10 records that prove 2024 was even better than you thought

(In a musical sense, obviously...)

The Lemon Twigs being thoroughly excellent at their Barcelona concert in December

There were lots of fantastic records released in 2024 and I got to write about many of them, an opportunity for which I am eternally grateful. Sometimes, though, a record slips through the writing cracks and there are albums I love dearly from the past 12 months that I didn’t get the opportunity to write about.

The start of a new year feels like the time to rectify this - in case you’re wondering why on earth I am sending out a newsletter on January 1 - so here is my list of 10 records that prove that 2024 was even better for music than you may have thought. I’m not sure what logic holds this list together, other than there are 10 excellent albums here that I didn’t write about and you should listen to them all. (See also a piece from the depths of July, featuring 11 brilliant albums I overlooked.)

Next week, I will be getting out of the 2024 round ups with a piece that, erm, looks back to one of my favourite records of 2000. Scorching into the future. Let me know what you make of these records and if you have any records from 2024 that could / should have got more attention.

Transmission Towers - Transmission One

As a once devote attendee of the Electric Chair club nights in Manchester, I know anything that Luke Una lends his name to is worth checking out. In 2024 that meant Transmission Towers, the first band to sign to Luke’s É Soul Cultura label, and Transmission One, their debut album, which is gorgeously all over the place, much like the Electric Chair itself once was.

The duo - Mark Kyriacou and Eleanor Mante - name Motor City techno, Black Dog IDM and mystical Sun Ra as influences, which I can kind of see, until they throw a post-punk-y guitar into the mix on Everything and the mixture shifts again. Roller Skater 23 is perhaps the strongest song on this hugely promising debut album, a broken beat-ish soul gem, with a lovely hint of galactic drift and astral grandeur to it, like Roy Ayers accepting a painless death on the International Space Station. Gilles Peterson is a fan, which figures.

Heavee - Unleash

At his best - 2022’s Audio Assault EP, say - Chicago producer Heavee brings a dayglo sunshine to footwork. This is best heard on Sumthin Different, from his 2024 album Unleash, which opens with a gorgeous flurry of synths, like coral swaying in underwater current, then careers into a slice of footwork-adjacent music that is tonally light and rhythmically heavy. He can’t quite keep it up over the course of the LP but Unleash is masterfully tricky, bearing influences from grime to jazz to techno.

The High Llamas - Hey Panda

On Hey Panda, The High Llamas’ eleventh and possibly final album, Sean O’Hagan and co. turn their ears towards modern pop and in particular the inspiration of (not that modern but we’ll go with it) J Dilla. This means lurching drums, woozy keyboards and a classic High Llamas vocal melody.

On the whole - e.g. the gilded groove of the title track, or Rae Morris’s vocal on How The Best Was Won - it works like a Californian dream. Going a bit Dilla has become one of modern music’s most clichéd directions but The High Llamas are perhaps better known for their quality than their originality, going heavy on Beach-Boys-inspired vocal harmony and neat production tricks, like Stereolab in expensive school uniform.

Orbital - Live at Synergy / Live Mystery Gig 1991 (Green album reissue)

Not many electronic acts gets all-singing, all-dancing four-disc reissues of their debut albums. Then again, not many electronic acts are like Orbital. For a start, the fraternal duo were always more rock than their peers, bringing concepts like full-length albums and live gigs to rave culture; and they are still going 35 years after making their recorded debut.

Orbital - the band’s 1991 debut album, also known as “The Green Album” for its cover - isn’t their best; that would be 1993’s Orbital - aka “The Brown Album”. But it is, perhaps, their most important LP, for the way it set out a new vision for Orbital and post-rave electronic music.

The big reissue rounds up pretty much everything that Orbital did from 1989 to 1992, including remixes, alternate versions and - most interesting of all - recordings of a Synergy concert and “mystery gig 1991”, which give an early indication of why Orbital would go on to be one of the biggest live music bands in electronic music.

The Synergy gig is from February 1990, when the band were supporting The Shamen, Irresistible Force and Ramjac, and it is tribute to Orbital’s unerring ear for a tune and slowly unfurling arrangement that it sounds pretty timeless today, 35 years on. The lesser-heard Son of Chime, in particular, is a monster. And if Choice, from Live Mystery Gig 1991, doesn’t get all the hairs on the back of your neck up and in revolt then I don’t know what to do for you.

Lou Reed - Why Don’t You Smile Now: Lou Reed at Pickwick Records 1964-65

Sooner or later, ever Velvet Underground fan will undergo the revelation that Lou Reed started off in music making quickly knocked off copies of chart trends, including - oh yes - The Ostrich, which attempted to start off a dance trend of impersonating the ostrich.

