Hi, I’m Fat Casey Kasem and welcome to another music listicle, but not a Top Ten because I bought one too many!

As part of my annual series of year-in-review entries, I remain one of six people nationwide who still prefers compact discs to digital downloads. My hangups about vinyl would require a separate essay unto themselves. My new-album splurges are rare because: (a) it’s increasingly tougher for new music to catch my ear as I grow older and more finicky; and (b) my favorite yesteryear acts died, stopped recording, or swiveled in directions away from me. That usually means missing out on what majorities loves, thus further dropping me down the bottomless wishing well into total irrelevance as chronicled on this very website, thirteen years and counting.

In 2024 I bought brand new studio albums from eleven acts, omitting any pre-2024 finds or gifts, and not counting non-studio releases we’ll cover at the end. It can be fun to walk past the cool-collectors’ vinyl bins to the way-back by the T-shirt rack and pick through what passes for in-person CD sections today, though I’m seeing diminishing returns as those get smaller and dustier, sometimes not even alphabetized.

Anyway, minus those, on with the countdown!

11. Ben Folds, Sleigher. For the tiny demographic of hermits who spend every Christmas moping in shadowy piano bars and perking up whenever a singer throws in an unseasonal F-bomb, have we got the home-game version for you! Long after the satirical joy of “Rockin’ the Suburbs” and the haunting tragedy of “Brick” and the campy thrill of that time he worked with William Shatner, the ’90s crooner who presented as Billy Joel’s naughty-tongued kid brother is old now and mining for evergreen holiday-album royalties, though that doesn’t quite work if you can’t convince big-box stores to shelve some copies. The mandatory standards are slightly less uninteresting than his somnambulant originals, though the obscure, Bacharach-co-written “The Bell That Couldn’t Jingle” is a nice change-up. The lone signal that the Over the Hedge songwriter hasn’t gone totally fuddy-duddy is the intentionally painful “Xmas Aye Eye”, clever faux-filler simulating the Silicon Valley joy-killing spirit of feeding a Christmas-carol prompt to ChatGPT.

10. The Jesus and Mary Chain, Glasgow Eyes. The Scottish shoegazer icons’ 1989 Automatic was among the key albums that irrevocably altered my musical perceptions for all time with its fuzzbox overdrive and feedback attacks, though critics at the time who’d heard their earlier albums first (unlike my teen latecomer self) rejected their sudden fondness for drum machines. After ending their 21st-century dormancy with 2017’s Damage and Joy, seven years later the Reid brothers bothered to have another go, and their electronica fallback position is not life-changing now that I’m three times older. They can still strike boy-rebel poses over ear-splitting riffs (the opener “Venal Joy”) and still ironically crave our pop iconography (“American Born”, The Eagles and the Beatles”). Jim’s mirror-universe Beach-Boy voice sounds as snidely edgy as ever and William’s distorted licks can still short-circuit a dozen radio frequencies at once when the mood strikes. But too often they settle for the sort of monotonous filler that padded out the albums before their breakup (the zoned-out drone “Pure Poor” is accurately titled), lighter jangle-bits float away (“Second of June” relives Stoned and Dethroned‘s pretty torpor without its MVP Hope Sandoval), and all the beats sound like they gave a roadie some Shriekback tapes and the Casio keyboard my grandma once bought from a Fingerhut catalog. Among the outnumbered wins, “JAMCOD” is like a Goth club’s Barbed Wire Kisses tribute night and I’ll cop to nodding along to the lovey-bouncy “Girl 71”, which features backup vocals by Jim’s partner Rachel Conti, which I had to look up because of this CD’s worst sin: no liner notes.

9. Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department. Considering how Midnights was very much Not My Thing, for the life of me I can’t recall buying this and thinking like a fool, “Maybe THIS will be her next 1989!” The title track reveals a deeper breadth to her music-history inclinations than I’ve ever noticed, “Florida!!!” thrives thanks to special guests Florence + The Machine, and the standout “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” is a convincing shout of defiance over ironic Tiffany heart-beeps, one of the few tracks that don’t sound like the producers were having high tea together while nestled on a big pile of cozy sweaters. Otherwise, easy-listening trance-pop maybe isn’t the strongest mode for furious hater smackdowns if those are all that’s on your mind.

8. Kim Gordon, The Collective. Sonic Youth’s former singer/bassist and rebel soul now dabbles solo. Her Thurston-less debut No Home Record was my favorite album of 2019 and leaned away from indie-rock goddesshood toward avant-industrial noise-dance that signaled her independence from The Scene. She switches producers for the follow-up, which initially throbs with “Bye Bye”, a twisty dance-floor kiss-off in the form of a goodbye-ex-lover packing list (with a video directed by Flea’s daughter!). Her regular anti-sexist stances are evergreen material (the faux-preening “I’m a Man”) and normally I’m up for pot-banging percussion hooks, but the first record felt more outré and after a while her limited vocal range blurs into a haze behind the producer pushing a custom “ROAR” button on the soundboard, and some engineer thought the depressive drum machine would be cooler with a black beret stuck on top.

