The Best Songs of 2020: #75-#51

ISSUE #131

The Top 100 continues as we make our way to the halfway-point—you can find #100–#76 here, if you missed it. As I said before, lists can be as prescriptive as they are restrictive if they are read as a hierarchy. Mine should not be; they're subject to the whims of my everyday thoughts and feelings (two of my most favorite things—until we reach the limit of my being and encounter yours). I intend to serve and share, not impose. This is less a competition than a hundred-course meal for the ears, each song a specialty dish on a gourmet menu. Up next:

75. FRANCES QUINLAN | Carry the Zero
Rare does a cover like this come along—one that strips a song for parts and then so delicately pieces it back together in its own image. In the hands of Frances Quinlan from Hop Along, this Built to Spill masterpiece becomes a rubber band, stretching but still retaining shape. She builds an eccentric rhythm and metes out each line with geologic patience, using her one-of-a-kind voice to make an impressionist's dream version of the original.

74. KATIE DEY | Darkness
In the corner of music's bedroom, Katie Dey has been quietly putting pop conventions through a shredder and building papier-mâché planets from their stringy remains. She's reshaping norms one jagged song at a time until they emerge stark and dripping new.

73. CLEO SOL | Shine
This "be yourself" anthem can make you feel like you're filled with golden-hour light, mask on, walking past the waist-high wall that's tagged anew each night as you make your way to the corner store, past couples grabbing bubble tea and shining despite the world.

72. BEABADOOBEE | Worth It
This one stomps so loud the downstairs neighbor will take a broom handle to the ceiling. Can't hear it, though—volume's up so loud we're missing texts, ignoring the doorbell, unshackling so fully we float.

71. THE STROKES | Selfless
It could have been the seven-year silence, or it could be our collective growth since 2013, but either way this comes out exactly how an aging Strokes should sound on record—mellower, but retaining their frizzy sheen, like an old car that still runs as smoothly as a space station.

70. WAXAHATCHEE | St. Cloud
Impossible to overstate the power of a great ending, and how difficult they are to pull out of the chaos of our world. This is one of them, a eulogy played with the softest possible pressing of each piano key. This song grew on me, and it was only in finding "When you get back home to Saint Cloud" playing in my head at the end of each day that I knew. Because every day has to end, and it helps to step outside one last time before retiring to bed—preferably on a rooftop, but I'll take the pavement. I hope I get to step out once more before I finally go.

69. ADULT MOM | Berlin
This beautiful cut about the loss of an important friendship is built like an oxymoron—gentle but firm, questioning but confident. Raindrops on the roof are usually heard when feelings overtake words, like in the backseat when the road opens up to the lip of a mountain, a moment where contradictions feel more like truths.

68. NO THANK YOU | Saturn Return
It's the year of the kick drum that sounds as wide as a gong. In the pattern of Joy Formidable, No Thank You wrote one of the few anthems this year that deserves to be heard in a football stadium, with words to shout from the top of the bleachers.

67. BRAIDS | Young Buck
The body and the brain differ on many things, but the foremost may be what's good for us in the long run. This song is about the little indulgences taken in the moments you're waiting for someone else. Things you really shouldn't be doing—but you're just doing what you can in the meantime. Then again, that's your whole life, isn't it? The meantime.

66. FONTAINES D.C. | Televised Mind
Something that never gets easier is recognizing the brainwash when you encounter it and trying your best not to listen. Every second leaves us vulnerable to bullshit—it gets most of us in the end, as we get older and our critical faculties weaken. At least punk continues to grip young people who want to be musicians instead of gulls in the sky.

65. ILLUMINATI HOTTIES | melatonezone
Sarah Tudzin was studio engineer for Weyes Blood and others before starting illuminati hotties, but even that industry experience couldn't save her from a label ethics dispute which left her unwilling to release her new record. Taking note from Free Wheezy or Endless à la Frank Ocean, she released this slapdash album written in three weeks to free her from contract and allow her to deliver her proper album in peace. The craziest part is how incredible these quisos (quick songs) ended up being for their sheer madcap energy.

64. SORRY | More
This song about the insatiable need to consume everything propels itself forward on such a steady beat that it sounds just like Ms. Pac-Man or one of the Hungry Hippos got loose inside a Guitar Center and wrote a hit.

63. IDLES | Reigns
IDLES again delivers one of the best punk albums in years using nothing more than a heavy bass, gunshot snares, and Joe Talbot's proletariat growl and scathing lyrics. This track from late in the album is an essential part of any kitchen where the rich are on the menu. Scares the neighbors every time.

