Albums of the Year, 2024; 10–1.
10. Blind Girls — An Exit Exists
A Plea, An Assault
There are some records that came out this year which were 40 minutes or longer, and instead of plodding through those, sometimes I’d just want to go through this 21 minute atom bomb two or three times. When not pummeling through blistering fast, grindy riffs the sounds coming off of these guitars sound warped, mangled in a heaving wreck. And vocally, there is an abundance of emotion. On the surface, there is a certainty and a violence, a barking dog at the end of a rusted chain, something sure to keep one at bay. But as the songs bound ahead there appear not just cracks, but full collapses, moments where the entire structure seems on the verge of complete implosion. The entire band shows capabilities of contemplative and melodic runs, oftentimes accompanying Sharni Brouwer offering up sounds on the cusp of a mental breakdown, a cocktail of tears and shouting and desperation. While the overwhelming tone of this record is an uber-aggressive screamo showcase, there’s a screaming spotlight on the vulnerability that this band is ready to show. This is a difficult and emotional record to get through, see-sawing back and forth between frenzy and fragility. This is a coin flipping in the air on a battlefield, this is a spinning top on the edge of a table. Hearing this record for the first time, I was in awe of something like this existing and a bit relieved that it somehow made its way into the light for me. Each successive time I hear it, it drags me further into its spinning blades. The album hurts. And it’s in the album’s title in which we find the most solace, a promise that there is an end to a suffering that we carry with us. There are avenues, there are pathways across.
Check Out: Closer to Hell
9. The Smile — Wall of Eyes
Arcadian Grasping
This record rode high on my list through most of the year. Before I expected the band to drop a second record, this was almost a miracle drop, another release from a band who delivered on all aspects of cerebral and creative art rock music. This is the second time in as many years where a band released two records, both of which ended up in my Top Ten (last year’s two The National records both put me in an emotional silo and forced me to sit in my own thoughts for hours), and it’s such an awkward balance to strike, not only figuring out where in the pantheon of other 2024 releases to place a single album, but also t then compare one work from an artist against another. Wall of Eyes takes the post-modern, mellow genre and turns it again and again as a representative of each member of the color wheel tumbles and kaleidoscopes against another, forming fractals and illusions within the mosaic. This record finds a way to coat the inside of your skull like a salve, a viscous recipe that creates a warm home for the brain waves that these songs generate. The first two songs from this record have a sensation of home, of a safe place to sit within. And as ‘Read the Room’ roils around, there is a diametric opposition to that sense of security, instead creating an uneasy tension with its choice of notes and its march forward towards the fuzz that rests at the end of the track. Much like Wonka’s boat ride, there’s a passage through a psychic portal at play, something that despite solid ground under one’s feet, feels like a dream that one can’t quite shake. It’s this kind of journey that makes this record challenging, as there’s a familiarity in the company that this record asks you to keep but an insistence upon movement and unevenness that doesn’t allow the ability to find faces within the crowd, doesn’t allow any eye contact to confirm recognition. Where Cut Outs grounds itself more within the confidence of the digital avatar, Wall of Eyes injects itself into the marrow of the listener’s thalamus, drowning us in a dream logic where nothing sits in one place for long enough to settle. This record is a rising and falling ocean of sonic imagery, a record that I find best engaged with in otherwise silent solitude. ‘Friend of a Friend’ and ‘Bending Hectic’ both contribute to this concept beautifully. This might be a bit of a stretch, but it’s like a dentist asking questions while fingers and metal are prying your mouth open. The psychic sense of trying to reckon with two opposing possibilities daunts the listener, unable to get proper footing in either landscape, we have to accept alienation on all counts.
