Perhaps, earlier this month, when the world and their highly Instagrammable dog were sharing their Spotify Wrapped stats, you quietly kept yours under wraps. Maybe the algorithm failed to serve up any songs from after the turn of the century. (Surely not the turn of the century before that?) Or possibly it listed “chamber psych” as your third-most-listened-to genre and you had to consult Google to find out what exactly that meant. This is what we’ve listened to and loved, best played like our favourite camp-collar shirts: loud. (Or like our buttery leather jackets: soft.)

In an era when Twitter can tell us what most pop stars have had for breakfast, this enigmatic outfit loosely linked (we think) to Mercury Prize-winner Mr Michael Kiwanuka released not one, but two albums that deftly caught the spirit of 2020 in real time. Soulful and joyous yet brooding and remorseful, and seemingly written on the hoof, the perfect soundtrack to an imperfect year. 

Opening an album with a Radiohead cover is a bold move; moulding it into something you might hear on Stranger Things is next level. With her sophomore collection of bright techno ballads and bangers, Ms Kelly Lee Owens steps out from behind the mixing desk and brings her ethereal voice, not to mention that of fellow Welsh musician Mr John Cale, to the fore.

Sitting somewhere between a gospel-house anthem stretched out over 43 minutes and the soundtrack to the Christmas movie that Mr David Lynch never made, Mr Drew Daniel’s masterwork is a cathartic release of the cynical and sinister turned into a warm bath of joy. 

The many influences of this Detroit house legend are there to see – the funk of Mr George Clinton, soulful harmonies of Ms Erykah Badu and beats of J Dilla, not to mention a reoccurring sample of Mr Al Green. But, as the album’s artwork suggests, this is very much about the many facets of Mr Kenny Dixon Jr, at possibly his most exposed.

Recorded at home in Venice Beach, it’s as if Ms Fiona Apple banged on walls, stomped on floors and used her dead dog’s bones for percussion to get Fetch The Bolt Cutters out into the world. Raw and freewheeling, rattling with echoes of Mr Bob Dylan and Ms Joni Mitchell, Ms Apple’s fifth record is a beautifully messy thing. (And the dead dog bones bit is a true story, btw.) 

Mr Michael Hadreas rips up the rulebook on bedsit songwriting (and gets ripped in the process) with a fifth album that takes his fragile queer pop into powerful new territory. Blue-chip musicians, guys usually in the booth with Mr Bruce Springsteen and Sir Elton John, add muscle, while Perfume Genius himself cuts an idiosyncratic path through musical styles.

A record of dancefloor fillers for the year that the clubs stayed shut. Typically, Ms Róisín Murphy aims for the head as well as the heart and the feet with her cerebral disco belters. This is indeed a simulation, albeit a very ballsy one, which we guess is, as she puts it, “Murphy’s Law”.

Not that Killer Mike and El-P have ever been stuck for words, but 2020 came with added urgency and no end of talking points. “Walking In The Snow” rightly became the unofficial anthem of the Black Lives Matter protests, but it wasn’t just on the streets that progress was being fought for – every Run The Jewels release gets that bit better. 

A decade in the making, if in the end “recorded over 40 days and 40 nights”, Jay Electronica’s studio debut is an album that actually lives up to its mythical status. It also came with the bombastic endorsement of – and something of a passing of the baton from – the rapper’s boss, Jay-Z, with Mr Travis Scott, Mr James Blake and Khruangbin also enlisted. 

Ms Laura Marling’s work has hardly lacked for introspection. But perhaps her current course of study – she’s doing a masters in psychoanalysis – has helped inform Songs For Our Daughter, an album dedicated to a fictional child. The unusual conceit bears fruit in rich fashion, with lavish, glorious melodies underpinning Ms Marling’s provocative thesis on what it is to be a woman. 

A reliably lo-fi, homemade Detroit house record from the man who began his career as a side-hustle while manning the Ford assembly line. Raw, but heartfelt, with minimal beats for sweaty warehouses.

The recent, radical reinvention of country music finds fresh voice in Mr Orville Peck, a masked singer channelling the ghost of Mr Roy Orbison while taking the genre into uncharted, queer territory. Lead track Legends Never Die, with country icon Ms Shania Twain, shows Mr Peck’s ambition while the album as a whole strengthens his case for being the next big, unexpected thing in country. 

Not content with releasing the best pop record of the year – an exacting, 11-track fusion of disco and contemporary pop – Ms Dua Lipa followed it up with this club version, remixed by The Blessed Madonna. With guest appearances from Madonna and Ms Missy Elliott, Club Future Nostalgia cemented Ms Lipa’s position at the top of the pop hierarchy and gave us a reason to go out again, when we can. 

Those previously resistant to Ms Taylor Swift’s considerable pop charms may have been drawn to her latest, Folklore, for its collaborators (including Mr Bon Iver and The National’s Mr Aaron Dessner). But once in, it is impossible not to be won over. Grounded in 1990s college radio and delicate rock, Folklore spins tales of love and loss and women like her with the all the craft of a short-story maestro.

If real life 2020 wasn’t weird enough for you, escape down the rabbit hole with Snoopy. This eight-track opus from Melbourne based duo CS + Kreme, aka Messrs Conrad Standish and Sam Karmel, blends songs and instrumentals, while morphing from chamber pop to psychedelia and spiritual jazz. An exit hatch from reality, Snoopy was a trip we wanted to take it over and over again in 2020.