The Year in Music

Welp, we made it, kids. It’s finally time to rip that last page from the calendar, diligently set it afire, and blow its dregs into the eddies of the Mighty Trinity™. So long, and thanks for all the fish. Like all years, this foul and contemptible year of our ill-humored lord of 2024 was a mixed bag. On the one hand, the past 365 showered us with a few blessings. Like Willie Nelson covering the Flaming Lips or our brief collective obsession with an adorable, yet no less deadly, baby hippo. On the other, we had to endure the year’s share of curses, too. Like the inexplicable 15 minutes afforded to the “Hawk Tuah” girl and having to witness a deranged electorate apparently flush the entirety of American history occurring between January 2017 and January 2021 from their Mountain Dew-addled brains and deciding a certain former reality TV star — this time toting 34 felony convictions and an insatiable bloodlust for revenge along with him — deserved another crack at manning the nuclear codes.

Thankfully, there was a ton of great music to soundtrack the last 12 months. Here’s just some of the music that helped us make it over the finish line and that we’ll remember fondly as we’re all frog-marched to the Woke Gulags next month, then forced to listen to nothing but Tucker Carlson-curated Lee Greenwood and Kid Rock Spotify playlists between our daily Two Minutes Hate. — P. H.

Patrick’s Playlist

For this music obsessive, this past year was one that paid off a lot of anticipation. Some of my favorite artists, both homegrown and from around the globe, finally released music that I’d been waiting for — for years or even decades — with all requisite clichéd Christmas morning excitement.

One local highlight consisted of the long-awaited return of Black Tie Dynasty. Their May release Steady finally filled a hole left by their signature danceable synth-rock 14 years ago. Also, one of the area’s most underrated artists, Rachel Gollay, gave us an incredibly beautiful album in The Edge of April, while singer-songwriter Hannah Owens overcame a serious physical injury to deliver a pair of great singles (“Kites,” “State I’m In”) that saw her music grow along with her life perspective.

Speaking of perspective, hip-hop guru SageMode Wrex offered more of his (a’hem) sage wisdom with Calm in the Storm. His liquid flow and laidback beatscapes were a consistent blood-pressure dropper for me. Heavy-gazers Trauma Ray’s Chameleon was another huge leap for one of Cowtown’s best bands. Of course, Fort Worth’s favorite son Leon Bridges released his most introspective and, in my opinion, best album so far. But by far my favorite 817-related release of the year was Rodeo Fortune by Spring Palace. The debut full-length from the erudite indie-rockers is big, bold, and beautiful and was in steady rotation this fall.

My musical anticipation wasn’t limited to the Fort. I was giddy with goth excitement for The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World, which is their best album since 1989’s Disintegration and the closest thing to it. Former Sonic Youth-er Kim Gordon’s The Collective was an interesting mix of smart lyrical musings and woofer-busting dubstep. Radiohead teaser outfit the Smile dropped two (!!) LPs this year which were both so good they reiterated the wonder why they weren’t just Radiohead records. Nick Cave’s Wild God was a return to form for the enigmatic Aussie songsmith, while Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus debuted the Hard Quartet, an indie-rock supergroup with veteran guitarists Emmett Kelly and Matt Sweeney and Dirty Three’s Jim White.

The record that spent the most time on my turntable in 2024 was Fontaines D.C.’s Romance. The follow-up to their 2022 breakout Skinty Fia (my favorite album released that year) saw the Irish post-punks expand their sound, creativity, and apparently their commercial viability to new heights. There are Grammys in their future.

While I didn’t take in as much live music as I did last year, I still managed to see some phenomenal shows. The “divorce pop” of supergroup Son of Stan, the lock-tight rock of Hotel Satellite, and the dreamy folk of Sleepy Atlantis at The Cicada last February was a particularly special night. The inaugural Lost ’N’ Sound festival series allowed me to pack in a lot in a single day. Standouts for me at the September leg were Dallas sludge thrashers Chemical Spell, the lighthearted Western swing of Ginny Mac, the fully improvised spectacle of Stadium, and the live debut of Burette Douglas’ new classic country outfit Ghost Roper.

