In 1984, I was a grade schooler with a brown bag lunch and an awareness of music criticism that was pretty limited. Still, I knew there was a debate going on about the best album of the year. In one corner, there was Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The U.S.A., a big, powerful, poetic set on which an emotional dissent to the upbeat themes of Reaganism had coalesced. In another, there was Purple Rain, an autobiography with cosmic overtones, and a musical supercollider in which soul, funk, and hard rock had been spun around and whipped into a froth. Run-DMC put out a rap debut that hit with the force of heavy metal, Madonna made a resounding declaration of sexual and economic autonomy, Talking Heads redefined the concert movie. Soon I’d learn about R.E.M. and Zen Arcade, Ride The Lightning and the stupefyingly great Hatful Of Hollow.
You might not like any of these albums. You might think that A Walk Across The Rooftops mops the floor with all of them. But if you’re being fair, you know they’re all significant. Moreover, you know that the artists involved reached for that significance. They were all shooting to do something that shifted the planet on its axis. These sets might not be your cup of tea, but you cannot deny that they’re the types of artworks to which superlatives accrue. They’re meaningful developments in the history of this thing we call popular music.
In the 21st Century, critical assessment and audience reaction have gotten misaligned. Critics continue to lay their laurels at the feet of peripheral artists making deliberately marginal works. In a sense, this is easy to cheer for: we all like underdog stories and independents. Yet by doing this, we’re running the risk of dishonesty, and exacerbating a split between the cognoscenti and pop listeners that wasn’t there during the classic era. For reasons I can’t entirely grasp, modern critics undervalue the storytelling craft and conceptual clarity that have always been the primary hallmarks of great art of all kinds — qualities that audiences still understand and appreciate.
This year, critical consensus elevated odd ducks and expressions of corrosive hedonism. That’s cool: great party music is priceless, and idiosyncratic voices keep music fresh. I have a soft spot for both kinds of albums, and the list I submitted yesterday is full of weirdos and party degenerates. Yet I ask critics to stop for a minute to consider what they’re doing when they make the claim that the records atop their lists are the very best around. Because when you’re creating a list like that, you’re not merely judging an artist against her peers. You’re also contextualizing the work in the greater sweep of pop history. You are saying that your designated favorite can withstand comparison to Abbey Road, Blue, What’s Going On, The Dark Side Of The Moon; the epochal albums that we think of when we think of Albums of the Year.
And if that is not what you are saying, then what you are implying is that in ’24 we’ve got a much lower ceiling than we had in the past. You believe that our modern champions are the qualitative equivalent of yesterday’s mediocrities. You are being a bigger rockist than me, even, and I spent half of last February listening to Goats Head Soup. Or perhaps you think that music itself is less central to common consciousness than it used to be, occupied as we are with doomscrolling, stand-up comedy, and AI-generated podcasts. In diminished conditions like these, it is simply unfair to judge popular artists by the lofty standards we once did. It’s okay to hang a star on an uneven collection of songs about nothing in particular, or an interminable, hit-and-miss exercise in stoned psychedelia. Because who is paying close attention, anyway?
I am. I’m paying attention, and as a dedicated music fan who listens to all the notes and all the words carefully and in the order in which they were recorded, I consider this critical negligence. Times may have changed, but art has not. Art will always be the way we investigate what it is to be a human being, music is the finest thing that people do, and the full-length album continues to be the fullest conveyor of meaning ever invented. Even stone-dumb albums have more to say to us about who we are than the cumulative talking of every TED. People who write about music have to stop pretending they’re allergic to importance and significance, because the greatest albums — the ones that endure — will always be the important and significant ones. Consider: this year, the Grammy committee did a better job of recognizing quality than the major critical publications did. That can’t be.
2024 was, in many ways, a breakthrough. Pop woke up from its long and pandemic-prolonged slumber with a bang and a shot of espresso. Stars stepped back into the spotlight and did what stars are supposed to do: they engaged directly with listeners, and made themselves conduits for stories, focuses of meaning, and projections of our collective fantasies. Audiences responded enthusiastically. Tastemakers lagged a little. They need to remember what the listeners know: this is and always will be the greatest show on earth, and it rewards ambition, and flamboyance, and, yes, a reach for genuine significance. So clear away the marijuana smoke, resist the temptation to gaze at that shoe, and sing it like you mean it. I promise I’ll be here to appreciate it.
