This year as I started thinking about this list I was sort of thinking, "What even came out this year?" 2023 was so stacked. But then as I started writing notes I realized 2024 was equally if not more stacked. So this is a long one. Albums are listed in release-date order, not organized by how much I like them (I like all of them a lot!). Playlist is up, too.
Galen Tipton & Death's Dynamic Shroud – You Like Music
Ghost Diamond / March 15
It makes me feel like a poser that I didn't really get into DDS until last year but I think it makes up the difference that I was listening to Galen Tipton way back in the DESKPOP days. To hear them both together is just as insane as I would've expected. You Like Music is something I think it takes a certain mood (& level of attention) to listen to but offers so, so much to dig into. Punchy, hyperspeed beats rolled in plundered audio so granularized and spliced that I think “smithereens” is more suiting than “samples.” I think it rocks when music asks something of the listener instead of just choosing to be agreeable and ignorable. Put this on and don't do anything else and see what you find.
TV Room – The Big Big Deal
April 3
I love TV Room so much. Back in 2021 his EP The Great State of Maine made this list along with its utterly incredible multimedia presentation. The Big Big Deal is, conversely, fully focused on the music, and the spike that creates in the sonic polish and emotional impact is huge. This is a silly little album of six short songs and yet it manages to strike something inside me that feels long-forgotten.
I think our culture is fully on the pendulum swing back from cynical irony toward commodified sincerity— “wholesome” and “cozy” as value proclamations, video games about baking, etcetera. Childlike earnesty and wonder suffuse this album, but never to saccharine levels; it's thoroughly earnest and hopeful in a way that feels genuinely transformative. A beautiful, wonderful record that ends on a song about a rock that has made me tear up more than once.
FM Skyline – Images
100% Electronica / April 19
Recently I've been thinking a lot about Scott McCloud's theory of six layers of art, which describes the artist's journey as usually starting with an attraction to a certain aesthetic or technique and then growing inward to the conceptual core. On Images FM Skyline retains the commitment to craft and presentation that's always characterized his work, but this album feels like a step toward a whole philosophy. It still has the classic sound (vintage MIDI instruments, '90s hardware, high reverb) but plays up their associated campiness much less, instead focusing on the compositions (which are great) and enter more emotional territory (which isn't to say there aren't some mega bangers). I love it. I was psyched to see FM Skyline live this summer and, having done so, I can say for sure that In The Clouds is the best song this year that I've had a cocktail named after.
Justice – Hyperdrama
Ed Banger Records / April 26
Look, I am not a hipster re: Justice. Cross came out when I was nine years old, so I kind of missed it, and then despite spending most of high school listening to a dozen bands who were aping their style I didn't actually check it out until like 2019. As a foil to that first record, Hyperdrama feels downright sophisticated: it's still funky, still riding the boundary between Having Fun and Genuinely Going Hard, but a lot of its best parts are what emerges from the in-betweens rather than what comes out on top of a big pile of noise. It's hard to call something that sounds so much like Justice (that sounds so much, full stop) “pared-back” or “minimal” but I think I would call it “intentional;” more focused on the interactions of different parts than on blasting you with a bunch of parts. Dear Alan spends five minutes just building on one riff and is probably my favorite track— a far cry from the head-pounding club bangers of 2007 (although there are club bangers on here, too). My only hangup about this album is I can't figure out why they put One Night / All Night up as the single instead of the other Tame Impala feature, which is way better.
Wavedash – Tempo
FADER / May 3
I used to deploy some form of "wow it's really fun" in every single review, and I am trying to stop, but this album really is fun as hell. Impeccable full-blast dance with "we had a great time making this" radiating off every track. It feels like the energy of circa-2016 Soundcloud distilled and polished into something novel but just as exciting (which makes sense, since they used to be OWSLA guys). I'm someone who is maybe less hungry for Xtreme Club Bangers than I was in 2016, but the slick sound design and mixing here make Tempo super listenable outside the club, where at my advanced age I am basically all the time.
A.G. Cook – Britpop
May 10
Yes, I'm aware that it was Brat Summer. Charli is gonna be on every wrap-up you read this year. And she rocks! I thought Brat was good, but as a straight male dweeb it maybe didn't hook me the same way it hooked many. She was spot-on about one thing, though: I am absolutely gonna jump if A.G. made it.
Britpop, at 24 tracks and almost two hours, is really sort of three albums in one: some super-clean classic PC Music, then an intermission of more emotional and gritty bedtoom-songwriter material, then a finale that pushes the vibe of the first act to even more experimental heights. I checked it out on the advice of my buddy Levi (shoutout Music Podcast), who in his review sounds almost confounded by how good it is (is the song of the summer really a ten-minute all-synthesizer symphony?). I barely even have space to talk about the second act, which is great alone but feels even more raw and emotional after the hypersynthetic first, and wraps up with a really touching tribute to SOPHIE. Britpop is an amazing portfolio from one of the best producers alive, and I will parrot Levi again by saying that we're lucky to be getting so much.
