ACTION POTENTIAL'S FAVORITE ALBUMS OF 2024
a year for albums about the self
Chronic playlist makers are sharing their Spotify Wrappeds, families are stringing up Christmas lights on their porches, and music critics everywhere are fighting in the mud to have the best end-of-year blurb about BRAT. It’s list season!
Narrowing down my list of favorite albums to just 10 was a long, torturous task, but I’m really happy with how it’s turned out. Looking over it, it feels like a deeply personal reflection of where I am at the end of a tough year. These are 10 albums that express a powerful and nascent sense of self or have a sturdy, earthy quality, rooting themselves in a distinct physical space. A breakup, living alone, family crises—this was a year that ripped me away from the anchors I had based my life, identity, and future around, forcing me into painful introspection. But this is also the year I best knew myself, and I feel now the first hints of solid ground beneath me after so much time surrendered to a swirling inertia.
Also—ACTION POTENTIAL has a new color scheme! As fun as the bowling-alley-carpet-chic colors were, I wanted something a little less dramatic and dungeon-dark to make this page more comfortable on the eyes. I feel like this one’s got a nice earthiness to it but still has that synapse-y pop of color that I like.
If you’d like a playlist of all the albums on this list, here it is: all EIGHT HOURS of it. I also have a playlist of one track from all my favorite albums of 2024, if you’re curious about what got cut. On to the list!
10) Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot — Liquid Mike
Instantly infectious and blaring with confidence, Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot is a joyful call to live life against the grain. No iconography is sacred to Michigan-based power pop act Liquid Mike—not the suburban ideal of a dog in the house, not drunk walks home with a lover, and certainly not folk legends like Paul Bunyan. Not a single song on this aggressively hook-y record passes the three-minute mark, each one squeezing the most out of its addictive and contrarian refrains.
The album’s theme is best summed up by the repeated line of “The American Dream is a Michigan Hoax” on “Mouse Trap.” In an interview with Whistle Stop, frontman and songwriter Mike Maple said the album was inspired by a story about a drunk kid impulsively deciding to take an axe to a statue of Paul Bunyan and his titular slingshot. “This guy Paul Bunyan, who’s immortal, who might as well be like George Washington, that some kid could just cut down his slingshot I thought was very funny.”
That irreverence fuels Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot, but it never veers into the mean-spirited. There’s a lovely reminiscence behind the record’s explosive riffs. “K2” takes aim at popular 2000s music with a chord progression that calls The Killers to mind and lyrics that mock Coldplay’s “Yellow,” but its core is about two people connecting over suburban boredom. The album’s climactic and penultimate track “American Caveman” experiments with amped up harmonicas and a more landscape-driven sound, but it’s not about hinting at some wisened sonic future for the band. “I feel like that’s the mature thing to do, to make a sort of rootsy, Americana album down the line but I don’t love that kind of music,” Maple said. “Maybe it hasn’t resonated with me quite yet. I’m pretty into just rocking out.” Keep on rocking, Mike.
Favorite tracks: K2, Usps, American Caveman, Paul Bunyan’s Slingshot
9) Manning Fireworks — MJ Lenderman
Which disillusioned MJ Lenderman character are you? If you’ve got a crush that isn’t crushing back, you just might be the priest with an unrequited love. Acting sad on the subway? Textbook depressed-guy at-water-park behavior. If you’re the guy who loves the Joker it is statistically improbable that you are reading this. And then there’s Lenderman himself, who spends Manning Fireworks stumbling through different vignettes of disillusionment. His weary, croaking vocals have a powerful gravity, seeming to pull the record’s tense twangs and guitar slides just that bit further to create a sound that has the exhaustion and explosiveness of a last gasp.
Manning Fireworks has the meandering energy of an album recorded on the road, produced in bursts as Lenderman toured as a solo artist and a member of Wednesday. A deep religiosity courses through the record, pairing Catholic imagery of seminaries and Noah’s Ark with drab mundanity just like Wednesday’s Rat Saw God (my favorite album of 2023) disguised its despair under an Americana veneer. Its most devastating moments center around unremarkable symbols like “A wristwatch that’s a pocketknife and a megaphone/And a wristwatch that tells me I’m alone” that portray a mind elsewhere, unable to take the world as it comes. Manning Fireworks puts a terrible tightness in my chest, like my heart is screaming for freedom from its cage.
