40 favorite albums of my 2024
The syllables, the letters, the black and white keys
Alright, let’s get this out of the way first.
Kendrick Lamar: GNX
I don’t mind the harsh reviews for this: if there’s any non-billionaire we should demand the world from, it’s the era’s most gifted purveyor of fine and varied rapping who has a history of taking the cheap way out. So before we overthink things, here’s what consumers need to know: it’s 44 minutes of fine and varied rapping, and there are beats too. Trying to find weaknesses besides the unapologetic self-aggrandizement (not a problem for me, I’m not British), the best I can do is to point out the featured up-and-coming Cali MCs aren’t in his league. Yet they’re essential to the theme, which is that he’s a local boy regardless of how much success he has on Earth as in Heaven. The album’s first great verse is the second of “Wacced Out Murals”, which starts in his GNX with Anita Baker, says what he needs to about the feud that those with finite interest in trainwrecks are sick of, and is blunt and potent in the battle tradition. And aside from “Heart Pt. 6”, the most felt tribute to ride-or-dies turned regular buddies this side of Let’s Eat Grandma’s “Happy New Year”, that’s how the record plays out. Kendrick knows his base requires no frills, just a few hooks, and his pronunciation can turn almost anything into a hook. If he were in cruise mode, as he was for much of the early 2020s, he could’ve turned the “quid pro quo” on “Squabble Up” into an entire song. Instead, his oft-abused knack for repetition is deployed with discretion—on “Peekaboo” it’s cover for his ominousness—in deference to his talent for cramming weird bars into a line’s required rhythm. He somehow carves two matching tetrasyllables out of “It’s bald heads and the heckling for all endorsements” thanks to a “hec-kle-ing”. With respect to Sounwave, at his best with minimalist sonics like the dwwwhips on “Man at the Garden” and minimalist grooves like “Dodger Blue” walking like Ohtani with men on second and third, and Jack Antonoff (not sure what he does but probably not too much, given that K. Dot doesn’t yell “MAYOOOOOOOO”), his most valuable collaborator is SZA, who gives the Greatest Rapper Alive permission to be a pretty effective singer and saves the one potential “Mortal Man”/“We Cry Together”-like opportunity for the enterprise to crumble: it doesn’t matter what the metaphor of “Gloria” is, he’s rapping to SZA. “Reincarnated” isn’t brittle at all: Kendrick finally comes across as pious when he’s playing God. That’s the least He should demand from His greatest conservative artist.
Grade: A PLUS (“Reincarnated”, “TV Off”, “Squabble Up”)
***
Phew. And now, my top dozen albums of the year (including one ringer I should’ve got to in ’23), in annoying countdown order. Number twelve, the only substantive upgrade, has the only blurb I cleaned up.
12. Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft
Tracks 2-3-4 top “Bad Guy”/“Xanny”/“Crown” as the easiest-to-enjoy treble of her career to date. There’s cunnilingus that’s conceivably enjoyable for both parties, which in music is as rare as dentata. There’s Spirited Away: The Musical, implying she’ll be able to pick up the T for her EGOT if and when she wishes. And there’s a straight (not that kind of straight) love-and-death song, which at first I thought went down too easy until the public convinced me that didn’t matter in the face of her immense melodic gift. Thereafter emotions and to some extent results are mixed: the multipart suites sound like arbitrary Finneas beats stapled together. Still, arbitrary Finneas beats have their now-familiar pleasures, and the pair ensure every piece is tuned and hooked: indeed, the outro of “L’Amour de la Vie” has proved a banger in its own right. “The Diner”, on which she portrays a genuine Bad Guy, opens a path to many more strong songs should she happen to find medium-term happiness. And “The Greatest”, which I couldn’t get to work as humblebrag or irony, eventually clicked as performance. Eilish moves to the top of her pop generation’s leaderboard as a singer, with that 2-3-4 again showing the breadth of her approaches: crisp coolness, high head voice, belted amorousness. If she can’t quite do every emotion yet, she can do enough of them that you might not notice.
11. Amaro Freitas: Y’Y
After three full-lengths on the post-bop to free jazz continuum, Recife’s Freitas both turns toward modern classical and adds influences from the Amazon and from multiracial regions of his country, earning an unexpected critical hit in the English-language press for his trouble. I’m happy to believe the rhythms of “baião” and “frevo” are there, despite not having any idea how accurately they’re reproduced. Percussion aside, what I hear on the solo first half is post-Cagean minimalism, colored by some hippie shit. Post-Cagean minimalism is pretty hard to mess up, so what’s more impressive is that the hippie shit—birdsong and rustling leaves and whatever he’s doing with his eBow—is just as rigorous and thought-through. Guests show up in the second half, and though this breaks the trance, there are some fine contributions: Shabaka Hutchings’s flute fits the palette very well, and if we must return to standard avant-jazz at the end, it’s better to have Hamid Drake around. Only the Jeff Parker collab “Mar de Cirandeiras” ends up underwater. Throughout, Freitas gets a remarkable range of sounds out of his piano. Preparing it with clips and seeds, he isn’t afraid to knock it around—but organically.
