The coronavirus pandemic dictated everything in 2020.

Live gigs (remember them) were a no-go, but it allowed bands and artists to take stock and deliver one of the most exciting years for Scottish music that I have seen in the years of this annual 'best tracks' list.

This eclectic annual journey began with a long list of over 300 tracks, distilled to this Top 100.

In this Scots playlist of the most essential tunes of 2020, you will find everything from alternative rock, dance, electronica, hip-hop, rap, indie choral, punk, post-grunge, folk and... well see for yourself.

It is a mix of the known, little known and the unknown, leftfield and mainstream,  immediate pop anthems and challenging experimental projects.

The 100-or-so is being published over four days with the final 25 revealed on Boxing Day.

Next is...the final chapter

Top 100 Tunes from Scotland in 2020 Part 1 (100-76)

Top 100 Tunes from Scotland in 2020 Part 2 (75-51)​

Top 100 Tunes from Scotland in 2020 Part 3 (50-26)​

Part 4 - 25-1

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25 The Grand Gestures ft Andrew Howie and Pauline Alexander - Quiet (Shorter)​

Standout track from the art-pop collection from the combo led by Spare Snare's Jan Burnett, is a glorious minimalist gem.

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24 Who Cried Wolf? - Used To​

A potent and dark first single with a smooth marriage of rap, hip-hop and rock by the exciting Scots duo. It was was created after lead vocalist DeeZy found out that a close relative was terminally ill. Being creative during this time acted as a form of coping mechanism.

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23 Kohla - Gorgeous

This brooding R&B vs trip hop cracker from the first EP by the Edinburgh singer-songwriter and producer aka Rachel Alice Johnson who cites the likes of Grimes, FKA Twigs and Kate Bush as influence.

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22 zildjianpinky - Sprinkler​

Irresisible collage of uplifting piano-led chillhop from the mysterious Glasgow producer who conspires to make classic-sounding lo-fi and ambient epics.

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=21 Kilgour - Why'd I Do That?​

The Glasgow-based artist/band aka Fionn Crossan produces/produce a fascinating kaleidoscopic mash of genre-bending instrumentation scattering drum n bass across the kind of dissonnant keyboard and guitar textures favoured by My Bloody Valentine.

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=21 Starless ft Steven Lindsay - Somewhere in the Night

Like a lost James Bond movie theme song this epic string-strewn nugget, the brainchild of Paul McGeechan, keyboard player of Love & Money, features Steven Lindsay, the front man with the Big Dish, one of the great lost bands of the 80's.

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20 Taahliah - Mind Body Soul

The first black trans DJ and producer to be nominated and and win in two categories in the Scottish Alternative Music Awards with an unreal,  experimental and disorientating dancefloor monster track that shows that this new Glasgow-based artist with nothing officially released is an underground creative force to be reckoned with.
 

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19 Dylan Fraser - I Do These Things For Me

The exciting new 18-year-old artist from Bathgate is at his best on this darkly twisting electro-synth epic which comes over like a poppier Nine Inch Nails from his superb debut The Storm EP. He says it’s about the internet and how you see everyone posting about things they are going to do and achieve but nothing really ever happens.

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18 Still House Plants - Crreeaase

The Glasgow School Of Art-formed trio are very much a law unto themselves and their latest album, Fast Edit, is a continuation of their harmonic but fractious discordant improvisations which in the wrong hands would just sound like an ambiguous mess.  This standout track has its roots in an irresistibly mutated groove, and like a funky abstract of Sonic Youth force fed Red Hot Chili Peppers, hangs together very very nicely while appearing to fall apart at the seams at the same time.

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17  Liam Robertson - Common Weaver

The debut Village of Killin EP from one half of the Perth producer duo Clouds, might from the title signal pastoral folk.  Nothing could be further from the truth. This standout track, is a fascinating experimental, brooding blend of shapeshifting minimalist techno, bubbling bass rhythms, broken tribal beats, stop-start  fast-slow dystopia and all underpinned by eerily distorted vocal samples that together sound like the hastily gathered debris of dance music fashioned into a cerebral post-dub.

