The last time I did one of these “favorite albums of the year” lists was for 2022, and it rolled in a full year late. I mention this mostly to point out that, hey, I could have done a lot worse than I am today, rolling out my favorite albums of 2024 list on the exact halfway point on our collective trip through the hellscape that is 2025. (What’s that? I never posted my 2023 list? Hoo boy…)
Anyway! This list, much like the one linked above, was originally created as a submission to the annual Uproxx Music Critics Poll; they only ask for a top 10, but I’m both overly ambitious and I just had so many albums I enjoyed last year that even whittling it down to 25 took some effort and deep consideration. The top 10 was solidified and submitted to Uproxx back in early January, but I’m happy to report that in the many, many relistens to these albums in the ensuing months to write the entries below, I haven’t wanted to tweak it at all. The top 25 had one last minute swap-out but otherwise stayed consistent as well.
One of the fun parts of taking part in the Uproxx Music Critics Poll is, of course, bouncing my own opinions off of the collective results. Their top 10 albums include my #1 plus two more from my top 25; all told, eight of my top 25 made their top 50. Of my top 10, I was literally the only person in the poll of nearly 300 music writers who voted for my #4, #6, and #10 choices, and I only shared my #2 and #8 choices with one other critic each. Meanwhile, another seven that I slotted down in the #11-25 range missed the poll entirely.
But ah, what do they know? I like what I like, and these 25 albums? I loved ‘em. I think you will too. The list is below, and here’s a playlist with a song from each to sample and enjoy while you read.
#11-25 (in alphabetical order)
Babehoven | Water’s Here in You (Double Double Whammy)
“Shoegaze folk” may seem like a contradiction in terms, but it’s the best way I can come up with to describe Water’s Here in You, the second album from Maya Bon and Ryan Albert, the Hudson, New York-based duo known as Babehoven—folk in that the tempos are languorous and the guitars are gently strummed, but shoegaze in that the atmospheric arrangements wash over you all the same even if the volume is best kept around the “hushed” level. It’s a sonically rich LP ranging from hypnotic pop (“Dizzy Spin”) to Enya-esque ethereality (“Lonely, Cold Seed”) to the sparse lo-fi guitars and marching drums of Something About Airplanes-era Death Cab for Cutie (“Lightness is Loud”), with Bon often delivering her vocals in a melodic sort of speak-singing; think Courtney Barnett, sans the Aussie accent.
Beabadoobee | This Is How the World Moves (Dirty Hit)
For her excellent third album as Beabadoobee, Beatrice Laus teamed up with superproducer Rick Rubin, who insisted, in his infamously vibes-based way, that Laus and her musical partner, multi-instrumentalist Jacob Budgen, present all of the songs for the project to him in person on acoustic guitars rather than play him finished demos. The idea was to make sure Laus put additional emphasis on the songwriting, and the gambit worked, pushing Laus to create songs with such maturity and emotional depth that many are calling this her first “adult” album. Though many songs made it all the way to the album centered around acoustic instruments (the tearjerker piano ballad “Girl Song,” the adorably twee “Coming Home”), this isn’t just a gentle folky singer-songwriter record: the chugging guitars and reverb-y vocals of “California” and “Post” conjure the sound of Soccer Mommy, “Real Man” finds Laus channeling Fiona Apple, and “A Cruel Affair” even has a bit of bossa nova swing. The album’s peak, and one of my absolute favorite songs of last year, is “Ever Seen,” a swooning romance about finding love in “the prettiest eyes I’d ever seen” with a bit of synths in the chorus sure to raise the lowest spirit and soften the hardest heart. (The video for it is just so darn sweet, too.) “Just let me write a song like all the ones I love to listen to,” Laus sings in the affectingly adorable album closer “This Is How It Went.” I’d say mission accomplished.
