The Unlaced list of the best songs of the year…

Joshua Chuquimia Crampton - "Monster G"

In the 21st century, being a fan of guitar music has mostly meant resigning oneself to the fact that the chances of being surprised have gotten vanishingly slim. It's a realm where nostalgia abounds — nostalgia acts, especially in the world of rock music, run the gamut from "We had real music back in our day" to "They had real music back in their day" — and even some of the most acclaimed guitar acts of today get marked with the nasty "throwback" branding iron. Joshua Chuquimia Crampton's latest LP, Estrella Por Estrella, however, pushes guitar fixation beyond retro sensibilities or trite music-with-soul narratives — it's an album of pure, uncut six-string indulgence (in fact, there are no other instruments featured anywhere), best exemplified by the sprawling, ecstatic aural onslaught of "Monster G".

Placed smack-dab in the middle of the record, it is, in essence, a tale of two tunes inelegantly fused into one: the first half, a mess of layered fuzz guitars driven through an arcade of loopers and effect pedals that occasionally opens up into a heavenly kind-of-sort-of chorus which evokes the imposing emotionality of post-rock à la This Will Destroy You, and the second, a rainbow-washed post-amp hum comedown comprised of crisp clean tones that slip into the next number so inconspicuously, it might just escape first-time listeners' ears. This is musicianship as a devotional act, fundamentalist axe-worship situated somewhere between Earth and My Bloody Valentine. It's painfully gauche to ponder the state of guitar rock in 2024 but Crampton's vision is one of such obsessive force, one can't help but wonder if there are still ways forward for the instrument.

– Fred Barrett

“I Spoke with a Fish” - Mount Eerie 

The idea of an eighty minute album, of the double album, is of something huge, something too ambitious and sprawling to be contained on a single disk. But Night Palace, the first record Phil Elverum has released under the Mount Eerie name since the trilogy of autobiographical albums about the death of his wife Geneviève Castrée, instead feels compact. Like a notebook carried around in back pockets until half-thoughts (several sub-minute long songs), diary entries (a twelve minute almost spoken word piece) and perfect poetry gather together, intermingling indiscriminately. It doesn’t feel like it was assembled by careful curation, exactly, so much as by time and proximity. 

And no song feels quite as disparate within itself, filled with its own collection of accumulated parts, as “I Spoke with a Fish”. The title almost sounds like a Weird Al parody of Elverum’s first death album A Crow Looked at Me where he sung with searing directness: “when real death enters the house all poetry is dumb”. And in some ways he is asking some of the same Big Questions about the value of art (or even description), despite the somewhat goofy tone. 

Because the title is literal: he speaks to a fish and the fish replies in a deep, autotuned voice, accompanied by the synthetic sounds of a drum machine, in contrast to the delicate acoustic guitar that accompanies Elverum’s ever-gently sung side of the dialogue. Each tells the other that what they see as solid, the fish’s palace of water and Elverum’s mountain of rock, are actually spacious and fluid; they are running water and flowing matter respectively. 

Within this surreal exchange, Elverum locates some of the most beautiful words he has ever written. “Recorded music is a statue of a waterfall”, he sings, now backed by a wave of voices, “the flashing glint on the marble where the eye once was on a taxidermied marlin’s frozen leap”. But it’s a beauty against itself: the attempt to capture something in a solid piece of art is rendered as not just futile, but almost a perversion of the original thing. 

As has been the case since he was recording with The Microphones at the turn of the century, Elverum’s work is one of constant self-doubt; you can almost see the more straight-forward poetry that he has scribbled over the top of, crossing out words until there’s almost nothing of the original left. But now that insecurity is less insular and solipsistic (not to suggest there is no value in that), as it carries with it the practical wisdom of living through tragedy. A humility that is reflected not just in the album’s more politically conscious tracks, such as “Non-Metaphorical Decolonization & November Rain”, but in the surprising conclusion of this song. Which, in its own way, is as much of a jolt as the sudden rush of noise in “Empty Paper Towel Roll” or the almost heavy metal scream at the beginning of “Swallowed Alive”. 

He returns to tell the fish that he loves the way that they move “as one flowing muscle” to which the fish replies, via a clip from “The Big Lebowski”, “I dig your style too, man”. It’s a punchline, basically. A gag. It seems like a fitting ending to a song about a talking fish, but maybe less so to one about the futility of art and the fluidity of all things. But that’s what makes this song and this album so special and so true. Life is hardly organised neatly into moments of sadness and profundity and silliness. They all intermingle; they all co-exist. 

