The 50 Best Albums of 2024

50. Fine, Rocky Top Ballads

Fine’s music doesn’t feel timeless so much as lost in time. She writes about days that wisp by and drown you along with them, writing as if it’s the only way to get a grasp on reality. “Oh boy,” she exclaims in a daze at one point, “I still remember the heart becoming you and me.” This you and me never feels tied to particulars – it’s always something, somewhere, sometimes in these lyrics – yet the songs are so textured and delicate that you can feel the air they’re breathing, old yet captured straight from the present moment. The word Fine uses, halfway through her entrancing debut album Rocky Top Ballads, is “ageless,” which is a broad feeling as much as the promise of a romantic escape: “Would you get lost with me, my love?” Read the full review.

49. Charly Bliss, Forever

“This is supposed to be fun,” Eva Hendricks recalls her brother saying during the making of Charly Bliss‘ 2019 record Young Enough. “Fun,” guitarist Spencer Fox notes in press materials, is the Brooklyn band’s “natural state.” But for a particularly intense period in their lives, it was a state they had trouble accessing. Forever is catchy and crushing and, yes, deliriously fun, but it’s also an emotional rollercoaster, careening through the head-spinning euphoria of infatuation (‘Easy to Love You’), the double-edged sword of nostalgia (‘Nineteen’), new and old friendships (‘In Your Bed’, ‘Waiting for You’), and career jadedness teetering on self-deprecation. “How do you do it?” Hendricks sings about handling, well, all of it. “You get through it, and then you do it again.” Read our inspirations interview with Charly Bliss.

48. Chelsea Wolfe, She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She

The title of Chelsea Wolfe‘s new album might point to the continuation of a infinite cycle, but it also marks what the artist has called a “rebirth.” Though once again cloaked in a storm of noise, sound effects, and electronics, Wolfe’s music comes across as a meditative practice rather than an effort to chart an enigmatic and fantastical journey around the self. Rather than another resetting of musical boundaries or a simple regression to older, sludgier sounds, its aim is the reconciliation of “darkness and cosiness,” in her words, stepping toward the light in the converging paths of self-actualization and undoing. She’s now found ways to separate the brooding, gothic nature of her past work from the perpetuity of toil and unrest, leading to her most spectrally cathartic and euphoric album to date. Read the full review.

47. Kali Uchis, Orquídeas

Kali Uchis has said her first label didn’t give Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞, her previous Spanish-language LP, the proper promotional push. But after the success of ‘Telepatía’, which became her biggest hit yet, there had to be more support behind Uchis’ multi-faceted approach. But Orquídeas, named after the national flower of Colombia, also happens to be an overall stronger album than Sin Miedo, bolder and more dynamic in its embrace of different styles. She seeks not just to combine genres but, in her words, “re-define the way we look at Latinas in music,” and her take on traditional Latin styles like bolero and dembow are not only refreshing but integrated as fluidly as the way she switches between English and Spanish – seamless while also punctuating her lyrical shifts and nuances. Read the full review.

46. Half Waif, See You at the Maypole

Nandi Rose made her latest Half Waif record in the midst, or the edges, of immense personal turmoil: she found out she was pregnant in the summer of 2021, then endured a miscarriage that December, followed by months of medical complications. Working with co-producer Zubin Hensler, she hangs onto the music to capture the cosmic tide of anticipation, the magnitude of hurt and exhaustion, the hunger for a road ahead, the sounds of rejoicing in beauty and community, all swirling into one. It’s the kind of album we tend to call an emotional triumph, but it’s also a marvel of attention: to Rose’s immediate surroundings, to her stream of consciousness, to the particular cadence and melodic potential of words, to the textures and colour in music and beyond. It’s in this transformative wavelength Rose hopes we can all meet: feet firm on the ground, head up to taste the sky, moving on. Read our inspirations interview with Half Waif. 

45. Julia Holter, Something in the Room She Moves

Though steeped in abstraction, there is a stark physicality to Julia Holter’s Something in the Room She Moves, which stands as one of the most sensual and somatic works in her career. While the music glides in different directions, she never strays from the central goal of “evoking the body’s internal sound world.” Whether breezy, dizzying, soothing, or bombastic, Holter’s output has always been immersive, and her latest is, too; yet she also eliminates any distance from the people, spaces, and ideas with which she interacts. “In the past my records were more focused on the past or the future, about love from afar, as maybe more of an ethereal thing,” Holter remarked in an interview. But Something in the Room sees the present as an endless stream – of days and nights, of unresolved mysteries, of love and grief entwined – and keeps its hands outstretched for everything that passes through it. Read the full review.

