Seeing the wood through the trees of the current plethora of pop acts isn’t easy. For every genuine star of the current resurgence, the industry has tried launching five others to cash in. 

Addison Rae has her work cut out, but she’s made the right move. Addison is pop perfection because it does the basics fantastically. Big hooks, bold production and plenty of personality. None of what she is doing is revolutionary. But when they’re trying to tell us that Gracie Abrams is supposed to be ‘good’, or that Benson Boon has generational vocal talent, or that anything Tate McRae does is actually listenable, Rae sounds like an industry veteran in comparison, not a breakthrough act.

Addison is more than just pop perfection in its writing, though. It’s sort of, well, everything – a bit of 2010s Charli XCX, some turn-of-the-century Britney, the crisp mixing of Ariana and the lustiness of Lana’s poppier material, all rolled into one. Your brain tells you she’s drawing too much from the past, and yet you cannot deny how fresh and authentic this thing feels. There is so much brawn to everything she touches, refusing to let even the quieter moments not be seductive. When she is so present on every cut, the translucent nostalgia of Addison’s sound is less hindrance and more “Oh, she knows her stuff”. 

Rae has never shied away from her ambition; she’s always made clear that she wants to be a star. Pulling that off requires at least some ego. This, however, is the debut album of someone who genuinely loves pop music, and isn’t just in it for the fame.

Debut of the Year

I don’t recall the last time I listened to an album that’s been praised by a bishop, but let Xabier Gómez García’s words explain it: this is a record about “the desire, the thirst [to know God]”. On LUX’s album cover, no ground is in sight, only sky and Rosalía, enclosed in angelic white. Listening to it only confirms that none of what’s going on here exists in the tangible world: this is one of the most ambitious examinations of faith that mainstream music has ever witnessed.

Rosalía conceived of LUX by associating each track with a female saint, forming a truly unique venture that converses with the conceptualising of women in religious contexts. When every track ascends its own mountain, it is as if she is attempting to reach the same bestowed heights as these figures from history, reckoning with the lives they actually lived and the confinement through the acts they are remembered for. It is a deep exploration of femininity in the eyes of those who would define it, and the efforts required to define it on your own terms.

LUX is also truly unique in its musicality, a Romantic period opera blended with the sharp, Latin pop sounds she is known for, plus lyrics in *14* different languages. It is quite unlike anything you have ever heard, far beyond the influence even of other Classical Crossover projects. To call it anything less than seminal would be profoundly unfair. Even if you find it pretentious, it is rare for something this ambitious to survive contact with reality. Far from it; in one bold, near-crazy, awe-inspiring move, Rosalía has staked her right to know what higher power means.

“They’re touring America at the moment” my boyfriend’s dad tells me one October weekend. ‘They’ are a Cardiff band who make the sort of fuzzy, jangly guitar stuff I go feral for, and, somehow, they’ve slipped by me. Take this as an apology for my ignorance, as one listen of their second LP beggars belief that they aren’t bigger.

Cotton Crown is filled with bright, kick-with-the-fray melancholia, its vibrancy and buoyancy a cover for the heartbreak and self-loathing of its lyricism. Every track runs on infectious energy and bountiful rhythm. Owen Williams and George Nicholls’s twee vocal harmonies on many of the cuts only add to the downtrodden warmth.

It’s clear that the band are well-read on Jangle, as the record takes it well away from the cleaner outings its more recent patrons have tried in the last decade. I’ve had plenty of time for those releases, but to take it down the route that bands like The Wedding Present and Teenage Fanclub had success is a welcome break. Their sound glows with the overshirt-wearing recorded-in-a-dusty-basement rawness of late eighties, early nineties indie that thrived on both sides of the pond, and they deploy it to the same level of success.

A comment on the album’s Bandcamp page sums it up aptly: “catchy chorus[es] with absolute downer lyrics”. You know exactly who you are if that sounds appealing. And if that is a Sonic Youth reference in the album title, it only makes me love this thing more. I’ll see you at their next hometown gig.

