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There is perhaps no moment in history when being a music critic felt like a respectable, lucrative, or essential position, though there are certainly years when it maybe seemed more fun—long before the mobilization of seething fan armies, before the alt-weeklies vaporized, before TikTok nurtured the idea that context is dispensable, before we all sort of forgot that real listening requires time. The job’s formative practitioners were smart, galloping, and bold: Lester Bangs loudly typing a review live onstage with the J. Geils Band at Cobo Hall, wearing sunglasses, his Smith-Corona miked like a Stratocaster. (He eventually knocked the typewriter onto the ground, stomping on it until it was smashed to bits. “It felt good, purging somehow,” he wrote.) Jon Landau scribbling “I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen” after a show at the Harvard Square Theatre. Greg Tate going long and weird on Bad Brains and the annihilating catharsis of hardcore (“I’m talking about like lobotomy by jackhammer, like a whirlpool bath in a cement mixer, like orthodontic surgery by Black & Decker, like making love to a buzzsaw, baby,” he wrote in the Village Voice). Ellen Willis, this magazine’s first pop-music critic, simultaneously celebrating and skewering the Velvet Underground in only six words: “antiart art made by antielite elitists.”
Yet just as the field became less cloistered and exclusionary, open to different backgrounds and perspectives, it also began to feel tenuous and sort of indulgent. In recent years, Charli XCX, Megan Thee Stallion, and Katy Perry have each worn the same stupid pink cropped baby tee that says “They don’t build statues of critics,” a barb that might have carried more sting if the world didn’t erect so many statues of objectively heinous people, and if the thing most critics actually wanted wasn’t just health insurance. This fall, the singer Halsey clapped back at the Pitchfork writer Shaad D’Souza, who published a thoughtful and incisive review of Halsey’s newest album, causing their fans to defensively swarm; this sort of thing happens more and more these days, now that criticism, like many intellectual pursuits, has been debased and devalued. (Though not so debased and devalued that it doesn’t still rankle famous people; every time a critic composes a review in good faith, but is nonetheless targeted by a celebrity, my first urge is to buy that writer an ice-cold Martini and whisper, “Still got it, babe.”) A. O. Scott, in his book “Better Living Through Criticism,” writes that anti-intellectualism is “virtually our civic religion,” but suggests that good criticism can still be a kind of radical, anti-consumerist force: “There is so much hype and hyperventilation in the world—so much breathless selling—that someone needs to draw a calm breath or throw cold water.”
Even Taylor Swift, who has never loved a critic (in 2010, she released “Mean,” a fragile, pretty banjo song in which she rebuffs an unnamed writer: “You, with your voice like nails on a chalkboard / Calling me out when I’m wounded / You, picking on the weaker man”), seems to have figured out that obsessive, parasocial fandom can also be ugly and inhibiting. On “But Daddy I Love Him,” a song from Swift’s newest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” she appears to take a swipe at the lunatic Swifties who frantically disavowed her brief and alleged romance with Matty Healy, the belligerent front man of the British rock band the 1975: “Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best / Clutching their pearls, sighing, ‘What a mess’ / I just learned these people try and save you / ’Cause they hate you,” she sings, her voice barbed. Even Swift has had enough. “I’d rather burn my whole life down / Than listen to one more second of all this bitching and moaning,” she adds.
Compiling a year-end list is still the only activity that makes me truly feel like a Professional Critic, rising from my gilded chamber to drop some sort of objective and imperious decree. It’s always hard for me to present a list without caveats—pop music, after all, is a vast and varied landscape, and art works on each of us in such different ways—but this year I felt more inclined than ever to simply embrace the silly grandiosity of the job. It’s also possible that I listened to more music in 2024 than in any other year of my life; I lost all interest in podcasts, I lost all interest in silence. There was too much extraordinary work out there, and I required its magic too badly. Music helped me to feel things that I needed to feel: to grieve, to rejoice, to access and better understand all the dark and inscrutable parts of myself. In the end, I couldn’t pick just ten albums, so I picked twenty. I have listed them here in descending order, though, in my mind, they coexist peacefully on a lateral plane.
Was there a single narrative thread to this year in music, some broad conclusion to be drawn about the state of humanity? Hard to say. These days, those sorts of proclamations tend to feel more specious than ever. A few months back, I stood in a field at Storm King Art Center, a contemporary sculpture park in upstate New York, drank a complimentary Vitamin Water, and watched Charli XCX stand on a rickety-looking stage wearing sunglasses and a fur-fringed coat, playing “brat” remixes directly off her phone to a scrum of rapt fans. It was not a performance in the traditional sense, but it was also a perfect performance, as close to an aesthetic encapsulation of 2024 as we may get. Lately, pop music has become even more reliant on visual shorthand, a series of unarticulated but essential codes, an unspoken, IYKYK insularity. Cowboy, tortured poet, brat—the important thing is catching a vibe.
