Th Blisks exist in a world all their own. The Australian trio's second album, Elixa, is bizarre in all the best ways. Its unusual topography seemingly sprung from the mind of some great science fiction writer, and its unique sense of language (see band name, album title, any song title) feels explorable and endlessly intriguing. A lot of music this year felt like it was designed to either bludgeon you to death with its loudness or help you slip into some kind of dissociative fugue; Elixa attempts neither. Instead, it feels like an album charmed with magic realism: a perfect soundtrack for riding around the city and discovering something new, or adding a thin layer of psychedelia to your days spent at a boring email job. Plug in and Blisk out. — Shaad D’Souza

Valentino is the album you’d expect from an angel who's been sent on a quest to find the most beautiful woman in New York City, but keeps getting distracted by the city’s buzzing hip-hop scene. With his cherubic singing voice and fresh-faced enthusiasm, wolfacejoeyy stretches sexy drill into confectionery taffy, pop music sumptuous and sweet enough to send to your Valentine and your sneaky link. Blurring the line between love and lust in much the same way adolescent hormones and relationship inexperience might, the songs on Valentino are supercharged with sentiment, alternately tender and turnt up, incorrigible and infatuated, ready to fall head over heels at a moment’s notice. — Vivian Medithi

Ever since his breakthrough with 2019’s “Dumebi,” Rema has defiantly built a reputation as one of Afropop’s most innovative stars, whether by infusing Bollywood-influenced melodies into his work or flirting with horrorcore rap. It’s all come together to make him one of the genre’s most defining artists, culminating in the success of “Calm Down,” off his debut album, Rave & Roses, which launched him into a different atmosphere altogether. But HEIS is a gritty recalibration of his sound that pays homage to the early 2000s era of afrobeats and Nollywood with its moody aesthetic, militaristic verses, and macabre storytelling. It's a powerful repudiation of conformity, prioritizing freewheeling experimentation and world-building. At just 28 minutes, it's Rema’s most concise and cohesive. Fellow Benin native Shallipopi joins for a joyous dedication to their hometown on “BENIN BOYS” while rising rapper Odumodublvck spits a vociferous verse on the riotous “WAR MACHINE.” When he stands alone, Rema is almost deliriously celebratory. “YAYO” is a victory lap built around his material success and “OZEBA” reworks an old Nollywood horror flick into a moshpit-ready anthem. Afropop has been seeking a lodestar; look no further than Rema. — Wale Oloworekende

Supergroup rap albums often fall prey to severe bloating. This is not the case on A Dog’s Chance, an inspired, organic linkup between Atlanta-via-Brooklyn MC POLO PERKS <3 <3 <3, born-and-raised ATLien rapper-producer FearDorian, and Milwaukee flamethrower AyooLii. The project's core is Dorian’s proudly sample-snitching production, stretching the songs of MIA, Teen Suicide, and Israel Kamakawiwo’ole (among others) over the sturdy frames of four-on-the-floor drums and claps. The particular lightning it bottles, however, is the chemistry of its three creators: Polo’s stoned yet amped-up bars bouncing and colliding with Lii’s all-out, unhinged flow. At 17 songs that average less than two minutes, A Dog’s Chance is full of high peaks and fast drops. Wherever you’re sitting, it’s one of the funnest rides of the year. — Raphael Helfand

Underground hip-hop’s rising profile this decade has provided a much-needed counterpoint to contemporary street rap’s youthful rawness, but the scene often feels beholden to a dozen or so artists. Enter Cavalier. Cav isn’t a newcomer — 2018’s Private Stock was deservingly lauded — but Different Type Time, his Backwoodz debut and first proper album this decade, heralds his transition from rap’s periphery to the center of the underground. Drawing on neo-soul smoothness, Stretch & Bobbito-era experimentation, and abrasive New York slang in equal measure, Cav pivots from reminiscing on Polo-draped street legends to inspirational musings on liberation at the drop of a beat, never dumbing things down and always remembering to keep it fly. The beats, overseen by Detroit luminary and close collaborator Quelle Chris, are rooted in the rich traditions of hip-hop, R&B, and soul but land just off kilter enough to grab the listener’s attention, an inviting combination that stands out amid indie rap’s recent turn toward noise. A welcome addition to hip-hop’s creative vanguard, Different Type Time proves that Cavalier’s moment is now. — Son Raw

In the late '80s, Cherry Red released a series of compilation albums titled Seeds. These albums were intended to highlight the best music released between 1977 and 1984, and they each featured a specific genre — pop, art-rock, punk, etc. Listening back, they act as nice audio scene reports: interconnected networks of the best young musicians working at the time. I view Road Less Travelled, Vol 2, the latest compilation from the brilliant London label and club night Scenic Route, as having a similar function. Here’s a survey of all the best weirdo-pop from around the globe right now: A new song by Astrid Sonne and Fine, two of Copenhagen’s best new-ish songwriters; a shimmery post-punk cut from Los Angeles trio untitled (halo); a throwback to early PC Music-style electronic music from pig$ and Paige Savahn; and fragmented lounge music from Mark William Lewis. This is what the Billboard charts look like in my dreams. — SD

Dreamstate, the fourth album by Welsh producer Kelly Lee Owens, is crisp and cold, like stepping out into some remote forest that’s never been touched by the smog and the heat of the industrial world. Club music is often seen as a natural aid in losing oneself, but it can also help you find yourself, which is absolutely the case here: These 10 crystalline electronic tracks each feel like tiny breakthroughs en route to a moment of pure clarity. It could even be a very simple one. As Owens sings on “Ballad (In The End)”: “Life is mine, all that I know.” — SD

The beloved slowcore band Duster once described the emotional register of the fragmented, creeping records they made in the late '90s as a kind of “desperate, purring distress.” This approach has always loomed large in my conception of slow-moving rock music — while there are pillowy pleasures to be found in shoegaze and dream pop, there’s something unique evoked in playing extremely loud and incredibly slow. It’s the sound of stress and stuckness, unraveling slowly as each chord rings into silence. This is an energy that the Minneapolis trio Prize Horse are well attuned to on their debut album, Under Sound, 10 tracks of gnarled riffs and dead-eyed vocals that trudge through the heaviness of existence. The trio get loud — edging closer at times to the crushing weight of doom metal than traditional slowcore sounds — which only amps up the gloom. As feedback and distortion swell, vocalist Jake Beitel rarely raises his voice, detailing gnarly emotions with a resigned sigh. Life is distressing sometimes, and that’s not always a feeling you can outrun. — Colin Joyce

