The Top 25 Tracks of 2024

From masterstroke diss tracks to bratty pop maximalism, via heady electroclash, trippy ambient arrangements, warping basslines and bittersweet nostalgia, these are the tracks that captured the many moods of 2024, according to Crack Magazine

Sabrina Carpenter

Please Please Please

Island

Burying big feelings in catchy lyrics and sugar-coated hooks is nothing new in pop, but in 2024, Sabrina Carpenter stood out with a voice all her own – one that was humorous, playful and at times extremely silly. That kitschy, camp persona – bright, bubbly, big-sister wise, yet so unserious – shines through whether she’s leaning into sparkly pop or country ballad storytelling. And we hear both on Please Please Please, with its ABBA-influenced production and Dolly Parton charm. Producer Jack Antonoff only amplifies Carpenter’s innate theatricality, punctuating the track’s chatty verses (“Don’t bring me to tears when I just did my makeup so nice”) with ornate flourishes, fluttering synths and a killer key change.

Rosie Byers

Mustafa

Gaza Is Calling

Jagjaguwar

The video for Gaza Is Calling tells two stories. Directed by Palestinian actor-director Hiam Abbass, we see Bella Hadid and Gazan MC Adbul portray a mother and son reflecting on memory and loss in America. Simultaneously, a parallel thread unspools in Jenin, in the occupied West Bank, as refugee Israa Ahmed and her little brother navigate conflict and destruction. Beyond the harrowing documentary-style footage captured in Palestine, the film carries the same folklike quality the song has – a balance of traditional, generational storytelling with urgent reflections on the horrors unfolding in front of our eyes. It ends with a distorted, Auto-Tuned warble, set against mechanical production touches by Nicolas Jaar. Mustafa is singing in Arabic, but the translation reads, “It was in my blood/ It was in my heart/ In my prayer.”

Duncan Harrison

Fcukers

Homie Don’t Shake

Technicolour

This year, a yearning for sticky floors and cheap thrills gripped us by our figurative skinny lapels. The musical outlook was… mixed. On paper, New Yorkers Fcukers could have been another hype band; downtown denizens who’d traded their guitars for synths and shot to in-crowd acclaim. But the trio attack their 2000s moodboard with something their indie sleaze compatriots lacked: love. Homie Don’t Shake cribs the riff for Beck’s Devils Haircut and hitches it to a Chemical Brothers-sized beat, while Shannon Wise perfects the disassociated vocals that sounded so damn cool when New Young Pony Club or CSS did it. It’s a heady cocktail, sure, laced with youthful exuberance and the odd Cobrasnake reference, but in a year that invited – no, demanded – reckless escapism, it certainly went down a treat. 

Louise Brailey

HiTech

SPANK!

Loma Vista

Sleaze, but make it fun. HiTech’s SPANK! is the sound of ghettotech’s resurgence – a comeback that is perhaps being led single-handedly by the Detroit trio. The revival is certainly helped by the infamy of their unmissable live shows, with their reputation exploding off the back of their sweat-on-the-walls energy and rowdy onstage antics, including pouring Hennessy into partygoers’ mouths and stage diving. It’s precisely this vibe that’s distilled in the sub-three-minute blast of SPANK! And ‘distilled’ feels apt – there’s a studied economy to the DJ Assault-esque production, with maximum bounce extracted from every rimshot, digital clap and distorted pad. Even the tinkling piano line sounds simply naughty. In short, it slaps.

Christine Ochefu 

Geordie Greep

Holy, Holy

Rough Trade

Holy, Holy is a bewildering, maximalist work of Fear and Loathing-style gonzo songwriting and mind-harrying histrionics. Backed by wild-eyed electric guitar fanfare, Greep has never sounded more like Billy Joel on speed in a jazz bar (that’s a compliment, by the way). The opening salvo of guitar and snare sounds like the intro to black midi’s John L accelerated by 1.5x. This soon unravels, switching genres at the whim of Greep’s wind-in-your-hair arranging, with the listener finding themselves in the role of a sex worker sat opposite – and inside the mind of – a repugnant, vulnerable barfly with delusions of grandeur and exuberant demands. “On the dancefloor I’m holy!” Greep yelps at the climactic moment. Disarmed and dazzled by the song’s assault of sensory overload, you believe him.

