This is a transcript of a special episode of Hit Parade. To hear the whole episode, join Slate Plus.
Chris Molanphy: Hey, everybody—this is Chris Molanphy, host of Hit Parade, Slate’s podcast of pop chart history. This is a recap of 2024, the year in music, with my colleagues in the Slate Music Club.
What is the Slate Music Club? For more than two decades, Slate convened a panel of critics at the end of each year to discuss the year in music, the cultural trends that drove the musical zeitgeist as well as our favorite albums and singles. We would share our thoughts in a series of written articles published just before the holidays. This year, after a brief hiatus, we’re bringing the Music Club back and turning it into a podcast conversation. We’ve convened a panel of smart folks to talk about music in 2024. Let me introduce our participants, two of whom have graced the Bridge before, and one joining us for the first time.
First off, making her debut on the Bridge, it’s Julianne Escobedo Shepherd. She is a writer, editor, and co-founder of Hearing Things, an independent, worker-owned music publication. They’re already doing exciting stuff, so do check it out. And she is the author of the forthcoming book Vaquera.
Next, of course, it wouldn’t be Music Club without veteran of the club Ann Powers. Ann is a critic and correspondent for NPR Music and the author of several books, most recently the superlative Travelling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, which Publishers Weekly named as one of the 10 Best Books of 2024—richly deserved, by the way.
And our host for this musical roundtable is Carl Wilson, Slate’s chief music critic. Carl is a freelance writer and editor based in Toronto. He’s the author of Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, and he helps run Popular Music Books in Process, a biweekly online series featuring conversations with the authors of new books about music. Without further ado, I will now turn it over to Carl.
Carl Wilson: Chris, thank you so much for that. It’s an honor to be here and to be here with Julianne and Ann as well. As you all know, critics spend a lot of time alone at our desks with our thoughts, and the annual Music Club conversations have always been a place of contact and sharing and renewal. I always learn a lot from them and have a lot of fun, and I’m sure today will be no different. But we’ve got a lot of stuff to cover. So, to get us started, I’d like to ask each of you to tell us about a couple of your favorite albums of the year. And Ann, let’s start with you.
Ann Powers: Well, Carl, let’s just start where we often do—you and me, old friends, with a record I think we probably both loved. This is by the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter auteur Cassandra Jenkins. It’s called My Light, My Destroyer.
What can I say about this album? It’s just, this is the album that really carried me through this very complicated year. What I love about what Jenkins does is that she creates these little luminous worlds in her songs. The album, it’s often about loss. It seems to be sort of about romantic loss, but it’s also about those tiny moments in life that become illuminated by some kind of magic. From the sound she’s cultivated to the stories she tells to the way she uses field recordings on this record—including a wonderful conversation with her mom in which they are stargazing, and her mom, who’s a science teacher, is explaining the stars at night—I found so much solace, and not just solace, but imaginative life in this album. It really meant a lot to me.
And then another album in which I also sought, I guess, refuge—I don’t know, maybe we can talk about how much we needed refuge in music this year versus needing other things, like motivation or just pleasurable release, but I found myself needing refuge a lot—is this beautiful collaboration between the Brazilian L.A.–based guitarist Fabiano do Nascimento and the young sax wizard Sam Gendel. It’s called The Room. And usually Sam Gendel is a guy who uses a lot of effects and tricks with his sax. And on this album, he and Fabiano, they just bring their instruments into a room and make beautiful, spare, highly vulnerable music together. And Fabiano do Nascimento—he’s a fascinating guy, and he’s been doing tons of really interesting collaborations of late, but this record stood out even within his growing body of work as one that I kept returning to.
Wilson: Thanks, Ann. Yeah, I very much identify with that desire for quiet places to retreat into in music this year. But Julianne, perhaps you’ll take us in another direction. What are your choices?
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd: My first pick is an album called I Hit the Water by the New York–based musician Lollise. It is an album about immigration and limitations and the lack of limitations and family. Lollise is originally from Botswana, and so it is a very adventurous piece of work that combines music that she listened to growing up, like South African bubblegum, kwaito, and highlife, alongside music that she learned about when she moved to the United States, such as drum and bass, punk, new wave. And it’s this wonderful mélange of all of these genres and these ideas about what it means to migrate and be someone who perhaps your family didn’t think that maybe you were going to be. She actually, before she was a musician, was a scientific researcher in a spinal cord laboratory.
Powers: Whoa!
