💽 A Look Back at the Records of 2024

This is an incomplete list. They always are.  I missed more records than I heard in 2024. I suspect that’s the case every year. So I compose this list knowing that I’ll add to it in the future: records that needed more time to hit me, albums I couldn’t get to in time, and those that have inevitably missed my radar. Do not mistake this list as comprehensive. 

In that vein, I’m using tiered system instead of a numerical rating. I’m just going off the hazy metric of about how much I liked and listened to an album and how much thought and conversation did it start. My commentary follows suit. In these phrases  I attempt to summarize these records for their sound and appeal with respect to people’s attention spans. 

 I’d like to let the records speak for themselves, and offer their own impressions of their year-of-origin, so check out the afterword for my reflections on 2024, and the role of albums in this day and age. 

⭐️⭐️⭐️ 3 stars

records I liked and played multiple times

Amyl and The Sniffers—Cartoon Darkness: Aussie punks bite and bark for riotous fun. Frontwoman Amy Taylor sounds like she could out drink you and kick your ass after.

Yungatita—Shoelace and a Knot: Los Angeles malaise baked into 90’s garage jams with a healthy dose of Riot Grrl energy. 

Bear1Boss—SUPER BOSS: Super Mario World heard on harder drugs than psychedelics. Consider the unintelligible verses power ups.  

Adrianne Lenker—Bright Future: Achingly earnest acoustic poems that sustain eye contact through shared tears. 

Erick the Architect—I’ve Never Been Here Before: Rapper-producer introspecting and flexing in equal measure over vinyl hiss beats.

Zsela—Big for You: A smoky voice toying with hushed experimental soul.

BbyMutha—Sleep Paralysis: Southern fried bars, both threatening and hilarious featuring rave ready warehouse beats. 

Megan Thee Stallion—MEGAN: Confident, raunchy rhymes in a punchy, percussive flow.

Friko—Where we’ve been Where we’re going: pastoral orchestral folk pattering into ferocious emo with beltable choruses.

Mavi—Shadow Box: Confessional verses tumbling out of a weary young man with a painterly flow. 

Doechii—Alligator Bites Never Heal: The baddest bitch at Top Dawg Entertainment dropping acrobatic rhymes over soul soaked West Coast beats. A concentrate of the best of 90’s rap with some modern punch.

The Hard Quartet—The Hard Quartet: 90’s indie rockers use rock’n’roll’s concessionary supergroup tradition to age gracefully with self-aware humor. 

070  Shake—Petrichor: Industrial, like both Yeezus and Depeche Mode; embedded with fragments of dream pop and soul, like a dense conglomerate rock. 

Alan Sparkhawk—White Roses, My God: Blown out mechanical rhythm sections couching grief stricken autotune. 

NxWorries—Why Lawd: Two hilariously heartbroken rhythm n’ blues men: a cocky crooner/rapper (Anderson Paak.) and a glitchy scratching soul sampler (Knwledge). Both know they have none but themselves to blame. 

Mach-Hommy—#RICHAXXHATIAN: Reclusive rapper spits locked in or loose with a global scope and commitment to the righteous. He still has fun though. 

ScHoolboy Q—Blue Lips: Breakneck bars betraying the anxieties of the rapper’s street life origins, and the hedonism of coping with success.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4 stars

records I liked or loved and played with frequency

Mannequin Pussy—I Got Heaven: Teeth baring punk or tender-hearted torch songs let us mosh or cry like the wounded animals we are.

Kendrick Lamar—GNX: A grab-bag of tracks with no concept, except that Kendrick is the GOAT we need but don’t deserve. A little league team of L.A’s  up-and-coming gangsta rappers offers colorful support.

Father John Misty— Mahashmashana: Can we still call it Yacht Rock once the boat has hit the iceberg? Leave it to our smirking soothsayer to show us to the few life-rafts left. 

JPEGMAFIA—I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU: Unwieldy, metallic, thrash rap for the petty and unrepentant.

Magdalena Bay—Imaginal Disk: Shiny, hi-def psych rock, with a hip swaying groove, for those who have ever felt, “not like the other girls,”—which is to say all of us. 

