The 50 Best Albums of 2024

Featuring Charli XCX, Bladee, MJ Lenderman, Tyla, xaviersobased, Jessica Pratt, and more

December 3, 2024

One major theme that runs through Pitchfork’s best albums of 2024 is disbelief. There are pop albums that defy all expectations, indie rock records that shouldn’t work but do, rap tapes that are made of everything but the raps, surprise debuts, stunning comebacks, and shocking finales. It’s the albums that leave us speechless that make us want to write about them. Here are those 50 incredible albums.

Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2024 wrap-up coverage here.

(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)

American Dreams

50.

Wendy Eisenberg: Viewfinder

Using a recent laser eye surgery as a launchpad, singer, guitarist, and bandleader Wendy Eisenberg ripples through questions of how vision relates to understanding and belonging within the world—whether seeing something is really the same as grasping it, and what happens when the impulse to grasp reality at all relaxes. Viewfinder’s warm jazz melange alternately loosens into spacious, staggered rhythms and tightens up into tense, guitar-driven whorls. Eisenberg leads their band through a series of freeform improvisations, venturing into a mode of music that’s as much about listening as it is about playing. Is there any such thing as seeing—or listening—clearly, any way to use our fractured senses to break through to what's there? Maybe not, but with its broad, searching instrumental passages and the kinetic mutual response of its players, Viewfinder posits that at least we can use what we’ve got to tune into each other. –Sasha Geffen

43B

49.

Chief Keef: Almighty So 2

The stopwatch started on rap’s postmodern era with Chief Keef’s Almighty So, released in late 2013—an obscure-sounding record misconstrued in its own time, whose intuitive style would inform just about every major rap trend in the decade to come. Long exiled from his hometown, where the once-vital drill movement has been commodified and curdled, the 29-year-old veteran returned 11 years later with a triumphant sequel, almost entirely self-produced. What could have been a perfunctory gesture is instead massive-sounding and soulful, a showcase of his oft-copied rhythms and idiosyncratic koans: “I could lay in an ant bed, come out with no ants on me/I could lay in a forest in a tent, come out with a brown bear’s head.” –Meaghan Garvey

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Houndstooth

48.

Djrum: Meaning’s Edge EP

Djrum’s own music rarely reaches the batshit velocity of his DJing. When the Oxford artist is throwing records around his three-deck setup, he cuts wildly between beats and breakdowns, making tempo jumps that would make most DJs recoil in fear. But Meaning’s Edge almost captures that energy, following his muse down a hedge maze through genres—drum & bass, techno, downtempo—at breakneck speed. Always one for a little drama, Djrum embellishes these zig-zagging tracks with wind instruments from around the world, sounding jaunty at one moment (the 14-minute, two-part “Freakm” suite) and eerie and foreboding (“Codex,” which sounds like if Jon Hassell got into breakcore through TikTok). The best is the centerpiece "Crawl," assembled from tiny percussive sounds that range from wooden to metallic. It’s like a muscular microhouse at warp speed, cycling through styles until it ends up somewhere close to dub techno and then just ends, leaving you warm and fuzzy but also wondering what just happened. –Andrew Ryce

4AD

47.

Helado Negro: Phasor

On Phasor, Roberto Carlos Lange’s eighth album as Helado Negro, the prolific electronic artist fine-tuned his craft toward the sublime. Here, Lange branched out toward groovy art pop, distorted psych rock, and trippy psychedelia with his typical pointillistic detail, whether creating an enchanting, impressionistic love song or an homage to experimental icon Pauline Oliveros and illustrious Fender assembly worker Lupe Lopez. Phasor signaled a subtle but important shift in Lange’s style—informed in part by his move from New York City to Asheville—that allows for new looseness and levity, blooming out of every burnished synth note and gently galloping drum beat. –Eric Torres

Jagjaguwar

46.

Chanel Beads: Your Day Will Come

After years of feeling adrift in the local Seattle DIY scene, Shane Lavers had an epiphany at a jam session that led him to take guitar music seriously and move to New York. Perhaps that’s why his debut album as Chanel Beads is filled with self-help idioms and reflections on internal conflicts. But this haunted manor of alien pop isn’t myopic—it’s intoxicating. The song structures melt into goo; the lyrics pelt flecks of raw feeling. Everything is well-calibrated yet alluringly askew: drums that sound like they’re being played in the backrooms, gorgeously distorted violins, a British robo-voice going “Police Scanner.” It transforms the uncanny placelessness of coming-of-age in 2024 into something motivating, even joyous. –Kieran Press-Reynolds

4EVER

45.

454: Casts of a Dreamer

The term “flow state,” which is really just psychology-speak for “locked in,” feels particularly engineered for hip-hop, a linguistic genre in which the way you say something matters just as much, sometimes even more, than the content of what you’ve expressed. There comes a point, in a really good rap verse, when you pinch your forehead in consternation and wonder how the hell this guy is still going. It feels supernatural when a rapper floats through time-space, bending the limits of locked-in-ness to deliver a cascading outburst of liquid truth. Got it? Sure? Now forget everything I just said and throw on the hour-long fast-rap waterslide Casts of a Dreamer. Though a good number of verbs exist for locked-in rap performances—floating, gliding, spitting—none of them feels entirely apposite for 454, whose latest mixtape hacks the system settings of consciousness and turns fatigue sliders all the way down. If you aren’t busy scrunching up your face by the 30-minute mark, you might find the words to ask how the hell he’s still going. –Samuel Hyland

Listen: Soundcloud

Stroom

44.

