The Best Things We Heard In 2024

This is what the Defector staff enjoyed listening to this year.

“Naive,” by Dafnis Prieto

I’m torn about even sharing this one. In October, I went to Blues Alley in D.C. and saw drummer Dafnis Prieto and the Sí o Sí Quartet. The show was spectacular, even accounting for the lady down in front who got drunker than should have been possible given the short-staffing of the venue. She was noisy-drunk within minutes, then belligerent-drunk, and finally being-escorted-out-of-sight-drunk while the band and everyone else just kind of froze in silent awe.

I hesitate to talk about Prieto because the difference between listening to his music played live and listening to a studio recording is shocking. I enjoy the album the quartet performed that night and listen to it pretty regularly—these are freakishly talented jazz musicians—but the studio stuff is sort of pinched and metronomic, if anything a little bit too precise. Played live, the songs are groovy and expressive; the vibe among the performers is that they’re having the best time ever. Part of the issue might be that in the studio recordings Ricky Rodriguez is playing an electric bass, whereas that night whoever was on the bass was jamming out on a huge upright acoustic job. It is my sincere if uninformed belief that this makes a big difference to the texture of the music.

All of the songs played live kicked mondo ass, but the one that stuck in my mind is called “Naive.” Whereas the other eight tracks on the album are up-tempo, percussive, and even jaunty, “Naive” takes time to build from an unhurried bass solo, and swells into something lush and tectonic. It took the crowd at Blues Alley a solid couple of minutes to realize that the bassist was doing more than noodling around—the quartet stretched out the solo quite a bit longer than it goes on the album, possibly to account for the noise of the very drunk lady—but then the piano joined and I think the same lump leapt into the throats of all 125 or so people in attendance.

I spent my entire 20s listening to the saddest music I could find and indulging in angst and sadness, even drowning in it. It took me a very long time to realize that this was the expression of a particular kind of rut, and that I was a Sad Person, by which time I was in crisis. Somewhere in there, I decided that I was absorbing too much external sadness. I made a playlist of sunny, summery things, and reached back to songs that had made me happy before I became addicted to sadness, and spent part of my 30s building out a sonic buffer zone, so that now I am almost always listening to things that sound like smiling or partying or doing karate kicks. Listening to happy music probably doesn’t make you a happy person—also in my 30s I finally became medicated for depression—but sad music is associated with sadness, and sad music works differently on depressed brains. Even now it’s hard for me to recover from a dose of play-sadness: Last year, I overheard an achingly sad song at a coffee shop where I was spending parts of my workdays, and the rattling of that song in my head over the next couple of weeks was bad enough that it showed up in my dreams, and I would throw myself out of sleep the way a person might dive from a burning building. I even stopped going to the coffee shop.

“Naive” is a sad song, and listening to it at Blues Alley felt dangerous, in the sense that I was trying not to make an even bigger scene than the very drunk lady. That was an angsty time, a couple of weeks ahead of the election; I think everyone was feeling frayed by the experience of being in the world. Things are not better today; it’s fucked-up that I should be pining for that also terrible time, when it felt like the sky might fall, but when it could at least be said that it had not yet fallen. It’s also just a very beautiful song, and I can remember the experience of hearing it live very fondly without any excuse at all, now that I am not actively gulping back sobs. 

After the song, Prieto explained to the crowd, “Sometimes I think I am too naive for this world.” He looked for a moment like he wanted to say more, but then he took a big breath and let it out and shrugged, and the band moved into the next song. I don’t think I am naive. If anything, I am too cynical, so intractably guarded and cagey that the vulnerability of having more-or-less the same valid and allowable emotional response as 124 other people in a very dark room feels wildly unsafe. To Prieto this tune is the sound of tragic naivety, but I think it can be the sound of whatever inside of a person makes them feel distant from the world, and lonely. Or it can just be a very goddamn pretty song. Either way, I recommend seeing it live, and maybe treating yourself to an unguarded experience of whatever it is you happen to feel. – Chris Thompson

