The Inflection Point

Holy shit what a year for music. Rather incredible looking at albums and artists that released in 2024 compared to 2023, a pretty down year in my mind for music all around. It had me looking into the cyclical nature of music in years past, because surely like the market there are up and down years in music that we don’t even think about. Some years, you’ve got the full billboard at your disposal, and other years you’ve just released another album on the same day as Kendrick Lamar (sorry Father John Misty).

Stacker has a really good article that I stumbled upon, I’ll attach here that summarizes the best and worst years in music – I would say I tend to agree for the most part.

https://stacker.com/music/ranking-best-and-worst-years-music-history

It’s quite obvious that the worst years would be the early beginnings of radio and popular, modern music (1940’s), but in my head, I expected music to evolve like athletes do. The very best athletes of the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s wouldn’t make a roster in modern day sports – not their fault, just how the game, athletes, science, and training has improved so much over the years. Yet with music, I think a lot of those mid 70’s and 80’s albums and overall years hold up significantly well compared to modern day music, and while the output has certainly increased tenfold, it’s been difficult to find those songs, artists, and albums that blow you away like they probably did 50 years ago. Somehow they age excellently.

Regardless – my top 10 albums in what was a tremendous year of music in 2024.

10. Freddie Gibbs – You Only Die 1nce

The Big Rabbit is back after a brief hiatus, stumbling from getting jumped by Benny the Butcher and the Griselda crew, while also formulating a nice little acting career on the side. While not hitting the mafia highs of 2020’s Alfredo, or the rapping masterclass of 2015’s Pinata, Gibbs again demonstrates he is among the best in rap right now with an innate sound for incredible beats. Gibbs hits a groove midway through the album that almost leaves you levitating slightly above the ground, lost in the melodic beats and sublime delivery, instantly replayable for any workday. There are no guest appearances here, just Gibbs for 13 straight tracks. When the Rabbit speaks, it’s best to listen.

9. English Teacher – This Could Be Texas

Well Hello There! Like a number 9 hitter crushing a game-winning homerun, this album came at a complete shock to me. Having no clue who or what the band was, I stumbled across The World’s Biggest Paving Slab, lead single for this band, and I mean, c’mon, how can you not listen to a song with that name? It turns out they are neither English teachers or have any real connections to Texas, but this UK band incredibly mixes across indie rock, punk, a bit of electronic music, and even some country twang. This result is a great mess of songs, enough to have you listen endlessly to try and pick up the pieces and put them correctly together. The best songs here stray into the post-punk world, and defy all songwriting altogether. Quite a debut from the nine hole hitter.

8. Vince Staples – Dark Times

The funniest man in hip-hop has carved out a specific lane of making the least funny music in hip-hop, and he continues his hit streak here. Vincent Staples (a must watch – The Vince Staples Show on Netflix) of Long Beach, CA, continues his dead pan delivery here, talking through police brutality, growing up with relatives selling drugs, depression, missed career aspirations, with slightly more upbeat and bouncy tempos than his 2021 eponymous album Vince Staples or 2022’s Ramona Park Broke My Heart. Standouts here include Black and Blue, Shame on the Devil, Etouffee, and Little Homies. Government Cheese samples Blue Suede, a standout track that showed his early prowess on 2014’s Hell Can Wait EP, bringing fans full circle of this epic 10 year run by Staples. In the original track, Staples sees fresh bouquets on friends graves and asks if we will outlive them. By the closing track here, Vince asks why the sun won’t come out. It’s an interesting dichotomy from the hilarious rapper from sunny California.

7. Sabrina Carpenter – Short n Sweet

I won’t lie – I struggled on whether or not to include this one. While definitely not the target demographic for Sabrina’s audience, I would be embarrassed to admit just how often I listened to this album in 2024. It’s sharp, concise, no filler, legitimately good pop music. An album that can be easily be put on in any situation – and that deserves some credit. More credit goes to just how ubiquitous Carpenter and this album became in 2024. She was relatively unknown in indie/pop circles for a few years, but maybe the most credit goes to her and pop music’s pocketknife Jack Antonoff on not blowing her chance for super-stardom. Please Please Please don’t overlook this one.

