Essential Albums of 2024

A fantastic year for music, no doubt about it. And a devilishly hard selection process: what for some was clearly the 'brat' year—due to Charli XCX's striking green album Calippo—for others it was the year of multiple "bernabeus" by Karol G and Taylor Swift. For us, it was the year of this selection where, and it's silly to do it any other way, subjectivity weighs immensely. All are resounding and unmistakable, opening doors to other worlds, having nothing to do with each other, and they demonstrate that there is no shortage of great ideas, personality, the desire to tell stories, and to express oneself boldly in these times. There are brilliant debuts and works of maturity, sharp turns in long careers, and new solo projects after painful breakups. Your favorite album might not be here, but perhaps your next obsession is. Let's see what you think.

It might sound exaggerated, but privately we'll call this album a global sound vanguard: pop virtuosity that sounds incredibly analog but is purely twenty-first century. Deliberately discarding conventions about how albums should "properly" sound, here the tape noise is almost another instrument, with fragments and inserts that jump out and stand out, and the mix does not try to go unnoticed. Brilliant ideas follow one after another, and a double bass that helps pump the dynamics is one of the few things to hold onto. But above all this fascinating puzzle-bed—a gift and a challenge for any sound and recording enthusiast—there are enormous songs that vividly maintain the essence of the group, recalling all its phases, each outstanding in its own way.

This album had to be here. It needed to be here. Adrianne Lenker had already amply demonstrated her fierce delicacy at the helm of her band Big Thief, but it is her solo work that transports us to scenes of almost untouched beauty, unexplored by humans. She did it with her previous work and does it again here, but this time with even more substance if possible. You can almost reach out and move the dust particles floating in the air of the room where Lenker recorded these songs. It's so immediate, so present, so true. You don't even need to close your eyes to feel the omnipotent yet contained presence of the young woman with a troubled past singing next to you. This Christmas is a time for gifts, gift yourself Adrianne Lenker.

A prodigious album, a huge surprise sung in lowercase. This unforgettable album immediately opens its own space, a small universe where with very few elements and great collaborators (Jordi Matas, Ferrán Palau, El Petit de Cal Eril... Catalan cream) Urbizu leaves behind his previous, highly successful phase in Berri Txarrak. Hence it's called 'Hasiera bat' (A beginning). Here, things are allowed to breathe, few things are heard, but certainly, nothing is missing. Family, love, and nature appear, seen as a living agent, as intelligence that suggests things to us, affects us. And great, great phrases—available in Spanish on his website—like this one, which could summarize the album: "some doors only open from the inside."

The music circuit (or whatever that means) sees fit to grant us from time to time, surprises that clash in the sad wasteland of monotony, the predictable and obvious: in short, of plastic, of cheap plastic. The sweetest of this year's surprises is from Cindy Lee. This was the name Canadian musician Patrick Flegel chose to give face to this cross-dressed alter ego that today overwhelms us all. Not one, not two, but three: a triple album. 32 songs were what Lee considered necessary to tell what needed to be told in this 'Diamond Jubilee'. But it could have been 67, 82, I don't know, maybe 104! The music spills over the cliffs of this album. To Cindy, songs fall from the pockets of her elegant—yet at the same time decadent—dress. There's no need to suffer trying to master all the material like that tourist trying to absorb and memorize the complete map of a city he is visiting for the first time. Allow yourself to explore aimlessly the winding streets of this little miracle and be happy.

Tyler, The Creator is one of the most versatile artists in the world of hip-hop. Instead of releasing track after track where the same things are always discussed and spoken in a clear, basic, and flat first person, Tyler likes to disguise himself, to create characters and whole worlds. He was Flower Boy, he was Igor (a dazzling album), and now "the Creator" invents 'Chromakopia,' a conceptual album with a thousand branches, accompanied by a powerful and astonishing visual campaign where the idea of the mask (somewhere between Mishima, Juan Manuel de Prada, and Jim Carrey) is central: who is speaking, the rapper or the character? And where also fits, yes, the rest of the things you would expect from a hip-hop album, from "collabs" to miracle samples pulled from obscure Japanese records.

All 'best albums of the year' lists published seem to agree that 'Romance' is one of the most outstanding works of this season. And no wonder, it's dark yet danceable, machinelike without losing sensitivity. It's an album that is absorbed in a sigh thanks to its enormous array of contrasts. The Irish Grian Chatten directs the theme of his songs towards betrayal, the only question left to resolve is who is the target of his accurate darts. Yet, one does not catch fatalism, on the contrary: the songs exude a vital and invigorating breath.

More direct and less meditated than its predecessor 'Everything Harmony', this 'A Dream is All We Know' misled for a second (or maybe two) this humble 'wordsmith' who at first did not know how to suck all the juice that the bone carried. What a fool! But it was right there, in front of my eyes. Excellence is not achieved only through the grandiosity of elevated art, no sir, and trust me when I say this album is excellent. The two brothers again perform an exercise in nostalgia that yet sounds fully contemporary, absolutely current. An orgy of vocal harmonies that surf the dizzying cliffs of melodic lines that embed themselves in your brain from the first listen. Lastly, it's worth noting that the album arrives just a few months after having released their previous work: others who find songs even among the cushions of the couch.