THE BEST ALBUMS OF 2020

• Author: Tony Clayton-Lea
• Date: 19 December 2020
• Published date: 19 December 2020

án Kane, Siobh

án Long, Lauren Murphy,

Éamon Sweeney and

Dean Van Nguyen

Irish Top 10

1

Fontaines DC

A Hero's Death

2 Denise Chaila -

Go Bravely

3 Aoife Nessa Frances -

Land of No Junction

4 Pillow Queens -

In Waiting

5 Ailbhe Reddy -

Personal History

6 Róisín Murphy -

Róisín Machine

7 Bleeding Heart Pigeons -

Stir

8 Hilary Woods -

Birthmarks

9 Nealo -

All the Leaves Are Falling

10 Brigid Mae Power -

Head Above the Water

We hear and experience everything amid the environment we live in, and so virtually (for the most part) everything we listened to this year, or at least from March onwards, was through a prism of knowing we weren't going to see the music being performed in a live setting. In other words? No rucking at a Fontaines DC gig, no furious toe-tapping to tunes from Pillow Queens, no skirmishes under the lights of disco balls at a Róisín Murphy show, no eyes closed in reveries to either Denise Chaila or Nealo, no nodding thoughtfully, blissfully, to Aoife Nessa Frances, Brigid Mae Power, Bleeding Heart Pigeons, Hilary Woods or Ailbhe Reddy. It wasn't that kind of year, was it? We were, for the most obvious of reasons, stuck in our own heads and our own homes trying to figure out the best way to maintain some kind of equilibrium. This may be why our critics' Top 10 Albums of 2020 is largely a reflective collection, with temperament influencing the year much more than Ticketmaster. Never mind whether or not the music was written prior to the insidious arrival of Covid-19 - we just needed a massage, rough and tender, now and again. We got them, too.

TCL

International Top 10

1 Run the Jewels -

RTJ4

2 Phoebe Bridgers -

Punisher

3 Sault -

Untitled (Black Is)

4 Taylor Swift -

Folklore

5 Dua Lipa -

Future Nostalgia

6 Bruce Springsteen -

Letter to You

7 Perfume Genius -

Set My Heart on Fire Immediately

8 Hey Colossus -

Dances/Curses

9 Matt Berninger -

Serpentine Prison

10 Jessie Ware -

What's Your Pleasure?

There was a clearcut No 1 from our critics. Run the Jewels' RTJ4 hit a potent political nerve, released as it was (in June) during demonstrations across the US at the manner of the death of George Floyd. In the UK, meanwhile, the truthfully enigmatic Sault funk-soul collective released Black Is, a card-marking missive of sociopolitical realism. If Taylor Swift's Folklore was a pandemic panacea par excellence, and Bruce Springsteen's Letter to You a batch of reassuring old-school hugs (of which there was a severe shortage this year), then Jessie Ware's...