
With concerts reduced to livestreams, curating an entertaining playlist has become an increasingly important in the months since the world shut down. To help populate your playlists with new content, The A.V. Club has waded through the new music offerings of the first half of 2020 to compile 25 of our favorite tracks—many of them speaking, intentionally or not, to our current tribulations.
Before we get to the music, here were the guiding principles for creating our (unranked) list:
1. The track must be featured on an album released in 2020, and/or the track must’ve been formally released as a single in 2020.
2. When deciding between tracks with similar vibes, we opted to highlight the lesser-known artist over a marquee name. (Carly Rae Jepsen, Selena Gomez, and Jessie Ware were all unfortunate victims of their notoriety.)
3. In an effort to spread the attention around, any artist featured on our Best Albums list (also out today) was ineligible to be included on this list. Otherwise, we might have ended up with all Dua Lipa and Perfume Genius tracks.