The Top 50 Albums of 2024

From ambient concréte to shapeshifting rap, via melancholy confessionals, hot-and-sticky bangers, bracing hardcore and – let’s be real – some of the best capital-P Pop music since forever… these are the albums of 2024, according to Crack Magazine

Katie Gavin

What a Relief

Dead Oceans

On Katie Gavin’s debut solo album What a Relief, we hear the powerhouse voice of MUNA taking on different shades. There’s less of her band’s bombast, and more Lilith Fair-leaning string instrumentation, as Gavin weaves her influences, while frankly discussing generational trauma, failed relationships and loss. Sanitized is pure Fiona Apple worship, and on country parable The Baton, she’s channelling The Chicks’ Natalie Maines. Of course, there are moments where those irresistible MUNA melodies rear their heads – Aftertaste and Casual Drug Use could easily have been on MUNA – but the best moments on this record are those that feel like they’re all Gavin. Despite the heavy subject matter, she sounds untethered, like she’s opening up, showing us who she is and what made her that way.

Lauren O’Neill

Jlin

Akoma

Planet Mu

Jlin’s origin story is well-known by now: a maths whizz who left her job at a steel factory to write footwork under the tutelage of DJ Rashad – a truly unrepeatable set of conditions that set her on a unique musical trajectory. Her list of past collaborators and co-signees is staggering, including musical luminaries SOPHIE and Holly Herndon, as well as titans of the art world such as Wayne McGregor and Rick Owens. On Akoma she adds a few more heavy-hitters to the list, including Björk, who features on album opener Borealis, and Philip Glass. More impressive than the shiny list of features, though, is her ability to bend these lofty contributors towards a sound so unmistakably her own. Part footwork, part avant-garde electronica, but always a hundred percent Jlin.

Oscar Henson

Doechii

Alligator Bites Never Heal

Top Dawg Entertainment

On Doechii’s third mixtape and first full-length for Top Dog Entertainment, the Tampa rapper draws largely from hip-hop’s past – be it the raunchy braggadocio of Lil’ Kim, the soulful groove of Lauryn Hill or the demonic punk energy of early Tyler, the Creator. Alligator Bites Never Heal sees Doechii flex her versatility beyond the club-ready sounds that have defined her singles so far, slinging everything from hard bars to breathy harmonies over boom-bap beats, astral jazz, and chopped-and-screwed instrumentals. But her real strength is in her one-two punch of charisma and storytelling, which oozes from every bar, whether she’s cycling through intrusive thoughts or “munchin’ on the box” while watching Hulu. Not a product of her time, then, but a signpost for the future. 

Emma Garland

John Early

Now More Than Ever

Thirty Tigers

In moments of doom and malaise, people will praise music’s ability to help us escape and find clarity amid the chaos. Nobody’s taken this idea more literally than American actor and comedian John Early. On his debut album-meets-rockumentary, Now More Than Ever, he punctuates exasperated musings on the state of things – like how recipes described as “garlicky” by Bon Appétit reflect en-masse intellectual breakdown – with beautifully arranged covers performed with his band, The Lemon Squares. Early comes from a class of comedians credited with deconstructing the form over the last decade, playing with ideas of performance and realness for an increasingly self-conscious audience. Somehow, when he’s covering After the Gold Rush by Neil Young or Overprotected by Britney, it’s the most sincere thing he’s ever done.

Duncan Harrison

Tristwch y Fenywod

Tristwch y Fenywod

Night School

Invoking the spirit of those gothic early 4AD artists – This Mortal Coil, Dead Can Dance and Bauhaus – Leeds trio Tristwch y Fenywod (“The Sadness of Women” in Welsh) lure us into their uncanny, eldritch world with outsider music steeped in ritual and intrigue. The temptation is hard to repel. Described by their label as a “Welsh-language, gothic, avant-rock power-coven”, these Leeds underground lifers have played only a handful of gigs together. Yet, their darkwave incantations – composed of stalking rhythms, the Gregorian chime of a homemade dual zither and darkly atmospheric electronics – possess all the bewitching power of a band several albums deep. This is an ancient sound reborn, harnessing our primal longing for ceremony and magic.

Chris Parkin

Nídia & Valentina

Estradas

Latency

The impeccable talents of Afro-Portuguese club artist Nídia – a longtime affiliate of revered Lisbon electronic label Príncipe – and the much-celebrated Italian-British drummer and composer Valentina Magaletti (Holy Tongue, Vanishing Twin, Tomaga) join forces for this hot-and-sticky workout. The erotic, body-moving pulse of the club provided by Nídia is guided into far-out territory by the steady, almost-metronomic hand of Magaletti’s labyrinthine drumming, as syncopated drum patterns, pulsating marimba lines and melodic synths interweave for a chest-rattling exploration of percussive possibilities. Mata and Ta A Bater Ya are here to make you move, with their off-kilter rhythms steeped in kuduro and afrobeat, while the skittering Rapido and Nasty ride a more experimental groove into all corners of your mind.

Jessica Eli Hill

Chat Pile

Cool World

Flenser

Cool World had its work cut out, following in the footsteps of God’s Country, one of the most lauded noise-rock records in recent memory. With its thundering mix of sludge, metal and post-punk – centred around eerie, dissonant riffs and the guttural, anguished vocals of Raygun Busch – the album channels emotion in a more widescreen format than its predecessor. Songs like Masc are haunting and cathartic, blending a deepening exploration of surreal lyricism with raw, unfiltered energy. The production is deliberately claustrophobic, intensifying the sense of unease while offering only fleeting moments of relief. Cool World is an unsettling, thought-provoking trip that continues Chat Pile’s exploration of existential dread, delivering a sonic experience that is as challenging as it is compelling.