The debut album from NYC-based experimental pop songwriter and producer Shane Lavers exists in an in-between space, a combination of heavily computerized sound and audible human touch; it’s improvisational and intentionally unfinished-sounding. Playful elements like the slap bass on “Embarrassed Dog” are quickly absorbed into the odd tenor of the record and consumed by yelps, text-to-speech read-outs, and industrial-sounding drums. String sections are deployed with an orchestral precision, particularly on the sweeping instrumental title track, adding to the weird grandeur. Some of the uncanniness comes from Lavers’s naive-sounding vocals, which can either seem sweet (“If you love me, I love you more,” he sings on “Unifying Thought”) or conjure images of a herd of haunted children (“Police Scanner”). Even the lyrics have a bad-dream logic, beset by intruders and non-sequiturs. “You're not supposed to be here, how'd you get in the gate?” he asks troublingly on “I Think I Saw,” before resolving: “I'll commit to you.” An album that is, like its title, menacing and hopeful in equal measure. — ARR

For Spectral Voice, making murky, impenetrable, glacially paced metal is as serious as death. In an interview around the release of the Denver band’s second full-length Sparagmos, drummer and vocalist Eli Wendler put it simply: Their music is made to evoke “the despair that emanates from all life.” That’s heavy stuff, obviously, but fitting for the four cavernous pieces that make up Sparagmos, which are universally weighted down with the anguish of being alive. The shortest of the four tracks is the seven-and-a-half-minute “Sinew Censer,” but even at this length, the band is unrelenting and overwhelming, the agony in Wendler’s vocals made all the more chilling by the band’s stomach-churning riffwork. Sparagmos, however, is at its most compelling when the band slows down and spaces out, as on the latter half of “Red Feasts Condensed Into One,” which grinds their sound down to an ooze of percussion and noise. The title is a reference to a living creature being torn to pieces in the context of a Dionysian spectacle — a ritual of violence and sensuality. It’s an appropriate image for the collection of queasy riffs contained on the record; you may feel like you’re being torn apart too. — CJ

It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that Salute had the best house music debut of 2024. True Magic is really that: an eruption of precisely engineered sonic euphoria, purpose built to fuel a dancefloor. “Saving Flowers,” the U.K.-based producer’s chemically aligned single with Rina Sawayama, is big, bouncy, and just the tip of the record’s ecstatic explorations. There are also infectious join-ups with Disclosure and Sam Gellaitry — house royalty — and wackier collaborations like “go!,” which features Japanese artist Nakamura Minami. Empress Of also joins for the record’s obligatory top-down midnight serenade. Throughout its 14 songs, you’ll learn that whatever the shade of sound Salute chooses, one thing’s absolutely certain: The thumping 4x4 will always kick in at the right moment, sending you off to club nirvana. — Steffanee Wang

The world has been hard on Envy over the last decade. The Japanese band — long established as titans of the heavy music scene in their home country and influential figures in the nether-realms between screamo, shoegaze, and many post-metal mutations around the world—has had to deal with their share of instability. After a dynamic-altering lineup change in 2018, as well as shifts caused by the pandemic, and the destabilizing impact of a car accident that guitarist Nobukata Kawai’s daughter suffered a few years ago, the band were forced to confront their smallness in the face of an uncaring world. But what they found, per Kawai, was “a little hope.” Consequently, Eunoia, the album born in the wake of this rough patch, feels shockingly optimistic — full of sky-scraping guitar arrangements and dreamy melodies that edge closer to the pillowy realms of shoegaze that they’ve flirted with in the past. There’s still tension and catharsis, provided most evidently by vocalist Tetsuya Fukagawa’s tonsil-shredding squeals on tracks like “Imagination and Creation.” But the band feels more open-hearted and clear-headed than ever before, as if they’re reaching skyward, and feeling for the first time that someone might be there to reach back. — CJ

To use 2024 terms, Clairo’s Charm is very demure. Ditching the bedroom pop of Immunity and insular folk of Sling, the 26-year-old singer-songwriter's third album embraces sophistication: the elegant grooves of ‘70s-inspired psychedelic soul and studied musicianship. Very mindful and very polite. Upon release, its songs about romance, love, and desire won TikTok over, forcing Gen Z to rally behind jazz melodies, flute breaks, and quirky mouth-trumpet solos. That alone speaks to the preternatural gift Clairo possesses as a generation-bridging songwriter, but it's also proof of just how damn excellent the songs are. The four-song stretch of “Nomad” to “Slow Dance” remains unparalleled. Demure may mean modest, but that doesn’t mean it can’t hit hard. — SW

Tyla navigates superstardom on her own terms, hinting at the truly global future of music perhaps more than any African breakout star before her. On her self-titled debut, she weaves together afrobeats, pop, R&B, and amapiano while paying homage to her South African roots with a charm and warmth that’s uniquely her own. Helmed by a phalanx of super-producers, the mood of Tyla sways and switches energies from from track to track, demonstrating a joy for playful experimentation while shining a spotlight on the personality and perspective that’s hers alone. She challenges the Western idea of African music as a monolith and announces herself as a genuinely singular, genre-blurring pop star. — WO

Even as reggaeton scenes spread from the Caribbean to Colombia, Mexico, and around the world, there are still artists who are trying to capture the sound of the genre’s gritty underground roots. El Malilla weaves the spirit of old-school perreo with a swagger and slang that’s unique to his home country of Mexico, which has made the Valle de Chalco native one of the leaders of the burgeoning reggaeton Mexa movement. Following six years of generating buzz on a local level, he is starting to go global with his debut album Ñerostars. El Malilla embraces being a chacal, a "bad boy," in the horny club banger "B de Bellako" featuring Yeyo and the romantically alluring "Dime." In interviews, he has even admitted to turning an inside joke of his fans’ requests for him to “whip it out” into the freaky romp "Mali Sácatela." Reggaeton Mexa is the next frontier and El Malilla's Ñerostars maps out a path where the provocative, inclusive, and fearless can thrive. — Lucas Villa

