–Allison P. Davis, The followup to Kelly Lee Owens’ breakthrough self-titled LP is rooted in pain and loss—the shedding of a toxic relationship, the death of her grandmother, and the decay of the environment. our overall list of the year’s best albums, Chicago Indie Rockers Dehd Tackle Life’s Cosmic Joke With Unpretentious Charm, Lomelda’s Hannah Read Is Forever Searching for Connection, Lucinda Williams on the Music That Made Her, Phoebe Bridgers on the 10 Things That Influenced, Porridge Radio Make Indie Rock for the Angsty Antisocial in All of Us, What It’s Like to Be Black in Indie Music, U.S. Fetch the Bolt Cutters is the sound of someone freeing themself from a mental prison built by others but unknowingly reinforced by the self. Find all of those individual lists and 2020's consensus rankings inside. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission. Slap bass intrudes, his gnomic utterances fold in on themselves, and his clenched voice disappears completely amid ambient guitar and unholy noise. That’s the precise kind of biting honesty that Alana, Este, and Danielle brilliantly amplify on Women in Music Pt. Their first album in seven years is their most finely honed, though it is still rumpled in all the right places. Led by a keening riff lifted from Uriah Heep’s “Weep in Silence,” Tumor and singer-songwriter Diana Gordon supplicate to a lover over walls of electric guitar and pummeling drums. “You girls mean business,” he bellows to two “fleet-footed guides from the underworld” on the swaggering “False Prophet.” “And I do too.” –Andy Cush, In a year of isolation and unattainable intimacies, Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas is our poet laureate of constant longing. Best of 2020: The Year's Best Albums; Best of 2020: Top Debut Albums; More articles » Highs and Lows. On his first collection of original material in eight years, he sounds unusually attuned to the suggestive power of his craggy instrument, using small changes of inflection to convey wry self-mockery, roaring prowess, and a certain uneasy nostalgia. One day after Pitchfork published their list of the top 100 songs of 2020, they've shared their list of the 50 best albums of the year. –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. Pitchfork's 50 Best Albums of 2020. What’s Your Pleasure’s adrenalizing disco, electro-funk, and deep house are indebted to the pulsing eclecticism of defunct queer nightclubs like the Paradise Garage and the Saint: The title track recalls New Order’s early ’80s cyborg funk, while “Read My Lips” pays homage to R&B group Full Force’s muscular rhythm tracks of the same decade, and the sparkling arpeggios of “Save a Kiss” evoke Robyn’s yearning 21st-century electro-pop. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz, Soakie’s members hail from Melbourne and New York City, and the opening song on their debut album is an international summit calling for frats to be nuked. Original Source → Comments. October 9, 2020. –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. All rights reserved. Live Forever argues that life is not some march toward a peak, but a closed loop—one that’s tighter if you’re Black. Now, Crutchfield gazes into the mirror and doesn’t shy away from the reflection. Girls on the Absurdist Meme, Anti-Colonial History, and Soul Records That Inspired, Phil Elverum on the Song He Wishes He Wrote, A Day in the Life of Bad Bunny, Introverted Superstar, Jessie Ware Explains Why This Smoldering Alicia Keys Ballad Is Her Personal Anthem, Phoebe Bridgers on the 10 Things That Influenced, Moses Sumney Is Ready to Claim His Spotlight, Fiona Apple on How She Broke Free and Made the Album of the Year. To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. A list of Pitchfork's best music of 2020. 