2024 is a year I will not forget in a hurry, and has definitely seen a change to the way I buy and consume music. It’s been less about vinyl, more about CDs, and has also seen a shift to rediscovering old favourites rather than hunting down new music every week. Some of this is likely to do with the fact that a few very old favourites have released great music this year, but maybe it’s also just down to the fact that as I get older my musical taste has just settled. There is still a lot of new music here though, and quite a few artists I’d not heard of a year ago as I continue to discover some of the newer punk/hardcore releases that sit nicely beside artists I was listening to decades ago.
Last year was the year of loud and angry music, and this year started off the same way. But after the first few months of the year I found a lot of comfort in music without words, which has always been a thing for me, but never more so than now. I think this is reflected in some of my choices, but also by the fact that most of what I played that was not from this year was largely wordless as well. The Post Rock Classics playlist that started off as a minidisc 24 years ago is now a Spotify playlist that still soundtracks most of my working days, and I spent a portion of the summer tracking down Godspeed and Mogwai CDs on Ebay to try and complete collections that were started around the same time.
Here is my list for 2024, starting with my top 20 which are in no particular order apart from maybe the first 2:
Albums
In all cases the links below are to somewhere you can listen to and/or buy the record in question (Bandcamp or the artist’s own website). For things you can’t buy anymore I’ve linked to a description. All quotes are from the same page as the link.
This record came out at a time when I was definitely grieving, but also about to give a talk at a conference about the last time I was grieving. It hits that emotional resonance perfectly, but I think I would still love it if I had been in a happier place at the time. Themes of growing older and being older permeate, and I think this is the perfect record for people who have followed the band over the last 40 years.
I keep trying to compare it to other Cure albums, and the best that I can do is that it’s a bit like the best parts of Disintegration and Bloodflowers. There isn’t a bad song on it, and I think it’s something I’ll come back to for many years in the way that I still do with Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography decades later.
Seeing the live stream of the launch concert reminded me how important this band were to me when I was growing up, and how much time I have spent listening to their music. I think this lineup is probably the best ever; although it’s not too different to who was on the stage in 1989 when I last saw them play live.
Everyone looks older, but they still sound great, and I think these new these songs definitely stand the test of time. I remain hopeful that the rumours of at least one more album before they retire are true.
THE PLAIN TRUTH==
we drifted through it, arguing.
every day a new war crime, every day a flower bloom.
we sat down together and wrote it in one room,
and then sat down in a different room, recording.
NO TITLE= what gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall? what context? what broken melody?
and then a tally and a date to mark a point on the line, the negative process, the growing pile.
the sun setting above beds of ash
while we sat together, arguing.
the old world order barely pretended to care.
this new century will be crueler still.
war is coming.
don’t give up.
pick a side.
hang on.
love.
GY!BE
Another band that have been very important to me over the years, from buying their second album at the start of the century, to subscribing to the Constellation Records Bandcamp earlier this year because the amount of new music they were playing at concerts made it seem like an album was imminent. I love everything they have made, and this one doesn’t disappoint at all. I listen to a lot of this type of music when I’m working, and this is one that I have been coming back to over and over again. It’s also made me dip back into their back catalogue, and discover a load of other great records by related artists that I missed the first time around.
I missed their first two records, but picked this up on a whim after hearing a couple of songs on Spotify. They don’t sound that much like Radiohead (the band 2/3 of them are also in), but it does tap into a lot of different types of music that I really like, and is basically just a collection of great songs played very well. Sometimes that’s exactly what I want, and this is one album that works as well shuffled with a load of other things as it does on its own.
I didn’t really discover Black Midi until just before they imploded, but after hearing the lead track from this I was definitely looking forward to hearing more of Geordie Greep’s first solo offering. It reminds me in places of the great crooners (Sinatra, Scott Walker, David Sylvian and David Bowie), and I very much look forward to what he does next.
A few words from the artist on this one:
“Music can be so much more than learning to play the same as everybody else. It can be anything you want. With recording The New Sound, it was the first time I have had no one to answer to. Being in a band (black midi), we often have this ‘we can do everything’ feeling, but you are also kind of limited in that approach, and sometimes it’s good to do something else, to let go of things.”
