Ten Albums That Have Kept Me Going During The Pandemic, Part One

A predictable and awkwardly self-aware yet hopefully entertaining review of the music that defined the more manic half of this year for many (March-August)

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This past year has sucked.

Obviously we all know it, so I won’t waste any time introducing this fucked up year any further. We’ve all had a shit time in different ways, and there’s no use adding to the shit, so here instead is a list of releases which have made the shit smell a little less, for me at least. Here we go:

Album Number One: FUTURE NOSTALGIA by DUA LIPA

This record, preceded by the extremely danceable and briefly club-ruling single “Don’t Start Now,” came as a truly needed gift in the first month of lockdown. Around the start of the pandemic, many of us were feeling the need to escape the unfamiliar terror (also we all still thought we could disco our way through “six weeks of inconvenience”, EL OH EL), and this disco revival-initiating mega-banger of an album was just what we all needed. It was the first of a number of direct panders to the gays that came out in 2020, and we were fully here for every imaginary club-thumping moment, even in the absence of any “good pipe in the moonlight.”

Best track: “Levitating”, hands down. What an expertly produced lowkey disco banger. Anyone who rode in a car with me this year (so basically no one?) has seen me scream “I’m feelin’ so electric, DAAANCE my AAAASSSS off” in an exaggerated English accent at LEAST fifty times.

Album Number Two: SAWAYAMA by RINA SAWAYAMA

This one came at just the right time, too. Around April, it was becoming ever clearer that this ordeal was not going to end in May or June. Moreover, the revelation that Lady Gaga was pushing the Chromatica release date back was quite the morale hit for The Gays. So when this absolute…explosion of an album came onto the scene in mid-April, we rejoiced. Every song is completely unique — each one a complete vindication of the oft-reviled though still nascent early 2000s revival. “XS” gave us riches where only isolation remained. “Dynasty” gave us ambition where hopelessness reigned. “Comme Des Garcons” gave us confidence (with a slight French accent) where doubt prevailed. The darker songs on the album took a little longer to sink in, but once the fall came around, our psyches had all been sufficiently shredded, and our relationships had been destroyed, songs such as “Fuck This World I’m Leaving,” “Bad Friend,” and “Akasaka Sad” were relatable and comforting — for me, at least, they were reminders that my eye-twitching spirals of despair and hopelessness were not unique.

Best track: “Tokyo Love Hotel”. Though it probably was the song I could personally relate to the least, for obvious reasons, this song became extra-significant during 2020’s racial reckoning. Many of Sawayama’s fans were likely blind to the pervasiveness of phenomena such as cultural appropriation and orientalism prior to May or June, and “Tokyo Love Hotel” perfectly describes Sawayama’s intense frustration at the mass-commodification and appropriation of her hometown’s deep culture and roots. This is a poignant and beautiful song from an underrepresented viewpoint — the simultaneous frustration and adoration in Sawayama’s voice are literally palpable.

Album Number Three: HOW I’M FEELING NOW by CHARLI XCX

The first full quarantine album. Very on brand for Charli, the perpetual vanguard, to do something like that before anyone else. I wrote a review when the album first came out (please check it out) summarizing my thoughts track-by-track, but dancing naked in my backyard to this was the closest I came to attending a rave this summer. I love this album because it was the first piece of music I heard — from one of my favorite artists in the world, no less — that was actually relatable in the moment. It was completely of our weird new world, not an artifact of some long-forgotten past that also somehow existed right in our immediate memories. “Delicate” was very relatable as friendships and personal boundaries changed in unexpected ways. “Enemy” was an emblem of the flattening effect of the pandemic — for many, acquaintances and even “enemies” were suddenly more reachable than our closest friends at times, and none of us really knew why. And of course, “anthems” brought me right back to Charli’s concert in October 2019 at Terminal 5. “I want anthems! Bright lights! My friends! New York!” Same, gorl…same.

