Andy's Song of the Year 2024
And much like brat and it's completely different...there may be some guests
Author’s Note
As much as I love to exist in a vacuum and blab about my favorite music into the void, sometimes, that gets old. This year, I asked a few of my writerly friends to join in and blurb about songs we both loved. What a joy! What a treat to have writers in my life who actually want to do this!
Thank you very much to Cassidy Jackson, Amy Muller, Ben Radomsky, Curry Brinson, and Madeleine Haas for joining in. Honored to have you.
30. Sexyy Red — “Get It Sexyy”
I haven’t stopped thinking about the mystery at the center of “Get It Sexyy” since the song came out. Is the chorus’s call to “Get it Sexyy” in the third-person? As in, someone else calling to Ms. Red to “Get it?” Or is it in the second-person? A command to you, the listener, to “Get it Sexy?” Either interpretation still makes the song a smash.
29. Addison Rae — “Diet Pepsi”
This 24-year-old TikToker is serving pop star the old-fashioned way: one fizzy, saccharine, cola-themed song at a time. “Diet Pepsi” has the faux innocence of early Britney Spears, the Americana of Born to Die-era Lana, the undying catchiness of Charli. Drink up.
28. Dehd — “Mood Ring”
Spry and easy, Dehd’s jangle rock finally locked in on Poetry. “Mood Ring” is ecstatic, bound to turn that ring bright yellow.
27. Tinashe — “No Broke Boys”
Look, I love “Nasty” too. But Quantum Baby’s sleeper hit is “No Broke Boys,” on which Tinashe eschews the financially insolvent with an infectious, bratty, cheerleader chant.
26. fantasy of a broken heart — “Ur Heart Stops”
“Ur Heart Stops” is the epitome of a band that has too many ideas per song, and are unafraid to keep them all in. The art-rock duo turn the song’s title into a polyrhythm across its chorus. Combined with 90125-style marimba and a hook in 7/4, this one is for the prog nerd in me.
25. Fake Fruit — “Cause of Death”
Each time “Cause of Death” seeps down into its half-tempo chorus, vocalist Hannah D’Aamato’s anger grows. What starts off as punky groove unravels into melodrama. “I can’t make up my mind for the life of me,” D’Amato admits. Across tempo and style, Fake Fruit turn indecision into a bitter, righteous banger.
24. Friko — “Get Numb To It!”
There’s some irony to calling a song “Get Numb To It” and ending the title with an exclamation point: feel apathetic, but do it expressively! Exclaim it! Friko spend every minute of their debut album doing the polar opposite of getting numb. This track—an anthem of resilience—is no different. They can’t help themselves from feeling it all. For Friko, getting numb was never an option.
23. Fontaines D.C. — “Favourite”
Part of me groups “Favourite” together with Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather.” Both songs feel like they’re pandering, primed for dramatic fan-cams about beloved fictional characters growing up. But then its post-chorus hits, with guitarist Carlos O’Connell joining in: “Favourite for a long time,” he repeats, holding out the words “long time.” You don’t need the fan-cam to feel this song’s earnest sentimentality and nostalgia. It’s the real deal.
22. Beyoncé — “YA YA”
COWBOY CARTER is an album about revenge. Deny Beyoncé her respect, and you’ll face her wrath. No other song on COWBOY CARTER displays Queen B’s taste for vengeance like “YA YA.” She snaps the ladies and fellas to attention in its first twenty seconds and delivers its purpose in thirty: “Those petty ones can’t fuck with me.” Why, Ms. Carter? Simple: “‘Cause I’m a clever girl.” “YA YA” is chock-full of references and knowing winks: the James Brown-esque scream, repurposing “Good Vibrations,” the spark of its trap hi-hats, sampling “These Boots Are Made For Walking.” Keep up, country; she’s too clever.
21. Tim Reaper & Kloke — “Juice”
Breakneck drum’n bass, rave-y piano, and a sped-up “Show Me Love” beat from the current King of Jungle? This has the juice indeed.
