best of 2024 ♡ the era of craftsmanship is here
Kendrick Lamar accepting one of his five GRAMMYs of the night for “Not Like Us”
If there’s one thing that stands out after watching the 2024 GRAMMYs, it’s how insanely high the bar has become for excellence in music. It's not just with the music itself but across the full package, including songwriting, production, performance, and presentation – we’re witnessing a new golden age of pop.
Yes, GRAMMYs have been controversial over the years – yet I've always loved it for being a night of celebrating a full year of music. I used to make best of playlists curating my picks from the nominations, trends, personal favourites, and every end-of-year list I could find – from the unknown to the critically acclaimed. It's what absolutely stands out to me across music and catching zeitgeist.
Think of this playlist as a shortcut to anyone who wants to know what's up in music but doesn't have the 4 hour it takes to watch the GRAMMYs and the countless others it took to make this curation that originally counted over 1.596 songs edited down to my picks for the top 100 best songs of 2024.
This year's GRAMMYs played a different tune, and the overwhelming consensus it was an all around great edition worthy of the AMAZING year of music that was 2024. The best music of 2024 wasn’t just good—it was exceptional across: songwriting, performance, production, visuals, promotion, and strategy.
the year of POP domination
When we keep hearing how 'attention is fragmented' and 'mono-culture is over' there are three projects in 2024 that truly managed to do the opposite: Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX, Chappell Roan. As a many meme-maker has crafted, the dubbed Powerpuff Girls were the undeniable IT girls of 2024. These three overshadowed a year with strong releases from Ariana Grande, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and even Billie Eilish. What a feat.
The PowerPuff Girls of 2024 <3
Sabrina Carpenter's roll-out of Short & Sweet was flawless.
Her songwriting and performance were already top-tier since emails i can’t send (2022), but this cycle took her to the top. Sabrina's memorable and viral performances of the Nonsense outro from last cycle shows she cracked capturing and sustaining attention. The masterful launch of this cycle with Espresso at Coachella unlocked the last piece of the puzzle delivering the undeniable biggest hit of the year with Espresso topped off with three well-deserved GRAMMYs.
Charli XCX, an industry veteran, created a concept so compelling even presidential candidates couldn't resist Brat summer.
What made a good cycle better was when Charli released the same album again, but this time with perfectly picked celebrity features on every single track – arguably giving us the (second) best Billie Eilish track of the year.
You need to understand my vision. This is global. I will provide momentum and tell the story in a laser-focused way. We must execute everything with power and confidence.
The whole album campaign is high art. But it is also crucial to understand the benefit of low art and celebrity. The coupling of the two is vital.
– Charli XCX's BRAT manifesto
and ohmygod the sweet success of Chappell Roan, what a story for the ages. It truly was The Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess, and luckily for all of us – the glorious rise again.
The Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Princess
what. a. record.
She met her main collaborator Dan Nigro, famously Olivia Rodrigo's main producer, six years ago and they have made over 30 songs together. She got dropped by her label leaving her struggling without a safety net, something she called out in her GRAMMY speech for Best New Artist. It's well worth watching where she puts down her award with a pre-written speech calling out exploitation of artists causing quite a stir already. Catch up on NME >>.
She is an artíst like a Lady Gaga, Madonna or David Bowie – exceptional music paired with a bold and brave artist heart that both sets boundaries and pushes them. Following the album release in 2023, Chappell Roan was mostly known as your favourite artists' favourite artist as a nod to the obsession the industry had with her before her rapid and astronomical rise in 2024 (thank you Paul from The Line of Best Fit who put me on to her allowing me to follow along from late '23).
The way the public started falling for her was largely based on strategic live performances, initially the opening act for friend Olivia Rodrigo which kickstarted her exponential jumps in listens. Coachella is the moment the music fans start jumping on board and by the time she attracts the largest crowd Lollapalooza has ever seen (over 110.000!) her superstardom has become undeniable.
The way that the public and the industry has rallied behind these three: Chappell Roan, Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter tells me that everyone is tired of the narrative that we are all 'one life-hack away' from some great success.
Chappell Roan at Gov Ball
All three of them epitomise that "overnight success takes 10 years", literally because they have all been actively working on their craft for over 10 years.
Letting the Music Speak
In a year where Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, and Billie Eilish all release phenomenal albums and still get outshined by new talent to me indicates there's something worth exploring there.
