As Popdose’s 2024 In Rewind series reaches its penultimate post, we’ve already explored the year’s breakthrough artists, best “the… band” comebacks, best star-studded albums, best power pop albums, and the latest UK invasion. In the final post, we’re going to end this series celebrating the women who absolutely owned pop culture in 2024… but today, let’s hear it for the boys.
The Eighties had the more memorable clothes, hairstyles, and movies – but the Nineties turned out to have a lasting musical legacy, as evidenced by Olivia Rodrigo’s mining of the sound on her first two albums. Plenty of icons from the day were back with incredible new music in 2024, further pushing forward their creativity and legacies, not quite ready for Nostalgia Tours and Vegas Residencies. While rising stars from Generation Z dominate the pop cultural spotlight, sold out tours from these acts prove there’s still plenty of power radiating from Generation X.
The Smashing Pumpkins • Aghori Mhori Mei
Here we are a quarter century after the Chicago legends farewell tour, ¾ of the OG band is back with their 13th proper album (if you count bonus tracks and expanded reissues, they’ve released a good 1,734 albums worth of material to date). Jimmy Chamberlin and James Iha have been back in the fold for a while now, but the band is still missing some feminine energy. Here’s hoping new touring guitarist Kiki Wong can influence future recordings. That said, the new album is perhaps their best since Adore while closer in spirit to Siamese Dream. While the 3CD Atum certainly had moments, the single disc Mei is focused and fierce. The original lineup had a decade-long run that I rank among ABBA, Prince and the Beatles in terms of creative growth and song quality, and in this 4th decade of their existence, the songs are brimming with excitement again – too bad Billy has all but given up on packaging. The once luscious art extravaganzas that accompanied the OG albums and their deluxe reissues is long gone, replaced with flimsy, dark, and depressing eco-paks.
Green Day • Saviors / Pinhead Gunpowder • UNT
Billie Joe Armstong, also in his 4th decade as a rock star, remained on top of his game throughout 2024. Saviors blazed into the year, packing a lot of punch in a blissfully short amount running time. ‘The American Dream is Killing Me’ sounds like an outcast from American Idiot, while ‘Bobby Sox’ pushes queer narratives into the arena rock mainstream.
Version 1.0.0
One of Billie Joe’s many side-hustles (which also includes Foxboro Hot Tubs, The Network, The Longshot, and others), Pinhead Gunpowder are back with a 14-song blitzkrieg of short and fun bops that would have fit in nicely with Green Day’s Lookout! Records era. And to top it all off, Armstrong still had time to drop an essential track onto the star-studded Jesse Malin benefit we talked about here.
Nada Surf • Moon Mirror
New York’s Nada Surf blazed out of the mid-1990s with high-adrenaline hits like ‘Popular’ and ‘The Plan’, before getting booted from their major label deal with Electra. What could have marked the end, seeded the beginning of a mellower, more cerebral second act that’s now a good quarter century in. Matthew Caws is one of the generation’s best lyricists and the new album is filled with clever wordplay along themes of love, longing, and loneliness. A limited edition bonus CD of demos lifts the curtain a bit into the band’s creative process.
Version 1.0.0
Pearl Jam • Dark Matter
Justin Bieber producer Andrew Watt has spent the past decade bringing legacy acts back to their creative and commercial peaks – not by forcing modern sounds upon them, but reminding us what made acts like Ozzy Osborne, Iggy Pop, and The Rolling Stones so great in the first place. Eddie Vedder first worked with Watt on the Flag Day soundtrack before tapping him for his all-star Earthling record. Now the rest of the band is in cahoots, delivering perhaps their most accessible rock radio record since Ten.
