2024 was an unusually strong year for music. Big releases from the likes of Charli XCX, The Cure, Kamasi Washington and Kendrick Lamar not only dominated much of the music media, they were also pretty damn good. Enjoyment of music is, of course, deeply subjective and contextual. I spent much of the year travelling before moving countries in November. Much of my enjoyment of these albums is tied directly to the experiences I was having, the things I was seeing, and the people and relationships I was forming. I'm leaning into this. An unbiased, objective critique of these albums will not be found below. Music is a dialogue between the artist and the listener, here is what we were talking about…
12. GNX - Kendrick Lamar
Kendrick Lamar's GNX dropped as a surprise late in the year. Following up on 2022's (criminally underrated) Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, GNX feels significantly less flashy and grandiose than its predecessors: a collection of well-crafted songs; somewhat standard lyrical fare concerning wealth, fame, and the trappings that come with meteoric success; and some great features, particularly from SZA, who lends her voice to two of my favourite tracks on the album: luther and gloria.
My greatest music crime is, perhaps, that I rarely listen to the lyrics. I get the gist, but there are songs I've heard hundreds of times where I could not recite a single bar. For something as lyrically dense as this, I'm not going to pretend I've read deeply into Lamar's rhymes, nor that I caught (let alone understood) even a fraction of his wordplay. The overall vibe of the album, however, was of a man who is confident in his position at the top of the music industry. It feels like Lamar is having fun - he hasn't anything to prove. Where his previous works were larger-than-life, full of brash assertions that he was the best in the game, there was an underlying feeling of insecurity; a man grappling with stardom. This feeling is gone, and replacing the over-the-topness of his previous works like Mr. Morale or To Pimp a Butterfly is a sort of self-assuredness.
But GNX also has a kind of emptiness to it. The album is enjoyable, but it is starting to feel like Lamar is going through the motions. The hunger is gone. His lyrics deal with the same tired topics of 'haters' and boasting about his come-up, and although he's more than earned the right to boast, it becomes difficult to take him seriously when you remember he's a multimillionaire pushing 40 who is still writing about his naysayers, albeit in a more hollow, less believable way. Lamar is writing about the haters not because he cares, but because that's what he's always written about.
I first listened to this in a library in Montréal, and while, on its face, this feels somewhat out-of-place, the more I think about this album, the more I'm convinced this was fitting. GNX is Lamar on the verge of understanding his contradictions but failing to make the final leap. It's an album that feels like a victory lap, yet its lyrical content still deals with the same topics Lamar was rapping about at the start of his career. It's a successful hip-hop artist cosplaying as someone on the up. It's Lamar going through the motions, promising big things, yet struggling to convince the world that he isn't done. It's library music - Lamar's story is written.
11. There Must Be Something Here - acloudyskye
I first listened to this album on a grounded plane, bound for Barcelona but instead stuck at Venice's Marco Polo airport. Fittingly, we couldn't take off because of a cloudy sky (though I think the lightning and rain contributed as well).
There Must Be Something Here feels like a bus journey in the rain. It feels like a sunbeam breaking through the clouds. It feels like the clarity you get after making a decision you were denying you had to make. It feels like saying goodbye to someone you love.
In short, it feels like a Tumblr post circa-2013. A little bit melodramatic, perhaps too much so in some parts, but fuck it, I love it. We're soaked in irony 24/7. Nothing matters. God is dead. Let's welcome back a bit of sincerity. Not everything needs to be a meta-commentary on the machinations of capitalism (though, if I'm honest, I love that shit too).
What acloudyskye does incredibly well is atmosphere. The album sounds big and spacious. The slightly low-fi production provides a similar ambience to a handheld camcorder from the early 00's - nostalgic. It's difficult to describe, but the album really feels nice. It feels genuine. It's flawed, but that's part of the charm. It feels like loss, but also the realisation that life goes on, and, while it never will be the same, it can still be very, very good.
It may simply be that when I first listened to this album, I was just in a particularly receptive headspace. I was exhausted - I'd been travelling non-stop for about 5 months. Every call home to my family felt strangely empty, as though nobody really knew what to say.
"How are you guys?"
"We're good. Just the same old."