20. This is Lorelei — “Dancing at the Club”
**Guest blurb alert!**
Thank god for all four minutes and forty six seconds of “Dancing in the Club.” One of the best things about This is Lorelei’s Box for Buddy, Box for Star is that Nate Amos knows how to let a catchy fucking song breathe, linger, and last. In the TikTok age of hooky but ultimately substance-less songs that end before they even start, it is so refreshing to hear something so simple and fun that keeps going! The average length of a song in 2024 was approximately 3:15 and the number keeps going down! Criminal! I want to rock out! We deserve more! Box for Buddy consistently gives us more.
The albumis full of songs that sound like the early 2010s in the best possible way. There’s hints of Hot Chelle Rae, Owl City, and Fun.(arguably my first ever favorite band). And there’s something I can’t quite put my finger on that keeps reminding me of Adventure Time. There’s a lightheartedness to the production—tinkling keyboards, autotune, sweet repetitive little melodies, strings!—and an undeniable sense of humor in the lyrics. On “Dancing in the Club” those lyrics—laden with double entendre, clever rhymes, and pun after pun—also punch you in the mouth. “And I know it’s only cards/ But I feel your heart in spades/ While you were dancing in the club/ I gave my diamonds all away/ I lost your love today.” Amos writes earnestly and poetically about heartbreak and recovery and lying down in the middle of the road to look at the moon. The song moves quickly, restlessly forward but leaves plenty of room to bop along. “Dancing in the Club” is a song for speeding in your car and chewing bubble gum and sitting with your loneliness and coming out better on the other side.
— Cassidy Jackson
19. Nilüfer Yanya — “Call It Love”
Nilüfer Yanya’s entire discography circles around the concept of shame. There’s angry shame on “Heavyweight Champion of the Year,” the denial on “Shameless,” the bargaining on “Try.” On “Call it Love,” she finally faces the shame head-on. “Some call it love/I call it shame,” Yanya admits, a harrowing (and incredibly queer-coded) line. The song moves slowly. It’s burning, sensual, and self-conscious.
18. Drug Church — “Peer Review”
Drug Church frontman Patrick Kindlon has been yelling about how much he hates your superiority complex for over ten years. The group’s discography is full of sarcastic, sneering hardcore with good bones: nearly every Drug Church song can be boiled down to the message “Don’t be a dick, and don’t think you’re better than everyone else.” “Peer Review” communicates that message with zero frills. It might as well be the band’s mission statement: “You can't feel superior to people you're in it with/These are your peers and you just gotta deal with it.” In a Drug Church mosh pit, everyone is equal.
17. Joy Orbison — “flight fm”
On “flight fm,” Joy Orbison takes one comet-shaped, behind-the-beat synth and morphs it into a gargantuan drop. The line repeats throughout the track, always moving against the beat with maximum friction. The track is so nasty, so stank-face inducing, that Fred Again felt compelled to edit the song with Lil Yachty’s “Flex Up,” featuring Future and Playboi Carti. That remake is a boring grab at a hip-hop/electronic crossover hit. Plus, it’s entirely unnecessary. The original version rumbles the floor perfectly well on its own.
16. Wishy — “Planet Popstar”
“Planet Popstar” swirls into your headphones, beamed from the world of Walkmans and Clinton era sexual scandals. It’s a picture-perfect ‘90s rock song. When you’re on Planet Popstar, you don’t want to leave.
15. Sabrina Carpenter — “Espresso”
**Guest blurb alert!**
Before “Espresso,” Sabrina Carpenter might have been best defined by her potential. Her voice, her sense of humor, her work ethic, her look, her name recognition, and her co-sign from a certain other Pennsylvanian blonde predate 2024’s song of the summer—each emerging sometime between her first release (during the Obama Administration) and “Espresso’s.” And while the pieces started to coalesce towards the end of the Emails I Can’t Send album cycle, it was “Espresso” that finally put them together, establishing once and for all what a Sabrina Carpenter Song is, and how quickly we’ll lap it up.
