Top 10 Albums of 2024 – Alex Lauria

With an interest in music across all genres, here is the list of my favorite records of 2024. I’ve also shared some words about my top three albums. Hope you find something you like!

Album of the Year:
Tigers Blood – Waxahatchee (Anti)
It’s been exactly four years since Waxahatchee’s St. Cloud was released, the album that took the indie scene by storm and was hailed as one of the best records of 2020 by numerous publications, and in the time that’s passed, band founder, frontwoman, and lyricist Katie Crutchfield has continued to forge her own sense of community through friends, collaborators, and family – all bound together by a shared vision of where her life is to go. And so the product of this is the incredible follow up Tigers Blood, an extravagant and involved record, steeped in both connection and nostalgia, that seeks to celebrate this community and all who want or have already taken part in it. Filled with the same impressively sharp diction that’s always separated her from her peers and a continued dedication to piercing transparency in the face of more complicated emotions, the album acts a crowning moment for the artist as she continues her 12 year arc from DIY undergrounder to folk/rock legend in the making.

Standout Songs “Right Back to It (feat. MJ Lenderman)” , “Crowbar”, “Tigers Blood”

2. BRAT/Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat – Charli xcx (Atlantic)
What happens when the once niche and severely online crosses into the mainstream? When Tik Tok soundbites, Lana Del Rey worshippers, and playfully misandrist edgelords prove themselves to hold sincere artistic weight? When a record, so entrenched in the fringe, is not just embraced by but holds capitalistic power over the rest of society? Well, Charli xcx seems to answer all these questions and more on her seventh and perhaps most *charli voice* “iconic” record BRAT. It’s a sleek, uptempo severely self-referential pop album that embraces the early 2010s club sound while still letting the artist’s experimental genius she’s perfected and relied on for the last decade shine through, particularly focusing on and honoring these roots on the later released remix record with global stars and old friends from throughout the industry. On BRAT and its subsequent remix record cheekily named Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat , Charli contemplates everything from drugs to childbirth to exes to womanhood, pulling from her queer inspirations and the internet landscape she’s helped form over the last 14 years, in a stunning moment of commercial and cultural breakthrough. “Brat Summer” became something larger than the music itself, a phenomenon that only comes once in a lifetime for a select few artists – and even so rarely achieves the heights and impact BRAT has.

Standout Songs “360” , “Sympathy is a knife”, “Everything is romantic featuring caroline polachek” , “So I featuring a.g. cook” “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde”

3.Diamond Jubilee – Cindy Lee (Realistik Studios)
On the last day of March, Cindy Lee, the drag queen persona of long time musician Patrick Flegel, released their incredible two hour lofi rock album Diamond Jubilee. Spending the first seven months of its release only available through a free download link on a poorly designed (and kind of sketchy looking) website or through a two hour video with no song breaks on YouTube, the project was clearly intended to subvert and protest any form of commercial success or even impact. It’s an unsurprising move from the longtime fringe musician – yet still shocking to a degree, adding to the allure of a record which, despite its staunch inaccessibility with still no official physical copies existing, has been able to garner itself intense widespread praise from journalists and listeners alike.

Diamond Jubilee, for all the conversation that now surrounds it, is indeed a remarkable and immediately timeless record that is split into two parts, each roughly one hour, that seems to paint the sprawling and tragic life of someone who’s lived nearly 40 years, with moments of revelation both drowning and sparkling in a lifetime of devastation and beauty. It’s a record that throws itself into conflicting nostalgia and immediacy, transience and permanence, intimacy and detachment to depict the ever contradicting nature of a singular existence, all with the backdrop of queer isolation continuously looming. On the cover of the record, a cartoon Cindy in full drag sits on a still of a realistic freight train, their face depressed as they ultimately leave the plains of Alberta, Canada, where they were raised, for somewhere different – and hopefully better. And it’s in this very central image we find the rest of the record taking place, fully surrendering itself to the transitory and at times lonely nature of life. The cartoon Cindy, contrasted with their surroundings in both the literal and figurative senses, exists as the focal point, as a symbol of a livelihood that can feel so at odds with the world and oneself, of the universal experience where one’s identity can feel both fully formed and completely unrealized at the same time, as we follow our natural inclination to ruminate on the validities and limitations that exist within ourselves. The record’s deep existentialism and sincerity is front and center and is steeped in both nuance and familiarity.

As for the music itself, the album’s lofi quality is charming, comforting, and bit nostalgic, reminiscent of the soft rock of the 1970s as hints of old time R&B also come through. The poor audio quality is a bit risky, especially for a musician who’s been in the game this long, yet it’s this very aspect, as well as its length, that adds to the enigmatic layers and draw of the record. Cindy isn’t asking the listener for deep dives, intense listens, or in depth lyric readings – at least not at first – but rather to exist along with the music, let it play in the background of a morning around the house or a small gathering with friends, to do other things and let whatever moments shock or hit do so with the synchrony of the universe seemingly guiding everything else. And so it’s this less demanding yet still intentional nature of Diamond Jubilee that makes it what it is and reinforces the themes at hand of an artist not necessarily making sense of anything in the world but allowing it to pass by. It’s a rewarding, comforting, and ultimately stunning two hour statement from someone who has found glimpses of the profound in the mundane and recognized this has to be enough.

Standout Songs: “Diamond Jubilee”, “Demon Bitch” , “Government Cheque”, “Durham City Limit”