And more than most artists, Elverum has become comfortable with that. He doesn’t even feel the need to make much of a point of it; he doesn’t force a greater sense of contrast and he doesn’t use the joke ending to undercut the poetry before it. He just lets them share the space. Because even if trying to capture and convey some of the world’s fleeting beauty is an absurd pursuit, even if in the face of real tragedy it seems pointless and dumb, it’s still worth doing. Despite it all, Elverum has kept reaching for all these years, and it doesn’t matter if either he or us can ever really understand why. 

– Esme Holden

“Holy, Holy” – Geordie Greep

55% of male voters in the US have elected president the world’s most powerful misogynist (again); in the same nation, women’s basic, potentially-life saving abortion rights are in peril; and a cabal of chauvinistic persona non gratas wield a terrifying influence over millions of young men. In 2024, countless monologues of male desperation – desperation to control, to subjugate, to, at the very least, prize attention out of the opposite sex – have formed a painful scream in the ears of women worldwide. And in “Holy, Holy”, one of the year's best track, Geordie Greep slips into the mind of one of these tragic mouthpieces like a tailored suit.

“I could tell you were lonely from the moment you walked in”, opens Greep in his feverishly theatrical tones, adopting the velvety insouciance of James Bond and Frank Sinatra rolled into one, before entertaining a lady companion who is to be swept up into the palm of his hand, and, “of course”, into bed. Tales of exotic adventures, jihadis and sexual conquests spill like fine wine; “in Cantonese, in French Guyanese”, our raconteur can tell you why men want to be him and women want to be with him. But through a genius coup de théâtre revealed by the heat of samba’s song, we discover the man of mystery is full of hot air: he’s just a delusional John on a date with a sex worker.

Performing here like a nuclear triad of wit, satire and storytelling, Geordie Greep masterfully appraises the fake ‘cool’ misogynist: his ostensible disregard for women, his complete, engulfing need to have their ears and eyeballs to feel like a man. It’s a tale that would be hilarious, if it weren’t so pathetic.

– Sam Quarton

“U Should Not Be Doing That” - Amyl & The Sniffers

There are very few musical genres- or more so in its case, a way of life- as protected and debated and rife with infighting as Punk. What even is punk? Not even gonna attempt to come up with some rhetorical answers to that question to segue into the rest of this entry, that’s above my paygrade (unpaid contributor) and I honestly don’t know if I could hazard an opinion I’m entirely satisfied with. I’m not a punk, not even if I wanted to be, because I honestly don’t think anything is really punk anymore. The second your protected movement of non-conformism becomes a Halloween costume identifiable by silhouette, at no fault at all of the originators and pioneers of these cultures, the waters become too muddy to say for sure wether the spirit of those people still exists in a meaningful way that can be tapped into and adhered to sincerely. Punk is now a style. If someone wants to be a punk more than they want to be punk, are they punk? It’s a hard one. It’s almost an information hazard. If the outfit and tattoos draw a person to the culture, that person begins the road to becoming a homogenised idea of a punk before anything else and cannot ever truly be ‘punk’ in the way they most likely want to be.

You can wear the denim vest and the patches and let your jeans get crusty because that’s what punks do, but then you have become an image of a punk, the Treachery Of Images Punk, ce n’est pas un punk. You have crossed a rubicon between the person you are, and the person that does what punks do. What a tragedy. I think punk died with The Young Ones. We live in a post-Refused world now, it’s been decades since Henry Rollins had to fistfight Black Flag crowds in the back corner of dives and garages every night who were spitting on and slashing at him before they accepted him. Anyway I’m sloppily wrapping this train of thought up now to say that “U Should Not Be Doing That” by Australian Pub Rock band Amyl & The Sniffers was my favourite song of 2024 and their continued output of snarling pub rock, blunt lyricsm and non-performatively offputting visuals to accompany them makes me believe that some people are just meant to do certain things. In their case, that thing is being punky little sludgy bugs in a way I didn’t really think you could see anymore.

“U Should Not Be Doing That”, an anthemic, growling putdown of an insecure and hypocritical man- or an insecure and hypocritical people, just as easily- who take issue with frontwoman Amy Taylor being gross, nude and loud on stage around the world.

