I voted in this year’s Pitchfork “best albums of 2024” list (and The Wire’s), and was asked to hold off on publishing my personal list until the full Pitchfork list went up on their website, which it now has, and the issue of The Wire with their look back came out today, too. (The Wire does a cool thing when listing the contributors to the voting: they list each contributor’s #1 album of the year.) So, here are my favorites. I have friends and colleagues who actively refine and adjust their lists of the best albums over the course of the given year, and even continue to do so, revising years and decades as time passes. I am, quite simply, not one of those people. Were I not asked to make a list, I would likely not. But I was, and I have, and I recognize these lists are very useful to people, so I share here happily. These are 25 records I enjoyed (or: appreciated, admired, got lost in) the heck out of this year:
- Bill Frisell/Andrew Cyrille/Kit Downes: Breaking the Shell (Red Hook Records)
- Jeff Parker / ETA Vtet: The Way Out of Easy (International Anthem / Nonesuch)
- KMRU: Natur (Touch)
- The Necks: Bleed (Northern Spy Records)
- Taylor Dupree: Sti.ll (Greyfade)
- Sarah Davachi: The Head as Form’d in the Crier’s Choir (Late Music)
- Dialect: Atlas Of Green (Rvng Intl.)
- Lia Kohl: Normal Sounds (Moon Glyph)
- Prefuse 73: New Strategies for Modern Crime (Lex Records)
- Eiko Ishibashi: Evil Does Not Exist (Drag City)
- Dirty Three: Love Changes Everything (Drag City)
- Eli Keszler: Live 2 (LuckyMe)
- Christopher Bissonnette: In a Second Floor Window (12k)
- Seefeel: Everything Squared (Warp)
- Kali Malone: All Life Long (Ideologic Organ)
- Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross: Challengers (Original Score) (Milan)
- FourColor: Lightscape (12k)
- Max Richter: In a Landscape (Decca)
- Tristan Perich & Ensemble 0: Open Symmetry (Erased Tapes)
- Michael A. Muller: Mirror Music (Deutsche Grammophon)
- Kenneth Kirschner: Three Cellos (Greyfade)
- Patricia Wolf: The Secret Lives of Birds (Nite Hive’)
- Nonkeen: All Good? (Leiter)
- Adam Wiltzie: Eleven Fugues for Sodium Pentothal (Kranky)
- Zimoun: Dust Resonance (Room40)