Top 10 Albums of 2024
Celebrating the music that meant the most to me this year, ranging from vocal jazz to cosmic country, self-aware pop to whimsical chamber music.
According to the running list that I maintain over the course of each year, I listened to over 100 new releases in 2024. In due time, I’ll share a longer chronicle, loosely ranked, of the albums that made an impression on me. For today, my attention is on the cream of the crop— and I honestly can’t remember the last time it was so challenging whittling down my list to just 10 standouts. (You’ll notice a couple of minor cheats.) This was a rich and rewarding year for music, and the selections here just skim the surface of what 2024 had to offer.
As usual, my selections are based around a few criteria: Which albums surprised me the most? Which provided the most pleasure and entertainment? Which broadened my tastes or cultivated new aesthetic interests? Which resonated with relatable humanity or offered a fresh point of view? Which delighted me with their humor, beauty, playfulness, candor, and revelation? Which reflected the questions and concerns of our culture in unique and meaningful ways?
I am pleased to offer a list of 10 favorites that are diverse not only in terms of genre, but also in terms of generation— as is so often the case, I found myself equally enamored with songs of youth and innocence and songs of wisdom and experience. With no further preamble, here are my favorites from the year, all of which are likely to remain in rotation for a long time to come.
1. Charli XCX - Brat/Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat
Self-described as “famous, but not quite,” Charli XCX reveals all the things you’re not supposed to say about being a celebrity— how she loves hearing her own songs blasting at the club, and how she feels anxious about being dwarfed by the higher wattage of Taylor Swift. Of the many gravity-defying feats of Brat, Charli’s big breakout album, the most astonishing is how she transforms these tabloid woes into a testament of messy, contradictory, endlessly relatable humanity. Not since Swift’s own Reputation has a pop album so capably marshaled meta-narrative to illuminate deeper, more universal themes.
As a pop star, Charli is everything— funny, braggy, self-effacing, conversational. She is a supernova of charisma, and she imbues Brat with ample personality and a particular point of view. Her glow creates a good kind of tension with the music, which is aggressively, even abrasively artificial— as if to mock the convention that meaningful, self-reflective music can only be wrought on acoustic instruments or in a conventional singer-songwriter setting. Crucially, in an era of streaming bloat and big-statement pop, Brat is also compact, fizzy, and endlessly fun. As Swift shifts toward headphones and Beyoncé to honky tonks, Charli remains singularly committed to the club.
The remix album, released as a companion piece for the original Brat, deepens and broadens the project’s musical and thematic ideas, creating an expansive body of work that exists in ongoing dialogue with itself.
Read my original review of Brat, then my follow-up piece on the Brat remix project.
2. Julian Lage - Speak to Me
On this sensational collection of original songs, guitarist Lage offers a range of tuneful, textured arrangements, spanning everything from solo recitals to full-band barn-burners. It’s hard to think of a contemporary instrumentalist whose phrasing so resembles that of a singer— not for nothing is one song called “Serenade”— nor a producer better-suited to this kind of warm, intimate recording than Joe Henry. Jazz is only the jumping-off point for Lage’s wide-ranging adventures through country, folk, and other American roots tributaries, resulting in an expansive sonic landscape that warrants comparison to Allen Toussaint’s The Bright Mississippi and Bill Frisell’s Blues Dream.
Read my review of Speak to Me.
3. Waxahatchee - Tigers Blood
Combining the heartland rock of Tom Petty with the rural storytelling of Lucinda Williams, singer Katie Crutchfield has perfected her sultry, simmering sound— a relaxed Americana that keeps the focus on her finely-chiseled lyrics and tangy voice. The songs here reflect the uneasy stasis of middle age, offering hard-won wisdom about love and addiction, faithfulness and co-dependence.
Read my review of Tigers Blood.
