Stuck in a Dream: The 90 Best Albums of 2024 (#45-1)

Better luck next time Blood Incantation

Nothing above her: Laurie Anderson

45. Pest Control, Year of the Pest [EP]

My ideal metal band in ten minutes, who opted not to include just under three more of their best song, “Enjoy the Show.” They turn up the gang vocals, which aren’t always to my taste, and harmonized guitar leads, which more or less are. It feels dumb to say I prefer 2023’s Don’t Test the Pest, which this would’ve made a hell of a deluxe edition at just over half an hour. So they’re still a blast you need everything from if you prefer hardcore-influenced, bite-sized thrash to anything by the Big Four. Except Reign in Blood of course.

44. 22° Halo, Lily of the Valley

I’m not ashamed to admit it’s not my habit to play a slow indie without the “hook” that Will Kennedy wrote it about his partner Kate Schneider’s terrifying battle with brain cancer. And I feel only slightly worse saying that Phil Elverum opened up a plainspoken, heartfelt new lane for singing about who knows what medical horrors lie ahead for us, up to and including “Real Death” — we’re going to need it. That’s thankfully not the case for this tenderly observed survival album, which is always better when Kate herself is singing, which isn’t often enough. But it’s Will’s kindness that makes it one of the most optimistic works you’ll hear this year: “Saw a slide titled ‘two years ago today’ / You and your bouquet / The mark on your head wasn't there / Then we both laughed at the face you made.” Not to mention the sound, a close-miked, almost brittle rendering of line-in guitar pings and pointillist harmonic scrapes that occasionally sound like piano wire being strummed. It’s also not that slow. Here’s hoping they’re around together for a long while; I’d love to hear them work out harmonies.

43. Kim Gordon, The Collective

Speaking of cool racket, you can play tennis with this once you remove it from the freezer. Industrial noise is, on the evidence of this legend’s solo career, all she’s ever aspired to (re: “I Don’t Miss My Mind”), flattening the possibilities of their most well-known body of work into even more complex intonations without sounding like she’s ever broken a sweat. Crudely sampled hair dryers, orchestra hits, and other sheets of pixelated grayscale scrape against 808s, and like Metal Box you can squint and hear hooks or close your eyes and see God. But the strain of trying to hear the music obfuscated by the noise doesn’t always yield results, even when it’s Auto-Tuned. After swallowing the drab second half you may wish for some color: A guitar freakout, some thumb piano. When Gordon starts chanting “return policy” and “gift receipt” on one of the diss tracks that’s always been the star of my favorite band’s secret specialty, the overall effect can come across like a Soul Coughing whose keyboardist’s only available sampling options are the complete works of Einstürzende Neubauten. Statement of intent: “Don’t make me whole.”

42. Girl Scout, Headache [EP]

When Emma Jansson asked the party their “Desert Island Movies” they thought she meant Cast Away, so she concludes she “needs funnier friends.” Too cool to make a full album, her completely regular alternative band’s third (and best) mini in two years somersaults through the chords of the title tune — better fake Elliott Smith than anything Alex G, Frank Ocean, or Girlpool combined have coughed up — into the juggernaut “I Just Needed You to Know,” which concludes by asking if she’s a void. The closer insists she’s a shell of a human being. Nope and nope.

41. Laurie Anderson, Amelia

I admit, as the person who awarded To Pimp a Butterfly a perfect 10 for SPIN in 2015, I’m a little more incredulous than others about Christgau’s perfect A+ for Laurie’s I’m-sure-it’s-lovely Heart of a Dog and for almost a decade now I’ve been waiting to Find the Time to sit and follow the words — rawdogging my ADHD for the last two decades also keeps out podcasts. But I also never tried driving to it. In a landlocked vehicle, this trip is downright brisk, intensely capturing the wonder of Amelia Earhart’s doomed transatlantic flight, actual flight logs mixed with Anderson’s wryly tender adaptation and finding the parallel musicality of not just sawing violins against the deafening muffle of an airship reaching peak altitude but, say, four of the most terrifying words you can string together in English: “no place to land.” The start-to-finish staccato actually parallels a rhythm, or maybe that’s your quickening heartbeat. And Anohni’s operatics belong, turning the tragic celebratory for once. And now if you’ll permit me to borrow the Inspirational Verse thing: “The sky has many avenues and streets / But you have to know how to find them.”

40. The Smile, Wall of Eyes

Emerson, Yorke and Skinner are inarguably prog. But because these are also the preeminent rock-splunkers of the millennium putting us through their paces, they know not just technique but grace, negative space, electrifying dynamics that don’t show off at the expense of the music. In fact, the Smile’s greatest contribution to the current state of anything is how navigably they bend pop without breaking it. This is literal on “Bending Hectic,” the eight-minute “single” that seesaws between Jonny Greenwood’s ascendant hyperpicking and slo-mo string-strangling while Mike Skinner pitter-pats his breakables. On “I Quit,” either via Greenwood’s sleight of hand or artificially sequenced programming, the entire song is filtered through a tremolo, not just a guitar but even the pick sliding off the frets, the squeaking looped like a hip-hop hook. I can’t condense this paragraph into a headline that will entice non-nerds. This is merely an album of advanced sound effects from extraordinary players tweaking whatever ghosts in the machine that they can. You don’t have to agree the Smile is better than or as good as Radiohead. But you can’t deny they’re fitter, happier, more productive.

