Now let’s take a look at some of the more recent albums that transitioned us from Winter to Spring to Summer. As you may notice, a lot of these albums are a bit more high profile or ones I had already been anticipating, but well, those are just the albums you end up listening to the week (or month) of their release. Hopefully, there will be a few more low-key albums out there from this first half of the year that I’m able to catch up with as the year progress. And who knows, maybe I’ll end up writing about them at year’s end.
For the first three albums, I don’t need to go too in-depth with them, since I already praised them on episodes of The Pick. But they’re albums so nice, they’re worth talking about twice.
Waxahatchee – Tigers Blood
Waxahatchee’s 2020 album St. Cloud built on Katie Crutchfield’s already strong songwriting prowess by creating something more comfortable and effortless, and in the process became one of my favorite albums of the decade so far. It was also an album that saw the indie rock veteran embracing her country roots in a way that felt surprisingly authentic compared to the way most established artists “embrace their country roots”. Considering how much I loved that previous album, I wasn’t really expecting this one to surpass it, and at this point, it hasn’t for me. Still, I’m impressed by the way Tigers Blood is able to keep going to the same sonic well as St. Cloud while still feeling fresh and honest. Crutchfield continues to infuse her songs with a clarity reflective of her sobriety and laid-back rustic life, while the backing band behind her (including current favorite MJ Lenderman) somehow manages to sound both cozy and electric at the same time.
Beyonce – Cowboy Carter
There was a small chance that Cowboy Carter, with its outsized ambitions that saw a beloved pop star venturing outside of her lane, could have been the moment where Beyonce finally bit off more than she could chew, but of course, that’d be an ill-advised wager. Sure, it’s not quite the all-bangers triumph that Rennaissance was, but conceptually and in terms how these songs meld country, pop, R&B, and Americana, it’s one of the more fascinating pop albums in recent memory. It’s an album where Beyonce feels very surrounded by other artists on the country fringes (from Shaboozey to Miley Cyrus to Post-Malone) along with cameos by likable institutions like Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, but where her own fortitude never gets lost in the mix. While conceptually the album tries to sound like a border radio show, its “everyone on the floor” vibe also manages to make it feel like one giant funky hoe down where even the gatekeeping naysayers are invited, even if they won’t be spared Bey’s wrath.
Vampire Weekend – Only God Was Above Us
There isn’t much that gets my aging millennial bones excited like a rousing new album by Vampire Weekend. After the more sprawling and shaggy Father of the Bride from 2019, the band returns with the kind of precision and experimentation that we’ve come to expect from these guys over the years. Still, getting an album this good from Vampire Weekend at this point was by no means a sure thing, since despite the fact that I liked Father of the Bride quite a bit, it didn’t quite stand alongside the band’s first three classic albums. Only God Was Above Us sees the band diving into a lot of the various sounds and lyrical touchstones of those records in self-referential ways that somehow avoid feeling indulgent, perhaps because the album’s mind-bending production sees them continuing to push pop, rock, and indie music (not to mention every other genre imaginable) into all sorts of hard-to-categorize directions.
Chastity Belt – Live Laugh Love
This artist might not have the same name recognition as the previous three I talked about, but they have been a band I’ve always kind of known of but never delved that deeply into. This is because Chastity Belt are longtime veterans of the Seattle music scene, though never entirely broke out of that scene despite putting out consistently melodic indie-rock that has gotten janglier as the years have gone on. Live Laugh Love is about as breezy and lovely of a guitar-driven record as I’ve heard this year, yet is so assuredly mellow that it’s just as easy to take for granted as Chastity Belt’s other records. Perhaps due to the dearth of great traditional-sounding indie rock albums this year, or possibly due to how confident the band sounds here, this one has stuck with me. It also doesn’t hurt that the song “I-90 Bridge”, about biking over the song’s titular bridge, can’t help but bring a very particular feeling of longing to this ex-Seattleite who feels like he’s always crossing an I-90 bridge in his mind.
Yaya Bey – Ten Fold
Yaya Bey’s debut album was filled with the kind of R&B I’m looking for these days: both classic and forward-looking, not too indulgent, full of irresistible grooves, and sneakily catchy. Ten Fold, the follow-up album from the Brooklyn-based singer is very much in the same vein, while the disjointed nature of Yaya’s relatively short songs feels appropriate for the album’s subject matter. Much of the album is influenced by the death of Yaya Bey’s father, but much like Hurray For The Riff Raff’s The Past Is Still Alive, this isn’t really a depressing album. It’s about finding wisdom in the words of those that you were lucky enough to know, and applying to the here and now. In the process, the album feels a bit like a collection of diary entries, and yet the production throughout is often pristine and groovy enough that it always contains more unpredictability and joy than a mere album-length elegy.
Dehd – Poetry
Dehd first popped onto my radar with their 2020 release Flower of Devotion, which established them as one of the more propulsive and jittery indie bands around. Since 2020 was just a blur of massive amounts of great music being listened to from the confines of my apartment, the album’s modest ambitions didn’t stick with me quite as much as a lot of the other music from that year. But lately, Dehd’s new album, Poetry has been a cool sugary treat, perfect for this sunny time of year with its undercurrent of surf-rock beating beneath its call-and-response vocal acrobatics. There’s a part of me that feels to some extent that every Dehd song sounds a little bit like the same song reconfigured into a different equation of plucky guitars and effervescent rhythms, but when the formula still continues to work as swimmingly as it does here, it’s pretty hard to complain.
Charli XCX – brat
As I mentioned in my last post, 2024 so far has seen its share of releases from the biggest pop artists around. They’ve run the gamut from pleasantly retro-leaning (Billie Eilish’s HIT ME HARD AND SOFT and Ariana Grande’s eternal sunshine) to befuddlingly dull (Taylor Swift’s THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT and Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism). Though it hasn’t been out quite long enough for me to come to a definitive consensus, brat by Charli XCX might end up being the pop album of 2024 (even if it still succumbs to these other albums’ tired use of capitalization or lack thereof). Or at least, brat might be the pop album of 2024 that actually came out during 2024, since it’s hard to deny that Chappel Roan’s 2023 release The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess is having a moment this summer that feels well-earned.
Anyways, Charli XCX has been at it for over a decade at this point, creating bangers dancing defiantly around the edges of mainstream pop. And while this probably won’t be the album that pushes Charli to another level of fame, at this point, it doesn’t really matter. She’s been consistently entertaining in her search for new kinds of maximalism, and brat’s embrace of dance music and club culture is by no means a surprise, but it’s still filled with enough strangely catchy sounds that it bears repeated listens to fully appreciate. I’m not sure I quite like it as much as some of Charli’s other albums (I’m a big fan of the retro camp sounds of 2014’s Sucker and 2022’s Crash), but the surprising self-reflection wedged between the album’s party anthems reveal a new side to Charli XCX that feels like a welcome next step for her.