The 20 Best Hip-Hop Albums of 2020

In 2020, few genres were more representative of a plethora of perspectives: from Bad Bunny’s thrilling reggaeton tributes to Burna Boy’s Nigerian dispatches to Lil Uzi Vert’s S.O.S. messages from the far reaches of the galaxy. Likely spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic, we were graced by a surge of late-year surprises: 21 Savage & Metro Boomin and the Daveed Diggs-fronted trio Clipping took their October release dates to heart and embraced a horror influence, and preeminent sadboi Kid Cudi dropped a long-anticipated sequel in the 11th hour. (Still waiting on you, Playboi Carti.)

This was also the year the music category that has long excluded and diminished women started to finally feel a little more egalitarian, with new feminist icons like Megan Thee Stallion and Rico Nasty rightly gaining recognition as some of the most commanding MCs working in the genre. As hip-hop’s capacity for expression from all corners widens, its popularity and proliferation only intensifies. Funny, how that works. Charles Lyons-Burt

Aminé, Limbo

On the intro to his 2018 mixtape, Onepointfive, Aminé demonstrated his talent for verbose, declaratory scene-setting. The opening track of the Portland-based rapper’s second studio album, Limbo, likewise sets the stage with a chopped soul sample-driven beat and telling references to hip-hop’s past (Jay-Z) and future (Rico Nasty), while unfurling some of the moral concerns plaguing his thoughts. By the album’s halfway point, though, it’s clear that this isn’t just another throwback, as Aminé’s full-bodied beats, vintage soul samples, and clever rhymes set him up as a deserving carrier of Kanye West’s torch. In melding traditional hip-hop form with just the right amount of modern trap verve, Limbo makes the case for Aminé, if not as the next great rapper, then as a pop-rap workhorse. The album proves that he can keep pace with his contemporaries while drawing on the history of the genre in ways many of today’s innovators are unconcerned with engaging. Lyons-Burt

Bad Bunny, YHLQMDLG

With his inclination for pairing heartbroken lyrics with fiery dembow beats, Bad Bunny has finetuned the art of crying in the club. On his second solo album, YHLQMDLG, the Puerto Rican reggaeton star offers dance floor-ready sentimentality that feels familiar, but he breaks out of his reliable formula with the most blistering production of his career to date, courtesy of Tainy and Subelo NEO. The viral “Safaera” is the best example of this audacious streak: Over an episodic five minutes, the track pivots between eight exhilarating beat changes, simulating the head-spinning pyrotechnics of a DJ club mix. With collaborations from today’s hottest Latin-trap heavyweights and legendary reggaetoneros like Daddy Yankee, the album solidifies Bad Bunny’s rightful place in the Urbano canon. Sophia Ordaz

Boldy James and the Alchemist, The Price of Tea in China

The Price of Tea in China is Detroit rapper Boldy James’s third studio album and his third collaboration with production polymath the Alchemist. In detailing the coldblooded environment of the inner city, Boldy’s sedate baritone at times comes off as unbothered and at others as completely in control. The Alchemist’s minimalism and ear for subtle melody bestow these songs with the air of a heist movie, like on “Pinto,” where a longing string sample makes Boldy’s recollections of moving drugs seem like mythology. On “Surf and Turf,” Boldy proves his skill as a storyteller and wordsmith, disclosing what it’s like to deal drugs while having a son to care for and spewing impressive verses laden with both internal and end rhymes: “Drunk in a Porsche, trunk full of corpse/Dump with the torch, run for the Ford, love for my daughter/Son was the fourth, youngin’ on the run with a warrant/Mother-fuck a judge and the courts, club full of dorks.” Ordaz

Clipping, Visions of Bodies Being Burned

Clipping’s fourth studio album, Visions of Bodies Being Burned, is an aural assault. The experimental horrorcore trio is schooled in the dynamic shading of scary movies. Unidentified banging, thumping, and thundering noises break stretches of silence throughout the album, creating an unsettling percussion to match the frantic rhythm of Clipping’s beats. Cam & China’s “This bitch boss” refrain on “‘96 Neve Campbell” drips with the impetuous attitude of a Ruby Rose or Bree Runway, but William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes’s sparing industrial production grants them an infernal air. Throughout, Daveed Diggs’s dramatic, almost spoken-word delivery takes dominion over these riveting, unforgiving instrumentals. Ordaz

