Photo of Margaret Glaspy by Ebru Yildiz
Extended plays can serve a lot of different purposes. Those wonderful little bursts of music—heftier than a single, not as portentous as a full LP—have a lot of boring, business-type purposes: a cheaper way to introduce a new artist, a tour souvenir, a dumping ground for songs that were already paid for but didn’t fit the LP. But with the rise of streaming and the ease with which a handful of tracks can be dropped on your fans, more musicians are using the format for artistic reasons: to experiment, to try new directions, to let loose without the strictures and obligations that come with dropping An Album. If an album is a four-course dinner and a single is a snack, then a good EP should like a good, hearty lunch to get you through your afternoon. And who doesn’t love lunch?
At the same time, as a music critic tasked with coming up with year-end lists, it’s really hard to judge an EP against their weightier counterparts. So this year, I decided not to, especially with such a strong crop of EPs that deserve highlighting on their own—all offering six tracks or less, all but one clocking in under 25 minutes. Here are my favorite EPs from the year that was 2024, along with a playlist of a song from each to enjoy while you read.
1. Margaret Glaspy | The Sun Doesn’t Think (ATO)
Margaret Glaspy penned the five songs that make up The Sun Doesn’t Think while on tour for her last record, 2023’s excellent Echo the Diamond, and quickly entered the studio to get them down while they were still fresh. But where reviews of her last full-length threw out words like “roaring” and “spiky” and “prickly,” this 20-minute EP dials back to just Glaspy’s voice (only occasionally double-tracked) and acoustic guitar, recorded with such bare bones simplicity that when she off-handedly says “Go ahead” between lines during the album opener “24/7,” you wonder if she was recording in her kitchen when somebody walked in to grab a beer from the fridge and she decided to keep the take.
The resulting quintet of folk songs are warm, intimate, melancholy stuff that lets all the attention rest on Glaspy’s vulnerable vocals and impeccable lyrics—and this is a set of songs that demands attention. Favorite couplets (among many, many great ones) are “I don’t need Rotten Tomatoes/ I know that movie was boring” (“I Need Help”), the evocative “If all of my failures were dimes/ I could fill up a bathtub” (“Bathtub,” a song Glaspy delivers in a beautiful Sarah McLachlanesque lilt), and I don’t know that there’s a more appropriate lyric to carry us into the hellscape that is 2025 than the EP’s opening refrain “To put it simply: whether life is Hell or Heaven/ I worry 24/7.” Lest you think it’s all downers, Glaspy ends it all with a ray of hope on the closing title track: “The sun doesn’t think, it just shines/ My heart just beats, it doesn’t mind/ What you did or what you do/ It just loves you.” Just a stunning set of songs from beginning to end.
2. Phoebe Rings | Phoebe Rings (Carpark Records)
If you’re looking for chill grooves, you can’t do much better than the self-titled debut EP from New Zealand quartet Phoebe Rings. Singer/pianist Crystal Choi started the group after completing an education in jazz and deciding to move away from that and toward her love for dream pop. While you can hear Choi’s jazz training in her playing—gentle, twinkling, ornate but not showy, with a light bossa nova swing—that jazziness gets filtered through dream pop’s atmospheric cool and the immediacy and catchiness of city pop (like on “January Blues,” which could easily be the closing theme of an ’80s anime romcom) to craft a musical cocktail that’s hard to resist. The ultimate vibe of Phoebe Rings is Stereolab at their dreamiest, while Choi’s spaced-out vocals bring to mind Molly Rankin of Alvvays crossed with the ethereal breathiness of Dido. This is a band, though, and not a solo project, and all members pull their weight ably: bassist Benjamin Locke and drummer Alex Freer give the songs a pulsating heart for Choi’s synths and Simeon Kavanagh-Vincent’s understated guitars to ride like a gently rolling wave. Six songs and 23 minutes isn’t nearly enough; this is an EP that leaves you wanting more.
3. Wilco | Hot Sun Cool Shroud (dBpm Records)
After a few solid but unremarkable mid-career LPs, Wilco has had a bit of a renaissance over the last couple years with the return-to-their-roots of 2022’s double album Cruel Country and last year’s Cousin, the most compelling album they’d put out in about 15 years. Hot Sun Cool Shroud, though, might just be the most crowd-pleasing entry of Wilco’s modern era. Surprise dropped the weekend of the band’s annual Solid Sound festival in North Adams, Mass., frontman Jeff Tweedy described the EP on his Substack (yeah, you bet I’m a subscriber) as “an EP with a summertime-after-dark feeling. It starts off pretty hot, like heat during the day, has some instrumentals on it that are a little agitated and uncomfortable, and ends with a cooling breeze.” “Hot Sun” and “Annihilation” are the kind of jangly rockers that people think of when they think of Wilco, and are sure to be a highlight in Wilco live sets for years to come. The aforementioned instrumentals let the band (particularly guitarist Nels Cline) run a little wilder, the kind of experimentation that works great in the EP format while also keeping the songs short enough to not wear out their welcome. And between the big single “Annihilation” (“A kiss/ Like this/ Is endless…tonight”) and songs like “Ice Cream” and “Say You Love Me,” this is the most swooning, romantic stuff Wilco has done in ages, possibly ever. EPs are often a minor addition to an artist’s discography, especially 13 albums and 30 years into a band’s career, but not this one.
4. Girl Scout | Headache (self-released)
Stockholm, Sweden’s Girl Scout are big believers in the EP format: all three of their releases so far have been 5-song, sub-20-minute affairs. Produced by Alex Farrar, who also co-produced MJ Lenderman’s year-defining Manning Fireworks and Indigo de Souza’s stellar last LP All of This Will End, Girl Scout’s latest has a little bit of a scuzzier sound than 2023’s crystal clear Granny Music but isn’t completely reinventing the wheel: the band still offers up a sonic blend of the sugary power pop rush of the Beths with blasts of ’90s throwback guitar a la Soccer Mommy or Bully. Best in show goes to opener “Desert Island Movies,” which recounts a particularly agonizing movie night (“I don’t wanna do this again/ I think I need funnier friends”), while the way the agitated verses give way to the soaring chorus on “I Just Needed to Know” is downright sublime. As singer Emma Jansson repeats “I’m so sorry” over the EP’s final ringing guitar note backed by a faint, twinkling piano, you’ll be ready to hit play again and start counting the days until Girl Scout gives us another five-song dose of goodness.
5. Sunday (1994) | Sunday (1994) (Arista)
I was first introduced to Sunday (1994) by a good friend of mine (Chris Patrick Carolan—check out his steampunk novel The Nightshade Cabal!), who shared the intriguingly cryptic video for their single “Tired Boy” with the comment “I feel like this track fell through a 30-year hole in time and I am here for it.” Me too! Details were hard to come by about this oddly named band and they were only trickling individual songs out one by one, but the Mazzy Star-ish swoon of “Tired Boy” was so undeniable that I awaited each new tune with bated breath until the full six-song EP finally dropped in May. (The EP was fleshed out into a nine-song “deluxe edition” in September that brought it to LP length, but we’re only talking EPs here! You can check out our Mike Rengel’s review of the whole thing here, if you’re interested.) The whole EP yields stellar rewards: “Stained Glass Window” tells the story of star-religion-crossed lovers that makes forbidden love sound as tantalizing as it is inevitable, “Blonde” filters that Mazzy Star-ish sound of “Tired Boy” through Taylor Swift circa Folklore, and “Mascara” rides on ringing guitars that sounds like Best Coast if they were really into The Cure. An assured debut, and hopefully a sign of many more good songs to come. | Jason Green
