The Best Songs of the 2020s (So Far)

ISSUE #302

As I listened to the long list of songs for this issue, over the many weeks it took me to get my groove back (jury’s still out), I was surprised at how sad this project was making me. I’d been more than ready to revisit the dull bite of those pandemic memories, obviously—from Fetch the Bolt Cutters through Jubilee and beyond—but this emotional hedging made it only more of a shock when I was blindsided by intense anti-nostalgia, a black hole that sucked me right back to that old, lonely room (we all had one five years ago).

I charged courageously on—soon I realized that my favorites were disproportionately the songs of 2020. How bizarre! The materialist in me knew this was simple: that was the year my resources were abundant (more time for music when you got jack shit to do) and all the attention to spare. The other side of me knew better—that I was twisted and tortured, pining for an easier time, when the world’s oppressive paradigm had been so profoundly shattered that it seemed some revolution might lay within true grasp.

That’s the story of these first five years, and you can’t get around it. We locked down, and millions died; we came out and we fought, even family. The bill is still being paid. Some future scholar may explore how the COVID lockdowns paved the way for AI acceleration—I don’t have the resources for anything more than a hypothesis. Inflation and mass protest certainly gave way to the red wave of today. The rich got richer than ever in lockdown, and I don’t see many reminding the layperson of that as they report on the ideological terror we’ve seen the past few months.

Life finds a way: the only year that beat 2020—four out of the top five slots—was 2022, the year I found the love of my life. That year, post-vaccine, filled with exuberance, was filled with songwriters exorcising lockdown grief with bleeding-heart songs like “Concorde.” It soundtracked a rebirth of my soul.

You’ll have to forgive me—the list is subjective. I have many blind spots (surprised?), but my main criteria was this: these needed to be songs that were so embedded—some without me even knowing—in me that they’d spring forth, unbidden, to microphone of my mind. These are songs that came up in my dreams, ones that dogged me morning to midnight, even in silence. Reader, beware: this is no mere playlist. It is, with regret, an exorcism.

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20. “Big Baby” | Whitmer Thomas

Snapchat filters dominated our lives in the forever inside of the pandemic years. When I first saw the video “Big Baby,” I laughed a long time, but the hook—the violent truth of “MOMMY WAS A BIG, BIG BABY / DADDY WAS A BIG BABY TOO” kept me coming back for years. Inventing gibberish may be simple (babies do it, even big ones), but inventing catchy gibberish is deceptively hard. With Whitmer does it here—skip skop ribbet don laptop pop. Slappy do to you.

19. “Greatest Hits” | Jockstrap

Georgia Ellery (of Black Country, New Road), and Taylor Skye (of independent genius) make music that holds off on delivering the goods, like all good electronic art pop. It refuses to resolve until it’s time to bring home the hook—and when the “I believe in dreeeeeeams” goes off twice in this song, it really rocks your world. Every drop is a firestarter.

18. “ballad of a homeschooled girl” | Olivia Rodrigo

It wasn’t until I heard Olivia Rodrigo go full Pinkerton fuzz and use the word “suicide” that she’d become fully actualized to me. This is the kind of whirlwind, hurricane chorus we can thank Hayley Williams for, but mix is straight-up Breeders or Ween, and the grit and gristle she puts on “Want to curl up and die” is a catharsis I didn’t know I needed. There’s no release quite like a build up where you can shout, “It’s… so… cial… su… i…… CIDE!!!” (Can’t think of a third line).

17. “Excalibur” | Daniel Hart

You can hear every fiber of the violin here, every centimeter of resistance from the resin. Beginning at The Green Knight‘s fevered end, when Sean Harris’s King Arthur lifts himself on strained elbow to bestow Excalibur to Sir Gaiwan—all the doomed young boy had ever wanted—the deflated weight of burden in his performance is all I can hear in this short masterpiece, A24’s twin brother to “ballad of a homeschooled girl,” all futility and compromise in the dishonest face of cowardice. It shudders, shivers, it cannot shake it off.

16. “Runner” | Alex G

This is practically a nursey rhyme by Alex G’s sonic experimentalist standards, but it’s all the more effective for its clarity. When he frays out in his usual way to “I have done a couple bad things,” it is a breath of fresh air, but the bottom falls out when the bass hits on that piano, and the stagger-step hiccup of the time-signature in those drum fills reminds you that nothing is what is originally seems.