Hit Me Hard and Soft, by Billie Eilish

Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft will be what I associate with the sound of 2024. “Birds of a Feather” is a perfect song for belting in the car, and the surf-rock guitar groove of “Lunch” makes it so addictive. The album felt like a step into a new place of ambition for Billie and Finneas, from the openly queer lyricism to the cinematic arrangements on songs like “Chihiro” and “L’Amour de Ma Vie.” At a time when pop music seems to be reverse-engineering itself for 15-second TikTok virality, Hit Me Hard and Soft was created to be consumed as a tight 10-song album that will endure past this moment. And yeah, a couple of the songs absolutely took over TikTok feeds for a few months, too. – Alex Sujong Laughlin

Jason Benetti

The best compliment I can pay Jason Benetti is kind of a strange one: He made me care less about whether the Detroit Tigers won or lost. His presence in the broadcast booth guaranteed, whatever the final score, that I was going to have a good time watching the game.

Arriving in Detroit as the Tigers’ biggest free-agent signing after a prickly split from the Chicago White Sox, Benetti freshened up a telecast that’d felt generic and boring ever since Mario Impemba and Rod Allen drove each other out of town. Eventually, when the Cats Got Hot late in the summer, Benetti became the play-by-play voice of Detroit’s most magical and memorable season in a decade. But long before anything seemed that different about this perennial also-ran, Benetti made it so any inning watching the Tigers was an inning well spent. In addition to being well prepared even with his myriad responsibilities throughout the sports world, he’s just funny in the booth, able to pull out sardonic one-liners and clever references that liven a regular-season evening. I especially appreciated his ability to engage his partners in conversation, rather than simply lay out and let them do their allotted 15 seconds of analysis after an at-bat.

This July game in Cincinnati, where he’s paired with Carlos Peña, still stands out to me half a year later. Tarik Skubal had a dominant start that led to a Tigers win, and a recurring topic through the broadcast was Skubal’s superior strategy—the way he was able to mix up speeds and keep hitters off balance. In the bottom of the fifth, Peña struggled just a bit to translate the complexity of a hitter’s mindset into digestible spoken language, but Benetti helped sharpen his observation about the rhythms of hitting until the two created some vivid imagery to pair with Skubal’s performance—a radio that keeps changing stations. In the middle of the inning, Benetti also snuck in some goofy self-deprecation on an ad read, and he put a period on the third out with an Ella Fitzgerald name-check.

The Tigers were a mere 41-48 when Skubal got that last strikeout. Of course I love them more for the way they took over baseball in the following months, but the voices of their action meant I was always going to stay attached. – Lauren Theisen

Here in the Pitch, by Jessica Pratt

A couple years ago, I got into slowing down Neil Young’s music. (I was doing great, thanks.) If you’re playing along at home, the sweet spot is around 0.85x speed. That pace recasts the boogieing “One Of These Days” as a resigned lament and links “Down by the River” to Sabbath. When it works, as in the oeuvre of DJ Screw, slowing things down can reveal a song’s durable, fractal beauty.

Slowness isn’t a virtue unto itself. Rather, it’s a stress test: In the same way that few creatures can tolerate deep-ocean pressures, rare is the song robust enough to endure at or below 80 BPM. At those depths, you can’t compensate for structural flaws with vigor.

Brisk runtimes aside, Jessica Pratt’s first two records weren’t in any particular hurry. They were, however, textured with bursts of dynamic, fingerpicked guitar. This year’s Here in the Pitch instead unfurls like a damask, uniform and stately. Five of the nine songs glide at a languid 105 BPM, while the other four mosey at a “Moon Dude”-like 80. Throughout, eighth notes are deployed judiciously; you get the sense that each one was subject to strict scrutiny.

Pratt’s melodies strike my clavicles with mallets, activating my resonant frequencies. From the first of my countless listens this year, I felt I’d known this music forever. It’s uncanny, like Pratt conjured these songs from somewhere just beyond my waking life. I still only recognize every third word of her blurry lyrics; I always know what she means.

