NPR Music - The Best Albums of 2024, Part 2

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

Our look back at the best albums of 2024 continues, with Tyler, The Creator, Cassandra Jenkins, The Cure and more.See NPR Music's complete list of the 50 best albums of the year.And be sure to check out our list of the 124 best songs of 2024.Enjoy the show? Tell a friend and leave us a review wherever you listen to 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

And we're back. Am Powers, Dawu, Tyler, I mean. How's it going? Oh, very well. Trying to think of who you sounded like when you said, and we're back. And we're back. Is that Paul Giamati, maybe? What?

I can see that. I don't get that at all. But this is part two of our best albums of 2024 show. If you missed it, you'll find part one in the All Songs Considered Feed from earlier in the week. NPR Music just posted a much longer, more comprehensive list of albums. We all picked for the best of the year. And these are just some of the first of the year. these are just some of our favorites from that great big list.

Let's start with the title of the creator album, Chromacopia, that just came out this fall. private home invasion's got my brothers dying notice every car that's driving by I think my neighbors when we did I got a cannon under the bed triple checking if I lock the door I know every creep that's in the floor Well I'm not really even sure where to begin with this album I will say

that when I first listened to it one of the first thoughts I had was I can't imagine anything better than this in 2024 and then I started talking with different people on the music team and it sounded like the reviews were a little mixed and I was really surprised to hear it because I just thought it was

like staggeringly good. My initial reaction, as you know well, Dioud was like, it was a little too busy for me, like too hard to absorb. I felt like there was some showing off going on. Yeah, I just felt like I wasn't, it didn't hit me initially, but I will say I'm subsequent listens. I just think it takes a little time.

At least for me it took a little time to absorb everything that he's up to. I agree. I think context is really important. The other night, my wife was like, oh, there's a new Tyler record. I didn't, I missed it. Put it on. What's it like? And we were sitting in the living room, so I just put it on our TV.

And I think I played Sticky. Sticky situation, discombabulation, call me rear-handed palms itching like rotation. Standing like ovation on business occupation. Dripping condensation got a o's-fucking conversation. And coming out of just like consumer-grade TV speakers, it was in. decipherable. I think really interesting. The mix of this record is such a particular thing where if you're not listening on good speakers or good headphones and really like focusing in, like you might not even hear the bass.

You might not even be able to discern between all of the marching band drumline stuff and all of the voices that are overlapping on top of each other. But if you can, it can feel really thrilling. And that Sticky is such a fun song because you get, I mean, you know, you get Glorilla and Sexy Red and Lil Wayne and Tyler, you know, all for the price of one, and everybody's kind of like, you know, just sort of stunting in their own way. Over a beat that's actually kind of skeletal, you don't really get a hard bass drop in the way that you keep expecting to. And I think it's because the bass is in this really kind of blown out space where you really have to be, like, locked in and listening. to it, otherwise you're just going to miss it. Maybe it's just my ADHD brain, but

what you call busy, Anne, to me, is just like a feast of sound. And it is exactly the kind of thing that I'm going to keep going back to again and again, because I know I'm going to keep hearing something new, and things are going to start to reveal themselves to me the more I listen to it.

Oh, I think that's absolutely right. And I'm curious, I just want to ask you, how do you think the Feast of Sound serves the stories he's telling? Like, do you think it gets in the way, or do you think it reinforces the story he's telling, which is essentially the story of him confronting his family inheritance, i.e., like, should I become a parent? Well, I mean, he's definitely talking about growing older.

I think there was apparently a listening party, I think, in L.A., and he said at that party, he made some announcement and talking about the album. He said, you know, I'm not the guy that I was when I was 20 years old. I mean, he's all of 33 now. But, you know, he said people are having kids and families and all he has is a new Ferrari, I think is what he pointed out. You know, he's gaining weight. He's getting gray hair. And as he said, life is lifing, which that's going to be my new, just catchphrase. You know, life, life is lifeing.