15. “Don’t Wanna Know” | Bo Burnham

A simple pleasure, this—I just think there are no words quite so effective as a simple hook. Doesn’t matter if it’s profound or gibberish. This is a true earw(y)rm, always sneaking into my brain in the morning commute—but its the lyrics, too, that astutely dissect what it’s like to live online, with people who are always online. We can praise or shit on Inside as long as you want, but—as I’ve written about before—whether you think the comedy is perfect or insufferable, Burnham’s greatest strength has always been his songwriting. Listen: the slight swing-step here, the absolute conviction he sells in those vocals despite his musical-theater-cum-YouTuber voice—all in service of one of the great micro-pop songs of the decade—and it builds so well, until it hits a beautiful brick wall.

14. “This Feeling” | my!lane

This is phonk. I couldn’t make a playlist without phonk, my favorite genre development of the past five years. Phonk house may not have been invented by chopping “Mask 2 My Face” by Gangsta Boo—of Three Six Mafia fame—but it certainly was perfected. The half-time breakdown with the goblin voice at the end is icing on the cake. Don your aviators at midnight and go for a drive, with nothing but the hum of this album and the wind.

13. “Over and Over” | Wet

This is the type of song I’ve dubbed the “clementine”—a sweet, perfect little morsel of a pop song in two minutes  or less. I love the reverb-laden, bottom-of-a-shallow-pool build that this has, and Kelly Zutrau’s wonderful, hazy, dreamlike delivery of the koan-esque lyrics speak to something I know in my bones—“Dreams that I let / Fall through the cracks / Over and Over.”

12. “The Steps” | HAIM

Things have definitely happened to HAIM since Women in Music, Pt. III—the Academy-recognized success of Alana in Licorice Pizza, the hanging out with Taylor Swift at the Super Bowl—but no matter what, this song still rips like it did back when I could close my eyes during lockdown and beg God that I could hear that howling guitar bend in person. I’m the oldest man that the HAIM show, connecting fully to the “I’mma do me”-ness of the lyrics—kill me, if you want. You don’t understand me anyway.

11. “On the Floor” | Perfume Genius

This is still one of the most visceral sonic portraits of crushing hard I’ve ever heard; I tucked it away for a while, but when I put it back on for review for this playlist, I felt it all flood back again. This is the song I used to sneak out at midnight to, with headphones, dancing under a July’s hazy moon. I was wracked with cabin fever then, longing so pitifully for the touch of ghosts that the slightest breeze would make me shiver—the itching guitars, the 6/8 swing, all of it evoking the rise and fall of the imagined lover’s chest.

10. “Bunny is a Rider” | Caroline Polachek

Desire, I Want to Turn Into You had many delights, but none that yanked quite like the bass of “Bunny is a Rider,” with Polachek doing her own in-mic stutterer effect  (that “Bunny is a (Bunny is a)”) and cementing her place in the 21st century pop canon. We all wish the satellite couldn’t find us (dare I say it?) now, more than ever, and cooing baby’s sample from the maestro Dan Nigro is direct line and sinker hook from Timbaland and Aaliyah’s “Are You That Somebody?”

9. “Ripples” | Arca

Arca’s quintuple KicK album cycle of 2020–2021 will go down in history as nothing short of virtuosic, each release a distinct and fucked-up vibe, form the punk-ass bulldozing of KicK iii to the tech-noir latency of KicK iiiii. Nobody has had a year of output quite like this—minus King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, but Arca’s queer dynamite blows those guys out of the water (no offense). “Ripples” is the epitome of everything she does best—the Spanish, the gibberish, the kaleidoscopic destruction, the alter-worldly disintegration, the bodily disruption, the subversion, the transgression, the urge to crawl out of your skin and burn whatever they're investing in these days.

8. “The Grants” | Lana Del Rey

Lana—an artist who made an indelible first impression on me with “Video Games” and has been shaky ever since (Norman Fucking Rockwell never hit, even less so the in-between, though “West Coast” throws full and absolute ass)—really shook my ass to the core she opened with this heart-on-sleeve, full freaking gospel-chorus banger about grief and memory in the year I lost my brother. I go back and forth on its blatant melodrama (something I typically love, but myself? I also hate). Ultimately this wins so hard for me: the chord progression’s simplicity, the minor verse and major chorus, the utterly charming gaffe in the intro. I start out mirroring the smile I hear on her face, yet it never ends without humiliating collapse: “My sister’s firstborn child (I’m gonna take that too with me) / My grandmother’s last smile (I’m gonna take that too with me) / It’s a beautiful life (Remember that, too—for me.)” Even the voice in my head is cracking.