39. Anycia, Princess Pop That

Rap may be feeling its way through a midlife crisis but you can always count on fucking. Cash Cobain’s “sexy drill” sure beats original flavor, and it’s personalities like NLE Choppa and Sexyy Red who’ll overcome the flat march of a tired 808 until the room stank. I didn’t expect the title Princess Pop That to vibe more like the former, but this Atlanta rapper conveys sex like she does everything else: subtly. Anycia’s beats are a purple haze of vape clouds that pull in steel drums (“Call”), vintage Cash Money horns (“Back Outside”), and a Leslie cabinet swirl on my favorite (“That’s Hard”) that employs Cobain himself. Her signature “haaaa?” turns out to be as much of a hook as Pusha T saying “yecccch” and this modestly luxurious, maybe even bland collection at first turned out to be one of 2024’s most replayable comforts (and more enduring than Cobain’s own LP). And that’s because no one in the genre matches her voice, a husky postcoital whisper that turns precoital once again all too soon, whether she’s fucking your man to Detroit beats or “out of town with my feet in the sky” to smoke one out before sitting on his face.

38. Jack White, No Name

He can do it, he just didn’t want to. That’s evident from No Name, the sixth album under Jack White’s own name and easily the best (and most garage) record he’s made since the White Stripes’ swan song Icky Thump. The secret isn’t just the simulated spontaneity he locks into with any session bandmate at his command but the simplicity his ex-wife Meg always championed. Few artists reach their deepest self in the midst of rocking out but he is one of them, just check the blunt-force momentum of “Tonight (Was a Long Time Ago)” or the Clash-homage “Missionary” or the MC5 blare of “Bombing Out.” You won’t hear a better slide-guitar riff this year than “Underground.” Maybe you won’t hear a better riff at all.

37. J.U.S. x Squadda B, 3rd Shift

Sort of a best-case scenario for a current state of rap that even headier heads concede is in an awkward stage and even serious adepts of 42 Dugg admit is rarely proving its gestalt in full-length form and certainly not busting a capillary to demonstrate skill. So they rap well (“getting money with the baby boomers / funky two-stepping on that Robert Downey Jr.” could be vintage Heems) and offer new beats (“Somethin Else” is as weird as anything Armand Hammer has done and probs hookier) but not all the time. Occasionally they even settle for “Cheese Cheese Cheese” in both respects. Title establishes class, which establishes fun-pokes like “Coming soon to a town near / You a worker but you broke, that’s a volunteer” as good-natured rather than blinded by wealth they could well accrue. The surprise-to-standard ratio is pleasantly just over the 60/40 mark. J.U.S. also flips “Iron Man” into “frying pan.” Keeping Gen Alpha’s greatest rap contribution alive — staying under the half-hour line with nothing exceeding three minutes — you’d never know without Google he’s actually a Danny Brown cohort.

36. Vampire Weekend, Only God Was Above Us

I love what it looks like: another run at the guy upstairs, one that can’t help cribbing from “Hudson” (“Gen-X Cops” chorus sound familiar?) and “Ya Hey” (“Mary Boone” is basically an Avalanches remix). Except this time there’s palpable desperation, hunger. Tightened budgets mean dirtier sounds — “Capricorn” sounds like Vampire Weekend screwed and chopped. Ezra Koenig is a decade closer to death than he was last time. “Classical” is his latest broadside against history, “Mary Boone” is a white-collar criminal, and “Prep-School Gangsters” his latest proof of belief that there are still masses to bait with a catchphrase alone, in the tradition of “Oxford Comma,” “Horchata,” and “Unbearably White,” all of which are better songs. And therein lies the rub; I don’t connect with “Connect” (another callback to that ragged “Mansard Roof” reggaeton) or “The Surfer,” whom I hope isn’t dead in the water. So it’s the final 12 minutes that give me “Hope,” which requests a tall order: “The sentencing was overturned / the killer freed, the court adjourned / A hope betrayed, a lesson learned / I hope you let it go.” Let’s put a pin in that one and revisit after November. [ed. note: ooof]

35. Wussy Duo, Cellar Door [EP]

This is more my thing than their first full-length since back when astronauts had more appeal: three tight, pretty duets catchy and upright enough for drum machine to nail the echoing production down like farmhouses in a Midwestern twister. I can testify firsthand that the title song positively rips from four feet away at a DIY show in a deprivation tank spa. In this version, the words are farther away, and I’m not sure the aural meaning remains complete. But I’m glad to have any.

34. Ulla & Ultrafog, It Means a Lot

I would not say my favorite ambient is always comforting. The drum loops on Boards of Canada’s early masterworks really scrape the skull. The ever-busy Burial is too lyrical and emotional to ever end up the same place he begins. Jon Hassell and Richard D. James are exorcising demonic forces at least as often as they’re extending an olive branch to the ear canal. Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica and that Huerco S. with the long title are richer for their interest in centering warm, static tape hiss, to say nothing of Pole’s first three salvos. Thus the kindest of my five most-played albums ever is the most obscure: RL/VL’s Chagrin, a cool batch of calm and muted hope from 2008 by a then-18-year-old. This collab between two purported giants in microscopic circles — one from Kamagawa, one from Berlin — joins it in frisson-generating quietude. I hear Burial’s disembodied vocals, Purelink’s pillow-silenced percussion clunks, and at least once, live-sounding piano if you press your ear to the basement door. Through extreme filtering you can usually squint and hear something moving as gentle and apt to blow away as a dandelion cypsela before ushering in the next breeze. I like their skeletally funny titles too: “Dumb Rain,” “Sad Bowl,” “Lame Mart.” They’re too reserved for coinages, but “Room Core” has a nice ring to it.