Francis Blagburn

Burial

Dreamfear / Boy Sent From Above

XL

Despite an affiliation with what we can loosely call ‘the rave’ – partly due to established associations with several key protagonists – Burial’s music has historically skirted around the subject rather than tackling it straight on. You know the drill by now: hazy mornings, contemplative walks through deserted cityscapes, paranoia and social disassociation. Dreamfear is something of a reset, tackling the dancefloor head-on. Its unambiguous, throwback opening – “I am the high one/ I am the lord of ecstasy” – lays the table for what comes next: 13 minutes of multi-BPM assault that skitters wildly around the hardcore/techno/breakbeat continuum, never settling anywhere, never getting comfortable. It’s the kind of track that could disconcert even the most hardened ravers.

Thomas Frost

Jim Legxacy

Aggressive

XL

Nostalgia sells, but few artists can conjure the bittersweet mix of melancholy and warmth that nostalgia summons as authentically as new XL signee Jim Legxacy. He paints a futuristic vision of Black British music with shades from the past that glow blue and purple like a bruise in their new form. On Aggressive – the first single from his upcoming sophomore project, Black British Music – he pairs his falsetto with a repurposed vocal sample from Chip’s sugary pop-pivot Oopsy Daisy, over a production that leans gently into dancehall. The song is a raw chronicling of a relationship in its death throes, and further enhances Jim’s reputation as one of the UK’s most unique voices, fearless in his vulnerability. 

Robert Kazandjian

Molina feat. ML Buch

Organs

Escho

A Molina and ML Buch link-up makes so much sense: both artists have been shaped by Copenhagen’s experimental scene, they’ve previously toured together and, sonically, their worlds merge seamlessly. But beyond the obvious parallels, they also share an affinity for abstract lyrics rooted in symbolism and corporeal themes, often focusing in on bodily sensations with vivid imagery and visceral gore – just listen to Buch’s Fleshless Hand (“Are those your nerves/ that clatter gurgle shriek?”), or the entirety of Molina’s Corpus EP (“Bullet casings stuck between my teeth/ cutting my gums/ cumming my guts”). Organs follows suit, evoking the heavy ache of sinking into the winter blues with fuzzy guitars and production, turning inwards physically to articulate the feeling: “In the post-summer/ the organs begin to blush/ they’re blushing and bursting.”

Rosie Byers

FOLD

Bottomless Brunch

FLDIN2

Rob Glassett – a.k.a. Fold – set out on his journey in the 90s and early 2000s, hitting free raves, tuning into pirate radio, and buying records in an era when breakbeats and sub bass were the frequencies of the UK underground. It’s been a decades-long love affair with sound system culture, and his knowledge cuts through his productions. Bottomless Brunch is a heady stepper for the times – a track of cold, industrial growl. It consists of scant elements: a snarling bassline that breaks out into occasional wobbles, held together by a razor-sharp, 2-step rhythm. In a year when the likes of Sammy Virji and Interplanetary Criminal have pushed garage towards harder, brasher, bassline-influenced waters, Fold dives towards the deep end.

Isaac Muk

Seefeel

Sky Hooks

Warp

Cult British band Seefeel returned after a prolonged absence this year. For fans of smeared dream-pop and spangled shoegaze, this was the 90s comeback worth waiting for. Sky Hooks – the lead single from their first album in 13 years, Everything Squared – opens with eerie curlicues of high-pitched vocals, drifting like mist over funereal beats. A snare drum and some shimmering synths drift in later, but the track’s minimal, trippy arrangements never build to much more than those fragmentary opening moments. At times, the wordless vocals sound angelic. At others, they emerge like haunting siren calls. This diaphanous ambient meandering treads a delicate line between dreamlike and nightmarish – a vibe-maker or vibe-killer, depending on your afters.