Shepherd: She became a handbag designer slash musician. So she’s had a lot of interesting jobs, to say the least. And also I think that she started her pop career in her 40s, which is something that I find compelling as well. And it was a beautiful album that I keep going back to. Absolutely original, absolutely deep, and her voice is beautiful, and because she’s a fashion designer, her videos are fantastic to watch. And my second album was Verbathim, by the Palestinian Canadian musician Nemahsis. That album is as perfect an alt-pop album as I could conjure. Her voice is very raspy and clear and she has a lot of range and she also experiments with style. There’s guitar pop, there’s sort of new wave–y, there’s some folk songs on there. And then also there was a lot of backstory behind it because she wrote it as a nonpolitical album. Her first EP, she considered it to be the political entry in her repertoire, but it became politicized because of who she is and because she was abandoned by her label after Oct. 7 and has been working as an independent artist since then. And so I looked to the album not just to listen to great and beautiful music but because it gave me a lot of solace and hope and beauty and just life in a year that was so exciting at times, to say the least.
Powers: Well, exciting, but maybe not in the way we want to be excited.
Shepherd: Yes, exactly.
Powers: We’re living in interesting times, as the old saying goes.
Wilson: Thank you, Julianne. And Chris?
Molanphy: Well, I guess I’ll go ahead and fulfill my usual role of being Captain Obvious and talk about some widely praised records that I played to death this year, because I am what I am. The album of the year for me was Charli XCX’s Brat, including all of its permutations: Brat but It’s Different but It’s Still Brat, or whatever they all were called. What’s so fascinating—I was trying to explain this to the Culture Gabfesters when I was on for their “summer strut” show in August, and I think it was Dana Stevens who asked me, “How is it that Brat is supposedly dominating the conversation but there’s no song by Charli that’s kind of in the ‘song of the summer’ competition?” And I was like, “That’s because the whole album is dominating the summer.” It really was an album that played as an album, and it’s kind of a miracle how it coheres as an album.
And yet, what’s the single from Brat? Is it “360”? Is it “Apple”? Is it “Girl, So Confusing”? You pick your favorite, right? “Sympathy Is a Knife.” I mean, it was just banger after banger after banger, and they all qualify as the hit. The remixes complicated the story in interesting ways. Obviously the remix of “Girl, So Confusing,” featuring Lorde literally in the title. The redo of “Guess” featuring Billie Eilish, Billie now in her fully queer phase and embracing it, God bless that. Actually, Ann’s husband Eric pointed out that it is dominating the field in the critics polls this year, the way literally no album ever has in the history of Pazz & Jop and everything. It’s like, by a 2-to-1 ratio, everybody’s voting for Brat. And, I don’t know, game recognize game. It won for a reason.
Powers: Yes, Eric won’t shut up about that, which is fair. Which is fair.
Shepherd: I do wonder what about Speakerboxxx/The Love Below.
Powers: Oh, it’s a good point. It’s a good point. That was huge.
Shepherd: That was really big.
Powers: He did some math, though, and I feel like he found out there were others that—who were some of the others?
Molanphy: Nirvana, Nevermind, in 1991.
Powers: Yeah. Time Out of Mind, Bob Dylan.
Molanphy: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, in 2010. There have been albums that have been dominant but not this dominant.
Powers: No, it’s crazy. And we can—as maybe the least brat among us, I totally admire and I’m for Charli XCX, but the album didn’t capture my imagination the way it did virtually everyone else I know. But I have to give it up to her for claiming this moment.
Wilson: I think that one of the funny things—you know, I saw backlash kind of in the second week, that critics’ lists were coming out, saying, Oh, all the critics are pretending they love Brat just to be cool with the kids and that kind of thing. But the hilarious thing is that critics in North America have been the main audience for Charli XCX for the past decade. And so it’s really our crossover moment as much as hers, and I think that that accounts in a lot of ways for the energy behind it on this level. But Julianne, you had thoughts about Brat that you wanted to share as well?
Shepherd: The marketing. I think so much of it was really just about the simplicity of the album cover—not the music, but just the idea of getting the music out there to people who would never have listened to an album that is basically, like, bloghouse and 2001 U.K. garage and that traverses all of these kinds of once-obscure dance genres. That, plus there’s also obviously Charli’s whole persona, which is really hitting right now. I think this sort of laissez-faire party girl feels very aging zoomer to me.
Powers: Yes, I agree with that.