There’s a Lost Highway feel in so many of these songs, a narrative through-line that one can try to follow, but there are so many aspects of it that not only shape a new reality, but promise an umbral dissonance that cannot be trusted, so have a feeling of being out in orbit. I call a lot of attention to the way that ‘Bending Hectic’ seems to unravel at around the 5:30 mark, a specific feeling of the entire soundscape going haywire after we have spent most of the song in the driver’s seat picturing a winding road, maybe falling asleep, maybe fighting dream, contemplating anything and everything other than the drive. Yorke lulls us into a sense of comfort, of lullabic familiarity, as if we’re listening to an alternate reality version of ‘The Tourist’ until he says, “I’m letting go of the wheel” and all at once, all things dissolve into a miasma of color and dissonance, a dragging of infinitude across the razor of time, and the road is different, the driver is different, the vehicle is different, and this song has become the most grounded and the most aggressive it’s been over the course of the 45 minute record length.
Check Out: Read the Room
8. The Smile — Cutouts
Technoleaning Architecture
Months after the release of their first album of 2024 (Wall of Eyes), The Smile started dropping these really incredible small clips of corrupted VHS style, .avi looking looping animations, combined with music clips that sounded boldly electronic, made up nearly entirely of boops and beeps and loops. My initial guess was that they were planning on doing a stripped down version of the first album with remixes and reimaginings. Instead what we received was an entire second record from Yorke, Skinner and Greenwood. Sure, some of the songs dive deeply into the more electronic hemisphere of their skillsets, but as early as the second track, we’re hearing full-bodied analog guitar work. Quickly realizing that receiving two albums from this band is an absolute embarrassment of riches, I started to use a little bit of my Radiohead fan mind and tried to find the ways that one record might be puppeteering the next, how one might be tied to the other either thematically or origamically or even spiritually. While I still haven’t figured out the tie-in (though I’m sure the internet could likely prove otherwise), these two albums both are comfortably in my favorite records of the year, and have yielded some of the best songs that The Smile have written in their short yet bountiful career. With these artists having so much musical mileage under their belt, it’s never exactly a shock that they’re able to pull some of these massive ideas out of their collective brain. Something like ‘Zero Sum’ feels like it’s on the cusp of falling apart, a wildly spinning gyro with the spinning mass rattling and shaking but creating a family of danceable post-modern mayhem. ‘Colours Fly’ brings an alternate middle-eastern flavor to the page, complete with what feels like a meditation on tuning and chanting voices mid-song, only to be wisped back into the dunes of the sprawling desert of the song. It’s an incredible transformation that happens within my own mind, after hearing the first few singles from the record and being a little distanced from the direction I thought they were headed to being dragged directly into the whirlwind of Skinner’s rattling and intelligently atmospheric drumming, an intuition on working with two of the most well-known, well-versed partners in music history, and leaving nothing on the plate, leaving no detail unattended, having my body swaying in tune with these heady and cerebral soundscapes. Each song, while boundariless and expansive, all have a center to them that’s easy to hum within, easy to find and get once they’re found get completely folded into. ‘Don’t Get Me Started’s stripped down, pre-internet era Futuristic Journey is such a mantra, like falling into a hollow of chords and wires, chunky buttons, discarded tech. The tracks here run the spectrum, some feeling like ready-made Songs meant for placing on a playlist or on an album, a very clear decision to have a verse, a chorus, a bridge, etc. Others present as place setting for entire scenes, for mental visualizations, for films. If these are B-Sides from the Wall of Eyes sessions, it’s just a testament to the raw power of this trio.
