The Best Albums of 2024
Unpacking my 16 favorite LPs of the year—plus 30 more exceptionally good ones.
Listening has always been something of a solitary act for me. I love dancing, of course, love the collective thrill of a good party, the shared energy of a good show. But I grew up mostly listening to records alone in my bedroom, and that pattern has held across most of my life. The internet was a more important conduit for my dance-music knowledge than clubbing ever was. So writing about music has always been, for me, an extension of listening—a way of making meaning, and a way of forging community, of listening with other people (even if they’re just the invented readers in my mind).
That collective listening, or thinking about listening, has taken place across many different venues—listservs (shout out to all the O.G. Hyperreal heads out there), alt weeklies, zines, music mags, blogs, forums, websites, social media, group chats, newsletters—but I don’t think the idea behind it has really changed much in the 30-odd years since I first reviewed a Fugazi show for my college paper.
I’ve been thinking about the state of music writing, here at the end of a year that has not been particularly kind to music writing. There’s no doubt about the fact that writing about music as a profession is endangered; every year, the number of people for whom it’s a viable path shrinks. And every year, the threats to music writing—to writing in general—seem to multiply. The collapse of advertising as a revenue stream; shortsighted corporations that can’t see the true value of the publications they own and the readers they serve; widespread societal flight from the written word as a communicative medium; the continued rise of LLMs and what we might call their texty output (to adapt a word from Stephen Colbert’s terms “truthy” and “truthiness”), which masquerades as writing, but is not, in fact, writing. These are all causes for concern, particularly the last two.
But the act of writing about music as a form of collective listening isn’t going anywhere for a while, I think—even if it’s just a few of us holdout freaks that still want to gather ’round it. So I want to thank everyone that has read Futurism Restated over the past year, whether it’s weekly, once in a while, or once in a blue moon.
Since it’s list season, I’m chiming in with my own selection of favorites. I trust that my readers will know that the usual caveats apply: These aren’t necessarily the best, they’re not necessarily representative of everything published in 2024, there are so many surely great records I never got around to hearing, etc., etc. (An interesting data point: My rolling spreadsheet of promos has 1535 entries on it, though of course there are many more things that I may have listened to briefly that I didn’t log, and there are plenty of things on that list that I didn’t listen to in full, or perhaps even at all.) But the records on my list do represent the records that clicked with me this year—that made me hear things I hadn’t heard before, or hear familiar things in a new way.
One other caveat: These are all albums (plus a couple of EPs). I’ve never really been a songs guy, or a tracks guy. Obviously, there are some perfect tracks in the world—just yesterday I was listening to Newworldaquarium’s “Trespassers” and marveling at its timelessness and simplicity—but for the most part, I tend to think of tracks within a larger context. The album is the unit of measurement, if you will, that most interests me—as a proof of concept, a statement of purpose, an indicator of what else could be done in that particular stylistic or theoretical zone. This is an entirely subjective position, and if I were more active in club culture, I might easily come up with a list of favorite tracks of the year as well. But I’m not, and I suspect my list of favorite tracks would be so idiosyncratic and perhaps arbitrary that it’s not worth assembling, much less sharing. (We will, however, be putting together a program of year-end faves over at Lapsus Radio later this week.) But I do think that this list of records stands for a certain ethos, a set of values and ideals I hold dear, no matter how stylistically scattered it may be.
My list of favorites stands at 16 albums, with a supplementary annotated list of 30 really good records I wanted to highlight as well. Most of them I’ve written about, whether here or on Pitchfork, but not all of them. For the top 16, part of the pleasure of assembling the list was writing about records I’d already written about without repeating myself—trying to find something new in them, or consider the ways my perspective on them had changed over the course of the year. I probably didn’t always succeed, but I like getting the opportunity to think about records in those terms—as a relationship that’s evolving and in flux, the longer I listen to them.
Which I guess brings us back to the idea I posed at the beginning of this rather lengthy introduction: of writing about music as a way of making sense of it, of writing as a technology for understanding. That’s something an LLM can’t do: It can string together a lot of adjectives, but it can’t listen, and it can’t think, and most of all, it can’t find pleasure in the act of wondering what any of this means.