Sabrina Carpenter | Short n’ Sweet (Island)
Sabrina Carpenter is a monster success as a singles artist, so is it weird that I think I might prefer her as an album artist? There are two big hits from this album—”Please Please Please” and “Bed Chem”—that I will turn off when they come on the radio, but on LP, they somehow hit just right. That’s because when viewed as a full piece of work, Short n’ Sweet is a full album’s worth of ruminations on modern romance, with Carpenter’s wittily sardonic lyrics (Wikipedia says “Romantic nihilism and deadpan lyrics are recurring motifs,” as hilarious as it is accurate) directed with laser precision at boyfriends past (“Taste”), present (“Please Please Please,” “Dumb & Poetic”), and future (“Espresso,” “Slim Pickins”). Sonically, the album is pleasantly all over the place but with a decidedly ‘80s/’90s pop bent, from the Tom Tom Club synths of “Please Please Please” to the TLC-style R&B of “Bed Chem” to the driving beat of “Juno,” which weirdly shares a fair bit of DNA with the Mike + the Mechanics hit “All I Need Is a Miracle.” (Seriously, listen to them back-to-back—it’s not a direct lift or anything, but the similarities are wild.) Elsewhere, Carpenter even leans into singer-songwriter territory—confessionals like “Dumb & Poetic” and “Lie to Girls” use acoustic guitars and vicious lyrics in ways that would bring down any open mic night. Would that all frothy radio pop hid these depths!
The Decemberists | As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again (YABB Records/Thirty Tigers)
This era of the Decemberists was announced to the world with “Burial Ground,” a seemingly simple strummy folk tune built on acoustic guitars, which may sound like it’s the standard “return to form” move for the band, but it’s really not: the Decemberists have always had a view of that genre that works in indie rock influences but is decidedly traditionalist in its approach to folk. “Burial Ground” is not folk, it’s folk rock, pure Byrds with its chiming guitars and rich, sunny harmonies (augmented by the Shins’ James Mercer, who joins the backing vocal choir on the track). It’s the only Decemberists song I could imagine Peter, Paul & Mary singing.
“Burial Ground” proved a way to reintroduce the band after six years away (it is the album opener, after all), but also seemed a bit simpler than what I usually expect, and love, from the band. Would the rest of the album prove as uncharacteristically sunny and uncomplicated? As if to prove those expectations wrong, the album announcement came along with the release of the second “single” (that I have yet to actually hear on the radio), the sprawling 19-minute-long “Joan in the Garden,” an epic rumination “about angelic visitation and creative visitation and the hallucinogenic quality of both” (according to singer/guitarist Colin Meloy). The track, which almost certainly takes up the entire fourth side of the double-LP, starts with those same chiming chords played at a slower pace, backing a multi-minute chorus-less verse that runs close to five minutes before it explodes into angry distorted guitar stabs and clanging bells, like the Decemberists making their own version of Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine.” Next comes almost six minutes of sound collage and spacy electronics. Then, unexpectedly, the song explodes back to life as a full-on prog-rock song, all chug-chugga electric guitars and laser synths while Meloy wails in the background with an almost Ozzy Osborne tenor to his voice. It’s the wildest ride in the band’s catalog.
The rest of the album naturally falls between those two extremes while still spreading the band’s sound into new sonic territory. Some songs are in the band’s traditional sweet spot: “Long White Veil” mines similarly jangly territory as “Burial Ground” but with more of a countrified sound (the first Decemberists song I could imagine the Jayhawks covering), “The Reapers” has the English folk base of a classic Decemberists song but its bass-driven melody and gentle piano and flute backing give it a decidedly different flavor, and story-song “William Fitzwilliam” features nothing but an acoustic guitar, an accordion, a bit of sad-sounding pedal steel, and Meloy and multi-instrumentalist Jenny Conlee singing a sweet duet. But scattered within those are left turns like “Oh No!” which, I swear to god, is basically salsa music, right down to the horn stabs.
All that to say, this is an album of stunning variety, yet, somehow, it all hangs together. All told, As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again offers up a rich variety and expands the band’s sound without offering up any missteps.
Fousheé | Pointy Heights (RCA)
When Fousheé’s debut softCORE made my 2022 best albums list, I marveled at her genre adventurousness as she leapt effortlessly from riot grrl fury to glitchy techno to hyper-pop excess to acoustic folk simplicity to aggro-industrial noise. Her 2024 follow-up manages the impressive feat of being just as stylistically varied but in a way that creates a more sustained mood—the songs just hang together better. The singer recorded the album in Jamaica, returning to her family’s homeland for the first time since she was 6 years old, inspiration causing her to toss out everything she had written in advance and start from scratch. The resulting 10 songs (which blaze by in a short but satisfying 28 minutes) have the chill vibes of reggae while rarely using the sonic signatures of the genre: “birds, bees” sounds like the kind of groove 1970 Curtis Mayfield would have made if he were somehow born 40 years later, “100 Bux” is a slow and pretty tone poem that manages to fold in the chorus from “Pass the Dutchie” without harshing the chill atmospherics, “Closer” plays like a mashup of Rihanna, belly dancing music, and a Tarantino movie score, and “War” is a spacy jam built off jaunty Tin Pan Alley piano. The songs are melodic, memorable, and pleasantly bass-forward. Between softCORE and Pointy Heights (named after a family estate in Jamaica founded by her grandfather), Fousheé has proven she can do, well, pretty much anything. Loving what we’ve heard so far, looking very much forward to what she does next.
