the top albums / songs of the midyear - 2024
This is one of those years where putting together a midyear list feels very frustrating - it’s normally one of my favourite lists to do, a quick microcosm of the year so far, a comfortable blend of great albums and songs and where I can take stock of where I am with respect to the rest of the music scene.
But 2024 feels like one of those years where I’m on the outside looking in, and where I question the relevance of this list even coming into next week - because, luck would have it, one of the biggest release weeks thus far this year just so happened to be last Friday, and I just could not get to everything there, because this is also a holiday weekend and there’s just a hard limit on the number of hours in a day. I’ve long had to reconcile that I can’t get to everything, which is saying something because I wasn’t nearly as frustrated last year and I have covered more albums by this point in the calendar year than I did in 2023!
But I also think it feels different - in comparison with 2023’s rocky emotional state coming out of the first half of that year, 2024 I’ve felt a lot more grounded and focused and on my game… and thus paradoxically my picks feel more off the wall than ever before, especially in comparison with the field! For starters, I think when it comes to individual songs I’ve heard more scattered highlights compared to full and consistent albums, which might translate to why I’ve seen so many folks herald 2024 as a great year in pop and… honestly, I can’t agree. Hell, especially compared to last year I’ve felt considerably underwhelmed and the pop I do like… well, you’ll see! I think country has had a slightly weaker year, with a lot of my picks leaning more on the folksier side, but even then my top picks do not align with even the indie country consensus! Paradoxically I think heavier music has had a ridiculously strong year - I don’t expect consensus in such a fragmented genre space, I think the surprise is more just coming from me liking so much of it! This leaves me with the one genre where I actually align with the popular opinion, which is that rap has had a legit great year, mainstream and otherwise… really wish more the ‘otherwise’ category had posted their lyrics online in full so I could include more of them here! And that’s the last thing, there are projects in my backlog from the first six months of 2024 that I’ve just not had a chance to fully cover, so if y’all come back to this in six months for my year-end and find albums from the first half of the year that should have been here… well, this is what happens when you review 90+ albums and still feel like you could have had space to cover twenty more if circumstances aligned!
All of that is to say that this list feels weird, and you’re going to get curveballs on it - and I know that specifically because a whole lot of you did not read or watch my reviews that contained my most glowing praise in 2024, I have the numbers to back that up! But hey, that means I can put you all on game for something you might have missed, so let’s start off with…
15. …yes, it’s an EP. I have three responses to that critique: one, I’ve put EPs on this list before, they have to have a higher rate of killer to filler to make it so it’s fair, two, the album structure based off of runtime or number of tracks is flimsy as hell these days, and three… it’s Nourished By Time, I don’t need a third reason!
For those keeping their ears to the ground, Nourished By Time has been having a quietly strong year, getting signed to XL and picking up steadily bigger stages, with this EP even landing among some mainstream critics who might have missed the boat last year with Erotic Probiotic 2. And that added polish really shows through - 80s freestyle and hypnagogic pop with a sharper melodic gloss to augment strong writing about struggling relationships, where the collapsing world and stress around him becomes a character in and of itself and feels strikingly prescient. Do I wish it was longer and there was more, of course, but for everyone who lost their minds over the newest Cindy Lee project and who might be looking something texturally similar but with more focus and refinement… yeah, this should be on your radar, catch up!
14. But on the topic of increasingly prescient and anxious projects with challenging textures exploring the world on the brink…
Ekko Astral has been one of the biggest surprises for me in 2024, the sort of DC hardcore and noise rock that beefed up their sound to a nightmarish, Kafkaesque swell, but didn’t compromise their melodies or competent mixing to do it, aka one of the big reasons that the new Knocked Loose isn’t on this list. But simply categorizing this as extended, overly online, doomscrolling nightmare fuel is doing it a disservice, not just in picking up elements of spoken word and no wave in the production, but also writing that serves to challenge the audience that thinks consumption under late capitalism is performing virtue, and just how much one would be willing to compromise their integrity for the right escape, and how much folks want to avoid discussing their price while ignoring how it’s a devil’s deal that isn’t extended to everyone, especially for those more openly queer. It could very well have fallen into a nihilistic spiral - hell, I find it hard to blame any of those in the states right now who are in a similar state - but solidarity in community wins out that even if it’s bleak, if folks hold to each other they might be able to get through all of this. It’s a very heavy, angry album… but justifiably so, and with so much intricacy in the lyrics and production, these are balloons that are worth letting loose!
