There was a week in mid-October when The Quietus’ release schedule spreadsheet was overflowing with bounteous goodness, with over ten albums by artists we’re partial to out on the same day. This was a fantastic problem to have – we reviewed some out of release week and squeezed out extra budget from our Subscriber revenues to pay to have them covered. The situation also highlighted the continuing strange situation that we find ourselves in as the twenty-first century approaches the end of its first quarter. So much great work is being made against increasingly ferocious economic, social and political headwinds.
We exist in a moment where the cultural infrastructure around us is in a state of crisis. This year alone, Pitchfork and other magazines and websites lost staff or closed, the mainstream broadsheet and broadcast media continued to reduce their arts coverage, independent label bastion PIAS was gobbled up by Universal Records, the march of AI continued unabated – an existential threat to writers, musicians and artists across the world.
Meanwhile, at the top of the musical pyramid, vast piles of coin continued to flow into the coffers of the superannuated artists at the top of the table – Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, Oasis’ 2025 stadium jaunt. I suspect that a decent proportion of the albums on our list below will make the artist who created them less money than the Bros. Gallagher will take from a pair of price-gouged, sorry I mean ‘dynamically priced’, tickets to Wembley. Increasingly, this is the way of things. Yet still we continue to be amazed by the diversity, individuality, creativity and joy of the artists we write about at The Quietus, 100 of whom are represented by our Albums of 2024 list below.
I think it’s worth pointing out that this list is only the tip of the iceberg, beneath which lurk hundreds more records that have been loved by our staff and writers over the past year. It’s not a definitive account, but a place to start exploring – keep your eyes peeled to the site in the coming weeks for more treats in the annual round-ups by our genre columnists.
As ever, we would urge you to help support the artists we love by buying their music either from our pals at Norman Records or via Bandcamp. You’re reading this chart on a tQ website that was regenerated back in the spring. If that hadn’t happened, it’s more than likely that this Albums of the Year chart either wouldn’t have happened, or would have been our last. We feel incredibly fortunate that we have this new platform to bring you words on the artists below, and so many more besides, but to make The Quietus sustainable we really need your support.
Become a Subscriber or Subscriber Plus-tier member here and help guarantee these charts long into the future, as well as getting a load of perks including bonus essays, podcasts, newsletters, playlists and exclusively-commissioned music. Subscribers can also listen to a whopping nine hours of music from our chart via our streaming playlists, which can be accessed here. Thanks for reading, and for all your support. We hope you find as many treasures as we have on the list below. – Luke Turner, November 29, 2024
This chart was voted for by tQ editors, staff and columnists. It was compiled by John Doran and built by Patrick Clarke and Christian Eede.
Fergus JonesEphemeraNumbers
Fergus Jones’ previous work, mostly under the now-shelved Perko alias, has often had a meditative, downtempo bent to it, his productions frequently suited to the warm-up and cool-down hours of a club night, or the hazy comedown of the afters. On his debut album, Ephemera, he takes that angle to further, brilliant depths. Standout cut ‘Heima’, one of six collaborations on the record, sees Jones link up with two of the best artists currently exploring the intersection between ambient and club music: Huerco S. and James K. The result is an elegant, gorgeous combination of trip hop and dubstep that affords James K’s dreamy vocal plenty of space to soar. Elsewhere, Jones subtly draws on classic hip hop on ‘Tight Knit’, a linkup with rappers Birthmark, ELDON and Withdrawn of Bristol’s Cold Light collective, and pairs Laila Sakini’s tender pop vocals with rolling 808s and weighty bass hits on ‘Can’t Touch’. He’s just as comfortable working alone as he is with his cast of collaborators, though, with sparse, dubby cuts like ‘Stack’ and ‘Heap’ woven expertly into Ephemera’s running order.
Able NoiseHigh TideWorld Of Echo
What’s special about High Tide is how its chaotic structure never feels aimless. Abstraction is purposeful, and the disjointedness – tape manipulation, broken rhythms, slo-mo landscapes – stays in dialogue. Able Noise’s multi-track layering and diverse processing techniques create an exploration that is both intuitive and meticulously crafted. Guest musicians (violin, saxophone, clarinet) only turn up the contrast, entering and exiting not as distractions but as part of the same endless push and pull – sometimes peaceful, sometimes abrasive, but always searching for meaning in the gaps.