Thomas Frost

KMRU & Kevin Richard Martin

Disconnect

Phantom Limb

Nairobi-born sound artist KMRU is famed for his ambient sound designs, drone explorations and albums of manipulated field recordings, while Kevin Richard Martin (a.k.a. The Bug) – as you’ll be well aware of by now – is the creator of rugged, dystopian and noise-strafed dub, grime and dancehall. So, you’d expect nothing less than boundary-pushing, depth-charging sonics from this meeting of minds – and that’s exactly what Disconnect delivers. The album is a back-and-forth dialogue between the two, in which KMRU’s colonial stories and spoken-word passages about stolen African artifacts are chopped up, Steve Reich-style, and woven into slowly disintegrating, end-of-times soundscapes that put the emphasis squarely on dread. The heavy mood throughout is devastating, harking back to Martin’s often-overlooked ambient work with Earth. 

Jessica Eli Hill

Magdalena Bay

Imaginal Disk

Mom + Pop Music

The second album from Miami duo Magdalena Bay flutters between hyperpop levity and melodramatic spectacle, offering a refreshing spin on overstimulated weirdo pop. On Killing Time, Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin blend wiggy, effects-drenched guitars, a loping beat and an irresistible melody into a psychedelic reverie. Elsewhere, the swooning and super-sweet Love Is Everywhere offers a surprisingly comforting take on AI – not as an existential threat, but as a new form of human imagination: intangible, complex and, perhaps, inevitable. Meanwhile, Tunnel Vision is an autumnal anthem for the chronically online. Who needs to touch grass when Tenenbaum’s rhapsodic vocals let you live out your flâneur-in-the-forest fantasies without leaving your doomscrolling nest? Fans of imaginative pop were truly spoiled in 2024.

Jonathan Davis

Princ€ss

Princ€ss

wherethetimegoes

This mystery Irish project is, we think, led from the shadows by producer Séan Being and friends of the noirish Dublin label, wherethetimegoes – pals rumoured to include Olan Monk and Maria Somerville. Working gauzy shoegaze guitars, groaning organ and glassy synths into a spectral, ambient-like dreamscape, this self-titled debut disconnects from a stereotype of Irish music that seems to settle on the indie-punk of Fontaines D.C., or bodhrán-driven folk jams. While a sense of absence chills the album’s core, the players, whoever they are, bring their humanity in the sound of organ drones, wintry chimes, austere strings and the living creak and rattle of their performance. Sometimes ushers in disorienting dream-folk, while Point of View is experimental chamber-pop drenched in reverb and haunted by the sounds of a world long gone.

Jessica Eli Hill

MIKE & Tony Seltzer

Pinball

10K

On Pinball – MIKE’s first full-length link-up with Brooklyn producer Tony Seltzer – the New York City artist downshifts away from pensive contemplations and backlit, jazz-tinted productions. Instead, Pinball is a 20-minute rollercoaster ride of immaculately rapped boasts and flexes over a clutch of unashamedly fun psychedelic trap beats. On God finds MIKE trading woozy verses with Earl Sweatshirt and Tony Shhnow over intergalactic synths and ominous bell chimes, while his flow on Reminiscing with Jay Critch channels the chest-thumping energy of classic ATL and Tennessee trap music. MIKE’s raps often shine a light inwards on the darkest and deepest parts of his experiences; here, though, he sounds energised and completely unburdened.

Robert Kazandjian

Lechuga Zafiro

Desde Los Oídos de un Sapo

TraTraTrax

Contemporary producers in South America, particularly from the Río de la Plata region encompassing Argentina and Uruguay, have been crafting electronic soundscapes from the sounds of nature for some time now. There was Juana Molina in the 2000s, and now there’s Uruguay’s Pablo de Vargas – a producer making experimental beats as Lechuga Zafiro, and with his ear to the swamp on debut album Desde Los Oídos de un Sapo. Even when veering between the meditative Encauce Destellante, full of psychedelic flourishes and the sound of crashing waves, and the thumping, frenetic rave of Agua de Vidrio, Vargas’ practice remains grounded in field recordings captured in the natural world. With these intense, deconstructed soundscapes, Lechuga Zafiro is channelling Latin American electronica through a frog’s ear. 

E.R. Pulgar

Ezra Feinberg

Soft Power

Tonal Union

As a member of San Francisco psych-rockers Citay, Ezra Feinberg was part of the 2000s Bay Area scene that spawned such luminaries as Comets on Fire and Wooden Shjips. Since then, he’s become a practising psychoanalyst and, perhaps inspired by the therapeutic insights of his day job, scythed away the rock while keeping the psychedelic. This third solo album is a soul-soothing doozy; a dreamy, utopian soundworld that filters Eno’s Ambient series, 1980s Japanese new-age music and the bucolic playfulness of Ernest Hood’s Neighbourhoods through his own distinctly Californian headspace. Composed of pulsing synths and soft drones, acoustic guitar, vibraphone and harp, Feinberg has found his way to a sound that is both serene and deeply intense.

