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Tyler Clark presents: Local Mythologies writesCHIRP Radio’s Best of 2024: Tyler Clark
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...It's been a long year. I took a leave from my CHIRP show. My dad got sick and died. I crashed my car. My second son was born. I didn't think I'd get to write one of these this year, but thanks to a last-minute deadline extension, I do, and for that I'm grateful. I can hear the baby stirring in his bassinet; by the time I finish this, it'll be time to feed him, and commence another winter night's tasks. I'm not getting much sleep tonight. I'm not getting much sleep at all these days. We're 23 hours from the new year as I write this, and all I want for 2025 is boredom. Through all that, I listened to over 300 records in 2024, the best of which I'll carry into next year as mementos, as trophies, as badges that say "Somehow, we made it." Take a look today, and maybe tomorrow, then get ready. A fresh year of records starts this week. Who's going to listen to them if not us? |
#1 Lafandar by Heems (Veena)
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#2 Ten Modern American Work Songs by St. Lenox (Don Giovanni)
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#3 Triple Seven by Wishy (Winspear)
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#4 The Closest Thing to Silence by Ariel Kalma, Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer (International Anthem)
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#5 Seashell Angel Lucky Star by Armlock (Run for Cover)
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#6 Big Ideas by Remi Wolf (Island)
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#7 Endlessness by Nala Sinephro (Warp)
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#8 Poetry by Dehd (Fat Possum)
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#9 Acacia by Yasmin Williams (Nonesuch)
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#10 Songs of a Lost World by The Cure (Polydor)
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Honorable MentionsThe Hastily Thrown Together, "First Thought, Best Thought" Rest of the Top 25: |
Throughout December, 
I love a good comeback story, especially when it involves one of my favorite artists of the mp3 blog era. Nine years after his last solo release, Himanshu Suri returned in February to remind everyone why he was always the real talent in millennial hip-hop. Paired with Chicago producer Lapgan (who spent his formative years listening to Heems' early work) and joined by guests including Saul Williams and Kool Keith, Heems uses Lafandar to reintroduce his hyperliterate brand of rhyming; while he's traded Pizza Hut and Taco Bell for curried goat and spritzes of Dior, he still brings the same mix of class-clown humor, post-9/11 agitprop, and New York braggadocio to his ruminations on what it means to be brown in America and American abroad. It's his strongest solo work to date, and an easy choice for my Album of the Year.
The latest record from Andrew Choi should come free in every grad school acceptance packet in the United States. Across 10 songs, Choi weaves his unorthodox autobiography (in which he goes from a poor philosophy phD in Ohio to law school at NYU to a lucrative job in corporate law) into something eminently relatable to anyone who's ever thought about going back to school. The only thing more fun than listening to the album itself is trying to fit Choi's singing voice into context; among the friends I shared this one with, we had comparisons to the following: Future Islands, the Decemberists, the Mountain Goats, the Magnetic Fields, Blues Traveler(!), Wesley Willis(!!), a raving priest, and a Broadway show about the night Jeff Buckley died.
I passed many of the misspent summers of my 20s in Indiana; if they'd sounded half as wistful as the music of Indianapolis-based popgaze torchbearers Wishy, I might never have left. Save this one for the first day the temperature rises above 60 this spring, then play it as loud as you can with the windows open.
My dad died this year. We found out he was sick just as January snapped into February. I wrote this at the time: "The first time I listened to The Closest Thing to Silence, the collaboration between French ambient legend Ariel Kalma and the experimental duo of Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Sofia Honer, it was just a few days after my dad’s initial diagnosis. Dusk was approaching, and I was driving into the sunset without a destination, just a head in need of distraction and a craving for a road I’d never traveled before. I wound up heading west on Foster, past Bohemian National and LaBagh Woods and out to the airport suburbs that barnacle along the border of O'Hare. As the light faded, I came to the T where Foster meets East River Road along the eastern side of the Catherine Chevalier Woods. The sun was gone, but the sky was still a cold orange; above, departing planes sloped upwards, closing their distance to the lake and away while, in front of me, a group of six wary deer took an evening meal on the other side of the red light. Everyone’s headlights were just coming on. For a minute or two, I let the stillness in. Anyway, that’s what this record sounds like."
You could, perhaps, debate the merits of ranking what amounts to an EP so highly on a year-end list. You could, but your time would be better spent listening to 18 minutes of pristine crystal-clouded indie pop from Australian duo Armlock. Lots of critics hear the ready influence of artists like Pinback and Alex G here; that may be so, but neither of those acts ever wrote something so concentrated, immediate, and hard to shake as this one.
It was a tidal wave of a year for major-label pop, and this list isn't immune to that surge. While Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter, and Chappell Roan commanded the bulk of the headlines, Remi Wolf turned in an AOTY contender that somehow seemed to fly under the radar. Buoyed by Wolf's enviable pipes and bombastic lyrics shot through with surprising turns of sincerity, Big Ideas contains plenty of 'em. Plus, like; tell me you can listen to "Waves" and NOT think about buying someone a boat.
This sounds like the kind of music that a graphing calculator would make if it had hands and could understand the concept of jazz. Luckily, the spirits of all those TI-86s flows through the boundary-pushing hands of Belgian experimentalist Nana Sinephro.
Am I a homer for Chicago bands? Of course I am. Do records like this one (from Chicago's self-described trash pop aficionados Dehd) make that position totally defensible? Absolutely they do. I can't tell you how many times I played "Mood Ring" on repeat on sunny-day drives this summer. Gotta be in the hundreds.
I usually try to close my submissions for AOTY contenders before the first year-end lists start coming out in late November, but sometimes a late-breaking record just forces its way in. That was the case with this one from finger-style guitar trendsetter Yasmin Williams; after checking it out on the recommendation of No Ripcord's Top 50 Albums of 2024 list, I knew it was bound for an appearance here, and on every autumn walk I take for the next 10 years.
At this stage in their careers, the member of the Cure are under no obligation to release music as good as this; Robert Smith could record himself reading Craigslist Missed Connections into a 4-track and their legacy would remain unblemished. The fact that their first album in 16 years is also their best since at least 1992's Wish (and proves that Smith's voice hasn't aged since 1979) is enough to make old goths everywhere cry their mascara off.Next entry: CHIRP Radio’s Best of 2024: Brian McDonnell
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