The 50 best albums of 2024 | Music

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50
Karl D’Silva – Love Is a Flame in the Dark

You expected Charli xcx to drop one of the British pop albums of the year – rather less so a bloke from Rotherham, known only in the deep underground, playing and recording everything himself at home. And yet D’Silva’s debut album has the huge scope of those from pop’s A-list, decked out with saxophones, massive drums, fret-scurrying guitar solos, Chicago house basslines and classic vocal melodies, resulting in industrial-leaning epics about the very biggest themes: love and existence. Don’t wait for the inevitable cult reappraisal and deluxe reissue in 30 years’ time – get on this masterpiece now. Ben Beaumont-Thomas

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Chat Pile – Cool World

The Oklahoman noise-rockers’ second album was one of the few releases in 2024 that reflected the horror and disbelief of witnessing Gaza and its people being destroyed. It is also about hard-wired failure across history – the album title is a savagely sarcastic dismissal of a planet whose human inhabitants are so wretchedly self-interested and easily given to violence. Vocalist Raygun Busch often takes the persona of a baffled functionary, operating on orders that have no reason, while his band squall and thunder through their groove-metal rhythms. BBT

A triumph of tenacity and independence, Los Campesinos! self-released their seventh album – and first in seven years – and scored their first UK Top 20 hit. Their earlier twee-pop leanings have matured into bitter, morose yet spirited emo, lashing out at fascists while castigating apathy from their peers (Idles must have winced at “punks on the playlist crooning for kindness”.) But it’s not all politics: they lust in hyper-literate poetry, and hop from Bundesliga one moment to bildungsroman the next. That mix of high and lowbrow can be found throughout but most potently of all on Feast of Tongues, an anthem Coldplay could have made were it not for the savage declaration in the chorus: “We will feast on the tongues of the last bootlickers.” BBT

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Adrianne Lenker – Bright Future

Whether solo or as frontperson of her band Big Thief, Lenker keeps her release rate high, with quality and emotional intensity to match. You can almost smell the leaf mulch in her latest, recorded in a studio in a forest with pianos, acoustic guitars and the occasional touch of ambient haze. She’s holed up away from the world, rueful and hopeful in equal measure (“This whole world is dying / Don’t it seem like a good time for swimming?”) as she takes stock of hard-won wonders, be it the lessons of heartbreak, the power of language or, on the absolute blubfest of Real House, her mother’s love. BBT

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Clarissa Connelly – World of Work

Much like Julia Holter’s early work, the Scotland-born, Denmark-raised composer Clarissa Connelly’s music feels like the sort of singular study of ecstasy that could only have emerged from a remote cloister. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, both cite medieval nun Hildegard von Bingen as an influence.) On Connelly’s unique second record, there are the confrontationally drawn-out notes and complicated intonations of traditional folk songs; the off-kilter depths of Les Mystères des Voix Bulgares; in the spartan piano and dappled acoustic guitar, the gripping structural abstractions of one-offs such as Holter and Joanna Newsom. Its abiding themes are loneliness and death, but the warmth and self-possession of Connelly’s earnest inquiries into the point of it all seem to embody the lesser-known meaning of apocalypse, as revelation and the lifting of a veil. Laura Snapes

Niger guitarist Mdou Moctar makes desert blues into a fractal art, each insurgent riff embroidered with detail. On Funeral for Justice, it seems like a call for his burgeoning western fanbase to play close attention – not just to be dazzled by his vaulting dynamics, but to heed his lyrics about colonialism, particularly former occupier France’s majority control of his country’s uranium supply. If justice is dying, Moctar lit the pyre. LS

One third of the xx turned in an expertly produced dancefloor LP, finely chopping up samples and guest artists and emulsifying them into darkly throbbing Jon Hopkins-y techno, emotional trance or sparkling disco-house. The latter style provides the best track, Baddy on the Floor, made with Honey Dijon – have trumpets ever sounded more euphoric? BBT

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Xiu Xiu – 13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto With Bison Horn Grips

