Here is my mix of the songs that meant the most to me in 2024, new and old. I thought it was an exceptional year for new music. Find my playlist below via Spotify.
The Postal Service – “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight”: My friends and I drove to Salt Lake City in May for the Kilby Block Party music festival. Perhaps the highlight from a stacked lineup (that also included Joanna Newsom and LCD Soundsystem!!) was The Postal Service, which played its album Give Up in full, following a performance by Death Cab For Cutie of its album Transatlanticism. Ben Gibbard and Jenny Lewis blew the roof off. Give Up was a core record for me when I was a teen, but I hadn’t revisited it much since, and I was stunned at both how well it held up and at how piercing it felt. It’s somehow the more reflective counterpoint to Transatlanticism’s despair: “I am finally seeing why I was the one worth leaving.” Catharsis.
Fontaines, D.C. – “Favourite” I was in Vancouver with my friend Connor in September to see Magdalena Bay perform. I had to work one of the days I was there, and put this on, from a recommendation from my brother, as I was walking down West 4th to the office. It felt the way I imagine it must have felt to hear “Just Like Heaven” for the first time in 1987. Pure electricity. I think this is the best song of the year, imbued with so much love and regret and history. I love the breathy way Grian Chatten sings the core refrain. I find the whole thing to be deeply resonant, but the bridge is transcendent — “Shoulder bound to the frame of a door/chewed into shape like a stone on the shore.” And then, there’s been few lyrics ever written that are more romantic than, “If there was lightning in me, you know who it was for.” The music video is beautiful as well.
Magdalena Bay – “Cry For Me”: The best song Abba never wrote. I loved Imaginal Disk, Magdalena Bay’s album from this year, enough to hop on a plane to see them perform it live. The gear that this song kicks into around the halfway point when that piano melody enters is intoxicating. Mica Tenenbaum, recognizing how remarkable this chorus that she has is, spends the track’s final three minutes repeating it, the sense of desperation in her voice growing each time. I adore the way her voice follows the piano line when she sings the song’s indelible line: “Think of love when you remember me.”
Angel Olsen – “Never Be Mine”: The most brashly self-effacing cut on Angel Olsen’s My Woman, a record fixated on unfulfilled and unfulfillable desire. Olsen wallows, her heartache ending and beginning again. Recognizing that there is nothing new under the sun does not make it easier to accept.
Angel Olsen – “Chance”: Is “Chance,” off Olsen’s follow-up record All Mirrors, a show of maturity? It’s at least a striving towards hope, towards change and possibility, framing desire as a gift worth embracing rather than a curse one must live with, and contemplating that the way things are right now isn’t the way things will be forever. It evokes Synecdoche, New York, as Olsen walks, dumbfounded, through the staging of her own life, strings swelling behind her, before offering her most beautiful refrain: “It’s hard to say forever, love/forever’s just so far.”
MJ Lenderman – “Rudolph”: Early in our sessions, my therapist asked me if I had a Catholic background, on account of my instinct towards penance for my real or perceived transgressions, as I sit in her confessional booth. I do not want to be in seminary, but it often feels as if it is the only choice I have. Many of MJ Lenderman’s lyrical quirks make me roll my eyes, but this song’s perfect.
Chappell Roan – “Good Luck, Babe!”: I find Chappell Roan to be a fascinating public figure because of how clearly she exists (or existed) outside of the industry apparatus. She was plainly not equipped to deal with celebrity, and she’s taken an exceptional amount of heat for that. But she has an incredible ear for melody, and, vitally, things she needs to get off her chest, two assets that combine to make “Good Luck, Babe!” one of this decade’s great pop songs. I recognize the absurdity of saying I relate deeply to this song about compulsory heterosexuality, but … I do!! “You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling” is a universal sentiment, never before expressed better than it is here. Wherever you go, there you are.
Broadcast – “Tears in the Typing Pool”: My favourite older discovery this year was Broadcast, and their masterpiece Tender Buttons. “Tears in the Typing Pool,” the album’s one departure from its indietronica sound, has stuck with me the most. It’s essentially proto-Mitski, imbued with an almost unbearable longing.
Los Campesinos! – “Long Throes”: Los Campesinos!, the avatars for my persisting teenage angst, released a vintage record this year with All Hell. It doesn’t quite reach the dizzying highs of their first three albums, but it’s a late-career marvel.
The Hold Steady – “Arms and Hearts”: A beautiful outtake from The Hold Steady’s classic Boys and Girls in America. Sincerity is Craig Finn’s default register, but this is another level. It’s the type of song that you could only have written if it had happened to you.
Vampire Weekend – “Mary Boone”: With Only God Was Above Us, Vampire Weekend reached rarified air, among an extremely select group of artists that have released two perfect records. Its most brilliant moment comes in the bridge of “Mary Boone,” when the downtempo drums cribbed from the Primitive Radio Gods fade out into a sparse, washed-out piano melody that interpolates Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.” The collision of these influences create this dizzying long exposure that links, like all else on this album, present to future to past. “These two tunnels go west and east.”
Andy Shauf – “Green Glass”: Canadian bias strong with this take, but I am more convinced with each year that Andy Shauf is my generation’s Elliott Smith. No one is doing it like this. “Two in the morning, baby. Three by noon./Isn’t it romantic? Maybe we could go home soon.”
Purple Mountains – “Nights That Won’t Happen”: David Berman’s Purple Mountains record hit me hard this year, as I found myself in a state of mind where I felt vulnerable to what he had been trying to say with all his projects. It is hard to listen to.
Pulp – “Disco 2000”: I listened to a lot of Pulp this year, but it’s this classic — one of the best pop songs ever written — that I connected with most. That change-up in the final chorus (“What are you doing Sunday, baby?“) is a dagger. Jarvis Cocker’s most enduring work.
Depeche Mode – “Enjoy the Silence”: And, what probably is the best pop song ever written. Ben Gibbard and The Postal Service played this as their final encore song when I saw them this summer, and it was probably the greatest concert-going moment I’ve ever experienced.
Cindy Lee – “Realistik Heaven”: Kinda a bonus entry, as Cindy Lee’s masterpiece Diamond Jubilee isn’t on Spotify and thus not in this playlist. I wrote in detail about that record here.