The newest and smallest section, and mechanically the simplest.
This is the smallest section in Cryptune, deliberately so. A daily puzzle that leans on very recent music asks players to have been paying attention lately, which is a different and less forgiving demand than asking whether they know a famous song. The recent decade is represented, but lightly.
Time is the other constraint. It takes a few years to find out which songs are going to stay, and a puzzle built on a title that everybody has forgotten by the time it appears is simply a bad puzzle. The entries here are the ones that already look permanent, with the understanding that some of that judgement will turn out to be wrong.
What is striking about the titles is how short they have become. Every answer in this section is one or two words, without exception, which is the first time that has been true of any decade in the game. The 1960s averaged well over two and a half words per answer. Sixty years later the phrase has been squeezed down to something you could fit on a phone screen without wrapping.
The other visible change is a return to plain emotional vocabulary. Titles in this decade tend to name a feeling or a state directly, without metaphor, in the sort of language people actually use about themselves. It is a long way from the abstraction of the nineties and, oddly, quite close to the directness of the early sixties.
This section will grow. As the puzzle library extends, more recent music enters it, and this page is regenerated from the puzzle data every time the site is built, so it stays current without anyone editing it.
The 2020s accounts for 14 puzzles in Cryptune, split 10 songs to 4 albums. The average puzzle from this decade has 1.5 tiles, and 7 of them are single tile puzzles, meaning the whole answer is one word.
The longest answer from the decade is Future Nostalgia, at 2 words. The most common clue types across those puzzles are synonym with 19 and opposites with 2.
The acts appearing most often from this decade are Dua Lipa (3), Taylor Swift (3), Olivia Rodrigo (2), BTS (1) and Ed Sheeran (1).
Mechanically this is the easiest decade in the game and it is not close. Every answer is one or two tiles, and the clue writing is correspondingly plain. If you know the music, these are the fastest puzzles here.
If you do not know the music, they are the hardest, for the same reason. There is no long title to work backwards from and no famous act whose catalogue you can run through. It is one or two words and either you recognise them together or you do not.
Trust the plain reading. This decade has almost no wordplay, no anagrams and very few soundalikes. A clue in this section usually means exactly the kind of thing it appears to mean, so the sophisticated interpretation is generally the wrong one.
All 14 answers from this decade, listed alphabetically with the act responsible. Puzzle dates are not shown, so this tells you what is in the game without telling you what is coming tomorrow.
Want to know how the clues themselves are built? The clue school takes each clue type in turn. Or go back to all decades.