Evan Rytlewski's Favorite Albums of 2024
On the best music of 2024, starting a Substack, and why even you, skeptical person older than the target demo, should give xaviarsobased a chance
An introduction to this substack.
I worked in media full time for nearly two decades, primarily covering music and culture. And then I stopped. I changed careers a few years ago, while still freelancing just enough to satisfy the shrinking part of myself that still self-identifies as a music critic. It’s been good, mostly. I still write for some great publications; I still get to feel like I’m part of the conversation without committing my life to it (although, if I’m being honest, that conversation retreats a little further from earshot each month). It’s fine. Most of us don’t do this forever.
Still, I’ve missed having a forum like this — a place to post more personalized takes, a home for faster, more digressive, more first-persony writing. And that’s why I’m starting a Substack. No pressure to subscribe; I don’t expect to update it much. But it’s cool to have a platform in case I want it. Case in point: I really, really, really wanted a place to write about my favorite albums this year. That’s mostly because 2024 really was that great of a year for music, better than any year so far this decade, and I wanted to gush about them a bit. Once you’ve been a critic for a certain amount of time having unexpressed thoughts in your head starts to bother you.
These were my favorite albums of 2024.
1. Los Campesinos! - All Hell
Growing old with this band makes me feel better about growing old. Almost two decades into their career, Los Campesinos! have become a longitudinal study in how the ideals, tastes, and cultural affiliations of our youth wear with age – not well, often, but there’s satisfaction in maintaining your sense of self. Singer Gareth Paisey still defines himself by his record collection in way most people stop doing by their 30s, and he’s thrown by the way his convictions have only continued to harden while most of his peers’ soften. Where he once bewailed failed romance, now he broods over the toll the slow creep of time has taken on his friendships.
That weariness hangs heavy, yet the music is still all fight and pomp and majesty. This is the kind of passionate, anthemic indie that hardly anybody even attempts anymore, songs that climb higher and higher until you think they can’t go any further, holy shit they’ve already gone so high, the view from up here is already so great, then they somehow rocket to another strada still. All Hell is the rare record that works as both a thrill ride and as a world unto itself. It’s normally an insult to suggest a record feels longer than its length, but this record is such a vast universe, every crevice so densely packed with wisdom, grievances, and lived experience, that it’s an even heftier statement than its 50-minute runtime promises.
Cards on the table: Los Campesinos! is my favorite band of the last 25 years, and there are a lot of reasons for that. But at the end of the day it boils down to this nearly impossible feat: Their records never burn. You’d think albums this this immediate, this excitable, this extra, would exhaust themselves fast, yet somehow they never do. Every record they’ve made – even that one I thought I didn’t like much at the time – has continued paying off, continued revealing new insights five, 10, 15 years after the fact. These aren’t just albums; they’re lifelong companions.
2. Gulfer - Third Wind
Every year or two, a new act comes along with a jangle pop record that recreates the charms of the genre’s heyday by faithfully replicating classics. They’re always welcome, but that kind of traditionalism can only take you so far. Gulfer may be the first band in ages that arrived at their jangle by way of somewhere truly unexpected. After three albums of twinkly, math-adjacent emo, for their final record, the Quebec quartet handed over primary songwriting responsibilities to guitarist Joe Therriault, a late joiner to the group who rerooted their sound in college rock while maintaining their signature pings and tapping. The resulting combination is sheer candy, the most inventive, addictive, and purely pleasurable guitar-pop record I’ve heard in years, studded with fountains of guitar that spray from all angles like jets from a luxury spa. If not for All Hell, this easily could have been a sleeper #1 pick for me this year. I couldn’t get enough of it.
3. xaviarsobased - Keep It Goin Xav
One reason I enjoy Indiecast so much is it’s fascinating hearing critics who are basically my demographic clones – guys roughly my age, who arrived at music fandom roughly the same way as me – frequently land at the exact opposite verdicts as me. Dissent is what makes criticism interesting. Still, even as a critic, there’s an irrational part of me that wants the rest of the world to love the same stuff they do, so listening to Indiecast’s best of the year episode, I winced every time they took a shot at xaviarsobased, the visionary but polarizing New York rapper who, for an unmovable chunk of the internet this year, became shorthand for everything shallow and confounding about next-gen rap. (“Pitchfork's commitment to this rapper named ‘xaviersobased,’ who makes some of the worst music I've ever heard in my life, is so deranged I almost respect it,” one critic tweeted in October – like Chief Keef a generation before him, xaviarsobased has a rare gift for riling this kind of guy).
Look, I want to be really careful here. One of the luxuries of modern music writing is critics no longer have to defend disparaged genres. I understand that attempting to sell an artist to an audience fundamentally unreceptive to them is nearly always a lost cause. But at the same time, Keep It Going Xav makes me want to shake its detractors and shout, how can you not think this is awesome? Have you heard it? It’s massively creative, and also just fucking massive. Did you hear that drop on “FanOut”? You don’t even have to wait long for it. It happens a minute thirty into the whole record, and it’s fucking everything. To me, this isn’t even music that needs explaining. Just give it five or six minutes in good faith. You might really like it!
