almost too sugary in its construction. But the bitterness of the lyric sharpens the edge, and makes the eventual turn toward self-care all the more fulfilling.

32. Dammit – Jenny Owen Youngs and Charlatan
It’s been almost fifteen years since a Jenny Owen Youngs song has made an appearance on the blog. Not because she hasn’t produced anything of note in that time; I’ve just never quite felt the need to write something up. I never would have guessed that the song to break the streak would be Blink-182 cover. But here we are. It’s actually from an entire album of Dammit covers (28 of them!), which…I don’t really know where to go with that.

31. No Clue – The Northern Belle
I remember the first time I heard Americana by way of Scandinavia, and I found the concept to be hilarious and fun. Many years on, and it no longer feels hilarious. Some of the finest Nashville tunes of recent years have come from the far north. The Northern Belle are a 7-piece band from Norway, and they continue the tradition in fine form. “I only want what’s best for you” she sings over the weeping pedal steel, and everything feels alright with the world.

30. Rtanj (Original Mix) – Goran Geto
If you could discover an equation capable of expressing the intersections of life and the physical world–everything from photosynthesis to the transfer of carbon dioxide and oxygen to struggle between hunter and prey–and then translated it into music, I think it would sound like this.

29. Generation Loss – Spanish Love Songs
The punk rock melodrama grows a little heavy when taken together in a whole album, but in small doses–like this song–it’s pure catharsis.

28. Lonely After – Yumi Zouma
A perfect indie pop song. The synths are light, the harmonies rich, and the songcraft is deft. If it risks feeling just a touch evanescent, that warm bass line grabs hold and pulls you back in for more.

27. Mother – Eve Owen
A song that builds and builds toward an epic crescendo. But it’s wonderful genius is that each step up the track comes as a surprise. Even after dozens and dozens of listens, I’m continually blindsided.

26. Silence – I Break Horses
When I was in Paris last year, I visited the Centre Pompidou where I saw an exhibit on light and movement. Semi-circular objects twisting and twirling to follow a designated path. If you didn’t look closely, they looked like the normal hypnotic circles you’ve seen many times before. But if you stayed with them, you discovered peculiarities–light echoes falling in strange directions. Your mind wanted to impose order, but if you looked just the right way you could open yourself to the uncertainty and experience the regularity as another type of chaos.

25. Local Radio – BAD MOVES
You work in a restaurant for less than minimum wage waiting tables for influence-peddlers and then play a show in the evening for 20-somethings still trying to convince themselves that they can live out their ideals. Everyone thinks that things should be better. No one seems to be able to actually do anything to make it happen.

24. Walking In The Snow – Run The Jewels
Released a month or so before the murder of George Floyd, but eerily prescient of what was to come. Every year is a good year for a Run the Jewels album but 2020 needed one in an existential way. The key thing they bring–which comes through on this song–is a balance of righteous outrage and genuine joyfulness. Both are necessary. There is no sustenance in rehashing the pain and suffering alone. You also need to find reasons to laugh, reasons to love, reasons to believe.

23. Siberian Butterfly – Bob Mould
Bob Mould is making some of the best music of his career these days, and this song is probably my favorite from him in decades. It’s a two minute burst of energy which begins as a critique of those who feel the need to capture natural things, to build collections, then transitions to a larger critique of our attitude toward the natural world as a whole, and concludes as an exultation of freedom and self-love (“Every Sunday the local men gather up at the barn and when the sun goes down the sky is filled with rainbow butterflies”). All in two minutes!

22. Out of Sight – The Beths
Delicate notes that bob and weave over you. But as it develops, the spine grows stronger. What began as a shimmery little pop song becomes an emphatic shoegaze explosion. You feel them reaching out over the distance, trying to bridge the gap.

21. Ms. California – Beach Bunny
A breezy California love song, but sung from the perspective of someone on the outside, filled with bitterness at losing out. The whininess hits precisely the right note–enough to feel genuine, but not so much to suggest genuine trauma. This is a song of adolescent frustrations–the perverse feeling of pleasure you get from dwelling on the pain. The way the object of your affection is understood primarily through your experience of loss.

20. Can’t Go Back – PRIZM
The New Wave is now four decades old, but it still sparkles and shines like a brand new jewel here.

19. Love Again – Dua Lipa
Most of the songs on this record failed to truly thrill me. They’re all good and I enjoyed listening to it plenty. But this is the only one that burrowed its way deep into me. That’s partly because of the wonderful sample–to my ears is inextricably linked to White Town’s late-90s classic Your Woman, but I was surprised to discover it’s actually itself a sample from a song called My Woman by Al Bowlly. Which makes this a third iteration on the theme, and all the more thrilling for that fact.

18. Mirrorball – Taylor Swift
Her genius has never been about carving out new pathways; it’s been about figuring out precisely what she wants to evoke and then evoking the absolute bejeezus out of it. This time she wanted to evoke Sarah McLachlan, and holy hell did it work.