Sophie Lou Wilson

Ayra Starr

Commas

Mavin

When Beninese-Nigerian singer-songwriter Ayra Starr dropped Commas back in February, it was met with the sort of instant acclaim reserved for pop royalty. And back home, Starr is just that. But this track – pairing a glitzy amapiano beat with expressions of gratitude and odes to personal autonomy – saw Starr dropping her guard. Here, Starr credits her success to her spirituality and drive (“Dreams come true, if na fight”) while displaying a vulnerable side at odds with her standard swagger. Following the backlash she received for her hit Sability, on Commas she tells us how even she needs to preserve her peace from time to time. “Energy wrong, I log off,” she sings, offering us all something to learn from. 

Hollie Hilton

Charli xcx, Lorde

Girl, so confusing featuring Lorde

Atlantic

A voice note sent from Charli xcx to Lorde set the wheels in motion for Girl, so confusing featuring Lorde, this year’s most nuanced, self-aware reflection on female friendship. And the internet went crazy. A certified bop with pitched-down, Auto-Tuned vocals, fuzzy synths and strobe-lit, glitchy beats courtesy of A. G. Cook, Girl… articulates the dynamics of female friendship in a world where women are raised to see each other as competitors rather than allies. It’s for all the party girls who’ve cried in club bathrooms. It’s for anyone who’s been called stuck-up or a “bitch” when they’re really just socially anxious and insecure. As Julia Fox declared on TikTok, “Consider my girl trauma healed.” 

Sophie Lou Wilson

DJ Babatr

The Journey

Paryìa

Venezuela’s DJ Babatr had all but quit music when, in 2022, a chance link-up with Nick León finally propelled him onto the global stage – in the process introducing a worldwide audience to the ‘raptor house’ style he pioneered some 20 years earlier. As he told Resident Advisor, the sound is “a tropical fusion of trance, techno, hard house – and a huge desire to party”. In practice, this approach can cover a multitude of moods, from sassy to sexy to menacing. On The Journey, though, one clear emotion rings out: euphoria. Buoyant bass plucks roll out under pulsing trance chords and a rising vocal chant – the triumphant sound of a pioneer finally receiving the recognition he deserves. 

Oscar Henson

Tinashe

Nasty

Nice Life

Tinashe’s career has not been plain sailing, with her early success derailed by label struggles and album delays. Nasty was a minor corrective, thanks to that moment in the summer when it became a TikTok sensation, its unabashed sexiness landing at a time when the collective appetite for all things feral was at an all-time high. But to define Nasty as merely a social media hit would be doing it a disservice. Nasty draws deeply from pop’s well of sensual energy, reaching back to the hot and heavy hits of the early 2000s, and recalling the futurism of Tinashe’s foremothers Spears, Aguilera and Jackson. And like the best pop of that era, there’s something slightly off in Nasty, too; the skeletal 808s, the eerie synth line, that minimal, meditative hook… it’s freaky, in every sense.

Christine Ochefu

Verraco

Godspeed >

Timedance

Verraco can’t and won’t be stopped. Since launching TraTraTrax in 2020, the Colombian artist has experienced a meteoric rise, receiving co-signs from anyone and everyone worth their salt, and headlining all of the parties worth playing along the way. It was a verified dance music moment, then, when he announced a new EP on Timedance – the much-adored label run by UK artist Batu. Godspeed > – the EP’s clear high-water mark – follows one of our favourite dance music formulas: keep the drums simple and let everything else go totally mental. Here, a galloping 4×4 beat underpins a snarling one-note bass drive, while whirring, crescendoing synths are stretched like elastic bands into increasingly psychedelic and maniacal shapes. It’s the kind of curveball bomb that DJs lose sleep over, providing that measured dose of “what is it?” bedlam without ever losing its groove.

