I’ll bet you woke up today with a song in your head. Maybe two songs were darting around in there like tadpoles in a pond. It’s something that every music fan knows about; I reckon even if you aren’t a big fan and follower of pop, you’ve contended with catchiness. There’s even a not-so-pleasant word for songs designed to insinuate themselves into your grey matter, one that was, perhaps, inspired by one of the uglier scenes in The Wrath of Khan: we call them earworms. Sometimes we try to get rid of them but find that de-worming is a harder task than we wish it was. Sometimes we just hum along. And sometimes we’ll take it as a signal that it’s time to play that song again.
Pop supremacists often claim that ephemerality is a virtue. This is music made for summer nights and passing fancies, and if the buzz fades fast, that doesn’t mean that the thrill wasn’t worth chasing. That much is true. But if that’s all there was to the story, artists wouldn’t spend so much time cultivating catchiness. They wouldn’t be trying to shimmy their way into your unconscious. They may encourage you to behave like nothing exists but tonight. Secretly they know that tomorrow is coming, and when dawn breaks, they don’t want to be forgotten.
The phenomenon we call catchiness is a reminder that music exists within time: both the minutes and seconds printed on the tracklist, and the much longer time that a song may stay with us and continue to color our emotions, set our rhythms, and become part of the frame through which we see the world we must navigate. Any old song may thrill us with sound and melody while it’s playing. But a really good song doesn’t stop when the recording is over. When a really good song ends, it’s just beginning.
All art stumbles toward permanence. No artist labors to be forgotten. Even throwaway pop — or that which we call throwaway pop — is cleverly designed to elude the confines of its runtime. The longer I listen to music, the more I realize that this defiance of its own dimensions, above all other things, is the real hallmark of quality and magic of pop. When we make year-end posts about the music that meant the most to us, this, I’ve come to see, is what we’re evaluating. Did the song slip, stylishly, into a playlist of other tracks and recede to the background hum? Did the song prompt us to sing or dance, spin us around, and then let us go? Or did the song, once heard, never really stop?
I’ll give you an example of what I mean. I first heard Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire) in 1985. I was a middle school kid learning about the history of pop, and while it was on my little turntable, it felt very much like many of the other LPs I’d checked out of the town library. I remember getting excited by the melodies, and the performance, and the intellectual and physical audacity of a rock band at the height of its powers. That was great. But when I lifted the needle, a funny thing happened. The record kept going. Maybe not immediately, and maybe not with the same clarity I’d feel after playing it again a few times, but with gathering intensity as I moved through the days, and months, and years. I kept returning to the questions that the album raised. What is empire? Does government rule by consent of the governed or through something else? What does militarism do to families and societies? How does it re-train our brains? Is there an enervating force hidden in our attention to history, and is it healthy to break away from tradition? Is suburbia the fulfillment of our expectations and desires, or an absolute dead end, or both? Why is it so important to love and care about our communities and our countries even when it’s difficult to do so? I was amazed by the ways in which the Kinks underscored and elevated their themes through the musical choices they made, and the passion of Ray Davies, who made every moment feel simultaneously pivotal and poignant. Through the peculiar resonance of pop, Arthur became part of my understanding of the world and my place in it.
And this, I have come to realize, is the thing that I’m trying to evaluate when I make my list of favorite albums of the year: not what sounded best while it was playing, but what sounded best when it wasn’t. This year, I heard hundreds of records that I liked, but even really smart ones often stopped when the music was over. Then there were those that didn’t. Those were the ones that kept me thinking about characters and predicaments, settings and narrative moves, and melodies and rhythms that made those stories indelible. These were the suites that wouldn’t let me go — I’d be on my bike, or at the checkout line of a store, or awake and staring at the ceiling, and I’d find myself obsessing over the shuffle of brand names and characters in Kenny Dennis’s lower-middle-class Midwest and the things they, and we, do to rebuild ourselves after personal disaster, and Lucas Naylor’s furious self-interrogation about what it means to be a winner in a society that encourages us to be too damn aggressive, and Mica Tennenbaum’s vicious, trenchant send-up of the cult of personal transformation, and Andrew Choi’s desperate tales of white-collar workaholics grasping for emotional and ethical balance, and Tierra Whack’s weird, funny, frightening look at hypersensitivity and the unsearchable immensity of death. These were the albums and ideas that I couldn’t turn off; these were the artists playing with volcanic forces, even as they were entertaining us with melody and harmony, sound and rhythm, gags, wordplay, and flights of fancy.