Each of Julia Holter’s albums, from concept records like 2013’s Loud City Song and 2018’s Aviary to more free-form projects like 2012’s Ekstasis and 2015’s Have You in My Wilderness, sounds like the soundtrack to a film about some far-off and vaguely Earth-like planet, sort of familiar but intoxicatingly alien. Something in the Room She Moves, her sixth album, was written as Holter adjusted to becoming a mother for the first time, from the depths of lockdown, and, perhaps as a result of that forced isolation, it is as wildly imaginative as a fevered daydream. There are clarinets and graceful pianos, bright synths and dizzying swirls, and stone-still moments of startling quiet. On “Sun Girl,” Holter listens in on the human body and hears heartbeat drums, a fluid fretless bass, and breath-like flutes, turning a network of blood and organs into its own universe. Fascinated by what she’s found, she never leaves; the rest of the album seems as though it takes place beneath the skin, from the visceral disembodied voices of “Meyou” through the underwater calm of “Evening Mood.” And it’s on the latter that she repeatedly asks a question that seems to have guided her to such remarkable spaces for the past decade: “Am I listening? Am I listening close?” — ARR

Chow Lee got his rap name from Ken Jeong’s character in The Hangover, but his music more often channels Jason Statham in Crank, like he might literally die unless he gets laid right now. His euphoric latest SEX DRIVE sidesteps sexy drill’s usual sleaze thanks to absurdly over-the-top ardor and wickedly agile raps: Even at Chow’s most libidinal, you’re never far from a heartfelt declaration of short-term affection or an unexpectedly fluid run of laugh-out-loud bars. The production here is exquisite too, from warmly analog PowR Trav flips (“settings!”) to Cash Cobain-ordained dirges (“act bad twin!”), so exquisite that the most outlandish come-ons feel less sour than sweet (i.e., “How do you feel about being my side bitch?”). Paired with a cinematic lens for scene setting, SEX DRIVE envisions a quantum leap for hookup culture, where toxic masculinity is counterbalanced by slizzy femininity, and nobody ever gets their feelings hurt because they’re too busy getting under someone else — maybe even for more than one night. — VM

Mixtapes are spaces for rappers to try new things and publicly reflect: on their careers, their personas, and how they make music the way they do. Xaviersobased has never seemed like an artist concerned with probing anything too deeply — for most of the past two years, the NYC-based artist has been an iconoclast disguised as the life of the party, creating weird turn-ups contained in songs that run exactly as long as the brief, euphoric feelings they evoke. But in that time, xavier has grown from a buzzing SoundCloud account attached to the post-jerk scene to a vital voice of the global rap underground. keep it goin xav takes stock of his development: interview segments with the tape’s host DJ Rennessy are peppered across the tracklist, and his aqueous sound is brought to Marianas Trench-level depths. Convulsing drum patterns pervert golden age Atlanta trap on songs like “Special” and “KlkMiHijo,” “Google” casts a glitchy bop underneath xav’s addled flexes, and “On My Own” takes Miluawkee low-end to distorted new regions. Xaviersobased has always sounded like he’s having fun; it’s central to his success. Keep It Goin Xav proves he can throw a rager in uncharted territory and have it hit just as hard. — Jordan Darville

Nate Amos has made music under the This Is Lorelei moniker for years, but Box for Buddy, Box for Star is his most fully realized effort to date. It's a perfect encapsulation of his shiny, off-kilter indie-pop. Favoring pitched-up, auto-tuned vocals, Amos is a vivid and wordy storyteller. The songs are romantic, nostalgic, forlorn, and introspective: He reflects on regret and self-blame on “Dancing In the Club,” laments the enduring memory of someone in “A Song That Sings About You,” his struggles with addiction and his path to recovery on “Where’s Your Love Now,” and his youthful misfortunes and blunders traveling around Spain on “I’m All Fucked Up.” Throughout narrating his own regrets and mistakes, Amos always remains optimistic and rose-tinted, never succumbing to the darker memories of his past, keen to start over, anew. — Cady Siregar

The lavishly intricate soft-rock that Office Culture released over the past few years was, in hindsight, always going to lead to an album like Enough. Their last full-length, 2022’s Big Time Things, was thick with jazz chords and oddball key changes, tightly wound and deeply complex like a bespoke wristwatch made by some hermetic artisan. Lead songwriter Winston Cook-Wilson could only push that idea so far: Enough sprawls, taking its cues from long-form CDs from the late-90s and early aughts. Cook-Wilson fills that new space with insomniac songs, unhurried and intriguingly anxious, more akin to a glowing alarm clock than a wristwatch. Warped samples, glitches, and tape loops shimmer and shudder behind almost every track; Charlie Kaplan’s bass simmers beneath Ryan El-Solh and Dan Knishkowy’s conversational guitars, and Cook-Wilson’s vocals hum with latent interpersonal disasters that reveal themselves between ellipses. (“No excuse like failure / No abuse like time / Chalk outlines where we used to sit,” he sings on “Damage.”) But for all of its self-reflexive sadness, Enough never feels lonely, full as it is with collaborators and friends. On three occasions Cook-Wilson either cedes or shares lead vocal duties. On the closer, “Everything,” he and Jackie West sing the denouement together like a well-earned breath out: “Lose those dreams, the burdens that you bring / Let go, let go.” — ARR

Honey, Dan Snaith's first Caribou album in nearly five years, uses AI for almost all its vocals on the record and, while that sounds foreboding, in practice it’s cool to hear his feathery, falsetto vocals get transmuted into a PinkPantheress-like coo or anonymous female club track singer. But that’s only half the story. The other is that he reached deep into his pop music pocket to pull out a record that’s his most buoyant and dancefloor-ready yet. “Dear Life” is all drops, while “Campfire” could be Snaith’s version of an early-aughts-era boy band ballad. Some critics took issue with these changes to Snaith’s creative process, citing them as the work of an artist who’s lost his spark. But I think this is the clearest we’ve seen Snaith through his music: Honey represents what he’d do with no limitations. — SW

