Lounge
Best albums of 2024: Kendrick Lamar, Peter Cat Recording Co and more
Summary
From moody indie-rock to industrial noise, these albums are a snapshot of the expansive geography of pop music
It’s never easy to distil a year’s worth of music listening into a neat list of 10 (or even 50) albums. But putting together this year’s best albums list has been particularly hard. 2024 was a year of left-field surprises, with brash upstarts and underground favourites regularly stealing the spotlight from some of the industry’s most bankable names. We had a new generation of wildly inventive pop starlets stake their claims to the crown, a brutal power struggle in hip-hop that enraptured rap fans, a long-overdue reckoning with country music’s racial politics, and a steady stream of genre-blurring, envelope-pushing albums from the unlikeliest of scenes and places.
The 10 albums that made the final cut range from moody indie-rock and industrial noise to rambunctious rap and spectral dance music, offering a snapshot of the expansive geography of pop music in 2024. In no particular order, here are my favourite records of the year.
Jlin—Akoma
Indiana producer Jlin’s 2017 album Black Origami was a masterclass in rhythmic innovation—spectral drum machines, polyrhythmic percussion and discordant synths coming together to form dark, sepulchral sonic structures that sounded like Aphex Twin overdosing on Chicago footwork. On Akoma, her first proper album in seven years, Jlin brings her experimental dance music into conversation with modern classical music, drafting Philip Glass, Kronos Quartet and Bjork as collaborators. Expressionist piano and chromatic chamber strings are warped, chopped up and wrangled into place alongside relentless, shape-shifting percussion in gothic, architectural compositions. This is music that makes you think even as it makes you move.
Sisso/Maiko—Singeli Ya Maajabu
Sisso has spent the past seven-odd years holed up in his studio in Dar Es Salaam, cooking up some of the fastest dance music on the planet. The producer is one of the best-known exponents of Singeli, a style that draws from Tanzanian genres like mchiriku and taraab, but revved up to hyper-speed velocities. On Singeli Ya Maajabu, Sisso and keyboardist Maiko up the ante even further, bringing in ideas from footwork, baile funk and hyperpop to create a fevered, futuristic soundscape of jagged percussion, manic treble and blown-out, abrasive synths. It’s deliriously fun.
Kim Gordon—The Collective
Kim Gordon may be 71 years old, but the former Sonic Youth songstress remains the epitome of alternative cool. On The Collective, she leans further into the noisy hip-hop she experimented with on 2019’s No Home Record, layering tossed-off stream-of-consciousness rhymes over Justin Raisen’s colossal, abrasive industrial-trap beats. Loops crash into each other like monster trucks at a derby, guitars droning with claustrophobic distortion, as Gordon sing-speaks about overpriced potatoes, TikToking kids and toxic masculinity in a deadpan drawl. It’s a record that reveals the chaos, paranoia and dysphoria that lurks under the glossy, hypercapitalist UI of modern life.
Rafael Toral—Spectral Evolution
In the summer of 2022, I picked up a copy of Rafael Toral’s Aeriola Frequency from a Lisbon record store at the suggestion of a Portuguese friend. Released in 1998, the album was made from a feedback loop with no input—it is, quite simply, the music of electricity. Spectral Evolution is a more intentional record, Toral shaping his guitar and synth sounds into eerie facsimiles of bird-sound, wind ensembles and storms of wah-ed out sound. But it still retains that sense of wondrous experimentation, as he assembles a blissed-out soundscape that draws equally from his avant-garde free-improv electronics, 1940s jazz and 1990s shoegaze. There’s nothing else out there that sounds quite like this.