In the goth stakes this year, Xiu Xiu’s 17th studio album made the Cure sound like Sabrina Carpenter. It’s a collection of haughty ambient balladry, skronking noise-pop and – in the underground hit Common Loon – ultra-distorted glam rock. Throughout, Jamie Stewart’s voice remains on superb, theatrical form: audibly trembling, even cowering at times; at others he strides around like a moustache-twiddling villain in a musical. BBT

The Kentucky metalcore quintet burst into rock’s big leagues this year with a 100mph battering ram, earning a Grammy nomination and a Slipknot arena tour off the back of this magnificent LP. The guitar tone has every drop of potential loveliness scoured away, leaving rough smears of noise, while the stop-start rhythms have a profound, almost hidden funk to them – learning how to duck and weave with these haymaker blows, listen after listen, is just one of this album’s great pleasures. BBT

Jessica Pratt makes music as if she’s painting watercolours, the shades of her acoustic songwriting blushing and blooming into one another with no sense of delineation. Her fourth album adds gentle percussion, bossa nova rhythms and synths for the first time, foregrounding a sense of temporal logic in songs that obsess over time – running out of it, dreaming of for ever; gorgeous koans like this, in By Hook Or By Crook: “Some people chip away time / More than they understand, an open hand / I’m waiting for way before first light / And it’s the edge worn clean again.” Pratt’s music is endlessly mysterious, but rather than create distance, her openness to the unknown plays like an invitation to wonder. LS

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Doechii – Alligator Bites Never Heal

You can imagine even the most modernity-denying hip-hop codgers getting on board with Doechii’s mixtape, characterised as it is by some of the year’s most technically astounding wordplay – particularly on the positively superhuman track Nissan Altima. But she’s just as good rolling over boom-bap at half the speed, and is funny and self-lacerating with it, as on Denial Is a River’s tour through drug and anger issues. As involving as the current generation of freewheeling young US MCs are – Playboi Carti, Ken Carson, OsamaSon et al – there’s something to be said for rappers who stay as perfectly on top of the beat like Doechii does. BBT

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Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – Challengers OST

For all the frisson in Challengers, the horniest thing about Luca Guadagnino’s surprisingly chaste tennis movie might be its score. More Berghain than break point, Reznor and Ross ratcheted the tension with adrenaline-spiking techno, the beat thwacking like a tennis ball against a hard court. The Boys Noize mixed version was the one you wanted, the ride intermittently imbued with a guttural, carnal undertow, taunting “yeah yeah yeah”s and a reckless sense of velocity that mirrored the players spinning out of control as they vied for Tashi Duncan’s approval. The song Brutalizer referenced the move where a player smacks the ball directly at their opponent’s body, but in the hands of the man who sang “I want to fuck you like an animal”, its relentless, panel-beater assault suggested quite a different kind of roughing up. LS

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Empress Of – For Your Consideration

After being dumped by a Hollywood director who began his Oscars “for your consideration” campaign the next day, Lorely Rodriguez played him at his own game and turned the breakup into a concept album about want and desire – one that doesn’t waste a second moping. Instead, with co-production from Rodriguez and artists including Nick Léon and Umru, For Your Consideration is a hot, sticky, direct dance-pop record that reflects her Latin roots and unknockable self-confidence: the joke of the title is that she doesn’t care for external approval at all. On the back cover she’s painted gold like an awards statuette. “I’m choosing myself,” she told Rolling Stone. “I know this record is good.” LS

White’s latest had a punkish release strategy: unmarked vinyl copies were popped into customers’ shopping bags at his Third Man Records stores, then he encouraged the recipients to leak the album online. Those tactics matched the music, which is the absolute opposite to careful strategy – it’s a first-thought-best-thought ripper full of riffs that could kick a saloon door off its hinges, the production values of an amphetamine-charged 1960s teenage garage rock band and White doing a series of outrageously fun takes on the frontman: hellfire preacher, punk oik, classic rocker. If it had been his solo debut it would be canonised by now – hopefully it’ll still earn the classic status it wears so casually. BBT

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Mach-Hommy – #Richaxxhaitian

