It’s that most wonderful time of an admittedly not-always-wonderful year, when I make my list and check it twice, or thrice. (Well, if I’m being honest, I’ve checked this one, obsessive-compulsively, at least 45 times in the past week alone.)

I’m talking about my year-end best albums list, of course. And while the headline of this article spoils what my No. 1 pick is, whittling down 2024’s rich sonic bounty — ranging from Zeitgeist-capturing or downright culture-shifting modern dance-pop triumphs to stunning comebacks by four of my favorite legacy bands — to only 10 LPs was daunting.

Therefore… I have also included 45 very honorable mentions. So, keep scrolling, enjoy, and let’s do it all over again next year.

10. Primal Scream — Come Ahead

Over the past 35 or so years, Bobby Gillespie has segued from twee pop jangle to leather-sheathed punk to ambient to acid-house to industrial to dub to pub to Southern-fried classic blooze-rawk — all with surprising ease and credibility, creating some truly decade-defining (if not easily definable, genre-wise) albums along the way. For Primal Scream’s first official studio LP in eight years (following Gillespie’s country-tinged collaboration with Savages’ Jehnny Beth, Utopian Ashes, an old-school call-and-response divorce album that was No. 2 on my best-of list for 2021), Gillespie has now metamorphosized into a funk soul brother raised on A Certain Ratio — groovin’ and movin’ on string-laden, Stax-does-disco epics like “Ready to Go Home,” “Love Insurrection,” “Circus of Life,” and “Innocent Money,” and conjuring the perfect screamadelic soft-porn soundtrack with the bedroom ballad “Heal Yourself.”

9. Kylie Minogue — Tension II

Few pop stars as have enjoyed a career as dazzling and deserved as this impossible princess of reinvention, who after exploding onto the charts nearly four decades ago with her Stock Aitken Waterman-produced hi-NRG hits, pivoting to indie in the ’90s with Nick Cave and the Manic Street Preachers, and staging one of the biggest comebacks of the aughts with “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” pulled off yet another stunning comeback in 2023 with the surprise club banger “Padam Padam” and Tension. This year, the tension didn’t let up on that album’s sequel (and Minogue’s 17th album overall) — a slinky, sexy, sparky collection of irresistibly fizzy Eurodance anthems. I already can’t wait for Tension III.

8. Redd Kross — Redd Kross

2024 was The Year of Redd Kross (a celebration that’s been long overdue), with glam/punk/powerpop phaseshifters Jeff and Steven McDonald entering their “third act” by not only releasing a career-spanning documentary and oral-history-style memoir, but also returning from a five-year recording hiatus with their most ambitious effort yet: the 18-song, double-disc, red-velveteen-swathed Redd Kross. (Or The Redd Album, if you will.) And the despite their reputation for trafficking in ‘60s and ‘70s nostalgia, after 45 years Redd Kross still sound so ahead of their time — from the swirling, lava-lamp-lit psychedelia of “Candy Coloured Catastrophe” and “Emmanuelle Insane,” to the Bic-flicking power balladry of “The Main Attraction” and “The Witches’ Stand,” to their origin story “Born Innocent” (the Oscar-worthy end-credits theme song to their film of the same name).

7. Faux Real — Faux Ever

It’s almost impossible to describe this post-post-post-ironic electro-glam duo — shirtless, shag-haircutted, high-kicking, high-camp Franco-American himbos Virgile and Elliott Arndt, rock’s quirkiest brothers since the Maels — without instinctively lapsing into a Stefon-from-Saturday Night Live voice. This band has everything: Y2K boy-band choreography, heart-shaped Daisy Rock guitars that may or may not be plugged in, crop-tops, tongues forever planted in sculpted male-model cheeks, phallic flutes, amateur stuntwork, homoeroticism… and some of the greatest glossy-but-glitchy synthpop of the post-post-post-modern age. Faux Real fake it so real they are beyond fake. They’re desperate but not serious, yet also as serious as a sheer heart attack. And their debut LP, which the Arndts accurately describe as “an 11-piece symphony for headbanging and longing,” backs up their style with surprising substance.

