My ON REPEAT Songs of 2024
A compendium of tracks I repeatedly returned to over the course of the year.
32 songs, 32 albums, 32 artists, 1 year.
Here’s the individual tracks I listened to the most in 2024!
Jackson C. Frank - “Blues Run The Game”
You may know this song, as I do, from its appearances in such places as an early Season 1 episode of This Is Us (which I haven’t watched past the first few episodes), and in David Lowery’s The Old Man and the Gun.
Mogwai - “Donuts” (from Kin)
I still haven’t seen the film that Mogwai composed this instrumental track for (mainly because the reviews for Kin were largely mediocre-to-negative), but at this point, I almost don’t want to, because I doubt its usage in the film could match the emotion and imagery I imagine when I listen to the evocatively dreamy shoegaze of ‘Donuts’ on its own.
Oliver Coates - “One Without” (from Aftersun)
My apologies for reminding Aftersun viewers of the heartbreak.
Richard Reed Parry, Little Scream & The Barr Brothers - “Live That Way Forever” (from The Iron Claw)
After my first viewing of the film back in February, I thought that The Iron Claw hadn’t left as deep an impact on me as I’d expected, given the superlative reviews and the unbearable sadness of the true story it retold.
And then out of the blue, many months later in December, I found myself re-listening to ‘Live That Way Forever’ on the bus, and the memory of the line “You must be my older brother Jack” resurfaced, and because I just recently met my own brothers in person for the first time in 20 years, and I am their older brother Jack, the whole knot of entangled emotions came flooding upwards, and I had to do everything in my power not to sob on the bus in front of all the other people sitting around me.
So yeah, I guess The Iron Claw did hit harder, and linger longer, than I gave it credit for.
Paramore - “This Is Why”
Todd In The Shadows used this song as an interstitial for his “Worst Songs of 2023” list video - something that’s usually indicative of his dislike for whichever song he uses for those interstitial purposes every year - but while he may have introduced me to the song in that derisory manner, the infectiously groovy quality of ‘This Is Why’ only made me like the song Para-more and more with every listen.
Hans Zimmer - “Harvester Attack” (from Dune: Part Two)
(Tied with ‘Beginnings Are Such Delicate Times’, ‘Harkonnen Arena’, and ‘Arrival’ for tracks I listened to the most from the Dune: Part Two score.)
Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross - “Challengers: Match Point” (from Challengers)
Trent and Atticus don’t need another Oscar… but if they didn’t already have two of them to their collective name, their Challengers score would be well worth the win of that little golden statuette.
Then again, I don’t know who their awards season competitors could be. Maybe the Conclave soundtrack by Volker “Hauschka” Bertelmann? But even he has also won an Oscar already for All Quiet On The Western Front (even though Justin Hurwitz totally should have been the one who won Best Original Score for Babylon that particular year), so who else will be the challengers to Challengers…?
Kendrick Lamar - “meet the grahams”
FUN FACT: The Kendrick/Drake beef was so massive and unavoidable, that this ugly-yet-captivating little advent in music history is what finally got me to listen to two whole Drake songs in full for the first time, after I’d managed to spend the past 14-odd years never hearing much more than snippets and memes from his (reportedly mediocre) prolific back-catalogue. Those two (and only) songs were ‘Family Matters’ - a mildly catchy Drake ditty/diss track, that Kendrick Lamar legendarily diffused the impact of within a matter of minutes, by unleashing ‘meet the grahams’, his blisteringly vicious and cutting rebuttal - followed by ‘The Heart (Part 6)’ - an embarrassingly weak Drake ditty/audibly defeated diss track response to Kendrick’s back-to-back knockout blows of ‘meet the grahams’, AND ‘Not Like Us’.
So devastating and wide-reaching was the blast radius of this strategic surprise attack, that it managed to breach my little bubble of music culture awareness. Even an ignorant plebeian such as myself, who’s never really paid studious attention to the intricate tapestry of rivalries and beefs between artists in the rap world, was compelled to sit up and pay attention to such an eye-wateringly scathing, vitriolic, venomous, furiously accusatory, earth-shakingly seismic track as ‘meet the grahams’, whose songwriting craft is as exhilarating as it is brutal. No bridge is left unburned, no shred of earth left unsalted, no mercy granted to Kendrick’s obliterated opponent.
The fact that all four of these songs dropped within the whirlwind span of just 48 to 72 hours in total? Insane.
And from all this mayhem, I learned that when comparing the lyricism, musicality, and quality of Drake versus Kendrick, it was clear that Drake hadn’t so much brought a knife to a gunfight, but more like a spork to a thermonuclear warhead fight. This wasn’t David versus Goliath… this was an ant versus Godzilla.
