The best songs of 2020 … that you didn’t hear

In an unusual year that’s kept us most of us away from live music venues, Guardian writers pick the songs that deserve to have made more impact.

I first heard Now & Then performed in a living room by a piano on a hot evening in the summer of 2019 when the world was open and life seemed plenty. Even in comparably liberated times, as the LA-grown singer-songwriter Lily Kershaw tugged her fist at her chest, clinging to fading memories and singing about the grief of an unfair tryst, her voice and her melodies were at once comforting and foreboding. “Remember the rooftop parties, remember the friends …” she sang, ruminating on past gatherings while in the presence of a new scene; a reminder that moments are precious and fleeting. In 2020, Kershaw released the song as a guitar-based duet with the Canadian emo rocker Goody Grace, and its acoustic melancholy inherited a deeper sorrow amid the intense isolation of a pandemic in which a story about unrequited love felt more cruel and unnecessary. Yet the way Kershaw validates past love with such a rich and bodied melody ensures that her precious time was never wasted. Eve Barlow

Grace Potter ft Marcus King, Jackson Browne and Lucius – Eachother

Given, well, everything this year, my appetite for content that even remotely referenced quarantine was basically zero (no thank you, Love in the Time of Corona). But Grace Potter’s Eachother, written five days into lockdown and released in mid-May, is one of the few pandemic songs to transcend the limitations of rapid-response art, and the only one that made me want to lean into the ache of isolation rather than escape or muscle through it. Led by Potter’s singed alto, a prismatic ensemble including the blues-rock singer and guitarist Marcus King, the rock legend Jackson Browne and the country-pop quartet Lucius pulls the last syllable of each chorus line into a cascade of uncertainty that still looks skywards. “I don’t know where we’re going / but when the going gets tough,” they sing – a temporary resolution, both balm and bruise, melded from voices isolated at home like the rest of us. “We’ve got each other, and for now that’s enough.” The shock of early quarantine has passed, but at least for me, the hymnal, humbled Eachother will outlast this cursed year. Adrian Horton

Hayley Williams – Dead Horse (Hot Chip Remix)

The most lizard-brained response I ever have to a song I like is: good, but it’d be much better sped up a bit. Imagine my delight when British national treasures Hot Chip dialled up the temperature on a standout from the Paramore icon Hayley Williams’ excellent solo debut, Petals for Armor. Her lilting funk-reggae meander through the infidelities that bookended her first marriage becomes a tachycardic shimmy in hypersaturated shades of UKG and happy hardcore. It’s lurid, diamond-hard and tooth-achingly addictive. Laura Snapes

theguardian.com