Trends change, but I’ve never in my lifetime seen the thirst for punk music die. It shows up in surprising ways, like when Olivia Rodrigo gets arenas full of impressionable kids singing along to punk songs even if they aren’t using that word. Or when Green Day fill stadiums to play 20- and 30-year-old albums in full to people who weren’t born when they came out. Or when a brutally heavy hardcore band like Knocked Loose finds themselves shockingly adjacent to mainstream success. This stuff’s obviously not all over the radio and television like it was in the ’90s and 2000s, but new generations still crave it and, fortunately, the great records do not stop coming.
2024 was an amazing year for punk, so amazing that it was very hard to narrow all the great records down to a list of the best 50. For the purposes of this list, “punk” includes hardcore, post-hardcore, emo, screamo, metalcore, ska-punk, pop punk, and good old-fashioned capital-P Punk, among other various offshoots of the wide-ranging genre of music. It includes both full-length albums and EPs, because some of the best punk records of all time are EPs, and it ranges from back-in-action veterans to the hungry young bands that are actively defining this genre’s next generation. It’s inevitable that anyone reading this will consider something a glaring omission (or a frustrating inclusion), but my personal favorite part of list-season is finding some great records I missed out on, so I hope you discover something new from reading this.
For even more beyond these 50, we have our other annual subgenre-specific punk lists, including hardcore and screamo. And also check out the main BrooklynVegan multi-genre list and our list of the best metal of the year.
See the list below, and also find the top 25 and other new features in the free BrooklynVegan digital magazine (thanks to everyone who subscribed to see the top 25 early!).
50. Barely Civil – I’d Say I’m Not Fine (Take This To Heart)
Barely Civil swing for the fences like never before on their Chris Teti (of TWIABP)-produced third album I’d Say I’m Not Fine. The 10-song album is like a patchwork quilt of various versions of emo–post-rock-infused climaxes, screamy post-hardcore, pastoral emo-folk, anthemic hooks, some dreamier/shoegazier moments–and the Milwaukee band deliver it all with the intent and power of a band that needs to be heard.
49. Kharma – A World of Our Own (Flatspot)
LP3 from Chicago’s Kharma is one of this year’s most curb-stomping hardcore records, and the head on the curb is America’s. With help from Regulate’s Sebastian Paba, and samples of civil rights activists (Fred Hampton, James Baldwin) and classic protest music (Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come”), Kharma take aim at the systemic racism, corruption, and general shittiness that our country is informed and controlled by, and their response to all of it comes in the form of some of the most gut-punching metallic hardcore released all year.
48. Omnigone – Feral (Bad Time Records)
A 2016 reunion of surviving Link 80 members turned into guitarist Adam Davis and bassist Barry Krippene starting their own new band, Omnigone, and Omnigone has turned into one of the hardest ska-punk/ska-core bands around. Feral is their third album but first since the band solidified a permanent lineup (that also features members of We Are The Union, Noise Complaint, and Eichlers), and depending on which way you squint at it, it could be your new favorite ska album or your new favorite hardcore album. Like Operation Ivy, The Suicide Machines, and of course Link 80 before them, Omnigone make gritty, shoutalong, purposeful ragers that suggest maybe Dischord and Studio One aren’t so different after all.
47. Oolong – Oolong (Chungis Recordings)
Do you miss the days when you could be pressed up against Snowing or Algernon in a sweaty basement as they busted out Kinsella-derived noodles and shout-yelped refrains? Or did you miss out on those shows but wish you didn’t? If you answered yes to either question, you need Oolong’s new self-titled album in your life. They bring the earliest days of “emo revival” back to life the same way the revival bands brought back the vibes of the Cap’n Jazz/Braid era, and they make it feel just like it felt back then.
46. Ogbert the Nerd – What You Want (self-released)
Do you want another album that scratches the “emo revival revival” itch just as perfectly as the Oolong album does, with the occasional foray into something prettier like some soaring horns here or some strummy acoustic guitars there? Ogbert the Nerd’s sophomore LP What You Want makes for the perfect double feature.
45. Regional Justice Center – Freedom, Sweet Freedom (Closed Casket Activities)
Ian Shelton (who’s since become best known as the leader of Militarie Gun) started the powerviolence band Regional Justice Center as a way to document his younger brother Max’s experience with prison and the justice system after being incarcerated for first degree assault, and now Max is out and he’s officially joined RFC as co-lead screamer. This version of RJC (which also has Taylor Young of Twitching Tongues/God’s Hate/etc on guitar) feels like the ultimate version of the band, with Max getting to tell his own story, with a bark that’s just as piercing as his brother’s.
44. Stay Inside – Ferried Away (self-released)
Branching out from the darker emo/post-hardcore vibes of their breakthrough 2020 album Viewing and its 2022 followup EP Blight, NYC’s Stay Inside take a warmer, brighter, more horn-fueled approach on Ferried Away. Like the inverse of a late teens/early twenties emo album about hating your suburban hometown, it finds a band of thirtysomething New Yorkers wondering if they should ditch the city and start families, and it’s a script-flipping maturation that this genre could use more of.
