0
0
Since 2024 has been such an influential year for music, these are my top five albums of the year.
The Secret of Us by Gracie Abrams is the new artist’s most recent album. She spiked in popularity this year because of her top charting songs from The Secret of Us like “us” featuring Taylor Swift and “I Love You, I’m Sorry.” Songs on this album are written like an internal monologue or a brutally honest “catch-up” conversation with a close friend. We get a glimpse into Abrams’s feelings, thoughts, and actions, which happen to be painfully relatable. The album talks about introspection, and the changes in relationships, and has both sad and uplifting notes. I love this album for both its incredible lyrical content and music with feeling.
The album Older by Lizzy Mcalpine is gut-wrenching and excruciatingly realistic to grief, acceptance, and love. It has a dreamlike quality with piano and Mcalpine’s echoey vocals. After losing her father to cancer in 2020, she has a beautiful perspective on grief in this album as well as depression, anger, and hope. It feels like late-night poetry into one amalgamation of complicated feelings and introspection.
Delaney Bailey’s 2024 EP Chiaroscuro is a combination of songs written like lullabies. The folk style, slow rhythm, and bittersweet lyrics in these five songs are enough to place them on this list as the best of 2024. Her layered and harmonizing vocals have remained the same as previous songs in her discography, but this time, Bailey is experimenting with more instruments and storytelling. After gaining more popularity in the past few years as an indie artist, this album is more expressive and individualistic to her songwriting style. Written about her recently passed grandmother, the opening song “Wella” uses her signature nature symbolism to describe the beauty of life and death. The album is both lyrically and instrumentally impactful, following her growing older, reflecting on the past, and leaving things behind.
The Supernova (Extended) EP by Aiden Bisset was released in 2024 as an addition to Ultraviolet, so I’m counting it as a 2024 release. Bisset’s upbeat pop-rock style is paired with fun lyrics making each song feel like the ending scene of a coming-of-age movie. Supernova (Extended) is super catchy and it makes me surprised he isn’t a more popular indie artist.
Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poet’s Department was the most streamed album of 2024, and broke a record for the most streams of an album in a single day, and rightfully so because the album is one of her best. She stepped into poetry-songwriting with great emphasis on the lyrical depth of her songs and used a few different musical genres like soft-rock, synth-pop, and folk. With emphasis on vocal layering and piano, the album has a mystical kind of feeling and carries a lot of emotional weight. It is bittersweet, and as always, Taylor Swift’s genius songwriting strategy of using vague yet specific details in her lyrics adds relatability. It is rightfully one of the most popular albums of the year, and has a few hit songs like “Fortnight” featuring Post Malone and “I Can Do it With a Broken Heart.”
These albums and EPs have been extremely difficult to choose out of the pool of incredible music of 2024. So, some honorable mentions include Ariana Grande’s eternal sunshine, Sabrina Carpenter’s Short ‘n Sweet, Billie Eilish’s HIT ME HARD AND SOFT, and Chappell Roan’s single Good Luck, Babe. From pop to folk to indie, these song artists have released the best music of the year.
