The Albums I Leaned On Most In 2020

No reason you should care, really, about what I listened to on the way to show you houses this year, or while I wrote your offer, thought about how best to deal with that parking spot that suddenly wasn’t. It’s just that I’m not sure that ten years from now it’ll be the music that comes back to me first when I consider this time, and so this is a note-taking of sorts. A way of forcing the memory. A reminder to my future self that this is the aural medicine I took when the pressure built up.

In no particular order then:

Porridge Radio - Every Bad

A Brighton punk-prog (?) band who sound like no one else I listened to all year. I traipsed through an old riverside forest with the headphones on the first time I listed to this one and could have wept it was all so damned lovely, and so damned sad.

Baxter Dury - The Night Chancers

I had the chance to see his dad, Ian Dury, back in Oxford in the late 70s and begged off, thought I wasn’t cool enough. And now along comes Baxter to remind me that though I might be older, more mature, I still ain’t cool enough.

Muzz - Muzz

A supergroup of sorts, and the prettiest, lost-in-the-desert sort of music I heard all year. Paul Banks, singer also for Interpol, has never sounded better.

Protomartyr - Ultimate Success Today

Detroit punk that doesn’t sound much like punk at all. I saw them in Toronto last year and the lead singer comes across like some rumpled uncle who, in his rough suit, shows up unexpectedly at your birthday party and steals all the presents.

Nadine Shah - Kitchen Sink

It’s still the boy bands who get the lion’s share of the attention in the U.K. (the possibly-past-it Idles most notably), but Shah is better than all of them.

Metz - Atlas Vending

I said to a client that this is the band I’d want playing as I shuffle off this mortal coil, so vividly alive is their music. It might not be this album I’d choose for that departure, (their first two are unbeatable) but I wouldn’t complain.

Fontaines D.C. - A Hero’s Death

An in-your-face Irish band that tells rollicking, unguarded stories. There is both the sense that these songs were made up on the spot and also that they were laboured over for years.

The Strokes - The New Abnormal

Someone in The New Yorker said something about this being exactly the album we needed mid-pandemic, and kicking through the long grass every day at Belle Park back when we were shut down completely, I felt the same way.

Adulkt Life - Book of Curses

Stevie K is the best punk song I heard this year. And this 25-minute album is terrific, vital stuff. An out-of-the-blue stunner.

Adrianne Lenker - Songs

I could listen to Lenker’s band Big Thief all day long. We were in Brooklyn last year and they were my soundtrack to that trip. On her own, Lenker captures the world.