You Have To Drink Paint With Me
I heard you, 2024
Advanced technologies invoke ancient entities; the human voice disintegrates into the howl of cosmic trauma; civilization hurtles towards an artificial death. Sinister musical subcultures are allied with morbid cults…[etc.]
Robin MacKay & Ray Brassier, introduction to Nick Land’s Fanged Noumena, collected writings 1987-2007
What song the sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.
Thomas Browne, Urn Burial
By the time I finish this post, the lists will be out - 40 great albums 2024, 100 best songs 2024, many of them ranked in order of merit. I promise to do no such thing. There aren’t that many top albums or songs, unless one is to mark them objectively (a well-played bassline here, good use of counterpoint there), when what matters, the only thing that matters, is the mark music leaves on our soul, whether or not it addresses our own specific longings and theories, and perhaps changes or advances them, which is all tied up with the way in which said music expresses the souls of its creators. So rather than list or rank the music of 2024, I’m going to spin my narrative about how the music of 2024 made its connections with me and my own aesthetic.
I began 2024, as we all did, with the best 2023 music playing strongly in my head - in my case Zheani’s The Spiritual Meat Grinder (produced, mostly, by Venesiaworld) and the Mona Evie 2023 singles and 2022 album Chó Ngồi Đáy Giếng, which I finally understood on acid on New Year’s Eve. This soon led me to discover tapetumlucidum<3 (produced, mostly, by Pilgrim Raid), released late in 2023 by Mona Evie singer Vũ Hà Anh (then known as aprxel), and a little later I discovered Amaarae’s beguiling mixture of psychedelic dance pop, punk spirit, and African electronic dance beats (still known regressively as ‘afrobeat’ despite their substantial variance from the music that originally bore that name) on Fountain Baby.
The above collection of sounds, created by fresh collisions of regional styles and international genres, once listened to obsessively, gave up keys to understanding plugg, vaporwave and hyperpop, and connected experimental music to the pop music of 2024, almost as innovative at its best, and something I’d given less attention in past years.
The first 2024 AOTY I encountered was Kim Gordon’s The Collective. Giant industrial guitar noise, autotuned angel bvs and hard trap grooves - finally an album in the new language by an old hand. Someone only a little older than me and not completely insane hears the music I do! I’d hear killer tracks like ‘Psychedelic Orgasm’ and people would say “what is this shit” and I’d say “haha it’s Kim Gordon, take that slacker, what price nostalgia now!” Gordon’s droll voice and dour lyrics finding a perfect setting that also provides a way back into Sonic Youth, who were always this innovative, and whose classic sound has become the template for a subsection of contemporary “pop”.
Death and the Maiden’s Uneven Ground gave us an updated version of their Dunedin Sound, thickly sequenced, deeply satisfying rhythm tracks, fractured post-punk guitar and bass, draped in rich “school of Lana” singing from Lucinda King, her new “catch-more-flies-with-honey” approach to singing some pointedly ambiguous lyrics making the listener complicit, creating the sense of moral tension that’s one of the things I’ve been looking for in modern music. ‘Leanest Cut’ was a fine single but I’ve played ‘364.1’ most.
Arab Strap’s I’m totally fine with it 👍 don’t give a f*** anymore 👍was a surprise AOTY contender, a set of songs about the internet, Scottish, compassionate, angry and sad. Modern and original in its production, ITFWI👍DGAFA👍 nonetheless harks back to classic 90’s sounds enough to back its “elder statesmen” stance. Poignantly self-aware critique, nailed down to last.
ITFWI👍DGAFA👍came into my ken because Hayley, who knows I have a special interest in music about the internet, sent me a link to an August Arab Strap interview by Tony Stamp (who recently declared it his AOTY) on RNZ’s The Sampler, one of the surviving venues for music journalism in NZ. Note that music journalism involves contending with new music or music news. I do not consider my or anyone else’s rediscoveries or reanalysis or just plain fanning of classic albums by safely dead, well-respected artists to be journalism. That’s just (fine) writing. Two New Zealanders writing on Substack, Chris Philpott and Chris Schultz, have kept me informed about the pop, rap and indie rock being appreciated by people who grew up in the 90’s, providing insights into 90’s music along the way. So when they both rated Mannequin Pussy’s 4th album I Got Heaven I had to give it a listen, and found it good; there’s an updated Riot Grrrl sound here, but also a solid sense of good rock songwriting and playing that reminds me of Neil Young and Crazy Horse. The wistful ‘I Don’t Know You’ is untypical of the album, but gives a good sense of how confident its songwriters are.
