Wye Oak co-produced Oakland-based singer-songwriter Madeline Kenney's third album Sucker's Lunch, and are sort of her backing band for the whole album, following Kenney's Jenn Wasner-produced 2018 album Perfect Shapes. And it's just a beautiful record, rich with vocal harmonies and densely layered guitar but also  great use use of saxophone on "Sucker" and "Sugar Sweat" and marimba on "Double Hearted." Here's my 2020 albums playlist with most of the albums I've listened to this year in it. 

Last Friday was a big day for Wye Oak fans, because both Sucker's Lunch and the band's own new EP were released. My Neighbor / My Creator is one of my favorite Wye Oak releases despite being just a 20-minute EP, and No Horizon follows in that tradition well. The drum pattern and the guitar tone on "AEIOU" alone remind me why this has been one of my favorite bands in the world for a dozen years, they just have such a great ear for arranging and piling sounds on top of each other. I was a little skeptical about the Brooklyn Youth Chorus collaborations on here working but they use their voices as a textural instrument in a way that totally fits into the Wye Oak sound, particularly on "Spitting Image." The two songs they released earlier in the year were really good, too, I'm enjoying this regular trickle of new material. 

I heard Flo Milli for the first time, like a lot of people, in 'fancam' TikToks and videos on Twitter, 30-second montages of different celebrities and public figures, often set to this previously unknown teenager rapping boasts like "I like cash and my hair to my ass" in a bored, taunting high school movie villain voice over a bleary beat from an early Playboi Carti song. "Beef FloMix" is on Flo Milli's major label debut, and most of the songs on the album have the same appeal (I particularly like "Send The Addy" and "19"), I feel like she's become this niche social media favorite based on the fancams, but she's got real talent and star quality, would love to see this album take off on a more mainstream tip and put her on the level of, say, City Girls. 

After listening to dozens of Willie Nelson albums this year for my deep cuts playlist, I was excited to settle in with this, his 70th solo studio album. A guy that's sounded like a wizened old sage since before I was born is 87 now, and his voice shows its age a little more with each new album. He's lost a little warmth and fullness, but a song like "Stealing Home" gets a little extra poignancy out of the sound of his withering instrument, and he still plays Trigger beautifully, and longtime harmonica player Mickey Raphael sounds great on "Our Song." First Rose of Spring only has a couple of new Willie Nelson/Buddy Cannon compositions, fewer than Nelson's last 4 albums of new material that Cannon produced, but "Blue Star" and "Love Just Laughed" are lovely, as are the tracks penned by Chris Stapleton and Toby Keith

Lori McKenna's written great songs for Little Big Town and Carrie Underwood and Lady Gaga, but her solo albums have a different kind of intimacy and texture from hearing her songs in her own voice. The Balladeer might be even better than 2018's The Tree, and it's hard to imagine any of her collaborators singing a story song like "Marie" quite as well as her. 

Rufus Wainwright's first proper 'pop' album of new songs in 8 years isn't as immediate as 2012's Out of the Game, but it's growing on me. There's a nice mix of beautiful songs like "Alone Time" and odder moments of whimsy like "This One's For The Ladies (THAT LUNGE!)" and "You Ain't Big." 

I've long hoped for Taylor Swift to do some kind of 'stripped down' or 'back to basics' kind of album, less out of any desire for ugh 'authenticity' or nostalgia for her early work than the fact that her last 4 big bombastic synth pop albums have featured some of the worst songs I've ever heard, in addition to some very good ones. And I suspect she might never have made one if not for the pandemic, although even as an intimate home recorded quarantine album Folklore is kind of big and maximalist and lush, and way longer than it needs to be like all of her albums. I think the big #1 single "Cardigan" is one of the weaker songs, but I think "The 1" is one of the best things she's ever written, and I really like "Invisible String" and "Peace" too. I don't think anyone would call this Taylor's 'indie' album if they didn't know who else worked on it, but I'm fine with her making a Sara Bareilles-style adult contemporary album, since the way a lot of people feel about Taylor Swift is how I feel about Sara Bareilles. 

I've enjoyed the last few Pretenders albums that sounded like Chrissie Hynde just kind of doing whatever she wanted to do under the Pretenders name without too much concern for what's expected of the band. But Hate For Sale is very close to the platonic ideal of what a Pretenders album should sound like 40 years into the band's career, a brisk half hour of mostly jangly uptempo rockers. "Junkie Walk" was a huge downer the first time I heard the album, though, 7 great songs in a row and then the mean-spirited gallows humor of a song with the chorus "every junkie has to die" just sounds a little fucked up coming from a band that lost 2 founding members to drug addiction. There's also a weird line about what "feminists claim" about there being no differences between women and men on the closing track "Crying In Public." 

Oliver Tree performs in a uniform that looks like a grown man playing a child in an Adult Swim series set in in the 1980s: unflattering bowl cut, gap teeth, red sunglasses, baggy jeans, and always the same hideous windbreaker. I was moderately confused by his whole schtick, and the contrast between the way he looks and the generic earnest alt-rock of his two radio hits, "Hurt" and "Let Me Down," enough that I was kind of curious to listen to his album and maybe figure out his whole deal. But I don't think there's really anything there, just some bland angsty songs and really obnoxious singing in what sometimes sounds like Tom DeLonge (he recorded a version of "Let Me Down" with Blink-182, so don't be shocked if he becomes part of their next Sublime With Rome-style lineup change). He also raps on a couple songs, which is really bad. I will single out the closing track "I'm Gone" as by far the best song on the album, though. 

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