But to me, life is never one thing for very long. In fact, life moves at a breakneck pace. And things are constantly changing and sudden shapes. shifts in your life, the rug gets pulled out from under you one moment, and then you're soaring the next, and then you're falling again, and you're climbing back out of whatever hole that you've tripped and fallen into. And I don't know, life to me is chaos. And when I listen to this, I feel like the whole sort of vast range of human experience is all kind of condensed into all of these songs. To me, this is just as ambitious and, I don't know, remarkable as something

like Kendrick Lamarck, with apologies to Kendrick Lamarck, we should mention his album that just came out too, but like to me this is like, this is damn or to pimp a butterfly or something like that. I feel like this album is that ambitious. I feel like there's a distinction to be made between what Kendrick does,

which is he's self-reflective, but I think he's always repping for the community, for the culture, and trying to tell a story that is very big, out of his own experience. And with Tyler,

he's telling a story that's very big that remains within his own experience. I don't know. I mean, he's creating himself as this character. But I think in the last couple of records, he's been, I don't know, he's been growing a little more conventional. That old Tyler,

who was the absolute trickster from the odd future days, is not gone, but is less present. and he's trying to negotiate, I don't know, just more conventional issues, which is cool, though. His awareness of the maturation that you're describing is the answer to the busyness question. I think it's him sort of manifesting the feeling of aging into a phase of life where mess is serious and consequential and potentially permanent. as compared to the ways that messiness and, you know, emotional turmoil feel to an adolescent, which, I mean, he was, you know, 19, I guess, when we sort of met him for real as a recording artist.

But he, I mean, you know, he was a kid. Really, you know, this very, you know, precocious talent. But, you know, he was so about this very juvenile nihilism. This is somebody coming into, I mean, if. effectively kind of like a second adolescence, like realizing that, like, oh, the thing that I thought of as my transition into early adulthood, that's not what that was. All of that was practice. Like, this is real adulthood. This is the place where the decisions that I make have real consequences that are lifelong and potentially life or death. Well, this is maybe album of the year for me personally, a chromocopia from Tyler, the creator. And I mentioned the Kendrick Lamar record. I mean, we should at least say something about it, G&X, that the surprise drop.

I'm still listening to it and trying to make sense of it. But it is one that ended up making the NPR list of the 50 Best Albums of the Year. Yeah. Well, if nothing else, it's just total pleasure to listen to this record. I mean, I just enjoy Kendrick's flow and the imaginative way he approaches, not just his lyricism, but his tonality, his vocality, and it's a real showcase for that. Yeah, there's been a little bit of a split in the early reactions to it. Some people saying that it feels a little bit tossed off, a little bit like sort of an odds and ends.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think that, and I'm cribbing some of this from the really wonderful review that our colleague Sheldon Pierce wrote that I think illuminates a lot of the things that, you know, that Kendrick was putting into this record. But that basically, part of what he's saying here, is that the scope of what hip hop has become under the watch of figures like Drake, who are so hybridized and so about being a kind of central pop network that draws in every possible influence is that it just felt like it was getting a little bit big and then it might be time for a reset. In a way, it's sort of lowering the stakes. And you know, you can say that this is a lower stakes record in that it feels like a lot less conceptual, a lot less conceptual, a lot

as sort of grandiose than, you know, the every single record he's ever made, basically. Right. But in a certain way, the stakes feel higher because they just feel a little bit more personal and a little bit more street level. And I think that that's the thing that people who are in on this record are really responding to. All right, Robin. So, of course, we talked about your album of the year. But let me talk about my album with the year.

Let me tell you a story. Make some space for me. Make some space for me right now. I'm completely in love with this album by the singer-songwriter, hard-to-define artist Cassandra Jenkins. And this record is called My Light, My Destroyer. This song is called Omicase. This song is called Omicasse.

It's such a great illustration of what this album does and why I love it so much. It's a love song. It's an ode to a lover who is her light and her destroyer. But it's also, she builds this image of feeding her lover the strawberry. And it's a very rare strawberry. Do you guys know what an omicasse strawberry is? Well, I know, I mean, in Japanese omacase, it means, well, it sort of means like dealer's choice. But it's very often used specifically.

with food. So like if you told the chef to surprise me. Right. Well, this strawberry was developed by an entrepreneur. It's sold, I think it's by the Oishi company. It's a varietal that grows only in the Japanese Alps. But this entrepreneur developed it to be grown in greenhouses and in vertical greenhouses. And it's now being imported and maybe grown in the U.S. I don't know. And sold at places like Italy. for $5 a strawberry. That's some strawberry. Yeah, and it's like the perfect strawberry.

But that is such a great metaphor for Cassandra Jenkins's art and what she thinks about in her art because it is this mundane object that is infused with magic. Well, that is her superpower. That is Cassandra Jane's superpower. Taking the most mundane moments like wandering around in a pet co. Locking eyes with a lizard. Oh, my God.

And then somehow discovering her true nature and the nature of everything. It's become my second name. Petco, that song devastates me. And it's not only because I used to live near Petco and would sometimes go in just to look at the foster cats for adoption. Right. But what does she say? It didn't make me feel better, but it did make me feel less alone, something like that. Exactly.

