We haven’t had a new album from Friendship since 2022’s fantastic Love the Stranger, but they’ve been active this year, playing Merge Records’ 35th anniversary fest in July and touring in the summer and fall, including shows supporting Wild Pink. As 2024 winds down, we’ve been asking artists about their favorite music of the year, and Friendship made us a list of albums they loved. Read that and their commentary below.
FRIENDSHIP’S FAVORITE ALBUMS OF 2024
Nap Eyes – The Neon Gate (Paradise of Bachelors)
This year I found myself avoiding music with words. I felt that I was listening to recordings of people who could not possibly understand the world as it exists today. I felt this feeling renewed each day. Nap Eyes’ The Neon Gate opens to reveal the true perpetrators of the woes of today: demons, massive birds, playful cheshire cats, phantoms, and other forces of evil. Opener “Eight Tired Starlings” moves at an interstellar clip between avian life and microscopic beings on another planet in another system, moving through radio noise and star beams. Nigel Chapman describes his surroundings from the outside in, with a sort of mystical winking specificity. Kaleidoscopic images of animal spirits, horses in the snow, castles, writhing worms, a mass of every beetle on Earth. The cover shows four panels, two of which appear to show the northern lights, scribbled over with a map of roads or maybe stars. They are placed next to two images, scientific drawings of starfish and ferns. I see this record as equating the two, playing with the edges of what the modern person knows as truth and fantasy and asking us to take joy in knowing less than we thought we did. -Jon
Styrofoam Winos – Real Time (Sophomore Lounge)
Styrofoam Winos are country-rock’s Yo La Tengo. I’m not the first to draw this comparison, but maybe the first to put his money on this Nashville trio to make as much of an impact on independent rock music as their Hoboken predecessors. Made up of Lou Turner, Trevor Nikrant, and Joe Kenkel, the band has elevated and democratised the beer-soaked bar band. The way they switch instruments is almost dancelike. LT’s getting behind the drums, which means the song will be propelled forward with featherlike precision. The pocket has deepened, meaning Trevor’s back on bass. Joe’s been handed a guitar, so we can expect a mind-expanding solo full of little winks and nods. Repeat these anecdotes for every possible player/instrument combination and you begin to understand this band’s power. It’s the alchemy of three deeply creative musicians playing in service to each other. Being a fan of the Winos is not dissimilar to being a sports fan. Half the fun of it is understanding (with increasingly greater nuance) the subtleties of each member’s contribution, then trying to predict how these forces will meet to perform miracles. – Michael
The Umbrellas — Fairweather Friend (Slumberland)
Imagine writing two of the greatest jangle-pop songs of the 21st century (“Gone” and “When You Find Out”) and burying them as a one-two punch in the middle of side two on your record. Such is the chutzpah displayed by The Umbrellas all over their second full-length on Slumberland. They hail from San Francisco, aka “the city of broken promises and canceled plans” and home to a rich musical ecosystem that yields a constant stream of stellar guitar pop releases. The Umbrellas’ approach to the style is dynamic and resourceful at every turn, with key ingredients being inventive string-hopping guitar heroics, hooks wherever they’ll fit, frenetic drumming suggestive of loose screws and a tight deadline at the hit factory, and above all else the endlessly charming vocal contrast of guitarists Morgan Stanley and Matt Ferrara. (Also in possession of a lovely voice is drummer Keith Frerichs, who gets his Moe Tucker moment at the mic on the Brighter-esque “Blue”). This band continues to thrill me, and I can’t wait to see what they do next. -Peter
Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee (W.25TH)
Slow motion exploration of a thousand-room dream palace, where every alcove houses ornaments new and beautiful and connected in glorious creation to everything else. Prismatic vision peering across the history of recorded music, girl groups and guitar groups, pop melodies and bizarre synth patches, dramatic, sincere, abundant. In Cindy Lee’s house, the beloved is gone, the voice is overcome, vulnerable and open not in ignorance of grief but expanded because of it. The beat staggers; the world is imbued: “I will never brush it off/ the hurt, the pain, and the loss… now I’m through with selfish ways/ forever for the rest of my days/ I’ll proper love myself/ and everybody else.” And Nikki Giovanni, who died yesterday: “ever think its possible/ for us to be/ happy.” Diamond Jubilee is a monument of devotion, Flegel’s life in music, and we’re lucky to witness it. I heard my friend Frank say recently “damn, music really is the lifeblood,” and it really is my “do I wanna hear this song again” requisite above all, that it has blood and MOVES. -Dan
