The One You've Been Waiting For (2024 Albums & More)
A belated year-end wrap-up
Happy Holidays and congratulations on making it through another year. This wasn’t an easy one, as anybody with a pulse and a conscience knows. Unspeakably horrible things happen every day and evidence of them is delivered to you in a matter of moments and you see it between ads for grocery delivery services and ai therapy apps. It’s fucking bleak. I have to lie to myself a little bit that the coming year(s) will be better and when I don’t believe the lie I tell myself that at least some good things will occur amidst all the awful things and that overall, things will continue to be interesting, and interesting is the most we can hope for. If you have money to spare and want to make the world a little less horrible, here are a handful of good places to give this holiday season and beyond: PCRF, Gaza Funds, Lilith Fund, TransOhio, GLITS, and Prison Radio.
The year that I had in particular was strange and busy and challenging and rewarding. I’m incredibly proud of the friendships I’ve cultivated and the writing I’ve done (published or not), and looking forward to doing more of the same in 2025 but doing it better, whatever that may mean.
Here’s a little wrap-up I started the night before my 26th birthday (which was back in November) about the year I’d had:
The song I listened to the most this year was “People” by Silver Jews. The artist I listened to the most this year was Lana Del Rey. (I am one interesting chica)
The best meal I ate this year was either reheated spicy peanut noodles (good the first night but mind-blowing as leftovers the next night) and a Modelo in Taylor’s parents’ backyard in Portland while listening to Alvvays self-titled on that album’s ten-year anniversary, OR a bacon cheeseburger, onion rings, and an Arnold Palmer at Park Slope Ale House sometime in mid-July, delivered by a waitress who looked and sounded so much like Lucy Dacus it was scary. This was also the year that I finally started drinking coffee. It only took me 25 years.
The best new movies I watched this year were Challengers and I Saw The TV Glow (also my favorite movie soundtracks).
My best TV-watching experience was rewatching the two wedding episodes of Girls with Lou and Sean while getting ready for Rob’s wedding.
The best live performances I saw this year were Ekko Astral at The Pinhook; Pool Kids at No Earbuds Fest; Los Campesinos! at the Aladdin Theater; MJ Lenderman at Thalia Hall; Wednesday, Carly Rae Jepsen, and Sudan Archives at Pitchfork Fest (RIP); and the final night of LCD Soundsystem’s residency at Knockdown Center
My favorite things I wrote this year were my Live Through This essay for Portable Model and my Chappell Roan essay for Paste. Honorable mentions for a couple my interviews:
-Geeking out about Fiona Apple with Eliza McLamb
-Talking shit with Los Campesinos!
-Making punks cry with The Softies
-Knocking back martinis and oysters with Charly Bliss
Because two of my life’s greatest passions are Music Journalism and Feeling Weird About The Passage of Time, I look forward to List Season every year. Each time a publication posts their AOTY or SOTY list, I feel like I’m reaching into the White Elephant bag. I might not always like what I pull out of it, but I’m excited nonetheless. I’ve been lucky enough to have the opportunity to contribute to a few year-end lists, and—full disclosure—have kind of been procrastinating on my own. I recently finished my second-to-last semester of grad school and I went to the aforementioned LCD Soundsystem show just hours after landing back home in New York, all of which kickstarted the “going out” urge in me, and all I’ve wanted to do for the past two weeks has been go out every night, dance with my friends, and be fiscally irresponsible in a way that would worry both bankers and psychologists. Shout out to everyone who has gone to a show with me, grabbed a drink with me, sat in the crowd at Pitchfork’s year-end event and played “Is It Brat?” with me, etc. Now that I’ve had a chance to take a break from the festivities, I’m back to work and ready to bring you the 2024 Our Band Could Be Your Wife Year-End List, featuring an annotated list of my 50 favorite albums of 2024. Let’s get into it:
50. DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ, Hex
I heard someone, I don’t remember who, describe DJ Sabrina as “Girl Talk for zoomers,” and as a zoomer who considered Feed The Animals a staple of her party soundtracks, I wholeheartedly agree. DJ Sabrina is someone whose music I was kinda scared to get into because she’s wildly prolific and it was hard to know where to start, but Hex feels like the perfect entry point.
