50-31 | 30-11 | 10-1 | EP/Live/Compilation

10. Foxing – Foxing

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

Foxing is exhausted, but don’t take my word for it! Their latest album’s cover depicts an over-saturated, digitized, and hollowed out close-up of the Greek bronze sculpture Boxer at Rest, originating from a period of antiquity marked by a shying away from the heroic regalia accentuated in prior generations. The actual statue survived with minimal oxidation only because it was promptly buried — an apt parallel to how this band, the emo revival’s most restless explorers, lay defeated even if their reputation seems well-preserved. Name me a more decorated, adventurous act from their scene and I’ll call you a liar, not that it seems to matter to them: here at LP #5, reinventing the wheel for the fourth time overall and the first time as their own producers and crowd-funders, a medal is chump change compared to a moment’s reprieve.

Not to bury the lede in there, but yes, Foxing have yet again willed their arc in unforeseen directions. With each release, they course-correct from a criticism of the one prior while accumulating touchstones — once a sound enters their DNA, it doesn’t escape so easily. Exhibit 4.1: observe how the tight pop songcraft of predecessor Draw Down The Moon evaporates in favor of Foxing‘s sprawling, nocturnal cynicism while the band’s comfort with electronics doesn’t just remain, but expands until it bursts — guitars and synths shriek, space age chords submerging vocalist Conor Murphy in waves of reverberated despair and clipped overdrive. The nearest reference point, in their discography or beyond it, is its hour-long rival Nearer My God, a dual-faced premonition of the life they now forge: Foxing is the just as apocalyptic aftermath, folding to the poverty, isolation, and mania they once theatrically gesticulated about.

The struggle sometimes arrives through uncomfortable stillness — “Cleaning” is akin to a warbling transmission from a lost satellite, Murphy slurring his words as he pleads for a bit more time to procrastinate on household chores. There are also two songs here about dead pets — but just as often, demented anti-nostalgia wins out. “Hell 99”, maybe the most divisive track in their catalogue, verges on electro nu metal like only The Armed before them have made work, and those guys sound way more enthusiastic about the proposition. In comparison, Foxing’s take is heaped in bitter satire, guitarist E.M. Hudson practically splitting his throat in the song’s fuzzed out chorus. Its broiling disdain is emblematic of Foxing‘s downcast mentality, if not its overall sonic disposition — the band’s feel for twisted, danceable grooves makes their avalanche of depression a little easier to swallow. The sheer artistic magnificence implies it’s still worth it, but heed their warning: some victories ring a little more Pyrrhic than others. –ashcrash9

9. Chat Pile – Cool World

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

The dystopic sludge of antiquated factories pouring smog into darkened skies. The great mechanical steel whirring of industry complexes pumping pointless product into the infinitely growing chain of supply and demand. The political compasses this guides, whose needle is made from the sinew of the people it sacrifices and the endless nothing that are all of its poles. This is the world that Cool World projects, of distance and disorder and isolation. The absolute degeneracy that “I Am Dog Now” decries with its canine-esque barks and guitar tone that sounds like it was dredged from the bottom of a sewer is only the beginning of this warped soundscape, and in its aggression showcases the most blunt ways in which this myriad of hells is created. “Shame” as the track that follows is unexpectedly much less visceral throughout a majority of its run-time, having a more hazed-out and nearly indifferent vocal approach that merges into an almost tranquil wave of grunge-influenced riff work. It’s all the more contorted to think that there will be moments of bliss and beauty on this record, since towards the guttural second half of the aforementioned “Shame” this is stamped out with indiscernible animalistic ugliness. Sure, there is a greater spaciousness/ambiance about this record than there ever was with the largely even MORE unhinged God’s Country, but this presents itself as a harrowing echo over the unhinged mania rather than anything meant to offer respite. Case in point: “Funny Man” having some of the most dizzying and alienating guitar work Chat Pile has EVER done while still feeling lost in the dissolution of its own web.