Single of the Year
- 1. Redd Kross — “I’ll Take Your Word For It”
- 2. Katy Kirby — “Cubic Zirconia”
- 3. Rosé & Bruno Mars — “Apt.”
- 4. Billie Eilish — “Lunch”
- 5. Vampire Weekend — “Capricorn”
- 6. Tyler, The Creator — “Sticky”
- 7. Beyoncé — “Texas Hold ‘Em”
- 8. Charli XCX — “Von Dutch”
- 9. Denzel Curry — “Hot One”
- 10. Sabrina Carpenter — “Espresso”
- 11. Waxahatchee & MJ Lenderman — “Right Back To It”
- 12. Dua Lipa — “Illusion”
- 13. The Lemon Twigs — “How Can I Love Her More”
- 14. Adrianne Lenker — “Free Treasure”
- 15. Maren Morris & Julia Michaels — “Cut!”
- 16. MJ Lenderman — “She’s Leaving You”
- 17. Kali Uchis — “Muñekita”
- 18. Ariana Grande — “Yes, And?”
- 19. Olivia Rodrigo — “Obsessed”
- 20. Doechii — “Denial Is A River”
Song of the Year
“So High School.” Starry-eyed, exquisite, hilarious, what else could a romantic aspirant want? We already know that Taylor loves Hayley Williams; these days, she’s name-checking The Starting Line and telling us I would have died for your sins/instead I just died inside. Just call up Joe Reinhart and make an emo album already. It’s long overdue.
More Tunes for Our Times
“Prep School Gangsters” and “America Made Me.” The plight of the educated white weenie should be a subject of great interest for me, but I admit I haven’t always been feeling it, and I think it’s because it takes us weenies awhile to realize our own endangerment. We always wonder who would want to screw with us?, we’re just weenies. We underestimate the predatory cruelty of the bros. Around the time of “Unbelievers,” it started to dawn on Ezra Koenig that we were in some serious trouble; ten years later, he’s writing elegies to an age of gentility that’s disappearing in the rear view mirror in a hurry as we race toward an iron-fisted future. Ezra is convinced that his excellent penmanship will soon be brutally overwritten by the self-justifying tales of thugs, and he’s got the historical facts to back up his pessimism. Nevertheless he continues to scream piano, and that’s an act of courage from a guy who has not always led with his bravery. As for the Decemberists, all they’ve ever asked us is to leave them alone while they playacted and spun neo-Victorian fairytales and had sex with waterfowl and whatnot. It doesn’t seem like much to ask, but Colin Meloy, like everybody else, has been dragged into the turbid flow of current events. Give me something that won’t keep me from my sleep!, he asks. We’re not going to get that, Colin.
Most Romantic Song
Oso Oso’s “Skippy.” He gets socks in there, and socks are pretty cute.
Funniest Song
“Dumb & Poetic” by Sabrina Carpenter. I covered this in the Abstract, but I’ll add this note: like just about everything on Short ‘N Sweet, it was co-written by Amy Allen. It’s got Sabrina’s particular sense of humor and exasperated personality all over it, but Allen was the composer who drafted the blueprint and nailed the boards together. Notably, she also built “Apt.,” the year’s catchiest song, around a Korean drinking chant, and added her architectural touch to other good tracks on albums by Rosé and Tate McRae. Reviewers lauding Short ‘N Sweet barely mentioned her name, but the industry noticed, and Amy Allen took home the Grammy for Songwriter of the Year. They also gave Producer of the Year to Daniel Nigro for his work with Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan. Craftspeople don’t always get the spotlight, but pop doesn’t work without them. Once again, the Grammy committee was well ahead of the cognoscenti this year. We should all be ashamed.
Most Frightening Song(s)
“27 Club” and “Two Night,” the bony-handed finishing touches on World Wide Whack. Death is real/life is fake, she assures us. She certainly sounds like she’s seen a ghost, and it’s probably her own. Reminding those left behind that she didn’t pay the light bill is the surest sign that the suicide drills she’s talking about weren’t just assigned by the coach.