Paywalling an end-of-year list felt wrong, somehow, so today’s newsletter is free to read for all; thanks goes to the generous paying subscribers who make that possible. You kind people are duly rewarded with access to exclusive playlists for chilling and clubbing; the semi-regular Mixes Digest posts; and full access to the archives, including interviews with Belong, Seefeel’s Mark Clifford, dub-techno mischief-maker James Devane, and more.
From now through New Year’s Eve, I’m offering a discount on subscriptions: 20% off—that’s $4 a month, or $40 a year. Just click this link to activate the discount:
https://futurismrestated.substack.com/6cc2129a
After today, I’ll be taking the next couple of weeks off. I’ll see you all in the new year, when I’ve got some exciting things in store. For now, scroll on for the list!
My Top 16 Albums of 2024
16. Cassandra Jenkins: My Light, My Destroyer (Dead Oceans)
As you’ll glean from the following entries, in addition to all the ambient music and leftfield techno that you’d expect me to endorse, I have a soft spot for smartly crafted singer-songwriter music, all the more so when it manages to render rock and pop forms with a healthy dose of atmospheric dreamweaving. (What can I say; I was at a very impressionable age when Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” hit the charts.) I’d been a fan of Cassandra Jenkins since I saw her at Pitchfork Paris in 2017, and I loved the slightly Destroyer/Sandro Perri-like touches of her 2021 album An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. (Like I said, I’m not really a songs person, but “Hard Drive” is one of my favorite songs of the past half decade.) On My Light, My Destroyer, she doubles down on the otherworldliness of her sound, fleshing out rootsy arrangements in shoegaze fuzz and sunrise synths, and framing overlapping takes on the search for self in stargazing sessions, hotel parking lots, and the loneliest Petco in the world. Once again, she’s given the world an absolutely perfect song: “Delphinium Blue,” a three-verse vignette that’s as ethereal as Enya and as economical—and evocative—as one of Haruki Murakami’s short stories.
15. Belong: Realistic IX (Kranky)
I was surprised by how divisive this record seemed to be; I expected people to swoon over it, yet some reviewers found it derivative, wanting. Were we hearing the same record? I definitely hear the shoegaze elements here—no matter what Belong themselves might say—but what fascinates me is the way they’ve inverted those influences, stripping away the habitual murk and zeroing in on the silvery edge of every detail, every frequency. Someone on Bandcamp calls it “a very clinical interpretation of shoegaze,” which is absolutely right: It’s pristine, airless, vacuum sealed. Even on the noisiest tracks, like “Bleach,” there’s more white space than white noise, while the “pop” songs are so carefully molded, they might as well come in blister packs. Not unlike ML Buch, they found a way to take the most familiar guitar sounds in the world and make them strange. And not unlike Kali Malone, of all people, they know exactly how shifting from one chord to another can turn your soul to jelly, over and over again.
14. Milan W.: Leave Another Day (Stroom)
The breakup album of the year, told from the perspective of a protagonist who’s about as likeable, and credible, as many of Bill Callahan’s most star-crossed characters, and in tones reminiscent of the gloomiest goth-pop the mid ’80s were capable of producing. The feathery acoustic guitars remind me of the Church; the opulent production had me flashing back to Peter Murphy’s Deep. Much like ML Buch’s Suntub, every song can trigger a wash of deja vu; at the same time, as I wrote in my Pitchfork review, everyone seems to hear something different in it. A gothic Rorschach blot, perhaps.
13. J. Albert: I want to be good so bad (self-released)
The most unexpected delight of my musical year was this note-perfect contribution to the dub-techno canon. It’s got all the hallmarks just right—the murk, the swirl, the chug, the crinkle—yet it never sounds derivative. It’s clearly guided not by some fealty to established forms, but by some elusive expressive sensibility, a deeper emotional register, that’s barely discernible in the curled-smoke melodies and the ground-liquefying bass. The legacy of Chain Reaction lives on.
