2024: A Musical Portrait in 65 Albums

Five years ago, in the midst of end-of-decade listmaking season, I wrote a piece for The Outline about what I perceived as the inadequacy of consensus-based “best of” lists to tell a compelling story about the year or decade at hand. It seemed to me that by searching for consensus, such lists could only ever reward the most popular artists and those with the broadest appeal (not necessarily the same thing), which the lists would then convert into artistic merit. As a result, the artists celebrated as best also happened to be extremely popular major-label superstars. This has changed some: Bandcamp long ago abandoned ranked lists, and, as you may have seen, this year’s Pitchfork AOTY can’t be streamed on Spotify. When Pitchfork released their mid-decade accolades earlier this year, the general response was that it felt incoherent and random, which scans to me as progress and evidence of change in both methodology and editorial direction. If we have to rank the best albums of the last five years, surely the results should be very random; surely the average person shouldn’t have heard of a decent number of them. I recognize that that comes off as elitist, but again, consider the alternative: Is it not elitist to hail the world’s most popular artists at the expense of music’s vast working class? 

I started being asked to participate in Pitchfork’s lists in 2020 and have always declined (though I made an exception for the best of the 90s coverage a couple of years ago). This is partly out of allegiance to my views, but it also comes from a place of inadequacy. Every time I’ve tried to make a year-end list this decade, it’s felt impossible for me to speak definitively.  “Taste and personality are constantly in flux for all people, as are critical priorities,” I wrote in that Outline piece. “As anyone who’s ever revisited a high-school mixtape knows, the way you hear an album today that you fell in love with nine years ago is necessarily conditioned by the way you saw yourself nine years ago and the way you see that version of yourself today.” 

Every now and then I’ll revisit old year-end lists that I made for The AV Club or FLOOD or Aquarium Drunkard. The person they speak to is unrecognizable to me. The AVC published my individual list in 2018, the last year I made one. Some of the selections still feel definitive to me (Sam Wilkes, Parquet Courts, Nine Inch Nails). The rest I know to be great (or at least very good) records, but I haven’t listened to them in years and have no desire to revisit them today. If I made that year’s list again today, it would probably include Peel Dream Magazine’s Modern Meta Physic and Nothing’s Dance on the Blacktop; it certainly wouldn’t include Szun Waves or Domenico Lancellotti, no disrespect to them. 

Nevertheless, I like the idea of taking a snapshot at the end of the year, if for no other reason than to say “This is what my experience of this year felt like to me in December of 2024.” Below are 65ish records that I think do that, that specifically signal 2024 to me right now. The first five are all new releases that seemed to give form to my year; everything else helped fill it out. These aren’t necessarily my favorite records of the year (though some of them are at the moment), nor are they the records I listened to the most (though some of them are at the moment). Only two of them I’ve written about professionally. About half came out in 2024; about half came out earlier. Of the latter, I'm only including albums that I really spent time with for the first time this year, so Hum's Inlet and Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, which have never left my regular rotation, don't make an appearance despite how important they feel to the vibe. Taken together, I think of everything here as what I see when I turn around and survey what was a very sad, challenging, and exhausting year. Call it an aura photo. Or maybe it's a map I tried to follow while looking for something I'm not sure I was able to find. Memory operating how it does, it seems very likely to me that this picture wouldn’t be the same if I were to take it again in a year, which is only right: The landscape might stay the same, but it always looks different from a new perspective.

And, before I forget, here are two early-2025 records I’m very excited about: The Tubs’ Cotton Crown and Kathryn Mohr’s Waiting Room.

(Spotify version here.)