Oscar Henson

Kamasi Washington & André 3000

Dream State

Young

This third single from Kamasi Washington’s Fearless Movement album saw two musical forces combine. Emerging from an improvised session with like-minded collaborators Brandon Coleman, Tony Austin and Mono/Poly, the nearly nine-minute track begins in a meditative space before building a quiet intensity through a dialogue of vibrant, free-flowing ad-libs. The result is a pacific (but not bloodless) soundscape – cohesive but unpredictable, mirroring the worlds we encounter in half-lucid dream states. Washington commands with graceful authority, weaving his lyrical playing through André 3000’s wispy flute tones and a pulsing, propulsive groove that punctures any naval-gazing stasis. “Dream State is a celebration of life and the opportunity it gives us to explore new possibilities,” Washington said, evoking the pair’s spontaneous, explorative sessions. “And what an amazing experience [we] had gliding freely through this world of sound, not knowing where we would end up, but joyful in the journey itself.”

Demajerle Myers

The Smile

Bending Hectic

XL

Anyone still dismissing The Smile as a Radiohead side project ought to have been instantly silenced by this eight-minute epic from January’s Wall of Eyes. Recorded with A Moon Shaped Pool engineer Sam Petts-Davies, Bending Hectic is proof of the trio’s perfect chemistry, showcasing the seamless interplay between Tom Skinner’s impressionistic percussion, Jonny Greenwood’s fluid guitar technique – often bending strings to the point of them appearing detuned – and the almost euphoric nihilism of Thom Yorke’s lyrics. Set on an Italian mountainside, Yorke’s narrator makes reckless hairpin turns in “a vintage soft top” before deliberately plummeting to his death around the six-minute mark. In an instant, the song’s spacious first movement is swallowed whole, enveloped in the airless fug of guitar feedback and hysterically swarming strings, contributed by the London Contemporary Orchestra. Exploratory and almost eerily portentous, Bending Hectic is an audacious lead single. It’s also, by far, The Smile’s most compelling songwriting to date.

Gemma Samways

John Glacier

Emotions

Young

John Glacier is a singular voice in the London underground – her stream-of-consciousness raps by turns vulnerable, muted and cryptic. Emotions, from her EP Like a Ribbon, turns up the brightness a little, painting a clear-eyed portrait of a rapper besieged by loser hangers-on and issuing acid-tongued warnings to the envious “snakes”. You can feel the ice flow through her veins as she raps, “I’m a glacier, that’s why I look so deadly/ this my space/ why they want to friend me?” Kwes Darko’s production is an equal match to this self-proclaimed “hottest in the game” – menacing and cinematic, and leaning into the kind of horror film synths and snare rolls not heard since the heyday of witch house. It’s a starkly unambiguous, unabashed statement that sees Glacier relishing in her status, exemplified by that incredible refrain: “Now they calling me a bitch/ you best believe it.” 

Christine Ochefu

Joy Orbison

flight fm

XL

Has any UK artist penned as many irrefutable, year-defining club bangers as Joy O? Since erupting onto the scene with Hyph Mngo in 2009, a near-constant stream of anthems have followed, from Sicko Cell to Ellipsis to the tautologically titled Big Room Tech House DJ Tool – Tip! In fact, pick any year over the last decade, and there’ll likely be a Joy Orbison heater among its most ubiquitously rinsed tracks. This year’s effort, flight fm, dropped in January, and from then on grew exponentially in size and stature over the course of the year – a rapid ascent put into overdrive in the summer by a surprise vocal edit featuring Lil Yachty, Future and Playboi Carti. In the studio, Yachty gleefully described the track’s immense warping bassline as sounding like “a thousand bees swarming”, and we honestly can’t think of a more tantalising way of putting it.

