Best in Rock 2024 or One Fan’s iTunes Replay

Was it just 2024 or 1994? With Pearl Jam, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Alkaline Trio dominating this critic’s 2024 iTunes Replay, the past year in rock was one of the best in thirty years.

For the first time in several years, the majority of my iTunes Replay, the list of songs that garnered the most repeat plays throughout the year in my iTunes account, was composed of new music…by old bands. It was almost as if my list of most played songs was somehow channeling 1993-1994 as the top songs were off of new albums by both Pearl Jam and The Smashing Pumpkins. There were other bands’ songs in the list, but the majority of those were by Jack White and Alkaline Trio, both of which are multi-decade recording acts. These four acts composed the majority of the songs on the list. There were some other newer acts mixed in, but for this rock fan, there hasn’t been as good a year of new releases by old favorites since they were new favorites thirty years ago. Here’s a brief rundown of the top four albums of the year in rock/alt-rock, according to me (in no particular order), followed by the other acts and albums that contributed the most new music to my 2024 Replay. 

The Smashing Pumpkins Aghori Mhori Mei

I’ve seen The Smashing Pumpkins in concert four times in the past 8 years. Billy Corgan and company have been on a roll and the tours and tunes have never sounded better live. Throw in another double album, followed by one of their hardest rocking albums ever, and The Smashing Pumpkins haven’t just turned back the clock, they’ve set a standard for the future of rock. Loud roaring guitars and heavy riffs make up the bulk of Aghori Mhori Mei, but like their defining classic Mellon Collie and The Infinite Sadness, The Pumpkins manage to balance the heaviness with some acoustic soundscapes that make the album the most diverse and hard rocking album since that aforementioned classic. Done with the synth laden storytelling of ATUM, Billy Corgan again demonstrates why he is the most prolific rock guitar song writer of his generation, and this fan was, and still is, a happy member of The Great Billy Pumpkin’s patch of fans. 

Pearl Jam Dark Matter

While The Smashing Pumpkins might be one of my favorite bands of all time, Pearl Jam is the favorite band of mine (of all time). So the following statement might come as somewhat of a shock: I hated Dark Matter on the first listen. It wasn’t the songwriting. It wasn’t the lyrics. It wasn’t that I was upset that they didn’t give us another VS. It was the production. Andrew Watt produced Eddie Vedder’s excellent solo album Earthling just before being brought on to produce Dark Matter. While Watt’s production crafted something new and different for Vedder as a solo artist, I firmly felt that the sound he crafted for that album needed to stay with that album. Brenden O’Brien will always be my favorite producer (just above Butch Vig), and the albums that O’Brien produced with Pearl Jam have, and always will, feel like the band is playing live just for me (or anyone listening). The intimacy of the live sound that O’Brien brought to Pearl Jam in the studio endeared the band’s sound, and relevance, to millions of their fans. Watt’s production felt like a step backward to the overproduced days of Ten. But…the songs on the album, with their nods to U2 (“Won’t Tell”) and Tom Petty (“Wreckage”) probably wouldn’t have sounded as much as a tribute and homage to those bands without Watt’s type of production. Pearl Jam has “been there and done that” in so many ways throughout their career, and have paid tribute to the bands that inspired them, but never have they done so more eloquently than they did with Dark Matter. Pearl Jam are giants, but they openly admit, and admire, the giants they stand on the shoulders of, and do, so powerfully, on Dark Matter. 

Alkaline Trio Blood, Hair, and Eyeballs

Alkaline Trio are another band that have been around for decades, and have pumped out everything from punk rock, to pop punk, to emo and made it all sound like the soundtrack to your best and worst days…at once. Seemingly peaking with Good Mourning, Alkaline Trio have released some good albums since then, but none that really, for me at least, comprised a top to bottom, listen straight through every time, masterpiece, until Blood, Hair, and Eyeballs. Alkaline Trio never have shied away from the darker aspects of their psyches (consider the lyrics to classics like “This Could Be Love” and “Addiction”), but rarely have they been as tongue and cheek as they are on songs like “Bad Time” off of BHAE. Darker songs like “Break” will keep the goth punks and latter day emo Alkaline Trio fans happy, but having a bit of self reflective humor as well as some of the hardest and fastest riffs in two decades makes Alkaline Trio the proud owners of one of the best albums of 2024. 

Jack White No Name

Jack White just might be the last real rock star, and with No Name he finally fully lives up to that honorific with a solo album. Ditching the experimentalism of his worst solo outings (Boarding House Reach) and relying upon straightforward, raw, and underproduced guitar rock of the type that catapulted him to mega rock stardom, White rips and roars through thirteen songs that rival anything he has written solo, or with The White Stripes. The angry, grungy, ornery bee stinging blues riffs that defined The White Stripes resurface here, but with more flair and complexity. “Old Scratch Blues” gets the revival started as White exorcises your rock n roll soul top to bottom with scorchers like “Bless Yourself” and “Archbishop Harold Holmes.” Nowhere on the album does he shine as powerfully and blast his listeners with a holy rolling rock and blues revival as he does with “Tonight (Was A Long Time Ago).” It’s quite simply the Second Coming of Jack White, and it is glorious to behold. No longer a boy with experimental angst, White is a man with a pocketful of riffs that will slay you in the spirit and an album full of blazing redemption that only the modern day master of garage blues and rock can deliver. 

