The best songs of 2020 – part 2

It’s time to wind up the best of the best songs of 2020.

Ranks 15 – 1

15. Sibling Rivalry

by PUP (punk)

As a big fan of their contemporaries like Jeff Rosenstock and Prince Daddy & the Hyena, punk rockers PUP, who have been hot stuff in the indie community since their fantastic debut Morbid Stuff dropped last year, are a band that I had a try out early this year. The killer single Sibling Rivalry stood out to me as a clear album highlight from first listen, and even now I keep finding new details and nuances to love about it. It’s full of energy and structural complexity, the occasional screeching guitar solo finding space between Stefan Babcock’s scintillating verses. There’s surprising poeticism and disgust in the way Babcock describes his unstable relationship with his sister “seeping into his sweater” and “soaking into his shoes”, and the chorus speaks to that distinct feeling of being too close to someone and yet also lacking honest communication. The development of that chorus, with added melody and guitar the second time round, is also an awesome touch. If you’re in need of a punching bag of a rock song to scream and shout to, look no further.

14. hand crushed by a mallet (Remix)

by 100 gecs, Fall Out Boy, Craig Owens, Nicole Dollanganger (electronic, punk, metal)

100 gecs’ 2020 offering was actually just a remix album of their minature 2019 album 1000 gecs, but the songs were often so fundamentally different to their originals that 1000 gecs and The Tree of Clues really deserved to be considered alongside this year’s most exciting albums of new music. In an album full of outlandish, sonically shocking moments (listen to the opener from 2:00 if you dare), hand crushed by a mallet stood out as the most ambitious. The track hops from an enticingly raw bass guitar to a technical few seconds of metal guitar to an electronic DnB chorus and back again and – if you can cope with the genre-hopping jet lag – the result is a track that is thrillingly unpredictable. Quite how 100 gecs manage to fit so much into so little time, and give every section it’s fair share of loving detail, is beyond me. The closing minute of hard rock and metal is easily the heaviest, angriest minute of music I’ve enjoyed all year, with the band unafraid to have the kick drum so loud that the audio starts clipping. hand crushed by a mallet may ruin both your speakers and your ears, but it’s such a banger you won’t even be complaining.

13. Elude

by Parcels (dance, disco)

Elude arrives towards the end of Parcels’ 2020 greatest hits album, recorded live in the studio just as the apocalypse was kicking in. The album and it’s accompanying film stood out to be as one of the best in a long list of recorded live performances I’ve enjoyed this year, and the surprise, looping new song Elude was stunning both on the night and now. Piano is an instrument largely missing from Parcels’ debut album, so I was thrilled to hear them finally using it here to provide an effortless, liquid groove over one of Noah Hill’s finest basslines. As a pianist I can tell you from experience that once you get that chord sequence under your fingers, you’re not going to stop playing it for a while. Despite the new directions that the piano and drum machine takes Parcels’ sound, this is still a quintessential Parcels track: hypnotic repetition remains king, and the crucial piano part is given plenty of time to live and breathe before Patrick Hetherington takes over with a beautifully simple synth lead. Perhaps more than any other track from the Aussies-turned-Germans, Elude is track that will keep it’s golden shine even after you play it again and again and again.

12. Self Care

by Louis the Child, COIN (electronic)

I’ve been besotted with COIN’s dance-worthy indie pop tracks like Boyfriend and Talk Too Much for a while, and whilst their collaboration with producer Louis the Child is a distinctly different sound, the result is just as exciting. I’m a sucker for any song with a buzzy synth bass and luckily Self Care has just about the funkiest, buzziest synth bass one could dream off. It takes all the attention it deserves underneath a vibrant colour palette of falsetto vocals and simmering synth pads. Meanwhile, Chase Lawrence’s lyrics take a leaf out of Bodys‘ playbook in the importance it places on dance as a form of self-therapy. That sort of thing is made for me, and makes for an even more enjoyable singalong when dancing on the bed or singing into the deodorant can. In a normal world, Self Care is a sure-fire dancefloor-filler, but for now – for me at least – it will remain a dazzling personal celebration of the joy of music.

11. Scram!

by Jeff Rosenstock (punk)

Jeff Rosenstock is one of those artists that can’t seem to write a bad album. His surprise summer 2020 album NO DREAM kept up the good form with some of his most raw and hard-hitting albums to date. Desperation pervades standout track Scram! in particular. Rosenstock has given up in trying to deal with those who belittle him and fill his life with platitudes, and instead he seeks validation when screaming “Don’t you wanna go away?!”. Released at a time when America was rioting and “getting away” was precisely what most of us so missed during that empty summer, Scram! struck a nerve. An inspired switch to a crazy metal-tinged half time groove in the final chorus seals Scram! as one of Rosenstock’s finest moments in a career also packed with finest moments.