43. Hey, ily! – Hey, I Loathe You! (Lonely Ghost)
Hey, ily! are back with another Very Online album and this one might just be their best yet. Both its doomscrolling-inflected lyrics and its post-genre approach feel extremely internet-bred, but Hey, I Loathe You! also has the energy of a band that rocks live and they very much do. Like past releases, it’s a melting pot of emo, chiptune, metal, screamo, indie pop, and more, and Hey, ily! narrow the focus jussssst enough to make this their most widely accessible record yet.
42. Carpool – My Life In Subtitles (SideOneDummy)
Carpool’s third album (and SideOneDummy debut) is the Rochester emo-punk band’s biggest-sounding LP by a landslide. All of the many bangers sound ready to fill stadiums, even if you’re more likely to see them in rowdy clubs, and the ballads add a level of range and depth that prove Carpool aren’t just another catchy punk band. Their scream-sung, beer-drenched self-deprecation brings past SideOne band PUP to mind, and Carpool carry that torch with a whole new perspective.
41. Worlds Greatest Dad – Better Luck Next Time (SideOneDummy)
In an era where everyone from pop stars to indie rockers are going country, Worlds Greatest Dad’s “redneck emo” brought some much welcome twang to the emo scene this year. From the rustic, earthy moments to the pop punk bangers, Better Luck Next Time has a ton of range but also exists in a lane of its own, and the not-so-secret ingredient is the way Maddie Duncan’s soaring voice ties it all together.
40. Blind Girls – An Exit Exists (Persistent Vision)
One of the year’s most devastatingly impassioned screamo albums came from Australia’s Blind Girls. An Exit Exists finds the band’s screamo/mathcore chaos, black metal fury, and post-rock-infused beauty in incredible form, but what really takes the album to the next level are Sharni Brouwer’s screams. The album explores the range of emotions that come with being abused by a person you loved, and even before you dissect the lyrics, you can hear all the pain, sadness, confusion, anger, and resilience in Sharni’s voice. Few albums in 2024 felt like pure inner turmoil the way this one did.
39. The Story So Far – I Want To Disappear (Pure Noise)
The Story So Far took a six-year break from new music and parted ways with a bassist, as multiple members launched new side projects, before coming back with a new album that made it feel like no time had passed at all. There are moments on I Want To Disappear that branch out from TSSF’s roots, like the indie rock-leaning single “Letterman” and the two acoustic guitar-fueled songs that close the album, but for the most part, this is the kind of fast, catchy, true-blue pop punk that TSSF have been devoted to since day one. With 10 songs in 28 minutes, it’s the shortest album of their career and void of any and all excess fat. It’s a reminder that sometimes the best way to make a comeback is by doing what you do best.
38. Southtown Lanes – Take Care (Dog Knights)
If you’ve been impacted by the grief-stricken post-hardcore of modern classics like Pianos Become the Teeth’s The Lack Long After and Touché Amoré’s Stage Four, Southtowne Lanes’ Take Care is right up your alley. From its mix of harsh screams and triumphant clean singing to its post-rocky buildups, theatrical piano passages, and heavy chaos, passive listening is not possible. It jumps out and grabs you, and its many cathartic climaxes are fueled by vocalist/guitarist Matt Kupka unpacking the experience of dealing with his father’s unexpected death from so many different angles. The level of sincerity and vulnerability is overwhelming.
37. Glitterer – Rationale (ANTI-)
I know we all want Title Fight to reunite, but we’re also very lucky to have Glitterer, the band led by Title Fight co-vocalist and bassist Ned Russin. Having launched Glitterer as a solo bedroom pop project in 2017, around the same time Title Fight was winding down, he gradually turned it into a full band that finds him in his most natural comfort zone: rocking out on stage the way he did with Title Fight. Rationale is the loudest, most punk-informed Glitterer record yet, and it scratches the exact itch that only Ned’s songwriting can scratch. Ned’s lyrics are vague and open-ended enough to interpret these songs in multiple ways, but as he discussed on the BV podcast earlier this year, there’s an underlying theme informed by the gut feeling that capitalism has become far too normalized. Rooted more in confusion than anger, it’s an album that’s there for you if you’ve ever found yourself wondering, “Does it definitely have to be like this?”
36. Carly Cosgrove – The Cleanest of Houses Are Empty (Wax Bodega)
Leaving any concerns about a sophomore slump in the dust, Philly emo fifth-wavers Carly Cosgrove go bigger in every way on LP2. Made at Studio 4 with Will Yip collaborator Justin Bartlett, The Cleanest of Houses Are Empty captures the energy and the loudness of Carly Cosgrove’s great live show, and it’s got an album-length concept that goes in a much darker direction than the sunny exterior of the music. (Carly Cosgrove carry the torch for Modern Baseball in more ways than one, and MoBo were masters of that particular approach.) The album follows singer/guitarist Lucas Naylor’s journey with a year-long depressive episode that led to a personality disorder diagnosis, and it finds Lucas exploring all angles of that experience with both vulnerable honesty and sticky hooks.
35. The Hope Conspiracy – Tools of Oppression / Rule by Deception (Deathwish)
There are a lot of good reasons for a band to come out of hibernation, and one of the best reasons is because they’ve become so frustrated with the world that they just had to use their platform to speak up through the music. That’s exactly what The Hope Conspiracy did on their first album in 18 years, Tools of Oppression / Rule by Deception. Right from the start of the album, Kevin Baker growls that “profit is everything amidst a crumbling vial decay,” and goes on to take aim at capitalism, war profiteering, genocide, fascism, and more, before declaring that “the west is dead” on the penultimate track. It’s one of the trailblazing hardcore band’s most direct, angriest albums to date, and that’s saying something.
