New music

What do I know about the sound of 2024?

I will answer the question in the subtitle first: I know nothing. I make these playlists of new music twice a year, for friends who don’t dig around, and therefore get stuck with things they know from the days when they did dig around; I still dig around BECAUSE I AM A WRITER AND AM THEREFORE BORED OUT OF MY MIND AT MY COMPUTER 40% OF THE TIME. But I don’t really know what 2024 sounded like to young people or music critics, despite my love for ‘Good Luck, Babe’ (included on the playlist I posted earlier in the year). I don’t think I had a Brat Summer, although how would I know? Maybe I did. Maybe I bratted the fuck out of July, before taking it easier or being nicer or choosing a less fashionable colour palette in August. The thirteen-year-old daughter of a friend thought I might like Clairo because I listen to jazz. She turned out to be right. I like Clairo, although Clairo’s connection to Miles or Joe Henderson is not as obvious to me as it is to her.

So this playlist isn’t 2024. It simply contains songs released in 2024 that I stumbled across somehow and liked, or loved. I couldn’t tell you how I found them. The Joy Clark and Queen Kwong tracks haven’t yet hit five figures on Spotify between them; neither my maths or my eyesight are good enough to work out whether Tommy Richman has had a billion or ten billion or one hundred billion plays. I couldn’t explain why one country singer is selling out stadiums and another is playing in a club at the end of your street. They are all as famous as each other as far as I am concerned. Some of these artistes I have known for a while, but many of them are new to me. All I can say is that if I like them, maybe you will too.

There’s one song here, ‘Pretend You’re Coming Home’ by Lauren Watkins, that stands out in a particular way for me. It could have been recorded at just about any time in the last half-century, so it really doesn’t have anything to say about our troubled decade, but Lauren Watkins is 24, and therefore some kind of product of it. The song is out of the very top drawer, full of hooks, beautifully sung, perfectly constructed - I kept wondering whether it was a cover. Paul McCartney wondered the same thing when he composed ‘Yesterday’. How could someone not have written it already? What it tells me is that there will be songs this good forever, that the seam of melody Watkins mines can never be exhausted. There’s something very consoling about that.