Consequence’s Annual Report continues with our most massive list of the season: the 200 Best Songs of 2024. As the year winds down, we’ve got tons of awards, lists, and interviews about the best music, film, and TV 2024 had to offer, including our lists of the 50 Best Albums of the Year.
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In 2024, more music is released in one day than the entire calendar year of 1989. Gone are the times when singles were only acquired at a record store, albums were released (mostly) on Tuesdays, and diversity was limited to each week’s offerings.
Today, music is at our fingertips, and it’s coming faster and in greater quantities than ever. It’s no longer the standard to simply record an album in a studio and wait for the label to physically distribute it. In 2024, more musicians are bypassing traditional release strategies via DIY recordings, the surprise album drop, or the very platforms where the music lives. Essentially, if you have choice paralysis when it comes to catching up on new music, you’d be forgiven for being left in the dust.
This was the year of the double album and, similarly, the companion album — as evidenced by Taylor Swift, Charli XCX, and Kacey Musgraves. This was the year of music released outside of the usual cadence or distribution tactics, like Artist of the Year Jack White’s mysterious No Name drop, Tyler, the Creator releasing CHROMAKOPIA on a Monday morning, and Cindy Lee sharing their opus Diamond Jubilee on a geocities website (and, to this day, refusing to put the album on streaming).
It was also the year of one-off releases quickly dominating the conversation: Charli XCX and Lorde publicly “working it out on the remix” just days after the release of Brat; Kendrick Lamar casually dropping “Not Like Us” mid-feud and instantly silencing his critics; Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter each offering promotional singles the week of their Coachella debuts, which then became their biggest career-boosting catalysts yet.
Everywhere you look, across all genres and mediums, there’s more and more and more. Hence, our decision to stretch this Best Songs of 2024 list all the way to 200 tracks — there’s so much noise out there that it’d be pointless to limit ourselves to 50 or even 100 songs. While we at Consequence have learned to surrender to the fact that we can’t listen to all the great new music that comes each year, we can still spotlight the tracks we couldn’t get out of our heads this year, as well as some under-appreciated gems and forgotten bangers. Check out our list of the best songs of 2024 below.
— Paolo Ragusa
Associate Editor