I don’t need to tell you what this song sounds like. You already know. It’s the sonic and practical equivalent of a popsicle. It’s infectious and feather-light. It bends language to the stern will of a good time, turning “me” into an adjective, “give a fuck” into a noun, and “dream come true” into a verb. It’s a showcase for her voice; laden with airy runs, cheeky line-reads, and eye-rolling ad-libs that communicate as much as the lyrics do. And it’s such a hit that SNL’s parody of it—intentionally sung like dogshit by Ariana Grande and the cast—also became a hit. Not since “driver’s license”—which all but name-checks Ms. Carpenter, I might add—has a single song cemented a New Pop Girl with such force. That, in the end, is that she espresso. Feel the buzz?
— Amy Muller
14. Tyler, the Creator — “Sticky (feat. GloRilla, Sexyy Red & Lil Wayne)”
Fifteen years after the release of Bastard, Tyler, the Creator is still putting out great records, where he tells introspective, album-length stories seemingly ripped from therapy sessions. Perhaps more impressive is his consistency when it comes to the bangers. On this year’s CHROMAKOPIA, posse cut “Sticky” is the highlight. Given Tyler’s affinity for bees and flowers, “Sticky” is a track I’m honestly surprised he hasn’t released sooner. But posse tracks like this need the perfect pairings. Tyler finds the ideal crowd to match his freak here, with GloRilla and Sexyy Red (and Lil Wayne is also here!) jumping off the walls of its Neptunes-indebted beat.
13. Charli xcx — “Apple”
Lovely, beautiful “Apple.” It’s the epitome of Brat-ness: succinct, captivating, and meaningful lyrics about family, packaged up in a pop song catchy enough to inspire the TikTok trend of the summer. The apple is sweet, but the aftertaste—regret, loneliness—stays with you much longer.
12. Magdalena Bay — “Cry For Me”
If Imaginal Disk is absurd and theatrical ala Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Cats, then “Cry For Me” is its “Memory.” It's an unexpected moment of tenderness within Matt and Mica’s fantastical world. Its narrator, scorned and astray, begs for one moment of sympathy: “Think of love when you remember me.” Magdalena Bay completes the swan song with disco sent from space. Its fabulous basslines and orchestration swirls like stars in the Milky Way.
11. Jessica Pratt — “The Last Year”
**Guest blurb alert!**
I wouldn’t be so surprised if, upon calling out to the abyss, Jessica Pratt’s voice called back. On “The Last Year,” the coda of her masterful album Here in the Pitch, Pratt concludes her meditation on time and the things we use to mark it with blind hope. Conceding her inexperience (it is her first time living, after all), but confident in her humanity, Pratt beckons us toward the end as she holds tightly to the promise of what’s to come. Pratt knows know that every end is a beginning, every distance a journey, every song a prayer. In the darkness, Pratt strikes a match. Cue the piano.
— Curry Brinson
10. Waxahatchee — “Right Back To It (feat. MJ Lenderman)”
**Guest blurb alert!**
Katie Crutchfield’s familiar and aching vocals make self reflection feel inevitable. As Waxahatchee, her lyrics have never shied away from the crueler waters of life, nor the shadows - loss, grief, addiction - that lurk beneath the waves. On “Right Back to It,” soft, steady percussion and no-frills banjo welcome us into an ode to a love that runs deep enough to see our worst moments and offer an olive branch. On the verses, Crutchfield sings about the kinds of faults we all wrongly think are unique to us: reticence to intimacy, the belief we are not worth connection, the desire to push away those closest to us. As if to remind us that true security is only earned through the hard work of loving others, MJ Lenderman joins Crutchfield on the chorus, providing the stakes for “Right Back to It.” The most arduous task of love is fighting through the muck and mud of living to find each other. It’s a lesson I have had to learn more often than I’d like, even five, ten, twenty years deep into love. Tragically, it seems at times we are fated to make mistakes. We lose ourselves, we get blunt, we refuse anyone’s help. Waxahatchee reminds us that this is a hard-won lesson in how to truly love ourselves and each other: we have to get right back to it, even when it feels impossible. If you can keep up, the prize is priceless.
