The 30 best songs of 2024
LA TimesIn a year of exuberance and dread, songs came from every which way to comfort, to amuse, to haunt, to tantalize. Chappell Roan, “Good Luck, Babe!” The achievement of Roan’s breakout smash — a stand-alone single so buoyant that it lifted her 2023 debut to the upper reaches of the charts — is its emotional specificity: Somehow sleek and jagged at the same time, “Good Luck, Babe!” is a song in which a woman gets a lover to consider what she’s abandoning in a breakup by asking her to imagine waking up a few years hence and realizing that she could have had all this — and now instead she’s just somebody’s … wife. Shaboozey, “A Bar Song ” A rich text on America’s cultural and racial realignments — and a guarantee that Shaboozey will never pay for a shot again. Taylor Swift, “But Daddy I Love Him” Best pregnancy-announcement troll in a pop song since “Papa Don’t Preach.” — A.B. Gracie Abrams, “That’s So True” “I could go and read your mind / Think about your dumb face all the time.” — M.W.
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