Top Five Albums of 2024 To Kill Your Colonizer
Music
While all albums are political in one way or another, these five are just a few of the standout directly political projects of 2024—most covering the everpresent evil of colonization across the world. From Niger to Palestine to Haiti, there are still many people living under brutal imperialist powers. It’s impossible not to witness it daily and it’s important to tune in and not drop out.
Mdou Moctar
Funeral For Justice
Matador Records
Streets: 05.03
Mdou Moctar = Jimi Hendrix + Frantz Fanon
I have already given this album a fairly long, hard look and came out a die-hard fan. The Tuareg rock group has reach euphoric heights in this past year with an appearance at Coachella, a proper world tour, an interview with The New Yorker and a surprisingly intimate NPR Tiny Desk Concert. We’ve always known this group can play their hearts out, but Funeral For Justice opened Mdou Moctar to a razor sharp critique of France’s colonization of Niger, one that ravaged not just the Tuareg people but left scars in the land from Uranium mining. Funeral For Justice takes shots not only at France’s history of colonization but at the entire West’s longstanding colonial exploitation.
Chat Pile
Cool World
The Flenser
Street: 10.11
Chat Pile = Korn + Primus + Twitter main feed violence
In Cool World, Chat Pile returns from the 2022 powerhouse God’s Country filled with even more rage and a toothy grin. Maybe it’s because I had the chance to sit down with the group earlier this year, but I believe this project is one of the best rock-adjacent records of 2024. From the wailing, Trail of Tears–inspired “New World” to the Korn-esque “No Way Out” with its spiralling guitar plucking, this album is punishing beyond belief and reaches out of the tape deck to shake you by the head and yell, “What’s wrong with the world?” Chat Pile has been best described by my fellow editor Emma Anderson as “noise rock for hardcore fans” so if you are into that, you’ll dig this project.
Mach-Hommy
#RICHAXXHAITIAN
Mach-Hommy Inc.
Street: 05.17
Mach-Hommy = Madvillain + Roc Marciano
Effortless yet cutting is the main way I would describe Mach-Hommy on #RICHAXXHAITIAN, which, for all that know him, is the norm. The Haitian-American lyricist has been making music nonstop since 2019, releasing over a dozen full-length albums and many more that live off streaming platforms. #RICHAXXHAITIAN is another critically acclaimed project that leans more autobiographical than his previous releases. Mach-Hommy slides from his immigration to New Jersey from Port-au-Prince to the devastation in Gaza on the track “POLITickle” with lyrics like: “White phosphorus fell on civilians in Gaza / Troglodytes squadron yelling epithets in a jogger.” Though prolific, Mach-Hommy still has so much to say.
Various Artists
Palestine Solidarity Compilation Vol. 1 & 2
Self-Released
Street: 01.12 & 10.18
Palestine Solidarity Compilation Vol. 1 & 2 = “We Are The World” (egg punk edition)
This double album (‘cause I’m making it one) called on some of the world’s most underground and fun punk groups to contribute a track each to the compilation, whose profits are being directly donated to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). There’s so much to love across the complete 54 tracks, but here are some standouts for me: Lothario’s cover of Gerry Rafferty’s “Right Down The Line,” ΜΠΡΙΤΖΟΛΙΤΣΕΣ’s insanely fun “I Used To Be A Cheesepuff / Alien and Warm” and finally, Fakfakan’s skin shredding “Yak.”
Godspeed You! Black Emperor
No Title as of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead
Constellation
Street: 10.04
Godspeed You! Black Emperor = Swans + pure catharsis made into song
There’s nothing better that I can say about this album that Godspeed You! Black Emperor hasn’t already said in the bandcamp description for the project: “No Title = What gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall? What context? What broken melody? And then a tally and a date to mark a point on the line, the negative process, the growing pile.” This fully instrumental project is Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s most melancholy and haunting to date, each track filled to the brim with bone-aching and hurricane howling riffs that, at times, feel like hitching sobs that have yet to be stifled.
Read more Top Albums of 2024:
Top Five Albums of 2024 for a Lost World
Top Five Electronic Albums of 2024 to Shred Your Amygdala