The Best Songs of 2020: #25–#1

ISSUE #133

We're here—I'll get right to it, but I want to say thank you for reading, and if you want to find the first three quarters of this Top 100, here's #100–#76, #75–#51, and #50–#26. Also, I've put them all into a playlist arranged from top to bottom, for whenever you have six hours to kill. Now, for the final leg of the tour:

25. OPEN MIKE EAGLE | Sweatpants Spiderman
Anime, Trauma and Divorce is a funny album for Open Mike Eagle’s easy delivery of self-deprecating jokes and a great album for its gentle honesty and grounded look at growing old. It’s clever in structure, too: the first time Mike gets hung up on "Tattoos" in the chorus, it's a good gag—until he repeats it at the next chorus and it becomes the song's main hook. It's a nugget in a gold mine album that synthesizes and actualizes every aspect of his work up to this point.

24. CARLY RAE JEPSEN | Heartbeat
I wrote about this bridge back in June, but I find it hard to talk about this song without bringing it up again. It's the same thing that makes "Window" so tantalizing, the verse differential that Britney Spears & Co. cemented—that a bridge exists not for variety’s sake, but as the breaching of a threshold. The kick drum echoes like a ribcage after the chorus drips with longing; a flutter opens you up and the whole mess pours out, the spilling which happens when thoughts race ahead of your words, the moment you love someone and who cares if it’s a secret anymore.

23. YVES TUMOR | Kerosene!
Bringing up Funkadelic feels cheap, but who else can make a guitar howl like this? It slithers, rears its head, then swims back beneath Yves and Diane Gordon as they trade exaltations of desire. I don’t listen to “Kerosene!” with my ears so much as with my spine, lighting through with warm oil like a torch burning for five minutes in a parade of flame.

22. JPEGMAFIA | BALD!
"IF U GOT A FUCKED UP HAIRLINE THIS FOR U," JPEG loudly tweeted before dropping this song in February. He’s shooting spitballs from the back of class; his cheekiness grips me. He can usually talk shit right to my face, and I’ll still think, "Sounds great!" Here, he brings his chaos energy buttoned up—he stays smiling while a generator drones in the back, suggesting everything's darker than it seems.

21. ARCA | Mequetrefe
This song treats verse and chorus as light and dark, back and forth like the rotating Earth, the whole song taking us through two days in only two minutes. It's a partner to Perfume Genius's "Queen," a dark ode to queerness which glitches and shudders while exploring the self-possession it takes to walk to work and read onlookers to filth. Arca doesn’t stop at crossing genre boundaries—she tears them up like painter’s tape, balls them up and swallows them, hiccups and makes it cute.

20. ILLUMINATI HOTTIES | freequent letdown
Nothing springs to my mind unbidden these days as often as this "Mm, mm” does. It’s a playful expression of self-hate, a "What can you do?" vocalization that helps me cope—because what can I count on if not the guarantee that I’ll fuck up again some day? Sure, there’s learning, but never quickly and never until I’ve already shit the bed. We all try our best, but how far can we get while we're squeezed into these boxes, taped shut by internet strangers and that tiny voice in the back of our heads?

19. LOMELDA | Hannah Sun
“This song was written for three, maybe four listeners to hear,” Hannah Read says. “But boomer Hannah forgot how the internet works and performed it on YouTube. Now it is for everyone. I am glad that people want to listen to this song, but I don’t understand why they want to.” These accidents somehow become our biggest hits, speaking to specifics we don't anticipate connecting with others. For example, I can tell this a small-town song. Come from a place with less than 20,000 people and you grow up singing of other cities. You pick up the sun from wherever you can, and send it home to those who can’t see it.

18. FRANCES QUINLAN | Rare Thing
So good at presenting the purity of a child's vision, Frances Quinlan unspools her verses like you're following her through a butterfly garden. They were written with her young niece in mind, taking inspiration from the idealism flooding Quinlan when watching her first discoveries of the world. This is the beauty we absorb from the young—the older we get, the more we’re cursed by memory, smudged by fingerprints of trauma, hardened into fading clay. All it takes is a reminder of how innately we love; we should be inhaling every bouquet.

17. TOMBERLIN | Wasted
Forgive me if I almost call this one a bop—it has such a steady bounce to it, surging with still energy from sleepy parts. It’s hardly more than a balanced melody and a string of perfect lines branching out from one: “How come you only say I’m cute when you’re wasted?” Topping off with her gentle guitar, Tomberlin writes us a restless lullaby, a whisper of what it’s like to lie next to someone who has nothing to lose.

