Albums of the year 2020

2020 has been a strange year. We all know that. Live music hasn’t really been a thing since March, and so many more people get to listen to music throughout the day thanks to working from home being much more common than it was before March. I think both of these things have probably influenced my list of favourite albums this year, and so I’m going to split it into two lists - one of traditional albums that are best listened to in sequence, and one of the music that soundtracked my working days during those rare few moments when I was not in Zoom or Teams meetings.

Looking down the lists I can see I’ve very much been influenced by the live music I did get to encounter this year (at the 6 Music Festival mainly), and also by the 130+ listening parties I did since live music dried up in March (which I wrote about here and here). I do hope I’ll be able to experience live music again next year, but I also very much hope that listening parties are still something that artists see as a valuable way of connecting with their fans.

In all cases the links below are to somewhere you can listen to and/or buy the record in question (Bandcamp or the artist’s own website). There’s a lot of music here, but hopefully some of it will appeal to someone.

First off we have my list of albums. It’s quite an angry list but I think that’s a fair comment on this year:

And then the list of compilations, soundtracks, live albums, instrumentals and other things that kept me soothed during this turbulant year:

Written on December 29, 2020