“Vagabond, nose in the bolognese, moi / Triceratops hoping I’ma stay calm …” From the opening lyrics onwards, the Haitian-American MC sets off on riveting stream-of-consciousness flows somewhere between Ghostface Killah or RZA’s delivery for Wu-Tang Clan, and fellow new-school sages such as Billy Woods and Earl Sweatshirt. The beats are full of old soul and library music samples warping in the sun alongside fresh input from jazzy outsiders such as Georgia Anne Muldrow and Sam Gendel. But rather than freestyle and meander, Mach-Hommy keeps the whole album tacking towards the mainstream, locking into keenly rhythmic verses and satisfying choruses. BBT

It takes an extremely fleet pen for a band to release an album mired in self-referentiality and pull it off – not least when that band is Vampire Weekend, who for 16 years have doubled as shorthand (often unfairly) for a particular kind of self-regarding aesthete. But their fifth album exists in the long shadow cast by 2019’s sunny Father of the Bride, Ezra Koenig plotting the distance between the band’s youthful idealism and the surrender to ideological defeat that can come with middle age. The guitars and keys often sound weathered too, but the frenzied gallop of songs such as Ice Cream Piano, or Connect, with piano as skittish as a sky of sycamore helicopters, speak to a level of insurgent awareness that would still put many of their younger peers to shame. LS

“The haters” might be one of pop’s most boring subjects; anyone minded to bemoan them should take Amyl’s Amy Taylor as the gold standard. “Need to wipe your mouth after you speak / ’Cause it’s an asshole” she spits on Cro-Magnon rager Jerkin’; “there’s too many snags at the party” on Tiny Bikini – as in, sensitive new age guys, the type to tediously profess their feminist credentials. The brute disco of U Should Not Be Doing That takes aim at purist scene bores who think the Melbourne band’s international success invalidates their punk credentials – but it’s also indicative of the complex expressions of self-confidence that Taylor asserts on Cartoon Darkness, which are really her best strike against the haters. “I’m working on my worth / I’m working on my work / I’m working on who I am,” she yells frantically. Pub rock inveterates, Amyl and the Sniffers aren’t exactly the type of band to have matured on their third album, but the expansive, incantatory Big Dreams reflected a new mode, and offered a bit of Taylor’s spark to anyone in need of it: “Hey! When ya get down, oh you’re a lit one / Never been a dull one / Always been a big star.” LS

From Charli xcx to Sabrina Carpenter and this Atlanta duo, cool-girl intimidation was one of 2024’s abiding musical moods. “Gotta have competition to make a diss track, ho,” Coco & Clair Clair taunted on Aggy, their savage pen countered by deceptively sweet, low-slung synth-pop and nursery-rhyme-catchy choruses. You might argue that they really do seem to fear the competition from the amount of barbs that litter basically every song on their second album, but the oozy, glistening trap, nihilistic electro house and sing-songy vocals are just aloof enough to support the pose. Plus, they’re funny. “Pandemic and recession,” they sing on Bitches Pt 2. “But the dumb bitch economy is booming.” LS

There’s a gorgeous and affecting juxtaposition throughout the ex-Coral man’s most ambitious solo album yet. The backings are sumptuous, with strings, pianos, twinkling percussion and even a children’s choir on more than one occasion – but Ryder-Jones’s voice is broken down, dejected, desiccated. He trudges through these songs like a man unable to lift his gaze from the cracked paving stones – and yet the idealism and ready beauty of his backings are like the sun on his face, encouraging him to look up. BBT

“Oh, one look is all it takes,” Cassandra Jenkins sings on Omakase, one of many songs on her third album about living and dying by someone else’s gaze (or even, as on Petco, seeking solace in the eyes of a lizard). Although My Light … has more melodic heft (and tentative rockers) than her last album, An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, it still trembles with that kind of heart-in-mouth immediacy, with Jenkins the ever-alert antenna for interventions both divine and domestic. LS

