Loud And Quiet Albums of the Year 2024
Our top 20 records from what might prove to be the last year on earth, as voted for by our contributors
A couple of months ago I wrote on loudandquiet.com about what we’d been up to this year. Including what we hadn’t been up to. The short version is that Loud And Quiet as a physical magazine has been on hold throughout 2024, as we’ve dedicated the year to our Midnight Chats podcast and thought long and hard about what the future of L&Q could be in a world of increasing printing costs and all the rest of what goes with running an independent music magazine these days. It’s how we accidentally ended up here on Substack, originally moving our L&Q Weekly newsletter over from MailChimp purely to save on the costs we were being charged there. But perhaps Substack has more in store for us in 2025. The long, hard thinking continues, now with something of half an idea forming.
Despite podcasts being our thing in 2024 though, it doesn’t mean we’ve listened to and debated the year’s album releases any less. You may not find full reviews of everything on our Albums of the Year list on loudandquiet.com this time around, but not due to how extraordinary we’ve found these 20 albums by these 20 artists. As always, we hope you find something new or rediscover records from earlier in 2024 that have been buried beneath an avalanche of Kendrick Lamar memes. Stuart Stubbs
*Note: If you’d like to listen to the embedded albums all within this post, you can do that by viewing this post in your browser rather than you email inbox, at loudandquiet.substack.com or in the Substack app.
20.
Tony Njoku – Last Bloom (PRAH)
British-Nigerian composer Tony Njoku was never an electronic artist making work you could comfortably describe as dance music, but those chopped and screwed experiments he was forever slowing down and speeding up, warping and twisting, feel like big room floor-fillers compared to where he is now. Over the last 3 years or so he’s been on a quest of refining, repeatedly reworking tracks as he boils them down their essence, heading deeper and deeper in a direction of minimal classical and ambient. Last Bloom might not even be the end point (despite the name it’s already been followed by an EP called Encore this year) but it’s Njoku’s best work yet, still featuring his almost choirboy vocals on two tracks (including the Bon Iver-ish 'The Reset Was Reset Again’) but otherwise confident in the less is more approach Njoku has been seeking, where his self-taught piano chops feel so expertly simple on ‘Pepper’ it sounds like a famed piece you’ve heard a thousand times by Erik Satie. Stuart Stubbs
19.
Bingo Fury – Bats Feet For A Widow (The state51 Conspiracy)
You will find Jack Ogborne, aka Bingo Fury, under a shadowy Bristolian streetlight musing about everything from vampiric billionaires to trips to the supermarket. Debut album Bats Feet for a Widow holds your hand for an esoteric walk-through Ogborne’s inventive mind, sometimes absurd but always captivating. The series of cinematic, dissonant piano ballads was recorded in his local church alongside an accomplished network of musicians from Bristol’s underground jazz scene. Inspired by Fury’s tangled feelings towards his strong religious upbringing, it’s a bit like David Berman, Archy Marshall and Scott Walker sitting down for supper with Ogborne pouring the drinks. Ian Roebuck
18.
English Teacher – This Could Be Texas (Island)
Released in May, English Teacher’s debut album won the Mercury Prize in September. Their triumph represented a few things: real affirmation for the band’s sonic ambition and elegant lyricism, vital representation for thriving but neglected British cultural scenes outside of London and, most importantly of all, spectacular vindication for this writer, who’d been telling you all for years how good they were, most notably in issue 163 of Loud And Quiet. Readers have since been able to discover for themselves what makes them such a special band – the assurance with which they navigate genre fluidity, for instance, or Lily Fontaine’s tying together of personal and social commentary with such poetry and wry candour. Winning the Mercury has, on occasion, proved more of a hindrance than a help when it came time for the victor to turn their thoughts to a follow-up. Such was the poise and self-possession with which English Teacher carried off This Could Be Texas, though, it’s hard to imagine the band’s spectacular 2024 will act as anything other than a massive springboard. Joe Goggins
17.
Kendrick Lamar – GNX (pgLang)
Kendrick Lamar didn’t need to release an album before the end of 2024 to have had the most successful year in hip hop, but he did anyway. Before GNX’s surprise release in late November, he’d already buried Drake in a publicly devastating tit-for-tit that gave us the biggest song of the year, ’Not Like Us’; February 2025’s Super Bowl halftime show was already his; Seven Grammy nominations had long since been secured. But when you’re considered the greatest rapper of all time you work to your own schedule, and GNX is Lamar once again proving that he does what he wants when he wants. His shortest and least conceptual record, it plays like a collections of effortless songs that honour Lamar’s beloved L.A. and slags off all rappers that aren’t him. It’s not even his best record, and yet no one argued for good reason. The last guy who messed with Lamar will never get over it. Stuart Stubbs
16.
