Jon Pareles | Jon Caramanica | Lindsay Zoladz
Jon Pareles
Concepts, Craftsmanship, Sensuality and Tidings of Apocalypse
The agendas for 21st-century musicians keep getting more complicated. They can try to out-game streaming and social media algorithms, stoking the celebrity-industrial complex or steadfastly ignoring it. They can lean into idiosyncratic artistic instincts and intuitions. They can channel the zeitgeist or defy it. Of course, listeners have choices as well. For me, there was no definitive musical statement for 2024, no obvious pathbreaker. But there were plenty of purposeful, heartfelt, exacting and inspired individual statements. I gave the top slot to a project that strove mightily to unite a glossy sonic (and online) presence with surprising confessions. But song for song, the rest of the list can easily stand alongside it. And if there’s more than a little apocalyptic gloom in these choices, well, that’s 2024.
1. Charli XCX, ‘Brat’ and ‘Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat’
The year’s conceptual coup belonged to Charli XCX. “Brat,” the album she released in June, used dance-floor beats, blippy synthetic hooks and meme-ready graphics as she assessed just where she stood as a pop striver in her 30s, more than a decade into her career: pushing, partying, wondering whether to set it all aside to have a baby. Somehow, “Brat” landed as a full-fledged hit — and by September, Charli XCX had rewritten all the tracks and added star collaborators, dispensing hooks while trying to keep a level head about success. Amid all the hyperpop gloss and online chatter, she still sounded honest.
2. Brittany Howard, ‘What Now’
Brittany Howard lays out the ragged emotions of a crumbling relationship on “What Now”: numbness, mourning, second-guessing, guilt and furtive glimmers of relief. While the tracks are rooted in soul, rock, R&B, funk and disco, they turn familiar styles inside-out with targeted distortion and surreal, displaced mixes. The songs capture all the disorientation that comes with a life-changing decision.
3. Vampire Weekend, ‘Only God Was Above Us’
Vampire Weekend’s once-meticulous musical universe gets punctured by noise on “Only God Was Above Us.” Its fifth album grapples with how what used to be called indie-rock can face a new pop landscape, and how determined innovators can keep pushing themselves. The answers include history lessons, quasi-sequitur lyrics and constantly morphing studio arrangements — a running, enlightening battle between strict song structure and an unruly world.
4. Billie Eilish, ‘Hit Me Hard and Soft’
Billie Eilish’s third album embraces both discipline and experiment. It’s deliberately concise: an LP-length 10 tracks rather than a streaming-era sprawl. It takes on the pop task of writing relatable love songs. And behind the album’s seemingly calm and unfailingly melodic surfaces is an omnivorous pop appetite — incorporating electronics, cabaret, folk-pop, hip-hop, reggae and more — and the recognition that darker impulses get tangled with affectionate ones. Eilish’s voice stays sweetly understated — until, in selected explosive moments, it’s not.
5. Kali Uchis, ‘Orquídeas Parte 2 (Deluxe)’
Desire dissolves boundaries — physical, linguistic, stylistic — on “Orquídeas” (“Orchids”) and its expanded version, “Orquídeas Parte 2 (Deluxe).” It’s nominally the second Spanish-language album by Kali Uchis, an American whose father is Colombian, but she switches into English often enough for Anglo listeners to understand. Her teasing, near-weightless voice glides through tracks that finesse sleek electronic R&B with old and new Latin rhythms, from bolero to reggaeton. Sensuality reigns, strictly on her own terms.
6. Willow, ‘Ceremonial Contrafact (Empathogen Deluxe)’
Willow Smith announces that she has “Big Feelings” on “Ceremonial Contrafact (Empathogen Deluxe).” She delivers them in lyrics that hop from mythic archetypes to therapeutic venting, in tracks full of jazzy, funky leaps and syncopations and with a voice that can suddenly go from coo to shout. It’s crafty music that’s every bit as volatile as those big feelings.
7. Beth Gibbons, ‘Lives Outgrown’
Beth Gibbons, the perpetually forlorn voice of Portishead, returned with a gorgeously melancholy album reflecting on time, mortality, loss, climate change and the inevitable fragility of human connections. The tracks set folky guitars against somber orchestral arrangements that often hint at Bollywood as well as Britain, invoking a world of woe.
