Redshift’s Best of 2024 So Far
Babehoven – Water’s Here In You
LABEL: Double Double Whammy
GENRE: Indie Rock
Babehoven’s sophomore effort is a testament to gentleness. It’s an album that centres the comfort and care earned through true connection, but is not afraid of expressing this journey through the occasional noisy middle eight or outro.
‘Water’s Here In You’ is a deceptively simple and often incredibly restrained record. It gives its instrumentational embellishments and added flavours the space to release tension in the same manner as a particularly exquisite back crack or a cathartically soft cry.
The final track, ‘Ella’s From Somewhere Else,’ is this embodied. Its closing refrain, “you’re my brother, you’re my family / you are everything to me” ends an ode to kinship both found and inherited, and ties a careful, warm bow on some of the most affecting indie/alt-folk in recent memory.
Ollie O’Brien
Donato Dozzy – Magda
LABEL: Spazio Disponibile
GENRE: Ambient Techno
One of my first and favourite releases of the year from the Don(ato) on his Spazio Disponibile label. Witness the album come to life from the very first track and steward you to the end through its subtly shifting rhythms. It’s ambient techno with a heavy emphasis on the first part, which is sure to hold you in its intimate, hypnotic embrace.
Simply magnifico.
Joe Negrine
Charli xcx – BRAT and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not
LABEL: Atlantic
GENRE: Dance Pop
Redshift has already covered BRAT - but the 8 minute addition to its deluxe release has newly reified the album’s hits, misses, and everything in between…
With all the sundry makings of a top-100-hit but none of the malignant charm, ‘Hello goodbye’ might be the least impressive track on the whole album. A.G Cook’s effervescent production (especially from 2:36) is the track’s saving grace, but it’s not quite enough to justify disturbing the peace that ‘365’ left in the original release.
‘Guess’, on the other hand, is 2 words: Horny Genius. Embodying a virulent and corporeal nostalgia for the sweaty sleaze of a time most listeners probably don’t even remember, the track has quickly cemented itself as a life raft for club-rats shivering below the equator, and a summer anthem for those above.
There’s no help feeling that after ‘Guess’, ‘Spring Breakers’ is an encore we wanted but didn’t really need. That said, the dirty electroclash track is a fitting sign off - demonstrating Charli’s unwavering talent for paradoxically consolidating trashy with intelligent and cultivated grace.
BRAT’s deluxe is unabashedly for the girls, and while there’s much left to desire, there’s no denying it’s just so much fun.
Lara Young
Anysia Kym – Truest
LABEL: 10k
GENRE: Jungle
Is it rude to say that this feels like the most interesting jungle of the year so far? Anysia Kim is a New York (read—not UK) producer closely tied with the 10k label crew, including artists like MIKE, 454, Niontay and Jadasea. The key point there is that Kym runs with a rap crowd, and one from the other side of the Atlantic at that, far removed from the major players around the junglist epicentres of London and Manchester.
Truest carries on the boundary-pushing spirit of the most important figures of the jungle scene in the 90s, slyly challenging a very 2024 conception of the role that the genre is supposed to play in the global dance music landscape. When I hear jungle today – and I admit I have not been going to cutting edge parties in the UK – it often sounds factory fit to satisfy those white-hot final minutes of a set, where the tempo is ratcheted up to fleeting heights before crashing down to earth. It tends to be defined by a singular momentum, surging and breathless. Kym’s jungle has a more cautious kind of motion: the drums alternately push ahead and pull back in an endless, playful give-and-take, gradually becoming enveloped by softly glowing sound. It reminds me of listening to good music in traffic, rolling forward and easing up in equal measure, particularly when a car horn honks out of nowhere on ‘Pool of Life’.
Sam Gollings
Sabrina Carpenter – Espresso, Please Please Please
LABEL: Island
GENRE: Pop
Last year, Nonsense hinted that Sabrina Carpenter might be destined for something greater than Disney channel residuals, with the earwormical follow-up Feather confirming as much. 2024 has seen her embark on a summertime conquest, deploying two suave, saccharine singles like she’s attempting a pop idol any% speedrun, no wall clip, no nervous breakdown. Though Espresso runs a little more dance-pop, and the finger-picked Please Please Please flirts with country, both sit comfortably within her synthy, disco-inflected oeuvre. Carpenter plays up her signature sardonicism to great effect, charming us with the coy frivolity of lyrics like “Walked in and dream-came-trued it for ya” in a celebration of pure, uncut popstar charisma. In a critical climate obsessed with the experimental, the cutting-edge, the pop-adjacent, it’s almost refreshing to see the revival of something classic; almost frightening to see it be done with such blue-eyed, blonde-haired, laser-focused precision. Like an assassin carefully assembling each component of a sniper rifle. Like David Beckham landing three perfect goals from outer space. Swathed onstage in shifting silk-and-tulle minidresses, Carpenter operates less like a fembot, and more like a six-million-dollar-man for popstars.
