COPY’s Favorites of 2024: Music
Lily
The Pilgrim, Their God, and the King of My Decrepit Mountain by Tapir!
An escapist, dreamy, and narrative-driven folk album with characters, interludes, and other somewhat ambitious things not often seen on a debut album. Favorite song: “My God,” which has been on my “listening to this right now” playlist for ten months when I usually cycle songs out after a week or two.
The Pilgrim, Their God, and the King of My Decrepit Mountain by Tapir!
Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay
Grandiose, explosive, and groovy. The ending of “Tunnel Vision” could propel me into outer space.
Honorable mentions: Manning Firewords by MJ “I’ve got a houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome” Lenderman, “I Got Heaven” by Mannequin Pussy, Luna Li’s When a Thought Grows Wings (what a gorgeous title), and Porridge Radio’s Clouds in the Sky They Will Always Be There for Me—a beautiful, rousing addition to their already stellar discography.
Taylor
Tigers Blood by Waxahatchee
Opening track “3 Sisters” always hits me like the breeze through a rolled-down car window on a slow summer drive. But Tigers Blood’s not all easy feelings, with the simply devastating and real-as-hell “365” being another standout moment. “Right Back to It” features MJ Lenderman, who also released one of this year’s best albums with Manning Fireworks—but you knew that already. This album feels more well-worn than it is. It reminds me of the Sheryl Crow, Shawn Colvin, and The Chicks songs I learned from my mom’s hand-me-down iPod. Speaking of, the first version of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” I really knew was the cover by The Chicks—if that experience resonates with you, I bet this album will too.
Seed of a Seed by Haley Heynderickx
This is an album for those souls replenished by nature in our contemporary, technology-laden world (is that everyone?). Rather than creating an out-of-time utopia or leaning too nostalgically on folk tradition, Heynderickx blends the ancient with the modern the way mustard-yellow wildflowers sprout abundantly on urban fringes. From the title track: “If I get lucky, maybe a simple life.” <3
Seed of a Seed by Haley Heynderickx
Naava
My Light, My Destroyer by Cassandra Jenkins
It’s hard to believe Cassandra could ever one-up 2021’s An Overview on Phenomenal Nature; instead, My Light, My Destroyer continues expanding the Cassandra Jenkins universe of lyrical songwriting and folksy guitar. Astral motifs and notes on grief persist on this record in new ways. I saw her play an album release show for this one on a sticky July night at Public Records, and the opening violin on “Devotion” brought me tears that combined with a full day’s sweat and left me a puddly mess.
BUG by Kacy Hill
The soundtrack to my summer. A quiet plea spoken between the earth and girlhood. “Listening back to The Shins, like I’m seventeen again.” (!!!)
Malegría by Reyna Tropical
Following the tragic loss of her bandmate in 2022, Fabi Reyna brings us Malegría, a knockout solo debut that combines beats, bird calls, guitar, and whispered secrets in the recording room. This album feels so much larger than life and sings in tune with the Andean music I grew up dancing to. It’s a welcome reminder to settle into spirituality through music.
Big Ideas by Remi Wolf
Fans of Remi Wolf were well-fed in 2024. Her second album, Big Ideas, is a whopping, electric, deliciously sonic landscape of vulnerability, longing, and her signature sense of humor. The album bounces between horny bops (“Toro”), expertly produced techno-infused ballads (“Alone in Miami”), funk-rock screeds (“Wave”), and the sharp-toothed, melodic confessionals we know and love from Remi (“Frog Rock”). Big Ideas is a shining, chewy example of what a sophomore album can be. Remi expanded her horizons while underlining what she does best: vocals, lyrics, insane production, and unapologetic, sumptuous fun.
The soundtrack to my summer. A quiet plea spoken between the earth and girlhood. “Listening back to The Shins, like I’m seventeen again.” (!!!)
Malegría by Reyna Tropical
Following the tragic loss of her bandmate in 2022, Fabi Reyna brings us Malegría, a knockout solo debut that combines beats, bird calls, guitar, and whispered secrets in the recording room. This album feels so much larger than life and sings in tune with the Andean music I grew up dancing to. It’s a welcome reminder to settle into spirituality through music.
Phil
Big Ideas by Remi Wolf
Fans of Remi Wolf were well-fed in 2024. Her second album, Big Ideas, is a whopping, electric, deliciously sonic landscape of vulnerability, longing, and her signature sense of humor. The album bounces between horny bops (“Toro”), expertly produced techno-infused ballads (“Alone in Miami”), funk-rock screeds (“Wave”), and the sharp-toothed, melodic confessionals we know and love from Remi (“Frog Rock”). Big Ideas is a shining, chewy example of what a sophomore album can be. Remi expanded her horizons while underlining what she does best: vocals, lyrics, insane production, and unapologetic, sumptuous fun.
