NPR Music - The Best Albums of 2024, Part 1

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

Our annual look back at the year in music begins with the first of a two-part episode highlighting the year's best albums, with Sabrina Carpenter, Doechii, Waxahatchee and more.Look for Part 2 on Friday, Dec. 6.See NPR Music's complete list of the 50 best albums from 2024.Enjoy the show? Tell a friend and leave us a review wherever you get podcasts.Questions, comments, suggestions or feedback of any kind always welcome: [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

A quick note before the show, this podcast contains explicit language. I have the most amazing way to talk about anything. Even if you have no idea what it is that you're talking about, it's foolproof. Okay. Basically, you just repeat the last thing that anyone says in a conversation. Says in a conversation. Yeah, exactly. So, Anne, if you say, you know, this new cure album hit me really hard.

then all I have to say is it hit you really hard. And then let you take it from there. Pretty good. You learn this from years of therapy. Yeah, because therapists always say, you said something really interesting just now. Exactly. Now, I can't take credit for it.

It came from the TV show. Nobody wants this. Do you guys watch that? Uh-uh. Nobody wants this? Oh, it's so good. Kristen Bell, Adam Brody. Oh, it's the one about the rabbi.

Yeah, he plays a rabbi. Yeah. And it's a bit of advice that one of the, the characters gives to another character, they have to attend some high-level executive meeting that they're not prepared for. He's like, trust me, I'm in meetings with executives all the time. Just repeat the last thing they say. It works every time. This is about dealing with narcissists. I'm just saying. Well, then maybe you don't want to hear the fact that I will probably be using this a lot with you guys

through the course of this show as we talk about the best albums of 2024. NPR music posted a much longer and fuller and a more expansive list. For everyone to dig into, you'll find that on the NPR site. But we're going to talk about some of our favorites in this. What would you say? Are wildly incomplete full of glaring omissions? You know, the usual. The usual disclaimers.

No, I would say are absolutely perfect, well-created, deeply informed lists. Well, I don't know what show you're listening to, Ann. And a quick note, we're going to break this up in the two. part. So this is the first part. We'll have part two coming a little bit later this week, but we should get to some music and we can kind of go wherever this takes us, but I did think that we should start with one of the most inescapable songs and albums of 2024, Sabrina Carpenter's short and sweet. That's the album name. And let's just hear the song espresso. My friends and I were doing a funny thing today. We were making up different, you know, when she sings,

I'm working late because I'm a singer. Is that on the song, Espresso? Yes. It's a very deep confessional autobiographical song, Robert. I didn't take to this album like everyone else did. I mean, it is undeniably catchy, but I couldn't get past it being just more than just sort of a hokey fun sort of low-stakes album, but you think there was more going on it than that?

Oh, my God. You're so wrong. I'm sorry. No, short and sweet is a compact masterpiece. I love it so much. It's like Sabrina Carpenter, who of course, this isn't her first rodeo. She's made several albums in the past and was a Disney star. But she comes into her own on this by creating this character that to me is like screwball comedian. She's hilarious. The songs are really sexy and fun and the production is light as a feather. I have to say, and I've said

this to you before, and espresso and please, please, please, the big singles from this record are not its selling points to me. I mean, when I first heard those, I didn't imagine that I would click into this record the way that I did. And it was hearing the deep cuts and understanding her particular sense of humor that got me into it

because she is corny as hell, but in a really fun way. I laughed out loud when she's trying, it's like a steamy, I can't remember what song it was. Maybe it was Bed Kim, where she's, She says the thermostat is set at 69.

The album was fun to me. I enjoyed it for just being pure fun. But she's doing something. There's a lot of people who could sing that exact line, and I would be like, you're under arrest. No. She pulls it off. She pulls it up.

I was recently having a discussion with a couple of colleagues, and we were talking about the themes for the year. And the themes that I listed in music for the year were Neil Young, anesthetics and girls giving side-eye and this is definitely that final one. This is about I mean so many of the songs

are like, you're a dumb hymbo and I'm going to tolerate it because I desire you but ultimately I'm not investing in you. I'm investing in myself. It's an empowerment message. All right, well short and sweet

the album for Sabrina Carpenter came out That one came out in August, on August 23rd, should we do one that came out just a week later, the Dochi record? Hmm. Hell yeah. That came out, yeah, on August 30th. The album from Dochi is called Alligator Bites, Never Heal. Throw a rock, you'll hit a great cut, but let's just do denial as a river. Hey, I thought it was all over.