44. Crumb, AMAMA

Crumb’s third album, AMAMA, is no less hypnotic and disorienting than the New York band’s previous material, but it longs to keep its feet on the ground. Singer and multi-instrumentalist Lila Ramani, keyboardist and saxophonist Bri Aronow, bassist Jesse Brotter, and drummer Jonathan Gilad remain wandering experimentalists, and the new record – produced in Los Angeles alongside Johnscott Sanford and Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado – hones that quality by restlessly locking into a groove and playfully straying away from it. But, abstract as it still is, Ramani’s songwriting is also tenderly introspective and emotional, threading together signifiers of her upbringing with memories from the band’s early touring days. But through these trips, down beyond what we might reasonably call memory lane, Crumb wake to a more solid and present understanding of home. Read our inspirations interview with Crumb.

43. Katy Kirby, Blue Raspberry

Katy Kirby‘s debut album, 2021’s Cool Dry Place, was full of clever turns of phrase, tender melodies, and hummable choruses that made it feel both genuine and instantly inviting. But what stuck with you long after its 30-minute runtime was the way it treasured human connection in different forms; Kirby’s natural tendency to home in and pick apart the little details made her songs feel special and effortlessly intertwined, even if they were written over long stretches of time. On Blue Raspberry, her sophomore effort and first for ANTI-, Kirby is even more intentional in fleshing out and untangling the similarities and contradictions between her songs – and the people in them. Taking inspiration from albums like Andy Shauf’s The Party and Lomelda’s Hannah, it huddles moments of intimacy that are beautiful, yes, but also strangely playful, ominous, and crystallizing. Read our track-by-track interview with Katy Kirby.

42. Hurray for the Riff Raff, The Past Is Still Alive

Gathering guests that include Meg Duffy, Anjimile, SG Goodman, Phil and Brad Cook, and Conor Oberst, The Past Is Still Alive finds Hurray for the Riff Raff returning to the folk roots of the project following 2022’s synthier Life on Earth. Both musically and lyrically, the past is a subject that Alynda Segarra rumbles and surges through, regarding fellow outsiders with the gentle wisdom she’s acquired over time. Rather than being didactic, though, Segarra reminds us The Past Is Still Alive only because they keep track of it: it feels like we’re strapped into the present even as they recount memories of youth and escape, as if the act of remembering itself is a matter of survival and solidarity – especially when the world is always seemingly beginning to end. “Some things take time, I know they do,” Segarra sings on ‘Buffalo’, but they’re not just waiting; to take time, they suggest, is to find some kind of comfort and reassurance.

41. Merce Lemon, Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild

Merce Lemon admits she didn’t learn to play a chord on guitar until she was 17, when she moved to Seattle to live with her uncle for a few years. The decision was partly a response to losing her best friend when she was 15, a subject Lemon explores with bracing intimacy on ‘Backyard Lover’, a highlight from her spectacular new LP Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild. Leaning more firmly on alt-country than any of her previous releases, the record is alternately, and often simultaneously, warm and wild, raw and rapturous, lonely and open-hearted. Lemon’s songs are uniquely capable of squaring hardened emotion with gentle curiosity – toward the natural world, which is to say, the wonder of staying alive – making aimlessness sound beautiful, and home a thing like heaven. Read our Artist Spotligh interview with Merce Lemon.

40. Wild Pink, Dulling the Horns

One of the most surprising moments on Wild Pink‘s 2022 effort ILYSM was ‘Sucking on the Birdshot’, its avalanche of sludgy, distorted guitars sounding all the more dissonant on a record of profound tenderness and intimacy. Frontman John Ross finished writing the album after being diagnosed with cancer, and having since recovered, the focus of his songs seems to be “moving on,” as he sings on the title track of its follow-up, “like the cold wind blows/ Like a train in the snow.” It should come as no surprise, then, that an experimental outlier on ILYSM ends up informing the primary mode of Dulling the Horns, at least when it comes to the guitars, which sound remarkably blown-out, massive, and crunchy. There’s an element of strain, of towering through bad weather, in the way a baritone guitar drudges the songs forward; Ross makes them sparkle regardless. Read the full review.

39. Chat Pile, Cool World

The transition from Chat Pile‘s God’s Country to Cool World is partly, as the album titles suggest, a matter of scope. While the Oklahoma City band’s 2022 debut God’s Country tore into the cruel horrors specific (but not unique) to American territory, its follow-up finds them widening their gaze, “with thoughts,” according to vocalist Raygun Busch, “specifically about disasters abroad, at home, and how they affect one another.” If only they were just thoughts. The profusion of violence, death, and suffering – at times unspecified and often unimaginable, the stuff of nightmares, but always harrowingly, inescapably real – is not merely a thematic concern. It feels elemental. Busch makes no attempt at an argument, and his bandmates offer no catharsis in its absence. To deliver anything but a hopeless and uncompromising vision of reality would be to ignore everything that’s in front of us; it would mean to conform, and Chat Pile have no interest in that. Read the full review.

38. Mabe Fratti, Sentir que no sabes

Mabe Fratti understands improvisation as part of human nature, a conduit to our chaotic inner lives. As much as it burrows reflexively inwards, her music exists and arises as a product of deliberation and communication – on a purely technical level, her latest album, Sentir que no sabes, was built around conversations with her partner and Titanic bandmate Hector Tosta (aka I. La Católica), which would last “until things became inevitable.” Through it, the boundaries of the mind and its surroundings become elastic, but rather than creating a gap between the artist and the listener, Fratti’s fertile imagination acts as the bridge. The results are raw, startling, and liberating. Read the full review.

