in Top Ten

We’re starting our top ten lists a little bit later than usual this year, which may affect my other lists, but not so much albums. It’s always the list I have the easiest time putting together at the end of the year, perhaps because I’m still fairly in tune with what’s going on in music these days, though the passage of time and the feeling of getting older never helps. But also, new music is just a lot easier to fit into the rhythms of your day-to-day than a new TV show or movie, and considering all of us have to fit our music listening habits into the constraints of our dayjobs, that certainly impacts what music we respond to.

For me, this was a year spent mostly listening to music while walking to work, riding the bus/subway, cooking, doing chores, or just enjoying a day off. Would I have responded to different albums in a year of different circumstances? Probably. But we’re dealt the year and the music we’re given, and these were the albums that intersected in just the right way with whatever was going on in my day-to-day.

Honorable Mentions:
Caroline Polachek – Desire, I Want To Turn Into You
Yo La Tengo – This Stupid World
Yves Tumor – Praise A Lord…
Sampha – Lahai
Hotline TNT – Cartwheel

10. The New Pornographers – Continue as a Guest

Now far removed from their ’00s heyday, I assume The New Pornographers are a band that most people don’t think about too much these days, at least in regards to their recent output. I was certainly in this same boat, as The New Pornographers’ last couple albums failed to sink their hooks in me all that deeply, settling a little too comfortably into an overtly new wave-inspired version of their indie power-pop sound.

Continue as a Guest feels a bit like a reset, as the synths have receded to the background, while at the forefront are strummy guitars and Neko Case and A.C. Newman’s interweaving vocals. It’s a sound that feels just fresh enough for a band whose strengths are always reliable, and they manage to sound like a truly cohesive unit here. I have to assume doing so was no easy task, since the current New Pornographers are scattered throughout various North American cities and apparently a lot of the album was recorded remotely during the pandemic.

9. Joanna Sternberg – I’ve Got Me

Sincerity is a tricky thing these days. It seems like everybody’s been so hardened by the past few years that it’s just easier to act cool and detached while still admitting that you’re “working on yourself”. Maybe that’s why Joanna Sternberg’s I’ve Got Me was such a disarming album, and honestly, still one that’s so sweet and unfiltered that there’s a part of its open-heartedness that makes me a little uncomfortable admitting my affinity for. But hey, it seemed better to embrace what this album is offering instead of pushing it away, since it expresses an artist’s interior thoughts and feelings with a clarity I haven’t heard in quite some time.

8. Kali Uchis – Red Moon in Venus

Kali Uchis has another album coming out in a couple days, this one being an album of all original Spanish language songs. This sets the precedent of her releasing a Spanish language album for every English album. I’m sure I’ll have a harder time getting into this new album than Red Moon in Venus or Isolation, since I unfortunately have never had that easy of a time getting into modern Latin pop music, but that’s on me! Either way, I loved the way she once again fused classic pop and R&B influences into a sound that felt like anything but a throwback. In a year filled with plenty of great chill albums, this was probably the most enjoyable for me to chill out to.

7. Jamila Woods – Water Made Us

Speaking of chill, Jamila Woods mastered a certain kind of effortless introspective cool on her first two albums, and while there aren’t any huge musical left turns on album number three, she gives us just enough new things for the album to feel part of a great, slowly-developing discography. The most noticeable difference on Water Made Us is that Woods delves a lot more deeply into past relationships and the way they shape people as they move forward.

This type of reflecting on the past feels like a definite product of the pandemic, as a lot of artists seemed to spend those years writing music quietly looking back on the bygone days they’d spent out in the world. And considering this is the first Jamila Woods album since 2019, that seems to be the case here. While this was probably the last year we’ll get these types of albums, they still have plenty of wisdom to shed on the way humans navigate the post-pandemic era.

6. Julie Byrne – The Greater Wings

This would be another album seemingly forged in the introspection of the pandemic years, though what a lot of its introspection is shaped by has continued to be a bit murky for me. The Greater Wings is inextricably linked to the death of Julia Byrne’s musical and romantic partner Eric Littmann, though it’s been a little unclear to me how much of the music was written after Littmann’s death and how much of it was actually influenced by this event.

But, regardless, it helped contribute even more to the album’s already long gestation time in relation to Byrne’s last release in 2017, which was also my number 6 album of that year. Much like this previous album, The Greater Wings was a great album to listen to in the morning, when the world is a little bit quieter and more still, and it was hard not to find some comfort in Byrnes’ spare compositions, regardless of how much the specter of death hangs over them.