I love the narcotized bossa nova of “By Hook or by Crook,” the flute curlicues which ornament “Empires Never Know,” the glimmering mellotron on “Get Your Head Out,” and the crooked tooth of a flub in the piano solo which closes out “The Last Year.” Improbably, the whole thing hangs together as even more than the sum of these elegant components. 

I haven’t listened to Here in the Pitch every day since it came out. That’s an unforced error—spinning it again would have been a huge improvement over the stupidest half-hour I spent each day. We’ll get ‘em next year. – Sean Kuhn

“RATATATA,” by Electric Callboy and BABYMETAL

Tell someone older than me that Germany and Japan collaborated on something big, and they won’t take the news very well. For everyone else, here are two bands who figured out that the best way to make bubblegum pop music in the 21st century is to set it to a wall of bitchin’ speed metal riffs. 

Electric Callboy is a bunch of German guys who pulse Backstreet Boys sheet music in a blender and then record it. BABYMETAL consists of three former Japanese Idol contestants (Su-metal, Moametal, Momometal) who never performed hard rock until producer Kobametal (these are all pseudonyms) had the idea to have them front a new J-pop metal group. This isn’t a formula that should work. In American hands, it probably wouldn’t. But fuck me, it works for both of these bands. I’m someone who loves heavy music that has a strong pop sensibility undergirding it, so discovering these bands was like experiencing second puberty. 

“RATATATA” is the best song either group has ever made. Listen for yourself. You might laugh it off, say it’s silly, and click right out. But some of you will get it. Some of you will hear Su-metal belt out the chorus, and you’ll want to dance on top of a semi going 90 mph. I’ll join you. – Drew Magary

Manning Fireworks, by MJ Lenderman

In my effort to consume more culture this year, I discovered tons of songs (new and old) that I really loved. I tried very hard to convince myself to write about something other than MJ Lenderman’s Manning Fireworks. Really, I did. I wrote about his live album last year for this series, and I want to prove that I listen to other things. But do I, really? I listened to Manning Fireworks so much this year. It’s one of the few albums appropriate for all my stupid moods. I love that the lyrics seem like they came from the mind of a demented internet-poisoned poet. I love that the guitars have actual riffs. I love that it’s fucking catchy. At the end of the year, I know this is the album that defined it for me. – Kelsey McKinney

“Farewell Transmission,” by Songs: Ohia

Picture a medical professional reviewing the results of a panel reflecting my listening habits. This professional is evincing a little bit of concern—“It looks like your Silkworm levels are a little high, and I’d love to bring these Mogwai levels down as well.” The concern is well-founded. I have always liked kind of downbeat and digressive rock music, from the first moments I realized I had any taste in music at all, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. The troubling part is in the level of repetition, and the tendency to light one Neil Young album off another in times when I’m feeling pressed or gloomy. It isn’t bad for me, but it doesn’t seem to augur well, either.

Starting with the period immediately after Steve Albini’s death this past May, I found myself returning to Songs: Ohia’s 2003 record The Magnolia Electric Co. more than usual. The record is great, and it never falls all that far out of the rotation. But if Albini’s death brought it back to the fore, the uneasiness and kind of lowering dread that I felt through the fall and then more heavily in the early winter kept it there. I listened many times to the song “Farewell Transmission,” which is one of the very best rock songs I’ve ever heard, and something like a mission statement for Songs: Ohia’s Jason Molina. If you’re familiar with Molina’s difficult life and early death—he drank himself to death at 39, in 2013—this would seem sort of worrying. You might want to order some tests, or just make a diagnosis.

I wouldn’t really quibble with the diagnosis; you know what you’re doing when you listen to this song multiple times per day, and you mostly know why. But I think the song is more complicated than it seems. It is extravagantly doomy, but there is something ecstatic about it, too; it is a plunge forward into the dark, but all the more giddy for the darkness ahead and the inadvisability of that plunge.

