2020 Was The Year Of *Trying* To Chill

In 2020, there were many ways to understand the year in music; this week, we're considering five. Even more than "mindfulness" or "self-care," "chill" has morphed into a context-flattening buzzword, not quite a genre of music but certainly a tool used to categorize it, especially as a beacon of calm in your streaming app of choice. Still, it might be just the right term for the palliative care so many of us have spent the months indoors desperately self-administering, by way of whatever meditative media we could find. The musicians who massaged our temples for us this year took more than one approach: some immersive soundscapes, some acoustic lullabies, one wild pop-punk experiment. We couldn't conquer the year's chaos on our own, and on some days it conquered us — but in our better moments, we could at least try our hardest