Another great Substack follow is The Other Dave Moore (not that I know who the first was); Dave finds pop songs from around the world, which he seems to have far more time to listen out for than me, and picked AKRIILA’s single ‘para siempre (｡ᐳ﹏ᐸ)’, which lead me to a Spotify countdown for its album epistolares, which, though I don’t understand a word of its Chilean Spanish, is my AOTY proper, because it reliably takes me on a journey from first track to last; as I wrote at the time,
”It’s full of the production moments - autotune fantasias, percussion blowouts, filter sweeps, skittery drum breaks - that make me laugh and clap my hands like a child, but once applied across Latin jazz feels - the Fender Rhodes hasn’t sounded this fresh in 50 years - and crisply defined reggaeton beats it often acquires a groovy laid-back quality, affirmed by the occasional drop into soft harp textures, brief moments of peace, like quiet sunlit glades met while crossing a noisy jungle.”
This seems like a good place to include my favourite dance track of 2024, found by going down one of Joshua Minsoo Kim’s V-pop rabbitholes, V# & Larria’s ‘Cafe Vợt’, which manages to be both understated and wild; the way that ubiquitous “babiddybop'“ sample is used so sparingly and quiet in the mix, the way the ever-evolving beat toys around with the song, the reminder of Home Brew’s ‘Run It Back’, the way the autotune solo is truly exotic and unpredictable in its melodicism make this little experiment perfect.1
Zheani, one of the artists defining modernity at the start of my year, only released two 2024 tracks, ‘Spoils of War’, about Joan of Arc with a guest spot from The Buttress (both connections I made in my 2023 review of I Hate People On The Internet), and ‘Sex Never Dies’, with the hardest ever trap/drill arrangement by King Yosef (so hard the hi-hat has its own sub). Otherwise, she’s put her energies into playing 60 or so dates in North America and Europe, performing some of her greatest work, with commitment enough to transcend the limitation of singing over backing tracks and multitracked vocals, to packed audiences that, like me, knew every word. ‘Sex Never Dies’ was the brand-new song premiered during the Maenad World Tour; this early performance in Texas was my first thrilling exposure to one of the songs of my year.
The song from the Nightosphere that threatened to resemble ‘Sex Never Dies’ at first but went off in a much gentler direction was ‘Remains’ by Alice Glass and CLIPS, which got me listening to Glass’s back catalogue, especially 2022’s Prey/IV and a fantastic remix album.2
Canada has a fine tradition of gothic modernism, including Glass and her former band Crystal Castles, The Birthday Massacre, and a band that the notoriously hard-to-impress Bob Sutton recommended to me this year, Elita, whose 2023 album Dysania is a perfect example of how to make dark themes pretty (and thus doubly disturbing). Emma Harvey’s special sense of humour making us okay with her not-ok subject matter, their softly-softly approach making Elita the Mazzy Star of Industrial Black Metal. The song Elita dropped for Halloween, ‘Masturbating in a Coffin’, perfectly balances Libido and Thanatos.
The best bit is that Elita seem to have started life as a kind of Lana Del Rey/West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band-influenced indie bedroom pop band, yet have turned out like this.
Kiwi favourites P.H.F. made lovely, anguished noise across three new collections that seemed to focus on three different electronica styles across 2024 - Load (post-hyperpop), Suffer (witchhouse) and, a few days ago, a four-song EP, Naturalized in Violence (death metal).
Because I’ve played The Breeders a fair bit this year, YouTube let me know that Kim Deal was releasing new work. ‘Crystal Breath’, a dance track demo from another world, become one of the top songs of 2024 at my place; the subsequent album Nobody Loves You More ranges whimsically across multiple styles. The title track has a complexity that contrasts with the modernist DIY simplicity of ‘Crystal Breath’, reminding me of ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’, and listening to the whole album, with its episodic structure and flights of fantasy, always makes me think of the Wizard of Oz, and see Deal, who sings throughout like a cross between Karen Dalton and Shelly Duvall, as a grown-up Dorothy Gale returning to Return To Oz.
I’ve also listened to a lot of the UK rap music Sage has been into this year - Lee Scott, Black Josh, Chester P, Dabbla, Dirty Dyke, Mr Traumatik etc, and it’s excellent - if you liked The Streets or The Fall back in the day this is the contemporary blossoming of that tradition, rap poets engaging with conspiracy theory, psychedelics, poverty and the dole-work-mental illness cycle that usually comes from telling people what they need to know not what they want to hear. Importantly, the beats are inventive and varied and don’t always take a back seat to the rapping. Here’s the latest from Chester P’s brother, Farma G; I liked this YouTube comment, like 43 other people - “It’s a good time to be a middle aged uk hip hop fan. Been waiting a loooong time for this golden age!”
