The Tomo Awards 2020
My Top 20 Albums Of 2020
20. Lil Uzi Vert — “Eternal Atake” and “Lil Uzi Vert vs. The World 2”
I actually kind of wanted to keep the first few album descriptions short until we reach the top 10, but what’s essentially a 4-disc album like this deserves a bit more words to highlight it.
In every sense of the word, Eternal Atake could have been a failure, and according to a lot of quick-to-react eggheads, it apparently was. But those of us who actually gave the album its fair chance after an almost three year wait since its announcement, Eternal Atake mostly delivers on what we’ve come to expect from Uzi and then some: his usual liquid-like vocal flows find itself melodically skipping all over the final 2/3 of the “3-disc” album. The first disc however finds itself focusing mostly on hard-rapping, a skill that Uzi only showed off to the majority of onlookers last year on SoundCloud loosies like ‘Free Uzi’, though anybody who heard his first mixtape The Real Uzi would know that he’s been capable of this, it just wasn’t as idiosyncratic as what he presented on his breakout sophomore mixtape Lil Uzi Vert vs. The World in 2016.
Which speaking of, not even a week after the long-awaited release of Eternal Atake, Uzi announced the release of a sequel to his modern-classic mixtape titled Lil Uzi Vert vs. The World 2, serving as a “deluxe edition” of Eternal Atake, a fairly scummy release tactic (on the part of the label, anyway; artists, get that bag any way you can) that essentially began this past year’s trend of releasing album-sized “bonus tracks” after the official release, which opens up a much, much longer ethical discussion for another time.
While Eternal Atake is comprised of entirely new unheard music with an emphasis on maximalist production and the astounding feat of actually delivering 18 fantastic songs with only a single feature (courtesy of ex-Odd Future and current The Internet member Syd), vs. The World 2 mostly focuses on the sound Uzi came up on, featuring previously-leaked songs like ‘Lotus’ and ‘Come This Way’, as well as features from Uzi’s biggest contemporaries like Chief Keef, Young Thug, Future, Gunna, and 21 Savage among others.
Eternal Atake Biggest Highlights: ‘I’m Sorry’, ‘That Way’
Lil Uzi Vert vs. The World 2 Biggest Highlights:‘Yessirskiii (feat. 21 Savage)’, ‘Got The Guap (feat. Young Thug)’
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19. BLACKPINK — “The Album”
I like BLACKPINK. I like them a great deal, actually. I didn’t however think that I would ever “album of the year”-like them, though. Frankly, if you told me last year after their flop of an EP, Kill This Love, that I would like their debut “full-length” (emphasis on the quotes) enough to say it breaks my top 20 favorites of the year though, I’d have laughed.
I went into The Album on release night with that same level of cynicism, especially after hearing the pre-release singles ‘How You Like That’ and ‘Ice Cream’, the former of which is a cookie-cutter by-the-books BLACKPINK single to a T, the latter of which is a fairly generic Young Chop snare-drowned combination of K-pop tropes (I mean, it’s called ‘Ice Cream’, does it get more uninspired than that?) and bling-era “twerk” trap rhythms. ‘Ice Cream’ also sports a lazy western market-baiting feature from Selena Gomez, a move that most definitely reads “we actually wanted Ariana Grande but were too cheap to actually pay for that kind of feature” from YG Entertainment, reputed as the single most scummy agency in all of South Korea. YG Entertainment’s main marketing tactic is to keep fans hungry, begging for more, starving them up until their just on the brink of dying by starvation before feeding them a few scraps to sustain and repeating the process. BLACKPINK fans are malnourished and they don’t even realize it.
The fact that The Album exists in any capacity at all is a miracle, and despite these seeming-missteps, what The Album finally delivers in its short 25-minute and 8 song runtime is a pretty damn good K-pop album. Even ‘Ice Cream’ began to grow on me after enough repeated listens to The Album and hearing quotables everywhere; and if there’s one thing that this album has, its quotables, almost to the level of a Kanye West albums. Lines like “Ice cream chillin’ chillin’”, “We are the lovesick girls”, “Mona Lisa kinda Lisa needs an ice cream man that treats her”, and “Look at you, now look at me” pop up as jokes and bits in conversations with different friend groups all the time since The Album’s release. They even managed to get Cardi B to record a feature likely right before her price would have skyrocketed back up with the release of her Megan Thee Stallion-assisted smash hit ‘WAP’ that put her back on the map after waiting far too long to release her still unannounced sophomore album.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Pretty Savage’, ‘Lovesick Girls’
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18. Mac Miller — “Circles”
The first time I listened to Mac Miller, I was a sophomore in high school and he was hot off the releases of Best Day Ever and K.I.D.S., with Blue Slide Park to come soon. I admittedly only listened to him to find something in common with a girl I was sitting next to in Spanish class. That whole story aside, Mac’s music stayed with me long after that and was among the major voices of the teenage zeitgeist of that time along with other contemporaries that have remained critical darlings this long like Lorde and the more prominent members of Odd Future.
On Circles, a posthumous but already-recorded sequel to his previous opus, 2018’s Swimming, which was released a few short weeks before his untimely passing, Mac gets more soft and sentimental than ever before, in a way that’s even more chilling and breathtaking posthumously. Mac sings more than raps, and further touches on topics addressed on Swimming, such as his estranged relationship with Ariana Grande, drug addiction, as well as his mental health that lead him to try finding something like peace in the drugs. This culminates on the track ‘Good News’, where Mac sings —
Good news, good news, good news
That’s all they wanna hear
No, they don’t like it when I’m down
— beautifully capturing the sentiment of the entire album, and the unfortunate last few years of Mac’s young life. If there was ever a tear-jerking song this year, this is the one. This is the goddamn one, man.
Rest In Peace, Mac Miller.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Good News’, ‘That’s On Me’
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17. NECRY TALKIE — “ZOO!!”
On ZOO!!, it’s business as usual for NECRY TALKIE, and while for most bands that wouldn’t be a good thing, it’s all I’d ever want from a band like them. It’s been so long since I’ve listened to a J-rock band not take themselves seriously. I’m embarrassed to admit that NECRY TALKIE is a discovery I only made in 2020 with the release of ZOO!!, because they’ve been making this incredibly carefree take on J-rock since early 2018, releasing one album every year since, and that’s two more years I could have had the joy of their two other albums flowing into my ears too. Better late than never, though, as bands like POLKADOT STINGRAY — as fun as they may try to appear — continue disappointing with subsequent releases and continue to leave the market open for a band as fun as NECRY TALKIE. Fun is the perfect word for NECRY TALKIE, a band whose sound could be best described as “pure joy” in layman's terms.
