THE YEAR OF MUSIC, 2024: The Big Review

“Without music, life would be a mistake,” writes krautrocker Freddie ‘Phat Mo’ Nitzsche in Twilight of the Idols, his subplot about the entertainment industry. But, returning thoughts and feelings to 2024, I'm not sure he's right. At least not in a literal sense. From a big city perspective, from a money perspective, it wasn't a great year. What did we get?
A country album from Beyoncé.
Which, yes, passed the test of time, showed that she can do it, and so on and so forth, and damn, Ms. Beyoncé did good.
But hoping for a little roughness, a little sweat and relish, something tangible and legitimate, I hit the PLAY button on this year's albums from Jelly Roll and Post Malone.
So what else did we have in '24?
Let's look into the eyes of the Taylor in the room. There was too much of the saintly Taylor - who will save us all - Swift.
The Billboard album charts opened in 2023 with a director's cut of “1989,” her 2014 album. When that rerun faltered and she finally lost the sales battle, Swift ran a celebrity overload ad campaign, setting up a date with a guy at the Super Bowl.
Then, after tea-drinking the Murican heartland, she retook the Billboard throne in May with The Tortured Poets Department album.
I can love the music, art, or literature of someone whose political views or personal behavior appalls me, but my problem with Vultures 1 topping the charts (or Vultures 2, the non-chart-topping sequel) is that it's just not crazy enough. Where are the masterpiece tracks like “Wolves,” Kanye West's skillfully stripped-down gangsta-maronite primal fusion epic from 2016's The Life of Pablo? This year's attempt is just . Not as good.
But there were some positives in 2024. There just weren't as many of them on the big stage. They weren't in prime time. They were at more modest events, like a house party in Seattle's University District as we watched Black Ends work to create impulses more akin to psychotic spasms than marketing.
You might like our picks for music year candidates. Or conversely, you might not like it. You might even want to meet us in the parking lot tonight to reflect your difference of opinion.

Albums of the Year

SABRINA CARPENTER
Short n’ Sweet (Island Records)

It seems like Sabrina Carpenter came out of nowhere. Of course, she didn’t. She was on a few Disney Channel shows from 2014 to 2017 and has continuously released albums since 2015. But it’s her sixth album Short n’ Sweet, released on August 23, that propelled her to the upper echelons of mainstream pop culture. The songs are undeniably catchy, honest and at times, unexpectedly snarky. It’s no wonder her first three singles—“Taste”, “Please Please Please,” and “Espresso”—made the top 5 on Billboard’s Top 100 in the same week. The only other group to have done that is the Beatles.
– Charles Moss

KACEY MUSGRAVES
Deeper Well (Interscope/MCA Nashville)

After chronicling her marriage and eventual divorce on 2021’s superlative star-crossed, Musgraves hit the reset button with aplomb on Deeper Well, which deftly splits the difference between more intimate, acoustic guitar-led fare (the gorgeous title track, the almost R.E.M.-ish “Cardinal”) and expertly produced, acutely felt odes to the promise of real, enduring love (“Jade Green,” “Too Good To Be True”).
– Jonathan Cohen

SAMARA JOY
Portrait (Verve)

The young-sensation jazz singer could have followed her Best New Artist Grammy for her Linger Awhile album of a couple years ago simply by sticking with the “new Ella Fitzgerald” tag some gave her. Nope. She wants more. Just listen to the beginning of “Reincarnation of a Lovebird,” where she wrote words to a very challenging Charles Mingus melody, which she sings with remarkable richness and daring agility, a cappella for a full two minutes. It’s hardly standards fare. Elsewhere she mixes material from Sun Ra, Barry Harris (a college mentor of hers) and some originals by her and her bandmates with a few buried treasures from the American Songbook, all given vibrant settings by the ace septet she’s assembled and cultivated. Ella would be impressed. And proud.
– Steve Hochman

THE SMILE
Cutouts (XL)

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood continued their sizzling hot streak in offshoot band The Smile, whose Cutouts conjures a beguiling, alternate OK Computer-verse where bangers such as the head-spinning “Zero Sum” and the darkly grooving “The Slip” would be as familiar to millions as tracks by Billie Eilish and Shaboozey.
– Jonathan Cohen

IMMANUEL WILKINS
Blues Blood (Blue Note)

Following two brilliant albums as a leader, and dozens of collaborative and sideman gigs, Philly-born saxophonist Wilkins — just 27 — leaps to the forefront of the jazz vanguard with this bold, distinctive album derived from a multi-media theater work. Working for the first time with vocalists — Ganavya, June McDoom, Yaw Agyeman and Cécile McLorin Salvant — Wilkins expands his core quartet to explore generations of cultural wounds and look to healing connections in a breathtaking presentation. Even without the chef who cooked on stage through the theater production.
– Steve Hochman

