Andy’s Favorite Music of 2024

For a professional music critic, I’m not especially good about keeping up with new releases. I spend a lot of time listening to and learning about old music, and going out to small shows around New York, but I’ve never quite felt like my finger is on the pulse. I like to think my strengths as a writer lie elsewhere. For that reason, list season is usually a little stressful for me. I envy my colleagues who are ready with a spreadsheet of their 50 or 100 favorite albums or songs of a given year, with detailed thoughts about each, while I’m scrambling just to reach the minimum required number of entries for a ballot.

That scrambling often involves catching up on albums that I feel I should like, either because they’re relevant to my particular interests or seem important to some broader zeitgeist. I tried not to do that this year. It’s not an entirely unfounded impulse—there is something to be said for music that reaches a wide audience or generates a lot of conversation among listeners—but I think it probably contributes to a feeling of homogeneity among year-end lists at major publications, and frankly, it’s just kind of a drag as a writer. 

Now that my colleagues and I run our own site, we wanted to try a different approach. Below, you’ll find my proudly scattershot list of favorite music from 2024, with 20 entries that include songs, albums, live performances, a film score, even a couple of radio shows. It may not seem canonical or authoritative, but it’s a good representation of what my year in listening was actually like. 

41: “Chill Guy”

I am generally pretty grumpy about the internet’s effects on music, both from a musician’s and a listener’s perspective. I like to think my attitude is mostly founded in good reason, but it sometimes also makes me unfairly suspicious of music that feels too much like the internet. I don’t think it’s useful to me as a listener to allow an aesthetic bias to stand in for a socioeconomic critique, so I’m trying to work on it. I’m glad that Dylan hipped me to “Chill Guy,” by Brooklyn rap trio 41, an amazing song that is apparently based on a popular TikTok meme involving Gia Margaret’s instrumental “Hinoki Wood.” (I wouldn’t know, I don’t go near the place.) The contrast between the three rappers’ hard-edged staccato flows and the bleary ambience of the beat is satisfying on a bone-deep level, especially with the seismic entrance of Kyle Ricch’s Pop Smoke-esque baritone in the second verse. It’s quite possible to love it without knowing anything about the meme in question.

Acetone: Live at Brooklyn Music School 6/21/24

Acetone was an L.A. indie rock trio that released a quietly stunning string of albums in the 1990s but flamed out without ever having attracted much of a national audience after the suicide of their singer and bassist Richie Lee in 2001. Like a lot of people, I got into them in 2017, when Light in the Attic released the elliptical best-of compilation 1992-2001 and Sam Sweet published Hadley Lee Lightcap, a slim and novelistic biography that may be the best book about a rock band I’ve ever read. Their belated cult has grown slowly since then, culminating with a swanky box set in 2023 and a handful of shows in L.A. and New York this year, with guitarist Mark Lightcap picking up vocal duties and visual artist Senon Williams filling in on bass. I caught one of the Brooklyn shows, which took place in an unusual but somehow appropriate venue: the humble and homey auditorium of a local music school, where the AC was either busted or nonexistent. The heat and humidity lent an extra charge to Acetone’s two sets, which were often loud and exuberant, in contrast to the languid understatement that characterizes much of their recorded output. Lightcap is one of rock’s great underappreciated guitarists; each time he took a pyrotechnic, Hendrixian solo, it felt like a much-delayed and -deserved celebration.

Adrianne Lenker: “Sadness as a Gift” / Tucker Zimmerman: “The Season”

For me, Adrianne Lenker has been the most consistently rewarding singer-songwriter of the last decade or so, whether working in Big Thief or solo. When I reviewed her latest album, I didn’t find space to even mention “Sadness as a Gift,” which in the months since its release has emerged as a clear classic of her catalog, its swooning strings soundtracking a look back on a past relationship that is profoundly moving in its admixture of grief and gratitude. I also loved “The Season,” from Dance of Love, her band’s album-length collaboration with the octogenarian songwriter Tucker Zimmerman, which confronts impending death with a combination of elegiac impressionism and cheerful defiance. You can read more about it in a piece I wrote about the making of the album.