The artist atop my list (again) is the absolute master at this. I’d like to throw you a curveball and say that somebody else occupied my attention longer. But I am not here today to tell lies. That she is the storyteller supreme is a hard fact ratified by millions of girls worldwide, and those girls are now young women still rapt, still pulling at the threads of the stories as if those tales have something to do with their lives and the world they’re asked to navigate. And of course they do. She gave us so many songs this year that a few of them were bound to be duff, and sure enough, a few of them were. She’s given us so much music over the past two decades that she was bound to repeat herself, and boy is she repeating herself repeating herself. It’s worth remembering, though, that all chart-toppers aside, she’s never presented herself as a singles artist. We evaluate her as we evaluate Pink Floyd, or De La Soul, or Frank Sinatra in the Capitol years, or Lerner & Loewe: writers and performers who understand that a the suite of interrelated songs makes a deeper impression than an individual track ever could.
So it was not meant to be pejorative in the slightest when I jokingly called my 2024 exemplar Taylor From Topographic Oceans. Tales is a near-masterpiece once you get to know it, but it isn’t the easiest album to know, and it is absolutely not where anybody should start with Yes. Likewise, if there’s anybody out there who still needs to be introduced to Taylor Swift, Tortured Poets is just about the last place I’d encourage her to begin. The expectations-driven chart success of “Fortnight” notwithstanding, the star did not provide the radio with anything to slot into heavy rotation. Instead, she’s strung together thirty or so midtempo ballads, some of which are deliberately ponderous. Without becoming more poetic, she’s gotten a good deal wordier than she’s ever been before. The songs are matched to Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner productions that are much like the Dessner and Antonoff stuff you’ve already heard, only not as fresh. The album doesn’t sound particularly good. Drop the digital needle anywhere and you’re likely to come away thinking that you’ve fallen into the molasses swamp.
She’s counting on you not to do her like that. As she is a megastar, she expects you to start at the top and work your way all the way through, perhaps several times until you get it, as if it’s a Wilkie Collins novel and you’ve got a paper due. Since I’ve come to trust this artist, I did just that. When I did, I found a through-story written in permanent ink — one so vivid and so searing that it earned a privileged place on a golden shelf in the library of my brain. The protagonist is a not-so-young woman who takes a leap from a place of safety with a man she admires and into the arms of a charismatic but immature scoundrel. When he fails to have the strength to catch and hold her, she falls flat on her face in front of everybody she knows. We feel the crash; we hear the laughter and the scorn of those who say that a good girl should not be doing such things. This is the real torture that the poet undergoes: not the guilt about the man she’s left behind or the heartbreak at the discovery that the man she’s fallen for undoubtedly does not measure up, but the long waltz through Castle Schadenfreude. Along a ghost-lit path that takes two hours to traverse, the writer supports and undergirds the album’s motifs by penning Folklovermore-style vignettes that tell refracted versions of the same story.
