All this week, we’ll be counting down our editors’ picks for the Best Albums of 2024 and, just like we did last year, we’ll be taking ’em on one chunk of the alphabet at a time. Next week, our genre columnists weigh in with their picks for the year’s best records. And you can get a jump start on your holiday shopping with our 2024 Holiday Gift Guide.
December 2: Best of 2024: A – F
December 3: Best of 2024: G – M
December 4: Best of 2024: M – R
December 5: Best of 2024: S – Z
December 6: 2024’s Essential Releases
Mo Dotti
opaque
Compact Disc (CD), Cassette, Vinyl LP
Much ink has been spilled over the “shoegaze revival,” but hiding in plain sight is Mo Dotti’s sublime LP opaque, an album that doesn’t so much evoke the past as give it a brand new verve that few revivalists can match. It’s not just the excellent, time-exacted production, but the band’s irresistible hooks that propel opaque to the stratosphere. Tracks like “really wish” and “whirling sad” are undeniable earworms. Kevin Shields would be proud.
–Eli Schoop
Read our Album of the Day on opaque.
Kelly Moran
Moves In The Field
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
This past April, I saw Kelly Moran headline arty Brooklyn space Pioneer Works. After showcasing programmed pieces from her latest full-length, Moves in the Field, a hush fell over the room as she encored with several renditions of Ryuichi Sakamoto compositions. Without context, it would have been difficult to distinguish between the work of the two composers—both coax glassy beauty out of right-brain ingenuity. Across Moves in the Field, baffling, inhuman melodies—generated using a cutting-edge Yamaha Disklavier player piano—marry technicality and inward-gazing mournfulness. Sparked amidst the disruption of pandemic lockdowns and partially inspired by psychedelic experiences, the album affirms that Moran is an academic pianist who thrives on subversive emotion.
–Ted Davis
Read our Album of the Day on Moves In The Field.
Sam Morton
Daffodils and Dirt
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Of all the musical surprises of 2024, this is one of the most devastating. On Daffodils, Samantha Morton narrates the story of her own troubled childhood growing up first in an abusive home and then suffering through the cold and labyrinthine mechanics of the social care system. The album is a collaboration with Richard Russell, the founder of XL Recordings who worked on similar albums from Gil Scott-Heron and Bobby Womack, and its list of collaborators includes everyone from avant-saxophonist and poet Alabaster DePlume to UB40 vocalist Ali Campbell. Every second of it is so subtle, so deep, and so heart-rendingly beautiful, it feels like stepping into someone else’s memory.
–Joe Muggs
Mount Kimbie
The Sunset Violent
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD),
Mount Kimbie’s career has been a constant process of both becoming and evading being a band. From their post-dubstep electronic duo beginnings, they collaborated with friends like James Blake, Mica Levi, and King Krule, all of whom also inhabited London’s shadowy spaces between DJ culture and live music. But they would then divert wildly, as on 2022’s diverse and abstract City Planning. But now, with a full-time keyboardist and drummer, they really are a band, and this album is one of their most focused yet. With King Krule back on a couple of tracks, and Andrea Balency-Béarn adding more vocals, its soft yet paradoxically steely krautrock chug doesn’t give a lot away at first; but the more you live with it, the bigger its personality is revealed to be.
–Joe Muggs
Keanu Nelson
Wilurarrakutu
Vinyl LP
In a year shadowed by Australia’s rejection of the Voice referendum, Keanu Nelson’s Wilurarrakutu arrived as a piercing reminder of what the nation stands to gain by listening. The Papunya-based artist recalls the intimate spirituality of Francis Bebey and Beverly Glenn-Copeland, where dub-tinged drum loops, Casio keyboards, and reaching vocals create spaces for deep contemplation. Singing in both Papunya Luritja and English, Nelson paints contemporary pictures of community, country, and longing that resonate beyond their remote origins. It’s a record that feels both deeply personal and universal, offering a window into Aboriginal culture when it’s needed most.