Mannequin Pussy, I Got Heaven (Epitaph, 2024)
Typically, when I review a record, I get really sick of it, and it takes me a month or two to want to listen to it again. I played I Got Heaven obsessively while working on my review, filed the review, and did not stop playing it. The way that I feel about this record tests a lot of my beliefs around how music should be discussed—it’s obvious to me that it’s my favorite record of the year, and that their shows at the Fonda, Pitchfork Fest, and the Bellwether were the three best shows I saw this year (and in that order, too). It makes me wonder if my refusal to play favorites has more to do with my own tendencies toward ambivalence than it does any kind of intellectual commitment. Or maybe it had just been too long since I’d heard a record that seemed to scream all the things I hadn’t been able to scream for myself. The last time this happened was a full decade ago, when Parquet Courts’ Sunbathing Animal fretted over the anxieties of selfhood. “How is agency built / in a life unfulfilled? / Tanned slow and low in the amines of guilt,” Andrew Savage sang then. Guilt as both a motivator and a preservative, all of it dead skin you can drape over yourself to make you think you’re alive and making your own choices—in 2014, that was the religious trauma I was enduring. In 2024, the line most stuck in my head, the lines that I choked on when I tried to shout along in Chicago and that pushes me up the 1st Street hill as I drive in to work, is Missy Dabice’s response, yelled into the past from new territory: “I’m stuck inside my loneliness, I’m stuck inside my grief / I wish I could’ve been there, to save you from the reach / I am spiteful like a god / Seek a vengeance like the rest / For what they did to you / I will never lay to rest.” 

Genital Shame, Chronic Illness Wish (The Garrote, 2024)
I’ve written before about Erin Dawson’s work as Genital Shame, and if you read my piece on Hearing Things about how transition has affected my taste, you might remember her popping up near the end. Even before I began to think about my relationship to my gender, I found myself drawn to black metal and other extreme forms of music being made by trans women. This is the kind of thing that would probably have a therapist licking their chops, especially considering how deeply my identity is bound up in the music I listen to, but even now it seems to me that the women who are making this music necessarily approach this once-very-masculine music from an unusual, and thus more interesting, direction. I love Chronic Illness Wish because it’s a black metal record that seems alienated from black metal as a form. There is beaucoup tremolo picking and a few blast beats, and the thin static of Erin’s scream wouldn’t sound out of place on a Darkthrone record. But the ache at the center of this music is so different from that of A Blaze in the Northern Sky. The way these songs are mixed makes them feel hollow—in “Schooled in Every Grace,” whose central chord progression plays in my head when I’m feeling low, it feels like a big, empty sphere has pushed all the actual music to the edges of the soundstage. This is a long way of saying that they feel dissociative, that they’re standing outside of their own center but are still near enough to know what they’re missing. (In the interest of full disclosure, Erin is a friend, but I was saying nice things about this record before I knew her.)

Midwife, No Depression in Heaven (The Flenser, 2024)
People often talk about the idea of luxuriating in sadness as a kind of indulgence, or even decadence. What I mean is that to allow oneself to be sad, and to be sad in a patient way, which is to be comfortable with sadness, is seen as stunted or emotionally immature. It feels counter to the idea that life should be one progressive journey forward, upward, into brighter and brighter heavens; if you’re choosing patience in the midst of your misery, you’re not acting in your own best interest. This is why Kurt Cobain singing “I miss the comfort in being sad” in “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle” is both annoying and very subtle. He knows you think it sounds like the kind of fake-deep thing a teenager would say, and that you presume he’s now happy, having just made a hit record. The assumption is that you’ll see what he’s saying as ironic. But he was, quite famously, truly not very happy in 1993, and he wanted permission to feel that way. A sliver of irony of a different kind was his way to slice open the suffocating bag fame had trapped him in so he could breathe a little more easily. Madeline Johnston’s sound as Midwife is undeniably luxurious in this sense. It is fascinated with sadness. She whisper-sings from a distance in a voice heavily feathered by tap-back delay and telephone distortion. Her guitar tone is clean, a little deep, something like a tolling bell. These songs move slowly, trailing tracers, jet-lagged. Nothing seems to push them forward. Johnson hangs them from the ceiling and lets them turn like a slow disco ball in an abandoned bar. They don’t reflect much light, but they change how everything looks. 