And here’s Dead Players (Jam Baxter, Dabbla and Ghosttown), in Mexico City for some reason.
And here’s a whole 2024 album by Mr Traumatik, who always gets my attention with his dark trap sound and library of cult teachings (that might well appeal to Wu Tang heads). There’s even a decent vegan rant here.
As far as I recall there are no women in this hyper-Logos UK scene, but if there’s a US equivalent of this sound that I’m aware of, it’s Sophie Hunter, representing the Fire Kingdom, who on her recent EP Wail combines the spirits of Amy Winehouse and Eminem into a series of mordantly comic (“shit so bleak it’s funny”) raps and songs, over a beaty 2024 mix of trap, dub, and R’n’B. (Thanks to one of my most productive informants, Doorag, for this and the fakepercs3x tip; thanks, and Happy Birthday).
I don’t believe there was much pop music in my best of 2023, and probably no charting tracks. Things changed in 2024, but before they do, here’s a DIY set from someone quite capable of writing a hit when he grows up, Frog Power, the brilliant morpheus, my son,
Cringe is based in 2024, and a banger is a banger. After I heard the Mona Evie and Vũ Hà Anh albums in the New Year I began to notice similarities between the plugg ‘n’ b and soul that’s the basis for their experimentation and the pop music I heard in malls, and I took to Shazaming the sounds around me to learn more about it. The results were disappointing at first, as I wrote in Ever The Poptimist:
”I’ve been having this false epiphany once or twice a week for the past year. I’m in the mall, or a coffee shop, or the Warehouse, or Countdown, and I hear the pop music streaming where the musak used to play. I think I recognize slow jam trap beats and autotuned or naturally sweetened female vocals, and wonder, am I hearing something amazing, beyond the clatter and chatter echoing off the tiles? Ever the poptimist, I Shazam these sounds if I can, and, so far, have always been brought down to earth with a bang. I’ve been hearing the value-products of the culture industry, and without the muffling and distortion of noisy environments, the Fairyland pleasures I’ve imagined I’ve been reaching for have died in my hands with a Crystalman grin. The list of songs that have deceived me in this way is too depressing to share. The closest I’ve ever come to where I thought I was is Camila Cabello’s vocal on Bazzi’s ‘Beautiful’ over The Warehouse PA. I really should delete Shazam from my phone.”
Apart from Cabello’s autotuned solo in Bazzi’s forgettable song, the only decent thing I Shazamed for months was a Billie Eilish remix, but that was in an airport, at the higher end of background music. But one night in July Hayley and I were on our way home from town when Sage texted to ask for takeaways. For some reason now obscure I went in to Pita Pit in New Lynn, not a shop I’ve been in before. And bouncing off the tiles of that fast-food franchise, loud enough to surround me in waves of pleasure, was what appeared to be, to all intents and purposes, a fairy trap song. Shazam it? My phone was in the car! In this aesthetic crisis, I was torn between living in the sound for as long as possible, in the knowledge that I might never find it again, or missing most of it for the chance at identification and classification. I’m proud to say I stood my ground. And I was rewarded by hearing the same song a few days later and being able to identify it as ‘EASY’ by J/K-pop girl group LE SSERAFIM.
Surprisingly, I found other good 2024 LE SSERAFIM songs, like ‘Good Bones’, a spoken indie-rocker a little in the style of Sonic Youth, and the glam-rock trap of ‘1800-hot-n-fun’. What distinguishes LE SSERAFIM from other battery-farmed East Asian pop stars is the sense of pastiche in their work; the songwriting leans West, and cool, in interesting ways, gets it all a bit wrong, and the result is often - fun.