Liam Gallagher & John Squire | Liam Gallagher & John Squire (Warner)
I’m happy for everybody who managed to score some very expensive tickets to see the upcoming Oasis reunion tour. Me? I’ll be happy to stay home and spin this record that finds Oasis singer Liam Gallagher teaming up with Stone Roses guitarist John Squire in what proves to be a very simpatico pairing. The pair lean heavily on psychedelic-era Beatles, but with Squire occasionally injecting in some nice, bluesy solos. The album as a whole sounds a lot like Chris Murphy-written Sloan songs sung with an English accent, which to these ears is very much a good thing.
Guster | Ooh La La (Ocho Mule)
Guster has steadily moved away from their folky busking roots as they embraced the possibilities of the recording studio, but the cold electronics of their last two albums (2015’s Evermotion and especially 2019’s Look Alive) suggest maybe they moved a little too far. Ooh La La is a much-needed course correction while most definitely not being a retreat or retrenchment. The foursome is still moving into new sonic territory and still embracing the synthesizers and processed sounds of those recent records. But this time out, songs like “Keep Going” and “All Day” have a pulse, a throbbing human heart at their center, while organic acoustic tracks like “Black Balloon” and “Maybe We’re Alright” add some prettiness and variety. Get over any disappointment that this isn’t Lost and Gone Forever 2.0 and you’ll find an excellent, engaging, experimental rock record. Bonus points: it also helped birth one of the best concerts of the year.
Hurray for the Riff Raff | The Past Is Still Alive (Nonesuch)
Alynda Segarra’s eighth album under the moniker Hurray for the Riff Raff is filled with indie folk tunes passionately sung over strummed acoustic guitars with slow and steady drums, dobro, and pedal steel to give a little country flavor. Segarra’s plaintive voice and emotional lyrics are backed this time out by guests like Matt Douglas of the Mountain Goats on saxophone, multi-instrumentalist Meg Duffy of Hand Habits, fiddler Libby Rodenbough of Fust, and Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis of Bright Eyes. I am aware that Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker just put out new albums, but if you’re looking for another album to scratch the same itch as Boygenius’ year-defining The Record, you’d be hard-pressed to do better than Hurray for the Riff Raff’s latest, with the best songs achieving the same liftoff that made “Not Strong Enough” such a smash.
MJ Lenderman | Manning Fireworks (Anti)
MJ Lenderman was on one of the best albums of 2023 with Wednesday’s Rat Saw God, but between this solo album and his appearance on Waxahatchee’s Tigers Blood LP, he had an even bigger and better 2024. What an album—sonically, it mixes the alt-country sound of Son Volt with the clanging guitars of Neil Young and even a bit of Wilco-style noise and experimentation, backing lyrics that are a heady mix of the cryptic and the profound and delivered in Lenderman’s shrugging warble of a voice. Odds are you have already seen this album on approximately one billion best-of-the-year lists so I’m probably not telling you anything you haven’t heard before, but if you haven’t listened to it yet, what are you waiting for?
Dua Lipa | Radical Optimism (Warner)
Controversial opinion: Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia is the best album of the 2020s so far, and it’s not even that close of a contest. I was mildly disappointed at its follow-up Radical Optimism at first because it wasn’t as instantly transcendent a listening experience, but how could it be? As the year went on, though, I kept coming across the songs in the wild and they kept getting stuck in my head in a totally pleasant fashion. Then came December and Lipa’s stunning Live from the Royal Albert Hall special, and hearing the new songs reimagined with an orchestra and played side-by-side with Future Nostalgia tracks landed me at just one conclusion: “I love all of these songs. Do I actually love this album and just not know it?” So I gave it another spin, and another, and another, and the answer was a resounding “yes.” No, it’s not quite Future Nostalgia, but the hooks are sticky, the lyrics shine a light on relatable romantic struggles, and the music blends ‘70s disco, ‘80s pop, and 2020s dance music (courtesy of collaborators like Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker and Miike Snow’s Andrew Wyatt) in a way that’s pure ear candy.
