The 2020s is the smallest category in the game, for the obvious reason that it is not finished yet. It is also the most internationally varied. Afrobeats, K-Pop and Latin music together account for a substantial share of this list, which is true of no other decade.
The pattern that started in the 2010s completed itself here. Popular music stopped being something exported from a small number of English-speaking countries to everywhere else. West African pop, Korean pop and Spanish-language music all achieved genuine global scale in this decade without being translated, repackaged or routed through an American label first. Streaming platforms are borderless by default, and it turns out that when you remove the gatekeepers, audiences are considerably less parochial than the industry had assumed.
Pop and Hip-Hop still lead the category, but with far less dominance than in previous decades. The interesting movement is underneath them.
The defining commercial mechanism of this decade is the fifteen-second clip. A song can now become enormous because a fragment of it works as a soundtrack to something else entirely, which is a genuinely new way for music to spread and an uncomfortable one for artists. It has revived decades-old records at random, made unknown acts famous overnight, and created a strong incentive to put the most striking part of a song in the first ten seconds.
Whether this is a disaster or simply the latest in a long line of format pressures depends largely on who you ask. Radio edits, three-minute limits and side lengths all shaped music before it. This is the same argument with a new delivery mechanism.
The other structural fact of this decade is that touring, not recording, is where the money is. Recorded music is increasingly the marketing for the show rather than the other way round. That has pushed the biggest acts towards enormous, theatrical, long-form live productions, and it has made it considerably harder for smaller acts to survive on the margins that remain.
This category will keep growing as the decade goes on. If there is an act you think belongs here already, the contact page is the place to say so.
The 2020s category in Alphabetish contains 71 acts. The genres best represented are Pop (14), Hip-Hop (13), K-Pop (9), Country (7), Afrobeats (7). 46 of the 71 names contain more than one word, and the average puzzle in this decade puts 9 letters on the board.
The shortest name in this category is Rema, which gives you just 4 tiles to work with. Short is not easy. Fewer letters means fewer distinctive ones, and there are only so many ways to read a small pile of common characters.
The longest is Tomorrow X Together at 17 letters. Long boards look far worse than they are, because a name that size nearly always hides a short connecting word you can pull out and set aside.
13 of these acts carry a Q, X, Z or J somewhere in the name, which is 18 percent of the category. If one of those turns up on your board, you have narrowed the field enormously before you have decoded anything else. Start there.
This is the smallest category in the game, which cuts both ways. Fewer possible answers makes deduction easier, but you will see repeat answers sooner here than in any other decade.
Play this decade. The 2020s category runs its own daily puzzle, its own puzzle number and its own streak, separate from every other category. Start playing the 2020s.
Spoiler notice: this is the complete list of every act that can appear in the 2020s puzzle. If you would rather work them out for yourself, stop here.
Think something is missing? Suggestions are welcome via the contact page. The only firm rule is that acts with digits in their names cannot be included, because the numbers do not survive the alphabetising step and the puzzle becomes unsolvable.