Variety music critics Jem Aswad and Chris Willman found a lot to love across genres, from hip-hop (Tyler, the Creator, Madlib, Topaz Jones) to rock (St.
Vincent, Wolf Alice, Liz Phair, Dirty Laundry) to global music (Mdou Moctar, Altin Gun) to indie singer-songwriters (Julien Baker, Lucy Dacas, Girl in Red) to even mid-20th-century jazz standards (Mandy Barnett).
Read far enough and you might even find an actual, long-established superstar on the list, too; stranger things have happened.
Willman chose the confessional singer Allison Russell as the year’s best to date, while Aswad went with the bracing collective known as Sault — who also happened to have two of the best albums of 2020, in a happy case of creatives really being set on fire.
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