Touch wood, as it stands, The Last Dinner Party have survived the second album hurdle. Their fans and the press haven’t eaten them alive, there doesn’t appear to be any internal drama, and crucially, they’ve made another record of note. From The Pyre democratises the band and sees every member freer to explore their own ideas. No longer are they just a five piece indie outfit, they’re taking on the qualities of a collective. I finally got to see them live at the end of November, and their stage show says it all. Their costuming, every bit of choreo, every new instrument they brought out; each feels like its own contribution, and all intertwine to form a whole.

That being said, From The Pyre is not the coven ritual its name might suggest (save for those manic, fantastic chants on ‘Woman Is A Tree’). Nor is it ceremonial. It comes across far more as music drawn out of the flames, each song a fable, compared to the greater statement of femininity and gender that their debut was. Those themes are not lost, but on this occasion, the grandeur of their baroque is better balanced with personability. Wrought most notably through their stunning vocals, the band carry themselves with colour and poise throughout, songs bustling with instrumentation, resonant and bucolic.

No longer inhibited by any new-band-nerves, The Last Dinner Party have found a majesty on From The Pyre that makes for one of the year’s richest, most flowing listens. Baroque Pop may come with such qualities as standard, but to bring them to life requires vision and personality. Clothed in the ruffled fabrics of their stage outfits and painting with earthy brushes, the band have emerged as a pinnacle of the music made by a generation raised on Tumblr. You will find no better soundtrack to romanticise your life too today.

That’s Mercury Prize winner Sam Fender right there baby. In spite of how middle class the award remains, seeing him win was a truly special moment. Not least because he was completely gobsmacked on stage.

It’s always good too when the award chooses an album that represents the times. People Watching is a Loachian portrayal of 2020s Britain, the constant swing between dolor and triumph rendered through his characters and his own revelations. There’s always been hardship behind all of Fender’s music, something he mastered from his love of Springsteen. On his third LP though, it feels more street-level and more dramatised than ever before. Injustices are interwoven into his storytelling; he’s more keen to capture the lives of those ignored by our political class than to shout about it in Parliament Square.

Working with Adam Granduciel of The War On Drugs has been a revelation, adding spirited motion to Fender’s Homeland Rock sound. He was already making music for big festival crowds, but with this collaboration, he’s found a new subtlety that truly relieves him of ever being stuck in an Indie act death spiral. 

Fender does not resent that his music hasn’t changed the world; indeed, with each release he has seemed more focused on affecting the lives of those around him. In this way, People Watching feels more consequential than political albums of the Post-Brexit New Wave because it will never be judged against changing the times. Our country is a complete state, but Fender’s undying love for his native Tyneside is a lens through which to share in both the pain and hope that Britain experiences.

The world has finally got it. CMAT’s dry, dross, pitch-perfect writings of heartbreak and self esteem issues have broken through to the masses. It’s crazy that it’s taken so long for her to get this big. Two stellar albums, including Sourhouse’s #2 of 2023, had seemingly dropped without anyone but a small slice of the queer community noticing. Not any more. Friends talk to me about how much they love CMAT. My dad loves CMAT. You nan probably does too.

Euro-Country is no less accessible than her previous works, but it is certainly her most advanced yet. She has nailed her knack: songs about big hearts in a world that promotes isolation. The diary-quality of her lyricism, both in subject matter and in her quirky humour, create a prescient narrative of what actual individualism looks like – the creative side, the human side – compared to capitalism’s self-exceptionalist tendencies. It’s an album for our times.

It helps too that she’s just such a fucking character. I urge you to check out her live performances from this summer, any clip will do. Big, obtuse harmonies fill her songs – fuck needing them to sound angellic – complementing a wry blend of Country and Indie instrumentation. In truth, the greatest success is that despite what a laugh her music is, none of this is a joke. No one crafts an album cover as camp and electric as that without winking to the audience. As they say, if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.

Charli wanted us to have a Turnstile summer, and lo, I did. Hardcore music doesn’t exactly exhume those vibes – unless you think it should stay in a straitjacket. Apparently, enough people do for there to have been serious, ongoing discussion as to whether the band that literally formed from the sweat on the walls of the Baltimore Hardcore scene are still ‘hardcore’. What, are flute solos and dance breaks too fucking complicated for you? You are listening to the same record, right? The one that still leads unrelentingly with the energy of their massive rhythm sections?

