Best Of 2024 (So Far)

The 25 (or 26) albums that kept me coming back over and over again

When people talk about “music today” - and usually in disparaging terms - they are more precisely talking about the music business and the thin slice of sounds that that lumbering behemoth chooses to promote and use to over-saturate the culture. Whether or not you believe the quality of mass-market music has declined since some imagined golden era, surely you can’t believe that such entropy has affected all music everywhere. Case in point: the 25 (really 26, I cheated on one) releases that make up my mid-year list for 2024.

As usual, this is far from the end of the story about the years’s absolute musical excellence - these are just the albums that kept me coming back time and time again, becoming stalwart companions to my days. I recently chatted with someone in the Sound Opinions Facebook group who revealed they hadn’t listened to any album more than twice in about five years. I hope that sad fact is not true for you - but if it is, may you find the remedy here. 

If I’ve written about the album previously, follow the link for my thoughts. Click “play” here or below to listen to tracks from all but one of the albums included.

A note about the playlist: See below for the one missing album from this year’s Spotify playlist. Also, there are some long tracks here. Those who make the best music of our time are not concerned about fitting neatly into playlists. I hope the readers of AnEarful are curious and intentional enough listeners to go the extra mile and give everything a chance!

1. Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee When I included a track from this sprawling masterpiece in my A Song For Friday series, I noted that from the first listen I was “…captivated by [Patrick] Flegel’s mastery of a variety of song forms, from 50s soda-shoppe pop to 60s jangle and Velvety hypnotics to icy 80s post-punk, 90s dance funk to 21st century indie rock and beyond.” I hope the fact that this two-hour album is only available on YouTube or Flegel’s Geocities site hasn’t kept you from its many, many wonders. 

2. Faye Webster - Underdressed At The Symphony On her fifth album, Webster doubles down on her sublime combo of bullet-proof hooks, lush production, and lyrics that slalom through wry, witty, and vulnerable poles like a gold-medal Olympian. As I wrote earlier this year: “There’s no shortage of “sweet escape” on Underdressed At The Symphony, which also includes the wonderfully oddball Lego Ring, featuring Webster’s middle-school friend Lil Yachty, and Lifetime, a sumptuous ballad which may just be the slow-dance song of the year.”

3. Michael Hersch - Poppaea “Typically for Hersch, he zeroes in without hesitation on very modern themes of trauma, resilience, and self-actualization. His longtime collaborator, the genius soprano Ah Young Hong, puts in her finest, most concentrated performance, which is saying something.”

4. Or Best Offer - Center “Or Best Offer is one of those bands that put aside the conventions of music to tap into its primordial power.”

5. Moor Mother - The Great Bailout Dark history calls for a dark telling and on this often pitch-black album, Moor Mother delves into and dissects the British role in the slave trade. The title refers to the 1835 act that had the U.K. government paying the equivalent of billions of dollars in reparations to slaveholders - not slaves - to compensate for “property” lost due to abolition and emancipation. As she noted on Twitter, “This is not entertainment. This is education.” But I would argue that it is more simply art: an impressionistic series of sound paintings created in collaboration with the London Contemporary Orchestra and a variety of extraordinary vocalists (Kyle Kidd and Lonnie Holley among them) with Moor Mother’s commanding semi-spoken word anchoring the album in her poetic texts. Standouts include All The Money, which interrogates the sources of Britain’s wealth (“Thieves disguised as explorers”), and the devastating South Sea, which features Sistazz Of The Nitty Gritty, and includes these arresting lines:

When the white man declares himself Science he is no longer human
The sound of everything at once
The sound of babies screaming for mothers
Mothers gagging in agony for the return of their babies, not from the womb
Fear in the form, fear in the form, fear in another form

While there is more conventional beauty here than in albums like The Drift or Bish-Bosch, Scott Walker may be the only other artist willing to similarly confront humanity’s darkest histories in a deeply empathic, honest, and artistic way. The Great Bailout is essential listening for our times.

6. Anastasia Coope - Darning Woman “Coope’s approach to songwriting, singing, and production results in obdurate creations that seem to exist out of time. They could be playground chants from a hidden society - or transmissions from another world.”

7. Talea Ensemble and the Harlem Chamber Players - Julius Eastman: Femenine “It manages to channel the pioneering spirit of the 1974 live recording within a sleeker, stunningly engineered context that hits all the marks for a contemporary Eastman record.”

8. Arushi Jain - Delight “The result is an utter triumph that sounds completely effortless.”

9. Friko - Where We’ve Been, Where We Go From Here “…an extraordinary range of sounds from gnashing, gnarly guitars and pounding pianos to delicate, string-laden chamber folk, it’s a fully rounded album made by and for musical omnivores.”

10. h. pruz - No Glory “A series of organically crafted songs featuring delicately intertwining guitars, piano, vocals, clarinet, and cello, the album also includes a wealth of unexpected details that seem to be direct transmissions from the instincts of the players.”

