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Rock, in its purest form, is predicated on a group of people gathered in a room. There’s no doubt it has suffered in the era of coronavirus. But bands persevered. Artists like Soccer Mommy and Porridge Radio expressed a distinctly 2020 sense of isolation in prescient albums recorded before the pandemic, while raging punk bands like Dogleg and Soul Glo summoned the catharsis we all hope to feel when we can attend live shows again. These are the best rock albums of 2020. The entries are listed in alphabetical order, and include several releases that also appear in our overall list of the year’s best albums.
Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist.
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2020 wrap-up coverage here.
(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)
Bartees Strange: Live Forever
“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. No artist wants to be pigeonholed, but for Strange this resistance is crucial to the art he makes as a Black man working in a field most associated with white dudes. 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. 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. It makes for a complex and personal statement about the nature and worth of Black creativity and labor. –Stephen M. Deusner
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Ben Seretan: Youth Pastoral
The opening track of Ben Seretan’s Youth Pastoral builds from a gentle flutter of flutes and fingerpicked guitar into increasingly knotty layers, bursting with exuberance as Seretan sings about feeling “free to be.” In the eight songs that follow, the New York-via-California singer-songwriter reckons with the Christian faith of his childhood and the growing pains of leaving the church. Powered by driving guitars and softened by droning winds and synths, the tender Youth Pastoral reckons with a question that requires no churchgoing history of your own to understand: how to find meaning amid a tumultuous life on earth. –Allison Hussey
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Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Ways
If nothing else, Bob Dylan’s 39th studio album should forever put to rest the idea that the storied songwriter is losing his voice. 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. 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. 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.
As ever with late-period Dylan albums, death lurks in every corner: as a prompt for bloody, Frankenstein-ish experiments in “My Own Version of You,” a red river to be traversed in “Crossing the Rubicon,” a body who shares his bed in “I Contain Multitudes,” a nameless rival in “Black Rider.” The gravity of Dylan’s voice and the clarity of his vision allow him to address these wraiths as an equal, one with intimate knowledge of the darkness they inhabit. One minute, he is at peace, nearly succumbing to whatever comes next; the next, he is spoiling for a fight, ready to wrestle death to the mat one last time. “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
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Bruce Springsteen: Letter to You
Mixing gritty rock with high drama, in arrangements packed with organ, guitar, and soaring tenor sax, Letter to You feels more like a classic-era E Street Band record than anything Bruce Springsteen has released in at least a decade. He basks in the band’s jubilant orchestrations, but also uses them toward more complicated ends. “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. “Rainmaker,” a resurrected anthem about a leader whose charismatic deceptions win over a desperate populace, somehow predates the Trump administration—a reminder that our stormy era is not an aberration, but a culmination. Not every song is so topical, but all are similarly burdened by history. Letter to You’s familiar sound dovetails elegantly with its subject matter, in which every present moment carries the full weight of the past. –Andy Cush
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Chubby and the Gang: Speed Kills
London punks Chubby and the Gang present themselves as a cartoonish version of an actual gang, replete with not one but two theme songs. On their debut Speed Kills, they are unreformable carjackers, turnstile jumpers, switchblade wielders, and speed addicts, who get locked up, get out a few years later, and get back to stealing stuff. The music expresses the joy of wildness, with fast and burly songs set off by handclaps and harmonica solos. In a year when the president and his supporters blew the “law and order” dog whistle incessantly, it was a welcome escape to enter the Gang’s world, where chaos is gospel and petty crime is just fun in the sun. –Evan Minsker
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Country Westerns: Country Westerns
