The Best Albums of 2024, Part 1
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No idea what it is that you're talking about. It's foolproof. Okay. Okay. Basically, you just repeat the last thing that anyone says in a conversation. Says in a conversation. Yes, exactly. So, Anne, if you say, you know, this new Cure album hit me really hard, then all I have to say is, it hit you really hard. Yeah.

And then let you take it from there. Pretty good. You learn this from years of therapy. Yeah, because therapists always say, you said something really interesting just now. Exactly. Now, I can't take credit for it. It came from the TV show, Nobody Wants This. Do you guys watch that? Nobody Wants This? Oh, it's so good. Kristen Bell. What is it?

Adam Brody. Oh, it's the one about the rabbi. Yeah, he plays a rabbi. And it's a bit of advice that one of the characters gives to another character. They have to attend some high-level executive meeting that they're not prepared for. He's like, trust me, I'm in meetings with executives all the time. Just repeat the last thing they say. And it works every time. This is about dealing with narcissists. I'm just saying. Yeah.

Well, then maybe you don't want to hear the fact that I will probably be using this a lot with you guys through the course of this show as we talk about the best albums.

Of 2024, NPR Music posted a much longer and fuller and more expansive list. For everyone to dig into, you'll find that on the NPR site. We're going to talk about some of our favorites in this. What would you say? Are wildly incomplete, full of glaring omissions? You know, the usual. The usual. No, I would say are absolutely perfect, well-curated, deeply informed lists. Well, I don't know what show you're listening to, Anne, but...

And a quick note, we're going to break this up into two parts. So this is the first part. We'll have part two coming a little bit later this week, but we should get to some music and we can kind of go wherever this takes us. But I did think that we should start with one of the most inescapable songs and albums of 2024, Sabrina Carpenter's Short and Sweet. That's the album name. And let's just hear the song Espresso. So you can't sleep, eat espresso, dry it all, switch it up, lighten it.

I can't relate to desperation. I give a vacation. Anyone stop. When they are this way. No, I got a dream came true. Yes. Yes.

My friends and I were doing a funny thing today. We were making up different, you know, when she sings, I'm working late because I'm a singer. Is that on the song Espresso? Yeah.

Yes! It's a very deep, confessional, autobiographical song, Robin. I didn't take to this album like everyone else did. I mean, it is undeniably catchy, but I couldn't get past it being just more than just sort of a hooky, fun, sort of low-stakes album. But you think there was more going on it than that? Oh my God, you're so wrong. I'm sorry. No, Short and Sweet is a...

masterpiece. I love it so much. It's like Sabrina Carpenter, who of course, this isn't her first rodeo. She's made several albums in the past and was a Disney star, but she comes into her own on this by creating this character that to me is like,

screwball comedian, you know? She's hilarious, the songs are really sexy and fun, and the production is light as a feather. I have to say, and I've said this to you before, and "Espresso" and "Please Please Please," the big singles from this record, are not its selling points to me. I mean, when I first heard those, I didn't imagine that I would click into this record the way that I did.

And it was hearing the deep cuts and understanding her particular sense of humor that got me into it because she is corny as hell, but in a really fun way. I laughed out loud when she's trying, it's like a steamy, I can't remember what song it was. Maybe it was Bed Cam where she says the thermostat is set at 69. Okay.

The album was fun to me. I enjoyed it for just being pure fun. But she's doing something... There's a lot of people who could sing that exact line, and I would be like, you're under arrest. LAUGHTER

No. She pulls it off. She pulls it off. Yeah. I was recently having a discussion with a couple of colleagues and we were talking about the themes for the year. And the themes that I listed in music for the year were

Neil Young, anesthetics and girls giving side eye. And this is definitely that final one. This is about, I mean, so many of the songs are like, you're a dumb himbo and I'm going to tolerate it because I desire you. But ultimately I'm not investing in you. I'm, I'm, I'm investing in myself. It's an empowerment message.

All right, well, short and sweet, the album for Sabrina Carpenter came out. That one came out in August, on August 23rd. Should we do one that came out just a week later, the Dochi record? Hell yeah. That came out, yeah, on August 30th. The album from Dochi is called Alligator Bites, Never Heal. Throw a rock, you'll hit a great cut, but let's just do Denial is a River. Hey, I thought it was all over. What's up, Dochi? Hey, girl.

You know, it's been a little minute since you and I have had a chat. Has it really? Probably since, like, your last EP, All the Places You'll Go. Oh, wow. Yeah. I've been getting some calls. People are a little bit worried about you. Not worried. And I know that that was kind of that outlet for you, so... You were. Why don't you just tell me what's been going on? Okay. Remember old dude from 2019? Nice, clean nigga, did me dirtier than laundry. Took a scroll through his IG just to get a DM from his wifey? What?

