Pop went brat, guitars are back, and bands are cool again – from Mk.gee, Mannequin Pussy, and Merce Lemon, to Charli, Camila, and Crack Cloud, we rank the records that defined our 2024.
Best Fit’s seventeenth albums of the year list was, as always, a herculean undertaking, finding an enemy in consensus and in telling a story that feels right for the magazine, and its staff and contributors.
Every single year is both wonderful and terrible for records depending on which side of the road you stand, and the arbitrary impulses that come with creating a ranked list is always hard to ignore. In the wider pop space, 2024 was a period of so much mediocrity as the oligarchs of pop, past and present, turned in work that was sub-par, thematically dull, or simply overlong and laborious. Ariana, Dua, Katy, Halsey, and Taylor did not understand the assignment at all, while Billie kept the lights on and Charli, Sabrina, and Chappell finally got their flowers.
But it was also a year of such beautiful innovation – with many artists finding their steps to glorious mid-career maturity: Laura Marling, Yung Lean, IDLES, Jessica Pratt, Kendrick, Tyler, Fontaines D.C., MJ Lenderman, Gillian Welch, and David Rawlings all turned in some of their best work to date, and debuts from English Teacher, Chanel Beads, Cameron Winter, SPRINTS, and Mk.gee were a reminder that great art eclipses all.
Of course, finding a true standout amongst all this wasn’t easy either, but our choice felt right for the site’s long-term support of our number one record and for the incredible work they produced this year – which deserves to be heard above all the noise.
To mark this year's list, we're also giving away a massive bundle of vinyl and a membership to the Secretly Society record club thanks to our friends at Secretly Canadian, Jagjaguwar, and Dead Oceans.
50
Free Energy by Dummy
Free Energy is a this-shouldn’t-work-but-really-does marriage of things: club music and propulsive motorik; minimalism and raucous guitar clangour; industrious intellect and unfettered fun. It’s joyful, but smart about it. Dummy’s MO has always been scientific music-making. “Making music shouldn’t be fun,” reads their Bandcamp bio, though they didn’t say anything about listening to it! After all, Free Energy is extremely fun, vivid, and inviting – at least for us. The album is full of ecstatic, heady pay-offs, impactful because of how methodically they are set up; see the bridge of Madchester-imbued “Blue Dada” or how the bubbly, pulsating “Dip in the Lake” careens into the lightspeed rush of “Sudden Flutes.” For the band, I’d imagine all of this approximates the giddiness scientists revel in when they reach a major breakthrough. This album is a major breakthrough for alternative music, the furthest from by-the-numbers that we can get these days.
Whichever way you try to define Dummy’s sound will likely be wrong. For instance, this Bandcamp tour diary touched on why comparisons to Stereolab, one of the most chameleonic, progressive, experimental acts of all time, are reductive. You can throw around that name – as well as Neu!, My Bloody Valentine, The Velvet Underground, and Sun Ra – but Dummy go deeper, their bottom-of-the-crate esoterica tastes no match for us and our 250-word blurbs. Let Dummy be the one to understand it. Our job, as guitarist Joe Trainor told me after their recent Brighton show, is to dance to it. – Hayden Merrick
49
Club Shy by Shygirl
Club Shy will remain the sweaty, euphoric, glistening core of Shygirl’s avant-club party girl universe. After she was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize with 2022’s Nymph – a debut which spotlighted the musician’s notable flair for converting experimental hip hop into seductive bass-laden pop – and opened for Charli xcx and Troye Sivan’s earlier this year, it’s no surprise Shygirl has been steadily encroaching on everybody’s radars. With its dedication to embracing dancefloors and party culture, Club Shy paid homage to luminaries of Eurodance and house music, yet also became a space to honour collaboration.
Whether Shygirl’s lightweight vocals are floating about or occasionally soaring, they always weave themselves through stylish production that immediately transports you into a messy, mid-'00s-through-early-'10s Ibiza nightlife scene – those all-consuming, highly stimulating worlds that aren't dissimilar to the bursting atmosphere of the Club Shy events curated and hosted by the architect herself, which accompanied and celebrated the record’s release.
While this project stepped a few feet away from the deconstructed and industrial approach to offbeat club-soundtracking that Shygirl habitually takes, it was no doubt a logical and exciting step – one that has only expanded the expertise of one of London’s most sought-after DJs. – Amy Perdoni
48
Starchris by Body Meat
Chris Taylor spent eight years meticulously crafting the intricate beats and percussive electronics that comprised STARCHRIS, his debut album under the Body Meat moniker. This type of obsessive production and engineering may not suggest a compatibility with super sleek pop bangers, but that duality of mindsets – plus his unparalleled set of skills – resulted in one of the more unexpectedly luxuriant musical outputs of this year.
Body Meat delivered a seismic jolt to the avant-pop landscape with STARCHRIS, an album that was as forward-thinking as it was ferociously personal. The Philadelphia-based polymath built a sonic mosaic bursting with manic energy and dazzling intricacy, an evolutionary leap and a maximalist manifesto that doesn’t just ask to be heard but demands to be reckoned with.
“High Beams” and “The Mad Hatter” exuded a hyperconnectivity that oscillated between glitchy, fractured electronics and irrepressible grooves, all stitched together by his fluid approach to melody. Clattering percussion, warped vocals, and synth lines that ricocheted like pinballs somehow coalesced into absurdly catchy hooks, while lyrically, Body Meat dug deep into themes of cultural displacement and existential tension, matching the frenetic production with verses of fragmented, confessional poetry.
It’s an album as indebted to the fractured rhythms of Oneohtrix Point Never as it is to the soulful R&B undercurrents of Prince, though it transcends comparison, teeming with a frenetic vitality all its own. Taylor may have built his career on deconstruction, but STARCHRIS marks a moment of bold worldbuilding. It’s not just Body Meat’s most cohesive and daring project to date; it’s a beacon for where experimental pop might go next. – Matt Young
47
Songs Of A Lost World by The Cure
After sixteen long years away, The Cure returned in 2024. That isn’t to say that they disappeared, more that they took time to master their craft, to reappear at the height of their powers when the world needed them the most. The goth rockers kept busy in the interim: they headlined Glastonbury in 2019; revised, remixed, and re-released a chunk of their back catalogue; and devoted ample time to crafting what would become another of their magnum opuses. Songs Of A Lost World was teased back in 2020, with Robert Smith stating that demos date back to 2010. This glacial movement was painful for fans, especially because it was never 100% confirmed that new Cure was on the way. However, when mysterious, unheard songs began populating live shows back in 2022, fans knew they were onto something.
Fast forward to 2024, and the miracle of The Cure’s fourteenth record graced our ears, and what a gracious offering it was. Anyone who has seen the band play live in the last decade will agree that they remain on top form: it’s noisy; it’s gloomy; and Robert Smith’s voice has never sounded better. It is a surreal moment when you hear that voice again on Songs Of A Lost World – his glorious howling, that signature yearning. It isn’t until halfway through “Alone” that Smith begins crooning, a sure-fire sign that The Cure have returned to the best versions of themselves. All of Lost World’s songs clock in at around the five-minute mark (not including the ten-minute closer!), indicative of the wonderful lethargy that the band are so great at conjuring and revelling in. This is also probably the band at their heaviest; “I Can Never Say Goodbye” features spectral tinkering on the piano, sounds of thunder rolling in, before a fat, buzzing bass booms its way through a gorgeous ode to Smith’s late brother. It is this juxtaposition of beauty and tragedy that has made the band so addictive for nearly half a century.
The Cure are a testament to growing with your art, refining it, and continuing to challenge yourself as you go. Robert Smith and co are clearly not going anywhere anytime soon, and Songs Of A Lost World is a triumph of the highest order. – Callum Foulds
46
Fine Art by Kneecap
Regardless of your background or knowledge, Fine Art saw Belfast hip hop trio Kneecap confirm that anyone can bond over a language... as long as the beats are sick enough. Embracing the themes of republicanism, sectarianism and politics, the trio's debut followed them on a night out – but an average night down the pub for these guys is more like a drug-fuelled, craic-laden trip that delves into love, loss, and a healthy deal of illegality to boot. Kneecap mixed their native Irish language with dirty beats, aided by the production chops of Toddla T, so that the trap beat-infused opener "3CAG" with its uilleann pipe introduction could raise St Patrick from his grave. Meanwhile, acting as a patriotic call to arms, "Parful" ensures that the party is not forgotten and the uniting force of music is celebrated. Powered by acid and DnB, the euphoric climax makes it perfect for any underground rave.