This does just narrowly begin to find itself too lost in the dontgiveafuck-isms on the surprisingly tame “Camcorder”, but any traction that is lost is returned threefold in the piss and hellfire of “The New World” and threefold of THAT threefold with “No Way Out”. The barks and screams and howls are amongst the most ferocious Raygun has ever delivered, as if he were a starved hyena cackling under the sweltering African heat. It’s a hopeless record to an almost frightful degree, an anthem that has been trampled underfoot. The bitterness of this acceptance is perhaps the fire still stoked in its belly however, and in the lines “From the time you were born it was over / Dreams shattered on the ground” there is a stinging contempt for the acceptance a collective portion of the USA feels it has been faced with. It is very much not a cool world, and out here there’s no mercy. –Dedes

8. Geordie Greep – The New Sound

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

Out with the old and in with the new! black midi frontman Geordie Greep (mostly) left his old bandmates behind as he engaged on an endearingly narcissistic jazz-prog carnival tour, spouting uncomfortably crass diatribes with all the finesse of your average e-girl orbiter over samba-fied Steely Dan instrumentals. A formula for the most annoying album of the year? Maybe, and you might be right to think that sacred genitalia is a risky topic to broach on your debut solo record, but if anyone could pull it off, why not this aggressively middle-class English boy stuck in two minds over whether he wants to be Peter Gabriel or Donald Fagen more. Listen, this whole thing could have been a recipe for disaster — there were signs all over black midi’s later work that Greep was angling to shift the band in a direction that didn’t quite play to their strengths. But here, given full rein to unshackle himself from the democracy and diplomacy of band politics, he explodes (occasionally violently, nearly always with sexual perversion) into a culmination of the influences common amongst all art school-educated prog kids, whilst not quite sounding like anything before him. Did I mention this guy likes samba? –Sinternet

7. Chelsea Wolfe – She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

To say that madame Wolfe is the goth queen is to say nothing. Although reaching out to reaching out to reaching out to a more compressed, industrially tinged sound can be jarring to those seeking a more gloomy brooding session. But fear not, for this is no production or mixing misstep. She Reaches Out utilises its fuzziness with clear intent in the most poignant of moments when tension and emotion rile up to near explosions. The only thing that the noisiness may distract from is the underlying fragility in all its subtle glory. This album is tragic like antiquity, theatrical and blunt to the core — once you bite through the harshness to get there. The album can delve into vulnerable topics like self-image either within dysmorphia or surrounding you as a public figure, in the end all being a liminal product, to yourself or others. Is ghost-rock a thing? It better be now. Have a goth day, drink blood and murder your local clergy. –someone

6. Kendrick Lamar – GNX

[Official Site] // [Spotify]

Even before he surprise-dropped GNX as the music industry slowed to its usual holiday season crawl, 2024 was indisputably Kendrick Lamar’s year. Throughout the spring, the world watched in wonder as rap’s lowest-profile megastar got goaded into and dominated a game of 4-D diss track chess against Drake. By the time he hosted his Juneteenth “Pop Out” concert, Lamar had united an arena of once-adversarial gang members in Los Angeles to rap about how his biggest commercial competition for the title of Best Rapper Alive was (allegedly) a pedophile. That song, “Not Like Us”, topped the charts and busted Billboard records, culminating in the rapper getting the nod to host this winter’s Super Bowl halftime show. As it turns out, Lamar still hadn’t finished sorting through his thoughts on the whole ordeal, but his enemy was no longer any one figurehead: it was his relationship with the notion of competition itself.

A large part of what made Kendrick and Drake’s spring beef so compelling (beyond the confirmation bias of watching an entitled creep fall from grace) was how Kenny’s rebuttals cherry-picked flaw from feature. Broader conversations about blackness, masculinity, and fatherhood played second fiddle to ensuring Drake’s cultural presence diminished, leaving a bitter aftertaste in some mouths that GNX mainly tiptoes around. Lamar’s career-long self-evaluations of fame remain present, but he unwinds those threads in finicky spurts instead of dedicated inquiry, deflecting from Mr. Morale’s counseled grandiosity by shooting layups.