Eliza McLamb | Going Through It (Royal Mountain Records)
Eliza McLamb is cohost (with Julia Hava) of the podcast Binchtopia, which the duo describes as “If Plato and Aristotle had internet addictions and knew what ‘gaslighting’ was.” I haven’t listened to Binchtopia (sorry, not really a podcast person) but if it’s as insightfully observed as this album, I may have to start. McLamb has a stated love for Big Thief, and you can definitely hear elements of Adrianne Lenker in McLamb’s acoustic confessionals and bedroom pop. The album’s MO in a nutshell is, as McLamb puts it so succinctly in the song “Modern Woman,” “Sad girl sings a simple song,” with many of those simple songs having the same heart-baring acoustic singer-songwriter approach as the album sitting down at the #2 spot of this list (“Just Like Mine,” the lullaby-gentle “Strike,” the hushed album closer “To Wake Up”), but with more of a self-deprecating/self-criticizing twist. Not all the songs are quite so quiet, and the ones where McLamb utilizes a full band are where Going Through It really achieves liftoff: check out how she channels Taylor Swift on the driving, fist-pumping chorus on “Mythologize Me” (“All I can do is fantasize about how you fantasize about me”). Top honors, though, goes to the aforementioned “Modern Woman,” a sharply observed self-critique (“I feel like shit in the afternoon/ 2:00pm is a wormhole into/ Buying clothes on Instagram/ Standing in front of my fridge eating deli ham”) with a soaring, guitar-heavy chorus that made it one of my favorite songs of last year.
The Umbrellas | Fairweather Friend (Slumberland)
I’m a sucker for a good power pop record, and the Umbrellas’ sophomore album is quite a good one. The rhythm section of bassist Nick Oka and drummer Keith Frerichs is punk rock propulsive while Matt Ferrera’s guitar shimmers and jangles, all in support of infectious boy-girl vocal melodies (Ferrera’s delivered in a flat shrug, Morgan Stanley’s delivered in a sunny chirp) that bring to mind the Vaselines by way of Apples in Stereo.
Vacations | No Place Like Home (No Fun/Nettwerk)
Australian quartet Vacations takes ‘80s alt-rock ingredients and somehow manages to concoct a uniquely 21st century stew, with jangly guitars, atmospheric synths, and singer Campbell Burns delivering his lyrics in a New Wave-y croon that’s distorted Strokes-style as if he’s offering a dispatch through some distant payphone. The album’s creation was fraught, with Burns suffering a three-year bout of writer’s block until a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder helped him break through and influenced the lyrics on this new batch of songs—though, with the echo-y vocals, the lyrics aren’t really what jumps out at your ears, it’s the pleasantly mid-tempo mood. Maybe not the most exciting release on this list, but I’m never disappointed to hear a song from it (especially the first track and first single, “Next Exit”), and the album is sonically on-point from beginning to end.
Vampire Weekend | Only God Was Above Us (Columbia)
After excursions into Jambandlandia on much of 2019’s Father of the Bride, Vampire Weekend return to the ornately constructed indie rock sound that is their biggest strength, but with enough new ingredients that it never sounds like a retreat or retread of past glories. The new songs sounded great live, too.
Jack White | No Name (Third Man Records)
I’ve loved the White Stripes from the moment I heard that scuzzy riff that opens “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground” lo those many years ago, but so far I’ve only just “liked” White’s solo albums—they were fine, but none really grabbed hold of me in the way every Stripes record did. No Name breaks that streak. It finally finds White back doing what he does best, working with a band that follows the Meg White mantra to Keep It Simple, Stupid and just let White run wild on the guitar with songs that range from straightforward rockers (“That’s How I’m Feeling”) to bluesy stompers (“Underground”). Other highlights include the fun angular stop-start riff on “Tonight (Was a Long Time Ago)” and “Archbishop Harold Holmes,” which plays with White’s not-nearly-exploited-enough silly side.
