Highsnobiety's 20 Best Albums of 2020

“I was fresh from a war but it was internal/Every day I encounter another hurdle,” J Hus spits as he closes *Big Conspiracy* on the piano-led “Deeper Than Rap”. That war, and the highs and lows of Momodou Jallow’s life, make for a mesmerising second album. Lyrics address his incarceration, street life, God, violence, his African roots and colonialism. From others those themes would feel heavy, but delivered in J Hus’ effortless voice, with a flow that switches frequently, they stun. The references are playful, too—Mick Jagger and Woody Woodpecker are mentioned on “Fortune Teller” and Destiny’s Child get a recurrent role in the standout “Fight for Your Right”. Hus is backed by inventive instrumentation encompassing delicate strings, Afrobeats, reggae and hip-hop and nods to garage and Dr. Dre’s work with 50 Cent, while Koffee and Burna Boy contribute to the celebratory feel on “Repeat” and “Play Play”. This is a record as diverse, smart and vibrant as anything coming from the UK right now.

On *The Angel You Don’t Know*, Amaarae colours outside the lines and defies sonic boundaries. The Ghanaian-American singer oscillates between the whimsical and authoritative with a lilting cadence, pondering escapism on “LEAVE ME ALONE” whilst nodding to a trap beat on “FANCY”. By smoothly gliding along Afropop sounds, she bends reality to her will—with Cruel Santino (fka Santi), CKay, Moliy and others along for the ride.

Pop Smoke opened the title track of his 2019 debut *Meet the Woo* with a series of bars that distill exactly what the Brooklyn MC is all about: “Baby girl, come and meet the Woo/She know we keep a tool/Big knockin\' on my body/Watch who you speaking to.” The album—propelled by the breakout single “Welcome to the Party”—made a star out of a previously unknown MC, at once familiarizing the rap game with this promising voice, as well as the Canarsie hood he came from. *Meet the Woo 2*, as its title suggests, is another helping of the consistently intimidating, endlessly catchy contemporary Brooklyn drill music that gave Pop Smoke his fame. Success has only served to fortify his earliest claims of citywide dominance (“Invincible,” “Christopher Walking,” “Element”), but he isn’t too self-important to share the mic with several of New York City’s most celebrated young voices (A Boogie wit da Hoodie, Fivio Foreign, Lil Tjay), spreading love in the Brooklyn tradition.

On his fourth studio album, Wizkid invokes a strong continental impulse across 14 tracks. With melody at the heart of his sonics, he enlists Burna Boy, Ella Mai, H.E.R., Damian Marley and more to capture the rhythmic essence of Afrofusion. *Made In Lagos* is rooted in Africa—with instrumentation, lingo and vibes inspired by Wiz’s Nigerian origins—and offers worldwide appeal.

“This album was so many albums before it was this one,” Kehlani tells Apple Music of *It Was Good Until It Wasn\'t*. Yet her second proper studio album arrives perfectly suited for this moment that is filled with uncertainty—when so many are taking stock of the things we often take for granted and yearning for closeness we can\'t have, whether due to physical or emotional separation. As she aptly sums up in the initial seconds of “Toxic,” the slick opening track, “I get real accountable when I\'m alone.” A central and familiar theme emerges early: the eternal war between need and want, between the sentimental and the carnal. Songs like “Can I,” a lurid come-on, and “Water,” an astrological seduction, smolder with sexual appetite that masquerades as control and confidence. But she offsets the posture in turns—“Hate the Club,” gilded by Masego\'s golden saxophone lines, is passive-aggressive; “Can You Blame Me” reflects the push-pull of desire at odds with pride, and “Open (Passionate)” portrays the insecurity of emotional nakedness. Taken together, it\'s a revelation about how easily, as she proclaims on “F&MU,” “\'I hate you\' turns into \'I love you\' in the bedroom.” But the whole picture isn\'t one that is so neat or simple; the album\'s real feat is its depiction of how we are all many things at once, often contradictory but sincere nonetheless. Kehlani\'s rendering of the personal as universal is a matter of course, but it\'s when she mines her experiences with unblinking specificity that she becomes transcendent. “I\'m kind of in a relationship that has put me in a space of almost processing my parents a little bit,” the Oakland-born singer says, adding that her father passed away from a “gang-related situation” when she was young. “I started diving into \[that\] headspace with the music I was making.” That link emerges most explicitly on “Bad News,” one of the album\'s most poignant performances, which finds her pleading with a lover to choose her over a lifestyle which threatens to pull them apart. Kehlani has always been powerful when she\'s vulnerable—the essence and through line of her music is in the way she allows that which makes her weak to make her strong again. *It Was Good Until It Wasn\'t* arrives in May 2020 as many people remain under orders to stay at home and practice social distancing, but this music can be a vehicle to another place, even if that place is your own head. Kehlani shrewdly captures the tangled intricacies of connection in a time defined by disconnect—a hurdle not just to relationships but to productivity as well. “The biggest thing about this whole quarantine was that I impressed myself,” she says. “That\'s why no matter what happens with this album, this might be my favorite project I\'ve ever put out.”

