Sourhouse Albums of the Year 2024

It’s incredibly difficult to comment on the quality of projects like this, when it’s known that Sophie was unfinished and will never get to be completed by the original artist. Sophie’s posthumous self-titled therefore can’t carry the same intensity as her previous releases, and struggles from the missing elements she had yet to bring in. So too is the ordering a salvage job, forced at points, like all of the album lacking something of a final going-over in her absence. But, there is absolutely no denying that her spirit remains untampered by her passing. It is incredibly touching that those closest to what this project would have been were allowed to give it to the world, clearly making the effort out of love instead of profit. Through this, Sophie’s 6th sense ability to give shape to sound ricochets throughout, especially as the energy ramps up throughout that middle section and comes close to the classic sets of hers she blew so many of our minds with. We’ll never know what Sophie was truly meant to sound like, but this is a place to find closure, and that’s good enough for someone whose legacy will continue to course through so many of the sounds today.

There’s a considerable risk of pastiche when you put the Big Apple so front and centre of your album’s aesthetic. But Been Stellar have become adept at using their home city as a backdrop, making a sound unabashedly lifted from some of its most famous acts. On Scream From New York, NY, the band embrace pure turn-of-the-century indie rock indulgence, right down the blue-washed album cover and strikethrough on their name. Embrace it; they’re in on the trick, and they use it to tell stories of young lust and longing in a place so established by its stereotypes. Deft production gives this a concrete-strewn twinkle to decorate an underbelly that hums and thrums with flannel shirt moodiness. Sam Slocum’s androgynous vocals are the perfect accompaniment for a record that so earnestly wants to be your new melancholic soundtrack. Fear not about anything being contrived here, for the band have an intelligent reading of their influences and intricate lyricism that peels away from pretentiousness. There’s a desire here to add another entry to alternative rock’s New York canon, no matter if this has no intention to end up being a classic. It’s got the credentials, and that’s what really counts – cool, urban, face up with the grime, toughness and romance its setting demands.

The Bob Vylan experience remains at its best when heard live. But Humble as the Sun is certainly the duo’s most forward and most accomplished release to date, intent on breaking the habits of a downtrodden nation with a defiance we’ve lacked for years. They’re not the first act to try something like this, but to frame it so squarely in the racial experience of modern Britain hems this tightly to the issues of the day. As do the direct references to numerous cultural items: structural racism in the police, the blight of trigger-happy men who do coke every weekend, and Top Gear. Nothing is left to nuance and everything is spoken directly. Some will find it too obvious – I have frittered with that aspect in the past – but to deny that they have a cadence would be wrong. More fundamentally, it matters little when you’re at one of their gigs, and the bass is harder, and the drums are heavier, and the mosh pit is beckoning. Bob Vylan are the most important band in the country right now by virtue of reminding us that racism is not just something we talk about at DEI training sessions. It remains the real, lived experience of millions. One hopes they’re able to receive more attention just so we can clock who gets pissed off by them.

It’s a little much to ask one band to take down the increasingly opaque boundaries between the brand and the self, and perhaps that’s why some still find Bodega to be a little too on the nose with the joke. A bunch of Brooklyn hipsters being ‘self-aware’ with their music? Thankfully, this is the band’s third studio outing, and they’re well aware of the reality that they’re not at the forefront of any revolutions. Indeed, Our Brand Could Be Yr Life finds a lot of time for melancholia, less reliant on the whiplash sharpness of some of their earlier material.

Consumerism is so obvious to criticise that we sometimes forget what an absolute drag it is on all existence. On the three part centrepiece ‘Cultural Consumer’, the lackadaisical horror of an unbearably safe world created by the “10,000 books I’ll never read” and accusations of “I can’t believe in the fact that you’ve never heard of that” presents the record’s main take: how can a world full of so much horror and urgent issues be muffled so much by marketing? Some takes on these matters end up far too cheap for their own good. Bodega never declare themselves as anymore than commenters, maintaining their Kim Gordon-coolness and everlasting tongue-in-cheekness.

