2024 in Review: Records 1-16

2412b: A long-ass German word for when you destroy something good

(Once again, playlist is at the bottom.)

I’ve been reading record reviews and looking for music recommendations all my life, and I’ve found that it’s really hard to jump into someone’s opinion totally cold. You have to know something about the record itself, about what the reviewer likes, how they interact with the music, and then you have to filter that back through their number rating or whatever to decide how you might react to it. A “four star” review loses context if you don’t know what a “one star” record is.

So I decided to keep track of every 2024 new release I listened to closely, be critical with myself, and be transparent. TLDR:

• I listened to 185 records released in 2024.

• Of those, I rated 104 of them (56.22%) as “very good” or better. And 28 of them (15%) I rated as “excellent”.

What does that mean? It means that I listen to music that I like! I try to be as discerning and open-eared as I can, but at the end of the day, I’m going to focus on records that I want to give my time to.

And this year, I decided “three times through” is the magic number. The first listen is to get over my preconceived notions, the second is to figure out what the artist was trying to do, and then once more to really sink into it. So almost everything on that list I listened to three times, even that godawful Green Day record.

If I really give something three critical listens, I find I can usually find something interesting. Which makes me feel a little like a mark - what don’t I like? The good news for me then, is that almost half the records I listed were on the other end of the spectrum! Even if I was able to find a reason to keep going, the music was somewhere between bad, dull, and good. I love that.

Finally, I am a big believer in stack ranking. It doesn’t mean that one thing is better than the other per se, but it does make you really consider the relative merit of whatever you are listing. So in December, I laid out all of them and ranked them 1 to 185. I’m still changing it daily, but it helps me be sure I’m focusing properly on their relative merits.

If you want to see the sheet I used to track the records this year, all 185 ratings, favorite tracks, and a little blurb to help me remember it, visit this spreadsheet. They are all there! I figure if I can’t share this here, where will I ever share it? And it was too much work to just sit on.

Heading into 2025, my goal is 200 new releases and 100 “first time-listens”. You can see on the sheet that I had 33 first-time listens this year, but that’s pretty soft. I had heard many of them before but just never really paid attention. I like this sheet that I’ve come up with, along with a few made up genres, so I plan on using it again next year.

I can go on and on about this, but I’ll end here. Hope you enjoyed my nerd-tastic summary! Keep track of your own listens - it’s really interesting!

OK, on to my top 16! In case you missed it, the first half of this list, where I go through numbers 17-32 is available here.

16. Beta - Peter Cat Recording Co. Probably no shocker to anyone reading this, but I love a crazy project. So of course, I I love working the Olympics. It’s the pressure of live TV non-stop for 2 weeks, 24 hours a day. And this year, I was working overnights. So I’d show up for work around 7pm, say good morning to the norm-o’s, work until 7am, and then go back to my hotel room, draw the blackout shades and try to get some sleep. As my brain was settling into the daze created by this rhythm, Tidal randomly recommended this little gem to me, and I popped in on because I liked the cover. And I’ll be damned if Tidal didn’t have my number. The easy, classic pop songs and supple Bollywood-y textures kept my sleepy little mind in a dreamy state until I made it through. Paris and Peter Cat Recording Co will always be entwined.
    Highlights: People Don't Change, Suddenly, A Beautiful Life, 21c

15. Wall Of Eyes / Cutouts - The Smile. I’m cheating and putting both of their records here, since they are from the same sessions. I’m a renown Radiohead hater, though that has become more of a pose than an actual position over the last 5-6 years. Fact of the matter is that the more I listen to and enjoy Krautrock (more later), the more I appreciate what they are doing. And The Smile is leaning in even harder than late Radiohead did. Great grooves, beautiful music, and I guess Thom is singing over the top too, though I’m really listening to everything else.
    Highlights (Wall Of Eyes): Bending Hectic, Friend Of A Friend, Wall Of Eyes, I Quit
    Highlights (Cutouts): Instant Psalm, Foreign Spies, Zero Sum

14. Dulling The Horns - Wild Pink. For an indecisive dork like me, the simple decisions are sometimes the hardest. That’s why I admire a record like this: simple bold choices, strong hooks, no frills arrangements and pithy bursts of lyrics. The songs are all about impermanence, loss and letting go, which seems to be a theme that resonated with me this year, moreso after the election. But at the end of the day, it’s all about the fuzz. I can’t even count the number of times I just cranked this record to be enveloped in the consistent, bold fuzz of guitars that dominates the sound. Also: the Pinksters namecheck my favorite basketball team, the Washington Wizards, which I don’t think has ever happened before this!
    Highlights: Disintegrate, Cloud Or Mountain, Eating The Egg Whole, Dulling The Horns

