2024: The Best (WIP)
The sonic circus of 2024 has run its last, dying gasps into the ground—a kaleidoscopic freakshow now smoldering at the edge of the highway. These 25 albums are, as much as possible, raw, uncut, and pulsing with life, or at least, an image of life as it perhaps could be. From the blood-sodden roars of reeling, Bacchic gods to pitchy, passionate amateurism of bedroom anarchists, this year’s best music is an ever-spiraling fractal into the open void. Ratings are updated, and most likely final. Are these the scarequotes objective best albums of this year? Come on. Are they the albums I've gained the most from? Yes, absolutely. Hopefully they can do something for you as well.
The ship circles the maelstrom once again—let’s all dance on the deck. In the wake of our existence, in our parades and in our dances. Gentlemen, for another year, it has been an honor. |
| 25 |  | Cyess Afxzs
Philip K. Dick Vol. 1
RATING: 3.8
Inspired by the sci-fi legend, this meticulous sound-construction gives us all the beautiful subtlety that post-noise is capable of. So far from being a pummeling feedback assault, it’s (as all my favorite noise-adjacent work is) an exercise in space as much as it is a |
| 24 |  | Shovel Dance Collective
The Shovel Dance
RATING: 3.8
Trad folk gets a modern twist in this earthy, multi-instrumental visit to great grand-dad’s plague village. Like stumbling into a medieval tavern where everyone’s discussing climate change and death is waiting with a game of chess in the corner. |
| 23 |  | Powers/Rolin Duo
Untitled
RATING 3.8
This underground power couple, armed with 12 string and hammered dulcimer, have made probably the best folk ambient album this year. |
| 22 |  | Stanley Welch
Virgins
RATING: 3.9
Feels at times like the jazz music echoing in the halls of the Overlook Hotel, the skewed surreality of a David Lynch film in its stylistic cribbing of the jazz standards with all the theater kid drama you could pound a piano at. Electronic breaks, big band glam epics, the everything and the kitchen sink comes very close to working some absolute wonder here. |
| 21 | | ummsbiaus and Difference Machine
на півшляху від вито�
RATING: 3.9
Contemplative mysteries of ancient-sounding Ukrainian folk music. Still waters running deep, a deception of traditional instruments and richly intoned poetry. If you like the Czeck film Marketa Lazarova this will be the kind of thing for you. |
| 20 |  | Horacio Vaggione
Schall / Rechant
RATING: 3.9
Argentinian composer Horacio Vaggione offers an album of abstract electronic soundscapes that sounds exactly like someone mangling classical music instruments in a 90s editing program. Of course that's exactly what this is, but what it also proves itself to be is a meticulously constructed exploration of the various permutation that can inhere in a given sound. It's beautiful, and yes, it's also the second nerdiest item on this list, nearly a titanic feat. |
| 19 |  | Einsturzende Neubauten
Rampen
RATING: 3.9
King Blixa and co. return as on-point as they’ve ever been. The new buildings have long-since collapsed of course, and they’ve been building the new for a wonderful while, and now they’ve returned with a vital sense of attack. With clanging pipes, whispered secrets, and enough metallic percussion to rebuild a small city, Rampen brings the rusted scrap to life again. |
| 18 |  | Geordie Greep
The New Sound
RATING: 3.9
The eccentricity and novelty carries a lot of the weight on this one, but it pushes itself into the kind of oddity that’s committed enough to be near-brilliant in its own right. Geordie’s insane vocal stylings and chaotic instrumentation make The New Sound equal parts brilliant and bizarre. It’s avant-garde rock for the utterly perverse. |
| 17 |  | Bab L' Bluz
Swaken
RATING: 3.9
Guess it’s a good year for neo-world folk music, as this and another entry attest. North African gnawa traditions meet electric riffs and soulful vocals in an album that’s equal parts desert mysticism and rock swagger. Whether you’re vibing in Marrakesh or stuck in traffic, Swaken transports you to a better place—assuming you don’t mind a little oud with your revolution. |
| 16 |  | tori inu
DXSTRXXRSX
RATING: 3.9
A completely unassuming bedroom emo album that got an expectedly lukewarm reaction around here. Sheer heart is the name for this album’s deep appeal, as well as the deftness with which it combines its amateur aesthetic with genuinely powerful songwriting chops. Unsung hero of the year, if you struggle to justify its placement I can’t fault you, but a sense of openness and lack of assumption may be the best approach. |
| 15 |  | Yellow Swans
Out of Practice I
RATING: 3.9
Who saw these guys making a comeback in 2024? Their return is only a partial one, and they've returned in a very loose sense, especially in the structures that they're building these pieces off of. Both Out of Practice I and II are built on the same framework, and the pieces are quite distinctive, at least as far as epic post-noise music can possibly be. As the group self-effacingly say themselves, "not bad for a band that hasn't recorded anything or played out in 15 years." |