Because this is Swift lit, the themes emerge in a hurry. She’s got a lot to say about the dynamics of humiliation, the dangerous allure of youth, what it means to grow up with the burden of societal expectations, and the rewards and punishments that come to those who decide to prioritize their desires. The tacit feminism that has been an animating quality of all of her recent albums is back in spades; the men on this record get away with things that the women never could, and the narrator wants you to feel the weight of the double standard. But mostly, this is simply a great story told to us by a lively and immensely likable narrator — one who has not always shown up on prior Swift albums. The similarity between the romantic misadventures of the protagonist of The Tortured Poets Department and the life of Taylor Alison Swift the actual human being from Wyomissing, PA is something that I’ll leave it to the gossip columnists to sort out. I note only that making thirty-five track double albums and touring the world with a relentlessness that would make Springsteen pant does not leave a person with a lot of time for girlfriending. My guess is that the events related here have been embellished when they haven’t been made up entirely. This shouldn’t put anybody off or occasion any cries of insincerity. This is a fiction writer we’re working with here, and the more she fictionalizes, the more profoundly her work resonates.
Tortured Poets is also the album that best foregrounds her sense of humor. Here’s one of the things that Taylor Swift shares with Joni Mitchell: because she has a reputation as a confessional artist to live down, people don’t seem to understand how funny she is. Even when she’s pulling your leg and making syntactical choices designed to illustrate how absurd her love-drunk characters are behaving, critics insist on taking every line at face value. Just about every song on Tortured Poets has jokes in it, even if they aren’t the kind of jokes we’d get from a comedian who thinks that humor and irony equals punchlines. Sometimes she’ll use exaggeration and hyperbole to show you how far her narrator has drifted from solid ground, sometimes she gets in sly little mid-line digs at the world around her, and sometimes, she’s just plain silly. Like Joni did, she’ll occasionally alter the pitch and timbre of her voice to let you know she’s putting you on. More often than not, though, she trusts the intelligence of her audience, the members of whom have shown, time and again, that they’re paying much closer attention to the richness of the text than the critics at name publications are.
I reckon the author knew it was going to take the audience awhile to get this one. It comes on like an album for Swift obsessors; luckily for her, there are millions of obsessors. 808s & Heartbreak is still getting re-evaluated. The Hissing Of Summer Lawns hung in space like a riddle, wrongfooting Joni’s contemporaries, before it was finally unraveled by younger people who were able to feel its undercurrents. Taylor Swift has a discography that a person could readily get lost in, and new discoverers probably aren’t going to get around to this sonic doorstop until they’ve exhausted Red and some of the other, more accessible sets. That’s okay. This one will be the bottomless epistolary novel next to the rattling tales and crowd-pleasers. It’ll be there when you’re ready for it. And take it from me: once it’s got you, it’s not going to let you go.
Album of the Year
- 1. Taylor Swift — The Tortured Poets Department
- 2. Magdalena Bay — Imaginal Disk
- 3. Carly Cosgrove — The Cleanest Of Houses Are Empty
- 4. Serengeti — KDIV
- 5. Office Culture — Enough
- 6. Bill Ryder-Jones — Iechyd Da
- 7. St. Lenox — Ten Modern American Work Songs
- 8. Tierra Whack — World Wide Whack
- 9. Tyler, The Creator — Chromakopia
- 10. Vampire Weekend — Only God Was Above Us
- 11. Charli XCX — Brat
- 12. Sabrina Carpenter — Short N’ Sweet
- 13. Vince Staples — Dark Times
- 14. Beyoncé — Cowboy Carter
- 15. Laura Marling — Patterns In Repeat
- 16. Haley Heynderickx — Seed Of A Seed
- 17. Katy Kirby — Blue Raspberry
- 18. Redd Kross — Redd Kross
- 19. Oso Oso — Life Till Bones
- 20. Dana Gavanski — Late Slap
Best Album Title
Spotted on a grocery store magazine rack: an issue of Harvard Business Review encouraging companies to transform themselves through artificial intelligence. An illustration of an electric insect with computer-chip wings accompanied the story. We’ve really been mixing up the technological with the biological lately. Musicians have noticed. There’ve been a few album-length meditations on transhumanity and our belief that we can upgrade ourselves as easily as a gamer switches avatars.On the cover of Magdalena Bay’s latest, a wicket-witchy hand slips a gleaming CD-ROM (an antiquated format) into a slot in Mica Tenenbaum’s forehead. So far so Phildickiean. But in order to understand the album, it helps to understand what an imaginal disc actually is. It’s not anything you’ll find on a hard drive. Imaginal discs exist within the bulbous, writhing bodies of larva. They contain the genetic sequences that, after full-body metamorphosis, become bug parts. What sort of form will the self-involved characters on Imaginal Disk take once their actualization and leveling up is complete? They’re sure not going to be beautiful butterflies.
