Top 10 Albums of 2024

It’s become a tradition here on the blog for me to share my favourite reads of each year on New Year’s Day. And I’m definitely planning on doing that again this year. But 2024 has also been a remarkable year — possibly one of the most astounding on record — in the music industry. This past Spring and Summer saw major artists release big albums on practically a weekly basis. And so I thought I’d take the opportunity of an intentionally slower Advent writing season to go over my favourites, and what I consider to be the ‘best’ — which aren’t exactly the same thing.

Favourite Albums

These are my favourite ten albums of the year. By ‘favourite,’ I mean these are the albums I not only see as being quality, but also are the ones I keep coming back to, the ones I actually listen to.

10. Hit Me Hard and Soft, by Billie Eilish

This highly anticipated May release deserves ‘better’ than to be number ten on my list, but for whatever reason, Billie Eilish is an artist I respect and appreciate more than I enjoy. I just don’t reach for her music. But this is a truly masterful piece of pop music. It’s sonically interesting (once again, she’s proving that her collaboration with her brother Finneas is extraordinarily fruitful), thematically cohesive, and lyrically solid. And, more than most pop artists today (with the exception of Lana Del Rey), Eilish makes really interesting use of her voice as an instrument. And all that deserves to be praised.

My personal highlights from this album are: 1. “BIRDS OF A FEATHER”, 2. “SKINNY,” and 3. “LUNCH”

9. rosie, by Rosé

This was one of the last major releases of the year (December 6), and could very well mark the start of a major solo career for this singer, formerly of the K-pop group Blackpink. The pre-release first single, “APT.” (featuring Bruno Mars) has been everywhere the past few weeks and is so full of infectious fun and energy that it felt like a shot across the port bow of the recording industry. It was also, however, not entirely representative of the quiet and thoughtful lyricism of the rest of the album. I was incredibly impressed by the album and am excited to see what the rest of her solo career has in store.

Highlights: 1. “APT.”, 2. “toxic till the end,” and 3. “number one girl”

8. SMILE:D, by Porter Robinson

Dance/electronic music doesn’t feature as a huge part in my listening, but Porter Robinson proved to be a big exception. I simply couldn’t stop listening to this album, which matches great dance floor sounds with introspective and often heartbreaking lyrics. The music here feels completely fresh to me, even as it makes great use of the nostalgic sounds of 8-bit video games and 2000s punk pop. It’s fun. It’s interesting. And its songwriting rewards deep and repeated listening.

Highlights: 1. “Knock Yourself Out XD”, 2. “Cheerleader,” and 3. “Russian Roulette”

7. Don’t Forget Me, by Maggie Rogers

Maggie Rogers is at an interesting place in her career. Appointed as the ‘next big thing’ after her 2019 release Heard It in a Past Life, opinions of her second album, 2022’s Surrender were mixed. (Something I find pretty wild, since it’s one of my favourite albums from that year.) Her new release this year, Don’t Forget Me, took a more back-to-basics approach, stripping back some of the production from her earlier efforts and settling into a more classic indie/country sound. While this album didn’t break out from a very crowded field in this “Pop Girl Spring,” it’s solidified Rogers as a solid presence in the indie music world.

Highlights: 1. “The Kill”, 2. “If Now Was Then” and 3. “Never Going Home”

6. Country, by Medium Build

Of my new musical discoveries in 2024, none has been as exciting as singer-songwriter Medium Build. His music pulls back the celebratory veneer of rural Americana that’s so common in male country music, and reveals something, not negative, but certainly more raw and honest. And what he may lack in the ‘quality’ of his vocals, he more than makes up for in his ability to convey raw emotion in his voice. (The best comp I can think of for how he uses his voice is Billie Holiday, which is outrageous but true.) If you want to see what I mean here, check out “Hey Sandra,” which is basically him just speaking over a simple guitar, but is utterly compelling. For a fairly young artist, this album strikes me as incredibly mature, dealing with universal themes of aging out of youth and into the realities of adulthood. As he puts it, “This ain’t Heaven, this ain’t Hell, it’s just life.”

Highlights: 1. “Can’t Be Cool Forever”, 2. “Beach Chairs” and 3. “In My Room”

5. Short n’ Sweet, by Sabrina Carpenter

They say it takes a lifetime to become an overnight sensation, and there are few better examples of this than Sabrina Carpenter, who seemed to come out of nowhere this year, even as Short n’ Sweet was her sixth studio album. Despite her ditzy and horny persona, there’s no doubt Carpenter is a very savvy artist and businesswoman. More than anyone else, she was able to use her gig as an opener for Taylor Swift’s Era’s Tour as a launching pad, creating streamworthy content with her ad-libbed ‘Nonsense outros’ and introducing two infectious singles, “Espresso” and “Please Please Please”, which both shot to the top of the charts. Throughout Short n’ Sweet, Carpenter combines her undeniable charisma and charm with a frank sexuality and sharp wit, creating memorable, catchy, and often hilarious music. In a pop world dominated by increasingly serious and confessional music, this was refreshingly fun, silly, and infectious pop.

