The 50 Best Albums Of 2024
The death of the album has been proclaimed many times, and after decades of piracy and point-and-click listening, cohesive bodies of work have indeed lost some of their cultural stature. Yet the long player remains a meaningful art form, the gold standard breathlessly anticipated by fan bases across the genre spectrum. Even the most brainless stans are always screaming at their idols to “drop the album.”
Perhaps it’s because we’re greedy for as much music as our favorites will give us — or maybe we still collectively appreciate the experience of a masterfully conceived audio adventure. Though there’s incredible value in assembling a string of great singles, or even just one perfect song, an expertly crafted full-length collection still feels special. And even at a time when the world’s slimiest biz-tech barons are flooding the market with AI slop, 2024 gave us some true works of art.
Below, you’ll find 50 of them selected by Stereogum staffers and contributors. The world is too vast and varied for any list to be the definitive word on the year in music, but this one is full of incredible releases, and it accurately reflects the journey we’ve been on together here at stereogum dot com in 2024. We’ve also compiled our picks into a playlist featuring tracks from all the albums (with one notable exception). Take it all in, and then share your own picks in the comments. Thanks for rocking with us this year. —Chris DeVille
We’re far enough from peak COVID now that “pandemic album” has ceased to be a trope. Cincinnati Ohio arrives so much later to the game, in part, due to how heavily that era weighed on Wussy. Besides the psychological damage we all underwent, the band endured the death of a member not long into lockdown. A deep mourning thus hangs over the band’s classic Midwestern indie rock, a bleariness that spans from the epic introduction “The Great Divide” to the impassioned conclusion “Winged.” Yet despite the plaintive vibes, the album is no slog. Wussy remain one of underground rock’s underrated treasures, and they’ve returned from the brink of oblivion at the top of their game. —Chris DeVille
In a TikTok-dominated landscape, where mystique is a distant concept about as feasible as the Dodo, Mach-Hommy’s unknowability feels precious. And with the sublime #RICHAXXHAITIAN, this underground rap wordsmith (who hides his face behind a silk scarf) feels more tangible than previous iterations and right on the edge of a mainstream breakthrough. We learn he was kept alive by amoxicillin as a child in the conflict-heavy Port-au-Prince (“Sur Le Pont’D’avignon”), but he never wallows in his pain for too long, more preoccupied with “making mountains out of mole hills” like on the bouncy, house-indebted Kaytranada-produced and 03 Greedo-featuring title track. Full of transcendent flutes (“LON LON”) and kooky, accordion-sampling beats (“THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW”) that MF DOOM would have loved, this is Mach-Hommy’s most colorful project yet. Not many can keep up with Black Thought (“COPY COLD”), or compare themselves to philosopher Howard Thurman and have it not feel like complete hyperbole. It is likely #RICHAXXHAITIAN, then, will be remembered as the moment this Haiti-born, New Jersey-raised emcee solidified himself as a rap legend. —Thomas Hobbs
If Critterland is a dark place, it’s only because life in America is frequently just as dark. On Willi Carlisle’s vividly realized third album, the Arkansas folk musician sings about depression, addiction, suicide, and life on the skids with the kind of empathy and conviction you can only muster from seeing it up close. That’s not to say Critterland is unremittingly bleak. Carlisle has weathered the things he writes about, and his hard-won lessons in resilience radiate generosity. Over an unruly assemblage of acoustic guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, and accordion, Carlisle sings out an ad-hoc guide for surviving a society that wants its most vulnerable dead. —Brad Sanders
LL Cool J was never fond of the term “comeback,” but, after dropping his best album in 25 or 30 years, he’ll have to forgive us. Layered in some of the most ambitious concepts of LL’s four-decade career, The FORCE is the resurrection you forgot you wanted, with Q-Tip’s retro surrealistic production conjuring LL’s MC spirit from the land of mid cop shows to distill righteous fury (“Spirit Of Cyrus”) and breathless exhibitions for flow dexterity (“Murdergram Deux”). Ferocious, inventive, and charming, The FORCE proves that, decades removed from his commercial apex, LL continues scaling to new heights. —Peter A. Berry