Fifteen years ago, during a much more rock-centric time for criticism, critics used to compare pop/rap/R&B projects to indie touchstones in order to put more ears on them. That’s a lame way to sell music, but because I’m shamelessly writing to likely skeptics here, I’ll make an exception and deploy that construct here: One of the records Keep It Goin Xav reminds me of the most is M83’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming – they share a similarly titanic production sensibility, and in the ways they reconstruct the past, both conjure these volcanic Mento/Coca-Cola combustions of modernity and nostalgia. It’s fun music, kicky and clever, but it’s also often unexpectedly emotional, too. Can Xaviarsobased rap? No, I guess? At least not by the standard nobody is asking from him. But he can make you feel. He’s so fucking good at making you feel.
4. Porridge Radio - Clouds In The Sky They Will Always Be There For Me
For a good chunk of this fall, this record absolutely owned me. As an angst delivery vehicle, nothing was better this year than Porridge Radio’s latest, and songwriter Dana Margolin has an incredible gift for channeling their roiling rage into lurid spectacle. All that frothing at the mouth wouldn’t have been nearly as captivating, though, if Margolin didn’t have such hauntingly oblique prose to back it up with. This was the kind of record that made me want to quote-tweet choice lines for weeks.
Consider this masterpiece of expressionistic, emotional horror:
Take off all of my clothes and run to your house
Where in place of a door is a hole in the ground
And I fill it with salt, the hard bits of my heart
They fall into the hole and they tear it apart
That’s a hook, somehow. This one isn’t:
I am a bumper car, I am a one-way street
I am the place where the roof meets the trees
It comes through the door and it sings back the melody
Comes through the door and it sits down to eat
Margolin is so great at making these frightening dissociative breakdowns sound like triumphant declarations.
5. Waxahatchee - Tigers Blood
Sequels are almost never as good as the original, and Waxahatchee’s Tigers Blood is unmistakbly a sequel to 2020’s Saint Cloud. Not a refinement, because you can’t refine a platonic ideal, but a true sequel. Just look at that cover art – same blue sky, same color palette, same photographer, same idea. “More of the same” is one of the least compelling pitches possible for a new record, but who cares when the original is a consensus pick for one of the best records of the decade so far? And the remarkable thing about Tigers Blood is it’s somehow just as good as Saint Cloud, just as graceful, just as assured – its highest highs (the perfect MJ Lenderman collab “Right Back To It”) are even be higher. Man, even my #5 record this year had all the makings of a #1.
6. Chanel Beads - Your Day Will Come
They just sound cool, all these Raspberry Beret-capped seances from the Alterred Zones graveyard.
7. The Cure - Songs of a Lost World
Let’s talk about one of the The Cure’s least loved records: 2008’s 4:13 Dream. It’s fine, really, probably better than its reputation – a pleasantly pop-centric run through The Cure’s playbook that makes time for a little bit of everything. But listeners don’t come to The Cure for that kind of record. The band’s most celebrated albums are the ones that drill down on the sustained intensity of a single mood, and Songs of a Lost World is a total eclipse of the sun so immersive that for 50 minutes you simply succumb to your new reality of an existence without vitamin D.
8. Barely Civil - I’d Say I’m Not Fine
Am I being a homer here? I’m from Milwaukee, and I root for acts from Milwaukee. So maybe I am. But I’ve been a fan of Barely Civil since before I even realized they live in my city. I fell hard for their 2018 debut We Can Live Here Forever, which disrupted tender, pattering Death Cab For Cutie-style emo with shots of volatile volume. On their third record, they push the loud/soft extremes even further, with singer Connor Erickson’s humble whisper often outroared by riotous gang vocals. The effect is a little bit like a circle pit breaking out at a show where you expected everybody to sit down. We Can Live Here Forever is very much a third album – by now you know what you’re getting with this band – but there’s also a fun factor to it that sets it apart from it. For a record about the ways repressed anger manifests itself, it’s fittingly cathartic.
9. Tinashe - Quantum Baby
Quantum Baby is not my favorite kind of Tinashe album. 2019’s Songs For You and 2021’s 333 were creative liberations, sprawling samplers that cheerfully sprinted from one stylistic exercise to the next, be it R&B, dance, EDM, or drum and bass – incredible records, both, two of my favorites of the last decade. Since then, Tinashe’s projects have been more focused and compact, and while I miss the sprawl, there’s a Mazda sleekness to Quantum Baby that flatters here, too. The portions are small but the plating is elevated, all easy sophistication and panache.
10. Yonaa - YonaaThon
Every top 10 list has one entry that doesn’t really deserve to be there, but it’s just too much fun to ride for not to include. So I’ll be honest that this mixtape is that entry for me, but since the album-agnostic nature of modern rap makes the genre underrepresented on lists like these, I wanted to tip the scale a little bit to make sure a favorite gets represented. If you know anything about Yonaa, it’s probably that she’s the sister of Milwaukee rapper Certified Trapper, and her feisty, uproarious, lovably inappropriate punchline rap really does have kid sister energy. But where Certified Trapper embodies the oddball, extremely online nature of the city’s lowend scene, Yonaa’s output looks more to Milwaukee rap’s other major sound, hard-knuckled slap music. This is some of the funniest, most spirited rap I’ve heard all year.