Chris Parkin

Fabiana Palladino

Fabiana Palladino

Paul Institute

In a year where capital-P Pop was as much about creating a moment as it was about the material itself, the quiet perfection and delivery of Fabiana Palladino’s self-titled debut made it even more compelling. Delivering on years of promise and a career spent on the peripheries of left-field British pop, this post-breakup meditation perfectly captures what makes her, and her Paul Institute peers, so distinctive. Deeper purrs with the nocturnal groove of Janet Jackson, Stay With Me Through the Night pops with a crisp funk reminiscent of Quincy Jones’ imperial phase, and the layered vocals on sublime closer Forever evoke Music of My Mind-era Stevie Wonder. It’s an album out of time, with just enough futuristic flourishes to ground it in the here and now.

Duncan Harrison

Boldy James & Conductor Williams

Across the Tracks

Near Mint

Despite the seven-year gap between his 2013 debut My 1st Chemistry Set and its eventual follow-up, Detroit rapper Boldy James has built an understated – and underrated – catalogue in recent years through his close collaborations with select producers. Whether he’s holed up with a classicist like the Alchemist or a new-gen beatmaker like Jay Versace, this undistracted approach unlocks a natural ease in the final product, where sequencing takes a backseat in the interests of the overall atmosphere. For Across the Tracks, it was the turn of Kansas City producer Conductor Williams (formerly linked to Boldy via the Griselda Collective) to build the canvas. James’ twisty wordplay and mellow delivery wrap around spacey, sample-driven beats and elastic loops for another bleak but nostalgic addition to his discography.

Duncan Harrison

Richie Culver

Hostile Environments

Self-released

It’s clear that respected visual artist Richie Culver relishes the freedom of the musical margins. He doubled down on his lane-switch this year with two albums, one of which is a head-clearing half-hour of bracing noise and techno under his Quiet Husband alias. The other is this – a record of malignant ambient, threaded with shellshocked meditations on a failed relationship. This is emotional terrain as scorched earth: “I took off my clothes for you,” Culver intones, his voice scratched out, negated, by static on Changed My Style 4 U. On Here We Go, Culver’s introspective scab-picking is mirrored by a loop that collapses into white noise. As an artist, Culver’s paintings often spill over the edges of the frame, as if whatever is being expressed is uncontainable. Hostile Environments captures that same suffocation – and the sense of something, someone trying to break free.

Louise Brailey

Beth Gibbons

Lives Outgrown

Domino

For an artist whose tear-stained voice millions know intimately, Beth Gibbons’ personal circumstances have always been surprisingly unknowable. A decade in the making, her debut solo album alters that, offering listeners rare insight into her inner world as she contemplates ageing, menopause, motherhood, mortality and ecocide, over immersive, shadow-cloaked folk arrangements. “We’re all lost together/ We’re fooling each other,” she rues on Lost Changes, her cries cocooned in earthy woodwind, plaintive strings and the funereal thud of muffled percussion. There is hope to be found here – not least in Floating on a Moment’s “All we have is here and now” refrain, which is paired with celesta, flute and children’s voices – but it’s hard-won. Unsurprisingly, these extraordinary dispatches linger in the heart long after the music stops.

Gemma Samways

Donato Dozzy

Magda

Spazio Disponibile

Even within the relatively serene limits of what is – on the surface – an ambient record, Magda channels the impulses and dynamics of club music. Sure, the drums are distinctly muted, languid, barely there even, but the way these tracks expand and spiral around a single hook or simple melody, tugging at the periphery of these core elements, calls back to the devastating simplicity of the best techno. As you’d expect from one of the most respected electronic musicians working today, the production is graceful and hypnotic: beguiling closing track Lucrezia is a slow-burning masterpiece, with each new element layered into the mix so gradually you barely notice – until you find yourself enveloped in a kind of transcendental bliss.

Thomas Frost

Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, Andreas Werliin

Ghosted II

Drag City

In which the powerhouse guitarist Oren Ambarchi is joined by longtime collaborator and bassist Johan Berthling, alongside Fire! Orchestra percussionist Andreas Werliin, to expand his locked-groove repertoire into the same hypnotic space inhabited by his Australian compatriots, The Necks. Improvised live in a Stockholm studio, these psychedelic minimalist jazz workouts unfurl, swirl and sway without ever resolving, taking on an ecstatic power that magic carpets the telepathic trio away from the motorik chug of their first Ghosted set, and deep into kosmische territory, by way of Alice Coltrane at her most levitational. Weaving between Berthling’s sonorous bass and Werliin’s skeletal percussion, Oren’s diaphanous guitar lines have never sounded so cosmic. Here’s hoping for numbers III, IV and beyond.

Chris Parkin

Astrid Sonne

Great Doubt

Escho

2024 was the year that Danish singer-songwriters became so prominent that they became a meme. Like ML Buch and Clarissa Connelly, Astrid Sonne – a classically trained composer – has an ear for the off-kilter and unsettling. Second track Do You Wanna sets the tone, its thudding drums and mournful viola the uneasy backdrop to Sonne’s self-searching: “Do you wanna have a baby? Do you wanna bring people into this world?” she sings, dreamlike and disassociated. Elsewhere, the spoken-word Everything Is Unreal is a mist-cloaked folk incantation over harpsichord and foreboding drum beat, while Boost is a creepy sound collage of handclaps, flute-like synths and ghostly pads, among other wunderkammer-ish thrills. The album may be less than 30 minutes long, but the spell it casts during that time is unshakeable.

Hannah White

Shabaka

Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace

Impulse!

