Tim’s 2024 Music Year in Review
The bops. The beefs. And the solace in sound.
THEY SAY POLITICS IS DOWNSTREAM OF CULTURE, but sometimes things flow in the other direction. Powerful art has often been born of times of struggle. Just ask any boomer about the protest songs of the 1960s. The soulful wails for civil rights gave us gems from Willie King to Nina to Marvin. Later, police brutality inspired much of the hip-hop canon. Examples abound.
So on the one hand, it makes sense that this consequential year for our democracy was the best year for music this decade—by far.
But I just can’t bring myself to attribute the music of 2024 to our national Trumpian convulsion. In my stops around the country during this most heinous of campaigns, I saw some incredible performances from most of the artists I’ll highlight below. But basically none of them had anything of substance to say about our political moment.
In Brooklyn, I joined the hipster dads singing along with a tune about leaving their hometowns and changing the way they dress and I saw a model and actress, wife to the world’s sexiest man, crooning about love, motherhood, and life’s myriad blessings.
In D.C., I watched a TikTok trendster give noodley fuckboy energy for an affected crowd of twentysomethings there mostly for the merch and the social-media posts. In Barcelona, a disco diva dropped an AIDS-era throwback performance for a gaggle of European gays protected from the worst by the PREP in their kit. And in New Orleans, a different diva belted out a heaping dose of nostalgia for the audience’s unremembered 1970s.
I streamed along from my couch as a Los Angeles stadium went crazy while the song of the year repeated over and over and over and over and over and over. What was the message that resonated so broadly? Well, it was the mic-drop moment in a hip-hop beef that essentially boils down to this: The best rapper in the world doesn’t like it when people compare him to a guy who used to be on the Disney Channel and may or may not creep on teen girls.
The most relevant political crossover of the year was possibly the most frivolous. It came when summer It Girl Charli XCX gave the Democratic nominee the imprimatur of her brand: “kamala IS brat,” she tweeted. Simple. Elegant. But what was “brat,” exactly?
Well it was defined by a distinct green-apple color and this cheeky explanation by Charli: “You’re just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and, like, maybe says some, like, dumb things sometimes. Who feels herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of like, parties through it, is very honest, is very blunt, little bit volatile.”
How was Kamala brat? Is she a little messy? Is that a compliment? Nobody really knew or cared to think about it that deeply. Brat’s most emotional track was about the falling out and reconnecting of two female music starlets who worked through their envy and the manner in which social media and the industry had torn them apart.
Cute? Yes! A musical triumph? Totally! But “Chilly Winds Don’t Blow” this record was not.
And that’s okay!
All these shows and records brought me and millions of others real connection, joy, inspiration, beauty, soulfulness, and love. I reveled in every moment of every concert. Every hour spent among the musically inclined was one spent away from my box of screams. If only there were time for more.
But through it all, earnest tales of real, consequential hardship or #resistance were hard to come by.
So maybe that is the tale of our moment: A decadent people battling the tedium of modernity chose a chaotic clown to lead them just so they can feel something. Or maybe there’s no connection at all between my twin passions, politics and poetics.
Or then again, maybe someone up above just blessed us with the best year of music escapism in a decade as a little gift to help us cope with our numbing reality.
I hope that’s the case, because God knows I needed it.
BEFORE WE GET TO THE LIST, I want to offer the same caveat that I have over the past four years: I am merely a humble political content man, dad, and music buff. I don’t have the schooling to judge these albums on musicianship, and given the craziness that was my 2024 I sure as shit didn’t have the time I once did to scour the internet for deep-cut gems. This is simply a collection of new music that resonated with me when it came over the transom, and I want to share it in the hope you, too, might find here something new to love.
In that spirit, here’s a Spotify playlist of my favorite 2024 music in case you’d rather just listen:
Now on to the list of a dozen records. These are grouped by category, not ranked—except for the top three.
Rap Gawds
12. Kendrick Lamar, GNX
There is no roundup of 2024 that does not include the world’s best rapper and his song of the year “Not Like Us.” After dominating the summer with his Drake beef, Kendrick released a record in the fall with a few tracks straight from the “Not Like Us” mold, a Nas homage, and very few misses.
Top track: “Man at the Garden.”
11. Doechii, Alligator Bites Never Heal
Kendrick called this Tampa rapper the “hardest” out in the game right now and this mixtape shows why. Over the course of nineteen tracks, she mixes straight rap with melodic R&B grooves and highly produced jazz rap with a couple of well-placed ’70s samples. It’s a delight.
Top track: “Beverly Hills.”
Tim Bait
10. Car7iel & Paco Amoroso, Baño Maria
My obsession with these boys began with this pantheon-level Tiny Desk Concert from October that you must watch.
I can’t speak to the songwriting, given that it’s almost all in Spanish and the first English lyrics on the record were the devastating reveal that “we’ve been fucking the same girl.” But that disappointment didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for these Latin bops.