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. –Peyton Thomas, Soul Glo makes punk music with real stakes and a palpable sense of danger. But the album isn’t just a grievance. –Jeremy D. Larson, The second album of soulful Americana from North Carolina songwriter H.C. McEntire begins with an early morning prayer and ends with a slow-burn Led Zeppelin cover. –Madison Bloom, Ka has spent his 40s laboring over how to animate the ghosts of his home. Since 2015’s modern classic Currents, he’s favored a sound led by lush synth chords, hooky basslines, and danceable grooves. On standout track “THC,” the band slowly cranks up the tension until it erupts into an onslaught of guitar fuzz. Prior to his death, he … It makes for a complex and personal statement about the nature and worth of Black creativity and labor. Portrayal of Guilt’s first album, 2018’s Let Pain Be Your Guide, was rooted in classic screamo and distinguished by crowd-pleasing jet-roar vocals and post-rock expanse. –Quinn Moreland, Jean-Sebastian Audet understands that drifting is sometimes the best way forward. But bands persevered. That’s the precise kind of biting honesty that Alana, Este, and Danielle brilliantly amplify on Women in Music Pt. Kempf and Balla trade yearning, hiccupy vocals across riffs that reverberate like heat waves off asphalt, as McGrady thuds away through the humid air. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz, Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal, Since his dance-pop breakthrough in 2015, Shamir has been finding his own way forward, with a series of skewed and often lo-fi indie rock albums that defy received ideas about a linear path from one release to the next. Mary Lattimore - Silver Ladders. Amaarae: The Angel You Don’t Know 18. The harpist’s ambient compositions are somber but whimsical, submerging her careful plucks in murky pools of reverb and synth. Low → High; High → Low; 50. Pitchfork may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. “I feel it in my bones,” he proclaims. The 50 Best Albums of 2020（Pitchfork） 来自: indiechild (北京) 2021-01-01创建 2021-01-01更新 一直对pitchfork的选辑表示疑问，list里倒是有几张和我今年的重合。 推荐. 50: Mary Lattimore – Silver Ladders 49: Yaeji – WHAT WE DREW 48: Chari XCX – how i'm feeling now 47: Lil Baby – My Turn 46: Burna Boy – Twice As Tall 45: Lyra Pramuk – Fountain 44: Freddie Gibbs / The Alchemist – Alfredo 43: Megan Thee Stallion – Good News 42: Kate NV – Room For The Moon 41: Rina Sawayama – SAWAYAMA 40: Arca – KiCK i 39: Dehd – Flower Of Devotion • 2020. Recording it over a few short weeks at the onset of the pandemic, Charli escaped isolation’s creative doldrums by opening up a feedback loop with her fans, sharing real-time updates and allowing them a hand in her process. Ignorance - The Weather Station. Ungodly Hour is a collection of low-key tracks that demonstrated true mastery of their intricate harmonies over slinky, charismatic production. Below, find the results, and compare them to Pitchfork’s own list of the 100 best songs and 50 best albums of 2020. 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. –Ross Scarano, Megan Thee Stallion’s official debut album is a triumphant joyride that more than fulfills the promise of its title. Grimes once treated lyrics as meaningless sound, but here, she’s shockingly honest about the pain of posh isolation: “I’ll tie my feet to rocks and drown/You’ll miss me when I’m not around.” –Arielle Gordon, On Every Bad, Brighton indie rock four-piece Porridge Radio make a strong case for curative self-scrutiny. In the summer of 2011, Pitchfork noted Bon Iver's self-titled release as "Best New Music", and later chose the release as the best album of 2011. The results are consistently stunning, from the barn-burning opener “Come Heroine,” to the masterful heel-turn of “Limelight,” which lands somewhere between a Cranberries anthem and a campfire sing-along. For all of the record’s industrial squall and techno blast beats, it doesn’t just inspire destruction—it asks what you’ll rebuild from the rubble. Across the hour-long odyssey, Uzi hops between kaleidoscopic new worlds: one where it sounds like he’s skipping across a Sega Genesis circuit board, another where he’s hosting an ethereal party alongside a turnt choir. Best Albums Of 2020 Pitchfork. Heaven to a Tortured Mind balances listeners on that knife point, declaring Tumor’s rock-star bona fides with roguish style. They are mostly untitled, proceed according to a single tempo across the whole album, and feature a drastically limited instrumental palette. –Andy Cush, Produced while Drakeo the Ruler was awaiting retrial in Los Angeles on a bogus gang charge, Thank You for Using GTL is punctuated with robotic warnings from the extortive inmate phone service over which it was recorded. Alive with the kind of freedom that 2020 mostly failed to deliver, Lipa’s vision of future-pop pairs classic themes of love with enough hope to carry us to a new year. Pitchfork, the most vital and ... the tour for the band’s 2020 album X: The Godless Void and Other Stories long since postponed. The napkins might be white linen but nobody’s using them. Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2020 wrap-up coverage here. On Fantasize Your Ghost, the Chicago band further explores this craggy terrain, with detours into noisenik squalls, Krautrock grooves, and chamber-pop delicacy. Music reviews, ratings, news and more. Girls on the Absurdist Meme, Anti-Colonial History, and Soul Records That Inspired. 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. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz, Sophie Allison paints with the shades of a bruise on color theory. Page navigation. ), “Genres keep us in our boxes,” Bartees Strange sing-raps on “Mossblerd,” a song that sounds like it’s falling apart even as he’s putting it together. 83. With no stadiums to fill, Swift could take risks that would have previously seemed unimaginable in a discography calibrated to reach the cheap seats: work with the National’s Aaron Dessner as her principal collaborator, duet with Bon Iver, make tracks that sound like Low and the Sundays, drop an s-bomb within the first 20 seconds of the first song. –Sheldon Pearce, Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Bandcamp |  Spotify | Tidal, Hannah Read can make a melody out of anything. Where on his debut album Sumney lingered on lack and absence, on græ he delivers effulgence and multiplicity with a shapeshifting swagger. The droll, phantom-like singer writes music for faithless burnouts who still want to believe: lost souls clinging to astrology and fucked-up intimacy, striving to get by in a brutal universe with no pre-ordained meaning. They make frequent diversions from their fast and chaotic signature sound, including the noise-rap sex jam “2K,” which arrives unexpectedly in the middle of the EP. Equal parts retro and fresh, Future Nostalgia is redolent of elements from the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, nodding to the work of artists like Blondie, Chic, Kylie Minogue, Nile Rodgers, Prince, Madonna, and Daft Punk. –Peyton Thomas, London-based tenor saxophonist Nubya Garcia made her debut album Source with the goal of exploring her roots: both her heritage as a child of Guyanese and Trinidadian immigrants, and the things that ground her as a person. Twirling in the fog of producer DJ Parrot’s near-industrial spin on 12” disco, Murphy lets us into her wildest dreams and wrongest desires (“Ten lovers in my bed / But I want something more,” she sings on “Something More”). Across the record, the rapper uses singular rhythms and invented syntax to imagine his jewelry eliciting gasps from the juror box, chide police for snooping through his DMs, and laugh along with the inmates nodding their heads to his phone calls. It’s both the country album she was destined to make and an acknowledgment that self-acceptance is hard-won; Saint Cloud reckons with addiction, sobriety, imperfect romance, trauma, and trying to navigate it all. The album’s material is based on club sets he performed at a “small but very radical” Tokyo venue called Forestlimit in late 2019 and early 2020… Death and apocalypse lurk in every corner of Punisher—lightning flashes, sirens wail, a Giants fan gets killed at Dodger Stadium—and Bridgers shuffles through this ominous fog, still alive, still growing taller. Getting to the precise meaning in English, she explained in an interview, required “some Korean etymology stuff”: “There are two different ways to say [‘Maladaptive’] in Korean. Highest of the Month. Share on Facebook; Share on Twitter; Open share drawer; The first posthumous album from Mac Miller plays like a compan But the best albums of 2020 proved that incredible new music will always make their way to our ears, even in the toughest of times. The most exciting and important new albums being released today. His nostalgia for reggaetón’s mixtape-era reaches its peak on “Safaera,” a crowning jewel of a record featuring elder statesmen Jowell & Randy and Ñengo Flow, with Bad Bunny’s subterranean voice bridging the past and present. We count down to number one, with entries from Soccer Mommy, Run The Jewels, HAIM and Moses Sumney. Much like Sufjan Stevens in the songs of Carrie & Lowell, Allison ventures into the tundra of her despair and emerges with an unsparing and unsentimental account of survival. In between, the Mount Moriah vocalist gives a breakthrough