*F\*\*k the World* is a curious title for a half-hour-long project that not only features a voice so inviting that it sounds like it was meant to sell dreams, but also revels in earthly pleasures like expensive clothing, casual sex, and the luxury of unencumbered travel. But it’s likely just the phrase that happened to be on Brent Faiyaz’s mind the day he decided to name it; at least, that’s how the verses on *F\*\*k the World* come off. Across the project, the 24-year-old Maryland native seems beholden only to a sort of Socratic whimsy, with songs like the title track and “Clouded” playing out like audits of his personal life, while “Skyline” and “Let Me Know” allow him to question the world at large. Then there is the after-party-perfect “Lost Kids Get Money,” which sounds in the very best way like a freestyle off the top of the dome. His voice—accompanied in most instances by very minimal production—sounds particularly naked here, and as such hard to reconcile with the nihilistic title.

One of the most heralded hip-hop artists of his generation, Lil Uzi Vert built no small part of his well-deserved reputation off of the promise of a record nobody had heard. For nearly two years, fans eagerly anticipated the release of *Eternal Atake*, a maddeningly delayed project whose legend grew while tragedy befell some of the Philadelphia native’s emo rap peers, including Lil Peep and XXXTENTACION. With the wait finally over, the patient listenership that made do with running back to 2017’s *Luv Is Rage 2* again and again can take in his glittering opus. Without relying on showy features—save for one memorable duet with Syd on the otherworldly “Urgency”—Uzi does more than most of those who’ve jacked his style in the interim. He imbues the post-EDM aesthetic of “Celebration Station” and the video-game trap of “Silly Watch” alike with speedy, free-associative verses that run from gun talk to sexual exploits. An obvious influence on Uzi’s discography, Chief Keef provides the woozy beat for “Chrome Heart Tags,” reminding that there are levels to Uzi’s artistry.

The first verse we hear on Jay Electronica’s *A Written Testimony* comes from JAY-Z. The God MC opens “Ghost of Soulja Slim,” the second track on the album, which follows an intro comprising mostly remarks from Minister Louis Farrakhan—adding an extra four minutes to the decade-plus many fans have waited to hear Jay Electronica rap on his debut album. Having Jigga bat leadoff registers as much less of a stunt in the context of the full project, and only helps build the anticipation. JAY-Z appears on nearly every song on *A Written Testimony*, assuming a partner-in-rhyme role not unlike the one Ghostface Killah played on Raekwon’s seminal *Only Built 4 Cuban Linx*. The Jays sound likewise inspired by each other, yielding the mic for continuous intervals of elite-level MCing, delivering bars both forthright and poetic, and also steeped in phrasings uncommon outside of the written word. “If you want to be a master in life, you must submit to a master/I was born to lock horns with the Devil at the brink of the hereafter,” Electronica raps on “The Neverending Story.” Electronica is credited with the bulk of production on the album, with additional contributions from No I.D. and The Alchemist, along with the all-star team (Swizz Beatz, Araabmuzik, Hit-Boy, G. Ry) responsible for “The Blinding.” The MC raps in Spanish on “Fruits of the Spirit,” and though he shouts out Vince Staples, Marvel villain Thanos, and cosmetic butt injections, there are very few references on *A Written Testimony* that could date the album long-term. The goal here was very clearly to make a timeless project, one we should appreciate considering there’s no telling if or when we will get another.

On her debut, Nigerian singer Tems meditates on love, life and relationships, and weaves subtle melodies with airy R&B production in a cool yet refined manner. Wrapping emotions in her arresting vocals, she ponders escapism on “Free Mind”, and explores newfound freedom from a love affair on the tropical-sounding “Damages”.