5. Olivia Rodrigo – GUTS

I didn’t listen to a ton of pop music in 2024, perhaps due to a dearth of interesting work in the genre. Though at the same time, I’m not really sure what kind of music I listened to a ton of in 2023, as it feels like nearly every album on this list is in a different subgenre. And if that kind of genre confusion wasn’t enough, it feels like half the time GUTS is more preoccupied with being a straight-up rock album than the sad-sack piano pop that first brought Rodrigo to prominence. Which, as many a nostalgic millennial will tell you, is super cool! Who knows if Olivia’s influence will compel other pop stars to explore the kind of snotty pop-punk attitude of GUTS, but in this age of increasingly niche personal music tastes, it was really fun to get an album that pretty much everyone I knew found irresistible.

4. Wednesday – Rat Saw God

As I just kind of alluded to, I didn’t really listen to as many straight-up rock albums this year, which used to be my bread and butter. I think this is more because there aren’t as many rock artists as there used to be being discussed in the music circles I pay attention to, but also because less young musicians are picking up guitars and turning the volume up to 11. But when a great indie rock album comes out, well, it still has the power to move me.

The best example of that this year was Wednesday’s Rat Saw God, which admittedly I haven’t listened to a ton since the Summer, since the album felt like a hot, confusing July day, which made it a great listen for that part of the year. MJ Lenderman has turned into a dependable indie everyman, releasing a great solo album that appeared on my top ten last year, providing powerful guitar work here, and showing up on a just-released Waxahatchee single. However, the star of the show here is Karly Hartzman, whose vocals snarl and wail over the band’s shaggy instrumentation in a way that feels like a perfect match.

3. Margo Cilker – Valley of Heart’s Delight

I’ve made no bones about it over the years; my top ten lists tend to be pretty boring. It’s because I often gravitate towards a lot of critics’ favorites, perhaps because I seek this music out or maybe because that’s the way my ears have been conditioned. So it’s always nice when an album that didn’t show up on a ton of Best of the Year lists happens to show up on mine. In fact, Pitchfork never even reviewed this album. This is probably due to the fact that Americana/country music doesn’t get a ton of critical attention, but also because a more indie-leaning country artist like Cilker doesn’t have the platform of releasing her album on one of the bigger indie labels. Regardless, Valley of Heart’s Delight was a very comforting place to be throughout the Fall months, filled with great world-weary lyrics evoking the trials and tribulations of being a working musician married to the open road.

2. Noname – Sundial

After arriving on the scene with a decidedly sweet and optimistic approach to hip-hop, it seems like Noname keeps getting a little more cynical and jaded with each release. And yet, she has still managed to keep things extremely listenable. Every song is pulsating with brilliantly jazzy production, while Noname’s knotty verses see her in more control than ever, even if her worldview displays a sense of the general state of things spiraling out of control. It’s not an album packed full of hooks, but somehow that made it an even more compelling album to come to constantly, with its various shades of grooviness revealing themselves with each listen. Noname’s music just becomes more fascinating with each release, even if the brashness of her public persona is sometimes a little hard to grapple with.

1. Jessie Ware – That! Feels Good!

This album was, oddly enough, the last thing I ended up writing about last year despite it coming out back in the Spring of 2023. So I’m not sure I need to add too much to what I like about Jessie Ware’s That! Feels Good! That said, I am compelled to wonder why a retro-leaning dance-pop album ended up being my number 1 album of the year for the second time in a row (last year’s was Beyoncé’s Renaissance), and in particular, why it was once again by an artist whom I’d known for a while but had never connected with that deeply.

But my best guess has to do with being in my ’30s and having to wrestle with the fact that I am no longer a young person. Though at the same time, I don’t have kids or even pets, and therefore have the flexibility to more or less live just as fun of a life as someone in their 20s. So there was something a bit liberating about hearing someone like Jessie Ware, who is a little bit older than me, having a ton of fun on this record, but doing it in a way where she’s still aware of the fact that she’s a mom and not some flavor-of-the-month teen pop star.

So because of that, the stakes for creating truly indelible pop feels higher. And Jessie Ware absolutely rises to the occasion. More than anything, this was quite simply the album from last year that had the most songs I liked and the fewest moments that felt skippable. Just every song is so concise and infectious that they make you want to continue dancing into the new year and even in a month as depressing as January. If that doesn’t feel good, I don’t know what does.