The 20 best albums of 2020 Clockwise from top left: Rina Sawayama (Photo: Greg Lin Jiajie), Moses Sumney (Photo: Alexander Black), Run The Jewels (Photo: Timothy Saccenti), Jeff Rosenstock (Photo: Christine Mackie), Soccer Mommy (Photo: Brian Ziff) Graphic: Natalie Peeples 3 Yes, it’s been a hard year, and yes, we’re also tired of confronting that fact. But the bizarrely repetitive and numbing hermetic existence most of us have endured this past year has made for a strange experience, one thankfully made more tolerable by all the art and pop culture streamed, downloaded, mailed, and delivered into our homes. A lot of the music that ended up on our list of the 20 best albums of the year already made an appearance at 2020’s halfway point, showing up on the list of our favorite music thus far. Most of those records were made before lockdown began, but there’s more than a couple here—Charli XCX, Taylor Swift—that drew inspiration from the same wellspring of hardship that created our present circumstances.