10. Bad Moves: Wearing Out the Refrain
A fun rock record? In this economy? True, that’s not unprecedented—not that you’d expect “unprecedented” from people who sent Brooklyn Vegan an arm-length influences list—but in this day and age, it’s rare that a band nearly a decade into their career can thrive without ending up adrift in neuroticism or ska. Part of the trick is that they enjoy being in a rock band. Regardless of the precarity of their settings, like an “Eviction Party” (T. Rex, Sly Stone, The Beths among others, per B. Vegan), said party comes through in melodic guitar solos, my-first-counterpoint singalongs, power-pop dynamics, and the bass getting to the new chord first. “Hallelujah” (Beach Boys, Modern Lovers, Parquet Courts), with the frontpeople trading reflections on the hypocrisies of present-day scribes and Pharisees, is a classic for our time. “New Year’s Reprieve” (okay, this one’s mostly just “Fairytale of New York” six days late), in which I think it’s guitarist Katie Park reflecting on “cleaning literal shit from a dive bar toilet” in December 2019. Not quite optimistic, she carves out space for future optimism that as it turns out would be necessary the following year. Yeah, that’s where I’m at.
9. The Paranoid Style: The Interrogator
No matter how many old New Wave riffs or ex-dB’s members they jack, they’re a songs band, and in terms of both melodies and, harder to judge, lyrics, this is their strongest set since the early EPs and Rolling Disclosure. This time Elizabeth Nelson goes heavy on declarative first-person sentences, which the listener is left to decide whether to interpret autobiographically: “I would punch you in the illegal zone” one doubts, “I have solved unproven crimes” who knows, “I have bested all my peers” well yeah. Despite a refusal to state opinions explicitly (those wanting an adjudication on the Molly Maguires’ alleged labor terrorism will, like the Mollies, be left hanging), this might low-key be these D.C. boundary riders’ most political album. For all its “Magic Woman Touch” thrust, “Styles Make Fights” betrays a palpable anxiety; if Mondale was never going to beat Reagan, Dukakis-Bush was just a bad match-up, and there are points in history when you really don’t want one of those. Nelson’s found more distinctive ways to cram all those syllables in there—it’d never crossed my mind to pronounce “semi-pop” like that—such that it’s hard to imagine anyone else singing these songs. Maybe noted woman author appreciator R. Zimmerman: now that’s a kindred match-up.
8. Eirik Hegdal Eklektisk Samband: Turnchest
All the big Nordijazz names are here—Ole Morten Vågan! Hans Hulbækmo! Per “Texas” Johansson!—and so are all the big ideas; it’s like they’re trying to cram all the songs they’ve ever heard into forty minutes. “Vibrato Chess” is a goof on “Wuthering Heights”—down to Vågan’s electric bass and Anja Lauvdal’s synth taking turns parodying the guitar solo—though with Cathy optimistic, having made a happy posthumous marriage to Casper the Friendly Ghost or someone, hoping one day Heathcliff too will be boneless. What’s truly supernatural is that both featured vocalists are fine. Violinist Josefin Runsteen gets in some reckless wails on “Lea!” before the song liquefies. Thea Grant sings the rest, and far exceeds my usual avant-vocal bar of “not insufferable”: she’s capable of deadpanning the hipster poetry as well as weirding it up. Oh yeah, there’s jazz too, with Hegdal and Texas J blowing all manner of blowables in all manner of moods, whether embracing the contrabass honking/sopranino squealing dichotomy on “Groundsky” or taking a conventional tenor solo on “Turnchest in Candle Wax” as Runsteen’s violin gets up to multitracked trickery. The whole enterprise teeters right on the Annoying Line; while your placement may differ, it miraculously never tips over for me. A singular record.
