Hey, everyone! It's been quite a while! I'm not sure I'm back* as such, but I had the urge to post about my favourite releases of 2024. I hadn't been keeping up with new music that much for a few years, but last year, I did some exploring in slightly unexpected directions, and suddenly had a whole crop of new favourites. I thought it was worth sharing some of my finds with people who similarly love to go wandering down different musical avenues, often the off-the-beaten-track ones.
Some of my favourites this year were not quite so obscure as usual – in this list, you'll find a mix of some more mainstream stuff as well as the usual hidden gems. You'll see in my Spotify playlist of songs from these releases, there are artists with plays in the millions sitting among those with much cosier audiences. I like to think it shows there's more in common with music across the board than you might think, as well as that neither popularity nor obscurity are markers of musical quality. Good music is good music.
Here's my list of favourite albums of last year. The top 5 are in order, but after that, there's no particular order. The Spotify playlist is linked in the image above, or scroll down for the embedded player.
Let me know what your 2024 favourites are in the comments!
My top 30 albums of 2024
- Sofie Royer - Young-Girl Forever
- Sabrina Carpenter - Short n' Sweet
- Charli XCX - brat
- Clairo - Charm
- Bat For Lashes - The Dream of Delphi
- Brijean - Macro
- Lauren Mayberry - Vicious Creature
- Sababa 5 & Yurika - Kokoro
- beabadoobee - Beaches
- Holiday Sidewinder - The Last Resort
- L'Impératrice - Pulsar
- Say Lou Lou - Dust
- Jane Weaver - Love in Constant Spectacle
- Melissa Fortin - Prismacolore
- Luna Li - When a Thought Grows Wings
- Cassandra Jenkins - My Light, My Destroyer
- Beautify Junkyards - Nova
- Fitness Forever - Amore e Salute
- The Marías - Submarine
- Magdalena Bay - Imaginal Disk
- Allie X - Girl With No Face
- Girl Ultra - blush
- Dar Disku - Dar Disku
- Halo Maud - Celebrate
- Julia Holter - Something in the Room She Moves
- Fabiana Palladino - Fabiana Palladino
- Raveena - Where the Butterflies Go in the Rain
- Leon Bridges - Leon
- Mk.gee - Two Star & The Dream Police
- AURORA - What Happened To The Heart?
My album of the year
My favourite album of 2024 is ... Young-Girl Forever by Sofie Royer! Sofie is a talented singer, songwriter, and multidisciplinary artist based in Vienna and Paris. Classically trained in violin and viola, she brings a deep melodic and compositional sensibility to her music, which encompasses pop-rock, electro-pop, and avant garde pop, among other flavours. This is her third album, but was my first time hearing her, and I'm excited she's come into my world. This album for me was instant love (I need an emoji for ears which is the equivalent of 😍). It has everything I love in pop music – particularly some avenues I'd been exploring recently – all in one sophisticated album.
Sofie has a love of French music, and incorporates that beautifully here, so of course that wins my heart! She sings in French a number of times here, but the influence goes deeper than that. The imprint of everything that makes French pop great is all over the songs here. She even faithfully covers one of my favourite 80s French pop songs here – a song I'd coincidentally had on high rotation last year before hearing this album, 'Sage comme une image' by Belgian chanteuse Lio.
Young-Girl Forever has so much that I love in a great pop album: it's varied but cohesive; it's catchy and accessible, but deeply intelligent; it's witty, yet earnest and affecting; it has classic, familiar elements but feels unique and new.
I was partly motivated to do this post because I saw this album was a bit overlooked, and perhaps not reaching people who would surely love it. A user on Reddit compiled a list of the top-rated albums of 2024 from some of the main music outlets (with a spreadsheet!), and I was surprised to find Sofie Royer nowhere on this list. Then again, I wasn't – this is the sort of intelligent, lesser-known pop that tends to fall between the cracks of poptimism and scrambling for indie cred, a model I think critics are still largely stuck in. It's a big part of why I started my blog way back when (nearly 20 years ago now! 😮), to showcase brilliant pop music not getting its due.
A great year for pop music!
In contrast, my next pair of favourites were as popular as they come last year, Sabrina Carpenter's Short n' Sweet and Charli XCX's brat. I've never disliked mainstream music because it's mainstream – this is something people often wrongly assume when you listen to mostly obscure music. It's just that for a long time, I haven't really liked what happened to be mainstream. I haven't enjoyed the production, the composition, or the lyrics in most popular music for some time. I know exactly what I like in music, and it just hasn't been present in most mainstream pop music for me for a long time.
I was pleasantly surprised to hear some wildly popular music that really hit the spot for me. Sabrina Carpenter's juggernaut hit Espresso first reached me when I happened to be oddly fixated on a particular microgenre that I'll call '70s Italian beach disco', and it really reminded me of that style. It's such a clever, fun, witty earworm, and a genuinely original take on a pop song. The subsequent album, Short n' Sweet, shows how broad her talent is. Sabrina deftly traverses multiple genres, often in the same song, in a way that feels less about showing off range, and more about finding the right home for the emotions she wants to express. She has an incredible pop sensibility and is a wonderful, quick-witted lyricist, largely exploring the ups and downs of navigating young love. She manages to capture genuine angst, heartbreak, and hope, yet seamlessly blend it with her brilliant, often hilariously dirty sense of humour.
I really think Sabrina is the real deal, and has a long career ahead of her. I'm excited to see what she'll do in coming years. She may have a pop team who helps shape and polish her songs, but at heart, I feel she's a really gifted, classic singer and songwriter. If you want proof, check out her fantastic NPR Tiny Desk Concert from last month.