Like the great English freak folkists before her, from Vashti Bunyan to Richard Dawson, Naima Bock can make the British Isles sound like a still-uncharted territory. The songs on her sophomore album, Below a Massive Dark Land, are wild, rangy beasts, grown strong and thorny on the marshlands surrounding Glastonbury, her birthplace. On Bock’s last album, 2022’s Giant Palm, a cluster of backing vocalists served as a Greek chorus, giving voice to her doubts and insecurities; here, they bolster and barricade her words instead, lending force and vigor to the tender “Feed My Release” and campfire singalong “Takes One.” On the anthemic “Age,” Bock speaks with the many mouths of a nation, or of an entire generation: “And in your mind, your 20s never went away / And in your mind, your country never looked the same.” But the crown jewel of Dark Land is “Lines,” a reminder that, at its best, Bock’s music is like the mossy standing stones of a cairn: solid, timeless, imbued with the kind of magic that is implicitly known, even if it can’t be spoken. — Walden Green

Gliding between Diamond Jubilee’s 32 tracks is like flipping through staticky TV channels in a fever dream; attempting to return to a show you passed, you’ll find it gone. These are songs that come at you slantwise and wrapped in fuzz, but unswaddle them and you’ll find them fully distilled, the ultimate version of every form they come in: “Dallas,” for instance, is a waltz’s waltz; “Kingdom Come” is a ballad’s ballad; “Olive Drab” should be played at a disco’s disco. Some of these songs transport you to a dive bar where no one’s come to watch but the regulars. Others take you to your parents’ prom. Still others are carried on a gentle breeze to the beach where you’re sitting alone, remembering someone you used to love. The album’s most palpable thread is an infinite yearning — for lost friends and romances, to be sure, but more crushingly for all the days you’ll never have back and the nights you’ll never have at all. Cindy Lee, the artist and myth projected straight from Pat Flegel’s singular mind, delivers nostalgia’s nostalgia, stripped of all its niceties and mainlined in its purest form. — RH

Copenhagen’s Fine Glindvad Jensenolk writes hyperreal folk songs that offer a high definition rendering of the emotions beneath their sleek exterior. Fine’s music shares a similar sense of alien warmth found in the music made by her fellow Danish artists ML Buch and Clarissa Connelly; this is an album that feels equal parts fantasy and science fiction, a chrome-plated update on classic singer-songwriter practices. That same sense of timelessness can be found in the lyrics: “Losing Tennessee” skips between night and day to capture how love’s disconcerting effect erodes daily routine. “Days Incomplete,” meanwhile, sounds like a chopped and screwed Joni Mitchell, as melodies flutter in half-time through the treacly production. The beauty of Rocky Top Ballads lies in its ability to create a womb-like atmosphere where past, present, and future dissipate. All that is left is an uncanny feeling of familiarity and warmth. — David Renshaw

Katie Crutchfield renders everyday nuance into unconventional, vivid poetry; her songs are meticulously crafted but feel as textured and unvarnished as driftwood. On Tigers Blood, her sixth studio album, she eases further into the cinematic roots music that garnered her so many new fans around 2020’s Saint Cloud. Producer Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Kevin Morby) returns along with banjoist brother Phil (Megafaun, DeYarmond Edison), while MJ Lenderman, the new crown prince of country-rock, brings languid harmonies to the gorgeous “Right Back To It” and complementary guitars to the rest of the record. It’s authentic and uncompromising, worthy of comparison to Lucinda Williams and Jason Molina. But there’s a punkish edge to Crutchfield too, something in the howl on the chorus of “Bored” and the unflinchingly emotive lyricism of a song like “365” that traces a faint line back to the emo kid of P.S. Eliot and American Weekend. In Crutchfield’s hands, such moments serve less as a reminder of the past than as proof of the human capacity to grow and transform. — ARR

The glowing core of experimental composer Félicia Atkinson’s music has always been its intimacy. Delicate close-mic’d whispers, the thumps of sustain pedals, and quiet inhales of breath make each record personal and private — there’s an almost voyeuristic quality to the sounds she chooses like you’re snooping in a loved one’s diary as much as you are hearing a record. Despite the vastness implied by the title of her latest record, Space As An Instrument, it's one of her smallest-feeling and most focused records — employing these component parts in such a way that emphasizes the homespun and hand-worn qualities of her sound. Even at its most spacious — like on “Shall I Return to You,” when she swims out into a puddle of disorienting synth programming— you can sense her careful touch, keeping it from drifting into a formless ambiance. Some ambient music aims for skyscraping pathos, but Space As An Instrument is grounded and real, the work of a solitary figure sitting in a room, writing a diary, and hoping that someday someone might crack it open. — CJ

Step into Fabiana Palladino’s cabaret, and watch as she performs death-defying balancing acts of genre — R&B, italo disco, dream pop, ‘70s AM gold — and commands the most serpentine of grooves (“Closer,” “Deeper”) with ease. Across most of her self-titled debut album, the Paul Institute member and daughter of Pino Palladino is hypnotically cool and impenetrably chic. Her perfectly coiffed hair and cuffed suit sleeves evoke the house singer for your city’s hottest secret club — and she denies everyone entrance. And yet, it’s the moments when Palladino lets her ivory mask slip that are the record’s most compelling. “I Can’t Dream Anymore” is a desperate howl at the moon, and on slow-burner “Give Me A Sign,” Jai Paul’s Princely guitar flourishes are put to their best use since his last solo singles all the way back in 2019. “I just wanna turn back,” Palladino coos, before her voice turns steely again. “Don't ask me why.” Stars — they really are just like us. — WG

Mk.gee’s 2020 mixtape, A Museum of Contradiction, was a polished and technically proficient guitar project searching for an identity. Something shifted after his star turn as a collaborator on Dijon’s 2021 debut Absolutely; Two Star & the Dream Police is the sound of all the window dressings being cast aside and new air let in. The album’s title sounds ripped from a movie poster in a casino level from a 3D Sonic The Hedgehog game, and the album’s sound has a similar vividity, transmitted from a place where space-age gospel melodies transform ‘80s electronic textures; a Prince demo rediscovered by Jai Paul. Mk.gee’s ascent — sold-out shows, appearances on Late Night, ubiquity in the videos of the most stylish TikTok creators — reified our desire to escape pop’s era of interpolations and machine learning and hear something not just new, but assured. On Two Star & the Dream Police, Mk.gee doesn’t just sound self-actualized — he sounds unstoppable. — JD

