#010: Tyler, The Creator – Chromakopia
Released October 28th, 2024 on Columbia Records
It’s clear by now that Tyler’s albums are all now capital-E Events, with glitzy rollouts, big visuals, and hype-building teasers. Chromakopia was no different, but there was something bigger about the whole thing. It was an entire concept, from music to fashion to video: Tyler, now finally and irrevocably an adult, batting back and forth about whether he’s glad or sad that he chose against parenthood. The mask he wears on the album cover is a misdirection – this is the most intimate and soul-bearing that Tyler, never one to bottle up his emotions, has ever been. He was a bisexual lothario on Igor, and a nouveau-riche jetsetter on Call Me If You Get Lost, but on Chromakopia he’s a successful man struggling with himself, one of the most timeless narratives in the history of storytelling. As usual, the music backs him up, stewing R&B in banger hip hop and serving it up warm and steaming.
#009: Johnny Blue Skies – Passage du Desir
Released July 12th, 2024 on High Top Mountain Records
The first album under the new nom de plume of Sturgill Simpson finds him diving into Willie Nelson-styled cosmic country, a style that fits him exceedingly well. His move to Paris seems to have taken some of the cantankerous fight out of him, which is actually a big positive in this case. Simpson’s battles with the Nashville establishment have been the stuff of legend, something he’s explored both in ZZ Top-type Texas blues and outlaw country. At some point, though, the danger becomes that such battles are all you’re known for, and then people get familiar. Once they get familiar, they get contemptuous, and then it’s over for you. Simpson avoids that on Passage du Desir, focusing instead on breezy, slightly stoned songs about kicking back and observing life without trying to dig answers out of it. There’s a loving sense of soul going on in a lot of tracks, one that bolsters Simpson’s poetics to the level of bliss.
#008: Kamasi Washington – Fearless Movement
Released May 3rd, 2024 on Young Records
He calls it his ‘dance album’ and that’s a succinct way of putting it. It’s still specifically a jazz record, of course, don’t get it twisted. It’s just that there’s a lot more going on here than jazz. That’s the template for modern jazz, but Fearless Movement has large dollops of funk and hip hop mixed in, like sour cream in chili. Washington’s saxophone is the main event, but he opens it up to the community to chip in where they can. The usual suspects show up – Thundercat, Robert Glasper, etc. – but George Clinton appears as well, making an excellent connection between the old and new school. New jazz cat Andre 3000 also pops his head out, further cementing his change in direction. It’s hard to beat Kamasi Washington when it comes to contemporary jazz, and Fearless Movement is a perfect example as to why.
#007: The Lemon Twigs – A Dream Is All We Know
Released May 3rd, 2024 on Captured Tracks Records
There was an altogether too brief period of time – basically the latter half of 1965 – between the Beatles as bubblegum pop band and the Beatles as drugged-out psychedelic band where Lennon and McCartney hit their peak as classic songwriters. That was the era of Rubber Soul, an impeccable collection of perfect pop songs. This is the era that Long Island’s Lemon Twigs latch onto, but on A Dream Is All We Know they show, once and for all, the difference between slavish imitation and using your influences for effect. The latter requires you to be a great songwriter on your own, and here the Lemon Twigs show that they can go toe to toe with the greats – Lennon and McCartney, yes, but also Brian Wilson and Alex Chilton. It’s power pop at it’s peak – sunny, melodic, and heartfelt.
#006: St. Vincent – All Born Screaming
Released April 26th, 2024 on Virgin Records
If Daddy’s Home, Annie Clark’s last album, was an homage to her jailbird father’s ‘70s-era record collection, All Born Screaming is the sound of her bringing that sound back into the fold. There’s a sense that, for the first time in a long time, Clark isn’t wearing a mask – she isn’t Madonna, she isn’t Pink Floyd, she’s herself. Everything hits hard, redrawing the boundaries of her music and grabbing the listener with both hands. It’s pop, to be sure, but it often leaps into hard rock – “Big Time Nothing” is like a crossover between ‘80s synth pop and Trent Reznor. The ending, a collaboration with Cate LeBon, feels nimbler than anything she’s done since her self-titled smash, right before it decays and then collapses in glorious fashion. Daddy’s Home was divisive, but All Born Screaming is the sound of the audience coming back together again like a thunderclap.
#005: Kendrick Lamar – GNX
Released November 22nd, 2024 on Interscope Records
Kendrick Lamar has always been a poet at heart. A rapper, yes, a generational voice, to be sure, but an artist and a poet first. This hasn’t always served him well. For sure, both good kid m.A.A.d city and To Pimp A Butterfly are top 5 records, but Mr. Morales sprawled and navel-gazed a lot, despite being overall a stellar album. Still, he has a way with words, even his detractors would say that, which begs the question of Drake: Why the FUCK would you get into a rap beef with this man? It was the central hip hop story of the year, crossing over into mainstream audiences, but Kendrick came away the clear winner, even before he scored the biggest song of the year with a diss track that accused Drake straight up of being a pedophile. That song, “Not Like Us”, is not even on GNX. What is on GNX is a series of West Coast bangers, one after the other. It doesn’t have the jazzy spreads or cross-contamination between hip hop, R&B, and funk that have characterized his other records. Instead, it has Mustard on that beat, ho. But also, interestingly, Jack Antonoff, who as it turns out can produce the hell out of a West Coast gangsta record. It also has Kendrick in full on pitbull mode. He may be one of the few people to go into therapy and come out more hateful as a result, and he runs laps around his opps as a result.