Milan W.: Leave Another Day

Most of Milan Warmoeskerken’s albums do not sound like this woozy, gloomy, meticulously appointed dream-pop. The Antwerp-based producer moved the ARPs and FX envelopes to the other room and promoted his hangdog voice and jingle-jangle guitar for his first singer-songwriter album. It’s a recalibration that gives Leave Another Day its singular sound: Behind the rhythmic picks and strums, everything else is smeared in long streaks—saxophones, synths, solos, a black melancholy that so cellularly real you’ll wonder if our moods are indeed governed by the bodily humors. Such is this power of Milan W.’s spell and this occultish record that taps into an olde magick that looms as the fog rolls in. –Jeremy D. Larson

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Astral Spirits

43.

أحمد [Ahmed]: Wood Blues

When أحمد [Ahmed] play a concert, there is only one song on their setlist. The European free jazz quartet doesn’t practice and they don’t record in the studio. They simply meet on the day of the show, agree on a song by the undersung bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik, and see where it takes them. On Wood Blues, the band subjects Abdul-Malik’s 1961 “Oud Blues” to an hour-long demolition, violent and graceful. Pat Thomas bangs on the piano with his fists and Seymour Wright blares through his sax like a fire alarm. Drummer Antonin Gerbal and bassist Joel Grip keep the rhythm going through sheer will. Or, as I suspect, through the spirit of the late Abdul-Malik goading them on through the most exhilarating iteration of his music in this world or the next. –Matthew Blackwell

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Incienso

42.

Loidis: One Day

When he wants to be, Brian Leeds is one of electronic music’s great sentimentalists. He’s described his swooning ambient work as Huerco S. as a “celebration of love”; as Loidis, he makes what he has called “minimal emo tech”—presumably jokingly, though the project’s debut full-length One Day lives up to the descriptor. On one hand, One Day is truly minimal. Leeds draws on dub techno’s grayscale palette, and it’s rare that any of the record’s eight tracks consists of more than a few repeated, interlocking loops. But he manages to conjure pathos and humanity from these simple components. “Love’s Lineaments,” a 10-minute track at the record’s center, slowly morphs into a delicate drumless interlude. It’s as intimate and heartwarming as a conversation with a loved one in a corner far from the dancefloor amid a long night out. –Colin Joyce

Milan

41.

Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus

Ryuichi Sakamoto knew time was short when he sat in front of his piano to record his final concert film. His cancer had progressed to terminal stages, sapping his physical strength—though his creative spirit was unbroken. He poured everything into Opus, playing new compositions alongside fresh arrangements of selections from his almost five-decade career. Sakamoto plays with emotional heft—swaying his weary frame along the bench and pressing the keys with the full momentum of his body—making a calculated decision with every movement. He spent what remained of his energy to play his heart out one last time. –Shy Clara Thompson

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

4AD

40.

Erika de Casier: Still

On 2021’s Sensational, Erika de Casier told a lover not to expect too much: “I’m way too busy… I gotta work real hard/To get to get where I wanna be.” The work paid off. On Still, de Casier outgrows the homage of her early records, quoting Sade without aping her, slipping easily between classic R&B and liquid D&B (shout-out longtime collaborator DJ Central), singing dear-diary lyrics that are sexy, humble, and, above all, relatable. Celeb beefs and paparazzi: No. Crushes and undone laundry: Yes. In a year dominated by quasi-deified “pop girlies,” de Casier served up something beautifully human. –Will Lynch

Double Double Whammy

39.

This Is Lorelei: Box for Buddy, Box for Star

The original cut of Box for Buddy, Box for Star included more than 30 songs and a voice memo apologizing for its length. That the final version of Nate Amos’ first official album as This Is Lorelei—following over 60 Bandcamp releases—fits neatly on a single LP only underscores how many ideas the Water From Your Eyes singer-songwriter can pack into just 10 tracks. There’s the twang of “Angel’s Eye,” the plucky toy piano on kiss-off “Where’s Your Love Now,” the jubilant piano runs on “Dancing in the Club.” A giddy puppy, a nosebleed that “tastes like god,” a boy named “Limbo”: Amos spit-shines low-brow lyrics until they sparkle like the diamonds he gave away. –Arielle Gordon

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Bayonet

38.

Being Dead: EELS

Like the giddy peak of an acid trip or the sensation of bombing downhill in a beater car, Being Dead’s EELS is an unhinged thrill, blending kitschy retro pop with the bared teeth of a garage-rock rager. The record’s new-wave ditties are an amalgamation of strange but immediately identifiable components, chimeras of ’60s pop à la Lesley Gore and the frenzied shred of a skateboarding compilation. Over the fugue of distortion on tracks like “Firefighters,” the Austin trio stacks harmonies like the Mamas and the Papas, spouting Dadaist incantations about raging fires and angels joining wings in the heavens. Are we having fun yet? Yes, we say uncertainly, faces melting. –Linnie Greene

Open Shift Distribution

37.

Lisha G / Trini Viv: Groovy Steppin Sht*

Sometimes I stare out the window and daydream about what Playboi Carti’s first official mixtape would have sounded like if he never left behind Awful Records and the intergalactic Atlanta beats of Ethereal. Maybe it would have sounded something like Groovy Steppin Sh*t. On the tape, the glazed flex-raps of South Carolina’s Lisha G meet the cyberfunk of Philly keyboard whiz Trini Viv. Lisha, who has been a constant in the underground plugg scene for years now, takes her loud whisper-raps to another level, backed by instrumentals that are like if Zaytoven grew up in the arcade instead of the church. But after a few listens, Trini’s waterfall of rainbow-hued synths and blaring digital horns start to transcend any comparisons that come to mind. –Alphonse Pierre

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Geffen

36.