Moin – You Never End (AD 93)
Proclamations of bands reinventing guitar music are a dime a dozen, but Moin’s You Never End hits differently. Immediately you’ll notice how textured this third album from the London trio is; three instruments establishing a pattern and repeatedly exploring it until they grow/unspool. The guitars are a little shoegaze buzzsaw, a little Mid-Western. They're scrappy too, often playing to a different speed than the percussion. Valentina Magaletti’s drumming is great; it’s able to wrongfoot with a jittery beat (the Four Tet meets Shellac ‘Anything But Sopo’) or sound deft and programmed like on ‘Lift You’. A key tenant of Magaletti’s shapeshifting practice is improvisation and collaboration, and both are correct and present on You Never End. Moin started as a collaborative project between her and Blackest Ever Black alumnus Raime, and this spirit is extended as the likes of Olan Monk, james K, Coby Sey and Sophia Al-Maria guest vocals over the course of the 11 idiosyncratic tracks. Some of the tunes are instrumentals whilst others are coloured by the tone of the different vocalists. The effect is like overhearing conversations on a night bus that journeys deep into the heart of the city. Theo Gorst
15.
Elias Rønnenfelt – Heavy Glory (Escho)
Although his band Iceage have increasingly expanded their range since their early days as the austere vanguard of Denmark’s punk underground, the tenderness and melodicism of Elias Rønnenfelt’s first album under his own name makes for a pleasant surprise. Even his other side projects, from the sturm und drang doom-blues of Marching Church to the apocalyptic new wave of Vår, hold the listener a little at arm’s length; the opposite is true of Heavy Glory. There’s real vulnerability and beauty here, from the Yves Tumor-like ambience of ‘Close’ to the widescreen balladeering of ‘Soldier Song’, which owes as much Townes Van Zandt or John Prine as it does to the more familiar Rønnenfelt touchstones (Nick Cave, Roland S. Howard) who haunt other parts of the record. Dropping the thousand-yard stare and looking a little closer to home, Rønnenfelt has hit upon something genuinely affecting. Luke Cartledge
14.
Nala Sinephro – Endlessness (Warp)
Endlessness extends a moment into infinity and somehow has it feel as if it’s lasted no time at all. The London-based Belgium-born composer, keyboardist and harpist centres her second record on a simple arpeggio, then explores the possibilities with a strong cast of collaborators, including Black Midi’s Morgan Simpson and saxophonist Nubia Garcia. Many voices form to give one fluid and continuous perspective over it’s ten tracks, fittingly called continuums. The record freely morphs in tone, temperature and genre. Its sounds are steeped in the London jazz scene, but also exist out of time. We drift from chilly ambience to sweeping, lovesick string sections, stunning sax solos and harp-led moments of intimacy. It’s gorgeously constructed, with detail to admire in every section. Despite the technical mastery, the album is felt before being intellectualised, and Endlessness seems to make your surroundings sharper and more colourful. With all this endless possibility, its true power is in making the everyday bright and profound. Skye Butchard
13.
Goat Girl – Below The Waste (Rough Trade)
Come for the melodies, stay for the atmosphere: Goat Girl’s third album is full of proper pop toplines – ‘words fell out’, ‘motorway’ and ‘take it away’ all feel like classics from the first listen – but there’s musical heft beneath them, too, that adds tang to the sweetness. Whether it’s surges of strings and massed choirs, sludgy synths, sawtooth basslines, or just barely-there, close-miked vocal delivery, Below The Waste’s arrangements create a perfectly self-contained weird little world unto itself, one into which you can burrow and discover new nooks that open up further with every repeat listen. Complex but approachable, intimate but substantial, odd but internally entirely coherent, Goat Girl have made a transporting, unpredictable record that sounds (completely intentionally, one suspects) unlike anything else released this year. Sam Walton
12.
Clarissa Connelly – World of Work (Warp)
How’s this for an intimidating elevator pitch: an album of haunted prog-folk, looking to medieval mythology, French philosophy, celtic folklore and the author’s own lapsed Catholicism for inspiration. It speaks volumes of Clarissa Connelly’s talent that she makes all of the above seem utterly essential on this, her spellbinding third album and debut for Warp. Alternating endlessly exploratory piano with classical guitar, these spacious arrangements prove the perfect foil for the Copenhagen-based Scot’s ornate vocal. As for comparisons, there are shades of Kate Bush’s The Sensual World at points but, really, World of Work confirms Connelly as a total one-off. Gemma Samways
11.
