It’s that time of year again, the time where we gather MOJO’s writers together to thrash out the definitive list of the best new albums this year has had to offer. We’ve had plenty of returning favourites in 2024 - Nick Cave, Jack White, Paul Weller and St. Vincent among them. And in some cases have welcomed back artists after we were starting to worry we may never hear from again – say hello, The Cure and The The. For us, though, what’s helped to make 2024 yet another vintage year for music is the new artists coming through and forging out new pathways. One's that we’re sure to be exploring for many years to come. If you want even more of the year’s best music make sure you pick up a copy of the latest issue of MOJO for the inside story on many of these records and a bespoke 'Best Of 2024' CD. Until next year…
50.
LEE ‘SCRATCH’ PERRY & YOUTH
Spaceship To Mars
CREATION YOUTH
Since his death in 2021, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry has enjoyed a fertile, if inconsistent, creative afterlife. Two 2024 releases, however, placed the reggae magus’s unreleased incantations in friendly new settings: King Perry, shepherded by producer Danny Boyle; and this cosmic roots confection, worked on since 2017 by Killing Joke bassist Youth. Heady flashbacks to the mid-’70s Black Ark sound proliferated, plus some game if unlikely vocal sparring partners including Boy George.
Standout track: Iron Shirt
49.
JOAN AS POLICE WOMAN
Lemons, Limes And Orchids
PIAS
“The title makes me think of attraction, passion, playfulness, paying attention, our collective downfall, loss, falling in love and love of humanity. That should cover it,” Joan Wasser told MOJO, comprehensively nailing the emotional breadth and maturity that filled her sixth solo album proper. Plenty of personality from this seasoned session pro (Anohni, Gorillaz et al) too, as she pared back her music to burnished, sometimes torchy, New York soul.
Standout track: Long For Ruin
48.
NICK LOWE
Indoor Safari
YEP ROC
The inimitable Basher’s first album in 11 years was, as he explained in MOJO 371, an investigation of “the craft of songwriting… It takes an enormous amount of effort to make it sound like you’ve made no effort at all.” Mission accomplished on Indoor Safari, as Nick Lowe and his wrestling-masked accomplices Los Straitjackets made a clutch of new songs, revamps and covers (Garnett Mimms!) resemble lost hits from a golden age of rock’n’roll radio.
Standout track: Jet Pac Boomerang
47.
THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN
Glasgow Eyes
FUZZ CLUB
If the reunion of Creation’s other battling brothers stole most of the headlines in 2024, the simmering entente between Jim and William Reid was the one that delivered the goods: a knockabout, argumentative memoir; and this equally spirited eighth album. Glasgow Eyes was a late JAMC classic of pop-culture snark (“Andrew Oldham’s on the phone”), gnarly self-mythologising (“The dark shit”) and even trace elements of filial affection.
Standout track: Jamcod
46.
THE LAST DINNER PARTY
Prelude To Ecstasy
ISLAND
A band who roughly resembled a cross between Kate Bush and Queen – or, perhaps, Florence & The Machine and The Darkness – were always going to be a bit much for some. Nevertheless, the gusto with which the mostly female band grappled with pomp-pop made them 2024’s breakout stars. Note, too, an autumn cover of Sparks’ This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us that asserted their art-rock bona fides with appropriate flamboyance.
READ MORE: The Last Dinner Party at Glastonbury Reviewed: Baroque pop angsts and mass arm-waving.
Standout track: Nothing Matters
45.
NUBYA GARCIA
Odyssey
CONCORD JAZZ
Another strong year for British jazz found some of the main players stretching their wings, as Cassie Kinoshi and Nubya Garcia leaned harder into ravishing, complex orchestrations to supplement their soloing chops. Garcia, in particular, proved a sophisticated and democratic leader on her second solo album: ceding space to notable guests like esperanza spalding and Georgia Anne Muldrow; taking her turns in the spotlight on sax with notable discretion and maximum impact.
Standout track: Odyssey
44.
KAMASI WASHINGTON
Fearless Movement
YOUNG
The deep-pile richness of Garcia’s Odyssey often recalled Kamasi Washington’s Heaven And Earth (MOJO’s 2018 Album Of The Year), but Washington’s belated sequel switched up his own game: less cosmic grandeur, more funkiness, danceability and street smarts. As ever, Washington was another master strategist, uniting George Clinton, André 3000, sundry next-gen rappers and a surfeit of good ideas into a relentlessly joyful 86 minutes.
