After much hemming and, yes, a fair amount of hawing, I've finalized my local and non-local playlists for the year. For bonus fun, I've listed 20 local and 20 non-local songs that I particularly loved, omitting anything from my best albums lists. (Runners up were fair game though.) Listen! Enjoy! Share!
Local Songs
Absolutely Yours, “Field of Nothing”
Bridget Collins floats through the diaphanous pop of the EP Mirror Maze like a ghost mixing with the vapor in the clouds. Her timbre makes it sound as though she’s recalling one of those sad dreams that are too understated to be nightmares, and—especially here—reminds me just slightly of Wendy Robinson from the unjustly forgotten ’90s indie-pop band Popinjays.
A not-quite-holiday underserviced with celebratory anthems gets its due. The guitars jangle optimistically, then the voices chime in with an ecstatic chirp that rises to a chorus of “We jumped right in and we’re falling down.” The rest of Avoider is aces as well.
Basement Gang feat. JuneThaKid, Craishon, and $aiko, ”Solo”
“It’s exhausting these days” is how JuneThaKid kicks off this group effort, but he sounds less whooped than determined to execute a “million-dollar vision with a 9 to 5 budget”—and with QuasiUno’s production summoning horn samples from the distance, this crew does just that.
Lyrics don’t get much more direct than “Good morning, I love you/And I always will.” Named for our state tree, Hilary James’s bittersweet little indie song covers all the important parts of life: 69ing, abstaining from weed, saying goodbye.
On this sad-girl piano ballad, the husky low-end of Berit Dybing’s voice never stoops to sulking, and when you listen up, you realize that the song is about the start of a relationship, not the end of one. Sneaky.
(Br)other, “(Br)other”
Didn’t know what to expect from chopsy Prince alums Michael Bland and Sonny T, but it certainly wasn’t this engaging, good-natured, soulful lope, which exudes a strong “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” vibe—and that is indeed a vibe to exude.
Cassieopia feat. Rozay Bella, Jada Brown, and The Lioness, “P.L.T. (Pretty Little Thing)”
Calling out “from the home of the Metrodome,” here’s a posse cut with a genuine communal vibe. “I’m tryna make sure that my people freak/Could care less who less”? That’s the spirit, though let’s spare some shine for the St. Paul DJ who gets lead credit here.
What I like most about Doyle is that she never oversings. Here she laments a life on the road and on the run, delivering lines like "I let the jukebox get the best of me last night" with precise understatement and just the right amount of twang. There's a reason we were all anticipating her four-song EP, Stranger. And a reason we weren't disappointed.
After a zigzag of a riff sets the mood, Julia Eubanks laments in a breathy float of a voice “You’re just like me and I hate you for it.” I’m going to ignore the rest of the lyrics and just assume this song is about how Capricorns are very cool people. Which is true.
Favourite Girl, “Favourite Girl”
Katy Vernon's new project is bigger and bolder than anything she's attempted yet. I was not expecting the horns. They're perfect.
The local faves rage and roar at their most old-school Paramoreish and translate themselves into Sims for a cool video (check the link above) Just a big ol’ rock song worth shouting along to.
A track that builds and crests and ebbs unexpectedly but coherently, driven by an insistent rhythm guitar and festooned with all sorts of electronic adornments. Mesmerizing stuff.
Keep for Cheap, “FedEx”
Plenty to pick from on Big Grass, the latest from the songwriting duo of Autumn Vagle and Kate Malanaphy; I choose this long-haul rocker about a big move “fueled by wine, hope, and weed.”
I like Lerado best at his noisiest and his funniest, and here he lifts some lines from Kreayshawn (whose shadow looms larger over today’s rap than anyone would have guessed it would) over a beat that dares you to make sense of it.
The North Country bard perks up with this quick-stepper I suppose I have to call a dance track. “You have a dance, I can appreciate that” he observes before insisting “When I’m dancing/This is how I dance.”
Ray Gun Youth, “Therapists Hate Him (For This One Simple Trick)”
A rush of tuneful angst from some talented kids whose EP Toothache is a blast and whose therapist is right—they will get better. Till then, they’ve got their guitars and drums.
Well, that was fast. Barely months after Beyond Reason, their first album in nearly three decades, the onetime alt-rock hopefuls returned with Within Reason. This standout track, however, takes its time, loping around at the pace you’d expect of someone stuck for more than a day in an airport.
Trash Date, “Same Old”
Slightly pouty, strongly yearning indie, of its moment but hardly generic.
Clever verses (“Like a nun in a wig, it’s a bad habit”) delivered in an indie deadpan, a chorus of “all right” over a monster riff—that’s enough for me.
This dancefloor burner snuck past me at the end of 2023. BPMs justify its title and burns like “You just an intermission, bitch/I’m the full show” prove why she shouldn’t be fucked with. Zoom!
Non-Local Songs
Amyl and the Sniffers, “U Should Not Be Doing That”
The brawny Melbourne punk outfit returns with a heavy bassline that has just as much attitude as irrepressible frontwoman Amy Taylor, who roams the world at large and mocks those small-minded folks back home who lecture her.