Kali Uchis: ORQUÍDEAS

Taking its name from the national flower of Colombia, Kali Uchis’ fourth studio album moves between boleros, merengue, dembow, house, and the ethereal alt-pop on which she made her name. The flower’s association with motherhood is also not a coincidence; Uchis announced that she was pregnant with her first child in the music video for “Tu Corazón Es Mío…/Diosa.” ORQUÍDEAS is full of angelic femme fatales, club demons, and divinity found within ourselves. Uchis positions herself as an abundant mother goddess, cup full of honey and rosewater, ready to nourish the world. –E.R. Pulgar

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Island

35.

Sabrina Carpenter: Short n’ Sweet

As is often the case with Disney stars, Sabrina Carpenter found herself in a love triangle. The roles of the heartbroken chanteuse and cheating ex were taken, so she became the poster girl for the temptress who stole the chanteuse’s soulmate. Short n’ Sweet is Carpenter fully leaning into the archetype forced upon her. “Too bad your ex don’t do it for ya,” she sings while batting her eyelashes on “Espresso,” a track likening her aura to the effects of caffeine. “Walked in and dream-came-trued it for ya.”

Everything is done with a wink and a nod on Short n’ Sweet. There’s clever wordplay (“Come right on me, I mean camaraderie”), bizarre innuendos (“I like the way you fit/God bless your dad’s genetics”), comical confessions (“This boy doesn’t even know the difference between ‘there,’ ‘their,’ and ‘they are’/Yet he’s naked in my room”), and snarky one-liners (“We never talk about how you found God at your ex’s house”). It’s not all dick jokes. With its lush ’70s pop homage and agile vocal runs, Short n’ Sweet lands like if Olivia Newton-John and Christina Aguilera made a country disco-pop album. It’s a much-needed, low-cal respite from the Freudian confessionalism and sample mania plaguing the pop charts. –Heven Haile

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Century Media

34.

Blood Incantation: Absolute Elsewhere

When Blood Incantation released the spaced-out, nearly growl-less “Inner Paths (to Outer Space)” as the first single from their second album in 2019, the Denver death metal band was planting a seed. Its germination was Absolute Elsewhere, an LP that makes good on all that Pink Floyd promise with pure ’70s excess: two side-long epics that ruminate on the nature of life, flowing from death metal to prog to Amon Düül II, with an accompanying film and even a passage that sounds eerily like “Dogs” (perhaps the coolest uncool musical reference all year). Epic but hardly pretentious, extreme but inviting, knowingly silly but deadly serious: Absolute Elsewhere is the rare genre album that explodes the genre from which it came, finding a way forward in death metal by ripping a wormhole into the past and beyond. –Andrew Ryce

Nonesuch

33.

Hurray for the Riff Raff: The Past Is Still Alive

As Hurray for the Riff Raff, Alynda Segarra makes music that celebrates those who’ve done time on the B-side of life: tramps and vagabonds, grifters and bandits. So it follows that Segarra would know how to craft an album with one of the year’s best B-sides. After an opening run that goes down sweet and smooth comes The Past Is Still Alive’s mangier, grittier, and richer back half. Stick with Segarra’s rough-and-tumble crew and be treated to the rollicking “Vetiver,” immense “Ogallala,” and quietly captivating “Hourglass,” which runs on one of those perfect looping metaphors: Time turns a boulder to sand, sand gets used to keep time. Of course, Segarra knows that time can’t really be kept at all. But memories can be, and Segarra will be damned if they don’t try. –Walden Green

Fat Possum

32.

Fievel Is Glauque: Rong Weicknes

Until Rong Weicknes came along, brevity was one of the defining traits of Fievel Is Glauque’s songwriting. On previous albums, Zach Phillips and Ma Clément often capped off individual tracks before the two-minute mark, seemingly out of necessity. Ignoring traditional verse-chorus structures, they painstakingly constructed their jazz-pop tunes one melodically dense fragment at a time, chasing a runaway train of thought until it eluded them. On Rong Weicknes, the band performs with an octet and allows the music to develop in turn, collaging disparate performances of each song into labyrinthine suites. With a little extra breathing room amid the band’s virtuosic chaos, it’s easier than ever to appreciate each gorgeous chord change and hairpin tempo shift. –Jude Noel

Chrysalis / Partisan

31.

Laura Marling: Patterns in Repeat

If patience and understanding are guiding tenets of motherhood, then Patterns in Repeat cradles you in its arms as its own. It’s certainly set up for comfort: Laura Marling’s eighth album is stripped down and devoid of percussion. Her voice is full of love for her newborn child, as are her hands as she finger-picks guitar on “Patterns” or “Caroline.” Yet Marling is transfixed not by the individualism of the nuclear family, but the patterns that transcend generations. Oh, the gravity of caring for another, blood relative or not. Marling’s maternal experience may be newfound, but her wisdom is that of a great-grandmother whose descendants have long claimed space by her feet for storytime. –Nina Corcoran

Matador

30.

Mdou Moctar: Funeral for Justice

Craving novelty and sated by familiarity, human brains magnetize to Mdou Moctar’s fiery synthesis of psychedelic rock, Saharan desert blues, and Tuareg folk. But if the recipe were that simple, he wouldn’t be cooking this hard: From its opening riff, Funeral for Justice hits like lightning. Moctar and his band gallop through a tightly edited collection informed by years of live performance, leveraging their international stature to call for Tuareg cultural pride and African self-determination on the world stage. “Imouhar,” an impassioned plea to preserve the Tamasheq language, streaks in over the horizon and ignites; the postcolonial lament “Modern Slaves” closes the album with a reminder that grief, too, can be rocket fuel. –Anna Gaca

34Ent

29.

xaviersobased: keep it goin xav

Xaviersobased was only 20 when he recorded keep it goin xav’s blissed-out designer rap. But his understanding of the ephemerality of youth lends emotional impact to what might otherwise have been just killer party music. “I just haven't been skating that much, I been tryna skate,” xav confides on “FanOut” to the mixtape’s host, DJ Rennessy, a casual remark rendered profound when the beat suddenly ruptures, splintering like sand that’s been particle-accelerated down a celestial hourglass. There’s so much to experience in this life, so many parties to hit up, but so little time. If you’re trying to skate, do it now. –Evan Rytlewski

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Dead Oceans

28.