34. Pinhead Gunpowder – Unt (1-2-3-4 Go Records)
I’m pleasantly surprised at how good the new Green Day album is, but the best album Billie Joe Armstrong released this year is Pinhead Gunpowder’s Unt. The band–whose current lineup also includes Aaron Cometbus, Bill Schneider, and longtime Green Day touring guitarist Jason White–hadn’t released music since 2008’s West Side Highway EP and hadn’t released a full-length album at all since their 1997 debut LP Goodbye Ellston Avenue, and they came roaring back on Unt like no time had passed at all. And not even no time since 2008, more like no time since 1994; this is exactly the kind of wide-eyed pop punk sugar rush that Green Day gave us in and around the Dookie era, and it remains a total blast to hear Billie Joe (and his bandmates) in this familiar comfort zone.
33. Envy – Eunoia (Temporary Residence Ltd)
Another absolute winner from Envy. The legendary Japanese band’s towering eighth album covers a vast ground, from Envy’s harshest screamo side to gorgeously shimmering post-rock and shoegaze with so much else in between. The way they combine beauty and chaos has influenced countless bands (including some on this very list), and they remain masters of the form, as emotionally charged and creatively inspired as they ever were.
32. Respire – Hiraeth (Dine Alone)
For a new album that treats Godspeed You! Black Emperor-esque orchestral post-rock and chaotic Orchid/pg.99-esque screamo with equal importance, look no further than Respire’s Hiraeth. The many-membered Toronto band’s latest album has their widest scope yet–touching not just on orchestral screamo but also anything from yearning Midwest emo to black metal fury–and its desperate-yet-uplifting tone is matched by subject matter. Hiraeth is filled with a sentiment that’s been gaining more popularity as political systems look more broken: the powers that be won’t help us, so we have to help each other.
31. Sweet Pill – Starchild EP (Hopeless)
With just four songs, Sweet Pill have put out their most pivotal release to date. After stealing our hearts with their 2022 Topshelf-released debut LP Where The Heart Is, the Philly/NJ emo band signed to Hopeless and leveled up in every possible way. Starchild embraces cleaner production, bigger hooks, and punchier rhythms without abandoning basement-dwelling tendencies like Midwest emo noodling and slowcore-ish build-ups. If you put Jimmy Eat World, Paramore, and Algernon Cadwallader in a blender, it might come out sounding something like this.
30. Origami Angel – Feeling Not Found (Counter Intuitive)
After a few releases that found Origami Angel throwing an almost-unruly amount of ideas at a wall and finding that just about all of it stuck, the DC duo returned with their most streamlined album to date. Produced by Will Yip, Feeling Not Found is their sharpest, loudest, tightest album, and it’s also their most self-assured. Throughout these 14 songs, Origami Angel know exactly what they want to be, however atypical that may be. The way they combine bright, quirky power pop with badass metallic riffage shouldn’t work, but Origami Angel play it with such brash confidence that it does. Down to its 404 error-referencing title, it’s a concept album about not knowing how to respond or react to all the unrest in our increasingly-online world, and it ends with a refrain that feels like a mantra for every aspect of the whole LP: “I can be as here and as real as I want if I want and you’ll never take that away/No matter how much the world wants me to change.”
29. SECT – Plagues Upon Plagues (Southern Lord)
No album captured the spirit of 2024 for me more than Plagues Upon Plagues, the fourth album by hardcore supergroup SECT. With a title referring to the combination of the first pandemic of our lifetimes, the political state, and the rise of fascism, vocalist Chris Colohan (also of Cursed, Left For Dead, Ruination, and more) calls the album “a funeral rather than a trial.” On this LP, SECT aren’t fighting for a better world; they’re mourning the loss of the one we’ve always known. And the band–which also includes Fall Out Boy/Racetraitor drummer Andy Hurley and members of Earth Crisis, Catharsis, Undying, Day of Suffering, and more–have crafted a backdrop of dark, sludgy hardcore that’s perfect for Colohan’s grizzled eulogy. A lot of recent albums have mirrored the unrest that’s all around us, but few evoke pure hopelessness the way this one does.
28. Kill Lincoln – No Normal (Bad Time Records)
So many of the greatest punk bands have softened up or slowed things down over time, but Kill Lincoln just keep playing harder and faster. For years, they’ve stuck to a formula that puts ska, pop punk, and hardcore in a blender, echoing bands like Less Than Jake, Catch 22, and The Suicide Machines, and at this point, they’re as impactful and enduring as all of their ’90s forebears. No Normal stirs up a concoction of self-deprecation, social commentary, and absurdly catchy choruses that whips by without ever taking its foot off the gas once. This doesn’t just capture the energy of a Kill Lincoln live show; it’s dripping with the sweat of one.