8. Elucid, ‘Revelator’
“Why play if I can’t bend the rules?” the prolific New York City rapper Elucid taunts on “Revelator.” It’s a dense, overdriven, fiercely abrasive album that cranks up the tradition of Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad productions for 21st-century impact. The tracks deploy aggressive live drumming and rampant distortion behind wordplay that can be abstract, referential or pointedly direct; the music demands a committed listener.
9. The Cure, ‘Songs of a Lost World’
The Cure’s first studio album since 2008 makes absolutely no attempt to update the band’s sound. It clings to stately marches, brawny drumbeats and reverberating guitars and keyboards, lingering over instrumental intros before Robert Smith’s desperate yelp of a voice arrives. But that bitterly majestic stubbornness perfectly suits the band’s ever more dire tidings about the end of everything: love, music, life, existence itself.
10. Nala Sinephro, ‘Endlessness’
Loops and live improvisations, meditations and excursions: the harpist, composer and producer Nala Sinephro harnesses all of them in the studio. Her album “Endlessness” — 10 numbered tracks all titled “Continuum” — can’t be pigeonholed as jazz, ambient, new age or anything else. With saxophone solos by Nubya Garcia and quick-reflexes drumming from Morgan Simpson, the tracks move forward even in a framework of recurring, undulating arpeggios. Amid the repetitions, the music always maintains a human touch.
And 15 more standouts, in alphabetical order …
Arooj Aftab, “Night Reign”; Les Amazones d’Afrique, “Musow Danse (Bonus Edition)”; Beyoncé, “Cowboy Carter”; Chat Pile, “Cool World”; Dawes, “Oh Brother”; English Teacher, “This Could Be Texas”; Angélica Garcia, “Gemelo”; Orla Gartland, “Everybody Needs a Hero”; Ka, “The Thief Next to Jesus”; Michael Kiwanuka, “Small Changes”; Kendrick Lamar, “GNX”; Charles Lloyd, “The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow”; Laura Marling, “Patterns in Repeat”; Residente, “Las Letras Ya No Importan”; St. Vincent, “All Born Screaming”
Jon Caramanica
Holding It Together, in All Ways
A half-century from now, the prolonged obsession with the concept of the album may seem like a historical quirk. It is a conceit intimately tied to marketing and retail cycles, as well as an anchor for tours. But the number of musicians, mainstream or otherwise, toying with the album as structural art appears to be dwindling each year.
So consider these collections of songs — albums, if you must — as outliers that underscore that larger point. They come from pop and country, stubborn genres that insist on big-picture storytelling. But also from hip-hop (which might be beyond its peak album era), hardcore, regional Mexican music, experimental ambient, African pop, bluegrass and more. The song — or increasingly, the snippet of a part of a song — is the coin of the realm now, but these are bodies of work that work best in their fullness.
1. Mk.gee, ‘Two Star & the Dream Police’
An album full of true space jams from an emergent post-ironic guitar god whose songs shimmer and decay and seem to cough up bloodied melodies at every turn. Frank Ocean, the Doobie Brothers, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, Night Ranger, Autechre — they’re all in here somewhere, sharded and squeezed for juice, then reconstituted into a contemplative, confident haze that’s just barely obscuring the year’s most provocative pop songs.
2. Sabrina Carpenter, ‘Short n’ Sweet’
Meet this summer’s actual brat. Sabrina Carpenter’s pinup pop is glossy, idiosyncratic and anything but reluctant; in places, this breakout album from the former Disney star is so bawdy it feels like a throwback to a less anxious time. She sings about sex and love and loving sex and loveless sex with a conversational frankness that makes everyone else trafficking in pained metaphor seem hopelessly chilly.
3. Candy, ‘It’s Inside You’
A genuinely surprising and sophisticated album of hardcore, its discontents and its experiments from the ferocious band Candy. It moves fast, and pivots even faster, taking in gestures from nu metal, digital hardcore, synth-rock, industrial and more. But none of those flourishes distract from the core fury of this breathtaking album, another milestone in the emergence of hardcore as the most innovative corner of American rock.
4. Ella Langley, ‘Hungover’
The year’s loneliest country album — perhaps in any genre, for that matter — comes from this Alabama singer and songwriter with a voice that pulses with regret and stories that leave dark, stubborn stains. Ella Langley doesn’t tiptoe around the wounds; she finds a way to dig them deeper while locking eyes, dispassionately and proudly.
