Oxford University Press named “brain rot” the word of the year for 2024. That looks like two words to me, but I’m not a linguist. Merriam-Webster did manage to confine itself to one word – “polarization.” Now, if, like me, you spend a lot of your time reading music reviews, you can be forgiven if you just assumed the word of 2024 was “introspective.”
Yep, lots of 2024 music was apparently introspective. That isn’t much of a surprise. Introspection has had a major place at the table since the pandemic forced everybody, well, inside. It seems that with major wars in full effect, political (dare I say) polarization running rampant, and, you know, general brain rot, artists are looking inside more than ever.
I should probably mention – before moving on to my own personal choices for the thirty best albums of 2024 – that I .. hate.. introspection.
Ranking the 30 best albums of 2024
That may be an overstatement. Hell, I never miss a Jason Isbell show and he’s nothing if not introspective. But Isbell does it in an expansive way that lets listeners inside his pain without becoming painful itself. It’s the old dramatic saw about how you can show boring without being boring. I found a lot of 2024’s most introspective music inveterate navel-gazing. I don’t deny that some of it was compelling, but too much of it made me work too hard to crack its inscrutable veneer.
But an interesting thing happened amid all that inward pull. Under the surface, some really outstanding modern rock & roll bubbled up. While some older genres like hip hop and metal continued their search for relevance in late middle age, the oldest modern genre of them all was finding an eighth or ninth wind.
That’s not to say that mainstream pop, or country, and even the aforementioned hip-hop and metal left completely barren fields. There always is good music floating around out there if you go looking. The trick is finding it amid the din. That’s why I’m here today. To silence the din.
The following list is certainly not obscure. It may have some obscure inclusions, but it also has heavy hitters. It has a lot of genres. It has veterans. It has newbies. In very broad terms, I think 2024 was a year of great depth. As much as I love the handful of albums at the top of this list, I’m not sure they are as good as, say, the top five in any of the past few years.
But I balance that with the fact that numbers 26-30 are probably stronger than their counterparts in the recent past. That made choosing thirty albums and then ranking them a bit of a challenge. But it was also great fun because each of these – even the introspective ones – has so much fine music to offer. And with that, let us begin…
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