12. upsammy: Strange Meridians (topo2)
upsammy’s Strange Meridians doesn’t feel entirely finished. It feels like she started working on the structures of the tracks, but couldn’t quite decide how to flesh them out. Or, alternatively, like she composed much more complex tracks, then muted half the parts, one by one—as though, perhaps, she’d started out something more like a techno record, then cut away all the beats until only a few pulsing accents were left. Erase the car from the photograph, leave only the glints of moonlight on the hood. It’s the most exciting use of negative space I’ve heard all year, and the first example of ambient music that feels truly fresh and unexpected in forever.
11. Loidis: One Day (Incienso)
I think that the rumors of minimal techno’s return—or dub techno’s, depending upon who you ask—have been exaggerated. Frankly, I don’t care if the genres make a comeback, and in many ways, we’ll be better off if they don’t, because both are ripe for some seriously lowest-common-denominator derivatives. (The original waves had more than enough dreck already!) I celebrate Brian Leeds’ latest album not as the harbinger of a new golden age of deeper, subtler dance music, but simply as a beautifully realized piece of work in its own right. There’s no question that it draws upon and reinterprets certain hallmarks of ’90s and ’00s European house and techno; the wriggly grooves, dry percussion, and airy emotional panoramas flash back on Thomas Melchior, Ricardo Villalobos, Roman Flügel, and other classics of the Playhouse/Perlon golden years. But the end result strikes me as neither derivative nor retro nor ironic; it’s just Leeds doing a deep dive into sounds that have clearly fascinated him for a long, long time and putting a spin on them that no other contemporary producer could. If only all producers could dispatch the anxiety of influence this elegantly.
10. Oliver Coates: Throb, shiver, arrow of time (RVNG Intl.)
This one might be my personal sleeper hit of the year. After the high-proof pathos of his Aftersun soundtrack, I was primed for another emotional gut punch—and then, somehow, I didn’t feel it; for the first however many listens, I thought Throb, shiver, arrow of time sounded good, nice, but maybe not soul-scouring in the way I was looking for. What changed? I don’t know—but at some point it clicked, got under my skin (pun kinda sorta intended). The shadows lengthened: the more abstract tracks took on more depth and definition, while the melodic themes leaped to the foreground. Throb, shiver, arrow of time may be subtle almost to a fault, but once your ears adjust to the gloom, a whole world opens up.
9. Rafael Toral: Spectral Evolution (Moikai)
It sometimes feels like Rafael Toral has been making the same record his whole career, over and over—not at all in a bad way. Spectral Evolution represents one more point on that same continuum; after all these years, he’s still treating his guitar more like an aeolian harp, as though the music were nothing more than a representation of moving air. And yet: There is a difference this time; it’s as though the stripped-down palette of his previous work had suddenly exploded into full color. New energy courses through his music: the chord voicings of jazz, the recognizable strumming of the strings. It’s as though his sound—for so many years so fundamentally disembodied—had suddenly flooded into a three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood shape, without losing any of its essential mystery. He’s still channeling the music of the spheres, but for the first time, he’s given it a human form.
8. Lifted: Trellis (Peak Oil)
Andrew Field-Pickering and Matt Papich’s fourth album is a triumph of vibes. Collaborative, outer-limits free-for-all meets carefully honed moodsetting; both hold their own. It’s fusion music not so much in the stylistic sense, more a question of intention: What kind of world do we want to build, they ask, finding the answer in a delicate balance of structure and sprawl, and pairing the virtues of radical openness with the rigor of a careful, guiding hand. (The fact that at least one track was created by reworking improvised source material on dueling CDJs is all the more mindblowing.)
7. Total Blue: Total Blue (Music From Memory)
Total Blue’s music could have been old hat. With a yacht rock documentary recently hitting HBO, of all places, it’s hardly like excavating ’80s kitsch in search of accidental pathos is a terribly novel or countercultural idea. But the Los Angeles group succeeds in part by virtue of the slipperiness of their sound: Yes, there are nods to new age and smooth jazz and corporate funk and quasi-Balearic and all sorts of other signifiers that flicker, like a lenticular image, between totally dated and weirdly timeless, hopelessly corny and eternally cool. But what makes Total Blue such a success—and not just another pretender in a long line of savvy post-OPN/Ferraro style mavens—is that Total Blue are simply very, very good at what they do. Nobody wielded a more seductive fretless bass this year, and no one came up with a more convincing Seal tribute than their “Bone Chalk.” Definitely in the running for my top five most-listened-to albums this year.
