In 2024, through 50 Records of the Week, 12 Nashville Artists of the Month and countless interviews On The Record, the WNXP staff has spent hours upon hours listening to music released this year. To compile our top 30 albums of 2024, we’ve taken each of our staff’s top 10 albums and crunched the numbers. The result is this time capsule of the albums that defined 2024 for us.
30. Yard Act – Where’s My Utopia?
Yard Act, post punk’s latest poster boys, return with their second studio album, Where’s My Utopia. With chunky and robust bass guitar, interesting lyrical poetry, and a delightful disco inspired infusion throughout, I found myself eagerly stepping into Yard Act’s office for every song. The album tells a story of a band that has realized it is ace, top, mint, boss, class, sweet, deece, and even not bad to just sell out, write catchy tunes, and have fun. — Aaron Monty
29. Rubblebucket – Year of the Banana
28. Father John Misty – Mahashmashana
26. Brittany Howard – What Now
Brittany Howard contains multitudes. Never content to simply retread the throwback Americana-soul of her breakout band Alabama Shakes, each of her releases since has seen the Nashville-via-Athens, Alabama artist exploring new genres with a true music lover’s curiosity. What Now is powerfully assertive in its themes and sonic choices; confidently blending sounds as disparate as singing bowls, watery blues, chipmunk soul, soupy experimental funk, and clattering house grooves. The result is a best-record-of-the-year contender that feels like a dreamlike composite of memories of an afternoon of flicking through the racks and needle-dropping at the world’s best record store. It’s everything you love about music, now. — Dan Digs
25. Vampire Weekend – Only God Was Above Us
24. Lola Young – This Wasn’t Meant For You Anyway
21. English Teacher – This Could Be Texas
19. Charli xcx – brat
18. MJ Lenderman – Manning Fireworks
For years, Lenderman has been providing big riffs as the lead guitarist for beloved Asheville, North Carolina band Wednesday. On Manning Fireworks he is in front of the microphone as a listless frontman. Lenderman’s tone is sad. His voice hangs in the air, affectless. Crying pedal steel and warbling fiddle underscore his pain. But buried below the weight is an undercurrent of humor. Lenderman can be outright funny. There is a sad song about an Apple Watch and one about staving off a hangover in a McDonald’s parking lot. Like outlaw musicians before him, Lenderman finds company in his misery and asks if they’ve got any good jokes. — Justin Barney
17. Magdalena Bay – Imaginal Disk
16. Jessica Pratt – Here In The Pitch
15. Childish Gambino – Bando Stone & the New World
14. Amyl & the Sniffers – Cartoon Darkness
With song titles like “Don’t Need a Cunt (Like You to Love Me)” and “Blowjobs,” one might assume Cartoon Darkness is another run-of-the-mill Amyl and the Sniffers record. But the album shows a softer side from the Australian punk rockers. It might take 20 minutes, but an unexpected arrival of acoustic guitars showcase frontwoman Amy Taylor’s vocal range and the band’s ability to stretch their limits. But still, what makes the album the most captivating is what fans have come to expect — rowdy, raucous garage punk that’s guaranteed to push buttons and social norms. — Emily Young
12. Clairo – Charm
The charm of Clairo’s Charm, her third full-length effort, lies in its intimate lyricism paired with fluttering jazz and funk-inspired instrumentation. Each song tells its own story about love in all its forms: she takes a microscope to longing on “Juna,” she zeroes in on desire in “Second Nature,” she calls out uncertainty in a lover on “Slow Dance.” Charm sounds like Broadcast meets Erykah Badu and Carole King, with sparkling production courtesy of soul and funk giant Leon Michels, who tracked the album live to tape using a fully analog recording process. The result is a warm and sensually confident body of work that embraces an uninhibited approach to womanhood, and in it Clairo proves that she is absolutely right: the third time is the charm. — Carly Butler
11. NxWorries – Why Lawd
10. ScHoolboy Q – Blue Lips
9. Mk.gee – Two Star & The Dream Police
The emergence of a singular talent can feel inevitable. The end of 2024 has been like that for Mk.gee. Posting up on nearly every best of list, kicking off the new season of SNL, selling out bigger and bigger venues. It all seems logical in hindsight. But the year started way under the radar with most people only knowing him as Dijon’s guitarist. His record Two Star & The Dream Police changed that with word of mouth first building among artists and culminating in powerful live performances that felt like the arrival of a generational voice. That’s why Mk.Gee ended up on our top 30 albums of the year list. — Jason Moon Wilkins
8. Gillian Welch & David Rawlings – Woodland
7. The Last Dinner Party – Prelude to Ecstacy
Having been named “The Sound Of 2024” by the BBC’s prestigious poll this time last year, The Last Diner Party had a lot to live up to. Their debut album Prelude To Ecstasy arrived in February with a euphoric release that absolutely lived up to its hype. Channeling pure feminine energy in all its very un-English, un-buttoned-down passion, these five young women come at misogyny in all its forms. They embody the freedom and unbridled strength of Gen Z feminism, while looking like baddie versions of the heroines you see on the front of Harlequin romances. They have the theater of Sparks, the sultriness of Roxy Music, and the side-eye of Jayne Mansfield walking away and looking over her shoulder (‘cause she knows you’re still checking her out). All this is built in with a stunning musicianship and choruses hookier than the unlaced front of a Victorian bodice. — Jude Mason
6. The Bug Club – On the Intricate Inner Workings of the System
5. Kendrick Lamar – GNX
To understand GNX is to understand the culture that Kendrick Lamar comes from, something that Kendrick has always celebrated. A dedication to Compton was the closing track of his groundbreaking major label debut good kid m.A.A.d city featuring Dr. Dre, closing with the lines “Ain’t no city quite like mine.” One year prior, on stage in Los Angeles, he was given the torch from California rap royalty to carry the West Coast forward, and Snoop Dogg said, “You better run with it.” And he did. Classic albums, a Pulitzer Prize and a few Grammys later, in 2024 he was back on stage in Los Angeles for “The Pop Out.” It was not just a victory lap after his war of words with Drake, but a celebration of the culture that made him a global superstar. “Not Like Us,” the final nail in the coffin to his feud with Drake, has taken on a deeper meaning beyond the quotable lines about his foe’s alleged behavior. It has become an anthem, like his uplifting track “Alright,” but this time the production was provided by fellow LA native Mustard.
