The Best (non-jazz) Albums of 2024

Some had to be outsourced from 2023

Jan 28, 2025

Below, I’ve collected writing of mine on most of these top 20 albums that is lightly edited and briefly new. If an entry in that range doesn’t have writing, I either did not write about it when it released (and you should play it) or I didn’t like what I wrote enough to reprint or attempt to edit it. Let’s call the first 19 A’s, the rest A-. If you scroll far enough, I’ve also included my favorite singles of the year as well as ballots for your perusing and nitpicking pleasure; one for the Uproxx Critics Poll (same as what I sent to Facebook’s Village Voice Pazz & Jop Rip-Off Poll) and one for the illustrious Expert Witness Poll (where I am a multiple year recipient of the coveted Smallwood Centricity Award, so there’s no need to get your music opinions elsewhere (imagine a comically unsubtle wink and nudge here)). Thanks for reading!

Chappell Roan: The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess
The best album of 2024 or the 2nd best album of 2023; choose whichever makes you happier. This album represents for me the sort of critical error possible when you are a glutton of culture (like me). The blunt earnestness of her lyrics didn’t strike me as a bug, but as a feature that I read as weak songwriting, so I quickly shrugged it off under fear of being crushed under my mountain of albums to evaluate. But it’s the same blunt earnestness paired with an aggressive sexuality that initially turned me off in the lyrics of “Red Wine Supernova” that she employs to translate the causal relating of events in songs like “Casual” into a deft and devastating takedown. The ultimate silliness of my dismissal is that these occasional unpoetic tendencies are prevalent in the literal lyrics of Sabrina Carpenter (author of my third favorite album of 2024) and the already enshrined Olivia Rodrigo (#4 album of 2021 and #1 of 2023). When so much of social media is overcome with insincere posturing and irony-prisoned discourse, I find her earnestness comforting. Besides, lyrics only matter as much as they serve the melody and when you can write those like “Guilty Pleasure” and write crowd anthems that make “YMCA” irrelevant for your first album, I can learn to enjoy a couple moment of discomfort. I even like the ballads now.
Adrianne Lenker: Bright Future
Before I had the chance to play it, I read reports that Adrianne Lenker’s new album was devastating and that the first song was an emotional assault that would force you to tears. On my first listen, I liked most of the songs except for what I heard as a painstakingly overwrought opener. How often is a great album sullied by the first song? I’m not sure. I also read comparisons of her casual songwriting mastery to that of Neil Young’s 70’s output, which is maybe the greatest body of folk-rock music there will ever be; she certainly competes with him melody for melody and my first listen conjured the same allusion. Young crafted a preferred acoustic arrangement of guitar, block piano, and harmonica in tandem with an electric wall of sound the his melodies pierced through. Lenker has fuzzy electric popcorn arrangements on songs like “Fool” or her bands “Time Escaping” and “Simulation Swarm” as well as tried and true guitar + piano, accented by the occasional banjo or mouth harp (or whatever other folk heirloom strikes her fancy) and the often excruciatingly serene fiddles keeping afloat affirmations like “Sadness as a gift” and her band’s “Spud Infinity” — she mixes both approaches on “Vampire Empire” — occasionally resting on just the tried and true to let the songs speak for themselves. Over time and after some more direct comparisons, I realized I love every song except the first one. I played Bright Future one more time while writing this and I suddenly found that sparse arrangement beautiful and complete. By the end of the song, I was almost in tears. Half a song later, I heard the left hook.
Sabrina Carpenter: Short n’ Sweet
Between Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and to a lesser extent Charli XCX, 2024’s megapop (if we don’t count whatever “I Had Some Help” is) is in great shape. Despite some lyrical staleness (you know she mountain does it for you anyway) her sound is versatile. I’ve put it on over other new albums more than most albums this year, which puts it in a small category with Adrienne Lenker, Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, This is Lorelei, and, forgive me for last year’s blitheness, Chappell Roan. Not every song is as irresistible as the singles, “Good Graces,” “Coincidence,” “Slim Pickins,” or “Lie to Girls,” but that’s over half of the album already. For every corny line, there’s a brilliant one that underscores the pathos of modern dating (or maybe just the state of men in general). The album flip-flops between lamentations to commiserate to and anthems to get back up and face the world to. Who needs Taylor Swift?
