By Jude Jones
Feed the sound of 2024 to a synaesthetic and they will vomit back one colour: that ubiquitous and bratty bile-hued green. The sonic highs and political lows of British pop star Charli XCX’s simultaneously self-absorbed and existentialistic BRAT need not be recounted to kick off a list of the best albums of 2024 (and, according to Pitchfork, already the 7th best of the decade). However, if the task at hand is celebrating the best queer artistry of 2024, the poppers-bottle pin is best passed over to its eclectic successor, Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat, the remix companion that takes both Charli’s signature self-absorption and her unexpected existentialism to wuthering new heights.
Illustration by GAY45.
The result was the career fag hag’s horny, yearny tour de force. On the one side, you had gay idol Troye Sivan sliding “Talk talk” a hit of GhB to turn it into a sweaty Grindr anthem and Billie Eilish driving lesbian Twitter crazy by whispering ‘Charli likes boys but she knows I’d hit it’ on the Dare-produced “Guess” remix. On the other, you had Lorde’s feature on “Girl, so confusing” to encapsulate every homoerotic are we, aren’t we friendship there ever was.
But, beyond the self-referential metaverse of Charli and her acolytes, pop music has welcomed other saviours this year. Disqualifying breakout star Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess on the technical basis of it releasing last year – despite only reaching mainstream success inside 2024 – the posthumous release of SOPHIE’s second album, SOPHIE, put a pensive punctuation mark on Charli’s ecstatic party-girl mood, especially since BRAT was, in part, a half-formulated ode to the singer’s genre-flipping mentor. Waxing and waning from immersive, vertigo-inducing soundscapes to throbbing, bashful dance tracks, SOPHIE was a both joyful and tearful ode to a trans icon taken too soon, the goddess who had promised she would reshape with her own hands the world of pop.
SOPHIE’s untimely death turned her into musical motif, extending her essence into lyrical beats and beaten lyrics (as I like to imagine, how she might have wanted it). If St Vincent’s tribute to the trailblazer in her single “Sweetest Fruit” was taken by fans as too on-the-nose in its approach to homage, the album All Born Screaming was lauded as more holistic and layered, more oblique and gauzier too. The album hurtles from hypnagogic ballads to thrashing rock anthems, a rollercoaster-trajectory employed elsewhere this year by British pop-rock band The Last Dinner Party for their baroque and indulgently iconographic offering Prelude to Ecstasy. The work is orchestral, cerebral, rococo, and opera, saturated in references to both religion and legend in an album that is perfectly and unashamedly a little bit too much.
Across the Atlantic, Philadelphia rock outfit Mannequin Pussy chose to digest Christian iconography a little differently, asking the profane question, ‘What if Jesus ate my fucking snatch?’ on their album I Got Heaven’s title track. If neither the name of the band nor their Tropic of Cancer-esque lyricism had already tipped you off though, their release is the sonic equivalent of a sleazy mosh-pit at a female rage rock concert. I Got Heaven is biting, cathartic, and funny, on the complete opposite end of the rock spectrum to The Last Dinner Party’s meticulously produced, Queen-esque pop-infused melodrama on Prelude to Ecstasy. Although, I Got Heaven is certainly melodramatic, just perhaps in a more much amphetamines-heavy than ecstasy-light sort of way.
And if Prelude to Ecstasy and I Got Heaven represent two opposing ends of rock music’s spectrum, the metamorphic experimental ensemble Xiu Xiu float somewhere alien-esque in its gravitational orbit. 13” Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips is evasive and eerie, a harrowing cinematic fever dream that then grounds itself every so often with the wall-of-sound curated chaos of tracks like “Common Loon” or “Veneficium”. Xiu Xiu, around for the better part of two decades now, were doing that East-London, Speedy-Wunderground post-punk long before Black midi and Black Country New Road made it cool then uncool, piecemealing a sort of anti-rock that feels to the broader genre what SOPHIE’s esurient anti-pop sound has been to pop since its 2010s introduction. 13” is thus an Ozymandias-like testament both to Xiu Xiu’s longevity and the band’s sonic sands of time.
But some of the year’s best music has come from innovating on timeless sounds. Brittany Howard, who rose to prominence as the lead singer of Grammy-nominated neo-blues rock outfit Alabama Shakes, made a career of paying tribute to the likes of Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, and AC/DC. In her sophomore solo album What Now, the celestial singer slips between psychedelia, funk, soul, house, and jazz in a way that is both sprawling and simple, an excellently executed hit of fresh nostalgia.
Cindy Lee’s exhaustive, two-hour long Diamond Jubilee plays a similar game. Dense and cluttered, its web of inspirations include classic rock n roll, dreamlike psychedelia, and retro pop to create a sound that is strangely haunting and ghostlike, like the lost lovers lead singer Patrick Flegel whines about in each and every track. The album is a marathon, but in the same way that as James Joyces’s literary masterpiece Ulysses: cruelly impenetrable, yet flourishing in genius, daring, and reward.
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