This feels like as good a time as any to thank readers of The New Yorker, and particularly readers of music criticism in The New Yorker, for still believing that this work can be useful. Maybe all writing is a gesture toward connection, but criticism, in particular, is a way of interrogating a shared experience, and then being wretchedly, frighteningly honest about what you felt and what you didn’t feel. As Robert Christgau, the so-called dean of American rock critics, once wrote, “the trick is waiting for the music to come to you or finding out that it doesn’t, then resisting the temptation to fib about the process.” Like any relationship, it requires a great deal of trust from both parties. I’m so very grateful to be in this with you.
20. “Mahashmashana”
Father John Misty
The singer and songwriter Josh Tillman is still best known for his irascible wit, which often manifests as provocation. But he can be shockingly tender—on “Screamland,” a throbbing, cinematic, almost seven-minute lament from his deep and dynamic sixth album, “Mahashmashana,” he channels Leonard Cohen, telling of the weirdos and exiles who are just trying to be better, “Like a sucker, with a scratcher / Like a fuck-up, with a dream.” Tillman finds beauty and salvation on the edge. “God must be with the outcasts / ’Cause when I call, you come,” he sings, his voice softening at just the right moment. The line still makes my stomach drop, dozens of listens later. Ideas of contrition and hope flow through all of “Mahashmashana,” an aching monument to human imperfection.
19. “Acadia”
Yasmin Williams
The twenty-eight-year-old fingerpicker Yasmin Williams sometimes lays her acoustic guitar flat across her lap, an unusual position that generates unusual (and joyful, and luminous) songs. “Acadia,” her third album, is a masterly collection. It’s hard for solo guitarists to avoid comparisons to John Fahey, but where Fahey’s music had a little bite, some kind of latent but occasionally palpable vitriol, Williams is sunny, benevolent, warm. “Acadia” is a welcome balm in even the grimmest moments.
18. “Charm”
Clairo
Clairo’s music career began on YouTube when she was just eighteen, but, at this point, “Pretty Girl,” her first viral hit, feels more like a footnote than a foundational track. “Charm,” Clairo’s third album, is a loungy, soulful, and sophisticated meditation on the vagaries of romance: how do we let another person in when we’re paralyzed and queasy with fear? “Charm” suggests that we should stop overthinking everything and submit to attraction, which can be as potent and rare as true love. The single “Sexy to Someone” is about the jolt and terror of holding someone’s gaze just a beat too long. “Oh, I need a reason to get out of the house,” Clairo sings, her voice fluttery with longing.
17. “Diamond Jubilee”
Cindy Lee
Well, here’s something you didn’t know you needed: a two-hour, thirty-two-song triple album—conspicuously absent from Spotify and other streaming services and available via a link on a busted-looking Geocities Web site—of odd, smoky, psychedelic guitar-pop. Cindy Lee is the nom de plume of the musician and drag artist Patrick Flegel, who, back in the late two-thousands and early twenty-tens, fronted the Canadian post-punk band Women. (According to various reports, Women broke up in the most spectacular way possible, with an onstage fistfight, a guy climbing up from the crowd to play Slayer’s “Reign In Blood,” and the drummer declaring, “My music career is over.”) “Diamond Jubilee” is maybe the most heavy, surprising, and unself-conscious thing I heard in 2024, a record that makes almost no concessions to time, place, physics, or modern life.
16. “Bright Future”
Adrianne Lenker
Big Thief, the beloved folk-rock band that Adrianne Lenker leads when she is not making solo records, is hardly known for being overproduced, but there’s something homemade and gorgeously ramshackle about Lenker accompanied by just one or two acoustic instruments, a microphone, and her longtime engineer and co-producer Philip Weinrobe. If it’s late at night, and you’re looking for a hand to hold, cue up “Vampire Empire,” a brisk and dizzying song about scrambling for purchase in an overwhelming love affair.
15. “Blue Lips”
ScHoolboy Q
On his first new album since “CrasH Talk,” from 2019, the California rapper ScHoolboy Q sounds determined and ferocious, as if he recorded these songs because he simply couldn’t hold them in anymore. The album’s best and most dexterous track, “oHio,” features a guest verse from Freddie Gibbs, and an incredible opening couplet: “I’ma stack my O’s like Ohio / Lookin’ at your life, that’s a long no.” There’s bluster and sorrow; there’s aggression and tenderness. I barely understand what it means, but, then again, I barely understand any of “oHio,” a song that twists and pivots a million times in less than five minutes. This is the thrill of “Blue Lips”: it will always outpace you, but it’s still exciting just to chase it down the road.
