In an extraordinary year for country music, these forty albums represent the very best of 2024.
The Best Album of 2024
Jett Holden
The Phoenix
“They say the best songs are three chords and the truth / Until that truth and your belief systems don’t quite align.”
2024 was a year in which creators from historically and presently marginalized communities used their work to put the country music establishment on notice for the ways that they continue to exclude perspectives that challenge their tightly-held status quo. But I don’t know if any artist did so more succinctly than did Jett Holden, with a single pointed couplet on “Taxidermy,” the opening track to his debut album, The Phoenix.
The song itself, which Holden originally wrote in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, is a protest folk song of the purest form, in that it identifies both a problem and its potential solutions. Producer Will Hoge recasts “Taxidermy” as a slice of rock-edged country, not dissimilar from what’s currently en vogue in the genre’s mainstream. Doing so makes Holden’s words even thornier: In a post-truth era, there’s an important and obvious disconnect between the “truth” and systems founded on know-your-place aggression. Holden’s song suggests that Music Row is inclined to tell listeners to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears.
He’s not wrong, of course, and what makes The Phoenix such an extraordinary album– our pick for the finest album released in a year chock full of tremendous works of essential country music– is Holden’s focus on resilience in the face of such gaslighting and gatekeeping. What each of his songs emphasizes are his authentic lived experiences as a source of internal strength and an opportunity for connection with those around him. “Backwood Proclamation,” a collaboration with John Osborne and Charlie Worsham and which absolutely sounds like a radio hit in a world where country radio PDs would entertain music by a queer POC, is about the joy of coming home to a loved one at the end of a hard day, while “When I’m Gone,” a duet with Emily Scott Robinson, reimagines Jason Isbell’s “If We Were Vampires” from the perspective of a couple who have different faiths.
Holden’s point of view is rooted in the ways human connection makes us better versions of ourselves– how we can gain the power to rise like the proverbial phoenix. And he sings his songs with one of the most powerful and distinctive voices to emerge in recent memory. He can lean into the raspiness of his tone to highlight the menace of “Karma” just as easily as he can belt the final chorus of “Taxidermy” with the kind of force that would rattle arena rafters.
As much as his singing voice impresses, it’s Holden’s masterful use of language that further distinguishes him. I can’t think of the last time I heard so many fifty-cent words used on a country album. In a world where the genre’s biggest star built a career on pre-K drivel like “Up-Down,” Holden believes that country music fans deserve and can handle songs that talk about taxidermy and necromancy and oxytocin.
He’s not wrong about that, either. More than any other album released in 2024, The Phoenix is one that gives me hope for what the future of country music can still be. It can still be accessible and catchy as all hell– we don’t have to settle for the greige production of current Americana– while writing songs that are, perhaps more than anything else, smart. That Holden accomplishes all of this on his debut record– and, it’s worth noting, The Phoenix is the first album released via The Black Opry’s partnership with Thirty Tigers– immediately announces him as one of the genre’s most essential talents. He’s showing us how, together, we all can rise.
Next up are the rest of our Top Ten Albums of 2024, listed alphabetically by artist:
Kaitlin Butts
Roadrunner!
A triumph of genre-savvy that works because Butts in no way feels beholden to toxic notions of traditionalism or authenticity. She’s confident in what she knows to be true about country forms and about herself. “Other girls don’t act like this, but other girls ain’t havin’ any fun,” is the thesis here, and no one at all acts quite like Butts does here. Her theatricality might lapse into camp in less capable hands, but Roadrunner! proves that Butts has few real peers in the current landscape.
Melissa Carper
Borned in Ya
On her finest record to date, Carper sounds like a hillbilly singing an old-school cabaret record, and every second of Borned in Ya is an absolute, utter delight. Even the heartache is tempered with real wit– “Your furniture is too nice for me and my doggie,” and oh my God, how rare is it for a joke like that to land at all, let alone not wear out its welcome on repeat listen– and her truly singular talents. “You can’t sing like that,” Carper observes, “Lest it’s borned in ya,” and has anyone ever been so self-aware on a country record?
Kasey Chambers
Backbone
Extraordinary and daresay the best of a career with multiple classic, essential records, as we highlighted in our Best Albums of the CU Era anniversary feature. Backbone is the rare album that is deepened by an autobiographical read (“Arlo,” a just-devastating song about her son’s adolescence; “Divorce Song,” a duet with her literal ex-husband, Shane Nicholson) for how Chambers finds the shared humanity in her own unique experiences. She channels her life story into a triumph of empathy.
JP Harris
JP Harris is a Trash Fire
Burn baby, burn. Harris’ best record by far, this is a how-to guide to dousing the flames once you’ve realized that both the world and you are fully ablaze. Harris uses his singular talent to tell that story on what sound like tracks Jerry Reed would have lay down in 2024, but sung by Neil Diamond. Wry and often savage in his self-assessments, Harris is a connoisseur of our unique cultural detritus, and he knows what burns brightest and warmest.