Asher White: Home Constellation Study

Back in the spring, I got a cold email from art-pop polymath Asher White asking me to check out her new album, which I later learned is her 15th. (Somehow, she is 24 years old.) You get a lot of emails like that as a music journalist, and sadly, it’s impossible to listen to all of it. Something about the erudition and breadth of musical knowledge expressed in White’s email got me to check this one out. I’m glad I did: From the Burt-Bacharach-via-Jim-O’Rourke orchestration of “Theme From Leaving Philadelphia” to the Radiohead-goes-noise-rock odyssey of “Downstate Prairie,” the music’s kaleidoscopic imagination immediately blew me away. 

Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor: Challengers (Original Score) 

“Everything is tennis, except tennis, which is sex,” says Zendaya’s type-A contender-turned-manager at one point in Luca Guadagnino’s ​​deliriously horny Challengers, explaining the movie in a single line. Whether any configuration of the three leads is on the court or in bed—or, for that matter, flashing dick in a sauna—they are usually accompanied by hammering techno from Ross and Reznor, whose insistent pulse dramatizes the blurred lines between domination and intimacy in lives obsessed with excellence above all else. I can’t remember the last time a film’s soundtrack was so integral to its sensibility; without it, Challengers would be an entirely different movie. 

Being Dead: Eels

As a devoted fan of old-fashioned rock bands, I sometimes feel like a dinosaur. Austin’s Being Dead, with their sidewinding song structures, surreally funny lyrics, and playfully inventive boy-girl vocals, reminded me that there’s plenty of juice left in the genre. My favorite song on Eels is “Problems,” in which the prospect of cleaning up after a fun party leaves our heroes sounding nearly ready to give up on life itself. Who among us hasn’t been there?

Body Meπa: Prayer in Dub

This quartet of veterans from the experimental vanguards of metal, jazz, rock, music criticism (!), and beyond makes music that’s more open-ended and improvisatory than what usually gets called “post-rock,” and more consonant and repetitious than what usually gets called “free improv,” though it contains elements of both. Its alternately searing and ethereal tracks mostly flow straight from one into the next, giving the album the feeling of one thrilling continuous journey. When I wanted music to take me far away from ordinary life this year, I reached for Prayer in Dub.

Cash Cobain: “Dunk Contest” 

“Dunk Contest” is kind of like a filthy 2024 version of “Mambo Number 5”: one extremely goofy man’s musical catalog of all the women he wants to sleep with. It would be easy for such a thing to come across as repellently sleazy, but Cash has a way of radiating beatific good nature even as he’s going into vivid detail about various hypothetical sex acts. When he does his mmm-mmm melodic adlib, he might as well be levitating with his legs crossed beneath him. The “Marni” moment (if you’ve heard it, you know it), apparently a tribute to a real-life girlfriend, makes me smile every time.

Cindy Lee: Diamond Jubilee

I don’t have much to say about my favorite album of 2024, the double-disc opus credited to Patrick Flegel’s glamorous drag persona, beyond what I’ve already said. In lieu of any new insight, I’ll just offer a bit of encouragement to anyone who was too exhausted by the critical discourse or put off by the unconventional release to check it out. Forget the hype: These are just amazing songs, whose charms could withstand any amount of critical-handwringing, easily appreciable for anyone with a soft spot for ’60s and ’70s pop, ’90s and ’00s lo-fi indie rock, or shredding guitar work from any era. Even my parents liked it. Just pony up for a download. It’s not that hard. (It’s even on Bandcamp now.) You won’t be disappointed. 

Frank Hurricane: Various live performances

How to label the music of Frank Hurricane? Try this secondhand description from the man himself. I couldn’t help reading it over the shoulder of an older lady who sat in front of me at a show in Brooklyn this year, whom he had evidently charmed into coming earlier that evening. “At a concert of someone we met at the restaurant,” she typed in huge letters into iMessage before he played. “He says it’s ‘spiritual blues,’ whatever that means.” 