L’Impératrice – Pulsar
Microqlima / June 7
I already mentioned that I used to listen to a lot of bands that listened to Justice, right? In high school I was a big “nu disco” (The Noisy Freaks, Televisor, et al) guy, and then I got into other stuff and I kind of assumed the genre died out. I was wrong! French people have been cooking this whole time!
This is, astonishingly, the third time my friend Will has sent me an album that ended up on my best-of-the-year list. It's a flavor of European cyber-funk I have aforementioned nostalgia for but refined for my now-adult palate (less cake-frosting and more, uh… beer or something). It's not overwrought or derivative or aggressively loud, or even built with any super-unconventional pieces. It's just rock-solid, neck-flexing grooves with super-clean production and mixing and a really great Maggie Rogers feature. Give Girl! a listen and try to stop your face from scrunching up.
Pond – Stung!
Spinning Top / June 21
I'm so charmed by the ecosystem of bands around Pond. Several of its members are current or former Tame Impala support, and one of those is the guy from GUM. It's fun to listen to all three of those and hear how different the results are, and Pond is firmly my second favorite (I'm a huge GUMhead but I'm gonna talk about him later).
Stung! just rocks, and I'm finding it kind of hard to offer much deeper analysis than that. It's crunchy in places, wide-open and soaring in others. There are songs built on a single killer riff (Black Lung approaches King Gizzard levels) and songs that feel like a prog ballad of the Yes days (Edge of the World Pt. III). This variety in structure (and the often kind-of-silly lyrics) reveal a writing process that seems like it was a lot of fun, which is something I always really value in a record.
Club Kuru – Before the World
Dog Holiday Records / July 9
Kind of a surprise hit for me this year. I really liked Club Kuru's Meet Your Maker and then I sort of forgot about them until my phone informed me this had come out, and then I listened to this at least once a day for about three weeks. Before the World is just a beautiful record, full of thoughtful and delicate melodic work and mixed in this slightly-muted, subdued way that feels like a T-shirt worn soft.
I very nearly included Club Kuru's right-after-this release Live at the Bungalow, which is just my four favorite songs from this album stretched out and jammed on. Huge recommend if, like me, you've got a genetic marker for liking the Grateful Dead but haven't gotten there quite yet.
GUM & Ambrose Kenny-Smith – Ill Times
p(doom) / July 19
Ambrose & GUM's Minor Setback was easily one of my favorite singles from last year, and I don' think they announced they were doing a full album for months, but it was worth the wait. Both these guys are creative powerhouses—Kenny-Smith not just part of King Gizzard but also fronting The Murlocs, who from a consistency standpoint I might like more, and Jay Watson touring with Tame Impala and writing with Pond as well as an incredible solo run as GUM. This record is bristling with that creative energy. Amby's vocal work gives even the sillier songwriting moments impact and weight, which you know he's good at if you're familiar with Gizz at all, and almost every track is built around a riff/progression that isn't just cool but memorable, something GUM is really good at if you know his solo work. It's a pairing where both artists bring their best and the combo turns out great.
Total Blue – Total Blue
Music From Memory / July 19
This is almost certainly my #1 album of the year if we're going by pure airtime. I heard the Sam Wilkes feature Corsair on my buddy Jason's summer playlist and immediately ran through the whole record while I was on the bus and it felt so refreshing and so new. This is yet another record that takes nostalgic sonic influences—bamboo-y marimba, wind synthesizer, new-age atmosphere—and converts them into something that sounds like it's from the year 3000. It's constantly swerving between sounding like the soundtrack to an unreleased Cyan game and the ambient music playing on an alien spacecraft. This album opens up its own worlds and invites you to chill out in them: cool seabed, soaring clouds, ancient forest. It's an experience truly unlike anything else I listened to this year, and if you know something similar, please send it to me.
trndytrndy – Virtua
July 19
“Vaporwave” has been so utterly drained of its original meaning that when a great vaporwave album comes out it almost feels like it should get to be called something else. Virtua is obviously playing around with nostalgic imagery and sounds, but—like that FM Skyline record or this JFA ‘24 honorable mention—is so rock-solid from a technical and production standpoint that the retro aesthetic is just a hook. Instruments and atmosphere that would feel at home on a Richard Myhill CD are woven into six super new-sounding tracks that transcend their own corniness. This album kind of feels like someone in 2024 making music with tools from 1997 but employing modern techniques, like one of those insane Brazilian hacks of the Sega Master System. The pitch-bent bass on Meteorological Centre is one of the coolest sounds I heard this year.