If the uproar over the original cover of *Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon*—designed, per Pop Smoke’s wishes, by Virgil Abloh—tells us anything, it’s that hip-hop fans cared deeply for the slain Brooklyn rapper. As Smoke’s official debut and the project following up the well-received *Meet the Woo* mixtape series—not to mention the first one Pop wouldn’t be around to deliver—*Shoot for the Stars* meant enough to fans that they’d object in droves to what they believed was an unfit representation of their hero. What they’d find once they got past the artwork, though, is that Smoke had quite a bit of music diverging from the quintessential Brooklyn drill he was best known for. *Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon* was executive produced by 50 Cent, the veteran MC having formed a mentor-like relationship with Smoke sometime during Smoke’s meteoric rise. “When me and Pop went to go see 50 originally, he told 50, ‘Yo, I\'m working on this album,\' and he was sending 50 songs,” Pop Smoke’s friend and manager Steven Victor tells Apple Music. “\'Yo, get Chris Brown on this song for me. I’m thinking about putting this song on my album. What do you think about it?\' They were already in conversation about his album.” Following Smoke’s untimely passing in February 2020, 50 would take the reins as a means of honoring his friend’s vision. “I recorded three records and then I was like, \'Don\'t let me overkill or *over-50* on Pop\'s s\*\*t,\'” 50 Cent tells Apple Music. “There\'s certain joints there that Steven will tell you—because of my process, I understood what he was doing.” 50 Cent appears on a single song on *Shoot for the Stars* (“The Woo”), which doesn’t make it any easier to determine where Smoke’s aspirations of diversifying his sound ended and 50’s curation began. Smoke flows gruffly over R&B samples on “Yea Yea” and “Diana,” and then chooses to explore the whole of his vocal range on the CashMoneyAp-produced “For the Night.” Attempting to channel a regional vibe, he’s not-so-inconspicuously titled his Tyga collab “West Coast S\*\*t.” UK-based producer and longtime collaborator 808 Melo is all over the album, along with guest appearances from homegrown NYC MCs Rowdy Rebel and Lil Tjay. There are also three separate songs featuring Quavo, as well as appearances from a handful of first-time collaborators who also happen to be some of rap’s most dependable hitmakers (Future, DaBaby, Roddy Ricch). Then there is “Enjoy Yourself,” a feel-good pop-rap collaboration that features Colombian vocalist KAROL G rapping in Spanish. But it is the uniquely charming NYC-bred aggression and sex appeal of Smoke himself that tie together the disparate features of *Shoot for the Stars*. And to let Victor tell it, the project is the realization of where he and Smoke knew the MC was destined to be. “It’s crazy because everything was coming together the way we spoke about it,” Victor says. “The whole idea was we were going to put out a series of mixtapes: *Meet the Woo* 1, *Meet the Woo 2*, *Meet the Woo 3*—however long it took to make his name a staple. Then from there, we would go to the album. After the second mixtape, he was \[already\] making a name for himself.”

The Mobile, Alabama, newcomer gets a new hater every single day (or so she raps on “Pockets Bigger”), and guess what? She’s loving it. With her brash, bratty delivery and supersized confidence, Flo Milli comes off like the cool girl at school—complete with a mouthful of braces—on her debut mixtape. A 12-track blast through swaggering boasts and bubblegum trap beats, Flo’s got punchlines for days on breakthrough hit “Beef FloMix,” hands for anyone who wants ’em on “Send the Addy,” and no time for thirsty dudes on the SWV flip “Weak.” Short and not-so-sweet, *Ho, why is you here ?* feels like the 20-year-old rapper’s official arrival.

