The best 40ish songs of 2024
Music is good
Welcome to the Hell World 2024 best of the year thing. Down below you'll find my picks for my 40ish favorite songs of the year. If you'd like to listen to the big playlist of 230ish good new songs you can find it here.
If you'd prefer the 75ish song short list you can find it here or on Apple here. You can also read the 2023 and 2022 editions if you'd like to for some reason.
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Since we're talking music today if you never read this series where I ask a bunch of great bands and music writers to share their top 5 songs by some beloved artists check out the best of David Berman, Jason Molina, Oasis, The Cure, Elliott Smith, R.E.M., and Weezer.
And as always it's never the wrong time to read my most recent book A Creature Wanting Form. (Excited to announce a new one will be out in 2025!)
As a bonus treat this year I asked a few of the bands that made my list to share their own top 5 songs (or albums) of the year. How fun! Let's go learn and know about new music now. Thanks for being here.
Edgar Viveros of Ben Quad
Real Life Love – Speed
This song partially inspired the music video for You’re Face as an Effigy. I love the brotherhood message of this track so much.
She’s Leaving You – MJ Lenderman
This song makes me want to drive on backroads and hit the local dive bar. The guitar work and vocal delivery is just so damn good on this.
Easily Undone – Macseal
This was my song of the summer. Easily the best hook Macseal has ever recorded. They channeled the perfect amount of pop sensibility into this.
Where Blue Light Blooms – Origami Angel
So wonderful to watch Ry and Pat keep putting out their best creative output years after putting out what many would call a scene classic. Emo legends forever.
Boomer – Red Sun
The emo scene is in good hands. So much talented new blood cropping up lately. This band in particular. 405 represent.
Merce Lemon
Depot Dog – Hemlock
I remember hearing this song live when I first played with Hemlock in Chicago two years ago and it’s a gift to have it in its recorded form. This is one you blast on every road trip no exceptions.
Never Arriving – Allegra Krieger
Two minute instant bop, gets stuck in my head every time so I have to be careful.
Sea or War – Robber Robber
This song puts me in a trance with its addictive drum beat and sharp guitars layered with such a catchy melody floating above.
Room to Room – Renny Conti
Renny writes a perfect pop song, and this is just one of them.
Big Bovine – Being Dead
The title of this song is what initially caught my attention, but as soon as the vocals came I was immediately hooked, so playful and fresh.
Tyler Jordan of Good Looks
Dance Of Love – Tucker Zimmerman
This record just rules. The songs are playful and incredibly written and the arrangements are phenomenal. Big Thief really did the hero’s work of arranging, recording, and producing this latter day Zimmerman masterpiece. This album feels like a victory lap for Tucker, and we’re lucky to have it.
The Lucky One – Caroline Says
I was very excited to have a new record from one of our favorite former Austin locals Caroline Says. I’ll use music review language and say this record is a triumphant return to form. Hell yeah.
EELS – Being Dead
Now you may think I’m just favoring the Austin bands, but this record rips and is Being Dead’s most ambitious record to date. Sure they’re friends, but they’re friends that are making phenomenal art and our city proud as hell at the same time.
Plunge – Sam Evian
This guy doesn’t miss. The production on all of his records is impeccable, and this one is no different. Rollin’ In has been my unofficial anthem for 2024. This is a pleasant album to throw on in the tour van watching the miles of middle of nowhere USA disappear into the rearview.
Be Good The Crazy Boys – Art Feynman
Ok, I know this is supposed to be our favorite records for 2024, and this one came out in November of 2023, but it’s too much of a banger not to include. Art Feynman is one of Luke Temple’s side projects. This might be my favorite record that he’s ever released. Lots of Bowie, Talking Heads, and Eno in this one.
John Ross of Wild Pink
What Qualifies as Silence – Little Kid
An incredible song I've had on repeat off and on all year.
Skeleton is Walking – Blake Mills
This came out in 2023 but I found it this past year and love it.
If You Don't Love Me Anymore – The Shivas
I really love this song, especially the production on it.
Crawling Back To You – Trace Mountains
An amazing song from an amazing record. We toured with Trace Mountains in 2022 and this was in their set. Loved it since then.
Good Stuff – Bnny
Another amazing song from an amazing record.