Sophie Rosen
Mannequin Pussy – I Got Heaven
LABEL: Epitaph
GENRE: Indie Rock
‘I Got Heaven’ is a 90-proof distillation of Mannequin Pussy’s sound and soul—an intoxicating, femme-forward effort that gives the impression that it’s always been around the corner, bubbling low and slow since the band’s inception.
The album is a listening experience that is an elevated, gritty pleasure to imbibe at its heaviest and softest—see ‘Loud Bark’ and ‘I Don’t Know You’ respectively for reference.
The record’s throughline is, as ever, mouthy thrashing about with lyrics that will make even your Nan blush. In sum, the Philadelphia quartet’s album is a rapturous, romping success.
Joe Negrine & Ollie O’Brien
MIKE & Tony Seltzer – Pinball
LABEL: 10k
GENRE: Underground Hip Hop
“The only thing I know bout death, it teach you how to live” – that’s the motto. Pinball is the sound of MIKE leaning back and loosening his shoulders after a heavy few years. Handing over the production reins to Tony Seltzer proves a blessing, giving MIKE the freedom to flex a little bit with the pen over synth-forward beats that draw from trap, drill and turn-of-the-century R&B. He's just as hungry on the mic but funnier than ever, variously shouting out 100 gecs, 21 Jump Street and being in the strip club with his sister. Pinball feels like a victory lap in some sense, but it’s more like an inspired artistic left turn for MIKE, evading the dusky sampledelia that’s been his trademark sound since 2017. In a way, the album lands like a rejuvenated take on Earl Sweatshirt’s underrated 2022 LP SICK!, so it’s all the more special when Thebe himself comes through with a scene-stealing hook: “I feel like Uzi Vert, all my friends in the dirt, only with dog / my bro and my sister, we making it work, on God.”
Sam Gollings
Ugly (UK) – Twice Around The Sun
LABEL: Self-released
GENRE: Art Rock
Early 2024’s hottest art rock project from a London-based 6-piece has it all: 5+ minute track lengths, twirling harmonies, scarily complex arrangements, and chants from the Lotus Sutra.
The project’s compositions can be an aural carnival ride, and its lyrics are quick to surrealism and the realities of Middle England - qualities best heard on tracks like ‘The Wheel’, ‘Shepherd’s Carol’ and ‘I’m Happy You’re Here’.
It would have been very easy for the EP’s all-thrown-against-wall style to get lost and muddled, but Ugly manage to wrangle nearly every far-flung ambition together with harebrained success.
Ollie O’Brien
A.G. Cook – Britpop (discs 2 and 3)
LABEL: PC Music
GENRE: Hyperpop
If Disc 1 marks the ‘past’ of Cook’s discography, Discs 2 and 3 respectively mark some present and future moments. And yet, these discs feel the most referential to earlier, reverb-soaked bedroom pop. This span of the album is refreshingly earnest with its guitar and Cook’s vocals (characteristically, generously auto tuned).
Not all punters appear to enjoy the detour from the Bubblegum Bass that PC Music revealed to the world. But Britpop should have something to offer to any listener. Personal favourites include the weightless ‘Pink Mask’; the head-banging ‘Bewithced’; and, most poignantly, the reverential ‘Without’, a tribute to SOPHIE.
These discs canvass a far broader range of emotions than one may expect from a hyperpop savant, opting for moments of incredible personal intimacy – call it a nu new sincerity.
Joe Negrine
Firnis DC – Firnis Der Civilisation
LABEL: FELT
GENRE: Ambient
A beautiful, mostly-beatless album is my favourite release of the year so far. Firnis der Civilisation plays out like an epic, slow-moving drama, finding unspoken beauty and tension in awesome sound that ever-so-gradually washes over you. The record has the iridescent, far-away sheen of William Basinski’s celebrated ambient material, though its occasional excursions into plain, unadorned canvases are where Firnis Der Civilisation really transcends. From the moment ‘Funktion Form’ unexpectedly falls into a cautious piano solo until the close of the splotchy, stunning ‘Spiegel Zeigen’, I find it hard to listen to the music and feel anything other than sheer dumbstruck awe. Much of Firnis Der Civilisation conveys a sense of stillness, like an artwork meant to be stood before and simply experienced. Then, in its restless final act, drums are suddenly introduced and the album sputters into wonderful, irrepressible life.
Sam Gollings