Purists be damned to their own misery. NEVER ENOUGH carries the torch lit with 2021’s fluid, wildly entertaining GLOW ON and takes it to new, achingly realistic breakup album territory. The accompanying short film, filled with lush imagery of slow-mo jetskits, twilight beach walks and sun-baked settings certainly help the hot weather credentials. But what really made it a Turnstile summer was its melancholy, warm psychedelic currents crashing against the hardness of those guitar tunings and drum machine beats, an apt companion for a year where the world has been burning. So easily do they move from the direct, immediate energy they have honed to fascinating new territory that the smoothness of the project is genuinely astounding. 

Turnstile’s ability to take the mosh urgency of Hardcore into the thoroughly metaphysical is unrivaled. On their fourth LP, they take a risk, happy to lack as many big hitters as their past works in order to realise a rug-pulling, psychotropic and adventurous expression of heartbreak. Not one moment of NEVER ENOUGH doesn’t leave you desperate for more, Brendan Yate’s narrative abilities having never been stronger, and the band’s vision never more confident.

For months, I had been ready to put Eusexua on this list. One of my all-time favourite artists had dropped a rave-ready album exploring the conceptual, philosophical side of the dancefloor, packed with jaw-dropping cuts and accompanied by mesmerising visuals. And then it turns out that what was going to be a deluxe version of the album isn’t really a deluxe version at all. It’s a whole new album, rescuing material from the tracks leaked back in 2023, with even more jaw-dropping cuts, accompanied by even more mesmerising visuals. Thus, in the wake of achieving Eusexua, one finds their Afterglow.

Twigs means business. It’s rare for someone of her sheer presence to feel like she’s making up for lost time, but Afterglow is urgent, direct, a striking vision fully realised. Where Eusexua could be forgiven for its lack of cohesiveness, this thing is like liquid, stimulating all senses and all frequencies, sometimes at once. It rocks an entrancing, ethereal production style, so minute in some places, thundering with the gods in others, all swelling and contracting with alien quality. Everything here either makes you move or strokes your psyche. We’re still in the club alright, but Twigs has taken her reimagining of the gaps in between to an even more lucid quality. Alice is through the looking glass, and she’s thoroughly tripping.

Which leads nicely on to the other great thing about this album: Twigs is weird again. Digitised one minute, angelic the next. She morphs into impossible shapes, extrapolates the most beguiling of sonic designs, all to the backdrop of pulsing club beats. Some of her fans have begged for years for a return to the experimental, avant-garde sounds of her early career, despite the fact that she has never lost her alien, otherworldly quality. But this was the right time to do it, the rave-inspired outlook she is utterly immersed in prime material to be respliced with her body-bending, cyberwitch touch.

It’s also clear how much Afterglow means to her with what she’s done to her voice. Never has it been so deep in the mix, melding with each track, sometimes completely blended in via effects. Combined with refinding her strength in sonic textures and abstractness, it feels like a true reconnection with what has made her so entrancing from the start. Each track is a technical delight and awe-inspiring experience in its own right.

It cannot be understated too how brilliant it is watching her collaborate with her partner, photographer and director Jordan Hemmingway. Their connection, and what he brings to Twigs’s mandatory requirement for a complete audio-visual package with all of her music, has imbued her with newfound confidence. She has never been captured better, nor has she been able to execute her vision to such a level thus far.
Perhaps this record is what Eusexua was intended to be originally. But in spite of what she has suffered, Twigs has achieved a rare beauty in this day and age: an artist building on their work in real time, recovering from the kinks of a work whose birth was complicated by track leaks and personal health. Afterglow does nothing to overpower its predecessor; it completes it, turning ‘Eusexua’ into ‘The Eusexua Era’. It was incredible enough the first time round watching Twigs take to dance vocals like she had been foolish not to try them before. To have two albums worth of it within a year is nothing short of remarkable.

Personal favourite

Reggaeton albums are not supposed to be noteworthy. Or at least that’s how the music industry in the West would want you to think. Just consider how much work has been done – and is still required – here in the UK to deconstruct our colonial prejudices of Caribbean and Latino peoples. Yet, those at the top of our industry continue to malign Latin music, the prudes who run the labels and Capital FM only ever permitting whitewashed interpolations of it (*cough cough* ‘Shape Of You’). Reggae and Dancehall, despite their enormous popularity here since the seventies, are not embraced by those in charge.

