By the end of 2024, “Brat” had become an aesthetic, an ethos, a meme, a paint swatch, a lifestyle, a losing presidential campaign strategy, a “Saturday Night Live” punchline, a Grammy contender and a gnarled monkey’s paw with slime-green acrylics: “Now I’ve started thinking again, wondering about whether I think I deserve commercial success,” the former underground pop star Charli XCX sang on “Rewind,” a song recorded just before the world decided for her that she did. Before any of this overexposure, though, “Brat” was merely a thrilling collection of songs that stretched the pop lyric into run-on text speak and pivoted provocatively from over-the-top braggadocio (“Von Dutch,” “360”) to mascara-smeared, club-bathroom confessionals (“I Might Say Something Stupid,” “I Think About It All the Time”). At the end of this long, strange year, the music might not be the first thing that comes to mind when one hears the word “Brat,” but sometimes I really think it would be cool to rewind.
4. Cindy Lee, ‘Diamond Jubilee’
“Diamond Jubilee” plays out like one long, late-night transmission from a pirate radio station that can only be heard when an antenna is pointed just so — you listen frozen in place, half transfixed by this utterly bewitching music and half-afraid that any sudden movement will cause it to disappear back into the ether. Cindy Lee is the drag persona of Patrick Flegel, the former guitarist and vocalist of the abrasive, greatly missed Canadian rock band Women, from Calgary, Alberta, but here that same haunting voice and spidery fret-board prowess are used to create a triple-album of dreamy, hallucinatory pop. Though it’s available for download on Bandcamp and Cindy Lee’s website, Flegel declined to release the album on most streaming platforms, instead uploading the entire project as a single track on YouTube. That it found an adoring audience anyway is a refreshing rebuttal to the tyranny of the algorithm. Has anybody sent the link to David Lynch yet?
5. Laura Marling, ‘Patterns in Repeat’
The experience of motherhood at once focuses Laura Marling’s vision on the domestic sphere and expands it to consider past and future generations on this gorgeous, confidently executed song cycle about love, loss and familial bonds. A beloved English folk singer who is still somehow underrated, Marling here reduces her music to its most basic elements, all the better to appreciate her nimble expertise.
6. Mount Eerie, ‘Night Palace’
In its scope, the sprawling, 81-minute “Night Palace” hearkens back to the Northwestern indie-folk bard Phil Elverum’s early epics as the Microphones, though his signature shaggy-dog sound is now imbued with a more mature and complex perspective. Over soundscapes that are alternately cacophonous and tender, Elverum ponders the nature of art and land ownership, considers the impermanence of life and the absurdity of wealth and — when it all gets a little too heavy — talks to the animals, who answer by gently poking fun at him. (In one of the album’s most memorable moments, a fish responds to him in the voice of Jeff Bridges as the Dude.) “Night Palace” is a rangy, searching album that gives a great American songwriter the space to roam, experiment and think aloud about the imperfect world around him.