Their sound takes the usual J-rock sound of twangy, funky telecasters, tight drums, and sliding bass, and adds an element of unpredictability to it. The songs on ZOO!! are riddled with syncopated guitars played through heavy but dry effects pedals, slide whistles, gliding synths, and singer Mossa’s squeaky voice that reminds of bands with similarly sugar-sweet frontwomen like nano.RIPE and Chatmonchy. If you’re as bored as me with the general output of J-rock lately and haven’t had the absolute pleasure of hearing NECRY TALKIE’s equally chaotic and joyous take on the regional genre, I think you’re in for a real treat.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Hokujou no Susume’, ‘Mushi ga Iru’
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16. Soccer Mommy — “color theory”
Among my earliest contenders for Album Of The Year in the first few months of 2020, color theory is one of the albums I’ve come back to over and over again the most throughout the Hell Year Of 2020. To just get the obvious out of the way, the production is crisp and immaculate, with a heavier emphasis on layering full-bodied acoustic guitars with gentler electric guitar chords as opposed to Sophia Allison’s mostly-electric guitar-focused 2018 debut as Soccer Mommy, Clean.
What sets color theory even further apart from Clean however, is the emotional weight of Allison’s songwriting and lyricism. While Clean was no stranger to heavy song topics (see: ‘Your Dog’), color theory takes things into a slightly more solemn territory, focusing less on the BandCamp indie rock sound they explored on their debut, and expanding their usage of auxiliary sounds and a more consistent aesthetic, both musically and visually, most obviously evident in both its name and album artwork. ‘royal screw up’ in particular is the song I revisit the most from the album, starting off with just an acoustic guitar and slowly building up into a full-band arrangement as the song goes on and the lyrics get more self-deprecating, something that Allison stated in a Pitchfork interview as intentional, wanting the song to start off sounding the way it did when she wrote the song in her bedroom.
Biggest Highlights: ‘circle the drain’, ‘royal screw up’
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15. The Midnight — “Monsters”
The Midnight have been without a doubt the best in the business when it comes to 1980s nostalgia-baiting. Call it whatever you want — hauntology, synthwave, retrowave, chillwave, futuresynth, electronic— but The Midnight make incredible music that’s far more than just the surface “haha it sounds like 80s music” comment the recently resurged genre receives from onlookers.
On Monsters, The Midnight make this even more clear, featuring the furthest stylistic shift away from their roots that they’ve taken to date as well as their most consistent front-to-back listening experience so far. This stray from their signature sound goes as far as putting a trap beat on ‘Seventeen’, something that’s not uncommon for anyone in this day and age, but still a first for the band. Tracks seamlessly blend into each other, songs call back to reference each other (see ‘Seventeen’ and ‘City Dreams’), their hooks are at times at their catchiest, and at other times purposely downplayed for more subtle and emotional themes to take center stage in their stead. As a matter of fact, it takes almost 7 minutes of Monsters’ 58-minute runtime to even hear a normal, unaffected human voice. The nearly 6-minute opener, ‘America Online’, which was released as a single in the summer of 2019, features repetitions of a vocoded voice singing —
If I love you, will you love me?
If I want you, will you want me?
I am reaching, are you reaching out?
If I touch you, will you touch me now?Through the wires to the heart
Phantom fingers fumble in the dark
I thought I did, I felt a spark
Are we all one beating heart?
— over and over again throughout the track’s still somehow progressive structure. It really reminds a lot of what Daft Punk were attempting to do on 2006’s over-hated Human After All, but actually delivering on the promise it offered. This album has a lot of similar tracks scattered throughout as pseudo-interludes like ‘Helvetica’ and ‘Night Skies’, as well as the catchy pop tunes they’ve become some cherished for, like ‘Dance With Somebody’ and ‘Prom Night’.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Dance With Somebody’, ‘Last Train’
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14. TWICE — “Eyes wide open”
Here’s one that I really wasn’t expecting. JYP Entertainment’s flagship girl group TWICE was at one point my favorite K-pop group. This was of course in 2015 and 2016, before LOONA stomped their way onto the scene with a game-changing and fiery pre-debut string of over three albums-worth of singles and B-sides (before inevitable disappointing post-debut with the departure of the brain behind the project, Jaden Jeong, someone who the fandom wrongfully hates which is again, a story for another time) and before TWICE changed their entire sound and aesthetic from “cute” to “beautiful” in 2019, something that shouldn’t have had any effect on their songwriting quality.
I’ve come to accept that I’m in the minority when it comes to opinions on the three releases leading up to Eyes wide open (FANCY YOU, FEEL SPECIAL, and MORE & MORE), mine being that I hate them — a lot. I once again had zero expectations for this project after three disappointing records in a row, the last of which was a mere four months prior to Eyes wide open. And while I still miss the sugary-sweet songwriting found on their now-legendary singles like ‘CHEER UP’, ‘LIKEY’, ‘SIGNAL’, and of course their magnum opus ‘Like Ooh Ahh’, I have to admit that their change in aesthetic has finally paid off with Eyes wide open, an album that focuses on incredible songwriting and smooth, watery production that dips its feet in pools of trap, funk, and disco in a way that few other K-pop groups that try their hands at these same styles often fail to deliver on in a way as interesting as this.
As somewhat of an honorable mention, we have NiziU now, JYP Entertainment’s latest project with a heavy emphasis on the Japanese market rather than Korean, employees TWICE’s pre-FANCY YOU-era songwriting team, with their debut single ‘Step and a step’ veering in the exact direction I had wanted TWICE to remain in. I’ve never been one to get attached to specific members of most J-pop and K-pop groups (although if I had to pick a favorite from TWICE, it’s probably Jeongyeon or Jihyo), nor do I watch a lot of music videos or comeback stages, so it doesn’t even matter to me that these are different girls singing, because they sound just like old TWICE. And frankly, at least TWICE are all my age, but some members of NiziU are really young and it would just be like…wildly uncomfortable to care that much about the members.
So anyways, everyone’s happy now. If you like new TWICE, here’s TWICE. If you like old TWICE, here’s NiziU.
Biggest Highlights: ‘UP NO MORE’, ‘QUEEN’
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13. Rina Sawayama — “SAWAYAMA”
While I don’t lose my shit over Rina Sawayama and her debut album like so many friends and people (white gays) I’ve seen this year, there’s no denying that SAWAYAMA is one bold statement of a debut album. Rina effortlessly tackles so many different styles on this album, from pop-metal on ‘Dynasty’ and ‘STFU!’, to late 90s/early 2000s R&B on songs like ‘XS’, runway bounce on tracks like ‘Comme des garçons (Like the Boys)’, and trap on cuts like ‘Akasaka Sad’. Those aren’t random cuts either, that’s literally just tracks 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
SAWAYAMA is a grab bag of so many different styles fit together perfectly into a consistent listening experience. Lyrically, Rina tackles the stereotypes and expectations that she faces as a queer Japanese-British woman. SAWAYAMA is, if anything, just an incredible and fun listening experience from front to back, more akin to a playlist of various styles rather than a single concise album.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Comme des garçons (Like the Boys)’, ‘Paradisin’’
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12. Bad Bunny — “YHLQMDLG” and “EL ÚLTIMO TOUR DEL MUNDO”
So…I think it’s safe to say that Bad Bunny heard ASTROWORLD. Because on YHLQMDLG, an acronym for Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana (literally: I Do Whatever I Want), Benito delivers his most maximalist and musically profound body of work to date. Most 20-song albums aren’t worth the hassle and the time, but at a fairly agreeable 66-minute track time, YHLQMDLG goes through the motions that an album as earthshattering as ASTROWORLD went through for trap music but for reggaetón. The ASTROWORLD comparison frankly feels like an insult to the artistic genius of Bad Bunny, so I’ll promptly stop with them going forward.
