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.
When I first started working as a music critic, I held nothing more sacred than a ranked albums list. The album felt like the idealized musical vehicle, a prime mechanism for the expression of true artistic vision and an opportunity to see that vision at scale. Songs — there were always so many songs. Too many to really wrap your arms around and judge fairly, in my opinion. But albums were self-contained, easier to quantify and could be stacked up cleanly next to each other — or so I thought then. In recent years, I've started to distrust the process, not simply because canonizing can reward a certain kind of self-important work, but also because the result has felt more and more often like an inadequate picture of the year. Such lists, by nature, exist for consecration and posterity first and foremost; diversity and sprawl are often secondary concerns, and even the most diverse, sprawling list always seems to be riddled with omissions no matter how thorough. Most year-end lists, including ours, only have 50 slots, which immediately creates certain priorities and demands compromise. Individual lists are less tricky, as they can certify individual taste, but even they can't truly say anything definitive about a music landscape growing more fragmented each year.
2024, as much as any year in recent memory, exemplifies this issue. I don't usually subscribe to the notion of "good" or "bad" years for music — great, meaningful and life-affirming music comes out every year — but this is one of such depth my efforts to measure it feel hopelessly frustrated. This list is not ranked — there is no real order to it — and it still feels somehow inadequate. I'm not exaggerating when I say I considered more than 200 albums for this list of 20 (really 30), and I'm not entirely certain of the ones I settled on here, as bests or favorites, which felt like moving targets beyond a handful. No Hurray for the Riff Raff or Cassandra Jenkins? Blasphemy. No Immanuel Wilkins or Joel Ross? Unacceptable. I feel like I'm punishing artists like Vampire Weekend and Waxahatchee for their consistency, and I don't think I listened to anything more times than GNX or Imaginal Disk. That's saying nothing of ScHoolboy Q and Doechii, Cindy Lee and Mk.gee, Adrianne Lenker and Mdou Moctar. And yet: Here we are. What I can say with certainty is that these 20 (really 30) albums all imprinted on me in some way that felt unignorable. If they aren't the best, or even my undoubted favorites, they are all treasures in their own right.
20 favorite albums of 2024
Meshell Ndegeocello
No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin
Amid a late-career renaissance, this neo-soul pioneer continues a conversation with the acclaimed activist, essayist and novelist James Baldwin in the year of his centennial, furthering the bassist and bandleader's rich journey through jazz fusion and building on her efforts to stay meaningfully connected to the continuum of Black thinkers and artists across time. The resulting record is sprawling yet focused, filled with rippling music and forceful spoken-word interludes, all servicing a funk activism. Marked by excerpts from Audre Lorde, the critic Hilton Als and the poet Staceyann Chin, No More Water is as much about text as music, thinking of the written and spoken word as forms fundamental to its understanding of the issues therein, and how to overcome them.
DIIV
Frog in Boiling Water
In an attempt to make the band democratic for the first time, DIIV nearly destroyed itself during the four-year recording process for this album, whose title references the Daniel Quinn novel The Story of B. The album's central metaphor concerns democracy at large — we are the frog, capitalism the boiling water — and the music is fittingly dense and cataclysmic. "A doomsday machine glitch / Is our new God," Zachary Cole Smith sings, but you don't have to be keyed into the lyrics to really understand what the songs are trying to express. Shoegaze is music of amplitude and distortion and, for me, nothing felt more pertinent to this moment. (Only Godspeed You! Black Emperor's untitled album comes close.) The power is in the mixing: a juxtaposition of heavy guitars and airy vocals, the surging tracks questioning an opulent nation in decay. The core revelation: "My livelihood is rotting in your hands."