33. Bad Moves, Wearing Out the Refrain

In a year when Charly Bliss, Illuminati Hotties, and from the looks of it, Pom Pom Squad are all politely declining to rock, this power-pop cell who dubbed their last one Untenable doesn’t view album three as a springboard to doing anything other than wearing out the refrain. That is, they reliably open with the first krautrock song to ever have gang vocals, a trademark that betrays their collective experience as volunteer counselors at queer rock camps (perfect tbh). Like Sheer Mag, their confidently unfashionable craft has built-in brains simply from growing up in a time (in D.C. no less) where “social control masquerading as virtue” and “when they see you as a vessel and not as a person” are unfortunate realities for anyone threatened with physical harm for trying to protest or abort. You’re not wrong for looking at those quotes and figuring the catchiest tune among “Eviction Party” or “New Year’s Reprieve” might be more personal: “I can’t get the part where you fucked up out of my head.” If what you’ve been waiting for from Paramore is an entire album of “Anklebiters” but smarter, well.

32. Pylon Reenactment Society, Magnet Factory

More freeform and less mantra-like than the original outfit’s classic material, especially the guitars that let the bass anchor possible permutations of a song’s breadth without resorting to anything resembling improv or, heavens, jamming. Like a screw, it tightens the deeper you go. One effective shortie reprises a couple ringing chords from the singer’s 1979 introduction to the world, which was also one of the introductions of the dance beat to punk-derived music. Turns out that one dates back to 1979, too, just never got around to recording it. The longie that follows is even catchier and sounds like a B-52 contributes, a trait it would share with the last Miranda Lambert album. Less onomatopoeic than the original outfit even though the grunting comes more naturally at 68.

31. Rosie Tucker, Utopia Now!

The almighty “All My Exes Live in Vortexes” threw down the gauntlet for song-of-the-year season ‘24 pretty early, but like their knotty forebears in Speedy Ortiz, Rosie’s homemade bedroom-pop compositions dyed with emo-prog take time (and perhaps seeing their excellent live show) to fully inhabit if not untangle. They pack an impressive, daunting amount of information and intelligence into three-minute symposia, complete with bars (“none of these fuckers even heard of Gil-Scott Heron”), empathies (“I want nothing but ending bliss for my enemies”), and hooks (“Suffer! Like You Mean It”). But as American memories degrade to the point that we’re all drinking from what seems like an endless bottle of piss, I’d like to know if they still feel that way in re: their enemies.

30. Red Velvet, Cosmic [EP]

K-Pop is the most sonically multivalent continuum of songform that I don’t spend enough time with, partly because even its buyers of those enormous limited-edition boxes don’t boast much about the deep cuts, and partly because said sonics have partly caught up (well, down) to Western ones. That is, BTS and Blackpink are more conventional (re: dull-sounding) than f(x) and Girls’ Generation a decade ago. But I’ve always waited for these cheerleaders to offer up a full “mini-album” (as they’re called) worthy of “Russian Roulette” and “Red Flavor,” two of the most purely perfect singles of the 2010s. This may not be as close as they ever get, but sonically multivalent it is — the glitching music box in “Love Arcade, say. Changes in the title tune alone approach Steely Dan numbers before we even reach the Moroccan string interjections; ditto the ones in “Bubble” without them.

29. Charli XCX, Brat

Playing the reality game like a rapper — squashing her Lorde beef on the record, weaponizing faux-relatability until “cult classic but I’m still pop” can never be cited to describe her again — Ms. Aitchison more or less honed her business-as-usual club classics and accidentally won. Her acting career’s already in full swing and it’s hard to imagine her doing much more with club classics, plus Kamala won neither the cult nor pop vote, so don’t be surprised if Charls does whatever tf she wants for a while before trickling out a Honey in eight years. I don’t think the gigantic AOTY consensus came from bulletproof songwriting; critics just have a tendency to cling to any dying gasp of monoculture we can clutch. Good album — beaty, self-aware, sounds best driving at night. Wild ten years later to see a shoutout to A.G. Cook on the Hot 100, a shoutout to Kamasi Washington topping it, and the underdog who played SPIN’s holiday party a decade ago hosting SNL. Less surprising that a Fantano 10 dominated the (online) conversation more than Cindy Lee or any other Pitchfork big-up in 2024. I still prefer “Von Dutch,” which backs up the title Brat, to the rest, which unless you count “Mean Girls,” mostly doesn’t. Now take it away, Keith Harris: “The 32-year-old-est album ever made.”

28. Pouty, Forgot About Me

Rachel Gagliardi sharply contests CMAT’s “No More Virgos” with the simple-enough “Virgos Need More Love” when her long-awaited solo debut hits its stride, purveying Kay Hanley pop-grunge from yet another angle, best witnessed on “Denial Is a Heavy Drug” (dig that sped-up “Teen Spirit” drum entrance) and highly recommended even if you don’t prefer Charly Bliss’ Guppy to Young Enough. I dig both and enjoy this McNugget of pink slime just the same. When the medium-rare grunge of her former duo Slutever gives the second half of a 26-minute “album” the jolt it needs, you’ll be compelled to replay the first — that’s how it works, right? Gagliardi’s other sometime-collaborator Japanese Breakfast could also benefit from her fuzzbox, though she wouldn’t be winning the Uproxx Critics Poll if she did. The jazzy “Underwear” and twangy “Bridge Burner” would fit on a big-voiced CMAT album themselves. And “TV on TV” is definitive proof that she should start duo number three with Alicia Bognanno. Bouty? Pully?

