2024 was stacked with big album releases: Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande, Coldplay, Kendrick Lamar. Add to that a couple of artists who have produced my past top albums of the year: Imagine Dragons and Sarah Jarosz. And yet I was mostly disappointed by those albums—songs from these albums didn’t even make my 2024 favorite track playlist. But of the 76 new albums I listened to during 2024 (a record for me, plus 8 from 2023), some album rose to the top. Here are my top 5 albums from 2024:
Sleigher by Ben Folds — It’s not often that an artist who produced one of my favorite albums one year produced another favorite album in the next year, but Ben Folds has managed it—and with a Christmas album of (mostly) new material, at that. Folds is a master of joyfully depressing vignettes, and the holidays is a perfect time for those. Beyond these slice-of-life gems (“Sleepwalking Through Christmas,” “Me and Maurice,” “Christmas Rhyme,” there is a perfect little solo piano accompaniment for snow falling (“Little Drummer Bolero”), some well-chosen covers, and some excellent harmonica playing (not from Folds). There’s also a song making fun of AI-generated lyrics—you could tell he is having so much fun with it. The album manages to be a good balance of the new and familiar that works really well for a Christmas album. And it has the perfect title.
UTOPIA NOW! by Rosie Tucker — This pick is definitely my rare #1 favorite album of the year. Tucker’s music is great, but she really won me over with inventive and biting lyrics that skewer capitalism, her exes, herself, and the music industry. It is hard to pick a favorite (are there a better song titles than “Paperclip Maximizer” and “Gil Scott Albatross”?), but maybe start with “All My Exes Live in Vortexes,” which references a country song in the title, but also somehow references the plastic crisis, the film Everything, Everywhere, All At Once, labor conditions in online fulfillment centers, and also the personal problems of people not really responsible for the destructive systems surrounding us while being self-obsessed (but also wanting love). And it’s a banger—maybe my top song of the year. There are also songs that personify the “White Savior Myth” and use obscure astronomical principles as central metaphors. The title track does one of my favorite things in songs—musically and lyrically sets up an expectation and then immediately undermines it; I’d explain more, but it actually doesn’t make sense written—I’ll let you figure it out. The songwriting and production never fail—the inventive and varied use of guitars also sets this album apart.
empathogen by Willow — Maybe the best-titled album of 2024, the music is also inventive. This is 23-year-old Willow’s sixth studio album, and up to now she has been mostly a pop musician, but here she takes inspiration from a lot of different genres and vocal styles. But I’m here for the all-over-the-place styles and enjoy not knowing what is going to come next (I think Pitchfork got it right calling one track “somewhere between Alanis Morissette and Esperanza Spalding” and I would expand this description to most of the album). If you like, you could also check out the deluxe version of the album, ceremonial contrafact, which has three extra songs.
Start Close In by the Rheingans Sisters —While the Rheingans sisters are British fiddle players and vocalists (and multi-instrumentalists), they take inspiration from all over Europe and North America for this album—Norway, Sweden, Ireland, France, Occitania, and Quebec. The arrangements are adventurous (even when only played with two fiddles). There is a mix of traditional tunes, contemporary traditional tunes, and some original songs. It’s a ride that doesn’t get old, even for a couple of 7-minute tracks.
With YOU-th by Twice —And moving from the self-released to the big company-produced…Twice is a K-pop group formed in 2016 of 9 women, and amazingly their lineup has not changed in all that time. This year, they came out with three EPs, one of which was in Japanese (or English-Japanese, I guess). Usually, I only like one about song per album (there is a lot of mass production in K-pop), but this album is pretty good all the way through (if you can get over the terrible title). If you want enjoy some light, fluffy pop music and not think too hard (and honestly, don’t think too hard about the mixed Korean/English lyrics), then this is the album for you.
Bonus playlist: Curated albums I *mostly* liked 2024 – There were a few album this year that I couldn’t elevate to my favorite albums, mostly because they were uneven—a lot of good tracks, but some “meh” or "I'm not sharing that publicly" tracks mixed in. Usually, albums like these are good fodder for my year-end-playlist, but there was enough good stuff that I had a really hard time just picking one track to represent these albums. So I compromised. Here is a curated playlist with all the good songs from five more albums. Some are from artists that I've highlighted here in the past:
Deeper Well by Kacey Musgraves (I’m a sucker for songs about birds, as in “Cardinal”…even if the syllabic emphasis is wrong; “Heaven is” a Scottish lullaby with word rewritten by Musgraves; also included is “Anime Eyes,” which I think a lot of people panned this song in the album, but you have to work pretty hard to name-check Miyazaki and have me not like the song)
ORQUÍDEAS by Kali Uchis (in which the American-Colombian artist proves a point and sings mostly in Spanish for change...with some English thrown in)
BRAT by Charli XCX (including one later-released updated song with an answer verse from Lorde—see the story here; “Rewind” and “I think about it all the time” feature some self-reflection you don’t normally hear on pop album)
Radical Optimism by Dua Lipa (an album I thought was much better than a lot of people did—or at least six of the songs)
As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again by the Decemberists (Classical depressing gothic/folk/pop as fine as any previous Decemberists' album, it almost made my top albums, but there is just one song, “Joan in the Garden” (the last track in the album) that I absolutely hated—so I have included every song here except that one)
Enjoy!
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