You may have noticed this year that FLOOD expanded our year-end coverage a little bit. Whereas we’ve always run a “Best 25 Albums of the Year” writeup, we’ve now expanded it to 50 titles; additionally, we rounded up and blurbed albums that fit into 2024-specific trends, including “Best Double LPs” and “Best Return LPs.” I thought that maybe that would sate our need to cover all the important records that dropped over the course of the past 12 months, but no, I think we maybe only really scratched the surface.
With 2025 already begun, I figured this was my last chance to shout out a few additional titles that I remained fixated on throughout the year, 15 records that largely fit the mold already established by this monthly-turned-bi-monthly-turned-annual column that’s existed in some form for over five years now. Whether promising debuts, transitory EPs, or even 30-year anniversary supplements, each item listed below served as my very own personal Brat at some point in 2024. Only usually with more searing grunge guitar riffs and fewer A-lister guest verses.
You can explore more of FLOOD’s year end coverage here, and find the full Signal Boost archive here.
Casino Hearts, Lose Your Halo
Considering all of TikTok’s music-sync trends over the years, “Freaks” making Surf Curse a household name is among the most baffling to me. And while the band has seemingly leaned into the mainstream success it’s afforded them with a major-label record deal and younger median listener base, both Jacob Rubeck and Nick Rattigan have quietly been reviving their individual experimental solo outlets in recent years, with the former returning to his Casino Hearts moniker for the first time in nearly a decade. I was immediately drawn to their first EP as a trio with the earwormy, 100% Electronica–esque “In & Out of Time,” while the three additional tracks leave things pretty open-ended for where the outfit will be taking things next.
Crippling Alcoholism, With Love From a Padded Room
Crippling Alcoholism are exactly what I’ve wanted every noise-rock band from the early ’90s that featured a former member of Swans to sound like. I’ve seen the project’s vocals compared to everyone from Lil Ugly Mane to Tom Waits to Rob Thomas, though in my opinion they land somewhere between their genre-blending post-metal contemporaries Mamaleek and Pop. 1280’s particular brand of horrorcore punk. With Love From a Padded Room perfects this blend of aggressive misanthropy and pristine anachronism (I had to google the band to see if they actually all had goatees) without veering off course for even a moment of the record’s hour-long runtime.
EU1OGY, Forever Hate
EU1OGY has roots in the same city JPEGMAFIA came up in, and the rapper’s charted a similar trajectory from the broad mid-’10s noise-rap scene into something wholly unique—in this case, leaning into his hardcore-punk background on his latest album, Forever Hate. With aggressive, nearly hoarse vocals replacing the distorted and mostly buried voice heard on 2016’s Flawless Victory EP, the new material brings to mind B L A C K I E’s early releases that mixed harsh noise with digital hardcore.
Fashion Club, A Love You Cannot Shake
It may seem like an oversimplification of the project to describe Fashion Club as the solo project of a post-punk band’s bassist who collaborates with notably ethereal vocalists like Perfume Genius and Julie Byrne, but it’s also a pretty apt summary. And that’s certainly not a bad thing—both guests are featured on two of A Love You Cannot Shake’s best tracks, and even if the influence of Byrne’s music is unignorable on “Rotten Mind” and elsewhere on the record, the instrumental on “Forget” has more in common with Oneohtrix Point Never than Perfume Genius. Like OPN, this sophomore album proves that Pascal Stevenson has a similar capacity for futuristic world-building, which she continues to hone outside of her work in Moaning.
Hayes Noble, As It Was, As We Were
If you can’t get on board with No Age slowly revealing themselves to be an ambient duo rather than punk rockers, or if you had a hard time processing Japandroids’ final statement as a band, Hayes Noble feels like a soothing return to the late-’00s breezy-power-duo trend in indie rock. Given his young age I don’t get the sense that the Seattle-based musician was conscious of these bands in their heyday, though As It Was, As We Were never feels like dull homage to these artists—or even to the confident riffage of Keep It Like a Secret era Built to Spill and vintage Dinosaur Jr. before them. With vocals that often recall Trail of Dead’s Conrad Keely, the record instead feels deeply embedded in that time period, even despite the touch-grass messaging of “Blue to Grey.”
Hot Joy, Small Favor
Not only does Foxing seem to reinvent themselves with every new release and use their platform to share the spotlight with more local acts than they could possibly ever bring on tour, but the outfit has also been an incredible incubator for side projects. Beyond Smidley, Falsetto Boy, Enrique Samson the Third, et al is Hot Joy, featuring part-time members of Foxing’s touring band. Rather than specializing in cosmic post-emo operas, though, their debut EP Small Favors is a modest collection of grunge-pop tracks in a similar vein to Washer, trading that band’s lyrical punchlines for playful vocal inflections as Austin McCutchen and Nicole Bonura’s voices weave through each song. Given the extremely Midwestern record title I wonder what it’ll take to have them buck the no-worries-if-not mentality and intrude upon us with a full-length.
Jasper Byrne, Mirrors
Ever since I downloaded John Murphy’s “In the House – in a Heartbeat” on iTunes in the mid-2000s, I’ve come to realize that film and video game soundtracks don’t quite hit the same way outside of the context of the visual media they were created for—let alone shuffled into other music on my iPod. It’s usually exciting, then, when the figures behind some of the most memorable syncs in these titles release a proper studio album. Jasper Byrne is probably best known as the artist behind the Hotline Miami OST (he’s also a video game developer in his own right), and Mirrors is an exciting foray into drum and bass, trip-hop, and haunting atmospherics, all complemented by fairly gothic vocals. It’s a pretty far cry from the sparkling ’80s sheen of his early-’10s soundtrack work, yet it’s possibly even more evocative.
