It feels gauche to compile a year-end list of music in 2020, a year in which the daily conditions of the music industry suffered a pandemic-borne cataclysm and the future of live music was subsumed into a haze of drive-in concerts and illicit plague raves. Time dilation made sure that this year felt like five years in one, and any music released before March must, by necessity, slot into some other temporal category entirely.

Sorrow struck the Quad Cities and the metal world on November 21 with the news of the passing of John Hopkins. A native of Oquawka, Illinois, a small town about an hour from the QC, Hopkins rose from the soundboard at Gabe's in Iowa City to become a highly sought-after sound engineer, front-of-house man, and tour manager for such doom metal and heavy rock giants as Sleep, the Melvins, Corrosion of Conformity, Neurosis, Weedeater, Boris, and Uncle Acid & the Deadbeats.

New Standards Men are a pair of "lapsed Iowans" based in Denver. Their album I Was a Starship finds ex-Dubuquers Drew Bissell (bass, electronics) and Jeremy Brashaw (guitar) joined by Michigander Ike Turner (drums) and two more un-lapsed Iowans: the venerable Bob Bucko Jr. of Dubuque on sax and synths; and Lee County's Luke Tweedy, who added synthesizer in addition to recording and engineering the album at his own Flat Black Studios in Iowa City. The three extended tracks are a wholly Midwestern creation but sound unearthly in origin, like a fading transmission from space, a slow and lonely echo that rises to a rumble and dies out.

The Bettendorf-based project Pulsing makes some sort of case for the continued relevance of Game Boy tones transplanted into other musical contexts – in this case, a strain of electronic weirdness that falls somewhere between dungeon synth and sludge metal.