Tapir!—The Pilgrim, Their God and the Kind of My Decrepit Mountain: Radiohead soundalikes weaving a tale of high-fantasy and global catastrophe in this folk-tinged mini-epic.

Mk.Gee—Two Star and the Dream Police: Pop punk and 80s power ballads getting the Bon Iver treatment. Gems of melody glimmer to the surface from murky ambiance. 

Kim Gordon—The Collective: Skull rattling trap beats graced by the deadpan haikus of the baddest punk you know. Oh by the way, she’s in her 70s. 

Chanel Beads—Your Day Will Come: Guitar littered fever dream pop dispatched from a psyche cast in the dim light of a laptop.

NATHY PELUSO—GRASA: Pan-genre Latin belter swaggers confidently on rap bangers and ballads alike. 

454–Casts of a Dreamer: Buoyant arcade beats and pitched-up verses to match address deep trauma and life’s joys that keep us hanging on. 

Jessica Pratt—Here In the Pitch: Fuzzy, yearning lounge-folk of interlocking lyrics and  arrangements. A wistful record best suited to an arm-chair and cup of tea—or maybe something harder.

Fontaines D.C—Romance: Irish made Brit pop for our dystopian drift. Strange ways here we come!? 

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 5 Stars

Records I loved, played consistently, and may bare larger cultural significance

Charli XCX—BRAT:  If 2024 has a signature record, it’s this. Unafraid to get existential, BRAT knows that we need no excuse to cry in this moment, and it gives plenty of room for insecurity and dread. But BRAT also gives us ample excuse to dance when more than ever, we need to channel that anxiety into sweaty, unhinged reverie.    

Cindy Lee—Diamond Jubilee: If 2024 has a timeless record, it’s this. Two hours of a grainy garage cabaret featuring fuzzed out guitars, swelling synths, and choruses worthy of the 50’s best girl groups. Swelling past simple nostalgia, the collection’s magnitude pushes us into an a-temporal dreamstate. Released outside of all streaming platforms, Diamond Jubilee provides communion with music’s inherent haunting powers that know no era. 

MIKE and Tony Seltzer—Pinball: 21 minutes of brazen bars and trippy beats. In this entry of the soul searching rapper’s prolific output, MIKE uses his heady flow for boastful strides, while Tony Seltzer’s soundscapes provide cosmic inflection. If you want to strut down the street with your head in the clouds, then keep this record on loop in your headphones. 

MJ Lenderman—Manning Fireworks: Painted in a country-rock pallette, Manning Fireworks offers damning and deeply relatable portraits of America’s new problem class: the disaffected white male. Like its subject, the record lopes and loafs, exposing those languishing between Christianity, a boner, and the seductions of pop culture. Lenderman presents an unflinching look at the countrymen who need to see themselves fully, and in turn must be fully seen. 

Vampire Weekend—Only God Was Above Us: Indie rock’s beloved institution uses its fifth record to summarize its oeuvre, and the changing world that the band emerges from. Incisive, insightful lyrical riddles challenge our collective sense of resignation with sharp musings  on the charms of the New York metro region, and the histories that our ancestors lived through. Vampire Weekend may be shrugging off their smug liberalism with the moment, but they’re holding onto their undeniable melodies, and balancing them with descriptive squalls of noise. 

Afterword

At this point it’s hard not to feel like every year is just another dumpster fire. But music has a unique way of articulating a moment’s idiosyncrasies, and shaping the way we experience the world at a given moment. BRAT summer was the hottest summer on record, and it only felt right to sing along to the should-we-have-kids quandry, “I think about it all the time,” before the fuck-it-lets-dance reverie of “365.” If each year has its own causes for outrage or despair, then it’s the music of the moment that can best galvanize or console us in that very moment. 

Hearing music will always help answer the question of what we’re alive for. It makes space for what we can’t acknowledge alone. While critics and audiences mourn the medium of the album, I still favor the form over the individual song. An artist’s collection of songs in particular order can open greater space for the range of thoughts and feelings that a single song can only glimpse at.  The record’s open field can offer both retreat and confrontation and helps us find our edges. In turn, these pieces of music become a lingua franca which help us identify with each other and build a capacious, shared experience of a disjointed, chaotic world.