James • Yummy (and bonus CD Pudding)
It may seem odd that the frontman for Manchester’s James is named Tim, or that a band named after its bassist that dominated the 1990s, began back in 1982. It even seemed like they broke up in 2001, only to reunite and never stop moving from 2008 forward. At worst, the band is very good, and at best, they’re transcendent, including landmark albums Laid (1993), Millionaires (1999), La Petite Mort (2014), and Living in Extraordinary Times (2018). Yummy is certainly in the very very good range, whereas the odds and sods collection Pudding is best enjoyed with an occasional stream if you missed out on the limited edition CD. Still, to see this band still firing on all cylinders and headlining arenas is breathtaking. The Bon Jovi documentary showed the risks of vocal strain on aging singers, so among life’s many blessings is to hear Tim Booth sing to the rafters like it’s 1988. A new live album just dropped onto streamers and will arrive on physicals soon into the new year.
Coldplay • Moon Music
For some reason, I keep buying Coldplay albums despite how sappy they sound – I guess because sometimes like mashed potatoes, you just need an emotional cushion to lay your head (metaphor not as mixed as it seems). Dua Lipa’s Hulu docuseries on London’s swinging Camden town provided a nice chronicle of Chris Martin & Co’s rise from clubs to stadiums, and they claim this new LP will be their last. I bought two special editions for the price of a coffee – one with a compete concert album bonus disc, and another with a complete second album’s worth of bonus tracks. Lovely for sure, forgettable, perhaps, but if this is the swan song, what a lovely coda to a quarter century of sunshine, rainbows, and sugary comfort.
Paul Heaton • The Mighty Several
I probably own more CDs by Paul Heaton than most any other artist in my collection. The Housemartins, The Beautiful South, Solo Albums, and Duet Albums. Melodically they don’t stray too far from the sun, but lyrically they’re all a hoot, as Heaton remains an exquisite storyteller and barbed lyricist. ‘We Are Each Other’ and ‘A Little Time’ remain two of the all-time best songs to chronicle the end of a relationship, while ‘Woman in the Wall’ is one of the most buoyantly catchy odes to murder I’ve ever heard. After a decade of collab albums with former Beautiful South singer Jacqui Abbott, Heaton assembles a new cast of outlaws (depicted as such in the lovely liner notes) for this stellar new affair. Wit and commentary abound alongside earworm melodies you’ll be humming for days, despite the NSFW lyrics.
A Certain Ratio • Keep It Real
In the States, I’m not sure if Manchester’s ACR have ever risen above the status of college radio, left of the dial, indie darlings, but in the UK, they’ve been a consistent hitmaker since the late 1970’s. Much like Goldfrapp in later years, they’ve always been consistently unpredictable in terms of what sound will greet you on any given record. Post punk akin to Factory Records labelmates Joy Division and New Order? Check. Madchester jams akin to Happy Mondays? Check. Death disco filtered through Chic and Nile Rodgers? Check and check. After decades of ACR brand awareness, I finally took the plunge with 2023’s 1982 album, that I spent the year collecting everything I could of theirs on CD – made easy due to the band’s reissue partner, Mute. Almost a year to the day later, ACR dropped another new album, and it absolutely kicks. For a band that has never really had a celebrity, a scandal, a meteoric rise or fall, it’s testament to the power of the musicians and their music to keep this groove going nonstop all this time. For further listening, they also just released a Christmas EP.
Propaganda • Propaganda (2024)
We’ll wrap today’s post with nods to two other very good albums that lit up the dark year that was. We raved about Germany’s Propaganda in not one, but two features this year. The band recently dropped the digital version of their 5-song EP – much like how the band’s Outside World and Wishful Thinking albums “reimagined” their landmark debut, A Secret Wish, more than remixed it, this new EP takes elements of five songs from the new album and lets them simply run free.
Pet Shop Boys • Nonetheless
The Pet Shop Boys is another act that for 40 years has never, ever gone away. Nonetheless delivers more of the same – sonically perfect, absolutely enchanting pop that core fans will adore. Early pressings include the Furthermore EP that updates a few classics like ‘It’s a Sin’.
Tomorrow, 2024 rewind series concludes with All The Single (and Album) Ladies.
Comments