Each year, it seems these pages come on here to say that there was way too much new music released over the course of it. That’s not necessarily a bad problem to have because the more art the better, although it did reach a breaking point at one stage with being able to fairly take it all in and process it fairly without burning one’s self out. We — the audience and the artists — deserve time and patience with our creative and listening pursuits, and so hitting reset began yet another a new chapter here on +rcmndedlisten where this one-person writing project continues to look for that elusive balance between covering everything that is “good” and enjoyed while evolving how many words should be designated to reflect that an honest effort and consideration was given to the listen. The takeaway at the end of 2024? Maybe it’s not the worst thing to write less, yet impactfully so, if it frees up more time to stay current with everything happening all at once. Stay tuned…

There was again a lot happening in 2024 with this year’s albums, on that note. It felt like a corrective cultural shift in the music landscape to some degree where after a winning streak for poptimistic point of views, truly independent and alternative sounds throughout rock, rap, hardcore, electronic, and experimental spaces are getting more due recognition. We’ve starved ourselves of authenticity thanks to influencer culture and TikTok trends for a minute now that it’s no surprise to see what hopefully will become a growing turn from those listeners who’d rather dwell out of sight and offline, building communities without the need for any clout attached to them. This is not to say that 2024 didn’t have its publicity perfect pop moments, late-career highlights, or artists who ascended from club stages to larger sold out venues behind the strength of their albums either! Hopefully, this means there will be more room for everyone to be heard in the years to come? These are the 50 Best Albums of 2024.

50. Feeling Figures – Everything Around You [K Records]

If you slept on Migration Magic, last year’s debut album from Montreal art-punks Feeling Figures, you actually have a great opportunity to connect the dots in a Fire Walk With Me kind of way if your starting point with the band is this year’s sophomore follow-up, Everything Around You. It’s one of those rare occasions where a band disrupts their own timeline by releasing an album recorded before its previous effort afterward. In this case, they’re reconstructing its punchy art-punk popped out in reverse through the delirium vibrations that turn up on Everything Around You‘s early highlights like “Swimming” and “Doors Wide Open”. The four-piece don’t tout themselves as breaking any molds within DIY rock’s ramshacklest of energies, but between influences that rest somewhere between Sonic Youth’s more sinister rippers and the dreamy power-pop of fellow Canucks Alvvays set to tape, Feeling Figures create an eerie presence in their spark that sets Everything apart from the rest of the anxious static.

49. Navy Blue – Memoirs In Armour [Freedom Sounds]

Navy Blue has been putting substance behind his rhyme craft since his 2020 breakthrough debut, Àdá Irin, and has remained annually prolific in the hip-hop underground scene in the years since before ultimately landing on Def Jam for last year’s assured Ways of Knowing. While the rap moniker of Brooklyn producer, fashion model, and skateboarder Sage Elsesser cleaned up the feverish, abstract-soul sound behind his work in favor of more polished contours running alongside an understated beat eloquence, the fluid bars in the face of existential strife remain his strongest fete. Memoirs In Armour returns to independence without taking any sharp detours. The listen hears Navy Blue more aware of the impact of his word and his place in the world, going deep into the self-searching from a spiritual POV and using that new found enlightenment to fill voids money doesn’t always have an answer for. Gleaming chopped and screwed soul effects reflect emotive states in textures somewhere between a rock and a hard place and an hour glass’ quicksand, but it’s a light lift with Elsesser already having done the work to find a higher conscious.

48. Brijean – Macro [Ghostly International]

Brijean entitled their 2021 breakthrough Feelings, and in retrospect, doing so doubled down on a defining cornerstone of theirs in solidifying their foundational energy as something their music thrives off: body, mind, and inner spirit moving rhythmically in unison with that of the universe in every way it expands, shapeshifts, and carries through our human experience without resistance. With their fourth studio album, Macro, the experimental pop duo of singer-songwriter Brijean Murphy and multi-instrumentalist and producer Doug Stuart exponentiate those sentiments onto a cosmic level. Soundwaves aerate emotions through a ’60s psychedelic dayglow, spellbinding dream-pop, disco lite, humid tropicália, and cool respites of jazz R&B that complimentary color all corners of the emotional spectrum with all of life’s highs and lows, or better sung through sound than stated, as a “Rollercoaster” made into a fun delirium.

47. Shellac – To All Trains [Touch and Go Records]

In true anti-industry fashion, we didn’t get any advance promo singles or any proper rollout beyond a release date leading up to Shellac’s sixth studio album, To All Trains, but then again, Steve Albini didn’t give us a head’s up that he’d be dying a week before it’s release either. There’s some dark, twisted humor and cosmic irony in the way everything has played out. Still, To All Trains being he, bassist Bob Weston, and drummer Todd Trainer conclusive thought could not have been written as a better epitaph if this was the way the universe decided to have its last laugh with you. The album leave us with a last rites of everything that the Chicago noiseniks has been, compacted into a 28-minute-long onslaught of lean, caustic noise-rock accentuated by Albini’s sardonic tongue and arguably the band’s hookiest retreat into the perils of living yet. For longtime listeners, To All Trains hears Shellac departing at the top of their game, and for the uninitiated, it delivers you to an quintessential entry point of one of alternative rock’s most uncanny forces from the belly of the damned.

46. One Step Closer – All You Embrace [Run for Cover Records]

On their sophomore effort, All You Embrace, One Step Closer have figured out a very, very sweet, hard to crack spot in their melodic hardcore formula that heavily figures in punk-pop and emo anthemry of a very early 2000s scene scale without sounding like they’re clinging onto glory years. Perhaps this is because they’ve still got their youth, but they’ve also got wisdom beyond them from all that time spent traveling the world over since releasing 2021’s breakthrough debut LP, This Place You Know. Where they were once were at war with the smallness of their worn out hometown surroundings, the Wilkes-Barre crew are already looking for a way to find their way back to simplicity in rallying missives on loss of both the romantic and platonic form, all from thousands of miles away. If This Place You Know accomplished an escape through sheer melodic grit and shoving boulders out of their path with determination, All You Embrace‘s energy is as limitless as the world that has opened before their eyes, even in its big scary thoughts and realizations.

