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.
1. Donovan Woods – Things Were Never Good If They’re Not Good Now
Sometimes, songwriters – even the great ones – start to run out of gas as they get deeper into their careers. That makes sense: You start off writing recklessly, without discipline but with a ton of enthusiasm, which often yields the most creative material in your career. You hit a peak 5-10 years in, when you’ve mastered the craft of songwriting to such a degree that you’re balanced perfectly between the sheer electricity of those early days and the professionalism that comes from hitting that “10,000 hours to become an expert” ideal. And then, eventually, you hit a rut, because your approach to writing songs gets so well worn that it runs out of magic.
Donovan Woods is the rare songwriter who seems immune to that arc. Even some of my favorite writers – the Jason Isbells and Lori McKennas and Adam Duritzes and Taylor Swifts of the world – have hit moments in their careers where I wondered whether their “thing” was getting stale. But I’ve never wondered that with Woods, who, now eight albums into his discography, can reasonably claim to have gotten better every single time out. Things Were Never Good If They’re Not Good Now is no exception, packing so many perfect songwriterly moments into its 40-minute runtime (46 minutes if you count a pair of stellar bonus tracks) that you begin to wonder if he’s even human.
Then again, it’s Woods’ humanity that makes him, in my humble opinion, the best songwriter on the planet at this particular moment in time. See “Back to the Funeral,” my favorite song of the year, which Donovan wrote alongside Matt Nathanson (another one of my favorite songwriters) and the aforementioned Lori McKenna. On the surface, it seems like a song about the death of a friend – and it is, in part. But it’s also a song about coming back to a place you used to call home and having to reckon with how it’s changed in your absence. It’s about reconnecting with other old friends and the bizarre mix of joy and pain you feel about that reunion, because it’s so good to see those people again and so sad that it took this particular circumstance to make it happen. Most of all, it’s a song about time and how it can seem to be mercilessly surging forward one moment and collapsing back in on itself the next. The song is only five stanzas long, but it packs a screenplay’s worth of ideas into that space.
Most of Things Were Good… is like that. None of the songs are big, ambitious things; the longest track barely clears the four-minute mark. But repeatedly, Woods fills his songs with characters and nuances that make them feel like boundless portraits of real life: the blue collar guy in “I’m Just Trying to Get Home,” working himself to the bone without realizing, yet, that the deck is stacked against him; the forever couple in “When Our Friends Come Over,” who rediscover a little bit of their relationship’s initial spark when they host dinner parties and have to behave just a little differently than they do when it’s just the two of them in a house alone; the narrator in “All Raked Flat,” looking back over the entire history of a plot of land and the homes and lives it used to hold, before someone plowed them away to pave paradise.
The lesser songwriters in the Nashville sphere where Woods has made his living in over the past decade could maybe capture a fraction of the energy and humanity that drives his songs. On Things Were Never Good If They’re Not Good Now, he gets at that magic again and again, in the same unassuming and beautifully sad way he always has. It’s enough that, after 14 years of listening to the guy’s music, I finally feel inclined to hand him an album of the year title.
2. Kelsea Ballerini – Patterns
Kelsea Ballerini made one of the century’s greatest divorce albums in 2023 with Rolling up the Welcome Mat, a compact little EP that, despite its slight length and February release date, topped my end-of-the-year list last December. Patterns is the logical follow-up, an album about finding love again – but more importantly, an album about all the walls you put up after that first massive, life-shifting heartbreak, and about what it takes to tear them back down again.
One of my favorite songs of the decade so far is a Matt Nathanson tune called “Beginners,” where he sings about the recklessness of youth and about how “You end up killing all the best parts, baby, trying to protect yourself.” Such is the case with love. When you’re young, you throw yourself into the throes of romance with wild abandon – partially because your hormones tell you to, but mostly because you don’t know any better. As you get older and more jaded, you find yourself armor, and a shield, and a sword, because you’ve been hurt once or twice or 15 times before and you don’t want to put yourself in that situation again. Patterns finds Ballerini trying to sort through the baggage of a broken marriage – and the label of “divorcee” – so she can truly give herself to someone again. The result is a beautiful and wrenching album about big risks and second chances. It’s the most fragile album that Ballerini has ever made – a notable thing to say for an artist who arguably made the mark she did with her debut album (2015’s The First Time) because she arrived with a trio of such confident and decidedly not-fragile singles (“Love Me Like You Mean It,” “Dibs,” and “Peter Pan”).
Even compared to the heart-shattering Welcome Mat, Patterns mostly feels tentative, whether it’s directly addressing the nervousness of getting tangled up in someone again (“Baggage,” “First Rodeo”) or trying – and failing – not to wear its heart on its sleeve (“Two Things,” “WAIT!”). It’s the kind of album that Taylor Swift used to make every two years, before she got (arguably) bogged down by the burden of simply having to be Taylor Swift. As Ballerini tells us here, she’s got baggage…but not so much that she can’t make mistakes in the public eye, or own up to them in messy and kaleidoscopically beautiful ways. It’s that mix of mess and beauty that makes Patterns one of the year’s best and most replayable albums.
3. Coldplay - Moon Music
At this point, it seems like just about everyone wants Coldplay to do a back-to-basics album that sounds like Parachutes or A Rush of Blood to the Head. Moon Music is decidedly not that. One track on this album (“Aeterna”) is basically interstellar disco; another (“We Pray”) is so 2000s pop-rap that it sounds like it could have been on Kanye West’s Graduation; a third (“Rainbow”) is a six-minute tone poem with nothing resembling a verse or a chorus. There are a few classic Coldplay gestures, of course: “feelslikeimfallinginlove” is the kind of big stadium pop song they’ve been putting on albums for the better part of 20 years, and “All My Love” might be the closest they’ve come to making something that sounds like “Yellow” since the Bush administration. There’s also a song where Chris Martin proclaims “I am a mountain,” a Coldplayism so perfect I can’t believe it didn’t exist before now. And then there’s “Jupiter,” a blissful little acoustic pop song about being yourself and loving who you love, some extremely Coldplayish messages delivered in the best way. On first listen, though, Moon Music is a lot – a lot of dreamy soundscapes and ultra-poppy pop songs and lyrics that, in any other hands would, sound like the epitome of cringe.