FauneDes FantômesStandard In-Fi
Faune are a duo of Jacques Puech and Guilhem Lacroux from the ever-brilliant French folk scene that has been delivering some of my favourite records of the last few years. Like trad folk sharpened on a knife block; like medieval troubadours who’ve heard Desertshore; like the cover to Airs & Graces crossed with Henry Flynt.
Chelsea WolfeShe Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To SheLoma Vista
Chelsea Wolfe’s music has always been admirably vulnerable and honest, qualities that are in even greater abundance on her latest album than they have been on her previous releases. The metaphysically themed She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She is dominated by loud guitars and feels incredibly abrasive, not least because it follows a record of acoustic folk songs. It deals with how personal change can be achieved by our present selves communicating with our past and future ones.
Thurston MooreFlow Critical LucidityDaydream Library
For a record with such a diverse set of players, Flow Critical Lucidity is undoubtedly Thurston Moore’s own. It spans his creative timeline, covering those early days guitar-duelling with Glenn Branca, through Psychic Hearts, The Eternal, and up to 2020’s By The Fire. Admittedly his dalliances with black metal (Twilight), free jazz and harsh noise (Cuts Of Guilt, Cuts Deeper) don’t really get a look in beyond the discordant harmonics squeaking like hungry cats on the opening track but, for the rest of Flow Critical Lucidity, it’s as if we’re being taken on a hazy drive through his back catalogue.
Christoph de BabalonAch, MenschMidnight Shift
If you’re new to Christoph de Babalon, you can immediately get an idea about his aesthetic by looking at Apolo Cacho’s captivating artwork for his latest release. Like the opening track’s title ‘Non Human Things’ suggests, there’s a certain fascination with that which transcends our conceptions of the organic. The brooding synthlines seemingly take the forms of strange creatures and weird vocal manipulations add to its surreal atmosphere. Ach, Mensch takes me back to the Centre Pompidou in Paris where I first saw the works of Yugoslav surrealist Dado. Both artists’ works are informed by intricate compositions, hybrid forms and dreamlike landscapes. Their uncanny art has an enigmatic quality, exploring the human psyche through expression and playing with motifs like violence and death.
Five Green MoonsMoon 1Pamela
Justin Robertson is a man of many hats, both literally and figuratively. As well as being a milner’s dream customer, he is an author, an artist and has mined a seam of psychedelia that mixes together acid house, psych, North African trance and dub in DJ sets that span three-and-a-half decades and counting. These musical interests can all be discerned to one extent or another, albeit welded to a heavy and scratchy post punk chassis, on the first album produced under new alias Five Green Moons. It nods to other bass-driven Brit-based outliers, such as The Pop Group, Dub Syndicate and Depth Charge; a satisfying immersive sound which occasionally rolls majestically out of the way to reveal a much older, arcane Albion glittering underneath.
Sex SwingGolden TriangleGod Unknown
Sex Swing can deliver killer bass rumbles and dense, wet-sand riffing with the best of ‘em, but this gluey, Melvins-esque heaviness is at its absolute best when drawn endlessly out to the point it begins to warp at the edges. Frontman Dan Chandler is core to this, variously sounding incredulous, furious and utterly bewildered as he delivers cracked tales in a mumblefuck manner that mushes together David Eugene Edwards, Mark E. Smith and Don Van Vliet. Saxophonist Colin Webster, meanwhile, serves as the band’s secret weapon, providing everything from Saints-y melody to full-on Fun House meltdowns.
DaastSS24Phage Tapes
Opening with its longest cut, the nine-minute ‘Bane Of Rats’, SS24 is invariably high-intensity if not especially high-BPM, with hi-hats hitting like clashing swords and jagged basslines feeling like a wilful reshape of power electronics production aesthetics. ‘Yielding Is Life’ cooks up a swirly post-junglist atmosphere – Pessimist, Karim Maas et al – but whacks a galloping girder beat over the top, and that’s far from the only time Chris Williams’ steez here feels attuned to the Perc Trax label’s most punishing output.
Peace TalksProgressPeterwalkee
Stalls are set out on ‘Life Is Strange’, which opens Progress and, for its first 80 seconds, is classically crescendoing hardcore with some serious kick pedal damage, but also a turbo-surf guitar style descended from East Bay Ray and delivered by John Villegas. Then the mosh part arrives, frontwoman Krystyna Haberman towering over the pawns below, and vocals go through the psychedelic wringer once or twice, and not for the last time. ‘Trash In A America’ has a raddled barroom piano part for a middle eight, puncturing what is otherwise a song worthy of dislocating your shoulder pumping your fist to, and ‘Taranaki’ has the best ‘deathrock, but at HC tempo’ guitar solo you’ve ever heard. It’s also one of two consecutive songs (see also ‘Last Chance Out Of Texas’) whose lyrics detail attempted kidnappings: Haberman, by all accounts, has had a hell of a life, and in this episode of it she sings in a hell of a band. I don’t think there’s a below-par moment on Progress, much less a song.
