We’ve already published our lists of the best albums and EPs of 2024, but picking the best singles of any given year is never as simple as choosing the highlights from these releases. There are both pop stars and indie artists that released solid, even great, albums that didn’t make the cut but featured at least one song – and not always a promotional single – worth placing on this list. There were watershed moments in pop culture that arrived just outside the traditional album format, celebrities making the internet go crazy with heated feuds and conflict-resolving remixes. There were cheerleaders and “vipers dressed in empath’s clothing.” There were songs designed for the present moment and others that took us back to when we were kids. Here are the 25 best songs of 2024.
25. Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, and Boys Noize, ‘CHALLENGERS [MIXED]’
Every Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score is a character in its own movie. But their soundtrack for Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers plays a uniquely propulsive role, especially compared to their more downbeat collaboration with the filmmaker on the subsequent Queer. It carries so much of what the film was hyped for, particularly its eroticism, which is barely depicted in the film but amped up in the language of throbbing techno – “like a heartbeat that makes the movie fun,” per the director’s instructions. When I went to the cinema to watch the film, fragments of the score had already been imprinted in my mind thanks to the Boyz Noise mix that had already come out. Running like a continuous DJ set, the producer condenses both the tension and runtime of the original soundtrack without sacrificing much of anything. His version of the theme is a little less slick, a little more disorienting, static seeping through the cracks. It’s an exhilaratingting romp all its own.
24. Christian Lee Hutson, ‘After Hours’
There are a few things Christian Lee Hutson’s ‘After Hours’ does really well. The first is building a unique image of heaven, stitching together ideas the singer-songwriter had at various points and letting them fall into place. The second is figuring out how music – this “weird angel band,” as he called it – might sound like in this place, from the perfect warmth of the guitar to Shahzad Ismaily’s bed of synths to Melina Duterte’s hummable trumpet section. And the third is filtering it all from the perspective of the song’s protagonist: someone who’s up there, writing to someone who isn’t. It blurs the line between memory and fantasy, this life and the next, magnifying the small things that slip through a wash of emotion. “Big budget productions of the lives of your loved ones/ The good stuff is behind a paywall,” Hutson quips. As the songwriter, of course, he can get right to it.
23. Porter Robinson, ‘Cheerleader’
Porter Robinson’s best songs tend to explode with dizzying synths and soaring melodies; that much is not surprising about ‘Cheerleader’, a standout from his latest album Smile! 😀. But beneath its anthemic sheen and bursts of adrenaline, what creeps through is a sense of toxicity: “It’s not fair/ ‘Cause I knew you like the back of my hand,” he sings, and it becomes clear he’s tackling the parasocial dynamic between fans and musicians. There’s a temptation on both sides – fame can be as addictive as any fan’s attachment to the person who owns it. But the hollow frustration it can leave behind, like any tangled relationship, doesn’t fully shine through until the song’s emo undertones rise to the forefront. “Now I feel you even when you’re not there,” both parties lament. There’s a good chance ‘Cheerleader’ won’t escape your mind, either.
22. Taylor Swift, ‘But Daddy I Love Him’
Brash, fanciful, almost outrageously self-aware – there are many songs on The Tortured Poets Department that share those same traits. But none handles them as deftly or viciously as ‘But Daddy I Love Him’: instead of invoking the heavy theatricality of ‘Florida!!!’ or the irony of ‘I Can Do It With a Broken Heart’, it finds Taylor Swift lassoing back to the country songwriting of ‘Love Story’ for a better sense of perspective. There’s greater maturity, sure, but also real venom for those who dare make judgment on her dating life. (She name-checks “Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best,” but “vipers dressed in empath’s clothing” is certainly one convoluted way of calling out overzealous fans.) Swift doesn’t take herself too seriously here, but the joke really lands when she fakes a pregnancy announcement: “Oh my god, you should see your faces.” It’s her own unbridled joy, though — lyrically expressed, yet beaming out of Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff’s dynamic production — that reinforces her version of the story, as evidently breathtaking as the love it defends.
