The 10 best albums of 2024 | Canada Voices

Let us put aside our feuds, be they of the potentially professionally lethal Drake-versus-Kendrick variety, or of whether brat summer belonged to everyone or solely the truest of brats. Here we seek only to celebrate quality, for 2024’s onslaught of albums was full of it. It was a year of bangers, slow burners, technological disrupters, futurists and thinly veiled metaphor-makers. There’s a lot worth celebrating.

Sabrina Carpenter – Short n’ Sweet (Island): Much of the year’s best pop music blended self-deprecation, self-awareness and refreshing production choices. (Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess came out in September, 2023, though its surge into the public consciousness took place this year.) The characters Sabrina Carpenter inhabits on Short n’ Sweet feel like well-constructed archetypes of Gen Zers showing up at a confessional booth that’s blasting records from all corners of a savvy collector’s bin: a bit of Bee Gees here, a dash of contemporary radio there, and over here, a bit of, inexplicably, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton’s 1980s collaborations.

Charli XCX – Brat (Atlantic): More than just the album of the summer. Charli XCX has been pushing the most interesting sounds of avant-pop into the mainstream for more than a decade, and Brat marked the long-awaited crossover moment that brought her from the top of the critical zeitgeist to the commercial one, too. Throw in a Ship-of-Theseus remix album, a thousand bad memes (and a few good ones), and you’ve got an album-of-the-year contender that everyone can love.

Fred again.. – Ten Days (Atlantic): The impossibly earnest British electronic producer Fred again.. surged to arena status this year, cementing his influence after emerging from pandemic lockdowns as an unexpected festival closer. Ten Days serves up dance-floor bangers and slow-build emotional catharsis. It shows Fred on equal footing working with hitmakers such as Anderson .Paak, rising stars including the Nigerian musician Obongjayar, and real-ones-know collaborators, including long-time producer Four Tet.

Kendrick Lamar – GNX (PGLang/Interscope): It’s nice when surprise albums are a genuine surprise. Though this may be the least thematically consistent album we’ve seen from Kendrick Lamar in years, it speaks volumes that he still made GNX feel like a consistent statement – enough that it soared to No. 1 on the Billboard charts and took up the top five positions on the Hot 100, even without including this year’s devastating, heard-around-the-world diss track Not Like Us on the album at all. And it’s nice that Los Angeles production legend Mustard gets such a full-throated shoutout on tv off.

Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee (Realistik): The most prominent pushback against today’s subscription-streaming ubiquity sounds like you turned the AM dial to an undiscovered station to discover a world of haunting harmonies, foregrounded bass and reverb-soaked guitars. Cindy Lee, the musical project and drag persona of Calgary’s Patrick Flegel, initially released Diamond Jubilee only on YouTube and a GeoCities-like website. To scan through its 32 tracks is to feel like time-travelling on an edible; whether you land on the insatiable groove of Flesh and Blood, the delicate distance of Don’t Tell Me I’m Wrong or the gentle jangle of Dreams of You, you’ll walk away with a smile.

MJ Lenderman – Manning Fireworks (ANTI–/Epitaph): Asheville, N.C., singer-songwriter Jake Lenderman has a gift for both storytelling and a good hook: Whether it’s a vignette or the melody that serves it, you’ll want to keep coming back for more. Each song, sometimes each line, on Manning Fireworks feels like its own short story. Lenderman’s character studies could inspire whole grad-school theses, whether it be the titular coward of Joker Lips or the tragic egotist of Wristwatch.

Mustafa – Dunya (Arts & Crafts/Jagjaguwar): Regent Park’s long-time poet-in-chief may have left Toronto for Los Angeles, but he’s willing to confront the tension. On Dunya, Mustafa confronts so much – friendships, heartbreak, grief, trauma both at home and abroad – on songs so gentle they themselves can feel in tension with his lyrics. It’s a debut full-length a lifetime in the making that plants Mustafa firmly in the present.

Ombiigizi – SHAME (Arts & Crafts): The collaborative project of Adam Sturgeon of Status/Non-Status and Daniel Monkman of Zoon brings out the best of both Anishinaabe artists. The band has cast SHAME as a work of Indigenous futurism – “making noise,” as the author Waubgeshig Rice put it, as part of an Anishinaabe revival. SHAME’s songs swerve between contemplative and explosive, taking cues from the best of indie rock, psych, shoegaze and postpunk.

Tyler, the Creator – Chromakopia (Columbia): Tyler, the Creator continues the self-produced genre explorations that have driven his public persona’s evolution from hip hop’s merry prankster to one of the most creative minds in music. Narrated by Tyler’s mother and with features from the likes of Daniel Caesar, Teezo Touchdown and Doechii, Chromakopia grapples with fame and age with a voice like no other.

Waxahatchee – Tigers Blood (ANTI–): The erstwhile Alabama punk and indie-rock musician Katie Crutchfield has, since 2020’s Saint Cloud, become a force of Americana. Her voice is clearer and stronger than ever before, but her songs remain tender. The Southern songs of Tigers Blood sound stress-free, but she’s a masterful enough storyteller to hide tension in the details. The album’s standout tracks, coincidentally, feature backing vocals from the aforementioned breakout star MJ Lenderman. Their voices intertwine over a tale of long-time love on Right Back to It, one of the year’s best songs, while on the title track, they drive the album to its cathartic conclusion.