13. Let’s continue in the territory of complicated, texturally ambitious records… and here’s one that feels like it’s been slept on by a lot of the folks who would normally get onboard, maybe because of how low-key it is, or its slightly strange release. Let’s change some of that, shall we?
This was another big surprise for me in 2024, the long-awaited debut / compilation from Tapir!, an English experimental rock collective that stays on the quieter side of indie folk, 60s psychedelic rock, even electronica in structuring its winsome, thoughtful pieces, full of traces of jagged smolder and pensive existential musings. On some level it comes across as much of a theater piece as it does an album with a distinct three act structure, an album deeply rooted in meditative, qualitative folklore but also challenging that nostalgia in its winding search for purpose, where the echo across time that shows how much that search for purpose past and present has left more questions than answers. It’s definitely an album that evades easy analysis, and admittedly this was higher on my list throughout the year until I realized just how often it slipped into the background… but it was a persistent background because there was something about the blend of jittery drum machines and acoustics and touches of baroque swell kept me on that trial. This is the sort of thoughtfully weird folk that would have run up numbers in the mid-2000s, and if you’re nostalgic for it - and then want to be interrogated about that nostalgia - Tapir! is what you need; at the very least, it’s familiar enough for you to realize there’s nothing quite like it.
Now this takes us to our usual venture into songs from projects that just missed the cut in 2024, or for this year singles that will never be attached to any project but deserve discussion and acclaim anyway! And let’s get it started with…
From She’s Back!, ‘Like That’ by Mery Steel
From Saviors, ‘Coma City’ by Green Day
From Mannequin, ‘Illusions Inside’ by Kyros
From COMING HOME, ‘One Of Them Ones’ by Usher
From Be Right Here, ‘Other Side Of The Light’ by Blackberry Smoke
And from Loss of Life, featuring Christine & The Queens, ‘Dancing In Babylon’ by MGMT
Alright, now let’s back to the list with…
12. …you know, I said country had a weaker year overall, but I think that’s my context in terms of covering more of the genre than most - the fact that I have multiple country albums on this list at all is going to be more than some ever will over the course of years. And hell, in this case for this sophomore album… I think the pop crossover is only a matter of time!
Katie Pruitt’s Expectations was one of the most wildly underrated albums of 2020, a queer coming of age story coaxed through softer romantic textures and quiet introspection. But through a change in producers, Mantras is considerably more confrontational right from the opening tracks: the guitars are louder, the groove is more palpable, and Katie Pruitt brings the balance of stridently charged examinations of religion and belief against their own musings on what they’re searching for, if the answers can even be found; there are more existential musings on this list than I originally expected! In retrospect, the album feeling front-loaded can be frustrating - the nuanced pictures on the back half can slip out of focus, the energy definitely peters out, and I truly hope this wasn’t done in an attempt to chase the boygenius wave - but when Pruitt has some of their best songs to date in that front half, it’s really hard to complain. This album was slept on by way too many folks - I recommend y’all change that, this is a mantra worth repeating!
11. …okay, I get it now, I’m onboard. And for once, I’m glad I’m not the only one.
This is another case of an artist getting the right look at the right time and having the album to capitalize on that momentum, and while no songs from Trail of Flowers managed to snag Sierra Ferrell another spot on the Hot 100, it’s precisely the sort of release primed to break her through and it’s great to boot! She still has her eclectic genre bending across Celtic folk, bluegrass, and traditional country, but it feels more focused in the service of stronger compositions built for bigger audiences, still warmly textured and endlessly inviting, but where the adventure feels of a bigger scope. And all of that works for rock-solid fundamentals - Ferrell’s trilling delivery is endlessly charming, her fiddle pickup remains outstanding, and while I can tell the theatricality is doing some heavy lifting over lyricism that can paint broadly, she’s still painting one hell of a canvas with a passion that’s as dangerous and thrilling as they come. It’s the sort of album that has me convinced I need to see her live because I can only imagine how much stronger these will play, but in the mean time Ferrell has established herself as a force to be reckoned with, and there’s a winding bountiful trail ahead!
10. The flipside to me saying that this year hasn’t quite felt as satisfying for me with pop is the record that did wind up here… and what increasingly feels bizarre is just how far I feel out of step with my contemporaries. Not the public at large who have embraced this to a frankly frightening degree… but hey, it wouldn’t be the first time they got mixed messages.
