Best Albums of 2024

Another year, another Best Albums list. 2024 came with a tsunami’s worth of great music with never ending waves to listen to. We’ve picked out our twenty favorite records of the year, radiating synth pop synergy, ambient aurora, house harmony, and a fourth bit of catchy alliteration that I can’t come up with at the moment. Read along, and we hope you find a new album to spin to close out 2024.

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There are too many names on this record to put into one hat, so here is the complete guest list: neatly ordered on Bandcamp and far from our formatting. Church Chords is the moniker of producer Stephen Buono, wrangler of talent, master of correspondence and email. The talent from track to track is striking. Members of Tortoise, KNOWER, Dirty Projectors, Bright Eyes, Wilco (understood!); it’s difficult to imagine half these musicians cobbled together for any number of recording sessions.

Yet record they did! Taking their ironic title from a very European term for “hit” music and applying it to a very Western name, elvis, he was a Schlager listens very differently from compilations, mixtapes or label samplers, perhaps owing to Buono’s synthesizing background conduction. elvis dances well enough (for a cowboy) to the jangly *blank*-wave tracks “Recent Mineral” and “Apophatic Melismatic.” Can’t hear the record over all the finger snapping? Point the finger at the drummer(s) for the jazz condemnation. No, it’s a proclamation! In recent years there have been few collaborative projects as dense as elvis, he was a Schlager, and there’s plenty more to hear here. Here here! – AB

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The mysterious DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ has been serving house excellence since debuting in 2017. Known for energetic production and pop samples, her mixes regularly run longer than an episode of your favorite prestige television drama. Sorcery clocks in at a brisk 90 minutes, a blissful entryway into the world of DJ Sabrina. “I’ve Been Waiting” shows off her repertoire the best – opening with fluttering acoustic guitar and sampled vocals that build up to a massive dance song. Her latest record is a hypnotic whirl of dance pop and house, the perfect soundtrack to blend away on the dance floor. – TM

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A return to the world of English art rock seemed inevitable, perhaps even prophetic, after Black Country, New Road landed their masterwork record on 2022. Spawned from a long list of progenitors including BC,NR, folk-leaning bands like Ugly (UK), English Teacher and, this year’s Tapir! have garnered praise for their adoption of classical styles in serving up artsy hors d’oeuvres.

While hors d’oeuvres may traditionally be enjoyed in bites, Tapir!’s record listens more like the ensuing banquet, enjoyed as an intentional progression of unbroken “Acts” served on three “discs” constructing a story. The story of The Pilgrim, Their God and the King of My Decrepit Mountain, which takes 1^st place on our list for longest title! (a close contest this year), trapezes across moors and heath in a Greco-Roman-style fable worthy of campfire tales and shanty renditions.

There is also an interpretation of Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie,” a piano piece that requires deft precision on the pianist’s part which, for a group of six odd-toed ungulates, is no mere feat. – AB

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DC underground’s Flowers for the Dead further refined their alternative sound with their 2024 outing. “Teeth” showcases their heaviest offerings, featuring a catchy riff and a White Stripes-eque vocal performance. “Two of Me” opens with the line, “I am a tree,” (Guided by Voices, anybody?).

Having already proved how loud they can get, tracks like “Gloria” show they can nail a quiet, folk sound too. The album’s closer “In Shadow” is the best of both worlds – its first half a soft, dreamy listen that billows and cracks to reveal an explosive breakdown, flexing all of their hardcore skills in the ultimate finale. – TM

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Counting Shellac amongst the “best of” list may look like the obligatory inclusion of the widely circulating, posthumously discovered artist, but that is not what this is. Well, yes, that is exactly what this is. To All Trains is absolute minted dude rock. The Chicago rock band’s compelling noise and harsh build works off a foundation of pure irreverent wit, scathingly apparent on the, now, classics At Action Park and 1000 Hurts.

Shellac’s cast included Todd Trainer, Bob Weston, and famously the late producer and record engineer Steve Albini, whose extraordinary, accredited repertoire extended beyond In Utero with his work on acclaimed projects by Pixies / The Breeders, Joanna Newsom, Low, PJ Harvey, Slint and The Jesus Lizard. To All Trains is lathered in Albini’s musical literacy and humorously sardonic writing that will go down as a cultural timepiece and an unexpected farewell from the auteur voice of indie music.

