When making this sort of list, there's the temptation to go flashy or hyper-obscure, to use the occasion to advertise one's esoteric taste. So these are simply the new albums I played the most this year, the ones I kept revisiting because they challenged, delighted, and reassured. These records shifted my horizons, and more importantly, I enjoyed them.
Gyeongsu & June - All to None
Dear Dogs | Bandcamp
A shimmer on the horizon. Extremely patient and a little gaudy, but never forgetting that music is a direct line to catharsis. These four songs are pop music from a much better future.
DJ Niraha - KorgMusic2024DemoEL-HELL-EΛ
Heat Crimes | Bandcamp | Boomkat
"Derived from the fiery Roma wedding music of Kavala, in northern Greece, eastern Macedonia," this album has been a steady companion for my ugly morning runs around the pond, and it delivered my favorite musical moment of 2024: Lale Pashmiri's accidental laughter in the middle of a hypnotic vocoded verse at the 1:43 mark of "Lali Lale". It's the sound of reckless abandon, ecstacy in its strict sense of escaping the body to join something greater, even if my running style is anything but.
Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee
Realistik | Bandcamp
This nostalgia-soaked opus will fill your living room with shag carpet, sploshed drinks, and overflowing ashtrays made of amber-tinted glass. At some point, it will soundtrack your grocery shopping, and you'll realize it's not an album, it's a haunting, the sound of a forgotten beehived girl group circa 1963, maybe the Rubies or the Sapphires, fooling around with the occult. As much as I've listened to this album, it shape-shifts and evaporates like an expertly blown smoke ring, and the only thing I can do is play it again.
Midwife - No Depression in Heaven
The Flenser | Bandcamp
Madeline Johnston's voice sounds like it's fighting its way through the static on a radio in the kitchen of a different decade. This is beautiful vapor, the afterimage of a flashbulb popping off after the encore of a band that littered the stage with only the finest reverb pedals.
Eat-Girls - Area Silenzio
Bureau B | Bandcamp
These ten tracks have nicely filled the DVA Damas-shaped hole in my soul. Spiky vocals cut through the coldest of waves, and it's a durable album for running through the frost.
Chantssss - Shyness
Theory Therapy | Bandcamp
The color blue in all its permutations, aquatic and airborne, and it inspired me to get with the spirit of the twentieth-first century and create my very first personal automation. Fifteen minutes before sunrise, this album plays throughout our flat. Sometimes I wake up to the sub bass. Most of the time it seeps into my dreams.
Dregs - Dregs
Purely Physical Teeny Tapes | Bandcamp
Seedy and a little tacky like remembering a night in 1994 when people earnestly said things like "trip hop" and "acid jazz" and "dub techno" and thought new hybrids of music would lead us to utopia rather than the inevitable flattening of everything into an endless sheet of liquid crystal gloss. But the production here is so plush and friendly that alright, sure, I'll sink into this corduroy couch with cigarette burns in the cushions while Strange Days plays on mute and you tell me all about the Information Superhighway.
Alva Noto - Xerrox Vol. 5
Noton | Boomkat
Dignified music for the right side of dawn. Stately orchestration woven with long threads of burning synthetics that conjure something beautiful entering an elegant room like Gerhard Richter's Woman Descending a Staircase in all her streaked glory.