I won’t lie and say that’s not a tad frustrating, but I also can’t ignore my gut fascination with how Kendrick’s sassy affectations drive lean arrangements to entertaining outcomes. And plenty of them do have meat: SZA duet “luther” is arguably Kendrick’s best soul ballad to date, “reincarnated” and “heart pt. 6” stand among his career highlights, and “wacced out murals” and “man at the garden” echo the haunted immersion of feud highlights “6:16 in LA” and “meet the grahams”. Dig the guy’s snider side? At least four tracks here repackage DJ Mustard’s minimalist, jerky “Not Like Us” beat and they’re all dripping with pomp and spite. In effect, GNX primes Lamar to shadowbox his insecurities and naysayers in the margins as often as the spotlight — a place this album proves he’s just as comfy and no less captivating. –ashcrash9

5. Ulcerate – Cutting the Throat of God

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

Ulcerate are a band whose foundations are built upon nuance to an almost dizzying degree. Riffs hold onto their motifs for oftentimes mere seconds, swelling like an ebbing ocean’s tide into calamitous tsunamis before receding back into unpredictable waves of calm. This can be said even more so for Jamie Saint Merat’s drumming, which has so many patterns and fills that weave in and out — it’s as if he’s making fully arranged orchestral movements with his percussive abilities alone. The only constant that Ulcerate have ever guaranteed was in their straightforward vocal delivery, in which powerful bellows echo across the chaotic canvas as a thunderous presence to cut through the dancing symphony of maelstroms merging into one another. This, confessedly, makes differentiation between albums a bit harder to rend out of the organized chaos the band have pedaled since Everything is Fire, yet it also makes it so much more impressive and gratifying. The shift was vague, but absolutely the most present it ever was on Stare Into Death and Be Still, which implemented greater breathing room — and, hell, even respite and a smidge of melody — to make something that felt like it was conveying genuine tangible emotion, an otherworldly sense of sorrow.

It’s this dabbling of melody that carries over more greatly into Cutting the Throat of God, although the sorrow here seems to bloom into grandeur, as if Ulcerate are the overture ushering forth a great battle of deities. “To See Death Just Once” and the title track are incredible examples of this penchant for absolutely DENSE crescendos, with the former acting as the blazing chariots that surge against the gates of heavens and the latter sounding more like the ensemble of carnage that follows the heinous act. This may be the most streamlined and, uh, I would suppose accessible the band have ever been — but it is for sure not them stripping their sound down for simplification’s sake and rather works as proof that the band are well attuned to warping whatever atmosphere they desire around their meticulous machine of dissonant death metal. –Dedes

4. Charli XCX – brat

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

Despite 5’ing Brat, I’ve done very little to argumentatively substantiate this opinion — mainly because I find the exercise worthless. Longform effort posting over the album that sold itself on defying low-level authority figures while spiralling through the existential questions raised by a late-twenties bender always seemed to miss the point of liking it to me. I mean it’s named Brat! Who expects any sort of radical dialectical movement from a pop album that’s main charm is being effervescent, aloof and snotty? I certainly never have, and I do think that’s a part of why I love it.

That said, bandying my expectations as the lone variable separating me from all those gormless plebeians who just don’t get Brat is a pretty bad faith way to start this entry, since it seriously undersells how great this album is. I spun Brat back to back throughout 2024, excised pretty much every song from it for one playlist or another, and shamelessly begged half of my friends to check it out. For the other half, I manipulated them through ‘aux-holm syndrome’ by playing “365” just a little too loud while driving a great bit over the speed limit. Even then, despite all the precedent Brat has already set, spinning it again always pleasantly surprises me, both with how much mileage each song still has and at how many different moments I simply love. The first drop on “B2b” and how the second drop builds on it. That driving beat that carries “Girl, so confusing” off the rails. The uncompromising vibe check of the opening three songs. Fuck. Every moment works perfectly within the context of the whole while standing out uniquely within the tracklist, like a puzzle coming together as it plays. The final image, a lean 11 track affair, stands triumphantly alone, greater than whatever could have happened after it released. What does the forgotten fervor of Brat Summer matter to 2025? If Kamala was Brat before November 5th is she Brat now, and if so, how has the term been cheapened? How about the double album rerelease that began with sixteen remixes (including the two you already know with Billie Eilish and Lorde alongside fourteen bad ones)?

