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.