"Best Of" lists are subjective. Calling this year horrifying is not. Thankfully, there were plenty of really good albums to keep us occupied while we were all stuck inside sewing masks and searching Amazon for bottles of off-brand Germ-X. Even though our 15 choices below don't reflect the full breadth of great 2020 releases (ones that just missed the cut: Phoebe Bridgers' Punisher, Waxhatchee's Saint Cloud, and Lil Uzi Vert's Eternal Atake, the Strokes' The New Abnormal), we believe they are the best of the best: a collection of projects that we'll be playing long after this wretched time in history is over.

15. Petals for Armor — Hayley Williams

Trading pop-punk for art pop and evoking wisps of Kate Bush, Bjork, and Bowie,  the Paramore singer opens up whole new avenues for her powerful vocals. Her vulnerability goes hand in hand with steely-eyed epiphanies about what it means to be strong (and sexy, “Watch Me While I Bloom,” indeed). And while the burbling electronics and trilling might make it seem like she’s applying a lighter touch on her dynamic debut solo album. she’s still packing plenty of punch and oozing attitude on this collection of sticky mini-dramas that offer rage and tenderness in equal measure. —Sarah Rodman

Read more: How Handmaid's Tale, Thom Yorke, and Hayley Williams's dog influenced her album Petals for Armor

14. Your Life is a Record — Brandy Clark

She’s become a go-to songwriter in Nashville, helping write some of the best, funniest, smartest tunes to come out of Music City in the last decade (including Miranda Lambert’s “Mama’s Broken Heart” and Kacey Musgraves’ “Follow Your Arrow”). Fortunately, the Washington native has been wise enough to keep a bunch of good ones for herself too. She continues to grow and deepen as a solo artist and vocalist on her third album, getting rawer than she ever has in examining heartbreak, healing, life and love. —S.R.

13. Set My Heart on Fire Immediately — Perfume Genius

Whoever decided indie rock had to sound small never met Mike Hadreas, the intrepid mastermind behind Perfume. The reach of the Seattle native’s sublimely wide-ranging fifth studio album includes but is hardly limited to orchestral pop (on the swanning opener “Whole Life”), fuzzed-up guitar pomp (“Describe”), rococo balladry (“Jason”) and tender, shuffling R&B boogie (“On the Floor”). — Leah Greenblatt

12. American Love Story — Butch Walker

It may have been recorded two years ago but this dynamite pop-rock concept album about bigotry and the sins of the father (eventually) bypassing the son, redemption and the power of love, was released in the perfect moment. Remarkably, because the in-demand singer-songwriter-producer (Green Day, Weezer, Pink, Taylor Swift) is ever the poptimist, he makes songs about our divided states of America catchy as all get out. Without didacticism or even judgement, the Georgia native deploys brawny guitar rock, tender piano ballads, massive pop hooks and ambling southern soul in service of the idea that emotional evolution is possible. —S.R.

Read more: Butch Walker on new album American Love Story: 'I wanted to almost blindside people'

11. Future Nostalgia — Dua Lipa

In a year where the present was the last place we wanted to be, Future Nostalgia felt exactly right: Thirteen tracks of squelchy, squiggly pop designed for a dream world of beach-day carpools and glitter-bombed discotheques, but weirdly amenable to the solo dance-offs in house pants that were our 2020 reality.  — L.G.

Read more: Dua Lipa offers up high-octane pop bliss on Future Nostalgia

10. Untitled (Black Is) — Sault

This mysterious British collective— collected by Michael Kiwanuka, we think—truly overachieved in 2020, releasing not one, but two albums of music so mesmerizing that the moment the albums ended pressing play again felt like medicine. Both Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise) brewed a beguiling mélange of soul, dub, funk, reggae, trip-hop, folk, and hazy psychedelia. Of the pair, Black Is vibrated on a higher plane, at once transporting and grounding, speaking to this moment of, with and about Black voices in way that felt like an authentic soundtrack for the season of reckoning. — S.R.

9. YHLQMDLG — Bad Bunny

The Latin trap star’s first of three projects in 2020 made good on its title (the letters are an acronym — Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana — that translates to “I do whatever I want”) by breaking gender stereotypes, sampling “The Girl From Ipanema,” and combining the many flavors of reggaeton past (Daddy Yankee, Jowell & Randy, and Yaviah all guest) and present. —Alex Suskind

8. A Written Testimony — Jay Electronica

If you’re going to make fans wait 13 years for your first studio album, you better bring the goods. Electronica came fully stocked on Testimony, which overflows with the type of philosophical yarns and triple entendres that once made him rap’s Next Great Hope. A decade on, the title still holds. —A.S.