Big Ideas by Remi Wolf
If There’s a Heaven by Melt
For their first album, the NYC-born band Melt delivered on the promise of their singles and EPs. Their bright, funky, emotional sound bursts through every song on this nearly perfect album. We’re talking vocals, harmonies, hooks, lyrics; look no further for an album you can listen to from top to bottom. Melt delivers endlessly repeatable songs with a deep consideration for narrative. If There’s a Heaven tells the story of lovers and friends growing up all over each other. “Veronica’s Apology,” “Fake Romantic,” “Through the Wall,” and “Plant the Garden” are songs that belong on every main-character playlist you have.
Victoria
The New Sound by Geordie Greep
Of course this would be one of my favorite albums of 2024. Greep’s debut album offers outlandish sentences that no sane person could ever imagine, let alone mutter into a microphone. It’s jazzy, whimsical, and most importantly, too smart and nuanced for all the critics that erroneously label it “incel” or “meme-core” music. Nobody gets The Greep like I do. Favorite song: “The Magician.” Favorite lyric: “Have you ever seen a woman give birth to a goat?” (Song: “Through a War”)
The New Sound by Geordie Greep
Only God Was Above Us by Vampire Weekend
This was potentially a magnum opus for the band that inspired me to get into music criticism all the way back in 2013. It’s the return to a grittier, more frenetic baroque pop my little prep school (gangster) heart beats for, and it’s also a love letter to and moratorium on New York City. The Surfer *literally* can’t forget the shells around his neck… Favorite song: “Connect.” Favorite lyric: “Oh, my love, was it all in vain? / We always wanted money, now the money's not the same / In a quiet moment at the theater, I could hear the train / Deep inside the city, your memory remains.” (Song: “Mary Boone”)
Adam
“euphoria” by Kendrick Lamar
He could’ve just dropped this and walked away with a win—it would be more debatable, but real ones would know the truth. One of Mr. Morale’s specialties is the capability to switch flows and voices in completely original ways that spin your head. He’s lackadaisical in one moment, insisting on his carelessness for his enemy, and then in the next, he bites and barks out his pure hate for the corny fool who has dared to challenge the king. Sure, “Not Like Us” was a huge moment and that final period on the feud, but “euphoria” was a track made to show off Lamar’s undeniable craftsmanship. “The crown is heavy.”
“ATTITUDE” by Don Toliver ft. Charlie Wilson and Cash Cobain
Charlie Wilson is only on this track for about ten seconds, but in that span, he claims it as his own and provides a moment of heavenly aura. It is a godly yearning, a romantic strife that most music just cannot and does not achieve these days. This short moment is surrounded by fun, bouncy verses by both Don Toliver and Cash Cobain. The Pharrell sample of him simply saying “OH” on repeat combines with a calamitous drill beat to make this a certified club classic.
Hardstone Psycho by Don Toliver
“360” by Charli XCX ft. Robyn and Yung Lean
“360” by Charli XCX dropped alongside its now-iconic music video in the spring. It was an amazing pop track and one that defined the Brat era. No one would have guessed that it was actually just a limited version of what XCX had in mind. She later recruited the Swedish all-star crew of Robyn, a proven pop legend for decades, and Yung Lean, an amazing rapper who’s collabed with the likes of Frank Ocean and FKA Twigs in recent times. They pass the mic around like a hot potato and, with funky smoothness, inform you how carelessly cool each of them is. Yes, we wanna be like them: strutting, fashion, sunglasses, brat-green drip, lights, camera, action.
Theodora
Here in the Pitch by Jessica Pratt
These songs blur together into one twenty-seven-minute vibey trance experience with bossa nova-inspired rhythms. I can hardly understand what she’s singing about, but it’s soothing. “The Last Year” is optimistic, simultaneously resigned and cheerful. “Life Is” is triumphant and plucky, while “Get Your Head Out” and “By Hook or by Crook” lower my heart rate. I often have this album on repeat in the background of my days.
Here in the Pitch by Jessica Pratt
Short n’ Sweet by Sabrina Carpenter
I thought Sabrina Carpenter’s new album was more of the same, but then I became addicted to it. The shift was so sudden that I became suspicious; it reminds me of the brainwashing music in the movie Zoolander, and I wonder what Carpenter or the forces behind her may be convincing me to do with her funny and fresh bubblegum pop. My friend and I call the album “champagne bubbles for your brain,” like audio amnesia. I love it all, but my favorite is the over-the-top breeding anthem “Juno.”
Brat by Charli xcx
Like most everyone else, I love this album. It makes me want to dance with my friends; it took over my year. The remix album I also enjoy, especially the industrial and sweaty “365 (feat. SHYGIRL).”
“Reckless” by Kassie Krut
Funny, optimistic, edgy, clever, confident—one of the best songs I’ve heard in a while. It gives me the strength to carry on with happiness; it makes me feel powerful while I run errands. I wanna be fast and I wanna be free, never look back there’s a runner in me.
