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As we near the end of 2020, we take a look back at the wealth of independent and innovative music that came out during this turbulent time.
Hand-picked music for your ears and your feet, we have expanded our top 10 list to highlight 50 of our favourite releases from 2020.
We hope you will find some more music to explore over the holiday season, wherever you are.
Following 2017’s ‘Arca’, on which Alejandra Ghersi found her voice, the alternately savage and serene ‘Kick i’ was the sound of Arca comprehensively owning it – a generational figurehead swerving between lanes of pop, torch song, reggaetón and crumpled electronics in a vehicle that could only be hers.
On the limitlessly pleasing ‘Magic Oneohtrix Point Never’, Daniel Lopatin twists left on his own internal radio dial and channel-hops through highlights of his career to date: from synth drift to scrambled sound collages to a kind of yearning adult contemporary that no-one else can pull off.
Stretching her three-octave range to breaking point and recasting it over avant compositions which mined a grey area between heartbroken folk and pockmarked glitch, Eartheater’s third album was an exorcism worthy of its cover art: striking, fiery, impossible to ignore.
The playful, breezy and gently hypnotic debut LP from Wisdom Teeth co-founder K-LONE was a perfect oasis of calm to escape to when things got a little too heavy this year. No surprise we found ourselves making countless trips.
Rhythmanalyst DeForrest Brown Jr. created with his project Speaker Music, an album of “street-level fire music”, a painfully beautiful record of battered pieces of techno and spoken word.
Actress telegraphed the intention for his seventh studio album by calling it a “romantic tragedy set between the heavens and the underworld” – in adding human voices to his signature style of textural haze and mid-tempo club pulse, he’s evidently found a new sweet spot.
Richard H. Kirk’s decision to reboot industrial pioneers Cabaret Voltaire pays off, as Kirk commandeers the first Cab Vol album since 1994 (!) to call out state-sanctioned cruelty and stomp through the shadows with impish defiance.
One of our favourites of 2020 came from Tara Clerkin Trio, a Bristol group whose debut album fused melodic songwriting, light smatterings of dub and graceful jazz flourishes to provide positivity in a year where it was in short supply.
Heaven To A Tortured Mind finds Yves Tumor growing into his position as an outsider popstar. The result is a beautiful, forthright LP from a supremely unique talent.
DJ Python’s Mas Amable is one of the most celebrated dance music LPs of the new decade, and with good reason. The producer’s second album for Incienso is an absolutely stunning listen, one that’s full of gorgeous textures but still manages to pack a consistent dancefloor punch.
Ital Tek’s new LP Outland is another set of foreboding electronic compositions from this consistently impressive artist.
Dylan Henner’s The Invention Of The Human is a brilliant collection of electronic compositions which combine the synthetic inventiveness of Sophie and Arca with Grouper’s spectral drones and the beatific simplicity of Arvo Pärt’s post-minimalist compositions.
Four Tet's 'Sixteen Oceans' brings us 16 tracks of crisp techno cuts, lilting downtempo hip-hop drums and gorgeous ambient tracks helmed by dawn-chorus electronics.
Workaround, the highly-anticipated debut LP from Beatrice Dillon, presents a new British techno sound for a new decade.
11 tracks 01:05:33 of Autechre. Can say no more, or no less.
Patricia’s sensitive electronics sound clean as a whistle on new LP Maxyboy, the producer’s debut release via Ghostly International.
Nathan Fake holds rose-tinted revivalism, experimental energy and club heft in balance on his new LP Blizzards.
James Ruskin and Mark Broom have delivered They Can't Be Saved, the latest full-length from their IDM-adjacent project The Fear Ratio.
File Under UK Metaplasm reminds us why Rian Treanor is one of the most inspired and innovative UK dance music producers currently working in the UK.
Carlos Niño & Miguel Atwood-Ferguson’s Chicago Waves improvisation is a spiritualised voyage into the fourth world.
Breakbeat veteran Luke Vibert flexes his muscles on Amen Andrews, the first LP in a trilogy that the producer is delivering via Hypercolour.
Undesignated Proximate is a typically innovative set of drum ‘n’ bass takes from dgoHn, surely one of the modern scene’s most forward-thinking artists.
An album of sleek, lush pop tracks which are elevated by Davidson’s trademark wit and wry lyrical content
Sound artist and composer Sarah Davachi presents us with Cantus, Descant, a sprawling double-album of organ drones and dreamy songs which she has released via her own Late Music label.
Dealing with both personal and collective trauma by darkening the sound of kuduro and adjacent styles, Nazar’s debut LP Guerilla is a uniquely powerful listen.
Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini unite for an LP of cinematic, frequently gorgeous drones and ambiences.
In bringing together players from different backgrounds and ability levels, To Cy & Lee has a playful energy rarely felt in any jazz LP we care to recall.
A soundtrack to an interwar German silent movie of the same name, People On Sunday finds Domenique Dumont creating dreamy synthesiser music of great beauty.
Room For The Moon is a delightful record of off-kilter pop productions from Moscow-based artist Kate NV.
Heart Math is a set of astral hip-hop explorations the likes of which only The Gaslamp Killer would have the ambition to attempt - let alone pull off.
At heart, The Mosaic of Transformation tells a universal truth through its ungraspable ethereality; we, each of us, contain the same electricity as the instruments that pull together the observable world, in art and utility.
Lorenzo Senni, trance’s premier deconstructionist, debuts on Warp with Scacco Matto, his first LP in six years.
Kelly Lee Owens’ Inner Song is an LP that moves outwards from techno to take in an impressively varied array of electronic music styles.
Life Works Out… Usually is the fruit of Demae’s years spent absorbing London’s culture and musical identity, as well as singing with Fatima or as part of hiphop trio Hawk House.
Drawing its inspiration from lost British railway stations, Gilroy Mere’s Adlestrop is a fascinating hauntological work to file alongside the organic electronics of Belbury Poly, The Focus Group and Bibio.
Full of the joys of Spring, Plone’s new LP Puzzlewood is a hugely exciting release for long-time followers of Warp, Ghost Box and British electronic music as a whole.
Pole’s Fading is another masterful set of dub-techno innovations from Stefan Betke’s long-running project.
Yaeji returns triumphantly on new mixtape WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던, a set that maintains her oddball bedroom-pop charm while also delivering some of her most sonically adventurous work.
Maya, John Frusciante’s latest album under his own name, finds the polymath musician bringing the breakcore junglism of his Trickfinger project out into the open.
London vocalist Ego Ella May is a formidable voice in modern R&B, and Honey For Wounds is the crowning achievement of her career so far.
The project’s first LP in six years is full of vigour, with Dan Snaith incorporating a wide array of genres into his typically tender writing style here.
The fourth instalment of Alva Noto’s Xerrox series once again finds the artist creating a set of perfectly imperfect copies.
Julianna Barwick's Healing Is A Miracle is a heavenly offering, capturing a sense of hazed ecstasy.
Jessy Lanza’s third LP All The Time is a set of idiosyncratic synth-pop which delivers all of the pop hooks, ebullient production and quixotic charm that we have come to expect from this beloved artist.
Man Alive! finds Marshall spending more time in the woozier end of his soundworld, more comfortable than ever with the more meditative side of his artistic voice
Harpist and composer Mary Lattimore has created a set of modern ambient pieces which are at once vivid and dreamlike, balancing the harp’s heavenly associations with both the psychedelic qualities of new-age/fourth world composition and an earthiness drawn from folk music.
