This year, I made it a personal project of mine to try to keep up with as many new music releases as I could. I’ve been hungrily expanding my album collection (mostly digitally) for a few years since returning to home working in 2020 made me realise how much I’d missed having music on all the time, but I’d spent much of that time going back to fill gaps on things I’d missed over recent years. Now, I felt I had enough knowledge of the sorts of things I’d be likely to enjoy that I could pick up a good selection of 2024 releases, including some artists whose work I’ve tried before and some I hadn’t.
Doing this, I learned two things:
- It was a mug’s game trying to ‘keep up’ with everything. There’s a bunch of stuff I wish I could have made time for, whether because I think I might have really enjoyed it (sorry, Cindy Lee, there’s no way I have time to try out the two-hour monstrosity that is Diamond Jubilee) or because I’d like to be a little more plugged into some of the bigger names (records from the likes of Sabrina Carpenter and Kendrick Lamar, for example). I can understand how professional critics can make time to get round to enough of what comes out, but no idea how they can actually make time to enjoy and spend extended time with the ones they really like.
- Music is fucking great. I found at least something to like in almost everything I tried and a lot to like in much more than half of it. This is obviously a very ‘person who has only deep-dived into one year’s music’ take, but 2024 was a fantastic year for music.
In total, I bought 66 full albums and four EPs. Obviously, ranking art is stupid and pointless, but ranking things is fun, so I ranked every single one of them. If you’re interested in the full list from 70 to 1, I’ve been posting a thread on Bluesky with short reviews of everything counting down from 70 to 11. And now I’ll go a little longer on my top 10!
10. Hit Me Hard and Soft – Billie Eilish
Billie Eilish was one of the first names I knew I had to put on my to-do list for 2024, as she completely fit the brief of ‘artist I have every reason to think I’d like but haven’t got around to yet’. I loved Bad Guy but just hadn’t made time for anything else of hers. Obviously, I’m completely unable to comment on what this album represents for her in terms of the evolution of her artistry and career. That said, it certainly feels like the act of a great artist confidently expanding her boundaries.
Opener Skinny is a rare kind of song in that it’s delivered with a profoundly confident quietness but that confidence in no way steps on the fact that it’s about insecurity. It’s a great, suble statement of strength which then lets the tracks that follow it go bigger, harder and more expansive with an earned trust. That it pivots into the album’s most fun moment in Lunch is just the icing on that particular cake.
I initially wasn’t especially thrilled by Birds of a Feather, which I felt lacked the infectious energy of Lunch and the engrossing mystery of tracks like Chihiro, but over the year it’s certainly grown into one of my favourite cuts from the record, a great combination of macabre lyrics and yearning delivery. Chihiro remains my pick for standout song, though; rarely else this year have I felt so viscerally transported through strange dream-worlds.
9. This Could Be Texas – English Teacher
I’d barely dipped my toes into the wave of ‘talk rock’ acts that seem to have proliferated across the British music scene in recent years but I already thought I was kind of over the aesthetic. English Teacher quickly overcame my wariness.
Their debut album is full of interesting ruminations – some abstract, some pointed – on class, identity, growing up and more, delivered with a surprising amount of vocal variation by Lily Fontaine. There’s fast-paced wordplay and slower, starker moments, as well as a few more sing-ier songs that get quite beautiful. But probably the biggest draws of the album are its lithe, wriggly bass and guitar parts – the former in particular grabs me immediately on R&B, a thrillingly angry rocker about being pigeonholed as a mixed-race woman in the white-man-dominated world of indie rock.
It’s a record that demands attention with busy and exciting songs but perhaps lingers longest with its quiet side. A great example is Sideboob, which finds Fontaine gazing out of her window at a beautiful hill and wrestling with low self-worth, but perhaps the album’s crowning achievement is closer Albert Road. Fontaine’s upbringing in a quiet Lancashire town informs much of This Could Be Texas and this song puts us there most firmly, exploring the insularity of a smaller community and her difficulty fitting in in a very white part of the world with a tone that’s much more complicated than either anger or nostalgia.
8. Tigers Blood – Waxahatchee
This one just crept up and up in my estimations all year long. I liked Katie Crutchfield’s 2020 album Saint Cloud pretty well, and I liked this follow-up pretty well at first too, but every time I go back to it I find it getting better and better. Crutchfield is really perfecting her brand of alt-country/folk-rock/whatever-it-has-guitars-and-a-twang, delivering sumptuous stories of imperfect people – herself very much included – trying to make things more or less work and sometimes succeeding.
