Year in Music: a Playlist and a Writeup for You
Brief dispatch mid-grad school on the sounds that gave me life
Hello dear folks—finishing this at an airport cafe, with a year-in-pet-videos compilation playing silently on the bar TV, classic rock on, and sleepy radiant travelers around me eating their $18 breakfast sandwiches. I end every year with a Spotify playlist of the songs and albums released during the year that thrilled, compelled, baffled, and moved me; this is my second time doing so here and it’s my first anniversary on Substack!
Since starting my (wonderful) master’s in August, I’ve found listening time and intellectual space incredibly precious and scarce, even compared to the crowded twenty-tabs-open, five-books-in-a-stack rhythm I’d bemoaned in earlier years. This year in listening mostly happened on long drives with Finn, Saturday cooking-ahead marathons, and dark raw rainy before-commute mornings where the music and the coffee felt like the only warm things in the world. My writing about the music is thus as brief and fragmented as my whole intellectual life this year but I hope it offers ways in, including to music that might at first seem like it’s resisting you; and I hope this playlist—the very best things I heard from 2024, techno and rap and indie pop and jazz, urbano and homespun country-rock and busted apocalyptic noise—kindles something you’re glad for.
Thankful as always for your support. It’s been a huge gift to have my number of paid subscribers (five! you know who you are!) slowly grow alongside free subs (184!). If you’re interested in making a monthly or annual gift to support my writing and thinking, you can upgrade by tapping this button; monthly subscriptions are now $5, annual are $50.
So first, here’s the playlist. Save it and make my nerdy ego glow, then read on!
First: two different future visions. Water from Your Eyes, on Everyone’s Crushed, make music whose anxious energy is resolutely contemporary in its mediation, pixelation, and noisiness. Rachel Brown sings ironic fragments (about mindless work, countless faces, endless data) in a teenage-sounding contralto and they assemble music out of pieces of absorbing sonic junk—thudding drum here, moaning synthesizer there. It’s a wrecked sort of future to live in, no utopia but endless scraps to repurpose.
Gentler and slower is the early ambient compiled on Virtual Dreams II: Ambient Explorations In The House & Techno Age, Japan 1993-1999. Cool surfaces; slow mutations; collectivity not a source of ironized anxiety but of utopian aspiration, like, wouldn’t it be sweet if we all could evaporate into this synth arpeggio, hang forever in the space between these drums?
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Living room dances to Ariana Grande’s “Supernatural” and RaiNao’s “Tentretiene.” Just found out RaiNao has a new album, Capicú, and I can take a first step out of my near-total ignorance of contemporary urbano music.
Psyching myself up on weekday afternoons—once I dropped my bag, took off my shoes, splashed cold water on my face, and needed to start on the evening’s homework reading and chores—with Disclosure’s “She’s Gone, Dance On” (though you must, must, must seek out the non-Spotify extended mix) and Jamie xx and Honey Dijon’s collaboration, “Baddy on the Floor.”
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Song my students sung around me most this year: “Water,” from Tyla’s self-titled record. TYLA is the first amapiano-derived record I’ve loved all the way through, one whose R&B sexiness circulates a little warm blood through the otherwise cerebral, austere-feeling beats that characterize the genre. What do I know, maybe in a year I’ll find more in Teno Afrika or Native Souls—but here the sweet harmonies and modest cocky charm add something meaningful those tight dry bu-bu-boom drums.
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“Everything Is Romantic,” reminds Charli XCX. Brat’s weird cultural moment has of course oozed away but she’s still right. Charli’s music is absorbingly smart, nerdily referential and joyfully self-absorbed.
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Gathering some dark evenings around the reverent weird hush of Jessica Pratt’s Here in the Pitch and of Adrianne Lenker’s “Feel Better,” her sublime contribution to the TRANSA trans-justice comp.
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This was a fabulous year for breakup songs. Usher’s “Good Good” (ft. Summer Walker and 21 Savage) is strikingly open-hearted and generous, marveling that he’s still doing okay and wishing his ex-lover well. “Dammit Randy” from Miranda Lambert’s Postcards from Texas (an unimpeachable, tuneful, varied, down-home-without-shtick country record) manages to be exasperated and fond, taunting and blessing at once, the big strummed sustained chords on the guitar pointing toward an open future, maybe, to the guy who once walked away is now counting singles in his double-wide.
“I Said What I Said,” from the Softies’ miraculous reunion album, The Best I Made, is resolutely grownup in its pain, self-disappointment, overdue second-guessing. Rose Melberg and Jen Sbragia polish their harmonies like mirrors; the effect is of a single instrument. Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” transforms pain into a gleeful malediction, especially in that incredible bridge. We can only curse—you’ll forever chase this feeling, you’ll do another shot, you’ll wake up “nothing more than his wife”—what we long impossibly for.