Most Moving Song
“Kalahari,” “On Fulfillment,” and most everything else on Ten Modern American Work Songs. Andrew “St. Lenox” Choi writes educated narrators who are too exhausted to be clever. They’re not going to try to impress you with wordplay or argument; most of the time, their desperate epistles don’t even rhyme. Nonetheless, we know they’re smart from the language they use and the width of their fields of reference. Most of his characters are lawyers or lawyers-in-training, but these scenarios could apply to everybody in a corporate job that threatens to subsume the rest of their lives. A few of the people he’s singing about don’t make it to retirement: they’ve given their best years to the firm and never had a chance to chase fulfillment elsewhere. Others are determined to stick in the rat race, but not without ambivalence and a strong feeling of a sunk cost. One addressee escapes the gravitational field corporate sector to move to Missouri (Choi’s big city narrator pronounces it “misery”) and inspires reverence, horror, and jealousy in those overtime-workers and move-makers he’s left behind. Another fantasizes, vividly, about a life with his husband in a cottage in the Virginia hills. Excited as he is to tell us about the country, he gives no indication that he’s ready to pull the ripcord and jump, and references to his billable hours suggest his mind is still on his paperwork. “On Fulfillment,” a track that, like lots of St. Lenox’s music, feels drawn straight from the hymnal, is a brutal confession from a wealthy achiever tormented by the personal price of his success, cursing at the ceiling in despair. It’s meaningful that Choi is Asian-American; he’s a lawyer himself, and his writing is surely colored by his own experience and the outsider’s drive to beat the Yankee establishment at its own game. I can sure sympathize with that, even as my collar is a few shades less than white. Then work breaks for these guys for a few precious late-night hours, and St. Lenox’s troubled characters must look at the hash that our law firms, our leaders, our universities, and our industries have made of society. Once, acceptance into the ruling class felt like victory — justification for years of agony. What must it feel like now?
Sexiest Song
Maren Morris’s “Push Me Over”: a very provocative solicitation to another young woman with an urge to try something new. Or so Maren hopes, anyway. I also, um, identified strongly with Billie Eilish’s “Lunch,” and yeah, I think I’ll stop oversharing now. Back to…
Most Inspiring Song
I could see somebody calling “Little Homies” corny. Vince Staples reputation for leanness is a well earned one, and we don’t expect him to have encouraging words for us or for himself. When he does at the end of Dark Times — over a buoyant beat by the underrated Kaelin Ellis — it’s a bit of a shock. “Life hard, but I go harder,” he tells us, and the implication is that he expects to continue outpacing his misfortunes by a few steps at least. He’s got the energy to elude the demons: poverty, violence, despair, self-doubt. In so doing, he’s gifted us a genuine mantra for the embattled. When he tells us to keep our heads up, he’s not merely quoting Tupac. He’s speaking from the perspective of a guy with the full measure of everything driving them down.
Saddest Song
“Nothing To Be Done,” and the rest of Iechyd Da. Bill Ryder-Jones’s fully realized narrator is a working-class English sad sack with a desirable Brazilian girlfriend who is, by far, the best thing he’s got going. He’s certain that she outclasses him and that she’s got one eye on the door, and his addictions and his self-doubt make it impossible for him to craft a strategy for keeping her. Instead, he (and we) just watch her slip away, song by song, into the Midlands murk that surrounds this doomed couple. By the end of the album, he’s running the bath for her out of habit while she’s in the arms of some better-adjusted man. “I’m no good/but I know love,” he concludes. It’s true. But it’s no consolation.
Meanest Song
Taylor Swift’s “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.” This is the most scathing part of Tortured Poets — the verbal laceration of the attractive but immature man who tempted her narrator away from her stable relationship only to drop her like a hot potato. The saga wouldn’t have been complete without an evisceration, and here it is: pure vengeance, set to some of the best music on the double disc extravaganza. If she really does want to be compared to Joni when all the dust settles, she’s got to put out some vicious ones, because Joni wrote some of the meanest songs in planetary history. Mostly about Jackson Browne, as it turned out. Can you imagine the look on Jacksone’s face when he heard “Not To Blame” from Turbulent Indigo? Joni essentially accused him of prompting and enjoying his wife’s suicide. Holy crow, Joni.
Best Cover Version
Miranda Lambert’s smoking read on David Allan Coe’s outlaw anthem “Living On The Run,” even if it did make the rest of the back half of Postcards From Texas feel listless and underwritten by comparison.