“I was in LA, shaking my shit
While you were down in Melbourne saying, ‘Fuck that bitch’”

Amy Taylor is a figure in music I deeply admire- one of the only true young hurricanes around, one of our premier freaks of nature who reminds you that some people do just simply have a calling on this Earth and when they fulfil it, they gotta do it however makes sense to them or not at all. Making music like “U Should Not Be Doing That” and pissing on dirt roads in wedding dresses on its album cover isn’t exactly that calling, rather they are two of the many sticky and crusty moons orbiting it and forming it. I don’t think Amy Taylor is the way she is because she’s in Van Halen, etc etc.

“'Cause I've been running around making a mess of myself

I know how you feel about that
You told me once when I showed you that, but
I am trying my best to get it on
Not everybody makes it out alive when they are young.”

To me, Amyl & The Sniffers and their magnetically feral frontwoman represent something very simple that I like seeing in music- something unapologetic and gross and nasty and unconcerned with aesthetics. In a popular music landscape where Pop Stars can’t pen songs about hating your ex’s perfect new girlfriend for teenage girls to scream into their hairbrushes without being tarred with the ‘not a girl’s girl’ brush, Amyl & The Sniffers feel like something electric and fresh. I feel like electric and fresh are two extremely annoying words to use in music writing but I only do this once a year so I don’t mind going to the standard toolkit for it, especially when a band is this electric and feels this fresh in today’s scene. It’s something that can not and never will be uber popular nor has any aspirations to be- to do so would mean giving up the slime and snide that makes their music what it is, it would mean giving up on the fog of saliva and sweat and lukewarm beer that forms clouds in every venue they perform in that wasn’t conjured by fans who feel it should be there, but that I just imagine follows Amy Taylor around like the mist that curtains Chiron’s ferry upon the Styx.

I want to sit here and say the other hack music writing thing here and tell you that “U Should Not Be Doing That” is a ‘warcry’ or a ‘warning’, something that makes this band sound far more dangerous or counter-cultural than it is. But I don’t think it would be genuine of me to root around for that kind of metaphor. Amyl & The Sniffers and Amy Taylor are deliberately grating and accidentally iconoclastic, in that order. They are unlike any signed rock band from the last decade, because not only do they not seem to care whatsoever about what the algorithms and virality of modern music promotion demands, I don’t think they actually do either. They relish being crass, slimy, wriggling nightcrawlers in the mud who also, somehow, have conjured 1.2 million monthly listeners on streaming platforms. Their sound has barely changed between their first EP, Giddy Up which was written, recorded and released in a 12 hour span, to their most recent album Cartoon Darkness. They’re growing, but they don’t seem to be changing, and I for one am ecstatic about that. The line between Stagnancy and Truth is a flimsy one to identify for artists as years go by but Amyl & The Sniffers have risen above- or entirely sidestepped- the need to ask questions like that of them. Do you think they should lean towards a more radio-friendly style to capitalise on their growing fanbase? Do you think with a few key changes to their image and performances they could spearhead a return of a more dirty punk sound? Do you think Amy Taylor should tone it down a little and save the theatrics for specific live shows? Cool. Who cares, brother?

“Another person saying I'm not doin' it right
Another person tryna give me some kinda internal fight, but
I'm working own my worth, I'm working on my work, I'm working on who I am I'm working on what is wrong, what is right, and where I am
I know my worth, I'm not the worst you told me once I was
I cannot do this anymore, I gotta hit the buzz.”

To aspire to be anything else would mean, of course, that they should not be doing that. – Louis Nokes

“Modern Girl” – Bleachers
One of my funniest musical memories occurred about ten years ago when my brother recommended to me this cool new band who make music that sounds like it’s from the seventies. In fact, the music sounds so much like a blast from the past that they named themselves The 1975. A decade on, I still don’t know where he got that idea from, but it makes me laugh to think about it because I imagine there are plenty of bands over the years that have actually tried to do that sort of nostalgia bait mimicking of an era long-passed, but as far as I know, none have been successful in turning it into a full-time career.

The difference between that dream of riding on the accepted classical highs of vintage pop, compared to what Jack Antonoff’s band Bleachers have done with the success of “Modern Girl”, is that Bleachers are confident enough in their own existence that they haven’t bothered trying to pump out an album full of 70s knockoffs – just the one song. In fact, the rest of the album is shit and sucks real bad, but that’s fine! In a way, there’s nothing more classic rock and roll than producing exactly one incredible, timeless track, chock full of trumpets and lyrics vaguely about hot women, and then failing abysmally at recreating the magic elsewhere.

