The 50 best albums of 2024: 50-31

50-31

50 Karl D’Silva – Love Is a Flame in the Dark

You expected Charli xcx to drop one of the British pop albums of the year – rather less so a bloke from Rotherham, known only in the deep underground, playing and recording everything himself at home. And yet D’Silva’s debut album has the huge scope of those from pop’s A-list, decked out with saxophones, massive drums, fret-scurrying guitar solos, Chicago house basslines and classic vocal melodies, resulting in industrial-leaning epics about the very biggest themes: love and existence. Don’t wait for the inevitable cult reappraisal and deluxe reissue in 30 years’ time – get on this masterpiece now. Ben Beaumont-Thomas

49 Chat Pile – Cool World

The Oklahoman noise-rockers’ second album was one of the few releases in 2024 that reflected the horror and disbelief of witnessing Gaza and its people being destroyed. It is also about hard-wired failure across history – the album title is a savagely sarcastic dismissal of a planet whose human inhabitants are so wretchedly self-interested and easily given to violence. Vocalist Raygun Busch often takes the persona of a baffled functionary, operating on orders that have no reason, while his band squall and thunder through their groove-metal rhythms. BBT

48 Los Campesinos! – All Hell

A triumph of tenacity and independence, Los Campesinos! self-released their seventh album – and first in seven years – and scored their first UK Top 20 hit. Their earlier twee-pop leanings have matured into bitter, morose yet spirited emo, lashing out at fascists while castigating apathy from their peers (Idles must have winced at “punks on the playlist crooning for kindness”.) But it’s not all politics: they lust in hyper-literate poetry, and hop from Bundesliga one moment to bildungsroman the next. That mix of high and lowbrow can be found throughout but most potently of all on Feast of Tongues, an anthem Coldplay could have made were it not for the savage declaration in the chorus: “We will feast on the tongues of the last bootlickers.” BBT

47 Adrianne Lenker – Bright Future

Whether solo or as frontperson of her band Big Thief, Lenker keeps her release rate high, with quality and emotional intensity to match. You can almost smell the leaf mulch in her latest, recorded in a studio in a forest with pianos, acoustic guitars and the occasional touch of ambient haze. She’s holed up away from the world, rueful and hopeful in equal measure (“This whole world is dying / Don’t it seem like a good time for swimming?”) as she takes stock of hard-won wonders, be it the lessons of heartbreak, the power of language or, on the absolute blubfest of Real House, her mother’s love. BBT

46 Clarissa Connelly – World of Work

Much like Julia Holter’s early work, the Scotland-born, Denmark-raised composer Clarissa Connelly’s music feels like the sort of singular study of ecstasy that could only have emerged from a remote cloister. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, both cite medieval nun Hildegard von Bingen as an influence.) On Connelly’s unique second record, there are the confrontationally drawn-out notes and complicated intonations of traditional folk songs; the off-kilter depths of Les Mystères des Voix Bulgares; in the spartan piano and dappled acoustic guitar, the gripping structural abstractions of one-offs such as Holter and Joanna Newsom. Its abiding themes are loneliness and death, but the warmth and self-possession of Connelly’s earnest inquiries into the point of it all seem to embody the lesser-known meaning of apocalypse, as revelation and the lifting of a veil. Laura Snapes

45 Mdou Moctar – Funeral for Justice

Niger guitarist Mdou Moctar makes desert blues into a fractal art, each insurgent riff embroidered with detail. On Funeral for Justice, it seems like a call for his burgeoning western fanbase to play close attention – not just to be dazzled by his vaulting dynamics, but to heed his lyrics about colonialism, particularly former occupier France’s majority control of his country’s uranium supply. If justice is dying, Moctar lit the pyre. LS

44 Jamie xx – In Waves

One third of the xx turned in an expertly produced dancefloor LP, finely chopping up samples and guest artists and emulsifying them into darkly throbbing Jon Hopkins-y techno, emotional trance or sparkling disco-house. The latter style provides the best track, Baddy on the Floor, made with Honey Dijon – have trumpets ever sounded more euphoric? BBT