The Top Ten:
10. Pearl Jam | Dark Matter (Monkeywrench/Republic)
Producer Andrew Watt pulls the same magic trick with Pearl Jam as he did with the Rolling Stones on last year’s unexpectedly great Hackney Diamonds: getting the band back in touch with what they do better than anyone else while still crafting an album that sounds thoroughly modern and of-the-moment. Watt kept the recording fast and loose (the group recorded together as a band over weeks, rather than in disparate individual sessions over years) and the urgency comes through crystal clear—Pearl Jam simply sounds more alive (pun unintended, I swear) than they have in years, whether it’s convincingly rowdy rockers (“React, Respond,” “Running”), radio-friendly ballads (“Wreckage,” the countrified “Something Special” co-written with ex-Chili Pepper Josh Klinghoffer), or soaring mid-tempo epics (“Won’t Tell,” “Waiting for Stevie”). And after decades of using it only sparingly, Eddie Vedder finally cranks his inimitable baritone up to its “anthemic” setting and pretty much leaves it there for the whole album.
9. Clairo | Charm (self-released)
Teaming up with producer Leon Michels (of the Dap-Kings and El Michels Affair), Claire Cottrill’s third album is pure sonic plushness, blending ‘70s soft rock, French pop, smooth jazz, and quiet storm come-ons with hip-hop beats and Clairo’s whispered vocals to create the sonic equivalent of an indie rock ASMR album, its twinkling pianos guaranteed to give you tingles.
8. Real Estate | Daniel (Domino)
I consider Real Estate my platonic ideal dream pop band, stripping away the add-ons of others (like the jazzy arrangements and electronic touches of the Sea and Cake, the Velvet Underground-inspired grooviness of Luna, or the Sonic Youth-ian feedback of DIIV) to get to the heart of the genre’s appeal: unhurried tempos, burbling bass, gently cooed vocals, and beautiful, ringing, arpeggiated guitars—in other words, music made for Spring days on the highway with the windows rolled down. On Daniel, their first album in four years, Real Estate and producer Daniel Tashian (who produced and co-wrote much of Kacey Musgraves’ 2018 album Golden Hour) give the songs even more clarity and sheen than on their previous albums (which were by no means lo-fi affairs) while pushing Martin Courtney’s everyman tenor front and center in the mix—never has he sounded more like Ben Gibbard than he does here. Most of the songs move along at a steady trot (particularly the opening trio of “Somebody New,” “Haunted World,” and “Water Underground”), though a few (like “Say No More” and the single “Flowers,” the album’s finest moment) kick the pace up to a canter. Courtney shouts out Neil Young’s Harvest Moon on “Say No More,” while bassist Alex Bleeker channels it when he takes over lead vocals on the pleasantly countrified “Victoria.” The album closer “You Are Here” does get a little bit of that swirling, hypnotic Luna-esque energy cooking, but at the end of the day, it, like all the other tracks here, is just Real Estate leaning heavily on what they do best.
7. Kacey Musgraves | Deeper Well (MCA Nashville/Interscope)
While I love a lot of country-influenced music, I long ago came to the conclusion that anything that’s actually popular on country radio this century is probably not for me. This, naturally, means that I slept on listening to Kacey Musgraves and that, dear reader, turned out to be a colossal mistake. This was evident from the opening notes of Deeper Well, when leadoff track “Cardinal” opens with a scratchy, distant, chiming guitar that channels the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’“ then turns into something meditative and more than a little ominous. What a beginning! Much of the album is gentler than that opener suggests, mostly just Musgraves’ pretty, plaintive vocals over prettily plucked or gently strummed acoustic guitars, with songs like the title track, “Too Good to Be True,” and “The Architect” speaking more to the sound of ‘70s singer-songwriters like James Taylor than anything on country radio. “The Architect,” in particular, is a real keeper, a hopeless prayer to the Person In Charge upon seeing how much suffering happens in a world supposedly run by a loving God. Special merit award goes to “Anime Eyes,” which is not only a sweet love song but also manages to namedrop Hayao Miyazaki and Sailor Moon, and how cool is that?
6. Peel Dream Magazine | Rose Main Reading Room (Topshelf)
Over the course of four albums, Peel Dream Magazine have tried on a wide variety of styles of psychedelia, but their latest is their best yet. Imagine the intimacy of Elliott Smith and the melodicism of Belle & Sebastian blended with the icy cool of Air and Stereolab and backed by the fluttering symphonics of Sufjan Stevens. Simply a gorgeous listening experience.