Bianca ScoutPattern DamageSferic
Steadily, unselfconsciously, and to a mystifying dearth of general acclaim, Bianca Scout has been fashioning a netherworld, its crevices inlaid with shards of her consciousness. The decade-stretching oeuvre which functions as the visible front for this hidden psychic reverse now comprises six albums, a strewing of singles and EPs, and various music videos and choreographed performances – the latter drawing from Scout’s background in dance. But to know her work, in full (unlikely, since its roots tend to redouble the deeper you dig) or in part, is to remain palpably distant from Bianca Scout, the persona and the person. She expresses herself with a sort of uncanny ingenuousness, a candour which communes with the emotions and perplexes more rational engagement. Revelations promptly dissipate on taking off the headphones, the fog of mystique gathers once more. Which is to say, listeners coming to her work for the first time through Pattern Damage need not feel underprepared; there are no privileged entry points.
MAVIShadowboxMAVI 4 Mayor
Shadowbox, MAVI’s third album, is a doggedly direct and frequently morose examination of the lows of substance abuse and the depression that can be fuelled by addiction. Set against a bed of equally melancholic and bright, soulful beats, the North Carolina rapper’s lyrics are refreshingly candid as he speaks self-critically of taking Percocets (‘I’m So Tired’) and “pills while mum was making dinner” (‘Tether’), and addresses the long road to recovery and accepting help. It’s a journey that he’s still openly navigating now following the completion and release of Shadowbox, and for that reason, there are few overwhelming moments of salvation sprinkled across the record, but what you get instead is a bracing exploration of the flaws that many of us will see in our own selves as we navigate life.
Nick Cave & The Bad SeedsWild GodBad Seed / PIAS
I suspect that at some point Nick Cave might have a late-period Scott Walker style boundary-pushing record in him, but for now, Wild God is exactly what you’d expect a Bad Seeds record made by church-going Nick Cave at the age of 66 to sound like – vocally, that wobble and rasp now is what you’re going to get from decades spent smoking snouts and everything else besides. Musically, it is a slow and elegantly-arranged record, which also seems fitting for where Cave is in life. I’ve often felt as if the magnificent Grinderman was a purging of the feral rock & roll instincts of both Cave and his band, a sweaty, horny, fiery blaze that then allowed them to move on. This is certainly the fullest, best arranged Bad Seeds LP since Push The Sky Away, a move forward from the beautifully arid Skeleton Tree and heaviness of Ghosteen.
VanishingShelter Of The OpaqueThe state51 Conspiracy
Changing landscapes and our relationships with them are at the heart of Shelter Of The Opaque: as places evolve, where do we fit into those, and how does it affect both our sense of self and our relationship to the past? The passage of time also runs throughout the album. The start of the unsettling track ‘Castling’ recalls Gareth Smith’s roots in Hull, the call of home feeling ever present as he seeks to understand his past in the context of the present. The song is also one of several on the album that explores climate change too: the drones on the track sound like an electronic sea of sorts, and one that threatens to subsume its surroundings at any moment. An underlying ticking beat stresses how time is running out for the planet.
D’En HautD’En HautPagans/La Nóvia
The Pagans label and La Nóvia collective are two of the most crucial incubators of talent within the French folk scene, and with D’En Haut’s self-titled second album, they’ve helped to bring one of the year’s most compelling releases into the world. D’En Haut are the duo of well-established figures of the new folk movement, Thomas Baudoin and Romain Colautti. Both sing (largely in Occitan, as far as I can tell) and employ a variety of instruments, including drone boxes and percussion. The latter is crucial; D’En Haut finds the pair singing traditional religious songs (“generally about love”, they say), chanting in harmony over lattices of clacky, woody percussion, bells, drone and buzzing acoustic bass. It grabs you from first moments of ‘Au Paradis’, earthbound but gesturing towards transcendence, through the lolloping ‘Quian Èri Joen Pastor’, the wonky folk blues of ‘Lo Pair De La Novia’ and achingly doleful and dreamlike closer ‘Hilhòta De Delà L’aiga’. Weirdly hooky, vigorous and, in moments, rapturously psychedelic, D’En Haut might well be this year’s French folk masterpiece.
