Sam’s Ten Best Albums of 2024
The following ten albums have been my favourites this year, the year 2024. It’s a little disappointing and unrepresentative to only spotlight the ones to come, as there were probably upwards of 15 other records that impressed me to a similar degree as, say, the albums that occupy the positions six through ten. It is for this reason that I will be revealing some more favourites for the year – songs, EPs, even more albums – in the coming days and weeks, though perhaps in less considered fashion than this.
It was a bit of a rush job, getting this put together before Christmas, and though this piece could probably have used an edit (and may yet get one) it still stands as my major word on the year in music. Perhaps my affection for the albums on this list did not burn quite as brightly as it did for those on my 2023 list, but I suspect it may burn a little longer in memory. 2024 was a year of wheels turning, scenes changing, the underground reassessing what it wants to be after the explosion of dance music as big business, a new coterie of stars holding court in the world of pop.
The albums of this list, then, veer towards the understated. Quieter, more timeless in sound, more interested in exploring distance-as-intimacy. That’s not to say that I was seeking respite from the brash maximalism of Charli and Chappell – both welcome developments – but, perhaps, something that better reflected how separated from that energy it felt to live in a post-Sideway Canberra as the year waned.
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10. Jonnine – Southside Girl
Label: Modern Love
Genre: Trinketcore
Does anyone ever actually want it to be New Year’s Eve? The chaste summertime that follows Boxing Day always feels preciously fleeting, while a history of disappointing occasions now leaves me feeling a distinct sense of dread as the final night on the calendar edges closer by the hour. I suspect that feeling is more common than most would care to admit. Jonnine Standish (of the unparalleled band HTRK) opens Southside Girl with a song called ‘December 32nd’, a fitting introduction to an album consumed by a fascinating question: what if you could put the end of the year on hold for just one more day?
There’s a dream logic to Southside Girl insofar as it inhabits everything you could want out of a mythical December 32nd. Some tracks are boredom personified, like the fiddly percussion workouts of ‘Rococo’ and ‘Poochie’s Pies’ that examine the resonance of clanging coins, dice and teaspoons. A patient mid-section yields space to the elements: hot wind, chirping birds, sticky rain. Most importantly, it feels a little bit haunted. The album hinges on three skeletal songs – ‘Spring’s Deceit’, ‘Southside Girl’, and ‘Sea Stuff’ – that centre Jonnine’s truly gorgeous voice above an eerie bassline tapped out on an acoustic guitar. These are songs enamoured with the mystery of nature: the promise of flowers, but also the perilous unknown of the sea. “Listening to secrets of seashells, as the ocean grabs my ankle”, Jonnine recalls. One more day to marvel at the Pacific and consider whether to let it enfold you.
9. Adrianne Lenker – Bright Future
Label: 4AD
Genre: Folk
Within the familiar terrain of her plaintive folk songs, Adrianne Lenker takes risks that most of her contemporaries simply wouldn’t be curious enough to replicate. The confounding ‘Evol’ is the obvious vindication of this adventurous spirit, a song about words backwards that reveals itself to be the platonic ideal of an Adrianne Lenker recording. On the next track, ‘Candleflame’, you can hear Lenker progressively divorcing herself from sad reality as she writes, and by the final verse, attempting to extract some literary significance out of a simple stream of numbers. But that risk-taking behaviour doesn’t confine itself to the intellectual pursuit of writing. It also comes through in the earnestness of Lenker’s artistic intent, without which Bright Future would not be so utterly endearing, so quietly devastating. “You spin me all around, and then you ask me not to spin,” Lenker sings on ‘Vampire Empire’, capturing a hopeless, familiar rage in sweetly innocent terms.
8. naemi – Dust Devil
Label: 3XL
Genre: Trip Hop
Dust Devil is indulgent, a little derivative, and indisputably the pinnacle of the sound that, in certain circles, has defined this year in music. There is a brand of ambient-facing, blustery post-trip-hop, championed by a transatlantic community of labels like Motion Ward (from LA), West Mineral Ltd. (from Kansas) and 3XL (from Berlin), that has emerged as an irrepressible force in the electronic underground, making stars out of names like Ulla, Huerco S., Perila, and, now, naemi. Although naemi’s submission to the canon of this peculiar movement comes right as its popularity is cresting, and despite boasting an intimidating army of collaborators to near the point of overkill, its sheer largesse is a winning formula. Dust Devil is 2024’s answer to the request to “give the people what they fucking want!” Each track comes with a featured artist, turning the album into the central meeting point for anyone who’s anyone making nü-shoegaze (nügaze?), including an appearance from Erika De Casier no less. And naemi stretches the music out to glorious proportions, revelling in its signature mopey zen state for well over an hour. I found no other music in 2024 that you could sink into quite as well as Dust Devil, an ambrosial gem that should come bearing a warning for anyone with a task to complete: ‘Caution: Will Induce Relaxation’.
7. Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee
Label: Realistik Studios
Genre: Hypnagogic Pop
That Cindy Lee defied every conceivable odd, however self-imposed, to deliver the event album of the year for music’s underground is nothing short of a triumph. This record of heartbroken hypnagogic pop, strikingly evocative of the sound of the 60s as it might have happened on a faraway Goldilocks planet, is undoubtedly Patrick Flegel’s magnum opus, and perhaps the very definition of that term. Stretched to an impenetrable length of over two hours, buried under the internet-equivalent of cold earth – that is, unable to be heard on any streaming software nor purchased by traditional means (until recently) – and shrouded in aural haze to nearly the point of artifice, the roaring, unlikely success of Diamond Jubilee is the strongest vindication of the future of music in some years. What a joy to witness the spectacular unity of music critics and devotees in admiration of this almost-unreal diamond in the rough. What a joy to hear Flegel in full glory: preternaturally poised, not quite yet emancipated from their pain but always twirling, twirling towards freedom.