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The cosmically spiritual music of Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane and others has been a central touchstone for London’s resurgent jazz scene in the last decade, but none of its members has ventured quite so far out of the solar system as Nala Sinephro. Her 2021 debut album Space 1.8 was a classic and she matched it with another: Endlessness seemed to drift off into heaven itself, landing in a vale of loveliness, the air filled with strings, gentle saxophone and her signature burbling electronics. It’s so difficult to make purely beautiful music not seem hellishly sentimental or twee, but Sinephro’s arrangements, with space for improvisation, are alert and vital. BBT

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Kneecap – Fine Art

Having already baited unionists with a song called Get Your Brits Out and a tour called Farewell to the Union – prompting Kemi Badenoch to cancel a £30,000 UK government-funded grant, a decision that was later found to be illegal – the Belfast rap trio had seemingly even fewer damns to give this year, advocating for Palestine much more loudly than most musicians, releasing an energetic self-titled biopic, and putting out a thrilling new album that massively evolved the tinny hip-hop of their debut. Produced by Toddla T and suffused with taunts, boasts, “rhino ket” and the very occasional dab of self-reflection, these rave tracks are perfect for hanging out of a hot hatch as the trio handbrake-turn from Irish into English and back again. BBT

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Tyla – Tyla

Tying together ultralight Afropop, US neo-soul and R&B, and the phosphorescent bass blooms of amapiano from her native South Africa, the production on Tyla’s debut album was expertly arranged and profoundly danceable. But the songwriting was even better – you expect even elite pop albums to have a couple of bits of padding, but every track here had a top line to cherish. Her serpentine high pitch on Jump, writhing with desire; her darting staccato on Art, softening into longer notes; her melancholy chatter on No 1, full of determination and resolve – this is pop performance at its most sensual, versatile and meaningful. BBT

The Canadian-American composer Claire Rousay made her name on gorgeously mundane field recordings, making her switch to Auto-Tuned slowcore pop on Sentiment seem surprising at first. Not just intimate but insular, it creeps through her self-loathing, depression and feelings of self-abasement, her lethargic melodies forging slow earworms: “Spending half of my whole life giving you head / Just in case you need to forgive me,” she sings, numbed, on Head. The cover depicts her hiding in bed, surrounded by empty cans and her guitar: perhaps Sentiment, suggesting an ecology of lo-fi bedroom pop, isn’t so different from her earlier work after all. LS

After her mostly underwhelming foray towards pop for 2021’s Star-Crossed, forged in the chaos of divorce, Musgraves found more stability in her life and headed back to the “spacey Kacey” cosmic country sound she found so much success with on 2018 breakthrough Golden Hour. The lyrics are full of trees, birds, fireflies and moonlight, all fecund with life as new love takes root, and it has her wondering about how it all came to be (The Architect) and whether wealth and success are pointless: “I’d burn it all to keep you warm,” she decides on Lonely Millionaire. BBT

Her previous album was Songs for Our Daughter, written for an imaginary child – and the follow-up ended up being about the real thing. It’s testament to Marling’s skill (which seems to deepen with every release) that even the most strenuously unsentimental listener will be moved by the way she writes about her newborn daughter. Although bathed in the bewildering glow of new life – there’s even a bedtime lullaby, called Lullaby – there’s also a fierceness in Marling’s promises of protection, and in how she asserts the importance of being present for one’s child. BBT

In the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, two young lovers sought the services of a dodgy psychiatry company to delete the other from their minds post-breakup – then attempted to outrun the memory erasers when they realised they were still in love. Refining her R&B luxe sound, Ariana Grande’s seventh album dwells in forgetting, both in how embracing new love requires the optimism that everything might work out this time, and in how quickly elements of the public turned against her when she split from her husband to date her recently separated Wicked co-star. “I’ll play whatever part you need me to and I’ll be good in it too,” she taunts on True Story, but the beauty of Grande’s own Eternal Sunshine lies in its complex, self-scouring songs about living with the reality of the heart. LS

