It's never easy to distill a year's worth of music listening into a neat list of 10 (or even 50) albums. But putting together this year's best albums list has been particularly hard. 2024 was a year of left-field surprises, with brash upstarts and underground favorites regularly stealing the spotlight from some of the industry's most bankable names. We had a new generation of wildly inventive pop starlets stake their claims to the crown, a brutal power struggle in hip-hop that enraptured rap fans, a long-overdue reckoning with country music's racial politics, and a steady stream of genre-blurring, envelope-pushing albums from the unlikeliest of scenes and places.
The 10 albums that made the final cut range from moody indie-rock and industrial noise to rambunctious rap and spectral dance music, offering a snapshot of the expansive geography of pop music in 2024. In no particular order, here are my favorite records of the year.
JLIN-AKOMA
Indiana producer Jlin's 2017 album Black Origami was a masterclass in rhythmic innovation—spectral drum machines, polyrhythmic percussion and discordant synths coming together to form dark, sepulchral sonic structures that sounded like Aphex Twin overdosing on Chicago footwork. On Akoma, her first proper album in seven years, Jlin brings her experimental dance music into conversation with modern classical music, drafting Philip Glass, Kronos Quartet and Bjork as collaborators. Expressionist piano and chromatic chamber strings are warped, chopped up and wrangled into place alongside relentless, shape-shifting percussion in gothic, architectural compositions. This is music that makes you think even as it makes you move.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة December 28, 2024 من Mint Mumbai.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة December 28, 2024 من Mint Mumbai.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Big banks flee climate coalition formed to cut carbon emissions
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Training
Is war a debate, a dilemma or a drama? Or can it be a poem? A class contemplates its many meanings
No End
An idyllic summer comes to a close with the dawn of realisation
Ocean of Spines
Trying to conjure a sliver of the past, and remember to whom a story belonged
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Netbanking 2.0: NPCI pilot to ease mobile payments
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New Angels Rush To Prop Early-Stage Funding Slack
Sports stars, actors and young professionals are taking early bets on new startups
Divided EU allows India to pitch for carbon tax relief
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States' Q4 borrowing to rise 18% after Q2 growth slump
Capex boost likely as West Bengal, Maharashtra, Karnataka lead ₹4.73 tn borrowing plan
