The Best Albums of 2024 (So Far)

Claire Rousay, sentiment

Drifting through the psychedelic badlands adjoining Midwest emo and early post rock, sentiment — the latest full-length album from prolific singer-songwriter and found-sound composer Claire Rousay — surveys the numbness of depression with a mapmaker’s exhaustiveness. “Head” observes a relationship in disrepair, grappling wearily with a tendency to placate a lover’s mercurial moods while flowing almost imperceptibly from a creeping slowcore riff to a shimmering coda. Rousay calls this blend of crestfallen sentimentality and economic instrumentation “emo ambient,” and there’s a self-deprecating humor in the distinction, but the glum, glacial “asking for it” and “please 5 more minutes” wear their contrasts and anachronisms well.

Shabaka, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace

The British bandleader Shabaka Hutchings, formerly of Sons of Kemet and the Comet Is Coming, sets his signature saxophone aside on Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, his elegant solo album. Like Andre 3000’s New Blue Sun, Perceive honors the expressiveness of the flute and its many siblings while assembling a cast of characters that speaks to Hutchings’s prolificacy as front and side man: Andre, poet and musician Saul Williams, Armand Hammer rapper Elucid, experimental-music veteran Laraaji, and British singer-songwriter Lianne La Havas each make appearances.

1010Benja, Ten Total

Ten Total, the electric debut album by Tulsa’s 1010Benja, wars with tradition in two ways: The 34-year-old rapper, singer, and producer juxtaposes motormouth sex raps and romantic Timberlake-isms early on as the coarse “Peacekeeper” and the warm “H2HAVEYOU” lay out a knack for playing into and against classic R&B conventions. Elsewhere, in the windswept, upbeat “I Can,” you hear the preacher’s son bucking against the family worldview and carving his own spiritual path, finding use not in the organ reveries of gospel so much as the earnest emotionalism of church performance. The sensibility recalls another midwestern artist’s introduction: Chance the Rapper’s 10 Day.

Kim Gordon, The Collective

The list of ingredients appears to spell chaos: shimmering guitars, grungy drum machines, a 70-year-old white woman. Luckily, the artist in residence is restless rock-and-roll lifer Kim Gordon, formerly of Sonic Youth and more recently of Glitterbust and Body/Head. The Collective, Gordon’s second solo album billed as such, revels in abrasive guitar noise and pummeling, programmed percussion. The sinister, suffocating “Shelf Warmer” and “The Candy House” gesture to southern rap, but the album is otherwise a reminder of the closeness of hip-hop and alt rock in the era where Sonic Youth and Cypress Hill collaborated. It’s also a wry meta-discussion about the machinery of cool. “So what if I like the big truck,” Gordon preens in “I’m a Man.” The lurid “Psychedelic Orgasm” deals in disaffected people watching: “Driving down, sunset / Zombie meditation / Getting caffeinated.” The Collective doesn’t speak out in judgment of what it surveys but makes sure to relay a faint sense of the hollowness of our routines and the smallness of our dreams.

Ben Frost, Scope Neglect

It itches to categorize Scope Neglect, Australian composer Ben Frost’s sixth studio album, as extreme metal, though the parts are present in abundance. “The River of Light and Radiation” is, on paper, a djent tune that takes after the time-signature workouts from Swedish technical geniuses. But it’s not spiriting you across heady peaks to a rewarding resolution, drawing attention to a compositional resourcefulness, as is the tendency in that genre. Opener “Lamb Shift” picks over the parts of a riff that might do someone like Meshuggah justice if it would just quit falling apart long enough to loop; “Turning the Prism” seems more interested in the ominously braying noise interrupting its main riff than offering the release the brain is trained to seek after the ear comes into contact with a heavily distorted guitar and a quick, threatening kick drum. Scope Neglect is exploring metal as scenery, as tonal palate. It’s saying plodding, icy stasis can be hellish, too.