Blood Incantation’s Absolute Elsewhere is unlike anything you’ve ever heard before. At roughly 45 minutes, the two compositions that make up this album are as confounding as they are engaging in their scope, melding the 70’s prog leanings of Tangerine Dream (whose Thorsten Quaesching appears on „The Stargate [Tablet II]”) with the deathly intent of Morbid Angel. Absolute Elsewhere, which takes its title from the mid-70’s prog collective (best known as a celestial stopover for King Crimson drummer, Bill Bruford), Blood Incantation are leaving the notion of genre behind and writing a new language for extreme music itself.
I didn’t realise ambient death metal was a thing until I heard this. Now I want to hear more ambient death metal. I don’t feel qualified to write much about this music because it’s not something I feel like I have any background or expertise in, but I love it, and I’ve listened to it a lot during the second half of this year.
Chenaux’s tunes have the uncanny ability to sound like jazz standards; songs you feel you’ve heard before, though certainly never quite like this. Yet these are of course all originals, compositionally and interpretively, bent through an inimitable avant/out-music lens. Delights Of My Life conveys warm familiarity, shot through with the exuberantly experimental subversion and playful, even mischievous, iconoclasm that continues to mark Chenaux as defiantly, virtuosically, and genially one-of-kind.
My discovery of the year, not so much this particular record, but a rich back catalogue that I have been familiarising myself with over the last few months. I got this as part of my Constellation subscription, although it doesn’t have much in common with most other artists on the label, tapping instead into the world of the crooners, but also of jazz instrumentalists. I really like the combination of clean vocals and minimalistic, but complex, instrumentation, and don’t think I’ve heard anything else quite like this before.
This album as good a place to start as any, but I suspect this is an artist I’ll keep coming back to, and definitely a name I’ll be looking out for on lists of upcoming records and live performances.
WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN (WAWBARC) is the new quartet of Mat Ball (Big Brave), Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion), and Jonathan Downs and Patch One (both Ada). On “NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER” they present six modal lullabies drenched in seared distortion, slathered across striding electronic pulses. Ball and Menuck began creating music in and for the bleakest moments of Montréal winters: “We’re honoring that idea of winter, when you come inside and your house is warm, a place that only exists because of how cold it is outside,” says Menuck. They later recruited Downs and Patch to flesh out their initial ideas.
Another Constellation release, and one that acts as an interesting counterpoint to the Godspeed record.
One of the few records I’ve bought on vinyl this year, and a definite highlight from the Wrong Speed Records catalogue. For me this hits the same kind of vibe as All Structures Align, who have probably been my favourite band of the last couple of years. I also agree with the label that this is likely to become a cult classic at some point.
Four years in the making, DEAD CENTRE is both a mindbending horror novel by musician TIM FARTHING (Hey Colossus, Henry Blacker, PJ Harvey) and the seventh album by enigmatic electronic duo REIGNS. The hardback book comes complete with a CD soundtrack and is illustrated by the author.
Dead Centre by Tim Farthing is one of my favourite books of this year. The fact that it comes packaged with the new Reigns album is a nice bonus. Does the album act as a soundtrack to the book? Or is the book an attempt to add some context to the music? I don’t know, but it may be a bit of both. I love this band, and whilst an almost wholly instrumental album might not be for everyone, it’s something I keep coming back to, even without the book to keep it company.
Another Wrong Speed release, and another instant classic. I loved the 7″ single from last year, and this picks up where that left off. Hopefully we will be hearing more from them next year.
This band have been important to me for as long as music has, but I was not expecting this album to ever be made, let alone for it to be so good. It stands up to the 80s classics, and like all good The The records soundtracks the times we are living in now, but also quite likely shows us some glimpses of what the future may be like if the world continues the current direction of travel.
As with The Cure, I am hopeful there is more music to come, but if there isn’t then this is a very strong swansong.
