Our Favorite Albums Of The Year

BY SAYRE PIOTRKOWSKI, NICO SIMONIAN & Others

Our inaugural Favorite Albums of the Year article is here! Every year we publish a Favorite Songs of the Year article and playlist, like this year’s We’re Patterns in Repeat. This year, our contributors submitted their favorite album(s) of 2024 and wrote a little bit about why they loved them. We ended up with a great balance of music and learned that quite a few of our contributors are incredible writers. Enjoy!

Alligator Bites Never Heal – Doechii

This album was a needed breath of fresh air this year. Doechii masterfully balances raw honesty about her struggles with relationships, industry pressures and habitual substance use while showcasing her versatility as a performer. Her chameleon-like ability to switch styles demonstrates both her artistic range as well as her status as a dedicated student of hip-hop. One thing this project makes abundantly clear, is that Doechii is not one to be slept on. – Kenya Scott

brat – Charli xcx

brat is a feeling. brat is a state of mind. brat is a practice. brat is hyperpop returned with a vengeance. brat is a major musical and cultural event. brat is self-care but brat is also falling asleep in your makeup. brat is my friend’s summer party featuring lime green jello shots. brat is becoming instant friends with every other gay on the wedding dance floor. brat is smiling at the barista who is also mouthing along to all the words in 360. brat is missing sophie and crying because you know it’s okay to cry. brat is loud and fun and silly and dancey but also introspective and confused and grieving, which is to say brat is hot girl shit. brat is you, brat is me, brat is us. – nico simonian

Chromakopia – Tyler, the Creator

Tyler’s latest is his light spectrum, a musical kaleidoscope that displays and examines who he is and who he might be, showing off his different sides musically and personally. Here is a mix of hard raps, gorgeous melodies, and confessionals verging on spoken word paired with aggressive confidence, empathetic storytelling, and introspective questions about aging, having kids, parental legacy, and the nature of selfhood itself. Tyler shines in different wavelengths, but it’s all light, as his mom says at the start of the record—a chroma/cornucopia. – Cecilia Santini

Cowboy Carter – Beyoncé 

Artistically, Cowboy Carter is the least successful Beyoncé project since her mother designed her jeans. It is still one of the most compelling records of 2024. Building on her 2022 masterpiece Renaissance, which grabbed hold of electronic dance music on behalf of its Black and Queer originators, Cowboy Carter ostensibly aims to make similar arguments in country music. However, much of this project betrays Beyoncé’s desire to rectify a more personal slight: her history of losing Album of the Year at the Grammys to lesser works by white artists. Co-signs from Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton feel overcompensatory on the part of all involved, as do covers of the Beatles’ “Blackbird” and Parton’s own “Jolene.” The latter is particularly gratuitous when contrasted with Beyoncé’s own excellent “Daughter,” which follows “Jolene” on the tracklist and honors the spirit of Parton’s original much more effectively. The album’s best moments come on tracks like “Spaghetti” and “Riverdance,” where Beyoncé blends country with more acrobatic rhythms and vocal stylings. While she has every right to demand recognition from institutions like the Grammys, if Cowboy Carter achieves what her previous works have not, it will only confirm the illegitimacy of the accolade she covets. – Sayre Piotrkowski (you can read the unabridged version of this piece here)

Diamond Jubilee – Cindy Lee

“All I’ve got is the truth; all I want is you.”

Echoing through dreams of electric guitars, marquee lights, and rose perfume: I love you and you are gone. Heartache and loss ring out through the vast and shapeshifting Diamond Jubilee, blanketed in enchanting hooks and candy-coated melodies. Cindy Lee’s mastery of fluidity makes this feel like a Numero Group compilation, sourced from warped vinyl and hissing tape, unearthed from the rubble of a record label only 12 people listened to in its heyday. But that’s part of the magic of this album — it is written and performed almost entirely by one person.

In these devastatingly heartfelt songs, you’ll find ecstasy in a diamond’s eye, loathing in stone faces, and yearning in the stars above. You’ll feel falling tears, see visions of doom, and hear melodies of yesterday. And you’ll sing, resoundingly, painfully, lovingly, again and again:

“I can’t go on living without you.”

“I only want to hear your voice again.”

“All I want is you.”

– Nico Simonian

The Force – LL Cool J

The Force is LL Cool J’s most cohesive and least compromised collection since Ronald Reagan was in office. The album is produced by Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest. With a 54-year-old on the beats and a 56-year-old on the mic, the album wisely avoids any attempts at contemporary rap music tropes or sonics. Thankfully, the album also avoids being a nostalgia exercise. Standouts include the title track, “Passion” and “30 Decembers.” On the latter, LL takes the listener along as Covid-era anonymity allows the multiplatinum, multimedia mega star to ride the NYC subways for the first time in three decades. If there is a quintessential New York emcee, it is LL Cool J, and 40 years into his career he and Tip have produced an album that proves they can still tap into the essence of New York City hip-hop.  – Sayre Piotrkowski