Jahari Massamba Unit, YHWH Is Love

A genre-hopping mind-meld uniting a pair of storied indie-rap figureheads, YHWH Is Love, the second album from Madlib and Karriem Riggins’s Jahari Massamba Unit, is brimming with playful, mournful, wily, and beguiling compositions that play to the duo’s wide-ranging talents as beat-makers and collaborators for everyone from Doom and Dilla to Denzel Curry and Diana Krall. Love is rangy without being showy: The de facto theme song “JMU’s Voyage” is all bustling, muscular jazz-funk; the simmering, sedate “ALL THINGS …” opts for a more silent way.

ScHoolboy Q, Blue Lips

ScHoolboy Q plugs the gap Kendrick Lamar left in TDE’s A-list rap roster with Blue Lips, his sixth album. Five years after dividing the fandom with the adroitly mainstream (if underrated) CrasH Talk, Q turns in a more dynamic performance. He can be the devil on your shoulder instigating unrest in “Pop” or the determined son and father in “Germany 86’” or the hornball in “Love Birds” or the grieving friend in “Blueslides.” “I done lost out on so much shit tryna live to your standards,” he says in the latter, resolving to prioritize his well-being and follow his own compass. The choice works wonders for the craft.

➽ Read Craig Jenkins’s full review of ScHoolboy Q’s Blue Lips.

Brittany Howard, What Now

A rock and soul historian whose guitar and vocal chops are as cold as her constellation of influences is vast, Brittany Howard serves another musicology lesson with What Now, a tour de force from the echoing, narcotic “Earth Sign” to the stately “Every Color in Blue.” Howard’s music dances deftly across decades: The motivational “Another Day” has New Power Generation airs; the wistful “To Be Still” and “Red Flags” serve hazy soul jazz. What Now documents straining relations — “I followed you and didn’t look back / I didn’t know love could feel like that / I ran right through them red flags” — but colorful compositions and arrangements undercut the sadness in tracks like “The Power to Undo,” where the protagonist is begging a partner not to demolish everything they’ve built accompanied by impossibly clattering drums and layer upon layer of gnarly fuzz. Brittany Howard is singing herself, and us, through it.

Mk.gee, Two Star & the Dream Police

Two Star & the Dream Police, the debut studio album from 26-year-old New Jersey singer-songwriter and guitar prodigy Mk.gee, marries evocative lyricism — “What’s keeping you fenced off? / And who’s got the power in your mind?” — and expressive playing, which communicates a firm grasp on rock canon but also the urge to subvert it. Highlights like the yearning “Candy” feel like conversations with the classics as much as adoring odes to their love interests. The production screams “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” but the vocals owe less to Sting than the plaintive earnestness of Frank Ocean; an unexpectedly skronky solo recalls Prince’s assault on the ideological partitions separating R&B and rock in the ’80s. Moments later, “I Want” drafts a rewrite of Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me” with a solo that can’t easily be identified as a guitar. You might start to suspect he’s using snazzy effects pedals, but he isn’t.

Shygirl, Club Shy

A curt batch of bubbly dance-pop bangers touching on entertaining (and/or rebuffing) a lover’s advances, London DJ and singer Shygirl’s Club Shy goes where earlier releases like 2020’s Alias and 2022’s Nymph somewhat resisted, serving full-throated club-diva anthems reaching for the blissful, carefree sensuality of Eurodance hits like La Bouche’s “Be My Lover” and Crystal Waters’s “Gypsy Woman (She’s Homeless)”; the gorgeous, cutting SG Lewis collab “Mr. Useless,” the pulsating Boys Noize team-up “Tell Me,” and the instantly quotable “Mute” — “We putting them boys on mute, mute, mute, mute” — get dangerously close.

The Smile, Wall of Eyes

Having gelled during their extensive touring, Radiohead’s splinter cell the Smile — comprising of OK Computer architects Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and London jazz drummer Tom Skinner — barrels into sophomore album Wall of Eyes touting denser, plusher compositions and a more wounded and introverted outlook. There are no searing indictments of political injustice this time from the erstwhile leftist-rock vanguard of the aughts. There is a subtle sensation of sliding into the too-hot bathwater of a trying time that could be a breakup or a death or a “dragnet” or whatever the listener needs to have a quick shudder about.