Because in music it isn't just the music that matters. It's the music and how it is packaged with visuals, performances, and the general hype the cycle attracts. Having these behemoths deciding to let the music speak for itself this time around, isn't because they don't know the playbook – since they partly wrote it themselves.
Album of the Year winner Cowboy Carter – the most overdue GRAMMY finally made its way to Beyoncé. She famously released no visuals for this album, other than the album artwork, and her tour announcement just came now, almost a year after the release.
You don't last three decades in this industry without artist integrity and in a rare interview she explained her choice was to deliberately make the heart of this release the music and the intentional choices in every vocal and arrangement.
"during a time where all we see is visuals, that the world can focus on the voice. The music is so rich in history and instrumentation. It takes months to digest, research, and understand.
The music needed space to breathe on its own. Sometimes a visual can be a distraction from the quality of the voice and the music. The years of hard work and detail put into an album that takes over four years! The music is enough."
– Beyoncé in GQ
Taylor Swift got six nominations for The Tortured Poets Department and no wins. This mouthful of a title reflects an album that doubled in size on the night of release when the second part of the album The Anthology got dropped without announcement. Even the journalists didn't get a heads up so her first wave of reviews for these 31-songs tended to call the project "too long" and "unedited".
The outcome is this strange sensation that the biggest name in music released something that feels niche, and no one can convince me that wasn’t her intention. It has taken even her dedicated fandom, led by Rolling Stone's Rob Sheffield, months to realise that in this dense pile of poetry she's buried her best work for only her true fans to discover, namely The Prophecy and How Did It End?.
The most impressive feat might be how half-way through the wildly successful Era's Tour, she updated her setlist to include a set for The Tortured Poets Department era – and yet again, us Swifties thank her for her commitment to surprise and delight us all.
The fact that Ariana Grande can drop a no 1 album with a no 1 single and it still feels like she’s underperforming just says what a crazy bar she’s set. Eternal Sunshine has nowhere near the presence of thank u, next and while her performance is of course infallible technically, the rollout was underwhelming. The album hit hardest with true lovers of songwriting and music.
Now that we've seen the promotion of Wicked we can see how she's slightly moved on from her pop-girl era with her label clarifying there's no tour coming. It’s hard to blame her, she's famously been repeatedly snubbed for the industry’s biggest awards and accolades so it’s understandable she'd want to follow her heart to somewhere where they let her fully shine (she's already favoured for an Oscar for this role). She sure put in the work, famously started vocal training three months before her first ever audition for the role. Talk about commitment.
Billie Eilish has always been music-first throughout her whole career which has served her well. It's hard to call HIT ME HARD AND SOFT anything other than a runaway success with Spotify's most played song of the year in BIRDS OF A FEATHER. While some say she was snubbed this year, it seems like the Academy this year was rewarding innovation and while the record sure did hit hard and soft, it also was a natural progression of the work she has already done.
Her most memorable single was her first ever feature with Charli XCX's on GUESS. It was cool, it was modern, and it told us a little bit more about Billie.
To have these last three albums, so full of talent not get recognised at the GRAMMYs tells me that the Academy is looking to award cycles that go beyond the creative.
It's about the precision of the whole cycle starting with creative excellence that is then also seen as innovative and packaged in perfect momentum.
letting the truth speak
The GRAMMYs formalise the demolition of Drake after his misguided attempt at a rap-beef with Pulitzer-Price winning Kendrick Lamar by awarding the latter with Record of the Year and Song of the Year which probably actually stung less than having the entire crowd of music's elite shouting his A Minor line as he accepted his fifth award of the night.
If you don't know the backstory, it's a good one.
Finally Celebrating Songwriting
Songwriter of the Year, nonclassical, only became a category three years ago. Allen calls out in her speech how songwriters have always been the backbone of the industry.
"This is the third year that songwriter of the year has even been a category, so this award goes out to all the legends who soundtracked the lives and generations with all of our stories. You should have been able to receive your flowers back then.
Without us, there would be no songs for anyone to win awards for."