Shepherd: But I really think we cannot underestimate the graphic design, and obviously it became the meme and went all the way up to the presidential election. But I do think that it’s kind of on a downslope. I think one of the least cool things that I can think of is playing a concert in Times Square for a fast-fashion label. So that was my prediction—perhaps backlash 2025, but I did love every bit of the music.
Powers: I have a question for you, Julianne. Do you think that Pantone released one of its dullest colors of the year ever, Mocha Mousse, because they just knew they couldn’t beat Brat?
Molanphy: Brat Green owned the year. I mean, without question.
Powers: Yeah, Pantone was defeated instantly by Brat.
Shepherd: I fully think your instincts are correct.
Powers: Chris, did you have another pick?
Molanphy: If I’m going to highlight one other album, I really want to mention Doechii’s album Alligator Bites Never Heal, my hip-hop album of the year. And that’s saying something, because there have been some bangers this year, including the LL Cool J album, obviously the Kendrick album, but gee whiz, what she brought to the table—I mean, it’s like a bars album and a pop album and a mixtape, and it’s got it all. I quote my buddy Tom Breihan, who calls her a hard-ass Florida rap technician. I can’t describe her any better than that. If you haven’t watched the Late Show performance of a couple of weeks ago, on Colbert’s show, do yourself a favor. It is stunning, dazzling.
Molanphy: And the album just cooks—I mean, it just goes and goes, and she’s got bars for days. And it’s conversational too. It’s kind of like she’s engaging the listener in chatter, but yet it’s got flow. And, I don’t know, call me an old-school rap fan, but I like flow.
Powers: But not just flow, like you said. She’s building characters. She’s doing musical theater. I have to throw in a little kudos to my team at NPR for inviting her to the Tiny Desk at exactly the right moment. And she killed it with an all-woman band. Honestly, Brat summer gave way to Doechii fall.
Shepherd: I agree. The one-two of the late-night performance, and then Tiny Desk, was like, All right, well, she’s blown up.
Wilson: We’ll come back to the question of the year in hip-hop, but I think there’s no question that Doechii was the real breath of fresh air in that case, and she was high on my list as well. And that theater-kid energy, I think, is something that—I didn’t structure a question around this, but I was thinking about that over and over again with some of the things this year, and the recent moment with Wicked brings that particularly to mind. But look at the Last Dinner Party, from the U.K., and all kinds of artists right now. Really, the drama kid is having a moment in pop culture. And l think that’s a reflection of something that’s been going on with the zoomers for a few years and that we’re really seeing crystallize in that way.
Molanphy: Chappell Roan, for one thing, the way she blew up this year—theater-kid energy.
Powers: And Sabrina. I think Sabrina has that too, completely.
Wilson: Yeah, Sabrina. The Disney Channel branch of theater-kid energy, for sure.
Powers: But she brings more than your average Disney star to the table.
Wilson: Just to round out the round, my own full list is up on Slate. But I’ll pick out two things. One that I know that I share with Ann is The Past Is Still Alive, by Hurray for the Riff Raff, which is a band that’s been around for over 15 years out of New Orleans, led by Alynda Segarra. And I think they really made a breakthrough on this album. I’ve been fond of previous records, but this one really captivated me, and I think it’s really bringing together things that Segarra has been working on for years and just bringing them into sharp focus. It’s almost kind of an audio memoir, a story of their youth as a kid at risk, basically traveling the roads of America. And through those memories, they kind of talk about America as a whole and about how the past is still alive in both beautiful and threatening and dangerous ways in American life. At the same time, it’s not heavy-handed in the way that Segarra in previous albums had a little bit of a tendency to be. It’s got this beautiful kind of handmade anthemic quality, but it eases off the gas in the right places. And I found it kind of endlessly listenable and moving on that level.
Powers: They’ve definitely evolved so much as a songwriter. I mean, I’ve been following Alynda since almost the beginning of their career, and I was hooked from the minute I heard their voice. But those early songs, they were so influenced by blues. The songs were very repetitive. They were like train wheels. I mean, Alynda was someone who rode the rails. They were kind of a hobo early on. They were a train hopper, and that was a sound they’d built. But on these songs, they’ve figured out how to structure and tell stories so exquisitely and offering us this intersectional queer vision of bohemian life that—well, you can imagine that’s my jam. I’m just so happy for them that they’ve reached this apex with this record.