And so the adventures of Robin H. Hood continue! The Prince of Fried has brung forth 12 brand new humdingers: all hummable and lyrically compelling and replete with wah-acoustic guitars and beautiful orchestrations of Mellotron 400 from Liverpool’s Blondest. So inhale the garage fuzz dub of ‘R in the Hood’; the mantric powerdrive of ‘Four Jehovahs in a Volvo Estate’; the sentimental Pete Burns lamentations of ‘In Spungent Mansions’… and who could resist the affectionate micro-trolling of ‘Will Sergeant’s Blues’?
Someone else I have listened to since before I was an adult. He’s releasing albums quite frequently again, and this is one of the better recent ones. I buy them on CD as soon as they come out to prevent more gaps in my collection, and is one that I bought without listening to any of it first (which is of course how we always used to buy albums before streaming was a thing).
The feeling that Anastasia Coope’s music transmits seems to emanate from a precipice beyond the material world, like a void or memory pressing up against the veil. It’s exacting and enveloping, but unmoored in space and time: ghostly, spectral, far-out folk. Darning Woman, her debut album, feels like a dispatch from another past. Akin to lullabies or nursery rhymes, its minimal folk instrumentation contorts into something staccato and strange led by Coope’s expressive, stratified vocals.
Short, weird, and otherworldly. I liked this as soon as I heard it on Spotify, and kept coming back to it.
One of the most beautiful records of the year, from someone who has never made a musical wrong move. This is one of those timeless albums that is just ten very good songs, five per side, lasting around 45 minutes. That’s how albums used to be when I was first getting into music, and I think this is the kind of thing I would have loved even then. This is the record that should have won this year’s Mercury Music Prize, and one that I think I will keep coming back to.
Fat White Family are back with the most sophisticated, vital and flamboyant creation of their career. The cult south-London band’s resplendent fourth album Forgiveness Is Yours, like everything they’ve done, has pushed them to the limits not only of their creative talent, but of their health, their sanity, their very existence.
Sounds like hyperbole, but I think the description matches the record quite well. These songs kept cropping up on Spotify, but were nothing like I expected the band to sound. Once I started actually playing it as an album it clicked for me, and I think there are parts of this that wouldn’t sound out of place on the radio, but also some great spoken word/experimental tracks that I love even more.
Wild God by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
I had a huge Nick Cave rediscovery last year, and this record came out at exactly the right time for me. He’s not made any bad records, but I think for me this is a highlight of his later years (not quite up there with Ghosteen, but as good as anything else from this century), and one that I think I will keep coming back to in the same way I do to Tender Prey and Let Love In.
For folk singer Willi Carlisle, singing is healing. And by singing together, he believes we can begin to reckon with the inevitability of human suffering and grow in love. On his latest album, Critterland, Carlisle invites audiences to join him: “If we allow ourselves to sing together, there’s a release of sadness, maybe even a communal one. And so for me personally, singing, like the literal act of thinking through suffering, is really freeing,” he says.
I had a tough start to 2024, and these songs helped a lot. It’s nothing like anything else on this list, but was always going to be on this list from the first time I heard it.
I love how this album is in two languages; the German that the band speak, and the English that allows me to better understand these fantastic and very unusual songs. It’s one of the few debuts on this year’s list, and I will definitely be listening out for what they do next.
Rack by The Jesus Lizard
Another totally unexpected comeback record, and one that sounds like it could have been made at any time during their history. The Jesus Lizard still rock, and this may be their best album ever. All of their albums have one-world titles, and there are still a lot of words they have not used yet, so hopefully this is the start of something rather than the end.
Whilst writing this third opus, Yoo Doo Right drew inspiration from patience, the commodification of art, AI and algorithmic music/art, as well as musical influences ranging from Wes Montgomery and Sergei Rachmaninoff all the way to Neurosis and Russian Circles, wanting to create something to sit and grow with, celebrating the saving grace and driving force of unconditional love for all living things.
A very recent discovery, but one that nicely compliments a lot of the other Post Rock I’ve been listening to this year. I definitely want to check out their other records in 2025, and this is easily what I have listened to the most whilst writing this list.
I think they could easily become one of my favourite bands if they keep releasing records like this.
Other stuff
Live albums, reissues, and things that were definitely available in some format before this year.
The rest
Other things I’ve listened to this year that I enjoyed.
Something for next year