READ MORE: Kamasi Washington Interviewed: “It was difficult to make because it was so personal.”
Standout track: Asha The First
43.
THE BLACK CROWES
Happiness Bastards
SILVER ARROW
Like the Gallaghers and Reids, a rapprochement between Chris and Rich Robinson resulted in the first Black Crowes album since 2009 – and the best, perhaps, in nearly three decades. Happiness Bastards charged through Stones/Faces raunch, Southern soul and country honk with a punch reminiscent of their earliest records – a focus borne out by Rich’s pragmatic assessment in MOJO 364: “In order to do this properly, we had to not be dicks.”
Standout track: Wanting And Waiting
42.
MICHAEL KIWANUKA
Small Changes
POLYDOR
Gene Clark, Beth Gibbons and Mazzy Star were the classy influences cited by Kiwanuka upfront of his fourth album, and first since 2019: reference points that reasserted his music as a complex evolution of soul. The aptly titled Small Changes, however, also reiterated his ability to make timelessly great music – historically resonant, subtly modern – and overcome self-doubt with the high-spec support of regular producers Danger Mouse and Inflo.
“Everybody hurts, it seems to say, but this may help… ★★★★” Read MOJO’s review of Small Changes in full.
Standout track: Four Long Years
41.
LAURA MARLING
Patterns In Repeat
CHRYSALIS
Marling’s 2020 album, Song For Our Daughter, was a hypothetical concept, but Patterns In Repeat made explicit the artist’s new reality, as Child Of Man opened with the gurgling of her one-year-old. And if Marling ruefully admitted in MOJO 372 that albums about motherhood had always bored her, she remained a subtle and uncommonly intelligent singer-songwriter – one alert to the lullaby clichés of the genre, and with the gifts to artfully circumnavigate them.
Standout track: Patterns
40.
BRITTANY HOWARD
What Now
ISLAND
Howard’s unshowy determination to transcend the garage R&B that originally made her famous has been one of the most compelling creative journeys of the last decade, and her second solo album built skilfully on the success of 2019’s Jaime. The Southern-accented Prince love remained, augmented now by an ever-widening range and confidence, as What Now accommodated pumping disco, woozy jazz fusion, New Age singing bowls and Pride-adjacent anthems into the soulful stew.
READ MORE: Britany Howard Interviewed: “Prince kissed me on the cheek… Next thing I know, he’d passed away.”
Standout track: Every Color In Blue
39.
AROOJ AFTAB
Night Reign
VERVE
After last year’s improvised trio LP with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily (Number 16 in MOJO’s 2023 list), the singer and composer returned to her solo mission of finding connections between Pakistani Ghazal, American jazz and an ethereal soundworld beyond conventional genre. Night Reign, consequently, embraced both Urdu poetry (Na Gul) and the Great American Songbook (Autumn Leaves), while also moving into tenser zones (Bolo Na, featuring spiky poetics from Moor Mother).
Standout track: Na Gul
38.
LEYLA McCALLA
Sun Without The Heat
ANTI-
Almost certainly the only 2024 album inspired by an academic text entitled Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals, the Haitian-American’s fifth solo album showed how far she’d travelled from her string band roots in the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Beyond the lightly-worn theory, Sun Without The Heat scored personal and political insight with everything from hi-life and Afrobeat to psych and Tropicália. “I am determined to be joyful,” she told MOJO; here was the proof.
Standout track: Tree
37.
COMMON & PETE ROCK
The Auditorium Vol. 1
LOMA VISTA
2024’s most prominent elder statesman of rap might have been Snoop Dogg, ubiquitous at the Paris Olympics. But on the mike, the medals were won by LL Cool J (back with The FORCE for the first time in over a decade), and Chicago’s meticulously eloquent Common. The pairing with another old-school vet in producer Pete Rock proved inspired: mid-life wisdom, reflection and spirituality aligned to nuanced, soulful beats and Curtis Mayfield samples.
Standout track: We’re On Our Way
36.