Favorite tracks: Joker Lips, Wristwatch, You Don’t Know The Shape I’m In, On My Knees
8) Alligator Bites Never Heal — Doechii
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WORLD WIDE WHACK —Tierra Whack
He who makes the rules breaks the rules. Number 8 is a tie between Alligator Bites Never Heal and WORLD WIDE WHACK, two wildly entertaining albums with completely original narrative and theatrical approaches to RnB and Hip-Hop. These two albums feel spiritually connected to me, partially because I listened to them for the first time in the same week, but also because they’re both such uncompromising personal statements that strike some similar notes. The comparison isn’t meant to diminish either of these artists: Tierra Whack and Doechii might be operating in a similar space, but they are two musicians with inimitable sounds and approaches to their work.
Alligator Bites Never Heal kicks down the door with one of the most unbelievable opening runs to an album I’ve ever heard, dropping banger after banger where Doechii’s sinister and explosive flow grants hook-y loops an impressive range that will have you playing tracks on repeat. Doechii is the whole package, rejecting genre limitations on songs like “BOOM BAP” and showing off wild singing chops on “SLIDE” and “BEVERLY HILLS,” demanding the world see her as the singular artist she is. Then there’s WORLD WIDE WHACK, a rollercoaster of an album that unpredictably jumps from deep dark bops to groovy love songs to introspective ballads about self-harm and mortality. It’s a meticulously crafted record—those genre leaps are united by a stripped down, spacious production and by transitions that clumsily hammer motifs on xylophones and pianos, teeing up its most sensitive moments with a questioning, anxious self-mockery.
Both records come down from outer-orbit highs to deliver cascading, deeply intimate final acts. WHACK lays bare the anxiety, autology, and maturity that hums beneath the surface of the whole album, and Alligator Bites acknowledges that the dream Doechii is working toward is one that not everyone she loves can join her on. 2024 was a breakout year for both Doechiii and Tierra Whack, who I know we can count on to show us something we’ve never seen before with every new release.
Favorites on
WHACK: IMAGINARY FRIENDS, X, MOOVIES, SHOWER SONG, TWO NIGHT
Alligator Bites: BULLFROG, DENIAL IS A RIVER, BOOM BAP, NISSAN ALTIMA, GTFO
7) Tigers Blood — Waxahatchee
Turning 30 has never seemed that scary to me, even as it inches closer and the years seem to grow shorter. Maybe naively, I’ve always felt like hitting that Big Age will also deliver a sense of comfort and stability, marking an end to the sloppiness of your 20s and serving up a neat sense of belonging. But Tigers Blood brought me the realization that the self-assurance I crave doesn’t slip on to you like a shirt, but is something you have to build from within. Katie Crutchfield turns a skeptical eye to co-dependence on songs like “365,” exes on the righteous and resentful “Bored,” and especially herself on “Right Back to It.” Across Tigers Blood’s wistful Americana canvas, Crutchfield questions her place among the hallmarks of early mid-adulthood stability.
Yet Tigers Blood is anything but self-conscious. Crutchfield’s circular melodies and golden hour instrumentation root her introspection in a sturdy self-knowing. It’s an album of instant classics as dependable and reassuring as the sun in the sky.
Favorite tracks: Right Back to It, Bored, Lone Star Lake, Crowbar, 365, The Wolves
6) I Got Heaven — Mannequin Pussy
I Got Heaven is a barely contained, throbbing album, begging to feel hands all over its body. Its first two tracks scream like nails digging into your back with a voracious, raunchy sex that wants to sate a blood-rooted need for command and power. Marisa Dabice hotly pants “I got a loud…bark…deep…bite” on the album’s second track with such a visceral exasperation before falling back into a seductive whisper, showing off the unbelievable vocal control and gasping come-downs that make I Got Heaven such an unforgettable album.