It's just, I mean, it's perfect. There are certain images on this record that are really, they're sort of devastating in a way that is difficult to put into words because it's the kind of thought that you feel like you're the only person who's had. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. Yeah. That's so well put. Yeah, totally. Everyone needs Cassandra Jenkins in their life.

An artist who is just so re-centering and reassuring and full of, I don't know, the kind of. wisdom that just makes you, your shoulders lower a little bit, you find yourself exhaling. Yeah. I mean, the thing that sticks to me across this record most of all is this idea of being broken apart as a way to sort of show you who you really are, the sort of the revelatory possibilities of being smashed and pulled apart and then put back together again in a shape that's a little bit closer to the way that you actually feel. So Cassandra Jenkins, my light, my destroyer, I cannot.

fault you for picking that one, Anne. It is a really, really beautiful album. Any year we get a new Cassandra Jenkins is a good year that came out back in July. 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. Let's go to another one, Ann, that I know you really love this year, the new album by The Cure, Songs of a Lost World. I don't know, maybe I should go back and give The Cure another chance, go back to the time travel back to the 80s when everybody I knew loved the cure except for me. And I felt I was the outsider. Yeah.

You really, I was surprised, Robin, when I brought up this record as one to talk about. And you were really not that excited. Well, I wasn't excited to talk about it until I listened to it. And I texted you fine. You did. This is much better than I expected it to be, you know, and I don't know if it's just me or, you know, my tastes have evolved from when I was, you know, an angry teenager and hated everything. And I just, I would not expect a band to get better after 40 years of making music or more.

And 16 years without a record period. Yeah. Yeah. And especially after such a long break. But it sure sounds good to me. I know. It wasn't, I guess it wasn't a shock to serious cure fans. And I'm also not a long-time cure fan. I'm not an anti-cure person, but I never was like deep into it, right? There's essentially two cures. I think it was Jacob Gans, our editor who said,

Bess and he's like, think of it, that band is two bands, right? There's the hitmakers, the Friday I'm in Love Cure. And then there's that epic, psychedelic, create a whole new atmosphere kind of band. And this record is mostly that latter cure, but there are hooks. There is a lot of emotion. And Robert Smith, who is the center of this band, you know, he's 65 years old. and he is really aged into his augst. Like, the man deserves his augst now, you know?

It's completely earned. Is it, like, more vulnerable than what you maybe heard 40 years ago when he was a 20-something? I think it's just more real, you know, like people actually around him are actually passing away. He lost his parents. He lost his brother. That's hard to endure, you know? And he's confronting his own mortality and that kind of loss. They also take it in new directions like a song, like war song, which is about a long-time relationship that is very contentious.

It also reads as a protest song in a sense, or just a lament for the state of the world. I mean, I can see how, like you're saying in, if your primary exposure to the cure was songs like, Boys Don't Cry or Close to Me or In Between Days or any of these things that are, you know, kind of like great soundtrack song, things that, you know, are sort of evocative of an era. I'm sure one of them was on, like, the wedding singer soundtrack. Right. Versus the more, like, disintegration-e mode that this record is in. I mean, it is, again, we said this on New Music Friday.

He's not in rush to get anywhere. This record is 50 minutes long and has, what, eight tracks? Right, and most of them, the vocals don't even come in until, like, two minutes in. Sometimes a song is, like, half over. Well, like, three and a half minutes into the opening track alone, it's all instrumental. This is somebody who has thought a lot about the different ways that pain, sadness, angst, etc., can manifest in the way that they can feel and the way that they can sound. And it seems like the vibe this time around was just to be like, let's go deep into the sonics of what those feelings are, rather than feeling like we have to spell everything out lyrically. So, Anne, if I spend my holiday time going back and giving the cure another chance, where do I start?

Like, kiss me, kiss me, kiss me. Oh, you got to start with disintegration. Deseintegration, that's the one. All right. That'll lead you right back to Songs of a Lost World. Songs of a Lost World, that came out at the top of November. Let's go to Blues Blood, the album Blue's Blood, from Emmanuel Wilkins that came out in October. Well, Robin, you know, this is really a song suite.

about memory, personal memory, family memory, but also cultural memory. Emmanuel Wilkins has said that he was very much inspired by stories like that of the Harlem 6, who were convicted of a crime back in the 60s, unjustly convicted. So one of the Harlem 6th, Daniel Hamm, when he was arrested, the police did not believe he was injured. He had been injured. And he said he had to cut his arm and let some of the bruise blood come through. And there's so many cultural touchdowns on this record and so many different variations on the concept and consciousness of the blues.