All’s well in love and rock. – AB

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Goat Girl’s latest record is like the moody younger sibling to last year’s Girl With Fish from Feeble Little Horse, and the similarities only begin with their four-legged namesakes. Goat Girl weaves in and out of punk, folk, pop, and more with ease, experimenting with sounds across genre to define a new type of indie. 

“ride around” features a rolling, stuttering, math-y riff that feels like shaking a bag of Scrabble tiles. “tonight” simmers with strained and moaning vocals over misshapen guitar that boils over with a delicate arpeggio. “motorway” kind of starts like a corny motivational trap song (i am slighting post malone) but they pull it around with a wave of synths. Vocal harmonies throughout the record dip into haunting territory, matching its dark tone. Goat Girl’s Below the Waste is an extraordinary experiment, might I say, goated? – TM

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Clairo’s emergence on the D.I.Y. indie scene may not have been purely coincidental, but it was perfect timing. Her assimilation into a market searching for the next “it” artist began with early singles “Flaming Hot Cheetos” and “Pretty Girl” which bottled, in lo-fi, a disposition earned from growing up online. Claire Cottrill was that it girl, influencing an artistic shift away from both musical recording traditions and regular-line tattoos.

Since the early successes of her singles and debut album Immunity, the latter produced by one ex-Vampire Weekend Rostam Batmanglij, Clairo circled the awkward growing pains and retrospection of a viral artist before landing on the sound of Charm. Her recognizable soft pop rock steps off the acoustic, singer/songwriter-leaning path taken with Sling and looks back, well past any lingering nostalgia, to an obscurity in 60s/70s records. Charm’s confident sound draws inspiration from parcels of comfort and explores for the first time since Immunity an expression unrooted in 2017.   – AB

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Jimi Hendrix painted the festival grounds of Woodstock 1969 with the sounds of the Vietnam War – screams, gunshots, and explosions mixed into his rendition of America’s National Anthem. Godspeed You! Black Emperor achieves a similar feat throughout their latest record, its lack of title referencing the death toll of Palestinians at the hands of occupying Israeli forces in the last year. Despair swells throughout these disparate orchestral tracks, but as the dust settles, a light shines through – resistance and hope. A Lancet study estimates the direct and indirect death toll due to the genocide is over 186,000 as of June 19, 2024. – TM

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On August 10^th frontman Geordie Greep delivers news of Black Midi’s hiatus and on August 20^th announces his solo debut, The New Sound, with the release of single “Holy, Holy.” With such swift adjournment and the turnaround of new material its natural that the news of both announcements came as surprises for fans… and (ex?) bandmates. Suspect timing aside, there are plenty of surprises in store for listeners of The New Sound.

Or should it be called “The Old Sound but also still The New Sound?” The London artist cites being inspired by crooner-era musicians (“If You Are But a Dream” is a cover of a Frank Sinatra song) and stories he overheard at local watering holes. Most of the track POVs come from despicable, yet pitiable, men that slink from song to song in wanton fables. Tony Bennett’s Broadway voice comes to mind, as there is a distinct theatricality to Greep’s anecdotage and the wounded characters inhabiting The New Sound.

Done up by Greep, BM-fellow drummer Morgan Simpson, touring mate Seth Evans, and 24 studio musicians, everything sounds incredibly polished and ensnaring, delivered with an audaciousness that’s rare for solo debuts. Will The New Sound become the prog fan’s Breakout? Stay tuned in 2025 for our breakout interview: “27 Questions for (27) proggers and Greepers.” – AB

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Guiness shortages are rocking the UK this holiday season – get your ration of Irish goodness with Fontaine D.C.’s latest. The post-punk veterans debuted a new look (ripped straight from Robert Pattinson’s GQ cover) and a new sound to match. Romance blends their Dublin punk roots with early alternative; the influence of touring with Arctic Monkeys is clear for this new era of stardom.