11. Elsa Hewitt - Chaos Emeralds “Anchored by overlapping keyboard loops and decorated by an array of sharp and satisfying little sounds, each track acts as a facet of the whole glorious gem of a record.”

12. The Slashsound Sound: I-R - Detroit Densha Seikatsu “These two understand sound thoroughly and deploy heavy beats and complex distortions with the mastery of architects.” And: kuuma - koniwa “…sheer heaven, a constantly unfurling tapestry of looping cells and swooping lines that feels like an enveloping forest of sound.”

13. Hannah Frances - Keeper Of The Shepherd From the complex, evocative guitar figure that opens the album to the way Frances rushes into the first verse of Bronwyn, there’s an urgency to everything she does on this brilliant album. The mastery displayed throughout this sixth release by the Chicago-based singer-songwriter-guitarist is at times nearly overwhelming, as on Bronwyn and the title track, which rushes by at a fast gallop. Frances and her co-producer, Kevin Copeland, make tons of smart choices, too, like the clarinet (Hunter Diamond) that acts as almost a second voice on Woolgathering, or the swooping strings on Floodplain. But it’s Frances’s voice that centers the album, a wonder of natural beauty and exquisite control. Her lyrics also reveal a true poet’s eye, with the overlapping concerns of the songs (nature, the ways of the heart, etc.) lending a thematic bent and building drama to the album. The opening stanza of Brownyn gives a good idea of what you can expect from the album:

the brilliance of the day waits for you to wake again,
patient in the way i waited for you to love me again
bronwyn, i lost the song
gone when i sang
bronwyn, i lost the way home where i knew
the ground smokes as it burns to hell

While I haven’t had a chance to delve into Frances’s back catalog, I can confidently say that with Keeper Of The Shepherd, she vaults herself into the top rank of singer-songwriters today. Don’t wait any longer to listen.

14. MIZU - Forest Scenes “Flutter, which comes near the center of the album (just after Pavane, already a modern classic), is a perfect example, its combination of a languorous cello melody, field recordings, and electronic sounds and rhythms creating a aural world in which to immerse yourself and perhaps experiment with some new identities of your own.”

15. Frances Chang - Psychedelic Anxiety

if you really think about it.
we don’t really have that much control over ourselves.
i mean we can try. but i guess what i’m trying to say is
we don’t have control over
what we don’t yet have control over

Those lyrics, which Chang relates conversationally in Rate My Aura, the last track on her second full-length, give you an idea of her slightly aslant perspective on life. That POV translates into songs with the wayward unpredictability of modern art song and the directness of folk music. Chang often records by herself, layering guitars and electronics in a way that feels handmade but somehow perfect. She takes the title of the album to heart, using her art to confront the overwhelming “metaphysical unease” (as Sophie Kemp’s liner notes would have it) that arises “when we’ve ignored too many signals, when we stare into the void.” First I Was Afraid, which Chang loosely based on I Will Survive and calls the unofficial theme song of the album, reveals some of the compounding traumas that contributed to her anxiety in an easily relatable fashion:

my parents fought ever since i can remember
and sometimes i got between them
and one time i fell into a basket of socks
and got a bloody nail

Not to sound too woo, but at least part of Psychedelic Anxiety strikes me as an act of caring for that inner child who was “…never taught…how to speak lovingly, or handle problems peacefully but…learned how to fight…” Through Chang’s artistry (and in concert, it became even clearer what a great musician she is), her compassion and empathy translate easily to the listener like text messages from a good friend.

16. Scott Wollschleger - Dark Days “…as rich and varied a collection as one could hope for.”

17. claire rousay - sentiment “…as well-sequenced as an album as the sounds she assembles in her tracks, with off-beat pop enjambed with sound collages and other forms of assemblage.”

18. John Cale - Poptical Illusion When How We See The Light came out early this year, I floated along with its mid-tempo rhythm and the dreamy wordless vocals, thinking it boded well for Cale’s 18th solo album. Then Shark-Shark hit “…like a serrated blast against anything that might prevent you from engaging with life” and I was READY. While I liked Mercy (2022) quite a bit, the preponderance of guest vocalists and murky production kept me from engaging with it fully. Those songs sounded better in concert, a cathartic experience that connected me more closely with Cale’s solo work. The album itself delivered on the promise of the two singles, alternating between hypnotic, downtempo tracks like God Made Me Do It (don’t ask me again), Edge Of Reason, and There Will Be No River, and driving, catchy numbers like Shark-Shark, All To The Good, and Davies And Wales, which may be as perfect a pop song as Cale has ever delivered. This time around, Cale and his production partner Nita Scott crafted all the sounds themselves, settling in a realm that could be called “post-punk classicism” while sounding resolutely contemporary. The second of three albums Cale composed during the dark days of 2020, Poptical Illusion sounds more hopeful than Mercy. Lyrically, Cale is mostly reflective rather than emitting the white heat of some of his earlier songs. In Edge Of Reason, he puts a brighter spin on his classic from 1974’s Fear: “Justice, rage, fear is a man's best friend/Can you see the light through the rain?” later singing “We can reverse the hate” - a dose of optimism I will be drawing on in the dark days to come.

