Best London albums of 2020, from Dua Lipa to Rina Sawayama
This was the year that London fell quiet. A city that used to shake with the sound of music — whether that was from a 20,000-capacity arena, a dark space hidden beneath a railway arch, a cavernous warehouse, the cosy back room of a pub, a speaker stack on a street corner, or somewhere else entirely — was forced to turn down the volume.
But while live music has remained largely absent (despite the best efforts of the laudably resilient venue owners who have tried to host gigs amid all the restrictions and hardship) the capital has still managed to produce a wealth of albums. With no touring commitments, and a seemingly endless amount of time within which to create, the city’s artists have delivered an outpouring of incredible new music, from simmering new-age jazz and searing UK drill, to tricky electronics and all-out rock.
What makes a London album, exactly? Our criteria is pretty loose, much like the fluid definition of what makes a Londoner, but we’ve stuck to albums released by artists who were either born in the capital, or who have spent significant periods of their life here.
These albums are London, but much like the people that made them, their roots spread so much further than the city limits — and that’s what makes our city, and the music created here, so special. Here, listed in alphabetical order, are our favourite full-length releases to emerge over the past 12 months.
Beabadoobee — Fake It Flowers
The Filipino-born, London-raised songwriter Beatrice Laus is just 20, and she grabs at the pre-Britpop signifiers of Nineties indie rock – fuzzy guitar, soft, blurred vocals and the occasional leap into messy volume – with the fervency of someone for whom the sound is still exhilaratingly new on her debut album. On Worth It, the mix of energetic riffing and her sweet, fragile singing voice recall key women in early Nineties alternative music such as Tanya Donnelly of Belly, or occasional Lemonhead Juliana Hatfield. Those who know her from her early acoustic sketch Coffee will notice a return to her early bedroom pop sound on the ghostly How Was Your Day?, but elsewhere, the guitars are cranked and she sounds powerfully confident, striding forwards deeper into the past.
Beatrice Dillon — Workaround
One of the most intriguing electronic releases of the year came courtesy of Beatrice Dillon, the ever-inquisitive producer who spent formative years working at London record shops, scouring their wares and developing a sweeping sonic palette. Set to a steady beat of 150bpm, eschewing the usual pace of dance music, this album moves through hyper-modern club cuts and wonked-out abstractions, building a tapestry of rhythm and texture through various instruments: a synthesiser, a tabla, a kora, and more. It’s an album that’s both immediate and demanding of repeat listens — each time you do, more is revealed.
Che Lingo — The Worst Generation
Wandsworth rapper Che Lingo met the hype of being signed to Idris Elba’s 7Wallace label by delivering this sleekly multifaceted debut album. He unpacks his experiences as a young black man growing up in south London — prejudice, love, mental health and more — with a shape-shifting flow that feels symbolically versatile. The production is deft, and the features are astute, especially the deep rumble of Kojey Radical on one of the standout tracks, Dark Days.
Dua Lipa — Future Nostalgia
Many of her fellow pop stars panicked and stuck a tentative TBC on their upcoming album plans (*cough* Gaga *cough*) when the world shut down in spring, but Dua Lipa thankfully took the opposite approach. She pushed the release of Future Nostalgia forward by a week, ensuring that its arrival perfectly coincided with that point in lockdown when we just really needed to turn our sad kitchens into makeshift discos (OK, this decision was no doubt prompted by the fact that the record was leaked online, but we like to think it was at least partly motivated by altruism...) It’s quite cruel that we’ve largely been robbed of the chance to dance to these disco-pop bangers en masse - when the clubs finally open, Future Nostalgia will cause chaos.
Duval Timothy — Help
Help is a reverie of an album, one that often gets swept up in its ruminative piano motifs, but is occasionally pierced by hauntings of legacy and identity. On the track Alone, a blissed-out, jazzy instrumental is rocked by the vocal sample that floats above it (“Stop touching me, it makes me feel uncomfortable,” says a manipulated voice). Elsewhere, Duval — the multidisciplinary creative who splits his time between London and Freetown in Sierra Leone — delves into the history of slavery, and draws links to the oppression of modern artists by today’s music industry. It’s an album never overloaded by its themes, though — it’s a gracefully layered and often beautiful wonder.
Emmy the Great — April / æé³
While Emma-Lee Moss has received acclaim for her musings on difficult relationships and break-ups, her expert lyricism is even more alive here as she turns her gaze on herself, her home city (Hong Kong, where she lived to the age of 12 before moving to London), and the complex relationship between the two. Folk-pop storytelling weaves with a Far Eastern-influenced sound and her witty writing to create a delightful, sparkling album.