After branching out across wind instruments on his 2022 EP Afrikan Culture, contemporary British jazz linchpin and bandleader Shabaka Hutchings packed away his saxophone for this first album under his own, now-shortened name. Writing and performing with guests including Moses Sumney, the rapper ELUCID, Floating Points and Laraaji – the godfather of the sort of meditative new-age music explored here – this is an album designed for close listening and inner peace. Rhythmic patterns dissolve into a haze as Shabaka conjures a swirling, hypnotic world from myriad flutes and clarinets, rich in tone and reverberation. On Managing My Breath, What Fear Had Become, Saul Williams ponders, “what it would actually mean to speak inwardly, instead of outwardly”, while Shabaka summons the ideal soundtrack for such a thought.

Jessica Eli Hill

ELUCID

Revelator

Fat Possum

On his third solo album, ELUCID – also known as one-half of avant-garde underground rap duo Armand Hammer – pairs his abstract, free-associative verses with a cacophonous maelstrom of punk-leaning live drums and disorienting, glitchy electronics. While its predecessor, 2022’s I Told Bessie, was comparatively warm, ELUCID’s gruff baritone on Revelator is brimming with a defiant, unbowed rage that traces a line from his experiences as a Black man in the US, unnerved by the jingoistic nationalism of “One too many flags” on In the Shadow of It, to the ongoing genocide in Palestine. “Force feed a war machine/ As you were, as it seems/ From River to Sea/ In lieu of peace,” he raps over thunderous percussion on closer ZIGZAGZIG.

Robert Kazandjian

Mount Kimbie

The Sunset Violent

Warp

The enigmatic production duo of Dom Maker and Kai Campos continue to confound anyone who thought they had a handle on what Mount Kimbie is. Here, the formerly dubstep-aligned pair expand into a four-piece, with vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Andrea Balency-Béarn and Marc Pell (a.k.a. Suitman Jungle) recruited as full members. Together, they spin mournful, bone-weary vocals, the sort of chiming, shoegazing post-rock guitars that are all the rage right now (see Moin), glassy synth pads and warped, autumnal atmospherics into what feels like a melancholy confessional. The album reeks of regret, although a double feature from King Krule, on Empty and Silent and Boxing, brings some levity, with smirking lyrics like, “What did your dad say about me again?”

Jessica Eli Hill

Knocked Loose

You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To

Pure Noise

Ten years into their tenure, Kentucky’s Knocked Loose have become the most prominent entry point for hardcore at a time of unprecedented visibility for the subculture. Their hybrid of tough-guy hardcore and frantic metal is both muscular enough for former Bridge Nine forum-dwellers and entertaining enough for a mass audience, which is precisely how they dethroned Taylor Swift on the Spotify charts and won fans in pop girlies Billie Eilish and Demi Lovato this year. Their third album charges forward along the same unrelenting path they set out on back in 2014; harsh and industrial, it sounds like a tornado ripping through a Rust Belt town – every riff serrated, the lyrics like acid rain (“No promise of heaven will make me march/ With my final breath/ I deny the church”).

Emma Garland

Jessica Pratt

Here in the Pitch

City Slang

Jessica Pratt’s Here in the Pitch is spellbinding psych-folk for dreamers. Her hypnotic songwriting seamlessly intertwines with twinkling soundscapes replete with jazz-pop guitars, horror soundtrack organ lines and the textural percussion of pacing drums, glockenspiel and mellotron samples mimicking horns and strings. Think the 70s folk of Sibylle Baier and Karen Dalton channelled through the cinematic universe of Stephen King adaptations or David Lynch. Pratt’s reedy, echoing vocals sound far away, as if emerging from a tunnel or a daydream. From the declarative opening drum beat of Life Is to the gentle, 60s-indebted The Last Year, the record builds on Pratt’s signature sound – breathy, languid vocals, ambiguous, mythologising lyrics and eerie, minimal production – to create a swirling, otherworldly cosmos where dreamlike sounds and imagery arise like wisps of smoke.

Sophie Lou Wilson

MJ Lenderman

Manning Fireworks

ANTI-

MJ Lenderman’s fifth record in as many years has the feel of a dog-eared short story collection an old friend might shove into your hands, full of exclamation marks in the margins. It’s a deceptively rich LP that requires multiple listens to uncover the full extent of the ache smuggled into his accidental profundities. Sonically, it’s a land of fiddles, cowbells, slumping acoustic chords and slacker rock guitar fuzz, on nodding terms with a bunch of Lenderman’s usual influences: Stephen Malkmus, country rock stalwarts Drive-By Truckers, and indie songwriters and poets like David Berman and Will Oldham. Plus Neil Young, obviously. Several lines jump out and stick, but “We sat under a half-mast McDonald’s flag” sums it up best. It’s almost funny, but that’s not quite the word.

Francis Blagburn

Joanne Robertson & Dean Blunt

Backstage Raver

World Music

If 2017’s WAHALLA taught us anything, it’s that Robertson and Blunt together pack an emotional punch. On their second collaborative album, the two underground operatives once again overwhelm us with their country-shoegaze atmospherics, introspective beauty and Robertson’s uniquely, serenely meandering vocals. Standout track Repeat Offenders adds a brooding new dimension to their sound, courtesy of Elias Rønnenfelt, frontman of Danish post-punk band Iceage; his bruised Americana twang matching Robertson’s every sighing exhalation. Backstage Raver may be a short-lived transportation, lasting just 17 minutes and 43 seconds, but like all of Blunt’s and Robertson’s best work, it sits apart from nearly everything else, valuing heart over complexity, intuition over technicality. Those who get it, get it deeply.