What's up, Doche? Hey, girl, probably since, like, your last EP, all the places you'll go. Oh, wow. Yeah. I've been getting some calls. Oh. People are a little bit worried about you. Not worried, okay.

And I know that that was kind of that outlet for you. So, why don't you just tell me what's been going on? Okay. Remember old dude from 2019, nice clean, nigga did me dirtier than laundry. Took a scroll through his IG just to get a DM from his wife. I was so confused what should know she do. She didn't know about me and I didn't know about Sue. I opened up the messages and had to hit the Zoom.

Turns out the girl was really a dude. Nick I think he slicked back till I slipped back. Got my lick back, turn a knicker to a knick-knack. I moved on, dropped a couple of songs, and then I went and got signed. Now it's 2021. Okay, I just feel like this is the perfect opportunity for us to just take a second and kind of unpack what's happened to you.

You know, this guy cheated on you and... Our friend Hanif of Derekeb, the wonderful poet, writer, you know, he's written for NPR music a couple of times. He does like an Instagram stories thing every week where he sort of recounts the new releases that he's been listening to. And the one for Alligator Bytes Never Heal was something like, I don't know, man. I think I'm listening to one of the greatest rappers alive right now. Yeah.

I was so stunned. Like, surprised isn't the word because, you know, we'd heard what she can do before. But the level of control and precision and versatility here, it's really staggering. And also, I was pleased to find out that it's not only a studio creation. She did this song at Camp Flagna, I think last week, the title of the creation. festival and it is like word for word like basically no backing tracks like didn't rely on you know like a hype man very much to like it out all the little bits pretty much it was huge i mean she was going back and forth with her DJ to do the um the therapist thing going through a lot by a lot

you mean drugs um i wouldn't drugs no it's a no it's a natural plan no i'm not judging i'm not an addict i'm just saying i don't think want to talk about it well one thing we can say is that this kind of fits in a pattern this year, I think, of women rappers and R&B artists who are very funny, but also dealing with like, you know, intense realities and intense, whether it's like self-doubt or finding your place in the world or in the case of Dochi, like, how does she fit into the music industry and all that? But they're using humor and theatricality in a really interesting way. I'm thinking of like Tierra Wack, also one of your other favorite. David Stowed, Remy Wolf does something similar.

So it's not, she's not, she is, she does stand out. And I mean, I really do think she's one of the greatest working right now. But if you want to know how she feels about her status as a rapper, just listen to the top of boom bap. I have to also point out her Oscar, the Grouch voice, that she brings out. She does it a little bit at the end of denial is a river when she's, she's getting worked up and she can't hold it. She also does it on the song Catfish. Let me relax a bit.

Catfish is almost like a little bit of a 90s Buster Rhymes kind of riff. She's doing the kind of... Wow. That's a freaking great comparison. She definitely has a... Busta in her, for sure. It's funny because when you did that, I was thinking Al Pacino in a sin of a woman.

We all come to things in our own way, Robin. It's fine. All right, Dochi Alligator Bites. Again, that one came out, August 30th. All right, we need to take a quick break here, but we'll have more from our best albums of 2024 list right after this. Where should we go?

Something totally different. Should we do maybe Pedro the Lion? Yeah, that sounds good. So Pedro the Lion had an album out, came out in June. June 7th. The album's called Santa Cruz, and this is the song, Spend Time. I'll just say, this is one of my all-time favorite Pedro the Lion albums, and I think it's some of his best work ever.

He's just such a gifted storyteller. He always has been, and that he's like at the top of his game, I think, on this one. What an incredible comeback he's made, too, in the past couple of years. Like, not just in terms of visibility, but to be able to. to be doing what is agreed upon to be some of his best work like 30 years into his career. Yeah. Yeah, he's been doing a little coming of age novel series, basically, in the past couple of years, where he's talking about his youth and the places that he lived and his journey through religion.

But it's all sort of in service of discovery, the ways that he discovered certain kinds of social dynamics. And on this record, it's really about the way that he discovered music, not just as a thing to fall in love with and construct his life around taste-wise, but as a calling, as a thing that he just would never put down. Yeah, this thing that he decided to pursue and give his life to completely, which unfolds so magnificently on the song Modesto. I heard the perfect song it were today, Having asked if there were bands to see and spots to play

Jim said, hell yeah, and then he handed me to take What I heard in my walkman, half-bones pacing by the speakers and the age Was a beautiful, hilarious tragic mess They sent tears streaming down my face Grab me by the lapel Stood me up and put a four track In my hand and told me, son Make all the messes you can vanish to me

And move back to Seattle Be the drummer in a band There's a girl from there That Friday's on my lunch break I read letters too And I think she likes me Do you think he's And that's how he has a handle on all of these details?

