In our age of algorithmically-tailored listening habits, it’s difficult to hail any particular year as a unifying, culture-wide classic. One listener’s brilliant Brat summer might be another’s Oasis-entrenched ticket gouging nightmare and, bar the odd brief trending hashtag, one might barely hear about the other. Nonetheless, in music, 2024 gave us everything we could’ve hoped for.
Bright, new, often female-led bands (English Teacher, The Last Dinner Party) raced from social media hype to Mercury Prize glory at a hearteningly breakneck pace. Pop queens (Charli XCX, Billie Eilish, Beyoncé) continued to stretch the boundaries of mainstream structures and sonics. The revered old school (Nick Cave, The Cure, The Smile, Kim Deal) released career-high albums that reasserted their roles as restless pioneers. Rap’s leading lights, both conscious and confrontational – (Kendrick Lamar, Tyler, the Creator) kept pushing the boundaries of beat to a Drake-riling degree. And enduring alternative names (Vampire Weekend, Bright Eyes, Fontaines DC) pressed ever forward, the firing pistons of the cultural engine.
Below are The Independent critics’ top 20 picks for the year’s best releases. A selection of records often bearing a common thread of uplift and endurance featuring songs to help you roll into 2025, and whatever Trumpian horrors it may hold, with the deathless words of Nick Cave as succour: “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.”
20. The Last Dinner Party – Prelude to Ecstasy
Full of gothic (not goth) orchestral climaxes, baroque drama, theatrical flamboyance and very modern approaches to sexuality, religion, gender and the many and varied feminine urges, this album rises above the squatland of the British alternative like a sonic Saltburn; frontage by Berlioz, interiors by Sparks, and Kate Bush tapping at the window in the night. “Sinner” and “Nothing Matters” may be its art-funk showstoppers, but Prelude to Ecstasy is a rich and ornate art-pop offering: here are dark tangos, plush torch songs, exotic Albanian arias, and melodramatic balladry with the allure of Cleopatra. Post-Raphaelite, anyone? Mark Beaumont
19. Taylor Swift – The Tortured Poets Department
“It’s the worst men that I write best,” says Taylor Swift. She proves as much with her 11th album, on which the pop star sinks her lyrical teeth into the kind of men who “slide into inboxes and slip through the bars”, the sort who crash your party and their rental cars. Never swerving her own flaws, Swift also eye-rolls at her “teenage petulance” and allows fans an insight into her “down bad crying at the gym”. Here, her confessional, albeit cryptic, storytelling is backed by addictive melancholy synth hooks. She allows herself the odd howl of delight in her own power as she teases the world: “Who’s afraid of little old me?” Helen Brown
18. Kendrick Lamar – GNX
“F*** a double entendre, I want y’all to feel this s***,” spits a seething Kendrick Lamar on a brilliantly bolshy sixth album that lacks the jazzy whizzkidery of 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly, but still packs a wildly charismatic punch. GNX came unannounced in the wake of the 37-year-old Compton-born rapper’s spectacularly down-n-dirty rap battle with Drake, a saga that concluded with Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us” being nominated for a Grammy and him securing the headline slot at the 2025 Super Bowl. That said, this album finds him in no mood to run victory laps – instead he continues cussing out the “old-ass” flows of his rivals and spitting chips that Nas was the only one of them to congratulate him. As ever, Lamar digs deep with his samples and lyrical references with a little help from uber pop producer Jack Antonoff and duet partner SZA. HB
17. Bright Eyes – Five Dice, All Threes
“I never thought I’d see 45,” Conor Oberst sings in his tremulous tenor, “how is it that I’m still alive?” After a comeback album – 2020’s Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was – haunted by death and divorce, Bright Eyes’ 11th outing presents itself in cross-gartered yellow stockings, as if embracing life once again. “Bells and Whistles” is a jubilant jig and “El Capitan”, a blast of mariachi glory folk to lift the heaviest spirit. Unbridled joy was never Oberst’s wheelhouse, though. His downcast literary observations soon break cover like alt-country therapy: lonely suicides, looming mortality, a world on fire. Sombre piano lament “The Time I Have Left” finds him screaming into the dying light, bawling desperate “sha-la-las” alongside The National’s Matt Berninger. Meanwhile, “Hate” lists pet peeves (religion; small talk; protest singing; sleep) over a subtle synthetic lope. As an album, it hovers at a magical midpoint between delicacy and drama, desolation and delirium. MB