21. Sour Widows, ‘Staring Into Heaven/Shining’
“There’s nothing in the wake/ Only the motions.” Sour Widows, of course, are singing about grief, a theme that towers over their debut album, Revival of a Friend. The band’s Susanna Thomson wrote the song following the passing of her mother in late June of 2021, realizing that the process is often less about picking apart the unanswerables than simply figuring out how to be alive and accept death at the same time – the mundanity and inconceivable weight of both things. ‘Staring into Heaven/Shining’ is an indie rock epic in the vein of songs like Ratboys’ ‘Black Earth, WI’ and Slaughter, Beach Dog’s ‘Engine’, which made our previous year-end lists, so it may have an unfair advantage. But there’s magic in surrendering to the song’s instrumental sprawl, as the singers do to the harsh reality of the morning – it lets a comforting fantasy slip, but at least letting go feels less heavy than you’d imagined.
20. Kim Gordon, ‘Bye Bye’
Leave it to Kim Gordon to turn a packing and to-do list into one of the most killer songs of the year. The Sonic Youth icon’s sly coolness and signature monotone do most of the work here, though producers Jeremiah and Justin Raisen’s abrasive trap beat provides an unnerving foundation. What’s in her suitcase, you might ask? Nothing that should really freak you out on paper: blue jeans, earplugs, medications. (“Pants to the cleaner,” she reminds herself, and then quite a bit later, hilariously, “Money for the cleaner.”) Despite name-checking clothing brands like Bella Freud and Eckhaus Latta, there’s nothing particularly luxurious about the whole production. Yet it’s both darkly and richly rewarding, winning you over without as much of a hint as to where she – or the audience – might even be headed.
19. FKA twigs, ‘Eusexua’
The first single from FKA twigs’ upcoming album begins by recognizing the titular feeling as indescribable, but tries its best through poetry: “King sized, I’m vertical sunrises/ Like flying capsized.” In press materials, the singer has likened the made-up word to “pure clarity,” like “when everything moves out the way, everything in your mind is completely blank and your mind is elevated.” The song, co-produced with Koreless and Eartheater, moves on to “the way we transcribe it, baby,” which is capable of crushing loneliness and reaching nothing short of transcendence. It’s enchanting and kinetic, but doesn’t need more than a propulsive beat and some spare keys to get there – call it blankness, or just minimalism. Although twigs begs the other person not to call this love, she can’t help but resort to that word in a moment of heart-wrenching vulnerability: “People always told me that I take my love too far/ Then refused to help me.” Too far, she makes clear, is a distance her music has no trouble traveling.
18. This Is Lorelei, ‘I’m All Fucked Up’
It takes some kind of skill to make “You little sick thing, you had your fun” the start of one of the most memorable refrains of the year. But the real magic of ‘I’m All Fucked Up’, a standout from Nate Amos’ first “traditional” LP as This Is Lorelei, is how the lines in between jumble through fragments of memory, resituating and assembling them in ways that shouldn’t fit such a purely infectious song. None of the lyrics follow a linear logic, yet the words flow intuitively, possessing the sort of interiority that only makes sense when you’re in dialogue with your younger self. “You hit the gas, yeah, your heart’s all play,” he sings. When the beat’s so irresistible, how could you not reserve some empathy for that old recklessness?
17. Father John Misty, ‘Screamland’
Over seven minutes, ‘Screamland’ towers with so much of what Father John Misty usually treats with skepticism, or at least a single layer of irony: faith, conviction, optimism even. It is the centerpiece of his sixth album Mahashmashana, and just as it reaches its peak, the song cuts off, as if Josh Tillman has only been pushing the boulder up the hill knowing he’ll leap back down, or be buzzed out of existence. “Keep dreaming,” is the plea he rhymes with the title, between a flurry of wild guesses, diaristic confessions, and admissions of what sounds like surrender. Low collaborator BJ Burton, who mixed the track, offers a glimpse into the fractured heaven Tillman might be angling around. Maybe the answer to the track’s conclusion lies in the lyrics: “Just drop your hands the way love taught you/ Ash-white and voodoo/ Deathless as a weed.” Well, love, or something that feels just enough like it.
16. Phosphorescent, ‘Revelator’
On the title track off his eighth Phosphorescent album, Matthew Houck reaches out from the pit of despair: creative, romantic, personal. Backed by gorgeous pedal steel, string arrangements, and Jim White’s patient drums, ‘Revelator’ nevertheless identifies weariness – “I got tired of sadness/ I got tired of all the madness” – as a turning point rather than an expression of defeat. While closed off from the world, the singer-songwriter remains open-hearted, if still hesitant about his ability to break through his own barriers. “I don’t even like what I write/ I don’t even like what I like,” he sings. When the time came for it to be released, however, he remarked, “I think it might be the best song I’ve ever written.” ‘Song for Zula’ still exists, but it’s hard to argue with that assessment.
