2024's Albums of the Year
Claiming any album of the year list contains 'the best' records is disingenuous at best. Delusional, at worst.
Going back 15 or 20 years, sure, most publications and broadcasters could confidently have said they have the resource to feel as if they had a bird's eye view of the notable music released in their area of expertise and that they, the cough-syrup-slurpin' critics of the day, could help you - the lovely, curious, diligent music enthusiast - zoom in on the most goodest records of that year.
Now though, there is so much music released that no media outlet and no individual can claim - no matter how hard they try - to be across everything that's going on in their scene, let alone in their country or in the overall global music scene.
Hate to be a stats nerd, but data on the exact number of albums released each year is hard to verify - although music distributor Ditto estimates that about 10% of releases are albums!
Data for songs is much easier. Back in 2019, around 40,000 songs were being uploaded to Spotify every day, whereas in 2023 it jumped to 120,000 tracks a day!? I dunno about you but I struggle to listen to 50-100 songs a day and give most of them my full attention. Try as I might, I don't think I have listened to anything close to 0.0033% of the music released this year. Definitely didn't get my money's worth with my streaming subscription - not that, as DiS newsletter readers will know, a lot of the artists get their money's worth, either.
One of the reasons I struggle to 'keep up' is because I have a habit of finding something special. I then get truly obsessed with a song, an album, or an artist's entire catalogue. I'll not want to listen to much else for days in a row, getting lost in the record(s) before trying to figure out what it is about a piece of music that makes this feel like it's perfectly aligned with my soul (or my life, the moment, the eternal, etc, etc). Other times it's because the music feels so alien that I feel truly alive spending time rolling around in its landscape, glancing at worlds I'll never truly visit.
With that said, these then are the 10 album releases from the year twenty-twenty-four that I really urge you to save/buy/bookmark/add to a note in your phone, to spend some time with. After much deliberation and exploration, these are my favourites, please take a moment to share your own in our annual reader poll.
10
They Kept Our Photographs
by Snakeskin
Mais Um | Bandcamp
This disquieting, dreamy, and at times truly beautiful record was a late entry into my albums of the year list, discovered by dipping into our forum thread about the one album everyone needs to hear before making their best of the year lists.
Julia Sabra and producer Fadi Tabbal aka Snakeskin have managed to bottle something both dystopian and hopeful with beats that pulse, vocals that swarm and a sound that's often shedding its skin.
With each track, melodic drones arrive like an ominous sea mist, leaving you enchanted or ecstatic or both.
They Kept Our Photographs feels as if from Bjork's extended universe, with more of a Broadcast-y thrum than Medulla and more of a shoegazy wooze than Vespertine. It's discovering records like this that keeps me, a quarter century deep into running Drowned in Sound, excited about what's around the next corner.
“This is an album of extremes, made in Beirut - a city of extremes. Unsettling quiet, deafening noise. Tenderness and rage. Extreme violence, extreme love. Extreme beauty. Extreme grief... As soon as we started writing this album, the war on Gaza started, and that heavily influenced the writing. We were glued to our screens watching Palestinians being massacred 24/7 and feeling totally helpless, these images filled our nightmares at night. A lot of the songs are about the horrors, the racism, what it means to be Arab in these times and holding on to love as a way to stay sane through all of it.”
- Julia Sabra, Snakeskin
9
World Wide Whack
by Tierra Whack
Interscope | Soundcloud
A delicious soup of cognitive loops. Distracted and dysregulated but calm and oddly confident, slouching or bouncing in World Wide Whack's insular world. On a fragmented voyage. A neon-lit hall of mirrors filled with soft furnishings. Reflective but instantly refracting, pulling a thought through a tunnel and sucking it out a straw. Is it even album?! Are these wonky and witty epiphanies actual songs or interludes if they're so quick? Would anyone be asking this about a collection of Napalm Death or NOFX ditties? Why do all the parts feel like they zip together only to fly apart? Are the beats made of magnets repelling each other or from the static of a party balloon? Shouldn't I have answered these questions before writing this? Probably. Is the fact this record leaves me questioning it, pondering what music is, scrolling through my sock drawer of thoughts, and wanting more, so endlessly returning to this record, a good thing? Yes, because it's a delicious soup of cognitive loops.