It’s an easy listen, with guitar work that fits like a comfortable jumper, and that state of comfort is what sets you up for its many excellent turns of phrase to hit you with more power. It’s not an emotional wringer of a record, just impressive as all hell. It also benefits from MJ Lenderman hanging out on guitars throughout, and he’s promoted to a full feature on Right Back to It, rightly lauded as the album’s best track – although the ancillary single Much Ado About Nothing released later in the year might be even better.
7. This Ain’t the Way You Go Out – Lucy Rose
After Lucy Rose gave birth to her son, she contracted a rare form of pregnancy-induced osteoporosis and was ignored and dismissed by doctors for a long time while in extreme pain before finally getting diagnosed and treated. Those experiences informed almost the entirety of the lyrics to this album but also its musical aesthetic, as back pain drove Rose to write from the piano rather than the guitar.
The result is an enchantingly jazzy record that feels like it could have been teleported forward from an era of classic pop standards. The album cover’s wispy smoke evokes the kind of sophisticated old-timey bar-room atmosphere that suffuses the whole thing with class even when Rose’s writing finds her uncertain and reaching out for support.
Most of the time, though, she’s coming from the perspective of having made it through the worst and reflecting on how it’s changed her outlook. There are so many gorgeous moments, from Whatever You Want’s gentle expression of hope for her son’s future to Sail Away’s meditative clinging-on to her bond with her husband to make it through tough times. Everything wraps up thematically with the delightful The Racket – lyrically, a tennis reference but pulling fun double duty by heralding the thrilling cacophony that erupts towards the end of the song. It’s a fun, bouncy and hugely satisfying conclusion to a thoughtful and beautiful album.
6. Lagos Paris London EP – Yannis & The Yaw ft. Tony Allen
Foals frontman Yannis Philippakis’s long-gestating solo side project finally saw the light of day this year in the form of a collaboration with the late Afrobeat legend Tony Allen. It’s perhaps an unusual combination but one that really pops – Allen’s busy, groovy style prompts Philippakis to bring down his snarling, expansive, arena-friendly guitar licks to a more staccato jam.
Walk Through Fire and Under the Strikes are great examples of this meshed approach, moreish movers that feel quite distinct from your average Foals song. They’re both well distinguished from each other by Philippakis’s vocal delivery, too; in the former he’s the rock-star force of nature of a What Went Down, in the latter he’s hushed and measured in quite unusual fashion.
In some ways, it might be considered a shame that my favourite song from the EP is the one that’s by some distance the Foalsiest. However, as well as being a soaring epic of the kind that gets fast-tracked to my soul, Rain Can’t Reach Us still has Allen’s indelible impression on it to mark it as something that Philippakis couldn’t have made on his usual turf. I’m absolutely fascinated to see who he’ll turn to next as a companion for a future twist on the Yaw.
5. Light Sleeper – Bess Atwell
Your Swifts and your Abramses can go away and think about what they’ve done; this is the Aaron Dessner production from 2024 you should be paying attention to. Atwell, whose work I already adored, finds a natural kinship with the National multi-instrumentalist and uses it to deliver some gorgeous reflections on self-discovery and healing.
Atwell just has one of the loveliest voices in the business, rich and full of gravitas, and this is her most consistent collection of great songs so far. From the cathartic Release Myself to the playful Something Now via Fan Favourite’s ennui about the passage of time, you really can’t go wrong here.
4. Prelude to Ecstasy – The Last Dinner Party
I was delighted to find that the hype for this one was totally justified. The Last Dinner Party’s influences are obvious and numerous, from Queen to Siouxsie and the Banshees via Kate Bush and David Bowie, but they combine into something that feels unique, vital and thrilling.
The band’s grandiose intent is signaled by the titular intro track, a baroque orchestral piece that announces them like the highest-profile arrival at a fancy ball. And then Burn Alive hits you in the eye with an absolutely scorching rocker about unhealthy passion that sets up some of the album’s main themes, with singer Abigail Morris giving it unbelievable amounts of welly.
It’s an album with lots of fascinating things to say about femininity and the many ways women are carved up and cannibalised to serve others’ desires. It’s explored from a variety of angles, from generational inheritance on The Feminine Urge to how women are expected to hurt themselves to heal men on the likes of Portrait of a Dead Girl and Mirror. I’m particularly partial to Beautiful Boy, a soaring sigh of jealousy at the easy freedom afforded to handsome men.
