50-31 | 30-11 | 10-1

50. Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee

[Bandcamp]

Listening to Cindy Lee feels like stepping into a lucid dream where past and future blur together, where nostalgia and invention mesh into a vivid hallucination. Diamond Jubilee is a massive, two-hour-long psych-pop suite that sounds like a transmission from a lost VHS of a world that never was. This lo-fi haze isn’t just aesthetic; it’s the emotional core, draping everything in a bittersweet fog of memory and longing. Cindy Lee (a.k.a. Patrick Flegel of Women) manages to transcend this retro-nostalgia by performing in drag, embodying a non-binary persona that disrupts the rigid norms of the eras the music evokes. Here, drag bridges retrofuturism and modernity — a way to revisit and reclaim the past while reshaping it through a transgressive, forward-thinking lens. This duality makes Diamond Jubilee feel timeless and impossibly new, tethered to the past but endlessly forward-reaching. It’s a sonic time machine for a world that only exists in dreams — and in Cindy Lee’s singular vision. –dedex

49. Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh, Tyshawn Sorey – Compassion

[Official Site] // [Spotify]

It may only take three people to form a jazz trio, but the likelihood that three virtuosic musical egos powered by academic rigour and already-bustling careers will have genuine, equilateral chemistry when they start playing together is slim. Enter Vijay Iyer, Linda May Han Oh, and Tyshawn Sorey, all of whom make venerable band leaders and composers in their own right, and enter Compassion, their second album together, and also the quality which each third of the trio must possess in abundance considering the delicate symbiosis at play, the way everything gives way for something else. Nobody bogarts their solos or overstates a supporting role, songs slide seamlessly toward conclusions that seem, in hindsight, postcodes away from their genesis, while simplicity and complexity are enlaced in a manner that sees challenging harmony resolve into weighty and familiar chord progressions, drums that were swinging like Dave Grohl on tour finally deciding to play it straight for a second, and the bass finds its way back to the tonic from the gin it had been swilling, and as much as the catharsis of the moment may seize you, you’ll find yourself pining for the imminent change to rear its mystic head once more. –MiloRuggles

47 (tie). Domestic Terminal – Sanctuary

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

Welcome back again, Domestic Terminal. Something about the music just always clicks with us. Maybe it’s the twinkly, beautiful guitar progressions or the subtle vocal harmonies or the luscious atmosphere. Whatever it is though, it keeps making these lists — and I’m all for it. Though it never deviates from their sound, Sanctuary continues to flesh out the tranquil energy found within Domestic Terminal’s music. From the traditional Capo Song opener, to the soaring peaks of “Golden”, to the ambitious ten-minute closer “Jeremiah Tried”, Sanctuary deserves all the recognition. If you haven’t taken the time to listen, you’re absolutely missing out on some of the most gorgeous sounding music of 2024 (big shoutout to our man YoYo). –tyman128

47 (tie). Thou – Umbilical

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

Thou have retreated back towards their less complex youthful style, reducing the winding nature of many of their compositions in favor of a sole focus on heaviness, early and often. But, in reality, Umbilical doesn’t particularly resemble the band’s 2000s full-lengths that much, either. Instead, these ten songs tend to be shorter than usual, leaning upon the hardcore/punk influences which informed their original sludge style, and finally and most importantly, much of this material feels similar in spirit to recent efforts by the likes of Primitive Man and Mastiff — acts which share some nihilistic sludge DNA with Thou, sure, but I’d previously found Thou’s musical interpretation far more “delicate,” for lack of a better term. Here, the band simply lets loose, and the resulting heaviness is (often) harder, better, faster, stronger (with credit to the once great Kanye West). Some listeners may quibble with one or more of the adjectives used in the last sentence, but the key takeaway is that Thou’s vicious anger is completely untrammeled here. –Sunnyvale

46. Midas Fall – Cold Waves Divide Us

[Official Site] // [Spotify]

Midas Fall records are always a vivid experience, with songs that usually take dreamy parts into darker, occasionally haunting corners led by Elizabeth Heaton’s gorgeous voice. It’s the type of music that builds a dense atmosphere over the course of the entire LP and can become both soothing and suffocating. On Cold Waves Divide Us, they varied the tempos and enhanced the electronic elements to broaden the sound within the post-rock spectrum to great effect. This is the band’s most mature effort yet, one that requires attention, offering a lot of thrills in return. –insomniac15