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16  Blue Rose Code ft Karine Polwart - (I Wish You) Peace In Your Heart
Edinburgh-born songwriter Ross Wilson won't be heard on Capital.  There won't be plays on Radio 1. With a jazz trumpet, a jazzy inflection and a whole dollop of soul, this emotional, pastoral, contemporary alt-folk anthem provides guaranteed chills.  
"May this next year go easier on your soul," they croon.   Amen to that.

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15  Harsh Winters - Liars

A post-rock vs country influenced track from The Marriage of a Killer and a Bird Song, the debut album from the new project by Edinburgh-based singer-songwriter Luke G Joyce who ended up in the home of country music, Nashville for its launch.  "My life has changed so much over the last few years – for better and for worse – and there is a lot of that in this record," he says.

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14  Death Bed - Ice Cream

A rabid lo-fi infectious screaming riffola beast made to melt eardrums and make moshpits [should they ever exist again] explode from the Glasgow-based experimental-metallers' barnstorming debut album No Breeze In Hell. It could be the angry son of Nirvana's Bleach.

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13  The Wild Places - Fear City

With an opening guitar hook that has whispers of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Under the Bridge, the Glasgow alt-indie three piece fashion an altogether more atmospheric, mood with a flicker of desolation, a hint of regret and lost love, a smidgeon of optimism, neat loud-soft-loud dynamics, a soaring, spinetingling Thom Yorke vocal pay-off halfway through and a a drum finale that sounds like shots in the dark. An exquisite standout from debut album Wires and easily their most inspired moment to date.
 

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12  Popup - Follow

This Glasgow four-piece indie-art-pop combo gathered 10,000 MySpace fans in a week at a time when that was worth a jot. They released a debut album in 2008 and then nothing...for 12 years. They then deign to release the devil-may-care second Whimpers with its mash of kitchen-sink Aidan Moffat-style drama and potent guitar jams and this eccentric, messy, fast-slow-fast-faster, thigh-slapping cracker of a third track that sounds like it was made up on the spot. Lazy blighters.

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11  Lewis Capaldi - Before You Go (Orchestral)

A soaring version of the song about suicide by the superstar Scots singer-songwriter which topped the UK Singles chart in January.  He says it was "by far the most personal tune" he had ever written and he drew on feelings surrounding his aunt who took her own life when he was younger.

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10  Amy Duncan - The Whole Town

The Hidden World, the seductive seventh album featuring the golden larynx of innovative Edinburgh-born singer-songwriter, who is a classically trained double bass player, is a tantalising and sensual and yet still unsettling not-quite-three-minute melodic meditation underpinned by harp-like synths from another galaxy that just ends far too soon.

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9  LivMassive & Hessian Renegade - Targe

This inspired Glasgow-based experimental collaboration born as a masters degree project, sees the classical/folk vibes of viola player LivMassive aka Rachael Olivia Black team up with the rave-rap duo to create a sweeping R Rated pounding blast from their EP Erocean that sounds like nothing else you will ever have heard.

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8  Luki - The Parts

The singer, pianist and synth player based in Glasgow says she began her musical career by accident in her late twenties, after making a soundscape for a toilet at a party and realising – quite suddenly – that everything before had been a mistake. This reveals itself in what in different hands could be a standard Tori Amos knock off  - but with Lucy Duncan's beautifully witchy vocals, which sound like their at the edge of an operatic breakdown and an undercurrent of weird sonic noises,  you have this barking treasure.

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7  Glasvegas - Keep Me Space

Seven years after the release of their last album Later… When The TV Turns To Static, the Glasgow's cult heroes with the awful pun band name returned with this triumphant single from their fourth album Godpseed that is a sublime sonic blast of Ramones vs Phil Spector wall of sound vs My Bloody Valentine. With an LP slated for release in April 2021, this taster is their finest ever four-and-a-bit minutes so far.