For all those reasons – and because this album doesn’t deliver the Parachutes Redux that I think a lot of people wanted – Moon Music got demolished by critics when it came out this fall. Something about this album just beguiled me, though, and I kept coming back to it. I especially felt the magnetic pull after reading Martin’s NME interview, where he talked about recent bouts with depression and how he tried to use this album to work his way through it. “When things appear overwhelmingly positive, that’s often because it’s what the singer needs most,” Martin told the British publication. On Moon Music – and increasingly, across Coldplay’s past decade’s worth of work – you can hear Martin trying to create this joyful, hyper-positive, multi-cultural “all you need is love” universe in his music as a means of staving off his own mental health struggles – not to mention the many broader existential crises currently plaguing the modern world.
Your mileage may vary on that kind of message, and I suspect a whole lot of people found it to be cloying and unrealistic, especially in a year where forces conspired to make the darkness all around us a whole lot darker. But as the planet seemed to tilt more and more toward madness, I kept reaching for Moon Music, longing to disappear into its technicolor songs of love and communion and acceptance. The song I loved the most, annoyingly, is a track that Martin and co. chose to cut from the regular version of the album: a propulsive pop ditty called “Man in the Moon” that I found just about as euphoric as any other piece of music I heard all year. That track sounds like a block party up in outer space – a cross between all those climactic celebrations at the end of Return of the Jedi and Mario Kart’s Rainbow Road – and it was nice to imagine such a scene when so much shit was going wrong down here on Earth. Would I love a Coldplay album that sounded like a band in the room again? Hell yes I would. But for as long as Chris Martin wants to turn the cosmic utopia in his head into Crayola-colored soundwaves, I’ll be listening.
4. Kacey Musgraves – Deeper Well
Watching music critics try to slot Kacey Musgraves and Deeper Well into this year’s run of albums from dominant “pop girls” might have been the moment I decided music criticism was 100 percent broken. I’ve been working on a theory for awhile now that Kacey was never meant to blow up like she did with Golden Hour, her 2018 masterpiece that won her a ton of new fans, topped end-of-the-year lists for a bunch of music publications, and scored an Album of the Year victory at the Grammys. Don’t get me wrong: Golden Hour is deserving of all of those things. But Kacey is not a pop star, and never asked to be one. The success of Golden Hour got a lot of people thinking that Musgraves could orchestrate some sort of 1989-style crossover to pop success, but the attempt to do so – 2021’s star-crossed – felt like a half-measure, and was easily her worst album.
Deeper Well recalibrates, bringing the focus back on the songwriting and delivering a sound that feels timeless and classic, like a well-worn folk record from Carole King or Simon & Garfunkel. Right on cue, a lot of people called it boring, criticizing it for being too mellow and low-key. But the mellowness – and the complete refusal to offer up anything that might be considered a “banger” – is a feature, not a bug; I might even go so far as to argue it’s the whole damn point. Deeper Well is a “search for meaning” album. In the songs, Kacey gets existential, taking stock of her whirlwind past six years – a huge album, a marriage that imploded, a pandemic, a lot of global and personal turmoil – and tries to make sense of what comes next, now that her career peak is very likely behind her.
I think just about every person assumes their life is going to follow some clean-arc script, but that’s rarely the case. What happens when the script goes off course, and when you have to accept that maybe life is all just a whole lot of randomness? For Kacey, grappling with that question is a push and pull. Sometimes, she’s finding peace and serenity in the simple and mundane, like on “Dinner with Friends,” about all the beautiful things in life that we sometimes ignore when we’re too caught up in the big picture. Sometimes, she’s trying to let go of the wheel and enjoy the ride, wherever it may lead; see “Sway,” an impossibly gorgeous song about going with the flow. And sometimes, she’s demanding answers from a higher power, as on “The Architect,” the album’s best song. “Was it thought out at all or just paint on a wall?/Is there anything that you regret?/I don’t understand, are there blueprints or plans?/Can I speak to the architect?”
Songs like this – so thoughtful and complex and carefully assembled down to the last syllable of the last word – are what Kacey Musgraves should be doing. Sometimes, pop stars have to sacrifice the craft of the song to fit in with the trends of the moment, or to challenge them. On star-crossed, it often felt like Kacey was doing just that. On Deeper Well, she puts the songs first again, and it’s the single best decision any artist made this year.
5. Katie Pruitt – Mantras
Katie Pruitt made easily my favorite debut album of the decade so far back in 2020 with Expectations. Primarily written about Pruitt’s upbringing and coming-of-age – she grew up gay in a conservative catholic family – that album served up raw, painful, and ultimately life-affirming stories about the push and pull between hiding who you are to keep the peace, and screaming it from the rooftops to set your soul free. Mantras is thornier and more complex – less about that big victorious milestone of reclaiming your identity and more about the day-to-day struggles we all face, regardless of orientation. By the time Expectations drew to a close, it seemed like Pruitt had found her happy ending in a pair of deeply-felt love songs for the woman she was seeing at the time. Fast-forward to Mantras and Pruitt is nursing a broken heart from that relationship’s end and trying to move on, even as the toxicity of the world around her challenges every coping mechanism she’s got in her back pocket.
I found my first listens to Mantras to be disappointing, because it is neither as immediately emotionally satisfying as Expectations, nor as loaded with incendiary political songs as I thought a Katie Pruitt album released in another fraught election year might be. Pruitt wrote one of the best protest songs of the decade in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, called “Look the Other Way,” and served up another on this album’s second single, the takedown of, shall we say, selective Christianity that is “White Lies, White Jesus, and You.” But Mantras is more searching than it is accusatory, and it’s more existential than it is emotional. The result is an extremely thoughtful and thought-provoking album that I reached for a whole lot less than I reached for Expectations four years ago. That might be the only reason this album isn’t at the top of this list, though, because song for song and line for line, I don’t think there was a more cohesive or complete record made this year, by anyone. I have a feeling it’s the kind of album that will take me a lot longer than a year to truly understand.
6. Zach Bryan – The Great American Bar Scene
I suffered the first real sports injury of my life this year, after running two marathons in the space of six weeks in the spring. That meant losing running from my daily routine for four or five weeks this summer, and I hated it – not just because I’d gotten so used to the exercise and the fitness, but also because runs had become the place where I could give new albums my full attention and really process how I felt about them. One of my first tentative runs back came on July 4, which just happened to be the day that Zach Bryan released The Great American Bar Scene into the world, and listening to this album on that hot, humid, sunny, sweaty morning was my most memorable first impression with an album in 2024. While Bryan is hardly known for making what anyone would classify as “workout music,” The Great American Bar Scene and its prevalence of moody, midtempo slow-burns proved to be the perfect fit for one of my slowest runs in years. For once, running wasn’t at all about the thrill of the speed or the gratification of getting my heart racing. Instead, it was about the gratitude of getting outside, tasting the fresh air, feeling the glorious warmth of the summer weather, and hearing a new record in a perfect environment.