Dummy, Free Energy (Trouble in Mind, 2024)
Over the first couple of months of 2024, I felt more optimistic than I had in years. I’d just re-started my PhD program after a year off, my writing (school-related and otherwise) felt loose and fluid and natural, my research was compelling, I was learning to deal with my anxiety in a clean and sustainable way. Then, on a Monday afternoon in mid-April, a drunk driver hit our car, which was parked on the street near our house, totaling it, and sending me into an intense anxiety overdrive that took months to come out of. The year never really recovered after that, despite plenty of good times, great shows, human connection, day trips, lattes from Thank You Coffee, vacations, birthdays, anniversaries, and so on. Anyway, feeling the way I felt this year conditioned most of my non-work-related listening, naturally, but Free Energy is one of the only records that consistently made me feel good without my having to remember that I feel bad. The heavy Stereolab influences (hoovering organs, motorik chug, low-register vocals) are always going to trick my critical filters, but they’re using that influence to reshape bits of madchester and drone music and comfy synth; “Unshaped Road”’s weird little drum’n’bass snare is pocking away while the rest of the song zones out in a meadow. People talk a bunch about the ability of music to “conjure entire worlds,” and I’m realizing that what that means is that records that do to me what Free Energy does aren’t representative of any true place, whether geographical or emotional, that TV On The Radio isn't actually drawing 2004 Williamsburg in their albums' sky, even though it always feels like they are. Lying down and gazing into these imagined spaces isn’t really an escapism so much as a way of actually living in a world that doesn’t seem like it should be possible. But it is.

Kelly Lee Owens, Dreamstate (DH2, 2024)
plus Beats in Space set (2024), Resident Advisor set (2022), Boiler Room/Warehouse Project set (2024)
What Kelly Lee Owens is doing on Dreamstate is not hard to understand. The brightest song here is called “Sunshine.” The ballad is called “Ballad.” Her style—big, airy dance music that occasionally scoops up house or trance, even a little ’90s style big beat—is warm and welcoming. It is very easy to dance to. On paper, its immediacy should make it feel like festival EDM, but the simplicity of her productions and the clarity of the music allows it to hit with more subtlety. These songs are huge, but they’re open, with plenty of room for her purring synths and perfectly rounded bass to roam. It’s like seeing a show at Sphere with the screen whited out. The relative simplicity and clarity of her productions allows the instrumentation to breathe a bit, which in turn makes something like the double-dutch bassline of the title track feel richer than it would in a busier song; you can tell that Owens appreciates the simple pleasure of absorbing the tone of a well-tuned synth the way you might pause over a glass of wine. I loved her 2017 self-titled debut, which operated on similar aesthetic principles at a much smaller scale and was a little moodier, but lost track of her over the years, even as her profile grew and her music became more complex. Dreamstate doesn’t sell out the smarts and taste that she’s demonstrated since the beginning, but it does use them differently, pushing toward a kind of euphoria that I imagine is much easier to reach when you’re playing bigger and bigger houses.

Babel Map, Teeth (Lost Future, 2024)
Boiling goth music for very big rooms.

Belong, Realistic IX (Kranky, 2024)
Swampgaze.

Black Curse, Burning in Celestial Poison (Sepulchral Voice, 2024)
Blackened death metal so well made and so aware of that fact it starts to feel obnoxious after a while, we get it, you totally rule, thanks.

Cindy Lee, Diamond Jubilee (self release, 2024)
I’m still not sure that this album is good enough to warrant the amount of talk it inspired in 2024, but the highs are very high for me.

crushed, extra life (Funeral Party, 2024)
When I was growing up, this is what I thought living in a big city felt like: glossy, dark, romantic, humming with an agency that's never yet been thwarted.

The Cure, Mixed Up (Fiction, 1990)
"Close to Me" Closer Mix is a top-ten song for me ever, the emphasis on the bass in the "Lovesong" remix makes it more clear why 311 covered it.

The Cure, Songs of a Lost World (Fiction/Capital, 2024)
They could’ve gone back to any era and it would’ve been interesting, but I’m glad they’re doing a late-period Disintegration here, they deserve to look and sound so elegant.