Despite some heavy themes, though, it’s not a bitter record; it’s exciting, theatrical and frequently raucous, best exemplified by queer self-acceptance banger Sinner.
3. My Light, My Destroyer – Cassandra Jenkins
In 2021, Jenkins put out one of my favourite songs of all time in Hard Drive, a Zen-like love letter to human communication that couldn’t help but massively overshadow the rest of her full album that year. While no individual track on this follow-up hits the stratospheric heights of Hard Drive, I’m so impressed by how strong, cohesive and consistent the whole record is from front to back.
The stars are her big inspiration here, with characters looking both up at them and down from them in search of meaning – William Shatner’s trip into space in 2021, which caused him to experience the overview effect, is a major thematic touchstone. Narrators speak of feeling small, lost and insignificant; sometimes they find beauty in those feelings, in luxuriating in love for its own sake, and sometimes they sound like they’re drowning.
Jenkins weaves these feelings into both slow, delicate, dreamy gems (the likes of Devotion, Delphinium Blue and Only One are all divine) and more uptempo, almost 90s radio-rock-esque drivers like Clams Casino and Petco. Interspersed between them are occasional snippets of recorded conversations and ambient sounds, building on the all-the-little-things-matter approach that informed the greatness of Hard Drive. It all adds up to a very contemplative, very human album that – much like the overview effect, I imagine – will stick with me for a long time.
2. Mountainhead – Everything Everything
This was the year that I belatedly got into Everything Everything in a big way, thanks to the one-two punch of finally clicking with previous record Raw Data Feel after bouncing off it for months and then the release of this synth-pop triumph.
I’m a sucker for lyrics that are oblique but powerful and Jonathan Higgs is one of the weirdest and best in the game. His exploration of a dystopian society of haves and have-nots where communication and division rise in tandem is spared from cliche by fizzingly evocative word choices – a preacher of hateful rhetoric is a “rancid Hellkite hoot” and love is expressed for the simple human trait of “smashing into everything”, as atoms rattling around in the universe. I particularly love “we’ve all become tomorrow’s bacon” on Dagger’s Edge, railing against people being crushed under rampant capitalists.
It’s worth shouting out The End of the Contender, a half-pitying, half-damning lament for a certain kind of old man growing out of touch in a changing society, as well as the exciting The Mad Stone and earnestly open-hearted Enter the Mirror. But the shining star of Mountainhead for me is Cold Reactor, a bouncy anthem about the flattening of expression and experience into digital transaction, and how those ecosystems make it harder to effect real change at a critical time for humanity. Its chorus is a breathless delight, which it then doubles down on in thrilling fashion on the second go around. “I love you like an atom bomb but I’ve become a cold reactor” is a delicious piece of wordplay, and it’s only one of several terrific lines from this total bop.
1. Time Is a Flower – Telenova
In the end, my favourite album of 2024 ended up being the one I was most excited for going into the year. Would it have been fun to have been surprised by an artist I’d never heard before? Yes. Am I mad about what I got? Not in the least. This was everything I wanted from Australian indie-pop trio Telenova’s debut LP.
I’ve been at fever pitch over Telenova for a couple of years thanks to a couple of EPs and standalone singles with basically not a skip to be found. Branding themselves as “cinema for your ears”, they’re heavily influenced by 90s trip-hop as well as disco, pop and that kind of retro arthouse French film aesthetic where there’s not really any plot, just beautiful people driving open-top cars along the coast and looking wistfully over balconies.
It’s not a record that I find quibble-free – though I’m fine with The Wallpaper as table-setting intros go, Restless’s infrastructural interlude to repeat key lyrics feels time-wastey, while Preamble is ultimately too repetitive for me to fall in love with it – but otherwise there’s so much I love that I couldn’t possibly mention it all.
My favourite moment – and an easy win for my 2024 song of the year – is Power, a luscious and irresistible dark disco banger about a flower falling in love with the sun. I love its bongos, its aching bridge, and its role as one of the record’s best vehicles for Angeline Armstrong’s effortlessly stunning vocals.
Other personal highlights include Margot (a zippy number about feminine imagery and self-comparison), Discotheque Inside My Head (anxiety metaphors as slick bops, yes please) and January (a sober ballad about being too far away to rush to the bedside of someone close to you, which I sure have feelings about given my own internationally dispersed family). I also have to shout out Bird of Paradise, the beautifully woozy closer that sends us on our way with a triumphant guitar solo.
This album is just a whole heap of fun, and I cannot wait to see what Telenova do next.