♪♪

Okay, I just feel like this is the perfect opportunity for us to just take a second and kind of unpack what's happened to you. You know, this guy cheated on you and... Our friend Hanif Abdurraqib, the wonderful poet, writer, you know, he's written for NPR Music a couple of times. He does like an Instagram stories thing every week where he sort of recounts the new releases that he's been listening to. And the one for Alligator Bites Never Heal was something like...

I don't know, man. I think I'm listening to one of the greatest rappers alive right now. Yeah. I was so stunned. Like, surprised isn't the word because, you know, we'd heard what she can do before. But the level of control and precision and versatility here...

It's really staggering. And also, I was pleased to find out that it's not only a studio creation. She did this song at Camp Flogna, I think last week, the title of the Creator Festival. And it is like word for word, like basically no backing tracks, like didn't rely on, you know, like a hype man very much. Acted out all the little bits. Pretty much. It was huge. I mean, she was going back and forth with her DJ to do the therapist thing. I'm going through a lot. By a lot, you mean drugs.

I wouldn't. Drugs? No, it's a natural plan. No, I'm not judging. I'm not an addict. I'm just saying. I don't think. You want to talk about it?

Well, one thing we can say is that this kind of fits in a pattern this year, I think, of women rappers and R&B artists who are very funny, but also dealing with like, you know, intense realities and intense, whether it's like self-doubt or finding your place in the world or in the case of Dochi, like,

how does she fit into the music industry and all that. But they're using humor and theatricality in a really interesting way. I'm thinking of like Tierra Whack, also one of your other favorites, Doe. Remy Wolfe does something similar. So it's not, she's not, she is, she does stand out. And I mean, I really do think she's one of the greatest working right now. If you want to know how she feels about her status as a rapper, just listen to the top of Boom Bap. Boom Bap.

Rap rap, rappity rap rap, rappity rap, boom bap bap bap bap They said they can't but they said they want me to rap

I have to also point out her Oscar the Grouch voice that she brings out. She does it a little bit at the end of Denial is a River when she's getting worked up and she can't hold it in. She also does it on the song Catfish. Leave me baffled, bewildered, relax a bit. Let me relax a bit, I think I need to cool it off. I put some pep up in my step and then I do it up. I shine my cutlery and hit my true love.

Catfish is almost like a little bit of a 90s Busta Rhymes kind of riff. She's doing the kind of, wah. That's a freaking great comparison. She definitely has some Busta in her, for sure. It's funny because when you did that, I was thinking Al Pacino in Sin of a Woman. We all come to things in our own way, Robin. It's fine. Ooh.

All right, Dochi, Alligator Bites. Again, that one came out August 30th. All right, we need to take a quick break here, but we'll have more from our Best Albums of 2024 list right after this.

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Where should we go? Something totally different? Should we do maybe Pedro the Lion? Yeah, that sounds good. So Pedro the Lion had an album out, came out in June, June 7th. The album's called Santa Cruz, and this is the song Spend Time. Spend time with me. I just started my show. I'm pretty excited. It's what I would have said to cousins I love at Christmas dinner.

I was up to if I had courage left instead I told teaching them I couldn't edit myself spend time

I'll just say, this is one of my all-time favorite Pedro the Lion albums, and I think it's some of his best work ever. He's just such a gifted storyteller. He always has been, and he's at the top of his game, I think, on this one. What an incredible comeback he's made, too, in the past couple of years. Not just in terms of...

but to be doing what is agreed upon to be some of his best work like 30 years into his career. Yeah, he's been doing a little coming-of-age novel series basically in the past couple of years where he's talking about his youth and the places that he lived and his journey through life

religion, but it's all sort of in service of discovery, the ways that he discovered certain kinds of social dynamics. And on this record, it's really about the way that he discovered music, not just as a thing to fall in love with and construct his life around taste-wise, but as a calling, as a thing that he just would never put down.

never put down. Yeah, this thing that he decided to pursue and give his life to completely, which unfolds so magnificently on the song Modesto. I heard the perfect song at work today Having asked if there were bands to see And spots to play Jim said hell yeah And he handed me a tape

It's a tear streaming

I think she likes me too.

Do you think he journaled as a kid and that's how he has a handle on all of these details? I just there's so many things that feel so vividly remembered. Like this record starts with the feeling of showing up as the new kid in town in junior high with this backpack that looked awesome in the store and realizing it was a

It was like just social suicide. It's the wrong color. Everything about it is wrong. He's like, none of this is going to work. Well, here's the thing. I thought about that moment too. There are 80-year-old people on the planet who are still embarrassed by something that happened to them when they were little kids. That's a fair point. You hold on to those things. So maybe those memories are more at hand than you might expect. Yeah, the traumas and the breakthroughs.