4. Kali Uchis - Orquídeas
On her most assured album to date, the Colombian-American singer combines glistening, state-of-the-art productions with song structures favored by her ancestors, resulting in a portrait of the artist as a futurist who hasn’t forgotten her roots. As a singer, she is equally magnetic when she’s belting melodramatic ballads or tossing off casually bilingual entendres. Uchis has an unyielding sense of swagger, and with Orquídeas she’s made an album whose vision and bravado actually exceed her self-hype.
Read my review of Orquídeas.
5. Vampire Weekend - Only God Was Above Us
The fifth Vampire Weekend album is lousy with Easter eggs, including both musical and lyrical allusions to their past work; only Taylor Swift is more adept at world-building and self-mythology. These relics aren’t signs of a band that’s become too insular, but rather they attest a band interested in interrogating their own history, taking stock of faded ideals, shifting perspectives, and the compromises of middle-age. This is as tight and punchy a record as they’ve made since their debut, and as densely-textured as anything in their catalog.
Read my review of Only God Was Above Us.
6. Ethan Iverson - Playfair Sonatas/ Technically Acceptable
The celebrated pianist, pundit, and composer ends a creatively fertile year with not just one but two outstanding releases. On Playfair Sonatas, a 90-minute sequence of chamber music, he conjures rich melodies drenched in whimsy, playfulness, and the blues. On Technically Acceptable, he wrestles old-timey jazz vernaculars into a succinct, modern aesthetic. Both albums are endlessly accessible and full of delights.
Read my review of Playfair Sonatas, and my review of Technically Acceptable.
7. Beyoncé - Cowboy Carter
What would it take for Beyoncé— the most-nominated artist in Grammy history— to finally receive an overdue Album of the Year award? Time will tell, but the answer might sound a lot like Cowboy Carter, an album awash in American roots signifiers, “real” (read: acoustic) instruments, and institutional credibility from the likes of Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson— there’s even a Beatle here! That’s only one way to consider Cowboy Carter, which is also a thorny and complicated thesis about genre and its potential to exclude; and, improbably, a surprisingly revealing album about Beyoncé herself, rooting her country bona fides in the complexity of her Southern identity.
Read my review of Cowboy Carter, along with my blurb for the FLOOD Magazine Albums of the Year list.
8. Johnny Blue Skies - Passage du Desir
Who is Sturgill Simpson? Following a decade of head-spinning success, the Kentucky-born country iconoclast forgot how to answer that question, and it took relocation to Paris— along with a new stage name— to figure it out. Passage du Desir finds Simpson at his funniest, his most moving, and his most philosophical, untangling issues of identity in a sonic milieu equally indebted to cosmic country, yacht rock, and back-porch picking.
Read my review of Passage du Desir.
9. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Wild God
Following several albums devoted to muted tones and meditations on grief, the venerable Cave leads his long-running band through their most exuberant music in years. But this isn’t an album of forced frivolity or artificial optimism: It’s a thoughtful reckoning with the long tail of lament, and the struggle to pluck joy from the jaws of despair. It’s also one of Cave’s most theologically robust albums, where song after song features God as the divine mover— instigator, catalyst, agent of change.
Read my review of Wild God.
10. Arooj Aftab - Night Reign
Nighttime often symbolizes a season of darkness, sadness, or fear— but on this spellbinding album, Aftab, a top-shelf jazz singer, presents it as something altogether more sensual and inviting. Her dusky aesthetic is equally informed by the intimacy of Urdu poetry and the romance of jazz standards, leading to a deeply appealing album that celebrates the rustle of acoustic instruments and— above all— the enchantment of the human voice.
Read my review of Night Reign.
I really appreciate these lists, even though what they mostly tell me is we have exceptionally different tastes, likely, because I'm a snob and will refuse to listen to certain artists. I still want you to review the weirder stuff I like (right now, for example, I'm working to Standard's 2024 release "Fruit Galaxy), mostly to see if there's crossover with your more obscure tastes. I deeply respect how you can critique and exegete a work of art, a skill I certainly don't possess.