The Echo Reviews: Your Best Albums of 2024, Part Two
Ryleigh Johnson | April 10, 2025
2024 was a landmark year for music, from pop culture bending to the unique vision of pop stars to rap songs becoming the center of legal disputes. It was also a time of great musical quality - one of the best in recent history. In this second installment, The Echo listened to more of your favorite albums to revisit the best and brightest of the past year and found some gems to carry into 2025.
Imaginal Disk- Magdalena Bay
You said: “Maximalist, ambitious, dreamy.”
We said: Loosely sketched as a concept album about relearning “what it means to be human” in an alternate reality where humans are physically fused to technology, Imaginal Disk is indeed dreamy- but whether that dream is pleasant or nightmarish is difficult to entangle. The album’s funk-inspired, tuneful sound merges with the synthetic to create a sense that something isn’t quite right in this fantasy, with that persistent, menacing undercurrent felt most acutely in tracks like “True Blue Interlude”. It’s a work that rewards repeat listens: by the second time you hear standout “Image,” it will have permanently lodged itself into your brain like the titular “imaginal disk.”.
Listen to: “Image,” “Death and Romance” and “That’s My Floor.”
Alligator Bites Never Heal- Doechii
You said: “Fire as fuck.”
We said: Confident and brash, Doechii’s 2024 mixtape Alligator Bites Never Heal pulls no punches. Taking aim at fans, detractors and even her own label, Doechii’s music reverberates with an unshakeable belief in herself- her power, her talent and her vision. This belief remains despite moments of intense self-doubt and vulnerability, a moving portrait of a woman wrestling with the fame’s benefits and temptations. Most of all, the mixtape is thoroughly fun, always buoyed in both moments of self-disclosure and self-defense by Doechii’s irresistible charisma.
Listen to: “DENIAL IS A RIVER,” “DEATH ROLL” and “NISSAN ALTIMA.”
BRAT- Charli XCX
You said: “Brat summer 4ever.”
We said: Alternative pop luminary Charli XCX’s whole career has led to brat, a perfect encapsulation of her boundary-breaking work on projects like how i’m feeling now and her mainstream ventures like 2022’s Crash. After previously declaring that she doesn’t “like to write very specific songs about specific things” in her life, BRAT takes a decidedly more personal turn, addressing topics as broad as the death of a friend (“So I”), personal and professional jealousy (“Sympathy is a knife”) and the complexity of female friendship (“Girl, so confusing”). These confessionals aren’t a drag, though- like any true party girl, Charli XCX knows it’s easiest to feel your feelings when the music is loud enough to drown them out.
Listen to: “Apple,” “So I” and “I think about it all the time.”
my anti-aircraft friend- julie
You said: “Grunge-gaze epic style.”
We said: julie’s debut album my anti-aircraft friend repackages the sound of 90s grunge and shoegaze bands for a new generation, trading in distortion and melodic, cryptic vocals. The band works well as both a tribute act and a standalone outfit, using older musical language to continue the legacy of those who came before them (Hole, Nirvana, My Bloody Valentine) and carve out a space of their own. Notable is their remarkable bending of time- every song on the album is less than five minutes long, and yet each one seems to stretch out for much longer, lulling the listener into a kind of hypnosis. It’s worth getting swept away in the sound.
Listen to: “catalogue,” “feminine adornments” and “clairbourne practice.”
Mahashmashana- Father John Misty
You said: “Desert divine revelation.”
We said: Some might call Father John Misty over-indulgent or dramatic, but his flair for the outsized works perfectly in apocalyptic times. Alternatively lush and rollicking, the album’s gorgeous instrumentation and clever, incisive lyrics form a masterful picture of mahāśmaśāna, a Sanskrit word for a “cremation ground: the burning wasteland before the next life”. Invoking “the act of creation” (“Mahashmashana”), a runaway Jesus (“She Cleans Up”) and the “the greatish minds of [his] generation/gladly conscripted in war” (“I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All”), Misty can provide only one antidote to a world on fire: “Love must find a way, love must find a way/After every desperate measure, just a miracle will take.” The grandiosity of his vision, after all, has to be matched by the only thing even close to equally vast.
Listen to: “Josh Tillman and the Accidental Dose,” “Screamland” and “Being You.”