But there's also like an amazing class aspect to that line that he gives us because it's also about his grandma like buys him this backpack that they think is cool, but it's not, you know, it's like a discount store. So there's this really interesting, this is the thing about David Bazan, he weaves in much more than just his own personal style.

And he's always thinking about how does this relate to my class? How does this relate to religion and his relationship with God and the complexities of that? And it just breaks out so much farther than just religion.

shared memory. That's what makes it so profound. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's go to one that I think was universally loved by every single person on the NPR music team, the new Waxahachie album that came out this year called Tiger's Blood. Let's do the song right back to it. ♪ Photograph of us in the spotlight ♪ ♪ On my hot night I was drifting in and out ♪

Better sin on the off chance I'm bunter than a bullseye Begging for peace of mind I get ahead of myself Bracing for a bombshell Your love's written on a blank check Wear it around your neck, I was at a low But you come to me on a fault line Deep inside a gold mine Like a mall I lose a bit of myself

Laying out eggshells I've been yours for so long Come right back to it I don't know why I do But you just settle in Like a song, we know it If I can keep up We'll get right back to you

This is one of those records when I listened to it I thought, you know, she doesn't venture

so wildly outside of the realm of what you might expect her to do, but at the same time it just feels like such an evolution for Waxahachie. There's been a real sharpening of craft and intention for her over the last couple of records. A thing that I really love about Waxahachie is that I think we've been able to kind of grow along with her. By the time that we heard her

Her first album is Waxahachie American Weekend. She had been playing in bands since she was a kid. I mean, she had lived, you know, three lifetimes on the road. But as a solo artist, she was really still figuring out what she wanted to be and, we later learned, was also struggling a lot.

with sadness, with depression, with alcoholism, and weaving all of that into her work, but in a way that could be sort of really relatably and viscerally unsteady. So over the course of her life,

the course of the progression of those first couple of records, we have American Weekend, this very stark, you know, Bon Iver style, you know, cabin record. There's Cerulean Salt, which is kind of still my favorite, which is the sort of like chamber piece where there's just a little bit extra. There's, you know, it's a little bit more of a multi-track thing. Ivy Trip,

is where things scale up a little bit. She's signed to Merge, she's got a little bit more of a recording budget, you know, she and her band made this record in like a gymnasium somewhere, but it's still a little rough around the edges. And then, Out in the Storm is where things really start to lock in and she, I think, becomes aware of what she wants to do in a

band context and in an arrangement context and really, really starts to get an amazing control of her voice. So now we find her with Saint Cloud and with this record, Tiger's Blood, in this sort of heartland rock mode and really channeling a sense of place in that way. This feels like a sort of wide open spaces, like pickup truck kind of record.

You ain't never seen Spellbinding copperheads banging a tin It's the kiss of death But it's the only guy I've left up to A guy I've left up to a mirror I've escaped the surface I've left you alone By now truer words spoken like blood from a stone

And it fills me with dread, but I've learned to ignore it. The smell of dust, it creeps up through the cracks in the floor. The smell of dust, it creeps up through the cracks in the floor. My head might bring me something down. You got every excuse but to hear your sound. And that siren blows me down.

Well, I mean, this is a record about having found your people.

And kind of having found your home, your center in life, but still experiencing restlessness, experiencing self-doubt. I mean, to me, her vocals are all about how we experience our feelings, right? I mean, they jump around, they change in the course of a second, you know? And I love that. But in these songs, which are about subjects like

What happens in a long-term relationship

when you get a little bored, you know? What happens when you've been a musician for a lot of years and you're not drinking anymore and you're trying to figure out how to live this life and have it be satisfying? What happens with your old friends when sometimes you feel like your old friends have betrayed you? That's what I think is so profound about this record. It is a perfect expression of kind of the young middle of a rich life

and all the questions that arise when you're in your 30s and you're like, oh my God, I'm in my life. I am in my life, you know? Yeah, I mean, I think that's got to be a very big part of this. I mean, she's a little bit older now than she was when she started out making music. As you said, she's been through so much

And I don't know, there's just clearly a lot of reflection and searching in really beautiful ways across this album that really resonated with me. I just, you know, taking stock of her life. So Waxahachie, the album Tiger's Blood that came out all the way back in March. I do have one important point of correction to make on Lone Star. She says she drove out to the only lake in Kansas and there are many lakes in Kansas. All right. Oh my gosh.

Oh, my God, Robin, get a little bit of poetry. There was. Come on. That was a real record scratch moment for Katie on the on the album. You are too literal minded, my friend. Robin just pulled his shirt open to reveal a Kansas City Chiefs jersey underneath it. With all the lakes. I remember hearing some ad at some point like we have just as much shoreline as California or something like that, you know, trying to sell because it's like dead last for tourism. Oh, I see.

