“I can’t wait to be alone, to be one with my blackest fire,” she exhales on “Nu World Burdens,” over a twinkling melody and drums warm enough to make your heart flutter. Distinctions Pitchfork: Best New Music Categorized as a "folk artist" since her 2009 album debut, Tamara Lindeman—frontwoman of the otherwise ever-changing band that is The Weather Station—defies pigeonholing with her fifth effort: a sensual, lavish collection of songs that borrows from modern jazz, electronica and straight-up dance music. Through it all, clearer-than-ever proof emerges not just of a great band in stride, but a cultural fact: women continue making the most vital rock music now. Using only her transmuted and multi-layered vocals, the Berlin-based composer creates a dense architecture where choral music and meditative techno meet. Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2020 wrap-up coverage here. –Olivia Horn, Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal, Quality Control / Wolfpack Global / Motown / Capitol, It’s taken time for Lil Baby’s My Turn to grow into the beautiful, sprawling mess that it is. His deep familiarity with each of those touchstones—he prefaced Live Forever with an EP of National covers—allows him to explode them from within and rethink not just how but if they speak for him. But they’re also jam-packed with sharp, critical observations about growing up with dual identities, the Orientalist gaze, and the trappings of femininity. Garcia has worked with many other musicians in and around her city’s vibrant jazz scene over the last few years, and her collaborators on Source are crucial to its eclectic range of styles. Workaround inverts that dynamic: By requiring sustained close attention to the thumps and shimmers in your headphones, it offers something truly meditative. –Rawiya Kameir, For 25 years, Dan Bejar has come across as the smartest absinthe-sipping aesthete in the room. –Ivie Ani, The warm, gracious folk on Shore seems to materialize from an alternate universe where there are no storm clouds or push notifications. Listen to Pitchfork's Best New Music now. Recently, American singer-songwriter Fiona Apple released her fifth album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, much to the delight of music publication, Pitchfork. Listen to The 200 Best Albums of the 1980s by Pitchfork on Apple Music. Rarely does a particular sound last longer than a single beat. –Marc Hogan, On YHLQMDLG, aka Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana or I Do Whatever I Want, Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny honors his home island’s past of sweaty marquesina throwdowns with a score of perreo bangers for the new age. Duets 65. “Oh, emptiness/Tell me about your nature,” she sings on “zombie girl.” While songs mostly consists of Lenker’s silvery vocals and brambled acoustic guitar, and instrumentals turns toward fingerpicked meditations and wind-chime drones, both sound like nothing so much as the rustic abode that Lenker has likened to “the inside of an acoustic guitar.” These records put you right inside that hollow. Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist. As she glissades through disco synths on “Love Again,” talkbox funk on “Levitating,” and electronic dance rhythms on “Hallucinate,” the British singer effortlessly fuses styles without resorting to forced formulas. She turns liquid on the synth-sheathed “Time,” raps on the chaotic “Riquiquí,” and glitches with her voice pitched high on “Rip the Slit.” Presented as the first of four eventual albums, KiCk i shares all the promise of becoming, in both its pain and its joy. Consider the load sufficiently lightened; on she climbs. With Saint Cloud, Crutchfield’s fifth album as Waxahatchee, she climbs to solid ground, emerging from the storm self-assured. –Anna Gaca, Phoebe Bridgers will tweet about eating ass with one hand and crush your heart with the other. Gary, Indiana, producer Jlin got her start making Chicago style footwork. It is a testament to Dylan’s spectral presence as a singer, and the sympathy of his accompanists, that the uptempo tunes often seem as misty and elusive as the slow ones. The Songs That Define Stevie Nicks as an Icon. But even though she’s sick of the bullshit surrounding her, she doesn’t let it consume her being. On their pop- and R&B-bending second album Ungodly Hour, they’re figuratively slapping an ID card on a bar and saying, “Bartender, I need a drink.”, The Bailey sisters have quietly lost some of the wide-eyedness of the past and instead turned towards the flotsam and jetsam of twentysomething life. Gordon’s howls are hell-bent and infatuated, with Tumor’s raspy pleas pushing them both closer to the edge of oblivion. –Michelle Kim, In February, electronic experimentalist Arca dropped @@@@@, a 