The Best Albums I Heard in 2024

Friday is fun because it’s music, so playlists and links. Today, the inevitable “Best of the year”, served however with a twist…

Man has to have choices. Has to have a little bit of “Variety”

Lists. December is the listicle month. January has lists too. Resolutions. More listicles. Aspirational nonsense and holiday destinations, and favourite ice-cream flavours, and best music for a summer road trip, and that sort of shit. Maybe the summer holiday reads is the best of that bad bunch, really.

I’ve done the list thing. To death. I’ve done best albums, best songs, best gigs, I used to do worst of the year stuff too — sometimes. I blogged every day about music for close to nine years. And before that I was part of a small gang of newspaper reviewers. So we’d do our picks for the year sometimes too. We’d share out our favourites all over again, and where we might have had 200 words previously we now had 10-20. One last ditch effort — and all for sales, and none of it for us. Just a bit of ego-glazing, and a bit of kudos if we were lucky.

Now we have Spotify Wrapped.

Just like we have news sites that publish everything as soon as they can, in a giant race to be first. Then they fix the typos, and the context mistakes, and then they fact-check to find out whether the anonymous tip was a prankster or a legit source. All of that can be dealt with after the click.

There are rumours curation is coming back. It’s like we’re a bit sick of the automation. Our Prime Minister shared his Spotify Wrapped on his social media. And you probably thought he couldn’t get more cringe, regarding music, than when he jammed along to LunchMoney Lewis — “good catchy intro, I think…”

What a surprise that New Zealand’s most rizz-less public-facing man has all the musical taste and knowledge of a potato peeler. The PM reckoned he had a pretty varied taste all up. So that’ll be that then. And if he’s struggling a little with his music, remember he inherited a playlist with U2’s “Lemon” on it from that last terrible, fiscally irresponsible lot. So the hard labour we all must do now is their fault, not his, not ours. Only theirs!

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You’ll read elsewhere of the albums of the year — I’ve shared plenty of new albums as I heard about them —

— and occasionally dropped a list of several favourite new releases:

Once or twice I even wrote an old fashioned album review of a particular single record.

Be it the latest John Carpenter:

John Carpenter: Lost Themes IV - Noir

Or a surprise return to form by Lenny Kravitz:

Lenny Kravitz: Blue Electric Light

The latest — and one of the best in recent years by one of my all-time favourite bands, The Necks:

The Necks: Bleed

Or a surprise shot in the arm from David Gilmour. Yes! Really. A surprisingly vital album from a guy whose solo albums I’ve never cared all that much about, and who, at 78, isn’t hiding his age and is just confronting and contemplating it:

David Gilmour: Luck and Strange

So I mean, there’s a list right there — a couple of dozen albums that came out this year that I gave the modern equivalent of ‘good old fashioned column inches’ to. And that barely scratches the surface.

Last night I bought the brand album by Wellington-based artist Box Of Hammers. I’ve written about him before:

BOX OF HAMMERS: Fallen Star - death of a Space Tourist

I bought the 2023 album, The Lake on brand new cassette tape just recently. And it’s a joy to listen to — in that format particularly!

And now I have Ghosts of The Drowned to hear for a first time.

I’ll probably listen to it right after hitting ‘send’ on this newsletter. Maybe it’ll be the last great album of 2024, or more importantly, one of the first great albums of 2025. But it doesn’t matter, does it. Lists are a fun part of curation, for sure. But they’re a little cold and irrelevant in a world that doesn’t support music journalism. It’s dead and gone, and there are some of us still carving out our little spaces, on the fringes, and far away from any of the ‘Music Journalism’s Not Dead’-styled articles (because, lol, gross!) But if we spend our days and weeks and months and this year and next and last and however long we keep at it championing a rediscovery of Tracy Chapman’s 1989 sophomore album: Crossroads — banger —

— as much as we do, or far more than we do around the latest Taylor Swift news, then it’s a bit churlish to come running over the hill just before Christmas with a best of the year. I did not have a Brat Summer, nor will I. But I did listen to that album. And it was okay…I did not listen to Beyoncé’s album all the way through, because it felt insincere instantly, and I just couldn’t care. But I listened to Mariah Carey heaps. And I bloody loved that for me! I bought her greatest hits on vinyl, her first album on cassette tape, and two of her other classics on CD. So, yeah, she wasn’t in my Spotify Wrapped. But I was busy buying her catalogue for real.