27. Woochiewobbler, Is My Future Bright? [EP]

What, you’re surprised a woman renders psych-cloud-sing-rap in vivider colors melodically (try that recorder-like synth on “Madder”) and lyrically (try last year’s “Fork Me Endlessly”) than many, many male-identified counterparts from Bladee to Gunna? Or that the artist who’s got such a way with words is also pushing an OnlyFans? In this economy? How Pitchfork sussed out a breakup narrative among these 12 minutes in heaven (unless the recurring phone-dial tag counts) I’ll figure out when the high comes down.

26. Drug Church, Prude

Prone to soundbites like “Nobody's trying to be smarter than the room of people that like Drug Church…so if there is going to be any type of evolution, I think it'll be rather slow,” Patrick Kindlon is a more perceptive interview than the young Steve Albini, and 30 years ago, he may have been a transgressive little rodent himself. But for the second straight album, I say his knowledge of Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter are more than just a keen awareness outside of the spectrum of his particular alt-hardcore scene. That is, for the second straight album, a band whose dynamic thickness makes Hüsker Dü look like Black MIDI delivers the kind of all-killer-no-filler half-hour-of-power that less perceptive bands only think their puritanism guarantees. Like the above-named pop phenoms they share nothing else with, they’re bigmouths who know when to change chords, which chords to change to, and most importantly (you listening, Fucked Up?), when to quit. It might be that very care that makes me reluctant to slot them alt-hardcore at all. Or maybe it’s lyrics promising “no deep dives into shallow minds” because “everything ages poorly” that defend the we’re-broke-don’t-fix-it ethos better than their favorite scene politicians ever did.

25. Ka, The Thief Next to Jesus

“Human nature ain’t changing / Hope the gods adjust,” quoth the only artist you or I could think of that faced death for an on-the-books living, who survived mustard sandwiches and ground-zero inhalations to become one of the most virtuous and genuinely deepest rappers in history. There’s a greater abundance of knocking-on-heaven’s-door content here than usual, magnified by what else? — sampled ghosts of blues and gospel and other cathedral dissonances with also more cracks of light getting in than usual. This FDNY called out the NYPD to the end. His death album was his clearest, even the gods can see that.

24. MJ Lenderman, Manning Fireworks

He’s absconded with his ex’s playbook, from transmuting trash culture into middlebrow acclaim (come now, “Cum on Feel the Noize” and “Bark at the Moon”?) to junkie prop-comic freeze-frames (“passed out in your Lucky Charms”) to, well, both (“we sat under a half-mast McDonald’s flag”). I’d salivate harder for her response if I wasn’t more worried about how this development will impact the follow-up to Rat Saw God. The important thing is that Lenderman’s writing twangier and crunching dirtier which both equal tighter; Manning Fireworks channels Wednesday and even their vaunted Drive-By Truckers more than it does Boat Songs. So even if “guess I’ll call you Rip Torn the way you got tore up” isn’t worthy of its subject, it may still shake out to the best Wilco album in at least a decade (Arc and “Less Than You Think” were both ballsier than a mere six minutes of closing feedback). Middlebrows have to stick — or at least tour — together. Let’s just not get too crazy with the Zevon comparisons.

23. Adrianne Lenker, Bright Future

You already know about her unmistakable voice, her gravitas within delicacy, her truly rewarding wordplay, her indelible but still-surprising prolificacy of melodies within this framework both trad and tempo-limited. I’d say this is the first time she’s sustained that power without her band, even though she’s still often with, and her band’s also continuing to get better at the same pace; I can’t wait for the album they’ve constructed around “Vampire Empire.” But with love to “Donut Seam” and maybe the one that owes “The Book of Love,” the second half is still too trad and tempo-limited for me. Sustain power it does. Pleasure is another matter entirely.

22. Tierra Whack, World Wide Whack

“I’ve been trying new things / Mama said she tired of my mood swings” is how Big Whack opens her first-ever album following six years of salivating brought on by 2018’s Whack World, a candidate for the most original hip-hop debut of all-time. Those 15 songlets in 15 minutes with stunningly kaleidoscopic visual accompaniment cannot be improved on. So she expands on them instead with 15 more in 38 minutes, not sounding terribly different from her patented first-take-best-take ethos and inimitable singsong. She just repeats the choruses a few more times, an effective tactic when they’re as hyped up as “Chanel Pit” or dripping with psych-soul like “Imaginary Friends.” I just hope she never stops outrunning impulses like “when I grow up I want to hang from a ceiling.” Now that the real André 3000’s retired to flute business, she’s happy to fill the shoes.