16. PHOEBE BRIDGERS | Garden Song
The context that “DVD Menu” gives this song as its lead-in on Punisher bestows a secret power. After a whir of melancholia, she thins out into an arrangement so soft it sounds like it’s playing from another room. Its effects are muted on first listen, more a vibe than a message—many great songs leave it as that and remain brilliant—but here, after months, I find this song still growing. It gets taller without my notice, a blanket of thorns locking lyrics in my mind, indelible images that aren’t my own but feel so familiar.

15. SAULT | Little Boy
Some people never grow up. Well, that's a misrepresentation—I use “grow up” not like "get taller" here, but more like “apprehend reality,” “see the truth,” “get schooled.” Some people never grow up because they will always cause suffering and never confront it. I'm not counting death here, a pain so routine we all have to face it. It’s life’s sufferings, like having to teach a son or daughter that police are built to target them, not protect them. SAULT is not in the business of teaching full-ass adults though. No one knows who actually comprises the band—they don't do any press or photos or live appearances. The context melts around them. The message is the message. All that’s left are words of hope to those who ought to know.

14. IDLES | Grounds
They used to send a drummer with troops when they marched to war, which sounds silly at first, but makes sense the more you listen to IDLES. Nothing makes you want to hurl a brick more than this year’s Ultra Mono. Like a guillotine casting its shadow on Capitol Hill, “Grounds” uses the slamming of triplets and an isolated drum kit to serve as a call to arms—all able bodies to the front line.

13. GORILLAZ | Aries (feat. Peter Hook and Georgia)
Even as reality remains pretty terrible, there are still a few life-affirming experiences, like the soaring high of listening to New Order. Peter Hook helped crystallize not only a genre by an entire system of sonic architecture with only a bass sound, factories of feeling and warehouses full of yearning. Gorillaz brought him back to the bass with "Aries," accompanied by Georgia in the studio, for this perfect cruiser which can make you feel like you just bought a jetpack.

12. FIONA APPLE | Drumset
When something at home has changed, you tend to feel it first before you notice anything's wrong. Every sensation congregates somewhere in the body—change resides in the arm hair, at the fingertips, and just behind the eye. The perfectly bitter “Drumset” speaks to that feeling as it bobs back and forth between still loving someone and knowing that they just pillaged your home. They stole away in the night with everything. Fiona has the clarity and experience to cut through bullshit, finding strength to confront people with who they really are.

11. VÉRITÉ | younger women
The drama of this song is akin to that of water skiing—you're kneeling over nothing and holding onto rope. Soon, it starts to yank, holds. It pulls you faster and faster for almost three minutes; then, you hit the wake and you're tossed to the sea like chum. I love when she holds the instruments on “What you want,” only for one endless beat before cuing them back with a blast, like pulling out a rug before catching you at the final moment. Singing it feels almost too vulnerable, a primal force which brings you lower and louder until you’re swallowed by every second—screaming in the car, pounding the sky, dancing in parks at midnight.

10. CHARLI XCX | forever
Little did I know Charli XCX would write the sweetest clear-eyed love song of the year by pointing to an extremely specific moment: quarantine in May, when couples strained under a forced isolation. Hard to say if it was easier together or apart. I suppose that makes this our "’Heroes,’” with lockdown our wall, A.G. Cook our Eno, and Charli our David Bowie.

9. ADRIANNE LENKER | not a lot, just forever
Infants and ex-believers; knives and stolen letters; wrens, rocks, a poison that stains the mouth—Lenker’s images are as naturally concise as William Carlos Williams'. There’s a comment on the video for this song which strikes me every time I read it: “she's so brave to be so vulnerable, can't even imagine the heartbreak she went through to write something like this." There's terror in hanging your heart where anyone can thrash it, but I've always found it soothing to see our insides are all so similar. Art like this becomes the blueprint for addressing the solitude of pain—honest, brave, and unflinching.

8. BECKY AND THE BIRDS | Do U Miss Me
These vocal effects layer to form an electric symphony, the modulation accompanying Thea Gustafsson’s unaltered voice in a harmonic fusing of selves. Half the song takes place in text message; the other occurs at the foot of the bed, a specter brought forth by astral will. Eschewing a desperate, repulsive need, she puts herself instead at a sensual remove and plays the singing siren rather than the spurned. It’s sultry, sad, sexy, and sweet—I find myself won over every time.