“I was writing that for my cousin who I grew up with who then, from the age of maybe 10 or whatever, I never really saw again. In the song I was saying ‘whatever was then, maybe that’s something that’s forever’. Because it happened all them years ago maybe you can’t touch it, you can’t feel a memory, it’s not tangible, but that’s not to say that doesn’t last forever because that’s maybe floating somewhere. Wherever you are in your thoughts, keep me a space’," says crooner James Allan.

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6  Zoë Bestel  - Show What You're Made Of

With one of the purest 'can sing the telephone directory' voices around, the Dumfries and Galloway nu-folk songstress, who has become a regular on this end of year list,  put aside her trademark ukelele and recruited collaborators on this compellingly sparse mid-tempo wonky-synth cover of an obscure song by Glasgow's Medicine Men. This triumphantly tender tune is the standout track on the Last Night From Glasgow label's The Isolation Sessions album where artists covered each other's songs and the proceeds went to venues that had to close due to Covid-19 lockdown laws.

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5  Conscious Route & True Note - Brothers 

A skyscraper slice of space-age electro places the Edinburgh-based emcee's sharp political posturing onto the dancefloor but with an inspired reflective piano-led twist at the end.  In the year where Black Lives Matter has come to the fore, this and Lost Routes, the landmark album it comes from only serves to show that really, the world should never have needed to be told that.

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4  Lizabett Russo - Release

This intriguing Edinburgh-based Romanian singer-songwriter conjures up a haunting blend of contemporary jazz, avant garde folk and world music, a combination which might be off-putting to some, but on this heavenly fifth track on her recorded-during-lockdown fourth album While I Sit Here and Watch This Tree Volume 1, there is a bewitching aural catharsis that resonates particularly during Covid. When she sings, "I let go, I set myself free", you can feel a burden lift and can only tip your hat to a world class artist at work.

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3  Django Django - Glowing in the Dark

The Edinburgh-formed avant-surf-pop combo are at their very best with this hook-filled acid-inflected breast-banging title track from an eagerly-awaited forthcoming album which is the music equivalent of Pringles - once you pop you can't stop.  Built around a sample from one of Dave Maclean’s spoken word records then plushly upholstered with Moog synths and drum loops, it is one to play again-and-again-and-again.

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2  The Blue Nile - Here Come The Bluebirds

A new Blue Nile song. Surely not. But, yes. While unheralded, this is the best of four unreleased songs for a newly remastered and reconstituted version of their fourth album High by one of the greatest ever bands from Scotland. It has all the intimacy and heartbreaking sophistication of their meisterwerk Hats and while ever so slightly stripped down, it has those trademarks building orchestral synths, and provides all the 'hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck-standing-on-end' moments that their best work always manages. And there's are 'yeah, yeah, yeahs' to boot.

If a voice was a Covid vaccine, then Paul Buchanan is the cure.

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1  sarya - i don't know where i'm going (but that's okay)

This perfectly articulated the feeling of emotional disorientation and heartache that Covid-19 brought, with the power to wash aside the isolation blues with an irresistible cauldron of indie, electronica and folk sounds and the soaring high-pitched vocal melancholy of the Edinburgh-based Taiwanese-American singer-songwriter/poet. 
It is taken from her glorious third EP Take Care Of Yourself which she describes as a "meditation on self-care, a rap to emotional openness, an ode to feeling okay (maybe even great) about you, yourself, and everything."

The full 'best of' is available on this Spotify playlist.  That is, those tracks which are on the platform.

This is the YouTube Top 100 playlist (minus those that aren't on the platform)

Top 100 Tunes from Scotland in 2020 Part 1 (100-76)

Top 100 Tunes from Scotland in 2020 Part 2 (75-51)​

Top 100 Tunes from Scotland in 2020 Part 3 (50-26)​