It does not necessarily sound like what we think of the blues, but the blues philosophy, you know, and the way the blue is in everything, everything, that's what this record is about. June McDoom was the sort of star discovery of this record for me. I didn't know anything about her, and she comes from a little bit more of a folk context. But the way that her voice is woven into a lot of these tracks, the way that she adds a lot of her own penwork to it, I think she wrote a bunch of lyrics for this record, the way that her voice sounds in contrast with Cecil McLaurin-Salvant when they duet together,

She's somebody that I'm going to be watching for a while as a result of having heard her here. Well, everything I know about this album, I learned from NPR Sheldon Pierce, because he played the June McDune, well, she appears on the song, Motion, and that was one that we played on the show. Back around the time the album came out in October, came out October 11th. I think as we said at the top of the show, NPR music did a much more comprehensive list of the year's best albums. You can find that on the NPR website. We could only get to a fraction of them on this episode. But let's just do one more before we wrap it up.

And this one is one that actually, I don't think it made the list. Did it? The final NPR 50? It did not. But you know what? The list is, it's a living thing, Robin. Let's change it right now. Well, this is one that I know. I think, Dow, you really love this record.

And I really loved it, too. And I thought I really just wanted to play something from it. Because I think it's just such a magnificent, beautiful work from the singer Ravina. It's called Where the Butterflies Go in the Rain. I don't know, there's just such an elegance and grace in this music. It is just so smooth, but it's just super charming and sweet and lovely. It has this very kind of classic old school, almost like 70s R&B feel to it, but she just breathes so much new life into it, partly in her voice, I think,

because her voice is just, her voice is so crystalline. It is so sharp in a lot of ways, but kind of fuzzy, too, around the edges. Yeah. I mean, smooth is a funny word, because I agree. But it's smooth in a way that might have been, that might have worked against it if it had come out in a specific time. Like, Anne, when you and I talked about this record, you mentioned that it reminded you of a lot of the sort of R&B and soul-oriented pop that was coming out in the early 2000s. People like Corinne Bailey Ray. Yes.

Nelly Furtado and, you know, I think I mentioned, you know, some of the late 90s Janet stuff that was going on. Right. And this is all music that, like, at the time, I considered myself much too cool for and sort of, like, thought of this kind of, like, bland, you know, sort of adult contemporary, like, radio pop and just didn't see any of the colors in it. The spectrum of different colors that exist across this record is so broad. Well, to forgive you for feeling that way, I would say the exact same thing. That was my experience too. And I don't know if it was us or if this is just genuinely more interesting.

I think it's a little of both. I think there's a lot from that time that upon revisiting, it actually had some wonderful things going on. The song that was most striking to me is one that is a little bit less showy, a little bit less epic in terms of the kind of rainbow of colors that we're talking about.

It's the song, bird. Oh, to me. Which seems like it must have been recorded, you know, live, maybe with just a single microphone with just a single microphone. I'm curious to know if it was just like a practice run or a demo or something like that, and it sounded so good that they decided to keep it. Because there's even a false start and stop where she sort of forgets the lyrics in the middle

and has to take a minute to remember where they go. But the rawness of it suits this song that is about counseling a friend who is in an abusive relationship, maybe dealing with some kind of domestic violence. And it has the same sort of starkness that some sort of, thing like Tracy Chapman's behind the wall has, a song that like, when my mom played that tape in the house when I was a kid, that was a song that like, again, I didn't get, I always wanted to skip past it because I was like, oh, this is so boring. And now I think that's like one of the most shattering pieces of music ever recorded. Now, welcome to middle age.

Well, I was really, I put Ravina's last album, Asha's Awakening on my list for that year it came out. But that was a very much of a concept album, you know, sort of, I mean, she had a whole sort of fantasy. A guided meditation at the end. Yeah, like a long meditation at the end and a whole storyline about kind of sci-fi storyline. So I like the way this album doesn't sort of overstate its vision, you know, but it contains the ambition and creativity of that previous release in a package that lets you find it for yourself. Well, I'm thinking of introducing a new segment, one-word reviews. Yeah. And if, like, if I did a one-word review of the Cassandra Jenkins, it would be cosmic. And my one-word review of the Ravina album would be radiant. Ah, that's lovely. Radiant. That's a good word. It's just the most

radiant, beautiful album, where the butterflies go in the rain. And that'll do it, at least as much as we can cram into about an hour or so, or two parts of our best albums of 2024 episode. We're going to have a whole lot of different year-end coverage coming all throughout this month, so check back and check the website for all of that. But Daew, Tyler, I mean, Ann Powers, thanks so much for doing this. Thanks so much for having us. And for NPR Music, I'm Robin Hilton. It's All Songs Considered.