Hannah White

Tim Reaper & Kloke

In Full Effect

Hyperdub

Reflecting on jungle’s prevalence in UK dance music this year, Tim Reaper told Crack: “You can call it a resurgence in terms of the amount of activity that’s going on, but if you’re talking about jungle as a spirit or an energy, that’s something that’s always been there.” On In Full Effect, Reaper and Kloke bottle that energy and release it in thrilling new directions, taking us on a vibrant journey through eight high-octane tracks that bridge the genre’s eras – from 90s breakbeats and dub-inspired sounds for the club, to more atmospheric and introspective cuts like Alienation. Both a celebration of the scene’s history and a testament to its evolution, it’s a fitting record to mark Hyperdub’s first-ever jungle release.

Demajerle Myers

Adrianne Lenker

Bright Future

4AD

On her latest (sixth) solo album, Bright Future, Adrianne Lenker has crafted a suite of songs that worm their way into heart and soul. Its eerie opener, Real House, depicts the fragile haze of childhood memories over sparse piano, leaving Lenker’s soul-searching vocals with nowhere to hide. Indeed, the spectre of the past hangs over much of the record. The brutal vulnerability of Ruined lingers like a fading echo, its scattered murmurs and floor squeaks leaving the listener feeling as though they’re eavesdropping on a hushed, private conversation. The straight-to-tape recording bottles up wispy nostalgia and lays it out in stripped-back, plaintive piano and country-indebted guitar, while Lenker’s emotional gut-punch lyrics leave you reeling.

Sophie Lou Wilson

De Schuurman

Bubbling Forever

Nyege Nyege Tapes

From the late 1980s and into the early 2000s, the Dutch genre of bubbling was inescapable in the Netherlands’ Afro-diasporic clubs. As the story goes, the sound – rooted in the syncopations of dancehall but accelerated and incorporating house and electro – was unwittingly invented when DJ Moortje ran a dancehall record at 45 RPM rather than 33 RPM, and the crowd loved it. Three decades later, bubbling is undergoing something of a renaissance, in large part thanks to Den Haag DJ and producer, De Schuurman. Bubbling Forever looks towards the genre’s future: a rattling, 12-track showcase of tight, pounding riddims engineered to move dancefloors, and infused with old-school hardcore and rave for an unmistakably Dutch twist.

Isaac Muk

Colin Stetson

The Love It Took To Leave You

Invada

Despite his intense 2011 track The Righteous Wrath of an Honourable Man becoming the soundtrack to that perplexing “blue Grinch knee surgery” meme (yeah, me neither), Colin Stetson is not – as that track title will tell you – in the business of novelty. At work, the Montréal-based saxophonist and multireedist constructs foreboding, towering mountains of sound through an arsenal of extended techniques that overwhelm through sheer scale. His latest solo album – his first since 2017 – is almost too much; a turbulent storm that oscillates between ecstatic liberation and emotional collapse. Stetson rides his own surging sounds and resonances as they bounce off the walls in the cavernous Darling Foundry in which he recorded, for a monumental solo piece that sucks you into its maelstrom completely.

Chris Parkin

Clarissa Connelly

World of Work

Warp

On paper, Clarissa Connelly’s world reads like an intoxicating fantasy – set against a windswept Scandinavian landscape where sacred sites reverberate with ancient melodies and pre-Christian myths loom large. Connelly – a graduate of Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory alongside Astrid Sonne and ML Buch (them again) – adapts this world for her third album: a wintry prog-pop opus that pulls at the tension between her awe at life’s beauty and existential fear. Weaving new myths from old – including a 16th-century lament sung from the perspective of a dancing rose flower (Wee Rosebud) – Connelly reimagines the theatrical mysticism of Kate Bush, Tori Amos and Enya as icy etherealism, with her crystalline voice leaving its frozen impression long after the final track has rung out. It’s a modern epic.

Chris Parkin

Lord Spikeheart

The Adept

Haekalu

Lord Spikeheart is a veteran figure in Africa’s underground metal scene. Formerly one-half of Kenyan-Ugandan grindcore duo Duma and vocalist of Nairobi deathcore band Lust of a Dying Breed, he has a habit of pushing confrontational sounds towards oblivion. On his solo debut, his primary metal influences become the ballast in a harsh mixture of noise, techno, industrial and trap. Dedicated to his great-grandmother – the only woman to attain the rank of field marshal in the Mau Mau uprising against British colonial rule – the album’s apocalyptic force meets colonial violence on its own terms. “I love heavy music because it’s my response to this resistance, to this trauma and pain,” he told Crack earlier this year. “My music is a reaction. It’s a hard reaction, but a positive one.”

Emma Garland

070 Shake

Petrichor

Def Jam

Since releasing her first EP in 2018, New Jersey’s Danielle Balbuena, a.k.a. 070 Shake, has gone against type as a rapper and singer, coding her music with layers of raw, unfiltered emotion. Petrichor is no different. Across its 13 tracks, Shake delivers deep, philosophical songs ruminating on her state of being, her desire for her partner and the exhilarating freefall of young love. Zingy guitar riffs, frenetic beats and vulnerable vocals – often delivered with a thick application of Auto-Tune – weave through an agreeably chaotic tracklist that never shies from expressing Shake’s innermost thoughts on mental health, obsession, sin and desire. With Petrichor, Shake offers a soundtrack for those swept up in the all-consuming storm of queer infatuation. 