performance as a bandleader, using her searing voice and imagistic songwriting to set a dusky, autumnal mood. It’s both the country album she was destined to make and an acknowledgment that self-acceptance is hard-won; Saint Cloud reckons with addiction, sobriety, imperfect romance, trauma, and trying to navigate it all. As he smiles on “Young Man’s Game,” “I’ll be lying in my ocean of time.” –Cat Zhang, Ghanaian-American singer-songwriter-producer Amaarae assembles music that makes very little sense on paper. Amidst the neverending whirlwind of 2020, it was tempting to crawl into a cocoon of nostalgic favorites and never come out. As is usually the case, you can predict a lot of this list if you read their reviews throughout the year, but it never entirely mirrors Best New Music. Critic Score. Wow! Alongside a new backing band, after losing the other original members to mandatory military service, she questions a young, freethinking artist’s place in a society that expects deference and decorum. View reviews, ratings, news & more regarding your favorite band. As is … Her mother’s terminal illness and her own struggles with depression appear in a wintry synesthesia of yellow, blue, and gray. “I have a gift, I’ve been told, for seeing what’s there,” she sings on “The Eye,” and her perspective has never sounded so clear. View reviews, ratings, news & more regarding your favorite band. –Allison Hussey, It was an album that was rumored to be rap’s next opus before it even materialized. This year, it felt like a serenity prayer. Her howled words and the music’s occasionally sharp edges are both caustic and restorative forces. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. 1. Rough and Rowdy Ways can be approximately divided into two types of song: the ballads, which nearly evaporate as you listen, and the more conventionally rocking blues-based numbers. Over a buzzsaw guitar, mononymous vocalist Summer screams through her disgust for entitled dudes with backward hats and hair gel. One refers to a condition where someone or something has failed, or someone is having trouble adjusting to something. –Brian Josephs, A band’s impact shouldn’t be hypothetical, but here’s Dogleg, the debutants of Michigan emo, whose breakout year mostly took place in the imagination. –Andy Cush, A band’s impact shouldn’t be hypothetical, but here’s Dogleg, the debutants of Michigan emo, whose breakout year mostly took place in the imagination. 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. She buoys her bleak lyrics with the bright melodies and buzzing guitars that soundtracked Beavis and Butt-Head’s bickering on MTV in the ’90s. The result is some of the finest songwriting of Swift’s career, vivid storytelling both personal and fictional (and somewhere in between), stuffed with more Easter eggs than a Marvel movie. Bartees Strange - Live Forever. Perfume Genius, Phoebe Bridgers, Fiona Apple, Lil Uzi Vert, Bad Bunny, and Moses Sumney. His 2020 album of original compositions is a radically different proposition: a 43-minute ambient suite meant to counter fascism’s global spread with joy rather than despair. With Saint Cloud, Crutchfield’s fifth album as Waxahatchee, she climbs to solid ground, emerging from the storm self-assured. Neither hot mess nor robot, sisters Chloe x Halle have chosen a different route, from YouTube sensations to Beyoncé protégées to grown women. From the choppy vocoder of “One More Year” to the loping soft rock of “Borderline,” Parker allows myriad influences to flow through his songwriting: house, boogie, yacht rock, R&B. Much like Sufjan Stevens in the songs of Carrie & Lowell, Allison ventures into the tundra of her despair and emerges with an unsparing and unsentimental account of survival. But the raw energy of Apple’s voice is the album’s life force, and there’s no mistaking the subjects of her missives—be it the men who refuse to recognize their abusive behavior; the women who, like Apple, were conditioned to compete with other women; the mean girls and those who called their bullshit; the users and the silencers; the people she fears will leave her. They’d been playing together informally for awhile, and they decided to make an album only after some encouragement from the late David Berman, who’d witnessed Plunkett and Kotzur’s earliest practices as a duo. III is themselves. Core duo Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham (who has