My favorite albums from 2024 - Crucial Tracks Blog

It’s that time again! Another year is nearly in the books, so that means it is time to take a look at my favorite albums from 2024. (Also see: 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023)

It might just be recency bias, but I feel like there was a LOT of good music this year. Almost every record in my top 20 spent a little time as favorite to be my #1 at some point this year.

Looking at my stats from Last.fm, this year I’ve listened to:

666 artists vs 645 artists in 2023
837 albums vs 825 in 2023
4,189 tracks vs 4,497 in 2023

That’s a lot of music!

My main goal with this list is to find you something new to listen to and love. You (generally) won’t see the same recycled albums you see on every other list, as I do my best to not pay attention to what other music blogs think…

To help with this, I also instituted a basic/simple rating system to help sort the large number of albums I listened to and liked (to some degree) this year. If you are curious, the rating system pretty much came down to me giving a score to each track on an album:

1, is a track I would probably never listen to again
2, is a track I would listen to again
3, is a track that would make a ‘best of’ song playlist

Then I just took the average of the track scores for the entire album and sorted high to low…thanks to the Collections app (macOS) for helping out with that task.

With that said, the scores generally came out in the order I had collected on Album Whale over the course of the year, so I feel validated – my first impressions were pretty accurate.

Let’s dig into my favorites!

Top 6 Albums of 2024