BramaBramaAirfono
Brama are a rollicking power trio fusing folk with 70s hard rock, psych, krautrock (see the motoric-inspired opener ‘Somnhar’) and luminous three-part harmonies. Hurdy gurdy is used to drive the trancey energy, but there are few slow-building drones here; tracks like ‘La Bruma’ burst out of the speakers with such joyous intensity that you can’t help but be swept up in it. ‘Senraija’ does have a gorgeous, misty dawn of an intro that temporarily moves the album into straighter folk territory, but the calm is eventually broken by a stinging riff before the band take off again at full clip. They remind me of Mdou Moctar in the way that they revitalise hoary rock tropes through a combination of local flair, blistering musicianship and infectious enthusiasm.
Teho Teardo & Blixa BargeldChristian & MauroSpecula
The Christian & Mauro of the title are the given names of Blixa Bargeld and Teho Teardo, of course. Dusting them off suggests that what we hear here will somehow skirt closer to the source – the essence of the men themselves. Rome-dwelling Teardo brings the sonics of his extensive back catalogue that has included the soundtracks for Paolo Sorrentino’s The Family Friend and the black comedy of his political masterpiece Il Divo, Enda Walsh’s Ballyturk, as well as collaborations since the 1980s with the likes of Girls Against Boys, Lydia Lunch and Nurse With Wound. His ability to move between cinema, composition in the classical tradition and artists who tend to work in more song-based formats seems to give Bargeld great freedom – throughout Christian & Mauro we hear him present in the manner to which we’ve become accustomed to in recent years. He approaches his art and lyricism in the aleatory manner that always keeps us guessing, marrying the abstract with wildly evocative images stored away in folders that he summons by the powers of divination.
KaThe Thief Next To JesusIron Works
Released just a couple of months before his death at the age of 52, Kaseem Ryan’s ninth studio album grapples with the hold that Christianity has on Black Americans, casting a critical eye over a religion that he says preaches great freedom but has ultimately been used to control, and even enslave as addressed in the opening sample of ‘Cross You Bear’, different generations of people. Over 14 cuts, the record showcases Ryan’s typically understated delivery, his grand and assured statements fully given the floor thanks to characteristically sedate production that is heavily influenced by gospel music and, as with most of his past projects, comes courtesy of the artist himself. Folding in bars addressing his own mortality (‘Borrowed Time’) and the landscape of modern hip hop (opener ‘Bread, Wine, Body, Blood’) amidst the album’s overarching theme, The Thief Next To Jesus, serving as the finale to a measured but hugely dynamic discography, is a masterful exhibition of Ryan’s penmanship.
HI! CAPYBARASA/M/Y/G/D/A/L/ASelf-Released
Nothing is hidden on A/M/Y/G/D/A/L/A, these haunted synth and spoken word tracks are a portal into private space. Setting reinforces the effect, luminous synths crumpled by tape, sonic comfort food while Leonard Susskind lectures reel off in the background. Through memories of pet snails and youthful misdemeanours, HI! CAPYBARAS holds a mirror up to past and present in search of a thread. Loss and discovery roll into tender honesty. “Have you ever felt truly, truly, truly alone? I mean like really, truly alone?” They ask on ‘Things That I Wld Tell My Younger Self’. Addressing the listener, the question halts time, fully embroils us with HI! CAPYBARAS’ perspective. Though stark and ruminating, this is generous music. Its vulnerability lifts facades, shatters the pressure to keep up appearances. Putting it all out there and perhaps offering a glimmer of comfort in the act of sharing.
TraümeWrzaskQuality Control HQ
Introduced with a minute of moody synth, thereafter Wrzask is urgent and hammering, fat-free guitar downstrokes and bass-driven verses giving way to moshable mushroom clouds of power chords. Piotr Królikiewicz’s guitar yowls in the grand Bauhaus/Killing Joke tradition and producer Rafał Wiewiór applies post-production with enthusiasm and care in equal measure, Dorota Stochmalska’s vocals often left to echo right across the bridge. On ‘Mogłabym Zabijać’, the record’s shortest and hardcore-est song, we find her reflecting on her potential to murder in unusually baroque ways: dragging the victim behind her car, or setting off a firecracker in their anal cavity.
