Four albums I like pretty well from the last 4 years* (2024)

• music
• reflection

*based on when I listened to them

The Winners!

Expert in a Dying Field by The Beths 🎶

The combination of a lightly grungy rock sound with pretty and rich vocal layering means that just on the merits of the music itself it would be worth listening to, but the lyrics are what really help to push this into winning territory. The title track kinda exemplifies this with an extended metaphor that feels incredibly apt:

Love is learned over time
Til you’re an expert in a dying field

All this time and effort that you continue to invest in this relationship eventually becomes this sunk cost, as each tiny detail you know about that person and each facet of theirs that you’ve become accustomed to or learned to deal with is poised to become a relic of a bygone time the moment the relationship ends. This isn’t a frame I think one would adopt for a relationship that felt like it was worth having had in retrospect, and certainly isn’t a lens I’ve ever applied to now dormant relationships or friendships, but I think it’s an insightful comparison.

The other song I wanted to pull out from Expert in a Dying Field, is the song Knees Deep. I as a person am non-trivially motivated by shame, especially the shame of seeming foolish or incompetent. I don’t think this is categorically a wrong or bad trait to have, but it is not always fun to have a profound amount of shame in you¹, and it has I think prevented me from trying or sharing things I might have otherwise enjoyed trying or sharing for risk of seeming not good at something². Knees Deep is about appreciating people who are able to push past (or simply lack) this kind of shame, and is a glum reflection on being paralyzed by it.

I’m only knees deep
I’ll never be brave like you

This album is depressing, running the gamut from death of relationships, to internal shame, to quiet fears that can never be disproved, to tinnitus. While I don’t think it’s always productive to listen to music that feels the way you feel when you’re going through a bad time, I find it powerfully important to know that I’m not the only person who’s looked at someone else’s courage and found a well of shame of their own inability to act, or who’s worried that all their friends secretly only tolerate them. I think it’s important that I know that these are more common feelings than I might think, even if there are times where it holds me down rather than lifting me back up.

Plus

The music is good.

Anaïs Mitchell by Anaïs Mitchell 🎶

I have a hard time listening to a lot of the songs in this album without crying. When so much of the media I consume is made by, for, and about youth, Anaïs Mitchell feels like a breath of fresh air by being about her now—closer to middle age, having a family and significantly having a sense of her place in the world. So many of the songs are about guidance, if not bearing explicit advice to the addressee (Watershed, On Your Way), and that’s just not a thing you can really get away with as a 20/30 something writing party bops³.

Some of the songs that feel more personal feel orienting. In my own conflict with my understanding of the nature of the divine, the perspective of Bright Star feels like a welcome relief—here’s someone who figured out how to cope with what feels like the obvious conflict between the world as observed, and how God and man could possibly hope to be interacting. Similarly, Now You Know feels like a glimpse into the kind of relationship that is only born and flourished with decades of committed knowledge—something that feels especially far off to me as a person who’s young and single.

Additionally, with the knowledge that the songs are from someone in a different phase of life, the shared ground feels comforting. The quest for meaning that saturates Brooklyn Bridge and Real World is the same quest for meaning I feel myself in my heart as I try to understand who I am and what I want to do for my life. It’s both enheartening and slightly disempowering to know that even later, spouse and family acquired, I’ll still be asking the same questions—still want to be someone, still want to live in the real world.

I love this album, and feel like it feels special to me as a person outside the age of prime relatability to it, or outside the experience of the writer like I’m glimpsing parts of my own future, or a possible one. And like, seeing into someone else’s soul—that’s a big chunk of what art is supposed to be, right?

Revealer by Madison Cunningham 🎶

Madison doesn’t need much to go a long way—her songs would be at like 90% capacity on just her lyrics, melody, guitar and voice. She doesn’t often use vocal harmony on the album, but her beautiful solo voice is more than enough to carry the album from the exuberance of Anywhere, to the grief of Life According to Raechel. Similarly, most of the guitar in the album is a solo guitar, using not too many quick rhythms or 3+ note chords, but it’s catchy and powerful and memorable all the same.

