12 records from 2024 that deserved more love...

...and an explanation of why I couldn't be the guy to give it to them

Welcome to stübermania, where I usually dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars, but for the next two Thursdays, I’ll succumb to music-journo peer pressure and feed the Year in Review content beast.

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A lot of things have to go right for an under-the-radar album to get reviewed in a high-profile publication. For starters, a writer has to be interested in writing about the record, and an editor has to be interested in publishing the review (presuming they have the space and budget to accommodate it). But within those seemingly straight-forward steps are a lot of complicating factors.

For the writer, being interested in writing about a record naturally depends on actually hearing the record in the first place. However, the opportunity for discovery is subject to a cruel paradox: the amount of easily accessible new music released into the world seems to increase exponentially on a daily basis, but there are still only 24 hours in a day, and you need at least four of those for sleep. And if you’re reliant on some other source of income to pay the bills and/or feed your family (which 99.8 percent of professional music writers most certainly are), the time available to leisurely click through Bandcamp links shrinks considerably as day-job duties and/or domestic responsibilities pile up.

As an occasional freelancer for Pitchfork, I receive an average of 250 press releases and/or review inquiries per day—everything from “surprise new Kendrick album drops today” to “I just recorded this album in my bedroom on my laptop last night, here’s my Soundcloud.” Lamentably, most of the links I receive will go unclicked—the greatest album of all time could be sitting in my inbox right now and I’d never know it—because writing for Pitchfork accounts for maybe 5 percent of my annual workload/income and 5,000 percent of my email.

I wish I could carve out a daily or weekly ritual where I can sample all the new releases I’ve received, but the truth is that happenstance often plays a huge role in whether I get around to listening to something unfamiliar on a whim—I might find myself with a brief work lull on a Tuesday afternoon, so the emails I receive between 2:24pm and 2:47pm suddenly have my undue attention, but once I have to dive back into work at 2:48pm, the next incoming email will go unread. And then there’s the basic fact that writing about music means focusing intensely on the music you’re writing about—and that means you don’t really have the time or brain capacity to acknowledge the existence of any other music in that particular moment.

But even in those magical scenarios that all music writers dream of—where you’re unexpectedly blown away by some unknown album you’ve just discovered in the promo pile—it can be an uphill battle to get it on the radar of assigning editors, who, bless their overworked souls, are juggling a number of variables within an increasingly limited amount of editorial real estate, like whether they’ve already covered a similar-sounding release recently, or whether they’ve got the right mix of genres and writer voices in a given timeframe, or whether they have the desired ratio of popular-to-obscure releases covered in a paricular week.

Of course, getting an editor’s attention first requires crafting a convincing pitch, which is a form of invisible labour that you need to factor into your work schedule, but which can often take a backseat to other more immediately pressing matters that pop up. You can start a week off thinking, “I’m going to fire off a bunch of pitches on Monday,” but then life happens, and before you know it, it’s Friday, the pitch is still unwritten, and by that point, you’ve missed the window for turning around a review that can run around the record’s release date. Or maybe you’ve sent the pitch off in an expedient fashion, but your editor is so busy with other stuff that they don’t get around to reading it in time. (If a freelancer stringer like myself is getting 250 emails a day, my editors’ inbox avalanche is likely 10 times the magnitude.) Or maybe the editor has read your pitch and taken the time to listen to the record you want to write about, but thinks it totally sucks and you’re completely delusional. Or there might be an album you really want to review and your editor is actually keen on it, too, but the record is slated to come out during a week where you already have three other deadlines on the books and a friend’s wedding to attend out of town. And sometimes, you just don’t get around to hearing an album until a month after its release date, by which point it might as well be a hundred years old.

All of which is to say: Here are a dozen albums from 2024 that I really wanted to write about, but didn’t get the chance to, due to one or more of the scenarios outlined above. And sadly, I’m not the only one who seems to have neglected them—none of these albums were written about enough to generate a Metacritic page, and I haven’t seen them turn up in many best-of-2024 round-ups. But I dream of a world where you’d see these names on everyone’s year-end lists, roll your eyes, and think, “ugh, them again?”

Blood, Loving You Backwards

If the Nigel Godrich-produced Terror Twilight outfitted Pavement with a regal U.K. art-rock sheen, then this Austin quintet’s debut imagines ‘90s Radiohead venturing down to Doug Easley’s Memphis studio to make an unkempt American indie-rock record. Or, in their more defiantly epic moments, Blood kind of sound like Wolf Parade if Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug morphed into one person, achieving the perfect symbiosis of gritty and grandiose.

The Bug Club, On the Intricate Inner Workings of the System

These Welsh whippersnappers strike me as the northern-hemisphere counterpart to Aussie garage-punk pranksters The Chats—i.e., smart people making dumb, delirious songs about mundane everyday items and occurrences. This is the sort of endearingly irascible album where the song titles (“War Movies”! “Quality Pints”! “Lonsdale Slipons”!) function as everything-you-need-to-know thesis statements.