–Jared Proudfoot
Read our Album of the Day on Wilurarrakutu.
Mary Ocher
Your Guide To Revolution
Vinyl LP, Cassette
Mary Ocher’s Your Guide to Revolution is as cheerful a record about how to live, laugh, love in an inhumane world as one could hope for in a year when cheerfulness (and humanity) was in short supply. On side A, the Berlin-based artist constructs rattling weirdo pop out of spacey beats and blink-y synths with sprinklings of cumbia, post-punk, industrial, and kosmische; there’s even a song that disses Auto-Tune. Side B is more spiritually-minded, devoted to a reworking of The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby. Much music that aspires to be labeled avant-pop seems to privilege the “avant” side of the equation, resulting in music that can be as much of a chore to listen to as it must have been to make. There’s no time for that on Your Guide to Revolution, where the most subversive notion put forth by Ocher is that work can indeed be play.
–Mariana Timony
Oranssi Pazuzu
Muuntautuja
On Muuntautuja, Oranssi Pazuzu take their blackened, psychedelic shock-and-awe to the next level, or perhaps more accurately, an umbral pocket dimension teetering on the edge of the event horizon. This is less a figure of speech than a statement of fact. Seldom has a work of heavy music reconciled sublime splendor and mind-rending agony so seamlessly, at such a transcendental scale, as the Finnish metallurgists have done with songs like “Voitelu” and the title track; in supplementing the avant-garde riffs and hissed vocals with EMP-grade synth explosions, sleek neoclassical pianos, and mesmerizing ambient interludes, the band have effectively pulled off multiple industrial revolutions simultaneously, arriving at an infernal brand of futurism that’s cryptic as ever, not to mention insidiously catchy. Hold on tight, enjoy the fireworks, and try not to fall into the void.
–Zoe Camp
Read our Album of the Day on Muuntautuja.
Kelly Lee Owens
Dreamstate
7" Vinyl, Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Cassette
Over the course of four full-lengths, Kelly Lee Owens has charted a path from moody, ambient-adjacent electronic music through spiky experimentalism to arrive at the triumph of Dreamstate—a full-on blast of euphoria that goes from peak to peak to peak with nary a sign of flagging. Much of that is down to Owens’s masterful sense of control; if you want an idea of the album in miniature, look no further than the title track, where Owens builds from a Morse code synth pulse to a manic, blissed-out, all-bodies-jumping eruption of joy at its conclusion. (For fun, play the beginning of the track, then drag the slider to the five-minute mark and release, and see if you don’t get goosebumps. We’ve embedded it above to make it easier for you.) She demonstrates that finesse over and over, from the subtly gorgeous electropop of “Ballad (In The End),” with its devastating chorus, to the giddy pulse of the four-to-the-floor banger “Air.” On Dreamstate, Owens attains God-like status—full mastery of all that she surveys and controls. The world couldn’t possibly be in better hands.
–J. Edward Keyes
Read our Album of the Day on Dreamstate.
William Parker, Cooper-Moore, & Hamid Drake
Heart Trio
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake rank as one of the most propulsive, elastic, and agile rhythm sections in free jazz; but in Heart Trio, with Cooper-Moore, a virtuosic improviser, they channel a more meditative spirit. While that vibe marks all of their work, here it’s front-and-center: Parker toggles between a variety of traditional wind instruments and the West African doson ngoni, Cooper-More casts spells with ashimba and hoe-handled harp—instruments of his own design—and Drake summons sonic calm with a frame drum. A welcome balm amid an uncertain future.
–Peter Margasak
Zacchae’us Paul
JAZZ MONEY
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Cassette
Jazz and hip-hop have been dancing with each other amiably for decades, rarely so stylishly as on this debut album from 26-year-old Zacchae’us Paul. The music feels much older than the man in the way it’s full of the history of ideas, peoples, and places. The songs and vocal arrangements show the roots in Black music going back to the 19th century, from soul to gospel to the funk flavors of Atlanta. Paul brings an instrumental quality to his voice, and he’s joined by vocalist Melanie Charles, the great young saxophonist Morgan Guerin, and stellar drummer Terri Lyne Carrington also produces. One of the hippest albums of the year.