YHLQMDLG honestly has a handful of filler tracks that won’t stick on first listen (namely — and I’m sorry, I know people love every song here —cuts like ‘Está Cabrón Ser Yo’ and ‘Una Vez’), something that’s almost inevitable with 20 full songs with no interludes, skits, or songs shorter than 2 and a half minutes, but the songs that hit just hit like a truck. Tracks like ‘Safaera’, ‘Yo Perreo Sola’, and ‘La Difícil’ absolutely dominated the music world this year, regardless of language barrier. It’s not entirely universal, I still get questioning looks from my Latinx friends when I tell them I like Bad Bunny, but I’m also not even remotely the only non-Latinx person I know that fucking adores Bad Bunny.
As if an album as colossal as YHLQMDLG wasn’t enough to cement Benito as the owner of 2020, he went on to release a second album, LAS QUE NO IBAN A SALIR (literally: THE ONES THAT WERE NOT COMING OUT), not even 3 months later in May, although it was later rebranded as a “compilation album”. But then at the tail end of November, he released his actual third studio album, EL ÚLTIMO TOUR DEL MUNDO, an album that while not as immediately impactful as YHLQMDLG happened to be, managed to serve as a brilliant stylistic shift for Bad Bunny, playing off of the indie-rock and downtempo closers to YHLQMDLG, ‘Hablamos Mañana’ and ‘<3’ for most of its runtime. This obviously divided a handful of listeners and purists. Benito himself stated however that this change in sound was simply due to the ongoing pandemic — which I really hope I don’t have to mention again for the remainder of this list. While YHLQMDLG relies heavily on features on 10 of its 20 tracks, EL ÚLTIMO TOUR DEL MUNDO features only 3 features on its 16 tracks. Rather than create the type of perreo-baiting (“perreo” means “twerk”, whiteys, catch up lol) reggaetón music he built the foundation of his career on, he set out to make a more fitting album intended to be listened to in your room alone. Because if you’re still going out trying to party and act like nothings happening…well, I’m not gonna break professionalism to call you what I think you are and what I think you should do to yourself for putting so many in danger.
YHLQMDLG Biggest Highlights: ‘Yo Perreo Sola’, ‘Hablamos Mañana (feat. Duki & Pablo Chill-E)’ (and subsequently ‘<3', as they transition perfectly into each other and set the mood to come on EL ÚLTIMO…)
EL ÚLTIMO TOUR DEL MUNDO Biggest Highlights: ‘MALDITA POBREZA’, ‘YO VISTO ASÍ’
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11. Bring Me The Horizon — POST HUMAN: SURVIVAL HORROR
I can sense the ghostly presence of a 15 year old me bullying the ever-loving shit out of a 25 year old me for loving a Bring Me The Horizon album this much. I’m years into having accepted that I was once an arrogant hardcore gatekeeper. I scoffed at pretty much any ____core genre (deathcore, metalcore, mathcore, etc.) for not being punk enough, believing Converge to be the only band you could consider “metalcore” that was worth my time.
Granted, my bias was based on the correct assumption that almost everybody around me who listened to bands like Bring Me The Horizon, Sleeping With Sirens, and Falling In Reverse (still don’t know why every ____core band has the same name with different substitute words) was toxic, manipulative, abusive, and would likely never grow out of their high school interests. Ten years on, at least that part was right. However, that crowd is what prevented me from being able to enjoy music like this.
Upon hearing about how incredible POST HUMAN: SURVIVAL HORROR was by virtually everyone in the music sphere and a still-burning addiction to Devil May Cry 5 (c’mon, V looks just like Oli Sykes) and DOOM Eternal (DOOM composer Mick Gordon produced on POST HUMAN: SURVIVAL HORROR), I decided to give Bring Me The Horizon a spin to keep the mood going while not playing the games, starting with 2008’s Suicide Season and 2010’s There Is A Hell Believe Me I’ve Seen It, There Is A Heaven Let’s Keep It A Secret, an album even I had heard of at the time of its release, seeing as every scene kid ever set it as their Facebook status twice a month throughout 2010. I was surprised, I was enjoying it a lot. So I worked my way through their discography, absolutely floored by releases like 2013’s Sempiternal and 2019's experimental mixtape/thing Music to listen to~… (the full title is so long it exceeds the character limit on iTunes), where the band went full-on with electronic production values to compliment their drop-tuned guitars and more melodic-focused songwriting the band has since shifted to since There Is A Hell….
On POST HUMAN: SURVIVAL HORROR, Bring Me The Horizon channels all sorts of different influences, most notably nu-metal and industrial metal of all things, though in less of a Limp Bizkit or Slipknot way and more of a Linkin Park way, a comparison that not a single soul who wrote of this release shied away from. It’s true, though, I can totally hear Chester Bennington — may he Rest In Peace — singing along to a triumphant and Xbox 360 commercial-esque anthem like ‘Teardrops’. Meanwhile, the intro track ‘Dear Diary’, would certainly make fans of their older music happy, though I couldn’t say for how long. Of all of the coronavirus bars that made their way into music this year, it’s the line during the Mick Gordon-produced single ‘Parasite Eve’ that stands alongside Anderson .Paak, Jay Rock (we’re gonna pretend he wasn’t on the remix, ok?), JID, and Noname’s ‘Lockdown (Remix)’ as the best topical lyrics of the year — “When we forget the infection, will we remember the lesson?”. Seeing the state of the western world not even two weeks into January 2021, I’m going to say we will not remember the lesson.
One of the biggest highlights of the record is a one-two punch, the interlude ‘Itch for the Cure (When Will We Be Free?)’ which serves as an intro to the BABYMETAL collaboration ‘Kingslayer’, not only one of the best songs BABYMETAL has been a part of in half a decade, but one of the heaviest and most fantastic songs in Bring Me The Horizon’s entire discography. The band has stated that “POST HUMAN” will be a series of albums, with POST HUMAN: SURVIVAL HORROR serving as the first of allegedly four installments, all of which will feature a different musical style recorded during the pandemic. If this record is anything to go off of, I eagerly await the next part.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Teardrops’, ‘Kingslayer (feat. BABYMETAL)’
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10. Autechre — “SIGN” and “PLUS”
I simply can not stress enough how significant and strange of a band Autechre is, nor can I even begin to describe how vehemently fucking massive and strange their discography is. The idiosyncrasies of the way Autechre moves as a unit perfectly compliments the actual sound of their music.
Autechre often follow a formula with their albums: release a very long album and then shortly after release an EP of — and neither B-sides, leftovers, and throwaways are frankly insults to the brevity of the songs songs, but I will nevertheless use the word “leftovers” for the sake of conversation and ease here — leftovers as a companion to the main album. For instance, shortly after the release of 2010’s Oversteps, Autechre released the companion EP Move Of Ten. I also use the term “EP” loosely when speaking of Autechre, as one of their most-loved, EP7, sits at a comfortably long 61 minutes, a mere 13 minutes shorter than the (frankly less awe-inspiring) album it serves as a companion for, LP5; this is nearly triple the length of the full-length album I released this year. This is almost always the case for the duo, save for their two previous releases, NTS Sessions 1–4 and the 5-disc elseq 1–5 (don’t ask me how to pronounce anything related to Autechre besides “Autechre” which is pronounced like the words “Awe”, “Tech”, and “Er” as in “earn”, I otherwise do not know or give a shit). Granted, elseq in its entirety sits at a little over 4 hours long, and NTS Sessions is nearly double that, sitting at 8 hours. Why would they need leftover collections for albums that long?