Wilson: Yeah, absolutely. And the other record that I’ll talk about occupies some similar territory in terms of queer sensibility in America in 2024, and that’s the soundtrack album for the film I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun’s horror-fantasy trans allegory set in the ’90s. The movie, to me, is a prime example of how young people right now are using horror as a way to work out anxieties around identity and survival. And that’s really backed up on this album with music from the likes of Frances Quinlan, Caroline Polachek, Florist, L’Rain, and Sloppy Jane with Phoebe Bridgers. It’s a real throwback to the way you could discover a whole host of new artists on a great movie or TV show soundtrack back in the CD age. It’s as if the director had made you a mixtape, which I think was what they were really going for here. And I hope that that cinematic universe kind of expands out for me. I was surprised, while I was watching the film, that I kept stopping to find out who that was on the soundtrack and who that was. And I find the record something that I go back to over and over again as a really rich text of very specific qualities of the zeitgeist right now.
Molanphy: There are certain soundtracks that sort of capture a zeitgeist moment. They sort of freeze-frame something. I’m thinking of The Harder They Come, in the ’70s, or Pretty in Pink, in the ’80s, or, God help us, the Garden State soundtrack, in the aughts, for better or for worse.
Wilson: Or Pulp Fiction, in the ’90s.
Molanphy: Pulp Fiction in the ’90s, lest I skip over that. And so it’s one of those—it’s like it’s crystallizing something, which is unique, I think.
Powers: And Jane Schoenbrun definitely has her finger on the pulse of the music scene in that she also cast Lindsey Jordan, i.e., Snail Mail, in the movie. So, I mean, this is definitely a music movie all the way. And I wonder, Carl, if you found a complement to this soundtrack in the epic Transa compilation that Red Hot put out just recently. Because I’m fascinated with that compilation. It’s the most collaborative and sort of generative compilation I’ve heard in recent memory, with artists repeating on several tracks and different ensembles. And to me, … these two albums together are sort of presenting kind of a vision of what a trans aesthetic is. Not to speak at all for those forming this aesthetic, but together these works, I think, do present a different way into music and the trans experience.
Wilson: That album, which is I think almost three hours long, came out towards the end of the year. And so it was really difficult to absorb in time for these kinds of year-end reflections. But I’m really looking forward to going back to it. It definitely has a landmark, in that Sade put out her first song in six, seven years, something like that, on it. Which is a nod to her trans son and kind of an apology for not understanding, and it’s just full of things like that. It’s definitely—I agree, it’s kind of a landmark.
So we might touch back on some of these examples again as we go, but we do need to move along. And I think what we should talk about is kind of the year in pop overall, which I think was kind of a strangely split experience. I remember in the spring and summer, it felt like critics were more excited than any other year this decade about all the fresh faces and energy on the charts, from Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan to Charli XCX and Shaboozey and more, but later in the year that felt like that kind of stagnated and maybe, postelection, kind of soured. And so I’ll turn to Chris as our resident chart maven to give us a bit of an overview of what happened on that level in 2024.
Molanphy: Yeah, I think you captured it right. It really was a tale of two different years in one, where the first half of the year was just full of all this energy—not just energy but variety. When you have turnover in the Top 10, not just among all of these pop women that we’ve been talking about, but also, Hozier had a No. 1 hit this year called “Too Sweet,” or folks like Teddy Swims, with what turned out to be the No. 1 record of the year, the impossible-to-categorize “Lose Control.” It’s R&B, it’s pop, it’s rock, it’s a little bit of everything.
Powers: Can I ask you a question about that song? Did it come out in—it came out in 2023, didn’t it?
Molanphy: It came out in late 2023, but it basically sat like a stone in the Top 10 all year, which is why, for those who care, for my chart nerds out there, if you’re wondering why a record that only spent one week at No. 1 wound up Billboard’s top record of the whole year, especially in a year when Shaboozey spent 19 weeks at No. 1, it’s because it just sat like a rock in the Top 10 all year long and just kind of cleared the field.
Powers: Like a magic rock, like a shining, beautiful magic rock.
