2024's Most Unconventional & Brilliant Albums

From moody indie-rock to industrial noise, these albums are a snapshot of the expansive geography of pop music

- Bhanuj Kappal

It's never easy to distill a year's worth of music listening into a neat list of 10 (or even 50) albums. But putting together this year's best albums list has been particularly hard. 2024 was a year of left-field surprises, with brash upstarts and underground favourites regularly stealing the spotlight from some of the industry's most bankable names. We had a new generation of wildly inventive pop starlets stake their claims to the crown, a brutal power struggle in hip-hop that enraptured rap fans, a long-overdue reckoning with country music's racial politics, and a steady stream of genre-blurring, envelope-pushing albums from the unlikeliest of scenes and places.

The 10 albums that made the final cut range from moody indie-rock and industrial noise to rambunctious rap and spectral dance music, offering a snapshot of the expansive geography of pop music in 2024. In no particular order, here are my favourite records of the year.

JLIN-AKOMA
Indiana producer Jlin's 2017 album Black Origami was a masterclass in rhythmic innovation—spectral drum machines, polyrhythmic percussion and discordant synths coming together to form dark, sepulchral sonic structures that sounded like Aphex Twin overdosing on Chicago footwork. On