14. “What Now”
Brittany Howard
If anyone is presently poised to inherit Prince’s mantle, it’s Brittany Howard, the former front woman of the indefinitely sidelined Southern rock band Alabama Shakes. Howard is a visionary; she can write an earworm, but is more interested in work that melts the boundaries between genres. “What Now,” her second solo album, is sometimes hostile, sometimes calming, but always unafraid. “If you want someone to hate, then blame it on me,” she sings on the title track, an agile and acerbic recounting of what it feels like to fall out of love. It takes balls to write a song from the P.O.V. of the antagonist, the person who woke up one day and just . . . wasn’t that into it anymore. You’ll root for Howard regardless.
13. “When I’m Called”
Jake Xerxes Fussell
Critics love to call things unclassifiable, which can sometimes feel like a subtle admission of defeat. But Jake Xerxes Fussell’s music, which draws heavily from nineteenth- and twentieth-century vernacular folk songs and archival field recordings, is idiomatic, and entirely his own. My favorite song on “When I’m Called,” Fussell’s fifth and best album, is “Leaving Here, Don’t Know Where I’m Going.” (Ennui is, of course, a very ancient and omnipresent feeling.) Fussell learned the song from the late folklorist Art Rosenbaum; he included an extra verse that, Fussell said, he discovered on “a Berea College archival recording of a somewhat similar song called ‘Alabama Water’ performed by the great Tennessee/Kentucky banjoist and singer Virgil Anderson.” Fussell’s music often comes with complex citations; he is a folksinger in the truest sense, collecting ideas and melodies and lyrics from distant and disparate traditions, looking for the things that unite us in our humanity.
12. “PHASOR”
Helado Negro
Born Roberto Carlos Lange and brought up in South Florida by Ecuadorian immigrant parents, Helado Negro makes spacey, liquid electro-psych that feels not entirely of this planet, or maybe not entirely of this dimension. “PHASOR,” his eighth album, is pulsing and wonderful. “Es Una Fantasia,” which closes the record, is one of my favorite tracks of the year, a languid, ethereal, wandering tune that reminds me of those soft, undefended minutes between wakefulness and slumber.
11. “Almighty So 2”
Chief Keef
Chief Keef is one of the most inventive rappers of the past decade: vibrant, twitchy, sharp. He put out the punchy single “I Don’t Like,” a fundamental track for Chicago Drill, when he was just sixteen. “Almighty So 2,” his fifth studio album, is a sequel of sorts to “Almighty So,” a mixtape from 2013. Yet it sounds more like Keef bounding toward the future than reckoning with the past. He can be caustic, but he is also funny (“Think he goin’ nuts, but he goin’ almond milk,” he offers on the single “Drifting Away”). His work is confrontational, electric.
10. “Hit Me Hard and Soft”
Billie Eilish
A significant piece of Billie Eilish’s success has to do with her capacity to hold true to some internal barometer—she never does what everyone else is doing, or (especially) what everyone else expects her to do. It’s a treat to be consistently surprised by a pop star, though “pop” increasingly feels like a mischaracterization of sorts; Eilish is now too unpredictable to pin down. “Birds of a Feather,” the hit single from “Hit Me Hard and Soft,” has a friendly melody and a fuzzy synth line, but it describes a very particular kind of despair: loving someone so much that your need for the other person becomes a self-obliterating force. It’s brave, dark terrain—Eilish’s eternal sweet spot.
9. “Only God Was Above Us”
Vampire Weekend
This is Vampire Weekend’s fifth album, and possibly its least immediate, which is a funny thing to say about a band so adored for its sharpness and urgency. “Only God Was Above Us” reveals itself at a slower pace, a big ask in an era of diminishing attention. But the reveal is worth the time. It’s a vast, searching, and grownup record about choosing hope over inherited despair.
8. “Funeral for Justice”
Mdou Moctar
Mdou Moctar is the name of the Tuareg guitarist at the heart of this continuously astonishing band. “Funeral for Justice,” the group’s sixth LP, is specifically about France’s lingering colonial presence in Niger, but unfortunately greed and exploitation are widely applicable political ideas; Moctar’s freneticism and rage feel germane to a variety of situations. The careening title track will make you feel a little bit like you swallowed a hand grenade, but in the best possible way—as though you are making room in your gut for new magic.
7. “brat”
Charli XCX
“brat” is a color—a lurid slime green—and perhaps the most patently vibes-reliant release of 2024, but it is not without depth. “360” is the track to bump while you stomp down the street, smoking, working angles, underdressed for the weather, but, if you’re looking for rawness, both “Apple” (a banger with a refrain—“To the airport, the airport / The airport, the airport”—that suggests fleeing as a kind of radical self-care) and “I think about it all the time” (a meditation on the personal and professional ramifications of not having children) are surprisingly frank when it comes to the angst of getting older, and the idea that, eventually, we all have to commit to a particular kind of life.