Check Out: Eyes & Mouth
7. Various Artists — I Saw the TV Glow Soundtrack
Be Everything, Everyone, All the Time
Listening to this collection reminds me of the dizzying emotional high that I had coming out of (and while watching) the brilliant (…brilliant) Jane Schoenbrun film I Saw the TV Glow from earlier this year. Not only one of my favorite films of the year, but one of the most incredible artistic works I’ve seen in recent memory, this soundtrack reflects so much of what it means to Come of Age, to embrace one’s entire emotional self. While the main allegory of the film’s story is one of extraordinary acceptance, the very specific journey of trans youth, there is something within the nucleus of this creation that should be exploding within each of us. Our emotions are boundless and limitless expressions that we only give restriction within a societal lens. Whether it’s love, whether it’s introspection, contemplation, joy, confusion, whether it’s need, whether it’s desire… our heart glows towards the path it wants to walk. It’s up to us to get our feet on it and to keep progressing. I think these songs do an unbelievable job at creating an environment of that raw adolescent time when the way we felt at any given moment meant everything to us. Some of my favorite artists like Frances Quinlan, Caroline Polachek, King Woman and Drab Majesty contribute to the mix here, but there are some rad new artists that this introduced me to like Florist, Jay Som and Proper. Soundtracks used to be one of the mainline ways to find out about new bands, to collect some of your favorite singles, and to even see some of the ways that songs you were familiar with could be retranslated and arranged to be something completely new. This soundtrack is actually one that I wanted to pick up immediately upon leaving the theater, but found out that the vinyl was able to be pre-ordered and would include the Snail Mail cover of The Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Tonight Tonight’, so of course I made moves. Overall, these songs tend to be fuzzy, lo-fi, borderline bedroom-pop expressions with [over-]earnest lyrics and performances which act as a celebration for not only this generation of Internet Kids, but for anyone who’s ever felt anything that they couldn’t quite express, for anyone who’s ever been something that they couldn’t quite fully realize. This is a varietal bouquet of exquisite compassion and I hope that within it, somewhere, you can find The Flower For You.
Check Out: Florist — Riding Around In the Dark
6. Clairo — Charm
Sensate
I’ve had a few different false starts in trying to write about this record in any detail. The biggest things that come to mind for me show up as closer to a vision board, as a collage, as a planchette surfing along the surface of a ouija board. This music feels like so many things. Lush carpet. Wood paneling. Conversation pits. Dark browns, deep oranges, humming maroons. Listening to these songs transports me to some alternate waiting room a la Twin Peaks, some organic Place with mood and purpose, but one that doesn’t immediately come to mind, like a Somewhere in a dream that your subconscious repeatedly transports you to. The blood warm keyboards and synthesizers are one of the leading instruments that set the tone, along with the perfectly produced drums that kick with a retro fizz but a modern zip. I’ve only been listening to Clairo since Immunity (kind of like you, I’d guess) but over her somewhat short career, it feels like she’s reinvented her style twice already, using the familiar carefree effort of her voice to propel these dynamic pop songs in different directions along the color wheel. These songs brim with a new confidence somehow, as she summons all of the spotlight amidst a room with lots of sounds and interesting music around it. Rarely is there a moment in this album where she is performing and there aren’t at least two things happening below her post-whisper, layers and dynamics, but she still manages to host the listener, to lasso them like a siren. It’s awfully difficult for me to hear one song on this record and not want to go immediately to ‘Sexy to Someone’ (another one of those favorites of the year), and from there, listening to the rest of the record just happens. Every song is excellent. They never overstay their welcome, all hovering like a family of cirrus clouds stretching and mingling in the sky but never obscuring it. These songs feel dragged from another realm, some alternate 1970s where we’re still picking full records up from a shelf and letting the full album play as they translate into a 30–45 minute mood piece. This whole album is smoky perfection.
Check Out: Slow Dance
5. Charli XCX — Brat
666
I have a hard time talking about something this enormous. Like I’m going to educate you. Like I’m going to change your mind. Like you haven’t already created an opinion something so globally digested. Something that’s just so Julia. To give a brief introduction, I have to say that before this record dropped, I had no opinion on Charli whatsoever. She was just some name that came up in pop culture, some name that got dropped by people who were in the pop sphere who Knew What Was Going On. She Was No One. Also, I have to also qualify this ranking on my list by saying that typically, the more popular something is, the more likely I am to either ignore it or to claim that it just isn’t my thing. My deepest animal instinct is to find reasons why I am repelled by it. All of this being said, I understand that this might have been the bigget record of the year. The color. The art design. The Brat Summer. All of that. I know that all of this contributed to making this one of the most easily hated records of the year. In fact, a couple of nights ago, I started hearing that this record was losing a lot of stock in the zeitgeist because major outlets were ranking it in their favorite records of the year. This is a record in every mouth of the populace.
I am here to tell you that this is a record that could have been my album of the goddamn year.