Zoya Raza-Sheikh

Kim Gordon

The Collective

Matador

Kim Gordon’s second solo album distils the apathetic disconnection of endless phone scrolling into nihilistic vocals, whispered over oppressive drums and propulsively groovy yet jarring guitar. It’s a disorienting collage of packing lists, bowling trophies, modern masculinity and personal branding, mirroring the erratic bombardment of a TikTok For You page. Just look at the cover art; the blurred image of a smartphone could easily feature in a news segment about the dangers of social media. The album judders along like heavy machinery, honing in on its themes of man v machine, while grinding trip-hop, broken beats and smashing glass create the confusing, jagged effect of a bad trip. The Collective is a groan of pure panic, and a dystopian portrait of our times. 

Sophie Lou Wilson

Chanel Beads

Your Day Will Come

Jagjaguwar

Chanel Beads’ mastermind Shane Lavers has been a fixture in New York’s underground (the polarising yet celebrated Dimes Square scene, to be exact) for a minute. Your Day Will Come, however, saw his psychedelic lo-fi miniatures break out beyond the confines of in-the-know New Yorkers. A sweetly squalling collage of adolescent fantasies and cryptic lyrics about grief, fear and the passage of time, the charm of this album is in its uncanny familiarity – each song a half-recalled daydream that vanishes as quickly as it forms. “I had that thought again/ Is memory just acting out, erasing/ What did you see?” Lavers sings on the tone-setting opener Dedicated to the World. It’s as fitting an encapsulation as any of this enigmatic album, which you sense is full of secrets.

Hannah White

Jasmine Wood

Piano Reverb

AD93

Like another brilliant album from this year, Colin Stetson’s The Love It Took To Leave You, Jasmine Wood’s Piano Reverb explores the interplay between instrument and architectural space. For her AD93 debut, Wood set up an antique Blüthner grand piano in an empty church, composing and recording for a year. It was enough time for Wood to learn to wield the acoustics of the space and the idiosyncrasies of the piano to staggering effect. Here, reverb functions as a second instrument and chance details, like the creak of the aged Blüthner, are part of the palette. Despite the sonic economy, there are subtle mood shifts – from shimmering textures and nimble runs, to sustained bass drones that wax and wane into infinity. Indeed, listening to this album is a little like suspending time: no beginnings, no endings, just pure luxuriation in the spaces between.

Louise Brailey

Mdou Moctar

Funeral for Justice

Matador

This incendiary blast of psych-rock from Niger guitarist Mdou Moctar isn’t just a masterclass in wigging out – it’s also a fierce and unequivocal memo to his nation’s former colonial occupiers, France. Lyrics like “My people are crying while you laugh/ All you do is watch” are directed with laser precision at a country that continues to exploit Niger’s uranium stocks while its people have little access to domestic power. So enraged is Moctar here that you could light up towns with the album’s electrifying energy. Jacked-up by breakneck rhythms, Moctar is on red-hot form as he pairs his wiggy, scorched-earth blues with trademark Tuareg grooves and polemical lyrics. You won’t find any empty nostalgia here.

Jessica Eli Hill

Tems

Born in the Wild

RCA

Tems’ star has been in the ascendancy ever since she blessed Wizkids’ 2020 track Essence with her rich, velvety vocals. On her own debut album, the Nigerian-born artist continues to flex her prowess, showing us why she’s had such a speedy ascent, while also exploring some of the pitfalls. As the tracks bounce between themes, from braggadocio (Wickedest) and higher powers (Me & U), to unfamiliarity in new spaces (Burnin’), we’re exposed to the inner monologue of a young artist dealing with global stardom. Sonically, the album brings together 90s African music – including a sample of Magic System’s high-energy Ivorian smash 1er Gaou – with modern R&B, pop and dancehall to put a fresh, invigorating spin on neo-soul that makes ample use of conga drums and shekere rattles. This is the sound of an artist levelling up.

Hollie Hilton

Total Blue

Total Blue

Music from Memory

There’s both a creative cohesion and an intuitive flow on display across the nine tracks that make up Total Blue’s self-titled debut. Although the LA-based improvisationalists have been collaborating for over a decade now, this is actually the first album release by Nicky Benedek, Anthony Calonico and Alex Talan as a fully formed trio – and it would be a crime if it’s their last. They’ve translated their shared history of sonic trial and error into a haze of smooth ambient, dub-jazz, drifting new-age and subaquatic psychedelia that rolls by with the ominous threat of little fluffy clouds on a sunny day. The tracks’ layered, fourth-world sonics are so rich in detail that each repeated listen bears fruit, and any suggestions of muzak dissolve into its sumptuous, cosmic expanse. If this is elevator music, we never want to get off.

Isaac Muk

Tyler, the Creator

CHROMAKOPIA

Columbia

The muted monochrome of CHROMAKOPIA’s cover art is a red herring; Tyler, the Creator’s eighth studio album is a swirl of colours and ideas, as he surfs the existential waves of life as a thirtysomething superstar. There’s an extra bite to his affirmations of being “the biggest out the city after Kenny” on the anthemic, Neptunes-ish sounding Rah Tah Tah. That chest-thumping belligerence is offset, though, by a simmering paranoia that bleeds into Noid. Here, Tyler raps about fear with a mouthful of gravel over psychedelic guitars and a Zamrock sample. On Hey Jane and Judge Judy, he explores the perspective of female lovers with an empathy that would make his earliest edgelord incarnation shudder. But it’s Tomorrow that stands out – a meditation on the ceaseless drag of time. “My mother’s hands don’t look the same,” he croons over gentle strings, before turning the lens inwards. “That version of T is a memory,” he admits later, metamorphosing again into a better version of himself.