There is no separating “Farewell Transmission” from the context of Molina’s life, but if that context is sad, the song is not. It’s defiant and raucous, and the thrill of it comes from the sense that it feels as if it is about to peel itself apart but does not. It charges toward midnight, across a desert without an end, a little crazed and curious, and to all appearances not nearly as worried as it should be. Covers, even good ones, sometimes treat the song as something of a dirge, and while I pretty much understand why, I don’t think that’s quite right. It’s a complicated text, but the more you listen, and maybe also the more you need it, the more it reveals itself. There’s a wild sort of light in it where the dread should be, something powerful reaching back “through the static and distance” not to annihilate but to pull you on. Into what doesn’t matter, or anyway can’t be helped. – David Roth

The Collected Works Of Jason Molina

I swear I did not coordinate this selection with Roth. It just so happens that I also spent a huge chunk of this year in Molina Mode.

I’m a little ashamed to admit that 2024 was the first year that I properly dug into Molina’s music. When I was younger, I was aware of him and appreciated his work, but he wasn’t anyone I grabbed onto. I suppose I can forgive myself for that, because I was much stupider then, and because Molina’s career was never all that easy to track. When a guy forms a band called Songs: Ohia, with whom he creates a masterpiece album called The Magnolia Electric Co., and then almost immediately renames the band itself Magnolia Electric Co., releasing a series of follow-ups under that moniker, it can be hard to keep everything sorted.

But this year I really got in there. I smothered myself with as much of Molina’s music as I could find. I just wanted it on all the time, no matter what I was doing. Cooking dinner? Jason Molina. Taking a shower? Jason Molina. Driving in the car? Jason Molina. Friends coming over? Jason Molina. Just kind of sitting there, not doing anything? Jason Molina.

Over time, my relationship to Molina’s music evolved. He did that thing that almost all of my favorite artists do: Fixate on a handful of images—big moons, falling and twinkling stars, darkened midwestern towns, etc.—and deploy them in new and interesting ways across his body of work. Like Roth, I also started to understand his work a little differently as time went on. After dozens and dozens of listens, songs that I once considered to be some of the saddest shit ever recorded suddenly took on surprisingly hopeful notes. Even a song as crushing as “Hammer Down” (“Sometimes I forget how I’ve always been sick/And I don’t have the will to keep fighting it”) manages to shine a little light. It’s a song written by a man who knows exactly what’s waiting for him, but maybe the thing at the end of the empty road isn’t all bad. Maybe there’s a dance floor where he’s going.

Anyway, listening to these songs has made 2024 a gratifying year for me. You don’t expect to find your new favorite artist at age 36, and I’m thankful that Molina’s work was out there, just waiting for me to find it. – Tom Ley

“Ball of Fire,” by The Skatalites

We must have missed this on previous Skatalites binges, but it makes everything the day can offer a little more like Mookie Betts and a little less like Tottenham Hotspur: 

You’re welcome. – Ray Ratto

Blue Jays

Outside my bathroom window is—well, I don’t really know. It’s frosted, so I cannot see through it. Opening it doesn’t give me a view of anything but a couple square feet of dirt at eye-level. It opens on the rear of my apartment building, and my apartment is sunken, and my building is on a weird triangular patch of land that doesn’t have its own backyard, though my little dirt patch does, I think, border the neighboring building’s backyard. The point is that I can’t see anything out this window, but I can hear things, and what I mostly hear are the blue jays.

I know that blue jays hang out and possibly nest very near to my window. I am not some sort of bird Rainman to be able to figure this out. Even if you don’t know you’ve heard blue jays before, you have: They are the loudest and crankiest of birds. They are at their loudest and crankiest when they are mobbing, a behavior in which, when a predator is nearby (usually a hawk), they all gang up to yell at it and bother it until it gets annoyed and leaves. This strategy works. Would you want to listen to this any longer than you had to?

So, it isn’t an objectively pleasant sound that I hear out my bathroom window every few days or so when the blue jays mob some hapless raptor. And yet it’s a welcome one. It’s sometimes easy, at home, to forget that I am not the universe—that even in this pure gray urban grid, life-or-death dramas are playing out in the greenery that remains—that the world rolls on whether I notice or not. It’s better to notice. – Barry Petchesky

ABBA

My thoughts on Swedish pop legends ABBA, before this year, could best be summed up as positive to neutral. I’d listen to a song when it played, think Hey, that’s a real bop, then move on with my day. I was neither fan nor anti, just a person occasionally enjoying their songs. 