37. Hovvdy, Hovvdy

Hovvdy‘s self-titled album sees them continuing their collaboration with producer Andrew Sarlo and multi-instrumentalist Ben Littlejohn, who worked with the duo on 2021’s True Love and 2022’s billboard for my feelings EP. This time, all four were present for each session, giving Charlie Martin and Will Taylor the space to hone their collaborative craft while finding ways to honour their lo-fi origins. The result is a 19-track double LP of sprawling intimacy, one that allows big choruses to jump out and quiet moments to linger longer than you might expect. It’s a gorgeous record about the passage of time that keeps you hooked, ensuring no amount you spend with it feels wasted. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Hovvdy.

36. This Is Lorelei, Box for Buddy, Box for Star

Written, recorded, and produced by Nate Amos (of Water from Your Eyes and My Idea) in the summer of 2022, This Is Lorelei‘s debut proper is sneakily earnest and playful at the same time, committing to the bit without veering into cliché. Prioritizing pure melody, it’s a collection of songs as shiny and gorgeous as it is disorienting; but unlike Amos’ experiments with Water From Your Eyes, the wry humour and chaos aren’t contained in the music so much as his lyricism, whose stream-of-consciousness sincerity is affecting as much as it can throw you off guard. But even when he shifts between perspectives and laces his voice in AutoTune for the sake of the song, the album’s romanticism and emotional pathos feel earned, precisely because of the funny, quotable ways Amos finds to present them. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with This Is Lorelei.

35. DIIV, Frog in Boiling Water

Frog in Boiling Water lifts its title from the “Boiling Frog” in Daniel Quinn’s 1996 novel The Story of B. The premise is well-known and self-evident – if you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will instinctively jump out; but if you place it into lukewarm water and gradually raise the temperature, it will be lulled into comfort and boil to death. The results are neither entirely bleak nor hopeful, and Frog is less of an explicitly political album than a politically outward-facing one, following a series of albums centered around addiction and mental illness. As much it curdles with anxiety and existential dread, the record is alternately haunting, soothing, sour, and enthralling, a culmination of DIIV’s singular sound after their attempt to make a “proper” shoegaze album with 2019’s Deceiver. Read our inspirations interview with DIIV. 

34. Father John Misty, Mahashmashana

In contrast to its predecessor, Chloë and the Next 20th Century, the latest from Josh Tillman feels extremely aware of itself, even if as a writer he’s still struggling to find a way out or towards transcendence. In classic FJM fashion, Mahashmashana is maximalist in both its self-indulgence and musical structure, its lyrics mixing wry humour, imagination, and longing that’s deep-seated and well-hidden. At the same time, it’s touching and selfless – or at least luxuriating in a space where, in Tillman’s own words, “the self is receding” – in ways Tillman’s songwriting has rarely been. It accumulates every facet of his persona – sardonic, romantic, even optimistic – and justifies every sprawling gesture through sharpened lyrics and genuine uncertainty. Read the full review.

33. Porridge Radio, Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for Me

Like every Porridge Radio album before it, Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for Me amounts to raw, blistering catharsis. The songs are frontwoman Dana Margolin’s way of gnawing through the extremes of human emotion, which, on the new record, range from personal heartbreak to intense burnout following a period of heavy touring behind 2022’s Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky. But the feelings don’t follow a linear timeline: they tumble over themselves and into what Margolin calls “a dissociative fog,” blurring the line between fantasy and reality. Margolin was able to inhabit this liminal space by focusing on writing poems, which, in their transition to songs, remain either searingly literal in their descriptions of numbing pain and mundane beauty, or edge into surreal, symbolic territory. Read our inspirations interview with Porridge Radio.

32. Kim Gordon, The Collective

Kim Gordon didn’t invent SoundCloud rap, but she sounds like she just sort of stumbled onto a whole new sound on The Collective. The former Sonic Youth bassist’s second solo record, carries the fearlessly innovative spirit that has marked her nearly 50-year career, and though she knew early on she wanted it to be beat-driven, how much of it would sound like this particular strain of hip-hop if her collaborator wasn’t Justin Raisen, who’s worked with everyone from Sky Ferreira to Lil Yachty, Yves Tumor to Teezo Touchdown? The Collective is their second full-length collaboration following 2019’s No Home Record, which was dark and fractured in its own way, but not quite as thrilling or cacophonous. Gordon doesn’t sound like she’s absorbed a bunch of contemporary influences, or even dutifully acclimated herself in them, just daring to reel off, hanging on to noise as the obvious thread to her legacy. Read the full review.

