Sometimes, I long for the days before. Before Twitter, before Facebook, before social media made every day feel like lining up for a firing squad of new information, new entertainment, new songs, new videos, new albums, new news, new clips, new music video premieres, new announcements, new pre-orders, new spoilers, new lunatics deciding to kill people for no reason, new hot takes and new threads. While I’m sure times have been worse, they’ve never been more, you know what I mean?

Which is to say, it’s a virtual impossibility to find room in your day-to-day life to keep up on everything, and it’s likely there are some cracks in your information-action ratio sieve. Nowhere are those cracks maybe the most like canyons than in music, where the sheer number of albums released — over 75,000 each year — make it a physical impossibility to even get close to hearing everything. This list isn’t going to get you close to that 75,000 number — we picked only 20 overlooked albums — but at least you’ll be exposed to 20 albums that you might not have heard otherwise.

Year end lists like this are a good excuse to try to pause that never-ending deluge, an opportunity to take stock and try to make some sense of what we all heard this year. Like we’ve done in the past, we have some of these on vinyl where applicable. So smash those buy links if you find anything here you enjoy. Fight the feed for a little while and catch up on things you might have missed. —Andrew Winistorfer