— Madeleine Haas
9. Two Shell & FKA twigs — “Talk to Me”
**Guest blurb alert!**
In the last few months of 2024, FKA twigs has granted us a few glimpses behind the velvet rope into Club Eusexua with “Perfect Stranger,” “Drums of Death,” and the title track, but what those songs do best is build excitement for the full album. She peaked early this year, is what I’m saying; one of pop’s greatest dancers is back in the club, and she’s still sad. On “Talk To Me,” she teamed up with Two Shell, no strangers to masking their sorrow with chaos, to drop a dance-pop heater that would be depressing if it didn’t go so hard.
Although the song was teased pre-release with the duo’s typical hijinks — name a celebrity and their face was switched out with twigs’ on the single’s glitchy, video-game-hellscape artwork — buried beneath Two Shell’s frenetic, crazed production are some of twigs’ most desperate lyrics since “Cellophane.” She is dead to whomever it is about and yet she still “inhales” them like oxygen. She haunts the dance floor like a ghost, her delivery occasionally distorted as though she herself has lost signal. There’s no catharsis to be found and yet she admits she “can’t stop” as the song roars to a close. Neither can we.
— Ben Radomsky
8. Cindy Lee — “Kingdom Come”
I will write this blurb when Kingdom Comes.
7. MJ Lenderman — “Wristwatch”
Blurb to be found docked at the Himbodome.
6. Cash Cobain & Bay Swag — “fisherrr”
In a single word, Cash Cobain summarizes the ethos of the so-called “sexy drill” movement he started: its sultriness, its addictiveness. You down? You in? You know Cash Cobain? Fisherrr. “Fisherrr” isn’t all that different from the dozens of other woozy, minimal Cash songs. But this one oozes confidence. It takes about 90 seconds to get to Cash’s signature production tag (“And this beat from Cash not from Youtube”). By the time you do, that tag feels like a victory lap. As though the beat could be from anyone else.
5. Blunt Chunks — “Fill My Cup”
On the bridge on “Fill My Cup,” Caitlin Woelfe-O’Brien airs her grievances: “This city is full/Of ugly people/With ugly protocols/And ugly.” Then, there’s a pause. You wait for Woelfe-O’Brien to finish the line with a kicker. But she finishes the thought, off-beat: “Malls.” It’s a slight disappointment; the momentum dies. That’s what it feels like to enter adult life, glance around, and find that this is all there is.
“Where do I go to/fill my cup?” is an essential question with an increasingly hopeless answer. The song never finds resolution, but it feels better to know someone else is out there staring around at the bureaucracy, traffic, and urban ennui and feeling that same longing.
4. Jane Remover — “Magic I Want U”
There’s nothing more humiliating than begging someone for the time of day, and Jane Remover’s Internet-rotted music is the perfect venue for that desperate feeling. It jitters and crumbles beneath itself. As the song morphs underneath, you hear her desire, and subsequent heartache growing. “Anything to tell me I’m your number one/Cause I’ll be your groupie baby,” she admits in its final minute. The real magic is how Jane turns that horniness, longing, and rejection into an odyssey of a pop song. “Can you feel it?” a distorted voice asks as the song fades away. Who couldn’t?
3. Kendrick Lamar — “Not Like Us”
The year is 2024, and division is everywhere. “Political polarization” has been a buzzword for a decade, but now, it feels bone-deep. The entire year can be ascribed to things that divide us: politics, the election, media, AI, podcasts, technology, Hawk Tuah, pop stars, even what is real or true.
Disunity has, perhaps, never been more present in American life. Kendrick Lamar–the maverick, the unimpeachable, the Greatest Of All Time–transforms this mentality that has poisoned all other facts of life into the decade’s greatest rap song. He makes it fun. If Donald Trump and Kendrick Lamar share anything, it’s how they antagonize and other their opponent to take them down.
Has there been a single rap lyric this decade that has electrified the world quite like the delectably petty and cruel “Why you trollin’ like a bitch? Ain’t you tired?/Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minor?” (rrrrrrrrr). By the end of a single listen to “Not Like Us,” there is no Pennsylvania Swing State vote. You know which side you want to be on. You know who you want to be Not Like.
