2024's Most Unconventional & Brilliant Albums

From moody indie-rock to industrial noise, these albums are a snapshot of the expansive geography of pop music

- Bhanuj Kappal

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.