Dean's List: 2024

The 74 best albums of the past year (or so)

I knew it would age me more than ever. But when I concluded that, damn it, the best new album 2024 was, damn it, recorded live in Great Britain in 1968 by a 66-year-old American trumpeter-vocalist who would die in 1971, well, I calls ‘em like I hears ‘em, and when all goes well because I loves ‘em. True, I own some 20 other Louis Armstrong CDs, six of them doubles, as well as two definitive boxes that bear down on his seminal ‘20s output, and readily acknowledge that more than a few of the 13 songs on Louis in London were already in my Armstrong collection, not necessarily in “inferior” versions because I’m too old to bother adjudicating such marginal differentiations anymore. What matters is that it’s a highly playable 2024 album that I more than once pulled out for friends and family, and not merely to filch their ideas about the sound recording at hand, although it isn’t just my dancing wife and Satchmo-fan daughter (and trumpet-playing brother-in-law) whose responses and observations I recall while forging my next album brief. But said brief is nonetheless mine alone. For me Armstrong’s songful and indeed hooky brand of replayability is the defining virtue of the American popular music that morphed into rock and roll circa 1955, after which it kept evolving stylistically and proliferating melodically, thus sparking my lifework. Catchy songs with a good beat—America’s greatest gift to world culture next to democracy itself, long after this parlous moment may it thrive.

Although I admire and sometimes cherish countless artists who’ve put their stamp on that tradition, for me Louis Armstrong and the Beatles are its towering geniuses, and in 2024 one of the two released yet another great album in said tradition as the other continued to astonish their huge surviving fanbase with an extraordinary eight-hour documentary. But records (or if the streamer in you prefers, “albums”) being my lifework, sticking to those gives me quite enough to mull over. That’s why Louis in London is Xgau’s pickest hit of 2024. But note that while three aesthetically comparable LPs also wound up in my top 10—juicy veterans Wussy, angelic youngblood Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief, and sexy newbie Chappell Roan are also selling hooky songs with a good beat—the rest of my top 10 ventured further afield.

Closest is the most fetching of the mere six African albums on my list (seven if you count expat Charlotte Adigéry), the endlessly compelling Kampire Presents: A Dancefloor in Ndola, an even catchier album than the Chappell Roan, which is saying something, plus in its way it’s as sexy to boot. But where the queer sexuality Roan is selling represents her escape from born-again Christianity, compiler Kampire is more political about it—a proudly out lesbian DJ in brutally homophobic Uganda with such an ear for groove records you’ll find the ones she’s singled out irresistible whatever the female vocalists on what is essentially an African disco album happen to be singing about. But I’m also fully behind Eminem’s stupidly underrated The Death of Slim Shady, hyper-literate Canadian rapper Buck 65’s slept-on-as-usual Punk Rock B-Boy (hear also birthname Richard Terfry’s 14th-ranked North American Adonis), and the Big Thief-produced testament from California-born, Belgium-based 82-year-old folkie Tucker Zimmerman with cameos by his wife-for-life Marie Claire, which I have the right to love not just because us old guys gotta stick together but because it was enthusiastically reviewed not only in Pitchfork (!) but by a 51-year-old (!!). And then there’s the L.A.-based, 10th-ranked Previous Industries, a trio of Chicago-identified mid-forties-ish alt-rappers who damn right aren’t giving up at this late date.

That covers nine of my top 10 artists, only three of them under 40. Note that if you count the rap entries, hooky in their own way like most quality hip-hop, all nine go for catchy songs with a good beat. The tenth, however, is another of those aforementioned African albums, Phelimuncasi’s Izigginamba, which is significantly different from most of the hundreds I’ve recommended since John Storm Roberts gave me a copy of his extraordinary Africa Dances comp, a life-changer for me in 1975 that’s “unavailable” from Amazon half a century later. Why’d we love it in our house? Catchy songs with a good beat, of course, which beat tends to have a roll to it in its most infectious soukous-style, rumba-inflected, Cuba-begotten variants and its choppier Senegalese mbalax-style rhythms. Going all the way back to the 1985 mbaqanga classic Indestructible Beat of Soweto, South Africa’s beats, like rock and roll’s, have tended more declarative and less lissome. But its Durban-centered, house-supposedly gqom dance “movement” has some avant give to it, and on the unspellable Izigqinamba (gq? really? isn’t that some men’s magazine?), in which South African gqom vocal trio Phelimuncasi absorbs post-ambient input from the equally exotic international instrumental project Metal Preyers to fashion or do I just mean emit one of those song-free atmospheric albums I can’t get enough of and have trouble explaining why.