Mannequin Pussy isn’t just interested in angst and domination: The record’s kerosene-coated opening demands attention with screaming lines like “What if Jesus himself ate my fucking snatch?” but quickly gives way to a distanced, soft-rock yearning on “Nothing Like” and “I Don’t Know You.” Closing track “Split Me Open” melds all the passions together, releasing itself from control with a needy declaration that “My Body’s a temple, It was built for you/To do all the things you dreamed you’d do.” I Got Heaven oozes desire like an open wound and drooling dog, exploring sex’s power to provide both self-fulfillment and connection. It’s an album with a furious yearning that demands to be heard, demands to be felt, and demands to be lived.
Favorite tracks: Loud Bark, Nothing Like, I Don’t Know You, Softly, Split Me Open
5) This Is How Tomorrow Moves — beabadoobee
“The Gen Z songwriter,” “TikTok breakout,” “Bedroom pop,” and more are dubious descriptors that get thrown like darts around beabadoobee’s name in an attempt to pin down her meteoric rise, and she defies them all. This Is How Tomorrow Moves, 24-year-old' Beatrice Laus’ third studio album, is a stunningly confident, deeply personal album that lays to rest any doubt that she is a one-of-a-kind singer-songwriter. Twenty-four may not be that much younger than me, but it only takes a few extra trips around the sun to realize just how early in life that really is. And at that early age, beabadoobee has already attracted legendary producer Rick Rubin into her orbit, who glows with a deep respect for her writing and earnest self-expression.
It doesn’t take long for This Is How Tomorrow Moves to make you perk up with the forceful realization that this album is something truly special. Its guitar-foreword opening has an instantly gripping energy, carefully introducing a jangly, almost circus-like sound with a screamable refrain on “One Time” and a sexy, irreverent chord progression on “Real Man.” The album’s gravity centers around “Tie My Shoes” and “Girl Song,” Two gorgeously produced and lyrical songs that, as Rick Rubin puts it, are “outside of time.” beabadoobee’s influences like The Strokes, The Cure, and The 1975 reverberate across the album, but she is wholly herself. This Is How Tomorrow Moves defies the labels many have spent the years since “Coffee" trying to ascribe to her. She is all those things, but also something more: beeabadoobee is the rise of an archetype.
Favorite Tracks: One Time, Real Man, Girl Song, Beaches, This Is How It Went
4) BRAT — Charli XCX
Undeniably the album of 2024, BRAT sees Charli XCX most herself at the pinnacle of her career: Ruthlessly commercial, surprisingly raw, and unrelentingly confident. After years spent torn between the more mainstream stylings of 2022’s Crash and iconic 2016 hyperpop EP Vroom Vroom, Charli’s biggest album yet shows that she doesn’t have to choose. BRAT isn’t just a return to the stylings of Vroom Vroom, but a culmination of everything Charli has done from “Boom Clap” up to her more innovative work with AG Cook and the late, great Sophie, both of whom have an imprint on BRAT. Approachable, dancey tracks like “Talk talk,” “Apple,” and “Von dutch” coexist with shockingly quiet personal revelations like “I might say something stupid” before ripping you away to experimental, alien bops like the incredible “Club classics” and “Everything is romantic.” Loud, bold, and frantic, BRAT is—pretentious critic voice—a historically important album with a forward-looking sound that will define pop music for a generation.
An inescapable cultural moment that stained the calendar lime green, BRAT has extended beyond the summer thanks to the artifice of extra tracks, remix albums, two world tours, and Charli’s unapologetic strut across pop culture and commerce. The “brat” persona might mean something specific for Charli, but it’s been co-opted by the culture to mean just about anything. Brat is Kamala; Brat is a marketing intern making Instagram posts; Brat is a BRAT-themed collection at H&M; Brat is a moment that is over, but whose shadow will loom forever, shifting the tides like a moon.
