I think The Chicks – March March is my track of the year.



Also a big, big shout for Caylee Hammack – Small Town Hypocrite. I’ve gone from not being quite sure about it/her to being a massive fan. Earwormed for most of 2020.



Halsey’s 2020 album was a bit of a letdown for me, but as usual the stripped down versions of her songs turned out better than the album versions. So Halsey – You Should be Sad (stripped) gets a mention.



I liked Yard Act – Fixer Upper. Felt like a trip back to the late ’90s.

This is probably worth mentioning here, even though the album might not quite be top-of-the-list worthy.  I got into Maria McKee earlier in the year - her of Lone Justice, Show Me Heaven and 'that song off of Pulp Fiction' fame - bought her back catalogue on Amazon and worked through as an early lockdown project.  In all fairness her career has been a mixed bag but it was worth panning for the gold (and her Life is Sweet album is really good on the whole).  I like her a lot, she really fizzes in interviews as a youngster in the troubled Lone Justice era, massive Juliette Lewis vibes.  Worth a watch if you want the depressing tale told well:



They basically ended up sounding like the Streets of Fire soundtrack, then it all imploded.

Cut to 2020, and 13 years on from her last record she released La Vita Nuova in March.  It's overblown in places and probably over-written throughout...but every time I give it another go it improves as an album.  So obvs I'm going to pluck the centrepiece out and post it here:



It's not really what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting a hold tight the Peckham crew shout on another track either.  

Give it a go, you'll probably hate it.  [*Rollsafe*] But if you don't, you might like it!

I thought the Waxahatchee album wasn't quite up to their best (I really like Cerulean Salt) but it's pretty good regardless, and worked its way under my skin over time. Conversely I think I listened to the Phoebe Bridgers album too much as, unlike everyone else, I sort of lost enthusiasm for it by years end.

Anyway, should anyone care, here's a bunch of songs (in no particular order) that I liked enough during 2020 to add them to a list.  There are a couple that are debatably 2020 (Bonnie Prince Billy, Kaiser Quartet) but which only came onto Spotify in 2020, so they get to stay...

Some are, in my opinion, properly great, whilst others got in there for more idiosyncratic reasons.  (For instance, the line "carving shapes that look like dicks into the wood", sung in that slightly portentous serious voice, induces a smile every time I hear it.  I have no idea why.)

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0bX4Ndzo8MFzdXtZV4PtJl