Rob Sheffield’s Top 20 Albums of 2024

The world has never seen a pop-girl explosion anything like the summer of 2024 — ever — and Sabrina is one of the crucial reasons why. She scored two Songs of the Summer with “Espresso” and “Please Please Please,” cranking out nasty couplets like Dorothy Parker’s depraved goddaughter, but those aren’t even the highlights of her coronation album Short ’N’ Sweet. That honor goes to the instant karaoke classic “Lie to Girls,” where she laments, “You don’t have to lie to girls / If they like you they’ll just lie to themselves.” Sabrina roasts dudes who idolize Leonard Cohen, but he probably would have loved “Espresso”—somewhere Leonard is kicking himself for not stretching out “Hallelujah” with “dream-come-true ya” and “Mountain Dew ya.”

Vince bares his soul about everything he’s seen — and lost — in his decade atop the West Coast rap hustle. On Dark Times, he keeps looking in the mirror and seeing all the friends, family, hip-hop heroes who should be there, as well as the missing pieces of himself. (As he raps in “Etoufee,” “In the ghetto I’m a Martian.”) “Where did 2Pac and ‘nem go?” Staples asks in “Black&Blue.” “Where Nipsey Hussle and ‘nem go? Swavey and Drakeo? Richee and Slim Foe?” But he turns his grief into his art: “I spend a lot of my time missing our kinfolk / Put ‘em inside of a rhyme hoping they live on.”

As Stephen Malkmus once sang, “Done is good, but done well is so much fucking better.” Everything about the Hard Quartet is done so much better than it had to be—the indie-rock supergroup of the year. They’re basically the Matador Wilburys: Malkmus from Pavement and the Jicks, Matt Sweeney from Chavez and Superwolf, Dirty Three drum legend Jim White. The secret weapon turns out to be Emmett Kelly from Ty Segall’s band—seeing the Hard Quartet live meant discovering he plays some of the grooviest guitar leads. “Six Deaf Rats” and “Hey” are hippie-folk trad-tech Malk bongwater beauty in the mode of Pig Lib or Real Emotional Trash. Inspirational verse: “Denim and doorknobs, that was our kink, you know?”

The eternally coolest of Eighties synth-pop duos picked the right moment to come back strong with Nonetheless, their zippiest album of this century. Neil and Chris are riding high these days, 40 years after “West End Girls,” in films like Saltburn. (Who can forget the karaoke scene where Barry Keoghan sings “Rent”?) They even scored the ultimate 2024 status symbol: a beef with Drake, after he used “West End Girls” without permission. Nonetheless is packed with bittersweet electro-disco tales like “Loneliness,” “New London Boy,” and the finale “Love Is The Law,” a lament for Oscar Wilde at the end of his life, in exile in Paris, watching the sex trade go on without him.

Nada Surf made a smashing return this year with Moon Mirror. Like everybody else, I assumed Nada Surf would never top their 2004 classic Let Go, and like everybody else, I was wrong. Moon Mirror might be even better, but that’s a choice I’m not ready to make right now. Matthew Caws sings his impeccably witty guitar vignettes about being in love (with a person, with a song, with a feeling) and how it changes over time, without ever settling for the trite phrase or the corny riff. Best line: “The wind is the right hand, the piano’s a tree, I wanna hear that for eternity.”

Nick Cave has always been a rock star you went to with your darkest secrets—a confessor. But as a fan since the “From Her To Eternity” days I never imagined he’d end up ministering the way he does in his Red Hand Files, or on Wild God. After the grief of Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen, and Carnage, Wild God is a religious rapture full of prayers on fire. “Amazed of love, amazed of pain” sums it up, even if Nick’s singing about a frog. “O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is)” is his massively moving elegy for the late Anita Lane, a muse since his Birthday Party days, the wildest of gods and baddest of seeds. From her to eternity and back.

Claire Rousay has perfected her own style of electronic collage, calling it “emo ambient.” Sentiment is her avowed pop album, building late-night diary entries out of synth textures, AutoTune robot vocals, and her nervously clumsy post-punk guitar. Her big theme is loneliness, and you hear that in the wide-open spaces in the music. But she’s got a flair for twisted love songs, as in “Head” or “‘Lovers Spit’ Plays in the Background,” about having an emotional breakdown listening to Broken Social Scene.