It’s true that his songs, generally performed solo on acoustic guitar, draw something from rural blues styles of the 1920s and ’30s in their deft fingerpicking, and that there’s something spiritual about them. Spiritual, the word itself, is an important part of his songwriting and conversational lexicon, as are similarly consecrating descriptors like mystical and holy. Lest you get the wrong idea about him as some kind of po-faced Americana revivalist, you should also know about the subjects to which those descriptors usually get attached. He might sing about a spiritual Arby’s, or a mystical group of Juggalos, or a holy old lady he met at a Chinese restaurant. It’s funny when he uses such high-flown words to describe such mundane scenes, but it’s also serious, a reminder of the radiant and mysterious life that corporate American consumer culture often threatens to conceal. 

Through many years of relentless road-dogging, Hurricane has ascended to legendary status on the DIY touring circuit while receiving almost no attention from music media. I had the pleasure of seeing him twice in 2024, first at a small festival in Milwaukee that my band also played, and again in Brooklyn, around the corner from my apartment. It’s possible that these were the two best live sets I witnessed all year. (When another tour wrapped up in Nashville and my bandmates and I heard he’d be playing in town the following night, we considered delaying our return trip just to see him again.) For a more detailed introduction to the Frank Hurricane experience, check out the beautiful PBS mini-documentary about him above. But really, you should catch him the next time he’s in your town.

WFMU’s The Frow Show With Jesse Jarnow, 12/3/24, and Freaking Out With Kendraplex, 12/16/24

One of the few perks of car ownership in New York is having a regular excuse to listen to WFMU, Jersey City’s beloved and long-running freeform radio station, whose signal is usually strong enough to reach me in Brooklyn. One cool thing about the station is the way certain hosts—especially those who broadcast in the wee hours—treat their shows as little artworks unto themselves. Two of my favorites from this year were this appropriately tripped-out hourlong collage of Olivia Tremor Control and Circulatory System songs, presented in tribute to the late Will Cullen Hart; and this three-hour set of various experimental pipe-organ drones, which provided a wonderfully eerie soundtrack to a recent rainy late-night drive through the borough. Like all of WFMU’s programming, they are archived in full online.

The Hard Quartet: Live at Webster Hall 10/7/24

The self-titled debut by indie-rock supergroup the Hard Quartet is excellent, but I was especially blown away when I caught one of their first live performances at Manhattan’s Webster Hall. Stephen Malkmus, Matt Sweeney, Emmett Kelly, and Jim White clearly take their new band seriously, using it as a vehicle to push forward rather than some sort of vanity project. Onstage, they exude warm and easy camaraderie, swapping instruments regularly, singing backup for each other, and stretching out for instrumental passages that are exploratory but never indulgent.

Jim Legxacy: “Aggressive” 

I love the way this single from the Southeast London rapper-singer-producer Jim Legaxcy sounds both slick and handmade, with vocal samples drifting to the surface like signals from a basement pirate-radio station and then receding again. I love the way Legaxcy’s featherlight voice floats along with a wisp of a keyboard melody atop the dancehall-ish drums; the way the whole mood is both wounded and vulnerable on one hand and fuck-you tough on the other. Most of all, I love the way he loops the word “you” on the chorus, chopping up and sampling his own voice: a quick digital stutter that feels, in some inexplicable way, like the song’s emotional center.

Joshua Idehen: “Mum Does the Washing”

In which a Nigerian British poet explains nearly everything you need to know about the world through repetition and variation of a single poignant image. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, it grooves like hell, it stands apart from any prevailing trend yet still feels utterly contemporary. My favorite song of 2024.

Landowner: “Landowner Plays Dopesmoker 666% Faster and With No Distortion”

For fans of the great doom metal band Sleep, the title of this absurd and audacious single from the Western Massachusetts DIY punk band Landowner says it all. For everyone else, a bit of background: Dopesmoker, Sleep’s third album, consists of a single hour-long song filled with riffs so slow and heavy they sometimes seem more suited to meditating than headbanging. Landowner’s tribute dials the tempo way up and the volume way down, rendering Dopesmoker as tightly wound post-punk. The whole thing clocks in at a relatively-breezy-but-still-pretty-epic 10 minutes and 43 seconds. 