Rafael Toral’s triumphant return to ambient guitar music after two decades in the world of electronics is a rainforest that sprouts over the course of 47 minutes from the seedlings of six sweetly plucked strings. Verdant but minimalist, simple but teeming with life, it’s exactly what we talk about when we talk about soft noise. Spectral Evolution spreads in myriad directions — sometimes in grand gestures but often so smoothly it’s subliminal. Listen closely and you can hear sparkling signals deep below the surface: a muted string struck or a dissonant note placed among the long tones to ripple your reverie; a familiar chord progression or passage of bird song to ease you back into it. The chirps we hear on Spectral Evolution sound like field recordings — this illusion is nudged along by the record’s cover — but Toral claims he created them from thin air using a modular synth that’s been a favorite of his for years. More than an album, it’s a ground-up recreation of the world as Toral sees it, an alternate planet I wouldn’t mind living on. — RH

Amen Dunes meant to write about life, but only death came breaking through. Death Jokes, his fifth album, very slowly reveals itself, making a puzzle of death. While we traditionally think of music as something irresolvable, Death Jokes is like a jigsaw puzzle. It consists of character vignettes and seemingly scatter-brained samples — including soundbites from J Dilla, Lenny Bruce, and the highly influential French music teacher Nadia Boulanger — which somehow fit together like latticework. Listening to Death Jokes should inspire furious cognitive activity: What does this sample mean? How does it fit with this? And how does that tie into this whole puzzle? The answers are hard to grasp, sometimes teasingly so, but that’s just how life goes. It’s a backbreaker. It’s a joke. — Emma Madden

The bops on Ayra Starr’s sophomore album just don’t let up. It’s not often that a record about meeting adulthood is so bright, but the majority of songs on the Nigerian singer’s blended Afrobeat-R&B effort flow high. She’s counting up her bills on the fable-like opener “Birds Sing Of Money,” putting her foot down on bad romances on “Last Heartbreak Song,” and seeing her future get big and limitless on “Commas.” I guess that’s what happens when you become one of the breakout stars of Nigeria’s rich alté scene at 19: You can focus your energies on locking down your confidence (“I don’t watch my tone ‘cause I like how I sound, bitch”) and cultivating a form of girlbossery that isn’t cringe (“Follow the woman commando”). Even in the project’s few contemplative moments, Starr continues to bet on herself: “I’m counting on myself now, crying by myself now.” Generally, turning 21 is finding yourself planted firmly on the edge of a precipice, looking down at how far you can fall; Starr’s eyes are trained nowhere but up. — SW

It’s been an absolutely fabulous year for bread-and-butter indie rock, which makes it all the more surprising that The Neon Gate — the brilliant fifth album by Halifax four-piece Nap Eyes — seemed to pass so many people by. It’s one of the best indie records released this year, a patient odyssey held together by lead singer Nigel Chapman’s inviting baritone. In these ambling, vast, 90s-adjacent songs you’ll find valiant horses and weary birds, as well as adaptations of poems by Pushkin and W.B. Yeats, braided together into one of the most affirming, fascinating journeys to be had on this list. — SD

The title of d0llywood1’s digicore opus cribs from the suicide note of Swedish black metal legend Dead. This would normally scan as a dull attempt at outrage farming through secondhand shock, but for d0llywood1, whose sludgy strain of digicore finds reprieve from racism and transphobia in the omnipresent American specter of gun violence, invoking Dead’s spirit seems less like a provocation and more like an acknowledgment. Some of us are marked from the moment we’re born, losers in colonial and cosmic lotteries who nevertheless will love and live regardless. If that doesn’t exactly sound triumphant, try listening past the endless walls of distortion hiding her everyday victories away from prying ears, cognizant that vulnerability can be a strength and a weakness alike. This is just a Dream (and soon I will awake) doesn’t sound like the end of the world as we know it; it’s the sound of refusing to die in the world we already have. — VM

Latin Mafia — a genre-blurring trio of brothers from Mexico City — are showing there are no limits to Latin music and that there's certainly more to the music scene in Mexico than música Mexicana. Mike, Emilio, and Milton de la Rosa swerve through different genres across their 12-track debut, Todos Los Días Todo El Día, while riding a rollercoaster of emotions. EDM, rock, and flamenco form a cyclone in the chaotic "Siento Que Merezco Más," which talks about the pressure of living up to high expectations. The trio taps into trap for the primal "Qué Vamos a Hacer?" that dissolves into a baroque pop fusion. Milton and Emilio later channel Frank Ocean with their soulful voices in the breezy R&B of "Me Estoy Cayendo." As the group's producer, Mike blends elements of música Mexicana with hyperpop in the vulnerable "Yo Siempre Contesto." His twin brothers sing about killing the doubts that are weighing them down in the punk rock-infused "Sentado Aquí." They turn their fears and frustrations with fame into a kaleidoscopic, swirling album as chaotic — and ecstatic — as their lives. — LV

At the start of 2024, it would have been easy to group Fontaines D.C. in with the clump of British and Irish post-punk bands trading in Sprechgesang vocals and a loosely-held sense of political discontent. With Romance, the Dublin lads put an ocean between themselves and their identikit peers, stepping out in neon sunglasses and gel-spiked hair with a sound nodding to both Lana Del Rey and Korn. It is the sound of a band hitting their fourth album and defiantly refusing to fall prey to the traps that face mid-career artists: repetition, safety, and lack of inspiration. From the swaggering, half-rapped panic attack of “Starburster” through to “Here’s The Thing,” with its rock idol riffs, Romance takes big swings and reaps the rewards. The album ends in celebratory fashion with the gleeful “Favourite,” capping off one of the year’s most enjoyable reinventions. — DR

Wake up. Open your laptop and wipe the screen with your sleeve. Double-click on your computer’s Spotify application. Press play at random on an algorithmically recommended album. “BYE BYE” plays, and a voice drones out a list of different products over a trap beat that’s been flayed alive; close the four tabs containing articles about different impending environmental catastrophes to free up computer memory to shop on Amazon. Complete the order. Open Twitter. Scroll as “I Don’t Miss My Mind” wails, Gordon’s straightjacketed flow riding on the wings of banshees. Find the most toxic trending topic and scroll until your brain feels like an evil caveman’s swallowed in a bubbling tar pit; “I’m A Man,” Gordon’s prescient shoegaze-tinted dissection of the manosphere’s motivations, growls with pyrrhic triumph. Check the time. About 40 minutes have passed, and you hear an alarm noise. Check the song that’s playing on Spotify: “Dream Dollar,” from Kim Gordon’s The Collective. The alarm pulses through your computer’s dying speakers, but it just as easily could have been coming from your real life. — JD