I just, there's so many things that feel so vividly remembered. Like this record starts with the feeling of showing up as the new kid in town in junior high, with this backpack that looked awesome in the store and realizing it was a, it was like just social suicide. It's the wrong color. Everything about it is wrong. He's like, none of this is going to work. Well, here's the thing. I thought about that moment, too.

There are 80-year-old people on the planet who are still embarrassed by something that happened to them when they were little kids. That's a fair point. You hold on to those things. So maybe those memories are more at hand than. you might expect. Yeah, the traumas and the breakthroughs. But there's also like an amazing class aspect to that line that he gives us because it's also about his grandma like buys him this backpack that they think is cool, but it's not, you know, it's like a discount store. So there's this really interesting. This is the thing about David Bazan. He he weaves in much

more than just his own personal story. And he's always thinking about how does this relate to my class. How does this relate to religion, you know, and his relationship with God and the complexities of that? And it just breaks out so much farther than just a shared memory. That's what makes it so profound. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's go to one that I think was universally loved by every single person on the NPR music team, the new Waxahatchie album that came out this year called Tiger's Blood. Let's do the song right back to it.

This is for so long, come at that you just said like a song. This is one of those records when I listened to it, I thought, you know, she doesn't venture so wildly outside of the realm of what you might expect her to do, but at the same time it just feels like such an evolution for Waxahatchie. There's been a real sharpening of craft and intention for her over the long. last couple of records. A thing that I really love about Waxahatchie is that I think we've been able to kind of grow along with her. By the time that we heard her first album as Waxahatchie American Weekend, she had been playing in bands since she was a kid. I mean, she had lived, you know, three lifetimes on the road. But as a solo artist, she was really still figuring out what she wanted to be, and we later learned was also struggling a lot with sadness,

with depression, with alcoholism, and weaving all of that into her work, but in a way that could be sort of really relatedly and viscerally unsteady. So over the course of the progression of those first couple of records, we have American Weekend, this very stark, you know,

Bonie Vair style cabin record. There's cerulean salt, which is kind of still my favorite, which is the sort of like chamber piece where there's just a little bit extra. It's a little bit more of a multi-track Ivy Trip is where things scale up a little bit. She's signed to merge.

She's got a little bit more of a recording budget. You know, she and her band made this record in like a gymnasium somewhere, but it's still a little rough around the edges. And then out in the storm is where things really start to lock in, and she, I think, becomes aware of what she wants to do in a band context and in an arrangement context, and really, really starts to get an amazing control of her voice. So now we find her with St.

St. Cloud, and with this record, Tiger's Blood, in this sort of Heartland rock mode, and really channeling a sense of place in that way. This feels like a sort of wide-open spaces like pickup truck kind of record. Named after a city, you ain't never seen spellbinding, copperheads banging a tambourine. It's the kiss of death, but it's the only way out gallows. Well, I mean left you alone, wet from a stone. Well, I mean, this is a record about having found your people. And kind of found your home, smell of dust in the floor,

smell of dust, it creeps up through the cracks in the floor. Well, I mean, this is a record about having found your people. And kind of having found your home, your center in life, but still experiencing restlessness, experiencing self-doubt. I mean, to me, her vocals are all about how we experience our feelings, right? I mean, they jump around, they change in the course of a second, you know, and I love that. But in these songs, it's, you know, which are about subjects, like, what happens in a long-term relationship when you get a little bored, you know? What happens when you've been a musician for a lot of years and you're not a lot of years?

not drinking anymore and you're trying to figure out how to live this life and have it be satisfying. What happens with your old friends when sometimes you feel like your old friends have betrayed you? That's what I think is so profound about this record. It is a perfect expression of kind of the young middle of a rich life and all the questions that arise when you're, when you're in your 30s and you're like, oh my God, I'm in my life. I am in my life, you know? Yeah, I mean, I think that's got to be a very big part of this. I mean, she's a little bit older now than she was when she started out making music. As you said, I would she's been through so much.

And I don't know, there's just clearly a lot of reflection and searching in really beautiful ways across this album that really resonated with me. I just, you know, taking stock of her life. Yeah. So Waxahatchie, the album Tiger's Blood, that came out all the way back in March. I do have one important point of correction to make on Lone Star. She says she drove out to the only lake in Kansas, and there are many lakes in Kansas, all right? Oh, my God, Robin. Get a little bit of poetry.