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I am a big fan of

Tosh Berman

’s newsletter, The World of Tosh Berman. You should definitely check it out for some great takes on books, movies, and music. And in particular his recent dive into the music he heard in 2024 that he loved — spoiler alert, it’s all music from the 40s, 50s, and 60s — albeit via some reissues and compilations in some cases:

My Favorite Music I Heard in 2024

I thought instantly of how valid this is — and how so many of my favourite records I’ve loved this year have been about reconnecting. And that’s not at all to say I haven’t loved what 2024 has served — because Tyler The Creator and Kendrick Lamar recently made really good records, and alongside JPEGMAFIA, and Doechii and a few others I find myself more invested in hip-hop than I’ve been in years. So that’s cool. And all of those mentions in the posts above — from debut albums by Fabiana Palladino, to the deep compositions of Kali Malone, to the long-gestating salsa record by percussion queen Sheila E. — pretty good year. And that’s just icing. That’s not even cake.

But everything is cake. Even and sometimes especially records from 1955 and 1964 and 1973, and 1986 — and how ‘wow’ it can be when you hear them for the very first time in 2023 or 2024 or 2025…or just hear them for the first time in ages, so much so as to feel like it’s brand new.

I reconnected with Pink Floyd in a way I never expected this year. I touched back in on R.E.M. and U2, also unexpected. And pleasant. I discovered Creed — for fucks sake. No one wanted, needed, nor expected that. But I’m happy to report that it’s starting to feel a lot like CREEDmas:

Taking delivery there of my first Creed albums as a physical product. Never before have I owned Creed. And never again — you all shout. But damn you, I’m pretty sure I mean it when I say that I didn’t find God this year, but I found Creed. And they found God, so, close…

And if I don’t mean it — it just doesn’t matter. It’s only music right?

So there’s my list of favourite albums for 2024. A non list. But before I close off and say goodbye, until next week — which will still be 2024 in as much as I can compute for right now — I do want to say that the album of the year dropped earlier this week. And it won’t be on anyone’s list. Which is why lists are stupid. They are prepared for deadlines and forget that magic can happen when you least expect it.

Aphex Twin, reclusive and mercurial wizard of electronic music — one of the greatest and most influential music producers of the last quarter century+ — just randomly dropped a mesmerising set of leftovers and offcuts and brand new unheard to the world music. He didn’t even do it on schedule. Appearing on a Monday or a Tuesday or whenever it was, Aphex Twin released Music From The Merch Desk (2016-2023), his first new full set of music in absolutely ages. His best in even longer. And it is even longer than we’re usually used to — 38 tracks, two hours and thirty-six minutes. It runs the gamut from ambient to glitch-hop and all points between. It truly is some of his very best, grooviest, and most fun music. It really does remind me that there’s been no one more challenging, fascinating and influential across multiple and blurred genre lines since the late 90s.

But more than that load of wank I just typed, it makes me happy. I listened to this on a loop for hours and hours the night it dropped. I walked the dogs around town and felt like I was in my own world with this on the headphones. I fell asleep to it and had dreams that told Melatonin to hold its acid-spiked beer! I drove around town with this on, and continued to listen to it while I worked, slept, walked, and just thought…and then, when I wasn’t listening to it I was thinking about how I needed to be listening to it. In just a few days this music got right under my skin. And so totally in my head.

And so, in just a few days, I feel like this beats all other albums from 2024 and from several other years. Then I remember music is not a competition. So what if I think I’ve just heard the best album of 2025 already! I’ll be wrong of course. And also gladly so. Because next year I’ll get even more into Mariah Carey than I did this year. I’ll finally write about Roxy Music who I adore, and was possibly my absolute favourite musical “discovery” of 2024. And I’ll also be open to whatever brand new thing is around the corner.

But this is also the 200th Friday Newsletter. Which means there’s the 200th playlist. Nothing special. No theme, not fanfare — just music! Great music hopefully. Certainly something for everyone. Chill, and nice, and jazzy and funky and no dirty, sneaky, tricky Christmas tracks. Don’t panic.

Happy Christmas everyone. Would love to know what music you’ve loved more than ever this year. Have so appreciated your readership, and thank you for listening to music and caring about it, and being interested in writing.