45. AKAI SOLO – DREAMDROPDRAGON [Break All Records]

The music world at large isn’t giving AKAI SOLO his rightful laurels for being one of the best higher conscious wordsmiths rhyming wisdom right now for those who prefer their beats with ample thought bubbles squeezed in between. For those still uninitiated, allow AKAI to show you what he does best in his style of flow on DREAMDROPDRAGON. A master of tapping into the human psyche, the Brooklyn rapper uses that to explore the inner workings of a mind. And he very much has plenty of words to spill into the clutter of a haze-smattered soundboard, too, packing even more particles in by volume over a subconsciously seismic rupture of hip-hop psychedelia curated by a small handful of producers from his surroundings including Wavy Bagels, TwentyFifthNight, and August Fanon. There’s plenty of talk of Freud, and death. It’s all interconnected with AKAI’s brainwaves rendering in real time as he ponders relationships and gets all turned up on the grand scheme of life in a big question existentialism kind of way. Maybe it’s his blunt honesty in owning up to his fucks ups and the-fuck-I-knows about what it all means when it comes to those highs and lows, but the lack of a filter makes him one of the most genuine voices speaking their truth in the hip-hop universe.

44. Regional Justice Center – FREEDOM [Closed Casket Activities]

For the past several years, Ian Shelton has been informing listeners through extreme hardcore on the modern day incarceration system with his pre-Militarie Gun band Regional Justice Center. He would know this better than most given that his brother, Max Hellesto, was behind prison walls under legally blurry circumstances, prompting the formation of the band. Having now served his time, it’s a fitting point for RJC’s third chapter to bring Hellesto formally into the band to put his scream behind the experience. Full of fastcore speed and a power violence intensity, FREEDOM SWEET FREEDOM forces your ear closer to hear Shelton’s emotions from looking on the outside in as well as Hellesto’s reckoning not only with what he saw and felt during his time in lockup, but the fallout on his future as someone cursed with a permanent criminal record behind their name, to be deemed a pariah by anyone with a closed mind, and is now rewired with perpetual anxiety in wondering if they may ever lead a “normal” life again. The rage custom created for maximum pit potential is secondary to the way it will leave you asking yourself if the debt paid to society truly ever does go away.

43. Ducks Ltd. – Harm’s Way [Carpark Records]

Nobody warned you that a dousing of spangled indie-pop could ever go as hard as Duck Ltd. go once they’re up and running. There was the potential of this heard on the Toronto duo’s 2021 debut breakthrough, Modern Fiction, with their abilities to seek out a hook and deliver it through motion capture in a blur, and that becomes all the more clear on its follow-up, Harm’s Way. A refinement of its predecessor to a certain extent, their sound embellishes a life luster while combatting doom and gloom with help from a surrounding community joining Tom McGreevy and Evan Lewis in the studio. Touring drummer Jonathan Pappo and bassist Julia Wittman’s prescence is scattered about alongside Ratboys’ Julia Steiner lending her voice with Marcus Nuccio offering up his drum kitwork. Dehd’s Jason Balla — with his own subverted pop perfectionism — arranged backing vocals in the company of Dummy’s Nathan O’Dell, Moontype’s Margaret McCarthy, Lawn’s Rui De Magalhaes, and Patio’s Lindsey-Paige McCloy. The collective effort matches the listens’ lyrical aesthetic of head-on collisions with the an off-rail daily struggle and plotting out escape routes from it, reinforcing the notion how it can take a village to see your way through.

42. Uniform – American Standard [Sacred Bones Records]

American Standard, stands — violently and towering — alone from the rest of Uniform’s world-burning narratives before it. Definitively the Brooklyn band’s most personally exorcised demon to date, the listen’s four epic-length chapters pore deep into frontman Michael Berdan’s lifetime battle with bulimia nervosa, ensuing bouts with mental health, self-hate, the collateral damage effects to relationships, and ultimately fighting to reconfigure the mind and body connection against a monster of an illness that never truly dies. Though fully exposed by his vulnerabilities, Berdan himself is a bastion and a beacon of reignited intensity in this visceral performance doubled down on a huge scaled up soundscape. The Molotov sound Uniform have become defined by is godlike in its powerful grip, tearing not through brick buildings or cop car windshields, but rather flesh and muscle, festering an ugly existence that can only be exacted through a brave admission worn on the face of a different kind of terrorizing human experience: the kind that lives inside of you.

41. Spiral XP – I Wish I Was a Rat [Danger Collective Records]

Following two EPs mostly under his guide, props to Max Keyes in amplifying Spiral XP’s collaborative energy when it counts the most on their Seattle rockers’ debut album, I Wish I Was a Rat. In giving bassist Lena Farr-Morrissey substantial shine on from the vocal heavens to offset his own bummer vibes getting buried under the dread of capitalism, they — alongside guitarists Jordan Mang and Kyle McCollum, and drummer Daniel Byington — sound wholly of a electric body in a static-diffused prism of colorful moods and textures where hook-perfect guitar-pop, the grungy indie rock inspo of their PNW surroundings, the cool slack of trip-hop, and a refraction of feedback-drenched riffs ebb the listen in and out of conscious and subconscious states. They’re seeking something real out of a world that’s becoming less honest by the minute, and yet, proving existential overcast and partly sunny skies can coexist within the same woozy atmosphere.

40. mo dotti – opaque [Self-released]

Since 2020, mo dotti have been humbly doing their own thing in the Los Angeles underground without much paid attention from ongoing discourse and social media trends outside that space. Instead, they’ve been perfecting their nuanced blend of noise and pop over two extended plays that trigger those extra special sensory-inducing chemicals vividly through their turbulent spinouts. opaque, their debut full-length, is that perfection realized in full as well as the mark of a band who understands how to bend their instruments in ways that the shoegaze gods intended. Despite its title, a balance of exhilarating aggression and transcendent serenity through its static shimmer hits from all directions and everything in between. Emotions, color, scenery, and the speed of sound travel in varying facets held within opaque. Perhaps the reason why no other light is let through is because mo dotti’s shoegaze of substance radiates out so much no matter the medium of melody.

39. Chat Pile – Cool World [The Flenser]

The world hasn’t changed all that much since Chat Pile reaped a towering bleakness from eternal noise rock damnation, corroded, twisted metal, and a poison tongue of post-hardcore intellect with their 2022 debut, God’s Country. Because what was horrifying back then remains equally — if not, more so — horrifying today, very little about the four-piece’s steady diet of chomping on and regurgitating society needn’t really be tweaked. You could say that with their sophomore effort, Cool World, they’ve found a groove to it all, however, like they’ve really leaned into the role of the biggest, benevolent bestial god at the top of the food chain who enjoys toying with its prey right before shredding its flesh and popping its organs open with its jaw. That added zest in their stalking steps is appreciative, in that they’re doing their most to tenderize a little extra seasoning in with their heaviness, inflict some sharper stabs of pain, dashes of dark, cosmic humor, and mix their nihilistic slurry together with terminally seasick rhythm in their chomping down of pathetic human miscreants that often litter the listen’s scenes and make them pray for mercy.

