Top Five Albums of 2024 for a Lost World

Well. Another year is ending worse than it began and all signs point toward further decline. Doesn’t it just make you want to lie back and dissociate with some moody music and a glass of the good stuff? If so, these five pensive, melancholy records of 2024 might be just what the doctor ordered.

The Cure
Songs of a Lost World
Lost Music Limited
Street: 11.01
The Cure = Siouxsie and the Banshees + Echo & the Bunnymen

On their first studio album in sixteen years, The Cure reminds us why they’re the best there is at making music that urges you to ugly dance and ugly cry at the same time. Songs of a Lost World is a gracefully lumbering behemoth of sound with a broken heart. It crawls forth at a pace which never quite reaches that of the band’s upbeat hits like “Friday I’m in Love” or “Just Like Heaven,” but each song carries a haunting sincerity and grief in its spacey synths, its anguished guitars and Robert Smith’s inimitable vocals. From beginning to end, listening to this album feels like sitting on the prow of a moonlit cruise ship and watching a pod of humpback whales glide by in the darkness. 

Softcult
Heaven
Easy Life Records
Street: 05.24
Softcult = My Bloody Valentine + Veruca Salt

Most other albums on this list are from well-established, world-weary rockstars, but Softcult’s Heaven is a little different. Twin sisters Phoenix and Mercedes Arn-Horn started the band in 2020 and they only have a handful of releases under their belt, so Heaven stands out for its zealous freshness and refusal to submit to its own misery. That isn’t to say the album isn’t moody, though. Lyrically, it wades into topics like mental illness and religious disillusionment, while the twins blend shoegaze and grunge for an obliterating sound that feels much heavier than you’d think a mere six tracks could possibly manage. 

San Fermin
Arms
Better Company Studios
Street: 02.16
San Fermin = City Calm Down + Woodkid

San Fermin’s newest album is a little less audacious and strange than their previous work. Nowhere on this release is there anything as feverish as Jackrabbit’s “The Woods” or Belong’s “Oceanica.” On Arms, the lyrics are commonplace and saccharine, and the music is more pop than chamber. However, this accessible simplicity lends itself to the album’s prosaic subject matter: everyday heartbreak and the struggle to come to terms with yourself. There are a few skips, namely “Weird Environment” and “Can’t Unsee It,” but I think “You Owe Me,” “Wasting on Me” and “Didn’t Want You To” are some new all-time bests from the Brooklyn band. 

The Voidz
Like All Before You
Cult Records
Street: 09.20
The Voidz = Late of the Pier + Clarence Clarity

This album certainly isn’t Julian Casablancas’ strongest outing in the last five years. Not by a long shot. It’s a little too haphazard, the over-processed lyrics are borderline unintelligible and the political commentary isn’t as shrewd or interesting as Casablancas seems to think it is. At its worst, it feels like The Strokes’ frontman is having a stream of consciousness frolic through immiscible genres and philosophical themes. But despite these faults, there are times—e.g. “7 Horses,” “All the Same” and “Flexorcist”—where the album achieves (or blunders into) a profound bittersweetness. On these standout tracks, The Voidz effectively crystallize the mournful bafflement and frustration that come with living in the 2020s.

The Smile
Wall of Eyes / Cutouts
Self Help Tapes LLP
Street: 01.26 / 10.04
The Smile = Liars + Maruja

Talking about two albums at once might be cheating, but Wall of Eyes and Cutouts were recorded during the same studio sessions and released within a year of each other—similar to Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac—so it feels right to review them together. On these, their second and third studio albums, The Smile layers funky polyrhythms under atmospheric guitars and eerily abstract lyrics. Listening to either album (or both in the same sitting if you’ve got two hours) will leave you feeling becalmed, yet vaguely unsettled and unsure whether you should flee or boogie to the groovy basslines. What better vibe for a grim year that nevertheless gave us brat summer?

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