10. jewellery and teeth

by Ewy (singer-songwriter, folk rock)

Questions are a big part of what makes Yorkshire singer-songwriter Ewy’s music so interesting. Over the three Ewan MacKinnon albums of 2020, he seems to repeatedly look for help from the listener when dissecting moments of conflict (“Were you falling apart or did I slip?”), past breakups (“Was it something that I said?”) or even himself (“Sometimes I question whether I really know myself”). The result is music that lives and breathes youthful honesty, both in his lyrics of confusion and his DIY setup and instrumentation, which catches every buzz of the strings or scratch on the fretboard with endearing detail. jewellery and teeth is one of many dealings with death found on the pitch-black December album World Is Mine, with MacKinnon asking what it means to have a personal legacy. Both jewellery and catchy opener i heard launch into choruses with direct references to death, with MacKinnon unafraid to describe his “rotting” body or the very real possibility that one day no one will love you, not even in death. It sounds like unremittingly bleak material, but the magic of jewellery lies in how MacKinnon frames his ideas. His qualms about death sound like a celebration over bright primary chords stubbornly in the major key, and the energetic guitar and falsetto backings sound like something much more fitting for a wedding than a funeral. The tightly-written chorus melody is bubbly and bright, in stark contrast to the growing darkness of the album that follows. In jewellery, MacKinnon has created that elusive gem of a song – one that sounds happy but reads as sad. I think back to The Beths’ infectious Happy Unhappy or, more appropriately, Jeff Magnum’s own beautiful song of death in Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Instead of a reason to feel down, jewellery presents death as a source of freedom, and a potent reminder to live in the present. Unusually, MacKinnon seems to have found a satisfactory answer to his questions. “I don’t think about it because I’m happy with you right now”, he leaves us with, over a sweet closing perfect cadence. Perhaps when we needed it most, he’s given us reason to appreciate what we have and smile.

9. Don’t Start Now

by Dua Lipa (pop, funk)

I don’t usually venture into the often-lamentable, always-uncool world of Top 40 pop, but when I do, it’s funk that tends to lure me up. Charlie Puth’s hit Attention is the perfect example, with a bassline that quickly became one of my favourites of all time. X Factor winner James Arthur did almost as well with You Deserve Better in 2018 and more recently UK pop giant Sam Smith had me grooving with the stellar single Diamonds. This summer Dua Lipa’s Don’t Start Now, however, hit different. It was a song that tapped into the gold mine that is the 2020 disco revival, and with this single and the hit machine of an album that followed, Dua found herself at the forefront of the most exciting pop music trend of the year. It shouldn’t be hard to work out why we were so obsessed with Don’t Start Now; for me, it was love at first bass slide as Matty Carroll revved his way into a stunning first verse of pocket playing and subtle little funk fills. Dua’s melody in the chorus is simple enough to give Carroll even more of the spotlight, who at this point has started to throw in some slaps. Carroll aside, the production in Don’t Start Now is as perfect as you’d expect for such a major league record, but there’s extra details to reward repeat listeners – a cowbell fill, a tantalising soundbite of a pre-Covid party crowd, a chuntering, effortlessly funky rhythm guitar. For me this is modern pop at its finest: pristine, punchy and very, very funky.

8. You Wake

by Feed Me Jack (punk)

If you need an up-tempo indie rock banger to boost your spirits and quicken your pulse this winter, Feed Me Jack’s 2015 gem is the best I’ve got. I found the young band’s incredible album Chumpfrey after hearing that my electropop idol Still Woozy (a.k.a. Sven Gamsky) had played guitar for them before they disbanded. Gamsky’s wobbly guitars and laid back RnB grooves are nowhere to be found here – You Wake is a rapid, unequivocally punk track that manages to squeeze all the bells and whistles of popular song structure in a blistering two minutes, 20 seconds runtime. Despite the stark musical differences, Gamsky is still one fire here – his rubber-wristed guitar work in the verse in particular is insanely tight, sounding as if Cory Wong got lost found himself in a rock band. The chorus, impactfully sung in harmony by all band members, is concise yet memorable. The bridge that follows offers an array of creative groove switches, from a shredding guitar to group vocals to an explosive synth interlude. The way the whole thing crashes to a halt by way of a drum fill before launching into a final rendition of “You wake me from my dreams / The best ones I’d ever seen” is genius. There’s not much wrong at all with You Wake and, as a choice for your next fist-pumping morning alarm song, it’s ideal.