31. Vampire Weekend, Only God Was Above Us 

As if to make up for the gap between albums, 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City and Father of the Bride were both stylistic swerves: one darker and strangely haunted, the other sprawling and casually vibrant. But Only God Was Above Us is Vampire Weekend’s first album since Contra that’s more interested in merging and retaining qualities from different eras; though lyrically and thematically, strongest are the echoes of Modern Vampires, and there’s even a beautiful ballad, ‘Mary Boone’, that feels like a direct descendant of ‘Hannah Hunt’. The record is focused yet loose, joyful and noisy, anxious yet curiously unfazed. It finds a definition of “alternative” that’s entirely contingent on the band’s own trajectory and musical language, which it unsettles mainly by playing with two elements: distortion – whether sputtering through ‘Ice Cream Piano’ or abrading the bright touch of ‘Classical’ – and space. Read the full review.

30. Kendrick Lamar, GNX

Imagine, for a moment, a world where GNX arrived with no industry-shaking feud in its rearview. Kendrick Lamar could probably make an album like it at several points in his career, but there’s no doubt it’s a hard pivot from 2022’s contemplative and messy Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers. As the surprise follow-up to a series of historic diss tracks, however, capping off a year that saw him knocking out the biggest rapper on the planet to be crowned the greatest, it makes complete sense. But you can’t ignore the fact that the artist who looked so nakedly inward on Mr. Morale is the same one who spent 2024 taking victory lap after victory lap. GNX could have been another one of those in album format, which is something the world did not need. What the record – snappy, invigorating, and tireless – manages to achieve is fuelling back our hunger while delivering something quite beyond any fan’s expectations. Read the full review.

29. Nala Sinephro, Endlessness

Endlessness offers a striking fusion of ambient, electronic, and orchestral jazz music, but the language of genre can hardly do justice to Nala Sinephro‘s pursuit of transcendence. Inviting you to regard time as a beautifully continuous stream of moments, the follow-up to the London-based harpist, keyboardist, and composer’s 2021 debut Space 1.8 gives form to ethereal, cosmic wonders while retaining a warm sense of humanity. It is constantly adrift yet infinitely lovely, basking in the liminal space where boundaries dissipate into a wordless kind of heaven, what Sinephro herself calls “the cycle of existence.” The music relaxes into this space, for all its vastness and complexity – strings shimmer, synths burble, and a host of instruments wisp in and out over the central arpeggio, so that you keep asking yourself just how far we’ve ventured from its origin.

28. Beth Gibbons, Lives Outgrown

Beth Gibbons‘ recorded output over the past two decades has included Portishead’s starkly haunting 2008 comeback album, Third, a magnificent performance of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 (recorded with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2019), and a memorable appearance on Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Mother I Sober’ in 2022. In her own writing, Gibbons, now 59, isn’t one to unpack intergenerational trauma the way Lamar does on that track, but her delivery of the chorus managed to perfectly encapsulate the tangled yearning at its core. Those great knots of time are threaded through her music, too, however inscrutable, and more than just feeling them keenly, Lives Outgrown is her opportunity to let them unfurl. Its somber, weighty, bone-chilling meditations never overstay their welcome, making brilliant use of both time and space. Read the full review.

27. Being Dead, EELS

EELS, the follow-up to Being Dead‘s 2023 debut LP When the Horses, was this year’s biggest grower for me. The Austin band’s John Congleton-produced LP is the kind of record that sneaks up on you, hitting a bunch of pleasure centers the more you pay attention to it: as infectiously hooky as it is nervy, it’s retro-pop at its most irresistible, garage-punk at its most eerily frenetic, surf-rock at its grooviest. Even when the songs – and there are a lot of them – melt into something off-kilter, understated, or lyrically fantastical, the record finds ways to be strangely endearing, like on the acoustic highlight ‘Dragons II’. Being Dead’s greatest and most human asset, though, remains Falcon Bitch and Shmoofy’s dueling harmonies. On ‘Blanket of My Bone’, one prays to find another to “crush me like the boundless sea.” EELS‘ hypnotic outpouring is not only a product of that daydream, but drags you right in, which is a thrill in and of itself. 

26. The Cure, Songs of a Lost World

The opening track on the Cure‘s first album in 16 years, ‘Alone’, the one that “unlocked the record” for Robert Smith, begins with the line “This is the end of every song I sing,” and the sequencing seems to have been firm in place for a long time; they’ve been bookending their live sets the same way since first introducing those songs on tour in 2022. ‘Dregs’, a poem by the decadent poet Ernest Dowson that ‘Alone’ was inspired by and directly echoes, does provide some useful context: “And health and hope have gone the way of love/ Into the drear oblivion of lost things.” This is the world Songs plunges headfirst into, where oblivion isn’t just an inevitability but the starting point, the throughline, and above all, a container for everything that cannot be restored in the mortal realm. The preposition matters here: not for, or in, but of a Lost World. Read the full review.