Kneecap are breaking new ground by combining controversial topics and music that would have been unheard of in the Northern Ireland of 30 years ago. Creating “fine art” in a community still navigating the consequences of the Troubles, the group have been faced with opposition and more than likely will be for years to come. But silence is not the way of the post-Good Friday Agreement children, and Kneecap’s debut is the first step of many into the uncharted territories of Irish language rap. – Sophia McDonald
Bandcamp | Spotify
45
Paradise Pop. 10 by Christian Lee Hutson
Talking to Best Fit for the release of Paradise Pop. 10 earlier this year, Christian Lee Hutson revealed some of the process behind his songwriting and the way in which he fleshes out characters: “Usually I’ll have a melody or music first and then, like, one lyric that is rattling around my brain, and then try to fill in around it and find out who the character is that is saying that.” It’s this approach to character building that brought Paradise to life. Instead of staying true to personal experience or sentiment, Hutson positioned the frivolity and absurdity of real life alongside indulgent storylines. Across the record, Hutson flipped phrases and set up conversations that he executed with perfectly subtle comedic timing. “Fishing for compliments and throwing some back,” he nodded on “Beauty School,” while on first single and album highlight “After Hours,” he snuck in a flawless Catherine O’Hara reference before lamenting, “Embarrassed in Paris to fuck on the terrace / Who cares? You said, ‘They do have rules here.’”
Unravelling over a backdrop of acoustic folk meets country rock, the lyrics are the album’s star. Hutson worked again with longtime collaborator Phoebe Bridgers, who co-produced the record with Marshall Vore and Joseph Lorge, and accordingly, there’s a subtle confidence to its sonics. Dynamic and broad, they leave space for Hutson’s stories to take centre stage, his strength as a songwriter continuing to expand. – Jen Long
Bandcamp | Spotify
44
Dunya by Mustafa
An accomplished and heartrending collection of songs, this debut from Canadian artist Mustafa – previously known as Mustafa the Poet – was one of the year’s most sentimentally rich and captivating releases. Mustafa Ahmed’s journey has been sadly steeped in loss, from his time in Toronto’s Regents Park housing project as a young teenage poet to songwriter for the likes of The Weeknd through to releasing his own music.
Having vowed to leave Toronto, Mustafa has travelled to cities around the world, writing and recording with the likes of The National's Aaron Dessner, Rosalía, Daniel Caesar, Clairo, and Nicholas Jaar. But Dunya doesn’t have the disjointedness of a feature-heavy collection of songs. Instead, you feel as though his collaborators are there to help platform his talent and message. The tracks are consistently in Mustafa’s voice, use a cohesive tone, and embrace a range of musical references from his past. On the compelling “Gaza is Calling,” Mustafa tells the story of a close friend from his childhood, the anecdote taking on a stark new meaning in today’s context. “SNL,” meanwhile, pays homage to his friends from Regents Park – Halal Gang – many of whom have died over the years. And on the somberly direct “Imaan,” he blends East African arrangements with American folk to create a narrative that is kaleidoscopic and dynamic.
Dunya is a quiet record, one that requires attention and thought, though it rewards over and again with its timeless soul and sweeping heart. – Jen Long
43
Sentir Que No Sabes by Mabe Fratti
As with all historical brushes with global pain and suffering, our collective emotional tone became muted and complex in 2024. While Central America's superstars launched syncopated grooves and rapping into the global consciousness, Mexico City-based Mabe Fratti took the underground route, her music matching that unifying, ambiguous, and all-too-pervasive bleakness.
Sentir Que No Sabes extended Fratti's recent run of avant-garde-come-classical-come-pop into its most menacing, downtrodden incarnation yet. It was beautiful in its defiance, showing us what you can discover after you've weathered layers of fuzz and an onslaught of drums more interested in beating down the listener than sticking to one time signature. Fratti’s angelic presence hovered above these complex, knotty instrumentals that siphoned noise into regal mood pieces. It’s pop as a time and place, in a year where neither should be returned to.
“Pantalla Azul,” a standout, was as melodic as the rest of the record was atonally unhinged, with heady, effortless cello lines gliding between shining arpeggios and Fratti holding the weight of living in an uncertain, misinformation-driven age. In this pit of ambiguity, she seems to imply that all we really needed in 2024 was to turn off the madness or to wait for it all to come crashing down. If either is accomplished in 2025, Sentir Que No Sabes was the beauty and the rapture of before. – Noah Barker
42
Viva Hinds by Hinds
After the double whammy of dropping their third record during the pandemic and then bassist Ade Martin and drummer Amber Grimbergen quitting the band a year later, Hinds' return was an unexpected high point for founding members Carlotta Cosials and Ana Perrote. Viva Hinds saw them link up with former Vaccines drummer Pete Robertson as producer (as well as Beck and Grain Chatten on two songs) for a survivors’ toast that played out across the band's catchiest work since their breakout debut. Rarely putting a foot wrong, its ten songs were a reset for the band, doubling down on their core messages of unity, sorority, and celebration. – Paul Bridgewater
41
Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild by Merce Lemon
Fitting effortlessly into 2024’s turn towards indie folk and Americana is Merce Lemon and her record Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild. Based in Pittsburgh, Lemon (who, yes, legally changed her last name to Lemon) produces a record fit for country summer evenings spent sitting out on the porch until way too late. It’s warm and naturalistic, taking a page out of the Lomelda playbook. From first play, expect to be enchanted by Lemon’s voice, endearing and textured, so much so that even the most daring imagery feels like an embrace. “This sounds like a song I barfed out in the drought / A love song for the rain,” Lemon croons, for example, on “Rain.” Or again, on “Birdseed,” Lemon sings: “There’s seeds between all of my teeth / I’ve been eating like the birds.” On Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild, Lemon spins vignettes like these into their highest form of poetry, anchoring them with masterful and rustic guitar arrangements. It makes for a record that is a welcome moment of calm in the busy rush of modern life. – Laura David
40
All Hell by Los Campesinos!
Returning after an unintentional seven-year hiatus, Los Campesinos!, the UK’s premier emo threat, continued to capitalise on the lore that grows around (and within) their music on one of their strongest records to date – a high water mark for the genre in 2024.
Despite their ever-expanding cult following, the band kept things in-house with All Hell, self-producing and self-releasing the record through their Heart Swells imprint. Removing deadlines set by an external label also removed the pressure to complete the album, allowing them the time and space to stay true to their creative vision. That sense of freedom, confidence, and camaraderie shines through the entire work. Composer and multi-instrumentalist Tom Bromley tinkers carefully with the songs' dynamics and construction, producing a rich, enthralling record whose sonics are as compelling as Kim Paisey’s intricate lyricism.
Tracks such as “A Psychic Wound” are full throttle, heart-on-sleeve crushes of emo guitars and nostalgic sentiment. “Do you still have that one tattoo? / That’s how it works, of course you do,” goes one of Paisey’s slyest punchlines. Meanwhile – and at the heart of the record – the epic work of collaborative synthesis “Clown Blood; or, Orpheus’ bobbing Head” is so deep in inference and wordplay that each listen reveals something new. With every line, buried sound, and audio clip, Los Campesinos! further weaved the lore that surrounds them and their music. All Hell is not just a career-defining record; it’s a future standard of the genre. – Jen Long
39
Gemelo by Angélica Garcia
Sung almost entirely in Spanish, the third album from Angélica Garcia – and her first for Partisan Records – was a glorious reset and re-introduction to an artist who took a massive risk creatively. The duality referenced in the record’s title was a neat device for song about self-discovery and re-connection, with a genre-crossing backdrop of electronic, cumbia, and pop, masterfully wielded by the 30-year-old LA-born Garcia and produced by Carlos Arévalo from Chicano Batman. Never thematically dense, Gemelo builds to a catharsis that was matched by its creator’s live shows – a masterclass in movement, vocal control, and sensuality. – Paul Bridgewater
38
Bird's Eye by Ravyn Lenae
Experimental, smooth, and lightweight, Bird’s Eye expands on Ravyn Lenae’s futuristic vision of R&B she mastered on 2022’s Hypnos. Her command of the genre allows her to truly explore, infusing the electrically diverse album with notes of indie rock, neo-psychedelia, and trip-hop alongside its more familiar terrain.
While emotionally turbulent cuts like “One Wish” and “Genius” lament the absence of a parent or the dissolution of a dead-end relationship, she’s more than happy to lay back in the grass and gaze up at the clouds on tracks like “Days” or “Pilot,” imagining herself languidly circling the sky. Lenae is confident, at ease, and her evocative yet uncomplicated writing leads to introspection and acceptance. “Me and myself got to talking,” she sings on the closing track, “Maybe I wasn’t the problem.” Clarity’s easier when you’re looking at everything from above. – Sam Franzini
37
Hex Dealer by Lip Critic
Hex Dealer, the debut album from digital hardcore anarchists Lip Critic, is a frenzied danse macabre for the end times. This year, the band crawled from the dark, sweaty dives of NYC – a beast of two warring drum kits and two sorcerous samplers, all presided over by frontman Bret Kaser, who takes on the character of a lurching, maniacal holy man. Its whiplash-inducing twelve tracks play out like a total power outage of God.