62-minute song framed as a pirate-radio broadcast from a post-singularity future that begins with whispers of a “diva constructed.” KiCk i, released four months later, is the Barcelona-based musician’s more straightforward take on diva-hood. As ever with late-period Dylan albums, death lurks in every corner: as a prompt for bloody, Frankenstein-ish experiments in “My Own Version of You,” a red river to be traversed in “Crossing the Rubicon,” a body who shares his bed in “I Contain Multitudes,” a nameless rival in “Black Rider.” The gravity of Dylan’s voice and the clarity of his vision allow him to address these wraiths as an equal, one with intimate knowledge of the darkness they inhabit. Pitchfork is an American online music publication launched in 1995 by Ryan Schreiber. Combining prog with alternative influences, they came up with a style that was supple, subtle and sensuous. ", In 2007, the site introduced a new system called "Forkcast." Ungodly Hour is a collection of low-key tracks that demonstrated true mastery of their intricate harmonies over slinky, charismatic production. –Ross Scarano, Megan Thee Stallion’s official debut album is a triumphant joyride that more than fulfills the promise of its title. But bands persevered. Jay’s lines are clever and self-reflective, and his references are evergreen: “Fuck Bill O’Reilly and Rudy Giuliani,” he passionately raps on “New Illuminati.” It’s rewarding to be swept up in his aura, and to feel the magnitude of every strategically placed interlude, every space where the beat rides endlessly, and every roughly mixed verse. Kempf and Balla trade yearning, hiccupy vocals across riffs that reverberate like heat waves off asphalt, as McGrady thuds away through the humid air. From left, Amy Winehouse, Arctic Monkeys, Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar. These instrumentals lend a “sense of comic relief,” Allison says, “like when you joke with your friend about your unhealthy habits.” In a year when hundreds of thousands of Americans perished, we needed friends desperately—someone to make us laugh, and someone to sit with us at shiva. Zoom In [EP] Enter to Search Sign In. It lies at the intersection of beats and ambience, where sounds are just vibrations entering and leaving the body, cleansing it of toxins. Synth stabs that at first seem uniform take on entirely new shapes with every repetition. The 50 Best Albums of 2020 . The Ones. They are mostly untitled, proceed according to a single tempo across the whole album, and feature a drastically limited instrumental palette. –Vrinda Jagota, Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal, While the Korean-American producer Yaeji has anchored her previous work in strobe-lit beats and floor-shaking bass, her first full-length mixtape captures the anxious, aching throb of the morning after a night out. –Sam Sodomsky, On Eternal Atake, Lil Uzi Vert employs an extraterrestrial concept that should be kitschy—in the album’s trailer, he’s jetted into the cosmos in a saucer the size of a city block by a humanoid cult—but instead lends the LP an intergalactic sheen. First with her album Post in 1995, and then again in 1997 with Homogenic. Inner Song’s palette of pulsing basslines, swirling synths, and visceral found sounds draws influence from the practices of the sound-healing community: sound baths, shamanic drumming, and voice work. Eventually, they were shared on Instagram by Gibbs himself, completing an utterly contemporary loop of art and life. Within these entrancing soundscapes, stray ruminations float to the surface. –Chal Ravens, There was the ambient danger that El-P and Killer Mike would eventually begin to bore us with their roughneck brilliance—another bruising Run the Jewels album to add to the pile, is it? Neither hot mess nor robot, sisters Chloe x Halle have chosen a different route, from YouTube sensations to Beyoncé protégées to grown women. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Frontperson Alli Logout’s jagged vocals dissect poverty, love, and commodified dissent, making The Passion Of the rare contemporary punk album that is actually as revolutionary as it sets out to be. Bullet casings fall to the floor on opener “Nonbinary,” but Arca isn’t under attack: “I do what I wanna do when I wanna do it,” she deadpans, and then proceeds to prove it by remaking herself with each track. Listen to playlists by Pitchfork on Apple Music. Each element, shorn of everything extraneous, glows with significance. 