25. Blood Incantation, Absolute Elsewhere

The most marvelous thing about Absolute Elsewhere, the third LP by Denver death metal band Blood Incantation, isn’t how brutal but how gloriously open-ended and far-reaching it is. It’s not a departure from their wordless ambient record Timewave Zero so much as the latest step in their evolution: passages of mind-mending extremity give way to sweeping, synth-infused soundscapes, and the record is as compelling and uncompromising when it builds and erupts as it is when it winds down. Its musical journey – psychedelic, gnarly, deliriously playful – is befitting of a sci-fi epic, revolving around the battle for human consciousness following the discovery of an alien text. The quartet made a whole documentary about the making of the record, which in itself invites deep analysis on a conceptual level. But there’s no bigger delight than just taking the music in, the way Blood Incantation intended.

25. Tyler, the Creator, Chromakopia

The build-up to Chromakopia primed us for a new era of Tyler, the Creator: a sepia-toned visual aesthetic, a main character drawn from Norton Juster’s 1961 children’s book The Phantom Tollbooth, and so, it seemed, a new persona. But after killing off his former selves on the music video for 2023’s ‘Sorry Not Sorry’, Tyler is left with no choice but to remove the veil of a character study; he gives form to the masked St. Chroma character, wearing a military jacket and foreshadowed in that same video, but doesn’t go as far to weave him into the narrative fabric of the album. The facade is thinner than ever, and he has no one to turn to but himself. What could’ve been another victory lap instead shines as an attempt to reconcile his conflicted personality – and the disparate styles that come with it. Read the full review.

23. Los Campesinos!, All Hell

Just days after Los Campesinos! announced All Hell, their first new album in seven years, the Welsh seven-piece put out a second single from it. ‘Feast of Tongues’ and ‘A Psychic Wound’ didn’t serve as a one-two punch so much as a preview of the record’s emotional dynamics, or rather, tonal whiplash: the first turns a single brooding note, a flickering ray of hope, into a fiery anthem about survival, while the latter leverages its explosive hook to bear the universal weight of its lyrics. The cosmic wound may never heal, but Los Campesinos! know what a song can do to treat, however slightly, the bitterness another one has just left in your mouth. For longtime fans of the UK’s self-proclaimed “first and only emo band,” it is a familiar spiral of self-diagnosis and self-medication, and the fact that the group’s seventh LP was also self-produced and self-released may give it the appearance of a rather insular pursuit. Read the full review.

22. Ekko Astral, pink balloons

Dubbing their style – an uncompromising mix of hardcore, noise punk, and no-wave – “mascara mosh pit” music, the Washington, DC-based outfit’s debut album, produced by Pure Adult’s Jeremy Snyder, is by turns galvanizing, raucous, and uneasy, but never totally dispiriting – confronting a world of suffering and disillusionment not only by pointing to it, but ceaselessly invoking and subverting what it feels like to inhabit it. Jael Holzman’s lyrics are as hyper-referential as they are exacting, as riveting as the music that drives them forward. “I can see you shifting in your seat,” she intones at the very beginning, but Ekko Astral ensure you remain strapped in. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Ekko Astral.

21. Nilüfer Yanya, My Method Actor

Nilüfer Yanya is less interested in naming the feeling than learning to trust it. It’s not always a straightforward path; her songs have a way of winding around a range of themes and emotional states, finding warmth and purpose in the in-between where others would see a maze of unanswerable questions. “There’s nothing out there/ For you and me/ I’m going nowhere/ Until it bleeds,” the London-based singer-songwriter sang on the chorus of ‘shameless’, a highlight from her excellent 2022 LP PAINLESS, and it’s the same nothings and nowheres that creep up on her latest effort, My Method Actor, whether she’s chasing storms or some semblance of certainty. But Yanya moves into it – and kineticism has been as crucial a component of her music as anxiety and exhaustion – with a deeper sense of confidence and intentionality. Read the full review.

20. Fontaines D.C., Romance

The follow-up to 2022’s Skinty Fia is framed as the now London-based band’s least Irish, most Korn-inspired record yet. And while it doesn’t exactly sound like Lana Del Rey or any nu-metal band – if anything, the album’s cinematic, colourful palette and thematic undertones owe more to a visual inspiration Chatten has cited, Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s Akira – what’s remarkable is how much more like themselves Fontaines D.C. sound they further they’re removed from their origins. At their heart is a duality: infectious melodies are elevated by sweet, luscious orchestration – which, with help from producer James Ford, is brighter than ever – yet deeper still is the yearning, more complicated and confounding. Read the full review.

19. Clairo, Charm

“I can feel there’s something in the between,” Claire Cottrill sings on ‘Glory of the Snow’, the penultimate track of her third album Charm. The song itself is a rather inconspicuous moment on a record that begins with two memorable singles before loosening up a bit, nestling into a kind of freewheeling whimsy. It doesn’t have the most distinct melody or lyrical ideas, but Cottrill has a gift for making the things that might slip through your fingers feel vivid, inescapable, and uniquely hers. “I pull on the string that binds me/ To memories of the way I loved you,” she goes on, as if describing the very act of songwriting; in her hands, restless and tender, gorgeous yet unshowy, hushed but never quite distant. It’s how we’ve come to know Clairo, and with each release, she’s getting better at refining these qualities and bringing them to the surface. Read the full review.