21. Waxahatchee, Tigers Blood

I’ve long felt Katie Crutchfield is so consistent, her melodies so circular and easy to take for granted — yet in an indie-critical continuum that treats songs as beside the point she’s never made a single record anyone could call underrated, not even her 2022 one-off with Plains where Jess Williamson provided fresh twang — that it’s become difficult to tell the difference between reliable and pleasurable. That there’s a ceiling for what she does, not having revved tempos before or since 2017’s cranked Out in the Storm or experimented beyond the three-four-minute guitar format since 2015’s (fine, underrated) Ivy Tripp. So I thought 2020’s automatically beloved Saint Cloud was settling into something I could appreciate if not adore, and on first listen, Tigers Blood appeared to confirm this. Nope. The slide-and-banjo overtures her tunecraft has marinated in for half a decade are finally given her brightest power-pop to flavor, having woodshedded out any merely good ones. Jake Lenderman is a crucial duet partner on the smashing “Right Back to It” and owner of the guitar hook on “Crowbar,” though as with Wednesday his solo material never rises to these vistas. So you could just as easily credit Taylor Swift for the no-bullshit scansions that make “Crimes of the Heart,” “3 Sisters,” and “The Wolves.” This is the best record Crutchfield’s ever made, beholden as ever to simple foundations that tall stacks of harmonies can rest on until you’re shouting along with “I get bored” like you just discovered Deftones and it’s 1995. And it’s named after a cult frozen-treat flavor that triangulates strawberry, watermelon, and coconut.

20. Chat Pile, Cool World

I don’t know what to do with the undercooked Model/Actriz, Mandy, Indiana, or the rechristened Gilla Band. But these downtuned Oklahoma City sickos make crossover noise-rock as intended: equidistant from paint-peeling Jesus Lizard screech and thrashing-in-place nü-metal lurch. Hooks crawl off their eerie guitars and steel-driving bass bends no matter what Raygun Busch is screaming — try Luther Manhole’s runaway riff on “The New World” — but the deciding factor is his lyrics. Debate at your peril whether or not they’re metal, but they convey external horrors better than most metal bands, like the meltdown “Tape” has over the “worst I ever saw,” left open-ended so you can fill it in with your nightmare, whether it’s the Palestinian genocide or the attempted coup in South Korea or the realization that any of it happening here is closer than we ever could have imagined. “I screamed about it all night,” mutters Busch over the darkwave sludge he called “Milk of Human Kindness.” Sounds about right.

19. Beyoncé, Cowboy Carter

You already know it isn’t country, so may I suggest rock? It’s not impossible that the third and final installment of Ms. Knowles-Carter’s Renaissance trilogy will crank up the Marshalls for huge-voiced Pat Benatar cosplay like her co-conspirator Dolly P’s, but I don’t see it. These 78 minutes (inexplicably minus eight on the CD, including Linda Martell’s 28 seconds) are likely the long and short of Bey’s fling with the guitar, and she gets bored enough before it’s over to subject Patsy to a Jersey club remix, et cetera. The sitar intro, suite presentation, miispelled tiitles, multipartite songfulness, familiarity with Jann Wenner’s (well, former) Rolodex, not to mention the often drumless arrangements that scream MTV Unplugged all spell R-O-C-K. She’s thinkin’ ‘bout good vibrations more than any drinkin’, and the writing almost entirely in semiotics that made Lemonade somewhat amelodic is buoyed here by her prettiest music ever, which usually means the singing. It took me over a month to hear it without an attitude — that she wastes the opportunity to showcase 90-year-old Willie Nelson’s still hearty pipes just like when she brings out Diana Ross to play second fiddle in the Renaissance film. It’s harder than ever to take her narcissism; as reported, she wastes a rare opportunity to convey vulnerability by turning “Jolene” into a beatdown threat. (Her husband’s lone contribution to this history-making trilogy thus far is clapping on it.) But it’s already rooting out the brainwashed as we face down an infinitely more dangerous narcissism in our elections yet again. So if you can stomach this always, always being about her, this is a singer’s record as galvanizing as anything she’s ever done. It’s too long, but not like the almost unwatchably paced Renaissance. You’ll make it to the end, mostly because that’s where the peaks are, on which you’ll notice Miley Cyrus and Shaboozey steal just enough of the spotlight. That’s the thing with billionaires: she gets by with a little help from her friends.

18. Les Savy Fav, Oui, LSF

One of those bands that strikes like lightning when everything lines up right, I’ve always looked for more to love than just Let’s Stay Friends and “The Sweat Descends.” (Maybe “Hold Onto Your Genre?”) The early records too spiky and 2010’s previous Root for Ruin insufficiently pop makes this evenhanded triumph of clever riffs (my favorite is the sax-doubled “What We Don’t Don’t Want”) and attention-holding others their second-best prospect by default, 14 years after Ruin and two decades to a quarter-century after their heyday. What’s new is the graduation from scene-skewering meta-commentary to Paranoid Style-esque musical referents: one chorus from LL Cool J’s “Doin’ It,” one from “Papa Ooh Mow Mow,” blink-and-you’ll-miss Otis Redding and one titled “Oi! Division.” See them live while you still can, not just because Tim Harrington will be in his 60s the next time he makes a record but because “I hope someday we can say / We were there when the world got great / we helped to make it that way” is what passes for escapism in this awful day. Two of them were just laid off by NBC.