“It’s The Magic” begins with doomsday synths, deep in the dirt, before the drums begin their hellish forward charge – faster and faster and faster – as Kaser’s preacher drags you on a death drive. With the choir of squealing pigs on “Milky Max” and the chorale of voices warped to fearful extremes of “In the Wawa (Convinced I’m A God),” Hex Dealer is super-charged with curses. But within that, there are blessings. The album boasts outrageous floor-fillers including the drum’n’bass adjacent “Death Lurking” and the blissed-out “Toxin Dodger.” These are truly the sounds of the end times. – Sophie Leigh Walker
36
Here in the Pitch by Jessica Pratt
Jessica Pratt’s sound is truly singular. She zeroes in on something warming and wistful and yet spectral and ephemeral, straddling the threshold between the waking world and fantasy – making listeners feel like we've embodied Alice, poised on the riverbank before our trip into Wonderland.
This a sound the Californian singer-songwriter truly dialled into on 2019’s Quiet Signs. Stepping into the studio for the first time, she also stepped into a magnetic new world of her own creation. Pratt’s fourth album, Here In The Pitch, saw her luxuriate in that space, now with a full band in tow. The result is her most fully realised work, something far more expansive than its 27-minute runtime suggests.
Here In The Pitch feels like stumbling across the ghosts of a forgotten Laurel Canyon folk band playing in a cathedral, like a hazy transmission from the 1960s still wandering the airwaves. With atmospheric, often spartan arrangements and Pratt’s crystalline voice reverberating through the empty air, the record is underpinned by a beautiful fragility but also a comfort – one that, like all good dreams, eludes definitive interpretation and is all the more enchanting for it. – Chris Taylor
Bandcamp | Spotify
35
Red Mile by Crack Cloud
The third record by Canadian art-punk collective Crack Cloud evidences a band who have earned maturity, stability, and peace. Red Mile is an exploration of home not as a place but as an inescapable condition, created in the furthest extremities of Death Valley's space, silence, and lack.
Crack Cloud themselves are proof of survival in an inhospitable world, formed as a lifeline of recovery in the face of Vancouver’s opioid crisis. The group is a mutant orchestra, and their 2020 debut album Pain Olympics demonstrated that maximalism to earn the band enormous acclaim; frenetic post-punk, electronic hardcore, funk, and downright pop emerge in white-hot bursts, at once baroque and industrial.
But with Red Mile, their outward ferocity has been replaced with an intense introspection. Every sound has fought for the right to be there. Lyrically, frontman Zach Choy wrestles with the band’s past, their struggles relinquishing control of their narrative, and questions of their legacy. On “Epitaph,” it’s likened to pulling hair out of cement: “Why can’t I say what’s on my mind? / Why are the words so hard to find? / I have no mouth and I must scream / Tower of babel in my dreams.”
There is the orchestral grandiosity of “Blue Kite” and the amped-up rock and roll of “The Medium,” but incredible moments of minimalism and restraint too, as with “Lost On The Red Mile,” which allows questions like, "Who are we now, and who have we been?" the space to breathe. – Sophie Leigh Walker
34
Woodland by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings
Pandemic, war, rampant division, and extreme weather (a tornado nearly destroyed these artists' Nashville studio in 2020): the world has grown ever more volatile in the 13 years since Gillian Welch and David Rawlings last released an album of original material. The reemergence contemporary roots music's reigning champions – renowned for never fundamentally changing even as they have tweaked their two-guitars-and-harmonies presentation – offered some reassuring certainty at a time when unexpected developments were plentiful, and almost always negative.
Even better, the critical consensus correctly judged Woodland worthy to stand alongside past triumphs such as 2001’s Time (The Revelator). Throughout the album, the channelling of country and folk traditions through a contemporary filter felt even more judiciously refined, with sparser duo cuts happily coexisting with subtly soaring orchestrations. Rawlings, especially, sang better than ever, his high-pitched, plaintive tones injecting unfiltered feeling into “What We Had,” a stunning lament of curdled love, gliding on a tear-stained melody ready to puree hearts.
It would be a misnomer to describe this work – of musicians who teleport the listener to an indeterminate era somewhere between the 19th century and tomorrow – as explicitly political, but Woodland seemed to acknowledge certain distinctly topical brutalities: a "new kind of flu," a community ravaged by urgent need on “The Day Mississippi Died,” the protagonist of "Lawman" worrying about destructive acts by law enforcement. Reality crashed Woodland’s exquisitely sepia-tinged terrain most irresistibly on “Hashtag,” a monumentally moving tribute to late Texan songwriter Guy Clark that also reflected on the relentless grind of working musicians. – Janne Oinonen
33
This Could Be Texas by English Teacher
English Teacher’s mazy, moving alt-rock debut is a checkpoint of sorts. The last time the Mercury Prize chose to celebrate guitar music, it pedestalled Wolf Alice’s dreamy alt-grunge. In the six years since, heads have turned for expansive formalism (bands like Black Country, New Road), but eyes really settled on the kind of angsty post-punk that IDLES and Fontaines D.C. were peddling before their Y2K makeover. All of this has led us to the door of This Could Be Texas, which plays with those punk, rock, folk, and pop stylings of its contemporaries while managing to find a warmer centre. Indeed, amid frenetic electric breakdowns and slow, wandering piano, it feels like an invitation.
Stretching out the hand is lead singer Lily Fontaine, whose distinct sense of direction sews thread between every dissonant note and time signature jolt. At times she spits hard-edged spoken word – life is all cracked and spiralling in the bitter observations on “Broken Biscuits" – but elsewhere she sings in measured croons, with “Mastermind Specialism” lamenting a history of being caught in-between. There is an abstract sadness to the lyrics, but This Could Be Texas is a bright and vivid piece of work.
The satisfaction is all in the build. The Leeds quartet revel in episodes of frenzy, but release the tension in floating euphoria. Their arrival feels cemented on the closer, “Albert Road,” which bookends 50 minutes of angular guitar lines and frenetic drums with a rousing ballad. Fontaine’s jolted cries rise to a final scream, and we’re played out to a chorus of grand, rising instrumentation. The moment feels earned – a cohesive, homeward-bound conclusion to an album of sonic exploration. Much of their music is about not quite fitting in, but This Could Be Texas feels like a new pacemaker for English alt-rock. – Ben Faulkner
32
Lived Here For A While by Good Looks
A dynamic offering from one of the most hearty and exciting bands on the rise, Good Looks’ Lived Here For A While is a record that sticks true to form in the best way – a classic 21st century indie rock cooked just right. Brimming with relatable lonerisms, crises of faith, romantic blow-ups, and family dramas, Lived Here For A While addresses squarely today’s cultural climate while calling upon lighthearted Uncle Sam guitar fare fit for fans of Her’s and Peach Pit.
This is one of those albums that just has that thing. Frontman Tyler Jordan’s lyrics are like tragicomic confessions from a friend, his vocal tone smooth and warm to match. The riffs and melodies that ground the album are sufficiently catchy but never imposingly so. This is the Austin, Texas band’s confident return after a string of bad luck: a major accident for their lead guitarist and a blown-up tour van were no match for the stubborn good spirits of Good Looks, and on Lived Here For A While, we watch them get a well-deserved victory lap. – Laura David
31
SOPHIE by SOPHIE
This year, we heard the final offering from hyperpop’s pioneer. SOPHIE’s posthumous, self-titled record was more than just a sophomore LP. Much was at stake – for the artist, for her family and friends, and for the audiences who looked to her.
SOPHIE as an album was musically unexpected. At a private pre-release listening event earlier this year, reps from her label admitted – fondly – that upon first listen, they weren’t quite sure what to make of the project. With the album almost finished at the time of her death, SOPHIE’s brother Benny Long collected what was left and carried it over the finish line, reportedly staying as true to his later sister's wishes as possible. Much about the record was kept hush-hush, aside from a few lead singles, until its release this past September. While audiences were primed to expect a follow-up to her 2017 debut packed with weird but danceable hits akin to “Immaterial” and “Faceshopping,” SOPHIE took an even more abrupt gear change.
If this last work is any indication, she had little interest in producing more of the same. Rather, her true love was pushing her niche as far as it could go. SOPHIE is abstract and experimental, often sounding more like an electric orchestra than an easily digestible pop record. Tracks such as “Plunging Asymptote” and “The Dome’s Protection” are the record’s most extreme, winding soundscapes instead of structured “songs.” Of course, this is still SOPHIE. Offerings such as “Always and Forever" (feat. Hannah Diamond) and “Reason Why" (feat. Kim Petras and BC Kingdom) are cut from her old cloth, providing sweet melodic releases amid synthesiser hazes.
SOPHIE, ultimately, is a parting gift. Defying convention on one last stand, it is a map for the future of a burgeoning genre from the legend who helped rear it. – Laura David
Bandcamp | Spotify
30
TANGK by IDLES
Only a couple of years since their last album, IDLES returned in 2024 with TANGK, a record that represented a significant shift in both sound and approach. Having spent the previous decade building a reputation as the future of punk – unapologetically loud, brash, and socially charged – the band took a hard left after the critical and commercial success of their modern masterpieces, Joy as an Act of Resistance and Crawler. With TANGK, they recalibrated, presenting a softer, more introspective side than their earlier, relentless sound – helped in no small part by co-producer Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Pavement).