When Rosalía broke out in 2018 with her modern flamenco record El Mal Querer, it felt like a pillar of tradition that had broken loose had clicked back into place. Palestinian-Chilean singer Elyanna’s debut album Woledto, which slickly merges traditional Arab sounds with pop — like, Lady Gaga pop, as opposed to Caroline Polachek pop — feels the same way, braiding together tradition and modernity in dizzying new ways. Like Rosalía, Elyanna has a voice of molten lava that rises and runs, blazing through anything in its path; like Rosalía, she is alchemizing two disparate realms together with blinding effect. Songs like “Al Sham,” “Mama Eh,” and “Lel Ya Lel” churn with 808s, mijwiz, and electric guitar as she sings passionately about love, relationships, and home (“Sad In Pali”). Bold, ingenious, and a match for the current moment, Woledto is nothing short of essential. — SW

Though the debut album from the Berlin-based producer naemi brings fragments of many different genres into its crackling, lively atmosphere, it can still be understood as ambient music. And while ambient is a genre created to soundtrack existing spaces, the ambient of Dust Devil feels made for better, more inclusive areas just beyond our reach. Here, the project’s diverse range of guests — including Erika de Casier, Huerco S, and Perila — contribute to a vivid internal life; they aren’t so much collaborators than aspects of a whole personality, switched together with sheer, unbreakable thread. It doesn’t matter if Dust Devil veers into glitch (“Lasagna Box (Ashley’s Theme)”), hypnagogic pop (“Couch Angel”), or a grunge demo (“Day Drifter”); it’s all in service of the same diverse, diaphanous album, a collection of warm and accessible avant-garde sounds capable of opening a new — or perhaps just neglected — chamber of your heart. — JD

Prior to his untimely passing in October, Brownsville emcee Ka authored an extended deconstruction of America’s decline and the street-level violence it engendered, as refracted through a series of concept albums. At first glance, The Thief Next to Jesus fits comfortably within this framework, using its focus on gospel music and the Black church to reflect on the cruelty of systemic poverty and its downstream effects. But whereas previous albums like The Knight’s Gambit and Honor Killed The Samurai deployed the distance of their themes from contemporary street life to creative ends, The Thief... features no such abstraction. An unflinching examination of both Black resilience and how the church promises salvation in exchange for tithes, Ka aims his pen at vapid industry rappers, white supremacist legal structures, petty betrayals, and hypocritical preachers. What makes this medicine go down smoothly is Ka’s unparalleled talent as a writer and musician, with every triple entendre carefully considered and a minimalist take on sampling that’s since been borrowed by every crime rapper with a Bandcamp. A brilliant capstone to a sterling career cut short, The Thief Next to Jesus is righteous fury unleashed. Amen. — SR

The mere existence of I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair is a triumph, though more of a stagger over the finish line than a celebratory trophy lift. Homelessness, heartbreak, and grief have all shrouded Christopher Owens’ life since he last released a solo album nearly a decade ago, and the new music offers an enlivened if wounded perspective. “Not one more song where I'm pretending everything will be okay,” he sings on “No Good,” his voice notably deeper than his days as the frontman of Girls, when he was a golden-haired indie rock idol content with pizza and a bottle of wine. Despite a loss of innocence and (some) hope, Owens doesn’t surrender his music to despair. His “tears have been my both day and night” but optimism still brightens the corners of an album in which Owens finds comfort in his ability to make music (“This Is My Guitar”) and his belief in an afterlife (“I Think About Heaven”). Uplifting gospel crescendos and sprawling, loose arrangements surround him as he picks up the pieces of his former existence and confronts what it means to keep going. “Life doesn’t care,” he sings between twinkling guitars on “Beautiful Horses.” It’s a sentiment that suits him, bruised from confronting the depths and grateful that such moments are fleeting. Life doesn’t care, so why let the past stop you from moving forward? — DR

The music of DJ Anderson do Paraíso is menacingly seductive as soon as needle hits wax. A detuned bass note kicks off opener “Sadomasoquista” as a leering voice introduces us to our protagonist: a woman whose kinks will not be left to the listener’s imagination. But one doesn’t need to speak Portuguese, or even read the title, to taste the song’s thickly oozing sleaze. This effect is achieved with very few materials beyond the rapped vocals: sub bass that inches in and out of tune, serving as the track’s only low-register percussion; a warped woodwind’s minor-key melody; clipped chirps; a moan; and the low-sung word “queridão,” a term of endearment akin to “darling.” The tagline, always delivered the same way, appears throughout his masterful Nyege Nyege debut, a 17-track compilation of new and previously released songs. (The Belo Horizonte, Brazil-based baile funk producer has been uploading to SoundCloud for a decade now, but Queridão marked his de facto introduction to northern-hemisphere non-obsessives.) Equal parts sweet and sinister, it perfectly captures the album’s black-hearted essence. Other forms of baile funk — most notably the bruxaria strain of São Paulo mandelão — achieve battering percussive effects without drum tracks, but Anderson and his Belo Horizonte scene conjure apparitions, drawing beats from negative space that hit like earthquakes. This is music for the underworld’s biggest rooms, a sound that will make you forget there’s no dance floor below your feet. — RH

Ravyn Lenae is a preternaturally gifted vocalist. That’s been clear since she emerged from Chicago as a high-school junior almost a decade ago, a vast range and effortlessly resonant tone guiding her as she searched for her own sound. After a handful of promising early EPs, she thought she’d found that sound on Hypnos, her 2022 debut LP, a deep-blue and self-conscious R&B album. But she wasn’t comfortable. She’d limited herself, placed too many rules on her music. “I was like, ‘This is an R&B album. It has to be that,’” she said in her FADER cover story earlier this year. On Bird’s Eye, its follow-up, she goes exploring, trying out the full range of her influences. Aided by Dahi, the producer behind Kendrick Lamar’s “Money Trees” and Drake’s “Worst Behavior,” she experiments with neo-soul, indie rock, hip-hop, avant-pop, and reggae. She mostly uses these genres as vehicles to explore romantic relationships from different angles — yearning, lust, melancholy, bliss — and adjusts her tone on each track to match the subject matter. She shows a proclivity for edginess on “Bad Idea” and “1 of 1,” but duly yields to more delicate tracks like “Dream Girl” and “Pilot.” Then there’s “One Wish,” on which Lenae reflects on a complicated relationship with her too-often-absent father and comes up with no easy answers (“I can’t forgive you / No matter how hard I try / I can’t forget you”). She practically whispers it, stretching out every “you” like a child sobbing alone in her bedroom, trying to stay quiet enough that her sadness won’t carry through the walls. — ARR

The promise of a pop album that shows the real person beneath the superstar is one of the industry’s most enduring scams. Most of the time it’s a fig leaf, a trite marketing line used to conceal the same mediocre iterations of sounds you’ve been hearing for a year or longer. Born in the Wild is that rare and glorious exception, a journey through the internal wilderness of its author suffused with startling intimacy and sonic mastery. It balances the triumphant, polished armor that is Tems, one of the biggest Nigerian music stars in the world, with the person it’s protecting: Temilade Openiyi, a young woman who endures at least as hard as she struggles.