“Starburster” is a chaotic, anxious mess, and probably the best rock track of the year. “Favourite” proves that Brits fake their accents, since these guys still sound very Irish in verse. Despite the new coat of paint, Fontaines D.C. remains one of the best rock-forward acts out now, and marks a step in the direction of Irish reunification. – TM

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There’s a late point in the night, or early point in the morning, where everything seems to come to one long pregnant pause. This pause and the ensuing quiet is thick, pure and undisturbable. Often, the restless and day-weary are the only ones awake to hear what the quiet sounds like, but for everyone else curious to hear, Pakastani / American musician Arooj Aftab recorded moments like these on Night Reign.

The album listens like one long restless night, or a muddied memory of countless, similar nights blurring into one. The inertia of jazz is calm, sultry at times and menacing at others but expectantly intentional in its gradual addition of percussion, brass, and fine fingerstyle strings, a sound that is comparable in pace and style to Jim Jarmusch’s insomnolent score and film Only Lovers Left Alive.

Aftab’s rich, cinematic voice swells with largesse, enveloping each track with its wakefulness. Crawling and organic, it decomposes on “Autumn Leaves” and haunts in tendrilled shadows on the threatening “Bolo Na” where it is perfectly complimented by the readings of brooding choir poet Moor Mother. Night Reign is the result of a long contact with the pulse of evening, and it makes for a beautiful witness to the long, quiet pauses in the night. – AB

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After a decade of waiting, Jamie XX finally returned with a full length album to follow up on his indie house classic In Colour. He recruited a star-studded cast of features, from pop legend Robyn on “Life,” a fifteen second cameo from Panda Bear on “Dafodil,” and a reunion of The xx on “Waited All Night.”

Jamie XX dips into French touch and electroclash, pulling his signature house style in new directions across the record. Every track oozes an innate danceability – its an album about dancing, for dancing. So dance, dance, dance! – TM

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The pillars of Philadelphia hardcore, Mannequin Pussy released their most deliberate record to date as a mature, yet characteristically unvarnished, production of queer rage that stands at the flourishing intersects of popular American music. Read our full review of I Got Heaven here because I told myself I wouldn’t write so much this year and I have already written so much. – AB

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In AP Literature, we studied Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (throwback to some og gazing) for its opening line, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” It’s possibly the most well known in literature – it establishes the titular character, her personality, ambition, and class, and even frames her interpersonal conflict explored through the rest of the novel. JPEGMAFIA joins that legendary first line canon with his newest album, kicking off the opening track with, “If I was an NBA player, I’d be Dillon Brooks, but worse.”

With each new album, it feels like Peggy may be the only rapper who would benefit from a Ulysses-style reading group. Every bar is layered with intricacy only the most terminally online listener could digest. By the third track, he references Jake Paul’s boxing record, Playboi Carti’s domestic abuse case and finsta album rollout, and Chaturbate. Features from Vince Staples and Denzel Curry continue the lyrical onslaught, a conclave of greasy white guys’ favorite artists. 

Peggy’s singular production remains the highlight of all of his releases, ILDMLFY is no different. Guitar makes up a significant portion of his instrumentals for the first time, with huge riffs playing through “SIN MIEDO” and “Exmilitary.” Although maximalist samples make up every track, even sampling an AI-cover of Future for “either on or off the drugs,” he often chooses to keep things simple on this record. Stripping back a few layers has revealed a new side of the artist, producing a vastly personal experience. Songs like “Be Right There” stick out amongst his greater discography, but show an attempt at mainstream, or at least his version of it. The result is another classic, further proof he’s one of the best rappers of the last decade, RYM-core be damned. – TM

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An album that looks in on all the usual emotions with an unusual delivery. Diamond Jubilee is the 3XLP/2CD soloist record by Patrick Flegel, aka Cindy Lee, aka former front-person for Calgary-based indie rock band Women. Listenable as an unbroken, two-hour feature or as snipped vignettes of verité 60s/70s psychedelic soul, floating like cheap smoke, refracting off rolled pane glass and burning up in neon luminescence.

Here in the freightyard of home recordings Cindy Lee is shunting the noise of proletariat publishing down the tracks to the station. Plug in the jukebox, drop a quarter into the inflation-resistant machine and ease yourself onto one of the benches on the platform. “Diamond Jubilee” reads your ticket. Yours is the last train, but there’s plenty of music to keep you company while you wait.