#004: The Smile – Wall Of Eyes
Released January 26th, 2024 on XL Recordings
Given the fact that there have been two Smile records released this year, it’s clear that the Yorke/Greenwood/Skinner lineup is infinitely more prolific than Radiohead has been, probably ever. The moody jazz/electronic/post-punk thing they have going on is similar to Kid A while being quite different, too. It’s a soundtrack for the end that doesn’t skip the wonder and the cautious hope involved in the destruction of all things. “Apocalypse”, Greek, meaning “A Revelation.” What is revealed? Here, on Wall Of Eyes, the paranoia of the current state of being is revealed, stripped away, and replaced with the revelation that all is floating on a gossamer-thin strand of existence. If you close your eyes it changes; when you open them, nothing is as it was. As ol’ Santa Claus once said, “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” Revolution, revelation. Apocalypse: The Smile.
#003: Adrianne Lenker – Bright Future
Released March 22nd, 2024 on 4AD Records
As I said of Lauren Mayberry not long ago, the criteria for a successful solo record is that it does something that the artist cannot do with their day job band. Bright Future shows that Adrianne Lenker is more than just the yearning voice behind Big Thief. Previous records showed that as well, but Bright Future shows that Lenker’s interests lie in more than just country-tinged alt rock. They’re a country-folk avant-chanteuse, equal parts Neil Young, Michelle Shocked, and a non-rapey Mark Kozelek. This oversimplifies it, of course, but you have to start somewhere. Its deeply intimate and relatable, as though Lenker is sitting across the campfire and singing specifically to you and you alone. More to the point of the criteria, though: she shows, on her own version of the band’s non-album hit “Vampire Empire,” that she can do more with herself and a couple of folky instruments than the entire rest of the band managed to do together.
#002: Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee
Released March 29th, 2024 on Realistik
Women were the Great Lost Band of the 2000s, delivering abrasive alt-pop with a flair few others have matched, then or since. Women singer Patrick Flegel released an album in 2020 as his drag alter ego, Cindy Lee. That record, What’s Tonight To Eternity, was brilliant, although only a few cottoned onto its greatness at the time. Well, now everyone’s playing catchup. The thing about Diamond Jubilee is that on paper there’s nothing about it that leads anyone to believe that it should have gotten the kind of response it did. It’s two hours of lo-fi pop and rock ‘n’ roll – gloomy, mysterious, often inscrutable, long stretches of it rather inaccessible. Initially, in order to get it, you had to go to a website that looked as though it were made during the Geocities days and navigate through downloading it, and then playing it. The MP3s weren’t entirely in order all the time, so you had to rename some of the files depending on the device. Maybe it was because of those things that the album has done as well as it has. In the streaming age, we’ve become perhaps too used to having music on demand, like turning on a tap and having water flow out automatically. Diamond Jubilee felt like an album you had to work for, something to mine out of the ground and then sift to find the titular diamonds among the reverb-laden lo-fi production. Eventually, you came to realize that it was all diamonds.
#001: Father John Misty – Mahashmashana
Released November 22nd, 2024 on Sub Pop Records
Josh Tillman’s last album, the criminally underrated Chloë and the Next 20th Century, was a divisive record for a few different reasons. People didn’t like the idea of doing an Old Hollywood framing – as though it were anything more than a framing and the songs were an example of Tillman’s mastery of the ballad. People didn’t like Pure Comedy at first either, but I think time has come around on that one. Mahashmashana has a lot in common thematically with Pure Comedy, but the human experience is played for wonder here instead of smirks. Who else but Elton Josh would start off the followup to a hard record with a nine-minute channeling of George Harrison whose refrain rests gloriously on the utter silence of the great cremation? The same guy that would invite Viagra Boys to come in and back up the banging rock ‘n’ roll of “She Cleans Up.” The same guy that would get Alan Sparhawk to pitch in on the ultimate Tillman ballad, “Screamland.” The guy that would imagine the crowd filtering out in Pure Comedy’s “Leaving LA” due to “some nine verse chorusless diatribe” and then score radio gold with the lengthy disco epic “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools Of Us All”, a nine verse chorusless diatribe. All the same guy, of course, who once wrote a eulogy for Charles “Entertainment” Cheese. He’s having us on, and at the same time he’s not. The absurdity of human existence is still all just a joke, but it’s a well-worn and comfortable joke, the kind you bust out in new crowds to get ‘em laughing, and then thinking. Which is, in the absurd year of 2024, looking out into the Great Crash Out, the only kind of joke worth telling anymore.