Best Album Cover
Even before you see the Chinese characters, you’ll know that the picture on the cover of Bolis Pupul’s Letter To Yu was taken very far away. The seats of the ferry don’t look like anything that could accommodate a soft American behind: they’re too stiff and unyielding. Though the boat looks like it’s been in service for awhile, nobody has vandalized or even chipped anything. We’re looking at a Star — a ship that takes commuters back and forth across the Hong Kong islands. And there’s the skyline of the city, dim in the distance, as the magenta lights of another ship illuminate the water, and fill the windows of the ferry with a rosy haze. Then there’s Bolis, who sits by himself with a look on his face that hovers between curiosity and extreme motion sickness. His shoulders are hunched, and he gazes back at the camera in a gesture that’s just short of defensiveness. There’s nobody else in his row, and the next two are abandoned, too. Either it’s very late at night, or nobody wants to sit next to him; either way, he’s got to do his acclimatization to his ancestral home on his own. Honorable mention: the melting cottages in the old English hill town on the cover of Iechyd Da, with small gasps of smoke curling from brick smokestacks under a grey sky. You’ll get home, Bill Ryder-Jones is telling us, but it’s going to be an uphill climb.
Best Packaging
Oliver Ackermann fashioned an album cover for the physical release of the latest album by A Place to Bury Strangers that’s also a synthesizer. Not a diagram for a synth or a written paean to synthesis like what you might expect to get from the likes of me. No, he’s made it so you can stick knobs on to the sleeve, turn them, and crank out the kind of abrasive signals we’re accustomed to getting on his albums. Bless him. As invitations to audience participation go, it’s one of the best gestures anybody has ever made. It’s nice to know that there are a few mad scientists left in Brooklyn. I’d though that sane science had conquered those precincts years ago.
Most Welcome Surprise
I’ve always liked Redd Kross, but I was unprepared for the landslide of British Invasion hooks, garage punk, Who-style rave-ups, throwback Britpop, blazing instrumental excellence, and outright impertinence that they’ve brought us on a self-titled set that crash-landed on our eardrums almost fifty years after they first put the band together. It’s pretty much the exact album that Oasis tried to make for years after What’s The Story (Morning Glory).
Biggest Disappointment
Calling people child molesters with no evidence to back it up is how Qanon, et. al. operates. Nevertheless, people who should have known better cheered for “Not Like Us.” Drake made himself look like a complete tool by threatening to take Kendrick and his label to court for defamation, but let’s not pretend that anybody was operating according to the time-honored rules of hip-hop beefing, or doing hip-hop at all. Because by the summer, “Not Like Us” had already been folded into the larger narrative of populist grievance against supposed elites, as if Kendrick himself wasn’t a corporate-label entertainer with one-in-a-billion skills. It became an anthem, all right: an anthem for the snowball that has come down the mountain and crushed the village. Kendrick followed up the single with an album that combined homicidal monomania with nauseating self-righteousness over some admittedly hot post-hyphy beats. Naturally, Jack Antonoff was involved.
Album That Opens The Strongest
Right off the bat on Blue Raspberry, Katy Kirby looks into her lesbian crystal ball and lays out the exact trajectory of her first doomed same-sex relationship. She also lets us know that just because she sees it all in advance — including her own lingering discomfort with the cubic-zirconian unnaturalness of what she and her friend are up to — it’s not going to hurt any less when it proves inadequate to her expectations. Why wouldn’t that be enough?, she asks her girlfriend, and her audience, and herself? Well, Katy?, why wouldn’t it?