18. Ka, The Thief Next to Jesus

The Thief Next to Jesus came out in the last month of his life; the Brooklyn rapper and firefighter passed away unexpectedly in October, leaving behind a legacy as one of the most singular and consistent voices in hip-hop. With brilliantly deployed gospel samples and typically understated precision, his last album explores the relationship between Black Americans and Christianity, a framework that allowed him to continue his meditation on themes of mortality, religion, and generational trauma. His lyricism, like his delivery, is subdued and weighted as ever, but paired with some of the most strangely minimal instrumentals of his career. And while there’s something about every new Ka release that strikes you as haunting, you can’t deny this one’s eerie resonance. “I hope it’s borrowed time when my time come,” goes a line on ‘Borrowed Time’. It’s hard to believe, still. But these are words you can hang onto.

17. Laura Marling, Patterns in Repeat

Eight solo albums into Laura Marling‘s career, one would be tempted to describe Patterns in Reat using a lot of the same adjectives that have long defined her songwriting: intimate, stunning, sincere. To celebrate Patterns in Repeat on those terms might also be a way to make up for lost time – the record marks the longest wait between new material since the 34-year-old first put out music as a new adult. But while Patterns in Repeat falls spiritually in line with 2020’s Song for Our Daughter and a lot of Marling’s past output, we’ve never heard her quite so unadorned and unguarded, her heart both lightened and moved by the confines of familiar spaces. Intimate, gorgeous, all that still is true – but it’s also tangibly her homeliest and most lived-in record to date. Read the full review.

16. Foxing, Foxing

On the chorus of ‘Gratitude’, a blistering highlight from Foxing‘s self-titled LP, Conor Murphy lists a series of desires, each more striking than the last: “I wanna hear God yelling at me/ I wanna live my life like a memory/ I wanna sow rage into my brain/ I want wrath written into my DNA.” Like so much of Foxing, the moment is visceral, unguarded, and relentless, neatly capturing the band’s catalog of yearning: a violently spiritual search for meaning, a fury so pervasive it needs biology, a reckoning with the past that can’t be chalked up to nostalgia. The album shares the ambition, rawness, and a lot of the same frustrations as its predecessor, 2021’s Manchester Orchestra-produced Draw Down the Moon, but what makes Foxing astounding is less of a streamlined approach than a sharp attunement to its emotional and aesthetic extremes. Read our interview with Foxing.

15. Jamie xx, In Waves

Even as a more robust, crowd-pleasing effort from Jamie xx, In Waves keeps the pulse going in ways both surprising and enveloping. The meditative sprawl of ‘Breathe’ turns out to be one of the weirder and more fractured stretches of the whole LP; the life-affirming directness of ‘Treat Each Other Right’ bleeds into ‘Waited All Night’, which benefits from the very distinct intimacy harnessed by the xx members, flirting with that hazy territory while delivering one of the album’s most immediate choruses. And ‘Dafodil’, its biggest oddity and standout, comes right after the particularly in-your-face ‘Baddy on the Floor’, a song that delights in its repetitiveness as much as the tinier interplay between the bass and horn sample. The more crowded it becomes, the more In Waves distinguishes itself from the insular (however collaborative still) process behind In Colour. Read the full review.

14. The Last Dinner Party, Prelude to Ecstasy

The marvelous thing about Prelude to Ecstasy isn’t the audience it’s reached as a debut album, but the commitment to craft and world-building that’s apparent as soon as you press play. The whole thing starts with an orchestral overture, signaling the sort of theatrical bombast and ambition that bands – especially “post-punk” bands that grow weary of the descriptor – don’t embrace until much later in their discography. As a group that formed just before the pandemic, the Last Dinner Party have had to take the fundamentally uncool path of taking themselves seriously, fleshing out songs, and establishing a strong visual identity before transferring any of their ideas to the stage. Calling the record “an archeology of ourselves,” the group may like doing things the old-fashioned way, but their assemblage of historical fashion feels fitted to the intensity of the present moment, not a retread of the past. Read the full review.

13. Cassandra Jenkins, My Light, My Destroyer

On My Light, My Destroyer, Cassandra Jenkins’ curiosity becomes a vessel through which to deepen her own emotions and understanding of self, playing with words and perspectives as if the subtlest twist might heal or surprise us. She immerses us in the sound of her environment as much as she observes and pulls us out of it, seeing poetry in this kind of translation, and translation as poetry. There’s so much to run through her filter that My Light, My Destroyer becomes endlessly rich, comforting, and vivifying, even as many of Jenkins’ confessions seem achingly solitary. “How long will this pain in my chest last?” she asks a stick-figure drawing of Sisyphus himself. Her wonder does not need an answer to persist, gentle in the knowledge that, surely, it won’t be longer than all this stuff that keeps us reveling. mj le

12. Mannequin Pussy, I Got Heaven

Mannequin Pussy have always recognized the power wrought from contradictions. Vulnerability has been as much at the core of their identity as their punk roots, making their music feel uniquely resonant when snuck between moments of searing aggression. I Got Heaven, their first album since 2019’s Patience, is an ambitious step forward that’s eager to express all different sides of the band: as rageful as it is hopeful, intense yet inviting, and altogether marvelous. Part of the record’s dynamism comes down to the way it was made: singer Marisa “Missy” Dabice, bassist Colins “Bear” Regisford, drummer Kaleen Reading, and newly added guitarist and keyboardist Maxine Steen decamped to Los Angeles to work on the songs with producer John Congleton, creating a collaborative environment that allowed them to revel in the nuances of Dabice’s writing – the intersection of pleasure and pain, fear and desire, the body and the divine – by adding new layers to their already versatile sound. Read our inspirations interview with Mannequin Pussy.