Nationally, I was able to catch French electronic duo AIR for the first time in two decades, while my favorite live-music experience of the year was taking my 11-year-old son to see Weezer with the Flaming Lips and Dinosaur Jr. It was a lineup seemingly made in a lab for me as a teenager and to share it with him, scream-singing every word to “Say It Ain’t So,” made it crack the Top 10 best shows of my life. — P.H.

Steve’s Playlist

I had a couple of poignant moments at Panther Island Pavilion this year. The first was while watching NOFX on April 7. After 40 years, the self-proclaimed “punk rock Rolling Stones” were retiring. That show was in the first part of the last leg of their final tour that had begun in Austin a whole year prior. Seeing as how they have soundtracked my life at various points across 30 years or so, seeing them play “Linoleum” live for the last time hit me like a ton of bricks. Or at least a ton of unsold Survival of the Fattest compilations. While I expected to feel the emotions knot up in my throat like a sad, swollen beer burp, I had also never quite felt so middle-aged as I did while watching a long-running pop-punk band crewed by men all pushing the age of 60 play a song about a monosyllabic girlfriend. At various times, I found myself wiping tears out of my eyes from behind my sunglasses. They say the music you get into the most in your teenage years is what sticks with you for the rest of your life, and seeing NOFX say their final goodbyes at the end of “The Decline” made me really think about where the time has gone.

The other Panther Island moment, which was poignant in a “sign of the times” sort of way, was on November 16, when I saw Jake Paul, fresh off his victory over Mike Tyson the night before, join Shaquille “DJ Diesel” O’Neal onstage during his set at this Shaq’s Bass All Stars concert. I don’t have enough room here to articulate all the ways that fight bothered me, but the combination of Paul’s win and Netflix’s shitty broadcast — their failure to anticipate how many people would watch Iron Mike battle the God-Emperor of YouTube fuckheads made for an incredibly glitchy stream — seemed, in my estimation, to be symptomatic of the forces that brought Donald Trump back to the Oval Office. Paul’s appearance during an otherwise good time just reminded me that everything is gross and that the technological progress promised by our technocratic overlords is pretty much always a bait-and-switch grift.

As for new music, Absolute Elsewhere, released in October by Denver-based death metal band Blood Incantation, continues to blow my mind. If Robert Fripp had been a teenager in the Florida of the late 1980s and learned to play guitar from listening to Cannibal Corpse, this is what King Crimson’s Red album would sound like. At this point in their career, I think Blood Incantation is pretty much a jazz-influenced prog band in a death metal disguise. In the way that Metallica’s black album rocketed from the thrash metal underground into the mainstream, so should Absolute Elsewhere do for Blood Incantation. — S.S.

Johnny’s Playlist

A lot of musicmakers burned my eardrums this year. While I mainly enjoy grunge, hardcore punk, and country/folk singer-songwriter stuff, I often have moments when I need to hit the refresh button on my listening habits. One such palate-cleanser was experimental hip-hop producer BLKrKRT (Blacker Karat). Fort Worth beatmaker Phil Ford creates moody sample-scapes that don’t fall within typical “rap” parameters. He utilizes hard tempos, interesting measure counts, and atypical structures while employing unique takes on a wildly varied scope of genres that results in a singularly artistic and abstract sound. Insanely prolific, he released no fewer than four albums this year via Bandcamp: A Dark Place, Black Rock & Roll, EGO-DEATH, and Hold Me Closer Tiny Darko. I enjoyed all of them at least as much as if not more than that classic, ever-ready YouTube playlist Lo-Fi Hip-Hop Beats to Study and Relax To.

I love a good comeback story. After serving a seven-year sentence for gang activity, rapper Hermez the God turned his life around and released a pair of banger singles this year, “Hated by Most” and “Just Watch.” While he isn’t big on glorifying his past criminal activities, he acknowledges that his negative former life helped him grow and allowed him to become the man he is today. Working from his studio on Hemphill Street on the South Side, the Diamond Hill native has been pumping out tracks and music videos on his own and producing like-minded artists from the Fort and beyond. His August album Forsaken shines a bright and well-deserved light on Latin-influenced urban street music and culture. — J.G.