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The Year In Music, 2024: Musicians Of The Year

SABRINA CARPENTER

Sabrina Carpenter crowd-surfing astronauts. (Credit: Jeff Kravitz/Getty Images for MTV)

The former Disney Channel star’s irreverent sense of humor and flirty persona have been at the forefront of her music since her 2015 debut LP, but never have they clicked in such a compelling way than on Short n’ Sweet, which is one of the best and most listenable pop albums of the decade. As comfortable delivering metaphor-rich twang (“Slim Pickins”) as she is dirtying up delicious, electric guitar-heavy kiss-offs (“Taste”), Carpenter cradles your heart and then pierces it with the cold, hard truth.

There’s great depth lurking just below the surface of Carpenter’s songs. To wit, the devastating couplet “don’t smile because it happened, baby / cry because it’s over,” which is being DMd to umpteen fuck bois across the planet at this very moment.

MJ LENDERMAN

Plenty of folks are wanting a fresh serving of MJ. (Credit: Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Images)

MJ’s only 25, but his music sounds timeless and lived in. If you went in blind, you’d be forgiven for thinking tracks like “Rudolph” and “Wristwatch” were written 30 years ago, when the alt-country movement re-emerged with bands like Uncle Tupelo and Whiskeytown. But there is a freshness to his music and that’s what makes it so compelling. Though he’s released three solo albums prior, it wasn’t until this year’s Manning Fireworks that Lenderman broke through to mainstream stardom. When he’s not playing to sold-out crowds and doing the talk-show circuit, he’s collaborating with the likes of R.E.M., Jason Isbell, Phish, and others for Hurricane Helene relief. Lenderman’s star is rising and it’s getting brighter.

Charles Moss

KILLER MIKE

Killer Mike wasn’t about to let a security guard get between him and his Grammys. (Credit: Paras Griffin/Getty Images for TV One)

Following the phenomenal success of 2023’s Michael, a Gospel infused rap, autobiographic-ish juggernaut of an album, Mike jumped into the top tier of hip hop artists globally. He swept the major rap categories of the 2024 Grammys — and was immediately arrested, for earlier pushing a fastidious security guard who wouldn’t let Mike enter the artists’ door. So now Mike was Gangsta too!

Michael also won Album of the Year at the 2024 BET Awards. In August he released Songs For Sinners and Saints, recorded with his Gospel Choir The Mighty Midnight Revival, a 10 track album positioned as an “epilogue to Michael.” It’s a great record. He played all over the country, including, enigmatically, six nights at New York City’s legendary jazz club Blue Note. He played Lollapalooza, Outside Lands and the Newport Folk Festival. And that’s been his greatest accomplishment in 2024 — he’s the ultimate rapper at the top of his game and class, and is never out of place wherever he goes.

BGJ

TAYLOR SWIFT

Bigger than Jesus now, John Lennon might have quipped. A Taylor Swift fan’s arm is permanently inked with “Anti-Hero,” a tune her heroine sings. (Credit: Christoph Reichwein/picture alliance via Getty Images)

We do not live under a rock. We know about Taylor Swift. She may not be Pearl Jam, who we seem to be strangely umbilically tied to, but Taylor, to date childless but not catless, as she showed in her articulate endorsement of Kamala Harris that immediately increased young voter registrations by hundreds of thousands, is the musical Colossus that bestrides the Earth.

She utterly dominated music in 2024. As she did in 2023. Only the Beatles ever dominated music as thoroughly as she does. She won Grammys and MTV Video Awards, and, I think, but you’d have to check, swept all six Nobel Prizes as the venerable Swedish Academy just gave up and said, “oh, what the hell…” She released an album, The Tortured Poets Department and made it a double album hours later. Who even thinks like this? Who else could be supported like this? By the end of her historic, mind-bogglingly successful Eras tour she will have done 83 dates across the world this year, one of which, in Munich, in the national soccer stadium, she performed before 74,000 fans, with a further 50,000 outside, listening in.

BGJ

MESHELL NDEGEOCELLO

Meshell Ndegeocello with her Grammy for Best Best Alternative Jazz Album for The Omnichord Real Book in Los Angeles on February 4, 2024. (Credit: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

With three decades of groundbreaking work to her name, Ndegeocello had a career year. Her No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin (which originated as a multimedia stage production) was one of the most powerful and creatively distinctive albums of the year. She also produced Immanuel Wilkins’ Blues Blood (also from a theater presentation, also one of our albums of the year) and captained the galaxy-cruising Sun Ra tribute album Red Hot & Ra: The Magic City.

Steve Hochman