6. The Dare — What’s Wrong With New York?

“Indie sleaze” is back, apparently, and in 2024, the Dare, aka Harrison Patrick Smith, almost singlehandedly brought back all those hazy memories of the aughts — that halcyon neon era of skinny ties, Karen O haircuts, Sparks drink binges, electroclash, nu-rave, and new-new-wave, when everyone looked good on the dance floor and had it captured for posterity by the Cobrasnake. Everything the Dare creates — including this year’s sexxxed-up, panty-tossing remix of Charli XCX’s “Guess” featuring Billie Eilish — sounds like something DJ Ultragrrrl would have spun at a Dim Mak Tuesday club night at the long-gone and much-missed Cinespace in Hollywood. What’s Wrong With New York? is so wrong, it’s right: obnoxious, stoopid, and just aggressively fun. And I am here for it. Pass me a can of Sparks.

5. The Libertines — All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade

“If you’ve lost your faith in love and music, the end won’t be long,” Pete Doherty slurred 22 years ago, in his cigarettes-and-alcohol Cockney rasp, on the Libertines’ thrilling debut, Up the Bracket. But at times it was hard for a Libs fan to keep the faith, as the shambolic band tragically (albeit fascinatingly) unraveled in real time in the British tabloids, and the end came way too quickly. The Likely Lads staged an unlikely comeback in 2015 with their third album (their first since 2004), the possibly-not-ironically titled Anthems for Doomed Youth, but then they went away again for another nine years. That’s why All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade is such an against-the-odds triumph. Carl Barat and the now-sober Doherty’s finest work since, well, Up the Bracket, the album showcases their innate intelligence and unending ability to create something fresh from their scrappy punk-/pub-rock influences (the Jam, Kinks, Who, Stones, Pistols, Pogues). The handclap-syncopated “Run Run Run” and guitar-chiming “Oh Shit” sound like the anthems of two starry-eyed Camden boys still in their twentysomething prime, while world-weary sea shanties like “Man with the Melody,” “Merry Old England,” and “Songs They Never Play on the Radio” reflect the now-grizzled Barat and Doherty’s hard-earned life experience and unbreakable bond. This album was truly slept-on (at least in America, where the Libertines could always get arrested in the literal sense but never in the figurative one), so give it a spin if you missed it.

4. Aaron Lee Tasjan — Stellar Evolution

A queer Orange Country misfit who cut his teeth in the NYC club scene as a founder of Lady Gaga-associated glam-rock trailblazers Semi Precious Weapons; later vamped it up in a revamped lineup of actual glam-rock originators New York Dolls; along the way rubbed glittery shoulders with Yoko Ono and Lydia Lunch; and then moved to East Nashville and found himself at the forefront of an alt-country revolution, Tasjan is the ultimate shapeshifter. And his aptly titled sixth album — a heady blend of rhinestone-cowboy heartland rock, grievous-angel folk, electric-lit-orchestral powerpop, John Hughes-soundtrack synthpop, ‘90s slacker indie, and wry, Petty wit — sounds totally of-the-moment, like the past, present, and future. It may not sound classically “country,” but it certainly is a classic.

3. The Last Dinner Party — Prelude to Ecstasy

It takes true audacity to open one’s debut album with a 96-second orchestral overture, but that’s a fitting introduction for these witchy-woman Brontë heroines, who have swashbuckled onto the scene fully formed and festival-ready with their maximalist coquette-core, trailing vintage silks and velvets and ribbons and pheromones and hormones in their wake. On the nonstop-erotic-cabaret that is their James Ford-produced debut, LDP truly go for baroque, evoking Country Life-era Roxy Music, nearly every era of Sparks, and a Gothic ABBA. But they also sound startlingly fresh and original, earning every column inch of their U.K. press hype. Hopefully this is the prelude to long and iconoclastic career.