6. Jessica Pratt – Here in the Pitch
Label: City Slang
Genre: Folk
There’s a Möbian motion to Here in the Pitch, the latest album from the enigmatic Californian folk artist Jessica Pratt. It is elliptical and slyly disorientating, by way of the hypnotic, loopy two-chord progressions Pratt thrums out on her nylon-string guitar, and the untraceable, adventurous vocal melodies floating above them. But it is also continually familiar. The album is comprised of nine simple variations on a common theme, with each new track sharing the bossa nova lilt, retro singularity, and lullaby-like atmosphere of the one that came before it. The whole thing, the very manageable twenty-seven minutes of it, feels like a study in déjà vu: Pratt muses obliquely on the concept of time, over and over again, while the slinky pulse of her guitar never really falls away, just resets. In any given song, you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve heard this one before, thinking you’ve smelt the same smoke in the air. But Pratt has a gift for sleight-of-hand: just when you start to get comfortable with the hallucinogenic environment, she withdraws pretence entirely on ‘The Last Year’, an epilogue so spare, so earnest, so unfathomably sweet as to stop time for once, for good.
5. Hannah Frances – Keeper of the Shepherd
Label: Ruination
Genre: Avant Folk
It is the raw, unbridled confidence of Keeper of the Shepherd that leads it to be so utterly breathtaking. That confidence is almost unbecoming of a folk singer-songwriter – the other such artists on this list, Adrianne Lenker and Jessica Pratt, display a more muted self-assuredness – yet Hannah Frances makes no effort to hide her boldness and ambition. These are patient, complex, immensely satisfying songs, constructed with balance in mind: fleet-footed percussion plays off the album’s meaty throughline of guitar and bass; when needed, woodwinds, cello and piano bring this fundamentally earthly music into the ethereal realm. At the core of each arrangement is Frances’ voice and her writing, which anchors itself around incantations and demands. “I cannot be kept without me”, “I know too much to love that way again”, “I want the one who’s gone”. Her approach to introspection is unyielding and almost intimidating. But the music swells and settles in perfect symbiosis with Frances’ intense performance, and what sounds like a confronting experience on paper turns out to be a truly invigorating one.
4. MIKE & Tony Seltzer – Pinball
Label: 10k
Genre: Rap
“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 past. Relinquishing production duties to Tony Seltzer proves a blessing, freeing MIKE 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. It would be too easy to describe Pinball as a victory lap following the momentous year MIKE enjoyed in 2023 – it actually plays more like a rejuvenated artistic left turn, tactically evading the dusky sampledelia that has been his trademark sound since 2017. It echoes Earl Sweatshirt’s approach on his underrated 2022 LP SICK!, so it’s all the more special when Thebe himself comes through with a scene-stealing hook on Pinball’s centrepiece, ‘On God’: “I feel like Uzi Vert, all my friends in the dirt, only with dog / my bro and my sister, we making it work”.
3. MJ Lenderman – Manning Fireworks
Label: Anti-
Genre: Slacker Rock
The title of Jake Lenderman’s 2024 breakout solo album neatly captures the dichotomy at the core of his luminous brand of Southern rock. Is “Manning Fireworks” meant to refer to the act of guarding and setting off fireworks – a bit of a world-weary occupation – or is it a nostalgic descriptor of a quarterback’s heroics? In other words, is Lenderman trying to evoke a dull sense of dread, or an electrifying thrill? The truth is, most of the time he’s actually doing both. The dreariest couplets Lenderman delivers on Manning Fireworks are also the funniest (“You can put your clothes back on / she’s leaving you”); at the same time, each liberating guitar duel also signals that a sour chord is just moments away from rearing you back to bleak reality. In between these two poles of sensation, Manning Fireworks lands upon a wry sweetness that fluently communicates the intrinsic okayness of the world for disappointing, middle-class men. “I’ve never seen the Mona Lisa / I’ve never really left my room”, one of them confides. That’s sad, but you’ll be alright, Lenderman seems to answer. The world has a way of working that out.
2. DJ Lycox – Guetto Star
Label: Príncipe
Genre: Batida
Perhaps the most significant achievement of Príncipe, the Lisbon club music imprint that I consider to be the best label in the world, is how effortlessly it has repudiated the need for real musical instruments (except for drums, paradoxically) since its inception in 2011. And if the label’s glorious success sounds the death knell for traditionalism in music, then DJ Lycox’s Guetto Star is the album you would put on to dance on its grave. I get the feeling that Lycox, like most artists on the Príncipe roster, produces his raucous, sidewinding songs primarily on a laptop, yet that doesn’t stop him from decorating them with a bevy of digital instruments – horns, woodwinds, flute, harpsichord, and electric guitar among them. They sound chintzy, and kind of unreal. But there’s something remarkable about the way the melodicism of Lycox’s illusory orchestra interacts with his wondrous variations on the West African percussion of kuduro and tarraxo. It results in music that sounds better than real. I’d call it supernatural.
1. Firnis DC – Firnis Der Civilisation
Label: FELT
Genre: Ambient
Firnis der Civilisation, a beatless electronic record from a mysterious eponymous producer (better known as тпсб), plays out like an epic, slow-moving drama, finding unspoken beauty and tension in stark sounds that loop and ever-so-gradually wash over you. The album has the iridescent, far-away sheen of William Basinski’s celebrated ambient material, though its occasional excursions into plain, unadorned canvases are where the music 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
23 December 2024