It’s a great time to be into a wide range of music, especially this year. The best work of 2024 is a post-genre smorgasbord of everything from emo-country crossover and metalcore hyperpop to melodic dubstep and Brat.

Skin to Skin – Amira Elfeky

Singer/songwriter Amira Elfeky’s debut album is a callback to 2000’s emo and heavy rock, imbued with a moody goth overtone and aesthetic. In true goth fashion, these are songs of haunting love, a push/pull agony best seen in the opening tracks, “Secrets” (“Broken pieces, empty promise / The memory of you leaves me haunted”) and “A Dozen Roses” (“You tell me that I’m so pretty / You hold my face and kiss my cheek / But what the fuck’s that mean to me?”). Elfeky’s vocal range sinks into a crooning, brooding despair, but also rises powerfully as she belts out the lines to “Save Yourself.”

While “Coming Down” is infinitely catchy, and “Skin to Skin” is heartbreakingly beautiful, the standout track is “Tonight,” which distills the complicated feelings of a tragic love affair into anguish and yearning with the simple, powerful refrain, “I need you tonight.” These are songs for the desperate, the hopeful and the obsessed.

AMERICAN MOTOR SPORTS – Bilmuri

2024 might be the year that mixing emo and country (in what should have been an unholy union) actually takes off, and this is in large part thanks to Bilmuri’s most recent album. It’s able to poke fun at country, while taking the best parts of it and integrating them into the emo/metalcore song structure, kind of like the soundtrack for a lonesome cowboy crying out on the open plain? This was definitely what Bilmuri intended.

Read my full review here.

POST HUMAN: NeX GEn – Bring Me the Horizon

After a long wait (that was very much worth it), BMTH’s second entry in the POST HUMAN series is a hyperpop/metalcore/emo/electronic thrill-ride that feels both cutting-edge and prophetic. The post-genre trend is in full swing, and music like this is the movement at its best.

Check out my full review here.

Brat – Charli XCX

There’s not really anything left to say here that hasn’t already been said about this juggernaut, not after the cultural stranglehold brat summer had on us. Brat is fun, but also touching and poignant, and it’s just so well done from beginning to end. The opener, “360” bookends the album with the closing “365” in both sound and vibe, creating an aural feedback loop that leaves you wanting to replay the album as soon as it’s finished. The playfulness of songs like “Club classics” and “Mean girls” maintains a lightness to return to as songs like “Girl, so confusing” and “I think about it all the time” tackle the complexities of womens’ lives today. “Everything is romantic” is a pleasant break in the intensity, while “Talk talk” gives us what might be the album’s most memorable lines, “Talk to me in French, talk to me in Spanish / Talk to me in your own made- up language / Doesn’t matter if I understand it.”

Even among such masterfully-composed songs, the standout is by far “Sympathy is a knife.” Mixing vulnerable lyrics with a powerful synthesizer melody and lightning-quick breaks that keep the listeners on their toes, it’s the most memorable, danceable track. And if one Brat isn’t enough, there’s the remix album Brat and it’s completely different but also the same, with features from such names as Billie Eilish, Lorde, Carolina Polachek and more.

MELLODEATH Tapes Vol. 1 – Marshmello & Svdden Death

The first of Marshmello’s many genre-ranging releases this year (in a move away from pop-oriented dance back to alternative EDM styles), MELLODEATH Tapes is a five-track dubstep-metalcore EP. If that combination sounds like it goes the fuck in, that’s because it does: blending Marshmello’s future bass style with Svdden Death’s viciously heavy dubstep, each song oscillates between glittering highs and breakdown-filthy drops. The result is a rollercoaster of uplifting ferocity, the devastatingly heavy soundtrack to an electronic apocalypse.

The most brutal track, “Fireball,” achieves this by featuring metalcore band Crown the Empire, alternating drops and breakdowns in a riot-inducing fury, while on the other end is “Burn It Down,” featuring Jedwill and calling back to Marshmello’s Joytime era in its glittering, airy synths.

Negative Spaces – Poppy

Dropping not even a month ago, Poppy’s Negative Spaces shows that she’s a master at blending metal’s brutality with electropop—achieving what should be impossible with a level of artistry and skill that has elevated her to the top of today’s alternative scene. Lyrically, the album wrestles with finding the strength to carry on while mired in the trappings of negative spaces. I can’t gush over this album enough, but I tried to here.

Honorable mentions

You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To – Knocked Loose

Raw, brutal violence for your ears.

Hole in My Head – Laura Jane Grace

Beautiful chaos, biting political and social commentary, it’s just plain fun.

The Sun Comes Up – Louis the Child

Sun-drenched, joyful electronic dance-pop vibrancy.

Photo Credit: Spotify