2nd Grade’s fourth album finds them going full Guided By Voices. In 38 minutes, Scheduled Explosions rips through 23 songs with titles like “Crybaby Semiconductor,” “Ice Cream Social Acid Test,” and “Bureau Of Autumn Sorrows.” The album was home-recorded, and its production veers between bright and sparkly to lo-fi fuzz. Both modes suit vocalist/songwriter Peter Gill, whose wide-eyed power-pop pours classic ’60s pop, Teenage Fanclub, and Alex Chilton into test tubes: Sometimes the songs fizz over and dissolve; sometimes they explode. It’s a series of unpredictable experiments that never feel slight, with a sonic sunniness flecked by cryptic dread. —Keegan Bradford
“I’m actually a very normal amount of horny,” Sabrina Carpenter recently told Vanity Fair ahead of the release of her sixth album Short N’ Sweet, a witty and charismatic record embellished with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it innuendos. Through vivid pop with notes of funk, country, and old-school R&B, Short N’ Sweet doesn’t offer the false claim that female sexuality is radical — instead, Carpenter demonstrates that liking to fuck is as innocuous as the sky is blue, even when finding a man worth fucking seems unlikely. (It often does.) —Abby Jones
The second album by glass beach is not the second glass beach album. The Tacoma-via-LA quartet have left the highly online techno-optimism of their debut back in 2019 where it belongs, but maintained their exuberant chops and ambition, hopping off emo’s fifth wave for capital-p Prog as fascinating and forbidding as the Mariana Trench. Pitch black and eerily bioluminescent, teeming with life and riddled with decay, plastic death reveals its depths even as you never really feel like you’ll get to the bottom of it. —Ian Cohen
Sometimes when Cassandra Jenkins looks up, she sees Mars and Venus, burning bright. Other times, she sees commercial airplanes making their descent over Illinois. On My Light, My Destroyer, Jenkins writes about the unknowably infinite and the crushingly mundane with the same sense of awe, as if her brain simply must refract her experiences as a touring musician into metaphors. Jenkins combines field recordings with warm guitar, horns, and plush synthesizers, a blend that suits her exuberant version of reality, one where William Shatner orbits the Earth, pet store lizards spark contemplation, and Hayley is both a comet and a friend. —Arielle Gordon
It’s strangely fitting that Sturgill Simpson’s first album under a pseudonym also marks the first time he’s consciously returned to an earlier phase of his career. It’s hard not to hear Passage Du Desir, credited to Johnny Blue Skies, as a companion piece to 2016’s A Sailor’s Guide To Earth. Like that album, Passage finds Simpson in widescreen mode, trawling the universe for answers with a sonic palette the size of a spaceship. Kaleidoscopic cosmic country epics, kraut-y psych-rock burners, front-porch folk jams — there’s room here for them all. Remarkably, every sound bears the same authorial stamp. Passage Du Desir isn’t a series of genre studies. It’s Johnny Blue Skies, speaking in his own voice. —Brad Sanders
“Do you think this could ruin your life? ‘Cause I could see it ruining mine,” Madi Diaz asks a new love on Weird Faith’s opening track, “Same Risk” — romantic, kinda, but also brutal. Weird Faith is about the utter terror and mortification of falling in love, or as Diaz has put it, it exists in the moments between saying “I love you” and hearing the reply. A veteran songwriter and sometime Harry Styles collaborator, Diaz’s pop-folk songs are appropriately gut-punching. —Mia Hughes
It’s called Odyssey for good reason. Saxophonist Nubya Garcia, a staple of London’s jazz scene, presents the genre in its most cinematic light here, translating “the notion of truly being on your own path” into 52 minutes that really do feel like a journey. With assists from fellow Black women Esperanza Spalding, Richie Seivwright, and Georgia Anne Muldrow, Garcia uses jazz as connective thread between classical and R&B, conjuring a blustery landscape where life is tough but anything is possible if you’re resilient. —Chris DeVille
It’s hard to tell if sludge rock is getting more distressing on its own or if the dourness of the world is just seeping further into sludge rock, but regardless, New York metal outfit Couch Slut have a strong contender for the most upsetting record of its kind in recent memory. Even before Megan Osztrosits’ pervasive lyrical threads of sexual assault and self-harm take maggot-like root, the sloughs of guitar suffocate like a poisonous marsh. It’s every bit as gnarly an experience as the mutilations at the center of “The Donkey,” hacking until the rotted core of it all is laid bloody and bare. —Natalie Marlin
After nearly three decades of groundbreaking material, Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden no longer feels the need to prove anything. It’s with this ease that he took his time crafting Three, an album that hones in on the music that has solidified his artistic legacy. From shifty, corroding techno with harp twinkles (“Daydream Repeat”) to guitar harmonics and spectral synths alongside ice skate-shredding textures, Three displays Hebden’s ear for contrast. In the process, Hebden honors the path he’s paved for himself. —Margaret Farrell