Best Singing
The gloriously impertinent Sabrina Carpenter by a nose over Beyoncé, whose letter-perfect channeling of Tina Turner thunder and Dolly Parton sass was a smidge too reverential. Thrilling though it was.
Best Singing Voice
Father John Misty. Some of my record-obsessed buddies, including a few who’ve never had much time for FJM before, assure me that Mahashmashana is his best. I think they’re probably right, but the problems I’ve always had with this challenging character are still there. His pessimism still feels unearned, his wounds pointlessly self-inflicted, and he continues to mistake restatement for development and length for profundity. As he often does, he lays on extra verses that don’t do much to advance his stories or complicate any of his ideas. But he sure does sound good while he’s doing it, and maybe that’s enough.
Best Rapper
This is going to belong to Megan Thee Stallion until somebody comes along and convinces me otherwise. It’s telling to me that I had no hesitation about giving this answer even as her latest album is as uneven as a pothole-scarred East Houston road in the middle of July.
Best Vocal Harmonies
The Lemon Twigs, with a tip of the cap to Katie Crutchfield and MJ Lenderman on “Right Back To It.”
Best Bass Playing
My gosh did I want to give this to Steve McDonald of Redd Kross, who spends sixty minutes tickling my low end bone on the self-titled album. But I have to give it up to Magdalena Matt — especially on “Death & Romance” and “Watching TV.” That sounded like John Wetton let loose in the disco. In fact, let’s go ahead and say:
Instrumentalist Of The Year
Matthew Lewin of Magdalena Bay.
Best Drumming
Jay “J-Zone” Mumford, sitting in on “Capricorn.” Maybe Chris Tomson could have come up with that part and maybe no. Regardless, I admit I did find it dispiriting how much effort went into simulating the sound of Vampire Weekend on Only God Was Above Us when actual members of Vampire Weekend are alive and, presumably, still on speaking terms with Ezra. Give me that genuine Rostam reunion, will you? Somehow I think Ariel Rechtshaid is to blame.
Best Drum Programming
Bolis Pupul
Best Synthesizer Playing Or Programming
A.G. Cook, Finn Keane, Cirkut, and the rest of the company on Brat. Yes, many of these textures and tricks come straight from previous P.C. Music recordings. They’ve never strung them together quite as nimbly, or collected as many fireworks in the same bundle and set them off with such a flourish. When they get to the finale — that’s “365” — well, the Grucci Brothers can just pack it up and go home. This old synthesizer terrorist tips his cap.
Best Piano Playing
Nick Rosen on Faye Webster’s Underdressed At The Symphony. I didn’t know who the excellent, imaginative pianist was — all I knew was that he reminded me of Jef Labes from Van Morrison’s ’70s bands, and that’s not a comparison I’m going to throw around lightly. The Bandcamp and Wikipedia pages were no help. Eventually I found his name, but I think Faye should do a better job of sharing the spotlight with her ringers.
Best Guitar Playing and Best Sequenced Album and Most Unconvincing Perspective On An Album
Haley Heynderickx set out to sound like John Fahey, and wow did she ever achieve the precise effect she was after. Fahey, Nick Drake, Laura Marling, Martin Carthy: overtones of all of these austere acoustic guitar heroes were audible on her excellent new set. The playing and writing on Seed Of A Seed is miles beyond what she was able to do six years ago on I Need To Start A Garden, and Garden was pretty good. Every track on the album is smartly arranged and positioned to enhance the impressions left by the songs that come before and after it in the running order. Every song is calibrated to intensify the wood smoke and the blush on the skin of the holly berries as you are led deeper into the forest grove. So why didn’t I put Seed Of A Seed in my Top Ten? Am I not a mandala-toting, spellcasting acid folkie whose heart belongs to Sandy Denny in perpetuity? Well, yes. But there’s a problem, and that problem is Haley herself. She is simply not the dryad that the music suggests she is, and if Witchseason still existed, I imagine Joe Boyd might need to give her a firm talking to. For starters, a wood nymph does not talk about skillsets. Even if it is in scare quotes, that’s not a magic spell — that’s marketing language. Also, a witch does not call her cat an asshole. More to the point, she is not freaked out by the ravenous hunger of nature. The mouth of a flower is to be celebrated for its insatiable will to power, not side-eyed as it takes takes takes from its habitat. Hey, it’s a great song. I just don’t think Haley belongs in the forest. She’s welcome in Hudson County any time. We have some wetlands here.