Porter Robinson – SMILE! :D
Mom & Pop / July 26
When this came out I have to admit I didn't know if it would make this list. I love Porter and I loved Nurture and the new edgy, ironic attitude caught me a little off-guard. But in September I got to see him live and I think it altered me psychologically to experience. Listening to SMILE! :D in a vacuum, it's easy to hear it as inauthentic, as a post-sincerity character piece where Porter is blowing off the vulnerability of his earlier work and putting up walls. But in person I realized that it's actually so much more earnest than that. This album completes Porter's trilogy: 2014's Worlds is, clearly and joyfully, the product of childhood. 2021's Nurture comes from a place of hope that the innocence and stability of that childhood can be reclaimed. With SMILE! :D Porter reaches a breaking point, laying bare everything he's tried to avoid accepting the fact that you can never have it all back. The self-aggrandizing bluster on the A-side (backed up by a genuinely fun sound in an Anamanaguchiesque pop-punk realm) is only there to set up the downfall; a child's dream of success and fame collapsing under a difficult, uncertain reality. By the middle of side B we accept it far enough to apologize to the child we've let down. “Please, be disappointed in me. Isn't it obvious I wasn't who you think?” he sings to his 17-year-old self. Plus, Cheerleader just goes crazy whether you care about the decade-long thematic timeline it's paying off or not.
Magdalena Bay – Imaginal Disk
Mom + Pop / August 23
This is another one I listened to brand-new (I had “New MagBay Album” on my calendar the same day as “Root Canal @ 8AM”) and my initial impression was mixed (may have just been in a bad mood!) but the longer I've spent with it the more I like it.
As an evolution from Mercurial World, Imaginal Disk seems like it's not afraid to breathe a little more, leave us with a little more room to think and listen. For the most part there's less filtering, less complicated stacks of sound, just fewer things happening at any given moment. Sort of like the Justice album, it's by no means underproduced but many of its best aspects emerge from the spaces in between where before every cranny was packed. Mica's singular vocals mean more for not having to squeeze through a crowded mix. When they get onto a really good riff or chord or sound (the bass on That's My Floor fucking rips) it's able to shine. I think I find the B-side a little stronger overall but the whole package is stellar.
Photay – Windswept
Mexican Summer / September 20
The first Photay project I heard was 2020's On Hold, a gorgeous ambient tape made from deconstructed hold music. Photay (Evan Shornstein) is a total champ of concept-driven, tough-to-categorize music that's genuinely unlike anything else I've heard.
Windswept is an electronic album in a Laurie Spiegel way where the electronicness of the sounds used is incidental to the project—there's also live drums, some precisely-deployed wind & strings, and some really lovely vocal layering on a couple tracks. The overall sound is soft but not distant the way most "ambient" music strives to be; there are harmonic peaks and moments of layered grooves I would almost pitch as funky. A lovely, rewarding active listen but also an album I've thrown on at the office a dozen times.
Up next is some stuff I missed when it came out but really got into this year, which given my slow rate of finding stuff is only a fair concession to myself.
Getdown Services – Crisps
November ‘23
I do not remember how I came across this album, but I remember that I immediately ran through the whole thing and was smiling like a goofball. I've already mentioned that it's huge for me when a work of art seems like it was fun to make, and Crisps is absolutely juiced in that respect. The beats are spotless; channeling a sort of post-disco ‘80s-new-wave energy combined with modern indie pop, and the lyrics & vocal performances are at once a meandering slacker manifesto and cathartically straightforward, reflecting an anxious inner monologue in I Wish It Didn't Bother Me and then hollering at your landlord and his shitty kids in lead single Biscuit Tin. A lot of the writing is stuff that would not work if this were spun as a "comedy album" but which totally works and even flourishes on top of genuinely great basslines and synth work. This album slams on the instrumental side and yet the one vocal-less track (Helen Back) feels kind of barren for not featuring them. I need these guys to tour in America so I can hurt my neck while shouting along to Deadly 60.
Sam Wilkes – Live on The Green
November ‘19
This was the year I became a big Sam Wilkes head. He's featured on that Total Blue record and has occasionally helped out Louis Cole, so I've always known the name, but making the intentional choice "let's check this guy out" was rewarding in a way that decision isn't always.
Live on The Green is a live album, recorded in 2018 at an "experimental" performance where performers and audience shared the space, and that intimacy reads clear even on the recordings. This feels like an album you are meant to be immersed in, embedded in—a sonic experience like hanging out with some friends, if you were friends with some avant-garde jazz players (Jacob Mann & Sam Gendel also belong to the Louis Cole-adjacent universe of talent). The songs are technically good and played well, but for me the hook is the atmosphere this album contains: you can feel the volume of the space, float through it, rest in it. It's become one of those comfort-listens that I know will be with me a long time.