There’s a generation of Black British female singer-songwriters shrugging at the limitations made for them: Tiana Major9, Pip Millett, Cat Burns, Poppy Ajudha, Cleo Sol and more could never be neatly tagged “R&B” or “soul”, even if people still often try. Rachel Chinouriri was also frequently miscategorised, but her debut album is a reminder of how boring – and permeable – genre boundaries are, from strutting new wave to squalling alt-rock and shuffling funk-pop to shivering acoustic ballads. But what really lights up this album is her strength of feeling as she takes people (occasionally including herself) to task for not being the best version of themselves. It’s intensely relatable and righteous – no wonder Sabrina Carpenter has invited her on tour next year. BBT

A three-year stint at Rada couldn’t get you even close to achieving the inimitable vocal delivery of Colombian-American singer Kali Uchis, whose blend of withering disdain, eyelash-batting seduction and awed wonder – sometimes all at once – is something to behold. Unlike its superb predecessor, Red Moon in Venus, the majority of Orquídeas is Spanish-language, but like a melodrama with the subtitles off, anglophone listeners can still intuit so much feeling and meaning from Uchis’s actorly performances as she builds from late-evening R&B to night-out Latin dance. BBT

After their banging Stuart Price trilogy of albums, Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe returned to swooning, songwriterly mode on Nonetheless. Pet Shop Boys’ finest album of the 21st century opens with Loneliness, a warning against succumbing to isolation. If its authoritative electropop doesn’t stir you from solitude, then their 15th album’s tales of queer dreamers, artists and lovers who went against the odds and thrived – Russian dancer in exile, Nureyev, on Dancing Star; Oscar Wilde watching boys on the promenade on Love Is the Law; the young Tennant himself as the freshly minted New London Boy – should make clear why big leaps are always worth taking. LS

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Anyone who has experienced grief will tell you that life in its wake doesn’t steadily improve on a straight, proportional axis; it’s all switchback turns on a bumpy emotional journey. And so it has played out with Nick Cave’s music since the death of his teenage son in 2015. Often harrowed and angry yet still with bursts of beauty and hope, the biggest burst yet came with Wild God, a maximalist celebration of the might of existence itself. The Bad Seeds manage to mingle real heft with a still-rickety quality, like a symphony orchestra and pub band combined, while Cave, finding joy even in a frog in a gutter, is inspiringly resolute in his lust for life. BBT

Mingling 18th-century Urdu poets and Rumi, words by a friend and jazz standards, Arooj Aftab’s fourth album casts a spell that brings these disparate traditions into a singular, spectral whole. Sometimes, as with the close vocals and weighty piano of Na Gul, it’s incredibly spacious; others, like the fiercely intricate plucked strings of Last Night Reprise, close and frantic. Both modes are entirely gripping. The beauty of the playing and arrangements is often otherworldly: the harp on the mournful Raat Ki Rani billows expansively against the song’s bodily heft. For all the striking, idiosyncratic arrangements elsewhere, the straightforward conversational intimacy of Whiskey plucks at the most core heartstrings. LS

After Katie Crutchfield leaned into her country roots on 2020’s Saint Cloud, Tigers Blood deepened her grasp on the genre, sounding as classic as Gillian Welch and David Rawlings one minute (Right Back to It, featuring the year’s breakout indie star MJ Lenderman), and delving into unpretentious southern rock the next (friend breakup anthem Bored). The comfort and ease in her songwriting set solid foundations for her voracious mind to wander, plotting the ever-changing distance between herself and others with tenderness and cryptic confidence – “There’s a lock on the door that costs more than my car, babe,” she warns on The Wolves – not to mention a voice that penetrates like a beam of light. Her second classic album in a row, Tigers Blood suggests an great catalogue forming before our eyes. LS

Fabiana Palladino cuts a surprisingly understated figure given the stature of her debut album, which she wrote and produced – and which revamps some of the most dramatic sounds of 80s pop. The spirits of Prince, Janet Jackson, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis echo through these songs, with their luxuriant, off-kilter arrangements, skin-prickling vocals and febrile, bone-dry funk. Yet it transcends pastiche, both on the quality of the songwriting and often-minimal arrangements that speak to rather more straitened times than the opulent era of Palladino’s influences. Next up, catch her collaborating on Lorde’s fourth album. LS