Defacement, Duality (Unorthodox Emanations, 2024)
What it sounds and feels like to have concrete harden in your ears and throat (I assume), so bricked-out it'd nearly qualify as drone if it didn't also have so many what-I'm-forced-to-call-bitchin' solos.

Draag, Actually, the Quiet is Nice (Julia’s War, 2024)
Show-offy trip through shoegaze, grunge, black metal, ambient music, a dream-pop song that sounds like it could be on Ween’s The Pod, all of it great.

Full of Hell, Coagulated Bliss (Closed Casket Activities, 2024)
Full of Hell understands the grammar of heavy music at a very high level, and they use that knowledge to write grindcore and noise and death metal miniatures that scan like modernist poetry; their best yet.

Garbage, Version 2.0 (ATCO, 1998) and Garbage (ATCO, 1995)
The two genders: couture and drugstore eyeliner, respectively.

Ghost Dubs, Damaged (Pressure Sounds, 2024)
Every year you’re given one coin that’s engraved “this artist sounds like their name” and I’m spending it here.

Hello Mary, Emita Ox (French Kiss, 2024)
Knottier and more risk-taking than their last one, a touch less successful melodically, but still very strong classic alt-rock.

Ivy, Long Distance (Stratosphere Sound/Sony,2000; Bar/None reissue, 2024)
I told Jason Woodbury this record sounds like if Stereolab had been played on VH1; there was a three-day period when Rachelle and I woke up at 4am to go to Pasadena, where she was installing a massive artwork at Cal Tech, and I played this in the car every morning, all three of which were exhausting but very sweet.

Loveliescrushing, Girl Echo Sun Veils (Wavertone, 2010)
Collection of rarities and what feel like sketches from the ride-or-die shoegaze band, though calling them shoegaze feels inadequate, this release feints toward Cocteau Twins every now and then but really drapes everything in a thick and gorgeous gauze of noise.

Lust Hag, Lust Hag (Fiadh Productions, 2024)
The entire world argues about trans women's competitive advantage in sports and misses that Eleanor Harper beat every blackened death-metal dude at their own game.

Magdalena Bay, Imaginal Disk (Mom + Pop, 2024)
I can only hear this as 100 Gecs if they'd been trained on The Cardigans instead of Less Than Jake.

Mediocre, Growth Eater (Dangerbird, 2024)
Starts as a bit of clever pop-rock pastiche ("I Might Be Giant," good one) that camouflages its levels of anguish and anger, really sharp songwriting all around.

Midwife & Vyva Melinkolya, Orbweaving (TheFlenser, 2023)
Every day since the election, I’ve either listened to or thought about “Hounds of Heaven,” a song that has nothing to do with anything but feels like it does; it’s really about as perfect as a song can be.

Milly, Your Own Becoming (Dangerbird, 2024)
The guitar tone in the chorus of “Blocked on Everything” is redlined, but it’s also compressed, which makes it sound small and manageable, which in turn makes it sounds heavy; it’s a great little trick on a record that is not hardly the only one here heavily influenced by Hum.

MJ Guider, Youth and Beauty (modemain, 2024)
Another friend on the list (Pitchfork editors look away) but I’m not doing criticism here so it’s fine; I played Melissa Guion’s Sour Cherry Bell a whole bunch this year, too, but I love the open structure and cold fogginess of her Youth and Beauty, an EP that is mostly flute, bass, field recordings, and dread.

ML Buch, Suntub (15 Love, 2023)
The appeal of Suntub only became apparent to me when I played it at low volume on shitty iPad speakers while reading in bed on a Saturday morning; I have since listened to it on airplanes, in the kitchen, while working, while walking, while writing; I have never and will never turn it up any more than halfway, and I do not want to hear this music live; it is miniature like a personal memory; also the heavy talk about her 90s guitar tones is overblown unless you’re referencing the quieter Jane’s Addiction stuff.

Mo Dotti, Opaque (self release, 2024)
Debut LP from super-buzzy LA shoegaze revivalists who work the MBV angle pretty credibly.