15. Magdalena Bay, ‘Death & Romance’
The ampersand sign bears a visual resemblance to that of infinity, which may explain why Magdalena Bay titled their song ‘Death & Romance’. The Imaginal Disk highlight plays out a euphoric, disorienting, and eternal dance, one that’s as much about symbolic forces vying for dominance as it may be about the trajectory of a single relationship. Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin are all too aware that fluttering infatuation is never less than a breath away from its own collapse: the track is groovy, twinkling pop perfection, but the production is so dense it’s a wonder it manages to hold itself together. Why keep giving it your all when you’re so close to reaching a threshold? The bright, all-consuming joy the duo conjures is an answer in and of itself.
14. Young Jesus, ‘Rich’
Out of all the songs on this list, ‘Rich’ is the best song you might have overlooked. It serves as a kind of centerpiece on John Rossiter’s seventh album as Young Jesus, The Fool, yet it’s also the only track on the list that wasn’t released as a single (well, technically, the only non-single that didn’t debut at No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100). It’s a difficult and gut-wrenching listen, stirring up conversations indie artists sometimes have, but rarely center in such an unflinching manner in their music. Whether autobiographical or not, it begins with an admission of privilege: “I grew up rich/ And my daddy did too.” From there, it probes questions around what else can be inherited, genetically or intergenerationally: mental illness, trauma, talent? Things only get knottier the deeper he looks and the more familial characters he introduces, until he turns the gaze back to himself. “And the worst of it all is that art saved my life/ And the money did too,” he intones, recalling the first guitar he ever bought. His voice is manipulated in such a way that, actually, you’re not sure if he’s remembering, growing older, or becoming a kid again – free from all that baggage, if only for a little while.
13. Fashion Club feat. Perfume Genius, ‘Forget’
Forgive but never forget, the saying goes, a concept Pascal Stevenson expands and self-directs on the lead single off her sophomore album A Love You Cannot Shake: can you really achieve self-forgiveness by creating distance between the parts of yourself you needed to change and the version of yourself you’re aching to become? It’s tempting to strive for what seems like a simple erasure of memory: “It’s almost like the history isn’t mine,” Stevenson sings along with Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas, who certainly knows how to lean into the fragility of any kind of emotional endeavor, the brittleness of the human body. When she floods the song with light, the effect is scintillating, the question it reveals all the more daunting: “What if changing doesn’t change a thing?” As promised, though, it also provides a reason to be kind, even if that gentleness looks like shaking up your whole world.
12. Fontaines D.C., ‘Starburster’
‘Starburster’ may be a catchy and relatable song – frontman Grian Chatten was inspired by a panic attack he experienced in London’s St Pancras station – but it certainly feels peculiar. Chatten lets his dissociative spiral take the reins, while the rest of the band sways and swerves to keep up over a trip-hop beat: “I want to live the arc, I call the ends on it/ I wanna take the truth without a lens on it/ My God given insanity, it depends on it,” he raps, before drawing out the word “keel” as if to cast out a much deadlier impulse. Every sharp inhale hits like a jolt of anxiety, but the unfiltered mania is also somehow exhilarating. Fontaines D.C. have made nervy music in the past, but it’s never sounded quite like this.
11. Tinashe, ‘Nasty’
The sultriness of “I’ve been a nasty girl” is one thing. But when desire slips into desperation in one of the stickiest and most quotable lines of the year, you get why ‘Nasty’ became Tinashe’s biggest single, and one of the weirdest pop hits of 2024. “Is somebody gonna match my freak?” became a meme, in part, because the singer’s deadpan delivery could make it sound bored, sassy, lonely, or whatever feeling the listener wanted to project upon it. Beneath the surface, though, Tinashe’s sense of melody remains indelible, and she doesn’t need more than a minimal, slightly off-kilter beat to prop it up. Virality may not be the best path to success, but in Tinashe’s case, it’s long overdue.
10. Merce Lemon, ‘Will You Do Me a Kindness’
‘Will You Do Me a Kindness’ zeroes in on a wave of loneliness – it’s a feeling that comes “for a bit,” Merce Lemon admits, yet balloons into something vast and almost insurmountable. You try staving it off with mundane tasks – the company of a few friends or a book you never read – but no pastime can relieve it like the cosmic force she requests in the chorus: “Point the sun/ Right into my flesh/ I want/ Nothing left.” If the Pittsburgh singer-songwriter can make you believe that her loneliness feels like “a kiss that missed my lips,” then you might understand why the emptiness can feel so cathartic, a release contained in one of the fieriest solos I heard all year. The single demonstrates Lemon’s way with words, to be sure, but wants to let them rest – for a while, at least until the wave subsides.