Album That Closes The Strongest
Carly Cosgrove’s See You In Chemistry was an ideal starter set for people who’d like to approach Philadelphia emo but who find the deep end (Algernon Cadwallader, Hightide Hotel, etc.) a little daunting. Lucas Naylor took the band over the top in all sorts of wonderful ways, but he also stayed true to classic virtues such as vocal clarity, instrumental excellence, and narrative craft. The Cleanest Of Houses Are Empty is just a great rock album — one that may remind you quite a bit of The Wall. Pink, you’ll recall, is psychologically stranded by his own success, isolated from friends, lovers, and his own growing audience. Lucas Naylor’s narrator isn’t an arena rocker like Pink is, but he’s in the same spot. He suspects that attaining what he wanted has aged him prematurely and soured his disposition. On The Wall, Pink’s self-loathing eventually renders him a split subject, and he’s forced to confront a fascist extrapolation of his worst tendencies, and the divided protagonist of Cleanest Of Houses faces off against a similar specter of cruelty from his unconscious. They both try and fail to get comfortably numb. Pink takes refuge in doobage and industrial-strength painkillers; Lucas Naylor’s character has Zoloft and other SSRIs, and that’s certainly not as cool, but at least he doesn’t blame his mother for his problems. Anyway, right after Lucas tears down the wall in a fantastic climax in which he tells the bully inside him to fuck off, he bids farewell with a slow-building ballad that sends off the North Star Bar (a great place to see emo) in style. The world I know is not the one I hoped it was/but it was there!, he roars. That’s exactly how I feel about Jersey City. Oh, and also…
Album You Listened To The Most
The Cleanest Of Houses Are Empty, followed very closely by Oso Oso’s excellent Life Till Bones.
Album That Wore Out Most Quickly
For Your Consideration by Empress Of.
Most Inconsistent Album
Kali Uchis’s Orquideas put fiery exercises in urbano and some great throwback Latin balladry next to tracks that were pure mush. The dreamier pieces grew on me over time, but never enough to ease the frustration of listening to an album that could have been great if Kali had exercised a little more editorial control. I’d get excited, and then I’d get narcotized, and yes, I do realize that might sound like a good time to some of you drug atics.
Album That Was The Most Fun To Listen To
This is a flatfooted tie between Indoor Safari, Nick Lowe’s resuscitation of Sam Cooke soul and Buddy Holly-style laments of sexual frustration at the sock hop, and Denzel Curry’s swamp-trawling exercise in Floridian kill-’em-all hip-hop King Of The Mischievous South Vol. 2. Thrills too shiny and too menacing to be cheap.
Album That Felt Most Like An Obligation To Get Through And Enjoy
Say Anything will always be one of my favorite bands, and I find Max Bemis hilarious, imaginative, broadminded, and, for a self-described silly jerk, weirdly profound. I’ll defend his first five albums to anybody, and I loved Oliver Appropriate, too. But I cannot in good conscience encourage anybody to put themselves through …Is Committed, which strikes me as the record you make when you are daring people from the funny farm to show up with butterfly nets. On these long and preposterously noisy songs, Max encourages his wife to masturbate, surfs around on waves of cum, and assures us that his penis is graceful. Mostly, though, he turns his attention to bitter score-settling: with relatives and in-laws, with the state of Texas, and with other emo and pop-punk artists whose dirty laundry might possibly have been of interest to readers of the Alternative Press in 2009. As on all Bemis projects, the music is interesting and inventive. This time around, he’s making sure that you never get to it.
