Her most recent, the staggeringly good The Idler Wheel… arrived in 2012. But Shauf ties those scenes together with emotional insight and an artful touch, soundtracked by luscious retro pop-rock arrangements that make the story feel timeless despite its meticulous sense of place. 86. SAWAYAMA combines the now-refreshing maximalism of early 2000s pop and rock and fleshes it out with some more detailed, left-field production courtesy of co-producer Clarence Clarity, resulting in one of the most daring pop albums of the year so far. Fetch The Bolt Cutters is meant to completely overtake you, and it does. Let it wash you away. But we simply have no choice but to persevere. It’s overflowing with ideas and dense arrangements, and Sumney is able to move between disparate sounds through the sheer will of his voice alone.

And yet, it doesn’t romanticize death as much as it yields up to it, and with searing force.

NME. Aided by Bullion’s crystalline electronic textures, Westerman uses his transfixing voice and serpentine guitar to perfect his singular sound, reaching for the horizon in “Waiting On Design” or conjuring yet another sublime, glimmering vision of a pop song in “Blue Comanche.” Your hero is indeed far from dead — he’s just now assuming the mantle. Across Warnings, Lindén grapples with crumbling relationships and nearly losing friends; she sifts through wreckages and specters. But now Manning-Walker has reinvented himself as Chubby Charles, and he’s put together a band that draws on a rich historical strain of British working-class rock: glam, pub-rock, street-punk. - Release date: March 13, 2020. How do we make things better and dig ourselves out of a hole—especially if we don’t see the hole or if that hole has become comfortable? Clocking in at just over an hour long, the album is a vast landscape of words and sounds that stretch far across the artistic spectrum, but at the same time feel very much like members of the same extended family. But they also have sticky, soaring choruses and big arena-rock riffs and a singer, Jimmy Wizard, who sounds like what might’ve happened if circa-1990 Perry Farrell got really into lifting weights. In many ways, 2018’s Safe in the Hands of Love was Tumor’s official rockstar moment. She uses the textures of everyday life to construct sing-songy hymns that sound like macaroni art. But “Ten Year Town,” now the opener on Whitters’ new album The Dream—which she fully funded herself with money she earned waiting tables and plucked from her savings—doesn’t feel sorry for itself, or bemoan a geographical situation. But once you get settled in her groove, her mumblings blossom into sturdy hooks, and her songs become comforting celebrations of friendship and creation. With 2018’s Clean, Sophie Allison aka Soccer Mommy recalibrated her sound to deliver a punchy yet strikingly vulnerable slice of infectious indie rock. –James, Imagine you’re climbing a mountain in a raging windstorm to fight a dragon. What we said: “Leithauser performs with his customary passion, and this marks a pleasing new direction for a singular talent.” Read the full review. Informed by the claustrophobic atmosphere of our times, Have We Met is cerebral and absurd even by Bejar’s standards. Quinlan has long had one of the best voices in indie rock, so why not essentially subtract everything else and give it 100 percent of the spotlight? Posthumous albums are notoriously hard to get right – labels will do anything they can to cash into the popularity of artists gone too soon by exploiting whatever bits and pieces they left behind. The critically acclaimed artist released her seventh solo album, “Pick Me Up Off the Floor,” which compiles ballads about melancholy, hurt, and loneliness—and the strength to get through it all. But it also rules. Chubby And The Gang, in other words, make a supremely British version of bar-rock, turning knucklehead soccer-hooligan chants into poetry. D’Agostino’s debut album as Empty Country plays like a drive through the heartland, except instead of coast to coast it takes you to the 1980s and back. –Ryan, How’s this for some truth in advertising: Introduction, Presence is a hell of an introduction with presence to spare. His libido remains rampant, but he searches his soul more deeply than ever. - Metascore: 83 Despite coming from turmoil, Marling’s songs — the lilting sigh “Held Down,” the catchy “Alexandra” and “Strange Girl,” the raw and sparse “For You” — are able to harness beauty hidden within the ugliness surrounding us. Saint Cloud is Crutchfield’s country/Americana record. Their recent parted/departed/apart is all visceral force and unhinged rage — the sound of winding up so tightly that your tension becomes a weapon to be deployed like a flamethrower. Silver Tongue, TORRES’ excellent fourth album—and first for Merge—is the result of that defiant burst. by: UPROXX Music Twitter June 25, 2020. Let’s listen to these albums and work to make that happen.

The result is a solid 35 minutes of laid-back zone-out psychedelia and breathtakingly twisty and intricate tough-talk. She considered leaving music altogether. Each of its 11 tracks are chapters from the same narrative, vignettes that cohere into something like a novel or an indie film. The 10 Best Hip-Hop Albums of 2020 (So Far) By Jarrod Johnson II June 29, 2020 | 4:34pm The 20 Best Post-Punk Albums of 2020 (So Far) By Lizzie Manno & Paste Staff June 25, 2020 | …

Fetch the Bolt Cutters isn’t a perfect album, but its rough qualities are part of the appeal. Anticipation for a follow-up has run high in recent months, stoked by a series of gorgeous singles and an unconventional roll-out: Sumney released part one of his sophomore album, græ, in February, and part two arrived this month. Even in the coronavirus-shortened record release schedule of 2020, the year has offered a mountainous feast of sublime music. With blistering production and lyrics that can be both boastful and sobering – not to mention the duo’s effortless chemistry, which has only gotten better with time – RTJ4 is as consistently rapturous as it is uncompromisingly fierce, managing to stay true to its playful spirit without minimising the impact of its political message. All rights reserved. There, 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. —Jade Gomez, Jason Isbell isn’t the kind of guy you’d think of as haunted, but he’s surrounded by ghosts on his new album. You look down and see the whole world — miles of earth stretching out before you, lives reduced to tiny ant-like specks. —Max Freedman, It’s no secret that 1980s nostalgia has been prevalent in indie rock for years now. The best albums of 2020 so far Clockwise from bottom left: BC Camplight, Fiona Apple, Jay Electronica, Carla Bley, KeiyaA.