5. Soccer Mommy | Evergreen (Loma Vista)
When I dropped Sophie Allison’s last Soccer Mommy album Sometimes, Forever onto my favorite albums of 2022 list, I praised the way the album’s “beefed-up production” gave Allison’s songs “more muscle and grandeur.” On Evergreen, though, Allison and new producer Ben H. Allen have dialed things back a bit, making Evergreen a more intimate affair more akin to Allison’s earlier work, albeit with modern, crystal-clear recording rather than the lo-fi bedroom aesthetic of those first Soccer Mommy songs. It’s a sound suitable to an album filled with songs about grief and loss, as exemplified by the album’s bookends “Lost” and “Evergreen.” But it’s not all doom and gloom: Allison said she wanted Evergreen to “to feel like you’re laying outside, eyes closed, the sun is on you, and you can feel the warmth & flowers & trees,” a task she accomplishes with aplomb on the floating, dreamy “Some Sunny Day” and the Cure-meets-Juliana Hatfield love song “Abigail.” The guitars don’t always stay dialed down, either: the album’s big single “Driver” has every bit as much crunch as Sometimes, Forever’s finest moments.
4. gglum | The Garden Dream (Secretly Canadian)
London-born singer-songwriter Emma Smoker dropped two earlier EPs under the moniker gglum that embraced the bedroom pop of her biggest influences like Alex G and Adrianne Lenker. But with her debut full-length, The Garden Dream, she teamed up with producer Karma Kid and embraced the full possibilities of the studio. The resulting sonic richness fits Smoker’s latest set of songs to a T. A decent comparison is the quantum leap forward that Tegan and Sara took between their plain, folky first LP and the alterna-pop perfection of their second and third ones: Smoker stepped up the quality of her songwriting, the whipcrack drums throughout give the songs an added urgency and propulsive kick, and even the songs that were built up from acoustic guitars (like second track “SPLAT!,” the album’s finest track, albeit among stiff competition) have so much more going on thanks to guitar effects and drums and perfectly deployed synthesizers that they’re elevated to a whole other level. Other highlights include the fuzzy Soccer Mommy swoon of “Glue” and gently plucked acoustic tunes like “Late,” “Pruning 2,” and “Honeybee” that maintain that same hushed intimacy of her earlier work, though even they benefit from the added atmospherics. The finest debut album I heard this year by far.
3. Marika Hackman | Big Sigh (Chrysalis)
Marika Hackman’s Big Sigh is all about the big build. Take opening track “The Ground,” which starts with a tender, almost Erik Satie-esque piano figure that’s gradually backed by strings that begin to sway and swell until they take over as the album fully takes flight. As the song drops out, “No Caffeine” begins with piano too, but it’s a little more angular, a little more menacing. As Hackman starts to sing with an ethereal uneasiness that brings to mind Portishead’s Beth Gibbons, a guitar straight out of Stevie Nicks’ “Edge of Seventeen” starts to chug in the background. Suddenly, drums kick at a much more agitated and insistent pace than the intro of the song would ever have you expect. Soon the orchestral elements careen back in, amplifying the song’s compellingly anxiety-inducing qualities—”No Caffeine” necessary, indeed. The title track opens with ringing, Cure-esque guitar notes, gently plodding drums kick in for the verse but drop in and out, only to explode back in a sea of distorted guitars on the chorus. Single “Slime,” too, has slow-burn verses backed by insistent drums that swells into a pre-chorus backed with stabs of synthesizer before cresting in an anthemic, ethereal chorus that recalls Kate Bush. (It also has quite the eye-catching music video.) Even when she dials back to a single mood, the songwriting is bold, complex, and irresistible throughout. When the album first dropped, I declared it “the first great album of 2024,” which I’ll admit wasn’t saying a whole lot when I typed it on Facebook on January 12th. But now, with the entire year in the rearview, I’m happy to report it remains true.
2. Sasha Alex Sloan | Me Again (Sue Perb Records)
Sasha Alex Sloan’s website URL is sadgirlsloan.com, and man, how’s that for truth in advertising? But while melancholy permeates the songs of Me Again, it’s not in the form of simplistic songs about heartbreak—Sloan deals in the emotions of adulthood and real adult relationships in all their messiness. Take “Highlights,” where Sloan explores a romantic relationship that feels built solely on appearances (“You love me when it’s easy/ You love me when it looks good to your friends”), or “Oxygen Mask,” which uses the metaphor of an airplane crash to illuminate the difficulties of being in love with someone who won’t step back and take care of themselves. The songs generally are just Sloan’s vocals (quiet, plainspoken, with a tinge of aching vibrato) and lightly strummed guitar backed by stately drums and the occasional piano or floating synth chords. But these bare bones arrangements just serve to put the emphasis on Sloan’s lyrics, letting them land with maximum impact—see “Kids” in particular, an emotionally devastating song about caretaking for one’s elderly parents and facing down your own mortality in the process. Part of me is tempted to post line after line of my favorite lyrics, but writing them out almost feels like robbing them of the power imbued by Sloan’s voice. Give this album a listen and let them hit you with their full force.
