Which album, for you, sums up 2024? Charli XCX’s all-conquering Brat? Kendrick Lamar’s triumphant GNX? An album that didn’t even come out this year but still managed to fill up your Spotify Wrapped?
As we do every year, here at Time Out we’ve got a lot to say about 2024’s best music records. To create a ranking of our fave albums of the past 12 months, we asked our global team of writers and editors for their input – and the results range fantastically from chart-topping pop and cultural-moment records to sci-fi death metal, high-concept rap and intimate folk.
Top of the list this year came, drum roll please…. Romance by Fontaines DC! With Romance the Dublin post-punks made the transition to all-guns-blazing stadium rock; Time Out global film editor Phil de Semlyen called the record ‘a total reinvigoration for dynamic guitar music’ and said it offered ‘a more widescreen sound and a vision of a band with near-limitless horizons’.
Second came Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, which, yes, we know didn’t come out this year. But Brat aside, has any other album dominated 2024 quite like Midwest Princess? Third was Cindy Lee’s sprawling, ‘stratospherically pretty’ Diamond Jubilee.
The rest of the list features the likes of Charli XCX, Kendrick Lamar, The Cure and many, many more. Check it out in full here.
RECOMMENDED: The best songs of 2024, according to Time Out.
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