Gunna, Wunna

Gunna’s sophomore effort, Wunna, was conceived and partly recorded in Montego Bay, a model that recalls the recording process of Kanye West’s 2010 opus My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Travis Scott’s recent Astroworld, the latter of which features vocals from Gunna. Perhaps the rapper’s approach is a nod to Travis, and by extension Yeezy, but more likely, he was attempting to summon the artistic energies that made both of those albums so successful. What he achieves is something closer to Scott’s crowd-pleaser than the untouchable grandeur of West’s album, but Wunna occasionally manages strokes of ingenuity. Like that of his mentor and executive producer Young Thug, Gunna’s approach to verse marries intricate wordplay and melodic rhyming. He offers one of the smoothest flows in rap, so slur-y and easygoing it approaches R&B yet still retains the clipped poetry of hip-hop. Lyons-Burt

Junglepussy, Jp4

A sorely underrated treasure of underground NYC rap for the better part of a decade, Junglepussy, a.k.a. Shayna McHale, further deepens her catalog of startlingly consistent anthems of self-pride with Jp4. McHale’s latest easily takes the cake for the funniest rap album of the year, as she strings together vivid imagery with wry observations from a perch of satisfaction (“This reminds me of the time I realized I’m that bitch/It was a beautiful day birds was chirpin’ and shit,” she reminisces on “Out My Window”). She also finds time in the album’s expeditious 28 minutes to take stock of her vulnerabilities, like her admittance on “Arugula” that “sometimes I give into sadness, sometimes I go to sleep.” No matter the level of confidence evinced, though, Jp4 boasts a bottomless supply of hilarious vocabulary and truth bombs, ingeniously deployed in McHale’s skeptical deadpan. Lyons-Burt

Key Glock, Yellow Tape

Key Glock bookends Yellow Tape, his fifth mixtape, with two tracks that dig a little bit into his personal life and family—with particular reverence for the grandmother who raised him. But they’re unrepresentative of a tape that’s entirely a pose. Still, if you’re going to spend 45 minutes with ruthless tough talk, do so with “Mr. Glock.” The Memphis-based rapper nods to fellow Tennesseans Three 6 Mafia more than once, though his style has more in common with West Coast hip-hop than the postmodern inventiveness we’ve come to expect from the Southern variety. He enunciates words emphatically and raps on the beat rather than supplanting it with strange flows or sing-song dalliances (he also interpolates California mainstays Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg on “Dough”). On Yellow Tape, the well-crafted array of menacing beats—which include plaintive guitars and liquefied horns—go down easy, and Glock’s baritone makes a lasting impression as he twists nursery rhymes and lodges lots of animal puns. There will be time for reflection later; for now, Yellow Tape’s infatuation with shiny surfaces and its author’s alpha status is enough to satisfy in this preternaturally assured 22-year-old’s hands. Lyons-Burt

Kid Cudi, Man on the Moon III: The Chosen

An improvement on the middling Passion, Pain & Demon Slayin’ and the misguided Speedin’ Bullet to Heaven, the third installment of Kid Cudi’s cult-favorite saga sees the emo rap auteur updating his sound—hums and talk-singing abound—with frequent ad-libs and maximalist psychedelic trap production that recalls Travis Scott’s Astroworld. The resurrection of Mr. Rager, Cudi’s jaded, drug-addled alter ego, brings about ambivalent emotional outcomes; often, it’s impossible to discern whether or not Cudi enjoys or abhors the drugged-out haze. On “Tequila Shots,” dazzling synths underpin his brutally self-aware observations: “See, it seems I’ll never learn/I won’t stop ’til I crash and burn/Tell my mom I’m sorry.” Elsewhere, on “The Void,” he sounds triumphant as he sings about the inevitability of falling into an emotional abyss. As always, Cudi’s exploration of altered states is loyal to their volatility. From one moment to the next, epiphanies give way to self-delusion. Ordaz

Lil Baby, My Turn

Lil Baby’s flow is a heat-seeking missile, single-minded and powerful, and it could be construed as monotonous if the material on his second album, My Turn, wasn’t so rich and his performances so magnetic. The rapper, a.k.a. Dominique Jones, spends the album locked in the present, acting like he indeed has “something to prove,” delivering tight, diamond-cut verses that are, to his benefit, more worked out than that of his trap peers. Some of these cronies (Gunna, Lil Uzi Vert, Young Thug) appear alongside him, but never extraneously. It helps that the album is equipped with punchy, top-shelf beats, insistent snares, and crystalline edges. In terms of subject matter, My Turn is Jones’s most romance- and family-focused effort to date, though the pull of intoxicants and sparkling jewelry is never too far off. Leave it to Lil Baby to make a gargantuan, blockbuster hip-hop album still feel like the work of an underdog. Lyons-Burt

Lil Uzi Vert, Eternal Atake (Deluxe Edition)