38. A Country Western – Life on the Lawn [Crafted Sounds]

A Country Western have done one of the more curious things an indie rock band could do with their breakthrough album, Life on the Lawn. At a point in time where so many of their peers — especially those in the Philly scene, including recent splitmates, They Are Gutting a Body of Water — have turned the City of Brotherly Love into a hotbed for shoegaze’s next wave of outside-the-box experimentalists, they’re instead cleaned up their act and opted for symmetry. This only comes to their benefit when taking into consideration that most of the traditionalist indie rock landscape nowadays doesn’t really hit in a way that singularly blazes an artists’ own identity out in the pack, burning through aesthetics rather than free-wheeling with substance. There’s a degree of Pavement worship laid down in A Country Western’s speaker-crackling sidewalks, but it’s a welcome reprieve to hears the four-piece crafting their own slanted and enchanted rock world in a balancing act of loud, off-kilter rippers, time sig shifts, beaming keys, and noodling away at noise frictioned between power-pop hooks and sun-tilted melodies steps away from home.

37. Cola – The Gloss [Fire Talk]

Cola spent their first album, Deep In View, shaking off some of their habitual remnants — especially that from their previous band, with guitarist Tim Darcy and bassist Ben Stidworthy being members of the cult fav Montreal act, Ought. Moving forward now alongside drummer Evan Cartwright, the trio’s sophomore follow-up, The Gloss, spurts them through changing shapes in their patterns that register as fully their own design, with them leaning into guitar-rock nuances and varying speeds. They’re steering away from simply brandishing a proper post-punk tutelage that respectfully gets the job done, and toward an alternative to it where instinct reclaims surprise in more pronounced tunefulness in their songs’ choruses, run-on brain trails that hinge upon profound observation, and motion swerves that at times, can even be calmingly delicate.

36. Peel Dream Magazine – Rose Main Reading Room [Topshelf Records]

The New York Public Library’s Rose Main Reading Room is a cathedral of literature surrounded by murals alongside its scaling 52′ tall ceilings. Architecturally majestic as much as it presents itself like a historic, artistically-inclined bookworm’s paradise, so is the music of Peel Dream Magazine on the experimental pop group’s fourth full-length effort. That’s not at all surprising for an underground institution who’ve evolved through absorption of muted designs in baroque chamber pop and psych-static-draped rooms over the years. Rose Main Reading Room is the peaceful collision of these dimensions, gluing together the post-pandemic insularity of 2022’s Pad with the essentialness of natural outside noises to our personal memory construction. The Los Angeles trio’s sonic canvas is made florid and psychedelically twee through brushed blush colors, prism reflections and faceted shades of light, and the use of classical indie rock materials to etch brain-decompressing mantras into its walls. Whether you find meditation through sound, words, or scenery, Rose Main Reading Room is a place where you can go to imagine your own version of paradise.

35. Adrianne Lenker – Bright Future [4AD]

In her in-between creative spurts away from Big Thief, Adrianne Lenker’s songwriting furthers its supernatural ability to hold the fraught nature of relationships, purpose, and the human experience with grace inside a song. Her latest solo effort, Bright Future, Lenker goes even further inward — spiritually and physically, at that. Recording the effort inside a studio in collaboration with multi-instrumental parlor players Mat Jeferson, Nick Hakim and  Josefin Runsteen who adorn her plucked-and-spindled acoustic nylon with rustic piano, fiddle, violin, and timber percussion, the dozen tracks which make up its webbed journey venture from a scrapbook of prose that moves past to present, views scary movies as reminders of our mortality, visits ruins as a monument to a love (or is it evol?) that was, and sees sadness as a gift. Like the live-to-tape takes of the album’s recording session, these songs sound like the poetic living testament of someone who sews life’s seasons for meaning, even if in the shadow of melancholia, rather than letting them exist solely as memory in vain.

34. Porcelain – Porcelain [Portrayal of Guilt Records]

Featuring members well-versed throughout other projects within the Austin music scene, Porcelain pile on a nuanced approach to heavy rock contortion that sees its roots turning inside post-hardcore, noise, and indie rock studies of the underground while never quite settling into one distinct corner of this scorched earth. That’s a fitting place for their sound to meander, as unease is rife throughout their sound on their self-titled debut album. Vocalist and guitarist Steven Pike oft peaks through shadowed grooves of rhythm before he alongside guitarist Ryan Fitzgibbon, bassist Jordan Emmert, and drummer Eli Deitz collectively explode the view of the world. Creatively and conceptually, Porcelain are a reflection of societal spoils tempered and blistered throughout. That it’s released and co-signed by the label run by Austin underground scene torchbearers, Portrayal of Guilt, only endorses their otherness in the rock world and leaves you with anticipation as to how they will further build their own.

33. Friko – Where we’ve been, Where we go from here [ATO Records]

Friko count themselves as part of the young, burgeoning “Hallogallow” rock collective of the Chicago scene, yet they don’t really sound entirely like their peers in Horsegirl, Lifeguard, and Cruel in the way each of those artists are respectively resurrecting ’90s DIY indie rock aesthetics through a fresh perspective in unbridled electricity. On their debut full-length, Where we’ve been, where we go from here, you can hear rumblings of that, but their Gen-Z nostalgia also winces a decade further to Aughts blog rock that came to define the culture of the mid-late 2000s. The duo of lead vocalist and guitarist Niko Kapetan and drummer Bailey Minzenberger — initially a trio, with original bassist Luke Stamos recording his parts before exiting the band before the album’s release — are fucking with timeline delineations in that sense where the listen speaks entirely to a different demo of listeners who have exhibited an uncanny ability to yearn for the years they weren’t even alive on this Earth as if they were in fact there. You have to give credit to Friko’s audacity in merging these eras in ways its originators had never thought, because up until now, these respective eras of indie rock rarely bled over, and here, you’ve got these agents of chaos parse it all together — putting into perspective everything Friko set out to do in the album’s title.

32. Alan Sparhawk – White Roses, My God [Sub Pop]

The only fair expectation of Alan Sparhawk’s first release following the death of Mimi Parker, his wife, bandmate and co-founder in Low, and a force of heaven here on Earth, was that it would definitively be something beyond traditional. Low in itself has never been stylistically predictable and were a far, far cry from the elegiac slowcore they began as in particlizing their sound through electronic distortions and diffusions. Even so, White Roses, My God is beyond that matter. This is Sparhawk wrestling with grief while transforming them with wonder into something sonically reflective of the beguiling human existential experience that is this chapter in his life. Chalk that up to an experimental restart in stepping out of his own skin, with songs crafted from pitch-tuned vocals, novice synthesizers and programmed electronic drums initially bought for his children’s use — who emerge in their own right as backing contributors. It’s an awe-striking revelation of something inside Sparhawk that confronts the heaviest of tragedy without relenting to evolve new paths forward.