Paranoia, guilt, and self-doubt stretch across Born in the Wild. The only way out, Tems sings in the title track, is through, believing in diamonds when all you see is rough. “I could hold on to the past and be absolutely mad,” she confesses on “Burning,” “But I let go of my sins / I just searchin' for my wings.” The album’s candor even gives a new perspective to the global smash “Love Me JeJe,” transforming the glowing Afrobeat from a tender wine with a loved one into a plea: “Because I need and I need and I need and I need you more.” This is the music of her heart, unmistakable, sizzling amapiano and Sade-level soul sitting next to post-SZA R&B and even an early ‘00s NYC rap joint, delivered with the catharsis of an exorcism. Such a display of personality and talent has healing properties, something Tems seems aware of on the closing track “Hold On”: “This is for the one with a voice inside / Don’t need to run, when you can break through.” — JD

The characters of MJ Lenderman’s fourth studio album have all seen better days. In “Joker Lips,” a hotel janitor cleans cum from hotel shower drains; the protagonist of “She’s Leaving You” is so depressed after his divorce he gambles away such a large fortune the casino offers him his room for free; and the priest on “Rudolph” is so sexually frustrated he contemplates leaving his religion to chase after a girl. Lenderman is sympathetic to the plights of his lovelorn individuals, but he narrates their misfortunes with more cynicism than empathy. With his slacker charm and lo-fi Americana guitar playing, the Wednesday lead guitarist does not revel in their misery the way, say, Morrissey does in his lyrics, but acknowledges that their strife is mostly self-inflicted, painting several caricatures of masochistic males who have probably gotten what they deserve. Lenderman is a witty lyricist and songwriter, with a keen fondness of dry, disaffected humor and zany pop-culture references: Mentions of the Himbodome, John Travolta’s bald head, and a destroyed Lightning McQueen make for memorable visuals in the world he has crafted so vividly. As narrator, Lenderman conveys emotional vulnerability while making it clear his protagonists can’t: “Yeah, you know I love my TV, but all I really wanna see is see you need me.” Even after hundreds of listens, it’s a natural reflex for us to finish the lyric with “all I really wanna see is see you near me” — but Lenderman is one step ahead. — CS

The long autobiographical essay that accompanies Night Palace is a fascinating thing on its own. Like so much of Phil Elverum’s music since leaving behind The Microphones and picking up as Mount Eerie, the piece is self-reflexive and thoughtful, idiosyncratically conversational, and, in parts, devastating. It’s a fitting accompaniment to an album that itself sweeps through the vast expanse of Elverum’s catalog. Night Palace is a successor of sorts to The Microphones’ The Glow Pt. 2 — another ”world in itself, interwoven with atmosphere and mystery,” Elverum writes — but it’s richer and more expansive for the years that have passed in between. The front half of the 26-song album takes its time to come to life, stretching out like a black bear waking up after a long winter, but “Swallowed Alive,” a loose black metal track featuring Elverum’s daughter Agathe on terrifying lead vocals, snaps things into focus. The rest of the album’s first 50-odd minutes is beautiful and diffuse, a breeze blowing through “Broom of Wind” and the airy “I Walk,” a Zen-like calm beneath “I Heard Whales (I Think)” and “I Saw Another Bird.” On “I Spoke With A Fish,” Elverum does, in fact, speak with a fish, and it’s as funny as it is quietly profound (“I told a fish: ‘I like how you move through the water as one flowing muscle’ / The fish said: ‘I dig your style too, man’”). On the back half, he goes places he’s never gone before in his music, writing explicitly about the ethical and moral concerns that have clearly lived between the lines of his lyrics from the beginning. But “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization,” “November Rain,” and “Co-Owner of Trees” don’t read as didactic. Instead, shouldering the weight of drones and drums, they are vital. There is fury at “stolen wealth [...] built on screaming bones” and a proud “allegiance to nothing at all / But the burning present moment.” Eventually he has a dream “of co-ownership of everything / beneath the trees that I share with the infinite.” Among hundreds of little epiphanies on Night Palace, that one feels transcendent. — ARR

The grandiose ambitions of Clarissa Connelly’s music and mythic imagination hardly exist anywhere else today. The Scotch-Danish artist’s second album World Of Work, which takes its name from George Bataille’s Eroticism, contains the high-minded grandiosity of ’70s prog rock with the poise and sensitivity of a sage. World Of Work is one of the year’s most epic endeavors. It’s an album that mirrors the arc of existence itself, beginning in a place of disorientation and confusion (“Into This, Called Loneliness”) before coming into its own (“An Embroidery”), then grasping on to a moment of beauty amidst existential irresolution (“Wee Rosebud”) and ending in apocalypse (“S.O.S. Song Of The Sword”). The album slowly gathers meaning, as a child acquires language, and burns as furiously as someone running from their grave. If, like me, your all-time favorite albums are Sinead O’Connor’s The Lion And The Cobra, Tori Amos’s Boys For Pele, and Kate Bush’s The Dreaming, this may be the greatest thing you’ve heard in years. It’s ascetic and voluptuous, terrifying and ecstatic. It has the power to turn loneliness into holiness, and I’m no longer sure where I’d be without it. — EM

After a few years atop the mountain, singing to the angels, and grasping desperately at a euphoria that’s always out of reach, Bladee is back among the people. And he doesn’t like what he sees. He says exactly that on a pair of tracks that sit at the center of the downcast Cold Visions, both of which are titled “I DONT LIKE PEOPLE,” and feature a hook that has him intoning the title in a zombified chant. “First things first,” he raps on the latter of the two tracks, “This the part where it gets worse.”