8
This Could Be Texas
by English Teacher
Island Records | Bandcamp
Some records feel as if they emanate from a lost deep in the ocean but evolved onto land in their own unique way. Within the belly of This Could Be Texas there's the swinging from the chandelier magic of cult heroes Life Without Buildings, they have the wide eyed melodies of Franz Ferdinand and The Big Moon, and the subtle but surprising time shifts of Foals and Black Midi. They're jangly but have gracious swells of late 90s art-rock with crumbs of Sea & Cake, shards of Slint, and a light dusting of Pavement. There's a charm and smirk when they get loud, too.
In short, This Could Be Texas is a nostalgic thrill for Gen-Xers and geriatric millennials alike but this award-winning, ridiculously and rightly acclaimed debut album must sound uneasy but oh-so refreshing to younger Auto-Tune-drenched ears.
Related reads
- Leeds band English Teacher say it shouldn’t be novelty that Northern band win Mercury Prize
- Interview - English Teacher: “We boxed ourselves in, and ended up having a bit of an identity crisis” (Loud And Quiet)
7
The Last Resort
by Holiday Sidewinder
Venus Beach Records | Bandcamp
Welcome to a tropical island. This must be the place and you can access it just by pressing play. There are guitars that languish in the long-long grass, everything bumps to the rhythm of a gentle Pacific swell, and your hostess truly has the mostess.
The Last Resort has a Parisian Phoenix-y funk astride a buffet of soft-rock. There are picture postcard perfect pop vistas and there's something special in the endless punch bowl. Holiday Sidewinder has done it again, and this warm sea breeze of a record is what you deserve. Put your feet up for three seconds then put your party shoes on, then throw them in the lake, and let's go!
6
Emosfere
by Alessandro Cortini
Modwheelmusic | Bandcamp
Do you ever find records on your phone that you've saved because a friend recommend them, and you can't quite remember who suggested it? You just have a note in your phone that says you might like this noise bath for the brain? This is that record.
Alessandro Cortini is perhaps best known as a member of Nine Inch Nails or in indier circles for his collaborations with Daniel Avery and Ladytron. This drone-loving Italian is a proper synth fiend, and has even made his own named Strega (translation: 'witch').
With Emosfere, the latest in a series of ambient releases, I have to admit, I have rarely been so transfixed by music that at times does so little. From the opening swells that grow into pulsating static, this record suspends you in time, lost in the throb of some internal clock. It's dark and heavy but soothing.
Headphones are very much recommended for the full head in a fishbowl of static experience.
"a series of atmospheres for the soul. use as necessary."
- Alessandro Cortini
5
My Light, My Destroyer
by Cassandra Jenkins
Dead Oceans | Bandcamp
You may her breakthrough songs with poetic spoken word monologues, so Cassandra Jenkins' reemergence from a Joni Mitchell-shaped cloud (or is it Feist or Father John Misty or Aimee Mann?) may take some by surprise. For anyone paying attention, this record underlines what an extraordinary talent Jenkins, with her cacao-soaked voice and gentle prowess, truly is.
My Light, My Destroyer is a reassuringly grounding record, a humanising record, and the sort of comforting record many of us need in a time of ecocide, conflict, and the rising tide of fascism. It's an escape hatch with a soft landing. It's not middle of the road, though. There are brain-contortin' cowboy whistlin' transitions, ad-libs, field-recording textures, and the exquisite penultimate track 'Only One' that's sweet on the surface but has a devilish line about punching the clock in the face.
Related read: Musician Cassandra Jenkins discusses the financial difficulty of promoting yourself, the power of speaking without cynicism, and creative expression as a need. (The Creative Independent)
4
Big Anonymous
by El Perro Del Mar
City Slang | Bandcamp
As a long time fan of Sarah Assbring aka El Perro Del Mar's big colourful blog-hyped pop, I was taken aback by the desaturated moonscapes of Big Anonymous. It's a melancholic body of work that drifts along Agnes Obel's haunted lake and into Lykke Li's shadowlands.
As big Heimlich hugs go, it leaves you breathless but ready to inhale again. Especially at the moment in the album when the sun cracks through the clouds of the sad groove of 'The Truth the Dead Know', bringing into focus the absolutely incredible 'Between You and Me Nothing' - a song that's flushed of colour save for its extremities turning purple, its lips blue, like a motionless carcass drifting toward the light... and yet, it's a song of the decade contender that feels full of hope and possibility as it lurches into an abyss.
As dark as this may all sound, there's a lot of room for the mind to sprawl into with this record, with soft walls of sound to cautiously lean into.
3
forgive too slow
by Julia-Sophie
Ba Da Bing | Bandcamp
I'm all about that bass thud that feels as if it's inside of your chest. A sort of oppressive presence that holds you still whilst lyrics snake around the room and other sounds rise from the carpet.