"Oh nice, I'm just in Prague."
"Oh cool."
Although I was more in the world than ever before, I felt somewhat detached from it. I didn't miss home, necessarily, but I was yearning for something. I was feeling unstuck in space and time. The world had shrunk, yet at the same time, become far, far larger. Perhaps this is merely projection on my part, but it feels like this is what acloudyskye was going for. The world is a big, complex place, and yet we all have love and loss and heartbreak and hope and it all matters. It's easy to forget that.
10. "NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD" - Godspeed You! Black Emperor
There's something strangely peaceful about places where there was once much death. I first felt it at Hellfire Pass in Thailand - the scene of a somewhat unknown piece of World War II history involving allied war prisoners building a railroad for the Japanese. At its peak, the death rate matched that of Auschwitz. Today, the railroad has been long removed, but a plaque stands in its place within a peaceful grove in the Thai jungle. Australian flags and ANZAC poppies decorate the rock walls that, all those years ago, were cut out by hand. It's difficult to describe the feeling of the place, but everyone felt a sort of reverence. Loud tourists fell silent upon crossing through the pass and laying eyes on the plaque, and swarms of butterflies decorated the ground.
In Cambodia, I felt it once again at the Killing Fields, namely the Choeung Ek Genocide Center. These fields were the sites at which the brutal Khmer Rouge regime massacred millions of their own people. Even today - as one walks around what is now an outdoor museum - scraps of clothing, teeth, and bone fragments from the victims can be seen emerging from the ground. Expelled from the earth.
Every artist thinks their art is the most pure form of expression, and I'm no exception. Music has a direct line to our emotions. Where all other arts require some level of conscious interpretation, music can be felt and understood on an instinctual, visceral level. Few modern acts have as great a control over this facility as the Montréal-based outfit Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
The band have been around for some time, releasing their first album F♯ A♯ ∞ in 1997. Even then, they had a winning formula, one they would refine over the ensuing 3 decades. Spoken word segments, field recordings, and long drones lead to huge, cathartic climaxes. Sometimes pejoratively called crescendo-core, it's music that, despite its many imitators, few can do as well as Godspeed (Swans being perhaps the only other band who come to mind).
The title (or lack thereof) is an obvious reference to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, backed explicitly or implicitly by Western governments but viciously unpopular amongst the populace. It's unfortunate that the answer to "What would we do if the holocaust happened today?" is "watch it on TikTok," but that's the world we live in. The album is standard fare, as far as Godspeed You! Black Emperor goes, but it somehow feels tighter and more focused than their recent output (such as 2021's G_d's Pee AT STATE'S END, an objectively stupid album name). Perhaps it's because there is a clear purpose embedded in this one.
Despite the huge, cloying climaxes and cold, desolate drone-scapes, I've always found the band's output to have a hopeful edge to it. This is particularly pronounced on NO TITLE, though so are the feelings of despair and loneliness. As I said, music is the only art with a direct line to our emotions. This album evokes similar feelings to walking around the Killing Fields, or seeing the Death Railway, or standing by the remains of the Berlin Wall, or walking through the centre square of Prague, where the Soviet tanks rolled in during the Prague Spring, or visiting one of many shrapnel-pocked caves in Laos. There is a placidness and a reverence to these places. An acknowledgment of their past, a sense of grieving for what had been, and ultimately a transformation into symbols of hope. One can only hope Palestine will one day be the same. From the river to the sea.
9. Parallel Realms - STRFKR
STRFKR's 2024 release Parallel Realms just sounds so colourful and full. It evokes driving through a big city at night - headlights on the highway, neon signs, and lit-up skyscrapers aplenty. There's an infectious groove to all the tracks here, and although a little bloated (the various Interspace tracks don't do a lot for me), there's enough interesting (or at least fun) stuff to carry it through. It also holds a special place in my heart because it was the main album I had on rotation during my reconnaissance visit to Montréal, a place I now call home.
Perhaps this is merely projection (or at least some kind of conditioning), but I can't think of a better soundtrack to late summer in Canada's cultural capital than Parallel Realms (all I'm saying is that it feels a bit too perfect a coincidence that Chizzlers is in French). Upbeat and energetic, yet relaxed and introspective. Colourful, like the art that adorns the city.