In addition to Godrich, the album was produced by Kenny Beats and guitarist Mark Bowen, and the band set out their stall immediately on the album’s opening track, “IDEA 01,” which opens with just a simple piano line. While songs like “Gift Horse” recalled the band’s aggressive roots, tracks like “Roy” and “A Gospel” leaned into more experimental, atmospheric territory. The play was clear: TANGK was not about playing to expectations. It was about subverting them.
TANGK was a bold statement made at the right time, showing that IDLES were no longer content to be this one-dimensional brute force but wanted to be considered true artists mentioned in the same breath as Radiohead and The National. As a result, TANGK is a defining and divisive record in their catalogue, one that reflects both their willingness to embrace change and bring their fans along with them. – Ross Horton
29
White Roses, My God by Alan Sparhawk
With the 2022 death of his spouse/collaborator Mimi Parker, Alan Sparhawk dissolved the legendary band Low. His 2024 solo album, White Roses, My God, though initially landing as a quirky departure from the duo’s refined templates, in many ways furthered Low’s essential vision, doubling down on the duo’s career-long tendency to juxtapose jadedness and innocent wonder, suffering and the possibility of redemption.
Consistently adept when it comes to volume dynamics, Sparhawk pivoted between subdued and louder segments on tracks such as “Can U Hear,” revelling in its enthralling riff and cleverly crafted melody. It's the kind of cut that could appease a drug-fuelled crowd swaying in a warehouse at 3am as much as middle schoolers staring at their socks during a disco in some small-town gymnasium. Throughout White Roses, My God, Sparhawk morphed his vocals with effects, creating slightly cartoonish tones that are otherwise offset by catchy riffs and grounding hooks.
The candidly titled “I Made This Beat,” for example, is built around a robotic vocal, a dancey pulse, and an irresistible melody. Although foregrounding a mischievous vibe, as the title phrase is repeated over and over, a palpable fatigue sets in like smoke creeping under a closed door. On “Get Still,” meanwhile, the singer sounds like a prankster who never strays far from the helium tank, and the hyper-innovative “Somebody Else’s Room” blends canonic pop, jagged accents, and lyrical ambiguities. Again, although the track relied on effects and sounds that were notably machine-generated, Sparhawk the human being was never overly dislocated. Indeed, as a member of Low and as a solo act, Sparhawk has always been ultimately anthro- rather than techno-centric, despite his frequent reliance on synthesizers and various programmatics.
Surviving the loss of his beloved wife and artistic partner, Sparhawk has undergone something of a reinvention journey. Hinting at a familiar dystopianism while remaining consistently playful, he conjured the joys, horrors, communality, and isolation of contemporary life on White Roses, My God, an album that reaffirmed his affinity for pop elements and sonic architecture, all the while striking a balance between high drama and Seussian whimsicality. – John Amen
28
Heavy Metal by Cameron Winter
The complicated birth of Geese frontman Cameron Winter’s debut album was both a self-described “inconvenience” and “pain in the ass” – and, by that same token, necessary. Heavy Metal captures a 22-year-old man barely old enough to legally drink in Brooklyn burdened with a voice that's heavy with a world-weariness, an unnameable loneliness that better befits a crooner slumped over a bar with experience for company. These songs channel Leonard Cohen’s solemnity with a beat poet’s hallucinations – animated by that voice, the one belonging to the lonely cowboy who made Geese so magnetic to begin with – in a way that makes obvious why they demand to exist in a project of their own.
It's an album torn between nihilism – a total loss of reason – and an acknowledgement of occasional beauty that makes you forget the rest, even for a moment. “$0” is a haunting piano ballad that swells into an exultant chorus of strings as Winter declares, raving like a street lunatic, “God is real God is real I’m not kidding God is actually real I’m not kidding this time I think God is actually for real…”
Winter has a gift of writing that damning lyric, that thing that gets under your skin (“Try as I may / To love what fits my hand / I don’t / I don’t…”), while also swinging the pendulum to the other side of absurdity as with “Nina + Field of Cops,” which sweats out Ginsberg-like ramblings like a raging fever. Whether it be in hymnal dignity or mania, Cameron Winter is in possession of a voice which knows and transcends it all. – Sophie Leigh Walker
27
The Hollow by Keeley Forsyth
Named after a mysterious mineshaft discovered while out walking, The Hollow contains within its dozen songs appropriately inky depths that roil and swarm with a veiled and rayless dread. Light-years removed from the mainstream cultural conversation, Keeley Forsyth’s third album in four years was both her most immediate and most daring yet, razoring down to the bloody marrow with allusions to violence, grief, and sinister interior scenes that, once absorbed, proved impossible to shake. From the beseeching title track to the domestic claustrophobia of “Horse” and riveting performance art of “A Shift,” Forsyth commands her songs through windswept moors and minefields of invisible forces, trusting that their fundaments will hold.
A gutsy and instinctual composer, with an actor’s ear for detail, Forsyth trades in a brutal kind of beauty – an “anti-sounding nice,” as she put it in an interview with Best Fit – capable of wringing out the essential rawness of each phrase and motif, allowing it to gush through the reeds of her complex and extraordinary vibrato. Charged with folk horror imagery and austere, dark ambient washes, The Hollow offered little respite from the increasingly polarised and war-torn world outside. What it offered instead was a vessel for emotions in flux, a sort of bardo state for the reeling: “a place to be swallowed by, but also to emerge from.” – Alan Pedder
26
Romanticism by Hana Vu
Los Angeles songwriter Hana Vu’s second full-length is a heartfelt ode to that particular kind of grief that emerges as you pass from youth into adulthood and realise what you’ve left behind. Romanticism comes filled with warmly glowing realisations and tuneful resignations all soundtracked by endearing, intelligent indie pop. 2024 has often felt like an endless barrage of anxiety, but within this darkness there still resides a generation experiencing evergreen feelings. Romanticism, then, is a perfect encapsulation of the youthful worries and concerns that plague us all, from rose-tinted reflections to near-past nostalgia, and the troubles of the world be damned. Vu’s ability to craft familiarity from the mundane alongside an array of lethally melodic sounds makes for an album more than deserving of its place among the year’s best. – Steven Loftin
25
Patterns in Repeat by Laura Marling
Laura Marling’s previous record, 2020’s Songs for Our Daughter, was something of a prophecy: she wrote for an imaginary child that became real only after the completion of the record. Her latest effort, this year's Patterns in Repeat, is the answer to the question of motherhood posed in Songs for Our Daughter, its reality spun into poetry by Marling’s expert hand. Where her writing has always maintained an edge of uncertainty and questioning, this record is decidedly content, the work of a veteran artist entering a new chapter in her career.
Marling launched a Substack newsletter just before the release of the album; she writes in the first issue, “Songwriting has been more than just my job or my art, it has been a vital part of how I have moved through life.” Marling certainly seems to embody her songs, as they embody her – her identity as an artist just as integral as her identity as mother. During the album’s title track, Marling references a melodic motif that has cropped up in her work since 2013's Once I Was An Eagle, as if provoking the very theme of the album title and cover imagery, drawing her entire life and career in towards herself – concentric as opposed to linear. Where this motif appears, she sings: “I want you to know I gave it up willingly / Nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me." Here, Marling addresses her daughter directly, as if anticipating her own questioning about motherhood – a pattern in repeat. – Amaya Lin
24
hella (˃╭̣ ╮˂̣)✧♡‧o· ̊. by 1999 Write The Future
Ironically, 1999 Write the Future reflects current trends in the music industry. Technically speaking, this isn't an artist or band but a "project" associated with a hybrid label that mostly represents Asian Americans. As an older millennial whose sensibility was informed by Rolling Stone's OG list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, naturally, I was dying to dismiss hella (˃╭̣ ╮˂̣)✧♡‧o· ̊ if only for embracing Gen-Z's disrespect for punctuation. But the passion behind this project was so obvious that it earned the approval of elder statesmen from rap's golden, bling-and-backpack eras.
88Rising mogul Sean Miyashiro manages to compress roughly 25 years of hip-hop culture into hella (˃╭̣ ╮˂̣)✧♡‧o· ̊ . Jazz-rap serves as its native tongue, and while the shout-outs to Bay Area tastemakers keep up with rap's regional renaissance, the small army of producers sample the entire globe, from afrobeat to nü-gaze and K-pop. (Granted, blurring the lines between so many genres is commonplace nowadays.) 1999 Write the Future recalls many familiar comforts, but the nostalgia only reminds us of everything we stand to lose in the face of our increasingly uncertain present.