Cassandra Jenkins: My Light, My Destroyer

Throughout Cassandra Jenkins’ 2021 breakthrough An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, the New York singer-songwriter mined a deep well of grief through vulnerable spoken word and gossamer-light art pop, eventually finding both lightness and a way through. On follow-up My Light, My Destroyer, Jenkins’ elegant music reached another creative peak. Snippets of collaged found sound—crickets chirping away, her mother imparting wisdom about the cosmos—trace detailed intimacy into a map of ’90s rock-inspired calls to nature (“Petco”), radiantly aqueous ballads (“Delphinium Blue”), and wending, jazz-inflected showstoppers (“Omakase”). Deeply complex and ruminative, Jenkins’ compositions hit you square in the heart. –Eric Torres

Constellation

27.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor: “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD”

Hope is not a bumper sticker you slap over catastrophe. It’s a reckoning with what is. Only when you’ve beheld what’s real in all its horror can you lurch into what’s possible. With their latest album—which cedes its title to a date and a death toll—the long-running instrumental collective Godspeed You! Black Emperor bears witness to the apocalyptic violence rained down on Palestine over the past year, the obliteration of irreplaceable lives and generational entanglements with now-uninhabitable land. Corroded guitars and shivering violins wail like human voices on “BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD” while the pounding bass drum of “RAINDROPS CAST IN LEAD” cracks numbness and exhaustion to force feeling back in. This album is a call to wrap your deepest self around the enormity at hand. The scars on this earth are real. So is what will grow from them. –Sasha Geffen

Columbia

26.

Vampire Weekend: Only God Was Above Us

It’s not just that Only God Was Above Us makes a concerted attempt to splice together genre combinations that really shouldn’t work; it also does so while layering on unusual and even contradictory textures, moods, and ideas. Want scratchy drum line and lush-ed-out orchestral swoon? “Ice Cream Piano” has you covered. Ultra-bright jazz piano and congested synths? That’s “Connect.” Baggy Soul II Soul drum groove and airtight classical choir? Welcome, “Mary Boone.”

On paper, this should be a mess. But the band’s fifth album runs true to its own un-dissolvable internal logic. This is a testament to the distinctive compositions of Ezra Koenig, who writes with the intellectual depth of a broken-hearted crossword setter, and the album’s cultured production, which ushers incongruous ideas into a surprisingly coherent whole. Every detail of this record has been labored over, polished, and scuffed up, yet the greasy light of mortal emotion shines through. Only God Was Above Us feels like a thought experiment that came to glorious life; an elegant solution to an earthy conundrum; and an ingeniously clever album that resounds deep in the gut. –Ben Cardew

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Planet Mu

25.

Jlin: Akoma

In the seven years between Jlin’s last proper album, Black Origami, and this year’s Akoma, the Indiana post-footwork producer vastly expanded the reach of her craft, earning a Pulitzer nod for her 2022 EP Perspective and winning famous fans like the Kronos Quartet and Philip Glass. Both of those luminaries appear on Akoma, along with a wisp of Björk’s voice salvaged from an unrealized collaboration. Akoma’s fusion of Midwestern club sounds and modern classical music is striking, but ultimately reinforces how sharp Jlin has always been, a great American composer with or without the validation of the classical-music cognoscenti. –Daniel Bromfield

Iron Works

24.

Ka: The Thief Next to Jesus

Though it was released a couple months before Ka’s death, The Thief Next to Jesus was always a heavy listen. The Brownsville, Brooklyn emcee takes Christianity to task, examining its use as a tool of trauma and oppression, especially against Black Americans. He strips gospel songs of their joy and levity, posing questions about what a life of faith can provide: If there is a Heaven, who qualifies? Are we all just moving from scenario to scenario, trying our best and often failing? Why isn’t that good enough? After Ka’s death, the album took a different shape. Thief plays like his Blackstar, a brilliant final transmission from an artist scared he’d been living on borrowed time. Ka was one of rap’s greatest auteurs, a poet of the highest order, a keen observer who always knew the veil was thinner than it looked. –Dash Lewis

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

4AD

23.

Adrianne Lenker: Bright Future

More than even Lenker’s scraggiest recordings with Big Thief, the songs of Bright Future flow forth as if emanating from an otherworldly musical body or conjured from a fugue state. Some lyrics are endearingly higgledy-piggledy, scattered into verse like childhood toys in an old leather trunk; others fit so snugly within the band’s ornate folk doodles they might be century-old field recordings. In those moments when Lenker bolts upright—with a hard-won revelation or cry of emotional ruin—she strikes upon suffering melodies that hit as hard as a power balladeer’s. She blows through our defenses by uttering the same reassurance again and again: People are fragile; life is beautiful; music and nature are alive, and sensitivity to them is medicine. —Jazz Monroe

Fax / Epic

22.