–George Grella
Klô Pelgag
Abracadabra
Despite all its attempts at magical thinking, Abracadabra remains a charmed but troubling landscape. Montreal’s Klô Pelgag (real name Chloé Pelletier-Gagnon) conjures up a carnivalesque mélange of synth-driven art pop, baroque orchestration, and psychedelic chanson that spans the pretty and pensive (“Sans visage,” “Le goût des mangues”) to the nightmarish (“Décembre,” “Deux jours et deux nuits“). Even lead single “Libre,” a synth-pop dance track, is colored by mournful French-language lyrics and icy synths that flurry into a dark maelstrom. Notably, Pelletier-Gagnon took over production duties for the first time on this record, making Abracadabra a real creative triumph for this ever exploratory musician.
–Stephanie Barclay
Jessica Pratt
Here in the Pitch
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Well, I didn’t have “Jessica Pratt collab with A$AP Rocky” on my 2024 bingo card. (That’s all I’ll say on “Highjack.”) That being said, all ends of the music spectrum have extended their praise for the folk-pop enigma’s latest album, Here in the Pitch, and deservedly so. Press play on opening track “Life Is” and be cast into a netherworld of spectral ‘60s pop, where a miasma of bossa nova, psychedelic folk, doo-wop, and jazz take on a surreal if not foreboding atmosphere. Where guileless la-la-la’s and melodies that sway like hula girl car ornaments foreground lyrics about the Manson family murders. In Pratt’s hands, the city of Los Angeles becomes the site of a Lynchian neo-noir as soundtracked by Brian Wilson. To put it another way, imagine that Phil Spector produced a cover of Astrud Gilberto’s “Girl From Ipanema” as sung by the Lady in the Radiator from Eraserhead. Here in the Pitch everything is fine.
—Stephanie Barclay
Ratigan Era
Era
Vinyl LP
You can’t have a good dancehall DJ without a good producer, and Uganda-based DJ Ratigan Era boasts six of them on his debut album Era. Most of these producers have leftfield releases of their own, but on Era, they take turns ruffling up Ratigan Era’s peppy, multilingual verse with their own distinct styles. Thanks to Scotch Rolex’s trademark humor and love of chiptune, “Drop It Down” creeps like the soundtrack to Bowser’s Castle on Mario Kart for the N64. Chrisman’s stabs of sawtooth synths give “Gorilla Talk” a rave sheen, and Debmaster’s loping signal bloops on “Gan Dem” land the track somewhere between dubstep and trip-hop. Such an eclectic range of beats emboldens Ratigan Era’s outsider character. Away from the squabbles around dancehall becoming traphall over in Jamaica, Ratigan Era has found his own, more experimental lane.
–Joseph Francis
Read our Album of the Day on Era.
Rogê
Curyman II
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Don’t let the title fool you into thinking this album is a collection of outtakes from Curyman I. Far from it; it’s part of a trilogy, and on Volume II, the tasty trio of proud Carioca musician Rogê, legendary Brazilian maestro Arthur Verocai, and Dap-King supreme Tommy Brenneck have really gelled. With Rogê singing effortlessly over all manner of rhythms, it’s a suitably deft tribute to the wide variety of Brazilian greats he has counted as friends, collaborators, and influences throughout his career.
–Andrew Jervis
Alice Russell
I Am
2 x Vinyl LP, Cassette, Compact Disc (CD)
Britain’s premiere neo-soul vocalist returned this year with her first solo project in a decade and sounding more self-assured than ever. On I Am, Alice Russell wields her rich timbre with old-school gravitas over minimal but resonant arrangements from collaborator TM Juke. Written in the wake of her father’s death and her children’s births, I AM sees the singer confronting and grappling with generational trauma, grief, and self-healing with a newfound vulnerability. This is Russell at her most mature and bolder than ever.