I mentioned the no longer ascendant (not to mention “alt-rock”) Pitchfork in part because I made it my business as I prepared this piece of work to scroll and most of the time stream briefly through the 2024 top 50 of what I years ago came to regard as my opposite number though I wish them luck because us rock critics need all the work we can get, only six of which made the Dean’s List—Charli XCX, MJ Lenderman, Waxahatchee, Kim Gordon, Adrianne Lanker, and Vampire Weekend. More remarkably and also dismayingly, only only nine of them meaning nine out of 50 of its year-end picks—could I remember ever having heard of (although two of the three non-Dean’s List entries—Sabrina Carpenter and Hurray for the Riff Raff, not please the just barely mentionable Mannequin Pussy—are likely to prove As). And what struck me without surprising me, since I’d been noticing something of the sort for years, is that fewer than half of the two-three tracks per Pitchfork album I sampled qualified as catchy songs with a good beat. There are two ways to rationalize this bummer of an anomaly. It could just mean that the now-struggling mag is a resting place for lead-asses. But it could also be that America’s greatest gift to world culture is going out of style, or even, to turn it up a natural disaster or two, that as our limp-dicked restored fuhrer hopes with all his bile, so is democracy.

Happily, a more encouraging factor also deserves mention: gender. On both the Dean’s List and Pitchfork’s, female artists are at or near parity with males. For me this means, in descending order, Lenker, Kampire, Roan, XCX, Fake Fruit, Doechii, Eilish, Beyoncé, Tucker, Anderson, Whack, Pearce, Lambert, Wimps, Willson, Amazones, Glaspy, Parton, Moroney, Wade, Spektor, Waxahatchee, Adigéry, Cucumbers, Hinds, Gordon, Rosali, Jackson, Grace—five of them, crucially, the kind of country artist Pitchfork has never cottoned to, although or is it because Nashville has become a crucial surviving stronghold of what was once the rock and roll aesthetic and hence of catchy songs with a good beat. Pitchfork’s picks are more inclined toward folkie-style/derived singer-songwriting and arty abstraction, tendencies that have been nodding me out for 60 years and counting—counting ‘cause damn it 90 is still on the table. I grant, however, that I reserve the right to wave bye-bye whenever I feel like it—and at 82 would be a fool to pretend that decision will be (not to mention is) totally up to me.

What I am proud to claim is that until I wave bye-bye recorded music will be part of my life—conceivably less new stuff given how often I find myself returning to known or fondly recalled or even half-forgotten records. (Just last night, for instance, Eno’s glorious Another Green World proved far less abstract than I’d hoped to claim for argument’s sake.) Four or five years back an audiologist told me that my hearing is in pretty good shape for an old coot who’s attended as many rock concerts as doctors always assume I have. I haven’t, not least because I spend so much time listening to, if you insist, not always “records” anymore but “recorded music.” And for as long as my ears convey organized sound to my cerebellum and beyond, I believe quite a bit of it will be in the form of catchy songs with a good beat.

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1. Louis Armstrong: Louis in London (Verve)

2. Wussy: Cincinnati Ohio (Shake It)

3. Phelimuncasi & Metal Preyers: Izigqinamba (Nyege Nyege Tapes)

4. Adrianne Lenker: Bright Future (4AD)

5. Eminem: The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce) (Aftermath/Interscope)

6. Buck 65: Punk Rock B-Boy (self-released ‘23)

7. Tucker Zimmerman & Friends: Tucker Zimmerman & Friends Play Dance of Love (4AD)

8. Kampire Presents: A Dancefloor in Ndola (Strut)

9. Chappell Roan: The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (Island ‘23)

10. Previous Industries: Service Merchandise (Merge)

11. Charli XCX: Brat (Atlantic)

12. Doechii: Alligator Bites Never Heal (TDE/Capitol)

13. Buck 65, Doseone, Jel: North American Adonis (Handsmade ‘23)

14. Fake Fruit: Mucho Mistrust (Carpark)

15. Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft (Darkroom/Interscope)