45. Kamasi Washington – Fearless Movement

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

“Lesanu”, Fearless Movement‘s blistering opening statement, emerges from backstage darkness via jubilant prayers and anticipatory percussion that accelerate into an unforgettable jaunt as the nine minute behemoth unfolds. While it may be the number that most accurately reflects the ethos of Washington’s past efforts, its unforgettable introduction makes a beeline for the listener’s heart and mind, inviting them to break free of all preconceived notions of what the next 86 minutes will be like and to simply experience them. Some may argue that this is Washington’s most streamlined and accessible release yet; I would argue in turn that Fearless Movement showcases a playfulness and artistic freedom in its effortless genre-hopping and sonic vision quests that we have not yet seen from one of our finest living bandleaders. It doesn’t matter what you want: mind-melting solos, throwback funk earworms, heartrending soul, or even an André 3000-cum-Ron Burgundy jazz flute bonanza. Fearless Movement has it all. –YoYoMancuso

44. ScHoolboy Q – Blue Lips

[Official Site] // [Spotify]

I feel like there hasn’t been enough recognition for BLUE LIPS. After the disappointment of CrasH Talk, it seemed that ScHoolboy Q was slipping from his creative peak. However, BLUE LIPS is the return of Q to that creative proficiency and is one of the most complete-sounding records of his career. With equal parts introspective (look at “Blueslides”) and hype (see “Yeern 101”), BLUE LIPS shows ScHoolboy Q at his most mature and most fun sounding in his discography. It’s not the most profound or innovative album ever made, but it is one of the most enjoyable albums this year. While 2024 had its fair share of great hip-hop/rap albums released (especially toward the end of the year), BLUE LIPS deserves its place here and deserves more discussion in the genre. –tyman128

43. Beth Gibbons – Lives Outgrown

[Official Site] // [Spotify]

The wait for Beth Gibbons’ new solo record has been stretched throughout the years like it was matching the pace of a Portishead song. It’s been a slow, agonizing wait but I think we can all agree that her new music was worth the patience test. Lives Outgrown echoes her entire career. The somber folk of her album with Rustin Man, released more than two decades ago, gives just a fainting idea of what Gibbons has truly encapsulated on her sophomore album. It’s no surprise that Lives Outgrown is lethargically driven by themes of aging and the inevitable tragedy of losing those close to you as we plod through this uncertain journey we call life. Her voice, on the other hand, preserves that sempiternal finesse that spurs a little flame of undying warmth in your heart the moment it touches you. Nobody sings sorrow like she does. Throw in a couple of names like Lee Harris from Talk Talk managing the beats, the pops and the thuds, and James Ford constructing a whole world of sounds like a frantic puppeteer wrapping up Gibbons’ skeletal tunes, and the result is one of the most profoundly poignant albums of the year — and, hopefully, not the last time we hear from her, either. –Dewinged

42. Ariana Grande – Eternal Sunshine

[Official Site] // [Spotify]

2024 was such a fantastic year for pop music that Ariana Grande dropped a solo album that spawned two number one hits in the midst of some high-profile tabloid drama surrounding promotion of a hugely anticipated movie adaptation and nobody is talking about it! Such is the case in the modern mainstream landscape that found Eternal Sunshine‘s headlines quickly shoved aside for the likes of a surprise Beyonce “country” album, a double-album from Taylor Swift, and the rap beef of the century — and that’s a damn shame! Ariana’s latest is among her best, refining some of the uneven and anxious energy of past releases into a devilishly addictive exploration of heartbreak and healing. –Odal

41. Arooj Aftab – Night Reign

[Official Site] // [Spotify]

You have to teach a musical community what they’re listening to for them to realize that it’s part of a larger conversation. But you can’t just teach that; you have to also give them a thing. You have to give them a body of work to reference […] All this crossover stuff is great, but it’s happening because there was a ceiling that was shattered.
–Arooj Aftab (in conversation with The FADER)

Beautifully profound and profoundly beautiful, Night Reign is an obvious year highlight for cultural exchange, not to mention one of the most universally palatable albums you could recommend to anyone of late. Arooj Aftab claims it to be a playful record, wily and sensuous as its titular realm — and so much the better to draw a growing crowd to her nomadic melting pot, to leverage the Grammy-snagging, Obama-playlisted accolades of her 2022 breakthrough Vulture Prince and offer personally-suffused interpretations of South Asian poetry and music for a rightfully captivated Western audience (I for one am more than happy to add ‘Qawwali’ and ‘Ghazal’ to my vocabulary).