“Every time I make a record, I\'m learning something new about myself,” Kid Cudi tells Apple Music. “I didn\'t realize that my father\'s death really had an impact on me in the way that it did until I started writing about it: \'Oh, I guess being alone is an issue for me. I guess being depressed is an issue.\' I\'m just making music, I\'m just doing what feels right, but this shit is coming out and it\'s things that I probably didn\'t pinpoint \[in the moment\].” The issues Cudi mentions have been emerging for him since his beginnings as the “lonely stoner,” a New York City-via-Cleveland cool kid who assured a generation of rappers to follow him that it was plenty OK to acknowledge your own inexplicable melancholy. *Man on the Moon III: The Chosen*, which returns to a naming convention Cudi hadn’t utilized since 2010’s *Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager* (with four solo and two collaborative albums in between), finds him in a sort of post-discovery nirvana, coming clean about his mental-health journey (“Mr Solo Dolo III”), his relationship with his mother (“Elsie’s Baby Boy \[flashback\]”), and the power of his celebrity (“4 Da Kidz”). “I was already in a really good place working on *Entergalactic* \[his forthcoming animated series and soundtrack\], going crazy on ‘THE SCOTTS’—but then I was making something else that didn\'t fit those two projects. After two or three songs, I was like, \'Whoa, this shit really feels like a *Man on the Moon*. It sounds like you pick right back up where we left off 10 years ago.\'” Ten years ago, Kid Cudi was sidestepping being pigeonholed as an “emo rapper,” leaning even harder into his alias Mr. Rager, even when that meant looking at himself in the mirror after the partying was done, as reflected in *Man on the Moon II*’s latter half. For *Man on the Moon III*, he’s just as in touch with his feelings as he was on *II*—along with the rest of a dependably vulnerable catalog—it’s just that now those feelings are a bit more positive. “The whole flow of my life is like so in tune with like everything that I want it to be,” Cudi says. “I\'m solid with my baby’s mom. I\'m solid with my mom, I\'m solid with my sister. I\'m solid with my daughter. I\'m solid with my nieces. Everything\'s in place. And I\'m happy, you know?”