Profoundly antisocial and grimly profound with it, Cold Visions weaves the abstract flexes that have become hallmarks of the Drain Gang founder’s last few records with meditations on violence and the growing burden of existence in a dark world. As he puts it on “D.O.A” — a brief track that, thanks to Skrillex, features some trance-inflected synths that mark one of the records brighter spots musically — he’s moving with a “dark cloud around my head” that he just can’t seem to shake. Cold Visions is emotionally curdled and unrelentingly intense, largely free of the breathy ballads he’s seemed to favor over the last few years — a return of the Bladee who once promised to show up to your house party with a crew of weird guys in tow, if he even feels like coming to the party at all. — CJ

“Not a single motherfucker who has tried to lock me up could get the collar round my neck,” Marisa Dabice sings on Mannequin Pussy’s defiant and furious “Loud Bark.” It’s a line that underscores the confrontational side of I Got Heaven, an album that acts as both a celebration of freedom and a warning shot at the oppressive forces that seek to diminish the agency of others.

The Philly punk band still have a ramshackle energy that they use to torch oppressive thought (“OK? OK! OK? OK!”) but I Got Heaven also features some of the band’s most clean and melodic songs to date. They are rightly enraged with misogynist scorn (“Loud Bark,” “I Got Heaven”), while also offering liberation from personal shame with soft yet explicit songs exploring desire. Both “I Don’t Know You” and “Split Me Open,” written by Dabice after the end of a relationship, drape a silk sheet over the hard edges found elsewhere on the album. Broadly, though, I Got Heaven is a razor-sharp scythe aimed at fields blighted by the weaponization of religion and regressive societal trends. Dabice and her bandmates refuse to cower in the face of such limitations or outside beliefs, loudly declaring their own terms and identity. “I’m a waste of a woman / But I taste like success,” Dabice sings at one point, standing tall among a wave of tradwives and manosphere ghouls. That message of defiance in the face of tyranny will ring out loudly far beyond the end of 2024; by proudly standing alone, Mannequin Pussy made the most unifying album of the year. — DR

Witnessing Charli xcx this year was like watching a star being born, flaming into a supernova, and collapsing into a black hole over and over and over again. Although she’s always been hard to look away from — the quintessential IYKYK favorite, who’s tended to attract outsized attention from fans and critics compared to her actual commercial success — in 2024 Charli presented her own stardom as both invitation and threat: Look away at your own risk. As she flexes on “360,” she’s always set the tone in one way or another, but Brat felt prophetic in a different way, acutely predicting the ways in which social discourse would collapse and be remade this year. This is an album about saying what you mean, finding clarity in gray areas, and partying like you might die tomorrow; it is genuinely unfiltered and real in a way that pop records basically never are anymore.

That being said: put an asterisk next to "pop." Although this is a mainstream album through and through, it most clearly exists in the lineage of Kanye West's 2010s work — specifically Yeezus and The Life of Pablo. It channels Yeezus' same burn-it-all-down energy, and its deep desire to be adored; its same harshly rendered version of French house and its same wounded, stream-of-consciousness lyricism. Brat's messy, revisionist remix album felt deeply in tune with Pablo's insistence on being as current as possible at any given moment. Kanye comparisons usually feel incredibly cheap, but Brat suggests that Charli might be his only true heir, creatively. She, more than any ephemeral buzz artist who rose in the past decade, has proven a willingness (or is that stubbornness?) to chart her own course until the mainstream submits to her will.

Because, although this album seems like a forgone conclusion now, make no mistake: it’s risky. It’s uncomfortable to hear Charli blithely joke about suicide, heartbreaking to hear her mutter about whether or not she should have a baby, genuinely shocking to hear her describe, in detail, her fractured relationship with another pop star. And that was the record’s brilliance, in the end: unlike other pop, which begs you to sympathise with billionaires and nepo babies, Brat forced you to take stock of your own desires, feuds and failures. Nobody this year was more brazen, more brilliant, more honest, more abrasive, more stupid, more genius, more rabid, more chic, and more totally necessary. — SD

The defining sound of 2024 is a blown-out kick drum, clipping through speakers at max volume until your ears submit. From dj ess remixes to tdf albums, OsamaSon singles to d0llywood1 mixtapes, abrasive, overdriven low end seemed a proverbial line in the sand, delineating where unbelievers are turned away and the diehards declare themselves. #gigi, the far-ranging debut album of Nottingham-via-L.A. rapper-producer skaiwater, might be the most accessible of these various subwoofer stranglers, but that shouldn't be mistaken for easy listening — these songs swerve from one subgenre to the next at breakneck pace, smudging familiar sounds into an impressionistic blur.

#gigi is an album where two truths can coexist without contradicting each other, pushing past simple binaries like "love or money" and "underground or pop." And this is assuredly pop music — skaiwater told me in June she writes her songs through all a capella first, how "Michael Jackson used to," though her vocals more immediately recall Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert at their most tender. The familiarity of her flow and her toolkit (chopped-up soul, pop-punk melodies, drums cribbed from baile funk and jersey club rhythms) keeps #gigi from skewing too far into esoterica, always close to a grandiose instrumental or a perfectly wailable hook.

Of course, the real secret sauce isn't in #gigi's musical omnivory or its precisely fucked up mixing ("we gna brainrot together twin"). It's the conscious, repeated choice of vulnerability over mythmaking, unashamed to weep in the shower at the Hilton or admit she still wants someone she shouldn’t. These are not coy confessions, but loud declarations: do it like this, I don’t like that, I need you, I love you, stop you’re hurting me. skaiwater’s feelings are so big they almost make her 808s seem small — even when the bass overwhelms the mix in a bid to communicate the sheer volume of her emotion. But that romanticism shines through in softer moments too, like on the refrain to “run,” when skaiwater chides a soon-to-be-ex, “You can’t stay inside, I can tell it’s affecting your whole brain.” Even this blunt diagnosis is nested in empathy: Won’t you come outside? Where it’s bright? Have the time of your life? Withdrawing from the world might help us survive but the courage to connect allows us to live. Nothing outside can cure us, but everything’s outside. — VM