I'd all but made my decision to move to the city before even arriving, but the reality of what I was doing didn't truly hit until I'd arrived at my AirBnB and attempted to order my dinner en français. This album helped pull me out of a potential spiral, and for that, I owe it a place on this list. To me, it's the first time I walked through Vieux-Port, looked out across the Saint-Laurent, climbed Mont-Royal to watch the sunset, and listened to jazz performers all along a pedestrianised Avenue Mont-Royal. It's just effortlessly cool.
8. My Method Actor - Nilüfer Yanya
I first came across Nilüfer Yanya in 2019, after a friend sent me her track Keep on Calling. Jealous of her umlaut, I continued to follow her career, listening to both her previous albums on release day, but being somewhat underwhelmed (having revisited both of them recently, both are great, but just didn't stick with me on the first listen). My Method Actor is different, but it's difficult to put my finger on exactly why. Of course, it's immaculately produced, the songwriting is top-tier, and the whole thing feels incredibly cohesive, but so were her last two albums.
Where I think it shines is in its space; the music breathes. To me, My Method Actor sounds like urban modernity. It's 21st-century London. Huge, impervious glass buildings. Looping guitar riffs. 10 million alienated people. Fuzz-laden guitar intersperses many of the songs, a temporary release of tension. Pensive introspection that only Western big-city-loneliness can provide.
7. The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions - Vegyn
Most self-help is bunk. At best, it's watered-down, decontextualised philosophy that relies on factually dubious, cherry-picked anecdotes about anonymous white-collar workers with names like John or Cathy to sell its utility as a panacea for all of one's individual problems. At its worst, it's vague woo-woo that can actively harm the individual who takes it as gospel (a la The Secret). With that said, there is one quote that has stuck with me from the broader self-help milieu; attributed to Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: "Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards." Like all pithy sayings, this is actually a paraphrase from a passage in his journal:
"It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards. A proposition which, the more it is subjected to careful thought, the more it ends up concluding precisely that life at any given moment cannot really ever be fully understood; exactly because there is no single moment where time stops completely in order for me to take position [to do this]: going backwards."
Søren Kierkegaard
Now, I don't want to get into my own banal observations about the nature of *life*, but listening to Vegyn's The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions always puts me into a pensive and reflective mood, even now, after having listened several times through. Reversed piano loops, spacious reverb, a slight lo-fi crackle on a recording of the serenity prayer - all of these elements come together to form an atmosphere of a dream. There's a fading in and out of consciousness. A half-remembered memory of people you don't know anymore. The album has a feeling of reverence, like a church hymn. A warm speck of light in an abyss of cold.
Perhaps what I'm getting at is this overwhelming feeling of smallness. An existential despair that we have all felt at some point. To rationalise your life in the retrospective is to exert a modicum of control over what is, at its core, unknowable chaos. The important part is not that 'life can only be understood in reverse,' it's that life can be understood at all. This album, to me, is this feeling. It's a hope that things turn out okay, even though the future is unknowable. It's a warm feeling of achievement, of looking back at your life and appreciating the simple fact that you've made it this far. But it's wrapped in a cold outer layer, a stoic acceptance of the existential despair that we all come to terms with - one way or the other.
6. Les chants de l'aurore - Alcest
My favourite period of art is Romanticism, and it's not even close. A response to the hegemony of Enlightenment ideals and beliefs, Romanticism advocated for subjectivity, beauty, passion, and an appreciation for nature. This was almost a complete 180 from the Enlightenment, which placed value on rationality, objectivity, and empiricism. Romanticism was all but dead in the water by the start of the 1900s, when rapid technological change and social upheaval marked the modernist period, in some ways a coda to Enlightenment ideals from 100 years before.
These ideals seem to swing back and forward as in a pendulum (one might even say, a dialectic…), and although we had a bit of a detour in the middle of the 20th century (with various postmodern schools of thought and art), I feel as though certain Romantic ideals are beginning to be espoused once again. Perhaps it's in response to what is clearly an untenable economic system for the survival of our planet. Or maybe it's the giving way of the techno-optimism that ruled much of the 90s and 00s - replaced with a growing (justified) distrust of a digital panopticon that has been fine-tuned to make us all miserable all the time. The ironic, self-referential, un-seriousness of the Postmodern era has become gauche. We are swinging back to sincerity, though interspersed with postmodern moments of irony and self-awareness.