Lu Racine of Thus Love
Right Back to It – Waxahatchee
A relatable breakup tune that got both me and [guitarist Echo Mars] through our breakups lol.
Death Kink – Fountaines D.C.
We like the part that goes shitshitshitshit.
CD-R – Toro y Moi
I love the honest look into how the grind is like sometimes. The line about throwing the chains on the sprinter van is fucking iconic and relatable.
Raunchadelic – Lahnah
Arguably the best track of the year. [Guitarist and singer] Tomis is husband material.
Sympathy is a knife – Charli xcx
Sympathy IS a knife!!!!!! I would blast this song after getting out of work at my lowest point of the summer.
John Rossiter of Young Jesus
Scorpion Lollipop – Dolly Creamer
Dolly is a true rock n roller. And a fantastic lyricist. She's on the borderlands where there are stories existing and poetry existing and it's up to the listener to decide what the message is. I imagine that takes a lot of patience and a lot of curiosity without judgement and a lot of bravery. Not easy these days.
Dry County Dust – Willi Carlisle
The story of the chickens and fox in the second verse is something else. The whole tune will tear your heart out.
PMA7_Rodmayne91 – goldenfinch and Dolfiin Alexander
Textures and grooves with beautiful melodies floating around. I can reach out and touch this tune. Softly jumps into the unexpected.
Gentle Violence – John Moreland
The name of the tune is the tune. This song hit me with truth but it's gentle and beautiful. It sounds classic to me, drawn from the well we all share.
Stay Cool – James Vincent McMorrow
This stanza sums up how I've been thinking and writing lately:
Do you pray?
I don't think that I do
I just speak all these
Words in the silence
1 extra:
Let the Guitar Sing (Live) – Aj Ghent
This is from 2019 but damn, I played a gig in Knoxville and the house engineer (Chris?) put this tune on as I was loading out and it stopped me in my tracks. Never heard anyone play guitar like this.
Carl Shane of Kal Marks
Drummy – J.R.C.G.
An amazing record. It’s really hard to pick one song from this one.
Car Crash – youbet
An amazing tune that gets stuck in my head a lot.
canon: in canon – BIG|BRAVE
A heart wrenching song from an incredible record.
This is Not a Prayer – Uniform
Fucking intense amazing piece of work. They really pushed themselves further than ever before. Maybe not the funniest thing you’ll hear, but art isn’t always easy.
Back up Plan – Robber Robber
An amazing newer art rock band. Heard the song on a college radio station and it instantly caught my attention.
Ok here's my thing. The top 20 are ordered and there are 20 more in no particular order but I don't really care about the ranking aside from the first few maybe.
Life Is – Jessica Pratt
Alone – The Cure
Ohio All the Time – Momma
Floating On a Moment – Beth Gibbons
Method Actors / Like I Say (I runaway) – Nilüfer Yanya
Knowing You – Hello Mary
Crucible – Schedule 1
Pulling Teeth – Slow Joy
Sunshine – Squint
See – villager
Dracula – Cindy Lee
An Empty Trainload of Sky – Gillian Welch and David Rawlings
Hal Ashby – Touché Amoré
Not Enough – Julie Christmas
Good Stuff – Bnny
The New You – Louder Joy
Image – Magdalena Bay
Running Through the Campus – Cloud Nothings
Nine Clean Nails – Dummy
Starburster – Fountaines D.C.
Hell 99 – Foxing
Perfect Storm/ Flock – Jane Weaver
20. It’s Up to Me – Teens in Trouble
19. Britney Spears – Ceres
18. K2 – Liquid Mike
17. Could Be Friends – Mourn
16. Nerves – Team Chino
15. OK? OK! OK? OK! – Mannequin Pussy
14. You Poor Thing – Ally Evenson
13. No Tomorrows 1999 – Bloom Dream
Gordon Skramzy (Nathan)
I don't think there's much I could write here that could further enhance your experience of listening to this one other than just telling you to go do it. Turn it up loud. Screamo is so back baby.
Christopher: You ever feel like nothing good was ever gonna happen to you?
Paulie: Yeah. And nothin' did. So what?
12. On the Floor – Thus Love
2022's Memorial, from the Vermont band Thus Love, was one of my favorite releases of the decade so far. This track from their latest LP All Pleasure picks up right where that one left off. It's sharp and punchy – and most importantly catchy as hell – 2020s New England post-punk that sounds like 2000s NYC post-punk that sounds like 1980s Manchester post-punk. It's enough to make a person want to remember how to dance again.