Why Don’t You Smile Now is, by far, the most comprehensive introduction to this part of Reed’s life, when he was working as a songwriter and performer at New York’s Pickwick Records, with the record offering 25 songs that Lou wrote, sang, played guitar on and was rumoured to have something to do with.

Remarkably, this compilation works both as historical artefact, reminding us that Reed produced his first drone back in 1964, and as listening experience, with gems of utter quality (like The Beachnuts’ charming Cycle Annie or The Hollywoods’ Teardrop in the Sand) sifting to the surface of commercial rip off. The All Night Workers’ Why Don’t You Smile - which also features John Cale and was once covered by Spiritualized - is one of the greatest songs Reed ever wrote.

Sharada Shashidhar - Soft Echoes

Perhaps the only thing more remarkable than the cute shorthand being used to describe Sharada Shashidhar - “the jazz Kate Bush” indeed - is that the LA vocalist and composer actually earns it, in that she makes jazz - sumptuous orchestral jazz - and her swooping, preening vocal melodies do sound a lot like Kate Bush. It’s a wonderful sound.

The best moments of Soft Echoes, her 2024 EP, come when this gorgeous sound is joined by fantastic songwriting, notably on As I Am and the title track, which leans lightly on Kate Bush circa-The Kick Inside (which is, with apologies to all the other albums, my favourite Kate Bush record).

Emma Anderson - Spiralée (Pearlies Rearranged)

Emma Anderson doesn’t get enough love in the shoegaze revival. Her former band Lush were, at their considerable height, a rival for anyone in the Thames Valley scene in elegance and hooks (not to mention sweetness and light) and her 2023 solo album Pearlies was a genuine pop-gaze delight.

In 2024 she enlisted a handful of gaze-adjacent artists (LoneLady, Julia Holter) to remix that album, pushing her music very delightfully into the shoegaze electronica zone and bringing back memories of The Drum Club’s remixes of Lush. A particular highlight is the Deary Dub remix of For a Moment, which send me right back there, when beats were hazy, bass lines dub influenced and vocals were required by law to be known as gossamer. It works like a dream.

The Lemon Twigs - A Dream Is All We Know

And talking of dreams…. The Lemon Twigs are one of those bands that you feel simply can’t exist in the modern world outside of some magical daydream, an impossibly well-dressed band of brothers who make immaculate Big Star-style power pop.

If there was any whiff of artifice to The Lemon Twigs, the whole empire would collapse. But the two D’Addario brothers mean it, this is the world they live in and we are lucky to be invited in. A Dream Is All We Know, the band’s fifth album, is one of their sweeter records, the darkness submerged in melodic sugar and floated off on a balloon (but still, you know, there).

It also contains some of their greatest songs to date, notably My Golden Years - which I must have listened to at least 200 times this year - the filthily addictive Rock On (Over and Over) and Church Bells, which could be the work of the early Beatles. That good.

Holly Macve - Wonderland

On Wonderland Holly Macve leaned into the inevitable Lana Del Rey comparisons by actually getting Lana to duet on her record. That duet, Suburban House, has raised all the attention on Wonderland but it’s far from the best song. That honour goes to the swooningly down-hearted Beauty Queen that follows, the kind of song that makes you want to cry your heart out into a velvet handkerchief. Comparing Macve to Del Rey is both wrong and irresistible. But, for me, Macve has a far stronger voice, albeit without Del Rey’s knack for world building.

Lankum - Live in Dublin

Lankum are a remarkably powerful live band, full of spit, vigour and artistry and Live In Dublin perfectly captures their seemingly contradictory raw energy and musical polish. (I’d be tempted to say that Lankum are even better live than they are on record - if they didn’t make such brilliant records.) Their cover here of The Rocky Road to Dublin, a 19th-century Irish song written by Irish poet D. K. Gavan that Lankum undercut with unfathomable amount of grace and latent menace, is one of my favourite things Lankum have ever done.

Things I’ve Done

Line Noise Episode 194 (Ron Trent)

This week’s guest is someone I had interviewed two times previously but always wanted to get on Line Noise: Chicago house master Ron Trent. Trent has done so much in electronic music, from composing the classic Altered States at the tender age of 14 to producing the dazzling album What Do The Stars Say To You? as Warm in 2022, that sometimes even he doesn’t remember what songs he’s featured on. We spoke about the follow up to What Do The Stars Say To You?, learning percussion from his father, recording Altered States, Erykah Badu, the state of house music and so much more.

The playlists

The newest and the bestest lives on! The newest and the bestest 2024 has slunk off into a corner to die. And the newest and the bestest 2025 is looking pretty bare - but won’t be for too long.