Take My Money, Wreck My Sundays: The 30 Best Albums of 2024 So Far (#20-11)
From street punk to sex rap, from grayscale noise to graceful prog
Princess Pop That herself: Anycia
20. Les Amazones d'Afrique, Musow Danse
Uhh, fuck Boygenius lol? OK, so the two headliners in this supergroup big enough to get Pitchfork-reviewed, Angelique Kidjo and Mariam Doumbia (you’d know her name with “Amadou &” in front of it) are long-gone, and Mamani Keïta’s on just two cuts. That leaves an impressive roundup of less distinguished vocalists on the best, twistiest African beats (not to be confused with Afrobeats, an increasingly popular lane for stars blander than Drake, or King Sunny Adé’s ensemble) I’ve heard since Montparnasse Musique’s majestic 2022 production Archaeology. Except these electrofunk adepts hail from Mali, Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, and Congo-Brazzaville, and explicitly seize the floor in both senses on “Kuma Fo (What They Say)” and the title tune respectively for anyone who speaks the languages, which overseer-to-the-stars (U2, Taylor Swift) producer Jacknife Lee does not. His job is to give these hefty hooks, from Congotronics to 808s, space to take up. And more often than not, they hit on a synth sound or a chorus — say, “Amahoro (Don’t Get Angry)” — that does.
19. Tierra Whack, World Wide Whack
Replay the Rap? Pop? R&B? trifecta of EPs and you’ll hear a talent immensely comfortable with both her unbothered gift for shaping a quick, meaningful tune out of anything (“Heaven has all my favorite people / I wanna go there / And do a show there”) and an acceptance that like so many talents, her masterpiece Whack World was a one-time flash of lightning and planets (and post-Lemonade video budgets) and the dizzying imaginational bliss of hitting drinking age. For an encore, she spent most of her 20s enjoying instead of killing herself to capitalize on the uncommercial prospects of a word-of-mouth 15-songs-in-15-minutes novelty and a fluke Grammy nom for a video where the hook is that she’s literally singing mumbo jumbo. Except now TikTok’s reoriented the charts to favor one-hit-per-minute and it can be alarming how often she does ponder killing herself, in song at least. Yet she doesn’t feel the need to fix anything that ain’t broken, including the half-recycled title, and if anyone’s earned the right to build a shtick it’s this one-of-a-kind. Not one moment will shut down your day like Whack World and not one moment needs to.
18. 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.”
17. Omar Souleyman, Erbil
If you make the same album over and over, does it matter if the album is great? How many times can it be made before it’s no longer great? Artists as consistent as Omar Souleyman, treated as exotic by default when they’re introduced to new masses before the market returns them to the specialty audience — how consistent are they really? It is almost impossible for me to tell if Erbil is Souleyman’s best album in years or if the musical landscape and my own personal cycling of taste has reached the point where I’m fully receptive again after feeling burned out on him around 2015’s Bahdeni Nami, just two years after I really enjoyed 2013’s Wenu Wenu and four years after I absolutely fucking loved 2011’s Haflat Gharbia. The best evidence I have of these judgments is that every time I’ve tried Erbil, it’s given me the same-size thrill. But it’s also telling that just the thought of A-B’ing it with Bahdeni Nami exhausts me and brings to the fore my fear of killing said thrill. As with everything else, thrills feel scarcer in 2024. I feel confident that I hear more sonics; “Mahad Yadri” that trades leads between the usual electronic saz, a (simulated?) wind instrument, and even your garden-variety Western synth, with more audible support from keyboard block chords underneath. But as usual with this guy, it’s the definition of madness to try and distinguish further. Go with your gut feeling, and mine is that he’s partying harder again. At this time, that’s an achievement in itself.
16. Mannequin Pussy, I Got Heaven
I was late to this band of regional heroes in part because 2019’s Patience was so slickly produced I could barely understand why the hardcore and power ballads were on the same record. Having acquired the taste, even 2021’s Perfect EP sounds better now and they meet me halfway as they should — rawer production plus more hardcore and more ballads helps everything pop like a blister. The elements that once felt like they didn’t belong now feel like the crafty surprises they hope, such as the synthy guitar bubbling up beneath the chorus on the title track whose punk-rapping earns the Olivia comparisons, though the highlight inspired by Buffy is just pandering (to moi).
15. 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.
14. Sleater-Kinney, Little Rope
They’re not quite the R.E.M. of cathartic shrieking having made it this far down the pike in a storied career that’s occasionally peaked when turning personal acrimony into brainy bloodlettings. But drummer or no drummer, they always come back to righteous fury and the properly jagged sounds that accompany it when exhaled. Even with a relatively new assortment of Whammy-adjacent squeal effects, Carrie Brownstein still picks (and picks at) her guitar like no other and Corin Tucker can still summon the Hellmouth with thorax alone. As been the case since 2019, this isn’t their most memorable batch — though tracks three through five are their catchiest in nearly a decade — but the tensile strength and emotional roar clock it nearer to New Adventures in Hi-Fi than anything after. In diametric opposition to the crestfallen lyrical content, the musical uplift makes hell out to not be so bad.
13. 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.
12. 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 achieved 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.
11. 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 turns out to be the most replayable comfort in 2024 rap thus far. 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.