My Top 10 Albums of 2024

1) The Past is Still Alive / Hurray for the Riff Raff / 2024

Because I grew up around a lot of rich, racist country-loving folks, I’ve had a lot of trouble sinking into good folk and country my whole life. I never thought 2024 would be the year folk and country albums would dominate my listening for long stretches. Hurray for the Riff Raff is the culmination of this new turn for me. A queer boricua cowgirl crooning about fentanyl, love, and highways, Hurray for the Riff Raff frequently pushed my despair into the sublime, transforming my grief into nostalgia. The first song “Alibi” reminds me of the worst times of my life, but not the terror and sickness, but the love of friends like Gionni Ponce during those times. These songs convince me to love, to dream, to try against the odds.      

Favorite Lyric: I used to think I was born into the wrong generation. But now I know I made it right on time to watch the world burn with a tear in my eye to watch the world burn I’m right on time. 

2) I DREAMT I FOUND A RED RUBY - Francesca Wexler - 2024

Francesca Wexler’s music makes me feel like my most beautiful, intelligent, and heavy self. Top-notch pen game with a complex range of queer emotions on lush beats. The music feels like the best sort of edible high in the summer sun. I literally feel warmer when I listen to it. This was my soundtrack for the entire summer, including my trip to Guatemala and El Salvador where I fulfilled my lifelong dream of reading the book I wrote on my mother’s life in the homeland surrounded by loved ones and comrades. 

Favorite Lyric: All my angels work the night shift. 

3) GNX - Kendrick Lamar - 2024 

It’s painful to watch so much of hip-hop culture be saturated with rappers’ lowest vibrations, completely self-abandoned to gluttony, amorality, egoism, and horrifyingly bad politics. Kendrick’s presence in the culture this year felt like a rare voice of authority trying to carve out a pocket in the culture where bangers and reason could co-exist. I was surprised by how much the fury and hatred he unleashed during the beef spoke to my own frustrations with the US at large and how much I needed that release valve. As ugly as the beef got, it was incredibly impressive to watch Kendrick remain grounded and emerge a fuller artist. GNX is some of my favorite Kendrick for its playfulness and groundedness. 

Favorite Lyric: Starting to see spaceships on Rosecrans. I see the aliens hold hands. They wanna see me do my dance.     

4) Lonestar Luchador - That Mexican OT - 2023

That Mexican OT feels like the first true heir of Big Pun’s legacy. That Mexican OT combines mariachi chillidos with Pun-level wordplay in a classic Texas country lean. Lonestar Luchador is brilliantly crafted with hilarious Ralph Barbosa skits and conceptually tight-knit songs that dive between bravado, trauma-dumping, and just pure fun.   

Favorite Lyric: I had to congratulate her parents cuz they made em a bad bitch. 

5) DEIRA - Saint Levant - 2024 

Rapping and singing in English, French, and Arabic, Saint Levant is the Palestinian lover boy you didn’t know you needed in your life. Because who said surviving and resisting a genocide can’t be sexy af. These dreamy tunes made my Chicago summer days magic, without asking me to stick my head in the sand either. Thank you to Lin Flores for turning me onto this. 

Favorite lyric: I hear the sounds of the bombs in our sleep, but I never in my life heard the sound of defeat. 

6) Dark Times - Vince Staples - 2024

Vince Staples deserves just as much love as Kendrick.  I think he is who people think J. Cole is. This is spiritual psychedelic rap, the album ending with a woman’s vision of the universe’s slow struggle to the perfection of our souls. I love Vince because he has a way of holding the agony of living and making it bearable, his calm steady voice slowly sinking into your subconscious. I don’t typically find his songs catchy, but after a few listens, I get hooked by the feeling and the space it opens in me to feel peace. This album traverses all sorts of heartbreak with ten toes planted in the concrete.

Favorite lyric: I don’t need your flowers, I’m living. The first time I saw a million dollars I squinted.  

7) Few Good Things - Saba - 2022

Saba taught me how to move through a Chicago winter with this album. The soundscape couldn’t fit the city better. The project dropped in 2022 when I was distracted by JID, Pusha T, and Amindi. I’m glad I returned to it though because this album is every bit as worthy and incredible as those three. Dominated by blue-gray soundscapes and gritty lyrics about how weird it is to survive and thrive in a burning world, Saba’s growth in this project is incredible. 