Diamond Jubilee is not on streaming services. The album is available to listen to in its entirety on YouTube. – AB

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BRAT summer was magic. “360” on repeat. Dasha discourse for “Mean Girls.” Lorde remix. Julian Casablancas remix. Caroline Polachek remix. Rachel Sennott was there. The Dare (sucks). A decade of music, defining pop from the background, all building up to Charli xcx earning that mainstream pop girl status. BRAT is an electric listen, packed with the best party songs of the year and the most refreshing pop music since Charli’s last album. BRAT speaks for itself. If only the straight DJs could keep up. 

It would be a great lapse in journalistic integrity not to mention the disastrous Kamala Harris presidential campaign (the 2024 one, not the 2020 one) in the same breath as BRAT. Charli’s infamous, “Kamala is brat,” tweet spurned the worst era of democratic pandering in the party’s sorry history. How Nancy Pelosi could ever be, “doing BRAT before BRAT was BRAT,” is beyond me, and researching how an album about cocaine and millennial guilt becoming the soundtrack to the worst presidential campaign of the 21st century is worthy of a dissertation.

But maybe it is the perfect fit. As Charli grapples with motherhood, anxiety, and pop girl feuds throughout BRAT, she closes the record with “365” – a club anthem about partying everything away. There’s no growth, no change, no solution, only a plea to, “keep bumping that.” Kicking her problems down the road to deal with whenever the party is over. It’s a fitting analogy for American liberals, resurrecting corpses to serve in Congress and maintain the status quo. They offer no solutions, and only exist to stifle progress. The DNC is bumping that, and by that, I mean fascism. – TM

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If suffering could be expressed in sound it might sound like the music of band Xiu Xiu. As blanketed as pinning an emotionally untraceable state and experience on an artist’s body of work is, the long-term Californian group’s sound is as much a lineage of feeling through music as it is just simply music. And that is “music” intended in the basest denotation of the word, as this dissection of form renders Xiu Xiu’s other role in the music canon as synthesists, a role that has become only more evident with their latest work 13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips.

Scrabbled together in 2002, Xiu Xiu functions as a manic recording project for Jamie Stewart, the band’s longstanding frontman and sole founding member for 16 studio albums. Highlighted early on for their flippant experimentation in musical forms and sweeping styles, Stewart has always cited diverse names, from The Blue Album to Krzysztof Penderecki as unconsciously influencing the makeup of each project’s sound.

Stewart’s tendency to challenge emotional and rhythmic range comes to fruition on 13” Frank Beltrame which dances the knife’s edge between blissful club pop and bleak arpeggios. The disparity of Xiu Xiu’s danceability and their lamentably darker lyricism could stem from an intentional vectorizing of their works as accessible platforms for underrepresented voices, or more likely, Flashdance catharsis. In a 2006 interview for Pitchfork, Stewart is quoted describing techno music as “plain and heartbroken and clear… all the songs are about sadness and trying to dance it away.” Add Jamie Stewart’s near-silent, perpetually breaking vocals to the mix and that’d make for a close description of 13” Frank Beltrame. – AB

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Vampire Weekend is prescient. From their debut album mixing Afro beats and harpsichords to their 2019 comeback making jam bands great again – they are always ahead of the curve. The same is true of Only God Was Above Us – a tight, ten track record that links their preppy origins to their experimental and abrasive new front. 

I’ve written about the album in length already, along with the album’s release party under a total solar eclipse, so I’ll focus on one song, “Hope,” and how it’s changed in the past few months.

The song’s final two stanzas are as follows: 

“The sentencing was overturned

The killer freed, the court adjourned

A hope betrayed, a lesson learned

I hope you let it go

I did the things you asked me to

I testified what wasn’t true

But now I lost my faith in you

I hope you let it go”

These few lines define American politics of 2024, written long before any of the major events occurred. Despite Donald Trump’s convictions, he won the presidency along with Republican majorities across the House and Senate – “a killer freed.” Joe Biden and Kamala Harris spent the last year committing genocide, abandoning student loan forgiveness efforts, suppressing trans rights, and campaigning with war criminals to earn votes that never came – “I lost my faith in you.”

