In a year when an entire globe was forced to be cooped up at home, music took on a new importance in many of our lives. Stuck in place, scared, with a global pandemic raging, many of us turned to music to comfort us, to give us a distraction, to give us something that we could turn all the way up and scream along to, if only, for a moment, to escape our own thoughts.
Below is a list of our 20 favorite albums of the year. Our rubric was laughably imprecise — we simply asked music fans on staff to share what albums meant a lot to them this year, and write a few sentences about what they meant. Cobbled together, we got our 20 for 2020. We hope you enjoy them as much as we did.