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Because a better relationship means better care. Learn how clinical excellence delivered with compassion can help you at kansashealthsystem.com. All right, let's completely change gears again and go to Nala Senefro, the artist Nala Senefro. She had this really gorgeous sort of...

I don't know, jazz, ambient kind of album? Kind of both. Kind of both. Lands right on the line. Yeah, called Endlessness. It came out in September. All of the songs are, well, they kind of all flow together. There's Continuum 1, Continuum 2. We played Continuum 3 on All Songs Considered back when this album first came out. Let's hear a little bit of Continuum 8. ♪

I love thinking about like if you went into some kind of, I don't know, like juke joint in space and this was the only thing on the jukebox and everything, you know, I'm like, oh, play Continuum 6. And somebody's like, no, no, no. I like Continuum 8. I think they're pretty distinctive. I mean, they do all flow together, but.

Some are a whole lot more animated than others with a lot more instrumentation. There's a lot of, well, I mean, I think it'd be easy to think of this record as being improvised, but it is so much more intentional than that. And I think that there are,

There's a lot more than just washes of sound, and there are all these different instruments that sort of feel like they're in conversation with each other, like chattering. Yeah, no, I'm glad you pulled Continuum 8, because it does one of my favorite things that this record does. See, Anne? There's a... Sorry. I'll just be over here listening to Continuum 4 by myself. I do think, she did this with her last record, too. I wonder if it's a little bit of, like, a self-conscious riff on the fact that ambient music is generally, like...

you know, it can be difficult to talk about and write about in concrete terms. But this track, so you've got a couple of elements in here, right? You've got this sort of modular synth sequence that has a noise layer. So instead of just a pitch, you get this kind of

going along. And then over time, that noise transitions seamlessly into the sound of the live drums on this record. And it happens all over the place. Nebaiya Garcia, the saxophonist who is all over this record and does an amazing job, does the same thing, sort of like weaving in and out of these synth sequences and kind of

mimicking their sort of mathematical rigidity and then flowing off into her own jazzier place. And so you get this phenomenon over and over where you can't really tell moment to moment which instruments are making which sound, which I'm such a sucker for. It's such a cool trick. Yeah.

Well, yeah, I think the thing that is obvious when I listen to you talk about it, and it's something I thought about with this record too, is there's a lot to hold on to here, right? It's not just these washes of sound or whatever. There is so much going on. Well, Robin, it's really a year for...

retuning our ears with this, these albums that don't fit easily into any category, but do touch on what we think of as ambient music. I mean, I have a whole list of like 12 albums, at least that fit in this category. Our colleague over in the jazz world, Nate Shanann and I were talking about how we wished we could have a pod episode that would just be about this, this,

I don't know. I don't even want to call it a category, but I'm thinking of everything from Ryuichi Sakamoto's incredible final album, Opus, which he made...

in his dying days and there's a beautiful documentary that goes with it to albums by hard to define jazz artists like Fubu Sushi for example or the Brazilian guitarist Fabiano do Nascimento who made this gorgeous album with a saxophonist Sam Gendel called The Room I could go on and on Gnavia's very meditative kind of chant oriented album Daughter of a Temple this is just the

richest territory. There were numerous albums this year made using field recordings of birds. We've talked about that on the show so often because there were so many and I'm such a sucker for it. You didn't mention the Claire Rousey record, Sentiment, that came out

earlier this year. That was one that impossible to define. I love that we're moving beyond category, that we have all these different places. It's like a whole new sky to look at at night. There was also an album by, do you know Leah Cole?

She had this album called Normal Sounds, and it was all these just... Oh, yes, actually, yes. Tennis court lights. Hazel mentioned that to me. Our colleague and friend Hazel Sills mentioned that to me. Yeah, it's so good. Clara Rousey sells hats and t-shirts that say emo ambient. I mean, she's aware of this hybridity as much as anybody. I mean, in recent times, there might have been a day or two where I was a little upset about...

the potential future of the world. Just a day or two where you were a little upset about that? But I think that's one reason why all this kind of music is being made. We not only are we open to it as listeners, but we need it. You know what I mean? Yeah.

So Nala Senefro, the artist, Endlessness is the album. We'll go out on this for now, but again, this is just the first part of our Best Albums of 2024 show. We'll have part two on Friday, New Music Friday, done for the year, astoundingly. You and you and Daoud have been hosting that all year long. We'll have part two on Friday, then instead a whole bunch of other year-end stuff coming this month. Until then, I'm Robin Hilton. It is All Songs Considered. ♪

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