Myka
“AMERIICAN REQUIEM” by Beyoncé
Like a mystic, Beyoncé sings in the closing lines of the track: “American requiem / Them big ideas / Are buried here / Amen.” I replayed “AMERIICAN REQUIEM” not long after the election and reassessed the entirety of Cowboy Carter. There’s so much to say that’s been said, but what’s most crucial to me is the album’s quest for authenticity: Black and Indigenous people were foundational to the birth of folk and country, using the accessible genres to narrate American history from the perspectives of its oppressed. This song offers something beyond its intention, though. It describes the decomposition of “America” and the fiction of an American dream. It scores how it feels to live in a country that is collapsing from the weight of its own hubris. I still want to cry when I hear the last lines of the song because it feels like our own funeral procession. But while the song is a requiem, it is also an incitement. “Amen” often precedes an action—the start of a feast, a slumber, a task, an album. As we mourn what’s lost to a violent empire, we are forced to move forward.
Cowboy Carter by Beyoncé
Mia
Big Ideas by Remi Wolf
My album of the year is not Brat… I had a Remi summer and a Remi year and I will have a Remi life. Her vocals are insane, her range is incredible, and her production is so refreshing. I went through the worst breakup of my life this summer, and this was the album that gave me a reason to get out of bed. I cried and screamed to this until I felt like a person again.
Birds Eye by Ravyn Lenae
Another breakup album. I feel so seen by this woman.
Imaginal Disc by Magdalena Bay
There’s hope. That’s what this album gave me: hope.
Imaginal Disc by Magdalena Bay
“Slug” by Matt Champion
This song is all my good memories of the year. All the calm before the storm. Matt Champion will always remind me of the unseriousness of being seventeen, and I guess I am always chasing that unseriousness now.
Allison
“Every Time the Sun Comes Up” by Sharon Van Etten
This was undoubtedly my song of the year, even if it was originally released a decade ago. Lucky for us, I found a way around this to respect COPY’s rules. As if she knew I needed saving, Sharon Van Etten re-recorded and released a live version of it on the ten-year anniversary of Are We There. This song is a haunting, an admission, a clarity, a relief—an unflinching truth about the fragmented self. Her ghostly, repetitive choruses that you can’t look away from echo through hotel hallways and clash against drink carts on a narrow 787. I played this song incessantly along the coast of California on a ten-day drive that I cried my entire way through this spring. It’s the truth of every unmade bed and every lease I could never sign my name to. When I’m slipping through the unfamiliarity of my own making, her voice rings out again: “Every time the sun comes up, I’m in trouble.” That phrase, so concise and blunt, has held me through every transatlantic red-eye. Then, Sharon pulls it off. She unpacks her vulnerability with the snarky line: “People say I’m a one hit wonder, but what happens when I have two?” Though I’m sure she’s raising her fists at critics, it feels like a moment of self-recognition, the kind you can only have when you’ve come face to face with your own resilience, when you pull off just one more performance of the self.
As I get older—more in the last year than ever before—it takes on a different meaning. What happens when I juxtapose myself so heavily that I’m unrecognizable even to myself? What happens when I pull off both—the nomadic runner and the woman who sets the table every Wednesday, waiting for an excuse to stay? What happens when I refuse to give up one life but make room for another? What happens when I have two? It’s in that tension where I can admit: “Every time the sun comes up, I see double.”
I love music that makes me tell the truth; I love anything that tells the truth for me. Every time that muted drum loop hits, I know what’s coming for me. Then, at the end of the track, there’s a break in the turbulence. Sharon laughs, telling us her headphones are falling off, and this sudden break in the fourth wall reminds me how unserious it all is—and thank God for that.
Romance by Fontaines D.C.
Refreshing. That's all I ever have to say about them. I’ve seen them live twice and have only gotten sweatier—and more devoted. Watching a band come into themselves in real time is what keeps me hooked on live music. One of my favorite nights of the year was spent in a Brooklyn theater. I love a show that makes me feel invincible. Bracing myself against the pit and rushing closer and closer to the stage, hand in hand with my friend Olivia, screaming out the record, is how I want to spend all my nights. Brooklyn Paramount, you will always be famous.
Romance by Fontaines D.C.
Amelia
The Collective by Kim Gordon
The fact that there’s a song on this album called “Psychedelic Orgasm” is all you need to know. Oh, and there’s also one where she lists items to presumably pack for a trip and her to-do list before said trip. At seventy, Kim Gordon is still the epitome of cool.
“booboo” by Yaeji
I saw her debut this at Pitchfork Fest (RIP but I hope they just relocate), and it was like an electric surge pulsed through the crowd. There’s also a cute dance that accompanies the lyrics, “booboo, don’t touch me.” Do the dance if someone is getting all up in your space, and they’ll back off, guaranteed.
Mallory
Brat by Charli XCX
Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet is a strong runner up (it was a great year for hot women artists), but Brat was just too infectious to beat. Charli is such an innovative and interesting artist who always seems to be ten steps ahead of where everyone else is musically. Brat reflects personal feelings and wants of my own that I seldom experience with most other records, and it goes hard as hell.