"So young, but living like this world's ending next week," Rich Brian rap-sings over the gooey G-funk of "avOcadO SHakE૮꒰ ˶• ༝ •˶꒱ა \̅_̅/." "I wonder if that girl gon' kiss me next week." As the twinkle in his eye stirs the beat into a cosmic soul fusion, we catch a glimpse in time that never existed until now. – Will Yarbrough
23
Letter to Self by Sprints
Irish quartet Sprints have spent the best part of this year solidifying their spot in the post-punk landscape. Released early in January, their debut album Letter To Self set the scene for a year that would find them hitting the road hard, as well as spreading the heartfelt and hard-won sermons of vocalist and guitarist Karla Chubb. With its fighting tension and wistfully romantic turns, spilling of guts and soul baring demeanour, Letter To Self is an expertly executed debut that explores every avenue the four-piece have to offer, from the howling and barrelling (“Adore Me,” “A Wreck, A Mess”) to the deftly driven and dynamic (“Shaking Their Hands,” “Heavy”). Who knows where Sprints will head next, but if this year is anything to go by, we’re in for a serious treat. – Steven Loftin
22
Blue Lips by ScHoolboy Q
The five years that elapsed between 2019’s Crash Talk and this year’s Blue Lips contained a lot of growth for ScHoolboy Q. The TopDawg Entertainment staple reckoned with – and wound up embracing – grief, sobriety, success, and fatherhood, and Blue Lips is the culmination of this period. Cementing Q as a vital voice in West Coast gangster rap, Blue Lips is when he enters his prodigious phase, connecting the dots with a sonic palette that ruptures with bombast (“Pop”) as much as it smoothly transitions into elegant jazz (“Blueslides”) and offers more biographical fare to give fans insight into the many lives Q has lived (“Germany ’86”). Lead single “Yeern 101” is the standout moment, though, proving Q is still packing lyrical heat with an unrelenting flow, and in a year that’s seen label-mates and peers release their own critically acclaimed albums (in fairly quick succession, too), ScHoolboy Q’s place in the hip-hop conversation shouldn’t be understated. – Steven Loftin
21
Alligator Bites Never Heal by Doechii
Doechii’s debut mixtape fits nicely in the 2024 well of meme-meets-creation, as the internet vicariously takes over our lives more and more with each passing day. After breaking through the noise with a 2021 viral moment and a track to boot (2023’s Kodak Black-featuring “What It Is”) – and eventually signing with Top Dawg Entertainment to become their first female rapper – Doechii offers a statement of intent with her debut, bringing together her entire story so far under one roof. Alligator Bites Never Heal is a wild, wicked, and downright unwieldy mixtape from the Floridian breakout star. With the album arriving in a year in which she also featured on Tyler, The Creator’s CHROMAKOPIA, Doechii’s ascension feels most notable because it looks like there’s still plenty of runway left for the rapper to expand her scintillating approach. – Steven Loftin
20
Tigers Blood by Waxahatchee
On Tigers Blood, Waxahatchee’s transformation seems just about complete. After honing the scruffier grunge sound of her early records into a unique brand of Americana with 2020’s Saint Cloud, Katie Crutchfield sticks the landing with her latest record. Written with a sharp pen and then finessed into indie twang bliss, the album has Brad Cook back on board as producer, and MJ Lenderman also crops up across its tracks – Waxahatchee’s typological sibling and fellow Americana star of the year.
While Cook and Crutchfield set out to make something epic after the success of Saint Cloud, their breakthrough came in realizing musical continuity could be just as powerful as change. A jam session with Lenderman helped the pair get back to basics and shake off the allure of mainstream pop-in-the-box grandeur in favour of organic, in-the-room live energy. Basic acoustic guitars, minor electric embellishments, and no-fuss vocals were all Crutchfield needed to shine this brightly.
Crutchfield has said that her relationship with Cook is “90% us just talking,” and the proof is in the album. Genius turns of phrase such as “you play the villain like a violin” and “my life’s been mapped out to a tee / but I’m always a little lost” show Crutchfield’s mastery of language. She’s one of those rare artists who both has something to say and can find the perfect way to say it.
Tigers Blood is, simply put, a delight. It’s a creature comfort sonically while also being a literary treasure hunt. It keeps you on your toes, but it also helps you find your way back home. – Laura David
19
CHROMAKOPIA by Tyler, the Creator
For a while, it felt like hip hop was going to go a whole year without any real blockbuster albums. But then October rolled around and we were invited to the ceremonial gut-spilling of one of the genre’s contemporary visionaries. Tyler, the Creator's seventh outing is more diaristic than he’s ever been. Although masking plays a prominent role, particularly on the artwork, CHROMAKOPIA is a grand unveiling (contrary to my initial conclusion upon release). It’s a fully fleshed-out realisation of his background and all the inner workings that constitute the artist known as Tyler, the Creator. It’s stylistically fluid, and sonically gorgeous, trading bombast and jazz flourishes back and forth. The vulnerability is completely taken in stride, without any approximations of questionable motifs. His life is on the table for this.
Even the album's rollout was indicative of an artist taking back their life. As Tyler has mentioned previously, releasing an album on a Monday (as opposed to the usual Friday) means that the average fan can listen during their commute, and thus bring the artist into their lives. Plus, the album was announced a mere two weeks beforehand, with a physical release dropping the same day as release – which traded (down) Schoolboy Q for Playboi Carti – as well as a worldwide sell-out tour.
A lot of this year's discourse has pertained to the idea of hip hop’s Big Three; the fact that Tyler, the Creator’s name isn’t employed in terms of GOAT status yet is diabolical. CHROMAKOPIA proves that he has the creative and socially conscious mind (“Hey Jane” refers to an online abortion website of same name), that he has the swing, that he will consistently hit conceptual home runs and is, like it or not, a true GOAT. – Steven Loftin
18
My Method Actor by Nilüfer Yanya
2024 was a real good year for British acts making grey-hued albums. Some, like High Vis' Guided Tour, were commanding and austere; others, such as My Method Actor by Nilüfer Yanya, beguiled us with their lush, after-dark gloom – the two interpretations of life in modern-day Britain (it’s grey either way).
Yanya referred to this, her third album, as a transitional one, while numerous others suggested the exact opposite: it’s the London songwriter locking into her own voice, demarcating her comfort zone. Perhaps none of the second-and-third-album tropes are applicable to My Method Actor. Or maybe all of them are. “I feel like what drives me is that the answers are found in the process,” Yanya says. In other words, she hasn’t settled, and she isn’t flailing around looking for answers either. Even when she’s literally looking backwards, as on the cover art, something serendipitous en route – in this case a mirror, but the ‘process’ more generally, if we're sticking with that metaphor – intervenes to divert her gaze.
Working again with PAINLESS (2022) collaborator Will Archer, Yanya sounds more in control and at ease than on that previous record, whose hackles have been smoothed down by treacly synths like those on the electro-lounge cut "Wingspan." There are also fewer of those clawing, staccato guitar parts that characterised PAINLESS – though the waves of roaring, Siamese Dream-esque distortion on “Like I Say (I runaway)” will dispel claims of her completely toning things down. All that's by the by, really: the main draw was and always will be Yanya's velveteen vocals and the way in which her lyrics jumble up ruminations on relationships and identity into beautiful, lightly cryptic poetry, as confidential as waxing nostalgic in the back of a taxi while blurs of neon whizz past.
In a year that saw traditionally ‘rock’ festivals continuing to grapple with existential questions, pinching headliners from elsewhere (see Primavera, Reading), Yanya is the kind of artist that bodes extremely well for the future of main-stage guitar music – she's got the voice, the aesthetic, and the songs needed to be a top-billed act, a lodestar to remind us all to make the most of our dreary, grey, middle-English lives. – Hayden Merrick
17
Night Reign by Arooj Aftab
Having become the first Pakistani artist to win a Grammy with 2021’s Vulture Prince – her exquisitely sung, played, and self-produced third album – Arooj Aftab had everyone's eyes and ears fixed her way as we waited to see what she would do next. That turned out to be last year’s Love in Exile, her potent live-off-the-floor collaboration with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily, but it was Night Reign that returned us to Aftab’s own visionary shadow play. Once again proving her to be a master of minimalist architecture, raising glittering obsidian palaces of song from elements that often feel almost vaporous, Night Reign made restraint feel like a superpower.
When Aftab’s compositions did gather force – as on the spellbinding “Raat Ki Rani” and the Moor Mother-featuring “Bolo Na” – the effect was more tidal pull than shove. Night Reign constantly tugs at the corners of absence and the black-laced hem of longing. It’s there in her recasting of the well-trodden jazz standard “Autumn Leaves” as a wracked prayer of possession, and in “Last Night Reprise,” heating the Vulture Prince track (based on a text by the mystic poet Rumi) into something closer to its live form, compulsively wilder and more thrilling at heart.
Still, if Night Reign’s familiar elements acted as portals through which to enter Aftab’s perfumed eveningland, it was its more expansive moments – the playful “Raat Ki Rani,” the raw infatuation of “Whiskey” – that confidently shed some of her own layers. “I think I’m ready to give into your beauty and let you fall in love with me,” she sings, letting her guard fall and go up in city smoke or crumble into sand, as if to say, yes, there is a crack in everything. That’s how the tide gets in. – Alan Pedder
16
Lives Outgrown by Beth Gibbons
Beth Gibbons’ Lives Outgrown arrived almost halfway through 2024, wrapped in the same reticence that had shadowed her throughout her career. The album’s first single, “Floating On A Moment,” foregrounded her wonderfully expressive voice, while the lyrics appeared characteristically obtuse. As the song's enveloping psychedelia faded to silence, anticipation intensified – we wanted more.