Autechre makes Aphex Twin seem approachable. And we all know how much gatekeeping eggheaded nerds love to gatekeep Aphex Twin as this unapproachable “smart people music”. But I’m not here to gatekeep.
If you can get your head into Autechre’s music, they will take you to a different world. The flow of time is genuinely warped when listening to their music. This is immediately evident on SIGN’s intro track ‘M4 Lema’, which starts off with what sounds like a long-sleeping, damaged machine finally trying to wake itself up. If you get your head into it right away, following the sound of this waking machine until the point where something resembling melody and rhythm starts to take shape will last almost 3 full minutes, although it can feel sometimes like 20 seconds when you’re truly immersed.
Despite this strange opener, SIGN actually happens to be among the most approachable Autechre albums to date, without compromising the oddity of it all. As a matter of fact, it’s not only one of their most approachable releases, it might also be one of their best. This first track introduces you to the idea of Autechre if you’ve never listened to them before, as well as the rest of the album. Autechre can be both scary and beautiful, both rhythmic and nonsensical, both melodic and dissonant. While SIGN could best be described as an “ambient IDM” album (believe me, I hate the term “IDM” too) similar to 2008’s Quaristice, its companion album, PLUS, finds its footing in more traditional rhythmic analog-synth, drum machine, straight up experimental IDM territory much like 1995’s Tri Repetae. They do however share some common chemistry, and possibly even some shared synth patches/presets. Depending on what kind of Autechre fan you are, there’s something to love on both albums, although I personally prefer SIGN’s beautiful Metroid-like synth textures the most.
SIGN Biggest Highlights: ‘F7’, ‘gr4’
PLUS Biggest Highlights: ‘ecol4’, ‘esle 0’
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9. The 1975 — “Notes On A Conditional Form”
Oh my god I wanted this to be perfect, I wanted so much for this to be my #1 album of the year. I wanted nothing more badly than for this to just be a consistent and powerful album with skipping but consistent genres and a strong message about the state of the earth. What we instead got, was a nevertheless still-powerful but slightly slightly bloated album that’s about a clean 1/2 Burial-inspired UK garage and different genre for every remaining song. When have The 1975 never not bloated their albums though? Even the preceding A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships sat at a cozy 15 songs and 59-minute runtime, their shortest to date. Notes On A Conditional Form however stands as their lengthiest, totaling at 22-tracks and 80 full minutes.
Now that’s enough negativity, because NOACF is still a massively bold statement for one of the biggest pop bands in the entire world to start their album as such:
Track 1 [‘The 1975’]: 5 full minutes of ambient music narrated by Greta Thunberg speaking about climate change and insurrection.
Track 2 [‘People’]: Literally just a hardcore punk song, screaming and all
Track 3 [‘The End (Music For Cars’)]: A fully orchestral interlude that leads into…
Track 4 [‘Frail State Of Mind’]: A stuttering future garage track with themes of social isolation and anxiety.
This is not the same band that was singing “Oh, they’re just girls, breaking hearts” almost 8 years ago. They’re worn-in and worn-out, frontman Matty Healy got addicted to and recovered from his addiction to heroin since then. They’ve toured arenas in every corner of the globe. But most importantly, they’ve come around to seeing the more important problems in the world than just girls breaking hearts: politicians and big businesses killing both people and the earth itself for more useless power and more useless money.
As ‘The 1975’ ends with Greta Thunberg stating “It is time to rebel”, ‘People’ begins with a short 4 bars of pounding drums before feedbacking guitars swell and Matty begins screaming at the top of his lungs in the fry register —
WAKE UP! WAKE UP!
It’s Monday morning and we’ve only got a thousand of them left
And I know it feels pointless and you don’t have any money
But we’re all just gonna try our fucking best
This is once again not the band we knew from 2013, they’re using their platform to promote change. Taking inspiration from their more punk influences not in sound, but in ethics, The 1975 even resonated the DIY ethos of Fugazi and Bomb The Music Industry!, by not printing new t-shirts for this era but instead recycling leftovers from previous touring cycles and encouraging fans to bring their own merch from previous tours to have Notes On A Conditional Form-era iconography printed on as additional, complimentary parts of the t-shirts. It’s frankly a genius move, and I know for a fact that I would have gotten my I Like It When You Sleep… Tour shirt repressed into a NOACF Tour shirt if the pandemic didn’t cancel all music tours (shit, I mentioned it again).
Among the other genres musically played on this album, the band tackles country and folk on ‘Roadkill’ and ‘Jesus Christ 2005 God Bless America’, shoegaze on ‘Then Because She Goes’ and ‘Me & You Together Song’, future R&B on ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’, as well as a more familiar pop-rock sound for fans of the band’s previous work on tracks like ‘If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)’ and ‘Tonight (I Wish I Was Your Boy)’.
Biggest Highlights: ‘People’, ‘Me & You Together Song’
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8. Ichiko Aoba — “Windswept Adan”
I actually just got chills and started laughing to ward off tears welling up just thinking about this album when I saw the name come up as the next in the list while writing this. Let me preface by saying Ichiko Aoba’s 2010 album Kamisori Otome (literally: Razor Maiden) is one of my favorite albums of all time, full-stop. Aoba’s music is absolutely haunting throughout her entire discography. She’s been best known in the past for her almost fully-acoustic guitar arrangements and sparse, foggy production (however, she’s explored more complex arrangements on live albums like 2017’s Pneuma in the past). Her acoustic guitar is tame and subtle, her voice is reverberated and equals the volume of the guitar so-as to not let one outshine the other. When Taylor Swift announced her (best until evermore topped it later in the year) new album folklore earlier this year, a few friends and I were joking with each other about how much we would love it to sound like Ichiko Aoba’s music. Of course, as wildly unlikely as it was, it wasn’t entirely off, and serves as a solid reference point to the uninitiated (fair reminder that her previous album qp was at one point one of the highest-rated albums of 2018 on RateYourMusic; she’s a big deal to seriously hardcore music nerds).
Ichiko Aoba’s music is solemn and cloudy like folklore and evermore are, but with even more artistic strength, integrity, and identity. In January, she released the 7" single Amuletum/Bouquet, which was the first time she had ever recorded music with more than just acoustic guitar in a studio setting. While ‘Bouquet’ was the standard enchanting acoustic guitar outing you’d expect from her previous work, ‘Amuletum’ on the other hand featured only a harp, a clarinet, and I think a cello — no guitar — and it was the most incredible thing I had heard from her in a full decade. As good as qp was, I expected that album; she had released five other studio albums that sounded just like it, and I was used to that sound. It wasn’t bad, just a warm blanket. Familiarity. But on Adan no Kaze (officially and beautifully translated as Windswept Adan), Aoba finally breaks free from the prominent acoustic guitars of her previous work and into the lush, chamber-esque instrumental arrangements found on ‘Amuletum’. That’s not to say there aren’t acoustic guitars here, but the overall emphasis of the album is put on the lush orchestration — did I use the word “lush” already? It’s like that word was invented with the foresight of Windswept Adan’s existence.
