2024 in Music

Lime green eats the summer A pop album arrives in June with a cover so aggressively simple it becomes a meme before anyone hears a note: a shade of green, a word in Arial. The record is built for the club, pounding bass and unpolished vocals tracked fast, some songs finished in a single four-hour session. Within weeks the color is everywhere, on campaign banners, on Halloween costumes, in a dictionary. Collins names the album's title its Word of the Year. The record wins three Grammys including Best Dance/Electronic Album.

The longest bar song A country-rap single built on interpolating a mid-2000s club hit parks itself at number one on the Hot 100 for nineteen weeks, tying the record for the longest reign in the chart's history. Its singer becomes only the second Black artist ever to simultaneously top Billboard's pop and country singles charts. Country songs spend more weeks at number one on the all-genre chart in 2024 than any other format, more than doubling country's share of the singles market in just two years.

Six minutes from Compton In May, a six-minute diss track drops with no advance warning: just a West Coast bounce beat, a voice, and a target. By year's end it has crossed one billion on-demand streams, the first diss track in history to hit that number. It wins five Grammys including Record of the Year and Song of the Year, a response record sweeping the ceremony's biggest categories. The feud behind it produces more than a dozen tracks from both sides across three months, including one that uses an AI-deepfaked voice of a dead legend and draws a cease-and-desist from the estate.

Metal at the Olympics At the opening ceremony of the Paris Games on July 26, a French metal band performs on platforms bolted to the outside of a castle, rain pouring down, pyrotechnics erupting behind a headless figure in period dress. The song is a metal arrangement of a revolutionary anthem from 1790, sung by an opera vocalist over drop-tuned guitars. It is the first time a metal band has performed at the Olympic Games. The performance wins a Grammy for Best Metal Performance.

Sixteen years of silence, broken in Wales A band that last released an album in 2008 reconvenes at a studio in rural Wales. All songs are written by the singer alone, the first time he has been sole composer since 1985. The finished record lands at number one in the UK, the band's first chart-topping album in over thirty years. The sound is enormous and mournful: layered guitars sustained through cavernous reverb, baritone vocals heavy with accumulated loss. It wins the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album.

Americana, rewritten A country album five years in the making arrives in March, rooted in one artist's Texas childhood and the history of Black musicians in American roots music. It spans banjo, pedal steel, harmonica, choir, and marching band. Its lead single tops both the pop and country charts, a first for a Black woman on the country chart. The album forces a conversation about who owns the sound of the American South and who gets credit for inventing it.

The swamp princess A Tampa rapper on a storied hip-hop label releases a mixtape in August that she calls her swamp tape. It fuses Southern bass music, trap, and chaotic energy into something hard to categorize and harder to ignore. She becomes only the third woman ever to win the Grammy for Best Rap Album. Her appearance list for the year reads like a who's who: features alongside names from every corner of rap, R&B, and pop.

A debut goes number one in nine years Five musicians from London release their first album in February. It debuts at number one on the UK Albums Chart with the biggest first-week sales for a debut in over nine years. The band wins the BRITs Rising Star Award, the first guitar band to take the prize. The record is produced by the same engineer behind three of the year's most acclaimed albums, a single pair of hands shaping records that range from chamber pop to post-punk to folk.

Two weeks at the ranch An alt-country singer books two weeks at a studio compound in the Texas desert with a small band that includes a twenty-five-year-old guitarist who is simultaneously making the most acclaimed solo record of his own year. They track the album live, pedal steel and banjo and electric guitar filling the room, arrangements that sound effortless but are tightly composed underneath. Both records, hers in March, his in September, land on every year-end list and between them define what indie rock sounds like in 2024.

The surprise drop, perfected In November, a rapper from Compton releases his sixth album with zero advance notice, no singles, no rollout, just twelve tracks appearing on streaming platforms overnight. He recorded somewhere between eighty and a hundred songs over two years and cut them to twelve. The album is named after a car. It debuts at number one in nine countries. The surprise release, once a gimmick, is now just another way to put out a record.

The tour that broke every number A twenty-one-month concert tour concludes in Vancouver in December after 152 shows across 51 cities. It grosses roughly 2.2 billion dollars, the first tour to cross both one and two billion. Economists estimate the total spending by concertgoers, on travel, hotels, food, merchandise, exceeds ten billion dollars. Two shows in Denver alone add 140 million to the state's GDP. The concert is no longer just a performance. It is an economic event.