The Best Albums of 2024
according to me
Well, if 2023 was a somewhat underwhelming year as far as albums go, 2024 more than makes up for it. This year has given a bumper crop of great albums, and in an era where the music business is very much led by singles and albums are no longer the ascendant art form, that’s not something to be sniffed at.
No doubt topping the list of albums that were memorable this year is the phenomenon that is Brat, by Charli xcx. The album has become a meme in itself, from the title being ascribed to all different kinds of people including Kamala Harris, to it taking over an entire season, to the garish lime green of the album cover which has spawned dozens of parodies.
Another album you couldn’t get away from this year was Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department. As Swift wrapped up her gargantuan Eras Tour, the album was crowned the most listened-to of the year on Spotify, and showed that people still apparently have the attention span to listen to an entire album – or even the double album that Swift served up this time around. It was divisive among critics, but whatever you think of her or her music, she certainly got people talking.
One of the year’s biggest surprises was the truly meteoric rise to prominence of Chappell Roan, arguably the most exciting pop artist to break out in the last ten to fifteen years. Off the back of her single “Good Luck Babe”, her 2023 album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess became a sleeper hit, such that it almost feels like a 2024 album in its current popularity. Her songs of sapphic yearning and romantic disappointment have resonated far and wide, and her campy, melodramatic stage persona drew record numbers of audience members to her live performances.
None of these albums are in my list, but I thought they deserved a mention given how much they have dominated the discourse this year around artists, their fanbases, and the intertextuality of their songwriting. It could have been a long list – there was that much quality – but I’ve whittled it down to the ones that truly had me from start to finish. These five albums are listed in no particular order of preference.
Maggie Rogers - Don’t Forget Me
On her third album, Maggie Rogers goes back to her roots as a folk singer-songwriter and comes out with several of her best songs to date. Don’t Forget Me is another welcome addition to the Great American Road Trip oeuvre, in the lineage of other albums such as Tori Amos’s Scarlet’s Walk and Joni Mitchell’s Hejira. For all its rootsy production, this is very much a pop record as well, and Rogers revels in her natural melodic ability, creating some of the wormiest earworms of the year. Just try and listen to a track like “The Kill” or “On & On & On” without repeating their hooks in your head for days at a time.
The album was written very quickly, over five days in total in the studio: two songs a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Rogers hadn’t intended to write another album; she just so happened to stumble upon one. This is reflected in the songs’ looseness and sense of fun, as well as their lack of pressure. That being said, she isn’t afraid to belt one out when she needs to, especially live: and what a set of pipes she has on her.
During the writing process, a character emerged in Rogers’ mind of a young woman driving alone through the American South, reckoning with all the stuff happening in her life. Much of the lyrical material revolves around relationships of the romantic variety: from the nostalgic regret of “If Now was Then”, to the teenage fury of “Never Going Home”, to the sassy kiss-off for a disappointing lover on “So Sick of Dreaming”. Rogers harnesses each song with good humour, sincerity, and a whole lot of passion. This is one to make you feel good.
St. Vincent - All Born Screaming
After her experimentations with persona, identity, and gender expression, on All Born Screaming St. Vincent (real name Annie Clark) strips her sound back to its bare essentials. Usually most well-known as a guitarist, she instead decided to start the writing process for this album using electronic synthesisers, a process she describes as akin to creating order out of chaos: harnessing electricity running through a machine to make human, heartfelt music. It’s verse-one-of-Genesis-type stuff.
The songs she ended up with are appropriately elemental, and some of the most exciting of her career. Take a track like “Violent Times”, which pairs swelling stabs of brass with skittering beats and one of the finest vocal takes Clark has ever put to tape; or “Reckless”, with its desolate piano chords giving way to thunder and hellfire as the ground collapses beneath. Each song has something different to offer — they are punishing, tender, and thrilling by turns.
All Born Screaming is the first of her albums Clark produced entirely herself, and you can hear how meticulous she was. “The Power’s Out” is nothing short of masterful from a production point of view, as is “Sweetest Fruit”. Everything sounds real, tactile, exactly right – as if you’re there in the room, at the bone of things. It’s a seriously impressive endeavour. And for those who have missed her more abrasive sound, there’s plenty to be found in “Flea” and “Broken Man”.
Where will she go next? As always with Clark, it’s a mystery.
Vampire Weekend - Only God Was Above Us
After 2019’s sprawling Father of the Bride, Vampire Weekend took a more concise and cohesive approach to their next album. Only God Was Above Us retains the glitchy, stuttering production of its predecessor, but creates a notably more somber atmosphere. The themes this album explores run almost the full gamut of history and experience – religion, war, empires, wealth, fame, nihilism, faith, love. The mythology and music of New York City, and its dark gritty underbelly, was a big inspiration conceptually, as was the photography and film archives of Steven Siegel, whose work appears in the music videos.
Far from taking a romantic, rosy view of the city, the album is labyrinthine and noisy, yet also beautifully melodic. “Capricorn” morphs from a wistful ballad into a caustic distortion-fest and back again. “Gen-X Cops” manages to sound both punk and symphonic. All this noise is contrasted by moments of subtler, cinematic elegance, such as on “The Surfer” and “Pravda”. On the latter, the band’s main songwriter Ezra Koenig grapples with his ancestry of European Jewish immigrants, the song’s title being “the Russian word for truth”. This is an album of hauntings, broken dreams, lives burnt and scattered like ashes. The restrained chaos of its sound could be said to represent these ‘troubled times’ we live in, or ‘chaotic times’ or any other phrase that gets thrown around a lot these days.