31. Gouge Away – Deep Sage [Deathwish Inc.]

There would be no modern hardcore scene breaking preconceived boundaries like it is right now without Gouge Away’s influence kicking down walls. Through it all, Gouge Away had been missing in action. The pandemic years made for loss studio time as members splintered across the country and took on other projects while the world stood still. Deep Sage, recorded in their newly adopted Pac NW meeting ground, is chapter three from Gouge Away which hears Christina Michelle alongside guitarists Mick Ford and Dylan Downey, bassist Tyler Forsythe, and drummer Thomas Cantwell sinking even deeper into their skin. It’s Gouge Away’s fuel to their original formula fully concentrated for both combustibility and slowburn, if now with wiser rage heard in crackling shoegazing embers and turbulent headcharges that dig incision points into the psyche and creates pop blisters. They’re not as outright visible as they are in the blue sky scourge of Militarie Gun or Scowl, but Gouge Away claim comfort in their own self-made chaos when letting the thrill of it take over them. Whereas others are chasing the escape from those feelings, Gouge Away are running straight into them.

30. Sabrina Carpenter – Short ‘n Sweet [Island Records]

Four forgotten Disney-era albums and a proper adulting album later, Sabrina Carpenter’s sixth full-length, Short ‘n Sweet, is one that sticks to you easily in a pop music landscape that’s in dire need of some unabashed innuendo and big personality pulled off flawlessly by a charismatic chanteuse who proves she can seamlessly costume change various outfits from the closets of R&B and dance pop, folk, and country alongside her superstar image with perfectionist entertainment value. It may not may not be the most “deep” or art-minded pop album to grace us recently in her having fun at the expense of dumb boys within her dating orbit, but she leaves a hell of an impression in her tastes for revenge and providing you a jolt every time she crosses your mind. At this stage in the game, if you can effortlessly plead the case as to why Jack Antonoff still has a magic touch by combining Musgraves-ian country-pop with lite disco, you’ve already pulled off an impressive fete (though Amy Allen and Julia Michaels are the true super powers behind Carpenter’s starmaking affair here.)

29. Font – Strange Burden [Acrophase Records]

Born and cultivated out of a DIY arts space in their native Austin, Font are a fever dream of art-pop sensibilities set to react and released into the wild to take on their own life on their debut album, Strange Burden. That being said, don’t anticipate the certainty of a concrete form from where their music takes you, as the band’s style never stays put in one linear direction. It’s like hearing sound being scribbled all over a wall or being jolted by fluctuating electrical charges with no guess as to where the pattern ends. Sweeping you into the hallucinogenic spirit of the band’s vocalist and lyricist, Thom Waddill. With him as the band’s conduit, Font shape-shift through influences of electro-clash, LCD-beaming disco-punk, gleaming synth-rock, and post-punk spikes that sync stream-of-conscious musings, poetry, movement, and white hot flashes of light into varying intensities of energy.

28. Prize Horse – Under Sound [New Morality Zine]

It’s hard to get as excited about anything emerging from familiar influences of ’90s grunge, post-hardcore as well as shoegaze now that we’re a decade removed from Title Fight’s Hyperview and the deluge of bands appropriating the same lot of sounds. Prize Horse challenge that notion, however, by slowing down its churn and swirling the formula. Instead of whelming the listener in a very loud eruption of dense, heavy prism of rock, they’re requesting your patience to hear through the reverb waves and static building in decibel form, pulling in queues from a slowcore state. It’s as though their collision starts out far away instead before arriving at the foot of your doorstep, moments from crushing down and burying you miles beneath with it. On the Minneapolis trio’s debut full-length, Under Sound, they pull you into their bottomless pit and make it all the more impossible to find your way back to surface in compliment to Jake Beitel’s poetic impressionisms of personal emotion. Still, sunlight lies visibly in the distance as a reminder of what was before everything came to collapse. It’s a submerging atmosphere that doesn’t necessarily want to break you — just leave you dangling in the atmosphere close enough to stay warm.

27. Moor Mother – The Great Bailout [ANTI- Records]

The Great Bailout, Moor Mother’s ninth studio album, is one of Camae Ayewa’s more thematically focused listens, yet a more viscerally noisy turn in respect to recent years where 2021’s Black Encyclopedia of the Air and 2022’s Jazz Codes delved into broader thesis statements on the evolution Black Experience by honoring traditional Black music (free jazz, soul, and hip-hop, more explicitly) in its atmosphere. The listen is broken into schisms traversing yesteryear and the present where its central highlights exploit, justly so, an ugly history that has whitewashed death and racist atrocities through channeled anger. Ayewa — joined in breath by a varied cast including activist and songwriter Lonnie Holley, vocalist Raia Was, the great harpist Mary Lattimore, British-Iranian soprano Alya Al-Sultani, cosmic jazz instrumentalists Vijay Iyer, and Angel Bat Dawid — poses the heaviest questions in these drowned facts in a broken sonic cosmos befitting of its energy in industrial trap beats warped around discordant swells of brass as well as splatters of heavy industrial electronic friction. 

26. ELUCID – REVELATOR [Fat Possum]

It’s becoming impossible to separate the chaos from the bliss bubble so many put in extra effort building around themselves to soften the blow of current events in a chronic content overload state against their mental health on the daily. On REVELATOR, ELUCID acknowledges both in an equal view through beats violent paired with an eerie calm produced in collaboration with the likes of avant-garde electronic artist Jon Nellen, jazz bassist Luke Stewart, DJ Haram, Child Actor, and Iranian-Canadian duo Saint Abdullah. In a sense, the album plays out like an appendix to last year’s Armand Hammer effort, We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, in its indulgence of nihilism and sonically, a meaner, more menacing industrial-rap aesthetic built from experimental electronics and blast burst samples merged with a free jazz confluence. It delivers his breath in bold font while maintaining that despite the atrocities, oppressions, and grim realities we’re facing on a national and global scale, you’ve got to will your path to a world you want to live in. His way is doing so is arguably his most freak shit display yet, but sometimes you’ve got to get a little crazy if you want stay sane out there.

25. Aluminum – Fully Beat [Felte Records]

The upstart Bay Area band Aluminum is by no means appearing out of the blue, as it features scene vets Marc Leyda and Ryann Gonsalves, respectively of the departed underground rockers Wild Moth and Torrey, as well as Leyda’s previous Wild Moth bandmate Austin Montanari and Marbled Eye’s Chris Natividad. Past lives don’t explicitly shape their form regardless on their debut album, Fully Beat. Breaking free from exacting angles, Aluminum are a band navigating fluidly through pop and post-modern alternative rock textures filled with hypnotic guitar ripples and sticky, liquid bass grooves, helium-rich synthesizers, and the snap of drum beats that ensnare a lush haze through finer point detail. The listen introduces their sound as one which filters the everyday malaise, mundane, and depletion from the capitalist grind through their sonic prism, creating a necessary reactionary resistance against these motions.