This changed on a whim. I had to travel to Sweden for research on a book I’m writing about Alice Milliat, the woman who helped put women’s athletics permanently within the Olympic movement. One of the men actively working against her, though she might not have been fully aware of it at the time, was Swedish sports leader and future Olympic president Sigfrid Edström. I couldn’t write a book without visiting Edström’s personal archive and going over the many letters in which he politely conversed with Milliat—while simultaneously writing to his powerful male friends about how much he disliked her, her movement, and wanted “the whole thing to disappear from the surface of the earth.” 

Despite the presence of this Swedish antagonist in a Frenchwoman’s story, I started listening to ABBA a few weeks ahead of time to get into the spirit of visiting Europe. Packing stinks, and packing for an entire month stinks even more, so the jaunty melodies of “Take a Chance on Me” and “Voulez-Vous” got my blood pumping just enough to manage questions such as “Are these enough shirts for a month?” followed by “Dammit, where is my passport?” and “OK, realistically, how many of these books will I read?” I kept listening as I got to France, until finally I had ingested so much ABBA that I insisted on visiting their museum during the little downtime I had in Stockholm. 

ABBA’s songs are more than five decades old now, so I won’t belabor you with deep analysis of their sound or lyrics. It’s surely not a coincidence that I turned to them during a presidential election year. Perhaps the brilliance of ABBA was that they knew exactly what they were going for—big, sparkling, joyful pop—and rarely deviated from that but for the occasional big, melancholic, and heartfelt ballad. In ABBA-land, there are no little whispers or minor feelings. It’s all grandiosity and glitter. That’s what I needed this year, and maybe you, too: just a moment to allow yourself to be happy. – Diana Moskovitz

January Never Dies, by Balming Tiger

In November, Balming Tiger, a Korean music collective, released their music video for a song called “Big Butt,” which leans harder into the bit but is nowhere as good as the other ass-referencing song they released the previous year, called “Buriburi.” That’s the sort of statement that covers the weird playfulness at the core of their music, if not the breadth of it, which is relatively easy to grasp from their YouTube presence alone: Seven out of the 14 tracks from January Never Dies have full music videos.

The group is self-described as an alternative K-pop group; accordingly, when Western media outlets cover them, they’re contrasted against “polished, well-manicured, and choreographed K-pop” or “slick choreography and major record deals.” Sure. Balming Tiger’s most popular song is “SEXY NUKIM,” because it features BTS’s RM; if you really want to make up a connection, you can think of “Kamehameha” as a sort of predecessor to Rosé’s “APT” in the famed “riffs on drinking games” genre of song. Insofar as K-pop is used as a catch-all for all Korean popular music, or you’re stretching the definition of the genre so you can sandwich Yoonmirae’s “Black Happiness” into your top 100 list, it’s not an incorrect descriptor. To be fair, the distinction can get finicky.

Balming Tiger is unique, but it isn’t through the lens of NewJeans or what have you. Within the realm of Korean hip-hop’s whole deal, it’s nice to find an artist that makes fun and interesting music and doesn’t make you cringe—or, if they make you cringe, it’s because they know exactly what they’re doing and have chosen to sing a song about big butts. All of this might sound like I enjoy thinking about music rather than actually listening to it, but I will be the first to admit to not being much of a “music” “listener.” This album came out in 2023, and it was one of maybe three albums I listened to all the way through this year (the other two I can think of: Married in Mount Airy and Diamond Jubilee). Years of listening to K-pop in high school has trained me out of the habit of caring about lyrics.

Still, I’d like to make it very clear: I like the songs. They’re weird, funny, and fun. – Kathryn Xu

Two Star & The Dream Police, by Mk.gee

The most precise piece of music criticism I read this year was a tweet from the account @Horse_Jeans that read: “The Mk.Gee album sounds like if OPN produced the Phil Collins Tarzan soundtrack (positive).” This is a lovely shard of gnomic microblogging, one that presents the ideal frame to think about my favorite album of the year, Mk.gee’s Two Star & the Dream Police. It does sound like that, and that hints at what makes it such a fascinating genre project: It’s the code that lets you decipher the question of why he is on the cusp of producing music for some of the most famous artists on the planet.

