Beats Per Minute's Top 50 Albums of 2020

This latest effort does nothing to upset that impressive trend, comprising their most sophisticated sound and presentation yet, seeing them grow beyond youthful exuberance to deliver pop with a bit more of a weathered, knowing edge.

Read has opened up immensely on both an emotional and musical level, resulting in her most resonant body of work yet.

Lament will be another great tool and guide for coping with this grey existence – especially when we’ll all eventually get to revel in it together and heal as one.

He may have been on the fringes until now, but with Live Forever, one of the year’s most daring records, he signals his intent – this is an artist not merely requesting his seat at the table, but demanding it.

NO DREAM channels the precise anger and weariness that has surfaced from what CNN’s Don Lemon recently deemed two deadly viruses killing Americans: COVID-19 and racism.

With true, human conflict between happiness and sadness on full display, Man Alive! is unequivocally King Krule’s, or better yet, Archy Marshall’s most sobering work yet.

If nothing else, Lianne La Havas should be a testament to one of the best songwriters occupying that intersection of pop, R&B, and art rock right now.

Her new album, Song For Our Daughter, is the first record she has written away from the road, and the evidence is there in the sometimes homely feel and the dulled theatrical flair.

The main difference between Stranger in the Alps and Punisher is simply maturation of her writing, which might well have come from working with so many talented songwriters in the last couple of years – but you would never mistake one of Bridgers’ songs for anyone else’s.

While remaining delicate throughout. Windswept Adan is a landscape, an aquatic world to be lost within, and one from which you’ll scarcely want to emerge.

From the Krautrock-leaning ripper “Tunnel Vision” to their dystopian Devo impersonation “Ouster Stew”, Crack Cloud explore the cracks and crevices of punk and new wave to the deepest and most feral depths.

With a wide range of enjoyment coming from each cut, Ohms further cements Deftones as the premier mainstream rock band to reinvent themselves every decade.

Heaven To A Tortured Mind is the kind of album that challenges listeners sonically and lyrically, and makes absolutely no bones about it.

Room For The Moon takes that fantastical potential and runs with it, creating an utterly unique and engrossing album that will set your imagination afloat in a world of possibility.

It seems unlikely that writing and recording songs and instrumentals allowed Lenker to fully heal her heart, but in among its living, breathing atmosphere are signs of new life and new hope.

She has found a finer balance between her more abstract images and cutting to the quick, which makes her gentle poetry more impactful than ever.

Grӕ is so rich in content and so vast in musicality it would be impossible to unpack everything in a single review. It is complex yet universal – comforting yet unsettling. It lives in an incorporeal realm of its own, and somehow, Sumney has gained complete and utter command over it.

TAKE ME AWAY FROM TOKYO is sinewy, lean yet complex, it’s absolutely throbbing at near all times. It’s both inviting and hostile.

What really strikes you upon listening to Island is the cinematic sweep of its overall structure ... Island bears the influence of Pallett’s forays into modern classical and soundtrack composition; this doesn’t feel like a mere collection of separate songs with each containing its own crescendo.

Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, for its part, feels like a culmination and natural progression of all that has come before.

Anime, Trauma and Divorce is a self-help rap record that manages to be heart-breaking and humorous at the same time, and never takes its audience for granted, which is a rare find in any medium.