49. Cold Gawd, I’ll Drown On This Earth
I love shoegaze. I’m getting a bit tired of the shoegaze-overload we’ve seen in the past couple years. This is an incredible shoegaze record that not only stood out from the pack, but revitalized my love of the genre.
48. Mall Girl, Pure Love
Imagine if Remi Wolf and Michelle Zauner had a daughter and she became the new lead singer of Black Country, New Road. Imagine how cool that would be, then go listen to this record.
47. Sharp Pins, Radio DDR
Kai Slater has such an idiosyncratic knack for 70s-power-pop-by-way-of-90s-slacker-rock songcraft that the Guided By Voices comparisons are absolutely warranted. I loved his first record, Turtle Rock, as well, and was thrilled to see his other band, Lifeguard, play an early set at Pitchfork Fest. He’s part of Chicago’s Hallogallo Collective with bands like Horsegirl and Friko, and I’m excited to see what any/all of them do next.
46. 03 Greedo, Helluva, Hella Greedy
2024 saw this titan of contemporary West Coast rap released from prison, and his first post-incarceration record—a triumphant team-up with producer Helluva—is a dense, hard-earned celebration. This interview that Dash Lewis did with Greedo for Stereogum is one of my favorite profiles I’ve read all year.
45. Yasmin Williams, Acadia
I can’t remember the last time I voluntarily woke up early enough to watch the sunrise, but this multi-textured, guitar-forward folk record feels like doing exactly that.
44. Etran de L’Aïr, 100% Saharan Guitar
My sister put me onto this band after she saw them play Solid Sound Fest, and while I’m hoping to someday dance to their soaring desert blues riffs at a live show someday, for now I’ll settle for hearing them on the record. Though listening to 100% Saharan Guitar doesn’t feel like settling in the slightest.
43. Jimmy Montague, Tomorrow’s Coffee
For transparency’s sake, I must admit that Jimmy is a friend and I wrote the bio for this record. Still, yacht rock is having a major moment—watch the HBO doc if you haven’t already, then go watch Jimmy Montague’s live session, because nobody making yacht rock right now is doing it better than him and the top-notch session musicians he’s recruited as his collaborators.
42. Madi Diaz, Weird Faith
As somebody who’s incapable of looking a good thing in the face without wondering what the catch is, the lyrics of “Everything Almost” have been in steady rotation in my internal monologue. We could all use a little bit of that weird faith she’s talking about, that’s kind of all we’ve got.
41. Allegra Krieger, Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine
Have you ever heard someone describe an experience so horrifying and traumatic and fundamentally worldview-changing, but with the ease of someone asking you to pick up a couple things for them at the grocery store? Yeah, that’s this. And it’s magnificent.
40. Gulfer, Third Wind
A shining sendoff to a beloved Canadian emo band that unfortunately broke up this year. Well technically, their final project was their follow-up EP, LIGHTS OUT (listen to that too).
39. RXKNEWPHEW, Always Remember Me
I kept trying to write something about this record, but nothing I say about this record could match any of the bars on “Saoirse Ronan.” Drink every time Neph says “Saoirse Ronan.”
38. Snarls, With Love
The Real Crushers album of the year. Snarls’ pop punk stylings are giddy and anxious, sticky like sweaty palms and heart-shaped lollipops, like an all-consuming crush should be.
37. Camila Cabello, C, XOXO
HEAR ME OUT. I had to come around on this one. Yes, the C, XOXO album cycle got off on the wrong foot, and sometimes Camila seems like she’s been playing in the other pop girls’ clothes (Charli, Lana, Rosalía, SZA—take your pick). But in this instance, all the artifice reveals some confusing and compelling truths. The initially derided “I LUV IT” has proven to be a weirdo party anthem, the piano riff at the bridge of City Girls’ swan song “Dade County Dreaming” feels like sticking your drunken, spinning head out a backseat window on the freeway, and you’d never expect a Pitbull sample to sound quite as eerie and morose as it does when it sneaks into heartbreak ballad “B.O.A.T.” If Camila had gotten rid of the two Drake features and a couple of the interludes, she’d have one of the best pop records of 2024.