It’s still a little insane to me that this album is doing as well as it is - yes, the machine is a factor and Swift’s billionaire status likely meant she’s too big to fail, but The Tortured Poets Department seems designed to test that mess to its zenith - and in this case, I’m specifically putting her original disk here, not the Anthology that’s primed to be more respectable and is increasingly less of what I want from Taylor Swift. This album might want to hide behind irony and satire, but it proves the axiom of what one says ironically they often believe unironically, and the moments in which the most overexposed and increasingly unsympathetic woman is flying off the moral guardrails are compelling for their insecurity and ego and intoxication and passionate mistakes. Taylor Swift may have built her career on relatability, and thus there’s a sweet irony in that when she’s at her worst and least populist is when I find her most relatable - and when you pair that with some really underrated songcraft and a run of deep cuts that are among her best… hell, cut this and the Anthology down to its best songs and you’d have her best album. This is the controversial pick on this list, the one I’m not ‘supposed to make’ - but hey, some of us are just modern idiots, right?
So while y’all stew on that for a bit, here’s a selection of songs from albums you might think deserve that spot, but missed my cut.
From Blue Lips, ‘Yeern 101’ by ScHoolboy Q
From Bleachers, ‘Tiny Moves’ by Bleachers
From Djesse Vol. 4, ‘She Put Sunshine’ by Jacob Collier
From Deeper Well, ‘Anime Eyes’ by Kacey Musgraves
From WE DON’T TRUST YOU, featuring The Weeknd, ‘Young Metro’ by Future & Metro Boomin
And from COWBOY CARTER, featuring Miley Cyrus, ‘II MOST WANTED’ by Beyonce
…yeah, I’m going to let y’all digest some of that. Ready? Okay, let’s get to…
9. I was going to say that ‘let’s get back to something respectable’… but I honestly think the artist in question might take as a slight, especially if we’re going off the beaten path yet again!
This is another criminally underrated album from the fringes of indie country and folk, but truth be told I should have been singing Willi Carlisle’s praises much earlier than now, especially as Critterland might not even be his best! But when it’s this full of homespun, bracingly raw minimalism, where amidst the rich organic tones Carlisle tells stories from the fringe, where those left behind by the system scrabble to make do and process loss however they can, with the fatalistic questions of what it’s all worth paired with Carlisle’s aching spare theatricality make for some difficult, very human moments. It’s not as funny as Carlisle's earlier projects - yes, even with that title - but that’s because the laughs don’t come as easy out there, and the gutpunch of the smaller moments that can mean the world… yeah, it’s still devastatingly effective. This dropped very early in 2024, I know it’s slipped out of the picture for a lot of folks… and yet I’m here to argue you should go back and find it anyway, it’s worth it.
8. But on the topic of achingly queer country-adjacent songwriting from the desperate fringes that is both deeply human and heartbreaking…
Not gonna lie, Alyssa Segarra’s newest project and a ‘return’ to her roots has slipped a bit for me this year - it’s legitimately great, their delivery is intense and raw and nails the heartfelt reflections on their rough past, the loss of their father, and a very unstable, uncertain future; the definition of a ‘songwriter’s album’ that never bothers carrying that pretension, the world is too close to the brink to bother with that. What I think I appreciate the most is that Segarra’s success has left them in a complicated place - they feel more kinship with the outsiders at the very bottom who have learned to survive, not a more stable world that offers its creature comforts but little emotional respite for the generational trauma they’ve endured. I’m not sure I would call this their magnum opus - The Navigator’s ambition, texture, and stylism has it firmly there for me - but this is one of the most welcome returns to form I’ve heard in 2024, an album so even-keeled that it catches you offguard for how bracing and emotionally charged it is. They’re right that the past is still alive - it infuses all of this.
7. Not gonna lie, I’m a little shocked that this album has grown so much for me this year… maybe it’s a sign of how much rap I’ve really liked, but when you have one of the funniest MCs to touch a mic in recent years paired with such a keen eye to improve off of his debut…
I remember in 2021 when I reviewed Dope Game Stupid I said Bruiser Wolf had a lot of potential, from his insanely funny punchlines to his taste in textured, sample-heavy production - I wanted to hear more sonic diversity and a little more depth overall… and while I wasn’t sure of the latter originally, the fact that this album just kept growing on me with every punchline and listen shows that Bruiser Wolf had more to offer. Not only did the production and guest features pick up a broader diversity of tones, but there was a more weathered emotional balance, chronicling the misadventures of a life he had to live to survive but an honest longing for something more and better, and also with a light enough touch and genuine sense of humour to balance it out. It can be silly and irreverent, but never cartoonish or inauthentic, the sort of wry humour that comes from experiences so absurd you often have to laugh, where he teases the deeper implications behind them rather effectively. What’s thrilling about this album is that I still think he’s got more room to grow, and when the fundamentals and wit are so solid - the melodic hooks in both his production and flow really had legs for me - Bruiser Wolf proved so long as he’s telling the stories, I’m going to keep on listening - great album!