Tyla: Tyla

Tyla’s breakout summer hit, 2023’s “Water,” landed at precisely the right moment in pop’s house revival, when the dance world needed a good slowed-down groove. The 22-year-old Jo’burg singer embodied the laidback energy of amapiano, a house-jazz fusion rooted in South Africa’s liberating club scene. As the subgenre grew global tentacles, her debut album gave it a firm foothold, riding a renewed mainstream appreciation for house music’s collective escapism. While artists like Drake have flirted with amapiano’s breezy aesthetic, Tyla’s homegrown approach is fully immersive. Instead of diluting the sound, she expands it, laying lithe vocals over its signature log-drum-driven rhythms and mellow keys to create her distinct “popiano” style. On album cuts like “Safer” and “Truth or Dare,” she disengages from careless lovers, alternating between caution and longing with a cool, hypnotic command. Even as she’s spilling her deepest anxieties about love, she sounds legitimately set free by the rhythm. –Clover Hope

Clairo

21.

Clairo: Charm

On Charm, Claire Cottrill makes her most playful collection to date, a record so lighthearted you can hear her audibly giggling in the background of “Second Nature.” With neo-soul producer Leon Michels behind the boards, Clairo furthers her shift from bedroom-pop darling to Brill Building revivalist. Her concerns about touch starvation or being desired are coolly shrugged off with lush woodwinds and melodies equally fit for ’70s AM radio and Sirius XMU. Listen to the mouth trumpet solo on TikTok favorite “Juna” and the loping pianos on “Thank You” and try not to crack a smile. Forget Clairo shade; Charm is a ray of sunshine. –Hannah Jocelyn

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Unheard of Hope

20.

Mabe Fratti: Sentir que no sabes

Mabe Fratti arrives at rock music with an experimentalist’s toolkit. The tight song structures on Sentir que no sabes reframe her previous work—her knottier past albums might have been understood differently if she played, say, guitar and not cello. Still, her latest marks a departure that’s both more maximalist and more aggressive in its poetic, jarring lyrics and bristling production flourishes, as well as in how she treats her instrument—on opener “Kravitz,” as though her cello is a distorted bass guitar.

The instrumentation is fairly stripped down, yet the peaks on Sentir que no sabes are intoxicating and triumphant: the key change on “Intento fallido,” the careening harmonies of “Angel nuevo.” While the songs assume more familiar shapes, their details spotlight a lush and teeming environment, one that’s just prickly enough to keep listeners on their toes. –Daniel Felsenthal

Mom+Pop

19.

Magdalena Bay: Imaginal Disk

Magdalena Bay’s alt-pop opus considers galaxy-brain concerns—the limits of consciousness, the malleability of identity, the fleetingness of time—that could scan as cheap mindfuck-bait, the sort of thing defeatist sixth-graders with Vsauce subscriptions might bring up to ooohs and aaahs at lunchtime. The crucial caveat that grants Imaginal Disk its glistening gut-punch is the simple fact of growing up. There’s a spiritually 20-something tilt to the LA duo’s existentialism, this tongue-in-cheek impulse to make the best work possible in the time one has left. They craft this impulse into a maximalist, brute-force expansion of pop music’s boundaries—not quite “recession pop,” a hyper-online catch-all for dystopian dance music, but the creation of a liminal space where everything, from choruses to keyboards to convictions, feels and sounds convincingly 8D. The brutal comedown almost feels like part of the point. –Samuel Hyland

R&R

18.

Mk.gee: Two Star & the Dream Police

Ah, the lost art of mystique. Michael Gordon tends to sing his opaque lyrics in a murmur, and when he performs live, it’s often in front of a giant spotlight, his face obscured by the backlight. In an interview with Dazed, Gordon proclaimed that “making sense is overrated” and said he wanted to make music that is “indescribable.” The draw of his debut album, Two Star & the Dream Police, is that it sounds intimate but is unknowable. It’s a record that revels in contradictions, as smooth as it is jagged, as lite (like ’80s adult contemporary radio, replete with pseudo-sax solos) as it is heavy (at this early juncture in his career, the 28-year-old is a guitar demigod).

Perfect little pop melodies spring out of a burbling bog of sonic murk and then plunge back down, only for the next to shine on through. He’s jazzy, now he’s shoegaze, now he’s Prince, now he’s Phil Collins, now he’s yacht rock for the indie sleaze revival. Dream Police is shadowy enough to feel like conscious myth-building; he’s compared the album to “funny, mythical old stories—Celtic fables and stuff.” This is not a record to understand, it’s more like a dream or fugue state to surrender to, a reality to accept in waiting. –Rich Juzwiak

Verve

17.

Arooj Aftab: Night Reign

Over the past three years, Arooj Aftab has been showing her range. Vulture Prince from 2021 offered the shock of the new—it was her third record but the first that most people heard, and it introduced her as a master of atmosphere and utterly transportive singer with an ear for how disparate genres could be assembled into new shapes. Love in Exile, her 2023 collaboration with pianist Vijay Iyer and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily, found her bending her music toward improvising and experimenting with longer forms. Night Reign is an intensification of what has come before, the place where all of these elements come together.

The sheer beauty of the record is overwhelming—a given arrangement might feature the delicate interplay of guitar and harp over hand percussion and upright bass, while Aftab’s assured-yet-weary phrasing conjures Pakistani folk forms one moment and Sade the next. But aesthetic pleasure is always in tension with sadness and loss. The lyrics come from all over, from an 18th-century Urdu poet to Aftab’s self-penned lament about a too-drunk lover that might be set in a Brooklyn apartment. But nearly all are rife with feelings of dislocation and existential dread. Jazz standard “Autumn Leaves” is slowed to a crawl, and sounds like an ancient religious rite, while Moor Mother’s poetry on “Bolo Na” seems beamed in from the future. Aftab collapses time and space and draws connections across eras and continents, fragments from dozens of influences are assembled into something all her own. –Mark Richardson

Janine

16.