1. The Cure | Songs of a Lost World (Fiction/Polydor)
It almost feels like cheating to put the newest album from one of my all-time favorite bands in the #1 slot, but man, when an album is this long-awaited, is this good, and plays to the band’s strengths as well as this does, how could I not? Hopes were impossibly high for Songs of a Lost World after its eternal 16-year gestation, yet it somehow managed to exceed all expectations. Much like 2000’s Bloodflowers (their last album that was anywhere near this good), Lost World channels the spirit of the band’s masterpiece, 1989’s Disintegration, with its languorous pacing, hypnotically lengthy instrumental intros (backed beautifully by Roger O’Donnell’s magisterial synths), and romantically forlorn lyrics. The Cure isn’t just resting on their laurels by recreating Disintegration like a faded photocopy, though: Lost World has a personality all its own, driven by Jason Cooper’s powerful, cascading drums and the stabbing, slicing guitarwork of Reeves Gabrels, making his first on-album appearance after a dozen years in the band. And while there are no pop nuggets akin to “Lovesong” or “Lullaby” to be found here (though “A Fragile Thing,” as slow and sad as it is, manages to still sound pretty great on the radio), there’s still plenty of variety within the album’s gothic milieu, like the sweetly twinkling “And Nothing Is Forever” or the “Hot Hot Hot!!!”-style agitation of “Drone:Nodrone.” But Lost World is never more perfect than during its swan song “Endsong,” a nearly 10-minute epic that opens with almost six-and-a-half solid minutes of instrumental grandeur and ends with Smith defeatedly repeating how he’s “Left alone with nothing/ The end of every song.” It’s one of the purest distillations of Robert Smith’s songwriting strengths that the man has ever put to tape.
While Smith has played with us before with song titles like “End,” “alt.end,” or “It’s Over,” there’s a finality to the mood of “Endsong” that would make it a fitting farewell to the band, though lord, I hope not. With how phenomenal and assured this album is, here’s hoping it’s just a sign of a new beginning.
Other albums I enjoyed a lot this year: Blind Pilot, In the Shadow of the Holy Mountain; Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Wild God; English Teacher, This Could be Texas; Francis of Delirium, Lighthouse; Beth Gibbons, Lives Outgrown; Green Day, Saviors; Humdrum, Every Heaven; Kendrick Lamar, GNX; Lauren Mayberry, Vicious Creature; Rosali, Bite Down; Sis, Vibhuti; Sleater-Kinney, Little Rope; Winnetka Bowling League, Sha La La; Wishy, Triple Seven| Jason Green
Photo credits:
- Babehoven photo by Wyndham Garnett
- Beabadoobee photo by Jules Moskovtchenko & creative direction by Patricia Villirillo
- Sabrina Carpenter photo courtesy of Universal Music Canada
- The Decemberists photo by Holly Andres
- Fousheé photo by Alondra Buccio
- Gallagher/Squire photo by Tom Oxley
- Guster photo by Alysse Gafkjen
- Hurray for the Riff Raff photo courtesy of the artist’s website
- MJ Lenderman photo by Graham Tolbert
- Dua Lipa photo by Tyrone Lebon
- Eliza McLamb photo by Missy McLamb
- The Umbrellas photo courtesy of Force Field PR
- Vacations photo by Charlie Hardy
- Vampire Weekend photo by Michael Schmelling
- Jack White photo by David James Swanson
- Pearl Jam photo by Danny Clinch
- Clairo photo by Lucas Creighton
- Real Estate photo by Sinna Nasseri
- Kasey Musgraves photo by Kelly Christine Sutton
- Peel Dream Magazine photo by Vice Cooler
- Soccer Mommy photo by Anna Pollack
- gglum photo by Sam Smoker
- Marika Hackman photo by Steve Gullick
- Sasha Alex Sloan photo by Slater Goodson
- The Cure photo (c. 2015) courtesy of the artist’s website