Favorite Lyric: I got everything I could ever need / and i try to keep that in mind / whenever i meet a man trying to sell a dream

8) Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying - Labi Siffre - 1972

December 2023 I crash land in India full of PTSD symptoms and the shock of the move to Chicago still fresh on my nervous system. Labi was a crucial part of my healing as I cherished the unimaginably cool moments with my new family, ate delectable food, and fell deeper in love with Anushka. I listened to Labi while practicing a difficult set of new qi gong movements and breathing through the pain. The opening song allowed me to enter a space of reverence with my loves and losses, and the rest splayed playfully out, setting me up for my year of exploring folksier sounds. Shoutout to the student who turned me onto the project. 

Favorite Lyric: I am free man and my father he was a slave. I have been broken but my children will be saved. Saved for the fire of man’s desire. Saved for tomorrow with today’s sorrow. Saved for a Jesus who does not need us. Saved for the lovers I pray they will discover.  

9) Chromokopia - Tyler, the Creator - 2024

Tyler’s paranoia-packed album came just in time to shake me out of my fear of the ever-rising tide of fascism with lyrics that are equal parts soulful and mischievous. It’s great to hear Tyler be his whole queer self on such energetic production.

Favorite lyric: give a fuck bout pronouns, I’m that n**** and that bitch. 

10) Hells Welles - Jesse Welles - 2024 

I found Jesse Welles through his song about the assassination of the UnitedHealth CEO, and his politically sharp folk with biting satiric lyrics has won me over so powerfully, he slid into this last spot in the final minute. He’s equally capable of making me seethe, laugh, and cry with croons that are equally soulful and goofy. He has a whole album on nature, giving odes to bugs, trees, and whales and two others making political commentary on everything from the genocide, cancer, modern-day slavery, and more. I’m just happy to have found someone as angry and silly as I feel most days. 

Favorite lyric: the dead don’t feel honor, they don’t feel that brave. They don’t feel avenged. They’re lucky if they got graves. 

Honorable Mentions (in no particular order)

La Isla - Rels B 

Mind Blade - Malev da Shinobi 

Antitesis - YoungShiva

Cowboy Carter - Beyonce

Please Don’t Cry - Rapsody

If My Wife New, I’d be Dead - CMAT

Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going - Shaboozey

Alligator Bites Never Heal - Doechii 

Javelin - Sufjan Stevens 

The Long Game - Marlon Craft 

The Secret Room: A String Quartet / Kazim Ali / 2017

The Secret Room: A String Quartet (Kaya Press, 2017) by Kazim Ali.

Presented as a novel written as a musical score for a string quartet, The Secret Room by Kazim Ali follows four characters as they navigate a numbing onslaught of longing and frost, death and red lights. Each story is told simultaneously, as if each voice were a different instrument on a musical score. If read as a traditional novel, the reader will alternate between two or more voices in most of the sections. Part contrapuntal, part free-form lyric narrative, the novel may not always read seamlessly in a traditional front-to-back manner, but the poetic connections and tensions make each page erupt with meanings and emotional nuances. The Secret Room is a book I revel returning to because of the deftness with which Ali exploits the potential of this one-of-a-kind form.

Take this excerpt from the introductory section of the novel, for example, aptly titled “theme.” The first voice and protagonist of Ali’s novel-in-verse is Sonia Chang. Sonia is a concert violinist, one of those majestically disciplined people who practices for hours, lost in darkening rooms, swallowed within an intimacy unknown to an unfortunate majority of us. Here, Ali provides a glimpse into her devoted practice. The rewards of her dedicated meditation are described in language that evokes both the spiritual and erotic, in the Platonic and carnal senses. If we read Chang’s voice in isolation, it reads like this:

She has never felt in her life / this way: / when music fills her / she feels lost. / And filled. / Remember the temple-pools. / She’s adrift now / halfway between sleep and the sound of ocean. / How can she open her self to the sky— / It’s a delirium, she thinks. / It’s a sort of fever (19-20)

On the page, however, Chang’s story is intertwined with the stories of three other characters, as in this image of page 19. Positioned as the opening notes of Ali’s string quartet, the quoted description of Sonia’s practice serves as a sort of ars poetica to The Secret Room’s biochemistry. Like much music, Ali’s The Secret Room has the power to make you feel lost and full at the same time. Voices interlock and slip away deliriously. Even when you cannot outline the exact shape of the narrative’s geometry, you will feel it. It’s not that Ali’s string quartet lacks structure or obscures itself through imprecision. Each narrative is told clearly on an individual level and combine to create one unified voice. Rather, the experience of shifting from voice-to-voice so swept me away in the swell and tide of the music that the traditional expectations of linear forms and plotlines became subordinate to the demands of lyric and prayer.

