Loudwire - 70 Best Rock + Metal Albums of 2020

For a lot of us, anything that happened before the stay-at-home orders were issued in response to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic seems like a completely different lifetime, nevermind events that transpired in this very year. In the pre-lockdown era, we got Ordinary Man, the first new album from Ozzy Osbourne in a decade. Meanwhile, Poppy foreshadowed a surge in rock's penetration of pop music as she did the inverse and transitioned away from futuristic bubblegum pop and into genre-warping metal territory with I Disagree.
Then came a jarring disruption to every day life, prompting a sort of holding pattern as bands kept their eyes on the growing pandemic. Some artists held their new releases indefinitely, while others delayed their records either as a result of supply chain issues pertaining to distribution or just preferring to wait out the situation a bit longer.