Only a generational pop album could create so much white noise while remaining clearly defined against itself; a miracle since Brat‘s rather cancerous post-release life seems so clearly related to the mood it’s inundated in — the euphoria of the eternal party, or the end of history. However, what makes Brat so effective is not that it solely valorizes this mood, but instead that it lets its unique anxieties pierce the illusion ever so occasionally. Nothing epitomizes this dynamic like “I think about it all the time”, a track Brat would utterly fail without. The meteoric impact of coked-out rager and hard SOTY candidate “365” as a finale is only deepened by immediately following such a vulnerable introspection on motherhood and the desire to take a step into a different stage of life — you almost feel as if Charli visited her friend and her new baby right before returning to white lines and clubbing within the hour. The dynamic between pleasure and pragmatism blurs itself throughout Brat, the way only a person growing blurs. I’m just a little under Charli’s age, and so much of the sentiment of Brat is profoundly resonant for me. Whether it be in me or in the world, a shift is happening. I want the party to continue, but, between you and I, digital weed and beer o’clock and sloppy streaming shows and doomscrolling aren’t quieting the nagging thoughts like they used to. Brat understands that. It understands that I don’t want to give up youthful fascinations just quite yet; in fact, it spends most of its runtime shoving them down my throat. But it also gives space for those other thoughts too. Not that there’s a solution in Brat, it isn’t the revolution, but it is the anxiety I feel everyday and all the hedonistic trash I crowd myself with to squeeze it out. As an encapsulation of 2024, it’s perfect. –FowlKrietzsche

3. Blood Incantation – Absolute Elsewhere

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

“What is the charge here, officer, riffing a meme? A succulent death metal meme?”

The Brat Autumn for the metalheads hath arrived and delivered. All your snootiest bros found themselves fawning over a particularly nerdy effort to bring about only the juiciest of retrofuturistic swish-swoop-clang-zing tunes. Listening to Absolute Elsewhere feels akin to stumbling onto cyberfleshy orgy in an alien temple, accidentally creating wormholes larger than yo momma. Blood Incantation seem often too clever for their own good, sprinkling a plethora of deliberate kooky instrugasms to make every two-track section a stylistic/production odyssey a lesser band would have exploited to make a full album. But Blood Incantation are not interested in dragging a concept to its ultimate gagging limits, they want to extract its meat and marrow, make the spiniest succulent broth and have it be the tightest 10-15 minutes of metal plating you will have heard all [insert your estimate of time]. Everything bagel metal has never sounded this refined, and one would have to be particularly joyless to only hear mush and clatter and Bass Pro Shop geekery. –someone

2. The Cure – Songs of a Lost World

[Official Site] // [Spotify]

Legacy acts have some of the toughest mountains to climb in the music world. On the one hand, sure, they can release new music that sounds equivalent enough to their best work, and fans will eat it up. One the other, the more critical among us (which, let’s be real, probably applies to all of us here, typing away about music on this lovely website) will always compare their new albums with their magnum opuses and all the albums that fall just short of that title. We’ll always ramble on about how the band is desperately trying to recapture their glory days — about how they have the shell of the right sound, but not the soul — and a million other platitudes to hammer in the point that, for all intents and purposes, new music from these old bands always end up sounding like they’re just spinning their wheels. And, granted, they may have earned the right to do so, but it doesn’t mean we can’t be critical of it, right?

But, once in a blue moon, a legacy act drops an album that proves the naysayers wrong, an album that sounds like it’s plucked straight from the band’s best era, an album that manages to flip two middle fingers to anyone who doubted that it could be done. For longtime goth act The Cure, it only took 16 years to deliver it.

Songs of a Lost World hearkens back to the band’s prime era, the days of Disintegration where the band was on top of the world (hell, even the song titles call back to that album, compare Songs‘ “Warsong” and “Endsong” to Disintegration’s “Plainsong” and “Lovesong”), and yet it also sounds fresh and new. It sees The Cure return to the dark and introspective lyrics that put them on the map, making it the darkest and most despondent album they’ve released in a while. It sees Robert Smith in top form, singing like he hasn’t aged a day since 1989. And, most importantly, it sees the band at their peak musically, wrapping you in gothic atmospheres, intros that build and build until Smith’s voice breaks through to deliver that heavenly sorrow. Songs of a Lost World may give the impression of self-indulgence, what with its minutes-long intros and plenty of songs that crack the 5+ minute mark. And, indeed, for many other legacy acts, it might very well have been just that: a self-indulgent last grasp at relevancy. But The Cure have never really been like most other bands or legacy acts. Whether or not Songs of a Lost World is their final album is up in the air, but it doesn’t really matter to me. What matters is that they’re here; what matters is that they did it. –AnimalForce1