MJ Lenderman – Manning Fireworks (Anti-)
The rise of MJ Lenderman from fringe hero to indie rockstar has been a joyous thing to witness. Between his own releases and his crucial part in Wednesday, and his part on this year’s record from Waxahatchee, he’s become an essential figure in alt-country. Manning Fireworks is the victory lap. That could make it a safe, perfunctory pick for a list like this. While Lenderman’s sixth record is the most traditional and accessible he's made, to view it as safe would be to deny how odd and singular he is as a writer. Songs like ‘Wristwatch’ and ‘She's Leaving You’ might bang like classic rock songs but they're full of turns and contradictions, and Manning Fireworks is buzzing with charm. There's a fascinating mix of empathy and disgust for its central characters. Each one-liner is at once a dad joke and a deep truth, somehow formed into an earworm rock song. Yes, it's another great MJ Lenderman album at the end of a line of great albums, but more than ever you can’t help but root for its protagonists, and for him, unabashedly. Skye Butchard
10.
Anastasia Coope – Darning Woman (Jagjaguwar)
New York artist/songwriter Anastasia Coope’s debut album is a giant display of artistry for something so small and self-contained on the surface. A supernatural record of domesticity and quiet habit, her dream sequences are tender and detached, surrealisms swirling into the air and retreating into the four-walled bedroom production. Through hushed freak-folk and lo-fi choral music, Coope’s the discreet puppeteer at its heart, conjuring ghosts as quickly as she dispels them. Its 20-minute runtime holds some of the longest-lasting, most easy to underestimate songs of the year. Tristan Gatward
09.
Claire Rousay – sentiment (Thrill Jockey)
In the same year that Dua Lipa opened her pop album with a “One, two, three, ay!”, as cocktails sloshed by the Ibiza pool ‘End of an Era’ was designed for, LA collagist Claire Rousay opted for a dismembered voice note that went: “It’s 4pm on a Monday and I cannot stop sobbing.” Two very different ideas of what ‘pop’ is, even if sentiment is Rousay’s most direct and accessible record yet. She called her new sound “emo ambient”, the perfect record store filing card for the half of the tracks here that have Rousay singing Death Cab For Cutie-esque confessionals (about sex and depression) through a vocoder, her guitar dialed in to slowcore picked patterns. The rest of sentiment is something else, distinctly anti-pop and more in line with Rousay’s previous (prolific) Bandcamp output from the practice of concrete musique and drone. The sour to sentiment’s sweet (if we’re calling songs about oral sex, like ‘head’, that), both deliver a gut punch, with Rousay’s full “pop songs” landing her abstract field recordings more than ever before. Stuart Stubbs
08.
JPEGMAFIA – I Lay Down My Life For You (AWAL)
In his most conventionally structured (shortest) album to date, Flatbush alt. rapper JPEGMAFIA’s orchestrations of chaos feel more striking than they’ve ever been. Following his critically acclaimed 2023 collaborative LP with Danny Brown, I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU leaps across beds of industrial noise, pantomime rock, punk and glitch-pop, brought together by his staccato rap and self-depreciating meme culture fluency. The features are concise and electrifying, Flume’s co-production of ‘New Black History’ is sutured and hair-raising, and it’s easily the most fun, most accessible record of his career. If he’s the black Michael Phelps, just acknowledge the stroke. Tristan Gatward
07.
Kim Gordon – The Collective (Matador)
In different hands, an album that combined glassy-eyed spoken word with industrial distortion and stalking, drill-like beats would be almost comically hostile to new listeners – aggressive, unknowable, aloof. Not so for The Collective, the latest work of strangely compelling, subversive experimentation from an artist who’s made a 40-year career of such projects. With her unmistakably icy delivery and knack for atmosphere-building, the Kim Gordon we’ve all known for so long is totally present and correct, but she spends the course of this record repeatedly de- and recontextualising herself, continuing to stake out new territories across a remarkably broad spectrum of contemporary music, making a whole host of novel textures entirely and permanently her own. Luke Cartledge
06.
