Neil Meehan’s Albums of the Year 2024
1. Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee
This remarkable record is simultaneously lo-fi and complex, and long (a triple album), yet never dull. Patrick Flegel, performance name Cindy Lee, plays pretty much everything, as well as adding production techniques akin to Sault – namely the music sounding ‘live’, imperfect and subsequently absolutely perfect. Diamond Jubilee takes the listener on an epic journey through the mournful (‘All I Want is You’, ‘Baby Blue’) to the dreamy (’Flesh and Blood’), and at 32 tracks, there is still so much more to discover.
2. Project Gemini – Colours & Light
The second album by Paul Osborne, aka Project Gemini, Colours & Light is a psychedelic swirl through folk, alt and psych. The various collaborators add grooves of funk and mystic rhythms, with the listener not knowing where this journey will take them next, nor wanting it to end.
3. The Smile – Cutouts
Not content with releasing excellent sophomore record Wall of Eyes in February 2024, The Smile shared an even better album – Cutouts – a mere six months later. Everything you want from a Smile record is here, yet more refined – drum rhythms expressing Tom Skinner’s jazz background, Jonny Greenwood’s unique guitar, and Thom Yorke retaining his highest of standards vocally, lyrically, and structurally. The Smile remains both a Supergroup, and a super group.
4. Nadine Shah – Filthy Underneath
Since releasing 2020’s excellent Kitchen Sink, Shah lost her mother during Covid, underwent a breakup, and spiraled towards addiction and ultimately rehab. Filthy Underneath is the extraordinary result. The poignant ‘French Exit’ – a term for an unauthorised departure, hinting here perhaps at suicide – closes the album (“But how close is it, the ‘now’ until the ‘no more’?”) Shah told Steve Lamacq recently that her creativity prospered with sobriety, rather than being a ‘tortured artist’. Although the emotions of such negative experiences have been strikingly developed for positive effect.
5. Gruff Rhys – Sadness Sets Me Free
The timing of this Super Furry Animal is impeccable; not just sharing this joyous (despite the title) eighth solo album in the darkness of January, but the poignant, epic ‘Cover Up The Cover Up’ was shared right as the Post Office scandal began to break. If it is indeed sadness that sets Rhys free, is it wrong to selfishly wish him a world of misery (and making music)?
6. Fontaines D.C. – Romance
2024 continued the Dubliners’ trajectory, stopping off for a blistering Glastonbury set. Those in attendance, and the TV masses, were treated to songs off Romance, the five piece’s more melodic and accessible fourth album, but with the bite on ‘Starbuster’ as powerful as ever. Favourite track? ‘Favourite’.
7. Dummy – Free Energy
‘Crude experiments in bubble-acoustics’ is all their Spotify page shares. It’s a good summation – the LA four piece’s second album, Free Energy, effortlessly shifting between dream-pop indie (‘Nine Clean Nails’) and shoegaze (‘Soonish’).
8. Godspeed You! Black Emperor – No Title as of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead
A deliberately-uncomfortable listen, the Candian band has produced a powerful post-rock record following events in Gaza. As usual, there are largely no vocals – yet the song titles (‘Babys in a Thundercloud’, ‘Raindrops Cast in Lead’) share the sentiments completely; Each of the six tracks (three at over 10 minutes) providing an emotive soundscape that requires no words. Dark, yes, but closing track ‘Grey Rubble – Green Shoots’ is in two parts, ending with a musical suggestion of hope.
9. Cast – Love is the Call
When stating, ahead of its release, that this could be Cast’s last ever album, singer and songwriter John Power was adamant that he had to deliver. The subsequent Love is the Call is as strong as any from their Britpop heyday. A reminder of what can be done with guitar, bass, drums, and good songs. Suitably, it is their highest-charting record since the 90s, mirroring the 2024 resurgence of another band from the era, Shed Seven.
10. NewDad – Madra
Following a string of EPs, standout single ‘Angel’ arrived late in 2023, before Madra followed in January to maintain NewDad’s ascent to the shoegaze stratosphere. After wowing both Glastonbury and a packed Ritz at Manchester Psychfest, amongst many others, the Galway quartet’s glorious year was presumably later capped with the return of idols The Cure.