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Now that it is 2025, and I am doing my pop culture retrospectives again, covering film and TV from 2020 proved odd. This was the year of the COVID-19 pandemic, after all. What about music, though? People could still record albums at home, or in studios while distanced. When I do this I always look for one album that feels reflective of the year, though through the prism of what I listen to, as opposed to an overarching look. Surely, options from 2020 would be available.
I kind of like Pinegrove, and Wolf Parade apparently put an album out. They released a couple albums back in the day I really dug. When I saw this was the year Beach Bunny released Honeymoon, though, it clicked in my head what album I would be writing about. See, that was my number-two album of 2020. This was honestly a great year for music, but Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher was my top album of the year.
I listened to Punisher a ton in 2020. It is an all-killer, no-filler album. Also? I have not listened to it in years. Call it a sensibility taken from my Gen X predecessors. I don’t like when musicians I really like become too popular. Even worse when they develop a fan base with an increasing number of annoying people. I don’t feel this way about movies or TV shows, but I do about artists.
Stranger in the Alps was an album I really dug, and I spun Bridgers a ton. Punisher is an even better album. Then, Taylor Swift got in the mix and, well, now the Bridgers space is pretty banal. I steer clear. I can do that and still listen to her music. I just haven’t really. To be fair, I listen to music in that realm a lot less in general.
This is a reflection of a year, though. Oddly, this is a year where a few albums I love came out from musicians I don’t really listen to anymore. Jeff Rosenstock. Hell, Honeymoon was followed by unlistenable music from Beach Bunny. Only Waxahatchee has avoided that fate from the artists behind my top five albums of the year. She had one of the only new albums I listened to in 2024. Some artists you stick with. Others, you don’t.
