On 900 albums of 2024

Last year, I tuned the fuck in: I listened to 914 albums released last year. I had a few aims: capturing the zeitgeist; seeing if our usual sense that new stuff isn’t as good is actually true; to be contrarian in the music catalog age; to see what it’s like to be Piero Scaruffi. I got all of those.

914 is a pretty huge sample, but still less than 1% of new music (one site I like lists 135,000 albums of 2024). It’s more than 1% of notable new music though. (e.g. There’s a thousand albums in this not-totally-arbitrary list.)

Vibe

I can’t think of any good single sentence for what I heard. (Maybe: “the centre cannot hold”.) In past years I could look to the indie press for guidance, but that doesn’t exist in force anymore.

True to rearguard type, I was unimpressed with most of what others were impressed with (see the critics or the extremely-online herd or the vox pop).

“Poptimism” was the claim that some pop is worth listening to and worth writing about. Over the last 20 years it so thoroughly destroyed its hipster / underground / rockist rivals that it became a perversion of itself. Zombie poptimism says that pop is as good as the best art and anyone who says otherwise is a snob or a hater or worse. Everyone has to write about pop now, including me. I say all this as background to 2024 of course being Brat summer. But I wouldn’t be surprised if after next year it is never mentioned ever again. Obvious empty hype and animal spirits to me.

It’s interesting how much critics and amateur ‘heads have diverged: eight entries in their respective top 10s differ, or 26 entries in their top 50s. (Maybe it was always so; maybe the critics, being ten or thirty years older than the fans, were always on their own, and we just have the tools to spot it now, to organise against our erstwhile masters. We will get what we deserve.)

The biggest single difference between the critics and the users is, as ever, hip hop. Specifically, users constantly lose their minds over the latest iteration of monotonous plodding “abstract” rap (billy woods, Danny Brown, JPEGMAFIA, …) and slurred-slurs trap (Travis Scott, Vince Staples, …). I guess I do like abstract more than the mumble it replaced. I should probably rant about Fantano here but I tire.

People (again, just the weirdo people who write about music online) think in genre in a particular tired, decadent way. Here’s the top genres on AOTY:

So old. “Plugg” and “rage” are quite new, but both are just minor elaborations on trap; drill is an old minor elaboration. The word “abstract hip hop” is only about 10 years old but it’s just backpack and Def Jux again. Cloud rap is again 15 years old but had some new sounds. K-pop has only bombed the west for the last 10 years, but it’s just involuted J-pop. The formulaic sound people now call “metalcore” is I guess only 15 years old but really blew up in the last 8 for some reason.

Pata

There is one actually-new thing, which hasn’t I think been named yet. The family-resemblance:

• “genrefucking”: take either noise rock, industrial, or dnb as your base. Then add more noise rock / post-rock / glitch-pop / meme music / breakcore / digital hardcore / indietronica / brutal prog.
• actually go ahead and prepend “emo-” to every item above
• bedroom production (but that means hardcore pro DAW now)
• trans or trans-adjacent or furry-adjacent
• evil-adjacent
• sometimes impressively ugly cover art. Sorry, I mean mutant alien cyborg beauty. (Currently the visuals are the most cohesive part of the group I’m proposing. Clock it a mile off.)

Dnb plus noise rock is not new. But dnb plus noise rock plus machine elves plus chiptune plus trans/furry themes almost has to be new, because the latter are new.

They’re pretty clearly Grimespawn.

You could call it queer noise - but not if you knew anything about the history of the sexuality of noise musicians. Let us not make redundant and patronising mistakes. (There is a difference between the old queer noise and the new kind: the new one is heavy-handed and reduces itself to queerness. An irritated name could be panderqueer.)

A name which could actually take is pata.

How finite is music? Should we expect there to be a point where new genres just don’t appear, because we’ve exhausted them?

Maybe. You can create jazz any number of ways: by just throwing away the metronome, or by empowering the performer 100x more, or by using blue notes 100x more, or by being comfortable with dissonance, or by just not resolving progressions, or by defaulting to dorian instead of ionian and aeolian / using modal interchange all the time, …

But the last of the major constraints maybe came off in the 70s or 80s, and, separately, experimental stuff hit apparently maximum intensity (on various dimensions) in the 00s. Even experimental/”progressive” music struggles to be totally new now. So what can you do?

Well, tastelessness and absurdity are large enough and repugnant enough to still be mostly virgin soil. And if you can’t grow a list of genres A you can take points in the genre product space A × A × … The likes of Stabscotch surprise you by sheer eclecticism, just constantly switching genres. Essentially musical jokes. If there are 300 genres, then there are 44850 dumb fusion genres, and millions of three-ways…

Other desultory trends:

• Country music has been eaten again after having been thrown up in 2005 and again around 2017. On the junk food side there’s Cowboy Carter, Morgan Wallen, Shaboozey; on the restaurant side there’s MJ Lenderman, Adrianne Lenker, Waxahatchee.

• Some oldies still doing great, great work: Mount Eerie, Melt-Banana, Einstürzende, Julia Holter, Arab Strap, J Mascis, Godspeed You, Laura Marling, Paysage d’Hiver, Melvins, Blixa, Vampire Weekend, Fred Frith, Four Tet, Xiu Xiu, Tyler, Wilco, Redd Kross, St Vincent. And we got one last go from Shellac and Ryuichi Sakamoto.

