For the first time in almost two decades, I didn’t do my end-of-year lists in 2023. It was partly a case of life getting ahead of me. Parenting is a lot of work, and our second baby arrived three weeks early right at the start of December. So the couple weeks I had set aside for myself to revisit the music of the year ended up being busy with other more important stuff. But more than anything, I just let the best become the enemy of the good. I couldn’t put the sort of work into the process as I’ve always done. So I just didn’t do it at all. And then regretted it.
This year I’m not making the same mistake. I’m confident that there is a huge raft of music out there that I would have loved, and may well have found if I were in the same place I was five or ten years ago. But that’s not where I’m at right now, and I’m going to be okay with that.
So, unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of these albums come from artists I already knew coming into the year. That’s a bit sad, but it’s also just the way things go. The important thing is that I really enjoyed all of these albums and am happy to be able to document that love. I hope everyone else also found new music to appreciate in 2024. And thanks to everyone who’s still here reading Heartache With Hard Work after two decades, and after a long delay in posts. Happy new year!
13-15 (tie).Beyoncé – Cowboy Carter, Taylor Swift – The Tortured Poets Department, Kacey Musgraves – Deeper Well: Deeper into the Well
I’m grouping these three albums together for a couple reasons. For one thing, there are just some obvious similarities. Established stars who released extremely (some might say aggressively and unnecessarily) long albums and dared anyone to tell them no. But the ways that they succeed (and in some cases fail to succeed) are actually very different, and do a lot to affect my personal relationships to the records.
Doing my best to look at it objectively, Cowboy Carter is the best album of this trio. By quite a distance. Beyoncé takes a lot of shots, some of them quite adventurous. That produces some songs that are borderline unlistenable to me. Which doesn’t mean they’re bad; they’re just not for me. It all adds up to a bold effort, but one that I didn’t actually enjoy all that much as a composite whole. Pick out the top half dozen tracks, and it would be a killer EP. Toss in the another five or six songs and it would be a great LP. But as a 27 track statement, I just didn’t connect all that much, even if I can recognize that it’s objectively quite good.
Tortured Poets and Deeper Well, by contrast, have basically no standout tracks. But they also don’t really have anything objectionable. Together, they comprise 40 or 50 songs that cover the huge distance between B+ to B-. Pleasing enough, but ultimately pretty unmemorable.
In a different time of my life, I could see myself being way more into the Beyoncé record. But this year, my honest truth is that I found myself more likely to just throw on Taylor’s or Kacey’s album in the background. So I’ll square the circle here and call it a tie, even though they’re actually super different.
12. Charly Bliss – FOREVER
This shares a lot more DNA with their debut Guppy than it does with the followup Young Enough. Which is a pretty big disappointment to me personally, since I found Guppy to be a nice pop record but think Young Enough is one of the best albums of the past ten years. So there’s nothing wrong here; it’s a good album full of tight songs which I mostly enjoy. That’s good! It just doesn’t make my heart sing.
11. Starflyer 59 – Lust For Gold
It’s been the better part of two decades since I listened to a new Starflyer album. Not for any particular reason. I just never really kept them on my radar. Would go back to the Silver and Gold recods now and then but never had any interest in checking out the new stuff. But for whatever reason, I checked this one out and…damn if it doesn’t take me right back. It’s not exactly sparse–this is shoegaze after all–but it’s a relatively stripped back take on the genre. Moody, evocative, strangely comforting.
10. Charli XCX – BRAT
I wouldn’t call myself a Charli superfan, but I got deep enough into this album to have cultivated my own personal cut, treating more than a few remixes as ‘my’ definitive take on the track. Girl So Confusing being the most obvious example. The original is a nice track. The remix with Lorde is one of the best songs of the year.
For the most part, I find the modes of pop music consumption in 2024 to be annoying at best and actively harmful at worst. But Brat was a notable exception–a case where the postmodern blended with the modern to produce something that felt authentic in its artificiality.
9. Sabrina Carpenter – Short n’ Sweet
Maybe the biggest breakout record of the year, but it’s a little perplexing to me why it works so well. The songs are clever-ish, but not really that clever. The melodies are big and bright, but they don’t knock you over or anything. There’s also an archness that gives them just a bit of mystique, and which keeps them from falling into cringe territory, but which I think we’re supposed to understand is there for precisely this reason. It’s a knowing wink that says “Sure, these songs are a little bit too on the nose, but since you know that I know, can’t we all just enjoy them anyway?” Or maybe I’m overanalyzing it, and it’s a just a big dump pop record and that’s also okay. In any case, it’s full of bops and that’s ultimately what matters.