24. Crumb – AMAMA [Crumb Records]

Across two EPs, their breakthrough 2018 debut full-length, Jinx, and their 2021 sophomore outing, Ice Melt, Crumb have found an escape from this Earth through a chic sonic style that opens pathways into the spirit world through dreamy, psychedelic pop spellbinding. And yet, they never permanently affix themselves to any one corner of those realms, always evolving along new planes. On their third studio effort, AMAMA, the New York quartet again venture through a new portal, now with their sound embellishing inner emotional energy radiating out more than ever. Synth keys refracting prisms, blood vessel-thumping basslines, and a cool, breezy meditative weave of percussive rhythm and brass transfix the body and soul through a crystalline production of subconscious-capturing color and pattern. In it, they’re daring to wonder a way through this world where they discover connections more organic, outrun isolation in their minds, and crack the existential through its soundwaves. Even as the space Crumb’s which sound expands as an in-between passage for humans on cosmic journeys, the atmosphere it creates from the inner self feels wholly lived in once it sinks into you.

23. RJF – Going Strange [Industry Standards]

CEREMONY, SPICE, and Crisis Man frontman and published poet Ross J. Farrar opened his head fully to listeners last year with Going Strange, his debut solo effort under the R.J.F. moniker. It was a stark departure away from the abrasive hardcore and punk corner voids we normally hear him shout into, with the album leaning spiritually into the realms of gothic post-punk and experimental rock with a minimalist angle of perspective, his voice stirring as if it’s taking on the form of incense smoke dissipating through air. Still, there is a lot of noise going on inside the disquiet of it all. This energy continues spilling out from his skull with its follow-up, GOING STRANGE. The timelapse since its predecessor now lays paths of structure around existential musings in defining words and sounds with more visible outlines in its psychedelic séance of basslines nudging doors, guitars flickering through hallways of the mind, primitive synthesizers going further into its recesses, and the meditative thump of a drum machine marking timestamps over his lyrical memory of faces, feelings, and places. These songs play out like tales personal and allegory, as if Farrar is sending warning signs to his future self by staring into past reflections.

22. Wild Pink – Dulling the Horns [Fire Talk]

Life isn’t pretty nor is it a cake walk, and Wild Pink are embracing the reality of it all doing its damnedest to wear you down with Dulling the Horn. Unfortunately for life, the Brooklyn indie rockers have figured out the perfect foil in their sound to keep their edges sharp. In the frame of Wild Pink’s current views on living, it’s being present in the moment which invigorates their fifth full-length’s next chapter where their sound embraces exhilarating, distortion pedal-fueled deep dives into the grit of those highs and lows, the omnipresent lingering questions that come with them, and getting on with it all. The turn makes Wild Pink sound more electrically embellished than ever across 10 tracks of indie rock with coarse edges doused with squelchy keys and the occasional brass smoke, complimenting the evergreen loud amp settings of fellow Justin Pizzoferrato-produced veterans Dinosaur Jr. rather than sinking deeper into a dad rock malaise (though, Ross is a new-ish father himself.) For his part, Ross is arguably at his most lyrically based with his philosophical quips on humankind, sports history, Dracula’s Catholic origin story, or the bombardment of tragic news cycles, all which have the ability to bowl you over, or at the very least, make you tilt your head sideways in confusing wonder.

21. Kelly Lee Owens – Dreamstate [dh2]

The solitude and isolation that would become the decompression and ultimately, the deconstruction, of Kelly Lee Owens’ hypnotic experimental electronic sound on 2022’s LP.8 only makes her fourth full-length, Dreamstate, all the more a lucid reawakening. In a world where dance music in its purest form has lost its way as an escape without the need of any substances, hearing the Welsh producer return as a kinetic soundwave curator whose new focus is fiercely pop-minded while embellishing a sophisticated vision for the dance floor arrives as a timely counterbalance to bratcore’s hedonism with its movement meditations. Lyrics — while fragmented and obtuse oft repeated in mantra — guide the listen with a strong gravitas, conflating emotions with the energies of the universe. Shape-shifting techno flickers and bobbles synapses through a radiant prism leading to infinite synesthesia experiences that stimulate the body, mind, and soul. Most astonishing is that Dreamstate requires nothing of turning to sleep in its search for your subconscious’ warmest desires. It unlocks those sensations we can only hope to feel when we close our eyes, and brings them vividly to us in our waking life.

20. Beth Gibbons – Lives Outgrown [Domino Recording Co.]

Lives Outgrown is something entirely of Beth Gibbons own personal depiction. It’s a collective body of art that took a decade for the Portishead frontwoman to bring to life, only to use the moment to look back on all of her years and career from the deathly hollows. That at least should satisfy the morbid urges of her main band’s listenerbase while introducing them to a side of Gibbons that exists as her. A densely rooted weave of gorgeous gothic folkwork and chamber pop with nary a breakbeat or industrial synthesizer to be heard near its foreground, it’s wholly of the natural world reflective of this human experience as she navigates the passage of time from a place of well-worn wisdom in living it. One thing time hasn’t weathered, however, is Gibbons’ voice which remains a conduit for spell-binding, as she departs her role as Portishead’s eerie specter and transforms into that fantastical light at the other end as her songs sing of life’s inevitable final chapters, the grief we carry for those who’ve already crossed over, and who we leave behind. For a subject so heavy on the heart, it doesn’t feel that way when she makes it into music. Instead, Lives Outgrown is the life’s work of an artist who has chosen to enchant death with a sparkle of her own dark magic rather than let it shake her.

19. Allegra Krieger – Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine [Double Double Whammy]

The fine art of observation through song is a slow nurture process, and Allegra Krieger’s craft of penning strange wonderments about the lives we live have been giving that art all of the space needed to grow since her 2020 debut, The Joys of Forgetting. Now four albums into her career with her breakthrough, Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine, the NYC songwriter is sewing seasons as the worlds she’s lived through come together, or fall apart, depending on the angle of perspective. Maybe more so the latter if there’s honesty behind the matter, as she stares down our respective inevitable paths toward death (following a brush with it of her own) and the collective societal decay we must sift through happening in the meantime. Don’t let the morbidity of it all bring you down, however, as Krieger’s sound — an insular, woven work of mesmerizing electric indie folk that inhabits spaces quiet, noisy, or somewhere rustling headspaces in the in-betweens — is neither that of a resolute subscription to a gothic lifestyle nor some twist on dark humor. There’s a profound awe for the human condition through all of the chaos in its constant perseverance for deeper meaning in this lifetime.

