To paraphrase Colin, while TV and movies were dealt another brutal blow by the strikes last year, the music industry felt fully back in swing as we closed out the first half of this decade. Finally, it seemed like there was more going on than songs about isolation during the pandemic or leftover relics from the 2010s! Perhaps not coincidentally, this corresponded with era of girl pop hitting its zenith (or perhaps merely just new heights) with Spotify’s data showing that women dominated the lists of most-streamed artists, songs, and albums of 2024. On top of that, long-dormant artists like Camera Obscura and Jamie xx showed up with pretty good new albums and others, like The Smile and Charley Crockett, couldn’t help but put out multiple complete LPs. I’ll just say it, 2024 was an embarrassment of riches!

But here’s what’s freaking me out: at the end of every year, I scoop up a bunch of albums from other “best of” lists and cram them into my ears as fast as possible so I can make the actual, definitive, best top 10 list on the Internet (not really, usually I crap out and make a big apologetic post). The thing is, at some point in late 2023, I definitely did stream The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess and yet not only did Chappell Roan *not* make last year’s list, I totally forgot about her until the Guts World Tour turned this sleeper hit into a smash.

Of course, the second time around I fell in love with Chappell Roan like everyone else, and her follow-up single “Good Luck, Babe!” was 100% my #1 summer jam, despite allegations of it being a BRAT summer. But there are precious months where I could have been way more on top of my shit instead of wasting my time on the mental gymnastics that could justify THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT as really good, actually. So what does that mean? What lesson have I learned from this humbling experience? Listen to new music more times, I guess. Don’t be a boring old guy? Oh no, more on that later!

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Much like the rest of 2024, I’m still not quite sure what to make of the year in music, even though it is officially, entirely, completely over. Once again, we here at Mildly Pleased would like to take more of a moratorium approach to a year after it’s completely dead and gone. None of this posting a Best of the Year List in November nonsense. Or maybe we just increasingly need the extra time for list-making when our lives continue to make keeping engaged with new music, TV, and movies harder by the year.

Anyways, as usual, music was the easiest medium for me to feel like I was on top of, especially when this year had the most to offer in terms of rewarding releases, since TV and movies were still reeling from multiple industry-wide strikes that happened last year. Still, I sometimes felt a bit on the outside looking in on the year in music, just because this year felt so pop-dominant (thanks, the algorithm). And while I did appreciate pretty much all of the year’s big pop releases, not a ton of them will be making my list. Instead, a lot of it will once again be pretty indie-centric, even if this year didn’t feel quite as rewarding for releases just a bit below the radar. Continue reading →