Momma, Household Name (Polyvinyl, 2022)
For me, the main difference between Momma and the 150 other woman-fronted heavy indie rock bands I listened to this year is that Momma is very cool, and they use that coolness in their music; there’s a self-assurance and dismissiveness to the melodies here, and an unwillingness to either overexpose in the name of transparency or get a little silly in the name of relatability that I find very compelling.

more eaze, lacuna and parlor (Mondoj, 2024)
Overwhelmingly beautiful ambient folk music, if The Lemon of Pink were a bunched up straw wrapper, and you dropped a bit of water on it, it'd unfurl into Lacuna and Parlor.

Narrow Head, Moments of Clarity (Run for Cover, 2023)
Of all the bands who claim Hum as a key influence, nobody comes closer to producing that sense of buzzing zen in me than Narrow Head.

Nine Inch Nails, Broken (Nothing/TVT/Interscope, 1992)
The drums in “Wish” make it a country song, “Gave Up” may be the first TV On The Radio song.

Nine Inch Nails, Fixed (Nothing/TVT/Interscope,1992); Further Down the Spiral (Nothing/TVT/Interscope, 1995)
Both remix albums that are interesting enough to stand on their own, I know this is contradicting what I said this summer about Fixed, what can I say, changing my mind is totally in keeping with the spirit of this exercise; Further Down’s “Piggy” is my favorite Rick Rubin production.

Nine Inch Nails, Hesitation Marks (The Null Corporation, Columbia, 2013)
The little “haw-haw” chuff in “Came Back Haunted” is my favorite use of breath as an instrument in an album I heard for the first time this year, narrowly beating out the reverse-sneeze gasp in Fontaines D.C.’s “Starburster.”

Orbital, Orbital (FFRR/Polydor/Internal, 1991) and Orbital 2 (FFRR/Polydor/Internal, 1993), a.k.a. the Green and Brown albums
Cheating a bit and including one album I've known for a while because for the rest of my life this is how I will get to remember turning 40: I watched Orbital play “Belfast” live, covered in light, my eyes sparkling.

Porcelain, Porcelain (Portrayal of Guilt Records, 2024)
The feeling of being mad that you woke up tired and mad that you have to go to work and mad that traffic will be bad and knowing that you're not mad at work or traffic or even your fatigue. 

Portrayal of Guilt, Christfucker II (Run for Cover, 2024)
They should send a royalty check to White Zombie for the idea, but this full-length remix of the original Christfucker is more inventive and strange and fun then I thought it could be, occasional shades of “Why They Hiding Bodies Under My Garage.”

Robber Robber, Wild Guess (self release, 2024)
Chicago group that runs various styles of indie rock through a very grimy filter, unifying it.

Slowhole, Slowhole (self release, 2024)
The sound of individual neurons misfiring as they fail to record a traumatic event.

Smashing Pumpkins, Machina/The Machines of God (Virgin,2000)
A real shame that Billy Corgan’s reputation was what it was by 2000, this is a great record, the perspective of Benjamin’s Angel of History looking backwards at Mellon Collie through Adore.

SML, Small Medium Large (International Anthem, 2024)
A classic International Anthem release in that it is technically jazz but thinks it's dance music, or the other way around.

Smoke Point, Smoke Point (Geographic North, 2022)
First of all, what an album cover, second of all, another friend sorry but hi Brian, third of all, while this is more-or-less an ambient record, or at least one that’s texture-forward (listen to the way the two bass tones soft-tickle one another across channels halfway through “Steam Machine”), the production is so glossy and tidy it hits me more like traditional dance music, I guess the proper term for this is chill-out music à la 90s rave and the Virtual Dreams comp, but, be honest, do I seem capable of chilling out to you?

Soul Glo, Diaspora Problems (Epitaph, 2022)
Screaming “Can I live can I live” and “Who gon beat my ass” in the car before and after laser hair removal sessions; saw them twice and by halfway through the second time I felt confident they’re currently the best American band, which is ridiculous but felt right; along with Bear from Mannequin Pussy, the only artists I’ve heard say the words “Free Palestine” on stage this year.