18. SPEED – ONLY ONE MODE [Flatspot Records / Last Ride Records]

Hardcore is going through a sea change at the moment, and SPEED are the answer to getting you to the other side. The energy shift on the horizon is hungry for something heavier, harder, faster, and the Sydney band’s debut full-length, ONLY ONE MODE, is the answer — a perfectly evolved transition for the scene since igniting it with their 2022 breakthrough EP built around muscular raw power, grooved adrenaline, heart-beating emotion, and high intensity cardio that amounts to coronating the hulking crew led by Jem Siow as the freshest freaks of nature coming from the pit. SPEED, in name, are no false flag either. They rep their ethos of holding up community unity, authenticity, and Southeast Asian pride through a fast and hard tour de force that never once relents across the 23-minute-long, 10-track listen, bridging the steps between Madball, Trapped Under Ice, and Have Heart with what’s in the water right now when listening to Drain, Big Boy, and SPY tipping the scales back toward metallic, chugging heaviness.

17. Wishy – Triple Seven [Winspear]

We first met Wishy a year ago when they put out one of 2023’s best EPs with their promising first release, Paradise. Like many new bands figuring out who they are, however, where Wishy were yesterday and where they are today is many moons apart on their debut album, Triple Seven. Luck — and timing — have very much been on the side of the Indianapolis crew, as primary songwriters Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites had been like two ships passing in the night within their scene while playing in their respective previous bands. Now that the stars have finally aligned between the two, it’s like everything is in sync within their universe, full band in tow. On Triple Seven, the five-piece arrive sounding nearly fully formed in their frame-up of daydream-swirled alternative pop-rock, with the listen baring no holes in its songwriting formula, whether it’s when Krauter takes the steering wheel and swervedrives distortion-fueled synesthesia onto exhilarating runways or the way Pitchkites’ turns every day into Sundays that shimmer on cloud nine. Equally lovelorn and blissed with a kiss, Triple Seven hears Wishy come true to the potential Paradise had to offer in lustrous effect.

16. The Cure – Songs of a Lost World [Fiction Records]

In hindsight, finally receiving the first new Cure album in 16 years in which Robert Smith now-infamously introduces it by proclaiming the end of everything song that we sing did in fact — through some cosmic tear — unleash a certain energy into the universe that would definitively lead us there. It’s also an alter offering of a reminder as why you should never write off the scene’s pioneers, even if it’s been 30-plus years since their last widely acclaimed release. Songs of a Lost World is no Pornography nor is it Disintegration, but that’s not what a modernist listener should expect. The album is the sound of these purveyors of the dark taking the generational temperature in modifying their gothic arena-sized ambitions with a production vibe of grandeur, meeting whatever’s left of today’s decaying alternative climate with heavy intentionality. These are epic pop dirges ringing out larger than life in crater-stamping riffs laid over moon-swooning synths, giving Smith carte blanch to paint the stars melancholic of whatever cliché wicked this way may come — his voice being vampirically ageless is a luster to it all, too. Dark matter doesn’t necessarily dim the more time passes, it turns out. It instead goes through a temporal period of creative dormancy before returning and swallowing the world whole all over again.

15. Mannequin Pussy – I Got Heaven [Epitaph Records]

Mannequin Pussy have been flirting with making the leap to big alternative rock ambitions status since their 2019 breakthrough, Patience, heard the Philly punk band softening their hard corners for glowing alternative rock hooks made all the more tantalizing by Marisa Dabici’s dark, broken halo circling around them. With their fourth full-length, I Got Heaven, Mannequin Pussy get to that place, but once again, by their rules only. Anti-dogmatic rage, vulnerable, self-reflective slow-burns pair well next to a worn LP copy of Japanese Breakfast’s Jubilee. Whirring fire and desire aims for a bigger platform, and hypnotic grooves bleed into the scene’s current fascination with trip-hop and blush mid-’90s-era alternative-pop. Consider these as red herrings just as well, as the album’s back half feeds off Mannequin Pussy’s innate fury in some of their most blistered up displays of hardcore-punk fireworks where emotions get the best of Dabici righteously, with drummer Kaleen Reading, bassist Colins “Bear” Regisford, and guitarist Maxine Steen ready to meet her at any moment. With that spark, Mannequin Pussy raise Hell in Heaven, making the album fully ascendant.

14. Kendrick Lamar – GNX [pglang / Interscope Records]

In hindsight, we should have known he had it gassed up and ready to go. Things had been very quiet in the world Kendrick Lamar, but then the summer’s spiciest rap beef prodded him out of self-exile with teeth-showing bangers and an entire citywide Juneteenth celebration for his victory. What, with plans to play this coming year’s Superbowl’s halftime show, came the realization that he was just warming up to ensure those in the stadium’s rafter seats could hear what he had to say before shifting the culture again with his sixth album, GNX. Even if your mileage may vary on which version of Lamar you like best — be it the accidental pop star whose rhymes are always matched with an all-too-cool beat or the poetry of when he gets all jazzed up and twisted up in his head — GNX brings all of the voices of the Compton rapper together in an album that matches the blown out energy of DAMN with the floatational inner monologues of good kid, m.A.A.d. city. He hasn’t forgotten what his haters brought onto themselves as of late, but he’s also having a hell of a lot of fun serving up flagrant fouls in their direction, returning harder than ever to remind us why he is the true master of all ceremonies in the game.

13. Broadcast – Spell Blanket – Collected Demos 2006 – 2009 [Warp Records]

13 years following her passing, we reach the final fragments left behind of Trish Keenan’s brilliance with Spell Blanket – Collected Demos 2006 – 2009, a collection of music that was to become the fifth Broadcast album. Bandmate James Cargill spent the better part of the past decade culling together these songs recorded onto four-track tapes and voice memos on MiniDiscs in the years since the band’s last proper studio album, 2005’s Tender Buttons. There’s no concrete linearity across the hour-long arrangement of 36 demo songs, yet it’s a fascinating glimpse behind Keenan’s creative psyche while also making the audience wonder and pore into detail of what would have become of them, as they lay bareboned, some more fleshed than others. Distortion-drenched echoes from beyond, sun-faded freak-folk, gothic retro-pop, minimalistic synthetic transmissions, and chiming, kaleidoscopic instrumentals astral project Keenan back to us. As has always been at the core of Broadcast, these songs even in their rawest form give of themselves unto the universe sonic matter with the ability to transcend logic and all senses.

