The Music Beat’s best tracks & albums of 2024

2024 has seemingly been a year defined by the shuffling of sonic seasons, a game of musical chairs with album aesthetics and eras. Throughout this past year, we’ve seen it all — from iconic albums entered into political campaigns to lyrical lows from beloved artists. Despite all the turmoil 2024 has brought us, certain albums and tracks stood out among the wreckage. Here are the music beat’s favorite tracks and albums of 2024!

— Music Beat Editor Mivick Smith and Senior Arts Editor Amaya Choudhury

“ROCKMAN” –  Mk.gee

As the best track of 2024, “ROCKMAN” is everything. Spiritually, it’s the grandson of the ’80s soft rock ballad. Sonically, it’s somewhere between sultry new wave and marimba-heavy reggae-funk. Within a succinct three minutes, there’s keyboard, there’s bongos, there’s reverb-drenched guitars and even a few (oddly fitting?) bird noises. Over all of this, the crown jewel is no doubt Mk.gee’s voice. Layer upon layer of silky harmonies that soar over the instrumentals, Mk.gee’s meticulous vocal arrangement gives the track its sleek, effortless feel. 

Forgive me for being trite, but no musical overview of 2024 would be complete without mentioning TikTok (and bite-sized social media in general) acting as the newest avenue to— or gatekeeper of — artistic fame. With the success of tracks now dependent on one perfect sound to backdrop a trend, it’s refreshing to hear “ROCKMAN,” in which the whole song is the perfect catchy sound bite. 

While catchiness is an initial draw, the track’s greatest strength is its unlikely cohesion. Mk.gee manages to borrow from his influences without robbing them. He effortlessly bending genres; ultimately creating something that is entirely both then and now. This spirit of genre-fluidity and unlikely combination is what drove the most successful tracks of 2024, including “ROCKMAN.” 

Daily Arts Writer Siena Beres can be reached at sberes@umich.edu 

Aghori Mhori Mei – The Smashing Pumpkins

One of the things I’ve always enjoyed the most about The Smashing Pumpkins (besides their complete disregard for stagnant industry standards) is their impressive tonal range. On their most recent album, Aghori Mhori Mei, it’s undeniable — almost to the point that it reads like a manic emotional oscillation from one song to the next. From grandiose references to the past to energetic exclamations about individuality, this album was an incredible encapsulation of the weirdness of the human experience and the strange visceral rawness that was 2024. Aghori Mhori Mei is a gorgeous experiment in controlled chaos responding to a mess of a year. With its ability to capture a range of emotions through esoteric narratives, coupled with love letters to prog rock hidden in remarkable riffs throughout the album, it shouldn’t be surprising that it was one of the best alt-rock pieces produced last year. So, as I personally flip off 2024 and welcome 2025 with a desperate hopefulness, I’ll also be expecting more strange uniqueness and emotion in our art this coming year — all thanks to this album. 

Music Beat Editor Mivick Smith can be reached at rmontsmi@umich.edu.

What Now – Brittany Howard

2024 was a year of fleeting album seasons, each rapidly overturning the last — Cowboy Carter spring, Brat summer, Imaginal Disk autumn, the list goes on. But if there was one album that stuck with me the entire year, it’s Brittany Howard’s stellar second solo project, What Now. 

The record exchanges the probing tenderness of Howard’s previous album, Jaime, for something even more daring and dynamic. Where the former — even at its most audacious — found itself coloring within the lines of exquisite, but traditional song structures, What Now has set that formula on fire and inhaled its hallucinogenic smoke. 

Howard’s croons layer and stretch luxuriously over “Earth Sign,” the record’s opening track, until thunderous drums and a buzzing synth join the fray. Then it’s off to the races. Though many of the tracks have a pop backbone, they play more like a jam session — a flurry of funk, jazz, electronic and psychedelic soul arranged into organic and often turbulent soundscapes, weaved together by Howard’s virtuosic vocal performance. Songs like “Every Color in Blue,” with its spiraling vocals and piano riffs, and “Prove It To You,” a slappy house song swaddled in What Now’s industrial flair, show her at her most unencumbered. These high-octane moments are paired back to back with meditative interludes featuring singing bowl performances and tracks that ooze more than they romp, including my personal favorite, “To Be Still,” where the album’s opening kaleidoscopic frenzy settles momentarily into a daydreamy haze.

It’s this unpredictability that gives What Now such high replay value, and throughout the year, I found myself gravitating toward tracks. From the beach-y swing of “I Don’t” to the wistful trumpet outro of “Samson,” the record felt like it laced itself into the backdrop of my existence. It doesn’t hurt that the album’s lyricism zooms out from the deeply personal self-discovery of Jaime, offering a batch of songs that lose none of that record’s poignancy but become open to reinterpretation; glimmering in new ways as my own friendships, relationships and understanding of myself morphed throughout 2024. This is all to say that if you’re looking for a project that promises to stick with you as long as you’re willing to be patient with it, there’s no better candidate from this past year than What Now. And if you can’t get enough, check out the live version she recorded from Austin City Limits — it’s incredible. 

