Deep Voices 100 Best Songs of 2024

All joy

Deep Voices 100 Best Songs of 2024 on Spotify
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Here are the 100 best songs of 2024. They rule. I took great effort (way more effort than necessary) in sequencing this playlist, so I hope you’ll listen in order. Listening on headphones is optimal. After that, listening straight out of your blown out laptop speaker is the next best option. This was a fruitful year for music, if not much else. Thank you to all the artists on here for doing what you do.

A quick note on Deep Voices is immediately below, and then an essay on this playlist and the year in music follows. I hope, in listening, you find something new to love.

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A decade or so ago, I heard a radio interview with the writer Jennifer Senior, discussing her book about parenthood, All Joy and No Fun. The premise, seared into my then-childless brain with a combination of jealousy and fear, was that being a parent was “all joy and no fun,” an experience that through its nonstop moments of rapture will lift you to a higher plane of existence. But, as you sacrifice free time and indulgence for the tending of your offspring, you will find yourself experiencing unfathomable tedium. Would you rather go to church or ride a roller coaster?

I thought of Senior’s book again recently after I went to see a concert by the organist and composer Kali Malone. Malone’s performed on a massive organ and with a vocal and brass group. The performance was expansive and droning. Her music can be gorgeous, but it’s heavy, and it shifts at a glacial pace. Experiencing it can be blissful, if monotonous. Like watching my daughter’s rib cage rise and fall as she sleeps on the baby monitor. All joy and no fun.

Is anything wrong with that? As I reflect on this list of The Best 100 Songs of 2024 (Schnipper’s Version), I see a lot of joy, songs that glide or crinkle, songs where the singer talks instead of sings. There are songs where the guitar and drums feel telekinetically connected, some songs where they feel like they were performed on different continents. The overarching theme here may be one of pleasure, but of the kind you take in while staring at the ocean on the last day of vacation.

It can seem like a fool’s errand sometimes to be so in love with music most people will never know exists. I think that’s why I take this stuff so seriously; I feel a proprietary ownership over some of these songs. Still, I’m not unrealistic. There are songs on this year’s list where I can understand why they may not have reached a wider audience, like Zuli’s “The Horn” and Nexcyia’s “Tales,” songs that have about as much surface area as a spiderweb. I have a special love for music that feels decrepit, pockmarked. But I do sometimes get puzzled by music that feels totally immaculate and is still roundly largely ignored. Why was Cindy’s “The Bell,” a gentle and hushed diamond of a song, not on everyone’s year end list? Because it’s not fun music? But fun is easy. Beauty is much harder.

Occasionally, I find something perfect hidden in plain sight. After reading glowing reviews for indie musician Cassandra Jenkins’ album earlier this year, I decided to check it out. I found myself liking it just fine, until I got floored by a wisp of a song called “Betelgeuse.” It’s made of intermittent piano and saxophone and recording of a conversation between Jenkins and her mother. They’re looking at the sky. “I just read that there was an asteroid the size of a skyscraper that, on Saturday night, went between the moon and the Earth,” says Jenkins’ mother. “Did we see it?” she responds. “Somebody did.” A tearjerker! The rest of the album, carefully crafted, was powerful, but did not take hold of me in the way this bit of accidental philosophy did.

It’s as much the accidental as the philosophical that got me this year. I don’t mean this derogatorily, but songs with quieter ambitions were often the ones that moved me most. Take what is probably the best song title of the year: “When the Bakery Has What You Want, and It’s Cheap,” by Memotone. The song is instrumental, but it speaks volumes: You know what it’s like when the scones are hot. Elsewhere, I was touched by Horse Jumper of Love’s clunky rhyme, “It’s not hard to tell when you’re not doing well.” It felt like a line in a letter written by someone who’s previously never expressed an emotion. I guess I just think it’s nice to care.

To answer my own question, I only rode a roller coaster once. I hated it. I also want to point out that I actually fell asleep during the Kali Malone concert. Parenthood is tiring. Maybe I could use a little more fun after all. Last year, when I released my year-end list I wrote about my daughter, then one. “​​My daughter is a big goof, a rambunctious little sweetie. She is awesome, but she is not chill,” I said. The same remains. She is a child who wants what she wants, and now has significantly more language to ask for it is. Most of that time that what she wants is for me to put on “360” by Charli XCX, which, despite my professed desire for music of a revelatory nature, was #1 most played song on my Spotify Wrapped this year. To request it, she says “Ah, ah, ah,” like Charli on the refrain and, because I know it will make her happy, I turn off whatever it was I was listening to and play her song.

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