Album That Turned Out To Be A Whole Hell Of A Lot Better Than You Initially Thought It Was
My initial resistance to Brat was, I think, fully justified. Charlotte Aitchison was the evil mastermind behind some of the most execrable songs of the millennium, and it’s not like she’s changed her approach or her outlook very much. In the Abstract, I called this album digital Louie Louie, and I don’t take that back: this is a soundtrack for getting blotto, rude and rudimentary, and it’ll surely be spinning at the frathouse kegger for the next few semesters. But the production on the set is, even by the high standards set by PC Music-affiliated beatmakers, tremendously tight, full of laser-zap synth tones, machine-shredded club beats and late-night iPhone glitches, and just enough glitter-stick prettiness to bring the sweetie pies to the yard. As for Charli herself, she shrewdly intersperses some personal reflections amidst the many entreaties to do a little key/do a little line. It’s hard not to appreciate the frankness with which she approaches her frenemies or recognize the FOMO she’s feeling when she sees her more settled acquaintances with their children. Her reflections on faux-romance are poetic in spite of her party-hearty intentions (“bad tattoos on leather tanned skin/Jesus Christ on a plastic sign”) and her character sketch of the gross socialite on “Mean Girls” is as vivid as anything that Damon Albarn has had for us lately. Basically she comes through the fire as a character in full, and that’s really all I ask of these people — even when the woman she’s playing isn’t necessarily a person you’d ever want to know.
Album That Sounded Like The Most Fun To Make
After reaching higher than their talents would ever allow them to go — something all artists ought to do — Neck Deep returned to core competency with a straightforward, gleeful set of speedy pop-punk songs that played like they’d been written and recorded on the spot after the bandmembers inhaled the vaporized essence of the Warped Tour. If you ever stood out in the sun at Monmouth Racetrack as seventeen different guitar-rock bands strummed in your direction at different angles and Faygo-sticky kids offered you free hugs, you might find yourself harboring nostalgic feelings, or maybe a PTSD flashback.
Album That Sounded Like A Chore To Make
Katy Perry’s 143. Katy has never come back from her breakup with former right hand woman Bonnie McKee, with whom she wrote some of the most memorable pop songs of the millennium. Since Bonnie flew the coop, Katy Perry has bulled her way through one charmless set of songs after another in the musical equivalent of grinding for Roblox items. Technically these are all new songs, but nobody’s heart, ass, mind, or bloodstream is in any of them, and whatever AI-assisted software was used in their assembly needs some fine-tuning. Either that, or we truly have reached the garbage in/garbage out stage of the LLM era.
Album I Am Probably Underrating
As I am not a metalhead, some of the moves that Moriah Pereira made on Negative Spaces are indigestible to me. Sometimes her screaming is legitimately scary, and sometimes she just sounds like Sam Kinison yelling at Rodney in Back To School. But that’s still a higher horror percentage than other metal singers manage, and she’s got her normal, or “normal” voice in her back pocket to deliver her melodies. When she does, she reminds us all why they call her Poppy. I think “Vital,” in particular, is an undeniably effective application of hyperoverdriven midrange guitar to the pop song format, and since that very thing is all the rage in certain shoegazy circles, I cram to understand why the cognoscenti have been slow to pick up on this set. I’m no better: I find about a quarter of this album unpalatable despite the creative production and conviction and power with which it’s performed. The rest of the set is a very nice balance of brutal heaviness and tuneful leavening, and if I can only rock along until I trip over a stray blargh or yargle, I think that says more about my poor emotional balance than it does about Moriah’s execution. Moreover, when Poppy sings, or screams, about the center falling out or surviving on defiance alone, I fear she’s got a better grasp on present reality than all the commentators on CNN. It’s not the first time she’s been able to match a scary moment with music that’s appropriate to its gravity, and its general tenor, too. Since she’s as tuned in as anybody, I imagine this ride is going to get bumpier before it smooths out, if it ever does.
Album I Am Probably Overrating
Cowboy Carter. Sorry.
Okay — individual honors next! Thank you for reading.