12. MJ Lenderman – Manning Fireworks [ANTI- Records]

MJ Lenderman’s style of country-smoked indie rock has the rock chops to compliment a hazy day in a similar vibe that his other band Wednesday does, but the Asheville guitarist and songwriter’s slouched wordsmith ways hit better as the days dim, temperatures start to turn their back on you, nature’s shades of fade to red, oranges, yellows, and ultimately, dried, brittle and brown, and the slowdown of life forces you to sit with your own thoughts a little longer than you’d like. Sonically, Manning Fireworks is also a thing of home-cooked comfort food where anything with pedal steel and slide guitars is going to kindle much better against the spark of Lenderman’s punchline-packed observations of the lonely. Be it his own backroads or that of the character sketches like the washed guy who docks his boat at the himbo dome on “Wristwatch” or the very divorced guy avoiding a confrontation with an obvious mid-life crisis by jamming Clapton into his rented Ferrari en route to Vegas on “Leaving You”, Lenderman’s knack for deprecating dudes rock non-sequiturs puts him on pace of joining the same league of comically gonzo songwriters as Malkmus or Linkous who you assume aren’t taking themselves too seriously.

11. This Is Lorelei – Box for Buddy, Box for Star [Double Double Whammy]

One of the most fascinating observations about the two members of experimental changelings Water From Your Eyes is that when you separate the two halves into their own respect creative outlets, you discover that both Rachel Brown and Nate Amos are highly refined in their prolific pursuits of the perfect pop song. Though abundant in its releases throughout the years as This Is Lorelei, it wasn’t until Amos hunkered down into a self-prescribed post-weed smoker’s recovery period one summer where the challenge to write beyond the fog of being high rendered around 70 songs designed in varying tones — be it anxiety-driven Casiotoned indie pop, triumphant loser synth-pop anthems, clean-strummed power-pop, orchestrated self-deprecation and country bumpkin relational odes — that would make many of the 69 Love Songs blush with flattery in their versatile songwriting craftwork. This Is Lorelei’s proper debut album, Box for Buddy, Box for Star, whittles it down to just 10 of them, and there’s nary a flaw to be found within any of these rough gems. What more is that it, in welcome ways, tempts you to delve even further down Amos’ own rabbit hole, knowing that the bottom of his box runs deep.

10. High Vis – Guided Tour [Dais Records]

Where many of their peers in the adjacent hardcore scene confront societal decay at the hands of oligarchical villains by making full use of an aggressive sound and fury, High Vis seek out the path of the life-affirming enlightenment in their working class anthem without sanding down any of the coarse edges needed to survive whatever trials may present themselves. Guided Tour — the band’s third album and follow-up to their 2022 sophomore breakthrough, Blending — glides through them with more stealth maneuvering compared to its hardened predecessor. The five-piece continues to converge a distinct style that mediates a post-hardcore rubble with an affliction for early Brit pop, with its tone gleaming brighter through the greyscale in the silvered shimmer of bent wave guitarwork and a collective vehicle of rhythmic versatility. They’re packing hooks with muscular fists full of rock when drudging through heavier political overcasts and depressive emotional states while pushing off the weight to make way for self-manifested wins over them. The duality is symbiotic, presented as both a song for rebellion and championing of the voiceless under the infinite echo shout-alongs trailing off Graham Sayles’ sandpaper tongue.

9. Jessica Pratt – Here in the Pitch [Mexican Summer]

Has time stopped or are we simply floating along some physically-defying conflation of its dimensions? Whatever is happening, there’s something unlocked beyond this plane, leaving much to be suspended in the air throughout the sonic orb that is Here in the Pitch, the wondrous fourth studio album from Jessica Pratt. The mystique which the Los Angeles-by-way-of-San Francisco songwriter has cultivated her sound over the years since its humble beginnings in finger-picked flickerings inside an empty bedroom has grown in mythology since moving into the recording studio properly with 2019’s Quiet Signs. There, Pratt’s voice and instrumental craft began to pull in a cast of echoes from past and present forms with an ornate, muted bohemia of folk and ’60s orchestral pop frameworks. Here in the Pitch enhances her music’s magical grasp ever so slight with additional layers of instrumentation recalculating gravity around her ethereal emergence from darker depths of the space-time continuum, building castles in the cosmos from memory. It’s as if Pratt fully realizes her own supernatural powers using song as her vessel to search through concrete points in time and all of its conjured places, and the essence of mortality.

8. julie – my anti-aircraft friend [Atlantic Records]

Despite their enigmatic, very online origin story, julie’s music is a case of the more you hear, the more you discover that there’s something more to them than just a mood board of delay pedals, murmuring vocals drenched in reverb, and blurry photo posts as has become the case with too many from those born out of the shoegaze scene’s viral era. The Orange Country-bred trio arguably sound the least reductive as far as what their peers are creating on their debut album (a major label debut, at that, being signed to Atlantic Records,) my anti-aircraft friend. For one, it doesn’t hide Alex Brady and Keyan Pourzand’s presence in its murk, with their voices cutting clean through its erupting grunge craters. Guitars occasionally swerve in a fluctuating gravity, but julie are also incisive in tuning their rumble toward bleeding their youth sonically into compact bouts of ’90s noise rock and lethargic pools many of their peers wouldn’t have the patience to wade through. If Horsegirl have got refreshing the classic moves of indie rock in earnest cornered, then julie are restoring shoegaze to its more corrosive form rather than hiding their flaws behind a wall of filtered, dreamy textures.

7. Jlin – Akoma [Planet Mu]

Stating that something is “experimental” in the sphere of creating art and sound, Jlin is the embodiment of a word that doesn’t need to have a concrete meaning or shape around it. Akoma, the Gary, Indiana multi-instrumentalist and producer’s third full-length album, enters our terrestrial vantage point as something beyond convention even though its linear progression can be dotted with the continuous evolution behind her work. The natural and unknown worlds of her recent interstitials in 2021’s Embryo and last year’s Perspective cross their respective DNAs, mutate, and produce some of Jlin’s clearest experimental electronic explorations. Even in being joined by universe-disrupting architects björk on the hyperkinetic opener “Borealis”, weaving strings through particles with the Kronos Quartet on “Sodalite”, and going beyond the limits with pianist minimalist Phillip Glass on “The Precision of Infinity”, her inventive approach to redesigning the glitch and bleep patterns of synthetic effects, varying textures of percussive movement, and tapping into energy can take on a range of emotions. In all, Akoma endures in her unsatiated journey through soundscapes futuristic yet tangible, leaving you in a state of wonder pondering what’s next.

