As 2024 reaches its end, it’s time for Brig to reflect on all of the outstanding music that has been released in the past 12 months. Here are Brig’s top five albums of the year:
Four Tet – Three
DJ and producer Four Tet’s newest album, Three, sounds just as wired to the earth as it does the Bluetooth speaker at afters.
Four Tet has been doing the rounds at festivals, raves and all-day events like the four-hour DJ set he did in London’s Finsbury Park in August. Playing live, his main motive is to make crowds dance until their feet hurt.
But his studio work is starkly different. Three sounds like an expansion to the DJ’s earlier organic house sound on albums like Rounds, but with added elements of downtempo and trip hop.
He had been teasing this album since April 2023 with the release of eight-minute album closer Three Drums. This song threw a curveball at fans, as the DJ had just been releasing bassline bangers under alter-ego K.H. and club-made collabs with Fred Again. It’s rhythmic, downtempo and includes just a little bit of drum ‘n’ bass to get us dancing. As the song reaches its peak, fuzzy, ambient synths kick in as the song disintegrates into a minimalistic, guitar-led outro.
Other songs like the eclectic Daydream Repeat take the listener on a magic carpet rollercoaster ride of orchestral and housey sounds. It’s a must-listen for fans of softer dance music.
Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee
Released in March, Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee is a sprawling two-disc album that lasts over two hours in length, with 16 tracks on each disc. This album is takes heavy inspiration from 60s’ Phil Spector-esque wall-of-sound, and combines it with lo-fi, dissonant, noisy elements of psychedelic rock.
The album is shrouded in mystery. It was originally only released on YouTube, so listeners only knew about the album through word-of-mouth. This matches up with its hazy, blast-from-the-past aesthetic. The record feels like a relic that was found at the bottom of a dusty old pile of cassette tapes.
In a year where hot and heavy dance tracks reigned supreme, Diamond Jubilee proved slow-burn albums can still make an impact, as long as the listener is willing to dedicate time to it.
Key tracks on Diamond Jubilee include: Kingdom Come, a sweet, lo-fi love song shrouded in reverb; title track and opener Diamond Jubilee, which has a killer drum solo at the start; and the album’s noisy crescendo, If You Hear Me Crying.
Jessica Pratt – Here in the Pitch
2024 was a big year for the sad girls, with releases from Adrienne Lenker, Portishead vocalist Beth Gibbons, and Billie Eilish. But none held a candle to Jessica Pratt’s gloomy effigy to love Here in the Pitch, which came out in May.
The singer-songwriter’s haunting vocals and orchestral instrumentals have a similar hypnagogic, cinematic feel to them as Diamond Jubilee. But if Cindy Lee’s record felt like a Tarantino action movie, Here in the Pitch is an introspective, black and white tale of falling in and out of love.
Pratt, whose last album Quiet Signs was released five years ago, has told Pitchfork that she was inspired by Hippie-era Los Angeles while writing the album. She was obsessed with “figures emblematic of the dark side of the Californian dream”. This is evident on tracks like Empire Never Know, which sound like a Laurel Canyon LSD-induced lullaby.
The whole record only lasts 27 minutes, but Pratt conveys so much emotion into each short song that is still makes a lasting impression and calls for a few relistens. Its final track, The Last Year is one of the most harrowingly melancholic songs of the year. A must-listen for any fellow dramatic people who love to use music as a soundtrack to all of life’s little moments.
Charli XCX – BRAT
BRAT was simultaneously an album, an era, a fashion movement, a genius marketing campaign, and a political ploy for Kamala Harris in the US elections. If you didn’t start getting sick every time you heard about something being “so brat”, were you even brat?
BRAT is a masterclass in dance music. It hits the ground running with a back-to-back track run of 360, Club Classics and Sympathy is a Knife. Further on in the album, we get tunes like Everything is Romantic, with its longing outro, which hears Charli repeat the line “Fall in love again and again” under increasingly intense autotune.
The album finishes with the TikTok viral reprise of the opener, 365, a banger that Charli herself has compared to the feeling of being on a messy night-out, stumbling through a corridor and emerging in the club, as the song’s bassline revs up to an intense finish.
BRAT was a huge cultural moment, with Charli releasing a deluxe version, an entirely different remixed version, and just completing a sold-out arena tour across the UK, including Glasgow. She’s so Julia.
A.G. Cook – Britpop
Britpop is the third full-length album from producer and former PC Music label owner A.G. Cook. This is a genius record because it is a multimedia project outside of just being a listening experience. To promote the album, Cook created a rich lore for it, with its own fake websites ‘Wandcamp, ‘Wheatport’ and ‘Witchfork’, as well as fake artists so detailed that Cook literally produced music for them.
Britpop is very lengthy, with three discs of eight songs each, labelled by the themes of past, present and future. Each disc comprises its own mini-world, with a pick ‘n’ mix of sounds ranging from experimental-electronic like opener Silver Thread Golden Needle, to the gloomy shoegaze track Bewitched on disc 2.
This is Cook’s first release since PC Music was disbanded in 2023, and Cook has proven that he can expand his sound beyond the bubblegum-melodies his record label made him most famous for. Other key moments on this album include track Britpop and its catchy chorus; the synthy, fantastical ballad Soulbreaker; and the absolute bop that is Lucifer, featuring vocals from fellow brats Addison Rae and Charli XCX.
I would urge any fans of BRAT to give this album a listen as a primer for the more experimental side of hyperpop pioneered by artists like Cook and the late SOPHIE.
Featured Image: Robbie McAvenue / brat generator.com
Student journalist with a passion for music.