Listen: the amount of tears I’ve had to wipe from my eyes while listening to this record is absurd. From joy, from ennui, from raw indefinable emotion, from feminine power, from speechless bombast… it’s all too much. I think it’s easy to write this off as a standard pop record, one with 4/4 beats and danceable hooks and electronic devices plugged into algorithms and teams of producers. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Maybe at the time of this writing, it’s the highest metacritic rated record of the year. I really don’t give a shit, man. There is something more primal at work here, something unquantifiably powerful about the way that this record draws its essence from some of the most important electro records of my youth, but also transports me to being introduced to dub-step just as it was exploding in a basement of a Greenpoint, Brooklyn bar in 2010 while being fed MDMA and finally understanding the spirit and the soul of what it means to be abducted by dance.
I’m not sure what my experience would be in an actual live Charli XCX concert in its modern height, but I have a sense that it would be some kind of detached observation that would feel completely as if I were in some UFO trying to watch a television reproduction of what “Cool Music” feels like. Luckily, I was able to go to a little club night where a DJ was playing music that was influenced by Brat and was also mixing in songs from the record and able to hear exactly how this music was meant to be experienced: loud, louder, under strobing lights, in organic darkness, with friends and strangers and reckless physical abandon. And as this album was already enormous in my heart, this record became actualized in my bones, in my muscles, in my bloodstream. Hearing ‘Everything is romantic’ and being able to have the light flashed into my pupils with the beat as she repeated “FALL IN LOVE AGAIN AND AGAIN” ad nauseum; hearing ‘Sympathy Is a Knife’ and feeling every nerve, every joint in my body seized up as the entire chorus beginning with “Couldn’t even be her if I tried” and I had a full body eruption almost like hearing Purity Ring’s ‘fineshrine’ for the first time; like hearing ‘360’ and having an out of psyche experience, becoming anyone and everyone else at once.
I’m not here to convince you to like this record if you don’t already. I’m not here assuming that you don’t already love this or hate this. What I am here to say is that this is an important record to me this year. And maybe it won’t always be. Maybe it won’t stick with me like the records it reminds me of (The Prodigy’s Fat of the Land; The Chemical Brothers’ Dig Your Own Hole; Purity Ring’s Shrines). But this year, 2024, this album became a billion things to me and the deconstruction and production and ingestion of every single note became an exercise in deregulation. This was the best feeling record of the year.
Check Out: Sympathy Is a Knife
4. Frail Body — Artificial Bouquet
Shred
I feel like this was my first record of the year. The first album that I heard in 2024 where as soon as I had sat through it my first time, I knew that I would be discussing it as one of the most completely perfect works in all of the last 12 months. I’d had some experience with the band, enjoying elements of their previous record, A Brief Memoriam from 2019, but it didn’t stick in the way that it had with many before. Right from the opening moment of this record, it had its fingers under my collar bone and was dragging me closer and closer to its endlessly milling turbine, the safety off, the blades erasing my lips, my eyelids, my everything. This music wants to burn you directly to the ground and stomp on the dirt. Even with a familiarity with the movement, with the “scenes” of these songs, it can be a little bit hard to tell one song from the next, as they act as a morphing design of unholiness. Limbs bend, one into the next, folding elbows into knees, thighs leaning into ribs. ‘Berth’ runs into ‘Critique Programme’ and its unnatural bass groaning. The first three tracks of this album attack as one, leaning into and over one another in an onslaught. It feels iron and slick. One of my favorite things about music this cacophonous, so obscene, is that the vocals act as a face, as a shadow of humanity, but I simply cannot tell a single thing that singer Lowell Shaffer is saying. And this is the way I like it. It’s like a horrid poem, a sonnet of weeping where the words matter not at all, it’s only the darkness that leads you further away from the light. ‘Devotion’ is the first song that gives a little bit of reprieve, some moments to breathe, the weight off of your chest, and it has a little bit more air to swirl around the room. And if this song is an example of letting up, its comparison is dire. This body stands as a whole, as much an abomination as it is beautiful. Astral in its possibility, this record drives and drives and writhes into some metal oblivion, sharp and serated, dragging you in like an undertow, sure to carve, but in brief moments, a floral beauty arranges itself in the listener’s eyeline, a golden ratio to lose yourself within.
