THE YEAR IN MUSIC, 2024: Albums of the Year

SABRINA CARPENTER

Short n’ Sweet (Island Records)

It seems like Sabrina Carpenter came out of nowhere. Of course, she didn’t. She was on a few Disney Channel shows from 2014 to 2017 and has continuously released albums since 2015. But it’s her sixth album Short n’ Sweet, released on August 23, that propelled her to the upper echelons of mainstream pop culture. The songs are undeniably catchy, honest and at times, unexpectedly snarky. It’s no wonder her first three singles—“Taste”, “Please Please Please,” and “Espresso”—made the top 5 on Billboard’s Top 100 in the same week. The only other group to have done that is the Beatles.

KACEY MUSGRAVES

Deeper Well (Interscope/MCA Nashville)

After chronicling her marriage and eventual divorce on 2021’s superlative star-crossed, Musgraves hit the reset button with aplomb on Deeper Well, which deftly splits the difference between more intimate, acoustic guitar-led fare (the gorgeous title track, the almost R.E.M.-ish “Cardinal”) and expertly produced, acutely felt odes to the promise of real, enduring love (“Jade Green,” “Too Good To Be True”).

SAMARA JOY

Portrait (Verve)

The young-sensation jazz singer could have followed her Best New Artist Grammy for her Linger Awhile album of a couple years ago simply by sticking with the “new Ella Fitzgerald” tag some gave her. Nope. She wants more. Just listen to the beginning of “Reincarnation of a Lovebird,” where she wrote words to a very challenging Charles Mingus melody, which she sings with remarkable richness and daring agility, a cappella for a full two minutes. It’s hardly standards fare. Elsewhere she mixes material from Sun Ra, Barry Harris (a college mentor of hers) and some originals by her and her bandmates with a few buried treasures from the American Songbook, all given vibrant settings by the ace septet she’s assembled and cultivated. Ella would be impressed. And proud.

THE SMILE

Cutouts (XL)

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood continued their sizzling hot streak in offshoot band The Smile, whose Cutouts conjures a beguiling, alternate OK Computer-verse where bangers such as the head-spinning “Zero Sum” and the darkly grooving “The Slip” would be as familiar to millions as tracks by Billie Eilish and Shaboozey.

IMMANUEL WILKINS

Blues Blood (Blue Note)

Following two brilliant albums as a leader, and dozens of collaborative and sideman gigs, Philly-born saxophonist Wilkins — just 27 — leaps to the forefront of the jazz vanguard with this bold, distinctive album derived from a multi-media theater work. Working for the first time with vocalists — Ganavya, June McDoom, Yaw Agyeman and Cécile McLorin Salvant — Wilkins expands his core quartet to explore generations of cultural wounds and look to healing connections in a breathtaking presentation. Even without the chef who cooked on stage through the theater production.

CHARLI XCX

BRAT (Atlantic Records)

BRAT captures a feeling of raw and unapologetic chaos reminiscent of gritty, sticky dance floors. A proud retaliation against the “clean girl” aesthetic of 2023, the songs celebrate surpassing carefree to reach careless — and if some mornings (or late afternoons) you find yourself picking last night’s glitter off your shoulders, then so be it. This album is the beat shaking the club bathroom’s stall door.

Sofia Goldstein

NUSRAT FATEH ALI KHAN & PARTY

Chain of Light (Real World Records)

People will tell you Qawwali is an acquired taste. And, you know, it’s hard to argue — it’s a mystical, rhythmic, repetitive singing-based music built on sacred Sufi texts, complemented by completely nonsense sounds to enhance the aural effect. It’s gorgeous. Quite literally divine. Nusrat was the foremost Qawwali vocalist by the time he died in 1997, revered in his native Pakistan and by East Asian expats all over the world, and curious westerners. And this 4 songs, just over 40 minutes album is, in more ways than one, a divine gift — it’s as fresh and transporting as his earlier masterpieces, and it comes to us from the afterlife. Recorded in 1990, his label, incomprehensibly, lost the tapes, only finding them recently.

BGJ