| 14 |  | As Living Arrows
Hope and Ruin
RATING: 3.9
As Living Arrows picked the wrong year to release what would be Screamo AOTY in most other years in recent memory. Post-Metal filigree is almost intuitively good in this mix and it's weight doesn't slow it down one iota. Being overshadowed by a landmark album of their genre is doubly unfortunate, as they’ve made one of the hardest hitting sophomore efforts in recent history. Soon, hopefully, this band will get its just desserts. |
| 13 |  | Goat
Goat
RATING: 3.9
Swedish psych-rock shamans Goat return with their most Goat-y album yet. Fuzzy tribe simulation, post-modern hierophanies, mandala tapestry on your studio apartment wall. Put on your favorite cloak, light some incense, and let Goat guide you to whatever the Ikea version of the astral plane looks like. |
| 12 |  | Knoll
As Spoken
RATING: 3.9
Knoll had to go somewhere after plumbing the abyss on Metempiric. Where they ended up might have been a bit of a head-scratcher, but our post-humanity deathgrind spelunkers have chosen their evolution to take the form of out and out black metal and made their attack all the more smothering. No longer lost in the horror of the infinite cosmos, we find ourselves buried alive, and something’s moving next to us in the dark. |
| 11 |  | Hoplites
Παραμαινομένη
RATING: 4
Possibly the nerdiest album of the year, if academic rigor and technical prowess can be pigeonholed in a term as dismissive as "nerdy" and also the album with the absolute finest sense of craftsmanship on every possible level, from concept to execution. Also just happens to be among the hardest-ripping phalanxes of metal cutlery this year as well. |
| 10 |  | The Necks
Bleed
RATING: 4
A beautiful hypnosis in which The Necks get absolutely haunted. Bleed is as minimalist and repetitive as ever, but here The Necks’ tightly wound progressions are dispersed, amorphous. The mystery collapses into a faceless menace, a direction that fits the Necks aesthetic like a glove. |
| 9 |  | Crippling Alcoholism
With Love From a Padded Room
RATING: 4
Get this band some more success. Lifting my self-imposed embargo on commenting on this band to say that this breed of nightmare gets all too real in the sleaziest, swingingest way possible. Many bands have tried to capture the sound of pure evil, but the twisted beauty of this act is that they've so completely realized that feedback and perversion only gets you one side of this nightmare funhouse mirror. |
| 8 |  | Lankum
Live in Dublin
RATING: 4
You ever wanted The Rocky Road To Dublin to sound like the soundtrack to a human sacrifice? Haunting harmonies step outside of time and stretch to gargantuan proportions. Is it the slo-motion burning freight train of False Lankum? Eh, not quite. But it’s still a weighty testament to the power of these Irish drone-folkers |
| 7 |  | MJ Lenderman
Manning Fireworks
RATING: 4
Idiosyncratic on this list for just how middle-of-the-road this sounds, but MJ's got an incredible knack for a turn of phrase and every song on this is simply wonderful. |
| 6 |  | Mamaleek
Vida Blue
RATING: 4
Mamaleek have kept going further and further into left field as their career has progressed. My review could probably say it better than I can now: There’s nothing to sift through, except in our futile, but necessary effort to put some meaning to that ungraspable, undifferentiated mass in front of us. Most music seeks to put some order, some meaning to that mass. At heart, Vida Blue is no different, but it distinguishes itself by describing, with perfect clarity, just what a chaos is given to us, and what a struggle it is to make sense of it." |
| 5 |  | And Also The Trees
Mother-of-pearl Moon
RATING: 4
This album feels so much like what a moonlit night is, it's difficult to put into words. And Also The Trees feel like a ghost of themselves here, a ghost that's finally at peace. It's crystalline, elegantly spare to the point of being almost ominous. It’s the soundtrack to an aftermath, where serenity is indistinguishable from entropy, and the listener becomes a solitary observer wandering through the ruins of something once alive, now perfectly still. |
| 4 |  | Meat Beat Manifesto and Merzbow
Extinct
RATING: 4.1
File this firmly in the "so stupid it's brilliant" category, the same glitched-out break layered over a tortured crescendo of feedback siren noises, fuzz and roar, this anarchic hyraulic-fluid Pollock painting of a piece is a synapse-invading lead sap to the back of the head over and over and over again. |
| 3 |  | Laurie Anderson
Amelia
RATING: 4.1 |
| 2 |  | Xiu Xiu
13" Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto...
RATING: 4.1 |
| 1 |  | State Faults
Children of the Moon
RATING: 4.3 |
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