No, not “R&B/country” or “country-tinged” or whatever other racist dodge words you wanna toss at it. This is a real two-stepper, Lumineery “hey ho” and all. Do I wish more of Cowboy Carter was like this? Well… sometimes. Was I delighted by this? Absolutely.
I won’t pretend the process is in any way organic, but TikTok trends do tend to cough up some snappy tunes. Country radio sure wouldn’t have figured to play this slick little number if the girls hadn’t come up with a viral dance for it, that’s for damn sure. Yee—and I really do mean this—haw.
I’ve been smitten with this Madrid indie band for two albums now, and I’m relieved to report that the departure of their rhythm section hasn’t undercut the femme camaraderie of their easygoing rock. An example of a sensibility they call “sincericide”: “I like black coffee and cigarettes/And flowers from boys that I'm not sleeping with/I like trees when they let go of their leaves/They're so wise, they get rid of their shit.”
I am convinced that a not-insignificant number of straight American guys, if given the choice of one or the other, would rather smack a woman’s ass than actually fuck. Do I have the numbers to back me up? Since when does that matter? Anyway, helluva track.
A downright ingenious sample flip: a beat built off the electronically harmonized "ha"s from Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman,” with her “but I know you” melding seamlessly with J.P.'s own voice.
Ravyn Lenae, “Love Me Not”
I dare you to listen to this without shoulder-dancing. Reluctant obsession at its most ingratiating.
Jon Langford & the Bright Shiners, “I Am Discarded”
The indefatigable Mekon et al. sings one for the losers, and characteristically sounds like he's hardly down for the count.
Amber Mark, “Comin’ Around Again”
Do I love this track for its own sexy, tuneful sake or because so much of modern R&B is vibes-first? Does it matter? Mark’s not sure she’s looking for love, but she’s willing to fuck around and find out—a decent attitude to take.
Frances Quinlan, “Another Season”
The soundtrack of I Saw the TV Glow does an excellent job of crystalizing a modern sad-girl sensibility for intrigued outsiders like me. Partly it succeeds by tossing in a few ringers like yeule’s cover of Broken Social Scene and—especially—this heart-wringer from the Hop Along singer at her most constrained.
The Nigerian Afrobeats star mocks your obsession with him with a sinister little laugh I still can’t get out of my head.
Tommy Richman, “Million Dollar Baby”
Anything that shakes up the pop charts is good by definition, so I was happy to hear this greasy little summer jam leap from TikTok to No. 2 on the Hot 100. Whoever Richman is, I dig his scratchy falsetto vocal, even if he may as well be slurring nonsense syllables on the verses for all I know or care. We may never hear from the viral 20-something Virginian again. But I’ve been wrong about that kind of thing before. In fact, I almost always am.
H! O! But it was released in 2023. T! T! You can't put last year's song on your 2024 playlist. O! G! O! There are rules! Oh, shut up, you stupid hoe! This was the year Chappell broke, and anyway we desperately need a new pop spelling chant now that the enemy has coopted “YMCA.”
Most of the demo-ish bonus tracks tacked onto the deluxe Guts (Spilled) are neither essential nor trash—they’re the kind of solid efforts a songwriter at the top of her game sets aside for later while going for the gold. “Obsessed” was the single, but I love this toss-off for the way Rodrigo rhymes the title with “fair of him” and “I’m gonna marry him.” But I still want to know if this is the guy who flew her to France when he’d say something wrong?
Shaboozey, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”
Back with another one of those boot-stompin’ beats, this Beyoncé collaborator slides a little J-Kwon reference in with his forlorn whistle, downhome drawl, and sawing fiddle, then dares you not to call him country on the year’s biggest hit.
Over a rockin’ country stomp that’s midway between “I Love Rock ‘n Roll” and “Man! I Feel Like a Woman,” another Bey cosignee invites her girls over with this party song about not partying, declaring “I’m just a homegirl/Just wanna be at home, girl.” And did country radio bite? My friends, it did not.
If the ’90s were so great, then explain to me how one of the ’90s-iest bands going started making the best music of its career in 2010? And hasn't lost a step since, even without Jon Wurster on drums.
South Africa’s finest current pop export will never top “Water” because she’s not foolish enough to stray too far from its indelible rhythmic template. But that doesn’t mean she can’t come close, working insinuating variations on that musical theme, creating wonderful moments like the chorus’s playfully extension of “dare” to “day-er.”
Kali Uchis (with Peso Pluma), “Igual Que Un Ángel”
No one is combining Anglo and Latin pop as effortlessly as Uchis right now, and this duet with nasal corrido master Pluma floats delicately above the Earth as its low-end glide keeps it from levitating too far into the heavens.
Waxahatchee feat. MJ Lenderman, “Right Back to It”
It’d be mean to say Katie Crutchfield and Jake Lenderman released the most critically overrated albums of the year. Both Tigers Blood and Manning Fireworks are perfectly solid collections. But neither approaches this moment, a real heart-troubler that any country singer or songwriter would be proud of.