While other rappers made albums, mixtapes, or loose collections of songs that were barely an excuse for either, Lil Uzi Vert fashioned a self-contained world with Eternal Atake. A suis generis, nearly two-hour double album, its first volume is a tonally uniform concept album about Uzi’s abduction from Earth by aliens. Its second edition, released one week later under the name Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World 2, is a spilling over of the material that didn’t make it onto the first cut, that while more incongruous, contains some of the most lively material on either part (“Moon Relate” being a deeply strange highlight). Taken all together, Eternal Atake’s saturation of cultural references, endless interpolations of other songs (including Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back”), and transportive, Day-Glo aesthetics congeal into something like an Afrofuturist statement piece. Not all of it works, but one is hard pressed to identify a more purely enjoyable and imaginative space in hip-hop this year than Uzi’s croaking, wailing chipmunk trap. Lyons-Burt

Lil Wayne, Funeral

Only a year and a half after an album that took the better portion of a decade to make good on its announced release, Lil Wayne’s Funeral arrived with little to no fanfare, casually staking its claim as one of the rapper’s best. Lower expectations could have something to do with it, as the return to form represented by 2018’s Tha Carter V was accompanied by a lot of handwringing. Funeral makes the case that Wayne doesn’t need that gestation period—just producers who can meet him on his level and inspire the kind of dazzlingly dizzy flows that once made his “best rapper alive” claims more than credible. The success of Mannie Fresh’s contribution is less throwback than understated innovation: Co-produced with Sarcastic Beats, “Mahogony” fuses together the smooth, New Orleans bounce of Wayne’s early sound with the rat-a-tat delivery of Weezy’s watershed “A Milli.” The early twofer of “Mahogany” and the squelching, PC Music-worthy “Mama Mia” may represent the album’s peak, but the 24-track Funeral is a party that never flatlines. Sam C. Mac

Megan Thee Stallion, Good News

Megan Thee Stallion’s debut, Good News, is a high-octane, heavy-hitting rejoinder that rearticulates the headlines of a year fraught by global and personal trauma for the Houston rapper. Within her framework, sexual prowess is the means of production and intercourse more often than not zeroes out to economic influence over a man. But Megan doesn’t break a sweat over earning her own coin, as she puts it on “Movie”: “I’m a boss, I could buy the same thing my man bought.” She isn’t flexing about getting money from men, but about the thrill of having that power over them. She’s a bundle of apparent contradictions throughout: an advocate for black women and a sex-positive vamp, a college student and a chart-topping rapper. Sadly, women in hip-hop are subject to small-minded efforts that would limit and categorize them as either serious MCs or “strippers turned rappers.” With Good News, Megan says to hell with all the scrutiny and authors her own narrative. Ordaz

Mac Miller, Circles

At the time of his accidental overdose in late 2018, Mac Miller was well into recording Circles, the intended companion album to that year’s Swimming. Producer Jon Brion saw the album to completion, ensuring that it would become a completed work unto itself. Circles finds Miller trudging through the emotions of missing an ex, falling into old vices, and fighting for self-acceptance, but at its center is an undying faith in the value of perseverance. Throughout, he slips into an effortless half-crooned, half-spoken rasp as Brion’s subtle arrangements of synths, strings, and muted guitars evoke the peculiar wistfulness of his score for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. On the title track, Miller is resolute, offering a piece of sage advice for his listeners as much as for himself: “Well, I drink my whiskey, and you sip your wine/We’re doing well, sittin’, watchin’ the world fallin’ down, its decline…Don’t you put any more stress on yourself, it’s one day at a time.” Ordaz

NLE Choppa, Top Shotta

In a post-Future, post-post-Drake world, melodic singing goes hand in hand with spitting bars, and NLE Choppa, perhaps the freshest new voice to arrive on the scene this year, can do both seamlessly. His staccato, motormouth verses give way to gliding croons characterized by drawn-out vowels, and you never quite know which mode he’s going to inhabit. This is because his signature approach, showcased in three separate “Shotta Flow” songs on his debut album, unfurls in the form of one long, distended verse, a chaotic maelstrom of gangland fantasies and sexual braggadocio with no room for a breath, much less a chorus. In these verses, not only does Choppa rap so furiously and quickly it can be tough to keep up, he ad-libs after or during almost every line, talking over himself and coloring in his thoughts with bursting, illustrative emotion. To counterbalance the galvanizing energy of its first half, the back half of Top Shotta is filled out with the kind of balladry that dominated his other 2020 project, From Dark to Light. On every song he’s self-aware and impassioned, performing like his life depends on it, a loose cannon trailed by piercing bass. Lyons-Burt

Rico Nasty, Nightmare Vacation

Rico Nasty has built a career on exorcising her anger. Over just five short years, the intensity of her music has built from the sugar-trap taunts of “iCarly” and “Hey Arnold” to the seething attacks of “Countin’ Up” and “Smack a Bitch.” Rico’s debut LP, Nightmare Vacation, merges the aggression of both rap and punk, but it also finds Rico venturing into the shocking sweetness of hyperpop and unapologetic sensuality. When the 23-year-old sneers “Rico, talk your shit, bitch!” on “STFU,” it’s evident that the urge to gas herself up isn’t egomania but self-love. She embodies self-acceptance on “Own It,” a slinky dance track that recalls the EDM infusions of Vince Staples’s Big Fish Theory. Songs like these diverge from her mosh-pit anthems, suggesting that self-adulation can be just as therapeutic as unleashing rage, showing off Rico’s artistic range in the process. Ordaz