Growing up in that environment therefore conditions you to disregard a genre like Reggaeton, the faster, louder, dembow-powered cousin of the ones mentioned above, proudly pioneered in Puerto Rico, despite it being the backbone of the pop scene of the Latin world. Welp, a Reggaeton album has just made Bad Bunny the most streamed artist on planet earth again, and to disregard what he has and is continuing to achieve with it is blatant ignorance.

Tricky though, because I only have a limited number of words, and Debí Tirar Más Fotos (I Should Have Taken More Photos) is a gargantuan album. A Reggaeton record, yes, but one that uses it to loop in a symphony of other styles: Salsa, Bomba, Bolero, Perreo, the old traditions of Plena and the right-now of House. A comprehensive portrayal of Puerto Rico, the magnitude of which it has been denied for centuries, expressed via the intricacies of Benito’s relationship with his home country. An urgent, essential statement against American imperialism, including the accompanying No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí concert residency at the José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum in San Juan, and an outright refusal to tour the album in the mainland United States. 

It’s no wonder the conservatives across the pond are so upset at Benito being given the Super Bowl Half Time slot. His ludicrous, infectious live energy will make it essential viewing as is. But what will really confirm it as one for the ages is that it will be the intercept of the US government’s appalling rhetoric against Latin American peoples with the reality that the United States is a Spanish-speaking country, neighboured by the Spanish-speaking world to its south. The backlash he’s already received says it all: his Half Time show booking is an offence to the white nationalist worldview.

Across 62 minutes, Benito constructs a songbook, pouring in feelings of joy, pride, regret, love, heartbreak and hype. It is a truly all-encompassing listen: the sweet, impassioned grief in the Salsa rhythms of ‘Baile Inolvidable’; the mindbogglingly addictive club banger ‘Veldá’, which I have been unable to go without listening to for days on end; ‘Turista’ and ‘Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii’s grounds-up, street level perspective on American imperialism; the braggadocious, sex-charged ‘Eoo’, being followed by the contrition, affirmation and warmth of title track ‘DTMF’. At its most pertinent, the record makes for some of the most important listening of the year. At its most energised, it contains some of the most eminently danceable music of the decade.

Benito, for all the seriousness required to pull off a record of this scale, effuses care-free charisma on every cut. He is impossible to counter: a complete performer, intelligent songwriter, ardent collaborator, slick, sharp, witty and unbearably attractive. He is more than just talented; he is the exact kind of talent we need right now, a bastion of flair and fluidity against the straitjacket of conservative aesthetics. Ask yourself why those snowflakes are so threatened by him that they’re arranging an ‘alternative’ Half Time show that will “spotlight faith, family and freedom”, as if the monobloc chairs on the album cover don’t convey exactly what family means. 

On YouTube, the visualisers for each song form a slideshow presentation of the history of Puerto Rico. No single public appearance by Benito this year, whether it be an interview or a photoshoot, has not had him wearing the clothing of working-class Puerto Ricans. It is clear that this is the album he has wanted to make for a long time, achieving it in being more personal than ever before, yet projecting too beyond anything he has previously attempted. It’s a difficult story of an oppressed, marginalised peoples, representative of the greed and imperialism that the West has wrought on the global south, told through terms of energy, passion and love. 

When times are as dark as they are, he boldly tells us that blasting the massive dembow beats he dolls out isn’t ignorance, it’s resistance. Marginalisation, suppression and dismissal of Latin scenes hasn’t stopped Bad Bunny becoming the world’s most listened-to artist. Debí Tirar Más Fotos is an ultimate statement on music’s ability to compel, to connect and to transmit. It’s living proof that they can never kill joy, and that they will never extinguish hope. Just watch what happens when he waves the Bandera de Puerto Rico in Santa Clara on the 8th February next year.

Personal favourite

What has always made Lady Gaga so compelling is that she has defined our times by pointing out its absurdities. Everything has become so manufactured and so coordinated that even being unusual doesn’t make you unique. Combating that absurdity requires out-weirding it. To this day, she still ensures that every touchpoint with her – every music video, every interview, every red carpet appearance – is its own piece of art, a continuous statement that to counter the grimace of greed and the malevolence of marketing strategies, she must make something too outlandish and too immutable for it to be tied down.