A couple months ago I griped about "Bed," the Powfu song built on a sample of Beabadoobee's "Coffee" that got popular on TikTok and became a massive chart hit. But recently I turned on my local college radio station and heard "Care," the lead single from Beabadoobee's new album, and was blown away by this big hooky rock song with propulsive drums. And the whole album continues in that vein really satisfyingly, with shimmering guitars and sugary vocal melodies over these crashing arena rock arrangements. Here's my 2020 albums Spotify playlist that you can find most of these records in. 

Ariana Grande's 6th album is her first since her 2013 debut that doesn't have any productions from Max Martin and Ilya, and I feel like she's just been biding her time and waiting to get to a level of success where she could ditch the Swedes and work with whoever she wants. That's not to say she completely abandoned dance pop, but it's more fully R&B with touches of house and retro pop balladry, her longtime producer Tommy Brown on every song with people like London On Da Track and Murda Beatz in the mix and the most sexually explicit lyrics of her career. "34+35" is kind of a silly song but her singsong ad lib as the song is fading out ("It means I wanna 69 with ya...nooooo shit") is so hilarious that it kind of wins me over at the end. But I think "Six Thirty" is really my favorite so far, that and "Love Language."

I tend to roll my eyes when an aging rapper makes a 'sequel' to one of their best albums, but I feel like I've been going against the grain a long time arguing that Busta Rhymes has a classic and that ELE is it. So I'm happy that he made such a well received sequel to it, and thematically it's kind of right on time. It was fun to put my Busta deep cuts playlist together and then put this on and have it totally exceed my expectations. I think it gets better as it goes on, though, most of my favorite tracks are from "True Indeed" onward, particularly "Deep Thought."

I've probably listened to a dozen Griselda albums at this point, and they're mostly good (Westside Gunn's annoying voice aside), but I'm a little amused by the entire Griselda phenomenon. It's cool that these guys stuck with their hardnosed street rap aesthetic until they became a big deal in their late 30s, but I think I'd understand the hype more if they had an in-house producer crafting their sound, a lot of their beats are by guys that have been in the industry for a decade or two. But Benny The Butcher is easily my favorite rapper in the crew this album is really solid, definitely my favorite of the string of albums Hit-Boy has produced this year. 

One reason I like to see the rise of Griselda is I think it gives me hope that there's a larger audience out there for some of the underground Baltimore rap veterans that are still doing boom bap hip hop really well. KMack (or K-Mack) is a Baltimore legend whose '90s debut with The Annexx Clique still gets traded among golden age hip hop collectors, but he never stopped rapping, and his new album produced by Jay Funk is great, and "Platinum Plate" with Silouette from Annexx Clique is killer. His raspy voice always kind of reminds me of Jadakiss, but I don't want to say he sounds like him because he's older than Jadakiss and has been making records for as long as him. 

This album doesn't really get going for me until track 3, "Burnin' Train," but from there out it really hits the spot, pretty close to what I could hope for from an E Street Band record in 2020. Ron Aniello's production serves the band a little better than Brendan O'Brien's on some of the other 21st century E Street albums, and the decision to track Letter To You in a few days with minimal overdubs was good, it feels really high energy, "Ghosts" is especially great. And Jake Clemons does a great job of conjuring his late uncle's sax sound. The 3 songs Springsteen wrote in the early '70s fit in with the new songs surprisingly well, they only stand out in the sense that they're the only songs that run over 6 minutes, I guess since back then he was just writing a lot more words in every song. 

Still just such a kickass, essential band, so proud to be kind of in the same scene with these folks, a couple years back I got play a show with Shawna and Brooks when they did an acoustic set of War On Women songs. Wonderful Hell has some cool tricky time signature stuff that reminds me a bit of their great previous band Avec. 

After years of writing songs for a variety of different bands and recording projects while based in Baltimore (White Life, The Art Department, etc.), Jon Ehrens now lives in Philadelphia and primarily releases music through his long-running solo project Repelican. And the latest release is kind of an interesting little 'mixtape' that strings 9 songs together into a 22-minute audio collage with interstitial found sound samples. It's a good format for him, kind of highlights the lo-fi whimsy of his Repelican songs, I particularly love the guitar leads on "Flawless Goodbye." Check it out on Bandcamp. 

After over 30 albums, Elvis Costello is still uniquely good at avoiding making the same record twice, but there are usually some parallels between albums from different eras. And Hey Clockface reminds me the most of 2002's When I Was Cruel with its sprawling patchwork of acoustic songs, clattering drum machine-driven tracks, and jazzy full band songs, with an ensemble that includes Nels Cline -- one of my guitar heroes and one of my songwriting heroes together for the first time! And I think he's getting better with the stuff with loops and samples, "We Are All Cowards Now" in particular has a really cool, unique sound.

I enjoyed interviewing T.I. about this album and his career, even if it was a little disappointing how stubborn he's been about coronavirus precautions. I think his later albums are kind of underrated, I don't think T.I.'s ever really made a bad album, outside of maybe No Mercy. And I feel like he's still finding different flows and different kinds of beats to rap over, I particularly like "Put Some On It," "Make Amends," "Ring," and "Horizons." 

Curtis Waters is the latest 20-year-old kid to get launched onto the charts thanks to a TikTok meme set to one of his songs, "Stunnin'," which is kind of an obnoxious singsong version of a laid back punchline rap song. There's probably nothing worse than "Stunnin'" on Pity Party but I wouldn't say he has much of anything of substance to offer beyond that song's stupid McLovin hook.

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