Everything kind of felt like it was falling apart in 2024, and I’m not just saying that because we decided it was a good idea to send a self-proclaimed wannabe dictator back to the White House again. Genuinely, it felt like everywhere I turned this year, some piece of the society I was told would always hold fast was sputtering, whether it was social media outlets, or search engines, or mail services or, yes, the music industry.
While this year brought a whole slew of new pop stars to the table, it also deepened the divide between the industry haves and have-nots and started an insane conversation about the place artificial intelligence has in the creative process. The pop charts got stuck in boring holding patterns for months at a time, supporting my growing assumption that the 2020s will go down as a decade with startling few legitimately iconic hits. And of course, 2024 saw the album as an art form repeatedly pushed to its absolute breaking point. Seriously, how many big-deal releases from this year could have been A-grade statements if they’d only traded their bloat and interminable runtimes for something more manageable and streamlined?
Amidst the chaos – of the world and this industry – I found myself gravitating to albums that seemed like little shelters in the storm. My favorite album of the year, for instance, is a release that didn’t seem to generate even a modicum of discourse on social media, but I loved it in spite of that fact, or maybe because of it. A lot of the major artists represented on my list, meanwhile, are those who have been more or less left behind by mainstream tastemakers – the broken toys of an industry so obsessed with fetishizing youth and finding the “next big thing” that it routinely overlooks stellar mid-career and late-career work. While my list does make space for more than a few dominant artists of the moment, you can mostly find me out here with the misfits, the sideliners, and past-their-primers. This year, those were my people, and I’m excited to tell you why.
Read More “Craig Manning’s Top Albums of 2024”