DORIS: Ultimate Love Songs Collection

You know when an artist gives you a little instrumental at the end of a song, compelling you to start freestyling? That’s the vibe of DORIS’ Ultimate Love Songs Collection, a 50-track compilation of SoundCloud fragments. The New Jersey rapper and visual artist makes music for a generation of rap listeners who remember random Thug ad-libs better than any actual hook or verse. If it’s often such raw, profoundly human moments on rap records that we really cherish, DORIS asks, why not make a full album of them? Sometimes he sings spell-binding melodies. Sometimes he croaks sweet nothings over “Girl From Ipanema.” Whatever the case, it’s not going to last more than a few seconds. On to the next wild idea. –Mano Sundaresan

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Bison

15.

Still House Plants: If I don’t make it, I love u

I have not personally asked Still House Plants what their main influences were on their third album, If I don’t make it I love u, but I feel confident taking a guess: the sound of a bank safe being cut open by a power saw, a big pond overrun with geese, the drumline of a marching band at a high school football game, Nina Simone, and mid-’90s emo. It’s free jazz by way of hardcore, but only in spirit, as the music, while beguiling and feisty, isn’t harsh or mean. Instead, like on the opening song, “M M M,” it’s incantatory. On a song like “Probably,” they improbably bring a heartbroken tenor to math rock, the most emotionless of genres. The music is full of contradictions, paradoxical meetings of tone possible due to the devoted performance of the idiosyncratic trio. Most prominent across the album is frontwoman Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach, a bluesy Brit who sings in cursive. The guitar, played by Finlay Clark, is woozy and the drums, played by David Kennedy, are off kilter and confused. Despite the music’s shagginess, they play with deep conviction. It’s like the music had a concussion and they’re doing their best to resuscitate it. –Matthew Schnipper

14.

Rafael Toral: Spectral Evolution

After years as a space-gazing electroacoustic journeyman, Portuguese soundscapist Rafael Toral tamed his arsenal of homemade noisemakers and reinvented the blissful, slow-motion drone music of his past. Toral was a key figure in that Jim-O'Rourkian mid-’90s nerve net of free improvisation, ambient, feedback, electronics, EBows, and distant beer bottles clinking in rock clubs. His shoegaze-inspired roots, electronic explorations, and deep appreciation of ’30s and ’40s jazz standards collide on Spectral Evolution. Familiar jazz harmonies are played with the slo-mo deliberation of a Morton Feldman piece, modulated feedback spirals out like a Chet Baker trumpet solo, squiggling electronics chatter like an android aviary, and Toral’s patient guitar makes graceful cameos. It’s the year’s most kinetic bliss-out. –Christopher R. Weingarten

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Ninja Tune

13.

Nilüfer Yanya: My Method Actor

The softer sound of Nilüfer Yanya’s third album, My Method Actor, belies a crop of new anxieties for the effortlessly innovative British singer and guitarist. She wrestles with the strangeness of growing older without ticking off the boxes that define how a person should be as they approach 30—married, entertaining motherhood, and otherwise settling down. “Shut up and raise a glass if you’re not sure!” she exclaims on “Keep on Dancing,” before launching into “Like I Say (I Runaway),” whose music video features Yanya literally absconding from the wedding altar at the very last second. But these worries go down easy, set to finger-picked acoustic guitar that melts into the reliable snap of a drum machine. She might “feel shame the modern way” on “Faith’s Late” or find herself “dreaming of the end” on “Made Out of Memory” but on My Method Actor, Yanya wraps her vocals in layers of gossamer guitar, sounding fully in command even as she mines the depths of her own neuroses. –Arielle Gordon

GoodTalk / Capitol

12.

skaiwater: #gigi

Has yearning ever sounded as intoxicating—or as painfully pleasurable—as it does on #gigi? skaiwater’s ambitious breakthrough album fuses the rambunctious energy of a Zoomer rave with lyrics so exaggerated and lovelorn, they’d even make a Wong Kar-wai character feel desired. The British rapper and producer embarks on transatlantic treks—journeying from Brazil for funk-infused rhythms to Jersey for headbanging 808s—to breathe life into their Auto-Tuned melodies until they burst with aching emotion. #gigi feels like both a party and a plea, desperate to leave with someone before it even begins. –Serge Selenou

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Epitaph

11.

Mannequin Pussy: I Got Heaven

I Got Heaven is about sex, except for the sex songs, which are about power. Mannequin Pussy’s album seethes and howls with desire: desire for love, connection, control; desire to be human; desire to be a dog; desire for desire itself. With masterful control of the tension in her voice, Marisa Dabice sells profanity and poignancy with equal conviction as the band rockets between fuzzed-out punk riffs and mosh-inciting hardcore. Hear Dabice out of breath, panting as she threatens, “I got a loud… bark… deep… bite,” or obscenely delicate as she pleads, “Split me open/Pour your love in me.” Raw, furious, and tender, these vulnerable, elliptical songs are ready to get as loud as it takes to expose the soft underbelly hiding beneath. Ecstasy is temporary, horniness is cliché: Here’s a desire that longs to consume everything in its path because what, then, is left to burn? –Anna Gaca

Matador

10.

Kim Gordon: The Collective

Like Kim Gordon’s 2019 album, No Home Record, The Collective is colossal and abrasive like a debris storm. Justin Raisen made a bunch of trap beats for Playboi Carti, then realized that what he just made weren’t “rage beats” but abrasive, seething, actual rage. Kim Gordon added her “abstract poetry shit,” improvised in her decades-long style. The result is a maelstrom of loops crashing into one another, lyrics shattered and left as shards, and of clutter: sonic, mental, and physical. “Bye Bye” is a song about packing stuff for a vacation that sounds like feeding a junkyard car crusher. That same deluge of stuff turns “Shelf Warmer”—a would-be intimate slow jam and relative reprieve from the noise—into trinket after trinket but never a touch.

