Take My Money, Wreck My Sundays: The 30 Best Albums of 2024 So Far (#30-21)
Paperclip maximizers, haunted waterparks, messes under dresses
Still House Plants, the rare post-rockers that could
30. Burial, Dreamfear/Boy Sent From Above [EP]
I thought I was sick of Burial a lot longer ago until the magisterial, unnecessarily reshuffled Tunes 2011-2019 comp convinced me he had a lot more going for him than just a third of that timespan. But sometime around the listless Antidawn and collaborations like Shock Power of Love, I really did get sick of Burial, to the point where even an offering this raucous (chant it with me: “Back from the dead / Fucked up in the head”) doesn’t quite move me. Worse, I think the production is why; hard to feel the ghosts in the machine from all the way across the airport, where it sounds like he mixed it. That changes on “Boy Sent From Above,” the kind of split-atom synthpop fireworks I wish Daniel Lopatin hadn’t exhausted from his own bag of tricks. Guess post-imperial nostalgists gotta stick together. But I’m still awaiting Lopatin’s best in years.
29. Swamp Dogg, Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th St
Maybe I’ll return to his (what else?) amazingly titled Auto-Tune records someday, but for now I’ll stick with asserting that maybe hip-hop isn’t the technology’s problem, everything is. The 81-year-old who defines cult legends cements this one from the git without ever clarifying if “Mess Under That Dress” is sticky-literal or loveless-metaphorical. Then the advice that the composer who’s “hung like a T-bone” would like to pass on is “if you want to live the high life / Become an ugly man’s wife.” If he’s never again as outrageous as those first two tracks, well, getting it up twice at his age is no joke. But Margo Price, Jenny Lewis, Bon Iver, and Gary U.S. Bonds have all got his back, even when Lewis leaves him.
28. Rosie Tucker, Utopia Now!
Ask anyone who’s ever Honorable Mention’d a Dan Ex Machina record if cleverness is its own reward (or if “like a PDF, you can’t change me” counts as clever, oops). And ask me if I bought into Penelope Scott a mite hastily. But neither would negate the mighty “All My Exes Live in Vortexes,” the gauntlet that announced song-of-the-year season ‘24 pretty early. Their twisty homemade bedroom pop dyed with emo-prog because what isn’t now has got bars (“none of these fuckers even heard of Gil-Scott Heron”) and the decency to keep almost everything under three-and-a-half minutes. I’m not sure most of the songs here untangle as well as “Suffer! Like You Mean It,” but they are indeed songs, and it’s possible to imagine Tucker crafting more than a couple as great as Illuminati Hotties’ Let Me Do One More. But don’t forget, Dan Ex Machina also released “Hot Honey.”
27. Yard Act, Where’s My Utopia?
I just wanted to place this one next to Rosie Tucker. Danceable! And full of doubt. Water flowing underground.
26. Couch Slut, You Could Do It Tonight
I found the “The Donkey” (“Here’s what happened when we got fired from the haunted waterpark,” “The man comes back to the center of the room and he says ‘I’ve got the blood’,” etc.) a bit tryhard and it still is, but I’ve since succumbed to its tsunami of sewage like everything else here and it will probably feel classic when they break up a set with it. This band remains everything I’ve ever wanted from the Jesus Lizard or Melvins or Shellac or most noise-metal confluences except their interest in sound design ends at paint-peeling feedback. I’d call them redneck-cosplay horror-grunge; Couch Slut excel at surviving to tell tales of getting high in the wrong places. But just because it’s calcifying into shtick doesn’t make their abattoir-stench riffs any less effective, with just enough sinister changes to push forward the miserable lurch. Maybe shtick means they won’t make us wait another four years.
25. Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross, Challengers [OST]
I haven’t kept up with Reznor/Ross’ Hollywood streak but it wouldn’t take much convincing. The Social Network and Soul burbled to life with the cartoon-sinister sound design I’ve always returned to NIN for, and I can’t wait to see Zendaya play tennis and get rotisseried to these Depeche Nails workouts that reach back to ravier beginnings than the Prince-informed Pretty Hate Machine. Sometimes they’re even the same workout; repetition can be crucial when you’re thrusting in the sweet spot.
24. Maggie Rogers, Don’t Forget Me
Yes, this is the most exciting year for pop this decade; no, that doesn’t mean many of the millionaires or half the billionaires in the mix have gifted us with a Great Album even though most of them have done so before. There’s something especially ominous about the forced positivity (Eternal Sunshine, Radical Optimism) or in the billionaires’ case, Grammy-choking ambition, suffocating these full-lengths, and I’ll be the first to admit the event-rap that has so exhilarated me and the Hot 100 is indeed pretty dark on the soul. For your mental health, I submit my onetime SPIN intern as an alternative, who only splashed the album chart at number 48 this time but still headlines the Wells Fargo Center in October. Yes, she’s a normie even compared to Taylor or Beyoncé, but all that means is sweet, sweet sanity — instead of buying up cultural real estate or pivoting to her next concept, she followed up her highest-charting success with a Master’s degree and her two best albums. Whenever Rogers emerges, it’s not necessarily all hooks (that would compromise the sanity) but aiming for nothing-but-songs makes them a surer bet. I’m partial to the homegrown Haim “The Kill,” the power-ballad-of-the-year title track, and especially the disco-paced “Never Going Home,” which hopefully gives her buddy Zach Bryan some ideas for his next number-one. And you won’t catch Taylor or Beyoncé calling themselves out by name to slow their roll.
23. Still House Plants, If I Don't Make It, I Love U
Analogies to Black Country, New Road or “Jeff Buckley fronting Squid” don’t wash simply because I never would’ve made it this far. But maybe Black Country heads (Roadheads?) can feel me on the so-unlistenable-I-can’t-stop-listening-to-it tip. Jess Hickie-Kallenbach is never operatic — in fact, there’s nothing divisive about her voice, a crucial distinction when the music keeps melting before it solidifies. It’s oft-echoed by admirers that listening to Still House Plants is akin to hearing the songs form in real time, but you’re better off without the s-word ever on the table. The experience is closer to worktapes from band practice, of picking at the same queasy bend like a scab until Finlay Clark’s fingers are too blistered to execute it anymore, and then instead of going home to listen back, Hickie-Kallenbach just improvised over the unedited sprawl. The process isn’t personally what interests me; absorbing the ugliness, that’s the ticket. And feeling something like elation every time the modulation hits in “More Boy.”
22. Heems & Lapgan, Lafandar
Himanshu Suri’s first music in seven years doesn’t burst from the speakers like he’s been saving up sideways punchlines or righteous rants. In fact, it’s the first record he’s ever made where you can go stretches without ever registering the words in the sea of Lapgan’s wonderful, often South Asian sonics. But he’s still fucking great at rapping, and maybe even taking care of his health. He’s well-aware that Das Racist’s job has since been overtaken by memes, but that doesn’t stop him from “stacking bread off [his] mixtape reissues” or upping his multicultural cachet tenfold: “I’m in Mozambique with 30 Sikhs / I’m cooking turkey cheeks / You know I’m with some dirty freaks.” To be this excellent at 38 and sound at ease in a genre that eats its young can be all too mutually exclusive. Here’s to doing it again at 45.
21. 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.