5. Ivan Cornejo, ‘Mirada’
OK, maybe this is the year’s loneliest album. This young Mexican American artist sings about longing with an almost preternatural gift for melodrama. Sometimes he’s flirting with contemporary corridos tumbados, but mostly he extracts almost unfathomable pathos simply from a guitar and a voice that sounds like woven-together tears.
6. Future and Metro Boomin, ‘We Don’t Trust You’
Even if it hadn’t kick-started hip-hop’s current world war, this album would have been remembered for its snarl. Future, the great Atlanta hedonist, had been lagging in recent years, but Metro Boomin nudged something spiteful and tart out of him, and this album is full of dismissive attitude, punchy production and tossed-off snippets of thoughts that immediately became catchphrases.
7. Zach Top, ‘Cold Beer & Country Music’
Calling certain eras or styles of country music “classic” tends to freeze them in time but also tone, as if humor hadn’t been invented five decades ago. Zach Top’s second album restores the frisky feeling to an expertly vintage sound. He sings with just a touch of mischief in his voice, recalling early Alan Jackson, but even when he’s delving into self-deprecation or arched-brow rebuking, the music is airtight and fluent — a demonstration of vivid coloring within hard lines.
8. Yung Lean and Bladee, ‘Psykos’
Somehow, these genre-upending Swedish rap surrealists have become something like elders in the last few years. This team-up album, their first, is full of surprisingly peppy alternate-universe pop smashes full of sometimes staggeringly grim lyrics. It’s like staring at the sun and recoiling, all in one fluid sweep.
9. BossMan Dlow, ‘Mr Beat the Road’
The Florida rapper BossMan Dlow narrates his life as a series of can’t-believe-it exclamations. These warp-speed cars! These wallet-emptying shoes! These chandelier-complex diamonds! These flirtatious women! This wipeout weed! These deliciously illicit transactions! When he’s on top, he’s amused and thrilled. And when he’s not, he’s still amused and thrilled, because adventure brings adrenaline, and he’s leaping from high to high.
10. Flo, ‘Access All Areas’
Just a sumptuously produced album of early ’00s girl-group R&B delivered as if it were an utterly new and fresh idea. Which, when it’s pulled off this audaciously, it practically is. The singing is buoyant and sassy, crisp and not woozy at all. And the songs practically tingle with lush instrumentation, sashaying drums, and a density of melodic ideas that suggests that R&B’s past may still be a model for its future.
11. Knocked Loose, ‘You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To’
The fourth album from the Kentucky band Knocked Loose is an adventurous and frenetic metalcore blockbuster, with gloriously shrieking vocals, dynamic dueling guitars, thunderous drumming and an exceedingly refined approach to a style of music that can often fray at the edges. It’s car-crash fearsome and somehow almost monastically focused at the same time.
12. Billie Eilish, ‘Hit Me Hard and Soft’
An affecting album about awakenings from pop music’s oldest young person, this is Billie Eilish’s best full-length thus far. It’s also her loosest, stripping away some of the gloom of her earlier releases in favor of a saucy style of singing, raw and blunt lyrics about womanhood, and a sense that the pop star she’s going to become might not have much to do with the one she’s been thus far.
13. Claire Rousay, ‘Sentiment’
This is a brittle, sometimes harrowing, appealingly unsteady album from a found-sound experimentalist freshly engaged with finding new sounds within. When she sings, Claire Rousay has a tentative voice, run through Auto-Tune, that sets a distance from her words that’s not clinical, but rather emotionally protective, as if sharing them unfiltered might be too much to bear. Her songs feel like mimeographs of emo dirges, so denatured from their original sadness that they ascend to a kind of smoothed-out hope.
14. Zach Bryan, ‘The Great American Bar Scene’
In Zach Bryan songs, you’re walked through a home rich with ornate detail, dense with memory and sentiment, full of life and laughs and hugs, and then deposited into a spare, cold, ramshackle room off to the side, left alone to rot with your feelings. It’s quite a trick, and it hasn’t gotten old yet.
15. Beyoncé, ‘Cowboy Carter’
The strangest Beyoncé album ever? “Cowboy Carter” is a history lesson, as all of her recent releases have been, and also zeitgeisty, and also dutiful fan service. But none of those things can fully distract from the exploratory instinct that runs through this album, which is playful, tonally varied, a scattershot experiment that’s pointedly heretical in places and even more pointedly faithful in others. It is the work of a superstar making, essentially, an anti-pop art piece to scratch a sociocultural and creative itch, deploying a whole lot of resources and a career’s worth of earned ballast to prove a point.