7. Thomas Anderson: Hello, I’m from the Future
I’ve liked many Anderson songs before, especially those written from unusual PoVs (Donner Party member, encyclopedia fancier) but admit sometimes thinking “good songs, so what?” No such reservations here; there’s no shortage of sharp angles. Whatever happened to David Bowie’s cell phone? Who’s looking after Judas’ orphaned kids? How does Titian’s Madonna of the Rabbit help us survive times of plague and/or the running dog imperialist bourgeoisie? If Anderson’s Syd Barrett tribute isn’t that mad, neither was Roger Waters’s; meanwhile, Johnny Mercer is dropped off at Moon River’s edge with a harmonica and left to fend for himself. There are enjoyable formal exercises: if you’re writing a song called “I Just Wanna Be Entertained”, it’s fun to take route one and repeat-rhyme the last word of the title. That after all these years Anderson still sings boyishly, or at least grad-studently, adds poignancy. His anti-virtuosic self-accompaniments deploy organ and jangle for atmosphere and to channel affect, with the minor-key “Miss January” sounding like a garbled memory of “Wicked Game” and/or a Kodak ad. When it comes to the emotional peaks, the elegiac “Jenifer Never” and the flashback finale “Lincoln in a Leisure Suit”, tears will be jerked.
6. Romy: Mid Air
The critical love R. Madley-Croft’s solo debut has received in the U.S. has been somewhat perfunctory, when it’s better sung and written than most and maybe all of the xx’s albums. True, the beats can feel more dated than retro: Stuart Price does what he’s been doing since the 2000s, and Fred Again displays the structural conservatism you’d expect from someone whose Wiki page lists his family tree’s peerages. And woman-for-woman desire is hardly taboo anymore—only it’s difficult for me to think of entries in the genre this intense on that topic. Tegan & Sara’s at their horny semipop peak, say, weren’t as quite as amorous as “She’s on My Mind” (“but I wish she was under me.”) Romy’s vocal coolness works in her favor: repeating “I love her” doesn’t scan as any kind of overstatement; it’s a state of being. And the datedness is itself a strategy, amplified by roping in ambient pioneer Beverly Glenn-Copeland (b. 1944, came out as a trans man in 2003) to emphasize the same feelings were experienced by LGBT generations past, even if their opportunities to express them publicly were limited. Turns out the 2000s were special for more than for being the time Calvin Harris got famous, and that’s worth a little nostalgia.
5. Doechii: Alligator Bites Never Heal
The story so far: “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” was rap song of its year, while “What It Is” was a blatant sellout that, huh, worked. What she didn’t have hitherto was a first-rate full-length (Oh the Places You’ll Go was 22 minutes, of which the first ten were great-great), so here’s a credibility bid that, huh, works. White-lined CV gaps are expounded upon during argument with her therapist (herself) b/w dyspneic breathing exercises “Denial Is a River”, which is as troublingly funny as anything since Mimi Zima’s deleted EPs. More often she just raps well, with an introspection not signaled by the Florida Woman artwork, and, less expectedly, interesting singing: the vocal processing on “Hide n Seek” complicates the emotion as much as I. Heap’s “Hide and Seek” did. The blend of populist and freaky beats is deft, if not quite coherent; Doechii plays well against all kinds, peppering “Boom Bap” with sarcastic flows and vowelless syllables. On “Nissan Altima” she goes Kill Yr Problematic Idols on Nicki and Azealea and shows that comfort with dropping casual C-bomb rhymes has improved over time (and people say there’s no technological progress anymore.) As a vocalist and entertainer, the current top dog on her label.
4. Dlala Thukzin: Finally Famous Too
Amapiano, gqom, 3-step, whatever: it’s 100% Thukzin. That means the usual effortless beauty, as on the approximately syncopated “Sohlala Sisonke”, one of his two current hits (single-only “Ama Gear” is also worthwhile), is table stakes. Though Thukzin can match almost any beatmaker for cool sonics, more than anyone else in his scene, Thukzin has the structures and the pacing to sustain bliss for a full-length; it helps that at an hour, by Afrotronica standards this is a mini. The percussion frameworks complement the singers: a big snare and an oscillating rattle for pop-leaning Simmy, while the rhythm-play vocalists in the center of the album get what I call “early fours”, where the fourth beat comes a sixteenth early for extra urgency. Towards the end, things get weird. Not sure what “VAR” has to do with the offside rule, but its high, hollow synths create an idiosyncratic groove; after a false start, the bass finally drops and it’s a tremendous contrast. “Ballito” has a different percussion sound again, like a faded memory of a beach party. “Whistle” starts off subtle, before fast rattle-rolls and the good old donk arrive in your face. I don’t think anyone since (sorry) Moby has better satisfied both the commercial and experimental imperatives of electronic dance music.
3. Megan Moroney: Am I Okay?
On her second record, Sonymoth tames her perverse streak, unless it counts as perverse that she isn’t permitted to complete the phrase “he’s good in bed” in 2024. If you can live with that, this is an improvement on Lucky, foremost because of her singing. She’s dramatically increased the engagement her pan-fried drawl has with her material: the unadorned piano ballad “28th of June” would’ve been beyond her an anniversary ago. With a singular voice, writing that conceals how clever it is, a knack for a punchline, and a very un-Zoomer public confidence in her looks to the extent that she can be phlegmatic about losing a guy to Miss Universe, it might seem her only worthy aspiration would be Dolly, except with country radio retrenching to a No Women Allowed equilibrium, she might be rushing crossover sooner than she career-planned. The seeds are in place: “Hope You’re Happy” plays out its conceit at least as well as Olivia Rodrigo did, while “Noah” is a blatant Early Taylor boy song that would’ve been above average on greatest of countrypop albums Fearless. When becoming the heir to one of your genre’s icons is Plan A and Plan B, you know that UGA’s Music Business major has served you well.