Read more: Jay Electronica's A Written Testimony is a righteous step forward

7. Women in Music Pt. III — HAIM

The family trio removed the clean edges from their first two albums and emerged with the kind of dusty, riffy rock record you might hear blasting out of your neighbor’s window on a humid summer day. In a year filled with backbreaking news cycles, WIMPIII delivered a necessary escape. —A.S.

Read more: How spontaneity helped Haim write 'The Steps'

6. Gaslighter — The Chicks

The perfect album title for 2020. The perfect soundtrack for annihilating liars, cheats, cowards, tyrants, racists, homophobes...and people dumb enough to leave tights on boats. The perfect polyamorous marriage of pop sheen, flinty sass, country flights, heavenly harmonies, and righteous rage. It was both lovely, and deeply cathartic, to welcome Natalie Maines, Martie Maguire and Emily Strayer back just when we needed anthems to exorcise our own demons— both personal and collective — the most. If a rage cry, a cleansing scream, a homemade salve and a good talk with a close friend could be an album, it would be Gaslighter.  —S.R.

Read more: The Chicks' Gaslighter is all fire and nerve

5. Folklore — Taylor Swift

Please, picture me, sitting in a seaside cottage listening to Taylor’s quietly devastating eighth album on repeat. Folklore broke all the rules the pop star had written for herself, arriving with little fanfare, zero stadium singles, and captivating tales of dead socialites ("The Last Great American Dynasty"), war heroes ("Epiphany"), and fictional love triangles ("Betty," "August," and "Cardigan"). —A.S.

Read more: Taylor Swift forges her own path on the confident Folklore

4. Rough and Rowdy Ways — Bob Dylan

Dylan’s best album in 14 years is a deadly affair — one of JFK’s murder, of spare body parts at the morgue, of people tossed into graves, of revenge (from "I Contain Multitudes": "Got a tell-tale heart, like Mr. Poe/Got skeletons in the walls of people you know"). His vocals are as dark and sturdy as his lyrics sung with a lingering, bloodcurdling delivery as they rumble across 12-bar-blues numbers and shuffle beats. —A.S.

Read more: Death, Dylan, and the American way

3. Run the Jewels — RTJ4

“F--- it, why wait,” wrote Killer Mike and El-P after dropping their fourth album two days early. Why indeed. Black Lives Matter protests had reached a boiling point, fascism was on the rise, and people were screaming for change. RTJ4 provided the moment with the bruising, brutal soundtrack it was looking for. To quote Mike on the record's closing track, "For the truth tellers tied to the whippin' post, left beaten, battered, bruised/For the ones whose body hung from a tree like a piece of strange fruit/Go hard, last words to the firing squad was, 'F--- you too.'" —A.S.

Read more: Killer Mike and El-P preview Run the Jewels 4: 'It's angry, raw, funny, nasty s---'

2. After Hours — The Weeknd

After’s title feels more than fitting for the artist born Abel Tesfaye, whose reign as the brooding Sith Lord of modern pop finds its apex on this sleek nocturnal mood piece: glassy, gorgeously falsettoed reflections on loneliness and lust and alienation designed for dancing in the dark (though they looked great under strobe lights, too). If the Grammys nominating committee infamously couldn’t recognize the album’s commercial and critical impact, let him wear that as a badge of honor — or fuel, at least, for the next round of desolate anthems. — L.G.

Read more: After Hours is the Weeknd's most consistent work to date

1. Fetch the Bolt Cutters — Fiona Apple

“Blast the music/Bang it, bite it, bruise it,” Apple commands over the clattering piano chords and thunderous drums of Fetch the Bolt Cutters’ frenzied opener. “Whenever you want to begin, begin/We don’t have to go back to where we been.” Moving music forward has become a sort of speciality for the singer, whose scarce output — she’s released only four albums since her touchstone 1996 debut, Tidal — tends to be met with the kind of dazzled awe that usually only attends a rare comet or solar eclipse. And what a cosmic wonder she is on Fetch, churning through dense sonic experiments, tricky time signatures, and lyrical pirouettes in a wild mosaic that feels both playful and urgent, melodic and chaotic—and always, indubitably Fiona, down to the last fantastic note. —L.G.