Have a read of Soul-net.co and feel your mind begin to melt. I’ve been to many depths of conspiracy theories in the time that I’ve had access to the internet, but ‘rosicrucianism’ is one I’ve never made it to. JFK was a member, apparently. You’ll have to scroll a fair way down to find it, past a hell of lot of other conceptions I’ve never made, and that’s before you get to the section about how ‘atoms are alive’. DIIV aren’t advocating for any of it, but in a period of extremities, they’ve gone the full length to express the fears of a time where all information can be known and you only have the primal instinct of trust to decide whether you believe in what’s reflected back at you. There’s fun to be had with the irony and bluster of those who propagate such ideas, which the band utilise well, but the forever-paranoia below the surface is real and all-affecting.

Frog In Boiling Water’s sound is big but not heavy, its medium slow but explorative, a gradual descent into a sub-world, hidden in plain sight and only capturable on DV camcorders and frenzied social media posts. What you see is what you believe, and what DIIV’s work gives back to you is the deep rooted apprehension of the age we’ve woken up in. Shoegaze taken out of its romantic familiarity and reupholstered with Post-Grunge firmness. When it’s easier than ever to witness peoples’ abilities to be convinced, the analogy of the album’s title is like a sledgehammer. We all instinctively believe the side that we’re on is the one that history will judge as correct. But perhaps we’re falling for the tribal trap. What if the beast of the information age is the bubbling water, that we’re happy to sit in as it boils us alive?

Rema’s ambition to build a truly global dance sound fuels the underlying act of HEIS. Self-styling as a villain breeds no evil here: it’s staged with craft and a knowing wink. Not a moment of his second album, however, is pantomime. I bet you to find anyone who doesn’t find Afrobeats danceable, but this of course is Afrorave, and Rema is dead serious about creating something with an unceasing commitment to sweat and movement. There’s a resplendent density to all of the song writing, packed and eclectic, yet eschewed with a composite lightness that allows it to move with agility. Afterall, those drums demand it, only heightened with the tension created by those wicked artificial elements (I will never turn down an orchestra hit, okay). It’s no wonder that other reviewers have noted that HEIS feels like a record created live and meant to be experienced live, truly living up to that rave moniker and claiming it in a new context outside of pills and strobe lights. Swagger abound yes, but never ruled by ego; the need to move your body trumps all.

It’s not that twenty-somethings necessarily have it any harder than anyone else in the twenty twenties with everything seemingly costing ten times more than it ever has. But, as a member of that demographic, the wrecking ball that renting takes to everything in your life is my lived experience. My flatmates and I have come to the horrifying realisation that we don’t have enough space in our current flat, and it’s still £400 a month each for the privilege. Exactly As It Seems isn’t all about the rental market, but it does treat it as something of a foundation of a lot of other woes. The long awaited debut album from the London outfit soundtracks a generation desperate to get away from Britain’s endless classification by class, yet wholly swallowed up by it. Rackings with fame, arrogance in music circles and musings on FOMO come along for the ride.

The solution? A bright, full-bodied sound that oozes New Wave cool and delivers it with a wonky, off-kilter sensibility. Wicked vocal effects meet gleaming melodies, with the outstanding production playfully gelling it all together with their satirical sensibilities. It’s supremely confident and backed by a fantastic sense of rhythm, many cuts bordering on out-and-out dance numbers, creating something that builds on the strengths of its contemporaries yet is very much a unique brand. No wonder they’ve managed to get an inclusion on the latest FIFA soundtrack (sorry, ‘EA Sports Football Club 25’, forgive my insolence).

On paper, Home Counties spend 37 minutes having a big old moan about everything wrong with the world. But when projected through such a confident sound, the end result is an opportune, inversely romanticised imagining of the times, Red Stripes and night buses decorating the reality of paychecks being dissolved by bills. 