7. Dark Side Riddim

by Ezra Collective (funk, jazz)

More than any song to come out of 2020, Dark Side Riddim is the one I wish I’d written. Surprisingly for a band leading the boundary-pushing UK jazz scene like Ezra Collective, Dark Side is simple enough for a songwriter like me to get their head around: mostly a four chord loop, with a horns melody that sounds like it’s pulled straight out of Grade 1 saxophone exercise book. As a track that any one of my musician friends can pick up with ease and play stylishly to the unwitting public of York on their first attempt, Dark Side sounds like it was written with me and my friends in mind. At the same time, Dark Side is anything but repetitive. Dylan Jones’ tasteful trumpet fills are one thing that no one I know personally can quite replicate, and the hip hop-tinged groove found by bassist and drummer TJ and Femi Koleoso suggests something special in that brotherly connection. Joe Armon-Jones’s piano solo is what inspires me the most. Starting out with what the sax solo left him with, Armon-Jones’s few minutes in the limelight are a masterclass in melodic development, with enough transposition and displacement of that initial idea to impress Beethoven. That and the immaculate way his glides across the keys with devilishly tricky stacked-chord arpeggios strikes me with awe on every listen. I may have been able to come up with a similar four-chord loop myself, but magic like that will always be very distinctly Ezra.

6. LAX

by Vulfpeck (pop, funk)

If you’ve read my most recent post about Vulfpeck, you’ll know that for this list it wasn’t a matter of if LAX would make it into the top 10, but where. With a handful of more musically or lyrically outstanding competitors, six seems like the right spot for this all-rounder pop track from the hit-and-miss fifth studio album. In terms of a vocal performance, this is peak Joey Dosik, sounding resplendent over a typically sunny setup of clean guitar, plonking piano and chirpy organ. Dosik’s lyrics are witty and the hook is one of the cutest the band has come out with in years – well worth the endless repeats and key change it’s spoilt with. With me still not having driving insurance despite passing my test shortly after the release of LAX, Joey’s gratitude of an airport lift also had some functional value as a way to thank my family taxi driver; playing it in the car and swapping the lyric “LAX” for “York Minster” has become a bit of a habit. Put it on loop and you’ll have the whole car singing along for the entire journey home, even if some of you didn’t know the song beforehand.

5. I Know the End

by Phoebe Bridgers (soft pop, indie rock)

I’ll be the first to admit that I was late to the party with trending American singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers. It was only her incredible four Grammy nominations that prompted me to give her lauded 2020 album Punisher a try, and I’m so glad I did. It’s an album that rewards repeat listenings, its heart of indie folk and what I like to call ‘soft pop’ revealing more secrets and mysteries with each run-through. Save for the phenomenal indie rock track Kyoto, it’s also an album packed with quietly concealed tension, which is part of what makes the epic closer, I Know the End, so special. In the first half Bridgers sounds tired and spaced-out over a fluttering electric guitar and eerie, distant horns as she reflects on the melancholy of touring and failed relationships. A mournful violin diverts the song in a new direction, revealing a slow build of clean electric guitar and minimal drums. The build culminates in a high-theatrics album finale with screams, cymbals and rousing horns. It’s classic end-of-album fireworks, but it’s done very, very well, and I bought it. After such a quiet album, the noise is comfortingly all-encompassing, with Bridgers doing a great job to drown out the spectres of the outside world with her own haunting cacophony. But it’s the lyrics here that hit the hardest. Bridgers’ deeply personal yet economic use of words is astonishing throughout Punisher, with many verses sounding desperate to be written on a page and sold in the next best-selling poetry anthology. Written together, the final ten couplets on I Know the End would make one of my favourite ever poems. Bridgers is comfortable acknowledging her own hypocrisies, pointing out her “cracked lips” as she attempts to ride of into the sun like a hero at the end of an epic album. Then there’s the hypocrisy of America, too, with an “outlet mall” being likened to a “slaughterhouse” and “fear of God” memorably linked with the West’s greedy addiction to “slot machines”. For such a short verse, there’s also a remarkable number of vivid images Bridgers manages to ingrain into your memory. A strange construction in the Californian wilderness is interpreted by onlookers as either a “government drone or an alien spaceship”, but Bridgers’s swift dismissal of the whole fiasco suggests a weariness of sensational news and a need just to get away to her own safe little middle class home (or, as she calls it, “a haunted house with a picket fence”). Then, of course, there’s Covid-19, which haunts over I Know the End and indeed the whole album. Bridgers ends the song stood in a deserted, mid-pandemic city centre underneath an evangelical billboard proclaiming in bold letters “THE END IS NEAR”. “Yeah,” Bridgers shrugs, “I guess the end is here.” In a year of such fraught emotion and fear, perhaps we could all learn something from Bridgers’ calm acceptance of the end of life as we knew it.