11. Mount Eerie, Night Palace

How much do you need to know about Phil Elverum to gain something from Night Palace, his first album as Mount Eerie in five years? I’ve been listening to his records for around a decade, yet I feel like I’ve understood on a more elemental level the noisy, turbulent atmosphere of his music just by spending a bit of time in the Pacific Northwest this year. Across 26 tracks, many of them knotty and expansive in their own right, the new record is often self-referential, yes, but also self-effacing, looking for – or through – something bigger than the self. “Can I abandon this position?/ See beyond my little life,” he wonders on ‘Empty Paper Towel Roll’, already in the process of bridging past and present, autobiography and poetry, meaning and void. The astonishing thing, then, isn’t how much you need to know about Phil Elverum going into Night Palace, but how much of everything that’s followed him his entire life – how much of you, maybe – is nestled inside.

10. glass beach, plastic death

the first glass beach album was audaciously maximalist and wildly inventive in the way it both fused and revitalized elements of pop-punk, bedroom pop, and art rock; the effect was by turns playfully cartoonish, bizarre, haunting, and hyperreal. Its long-awaited follow-up, plastic death, is similarly ambitious yet even more deliberate and immersive – not only in stitching together disparate styles that move beyond their original identification as a “post-emo” group, but also in the juxtaposition of catchy hooks and labyrinthine arrangements, deceptively simple song structures and multi-part, polyrhythmic epics. Emotionally and thematically, too, frontperson J. McClendon’s shift toward abstraction allows them to examine the relationship between aggression and tenderness, nostalgia veering into mania, the self through society, in a way doesn’t elude present reality so much as violently point at it. Read our track-by-track interview with glass beach.

9. Adrianne Lenker, Bright Future

“We look at the world once, in childhood,” Louise Glück wrote in her poem ‘Nostos’. “The rest is memory.” The quote springs to mind each time I listen to Adrianne Lenker’s new album, Bright Future, which might, as its title suggests, be looking out on the road ahead, but allows itself the treasure of remembering, the freedom to linger on memories that both fade and harden with the coming of age. Lenker – lead singer of Big Thief and one of today’s most acclaimed songwriters, recording her new album in a forest-hidden studio with frequent collaborator Philip Weinrobe and friends including Nick Hakim, Mat Davidson, and Josefin Runsteen – perhaps has little reason to introduce her new record by dredging up past trauma. But in these fortunate circumstances, she finds the clarity of her senses awakened as they were when running through the woods as a child. Read the full review.

8. Magdalena Bay, Imaginal Disk

The expansion of Magdalena Bay‘s world isn’t just about meeting the expectations of a rapidly growing fanbase; it’s a way to make space for the LA-based duo’s gnawing existential concerns. Building on the kaleidoscopic vision of their 2021 debut Mercurial World, Imaginal Disk is a sci-fi odyssey as playful and proggy (if not quite as brutal) as the Blood Incantation album on this list, which is really saying something. Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin use this framework to probe questions around personal identity, human consciousness, AI, and more, but you don’t need to digest all the lore to indulge in everything it has to offer on a musical level- swirling song structures, impeccable hooks, impossibly lush pop production. Magdalena Bay certainly retain their knack for balancing disparate styles, heady ideas and sticky songs, but Imaginal Disk widens the group’s scope beyond any fan’s wildest imagination.

7. Grandaddy, Blu Wav

Jason Lytle drapes the songs on his first Grandaddy album in seven years – many of them ballads or slow waltzes – in tons of pedal steel (performed by Max Hart), its sweetness balanced by off-kilter electronics, over a foundation of acoustic guitars, piano, and lush vocal harmonies. The sound of Blu Wav feels both old-timey and timeless, if not futuristic, and its warmth is almost as pervasive as the melancholy. If a song title like ‘You’re Going to Be Fine and I’m Going to Hell’ makes it seem like Lytle is treating bouts of heartbreak and depression with a dose of humour, there’s no mistaking the haunting vulnerability of songs like ‘On a Train or Bus’ and ‘Ducky, Boris and Dart’. It’s a ride worth sticking to, all summed up in the first lyrics of early single ‘Cabin in My Mind’: “Well, it’s a long and lonely road/ But there’s a safe and loving glow.” Read our inspirations interview with Grandaddy.