CHARLI XCX
BRAT (Atlantic Records)

BRAT captures a feeling of raw and unapologetic chaos reminiscent of gritty, sticky dance floors. A proud retaliation against the “clean girl” aesthetic of 2023, the songs celebrate surpassing carefree to reach careless — and if some mornings (or late afternoons) you find yourself picking last night’s glitter off your shoulders, then so be it. This album is the beat shaking the club bathroom’s stall door.
– Sofia Goldstein

NUSRAT FATEH ALI KHAN & PARTY
Chain of Light (Real World Records)

People will tell you Qawwali is an acquired taste. And, you know, it’s hard to argue — it’s a mystical, rhythmic, repetitive singing-based music built on sacred Sufi texts, complemented by completely nonsense sounds to enhance the aural effect. It’s gorgeous. Quite literally divine. Nusrat was the foremost Qawwali vocalist by the time he died in 1997, revered in his native Pakistan and by East Asian expats all over the world, and curious westerners. And this 4 songs, just over 40 minutes album is, in more ways than one, a divine gift — it’s as fresh and transporting as his earlier masterpieces, and it comes to us from the afterlife. Recorded in 1990, his label, incomprehensibly, lost the tapes, only finding them recently.
– Bob Guccione Jr.

Musicians of the Year

SABRINA CARPENTER

The former Disney Channel star’s irreverent sense of humor and flirty persona have been at the forefront of her music since her 2015 debut LP, but never have they clicked in such a compelling way than on Short n’ Sweet, which is one of the best and most listenable pop albums of the decade. As comfortable delivering metaphor-rich twang (“Slim Pickins”) as she is dirtying up delicious, electric guitar-heavy kiss-offs (“Taste”), Carpenter cradles your heart and then pierces it with the cold, hard truth.
There’s great depth lurking just below the surface of Carpenter’s songs. To wit, the devastating couplet “don’t smile because it happened, baby / cry because it’s over,” which is being DMd to umpteen fuck bois across the planet at this very moment.
– Jonathan Cohen

MJ LENDERMAN

MJ’s only 25, but his music sounds timeless and lived in. If you went in blind, you’d be forgiven for thinking tracks like “Rudolph” and “Wristwatch” were written 30 years ago, when the alt-country movement re-emerged with bands like Uncle Tupelo and Whiskeytown. But there is a freshness to his music and that’s what makes it so compelling. Though he’s released three solo albums prior, it wasn’t until this year’s Manning Fireworks that Lenderman broke through to mainstream stardom. When he’s not playing to sold-out crowds and doing the talk-show circuit, he’s collaborating with the likes of R.E.M., Jason Isbell, Phish, and others for Hurricane Helene relief. Lenderman’s star is rising and it’s getting brighter.
– Charles Moss

KILLER MIKE

Following the phenomenal success of 2023’s Michael, a Gospel infused rap, autobiographic-ish juggernaut of an album, Mike jumped into the top tier of hip hop artists globally. He swept the major rap categories of the 2024 Grammys — and was immediately arrested, for earlier pushing a fastidious security guard who wouldn’t let Mike enter the artists’ door. So now Mike was Gangsta too!
Michael also won Album of the Year at the 2024 BET Awards. In August he released Songs For Sinners and Saints, recorded with his Gospel Choir The Mighty Midnight Revival, a 10 track album positioned as an “epilogue to Michael.” It’s a great record. He played all over the country, including, enigmatically, six nights at New York City’s legendary jazz club Blue Note. He played Lollapalooza, Outside Lands and the Newport Folk Festival. And that’s been his greatest accomplishment in 2024 — he’s the ultimate rapper at the top of his game and class, and is never out of place wherever he goes.
– Bob Guccione Jr.

TAYLOR SWIFT

We do not live under a rock. We know about Taylor Swift. She may not be Pearl Jam, who we seem to be strangely umbilically tied to, but Taylor, to date childless but not catless, as she showed in her articulate endorsement of Kamala Harris that immediately increased young voter registrations by hundreds of thousands, is the musical Colossus that bestrides the Earth.
She utterly dominated music in 2024. As she did in 2023. Only the Beatles ever dominated music as thoroughly as she does. She won Grammys and MTV Video Awards, and, I think, but you’d have to check, swept all six Nobel Prizes as the venerable Swedish Academy just gave up and said, “oh, what the hell…” She released an album, The Tortured Poets Department and made it a double album hours later. Who even thinks like this? Who else could be supported like this? By the end of her historic, mind-bogglingly successful Eras tour she will have done 83 dates across the world this year, one of which, in Munich, in the national soccer stadium, she performed before 74,000 fans, with a further 50,000 outside, listening in.
– Bob Guccione Jr.