17. Megan Moroney, Am I Okay?

Did it really take this long for a meteoric crossover star to grab that title for their sophomore effort? With Billie getting artsy and Olivia sticking to four-letter words like the Jesus Lizard fan she is, Morgan Wallen’s alleged (and far, far superior) ex calls dibs. Having grabbed the Hot 100 with “Tennessee Orange,” one of the corniest tunes I’ve ever loved, Moroney’s first top-ten album further exploits one of mainstream country’s least showy voices in pursuit of unbothered Shangri-La. She nominates more men to put on the moon, starting with the ex named “No Caller ID.” In another winner about a loser, she rationalizes, “at least my whole world left me for Miss Universe.” And just as kindly as the tribute to a loved one she didn’t know would be in “Heaven by Noon,” the most moving of her many (perfectly) off-the-rack heartbreak ballads opines, “I hope you’re happy as can be / I hope it don’t get back to me.” She follows that with the closer, her angriest and sparsest cut, which stops entirely for a long sigh after stating how mean this bastard was to her. Knowing just when to trade unbothered for an emotional exorcism is far from the only reason she’s gonna be okay. But I’d say she’s actually great.

16. 2nd Grade, Scheduled Explosions

“You’re uncontrollably cool / You’re calling a bomb threat into my school” and “you can tell he’s not very catholic from the way he puts on that cherry chapstick” made me realize how quotable indie-rock currently isn’t, nor is it quoting “Wild Thing” anytime soon. Three decades ago, 23 GBV-style foreshortened tunelets of Peter Gill’s retro, songful Rickenbacker jangle in 38 minutes would’ve been considered a catch or a sell, depending on how trad the record nerd you’re trying to convert. But Guided by Voices is more rooted in a fantasy, the triumph of the underachieving rock star, and gave their every hiss and pop a Pete Townshend power-strum back before Robert Pollard had 50-plus products competing with each other for bin space. Gill simply writes short because he grew up during TikTok, and his melodically thoughtful debt to Shoes and Sloan departs calmly in his voice, one that sounds like it accepts the ceiling for power-pop reach. Unprepared for summer 2020 like us all, Hit to Hit only packed enough dynamite for its intensely excellent first third. This one doesn’t stop scheduling explosions until it ends, and anyone who isn’t a stan that’s tried a few recent GBV albums knows that’s fantasy fulfillment enough.

15. Mount Eerie, Night Palace

Waiting for a Phil Elverum album where the music’s finally subsumed the words seemed as foolhardy as waiting for a Mountain Goats one. But the pull of the grinding Stereolab concoctions here especially seemed like cause to extract the meanings from their environments. He records the wind, the rain, his daughter playing the Eric Gaffney on “Swallowed Alive” to his Lou Barlow, his garage bangings, his diary, distortions that sound not just homemade but like amplifications of the home itself. He encounters birds he doesn’t speak to and a fish he does, possibly to warn it about the birds. Not much of a singer because he can’t fathom an atom of artifice, he can stop you sideways with an “I love you.” He also quotes The Big Lebowski and I Think You Should Leave and tucks in Easter eggs from his own discography, even his own imprint on “& Sun” like he’s Patrick Stickles or something. What’s more surprising, that Phil actually rocks out on “Writing Poems” or that his “November Rain” is catchier than Axl’s? And because you asked, my favorite musical component here is the Another Green World-esque lead guitar on the Another Green World-esque title “Blurred World.” For a striking lyricist to achieve so much parity with his aural gestalt is to conquer a long-held gap.

14. Jlin, Akoma

Jerrilynn Patton cares less about melody than Megan Thee Stallion and Autechre combined, and I’ve found her allegiance to waltz-time footwork with 808 cowbell clicks a bit perplexing and admittedly too limiting for an album-length listen. But her work has blown minds more prestigious than mine for some time, in rough chronological order: the late great Rashad (‘course), Pitchfork (sure), Basinski (how could he resist), the Pulitzer board (about time), Björk (excusez-moi), Philip Glass (on brand), and most crucially, the honorables Phil Overeem and Brad Luen. This proper third album is so reward-rich I’ll give Black Origami another go, but I’m positive it’s the most listenable Jlin record by some distance, thanks to Philip Glass more than Björk, but also to melody and waltz-time footwork with 808 cowbell clicks. I’m not surprised and somewhat embarrassed that the “organic” bits — ensemble percussion workouts and menacing cello on “Summon” à la the Knife’s “Fracking Fluid Injection” — get me more hyped than her drum programming, but I am shocked by how much classical music contributes to the overall enjoyability of the thing. Ms. Guðmundsdóttir can introduce her to Arca, right? For a comeback album keyed to Mutant’s ten-year, time is of the essence.

13. The Chisel, What a Fucking Nightmare

It’s now hard to tell if Charlie Manning-Walker is moonlighting in this band or Chubby and the Gang, both of whom have attained Stereogum-sized acclaim putting well-bellowed, brick-simple street punk on the normies’ radar again à la Turnstile did hardcore. But where his other band spread themselves a bit thin on a sophomore bid that tried to be too many things without enough of them being bangers, the Chisel builds on the sturdy foundation of 2021’s Retaliation by doing more less, always a punk’s best option. The power-pop gestures are less extricable from the “fuck ‘em fuck ‘em fuck ‘em fuck ‘em” because they shake out equaling Rock, which can be a bit ordinary but is never a given. “Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” is how you keynote a follow-up.

12. The National, Rome

For a band I’ve liked since Alligator but haven’t found much reason to play in the 2020s, this is incredibly fluid, loud, perfectly selected including from records I don’t care about, and the drummer is all over it. Material reprises just enough of their best studio album (High Violet) to improve the smart culls from lesser ones (especially “Murder Me Rachael” and the Trouble Will Find Me stuff) by osmosis in that time-honored but increasingly rare live album way. I snicker as they turn the sole inclusion from the overrated Boxer into a grand singalong. The performances are choice but the songs blur together in a way that’s more useful than the songs themselves; it’s the momentum that impresses for 140 minutes. The best I can do is that it’s like if Springsteen made a krautrock album. And I specified “best studio album” because this is better.