The final track, “Hope”, is surely one of the band’s best songs to date. It is also the longest, at nearly eight minutes, and reads almost like an epic folk ballad. Despite what the title suggests, it is not a sunny ending, but rather details various failures, betrayals, and conflicts, each followed by the refrain, “I hope you let it go”. It’s an admission of the dark forces in the world, a somewhat resigned acceptance of them, but also a desire to make peace with that which cannot be changed.
For a band whose first three albums have become one of the triumvirates of modern indie music, Only God Was Above Us is also an exercise in self-mythologisation, albeit one with a winking, ironic slant. The number of references to albums past echoed by brief drum fills or rollicking violin lines will probably be the subject of an academic thesis somewhere in the future. But rather than dwell on nostalgia, the album uses the past as part of a complex interweaving with the present and future. It is the work of a band that has matured and honed its sound.
Jessica Pratt - Here in the Pitch
Jessica Pratt is a songwriter in miniatures. Her songs are mostly short, as are her albums, with this one clocking in at under 30 minutes in length. But in that brevity opens up an almost infinite space. These songs are intricately constructed, complex in their harmony, completely original, and Pratt’s vocal poise and smooth guitar licks are spellbinding to witness. Space is an important component of her sound, in the production as well as the musical framework. Reverb is a big player here. Here in the Pitch takes cues from the psychedelic pop of the 1960s, such as the Beach Boys and the Velvet Underground, and spins it in a way which feels somehow timeless.
Pratt has been building up her sonic universe for a while now. Quiet Signs marked the first time she took her songs into a studio and added other instruments to her sacrosanct vocals and guitar, and on Here in the Pitch she takes another step and uses percussion for the first time. But this is far from a ‘band’ record. Opening track “Life Is” is the only song here which uses drums in a conventionally consistent way. For much of the album she instead takes “a jazz approach”, using the instruments as colours in her palette, which rise and fall as the mood of the song dictates.
The result is an album which is subtle and low-key, but this is not to be mistaken for so-called ‘easy listening’. “Better Hate”, one of the highlights, pairs breezy guitar strumming with lyrics about “no longer trying” and being “tied to an infamy that I tried to hide”. Pratt’s lyrical style is intentionally abstruse, even free-associative, so any biographical speculation is pointless. “By Hook or by Crook” is wonderfully weird and carries a tinge of the occult, the sonic equivalent of a question mark. “Empires Never Know” switches out the guitar for piano, and shows off her lower register to great effect.
“The Last Year” ends the album on a sweet but not entirely unambiguous note — on the one hand, “I think it’s gonna be fine / I think we’re gonna be together”; on the other, “It’s true, the last year ought’ve plagued my mind … ‘Cause I’m exactly what you said / And better off than dead / Still can’t get me out of my own bed / You’d wonder if ever there’s been hope for me”.
What’s amazing is that these songs are so moving, even when you don’t really know what they mean. But such is their beguiling power.
Laura Marling - Patterns in Repeat
Much of Patterns in Repeat was written in the throes of early motherhood, an experience which Laura Marling uses as a jumping off point for reflections on families, childhood, and the experiences that shape us. The album was largely made at home, and the occasional sounds of other people in the background, as well as the soft, unfettered delivery, evoke a sense of domesticity which ties in beautifully with the narrative of the record.
Some of the songs here are downright rhapsodic about motherhood, such as the opener “Child of Mine”, in which Marling extols the wonders of bonding with her child, and later track “Lullaby” does exactly what it says on the tin. Both are unapologetically gorgeous. But Marling is also keenly aware of the impressions parents can leave on their children, both good and bad. She seems to be preoccupied with keeping her child safe — in “Child of Mine” one of the verses goes, “Last night in your sleep you started crying / I can’t protect you there, though I keep trying”; while “Lullaby” softly repeats the mantra “Safe in my arms / Safe in my arms … You’re safe with me”. There’s a sense of responsibility as well as all the happiness.
And on the title track, we hear about another woman who has failed to provide her children with a safe environment. “You had your children on the fly / Another child, another guy / Another chance to fall in love again / I fear they may have paid the price / For the freedom of your life”. The tension between freedom and responsibility is another of her preoccupations. The ‘patterns in repeat’ in question refer to the way parents pass things on to their children: always a fraught and complex process. The “drama of the domestic sphere” formed a major inspiration for the conceptual idea behind the album.
Other tracks concoct tales of lost love and thwarted relationships. “Caroline” concerns the sudden reappearance of an old flame in one’s life, and the mix of longing and bitterness that brings up. In the end our narrator resolves: “I’d like you not to call again”. “The Shadows” follows the emotional desolation of a person whose lover has left them in the night. One can’t help reading into the psychoanalytical implications of shadow, especially since Marling has a Master’s degree in psychoanalytic theory. Both tracks are highlights. Also her guitar work has never been better.
What perhaps ties all of these songs together is that they all deal with the way we project onto other people. We can’t help it; it’s how we’re wired. But you can use your projections for good, or you can become too attached to the ideal of a person to the detriment of both parties. Either way, it’s the humanity in these songs which makes them so compelling. Song for Our Daughter was a tough act to follow, but she has done it beautifully.