MESHELL NDEGEOCELLO

With three decades of groundbreaking work to her name, Ndegeocello had a career year. Her No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin (which originated as a multimedia stage production) was one of the most powerful and creatively distinctive albums of the year. She also produced Immanuel Wilkins’ Blues Blood (also from a theater presentation, also one of our albums of the year) and captained the galaxy-cruising Sun Ra tribute album Red Hot & Ra: The Magic City.
– Steve Hochman

Songs of the Year

SHANNON AND THE CLAMS
“Real or Magic”

Shortly after her fiancé Joe Haener’s untimely death, Shannon and the Clams’ Shannon Shaw received a visitation from him. “I think it was him saying goodbye to me,” she told me, in our May interview on spin.com, describing Joe as “completely bathed in light.” But was it real or magic? That’s the question the band allows us to explore together in one of the most beautiful and bittersweet songs ever recorded, off of their 2024 album The Moon Is in the Wrong Place. Shannon’s performance is one of the best of the year.
– Liza Lentini

WAXAHATCHEE (FEATURING MJ LENDERMAN)
“Right Back To It”

“Play a song about fucking!” an annoying friend yelled at a band between every song at a gig one night. The band of grizzled veterans was purely instrumental — no vocals whatsoever — but I guess they complied, because each tune lit a low, dark fuse that eventually had punters wanton and clawing at each other. But times change, raw desire is dangerous and dangerous is irresponsible and irresponsible is unethical and unethical is abusive and so on and so forth, hence we now have 30- and 20-somethings like Waxahatchee and MJ Lenderman singing like 70-somethings, all tender, wistful and nostalgic, with due respect for people who just want to sway a little. And they do it so well. It really is the love song of a generation that has been fixed.
– Matt Thompson

RAPSODY
“3:AM” featuring Erykah Badu

On her 2024 masterpiece Please Don’t Cry, Rapsody paints perhaps the most comprehensive picture of Marlanna Evans, her given name, showing her fears, insecurities and past. On the exquisite “3:AM”, featuring Erykah Badu, Rapsody reflects on a failed romantic relationship over the soothing sounds of soulful R&B. Badu offers the hook, which complements the song’s neo-soul vibe. The duo took “3:AM” to The Tonight Show, where their deep musical connection was right on time.
– Kyle Eustice

EMINEM
“Houdini”

The lead single from The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce) is eerily reminiscent of 2002’s “Without Me” from The Eminem Show, and leans hard into the nostalgia factor. Eminem plays into it with lyrics like, “My shit may not be age-appropriate/But I will hit an eight-year-old in the face with a participation trophy.” The song is a reminder that he’s still got it, and obliterates the notion that rap is only a young man’s game.
– Kyle Eustice

BILLY JOEL
“Turn the Lights Back On”

Remember Billy Joel’s 2007 single, “All My Life”? That’s okay, we don’t either. Maybe that’s why it took him 17 years—and much coaxing by producer, songwriter and superfan Freddy Wexler - to release the stunningly beautiful “Turn the Lights Back On.” Joel returns to classic form in this nostalgic tune about rediscovering the long-lost passion you thought was gone for good. It’s simple yet elegant, with his signature piano style and a subtle strings accompaniment reminiscent of his classic 1977 album The Stranger.
– Charles Moss

Breakout Artists of the Year

JELLY ROLL

For the past 20 years, this genre-jumping, heavily tattooed, Nashville-based musician has steadily built a following. In 2024, as he blasted into the mainstream. He sold out arenas, dazzled at TV awards shows and festivals such as Stagecoach and CMA Fest, and collaborated with stars from Lainey Wilson and Eminem to Falling in Reverse and Wiz Khalifa. The cherry on top was his album Beautifully Broken, a potent brew.
– Daniel Kohn

SABRINA CARPENTER

Carpenter’s sold-out tour in support of her album Short n’ Sweet proved why she’s risen to the vanguard of pop performance. The show’s ingenious set design revolved around the interior of a retro-cool penthouse apartment, complete with a three-story window, two spiral staircases, a fireplace and, of course, a fur-covered, circular bed on which she belted out “Bed Chem.” Add in a heart-shaped conversation pit, one song performed while sitting on a toilet and clever interstitial videos evoking the Playboy channel and old-school infomercials, and it’s clear why Sabrina quickly leapt from headlining clubs to leading entire sports arenas in cheeky, profanity-laden singalongs.
– Jonathan Cohen

FAYE WEBSTER

Painfully shy and wielding self-deprecation as her artistic métier (some with biting humor, some with bitter sorrow), Atlanta’s daughter didn’t seem poised for a big breakout. But as youngsters (and not-so-youngsters) flocked to the post-breakup wit and sadness of her recent Underdressed at the Symphony album and appreciated her musical flair, she unexpectedly blossomed as a live performer, earthier than Taylor or Billie and, for the time being, more intimate.
– Steve Hochman