Gordon, ambivalent about the idea of making music let alone “political music,” resists obvious polemic throughout. The man of “I’m a Man” is a Proud Boy astride a fuck-off monster truck of a beat, but also a pathetic schlub muttering petty fixations as that beat goes limp; a fake-earnest troll hitting all the “lost generation of men” talking points, but also just a person who wants to wear a dress. The record also resists simplistic takes: It’s not her TikTok album or her trap album. It sounds like spending days inside a Big Data server room, pummeled by the light and noise pollution that powers the machines, and excavating what it’s done to your mind. –Katherine St. Asaph

Escho

Astrid Sonne: Great Doubt

Astrid Sonne’s facial expression on the cover of her third album, Great Doubt, reminds me of Ben Affleck’s shit-eating grin as he stands next to a poster of his character’s missing wife in Gone Girl. Why make a face like that at a time like this? Sonne’s lyrics across Great Doubt make good on its title: They quiver with anxiety and uncertainty against her takes on dub, pop, R&B, and contemporary classical that feel like they’ve been scraped hollow. Released in January, Great Doubt felt more vital with each passing month, as 2024 became even more unsettled and liminal. At this point, that smile on the cover feels just right: a glazed-over grin for a year in which, as she sings over and over, “everything is unreal.” –Shaad D’Souza

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Trash Island

Bladee: Cold Visions

“I got so old I got embarrassed to be even here, you know?” Bladee confesses in Cold Visions’ opening seconds. Now 30, the Drain Gang CEO surveys the empire of ultra-online hypebeasts he’s built from scratch, and for once seems to genuinely wrestle with the possibility that being a nerdy white guy flexing your Balencis might not actually be the most flattering look. After years of gliding between cloud rap and hyperpop without being beholden to either, all the fairytale imagery and AutoTune cooing has led him directly to a cliff. “I’m in this beauty pageant/And everybody’s laughing,” he imagines in a panic. What are you supposed to do with that?

Might as well crash out. Alongside F1lthy, Yung Lean, and a smattering of the collaborators who’ve helped him on his rise to e-boy stardom, Cold Visions is a 30-track meltdown, as Bladee folds some of his most inventive flows yet into a slurry of overstimulating samples and producer tags (with claustrophobic mixing somewhere between Chuquimamani-Condori and early Chief Keef). Bladee makes his personal crisis as tender and sincere as it is totally absurd—the album’s angriest moment involves him shouting that he’s “been going back to cussing”—yet the way he tells it, you’d think heaven and hell hung in the balance. –Sam Goldner

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

P.W. Elverum & Sun

Mount Eerie: Night Palace

Phil Elverum has spent the better part of the last three decades staring at the sky and looking for meaning. First as the Microphones, then as Mount Eerie, he’s written songs that are both introspective and expansive, looking deep within himself and out at the natural world, trying to puzzle through where he sits in relation to everything around him. On Night Palace—a discursive, turbulent, meandering, ecstatically arranged epic—he’s thinking bigger. Each song—of which there are 26—is rich with imagery and dense with ideas: He considers, for example, the perspective of a fish and wonders how seeing the world through their eyes might change the way he views everything around him. He also, on a song called “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization,” considers the history of the land he lives on, pledging “allegiance to nothing at all” and calling for the death of America. To hear him tell it, after making this album, he’s no closer to finding any of the answers he’s looking for. “If there’s a message,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s pro ambiguity, pro pointlessness, pro meaninglessness.” But he sounds content in this place: asking big questions and hearing them echo into the void again. –Colin Joyce

Anti-

Waxahatchee: Tigers Blood

To make Tigers Blood, Katie Crutchfield and her brilliant band refitted the interior of her 2020 album Saint Cloud with a bigger, warmer Americana sound while keeping her razor-sharp, big-hearted perspective. Here, she surveys and questions her life’s newfound stability; she scrutinizes stable bonds and frayed connections, long-term love and codependency. She’s unafraid to cast blame—as on the scorched and bitter “Bored”—but continually bends back to implicate herself: “I let my mind run wild,” she sighs on “Right Back To It,” a song about the push-and-pull of long-term commitment where she’s joined in twangy harmony by MJ Lenderman, “I don’t know why I do it.” Crutchfield sings with the self-recrimination of a perfectionist, a bearer of high standards who believes her potential is limitless—with each subsequent entry in the Waxahatchee canon, it’s hard not to believe her. –Marissa Lorusso

Warp

Nala Sinephro: Endlessness

Across Endlessness, Nala Sinephro’s second album, her arrangements build and dissipate to reveal the record’s anchoring arpeggio, which itself morphs all of the time, handed off like a baton between synth, piano, and harp. This is a log of liminal moments, blurring the space between orchestral ensemble and bedroom ambient project. Sinephro does not limit herself to being a harpist, synth player, and bandleader—she becomes a collage artist.