10 December 2019 Pitchfork: The 50 Best Albums of 2019 [see also 2020, 2010s, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011] Lana Del Rey — Norman Fucking Rockwell! In February, it was a memorable yet conventional 20-track Atlanta rap album. –Jazz Monroe, Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal, “My execution might be televised.” That line and others from Freddie Gibbs’ “Scottie Beam” appeared in black marker on handmade signs this summer, held aloft in cities across the country during what may have been the largest wave of civil-rights protests in American history. One minute, he is at peace, nearly succumbing to whatever comes next; the next, he is spoiling for a fight, ready to wrestle death to the mat one last time. So as she thrashes between anti-capitalist bops and introspective anthems, Sawayama assumes the role of both pop diva and pop rebel, subverting expectations of what the genre could and should stand for. Other albums that have received perfect scores are Neutral Milk Hotel’s, In An Aeroplane Over The Sea, D’Angelo’s VooDoo, and The Blue Album by Weezer. His songs can be layered and minimal, lingual and graphic, natural and mechanical—all coming together in a work that both registers the omnipotence of imperial history and documents an ongoing restoration process. They wrote, “Kanye's big year culminates in an LP that feels like an instant greatest hits, the ultimate realization of his strongest talents and divisive public persona.”, Another album to garner a perfect score was Radiohead’s 2002 release, Kid A. Presenting ingenuity with the use of computers to create the music, the music publication pretty much proclaimed Radiohead the best band of all time. Inner Song is club music at its most spiritual. 31 albums reviewed by Pitchfork from ’03-’09 appear on the P2K list but did not originally receive the Best New Music Designation. Recommended If You Like: Haim’s Women in Music Pt. Her mother’s terminal illness and her own struggles with depression appear in a wintry synesthesia of yellow, blue, and gray. More Pitchfork. What other albums does Pitchfork deem perfection? –Quinn Moreland, Fifteen years ago, on the title track to Extraordinary Machine, Fiona Apple declared, “I still only travel by foot, and by foot, it’s a slow climb.” She worked her way up to the clear heights of Fetch the Bolt Cutters over the course of the last half-decade or so, largely at her L.A. home alongside trusted bandmates and friends and a small shelter’s worth of barking dogs. “If this is all that we get, so be it,” Kempf insists, a bit of wistful resignation that doubles as a mission statement for their proudly stripped-down approach. Gang of Four Songs of the Free (1982) 98: 98. Pitchfork: The 50 Best Albums of 2019. Pitchfork may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. If nothing else, Bob Dylan’s 39th studio album should forever put to rest the idea that the storied songwriter is losing his voice. 5. It was first based in suburban Minneapolis, then Chicago, later moved to Greenpoint, is currently in One World Trade Center, and is owned by Condé Nast.. Heaven flirts with familiar rock motifs as often as it subverts them, morphing into something unrecognizable. Pitchfork Music Festival Berlin 2020. Chemtrails Over the Country Club 76. Music publications like Consequence of Sound, Rolling Stone, and Pitchfork have been stingy with their praise for albums. All Rights Reserved. 'Blonde on Blonde' (1966) - Overall album rank: #27 - … On Pitchfork's list of the top 100 albums of the 1970s, this one lands at No. Her howled words and the music’s occasionally sharp edges are both caustic and restorative forces. The result was her truest, wildest record to date—the kind of album that borders on literature in its ability to convey nuances of the human condition. As on 2017’s No Shape, producer Blake Mills reveals the music with startling clarity and subtlety, bringing out lifelike strings and trembling synths through sound design as much as conventional production. And you can't wait to dive back in and try to prove that wrong over and over.”. –Jillian Mapes, The tracks that defined this bizarre year, featuring Megan Thee Stallion, the Weeknd, Christine and the Queens, Noname, Waxahatchee, and more, Featuring Cardi and Meg, Bad Bunny, Perfume Genius, Christine and the Queens, and more, © 2021 Condé Nast. For the first time in 10 years, Pitchfork gave Fiona’s album a coveted 10/10 rating. Pitchfork, however, deems themselves the “most trusted voice in music.”. Twice as Tall triumphs not so much for its substance but as a shimmering surface, a landslide victory for the politics of pleasure. –Paul A. Thompson, For years, Matmos’ Drew Daniel used his solo project the Soft Pink Truth to join his disparate interests, reimagining punk classics and black metal as squirrelly glitch techno. The Who’s Top 10 Best Albums – Ranked. Her glittering debut, The Angel You Don’t Know, features waist-winding afropop rhythms; bouncy, avant-pop melodies; experimental modulated vocals; and playful lyrics as Instagram-ready as any artist this side of Drake.