The Best Sounds of a Terrible Year

Good news, everybody! 2020 is half over!

This year has been a dumpster fire in countless ways, but at least it’s given us some genuinely great music. To mark the halfway point of this weird-ass year, I thought I’d throw together a playlist of my favorite songs of 2020 (so far). That link is at the bottom of this post. I’m also going to do a quick(ish) run-down of a few of my favorite albums, because it’s always fun to look back at the end of the year and see where things stood in the summer.

Waxahatchee – St. Cloud

This has been my favorite 2020 album since the first time I heard it, and it’s going to be hard for anything else I hear this year to change that. From beginning to end, St. Cloud is a gorgeous collection that finds Katie Crutchfield stretching in all kinds of new directions musically and thematically. Even songs that seem light and airy on first listen are clever vehicles for delivering smart, contemplative lyrics that make you think as much as you feel.

It’s strange how songs this clearly personal and introspective are capable of striking such universal chords. And lord, it’s refreshing to hear emotionally intelligent, literate songs about romantic love and self-acceptance in a musical landscape littered with clichés. In a year that’s been incredibly taxing on a number of fronts, it’s nice to have an album that soothes even as it encourages you confront yourself. St. Cloud is ultimately about honesty, and that’s pretty much the best thing we can find (and take) from a year like this.

Phoebe Bridgers – Punisher

I’m going to be honest here: I didn’t think Punisher was going to be this good. I love everything Phoebe Bridgers has done in her relatively short career (including her collaborative projects boygenius and Better Oblivion Community Center), but I really thought Stranger in the Alps was one of those lightning-in-a-bottle debut albums whose strength couldn’t be replicated. I was wrong. Punisher is the album you listen to late at night when you're drinking wine, remembering all your mistakes, and resolving to get your shit together. Phoebe’s voice is distinct and unmistakable, and Punisher invites you into a dreamscape world where broken people remember what got them there and hope that maybe one day they’ll be able to put themselves together again. But until they do, at least there's a lot of beauty all around.

Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit – Reunions

Like Waxahatchee’s St. Cloud, Reunions is all over the place stylistically. But that’s always what Jason Isbell does best. His strongest songs sound nothing like each other, and Reunions benefits from reaching in a dozen different directions at once. Isbell is one of America’s great musical storytellers right now, and Reunions covers a lot of narrative ground: parents saying goodbye to their grown kids, childhood summers tainted by family instability, the constant struggle of recovery, comforting your significant other after a tough loss, and the difficulty of trying to do the right thing in a world gone mad. Backed by the muscular sounds of the 400 unit and the violin of his wife and collaborator Amanda Shires, Isbell dropped this album in the middle of a pandemic and an election cycle that's tearing us apart. Reunions is a timely album that reminds us that there are a lot of threads still holding us together.

Run the Jewels – RTJ4

If there’s a soundtrack to the racial reckoning America is currently undergoing, RTJ4 is it. Remember that scene in Pulp Fiction where Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) threatens to “strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers?” Well, Killer Mike and El-P are here to deliver. Facing a country grappling with the Black Lives Matters movement, increased scrutiny of police brutality, and growing socioeconomic disparity, Run the Jewels blow up some fireworks and shine a harsh, loud, unapologetic light on all of it. Even songs with ridiculous names like “Goonies vs. E.T.” (my favorite song on the album) are packed full of righteous anger, and the thunderous “JU$T” revolves around the unforgettable hook “Look at all these slave masters, posin’ on yo dollar.” RTJ4 has managed to brilliantly channel the bottled-up angst a lot of us have been feeling the last few months, and this is undoubtedly the most cathartic album I’ve heard this year.

Pinegrove – Marigold

This is another one I didn’t expect to love as much as I did. Pinegrove’s Cardinal is one of my five favorite albums of the last decade, and it looked like the band was headed toward great things after its release and tour. But when lead singer/songwriter Evan Stephens Hall was sidetracked by some pretty serious accusations in 2017 and Pinegrove took an entire year off from touring, it looked like Pinegrove might just flame out. Their second album, Skylight (which was recorded before the band’s hiatus) fell flat and didn’t live up to the promise of Cardinal. Marigold, though, returns to a lot of what drew fans to Pinegrove to begin with.

It would be easy to dismiss Marigold as an intimate, overly personal experiment in indie rock navel-gazing. But the band’s experimentalism here has a purpose that goes beyond self-indulgence. Hall’s lyrics might be insular and his delivery eclectic and unpolished, but there’s something to be said for finding meaning and beauty in quiet solitude and reflection. This album was made and released before any of the terrible 2020 things started happening, but it’s album that seems like it was crafted specifically for this moment—one where being trapped and taking account of our lives in our houses and our heads is the healthiest, most productive thing we can possibly do.

. . . . . . . .

Okay, those are the five albums I’ve returned to repeatedly this year. A couple other 2020 albums are sentimental favorites, so it’s hard for me to hear them with an objective ear. Tennis and Destroyer are the last bands I saw live before the coronavirus lockdown happened. They both released new albums early this year. I’m not sure if they hold up to the five albums I described above, but I like them both a lot. And I’ll be grateful to both bands for giving me some great live music before every-damned-thing got locked down.

If you’re looking for more to listen to this summer, here’s a list of other albums I’ve enjoyed and listened to a lot this year: