5 albums from 2020 that define early COVID-19 quarantine experience

Five years ago this week marks the official declaration of COVID-19 as a pandemic. Headlines flooded with news about lockdowns, quarantines, cancellations, and perplexity as Americans were urged to stay at home and await further guidance.

High school and college students were expecting a “three-week spring break,” corporate 9-to-5-ers prepared to temporarily work at home, and musicians pushed back their spring shows to the summer.

The initial three weeks went by, but the illness persisted, and what had been expected to be a brief interlude turned out to be the lengthy, stationary period of lockdown that followed.

The global halt left the music industry disoriented as artists scrambled to figure out how their tours and songwriting processes would survive the glaring obstacle of isolation. However, the albums that were released during the first month of lockdown not only overcame this noisy fog; they became our anthems for grappling with the loneliness and loss that quarantine brought on.

5 albums that define the quarantine year of 2020

Despite the world being distracted at the time of their release, they thrived by winning Grammys, like Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters, or plateauing at the top of indie internet charts, like The Strokes’ The New Abnormal. Listening to these albums brings back those vivid feelings of 2020 in full-swing, the moments spent sitting in a college lecture hall listening to Eternal Atake by Lil Uzi Vert for the first time before saying goodbye to classmates you would never have school with again.

In the future, when my children ask me how I felt during that fateful week, I think I’ll have a hard time putting it into words. Instead, I might opt to play these albums for them and let the sensations of confusion, isolation, loss, disassociation, and eventual growth come back to me. COVID-19 was a once-in-a-lifetime human experience that irrevocably changed all who went through it, for better or for worse.

The music that we listened to during that initial period will go down in history as our collective soundtrack for the “end of the world.”

Eternal Atake: Lil Uzi Vert (March 6th, 2020)

If you search this album’s name on TikTok, you’ll be met with POVs from young, nostalgic college students reflecting on the “random Friday morning” when the Philly rapper’s second studio album dropped during the school day, just a week before they were unknowingly sent home for good during their freshman year of high school.

Eternal Atake is the project that these late Gen Zers/Gen Alphas relate with their last few days of normalcy, but the space-age rap album transcends the limits of the earthly timeline. Uzi lays down bars about money, women, and high fashion at a rapid pace, creating catchy, seamless party tracks that combine elements of drill music, 2010s hyperpop, and 2000s pop rock.

I have memories of sitting in some frat basement that week five years ago, my friends joking about having to wear hazmat suits if this “virus” started to “get out of hand,” with the anthemic, breakneck “Futsal Shuffle” blaring in the background on some blown-out JBL speaker. Eternal Atake feels like ignorant bliss, one last party before the lights turned on—a true “if you were there, you know” moment.

The Weeknd: After Hours (March 20, 2020)

Finding a video online or a supermarket during a masked-up grocery run where the synthy, 80s-inspired hit “Blinding Lights” wasn’t blasting during 2020 could have been its own TikTok challenge. Admittedly, I’m not into The Weeknd as much as some of my other peers, but there’s no denying that his fourth album, After Hours, was an immediate cultural sensation that explored the dark underbelly of pain, regret, and self-loathing of singer Abel Tesfaye’s fact-and-fiction storytelling.

“Heartless” and the titular track “After Hours” are gloomy and lonesome, appropriate to play in a bedroom with no natural light like many of us resided in during our quarantine days. Even the poppy “Save Your Tears” has a tinge of sadness to it.

Tesfaye’s tales of solitude over pulsating nightclub beats seem to be reminiscent of the time of vacant streets and isolation they were born in, shown most distinctly in the “Blinding Lights” bridge: “Sin City’s cold and empty, no one’s around to judge me.”

Yves Tumor: Heaven to a Tortured Mind (April 3, 2020)

During the early days of quarantine, I thought I would take the extended free time to brush up on some new music that I was missing out on. Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlists blessed me in early April, as it played me the first notes of experimental mastermind Yves Tumor’s triumphant and vast “Gospel For a New Century.”

Heaven to a Tortured Mind, the artist’s fourth album, has many of these hard-hitting moments. It is an indie rock opera that blew everything I had ever heard previously out of the water the first time I heard it in full. Songs like “Gospel” and “Kerosene!” are journeys in themselves, with electric guitar riffs and Tumor’s gravely wails exploding off of each other to create rousing anthems.

The dreamy ambience of “Strawberry Privilege” and “Romanticist” have the power to transport the listener to a cosy, blissful, ecstatic state—far from where we all were in reality at the time. It’s escapism through music at its finest, making it a perfect listen for the long-strung days of lockdown when I just wanted to forget it all.

The Strokes: The New Abnormal (April 10, 2020)

The title of the legendary NYC rocker’s sixth studio album is a fitting one—a play-on of the expression that politicians were using to convey the changes in everyday life during the pandemic’s early stages. The piece used for its cover art, the iconic Basquiat work Bird on Money, is a beautifully colorful and chaotic culmination of universal obscurity and general disorientation.

While the songs on The New Abnormal possess that trademark sunny Strokes tint, it also hits at buried, unrelenting fear and uncertainty. “Selfless” is chill with a glistening dreampop edge but also tugs at existential anxiety: “Please don’t be long / ‘Cause I want you now,” singer Julian Casablancas begs. “Life is too short / But I will live for you.”

“The Adults Are Talking,” the overpowering hit from the album that trended on TikTok in the following months, is lighthearted in a charmingly mindless way, feeding the online generation’s need for something to take the edge off of quarantine comedowns.

One song I enjoyed during lockdown was ‘Why Are Sundays So Depressing’, which honestly reflected the lethargy I felt during online college classes. Quarantine life was certainly unusual, and this album captured it in a raw, truthful manner that still resonates five years later.

Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters (April 17, 2020)

While some of the other albums mentioned on this list explore the ideas of escapism during the pandemic, Fiona Apple’s monumental fifth album is a raw, unforgiving lens on the human condition right at the forefront. Fetch the Bolt Cutters was recorded in the singer-songwriter’s home in Venice Beach, most of the takes being unedited Garageband files.

Apple’s exposed and tender wounds are on full display, and her shaky voice, ground stomps, and assistive howls from her five dogs are long-restrained gashes being unearthed, finally coming to fruition. The first track, “I Want You to Love Me,” starts off as a slow ballad, Apple lamenting over a fleeting relationship that will most likely never come to fruition, ending with a series of vicious, sputtering yelps and cries.

There’s no fluffing up or placing a pretty bow on a pain this great, and the many who struggled with intensified mental health issues can relate to the isolation-induced spirals and losses of composure that Fetch the Bolt Cutters paints so vividly. It wasn’t an easy time for everyone—as we all grappled with loss, heartbreak, and daydreams of what could have been in our own way—but it is comforting to know that an album as masterful as Fetch the Bolt Cutters could finally put a sound to this collective catharsis.

2025-03-17 13:03