Think of a great pop artist as a prism. Inspirations and references jag into and through them, where they are incorporated and refracted outward on a wholly new vector. The creative genius working in this field is someone who is capable of sending them off at an unexpected angle, pushing into new sonic territory by combining elements of established forms. What makes Two Star so special is the unique way Mike Gordon both incorporates and redirects. It’s an album of guitar music that sounds like it was made by ghosts, for ghosts. It is interested in being beautiful, and the more you listen, the more Perfect Sounds you will notice (the spectral jackal laughs on “Breakthespell,” the heavy machinery clanging at 1:30 of “Are You Looking Up” that vaults the song to its long coda, the sung-along bassline throughout “I Want,” etc.). It sounds like if you took a Bonnie Raitt record and dipped it in the goop used to make weed gummies; the sort of record Sting would make if he listened to Blonde once, ripped a line of ketamine, and tried to recreate the album start to finish; or the album Kevin Shields would have made if he grew up as an iPad child.

It is the album of a rockstar, someone with a coherent vision and the put-upon persona to match. The sensation of listening to earlier Mk.gee stuff is somewhat baffling because it shares so little DNA with Two Star, not merely in its aesthetics but in its level of craft. Gordon is sort of credited with being the secret musical engine behind the artist Dijon’s Absolutely, and his counterpart is conversely credited with teaching Gordon how to sing. It’s hard to say which end of the exchange listeners should thank more vigorously. Gordon’s confidence as a yowler, whisperer, and crooner both defines the emotional register of the album (the best example here is “Alesis”), and it makes me appreciate the rich texture of Dijon’s voice.

Gordon’s crafted sense of mystery is best exemplified at his live shows. He spends most of the time aggressively backlit, his face made invisible both by his long stringy hair and a column of light. Sometimes he recedes from the audience almost completely, and sometimes he Performs. Sometimes he whips his shirt off at his shows, and he’s been known to play certain songs over and over again, up to 12 times in a row.

When I saw Mk.gee in September, he played “Candy” twice. It’s neither the album’s best song (“Are You Looking Up”) nor its aesthetic median (“I Want”), but it’s a clearly communicated exercise in another of pop music’s characteristic dichotomies: tension and release. The guitar solo is the one pure ray of sunshine he allows to poke through the album’s weed-smoke haze, and it rips. He builds and releases that tension along multiple musical strands in an overlapping but slightly syncopated manner. It’s a little wink, situated in the middle of the album, one that shows that even the self-anointed geniuses get to have fun. – Patrick Redford

“Good Luck, Babe!” by Chappell Roan

It’s fine, it’s cool. While I had heard The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess when it came out last year, it didn’t initially make much of an impression. I listened to it once on a friend’s recommendation, enjoyed my time with it, and moved on. Fast-forward to the dregs of this past winter, and Chappell Roan was suddenly popping up everywhere. Her tour with Olivia Rodrigo and her NPR Tiny Desk concert both blew up and received rave reviews, and I saw performance videos all over the place. I “got it,” because Chappell Roan is an incredibly entertaining performer, one whose charisma maybe surpassed her songwriting, at least with regards to her debut album. Even in my wildest dreams, I didn’t think she’d put it together so soon and with such skillful execution as she did in “Good Luck, Babe!”

The song, released on April 5, immediately felt like everything that Chappell Roan, the musical act, had been missing. Sonically, it has a simple beat, drum-heavy but with a playful synth clopping alongside. Lyrically, it’s Roan’s best song by a mile, a spiteful and almost nostalgic kiss-off to an ex struggling with compulsory heterosexuality. Once the chorus comes in, and the synths roar to match what’s coming vocally, Roan’s voice goes nuclear, hitting heights that I will never try to replicate at karaoke, despite wanting to oh so badly.