That first listen, I think, colored how I felt about The Great American Bar Scene significantly. For me, this is Bryan’s best album yet, showing off impressive growth in his scene-setting songwriting (the title track, “Pink Skies”), in the dynamite chops of his backing band (“Oak Island), and in his ability to share the stage (whether it’s with the gospel choirs in “Towers” or Bruce Springsteen on “Sandpaper”). That collaborative feel might be my favorite thing about Bar Scene. This record feels like a blank check album, except the check isn’t so much about money and means as it is about being at a point in your career where literally anyone will take your call. And so Bryan cashes in his capital as a newly-minted stadium draw by filling his songs with his heroes. Lucky for me, Zach’s heroes are my heroes too, so I got a ton of joy out of seeing him put the spotlight on genius Oklahoma songwriter John Moreland on “Memphis the Blues,” or getting John Mayer to drop curtains of gorgeous guitarwork all over “Better Days.” Best of all, he somehow convinces Bruce to wind back the clock to 1984 and try recreating “I’m on Fire.”
7. Maggie Rogers – Don’t Forget Me
Five years ago, while writing about my favorite albums of 2019, I spent a few lines praising that year’s impressive run of “freshman class” albums. From Billie Eilish to Sigrid to Jade Bird to Yola, that year, for whatever reason, served up a whole lot of dynamite debut albums from promising female artists. Of that crop, Maggie Rogers’ Heard It in a Past Life is the one that has endured the most for me half a decade later, and it’s partially because Rogers has since shown herself to be a masterfully chameleonic artist. Past Life was cool because it melded Rogers’ roots – ostensibly, a very American type of folk music – with the thumping beats and radiant synths she’d heard in Berlin clubs during a semester abroad. I wouldn’t have minded if she’d kept serving up songs like “Give a Little” or “The Knife” for the rest of her career. Instead, the follow-up, 2022’s Surrender, was way more of a rock album, pitched somewhere between ‘90s Lilith Fair and 2010s Florence + The Machine. I loved that album even more than Past Life, especially how it allowed Rogers to take the delicate folk-pop voice she’d shown on Past Life and turn it into something way more guttural and raw. Don’t Forget Me flips the script again, taking Rogers back in time to more of a ‘70s/’80s album-oriented rock sound. It’s classy and classic-sounding, with songs that glide by on beautiful guitar grooves (“So Sick of Dreaming”) and dusty acoustic strums (the wrenching title track). And again, the most impressive thing about it might be how Rogers’ tweaks her vocal delivery once more to paint in a new collection of colors, splitting the difference, this time, between what Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie were each doing on Rumours. Three albums in, the highest compliment I can pay to Maggie Rogers is that I don’t know which of her albums is my favorite – perhaps because each feels like it could be the amazing debut LP from a brand-new sensation. If her plan is to be this kind of journeywoman artist for the rest of her career, then I frankly can’t wait to hear what the next version will sound like.
8. Snow Patrol – The Forest Is the Path
Snow Patrol were one of my very favorite bands back in middle school and high school. That was a time in my life when I was obsessed with what I’ll call “TV show coda music,” or the type of climactic, emotional pop-rock tunes that came to prominence soundtracking the final moments in episodes of soapy television shows like One Tree Hill, The OC, Grey’s Anatomy, Scrubs, and Smallville. A couple long breaks and a pair of albums I didn’t care for nearly as much as the 2000s heyday – 2011’s Fallen Empires and 2018’s Wildness – had me wondering whether I’d outgrown these guys and their big, yearning Coldplay-sized anthems. But The Forest Is the Path served up arguably the biggest musical surprise of the year for me by proving this band I’ve loved for 20 years could still deliver the emotional fireworks. Peak Snow Patrol albums like Final Straw and Eyes Open worked because they took every-day love stories and blew them up to big-screen proportions, on epic heartbreakers like “Run” or wedding-ready slow dances like “Chasing Cars.” On Forest, frontman Gary Lightbody is still writing about those types of love stories, but he’s doing it with more distance and perspective. “I haven’t been in a relationship for a very long time, 10 years or more, so love from a distance to me meant the way a relationship sits in your memory from a distance of, say, 10 years,” he said of the album. “When you’re in love, you’re standing in the lobby of the Empire State Building. When you’ve broken up with that person, you’re out in the street. You can still see the building, but you’re not in there anymore. And when it’s 10 years later, now you’re standing in Brooklyn looking at the Manhattan skyline.” There’s something intensely profound about that description, and about the songs that Lightbody and co. get out of it. “Maybe I love you like the ocean loves the sky/Never gonna find a way to reach you, no matter how I try,” Lightbody sings on “Everything’s Here and Nothing’s Lost.” It’s the kind of line that would have stopped me in my tracks if I’d heard it in one of those big, beating-heart TV coda moments I mentioned earlier. But it maybe hits even harder now, when I’m a little older and have a better idea of what the word “never” might actually mean. This album, about reaching out desperately for something that’s long gone – and about somehow accepting what it means to live with the loss – is wrenchingly sad and rousingly uplifting at the same time.
9. Taylor Swift – The Tortured Poets Department
The most frustrating thing about Taylor Swift’s 11th album is that it’s a complete mess. That’s also the most fascinating thing about it. Taylor had just about as big of a year in 2023 as any pop artist has ever had, and The Tortured Poets Department is at least one part victory lap. But it’s also a breakup album, an album about a toxic rebound relationship, an album about a new love story, a rebuke of demanding, obsessive fans, and a transmission from someone who is maybe starting to fray at the edges. The result is overlong and lyrically overstuffed. The double-album conceit of it, a middle-of-the-night surprise on release day, feels almost entirely like a cynical attempt to break chart records. Disc two languishes in more mid-tempo Aaron Dessner collaborations than ever needed to exist, proving that the man who helped make folklore and evermore into twin masterpieces is running out of magic tricks, at least when it comes to Taylor Swift. And even the core album has more misses than I’d like to admit – sloppily written songs like “Fresh Out the Slammer” and “Florida!!!” that never would have made it past the last cut on more economical albums like Fearless or 1989. And yet, despite all these little needling issues, Tortured Poets serves up enough thrills to prove that Taylor Swift can still summon the thunder when she wants to. On songs like “Guilty as Sin” and “But Daddy I Love Him,” she turns her tryst with The 1975’s Matty Healy into the stuff of epic forbidden romance, complete with darts for all the fans who criticized said relationship. On “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” and “Clara Bow,” she gets candid about the costs of fame in a way she hasn’t since “Clean” – and honestly sounds like she might be one verse shy of walking away from it all. And on “The Black Dog,” the album’s greatest song, she revels in the pettiness of post-breakup anger in a way she hasn’t in at least a decade, wishing nothing more or less awful upon her ex than a shitty time in his favorite bar.