JESSICA PRATT
Here In The Pitch
CITY SLANG
“Shangri-Las séance music” was how MOJO’s reviewer described Jessica Pratt, another songwriter in thrall to the reign of night. The Californian’s fourth album was as candlelit, eerie and troubled as its predecessors, but shafts of light penetrated the entrancing gloom: a tinge of bossa nova here, a splash of classic ’60s pop there; a sense of corners being approached, if not turned. “Shit’s been really bad,” she revealed in MOJO 368, “but I think we’re going to be OK.”
Standout track: The Last Year
35.
ADRIANNE LENKER
Bright Future
4AD
A relatively quiet year for the industrious Big Thief, who lost founder member and bassist Max Oleartchik in July. Lenker, though, remained as active as ever, midwifing the return of cult octogenarian songwriter Tucker Zimmerman (see MOJO 372) and releasing her sixth solo LP. Recorded in deep woodland seclusion, Bright Future was intimate, reflective, folk-infused and Dylanish without being beholden to tradition – an album at once rough-hewn and beautifully crafted.
"There is a hardness to Lenker ’s writing. It doesn’t flow cleanly – it catches in currents, snags in overhanging branches... ★★★★” Read MOJO's review of Bright Future in full.
Standout track: Vampire Empire
34.
AMYL AND THE SNIFFERS
Cartoon Darkness
ROUGH TRADE
Hard, perhaps, to pitch an album that begins, “You’re a dumb cunt” as an emotionally nuanced maturing. But the third album by the Melbourne punks brilliantly elevated their game – a big crisp production from Nick Launay at the Foo Fighters’ studio; the odd confessional ballad – while retaining the confrontational energy that made them so initially appealing. As Amy Taylor notes on Going Somewhere, “The best roses are always grown out of cow shit.”
"There’s virtually nothing not to like about this record... ★★★★" Read MOJO's review of Cartoon Darkness in full.
Standout track: Chewing Gum
33.
EZRA COLLECTIVE
Dance, No One’s Watching
PARTISAN
While contemporaries pursued more esoteric and challenging paths, Ezra Collective took on the mission of bringing jazz to the masses with near-evangelical zeal, culminating in a Wembley Arena show to 12,000 in November. Their third album synthesized jazz with rap, soul, pan-African pop and reggae, with a sleek, feelgood, dancefloor-friendly imperative that earmarked them as natural successors to the London acid jazz movement of the 1980s.
Standout track: The Herald
32.
PET SHOP BOYS
Nonetheless
PARLOPHONE
James Ford’s production dominance continued apace: following Arctic Monkeys in 2022, then Blur and Depeche Mode in 2023, 2024 found him pointing up albums by Beth Gibbons, The Last Dinner Party, Fontaines D.C. and, here, the urbane synth-pop lifers. The fifteenth PSBs album updated and finessed their balance between disco and melancholy, stitching in glam memoir and Rudolf Nureyev biography along the way. Avery British institution… nonetheless.
Standout track: New London Boy
31.
THE CURE
Songs Of A Lost World
FICTION
The 16-year tease leading up to the fourteenth Cure album – even the title was revealed five years ago – ended in November, when Robert Smith finally released Songs Of A Lost World from his perfectionist grasp. If The Cure had articulated despair and loss from the off, the subjects were now freighted with lived experience, adding even greater heft to the blasted, slow-motion grandeur of the music. A fragile, magnificent thing.
"An audaciously bleak, beautiful journey... ★★★★" Read MOJO's review of Songs Of A Lost world in full.
Standout track: Endsong
29.
WAXAHATCHEE
Tigers Blood
ANTI-
“I wanted Tigers Blood to be an elevated, more feminine bar band,” claimed Katie Crutchfield in MOJO 365, neatly encapsulating the countrified jangle and open-hearted frankness of her sixth Waxahatchee album. A document of change, sobriety and hard-earned wisdom (“I’m an outlaw in the court of strong opinions”), with handy assistance from guitarist MJ Lenderman, whose own Manning Fireworks album was another fine take on new-school Americana.
Standout track: Crowbar
29.