36. Charly Bliss, Forever
I interviewed Charly Bliss about this record, which is the sonic equivalent of a massive group hug under a disco ball.
35. Hinds, VIVA HINDS!
Few bands sound like they’re having more fun making music than Hinds do. Lead single “Coffee” alone makes me want to greenlight three seasons of a Broad City-style buddy comedy about Ana and Carlota’s adventures in Madrid.
34. Eliza McLamb, Going Through It
This is the first record of 2024 that I really fell in love with. I reviewed it for Paste when it first came out and interviewed Eliza for Stereogum over the summer, so read those if you wanna hear my (and her) thoughts on this album in depth.
33. Vince Staples, Dark Times
Vince is probably one of my top 5 favorite rappers at this point, and while I loved his 2022 return-to-form RAMONA PARK BROKE MY HEART, the brooding, introspective Dark Times sees him moving in a seriously fascinating direction, growing into elder statesman status with his wit as sharp as ever.
32. Angelica Garcia, Gemelo
Released in early 2020, Cha Cha Palace got a raw deal. While its follow-up is darker and moodier, it also makes abundantly clear that Angelica Garcia’s ambition, sonic curiosity, and disregard for genre conventions knows no bounds.
31. Erika De Casier, Still
The hypnotic hook of “ice” (and the little chime after the title drop) gets stuck in my head all the time and when it does, it’s enough to convince me that Erika’s the most effortlessly cool person ever—and that’s saying something for a song that follows “The Princess,” which is literally about just how much effort goes into being an untouchable bad bitch.
30. Kim Gordon, The Collective
Speaking of effortlessly cool, here’s the patron saint of it. Confirmation that I would, in fact, listen to Kim Gordon sing her to-do list (provided that she does so over a hard-as-hell trap beat).
29. Tyla, Tyla
Try not to shake ass challenge (Level: Impossible). I gladly welcome Tyla’s pop queen reign.
28. RiTchie, Triple Digits [112]
“WYTD?!?!” will never not hype me the fuck up. Also if you told 2019 me that one of the Injury Reserve emcees would make a song that heavily interpolates “Cut Your Bangs” by Radiator hospital, I would’ve had a heart attack (in a good way).
27. Father John Misty, Mahashmashana
Can we leave the “I don’t wanna like Father John Misty, but…” thing behind in 2025? Man’s earned his flowers and the rest of us could stand to be both as honest and as interesting as he is. Collab with Kendrick when?
26. Fontaines D.C., Romance
“Starburster” is one of the most batshit songs I’ve heard all year. “Favourite” is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve heard all year. It’s insane that they make sense on the same album. Dying to see these Dublin boys live the next time they’re stateside.
25. The Softies, The Bed I Made
I interviewed The Softies and immediately afterwards I cried thinking about growing up alongside my best friend and the prospect of us still being best friends decades from now after so much more life has happened to us. It was the first time in a long time that I felt genuinely excited about the future and about getting old. You can read about it here.
24. Kendrick Lamar, GNX
At its worst, the celebrity and spectacle of the ongoing Kendrick/Drake beef has overshadowed the music and has sensationalized the very serious allegations of abuse and pedophilia (Alphonse Pierre did an incredible job of highlighting this in his op-ed for Pitchfork). Kendrick Lamar is a man of many personas, and while I’m not crazy about the tracks where he grandstands as a morally upright family man, I do love the tracks where we see Kendrick at his most petty and vindictive—those are the moments where GNX shines the brightest.
23. Ka, The Thief Next To Jesus
I’ve been thinking of Ka a lot since I returned to my hometown of Brooklyn for the holidays. Ka was a lifelong New Yorker. He served this city as a firefighter and as an outspoken rapper whose poetry is an essential chronicle of New York City’s history. When Ka died back in October, a part of the city died with him. In a more just world, The Thief Next To Jesus wouldn’t have to be a preemptive eulogy, but only Ka could do himself justice.
