Top singles of 2024: From Kendrick Lamar to Sabrina Carpenter
By Chris Richards
Near the end of each year, music people scribble out lists of their favourite songs then take a few steps back to squint at the rankings.
Is there any kind of theme in there? A unifying essence? A through line? A lasso we can throw around it all? After much squinting at the list below, I’ve arrived at “Nope.” Maybe disorder is the theme? At the end of a dizzying year, here are my favourite songs of 2024.
10. Pet Shop Boys: “Why Am I Dancing?”
“Why am I dancing when I’m so alone?” Neil Tennant asks during the regal jounce of this standout track from “Nonetheless,” the Pet Shop Boys’ brilliantly titled 15th studio album.
Sung with trademark lucidity, Tennant’s question - about the familiar paradox of communion and isolation that we so often feel while dancing in crowded nightclubs and empty living rooms - feels as fresh, introspective and unanswerable as ever.
9. Sabrina Carpenter: “Espresso”
Please, please, please don’t tell me you prefer “Please, Please, Please.” This is easily the best song Sabrina Carpenter dropped on civilisation this summer - a deceptive spritz of disco-pop that betrays its title with a mean-girl smirk.
Instead of feeling piping hot, Carpenter’s hooks waft like melodic air conditioning. Instead of twitching on caffeine, the beat refuses to hurry up. Musically, it’s a cool song about being hot. Lyrically, it’s a nice song about being cruel. Sip carefully.
8. Rixe: “Tir Groupé”
A friend of mine says it’s easier to learn French from Rixe songs than from Duolingo. I believe it. This reputable French Oi! trio has long specialized in tough, irresistible shout-alongs, but here, they make a bold stylistic shift, replacing their well-pummeled drum kit with a thudding drum machine. This song teaches a new kind of lesson. The kind that leaves a bruise.
7. Lolina: “Easy Rider Geneva Heat”
I yelped like a shocked dog when I heard Lolina perform this song live earlier this year, surprised and delighted that someone in this world possesses the temerity necessary to pen a reply to “Little Red Corvette,” one of Prince’s most immaculate moments.
“You should have known by the way I parked my car sideways that it wouldn’t last,” Lolina sings, lyrics falling from her mouth the way someone’s irises fall after an almost imperceptible eye roll.
This is a different kind of Saturday night where “the only thing in life worth doing again is trying.”
6. Landowner: “Landowner Plays Dopesmoker 666% Faster and With No Distortion”
This whole thing might be a gag, but after the laughter, it feels profound. Landowner is a fantastically fidgety punk band from Massachusetts who have chosen to cover the entirety of “Dopesmoker,” the lumbering opus by doom metal legends Sleep - only with the album’s glacially slow tempos sped way up and played through clean electric guitars. Transforming an album into a song,
Landowner sounds like the Minutemen chasing the Meat Puppets across purgatory, conjuring some sort of Benny Hill “Yakety Sax” routine in a realm where time doesn’t exist.
5. Astrid Sonne: “Do You Wanna”
Of all the Charli XCX songs that inspired think-piecing and pod-blab this year, “I Think About It All the Time” seems to have produced the most illuminating results.
Shouldn’t there be way more pop songs about the decision to become a parent?
Here’s one, and it’s exquisite. “Do you wanna have a baby?” the Danish avant pop singer Astrid Sonne asks over a meandering sequence of blocky piano chords before deepening the question. “Do you wanna bring people into this world?” Her answer sounds as forthright and disorienting as the music itself: “I really don’t know.”
“4. Latto: ”Sunday Service“
“Anyway.” That isn’t the proper hook animating this colossal heap of trash talk generated by the dexterous Georgia rapper Latto, but it does feel something like her signature flourish. It takes a special blend of charisma and sangfroid to follow this level of gauntlet throwing (“Do you rap or do you tweet?”) and metaphor mixing (“You a clown and I’m allergic”) with a shrug.
3. Kendrick Lamar: “Not Like Us”
Even with Kendrick Lamar and Drake’s history-making rap beef months behind us, “Not Like Us” still glows with hot menace, like nuclear waste.
Yet, somehow, this thing became a one-size-fits-all hit that had fans dancing from the streets of Los Angeles to the nosebleeds of the Democratic National Convention.
Does anyone remember a rap song this distinct, this furious becoming this flexible, this fun?
2. Concrete Boys: “Not Da 2”
The unfortunate falling-out between Concrete Boys honcho Lil Yachty and crew standout Karrahbooo back in August makes the year’s second-best musical duet feel all the more mind-twisting: It begins with Karrahbooo bragging with effortless, clock-stopping nonchalance - but then the beat suddenly accelerates, as if Yachty slipped on a banana peel into the future.
1. Camila Cabello: Playboi Carti, “I Luv It”
The most vivid stand-alone pop hit of 2024 is a maximalist collage about desire that already has it all: a reincarnated Gucci Mane hook, a glossary of neon synthesizer melodies, an extradimensional cameo from the unknowable Playboi Carti and a hook from one Camila Cabello that feels like a manic episode of hiccups: “I luv it, I luv it, I luv it, I luv it, I luv it, I luv it, I luv it! I luv it, I luv it, I luv it, I luv it, I luv it, I luv it, I luv it! I luv it, I luv it, I luv it, I luv it, I luv it, I luv it!” Whether she’s deploying this refrain as a mantra or a hypnosis tool, it works.