Dopesmoker is so slow that it can be difficult to even perceive the music in terms of linear progression, which is part of the point; it forces you to surrender to the moment, basking in the glow of one gloriously distorted power chord at a time. Landowner’s frantic pace brings the composition into new temporal clarity, revealing intricate lines that are “obscured by slowness” in the original, as the band astutely puts it in their own description. It makes me think of the way that hummingbirds and houseflies apparently perceive time on a finer scale than we do—a good reminder that our realities are entirely subjective, constructed and mediated by our senses and minds. In other words, this version of Dopesmoker may be even trippier than the original. 

Loidis: One Day

Dreamy, atmospheric four-on-the-floor dance music is one of my deepest comfort zones: The way the rhythmic propulsion tugs at the echoey stillness of the harmonic sounds, and vice versa, never gets old for me. (Also, it’s great music for writing and editing.) One Day, the debut full-length from Brian Leeds’ Loidis alias—he’s better known as Huerco S.—is on the twitchier side of the spectrum, its crisp tech-house grooves and bubbly synth sounds equally suited to tuning out the world while you work and, y’know, actually dancing.

Nikki Nair: “Sugar Kingdom” 

Ascendant club hero Nikki Nair’s experiments with vocal-led songwriting don’t always work for me on the same level as his dancefloor heaters. “Sugar Kingdom” does. The beat is as minimal as could be: 808 low end and snare, slow-mo shaker, a host of clattering hand percussion. Nair sings through a swirling vocal-processing effect, which sometimes makes him sound like an alien baby and sometimes recedes to reveal more of his plainspoken natural timbre. The lyrics aren’t easy to make out, but what snatches come through are appealingly mysterious: something about “other peaks” and “other valleys,” a repeated mention of “brighter suns.” Every so often, a sampled and pitched-down voice interjects with a relaxed-but-enthusiastic yeah, which is just how “Sugar Kingdom” makes me feel.

Nino Paid: “Kryptonite” 

One of this year’s great pleasures for me has been following the semi-regular stream of singles by the Maryland rapper Nino Paid, which usually arrive on YouTube with a beat like a thousand-dollar pillow and a music video that might as well be a deleted scene from Belly. Last December’s “Pain and Possibilities” remains his signature song, but my favorite is “Kryptonite,” a narrative of relationship turmoil released in July. The production is as airy and beautiful as ever, flipping a SZA sample in the same manner that Clams Casino used to flip Imogen Heap for prime-era Lil B. A lot of Nino’s music deals with sadness, but his delivery is so chill that he almost seems unbothered. When he laments that “as soon as we fucking, we fighting again,” it’s hard to tell whether he’s exasperated or heartbroken. Probably a little of both. 

SML: Small Medium Large 

This L.A. electro-jazz quintet’s debut, culled from live improvisations and edited in the studio, is unmistakably indebted to krautrock legends Can and On the Corner-era Miles Davis, giving their forebears’ quest for the ultimate groove an Ableton-era update. Small Medium Large has an equally excellent vibe whether you’re smoking weed at home or playing it out for a crowd of drag queens at a late-night party in Ridgewood—as I did, with some trepidation, at a recent DJ gig. I shouldn’t have worried: It went over great. 

Tommy Richman: “Million Dollar Baby”

Before I’d heard this perfectly nonsensical slice of electro and Memphis rap revivalism, a friend described it to me as the sort of song you can’t get enough of even as you know in the back of your mind that the day will come when you never want to hear it again. I knew what he meant as soon as I heard it. Then I heard it again, and again, and again, everywhere I went, for months on end, and the jolt I got from its cowbell-laced production and one-after-another falsetto hooks didn’t wane. Its viral moment wrapped up with the summer, now long since passed. We may never hear from Tommy Richman again. And yet I must admit: I still can’t get enough of “Million Dollar Baby.”

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