Best Instrumental Solo
David Gilmour on “The Piper’s Call.” It’s inspiring, and also a little embarrassing, that he’s still the champ.
Best Production
Since I believe the sole job of the producer is to create a sonic environment that highlights and amplifies the star’s character, I haven’t always loved Finneas’s approach to his sister’s music. I think he’s often pushed Billie Eilish to be a zonked-out caricature of herself via heavy handed choices like running the bass through the digital equivalent of a box fan on “Xanny” or laying the ASMR on thick on “Not My Responsibility.” One of the neat things about keeping the production in the family, though, is that you do have time and a powerful incentive to figure it out. On Hit Me Hard And Soft, the O’Connell siblings are finally pulling in the same direction, switching up beats at opportune moments, adding deft, fragile little sonic signatures like the synth hook on “Birds Of A Feather,” and keeping the focus on the through-story. For the first time, Billie’s desires and her disappointment were audible to me, and while I can entertain the notion that they’re writing is sharper than it has been in the past, I think it’s more likely that she wasn’t washed headfirst into the wave-pool of solipsism by the music. Also, instead of whipping up cinematic climaxes via his audio suite, he brought in an actual string quartet and, better still, figured out how to integrate it into the soundtrack he’d developed. Suddenly, Billie Eilish was not another talented Los Angeles girl who was self-consciously playing the role of a “star” for other young people who felt shut out of the star system. She was an actual star, unironic and full-throated, entitled to her own lusts, her own aspirations, and her own masochism. That wasn’t pretty, or cute, or clever. It was, however, brutally real, and now it’s enshrined for the ages on what is, by far, the best project she’s ever done.
Best Songwriting and Best Arrangements
Winston Cook-Wilson of Office Culture. There are other artists out there who are taking comparably daring risks with melody and song structure and chucking odd sonic textures and noisy samples into their compositions. But by and large, they’re avant-garde. They’re not speaking the language of pop; they may be trying to transcend it. That’s cool. But pop is way cooler, and Office Culture makes actual pop songs. Offbeat pop, to be sure, moody and meditative, with tunes that take hairpin turns and develop in unexpected directions and rhythms that nod toward hip-hop, glitch-pop, and ’80s progressive rock. Sophisticated as it is, the material on Enough is hummable, approachable, memorable. And because it’s so unusual, it’s also inexhaustible: I’ve been listening to it steadily since its release, and I’m not close to finished with it. I probably never will be.
Best Lyrics
Serengeti by a mile. If it’s hard to understate his achievement on KDIV, it’s even more difficult to sum up its scope. He’s again performing as Kenny Dennis, an aging rapper, all-purpose entertainer, working-class Midwesterner, and unrepentant hypebeast whose story has been unfolding for years over a series of byzantine narrative sets. We also get to see Kenny from the outside, sort of, through a series of spoken word pieces performed by Anders Holm in the role of Ders, Kenny’s former partner. Then there are the other people in Kenny’s circle — buddies and hangers-on, accessed indirectly through Kenny’s rhymes and Ders’s descriptions. The biggest shadow hanging over the set, however, is cast by a character who is mostly out of sight: Kenny’s late wife Jueles, whose absence colors the entire story and drives the rapper into a spiral of compensation that drives everybody into an oblique orbit around her fading memory. We see Jueles through a series of pinholes, including Kenny’s scattershot reflections, Ders’s awed mythologizing, and the comportment and disposition of Elaine, the new girlfriend who may be a godsend and may be a chilling kind of echo. It’s clear that Kenny is trying to reclaim what he can from the broken pieces of his life, grasping for value and permanence in a world devoted to the glorification of junk. His determination to reconstruct himself is downright moving, even when it seems like he’s mostly concerned about his Girbaud shorts and his giardiniera on a roll. And when he tells his stories about having a breakdown in a J.C. Penneys, or getting into a fight with a salon owner and wrecking a Fabergé bird, or a late night car ride that becomes a daybreak cruise to nowhere, or discussing the relative merits of the teams in a pickleball tournament, it’s sad, detailed, and hilarious, as all great art is.
Okay, that’s all for today. More later, friends.