in Top Ten

Much like the rest of 2024, I’m still not quite sure what to make of the year in music, even though it is officially, entirely, completely over. Once again, we here at Mildly Pleased would like to take more of a moratorium approach to a year after it’s completely dead and gone. None of this posting a Best of the Year List in November nonsense. Or maybe we just increasingly need the extra time for list-making when our lives continue to make keeping engaged with new music, TV, and movies harder by the year.

Anyways, as usual, music was the easiest medium for me to feel like I was on top of, especially when this year had the most to offer in terms of rewarding releases, since TV and movies were still reeling from multiple industry-wide strikes that happened last year. Still, I sometimes felt a bit on the outside looking in on the year in music, just because this year felt so pop-dominant (thanks, the algorithm). And while I did appreciate pretty much all of the year’s big pop releases, not a ton of them will be making my list. Instead, a lot of it will once again be pretty indie-centric, even if this year didn’t feel quite as rewarding for releases just a bit below the radar.

Honorable Mentions:
Yasmin Williams – Acadia
Mannequin Pussy – I Got Heaven
Brittany Howard – What Now
Illuminati Hotties – Power

10. Charli XCX – Brat

Ok, so this one wasn’t terribly below the radar. Brat may have ended up being the biggest pop album of the year, or at least it was the biggest pop album that also managed to unanimously win over critics, hence it placing on the top spot of various Best of the Year lists. It was an album that birthed TikTok trends and unexpected election engagement, and while it’s probably not my favorite Charli XCX album, I still can’t say the album’s success was undeserved, considering she’s been putting in the work for years and often hinting at the kind of cultural caché she finally achieved with Brat. My main issue with it is that there are a few skippable songs for me, but the moments that really hit, from “360” to “Talk Talk” to “Von Dutch” to “Apple”, make the album’s hyped-up vibes (and hype itself) hard to deny.

9. Dehd – Poetry

Speaking of putting in the work, Chicago’s Dehd have released 5 albums in less than 10 years of existence as a band, and while I can’t claim to being a hardcore fan of them, Poetry was the album that convinced me that they may well be one of the more consistent indie outfits going right now. Jason Balla and Emily Kempf’s call-and-response vocals are as jittery and infectious as ever, while the album as a whole has some of their warmest and most inviting songs yet. It was quite simply a great soundtrack for a summer spent trying to grasp onto the good times while the world felt like it was falling apart at the seams.

8. Beyoncé – Cowboy Carter

Look, the first Renaissance album was always going to be a hard one to follow, and while Cowboy Carter didn’t quite manage to achieve that album’s blissed-out highs, it was still one of the more compelling pop albums of the year. In an era when singles tend to be valued over albums, it’s pretty cool to see an artist with as much reach as Beyoncé turning to the album as its own unique art form with the kind of big, sprawling ambition that can only be achieved with a bunch of divergent songs flowing into and crashing up against each other. This feels perfect for an album that sees Beyoncé’s typical R&B, pop, and hip-hop crashing against country and Americana in ways that were pretty fascinating to think about as well as listen to.

7. Cassandra Jenkins – My Light, My Destroyer

Hey, it’s the artists who made my favorite albums of 2021 and 2022 coming in back-to-back. Which is… almost interesting. A theme I’m noticing with a lot of the albums on my list is that they see artists coming off of albums I really loved putting out follow-ups that aren’t quite as good, but pretty darn close. Which maybe sounds like a less impressive feat than it actually is. Because the fact of the matter is, Cassandra Jenkins manages to follow-up a really unpredictable and rewarding album with one that was just as full of surprises while also being the kind of cooly meditative collection of songs that was perfect for an autumnal morning walk to work. Much like Jenkins’s earlier albums, it’s a short n’ sweet under 40-minute package, but has so many unusual little moments that it leaves you with plenty to chew on.