2. Kendrick Lamar: GNX
“Hey Ken, I’m sorry sorry about Thanksgiving, it wasn’t that good a bit, we got a little carried away.”
“We’re okay Keem. Know what, you can fix me a drink to make it up.”
“Really? After all that swimming pools shit?”
“Yeah I watched a bunch of Bond movies and got into martinis. Except he orders them wrong.”
“You mean when he goes ‘Shaken, not stirred’?”
“Yeah, if you want to keep the ice intact and have a better texture then you MUST STIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
1. Adrianne Lenker: Bright Future
One of the best electric guitarists of her indie generation shelves her main axe, instead soundtracking the opening “Real House” with Nick Hakim’s piano and “a few tiny notes on the violin”: gutsy at a time when many streamers quit an album as soon as they encounter negative space. Put the album on loop and move on to the 12-string accompanied second track, “Sadness as a Gift”, more in line with past Lenker downer highs yet formally searching, with a chorus accumulating amplitude as it repeats. “Fool” does have electric guitar, but subordinated to a Philip Glassian arrangement that turns Facebook updates from blood and chosen family into casual prophecy. The album then settles into an acoustic guitar-driven equilibrium, centering lyrics that mix up striking imagery (“a needle shining like a diamond in the desert”) with gnomic koans (“water like a washing machine”). Her singing on “Vampire Empire” is outstanding even compared to the Big Thief version, with the “chills”, “drills”, and now “gills” sounding less like hooks and more like organic expressions of amphibiousness or some parallel debinarization. By the time she claims the piano stool for herself on “Evol”, she’s chiseling down to the connotations of individual sounds: the consonants and vowels that combine into the imperfect heteropalindromes “teach”/“cheat” are as uncanny as the black and white keys of C sharp. And soon, if you trusted my instructions, the dissonant chords and exquisite devastation of “Ruined” flow back to “Real House”, childhood and adulthood collapsing into each other, moments of love and death and her mom finally crying searing themselves in your brain as they’ve been seared into hers. As close to a raggedly perfect album as After the Gold Rush.
***
Here’s my full top 40, all of which I re-listened to this month, most more than once. For transparency, the number of times I played each album is in square brackets (this is biased against things I got to late in the year and long things, and towards things my spouse wants to listen to.)
Adrianne Lenker: Bright Future [13]
Kendrick Lamar: GNX [10]
Megan Moroney: Am I Okay? [10]
Dlala Thukzin: Finally Famous Too [10]
Doechii: Alligator Bites Never Heal [10]
Romy: Mid Air (2023) [12]
Thomas Anderson: Hello, I’m from the Future [12]
Eirik Hegdal Eklektisk Samband: Turnchest [11]
The Paranoid Style: The Interrogator [11]
Bad Moves: Wearing Out the Refrain [10]
Amaro Freitas: Y’Y [11]
Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft [12]
Hans Winterberg/Amernet String Quartet: Chamber Music Vol. 2: String Quartets Nos. 2-4 (2023) [8]
Franco Luambo Makiadi Presents Les Editions Populaires (1968-1970) [8]
Kris Davis Trio: Run the Gauntlet [6]
NMIXX: Fe304: Break EP [8]
Unholy Modal Rounders: Unholier Than Thou: 7/7/77 (Live) [6]
Chappell Roan: The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (2023) [7]
A Moi La Liberté: Early Electronic Raï Algérie 1983-90 (2023) [8]
My full 87-album A-list is in a separate non-emailed post; it’s a good list, if I do say so, with solid geographical representation of five continents plus Canberra’s Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers. My only concern is that African-American music thins out a little in the bottom half (though there’s a decent amount of African-African music throughout.) Betting against Black music has been the easiest way for a critic to go broke for a century, so next year I’ll try harder.
Also coming in 2025: fair warning, I’m going to ask you for money, having finally come up with a plan for doing so that results in me keeping zero dollars for myself.
Wow! as always. I have been having some ear / hearing problems and the "sound" of some albums aggravates them. Don't ask me. This has led me to limit or put off listening to those albums, one of which is the Adrianne Lenker. But if you are going to invoke "After the Goldrush", well, I'm going to have to dive back in and tough it out.
Fantastic!