9. The Dare, What’s Wrong With New York?
8. The Swedish Railway Orchestra, Once Upon a Time. . .
Many people shorthand the Dare as “GenZ LCD Soundsystem.” And while there are certainly some echoes in the synth-loving front men, the real heir to James Murphy is Swedish Railway Orchestra’s Rob Smith, an Irish musician and producer who basically doesn’t tour. The parallels are so great that the track “Obelisco” is basically a straight Murphy ripoff. But hey, what musician hasn’t ripped someone off? And the departures are just as satisfying as the homage.
As for the Dare, while the teens at the show were there for the TikTok bops, this dad was most impressed with “Elevation,” his only ballad.
Top tracks:
Sad Songs
7. Bill Ryder-Jones, Iechyd Da
My melancholy airplane record, Iechyd Da (Welsh for “good health”) is operatic, mature, layered, and achingly beautiful.
The album includes James Joyce spoken word, a children’s choir, violin intros, a sample of a 1960s Brazilian song and, well, lots of other pretentious shit. But goddamn if it isn’t pretentiously wonderful. There are a few moments that are nothing short of soul-stirring.
Top track: “A Bad Wind Blows in My Heart.”
6. Adrianne Lenker, Bright Future
5. Christopher Owens, I Wanna Run Barefoot
My favorite sad queer gal and sad boi albums of 2024 are both spinoffs from more prominent indie acts—and both will rip your heart out. Lenker is the lead singer from the duo Big Thief, but for me this solo record surpasses anything in the band’s oeuvre. In part, it’s the unique texture of the sound, which she put straight to tape.
Owens is the songwriter behind the legendary Millennial hipster band Girls and he’s back from a period of darkness where he got clean, got in a motorcycle wreck, got dumped by his fiancée, and spent some time living out of his car. In other words, this is a man who has learned about life’s unfairness and the fleeting nature of “buzz.” I Wanna Run Barefoot is a hauntingly beautiful record about death and heaven and crippling loneliness that dispenses with Girls’ twee jangle. It will always have a special place in my heart as my November 2024 sad-walk companion.
In fact, both records pair perfectly with a post-election winter wallow, if that’s something you need.
Top tracks:
“Sadness As a Gift” (Lenker)
“This Is My Guitar” (Owens)
Tier Bey
4. Beyoncé, Cowboy Carter
For starters, the BALLS on Beyoncé to immediately drop a country album at the close of her stadium tour and then bully the old white country world into recognizing her as legitimate. A truly amazing feat. “Texas Hold ’Em,” “Alligator Tears,” and “Ya Ya” are earworms that burrowed throughout the year we were all survivin’. The record did have some clunkers, though, which keeps it out of the rarefied 2024 highest echelon.
Top tracks:
Tier One
Here’s the thing about the next three records: Any of them would have been my #1 in 2021 or 2023. It’s a murderers’ row that was almost impossible to rank. The emotion I feel most strongly when I look back on them is gratitude—gratitude for discovering that I can still love new music this completely. There was a minute where I worried that that phase of life had passed and I was fully pivoting into nostalgia mode. It was a gift to learn that wasn’t the case.
With that, here are my records of the year.
3. MJ Lenderman, Manning Fireworks
At any given moment it feels like there is one indie singer-songwriter who captures the zeitgeist and there is no doubt that MJ currently holds that crown. His songwriting is impeccable, with an unteachable ability to tell a story that guys of a certain age will connect with, employing just enough humor to create the comfortable emotional distance us soft bois require.
He is also the guitarist on his ex-girlfriend’s more hard-core rock band Wednesday. Their 2023 record Rat Saw God was in my #3 slot last year. I’m a full stan.
Top tracks (all of them, really):
2. Charli XCX, Brat
The best pop record of the decade, where not a single second misses. The most culturally relevant pop album (non-T-Swift category) since When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? Or Homecoming? Or The Fame Monster?
Charli made the leap this year from an artist whose fandom was so limited to gay culture that I once heard it joked that knowing two of her songs qualified you to receive the monkeypox vaccine to one whose fandom is so expansive that she can fill stadiums with moms I talk to at school pickup. She did it by doing something crazy: She decided to make a bunch of bops with no forced authenticity, no pretend struggle sesh, and no affected homages to the great divas. Instead, she wanted us to dance and sweat our asses off. We obliged.
Top tracks (again, all of them, really):
“Girl, So Confusing” (remix feat: Lorde)
1. Magdalena Bay, Imaginal Disk
I wish I had deep thoughts about this record other than the fact that I love every single track. It’s beautiful and boppy and fresh and it brought me hours of joy in a year where I really needed that. The Miami duo give off theater-kid energy in the best possible meaning of that phrase. The album is pop but it’s goofy and not formulaic. It’s a commentary on being human at a moment where AI mania pervades. It is produced to the gills, eschewing the dorm-room Billie aesthetic for something fuller. The record ends with its best track, a mythic tale of the artist’s journey to actualization in a world of ennui.
Would it be so for us all.
Top tracks (yep, all of them):