Have I done that pun yet? Mate, I am struggling, honestly…
So here we are again, a round up of the hot stats of the best albums and songs of 2024, which I have bizarrely fallen into the habit of doing doing eleven fucking months after the Necessary Evil list of the best albumsand songs of the year is actually published. Why do I always leave it this long? Because, quite simply, after writing 40+ blog posts and a gargantuan song list in little over a month, my brain seriously doesn’t want to even acknowledge the previous year’s music again for at least a thousand years.
I almost didn’t do it this year. But – but! – then I realised that 2025’s list might have some extremely notable points! So maybe I’ll retire this dumb fucking tradition once I get round to that in winter 2026. Until then? Yeah, we gotta do this.
Top twenty bitches! Ain’t no more fucking around now, we are – as a great poet once said – about to enter pound town, this list about to dick a bitch down. This list’s coochie pink but its bootyhole brown. And we enter the top twenty with another concept album!
“Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!”
As concepts go, it’s definitely more apparent than Dua Saleh’s vague allusions, but a lot less more batshit insane that Lupe Fiasco’s Amy Winehouse fanfic, so I can’t really place it higher than second in the list of 2024’s best concept albums at time of writing. At time of writing because there’s a shitload more of these things to come further down the list. I might seriously be able to do a top ten, and that’s without including borderline examples like ‘Cowboy Carter’ (CONCEPT: Billionaire Celebrity Makes a Quasi-Country Album to Impress People Nobody Else Cares About’), Danny Brown (CONCEPT: ‘Rapper Gets Old’) or Hinds (CONCEPT: ‘WE’RE MOTHERFUCKING HINDS!!!!!’). Moor Mother though? Yeah, might count that if I’m desperate. Break instead of emergency.
OK, so mark it down: this is the first album that I’ve come to so far that I’ve rated way too low. This album’s fucking mega! And thirty-fucking-second?? Geddafuggardahere! Trust me, there are some stinkers lower down on this list.
Well… not stinkers, but… y’know…
‘Cowboy Carter’ is still to come? Geddafuggardahere!
I have to say, ‘concept albums’ give me a bit of an ick. If you’re going to go all in, dress up a smurfs, sing all the lyrics in n’avi, and get James Cameron to pilot you to the bottom of the ocean to record the whole album in one whole live take before the deep ocean pressure causes the submarine to explode, killing everyone on board, instantly, that I can respect. Like, I don’t even know what ‘concept’ you’re going for there, and I guess it’s a shame you didn’t survive to edit the Genius entry, but by gahd I respect the dedication!
In their 1972 book ‘Psychology of the Arts‘, Hans and Shulamith Kreitler tried to explain the reasoning behind why certain people react in certain ways to certain pieces of art. However, they deemed that to fully explain it, your knowledge of each person would need to “extend over an immeasurably large range of variables, which would include not only perceptive, cognitive, emotional and other personality characteristics, but also biographical data, specific personal experiences, past encounters with art, and individual memories and associations”. Sounds like a lot of work, right? Well, luckily, I’m here to just tell you what the best music of 2023 was, so all that effort behind your own personal psychosis can be sidestepped altogether. Think of it as my new year’s present.
And there’s one hundred and sixty this year. Maybe one hundred and sixty one. Because there was a lot of great tunes released in 2023. While limiting the Necessary Evil list to just 40 albums still meant there was space for at least one ‘meh’ album and one absolute stinker, over the past week I’ve actually had to really edit this list down to prevent it being ridiculous. And yet here we are: 160. Maybe 161.
I’m also going to be giving shout outs to particular golden moments in certain songs – similar to what I did in 2018 – and for each of those I’m going to be using a picture of one of the greatest moments in the short history of All Elite Wrestling, because… well… I get the horrible feeling that company is cooked and I hope to look back on this list in five years time and laugh at how pessimistic I was.
Can I finish this before 2024 and maybe have some days off before I go back to work?? Let’s seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!
[Edit: No. No I cannot. Not even close.
You’ve got some playlists though, will that make you happy?? Here’s the countdown on Spotifyand on YouTube, minus the unavailable songs on whatever platform]
All albums featured on the Necessary Evil best of year countdown
I’ve been doing this dumb blog that nobody reads since my first post on the 1st December 2014 called the latest Pixies album an “especially grievous dirty protest”. 2024’s list was the tenth I’ve written in excruciating detail on the blog. The intelligent thing to do would be to call it a day after that. But then again the really intelligent thing to would have been to never start it in the first place. As a stupid person, I’m definitely conflicted. My (recorded) albums of the year go back to 2007. I’m not wanting to put too fine a point on it, nor am I at all pompous enough to ever overexaggerate my importance, but I think it’s fair to say that I am objectively the paramount and most respected voice on music of the last 15 years. And before that too, I just didn’t have a blog then.