Oscar Henson

FKA twigs

EUSEXUA

Young

For FKA twigs, EUSEXUA – the made-up word that’s also the title of her upcoming third album – is “a practice”, “a state of being”, “the pinnacle of human experience”. Inspired partly by the freedom she found in Prague’s techno parties, EUSEXUA embodies a state of transcendence: feeling aligned, fully alive and fizzing with potential. As Skunk Anansie’s Skin put it in a teaser video for twigs’ forthcoming album: “Everything feels perfect.” Too conceptual? FKA twigs creates the physical experience for us on the project’s title track, made alongside the formidable combination of Bapari, Eartheater, Koreless and Sasha. Building tension with prickly production and a racing beat, before giving in to a headrush of giddy techno euphoria in the song’s second half, she’s in full command of how the sensation surges and folds, pulling us in to ride through it – and this new era – with her.

Rosie Byers

Kendrick Lamar

Not Like Us

Interscope

There was a point where it stopped being fun. Kendrick had just dropped Meet the Grahams, a rapid response to Drake’s Family Matters, taking the form of a letter alleging that Drake was running a sex trafficking ring out of his Toronto mansion. As rap beefs go, the writing was on the wall, and the championship ring already had a Dodgers badge on it. But the mood was dark. Then, 24 hours later… Not Like Us – his fifth and final diss track, a masterstroke that managed to upstage its own backstory without compromising on surgical character assassination. The track takes Kendrick’s vocal manipulation to new heights. In one moment, bark-like (“Hey Drake!”), in the next, sustaining “A minooooooor” in a dead-eyed, cartoonish monotone. Beyond the track’s technical and lyrical wizardry, Kendrick displayed a rare humour, dethroning the lyric-caption king with a grab-bag of quotables and gliding from critical darling to viral hitmaker without breaking a sweat.

Duncan Harrison

Fontaines D.C.

Favourite

XL

The second single from the Dublin-London transplants’ fourth album, Romance, was, at first listen, an uncomplicated embrace of the promise of the title. Landing on the cusp of summer, Favourite has welcome nods to The Cure’s Just Like Heaven, and contains some of Grian Chatten’s tenderest proverbs to date (“Did you know I could claim the dreamer from the dream?”). The result is a kind of yearning nostalgia that might grace the credits of a coming-of-age film, complete with jangly guitar line and “bah-bah-bah” backing vocals. Even the accompanying video is a montage of childhood home videos of the band members – how cute is that? But scratch below the bright surface and there’s a brooding sense of hopelessness coursing through the song’s central character study, as Chatten sings: “Well, look who’s just the newest clown/ 35 hours coming down.” Love or delusion? As always, it’s complicated.

Hannah White

Chappell Roan

Good Luck, Babe!

Amusement / Island

In 2024, pop made a triumphant return to bratty maximalism. And Chappell Roan’s Good Luck, Babe! – a theatrical gem with new-wave synths, sassy-but-eviscerating lyrics and massive, cloud-busting chorus – was (sorry, Charli fans) the pinnacle. The acceleration from its opening drums and synths to the dramatic, orchestral string sections and earth-shattering falsetto bridge remains as jaw-dropping on the hundredth listen as it did on the first, while its lyrics range from vulnerable – “I just wanna love someone who calls me ‘baby’” – to barbed sarcasm. The climactic poison dart – “You’re nothing more than his wife” – is a line made to be screamed at the top of your lungs. Indeed, Good Luck, Babe! resonated far beyond Chappell’s largely queer fanbase. Ironically, given the song’s evocation of a loveless marriage, you’re just as likely to hear it on the dancefloor at a heterosexual wedding as you are at your local gay bar – a fate limited to only the greatest, gayest pop.