CHARLES LLOYD
The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow
BLUE NOTE
A tenor and flute legend sporting collaborations with Cannonball Adderley, Keith Jarrett and The Beach Boys on his CV, Lloyd’s seven-decade journey from West Coast jazz, via LA rock and back again, reached a serene high on this sparkling gem. Fronting a quartet that also featured pianist Jason Moran, the 86-year-old paid tribute to Billie Holiday and Thelonious Monk, reworked old tunes, and asserted a pioneering jazz generation’s continuing potency.
Standout track: The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow
28.
JOHN CALE
POPtical Illusion
DOMINO
No hanging around for Cale these days: this eighteenth solo album arrived only a year after predecessor Mercy. While that record was studded with guest spots – Weyes Blood, Animal Collective, Fat White Family – and haunted by memories, POPtical Illusion was a brighter, more self-contained affair, one that privileged the 82-year-old’s inexhaustible appetite for new sounds and ideas. As he sang on Calling You Out: “There’s always time for change, my friend.”
Standout track: How We See The Light
27.
THE THE
Ensoulment
CINEOLA/EARMUSIC
Twenty-four years between the last The The album, NakedSelf (soundtracks apart), and Ensoulment put most of 2024’s long-awaited comebacks into a different context, and it proved notably worth the wait. Matt Johnson’s curdled, punning declamations on the domestic and global hellscape (“Kissing the ring of POTUS”) were a given; new perspectives in the wake of bereavement and illness, plus his best tunes in three decades, a welcome bonus.
Standout track: Cognitive Dissident
26.
DIRTY THREE
Love Changes Everything
BELLA UNION
Warren Ellis tipped off the MOJO Record Club podcast back in 2022 that a Dirty Three reunion was in the works, and the Australian trio’s first album since 2012 duly arrived this summer, before Ellis returned to Bad Seeds duty. The band’s mission to channel Coltrane and Stravinsky informed the five movements of Love Changes Everything, with the trio of guitar, violin and drum virtuosi improvising at a level of wildness and romance unusual even by their standards.
Standout track: Love Changes Everything V
25.
ST. VINCENT
All Born Screaming
VIRGIN/FICTION
“Post-plague pop” was how Annie Clark described her seventh album to MOJO back in February, signalling her great leap forward from the artful ’70s stylings of 2021’s Daddy’s Home. “Darker and harder,” she added, pinpointing the dystopian electronica and industrial heaviness that prevailed. Fine tunes, though, and Clark’s ability to retain her character in the face of radical transformations remained Bowie-esque – not least on the Five Years apocalypse of The Power’s Out.
"Further proves Annie Clark to be a brilliant and multifaceted musical force... ★★★★" Read MOJO's review of All Born Screaming in full.
Standout track: All Born Screaming
24.
MERCURY REV
Born Horses
BELLA UNION
A theatrical sense of wonder has pervaded all of Mercury Rev’s albums since their debut in 1991; never, though, to the extent it did on this tenth album. Born Horses found Jonathan Donahue declaiming rather than singing, a Broadway beat poet, while his band mapped expansive Catskills vistas: at times verging on a psychedelic Miles Davis; at others like an enchanted ambient remix of The Funny Bird from Deserter’s Songs.
Standout track: Mood Swings
23.
RICHARD THOMPSON
Ship To Shore
NEW WEST
Life’s A Bloody Show, ran one of the song titles on Ship To Shore, and Thompson’s eighteenth solo LP was a reliably rueful examination of the human condition. “I’m fairly optimistic but I know what darkness is,” he explained in MOJO 367, grappling with sundry disappointments and quintessentially British dread at a jaunty folk rock clip. Business as usual, then; a singer-songwriter and guitarist still, indefatigably, at the top of his game.
Standout track: Singapore Sadie
22.
MDOU MOCTAR
Funeral For Justice
MATADOR
Stranded on tour in the US when a military coup threw Moctar’s home country of Niger into greater turmoil, the Tuareg guitar hero and his band recorded a sixth album that ramped up their furious intensity levels even further. Moctar’s powerhouse shredding became an eloquent way of conveying rage across language barriers, but there were meditative moments, too – harbingers of an acoustic reworking of the songs, Tears Of Injustice, due in February.
Standout track: Imouhar
21.