27. Amyl and the Sniffers – Cartoon Darkness (B2B/Virgin)
Aussie hellions Amyl and the Sniffers have never had any problem cranking out barn-burners and pile-drivers and their third album has more than its fair share of riffy rippers, including “Doing in Me Head,” “Pigs,” and “Motorbike Song” which has firebrand Amy Taylor sweetly telling her object of affection “I wanna ride you like a Harley D!” But on Cartoon Darkness Amyl take their foot off the gas just a little and show us new, appealing sides of the band. There’s the smoldering “Big Dreams,” the vocoder-infused, Beastie Boys-inspired “Me and the Girls,” the jangly and vulnerable “Bailing on Me,” and the strutting, confrontational “U Should Not Be Doing that.” Through it all, Amy is still in take-no-prisoners mode, not letting any fools get in the way of her and those big dreams. She just asks nicely now before resorting to punching someone in the face. [Bill Pearis]
26. VIAL – Burnout (Get Better Records)
VIAL’s third album is a 19-minute sugar rush that follows the story of a breakup and evokes the range of emotions that accompany that kind of major life turning point. There’s anger, sadness, humor, apathy, and more, and the musical backdrop is just as ever-changing, shifting from aggressive punk (“two-faced”) to pop punk (“falling short”) to brat punk (“ur dad”) to dream/jangle pop (“bottle blonde”) to power pop (“just fine”) and beyond. It’s an album that knows that sometimes the best response to life’s shittiest moments is really, really fun music.
25. Red Sun – best buds 🙂 + Unnecessary Riffness (self-released / Wax Bodega)
Nothing is certain in life except death, taxes, and Midwest emo bands doing the most Midwest emo shit imaginable. Red Sun’s debut EP has the same name as Mom Jeans’ 2016 emo classic Best Buds except it’s all lowercase and has a smiley face at the end. The first song is called “life sucks, then it gets better, then it sucks again” and the last song is called “ball mccartney.” One song is called “red SUNFO” which is an amalgamation of Red Sun and another Oklahoma City emo band called SUNFO. Beneath the in-joke song titles, they have noodly guitar riffs and a yelpy singer that you just can’t help but sing along to. It’s one familiar trope after the next, all delivered with a wink from a band who knows exactly what they’re doing. Oh, and have I mentioned they do it so fucking well? They’ve got the secret sauce that all great emo bands have some version of, the knack for making a basement gig feel like the most important show of your life, the total catharsis that comes with every great emo singalong. It’s no surprise that they went from self-releasing this EP to signing to Wax Bodega (Hot Mulligan, Home Is Where) in just a few months, and the two songs on their Wax Bodega debut Unnecessary Riffness (a split EP with South Florida emo band Bonus) up the ante for Red Sun in every way. I can’t wait to see where this band goes next.
24. Frail Body – Artificial Bouquet (Deathwish)
Five years after their great debut LP A Brief Memoriam, Rockford, IL’s Frail Body are back and better than ever. For anyone who ever considered Deafheaven’s Sunbather to be kind of a screamo album (complimentary), there are two albums on this list that you need to make sure you’re not missing out on and Artificial Bouquet is one of them. It makes the line between screamo and black metal seem virtually nonexistent, and it pushes Frail Body further in every direction. It’s their heaviest music to date and also their most beautiful music to date. It’s a towering, sensory-overload experience but it still has the intimacy that you want from a great screamo record. It’s an album that provides drama in every chord change, every earth-shaking drum fill, every blown-out bassline, and every desperate shriek. It’s blackened screamo at its most emotionally overwhelming.
23. Thirdface – Ministerial Cafeteria (Exploding In Sound)
Thirdface’s sophomore album was inspired both by real-world terror and that of a campy horror flick, and Kathryn Edwards’ words are open-ended enough–and real life is scary enough–that it’s not always immediately clear which one she’s singing about. Thirdface don’t always have the answers to the world’s problems, but they fight fire with fire, responding to *gestures at everything* with an album that sounds as terrifying as its subject matter. Kathryn’s shrieks are vicious, and they’re matched by a dissonant, chaotic backdrop that sounds like The Jesus Lizard pivoting to powerviolence. I’m tempted to nerd out about all the ways this band breaks down barriers between like seven different subgenres, but instead I’m going to wrap this up by borrowing one of my favorite Henry Rollins quotes: what a great fucking racket these guys make.
22. Ben Quad – Ephemera (Pure Noise)
Ben Quad turned a lot of heads in the DIY emo scene with their 2022 debut LP I’m Scared That’s All There Is, but the catalyst for their Pure Noise debut Ephemera is the standalone single they released that same year, “You’re Part of It.” The Piebald-referencing track broke from the band’s usual scrappy Midwest emo and instead embraced heavy, melodramatic screamo, and with Ephemera, Ben Quad have crafted an entire 5-song EP in that style. They take influence from the aughts-era screamo-pop of Alexisonfire and Underoath as well as heavier stuff like Deafheaven and Orchid, and they pull it off like a band that’s been doing this kind of thing all along. Combined with lyrics that take on capitalism, war crimes, and other oppressive forces, the EP packs a punch that, for my money, hits even harder than their Midwest emo stuff. With LP2 expected to arrive in 2025, it remains to be seen where Ben Quad go next, and it’s exciting to see a relatively young, new emo band that so obviously has the potential to go in multiple different directions.