Run the Jewels, RTJ4

With their fourth album, Run the Jewels achieves a synergy and cohesion that heightens the moral clarity of their work as it fiercely meets the chaos of our current moment. Addressing racist social structures and the exploitative nature of late capitalism on “Walking in the Snow,” Killer Mike raps, “All of us serve the same masters, all of us nothin’ but slaves.” What does a nation owe its citizens, and what does it say about America that the bulk of what we’re provided by our power structures is either the warehousing of bodies in schools and prisons or their destruction? On RTJ4, Killer Mike and El-P pose such thorny questions, advancing the thesis that the nature of modern life is inherently carceral. Structurally inventive, lyrically deft, passionate and heartbroken, the album positions Run the Jewels as the laureates of our collapsing era. Seth Wilson

Spillage Village, Spilligion

For two months, Spillage Village, the hip-hop collective composed of Earthgang. J.I.D, Mereba, 6lack, Jurdan Bryant, Hollywood JB, and Benji, holed up in J.I.D’s West Atlanta house to record their major label debut. Drugs, sex, and God are among the album’s main thematic threads, uniting the members in artistic and spiritual communion. On “Baptize,” the collective overlays condemnations of police brutality and depictions of street life with religious imagery. J.I.D offers some particularly clever bars, transporting listeners from staring down the barrel to sitting in the pews of a Southern Baptist church, all in one breath: “Case and point the pistol at yo’ neighbor/Look at yo’ neighbor and say ‘neighbor.’” On the album’s more melodic cuts, the vocal talents of Mereba act as the group’s guiding force, a north star for hip-hop anecdotes in the Southern storytelling tradition of OutKast. Ordaz

21 Savage and Metro Boomin, Savage Mode II

21 Savage is often the stabilizing force of Savage Mode II. As he frequently reminds us, the 27-year-old Atlanta MC has a real claim to legitimacy in his gangsta raps. “I grew up ‘round drugs, sex, and violence,” he tosses off on “Slidin.” 21’s dark, foreboding presence and tone are borne of an early acceptance of death’s omnipresence and randomness; he lays down spiky bars with a sneering swagger but also a pointed humbleness. It’s Metro Boomin, though, who elevates 21’s stories to something approaching greatness. He has a finesse for texture and atmosphere, employing the sound of a scratchy vinyl on “Runnin” and “Said N Done,” a static-y beat on “RIP Luv,” and the solemn piano riffs that were the driving instrument on the more minimalist Savage Mode. This sequel is a ratification of “bigger and better,” an example of steady improvement through impeccable craft. Lyons-Burt

YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Still Flexin, Still Steppin

It was tough to decide which of Baton Rouge native YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s four 2020 projects (not counting a full-length collaboration with Rich the Kid) to select for this list, but Still Flexin, Still Steppin is the most succinct distillation of the fatalistic troubadour’s emotionally grandiose yet hard-edged style. Backed by the undulating violins of “RIP Phat” or the frothy, spacious keys of “Fine by Time” and “Bat Man,” YoungBoy is as adept at maintaining a transfixing momentum as he is at opening up about his clearly intense inner turmoil. He has a lot of feeling and pain (a word he returns to frequently) to expunge, and his excavations of troubled mental health are only approachable because he couches them between melodic moans and groans and severe blows of aggression. For all the swagger that the album’s title and spirit of conviction suggests, the implication here is that YoungBoy is still flexing and stepping despite nursing a broken soul. His pleas sound like he’s atoning for his sins at the same time he’s committing them. Lyons-Burt

Young Nudy, Anyways

Young Nudy’s Anyways features 16 excellent diaristic street tales and, true to the album’s title, casually tangential narratives about the road to modest success. Nudy’s verses are denser than they’ve ever been, and they’re delivered with lightning speed that nonetheless seems tossed off and effortless. In his braying, soft-spoken cadence, Nudy makes violent imagery and chest-puffing sound downright affable and sweet, and his low-key approach is matched by the production, mostly handled by the otherwise untested upstarts COUPE and 20Rocket. Their water-logged, Zaytoven-influenced beats sound sad and forlorn, with prominent keys and synths that mimic an organ (“Deeper Than Rap”) or, delightfully, bagpipes (“Marathon”), but they’re ultimately deferent to Nudy’s stream-of-consciousness musings. Lyons-Burt