Debut albums rarely come as worn-in and weathered as Country Westerns. The Nashville trio consists of guitarist (and bar owner) Joel Plunkett, Silver Jews drummer (and Trash Humpers actor) Brian Kotzur, and bassist Sabrina Rush, who also plays violin in the Midwest alt-country group State Champion. 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. Along with producer Matt Sweeney, the band made Country Westerns with no filler, packing every song with twangy riffs and shout-along hooks. You can practically smell the sweat and beer from the crowd. –Sam Sodomsky
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Dehd: Flower of Devotion
In 2019, Chicago indie rock trio Dehd released the sparse and scrappy album Water, with songs informed by the romantic breakup of bassist Emily Kempf and guitarist Jason Balla, accompanied by Eric McGrady’s one-tom, one-snare minimalism. For their exquisite follow-up Flower of Devotion, Dehd upgraded to a proper studio, refining their gritty alchemy without scrubbing it too clean. Kempf and Balla trade yearning, hiccupy vocals across riffs that reverberate like heat waves off asphalt, as McGrady thuds away through the humid air. “If this is all that we get, so be it,” Kempf insists, a bit of wistful resignation that doubles as a mission statement for their proudly stripped-down approach. –Marc Hogan
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Deradoorian: Find the Sun
After zoning in on starry ambience and minimalism on 2017’s Eternal Recurrence, Angel Deradoorian returns to polyglot psych rock on Find the Sun. 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. Deradoorian is quietly self-possessed, nearly beatific, in her movements through these environs, distinguishing herself with a rare quality among her psychedelic cohort: restraint. –Andy Cush
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Dogleg: Melee
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. 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. The fact that Melee conjures a year so different from the one we got is part of why it leaves such a mark: The histrionics of emo aren’t just dramatic, they’re now science fiction. We’re left to sit alone and imagine what these songs should be doing. You air-drum the little hitch in “Fox” again and again across your steering wheel; you throw your chest forward in your home-office at all the perfectly executed half-time breakdowns; you do isometric lunges while Stoitsiadis sings about disintegrating. The old world that Dogleg wrote about sucks in its own way, but it’s the world they deserve. –Jeremy D. Larson
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H.C. McEntire: Eno Axis
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. 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. McEntire began working on the album after touring as a member of Angel Olsen’s band for two years, and her time on the road is audible in these electric, live-sounding performances. As she sings in the rousing chorus of “Final Bow”: “It’s as real, real, real as it gets.” –Sam Sodomsky
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Haim: Women in Music Pt. III
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? That’s the precise kind of biting honesty that Alana, Este, and Danielle brilliantly amplify on Women in Music Pt. III. Writing with more personality and candor than ever about a range of difficult themes—depression, loss, misogyny, the complications of loving on one’s own terms—they’ve also loosened their taut pop rock just enough to breathe more life into it, incorporating the ‘90s Lilith rock of Sheryl Crow, the blue-skied strums of Wilco, and a groovy Lou Reed interpolation. Through it all, clearer-than-ever proof emerges not just of a great band in stride, but a cultural fact: women continue making the most vital rock music now. The most revelatory sound Haim make room for on Women in Music Pt. III is themselves. –Jenn Pelly
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Jeff Rosenstock: NO DREAM
Jeff Rosenstock’s NO DREAM is littered with the mundane, the dirty undesired bits of life that aren’t usually preserved in song. Moldy laundry, “weird chips,” and straight-up garbage line the former Bomb the Music Industry! leader’s latest solo album, a collection of pure pop melodies smuggled into strident, feisty punk songs. Rosenstock surveys the debris, which doesn’t add up to much. But he’s anything but dreary in his delivery, using loud guitars, louder drums, and his own brash and unwieldy voice to set scenes of filthy rental cars and beer-can pyramids. Somewhere in these melodic tantrums, drudgery becomes liberation. –Madison Bloom
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Lomelda: Hannah
Hannah Read can make a melody out of anything. Throughout Hannah, her fifth album as Lomelda, her expressive warble blooms and shrinks into strange and beautiful phrasings, heightening their meaning. 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. She sings like no one else in indie rock, as though she is guided by a golden energy from within. –Jillian Mapes
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Lucinda Williams: Good Souls Better Angels
