2020 has been a strange year. We all know that. Live music hasn’t really been a thing since March, and so many more people get to listen to music throughout the day thanks to working from home being much more common than it was before March. I think both of these things have probably influenced my list of favourite albums this year, and so I’m going to split it into two lists – one of traditional albums that are best listened to in sequence, and one of the music that soundtracked my working days during those rare few moments when I was not in Zoom or Teams meetings.
Looking down the lists I can see I’ve very much been influenced by the live music I did get to encounter this year (at the 6 Music Festival mainly), and also by the 130+ listening parties I did since live music dried up in March (which I wrote about here and here). I do hope I’ll be able to experience live music again next year, but I also very much hope that listening parties are still something that artists see as a valuable way of connecting with their fans.
In all cases the links below are to somewhere you can listen to and/or buy the record in question (Bandcamp or the artist’s own website). There’s a lot of music here, but hopefully some of it will appeal to someone.
First off we have my list of albums. It’s quite an angry list but I think that’s a fair comment on this year:
- Another Sky – I Slept on the Floor
- Ben Lukas Boysen – Mirage
- The Big Moon – Walking Like We Do
- Bob Vylan – We Live Here
- Destroyer – Have We Met
- Dream Wife – So When You Gonna…
- Fontaines DC – A Hero’s Death
- Hawkwind Light Orchestra – Carnivorous
- Hey Colossus – Dances / Curses
- IDLES – Ultra Mono
- Jehnny Beth – To Love is to Live
- Julian Cope – Self Civil War
- Lanterns on the Lake – Spook the Herd
- Levellers – Peace
- Paul McCartney – McCartney III
- Mr Bungle – The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny Demo
- Nadine Shah – Kitchen Sink
- Osees – Protean Threat
- Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs – Viscerals
- Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever – Sideways to New Italy
- SAULT – UNTITLED (Black Is)
- SAULT – UNTITLED (Rise)
- The Soft Pink Truth – Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?
- Sonic Boom – All Things Being Equal
- Taylor Swift – folklore
- Taylor Swift – evermore
- Tim Burgess – I Love the New Sky
- The Waterboys – Good Luck Seeker
- Wire – Mind Hive
And then the list of compilations, soundtracks, live albums, instrumentals and other things that kept me soothed during this turbulant year:
- Aidan Baker – An Instance of Rising/Liminoid
- A-Sun Amissa – Black Rain (I)
- British Sea Power – Disco Elysium
- Bulbils – (50 different albums released during lockdown all available from Bandcamp)
- Edward Ka-Spel – The Singles (expanded)
- Legendary Pink Dots – (4 compilations, many live albums – see their Bandcamp page for more details)
- Mogwai – ZEROZEROZERO
- Nine Inch Nails – Ghosts V: Together / Ghosts VI: Locusts
- Penfriend – No album yet, just some great songs
- The Twilight Sad – IT WON/T BE LIKE THIS ALL THE TIME LIVE
- The Twilight Sad – Oran Mor 2020