Lives Outgrown, as we soon learned, is a haunting collection of compositions from the former Portishead frontwoman – her most personal work yet. Stripping away the layered trip-hop production that defined her early career and the jazzier edges of her Rustin Man collaboration, Gibbons presents a stark, acoustic vulnerability that feels both timeless and painfully topical. At the same time, she makes room for pacier cuts, such as the frantic single “Reaching Out,” taut with energy and showing us a liberated, free-sounding singer.
Lyrically, Gibbons grapples with the weight of time and disconnection, themes that resonate more acutely in a post-pandemic society. Motherhood and mortality also feature heavily, and tracks such as “Burden of Life,” “Rewind,” and “Lost Changes” are steeped in melancholia, Gibbons' iconic voice – part ghostly wisp, part piercing lament – laying bare a rawness rarely heard in her catalogue. Her meditations on aging, loss, and resilience unfurl with devastating precision, carrying echoes of her past work while carving out this new, more intimate path, and sparse arrangements underscore this lyrical and emotional gravity, placing her voice firmly at the centre.
Unsurprisingly, Lives Outgrown garnered acclaim, not just as a rare release from a beloved and accomplished artist, but also because it mirrors our increasingly fragmented world, with critics and fans alike embracing its quiet bravery. For an artist who has spent decades mastering the art of the ethereal, Lives Outgrown proved, for any doubters at least, that Gibbons' power lay in her ability to distil complexity into the achingly simple. – Matt Young
15
You Won't Go Before You're Supposed To by Knocked Loose
Heavy music’s moment comes and goes, comes and then goes again – but deepening into their pit of metal-infused hardcore, Knocked Loose have broken ground for a new generation. The Kentucky quintet’s third album, You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To, is perfectly befitting an increasingly fractious world, the underlying violence of its guttural screams throwing us into the void at top speed. It’s all or nothing, and Knocked Loose have dumped it all into the furnace and spun the gas tap. Welcoming experimental singer Poppy – whose CV is filled with her own dalliances with metalcore and heavier genres – for the Grammy nominated single “Suffocate,” You Won’t Go is a total unloading of the Knocked Loose arsenal, razing the musical landscape to the ground and daring the world to piss on its remains.
2024 is also the year Knocked Loose became the heaviest live band to play Jimmy Kimmel Live! (at least the first to throat-squeal, anyway), a performance so deliciously anti-viewer it apparently made young viewers cry. In a predominantly heartfelt response to the viral clip of their performance, vocalist Bryan Garris succinctly summed up the nature of Knocked Loose: “P.S. if it scared you, good.” As You Won't Go confirms, the band's place among heavy music legendary is all but secured. That is if they haven’t set the whole thing alight before then. – Steven Loftin
14
C,XOXO by Camila Cabello
Here’s the opening scene: it’s blue hour in the 305, early morning. The Floridian sun begins its first, lazy stretch; the dreamy hued shoreline of Miami Beach is awarded to the girls who stay up late enough to watch it. Bottle-blonde hair with dark roots sticks to glossed lips, and stilettos are swapped for chancletas as the Collins Avenue clubs empty out. Reggaetón and Latin rhythms collide with shocks of EDM by night, and the beats of Denzel Curry and Kodak Black walk you home. There’s the party, the laughter, and idle afternoons indulging girlhood rituals – but then there’s the hangover, too. Another summer night’s end closer to womanhood.
I can see it all so clearly because Camila Cabello, for the first time in her career, is a writer. C,XOXO is her fourth record, but in many ways, it marks a pop star’s introduction and a whiplash-inducing departure from everything you’ve come to expect. It’s more than deep-fried peroxide as an attempt at reinvention; more – though her detractors would have you believe otherwise – than a Charli XCX manqué. Armed only with executive producer El Guincho, the architect behind sonic left-turns including FKA Twigs’ Caprisongs and Rosalía’s Motomami, and Jasper Harris – whose fingerprints can be found on the works of Kendrick Lamar, Jack Harlow and Post Malone – C,XOXO is one part Miami art piece, one part homage to the pop culture of the ‘10s that raised her. This all makes it a record which is – as Camila Cabello herself told us with pride – “weird."
“I LUV IT” is a nosebleed-triggering collision between a pummelling Jersey Club beat and a mutant orchestra in the vein of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The synths are hungover, electrically charged but running low, belonging to an imagined rescoring of Harmony Korine’s Springbreakers. “Chanel No. 5,” an out-of-tune piano ballad distorted through a hip-hop lens, carries a startling elegance. At every turn, C,XOXO is a risk – and that is more than many pop records could claim to be this year.
There are interludes which speak to Cabello’s cinematic ambition for the project, and it boasts some of the most well-crafted ballads of her career. “B.O.A.T” captures the melody of Pitbull’s “Hotel Room Service” and reimagines it into a shimmering, distant synth that plays out like some far away memory of girlhood. C,XOXO (Magic City Edition) only expands the possibilities of style and storytelling that Camila Cabello explores to dazzling effect. – Sophie Leigh Walker
13
Odyssey by Nubya Garcia
The debut full-length from Camden Town’s most explorative musician feels like both an inward exploration and a reckoning with the world around her. It’s the sound of Nubya Garcia, the British-Caribbean saxophonist, coming into her own while reflecting on the socio-political currents shaping her country. A profound meditation on identity, movement, and resilience, Odyssey manages to push boundaries while staying deeply grounded in the jazz tradition. It’s as much about the personal as it is about the collective – a sonic odyssey that takes us to places familiar and foreign without any of modern jazz's self-gratifying clichés.
We listen to avant-garde jazz and confidently tell ourselves 'this is what music is all about, man.' But once we hear the sound of an 808 or airy vocal, all that hubris goes out the window. Odyssey feels like it's going to survive the years, to stick its roots in – an album that deserves proper attention and will be here waiting whenever you need reminding.
What’s most striking about Odyssey is how Garcia manages to weave a sense of narrative into her compositions. Tracks like "The Seer" and “Clarity" offer lush, expansive soundscapes that are more like storytelling than performance. There’s a tension between intimacy and grandeur here – moments of deep reflection give way to euphoric bursts of energy, drawing from the same volatile mix of vulnerability and resolve that defines the times we’re living through.
In a moment when jazz’s role as a site of political and social engagement is finding its feet again, winning awards, and inserting itself back into the conversation, Garcia's Odyssey nails itself to the picket line. – Max Gayler
12
Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay
We can all agree that the best kind of pop transports you to another world. Magdalena Bay’s second outing removes you from this universe entirely. The galaxy that inhabits Imaginal Disk is landscaped by melodiously transcendent tunes that twist and turn and re-establish the Miami duo’s resplendent knack for composition and world-building.
2024 was a year in which pop entered a phase of unknown certainty – in the best way possible. The array of talent has never been wider; between the traditional starlets (Sabrina Carpenter) and the vibrant outliers (Chappell Roan, Charli xcx), Magdalena Bay’s place in the alt-pop sphere, orbiting these behemoths, sparkles with just as much ambition and alluring curiosity.
Imaginal Disk is an entry in the greater canon that befits the escapism we all desperately need. Exploring every nook and cranny of their creative minds, from the saccharine (“Death & Romance”) to the weird and wonderful (“That’s My Floor”), Magdalena Bay achieve all of this while pulling apart and reassembling a conveyor belt of epic pop cuts over the course of Imaginal's runtime. The album is a reminder of how fun, shiny, and brash music can be without sacrificing artistry, all the while allowing a burgeoning duo to stake their claim within the hierarchy of alt-pop upstarts. – Steven Loftin
11
Romance by Fontaines D.C.
Fontaines D.C. have come a long way from their days as rough-edged punks on the fringes. In fact, Romance, their latest, saw the band trade in their scrappiest impulses for a vision far broader, bolder, and more self-assured. Not quite a departure, Romance is more like a natural progression – a record that channels the band’s trademark intensity into something expansive yet refined. Where their last effort, Skinty Fia, burrowed deep with shadowy introspection, Romance opens outward, pulling in Britpop shimmer, art-pop ambition, and indie warmth while holding onto the wiry urgency that has made them one of the most thrilling acts around.
For a band at this stage, the temptation to play it safe or overextend is real, yet Fontaines deftly avoid both. Romance isn’t about reinvention but about deepening their identity – it’s both the picture and sound of a band growing into themselves. Tracks such as “Here’s The Thing” and “Bug” bristle with that familiar grit, but it’s in their moments of restraint where they find new depth. On “Favorite” and “In the Modern World,” they slow down without losing momentum, pairing naked honesty with melodies that feel lived-in, even comforting. Optimism emerges into frame – not as naive hope, but as something earned through experience, bruised yet resolute.