They’re five for five. Vampire Weekend albums don’t come out often, but whenever they do, the band brings that same combination of sharp writing, inventive hooks, and bugged-out compositional vision. Maybe the songs on Only God Was Above Us weren’t as immediate as the ones on past records, but they’re pulling moves they never could’ve pulled before. When the Soul II Soul “Back To Life” drums come crashing in on “Mary Boone,” you might find your soul levitating out of your body. —Tom Breihan
High Vis have mined the sounds of British subcultures and the emotional tolls of austerity better than almost any guitar band from the past decade. Smokey-eyed goths, Outbreak Fest attendees, and middle-aged dads who swear the Stone Roses’ infamous Spike Island gig sounded great, actually can all find something to love. Their third LP, Guided Tour, affirms their poignant anthem-writing, post-punk beauty, and vein-popping punk cred — anyone who says hardcore can’t be pretty is talking shite. —Lizzie Manno
Mabe Fratti’s work contrasts art-pop melodies with the moodiness of trip-hop, jazz, and post-rock. The Guatemala-born, Mexico City-based artist’s latest album finds her leaning left-field cello and smokey singing against a baroque backdrop — painted by a host of collaborators, including Fratti’s romantic partner Héctor Tosta. Sentir Que No Sabes is notably dynamic, dovetailing between bouts of murky experimentation and euphoric surrealism. The end result calls to mind Arthur Russell and Nancy Sinatra in equal measure. —Ted Davis
Who hasn’t at some point looked at a dog and felt envious? That furry little guy doesn’t have to worry about anything more than what his DNA has already programmed. This is one such trench Drug Church’s Patrick Kindlon falls into on the raucous and roiling Prude. The album races by in a jet-fueled 28 minutes and leaves the listener spun out on Kindlon’s honed-in anecdotes about a friend who faked his own kidnapping to get drug money or what could have happened to a kid on a “Missing” poster. Drug Church might have built an empire on skewering mob mentality, but Prude demonstrates they are equally, if not more so, adept at converting macro to micro. —Rachel Brodsky
Hovvdy songs have always felt like a close friendship you can revisit years later, with that immediate connection never fading. Hovvdy is no different, offering intricately framed vignettes of love and grief with raw, intimate soundscapes in a variety of shapes — glitchy pop, lo-fi alt-rock, and lush Southern rock. Each track feels like a prayer to be closer to the ones we love the most, creating a space outside of time in a world where moments often slip through our fingers. —Margaret Farrell
If you became acquainted with Sam Shepherd through Promises, his 2021 collaboration with Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra, you might associate Floating Points with jazzy ambient. But Shepherd came up in the 2000s UK dance scene, touting a stylish club sound. To describe his newest solo full-length, Cascade, as a return to form would be an understatement. Across nine computer-generated tracks, foghorn basslines and brittle synth leads crescendo above four-on-the-floor grooves. The whole thing seems about to combust at any turn, cementing that Shepherd’s comparably buttoned-up efforts have hardly detracted from his festival friendly nature. —Ted Davis
Part of the allure of When I’m Called, the fifth album by the Georgia-born folksinger Jake Xerxes Fussell, lies in the histories of the songs he’s chosen to interpret. “Andy” was written by the outsider artist Maestro Gaxiola, whom Fussell met through the documentarian Les Blank; the title track is a scrap of found text spliced with lines from the bluegrass standard “Look Up Look Down That Lonesome Road.” Several selections came to Fussell via the late folklorist Art Rosenbaum, a mentor and collaborator whose influence is a throughline of When I’m Called. But the album’s deepest pleasures aren’t academic. With his languorous drawl and intuitive arrangements — sometimes stripped down to guitar and voice, other times lush with strings and horns — Fussell makes the music as easy to sink into as an old recliner. No background reading required. —Brad Sanders
Through dense, shoegazing riffs and stark lyricism, DIIV’s hard-won latest paints a bleak, albeit truthful picture of our current landscape: a hyper-capitalist Paradise Lost where “rotating villains profit off suffering” while “the sun erupts.” But DIIV aren’t being high horse-y; far from it. With its own chaotic history, this group is familiar with submitting to its worst impulses, then making the conscious choice to rebuild. The result of those efforts should be a well of optimism for us all. —Rachel Brodsky