• Lots of new people I like - see the top 10 below. For one: the Irish band Lego Indiana Jones have a manifesto. Incredibly, they managed to make it neither an intentional or unintentional joke. This is an amazing achievement, one not spoiled by them also having a song called “Cloudy w/ a Chance of Meatballs”. The essay is extremely thoughtful about zombie poptimism and the failure of New Pop to satirise and oppose the bad, stupid, antihuman side of pop.

An obscurity scale:

0/5: Played on national radio. During the day.
1/5: Reviewed by big paper / millions streams.
2/5: On Spotify in full
3/5: On Youtube mostly
4/5: On Bandcamp
4.5/5: One sample track on Bandcamp
5/5: No digital recordings
6/5: No recordings

So here’s the actual 99th percentile music of last year:

Top 10

1. Puddle Dives – Water Shrew Trio (Portland synth improv)

I didn’t really want the songs to have an ending… We have found a lot from just allowing one tone to hang out for a long time

I’m not a particularly patient listener and only in the last couple of years have I been able to sit through 20 minute drones, let alone appreciate them, let alone enjoy them. But something about this clicks. The harmonics or something. There’s enough repetition and enough one-offs. It doesn’t hate you - they claim descent from Albert Ayler, but there’s zero contempt for you or themselves here. if this means I’m still basic that’s ok.

Couple of prompts for you if you need them:

• This was recorded live, but it isn’t live.
• They’ve been playing together for like 5 years. Imagine doing this 60 times. How many of them are this good?
• Digital design software has been mature for about 35 years. Pasting and scanning can thus only be homage or affectation.
• How small do you need to be to dive in a puddle?

• Newness: 3/5. third or fourth release. They’ve been playing together for like 5 years. Technically a supergroup, if you count the 15-fan Portland bands that formed it as eligible groups.
• Obscurity level: 4/5. Critic review, Spotify, Youtube, Bandcamp in full, Bandcamp in part, cassette.
• Profile

2. Saisons – Pomme (Paris orchestral chansons)

we are quite disconnected from what surrounds us… plants growing, trees dying, vegetation decomposing

Has the character that tragic opera once had and is still wished to have: to be the knife without a hilt or a blade, to instantly draw vast sympathy. Reminds me a lot of my beloved Freschard.

• Newness: 3/5. 8 years in
• Obscurity level: 2/5. On Spotify. Surely some French critic noticed her. And Aaron Dessner is in on it!
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3. When It Rains It Pours – Farida Amadou (Bruxelles bass improv)

The songwriter Farida is very quiet. I mostly compose on an electric guitar with clean sound, then I destroy the composition with my bass

sounds like a storm drain feels. sounds like 4 basses rather than one.

• Newness: 3/5. Been going 6 years.
• Obscurity level: 2/5. Critic review, Spotify
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4. Words Unspoken – John Surman (Oslo modal jazz)

Surely among the better sounds an 80 year old has ever made

• Newness: 0/5. Released his first album 56 years ago.
• Obscurity level: 2/5. Spotify. Got a Wire review but that doesn’t count. Wasn’t on youtube for all of last year but is now.
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5. Dennis – Sega Bodega (Glasgow UK Bass)

I am an old rockist as well as an old poptimist, and I still unfairly have a higher bar for dance music. Navarrete is somewhere off of the retro/futuristic X poppy/experimental plane and so walks around my bar.

• Newness: 3/5. been around a while
• Obscurity level: 1/5. Pitchfork
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6. Ten Total – 1010benja (Kansas City alt-R&B)

Just incredibly charming and fresh and goofy and earnest. Probably, hopefully just a warmup.

• Newness: 5/5. Did not exist until March.
• Obscurity level: 1/5. Pitchfork review.
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7. The Shovel Dance – shovel dance collective (London mumble folk)

• Newness: 3/5.
• Obscurity level: 1/5. Covered in the NYT and Uncut.
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8. Redd Kross – Redd Kross (LA power pop)

brightness bisecting you. the 60s but without the mental or physical stench

• Newness: 0/5. Started 45 years ago.
• Obscurity level: 1/5. Pitchfork, SPIN.
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9. TRAИƧA – Various

Normally wouldn’t put a compilation in, particularly one this uneven. But the range and the experiments moved me. I found it impossible to predict who would show up next - Sade? Andre?

• Newness: 0/5.
• Obscurity level: 1/5.
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10. Salt Sermon – Missouri Executive Order 44 (Kansas City extreme math)

I had been needing something demented and cathartic, but I don’t believe in the degeneracy of mere metalcore bands and it doesn’t work if I’m not at least in some doubt.

• Newness: 4/5.
• Obscurity level: 2/5. On Spotify.
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And? Is new music worse? Under various interpretations no, meh, no, yes, and no but the epistemics got worse:

• “No new music is Great” - insane statement
• “The average 2024 release is worse than past year average” - completely moot question
• “There are fewer great albums per year” - dubious given 10x quantity
• “The very best of the past were higher than the very best of today” - erk; given my top 5 were all compilations and reissues I think I have to concede this one (but consider my old-man bias towards old sounds). My top score for the year was 74th percentile among all scores.
• “Critical acclaim is an even worse predictor of quality than before” - I think I believe this one.

Was this whole exercise worth doing? I don’t know. I am much less confused, much less FOMOish, and can see where things are going in my favourite artform. I get the references, and can again see who’s riffing off whom. My 2024 playlist is pretty kickass and readily convinces people that cool things are indeed happening. But I won’t do it again.