Check Out: Horizon Line
3. State Faults — Children of the Moon
Selene Be Praised
I was rooting for these guys hard. I knew that eventually this record was coming. When this band dropped Clairvoyant five years ago, it felt like they were right on the cusp of some new movement. That record was special in its own way, a unique voice in a genre that had been quasi-dormant for a good deal of time. They were doing a fairly classic screamo sound, but without tributing, without feeling like it were some kind of nostalgic “Remember When.” And then, for all I could tell, they dropped away. I still listened to ‘Funeral Teeth’, almost as if in memoriam to them. When these songs came together and started rotating into my vision, it felt like they had overcome some untoward obstacle, had dragged up some rebellious anchor. And the songs herein had that same feeling of triumph, of strained effort against some untold contention.
There is a begging into the night almost throughout these records, some naked desperation. A promise to sacrifice and bleed into a chalice to retrieve or to recapture or to remember. Just arriving at a point where we have a chance to hear these songs as an audience feels special. It feels like the band had to drag this album from themselves and deliver it to “us” if it were the last thing they were going to do. The way that Jonny Andrew belts out these words, there is a sense of a final act, a begging from some great beyond for someone, anyone to hear what he has to say. For it to matter. For it to feel like something. And I think that’s what this record has meant to me every time that I’ve heard it. That this feels like a breaking through an invisible psychic barrier, that it means more than anything for them to allow us to hear this. That this is a scream that has always been with them, but it needs to be passed on.
Musically, these are big and ambitious songs. While the vocals indicate some kind of emergency, the guitar and drum parts feel more concentrated and composed, more like an outlined illustration than a blood-urgent declaration. Guitars paint portraits with a vast and wide wealth of locale. There is a verticality to the composition of these songs, with trills and squeals coming off of the guitars in theatric embellishment. It wouldn’t be a record with this kind of urgency if there weren’t the trademark chugging, the pointed delivery of headbanging elements. But there are aspirations here that reach for massive proportions along the way. On ‘No Gospel’, right around the 2:30 mark, they get danger close to hitting some early Mars Volta vibes, and I mean this in the most ingratiating of ways.
I think every band’s release of a record is a landmark in each of the members’ lives. But there is something about Children of the Moon that feels like it was pulled from the fathoms of some infinite ocean, like pulled to the earth from some foul orbit. This record feels like it arrived despite what was told in the cards. I am infinitely grateful for it, because I think it somehow speaks a language that I’ve been meaning to hear for decades, that I’ve been meaning to find in tomes and libraries with no success. This feels like a referential piece of art, a line in the sand of what it means to create a piece of work that overcomes impossibility, that defies fate. These songs rage on and on because they’ve been given new life. At just over an hour long, this feels like an album which gave more because it was given more.
Check Out: Distant Omen
2. Glassing — From the Other Side of the Mirror
Torn From Stasis
The way that this record sounds makes me uncomfortable. It seems to want to find some semblance of melody and serenity. In fact, when the songs are able to find their way to a place of harmony, they sound like a new form of beautiful. In its brightest moment (the penultimate ‘The Kestrel Goes’), the band is able to produce some of the most anthemic, uplifting post-rock of the year. The vocals are filtered through some kind of techno-angelic prayer device, coaxing a cybernetic calm from the listener. The main volume of this record, though, is that of unrest. The wax boils and the skin peels as guitars absolutely shred. This record harnesses speed and violence in a way that few others are able to present. It feels like an enormous and awful beam, a chrome blade that dances. Glassing has found a way to pull extreme music towards two poles of a field, finding a new beauty and a new horror at maximum outputs. This record finds ways to exhibit a future both cosmically unfit for survival and cybernetically suited for synthetic existence. This is a heavy record, pulsing with aggression and unabashed vitriol in its best moments. But between the vile and wretched, there is a seraphic core, a way that the sound opens up to find a vision of celestial clarity. The same designs implemented for hurt are utilized for pleasure. I’ve never heard a record like this before, one that so distinctly provided satisfaction on a scale so immense for so many different reasons. Both in its fury and in its penance, there is a purity at play here, a fire both cleansing and immolating. This record feels like it’s on the cutting edge of creation. I love it as an achievement for the band and it’s one that I will definitely be bringing forward with me into the future and listening to many, many times ahead. Far from emotion for me, this is an album that yield reaction, a catalyst for energetic and cathartic release.