21. Gel – Persona (Blue Grape)
The best EPs feel just as monumental as LPs, and to say that’s true of Gel’s Persona feels like an understatement. This five-song, 13-minute rager is the NJ hardcore band’s best record yet and it’s not close. These are their cleanest, catchiest, and biggest-sounding songs to date, and Gel did that without crossing over into grunge or indie rock or some other non-hardcore genre. A lot of great music has come from bands doing that, but it’s also exciting to hear a band keep pushing themselves within the confines of heavy, aggressive hardcore, and that’s exactly what Gel did on this nonstop riot of an EP.
20. The Jesus Lizard – Rack (Ipecac)
In the 26 years since The Jesus Lizard last released music, a near-endless amount of bands have popped up that take clear influence from the legendary Austin quartet. Their brand of sarcastic, noisy post-hardcore never fully got the due it deserved in real time, they were always more “your favorite band’s favorite band” (especially if your favorite band was Nirvana), but it’s stayed massively influential and aged so much better than so many other forms of ’90s rock music, so the timing was great for The Jesus Lizard to come back and reclaim their throne. And that’s exactly what Rack does. They sound even nastier than they did on their last record, and they shove a middle finger in the face of anyone who says this type of music is a young person’s game. David Yow is in his mid 60s and he still sounds like an utter maniac, and his iconic sneer is matched on Rack by everything else you want from a Jesus Lizard record: Duane Denison’s twisted guitar work, David Wm. Sims’ thunderous basslines, and drummer Mac McNeilly’s unwavering backbone. Rack sounds as fresh and ferocious as any of the best music that came out in 2024. It’s not great for a band who took a quarter-century away from new music; it’s just a great record, period.
19. Spaced – This Is All We Ever Get (Revelation)
The title of Buffalo “far out hardcore” band Spaced’s debut LP comes from a line on its second track, “Big Picture”: “Try to make something better, but this is all we ever get.” It’s easy to interpret it as being about the state of the world lately, and the frustration in Lexi Reyngoudt’s screams is something that I’d imagine a lot of people reading this can relate to. Shit sucks, but at least we’ve got cathartic records like this one to help us let it all out. Spaced cite Gorilla Biscuits as a core influence and they’re signed to that band’s longtime, legendary home of Revelation Records, and like GB, Spaced know how to make short, fast, no-frills hardcore punk songs with an underlying sense of tuneful songcraft. Their “far out” side comes out in the surrealistic album artwork and some kinda-psychedelic guitar parts, which add a nice genre-defying touch without sacrificing any of Spaced’s attack.
18. Infant Island – Obsidian Wreath (Secret Voice)
Virginia’s Infant Island have always been on the black-metally side of screamo, and with their best album yet, Obsidian Wreath, they blur the lines between those two genres more than ever. (If you’ve been reading all the blurbs, yes, this is the second album on this list that fans of Deafheaven’s Sunbather need to know.) Depending on which way you squint, you can hear it in the lineage of hometown screamo heroes like Majority Rule (whose Matt Michel produced this album), pageninetynine, and City of Caterpillar, or you can hear it among the Deafheavens and the Alcests of the world. It feels punk in its brevity and its uncompromising critique of capitalism, the climate crisis, and other societal woes, and it also sounds majestic and beautiful in the way that atmospheric post-metal albums so often do. The word “apocalyptic” gets tossed around a lot when people talk about this kind of music, but there truly were few better soundtracks to our collective downward spiral than Obsidian Wreath this year.
17. Pissed Jeans – Half-Divorced (Sub Pop)
Pissed Jeans haven’t slowed down with age; just the opposite. As the title implies, Half-Divorced is their middle age album, and it’s also their overall fastest record yet. My War-era Black Flag has always been a sort of ground zero for Pissed Jeans’ noisy, sludgy, sarcastic post-hardcore, and that’s still the case, but Half-Divorced is a little more Damaged than Pissed Jeans have been in the past. Themes of parenting, marriage, and divorce are present, but Half-Divorced‘s concerns aren’t just domestic ones. They tackle living life in debt, the futile journey of leaving your home town or city for a better one (“everywhere is bad”), and misguided brutality (“it’s not the killing that’s inherently wrong, it’s that they’re killing all the wrong people”), and Matt Korvette’s delivery is drenched in mocking sarcasm throughout all of it. It’s not about wishing or fighting for a better world; it’s about looking at the hand you were dealt, tossing it over your shoulder, and walking away.
16. NØ MAN – Glitter and Spit (Iodine)
Majority Rule haven’t released music in over 20 years, but three of their four members are now three albums deep with NØ MAN (whose vocalist Maha Shami guested on Majority Rule’s “Packaged Poison”), and they’ve become one of hardcore’s most impactful bands in their own right. Majority Rule were often pissed off, but NØ MAN sound even angier. Their third and best album yet finds them busting out fast, direct, to-the-point hardcore songs and Maha Shami sounds venomous on every one. The album was written before the genocidal rampage that Israel has been on since October 7, 2023 and before America’s election year reignited widespread conversations about the oppressive political, social, and economic systems that impact our daily lives, but listening to it now, it sounds like a direct response to all of that and more. Maha, the daughter of Palestinian refugees, wrote about the violence that her family escaped on album highlight “Can’t Kill Us All,” and it’s one of the many songs on Glitter and Spit that puts no barrier between the personal and the political, that gives a voice to the voiceless.
