The Tepid Take

     Absolutely no shade if you're from a chocolate box town, a financialised city or (god forbid) the countryside. Thing is, we can't all be so lucky. Astride rivers and seafronts in every corner sit towns that have seen better days, home to dastardly half-empty high streets that die at 5 o'clock sharp, eerily quiet industrial estates, suburbs with no character and few amenities save the Harvester. On a bad day, you could tar most towns (and even some cities) in England with this brush. It is an immediate experience, and it's not hard to find; every time I go home, I can find the canal always more brown than green than blue, I can find the shopping trollies and cans and needles, I can find the streets you don't go down because the streetlights have already been switched off.     And yet! Living in London, the city with something for everyone, you start to forget these images in favour of this gleaming cosmopolitanism, pedestrianised streets and pocket parks. Lo...

So... 2024. The year when things didn't really get any better. I mean in society at large, of course, not personally, I'm fine, how are you? Papering over a sense of hyperobject fatigue at the threat of a world war and climate apocalypse all coming at once? Me too! At least we have Bluesky now, eh, horses for courses. But like every year, artists released music and we listened to it. Spotify has of course given us its machine-learnéd supposition of our favourites, but having lived with a computer programmer who works with music databases, I'm no longer convinced that such a bodged-together tier list really holds water. We make our own priorities about the music that matters to us, every day; in moments, things cut through, not just songs but albums, not just .m4as but gigs, listening parties, heck, even journalism. So I like to make my own list of top albums that reflects that sort of stuff for me, and I encourage you to do so too - just like you might list the favour...