6. Seefeel: Everything Squared (Warp)
It’s still hard to believe that Seefeel not only returned in 2024 with their first new music in 13 years, but that said recordings seemed to emanate from the same otherworldly zone that they accessed on their 1995 classic Succour and its follow-up, (ch-vox). Seefeel have long been one of my favorite artists—those ’90s records articulated a fusion of ambient, IDM, dub, and post-rock that feels not just inspired but necessary, as though it were always out there, waiting for someone to dream it into being—and I’ve probably listened to this new album more than almost anything else on my list, to the point where I have an even harder time fathoming that it’s a new release. It feels like I’ve known it forever. (It’s all the more incredible that they followed up earlier this month with Squared Roots, an album of alternate mixes from the same sessions—and yet, presumably, not the other new album that Mark Clifford hinted at when I interviewed him earlier this year. My breath remains bated.)
5. Jeff Parker & ETA IVtet: The Way Out of Easy (International Anthem)
Feel a little funny listing this one, because I’m not “a jazz listener,” and I have no idea if this was the “best” jazz album this year. But I remind myself that this isn’t really about that; it’s about the albums that meant something to me this year, gave me pleasure, and, in the best cases, taught me to hear something new, and that’s absolutely true of this one. Something I find fascinating is the way they can take relatively considerable track lengths—17, 22, 24 minutes—and make them feel not long at all. They keep the ideas flowing, the tempo moving; their songs are fascinating conversations, the kind that seem to make time melt away—and yet, at the same time, they’re understated, low key, unshowoffy. They tap into a whole bunch of very different vibes—the breezy strut of “Freakadelic,” the melancholia of “Late Autumn,” the pointillist reggae of “Chrome Dome”—yet they make them all sound uniformly easy. At points, it boggles the mind that these are four brains and eight hands, and not one single organism simply breathing the music into being.
4. Raphael Rogiński: Žaltys (Unsound)
If Raphael Rogiński’s stark, mysterious 2023 album Talàn felt like the spiritual successor to his 2015 landmark Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes: African Mystic Music (which was at last reissued this year, for the first time on vinyl), then Žaltys feels like a glimpse at a parallel universe. It’s a softer, shimmerier sound; his guitar tone feels weightless, haloed in dissonant harmonics, occasional overdubbing (a first), and the bright, wispy tone of the Lithuanian kanklės. His melodies are less sentimental here, perhaps less recognizable, too; there’s a weirdness at work, a fundamental wildness, an unwillingness to be pinned down. It seems too perfect that the album is titled in homage to a mythical grass-snake spirit, given the way the music flits stealthily around the edges of your perception. It’s his most restless, and challenging, work yet.
3. Kali Malone: All Life Long (Ideologic Organ)
I’ve been fortunate to see Kali Malone perform All Life Long three times in the past two years: first in Carnac, France, where I traveled to experience Stephen O’Malley’s You Origin festival amid the town’s neolithic ruins; then in Berlin, where I profiled her for the New York Times; and finally at Unsound this past fall. The suite of pieces for organ, voice, and brass has changed every time; every space imposes its own fingerprint. The most impressive performance was in Berlin’s imposing Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, but my favorite was the small Église Saint-Cornély in Carnac, where a hundred or so people sat on worn wooden pews while she played on a compact chest organ, months before the album was to be released; it felt like being let in on a secret. The album retains that same feeling. Malone’s music has always been about closeness, I think—about what happens when two harmonies cling together, as though bound by each other’s gravity. All Life Long notably expands her palette, fleshing out her core organ pieces with complementary arrangements for brass and chamber choir. But it remains, at heart, a fiercely private music, as though every momentary dissonance were a deep internal conflict, every resolved chord a small psychic victory, a state of respite—however fleeting.