I really don’t even want to say more about it —Windswept Adan is so hauntingly beautiful. The previously mentioned Autechre might take you to a world by way of bizarre songwriting and synth textures, but on this album, Ichiko Aoba takes you to a different world by sheer beauty alone. While most of the choices on this list so far are fairly objectionable personal takes, I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s listened to this album and not walked away floored. It’s truly that difficult to dislike.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Pilgrimage’, ‘Dawn In The Adan’
7. Code Orange — “Underneath”
Code Orange’s Underneath is not just a masterwork, it’s a genre-defining album. So often did I once scoff at both Code Orange themselves, but the metalcore genre itself. In full gatekeeper fashion, my enjoyment of the genre began and ended with Converge’s discography. But if 2020 has taught me anything, it’s just how incredible metalcore can be, in bands like the previously mentioned Bring Me The Horizon as well as Pittsburgh’s own Code Orange.
Calling Underneath a “metalcore album” however does it a great disservice. Underneath takes detours into glitch, industrial, and even a little bit of “butt rock” of all things, something that has for sure alienated a fair amount of “hardcore kids”, and by kids, I mean grown adults who still take this shit seriously. I’m grown adults. But if retrospect has taught us anything this year, maybe it’s that some “butt rock” can be kind of fun? Think about how stupidly cool that Halo 2 trailer with that Breaking Benjamin song felt back in 2004. While Underneath doesn’t get that corny, some of its best moments are its more darkly-melodic, clean-vocal passages that remind of the hilariously named and universally-hated “genre” of “butt rock”.
Code Orange hasn’t lost their hardcore identity on Underneath as much as extremist man-children claim they have, but they do share a lot of sonic characteristics with other bands here, wearing their influences loud and proud on their sleeves. You could play the intro to ‘You And You Alone’ to me and tell me it’s a B-side from the (incredible) album Slipknot released last year, and I would believe you until Eric “Shade” Balderose begins singing. (I’ll be honest, I don’t know too much about Code Orange, do people really call him “Shade”? Forget what I said about butt rock, that shit is corny as hell lmao).
The production on Underneath is so futuristic and dystopian, elevated by the visual aesthetic that the band used for the promotional material like music videos and their next-level livestream performances they used to promote the album in place of cancelled tours (seriously, both of Code Orange’s livestreams this year, ‘Last Ones Left’ and ‘Back Inside The Glass’ respectively, are the best western music has offered this year, topped only by Perfume’s ‘POP FEST’ from this past September, but Perfume has always been ten steps ahead of the game; let’s just end it there.
If you can handle your music on both the extremely heavy and experimentally glitchy sides, Underneath will impress and then some. If you’re a purist, well, I don’t know what to tell you — stay mad, I guess.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Who I Am’, ‘Sulfur Surrounding’
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6. chelmico — “maze”
Leading up to maze, we had already heard four full-length records by chelmico (a portmanteau of their names, Rachel and Mamiko) that certainly managed to still capture the same fun nostalgic energy that made ‘Love is over’ such an underground hit, but doing very little else besides replicating that vibe. This changed with ‘Easy Breezy’, a song that, on top of being a massive hit because of its use in the biggest anime of the season, showcased artistic growth between the two. There’s a level of chaotic energy immediately present in the crunchy slide guitar that opens the track up before a pounding drum beat and repetitious vocal refrain carries us into the first verse full of speedy and skillful rapping and vocal harmonies serving as ad-libs. This is more than the slower rapping and beat that would feel at home on any Maltine Record compilation that we got almost five years ago with ‘Love is over’. This was true artistic evolution while still retaining the style they came up on.
On maze, the hooks are more clear and consistent, the production is focused and compliments their vocal performances, and the songwriting is just miles better than it’s ever been. That’s not to say that chelmico was a bad band before maze. On the contrary, songs like ‘Oh, baby!’, ‘Player’, ‘Himitsu’, ‘Good Morning’, and ‘BEER BEAR’ showed that they were capable of more than just falling back on the “lazy” and “bored” sound that so many J-rappers like KOHH use to essentially delegitimize so much of what Japan has to offer to hip-hop. Those songs showed that they indeed were capable of making a record like maze — all they had to do was put emphasis on what makes the best of Japanese rap so insanely good.
And the first time I listened to maze, I was admittedly a bit worried. Those songs from earlier in their career showed promise but the albums they resided on ultimately fell flat; ‘Easy Breezy’ could have very easily been a similarly lucky break, but it thankfully wasn’t. Hell, it’s not even the best song on the album. Immediately after ‘Easy Breezy’ comes ‘Terminal chaku, Soku dance’, a song with a beat as wonky and fun as ‘Easy Breezy’ as well as the same energetic rapping to pace. This is how almost the entire album goes. The beats are zany and at times unhinged, while the rapping never relies on the usual crutches rappers like AKLO and CREAM’s Staxx T lean on; repeated phrases, forcing rhymes by emphasizing the final syllable of a word, or even worse — nonsense English words just to have something to rhyme with. Instead, chelmico’s lyrics are focused, their rhyme schemes are more thoughtful, and their hooks are catchy.
More than just rapping on verses and singing hooks, a few songs lower the mood. The title track ‘maze’ is a 93-second instrumental beat that wobbles and swirls around your head. ‘Gohandayo’ features that most hectic beat on the entire album, its first half carried by what essentially sounds like an accordion playing two chords willy-nilly without direction while drums pound and at times freestyle to the rhythm of it, before the song beat-switches into a chaotic and pounding electronic beat, not too dissimilar to happy hardcore. ‘Disco (bad dance doesn’t matter)’ on the other hand is a fairly straight forward funk and disco number, something that wouldn’t feel out of place next to a track like Doja Cat’s ‘Say So’, Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’, or the father of all disco and funk music, Skylar Spence’s ‘Fiona Coyne’ (full shade, sorry bro but you didn’t fucking “invent” disco in 2015 lmao). The penultimate song, ‘milk’, is a fully-acoustic and emotionally powerful song that fits the mood of lonely and longing pandemic life —
jp:
ミルクは多め わたし好みのコーヒー
甘すぎない ぬるいくらいがいいよ
ちっぽけだって これはふたりの日々
少しだけ眠たそうな君を見るen:
A lot of milk, my favorite coffee
It’s not too sweet, and I like it a bit lukewarm
I can see you got a little bit of sleep
If only for a little while, this is how we spend our days
Above all else, the first time I listened to maze, I felt the same way I did the first time I heard the greats of post-Y2K Japanese hip-hop. I felt the same way I did the first time I heard M-Flo’s ASTROMANTIC, the same way I did the first time I heard RIP SLYME’s FIVE, and in their vocal delivery and technique, the first time I heard Shing02 rapping on Nujabes’ (may he Rest In Beats) legendary ‘Luv(Sic)’ hexalogy, particularly the third part of six on the eternal 2006 album Modal Soul.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Douyara, Watashi wa’, ‘Disco (Bad dance doesn’t matter)’
Listen:
5. GING NANG BOYZ — “Ne- Minna Daisuki Dayo”
Volume warning if you’re about to throw this album on: the first track starts with 2 seconds of silence before very loud and persistent noise begins at the 0:03 mark. You’ve been warned. It’s a bit jarring if you’ve never heard a GING NANG BOYZ album before. For the initiated, however, it’s a comforting sound and some reassurance that they’re not changing their sound even a little bit after such a long absence.