JPEGMAFIA
I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU
No one online admits they were wrong, least of all the edgelords. It is more effective to simply double down, to build an entirely new identity around digging in. Few have been more committed to standing their ground than the rapper JPEGMAFIA. Across four albums of incendiary rap, he has emerged as hip-hop's troll in chief, belligerent, unshakable and trenchant. The gripping, knotty I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU carries many of those same instincts — taking on all comers for the rap equivalent of a Royal Rumble (if it were held on Twitter). But there is something lingering just under the surface that had previously eluded him: the pangs of conscience, which bleed into charged-up polemics turning defense into offense. In the wake of a controversial collaboration with Kanye West, a career provocateur does some self-reflection, coming out reinvigorated if not reformed. Though far closer to apologia than an apology, the music takes thoughtful, unexpected turns, and the album is gorgeous even when ugly, managing punk fury with an artisanal flair. As an idealogue's conviction takes the slightest of blows, he produces the most stunning work of his career. (This review originally appeared on NPR Music's list of the 50 Best Albums of 2024.)
Rapsody
Please Don't Cry
Four albums in, one of the most accomplished independent rappers of the last decade allows her music to take an intimate turn, drawing the focus away from her dextrous lyricism and toward a multifaceted introspection activating the full range of her talents as a storyteller. After spending her 2019 album Eve in admiration of iconic Black women — a far-reaching list that included Nina Simone, Oprah Winfrey, Maya Angelou and Afeni Shakur — she adds her own name to that monument by considering all that it holds and means. That process includes probing considerations of spirituality and sexuality, integrity and responsibility, prestige and purpose. The production matches her searching approach, spanning soul, trap and even reggae. In an exercise that is both far-reaching and inward-looking, she is not defined by the implementation of her bars but by the ways in which they finally seem to provide a true portrait of the artist.
Nala Sinephro
Endlessness
Rarely do albums arrive without narrative fanfare anymore: Often alongside the story an album is telling is a story being told about the album, one that inevitably frames the way we think about and hear its music. Endlessness has none of that. Composed, produced, arranged and engineered by the masterful English harpist Nala Sinephro, this is a record without baggage or explanation, forcing the listener to peer inside it and uncover its secrets on their own. The expanse is as vast as that of its predecessor, Space 1.8; in its 10 compositions, all "continuums," I hear the unbroken continuity implied by its title, an absorbing ambient adventure shuffling the listener off into the infinite. But each continuum also feels like its own little heavenly body, marked by specific electronic and orchestral flourishes. Together, those bodies occupy a marvelous arpeggiated universe that feels unknowable.
The Smile
Wall of Eyes
There has been a decent amount of chatter about a Radiohead reunion — isn't there always? — with this band serving as a pretext for the core members to get back into the swing of things. Thom Yorke, for his part, doesn't want to hear it, saying in October that the members don't have to explain themselves "or be answerable to anyone else's historical idea of what we should be doing." That feels like important context for the music of Wall of Eyes: refusing explanation, not answering to anyone, aware of historical precedent but not beholden to it. There is a temptation to think of it as Radiohead-lite, but to me it is something more intense: propulsively rhythmic, constantly draped in an eerie, suspended fog that evokes Jonny Greenwood's score work, all while embodying the itch of being constantly watched and scrutinized. For me, the songs channel the terrors of the panopticon bearing down on us.
Vince Staples
Dark Times
Only Vince Staples would release his most personal album in the shadow of a satirical Netflix series that fictionalizes his life. The Long Beach rapper has always been cagey about the particulars, the mark of someone who seems painfully aware that anything he says can be used against him, but here, one of hip-hop's premier album artists uses the form to consider the ways he is a byproduct of his community — and what he owes those still waging war on a battleground he's escaped. Dark Times has the defining qualities of all of Vince's best music: curt and concise, buoyant yet bluesy, poignant but funny, dark and skeptical but not quite cynical. No one treats rap more like a job than he does, but this is the first of his albums that thinks about the job's relationship to the man at work.