6. Waxahatchee – Tigers Blood [ANTI- Records]

After sprawling through storms and cloudforms, the latest from Katie Crutchfield and her band Waxahatchee is a quintessential glass of sobering sweet tea to quench all things imagined of rustic Americana existentialism. She’s been headed down this path for quite some years now, but with her sixth studio effort, the alternative country scenery is all hers to run through in its most vivid detail whenever her words and sound spark rumination. Helping hands bring all temperature color to life, as she invited in-demand Wednesday guitarist, MJ Lenderman — who makes for the picturesque dance partner with her on the centripetal lovers’ waltz “Right Back to It” — alongside Spencer Tweedy, and Twin Peaks’ Colin Frankel and Colin Croom into the studio to fill in some of those quieter spots left intentionally within the interiors of 2020’s St. Cloud. The collective energy tumbles clear-headed concessions of Crutchfield’s self as well as her personal and creative satellites off her tongue. She’s twisted, breathless, roiled, and satiated at once, and into the foreground with tinning bass drum and waning pedal steel, her song swoons with epiphanies sky high and deepthinks as soft as southern humid air from one of the 21st century’s most transcendent indie rock songwriters.

5. Knocked Loose – You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To [Pure Noise Records]

Heavy music that hits you with something harder than just impact will always be made by artists who make you feel like you are genuinely being brought within an inch of your life. On their third studio effort, You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To, Knocked Loose exponentialize it to confront the most terrifying of existential matter on their biggest, hardest, and fastest collision course with oblivion yet. A top of mind panic attack aboard an airplane is the catalyst of the listen. Blind faith, fake prophets, fake friends, and struggling under the weight of everyday anxieties surge through the mind across the listen, and Bryan Garris alongside guitarists Isaac Hale and Nicko Calderon, bassist Kevin Otten, and drummer Kevin Kaine are hellbent on smashing through each and every one of them. Stylistically, they’re still very much the savages of shifting tectonic plates from the Earth’s core they were on their 2019 breakthrough, A Different Shade of Blue, even from the gravity of a bigger stage. Though now bolstered by production of mainstream metalcore studio guru Drew Fulk, there’s a greater degree of intensity and weight behind the way their sound hits the sensory surface.

4. Kim Gordon – The Collective [Matador Records]

That Kim Gordon has made a noisy experimental electronic album leaps ahead of the year 2024 at the age of 70 with The Collective shouldn’t surprise anyone. She’s had her pulse on shaping the future since forever, but coming out of 2019’s astounding solo debut, No Home Record, perhaps there’s an even more jaw-dropping audacity of the multi-threat artist icon to further fracture her sound away from the many past lives on its follow-up. Blistering riffs and blown-out amps still tear through its fabric, but really, it’s Gordon’s endless pursuit of reinvention through her art that constitutes the one constant fingerprint in her sonic influence. Her lens on grotesque observations of pop culture gives listeners much to consider as she flips into selfie mode to embark on a deconstruction of digital self-currency. Somehow, it’s a statement on the loss of something wholly of the individual, yet altogether very Kim Gordon.

3. Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee [Realistic Studios / Superior Viaduct]

Diamond Jubilee is the definition of independent artistry, and thank Cindy Lee for reminding us of that. As the former lead vocalist and guitarist for Canadian Aughts rockers, WOMEN, the drag persona alter ego of Patrick Flegel has more or less maintained the creative integrity of their past life wrought in low fidelity art rock and experimental pop in the singular form across several albums that had — until its word-of-mouth, self-released, non-streaming service subservient breakthrough this year — quietly existed in their own plane. Anyone who came of age at the tail end of the 2000s scene will find that the listen harkens to an era that embraced the messy and the unkept, and where criticism was led by the sound of songs challenging sonic status quo rather than milking playlist strategies. Though a dense effort in its double LP length, it’s also one that can easily be digested in piece meal without losing your placemark thanks to its crackling, hypnotic fusion of art rock, pop, and psychedelics that traverse decades spanning aesthetic touch points of ’60s girl groups and foundational pop music formations, the wake ‘n bake of early freak-folk and Woodsist outputs, stains of the Smell scene’s shitgaze and crude, synthy noise-pop bands, and yes, that eerie transistor indie rock strain of WOMEN echoes on, too. Still, it stands altogether as the outsider vision of Cindy Lee alone, and perhaps that’s why it sounds so radical to hear in 2024 even if we’ve spiritually encountered a similar vibe before.

2. Charli XCX – BRAT [Atlantic Records]

In trying to achieve major star status, Charli XCX has never felt fully satisfied with the end result of becoming the perpetual artist influencer who dared to shift the shape of pop. Be it singles-ready, redefined as experimental, or in gleaming cinematic, she’s become the it girl who the rest steal from it as she falls short of achieving that same degree of clout. BRAT, her sixth LP, is her definitive thunder boom clap back to all of that. No longer beholden to rules beyond her own, it’s an ultra-sleek synthesis of electro-pop club bangers and post-hyperpop futurism aided by production from collaborative constant A.G. Cook alongside Cirkut, El Guincho, and Gaseffelstein to fuel her late night rave convictions. That sound itself puts her miles ahead of the current conversations going on stylistically, but if you want to talk about Charli, the person, too, she shares more than ever of her insides out on everything from surviving the pop machine, an Internet-buzzing rivalry with Lorde, hypothetical motherhood, and doing her most to make Sophie proud with tears in her eyes. BRAT‘s rollout being utterly flawless, with everything from deliberately ugly album cover discourse,  subsequent memes, a record-breaking live Boiler Room session, indie sleaze nostalgia, a remix album, and a whole summer dedicated to its energy, sets the new bench mark in what the culture should strive for in exceeding on substance and personal fodder in the same sweaty, out-of-breath heartbeat.

1. Dummy – Free Energy [Trouble In Mind Records]

Dummy’s sophomore follow-up, Free Energy, moves past any and all discourse happening elsewhere in today’s music landscape, and instead shifts focus onto their singular, amorphous form of where their sound can move when approached outside the sphere of trend. It asks of you to open your mind past their many influential touchstones like Stereolab and My Bloody Valentine, and let mutating layers of noise-pop and ambient waves guide your through an all-in-one-sitting sensory experience. The dissolve of linear timelines on Free Energy is most obvious where Dummy blend colorful, cranking archways of static with meditative orbs. It’s a push and a pull, an ebb and flow, and expansion and decompression of matter reacting accordingly by their sonic guide. Unlike today’s vibe-as-aesthetic markings across indie’s dreamier pastures, its four members understand the power of bubbling pop into their own unshaped roads, offering up co-vocalists Emma Maatman and Nathan O’Dell as sage conduits for alien signals to be verbalized in the human language, as guitarist Joe Trainor criss-crosses any and all null spaces with cosmic electricity and drummer Alex Ewell oversees particles kinetic through motorik sputters. To be able to create music that liberates sound and style as if it wants to abstract the space-time continuum is perhaps one of the few remaining tells of any artist that takes advantage of this freedom through art, and Dummy are inviting all of that energy into their universe.