“Long Way Home” from Myriam Gendron’s Mayday is a wish for recovery after a devastating loss, one of those broken hearts characters in the Child ballads pine away to dust for. Mayday is a folk record of different weights. The skittering restless drums and exploratory electric guitar from avant-garde heroes Jim White and Marisa Anderson; Gendron’s own solemn, deep, tree-heavy voice, often well behind the beat; the unbroken stride of her acoustic fingerpicking; these combine for an exhilaratingly imbalanced feeling, like any given song might pitch over, but instead, every one finds a groove. My favorite musical experience of the year was sitting front and center at Gendron’s May show at the Rabbit Box here in Seattle.
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Amy O’s Mirror, Reflect is more modest than Elastic (still one of my very favorite indie rock records of the 2010s) but even the homespun recording quality here speaks to her insistence that what we think of as the hidden transcendent world is nowhere else but in this one—superblooms, canyon drives, mango slushies, blankets spread in a cemetery, heartbeats through a belly.
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But when it was all dark, all rain? That was the time for Hana Stretton’s Soon, a record of green shoots in the dust, animal noises, high rivers, encroaching blazes, gently overlapping close-sung harmonies, guitars multitracked on the porch.
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Rap: Rome Streetz’s “Stunna” (with Double Dee and Boldy James) is the first song from Griselda I’ve ever loved. Griselda’s production sound—grimy, allusive, noirish, New-York-winter gray—has often felt a little, I don’t know, theoretical, too clearly a product of homework into a 90s moment for my immediate pleasure. But then again, what do I know, because this song immediately seized me, the way Streetz’s flow finds a pattern, subtly changes it up, and hands it on: syllables and stresses strung tight, rap like dancing. Speaking of noir, my far and away favorite rap record of the year is Roc Marciano’s Marciology.
Marciano, hugely influential as an MC and producer, still lives in his own hermetic world out on Long Island, where luxury and poverty, cold-eyed violence and chilling near misses, musical history and an urgent don’t-blink present coexist right up against each other. No pity, no self-reflection, just the dusty facing mirrors his sounds hold up. His beats have the dry sound of old vinyl and his raps are effortlessly complex. If he knows he’s an institution, he hasn’t let it get to him. Special love too to the Cardi B remix of GloRilla and Megan thee Stallion’s “Wanna Be,” three women sick of sniping and sick of saving loser guys.
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When I felt like our maddening country has no legacy worth offering, I found a root-sense of sanity, togetherness, and endurance in Waxahatchee’s Tigers Blood and Hurray for the Riff Raff’s The Past Is Still Alive. Trusty, sturdy song structures; country-rock flourishes; troubadour, revolutionary, and outlaw spirits; no cliché.
There’s a very American loneliness and depradation, though, lurking in the night highway spaces of Wussy’s “Inhaler.”
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Polymath sensibilities: there are almost no clean lines, rubato solo flourishes, or ABA structures on Four Guitars Live from Bill Orcutt’s Guitar Quartet. Instead, Orcutt and his band (Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parish) find a harsh, uniform electric ensemble sound supported by a mutating and intricate sense of structure; it demands chops without ego and listening to it feels like riding a helicopter between skyscrapers.
Vijay Iyer’s Compassion is a surging, melodic, exploratory jazz trio record: he, bassist Linda May Han Oh, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, temper some of their freakier impulses and the resultant record is sometimes even gentle. A few quiet evenings in the living room listening to this with Finn while they worked on their comics and I looked through an art book. Nilüfer Yanya’s My Method Actor has my favorite production of any record this year; she and her co-producer Wilma Archer fanatically coax a huge array of sounds out of their drums and guitars (sometimes shoeboxy, sometimes soaked in delay, sometimes punishingly distorted) and the record’s sound will set your heart racing. Daisy Moon’s EP Shadow of Silhouettes—cramped, complicated, brainy, futuristic—is also kinda fun, synced up to heartbeats and sweat, much less chilly and celebral than most of Timedance’s catalogue. (Timedance is great! Perfect music for an exhausted late-night train ride or for dancing in an underheated warehouse! Daisy Moon’s music, though, invites my warm body in.)
And final polymaths: if you want nerds in their full ragged joy, I can’t recommend enough the Unholy Modal Rounders’ newly-unearthed Unholier Than Thou: Live 7/7/77, carefree folky utopians crowing and sawing and goofing through a treasury of old American songs as far from canonical respectability as you can possibly imagine, as well as songs from their own 1976 record Have Moicy! If joy is your baseline criterion for ensemble playing, you will love this record.
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This was it, this was my year. Peace to you, dears, as the new one turns toward us.
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Substack recommendation: the multiform daybook of Drew’s World; if you’re not sure where to start, try “Sleep Paralysis Angel.”