GRUFF RHYS
Sadness Sets Me Free
ROUGH TRADE
With a modus operandi for his eighth solo album that he described as “euphoric melancholy”, the high concepts that have often driven Gruff Rhys’s post-Super Furry Animals work were parked in favour of sun-dappled self-criticism, see Bad Friend (“You know I’m as reliable as asking a seal to deliver the post”) and Silver Lining (Lead Balloons). All aligned, usefully, to some of his best and bounciest classic pop since the heyday of SFA.
Standout track: Bad Friend
20.
LADY BLACKBIRD
Slang Spirituals
BMG
Long years struggling for a break in the US pop-industrial complex paid off in 2021, when Marley Munroe became Lady Blackbird for the Black Acid Soul album, a spare and jazzy set of, mostly, covers. This follow-up radically broadened the canvas: a full-on, lavishly ornamented retro-soul jam, at once psychedelically tinged and mainstream-friendly. All original compositions, too, save for a swampy reckoning with Bettye Swann’s 1974 nugget, When The Game Is Played On You.
Standout track: Whatever His Name
19.
PETER PERRETT
The Cleansing
DOMINO
The Only One continued to tackle regrets head on for this third solo LP since his welcome, if unlikely, 2017 comeback with How The West Was Won. “All that time I thought I was having fun,” he sang, “just another wasted life.” Yet The Cleansing was the sound of a punk survivor fully capitalising on a second chance, his unstinting ramalams assisted by a cast including Johnny Marr, Bobby Gillespie, Fontaines D.C.’s Carlos O’Connell, and Perrett’s two sons.
Standout track: I Wanna Go With Dignity
18.
DAVID GILMOUR
Luck And Strange
SONY
“I usually want everything to be musically perfect,” Gilmour told MOJO, “but here there are moments of complete anarchic madness.” The fifth solo Gilmour LP proved an escape from surrounding himself with people who are “too respectful”, revamping his approach with Alt-J producer Charlie Andrew. Amidst the fresh angles, though, Gilmour’s storied past still resonated – not least when building the title track out of a 2007 jam with Pink Floyd keys maestro Rick Wright.
READ MORE: David Gilmour On Roger Waters Rift: "I have no regrets about it whatsoever..."
Standout track: Scattered
17.
PAUL WELLER
66
POLYDOR
Along with Suggs and Noel Gallagher, Bobby Gillespie cropped up again on Paul Weller’s seventeenth solo album, released a day before his sixty-sixth birthday. Weller’s intention was to stretch himself as a songwriting collaborator, resulting in an album that alluded to various corners of his rich history (My Best Friend’s Coat, redolent of early Style Council Francophilia; the Wild Wood-ish strum of Ship Of Fools) while also extending into new territory, notably the Floydian sprawl of Burn Out.
Standout track: Burn Out
16.
MICHAEL HEAD & THE RED ELASTIC BAND
Loophole
MODERN SKY
Strong carpe diem vibes from Head, riding the momentum of Dear Scott, MOJO’s Best Album Of 2022. Loophole was less cohesive than its predecessor, but brimming with well-crafted and emotionally poignant songs, as Head tacked between measured nostalgia and cleaned-up optimism. Arthur Lee remained his pole star, but the Scouse bossa of You Smiled At Me also harkened back to Head’s 1980s in The Pale Fountains.
Standout track: A Ricochet Moment
15.
ENGLISH TEACHER
This Could Be Texas
ISLAND
In MOJO 372, Leeds’ English Teacher railed against post-punk orthodoxy dominating British indie-rock – a sound the quartet had absorbed and mostly transcended by the time this debut landed. Singer Lily Fontaine’s determination to subvert expectations had been upfront since their 2021 single R&B (“Despite appearances, I haven’t got the voice for R&B”), fully realised here as they folded Smithsy jangle, space rock and their conservatoire training into an individual and mighty satisfying whole.
Standout track: You Blister My Paint
14.
CASSANDRA JENKINS
My Light, My Destroyer
SECRETLY CANADIAN
New Yorker Jenkins’ resumé includes stints in the bands of both Eleanor Friedberger and Craig Finn, but it’s possibly her two years spent working at The New Yorker magazine that are most revealing of her literate, discreetly moving music. Jenkins’ third LP mixed ’90s grunge-pop with the grandly ethereal (think: Weyes Blood, Sharon Van Etten), plus musings on the stars from her science teacher mother and, memorably, an “existential crisis” in a pet shop.