Is there a better way to describe GING NANG BOYZ’ sound than that, though? They’re not a noise band, exactly. They simply have a lot of static background noise as a compressed backdrop to all of their songs; just a quirk of their own production values. I wouldn’t even call them “noise-punk”. I would however call them among the most legendary punk rock bands in the history of Japanese music. It’s been almost a full a decade since we got a new GING NANG BOYZ album, with them last releasing the compilation album La Strada in 2017 and their third studio album Hikari no Naka ni Tatteitene (roughly: Stand in the Light) in the first few weeks of 2014. Aside from those releases, the most recently we had heard from frontman and mastermind behind the band, Kazunobu Mineta, was on his brilliant collaboration with Seiko Oomori, “Re: Re: Love”, at the beginning of 2019. Even if you don’t listen to Japanese punk, if you like western punk, there’s a good chance you’ve heard a cover of GING NANG BOYZ’ song ‘I Don’t Wanna Die’ on the tail-end of Jeff Rosenstock’s debut album/mixtape I Look Like Shit. Ever thought that Jeffy singing in not-English felt a little out of place? There’s your answer.
Ne- Minna Daisuki Dayo (roughly: Hey, Everyone — I Love You) picks up right where the band left off in 2014. Their loud, abrasive, uncompromising take on post-Number Girl and post-Weezer punk and emo tropes is as powerful as ever here, if not more so. Mineta sounds absolutely tortured on this album, even if you have the language barrier between you; understanding the lyrics just adds an extra layer to it as well. The intro song ‘DO YOU LIKE ME’ starts off as a fast hardcore punk number before falling into a dreamy, melodic, and arpeggio-picked second movement at the halfway mark. This summarizes the sound of the album quite well, despite it’s length of just under 3-minute, the shortest track on the album. GING NANG BOYZ, despite playing a take on hardcore punk music opts to write long, well-structured songs rather than the short sub-minute tracks that are almost synonymous with hardcore punk — take for instance track 9, ‘Ikitai’ (roughly: ‘I Want To Live’), which clocks in at 12 minutes and 19 seconds.
But GING NANG BOYZ aren’t entirely hardcore punk either, they just have the loud and fast tendencies. They have a strong understanding of melody and harmony, with catchy choruses (almost pop, but far far far far far too raw to be considered so) and complex harmonic structures in their chord progressions; far more than I’ve heard most western punk bands doing in the last decade, the closest example I can think of being Beach Slang, with their similarly raw sound and dreamy chord progressions, though still far more polished than the GING NANG BOYZ.
Mineta’s time working with Seiko Oomori shows quite clearly on the B-side of the LP, particularly on more synthpop-sounding numbers like ‘GOD SAVE THE WORLD’ as well as the brutal but jangly ‘Koi wa Eien’ (roughly: ‘Love Is Forever’), taking hints from Oomori’s on tongue-in-cheek take on love songs and even a more retro Beach Boys-esque style. On songs like ‘Ichigo no Uta’ (literally: ‘Strawberry Song’), the band take their progressive punk and pop sound to a 10, fully embodying the sonic characteristics that make the best J-rock songs so good, with repeated English lyrics like “I’m yours, you are mine” that would get a good chuckle of familiarity out of any Weezer fan.
On Ne- Minna Daisuki Dayo, the GING NANG BOYZ make not just a triumphant return for their own legacy, but as a massive statement for the landscape of Japanese music in general. With songs this varied, well-written, and potent, it’s a hard album to hate if you can handle production that isn’t perfectly polished.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Amen Semen Mary Chain’, ‘Ichigo no Uta (long long cake mix)’
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4. The Weeknd — “After Hours”
I hated After Hours the week it came out. I’ve been XOTWOD since Kiss Land dropped all the way back in 2013. I’m so deep into it, that I’m of the refined few that believe Kiss Land to be Abel Tesfaye’s magnum opus. A cinematic masterpiece in the medium of music, rather than film. I still think After Hours could have been handled better, particularly in the singles leading up to its release. Abel was teasing a gritty, dark, and “back on my bullshit” vibe with songs like Heartless, where boldly states —
I’m back to my ways, because I’m heartless
All this money and this pain got me heartless
Low life for life because I’m heartless.
— as well as the title track ‘After Hours’. Even ‘Blinding Lights’, despite being Abel’s biggest pop single to date (and the most-streamed song of the entire year, according to Spotify), much in traditional Weeknd fashion, is so unbelievably not radio material (he can’t feel his face when he’s with you because the “you” in that song that he’s referring to is “cocaine”). Lyrically, the song is dripped in both innuendos and direct sexuality despite having a “fun” and “nostalgic” and frankly boring synthpop beat. The kicker for me, however, was ‘After Hours’ itself, released as the final teaser track before the full album’s release in late March. It’s among my favorite songs of the entire year. Its structure is progressive, it’s lyrically depressing, and musically, it’s unbelievably dark and lowkey; everything I love about a Weeknd song, 6+ minutes long and oozing out a late night state of mind.
And then the album dropped. Saying I was disappointed would have been an understatement. On the surface, the album seemed like his brightest album to date — daytime music , which seemed like a strange aesthetic choice for an album called “After Hours” and an even stranger choice for an artist as synonymous with “nocturnal” as The Weeknd. However, after forcing myself to listen over and over again, the darkness makes its way through. Much like 2013’s Kiss Land, After Hours is actually a concept album, inspired by a city. Whereas Kiss Land was inspired by Abel’s trips to Shinjuku (and likely Kabukichou), Tokyo, After Hours was inspired by Las Vegas. And furthering the Kiss Land parallels, After Hours follows the story of a man whose love leads him to disaster. Whereas the big reveal of Kiss Land is that Abel himself murders his love interest for being unfaithful, around halfway through After Hours, it’s Abel himself that winds up gravely injured from pursuing his love interest —
I ended up in the back of a flashing car
With the city shining on my face
The lights are blinding me again
It’s because of these lyrics at the end of ‘Faith’ directly foreshadowing the track immediately following it that makes ‘Blinding Lights’ bearable in the context of the album when it finally comes on. He really does know how to tell a story. Songs like ‘Too Late’ and ‘Hardest To Love’, songs which have hints of UK garage and drum n bass respectively, seemed like among the strongest of the tracks until rediscovering how powerful of a song ‘Faith’ is both in the punch of its kick drum and bass as well as the lyrical cohesion that it uses to connect to other tracks on the album.