Daily Arts Writer Matthew Popp can be reached at poppmatt@umich.edu 

Box For Buddy, Box For Star – This is Lorelei

I spent 2024 fighting to find fun in singer-songwriter music — a genre that feels almost cursed to be dour by its nature. First attracted to the genre’s complex storytelling, which doesn’t need to hide behind theatrical production, I soon became enthralled by the spartan melodies. Folk music is deeply rooted in tradition, and most new artists innovate by overtly steeping their music in depression, a fact I sometimes struggled with as I found these songs entrenching me in dark emotions. I craved modern folk music that would not ruin my mood. Halfway through the year, I found This is Lorelei, and his new release Box For Buddy, Box For Star filled my happy-folk-music shaped hole. 

The album is folky in its rawness. The bare emotion flows into the listener’s ear, woven into complex metaphors. This emotion is delivered in a voice that expresses hurt, that portrays a man who is struggling but has not yet given up. For most of the work, Lorelei’s voice is a drowned-out falsetto, occasionally switching to a near spoken-word delivery. The album primarily rests on guitar and piano riffs, backed by small shakers, quiet bits of brass, drums and occasionally interrupted by electronic instrumentals. It’s these goofy tones on sullen pieces that I fell in love with. Unlike a lot of his self-serious peers, This is Lorelei’s album responds to sadness with fun, a uniquely hopeful imprint on a somber genre.

Daily Arts Writer Joe Bogdan can be reached at joebogdn@umcih.edu

Wall of Eyes – The Smile

Radiohead fizzled into the musical stratosphere with a mediocre, wonderbread debut: the incredibly underwhelming Pablo Honey. The unexceptional album’s single redeeming aspect was a track called “Creep.” A track that the English rock outfit would later grow to hate, despite its role as a progenitor to their fame. This was the foundation for a band that would likely very briefly fade in and out of the music world, but anybody even vaguely familiar with Radiohead’s story knows this was not the case.

After a string of successes, from glowing — albeit strange — Pitchfork reviews to concertgoers packed like sardines, the band was on top of the world. Eight studio albums later, what could be left for Radiohead to do? The Smile was Thom Yorke’s and Johnny Greenwood’s answer, a way to continue pushing musical boundaries under a new moniker. In 2024, The Smile released their second studio album: Wall of Eyes. 

Wall of Eyes is a cacophony of sound — a lush, melodious jungle at times, dissonant and claustrophobic at others. There is a tenderness intertwined with the noisy synths, and a bitterness echoing in the more gentle moments. The musical see-saw generates a restless atmosphere, full of pent-up energy released by the album’s emotional heart and climax: “Bending Hectic.” The cinematic track is a first-person descent into an automobile accident, which concludes with Yorke’s voice soaring over a metallic exoskeleton and engine guts spilling over Greenwood’s fuzzy instrumentals. 

The tracks following are a jazzy, psychedelic expedition into territory previously unventured by Yorke and Greenwood. It’s a series of vestiges from the band responsible for the greatest left-turn in music history. Radiohead has only known evolution, and The Smile is born from this very refusal to be caged. Wall of Eyes is only the latest iteration of this perpetual metamorphosis, bringing 2024 a noisy promise to become something greater than a mere Radiohead offshoot. 

Senior Arts Editor Amaya Choudhury can be reached at amayach@umich.edu.

Night Palace – Mt Eerie

First off, I have to admit that I’m biased here. As a Phil Elvrum enthusiast, I would have found a way to defend this album even if Elvrum released an hour and twenty minutes of him sobbing into the mic over calming nature sounds. Instead (thankfully), we were blessed with Night Palace — an intimate meditation on healing, our smallness within the natural world and rejecting our fragile history — in that order.

Soundwise, Night Palace follows the status quo as set by Mt. Eerie and The Microphones. Most songs are driven by a mix of crunchy electric riffs, acoustic strums, the occasional messy drumming and little else. Despite the lack of major sonic changes, there are many rewarding experiments: some more vague drone and black metal inspired than usual, some synths, a brief auto-tune electronic drum bit, even a Big Lebowski audio clip. It’s this creativity that allows for some of the best moments on the record. 

What sets Night Palace apart from Elvrum’s previous releases (and others’ from 2024) is its thematic relevance. While this is surely an album about the individual, it is not about his significance but rather his lack thereof. Elvrum’s lyricism remains deeply personal, but his focus now shifts outward. 

2024 was a loaded year. From campus protests, to climate crises, to the presidential election, it became impossible to ignore the world around us. Witnessing these “constant catastrophes” as a naive college kid with a newly adult brain, I had a recurring realization that went something like this: Wow. I am actually super small and lucky in the grand scheme of things. I should really stop being so self-important all the time. 

While this thought is freeing, it can also make you feel helpless. So, now what? Can I change things? What place does art have in this impossible world? While Night Palace reckons with these questions, Elvrum doesn’t pretend to know the answers. Rather, he assures us that we should be confused, we should be bothered and it’s okay to be small. 

Even if “a poem only says a thing halfway,” that doesn’t mean we should stop writing them.

Daily Arts Writer Siena Beres can be reached at sberes@umich.edu 

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