Read more: Fiona Apple returns with the wild, wooly Fetch the Bolt Cutters

For more on our Entertainers of the Year and Best & Worst of 2020, order the January issue of Entertainment Weekly or find it on newsstands beginning Dec. 18. Don’t forget to subscribe for more exclusive interviews and photos, only in EW.

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• By Leah Greenblatt
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This story originally appeared on: EW - Author:Leah Greenblatt

“Slow boat” isn’t a bad metaphor for Steven Soderbergh’s latest, but take that as the greatest compliment: Let Them All Talk (on HBO Max Dec. 10) is part absurdist character study, part shaggy-dog caper on the high seas, and thoroughly delightful — not least because it stars Meryl Streep as a self-regarding novelist named Alice and Candice Bergen and Dianne Wiest as her two oldest (if not precisely dearest) friends.

Alice doesn’t fly, so she’s taking a luxury liner from New York to England to receive a literary prize. The trip, as she sees it, is the perfect chance — if you don’t count nearly half a century of past hurts and passive animosities — to reconnect. For her lovely but anxious new agent (Crazy Rich Asians’ Gemma Chan) it’s also an opportunity to find out whether her client’s long-gestating manuscript is a sequel to her singular triumph, a Pulitzer prize-winner called You Always You Never. (Though Karen hasn’t exactly been invited; in fact, she’s essentially a stowaway.)

Also on board are Alice’s earnest young nephew (Lucas Hedges), brought along as a sort of companion-slash-Boy Friday to his high-maintenance aunt, and a mystery writer (played with great non-actory charm by the filmmaker Dan Algrant) whose outrageous popularity represents everything she so strenuously rejects. Alice, you see, is a true artiste, not some craven content monkey churning out literary pablum for the masses; that must be why her sales have dropped so precipitously since You Always.

On the ship, ancient rivalries are relit and new alliances are forged. Wiest’s Susan, a serene Seattle social worker in floaty Eileen Fisher linens, stealthily delivers some of the movie’s best lines, a whole quiver of arrows encased in her girlish, guileless inflections. (Wait till you hear what she has to say about threesomes.) And as Roberta, an aspiring Texas trophy wife desperately in search of a solvent man to put a ring on it, Bergen is a brittle wonder, quietly furious at the indignities dealt to a single lady of a certain age.

Streep, cocooned like a pasha in her neuroses and cashmere wraps, imbues her fussy, querulous Alice with a queenly hauteur; witnessing her with Chan’s Karen is like watching a bored lioness toy with a baby springbok. And there’s a loose, jazzy verve to the production, a sort of sonic and visual razzmatazz that gives the film a fanciful Oceans 11-style gloss. Mostly, though, Talk is just a chance to spend two hours watching Streep & Co. make the most of Deborah Eisenberg’s deliciously salty script, while Soderbergh — who also serves as cinematographer — shoots it all in ruthless, radiant light. Grade: A–

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This story originally appeared on: EW - Author:Leah Greenblatt

If pop idol-dom had a platonic ideal, it might look a lot like Shawn Mendes: dreamy, dimpled, dulcet- voiced. He’s like a sweeter Justin Bieber, minus the pesky personal issues and neck tattoos; Ed Sheeran’s strummy sincerity repoured into 74 inches of clean Canadian marble.

Over the past half-dozen years, the Toronto-bred singer has also steadily, almost stealthily, managed to amass a truly startling set of numbers — more than 20 million albums and 175 million singles sold; some 50 billion song streams, with over 8 billion music-video views on YouTube alone. In 2018, Time magazine named him to its 100 Most Influential People list alongside astrophysicists, tech moguls, and Kim Jong Un; his concerts, when those were a thing that still existed beyond a Zoom lens, briskly sold out stadiums.

And yet it can also be easy to feel like we hardly know Mendes at all: In a world of constant unmitigated access, his greatest scandals to date have been a handful of racially insensitive tweets unearthed from his early teen years (he promptly apologized) and a particular way of kissing girlfriend Camila Cabello that some fans dubbed “like fish.” (Kids! just let them do as the guppies do.)

Accordingly, even though Wonder is his fourth studio album, it often feels like the sound of an artist still discovering himself in real time — the pleasant but vaguely unplaceable style of previous hits like “Treat You Better” and “There’s Nothing Holding Me Back” now gilded with swirling psychedelic pomp (on the expansive title track), ring-my-bell disco (“Teach Me How to Love”), and slinky R&B (“Piece of You”).