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. Her songwriting may be more openly topical than usual, but her sound hasn’t changed much. She maintains her unmatched knack for ferocious marriages of country and rock, swooping from the snarls of “Wakin’ Up” and “Man Without a Soul” to the weary last-call shuffles of “Good Souls” and “Shadows and Doubts.” Alongside her fury for oppressors, Williams offers comfort and solidarity to the dispossessed, with a set of tunes that break your heart only to glue it back together again. –Allison Hussey
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Magik Markers: 2020
Magik Markers distinguished themselves in the early 2000s with unfettered noise jams and a merch table so teeming with CD-Rs, tapes, and LPs as to render the idea of a coherent discography faintly obsolete. The New England trio led by singer/guitarist Elisa Ambrogio has slowed down and tightened up considerably as of late. Their first album in seven years is their most finely honed, though it is still rumpled in all the right places. With creaking Crazy Horse guitar solos, basement-Sabbath sludge, and A Thousand Leaves-rustling mysticism, 2020 finds clarity in controlled chaos, an eye in the year’s hurricane. –Marc Hogan
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Melkbelly: PITH
On PITH, Melkbelly’s second full-length, the Chicago foursome refine their knotty but melodic noise rock. Singer-guitarist Miranda Winters calls out from murky depths, conjuring memories of loss, anxiety, frustration, and occasional bliss. On standout track “THC,” the band slowly cranks up the tension until it erupts into an onslaught of guitar fuzz. Melkbelly rarely stays in one place for long, whiplashing from one fractured groove to the next, always finding new ways to shift from quiet to explosive. –Quinn Moreland
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No Home: Fucking Hell
Like the modern conditions it reflects, No Home’s music holds unavoidable ugliness: Each song is an anxious, staticky shudder. Charlie Valentine, who operates No Home as a one-person band, can sing powerfully, as on “Exile,” but more often their voice is unpolished, punctuated by low moans or painful stabs of feedback. “Anxiety… anxiety… post-graduate anxiety,” they chant on “A B- in This Economy,” a wry accounting of the stress and poverty of student life. And then: “You don’t get this persona for free.” Fucking Hell plays with the distorted abstraction of no wave, the destabilizing aggression of Suicide, the deadpan howl of Kim Gordon. But the album isn’t just a grievance. As Valentine describes it, it’s also darkly funny: a catalog of irrepressible humanity, surviving and thumbing its nose in the face of cultural judgement and capitalist enforcement. –Anna Gaca
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Ohmme: Fantasize Your Ghost
With their 2018 debut Parts, Ohmme introduced a combustive art-rock style based on tightly intertwined dual vocals and improvisatory guitars, wringing sing-song catchiness from baroque complexity. On Fantasize Your Ghost, the Chicago band further explores this craggy terrain, with detours into noisenik squalls, Krautrock grooves, and chamber-pop delicacy. 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. –Marc Hogan
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Phoebe Bridgers: Punisher
Phoebe Bridgers will tweet about eating ass with one hand and crush your heart with the other. 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. 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. 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. For each tart complaint (“I hate your mom”) or fatalist disclosure (“I’ve been playing dead my whole life”) is a glimmering prophecy that one day things might be just fine, even if that day comes at the very end of civilization. –Cat Zhang
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Porridge Radio: Every Bad
On Every Bad, Brighton indie rock four-piece Porridge Radio make a strong case for curative self-scrutiny. Lead vocalist and songwriter Dana Margolin is incisive in her observations, and she often points them inward. Over airy guitars on the somber “Pop Song,” she exposes her least flattering attributes: a rotten core, a bitter disposition. But instead of corroding Margolin further, this music uplifts her, more like an exorcism of destructive thoughts than a platform for them. Her howled words and the music’s occasionally sharp edges are both caustic and restorative forces. –Madison Bloom
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Se So Neon: Nonadaptation
Before Se So Neon settled on Nonadaptation as the English title of its second EP (비적응 in the original Korean), frontwoman Hwang So-yoon referred to it as Maladaptive. 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. One refers to a condition where someone or something has failed, or someone is having trouble adjusting to something. But the Korean title of this album means that you're sort of unwilling to adjust.” In a music industry dominated by world-conquering pop empires like BTS and BLACKPINK, Hwang’s guitar-based songwriting is as radical as the title implies. 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. With an androgynous voice that shifts to suit her mood, Hwang effortlessly drifts from mid-2000s O.C.-core power pop to cocktail-lounge R&B, but seems most at home crooning atop her stratocaster’s airy twang, drenched in reverb. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz
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Shamir: Shamir
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. The Philly-based artist’s self-titled seventh album is a culmination of sorts, bundling together every divergent thread he’s followed over the last five years, from synthpop to country-tinged balladry, with bright and welcoming sonics. What stands out is Shamir’s commitment to his own vision, no matter the shape. Standout track “On My Own” is a huge, glittery anthem, and one of the most immediate songs in his catalog. “I feel it in my bones,” he proclaims. “Inside myself is where I belong.” –Quinn Moreland
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Shopping: All or Nothing
Shopping crafts dancefloor bops that make railing against consumerist capitalism sound like fun. 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. 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. It resembles no other Shopping song before it, raising the ceiling for a promising band with plenty left to say. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz
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Soakie: Soakie
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. Over a buzzsaw guitar, mononymous vocalist Summer screams through her disgust for entitled dudes with backward hats and hair gel. The punk quartet mocks capitalism and the patriarchy across this 13-minute self-titled release, each brief song its own fierce declaration of autonomy. “I don’t owe you or you or you,” Summer growls at one point. It’s furious music that dares you to feel the same way, and unleash a few screams—or bombs—of your own. –Evan Minsker
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Soccer Mommy: color theory
Sophie Allison paints with the shades of a bruise on color theory. Her mother’s terminal illness and her own struggles with depression appear in a wintry synesthesia of yellow, blue, and gray. 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. 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. These instrumentals lend a “sense of comic relief,” Allison says, “like when you joke with your friend about your unhealthy habits.” In a year when hundreds of thousands of Americans perished, we needed friends desperately—someone to make us laugh, and someone to sit with us at shiva. With this intimate hospice of a record, Allison gave us both. –Peyton Thomas
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Soul Glo: Songs to Yeet at the Sun
Soul Glo makes punk music with real stakes and a palpable sense of danger. But the Philadelphia hardcore band is hardly self-serious: they can be loose, irreverent, and downright funny. Songs to Yeet at the Sun brings all these qualities into focus in the space of an EP, packing an album’s worth of twists into 12 searing minutes. 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. Pierce Jordan’s screamed vocals are often nearly unintelligible, but the lyric sheet reveals incisive observations about money, power, and race in America. 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. –Mehan Jayasuriya
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Special Interest: The Passion Of
New Orleans electro-punks Special Interest see catharsis in demolition. 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. 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. –Madison Bloom
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Stephen Malkmus: Traditional Techniques
From “Gold Soundz”-era Pavement to his last two decades solo and with the Jicks, Stephen Malkmus has written songs like jokes you laugh at before you’re sure you get them—sometimes before you’re even sure they’re jokes. Traditional Techniques, a lush folk-rock album with a title that winks at Adorno, offers a new angle on his semi-inscrutable charm. After 2018’s surprisingly zeitgeist-y Sparkle Hard and last year’s synthwave lark Groove Denied, Malkmus luxuriates in gorgeously recorded 12-string acoustic guitar, pedal steel, and non-Western instruments like the Afghani rabab and Nigerian udu—only to deadpan about online conspiracy nuts or stack up non-sequiturs about modern religion. When he does allow himself some of the stereotypical earnestness of the folk-singer mode, on the moving and tender “What Kind of Person,” it’s with the deft misdirection of a veteran magician. –Marc Hogan
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Tame Impala: The Slow Rush
Ironically, Kevin Parker became one of today’s most influential rock stars by sidelining the scruffy guitar riffs of early Tame Impala records. Since 2015’s modern classic Currents, he’s favored a sound led by lush synth chords, hooky basslines, and danceable grooves. Fourth album The Slow Rush pushes the approach even further, towards canons previously unexplored. 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. Within a genre now largely built upon sustained engagement with the past, Parker’s one-man project continues to expand what a “rock band” can be or do in the modern age. –Noah Yoo