GNX – Kendrick Lamar

“Ain’t no other kings in this rap thing.” “Motherfuck the big three, it’s just big me.” “Sometimes you gotta pop out and show…” However you choose to put it, 2024 was the year Kendrick Lamar removed any doubt about his position within hip-hop. He appears three times on our year end list and he produced at least four more tracks that could easily have been included. GNX is far less conceptualized than Kendrick’s other albums. It feels more like partying in the victorious locker room than an attempt to reveal or portray something profound. The championship was well-earned, and the party is a blast. – Sayre Piotrkowski

Manning Fireworks – MJ Lenderman

MJ Lenderman makes it seem easy. His beguilingly simple music is like a dandelion that floats through your car window on a country drive, only to take up permanent residence on your dashboard. Like the dandelion, you will not be able to shake these tunes, they stick to your bones. Lyrically, Lenderman carries this carefree energy while delivering funny, goofy lines like “Kahlua shooter, DUI scooter” with a straight face. But while the jokes are plentiful, his deadpan delivery also tells the story of everyday tragedies, of dead-end jobs and empty relationships. The characters in Lenderman’s songs remind of those in Springsteen’s songs, except all their ambition and desire has been dulled and they’ve resigned themselves to laugh through it. Manning Fireworks is the sound of making the most of it, the sound of sharing a six-pack and cracking jokes in the back of someone’s truck, the sound of being alive in 2024. – Adan Magaña

My Light, My Destroyer – Cassandra Jenkins

My Light, My Destroyer is a celebration of the infinite in the everyday, the wondrous in the ordinary. A simple list of flower shop tasks is revelatory. Stargazing with mom is profoundly beautiful. An unembellished account of having covid in a hotel is one of my favorite songs of the year. The album traverses jazz, indie rock, ambient, and minimalism as it travels from the ocean to the troposphere to Illinois. Her prose is simple, beautiful, and effective, a little oddball and often funny, and it’s clear that the Venn diagram of Cassandra Jenkins and her music is very nearly a circle. In giving herself fully to these songs, she teaches us to see the magic in the world, to be kind to ourselves, and to feel it all. – Nico Simonian

Only God Was Above Us – Vampire Weekend

On “Capricorn”, Ezra Koenig sings: “Too old for dyin’ young, too young to live alone”, succinctly capturing how many Millennials feel: stuck between the freedom of their younger years and the increasingly unattainable comfort of their parents’ generation. This generation-defining mantra feels appropriate for a band who turned MySpace notoriety into a lasting and critically acclaimed career, a band whose trajectory is forever linked to a generation of 30-40 year olds struggling to orient themselves in the world. 

This tension is felt throughout the album, with songs that make you want to dance and cry and equal measure. Rather than explore a specific aesthetic diversion, like 2019’s jammier Father of the Bride, they synthesize all of their previous works and influences and bring them to bear on this record. It can feel, at times, like a retrospective, with several references to their own work peppered throughout. But these don’t feel like easter eggs or displays in a museum; instead, they’re evidence of a band grappling, like many of us, with a legacy that is still being written. – Adan Magaña

Slow Burn – Baby Rose, BADBADNOTGOOD

The release of “Slow Burn” already feels like a lifetime ago, but I can bring back that transcendent feeling as soon as the gospel organs of “On My Mind” are summoned. How we enter Baby Rose’s fire immediately and then drop down into her haunting, otherworldy, othertime voice. Deep, husky, sultry, tender, aged. How each song propels us forward through a different dynamic of love as the past hangs alongside on a cigarette. The longing in “Slow Burn,” the revisiting of past love in “Caroline,” the slipping romance of “Weekness,” the fierce desperation in “It’s Alright,” and the pained sweetness of “One Last Dance”–all these trials sung by a voice I have long felt to sound beyond gender, body, and time. “Slow Burn” has the spirit of a queer lullaby for me–hitting just right after reckoning with my own slow burn of self-realization and refamiliarizing myself with another coil of queer friendship-romance. Baby Rose and BADBADNOTGOOD captured a beautiful, hypnotic ache that filled my soul like a matured, loving quiet, like a slow dance between old, dear friends. – Melinda Noack

Tiger’s Blood – Waxahatchee

Waxahatchee’s latest record settles deeper into the direction of St. Cloud, which transitioned the shrouded, raw grunge of Katie Crutchfield’s earlier sound into an almost country twang with clean and clear vocals. Her songs are still full of yearning and emotional intimacy, but with a maturity and a sense of perspective and confidence that comes with growing into yourself—as captured in “3 Sisters”: “how the time passing / Covers you like a friend,” one of my favorite lyrics on the album. Her compelling and consuming vocals are in tandem with the lush harmonies and soulful folk sounds of the band.

Crutchfield’s lyrical storytelling paints vivid but meandering pictures, full of emotional specifics and dizzying internal rhymes that transport you into her inner world and drag you under the weight of memory. Tiger’s Blood is an album that feels like going back home and reconciling who you’ve been with who you’ve become, and finding newness in the familiar. The love she sings about is one that is about letting go, wandering, but having somewhere to come back to—“I’ve been yours for so long / We come right back to it.” – Fiona Hannigan