16. Taylor Swift, ‘The Tortured Poets Department’
OK, fine! Enough! Perhaps a little too slick for an artist who excels when cutting to the quick, but nevertheless a reliably sticky album full of cocksure kiss-offs.
17. Omar Courtz, ‘Primera Musa’
The debut album from the rising Puerto Rican star Omar Courtz is a musically diverse approach to reggaeton’s future. He’s a sweet, sensual singer, and maintains a sense of playfulness in his songs that suggests a time back before the genre’s global-superstar era.
And another 13 for good measure …
Asake, “Lungu Boy”; Benny the Butcher, “Everybody Can’t Go”; Charli XCX, “Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat”; Contention, “Artillery From Heaven”; Kim Gordon, “The Collective”; Megan Moroney, “Am I Okay?”; Mustafa, “Dunya”; Peso Pluma, “Éxodo”; Shygirl, “Club Shy”; Nala Sinephro, “Endlessness”; Speed, “Only One Mode”; Billy Strings, “Highway Prayers”; Tyla, “Tyla”
Lindsay Zoladz
Beautiful and Agonizing Journeys
Some of these albums are inspired by the majesty of the great outdoors, others by the intimate drama of the home. Some are set on the wide-open road, others in the clammy, strobe-lit utopia of the club. All of them are travelogues of some sort, navigations through worlds both recognizably real and boldly imagined, full of postcard snapshots that capture the pain, the absurdity and the beauty of modern life.
1. MJ Lenderman, ‘Manning Fireworks’
Combining a sweet, slacker’s neigh and a disarmingly precise pen, MJ Lenderman sings like someone who doesn’t care but writes like someone who secretly, very deeply, does. Such is the tension holding the 25-year-old Asheville, N.C., singer-songwriter’s brilliant fourth album, “Manning Fireworks,” in balance. Lenderman is an ethnologist of sad sacks (“Once a perfect little baby who’s now a jerk,” he sings on the country-tinged opening track, “standing close to the pyre, manning fireworks”). But he nonetheless lends even his most pathetic characters a bit of warm-blooded humanity. He’s also an ace guitarist with a keen ear for jangly tones, and “Manning Fireworks” improves on the lo-fi sounds of his early work to embrace a big, full-bodied rock sound with — to paraphrase one of his clearest antecedents, Neil Young — just enough “barn.” “You can put your clothes back on, she’s leaving you,” Lenderman deadpans in the opening moments of one of his best songs to date. About a dozen of the year’s funniest lyrics are on this album, along with about a dozen of the saddest. To Lenderman’s credit as a casually studious, wise-beyond-his-years songwriter, they’re usually the same ones.
2. Hurray for the Riff Raff, ‘The Past Is Still Alive’
Alynda Segarra unlocks a new level of artistry on “The Past Is Still Alive,” the singer and songwriter’s stunning eighth album as Hurray for the Riff Raff. Moving ever forward at the steady chug of the freight trains that once took a young, nomadic Segarra across this fractured country, “The Past” blends plain-spoken memoir, vivid reportage and straightforward lyricism with a healthy dose of political consciousness. “I can be your poster boy for the great American fall,” Segarra promises on one song, through gritted teeth — a daunting role to which they rise with purpose and ease.
3. Charli XCX, ‘Brat’
By the end of 2024, “Brat” had become an aesthetic, an ethos, a meme, a paint swatch, a lifestyle, a losing presidential campaign strategy, a “Saturday Night Live” punchline, a Grammy contender and a gnarled monkey’s paw with slime-green acrylics: “Now I’ve started thinking again, wondering about whether I think I deserve commercial success,” the former underground pop star Charli XCX sang on “Rewind,” a song recorded just before the world decided for her that she did. Before any of this overexposure, though, “Brat” was merely a thrilling collection of songs that stretched the pop lyric into run-on text speak and pivoted provocatively from over-the-top braggadocio (“Von Dutch,” “360”) to mascara-smeared, club-bathroom confessionals (“I Might Say Something Stupid,” “I Think About It All the Time”). At the end of this long, strange year, the music might not be the first thing that comes to mind when one hears the word “Brat,” but sometimes I really think it would be cool to rewind.
