THE MUSIC AND MUSICIANS THAT MATTERED IN THE LAST 12 MONTHS

FEATURING:

✹The 75 Best New Albums and 20 Best Reissues

✹The top music books and films

✹Works of wonder by Nick Cave and Jack White, Neil Young and David Bowie

✹The returns of Beth Gibbons and Oasis

✹Plus: Paul Weller, Jane Weaver, Fontaines D.C. and more on “The Best Thing I’ve Heard All Year!”

✹An annual of sounds and stories to blow the mind and swell the collection

50

LEE ‘SCRATCH’ PERRY & YOUTH

Spaceship To Mars (CREATION YOUTH) Since his death in 2021, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry has enjoyed a fertile, if inconsistent, creative afterlife. Two 2024 releases, however, placed the reggae magus’s unreleased incantations in friendly new settings: King Perry, shepherded by producer Danny Boyle; and this cosmic roots confection, worked on since 2017 by Killing Joke bassist Youth. Heady flashbacks to the mid-’70s Black Ark sound proliferated, plus some game if unlikely vocal sparring partners including Boy George.

Standout track: Chase The Devil

49

JOAN AS POLICE WOMAN

Lemons, Limes And Orchids (PIAS) “The title makes me think of attraction, passion, playfulness, paying attention, our collective downfall, loss, falling in love and love of humanity. That should cover it,” Joan Wasser told MOJO, comprehensively nailing the emotional breadth and maturity that filled her sixth solo album proper. Plenty of personality from this seasoned session pro (Anohni, Gorillaz et al) too, as she pared back her music to burnished, sometimes torchy, New York soul.

Standout track: Long For Ruin

48

NICK LOWE

Indoor Safari (YEP ROC) The inimitable Basher’s first album in 11 years was, as he explained in MOJO 371, an investigation of “the craft of songwriting… It takes an enormous amount of effort to make it sound like you’ve made no effort at all.” Mission accomplished on Indoor Safari, as Nick Lowe and his wrestling-masked accomplices Los Straitjackets made a clutch of new songs, revamps and covers (Garnett Mimms!) resemble lost hits from a golden age of rock’n’roll radio.

Standout track: Jet Pac Boomerang

47

THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN

Glasgow Eyes (FUZZ CLUB)

If the reunion of Creation’s other battling brothers stole most of the headlines in 2024, the simmering entente between Jim and William Reid was the one that delivered the goods: a knockabout, argumentative memoir; and this equally spirited eighth album. Glasgow Eyes was a late JAMC classic of pop-culture snark (“Andrew Oldham’s on the phone”), gnarly self-mythologising (“The dark shit”) and even trace elements of filial affection.

Standout track: Jamcod

46

THE LAST DINNER PARTY

Prelude To Ecstasy (ISLAND)

A band who roughly resembled a cross between Kate Bush and Queen – or, perhaps, Florence & The Machine and The Darkness – were always going to be a bit much for some. Nevertheless, the gusto with which the mostly female band grappled with pomp-pop made them 2024’s breakout stars. Note, too, an autumn cover of Sparks’ This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us that asserted their art-rock bona fides with appropriate flamboyance.

Standout track: Nothing Matters

45

NUBYA GARCIA

Odyssey (CONCORD JAZZ) Another strong year for British jazz found some of the main players stretching their wings, as Cassie Kinoshi and Nubya Garcia leaned harder into ravishing, complex orchestrations to supplement their soloing chops. Garcia, in particular, proved a sophisticated and democratic leader on her second solo album: ceding space to notable guests like esperanza spalding and Georgia Anne Muldrow; taking her turns in the spotlight on sax with notable discretion and maximum impact.

Standout track: Odyssey

44

KAMASI WASHINGTON

Fearless Movement (YOUNG)

The deep-pile richness of Garcia’s Odyssey often recalled Kamasi Washington’s Heaven And Earth (MOJO’s 2018 Album Of The Year), but Washington’s belated sequel switched up his own game: less cosmic grandeur, more funkiness, danceability and street smarts. As ever, Washington was another master strategist, uniting George Clinton, André 3000, sundry next-gen rappers and a surfeit of good ideas into a relentlessly joyful 86 minutes.

Standout track: Asha The First

43

THE BLACK CROWES

Happiness Bastards (SILVER ARROW)

Like the Gallaghers and Reids, a rapprochement between Chris and Rich Robinson resulted in the first Black Crowes album since 2009 – and the best, perhaps, in nearly three decades.

Happiness Bastards charged through Stones/Faces raunch, Southern soul and country honk with a punch reminiscent of their earliest records – a focus borne out by Rich’s pragmatic assessment in MOJO 364: “In order to do this properly, we had to not be dicks.”

Standout track: Wanting And Waiting

42

MICHAEL KIWANUKA

Small Changes (POLYDOR) Gene Clark, Beth Gibbons and Mazzy Star were the classy influences cited by Kiwanuka upfront of his fourth album, and first since 2019: reference points that reasserted his music as a complex evolution of soul. The aptly titled Small Changes, however, also reiterated his ability to make timelessly great music – historically resonant, subtly modern – and overcome self-doubt with the high-spec support of regular producers Danger Mouse and Inflo.

Standout track: Four Long Years

41

Andy Martin

LAURA MARLING

Patterns In Repeat (CHRYSALIS)

Marling’s 2020 album, Song For Our Daughter, was a hypothetical concept, but Patterns In Repeat made explicit the artist’s new reality, as Child Of Man opened with the gurgling of her one-year-old. And if Marling ruefully admitted in MOJO 372 that albums about motherhood had always bored her, she remained a subtle and uncommonly intelligent singer-songwriter – one alert to the lullaby clichés of the genre, and with the gifts to artfully circumnavigate them.