Kendrick saying “brother” at the end of every line in the middle part of his verse never fails to crack me up

Cliffdiver's second full-length album really delivered for me. It's not surprising in hindsight that their debut album Exercise Your Demons wouldn't live up to the high expectations set by their 2020 song Gas City; it's by all means a good album but for me it lacked the sort of top-tier memorability that I'm looking for when listening to this sort of on-the-nose pop-punk "DIY" music. Birdwatching, as a counterpoint, sold me from the very start with opener "thirty, flirty, and thriving!!!" Co-lead vocalists Joey Duffy and Briana Wright are both extremely charming, the band's work continues to be my favorite use of the saxophone in recent memory, the whole album kinda breezes by and dares you to go back to the start and listen all over again like many of my favorite albums this year, and I would like one hundred more years of Cliffdiver songs to put me in a good mood and make me feel thirty years old again.

bards will be like "so baby listen carefully / while I sing my combat song"

This second album by the Australian slacker-rock duo is a perfect example of why I love Run For Cover Records. It's unfortunately brief, weighing in at just 19 minutes across 7 tracks, but I had it in the rotation pretty regularly in 2024. The lofi music videos put out over the course of the year match the vibe pretty well. More of this please!

new Lorde album (but good this time)

there's a sort of weird slowed-breakbeat-ness to the drums on this track, right?

just thinking about how if we got new music from both sadurn and cartalk this year that'd pretty much be all I need

the "You Could Make a Case For" series is for albums that did not spring to mind for me immediately, but when reviewing the stuff I did actually listen to this year, I noticed them as things that I definitely did find myself pressing play on during the course of the year.

I first learned about Durante via the 2019 Fabric DJ mix by electronic artist Bonobo, an album I listened to constantly both by myself and when putting on music for other people. His track "Maia" swoops in beautifully and while he didn't have many tracks released at that point, I was excited eventually to discover his 2021 song "Thread Tension", a driving, hypnotic track. There were some releases here and there but it was this year's Enter and the accompanying February and May DJ mixes that I could tell there was something special he was doing, creating a sound I'm really glad to have had available to me this year.

I dunno what to say about this one, it just is the mood I felt in the most this year. I felt ready to put this on just about any time-- as a plane was landing, when I couldn't sleep, when I had a quiet afternoon sitting around peacefully with my parents in my new living room, when I was walking around a new part of San Francisco I had never been in before (near the Moscone Center? lol), just any time really. I guess that makes it the next in a series:

2024 - this one
2023 - overmono - good lies
2022 - sadurn - radiator
2021 - ross from friends - tread
2020 - cartalk - pass like pollen
2019 - glass beach - the first glass beach album

I had very complicated feelings about Father of the Bride, though ultimately came out pretty positive about it. I do feel like this is a return to Modern Vampires success but also I feel a little bit guilty about feeling that way because of the signifiers