Amythyst Kiah
Still & Bright
In every way that matters, this is an album that’s at once Kiah’s most accessible and most progressive. These songs sound like hits in a better timeline that actually recognizes that queer, black, and women artists are making the most compelling music in the country space. Walker does career-best production-work here, too, without pulling focus from Kiah’s powerful singing and politically, personally ferocious songwriting.
Sarah King
When it All Goes Down
King’s vision of Southern Gothic is a wonder of country, folk, and blues formalism. Comparisons to the great PJ Harvey don’t come easily, but what King does here is akin to what a country album by Harvey might sound like. She sings of the Devil like she’s the final girl in a horror film: She’s tired of running, and she’s ready to fight with everything she has. That she spent much of 2024 following the release of this essential album in a literal fight for her life against cancer was the cruelest of ironies.
Joy Oladokun
Observations from a Crowded Room
Her best album yet, and by some margin. Early on, she asks, “Where is the safe place for someone like me?” and she spends this album staking out her own territory in a space far beyond typical boundaries of Americana, even as she still draws from country, folk forms. Oladokun isn’t one to mince words, and she speaks truth to power in how her time in mainstream-adjacent spaces in Nashville put her ill at ease.
She found it to be a room crowded by literal Proud Boys, and this album is about staking a claim in a space that lets her be her most authentic self.
Katie Pruitt
Mantras
An ex-vangelical treatise, made all the more powerful because it’s not delivered as a sermon but as a collection of tuneful country, folk, and pop songs that display a once-in-a-generation command of melody, structure, and language. Pruitt’s POV is one that feels radical, even as she draws from a host of genre conventions to bolster her points. Hers is a brand of country and Americana that truly center the notion of “authenticity” in a way that reclaims that term from those who fetishize one specific type of lived experience, and hallelujah for that.
Moira Smiley
The Rhizome Project
A heady, tremendous masterclass in arrangement and composition. Smiley’s approach to the collection of folk tunes she’s curated for this Project is to tease apart their interconnected roots to find what makes them life-sustaining: It’s as much a study in modern botany as in folk traditions. Certainly not the year’s most accessible record in the broader country universe, this is perhaps the finest example of how country and folk music are art forms worthy of academic-level analysis.
Further Listening…
These thirty releases, listed alphabetically by artist, complete our list of The Best Albums of 2024.
49 Winchester
Leavin’ this Holler
Their finest record to date, this finds all of their influences coming together into an aesthetic that is uniquely Appalachian and is honed to their specific talents, and it ought to be the album to break them to the level of an American Aquarium or a Silverada.
Adeem the Artist
Anniversary
They just keep getting better with every new record. This spectacular collection (“Rotations,” y’all. Had that been a proper single, it would have been a strong contender for the year’s best.) is about acknowledging the ways difficult, complicated humans find ways to connect with each other to make an unbearable world slightly less so.
American Aquarium
The Fear of Standing Still
Fascinating for how the band leans into a masc-coded brand of bar-room ready country rock while challenging toxic masculinity’s norms about how men are supposed to express their emotions and interiority. BJ Barham’s headiest and catchiest set of songs to date.
Beyoncé
COWBOY CARTER
A dense, studied provocation that dares the country industry to own its shit while, in form and content, standing as a triumph of “Americana” as it should be. Messy, audacious, funny, and self-aware, it’s an instructive text with plenty of bangers.
Willi Carlile
Critterland
Not to get too, “I read theory!” about it, but this is a masterwork of what it means to queer a set of artistic conventions. Wry, smart, and emotionally raw, Carlisle centers a historically marginalized POV in country and folk forms with a clear vision and catchy tunes.
John Craigie
Pagan Church
Craigie’s band is so adept at various country forms that their latest could launch a slew of hit singles, if only the songs weren’t alternately so smartassed, horny, irreverent, savage, and blasphemous. Can I get a hallelujah? Can I get an amen?
Denitia
Sunset Drive
The warmth of her vocal tone and empathy of her songwriting are known commodities, so the surprise here are the trad-country flourishes she’s brought to this, her third and finest album. The aesthetic points to how genre signifiers can fit best into modern sounds.
Liv Greene
Deep Feeler
Lord, that title is the damned truth. These songs cut marrow-deep, and with a marvelous economy of language. Greene proudly wears the influences of some of the all-time finest songwriters, and she’s an emotive, intuitive vocalist. A true wonder of introspection.
Chris Housman
Blueneck
Blueneck mines the tension between a bald-faced bid for mainstream acceptance– this is an album of radio-ready bangers– and narratives that center queer experiences, with lines that are smart, pointed, and provocative. Thoughtfully written, confidently performed.
Hurray For the Riff Raff
The Past is Still Alive
Their charms have, admittedly, been somewhat lost on me in the past, but the writing on this album cuts like piano wire, and the genre signifiers sound fully of a piece with the songs’ content. A powerful album that finds cause for cautious optimism in grief.
Hannah Juanita
Tennessee Songbird
Her single, “Fortune,” was our first intro to her, and we are now fully ride-or-die on this train. This, her second album, is just stunning for her mastery of traditional genre conventions and her ability to bend those conventions to her will and whims.