1. State Faults – Children of the Moon

[Bandcamp] // [Spotify]

Despite this site’s disproportionate fanfare, State Faults are but an under-cherished, overambitious act determined to elevate screamo’s signature torment to new heights. They’ve been building from ground level for some time, and their previous albums, each separated by lengthy periods of red tape and financial infeasibility, proved the band’s ramshackle will while inching towards this magnum opus. Self-coining their spin on the sound “flowerviolence,” the quartet gained a reputation for incorporating blankets of ethereal ambience between their spasms of fury. Before Children of the Moon, that was experimental for its own sake more than it was consistently effective, but here, their grander vision finally emerges unencumbered, prioritizing the record’s fluidity, poise, and spiritual resilience above all else. Its fourteen tracks beg to be listened to in full, sequentially, and without interruption, each uproar leaning on its adjoined moments to produce a gapless chain of gut punches and gracious reprieves.

It transposes onto a cinematic, macro-sized scale components once traditionally condensed: vocalist-guitarist Jonny Andrew shrieks 90% of this album, but he also slips cleanly sung passages in at the perfect intervals, always catching you by surprise, never resting out of place. Children…‘s cascading leads and metamorphic walls of hi-fi distortion usurp expectations of staccato-heavy riffage, too; instead of being slammed against cement ad nauseam, its songs exist within the plummet, all racing thoughts and bracing muscles. If last generation’s most esteemed screamo pushed boundaries by subverting what songs could logistically be, State Faults catapult the question in the opposite direction without sacrificing any of their forebears’ scrappy defiance.

Most importantly, and as its formidable bloc of user votes indicates, its myriad explosive moments just fucking stick with you. Words don’t easily convey how cool “Blood Moon” simultaneously careens into and levitates above intro track “Fragile Light”; how the portentous opening passage of “Nazar” or the descending, shimmering riff of “Transfiguration” respectively unspool dread and absolution; how the stepping stone climaxes of “Leviathan”, “Distant Omen”, and “Wind Song” imbue the journey with internal arcs, or how the up-tempo pummelers “Heat Death” and “Palm Reader” guarantee limbs will fly in the pit as vigorously as Jared Wallace’s do atop the drum stool. And I haven’t even mentioned Children…‘s two most obvious highlights yet: closer “Bodega Head” and centerpiece “No Gospel” each exceed nine minutes in length, the former a descent into cliffside psychosis, the latter a spicy jam suite flush with organs, Latin grooves, and an extended hallucinogenic comedown. At each juncture, simply stellar songwriting retools the album’s bodily exasperation as a pretext towards starting over, and you feel it with every fiber of your being. State Faults wrote a masterpiece of epic proportions in Children of the Moon; it’s extraordinary while remaining exemplary, resonant on first listen and just as riveting after dozens more. Whether or not it stood atop your AOTY list, the data doesn’t lie: collectively, it’s the most SputnikMusic album of 2024, and the contest wasn’t even close. –ashcrash9

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Thank you to SandwichBubble for being gracious with your time in helping us with the Community feature’s artwork! Many thanks as well to all those who submitted a ballot for the 2024 feature (including those that came in from souls who still can’t get a confirmation e-mail when they created their 4,732nd new account within the past two years). While it’s somewhat bittersweet seeing the total number of ballots submitted precipitously shrink this year due to the aforementioned ongoing registration impasse (to paraphrase Sweet Lou Brown: “We didn’t get hacked last year. We didn’t get hacked this year; that’s two in a row. If we don’t get hacked midstream next year, that’s called a winning streak. It has happened before!”), we’re thankful for all the time and energy the contributors and volunteers committed to ensure 2024’s Community feature was a triumph. Additionally, please know it goes without saying that you all make our slice of the Internet a merrily unparalleled space for camaraderie, so thank you for being here while the lights are still on. We’ll see what happens in 2025!