Robert Kazandjian

Skee Mask

Resort

Ilian Tape

Is there a more consistent producer operating today than Bryan Müller? After removing his entire discography from Spotify in 2022, Müller has continued to release records exploring the hinterlands of bass music at quite a clip. Resort distils the essence of the Skee Mask project, harnessing dual ambient and dancefloor tendencies in a collection of intricate, multilayered compositions where broken beats, drifting ambience and techno elements blend seamlessly, often within the same track. The result evokes an atmosphere that’s greater than the sum of its parts. Waldmeister is a case in point: by turns grizzled and weightless, turn it up and it could work in the club; turn it down, you could play it at an elegant afters. Besides the occasional swerve into full-throttle dub house – the superb Hölzl Was a Dancer – Resort is a masterclass in blurring the line between movement and stillness, with its shimmering qualities undercut by something altogether grubbier.

Thomas Frost

Mabe Fratti

Sentir Que No Sabes

Unheard of Hope

Reflecting on her classical training, Mabe Fratti recently told Crack that “[it] gave me a colour palette that I could have fun with, but also destroy”. The quote provides useful context for Sentir Que No Sabes, which finds the Guatemalan cellist balancing formal experimentation with the most immediate melodies of her career. Both a close companion and striking counterpoint to her own vaporous vocals, Fratti’s cello playing is rich and characterful throughout. On Kravitz, she evokes swaggering double bass, the sinuous groove offset by sporadic horn blasts and syncopated piano. We get seesawing arpeggios (Oídos), overpressed scratching (Kitana) and warped glissando (Elastica II), each technique offering tonal originality to what is essentially stealthily pop-focused songwriting. For an album reportedly predicated on feelings of “perpetual confusion”, it’s impressively laser-focused in its vision. Destroying the rules never felt so fruitful.

Gemma Samways

Jawnino

40

True Panther

Enigmatic, Wandsworth-raised artist Jawnino’s 2019 breakout It’s Cold Out might’ve been rooted in grime, but the song’s warped synth line and his languid, conversational rapping style edged towards something more free-form and experimental. An extended mix of the track features on his long-awaited debut LP, where that innovative approach feels fully formed. Across 40, Jawn mud-walks through a ket- and pills-induced haze over nocturnal productions that draw on everything from propulsive jungle breaks on Lost My Brain to transcendent dream-pop on Wind. Here, his lucid observations cut through the project’s hedonistic aura, like fleeting moments of clarity glimpsed through a rain-streaked night bus window. “I didn’t go to prom but sold a Gucci belt that did/ Beanie with Egyptian font I would’ve held you in the wind,” he raps over glowing synths, hinting at a quiet loneliness that perhaps underpins his penchant for anonymity.

Robert Kazandjian

Mk.gee

Two Star & the Dream Police

R&R Digital

Two Star & the Dream Police made Mk.gee a star in the way only career-defining debut albums can: slowly, then undeniably, and all at once. There have been Tyler and Kendrick co-signs, a Jil Sander runway soundtrack, sold-out shows attended by Jai Paul, and, more recently, markers of imminent mainstream success – like a SNL appearance and even sessions with Justin Bieber. The album’s appeal may borrow from easy-listening chart pop, especially nostalgia for 80s pop-rock and R&B, but Mk.gee carves his own style by juxtaposing the familiar with the unpredictable, crafting meandering structures, abstract lyrics and cloudy but carefully detailed production that sounds like it’s playing underwater. These are textured, shapeshifting tracks that swell with feeling and seem to reveal new layers with each listen, yet fit neatly together over just 33 minutes, consolidating Mk.gee’s unmistakable sound. 

Rosie Byers

Arooj Aftab

Night Reign

Verve

Over her past four albums, Pakistani-American singer Arooj Aftab has made her signature a quiet intensity – the kind of sound that draws the listener in with its whispered intimacy. On her fifth record, Night Reign, she refreshes her usual palette to produce an experimental and often startling collection of moody and mercurial soundscapes. Taking inspiration from the nocturnal setting where Aftab does most of her writing and recording, these songs embody the evening’s capacity for romance, danger and darkness. On Na Gul, plaintive jazz piano and finger-picked folk guitar interweave, while Raat Ki Rani approaches the dancefloor with its combination of horn fanfares and shuffling percussion, and Bolo Na descends into uncertain murkiness through growling bass. Throughout, Aftab’s powerful voice anchors each composition, gliding with languorous ease over shifting sounds to embody a fresh, more insistent setting for her ever-evolving music. 

Ammar Kalia

Charli xcx

brat

Atlantic

Looking back, it’s kind of a headfuck to consider that all of that – the brat wall, the Kamala tweet, the literal Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Year Award – was over a Charli xcx album. For over a decade, Charli was held at arm’s length by the mainstream, her work slightly too esoteric to truly cross over – but in 2024, entirely because she had one foot in the charts and the other in the booth, she finally crashed the zeitgeist with the force of a hen party meeting a free bar. That she did it with brat specifically, both the rawest Charli xcx record – she prickles on Sympathy is a Knife, broods on I Think About It All the Time – and the most balls-to-the-wall (Exhibit A: 365) makes sense. Pop music, long plagued by earnestness, needed to reflect listeners’ complexity again. brat held the mirror up, then smashed it underfoot.