16. Sabrina Carpenter – Short’n’Sweet
After all the gossip about whether or not she pinched Olivia Rodrigo’s boyfriend a few years ago, this 25-year-old Disney graduate leaned hard into her man-eating image on a terrific collection of songs that saw her defiantly hair-flipping her way between TikTok pop, yacht rock, and country. Songs like “Espresso” were fun and flirty with a bitter little kick, while “Taste” delivered this year’s slickest FM guitar riff, over which Carpenter boldly warns off a love rival. Funny, sexy and fierce, she squares up to the men she dates elsewhere, growling: “Please don’t embarrass me, motherf****er.” HB
15. Hinds – Viva Hinds
Gen Z’s streaming-led rush for the next undiscovered superstars has left many acts – the ones that might’ve evolved towards landmark third or fourth albums in more appreciative times – to become brilliant in the shadows. So let’s redress a balance: while you were busy trying to like Dry Cleaning, Madrid’s once ramshackle and lo-fi garage pop outfit Hinds have quietly turned into one of alt-rock’s most magnificent propositions. If 2020’s The Prettiest Curse was their kaleidoscopic psych-pop blooming, their fourth album – the band reduced to joint frontwomen Carlotta Cosials and Ana Garcia Perrote – is an ultra-confident expansion. Taking in explosive melodic rock, Cocteau Twins shoegaze, “Coffee & TV” indie, poolside synthpop and, on “Boom Boom Back”, gritty electro-funk with Beck on it, this is a sonic tapas platter of styles, all melting on the eardrum. MB
14. Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft
With a cool knack for singing like she’s inside your head, the 22-year-old harnesses her ability to sound like alt-pop’s stickiest intrusive thought on an album, which addresses the tender reality behind her sharpening public image. On the opening track, she hush-croons: “People say I look happy/ Just because I got skinny/ But the old me is still me and maybe the real me and I think she’s pretty… and I still cry.” Elsewhere, bonafide banger “Lunch” finds her high from a crush on a girl who “might be the one”. Sleepy guitars, sighing cellos and trance beats come courtesy of her brother Finneas, while her pitbull, Shark, adds a little collar jangling in the background. A bittersweet plushy pill. HB
13. English Teacher – This Could Be Texas
In the great exodus to social media platform Bluesky, the only thing worth rescuing from X (Twitter) is its ability to form an instant pan-media consensus around great records that are of little consequence to the algorithm. It is what has elevated English Teacher’s scintillating debut album to critical acclaim, chart success and Mercury Prize triumph. And what lifted their singer Lily Fontaine to the status of generational mouthpiece: no voice for R&B (she claims), but a hard-bitten knowledge of broken home struggle and emotional turbulence, the literary eloquence to articulate it – and the melodic nous to push the tiring trends of sprechgesang post-punk, chamber rock and jazzy avant-pop into broader and more enveloping areas. Anyway, who else is writing songs about snowy hills resembling sideboobs? MB
12. Paraorchestra – Death Songbook
This year was when Charles Hazlewood’s Bristol-based, multi-abled Paraorchestra teamed up with Suede’s Brett Anderson and guest singers Nadine Shah and Gwenno. Together, they deliver sublime and avant-garde orchestral reskins of songs that taunt, confront, lament and ultimately celebrate death, for all the life that went before. Echo & The Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon”, Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence” and Skeeter Davis’s “The End of the World” each become devastating elegies, but it is in the reworkings of Anderson’s own tributes to lost friends and family – “He’s Dead”, “The Next Life”, a stunning “Unsung” – that a raw and tender emotion spills forth. MB