Standout track: Delphinium Blue
13.
THE SMILE
Wall Of Eyes
XL
The Smile will likely never relish comparisons with Radiohead, but 2024 turned out to be their equivalent of the 2000-01 stretch that brought _Kid A_and Amnesiac. Sessions again produced two LPs, January’s Wall Of Eyes and October’s Cutouts, with the first MOJO’s marginal favourite: a multi-faceted wonder that privileged Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke’s proggier instincts. Hard to remember now that The Smile were initially presumed to be a post-punk side product.
Standout track: Wall Of Eyes
12.
SHABAKA
Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace
IMPULSE!
Ambient jazz flute became a surprise trend of the year, thanks to the efforts of André 3000 and Shabaka Hutchings, the latter retiring his saxophone and with it bands The Comet Is Coming and Sons Of Kemet. Perceive Its Beauty was a gorgeous, meditative left turn for British jazz’s pin-up boy, and one which found room for Joanna Newsom homages, breathwork rap and Rastafarian poetry from Hutchings’ father, without ever disrupting the Zen rapture.
"One of our finest musicians might just have achieved a higher state of artistic consciousness... ★★★★" Read MOJO's review of Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace in full.
Standout track: Body To Inhabit
11.
JOHN GRANT
The Art Of The Lie BELLA UNION
“I think MOJO has been disappointed with me since [2010’s Queen Of Denmark album],” Grant alleged in MOJO 368 – an assumption disproved once again by the high ranking of The Art Of The Lie, his sixth album. The creamy ’70s AOR of that solo debut was long gone, but ballads dwelling on his childhood suggested a coldwave Scott Walker, while a hitherto suppressed penchant for ’80s electrofunk was an enterprising – and successful –new direction.
Standout track: Daddy
10.
KIM GORDON
The Collective
MATADOR
The experimental zeal of modern hyperpop reached a high-water mark in summer 2024 with the sensation around Charli XCX’s Brat album, but Kim Gordon had already risen to the challenges of this often brutal, synthetic music. The Collective suitably recast Gordon’s trademark poetics in a post-hip-hop, post-industrial, maximum-abrasion zone: the MOJO Top 50 album aesthetically closest to the chart Zeitgeist, but also the most artistically uncompromising.
Standout track: I Don’t Miss My Mind
9.
JANE WEAVER
Love In Constant Spectacle
FIRE
The consistently excellent Weaver’s twelfth album marked a slight retreat from the shinier pop territory of its immediate predecessor, 2021’s Flock. Instead, Love In Constant Spectacle mostly found Weaver further perfecting her ritual electrokosmische – a studio magician at the end of a lineage that stretched back through Stereolab and Broadcast to key German antecedents (check that Holger Czukay-style bass line on The Axis And The Seed).
Standout track: Is Metal
8.
THE LEMON TWIGS
A Dream Is All We Know
CAPTURED TRACKS
Powerpop enfants terribles when they first emerged a decade ago, the absurdly gifted D’Addario brothers survived a truly mad concept album (2018’s Go To School) to make good on their promise. Hence this gilded marvel of a sixth album, all Beach Boys harmonies, Chilton crunch, Left Banke chamber manners and a Rundgren-ish gift for melodic richness. Pastiche be damned, this was the oversaturated real thing, miraculously out of time.
Standout track: My Golden Years
7.
FONTAINES D.C.
Romance
XL
Four LPs in five years confirmed the Dublin quintet’s fierce drive and restless desire to evolve – beyond their post-punk origins, and now beyond the obligation to culturally embody their homeland. Romance was unmoored from the past, a future-facing fantasia with widescreen ambition – touchstones: Jeff Buckley, The Smiths, Panda Bear, Depeche Mode, Korn (!) – that made clear Fontaines D.C. were now, in terms of risk-taking potential, the Arctic Monkeys’ closest rivals.
READ MORE: Fontaines D.C. Interviewed: “Embracing the risk – that’s fucking exhilarating.”
Standout track: Horseness Is The Whatness
6.
