jessie ware

After a deluge of canceled or delayed tours, drive-in experiments, Bandcamp Fridays and bedroom livestreams, we’re finally here. Yay? It’s hard to celebrate much of anything in 2020. But one encouraging sign from the music industry has been the number of artists innovating on the fly — figuring out ways to sustain their careers through the madness. And as fans, at least we’ve had new albums to help us process our continuing semi-apocalypse. Having (mercifully) reached the end of this awful year, we have even more perspective on the functionality of a great record. The 30 we’ve assembled here have prompted us to dance, helped us grieve, made us laugh, or even just allowed us to escape into a transportive riff or soundscape. We assume they did the same for the artists themselves. Let us reme...