Throughout its constant transformations, Endlessness is always compositional. Its base unit is not the droning chord, but instead the articulated phrase—however serene, this is a music of statements, not mere soundscapes. Her fractal melodies channel modern modular noodlers as much as classic jazz solos. Still, Sinephro carves out a habitat for each of her players, many of whom are based in the South London improvisational scene, which sets the LP’s ceaseless ideas to a human pace. Both dreamy and deliberate, expansive and focused, this collection’s ten tracks unfold as if to point toward the very meaning of the word endlessness: We see the impossibility of this concept, but Sinephro makes us feel as though it’s in reach. –Daniel Felsenthal

Anti-

MJ Lenderman: Manning Fireworks

Manning Fireworks proceeds like a greatest hits collection. Every line is a short story. Its jokes are profound, its wisdom ridiculous, its irreverence wide-eyed and irresistible. It is a record so instantly elemental, you feel compelled to sing every guitar riff, to rip every melody, to quote lyrics like “goin’ on vacation brings the worst out of everyone” as mantras. On his fourth solo album, MJ Lenderman, the tragicomic Southern rocker of the moment, channels heroes like David Berman and the Band but fills his pithy songs with time-stamping specifics (Guitar Hero, an all-seeing smartwatch, the “houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome” that deserves a dedication plaque in 2024’s collective imaginary) that make his persona self-effacing and modern. The lost protagonists of Lenderman’s windows-down country-fried bangers often sound like vexed middle-aged divorcées who may or may not ever get their shit together and yet stir empathy; “manning fireworks” ultimately feels like an allegory for boyish wonder that just might slow the unstoppable crawl from baby to jerk. That playful awe is aglow in the gorgeous dissonance of a fiddle, the lonesome grace of a clarinet, a Sonic Youth-worshiping noise-drone excursion on a song that says “Don’t move to New York City,” no less! Beguiling, funny, exuberant and true—sometimes the alchemy is just right for a modern classic. –Jenn Pelly

Mexican Summer

Jessica Pratt: Here in the Pitch

Jessica Pratt looks for meaning in places where time follows its own curlicued logic: the warped grooves of vintage vinyl, the unending spiral of the ancient cosmos. What else would you expect from a one-time Amoeba Music employee whose mother was an astrologer? On her fourth album, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter adds the faintest hints of drums and an expanded cast of collaborators to contribute to the music’s snow-globe swirl. The lo-fi minimalism of her previous records has ceded to a gaseous soft-pop idyll in which strummed chords fan out like galaxies and endless reverb signals the unfathomable reach of the infinite. Singing with heartbreaking sweetness of both familiar desolation and fresh hope, Pratt’s voice remains the music’s animating spirit. Listen closely, and her control of pitch and timbre speaks to a dazzlingly exacting vision for her music, every pirouette mapped out with an engineer’s precision. Yet her singing flows with effortless grace—an emissary arriving from a time unknown, offering hints of a plane beyond this mortal coil. –Philip Sherburne

Atlantic

Charli XCX: BRAT

Remember in the final season of Sex and the City, when Lexi Featherston did some blow in the bathroom of a stuffy uptown party, tried to smoke out of the living room window, and then splattered onto the pavement after declaring, “I’m so bored I could die”? That was BRAT. With her sixth album, Charli XCX spawned a self-mythology so colossal it was ingested by diehard Angels and new converts across the globe. We assessed behavior, fashion, and political campaigns through a blurred, lime-green lens, attempting to comprehend the sly power of Charli’s new era…and its ubiquitous rollout. “I talk about music in terms of marketing and campaigns more than I do music,” she admitted following BRAT’s world domination.

But to say her zeitgeisty masterpiece was solely indebted to tweets and billboards would be an affront to the album itself. Indulging in the scuzz of her early club days, Charli tweaked mid-aughts electronica, indie house, and French Touch into a stacked pop manifesto smeared with illicit residue. It became the Überalbum; the soundtrack of every basement party, mean girl TikTok—of an entire season. But like the best pop songwriters, Charli imbued BRAT with the untidiness of human life, smushing It Girl flexes in between the banal insecurities that infect friendships, self-image, and romance. The reigning Brat had been through the glossy pop star PR machine on her last record, but she conquered 2024 by sweating it out on the dancefloor among mere mortals. A Brat of flesh and blood. –Madison Bloom

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Realistik Studios

Cindy Lee: Diamond Jubilee

The 32-track magnum opus from the glamorous alter-ego of Canadian musician Patrick Flegel hit the scene like some old movie where a mysterious drifter shows up with their guitar to breathe new life into a sleepy town. Presented as a two-hour listening gauntlet with no breaks between tracks—or as a sketchy download link on a GeoCities website that channeled Heaven’s Gate—Diamond Jubilee seemed to float in from another place and time. You might follow its wistful melodies all the way back to the Ronettes and the Righteous Brothers, stopping along the way at Motown soul or Velvet Underground fuzz or the cool camp of a band in a Russ Meyer flick, or to the late aughts blog scene, when indie acts were distorting retro pop sounds as if the young, urban millennials had all rewatched Twin Peaks at once. Like the girl groups at the center of their moodboard, Cindy Lee’s songs are about love—having lost it, most of all. She is lonesome, she is blue, she is riding the Greyhound to the Canadian border with nothing but her memories; she is wailing on her cherry-red guitar with the kind of casual mastery generally reserved for those who’ve made deals with the devil.

No one could have predicted that this sprawling, out-of-time record, self-released by an artist opting out of the streaming era’s marketing and distribution paradigm almost entirely, would become the “feel-good indie rock story of the year,” according to the headlines on music publications celebrating a rare victory against their own perceived irrelevance. It’s hard to say whether the sentiment was shared at all by Flegel, who announced onstage at one of the subsequently sold-out shows, “I feel like a caged fucking animal,” before canceling the tour completely. In an era dominated by fan service, you could almost forget that it's personal, or that the scalability obsession of the tech industry masquerading as the music industry needn't be our own. If all of Cindy Lee that we are left with is the music, echoing like a memory from another life, maybe that’s the way it ought to be. –Meaghan Garvey

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Bandcamp

Listen to the Best Albums of 2024 on our Spotify and Apple Music playlists.