Les chants de l'aurore, the 7th album from France's Alcest is a celebration of The Sublime. Lush soundscapes evoke imagery of otherworldly, ethereal landscapes. Snowy mountains, tree-filled valleys, hilly plains bathed in golden light, a still lake at sunrise. Nothing made by man can replicate the feeling stirred when looking out across a grand vista. Like Alcest's other work, it feels self-serious - but not in an off-putting way. Epic and grand, yet deeply personal and spiritual. There's an appreciation for beauty in here, and it does sound beautiful, with walls of sound accompanied by soaring guitar lines and airy vocals (and punctuated with the occasional blast beat - as a treat).
Beauty is everywhere for those who look for it. Capitalist Realism is our reality, but our way forward lies in passion. To create, unhampered, unbothered. To rediscover the sublime. To experience the world subjectively, on our own terms, without judgement or fear of 'not doing it right'. Our reality can't be approximated by a million trillion 1s and 0s fed to us through Earth's greatest plagiarism machine. Trust your senses, trust your gut, but don't blindly trust the supposed rationality of the technocratic class. They can't quantify awe, they can't quantify beauty. The world is alive. C'est l'essence de «Les chants de l'aurore».
5. Feu de garde - Bibi Club
Montréal, c'est une ville dynamique. Sa musique pop est cool et chic. En cherchant de la musique québecois, j'ai découvert Bibi Club grâce à leur chanson La Feu. Feu de garde évoque l'energie et le diversité de Montréal - leur ville natale.
One of the coolest things about Montréal is that it's a truly bilingual city. Although French is the only official language of the province, almost everyone speaks perfect English, and if you hang around the city, you'll hear the Montréal locals switch between English and French effortlessly, sometimes mid-conversation. Unfortunately, I can only pretend to be a Francophone online, but I aspire to be like the locals. Two of the locals are Bibi Club, and just like their city, Feu de garde is a mélange of French and English. On its face, the album is a collection of somewhat simple pop songs, but there's a cool, noir edge to the record. Driving, sometimes breakbeat-adjacent drums are accompanied by angular guitar lines and Adèle Trottier-Rivard's airy vocals.
The French songs are the real standouts here, with Le terre, Le feu, and L'île aux bluets all possessing a chic, energetic edge; a soundtrack to late summer in Parc la Fontaine or an afternoon in Centre-Ville.
Pour moi, the latter half of 2024 became, quite suddenly, very French. Deciding that my move to Canada would be Québec-flavoured, I started learning the language at pace. Bibi Club has been my soundtrack to these last few, French-filled months, and it would earn a place on this list from that alone.
4. I Got Heaven - Mannequin Pussy
I know one, two things I have heard about you
But I wouldn't tell you
No, I couldn't tell you
An intoxicating mix of power pop, indie rock, and abrasive punk, I Got Heaven took a while to grow on me. I'd draw comparisons to The Beths, but with the punk elements turned up. I'm not usually a huge fan of hardcore, but the deft weaving of gentle melodicism interspersed with abrasive, energetic punk on this record won me over.
Why? I Got Heaven is pure energy, that's why. It sounds like it was made to be played live, loud, in a slightly rundown dive bar. There's the smell of spilt beer and old cigarette smoke. The ground is slightly sticky, but it doesn't matter to the throngs of people packed in front of the stage. Blue and red lights spin and dance in time to the music. You should leave with ringing ears. That is how this should be heard. Some albums feel so composed, pieced together, written to be recorded. This feels live-first in a way that is unlike most other albums I've listened to this year.