As someone whose electronic music palette was forged in the early days of Warp and reached its sommelier peak when I first heard M83, everything about Julia-Sophie's dreamy bedroom disco is what I look for in euphoric music. There's the shimmering surface, the hypnotic lyrics, and the machines wrestling with those 3am thoughts.
forgive too slow is what a personalised AI would one day hope it could write for me but it will never have these big dollops of humanity. Which is to say, we definitely need more video game techno written by people studying to be a gestalt psychotherapist, and I'm not sure there's an algorithm that could wrap its head around that dizzying mix.
Related read: Headliner's interview with Julia-Sophie about touring with her rock band before going solo
2
Letter to Self
by SPRINTS
City Slang | Bandcamp
Some band names have to be written in all caps. It's not just a stylistic choice, it's a signal of how loud they are. SPRINTS share a noizey DNA with their producer Dan Fox's group Gilla Band but where they take you with Karla Chubbs songwriting is somewhere quite different. This is raw. It's bandages being ripped off. It's a picture of Kurt Cobain and Brody Dalle howling out the window of a flaming blimp, crashing into a firework factory, painted in blood and red candle wax.
For every rock is dead obit you will read in a time of brat and Beyonce, there's always incredible bands like this, and most of them seem to be hanging out in Dublin where spinning a great yarn and slinging it into a stormy sea of riffs seems to be a favourite pastime.
Letter to Self deserves all the plaudits bestowed upon it but above all this ejection the soul deserves to be played VERY LOUDLY!
1
Remembering the hopes and dreams I had and all I had to do
And wondering what became of that boy and the world he called his own
I'm outside in the dark wondering how I got so old
- 'Endsong' by The Cure
Songs of a Lost World
by The Cure
Fiction | YouTube
If you ever read ancient philosophers, the way they joyously eulogise about life, death, and the world, oscillates between cringe and being so sincere it's kinda cute. Like them bombastic big brained thinkers of yore, my gushing about music is something I fear can go a bit too far and then keep going. It's a giddiness, typing away, auto-writing, catapulting thoughts onto the screen, rather than thinking about what's coming out. Much of it is embarrassing to read back (I will save you from reading my various hideously verbose attempts to bottle this particular butterfly).
Other times, I can't find the words. When something really blows my music-obsessed mind, there aren't the superlatives, analogies or metaphors that express how it feels. Just, gah, er, wuh, wut...?! It's these moments of overwhelm when the mouth empties, the brain turns into a grey hiss, and you become non-verbal. Don't get me wrong, overwhelm isn't always a negative, sometimes you can reach an ecstatic state of euphoria where words fail and if something bubbles up it has a clarity. On first listen to Songs of a Lost World, I found myself without words and worried I was just being the lesser-spotted superfan.
To be fair, I did manage to write this, eventually:
Sean Adams
Many plays on and I'm still struggling to find enough distance to have a true perspective and maybe that's ok. To be 'a music critic' or whatever you call passionately blabbering about music on the internet nowadays, requires a set of skills and tools and objective anchors to weigh down the subjective spaffin'. Perhaps it's ok to be bad at your job, sometimes (it doesn't seem to stop our politicians, etc).
So I'll just say this about Drowned in Sound's album of the year: Whenever anyone ever asks me what the greatest album of all-time is, my answer is always Disintegration. Hearing a record by the same band, that's a feather away from being as good, it's not something I can truly explain. I listen, therefore I am...
Robert Smith speaks to Matt Everitt
Drowned in Sound's 10 Essential Albums of 2024
- The Cure - Songs of a Lost World
- Sprints - Letter to Self
- Julia-Sophie - forgive too slow
- El Perro Del Mar - Big Anonymous
- Cassandra Jenkins - My Light, My Destroyer
- Alessandro Cortini - Emosfere
- Holiday Sidewinder - The Last Resort
- English Teacher - This Could Be Texas
- Tierra Whack - World Wide Whack
- Snakeskin - They Kept Our Photographs
- Hear tracks from these records on our 2024 Favourites playlist on Spotify and Apple Music.
- Browse our previous Drowned in Sound albums of the year lists featuring the likes of M83, FKA Twigs, Phoenix, Sharon Van Etten, David Bowie, Twilight Sad, and many more.
- Vote for your albums of the year in our annual reader poll
Thanks for reading and for your continued support of this newsletter.
Sean Adams
Member discussion