My 2024 in Music

Image: my most listened-to albums of 2024, though not all of them came out this year. My full Last.fm year-end report is here.

I listen to new music obsessively, and I’m still dedicated to albums over algorithmic playlists. I read reviews, follow a few new-music newsletters (especially Philip Sherburne and Shawn Reynaldo), get release-update emails from the wonderful Boomkat, and keep up with close to a thousand artists’ releases with the indispensible app MusicHarbor. Everything that catches my eye gets added to a Queue playlist. Then begins the filtering process.

Albums with only a few good songs get tossed, with the fun tracks added to a songs playlist. Releases that are good front to back get added to my annual albums playlist. At the end of the year, I add a subset of those choices to my Apple Music library. In 2024 I saved 169 albums to my annual playlist and 80 to my library.

Many are from favorite artists. Alva Noto released the fifth and final volume in his Xerrox series. Caribou, whose Massey Hall show in Toronto was delightful, released Honey. Kali Malone, whom I wrote about nearly five years ago, released All Life Long and got profiled/reviewed in the New Yorker. John Roberts and Matt Karmil continued their experimental progression outward from house music with Swan and the appropriately named No Going Back, respectively. Loscil released a new record and a collaboration with “ambient daddy” Lawrence English. New ones from Dorian Concept, Helado Negro, Loidis, Maria W Horn, Rafael Anton Irisarri, Shinichi Atobe, Skee Mask, Vladislav Delay, and William Basinski reaffirmed my love of their music. And there was a final recording by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

---

As for artists new or newer to me, I’ve tried to organize them into the broad categories that dominate my listening. I have more practice describing visual art than music, so the accompanying comments are brief and amateurish, but enthusiastic.

Frayed ambient/experimental. I listen to ambient and experimental electronic music more than any other genre. But my taste is relatively narrow: I like “frayed” music—sounds that are harsh and enveloping, rather than conventionally pretty and meant to fade into the background. The selections below range across the ambient spectrum, but, for example, you won’t chill out to the Final or Concepción Huerta albums.

• Bibio, Phantom Brickworks (LP II). Second outing of lilting ambient jams inspired by abandoned or decaying sites around Britain.
• Black Decelerant, Reflections Vol. 2: Black Decelerant. This collaborative album by Contour and Omari Jazz “explores improvisational jazz traditions through contemporary tone and texture.” The tones are pure and the textures gritty, with “a kind of inner self-realization” in the middle.
• Civilistjävel!, Brödföda. This record’s numbered tracks range widely, but, whether they have a beat, a guest vocalist, or found sounds, all are ringed with haze.
• Concepción Huerta, The Earth Has Memory. Synths given the rough tape treatment, here invoking rocks and oceans. Huerta and Edgar Mondragón are two of my favorites working in Mexico right now.
• Final, What We Don’t See. I will listen to any album Justin K. Broadrick releases using his four-decade-old alter ego, and this one doesn’t disappoint. Mastered by Lawrence English.
• Florian T. M. Zeisig, Planet Inc. I’ve loved nearly everything Zeisig has released since happening upon Coatcheck in 2020. There are so many delightful details in his ostensibly “ambient” records; this one is influenced by the 1990s German TV show “Space Night.” Special mention goes to Zeisig’s Angel R alter ego: “Mossed Capable of Being Observant,” released in December, is great, too.
• Hanno Leichtmann, Outerlands. Short tracks that blend “minimalism, exotica, and devotional music.” I’d pray in this church.
• Klara Lewis, Thankful. Exquisite tension between beauty and dissonance throughout. On the title track, the difference in sound from the lovely strings at 1:00 to the unhinged noise from about 10:00 onward reminds me, in a great way, of 7038634357’s “Winded” or Continuty’s “The Neon God.”
• Lasse Marhaug, Provoke. Marhaug has been at this for decades, and remains an inspiration. This album also has a track called “New Topographics”—what’s a onetime photographer curator not to like?

• Maya Shenfeld, Under the Sun. Shenfeld’s last album was my second-favorite release of 2022. This album explores “change and repetition, deep time and the ephemeral moment, equilibrium and imminent threat.” Its closing track, “Analemma,” may be the most beautiful new song I heard this year.
• Joachim Spieth, Retrace. At the ambient end of the dub techno spectrum, this one’s icy; my favorite track may be the watery abyss of “Drip.”
• Lynn Avery & Cole Pulice, Phantasy & Reality. To my ears, SF (by way of Minnesota) artist Cole Pulice can do no wrong; his twenty-two-minute Longform Editions release was perhaps my favorite piece of 2023. This is their second ambient-jazz collaboration with Lynn Avery and the vibes are just right.
• Yui Onodera, 1982. Not to be confused with the television personality, this Yui Onodera is a composer & artist in Tokyo, and this record emerges from his interest in “degradation and rebuilding” and was recorded on “an old tape recorder.” It sounds like it—and it sounds great.

Guitar heroes. Though I’ve never played the instrument, I’ve somehow come to follow a bunch of musicians who put out solo-guitar experiments. This music, too, is often “frayed,” and I especially enjoy players who bring me deconstructed versions of music from other parts of the world.