15. Balance and Composure – With You In Spirit (Memory Music)
We punk/DIY fans like to pride ourselves on thinking we can sniff out whenever a band reunion isn’t happening for the right reasons, but I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone with a good argument that Balance and Composure’s return has been disingenuous. Their new album With You In Spirit kind of does everything you could expect or hope a Balance and Composure album to do. It combines the grungy post-hardcore catharsis of 2011’s Separation and 2013’s The Things We Think We’re Missing with the more experimental/electronic vibes of 2016’s initially-divisive Light We Made, and it takes a step forward in more ways than one. It harnesses all of the growth and maturation that the members of Balance and Composure have undergone since burning out nearly a decade ago, and it makes the eight years since Light We Made feel like nothing at all. Nothing is off limits on With You In Spirit; they’re not afraid to give the old fans what they want and also not afraid to challenge them, or to challenge themselves. Some element of nostalgia is inevitable but it feels fresh, present, and forward-thinking in a way that so many reunion records fail to. Throughout it all, Balance deliver the most lyrically-vulnerable songs they’ve ever written, and some of their catchiest. Balance have vowed to keep their schedule lighter than they did in the early/mid 2010s, but let’s hope With You In Spirit isn’t the last we hear from them. The emo/post-hardcore world is a better place with Balance and Composure in it.
14. Drug Church – Prude (Pure Noise)
Like many great punk bands before them, Drug Church don’t fix what ain’t broke. Their formula is simple: Patrick Kindlon leads the way with his hardcore-informed bark and sardonic worldview, and the rest of the band back him up with big, chunky alt-rock riffs and a powerful stage-divable rhythm section. They’re one of the best bands in the punk/hardcore scene and their crossover appeal makes them one of the best underground rock bands in general, and Prude finds them doing what they do best. It’s one wall-rattling banger after the next, and throughout it all, Patrick takes a lyrical point of view that’s ever so slightly more somber and emotional than usual. It’s a subtle and welcome change of pace, and it does nothing to dampen Drug Church’s full-blown adrenaline rush.
13. The Chisel – What A Fucking Nightmare (Pure Noise)
When it came to good old fashioned street punk, nothing in 2024 hit harder than The Chisel’s What A Fucking Nightmare. The UK band has devoured everything from home-country OGs like Cock Sparrer to US torch-carriers like Rancid, and they spit it back out in a way that’s every bit as thrilling as their heroes. Like both of those aforementioned bands, The Chisel know that gritty punk aggression and super catchy singalongs make for great bedfellows, and on What A Fucking Nightmare, they acknowledge that nice-sounding production can go a long way too. The album’s not that deep–singer Cal Graham says the songs are about “dickheads, working class people, punching people, getting punched”–and that’s the point. Don’t overthink this one.
12. SeeYouSpaceCowboy – Coup De Grâce (Pure Noise)
Coup De Grâce sounds like a version of the mid 2000s that never happened, one where just about every then-prevalent style of alternative rock exists in unison. Fueled by Ramen’s pop-emo theatrics? Check. Bloc Party/Yeah Yeah Yeah-style dance-punk? Also check. Underoath and Every Time I Die’s bone-crushing metalcore? It’s got that. Some Blood Brothers/Fear Before-style sassy hardcore? That’s here too. It’s no coincidence that Coup De Grâce was produced by Matt Squire, who most famously produced Panic! at the Disco’s world-conquering debut A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, and SeeYouSpaceCowboy sound intent on winning over that band’s lovers and haters alike. They blend the fashionable with the unfashionable, the abrasive with the poppy, and they do it in a way that I don’t remember any actual mid 2000s band doing it. There’s plenty on Coup De Grâce for aging millennials to get nostalgic about, but mostly, this album pushes this music forward in a way that so many other Myspace-era revivalists do not. It’s a clear step up for SeeYouSpaceCowboy and their best yet.
11. Touché Amoré – Spiral In A Straight Line (Rise)
Touché Amoré prefaced their sixth album Spiral In A Straight Line by posting a list of 23 musically diverse songs that influenced it, but more than any outside reference points, Spiral In A Straight Line sounds like a reflection of the long-running, consistently-reliable, workhorse band that made it. Vocalist Jeremy Bolm himself calls it a cross between Parting the Sea and Stage Four, the widely-accepted high water marks of “early” Touché and “later” Touché, and that pretty much sums it up perfectly. Spiral has some of the fastest, most aggressive Touché songs in years, and it also continues their path outside of post-hardcore’s usual barriers. On this album, that means anything from Beatlesque chord changes to Sebadoh’s Lou Barlow interpolating one of his own songs to an underlying acoustic guitar that adds depth to almost every track on this LP. It sounds like trademark Touché Amoré, but it’s also their most subtly genre-defying album to date. And, as ever, Jeremy’s heart-on-sleeve poetry is what keeps this band in a league of their own. As he navigates mental health struggles and loss throughout Spiral In A Straight Line, he remains as autobiographical and heart-stoppingly sincere as ever.