9. Clairo, ‘Sexy to Someone’
Clairo may not be asking if somebody is going to match her freak, but the vibe isn’t too far off on ‘Sexy to Someone’. Our first glimpse into Charm wasn’t memed or streamed like the Tinashe hit, but it spins the warm intimacy that’s marked her past two albums into a velvety soul-folk jam we can all relate (and get dressed) to. For Clairo, feeling attractive is powerful if only because it provides a reason to get out of the house – one that’s also cozy enough to validate your decision to stay in, should that be your wish. If “sexy is something I see in everything,” as Clairo sings, wryly twisting the meaning of the whole song, you can’t really go wrong either way.
8. Jessica Pratt, ‘World on a String’
The lyrics to ‘World on a String’, like so many of Jessica Pratt’s songs, are a total mystery. But they are as meticulous, bright, and commanding as every other element of her music, spinning as if to challenge your very perception of the space-time continuum. Each tangle of words, dusted off by a gorgeous melody, strikes with steely precision: “I used to want for what your desolation hadn’t come by,” Pratt sings with ghostly innocence, before shifting to present tense. “I want to be the sunlight of the century.” It’s more comfortably understated and seemingly wistful than ‘Life Is’, the radiant orchestral pop tune that led Jessica Pratt’s fourth album, Here in the Pitch. But its iridescence seems to echo even louder.
7. Sabrina Carpenter, ‘Espresso’
Streaming numbers aside, ‘Espresso’ hit instantly. I remember listening to it for the first time the morning it came out and, before the chorus had come around, already thinking the title was apt. But caffeine as a metaphor for love? Well, that was bizarre. Then it became undeniable, like every one of its nonsensical yet matter-of-fact lines, which not only managed to rhyme “dream came true” with “Mountain Dew,” but turned both of those phrases into verbs, for whatever reason. It’s frothy pop absurdism done right, letting its nu-disco beat breeze through instead of running the show, which is all Carpenter’s. So what if she’s working overtime? ‘Espresso’ looks at most every song on this list dead in the eye and proclaims, “I can’t relate to desperation.” No wonder you find yourself hooked.
6. Adrianne Lenker, ‘Real House’
On Adrianne Lenker’s Bright Future, ‘Real House’ is followed by ‘Sadness as a Gift’, another contender for this list. The juxtaposition makes me wonder whether the album’s opener is “too heavy to hold,” what gratitude can still be wrought from its devastating melancholy. ‘Real House’ is spare to the point of formlessness, so viscerally raw it should qualify as a violation of personal space. (I have to clench my jaw just to brace myself for listening to the song, let alone write about it again.) But the space in the song, filled up by Nick Hakim’s reverberating piano and Lenker’s spoken word, is vast, encompassing childhood memories, dreams, and tears both figurative (like those “on the night’s face”) and remembered – seeing her mother cry for the first time. At the heart of the song, and maybe the most real and grounding thing about it, is the chasm of time separating its main subjects, mother and daughter: “I never thought we’d go this long,” she intones, addressing her directly. Is it time that floated along, you’re left wondering, or Lenker herself? Either way, the reward comes from weaving some kind of clarity out of darkness, which starts to feel a lot like home.
5. Kendrick Lamar, ‘Not Like Us’
In a flurry of diss tracks that got ugly more than just divisive, ‘Not Like Us’ was oddly unifying, an omnipresent rap banger that was unlikely in more than ways than one. Of all of Kendrick’s hits, how did the one with the line “Certified Lover Boy? Certified pedophiles” become the longest-running No. 1 song on the Billboard Rap chart history? Mustard’s euphoric, chopped-up production keeps the pulse going, but it’s Lamar’s flow that thrills no matter how many times you listen to it: ‘Not Like Us’ is an uneasy and knotty song, but the rapper drops one accusation after another with such ease and wild-eyed precision that it ends up more fun than it has any right to be. Its impact was immediate, and though it’s dulled since then, it also registers less as just another victory lap from Lamar – he did surprise us with GNX, after all – and more like a celebration of what brings hip-hop culture together.