Church Chords, elvis, he was schlager

My 2007 self would be a little dismayed at how little I care about an LCD Soundsystem reunion in 2024, but maybe that’s because this hydra-headed project (founded by Otherly Love Records’ Stephen Buono and featuring guest contributions from Wilco’s Nels Cline, Tortoise’s Jeff Parker, and Japanese indie-pop icon Takako Minekawa, among many others) has thoroughly satisfied my deviant art-disco needs for the year.

Corridor, Mimi

If all the Cindy Lee discourse this year reminded you of how tragic it was that Patrick Flegel’s former band, Women, only got to release two albums in their short lifespan, you could get your fill of their angular yet iridescent indie rock via this Quebecois quartet’s motorikerrific fourth album.

Girl and Girl, Call a Doctor

With their quasi-conceptual debut album, this Brisbane band come off like the off-Broadway-musical version of Pavement—i.e., ramshackle yet erudite indie-pop about a debilitating existential crisis delivered with uncommon flamboyance and giddy gusto, perpetually blurring the line between anxiety and joy. Or, for a certain type of late-‘90s head, Girl and Girl might sound like the second coming of the late, great Hefner. Or, if you came of age in the 2000s, think of them as a Los Campesinos! with no funds left in the glockenspiel budget.

Jade Hairpins, Get Me the Good Stuff

Over the past few months, Mike Haliechuk and Jonah Falco issued no fewer than three albums with their primary band, Fucked Up, and yet they still had more than enough energy leftover to deliver another knockout release from their dancefloor-oriented side project Jade Hairpins. Stacking Falco’s effervescent multi-tracked vocal harmonies onto ecstatic electro-funk grooves, the aptly titled Get Me the Good Stuff achieves a state of pop euphoria best described as “disco Sloan.”

Luna Li, When a Thought Grows Wings

The second album from L.A.-via-Toronto auteur Hannah Bussiere Kim expands her psych-pop vision from its previous DIY dimensions to widescreen scale, patenting a style of cosmic yacht rock ideal for sailing to the moon.

Midwife, No Depression in Heaven

Madeline Johnston’s fourth album as Midwife is surely the quietest release to come out this year on San Francisco heavy-music hotbed The Flenser (a.k.a. Chat Pile HQ), but her eerily whispered dream-pop hallucinations are no less overwhelming and crushing in their emotional weight.

Nyssa, Shake Me Where I’m Foolish

One of the great mysteries of our time is why this Toronto dynamo isn’t a star outside her hometown, where she’s been waging her sass offensive for the better part of a decade now. While Nyssa can easily own a stage with nothing more than a drum machine and a shit-ton of moxie, her second album is a full-band affair that keys in on that late-’70s/early-’80s moment when old-school alterna-queens like Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde, Debbie Harry, Siouxsie Sioux, and Carole Pope were refashioning punk attitude into pop appeal. Hopefully, Nyssa’s recent relocation to London constitutes her own Peaches-like myth-making moment, where she gets the Europeans onside before taking on the world.

THE OBGMS, SORRY, IT’S OVER

Another great mystery of our time is why this combustible Toronto crew hasn’t yet reached Riot Fest headliner status. At a time when rappers are rocking Crass shirts and metal bands are hooking up with superstar MCs like it’s Judgment Night all over again, The OBGMs have developed their own unique hybrid theory, by effortlessly retrofitting Pixies/Nirvana/Weezer alt-rock aesthetics for a post-trap world, shouting-out Gucci Mane while screaming like Kurt Cobain.

Personal Trainer, Still Willing

This delightful Dutch group’s second album doubles as a pocket history of indie rock’s turn-of-the-millennium transformation from scruffy slacker soundtrack to sophisticated post-modernist pop music, drawing a straight line from the dorm-room slackitude of Pavement and Beck to the cosmopolitan panache of Jens Lekman and Phoenix. If this came out in 2006, Pitchfork would’ve BNMed the shit out of it. I must give special mention to the monumental opening track “Upper Ferntree Guilty,” the most successful marriage of indie-pop whimsy and heavy-metal anarchy since Super Furry Animals’ immortal “Receptacle for the Respectable.”

Sunnsetter, Heaven Hang Over Me

Sunnsetter’s Andrew McLeod has been a key ally within the Southern Ontario Indigenous indie-rock network that includes their friends and collaborators in Zoon and OMBIIGIZI. Their music has always dealt in brutal truths: Heaven Hang Over Me’s self-interrogating standout, “I ACTUALLY DON’T WANNA DIE,” is a radiant remake of a song originally recorded in 2018 as a folky dirge, uncorking the spirit of perseverance and hard-won optimism embedded in its seemingly grim title. McLeod’s songwriting still strikes a raw nerve, but, through a mesmerizing mix of Elliott Smithian sensitivity, shoegaze haze, and post-hardcore catharsis, they provide a sonic salve that can momentarily soothe the deepest psychic wounds.

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