And now onto another slice of songs that are excellent but not on projects that made this list… or projects at all, come to think of it…
From Ehhthang Ehhthang, ‘Opp Shit’ by GloRilla
From BLIP, ‘Smarter Than I Am’ by NAHreally & The Expert
From Undefeated, ‘Ceasefire’ by Frank Turner
From Anniversary, ‘One Night Stand’ by Adeem The Artist
From Giant Formula, ‘Lost In Babylon’ by SUNDAYS
And from… well, the beef that shook hip-hop to its core, ‘euphoria’ by Kendrick Lamar
Alright, over halfway through this list, let’s get to…
6. There are albums I think get slept on for bad, likely systemic reasons. I hear a lot of folks rant about the modern wave of women rapping who say that ‘they only talk about sex or tricking or flexing or catty bullshit’ - seemingly unaware of their male counterparts doing the exact same, nor willing to accept the shades within that subject matter - but when we have a woman rapping with more technical prowess and diversity of subject matter, I see a lot less of y’all cheerleading. But, you know, no need to cry about it.
This is Rapsody’s best album - she made the best use of the years away in order to craft her most diverse and personal project to date that proves not only can she wash the majority of her peers of any gender, but also do so in the process of healing and growth as an artist. Not only does the project leap across sounds and prove just how capable she is with nearly all of them, not only does it show a level of challenging emotional introspection around relationships and sexuality and her own status in the game that reflects the hard kind of self-aware healing, but she also proves that she could play the mainstream game well with material that’s just as sexually charged, and deliver in spades too! It’s by no means perfect - there are plenty of rough edges and a few questionable choices in framing and content - but in getting to the most difficult parts of herself, Rapsody takes a great risk as a Black woman in a hierarchical game and lands both dominance and solidarity. Criminally underrated album and a long time coming… I’m just happy she was able to deliver such a leap forward.
5. There are times in assembling these lists where I feel I have to provide a lot of justifications. This is not one of those times.
Possibly one of Alcest’s best albums, and easily one of their most striking, until we get that next Unreqvited album this is the most gorgeous black metal I’ve heard in years. And while there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to pigeonhole this as ‘just’ black metal when it goes to post-rock and shoegaze as well, there’s a thicker groove and muscle underscoring these compositions that highlight just how stirring blackgaze can be. And when you pair that with a gloriously tragic story of loss and transcendence, Neige once again proved his unique formula has legs for what could be their best album since their debut. This is the most recent album to make my list… and man, I’m thrilled I got to it before the midyear - if you haven’t had a chance to hear it, even if you’re a bit spooked by black metal’s sound or reputation, this is a jump on point… and man, it’s worth it!
4. One thing I’ve noticed about the albums on this list is that a chunk are reaching for what might be described as the ‘most’ of the artist, for better and for worse. Sometimes that manifests as their most personal album, sometimes it’s their most messy album… and sometimes it’s the apotheosis of what we knew he was capable of the whole time.
Yeah, I’ll say it, this is Vince Staples’ best album - better than FM!, better than Big Fish Theory. And the funny thing is that across the board if you listen to what Vince Staples has said in interviews or on his Netflix series, it’s by no means surprising. It’s lean and ruthlessly clever, it’s funny but almost incidentally in passing, and the more you think about it the darker the jokes get, the production finally nails the balance of west coast swagger and a more weathered, textured groove, it’s utterly vicious in targeting the commodification of the Black experience in rap, only expanding on the themes from FM!, and most importantly, it offers the sort of complicated glimpse behind the curtain that shows the human cost that has been taken to succeed in these dark times. Vince Staples’ art can feel deceptive in its simplicity, but the reality is that there’s no deception beyond the one we choose in engaging with his work, and with this project, there is no more room for obfuscation. An absolutely bleak listen - because his brand of realism in today’s day and age is too honest not to be bleak - but absolutely one of the best; highly deserving of all the acclaim it’s received, and if you think it’s too simple… well, sometimes it’s just in plain sight, and you have to be willing to look.