3) What Now — Brittany Howard
Brittany Howard knows writers who use subtext, and they are all cowards. For someone who claims “I’ve never been good at saying what I mean,” Howard throws wordplay out the window with powerful, blatant lines like “Peace is the prize of our timeline/Yes, I know we can do it/’Cause we must do it” that give her screams for unity and togetherness the urgency that they deserve. What Now opens with tracks that call to mind 2015’s Sound & Color and the soul roots that molded Brittany Howard’s early artistry, but quickly explodes into something wholly original on its title track, setting up an album of stark opposites that are united by Howard’s sharp, iconic vocals.
A thumping sonic experience from beginning to end, What Now demands to be listened to in order. Its most independently listenable tracks “What Now” and “Prove It To You” are driving, relentless songs, but doing so robs What Now of the shocking moments when they blast into view with a g-force that slams you into your seat. One second it’s wind-chime interlude and then boom, out of nowhere: club. banger. What Now melds saxophones, screams, heavy bass, and grand piano to create a swallowing soundscape that emanates from the Earth itself. With the forcefulness of an earthquake and the fading whisper of a breeze rolling down a field of flowers, Brittany Howard is the voice of Gaia.
Favorite tracks: Earth Sign, I Don’t, What Now, Red Flags, Samson, Every Color in Blue
2) Here In The Pitch — Jessica Pratt
Here in the Pitch is a ghostly album that lives in the wind itself. Jessica Pratt’s distant vocals hover over a bottomless pit with just the evaporating whisper of percussion to suggest a ground somewhere below. A fiercly visual album, Here in the Pitch conveys such a hefty sense of place despite its ephemerality—steam rising from a manhole in the winter, the echo of long-gone travelers in a tunnel, a face buried in a coat. It is at once fleeting and permanent, the world viewed from above through a gossamer rain.
Trying to clumsily anchor this album down with words feels futile—almost blasphemous. I can hardly convey where Here in the Pitch takes me. It strikes me with a longing that pulls me deeper within myself, out into the night to wander. It’s transporting, and I want nothing more than to sit in a dimly lit room, listening to the record spin with the people I love, wordlessly going on that journey together.
Favorite tracks: Life is, World on a String, By Hook or by Crook, Nowhere it Was, Empires Never Know
1) Imaginal Disk — Magdalena Bay
The album that inspired this blog, that dominated my year in music, that motivated me to look away from the impossible perfect self, there is no other place for Imaginal Disk than the throne. In a year where BRAT set the blueprint for the next decades of pop, Magdalena Bay is already showing us what the future sounds like. Rich with influences from prog rock to hyperpop to ABBA’s melancholy, Imaginal Disk is a dense album that spans an endless universe of Mica Tenenbaum and Matt Lewin’s own creation. Imaginal Disk sends you careening through a starry journey to self-actualization, asking you to accept yourself in all your beauty and ugliness to find a yet unknown truth that lies beyond. It’s anything but an easy journey—Imaginal Disk is rife with monster imagery, framing terrifying confrontations with doppelgängers on “She Looked Like Me!” and wild refusals to let go like “Death & Romance.” In the depths of that fear, Magdalenay Bay finds sympathy for oneself through loving another on mid-album tracks “Watching T.V.” and “Vampire in the Corner,” my favorite song of 2024.
A hyper-digital deconstruction of the ideal self, Imaginal Disk explores what the perfect you really looks like on the haunting “True Blue Interlude” and “Image.” It is a grotesque, coldly industrial, post-human transformation into something alien, something that should not be, a something that is ultimately not you. In its final act, Imaginal Disk lands on a beaming, sunny acceptance that cements this album’s soul. A cleverly hidden transition at the album’s introduction sonically links it to their debut album Mercurial World, only to close the loop definitively with closing track “The Ballad of Matt & Mica.” Its surprising, synth-laden outro extends up and up into the sky, beyond our reach as Magdalena Bay leaves any shred of self-doubt behind, ready to kick off a new era and to chart new skies.
Favorite tracks: Killing Time, Death & Romance, Vampire in the Corner, Love Is Everywhere, That’s My Floor, Cry for Me, The Ballad of Matt & Mica.
Thanks for reading, friends. See ya!