6. “Cowboy Carter”
Beyoncé
Beyoncé’s virtuosity is so steady and obvious—she is the boldest and most inventive singer of her generation, possibly of several generations—that at this point it’s easy to take her talent for granted. “Cowboy Carter” is a reclamation of sorts—a Black woman singing country music, a genre that for almost a century has been erroneously thought of as a largely white art form—but, even independent of its extra-musical narratives, which can sometimes feel a little leaden, it is still staggeringly good.
5. “Tigers Blood”
Waxahatchee
Katie Crutchfield has one of those voices—rich, effortless, so perfectly suited to her songs—that make it easy to forget just how remarkable it is. Yet her vocals, which swing from earthy to spectral, contain enormous amounts of pathos, boredom, joy, anxiety, resignation, hope. “Tigers Blood” is a flush, complicated album about trying to figure out what comes next. It’s not quite a midlife record—Crutchfield is only thirty-five—but it’s plain that it was written by someone who has learned a few things about herself. Crutchfield’s lucidity can be poignant. On “Right Back to It,” my favorite song of 2024, Crutchfield sings of trying to avoid self-sabotage when things are going O.K.: “I’ll fall down into a fair game / Lick a wound that was not ever mine / I get ahead of myself / Refusing anyone’s help,” she admits.
4. “SABLE,”
Bon Iver
I likely would’ve ranked this one higher were it not an EP, and therefore a mere twelve minutes long, yet its length is also one of the more remarkable things about “SABLE,” Bon Iver’s first major release in five years. Over an expansive three-song arc, Justin Vernon catalogues his limitations, fears, failures, collapses, missteps, and convolutions (“There are things behind things behind things,” he sings), before ultimately arriving at a place of grace, optimism, and wonder. Vernon’s voice has never sounded clearer or closer; “SABLE,” is vulnerable by design, a necessary externalization of some very heavy feelings. The square on the cover feels symbolic to me, somehow—as though Vernon boxed up his despair, and is perhaps ready to place it aside for a while.
3. “Short n’ Sweet”
Sabrina Carpenter
Sabrina Carpenter—a five-foot-tall former Disney Channel star from Quakertown, Pennsylvania—put out the best, funniest, and most nimble pop release of the year. “Short n’ Sweet” is technically Carpenter’s sixth LP. It took her a while to find the right style, which is now defined not so much in musical terms (“Short n’ Sweet” moves from Italo-disco to Loretta Lynn-esque country swingers to nineties R. & B.) but attitudinally: Carpenter is mischievous, lusty, unapologetic, impish, winking, teasing. Her colossal success seems to mark a further turn away from confessional and overly self-serious pop writing, and toward something more effervescent and knowing.
2. “Two Star & the Dream Police”
Mk.gee
Mk.gee is the alias of Michael Gordon, a twenty-eight-year-old songwriter and guitarist based in Los Angeles. I am not sure I’ve heard music exactly like this before: these songs are garbled and atonal, gleaming and perfect, deeply withholding yet still wildly satisfying. Gordon’s music reminds me, in some vague way, of the work of Arthur Russell, Oneohtrix Point Never, Genesis, Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight,” Bruce Hornsby, Toro y Moi, and especially Bon Iver, whose “22, A Million,” from 2016, feels like the closest probable touchstone. A friend once told Gordon that his songs sounded as if he were “trying to remember what pop music sounds like,” which is an impeccable characterization—“Two Star & the Dream Police” has a dreamy, surreal quality. Its beauty is in the way it sits just slightly out of reach.
1. “Manning Fireworks”
MJ Lenderman
There were more risky and innovative records released this year, but none that I found as purely and consistently pleasurable as “Manning Fireworks,” the fourth solo LP from MJ Lenderman, a twenty-five-year-old singer and guitarist from North Carolina. His lyrics are smart, funny, and written with astounding precision: “Clarinet / Singing its lonesome duck walk,” he sings on “You Don’t Know The Shape I’m In,” a song about trying to peacefully loosen one’s grip on a broken relationship. It’s the kind of line a listener can breeze right by, until you think about it for a moment, and realize, Oh, shit, that’s exactly what a clarinet sounds like. But “Manning Fireworks” isn’t all one-liners and guitar tone; without ever being explicitly defeatist or pitying, Lenderman captures something true and profound about what it’s like to come of age in a world that is hugely unsteady, and how dark it can feel, not knowing what to do with your yearning. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