4. The Curtain

by Snarky Puppy (jazz)

2020 was the year I properly became a Snarky Puppy fan, with the enormous jazz fusion collective ranking third in most listened artist of the year. Discovering their acclaimed 2015 collaboration was a big part of that, and 15-minute epic was the jewel in the crown. Almost everything about the first half of the track is ominous. It starts subtly; Jay Jennings’ trumpet solo early on sounds like chinks of sunlight through the trees over Jason Thomas’ vibrant splashes of cymbals and snares. An intriguing marimba break sends us plunging into a truly ghastly Michael League bass solo that roars with detuned distortion and boisterously stomps around just behind the beat of Thomas’ thumping drum groove. A little respite is given before Cory Henry does his thing on a spiky synth, hopping his way around the keyboard in the way that only he can. The explorative harmony is extraordinary, the use of detuning and pitch bending exquisite – it’s a Cory Henry solo, we expected nothing less.

And yet for all the creative genius of Jennings, League and Henry’s solos, it all feels like preamble to what comes next. The room goes quiet, Metropole Orkest’s beautiful strings section fades from view and all that is left is Bill Laurance and his piano. A classically trained pianist, The Curtain and the company of one of the world’s most magnificent orchestras offered the perfect opportunity for Laurance to flex his classical muscles. The result is something that’s difficult to describe. You can sense the awe in the room as 100 or so people witness Laurance nurture a four chord loop until it flowers into a beautiful sonata, made divine by stunning runs down from the stratosphere of the piano and a rapid broken chord finale that I still find impossible to even begin to play on my home piano. To make things even more cosmic, Henry and League gradually fade in with harmonies on Moog and bass in a wonderful moment of musical empathy – the fresh, often whimsical timbre of the Moog now sounding soothed and refined by the centuries-old piano. The re-entry of the strings is brilliant, but it doesn’t really matter. You’ll already be in tears before then anyway. There’s no other way to say it: I’ve never heard anything as beautiful as The Curtain.

3. Down the Line

by Remi Wolf (electronic, pop)

About once a year I find a track that becomes an obsession, and find myself listening to it several times a day for weeks. 2018 had Tieduprightnow and Goodie Bag (Parcels and Still Woozy tracks), 2019 had Dream Boy and now 2020 has Remi Wolf’s delectable Down the Line. Maybe it’s something in the genre: Remi has more than a hint of the Still Woozy about her (she’s supported him on a US tour before), and the rhythm guitar on Down the Line wouldn’t sound out of place on a Parcels track. Whatever the reason, Down the Line defined the sound of late 2020 for me, and the quirky, fun and danceable track became something irresistible. Remi is clearly not someone satisfied with being background music; Down the Line opens her EP with a storm of distortion, grabbing the listener by the collar before throwing them into a disconcertingly minimalist verse. The track continues with a simmering funk rhythm guitar, a hip hop drum groove and surely one of the most killer basslines of 2020. The chorus is an ambitious one, clocking in at a hefty 50 seconds and therefore only allowing one repeat before the song starts to exceed the radio-friendly three minute mark. The thing about Down the Line is that somehow Remi has managed to make every last bit of that chorus unforgettable. It may be a long one, but you’ll find you’ve learnt that sprightly, sassy melody very quickly. Remi’s lyrics about self-destructive patterns of procrastination certainly also caught my lockdown mood, and Down the Line picked up my spirits with ease when I got bogged down with unproductivity guilt, time and time again. If this is what Remi produces when she’s putting off ‘real’ work, than I can only hope she gets very little done in 2021.

2. Good Girls (Don’t Get Used)

by Beach Bunny (rock)

I had something of a personal crisis a few minutes past 6pm on Monday 30th November 2020. I had already drafted my top ten songs of the year, with Cuffing Season positioned firmly at the top. I even had ideas for the opening line of the review: “Before February was over, I knew Cuffing Season would be my song of the year”, or something like that. It took until the release of Good Girls (Don’t Get Used), the lead single from the upcoming EP Blame Game, for me seriously question that statement. It may not quite have pipped Cuffing Season to that number one spot in the end, but Good Girls is nonetheless another phenomenal indie rock track from Lili and the Bunnies.

