Jill’s Favorite Music of 2024
Getting right back to it with Mag Bay’s cosmic art-pop, J-Pratt’s dispatches from another century, the Ginger Root cinematic universe, and a sage-of-mind country duet from Waxahatchee x MJ Lenderman
The hierarchy of ranking music is a dude thing, an inherently anti-feminist approach: this is what some of my smartest women friends in music journalism say, and after years of doing it down to the decimal point, I have to agree. This is a subjective artform that, for me at least, is highly connected to memory and emotion. I don’t know how to write about or even listen to music while putting those parts of myself aside. There’s no unified theory of Good Music that creates an easy rubric by which to judge a song or album. It’s based on gut feeling, and educating yourself on music as much as you can, in order to understand what came before as you look forward.
So while I appreciated what my longtime colleague and ex-Pitchfork comrade Ryan Dombal had to say about running on the internal clock of year-end institutional voting and list-making, I don’t particularly feel that way. The thing I missed about Pitchfork, and got back with Hearing Things, was the external motivation and internal support system needed to keep up with new-music listening and the weekly release schedule. I’m someone who will love a song and listen to it 20 times in a row if left to my own devices, while doing tasks around the house or painting abstract watercolors (my layoff hobby of choice), and look for new ways to love it even more. This year, during the liminal space of my severance period, I let my naturally obsessive way of enjoying music rule my world. That’s reflected in certain picks here.
This list of 20 favorites—including a live show, a late-night performance, a movie score, many songs, several LPs, and a visual album that plays like an old Japanese TV show—is alphabetical and deeply personal.