Fontaines D.C. aren’t chasing hits or trying to rehash the past; they’re confidently building something distinctly their own. Romance isn’t a reinvention – it's a reckoning and statement of intent from a band no longer content to rely on chaos or unbridled energy of the moment alone. Their sharp edges may have softened, but they’ve stretched their sound, and thankfully, the punch still remains. – Kyle Kohner
10
Psykos by Yung Lean and Bladee
When Yung Lean and Bladee come together, they create a haunting, irreplicable kind of magic. For the past decade, the two have transformed the underground and revolutionised the possibilities of what rap music can be through a warped, anchorless lens. With an unwavering devotion to their own vision, and a complete disregard for the music industry’s conventions by spontaneously releasing several projects a year without warning, these childhood friends have become punk icons armed with the kind of adoration reserved only for pop stars.
United, the Swedish rappers create sounds which carry a strange, glacial quality closer to the likes of Joy Division than their obvious peers. Psykos, for that reason, earns the paradox of being the pair’s most natural experiment to date. The eight-track project is a love letter to post-punk, built with a sense of grandeur which is almost Sistine.
For Lean, it’s the latest tryst in a love affair: the inky, motorik guitars of “Golden God” evoke the Soviet post-punk sample he used in 2022’s FKA Twigs-assisted “Bliss,” and the pummelling hail of drums on “Enemy” befit his alter ego project Död Mark. To see those instincts explored in fullness is just another wonder offered up from his unending imagination.
It's a sound which brings the existential bleakness of their lyrics into sharp relief, but Psykos is nevertheless flooded with light. Backed with acoustic guitars on the duet “Things Happen,” Bladee’s unorthodox vocals take on a gravity that is near-religious; when Yung Lean sings, he evokes a deep ache that exists someplace beyond words. Maturity, reinvention and a profound sense of dignity, are the project’s hard-earned merits. – Sophie Leigh Walker
9
GNX by Kendrick Lamar
When you’re already one of the biggest rappers in the game, it’s quite a feat to storm even further ahead of the herd, to ascend to an entirely new plain where you stand alone. That’s what Kendrick Lamar did with GNX, an album less conceptual and thematic than what we’re used to. Instead, Lamar chose to double-down on the West Coast pride he’s been peddling ever since wiping the floor with Drake during their beef earlier this year. This period culminated in The Pop Out: Ken & Friends, a one-off concert that unified an array of LA factions, and GNX is the version of that we can all partake in – a way to be privy to the future of hip hop, the one that Lamar is stealing from generics and the apathetic masses that have diluted his beloved lifestyle.
It’s clear how this album sets him up for next year’s Super Bowl: GNX is a unifying, party-heavy album that reaches back to his nefariously fun diss tracks from May. It doesn’t need to retread old ground, and allows the icon to stand on his own merit, rather than having to drag the figurative shit on his shoe up onto that hallowed stage. 2024 is all Lamar’s. Taylor Swift may have the zeitgeist, but Lamar has the future. – Steven Loftin
8
Brat by Charli xcx
That some of the year's biggest records dealt with the confessional is very telling of 2024 – and Brat did nothing to turn back the hyper-specificity of identity pop. With a Venn-diagram extended universe that pulled Taylor, Lorde, Boygenius, PC music, and The 1975 into the mix, the record’s just-living-that-life-and-you're-obsessed-with-me-and-I-love-it veneer was a trojan horse for songs that were among the most revealing ever penned by Charlotte Aitchison.
Setting obnoxious and lyrically clumsy notes-app soundbites over a turbo-charged version of her 2016-era paid off way better than anyone could ever have imagined. Brat gave us a flipside to Tortured Poets – a 90 degree lean into the ugliness of friendship and growing older set against the messy canvas of fame and accountability. It was tender, silly, escapist, and beautifully self-referential. No record this year matched what she achieved in terms of fun and sheer spectacle.
Did it level up pop? Probably not, but if nothing else Aitchison brought the edge back to a genre that’s become more circus than substance, flicking cigarette ash on the pop pageantry of Sabrina and Chappell along the way. Capitalism may very well be its legacy, with 25 vinyl variants to date and the xcx machine working its way full steam into 2025, Brat summer ain’t over yet. – Paul Bridgewater
7
Two Star & The Dream Police by Mk.gee
Nobody knows what to make of Mk.gee. Under an unruly mop of hair and ripped up t-shirts is Michael Gordon, the man behind one of this year’s most surprising breakout hits, Two Star & The Dream Police. Long established as an artist’s artist, Gordon was mostly known either by industry insiders or by indie diehards curious enough to investigate the man popping up across the production credits of iconic albums such as Apolonio and Absolutely. But with Two Star – not the official Mk.gee debut, though it might well be – Gordon was whisked into the dizzying sphere of proper stardom.
Now, Gordon’s following has ballooned into a crop of devotees who hang on his every Mk.gee-ism. Audiences at his live shows have come to expect repeat playthroughs of “Candy,” Two Star’s epic singalong, and fans scream for every flyaway eagle noise that floats disjointedly atop his mixes.
Two Star & The Dream Police feels like both the prodigal return of guitar music and also something refreshingly, entirely new. Eric Clapton said of discovering Mk.gee that he was someone who had “found things to do on the guitar that are like nobody else.” Listening to Two Star is one of those back-to-the-future experiences. It references 80s pop-rock icons such as The Police, Prince, and Michael Jackson, sounding like a distant cousin of the Top Gun soundtrack. The breakdown of “I Want” sounds like revving an IROC-Z outside an American strip mall in 1988 while wearing an oversized, neon ski coat. Critics make these comparisons with a sneer, but believers see the genius. After all, while Mk.gee borrows from this bygone era, he also transcends it.
Mk.gee’s riffs are so fizzy, faded, and chorused that they sound like alien sounds being beamed down to earth. His beats are subterranean, none more than standouts “Rylee & I” and “Breakthespell.” His vocals crack and clip, often ascending to effortless shrieks. And yet, alongside the experimental production sits genuine singalong, earworm melodies. You can’t help but hum “Alesis” or “Are You Looking Up” over and over. Still, if Mk.gee is an Internet-era guitar hero, then he’s an anti-hero at heart. “Every now and every then you hit a new low,” the record opens. Here is the real Mk.gee – self-deprecating, the butt of his own joke.
Guitar music is back, and, if Two Star’s mainstream success is any indication, we owe Mk.gee a thank you. – Laura David
6
Endlessness by Nala Sinephro
With an ensemble that includes Camden’s stalwart saxophonist Nubya Garcia alongside members of black midi, Kokoroko, Sons of Kemet, and the Ezra Collective, Belgian composer Nala Sinephro assembled a kind of modern-jazz Avengers for her second album, one that would make Irving Townsend blush. Instead of showing off this mass of talent by having her players rip scene-stealing solos however, Sinephro (now a Londoner herself) does something far more captivating: she folds each of her coterie's numerous talents, as well as her own pedal harp, piano, synthesisers, drums – the lot – into a single continuum. Endlessness is one 45 minute-song, based around a single trilling arpeggiator, embracing all of its various components into a shimmering, undulating whole.
Even jazz albums tend to have with their highlights – the songs and solos you return to the most – but that’s not the case with Endlessness. Sinephro’s album is a single piece of music, to be experienced as a whole. Its ten tracks, named simply by numbers, are not even distinguishable by clear changes of tone. Is that the one with the drums? Is that the one with the trumpet? Well, yes and no. Often poised and non-imposing, certain instruments flutter in and out of the piece like drifting clouds. One minute you’re being treated to gushing strings and a low, humming voice ("Continuum 4"); the next a saxophone is wrapping around a stabbing arpeggiator like ivy round a trellis and you’re not really sure how you got there. That’s this album’s magic trick: coaxing all of it’s disparate parts into a stretch of music that throbs and reshapes before your very eyes (and ears), sometimes quickening the pulse, other times soothing it. The result is all-consuming music capable of leaving a warm, soporific mark upon your day. – Liam Inscoe-Jones
5
I Got Heaven by Mannequin Pussy
Despite forming in 2010 and making only little ripples in the hardcore scene until 2019’s Patience, Mannequin Pussy went supernova with this year's I Got Heaven – their fourth (and best) album. They found themselves getting frequent plays, features, and mentions across the full range of indie tastemaker sources; found themselves being played regularly on Iggy Pop’s Sunday radio show… They also found time to record a fiery KEXP session and even dented the UK Album Charts. Pitchfork compared them to Belly and Stereogum compared them to Patti Smith (both valid comparisons), but the true wonder of I Got Heaven is that despite all the fuss, it remains a fresh experience no matter how many times you play it, the particularly potent blend of punk, shoegaze, hardcore and indie balancing aggression with tenderness, passion with ennui – often within the same song.
I Got Heaven contains at least three tracks that could be considered among the best songs released this year in “Loud Bark,” “I Got Heaven,” and “I Don't Know You,” but what truly sets the album apart is its fearless exploration of themes of sexuality, gender, and mental health. Missy Dabice’s lyrics are both brutally honest and deeply poetic (without trying to sound trite), which is entirely in keeping with her consistent use of juxtapositions throughout her music.