22. Couch Slut, You Could Do It Tonight
Truly twisted, disgusting, awful, ugly hardcore record. Fucking deranged shit. Megan Osztrosits is an evil genius.
21. Combat, Stay Golden
There are so many standout moments on this record: the gang vocals rhyming “Hey Holden!” with “stay golden” on the title track, the jagged riff that kicks off “Put Me In, Coach,” the “we’re all in this together”-ness of the aptly-titled victory lap “Epic Season Finale.” “Let’s write a chorus that everyone will scream”—clearly Combat can do anything they set their minds to.
20. Cloud Nothings, Final Summer
Sleeper hit from a guitar rock band that’s somewhat-recently grown into a legacy act, easily their best album since Attack On Memory.
19. Nilufer Yanya, My Method Actor
Half of Radiohead put out TWO albums this year, which I don’t acknowledge here because if you look up “None of Grace’s Business” in the dictionary you will find a photo of The Smile next to it. That being said, Nilufer Yanya made a better Radiohead record than either one that the two guys who are in Radiohead put out this year, so that should tell you something. “Keep On Dancing” is both one of the best album openers of the year AND one of the songs that best sums up how I feel about my creative pursuits right now.
18. The Cure, Songs From A Lost World
Comeback album of the year, hands down. I will follow Robert Smith and his crusade against injustice and Ticketmaster to the ends of the earth—and on this record, it feels like that’s where he’s bringing us.
17. Mount Eerie, Night Palace
Painful, biting, soul-crushing meditations on the natural world and human beings’ place in it from the guy who brought us these:
Frankly, I would expect nothing less.
16. Rosali, Bite Down
There are some records that make you feel so grateful to be alive, not just for the obvious moments where you get to do wonderful things like be in love and watch a perfectly in-sync band crush onstage, but also imbued you with a gratitude for your capacity to feel sorrow and pain and heartbreak. This is one of those records.
15. Doechii, Alligator Bites Never Heal
Every time I see a clip of one of Doechii’s recent live performances—the one on Colbert, the one with Issa Rae—on my timeline, I have to go watch the whole thing. I watched her Tiny Desk the morning it dropped, then went to a friend’s house and watched it again with them. The self-proclaimed “swamp princess,” “new hip-hop Madonna,” and “trap Grace Jones,” her charisma and versatility are on full display on this mixtape.
14. This Is Lorelei, Box For Buddy, Box For Star
In terms of its comps, this feels like a greatest hits collection of the artists that helped shape my music taste during my middle- and high-school iPod-listening years: The Mountain Goats, The Magnetic Fields, Belle & Sebastian, Elliott Smith, The Postal Service. You can get a more extensive idea of my thoughts in this album review for Stereogum.
13. Waxahatchee, Tigers Blood
As much as I am partial to the more punky, guitar-rocky offerings from Katie Crutchfield’s catalog, I’ve also grown to appreciate her embrace of alt-country. And while I get why the MJ Lenderman collab “Right Back To It” has become the critical and commercial favorite, the dark horses “Evil Spawn” and “Crowbar” have some of Katie’s punchiest songwriting.
12. MJ Lenderman, Manning Fireworks
Speaking of indie rock’s new golden boy. What’s there to say about MJ Lenderman that everyone and their uncle hasn’t already said about it? When Manning Fireworks first dropped, I wrote about how I was kind of frustrated with the way a lot of music writers were covering it. I then tweaked that a bit and ended up with this essay. Awooooooooooooo.
11. Liquid Mike, Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot
I’m happy to see Mike Maple & co finally receive their flowers (even though I didn’t get to see any of the shows they played with Joyce Manor). I reviewed this album for Paste when it first came out, so you can read more about the rise of Liquid Mike Hive there.
