In the latest installment of our year-end podcast coverage, we’re talking about 2020’s best rock and rap albums. Pitchfork Editor Puja Patel is joined by News Editor Evan Minsker, Contributing Editor Jayson Greene, and Staff Writers Alphonse Pierre and Madison Bloom, who argue in favor of their personal favorites, from Yves Tumor and U.S. Girls to Westside Gunn and Jay Electronica. They also get into some broader discussions about the state of the genres more generally, including: Which old heads or new kids ruled rap in 2020? And what does “rock” even mean these days?
Listen to this week’s episode below, and subscribe to The Pitchfork Review for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also check out an excerpt of the podcast’s transcript below. Listen to our “Great Year-End Songs Debate” episode here, or look back on last year’s rock and hip-hop genre lists. Vote for your own favorite albums in our readers’ poll, and keep your eyes peeled for upcoming 2020 year-end lists and coverage.
Evan Minsker: The album that I’ve had the most fun listening to the most consistently throughout the year came out in January. It’s the debut album by a London-based band called Chubby and the Gang. This album came out on Static Shock Records in the UK. It’s called Speed Kills.
It is an incredibly fun record—really heavy, burly, fast, aggressive, fun punk music. It’s also performed clearly in this fully committed caricature: Chubby and the Gang perform as though they are a very literal gang. So all of the songs are about being in a gang. According to all these songs, they are just running around, stealing cars, jumping the turnstiles, beating up the haters, getting locked up for like five to ten years at a time, and then coming out and doing it all again.
For me, that’s what the charm of this band is. It’s really aggressive music, but it’s also very happy music. It’s cheerfully scummy, I guess.
Puja Patel: It does feel cheery.
EM: The other thing I love about this band is that rock’n’roll has this great, long, storied history of bands deciding, “Hey, we’re going to write our own theme song.” The Monkees have a theme song, Devo have a theme song, etc. And Chubby and the Gang, on this album, have two theme songs. There’s the first one called, “Chubby and The Gang Rule OK?” And the second one is called, “The Rise and Fall of the Gang.”
PP: They’ve already fallen? In their theme song?
EM: Well, honestly, the second song is a tragedy. Because the first song is basically saying, like, “We ain’t done, we’re on the run/Chaos is the reason that we’re having fun.” And then the second one, “The Rise and Fall,” is like what would really happen: where they’re like, we’re really hungry all the time, and that’s why we steal, and now we’re in jail. But we’ve got to keep doing it because we don’t have opportunity. So it’s like the grim reality of what it means to have to steal in order to eat. It’s very Les Misérables or something like that, but on this album of very fun punk songs.
PP: Madison, what is your version of Speed Kills?
Madison Bloom: Evan and I have both picked—not similar, they don’t sound the same—but we both chose records that are very fun and supplied a lot of joy for us. Mine is Jeff Rosenstock’s new record NO DREAM.
Jeff Rosenstock is someone that I was not always super into. I’m not a huge pop punk person. But something about this record completely caught my attention. It’s just super fun, very immediate, approachable. This is a very fast record, but it’s also incredibly melodic. So it’s not quite as heavy as a metal album.
But the thing that I find most enjoyable about Jeff Rosenstock’s music is that he’s a very earnest and sincere songwriter, but he’s not without humor. One of my favorite songs on the record is a track called “***BNB.” He’s really just singing about how someone is renting out their daughter’s apartment on Airbnb without telling their daughter, which is a very specific, strange thing to sing about, in my opinion. But it’s one of my favorite songs because he has these hilarious lines in it. One of my qualifications for what is good rock music at this level is like, are there lyrics that you’re just shouting along to and shaking your fists along with? This is for all you New Yorkers who probably know what this means, but he says, “Massage place in the building, we know what’s the fuckin’ deal.” And I shout it every time I hear it.
I think that one of the great things about heavier rock music is you’re not always going to it for some, like, deep introspective moment. It’s like sometimes you know, it’s just a massage place that’s a little sketchy and that’s all it is. I’m not writing volumes of notes about what that means—I know what it means.
