Staturday Night Fever: The Best Music of 2024 In Numbers

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 albums and 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.

I do like making these purdy pictures though…

Stats in the cradle and a silver spoon

#6 Godspeed You! Black Emperor: “NO TITLE AS OF 21 DECEMBER 2024 45,206 DEAD”

Or ‘”NO​ ​TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28​,​340 DEAD“‘ if you want the original title. I was just trying to update it a bit to help them out.

When GY!BE finally settled on that title in February (“NO TITLE= what gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall? what context? what broken melody?“), the Israeli authorities had been causing massive, deliberate forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza for around four months. Perhaps, knowing that the record would be released in October, GY!BE assumed that the massacre would have surely been brought to a halt by international operations by that point. Perhaps GY!BE named the album that way to ensure a moment in time, a gross period of humanity, was forever notified in the most matter of fact way possible. At their most cynical, the band might have thought that by the time of the album’s October release – close to to the one year anniversary of the Hamas attacks on Israel that set off the bloodshed in response – the international community were doing their best to sweep this tiny little genocidal snafu from everybody’s memories and attempting to rebuild Netanyahu’s image as a cuddly friend to imperialism and the West. They might not have dared to think that the slaughter was still continuing.

Jannat Naji Abd Al-Rahman Abu-Hammad