10. Planes Mistaken For Stars – Do You Still Love Me? (Deathwish)
Coming almost exactly three years after the death of vocalist Gared O’Donnell, Do You Still Love Me? feels less like a typical “posthumous album” and more like an artist throwing their own funeral, à la David Bowie’s Blackstar or Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York. It’s the kind of post-hardcore that only this band can make: fast-paced and riotous at times, sludgy and psychedelic at others, with plenty of strange twists and turns in between. Knowing the context, it’s impossible to hear the album and not feel haunted by Gared’s ghost, but it also sounds like the work of a man whose spirits were never broken, even after he was diagnosed with stage III esophageal cancer. He always seemed like the type who was here for a good time not a long time, so it should come as no surprise that he sounds as wearied and as lively as ever throughout his final act. If anything, I wonder if knowing the end was near made Gared push himself even harder on this LP. It’s not just one last great record; it’s one of Planes Mistaken For Stars’ best.
9. Speed – Only One Mode (Flatspot)
Sometimes it seems like there’s an ideological split between the genre’s usually-more-melodic crossover successes and the tougher-sounding bands keeping it real on a more underground level, but Speed defy that entirely. The Australian gang has become even bigger in the States than many of our homegrown heroes, and their debut album Only One Mode does nothing to soften their blow. Taking cues from recent forebears like Trapped Under Ice and early Turnstile as well as OGs like Madball and Biohazard, it’s catchy as hell but only has about 10 seconds of vocals that qualify as “melodic singing.” Usually their one mode is informed only by crisp, ass-beating, chuggy hardcore, and Speed have figured out how to churn out songs within that style that are as concise and memorable as possible. Gang vocals, flute interludes, turntable-scratch breakdowns, and other little embellishments make the whole ride even wilder, and every aspect of this album feels built to keep the crowd moving at every turn. Like most hardcore bands, Speed are best experienced in a room surrounded by a few hundred other sweaty individuals, and if you need a little extra push to go see them, the ten kickass songs on this album are a pretty damn good sell.
8. Candy – It’s Inside You (Relapse)
We’ve seen a lot of band toy with the confines of hardcore these past few years, but no one’s doing it like Candy’s doing it right now. On their third and most expansive album yet, they give you everything from straight-up hardcore punk to chugging metalcore to synths, breakbeats, and other electronics to the best and catchiest ’90s industrial rock song of 2024, “Love Like Snow.” (Candy bristle at being called “industrial” though. They prefer “hypercore.”) With a little help from their friends (including members of Angel Du$t, Fleshwater, Trash Talk, and Integrity), Candy defy expectations left and right on It’s Inside You. For 31 relentless minutes, they fit square pegs into round holes, turning unsettling moments into satisfying ones and squeezing boundless experimentation into concise bursts of rage. It pushes them further in every direction–weirder, heavier, catchier, etc–and it just never lets up.
7. Combat – Stay Golden (Counter Intuitive)
Every now and then a young punk band comes around and just totally reinvigorates your love of the genre, and for me, Combat was that band this year. It’s not hard to hear their influences coming through on Stay Golden (namely Bomb the Music Industry! and Prince Daddy & the Hyena), but it’s even easier to hear Combat’s own perspective and a seasoned-beyond-their-years knack for tuneful songcraft and word-vomit lyricism. The album (their second) is a concept album / semi-rock opera with recurring lyrical themes, musical reprises, and two multi-part suites, and somehow it manages to actually sound concise. It’s arena-sized ambition dripping with basement-dwelling sweat, it’s one supremely catchy song after the next, and it’s an energetic overload that perfectly matches the anxiety-ridden tales within. Every generation of twentysomething punk/emo kids deserves their own quarter-life crisis record, and for anyone who fits that description right now, it just might be Stay Golden.
6. State Faults – Children of the Moon (Deathwish)
The long-running, sporadically-active band State Faults have been staples of West Coast screamo since the early 2010s, but it was a trip to the East Coast that resulted in their most spacious-sounding and best album yet. Recorded in Burlington, CT with producer Chris Teti (of The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die), Children of the Moon finds State Faults sounding warmer, brighter, and more towering than ever before. No disrespect at all to the great Jack Shirley who helmed their last two albums, but it feels like Chris helped unlock something in State Faults that we’ve never heard from them before. They also wrote a batch of songs that ranges from their most instantly-satisfying and melodic (“Palo Santo”) to their most immersive (the ten-minute “No Gospel”), and throughout it all, they toe the line between shimmering beauty and harsh chaos at every turn.
5. High Vis – Guided Tour (Dais)
Guided Tour feels like the album High Vis have always been working towards. Since forming in 2016 with members of Tremors, Dirty Money, and other UK hardcore bands, High Vis branched out from the members’ aggressive roots to explore post-punk (2019’s No Sense No Feeling) and baggy/Britpop (2022’s Blending) before finding ways to merge their past, present, and future like never before on Guided Tour. It embraces the moshy hardcore/punk vibes of the band’s live show more than any other High Vis LP, while exploring a host of other forms of Brit-centric alternative rock and making welcome left turns like the house/punk hybrid “Mind’s A Lie.” Throughout it all, commanding shouter Graham Sayle turns societal contempt and a refreshing sense of hopefulness into one magnetic chorus after the next.