43 Xiu Xiu – 13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto With Bison Horn Grips

In the goth stakes this year, Xiu Xiu’s 17th studio album made the Cure sound like Sabrina Carpenter. It’s a collection of haughty ambient balladry, skronking noise-pop and – in the underground hit Common Loon – ultra-distorted glam rock. Throughout, Jamie Stewart’s voice remains on superb, theatrical form: audibly trembling, even cowering at times; at others he strides around like a moustache-twiddling villain in a musical. BBT

42 Knocked Loose – You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To

The Kentucky metalcore quintet burst into rock’s big leagues this year with a 100mph battering ram, earning a Grammy nomination and a Slipknot arena tour off the back of this magnificent LP. The guitar tone has every drop of potential loveliness scoured away, leaving rough smears of noise, while the stop-start rhythms have a profound, almost hidden funk to them – learning how to duck and weave with these haymaker blows, listen after listen, is just one of this album’s great pleasures. BBT

41 Jessica Pratt – Here in the Pitch

Jessica Pratt makes music as if she’s painting watercolours, the shades of her acoustic songwriting blushing and blooming into one another with no sense of delineation. Her fourth album adds gentle percussion, bossa nova rhythms and synths for the first time, foregrounding a sense of temporal logic in songs that obsess over time – running out of it, dreaming of for ever; gorgeous koans like this, in By Hook Or By Crook: “Some people chip away time / More than they understand, an open hand / I’m waiting for way before first light / And it’s the edge worn clean again.” Pratt’s music is endlessly mysterious, but rather than create distance, her openness to the unknown plays like an invitation to wonder. LS

40 Doechii – Alligator Bites Never Heal

You can imagine even the most modernity-denying hip-hop codgers getting on board with Doechii’s mixtape, characterised as it is by some of the year’s most technically astounding wordplay – particularly on the positively superhuman track Nissan Altima. But she’s just as good rolling over boom-bap at half the speed, and is funny and self-lacerating with it, as on Denial Is a River’s tour through drug and anger issues. As involving as the current generation of freewheeling young US MCs are – Playboi Carti, Ken Carson, OsamaSon et al – there’s something to be said for rappers who stay as perfectly on top of the beat like Doechii does. BBT

39 Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – Challengers OST

For all the frisson in Challengers, the horniest thing about Luca Guadagnino’s surprisingly chaste tennis movie might be its score. More Berghain than break point, Reznor and Ross ratcheted the tension with adrenaline-spiking techno, the beat thwacking like a tennis ball against a hard court. The Boys Noize mixed version was the one you wanted, the ride intermittently imbued with a guttural, carnal undertow, taunting “yeah yeah yeah”s and a reckless sense of velocity that mirrored the players spinning out of control as they vied for Tashi Duncan’s approval. The song Brutalizer referenced the move where a player smacks the ball directly at their opponent’s body, but in the hands of the man who sang “I want to fuck you like an animal”, its relentless, panel-beater assault suggested quite a different kind of roughing up. LS

38 Empress Of – For Your Consideration

After being dumped by a Hollywood director who began his Oscars “for your consideration” campaign the next day, Lorely Rodriguez played him at his own game and turned the breakup into a concept album about want and desire – one that doesn’t waste a second moping. Instead, with co-production from Rodriguez and artists including Nick Léon and Umru, For Your Consideration is a hot, sticky, direct dance-pop record that reflects her Latin roots and unknockable self-confidence: the joke of the title is that she doesn’t care for external approval at all. On the back cover she’s painted gold like an awards statuette. “I’m choosing myself,” she told Rolling Stone. “I know this record is good.” LS

37 Jack White – No Name

White’s latest had a punkish release strategy: unmarked vinyl copies were popped into customers’ shopping bags at his Third Man Records stores, then he encouraged the recipients to leak the album online. Those tactics matched the music, which is the absolute opposite to careful strategy – it’s a first-thought-best-thought ripper full of riffs that could kick a saloon door off its hinges, the production values of an amphetamine-charged 1960s teenage garage rock band and White doing a series of outrageously fun takes on the frontman: hellfire preacher, punk oik, classic rocker. If it had been his solo debut it would be canonised by now – hopefully it’ll still earn the classic status it wears so casually. BBT