Sophie Lou Wilson

Nick León & Erika de Casier

Bikini

TraTraTrax

It’s hard to capture the fragility of a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it summer romance. In Bikini, Miami’s producer of the moment Nick León attempts to freeze that heat to the tune of electronic harp flourish, breakbeat and accelerated bass. Neo-R&B singer and producer Erika de Casier glides coolly over the track, weaving a tender fantasy around that decisive moment when two new lovers choose one another: “Every time you kiss me/ I go crazy for the rush/ and I know you’re special/ I won’t hide it any more.” Taking the club to the beach (and vice versa) is what the 305 – and its crew of increasingly influential dance music practitioners – does best. Beyond the seaside setting of this city Cinderella love story, León’s keen ear is tuned to a hyper-specific sliver of space and time: the coastline at sunset, gentle strumming in the distance, bass rushing at full speed, two dancers hand in hand in the fading pink light, leaning in. 

E.R. Pulgar

Nourished by Time

Hell of a Ride

XL

On Nourished by Time’s website, there is a menu tab titled “History”. Instead of an uninspired artist bio or play-by-play discography, as one would expect, the page hosts only one thing: a collection of links to seemingly random songs on YouTube. Like off-the-cuff recommendations a friend might text you after a particularly enlightening evening getting baked, the songs span genres, decades and aesthetics, but the dots somehow remain connected. The sultry jazz pop of Fiona Apple’s The First Taste. Proto art-punks Suburban Lawns performing Unable live in 1979. If You Want Me by Brownstone, the best song by a 90s R&B girl group. You get the picture. While pointedly eclectic, for anyone who is familiar with the Baltimore artist’s music – that’s to say, the total disregard for genre, the gleeful experimentation, the superior production know-how – this constellation of influences is anything but disparate. On the contrary, Marcus Brown’s strength as a songwriter and producer is his ability to splice any DNA that interests him and build an entirely new creature, and Hell of a Ride is just that – a glorious chimera no other mad scientist would even attempt to stitch together.  

Hell of a Ride – the opening track on Catching Chickens, this year’s follow-up EP to his 2023 debut record Erotic Probiotic 2 – sets the tone for a new chapter, where Brown’s pop sensibilities are placed at the very forefront of his sound. Within the song’s first 30 seconds, a reverb-drenched, midwestern emo guitar intro collides with a simple yet effective hip-hop beat, a tinny synthesiser blasts an infectious, off-kilter melody, and Brown delivers a rush of heavenly R&B harmonies that propel the track headlong into its first verse. So much happens so quickly, it’s a wonder that the rest of the track doesn’t immediately collapse under the weight of its own ambition. Yet, Brown doesn’t take his foot off the gas, and the raw emotion unleashed at the start of the song never dissipates.

At its core, Hell of a Ride is a song about loss – not necessarily grief, but tender-hearted resignation, the kind that hurts too much to dwell on. “Don’t eat till I’m faded/ Still call my ex-girl when I go half-crazy,” Brown laments, “You know that’s still my baby.” As he continues to ride the waves of distortion, he touches on themes of late capitalism and despondent youth, describing “children stuck in The Matrix” who “have no options”. Everything has changed, and it’s decidedly not for the better. 

People look down on nostalgia: it’s seen as indulgent, as if it’s irresponsible – childish, even – to romanticise the past. But what is pop music if not romantic? Picking from his wide breadth of 80s and 90s influences, Nourished by Time concocts the exact formula for that lump-in-the-throat feeling – the moment when your chest swells as you realise you’ve returned somewhere you thought you’d forgotten. But by the time the chorus kicks in, he’s left it all behind. “Goodbye, baby, goodbye,” he sings, his scratchy baritone sounding like André 3000 imitating Toni Braxton. “You know it’s been one hell of a ride.” As a languid guitar solo settles in, the song begins to de-escalate, awash in the sort of meandering twang any other producer would have used as an outro. Instead, Brown resurrects the chorus one last time, as if to underline the fact that this time, it really is over. The emotional release is palpable, and it’s this quality that ultimately makes Nourished by Time so exciting – his uncanny talent for reflecting the most universal aspects of ourselves while pulling out a sound only he can conjure.

Cameron Cook