I started 2024 by getting infected by COVID-19. By the end of the year, I would have lost my appendix, my job, and my father. Moments of hope were often dashed by the harsh realities of this moment in time. Kamala Harris would not win the US presidency. The entertainment industry wouldn’t find its footing. I wouldn’t win the lottery.
The ache of loss wouldn’t ease, only transform.
In February, though, Hiatus Kaiyote started sending signals to my aching heart with new music. “Everything’s Beautiful” quickly became a guide for my soul. I might be sad, weary, anxious, and gloomy, but when Nai Palm reminds me that the sun is kissing my face, that I’m singing this song that’s blaring in my headphones, and that I know love, well, everything is beautiful.
I am free from harm’s way. Everything is fine.
Every time my song of the year played, I was back on the path to joy no matter how far I had veered off the road.
My Hyper-Specific Listening Behavior
I wrote about my disappointment with this year’s Spotify Wrapped. Their lack of meaningful genre exploration led me to utilize my own last.FM data to understand my digital music consumption.
While not fully comprehensive, I used the top five tags for each artist that got 100 or more plays from December 2023 through November 2024. These genres and thematic clusters represented my listening for the year.
- Hip-Hop/Rap
- Instrumental
- Underground
- Trap
- Soul/R&B
- Neo-Soul
- Alternative R&B
- Jazz
- Fusion
- Pop
- Singer-Songwriter
- Female Voices
- Los Angeles
In Spotify hyper-specific genre parlance, my 2024 music listening might be categorized as Love Heart Cheat Codes for West Coast Heads Having a Shitty Year.
Beyoncé, KAYTRANADA, and NxWorries (or Anderson. Paak in general) were glue artists this year, often providing the music that allowed for a seamless transition between these clusters.
Charli xcx and Sabrina Carpenter had their moment in the sun during August, my BRAT summer month, and while I think those are great albums, they ultimately didn’t feel like they belonged with the core list.
Albums of the Year
- GNX – Kendrick Lamar
- Chromakopia – Tyler, the Creator
- GLORIOUS – GloRilla
- Love Heart Cheat Code – Hiatus Kaiyote
- Ceremonial Contrafact (empathogen deluxe) – Willow – Pop
- Alligator Bites Never Heal – Doechii
- Cowboy Carter – Beyonce
- Timeless – KAYTRANADA
- Please Don’t Cry – Rapsody
- BRAT – Charli xcx
There’s some recency bias at play here, but IDGAF. GNX is a master at work. All these albums were made by people with impeccable taste, vision, and a commitment to their craft. They also all demand to be listened to in their entirety when any of their songs shuffle through the speakers.
Discoveries
While I have listened to Willow since she first whipped her hair back and forth, Empathogen is the album where, for my ears, she became more than one of Jada and Will’s talented children. She is one of the few artists I saw live this year, and I was a bit overwhelmed by her musicianship, stage command, and vocal quality.
Pale Jay’s Shameful Game likely came to me as a discovery from a Spotify playlist. Before their data-driven “Pulse of…” playlists started to falter in May of this year, it was my routine to add the most recently added tracks to my “New Music” listening on Saturdays. Shameful Game showed up on a Saturday in early January, and Pale Jay’s music has been consumed every month since. Over the summer, his 2021 release, The Celestial Suite, entered regular rotation by blending well with Hiatus Kaiyote and Cleo Sol.
KOTA The Friend’s Lyrics to Go vol. 5 was also likely discovered via a Spotify playlist. His track TULUM surprised me enough to seek out the full-length that it came from, and that album was popular on my playlists for the first half of 2024, especially in February.
I’ve been thinking more about how we discover music now. I find myself seeking out more human music curators and tastemakers lately to counterbalance both the increasing dependence on recommendation engines to drive playlists on digital platforms.
2025 will likely have me returning to hunting out the playlists of DJs and music critics whose ears I respect just as much if not more so than algos and AI even as I have been a fan of that kind of data magic in the past.
My musical consumption is hungry for more balance between tech and taste.
How did you discover new music in 2024?