Lockdown seems to have made Lili Trifilio younger by about five years – she sounds like a proudly misfit teen who’s listened to Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend on repeat and is now ready to take the world by storm with her own feminist punk anthem – and she sort of has. Good Girls certainly hasn’t been roaring up the charts but it deserves to be, with Trifilio’s rejection of “dumb boy talk” and cute boys’ ghosting sounding just as compelling as the noughties belter. The chorus is simple, powerful and in-your-face, working well in tandem with the peppy, pretty earworm hook that follows. Over the past year that I’ve got to know Beach Bunny (although it feels like I’ve known them a lot longer), I’ve learnt how Trifilio likes to be creative with the final chorus, often editing the melody or having the band kick back in when you least expect it. Nothing could prepare me for Good Girls, however. Trifilio ditches the chorus altogether, instead riffing on the words “You say you won’t but then you do” over a pulsating, shifting drum groove and guitar chords that perfectly slot into to every gap left over. Trifilio’s vocals over the chaos are stellar, and the lyric becomes something of an empowering mantra in itself. There’s something obviously freeing about the way she has accepted her poor choice of a boyfriend and is now celebrating her decision to see sense and call the relationship off. Whether you can relate or not, the ending of Good Girls is surely the most thrilling minute of Beach Bunny’s career so far.

1. Cuffing Season

by Beach Bunny (rock)

A quick glance of my Spotify Wrapped stats and you’ll see that for me, 2020 has been the year of the Beach Bunny. Lili Trifilio’s band scored second place when it came to most-played artists, beaten only by my beloved Vulfpeck who won their third year in a row. What’s more, all five of my top five most-streamed songs of the year came from Beach Bunny’s short and snappy debut album, Honeymoon. As loyal Undertone readers may have read back in February, Honeymoon was an album enthralled me like no other, and its succession of tightly-written indie rock tracks (as well as its release date early in the year), propelled the band to a dominant performance in those all-important end of year statistics.

I can hear the readers protesting right now. A Beach Bunny one-two? How did this even happen?! Okay, maybe you’re not that invested into this list, but if I haven’t already converted you to Lili and the gang then I don’t blame you. The thing is with Cuffing Season and Honeymoon as a whole is that it’s quite difficult to recommend. Everything in the album is almost too familiar and accessible – the melodies are simple, the instrumentation rarely ventures away from the traditional four-man setup and the chords are hardly adventurous. In all honesty, if you don’t like indie rock, you won’t like Honeymoon. For me, however, by nailing an already well-explored genre, Beach Bunny was irresistible. The band is not completely without their defining features: Trifilio’s voice is always stunning, even more so when melodies reach their peak, and diversions into mini guitar solos and instrumental breaks gave the album the occasional Vampire Weekend injection of creativity. The subtle changes in song structure – a heavily edited final chorus melody, a double-time punk outro here and there – also became one of my favourite defining features of the band’s sound.

There is also a considerable element of right place, right time for Honeymoon. After months of buildup since I discovered the utterly brilliant lead single Dream Boy in late 2019, the album dropped on the night of one of a special few gigs I could perform in 2020, and this one in particular happened to be one of the most memorable nights of my life so far. I first listened to Honeymoon pumped on that midnight adrenaline, and I had no problems dancing around despite the lateness, sat up in bed and wary not to let my headphones slip off my head in all the excitement. More or less any song can sound good when you’re in that mood. But, of course, the album had staying power past 14th February, too. Cuffing Season had a lot to do with that, being (just about) the best song of the bunch. Trifilio packs a hook into every nook and cranny of this song, only requiring two bangs on the toms before launching straight into verse one. The chorus not only has a stunning melody but feels ironically prescient. “Maybe we are getting too close” Trifilio sings with a sense of triumphant honesty, reminding us all that “paranoid permanence is just an empty promise”. Indeed, the promise of an exciting 18th year of life was an empty one, and “getting too close” soon became a problem not just for introverted millennials like Trifilio, but for all society. Of course, Trifilio couldn’t have planned this, but lyrics like this nonetheless make Cuffing Season feel even more special to me, and, even more than that Phoebe Bridgers closer, Cuffing Season feels like a song built for 2020. It’s a song that takes me back to the joy of that unforgettable February night, whilst Trifilio’s fears of “winding up alone” remind me of the lonely summer that followed and my uncertain future when I leave all my friends at sixth form next summer. Cuffing Season may not be revolutionary and its personal importance to me may be pure fluke, but that’s no reason for me to love it any less. You can be sure that when (and, as I’m now used to asking, if) I see Beach Bunny live in spring 2021, I’ll be singing the loudest.