7. WAXAHATCHEE | Lilacs
For as intense as emotions can be, they never move the flowers or dust. The terror in my head will never bubble forth in telekinetic fury like it feels like it should. There's no witness to my writing in the dust: “I get so angry, baby / at something you might say / I dream about an awful stranger / work my way through the day.” We have to keep taking care of ourselves, forever. The breeze always comes back, anyway. Time to build back up and water the lilacs.

6. HAIM | The Steps
Some artists reach a point where everything they write is undeniable gold. I think about how much I’d love to hear this live, that riff so loud it hurts my feelings—a supreme pleasure, considering how long the Earth existed without the ability to experience art in rooms the size of canyons. It’s easy to forget the privilege, as well as that of hearing women celebrated for writing with anger—the disdain that drips from Danielle’s delivery of “So, baby” is so thick it fries my speakers.

5. REMI WOLF | Photo ID
Imagine hearing this song and not wanting to dance—it’s perfect! A bop full of batteries, reality not included. It makes the moment you hear it feel like the start of your own credits sequence, sliding down the streets, juggling your shoulders, spinning on your heels. The way she sings “Ooh baby, turn out the light,” is so bouncy it tickles the tongue, the exact kind of weird intonation that I can’t wait to shout with a room some day.

4. WET | Come to You
Last year, I listened to Outline by Rachel Cusk in a single drive from Atlanta back to Iowa. I bookmarked almost every passage, my thumb reaching up to tap my phone like an auction of one. A passage: “My younger son has the very annoying habit of immediately leaving the place where you have agreed to meet him, if you aren’t there when he arrives. Instead he goes in search of you, and becomes frustrated and lost. I couldn’t find you! he cries afterwards, invariably aggrieved. But the only hope of finding anything is to stay exactly where you are, at the agreed place. It’s just a question of how long you can hold out.” This patience relies on a pivotal factor—faith that someone is out there looking. This lush and caring love song does what all great stories do by providing a model of hope, a set of instructions for care that culminates in the way Kelly Zutrau’s voice unmoors and floats through the breeze when she sings “Leave it alone and come into my heart.”

3. MAYBEL | Bird Song
Nature has many singers—it is not uniquely human, emerging instead far before. Whales, frogs, bats, mice, and birds, who have sung with us from the start, waking us up before electric clocks. What we do claim is the natural wonder of harmony, of hearing a note and knowing its complement, expelled with breath from the same room—a pleasure I know we’re all mourning, but I think we should acknowledge if only to some day save. That’s the power Maybel brings to me, leaving me engaged with a divine awe, particularly the heights of “I’m a warbler in the tall trees / I’m a starling in the sky.” They make some of the most spirited folk music I’ve heard, a tradition I hope we never leave behind.

2. PERFUME GENIUS | Whole Life
I keep hearing about how we’ve all lost a year, particularly loud coming from anyone in their 20s. It’s impossible, of course, to lose a year, precisely because we lose every one. The way the internet clocks the weeks forces us play by their timetable, a newbie every day tweeting something like "You're not adulting, you're thirty-two and you bought an air fryer.” It’s society’s greatest trick, to convince people we’re not worthy of life. Some people turn thirty by the age of sixteen simply by nature of what they’ve lived through; others haven’t made it past twenty even well into their fifties, as they’re never forced to separate life from a dream. Thinking ahead will materialize nothing but a series mirages you eventually sail through. Where'd it all go? It was never there. Perfume Genius writes the right way to look at it—let it drift and wash away.

1. GIA MARGARET | body
Last year, Gia Margaret lost her singing voice while touring her first album, sidelining any songs written for a follow-up. For solace, she turned to her synthesizer as a tether to her art. Soon, she had a bevy of ambient songs, and newly formed purpose. The result is an album that makes you think of the instrument as almost a prosthesis, an extension of voice. In "body," she lays a glimmering membrane of bells over a recording of philosopher Alan Watts giving a lecture entitled “Overcome Social Anxiety.” Watts’s delivery is already musical—it carries all the melody you need. Gia simply has to step back and cover him in a sequined shawl. You can’t quite sing along, but still I find myself whispering aloud with it: “‘You feel that you are carrying your body around. Common speech expresses this all the time: ‘Life is a drag; I feel I’m just dragging myself around; ‘My body is a burden!’ To whom? To whom.”