13. The Pilgrim, Their God, And The King Of My Decrepit Mountain - Tapir!. I took this record as a personal challenge. Is there anything that is too twee for me? Turns out, the answer might be no! It’s one of many records on this list from the BCNR tree, dabbling in prog rock, theater music, and English countryside folk music. It’s a three-act play, but I don’t totally understand the story. All I hear are whimsical songs about the search for meaning, weird creepy lovable creatures, a broken God, brotherhood, and just barely holding it together. I saw them play in a foggy church at the end of the year, just after they released a fantastic additional two-sided single, maybe be my favorite show of the year.
    Highlights: Eidelon, Gymnopédie, Untitled, My God, Broken Ark

12. "NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 28,340 DEAD" - Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I’m telling you, if it wasn’t for the cookie monster voice and the double kick drum, I would listen to a LOT more metal. The vibrations of the distortion, the heavy melodic counter lines, and the overall patience of doom metal are really compelling, and it’s all there in a lot of post-rock, including this doozy from GY!BE. They have decided to fully embrace the drone, including the bells and the long silences. Having chosen the title to commemorate the Palestinian death toll, I was expecting the 80 minutes of mourning and rage, but I wasn’t expecting the moments where the music lifted its skinny fists to heaven and allowed hope and triumph to peek through. Defiance is not just speaking truth in the darkness but building a new future with it as well.

    Highlights: PALE SPECTATOR TAKES PHOTOGRAPHS, RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD, GREY RUBBLE / GREEN SHOOTS

11. brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not - Charli XCX. Look, the last thing you probably need is for someone else to tell you how great this record is. Especially a middle age dude from the suburbs. But I was jumping around singing about the color of my panties all summer too, just like the rest of the goddamn world. Also: bonus points for the video of the year (360).
    Highlights: 360/365, Guess, So I, I think about it all the time

10. >>>> - Beak>. Another win for the local record store (support your local record store). A guy who works there told me that the other guy from Portishead (Geoff Barrow) has his own band too, and I’ll be damned if it isn’t an excellent band that has been around for like a decade! Another Krautrock-inspired entry, these guys are super proggy, with great grooves and a soft, early Pink Floyd underbelly. It’s a mood, which is what Portishead always did best, set the mood. Also: bonus points for the album cover of the year.
    Highlights: Ah Yeh, Hungry Are We, Secrets, Strawberry Line

9. This Could Be Texas - English Teacher. Sometimes you just have to give in to the records that are made for you. And this one is total me-core: an English indie band with repetitive guitar and piano figures, dramatic musical swells, great counter lines, driving wiggly rhythms. It’s a top notch debut, and though it’s all indie-rock adjacent, the styles here are pretty wide-ranging - bits of shoegaze, R&B, post-punk, Krautrock (again), and soul, among others. No matter the style, these hooky, not-so romantic tales of growing up odd in a small Yorkshire town are all-killer no-filler, from the heartbreaker ballads to the rock and roll singles.
   Highlights: I'm Not Crying You’re Crying, The World’s Biggest Paving Slab, Nearly Daffodils, Albert Road, Not Everybody Wants To Go To Space

8. The Past Is Still Alive - Hurray For The Riff Raff. A couple years ago, it felt like HftRR was starting to figure it out, with a great Americana record about the death of the planet. I was really looking forward to another pick-me-up with this one, and indeed, they really merged into the Lucinda Williams lane and hit the gas. Of course, these are not your classic stories about hope and the promise of the open road. They are stories of wandering through a morally and environmentally scorched America, where the only things worth investing in are personal commitments, making art, and running faster. There is no ruing what is lost, because they never had it in the first place. Let’s just watch it burn and enjoy the fire.
   Highlights: Buffalo, Colossus of Roads, Alibi, Snake Plant

7. You’ll Have To Lose Something - Spirit Of The Beehive. The title of this record became horribly real when these guys had all of their gear stolen on tour this year. An album about letting go of a relationship became an album about letting go of everything, the sacrifices that need to be made. When I first put the record on, I didn’t know where anything began or ended. It was all little chopped up pieces of psychedelia woven into a mysterious, disorienting soundscape, with little bursts of bubblegum pop and noise jutting through. The structures reveal themselves with time, though, you just have to sacrifice your expectations of pop song structure along with everything else. It’s a whole new 3 minute song.
   Highlights: 1/500, Let The Virgin Drive, I've Been Evil, Found A Body

6. Bright Future - Adrienne Lenker. Growing up in the 70s and 80s, every damn singer songwriter was compared to Bob Dylan. Of course none of them could live up to it, and I’m afraid with this movie out now, it’s going to start up again. But I think that of all the “next Dylans”, Adrienne Lenker might be the one I ride for. She’s prolific, personal, universal, vulnerable, and appears to be completely unafraid. Also, a little more on the nose, she sings in a bit of a nasally voice, plays with whomever is around, and is an underrated guitar player and first-take maven. The songwriting is flawless top to bottom - these are ten soon-to-be timeless classics - and the recording is so lofi it feels like I am intruding.
   Highlights: Sadness As A Gift, No Machine, Real House, Vampire Empire

