The 10 Best Country Albums Of 2024
This year’s best country albums list is once again presented in partnership with Don’t Rock The Inbox, the amazing country music newsletter run by Stereogum contributors Marissa R. Moss and Natalie Weiner. Check it out and consider buying a subscription.
Another year, another flood of news that country is more popular than it’s ever been! Unfortunately with a few notable exceptions, the country music dominating the charts over at Billboard is too often algorithm bait crafted by a cynical Nashville machine that leverages its rich tradition as collateral to promote an mostly interchangeable cast of white, straight, cisgender men.
Plenty of people have been fighting that tide; most notable this year were Shaboozey and Beyoncé, who made concerted efforts to enter a genre (and specifically, radio format) more hellbent on maintaining a legacy of racist exclusion than any particular musical one. Never mind that Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” was not just a smart, thoughtful, and catchy reinvention of an aughts hip-hop classic but the biggest song of the year, or that Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter boosted not just his career but those of a whole slew of other talented Black country artists. Neither, predictably, was enough to actually change the way Music City operates in a substantive way; the Luke Bryans of the world have made sure of that.
But country’s commercial growth goes beyond Jelly Roll and Morgan Wallen and even Zach Bryan (and to a lesser extent Lainey Wilson, because women are allowed one at a time and without as much fanfare, as ever) — and all their legions of imitators. Tyler Childers and Sturgill Simpson are filling arenas, Sierra Ferrell has gone from upstart to Grammy darling in no time flat, and “Americana” acts of all stripes are surging in popularity (thanks in no small part to music direction over at Yellowstone). Country is cool again, and the flood of excellent records that came out this year is proof.
Narrowing them down to 10 favorites was obviously a challenge, with legends like Willie Nelson releasing Flaming Lips covers, Miranda Lambert returning to Texas, and Charley Crockett putting out not one but two albums — and some stuff even went on outside the Lone Star State! There is so much wonderful music we’ve written about over the course of the year at Don’t Rock The Inbox, and this is just a tiny fraction of it; all the same, we’re hoping this array gives you some good listening. Here are our favorite albums of 2024, presented in alphabetical order.
It’s fair to say that no one is writing country story-songs these days as well as Adeem The Artist, who approaches each tale not with a faux nostalgia or authenticity complex, but a desire to keep their music both rooted in history and accountable for our collective past. “She’s got borderline personality disorder, and in order to get off, she’s gotta see me cry,” Adeem sings on “Nancy,” an opening line only they could pull off. But we’re all erratic and idiosyncratic, and that’s the point: these are songs not about broken people but people broken by the world, and what saves us when we get too close to the edge. Sometimes it’s a lover, sometimes it’s ourselves, and sometimes, when no one shows up, the biggest problem is how no one asks why. — Marissa R. Moss
“I’ve lost friends, I’ve lost heroes, I lost everything I am, even my name,” sings Sturgill Simpson on his first album under the moniker of Johnny Blue Skies. We may not all be one of the most influential and important country artists of our generation, but we all can relate to the idea that nothing is more frustrating than the world around us trying to define and shape us against our will. It’s a driving theme around Passage Du Desir, but not just in how others have treated him: Here, he’s more often accounting for how he’s treated others on songs like “Jupiter’s Faerie” and “One For The Road,” where he blends the country music he grew up on with disparate rock sounds in a way that fees both rooted and free. Simpson’s still peerless, and names are just names. He’s singing the truth, either way. —Marissa R. Moss
The Deslondes are neither nobodies nor newcomers. Fixtures of the Taylor Sheridan soundtrack-verse, the New Orleans-based ensemble has been playing together for over 15 years and have released several well-streamed albums — so why, then, does it feel like I’m constantly telling people about them for the first time? Their seeming inability to penetrate music discourse though, is, if anything, a testament to the strength and consistency of their work: songs that may not be particularly hip or edgy but teem with a hazy, nostalgic warmth and that most elusive of qualities, feel. Their latest, Roll It Out, is full of that casual, divey excellence, articulating millennial ennui (“I don’t wanna go out tonight,” Howe Pearson sings, “I knew I’d end up talking to you”) and reassuring mantras (“We’ll find the ground one way or another/ By this time tomorrow, trade the heartache and sorrow for some good times”) with equal ease. Sweet harmonies, garage-y reverb and pedal steel get punctuated by the occasional wind instrument (for extra Big Easy flair) as the band cycles through hook after unassuming hook; you’ll get these songs in your head, and you’ll be happy you did. —Natalie Weiner
Who else could write a country song that’s a Beatles song that’s a pop song that’s a honkytonk song that’s completely irresistible? Only Sierra Ferrell on “Dollar Bill Bar” off Trail Of Flowers, which was just nominated for four very deserved Grammy awards. Ferrell’s world is a mystical one, always grounded by her connection to the string instruments and traditions she learned busking on the streets in West Virginia and New Orleans, but she’s never afraid to modernize or play, either. That’s what makes her work so exciting, from the ferocious fiddles of “Fox Hunt” to the subdued lovers farewell of “Wish You Well.” Ferrell’s voice is as spectacular as her performances are – she’s a rare artist who can deliver as writer, as a player, as a singer and also as a dynamic stage presence. The album itself would be the cherry on top of it all, if it weren’t so damn good. —Marissa R. Moss