Kendrick Lamar: GNX
Has any rapper in history been as beloved and respected, as they live and breathe, as Kendrick Lamar is currently? Even when he is boisterously arrogant like he is all of GNX, sentiment about him conjures up images of the dad from Get Out. Naturally, this is just a victory lap after his grand slam last spring. The further explortation of DatPiff inspired beats — think Lil Wayne’s Da Drought series, he’s trying to earn his favor back — can’t top the ecstasy of watching Drake’s live execution even if “Not Like Us” doesn’t end up being the best Kendrick song of 2024. Not to say he doesn’t cover topics other than “they’re not like us, but don’t forget I’m the greatest” on songs like “hey how” (gentrification), “reincarnated” (talent coming with the curse of temptation; new framing, old theme), and “heart pt. 6” (reminiscing on his rise to stardom with TDE — his description of being in the studio at the beginning of the track may be his most evocative, and my favorite, verse on the album). Unlike Pitchfork and some of my friends, I don’t think the music on GNX is worse than Kendrick’s standard — Jack Antonoff, we’re cool (for now) — or that his wordplay and delivery have diminished. He simply isn’t striving for bigger ideas like he has on his last few albums, but I guess that’s the point of a victory lap. He strives to prove himself to his wife, children, community, his father, and the father on the album, what does he have to prove to the rest of us?
Editor’s note: Since I’m not yet tired of kissing ass after that review, and since I’m not satisfied with how it ended up, and since any revision I could dream up is already stated with a succinctness elsewhere that would take me days to conjure, I direct you to two excellent reviews of GNX over at Semipop Life and An Acute Case which I am lucky to be in conversation with.
Beyoncé: COWBOY CARTER
There are few albums of this short millennium that I hold in higher esteem than Beyoncé’s club masterpiece RENAISSANCE (as of today, about 5 from the aughts and only 3 from the tens). Because of this impossibly high bar she has set, COWBOY CARTER was destined to disappoint. It’s sprawling, it’s sequenced haphazardly, it has hokey cameos, and it’s the full length of a CD in the age of the double 180 gram LP, but like the album “Blackbird” first appeared on, it’s just another victory lap; like the magnum opus of a another megastar, Sign ‘O’ the Times, a bombastic showcase of the full-range of Beyoncé’s skills as a performer, curator, entrepreneur, and conductor. And like that infamous Beatles album, not every song is a winner (I’m lookin at you “Jolene”). But the math shakes out in an interesting way (as if Beyoncé knew which songs were the weaker ones. I don’t think she thinks in that way): there’s never a stretch longer than 3 tracks between the songs that keep me coming back — and remember: there are 27 tracks. If I made a list of the 20 best songs I heard this month, Beyoncé (and Lenker with her own) might represent a quarter or more. Despite their mastery of the album format, I never had much use for The White Album as a unit. By the time I publish my favorite albums of 2024, I predict I will have played (and enjoyed) COWBOY CARTER more than I ever had The Beatles: The Beatles.
Editor’s note: the above statement is probably true even though there is no data to base this claim on.
The Paranoid Style: The Interrogator
The Interrogator is just another great rock album of varied timbre and style from one of America’s premier indie rock bands. It seems so easy for The Paranoid Style now that I’ve come to expect this. However, after playing A Goddamn Impossible Way of Life to death at the end of the last decade, I found For Executive Meeting underwhelming and slight in comparison even though it is still excellent. Unfortunately, I think The Paranoid Style now have a new watermark to compare all of their future releases to.
Liquid Mike: Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot
Wait until the next day, give your ears a break, and then play Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot even louder. On the other end of the enbigification spectrum, Liquid Mike makes masterful power-pop-punk with expert slight. With an average song length of 1:58, every song has an indelible riff or a perfect melody, often floating on a sea of distorted fifths. Some even have all 3.
Bad Moves: Wearing Out the Refrain
Wussy: Cincinnati Ohio
Through most of tracks of Cincinnati Ohio, Wussy let their ensemble of distortion subsume their voice, hoping that the dead might be raised for 41 minutes. Elsewhere, more than any other Wussy album, the ghosts skulk around, in the reverb soaked guitar picking and signing, in the achy accordion, and, aptly, in the pedal steel, like in the 2-chord vamp, interrupted by a synth glissando peaking around the corner, in track 2. The ghosts keep them alive. And they live despite it all on the 2 centerpiece singles that some tired souls might even find hopeful. With this wake, Wussy have mastered the sound of autumnal desolation — rightfully succeeding Yo La Tengo — and redemption.