Decades of political struggle are defined in those stanzas, but the song’s echoing refrain gives a reason to believe: “I hope you let it go, the enemy is invincible, I hope you let it go.” We can’t escape our chains while holding onto their links. For any chance at progress, the DNC must be let go. – TM

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Every once in a while, music will stop someone in their tracks. Still House Plants compelled me to stop what I was doing (making dinner) when I heard the first note of the first track of their new record If I don’t make it, I love u. “M M M” opens with a simple drum beat, bass-snare-hi-hat, and then adds a few reverberating guitar chords, alternating thrums from left ear, to right, and back again. Then a deep vocal vibrato chaining the verses: “I looked up, I stood up, I hood up” once, twice, thrice, so many times. With that simple progression I was transfixed and I was burning my grilled cheese.

If I don’t make it, I love u is at once arrestingly simple and disarmingly vast. The polarity of that statement speaks to both the album as a sum of all its parts and my delirium at the time of this writing. “M M M” charts an upward rhythmic trajectory and downward lyrical spiral, sputtering at irregular paces until a homogenous still is reached.

The trinity of drums, guitar, and vocal parts all self-regulate in a layering of tempos that don’t seem to match up on first listens but eventually reveal themselves locked in an interplay of responsorial cycles. A fixed time signature is boring, so it’s been decentralized, and occasionally eliminated altogether, noticeable on “M M M’s” divergent parts, “Sticky’s” flashing guitar and drums, “Silver grit passes thru my teeth’s” cacophonous switch halfway thru, and “More More Faster” taking more away slowly.

The instrumental spotlights trade around quite a bit, while the vocalism ranges from echoing a repetitive rhythm to acting entirely on its own volition. Plaintive and soulful, the voice of Jess Hickie-Kallenbach has been compared to the diapason of Nina Simone’s emotive timbre. An ancient voice, filled with a lachrymose quaver capable of adding umpteenth syllables to the words “deeply,” “mostly,” and “wanting” and a beseeching urgency to the words “I really like it my way” as expressed on track 9: “no sleep deep risk.” Not a word slips out unimbued with feeling.

The London-based trio behind Still House Plants create something regenerative in their aberration If I don’t make it, I love u; a record that hooks the senses and keeps you coming back, just to hear it remake itself over and over and over. – AB

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I saved my first listen to Imaginal Disk for a trans-Atlantic plane ride. Within the first minute of “She Looked Like Me!” I became DiskInserted, and had the album on repeat for the rest of the flight, unable to sleep due to the sheer pop insanity playing through my headphones (later that day I fell asleep during halftime at a Fulham vs Leicester match in West London, but I did see ESR’s first goal at his new club).

Imaginal Disk is almost too audacious to be real. Mica Tenenbaum and Matt Lewin spin an intergalactic journey on the concept album, following the character True as they seek their ideal self and rediscover what it means to be human. The music is a ravenous blend of dance pop and progressive rock, maturing from their debut Mercurial World in all the right ways. Every song is perfectly produced, each track blending seamlessly into the next. It’s like watching a movie; you don’t even need to fake having synesthesia to see the music in front of you.

Listening front to back is a religious experience. Each track births an array of sounds that have never been made before, each track is the best song you’ll ever hear until the next one plays. To put a song like “Image” fourth on the album, and for every song after it to be equally brilliant in different ways, is just unbelievable. From the galactic “Death & Romance” and its solar flare of a chorus to the ska-chedelic jams of “That’s My Floor” to the heavenly piano runs of “Cry for Me” – there’s nothing else like this.

Every now and then a canon record comes out; something that clicks to mark a moment in your life, something to push you forward, something to define you. When I was thirteen, Modern Vampires of the City taught me to love music. I bought a guitar after listening to Snail Mail’s Lush, and bought a synthesizer after going deep on Panda Bear. I started Gone Gazing after listening to Ants From Up There, which I called, “… a holy text, a guide that shows us what music can be, and what music should be … A guide for being human,” on our first Best Albums list (wow I am pretentious). 

Imaginal Disk is one of those records. There is a clear line I can see in myself before and after Imaginal Disk, pushing me on the same journey as True. I don’t know where it ends, but I’ll be spinning “Vampire in the Corner” until I get there. – TM

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Check out our favorites from each album on the playlist below, and hope you go gazing in the new year.