Majesty Crush, Butterflies Don’t Go Away
Butterflies Don’t Go Away is the B-sides collection I’ve dreamed of ever since I found out about Majesty Crush in the months leading up to the album’s release—an add on, essentially, to the 30th anniversary reissue (well, 31st) of the wrongly uncanonized Detroit shoegazers’ lone 1993 album, Love 15. Beyond the alternate versions of that album’s tracks are a handful of unreleased numbers that match the record’s shit-talking confidence (Love 15 opens with a fantasy about dancing on the drawn-and-quartered flesh of a stranger’s boyfriend he spots on public transit before feeding his body parts to the seals) and/or incredibly delicate early-4AD-era dream-pop melancholy (the second track is about being down extremely bad for Uma Thurman). My personal favorite among these bonus cuts is the one where the singer’s flirting by asking a woman if she’s heard his own band’s album before offering to let her borrow his copy.
Mandy, Lawn Girl
There is some precedent for Miranda Winters solo material, though good luck making heads or tails of the Melkbelly vocalist’s 2018 EP Xobeci, What Grows Here?—a no-wave-y, unrestrained voyage into the abstract mind of one of Chicago’s oddest noise-rock fixtures. Her debut under the moniker Mandy, then, is a little more familiar to her band’s freak-grunge templates and lyrics about dead pets and stuff, albeit with lightly sanded edges welcoming of indie-rock listeners. Unlike much of the Melkbelly discography, these tracks have been stuck in my head for the better part of the year—even if the evident self-realizations documented in the hooks here remain totally opaque to me and are often drowned out by searing grunge guitars at unexpected moments.
MX Lonely, Spit
I think it’s safe to say that even the biggest fans of grungegaze (a portmanteau, I’m sure you could deduce, of “grunge” and “shoegaze”) grew tired of grungegaze at some point in 2024. But if I was to pick one artist out of the new wave of figures populating the middle of this increasingly popular genre Venn diagram, I’d pick MX Lonely in a heartbeat—not just because the dual vocalists (and heavy synth usage) provide a much needed change within the often-monotonous experience of listening to a grungegaze record, but also because the Spit EP’s tight tracklist contains visceral nightmare imagery comparable only to Frankie Muniz’s darkest tweets. Even if “emo” could be comfortably worked into the term “grungegaze,” it doesn’t quite feel apt for subject matter this heavy—or a live show as fun as theirs.
Nara’s Room, Glassy Star
Maybe I’m showing my ignorance here, but Nara’s Room seems to be accomplishing a feat that every artist actively helping to revive shoegaze, slowcore, slacker rock, or any other ’90s alt-rock subgenre has fallen short with: creating a sound that feels comfortably embedded in that time period without showing their full hand when it comes to influences. Glassy Star is a gentle work of acoustic-led dream pop ambiguously alluding to the tail end of that decade with its Y2K-aesthetic album cover. Even a song called “Sparklehorse” keeps a firm distance from Mark Linkous’ well-defined sound.
Oreo Jones, Nephew
Three years since the 81355 LP dropped and it seems like that project has only picked up momentum, as is evident in the rap group’s expanding instrumental live sound. But as we anticipate new material, emcees Sirius Blvck and Oreo Jones have kept us sated with a series of solo releases, the former with a set of angst-ridden political-rap EPs and the latter—Sirius’ good-cop foil, if you can forgive the phrasing—honing his feel-good-nostalgia pop-rap sound that feels reminiscent of a time when Chance the Rapper was being pitched to indie-rock blog readers as a harmless gateway drug to the mainstream.
PlayThatBoiZay, VIP
On the one hand you could reasonably accuse PlayThatBoiZay of drafting off the success of Denzel Curry, given that VIP was not only released in the immediate aftermath of the King of the Mischievous South mixtape (and via the same label), but it also featured largely the same guest list (including one overlapping track co-created by both ’Zel and ’Zay). On the other, I like to approach this as the afterparty for that record—the VIP-only event that keeps the night going, providing enough stamina that you’re never once tempted to look at your watch and worry about securing a Lyft home.
Slift, Ilion
The attendance of the sold-out Slift show I went to last year might suggest that this French band isn’t short on listeners—even overseas here in the US—but their blend of epically scaled space-rock, prog-jazz, and bad-high stoner metal deserves the crossover success groups like Blood Incantation managed to achieve in 2024. I guess if Sub Pop haven’t been able to alert King Gizz’s massive following to Slift’s appeal I may not be the person for the job, I just can’t think of another artist who’s been better able to, say, polish up the entrancing and incanting psychedelic atmospheres of Oranssi Pazuzu for a wide audience, or the panicked yell-rock of Birds in Row.
Truck Violence, Violence
Given that the sonic reference points for Violence at times seem incredibly obvious—Show Me the Body; Black Country, New Road; Chat Pile; black metal; Appalachian folk; even a bit of stomp-clap pop-folk—it might be tempting to accuse Truck Violence of dumping a bunch of currently popular music terminology into an AI prompt. That obviously isn’t the case, though, given that all eight tracks of backwoods noise-rock collected here are not only really good but also deeply emotive. I don’t need to see the bear on the album cover’s paw to know that it has five fingers.