Cool comes too easy to Kim Gordon, the koolest of Kool Things. The Collective slams with the charisma of a 70-something punk goddess who was dancing in the Pink Pony Clubs of the Lower East Side before Chappell’s parents were born, and who’s been staring holes in strangers longer than you’ve been chewing your own food. She talks her shit over industrial electro-clang and trap beats from producer Justin Raisen — if the tracks sound like they could have been intended for Playboy Carti, that’s because they were. It’s the hardest she’s committed to fun as a concept since, hmmmm, the Free Kitten records she made with Pussy Galore’s Julie Cafritz back in the day. (Nice Ass was a pretty lousy album, but it sure was fun.) It’s also the hardest she’s leaned into songwriting since Rather Ripped if not Daydream Nation. Squabble up, Kim.

Katie Crutchfield at her toughest and most confident, building on the heartland rock twang of Saint Cloud. Tigers Blood is really the first Waxahatchee album that aims to follow through on the previous one, but not too far from the spirit of earlier indie gems like Cerulean Salt and Out in the Storm. She chronicles romance, family, struggling for sobriety, the day-to-day work of holding it together — in the poetic voice of a Lucinda Williams who came of age playing DIY punk-house basement shows. She and MJ Lenderman sing “Right Back To It” with the soul of a ragged-ass Gram and Emmylou. 

Remember three years ago, on Happier Than Ever, when Billie sang, “I’m in love with my future, can’t wait to meet her”? The future Billie turned out to be worth waiting for. Hit Me Hard and Soft is her coming-of-age album as well as her coming-out album, from the synth-pop yearning of “Blue” to the heart-grabbing balladry of “Wildflower” to the queer gastronomy of “Lunch.” I also love how “Lunch” is her most Duran Duran-sounding song, the same year Duran Duran were on tour doing their fantastic live version of “Bury a Friend.”

Rose Melberg and Jen Srbagia have the kind of chemistry that comes from the heart. As the Softies, they make intimate indie-pop, as hushed as folk but as powerful as punk, just two voices and their whispery guitars. These lifelong best friends reconnected musically for The Bed I Made, their first Softies album in 24 years. It’s full of fabulously open-hearted tunes about adult emotion, whether that means insomnia, grief, or (in “California Highway 99”) driving away from a broken romance at 3 A.M. in a rented Chevy Malibu. It’s a monument to friendship, to artistic gumption, to how much beauty you can put into the world when you stop waiting for the right time and just do it noooow.

The L.A. avant synth-pop duo duo of Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin whip up a head-spinning concept album. They’re old-school prog fans, so it makes sense that the plot isn’t so far from Rush’s 2112: a heroine named True resists the alien overlords who try to give her brain an upgrade by planting an Eighties-style laserdisc in her skull. But the songs thrive on their own, especially the glossy brunch-disco jewel “Death and Romance,” where flesh-and-blood eros makes the streetlights look like halos. (Songs about streetlights are always great: it’s the law.)

Doechii proves she can do it all. Her mixtape is a master class in balancing raw emotion with brash flamboyance, as in her genius call-and-response with herself as she plays her own therapist in “Denial Is A River.” Alligator Bites is a freewheeling mix of TDE rap finesse, pop craft, deep soul from a “Swamp Princess” from the badlands of Florida. And she leaves a few toothmarks on that alligator herself.

Goth, it’s so confusing sometimes to be a goth. Robert Smith kept promising this album for 16 agonizing years, tinkering in the studio with his usual “you think you’re tired now but wait until 2024” disregard for deadlines. But Songs from a Lost World turned out to be even greater than we were all hoping. It’s a power-doom epic masterpiece, on the level of Seventeen Seconds or Disintegration, as Smith reaches into the depths of his cobwebbed heart. It begins with the line “This is the end of every song I sing,” and closes with “Left alone with nothing at the end of every song.” It’s a full-circle triumph for the goth moppet who was already singing “Yesterday I got so old” when he was halfway through his 20s. Now Robert says he’s at work on the next Cure album — can’t wait for 2040. 

Rosie Tucker knows how to grab your attention: “I hope no one had to piss in a bottle at work to get me the thing I ordered on the internet.” That’s just one of the anti-capitalist zingers in the brilliantly titled “All My Exes Live in Vortexes.” Tucker rips modern culture apart in their Utopia Now!, a piece of top-notch indie-rock agit-prop tunecraft. “Gil Scott Albatross” is six or seven crucial love songs piled on top of each other. “What you give to me no app can track” — that’s amore, circa 2024. But “White Savior Myth” crams so much  satire into a mere 56 words: “The white savior myth got a good night’s rest/She is twenty minutes late and impeccably dressed/She is skinny like a teen and exactly as depressed.”