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Mk.gee – Two Star & the Dream Police

Whenever you think the electric guitar must have lost its potential to express something genuinely new after so many decades, someone like Mk.gee comes along. The young American parlays conservatoire-level technique into the most casual of playing, with a tone that’s half Delta blues, half Every Breath You Take. It would be simply the stuff of online guitar-nerd forums were it not for his astounding songs. They’re like transmissions from a phantom late-night AM radio station in the 1980s, beaming out peppy pop for giggly sleepovers (DNM, Candy) and yearning ballads for wistful truck drivers (Dream Police, I Want). BBT

As the huge resurgent success of Chase and Status this year has shown, British youth will always be receptive to drum’n’bass that you can fire gunfingers and sling Dark Fruits to. So it would have been easy for the young British producer Nia Archives to do an album of straight bangers, like her enduring Brazilian-tinged 2022 hit Baianá. Instead, she created a much more exciting hybrid of vibey junglism and thoughtful, vulnerable singer-songwriting. The high-tempo, high-stimulus breakbeats on tracks such as So Tell Me and Crowded Roomz seem to bear down on Nia as she tries to get perspective on her life. BBT

“It’s hard to know about anything,” Jessica Hickie-Kallenbach sings on Pant, from the London post-punk trio’s third album, “but feeling is good by me.” And Still House Plants layer feeling like a painter builds up impasto, with thick jabs of dissonant guitar that evoke Bill Orcutt’s splayed angles, discrete pockets of percussion that don’t adhere to traditional rhythmic structure, Hickie-Kallenbach repeating phrases and sounds as if summoning the strength to push at a locked door. This would all be so much avant garde noise if the effect weren’t weirdly emotional, making the familiar strange – the glowering guitar of 3scr3w3 has no attack, and seems to ooze like silt and mud at the bottom of a river – and betraying a profound effort to communicate and break through. LS

The protagonists of Jake Lenderman’s fourth studio album are on their knees, puking in their cereal, turning loneliness into a fetish; so desperate for connection that they’re knocking on glass at the aquarium to get the sharks to pay them some attention. They’re losers, no doubt about it, but the precision of Lenderman’s portraits – “I could really use your two cents, babe / I could really use the change” – speaks to a real kind of affection, as do the crunchy little bar-rock hymns he writes them. LS

The title of Mabe Fratti’s third album in eight months means “feel like you don’t know”, and the Guatemalan cellist and her small ensemble venture into strikingly novel territory here. Moving away from the abstractions of her previous records, these are strange, stately songs led by prowling cello, starbursts of brass and otherworldly distortion and effects that recall her sometime collaborator Oneohtrix Point Never. Songs such as Kravitz, Elastica II and Descubrimos un Suspiro centre bassy grooves as self-possessed and suggestive as those of Mingus’s Solo Dancer; the space in Pantalla Azul and Quieras o No seem to open up vast new vistas. Fratti’s piercingly clear voice cuts through it all like wax through watercolour. True to its title, Sentir Que No Sabes is an album that keeps yielding new revelations – a sense amplified by its surprisingly metal and totally astonishing live incarnation. LS

Moving at the pace of a pallbearer carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders, the Cure’s return is full of sombre finality: for love affairs, for loved ones, for a planet gone asunder, and also, perhaps, for this band’s long career. Robert Smith faces death not with his chest out, but caved in with sadness and disappointment; any accrued wisdom seems stupid or unimportant. Warsong is about a couple given to feuding but its declaration “for we are born to war” can’t help but be about retributive violence on a global scale. Romance falls short (“The way love turned out every time was never quite enough”) and even art can’t provide solace: “Left alone with nothing at the end of every song” is the album’s final line. But the deep, steady grooves suggest tenacity: humanity gritting its teeth as we trudge towards a scorched future. BBT