The truth is, I’ve listened to this song an upsetting amount of times. One of my friends recently told me about a guy he met at a Super Smash tournament who, when asked about the music he was into, admitted that he only ever listened to “Fireflies” by Owl City, and when they looked at his phone, he had listened to it for forty thousand hours in total (four and a half years). Now, I’m not saying that I’m anything like that freak when it comes to “Modern Girl”, but also *trumpet noises*

- Matt Gawronski

“Cry For Me” – Magdalena Bay

Magdalena Bay, the indie duo headed by synth wizards Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Levin, have spent the better part of the last decade emulating and fusing their various retro influences towards delightful, psychedelic pop ragers, elevated by their knack for hooks and sonic worldbuilding. Once again this is the case for their latest record Imaginal Disk, which shoots far beyond homage towards a holistic landscape of alien sounds, earworm choruses, and major breakdowns that harken back to their roots in prog rock. In this sea of gorgeously produced tunes though, “Cry For Me” at track thirteen stands alone.

Possessed by the ghost of ABBA’s past (Levin himself describes the song as an emulation of Dancing Queen’s energy), bright synth leads sing away against pulsating guitar licks, piano subtly weave in and out of the vocal melodies, Tenenbaum enters the track like (as the lyrics describe) she’s begging for second chances. The song is almost all chorus but the structure still opens up for breakdowns and bridges and buildups until the end where she is literally screaming for forgiveness. It’s not redefining any of the genres it plays with, nor does it have to, Tenenbaum and Levin reshape the past in their own image and narrative towards a bittersweet, beautiful future. It’s everything that works about Magdalena Bay in five minutes, progressive and hooky and nostalgic and futuristic and cathartic all in the same breath. The best pop song of the year. Spare me the allegories, please.

- Adam Sullivan

“Suffocate” – Knocked Loose

I’ve watched Knocked Loose’s performance of “Suffocate” on Jimmy Kimmel more than I’ve listened to any piece of music released in 2024. At this point, it might be THE definitive document of the song–the surreal collision of boob tube slickness and musical fury ends up being the perfect summation of the metalcore’s band unlikely ascent. In the days after the Kimmel episode aired, the performance prompted a wave of complaints to ABC about something this ungodly invading the supposedly family friendly terrain of late night. Which means Knocked Loose has at least one thing in common with Elvis. 

Most of the discussion around Suffocate has revolved around its more outré elements–the unlikely guest vocal from hyperpop star Poppy, the even more unlikely appearance of an honest-to-god reggaeton breakdown in the song’s second half. But none of these provocations would land without a band this locked in, delivering the fundamentals with power and finesse. At the center of it all is Bryan Garris, whose metal scream somehow maintains a boyish quality. It allows him to locate a vulnerability not always accessible in this genre. In this way, Poppy is the perfect foil–together, they find humanity in the hellfire.

- Matt Lingo

“Connect” – Vampire Weekend

I have a confession to make: I’m a hipster. In 2009 I was 10 years old listening to Vampire Weekend, and by 2011 I was listening to all the hippest bands: Interpol, Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, LCD Soundsystem. At an age much too young to be any part of any movement, I think my connection to Vampire Weekend grew stronger- I felt they were outsiders as well. Their sound didn’t fit the landscape of that era, popular as they were: they never fit in with the cool guy aesthetics of Interpol, the experimental genius of AnCo or the “what a jackass” energy of LCD Soundsystem. They were a band out of time, for a child out of time. 

Fast forward to 2024 and Vampire Weekend has now been a part of my life for well over half of it. Every song they’ve made I can play on drums, every lyric seared into my brain. So when I learned there was a new Vampire Weekend album, I was actually frightened. I’ve grown up, so have they, will it be… boring? Any fear I may have heard was quickly discarded when I heard “Connect”.

Cascading pianos, upright basslines, a wonderful percussion section from Chris Tomson and a strange middle 8 fill the song, a beautiful arrangement, and one that they couldn’t have possibly done at the early stages of their career. With age comes boredom, but also experience and knowledge, and Vampire Weekend used said experience to craft a truly beautiful song. Clocking in at five minutes, it floats by. The interludes and extended outros don’t fill the song; they make it. Not a second is wasted, and every lyric is rich. 

