As we wrap up our coverage of the year in music, we are publishing lists of the music loved best by individual members of NPR Music's team. For more, check out the full team's picks for the 124 best songs and 50 best albums of 2024.
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As I've been going through the always agonizing process of making my year end lists, a comment made by Nadav Lapid, one of the subjects of the documentary Room 999, kept coming to mind. That film features 30 directors discussing the state of cinema as it grapples with the onslaught of digital culture. Though he agrees that the film's classic period is over, Lapid finds possibility in the present "for the simple reason that the present is right, because it won. Because the past no longer exists. If the past were as smart, it would still exist."
These words resonate for me at a time when each month seemed to bring a paradigm shift, for me personally and for the world — dizzying highs and lows that pinned me to my bed; phases that demanded intense extroversion and others where the only meaningful contact I had, for days on end, was with my dog. At the end of this year that felt like a whole complicated life, I found that much of what I gravitated toward was calming and centering: I needed ports in the storm. Yet I was also attracted to music that confronted instability — that asked questions, enacted experiments and welcomed vulnerability.
Lapid's brief time in Room 999 ends with him saying that filmmakers and film lovers must embrace fragility and vulnerability, "everything this state of agony requires." That's true, I feel, for music makers and lovers, too. Below is a list of 15 albums, none of which could fully capture the spirit of this frighteningly convulsive yet still vital time, but which I'll remember as emissaries for a present that keeps changing, even as it lingers within the ground of our experience.
My top 15 albums of 2024
Note: For my personal list, I select music that's mostly different from NPR Music's main lists. With so much music out there to discover, I want to extend your possibilities.
Fabiano do Nascimento and Sam Gendel
The Room
Two master players, a Brazilian guitarist and a California saxophone wiz, challenge themselves to set aside their usual forms of mastery and listen closely to each other and come up with a model for making space within life's cacophony.
Berwyn
Who Am I
Born in Trinidad and raised in London, the rapper and singer Berwyn du Bois employs a smoothly experimental, subtly theatrical style to fully express the insistently hopeful, unremittingly challenging life of immigrants in an increasingly hostile world.
Norma Winstone and Kit Downes
Outpost of Dreams
At 82, Norma Winstone retains the exploratory finesse she's long brought to jazz singing in this collaboration with the deft and respectful pianist Kit Downes. Her lyrics to the albums original compositions contain the luminous power of a wise elder still open to what the world brings.
Sítio Rosa
Sítio Rosa
A rural artists' collective in the Southeastern Brazilian state of Minas Gerais is the source for this miracle: A whole world coalesces within 45 minutes on this album structured around a day in the life of singer Jennifer Souza and bassist Bernardo Bauer's daughter, Rosa. The voices of children and animals weave through songs whose calm and grace offer exquisite refuge.
Talibah Safiya
Black Magic
The voices of the elders offer guidance toward the light, and Memphis' most imaginative soul daughter turns to them, literally, on an album incorporating the voices and playing of her forebears via samples from the Highwater label archives. Safiya's own glinting voice reanimates the spirit, pain and passion of hill country blues.
Willi Carlisle
Critterland
What is folk music? A fiddle and a drum? An Irish cast to a tune? In the hands of this uncompromisingly honest Arkansas storyteller, it's a confrontation with the darkness of narrowly lived lives and an unwavering belief in the right to be free. He calls it a higher lonesome.
Ha Vay
Baby I'm the Wolf
I felt strangely removed from the triumphalism expressed by pop's reigning queens this year, but that doesn't mean I didn't crave some extravagance. This California fabulist delivers it in my favorite way: by recasting myths and fairy tales in a 21st century light. Winner of the annual Kate Bush Award for shrieks and dazzle.
Charles Lloyd
The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow
Five minutes that kept shining in my mind all year: the span of time 86-year-old Charles Lloyd danced to a solo that bassist Larry Grenadier laid down during the set celebrating this album at Knoxville's Big Ears Festival. Contemplative and joyful, this album — also featuring pianist Jason Moran and my favorite drummer, Brian Blade — radiates love.
Rufous Nightjar
Songs for Three Voices
The original songs composed by member Branwen Kavanagh for this Irish traditional vocal trio, along with its playfully rebellious approach to harmony, set its debut album apart within an inexhaustibly creative folk scene. Capturing moments of transition within nature and the human lifespan, these small stories sow the seeds of a new mythology.
Hovvdy
Hovvdy
I carried this album around with me for most of this year. Its gently irresistible hooks and synth-brushed indie jangle felt like sustenance, warmly embodying the partnership of two songwriters who've stuck together through the quests and questions of youth and on into adulthood, with its grounding responsibilities. This album is about that transition, one that never ends in many ways. Nineteen songs, split down the middle by Will Taylor and Charlie Martin; has a project ever been more equitable? This is what friendship sounds like, enduring when partners and kids and the acceptance of life's limits turn youth's reveries into something more clear-eyed but still worth dreaming about.
Haley Heynderickx
Seed of a Seed
In a bounty year for singer-songwriters, Haley Heynderickx staked out her own wild forest copse. Forgive the nature metaphors; they serve this Oregon singer-songwriter's main preoccupation, the possibilities of the pastoral in an overly mediated world. Dense musical arrangements built around her airy fingerpicking flesh out her reflections on the struggle to look up from our screens and seek a different kind of light.
Saint Levant
Deira
Putting aside political debates, I'm always intrigued by artists whose work transforms under the weight of world events. Marwan Abdelhamid is the son of a half-Algerian mother and half-Palestinian father and grew up partly in Gaza City, where his parents owned a hotel. The destruction of that building in the current conflict is the background for this Drake-ish loverboy's inquiry into his family's musical heritage, a source of pride and a cause for lamentation.
Thee Marloes
Perak
Loving music means entering imaginary worlds while staying grounded in the real one. Cross-cultural journeys like the one this Indonesian trio takes on its debut album show the value of that balancing act. The guitarist Raka Dharaka, a huge fan of the cotton-candy soul of bands like The Spinners, had little context for his compositions until he and drummer Tommy Satwick found vocalist Natassya Sianturi, whose style forges a connection between vintage Black American sounds and the luminous gentility of Indonesian pop. This is global music.
Rafael Toral
Spectral Evolution
Portuguese experimentalist Toral has been in deep space for several years, composing works for guitar and his self-designed instruments that invoke the vastness of the galaxies. This delicate work returns him to earth — specifically, to a rainforest ecosystem that, via his synthesized sounds, seems to chatter with the voices of the wild. His wholly artificial composition somehow captures all we are losing of the natural world.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Wild God
In a year full of artists riding the beast of age to new victories, none shone with more vitality than the 67-year-old Cave. Back in the brawny arms of his band and ready to place joy in a dynamic relationship with the grief that's shaped his life after hard losses, Cave has crafted a conversion story still in process, welcoming skeptics and heretics into his circle of complicated faith.
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