Hidden gems of 2024

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, January 31st. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: some of the best music from 2024.

The music business is fragmenting and subdividing … at the same time that making and disseminating music is getting easier. Because of that, more acts than ever are releasing music to the world, but finding them is getting harder. So we’ll tell you about some albums that deserve special attention—whether for the depth of their lyrics, the quality of their performances—or both.

EICHER: Today, we welcome back to our program WORLD’s longtime music critic who’s been around here as long as I have. He goes all the way back to the early days, back when we were weekend-only and had written for WORLD long before that. Here is Arsenio Orteza!

MUSIC: [“(I’m Gonna Get over This) Some Day” by T Bone Burnett]

ARSENIO ORTEZA: Consider, for instance, The Other Side. It’s the latest album by legendary producer and singer-songwriter T Bone Burnett. Burnett’s fans were expecting a different recording altogether. They were anticipating the final installment of his foreboding and forbiddingly avant-garde Invisible Light trilogy.

Instead, with The Other Side, they got a dozen country-folk songs that found Burnett cleansing his musical and philosophical palates. Burnett had gone back to basics before–38 years ago, in fact, with the album T Bone Burnett. But this time the basics that he went back to had mainly to do with the melodies and instrumentation—his lyrics, clearly articulated though they are, will keep metaphor unpackers busy for weeks. But the lyrics of “(I’m Gonna Get over This) Some Day” are straightforward–and should be magnetized to the refrigerators of everyone struggling with letting bygones go by.

MUSIC: [“Whoever You Turn Out to Be” by Luke Combs]

Perhaps the most emotionally direct album of 2024 was Father & Sons by country star Luke Combs. Combs is one of several co-writers on most of the songs, so it’s hard to say where the abundance of insight about being a loving father or a grateful son comes from. But there is an abundance. And if you’ve ever tried to be a loving father or a grateful son, the album’s relentless emotional bulls’-eyes will at some point have you dabbing your eyes.

On the explicitly Christian front, Charlie Peacock celebrated the 40th anniversary of his Exit Records debut with Every Kind of Uh-oh, a wise, bold, and challenging album that ranks with his best. The nearly omnipresent steel guitars provide the atmosphere, but it’s Peacock’s lyrics and hooks that make the musicianship more than ornamentation.

MUSIC: [“The Only Remedy” by Charlie Peacock]

Contemporary-Christian-music radio probably won’t play “The Only Remedy” because it contains a crudity, but Americana radio might. And actually, it should. The song could pass for Paul Simon at his peak.

MUSIC: [“Life Is” by Jessica Pratt]

Perhaps the sweetest album with no particular socio-cultural messaging was Here in the Pitch, the fourth long player by the singer-songwriter Jessica Pratt.

Pratt used to confine herself to acoustic-guitar-only instrumentation and melodies that hearkened back to the days when coffee houses were the locus of intimate female musical expression. Today, with Here in the Pitch, Pratt has gone in a different direction. She uses percussion, mellotrons, and a keyboard, a bossa nova rhythm, and a Burt Bacharach chord change here or there. But she doesn’t sound like a sellout. Rather, she sounds as if she’s hearkening back to ’60s girl-pop with an ear toward doing it better than anyone thought possible at the time.

Perhaps the year’s most pleasant surprise was Sea Songs by the operatic baritone Bryn Terfel. We don’t need opera singers doing pop tunes. But when the pop is as old as this album’s folk songs and shanties, that’s a different matter, particularly with fiddle, bagpipes, accordion, and whistle augmenting the acoustic guitar and double bass.

MUSIC: [“Bold Riley” by Bryn Terfel]

As you might expect from a collection that includes “Drunken Sailor” and “The Wellerman,” a mood of hearty joy predominates. But on more than one track, there’s elegiac heartbreak aplenty.

And finally, in keeping with the voting shifts that delivered the White House to Donald Trump for the second time, there’s Ensoulment by the British pop group The The. Matt Johnson, who has led the band for decades, probably doesn’t want the following revelation shouted from the rooftops, but his latest songs make clear that he has been red-pilled—preferring truth over the status quo.

LYRICS: Truth stands on the gallows. / Liеs sit on the throne. /Something in thе shadows / communicates by code. / The unthinkable is now thinkable. / The poison, it's drinkable. / So get with the program. Get in sync. / You'd better self-censor for wrongthink.

And that’s just the first song. In the next one, he laments that the “London [he] knew is gone,” citing free-speech issues, among others. But he doesn’t let the U.S. off the hook either: The song “Kissing the Ring of POTUS” implies that the U.S. has become little more than a hypocritical, power-wielding caricature of its better self. Johnson speaks more than he sings, amid sounds and melodies that in underplaying their hand increase their grip. “I’m just trying, in a way, to sort of capture the zeitgeist,” he told American Songwriter. He has.

I’m Arsenio Orteza.

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