I still think ‘Snowchild’ is a little underwhelming, if not a solid and downtrodden change of pace. The only songs I can really complain about are ‘In Your Eyes’ and ‘Save Your Tears’. Again, if these songs didn’t directly connect to each other with a lyrical cohesion, I’d write them off as him radio-pandering. But with both the lyrics and especially the music videos, Abel is essentially doing with this album what he didn’t have the popularity or budget to do as well with Kiss Land in 2013, despite the Kiss Land music videos being absolutely jaw-dropping. I also think ‘Scared To Live’ would have felt a lot more powerful if it had a really sick keytar solo right where the drums kick back into the last chorus instead of the way it actually is; like the kind of sick keytar solo that appeared on the track ‘Shameless’ off of his 2015 album Beauty Behind The Madness.
‘After Hours’ really grew on me after repeated listens and investing myself into the story and world he’s created for it. The title track is moody, the 3 bonus tracks (‘Nothing Compares’, ‘Missed You’, and ‘Final Lullaby’) give the cliffhanger that ‘Until I Bleed Out’ leaves us with some closure, ‘Escape From L.A.’’s second part is downright filthy, and the kick and snare on ‘Too Late’ absolutely donk. It’s one of the rare times where I’ve truly outright disliked an album, and an even rarer time where that album becomes one that I absolutely cherish. ‘After Hours’ is incredible, more than just a pop album, it’s the type of album that pop-only fans and radio listeners who only hear ‘Blinding Lights’ on TikTok and car commercials wouldn’t be able to fully appreciate, as pompous as that may sound.
The album’s “snub” from the 2021 Grammy Awards is yet another shining reminder that the Grammys are fucking worthless and should be abandoned in favor of something more like The Olympics, where it takes place over a longer period of time, judgement is done on the spot over the course of several days, and it includes the rest of the world, not just white people.
After Hours might not be best album in Abel’s catalogue, but it’s a damn good one that eventually lived up to the hype and threw me for a major loop.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Faith’, ‘After Hours’
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3. Haru Nemuri — “LOVETHEISM”
I don’t want to take all the credit for discovering Haru Nemuri and helping put her on the map, since it was mostly a joint effort between me and Deadgrandma (you can check his AOTY list by clicking here), but let’s keep it humble, alright? I don’t need to go into a long story about how we discovered her early albums like Atom Heart Mother and Sayonara, Youthphobia and went on to spread the good word into the ears of influencers with a bigger reach than us like Anthony Fantano, but, y’know…that was us.
Haru’s championed 2018 debut full-length album Haru To Shura made it high up on my favorite albums of that year, and her growth as an artist has continued since then, hopefully culminating in her sophomore effort later on in 2021. Her short but sweet 2020 mini-album LOVETHEISM takes that raw punk rock, dream pop, and hip-hop energy that Haru To Shura captivated everyone in 2018 with and takes it a step further, with more of her violent shouty hooks and dreamy production values while putting a bigger emphasis on more English lyrics for her newfound audience to easier understand without compromising her message of tolerance, love, and anti-establishment values. While I think the MIDI orchestra on the opener ‘Fanfare’ would sound miles better with either a real orchestra or at least higher quality samples, it still gets the point across well and mostly takes a backseat to the more conventional instruments in the arrangement anyway.
The real stunner here is the track that follows ‘Fanfare’, however, the ferocious and aggressive ‘Trust Nothing but Love’, starting with the sound of Haru taking a deep breath before spitting words into the microphone faster than a jet plane. As usual with Haru, she weaves the signature elements of artists that influenced her into a sonic assault that’s uniquely her own; the million-words-a-minute ironically sugary pop of Seiko Oomori, the punk and art rock experimentalism of Shinsei Kamattechan, and likely a bit of the rap flow of her better J-rap contemporaries like Macra Izumi and some of DAOKO’s pre-major label mixtapes. The drum beat runs fast enough to keep up with Haru’s lyrics, and the guitars are distorted just enough to match the shrill vocal fry of her passionate screams.
If you heard Haru To Shura in 2018, you’re in for another wild ride. If this is your first time hearing Haru Nemuri, you’re also in for something truly truly special, and I’m deeply sorry you’ve missed out on one of the most unique and enjoyable artists in the entire world for this long.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Trust Nothing but Love’, ‘LOVETHEISM’
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2. YESEO — “BE”
YESEO’s debut full-length DAMN RULES topped my list back in 2018, coming out just ahead of other landmark albums of the year like Noname’s Room 25, Haru Nemuri’s Haru To Shura, Travis Scott’s ASTROWORLD, and KIDS SEE GHOSTS’ self-titled album, and Cacophony’s debut album Harmony. While I still listen to DAMN RULES often, I find my retrospect changing a bit, coming more to terms with the fact that Noname’s Room 25 is probably the single greatest rap album of all time, as well as how late-to-the-party I was in hearing The 1975’s magnificent A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships after the new year.
While I can of course see something similar happening with YESEO’s 2020 effort BE, maybe in the form of previously mentioned albums aging better or finding something profound that I managed to miss in the year of 2020, as of writing, BE is still an enchanting and magnificent record. While it’s not a full-length LP, I find the dismissal of South Korea’s most common mediums of music — the EP and the mini-album — to be offensive and exclusive of the nation’s musical output. A full-length album from a South Korean artist is a rarity. It’s just the norm there to more frequently release smaller bodies of work than infrequently dropping larger projects. That’s why you’ll find records like BLACKPINK’s The Album sitting at a mere 8-tracks long and TWICE’s Eyes wide open being considered only their second studio album despite a now-6 year’s worth of consistent banger after banger on smaller EPs.
BE sits at a snug 5 tracks long, 4 full songs, and an instrumental. What makes YESEO so appealing to me is her uncompromising artistic vision. At the beginning of 2018, she released the single ‘Privacy’ with SM Entertainment, known for their slightly shady work with legendary girl groups like Girls’ Generation and Red Velvet as well as the new girl group æspa. This was part of a program where SM usually does a trial release with artists before signing them. YESEO, however, opted to stay independent, going on to release DAMN RULES a few months later. You see, YESEO does almost everything on the music end herself. There have been a handful of times where she’s had other artists co-produce or master her work, but by and large, YESEO’s albums are 100% written, recorded, produced, mixed, and mastered by her own two hands, something that can be seen as a truly refreshing breath of fresh air in an industry that prides itself on collaboration and agency-lead production.
Since DAMN RULES, YESEO released two loosie singles: ‘Take Flight!’ and ‘HOT HAND’. While she’s no stranger to releasing non-album singles like ‘Privacy’ and ‘Night Night’, the exclusion of these songs from BE baffled me at first until I noticed that every song on the record starts with the letter “B”. Way to go, genius. It’s pretty obvious. That being said, despite their names not starting with the letter “B”, I think ‘Take Flight!’ would both fit fairly well onto the record, though ‘HOT HAND’ might be a little more in line with the gritty eroticism of DAMN RULES rather than the clean and serene beauty of BE.