11. If It’s Gone – Good Looks
If It’s Gone, the Austin band Good Looks has explained, is about what is one of the most fraught losses a musician can experience: a breakup with a bandmate. Yes a lost romantic love is obviously the most bountiful well to drink from for inspiration, but if you’ve been through this version of parting ways you know how uniquely it can sting. This track is really just the platonic ideal to me of the kind of top notch Americana songs that they make nowadays. Sunny summer day. Windows down in the car. Harmonies and twang. The solo that sounds like that. All the touchstones done perfectly. Makes me want to start another band just so I can fuck it up and then feel bad about it. It’s not all spiteful though. There’s a love there. Anger perhaps but with an understanding.
And I think that the next record
Could really take you to the top
'Cause you possess a gift that
So few other folks have got
I hope you find true love and money
Many orgasms and fame
And if you're somehow still unhappy
Find somebody else to blame
10. Never Arriving – Allegra Krieger
Considering that the prolific New York songwriter Allegra Krieger was finishing up her fifth record Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine not long after barely making it out of a deadly apartment fire, it’s only natural that a surfeit of conflicted emotions about life and death would course throughout the album. Perhaps it’s no coincidence either that she cuts straight to the point on these 13 songs (clocking in at a total of 33 minutes). Never Arriving is characteristically succinct. Built around a dirty, hooky alt-country-ish guitar lick, and her beguiling but weary vocal, it’s gone before it’s even announced its presence. All the better reason to put it on repeat, which I did all this year.
Never arriving
No crying
Just lifting your chest to the sky
“In this song I imagine a world without violence, or possessiveness, where we keep moving through life, for the sake of wonder and curiosity, not for the sake of attainment, or arrival,” she has said of the song. “I think the true points of arrival are birth and death, and everything in between, all of the turmoil and fighting, are the makings of our own corrupted souls. It’s a song begging for softness, in a world that can feel so harsh.”
9. You’ll Get Nothing and Like It – Ben Quad
“The emo scene is in good hands,” Ben Quad’s Edgar Viveros said in his favorite song picks above. He may well have been talking about his own band. Eschewing the more noodly “midwest emo” that the band has become known and beloved for over the past few years, this song here is a surge of power, sounding more like the crossover screamo of the early 2000s. When I say it sounds like vintage Underoath that's an extreme compliment coming from me.
8. Sprinter Brain / Air Drumming Fix You – Wild Pink
Wild Pink build gorgeous textures here on Sprinter Brain. It’s a propulsive song with a grandeur to it in the Springsteen via War on Drugs mode. “This song is kind of about learning how to deal with your problems and not catastrophizing,” John Ross said. “Just trying to be more realistic and objective when times get stressful.” It’s the kind of song, if you’re not careful, that might make you believe you can overcome an obstacle!
Air Drumming Fix You unfurls slowly and romantically with a diametrically opposed energy. More of a pensive soundtrack to wandering the city streets at night, romanticizing the aimlessness, perhaps getting ready to make mistakes you’ll need Sprinter Brain to help get you out of later on.
7. Dog Days/ Hits / Men like you – Heave Blood & Die
The most exciting sounding new (to me) band I heard all year is this northern Norwegian anti-capitalist act that rips faces off in a way that feels both alien and familiar at once. Like theirs is a style that has always existed just somewhere else I’ve never had access to. Norway for example. But not really that you know what I mean. It’s not quite post-punk and not quite industrial or post-metal but their songs manage to incorporate all of it into a pummeling, percussive assault, with gang-shouted-lyrics that tend toward the short and repetitive, becoming almost hypnotic with each iteration. I’m not saying Men like you is the best song ever written with the hook of “burning down the house” but it’s close.
6. Insects – Kal Marks
Wasteland Baby, the latest album from Boston noise-rock post-punk veterans Kal Marks is the sound of barely-contained chaos. It’s beauty and ugliness in tandem. Insects is the standout, both in its songwriting and energy. It’s an impending fucking car crash that you want to speed into anyway. It makes me want to fly off the road and never land.