Nilufer Yanya
My Method Actor
As Nilüfer Yanya began to make her third album, on the cusp of her 30s, she started thinking about the nature of performance, of being unable to separate herself from her songs and uncertain about giving her life to them. Previous albums established the Londoner as an electrifying young polymath, an indrawn songwriter and menacing guitarist with a majestic, sandpapery voice that could light a match. Where do you go from there? What stokes the desire to keep committing oneself to such an invasive process? The search for answers charges My Method Actor, a discerning record that interrogates the process itself and the identity put into it. Dynamic yet locked into an indefatigable groove, even as its grungy sound begins to dissolve into something more understated and unwound the longer it plays, the album is poised amid existential confusion. Yanya emerges from her crisis of conviction a virtuoso more in command of her artistry than ever, blazing her path forward by simply trusting her instincts. (This review originally appeared on NPR Music's list of the 50 Best Albums of 2024.)
Mount Eerie
Night Palace
I have been in awe of Phil Elverum for many years, for many reasons. Most notable is the gift of The Microphones' lo-fi masterpiece, The Glow Pt. 2, but more recently I've been captivated by his music wrestling with loss and impermanence, particularly 2017's A Crow Looked At Me, stripped down, visceral music of mourning, and 2020's Microphones in 2020, a career-spanning retrospective released as a single, unchanging, 44-minute song. I am awestruck once again by Night Palace, which feels as if it's in conversation with everything he's done before and all he's yet to do. Created in the reel-to-reel studio at his home secluded deep in the woods, it is an isolationist symphony, gritty and claustrophobic but also gorgeous, wringing such raw emotion out of static and noise. It has a transfixing sense of fuzz and calm, light and dark, clarity and fog.
Rema
HEIS
In a banner year for African pop, no artist made greater strides than Rema. Long seen as the chosen one — the first Afrobeats star to synthesize a truly post-global sound, and one of the genre's biggest thanks to the record-setting 2022 hit "Calm Down" with Selena Gomez — he came into his second album a clear ace who simply hadn't put it all together yet. HEIS takes his synthesis to unprecedented heights, imagining a new course for himself and the genre on the whole. Dark, dynamic and singular, it exists on the polyrhythmic cutting edge, materializing a fully formed version of the Afrorave style he's been tinkering with since his days on SoundCloud experimenting with trap. No performer in the genre is more progressive or more kinetic, and the album realizes the singer and rapper's vision of a Nigerian music that is both rooted and diasporic.
Kali Malone
All Life Long
Pipe organs are gargantuan instruments that feel like architecture. Many require four hands to play, as well as a certain rigor and exactness. The droning, harmonic music they produce can be heavy but also radiant, embodying both cathedral solemnity and stained-glass refraction. On All Life Long, Kali Malone captures all of the instrument's physicality and emotionality, treating its play as a hallowed communion. Recorded on four different organs, spanning national borders and dating from the 15th to 17th centuries, with Stephen O'Malley of Sunn O))) as her performance partner, the album's investment of labor is evident. But the organ is merely the centerpiece of a mesmerizing tonal display: There is also brass and choir music, each section building out a pattern — some songs arranged for organ and brass, for organ and then for voice — and as ideas spiral out across instruments, a compositional focus comes into view, aligning with a spiritual calling.
Beth Gibbons
Lives Outgrown
The two most established public truths about the singer Beth Gibbons — that she is the lead vocalist of the trailblazing trip-hop group Portishead and a notoriously off-the-record person — are complicated by her solo debut, Lives Outgrown. Ten years in the making, the album introduces a brand new sound world of hushed chamber folk, using its delicately layered, splendidly crafted arrangements and their faintly rhythmic thrust to reveal more of herself than ever before. Wraithlike and pensive, its penetrating music meditates on maturity as a process, with all of its aches and hard lessons. The album can feel haunted in similar ways to the striking Portishead classics, but it is a personal sanctum all to itself that seems possessed by its own myths and folklore. Death and loss loom large, but Gibbons' spindly voice remains steadfast. Clear-sighted through an encroaching gloom, an anxious artist seems determined to fortify herself through doubt. (This review originally appeared on NPR Music's list of the 50 Best Albums of 2024.)