6. Kendrick Lamar – GNX

A late addition to the list! In 2015’s sprawling jazz infused masterpiece To Pimp A Butterfly, Kendrick Lamar claimed that he “had a bone to pick” on lead single King Kunta, a song where Lamar first vouched for the hip-hop title. Fast forward almost ten years, and no rapper, maybe ever, has had a better bone picking year than Lamar. From being slyly lured into a rap beef over the king hit-maker Drake, to burying him with incredible vile and villainous raps, making the biggest rap hit ever about claiming pedophilia, claiming the Super Bowl halftime over Drake’s mentor in his hometown city, to finally, a surprise 6th album. K-Dot remained incredibly busy throughout the year, and the songs here do the same. West Coast inspired beats throughout (perhaps as a victory lap of sorts against Drake), Kendrick goes in on a variety of topics, burdens, slights, and boasts all at once. It’s a bit sad at times to see the only rapper who has won a Pulitzer Prize award to be obsessed by such things instead of the genuine groundbreaking music of his early career. Even worse, to realize this man struggles with writing in hooks and choruses for his otherworldly raps. While Lamar may not hit the atmospheric highs of Good Kid, M.A.A.D. Ciy, or TPAB, it’s clear now, more than ever, that Lamar is the face of a dying rap industry. If only he seemed to enjoy that. Standouts – Wacced Out Murals, Luther, TV Off, Heart pt. 6, Gloria.

5. Charlie xcx – Brat

It was a Brat Summer, one to remember for some, and one to forget for others (Hello Kamala Harris). Yes, this album became so big it became a sense of relativity and unity for 1/2 of the political nominees in 2024, and despite it’s probable need to distance itself from that, it was easily the best pop album of 2024. Similar to another pop star listed above, Charlie had withered away in the indie pop world for years, making legitimately good pop music without any of the relative hype. Her engagement to The 1975 drummer and songwriter George Daniels threw her on my radar a few years ago, and despite all the talk, this album finally pushed Charlie into the realm of super stardom. Opener and closer, 360 and 365, are incredibly, future forward pop anthems, and the use of electronic music as well as a lush space of emptiness throughout the album provides an incredible blueprint for post-modern, electro-pop albums for the future. A stunning year for the UK star – her past insecurities and burdens washed away on songs like Sympathy is a Knife and Von Dutch, a remix album full of genuine A-list stars, and even double hosting SNL. It’s the “French manicure, wipe away the residue”. Genuinely forward thinking pop music.

4. Wild Pink – Dulling The Horns

Now we enter the good stuff. Wild Pink, a band I had never heard before, released an absolute stunner of an album earlier this summer that I’ve had no choice but to endlessly replay it. It’s fuzzy, it rocks out, it calms down when needed. There are bagpipes. There are deliciously good riffs. There are immaculate lyrics about growing, letting go, Michael Jordan’s run through the 90’s, the Expos moving to Washington D.C, broken down McDonalds, surviving cancer, and falling in love. It dares to be too much of an album. I was so sure upon release that John Ross and Co. would launch into the stratosphere, but so far they’ve remained lowkey as any. Cloud or Mountain has an electric two minutes of prime Weezer power pop before diverging quickly into a country lick. Dulling The Horns has an incredible riff throughout, reminiscent of the Red Hot Chili Peppers 2022 standout song White Braids and Pillow Chairs. St. Catherine Street has a guitar solo that will send a gust of wind at the brain so hard it’s similar to driving down I-40 with the windows down. In Bonnie One, the de-facto closing track, Ross brings the album to a standstill, releasing the lines “I love you, my darling one” with such passion and energy. Bagpipes come in, and despite all best efforts, the horns will not be dulled. Ring the sirens.

3. Waxahatchee – Tiger’s Blood

If I can’t convey just how good this album is, just know that it’s a folk record, sung by a female, at a tone throughout that would register at barely over a whisper. I mean no disrespect, but this is far from my musical taste. But throw it on, and it’s an album as timeless as it is great; surely it could fit in to any time period or era of the last thirty years. Most songs here just register an acoustic guitar, foregoing any drum patterns or additional sound. The result allows Katie Crutchfield, whom I can only describe as an artist as if in an alternate universe, Taylor Swift had decided to forego the pop music for the masses and continue down the path of her early folk/county music writing, to unleash her voice. Her songwriting is universal, and despite my recent comments here, this is not a country album. It veers, ever so slightly enough, to make it more indie/alternative than folk. Supplied throughout the album by back up vocals from MJ Lenderman (we’ll get to him in a moment), Crutchfield sings about heartbreak, traveling to lakes, swerving to miss dead deer in the road, and various other topics and one liners that will have you playing it back. Right Back To It might legitimately be the best song that I heard all year, with a guitar solo 2/3 of the way in that subtly stops the album completely. On the closing track of the same title, Crutchfield sings in her slightly raspy voice, ever so gently about a relationship:

“And I held it like, a penny I found,

It might bring me something, it might weigh me down”

It’s just one of many observations made in one of the best folk/indie albums I’ve heard in a long time.