We love a good parlor game, don’t we folks? Choosing your favorite moments in music is one that’s always wildly idiosyncratic, but intriguing in the way it forces us to abstract simple songform down to it’s molecular structure. Add 47 seconds into “Winged” into that pantheon. I can’t think of any way to describe it that isn’t horribly cliché, but if you listen to the opening of “Winged,” the breakthrough at 0:47, the desperate change in Cleaver’s singing through the second verse and chorus, and you promise to play it loud, I think you’ll get it.
Dlala Thukzin: Finally Famous Too
Tucker Zimmerman: Dance of Love
Carly Pearce: hummingbird
Previous Industries: Service Merchandise
LL Cool J: The Force
You could have given me 100 guesses for which rapper would release a great rap album in 2024 and I don’t think I would have guessed LL Cool J. I think it’s okay to call it a comeback. It’s at least the best LL Cool J album since his last comeback 34 Decembers ago. This is in large part due to to veteran Q-Tip’s incredible production (let the record show that this is the first album Q-Tip has produced since A Tribe Called Quest’s masterpiece in 2016 and the first album on which he has produced more than one song since Danny Brown’s solo magnum opus uknowhatimsayin?), but it should also be noted that LL’s flow has only become more utilitarian with age. He’s not the braggadocios pretty boy he once was, and he shines the most here when his rhymes and rhythms become inseparable from the groove. I’ve headbobbed, stankfaced, and otherwise convulsed — in ways that should bar me from getting to listen to rap ever again — more while listening to this album than any new album in a long time. It’s fitting that less than a year removed from an interview where Andre 3000 — the same Andre 3000 who had just released an ambient album in the spirit of a $5 CD collecting dust in a carboard display at a Starbucks checkout in 2008 — questions what he could possibly rap about entertainingly at 48, even older rappers like Ka release fascinating and contemplative mature work and LL releases the best rap album, possibly the best album period, of 2024.
Editor’s note: Well, that last line didn’t age well, but if everything I wrote did then what’s the fun in recollecting?
Kim Deal: Nobody Loves You More
Doechii: Alligator Bites Never Heal
Doechii is fun to listen to because she’s funny. She does the alter ego schtick as good as anyone this side of Kendrick and Serengeti. These are the main reasons there has been so much positive mention of “Denial is a River;” it plays on these unique strengths. No delivery this year has made me laugh as hard as “I’m goin through a lot— was it drugs? Uhhhhhmm…” or after she hulks out at the end of the songs and lets out a deranged, restrained “SORRRRY.” But this album/mixtape has playability because of her casual mastery of the hip-hop fundamentals: indelible hooks (“Wait”), knowledge of the game through the emulation of her favorite legend (Missy Eliot, of course, on “Bullfrog” and “Catfish”), and a variable flow (“Death Roll,” “Slide,” “Skipp”). Don’t worry, some songs have it all (“Boiled Peanuts” and, especially, “Nissan Altima”).
Billie Eilish: HIT ME HARD AND SOFT
Low Cut Connie: CONNIE LIVE
Tough Cookies was Low Cut Connie’s best and my most played album of theirs because Adam Weiner put his showman chops up front without having to worry if the songwriting could measure up. There the covers, performed live from a living room, allowed Weiner to take great songs that he loved and focus solely on how to deliver the originator and orator’s collective soul to you. In that way, it was a surer shot than CONNIE LIVE, and Weiner shows he knows this in his choice of tracks on the new album. It didn’t matter if the song was one of their 13 best written, only whether the band reached a sweaty critical mass during their and the audience’s mutual catharsis. Because of this shrewdness, this is the best album of Low Cut Connie originals that you can hear in your living room. If you want to hear a better one, you’ll have to catch them on the road.
This is Lorelei: Box for Buddy, Box for Star
I’m embarrassed to type I didn’t know until last month that the Nate Amos that is 2/2 of This is Lorelei is the same Nate Amos that is 1/2 of Water From Your Eyes (maker of Everyone’s Crushed, my #19 album of 2023) and My Idea (maker of That’s My Idea, my #23 of 2021, and CRY MFER, my #32 of 2022). Despite the excellent signing, lyricism, and melodizing from the female halves of each group, Box for Buddy, Box for Star may be the best album Amos has authored. Not quite as impressive and sparse as Prince’s Dirty Mind, but I am still struck by the range of yearning and reverie Amos has squeezed out of his voice, guitars, drums, and keybs of choice that only he played and sequenced.