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Touché Amoré: Lament
Touché Amoré crafted one of the year’s best punk records using unusual tools, like pedal steel guitar, and riffs that may seem more suited to post-rock. But there’s something undeniably hardcore about the energy, earnestness, and intensity with which Lament comes roaring out of your speakers. After a decade as one of the most revered bands in their genre, the L.A. group recorded Lament with heavy music legend Ross Robinson and an abundance of songwriting ambition. 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. Like all of Touché Amoré’s best work, Lament has a therapeutic quality, sublimating even the knottiest emotions into glorious catharsis. –Mehan Jayasuriya
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Trace Mountains: Lost in the Country
There is no greater proof of the universe’s cruelty than embarking on a long, clarifying hike, then receiving an email about a 20%-off sale at Macys to interrupt your peace of mind. Wi-Fi is the skulking antagonist of Lost in the Country, Dave Benton’s second full-length album of rangy indie rock as Trace Mountains; the former LVL UP singer looks down onto miles of forest and briefly grasps the world as “only violence and smartphones.” Benton sings with his hands in his pockets, musing folksily on black rivers and black dogs. His observations are modest and sweet (“just sing your silly song”), just enough to nudge you away from doomscrolling. –Cat Zhang
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U.S. Girls: Heavy Light
From the opening disco swagger of “4 American Dollars,” U.S. Girls’ Heavy Light crackles with kinetic energy. Songwriter and bandleader Meg Remy reckons with alienation and injustice, drawing on a palette of pop, rock, and experimental sounds to convey the anxiety of the era. Poignant collages of interviews split the album into sections; the speakers’ recollections of hurtful memories and childhood bedrooms suffuse the music with empathy. Heavy Light is filled with existential dread, but it aspires to a gentler world, one where the burden of being isn’t so leaden. –Allison Hussey
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Waxahatchee: Saint Cloud
From her early punk recordings alongside sister Allison to her quietly devastating solo albums, Katie Crutchfield is always steadfast in her truth. With Saint Cloud, Crutchfield’s fifth album as Waxahatchee, she climbs to solid ground, emerging from the storm self-assured. The album reflects her newfound ease, all big skies, wide open spaces, and Americana twang. 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. Now, Crutchfield gazes into the mirror and doesn’t shy away from the reflection. “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. –Quinn Moreland
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Yves Jarvis: Sundry Rock Song Stock
Jean-Sebastian Audet understands that drifting is sometimes the best way forward. Since scratching out rickety post-punk on his 2015 debut Tenet (released as Un Blonde, a previous alias), the Montreal-based singer-songwriter and producer has eased toward fluid, soul-inflected folk—like if Toro y Moi produced early Iron and Wine. Sundry Rock Song Stock, either the second or third album under the Yves Jarvis name (it’s complicated), is also the project’s first set of 10 conventional-length tracks. With shifting layers of don’t-wake-the-baby vocals over glinting acoustic guitar and honeyed Rhodes, these are ambling tone poems, their free-flowing wordplay and intermittent societal commentary more about evoking feelings than drawing conclusions. “Hardly linear like narratives read,” Audet sings. This year, it felt like a serenity prayer. –Marc Hogan
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Yves Tumor: Heaven to a Tortured Mind
If 2018’s soul-affirming Safe in the Hands of Love established Yves Tumor as a preeminent experimentalist, then the pleasure-seeking and approachable Heaven to a Tortured Mind is the sound of them strutting into the role of a rock god. On their fourth album, Tumor is smoldering and romantic, expressing their appetite through squalling guitar solos, slinky basslines, and an ensemble of guest singers who match their lusty fervor beat for beat. Heaven flirts with familiar rock motifs as often as it subverts them, morphing into something unrecognizable. Traditional structures melt into long vamps, as on the tormented psychedelic ballad “Kerosene!,” which distills the album’s beguiling agony. 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. Gordon’s howls are hell-bent and infatuated, with Tumor’s raspy pleas pushing them both closer to the edge of oblivion. Heaven to a Tortured Mind balances listeners on that knife point, declaring Tumor’s rock-star bona fides with roguish style. –Eric Torres
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