3. The New Sound - Geordie Greep
If you're not habitually on the internet, you'd be excused for not knowing the word incel. A contraction of involuntarily celibate, it's a label applied to (and sometimes proudly worn by) a particular type of man: one who has not had sex and who defines themself by this trait. Around the start of the 2010s, these people began gathering in online spaces like 4chan and Reddit, and by the time of the 2016 US election, these spaces had radicalised. Incels, rather than looking within, lashed out and blamed all of their problems on women as a collective. They progressively got more and more toxic, with influencers like Andrew Tate working to siphon money from these desperate (and often already-poor) young men, whilst radicalising them further.
As disgusting as the community is, as pitiful their cause, incels can't be ignored because they're a symptom of a deeper sickness within the world that has been built for us. Their problem isn't with women; it's with the patriarchal systems we operate within, it's with the alienation of capital, it's with the loss of viable third spaces, it's with the loss of social mobility, it's with the slot machine of online dating, it's with the toxicity of online discourse. To escape the incel community requires self-love, the very thing which they lack. When you're amongst the trees, you can't see the forest, and charlatans take advantage of this, waylaying those who are trying to escape.
The New Sound is 62 minutes of eclectic chaos that captures the absurdity, pitifulness, and plain wrongheadedness of the incel and incel-adjacent. The album features a raft of characters, from the overconfident womaniser (reminiscent of Neil Strauss' The Game) on Holy, Holy, who is revealed to be putting on an act, to the delusional character on Blues who is suddenly aware of his mortality. Greep's creations are insecure, and overly concerned with appearance, yet undeniably tragic. Each of them took a wrong turn at some point and now lives out a strange, twisted life in a world of their own creation - one that only they believe in.
The music is an immaculate mix of vivacious bossa, angular riffs reminiscent of Greep's previous project Black Midi, and theatrical jazz. It's everything, all at once. Thematically, it makes sense within the context of Greep's characters. The album has a twisting mania, an overbearing aura of confidence meant to hide deep insecurity. A schizophrenic insanity. Greep's characters are at the very edge; they could flip at any moment. Even the most pathetic figure can be dangerous, and the growing dissonance signals their march towards the precipice.
Perhaps the scariest thing about The New Sound is that we've all met these people. Sure, Greep turns their worst qualities up to 11, but we've worked with them, or we've met them in a bar, or we went to school with them. They were coworkers, our fathers, our brothers, our friends. They were harmless until they weren't. How do you get through to someone so divorced from reality? How do you convince them that their problem lies elsewhere when so much of their identity is tied up in feelings of persecution, of a sense of unfairness they feel to their bones?
2. Imaginal Disk - Magdalena Bay
I'd wager that nostalgia is the most powerful emotion. Empires have risen and fallen on the stuff. And with the rapid flattening-out of culture that we're experiencing now in the 21st century, our near-complete loss of cultural touchstones and temporal identity, one is drawn more and more to the aesthetics of the past. But it is an aesthetic without a soul, without substance. It is a copy of a copy. Pure pastiche. It is sound removed from the conditions that made it. Without Benjamin's aura. Empty sound.
Mark Fisher identified this trend back in the '00s in his essay "The Slow Cancellation of the Future." The cultural institutions that facilitated the sounds of the past have disappeared. Without these engines to drive forward progress, we're stuck in time, cursed to relive the past forever. Sounds no longer evolve, they just cross-breed.
Magdalena Bay's sophomore effort, Imaginal Disk, sits at the edge of recognition. It's in the same liminal space as bouts of deja vu, or grainy film photographs. It's the fuzzy muscle memory of blowing dust out of a game cartridge, or hanging up the telephone on the wall, or missing the simplicity of your 240p camcorder, even though you were born in this millennium and never experienced any of this. It's manufactured nostalgia. Even the cover is designed as such: evoking a 90s glamour shot, or a bad 80s music video. A sort of optimism runs throughout the record, but it's an optimism from the 90s; a retro-futurist vision of what things could be.
So why is Imaginal Disk my runner-up album of the year? Because, to me, it captures, more than anything else I've found, this overwhelming feeling of our modern world. I cannot describe this any better than a sort of "running in place." We are stuck in time, yet the world moves faster and faster. Life is a blur, and there's nothing to hold on to. We cannot move forward because we are held back by the past. Derrida's hauntologies are even more present in politics; science; technology; and philosophy than when he first put his pen to paper. Capitalism no longer breeds innovation (whether it was ever an effective system to do so is another article), yet we hold on to this techno-utopian myth from the 80s that tech will save us from ourselves.