worked for the company that produces Pitchfork Music Festival) are most impressive in their sharp-tongued songcraft, whether confronting a distant partner or conjuring up a childhood reverie that juxtaposes hot lava and hot dogs—unsettlingly delectable. The historical sweep of the music is equally broad, not simply focused on this-minute sounds but spanning decades of influences and collaborators—the latter ranging here from ancestral icon Youssou N’Dour to nineties legends like Timbaland and Diddy, to recent stars like Stormzy. As she sings in the rousing chorus of “Final Bow”: “It’s as real, real, real as it gets.” –Sam Sodomsky, Three songs into Haim’s sharpest album yet, Danielle is behind the wheel in her beloved Los Angeles with a Joni Mitchell classic on the stereo, “screaming every word to ‘Both Sides Now.’” How lost must one feel to shout “I really don’t know life at all” alone in the car first thing in the morning? Led by a keening riff lifted from Uriah Heep’s “Weep in Silence,” Tumor and singer-songwriter Diana Gordon supplicate to a lover over walls of electric guitar and pummeling drums. The wintry decay that initially clouds the album disintegrates on “Garden Song,” where the arrangement blooms and burbles, thumping steadily, like a walk home in crisp evening air. Search query All Results. –Amy Phillips, Historically, there are two trajectories from sweetie childhood star to flawed adult: the bumpy one full of high-profile foibles or the one where they wind up as robots. Heavy Light is filled with existential dread, but it aspires to a gentler world, one where the burden of being isn’t so leaden. But there’s something undeniably hardcore about the energy, earnestness, and intensity with which Lament comes roaring out of your speakers. Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2020 wrap-up coverage here. Righteous anger pointed at society’s rulers flows throughout RTJ4, which was released at the start of June amid nationwide protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd. “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. Folklore is clearly beating those albums on the majority of year-end lists. As befits an artist obsessed with being a superhero, Burna Boy’s music is thoroughly posthuman: much of its succulence comes from how the singer’s lilting cadences mesh with Auto-Tune. 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. 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. III. But instead of corroding Margolin further, this music uplifts her, more like an exorcism of destructive thoughts than a platform for them. –Jia Tolentino, From her early punk recordings alongside sister Allison to her quietly devastating solo albums, Katie Crutchfield is always steadfast in her truth. We count down to number one, with entries from Soccer Mommy, Run The Jewels, HAIM and Moses Sumney . The Chicks dropped “Gaslighter”—the title track of their first album in 14 years—on March 4, shortly before 2020 went all the way up in flames. Fourth album The Slow Rush pushes the approach even further, towards canons previously unexplored. Below, find the results, and compare them to Pitchfork’s own list of the 100 best songs and 50 best albums of 2020. A list of Pitchfork's best music of 2020. Good Woman - The Staves. Indie Rock. All articles filed in pitchfork best albums 2020. A married mom in her mid-30s, Ware is still able to capture one of nightlife’s great gifts—the exhilarating thrill of being single, looking out onto a packed dancefloor, and seeing the possibility of magnetic attraction. On his second album of 2020, the underground New York rapper reaches a new level. One day after Pitchfork published their list of the top 100 songs of 2020, they've shared their list of the 50 best albums of the year. But bands persevered. The album reflects her newfound ease, all big skies, wide open spaces, and Americana twang. “Last Man Standing” describes a musician packing up his instrument alone onstage at the end of the night, a poignant metaphor for the twilight of a performer’s career. III. Ad Choices, The albums that got us through this chaotic year, featuring Fiona Apple, Bad Bunny, Lil Uzi Vert, Phoebe Bridgers, and more. On his first album, Live Forever, there’s a righteous defiance to the way the D.C.