Jack White performing in Mexico City in November

36 Mach-Hommy – #Richaxxhaitian

“Vagabond, nose in the bolognese, moi / Triceratops hoping I’ma stay calm …” From the opening lyrics onwards, the Haitian-American MC sets off on riveting stream-of-consciousness flows somewhere between Ghostface Killah or RZA’s delivery for Wu-Tang Clan, and fellow new-school sages such as Billy Woods and Earl Sweatshirt. The beats are full of old soul and library music samples warping in the sun alongside fresh input from jazzy outsiders such as Georgia Anne Muldrow and Sam Gendel. But rather than freestyle and meander, Mach-Hommy keeps the whole album tacking towards the mainstream, locking into keenly rhythmic verses and satisfying choruses. BBT

35 Vampire Weekend – Only God Was Above Us

It takes an extremely fleet pen for a band to release an album mired in self-referentiality and pull it off – not least when that band is Vampire Weekend, who for 16 years have doubled as shorthand (often unfairly) for a particular kind of self-regarding aesthete. But their fifth album exists in the long shadow cast by 2019’s sunny Father of the Bride, Ezra Koenig plotting the distance between the band’s youthful idealism and the surrender to ideological defeat that can come with middle age. The guitars and keys often sound weathered too, but the frenzied gallop of songs such as Ice Cream Piano, or Connect, with piano as skittish as a sky of sycamore helicopters, speak to a level of insurgent awareness that would still put many of their younger peers to shame. LS

34 Amyl and the Sniffers – Cartoon Darkness

“The haters” might be one of pop’s most boring subjects; anyone minded to bemoan them should take Amyl’s Amy Taylor as the gold standard. “Need to wipe your mouth after you speak / ’Cause it’s an asshole” she spits on Cro-Magnon rager Jerkin’; “there’s too many snags at the party” on Tiny Bikini – as in, sensitive new age guys, the type to tediously profess their feminist credentials. The brute disco of U Should Not Be Doing That takes aim at purist scene bores who think the Melbourne band’s international success invalidates their punk credentials – but it’s also indicative of the complex expressions of self-confidence that Taylor asserts on Cartoon Darkness, which are really her best strike against the haters. “I’m working on my worth / I’m working on my work / I’m working on who I am,” she yells frantically. Pub rock inveterates, Amyl and the Sniffers aren’t exactly the type of band to have matured on their third album, but the expansive, incantatory Big Dreams reflected a new mode, and offered a bit of Taylor’s spark to anyone in need of it: “Hey! When ya get down, oh you’re a lit one / Never been a dull one / Always been a big star.” LS

33 Coco & Clair Clair – Girl

From Charli xcx to Sabrina Carpenter and this Atlanta duo, cool-girl intimidation was one of 2024’s abiding musical moods. “Gotta have competition to make a diss track, ho,” Coco & Clair Clair taunted on Aggy, their savage pen countered by deceptively sweet, low-slung synth-pop and nursery-rhyme-catchy choruses. You might argue that they really do seem to fear the competition from the amount of barbs that litter basically every song on their second album, but the oozy, glistening trap, nihilistic electro house and sing-songy vocals are just aloof enough to support the pose. Plus, they’re funny. “Pandemic and recession,” they sing on Bitches Pt 2. “But the dumb bitch economy is booming.” LS

32 Bill Ryder-Jones – Iechyd Da

There’s a gorgeous and affecting juxtaposition throughout the ex-Coral man’s most ambitious solo album yet. The backings are sumptuous, with strings, pianos, twinkling percussion and even a children’s choir on more than one occasion – but Ryder-Jones’s voice is broken down, dejected, desiccated. He trudges through these songs like a man unable to lift his gaze from the cracked paving stones – and yet the idealism and ready beauty of his backings are like the sun on his face, encouraging him to look up. BBT

31 Cassandra Jenkins – My Light, My Destroyer

“Oh, one look is all it takes,” Cassandra Jenkins sings on Omakase, one of many songs on her third album about living and dying by someone else’s gaze (or even, as on Petco, seeking solace in the eyes of a lizard). Although My Light … has more melodic heft (and tentative rockers) than her last album, An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, it still trembles with that kind of heart-in-mouth immediacy, with Jenkins the ever-alert antenna for interventions both divine and domestic. LS