The first time that Mac Miller and Jon Brion formally met, Miller was already hard at work on what would become 2018’s *Swimming*, an album that Brion would sign on to produce. “He comes in and he plays five or six things,” Brion tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “There was more hip-hop-leaning stuff, and it was great and funny and personal—the tracks were already pointing someplace interesting. After a couple of those, he goes, ‘I’ve got these other things I\'m not sure what to do with.’” Those “other things” were the beginning of *Circles*, a now posthumous LP that Miller had envisioned as a counterpart to *Swimming*—one that finds him exploring levels of musicality, melody, and vulnerability he’d only hinted at before. It feels more akin to Harry Nilsson than hip-hop, and the breadth of Brion’s CV (Kanye West, Fiona Apple, Janelle Monáe) made him the perfect collaborator. With the support of Miller’s family, Brion completed *Circles* based on conversations the two had shared before Miller’s death in September 2018, adding elements of live percussion, strings, and various overdubs. Here, Brion takes us inside the making of some of *Circles*’ key songs and offers insights on what it was like to work so closely with Miller on something so personal. **Circles** “That\'s what he played me. I added a brush on a cymbal, and a vibraphone. Throughout all of his lyrics, his self-reflection is much more interesting than some other people’s. ‘Circles’ and a few other songs on this record: You hear him acknowledging aspects of himself, either that he doesn\'t feel capable of changing or things he thinks are questionable. Things you\'ll hear in the lyrics directly—‘I’m this way, and I think other people might not understand how I think, but actually I\'m okay with that.’ It\'s so pointed. I was just a hundred percent in from the get-go.” **Complicated** “I think that vocal was done, if I recall correctly. He\'d play me things in various states, and the whole batch, meaning both albums’ worth of songs. He\'d play things, and I might just go, ‘That\'s great. All it needs is for the low end to be a little better.’ Almost every time I\'d make a suggestion like that, he\'d go, \'Oh, I\'m so glad you said that. I just didn\'t know how to do it with this type of thing.\' Other times, I might listen to something and go, ‘I love it. I love what you\'re saying. I like that vocal. I like the rhythm. In this case, about halfway through, my mind wanders, and I don\'t want the listener\'s mind to do that, because what you\'re saying is great.’” **Good News** “It was him singing over a very minimal track. The lyrics were incredible. It didn\'t have the chorus. He said, ‘I just think you should play a bunch of stuff on it.’ I gingerly asked, ‘Do you like the chords that are there?’ He\'s like, ‘No.’ I\'m like, ‘Okay. Well, I\'m going to play, and every time you hear something you like, let me know.’ I did with him what I\'ve done with a bunch of directors, which is watch the body language, when somebody\'s happy or not. He came into the control room, and he was really excited. He started singing over it in the control room, and he sang the chorus. I’m in the middle of the keyboard over top and I look up and go, ‘That\'s great. Go run onto the mic.’ After he first did it, he came in and he was still a little unsure, like, ‘Yeah, I don\'t know, maybe that\'s a different song.’ And thank god he lived with it and saw the sense in it. Again, that\'s not something I created—that\'s something he was doing. I think I did say to him when he was walking around in front of the speakers and he was singing that, like, \'Look, there\'s a reason that came to you right now.\'” **I Can See** “It’s not fair to give words to the heaviness of it, but I can tell you that the week I had to listen through stuff was a torture and a delight. Torture because of the loss. And then ‘I Can See’ would come up and I\'d be beyond delighted because I\'m like, ‘This is good by anybody\'s standards, in any genre, this human being expressing themselves well.’ It would turn back to a torture because you\'re like, ‘Oh my god, you were capable of that. I didn\'t even get to hear that one yet.’ I could sit there and wonder, would I have? Was it something he was nervous about, or because it was already so complete, did he not feel a need? No idea. You can ascribe all sorts of things to his sense of knowing. But people are going to have that experience because he was already self-aware and was unafraid of expressing it. But beyond that lyrical wonder of honesty, the melody just made me cry.” **That’s on Me** “He had come back from Hawaii. I was sideswiped by the song and the feeling of it. He usually said, ‘Oh, you should just play everything.’ I\'m like, ‘No, you\'re already great, I\'ll play along with that.’ Inevitably, he\'d finish a take and say, ‘Was that all right?’ And all I could do is honestly go, ‘Yeah, it was great. I\'m having a blast.’\" **Hands** “He wanted it big and expansive and cinematic, had no idea how he had one keyboard pad implying that. I said, ‘Oh, I\'ve got this notion of Dr. Dre-influenced eighth notes like he would have on a piano sample. Instead of it being piano or a piano sample, let\'s take the influence of that era, but I want to do it on orchestral percussion but a lot of different ones. So it\'s sort of subtly changing across the thing.’ And he was like, ‘Just put everything you want on it.’ So that\'s one where I went to town. He was really excited but had no idea how one would even go about that.” **Once a Day** “He came over, played two or three things—that was one of them, and it had a little mini piano or something. I couldn\'t believe the songwriting. I looked forward to his visits so much because every time, there was this new discovery of, ‘You\'re hiding this?’ Honestly. I don\'t know what else he\'s got undercover, but this thing is fully fleshed out. It\'s personal. It\'s heartbreaking. I went through the rigmarole to get him to play it and I did what I thought was the right production decision. I left the room, but I didn\'t close the door. I didn\'t leave, not even slightly. I stood in the door, basically a room and a half away from the control room with the door open. And he started playing and the vocal was coming out and I wasn\'t having to be in the room and he did a pass and I could hear there was something on the keyboard needing adjustment. It needed to be brighter or darker, and I just sort of came running in like, ‘Oh, sorry, just one thing.’ And I went back out and I stood in the hallway and I listened to a couple of takes. And this is how I can tell you I\'m not looking at it with the loss goggles: I bawled my eyes out. Heard it twice in a row. I kind of poked my head around the door and said, ‘Oh, I heard a little bit of that. That sounds good. Just do a double of that keyboard just right now while the sound’s up. Okay, cool.’ Boom. Ran out into the hallway and cried again and dried my eyes out and went back in and sat through the usual ‘Was that good? Are you sure you shouldn\'t just play it?’ Maybe it\'s something the rest of the world wouldn\'t see and I will be blinded by personal experience, but I don\'t fucking care. It\'s what happened. It\'s what I saw, and I just think it\'s great and doesn\'t need any qualifiers, personally. So there.”

The title for Gunna’s heavily anticipated *WUNNA* album—his first full-length project since 2019’s *Drip or Drown 2*—is an acronym for “Wealthy Unapologetic N\*gga Naturally Authentic.” The Atlanta MC has also claimed that it represents an alternate identity, a chance to step away, if only momentarily, from the franchises that made his name, *Drip Season* and *Drip or Drown*. Thankfully for Gunna fans, however, the MC we get in *WUNNA* isn’t all that different from the man who taught us the meaning of drip. Across beats from a veritable wish list of can’t-miss producers including Wheezy, Turbo The Great, and Tay Keith, Gunna raps in effortless non sequitur about clothing, jewelry, and women. He’s joined by frequent collaborators Lil Baby, Young Thug, and Travis Scott, and also Roddy Ricch, who guests on “COOLER THAN A BITCH,” a song dedicated to anyone mistakenly believing that they’re operating on the same plane as he is. Across 18 tracks, *WUNNA* is everything fans could have wanted from an MC who’s dedicated his career to establishing himself as a trendsetter. In fact, the only place the drip is missing is in the title.