6. Cindy Lee, Diamond Jubilee

As far as indie and underground music is concerned, Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee is 2024’s biggest success story. Despite not being available on streaming platforms, the album gained traction via word-of-mouth and received Pitchfork’s highest score in four years following its release. Between high-profile releases from Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, it couldn’t be easier to root for Cindy Lee, the stage persona of songwriter and guitarist Patrick Flegel, who has put out several records under the moniker following a stint as the leader of the ’00s post-punk band Women. But when you listen to it on your headphones – it’s the kind of album that keeps you company as you look out the window on a long journey – the ghostly sprawl of the music seems bigger than whatever hype surrounds it: melancholy, arresting, brilliantly executed, and the only 2024 record other than Jessica Pratt’s Here in the Pitch deserving of the term “hypnagogic.”

5. Waxahatchee, Tigers Blood

2020’s Saint Cloud was a stunning balm of a record, one that saw Katie Crutchfield embracing the Americana aesthetic that carries onto the new record; she tried experimenting with more pop-leaning production for “a good six hours,” she estimates, but it didn’t stick. Reuniting with producer Brad Cook to record the album at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, this time with help from Cook’s brother Phil, Spencer Tweedy, and Wednesday guitarist MJ Lenderman (who plays on every song and provides harmonies on many of them), Tigers Blood leans into and refines its predecessor’s sonic palette in ways that make space for the growth in Crutchfield’s lyrics. If Saint Cloud aspired toward and invited the clarity that comes with getting sober, Tigers Blood settles into it without losing grasp on the melodic and lyrical acuity that makes Crutchfield’s music so impactful. Read the full review.

4. Jessica Pratt, Here in the Pitch

If part of the songwriting process is like sleep talking, how can Jessica Pratt’s music sound at once of sleep and outside of it, swimming in the unconscious while also alerting you of all the things you missed when you were lost there? How come she’s both the one talking and waking you? Pratt is so singularly capable of tuning into that hazy space that when she puts out new material after so many years, it’s like realizing you’ve been missing something, been a little lost for a long time. This might sound like an exaggeration, but it’s the only way I can describe diving into Here in the Pitch, her first album since 2019’s Quiet Signs. It might be the most lucid and grounded record of Pratt’s career, but it’s still governed by that uncanny feeling: the ambiguity of time, how it blurs and slips one by, or simply slips, and how a song can suddenly pick it up. Read the full review.

3. MJ Lenderman, Manning Fireworks

“So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people,” the author Harry Crews, one of the biggest inspirations behind Manning Fireworks, once said. “The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.” Lenderman has an instinctive way of tapping into this fractured humanity, avoiding both judgment and redemption in his songs – these are scenes, not story arcs. A lot of the time, the tone he ultimately strikes isn’t a sardonic sneer but a kind of empathetic smirk, especially on the more acoustic songs where Karly Hartzman, Wednesday bandleader and Lenderman’s ex-girlfriend, tenderly joins in on vocals, like the opening title track and ‘Rip Torn’. Without the lo-fi charm that marked his earlier work – this is Lenderman’s first studio LP for ANTI- Records – he finds different tools to evoke the brokenness, not water it down so much as give it a particular texture. Read the full review.

2. Charli XCX, BRAT

Charli XCX‘s BRAT rollout initially hinted at a rather single-minded focus: a return to the singer’s club roots with help from close collaborators well-versed in its language, namely A.G. Cook and EasyFun. In a live setting, CRASH‘s mainstream flirtations also meant embracing her previous eras, whereas BRAT zeroes in on the present and is only interested in recontextualizing old hits that can slot into her set, the word “PARTY” looming behind her. But while it may be a party record, a club record even, Charli treats these spaces with the same nuance afforded by the singer quickly assumed (and confirmed) to be the subject of ‘Girl, so confusing’. It’s perhaps too easy for an artist with Charli’s self-awareness to wink at her place in the pop landscape, gamified as it is. But none of the references on BRAT totally scan as such; even if they become cause for speculation, Charli focuses on the emotion, not the person or the world they belong in. Read the full review.

1. Fashion Club, A Love You Cannot Shake

Self-produced but featuring remarkable guest appearances from Perfume Genius, Julie Byrne, and Jay Som, Fashion Club’s A Love You Cannot Shake finds Los Angeles-based artist Pascal Stevenson tangling in the relationship between experimental and pop music, tenderness and confusion, current and past selves, self-growth and systemic inequality – dialogues that seem beyond language but remain ceaseless and transformative. “I found comfort in the lie,” she sings on ‘Ice Age’, but you’d be forgiven for hearing the word “light” instead – after all, that’s exactly what pours in halfway through many of the album’s songs. The light, Stevenson suggests, is never too far from the darkness. But to get from a lie to the truth – uncomfortable, soothing, radiant, and undeniable – takes one hell of a leap. A Love You Cannot Shake isn’t just the sound of Fashion Club making it and breaking through, but reveling in every facet of its breathless, uncompromising expression. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Fashion Club.