The Texas of This Could Be Texas doesn’t bear much resemblance to the infinite sky of the cowboy state. Then again, the question it asks of modern Britain is much less about substance and far more about application. “Blame the council, not the rain”; a structural assessment of the times, in which English Teacher find a heavenly melancholia. Much like the myriad of problems our country faces, the album is a collage of ideas and explorations, strung together with a Slint-style emotional resonance. Every cut has an immense scale, always willing to change it up, always willing to throw something else into the mix, such that even the shortest tracks can feel like progressive rock numbers. A big album then, especially for a debut, and one that can sometimes feel in need of more visible landmarks to build itself around.

But listen closer, and you find them. The tapered riff on the coda of ‘I’m Not Crying, You’re Crying’, the renewed version of ‘R&B’, the lowly pain of ‘You Blister My Paint’. If some records on this list are pummelling energy into finding ways to reimagine our times, English Teacher serve a potent reminder of the every day. Even more so when this album has been years in the making, singles stretching back to the start of the decade, further doubling down on the fact that the gripes they sing of are not immediate issues, but rather the result of years of mismanagement. Long though it is in form, in its strongest moments, their song writing is wildly engaging and inspired, a record to bathe in and let its subtlety be your affirmation.

Yes, that is a KLF reference in the album title. 34 years on, ‘3AM Eternal’ remains one of the most towering and iconoclast achievements of the Justified Ancients’s whole project, and of the Acid House era, a triumphant, intrepid and affirming dedication to nocturnal dance culture. In the present, Confidence Man’s mockumentary-esque caricature of a nineties House duo, reimagined queerer and all done with love, has reached something of a moment of self reflection. For all their brilliance when being comics, they have always possessed an immense talent to make bumping, pulsating dance music. 3AM (LA LA LA) loudly blasts that insane album cover in your face, and still rocks the wonderfully shallow lyricism of before, but doubles down hard on being a 12 track party mix. They too now want to pay their respects. 

To do it, they’ve pulled off something truly impressive in managing to nail the same tone that borders on the ironic yet winds up being deeply moving. So too do they draw from the same fundamental belief that, whatever statement you makee with it, House music affirms the human need to dance in a way few genres have been able to maintain to the extent it has. 3AM, first and foremost, is a celebration. The rush of being almost slightly too inebriated. The safety and certainty in where the music is taking you. Less than just aiming for euphoria, Confidence Man worship at its altar and pay homage to what it does to us.

The brilliance of their aesthetic, seemingly wilder and funnier every time they make an appearance, feels as though it’s never been working as well as right now. That sense that, even if they’d only ever sold a handful of records their sound would still convince you that they’d made it to the big leagues, bangs louder than ever. Less than relying on stronger tracks as before, every cut is as enormous as the last, begging for you to be dancing to them at one of their bombastic shows. Everything you love about the genre gets the love it deserves here – pumping Technotronic-esque sweat makers, druggy dancefloor thumpers, and huge trip-inducing anthems. Far beyond on any risk of just being a nostalgia trip, 3AM’s foundation comes all from the love it knows you share for 128 BPM nirvana.

Being queer has been a rollercoaster in the last few years. Politically, it’s increasingly dire, whilst many voices in the media continue their haranguing of transgender people at every turn. But musically? Tell me we haven’t been given the dream soundtrack of resistance. Heat encapsulates the attitude of the times; what we can’t solve in the day, we can dance away in the night. Sweat will always be a commonality for queer sounds, and would you just look at Lo’s glistening body rocking that cover art? I’m not kidding when I say that this was the final straw in me not rolling my jeans over. I haven’t bought the chainlink underwear to match – yet.

Four tracks of thumping, sweltering, intelligent cuts grace Lo and Lewis’s collaborative EP, each as horny and cunty as the last, drawn from an unbiased reading of noughties Euro Club sensibilities. ‘Busy Girl’ is as Ian-Carey-meets-Bodyrox as it gets, whilst personal pick ‘Desire’ makes it to Hedkandi heaven and beyond. Heat sees no other world than dancefloor escapism, a 15 minute diversion to post-12am euphoria and the places homophobic politics will never reach.