So yes, The Tortured Poets Department is messy and unwieldy and way too bloated. But it’s also the closest we’ve gotten in years to the Taylor I fell in love with in 2010, when Speak Now unleashed a torrent of lovelorn daydreams and vengeful jealousy upon the world. It’s a reminder that, underneath all the fame and money and accolades, Taylor Swift is still the girl scrawling in her diary, turning her pen into a sword and her guitar into a battle-axe.
10. MJ Lenderman – Manning Fireworks
“Once a perfect little baby, who’s now a jerk/Standing close to the pyre, manning fireworks.” “I’ve got a houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome/And a wristwatch that’s a pocket knife and a megaphone/And a wristwatch that tells me I’m on my own.” “She’s leaving you/No time to apologize for the things you do/Go rent a Ferrari and sing the blues/And believe Clapton was the second coming.” All these lyrics – and plenty of other lines on MJ Lenderman’s terrific new album Manning Fireworks – beg the question: Am I supposed to feel sad about the words he’s singing, or am I supposed to bust out laughing? Arguments in the “sad” column: the songs sound a little bit like August & Everything After, with a similarly killer Americana backing band playing circles around the melodies, and Lenderman himself sounds like a droll Americana sad-sack whenever he opens his mouth to say something. Arguments in the “laughter” column: just about every lyric on this album comes across as a quotable, tongue-in-cheek witticism from a guy who knows that most people are selfish dipshits who deserve neither pity nor love. Perhaps MJ Lenderman’s appeal is that he’s a poet for all the dipshits in an era where dipshits reign supreme. Perhaps his appeal has to do with the fact that he rips epic guitar solos on nearly every song. Or maybe it’s just that the songs themselves are sturdy and catchy and addictive in an unassuming way that keeps you coming back to the album like it’s an old Tom Petty classic. Whatever the reason, Manning Fireworks proved to be one of the year’s sneakiest great albums for me – an album I shrugged off at first that then would never let me go.
11. Sarah Jarosz – Polaroid Lovers
For years, I considered the “car test” to be the truest benchmark for whether an album deserved to be on a list like this one. I spent a lot of time driving when I was young – going back and forth from school, visiting friends all over town, driving out to my girlfriend’s house – and car time was sacred for what it could do to an album. A good album could become great in the car, and a great album could become transcendent. One funny thing about adulthood, for me, is that I now own a much nicer car than I did back then, but drive exponentially less frequently. But the car test is still very much a thing, for me, and maybe no album from this year passed the car test with the flying colors that Polaroid Lovers did. Released on January 26, this new album from the great Americana singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz was one of the first great albums of 2024. I knew that before I ever heard it in a car. But one of my fondest memories of the year was taking this album for a long, scenic drive on a sunny, unseasonably warm February day. Driving through a hilly, rural county in northern Michigan, the sunlight turning all winter’s browns radiant gold, this album of luminescent moonlit songs came to life in brilliant technicolor. It reminded me of the first time I heard the now-classic Kacey Musgraves LP Golden Hour, on a sunrise run in San Francisco the day it first streamed on the internet. Fittingly, the producer of Polaroid Lovers is Daniel Tashian, one of the key collaborators from that Musgraves album, and he lends these songs a similar level of shimmering, otherworldly beauty. Of course, it wouldn’t matter if the songs weren’t good on their own, which they are. “Runaway Train” sounds like the kind of song that should be a country radio hit, while songs like “Jealous Moon” and “Take the High Road” hit upon this soul-deep wistfulness that will make you feel nostalgic the very first time you hear them.
12. Michigan Rattlers – Waving from a Sea
I love when a band levels the hell up, and Michigan Rattlers absolutely did that this year on Waving from a Sea. I adored this band’s previous album, 2021’s That Kind of Life, but it definitely felt like the kind of record you make on a small budget when you’re an independent band from small-town northern Michigan. Waving from a Sea isn’t that at all. This album sounds expensive. It sounds like a band pulling out all the stops and investing everything they have – physically, spiritually, monetarily, and musically – into making their definitive statement. These songs are lush and texturally rich and jaw-droppingly beautiful. Check out the way the keyboard sounds float over songs like “Gridlock (Just the Sky)” and “Strange Heart” like luminescent sunbeams, or the way the drum machines lock in with the melody on “I’ll Be Here Tomorrow” to give the song this surging slow-burn momentum, or the way the electric guitar and the organ sound on “Pure Resistance” flash right back to ‘90s roots-rock records from the likes of The Wallflowers or Counting Crows. These are the kinds of sounds that are pure ear candy for me, and they’re harder to come by in an age where fewer and fewer records are made by actual bands playing actual instruments in actual recording studios. And just like all those ‘90s records I’m talking about, Waving from a Sea has one surefire hit to anchor the whole damn thing – or, at least, a song that would have been a surefire hit if this were 30 years ago. That song is “Heaven,” the opening track and leadoff single, and I’ll just say this about it: if you made it through summer 2024 without putting this song on your summer mix, you may want to rewind the clock, because you did summer wrong.
13. Green Day – Saviors
Saviors¸ the 14th album from Green Day, got essentially memory-holed thanks to its early release (it came out on January 19) and the fact that the band spent most of the year riding the anniversary wave for their two most iconic albums (Dookie and American Idiot). Plus, as has become par for the course for most legacy rock bands that insist on continuing to make new music, critics pretty clearly wrote off Saviors before they ever actually listened to it. To my ears, though, this is the best Green Day album in two decades, and a surprisingly fresh approach for a band that hasn’t seemed sure of what to do since American Idiot blew up in 2004. Rather than trying to be edgy (2020’s Father of All Motherfuckers) or political (2016’s solid but not-quite-great Revolution Radio), Green Day make hay on Saviors by simply writing a bunch of fun, melodically-rich songs about summertime and fast cars and pretty girls and dumb decisions. At its best, this record makes you forget that the guys that made it are now in their 50s, like on sunny, feel-good pop songs like “Corvette Summer” and “Susie Chapstick,” or huge-chorus rockers like “Dilemma” or “Goodnight Adeline.” It’s such an effective time warp that you almost don’t see the songs about age or mortality coming – something that allows more poignant tracks like “Strange Days Are Here to Stay” or “Father to a Son” to punch you in the gut.