The Cure’s first album in 16 years doesn’t diversify or master the group’s tenebrous pop palette, but that’s hardly the point. Robert Smith still sounds achingly glorious — that vampire-looking millionaire trying to “hack” aging should contact goth-rock’s poster boy — and the band’s vast soundworld has a dizzying plushness, without sacrificing any edge. If Songs Of A Lost World becomes their swan song and Smith disappears for a life of sheep tending, it’s a delicious finale. —Lizzie Manno
Since their impressive 2019 debut Dogrel, Fontaines D.C. have mastered the art of mesmerizingly dreary post-punk. Three albums later, the Irish group has taken a risk with Romance, a record that flirts with hip-hop on the unforgettable “Starburster,” jangle-pop on the sweet “Bug” and “Favourite,” and grunge on the lacerating “Death Kink.” Romance is a satisfyingly diverse experience by a band that was already incredibly skilled at its niche; it’s Fontaines D.C.’s best album yet. —Danielle Chelosky
With her natural talent for turning personal demons into something warm, pretty, and quintessentially British, My Method Actor feels like Nilüfer Yanya’s most accomplished project. Filled with fuzzy, In Rainbows-esque guitars and trademark buttery yet intimate vocals, the album asks probing questions about heartbreak (“Keep On Dancing”) and even takes a risk with more of an Americana sound (the wistful “Call It Love”). Her brilliance is perhaps best summed up amid the slightly tremoring cymbals on “Binding,” a song that feels like having a heart-to-heart with your best friend during a pitch-black 3 a.m. drive through the city. Yanya summarises so many of the pressures of contemporary London life, with stream-of-consciousness lyrics summarizing the inner dialogue of exhausted millennials and zoomers. My Method Actor is that rare modern musical diary that feels totally sincere and not rooted in therapy speak — something truly capable of making the lost feel found. —Thomas Hobbs
The few progressive death metal bands that successfully incorporate clean vocals and more melodic compositions are the ones whose sheer nerdiness nullifies any suspicions of ulterior motives for broader appeal. Blood Incantation’s third album is simultaneously their most palatable and their most daunting. Absolute Elsewhere convincingly pulls off passages of soulful, Floydian space rock, but it does so within two 20-minute tracks that keep the band’s pummeling, extraterrestrial-obsessed identity intact. In mining everything from dub to krautrock to jazz fusion, Blood Incantation only strengthen their underlying theme. —Patrick Lyons
Mannequin Pussy have never been quiet or reserved. Their fourth album I Got Heaven doesn’t feel as much like a breakthrough, then, as it does a culmination of everything that’s led up to it. Here, Marisa Dabice and company swing harder than ever — the riffs huge, the melodies colossal — resulting in a half-hour blast of punk-informed indie rock that never loses steam. I guess that’s just the kind of thing that happens when you believe in your own righteousness. —Abby Jones
Sometimes you think the rock vanguards of decades past have done everything they can to exert their cool, but Kim Gordon was never content to just stay another predictable rock star. Case in point: The former Sonic Youth member’s latest solo record is somewhere between noise rager, avant-shred bombardment, and… experimental trap? But Gordon wholeheartedly sells this blend, lacing each hypnotizingly blown-out beat with blistering, disaffected screeds against male entitlement and commercialization. It’s as lacerating and riveting as anything she’s ever done, and may well be one of the definitive innovations of an artist who’s done nothing but. —Natalie Marlin
At the near-midpoint of Endlessness, a delicate piano melody lays the groundwork for the strings to simmer together and bloom. A distant wisp of a voice floats behind this gossamer curtain, eventually merging with glittery synths — the distinctions disappearing between the vocal and the instrumental, the analog and the digital. Nala Sinephro’s hypnotic ambient jazz exists in the in-between states, each continuum slipping subtly into the next, a record that feels like falling asleep and waking up all at once. —Grace Robins-Somerville
Michael Gordon came of age in the days of ripping web-hosted files and YouTube videos to his computer, discovering Nile Rodgers and fellow New Jerseyian Bruce Springsteen through the reduced bitrates generated by his pirating software. Gordon, who performs as Mk.gee, filters those compressed memories through his electric guitar, which recalls rain falling in a zen garden, wind whistling through organ pipes, and yes, his hero Prince. Mk.gee wields his instrument like it’s sharp as a diamond and soft as melted butter, his vocals lending pathos to support the six-stringed star of the show. —Arielle Gordon