Geordie Greep – The New Sound (Rough Trade)
When Black Midi frontman Geordie Greep announced the abrupt split of his group earlier in the year, he had already begun to play with other groups, so this impish solo debut release perhaps didn’t come as much of a surprise. What is surprising, however, is how wildly accomplished The New Sound is, as Greep soars to new heights all over this thing. Nu-Yorican salsa, Zappa, Steely Dan and ECM jazz have all left their imprint on this vital solo debut, but the end result is a thoroughly brilliant and modern rock album. Cal Cashin
Listen to Geordie on our podcast
05.
Waxahatchee – Tigers Blood (Anti-)
Tigers Blood could be the end of the road for Waxahatchee. While that might sound ominous, it's actually kind of a good thing. In what might be the last stop of a journey that Katie Crutchfield first embarked on with 2020’s Saint Cloud, her seventh record finally irons out the concessional indie rock of her early records, honing down on a sound more honest to the grit and heartache that lies at the centre of her music. The result is an album that, like the prairies of her Missouri home, seems caught between inescapable intimate moments and vast, unknowable horizons. Almost every song feels like you’re laid out with Crutchfield by a crackling campfire out in the boonies, staring at the embers as they reach up to the stars and laughing while you dissect all the same old relationship mistakes and self-destructive patterns. Dominic Haley
Listen to Waxahatchee on our podcast
04.
Ex-Easter Island Head – Norther (Rocket)
Norther is magical. Previously known for rigid, scientific experimentation with mallet guitar, Liverpool quartet Ex-Easter Island Head’s latest record finds a delicate and emotive beauty amongst their minimalist compositions. Each track takes a different approach: opener ‘Weather’ recalls the majesty and propulsive percussion of Julius Eastman’s ‘Femenine’, thanks to motorised plucking; ‘Magnetic Voices’ pieces together a hypnotic choir from wonky, humanoid samples; ‘Lodestone’ steps in to close as a grounding, earthy swarm of strings. Together, they collapse the gap between the past and present, incorporating both an aeolian harp, played by the eponymous Norther wind, and voice samples funnelled through their horizontal guitars. It’s a perfect suite of spells. Jake Crossland
03.
Mabe Fratti – Sentir Que No Sabes (Unheard of Hope)
Mexico City-based Guatemalan cellist Mabe Fratti has emerged this decade as a potent whirlwind at the vanguard of experimental music. Here, she adds another string to her bow, as her boundless spirit of adventure takes her to a world of industrial, writhing pop music. Her virtuosity on the cello, hypnotic voice and astral pop sensibilities make this her most instant and accomplished work yet. Cal Cashin
02.
Charli XCX – Brat (Atlantic)
The most Brat album of the year. Everyone
01.
Cassandra Jenkins – My Light, My Destroyer (Dead Oceans)
We now know how close we came to never having this incredible third album from New Yorker Cassandra Jenkins. As the often cosmically loaded My Light, My Destroyer was launched in July the story by its side related to Jenkins’ breakthrough, previous album, An Overview On Phenomenal Nature. That album was to be her last, following years of music not quite working out. It existed only to get Jenkins through a tour she’d committed to at a time when she was so sick of her old songs that she needed something new to play to face getting on stage each night. She’d take those songs on tour for the first and last time, and then pack it all in. Only An Overview… – a record of crossroads and questioning and grief and identity crisis – found an audience, you have to say naturally, in the strange days of Covid-19. It was Jenkins’ big break just as she’d made peace with a big break never coming, making My Light, My Destroyer the first record in what she called “the bonus round of life” on our Midnight Chats podcast earlier this year. Nothing is hidden in metaphor on this most literal of indie records, where The Bends-ish ‘Petco’ really was written in a Petco store, ‘Aurora, IL’ is the autobiographical tale of being stranded on tour whilst recovering from Covid, and the siren call of ‘Delphinium Blue’ speaks plainly of Jenkins’ job in a flower shop. Her voice has always felt like she’s whispering to you and only you, and it remains the case here, as she repeatedly sings about a loneliness that she’s still working through and the recurring, awestruck theme of outer space, from Jeff Bezos firing William Shatner into orbit (again, it happened), to a secretly recorded voice note of her mother discussing the red supergiant star Betelgeuse. As Jenkins has said, it’s a record that absorbed An Overview…’s ‘fuck it’ energy and turned it into unashamed ambition, but nobody could have dreamed of it reaching such heights as being the Loud And Quiet Album Of The Year. Stuart Stubbs
I have not seen or heard anything related to waxahatchee being done. Even google search hasn’t come up. On what basis are those comments made?