62. DESIRE | Escape
There's something about the candied center of this hook that takes over your entire body. Desire is ready to release their first album since 2009, and they've brought that decade with them—"Escape" sounds like it just got off the bus with earful of Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix and backpack full of face paint.

61. HAIM | Don't Wanna
I like to call Women in Music Pt. III the saddest album I've ever heard (coming from a boy who used to fall asleep listening to Carrie & Lowell). The way the trio combines hopeless desperation with sunburnt Los Angeles guitar licks all sounds so familiarly like self-delusion made aural—love every second.

60. ANGIE MCMAHON | Soon (Piano)
I was shown her 2019 album too late to include in last year's list, but McMahon gave me a gift this year by sitting down at the piano and pouring out some great versions of those songs (along with beautiful covers of Springsteen and Lana Del Rey). Her voice could sink an ocean liner, and the songs sound to me like the Arctic iceberg castles Jules Verne wrote about.

59. TENNIS | How to Forgive
Here, the drum machine wobbles so sensually, padding forth on a drunken swagger and sway that makes me feel like I'm standing on stilts. I bend back as far as I can when I listen to it. It's about burying love even when you know it's so stupid to do so, and Alaina Moore's performance strains beautifully, bursts with desperate need. How could you forgive yourself if you don't say anything? How could they forgive you if you do? Who's to say? March out that door and do it anyway.

58. BEACH BUNNY | April
Many of my beloved were on Chicago's Beach Bunny beat far before I was, so I was excited for the debut and it didn't disappoint. "April" is a standout, sounding a little like a heavier Alvvays until the end, when a thermal uplift takes the band by the wings and delivers them to the doorstep of Arcade Fire circa Funeral or a winged cherub on rollerblades.

57. RYAN BEATTY | Evergreen
Ryan Beatty collaborated with Tyler, the Creator on last year's Igor and even the soundtrack album for the animated Grinch movie, which makes him something like the new Phillip Glass in my book. This is crisp bedroom pop, headphones and heartache with a reviving breakbeat at the end.

56. OCEANATOR | I Would Find You
Once, finding our friends in an apocalypse may have been something all would agree we'd do in a heartbeat—that is, before this year proved that when the going gets tough our main instinct is actually just to break up and isolate. This is a rare song so strong in its ideals that it makes you want to hike a desert right now to see a friend who needs it. “It’s about taking care of the people you love in dangerous or hard times,” Okusami says. “It’s a platonic love song to a friend at the end of the world.” There's perhaps no subject more noble.

55. PHOEBE BRIDGERS | I Know the End
The end of "I Know the End" is poetry as American as Sylvia Plath: "A slaughterhouse, an outlet mall / Slot machines, fear of God / Windows down, heater on / Big bolts of lightning hanging low / Over the coast, everyone's convinced / It's a government drone or alien spaceship / Either way, we're not alone / I'll find a new place to be from / A haunted house with a picket fence / To float around and ghost my friends / No, I'm not afraid to disappear / The billboard said the end is near / I turned around, there was nothing there / Yeah, I guess the end is here." Then come the Sufjan horns like sirens, the screaming so hoarse it sounds like crying.

54. FIONA APPLE | Cosmonauts
Leave it to Fiona Apple to write a love song for realists and still make it about astronauts, with all the necessary gravity of someone launching into a weightless void. The lyrics mirror the real stakes of eternity, the way anyone who dons a space suit in science fiction knows they likely won't be coming back.

53. CHARLI XCX | detonate
Most of Charli's How I'm Feeling Now sounds like a bubble bath drawn with molten lead, but no track evokes the bubbling half of that image like "detonate." The cheer belies the conflict at its center—this is a song about being the one who leaves. "I don't trust myself at all / Why should you trust me? / I don't trust myself alone / Why should you love me?" This is when the bubbles start to pop all around us, casting slivers of shrapnel to each corner of the room—at least it doesn't hurt.

52. JEAN DAWSON | Triple Double
Jean Dawson made a record for the teenager in all of us, writing songs that sound "like Manchester and Compton had a baby," as he eloquently puts it. This one sounds like Sugar Ray chopped and screwed. It's what I'd imagine would form if every Tony Hawk Pro Skater song got together to build a giant mech suit.

51. QUELLE CHRIS & CHRIS KEYS | Mirage
This song delivers the warm nostalgia of analog tapes, a cozy hiss and enshrouding fuzz which never fails to get me to lean back and take a deep breath. God bless Chris & Chris for making this song seven minutes—I want it to last forever, like the drive home after a wonderful date.