As an admitted Taylor Swift fan, I love a good bridge, so when the “Good Luck, Babe!” bridge hit me in the face, I smiled and asked for more. Channeling Kate Bush, Roan snarls through an “I told you so” for the ages, including actually singing the words “I told you so” three times. The first time, it’s a slap. The second time, it’s a kick. But the third time, when she goes for broke, my god. It’s rare that music affects me on such a physical level anymore; I’ve been too deep into music journalism and generally have become jaded toward all but the rarest of acts. That being said, that third “I told you so” still makes me feel goosebumps, something like 200 listens later. – Luis Paez-Pumar

The Audiobook For Open Throat

This pick could be divisive, depending on where you fall on the “listening to audiobooks is or is not reading” debate. For whatever it’s worth, I consider listening to audiobooks a kind of reading, one that can sometimes be more passive or more active than reading works off ye olde page. Occasionally, an audiobook can even be transportive—swathing you in the precise cadence the author intended, as if casting a spell. 

My experience listening to the audiobook for Henry Hoke’s novel Open Throat, which follows a queer mountain lion living under the Hollywood sign in L.A. and was inspired by the life of P-22, was uncanny. Much of the book is concerned with the lived reality of mountain lions in SoCal—how their territory is cross-cut by highways that can be fatal to cross, and how this makes food even scarcer and wildfires more difficult to escape. The lion knows the L.A. freeway as “the long death.” I listened to some of the book while walking along Queens Boulevard, a sprawling thoroughfare that is historically deadly for pedestrians, and I felt impossibly soft and small each time a car sped by and spat out dust in its wake. Open Throat is written in prose so fragmented it resembles poetry, and the audiobook is just an hour and 46 minutes long. But the narrator, Pete Cross, lingers on each line and moment, following the increasingly starving mountain lion as they venture more and more into the dangers of human civilization.

I should say that I loved this book so much that I immediately bought it in print to read it over, where I was able to appreciate the lion’s idiosyncrasies. But I initially felt unmoored by my absolute control over such a tiny text. I read pages in a second, and then reread them because I felt I had gone too fast. I found myself missing the gentle pace of the audiobook, how it lulled me into some kind of trance where, gasping, I imagined myself a mountain lion pacing the side of a freeway, calculating not just when to run across but if whatever lay on the other side was worth risking death. When it came time for me to cross the boulevard, I stumbled through the crosswalk, almost running, afraid to trust the lights. – Sabrina Imbler

“Child in Time,” by Deep Purple

Almost all the music I listened to this year was real old. I’d set up a heavy bag in my garage in the spring and got really into hitting it. Tunes eased the pain of tough workouts, but I needed familiar stuff to get lost in and take my mind off the physical misery. The soundtrack of my youth became the soundtrack of my bag sessions. I found myself digging into lots of hard rock from the ‘70s. I was surprised how little shame my nostalgic, dirtball-heavy playlists brought me. I’m no longer embarrassed to admit that as a lad I was deep into Deep Purple, the British hard rockers of “Smoke on the Water” fame/infamy.

I’d gotten into the band through the soundtrack from Jesus Christ Superstar, a smash Broadway musical that was the Hamilton of the Nixon era. It wasn’t cool in my grade school to dig showtunes, but when I found out the guy singing the part of Jesus in the play, Ian Gillan, was also the lead throat of Deep Purple, I fell hard. Guitarist Ritchie Blackmore was a first-wave hard rock shredder, and keyboardist Jon Lord added prog touches to the Deep Purple oeuvre that were of their time to a giggly degree. But it was Gillan’s pipes that wowed me the most, and influenced latter-day wailers like Rob Halford and Axl Rose.