Molanphy: Right. And like you said, Carl, the critics were excited. It wasn’t just critics. I talk to radio programmers from time to time, and they were excited too, because they’re like, These are not TikTok fad songs. These are actual songs that are connecting with both active audiences and passive audiences who just tune in to the radio and want to hear whatever’s happening. And that first half of the year when Chappell was breaking, when the Teddy Swims record was breaking, when the Hozier record was breaking, when “Espresso,” obviously—I mean, there was a period where three different Sabrina Carpenter hits were in the Top 10 simultaneously, including when she was competing with herself with “Espresso” and “Please Please Please.” That was really exciting, and then sort of the pattern set in where, once radio finds something that tests well, they just kind of run it into the ground. And that’s a hallmark of radio, which has been kind of under siege for the last five years. Once something tests as well as Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song”—a terrific record, by the way—they just kind of put it on autopilot, and that’s your year right there. So I do hope that we have not just the excitement but the musical variety that we saw in the first half of this year back in the Top 10 soon enough. We’ll see what happens after we get past the typical Christmas wave that we’re having right now, with Mariah and Wham! and all of those records. But it was, for a time, a pretty exciting pop year, and we hadn’t really had one of those in the 2020s yet.
Wilson: So, Julianne, your reactions about the year in pop?
Shepherd: I was very thrilled by the year in pop and all of the new faces. I really like what you said about theater-kid energy. No. 1 Miss Theater was Chappell Roan, and I was thrilled to see a queer operatic theater kid who is inspired by her and my favorite drag queen, Sasha Colby. And wearing drag in the mainstream becomes such a huge story of the year. It was very exciting. And then, I agree, it kind of all curdled after the election, but everything curdled after the election. So I don’t know if we can necessarily blame radio, because I wasn’t listening to terrestrial radio, and it still felt weird to me.
Powers: “Good Luck, Babe!,” for me, just grew. Its beauty grew for me, and every different version I would hear, and I have to single out the Miranda Lambert and Kelly Clarkson performance that they did on Kelly’s show. Because I already love the song—I was a pretty hardcore “Pink Pony Club” person before that—but then, when I heard Miranda and Kelly do it together, [it struck me anew] on two levels. One, on a kind of a story level, because of Miranda bringing it in and saying her brother is gay—my brother brought this to me, and it was kind of, look, any ounce of solidarity and allyship we can get from a mainstream country star, I’m like, Yes, thank you. So that, and then also, Chappell’s a great singer, but Kelly is our great cover singer of the moment. She’s so incredible. And to hear her sing that chorus just reminded me of what a stunning structural achievement that song is.
Wilson: Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the things that Chappell makes us think about is the ways in which mainstream pop and music in general creates political energy by bringing constituencies together, by making people see themselves reflected back, or seeing people they know, people they love, reflected back and understanding themselves to be part of an audience. But short of that kind of action, which I think we got from a lot of these major stars this year, we were short of directly political music or protest music at a time when things are so volatile. It’s hard to point to anything strong that happened on that level. And I know that we were talking beforehand about that issue in pop right now, and I wonder if it affects how we hear the pop landscape.
Powers: I definitely think 2024 is a year in which identity stood in for explicit protests. And honestly, the political conflicts of this year have a lot of the media running scared. I’m not speaking for any organization, and as an NPR employee, I am nonpartisan. I’m not taking a stance, but I’m just saying, … analyzing the moment, I think we see that. I think we see that there wasn’t a lot of coverage of artists making protest music. There’s another Palestinian artist, named Saint Levant, who made a record that I find fascinating, and I find this artist’s journey very interesting. He grew up partly in Gaza, in a hotel that his father had built there, and the hotel has been destroyed in the recent conflicts. He made this album that in a lot of ways is a lament. In a lot of ways, it’s an expression of pride in his identity. Complicated, interesting figure. Played at Coachella, has a big global following. And honestly, crickets out there. I mean, nobody covered this record. I don’t know. I find that really, really interesting. So part of it is what the media is willing to take up. Maybe there’s a ton of protest music happening out there and it’s not being tracked. And NPR recently did do a feature on Saint Levant.
Shepherd: It does seem like it was much harder for sort of explicitly protest music—or even music about whatever cultural sociopolitical conflicts are happening right now—to rise through. And I don’t know if it’s because pop music has become so dominant and there was so much to talk about. But also, I don’t know why it couldn’t break through other than perhaps media is a little scared. And also perhaps we’re too divided, as they tell us.
Molanphy: We are going to pause here, but be sure to tune in to Part 2 of this special Bridge episode with the Slate Music Club. It’s now live in your podcast feed in the second half. We discuss the year in Taylor Swift, the crossover of country music, the epic beef between Kendrick and Drake, and the state of music journalism. If you aren’t a Slate Plus member and want to listen to the second half of this conversation, join now at slate.com/hitparadeplus.