16. Beyoncé: Cowboy Carter (Parkwood/Columbia)

17. Jason Moran: From the Dancehall to the Battlefield (Yes ‘23)

18. Rosie Tucker: Utopia Now! (Sentimental)

19. Heems: Lafandar (Veena Sounds)

20. Unholy Modal Rounders: Unholier Than Thou 7/7/77 (Don Giovanni)

21. Fred Again..: 10 Days (Atlantic)

22. Laurie Anderson: Amelia (Nonesuch)

23. Tierra Whack: World Wide Whack (Interscope)

24. Kendrick Lamar: GNX (pgLang/Interscope)

25. Carly Pearce: Hummingbird (Big Machine)

26. Jon Langford & the Men of Gwent: Lost on Land & Sea (Country Mile ‘23)

27. Miranda Lambert: Postcards From Texas (Republic/Big Loud/Vanner)

28. The Paranoid Style: The Paranoid Style Presents: The Interrogator (Bar/None)

29. Bad Moves: Wearing Out the Refrain (Don Giovanni)

30. Vampire Weekend: Only God Was Above Us (Columbia)

31. Wimps: City Lights (Youth Riot ‘23)

32. África Negra: Antologia Vol. 2 (Bongo Joe)

33. Azuka Moweta & Aniome Brothers Band: Nwanne Bu Ife (Palenque)

34. Chris Smither: All About the Bones (Signature Sounds)

35. Jon Langford and the Men of Gwent: The Legend of LL (Country Mile ‘15)

36. Kathryn Willson & Withered Hand: Willson Williams (One Little Independent)

37. Jamila Woods: Water Made Us (Jagjaguwar)

38. Jon Langford: Gubbins (self-released '23)

39. M.J. Lenderman: Manning Fireworks (Anti-)

40. David Murray: Francesca (Intakt)

41. Guy Davis: Be Ready When I Call You (M.C. ‘21)

42. Les Amazones d’Afrique: Musow Danse (RealWorld)

43. Margaret Glaspy: Echo the Diamond (ATO)

44. LL Cool J: The Force (Def Jam/Virgin/LL Cool J)

45. Dolly Parton: Rockstar (Butterfly/Big Machine)

46. Ren: Sick Boi (The Other Songs)

47. Jack Harlow: Jackman (Atlantic ‘23)

48. Rail Band: Buffet Hotel de la Gare (Mississippi)

49. Megan Moroney: Am I Okay? (Columbia Nashville)

50. Morgan Wade: Obsessed (RCA)

51. Sonic Youth: Walls Have Ears (Goofin’)

52. El Michels Affair & Black Thought: Glorious Game (Big Crown)

53. Regina Spektor: Home, Before and After (Sire)

54. Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul: Topical Dancer (DeeWee ‘22)

55. Waxahatchee: Tigers Blood (Anti-)

56. Kim Gordon: The Collective (Matador)

57. The Old 97’s: American Primitive (ATO)

58. Guy Davis: The Legend of Sugarbelly (M.C.)

59. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit: Weathervanes (Southeastern)

60. Zach Bryan: The Great American Bar Scene (Warner)

61. Serengeti: Kenny Dennis IV (Cohn Corporation)

62. Robert Finley: Black Bayou (Easy Eye Sound ‘23)

63. Thomas Anderson: Hello, I’m From the Future (Out There)

64. The Cucumbers: Old Shoes (self-released)

65. Hinds: Viva Hinds (Lucky175)

66. Swamp Dogg: Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th Street (Oh Boy)

67. Rosali: Bite Down (Merge)

68. Millie Jackson: On the Soul Country Side (Kent)

69. Yard Act: Where’s My Utopia? (Island)

70. Fox Green: Light Over Darkness (self-released)

71. Ciara Grace: Write It Down (self-released)

72. Okuté: Okuté (Chulo ‘21)

73. Bill Orcutt: Music for Four Guitars (Palilalia ‘22)

74. MC5: Heavy Lifting (Ear Music)