Tyler, The Creator: CHROMAKOPIA
I didn’t understand Tyler, the Creator‘s mass appeal. I played each new release since 2017 with mild enjoyment and then let them slide out the back of my brain as I moved on to other new music. He had good influences to draw from — I hear (in his music, not the vocals) Prince, Dr. Dre and Andre 3k, Tame Impala at times — but his imitations come off as distant to me. His music has a faint, inverted presence. His R&B was dreamy, but stuck in NREM (think The Internet but not as melodious or groovy). Apparently, the key to his evolution was a to pull the knot at both ends, to get more vulnerable and more raucous. He’s claimed that every word on this album is true — I’d love to believe that improving your art is as simple as telling your truth — but what first grabbed me was that he hasn’t tried to go this hard since Goblin. The aggression here stands out because it’s more audibly physical, guttural. There are fat handclaps, stomps in march step (“Sticky” could be part of an R-rated STOMP show in New Orleans), shrieks, moans, barks, and mumbles paired with distorted synths and bass all over the album. He sprinkles them throughout his songs with benevolence, but not abandon. I hope I’m not suggesting that Tyler is any type of underdog, but the easiest explanation of CHROMOKOPIA’s jump in quality is that he is no longer a novice. He’s honed his style with a steady release schedule and now he has some grooves and melodies that can converse with the work of his idols. The closest comparison to his musical style I can pinpoint is the amalgam of one signature to the typically excellent Young Fathers, but I think I will return to Tyler’s nuanced machismo and comforting tenderness here more often.
Hinds: Viva Hinds
Waxahatchee: Tigers Blood
MJ Lenderman: Manning Fireworks
Fred again..: ten days
Phelimuncasi & Metal Preyers: Izigqinamba
Heems & Lapgan: LAFANDAR
Mannequin Pussy: I Got Heaven
Thomas Anderson: Hello, I’m From the Future
Amyl and The Sniffers: Cartoon Darkness
Megan Moroney: Am I Okay?
Guy Davis: The Legend of Sugarbelly
Vince Staples: Dark Times
Chris Smither: All About the Bones
Homeboy Sandman: Nor Can These Be Sold (At Least By Me)
Tierra Whack: WORLD WIDE WACK
Sarah Jarosz: Polaroid Lovers
Jamie xx: In Waves
NLE Choppa: SLUT SZN
Madi Diaz: Weird Faith
Manu Chao: Viva Tu
The Buoys: Lustre
Lady Gaga: Harlequin
Miranda Lambert: Postcards from Texas
Morgan Wade: Obsessed
Vampire Weekend: Only God Was Above Us
USHER: COMING HOME
Swamp Dogg: Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th St
Rosie Tucker: Utopia Now!
Serengeti: Kdiv
Bill Orcutt: Four Guitars Live
The National: Rome
Amaarae: roses are red, tears are blue
Glorilla: Ehhthang Ehhthang
Fake Fruit: Mucho Mistrust
Hurray for the Riff Raff: The Past is Still Alive
Kim Gordon: The Collective
Les Amazones d’Afrique: Musow Danse
Rosali: Bite Down
Jeffrey Lewis: Ghosterbusters
X: Smoke & Fiction
Chuck Prophet & Qiensave: Wake the Dead
MC Lyte: 1 of 1
illuminati hotties: Power
Fox Green: Light Over Darkness
Zach Bryan: The Great American Bar Scene
Laurie Anderson: Amelia
Praktika: Balani Factory
Sahra Halgan: Hiddo dhawr
Leyla McCalla: Sun Without the Heat
Nia Archives: Silence Is Loud
JPEGMAFIA: I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU
Ka: The Thief Next to Jesus
Maggie Rogers: Don’t Forget Me
Katy Kirby: Blue Raspberry
Dave Alvin & Jimmie Dale Gilmore: TexiCali
Wussy Duo: Cellar Door
Yard Act: Where’s My Utopia?
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: Chain of Light
Snotty Nose Rez Kids: RED FUTURE
Kathryn Williams & Withered Hand: Willson Williams
Jeff Evans Porkestra: Willow Pillow
Katie Pruitt: Mantras
Cloud Nothings: Final Summer
Lyrics Born: Goodbye, Sticky Rice
BigXthaPlug: TAKE CARE
Etran de L’Aïr: 100% Sahara Guitar