Recency Bias
Some Pop Songs from 2024
As per tradition, I’ve spent the last weeks of the year pressing friends and strangers, while scouring Best Music of ’24 lists for songs I find relatively interesting to curate my own list—so that I can pretend I’ve been keeping up all year. And oh my god, it’s always so much harder than I anticipate.
My musical tastes were set in stone decades ago, my playlists locked down long before Spotify or YouTube algorithms took over, so this process can feel like a grind—akin to memorizing reviews in Maximum Rocknroll, stumbling across a record in the wild, and having to pull the trigger instantly while thinking, Do I even like this a little? It’s a kind of musical conversion therapy. Some songs are wildly experimental, others seriously heavy. They can toe the line between overly heartfelt and fantastically bombastic—and yet they often surprise me with repeated listening, thus explaining the recency bias noted in the headline. For that reason, I should probably call the playlist Patience Required, Rewards Unassured.
Despite the discordance, there’s a lot of amazing music here—enough to help you fake modern music cred while simultaneously convincing your peers you’ve completely lost your mind. Enjoy.
PS: Surprisingly, more punk/hardcore made it into the mix this time around—something I usually steer clear of, but maybe it’s just the times. If that’s your scene, and you need a gateway, State Power, Straw Man Army, Drug Church, and The Chisel are solid starting points.