STE's Best Albums of 2024
A loosely ranked list of the 87 albums from 2024 that I wouldn't hesitate to put on again.
Other music critics have called 2024 the best year of the 2020s to date and who am I to argue?
Certainly, 2024 produced enough music I either liked or loved for it to be a very good year…perhaps even a great one, but that's the kind of assessment I can't render without some distance. Maybe with some time, I will eventually be charmed by Sabrina Carpenter, whose twin smashes "Espresso" and "Please Please Please" grew increasingly grating on my ears with repeated listens.
Carpenter isn't the only new sensation of 2024 to not quite click with me. Every time I hear Chappell Roan's "Good Luck, Babe!" I stumble upon "it's a sexually explicit kind of love affair," a line whose bluntness keeps me from embracing a song I otherwise should like (I have a similar problem with The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, I'm afraid). Since both Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan are practitioners of a pop style I like, I'm holding out hope that I'll discover some pleasures within their work when I revisit a little bit down the line. It's happened to me before, it'll happen again.
That quirk of listening points out the fact that Best Of lists aren't carved in stone. They're mutable, changing according to mood, taste, or calendar. Best Of lists published at the end of the year are invariably snapshots or perhaps the first draft of musical history: these lists don't tell the entire story but do offer guideposts for a given year.
As always, my particular list is shaped not only by own sensibilities but by exposure. I didn't get around to some records and I didn't spend as much time with some albums as perhaps they needed. An absence shouldn't suggest I harbor a dislike for a particular record; it may be that I just didn't hear it. What follows is a descending list of the 87 albums from 2024 that I liked enough that I'd put them on again without hesitation as of December 2024.
(PS: Best Reissues list coming next week)
Johnny Blue Skies—Passage Du Desir
Charley Crockett—$10 Cowboy/Visions of Dallas
The Hard Quartet—The Hard Quartet
Waxahatchee—Tigers Blood
Kim Deal--Nobody Loves You More
The Messthetics & James Brandon Lewis—The Messthetics & James Brandon Lewis
Nick Lowe & Los Straitjackets—Indoor Safari
Jack White—No Name
The Cure—Songs of a Lost World
MJ Lenderman—Manning Fireworks
Gruff Rhys—Sadness Sets Me Free
The Paranoid Style—The Interrogator
Aaron Lee Tsajan—Stellar Evolution
Cactus Blossoms—Every Time I Think About You
Jessica Pratt—Here in the Pitch
David Gilmour—Luck and Strange
Father John Misty—Mahashmashana
Gillian Welch & Dave Rawlings—Woodlands
Vampire Weekend—Only God Was Above Us
Liam Gallagher & John Squire—Liam Gallagher & John Squire
X—Smoke & Fiction
Mary Timony—Untame the Tiger
JD McPherson—Nite Owls
Dwight Yoakam—Brighter Days
Hurray for the Riff Raff—The Past Is Still Alive
The Lemon Twigs—A Dream Is All We Know
Illuminati Hotties—Power
Billy Strings—Highway Prayers/Live, Vol. 1
Pet Shop Boys—Nonetheless
Ethan Iverson—Technically Acceptable
Swamp Dogg—Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 126th St
Miranda Lambert—Postcards from Texas
The Coward Brothers—The Coward Brothers
LL Cool J—The Force
The Softies—The Bed I Made
Charli XCX—Brat
Cunningham/Bird—Cunningham/Bird
Soccer Mommy—Evergreen
Faye Webster—Underdressed at the Symphony
Silverada—Silverada