2. The Cure — Songs of a Lost World

Robert Smith has always grappled with a sense of mortality and impermanence, but on the Cure’s first album since 2008, the aging icon’s reflections on love and loss just hit different. Songs of a Lost World is a work of sonic grandeur and melancholic majesty along the lines of its obvious companion album, Smith’s midlife-crisis masterpiece Disintegration. But this is only the second Cure album to have Smith credited as sole songwriter, so it also sounds like a record crafted in solitude, a deeply and devastatingly personal passion project. At age 65, Smith has experienced actual loss — the deaths of  his mother, father, and older brother — and his lyrics have become plainer, blunter, and arguably even more potent as a result. (“And Nothing Is Forever,” a deathbed confessional inspired by his real-life broken promise to be by a loved one’s side in that person’s final moments, just might be the saddest and sincerest thing he’s ever written.) An instant classic best listened to in a tightly curled fetal position, Songs is a stunning, absolutely expectations-confounding comeback.

1. Charli XCX — Brat

Forget about Brat Summer; 2024 was a Brat Year, and Charlotte Emma Aitchison was my girl for all seasons. It may seem cliché to pile on and choose the Metacritic-topper as my own No. 1 pick, but Charli is so much more than just some 365 partygirl; I literally believe she is a genius. While I’ve been a fan since her punky Sucker era, and have been fascinated by her artistic evolution over the past decade, it was the now-32-year-old hyperpop provocateur’s raw, starkly confessional lyrics that drew me in this year. On Brat, Charli boldly goes places that no pop star has ever dared or even thought to explore before. One moment, she’s brimming with swaggadocio on audacious it-girl anthems like “360” and “Von Dutch” and bumpin’ that on partystarters and floor-fillers like “Club Classics,” “365,” and “Spring Breakers”; the next, she’s opening up about her imposter syndrome and insecurities (“Sympathy Is a Knife” “I Might Say Something Stupid,” “Rewind”) or even tenderly contemplating motherhood (“I Think About It All the Time”) and wondering if her whirlwind clubbing lifestyle is ultimately meaningless and purposeless. Whether it’s the messiness of romantic entanglements (the looping love-triangle lament “B2B,” or “Talk Talk,” a relatably cringey account of her awkward early courtship with fiancé George Daniel); the messiness of female frenemy-ships (“Sympathy,” “Mean Girls,” and especially the uncomfortable honest Lorde remix of “Girl, So Confusing”); or generational trauma (the surprise TikTok hit “Apple”), Charli unflinchingly examines it all with a foxeyelinered wink though her vibrant Pantone 3507C lens. I will be bumpin’ this thinking-parytygirl’s collection of club classics for a long, long time.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

A Certain Ratio — All Comes Down to This

Adam Lambert — AFTERS EP

Amyl and the Sniffers — Cartoon Darkness

Beachwood Sparks — Across the River of Stars

Ben Platt — Honeymind

Beyoncé — Cowboy Carter

Billie Eilish — Hit Me Hard and Soft

Billy Tibbals — Nightlife Stories EP

Bleachers — Bleachers

Brigitte Calls Me Baby — The Future Is Our Way Out

Bright Light Bright Light — Enjoy Youth

The Black Crowes — Happiness Bastards

The Bug Club — On the Intricate Workings of the System

Childish Gambino — Atavista

The Dandy Warhols — Rockmaker

Dizzee Rascal — Don’t Take It Personal

Dua Lipa — Radical Optimism

Elbow — Audio Vertigo

Empire of the Sun — Ask That God

Ferry Townes — Side Effects of Happiness

Fontaines D.C. — Romance

Ginger Root —  Shinbangumi

Gossip — Real Power

Green Day — Saviors

Gruff Rhys — Sadness Sets Me Free

IDLES — TANGK

John Davis — Jinx

Judith Hill — Letters From a Black Widow

Justice — Hyperdrama

Kendrick Lamar — GNX

The Lemon Twigs — A Dream Is All We Know

The Midnight Cowgirls —  Midnight Cowgirls EP

Modern English — 1234

Molchat Doma — Belaya Polosa

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds — Wild God

Orville Peck —  Stampede

Pharrell Williams —  City of Limitless Access – Black Yacht Rock

Richard Hawley — In This City They Call You Love

Ride — Interplay

Sabrina Carpenter — Short ‘n’ Sweet

Sheer Mag — All Lined Up

Sleater-Kinney — Little Rope

Travis — L.A. Times

Wallows —  Model

X — Smoke & Fiction