Don’t Dave Blunts, Art the Clown, Jake Paul, and Mike Tyson feel like the four horsemen of the apocalypse? Pop culture is about to get a lot dumber and more gruesome as we enter the second Trump administration. And the realities of the music industry and capitalism’s own tendency to absorb and decontextualize any countercultural movement that gets a lick of press makes it hard to be excited about whatever else this anemic decade has to bring. It’s discouraging to make or promote challenging and original art when you know deep down it doesn’t have much of a chance against a re-recording of Smash Mouth’s “All Star.” Yet as long as there are still a stubborn few questing quixotically for transcendence through art, the world still has a soul. Here are a few of the albums that gave me hope in 2024.
1. Wadada Leo Smith and Amina Claudine Myers, Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths & Gardens (Red Hook Records)
I visited New York for the first time recently and was struck by the wealth of history contained in every single city block: the knowledge that millions of people had lived and died there and the idea that their spirits might still be swirling around in some form. I started to understand the tone of the music that comes out of New York. Maybe it’s because AACM vets Wadada Leo Smith and Amina Claudine Myers dropped their collaborative tribute to Central Park just days after my partner and I returned from the trip, but it’s almost uncanny how well Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoir, Lake, Paths & Gardens captured the same feeling I felt walking through Manhattan’s skyscraper canyons: haunted, sensitive to the transience of things, awed and a little saddened by its immensity.
Smith calls Central Park his favorite park in the world, but it’s pretty obvious there’s a lot more on his and Myers’ mind than how nice it is to traipse through its meadows. Myers’ style of piano playing feels brutalist, composed of big oblong blocks and suspicious of ornamentation; Smith’s trumpet cuts through as sharply as the park itself through the city, and they leave big pregnant pauses to conjure a sense of vast space and deep contemplation. It’s only 36 minutes, a morsel compared to Smith’s infrastructural epics like America’s National Parks and Ten Freedom Summers, but it never really seems to begin or end, as if there’s a theoretical Smith album for every single place in New York. The playing is as masterful as you’d expect from two lifers who’ve been making music since the late ‘60s, but at its best, Central Park sounds less like something composed or played than a numinous reverberation from the park itself.
2. Fennesz, Mosaic (Touch/Fairwood)
Mosaic is the least exciting Fennesz album to date, and weirdly that’s the most exciting thing about it. It feels institutional, frankly bougie, but in ambient music that’s usually a good sign: It means the artist has grown comfortable in their own style, and Mosaic has the same self-assurance we hear in other ambient albums by artists in their sixties or seventies, like Harold Budd’s 2000s albums (“Patterning Heart” even sounds a bit like Budd’s collabs with Robin Guthrie) or Gigi Masin’s 2010s albums.
The 62-year-old Austrian guitarist calls this album “reflective” without elaborating what he’s reflecting on, but if I had to guess I’d say it’s his married-bliss album. He and his wife Mira have been together for 10 years, and the album’s tone of low-key rosiness and sighing gratitude would certainly be a fit for the subject. But what really lights a fire under Mosaic is Fennesz’s longstanding love for big chord changes, heroic guitar downstrokes, moments that catapult the listener to pop transcendence even when they’re basically listening to processed noise. It makes me excited for what the other members of the Y2K-era glitch vanguard will make once they enter their own elder-statesman periods.
3. Mount Eerie, Night Palace (P.W. Elverum & Sun)
Phil Elverum’s longest Mount Eerie album still feels like the best album of the decade to me during its first half and something a lot less superlative during the second. It’s a good sign both for his music and his mental health that the Washington songwriter has returned to the Zen poetry and sonic trickery of his earlier work after a run of austere albums that rejected his earlier sound following the early death of his wife Geneviève. Yet his instinct to deflate his own music remains: The first half is as good a baroque pop song-cycle as his 2012 masterpiece Clear Moon, and the second half is like an appendix explaining what he’s trying to do (and, more pressingly, what he’s not trying to do) with his music.
“Broom of Wind” and “I Walk” contain some of his best pagan poetry yet, but he’s keen on informing us that a poem can never really capture the beauty he sees around him. He’s driven by a profound rootedness in the Washington coast, and yet he’s inescapably aware that this is stolen land and “Washington” is a genocidal construct. By the end, he’s more lost in questions than ever, and so are we. Don’t come looking for a resolution to the conflict between Elverum the dreamer and Elverum the realist, but if you’re looking for some of the best indie rock of the year, you’ll find it here.
4. Klein, Marked (self-released)
5. Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, Estrella Por Estrella (Pura Fantasia)
Remember the mid-2010s, when being a guitarist was vaguely embarrassing and rockers like Tame Impala and Unknown Mortal Orchestra were switching out riffs for the supposedly more inclusive and morally acceptable sounds of ‘80s post-disco? That weird moral panic about that most phallic of instruments seems absurd now, especially with a new wave of instrumentalists emerging who use loud guitars to channel something artful and awestruck, with a sheen of Internet-era chintziness.
Here are two great examples of this new guitar music from opposite sides of the pond. Klein has been making abstract electronic music for almost a decade, but the dystopian guitar hell of this year’s Marked is a new sound for her: imagine the distorted blues elegies of Loren Connors’ Hell’s Kitchen Park, transplanted from Manhattan to the cold and foggy English climate that gave trip-hop its edge. Joshua Chuquimia Crampton has channeled Aymara spirituality and fearsome heavy-metal symmetry into four albums of solo guitar music, and Estrella Por Estrella is his most jubilant—30 minutes of lustrous, metallic sound somewhere between Laraaji’s beatific drones and Sunroof’s astral noise.