“Insects was an excruciating song to get right," the band’s Carl Shane said. "We were listening to a lot more danceable music at the time. Anything from Depeche Mode, Giorgio Moroder, Rhythm Nation by Janet Jackson, Cerone and DAF. We wanted to make something danceable and poppy but have it make sense in our world. We also loved the duality a lot of this music had with dark lyrical themes with upbeat propulsive rhythms. It’s a grim tune to tap your feet to. A lot of frustration in it.”
"You won't make it out alive,” Shane sings. He sounds like he means it.
Not just from this but from everything.
5. Right Back to It / Crowbar – Waxahatchee
Twenty or so years into her career Katie Crutchfield is writing some of the most vital and heart-wrenching music she’s ever made. The duet here with MJ Lenderman is certainly one of the most infectious songs of the year, and I expect it will be on many if not most top songs lists for good reason. Anyone can harmonize, but it takes some doing to find two voices that interlock so perfectly it’s like they were made for each other. It’s a team up so obviously logical someone would have to invent it as soon as possible if they hadn't already thought to do it.
Don’t sleep on Crowbar either, my wife’s favorite song of the year as it so happens, and another standout from Tiger’s Blood.
I take a sip of something I can barely taste
Dull as dusk, with a skull and crossbones to bring us luck
And I know that you can't read my mind
I swear I said the same thing a hundred times
Ah crap maybe I should look into what she finds so appealing about it.
4. Doom / Kid – Great Grandpa
Up until now I had largely thought of Seattle’s Great Grandpa as a grunge/emo band, a quite good and inventive one to be sure, but operating largely within those genre contours. So hearing these two songs – their first since 2019 – absolutely floored me with their vastness and splendor and depth. I shared them with a friend and we both had a similar reaction: “So many parts.”
So many parts.
Doom opens with a haunting multi-tracked harmonization before paring itself down into a sinister propulsive verse that, overtly I’m presuming, echoes Radiohead’s Paranoid Android. Next comes an over-driven tension breaker then back to a variation on the verse leading into a climactic noisy guitar build, more of an outro than a proper chorus. Al Menne sings:
It's funny how I need you, damn
It's perfect when I leave you, damn
They'll find me in that lake soon, damn
Few minutes and then born new, yeah
For all its its wending and weaving it has nothing on Kid, which starts with a similar harmony style, then says fuck it, let’s do the Beatles now for a while, taking a walk through Abbey Road and the White Album style folksy, psychedelic pastoralia and 70s guitar hero anthem ambition. And there’s still more new to come after that. They could have written seven or eight songs just with these disparate sections alone, but somehow they end up stitching them together so well it’s less like pastiche and more like drawing from the building blocks of the rock canon and forging something entirely new from the raw material.
3. She’s Leaving You/ Wristwatch – MJ Lenderman
What more is there to say that hasn’t already been said a thousand times and is likely being said right now on every other best of the year list around the country. I’ve seen stronger contrarians than I who held out much longer before admitting it, but he is just simply the real deal.
A songwriter this talented, with such an appreciation for (the specific) rock history (that I personally like), and an ability to quote from it without coming off as precious or mannered is the absolute best case outcome for a nephew you lent all your old vinyl and your fucked up amp to then checked back in on him a few years later to see how the experiment turned out. No one else is writing effortless vocal hooks and ear worm riffs like this. Poignant and sad and funny all at once. Jason and David and J. and Doug and Neil should, or would, be proud.
heywinkie
2. God’s Plan / Sunrise / Jesus Christ In Hell – Young Jesus
I couldn’t decide between these three songs here and there’s no rule that says I have to. The first two come from The Fool, the literary-minded, furious and wounded document of contemporary young manhood by Young Jesus (John Rossiter), and the latter from a more recent EP John Case. God’s Plan is a mostly sparse country folk anthem, with Rossiter’s wailing doing most of the work atop hand drums and jagged guitar. Sunrise is somewhat more fleshed out with piano, but still leaves wide open space for an aggressive vocal that he strains to the breaking point in its climax. Jesus Christ In Hell is a chaotic noise-scape befitting its subject matter.