Marisa Dabice has a delicate way of walking right up to a song and punching it in the face, then punting it out the nearest window. Tell it, Missy: “Not a single motherfucker who has tried to lock me up / Could get the collar around my neck or find one that’s big enough.” Mannequin Pussy have made more great rock albums over the past decade (four) than any band around, taking a giant stylistic leap with each one. I Got Heaven is their most tuneful, maybe because it’s the first album they made knowing people would hear it, punk rage at its most charismatic. Dabice flexes her whisper-to-a-scream vocal firepower, with the band matching her every step. Loud bark. Deep bite. Get out of her way or get run over.

Like she said, it’s not a country album, it’s a Beyoncé album—except it’s a Beyoncé album about the whole country. Cowboy Carter is the Queen using music as a map of American culture, from Willie and Dolly and Linda Martell and Shaboozey to the Nancy Sinatra bassline, right up to the great moment when she starts singing the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” She gives it the festive anything-goes spirit of Eighties hip-hop, with “Ya Ya” coming on like a Native Tongues-era throwdown for all the clever girls. One of the most beautiful moments is her “Blackbird,” where she connects the dots through the song’s long history in Black music and brings it all back home. P.S: a year after the Renaissance movie, and we still don’t know what she puts in her pre-show sandwich? Information, please.

MJ Lenderman wins this year’s “you think it’s easy but you’re wrong” award with a baked guitar album that sounds like it was knocked off over a lazy weekend, except if it were really easy we’d get a dozen records this great every summer. On Manning Fireworks, he takes over as the hardest-abiding dude in show business, with a Southern-fried sense of country feedback rooted in his love for Dinosaur Jr., the Band, and Pavement. (His Himbo Dome is right down the road from the Protein Delta Strip, where Pavement docked their abandoned houseboat.) Side One channels the sound of a human hangover through his Jazzmaster, yet Side Two is where the best songs are, as he warbles “Clarinet sings its lonesome duckwalk/What else can you say to a friend with a broken heart?” or sails off for the 10-minute “Bark at the Moon.” Sad but true: “You said it takes revision/You said it takes finesse/Don’t move to New York City, babe, it’s gonna change the way you dress.”

Or Female Rage: The Musical. Taylor Swift spent the year on a historic roll with the Eras Tour, but that wasn’t enough melodrama for her, so she devised a 31-track song cycle full of seismic mood swings. It’s a big, messy, wildly chaotic, furiously cathartic sprawl, lurching from oddball experiments to dead-on-the-money heartbreak. It’s full of pop sparkle like the New Romantic synth-disco of “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” or the alien petulance of “Down Bad,” raging at a hot English rock star I humbly pray I never have to think about again. But in the great double-album tradition, it has sleepers that take months to sneak up on you — in my case, I thought “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” was total garbage until I saw a stranger karaoke it while she crawled on the floor. Tortured Poets might seem like a departure, or maybe a sadistic scam to keep delaying Debutation TV. But it’s Taylor doing what she’s done all year—all her career — which is dreaming up impossible things, then making them happen, until it starts to seem impossible that they never happened before.

It’s obvious, she’s your number one. Charli seized the zeitgeist with Brat, because everybody wants their turn to be 666 with a princess streak. Her brutally high-energy punk-disco cyborg aesthetic is all delirious solipsism, all synthetic robot rah-rah in the beats, but with vocals swerving between defiant egomania and tortured self-doubt. She’s in a world of her own where every hot stranger on the floor, every dealer in the bathroom, is a disco-ball mirror for her own larger-than-life bravado. But she raised the stakes on her remix album, with a crew of famous guests entering the Charliverse. Her presence brings out the brat in everyone—we’ve never heard Lorde talk this way on a Lorde record, but she’ll do it for Charli, just as we’d never heard Billie get so filthy on a Billie record. It’s almost like they feel free to get vulnerable, knowing they have Charli there shielding them as a protective force field. It’s the ultimate validation of the Brat concept: we start out engaging with Charli about her problems, until we end up seeing ourselves in her mirror.