Chief Keef
Almighty So 2
True to form for this mercurial wunderkind, Almighty So 2 doesn't sound a lot like its predecessor. To be fair, the projects were released 11 years apart, but that's also kind of the point: The Chicago rapper, a drill pioneer turned once and future star turned indie oddball has mapped out a lot of territory since then — from the boisterous sounds of his youth to "mumble rap" to gargled Auto-Tune trap and back — becoming one of the most influential rappers in the process. This album, long-teased, self-produced and maximalist in nature, is the first that seems concerned with what he is owed for his contributions to modern rap. In the act of proving himself, Keef summons some of the most flagrant, undeniable songs in a distinguished career full of such discoveries.
Blood Incantation
Absolute Elsewhere
As a lapsed fan of heavy music longing to worship at the altar once more, few things have been more satisfying this year than surrendering myself to this epic. Its touch points — the science fiction of Werner Herzog, prog, psychedelia — lay the groundwork for a layered mythology that is detailed and immense, enriching and never overbearing. There is so much depth and dynamism in the movements, matching glorious chaos with ascendant, hymnal passages. But, more than anything, there is a bonkers sense of theatrical fantasia — the perfect balance of inanity, insanity, retrofuturist pulp and brilliant pomp. All the camp of the David Lynch Dune and all of the craft of the Denis Villeneuve one. Don't overthink it: Travel through the Stargate and let your consciousness be free.
Mustafa
Dunya
The music made by the poet and folk artist Mustafa can feel like it is operating across planes. The songs are remarkably present yet obscure somehow. His voice, translucent in its own way, hangs at a middle distance. He is in conversation with both the living and the dead, and he sings as if he is occupying a liminal space. Dunya, his second album of quietly awe-inspiring elegies and remembrances, stands at many intersections to consider the toll the messenger must bear in service of keeping memories alive. In his capacity as hood archivist, he comes to represent many things: his Regent Park neighborhood, a Toronto youth movement in crisis, the Black Muslim diaspora, the gang as a means of community, a facilitator of violence and a refuge from it. Through the softspun sounds of his heartbreaking memoranda, written so carefully as to feel both intimate and unknowable, Mustafa reaches out across the threshold, continuing to try to make sense of the senseless, even as his spirit grows weary. (This review originally appeared on NPR Music's list of the 50 Best Albums of 2024.)
Tinashe
Quantum Baby
After years trying to balance experimental instincts with pop aspirations, several spent in label purgatory, Tinashe finally achieves the breakthrough she's been chasing: an alluring, soft-lit suite of songs that zips along at a heart-racing, lust-induced pulse. This album, the second installment in a trilogy, uses the viral success of "Nasty" as a springboard for music seeking reciprocated energy. Though not as downright uninhibited as that single promises, Quantum Baby is refreshingly audacious. As snappy as it is sensuous, the album shuffles the listener through a series of sleepless nights. Across its many trysts, pursuit becomes an ideal, and the pull of courtship is electrifying.
Nubya Garcia
Odyssey
On the 2020 album SOURCE, the saxophonist and composer Nubya Garcia sought to tap into the fount of music history, spiraling out from jazz into dub, soul, Afrobeat, calypso and beyond, in search of connection and collectivism. That ambitious proposition was grounded by her playing, which felt in tune with all the frequencies of a spectrum spanning generations. Odyssey is, decidedly, about what comes next. In its songs, you can hear an artist charting a daring path forward; if slightly more conventional, it is so merely in deference to cohesion and momentum. Cinematic and grand, guided by an adventurer's sensibility, its thrust carries you through the many lessons of Garcia's studies in ancestry and legacy.