11. Doechii, Alligator Bites Never Heal

I admit, my standards are unfair and my favorite type of star makes a big deal of how they can do anything. Anyone who witnessed Doechii’s Tiny Desk Concert or her instantly legendary Colbert performance will tell you that star right now is Jaylah Hickmon, who matches the peerless breathlessness of the two most talented rappers of the last decade: Kendrick Lamar and Nicki Minaj. Her debut “mixtape” whirls through history from Roxanne Shanté (the jaw-dropping “Denial Is a River”) to Azealia Banks (“Nissan Altima”) and never gives up trying on flows and guises for 19 tracks. Ever since she leveled the viral channels with “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” in 2020, the “Black girl who beat the statistics” has yet to find a ceiling. She’s just getting started.

10. NLE Choppa, Slut SZN [EP]

Tommy Richman could learn something from this concept EP about “Slut Me Out 2,” which justifies the extended versions hustle at least as well as Lil Jon’s “Get Low” or Chad Matheny’s “Stay Where You Are.” But the entire loosie-rap multiverse could learn something from Bryson Potts shamelessly embracing his own novelty (and sl*t) status as well as his own voracious stylistic appetite on the other 5-or-maybe-4/8ths. He’s right to milk synth-disco a few moments longer. And his country stab is more fun than anything on the Shaboozey, Post Malone, or Beyoncé.

9. High on Fire, Cometh the Storm

Matt Pike is a golden god to some for grinding us to Sleep (who are more static than High on Fire, if you can imagine) and an amateur David Ickeolyte to others, so permit me to not Google his conspiracy doggerel and just dub him the unthinking man’s Motörhead on 2018’s excellent, Grammy-recgonized Electric Messiah. Six years later, this tops it; when a metal band’s longest album is their best, it’s cause for black celebration. For all the detours into bağlama instrumentals and Arabic-scale psychedelia, it’s still the thickness of the bruise-rubbing guitar and all its queasy blues that keeps me cometh back. And even the levelheaded among us can feel appropriately doomy opening statements like “no one will listen here / Too late now so we dread it.” Even if that includes Pike.

8. Ice Spice, Y2K!

As a leader of her subgenre, this doo doo chaser was only a marginally more commanding mic presence than Playboy Carti or Lil Uzi Vert until this level-up. The other crucial traits she shares with those two galvanizing dipshits are that her sound is her playground and that she views the album format as an opportunity to burrow further into it rather than building on her Swift/Barbie/Pinkpantheress footholds. Hence, “Oh Shhh…” might be her most traditional drill cut ever. But she reminds me more of early grime bouncing around these darker beats with a single-mindedness she clearly relishes, and rumored poopie Central Cee confirms it on one of three more hit-ready singles toward the end. The others are “Gimmie a Light,” which does eventually transcend the limitations of “sample drill” and “Think U the Shit (Fart),” which transcends everything else. The rest is Not Pop, and the weirdest, “BB Belt,” is my favorite. Despite her scatological insistences, she’s got more memorable lines than Vince Staples’ similarly beat-driven Big Fish Theory even if hers are less futuristically plugged in. Should she dub the next one Big Fart Theory, she can probably snag George Clinton himself to guest if she moves fast. And she moves fast.

7. Pissed Jeans, Half Divorced

I’ve always admired other people admiring this band, who’ve been trying to make a difference since long before hardcore was back in style. So all that kept me from appreciating their acclaimed odes to ice cream or apologies for the male gaze was that they couldn’t sing, play, or write songs. (Actually, that last one’s Rid of Me-goes-Jesus Lizard churn sounds pretty good today.) Titles like “Ashamed of My Cum” didn’t help either, but 2017’s Lydia Lunch-produced Why Love Now really was a turning point towards meaningful (if crude) male feminism (that still took at least 30% of its rage out on kinksters while still mocking them for being scared to express their desires). “The Bar Is Low” was a well-titled best-case scenario previously unimaginable with a riff, a point, and a video that was actually funny. So seven years later, they turn out their most listenable album figuring out some other stuff, like keeping more than half the songs on a noise-punk album under two minutes. Most decisively, they finally let themselves indulge in rock’n’roll pleasure, on the George Thorogood stomp “Helicopter Parent,” actual punk song “Cling to a Poisoned Dream” or setting off a Greg Ginn power-solo on “Monsters.” Good Black Flag is the m.o. here, with the motorik “Junktime” coming yay close to quoting “Slip It In” and Matt Korvette playing the young Henry Rollins on “Everywhere Is Bad,” complete with “TV Party”-style backup shouts. They finally discover a sexual culture worth mocking on “Anti-Sapio.” “Sixty-Two Thousand Dollars in Debt” is self-explanatory. And it’s not too late to change their name to Pissed Dads.