In 2022, Chat Pile broke out with the critically acclaimed debut LP God’s Country, and Cool World is a reminder of why the Oklahoma City band deserves praise. Though the album opens with the vicious anthem “I Am Dog Now,” an ode to animalistic derangement, the songs that follow are more calculated and bleak, such as the seethingly evil “Funny Man” or the pulsing “Masc.” Cool World gets under your skin in the best way, serving as a portrait of darkness that sucks you into the alluring void. —Danielle Chelosky
Erika de Casier’s studious dance music take on ‘90s and Y2K R&B is hair-raisingly beautiful, each track a fascinating contradiction of weightlessness and tactility. The singer-songwriter, producer, and NewJeans collaborator is a key figure in Copenhagen’s left-field pop boom, and her third album, Still, is as sexy and biting as ever. “You know the walls are tainted/ With the love you didn’t feel,” de Casier sings, her lamenting soulfulness landing like a quiet avalanche. —Lizzie Manno
Bright doesn’t necessarily mean good. It could be a nuclear blast, or your house going up in flames. Adrianne Lenker’s not certain that everything’s gonna be okay, and that’s what makes the present so breathtakingly beautiful. She greets heartbreak with gratitude for the love from which it came, the fear of a dying world with going for a swim while we’ve still got water. Appropriately, Lenker and her band recorded analog, without headphones and without any second listens. That chemistry and trust is the warming fire at the record’s heart. —Mia Hughes
It feels too easy, too obvious, and too simplistic to frame Ka’s ninth and final studio album as a premeditation on mortality that would take on the additional weight of his death less than a month after its release. But Kaseem Ryan — prolific rapper, firefighter, lifelong New Yorker — spent his whole career contending with grief in the past, present, and future tense. Even if it hadn’t been his swan song, The Thief Next To Jesus would still be an unmatched feat of storytelling, faith, and fearlessness. —Grace Robins-Somerville
It’s about time Wild Pink made a proper Rock Album. Since 2017, the band has turned out gorgeous heartland rock with increasingly lush production. But their sound has always been intimate, centered around singer John Ross’ lips-on-mic murmur, even as live shows remained rowdier and woolier. Dulling The Horns was recorded live, and the result is anything but subdued. All over the album, big slabs of distorted guitars loom, crackling and propulsive, as Ross gets more self-reflective than ever. “Made a life out of a detour,” he sings at the end of “The Fences Of Stonehenge,” as declarative a mission statement as the band has ever had. On the next song, he warns, “Sometimes a dream ain’t meant to be lived in/ But my stupid ass is always searching.” —Keegan Bradford
How does Josh Tillman keep doing this? How does he continually suffer existential crises, write about them with scalpel-sharp precision, and then transform them into sprawling velvet-drapery folk-rock epics that he sings with lounge-lizard gravitas? Every time we might think we’re over the whole Father John Misty thing, he comes through with an image or a vignette that won’t leave our heads. Mahashmashana might be the most heavily orchestrated FJM record, and the music matches the depraved grandeur of his societal reflections. —Tom Breihan
In 2024, Chief Keef occupies a strange position. His zeitgeist-y heyday is far behind him, but his influence endured while he quietly, more patiently hit a second peak in the latter half of his career. Following years of niche fan favorites, Keef delivered a sequel to Almighty So, a beloved 2013 mixtape dropped at the height of his notoriety. It’s just as infectious as his drill-defining early work, but it also retains the weirdness that’s crept into his music ever since he started self-producing. Purists may prefer Dirty Nachos, the Mike Will Made It collaboration released earlier in the year, but Almighty So 2 is the rare maximalist reach by a veteran rapper that doesn’t sacrifice an ounce of that initial, star-making adrenaline. —Patrick Lyons
Gouge Away all but broke up in the years before their third album, Deep Sage. Constant touring ground them down, and the pandemic finished the job. Deep Sage brought the hardcore punks back to life. It’s less heavy than ever, instead going all-in on gritted-teeth tension, like the nth day of sitting in a van with the same four to seven people rubbing on your nerves and a personal life back home that you’ve had no time to smooth out. All recorded live and sonically unvarnished, the effect is purgative. —Mia Hughes
This Is Lorelei - Box For Buddy, Box For Star (Double Double Whammy)