14. Super American – Gangster of Love
At some point, pop-punk shifted from the bratty angst of the early 2000s to something significantly more lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the heart-on-the-sleeve thing that bands like Yellowcard or The Starting Line or Something Corporate were doing back in my youth. But if I can’t have that, then hearing a band like Super American bring the wit and whizbang melodic genius of, say, Motion City Soundtrack into the 2020s is a fitting substitute. Silly song titles (“Hopefully Pitchfork Doesn’t Hear This,” “ugly crying with my dog”), sillier interludes (listen for the mini “My dad is a pop-punk vocalist” skit at the beginning of “Mental Karate”), and a whole lot of big summer-ready melodies (the chorus to “Mental Karate” sounds almost like a long-lost Blink-182 banger) are all elements that make Gangster of Love feel like a spiritual successor to records teens were jamming in their shitty cars via iPods and tape deck adapters 20 years ago. And fittingly, there was no time this year when I felt more kinship with my younger self than when I was listening to “Drowning” on repeat during summer drives. Pop-punk isn’t the national anthem of young people anymore, which meant Gangster of Love went sadly overlooked on 2024’s musical landscape. But if you’re like me and you’re still looking for records that might make you feel how Ocean Avenue or Everything in Transit or Commit This to Memory did all those years ago, you might just find something to love in the sunny sounds of Super American.
15. Madi Diaz – Weird Faith
One of my favorite things is when professional songwriters who’ve spent years working behind the scenes finally emerge and grab the spotlight for themselves. It happened with Chris Stapleton a decade ago, and with Lori McKenna a few years after that, and now it’s happening with Madi Diaz. A Connecticut-born singer-songwriter, Diaz has been making albums since 2007 and has toured with everyone from The Civil Wars to Kacey Musgraves. Until recently, though, her biggest claims to fame probably had to do with her songwriting credits (she’s penned songs for Kesha, Elle King, Pentatonix, and the Nashville TV series, to name a few) or her stint as a member of Harry Styles’ touring band. Diaz broke through to a new audience with her terrific 2021 LP History of a Feeling, and she’s growing that tent with Weird Faith, which has racked up end-of-the-year notices from major publications and even scored some Grammy nominations. Listen to the album and it’s not hard to see why Diaz and her songs are resonating. The way she writes is so blunt and so honest, whether she’s talking about breakups (“For Months Now”), or exes (“Girlfriend”), or toxic relationships (“Don’t Do Me Good”). or sex (“Same Risk”). Best of all might be “God Person,” the most potent song about spiritual yearning I’ve heard since “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”
16. Gracie Abrams – The Secret of Us
When Gracie Abrams arrived in 2023 with her debut full-length Good Riddance, she sounded immediately like a Taylor Swift clone. That album’s soft-spoken folk-tinged ballads were dead-ringers for folklore/evermore era Taylor, the resemblance only hammered home by the fact that frequent Taylor Swift collaborator Aaron Dessner was the producer and co-writer. Hearing Gracie take some of those stripped-down songs to the stadium environment as part of Taylor’s own Eras Tour convinced me that she had more to offer than just regurgitating the COVID-19 work of Earth’s most famous pop star, even if I enjoyed Gracie’s version of Swiftian sounds. The Secret of Us vindicates that assumption, delivering bigger-sounding songs which start to sketch out a very fun, charismatic personality for Gracie Abrams that is (almost) entirely separate from her idol. Sure, Swift herself does show up as a guest artist on this album, but when she does, on the duet “Us,” it’s actually the least successful track on the album. Turns out that Abrams is infinitely more appealing on tracks like “Risk,” a song that packs all the insecurities and doubts about a potential new relationship into a powder keg of hooks; or “Close to You,” a big, lovelorn pop song seemingly tailor-made to soundtrack the trailer to a romantic comedy (as it did for this year’s stellar Nobody Wants This). Gracie is still more in Taylor’s shadow here than I’d like, thanks largely to her continued collaborations with Dessner – not to mention Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, who also guested on folklore and evermore. Then again, on songs like “Blowing Smoke” and “Tough Love,” or stellar deluxe version cuts like “That’s So True,” Gracie is bringing a unique kinetic energy to Dessner’s minimalist National-esque compositions that isn’t really there in Taylor’s more slowburn cottagecore. It’s a sign that, while she’s still finding her own path as an artist, Gracie Abrams is really going to be a dynamite talent when she finally hits a home run.
17. Sabrina Carpenter – Short n’ Sweet
Blasphemy though it may be to admit, I wasn’t particularly taken with “Espresso” when it started jetting off toward “song of the summer” status earlier this year. I tend to prefer my pop smashes propulsive and euphoric – think “Teenage Dream” or “Party in the USA” – and “Espresso” just didn’t have the energy I expected or hoped it would when everyone started touting it as a summer jam to end all summer jams. “Please Please Please,” the follow-up single, was more in my wheelhouse, but still lacked that barnstorming chorus melody that to me screams “hit pop song.” As a result, my expectations were only moderate when I pressed play on Short n’ Sweet. Then I immediately got exactly what I was looking for in the form of “Taste.” Funny, provocative, packed with personality, and most importantly, sporting a mighty melody, “Taste” delivered everything I’d hoped for from this album’s first two singles…and then some. It’s not even the best song on Short n’ Sweet, which serves up a mix of dizzying pop songs (see “Juno,” a roller-rink-ready-ready 1980s jam with maybe the best hook I heard all year), horny-as-fuck slow jams (“Bed Chem,” a song with a double entendre so bald-faced it would make Roger Moore blush), and country-leaning ditties that betray a sizable Kacey Musgraves influence (“Slim Pickins,” which peaks with the amazing lyric “Since the good ones are deceased or taken/I’ll just keep on moaning and bitching”). The album is mostly kitschy, lightweight fun – which makes it hit that much harder when Carpenter serves up the pathos on “Lie to Girls,” one of the year’s smartest and most beautifully constructed heartbreak songs.
