The best albums of 2024 – chosen by ROLLING STONE

Tom Liwa has never lacked curiosity and the courage to develop further regardless of losses. On “Another Time” (2022), his songwriter self suddenly inhabited many characters. This created a multi-perspective stream of stories with great narrative power. The latter finds a powerful musical counterpart in Luisa Volkmann’s spiritual jazz saxophone on “Prime Numbers from the Bardo”. – MB

The drums and brass sound like Willie Mitchell recorded them for an album on his Hi Records label in Memphis, the bass sounds like it did at Studio 54 in Midtown Manhattan. When Stuart Staples raises his voice and the strings swell, we are standing in the English rain. Desire, melancholy, soul, disco and dandyism come together in a beguiling way in this crossmapping. – MB

The fact that Laura Marling has completed a trilogy with her eighth studio album is not even worth mentioning in the press release for the modest Brit. But of course you can still point this out: it started with “Semper Femina”, which was published in 2017, in which she reflected extensively on femininity and her own feminine metamorphosis. The album title at the time was an abbreviated version of a central sentence from Virgil’s Roman national epic “Aeneid” and means in full and translated: “A woman is an always capricious and changeable being.”

Musically, Marling has always remained true to himself – and in this case that’s not a bad thing. The quiet, glowing jewel of the guitar is still their flagship discipline. This time she even left out percussion altogether! The change mentioned took place less musically, but primarily in personal development, which in turn was clearly reflected in the lyrics to “Patterns In Repeat”.

Which patterns play a role in the family constellation? Which ones repeat, which ones change? Particularly touching: Marling’s father, Charlie, wrote “Looking Back” almost fifty years ago, and now she is interpreting his song. While “Songs For Our Daughter” (2020) was still a thought game, Marling actually became the mother of a daughter in 2023. The singer-songwriter now has to work more focused and immediately, using time windows whenever she wants to open them up. The decision to record their songs in a very reduced manner in the home studio, often even with the baby in the same room, shaped and made the process of creating the new record easier. Gorgeous strings inspired by Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” were added later. These eleven delicate, moving pieces are some of Mama Marling’s best. – Ina Simone Mautz

Despair and loneliness, broken dreams and dwindling hope: no one creates such wonderful, often astonishingly upbeat songs like Conor Oberst, with Bright Eyes’ typical love of quirky details. Oberst may see a noose where others see a rope to swing with, but he has phrases for the ages and great melodies for comfort. And we’re lucky to have him. – BF

It took Robert Smith a very long time to write these songs – 16 years. The “Songs Of A Lost World” are a dance of world-weariness, a lament of transience. The long introductions of the following pieces are followed by the weeping song of the doom poet, who sings about the end of the world he knew. Against static, powerful drums, the lament does not seem loud, but rather like pure lyricism. – AW

For their second best album (after “Modern Vampires Of The City”, 2013), Vampire Weekend return to the jittery melting pot sound of earlier days. In this sound, even the most urban corners of Manhattan are lined with lushly sampled rhythms. No 40-year-old indie pop musician sounds as young as Ezra Koenig on the one hand and, on the other hand, speaks so much about the joy and burden of legacy.

“Pravda” is about his Russian-Jewish roots and the fear of not doing justice to his ancestors. “The Surfer” imagines surfers, not on Coney Island Beach, but in the “Water Tunnel 3” water supply system, which is essential for the Five Boroughs. The largest construction project in the city – also a Koenig topic. You learn something here.

“Mary Boone” describes old New York art and the life of the SoHo star gallery owner of the same name and supporter of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Why Boone? Simply because the name sounds nice, said Koenig, sampling the club beat of Soul II Soul from “Back To Life”. The play with pop culture quotes culminates in his seemingly insane inspiration for the record: Koenig “took raga singing lessons with Terry Riley in rural Japan.” That’s not listening. But it certainly contributed to the success of this little masterpiece. – Sassan Niasseri

The most surprising, wisest, most exciting pop album of the year. After the brooding and musically understated “Happier Than Ever,” it wasn’t really expected that Billie Eilish would enter the door so vehemently. Her third album combines all of her strengths and expands them enormously: lyrics that, as personal as they are, offer points of identification for her audience (“People say I look happy just because I’ve gotten skinny”); a sound spectrum that, no matter how different its components are (jazz pop, electrobeats, disco, classic rock), sounds like a homogeneous and quickly overwhelming work.

With “Lunch” and its powerful bassline, Eilish delivers the most casual commentary on adolescent gender confusion and sexual self-determination (“I could eat that girl for lunch”). With “Blue” an intimate swan song to a love, without accusations and hate, with “The Greatest” a Queenesque rock bombast. And with the eighties electro beat banger “L’Amour de ma vie”, which emerges from a jazzy ballad, she and her brother Finneas show what’s possible. While Beyoncé and Taylor Swift need at least double albums and a remodel to score their points for 2024, Billie Eilish needs ten songs. And they are disarming. – Sebastian Zabel