10. Yatta, Palm Wine
In the spirit of the holiday season, I will posit that the best gift (to give or to receive) is something that the receiver did not know they needed, something that gives them that “where have you been all my life” feeling. It’s not even about the gift itself, but the display of intimacy and understanding that it represents, how it reminds one person of how well someone else knows them. During the hook of the closer “No Greater Love,” Yatta repeats the line “Dancing without you was a vibe, but now that I found you I love you.” To me, that line encapsulates that feeling of being given the thing you didn’t know you needed. It presents love not as something that fills a void, but something that gives all preexisting joys new dimension and depth. The layered, watery echo that ripples throughout this track submerges and warps everything, permeating all that it surrounds, just like love itself.
9. Cavalier, Different Type Time
Have I mentioned that I’m back in the city? Well, I am, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the way New York-born-New-Orleans-based rapper Cavalier writes about the concept of home—as a cluttered, transient thing, something that changes each time you revisit it either literally or through the portal of memory. When I put it that way, it makes Different Type Time sound like a much heavier record than it is, and while it is cerebral and meditative in ways that shouldn’t be understated, it’s the moments of goofy, memey humor that expose its brilliance—it’s earned the longest yeah boi ever.
8. Ekko Astral, pink balloons
I must once again get ahead of my own biases and tell you that Ekko Astral’s frontwoman Jael Holzman is a friend of mine. What I don’t need to tell you, if you’ve heard her band’s debut record, is that she is also adept at writing blistering, brain-shaking punk songs that somehow make you feel both more and less insane about being alive during an abjectly insane time. Though I love the fast-paced rattlers that make up the majority of pink balloons, my favorite is the relative outlier, closer “i90,” which has this slow build to a soaring, epic outro that sounds timeless now and probably will for decades to come.
7. Los Campesinos!, All Hell
When I saw Los Campesinos! live this summer, Gareth told us that the new record was called All Hell, “because, well—look around.” I had the honor of interviewing the band before that show, and you can read the profile over at The Alternative. The sparknotes version, though, is that this band that have grown a passionate, close-knit fanbase writing sad-sack songs about the enormity of everyday tragedies have continued to do just that with a comeback album well worth the wait.
6. Mdou Moctar, Funeral For Justice
During the summer of 2023, I caught Mdou Moctar’s Sunday Blue Stage set and watched the titular frontman and lead guitarist twist crowd-shattering, electrifying riffs from his six strings. This was shortly before 3/4s of the band were forced to extend their stay in the U.S. indefinitely when a coup broke out in their home country of Niger, preventing them from returning after their tour. Since finally coming back home, the group has turned up the volume and the stakes on their blend of psychedelic rock and desert blues with Funeral For Justice, their greatest and most ear-splitting work to date.
5. Rachel Chinouriri, What A Devastating Turn Of Events
I lost count of how many times I thought to myself, “This girl’s a STAR” during my first listen to Rachel Chinouriri’s debut album, or while watching its accompanying music videos afterward. If I were giving out superlatives for this year’s list, I would give Rachel the following: Best Debut, Most Promising Up-And-Coming Pop Girl, and Artist Who Needs To Write The Soundtrack To A Teen Movie Immediately.
4. Charli XCX, BRAT
What else am I gonna say about BRAT or Charli XCX or the year she’s had that someone else hasn’t already said? That I haven’t already said? I’m sure you’re tired of hearing about it. It lives up to the hype, okay?
3. Cindy Lee, Diamond Jubilee
The radio show-turned-podcast Sound Opinions was extremely formative to how I discover music and think critically about it, and there’s one segment in particular that comes to mind. It’s called Buried Treasures, and it’s one in which Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis highlight artists who are flying under the radar. The term “buried treasure” feels pretty obviously applicable to the Diamond Jubilee album cycle, though when critics talk about this record, they tend to focus more on the “buried” aspect of it than the “treasure” part. And to some extent, I get it. In the era where streaming is king, it can feel novel for something that eschews conventional marketability to break through. But even if this weren’t a record that was only available on YouTube or a GeoCities site, it would still sound both anachronistic and timeless, grounded in its clear strains of influence from The Velvet Underground, Phil Spector-produced girl groups of the 60s and 70s, and a classic country sound that borrows equally from outlaw ballads and the Grand Ole Opry. It earns its 2-plus hour runtime, vast and hypnotic as it revels in understated drama.