The thing is, despite (and likely because of) turning down that contract with SM Entertainment, YESEO simply isn’t that popular, and that’s a real shame, because I think she stands up there with Neon Bunny, Cacophony, and Aseul as being one of the greatest contemporary artists in the non-idol sphere of Korean music. Almost all of the lyrics on BE are sung in fairly rough English, and she really doesn’t need to do — she doesn’t have an international audience larger than her domestic one the way someone like Haru Nemuri does — she simply wants to. While lyrically, the English lyrics get the message across well enough, the lyrics aren’t the most important part here. YESEO’s often broken English takes a backseat to her gorgeous and airy voice sitting atop her dynamic production.
YESEO is a master of both minimalism and maximalism. This can be best exemplified on the opener, ‘Blood Stream’. The instrumental is sparse — just a piano, a synth pad, a simple bass, a very downtempo drum kit, and lots of delay and reverb over her lead vocals and her harmonies, which she chops up into a stuttering top melody over the refrain where a guitar also plays a simple lead with no more than four notes.
On the other side, ‘Broken Water’ is absolutely massive by the end of it, my #4 favorite song of the entire year. It starts with a few simple and fluttery synth pads that dance around each other before dropping out to introduce her voice over a lowkey and dreamlike verse. As everything drops out into the chorus, some lightly thudding drums and a jittery bass join the fray, intensifying into the pre-chorus where everything else drops besides the drums, bass, and multiple layers of YESEO’s voice. More and more instruments and droning sounds join as the following pre-chorus builds into an even louder and more pounding second chorus, the second post-chorus dropping out into a quiet bridge that finally explodes into an absolutely colossal outro, with multiple layers of droning feedback guitars and furiously banging drums. The only time I’ve ever heard something like this in pop music is the final guitar solo of Kanye West’s ‘Hold My Liquor’.
YESEO’s BE might not be the longest project of 2020, but it’s an incredible and easily-palatable sampler of what one of South Korea’s finest independent artists is capable of doing all by herself.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Better Me’, ‘Broken Water’
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1. Seiko Oomori — “Kintsugi”
I am a fucking freak for Seiko Oomori. I always have been, and I always will be. My very first Medium article was about the emotional weight of her music. I think Seiko Oomori is the greatest living Japanese artist. Not only that, but I think she has more consistency than just about any other musical artist in the world right now. Her entire career has happened in the blink of an eye over the last 8 years, producing 8 major full-length releases, 2 compilation albums, 2 collaborative albums, writing hits for megastars like Morning Musume and smaller artists like LADYBABY and Yufu Terashima, and maintaining the same level of quality, thoughtfulness, and care throughout each one.
Her third major release and final independent solo album, 2013’s Zettai Shoujo stands as my third favorite album of all time. If you even type “Seiko Oomori Zettai Shoujo” into Google, my review of it for the now-defunct IDOL iS NOT DEAD is the very first result. I’d go as far as considering myself a Seiko Oomori and general anti-idol historian, I wrote half of Seiko Oomori and BiS’s Wikipedia articles. But even with how much I love Zettai Shoujo, it’s an impossible task to at this moment say that it’s a better album than 2020’s Kintsugi. Seiko has continued to evolve as an artist, topping her previous work over and over and over again save for the slight fumble in 2018, her 6th studio album KUSOKAWA PARTY, which despite being my least favorite of her albums, is still to this day her most commercially successful album and at the end of the day is still a mile better than anybody making remotely similar music.
To say Kintsugi is profound would be understatement of the year. Seiko does what she does best here, and that’s writing an emotional gut-punch of a song, sprinkled with tongue-in-cheek idol pop mimicry, a million words per minute vocal deliveries, punk attitude courtesy of her upbringing in Tokyo’s Koenji district, personal and sociopolitical lyrics about the everyday woman’s expected place in Japanese society, and this time around, a much more clear idea of the subject of her affections, having recently revealed it was Pierre Nakano — drummer of post-hardcore powerhouse Ling Tosite Sigure — that she eloped with in anonymity all the way back in 2014.
I cried a lot listening to Kintsugi. Will you? If you’re familiar with Seiko, probably. You probably will if you speak Japanese, too. Seiko’s lyrics always dripped in raw and painful emotion, laying her traumas and insecurities bare in ways that would make Frank Ocean shudder. I’m kind of running out of adjectives here, but the opener Yuugata Mirage is so emotionally profound that it didn’t even take a full minute before the waterworks started on my first listen. It’s such a triumphant return to form for her, made extra potent by her filtered voice and the sparkly but melancholy piano-guitar chords on at the beginning of every measure. It eventually erupts into an immense chorus where the filter comes off her voice and she starts cracking into the falsetto of her already whiny and nasally vocal range, a familiar sound to any fan of Oomori’s.
I am simply begging you, I don’t care if you don’t want to listen to a foreign-language album. If you listen to anything here, listen to Seiko Oomori’s 7th studio album Kintsugi. If you really, truly love music, I don’t think there’s a way you won’t walk away from this album absolutely floored. Seiko is without a single doubt in my mind one of the most brilliant, tortured songwriters in the history of modern music. Her worldwide success is barred only by the one-inch-tall language barrier she carries. Do yourself a favor and get acquainted with her.
Biggest Highlights: ‘Yuugata Mirage’, ‘ANTI SOCIAL PRINCESS’
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Honorable Mention:
Oranssi Pazuzu — Mestarin Kynsi
Megan Thee Stallion — Good News
Juice WRLD — Legends Never Die
Poppy — I Disagree
Mariko Goto — Acoustic Violence Pop
Teenage Halloween — Teenage Halloween
Crucial Dudes — A Piff In Time: 2012–2016
Kid Cudi — Man On The Moon III: The Chosen
Taylor Swift — folklore & evermore
Charli XCX — how i’m feeling now
YUKIKA — Soul Lady
Liturgy — Origin Of The Alimonies
100 Gecs — 1000 Gecs And The Tree Of Clues
Scandal — Kiss from the darkness
Lovely Summer-chan — THE THIRD SUMMER OF LOVE
Avatar — Hunter Gatherer
Oceans Of Slumber — Oceans Of Slumber
Denzel Curry & Kenny Beats — UNLOCKED
KOTA The Friend — EVERYTHING
Jaden — CTV3
Chloe x Halle — Ungodly Hour
Sadness — atna
VenoSci — Air Decade
Kvelertak — Splid
Tame Impala — The Slow Rush
DREAMCATCHER — Dystopia: The Tree Of Language
Chris Stapleton — Starting Over
Dark Fortress — Spectres From The Old World
Hebe Tien — Time Will Tell
Redveil — Niagara
Demons & Wizards — III
Aseul — Slow Dance
Nine Inch Nails — Ghosts V-VI
Ghostemane — ANTI-ICON
Mystery Skulls — Now Or Never
Bladee — 333
Grimes — Miss Anthropocene
21 Savage & Metro Boomin — Savage Mode II
Zovi — Stories in Eternal Ash and Elsewhere
BTS — MAP OF THE SOUL: 7
The Lawrence Arms — Skeleton Coast
Jeff Rosenstock — NO DREAM & 2020 Dump
BBHF — BBHF1 -YOUNG MAN GOES SOUTH-
Dempagumi.inc — Ai ga Chikyuu Sukuunsa! Dempagumi.inc wa Family Desho
Imperial Triumphant — Alphaville