4. Cindy Lee, ‘Diamond Jubilee’
“Diamond Jubilee” plays out like one long, late-night transmission from a pirate radio station that can only be heard when an antenna is pointed just so — you listen frozen in place, half transfixed by this utterly bewitching music and half-afraid that any sudden movement will cause it to disappear back into the ether. Cindy Lee is the drag persona of Patrick Flegel, the former guitarist and vocalist of the abrasive, greatly missed Canadian rock band Women, from Calgary, Alberta, but here that same haunting voice and spidery fret-board prowess are used to create a triple-album of dreamy, hallucinatory pop. Though it’s available for download on Bandcamp and Cindy Lee’s website, Flegel declined to release the album on most streaming platforms, instead uploading the entire project as a single track on YouTube. That it found an adoring audience anyway is a refreshing rebuttal to the tyranny of the algorithm. Has anybody sent the link to David Lynch yet?
5. Laura Marling, ‘Patterns in Repeat’
The experience of motherhood at once focuses Laura Marling’s vision on the domestic sphere and expands it to consider past and future generations on this gorgeous, confidently executed song cycle about love, loss and familial bonds. A beloved English folk singer who is still somehow underrated, Marling here reduces her music to its most basic elements, all the better to appreciate her nimble expertise.
6. Mount Eerie, ‘Night Palace’
In its scope, the sprawling, 81-minute “Night Palace” hearkens back to the Northwestern indie-folk bard Phil Elverum’s early epics as the Microphones, though his signature shaggy-dog sound is now imbued with a more mature and complex perspective. Over soundscapes that are alternately cacophonous and tender, Elverum ponders the nature of art and land ownership, considers the impermanence of life and the absurdity of wealth and — when it all gets a little too heavy — talks to the animals, who answer by gently poking fun at him. (In one of the album’s most memorable moments, a fish responds to him in the voice of Jeff Bridges as the Dude.) “Night Palace” is a rangy, searching album that gives a great American songwriter the space to roam, experiment and think aloud about the imperfect world around him.
7. Helado Negro, ‘Phasor’
At once soothing and emotionally evocative, Roberto Carlos Lange’s immersive eighth album as Helado Negro carries its conceptual weight with an inviting lightness. He alchemizes his experiments with an early bespoke synthesizer housed in a university and inserts references to electronic music pioneers into a beautifully breezy collection of jazzy, bilingual pop inspired by the natural world.
8. Kim Gordon, ‘The Collective’
On her bold, occasionally hilarious second solo LP, the indie legend Kim Gordon finds the invisible thread connecting Suicide to Playboi Carti and pulls it taut enough for a tightrope walk in Eckhaus Latta boots. “Passing all the kids, TikToking around, sipping on smoothies,” she deadpans over a beat that sounds like malfunctioning heavy machinery. “Wish I knew what they were cookin’ up.” The twist, as a new generation of admirers will readily admit: She does know.
9. Waxahatchee, ‘Tigers Blood’
The rough edges and punky tempos of Katie Crutchfield’s earlier work as Waxahatchee are sometimes missed, but the casual confidence, lived-in wisdom and patiently unfurling melodies of “Tigers Blood” offer a more laid-back kind of gratification that keeps on giving throughout her sixth album. These are open-air songs, conjuring slow parades, state fair stages and post-barbecue backyard jams that stretch late into the muggy night.
10. Beyoncé, ‘Cowboy Carter’
“Cowboy Carter” is like one of those Simone Biles routines where she stumbles and at one point even falls off the beam entirely (“Jolene,” ahem), but the level of difficulty, ambition and innovation are all so far above any of her peers that she medals anyway. It takes a while to get there, but that stretch from “II Most Wanted” through the sublime grand finale “Amen” is a seamless floor routine without a pause for breath. Country, hip-hop, Americana — who cares? She’s a genre of one.
And 10 honorable mentions, in alphabetical order …
Kim Deal, “Nobody Loves You More”; Ariana Grande, “Eternal Sunshine”; Julia Holter, “Something in the Room She Moves”; Mustafa, “Dunya”; Mdou Moctar, “Funeral for Justice”; Kacey Musgraves, “Deeper Well”; Tyler, the Creator, “Chromakopia”; Vampire Weekend, “Only God Was Above Us”; Nilüfer Yanya, “My Method Actor”
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