I am telling you something has been done here on the latter song. An entire world has been conjured. Even if that world is Hell. Or California. Maybe the border where the two so often overlap. I got a feeling hearing it for the first time something like when I heard Farewell Transmission. It's quiet then discordant then quiet and keeps throwing things on top of the uncanny musical pyre it's building – or rather into the pit it's digging – as the song itself builds and builds and digs and digs. An infernal orchestra is warming up in the periphery. A man is screaming out for a catharsis that doesn't come. Is purposefully being withheld. This is Hell after all.
There is a Jesus Christ in Hell
but he's just like everybody else
He gets roasted all day long
There is a PCH hell
but the water's boiling
and what about the smell?
Nobody cleans up all that fish
It's been so long since I heard a new to me act and immediately had to go look up the lyrics. To see if they could stand on their own like I suspected they could. Stripped of the arrangements of what I can only describe as Americana troubadour rock cut with ambient and experimental jazz embellishments.
He sings on Sunrise:
Man, I swear I had a big job
Yeah man, I talked to God
But God was so damn dark
I had to light God’s hеart
So I watched the sun rise
It was likе a balloon
Sent from Hell
Straight to the moon
You're probably detecting a preoccupation with God and Hell here and if you're familiar with my Catholic brain damage that's obviously a big part of why the music compels me. And probably why it will have the same effect on 75% of my readers who as best as I can tell are people who once believed in God and are furious that he didn't end up existing or else people who do still believe in God and are furious that he is absent.
There's also something of David Berman in here. He of course falls into one or both of those categories. No new word from God... as the song goes. And so one also has to find the joke amidst the crises of faith. Like on the album closer God's Plan:
I met a priest
At the pearly gates
He said, “I should be excited
But I don’t feel that great”
I made a joke about communion
How it must have been something he ate
And then after nothing is funny about it anymore we resolve to find God where we can. Down here in the everyday.
So we walked up
To Saint Peter to say
“Is there a god in Heaven?”
“No God’s down there in the everyday
If you give up looking
God’s beneath that thing you can’t explain”
Maybe in a piece of music.
1. Backyard Lover / Will You Do Me a Kindness – Merce Lemon
Backyard Lover is a song that has crawled inside of me so deeply the past few months that affixing words to it makes me feel inadequate. As if trying to describe it in my little music writer tone with all the tedious adjective-peddling diminishes us both. As if I’m letting both the song and the artist down.
Musically it slots neatly into the Americana/alt-country scene that has pervaded for the past couple years, at least on a superficial level. Xandy Chelmis, the Wednesday and MJ Lenderman pedal steel player’s contributions here likely have a lot to do with that. But Backyard Lover, and the stunning album it comes from, Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild, has something that so many other younger acts are lacking of late: a depth and breadth to the contours of its melancholy. A haunted home has been erected here, even if it was only to give the singer a place to sit alone for a while in solitude. To contemplate a visceral sadness that expands to fill the entire horizon, but that is seen only in fleeting glimpses from out a bedroom window.
Not just sadness of the heartbroken romantic variety, but of bone deep grieving. The kind you never get over long after everyone has told you it is past time that you got over it. Maybe you pretend to for their sake but it’s still inside of you. Always will be.
It is also, like a lot of the other songs on the album – as well as the similarly sprawling, devastated and devastating single “Will You Do Me A Kindness” – oddly funny. Weird how those two emotions so often walk together hand in hand. I am sort of surprised Kindness wasn’t included on the album because it’s as good as or better than almost everything else on there, which is saying a lot.
On my first few listens I assumed Backyard Lover was about a betrayal, particularly with the gut-punching climactic lyric of “you fucking liar.” It’s the kind of song a liar hopes is never written about them. Perhaps you know that feeling.
It’s about a different kind of betrayal though. The complex anger we feel, of course illogically, at someone who has left us behind in another way.
Merce Lemon has explained that much of the emotional resonance in her music was born out of the death of a friend.
Now I am falling to a dark place
Where just remembering her death's
About all I can take
But I don't get out much
Is being swallowed by a room
Supposed to feel this way?
Maybe I'll come out, babe
“So many of my songs are touched by and explore death, specifically in relation to the loss I experienced of my best friend when I was fifteen years old,” she said. “That loss has forever changed me and who I am in my relationships to lovers, friends, family."
Maybe she was
She was right
What dying felt like
A wooden spoon tossed in the fire
Cause nothing's good enough
You fucking liar
I don’t know what that means specifically besides everything. The way she sings it it sounds like it means everything.