Queen Bey’s eighth album saw the pop star strut her country stuff. As a Texan, she grew up on the geetar pickin’ and lyrically stickin’ sounds, feeling as though Black musicians hadn’t been properly credited for their contributions to the genre. This experimental record rode those sounds wild and bareback. She broke chart and streaming records with denim-slappin’ single “Texas Hold ‘Em”, and boasted of straddling the Marlboro Man like a mechanical bull on “Sweet Honey Buckin’”. Beyoncé brands her own savvy mark onto every aspect of country from honky tonk to river baptism on an album that finds her relentless at the reins of a racial reckoning. HB
“Fast and fluid” is how Radiohead’s Thom Yorke describes songwriting with The Smile. The trio – also comprising fellow Radioheader Jonny Greenwood and jazz drummer Tom Skinner – emerged out of Covid as an apparent side project for the musicians, but their 2022 debut, A Light for Attracting Attention, proved it was no Radiohead subsidiary. Their second album doubled down on this fact and found them relishing their knotty new groove. Shuffling between laissez-faire bossa nova and paranoid angst, Wall of Eyes allows Greenwood to showcase the narrative, string-arranging skills he’s learnt scoring movies – while affording Yorke a looser space to float through his stream-of-consciousness lyrics about corrupt politicians and crashing currencies. All this, with a little rhythmic, off-duty kick of the heels. HB
9. Laura Marling – Patterns in Repeat
Proving to her audible relief that motherhood doesn’t have to spell the death of creativity, the nu-folk icon is as unflinchingly direct as ever on her first record after the birth of her daughter. Over her distinctively picked acoustic guitar, Marling assures her child that “nothing real was lost in the bringing of you to me”. Later, on the pretty “Caroline”, she assumes the persona of an older man whose evening is disrupted by a phone call from an old flame who takes a satisfyingly cruel pleasure in saying his life has turned out fine without her. There’s never anything sentimental about the straight-shooting Marling and this album finds her facing her changed life with piercing relish. HB
8. The Cure – Songs Of A Lost World
Like the stateliest monument or most ancient world wonder, The Cure emerged from mists unchanged by the 16 years that had passed since their last recorded epistle from despair’s edge. Age – and much procrastination – did not wither or date Songs of a Lost World. Robert Smith’s atmospheric pallor instead takes on a profound depth and contemporary crackle on album opener “Alone”, floating amid much shoegaze clatter and antique strings, and later the gossamer piano lilt of “And Nothing Is Forever”. There is still doom-mongering at play, not least on the battle-muddied “Warsong” or austere 10-minute closer “Endsong”, but as a habitual, long-term peruser of the abyss, Smith is uniquely placed to create a wistful, romantic and uplifting paean to mortality. Its desolate final declaration – that Smith was “left alone with nothing at the end of every song” – is arguably the most short-selling lyric of all time. MB
7. Tyler, the Creator – Chromakopia
Smashing together tribal rhythms, whispered cuss words, distorted club bass beats and his usual freewheeling approach to melody, the disruptive Californian rapper’s eighth album is a giddy exploration of a messy world. At 33, he admits he struggles to watch his friends raising children while all he has to take care of is a Ferrari. “Boy, you selfish as f***, that’s really why you scared of bein’ a parent,” he self-disses on “Take Your Mask Off”. Previously accused of misogyny and homophobia, the rapper now knuckles down with lines such as “Give a f*** ’bout pronouns, I’m that n**** and that b****” on a track featuring female rappers GloRilla and Sexyy Red. Still infectiously cocky, but newly wised up. HB
6. Kim Deal – Nobody Loves You More
After three decades of being bent and beaten with divine art rock hammers, Kim Deal’s delightfully fragile songwriting deserved some pampering. Long-gestating and coloured lyrically darker by the deaths of her parents during its making, Deal’s first solo album finds her wrapped in ballroom strings, slick brass and soft-focus textures. “Let me go where there’s no memory of you, where everything is new,” Deal sings over lustrous blue bayou guitars on “Are You Mine?”, one of music’s most poignant depictions of Alzheimer’s. This is no flapping palm frond of a record, however. Plenty of room is found for the former Pixie and Breeder’s trademark grunge pop, alongside forays into electro rock, slowcore, crank ambience and, on “Big Ben Beat”, the invention of shoe metal. MB