Throughout the entire beef, Drake maintains one contentious point over Kendrick: the numbers. Drake’s omnivorous approach to pop music might be considered “cultural colonization,” but he has churned out dozens of catchy hits that we all still stream. Kendrick has hits too, but prior to “Not Like Us,” he had never had this kind of summertime cross-cultural smash. Kendrick Lamar beat Drake at his own game: scoring a monolithic pop hit that puts “One Dance” and “Hotline Bling” to shame. I’d like to think that we can agree on who’s side we're on.
2. Charli xcx & Lorde — “Girl, so confusing remix”
**Guest blurb alert!**
I’ll be honest, the first iteration of “Girl, so confusing” annoys the hell out of me. Charli’s repetitive lyrics and the discord between her delivery and the production overstay their welcome. It’s her sole miscalculation on the original album. But, as an artist, Charli’s never been afraid to put herself out there. With “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde,” Charli brings that same artistic bravery to her personal life; if things don’t work out at first, work it out on the remix. In doing so, she creates both a new friendship and, in my opinion, the best song of the Brat era from the worst.
The genius of the “Girl, so confusing” remix is that it makes these two icons’ detente feel like it’s two of your friends reconnecting after some argument that was so long ago you can’t even remember who started it. I still get goosebumps when I hear them say they “ride” for each other, as if I know these women. For they would never have met, and therefore never gotten off on the wrong foot, were it not for their celebrity. And they wouldn’t be friends now if not for this most public of collaborations; it was the internet Lorde correctly predicted would “go crazy,” not just the groupchat. But as Lorde’s verse — as precise as any she’s written — balances out Charli’s lyrics, their friendship stabilizes through mutual honesty and understanding, and they tap into a universality that goes beyond female celebrity. “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde” reconfigures the role of the remix in artistic and celebrity life, reevaluating not only a song but a relationship — it is the remix as reconciliation.
— Ben Radomsky
1. Adrianne Lenker — “Sadness As A Gift”
There was a time when songs weren’t disposable. Before recorded music existed at all, songs were moments: they were inseparable from the instances in time when a real, live human being sang or played them. They were irreplicable and impermanent. Songs were not files. They were moments.
Look, I’m certainly happy to be living in a time of recorded music. I’d much prefer it that way. This way, I get to write album reviews and listen to Rush and share the Finn Keane remix of Janet Jackson’s “No Sleeep” on YouTube. But with something gained, there is something lost: the magic of a song being more than a recording, more than something so easily obtained and forgotten.
Part of the reason why I write these damn Year End lists (are you getting sick of them each year? I am) is because I feel that it’s important to memorialize the music that means something to me beyond the unsubstantial act of “Adding A Song To My Library” or streaming it or even buying a physical copy. Songs are more than recordings. They’re more than streams.
I’d bet Adrianne Lenker sees songs similarly, too. Starting with Big Thief’s 2019 album Two Hands and continuing through this year’s Bright Future, Lenker’s songs have felt looser and less tied to a final product. Slowly but surely, she has shifted away from creating music as recordings (see: UFOF) and more towards songs as transient, impermanent things (And, with all due respect, may I also note, that Big Thief’s appearance has become increasingly…scrappy as well).
The music on songs, Dragon New Warm Mountain, and especially her 2024 album Bright Future feels less like final products. These albums are not arrays of songs bundled up in their best production to be immortalized forever. They’re snapshots of what those songs sounded like in that one moment, performed in that one place. They’re folk songs, not in the Noah Kahan music with acoustic guitar-sense, but in the sense that they exist outside of their recordings. That that the recordings offer only one angle, one reality of the many ways that a song, the immaterial thing, can be.
It’s not just that “Sadness As A Gift” is a treasure of a song mined from Lenker’s rootedness; or that it talks about nostalgia, hopefulness, and “sadness” outside of monotonous or ineffective therapy-speak. It’s that it also reminds us of the inexplicable power that a song can take. We’re given one version here, with vocals, a fiddle, and guitar. But isn't there a world where this could be a synth-y dance pop banger ala “Dancing On My Own?” An indie rock track? A campfire sing-along? A prayer?
No other songwriter alive makes the world feel so hopeful to me. If 2022’s “Spud Infinity” was her treatise on the natural world, then “Sadness as a Gift” is her guide to getting through the day. Smaller, less ambitious, just as essential.