7. Various Artists, Everyone’s Getting Involved: A Tribute to Talking Heads’ “Stop Making Sense”. Tribute albums live or die differently among listeners depending on your familiarity and the intensity of your attachment to the originals. The only album on this list to exceed the 50-minute mark, the salute to NYC’s New Wave elders varies wildly — Miley Cyrus’ overprocessed “Psycho Killer” suffocates its monster-under-the-bed, Teezo Touchdown’s “Making Flippy Floppy” grooves well but the drum machine’s flipped to Pedestrian mode, Lorde’s stodgy “Take Me to the River” reminds me I don’t miss Hammond organs, and Jean Dawson has the right idea for taking “Swamp” toward Southern Gothic, if only there hadn’t been a coffeehouse on the way to the bayou. On the brighter side, the Linda Lindas demo a funkier vibe from studying “Found a Job”, Paramore stabilize “Burning Down the House” into power-pop therapy, Girl in Red’s loosely danceable “Girlfriend Is Better” gets two snaps up, and on the locomotive “Crosseyed and Painless” the erstwhile Chicano Batman (who followed Talking Heads into Splitsville last year) jamming with the Beastie Boys’ old pal Money Mark sound like Bloc Party in their prime, which I mean as highest praise. I’m miffed everyone avoided True Stories and all my favorites from Little Creatures or Naked, but that’s how grab bags are: you’re lucky to find a gem or two among the remaindered merch.

6. The Vaccines, Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations. I still have the guitar pick one of these Brits hurled into the audience when I saw them live in 2016 and knew nothing about them. Their sixth album is far glossier than my fading memories of that evening — post-20th wall-of-sound chamber-glam a la Neon Trees or Phoenix, all about singer Justin Young mourning failed or failing relationships while his bandmates speed onward and won’t let him catch his breath. He’s most convincing in “Heartbreak Kid”, where he reassures a fellow dumpee who’s as lovelorn as he is, but who might be likewise at fault for taking other people too casually.

5. Linkin Park, From Zero. The very first band that my son and I ever had in common returns at last! Seven years after Chester Bennington’s suicide, Mike Shinoda finally felt ready to record a revival with his bandmates, along with a new drummer (music-biz veteran Colin Brittain) and new co-vocalist Emily Armstrong, who reaches Bennington’s octave range (cf. her belt-sander’d screams in the needlessly acroynmized “IGYEIH”) and isn’t yet worn down enough for the textured-ballad doldrums that lost my interest way back when. She does her part for the legacy while trying to shrug off credible testimonies that she may in fact have been a Scientologist and, concurrently if not causally, an awful person. If we allow for “separate art and artist” listener indulgence (keeping an opt-out card in pocket), the band dusts off their stacks and recaptures the first two albums’ nü-metal glory days with quiet-loud-quiet showcases like “The Emptiness Machine” and “Heavy is the Crown”, though their two favorite topics remain self-aware primal-scream sessions and tirades toward unnamed offenders who suck. With the band-reset button firmly pressed, the question of where LP goes from here — i.e, venturing into new ideas or rewriting the same single every few years, like Skillet — remains To Be Continued for now.

4. Japandroids, Fate & Alcohol. I don’t drink, so the Canadian RAWK duo’s power-chord storms are my inroad to vicariously pounding a bar table while sing-bellowing alongside drunken revelers, though in my head-canon alt-timeline our society is hooked on energy drinks instead of depressants. Their purported swan song is the same as it ever was — all anthems all the time, still howling about liquor and the endless roads ahead and the catharsis in volume-11 herd-chants, of which “D&T” may well be their apotheosis that obviates any further need to keep writing variations on that theme. Best to stop now before the returns and the wattage diminish any further into an arthritic “unplugged” phase.

3. Green Day, Saviors. Once upon a time in 1993 a friend and I visited the townhouse of an eclectic teen named Clark Giles who swore this “Green Day” band would be the Next Big Thing. The following year Dookie emerged and fulfilled his prophecy. 31 years later, the ex-punk trio keeps on fist-pumping, though not quite the rebel slackers they used to be. The first album released in their 50s (they’re all my age, or near enough) is gleefully AOR with an effortless backbone, polished toolshed riffs, and general discontent expressed in familiar ways. Never mind the offenses to DIY cred — once again Billie Joe Armstrong has an ear for proper hooks to steal (“One-Eyed Bastard” pillages Pink’s “Start a Fight”, or whatever Deep Purple number that was cribbed from). The mandatory power ballad “Father to a Son” is a sequel to Creed’s “With Arms Wide Open” ready to accompany some TV drama’s Emmy-consideration deathbed scene. “Bobby Sox” is sprinkled with Pixies dust, they channel Weezer more than the FDA should allow, and on “Corvette Summer”, which, okay, the video remake with Mark Hamill himself is precious…but is that a BTO cowbell? And yet it’s cathartic enough for interstate-gridlock escape, and no 2024 anthem has captured my mood more accurately than “The American Dream Is Killing Me”, in which we middle-agers live again and reclaim our right to vent about how everything sucks, same as it ever did.

