Top Five Soundtracks of 2024 for Being Where You Already Are 

I can’t believe it’s over. The best year of my life, and now it’s become a story I’ll tell myself tomorrow. In 2024 I became obsessed with preserving my every thought and feeling. “If I just write this down enough, if I journal, if I feel hard and slow and fast, then I won’t lose anything precious.” But here I am now, feeling like water slipped through my fingers. Whatever! I learned a million new things, most of them arch clichés. Here are five soundtracks that helped me learn life’s most timeless — and obvious — lessons.

Tomas Batista
Arranger: A Role​-​Puzzling Adventure (Original Videogame Soundtrack)
Sombra
Street: 07.25
Tomas Batista = Big Thief + Early Death Cab for Cutie (K.K. Slider)

Jemma is leaving home for the first time. Arranger is a puzzle game in which you slide the protagonist across a world divided into tiles. When Jemma moves, everything on the same row or column moves, too — like a less-frustrating sliding block puzzle. It makes for a fiddly time. You’re constantly moving Jemma like a fidget toy, and so it can be hard to stop and appreciate the scenery, the art, the progress, the passing of time. The only thing that truly slows you down is stopping to speak with other people. By the time the game was over, I had made so many connections with the cast of quirky characters, and I quickly found myself feeling sentimental about everything I had done, passed by in a flash. The soundtrack is bopping and upbeat. Through a plucky guitar, it says, “Hey, isn’t life crazy? Isn’t life fun?” Some years, everything changes, and there goes you, moving and moving like you didn’t just experience a miracle. Arranger gave me the compressed feeling of finally growing up, only to wish I could do it all over again. 

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross
Challengers (Original Score)
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc.
Street: 04.26
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross = Air x French Police

2024 is the year I started running, and I think I owe some of that to the Challengers score. Something I realized while training to do my first 5K, which maybe was always obvious to everyone else, is that feeling convinced you can’t do something hard is part of the process of overcoming it. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score cuts through anything in front of it, giving Luca Guadagnino’s super sexy tennis rivalry its brisk pace and my workouts a sweaty sense of drama. Here’s the play order I recommend: “Pull Over,” “The Signal,” “‘I Know,’” “Yeahx10” into “Brutalizer” and finish with “Challengers.” You’ll be overcoming hard things before you know it. 

José Ramón “Bibiki” García
Arco (Original Game Soundtrack)
Self-Released
Street: 08.15
José Ramón “Bibiki” García = Gustavo Santaolalla + Dan Romer

In Arco you play as three different people who are each contending with the Newcomers —  settlers who are colonizing the land, stripping it of resources and pillaging Earth for oil. Each protagonist has their life upended and ends up in the same bar ready to exact revenge. A total sleeper hit, I’ve seen almost no one mention this four-person team’s incredible first game — maybe because it’s a turn-based, tactical RPG in which you make decisions and watch them play out in 1-2 second increments. Sort of a niche, I guess, but if impressionistic pixel art, sweeping landscapes and pithy writing don’t lure you, well, God, that soundtrack. Despite being so abstracted in its wide-lens, the game feels intimate thanks to José Ramón “Bibiki” García’s sprawling, three-disc soundtrack. Each character has a full album’s worth of tracks comprising instruments appropriate to their backgrounds, so each act feels personal. The early track “Forgotten Memories” uses the oboe like a siren, a signal to warn your heart that nothing can hold forever. The only constant is change itself, so don’t stop, keep going and learn to hold on — and then to let go. 

Luis Clemente
Balatro Original Soundtrack
Self-Released
Street: 02.20
Luis Clemente = STRFKR (Martian Cult)

This is less of a soundtrack and more of a single, hazy, winding magic carpet ride you never want to get off. In Balatro, you build poker hands and score them according to rules you pick up along the way. Does your two pair have all face cards? Great, because you’ve got a joker that multiplies your score by two if your hand is all face cards. Congratulations, your other joker rewards you for each spade, so that’s another hundred points for you. Suddenly, you’re racking up thousands of points off one measly two pair, and you wonder if God himself ever felt this accomplished. The secret sauce is the soundtrack, which surrounds you like a puffy cloud and bathes hand after hand in droning comfort. Listen, just do what feels good. Don’t worry. Don’t think. Just a flush, a straight, a three of a kind, a pair, two pair, flush, straight, three of a kind… 

Drew Redman
1000xRESIST (Original Soundtrack)
Self-Released
Street: 05.09
Drew Redman = Masakatsu Takagi x Hiro Ama

The moment I truly got on board with 1000xRESIST was a couple hours in. Two sisters, Watcher and Fixer, are sitting together at sunset 1,000 years in the future. It’s the Allmother’s birthday, and Fixer says she’s working on a song to celebrate. Surprised, Watcher asks to hear it. Fixer sings a cappella about her love for the Allmother, how someday they’ll all join her in her metaphorical garden. Then: “The Allmother, she shines / So bright / But mother’s glow is not / As warm as it had seemed to be / And it feels very far / From me / And it feels very far / From me.” It’s transcendently intimate — and forbidden. “Fixer…” Watcher says. “We both know you can’t play that song tonight.” The artistic accomplishment of 1000xRESIST is how it renders complex, systemic conflicts in ways that feel personal and emotional. Even when you don’t know what’s exactly going on, you know how you feel, and Drew Redman’s soundtrack provides a light netting underneath it all to catch the player’s many moments of emotional freefall, big and small. In the game’s end, you must choose which of your experiences you will take with you into the future. It’s painful to realize, but not everything will fit in your backpack. Aren’t we lighter for it? 

Read more Year End Top Fives:
The Top 11 Films of 2024
Top Five Albums of 2024 To Speed Run the Stages of Grief