021: My favorite albums of 2024!

The guitar features prominently, alongside experimental expressions of ambient, folk, classical, and even a little metal.

I went hard on my favorite jazz albums of 2024 so this one will be a little lighter on my words. Not to worry, however – there was so much fantastic music this year that I’ve doubled this list to include twenty favorites as well. (It still might be too long for email so open in a new window if you must!) I could have made a case for slotting a handful of these on the jazz list but for one reason or another, I made my decisions and we’ll leave it at that. Genre labels are fluid and fleeting and useful for categorizing but can be a burden, too. I close every annual list intro with the following: please buy music that moves you and support artists directly. Love to everyone!

Danielle Boutet
Pièces
2/16, Freedom To Spend

Charmingly strange and minimalist music self-released in Montréal in 1985: Françoise Hardy meets the Fantastic Planet soundtrack. My favorite archival discovery of the year!

Molly Lewis
On the Lips
2/16, Jagjaguwar

Music videos are a lost art but preeminent whistler Molly Lewis blessed us with this incredible miniature film to go along with her lovely album of hypnotic, hazy music that harks back to the time of lounge acts in cocktail bars.

Discovery Zone
Quantum Web
3/8, RVNG Intl.

Shimmering retrofuturist pop that had me in its grip all year long every time I wanted to listen to something nice that wasn’t also ambient. In my imagination, the Sims listen to this music.

Hannah Frances
Keeper of the Shepherd
3/1, Ruination Record Co.

A gorgeous album of avant-folk with the orchestral scope of progressive rock and serious guitar chops that evoke bands like Unwound. The title track is a standout, rollicking cosmic country that brushes up against jazz.

Grimório de Abril
Castelo d'Água
3/14, Municipal K7

Experimental psychedelic music from Brazil that slides up and down the spectral spectrum, this is the best ‘90s Blonde Redhead album that was not made by Blonde Redhead in the ‘90s or ever. This is the album I most wanted to write about at length this year but never got the right opportunity to do so. Maybe I’ll return to it another time.

Cindy Lee
Diamond Jubilee
3/29, self-released

The uncommon album release strategy was immediately endearing but it’s the massively terrific music that kept this album top of mind all year long. Yes, it’s a commitment to listen to the whole thing but a worthy one. Diamond Jubilee is the hypnagogic pop of our modern nightmare world and we love it very much.

Kira McSpice
The Compartmentalization of Decay
4/12, self-released

Dark and spellbinding, this music is doom folk that’s something like Kate Bush meets a slightly less intense Neurosis. This is another album I wanted to write more about that should have received more attention. It’s ambitious and gripping and will make you feel like you’re lost in the woods and it’s kind of scary but you know you’ll be okay in the end.

Shane Parish
Repertoire
5/10, Palilalia Records

A virtuoso who has given us fourteen lovingly diverse guitar-only versions of fantastic songs. Where else are you going to find Alice Coltrane AND Minutemen on the same album? I had the chance to see Parish back in May and it was a highlight of my live music experiences this year!

Gastr del Sol
We Have Dozens of Titles
5/24, Drag City

Speaking of highlights of the year, it was an honor and pleasure to write about niche avant-garde legends Gastr del Sol at some length for Uncut – not to mention getting the chance to speak with both David Grubbs AND Jim O’Rourke for it! (You can read the review online but the interviews are print-only.) This career-spanning box set gathers previously uncollected live material (much of which came from their final performance together) with music from obscure compilations, singles, and EPs. It’s wonderful! Just fucking wonderful!

Rebecca Bruton | Jason Doell
a root or mirror, blossom, madder, cracks; together
8/28, Collection QB

A fantastic album of avant-garde contemporary classical (or experimental chamber music) and the third album on this list that I wanted to write more about. It consists of two long pieces, written respectively by the named composers and performed by Quatuor Bozzini and junctQín keyboard collective. I’ll borrow some words from the album bio, written by Martin Arnold: “There’s so much detail in both pieces: they’re both variously piano-delic (one piano rung by six hands!); string harmonics pinging and whistling (sometimes together with mouths whistling); impossible piano sustains created with rolling mallets; impossible solos made by many players sounding as one.”

