Musical Musings: Top 10 Albums of the 2020s (First Half)

Jarrett McCall is fast becoming a Musical Musings regular. He's brought us an alphabet of American 70s bands, twice; he's brought us Stereolab; and he's brought us the best albums of 2026 so far, twice. This week, on his sixth visit, he arrives with half a decade. Jarrett has picked his ten favourite albums of the first half of the twenties — 2020 through to the end of 2024 — and we're counting them down, one song from each, from ten to one. Anyone who only knows him from the #USAtoZ shows should brace themselves: only four of his ten are American, eight are fronted by women, and not one of them has come within shouting distance of a Top 40. We open at number ten with Blanco White, the Londoner Josh Edwards, who learned flamenco guitar in Cádiz and the charango in Bolivia and folded both into English folk — his song "Olalla" is a lament for the emptying villages of southern Europe. Then it's Brooklyn's Say She She, three-part "discodelic soul" with a name that nods to Chic and a Nile Rodgers seal of approval, and "Forget Me Not," their protest song for the Guerrilla Girls with a hook borrowed from a French opera. Montreal's TOPS follow with the closing track from I Feel Alive, the record that made the Guardian call them "masters of modern soft rock," and then Loma — Emily Cross, Jonathan Meiburg of Shearwater and Dan Duszynski — with "Arrhythmia," from an album made in a Dorset stone house and a chapel while the three of them lived on three different continents. Number six is the strangest thing Jarrett has ever brought us: Tirzah and Mica Levi's trip9love…???, a whole album built from one drum-machine loop, and a song whose title, "2 D I C U V," nobody has ever explained.

The top five starts with a cat. The Orielles' "Bobbi's Second World," from Halifax in West Yorkshire, is a northern-soul-meets-post-punk rush about a kitten who has to survive the front garden and the back garden to become a lady, and it's a lot better than that sentence suggests. Number four is the loudest record on the list — Just Mustard's Heart Under, self-made by five people from Dundalk in a studio in rural Donegal, the highest-rated album of the ten, and "Still," the song they wrote because they wanted something people could dance to. Number three is sung entirely in Swedish: Dina Ögon's Oas, cut live in a single day in Stockholm, with "Berget" — "the mountain" — as our way in. Number two is the biggest band here, which tells you something about the list: Warpaint, four women from Los Angeles who formed on Valentine's Day 2004, and "Stevie," which they describe as "a love song, pure and true, sincere as it comes, with a little bit of freak." And number one is a band who won't tell you who they are. Blood Cultures, from New Jersey, have performed in black hoods since 2013, never shown a face or given a name, and their self-released 2021 album LUNO is Jarrett's record of the half-decade; we'll play "Andromeda." Ten albums, ten small rooms, and almost nobody you've heard of.

Broadcast 23 September 2026

Songs in this episode:

0:00 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: Top 10 Albums of the 2020s (First Half)
1:04 Blanco White – Olalla
2:27 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: Top 10 Albums of the 2020s (First Half)
3:31 Say She She – Forget Me Not
4:52 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: Top 10 Albums of the 2020s (First Half)
5:56 TOPS – Too Much
7:20 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: Top 10 Albums of the 2020s (First Half)
8:24 LOMA – Arrhythmia
9:50 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: Top 10 Albums of the 2020s (First Half)
10:54 Tirzah – 2 D I C U V
12:15 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: Top 10 Albums of the 2020s (First Half)
13:19 The Orielles – Bobbi's Second World
14:40 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: Top 10 Albums of the 2020s (First Half)
15:44 Just Mustard – Still
17:07 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: Top 10 Albums of the 2020s (First Half)
18:11 Dina Ögon – Berget
19:36 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: Top 10 Albums of the 2020s (First Half)
20:40 Warpaint – Stevie
22:04 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: Top 10 Albums of the 2020s (First Half)
23:08 Blood Cultures – Andromeda
24:29 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: Top 10 Albums of the 2020s (First Half)