6. Skee Mask, Resort (Ilian Tape)
This young German might be the most inventive producer of ‘90s-style IDM since its heyday. He’s more pro than prankster, more gear-nerd 2010s Aphex than prankish ‘90s Aphex, an almost implausibly gifted sound designer whose music is like manna for the ears. Resort allows a semi-psych-rock warmth to penetrate his music: the chords are rosier, the drums are squishier, the sounds are less sharp, everything seems shrouded in fog. It’s explorable in the way of a ‘70s double album, weed music rather than ketamine music, wistful for the past in a way that’s harder to place than the borrowed Fiorucci nostalgia of a lot of neo-rave music. It sounds like a memory of easier times.
7. Kali Malone, All Life Long (Ideologic Organ)
30-year-old Kali Malone is one of a crop of young organists (Sarah Davachi, Ellen Arkbro) who owe their success in part to the ongoing desanctification of churches and the subsequent availability of their organs for secular use. All Life Long grapples explicitly with this conflict, opening with a choral setting of an Italian essay on that exact subject before launching into more than an hour of non-denominational liturgical drone. Yet the deep subject of the music is as wholesome as it gets: Malone’s marriage to doom-metal legend Stephen O’Malley (there’s someone who deals in the profane). This music moves so slowly that every change feels like a big decision, and there aren’t a lot of decisions bigger than choosing to spend your life—all life long—with someone else.
8. Loidis, One Day (Incienso)
When house producers revive obscure aliases, it’s usually a good sign, implying both a narrowed focus and a desire to work outside of the main arc of their career. Loidis’s One Day is the best-case scenario for this kind of release. Brian Leeds usually records foggy and paranoid ambient music as Huerco S., but here he immerses himself in the ‘90s-era microhouse sound associated with artists like Vladislav Delay (especially his Uusitalo moniker) and Basic Channel’s Maurizio side project. The beats are well-oiled and sharp, and staccato house chords throb and undulate. Undergirding everything, as on Leeds’ last Huerco S. album Plonk, is a suspicion of ambient music and the unobtrusive bourgeois pleasantries the term has increasingly begun to imply in the streaming age.
9. Julia Holter, Something in the Room She Moves (Domino)
Julia Holter has quietly become one of the most consistent artists in indie rock, with her albums, starting with 2011’s Tragedy, ranging from good to great. Her first album since 2018’s teeming double album Aviary, and her first following the birth of her first child, finds her in effortless command of her technique. Holter has been improbably ambitious in the past, adapting ancient Greek poems and mid-century musicals to fit her arch, academic vision of pop, but Something in the Room She Moves conveys a lower-key weirdness through its jazzy murmurs and twinkling air of mischief. She’s only 40, but if we’re lucky, this is the first stage of the middle-aged archfreakdom that leads to albums like Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, Bowie’s The Next Day, or Joni Mitchell’s Taming the Tiger.
10. Steve Roach and TheAdelaidian, Parallels (Timeroom Editions)
How often do you listen to a two-hour album of cosmic synthesizer drone and find yourself thinking: I love this part? The first collaboration between American kosmische master Steve Roach and Aussie sound artist TheAdelaidian is a highlight in both discographies, and though it’d be pleasant enough even if its synthscapes didn’t have a tendency to congeal into curiously catchy progressions, it’s those little moments—when the two bring in a piano deep into the album, for instance—that demonstrate the skill and purpose of its making. Roach has been remarkably prolific and consistent, and this album comes on the heels of a similar-sounding solo record called Reflections in Repose, but while that one is content to simply hover, this one swirls, dances, sparkles.
Honorable mentions: Ghost Dubs’ Damaged, a foreboding slab of industrial dub that sounds like the death throes of a Rube Goldberg machine; Shinichi Atobe’s Discipline, a delay-drenched doozy from the insanely consistent Japanese producer; Sarah Davachi’s The Head As Form’d in the Crier’s Choir, one of the scariest and most expansive expressions of the Canadian composer’s vision; the original soundtrack to Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, a perfect snapshot of a moment in indie rock; Johnny Coley’s Mister Sweet Whisper, a surreal compendium of Southern Gothic jazz poetry; Ex-Easter Island Head’s Norther, the most stoner-friendly no-wave guitar-ensemble album ever made; Taylor Deupree’s Stil.l, a classical reinterpretation of a minor Y2K-ea glitch classic that blows the original out of the water; Lisa Lerkenfeldt’s Suite for the Drains, an ambient fantasia on illegal urban exploration; ML Buch’s Suntub Extras, an eerie dispatch from the world of 2023’s best album; and Total Blue’s Total Blue, a tribute to ‘80s new age that doesn’t pretend the genre is anything it’s not.
Dog of the year: Arooj Aftab’s Night Reign. Arooj is a rare talent who deserves every accolade that comes her way, and yet her tendency to disrupt her own albums with ill-advised experiments has thus far kept her from making a great record. After the majesty of Night Reign’s first two tracks, which are as sumptuous as any spiritual jazz from the ‘70s, it’s disorienting to be greeted by a cover of “Autumn Leaves,” which a kid is probably playing for their jazz-camp audition as you read this. What’s next—“Blister in the Sun?” It doesn’t help that she brings back “Last Night,” the sub-Norah Jones lounge-reggae song that torpedoed her last record Vulture Prince, for a reprise.