And that takes us to our last group of songs that didn’t make albums on this list but are worth praising regardless…
From Norther, ‘Hummingbird’ by Shane Smith & The Saints
From Clancy, ‘Midwest Indigo’ by twenty one pilots
From Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going, ‘Let It Burn’ by Shaboozey
From brat, ‘So i’ by Charli xcx
From hummingbird, ‘pretty please’ by Carly Pearce
And finally, from Fathers & Sons, ‘Take Me Out To The Ballgame’ by Luke Combs
Alright, final three, it’s going to get interesting…
3. One thing that the next two entries have in common is that it seems like nobody was checking for them, either the album or my review. And in this first case, it’s utterly mystifying - even outlets I expected to be covering this and singing its praises seem to have completely passed it by! Time to correct some of that, shall we?
This was what I’ve been waiting for Wade Bowen to deliver since I started covering him nearly ten years ago - he’s run up the score with great work with Randy Rogers, but I knew his more nuanced and thoughtful approach to Texas country would show dividends if the production just stuck the landing. And with Flyin, he did just that - incredibly warm and textured, neotraditional to a fault but also dabbling near southern rock and funk and Americana, showing the sort of experimentation he last really touched in 2018 with an incredibly strong crop of songs! What I love about this album is that Bowen gets the loose Texas swagger and anthemic bravado, but balances it effectively with emotional complexity and maturity - it’s a familiar taste, but there’s a refinement and depth that you might not expect. It was my comfort album in 2024, the sort of consistently solid release where the quality feels unassuming until you reach the end and realize there’s not a bad or even lukewarm song here! This is my favourite country album of 2024 thus far, and while there’s some stiff competition coming - including from himself another collab project with Randy Rogers - right now this is flying high!
2. On the flip side, I’m not surprised this has gone under the radar of a lot of folks, even self-professed underground hip-hop fans. His last solo album was in 2015, and while he had two critically appreciated projects in the late 2010s… that can almost feel like a different time, given how the genre evolves and mutates. But he had a reason for being gone so long - like Rapsody his journey was also one of healing - and now that he’s back, we have this.
It’s rare that a rapper, especially in the underground, delivers an album that may well be his best, but also his most loose and charming and accessible along the way! B. Dolan’s writing can be heavy and almost uncomfortably introspective, and there’s a lot of that here as well, but it’s tempered with his best ever grooves and hooks, where not only does he prove he can still be funny, but there’s also a lot of candid insight along the way! What becomes very apparent is how much distaste he has the structures within hip-hop that would place or confine him, especially when they only serve cheap purposes of capitalism or petty machismo, so he endeavours to deconstruct all of them, not only by highlighting his own position within the exploitative structures, but also with the care and empathy to those who could save themselves… and punch back hard enough at those who aren’t willing to try. And I love the structure of this album - it runs just under a half hour and not a song is wasted, every track has a distinct identity and facet to build to the themes of breaking the normalized systems of oppression, alongside fostering the sort of community that would stand with him. Thus far, this is the best rap album of 2024 in a really strong year - you probably haven’t heard it, you really should.
1. Truth be told, I’ve struggled with this list in general this year, mostly because I don’t think there’s an obvious standout that could run away with the entire year. Now I could well be missing something - again, see the backlog and the stack of releases I need to get through that dropped a few days ago - but it’s also been since 2015 when the album that topped my year-end list didn’t come from the first half of the year, and there’s a strange feeling in 2024 that it’s still anybody’s game, there’s no runaway contender. But if you want the closest thing to it… you have a mountain to climb.
In 2022, I remember feeling so stunned that Everything Everything had not only returned to quality with Raw Data Feel, but possibly was returning to the heights of their best alongside Get To Heaven. To put it bluntly, Mountainhead is the followthrough and slight return to progressive rock that showed there were heights still to climb, taking the refined melodic core of their alternative dance experimentation and pairing it with their grandest conceptual experiment to date. And from there you get the best kind of prog rock: not only are the songs diverse and colourful and even offering enough ear candy for the listeners - to the point where I joked they reminded me a bit of twenty one pilots with a graduate degree - but the thematic core is layered and challenging in its exploration of late capitalism from every angle, from those labouring in increasingly isolated and uncaring corporate structures girded by commodified religion, to those plumbing the depths for animal spirits that can bring their own feral danger, to the dazed hall of mirrors at the very top, all the while highlighting every angle modern masculinity is co-opted, exploited, and weaponized in that process. It’s dense and distinctly weird but rarely feels like it, where if you’re just looking for killer grooves and experimentation you’ll get it, but delving deeper reveals so much more. It’s bold and populist and witty and emotionally charged, an album that absolutely nails my criteria for great political art… and not only is it Everything Everything’s best album, as of right now it’s the best album of 2024. I can only hope that more is coming to challenge it… we’ll have to see!