Paste's 50 Best Albums of 2020

The result is Dehd’s best album to date, a significant upgrade on their sound that finds their Windy City DIY scene-honed amalgam of surf rock, shoegaze and dream pop at its most melodic and expressive.

Celebrated By Strangers offers endless, off-the-wall playfulness and lines of hopeful sincerity. Surely the only people who wouldn’t want that are the characters they skewer here.

The Baby is teeming with exceptional depth and pop/rock hooks that ascend effortlessly.

WIMPIII impressively leads us to believe that the best could still be on HAIM’s horizons.

After making such a peppy, instant classic debut, they weren’t intimidated by the thought of a Sunday stroll album, and they reached newfound emotional and sonic heights in making one.

Mitchell, Johnson and Kaufman zeroed in on their goal: to give ancient songs a contemporary twist, and to surround the timeless feelings expressed in those songs with drop-dead gorgeous string and vocal arrangements.

The concept behind the music can only be as moving as the music itself, and, thankfully, Protomartyr delivers. The band’s knack for meaty percussion and jagged guitars continues.

Shore doesn’t ask much of us—it merely shines into the room where you’re sitting, bringing in light like early morning sunbeams.

Elverum’s work proves as expansive as ever. An engrossing one-track album is no easy feat, but he draws us in with expertly rich, layered lyricism and immersive production.

The record, with all its idiosyncrasies, will be remembered as a definitive piece by one of our era’s most important rock icons—a pop star as transgressive and rule-breaking as the legends of the ’70s and ’80s we take for granted now.

It trades Poem’s jagged punchiness for overflowing empathy, coalescing as a meditative and challenging album.

If Kelly Lee Owens gently opened the door between dream pop and techno, Inner Song rushes through it and builds a world where ecstatic, curative, untethered electronic sounds abound.

It Is What It Is isn’t so much a showcase for the bass, though. Instead, it functions more as a modern-day love letter to a certain bandwidth of the R&B spectrum that we would all do well to rediscover.

Her sophomore album Punisher cements what may be Bridgers’ most understated gift of all: her seemingly innate ability to capture the mundanity of modern sadness in song.

The result is a body of work that often feels indispensable. Isbell is a songwriter’s songwriter, but the songs that result are for all of us.

Coupled with some of the loosest, most pop-minded production of Snaith’s career, Suddenly becomes a glimmer of optimism, immaculate music for communal grief and celebration. In that, it’s the most vital album of his career.

Perhaps the only thing more exciting than græ will be seeing where Moses Sumney goes from here.

Adrianne Lenker’s songs is beautiful and ugly in all the best ways.

Sawayama is an exhilarating reminder of a bygone time when boy bands ruled all and commercialism ruled the boy bands. That era is long gone, but that particular brand of maximalist pop is back, only better now than before.

color theory is an astounding feat of lyricism as clever as it is devastating.

Every Bad is the nuanced album that indie rock has needed for years.

His effort to overcome the body-brain gulf is more apparent than ever throughout No Shape follow-up Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, on which Hadreas loses control of not just his body, but his heart. As ever, his voice and music contort and warp in tandem with his anatomy.

Saint Cloud is the sound of Katie Crutchfield at her most conscious, comfortable and controlled.

Apple tackles a similar range of emotions on Fetch the Bolt Cutters that she has dealt with before, but in a new, fiercer way.