“I can be your poster boy for the great American fall,” Alynda Segarra sings on “Colossus Of Roads,” making that exact case over the 35 minutes of The Past Is Still Alive — a clear-eyed travelogue of Segarra’s wanderings around this dangerous, fatally flawed, beautiful country. They cracked themselves open on this one, channeling a lifetime’s worth of wandering, fear, triumph and wisdom into urgent modern folk songs; rarely has an album conveyed intimacy and vulnerability in such creative fashion. Segarra’s voice, conversational and expressive, sits front and center; the musical adornment is thoughtful and unobtrusive, letting the stories and images shine. It’s an album that speaks to living through an ending, and hopefully a beginning; for letting your experiences inform your present and future without suffocating them. “Nothing will stop me now,” they sing on one of the album’s central refrains — a personal declaration that still empowers everyone who listens to it. —Natalie Weiner
As good a storytelling troubadour as we have around right now, Corb Lund introduces a whole cast of characters on El Viejo — aging fighters (“Out On A Win”), card sharps (“The Cardplayers,” “When The Game Gets Hot”), soldiers in World War I (“Insha’Allah”), and of course, Lund himself, experimenting with edibles to ill effect, among other misadventures (“Old Familiar Drunken Feeling”). Lund wears the heavy role of singer-songwriter with welcome levity, blending more serious lyrics with self-deprecating ones. “I had it all and pissed it away,” he sings on the song of the same title — but it’s fun and catchy instead of overly dour. What put this loose, offbeat album over the top, though, was the release of its recent deluxe edition, which includes a song called “Police State”: “I got me a badge, got me a gun/ Someday I’m gonna get to shoot someone,” he sings in the potent and perfect protest song. —Natalie Weiner
McCalla calls it “Louisiana tropicalia.” However you describe her latest region-agnostic roots album, which situates American folk music and blues alongside other Afro-diasporic traditions, it sounds both new and appealing — a groovy blend of styles backing McCalla’s poetic, revolutionary sentiments. “I’m trying to be free,” she sings on the album’s opening, over an Afrobeat-inflected guitar riff; the album closes with McCalla singing “I want to believe in a world I cannot see,” almost as a hymn. As much as McCalla is tapping an array of different traditional musics on this album, her focus on making music for a better future in the near (see: “Give Yourself A Break”) and far term gives it a timeless quality. —Natalie Weiner
No crafted an ambitious concept album that spans styles easily, with honky-tonk, grungy rock, and melancholy harp-driven balladry living happily alongside each other to show their range. The singer-songwriter is patient and thoughtful in her quest to bring everyone along in pursuit of liberation, weaving the personal and political together (as they always are) into memorable tunes for just about every mood. A lover’s “shield and sword” feels literal and figurative, an intrapersonal metaphor and a sign of societal crisis — much like visiting “The Heartbreak Store” (who isn’t a little existentially heartbroken these days?). Persistently creative with how she presents her stories of seeking, of growing, of changing, No pushed away from the expected and into a sound that’s exciting and new with this release. —Natalie Weiner
It’s easy to dismiss a duets album as a phoned-in side venture, probably because so many of them are. But it’s also one of country music’s most beloved traditions, one that Orville Peck executes perfectly with a star-studded cast of friends, from Willie Nelson to Beck to Molly Tuttle. Stampede, with both originals and covers (“Cowboys Are Secretly Fond of Each Other” alongside, of course, Nelson), feels like a thundering roar away from the straight, bro-centric world of country radio and into a land where Margo Price, Mickey Guyton, and Allison Russell are the leaders of the pack, with Peck as the ultimate ringleader. The whole thing ends in a triumphant, queer version of “Rhinestone Cowboy” with TJ Osborne, Waylon Payne, and Fancy Hagood that proves that, sorry bros, country’s always been, and always will be, gloriously gay. —Marissa R. Moss
Lauren Watkins - The Heartbroken Record (Big Loud/Songs & Daughters/Mercury/Republic)
Chances are, you probably didn’t hear the debut album from Nashville native Lauren Watkins, even though she shares a label with country music man of the year/bar/chair Morgan Wallen. That’s because the genre makes it almost impossible to succeed if you’re a woman, especially one trying to make a name in the Music Row mainstream ranks. But The Heartbroken Record is one that simply cannot and should not get lost in the pile: Watkins is a smart and surprising writer and delicately relaxed singer who often feels like a twangier Sheryl Crow (with Crow even appearing on “Set My Heart On Fire”), or like if Loretta Lynn didn’t get married young and went to Ole Miss instead. “Mama, I Made It” is a perfect ode to imperfection, while songs like “Settling Things” are full of killer lines like “we’re all going to heaven, but no one gets the hell out of dodge.” File under one of Don’t Rock The Inbox’s undying categories: country radio in a better world. —Marissa R. Moss