19. Nathalie Joachim - Ki moun ou ye “A sublime synthesis of translucent electronics,  clattering beats, art-pop melodies, chamber music strings, and flute…”

20. Crumb - Amama At the end of my ecstatic review of their 2022 show in Prospect Park, I proclaimed that Crumb, “…have been holding back throughout their career. Either they have to somehow get this energy onto one of their records or just release a live album from this tour.” I was even more convinced of this when we saw them again last year. Well, they’ve gone and done it. While there’s nothing on Amama that could be called raw, there’s a new energy to the bass and drums of Jesse Brotter and Jonathan Gilad, giving Lila Ramani a more dynamic foundation over which to float her dreamy vocals. On songs like The Bug and Crushxd, Ramani matches the rhythm section’s propulsion with some distorted guitar while keyboard/sax player Bri Aronow creates a mesmerizing swirl. Then there are the wild tempo changes in Sleep Talk, which alternates between their signature wooziness and pounding beats - thrilling. The title track starts with a sample of Ramani’s grandmother singing in Malayalam, a strikingly personal moment for a band known for their musical and lyrical impressionism, and a further suggestion that Crumb is coming out of their shell. There’s nothing better than hearing a band you’ve loved for a long time reach its full potential, which is exactly what we have here. For Crumb, the third time is the charm.

21. Billie Eilish- HIT ME HARD AND SOFT “…a dimensional heat-seeking pop album suffused with Eilish’s winning, witty, and winsome personality.” NOTE: The more I’ve lived with this album the more I’m convinced Eilish is a melodic genius. The way the songs get under my skin goes beyond their lyrics and musical backgrounds. Which reminds me - Memo to Disney: When are you going to put out an audio-only version of the Hollywood Bowl/L.A. Philharmonic concert?? Let the music be free!

22. Michelle Lou - Near Distant After finally being introduced to the music of Michelle Lou at Tak Ensemble’s Swoonfest, I became an instant fan, noting during the world premiere of A Forest that she “…seems to have developed some new approaches to the intersection of sound and time.” It turns out, those approaches were not as new as I thought, as revealed by this staggering three-hour-plus collection of her music going back to 2014. Ten years! Now, one could argue that holding on to recordings for a decade and then releasing them as part of an absolute data dump is not the wisest commercial or even artistic decision, but it makes a curious kind of sense with her music. Lou likes to play with scale, creating pieces that often top 20 or 30 minutes, large format sound images, like aural dioramas. Like David Smith, whose sculptures showed a tremendous variety of approaches, each Lou piece operates under its own rules, whether the ticking, grinding, and knocking of Untitled three part construction for accordion and two percussions (2014), the silvery glow of Opal (2018) for saxophone, percussion, and electronics, or the unearthly shimmer of the title track, composed in 2021 for bass flute, tenor saxophone, piano, percussion, and electronics. Every piece here is deeply absorbing, compelling, and strikingly novel, but with no tricks - even the older pieces here still feel like tomorrow. The performances by Ensemble Inverspace, Line Upon Line Percussion, Scapegoat, Gnarwhallaby, Distractfold, Ensemble 2e2m, WasteLAnd, and Trio K/D/M are superb - and superbly recorded - making Near Distant a landmark release from one of our most exciting composers.

23. pet wife - Foam Set “The strongest collection yet from this queer trans duo features sculptural sounds, finely honed songs, and that harder-to-define quality: a world view.”

24. Lionlimb - Limbo “…a moody journey that you won’t soon forget.”

25. Yaya Bey - Ten Fold For her third full-length, Brooklyn’s Bey doubles down on Remember Your North Star’s mix of sweet jazz-inflected vocals and funky tracks that traverse R&B, hip hop, and reggae with equal ease. She even assays dancehall on So Fantastic, which also samples her late father, Juice Crew member Grand Daddy I.U., who died in 2022. Lyrically, she spreads love and positivity on songs like Chrysanthemum (“And one day/We're all gonna bloom”) or tells it like it unfortunately is, as on Eric Adams In The Club:

'Cause the rent is too high, and yo savior ain't comin'
So you better shake somethin' while you motherfuckin' can

Ironically, that song has no beat, but in general, shaking something won’t be a problem with these often languorous grooves. While she works with a variety of producers, including rhythmic genius Karriem Riggins on one track, she knows exactly what she wants as evidenced by the consistency of the album. Put it on for your next backyard (or living room) jam. Who needs a song of the summer when you can have a whole album?

Are any of these on your list? Or new to you? Tell me in the comments!

From the archives:
Best Of 2023 (So Far)
The Best Of 2022 (So Far)
The Best Of 2021 (So Far)
The Best Of 2020 (So Far)