Highlights: 1. “Coincidence”, 2. “Espresso,” and 3. “Please Please Please”

4. brat, by Charli xcx

In what was, again, a very crowded pop music environment, I don’t think many people expected the new release from Charli xcx to break out beyond its native electronic/dance genre. But break out it did, branding both a colour and a season, and coining a new adjective in the process. It’s a self-aware celebration of party and club culture, and doesn’t try to do or be anything else. It may not be ‘good, clean, fun’ but it’s two of those things. And most of all, it’s brat.

Highlights: 1. “360”, 2. “Apple,” and 3. “Sympathy is a Knife”

3. Cowboy Carter, by Beyoncé

No one knows how to grab hold of a moment and the narrative better than Beyoncé. When she surprise dropped the two pre-release singles from her highly-anticipated turn toward country music (the second in her planned three-part exploration of Black contributions to the history of American music), it was as if the pop culture wheel stopped spinning for two solid weeks, while the whole world danced to and memed “Texas Hold’em.” The mashing up of genre and sound throughout the album is effective and impactful. But it also renders it an album that’s difficult to position. It’s certainly not a country album; and it also doesn’t feel like a pop or RnB album either. It’s its own thing. It’s a Beyoncé album. And that’s high praise. That said, there are also a lot of songs here I automatically skip, which is the main reason it’s sitting here at number 3 for me.

Highlights: 1. “TEXAS HOLD’EM, 2. “II MOST WANTED” and 3. “LEVII’S JEANS”

2. The Secret of Us, by Gracie Abrams

There’s been an ongoing discussion this year about which of the emergent generation of female singer/songwriters is the ‘true’ heir to the legacy of Taylor Swift. I think the answer is all of them, in different ways. But Gracie Abrams has made a great case for herself this year. I’m not really talking about her status as Swift’s opening act on multiple legs of the Era’s Tour, or the two’s successful collaboration on the song “us.” (which was not hurt by a viral video of them accidentally setting Swift’s kitchen on fire while writing it). Rather, I’m talking about the conversational and confessional tone of her songwriting. Like Swift’s early work, Gracie Abrams’ The Secret of Us is full of open and honest songwriting that harnesses the way people actually talk. (Case in point, “I think about your dumb face all the time.”) The music itself is, honestly, not that interesting, even by the uninspired standards of contemporary pop music, but the lyrics are a great slice of life in one’s twenties. And there are so many songs I couldn’t help but come back to time and time again this year, making it one of my favourite albums not just of the year, but of the decade so far. And in the process,it’s finally silenced any lingering suspicion that Abrams career was more about the privilege and access of being a nepo-baby than her own talent. She’s definitely emerged this year as major voice in pop music.

Highlights: 1. “I Love You, I’m Sorry”, 2. “Risk,” and 3. “Tough Love”

1. The Tortured Poets Department, by Taylor Swift

This will be both a popular and deeply unpopular opinion. I am fully aware of the problems of this sprawling, sonically repetitive, and narratively confusing double album. But here’s the thing. All thirty-one songs are really good. They may not all be for me, or may not often fit my listening mood, but there’s not a song here that’s bad. (For example, I don’t often listen to the “female rage: the musical” tracks from the core album, but there’s no doubt that they hit amazingly in performance on the Era’s Tour, and they definitely seem to have been written with this full musical-theatre production in mind.) I honestly think that if she’d released the two halves as separate albums, like what she did for Folklore and Evermore in 2020, and re-arranged the tracks to present a more cohesive story, the narrative surrounding the album would have been quite different. Instead, we got a discussion mostly about the quantity of the music instead of its quality. And these are quality songs. Nineteen of them are in my top 50 songs of the year, and I can’t even roll my eyes at that because the songs are so good. So, while this doesn’t work great as an album, it’s an incredible and successful collection of songs that I haven’t stopped listening to.

Highlights: 1. “loml,” 2. “Guilty as Sin,” and 3. “The Black Dog”

BEST Album of 2024

Cowboy Carter, by Beyoncé

If The Tortured Poets Department was my favourite and most-listened-to album of the year yet didn’t work well as an album, Cowboy Carter is the opposite. It works super well as an album, even if I don’t love all or even a majority of the individual songs and interludes. This project stemmed from the country music scene’s dismissal of Beyoncé’s terrifc “Daddy Lessons” from 2016’s Lemonade, and is an unapologetic statement about the history of Black artists within country music. It offers collaborations not only with Black artists from classic country, and participation from such country luminaries as Dolly Parton and Willy Nelson, but also several Black artists working in country music today. As such, Cowboy Carter is sociology, history, and politics as much as it is music. And this is both its amazing success, and — potentially — its weakness. The message for me often became more important than the songs. I get it, and I think it’s important, even if there are only a handful of songs I come back to. For this reason, it’s what I think is the best album of 2024, even if it’s not my personal favourite.

Honourable Mentions: brat, by Charli xcx, and Hit Me Hard and Soft, by Billie Eilish