Check Out: Nominal Will
- Horse Jumper of Love — Disaster Trick
Baleful Archetyping
I attribute the pure joy and adoration I feel for this record to seeing the band perform live while opening for Diiv. [An admission: for some reason, in the time leading up to the show, I had confused this band with Car Seat Headrest and it wasn’t until moments before they went on stage that I remembered, “holy fuck; this is not Car Seat Headrest.”] I didn’t know that Horse Jumper was releasing a new record and being at this show was not only a mind bending affair, a heart opening interval in my life, but it allowed me to see that this band was able to play these emotionally rending songs in a way that sounds heavier by magnitudes. Knowing the devastating emotional release, hearing these songs played at massive volume as I stared in awe at their composure, at the way that drummer Jamie Vadala-Doran sat in the pocket and delivered a clinic on how to experience rhythm while backing a band who lets matters of the heart do the heavy lifting. That experience, as I stood before them, was a study in composure as I tried to learn and absorb every note, every shift in technical presentation -vs- raw release.
Armed with this mental laminate, finally hearing this record on release date was an emotional experience. While this recorded version of these songs doesn’t exactly convey the same sense of weight that the live performance delivered, there’s another aspect of the songs that hit just as hard, directly in the gut. These songs are all timed release spirit evacuations, with a paced and steady vocal delivery massaging some vulnerable part of our soul. The guitar bridges create some of the best fuzzed out landscapes I’ve ever been affected by. They act like highly detailed woodblock art, ones that pull me deeper into the lips of their characters, the eyes of their authors, the religions of their populace. Songs don’t spend too much time deviating from their austere engines, driving instead onward and asking its listener to engage in an organic and hand-wringing bleakness with attrition.
The songs are waiting games. The songs are thick envelopes heavy and loose with ink. A song like ‘Wait By the Stairs’ is an excellent example of the band’s dynamic, as most of the work is an act of repetition and steady darning. Setting the watch by the steady and consistent rolling tide, a flowing and certain rotation of stewing guitars, yearning vocals, almost ironically slow drum work. It offers endless meals of reiteration, allowing a new sacred geometry to become a woven basket of one’s own introspect, one’s own regard. The pacing gives way at 3:48 to a blasted scrying, a break in the chain, to heavy and pounding guitars, a shuddering of the ribcage, a smearing of form. Each song has a similar moment, a way that the routine falls apart, a way that discomfort settles in after we take all that’s been given for granted.
Dmitri Giannopoulos’ vocal delivery has just the right essence of sadness, of inner dread, of ennui. There is a hyper-realism to his words, a way that he recollects what seem like moments so imperfect that I wonder if they happened to him at all, if they happened just like this, if they are snapshots of his life, if they are snapshots of my life. There is a microscopic examination of his experiences that sit at the table with me for hours. And thinking back to that live performance, I think of his face and how he stares back the timed miles, and how he relives these moments in real time, in writing time, in performance time, and it all spirals together in either fictional or non-fictional abstraction, building a callous and an immunity to these confidences.
This record, for me, has that bitter and life-altering quickening that one can only feel in very specific interhumanal moments. In breakups. In talking to someone you want to love you back. In fearless communication of someone you want to drag into your council. In watching them get away. In building a wall you know stays up forever. This record is one way emotion, like a talisman you swallow to ward off what’s good. This is an album that makes me feel things I’ve rarely felt before, things I’ve only really felt as a result of interactions, not as the result of hearing representational music. This is a collection of events that act as thaumaturgy.
Check Out: Wink