Other bands that made the 2024 iTune Replay that I just can’t get enough of…

The Mysterines Afraid of Tomorrows

While not as strong a release as 2022’s Reeling, The Mysterines’ sophomore album Afraid of Tomorrows certainly doesn’t suffer from a sophomore slump. With the heavy grunge of “Stray,” The Mysterines maintain their heaviness while continuing to accentuate their lead singer Lia Metcalf’s husky vocals. The heaviness in her voice is the perfect match for the band’s heavy style, but Metcalf manages to pull off the type of angry sexiness that only the best singers of her range, like the immortal Grace Slick, can. This adds a depth to the music that makes the band something truly special. Standout tracks like “Another Another Another” grind remorselessly on buoyed by Metcalf’s deep intonations. Rarely has a band managed to be as compellingly heavy and engaging at the same time. The Mysterines are the type of band that takes its cues from past acts and morphs them into something new and relevant. That’s a rare feat these days and they have no reason to be afraid of their tomorrows as they will completely dominate them. More than any other “new band,” I cannot wait to see what they release next. 

Crows Reason Enough

On their third major label release, Reason Enough, Crows fully embrace the Joy Division comparison without simply aping their sound. A little more clean sounding than their previous two releases, Beware Believers and Silver Tongues, the album still manages to grind and groan gloriously through ten original goth-rock tinged tracks. The stage is set by the album’s title track, “Reason Enough” which grinds slowly before suddenly launching into a frenetic third act that will simply devastate live. Followed up immediately by what is their most stripped down post-punk anthem “Bored,” the tone of the album fully embraces its schizophrenic bent by bouncing along to the most punk aspects of post-punk. “Is It Better?” cues up next and glides along like the best pop rock can, although this pop rock is drenched in reverb and echo that only the darkest post-punk goths will even attempt. Like The Mysterines, Crows mines the past and ends up manifesting the future. Crows is another band that I will be anxiously awaiting to see what they do next simply because I can’t get enough of what they are doing now.   

The Cure Songs of a Lost World

Speaking of goths, Robert Smith returns with an album of tunes that rivals the most introspective and dark songs he has ever written. While not as angry as Nine Inch Nails’ dystopian cataclysm of an album, Year Zero, Songs of a Lost World is no less harrowing. Here Smith is truly living up to the title of The King of Goth. Gone are the poppy, yet morosely melancholic, songs a la “Just Like Heaven” or “Friday I’m in Love.” Nor are there any clear toned, acoustic or electric strummed deep thinkers of the type that populated Blood Flowers. Instead, long tracks like the album opener “Alone,” with its breezy synths that sweep the landscape clear of the intermittent electric guitar riffs that populate the landscape of this lost world, dominate. It’s a lost world that can metaphorically be the lost world of a relationship gone bad, or a world and species gone bad in the face of avoidable calamity. The kind of calamity that is the child of willful ignorance and selfishness, on a personal, political, and popular scale. Songs of a Lost World is the last testament of a world that either destroyed itself, or imploded under its own dysfunctional weight. “Warsong,” another stand out track, is a maelstrom of interwoven electric guitar lines that brings to life the horrors of war not unlike Picasso’s “Guernica” does. “Drone:Nodrone” soars with a rhythm that makes it the most straightforward rock song on the album, but overall this isn’t a straightforward rock album. It is a masterpiece painted in sound, drenched in black and white, sorrowful without being sad, but easy to get deliciously lost in. As The Cure wind down their near 50 year career, they’ve rarely sounded this good, or poignant. 

The Smile Cutouts

During the pandemic, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood teamed up with Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner to form The Smile, the best and most artistically relevant offshoot of Radiohead to date. Just about everything Yorke and Greenwood do is automatically classified as high art, with good reason. Cutouts, the band’s third LP, is more of the same we got from the band on their first two albums, marking, for the first time, an instance where a Yorke/Greenwood project managed to maintain a consistent sound and direction (outside of Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac). Perhaps this is because most of the songs here were written and subsequently performed live in pretty much the same sitting. No Radiohead album sounds like the previous Radiohead album as much as The Smile’s previous albums sound like each other. This is not a slight. It is a compliment. Radiohead’s strength came from its ability to get unique sounds out of the same instruments from album to album. The Smile’s strength is finding a unique sound, coaxed out of, but nevertheless rooted in, the traditional interplay between rock’s classic guitar, bass, and drum combo, and composing something unique that actually has the elasticity to stretch across three equally unique and, quite simply, great sounding albums. Tracks like “Zero Sum” and “Eyes and Mouth” make use of Greenwood’s unique math rock/jazz fusion guitar playing that is instantly recognizable from the previous two albums, but here still sounds fresh and inviting. Throw in a little Middle Eastern flair and that math rock/jazz fusion becomes something even more intriguing and inspiring on “Colours Fly.” Nothing Yorke and Greenwood do will ever replace Radiohead, but The Smile is the best we are going to get from Yorke and Greenwood outside of Radiohead. 

Several tracks off of Green Day’s new album, Saviors, and Modern English’s new one 1 2 3 4, which were both returns to the earlier sound of both bands, made the Replay playlist as well. Modern English mined the sounds of their first album Mesh and Lace and updated it, putting the punk back in post-punk, much like Crows do. Both bands’ music had been on the steady downslide, but the ship is righted and Modern English, for one, is still a great live act. I was lucky enough to catch them live again in 2024.