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Music

Annual Playlist: The Best Albums of 2024

Time flies, man. It’s hard to believe another year has come and gone. But it has, which means only one thing…another edition of America’s Favorite Year-End Music List! That’s right, we’re back for Year 4 of FTL’s Annual Playlist. This year, thanks to the sheer amount of blue-chip music releases (seriously, it felt like everyone put something out in 2024), The List™ is bigger and better than ever. Hold on to your butts and grab a nice pair of headphones. Time to dig into my favorite year of music since starting this list.

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Music

Annual Playlist: The Best Albums of 2023

Welcome back for another edition of (surely) everyone’s favorite end-of-year music list! We’re officially on Year 3 of this exercise, in which I do my best to keep up with as much new music as humanly possible without feeling like Steve Buscemi wandering the halls of a high school.

Again, this list is a mostly subjective, mostly comprehendible selection of the music that made my year. Hopefully I included your favorite 2023 album, or mention your favorite song. If not…well there was a lot of great music this year, and there’s always room to listen to more! For what it’s worth, I have 2023 as not quite as good as last year, but better than 2021 (although I am open to hearing arguments to the contrary). Regardless, I loved everything mentioned here, and a few things that didn’t make the cut.

Without further ado, let’s kick this thing off with a brand new bonus category!

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Music

Annual Playlist: The Best Albums of 2022

I regret to inform you, dear reader, that I have lied to you. Okay, maybe not a full-on fib, perhaps exaggeration is a better description? Granted this space has been prone to the occasional melodramatic post so that shouldn’t be too surprising, but I still feel like I should come clean: Last year, despite my insistences to the contrary, was not necessarily a great year for music. While there were certainly a bunch of excellent releases, in hindsight it wasn’t as good on the whole as I thought it was when I put 2021’s version of this list together.

The good news? 2022 was mostly killer, very little filler. At minimum, it certainly felt like there were more big time albums released by big time artists all year long. And, for whatever it’s worth, I had a much tougher time whittling down the 150+ albums I listened to this year into the tidy top 10(ish) list you have before you.

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Music

Annual Playlist: The Best Albums of 2021

I spent an arguably unhealthy amount of time listening to music this year. According to the data from Apple Music (yes, I’m one of those people), I listened for 1,023 hours in 2021, and that’s just from that streaming service. Naturally, absorbing that much music is going to lead to likes, dislikes, and opinions ranging from “pretty agreeable” to “this is an insane person”. With the year coming to a close, I figured it’d be a worthwhile exercise to give my top ten albums, plus a few honorable mentions, for this past year. Please note: this is a totally arbitrary list, meaning I’m not entirely sure if it’s the ten best albums I listened to over the last 365-ish days, or my ten favorite, or just the ten I happen to be thinking about at the moment. Either way, here’s my year-end list for 2021. Hopefully you, my dear reader, will find something new that you might have missed, or be reminded of a great album from earlier this year that’s worth revisiting. On to the good stuff!

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Album Review

Review: Red (Taylor’s Version)

There’s something special about an album that, upon listening, recalls an extraordinarily specific time and place. The first few seconds of the first track blare over your headphones, speakers, or whatever listening apparatus is handy, and suddenly you’re instantly transported from wherever you are right now to wherever you were when you initially heard that collection of songs.

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Album Review

Cosmic Heroes and Average Joes: Teens of Denial, Five Years Later

Last spring, during the height of the pandemic in New York City, I binged Watchmen, both the original comic by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and the HBO miniseries sequel from Damon Lindelof. For the uninitiated, the stories take place in an alternate history in which masked vigilantes are real and the norm. It’s a rich world with incredibly complex characters, and isn’t afraid to tackle huge moral, philosophical, and psychological questions.

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Music

Julien Baker Bodyslams Me into Depression

PHOTO CREDIT: Amber J Davis, Nashville Scene

We are truly living through the golden age of sad music.

Ever since Bon Iver made crying in a cabin sexy again, young artists have been tripping over themselves to bare their hearts and spread the Big Sad™ to listeners worldwide. The last decade and a half has seen the woe-is-me musical movement pop up all over, with artists like Drake and Billie Eilish flexing their Feelings all the way to the top of the charts. But the biggest scene for saddies has always been the indie scene. 

And no indie musician has been better at making people sadder than Julien Baker.

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Album Review

Review: Strawberry Mansion

If nothing else (and I mean absolutely nothing else), 2020’s dire conditions have led to some pretty damn good music. Langhorne Slim’s new record, Strawberry Mansion, is the latest entry into this COVID album canon, and a worthy one at that.

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