During my rounds with the punching bag this year, I found myself again getting deep into Made in Japan, a double live album recorded on Deep Purple’s 1972 world tour that captures the band’s heyday. Yeah, “Smoke on the Water” is on there, and it’s fine. But the real paydirt came from rediscovering “Child in Time,” an epical hard-rock opus with 12 minutes of Blackmore’s 16-note triplets and Gillan hitting high notes that could break glass. For most of 2024, I’ve shrieked along and banged my head while throwing unpolished left-right combos at the heavy bag. Geezer me is getting all the fun out of this tune that adolescent me did, half a century ago. (And yes, I’ve also shed any embarrassment over loving Jesus Christ Superstar: Check out this cover from Sinead O’Connor and get back to me. Good god!) – Dave McKenna

Cash Cobain and Playboi Carti

It feels weird to call this the year of Playboi Carti, considering that he never actually dropped his long-awaited album, I Am Music, but he might be the rapper that best exemplified the chaos of 2024. His sporadic drops and teases in the form of singles, mostly debuted in his live performances, made his shows the only way to know for sure what was official. The only single that came out on the official channels was “All Red,” an aggressively bass-heavy anthem that is somehow both the best Travis Scott song and the best Future song to be released all year.

Speaking of those guys, the other way Carti put his imprint on the year is through features: irascible, personality-filled appearances on otherwise bland tracks like Scott’s “FE!N,” which is like if a 2010s Gatorade commercial could make music—predictably, Gatorade put the song in an ad; reverse engineering works!—and the Future and Metro Boomin track “Type Shit,” a strip-club record that might’ve been fresh three Future albums ago. Carti’s year has been so totemic that even our musical darlings are taking a page from his book.

The only other artist with the same kind of imprint on the year would be New York rapper/producer Cash Cobain, whose slizzy sound and inventive sampling of rap/R&B/reggae hits of the ’90s and 2000s are making an infectious mark all over. “Fisherrr,” with Bay Swag, has been one of the year’s best songs, and his production for Don Toliver, Danny Dior, Chow Lee, Lucki, and (blechh!) Drake have been outliers. This is his year before the year—the year before he produces a Sabrina Carpenter or Billie Eilish record and completely takes over radio. If the past is going to inflict the future, no one has made it sound better than Cash. – Israel Daramola

The Head Hurts But The Heart Knows The Truth, by Headache

One thing I enjoy about this Headache album is that you’re never sure how seriously to take it. It’s a project by three collaborators, two human and one not. Foremost of the three is Vegyn, a producer whose elegant and uncluttered work I’ve always admired. Lyrics on the album were written by a poet friend of his called Francis Hornby Clark. Those lyrics are read aloud not by the poet but by an A.I. voice.

Over finely wrought downtempo beats you hear a nonexistent British guy mumble in a range of modes: rambling about his alienation, recounting oddly specific moments of transcendence, free-associating insipid mantras for self-improvement. The monologue starts out somber for a stretch, then turns cartoonish, then back to somber—and then, without warning, goes obliquely poignant. Often I’d be immersed in the beats only to resurface because some remote emotional nerve had been plucked by the language being spoken over them.

None of this was intended by the creators. After having spent four years tinkering with his (also excellent) 2024 record, Vegyn wanted to work in shorter bursts, and a little bit in jest. This Headache album was made in two weeks of studio time and it came out three weeks later. They’d set out to construct an elaborate joke. “We did an NTS show as Headache and we were like ‘People will get this. People will understand that it’s actively a joke,'” said Vegyn of the project. “And then we had a friend of ours text us like, ‘Bro, I’ve been listening to the Headache NTS show all week and I can’t stop crying,’” he continued. “I don’t want to make anyone think they’re not right for feeling some intense feelings with it. I don’t want to belittle that experience.” That tonal ambiguity gets addictive when the album is heard straight through. I have even warmed to the oafish narrator, who seems like an old friend you’d urge to shut up 80 percent of the time, if not for the 20 percent of bracing truth he blurts out.

I love Vegyn’s ear for production, his attention to the timbre and texture of all his sounds and his insistence on remaining vaguely undanceable. Here the net result of his choices is a powerfully nostalgic Y2K mood: I feel like I’m sitting on the London Eye, thinking about America Online, awaiting a millenium I do not understand. Very propulsive listening, suitable for walking, running, waiting, and even writing—the words are just loose and nonsensical enough not to intrude on your own thought, and to sometimes even stimulate it. – Giri Nathan