17. Notice that, – Benoît Pioulard
A diaphanous bubble drifting over the hillside. You look back, aching for that which has been left behind. You take a deep breath, savor the feeling of new possibility to come.

16. when i look at you. – Rosie Carney
A breakup song, but one that’s far more about the trauma that comes from within. The way you relied on someone else to keep you afloat, and the abject terror when that anchor begins to drift away. It’s a terrifying song, but also an achingly beautiful one.

15. For Those We Knew (feat. Mimi Page) – Jody Wisternoff
I almost always have a song from Mimi Page on these lists, since I love her own music and she also has excellent taste in collaboration projects. This track is her second appearance for 2020. Where the Yuta Itani collaboration above was all atmospherics and textures, this one is a gentle but insistent deep house track. Page’s vocals are bright-eyed and piercingly clear, providing the perfect counterpoint to the ebbing and flowing violin.

14. Don’t Tell Me – glimmers
Sometimes a band’s name so perfectly encapsulates their sound that there’s almost nothing left to say. That’s definitely the case with glimmers. This song hits me like a ton of bricks today. I think it would have literally broken me if I’d heard it twenty years ago.

13. Georgia – Katie Pruitt
A song written to her home state that she felt would never accept her. And to the family that she worried wouldn’t either. It sounds like her family was able to come around. And of course Georgia has been in the news a lot this year for turning ever-so-slightly blue. Which is certainly not to say the troubles are over. But it feels like a moment of possibility and hope. That the next generation of kids growing up queer in the state might find more acceptance, more love, more room to be themselves.

12. PTA – The Lawrence Arms
A scorching bit of punk rock from some of the best in the business. The final line kills me: “Remember? We used to hold hands / Now, I just go out alone when I need to dance.”

11. Helpless (Feat. Old Crow Medicine Show) – Molly Tuttle
One of my favorite Neil Young songs, and one that I’ve always felt could only be captured in his voice. But Molly Tuttle managed to make it very much her own. The etherealness is replaced with warmth, turning this beautiful song into a wondrous campfire sing-a-long.

10. Sounds Are Fine – Sophie Moon
A balm on my soul. In the longest days of the spring lockdown, when I had spent several months wholly removed from the world, this beautiful song found its way into the world. It was written by Mike Park (one of the few truly Good Guys in the music world) and sung as a duet between between Dan Adriano of Alkaline Trio and his daughter. It is good and right and never fails to make me smile.

9. I See You – Phoebe Bridgers
It’s a strange thing when an artist that you’ve closely followed for years has a huge breakout year. It’s even stranger when it’s for an album that mostly left you cold. Try as I might, I just couldn’t find a way into Punisher. With one exception: this song. It wrecks me in the way that the whole album seems to wreck everyone else.

8. Alnitak – Six Organs Of Admittance
Given its 20 minute running time, this is probably the song I’ve spent the most actual minutes listening to this year. It hangs over your shoulders like a warm scarf, asking nothing of you except the opportunity to keep you warm and safe.

7. You’ll miss me when I’m not around – Grimes
It’s a killer track on its own, with one of the purest melodies she’s ever constructed. But it’s also one of those tracks that gains strength in context. To my ears, this track and Delete Forever are the tentpoles that hold up the rest of Miss Anthropocene–and therefore create the potential for all the darkness that lurks within.

6. Animal – Katie Malco
A strong competitor for chorus of the year, and it’s not even the best part of the song. The best part of the song is the instrumental breakdown that serves as the bridge between moments of catharsis.

5. Waves – Hum
A missive launched into the cold dark night sky. It leaves behind a blistering trail of heat and light and thundering echoes of what might have been.

4. Horses – sea oleena
A single exhalation stretched out to twelve minutes. Heart-wrenching, pure as a mountain stream, effortlessly soft, impossibly beautiful.

3. Walk In The Woods – snarls
Shimmering guitars, a warm bass line, soaring vocals. It’s already perfect, and then they somehow rocket things up another level in the final chorus and I burst into a million pieces. Technically released in 2019, but I missed it, and the album is from 2020, so I’m absolutely counting it.

2. Extraordinary Life – Gordi
Most of the great love songs are really songs about infatuation, the early blush of love, the excitement and anticipation. This is something better. John Lennon called the final verse of The End a ‘cosmic line.’ I think fits here as well. It seems to me that there is no higher expression of love than: “I want to give you an extraordinary life.”

1. Tenderfoot – The Day
It was originally by Smudge, but I always knew Tenderfoot as a Lemonheads track–with that classic Evan Dando crackle being its defining characteristic. And while I like that version just fine, I would never in a million years have guessed that a new cover would end up as my favorite song of 2020. But to borrow from Vin Scully: in a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened. What began as a scuzzy drunker brawler of a song has been utterly transformed. This reimagination massively expands the sonic palette, significantly softening the edges in the process. The result is absolutely glorious. A song I could listen to on repeat for days and never get tired of hearing. It just makes me smile so much. And in 2020, that’s the greatest gift I could ask for.