SOPHIE, Heav3n Suspended (self-release, 2020) and Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides Non-Stop Remix Album (self-release, 2019)
Jose Mourinho voice if I speak about the non-remix version of Oil of Every Pearl I’m in big trouble, but SOPHIE’s genius is more glaringly obvious to me in her club work, don't worry sisters, I promise I'm slowly growing softer.

Spectral Wound, Songs of Blood and Mire (Profound Lore, 2024)
Montreal black-metal band whose first two albums are basically perfect in trad black-metal terms, I was so hyped for this record, and it's fine, but I swear you can hear them raising the goblet and strutting on this thing, and while I recognize that basically all metal is camp, I do prefer when bands don't acknowledge it, including because disappointment threads through a lot of this year's listening for me (see also Necrot and I'm sorry but Blood Incantation).

Spiral XP, I Wish I Was a Rat (Danger Collective, 2024)
I wish the title was grammatically correct, otherwise no complaints with this bit of heavy '90s alt.

Sunshy, I don’t care what comes next (Longinus, 2024)
Chicago shoegaze group whose music feels both a little thin and a little sunshiney, has one thing most of these nü-gaze bands lack, which is: songwriting.

Thou, Blessings of the Highest Order (Sacred Bones, 2020; vinyl reissue, 2024)
(cautiously) Absent historical context, on a pure performance level, almost every track is an improvement on the Nirvana original (scurrying back, out of spotlight, voice is quieter, but clearly yelling) No, no, I don’t think that’s true.

Thou, Umbilical (Sacred Bones, 2024)
The homie Patrick Lyons called Umbilical a grunge record, which is right in the same way that people who used to say Bleach was basically a Beatles record were right: spiritually, sure, but they never imagined anything this heavy.

Trauma Ray, Chameleon (Dais, 2024)
Heavy shoegaze bands are a dime a dozen these days, and I'm obviously buying high; for my money, Trauma Ray is the best of the breed.

U2, Zooropa (Island, 1993)
Blame Garbage!

Various Artists, Saturno 2000: La Rebajada de los Sonideros 1962–1983 (Analog Africa, 2022)
You’ve never heard this many organ tones used this many ways; it is remarkable how many different ideas the cumbia shuffle can hold.

Various Artists, Virtual Dreams II: Ambient Explorations in the House & Techno Age, Japan, 1993-1999 (Music From Memory, 2024)
I wore a hole in my hard drive playing the first edition in 2018, this one might be even better; does exactly what it says on the tin.

Wishy, Triple Seven (Winspear, 2024)
If this had been released in 1997, which it could've been, it would've been in every cut-out bin at every CD Warehouse location, and then some contrarian 7th grader would stumble upon it context-free and decide to fall completely in love.

Wolves of Desor, Lost Kingdom of the Giants (self-released demo, 2023)
Black metal so lo-fi it starts to feel like a high-pile rug, incredibly comfortable listening.

Octo Octa/Eris Drew, fabric presents Octo Octa & Eris Drew (fabric, 2020), individual Dekmantel sets from 2023, individual RA and BBC1 Residency sets (ask Soulseek about the latter unless you live in the UK)
I’ll just say that watching videos of two great trans woman DJs at the top of their game turning on a massive and appreciative crowd at Dekmantel made me feel a sense of identification and pride that I’ve always observed in others and had never felt myself; even in my days as a Christian, seeing someone like Sufjan do their thing didn’t feel like I was seeing one of “my people” being celebrated, more like they’d overcome their Christianity to make something genuine, something I was hoping I could do too but how would you ever know; it’s been a year in which I’ve felt very scared and very anxious because of my gender and a year in which I’ve felt more powerful and more fluid and more at ease (oh shit is that why she named herself that) and it’s hard not to just use a cliche and say more human, so it feels like the only appropriate way to respond to any of this to all of this is to dance.