Going sober and getting single are life choices that usually lead to some degree of greater stability, but the initial aftermath can make you go a little crazy. Written in a headspace where clarity becomes its own form of chaos, This Is Lorelei’s proper debut, Box For Buddy, Box For Star, is loaded with stream-of-conscious diatribes, rambling introspections, and some of the finest, purest indie-pop melodies this side of 69 Love Songs. —Eli Enis
Look: those Big 3 conversations are annoying, but if you’re going to have them, Tyler, The Creator will have to be included. After dropping a series of shapeshifting albums between 2017 and 2022, the Odd Future founder leveled up again with Chromakopia, an electric exercise in flamboyant versatility. Here, Tyler’s mad genius is splayed out all around, like a kid who’s got too many toys for his room to stay neat. For “Sticky,” he taps in with Sexyy Red, GloRilla, and Lil Wayne for a bop that’s midpoint between a cheerleading chant and club anthem. Meanwhile, on tracks like “Like Him” he turns off the irony for some of the most earnest introspection of his career. —Peter A. Berry
Off the bat, Wishy get in your face with Triple Seven opener “Sick Sweet,” the distorted guitars bursting with color and Kevin Krauter sing-shouting with contagious ardor even before Nina Pitchkites joins in with gorgeous harmonies. The enrapturing moments on Triple Seven are aplenty; “Game” explodes with energy, attempting to outrun itself, and “Little While” slides into hypnotic Cocteau Twins-like dream pop. No matter what Wishy are doing, they’re sweeping you into a sonic landscape that you’ll never want to leave. —Danielle Chelosky
Is there a band that’s been consistently great for as long as Los Campesinos! have? Once harbingers of scrappy, aughts twee pop, the Welsh band has only grown more refined, more razor-sharp, and perhaps most of all, more timely. All Hell is for the jaded punks, the millennial doomscrollers who’d consider having kids if the world wasn’t so cursed. But as agonized as All Hell can feel, there’s an air of hopefulness to it, too. Sometimes anger and sadness are the most effective acts of resistance. —Abby Jones
How do you solve a problem like Doechii? The TDE label didn’t have an answer. She’s a furiously creative force, a hard-ass Florida rap technician with a gift for explosive pop melodies and a visionary auteurist streak. She should be a star, but the momentum from her 2023 hit “What It Is (Block Boy)” dissipated. So Doechii solved it herself, posting fiery and cinematic freestyles and then collecting her tracks into the euphorically hungry, stylistically divergent mixtape Alligator Bites Never Heal. Over 19 freewheeling songs, Doechii shows all the things that she can do, and all of them are good reasons to stay out of her way. —Tom Breihan
Hitting play on Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee feels like drinking a cold beer in a wood-paneled bar at the end of the world. As Patrick Flegel cycles through confrontational guitar exercises and haunting girl-group pop, you can’t relax, but you can settle into an uncanny groove that oozes magic. Diamond Jubilee is two hours of unrushed wandering through a lo-fi escape, catchy to the point of sticky, tarnishing in its abrasiveness yet sun-baked to perfection. —Devon Chodzin
Phil Elverum saw a raven last week, but it’s no big deal — he sees them all the time. He’s also got a standing lunch with a fish, and you might not believe him, but he swears he heard a whale talking to him the other day. On Night Palace, Elverum studies his surroundings on the San Juan Islands off the Washington coast, listening to the wind. It leads to some heavy epiphanies (see “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization”), but it’s also his lightest album in years: His young daughter provides vocals on the metal freakout “Swallowed Alive,” one of its liveliest cuts was inspired by a sketch from I Think You Should Leave, and you’ll never guess who voices that aforementioned fish. —Arielle Gordon
Despite the modernity of its stucco facade, 20th century psychedelia is a muse for the Los Angeles underground. Jessica Pratt’s time-forgotten allure makes her the most authentically bewitching figure currently operating in Southern California. Where Pratt’s prior records have been spidery and mystical, her latest, Here In The Pitch, plays like a heartfelt affirmation. Whispery vocals rest atop honeyed production. The album is carried by muted guitar chords and jingly percussion, seemingly beamed straight from the ornate lounges of Old Hollywood. For as cobwebbed as Here In The Pitch’s exterior may be, the gems inside of its treasure chest sparkle with hope. —Ted Davis