5. Adrianne Lenker – Bright Future
“I never saw you cry, not until our dog died,” sings the lead vocalist and chief songwriter of Big Thief on her gorgeously eloquent eighth solo outing. Nominated for Best Folk Album at the Grammys, Bright Future was completely recorded and mastered on analogue tape, lending an almost unsettling immediacy to her minimal piano and guitar-backed songs about romance and unmet expectations. Much of the magic crackles from the chemistry between sweet-voiced Lenker and Queens-based psychedelic soul artist Nick Hakim, with Josefin Runsteen (Swedish composer, arranger, and producer) on violin and percussion, and Brooklyn alt-country artist Twain on piano, guitar, and violin. The result is a clued-up conversation that sounds as though it took place in a log cabin at 2am. HB
4. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Wild God
Punk-turned-prophet Nick Cave often describes music as “sacred”. Performance, for him, is an act of communion, but his 18th album with the Bad Seeds, feels more like a baptism: an ecstatic immersion in the rushing, pooling waters of love and loss that the sexagenarian has experienced since the deaths of his sons Arthur Cave and Jethro Lazenby in 2015 and 2022, respectively. Over romantic swirls of strings, roiling undercurrents of bass and elegant piano patterns, the singer exults the consolations of the natural world. For him, frogs are not just “jumping in the gutters” but are: “Amazed of love/ Amazed of pain/ Amazed to be back in the water again/ In the Sunday rain.” His grief feels fathomless, and yet Cave leaves listeners buoyant. HB
3. Vampire Weekend – Only God Was Above Us
Like all the best modern bands – Wolf Alice, English Teacher, Wet Leg – Vampire Weekend reject the post-Radiohead consensus that a next-gen rock evolution must do away with such tired obsessions as infectious, accessible tunes. Their fifth album almost works as an aural presentation called “Arctic Monkeys: How It’s Done”; orchestrated lounge bar futurism, yes, but draped in feather boas of classic pop elegance and adorned in hook line sequins. Between such moments of graceful pop drift (“Capricorn”, “The Surfer”, “Connect”, the glacial “Hope”), Only God Was Above Us still finds time for some sublime highlife on “Pravda” and “Prep-School Gangsters”. Elsewhere, “Gen-X Cops” is the sound of suicide ascending from damnation; “Ice Cream Piano”, a head-spinning acceleration from low shuffle to Black Beauty gallop; “Mary Boone”, De La Soul: The Opera. MB
Hailed as a “surreal and inventive” songwriter by Taylor Swift, Essex girl Charli XCX (real name Charlotte Aitchison) has been throwing her own idiosyncratic shapes in and out of the mainstream since her mid-teens. The giddy-wonky, rave-influenced Brat was her second album to top the UK charts and 2024’s highest-rated record on the Metacritic website, which compiles scores from reviewers around the world. Brat does a thrillingly clever job of “capturing a feeling of chaos”, pulling in all the contradictions, rivalries, freedoms and limitations of being a female artist in the 21st century. Aitchison sings of wanting to party, wanting to have kids, and wanting to earn recognition without caving to conformity. She does it all over thudding bass lines; you can imagine glasses of vodka and coke shuddering on the bar. Picture Jurassic Park, only the T rex is a subwoofer. In the year 2024, Brat totally brought the bass back. HB
There was a tangible “what’s next?” to the tone of 2024, and no one explored more options than Fontaines DC. Less Hallmark card than it is a bloodstained compendium of modern romance – menacing obsession, oppressive relationships, polyamorous webs, love amid the apocalypse – their fourth album expands the Irish outfit’s post-punk remit into acidic folk, subterranean shoegaze, orchestral rock and, on “Starburster”, spy flick hip-hop seemingly recorded mid-panic attack. The title track alone is one of the year’s most surprising and exploratory songs: a gruesome electro-Shinto creep better suited to soundtracking Terrifier 4 than Love Actually 2. Other parts touch on Pixies, Smiths, and even Coldplay. If 2024 asked “what’s next?”, Fontaines replied, “what you got?” MB