2. Astrid Sonne: Great Doubt (Echso)
I first began listening to Astrid Sonne’s Great Doubt in November 2023, and I reviewed it in January. It’s been floating around near the top of my ongoing best-of-2024 list for months, but it had been a while since I actively listened to it. Putting it on today, I was immediately reminded why it’s such an exceptional record. It’s not just a gratifyingly moody example of leftfield R&B, though it’s also that; it’s also unusually wonderfully strange, shot through with a real sense of foreboding—just listen to way the opening “Light and heavy,” a sweet nothing of a flute fantasia, suddenly darkens and sours in its final moments. It shares qualities with Tirzah’s occasionally confounding Trip9love…???, though it’s more nuanced and more gratifying. I love how blocky and cramped it can sound, overdriven studio drums and dry 808s and sour, spindly string synths all competing for space in her claustrophobic songs; her voice, meanwhile, is a boundless source of light and heat, even though she rarely rises above the level of a murmur. I’m fascinated by the way that Great Doubt feels like a companion piece to her friend and peer ML Buch’s Suntub, even though the two records sound nothing alike. What they share in common, perhaps, is a belief in the cleansing power of unreality.
1. Jessica Pratt: Here in the Pitch (Mexican Summer)
In Quinn Moreland’s New York Times profile of Jessica Pratt, her partner and collaborator, Matt McDermott, mentions a friend of a friend who “was stunned to find out that Jessica is a modern artist.” I’m pretty sure I was in the same boat until early this year, when I got the promo for Here in the Pitch—I’d heard Pratt’s music before, and enjoyed it, but I hadn’t really investigated anything about her; as far as I can recall, I’d vaguely assumed she was some long-long folkie, like Judee Sill or Karen Dalton. That’s on me for not paying closer attention, of course, but I don’t feel that bad about it, because everything about her music, and especially her latest album, feels calibrated to evoke some mythic past where the amps all have tubes and reverb springs eternal, some lost Eden blossoming under the watchful eye of Saint Bacharach. But still—and this is the thing I find so hard to articulate about this album—the retro trappings really aren’t the point. What makes the album is first and foremost her singular voice: As I wrote in my Pitchfork blurb, it seems absolutely effortless, yet a daunting degree of precision lies behind every ribbon-like twist of her voice, every glint and crinkle. And after that, it’s the miraculous totality of it all, the way the whole thing congeals into an undulating glowing whole—like a towering Jello cake pocked with candied fruit and tiny marshmallows (or, as per her own slightly more elegant description, a snow globe). After listening to this literally untold times this year, I keep coming back to one fundamental question: How can something so simple be so mysterious?
30 More Exceptionally Good Records From 2024
Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, and Andreas Werliin: Ghosted II (Drag City)
Not so much a sequel as an extension of the first album: further studies in the fusion of patterning and texture from Oren Ambarchi’s uncannily locked-in trio.
Bullion: Affection (Ghostly International)
Eighties revisionist Nathan Jenkins’ best album yet collects suggestively blurred snapshots disguised as perfectly imperfect pop miniatures—colors fading, corners curling, every splotch of bokeh just so.
Civilistjävel!: Brödföda (FELT)
Foggy setpieces in the tradition of Chain Reaction, but with occasional woodwinds—and standout guest performances from Mayssa Jallad and Laila Sakini.
James Devane: Searching (Umeboshi)
An algorithm with few controls—in his words, “a search button and a save button”—yields psychedelic dub techno of dazzling complexity.
Djrum: Meaning’s Edge (Houndstooth)
Atom-smashing breakbeats in the tradition of Photek, Minor Science, and Lanark Artefax; I have the feeling his 2025 is going to be even bigger.
Tashi Dorji: We Will Be Wherever the Fires Are Lit (Drag City)
Acoustic-guitar fugues to fill in the space where mourning becomes rage.
Fan Club Orchestra: VL_Stay (12th Isle)
An outfit with a long history of mischief carves out a space of abiding calm.
Keeley Forsyth: The Hollow (130701 / FatCat)
Coolly dramatic, almost gothic songs from a singularly powerful voice, framed in the starkest arrangements of her discography yet.