KIM DEAL
Nobody Loves You More
4AD
A summer of fronting The Breeders on tour with pop superstar Olivia Rodrigo asserted Kim Deal’s enduring relevance. But rather than cash in on ’90s nostalgia, Deal finally completed her long-gestated solo album, a tender and spirited document of caring for ailing parents, coping with bereavement and coming out the other side. Fragile, funny, studded with the odd unexpected brass section, it cumulatively added up to one of Deal’s best ever albums.
READ MORE: Kim Deal Interviewed: "“Cannonball broke Olivia Rodrigo’s brain…”
Standout track: Nobody Loves You More
5.
BILL RYDER-JONES
Iechyd Da
DOMINO
“Big-sky music for introverts,” was how MOJO’s Dorian Lynskey summed up Ryder-Jones’s fifth solo LP, the high-point of a notable musical journey that began in The Coral and has also encompassed producing Michael Head and playing with Arctic Monkeys. Iechyd Da (Welsh for “Good health”) was a cathartically brilliant musical response to personal turmoil, its coordinates revealed by the opening to This Can’t Go On: “I walked all night to The Killing Moon.”
Standout track: This Can’t Go On
4.
GILLIAN WELCH & DAVID RAWLINGS
Woodland
ACONY
Thirteen years since the last set of Welch originals, and seven since Rawlings’ last solo LP, the first couple of American folk whittled down 100 songs into the tight 10 that filled this superb duo album. Welch’s knack of writing new songs with the resonance of ancient traditionals, mingled with Rawlings’ Crosby-esque canyons feel, combined their skills in the most harmonious way yet – a release of the remaining 90 tracks can’t come soon enough.
READ MORE: Gillian Welch And David Rawlings Interviewed: “There is a renewal, but with stories and scars…”
Standout track: What We Had
3.
BETH GIBBONS
Lives Outgrown
DOMINO
Forensic examinations of midlife have become commonplace among male artists – a second rite of passage – but albums that tackle specifically female experiences are rarer. Thirty years after Portishead’s debut, Gibbons proved an unflinching witness to time, loss, the menopause and much more on her first strictly solo album. A beautiful record, nonetheless, with a woody ambience that seemed born of the British landscape, without relying on standard folk tropes.
"These are songs shadowed by death, songs that deal with loss, grief and the menopause... ★★★★" Read MOJO's review of Lives Outgrown in full.
Standout track: Floating On A Moment
2.
NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS
Wild God
BAD SEED
“Regardless of how bad it seems, we keep doing beautiful things,” Nick Cave told us in MOJO 370, “that’s what the record feels like to me.” Wild God, then, became another outstanding 2024 LP about what comes after tragedy. For Cave and the reconstituted Bad Seeds, that meant a bigger, gospel-infused sound palette, for an album predicated on rediscovering a kind of joy, built to be celebrated live in arenas. "Here we go!"
READ MORE: Nick Cave Interviewed: “Human beings remain systemically beautiful.”
Standout track: Frogs
1.
JACK WHITE
No Name
THIRD MAN
To call No Name a return to Jack White’s garage rock roots would be something of an oversimplification given he’s recorded plenty of songs that fit that brief in recent years. What the album represented, though, was a return to a sonic aesthetic the former White Stripe has generally avoided for the past decade. One that leaned heavily on the signifiers of raw punk authenticity: the frisson of guitar, bass (from longtime foil Dominic Davis, White’s wife Olivia Jean and his daughter Scarlett), drums (played by Raconteur Patrick Keeler or Olivia Jean) and occasional organ, recorded unadorned at the Third Man Studio in Nashville.
READ MORE: Jack White Live Reviewed: "A spontaneous display of rock and roll magic..."
Initially given away to shoppers at Third Man Records, on No Name we were roughly transported to a point on an alternative, dislocated timeline of rock history: one where Led Zeppelin rather than The Beatles and The Stones inspired the ur-punk attack of the Nuggets generation.
As ever, White was a master at expressing his range within tight, self-imposed restrictions. No Name was packed end to end with tracks that balance great riffs and catchy tunes. But whereas the creative obstacles White has placed in front of himself since the ornate studio experiments of 2018’s Boarding House Reach occasionally felt like he was keeping listeners at arms’ length, producing records which lacked that sense of life that made The White Stripes so vital, here was a record which crackled with life.
Standout track: What's The Rumpus?