8. Vanessa Peters – Flying on Instruments
Vanessa has been there since the early days of the blog, the wonderful case of an artist who enjoyed my writing and who (extremely correctly) guessed that I would love her music. I think I described her as reminiscent of Aimee Mann in that first review, and I’ve never seen a reason to back down from that comparison. Her songs don’t just feel personal and specific (though they certainly are both of those things), they also feel like living, breathing creatures in their own right. Flying On Instruments is another wonderful chapter in the ongoing story. Searching for adjectives this time around, I kept finding myself grasping around thing like ‘mid-tempo’ and ‘mature.’ But I hate those words because they sound like another word for boring, and this record is so far from boring. In the absence of inspiration, I suppose I can just say that Instruments is contemplative, honest, and beautiful and leave it there.
7. Miranda Lambert – Postcards from Texas
It’s a pretty standard Miranda Lambert album. Half the songs are great. Half the songs are okay. Given how prolific she is, I do wonder if she might do better to trim some of the weaker tracks, slow down the release schedule a bit, and truly park some of these records. But I can live with a ratio of four or five good albums for every great one, especially when they come out every year or two.
6. Adam Wiltzie – Eleven Fugues For Sodium Pentothal
We sadly lost Brian McBride last year–someone who I loved both for his incredible music and also as a brilliant and generous person–but this record from his long-time collaborator Adam Wiltzie provides a gentle salve for the soul. It’s quiet, reflective, and peaceful while also conveying a bit of menace in the waves of ambient drift.
5. Morgan Wade – Obsessed
Morgan Wade is a pretty polarizing force, with some extremely intense fans and some equally intense critics. I find myself somewhere in between, definitely more on the side of the adorers, but the intensity of the psychodrama is honestly a bit much for me, and the emotional stakes don’t quite hit. I also find her vocal performances a bit frustrating–they sometimes feel like they are challenging the underlying melodic structure of the songs too much, which breaks apart the revery. Still, the songs themselves are mostly gorgeous. And when the combination of intense emotional pain, ragged vocals, and beautiful pedal steel all hit the same register…it’s astonishing. I wish there were more of those moments, but it still edges into the top 5 records of the year for me, even with an imperfect hit rate.
4. Bess Atwell – Light Sleeper
The music is light and gentle as a warm summer stream passing through a quiet meadow. The subject matter–coming off antidepressants and facing the pain of a complicated and uneven life–is heavy. The counterbalance of form and content produces that strange ineffable magic that can only be found in this sort of record. Would it be too much of a stretch to reference Joni Mitchell here? Maybe. How about Joan Shelley, then?
3. The Day – The Kids Are Alright
Another beautiful album from a band who has meant a lot to me over the past five years. More than anything, I love the way they make beautiful pop songs sound incredibly fresh, somehow both well-traveled but also perfectly pristine. As always, the production quality of this record is immaculate. The best song here is Tenderfoot, which was my #1 track of 2020 when it was released as a single. But there’s plenty of other great songs to go with it.
2. DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ – Hex
This album is–by a huge margin– my most-listened record of the year. Not something I ever would have predicted, but there’s something about the combination of insanely catchy hooks and long grooves. It’s a record I could put on and enjoy as one seamless whole, and then start right back at the beginning and go again. It also got a lot of action because our new baby loves dance music and was always happy to listen to DJ Sabrina.
1. Japandroids – Fate & Alcohol
It’s might only be the third-best album from Japandroids, and yet it’s still topping my list for 2024. That’s partly an indication of how much time I had to listen to new music this year. I’m sure there are a few all-timers out there that I just never found. But it’s also a sign of just how damn good this band is. I’m very sad that this seems like it is their swansong. It doesn’t stray too far from their previous work, but manages to bring a nice dollop of maturity to the high octane chaos that has always made them so great.
Honorable Mentions
- Say Lou Lou – Dust
- Andy Aquarius – Golla Gorroppu
- kinoue64 – 半永久機関
- Cassandra Jenkins – My Light, My Destroyer
- Katie Pruitt – Mantras
- Marika Hackman – Big Sigh
- Soccer Mommy – Evergreen