Streaming has mutated the album as a format over the past decade, lengthening tracklists, shifting where likely hits get placed, and chipping away at song runtimes. But this year, artists seemed less beholden to the bean counters at record labels and tech companies, releasing albums tailored to their own stories and musical interests.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]These 10 records, spanning death metal, Americana, dance, rap, and more, don’t just feature some of the most striking and virtuosic songwriting of the year. These artists skillfully use the enclosure of the album—its convincing air of a bespoke space in here, at this time, under these conditions—to burrow deeply into a given sound or concept. Even as these albums explore the anxieties and joys of our own world, they feel thrillingly alien, governed by sovereign laws of physics and shaped by singular experiences.
In January, I thought music would be the treehouse I climbed to escape the absurdities and miseries of an election year. But thanks to these records, it more often served as my reflecting pool, the place where I learned to sharpen my senses—to look and listen deeper.
Programming note: these albums were selected with our list of the 10 Best Songs of 2024 in mind, so to showcase a greater range of music, no artists appear on both.
One of the founding members of this Los Angeles-based Latin act didn’t live to see the release of its debut album: Nectali “Sumo” Diaz, who formed the duo with guitarist and surviving member Fabiola Reyna in 2016, died in an accident in 2022. The music nonetheless feels warm and triumphant. Reyna, backed by a few producers, leads a humid romp through the dance cultures of the Latin diaspora, melding bouncy polyrhythms, syrupy melodies, and field recordings of birds and moving water. The album title is a Spanish word for “bad happiness,” a reference to both the sad circumstances of the album’s creation and the broader coexistence of joy and pain. This is music for dancing away the grief and lingering inside it.
Night ripples with possibility and wonder on composer and singer Arooj Aftab’s fourth solo album. A technician of texture and negative space, Aftab crafts gorgeous arrangements where soft tones and harmonies sound intense despite the calm of the music. Influenced by a childhood spent between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, a formal musical education at Berklee College of Music, and a young adulthood in New York, she pulls from many traditions. The songwriting spans classical Hindustani and Western music, with lyrics from Aftab as well as an 18th century poem and a jazz standard. Aftab’s not exactly a classicist though. Her eclectic compositions—one of which features a very modern dose of Auto-Tune—evoke film noir, trip-hop, and Lovers Deluxe-era Sade. For Aftab, night is a melting pot.
Rapsody is one of rap’s premier lyricists, but on her fourth album, she flexes new muscles. Inspired by her idol Lauryn Hill, the North Carolina rapper emphasizes expression over wit, reflecting on her life and career over rich blends of R&B, soul, and reggae. She’s an accomplished storyteller, and spends much of the album, which is framed as a poignant therapy session, unspooling experiences as mundane as vacationing and as charged as watching a beloved relative lose their memory. It’s her best music yet, and her pen remains potent. While her snappy lyrics structure these songs of reflection and self-care, her deep arsenal of flows, intonations, and melodies bring them to life.
Blood Incantation’s third album is technically two songs divided into three tracks each, but good luck holding any number in your head as these arrangements blast you through spacetime. The Denver death metal quartet rip through drone, prog rock, and ambient across the dense, riveting album, which is perpetually in transition. Technically, the music is about the obliteration of human consciousness upon coming into contact with an alien text, and that zany premise is the appeal. Moments of stillness build into lysergic riffs, which beget gnarlier riffs before simmering into a synth-driven calm that gathers energy for the next detonation. For Blood Incantation, the metal mandate to seek extremity is joyously open-ended, freeing them to explore quietude as often as ruckus. Into the Stargate!
If Nilüfer Yanya decided to put down her guitar and pursue a career as a vocalist, most of her fans probably wouldn’t protest. She’s got a voice of velvet: rich, full, colorful. But the British singer songwriter is also an accomplished strummer, and she spends her third album proving how essential the instrument is to her angsty songs of young love and adulthood. Co-written entirely with electronic producer Will Archer, who has worked with Jessie Ware and Sudan Archives, My Method Actor does more with less, finding strength in restrained melodies and subdued vocals that heighten the tension of her songwriting.
What if a pop record were constructed like a MySpace page? That’s the simple but genius premise of Charli XCX’s BRAT, a kaleidoscopic dance album that revels in the freedoms of living messily. The British singer doesn’t have a golden voice, killer choreography, or a Grammy, but she’s indelibly cool. And her coolness isn’t just a pose; it’s true taste—a hankering for the very specific melodies, phrases, and beats that rouse her. In brattiness, Charli unlocks her inner paranoiac, mean girl, and so much more, a palette that further enlivens the restless electronic music she’s long championed. The richness of the brat persona and the immediacy of the songwriting turned the album into a zeitgeist event, but that massive success is secondary to the record’s idiosyncratic purview. BRAT offers a 360 view of the scenes and sounds Charli holds dear. So stylish.
There’s no question mark in the title of Brittany Howard’s second solo album since going on hiatus from the Alabama Shakes in 2018. The multi-instrumentalist and singer sets out to make a statement with this swinging set of funk, pop, soul, and rock tracks. Leaving behind the intimate storytelling of her debut, she lets the music take charge, showcasing her skill as an arranger with richly layered rhythms and melodies. The music never feels overstuffed though, its profusion in service of the searching writing, which often examines the fragility of love. Don’t dare ask her what next.
Producer and rapper JPEGMAFIA makes hyperactive songs that jitter and rumble like an overloaded washing machine. Beat switches are common, samples get sourced from anywhere, and the rapping is variously smooth, abrasive, and stoned. He slows down a bit on his fifth album, which finds him processing the recoil of working with his controversial idol, Ye (f.k.a Kanye West), on the album Vultures 1. The songs are muscular and syncretic as ever, but the normally peevish rapper doesn’t maintain his trolling energy for the full record, settling into a questioning and pensive pace. This in turn opens up the music, changing it from a bludgeon to a balm. JPEG doesn’t reconcile these two modes, but with repeat listens they feel less polar, facets of a single mind.
After four albums of gauzy indie rock, Alabama-born singer Katie Crutchfield turned to folk and country for Saint Cloud, her fifth record. The change of pace, rooted in both a sense of homecoming and her recent embrace of sobriety, recalibrated her songwriting and widened her audience. She further refines those heartland sounds on Tigers Blood, a stunning set of easygoing downhome tunes cataloging the travails and charms of mid-30s living. The rhythm section, helmed by multi-instrumentalist Brad Cook works wonders, flickering and flaring in tandem with Crutchfield’s mighty but nimble voice. “Oh, when that siren blows, rings out all over town,” she sings on the title track. Indeed.
Singer Beth Gibbons hasn’t released much music in the 30 years since her iconic band Portishead stormed out the gate with seminal trip-hop record Dummy. Nor has she spoken to the press much, gaining a reputation for intense privacy. But she’s not necessarily the hermit these habits suggest. Her second solo album, a collection of baroque chamber folk, explores mortality with striking verve. It’s a deeply interior record, abuzz with images and thoughts that feel borne of rumination and experience. The bustling arrangements—which frequently feature layers of strings, percussion, and woodwinds—surge and swell as Gibbons sings of her aging body and home life. Where the languid rhythms of trip-hop soundtrack the feeling of eternal night, that blissful post-club chill, this record inhabits the charged peace of knowing that all nights, and days, must end.
