The Best Single of 2024
“White Lies, White Jesus, and You”
Katie Pruitt
The first single from and centerpiece of Mantras, Katie Pruitt’s extraordinary missive from the frontlines of the ex-vangelical movement, translates her personal traumas into a rallying cry. 2024 was a year in which Christian nationalism solidified as the driving force for a very loud and very powerful plurality of the American electorate, and Pruitt’s “White Lies, White Jesus, and You” lays bare the ways in which the adherents of that worldview leverage the “DARVO” principle that’s common to abusers.
“The way I felt the knife turning into my side,” Pruitt sings when she recounts coming out to her family, “When I heard you say the words, ‘I’ll pray for you’.” In this instance, she recognizes that the prayer isn’t something offered from a place of love or compassion; it’s an act of violence and an attempt to inflict shame. She was looking for acceptance and, instead was told that while she might be someone to love, her authentic, lived experience was something worthy of hate. Pruitt’s song is about finding the strength to leave that behind her.
“You talk about forgiveness like a favor,” she sings a few lines later, “Like it’s something that you didn’t have to do.” Pruitt is savvy enough to see how modern therapy-speak focuses on an obligation to forgive abusers, an intellectually dishonest way of allocating the entirety of the emotional labor to the victims of abuse. In this exact moment, it feels at once naive and absolutely essential to hope that a perpetrator might actually reflect upon their own actions, let alone ever be held accountable for them.
To that end, “White Lies, White Jesus, and You” chronicles the ongoing horrors of 2024 as outright abuse in the name of religion gets codified into laws governing believers and non-believers alike. Whether that takes the form of repeated attempts to trap spouses in abusive marriages or court rulings stating that priests have property rights not to be sued for raping children, we continue to be confronted by the ways that “forgiveness” gets weaponized. If Christ can forgive, then surely your suffering isn’t enough to stop you from doing the same, and who are you think otherwise? We’re supposed to be answering a call in the spirit of unity, after all.
Pruitt’s song is a stark rebuke of that manipulative dogma. It’s one of the things she sings of putting behind her here. What makes this particular single so stirring is her recognition that it was the theology of coercive control that was holding her back from healing and from living a life of radical authenticity. – Jonathan Keefe
Next up are the rest of our Top Ten Singles of 2024, listed alphabetically by artist:
“Backseat Driver”
Kane Brown
The best of several strong releases from his new album The High Road, “Backseat Driver” suggests that Brown’s road is so much higher than his mainstream contemporaries that he’s operating on a higher plane. This is a radio hit about listening to his daughter, released in an era where mothers are routinely silenced on country radio. That Brown’s deep empathy and unshakeable decency feel so subversive in 2025 speaks volumes of where we are as a genre today. – Kevin John Coyne
“Backbone (The Desert Child)”
Kasey Chambers
Chambers recalibrates her autobiographical lens to adjust for newfound wisdom, resulting in a joyous, singalong celebration of her roving spirit that remains lightly tethered to her ancestral homeland. – KJC
“Back to You”
Denitia
The more stripped down a song is, the more heavy lifting the vocal performance has to do for me to love it. With nowhere to hide in front of such a simple backing track, Denitia gives a virtuoso performance that cycles through a wide array of emotions using just slight variations of tone and phrasing. – JK
“Play God and Destroy the World”
Amythyst Kiah featuring SG Goodman
Kiah and Goodman posit that the push toward self-immolation among the men who are always playing a game of chicken with their nations’ nuclear codes is a manifestation of childhood impulses. And it’s to their unending credit that they somehow turn this observation of the failings, past and present, of world leaders’ psychology into one of the catchiest country-rock bangers of the year. – JK
“I Never Cared for You”
Tami Neilson
Neilson’s take on this sardonic Willie Nelson deep cut strips the song down to its brass tacks and rebuilds it from the ground up with Neilson giving the song a reliable narrator for the first time. As transformative an interpretation as Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” – KJC
“The Ghost of You”
Lindi Ortega
Ortega’s always had a flair for the cinematic, and the overall effect here is to create a truly unsettling vibe. The song itself is terrific, too. It’s an immediate companion to Sinéad O’Connor’s tremendous “No Man’s Woman,” about a woman who is singing rapturously about being in love with– literally, perhaps?– a spirit. And anytime someone draws favorable comparisons to the late O’Connor, it’s an immediate win. – JK
“Whether You Love Me or Not”
Meghan Patrick
It was “Golden Child” that put Patrick on our radar this year. As good as that record was, this single that we missed is even better. Beyond just the production and strong vocal, Patrick is a throwback to the sophistication of the nineties country women at their very best. – KJC
“A Bar Song (Tipsy)”
Shaboozey
As a song, there isn’t much here that isn’t familiar: Shaboozey is championing the power of a good buzz to unite people. What elevates that message are the creativity of his production choices– the fiddle on this sounds so, so good– and his ingratiating presence. He sounds like he’s having fun on this record, and that makes it all the more inviting. – JK
“Went for a Ride”
Adia Victoria
“Went For A Ride” is a song about reframing narratives that romanticize white America’s doctrine of Manifest Destiny and marginalize the stories of other groups who were very much present and involved in westward expansion and the proverbial wild, wild West. Victoria won’t let anyone forget that the inhabitants of those western ghost towns were never all white, and she’ll “swear at the Devil” without flinching to make her point. – JK
Further Listening…
These thirty singles, listed alphabetically by artist, complete our list of The Best Singles of 2024.