GNX takes that same approach sonically. It’s California through and through. He channels 2Pac on the song “Reincarnated,” and “Squabble Up” features a sample from Debbie Deb’s “When I Hear Music,” an ode to the roller-skating scene of the 80s in California with a similar sonic approach to his mentor Dr. Dre with World Class Wrecking Crew. “Luther” featuring SZA samples a classic from Cheryl Lynn and Luther Vandross, “If This World Were Mine,” a song that plays a big role in the movie The Wood based in Inglewood. “Hey Now” pays homage to the hyphy scene out in Oakland, and California artists are featured throughout the album. To understand GNX you have to understand the culture that Kendrick comes from. This is not the lyrical, deep, double-entendre-under-jazzy-beats album Kendrick fans are accustomed to. It’s simple and straight to the point, with confident flows with braggadocio lyrics under the sounds of California. As Kendrick Lamar approaches his Super Bowl headlining performance in 2025, he’s going to “Walk in New Orleans with the etiquette of LA, yellin’ MUSTARD!” — Marquis Munson
3. Tyler, The Creator – CHROMAKOPIA
CHROMAKOPIA is in improvement in everything Tyler, The Creator excels at: musicianship, arranging, brash lyricism, curating perfect features and exploration of his complicated past and feelings. Tyler tackles love and lust, the challenges of ethical non-monogamy, more directly addresses his sexuality than he ever has before and explores his hesitance to become a father as it relates to the selfishness he feels toward his music… And that’s just in the span of eight minutes, over the course of the fourth and fifth songs, “Darling, I” and “Hey Jane.” Tyler’s relationship with his mother, who raised him by herself, is the central unifying narrative thread in the album, teased in skits throughout and directly the subject of songs like “Tomorrow” and “Like Him.” CHROMAKOPIA is also loaded with Tyler DEEP in his hip-hop bag, trading ultra confident bars with the likes of Glorilla, ScHoolboy Q, Lil Wayne and Doechii, firmly asserting himself on “Rah Tah Tah” as “the biggest in the city after Kenny (Lamar).” On “Thought I Was Dead,” he takes aim at interlopers within hip-hop mocking the very culture they eat off of. Tyler, The Creator has been a hip-hop superstar for a while now, but with his magnificent seventh album, his legacy is firmly, inexorably chiseled in stone. — Michael Pollard
2. Jack White – No Name
1. Mannequin Pussy – I Got Heaven
A staff-favorite record, when assessing the diverse tastes of all WNXP hosts, need not necessarily reflect some agreed-upon “tone” of the year. You might like a given song just because it rips or it grooves or gets you sentimental, not because it makes some statement that feels very Of The Times. Albums are the same. We’re not so precious or academic over here on public radio, trust me. And yet, as we wrap up 2024, I Got Heaven from Philly rockers Mannequin Pussy does seem like an almost obvious year-in-review encapsulation. Its 10 tracks are surprisingly sweet in moments – Side A’s “Nothing Like” and “I Don’t Know You,” for instance – but also righteously furious, as on the blistering two-minute “OK? OK! OK? OK!” Lead singer and lyricist Missy Dabice delivers seductive whispers and loud barks (ominous warnings of deep bites) in almost equal measure, sometimes in the same song. But this wide range on the full record is not herky-jerky, it’s human. Mannequin Pussy’s fourth record, I Got Heaven was released in the early months of 2024 and still reverberates here at year’s end, so much so that it’s WNXP’s #1 album of the year. Watch the band’s defiantly D-I-T (“do it together”) spirit activated in our Sonic Cathedral session, recorded on the day of their sold-out springtime Nashville show. — Celia Gregory
Listen to a playlist of our top 10 albums of 2024 below.