Save There are certainly existential questions to ask about The Album in an era where the platforms-that-be are trying to steer the direction of music towards fragments of songs. But if this list is any indication, it remains as vital a form as ever. Here are the best albums of the 2020s so far. You’ll find high-BPM dance music, hypnotic ambient jazz, new-gen indie rock, daring rage rap, and maybe, just maybe, that album that scored a Perfect 10. –Mano Sundaresan Jazz Monroe Every story about Diamond Jubilee should begin with “There was a time….” The sprawling, eternal, double-album is a period piece that allows us to look back at what it was like to look forward. Enchantment and disenchantment work together to conjure this singular sugar-sweet unease unlike anything else in music released in the last handful of years. “Dreams of you/Visions of doom,” sings Patrick Flegel in their brittle falsetto, capping off their years-long Cindy Lee project with the clearest songwriting and sharpest melodies of their long career as a musician. Inside the spell of Diamond Jubilee’s ’60s psychedelic chanson garage-pop there is unbridled romance and hope, yet to consider its obstinately antiquated and luddite qualities in the stark reality of the 2020s is to feel total hopelessness. Part of the album’s lore is that it’s only available to stream on YouTube and download on a Geocities page, but still not available on streaming services or physically. It’s not that all good things should be slightly unattainable, but, specifically, Diamond Jubilee should be slightly unattainable. You can spend your entire life trying to put your arms around what makes a pop song good, but you always have to leave room for the unknowable holy spirit that runs through it—that which is slightly unattainable. It’s a perfect little overtone for the magic Diamond Jubilee. Just put this record on any way you want and Cindy Lee will appear as a mirage—wearing a fabulous beehive wig and red sequin dress, singing through spring reverb playing a Telecaster plugged into a little overdriven Fender Champ. She’s here for an unforgettable moment, briefly and simply, and then maybe never again. –Jeremy D. Larson AWGE / Interscope