Magdalena Bay’s music strikes a careful balance on multiple axes. They balance the prog and psych of their early career with the sugar-dipped pop for which they’ve since became true fiends; they spool out extremely online cyberpunk concepts, but their best songs charm you equally well without the lore bible. The backstory to Imaginal Disk is as ambitious as anything they’ve done — posthuman evolution with LaserDiscs, basically — but the record’s perfectly luxuriant without it. Mag Bay lean a bit harder into prog-rock structure: song suites, tempo shifts all over, spacey arpeggiated bridges, half-time breakdowns. Yet the hooks are as immaculate as ever, and at times vocalist Mica Tenenbaum sounds like she’s biohacked her voice box to sound exactly like Kylie Minogue. The result is primo sophistipop: a gorgeous portal that leads to a whole world. —Katherine St. Asaph
We’ll always have Katie Crutchfield’s scratchy, wounded early records, and now we’ve got something that might be even better. In her long, gradual journey into country and folk, Crutchfield has discovered new shades of her already-spectacular voice and new ways to convey serene yearning. On Tigers Blood, she teams with a group of ace musicians that includes MJ Lenderman, Brad Cook, and Spencer Tweedy, to make a set of amber-hued instant classics. When you play Tigers Blood on a sunny afternoon, it makes the light look different. —Tom Breihan
A mega-anticipated superstar event album arrives out of the blue and then actually delivers. This doesn’t happen often enough, but when it does, it’s one of the greatest thrills that popular music can provide. On GNX, Kendrick Lamar builds on the momentum of an historic rap-feud ass-whooping with a terse, tough, populist ride-out record. He continues to settle scores, but that takes a backseat to his embrace of a thriving LA underground that’s clearly energized him. Anthems like “squabble up” and “tv off” smash the Nos button, while mellower jams like “dodger blue” hit nearly as hard after multiple listens. To experience a record like this in real time with the rest of the world is an absolute gift. It’s a party, a spectacle, a victory parade, and we all get to take part. —Tom Breihan
Every generation gets its own slacker poet laureate. In the early 2020s, Jake Lenderman has emerged as the drawling bard of Zoomer indie rock. The Southern-fried Pavement songs of Manning Fireworks are full of savvy character studies of America’s most pathetic men: the former baby (now a jerk) who tries to pick up women by reading the Bible in public, or the smartwatch enthusiast who parks his houseboat at the Himbo Dome, or the failure-to-launch case too distracted by Guitar Hero to venture out into the world. Lenderman avoids a descent into smarminess by reserving some sympathy for even the most clueless of his protagonists — “we all got work to do,” after all. More importantly, he pumps his songs full of pop appeal and threads them with some of the raddest guitar work in recent memory. —Chris DeVille
Charli XCX - Brat & Brat And It's Completely Different But Also Still Brat (Atlantic)
One evening this past July, I found myself partaking in one of the most glamorous indulgences known to humankind: crying on the street in New York. I was inconsolably weeping, trudging towards home, when a man on a bicycle cruised in my direction. Affixed to his vehicle was a backpack-sized speaker blasting Charli XCX’s “Von Dutch.” With sob-induced sinus congestion muffling my voice, I couldn’t resist murmuring along: “It’s OK to just admit that you’re jealous of me.” The bicyclist offered me a subtle nod, as if an angel was sent my way to remind me in the throes of sadness: You’re not even 30. Think of all the drugs you haven’t tried yet. Your life has only just begun.
Such is the spirit of Brat, an album that argues that messy, melodramatic existentialism is inevitable, but so is the next party. It bottles up the anxieties of no-longer-young-but-not-yet-middle-aged adulthood — Is this girl my friend or my enemy? Should I quit my birth control? Am I “cool”? — between days-long benders, treating both facets of Charli’s personality not as conflicting traits, but as complementary parts of a whole. Even Charli XCX, a party girl with the Boiler Room set to prove it, doesn’t pretend she’s immune to the effects of grief, generational trauma, and suicidal ideation — but she doesn’t pretend she’s the sole victim, either.
Not only did Charli accomplish that tricky tonal balance, she did it so effectively that she upended an entire culture, catalyzing a ubiquitous, once-in-a-generation phenomenon that somehow left listeners craving more. And just when we thought she might’ve been slowing down, she outdid herself with a track-by-track remix album featuring a who’s-who roster of guest performers. Charli’s emotional self-awareness and her indisputable dedication to the art make Brat’s moments of debauchery feel all the more rewarding. When you can’t help but cry on the street, why not paint the town neon green? —Abby Jones
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