6. Yaya Bey – Ten Fold

This album would probably fall into that same category of “pretty good, but not quite as good follow-up”, since I did really fall for Yaya Bey’s debut album, but Ten Fold still comes pretty darn close. The album sees her exploring her father’s death in ways that are mostly meditative and groovy, with just a little dash of melancholy, to the point where you wouldn’t necessarily assume it’s an album that has anything to do with death. Making an R&B album that’s both this chill, bass-heavy, and catchy is quite the feat, and the short, disjointed nature of the songs makes the album feel a bit like a series of journal entries set to some stellar production. Also, I don’t live in New York but I can still appreciate how alternately funny and frustrating the song “Eric Adams In The Club” is.

5. Nilüfer Yanya – My Method Actor

I listened to the shit out of this album in 2024 and I could still keep listening to it in 2025. Truly one of those albums that takes time to grow on you with all of its various melodic and textural subtleties, but at the end of the day is still a pure delight to listen to. It’s easy to feel like guitar music has a hard time feeling fresh or new these days, but Yanya manages to pull from influences beyond the indie rock sphere to create something that feels all her own. With three great albums under her belt, I see no reason to believe her next release will be any different.

4. Hurray For The Riff Raff – The Past Is Still Alive

It’s hard to say why or why not a “back to basics” album will work (see: Deeper Well by Kacey Musgraves), but maybe it just comes down to the songs at the end of the day. After venturing further into indie rock and avant-pop territory on their last couple albums, Alynda Segarra returns to more familiar folk and Americana material, and in the process sounds as comfortable and commanding as ever. Segarra has always exuded road-weary troubadour vibes, and on this album that aesthetic feels as lived-in and authentic as ever. It’s the type of album that feels silly to talk about, because there is a kind of beautiful simplicity to it that doesn’t seem worth dissecting too closely, to the point that it would be an easy album to take for granted if it didn’t sound so inviting every time I put it on.

3. Waxahatchee – Tigers Blood

Putting my Top 5 together is reminding me of the big year country music had, as it even invaded my indie-leaning tastes pretty effectively. Maybe it’s just easy to forget because of all the pop girls that dominated the year so thoroughly among the type of people I end up talking to about music. Anyways, Katie Crutchfield followed up one of my favorite albums of recent years, 2020’s Saint Cloud, with an album that doesn’t stray too far from that album’s relaxed formula and didn’t really need to. Crutchfield wears her more country and roots sound effortlessly, and the band she’s assembled here (featuring an artist we’ll return to quite soon) fits the easiness of these songs like glove.

2. Vampire Weekend – Only God Was Above Us

I would say Vampire Weekend is among the more talked about musical artists in the history of this blog, perhaps fittingly since their debut album dropped mere weeks before our first blog post dropped. So it’s a little hard to find new things to say about them, while similarly you would think there would be new things to hear in this band. After expanding a bit on what this band could be with their last album, VW returned this year with a more condensed, focused version of their sound, and yet there’s still just so many layers to what makes this album so darn listenable.

This was by far the album I listened to the most this year, not just because Ezra Koenig’s songwriting is just as sharp and poignant as ever, but also because the production and instrumentation are so dense and sprawling. In a word, it feels like it truly captures the sound of their once-native New York, yet with the passage of time, there’s something decaying and strange about it, and yet in its own way, is still beautiful.

1. MJ Lenderman – Manning Fireworks

Sometimes the albums you expect to like the most are the ones you have the hardest time enjoying to their full potential. Or at least, that’s what happens when you’re as fickle as I am. MJ Lenderman released a great debut album in 2022, another great album as a member of the band Wednesday in 2023, and contributed to another one of the great albums of 2024 in Waxahatchee’s Tigers Blood. So the expectations were fairly high, which made it a little hard for me to enjoy Manning Fireworks as much as I knew I should when it came out in September.

Fortunately, over the course of those few months, this album has become a mainstay of what we’ve been listening to in my house and I’m still not sick of it. Lenderman’s songs here are so effortlessly playful, tuneful, and full of hilariously insightful lyrics that I can’t really get enough of them. I’m not sure I have a ton more to say about Manning Fireworks, but after a year that was mostly pretty disappointing, I’ll leave you with one choice mantra from one of the album’s high points:  “It falls apart, we’ve all got work to do. / It gets dark, we’ve all got work to do.”

I think we’ve all got a little work to do in 2025. I’ll see ya there.

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