These come wrapped in as many folk and jazz permutations as you can wave a finger at, with vocal stylings that run all the way from Billie Holiday to contemporary R&B to dazzling melisma, but rather than any semblance of that awful, internet-polluted descriptor ‘post-genre’, Aftab’s attachment to her constituent influences smacks of deep, spiritual engagement: she has an intimate affinity for the holistic, establishing a shared language between disparate contributors, celebrating difference without outright peacocking it. The results are gorgeously intuitive, and we are welcomed unreservedly: the foreignness of her Urdu lyrics is strictly secondary to the soulfulness of her delivery, the arrangements and free-flowing, quenching grace of tracks like “Raat Ki Rani”, “Saaqi” and “Aey Nehin” exquisite in a manner that transcends taste or borders.

One can hardly put a foot wrong here — even if you come away from it as I first did, ignorant to the most fascinating parts of its heritage, convinced that the scope of its appeal could be reduced to nice chamber jazz and proudly clutching the sole takeaway that God, the harp in that opener is gorgeous, then hey, you’re still sitting on the starter to one of the year’s most worthwhile conversations. –JohnnyoftheWell

40. Brodequin – Harbinger of Woe

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

The chroniclers of medieval torture have returned with a full-length album after nearly twenty years, and wow, was it worth the wait! Harbinger of Woe is an absolutely colossal brutal death metal record, one that is quite flawless no matter how you look at it (and the genre is a pretty challenging genre to digest – certainly in my case.) As today’s audiences expect, the album sounds massive — a significant step up compared to their earlier material, in my opinion — and this is the album’s greatest strength: the sound is, quite literally, brutal. The drums drive the tracks with ferocious speed (that’s a lot of blast beats, of course!), perfectly complemented by the tight, razor-sharp guitars, pounding bass, and somewhat backgrounded vocals. A touch of reverb here and there, combined with Josh Welshman’s (Defeated Sanity) masterful production work, has birthed a monstrous-sounding beast that utterly crushes its listeners. If there is a golden standard for a brutal death metal record, then this could be the one. –garas

39. Iglooghost – Tidal Memory Exo

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

Trying to nail down the particulars of Tidal Memory Exo is a fruitless task. I’ve listened to it more times than I can count, but I couldn’t tell you where one song ends and another begins. Instead, I’m too busy listening to its chaotically confident soundscapes and imagining myself stoically walking through a crowded nightclub like I’m in a Michael Mann film or frantically coding in a zip-up and sunglasses. It’s dark and moody and incredibly badass. This is less a collection of songs and more so a vehicle to let your imagination wander. Or maybe it was all just an excuse to have the coolest cover art of the year. –Odal

38. Waxahatchee – Tigers Blood

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

Tigers Blood may’ve taken a few spins to get under my skin, but eventually it became apparent that Katie Crutchfield’s second effort in a more countrified direction (following 2020’s sublime Saint Cloud) is a triumph, solidifying her status as one of the finest singer-songwriters going today. While I’m still not sure this record quite measures up to its remarkable predecessor, these twelve songs’ seeming simplicity belies the magic they invoke — there’s something special in the combination of their classic Americana instrumentation, their wonderfully delicate melodies, Crutchfield’s gently distinctive singing, and her homespun lyrics’ slowly-unveiling profundity. Somewhere along the way, all those worthy attributes added up to make Tigers Blood my most-listened-to album of 2024. Not too shabby! –Sunnyvale

37. Slift – Ilion

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

SLIFT’s Ilion isn’t just space rock — it’s the sound of three French dudes trying to outdo the very size of the cosmos. If Ummon was their mission to escape Earth, Ilion is where they punch through hyperspace and push their amps past the point of sanity. The space vibes aren’t just aesthetic here; they’re a blueprint for the sheer gigantism of the music. Everything SLIFT does, whether it’s the hypnotic repetition or those bursts of cosmic heaviness, feels like it’s designed to make you feel small in the face of something massive: the loops are enormous, the riffs are heavier than a black hole, and the reverb could drown a solar system. SLIFT don’t just play music — they terraform it. –dedex

36. MIKE and Tony Seltzer – Pinball

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

ayo MIKE let’s turn that shit up –Tony Seltzer, probably.