4. Foxing – Foxing (Grand Paradise)
There was always something holding Foxing back. They’ve always been one of the most wildly ambitious bands to come out of the 2010s “emo revival” movement, and it always seemed like they were swinging for a fence that was ever so slightly out of reach. By the time their debut album The Albatross took off, they were ready to move on from it. They failed to meet their own expectations with their gorgeously somber sophomore album Dealer. Reviews of their third album Nearer My God spoke of it like an art rock opus that drew parallels to OK Computer, but it never truly became a widespread critical darling. Their fourth album Draw Down the Moon gave festival-pop bands a run for their money in a musical sense but never reached festival-sized crowds. The more they weren’t getting the full credit they deserved, the more it felt like: what more could you want from them? Well, apparently what people wanted from them was their noisiest, harshest, most stereotypically inaccessible record to date. On their self-titled fifth album, Foxing followed up their festival-sized swing with an album that found them headed happily back down to the basement, and it feels like it’s resonated more quickly than any Foxing album before it. When I saw them on tour in October, they played almost entirely songs from this album, and it was the first Foxing show I ever went to where it didn’t feel like the crowd was waiting around for “Rory” and “The Medic.” The album grabs your attention right away with the full-on screamo of its opening one-two punch (“Secret History,” “Hell 99”), but this is not just “Foxing’s screamo album.” Among its best songs, there are also lengthy slow-burners (“Greyhound”), groovy art pop anthems (“Barking,” “Gratitude”), and a sentimental, album-closing piano ballad (“Cry Baby”). And it’s Foxing, so even when they do screamo, they do it in the ambitiously melodic way that they do everything else. For so many bands, this would be their “weird, difficult” album, but for Foxing, it’s a new contender for magnum opus. And judging by the way this band has operated throughout their entire 12 years as a band, I’ll place my bets right now that LP6 is gonna be yet another left turn that none of us see coming.
3. Knocked Loose – You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To (Pure Noise)
Knocked Loose aren’t just one of the biggest hardcore bands in the world but one of the most chameleonic. On top of going on increasingly-large headlining tours with diverse tour packages, they’re as likely to be found opening an arena tour for Slipknot and getting the kinds of crowd reactions they’d get at their own shows as they are to turn Coachella into a hardcore show with Billie Eilish rocking out sidestage. Whether it’s Coachella or a hardcore fest, a heavy metal fest, or an emo nostalgia fest, Knocked Loose emerge as a show-stopping band with mass appeal. And they continue to do it all without ever softening up their sound one bit. This year’s You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To is one of the most brutal records of this band’s ten-plus-year career, but it’s also one of their catchiest. And it manages to be “catchy” without having a single part that would count as “clean vocals”–even when radio-friendly guests Poppy and Chris Motionless show up, they’re here to scream their heads off too. It’s an album that finds Knocked Loose walking the walk, making music that’s true to themselves that also happens to fit in so many different contexts. It’s genre-transcending without being genre-defying. It suggests that maybe Knocked Loose keep getting all these Ws because they’re just that good.
2. Gouge Away – Deep Sage (Deathwish)
Not many bands come back from hiatus to release their best album yet, but not many bands are Gouge Away. Deep Sage, their third LP, delivers on every promise that its 2018 predecessor Burnt Sugar made and it sounds like the album that Gouge Away were always destined to make. It’s a hardcore album and a post-hardcore album all at once, with expansive moments that owe as much to Sonic Youth as they do to The Jesus Lizard, as well as no-nonsense rippers that go as hard as this band ever has (“Stuck In A Dream,” “Spaced Out”). Christina Michelle’s voice is as shapeshifting as the instrumentation, and she puts as much blood, sweat, and tears into her ethereal singing as she puts into her throat-shredding screams (and does it just as perfectly live). There’s no denying the absolute force of Gouge Away at their heaviest, but with the dreamy alt-rock of album closer “Dallas,” Gouge Away send us off on the album’s softest note, and it just happens to also be one of its strongest.
1. Mannequin Pussy – I Got Heaven (Epitaph)
Was there a more versatile or transcendent punk record in 2024 than I Got Heaven? Was there a more provocative lyric than “What if Jesus himself ate my fucking snatch”? Was there a punk record that felt better suited for this year’s ever-changing social and political climate, throughout all its up and downs? The answer is a resounding “no” to all. The album is a walking contradiction, screaming and cooing its way through pleasure and anger and danger, refusing to settle between vicious hardcore punk and ethereal dream pop. But it’s only as much of a “contradiction” as just about all of us are. Why should Mannequin Pussy settle on a particular theme or emotion if our own lives rarely let us do that? Why not put a potential alt-rock hit (“Sometimes”) right up against chaotic mosh fuel (“OK? OK! OK? OK!”) if so many of us crave both of those things? Mannequin Pussy did it seamlessly, and they did it better than ever. I Got Heaven has the best and most wholeheartedly pop songs the band has ever written, along with some of their most ferocious hardcore songs, and the in-between moments like the title track and “Loud Bark” are among their most gripping songs to date. Whatever you were looking for this year across the wide spectrum of guitar-based alternative rock music that this album covers, Mannequin Pussy did it best.
**
SEE ALSO:
* 50 Best Albums of 2024
* Our 20 Favorite Hardcore Albums of 2024
* 15 Great Screamo Releases from 2024
* Our 32 Favorite Metal Albums of 2024