This was another year of riches in the best jazz and creative music, with barriers between the tradition and the avant-garde melting away.
Thematically, much of this year’s best punk and hardcore music addressed mental health and working through the past while striving for a more peaceful present.
The excellent Brassroots Democracy details the beautiful and bleak ways that jazz music created the soundtrack of an emancipatory movement that lasts to this day.
Americana has never been better with the quality of music, diversity of styles, and the artists’ demographics in terms of race, gender, and wealth.
The year’s best folk albums transcend genre boundaries, yet each entry remains firmly grounded in the folk ethos of connection and storytelling.
Hard rock band Shinedown are never quiet about their struggles and never will be as they assure fans that being “slightly awkward, kinda weird” is perfectly normal.
Opa’s Goldenwings is an influential Uruguayan jazz album that somehow got lost in the shuffle but is gloriously brought back to life with love and care.
STS9 conjure pure mana for the soul with their wizardly sonic alchemy. The livetronica tone scientists continue to play at a very high level.
The Chatuye archives offer a broader understanding of how Garifuna artists have sounded their identity in community with one another.
In 2024’s best global music, celebrations of culture abound, with performers playing with sounds of home and family from the Caribbean to Tanzania and beyond.
Michael Kiwanuka’s most striking quality remains his voice, which has the power to evoke deep feelings, as his idols did for another generation.
Arthur Russell biography Travels Over Feeling is an elegy for a generation of underground artists that died too soon and a requiem for a vanished New York.