Pat Keen – I Saw A Bug (Island House)
I’m classifying this record with a genre of my own devising–music for feeling like a kid again. It’s a whimsical 15-track exercise in discovery–best listened to with hands and knees in the dirt, peering through tall grasses. Pat Keen, known for his sideman work with the Minneapolis-based folk outfit Humbird (who also put out a fantastic record this year), is the bandleader and primary composer. He stretches through a whimsical range of styles, from woozy tropicalia to acoustic guitar-led reveries. There is precedent for this sort of album (moments remind me of the LA-based recording project North Americans, other moments the spread out ambient jazz collective Fuubutsushi, others still reminiscent of some of classic Koji Kondo scores), but what’s exciting to me is when I’m listening–which I’ve done repeatedly since the record’s release–I’m not thinking about any of this. The palpable joy that went into making this music completely takes hold. It’s the sonic equivalent of walking down the sidewalk in your hometown on a sizzling hot summer day. The first kid in your class to get their license pulls up beside you in a hand-me-down sedan and says “hop in”. “Where are we going?,” you ask from the passenger seat. “Dunno, wherever” they respond, dripping with cool. -Michael
Norma Winstone & Kit Downes — Outpost of Dreams (ECM)
Lately I’ve been over the moon about this cross-generational offering from legendary jazz vocalist Norma Winstone and pianist Kit Downes, who at the time of release were 82 and 38 respectively. They make a remarkable team, patiently finding their way through interpretations of originals, traditional tunes, and works by Carla Bley and Ralph Towner among others. On the piano Downes is empathetic, mature and searching, a water witcher intuiting the courses of hidden streams. Winstone remains a force of nature, plucking poetry and unclaimed sound-shapes out of thin air, her voice bottoming out and pirouetting back up to the upper register, inducing sympathetic vibrations all through your skull. The choices these two make accumulate into something moody yet casual, always light on its feet. “All is sunlight and moving shadows / and every frame is more precious.” -Peter
More natural numbers for the Friendship heads in ‘24:
22° Halo – Lily of the Valley (Tiny Library)
Advance Base – Horrible Occurrences (Orindal)
Amy O – Mirror, Reflect (Winspear)
Anna McClellan – Electric Bouquet (Father/Daughter)
Babehoven – Water’s Here in You (Double Double Whammy)
Cass McCombs – Seed Cake on a Leap Year (Domino)
Chris Cohen – Paint a Room (Hardly Art)
Climax Landers – Zenith No Effects (Gentle Reminder)
Dan Reeder – Smithereens (Oh Boy)
Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn – Quiet in a World Full of Noise (Merge)
Dorothea Paas – Think of Mist (Telephone Explosion)
Dummy – Free Energy (Trouble in Mind)
Earth Flower – s/t (Self-released)
Ella Zirina – Boundless Blue, Sunset Hue (Dox)
Eiko Ishibashi – Evil Does Not Exist (Drag City)
Ex Pilots – Motel Cable (Smoking Room)
Fievel Is Glauque – Rong Weicknes (Fat Possum)
Fred Thomas – Window in the Rhythm (Polyvinyl)
Gillian Welch/David Rawlings – Woodland (Acony)
House Of Gold – s/t (Sofa)
Itasca – Imitation of War (Paradise of Bachelors)
Jeff Babko, Tim Lefebvre, Mark Guiliana— Clam City (Sam First)
Joni Mitchell – Joni Mitchell Archives Vol. 4: The Asylum Years (1976–1980) (Rhino)
Josh Johnson – Unusual Object (Northern Spy)
Kelly Moran – Moves in the Field (Warp)
Little Kid – A Million Easy Payments (Orindal)
Luka Kuplowsky – How Can I Possibly Sleep When There is Music (Next Door/Outside)
Myriam Gendron – Mayday (Thrill Jockey/Feeding Tube)
Mythical Motors— Upside Down World (Self-released)
Nala Sinephro— Endlessness (Warp)
Robin Holcomb – One Way or Another, Vol. 2 (Elektra/Nonesuch)
Rafael Toral – Spectral Evolution (Moikai)
Ryan Power – World of Wonder (Feeding Tube)
Sam Wilkes – iiyo iiyo iiyo (Wilkes)
Simon Joyner – Coyote Butterfly (Grapefruit/BB Island)
Tara Jane O’Neill – The Cool Cloud of Okayness (Orindal)
The Smashing Times – Mrs. Ladyships and The Cleanerhouse Boys (Perennial/K)
The Wickies – s/t (Ba Da Bing)
This is Lorelei – Box for Buddy, Box for Star (Double Double Whammy)
Windier – Doesn’t the Baby (Self-released)
Wendy Eisenberg – Viewfinder (American Dreams)
Ylayali – Birdhouse in Conduit (Circle Change)
See more 2024 year end lists here.