The 12 Best Albums of 2024

The best-of-2024 lists below no doubt would be somewhat different if events in early November had gone another way. After that, instead of a top singles list, I’ve put together a set of “singularities”—some songs but also other musical moments and mutations that summon the essence of 2024, a year divided against itself. The Delightful Rise and Regrettable Disillusionment of Chappell Roan Chappell Roan’s album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess came out last year basically unnoticed outside of gays-only circles, but this year she rapidly became one of the three or four hottest things in pop, with one entrancing single after another—“Good Luck, Babe!,” “Hot to Go!,” “Pink Pony Club”. The Dream Birth of “Hit Em” Dance Music, July 29 As proof that good things can still happen on the internet, near the end of July, Drew Daniel tweeted that he’d had a dream in which a girl at a rave told him about “a genre called ‘hit em’ that is in 5/4 time at 212 bpm with super crunched out sounds.” Some 7 million views later, Daniel found that people all over the world were making his subconsciously conjured genre a reality and producing “Hit Em” tracks. This year the New York avant-garde saxophonist, composer, and new-music impresario is 71 and he has released, as of this writing, 12 full-length albums—not just live improv recordings as you might think, but three albums of compositions for organ, one live album of radical love songs, two volumes of the acclaimed classical singer Barbara Hannigan performing Zorn’s intricate vocal compositions, a quartet album called Ballades, another called Lamentations, a trio record called Her Melodious Lay, another of his ongoing project the New Masada Quartet live in concert, and a reunion of his death metal–jazz trio Painkiller.