18. Augustana - Something Beautiful
Augustana got their start as an Americana-leaning rock band – think the 2000s version of The Wallflowers or Counting Crows – and made a sizable splash making major label albums for Epic during the last years where it seemed like mainstream rock had any kind of shot on the radio or MTV. The band fizzled after that, making one more album album once their days in the big leagues were done – 2014’s just-okay Life Imitating Life – and then calling it quits. But Augustana – or at least Dan Layus, frontman, singer, songwriter, and by all accounts sole remaining creative force in the band – somehow got resurrected in 2024, and the result is the kind of big-tent soft-rock grandiosity that I thought was mostly extinct. Something Beautiful has almost none of the roots-rock elements that drove Augustana in the early days, sounding more like a Don Henley solo album than Bringing Down the Horse. But the pivot isn’t a bad thing, especially since it gives Layus’s big, craggy, emotive voice plenty of room to paint massive melodies all over the place. See the mid-album ballad run of “Farther Down the Line,” “If I Fail Now,” and the title track, or the epic closer “Always a Way Out.” These songs sound so big and bruising and beautiful, and they remind me of a time when this kind of music – huge music with huge heart – felt a whole lot more common. It’s the best Layus has sounded since Can’t Love, Can’t Hurt, Augustana’s unheralded masterpiece from 2008.
19. Taylor Acorn – Survival in Motion
20 years ago, Taylor Acorn could have released this same exact album and become an overnight sensation. I’m talking household name status, right there alongside the likes of Avril Lavigne and Ashlee Simpson. Even now, I’m surprised that Survival in Motion didn’t make more of a mark, considering how popular Olivia Rodrigo got three years ago by trying to resurrect precisely this type of Myspace-era pop-punk through a modern pop lens. Even if she’s not destined to become the superstar she should be, though, Acorn will do just fine in the nostalgia-pilled present that’s made When You Were Young one of the most popular music festivals in the country. From the jump, Survival in Motion plays its reference points so well that you’d swear you bought it on CD in a Hot Topic circa 2005. My old guy take is that pop music has become way too melody-averse, trading propulsive hooks for vibes and powerful singers for soft-voiced artists boring enough to blend into whatever playlist happens to get served up by the streaming algorithm. Taylor Acorn is decidedly not that. She sings with grit and power and attitude, and does it on songs with such rich, rousing hooks – see the title track, or “High Horse,” or “Nervous System” – that they end up lodged in your brain almost immediately. And for all that Survival in Motion leans into nostalgia for a very specific era of music, the songwriting is often just brilliant. Case-in-point is “Be Like You,” a song seemingly about daydreaming of fame and success that, with an incredibly poignant final-chorus twist, turns out not to be about that at all.
20. Post Malone – F-1 Trillion
I truly wanted to hate this album, which is as calculated a play for mainstream dominance as anything I’ve heard in years. Post Malone is a guy who got famous for making trendy pop-rap songs in the middle of the 2010s. Eight or nine years ago, in the middle of my “country purist” days, I would have turned up my nose at this album to such a degree that I probably wouldn’t even have listened to it. Back then, “pop stars going country” was one of my biggest pet peeves, and I think it would have counted double for F-1 Trillion, an album that seems like a lab exercise in reverse-engineering everything that’s made recent country superstars like Morgan Wallen and Luke Combs into some of the most bankable and dependable commercial forces in modern music. Just look at the credits for this album, which feature a brigade of hitmaking Nashville songwriters behind the scenes and a cadre of splashy names on the tracklist itself. Guest features include not just Wallen and Combs, but also Blake Shelton, Dolly Parton, Chris Stapleton, Tim McGraw, Lainey Wilson, Brad Paisley, and Jelly Roll, to name a few. On the surface, F-1 Trillion FEELS like such a cynical sellout move that I almost hate myself for loving it. But the songs themselves are so well constructed, and Post Malone has such a clear affection for the genre, that this record ultimately broke down my walls. It’s too long, and at least four of the tracks on the deluxe “Long Bed” edition should have made the album. But at its best – the surprising alchemy between Post and bluegrass wunderkind Billy Strings on “M-E-X-I-C-O.”; the radio country gold served up by songs like “I Had Some Help,” “Buy Me a Drink,” and “Hey Mercedes”; the classic honky-tonk weeper “Never Love You Again” – F-1 Trillion delivers the goods by the truckload. Best of all is the Lainey Wilson collab, “Nosedive,” a song about hitting rock bottom and fighting your way back that transcends all its cliches to become a legitimately moving treatise on human resilience. That’s the thing about great country music: Even when your defenses are up, the right song can still throw a grenade over your walls and blow you away.
21. Pale Waves – Smitten
On past albums, you could have easily mistaken Manchester’s Pale Waves for an American band – or at very least, Canadian. Blame their extreme fondness for 2000s mall emo, or blame singer Heather Baron-Gracie for sounding a whole lot like peak Avril Lavigne. Smitten doesn’t necessarily shed those influences, but it does run them through a sonic filter that, for me at least, makes this band’s British roots audible for the first time. It’s not just namedropping Glasgow on the superb opening track, either. On the contrary, from start to finish, Smitten pairs the hooks and open-hearted angst of aughts emo-pop with the stately, jangly glory of 1990s Britpop. Imagine Avril covering “There She Goes” by The La’s and you’ll have a decent idea of what this album sounds like. It’s a change of pace, sure, but one thing that doesn’t change is Pale Waves’ ability to churn up earworm hooks that won’t leave you’re head for days. See “This Is Not a Love Song,” a song where the verse is more infectious than most bands’ choruses, or “Seeing Stars,” one of those euphoric love songs that just seems tailor-made for a coming-of-age movie.
22. Liv Greene – Deep Feeler
Every year, I have at least one “late-breaker” – an album I hear in the last two or three weeks of the year that blows up my entire list and forces me to move things around to make room for it. This year, that album is Deep Feeler, Liv Greene’s stunningly beautiful sophomore album. Aesthetically, Deep Feeler is the most gorgeous album I heard this year – an Americana record that sounds genuinely timeless. Greene’s press materials tout her in the lineage of Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin, Gillian Welch, and Lucinda Williams, which would be a risky claim for any PR writer to make if it weren’t so obviously true from the first moment Greene opens her mouth to sing. Her voice really does sound like Emmylou Harris, and she’s got the collaborators behind her (including veteran engineer Matt Andrews, who worked on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack; and Sarah Jarosz, who you’ll find elsewhere on this list) to make a record worthy of such a striking instrument. Supposedly recorded to tape at a studio in Nashville, Deep Feeler sounds almost anachronistic, with its sparse bed of acoustic guitars, pedal steel moans, and lilting mandolin evoking wide-open prairie vistas, vacant snowy expanses, and lonely, dusty roads. But Deep Feeler is doubly rewarding because Greene is the kind of artist who might not have gotten to make this kind of record in prior generations – an openly queer woman who wrote these songs about coming to terms with her identity, her sexuality, and herself. Take “Katie,” a love song written for a woman that shoots not for a grand statement of affection, but for one of the simplest and sweetest confessions of love I can imagine: “I’ll just say I’m glad you’re around/For whatever time you’ve found for me.”