– Amy Allen acceptance speech at the 2025 GRAMMYs
Amy Allen is the first woman to receive this honour, and she sure has earned this accolade. Her credits include Espresso and Please Please Please off of Sabrina Carpenter's Short & Sweet; Adore You and Matilda off of Harry Styles' Harry's House, hit-single APT. by Bruno Mars and ROSÉ and over a 100 other hits with artists like Tate McRae, Justin Timberlake, Olivia Rodrigo and many others.
what’s coming
It might sound terrifying to some new artists to realise how the bar has never been higher. For others it has become fuel to strive for excellence. What the GRAMMYs did well this year is give every Best New Artist nominee a performance slot – and it sure was stacked this year. Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan we know already, but other stands-outs are:
Benson Boone had one of the biggest songs this year in Beautiful Things. The story with him goes he started gaining traction on a talent show – pulled out and then shut the world out for a couple of years. When he came back he had a look reminiscent of the rock stars of the 70s, a captivating live performance, and multiple hits under his belt. That's a student of the craft, that's for sure.
see her full performance here – it's well worth a watch
But Doechii stole the GRAMMYs this year. Her speech, perfect. The execution of her performance, flawless. Dropping a single on the night of the GRAMMYs with a cocky Kanye West reference, priceless. Hers is a well-documented journey to committing to her craft above all else – above the fan-fare, above external validation, and focusing first on the work.
Her single Denial is a River has not left my FYP since the GRAMMYs, she's all anyone wants to talk to me about. If you take one thing away from this piece, it should be the name Doechii.
from the Iceland dept
It is a joy to watch Víkingur Ólafsson finally get this highest accolade of music, only the forth ever Icelander to bring the golden gramophone home. He epitomises the thesis of this post, the quality of his work has been exceptional since childhood.
Víkingur was always a wonderkid when it came to the piano and has in recent years released renditions of the works of Debussy, Bach, and Mozart. He's been a pride of Iceland for a long time already, and now it's been truly solidified with this highest accolade brought to our icy shores. Congratulations Víkingur & team!!
The Era of Craftsmanship is here
My takeaway is that the bar has never been higher. It’s no longer enough to be a great songwriter or performer – it has to go beyond that presenting an entire package meaning presenting creative excellence with an innovative and brilliantely executed strategy. We’re officially in the Era of Craftsmanship. I think we're all happy to see the back of influencer-turned-artist attempts or our feeds flooded with cool-kid-copycats hiding behind obscurity instead of true artists going for it.
What's beautiful about craftsmanship is that it's something that is within our control. A deep-dive into the story of any person named in this piece shows how each made a choice to strive for excellence, go for the delusional, and dare greatly. While it's fun to celebrate the biggest stars in the world, there are also many life-changing wins that don't play out on the main broadcast – like Tony Succar's landing a win for Best Tropical Latin Album for a collaboration with his mother Mimy Succar who started her career only two years ago. Avery*Sunshine opens her acceptance speech on saying "what a way to punctuate my fiftieth year of life" for her first GRAMMY ever win for So Glad to Know You.
If we are seeing it takes over a decade to break to the top then the future of music depends on continued investment in true talent and the teams that support them – just like Chappell Roan said in her speech.
My best of 2024 playlist might look like a collection of obvious zeitgeist-dominating singles of the year, and there sure are plenty in there, but they are mixed with new discoveries from around the world.
Its curation is a means of storytelling where sequencing matters just as much as song selection – and the song selection was brutal, as for every one song included more than 15 got cut. Every song is special and deserves a listen, and that's why the playlist is not in a ranked order but designed for a full listen all the way from track 1 to track 100. It's curated to be an enjoyable listen for anyone from passionate music nerds to busy parents with screaming kids in the car.
It feels wild to not have specifically shouted out the releases from Kacey Musgraves, RAYE, The Vaccines, Gracie Abrams, beabadobee, and SZA because they were all excellent. The biggest discoveries for me putting this together are Coco Jones, Maggie Rose, Muni Long, and Kenya Grace. My Icelandic standouts for 2024 are Emmsjé Gauti, Emilíana Torrini, Katla Yamagata, Kári Egils, Arny Margret, Svavar Knútur, Kælan Mikla and Bang Gang.
I must also declare bias with my work as artist manager for Elín Hall, Baldvin Hlynsson and Magnús Jóhann – counting my blessings everyday to work with talents whose work I genuinely love. In 2024 my favourite songs include tracks made by them released under Elín Hall, mammaðín, Una Torfa, MAIAA, Camryn Quinlan, and Magnús Jóhann.
The selection is across indie-pop, alternative, and electro-pop as the genres I personally am most drawn to. Expect contrasts from the up-beat to the introspective but what they all have in common is having created their own stand-out moment of excellence in craftsmanship in music and its presentation in 2024.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did putting it together.