2. MJ Lenderman – Manning Fireworks

Every once in a while, and this has been increasingly rare, an artist or a song will just completely knock your socks off. You have no choice but to accept it, no decision in the matter at all really except to play it back. Every once in a while, that artist is in your own backyard. MJ Lenderman, lead guitarist for standout Asheville band Wednesday, released his 4th solo album here, and the Asheville native can only be described as making music I’ve been unknowingly searching for a long time. It is a classical “dudes rock” album, only saved by the fact that most of the protagonists in these songs do not in fact rock. Wristwatch is the best/saddest song about a man with an Apple Watch. Joker Lips has a man so lonely and out of touch that he’s “draining cum from hotel showers, hoping for the hours to pass a little faster.” Rudolph tells a slightly funny story of a drunk Lightning McQueen hitting Rudolph on the highway before two thrashing guitar solos leave us with a catholic man determined to “leave the seminary, if only he could be with you”. Who needs religion anyway? There are riffs for days, it’s indie music made and sung by a man who has no interest in additional passion or energy. Out of all of these albums, it is the one that will always leave you wanting more. On My Knees is an excellently composed indie rock track, and closer Bark At The Moon hits home the closest, where a guy questions what happened with his relationship “You’re in on my bits, but you’re sick of the schtick” before begging her not to move to New York because it will “change the way you dress”. It’s leagues better than his 2022 album Boat Songs (which was also a great album). Lead singer of his band Wednesday and ex-girlfriend Karly Hartzman sings backup vocals throughout and it’s been abundantly clear since the first single that Lenderman is the new face of indie rock.

1. Vampire Weekend – Only God Was Above Us

“Fuck the world” whispers lead singer Ezra Koenig, on his first album in five years, and the band as a wholes first album in eleven years. These are not the bright eyed, sunny graduates of Columbia that released the afro/indie rock music that jarred the indie world in 2006. No, these are grownups now, and despite moving to LA in the recent years, they’ve journeyed back home to make an album about a New York of past lives, of a subway station that leads to nowhere, of twin towers that still stand, of posters ripping off walls to only show posters that were previously there before. The Boys are back together, and from the opening song Ice Cream Piano they set the tone of where they plan to go next. It begins at just a whisper, Koenig and a partner claiming that they’ll be stuck fighting forever, that neither wants to “win the war, because they don’t want the peace”. It devolves, twists and turns into three minutes of the finest journey you’ll hear this year, and that my friends, is just the first track. Classical is a lead single you’ll hear no other band try, with a harpsichord, piano, violin, organ, drums, saxophone, and bass guitar all fluttering in an out while Koenig ponders on generations past and future. Is this the indie rock you imagined? Capricorn spins a metaphor about being born at the end of the year, forced to accept and be apart of a year that wasn’t truly yours into a larger context of generational identity, and midway through scraps the ballad for a ballistic missile of fuzzied up guitars. Connect is the most deliriously absurd song the band has put out in it’s discography, running the piano all the way around the track and back (the piano runs throughout this whole album beautifully) as other instruments peek in and out, the songs meanders, and Koenig concludes that “Once it’s lost, it’s never found”. The band has always been obsessed with making genuinely smart music, at times to it’s own detriment in the charts. Songs about oxford commas, font sizes, California air waves, mansard roofs, and the dark history of the Hudson River have always made them the headiest band around, and with 2013’s magnum opus Modern Vampires of the City, they were no longer pondering the short term questions, instead turning their Ivy league brains and melodies to religion, faith, and growing up. Despite 2019’s Father of the Bride providing more laid back, new-dad, Grateful Dead type energy, the new album here has the boys turning back inward, trying yet again to find meaning to all of life’s questions. When Mary Boone comes on in the back half, it couldn’t describe the band any better – an opening hip-hop beat, a generational few verses and choruses from Koenig, asking why he’s been moved to the dark side of the room, before finally formulating and closing with a gospel choir sprinkled over by a killer piano solo. It requires the listener to understand the hip-hop sample, who the infamous art collector Mary Boone is, what she meant to New York, and just how far this band has come to fully appreciate it. Yet despite all these heavy questions and muses on life, the band closes with Hope, it’s simplest song to date. An eight minute churner, where Koenig runs through a list of atrocities and failures, both big and small, and simply pleads the listener that he “hopes you let it go”. It’s a minor statement from the best songwriter in music right now. A reminder of all things in the past, good and bad; to relive those moments, and perhaps by doing that, we can start earnestly living in the now. It’s a quaint realization and conclusion for a band dead set on figuring this life out, both big and small – remember the unfair, unsolvable equations the world throws at us, the “call that keeps coming from the inside” and then hope to let it go.