Setting
at Eulogy
9/6, DOSed

Call it ecstatic drone, call it minimalist krautrock, call it avant-garde jamming. This music, a live set documented at the venue Eulogy in Asheville, is strange and sublime and when it gets into a groove, you can’t pull yourself away. The instrumentation includes banjo and harmonium alongside synths and percussion and it all works really well together. I hope I get to see this group live someday!

Masayoshi Fujita
Migratory
9/6, Erased Tapes Records

This is one of several albums I toyed with putting on the jazz list but ended up placing here instead. Masayoshi Fujita plays the vibraphone and marimba but the music feels closer to ambient or even neoclassical. “Tower of Cloud” in particular sounds like a happy version of the Twin Peaks music, “Blue Rock Thrush” features a languid saxophone that may be the album at its most jazz, and Moor Mother is on the excellent “Our Mother's Lights.” Always a good sign when Moor Mother appears!

Quarterly
Adonis
9/13, Ruination Record Co.

Another album you might call neoclassical. I think I’ll call it experimental folk. It’s beautiful, at any rate: guitar and cello music, slightly expanded upon here with various percussion, field recordings, and tape loops. Intimate, textural, and lyrical, I often returned to this album when I wanted to hear something lovely but moody.

Wendy Eisenberg
Viewfinder
9/13, American Dreams

A wild, wonderful, incredibly inventive album of experimental music that hits upon free jazz, post-rock, and even art-folk (it closes with Eisenberg’s stark, jazzy take on the traditional “In the Pines”). Inspired by Eisenberg’s struggles with vision issues that finally led them to get laser surgery, writing this music served as a unique form of meditating on the philosophy of vision and the eye itself. It’s something of an odyssey, tense and challenging but with vast sonic rewards for adventurous ears all along the way.

Alan Licht
Havens
9/20, VDSQ

I love guitar music and this year has been full of excellent exploratory guitar albums! This is one of my favorites and I would have been excited about it even if I wasn’t instinctively drawn to the cover art before I heard a single note. I reviewed this one for Uncut and described it as a pure distillation of the guitar’s possibilities. You gotta hear his enchanting cover of the Stooges’ “1970,” which transforms the controlled chaos of the original into crystalline guitar hallucinations entirely Licht’s own.

Leila Abdul-Rauf
Calls from a Seething Edge
10/11, Cyclic Law/Syrup Moose

A last-minute addition to my list that I wish I would have checked out sooner, but here we are. This music is dark, a brilliant mix of ambient and industrial, with brushstrokes of metal, jazz, neoclassical, avant-pop, and even choral music. It is really powerful, massive in its own way. It’s a bit reminiscent of my favorite defunct doom metal band SubRosa, with more of an ethereal bent.

The Necks
Bleed
10/12, Northern Spy

No list of favorites is complete without the Necks. This time around they’ve given us another 40+ minute durational monument to the power of concentrated listening. I love bells and I love the way the Necks use them here. As atmospheric as always, with piano that sometimes is crushing and other times is overwhelmingly gentle. If you love the Necks, you’ll love this one, too.

Barry Archie Johnson
Fortune's Mirror
10/18, VDSQ

I already love the guitar but then you add some flute to the mix and game over. Barry Archie Johnson plays both on his wonderful debut album. The sonic ground covered is rapturous at one end and plaintive at the other, rich with resonance and painterly vitality. The cosmic-tinged “Outlaw’s Wand” is my favorite but I’ll give album closer “I’m Sure I’ll See You Soon” a nod too, for a surprise Patrick Shiroishi saxophone appearance. A delightful listen from beginning to end.

Ava Mendoza
The Circular Train
11/15, Palilalia Records

True experimental rock ‘n’ roll at its absolute finest from one of our greatest modern guitarists. Everything Ava Mendoza is involved with tends to rule but she’s in particularly fine form here. Kraut-levels of hypnotic guitar on this mostly instrumental album, but when her voice comes in, I hear PJ Harvey at her most rock and I love it.

Alice Hebborn
Saisons
12/6, Western Vinyl

A darkly meditative neoclassical debut from the Belgian composer Alice Hebborn. This music is atmospheric in the best way, a scintillating blend of her electronics in conversation with the spry piano of Nao Momitani. A bit Nick Cave, a bit Lynchian, entirely absorbing.

One more time, thank you for reading and following. It means more than I can properly say, so I’ll leave us with this: here’s to more excellent music in 2025 and beyond!

Now Reading: End Zone by Don DeLillo; Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa; Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon; The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War by Michael Gorra