Tyler, the Creator
CHROMAKOPIA
You can split the career of Tyler, The Creator pretty neatly into two phases: the confrontational wildness of his attitude era, running from the early days of Odd Future to the explosively shifty Cherry Bomb; and the more thoughtful expressions of his post-Flower Boy awakening, bringing increasing degrees of experimentation and refinement. They are divided by an artistic puberty of sorts, whereby a once and future auteur began to grow into himself as both a performer and a personality. Now 33, the fully rehabilitated rabble-rouser makes another leap with CHROMAKOPIA, a colossal album of developmental epiphanies. In asserting himself as the premier rapper-producer of his generation, Tyler reckons with aging into a new personal reality, realizing the weight of adulthood bearing down on him. If this quarter-life crisis finds him off-guard, he chooses to meet it emphatically with platoon march aesthetics that embrace the flashing, prismatic energy of a carnival. Throughout the album, you get the sense that growing up shouldn't mean sacrificing the creativity of one's inner child. (This review originally appeared on NPR Music's list of the 50 Best Albums of 2024.)
Julia Holter
Something in the Room She Moves
All of the music that Julia Holter makes feels majestic and sophisticated. Across many stylistic shifts, refinement remains the unifying principle. Something in the Room She Moves is the loosest album she's ever made — intuitive and "jammy," as she put it, marked by field recordings from playgrounds and Ponyo-inspired fluidity, recorded without any pre-thought-out lyrics, a departure from referencing Hippolytus and Colette. There is a whimsy that courses through the entire album, one befitting the wonder and upheaval that accompanied Holter's experience of pregnancy, motherhood and corresponding ideas of transformation. But even through this fanciful sense of play, the album can't shake the chamber pop magnitude of her songcraft, or the grandeur that possesses it.
Boldy James
Penalty of Leadership / Across the Tracks / The Bricktionary
In January 2023, the Detroit rapper Boldy James was in a traumatic two-car collision that left his neck broken and spine damaged. When he first got out of rehab, his arms wouldn't work; he couldn't write raps, so he freestyled, performing at any cost. A year later, he was back at it in prolific style: In 2024, James released three projects that collectively stand as some of the best in his catalog — and essential additions to the one-rapper-one-producer canon. Taken together, they are not only a mark of his resilience and work ethic, but the supreme craft and care that he puts into his croaked coke raps, which have an understated elegance despite their grit. There's nothing fancy about what he does, but few have a greater sense of finesse. The bars are performed leisurely, as if on an unreachable perch from which James can see all, and strung together with a meticulousness that betrays the artist's tremendous patience and watchful eye for detail.
Honorable mention
Jessica Pratt, Here in the Pitch
A stunning folk world in miniature, crisply captured as if on 35 mm film, where the Hollywood sign casts a looming shadow over dreams of would-be starlets.
Charli xcx, brat
Gripping pop autofiction wherein a 365 party girl vivisects celebrity culture from inside a never-ending Boiler Room set — as meta and referential as it is open and accessible.
Mavi, Shadowbox
One of rap's most prodigious (and reflective) talents reexamines his core drives.
Brittany Howard, What Now
A virtuosic album that imagines propulsive funk as a cleansing ritual.
Helado Negro, Phasor
These self-described "tone poems" are full of impressionistic splendor and wide-eyed wonder, psychedelic but also shimmering, treating synths as a canopy of light.
Kim Gordon, The Collective
Pursuing more beat-oriented music leads a rock legend to gripping witch house.
Erika de Casier, Still
A Y2K revivalist whispers sweet nothings that conjure fantasies and daydreams, slowly dissolving back into a mundane romantic reality without losing any pop charm.
SahBabii, Saaheem
After years of R&D, the Chicago rapper brings trap and its offshoots into symbiosis.
Tyla, Tyla
Pristine amapiano from a sylph-like diva rendering a sweeping, sweaty paradise.
Arooj Aftab, Night Reign
The neo-Sufi trailblazer conjures a quiet storm, her voice mysterious and spellbinding.
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