I realize this image in isolation can make the novel seem labyrinthine. I confess, I flipped through the first twenty pages of the introductory “theme” five times over: four times following one of the four protagonists in isolation and a final time reading them all together. If this sounds tedious, it wasn’t. First of all, this didn’t amount to much reading because each character only has four lines per page at most. More importantly, however, Ali’s sense of rhythm and tension is so keen it was absolutely captivating. After developing a familiarity for the voice and the narrative conflict of each individual character, it became not only easy to follow if I read them altogether, but magical. In the same image from page 19, for example, Chang’s voice combines with the voices of Rizwan Syed, a yoga instructor. When music makes Chang “[feel] lost. / And filled,” and she “[r]emembers the temple pools,” Syed’s section follows with a resonant description of the practice of yoga: “In these quiet moments the empty spaces of silence open wider still.”  A few lines down, when Chang is “adrift now / halfway between sleep and the sound ocean,” Syed recalls, “the “Temple-pool” position” where “students breathe, become bowls.” Ali has not merely placed four different narratives side-by-side. He has arranged them so they parallel and contradict one another, so sentences almost flow completely into one another.

There is little doubt that this potentially intimidating form has limited The Secret Room’s readership. Of the three scanty reviews online (two of which are less than 120 words and on Goodreads), each points to its formal innovation as a sort of deformity, an experimental fetish “not for everyone,” lauded with five stars but noted as a deterrent. It wounds me to see such painstaking craftsmanship and poetic form dismissed by some readers, as works of literature that marry form and content so masterfully are so rare. 

Genre and reception aside, The Secret Room’s value lies not merely in its undeniable technical brilliance, but in the heart of its concerns: each character struggles to create meaning in a life severed from their mother country, spurred by the demands of two, at times diametrically opposed, cultures. With the focus and exertion of a true artist, Sonia Chang prepares for her upcoming concert, “suspended against logic and her fear” (115). Meanwhile, Rizwan Syed, a yoga teacher and aging bachelor, is broken by the death of family members; years of isolation, cultural disconnection, and familial alienation flood in, forcing him to break his personal silences. Jody Merchant, on the other hand, is a social worker whose life beyond the redundant labor of motherhood and her career has come to a halt; like the traffic, it is “nearly unmoving,” as Merchant struggles to rekindle her faded passions (25). Lastly, Pratap Patel grapples with the trauma of losing his younger brother to cancer as a child in India and the paradoxical meaninglessness of his successful life in New York.

Each character must exchange a pound of their souls for survival. Sonia gives up on her dreams of traveling to Kerala and studying South Indian classical music; Jody abandons her name; Rizwan does not speak to his family for years; and Pratap chooses to bear his burdens alone, alienating even his wife. In this way, The Secret Room models and undermines a variety of strategies for healing—from death, from burnout, from migration. Just as Patel begins finding solace in yoga, for example, Syed begins to feel disenchanted with the practice. Ali’s genius lies in the way he shows that each of these fragmented narratives and shattered lives is connected, pulled together and parallel like the strings of a violin. Images from one voice will reappear inverted in another. Characters encounter one another in surprising ways, revealing the intimacy possible within a yoga studio or concert hall, the lightyears between people in the same offices and beds.

Ali has one of those voices that can make the most complex compositions feel lucid. And he manages it all while chiseling jaw-dropping lines that can stand alone, no form or narrative necessary. For the past weeks, I have walked around the following line like a sculpture in mind: “At some point in the barely seen seam between noon and Sonia, a bell rings” (68). Readers will undoubtedly feel their own lives braid into the threads of each narrative until there is no seam between them and Jody’s utter devastation. Until there is no seam between the reader and Pratap’s salvation.