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The free-associative nature of the lyrics on Kim Gordon’s second solo album – sports cars, sex, bowling trophies, “$20 potatoes”, each recounted in her charred, vengeful mutter – take on a dissociative affect, like waking up from a bad dream into a worse one and wondering what happened. Produced by Justin Raisen, the industrial, blown-out churn of The Collective is an intentionally abrasive strike against society sleepwalking its way into a convenience culture touted by self-styled disruptors, and a reminder that real disruption only comes from the margins: at 71, Kim Gordon stands at a frontier, agitating against the future with her massive, singular perspective. LS

9
Sabrina Carpenter – Short n’ Sweet

The first time most adults heard of Sabrina Carpenter was in the fallout from Olivia Rodrigo’s 2021 breakout hit Drivers License, which appeared to cast her fellow Disney star as the other woman. While Carpenter’s 2022 album Emails I Can’t Send toyed with perceptions that she was a “homewrecker … a slut”, her sixth record leaned all the way in, Carpenter adopting a bawdy bombshell persona that revelled in the idea of her as a threat. “Yeah I know I’ve been known to share!” she laughs on Taste (which spent nine weeks as UK No 1), one of Short n’ Sweet’s many comically, casually horny hits. It was a monstrously successful concept, rebooting the classic blond pop princess with a lacerating tongue and a withering attitude to men straight out of the Lana Del Rey playbook – and most winningly, a savage sense of humour that rightly earned Carpenter comparisons to Dolly Parton. Perhaps the embarrassing boyfriend of the amazingly weird country song Please Please Please should just … stay at home; “Come right on me – I mean camaraderie,” she winks on the falsetto-drenched Bed Chem. Rodrigo witheringly cast Carpenter as “another actress”, and on Short n’ Sweet, Carpenter convincingly played the role of Nashville warbler, disco revivalist, R&B temptress, each mode tied together by her sharp pen. Espresso positioned Carpenter as the girl of your caffeine-addled dreams; her versatility and nimbleness with a heel turn and a wink made very clear that she can also be the girl of your nightmares, if you want her to be. LS

The sepia-tinged visuals for Tyler’s surprise eighth album made it look like a complete break from the globetrotting, pastel-hued luxe of 2021’s Call Me if You Get Lost. It turned out to share quite a bit of that album’s sound – the lush, swaggering G-funk and kaleidoscope of references – but stripped away at least some of its braggadocio to reveal the conflict beneath the fur hat: about commitment, parenthood, being doomed to repeat the sins of the father – and the shock reveal that maybe a figure he’d spent his whole life demonising wasn’t so bad after all. And if the sound was somewhat familiar, he made it newly disorienting, metal samples and lavish slow jams colliding into each other. Amid all the uncertainties, though, his supreme self-worth remained as magnetic and justified as ever, and whereas women were collateral in the Kendrick/Drake beef, here guests GloRilla, Sexyy Red and frequent interstitials from his own mother, Bonita Smith, spurred him to greatness. LS

The Irish band’s ambition gets bigger with every release, and with this fourth album they were aiming at arenas. Perhaps there’s something a bit too difficult – too poetic, yet too chippy – about them to make them cross over to the good-times crowds you need at that level; Liam Gallagher certainly isn’t a fan. But if you don’t get it, it’s your loss: who else right now has a four-album run like this? Even a sad ballad preposterously called Horseness Is the Whatness, tucked away on the final third, has a chorus you can’t believe no one’s written before, while Favourite genuinely is an arena anthem – something that sounds better with every beer you drink, until you’re flinging an arm around a stranger’s shoulders. BBT

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Nilüfer Yanya – My Method Actor

The heartbroken protagonist of the British songwriter’s third album is hollow inside, bleeding out; soul awol, amnesia reigning. The beauty lies in how she makes this state of desolation feel as opulent as a ruined palace. The palette is febrile and close, as humid as the tropics or as Sade’s sultriest moments; Yanya’s sidling, furtive guitar suddenly obliterated by pockets of thrashing rage, her usually poised voice betraying every wound inflicted on her. It’s one of the best-arranged albums of the year: judiciously applied strings up the sense of suspicion and devastation, and the tension and transitions trap you right up there with her on the knife’s edge. “I’m hardly here either,” Yanya sang on crushed standout Binding, but the 29-year-old’s utterly unique voice has never had more presence. LS

