Carnival of Soul

The theme of 2020’s albums — three months in, at least — seems to be career comebacks and career liftoffs, with plenty of the big dogs closing long gaps between albums (Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber, Tame Impala, and, next up, Lady Gaga, Adele, and … eventually??? … Rihanna), while the newer and nascent continue to shake things up (Roddy Ricch, Soccer Mommy, King Krule, Bad Bunny, etc.). Has 2020 already seen its best album before spring even hits? Below, New York music critic Craig Jenkins rounds up the standout albums the year has had to offer so far, to be updated monthly.

In the five years following 2015’s Currents, Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker became a festival headliner and a husband. This year’s The Slow Rush imparts wisdom learned in both endeavors. The music retools Tame’s kitchen-sink psych-rock as booming dance music, leaning confidently into the sprightly step of Currents opener “Let It Happen” without coming off like an artist trying to bottle lightning in trippy tracks like “One More Year” and “Breathe Deep.” On “Instant Destiny” and “It Might Be Time,” Parker speaks to aging gracefully and shacking up, to knowing exactly when to duck out of the party and head home. It’s the rare album about maturity that doesn’t make it sound like giving up, the rare follow-up to a commercial breakthrough structured to bowl over stadium crowds at no cost to what made the band a blast before the masses came around.

It’s tempting to call the posthumous Circles Mac Miller’s long-awaited rock album, but that undersells the extent to which the rapper, singer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist mixed genres throughout his back catalog. What the new album is, is the most cohesive amalgamation of the interests in rock, soul, rap, jazz, and folk the late Pittsburgh star pursued in his lifetime. With the help of the legendary producer, session player, and film score closer Jon Brion, Mac stepped out into his versatility as a writer and a musician and was rewarded, and rewarded us in turn, with a work that ranks among his personal finest. Songs like “Good News” and “I Can See” fuse the melancholic moods and promises of perseverance warring in Miller’s music. What comes out is a ragged glory that makes losing him feel fresh, that makes the speed at which he got to this brutal self-awareness from the happy-go-lucky teen dreams of 2011’s Blue Slide Park seem all the more impossible. What could he have done with another seven years?

On her brilliant second studio full-length as Soccer Mommy, singer-songwriter Sophia Allison traverses stress and family illness, closely capturing the bleak hollowness of depression through weaponized slacker rock. Color Theory is both impossibly catchy and deceptively downcast. “Bloodstream” and “Circle the Drain” are summery tunes about the elusiveness of happiness and the knuckle-busting difficulty of putting up a strong front in the face of adversity. At 22, Allison is sort of like the alt-rock songbook made flesh. You hear shades of the neat, autumnal sadness of early Death Cab for Cutie, the rawness of peak Lou Barlow, and the fearless adventurousness of Blur, but even though the touchstones can feel familiar, the writing is always original, personal, and tuneful. This isn’t rock and roll revivalism; it’s proof the real thing can never die.

Georgia country-rockers the Drive-By Truckers are poets of American disorder, from 2001’s Southern Rock Opera, which used the rise and fall of Lynyrd Skynyrd in the ’70s as a window into a difficult time in the history of the South, to 2016’s American Band, which spoke similarly to modern ills. This year’s The Unraveling catches us four years later, still trying to put the pieces back together. Scathing political commentary from chief songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley is whittled to a sharp point on the rock tunes and bolstered by emotive musicianship on the folk and blues tunes. “Heroin Again” is a rock historian’s furious realization that the bad drugs that killed the legends are back in circulation. “Thoughts and Prayers” rages against the gun lobby, while “Babies in Cages” presents the nightmare at the nation’s southern border as a betrayal of our stated ideals. This band was born ready for this moment in history.

As King Krule, British singer-songwriter, producer, and guitarist Archy Marshall makes songs about love and danger and the infinite possibilities of cities, where it’s possible to walk down a street and find either death or lifetime companionship and not know which until it meets you. Man Alive!, the third Krule album, carries this duality in its title; it’s an exclamation we use when we’re mortified and a word about Marshall finding new joy in life as a father. The music lives along the same fault line. There’s coarse punk rock and gritty sludge on one end and weightless songs about drifting and flying on the other. Life, it seems to say, is the time we spend between the gutter and the stars.