Kyshona
Legacy
The first two singles, while both solid, did not set the right expectations for this declaration of agency and authority, which is a ferocious hybrid of blues, country, funk, and folk. And Lord, that voice– and, somehow, her collaborators meet her power.
Ella Langley
hungover
There have been plenty of strong mainstream country debuts this year, and Langley might just have the best one yet. Heavy on traditional instrumentation but with an ear for a mean pop hook, too, she learned all the right lessons from early Lambert and applies them with a unique voice and POV.
Shelby Lynne
Consequences of the Crown
I’ll go to bat for every phase of her career, including the last 20 years of mellow Americana, but this plays in form and content as the first “proper” follow-up to I Am Shelby Lynne. She’s back in Nashville, and her collaborators, including Karen Fairchild and Ashley Monroe, truly did right by her.
The Mavericks
Moon & Stars
For sure their best since What a Crying Shame, and daresay their finest album ever. They remain a singular outfit: Theirs is an aesthetic that is immediately recognizable even before Raul Malo starts singing, and the line-up changes drive purposeful evolution.
Willie Nelson
Last Leaf On the Tree
Astonishing. That a veteran act, at this point in their career, would release an album that still pushes the genre’s sound forward the way this does is, frankly, without any meaningful precedent. Savvy country and Americana producers must pay close attention here.
Tami Neilson
Neilson Sings Nelson
One of the genre’s all-time greatest vocalists digs into the catalogue of one of the genre’s all-time greatest songwriters. How could this be anything less than extraordinary? Her interpretive gifts are simply unrivaled in the modern era.
Lizzie No
Halfsies
Spectacular. A wide-ranging, progressive vision of “Americana” supports an album about how human connections should be about empathy and support, rather than compromise and sacrificing our authentic inner lives.
Lindi Ortega
From the Ether
A singular and peculiar talent, who else but Ortega would take this kind of inspiration from the recent rise of cinematic folk horror? Sinéad O’Connor and PJ Harvey influences are here in the writing, too, as Ortega’s unnerving narratives and aesthetic choices puncture the veil.
Meghan Patrick
Golden Child
A tremendous album that would instantly improve the genre’s mainstream. Patrick’s writing is smart, self-aware, and savage, and she’s a singer of deceptive power and grit. The best moments here recall Jennette McCurdy’s memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, for adult-child-of-toxic-parents insight.
Shaboozey
Where I’ve Been, Is Not Where I’m Going
The best album in this vein since Bubba Sparxxx’s Deliverance a lifetime ago, and with a similar clarity of purpose and vision. And with outright bangers front to back, too. No mere novelty, this should be a true star-making turn, and country’s the better for it.
Sarah Shook & The Disarmers
Revelations
About as good an alt-country album as there’s ever been, with a grunge-inspired, distorted brand of twang that’s perfectly matched to the sharpest and most personal writing of Shook’s career– their best singing, too. What turned out to be the band’s swan song allows them to go out on a high.
Steve Slagg
I Don’t Want to Get Adjusted to This World
Another fine example of how “Americana” would be so much richer if it centered more diverse production aesthetics, and Slagg’s narratives find the faultlines in America’s heartland, foregrounding queer perspectives in his anxieties and uncertainties.
Shawna Thompson
Leon On Neon
In the strongest year for pure trad-country in decades, Thompson has shown up damn near everybody. Great songs, classically styled, sung brilliantly solo and with like-minded friends. She says it’s the album she always wanted to make, and it sure sounds like that’s true.
Tony Trischka
Earl Jam
A titan of progressive ‘grass enlists A-list collaborators (Bush! Fleck! Ferrell! Tuttle! Strings!) to join him in fleshing out his transcriptions of long-lost Scruggs & Hartford jam sessions, and everyone involved rises to the task. Inspired and essential work.
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Various Artists
My Black Country: The Songs of Alice Randall
The Adia Victoria track is one of the year’s best singles, and the rest of the collection is no less inspired or riveting. An important re-centering of the voices of black women in country music, via Randall’s extraordinary songwriting.
Waxahatchee
Tiger’s Blood
An album that somehow immediately announces itself as brilliant while also sounding like a grower. As ever, her best songs simply stop time so she can take stock of the full emotional cadence of an instant, before it slips away.
Drake White
Low Country High Road
Triumphant return from an artist whose mainstream ascent was derailed by a health crisis. This set draws from a wide range of southern influences, production-wise, and he continues to grow as writer of both wit and candor. And God almighty, is he a great singer.
Cecily Wilborn
Kuntry Gurl Playlist
The way I lost my entire mind when she drawled, “Big Mama gon’ fix you a plate.” A few too many familiar snaptracks in the production, but this is otherwise a triumph of modern country-soul bangers from a phenomenal singer who deserves the whole world. The collaboration with her father is the most joyous track of the year.
Yasmin Williams
Acadia
An album of (mostly) instrumentals that mines a deep well of genuine joy from the shared experience of playing music with kindred spirits. Williams’ gifts for arrangements and composition shine on songs that draw from folk, country, blues, and jazz conventions.
The Best of 2024
Best Singles of 2024 | Best Albums of 2024
Single of the Year (2004-present) | Album of the Year (2004-present)
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