The 10 Best Albums of 2024

As rom-coms fade into a minor art form, pop has taken its place in charting society’s courtship anxieties. A little bit Dolly and a little bit Britney, Carpenter reworks the blond-bombshell archetype for an image-obsessed, connection-starved era. Beneath an easy-listening, FM-radio surface, Short n’ Sweet is supersaturated with ear-catching detail and sex-columnist wit, ballasted by tragic irony: If a girl like this can’t find a good man, what hope is there for anyone else?

Writers, take heed: “Only embed indispensable, not a sheet wasted.” So preached the last testament of Ka, the 52-year-old New York City emcee who died in October. The album opened with a broadside against materialistic “dummy rap” and sexual exploitation sold as empowerment—a common complaint from the underground, but one that Ka rendered with new clarity. His power—whether analyzing poverty, religion, or racism—lay in the haunted timbre of his voice, and his insistence on making every syllable matter.

Indie rock is sounding comfy and nostalgic lately, so it’s worth cheering the artists who make independence still sound ferocious. The fourth album by these Philadelphia punks is a pristine work in the Sleater-Kinney tradition of petulance: Noise and vulnerability surge in exquisite counterpoint; guitars crunch as satisfyingly as an autumn leaf under one’s heel. “What if we stopped spinning, and what if we’re just flat?” singer Missy Dabice asks, her voice trembling with fury at complacency in all its forms.

The ringtone that cries out one minute into this album is like an inverted wake-up alarm, drawing the listener into a shared dream state with one of the most interesting electronic producers of the moment. Sega Bodega uses EDM as a storytelling tool, and what he’s expressing here is a whoosh of inexpressible feelings. You’ll summit mega-rave peaks, rest in oases of Enya-esque choral singing, and arrive at the end of the journey thankful that you can return to his netherworld whenever you want.

The ninth album by the folk singer Alynda Segarra is a warm and inviting road memoir that also bitterly criticizes an unfair nation. Many of the friends Segarra made while wandering America as a “little girl with a buck knife and a fake ID” have lost their lives amid poverty and addiction, but Segarra sings about them in a way that underplays the drama, trusting in the efficacy of strong melodies with soft reverb. “You don’t have to die if you don’t want to die,” Segarra sings—magic words at a time of waning faith in the future.

“Pop star goes country” is a common gimmick that’s enabled plenty of mediocrity, but Beyoncé flipped that expectation on its spurs. Let loose on the range of the Americana canon, she went wild, getting as experimental as any celebrity musician ever has. Months later, I’m still shocked by the electric-sitar molasses of “Ameriican Requiem,” the maximalist-minimalist bass lines of “Levii’s Jeans,” and the twisty-turny dance megamix that takes over late in the album. Even after the online arguments about Beyoncé’s influences and ideology became tiresome, Cowboy Carter’s music remained grander and weirder than discourse could capture.

A neuroscientist who’s made acclaimed forays into jazz and scoring ballet, Sam Shepherd turned his brainpower to the dance floor for Cascade. The songs start as seemingly by-the-books techno beatscapes, but they bloom and morph in thrillingly exotic ways. On “Birth4000,” it sounds like the ghost of Donna Summer is cooing through a motorcycle engine; when “Afflecks Palace” explodes into live drumming, it’s as though a blueprint is suddenly becoming a building. Making body music this vivid takes intellect.

A 71-year-old noise-rocker reciting spoken word over drum machines might scan as avant-garde impenetrability. But the miraculous truth is that Kim Gordon, Sonic Youth’s droll co-founder, made one of the most sheerly amusing albums of the year. Her free-associative lyrics are either mesmerizingly strange or plainly hilarious, and her tangled, clanging riffs have an oddly soothing effect. She’s describing modern brain rot so as to counter it with something better: creativity expressed at max volume.

I’ve never been a 46-year-old indie-folk songwriter living on a rainy island in the Pacific Northwest, raising a young daughter, contemplating the impermanence of existence. But Phil Elverum’s astonishing, 26-track album makes me feel as though I know him and his life as well as I know my own. I can feel the clammy wind, smell the piney brushfire, and sense the precise blend of isolation, ennui, and wonder that seems to fill his days.