The languid keys and synths here are all one breath away from whalesong, allowing Krgovich to drift off into bliss utterly unburdened: “A dusty minivan with the hood flipped up / A frazzled woman / A pretty sunset / Wrap your loving arms around it.” Philadelphia was conceived of and recorded before lockdown, but, in the midst of a million anxieties, it provided a much needed pause. In fact, at one point, he gazes at a coffee cup for a while just in case it offers up a philosophical breakthrough. On Philadelphia, a Japanese New Age-inspired collaboration with the prolific saxophonist Joseph Shabason and multi-instrumentalist Chris Harris, he frees himself almost completely from the pressures of writing about anything at all. When he tackled heartbreak for the first time in earnest on his last solo album, the plainly titled OUCH, he exposed his bitterness and grief with terrifying shrugs (“Everything’s fine I guess / But I wish I were dead”). When he set out to write about the glitz and glare of a long-dead Los Angeles on The Hills six years ago, his focus landed on the lonely B-listers leaving Oscars night empty-handed, the aspiring actors choking on smog in drop-tops. The intermittently Vancouver-based singer-songwriter Nicholas Krgovich has spent the better part of the past decade refining a talent for wry understatement. In the meantime, here’s a selection of albums that transcended the year they were born into. Hopefully a few months from now we’ll be able to listen to some of this music in re-opened DIY spaces, lush concert halls, or living rooms populated by at least a half-dozen people. Punks as disparate as Gulch and Jeff Rosenstock kept tearing the world to shreds HAIM, Helena Deland, and Hayley Williams delivered prismatic, idiosyncratic takes on indie rock unclassifiable artists like Bartees Strange and Yves Tumor still managed to confound and thrill. Dextrous hip-hop the world over, from Pink Siifu in Los Angeles to Headie One in London, sounded incendiary and gave voice to the moment. Ambitious, beat-driven albums like Lady Gaga’s Chromatica and Burna Boy’s Twice As Tall connected even without dancefloors to share them on. And while it would be neat to say that the albums we held closest this year were all linked in some way, that we gravitated towards the introspective or the anxious or the angry to pull us through, that would be a lie. Enough to argue about as we put together this list of our favorite albums, enough to have some records we fought for lose out, definitely enough to make these wretched days seem bearable. Creating and releasing art in the middle of a plague is hard work.īut we did get new music. That there was any new music to listen to and fall in love with by the fall, after the pre-lockdown albums had been mastered and released into an unfamiliar world, was a marvel in itself. It’s difficult to fully grasp the devastation that this year wrought on music: the artists lost to the pandemic, the local venues forced to close their doors for good, the independent musicians and crews left stranded and exposed without shows.