Henry's top albums of 2020 blog

This year I’ve had a lot of time on my hands. Back in July, I decided to listen to a new album every day. I tried to ensure a mixture of genres and eras, and make sure I was listening to voices outside the straight, white male mainstream. As of typing, I’ve managed to check out about 191 albums. It's also been part of my project to write a book about the protest music of the 2010s.

There’s no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic has stopped bands writing, rehearsing and recording. And there’s no shame for artists unable to be artists in these difficult times. There has been a good wodge of new music though, and some years I post my top albums list.

This year I’ve needed anger and hope more than ever. I’ve been feeling thin. For every surge forward the Black Lives Matter and anti-racism movements make, it feels the Hard Right radicalise more people against an ‘anti-woke’ agenda. The military gets another wad of money while poor children starve. Brexit has made Far Right policies mainstream, and the climate chaos is just around the corner. Still, there’s been some solid musical bangers this year.

If you want anger, from across the pond my top rage-inducing punk album is War On Women’s Wonderful Hell. The album is loaded with righteous anger through acerbic lyrics. The slicing post-hardcore guitar underpin a sharp intersectionality through ‘This Stolen Land’ and ‘Milk and Blood’. A lot of punk can feel timeless, but I think the power of Wonderful Hell is it feels so rooted in 2020, a determined energy from years under Trump’s administration and still riding the explosion of #MeToo and #TimesUp. And born from DIY and grassroots acrtivism. At a time when the alt-right’s voice is amplified, Wonderful Hell’s noise feels like it fills every corner of a room.

Other notable fist-shaking albums include the scathing Growth (Screaming Toenail), the unapologetic Royal Disruptor (Nekra), the all-out assault of We Are Knife Club (Knife Club) and the filthy ska-punk of Harijin’s self-titled debut. I discovered the immediacy of Seamless by Pardon Us, the restlessness of Svalbard’s When I Die, Will I Get Better and the call-to-armness of Svetlanas’ Disco Sucks. Bad Luck by Answering Machine is a indie-pop-punk booty shuffling-inducer. I love Jeff Rosenstock’s No Dream, which sounds like someone having a panic attack during a jam session. I Am Moron is The Lovely Eggs’ latest trippy North West jangle. I enjoyed Billy Nomates’ low-fi, bedroomcore self-titled debut, and although IDLES’ Ultra Mono is their weakest release, it’s still biting and fun. We Fight by Fistymuffs is a rough and raw stomp of an EP. Revolution Spring by Suicide Machines is a good listen if you want a bolt of anger, whilst Peaceful as Hell by Black Dresses is as distrubring as it is rewarding. Untenable (Bad Moves) is a delightful indie-punk-pop bop with the absolute anthem ‘Party With The Kids Who Wanna Part With You’. Telling Truths, Breaking Ties by Millie Manders and The Shutup delivers upbeatness in spades. As we bid farewell to Toots Hibbet of Toots and The Maytals, I’m thankful he left us Got To Be Tough.

As I type this, people across the UK are buying and streaming ‘Comin Over Here’ by Asian Dub Foundation sampling Stewart Lee’s anti-racism parody set. ADF’s album Access Denied is a pertinent collection of stories and songs about migration, race and culture. With all their usual inventive and innovative music fusions, the politics of ADF is the soundtrack to a Brexit Britain. ADF are able to look at a wider compelx picture of colonialism and borders, and tear it apart.

There’s been some emotional releases from this very hard year. I went for a long walk and listened to Climbing Frame by Gecko. It really sat neatly in my skull in York’s outskirts, surrounded in trees and fields hearing these gentle and honest accounts of growing up. Especially when I felt like I did a lot of growing up this year. Perkie’s I Let Myself Die To Live Again hits me square in my punky heart. South Somewhere Else (Nana Grizol) is a portrait of strength and gentleness in harsh realms. Young (Erica Freas) is soft and makes me feel fragile but secure. Even In Exile (James Dean Bradfield) is a layered tribute to Victor Jara. Non Canon II (Non Canon) is an insightful antidote. Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters was delightful in it’s melancholy. In the hip-hop camp, Princess Nokia’s two mirror releases, Everything is Beautiful and Everything Sucks are full of dynamite and evolution. Sharecropper Daughter (Sa-Roc) is also a vital release of confidence and defiance. Arrested Development, Run The Jewels and Public Enemy added to their genre-defining canon. Odd Cure by Oddisee was familial and perfectly framed against the pandemic.

My top albums are a tie. Dream Nails’ self-titled debut album is a lovely, bratty mixture of fun, bouncy pop-punk which masterfully combines the cheekiness of Millennial life on ‘Jillian’ and ‘Text Me Back (Chirpse Degree Burns)’ but also the damning need for intersectional radical feminism on ‘Kiss My Fist’ and ‘Payback’. There’s so much going on here, bouncing between themes and ideas whilst keeping the driving, poppy energy. But a key reason this album has meant a lot to me this year is it reminds me of seeing Dream Nails in October at The Crescent in York. My heart soars when ‘DIY’ comes on, it makes me want to bounce and dance in a sweaty, DIY venue (obviously from the back). It’s been the closest I’ve got in 2020, and I think Dream Nails have really captured that vibe.

Untied Kingdom is the second album from Commoners Choir and is my other top album for the same reason. Not that it makes me want to bounce around (no matter how punky a choir can be). But it reminds me of people. The album came out in February and their launch at the Wardrobe in Leeds and to say it was emotional is an understatement. The lyrics to Untied Kingdom are pure poetry, and make me strive for ways to articulate with language. The lyrics are not just about working class history, but our multicultural present. It’s an album for the national, an album for communities, multiculturalism and our identity here in the 21st century. Nothing sounds to modern but so classic. Time and time again it holds my heart tight and sings truth to power. “It’s where we go from here that will define us.” Fuck me, that lyric on the eve of 2021 with Hard Right Brexiteers running the show hits me hard. But there are a million voices of solidarity behind me.

Also, Plastic Hearts by Miley Cyrus was a banger.

2020: They see me Doomscrollin'

I’m typing this sat in a very familiar front room. It’s a gloriously sunny December day outside, and the crispness and cloudlessness makes me want to sit on the flat-where-I-pay-rent’s small balcony and read a book. Like I did in the late spring and summer earlier this year. My reference point is Lockdown #1, when I was fully furloughed and generally divided my time between scrolling, reading on the balcony and playing hordes of board games with my flatmate. And a bit of writing. 

I say a bit of writing, and that’s pretty generous. Last year, 13 years after I wrote my first performance poems, I feel like I wrote some of my best pieces ever. They became part of a show called Apps and Austerity. But in 2020, I didn’t write anything new for months. And months. I told myself, and other people, you can’t guilt yourself into writing. And yet everyone else in the Entire World seemed to be getting commissions, or writing responses, working on a new play or novel or poem or song. “Obviously that’s not true” I often reprimand my anxious brain.

 How can we dare to articulate this difficult time? I’d tell other artists; as we move through a dark tunnel, it’s only on the other side that we can wrestle the experience into a communicable form. But we’re never properly on the other side of a neat metaphor. All these experiences will stay with us, and have changed us. I am not the same person who sat on the balcony back in the summer, and nor am I the same person who performed at live gigs back in January, February and March 2020, and I will never return to being the person who wrote Apps and Austerity in 2019. So if I want to find comfort and pride, I need to look at modern Henry’s achievements in these circumstances. 

I’ve started writing a book about the protest music of the 2010s, tentatively titled Austerity Anthems, with a few extracts on my blog here and here. I’ve sent submissions to a few publishers, but nothing is concrete beyond a rough manuscript and some hope in my heart. 

I used Bandcamp Fridays as a handy excuse to record my solo shows from across the decade. You can download them as albums for £3 off my Bandcamp (even though I’m not a band obvs). This was an interesting process, because I thought a lot of these poems were confined to the pages of history, or at least the pages of my 2018 debut collection, and were done and dusted. I wanted to make sure the recordings were solid for posterity, but also had the rough, spluttery, I-can’t-quite-remember-this-line on-tip-toes energy summoned when I perform on stage. 

With Say Owt, I am so proud that we managed to hold an actual gig at the Crescent in early December. Sitting here in late December, I am worried that facilitating people coming together in a space during a pandemic was dangerous and ethically dubious, no matter how amazing the Crescent staff were at making the event socially distanced. But making something happen is a herculean effort and the vital energy of performance poetry was potent. That will stay with me all my life. 

I’ve been listening to an album every day since July. I’ve been applying for jobs, sadly unsuccessfully. I’ve been reflecting deeply about my career and work. It’s felt like the arts have moved at breakneck speed and I feel left behind. I’ve felt isolated, doomscrolling deep into the night. But also occasionally inspired by the advocacy and activism I see on my social media, and inspired by my friends. 

Thank you everyone. See you on the digital barricades.

 (here's a photo from February taken by Henry Steel at Say Owt Slam. Look how close we are. Weird.) 

 (here's a picture I drew from memory of some super-heroes I created when I was a teenager. Look how close they are. Weird)