• Bill Orcutt, How to Rescue Things. I’m no Christmas music fan, but this album, which came out in December and which features Orcutt playing over samples of “syrupy,” 1950s-era easy-listening music, may be my new string-laden (in multiple senses) holiday-season favorite.
• Joseba Irazoki, Gitarra Lekeitioak (Onomatopeikoa II). This double LP is the first I’ve ever heard by the Baque guitarist, and I love its restless, improvisatory spirit. I could’ve guessed I would, since Raphael Roginski and Rhodri Davies, two other favorites, make appearances.
• Mat Ball, Amplified Guitar 2. I wrote at length here about Amplified Guitar, my favorite album of 2022. Apparently, I listened to the second track on this year’s followup more than any other Last.fm user. Ball’s band Big Brave also released A Chaos of Flowers, which sets poems by female poets to austere, broken doom metal—and was another favorite.
• Raphael Roginski, Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes and Žaltys. I ride hard for Roginski, who I came to know through the exceptional 2023 album Talàn (thanks Philip Sherburne, again). Was this close to flying to NYC for his Unsound Festival performance in November. This year Roginski released an expanded version of a 2015 album and an exploration of Lithuanian folklore.
• Tashi Dorji, We Will Be Wherever the Fires Are Lit. I’m grateful that in 2024 my hometown record labels are releasing solo-guitar records by Bhutan-born experimentalists. This Pitchfork review gets into the politics of the album, if you want to add another layer to the music—which itself is characterized by repetition, violence, but also exaltation.
• Nick Millevoi, Moon Pulses.

“Indie Rock.” I put the term in scare quotes because I’m not sure what it means these days. But here are the guitar bands whose new albums remind me of music I loved in the 1990s and early 2000s.

• Ducks Ltd., Harm’s Way. Two guys here in Toronto making guitar pop with an evident affinity for 1980s New Zealand. “The Main Thing” is such a fun ripper, with a VHS-basic video that features footage from Dundas & Shaw, King & Dufferin, & so many other familiar corners before heading out to the country.
• Hotline TNT, Trilogy. Re-release of a 2019 record I missed the first time around, and with the added fuzz I think I might like it more than last year’s Cartwheel? The last minute of “Trinity” is pure ecstasy.
• Loving, Any Light. Another Canadian duo, this time out west. Unhurried, meticulously arranged AM-radio pop.
• Prize Horse, Under Sound. The opening of “Your Time,” this record’s second track, bought Unwound to mind, and I stayed for the rest: shoegaze-tinged alt rock in which everything sounds a little sour and the bass rumbles.

• Sour Widows, Revival of a Friend. Apparently I listened to the epic eight-minute closer on this record thirty-five times this year. An album of slow builds, intertwined vocals and guitars, and a whole lot of grace.
• trauma ray, Chameleon. A band from Fort Worth, Texas, where I lived for six years as a child, doing its best Hum impression? Yes, please.

Screamo, hardcore, metal. The other genres wherein nostalgia for “My 1990s” (as one of my playlists has it) drives what I listen to.

• Agriculture, Living Is Easy. The biggest live-music regret of my year was passing on seeing this band play Toronto with Chat Pile. Love their “ecstatic metal.”
• Be Safe, Unwell. The cheeky album cover, almost a direct copy of the little-known Louisville band Elliott’s 1998 album US Songs, suggested the music could’ve gone either way: hollow pastiche or deeply informed torch-bearing. Thankfully, this is the good stuff: late-’90s-style Midwest emo from small-town Maryland. Favorite track: “Replaceable Man.”
• dim, planted in the soil. Two-man drums-and-guitar post-hardcore from Georgia. The band is new to me this year, but the band’s 2021 album to realize its own, the earth is also good. Here’s a track-by-track breakdown of the new one.
• drive your plow over the bones of the dead, tragedy as catharsis. This Vancouver band’s name and album title yielded endless jokes in the group chat. But the bands we joked about are some of our favorites, and this record holds up—if not with some of our all-time favorites, at least with this year’s crop.
• Heavenly Blue, We Have the Answer. Describing themselves as “screamo with dignity and integrity,” this Michigan seven-piece is new to me. But this record hits all all the right notes—even on the relatively “poppier” tracks like “Static Voice Speaks to Static Me.”
• Infant Island, Obsidian Wreath. Released back in January, this is “an album about trudging through the end of the world” that has resonated with me throughout the year. With orchestral and electronic elements, “gang vocals” on one track featuring seventeen vocalists, this is ambitious “blackened screamo” that hits far more than it misses.

• mis sueños son de tu adiós, No Necesitas Palabras. “No words necessary.” Classic screamo from La Plata, Argentina. The “full album” (per the video description above) clocks in at six and a half minutes. Thirty years ago, the only bands outside North America I could find were from France. I’m glad I live in a world where this genre’s influence has traveled, and what comes back to us here is this good.
• sonagi, Everything Is Longing. Four tracks of gay Philadelphia post-hardcore (to cite its Bandcamp tags). Rumbling bass,
• Terry Green, Provisional Living. Local guys made good on their first record in seven or ten years, depending on how you count. Blast beats, screamo, and, as the label has it, a little bit of … country? The guitars certainly can twang. Loved seeing them play “Blur” and “Easy,” my two favorites, live.

Honorable mentions. Of course I listen to lots of music that doesn’t fit into the above categories. Some favorites include Elori Saxl’s synth soundtrack Earth Focus, Ginger Root’s Shinbangumi, Mildlife’s Chorus (“Forever” is my roadtrip song of the year), MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks (like everyone else), Nala Sinephro’s Endlessness, Shigeto’s Cherry Blossom Baby, and 40 Watt Sun’s Little Weight.