Speaking on the lyrics, unlike many Vampire Weekend tracks, this song is quite cryptic. “I know once it’s lost it’s never found/I need it now” frontman Ezra Koenig sings ambiguously of something that could or could not be tied to the content of the verses. And then there’s the outro. Where Koenig seems to allude to life of luxury, discontent, feeling like it’s all over anyway, having sex, and seemingly being displeased in having sex. All of this is conveyed in three immaculate couplets.

“A country house in June
It's happening too soon, your book of revelations
We can't unmake the bed
We used the chair instead and called it a vacation”

Only God Was Above Us and its crown jewel, “Connect” are two very bizarre pieces of media in 2024. They feel out of time, yet ahead of the curve, of its time, yet behind. It’s an incredibly forward thinking piece of music from a composition standpoint, but seems like it belongs in 1997 at the same time. Vampire Weekend has always had this issue of being in the wrong time doing the right thing, and that’s why they’ve endured for so long. 

“The sandhogs in the street

the chickens in her bedroom”

Is there a connection? If we’re talking analytically, no. If we’re talking emotionally, yes. The connection is very, very strong. I love Vampire Weekend and Vampire Weekend loves me. 

- Daniel Ellis

“Binding” – Nilufer

“Binding” opens with a hypnotic drum loop, lulling you into relaxation like the chugging of a National Express train. And then this wonderfully layered guitar loop comes in, complementing the hazy drums, setting the perfect template for what Nilufer explores as she creates an image of a never ending journey. As the tension rises in the chorus with less subtle guitars in the instrumental, she goes into more detail about this journey and her companion alongside her who seems to be more dissatisfied but in a scornful manner so she begs for them to give her their best in that emotion, she needs to feel something, anything. Even hate.

Interpretations aren’t everything, but the sense of melancholy found in the idea of a cycle or journey is communicated sonically with the instruments and Nilufer’s vocal tone. As the track progresses, it’s not disillusionment but a plea for something real and ground-shaking in her life. Beyond finding these ideas immensely relatable, the song takes you through this journey with gentleness and grace, allowing the ideas to be found in their own time with its sparse sound and lackadaisical yet driving pace.

– Ellis Lamai

Foxing - Greyhound

The oceanic 8-minute nosedive Greyhound and the lead single for their self-titled fifth record is the St Louis emo (?) outfit at their best: arena-sized, meticulously produced, and unapologetically damaged. The fist-pumping optimistic refrains of Foxing’s previous album Draw Down the Moon (“I can’t do this alone”) and its top- 40 hooks have been eschewed for the more tortured energy of their 2018 art-rock masterpiece Nearer My God. But there’s nothing about their self-titled fifth album that suggests a re-tread; whereas that previous album confronted spiritual turmoil with a genre-jumping track list, Foxing the album is sonically consistent- in fact, the repetition is the point, sometimes exhaustingly so. Greyhound is awash with anguished vocal loops, a bone-chilling descending synth line, snap back snares and truly wild wham-pedal riffing. It takes its time, it wallows in its sonics, it struggles under its own weight.  

Murphy’s lyrics, meanwhile, have never been more captivating; his imagery as grand and Biblical as the sounds his band summon:

 “I had a dream of the present eating past/ like a blue whale grazing in the Table Rock/ oversized and underfed I had a chance to amend what was wrong/ 

But the wrong was still to come so the whale had run aground/ 

Heaving breaths over time, soothed itself like a child 

Until it disintegrated 

I admit it meant nothing to me”. 

This admission of nihilistic bitterness is punctuated by thunderous guitars until the darkly lit soundscape retracts and thrashes with minute electronic details. And by the end, when Murphy is left to repeat “I’ve been feeling like I ain’t got nothing left to give”, you feel ravaged by the elements. Foxing the album reminds me of Fleet Foxes’ work on CrackUp, an album whose primordial, towering arrangements threatened to submerge the narrator wading through them. But in a period where so much modern music seems to be heading towards a feel-good, self-help school of thought, it’s a downright pleasure to hear Foxing embrace their most venomous instincts: sometimes life just makes you want to scream at the heavens; Foxing offer no catharsis, no ribboned-up conclusions. ­

- Louis Norton