Sometimes bad timing or unlucky circumstances prove insurmountable. Anchored by a whirlwind of ambient synths, ominous strings, and industrial noise, Jehnny Beth’s debut solo album sees her widening her scope without sacrificing the pummelling intensity that has been the hallmark of her music in the past as the leader of Savages.

While recording their sophomore album Auto-Pain, guitarist Mike Clawson left the band due to deteriorating relationships with the Chicago group’s other three members. These are the 50 best albums of 2020 (so far). “Fuck it, why wait.” was the cathartic boom written in neon pink letters that signaled RTJ4’s arrival two days early, for free, in standard Run the Jewels fashion.

Six-year break or no, Hunt might still fuck around and dominate. Southside transforms bluegrass samples into trap beats, casually flirts with clever abandon, and makes its personal epiphanies register as full-throated arena pop. We’ve all taken a road trip that wound up going wrong, whether the kind of wrong where everything goes off the rails or the sort where everyone’s out of sync and nothing’s as fun as it’s supposed to be. ], You may also like: Best and worst Al Pacino movies, - Metascore: 83 Bob Dylan contains multitudes, but he is also one of the few songwriters who can make that claim about himself without being accused of arrogance. But, like Bob Dylan before her, this is also her greatest strength, as impenetrable as her lyrics may be. Phoebe Bridgers doesn’t need much more than a guitar and her voice to bring tears to your eyes – anyone who’s listened to her stunning 2017 debut Stranger in the Alps can attest to that. These challenges lied solely at the periphery of Clean’s tales about youthful, regretful romantic breakdowns and insecurities, but on her eagerly anticipated Clean follow-up color theory, Allison bravely pulls her mental illness from the sidelines to the forefront, and she also tackles a grave subject she’s spoken about far less frequently: her mother’s terminal cancer. –Tom, Nicolas Jaar has been good to us this year.

Over the past six months, we’ve seen artists like the Weeknd, Westside Gunn, and Lil Baby rise to the moment and deliver outstanding projects that we’ve kept in constant rotation since they’ve arrived. Named after and dedicated to the Tortoise guitarist’s mother, and with his daughter on guest vocals, this wide-ranging fusion record is relaxed in the way you can only be around your family. The album contains some of Charli’s most vulnerable songs ever, her chaotic take on pop music spilling over into something that can help bring us all together while we’re all apart. What we said: “Does what all good jazz does; it carries on a musical discourse which it invites you to follow. There are multiple layers of nuance within the album’s impeccable compositions and poetic lyricism, but this defining body of work also captivates with the sheer beauty and warmth of its recordings. Like their colorful, cartoonish album cover, the album celebrates the vast characters of working-class London: the dubious, fun-loving rascals, the crass authority figures, the squares and the reckless brutes. Taken Away is full of syncopated thumps and bluesy murmurs and echoes of sirens. Still, his debut full-length—2017’s Aromanticism, an intimate exploration of lovelessness—sparked a fire that even Sumney couldn’t sidestep. Saint Cloud is the work of a songwriter confident enough to let the listener approach at their leisure, patient and unflashy but rich with rewards for those who lean in close and soak it all in. 87. “Virile,” the album’s stunning lead single and towering achievement, is a grandly operatic song about masculinity and vulnerability that uses both as a shield, armor that holds together opposing forces with iron-clad bonds and suggests that maybe they’re not so opposing after all. Even if none of us know how to process this shit, we are not alone. Like every record before it, her latest album Fetch the Bolt Cutters taps into both the repulsive and the revolutionary. It’s the soundtrack to the apocalypse as experienced by those who are faced with feelings of existential dread and loneliness on the regular, who “romanticize a quiet life” and are “not afraid to disappear” (‘I Know the End’), who have “been playing dead” all their lives (‘I See You’). “Chubby and The Gang Rule OK?” is both a statement of fact and their unruly lead album track that takes about 30 seconds to convince you that their breakneck rhythms and pop chops are the real deal. Largely, the album is a move to activism of consent: She isn’t making assumptions about what people want or how they feel; they have to want it too, and need to get there in their own right. Yes, Grimes is a lot, but that’s part of what makes her songs special. The arc is simple: guy runs into his ex at the bar, flashes back on falling in and out of love, awkwardly flirts for a while, and heads home. 09/10/2020 …

As heavy as light.”), and Remy merges the ideals of the realist movement with narratives of experiential, hometown frustration. 2020 has pretty much been a disaster so far. –Tom, The way Yves Tumor renders heaven sounds more like hell.