Mabe Fratti: Sentir que no sabes (TAR / MM / UOH)
After her explosive 2023, the Guatemalan cellist/singer/composer shifted into an exploratory mode this year, testing new directions she might take her songwriting.
K. Freund: Trash Can Lamb (SODA GONG)
Typically gorgeous, spare, summery jazz miniatures from one of the key figures in the Axis of Akron.
Ghost Dubs: Damaged (Pressure)
The heaviest, gloomiest dub techno since Modern Love’s subwoofer-crushing years.
Guerra / de Paiva / Hornsby / Konradsen: Contrahouse (Ulyssa)
Moonwalking Balearic pop that’s part house, part jazz, all vibes.
Jack J: Blue Desert (Mood Hut)
The Mood Hut cofounder goes (Pender Street) stepping away from his familiar house terrain, stumbles into an undiscovered patch of the half-imagined ’80s.
Fergus Jones: Ephemera (Numbers)
A sidewinding survey of electronic styles—weightless ambient, doomy rap, dub techno—that happens to feature the year’s best trip-hop single: “Heima,” a collab with Huerco S. and James K.
Matt Karmil: No Going Back (Studio Barnhus)
Idiosyncratic, leftfield excursions from an unsung hero of house music’s margins.
Adrianne Lenker: Bright Future (4AD)
The Big Thief singer’s exquisitely detailed, bite-sized evocations of pathos are so effortlessly rendered, she can be easy to take for granted. The back half dragged ever so slightly for me, but the first half is just gut punch after gut punch.
Klara Lewis: Thankful (Editions Mego)
A moving tribute to the late Peter Rehberg that, in channeling his spirit so well, only further proves Lewis’ command of her own craft.
Lia Kohl: Normal Sounds (Moon Glyph)
An alchemical study of the sounds of everyday life.
Jichael Mackson: Wait for It (Ilian Tape)
Peerless dispatches from electronic music’s deep end, by an unheralded veteran with formidable skills.
Lasse Marhaug: Provoke (Smalltown Supersound)
In the tradition of Mika Vainio, an eveloping “noise” masterpiece that is as warm as it is bleak. Perfect winter listening.
Moin: You Never End (AD 93)
Splintered post-rock studies with some of the year’s most carefully thought out vocal features.
More Eaze: lacuna and parlor (Mondoj)
Ambient country pocked with the subtlest, most provocative matrix glitches, sentimental and hyperreal.
mu tate: wanting less (Warm Winters Ltd.)
The subtlest, spongiest ambient music I heard all year.
Naemi: Dust Devil (3XL)
Ambient, trip-hop, shoegaze, and dream pop, all polished off with a patina of damage and giving a heavy dusting of doubt.
Shane Parish: Repertoire (Palilalia)
Acoustic fingerstyle guitar covers that find commonalities between Ornette Coleman, John Cage, Aphex Twin, Kraftwerk, D. Boon & Minutemen—audacious on paper, completely intuitive under Parish’s kindly guidance.
Skee Mask: Resort (Ilian Tape)
It’s such a pleasure to witness Bryan Müller continuing to do his own damn thing—and do it so well.
Carmen Villain: Nutrition EP (Smalltown Supersound)
An unexpected shift back to rhythm after several years wading progressively deeper into ambient waters. Can’t wait to see where she goes from here.
Verraco: Breathe… Godspeed (Timedance)
A continuation of last year’s “Escánadloo”—“Godspeed >” is essentially a remix of the former—that maps out four distinctly different tempos and beat structures, going fully intergalactic on the closing track, which I hope is a harbinger of things to come.
Wrecked Lightship: Antiposition (Peak Oil)
A tantalizingly brief mini-LP of dusted bass music and metal-shop dub.
ZULI: Lambda (Subtext)
Ahmed El Ghazoly turns toward reflection, pulverizing his imposing club constructions into a million glittering shards.
That’s it for this year—see you in 2025!
hurray for Jessica and Phillip, so love with your music review❤️
Love the Jessica Pratt and Stroom albums!