“Call My Friends” blooms from its pensive piano intro into a kind of candied glam-rock stomper, a YOLO ode to wasted youth. Gossamer confection “Dream” yields to the plucked strings and spacious ’60s soul of “Song for No One.” At 22, Mendes is freer, maybe, to express his fondness for sexual tension and cocktails and reflect on the vagaries of early fame. Yet even those allusions tend toward the unfailingly polite. (You can take the boy out of Canada, etcetera.)

“You put me on a pedestal and tell me I'm the best/Raise me up into the sky until I'm short of breath,” he coos on “Monster” — a duet, no less, with his fellow Ottowan and traveler in Gen-Z existentialism Bieber —  “But what if I, what if I trip/What if I, what if I fall?” He very well may one day, and even get a good record out of it. But for now the world, and all that wonder, are still his to lose. Grade: B+

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This story originally appeared on: EW - Author:Leah Greenblatt

The original Danish title of Another Round is Druk, and it doesn’t take Rosetta Stone to sense how much more succinctly that captures the spirit of Thomas Vinterberg’s deeply Scandanavian dark comedy — an intoxicated tale of midlife angst and catharsis and better living through Aquavit.

History teacher Martin (Mads Mikkelsen) has, at least on the surface, a nice life — lovely wife, two sons, haute-Ikea home — and a terminal case of ennui. There’s hardly any joy or connection left for him in daily routines, and even his students can sense it; his lesson plans sound like the distracted dronings of a broken Wikipedia. So when a coworker at his Copenhagen high school floats the theory that they all just might have been born with a blood alcohol level .05% too low, he and two other instructors decide to approach drinking as a sort of freeform mental-health experiment.

To keep it professional they will imbibe, it’s decided, like Hemingway, “Never after 8 p.m. or on the weekends.” Suddenly, with a little Stoli for breakfast, Nikolaj (Magnus Millang) no longer feels so stymied by the demands of his wife and children, Tommy (Thomas Bo Larsen) is coaching his ragtag youth soccer club to victory, and choir director Peter (Lars Ranthe) is making a bunch of hormonal teenagers sing like Benedictine angels.

For Martin too, it’s a revelation: His lectures are electrified, his checked-out spouse (Maria Bonnevie) and kids reconnect, and the world, it seems, comes in colors again. But will life get even sweeter, Nikolaj wonders, if they bump their intake up to .08, .12, or beyond? You may think you know which side vaunted writer-director Vinterberg (The Celebration, Far From the Madding Crowd) will land on, but his storyline — which veers tipsily between satire, wish fulfillment, and minor-key tragedy —  rarely fits inside the neat contours of Hollywood moralism.

Are there consequences for showing up to work eight absinthe-and-sodas in, or for surreptitiously offering a student a shot of vodka to get through an exam? Maybe! And maybe not. Though Vinterberg doesn’t dismiss some of the very real consequences of his characters’ 180-proof experiment, it often falls on the actors to fill in the finer lines his antic script (cowritten with Tobias Lindholm) dodges or leaps over. In that task he has no one better than Mikkelsen, whose sharp-planed bones and mournful gaze seem to contain multitudes, even in repose. (The pair's last collaboration, 2012's The Hunt, landed them both multiple prizes at Cannes and abroad.)

Now a bona fide industry player between TV’s Hannibal and his roles in Bond movies and Marvel (and soon, Fantastic Beasts), Mikkelsen has become perhaps Denmark’s most familiar face Stateside over the past decade. But he still feels most in his skin in roles like these, and in Round’s final ecstatic scene, the actor does what only true stars seem able to: Take the silly or messy or improbable, and make it fly. Grade: B

Another Round is in limited theaters Friday and on demand Dec. 18.

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This story originally appeared on: EW - Author:Leah Greenblatt

Sound of Metal is the kind of movie that, when it premiered last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, seemed easy to lose in all the noise: a modestly scaled drama whose unhurried pacing and scrappy, naturalistic tone spoke nearly as loudly as its intermittent dialogue. It also turned out to be one of 2019's best small surprises, even if its relatively esoteric subject — a thrash-punk drummer confronts hearing loss — faces even steeper odds for attention in the chaos-walking of 2020. (The film is now in limited theaters, and hits Amazon Prime Dec. 4.)

