Exclaim!'s 50 Best Albums of 2020

Free I.H: This Is Not The One You've Been Waiting For is Illuminati Hotties defying the record industry while balancing purposefulness and playfulness at the same time.

Shore is a return to the band's roots, but with a potent acknowledgment that much has changed in the interim — like visiting your hometown and wandering around the streets, taking in all the familiar sights, sounds and smells while pointing out all the differences.

Despite the underwhelming musicality of Total Freedom, many of these songs still pack some undeniable emotional force.

Back with arguably more certified bangers than before, clipping. throws caution to the wind with soul-rending sonics and elite-tier rapping.

The feel-good nature of Future Nostalgia is enough to momentarily divert our attention from the stress-inducing state of the world.

Lenker's work continues to reimagine love and loss, and albums like songs are her way of turning those complex emotions into something timeless.

Their fourth LP, Underneath, has every nuance they have ever dabbled with shifted into overdrive.

A darker and more complex record, it displays a newfound maturity in Allison's arrangements and a decidedly higher set of stakes.

It's a thorny and ferocious record that beats emotional complexities into their most elemental form, each simple mantra or thunderous guitar containing mountains of unspoken meaning.

Prince offers himself as an anchor for those feeling rudderless. This is the artist at his most inspirational, thankful and powerful.

La Havas's third full-length record is fluid with feeling, and evidence that she has fully come into her own. Lianne La Havas is a masterpiece of vulnerability charting the path of a heart in the throes of new love.

2017-2019 is the music we need in 2020: ambitious, fearless and provocative.

However difficult it might be to ingest his candour, there is also a maturity about Miller in which to take solace. There's a sense of growth and lessons learned.

The conversation surrounding Jessie Ware's luxurious What's Your Pleasure? has been a tug of war between reinvention and return to form — is it a bold new frontier or a homecoming to the dance music of her debut? The answer, it turns out, is both and neither.

While the Weeknd's sound has veered off track from his early feel in the past, After Hours gives fans the closest taste to Trilogy that they will get.

This is Elverum's indelible stamp of style, distilled into a single track that flows like waves in the ocean or hills on the mountainside.

Where it ultimately stands within her catalogue will take more time to decipher, but folklore nonetheless feels like a watershed moment for Swift. It's proof positive that she's one of our better pop chameleons, and a palette cleanser after several intriguing, if sometimes questionable, sonic detours.

It may very well be his most challenging and ambitious undertaking to date as well as a sign of the new era of Stevens to come.

Saint Cloud is a refreshing listen from an exceptional singer-songwriter that shatters the myth of hard-living artists and proves that great artists can make great art without a drink.

Despite its digressions, Have We Met is rich and varied enough to offer more than just throwback thrills. It's further proof that amid both destruction and devotion, Bejar's voice remains compelling.

This sounds like the logical followup to 2015's Art Angels. It's a little darker and heavier than that prior record's vibrant palette, but it still has everything we've come to expect from Grimes.

The Neon Skyline is a crystallization of everything Shauf has been working meticulously to perfect throughout his rise to international acclaim — his characterization, world-building and ear for arrangements.

It Is What It Is manifests as a beautiful ebb and flow of emotional states, philosophical musings and plain old comedy.

Heavy Light, the remarkable new record from Meg Remy's U.S. Girls project, is a scavenger hunt for these elusive pasts — music devoted to reflection and retrospection.

Rough and Rowdy Ways is the work of a man in love with language and philosophy, and, at 79, he continues to take the pulse of the zeitgeist with unerring precision.

It's the sound of a new kind of warped pop star — an artist capable of weaving the unending unknown of space and the throb of blood and skin, willing to take us and destroy us and create something wholly new from what remains.

Miss Colombia displays an artist who has a clear vision combined with a desire to experiment with sounds.

Suddenly is a fresh perspective shift that encourages listeners to examine the bigger forces at play that act as a catalyst for change.

Bridgers gives you the moon on Punisher. Which is to say that she gives you everything that you are looking for in a Phoebe Bridgers album but still manages to make it feel miraculous and larger than life.

The scope of Fetch the Bolt Cutters' meaning, its infinite feeling, will likely take years to fully absorb. An album like this doesn't come often, and an artist like Apple will never come again — she's given us an invaluable piece of light, a reminder to stay alive and awake and angry and kind.