2. Nala Sinephro, Endlessness
I’ve written about this spellbinding record for both Paste’s and Stereogum’s 2024 AOTY lists, and I wrote those blurbs while on two different listens. I find that each time I put on Endlessness, I find something new to be entranced by. It’s an album that feels like it’s always unraveling before my eyes (or ears) and showing me a new side of itself with each revisit, and that feels like a true mark of greatness.
1. Magdalena Bay, Imaginal Disk
The past few years, my AOTYs have mostly been albums that I anticipated would be among my favorites, new records from artists I already loved. I had some familiarity with Magdalena Bay and a sort of ambient awareness of the Imaginal Disk concept and album rollout. I’d listened to Mercurial World when it dropped. I’d liked it just fine, but it wasn’t a record I was quick to return to. I didn’t expect my response to Imaginal Disk to be all that different.
I love to be proven wrong in the right way. I’ve seen some people call Imaginal Disk “experimental pop” while praising it, but I don’t think that Magdalena Bay have a particularly untraditional take on pop music. True, they’re approaching it from a prog-influenced lens, but their sound is pretty straightforwardly poppy. I think people are quick to label it “experimental” because we’re not used to pop music that feels as unpredictable, organic, and purely joyous as Imaginal Disk does. Professor Skye, a French professor/music reviewer whose YouTube videos I started watching a few years ago and whose form of music criticism I find really refreshing, described Magdalena Bay as a cross between Daft Punk and ABBA, which feels pretty accurate, not just in terms of how the music itself sounds, but as a means of highlighting both groups’ knack for crafting sleek, energetic pop songs that hit the listener’s pleasure sensors dead-on.
Imaginal Disk is tactile and immersive. It’s a record that breaks out of the sensory confines of its audio medium. I don’t just hear these songs, I feel like I could taste them or run my fingers through them. Or, I feel like Imaginal Disk is a museum and each song is an interactive art installation that I’m walking through. It feels like the first time I visited Meow Wolf. Or like when I was a kid visiting Leandro Erlich’s Swimming Pool at Moma PS1, peering at the people walking around beneath a layer of transparent blue water, and then going down to its lower level and staring up at everyone above through that same water while I stand below it, completely dry in a windowless blue room. This record has a defamiliarizing quality, like when you stare at your own face in the mirror for too long or repeat the same word over and over again until it doesn’t sound like it means anything anymore.
I’m gonna stop before I make this record seem way headier and inaccessible than it is, because it is also, hands-down, the most fun album I’ve heard all year. The glitchy, “Anthems For A Seventeen-Year-Old Girl”-sounding instrumental that shatters midway through opener “She Looked Like Me!” feels like a portal opening into the world of True Blue (the record’s sci-fi protagonist) and when its hook returns for a jazzy reprise in “The Ballad of Matt & Mica” it’s the perfect payoff. There’s a particularly bubbly moment in “Killing Time” that makes it sound like the title track of Ween’s The Mollusk. “Image” (with its delightfully kitschy “bowling alley screen when you get a strike”-ass music video) is the most exhilarating piece of synthpop this side of Grimes’ Art Angels. The chorus of “That’s My Floor” feels like entering the best house party ever at the perfect time and everyone being thrilled to see you, while “Love Is Everywhere” and “Angel on a Satellite” are roller disco dreams come true. There’s a part of “Tunnel Vision” that sounds like the Bird Up! music from The Eric Andre Show. This album is all over the place and yet everything is exactly where it should be.
I could probably get more into the central concept driving the record—one that, in all honesty, I don’t totally follow, but I don’t necessarily feel like I need to. Sometimes it’s enough to say “Hey what if somebody tried to put a DVD into your brain, wouldn’t that be fucked up?” It all seems to be a metaphor for the lengths we go to in pursuit of our “best selves” (or, as Mica puts it in “True Blue Interlude,” “the purest you”). It’s surreal and conceptual, but most of all, it’s a good time.
And that’s a wrap on 2024, see you all soon!