Hospital feels like a really good exemplar of this: throughout the entire strong there are only maybe three or four places where she uses vocal harmony at all, and they’re all kind of snuck into the verses, Similarly, aside from the really big obvious breakdown section, there are very few places in the whole song where more than one guitar is making noise. This feels especially noteworthy in this song, where you’ve got these big heavy lyrics

Checking in to a hospital
Where the nurse is earth and sky
Fighting against my flesh and blood
There’s nothing I won’t try

I personally would have a very hard time suppressing my instinct to place a lot of emphasis on these heavy lyrics, or to at least thicken the sound, but she doesn’t, and the song is better for it. In an interview about a remade she made with Remi Wolf (Hospital (One Man Down) 🎶 ), Madison says this about the song:

‘Hospital’ has always had this underlying feeling of wanting to fall apart at the seams and then actively restraining itself.

While most of the album doesn’t threaten to “fall apart at the seams”, the restraint is everpresent and is enabled by the simple excellence of Madison’s guitar playing, voice, musicianship, and lyricism.

My favorite track in the album would have to be Who Are You Now. It’d be easy to write a song that’s all about how everyone is constantly changing and to make that sound cynical, but Who Are You Now is comforting and assured, as the chorus floats along on Madison’s beautiful steady held “Whooooo are you Nooooooooow”⁴,and it makes a nice thesis just before the last chorus—

When did war become sensible and love unfair?
Well, neither one will give you the time to prepare
But this dance comes naturally once you put your feet there

She also features a couple other things I’ve really enjoyed, including the song Grief and Praise by the Watkins Family Hour 🎶 and the album Work Songs by the Porter’s Gate Worship Project 🎶 !

22 Break by Oh Wonder 🎶

This album was in the right place at the right time for me. When I first listened to it, my first relationship had either just ended or was in the process of ending, and it spoke so well to the depth and variety of feelings that the end of a long term relationship can invoke. Despite being a breakup album, it spends basically no time finding or assigning blame. Instead, it’s caught up in the pain of the moment, and in the “Did/can I do enough” or “What happened to how good things used to be” or “What do I even deserve”–all of these conflicting emotions that come with relationship troubles. Assigning singular blame or not—this kind of situation is incredibly taxing.

This album feels remarkable both for representing such a wide range of feeling, and for coming from Oh Wonder. Don’t get me wrong, prior to this I found them very good and there are many songs of theirs that I love, but no album—no song even—floored me the way the music from this album does⁵.

If you listen to this album, you should listen to the whole thing straight through. If you can’t do that, then listen to Don’t Let the Neighborhood Hear, but you should listen to it straight through.

Also, listen to the album with the f-bombs. The explicit version. You should do this even if you don’t like swears—the replacement words are bad. You cannot convince me that “Don’t let the neighborhood hear just how fucked up it’s gotten here” is even a comparably good lyric to “Don’t let the neighborhood hear just how (struck/stuck) up it’s gotten here”. I almost feel like you shouldn’t listen to the album at all if you can’t deal with an errant f!ck or two.

Almost.

It’s a really good album.

Honorable Mentions

Bright Blues by Ripe 🎶

Many of the songs have very reflective, often unhappy, lyrics, while still being situated on top of the danceable joyous funk music that Ripe is so good at. It’s a fun contrast that works well.

Sleep on the Wing by Bibio 🎶

Peaceful, folksy, and full of Bibio’s intricate, folksy, loopy guitar playing. It’s hard to pick out individual tracks here, but if you like any of the ones in the highlights, consider giving the full album a listen.

American Bollywood by Young the Giant 🎶

This isn’t just about the 2nd gen Indian-Ammerican immigrant solidarity, although that definitely doesn’t hurt. Like the one-before-prior album Home of the Strange, American Bollywood pulls very strongly from the immigrant experience in America, in ways that are both obvious and affirming. It’s also (apparently) based loosely on the Mahabharata, but I’m not familiar enough with the Mahabharata to say more about that.

🕰️ Supermodel by Foster the People 🎶

This has been out for over a decade, but I didn’t listen to it before the pandemic so it’s allowed to be here. I find it… motivating? Like there’s a lot about active caring for people, and several of the songs are laden with the quest for purpose, especially the opening track.

Otherwise Special Mentions

Albums listed alphabetically by album name

Albums denoted 🕰️ weren’t published in the last ~4 years, but I did listen to them first in that time.