Excise Dept—Sab Kuch Mil Gaya Mujhe Vol. 1
Excise Dept are ostensibly a hip-hop act, but the influences evident on their debut album range far and wide—you can hear hints of 2000s Pitchfork indie, 2010s trap, 90s Bollywood, Punjabi folk, all interspersed with samples and references to ancient Buddhist scripture, 20th-century Indian film and 21st-century memes. The trio blend all these influences into a chaotic, relentlessly dystopian sound that provides the backbeat for their English-Punjabi-Bengali meditations on identity, nationalism, and the corrosive violence that defines contemporary India. The music is experimental but not bloodlessly cerebral. Instead it feels vital and necessary—a love letter to a country that’s busy tearing itself apart.
Tyler, The Creator—Chromakopia
Tyler, The Creator broke into mainstream consciousness as a confrontational rabblerouser with a keen eye for snot-nosed provocation. But starting with 2017’s Flower Boy, he has evolved into one of contemporary hip-hop’s most thoughtful, inventive and emotionally complex artists. Chromakopia is the 33-year-old’s most introspective and vulnerable album yet, as he grapples with adulthood, fame, and a growing awareness of his many foibles over disorienting beats that lurch between 1970s zam-rock, lush G-funk, Beach Boys harmonies and 1980s r&b. Meticulously crafted and achingly raw, Chromakopia is the work of an alt-rap auteur at the peak of his creative power.
Peter Cat Recording Co—Beta
Beta, the latest album by New Delhi band Peter Cat Recording Co, opens with the compressed, distorted sound of two faraway nuclear explosions. Then silence, followed by ghungroo, swarsangam, clarinet and acoustic guitar notes coming together to form a shimmering, pastoral wash of sound. It’s masterful scene-setting—modern destruction set against bucolic beauty—that foreshadows one of the record’s key themes, but also offers a great encapsulation of the band’s new sound. Beta is a stunning, kaleidoscopic record that moves between disparate sounds and eras—old-world folk, 20th-century jazz, space-age synths—as it grapples with existential fears and personal failings, all while grasping for a better, more hopeful future.
Kendrick Lamar—GNX
Coming towards the end of a year when Kendrick Lamar sucker-punched Drake—thrice!—in the biggest, meanest, most culture-shifting rap beef of the 21st century, you could forgive GNX for being an extended victory lap of an album. Instead, we get Lamar at his hungriest and most prickly in years, as he takes up arms against everything and everyone who has ever wronged him—online haters and critics, idols-turned-detractors, even the capitalistic, appropriative edifice of contemporary hip-hop itself. GNX recasts Lamar from reluctant saviour to salty, pugilistic anti-hero, laying waste to all challengers and revelling in his newly reconfirmed status as a hip-hop GOAT.
Still House Plants—If I don’t make it I love u
On the face of it, If I don’t make it I love u is a record that just shouldn’t work. It takes the cerebral polyrhythms of math-rock and imbues them with the emotional heartbreak of 1990s emo. It marries the martial drums and jagged, angular guitarwork of no wave and noise-rock with the incantatory blues of Jeff Buckley and the soulful warble of Nina Simone. It’s postrock filtered through the lens of dub music and avant-garde electronica. We’re often presented with a false binary between the abstract conceptualism of experimental music and the emotional immediacy of pop. Still House Plants refuses to choose between the two, and ends up creating the best guitar music to come out this year.
Waxahatchee—Tigers Blood
On her sixth album, American singersongwriter Katie Crutchfield (aka Waxahatchee) returns with a warmer, more polished iteration of her indie-Americana sound. The music on Tigers Blood consists of slow-burn fireside jams and anthemic sing-alongs, over which Crutchfield sings about monogamy, addiction and her commitment to a creative life in tender, elliptical verse. M.J. Lenderman—whose own 2024 album Manning Fireworks deserves its flowers—sits in on guitar and backing vocals, his roots-rock guitar lines and freeranging harmonies perfectly complementing Crutchfield’s woozy croon. Expansive, warm-hearted and full of razor-sharp insight, Tigers Blood is a brilliantly endearing ode to human resilience and the power of companionship.
Bhanuj Kappal is a Mumbai-based writer.