But what about the artists themselves? They sometimes play a part in the psychosexual agitprop magic of this blog. We can obviously consider the artists whose work has appeared most in my year end lists, but that’s obviously going to be the Manics (eleven + one very decent JDB solo record and one dreadful Nick Wire one), Prince (eleven, and eventually all 42 of the fuckers) and Nick Cave (I think around eleven, over a variety of projects). Like, duh much? We can all agree without any argument at all that these are the three most important musical artists of all time. It’s like if someone says their favourite food is “crisps”. Like, of course it’s crisps. Crisps are amazing. Everyone loves crisps. But what does that tell you about them as a person?? No, we need a different gage to work out the real stars of Necessary Evil.
(*yeah, that song isn’t actually included. It’ll be on Legit Bosses 2022 though! I’m just a bit slow with these things…)
So, only 121 this year, a marked decline on 2020’s 125. So was it a notably worse year? Absolutely chuffing not. Despite the 2.928% drop in numbers, the quality on show is outstanding. Never mind the weight, feel the quality. The top maybe twenty songs especially are on some next level shit, and you haven’t seen so many GOATs since you traumatically happened upon Weird Uncle Colin’s problematic porn collection back in 92. I also shaved a few songs last minute, mainly because they were from albums due to be released in 2022 and I decided to make them Next Year Alex’s problem. Also, one or two I realised… weren’t… actually… that… good… So that just means the 121 that made the cut are all of such spectacular quality that you may want to warn the people around you before you start reading this list, as the floor between your legs is about to get soaked.
No, no, hey, maybe it’s you that’s too gross, ever considered that??
Anyway, let the festivities begin, here are the playlists:
Yeah, I know, looking at that contemporary photograph of The Archies there, you might worry that there were real issues with representation in the late 60s, but if it makes you feel any better know that three of the members were proudly out homosexuals, two did not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth, and one was a literal dog.
Finally, on the the 31st day of March in the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty one, we can officially put 2020 to bed. I like doing this post every year, as it’s mostly pictures and I don’t have to do much talking. Just to make it clear, I can’t stress enough how much I hate talking to you people. No, not the person reading this, you’re cool, all the other people, yeah? You know what I’m talking about! Fuck them, right?
We start off, innocently enough, by ranking the countries of nationality in a proven failsafe way to find the best country in the world.
Seriously though, USA always wins this by such a margin that it’s actually embarrassing, and I don’t expect different this year…
Nationality
My tip for inevitable greatness, Dua Saleh, was born in Sudan but was forced to flee the Second Sudanese Civil War in the 90s with her family, eventually being granted asylum in the USA. I have no idea what nationality she considers herself, or even if she bothers to consider it at all, but I’m calling her half Sudanese in a desperate attempt to make this list a little more diverse
‘Member 2020? Do you really?? I’m not 100% sure 2020 as a year actually took place in any official capacity. I accept that days were marked off and months were filed as ‘complete’ in admin, but it was all just a box ticking exercise to make sure that all the paperwork lined up and we weren’t caught out were the concept of the year twenty twenty be questioned in any future audit. Sure, it happened, just look at that tick of the Excel spreadsheet. Can we move on? Please?
“Fuck it, check off 2021 as well, I’ve got a feeling that’s already a goner…”
While its existence is obviously a hotly debated issue, what’s undeniable is that we saw a shovel load of amazing songs in 2020. Thirteen more than in 2019, in fact, which means that, despite everything, 2020 was actually 14.56% a better year than 2019…? I know, it didn’t seem that way, but the maths doesn’t lie. In every previous year’s Legit Bosses countdown, I was fully confident what was going to finish top before I started writing it. In 2020, however, there were so many massively different but equally stonking songs that I had no idea where it was going to to land when I ranked them last night, the one that ended up on top really surprised me, and- fuck it- I may well change my mind again whie I write this. It’s my fucking list, piss off.
Some of you might remember me previously explaining that the Legit Bosses will be published a little later in the year because I had a big immigration law exam on the 25th February to study for. Well, despite studying like an appropriately legit boss myself, a week before the exam I was rushed to the hospital with ulcerative colitis, which was serious enough for me to be kept in the hospital for eight days, miss the exam and have to reschedule for May. I could have finished this dumb fucking list before New Year Day. Ah well, not to worry, just know that, no matter how fiendishly provocative and titillatingly obtuse my writing predictably, I resent everything about having to write this list and in all honesty despise you for reading it. More after the jump!!
Necessary Evil 