CHARLES LLOYD

At 29, sax and flute player Lloyd had a breakout year for the ages, establishing him a one of jazz’s true stars. Of course, that was 1967. He’s had another one now, at 86, with his The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow album and concert appearances showing him to be as freshly and affectingly creative as ever. It’s part of a remarkable, perhaps unprecedented run of breakouts in recent years, with acclaim and honors piling up. He’s still got that rookie-of-the-year spirit.
– Steve Hochman

THE YEAR IN MUSIC, 2024: EDM

In 2024, musicians such as Charli xcx improbably topped worldwide charts with a cheeky remix album, and U.K. upstart Fred again.. sold nearly 78,000 tickets for a stadium show in Los Angeles. Even Billie Eilish hit the club with an extended version of the jam “L’AMOUR DE MA VIE” from her new album, while Tale of Us co-founder Anyma became the first EDM act to stage a residency at Las Vegas’ sensory overload Sphere. Pop that molly at your own risk, y’all.
The more left-of-center delights took a little sleuthing to uncover. Yes, Four Tet can hold his own when selling out arenas in tandem with Skrillex and Fred again.., but his music remained as thoughtful and emotive as ever on the outstanding Three, which he celebrated in May with a two-day mini-festival under (where else?) a highway bridge in industrial Brooklyn. If his “Skater” and fellow U.K. electronic legends Underworld’s “Black Poppies” can’t melt your freezer-burned heart, we don’t know what to tell you.
Honorable mentions go to Floating Points’ first proper dance album in five years, the blippity/bloopity delight Cascade; Justice’s Hyperdrama, highlighted by two monster Tame Impala collabs; and Kaytranada’s TIMELESS, which hit almost all the right notes despite the presence of a few too many mainstream guest vocalists.
When it comes to dance music discovery, no platform is as elite as NTS Radio, which continues to champion outstanding creators operating criminally below the radar. Our favs? Wallace, whose classic house- and techno-inspired tracks throb, vibrate, duck, weave and radiate the elemental pleasures of getting sweaty with the fam of your choice; DJ Moxie, whose love of breakbeats equals her passion for hipping listeners to their next favorite track; the Red Laser Records crew, whose rare Italo disco vinyl, acid heat and boogie bombs will stump your Shazam every time; and underground tech-house maven Boulderhead, whose I Need Space To Dance EP will force those hips to move like they haven’t been exercised in ages. See you in the gaff.

Year of the CD

The tiresome snobbery of the vinyl mafia might have convinced you that the compact disc, first introduced in Japan in October 1982 and the rest of the world in March 1983, was dead and buried. This seemed confirmed by reports that vinyl recently overtook CDs for the first time here as the biggest selling physical format for music.
But in the United Kingdom sales of new-release CDs have risen for the first time in two decades. In the UK the CD still outsells vinyl. In the digital age when every track you could possibly think of is now available to stream, why are CDs coming back?
CDs account for roughly one-fifth to a quarter of all sales on the world’s biggest music online marketplace, Discogs, where there are over 20 million CDs for sale.
Yamaha has released a new five-disc player, the CD-C603. Facebook groups, like CD Collectors & Music Lovers, Compact Disc Collectors Cave, and The CD is Alive have tens of thousands of members. Popular YouTuber Cheap Audio Man implores viewers to: “buy CDs right now… before it’s too late.” And online prices are increasing.
The inescapable fact is used CDs are dirt cheap compared to vinyl and represent astonishingly good value for anyone starting a music collection. And the best place to start, of course, is thrift stores, where It’s possible to walk away with 40 or 50 premium-quality CDs for less than the price of single new vinyl record — months of listening. And on a good day you might get seriously lucky: entire catalogues of old jazz labels such as Verve, Concord or Blue Note, or bundles of classic rock or soul/funk, prohibitively expensive on vinyl.
I collected vinyl as a teenager and offloaded 10,000 or so records for a song in my early 20s simply because I preferred the sound of CDs and their ease of use. I now own about 7,000 CDs and have no regrets switching formats. The trick to CD collecting today is timing. Get in before the prices jump. The revival was always inevitable because the technology was brilliant and cycles of nostalgia have a habit of not forgetting the things that once made life so wonderful. Streaming cannot eclipse the sound that comes from a quality amplifier, speakers and CD player. Hearing Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly or Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain on SACD (Super Audio CD) might just change your life.
But best of all, CDs offer a very affordable gateway to the real buzz of collecting: the sheer joy of discovery. An algorithm on Spotify can never match the thrill of chancing upon an artist you’ve never heard of while rifling through a stack of unloved, secondhand CDs in a cardboard box at a flea market.

- Written by SPIN Team - spin.com