As for the phenomenon that was Charli XCX's brat – I must admit I did not like what I'd heard from this at first. I was surprised when it started growing on me and I ended up loving it! I suggest if you heard it in passing and felt the same, it's worth giving another go. I'm really not into the idea of force-feeding yourself music until you have the 'right' opinion or anything silly like that. I'm just giving a perspective that it's possible for this to be a grower (something that doesn't often happen with me).
For example, at first, I found the boastful lyrics in the singles pretty alienating and unappealing, but these themes make more sense as part of the whole album. Situated among many moments of vulnerability and self-doubt, you can see, in context, some of the confidence is more of a front. These are themes Charli deliberately explores in a way that ends up being really fascinating.
Other than that, there's not a lot I need to say about brat that hasn't been written ad nauseum – you can see in that list above it was the critics' fave. It's just a really fun, cathartic, weird album, and it's exciting that such an original, creative, and personal take on pop music has hit the spot for so many people.
Mellow beauties: Clairo and Bat For Lashes
Rounding out my top five are Clairo's Charm and Bat For Lashes' The Dream of Delphi. Charm is a gorgeously mellow, 70s-esque listen, which brings to mind a cherished favourite, Margo Guryan. The superb production here is courtesy of Leon Michels, co-founder of Big Crown Records, whose own albums under El Michels Affair as well as productions for other artists like The Shacks, have appeared on my end-of-year best release lists in the past.
I seem to favour the most underrated Bat for Lashes albums, like 2016's incredible The Bride. The Dream of Delphi deserves much more love than I see it getting. This release is Natasha Khan's incredibly moving, deeply personal tribute to her young daughter, Delphi. It somehow seamlessly blends pastoral sounds with synthpop elements. The cover art really captures the feelings present in the album – joy and beauty and connecting with nature. There's an accompanying release of alternate arrangements on the harp, The Dream of Delphi (Harp Visions), featuring harpist Lara Somogyi. This is also lovely, and worth checking out.
Best of 2024: Spotify playlist
I've put together a Spotify playlist of one song from each album (with a couple of extras from my top two albums). As I've mentioned before, I like my playlists to be a sort of a journey (for want of a less hokey word), that takes you through different moods and sounds. I'm fairly obsessive about ordering them just right, so that there are mini-arcs that make sense, and transitions that ease you into a different sonic landscape. I feel like careless juxtapositions can throw off a balance, like eating a particular food after another it doesn't go with, and getting the wrong impression of an otherwise tasty dish! So for that reason, I highly recommend listening to this playlist in order, rather than setting it to shuffle.
I've only put this playlist on Spotify, but I can transfer it to another service on request.
I really enjoyed just going where the musical tides took me last year, down some new pathways and out of certain musical ruts I'd been in. I felt like having fun with music, and was drawn to a lot of upbeat disco pop and synth pop, some of which you'll find here. But hang in there if you like the psychedelic pop I've favoured in years past, there's a great patch of that later in the playlist.
2024: Yet more to explore
I must admit, I didn't find out some of my favourite artists had released new music last year until I started compiling my list. I only had a chance to briefly sample some of those releases, and can tell there's some fantastic stuff there, but I didn't have time to get to know the albums in full. (And hey, I'm already late to the party getting this list up, but I feel like if I get it up in January, I'm still not embarrassing myself too much. If I listened to everything I discovered at this late stage... well I guess I'd be ready to get this list up by next year!) Apologies to blog faves of prior years who didn't get a look-in here! I'm looking forward to spending quality time with those releases in good time. But for now, I want my best-of lists to be a true reflection of what I happened to listen to and enjoy throughout the year.
In previous years, I've shared a supplementary playlist of a number of other songs I've enjoyed through the year. These are usually very long, but the idea is to just dip in and find some stuff you might like. I did start a playlist like this, but it was going to take too long to get ready, so I thought I should try to just get the main list up. I also realise they haven't been very popular in the past – "overwhelming" was some of the only feedback I received 😅 – so I've decided I'll only share the extended list if someone requests it in the comments.
The playlist would include songs from my favourite singles and EPs of 2024, and songs I enjoyed from albums I didn't get to know better. If no one asks for it, I'll put some of my favourite singles and EPs of 2024 in The Listening Booth section instead. If you would like the list, please don't be shy to ask! I'm really hoping to see people get back into leaving comments on the blog, and not everything being so social media-based.
Speaking of social media, I'm staying off it for now. I wanted to try blogging the old-school way, just writing a blog post and letting people find it, rather than trying to promote it on half a dozen different platforms. I found the latter just quickly ballooned how much work and effort writing a blog is, and kind of zapped some of the joy from it. If you want to keep up with my blog, I recommend subscribing to the RSS feed, using something like Inoreader (use the RSS button at the top of the home page, to easily subscribe).
*I'm not sure I can promise any regular blogging at this point, so I hesitate to say I'm back. This is a tentative step of trying blogging again, to see if I'm up to it. I'm still struggling a lot with my chronic illness, more than ever really, and it makes it hard to keep up the blog. But I'm trying to see if there are ways I can make it manageable enough to at least occasionally update it. One of them is staying off social media, and keeping things simple. Regretfully, I don't feel I can manage catching up on personal correspondence at this stage. I may share a more personal note about all this in future.
Anyway, I hope anyone reading this is having a great 2025 so far, and that you find some listening to enjoy here! Please say hello in the comments. Let me know what you've been listening to, and if you found any new favourites here.
Comments (0)