Three albums that will always remind me of lockdown

Now we're in level one, it's time to learn all the words to these masterpieces.

Pretty soon, possibly over just the next few weeks, we’re going to be swamped by lockdown-inspired anthems. Musicians have spent the last couple of months lamenting the lack of touring by singing sweet songs into their mirrors about isolation and loneliness and and Survivor binges and eating cold pizza at 2am.

Pretty soon, those songs are going to be released en masse. They’ll be all over the radio, swamping streaming services, blasting out of car stereos, and soundtracking sports highlights reels. Some of them will probably be quite good. Others could be quite terrible. None will top this exquisite remix of Cardi B’s Coronavirus quip.

I’ve already written about someone who released an entire album’s worth of material about lockdown during lockdown, and there are absolutely certain to be more.

Right now, to my ears, despite that ridiculous Da Baby artwork up there that features the incendiary rapper wearing a Covid-19 mask but fails to include a single reference to the worldwide pandemic on the album, there are three full-lengthers that were absolutely built to soundtrack the trying times we’ve all just been through.

These are the albums that will soundtrack all the Covid-19 documentaries that will hit Netflix over the next 12 months, so if you don’t know all the words to them by now, you will soon.

Fiona Apple - Fetch the Bolt Cutters

When Fiona Apple first started work on Fetch the Bolt Cutters seven years ago, she had no idea that the kind of self-isolation the recluse imposed on herself would resonate with everyone else stuck at home during Covid-19. Apple’s timing for the release of her fifth album couldn’t have been more perfect, and that makes this a particularly brutal listen, an album that flirts with emotions of raging honesty and intensity. It’s a stone cold masterpiece, one I must have listened to 100 times by now, but the way Apple erupts near the end of Cosmonauts still hits me with stone-cold chills.

Charli XCX - how i’m feeling now

During the two months, the sum total of my achievements was nailing some pretty decent homemade fried chicken and painting half a fence. Charli XCX puts all of us to shame. While holed up in her Los Angeles apartment, the British pop star recorded and released an entire album in just five weeks. how i’m feeling now sounds exactly like it should: underproduced, frenetic, ragged and raw. But it crackles with the kind of kinetic electronic energy you’d expect from a hyper-real pop star stuck in enforced isolation, a record so fuzzed out that it could be compared to Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile, or Kanye West’s Yeezus. When she yelps, “I’m so bored!” over skittery synths and kickdrums at the start of album centerpiece anthems, it makes me want to smash down the front door and yell it at the world too.

Ka - Descendants of Cain

Ka isn’t the biggest rapper around. He’s never going to become a hip-hop figurehead like Jay Z or Kanye West. But the New York firefighter uses his underground status to his advantage, crafting brooding albums full of biblical references and beatless soundscapes that are perfect soundtracks for sleepless nights. Imagine Wu-Tang Clan without the beats or the bombast and you get somewhere close to his minimilist ethos on Descendants of Cain, his latest album which is also his best. Put your headphones on, lie down on the floor and shut your eyes for this one.

• Hey! If you’re into video games, I interviewed one of the bosses behind The Last of Us Part II for Stuff. Because of embargoes, we can’t say much yet but trust me, there’s much more to come from this brutal beast of a game. Watch this space…