In a year where the world feels increasingly chaotic, I Got Heaven offered a much-needed respite, but only in the sense that a rage room or paintballing offers relaxation through catharsis. It’s a reminder that music has the power to heal, to inspire, and to provoke (Jesus Christ is going to eat your what, exactly?). Mannequin Pussy’s first masterpiece is a must-listen for anyone seeking authenticity, innovation, and sheer sonic brilliance in 2024. Which might, you know, include you. – Ross Horton
Bandcamp | Spotify
4
Your Day Will Come by Chanel Beads
The debut album of Shane Lavers moves like a spirit observing New York City on high, some lonely satellite floating in the ether. Though it begins “Dedicated To The World,” it lives in someplace decidedly beyond it. Grief, fear, and courage are signals to be tuned into – and, for a moment, their messages are striking clear – before corrupting and transforming, stations lost to static. Listening to Your Day Will Come is the furthest thing from an introduction, but rather half-remembering something long forgotten.
Chanel Beads has been the fascination of Brooklyn since his vague emergence in 2018: a project which flourished in parties, warehouses, and the dark. “Beautiful, shitty” – these are the two descriptors which guided Lavers as he brought the record to life. Though he is fortified by his partner Maya McGrory, whose vocals flood the hypnagogic “Idea June” with light, along with close friend Zachary Schwartz’s violin, which is warped to droning extremes on “Coffee Culture” – the vision, however indefinable, is entirely his own.
Sometimes, he nearly screams. “Embarrassed Dog” begins in a haze: vaporous synths, suckerpunch drum samples, and stumbling guitars. His incantations build to a kind of catharsis that is almost hardcore in spirit: “I was just a child, peace symbol on your grave / Reckoning the past moves closer every day...” Other times, he raps in impressionistic sketches: his narcotised vocals join a strange chorus on defining hit, “Police Scanner,” It’s a constantly shifting, near-collapsing thing.
What’s unspoken cuts deeper still. The record’s emptiness, the hollows where Chanel Beads’ collage of sounds seem to pool, communicates something just as loudly. What that ‘something’ could be is held up to us like a mirror. In an era of popular culture where the instinct is to confess, Lavers obscures; we work harder to draw our conclusions, and in that there is greater reward. The artwork for Your Day Will Come is a cropped, greyscale edit of a 20th-century oil painting; a crowd gathers on a beach, enraptured by something happening just beyond the frame. It’s yours to imagine. – Sophie Leigh Walker
3
Diamond Jubilee by Cindy Lee
Loss is a resonance in a storage of memory; every collision of recollections sounds an eerie echo that defies time, a result of unending rewinds. One way to get into the mystical realm of Diamond Jubilee, Patrick Flegel’s crowning achievement as alter ego Cindy Lee, is to inspect its incisive cover. Dipped in faded blue, Lee sits contemplatively before a grain elevator that symbolises a storehouse of memory. Because it’s also a terminal, whatever is stored there is only there temporarily, but the leftover sound remains unchanged: the sonority of loss, monumental and indelible.
Diamond Jubilee captured that essence through cheap recordings of blaring electric riffs, episodic orchestra, and unsynchronised intervals of drums. The melange of influences from the decade the title celebrates – the 1960s – was what made it a most remarkable fixture in a year obsessed with redefining pop and succeeding only minimally. Within its well-established, tumbledown atmosphere, you may come across a synth that sounds out of the period, an eruptive and drastic shift from one genre to another within one song. Lee, with a determination to distort the concept of boundaries, created something that became lost in time, an uncanny blurring of familiarity and alienation.
The elusive and unidentified “you”s that Lee sings to (often in despair) add to the allure of Diamond Jubilee. They could refer to a person, a group of people, ideas, or beliefs; the crucial clue is that Lee’s love for the subject is immense. Regardless of the identity, what's left is a ghost of unfinished feelings, promises, ideologies, philosophies. When thinking of the past has become an escape for many, Diamond Jubilee is a coronation of that very sense, sounding one more resonance, a sublime contribution to a loss that disrupts interior time. “This world was haunted,” they cried on “Golden Microphone.” “All I wanted / I want is you.” – Tanatat Khuttapan
2
Manning Fireworks by MJ Lenderman
You take what you’re given and you make fiction of it. A grill is neglected to rust in a downpour; a fork pushes around scalding TV dinner perched on a lonely lap in the glow of a TLC Cage Match; a man wakes up on a dog-day afternoon with his face in a bowl of Lucky Charms. This is MJ Lenderman’s America: half-funny, half-tragic, tapped straight from the shit that keeps you up at night.
Jake Lenderman is a modern guitar hero steeped in the good old ways. He unleashes a particular chaos upon Wednesday’s terrible beauty, the country-shoegaze band fronted by his ex-partner Karly Hartzman. But as an artist in his own right, shyly evolving in parallel, Lenderman has grown capable of a certain ramshackle storytelling found only at the bottom of a bottle and between the covers of the Southern American realists. Manning Fireworks, his fourth album and studio debut since signing to taste-making label ANTI-, is a refinement of his early gifts – an ugly reflection of human frailties in a way that feels painfully, personally, familiar.
His lyrics, uttered with a self-aware smirk and clumsy drawl, are humdrum portraits of men who are disappointed, or disappointments – “jerks” – littered with sports in-jokes, off-kilter pop culture references, and deliberate misquotes. Because that, after all, is how guys talk to each other when other words fail. Cum circles the drain of a hotel shower as the hours pass by alone in “Joker Lips,” a song about a man’s desperation not to be laughed at; “On My Knees” aches under the weight of those forsaken mornings, “Burdened by those wet dreams / Of people having fun.”
“Wristwatch” has transgressed the status of ‘song’ into a sardonic modern parable; a man distracts himself from loneliness with material excess, granting us one of the most memorable lyrics of the year (“And I’ve got a houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome”). But when the humour runs dry and you reach the bottom of the bottle, Manning Fireworks is devastating in its confrontations. “She’s Leaving You” is one of the great indie-rock songs of the year, which, when catching you on just the wrong kind of day, can hit you like a piano falling from the sky. A duet with Karly Hartzman, it wreaks a personal devastation that transports you to a person, a memory, so that the hurt is our own. Manning Fireworks accomplishes a rare thing, something which few records dare to try: it grants dignity to a losing streak. - Sophie Leigh Walker
1
My Light, My Destroyer by Cassandra Jenkins
When an album is as perfect as An Overview On Phenomenal Nature – and I do mean perfect; every deadpan aperçu and puffy saxophone whisper somehow fastidiously placed and yet also scattered as candidly as autumn leaves – the follow-up is a daunting undertaking. Daunting for Cassandra Jenkins, no doubt, but also for her fans – crossed fingers and baited breaths that mutter “don’t fuck this up,” because we know from experience that sequels often burn us, sometimes even scorching what’s come before. It’s a small miracle that My Light, My Destroyer is the album that it is, then, all that tension immediately assuaged by the soothing acoustic guitar strums of “Devotion” that invite us to sink into this new era.
It’s a miracle not least because Jenkins never thought she’d make a third album or continue writing music after An Overview, and also because she walks that impossible tightrope of expanding her already delicate, fully realised personal voice while inviting us closer, making everything simultaneously smaller and wider in scope. That increased intimacy is encapsulated by the fact that, rather than Jenkins merely quoting her mother, as she did on “New Bikini” (“baby, go to the ocean,” etc), My Light lets us hear her. It’s during the album’s astoundingly beautiful midpoint, “Betelgeuse,” off of which the album’s core themes shoot like, well, shooting stars. We are privy to Sandra Jenkins’ effusive, empathic stargazing 101 lesson (starsplaining?), as she walks her daughter through various telescopic observations (“that’s Mars; do you see where it’s really reddish?”) on some idle summer’s evening, a coruscating piano dotting her I’s and T’s. It’s the album’s emotional heart and biggest treat – fan service, in a way, but not the cheap wink-wink kind.
Indeed, given how rapturously we all consumed, in particular, “Hard Drive” from An Overview, it feels like Jenkins has taken on board what worked best the last time around, what we loved and wanted more of. “Delphinium Blue,” the joint-best song she’s ever come out with, is an extension of “Hard Drive,” reviving its meditative approach to the mundane (“take a deep breath / count with me”) for a florist setting: “Chin up, stay on task, wash the windows, count the cash,” Jenkins enunciates in a timbre that could talk you down from the most riotous of panic attacks, while also letting us see the Cassandra that doesn’t make albums and play shows, the one that mindfully tends an Upper West Side flower shop. All of this gives the impression that while An Overview was for Jenkins – a way to balm her grief after David Berman’s death; an album she didn’t foresee blowing up like it did – My Light feels like it’s actually our light, our destroyer. We must never take it for granted. – Hayden Merrick
To celebrate our number one record this year, we've giving away a bumper package of vinyl from our friends at Secretly Group, including records from Mustafa, Cassandra Jenkins, Crack Cloud, Chanel Beads and a subscription to their Secretly Society record club – which sees a limited edition album shipped to your door every single month.
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