Maybe Fukiyama was right, if a bit premature. It truly feels like we have reached the End of History. Neoliberalism seems to have a stranglehold on governments. The market is a confidence game, one disaster away from total collapse. Strongman fascism is back in vogue. The planet is spiralling out of control, yet we have idiots focused on sci-fi visions of colonising Mars, AI that can make art for you, and sucking up all the water in the world to cool down huge data centres that purely exist for the storage of slur-laden social media posts. Imaginal Disk is hauntology. A nostalgic past that never existed; a future that was promised. It's also catchy as hell.
1. Mountainhead - Everything Everything
If you talk to anyone from my generation, you'll find that we're pretty much in agreement about one thing: the world is absolutely, positively, fucked. Almost beyond repair, and on almost every metric you care to look at. Of course, a powerful media apparatus has spun up a whole optimism industry around this fact. You'll get a bunch of chuds with pretty charts and articles from The Economist, trying to convince you that "No, we're actually wealthier across the board than ever before because you can now buy 100 TVs on a single income, when before you couldn't even buy one." These people are idiots. They've bought the enlightenment myth of the rational man, they read Sapiens when they were 16 and now think the world is just numbers. They have terminal engineer-brain that might be able to solve partial derivatives in imaginary space, but struggle with anything unquantifiable. They live in a world of theory. They've quantified every inch of Plato's Cave but they don't know they're inside.
The thing with numbers, with data, is that they abstract the real world into projections. This is great in some respects, we have little brains, but we can understand the idea behind a line that goes up or down. The problem we have is that any collection or storage of data loses information. Analysis of the data into pithy insights loses more information. Presentation of the data onto a nice chart is, really, a re-projection of a hand-drawn sketch of a single angle of a real, multidimensional thing onto a flickering shadow on a cave wall. Data is not the real world, it's not even close to the real world. It's an abstraction of an abstraction. The world is an experience, a phenomenology. To truly understand the past, we turn not to the engineers, or the accountants, or even the historians. We turn to the artists, the poets, the authors, the composers, the painters and sculptors. Art is crystallised phenomenology, the only way one can share their visceral experience of the world with others, at least partially.
Why start this with a diatribe on the technocracy? Because this album is about capitalism. It's about the nonsensical machinations of a system that is destroying everything. The world's biggest AI isn't some bullshit made by OpenAI, running on silicon and boiling entire lakes to do your kid's homework; it runs on carbon. The paperclip maximiser has been playing out in real life for the last 150 years, but with mass deregulation in the 80s across much of the Western World, followed by the subjugation of the global south with neoliberal instruments such as the World Bank and the IMF, we've seen a huge acceleration of this behaviour, to the detriment of everyone.
Mountainhead is a concept album about a cult of people building a mountain by digging a giant pit. The mountain has been growing for as long as anyone can remember, and they no longer remember why they were building the mountain in the first place. As the mountain grows larger, the pit grows deeper, affecting the health of the diggers. There are a couple of other plot points; an elite group who live on the mountain acts as quasi-priests for the cult, and at the bottom of the pit is rumoured to be a deadly golden serpent that the group will encounter if they dig too far. It's a clever allegory, and while not overly subtle, media literacy is dead. The time for subtlety has passed.
Like all of Everything Everything's outings, it features incredible production, catchy hooks, and obtuse lyrics. Truly unlike anything else. Cold Reactor is a highlight, but I genuinely love every song.
Perhaps what I love about this album the most is the absurdity of the entire thing. A lot of social commentary can feel surface-level or juvenile. Just look at Muse's Drones, or how most people seem to understand Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. There's a lot of depth to the allegory, and its absurdity holds a mirror up to capital that is more immediately effective than any wordy materialist critique. Why? Life is phenomenology, and the only way to get people to understand what is happening is to pull them out of their caves. They need to experience the world, not merely measure it. They need to feel, deep in their bones, the absurdity of this system we've built. Nothing changes otherwise. It won't be critical theory or endless 'reasonable debate' or voting that starts the change of the tide. It'll start with art. It'll start with culture.