How amazing is it that in 2024 we could watch Coachella shows free online as they happened? I managed to catch Jockstrap (twice), Grimes (who had the most awesome hologram and whose second night sounded great), Doja Cat and Lil Uzi Vert (both of whom were disappointing), Thuy (whose attitude to lightweight pop was easy to enjoy) and a lot of little pieces of a lot of rather less fun stuff, sometimes positively grim. But the absolute highlight was Lana Del Rey’s second night, a series of tableaux with spoken word sections that presented Del Rey’s worldview as a theatre experience, a movie, a dream, almost as an ideology. In the course of that Coachella set a pop singer jumped onstage to sing a little upbeat song that reminded me of Lana’s hip hop style on Born To Die. I didn’t pay too much heed, it seemed like a distraction from the Great Work being expounded, but the upstart was in fact Cuban-American pop singer Camila Cabello, whose autotune solo in Bazzi’s ‘Beautiful’ would later catch my attention in The Warehouse. As did her album C,XOXO, spotted in JB Hi-Fi. Track 1 is ‘I LUV IT (feat. Playboi Carti)’, the song she sang at Coachella, and, belatedly, it’s become my Song of 2024, and C,XOXO one of my top album picks. Why? Because of Cabello’s experimental way with autotune - no other major pop singer is taking it as seriously as an instrument. Because the imperfections of C,XOXO are utterly in character and seem to improve it. Because of the blatant stealing from Charli, Lorde, Lana, Amaarae, and others I can’t possibly know about, always interesting, and exciting to witness, like a cool heist film. As is ‘I LUV IT’. Until recently, ‘Diet Pepsi’ was my pop song of 2024, it’s a beautiful thing, but Addison Rae’s act is a put-on, her innocence and happiness are not really at stake in ‘Diet Pepsi’, whereas Cabello’s joy in ‘I LUV IT’ has a manic-depressive quality. The Pitchfork review of C,XOXO complained that Cabello and Playboi Carti lack chemistry, but I think this is the point, his flat trapping is all about the drugs he wants to take. He’s the gravity to her high-wire act, and he will not catch her when she falls. The contrast implies something heartbreaking and real within the song, keeping Cabello’s part fresh; and this energy pervades the whole album, even the bonus tracks on the ‘extra’ edition. I’m including the Jimmy Fallon show version for the transcript of Carti’s druggy mumblings, and the robot dog dancers; no-one seems to have written anything about Grimes’ hologram, do we just take these things for granted till they turn up starving on our doorstep?
Talking of trap proper, it’s not Travis Scott or Future or Yeat that’s sounding like the real thing in 2024 (though Don Toliver’s ‘Kryptonite’ has sucked me in a few times), but DIY star fakeperks3x cooking this sort of thing up on BandLab. Check out her mighty ‘DOSUM’ too.
And talking of A-pop, thanks to William Dart’s New Horizons, I got to hear a Kiwi, Jaz Paterson, making perfect examples of it. Her producer Dan Martin’s beats on ‘Jealous’ seemed, like Cabello’s, to have knowledge of Amaarae, so I checked out the rest of Jaz’s work and discovered her making songs in a perfect 2024 A-pop style on her EP Ache a couple of years ago. I have friends who think I’m mental for rating this commercial pop music, but it’s an artform, like, say, the sonnet, or the string quartet and Jaz songs like ‘What Am I Meant To Do’ are currently some of the most perfect examples in existence. The Sly Chaos remix of ‘Jealous’ loses Dan Martin’s Amaarae beats, but compensates by rocking out.
Hanoi in 2024 is like Dunedin in 1984, wakening from isolation, offering up pop inspired by the cool sounds filtering in from outside, but pop that the musicians are only able to make their way. Hence December’s Rottweiler, a vocal-and-glitch album from Mona Evie’s Pilgrim Raid, the album I wanted from Vietnam for Christmas! I’m already hearing the sounds, deep in these colourful and emotive collages, that I’ll need to hear again. On acid.
And to help you celebrate the New Year, listen to the fireworks closing this brand new Vũ Hà Anh mini-album, Love Ampule, full of moonlit longing and unique modernist production, this time (mostly) from Flea. Although some of the signature sounds from tapetumlucidum<3 (monophonic synth lines, gaming effects) are still present, instead of that album’s futuristic late night cityscape these settings, which include some guitars, are lushly nostalgic for an alternative Vietnamese history of soul, R&B, and bossa nova.
So glad I didn’t publish my lists in November!
And so, in my wanderings I have I found myself back where I started, which is usually where I prefer to leave things. Along the way, I’ve realized that my preferences aren’t just for albums and songs but often for the scenes where original things first appear. I salute their denizens, and I offer you something from my own friends in that storied Dunedin scene, a recent gig that I think you’ll enjoy, first a new song from Ca$h Guitar that deserves to be a hit, ‘The Fairies Outnumber The Trolls’ (the whole set here is great and they cover one of mine).
And a really sublime set of beats and vibes, from the brat before there was brat House of 2000 (AKA Future 2000), I can’t better the brilliant description on YouTube.
Some quick reviews of a couple of Big Ones that others will have done to death - CHROMAKOPIA - Tyler The Creator has been listening to The Who, and this is good. In a Stevie Wonder kind of way.
Brat, etc. Charli XCX is the new ruler of the Candy Kingdom and we’re tummy full after eating this encyclopedic assortment of beats and special guests.
Here are most of these songs and some others that impressed me in one Spotify playlist:
Merry Xmas!
Ca Phe Vot - Saigon net drip coffee, also the name of a cafe at 330/2 Phan Đình Phùng, Phường 1, Phú Nhuận, Hồ Chí Minh, Vietnam, which appears in the song’s visualizer.