Lauren O’Neill

Nala Sinephro

Endlessness

Warp

Ever since the release of her 2021 debut Space 1.8, Nala Sinephro has made a virtue of quiet minimalism, something that perhaps marks her out amid the new generation of London jazz artists. Melding the murmurations of synth pads with the melodic glissando of her strings, Sinephro sits somewhere between spiritual jazz and electronic ambient, letting her compositions unfurl at their own pace. On her latest record, Endlessness, Sinephro pushes this languorousness to its limit, producing ten tracks seamlessly sequenced around the ascending motif of her synth’s arpeggiator function. A record with such a sparse setting (punctuated by James Mollison’s keening saxophone and a line-up of guest drummers) runs the risk of becoming pleasant background noise, but Sinephro’s skill lies in gently jolting us from our reverie, striking a new chord or tempo to remind us of her presence – guiding, journeying and always flowing through her own masterful direction.

Ammar Kalia

Fontaines D.C.

Romance

XL

It started with a panic attack. Every intake of breath, every claustrophobic drum beat of first single Starburster suggested something was up. Written directly after Grian Chatten had a panic attack en route to the studio, the track would herald a brave new direction for Fontaines D.C. – the first sign that they were shrugging off their brooding, literary post-punk image to craft stadium-ready anthems about love, fantasy and anxiety in the end times. Accompanied by a nu-metal-inspired aesthetic, some feared their new release could be more style than substance. Far from it. The eclectic results range from haunting to sanguine; from sprawling 90s rock and filmic Americana, right through to bright jangly pop. Romance stretches the possibilities of a Fontaines D.C. album like a string of bright pink Hubba Bubba gum. These are songs for the anxious and the alienated; for feeling disconnected from the modern world yet still fanning a quiet flame of hope for better days ahead. 

Sophie Lou Wilson

Cindy Lee

Diamond Jubilee

Realistik Studios

In the waiting room for heaven, a radio plays the songs of your life. You are overcome with a kind of loneliness that soon turns into tranquility. “I look around, what do I see?/ My baby blue/ Don’t you know that I love you,” sings the radio, the fundamentals of musical language. 

Patrick Flegel a.k.a. Cindy Lee’s 32-track masterpiece Diamond Jubilee is that sense of isolation made tangible. Lee – an artist, drag performer and, back in the 2000s, a member of the short-lived Canadian band Women – is Flegel’s self-proclaimed “diva alter ego”. When Lee posted Diamond Jubilee on their Geocities site in March, it came out of nowhere. There was no promotional campaign nor any attempt to engage with the world – with its craven streaming platforms or social algorithms – as it exists today. From the circumstances of its release, through to the music itself, Diamond Jubilee feels like an attempt to reclaim creativity from the logic of market capitalism and the jaws of an ever-greedy social media which has fundamentally exploited art and diminished its value. For at least the past 15 years, music has been sold too cheap. Flegel once again gave it a price: $30 to download. (The Geocities site also includes a statement reprimanding Spotify CEO Daniel Ek for “stealing artists’ profits”.) 

All throughout Diamond Jubilee, you hear familiarity strangely reimagined. Cindy Lee collects musical motifs that are taken for granted and sets a steady flame to them. Overdubbed guitarmonies, 60s girl group toplines and fuzzy, mid-century recording techniques melt in its heat. Some minds will trace back to the 60s – Phil Spector, Joe Meek, The Beach Boys’ Wild Honey and The Smile Sessions – others, to 2010s indie rock, when bands like Dirty Beaches, Deerhunter and Ulrika Spacek were cribbing from similar source material. 

These sounds are all catnip to music journalists. They invite sexy words and theories like hauntology and hypnagogic; lost futures and found paths. Tacking these icy words onto Diamond Jubilee, as several writers have done, might be a way to emotionally detach from just how sad this album is. As benign as a Beatles or Christmas song played each and every year, from birth until death, the songs on Diamond Jubilee are a sorry marker of time – a reminder of everything that’s been lost through the years. 

It’s a fitting mood for the album’s unwavering subject: the heartbreak of losing a friend, and feeling no sense of hope, direction or purpose without them. Perhaps the saddest thing about the album is simply that its two hours of material doesn’t deviate once from its single-minded focus. “In a diamond eyes/ A single memory/ And it’s of you,” begins the heartache, with each song that follows serving as an iteration of this “you” and everything they left behind. “I can’t go on living without you,” they sing on Government Cheque.

That the album is soon to be released on vinyl may change its meaning and our relationship to it irrevocably, but most people who first heard it through word of mouth or that 9.1 Pitchfork review won’t hear Diamond Jubilee as sad, and that plays into Cindy Lee’s hand. They couch utter heartbreak in the grammar of performed, commercially viable despair, like how The Marvelettes pleaded desperately for a letter from their lost love in Please Mr. Postman, with an anguish that was mitigated by purposely clichéd musical expression. This is sorrow to bop to. This is pain delivered as grace. This is wretched, almost unfathomable pain that Cindy Lee turns universal and sweetly, brilliantly banal. “Look in the mirror/ A face you know too well,” sings Lee. “If this is heaven/ I’m going straight to hell.”

Emma Madden