5
Beyoncé – Cowboy Carter

Cowboy Carter was Beyoncé’s attempt to stake a claim for the Black history of country music, but it was no straightforward Nashville record. Instead, in keeping with the sprawling ambition of the auteurist albums she has been releasing for the past decade, it wrapped its arms around the entire American music vernacular. She wasn’t afraid to tackle country’s iconic moments, notably recasting Dolly Parton’s Jolene as a steely eyed warning shot, but it was her attempts to shape country in her own image and foreground its Black origins that felt especially fresh and thrilling: Parton and Willie Nelson made lighthearted cameos; more significantly, greater deference was afforded to Black country musicians. “They don’t know how hard I had to fight for this / When I sang my song,” she sings on Ameriican Requiem, about being snubbed by the country music industry in the past. The depth of knowledge and the conviction of performance on Cowboy Carter are a clear testament not just to Beyoncé’s fight, but her intimacy with the genre. Read more. Annie Zaleski

4
Clairo – Charm

Charm dwells in a world of attraction and desire. Giddy songs such as Second Nature, with its heartbeat pulse of piano and Claire Cottrill’s nervous laughter, exist in the magnetic forcefield between two people inexplicably drawn together. But with Clairo’s typical incisiveness, her third – and best by far – album is also about what happens when the spell wears off, and when closeness becomes cloying. Co-produced with soul revivalist and bandleader Leon Michels, Charm’s world is fleshed out by vintage Wurlitzers, flurries of brass and breathy woodwind recorded straight to tape. It’s far from the lo-fi intimacy of her breakthrough work – the kind of intimacy that is forced, rather than given. Read more. Katie Hawthorne

3
Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft

Culpability in a breakup and – as with the paradox in the album title – the impossibility of identifying the villain in a complex situation are the murky themes of Eilish’s third album: sometimes anguished, sometimes vindictive, always satisfyingly messy and candid. Rather than reflect generational angst (as her debut did) or the hell of teenage fame, Hit Me Hard and Soft is insular and intimate, right down to the fantastically prosaic lyric in Lunch – about her newfound desire to intimately acquaint herself with the fairer sex – where she’s “pullin’ up a chair” and “puttin’ up my hair” as she prepares to get stuck in. Lunch is an apt title: desire nourishes and depletes across these 10 songs, and by ragged epic The Greatest (as raw as any Sharon Van Etten rager), Eilish wails in frustration about “All the times I waited / For you to want me naked”, recriminating herself and her estranged lover from breath to breath. Read more. LS

2
Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee

Before you even pressed play, Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee took you back in time. When it was released in March, the only way to hear it (aside from a YouTube video) was to go to a GeoCities website – a relic from the 90s internet, complete with multicoloured Times New Roman lettering – and download the audio files via Mega, the filesharing service beloved of 00s music blogs. The music itself went even further back, and indeed sideways, into a parallel dimension of 20th-century pop: doo-wop, glam, folk-rock, Nuggets-y psych/garage, Velvet Underground-style art-rock, French chanson, classic soul, 60s girl-group pop, synthwave, rockabilly and ambient all feature, emerging through lo-fi production as if corrupted on its journey from this spirit realm. Read more. BBT

1
Charli xcx – Brat (and Brat and It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat)

Brat came wrapped in a blunt, lowercase rendering of the album’s title against a sickly lime green: intended as a snub to the “misogynistic and boring” assumption that a female artist should automatically appear on her own album cover. It turned out to be a masterstroke of branding far more pervasive than any glossy photo, even influencing the US presidential race. Its sound was brash and aggressive, early 00s London club music – electroclash, acid-y bloghouse, dubstep, maximalist rave synths – shot through a chattering, trebly hyperpop filter; “Club classic but I still pop,” as Von Dutch put it. Oozing self-possession and confidence, Brat seemed to swagger even as Charli confessed to insecurity or inadequacy, a cocktail of emotions that seemed to be at the album’s centre. Read more. Alexis Petridis