7. “body” | Gia Margaret

In 2020’s “body,” the song that single-handedly got me through more panic attacks than any medicine, Gia Margaret’s sample of Alan Watts—and her gorgeous carnival of shimmering blips—will bring me often to tears. It leaves me feeling like the album’s cover—floating, protected, invisible, sustained—and my body is no longer a burden to me.

6. “Scratching” | Dijon

With that voice, Dijon wields an incredible instrument, one from which he can wring that wretched emotion as if from a barbed-wire sponge. It’s partly the deft use of multi-layering in his production, but the power of “Scratching” comes from its being another clementine, just like “Don’t Wanna Know” and “Over and Over.” It may be one of his lesser-played tracks, but it struck me on first spin and it’s stuck with me ever since. I love when songwriters use a specific name—love it—and when he cries “Joanne,” you can hear who she is to him, even if she never existed. The cascade of drums tumbling in at the end have me hitting repeart almost every time. It reminds me of my love, my life—I want to see her again whenever I hear it.

5. “Summer Sun” | Plains

I, for one, have been personally actualized by Katie Crutchfield’s embrace of her Alabama roots and country twang in the past five years, when she’s tranformed hers into one of the most wonderful home-grown voices on this recorded earth. That she brought Jess Williamson’s Texas twang out of her self-conscious brain—all the better for its imperfections; wreathed in feeling, brambles and thorns—was simply God’s good will for the better of humankind. The reigning verse (“It was always fun getting a little drunk / on your back porch in the rain / and I cook for you like a good woman do / you had no reason to be afraid,”) is a revelation—the dry dirt of matured resignation, the knowledge that no act or action in love is truly wrong, the painful courage it takes to tell the truth to the one you’re breaking—it’s the most any well-meaning person could ever do.

4. “Hangover Game” | MJ Lenderman

For a man named “MJ” to open an album with a song about Michael Jordan is incredible—I was named after that man too, you know—but to make it a revisionist critique (“It wasn’t a pizza that poisoned him in Utah”) and knowing pat on the back to the addicts all around us (“Yeah, I love drinking too”), with a ripe-roaring whirlwind of a guitar riff is just the next-level shit, the kind that set Lenderman up for the victory lap that Manning Fireworks ended up being. I think I still love this one the most—the hook that shows up in my dreams and dogs me like the hair of the night before.

3. “HAZARD DUTY PAY!” | JPEGMAFIA

I’m sorry, but—Peggy keep scoring. And despite never missing, “HAZARD DUTY PAY!” is still a topping of himself, a gonzo apotheosis from an outsider genius who leapt from the three-point line, doused the ball in gasoline, lit it on fire midair, took some shots at his enemies, and still brought down a tomahawk dunk at the end. He’d hate this if he read it. I cannot get enough of this song.

2. “Roman Holiday” | Fontaines D.C.

Dark, propulsive, sturdy, inevitable—”Roman Holiday” sounds like the reflected amber of a cloud sheet that hangs over an Irish evening. This is what I put on when I have that resigned, depressive anger—it’s the spark of warmth that begins to glow amidst your shivers when you swallow cold air in deep, meaningful gulps. It’s how the soul feels when it’s truly alone, and stronger for it—the only way we come in and out of this world.

Proud, proud Dubliners, Fontaine’s D.C. took a Gaelic saying often invoked by their drummer’s great-aunt to title this album, which stems from this song’s lyrics. "Skinty Fia” translates roughly to "the damnation of the deer,” which itself refers to an extinct breed giant Irish elk. We’ll all be run off this plane some day, and this song, in its structure and its form, mirrors that petty pace from day to day that we all must live, to the last syllable of recorded time—let us hope our tale is at least uttered in Irish brogue.

1. “Concorde” | Black Country, New Road

In the wake of scandal, this is the new legacy of Arcade Fire (but it’s so much better than that). This, you can tell, is an group of young, vibrating, soul-searching artists, humming in tandem—one of the most magnificent things to occur, let along wrap into a recording. While each member is a master instrumentalist, “Concorde” is a showcase for Lewis Evans’ saxophone—hear how his harmony leaps off the others in the second break, then the end when he bears down on the pressure point.

Much has been made of Isaac Woods’s lyrics, with their lightsabers and Atkins diets, but are the features of a late-capitalist hell any less worthy of songcraft than the oceans and moons that came before? Let our children at least reflect the world we force them to grow up in. Besides, he follows that with his most tender line—indeed, one of the greatest of the decade—“I was made to love you. / Can’t you tell?”

The catharsis of the ending—perfectly mixed, impossibly restrained—makes me think that the kids are alright. They just might help land this cursèd plane—they certainly saved my soul on board.

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