5. Only God Was Above Us - Vampire Weekend. I can’t believe these guys sold out Madison Square Garden. Twice! There were hordes of 20 and 30 year olds who knew all the words. I could only think that their parents probably loaded Modern Vampires of the City onto their first iPod Minis (or maybe that was just me). It speaks to their longevity and consistent quality, and OGWAU is almost a career summary, looking back and forward at the same time, new sounds built on familiar musical soil. At the same time, the record is really about the self-referential nature of New York itself, the way it builds upon itself, constantly destroying and reinventing itself without losing the essential core. You can always go home again, even when the home you knew is gone.
   Highlights: Prep-School Gangsters, Pravda, Capricorn, Connect

4. World Of Work - Clarissa Connelly. This collection had me from the moment I realized the second track is called “The Bell Tower,” and it’s a recording of a woman walking up a tower and ringing the bells. That’s it, that’s the whole thing. Clarissa Connelly is from the Kate Bush/Sineád O’Connor school of banshee wail and whisper, but as you can tell from the silly cover, she is playful with her modal moodiness. An intensity simmers just below the surface and ramps up with repeated listens while she calmly tells you about your own sense of desperation and being trapped. After the election, I listened to this for days, tuned in to the dark Nordic sense of poetry and perseverance. As I read the hundreds of Best of 2024 lists, it feels like this is being slept on; it has a lot to offer.
   Highlights: Into This Loneliness, An Embroidery, S.O.S., Wee Rosebud

3. Lives Outgrown - Beth Gibbons. My secret wish this year was to live in a cabin somewhere very cold where I could drink tea and bone broth, tend a fire, and just think about my connection to things. Instead, I spend all day on my iPhone playing Candy Crush. But for a few hours, I can put this on and transport to a different world. The songs themselves are about long arc of time: years passing, earth shifting, oceans changing. But at the same time, the sound is extremely grounded. You can feel the bow pulled across the string and the skin stretched on the drum. Plus the music dork in me got to enjoy not one but TWO songs in phrygian! You don’t hear that every day. I just love combination of the tactile feel and the philosophical, the intuitive and the intentional, or to quote the great YouTube commenter @PalaceDude, “This some of that mystical folk shit”.
   Highlights: Beyond The Sun, Whispering Love, Reaching Out, Burden Of Life

2. Twice Around The Sun (EP) - Ugly (UK). This summer, I was talking with my son, and he said, “You just love modern British prog-folk!” And while I felt kind of busted, he’s not wrong. It’s all over this list, and this EP is a prime example. I guess it’s a little lame to put an EP this high, but I don’t even know what an EP is anymore. I listened to some full LPs that were shorter. Anyway, this was a great find that hasn’t left my mind for months: lovely choral harmonies, caffeine-driven beats, pop melodies, and the sparsest lyrics yet! It is a real chorus student’s approach to lyrics; describe an image simply, sing some additional syllables, and repeat. I loved the Woodentops and early twee Del Amitri, and these guys fit right in with a ton of earnest energy, soaring arrangements and epic winding tracks. I can’t wait for their first real album!
   Highlights: The Wheel, Shepherd's Carol, Icy Windy Sky, Sha

1. The New Sound - Geordie Greep. There’s nothing cool about glee. It’s all smiling until your face hurts, following your fancy to extremes, unabashedly pursuing an idea without a care for what it looks like. And nothing filled me with more unbridled glee this year than this did. I had fallen in love with Black Midi a few years ago, and the announcement that they were over was a heartbreaker. Then this record was announced, and it became clear that something was coming. Greep’s articulate love affair with Brazilian music, the 8-bit color cover art (both versions), the incredible lead single… with each trickle of information, the hook was sinking deeper and deeper into my cheek. Once I finally sat down with the actual music, I was literally giggling at the chaos: absurd stories of hyper-masculinity and hyper-lack-of-masculinity, non-stop twists and turns of post-Zappa hyper-musicianship, extended songs that stretch to the point that there is almost no structure, soft TV-theme-show jazz living side by side with thrashing post-punk. There’s one point in “Holy, Holy” where I still laugh every time; the weak, horrid narrator reaches the peak of his crassness, the swirling outro finally lands on the tonic, and out of nowhere a marimba starts noodling around, like we’re watch a cartoon and Tom is chasing after Jerry. Best of all, it’s not a perfect album by any means; there are all kinds of things that could be pruned or cleaned up, and the singular approach to the singing is an acquired taste at best. But this is a glorious hilarious mess, a true achievement. I wish more records were like it.
   Highlights: Holy Holy, Through The War, Blues, Terra

Playlist

That’s it, we made it through another year! Playlist is available on Tidal (my preferred platform), Apple Music, YouTube, and Spotify (under protest). Two songs from each album on this one.

Don’t forget, you can also click here to get my post (and playlist) with records 17-32.

One more 2024 playlist next week, and then I can finally move on to next year!