6. Sheer Mag, Playing Favorites

Not only is it as ornately guitar’d as Speedy Ortiz’s densely woven Rabbit Rabbit, but the breathtaking architecture of Philly’s finest borders on downright classy. I’ve scarcely heard such an accomplished fretwork album since…Bassekou Kouyate’s Jama Ko? “When You Get Back” is worthy of 1983 Marshall Crenshaw backed by the 1983 Blackhearts, and the other power-popabilly one bounces like the locally appropriate Hall & Oates. For sure they’re still honoring Thin Lizzy (and the Dolls) on “Eat It and Beat It” before welding a country intro to Aja-funk boogie (“Moonstruck”) and purveying plenty of post-Pretenders jangle, even on the funky, nearly six-minute centerpiece “Mechanical Garden” that finally begins after an overture of Slade, orchestral fanfare, and record-warping itself into the right key. That one even features a section of Agadez-sourced shredding that closely resembles the guest it turns out to be. Always a force onstage or behind a layer of fuzz on their records, Tina Halladay is more than a host for the bounty of fleet, often harmonized guitar leads, and they’ll more than hold court over these lovely compositions in the club. Even the backup lads sparkle. Their most pleasurable record, and the classic rock triumph many of their ‘70s heroes didn’t have in them, or even the chops for.

5. Kampire, Kampire Presents: A Dancefloor in Ndola

Kampire Bahana’s very existence is political as a queer woman living in extremely homophobic Uganda, and that defiance colors her art. But these 72 heavenly minutes hearken back to her Zambian upbringing and deliver what the title promises. Floating East African guitar vamps mesh with bassy log-drum simulacra on uncovered DJ manna like V-Mash’s bratty “Naughty Boy” and Di Groovy Girls’ three-chord synth-pop throwdown “Ririmi Rotsombela.” You’ll never want your playlist curator of choice to go without African House Party Project’s absolute classic “P-Coq” ever again. It won’t be a surprise that they’re predominantly fronted by women. If you’re completely new to dance music in African languages, Kampire’s bulletproof ear will serve as a reminder that there’s so many jams left to discover if nothing else.

4. The Paranoid Style, The Interrogator

With Peter Holsapple taking over on lead guitar (of which “I Love the Sound of Structured Class” takes full advantage by nicking Eliminator’s gated pulse), these exceptional Stiff Records scholars continue pursuing labors of louche unknown to the TikTok timeline: “Lust for Life” drums, “Rudie Can’t Fail” horns and for that matter “Careless Whisper” sax, a lyrical acumen for dropping Scrabble scramblers like “temerity” in the same breath as Thin Lizzy’s biggest hit. But there are fewer overt musical or political references on their most muscular production job so it’s easier to mindlessly immerse until Elizabeth Nelson’s jokes start opening up on a power ballad featuring two words never heard in a song before, “kerfuffles” and “vouchsafe.” The ivories tickled from Elvis Costello’s “Man Out of Time” I have. That’s the idea: something borrowed, something Almost Blue.

3. LL Cool J, The FORCE

The story’s a heartwarming one. Embarrassed by reactions to “Accidental Racist” a decade ago in an America that’s changed unfathomably for the worse, the 56-year-old who invented pop-rap stardom strove to have something to say. So he takes on racial extremism on “Spirit of Cyrus” and the beauty of life in a Black family on “Black Code Suite.” Some things never change; he’s sexy as ever trading comelies with Saweetie on “Proclivities.” James Smith holds his own throughout, but the astonishing art-funk beats are now a third bid in ten years to nominate Q-Tip as the best producer in America, after Tribe secured a Billboard number-one with the greatest reunion LP of all-time and Danny Brown found a musical voice to match his red-hot MCing on uknowhatimsayin?. Some 35 years after his previous masterpiece I think you can go ahead and call it a comeback.

2. Gouge Away, Deep Sage

Another alt-hardcore synthesis outfit; keep them coming. On Gouge Away’s first album in six years, Mick Ford and Dylan Downey play Lee and Thurston on competing noises darker and grungier than their Sonic Elders, while Christina Michelle cuts the stage in half with thrashabouts like “The Sharpening” that would have slotted just fine after “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter.” There’s melodies, too, garnished from all corners of the punk-metal axis, from Pixies (“Maybe Blue”) to some bastard child of Fugazi’s The Argument and Tool’s Undertow (“Idealized”). If you don’t need to scream along with free-floaters like “stuck in a dream” or “I need space,” then maybe you had a different year than me. And if you’re still not convinced they’re the band we need now, for that 2024 touch they go out on a two-part shoegaze epic.

1. Sabrina Carpenter, Short n’ Sweet

From her therapy-speak entendres to her breeding kink to her newly grisly videos, I’ve been rooting for Sabrina ever since she managed to neatly tuck the word “catastrophizing” into 2022’s excellent Emails I Can’t Send. No one else was funnier, sexier, or smarter than the pop breakthrough of 2024, which among other things freshened up Jack Antonoff’s synth work immediately following Taylor Swift’s most labored album. Dolly Parton herself would have a ball with “Slim Pickins,” but “Bed Chem” would’ve fit on Aaliyah’s One in a Million, too. With a real-life fuckboy for a comedic foil, Carpenter takes a neverending supply of fodder to new realms, dissing Leonard Cohen fetishists even harder than Boygenius did on “Dumb & Poetic” or swiping the tune from “I Touch Myself” for the I-hit-it-first triangling of “Taste.” No one else in pop worked harder to dream-came-true it for ya and her casually merciless, intermittently horny kiss-offs prove she need not sugarcoat her own experiences to provide everyone else’s candy-colored entertainment. Is it that sweet? I guess so.