(And no, I didn’t buy the 2025 deluxe edition with extra tracks. I just bought the album last year. Call me when it’s time for the 10th- or 20th-anniversary reissue.)

2. The Linda Lindas, No Obligation. The all-female power-pop quartet’s self-titled debut was my second-favorite album of 2022 (curse that meddling Jack White!), quite the surprise considering they were all under 18. They’ve only a bit bigger since then and other legends have been raising banners for them — they were guests in last year’s Elton John documentary and, for the all-Spanish “Yo me Estreso”, they welcomed a special guest: accordionist “Weird Al” Yankovic! Actually jamming with them in the studio, not just a video cameo!

Their sophomore disc finds joy in inner turmoil (“All in My Head“, “Don’t Think“) and learns from their New Wave grand-elders (the Blondie-strut of “Lose Yourelf”), but doesn’t let go of their riot-kawaii edge. From Eloise Wong’s opening howls of “No Obligation” to “Once Upon a Time” (“I’m good at being angry!” admits Lucia de la Garza, sorry-not-sorry) to the defiant harmonies of “Resolution/Revolution” (“You don’t have any takes and/Your sympathy is wasted”), the Lindas keep it candid and bracing even in their steady climb toward the mainstream that hopefully doesn’t ruin them after they reach drinking age or drummer Mila de la Garza starts high school. You can practically hear the wheezing of an elderly Disney A&R man lurking in the alley behind Epitaph Records, plotting to con one of them into selling out and signing a contract that would order them to smile more.

1. Jack White, No Name. Well, well, well, speak of the devil! It seems almost unfair at this point to rank anything against a White album, but it’s gonna keep happening if I keep buying his new works as they and anyone else’s albums come out the same year. The vinyl-ready authenticity and vibrancy of refreshed classic rock pulsates through even on CD, though I’m sure it’s positively transcendental on a turntable if you’re not afflicted with my curse — i.e, whenever I touch an LP, it’s instantly covered with scratches, even within the shrink-wrap. Speaking of timelessness, the best side effect of procrastinating this entry for so long is the ’25 summertime release of the video for “Archbishop Harold Holmes” featuring Walk Hard‘s John C. Reilly as the titular preacher (kindasorta). It’s a perfect distillation of White’s licks, unpredictable change-ups and sardonic humor. Or you can double back to the rhino-charge of “That’s How I’m Feeling“, with its throbbing bass line and lyrical declaration of his self-evident independent streak, which is absolutely my kind of theme.

Special shout-out for two non-studio albums that came out in 2024 and fell into my clutches, each worth checking out if you don’t already own their contents:

Linkin Park, Papercutz — Before Year Zero‘s drop came the overdue greatest-hits, which collects all the heavy-rotation favorites I already owned (skipping The Hunting Party, which I liked, but whatever), one track apiece from the ones I don’t (their Jay-Z mash-up “Numb/Encore” and the title track from Bennington’s final album One More Light), both Transformers singles, and some choice ephemera — live favorite “Qwerty” (I have the LP Underground disc, but it was never a studio-album track per se), Meteora outtake “Lost” that showed up on its 20th-anniversary reissue, and the previously unreleased “Friendly Fire”, a fittingly emotional farewell.

They Might Be Giants’ Beast of Horns — One of many gems offered only through their Instant Fan Club mailing list, the latest live album from some of the Music Hall of Fame in my mental hermit-shack shows off a three-piece horn section that they rarely bring on tour. The set list contains none of their most widely known singles or TV tunes, instead highlighting invigorating ditties that in a cleverer world would be huge hits if the band still garnered any mainstream attention. Highlights include but aren’t limited to late-stage album tracks “Brontosaurus” and “Synopsis for Latecomers”, oldies “Mr. Me” (more tenor-sax-heavy than usual) and “Doctor Worm” (apropos of its debut on their mostly-live Severe Tire Damage), and one of my faves for personal reasons, the payola satire “Hey, Mr. DJ, I Thought You Said We Had a Deal”, which I once wrote about for a college English assignment. Been a while.

…and that’s the musical year that was. Thanks for reading! Lord willing, see you next year, maybe even in a timely manner!