-via-Oklahoma artist scrambles 2000s indie rock (the intimacy of Bon Iver, the bombast of the Arcade Fire) with hip-hop cadences, emo intensity, and punk catharsis, as though he’s working it all out in real time. She buoys her bleak lyrics with the bright melodies and buzzing guitars that soundtracked Beavis and Butt-Head’s bickering on MTV in the ’90s. The 10 Best Albums of 2020. Songs to Yeet at the Sun loudly announces the arrival of a band whose perspective feels like an overdue corrective to punk’s overwhelming whiteness. From the motorik chug of “Saturnine Night” to the suave flute-led jazz pop of “Devil’s Market,” she renders familiar sounds with such style, character, and attention to detail that you might as well be hearing them for the first time. The old world that Dogleg wrote about sucks in its own way, but it’s the world they deserve. –Cat Zhang, The first half of græ, Moses Sumney’s tour de force sophomore album, came out just before lockdown; the second was released a few months later, after its audience had been humbled by the soft brutality of isolation, the brutal clarity of wandering our own inner landscapes day after day. Pierce Jordan’s screamed vocals are often nearly unintelligible, but the lyric sheet reveals incisive observations about money, power, and race in America. The song’s title sentiment is simply uttered on the hook—he’s wounded, yet hopeful that the sentiment’s warmth can be felt. Over airy guitars on the somber “Pop Song,” she exposes her least flattering attributes: a rotten core, a bitter disposition. We’re left to sit alone and imagine what these songs should be doing. In 13 Lists. Instantly, it felt more like an unfocused, loose, and chaotic mid-aughts Lil Wayne mixtape with memorable tracks like “All In,” where the flexes are brilliantly batshit (Lil Baby threatens to wreck his Lambo truck just to prove, to no one in particular, that it’s not rented). –Jillian Mapes, Lucinda Williams drew on a new but all-too-familiar well of inspiration for her 14th studio album: the anger and frustration she felt over the poisonous turn of recent American politics. He sounds possessed here, supercharged by something supernatural—even when he’s just shouting a luxury brand’s name into the ether 15 times in a row. When a slightly unfinished version of Jay Electronica’s Act II appeared this October, it had been a little over a decade after its initial slated release, and most fans had given up hope on it ever actually coming out. –Allison Hussey, Listen/Buy: Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal. The U.K. post-punk trio’s latest LP updates their DIY aesthetic, filling some of the negative space they’ve so expertly wielded in the past with pulsing electronics. On the slow-burning “It’s Lomelda,” she croons off a list of her musical heroes and their work, from Yo La Tengo to Frank Ocean to Sufjan Stevens’ devastatingly spare “The Only Thing.” She turns a conversational bit of advice into a soaring mantra on “Wonder,” repeating the phrase “When you get it, give it all you got, you said” across vocal peaks and valleys. The album is the first project between only Gibbs and The Alchemist, as it also marks the second time they have collaborated on a full … “Why doesn’t it feel the same when I’m in the air?” she murmurs on “In the Mirror.” “My life is in a weird place,” she raps in Korean on “Free Interlude.” But she finds clarity, and joy, in examining it nonetheless. Heaven flirts with familiar rock motifs as often as it subverts them, morphing into something unrecognizable. Album centerpiece “For Your Pleasure” is a treatise on hedonism set to retrofuturist synthesizers and artificial handclaps; perhaps too frantic for the ’70s discotechques Shopping has conjured in the past, it would sound right at home in the cocaine ’80s. Singer-songwriter Alex Stoitsiadis was supposed to be hollering his hooks over melodic post-hardcore guitars in roiling 250-cap clubs, and the scenes of heartbreak he described were supposed to be playing out for listeners in real life. GTL is a technical marvel as well as a creative one: producer JoogSZN’s beats retain their funk and low end while making space for Drakeo’s vocals, which come through impressively crisp. Rough and Rowdy Ways can be approximately divided into two types of song: the ballads, which nearly evaporate as you listen, and the more conventionally rocking blues-based numbers. For all its gentleness, it is an album of deep resolve, unshakable in its commitment to the idea that a better world is possible.