Riz Ahmed (Rogue One), hair bleached white and sinewy arms laced with stick-and-poke tattoos, is Ruben, crisscrossing America with his girlfriend and bandmate, Lou (Ready Player One's Olivia Cooke, also creatively peroxided), in the neat little Airstream that is both faithful transportation and home base. The clubs they play are small and sticky and the money mostly nonexistent, but it's clearly a routine that Ruben, four years sober, finds comfort and safety in. So when his ears suddenly seem to turn against him mid-show — the whole clamorous world reduced to a muffled vacuum — his first reaction, understandably, is outright denial.

Lou is quicker to see what he doesn't want to: that life as they knew it is gone. There's a place for him to go, a sort of rural retreat for deaf people also struggling with substance abuse. But he has to do it alone, and cut off contact to follow the rules. Ruben agrees mostly because he has no choice — and because as soon as he can find the funds, he's sure, he can get implant surgery; anything past that strains not just his patience but his imagination.

Metal is the feature debut of writer-director Darius Marder, who is probably best known for penning the script for 2012's The Place Beyond the Pines, and though its measured unfurling requires a certain kind of endurance, he trusts his story enough not to rush or make it showy. There's an intimately lived-in quality to the film that feels almost documentary, even as it uses editing and sound design to ingenuously mark the widening gulf between Ruben's hushed interior world and the frenetic, clanging one outside of him.

Several hearing-impaired actors and allies also add a note of authenticity, including The Walking Dead's Lauren Ridloff as a sign-language teacher and Paul Raci as the blunt but not unkind counselor who runs the place. The London-born Ahmed, an Emmy winner several years ago for HBO's The Night Of, reportedly spent months learning ASL and drumming, but the resonance of his performance lies in more than faithful technique. As Ruben's fear and rage begins to open itself to the unknown, the movie reaches toward something profound — finding real, furious power in the spaces between the sound. Grade: A-

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Author:Leah Greenblatt - Source: EW

It’s no mystery why so many movie stars seem to gravitate, at some point in their careers, to theater. What green-screened franchise can compete with the thrill and immediacy, the sheer soliloquy of words promised by taking the stage six days a week, plus matinees?

Broadway has been shuttered for months now of course, and will be indefinitely. But Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, a jewel in the crown of the late August Wilson’s acclaimed Pittsburgh Cycle (though in fact it takes place almost entirely in Chicago) is exactly the kind of chewy, loquacious showcase even the most decorated performers — including Viola Davis, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her turn in the 2017 film version of Wilson’s Fences — dream of.

As the titular Ma, Davis doesn’t just sing the blues, she personifies it; her voice a low libidinous rumble and her makeup a Technicolor smear, she rules the nightclubs and juke joints of a certain 1920s circuit. And she is indubitably great — a hip-rolling force of nature in her flocked velvets and gold-capped teeth, issuing queenly commands on how she likes her girls (demure), her soda pop (cold), and her songs (slow and low).

To live in Ma’s world is to serve her, or suffer the consequences: everyone from the petulant young lover (Taylour Paige) and speech-impaired nephew (Dusan Brown) who make up her small entourage to the band of old hands (including Colman Domingo, Glynn Turman, and Michael Potts) who back her on constant, obedient standby. Even a prosperous white producer (Jeremy Shamos) — nearly all the action unfolds over the course of a single day in a recording studio — scrambles to please the woman whose passing whims may mean the difference between getting her down on vinyl or watching her (and his musical profits) walk away.

The lone exception in all this is Levee (Chadwick Boseman), a brash young trumpeter with the blazing ambition to match his daffodil-yellow shoes. Scrappy but hungry, he can't wait to take a bite out of it all; the kind of dreamer with no patience for anything but big swings when it comes to work, women, and other appetites. That portends trouble for him, and sometimes for the script (adapted by Ruben Santiago-Hudson) too, whose natural lean toward speechifying and high melodrama has a tendency to land heavier on screen.

Tony-winning director George C. Wolfe (Angels in America) takes care to mitigate his confined setting with some cinematic Jazz Age noise and flair — moonshine, shiny cars, city life thrumming just outside the doors — but the resonance in Rainey (in theaters Nov. 25 and streaming on Netflix Dec. 18) rests largely on his actors' ability to bring the stagier cadences of Wilson's sprawling, famously dense monologues down to human scale.

If Davis hadn't already taken home Oscar gold so recently, she'd almost certainly claim another prize here for the raw transformative verve of her performance; it's more than possible she still might. It's Boseman, though, in his final appearance on screen, who makes both the bitter and the sweet of the story sing: a pointed arrow of hurt, hope, and untapped fury, heartbreakingly alive in every scene. Grade: B 

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Author:Leah Greenblatt - Source: EW