In March 2024, the typically laid-back, introspective rapper MIKE suddenly sounded like it was time for him to flex on everyone in the room. His verses saw him balancing his usual reflective musings on pain and perseverance with a lighter, swaggering braggadocio that feels unforced and, at times, cathartic (he indeed didn’t sound proud he had to do a homie bad). That newly-found energy wouldn’t have been possible without Tony Seltzer’s vibrant, bouncy production — his trap-flavored beats yanked MIKE out of his boom bap comfort zone and ended up fitting his flows way better than expected. Sure, the trademark existential dread and cocky one-liners remain, but this production gives him a fresh swagger that’s impossible not to vibe with. It’s like watching your bro, the chill one, finally dance at a party — he’s killing it, and he always knew he would kill it. Pinball is proof MIKE doesn’t just brood; he can brag, too. –dedex

35. gyrofield – A Faint Glow of Bravery

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

The ‘cat-spirited interdisciplinary artist”s third full-length showcases an impressive sense of refinement that builds upon her established motifs with startling elan. Opting for a more structured dnb framework over the ambience of 2020’s All of Meaning or the attempted IDM sophistication of 2022’s Depths of Winter, A Faint Glow of Bravery nonetheless retains many of the dark, idiosyncratic elements explored by its predecessors for this new template. The result is a warped, bassy odyssey of subdued yet urgent synths and skittish rhythms; elements of jungle, liquid and neurofunk liberally infused with a glint-eyed digital playfulness and grimacing UK severity. It produces a warming quality despite the downtempo undercurrent, its airy sparsity a testament to the prominent ’90s influence of the electronica, but imbued with a modern dnb edge that affords a pulse-pounding, mysterious edge to the overtone. The producer’s impressive history of unique, atmospheric electronica is here manifest as a superb collection of unusual, hard-hitting, wonderfully textured bangers — acid-tipped rollers with a huge, thumping heart. –PumpBoffBag

34. Magdalena Bay – Imaginal Disk

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

On “True Blue Interlude”, the third track from this year’s unstoppable Imaginal Disk, Magdalena Bay present their aim to refashion the listener: “Say hello, it’s you, the purest you,” Mica Tenenbaum coos, and the sentiment would register as ironic were it not for the feathery pads over which she enunciates, for the purity or at least subjective cleansing effect of the record as a whole. The duo use Imaginal Disk‘s 53 minutes to whirl through daring song structures (based often on climaxes that disrupt more than they resolve) bolstered by highly expressive melodies, all of it shot through with a notion of utopia, a cleanliness and intensity in the instrumentation and production that conjures up a world free of anxiety but not variety of experience. “Killing Time”, the indelibly graceful second track, is the skeleton key: “I don’t know why but we call it killing time” as a hook is romantic gesture and pithy observation and anthropological musing all at once, and its meaning is not just enhanced but unlocked by the ascent of the tender keyboard arpeggi and the swing of the muscular drums behind them. If you’re looking for the best pop music of 2024, cast away fashionable hedonism and spend some quality time with this comprehensive spiritual makeover. The next phase is here. –robertsona

33. Skee Mask – Resort

[Official Site] // [Bandcamp]

Can someone, anyone, book our boi Skee Mask a holiday in Spain or something? A few years ago he was going on about a Pool, now he’s desperate for a Resort — and the carefree vibes have been there all along. Sure, he seems even less focused on getting a party-capital-P started than ever, but the calm, pulsating soundscapes are begging for some vacation time. Aided by some sugar free virgin mojitos, of course. Adiostschuss. –JesperL

32. Julia Holter – Something in the Room She Moves

[Official Site] // [Spotify]

Do you remember the first time you were absolutely awestruck by music? I don’t. I doubt many of us can — it’s such a deeply emotive, mainstream, accessible artform that we could all very well have been infants. Despite that, Something in the Room She Moves feels like it takes me back – not back in any musical sense to the sounds of last century – but back to that level of fresh wonder when I originally felt a song touch my heart. Listening to Julia Holter often has that inspiring effect on me, but perhaps here most of all — like a classical concert hall melting into an ambient aquarium while your favorite hit plays on the radio, there’s something encouraging, dramatic, and almost inherently restorative about it. This is a reminder that there’s a whole world of music out there, ready to be explored. –granitenotebook

31. Opeth – The Last Will and Testament

[Official Site] // [Spotify]

Upon the release of “§1”, the people’s focus was on the return of growls to Opeth music. Yes, they were a major part of their sound, adding gravity and flavor to all those brilliant heavy moments over the years. Nevertheless, the previous decade saw the group expanding their repertoire, exploring in depth the progressive side of their music. It felt like a reset twenty years into their career. The Last Will and Testament represents a step forward in the respective journey rather than a return to form. The performance is excellent and the execution is flawless. You can hear all the idiosyncrasies that you have come to expect from the group on the most cohesive record of this second era. The growls are just a bonus feature after a long absence, as each member goes out of his way to intricately layer each track until it becomes a sonic labyrinth, topped with an interesting storyline. –insomniac15

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