The 25 Best Albums of the 2020s

Muzak, world supergroups, quarantine music, and more!

Index of all best albums of the decade posts.

We’re only halfway throught the 2020s, so it’s maybe a little early to do a best of. Still, the last 5 years already feel like a very long time. For a while it seemed like Covid, and the halt to touring, was going to make permanently damage the infrastructure of clubs and venues that made it possible for many musicians to make even a modest living.

And yet, at the same time, the half-decade has seen a dazzling proliferation of wonderful music. The Covid pandemic launched an entire genre of quarantine woodshedding albums; just as the George Floyd protests were the inspiration for albums chronicling, and grieving a history of Black oppression and resistance. I’m sure by 2030 I’ll have a whole list of other favorite albums from the 2020s, but here’s my best for now.

25.
Canto+  (2021)
Beatriz Ferreyra

This compilation, drawn from forty years of Argentinian composer Beatriz Ferreyra’s electro-acoustic and tape loop experiments, includes five tracks of mysterious quasi-ambient buzz, burp, whistle and whine. The “music” can feel like a hearing test, with sounds in this ear and then that, often disappearing into inaudibility before returning with a piercing ice-pick to the skull. On “Pas de 3…ou plus,” Ferreyra starts with the sounds of people talking and giggling in the next room, before washing hem away in static or a growing hum. “Canto del loco” sounds like angry flies trying to learn to speak. Ferreyra’s music is a ghostly Carl Stalling soundtrack, where you can’t quite make out the shifts in genre or tempo because you’ve lost your television in the land of the dead.  

24.
Make Your Move (2020)
Eve St. Jones

Eve St. Jones isn’t a real person. She’s a pseudonym for a probably Swedish, probably work-for-hire singer/band who is (again probably) paid by streaming services to fill out playlists on the cheap. Make Your Move is, therefore, almost certainly the least critically validated album on all of these best-of lists. It’s a bunch of sold-out Muzak covers of big pop hits—Fleetwood Mac’s “Everywhere,” Amy Winehouse’s “Back in Black,” Britney’s “Oops…I Did It Again,” and (hilariously) the Eagles’ “Hotel California.” Blues, pop, classic rock, all sway to one gentle, mid-tempo, quasi-Brazilian rhythm. It is commercial schmaltz—and yet, in the best traditions of pop music commercial schmaltz, it’s also insinuatingly addictive. St. Jones, whoever she is, has a husky, sensual voice, and her languid phrasing turns the disparate material into a smokey nightclub set—dreamy, silky, and hilariously, inoffensively offensive. This is the great hybrid plastic library music of the 2020s. Some decades from now DJs will be recuperating it for hip retro beats and maybe they’ll even dig up Eve St. Jones’ real name. In the meantime, lean back, and let the smooth anonymity wash over you.

23.
ESPANTA GRINGO (2023)
d. silestre

There’s loud electronic music, and then there’s funk curacao…and then there’s d. silestre. The Brazilian DJ draws from the repetitive (repetitive) repetitive soundscapes of juke, the crazed shifts of hyperpop, and the brutality of power electronics to create pounding jackhammer loops that throb in the corner of your eye like a migraine wearing knives on its boots—a “Viagem Intercerebrál” (“Intercerebral Journey”) as one relentless track puts it. ESPANTA GRINGO ( or Amazing Gringo) is only 22 minutes long, but it feels like an eternity in a pit being forced to dance to the screams of the damned (damned! damned!) Female and male guest vocalists come screeching through and out, and the “melodies” and “beats” alter slightly from “song” to “song”, but the point is less the variation than the submersion in the grimy asphalt of pulverizing grit. If you can’t get enough of Espanta Gringo, d. silvestre released another short album, Vol.1 the same year, and it’s every bit as punishing.