23. Dawes - Oh Brother
Probably the first 20 times I listened to Oh Brother, I found it deeply underwhelming. If Dawes weren’t my favorite band during the 2010s, they were certainly the most reliable, whipping up five albums that made my top 200 of the decade and at least three that I’d call masterpieces. They had a knack for taking the four-guys-vibing-on-the-same-frequency energy of their shows and making it come through with crystal-clear brilliance in the studio. The fact that they were constantly switching collaborators and working with some of the most exciting producers in the game took things to the next level by imbuing every album with a totally different feel: the throwback Laurel Canyon majesty of Nothing Is Wrong; the improv-heavy All Your Favorite Bands; the booming low end of We’re All Gonna Die. But between 2022’s The Misadventures of Doomscroller and this year’s Oh Brother, Dawes lost two of their members – bassist Wylie Gelber and keyboardist Lee Pardini – leaving only brothers Taylor (guitar and vocals) and Griffin Goldsmith (drums) in the group. To my ears, this version of Dawes sounded all wrong. That electricity that comes from four guys tapping into a groove and riding it together forever, was gone. This Dawes was a shell of its former self, and I found myself wishing that the Goldsmith brothers had simply let the name rest and moved on to new endeavors.
Then, two things happened. First, I got my copy of Oh Brother on vinyl and gave it a spin. Hearing this record in that format totally unlocked it for me, revealing dimensions in the arrangements and production and songwriting that I hadn’t clocked listening to a 320kbps digital rip. Second, my brother had a serious medical scare that shook our family to its core. Listening to this album again, with brotherhood at the top of my mind, I felt like I was suddenly hearing the musical chemistry of Taylor and Griffin coming through extremely audibly. The way songs like “Surprise!” and “King of Never Wills” seem to meander off down all these random sonic side trails is representative of the complete faith and trust these two brothers feel for one another, as people and as bandmates. It’s a little different from the chemistry I always heard from the full band, but it’s still a beautiful thing to behold.
24. Waxahatchee - Tigers Blood
Katie Crutchfield’s much-acclaimed pivot to dusty Americana on 2020’s Saint Cloud took awhile to click for me. At that point in my life, I was a listener coming more from the country music world than from the indie universe where Crutchfield had made a name for herself under the Waxahatchee moniker. As such, she felt a little to me like an interloper, someone who was trying on this music as a costume rather than investing in it as a true-blue lifer. Over time, though, that album’s patient, sneakily catchy, and surprisingly profound songs wormed their way under my skin, to the point where, by the time Tigers Blood rolled around, I was ready for a sequel. That’s exactly what this album is, to the chagrin of some critics who wanted Crutchfield to keep zig-zagging through different genres. In my mind, though, there’s enough new on Tigers Blood to make it a distinct chapter from Saint Cloud, even if the albums are clear stylistic companions. The most notable new addition? MJ Lenderman, whose voice blends so well with Crutchfield’s that it’s a little hard to believe they didn’t find each other until now. On songs like “Right Back to It” and the title track, Crutchfield and Lenderman take all the things that made Saint Cloud great and add gorgeous, classic country harmonies on top. That aspect, combined with the fact that Crutchfield decided to put down some roots in roots music and stay awhile, had me discarding any reservations I ever had about Waxahatchee making country records.
25. Hannah Ellis – That Girl
The Nashville system is stupid. Case-in-point: I’ve been clamoring for an album from Hannah Ellis, an ace pop-leaning country singer-songwriter who sounds a lot like early Maren Morris, for at least half a decade. In fact, there is a song on this album that I was jamming incessantly as part of my summer 2018 mixtape. It took until now for the country music powers-that-be to finally let Ellis make a full-length album – not a rarity in Nashville, where young artists, especially women, get stranded in single-and-EP purgatory during their prime creative years in ways that will never make any sense to me. Two bits of good news, though. First, the old songs here hold the fuck up: See “Home and a Hometown,” the aforementioned 2018 single that finds its narrator in identity crisis mode, caught between their small-town upbringing and their big-city adult life; or check out “Us,” an infectious love song that dropped back in 2022 and took up similar real estate on my summer playlist that year. Second, the new songs are just as good as the old ones – particularly “One of These Days,” a song about trying to live every moment of your life in such a way that you won’t end up looking back wishing you’d cherished it all more. That Girl doesn’t reinvent the wheel, and it might even be a little dated when you think about where pop-country is right now; this album sounds a lot more 2015 than 2024. But sturdy, well-written, catchy songs never go out of style, and I’m glad this album finally came out – even if it took five or six years longer than I would have liked.
26. Nada Surf – Moon Mirror
Nada Surf were one of the most dependable bands on the planet in the 2000s. Though I never truly considered these guys to be among the echelon of my favorite artists, 2003’s Let Go, 2005’s The Weight Is a Gift, and 2008’s Lucky absolutely ranks among the best three-album streaks of that decade. I’d even be willing to extend the hot streak one album in either direction, back to 1998’s The Proximity Effect or forward to 2012’s The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy. For whatever reason, though, Nada Surf kind of fell off my wavelength after that. 2016’s You Know Who You Are and 2020’s Never Not Together are solid enough records, but they never glued themselves to my brain in the way that those 2000s LPs did, with their mix of ultra-sincere melancholy and tongue-in-cheek cool. (It probably didn’t help that Nada Surf shifted from an every-two-years album release schedule to an only-in-presidential-election-years cycle.) In any case, I’m fully back in on Nada Surf with Moon Mirror, an album whose big, boisterous guitars and catchy, autumnal melodies remind me exactly why I fell in love with that 2000s trilogy when I was in high school. Back in the iTunes Essentials days (remember those?!), Apple described Nada Surf and their albums as “understatedly gorgeous guitar-pop,” and that’s still what they’re doing on Moon Mirror. The difference now is that there are a whole lot fewer “understatedly gorgeous guitar-pop” bands left standing, which makes sparkling, street-lit pop songs like “Second Skin” or “Moon Mirror” feel that much more vital.