Adeem the Artist, “One Night Stand”
Kelsea Ballerini featuring Noah Kahan, “cowboys cry too”
Beyoncé, “TEXAS HOLD ‘EM”
Laura Bryna, “Time to Say Goodbye”
Brei Carter featuring Electrohorse, “Boots Get to Talkin’”
Jessye DeSilva featuring Old Tom & The Lookouts, “Gallows Tree”
Maya De Vitry, “Odds of Getting Even”
Roberta Faceplant, “Yee Haw Stuff”
Wyatt Flores, “Don’t Wanna Say Goodnight”
Jason Hawk Harris, “The Risk You Take”
Hayes & The Heathens, “Any Other Way”
Jett Holden featuring Charlie Worsham & John Osborne, “Backwoods Proclamation”
Ghost Hounds featuring Patty Griffin, “Long Ride Home”
Cody Johnson, “The Painter”
Kaia Kater featuring Aofie O’Donovan, “The Witch”
Roberta Lea, “Somewhere in the Tide”
Carín Leon & Kane Brown, “The One”
The Mavericks f Nicole Atkins, “Live Close By, Visit Often”
Reba McEntire, “I Can’t”
Ashley Monroe, “I Like Trains”
Willie Nelson, “Last Leaf”
Autumn Nicholas, “Slow Down”
Brad Paisley, “Truck Still Works”
Ron Pope, “In the Morning with the Coffee On”
India Ramey, “Ain’t My First Rodeo”
Swamp Dogg featuring Jenny Lewis, “Count the Days”
Josh Turner, “Down in Georgia”
Waxahatchee featuring MJ Lendermann, “Right Back to It”
Sam Williams, “American Actress”
Trisha Yearwood, “Put it in a Song”
The Best of 2024
Best Singles of 2024 | Best Albums of 2024
Single of the Year (2004-present) | Album of the Year (2004-present)
…one of the songs/clips i deliberately revisited many times last year. fullfilling in every department ms. pruitt’s catharsis.
it was closely followed by katie crutchfield’s (waxahatchee) “right back to it” and alynda segarra’s (hurray for the riff raff) “alibis”.
when it comes to cody johnson, i fell for the other one.
“backseat driver” just made my list of potential “song of the year” candidates 2025.
meghan patrick slipped under my radar completely. more homework for me to do on her, i guess.
Glad to see you back around these parts, friend!
Excellent choices, of course, with the Waxahatchee / Lenderman single (which just missed our t10, in full transparency) and the HftRR single (“Hawkmoon” just missed our t40), and both of CoJo’s singles were in contention.
Eager to see how Brown’s single performs at radio this year; we’re happy such a high-quality single is getting the proper radio push that “Whiskey Sour” didn’t get. Keith Urban’s “Straight Line,” another of our favorites of 2024, is his official new radio single, too. So there are at least a couple of bright spots for country radio to kick off the new year.
Patrick’s a tremendous talent. Both this single and “Golden Child” are essential, and she’s likely right in your contemporary country wheelhouse.