Nine Records I Loved in 2024
Hesaitix; Thomas Bush; Daria Lourd; V/Z; Shackleton & Six Organs of Admittance; Young Echo; TRii Group; Danny Daze; Dregs.
Here are nine records I loved listening to throughout 2024. (Nine is a left-handed number; ten is right-handed. I can't explain further.) There are no rankings, nor is this list complete. Some of these records I've listened to all year, and some just for the past few weeks.
All of them are extraordinary, and all of them you should listen to.
Hesaitix (fka M.E.S.H.) — Noctian Airgap (PAN 2024)
Previously as M.E.S.H., artist-producer-DJ James Whipple trafficked in quantum-future club music, his tracks chemically etched, spare and skeletal. Seven years after his last LP, Whipple has a new alias, Hesaitix, to match his most humane and corporeal album yet. The sound design is as extraterrestrial as ever, sometimes uneasily so. But the grooves are settled, confident, more at ease than ever before. Put simply, this record bangs in ways that Whipple seemed hesitant, or even unwilling, to approach as M.E.S.H. Aging mellows us, and as this record demonstrates, it also sublimates us.
everett
Thomas Bush — The Next 60 Years (Jolly Discs 2024)
The third LP from British trickster Thomas Bush is, in a word, timeless. (Never mind the album title or its psychedelic Marclay-esque clock artwork.) These eight songs see Bush channeling U.K. freak folk tradition—think Comus, Current 93, maybe even Nick Drake—into new forms, marrying pastoral guitars with warbling synthesizers. Like on previous albums, Bush sometimes veers toward abstraction, like the haunting 'Mulligan' or 'Flood of Light.' His immaculate songwriting chops, though, make the record irresistibly replayable: opener 'Same Life Flowed' might be my single favorite song of 2024.
mgiovanni
Daria Lourd (aka Bored Lord) — For The New Moon On November 30th 2024 (self-released 2024)
As Bored Lord, Daria Lourd has built a global following with her razor-sharp productions and DJ sets coursing through house, garage, and jungle. That’s probably why this first LP under her own name, a moody journey through half-time ambient dub rhythms and beneficent synthesizer melodies, "is not what people asked for," she writes in the release notes. Perhaps that's why it's so powerful. Written in a months' time with an array of gear and a bass guitar, each composition is genuine and unvarnished, with no studio trickery or artifice to be found. Their simplicity is beautiful, and their tenderness is unequivocal.
silversound
V/Z — Suono Assente (AD 93 2023)
Italian percussion sorceress Valentina Magaletti might be the most adept collaborator in left-field music right now. Here she teams up with London-based kitchen-sink producer Zongamin, aka Susumu Mukai, on one of the most pristine post-punk records I've heard in years. The duo wind airy bass-'n-drum grooves tight like a spring, letting them unfurl in washes of echo and reverb. Two songs with guest vocalists, Cathy Lucas from Vanishing Twin (yet another Magaletti co-production) and Coby Sey, are so exquisite they alone are worth the price of admission. The rest of the record—just as good—ices the cake.
Paul Crary
Shackleton & Six Organs of Admittance — Jinxed By Being (Drag City 2024)
As it turns out, British dub mystic Shackleton and American psychedelic folk maestro Six Organs of Admittance have much in common. It makes sense: Shackleton long ago left the club behind for more occult concerns, and Six Organs' Ben Chasny has always toyed with hypnotic rhythms and drones. In fact, Chasny's serpentine guitar-picking and chant-like vocal intonation meet Shackleton's eldritch atmospheres so well it seems they were destined to be together all along. Shackleton, for his part, keeps his typical oscillating bassline arpeggios to a minimum, mostly opting for ritualistic hand drums. File under: Collaborations I Never Even Considered But Actually Desperately Needed.
Diabolical Jim
Young Echo — Young Echo (Young Echo Records 2018)
Though I've followed them for over a decade, it wasn't until this year that I listened to the 2018 self-titled LP by Young Echo, a Bristol collective comprising at least a dozen loosely connected artists. The crew collaborates mycologically, indexing one another via guest appearances, remixes, and co-productions. Together as one, they collide rap, spoken word poetry, dub, dancehall, trip-hop, musique concrète, noise, and beyond across 24 sketches, songs, intervals, outtakes. Mercurial and unbound, it doesn't make for easy listening, but it's a visionary record, the perfect soundtrack to the unease of our age.
everett
TRii Group — Interest In Music (Stroom 2021)
My favorite musical discovery of 2024 was also the weirdest. TRii Group is the (collective?) alias of a mysterious Berlin-based artist (or artists?) who crafts bizarre, otherworldly electronic pop music—of sorts. In the TRii Group universe, circuit-bent synthesizer tones, woozy and gamelan-like, shimmer above spartan rhythms, sometimes paired with distant hypnotic vocals. This LP, released by Belgian freak-pop label Stroom, collects numerous TRii Group tracks written across a period of several years. But they all cohere perfectly, and the album is brilliantly disarming: rarely is experimental music this playful—even childlike—or this catchy.
Anthony Childs
Danny Daze — ::BLUE:: (Omnidisc 2023)
Earlier this year, I spent months listening over and over again to this record, Miami electro magician Danny Daze's debut LP, stunned by the totality of it. Released more than two decades into his career, ::BLUE:: is an impassioned love letter to the brain-dancing electronic music he (and I) grew up on: Warp, Schematic, Skam, Merck, Rephlex, and so on. Except it's not a throwback record—it's not really like anything else I've ever heard. Minimal, cerebral, and kinetic, its melodies interlock and bisect; its beats are submerged, more hints than drums. Epochal in scope and sound, it's more a manifesto than a mere album.
louk-house
Dregs — Dregs (Purely Physical Teeny Tapes 2024)
At some point—I'm not sure when exactly—the global nexus of trip-hop shifted from Bristol, England to Melbourne, Australia. Dregs' self-titled album, a sludgy morass of dark and doomy dubbed-out murk, stands far out amongst the contemporary Naarm scene. Grooves float on, carried by potent bass guitar phrases repeating like mantras. Voices emerge like vapor and dissipate accordingly. (One track is called 'Swampy,' which feels particularly on the nose.) And though Dregs are clearly indebted to their tripped-out forebears, they're very much doing their own thing. Sinking into the muck never sounded so good.
Greg Hodgson Design