There was, that was a real record scratch moment for Katie on the album, I think. You are too literal-minded, my friend. Robin just pulled his shirt open to reveal a Kansas City Chief's jersey underneath it. With all the lakes. I remember hearing some ad at some point like, we have just as much shoreline as California or something like trying to sell it because it's like dead last for tourism or something like.

All right, let's completely change gears again and go to Nalas and Efro. The artist Nalus and Efro, she had this really gorgeous sort of, I don't know, jazz ambient kind of album. Kind of both. Kind of both. It lands right on the line. Yeah, called Inlessness.

It came out in September. all of the songs are, well, they kind of all flow together. There's continuum one, continuum two. We played continuum three on all songs considered back when this album first came out. Let's hear a little bit of continuum eight. I love thinking about like if you went into some kind of, I don't know, like juke join in space. And this was the only thing on the jukebox. And everything, you know, I'm like, oh, play continuum six.

And somebody's like, no, no, no, I like continuum eight. I think they're pretty distinctive. I mean, they do all flow together, but some are a whole lot more animated than others with a lot more instrumentation. There's a lot of, well, I mean, I think it'd be easy to think of this record as being improvised, but it is so much more intentional than that.

And I think that there are, there's a lot more than just washes of sound and there are all these different instruments that sort of feel like they're in conversation with each other, like chattering. Yeah, no, I'm glad you pulled Continuum. because it does one of my favorite things that this record does. See, Ann?

Sorry. I'll just be over here listening to Continuum 4. It feels silly to say. I wonder. I do think, she did this with her last record, too. I wonder if it's a little bit of like a self-conscious riff on the fact that ambient music is generally, like, you know, it can be difficult to talk about and write about in concrete terms. But this track, so you've got a couple of elements in here, right? You've got this sort of modular synth sequence.

that has a noise layer. So instead of just a pitch, you get this kind of going along. And then, over time, that noise transitions seamlessly into the sound of the live drums on this record. And it happens all over the place. Nabaya Garcia, the saxophonist, who is all over this record and does an amazing job,

does the same thing, sort of weaving in and out of these synth sequences and kind of mimicking their sort of mathematical, rigidity and then flowing off into her own jazier place. And so you get this phenomenon over and over where you can't really tell moment to moment which instruments are making which sound, which I'm such a sucker for. It's such a cool trick. Yeah. Well, yeah, I think the thing that is obvious when I listen to you talk about it, and

it's something I thought about with this record too, is there's a lot to hold on to here, right? It's not just these washes of sound or whatever. There is so much going on. Well, Robin, it's really a year for retuning our ears with these albums that don't fit easily into any category, but do touch on what we think of as ambient music. I mean, I have a whole list of like 12 albums at least that fit in this category. Our colleague over in the jazz world, Nate Shenan and I were talking about how we wished we could have a pod episode that would just be about this terrain. I don't know. I don't even want to call it a category.

but I'm thinking of everything from Ruiichi Sakamoto's incredible final album, opus, which he made in his dying days, and there's a beautiful documentary that goes with it, to albums by hard-to-define jazz artists like Fubut sushi, for example, or the Brazilian guitarist Fabiano Doe Nassimento, who made this gorgeous album with a saxophonist Sam Gendel called The Room. I could go on and on. Gannavia's very meditative, kind of chant-oriented album,

Daughter of a Temple. This is just the richest territory. There were numerous albums this year made using field recordings of birds. We talked about that on the show so often because there were so many, and I'm such a sucker for it. You didn't mention the Claire Rousey record,

sentiment that came out earlier this year. That was one that impossible to do. define. I love that we're moving beyond category that we have all these different places. It's like a whole new sky to look at at night. There was also an album by, do you know Leah Cole? She had this album called Normal Sounds and it was all these just... Oh yes. Actually, yes. Tennis court light, and Hazel mentioned that to me. Our colleague and friend Hazel, Sills mentioned that to me. Yeah, it's so good. Claire Rousey sells hats and T-shirts that say emo ambient. I mean, she's aware of this hybridity as much as anybody. I mean, in recent times, there might have been a day or two where I was a little upset

about the potential future of the world. Just a day or two? Just a day or two. Just a day or two. But I think that's one reason why all these, this kind of music is being made. We not only are we open to it as listeners, but we need it. You know what I mean? Yeah. So Nalosinefro, the artist, Inlessness is the album. We'll go out on this for now, but again, this is just the first part of our best albums of 2024 show. We'll have part two on Friday. New Music Friday, done for the year, astoundingly.

You and you and Daoud have been hosting that all year long. We'll have part two on Friday, then instead, a whole bunch of other year and stuff coming this month. Until then, I'm Robin Hilton. It is All Songs Consider.