Best track: “7 years”. I actually didn’t like this track at first, but after listening to it over and over again, I can recognize both the impeccability of the production and the message. The celebration of the “seven year” mark of a friendship or a relationship (after which a friendship or romantic relationship is solidified for life), though not the only intended message on Charli’s ode to her relationship, could not have been more relatable to me as I reunited with my old and also suddenly home-moored protracted adolescent friends in the humid summer air.

Album Number Four: ……..CHROMATICA by LADY GAGA

Look, I’d like to believe my white ass listened exclusively to the myriad of anti-racist and anti-capitalist albums I discovered during the historic and revolutionary month of June 2020. I listened to a ton of Vince Staples, for example, and without Spotify to check my performative allyship, I would proudly declare that I expanded my mind through his *EXPERTLY PRODUCED, GENUINELY MIND-BLOWINGLY SKILLED DISCOGRAPHY* (holy fuck I love Vince Staples so much, and props to SOPHIE for some expert production) every moment of this summer.

Unfortunately — and unsurprisingly to anyone but me — that was not the case. Without even realizing, I made a pure mockery of myself and listened to Chromatica more than anything else this entire year.

And why? Because no one invades ears like Lady Gaga. Some of the songs were kind of awful to listen to, to be fair, but the bangers like “Alice”, “Replay”, “Rain on Me”, and “Babylon” are already gay classics. I wanted to personally punch every Fire Island-bound gay this summer, but in my mind I was right there with them because holy FUCK was this album full of bangers. I literally feel like I’m on cocaine just listening in my bedroom. Props to Gaga for listening to her fans and returning to what she does best — pure, glossy, electropop-inspired gay anthems.

Best track: “911”. Most of this album was glitz and glam galore, but sort of a safe bet. But “911” is…WEIRD. I had truly no idea what was entering my ears when I first listened to it, but wow. This summer was probably the period of time in my life that I consumed the largest quantity of emergency benzodiazepines, and the distorted, nearly atonal yet still thumping nature of this gift from above/panic attack anthem could not have applied more to the dazed, confused, and totally panicked state I and so many others inhabited for much of the summer.

Album Number Five: HO, WHY IS YOU HERE? by FLO MILLI

Okay, yeah. I first discovered Flo Milli on TikTok. Almost as soon as I heard it, “Beef FloMix” was the anthem to my summer, and I gleefully joined the legions of eager white people in their teens and twenties thoroughly embarrassing themselves by declaring that they were on their “Flo Milli Shit.”

And then, by some miracle, the whole album dropped and ruined/made my life less than two days later.

It is perfect. The production is simple yet skewering, her flow is impeccable, and her confidence is so overpowering that I nearly experienced full ego death/had childhood bullying flashbacks listening to “In The Party” and “19” for the first time. It was the single most satisfying listen of the year for me, and while July/August were personally some real confidence-destroying months, Ho, Why Is You Here? was the soundtrack to some of those months’ most empowered and determined moments for me. Thank you, Flo Milli.

Best track: “In The Party”. The exact moment I experienced ego death was the moment the beat dropped twenty seconds into the song and, without even a millisecond to spare, Flo Milli’s opening lyric (“D*CKS UP WHEN I STEP IN THE PARTY”) came positively blasting through my car speakers. I almost crashed my little Honda and also maybe peed my pants. Like a defibrillator to my aching heart (you can punish me for that simile, I deserve it), it literally changed my life.

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After August, as we know, the deadly events of Kenosha, Wisconsin and the concurrent end of summer signaled that things were about to get even more depressing than they already were. The traumatizing and apocalyptic — yet highly energized and pivotal— summer gave way to a…well, really just purely traumatizing and apocalyptic fall and winter (for me at least…for many people who hold less privilege than me, the year was only traumatizing and nothing else, and it is important that I recognize that). I’ll do part two when I regain consciousness from my coma. Writing is hard.