Georgia — Seeking Thrills
The daughter of Leftfield’s Neil Barnes, Georgia is effectively dance music royalty, and you can hear that heritage in the cavernous bassline of Started Out’s irresistibly energetic second half, the old-school house of The Thrill and the retrofuturistic clatter of Ray Guns. But what makes Seeking Thrills feel like a fresh start is Georgia’s new-found ear for pop melody, and her readiness to stop digitally altering her sweet singing voice. About Work The Dancefloor is a glorious rush towards a gleaming chorus, while Never Let You Go and 24 Hours, which run it close for bright euphoria, confirm Georgia as a whopping talent.
Headie One — Edna
Drill had a big year in 2020, cementing its place as the dominant force at the top of the UK rap food chain, and it was capped off by the chart-conquering release of Edna. It’s a debut album, even if it is slightly misleading to call it that — he’d already delivered a number of album-length mixtapes — but this is the Tottenham rapper’s most potently focused release to date. There are some hefty collabs (Drake, Stormzy and Skepta chief among them) but never is Headie One overshadowed. His reflections on grief, crime, and redemption are compellingly clear-eyed, punctuating a parade of sleek, hard-hitting beats across 20 tracks. It’s the sound of an artist who, after years in the music game, is only just getting started.
J Hus — Big Conspiracy
After years of pretty major ups and downs (sharing the O2 stage with Drake; prison time for knife possession) J Hus is back doing what he does best, and making fantastic work. “How you gonna run the world, you can’t even run your life?” he asks himself on Fight for Your Right. Musically, with his regular collaborator JAE5, he hops genres with confidence, from the melodic dancehall of Repeat, sung by new Jamaican star Koffee, to the spy theme bass of Helicopter and the mariachi horns and jittery strings of No Denying.
Jessie Ware — What’s Your Pleasure?
This old-school and flirtatious album provided some much-needed escapism in this mad year. There’s no melancholy or yearning here, instead we get sexual tension, hazy summer nights out and the electricity of connection. Musically, Ware’s returned to her club-culture roots, with a throwback to classic funk, dance and disco, although sizzling synths and intuitive production pull the songs into this decade and her voice is stronger than ever.
Lianne La Havas — Lianne La Havas
Released in the summer, Lianne La Havas’s self-titled third album was a delicious antidote to the chaos of this year. From the opening bars of its front song, Bittersweet, it was full of songs that sounded like opening the window to a summer day, closing your eyes and enjoying the breeze. It was the perfect soundtrack to chilling at home (just not while working from home - it deserves full attention) and will surely make for some divine live music when gigs are back on the cards.
Moses Boyd — Dark Matter
When the BBC first broadcast Jazz 625 in the early Sixties — featuring performances from the likes of John Dankworth and Tubby Hayes — it documented a boom in UK jazz. Earlier this year, the channel resurrected the programme and dedicated it to the fizzing, multifarious scene that has emerged over the past few years. It was presented by saxophonist Nubya Garcia (more on her below) and Moses Boyd, both flag-bearers of the new cohort. Catford’s Boyd, an exquisitely measured presence behind the drums, highlighted with brilliant skill much of what makes the British crowd so exciting on his debut album — it flowed like water around the rocks of genre, a confluence of traditional jazz, Afrobeat, house, UK garage and so much more. An emblematic triumph of a scene that surely has so much left to give.
Nubya Garcia — Source
The album name here could be taken in a number of ways. It could be in a literal, biological sense — the title of the track Before Us: In Demerara & Caura recalls ancestral roots, name-checking the regions of Guyana and Trinidad from which Garcia’s parents came. Or it could be a reference to the various musical strands that thread through the music, drawing in jazz, dub reggae, cumbia and more. For sure, the Camden-bred saxophonist knows where her sound comes from, but this isn’t just an ode: she pushes it into new places here. Source is a spellbinding, unhurried adventure, sprawling across a dizzying hour of sound, at times meditative and at other boisterously exultant, but always excellent.
Rina Sawayama — SAWAYAMA
This debut is a throwback to the Noughties, but is in equal parts nostalgic and futuristic. Family and identity are stand-out themes (Sawayama was born in Japan but raised in north London). On STFU! she revisits racist micro-aggressions she has experienced and tells those “expecting fantasies” about her to, well, you guessed it. But this is also serves as a sweet love letter to London’s queer community, her chosen family. A riveting, electrifyingly eclectic success.
Tiña — Positive Mental Health Music
Anything that comes out of Speedy Wunderground, the label around which a whole scene of new guitar music seems to revolve, is carried on a wave of expectation. It’s no surprise, then, that the label’s first ever full-length album release came with high hopes. The debut from south London band Tiña isn’t quite as boundary-pushing as other Speedy releases, but instead embraces its superbly languorous psych-rock sound. Frontman Joshua Loftin wrote the lyrics to work through a mental breakdown — the result is an album that captures all the grimness and absurdities of such a situation, nonchalantly moving from lyrics about suicide, to tension-relieving humour and open-hearted compassion.