4. MJ Lenderman, ‘She’s Leaving You’
In the verses of ‘She’s Leaving You’, MJ Lenderman describes the coping mechanisms of the type of guy we’ve all encountered in our lives – unless you’re the one. Maybe it’s a breakup, maybe it’s a midlife crisis (most likely both), but whatever it is, its dissolution is enough justification to self-prescribe renting a Ferrari and ranting in awe of Eric Clapton. “We all got work to do” is the central mantra, a refrain that keeps crawling up my mind, while the titular phrase is reduced to a ghostly echo – flickering a little longer thanks to backing vocals by Lenderman’s Wednesday bandmate and ex-partner Karly Hartzman, which rise to the foreground before the song ends. He can do it with a broken heart, but he’s hapless and lousy, and he won’t mind losing the spotlight as part of the fallout. Lenderman’s got enough empathy to render ‘She’s Leaving You’ as more of an anthem than a caricature, but he urges the dude to get going before the darkness becomes overbearing.
3. Chappel Roan, ‘Good Luck, Babe!’
The unrequited love at the core of ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ may be short-lived, but it’s world-shaking even in the grand scheme of things. The song eases the listener in with plaintive synths, which grant the cult-singer-songwriter-turned-megastar the necessary space to both sketch out the situationship and flex her vocal theatrics. But it’s not until the song’s monumental bridge that you understand the scale of it, as Chappel Roan jumps to the future to disrupt her ex’s bubble of compulsive heterosexuality. While she swoons in exasperation through the chorus – treating avoidance with just enough empathy to steer the song’s well-wishing away from the snarkiness of, say, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess’ ‘Casual’ – here her roaring falsetto transforms pent-up frustration into a kind of triumph. She purportedly hates to say “I told you so,” but the pleasure seems to be all hers. If only the world could keep up in time.
2. Waxahatchee feat. MJ Lenderman, ‘Right Back to It’
When it comes to laying flaws bare, no one wields language like Waxahatchee. Feeling a little guarded and non-verbal? “Reticent on the off chance/ I’m blunter than a bullseye/ Begging for peace of mind.” A bit of envy? “I’ll fall down into a fair game/ Lick a wound that was not ever mine.” But ‘Right Back to It’ isn’t about the shifting tides that tear a relationship apart so much as the thing that steadies it, the strange pull of stability. Katie Crutchfield’s graceful words and melodies unfurl with ease in the chorus, where she’s joined by MJ Lenderman, a duet that sounded freshly exciting at the time of its release yet somehow still weathered by time. “But you just settle in/ Like a song with no end,” they sing. The song ends, of course, but that only makes you want to come back one more time.
1. Charli XCX, ‘Girl, so confusing featuring lorde’
As a PR move, inviting the rumoured subject of a song to be part of the remix was risky, obvious, and ultimately brilliant. But as one of the defining moments of an album campaign that came to penetrate cultural discourse more for its marketing than the actual music, ‘Girl, so confusing featuring lorde’ was disarmingly, viscerally raw – even in the context of a record that was celebrated for its vulnerability as much as its bangers (of which ‘Girl’ is definitely one). On the original version, Charli XCX showed no interest in working it out with this other female pop star, not necessarily because of the specific dynamics of their friendship but because the conflict only served to validate her own, more existential cycles of anxiety, self-hatred, and self-defense. “We talk about making music/ But I don’t know if it’s honest,” she sings, but with such a public image and network to protect, how much of her own gut-spilling candor can we really accept as truth?
Lorde’s feature was transformative, clumsy, and electrifying. The honest part was undebatable. Could she really be singing the verse she apparently texted in its entirety to Charli, which totally warranted the response “Fucking hell”? The collaboration dismantled not only the perceived barrier between the two artists, but the very façade of carefree stardom, each “girl” and exclamation point as well as a stab of empathy. A.G. Cook’s nervy, clanging beat provides fuel for the drama yet is more gripping for the way it narrows the distance between the singers’ inner monologues. The song is not about two of the industry’s biggest voices coming together in perfect harmony; it’s no happily ever after. It cuts way deeper than that, broadcasting in real time insecurities that may not manifest identically for both parties, but are nonetheless shared and pervasive to countless more people whose lives look nothing like theirs. Who believe themselves to be something, but not quite. “I think I know how you feel,” more than a reach for compassion, is always a truly wild guess. Lorde and Charli make it feel worth the effort.