27. Mat Kearney – Mat Kearney
Mat Kearney essentially becoming Jack Johnson was not something I had on my bingo card when I started listening to him almost two decades ago. Kearney arrived with a genre-blending spark, pairing pop hooks, hip-hop verses, and folky instrumentation to serve up a debut unlike any other on 2006’s Nothing Left to Lose. He’s been truly all over the place in the 18 years since, hitting everything from Laurel Canyon Americana (2009’s City of Black and White) to beat-heavy pop-rock (2011’s Modern Love) to post-Drake R&B (the title track from his 2015 LP Just Kids). His last album 2021’s January Flower, hit at just the right time for me, delivering a breezy, summer-ready mix of catchy pop tunes and wistful ballads that felt amazing for a riotous post-vaccine summer. Mat Kearney is a continuation of that sound – that perfect soundtrack for losing yourself in the waves and the sand and the salty sea breeze of another idyllic summer. The first half is particularly sublime, serving up summer mixtape songs (bangers like “Headlights Home,” “Palisades,” and “Real One”) and cool little left turns (the Bon Iver-inspired “Sumac,” or “Drowning in Nostalgia,” a wonderfully smokey, vibey campfire song). But even the beachy back half, which splits the difference between Jimmy Buffett and the aforementioned Johnson, sounded mighty charming to me on warm-weather days this summer.
28. Japandroids - Fate & Alcohol
There is something so thrilling and poignant to me about hearing bands go out on their own terms. Even if those sign-offs get reversed at a later date, a well-planned swansong can deliver the same emotional punch as a smartly-orchestrated series finale of a beloved TV show. Such is the case with Fate & Alcohol, the fourth Japandroids album, their first in seven years, and their last one ever, if the guys in the band are to be beloved. Where 2017’s Near to the Wild Heart of Life slowed down the tempos and traded the party songs of early Japandroids records for tunes about marriage and domesticity, Fate & Alcohol plays like a bachelor party: one last night of debaucherous revelry before you close the book on your youth for good. Initially, I was underwhelmed by this album, in part because debaucherous revelry was something Celebration Rock captured with such wild abandon that I couldn’t help but feel that retreading similar territory here was a losing game. When the gang vocals hit on opener “Eye Contact High,” for instance, they don’t hit with anywhere near the force of the ones on “Fire’s Highway.”
But when I actually thought about it, I realized there was something incredibly poignant about juxtaposing the authentic wildness of Celebration Rock with the attempted wildness of Fate & Alcohol. When I get together with my high school or college friends, no matter how much we want to recapture the glory of the “good ol’ days,” even our wildest nights will never have the unpredictable anything-could-happen charge of 10 or 20 years ago, and that’s because things have changed. We have families now; responsibilities; places to be in the morning, or later tonight; more on our minds than just the next drink, or the next bar, or the next song, or the way the night feels. Fate & Alcohol has all that extra baggage, too, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be rewarding. In fact, I’d argue that it’s all the baggage of adulthood that ultimately gives this album its magic – most audible on the closing track “All Bets Are Off,” which hits with all the climactic heft that you’d hope a last song on a last album would deliver. Lyrically, it’s not much – just another song about another bar, another girl, another hookup. But if you listen between the lines, to the way the guitar ricochets around the song, or how frontman Brian King sings the title line right before the music ramps up to 11, you can hear every goodbye you’ve ever said – to friends, or to lovers, or to places that meant the world to you. And as someone who bid farewell to his college days of wildness with “The House That Heaven Built” playing in the background, it felt incredibly meaningful to hear this goodbye, now.
29. Billy Strings – Highway Prayers
Billy Strings is such a whizbang musical talent that I’ve sometimes felt like his musicianship was overwhelming his actual songwriting. A bluegrass wunderkind with a penchant for playing fingerpicked guitar very, very fast – hence his stage name – Billy Strings tends to give as much time on his albums to long, jammy instrumental sections as he does to verses or choruses. It’s impressive stuff to hear, but it can also grow tiresome on repeat listens, and that’s what has held me back from truly loving a Strings album in the past. But Billy has skyrocketed to superstardom in the past few years, and with that rise has come more of an intersection with the pop mainstream – most obviously with a guest spot on this year’s Post Malone album, with the awesome, hilarious cut “M-E-X-I-C-O.” After hearing Highway Prayers, I can’t help but feel like some of the pop appeal of the Post record rubbed off on Billy. These songs feel hooky and immediate, from road-trip-ready barnburners like “Leaning on a Travelin’ Song” and “Gone a Long Time” (both of which namedrop my hometown of Traverse City, Michigan, where Billy cut his teeth performing on street corners and at dive bars) to serene ballads like “I Believe in You.” Even the song that uses bong sounds as percussive effects (the wonderfully weird “MORBUD4ME”) is stuffed with surprising earworms. Like past Billy Strings albums, this one is way too long; 20 songs and 74 minutes of riotous guitar pickin’ does indeed bring on some fatigue when taken in one sitting. But such is the state of the album in 2024, and few of this year’s overlong albums are as fun or idiosyncratic as Highway Prayers.
30. The Dangerous Summer – Gravity
I thought they were going to do it again. Now seven albums into their career, The Dangerous Summer have the distinction of being the most inconsistent band that I love. On three occasions, they’ve made my favorite album of the year – records so important in my life that I can’t imagine who I’d be without them. On three other occasions, The Dangerous Summer have fallen well short of my expectations, making fleetingly great albums that got bogged down by interpersonal drama, sloppy production, or lazy songwriting. Across its three pre-release singles, Gravity looked like it would fall squarely in the territory of the band’s masterpieces. Each of those songs served up something a little bit different – a poppier vibe on the title track, a perfect wistful summer evening jam on “What’s an Hour Really Worth,” and a classic, surging Dangerous Summer anthem on “Pacific Ocean.” The bad news is that those singles represent three of the album’s five best songs, and plenty of Gravity doesn’t land anywhere close to what this band accomplished on past triumphs like Reach for the Sun, War Paint, and Mother Nature. The good news, though, is that Gravity still offers as many goosebump moments as any other album I heard this year, including highlights like “Where Did All the Time Go,” “Dream,” and “Into the Stratosphere” that absolutely reminded me of what it felt like back when I would listen to this band’s songs on repeat in my college days. So yes, I’ll admit that nostalgia is doing a lot of legwork to get this album on to my best-of-the-year list. But there’s also maybe no band I’m more nostalgic for than heyday Dangerous Summer, and so even if Gravity lands squarely in the middle of their discography ranking, the fact that it summons up those old feelings more often than not was enough to keep me coming back to its considerable charms.