Of course, Drake only demeaned himself further with that egregiously awful ‘Hey There, Delilah’ cover he sang in his fake Chet-Hanks-esque patois, and his feature on the appalling and frankly should-have-been-classified-as-unreleasable Sexyy Red track, ‘U My Everything’. (No, I did not listen to these two tracks in full, but I heard enough of them to know they’re both unambiguously garbage…)
Sidewalks and Skeletons - “Goth (Slowed + Reverb)”
Kind of similar in sound to Solomon Grey’s ‘The Rift’ (a track that UK cinema-goers will know from its past usage in certain Vue Cinema advertisements), but with a shoegaze-y zest. The “slowed + reverb” part of it smacks of the influence of TikTok, but having listened to the regular and sped-up versions of this song, this one hits the sweet spot in tempo, and has the best vibes to my liking.
John Murphy - “Strobe (Extended Dirty Mix)”
It began as ‘Adagio in D Minor’ from Danny Boyle’s Sunshine.
It evolved into ‘Strobe (Adagio in D Minor)’ in Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass.
And then finally, John Murphy stretched his spine-tingling magnum opus out to its absolute limits, resulting in this blissful 7 minute guitar-driven epic (for when the original 4-minute-long ‘Adagio’ just isn’t long enough).
Moby - “One Of These Mornings”
Remember that whole Miami Vice debacle on Twitter earlier in 2024?
Yeah, the timeline of its occurrence adds up to it probably being the impetus that made me think about Michael Mann’s film, and that speedboat scene scored with this Moby track, to the point that I wanted to hear this song over and over.
Naoki Sato - “Godzilla-1.0 Resolution” (from Godzilla Minus One)
GOD(zilla), this movie RULES.
Sleep - “Dopesmoker”
A tweet randomly came across my Twitter timeline back in June - several months prior to me almost completely jumping ship to Bluesky - which contained the following information regarding this album. Quote:
>be homeless
>get record contract
>given $75k
>spend $50k on sound equipment
>spend literally $25k on weed
>record in cheap motels
>spend 4 years on ONE SONG
>label refuses to release
>band breaks up
>it’s the best song anyone’s ever heard, changes metal forever
This, plus the Dune-esque album cover, piqued my interest to check this out.
For a title song that’s literally over an hour long, and is basically the entire album in and of itself, Dopesmoker is pretty good! I’ve never had weed in my life, so maybe that would amplify the experience to appropriately meet the weed-suffused making of the album, and its lyrical content. (Couldn’t catch all of the words on a first listen, barring the legible mentions of “Zion” and “Nazarene”, so when I went back and read what had been sung that whole time, I was surprised at how silly the lyrics are in contrast to the doom metal style of the music. Perhaps it’s better not to know the lyrics? Discuss.)
The bonus, much shorter song, ‘Hot Lava Man’, is quite good, too. Certainly less time-consuming in its replay value, that’s for sure.
I would thank and credit the person who wrote the tweet that lead me to this record… but upon closer inspection of that blue-check user’s other tweets (the blue check already a red flag), it became quickly apparent that the person is a horrifically racist, conspiracy theory-spouting, paying-for-Twitter piece of shit. So hey, thanks a lot for serving me up something from a guy like that, Elon (you jumping-jack fuck)!
Would’ve been nice to find out about this album from a better source than that, but OH WELL! 🙄
Low - “Last Snowstorm of the Year”
Any given Low song could have appeared on this list. In fact, multiple Low songs did, play-count-wise. But I narrowed it down to just this one short, sweet, and unofficially Christmassy track from their underrated 2002 album, Trust.
Sunn O))) - “Alice”
The rare Sunn O))) track that doesn’t completely engulf you in a claustrophobic soundscape of nightmarish drones from start to finish, but rather metamorphoses gradually over its 20 minute runtime from initial disquieting aural darkness, to a verdant uplifting finale of jubilant horns, and triumphant major-key power chords. (Assuming I’m describing the technical specifics accurately. But hey, at least I’m not like Max Landis stupidly describing the saxophone in Carly Rae Jepsen’s ‘Run Away With Me’ as a quote-unquote “synthetic bagpipe”. Christ, what a twat.)
Rob Zombie - “Dragula”
Until 2024, I thought I’d never heard a Rob Zombie track in my life. But then, randomly and miraculously, at some point I found myself listening to ‘Dragula’ (a song I’d certainly known of beforehand), whereupon I discovered that I had heard this song many times before, without ever knowing it was by Mr. Zombie; this is because I knew it best via the remix of it that appears early on in The Matrix, playing in the club where Neo first meets Trinity! So that’s all good then.
Oasis - “Morning Glory”
I am not rich enough - nor quite nostalgically enamoured with the band enough - to have bought any tickets to the Gallagher Brothers’ much-anticipated Oasis reunion tour. Good on them who did get tickets, though. Fingers crossed that Noel and Liam don’t have yet another breakdown in their notoriously fractious brotherly relationship before the tour starts, eh…?
Kings of Leon - “Reverend”
I call dibs on using this as the main titles music for a future yet-to-be-developed TV show!
TOOL - “Schism”
Those constantly shifting time-signatures must be a right ball-ache for Tool to compose, practise, and record with every song and every album. No wonder it takes them so long to craft new music!
(I know nothing about Tool.)
Lil Nas X - “THATS WHAT I WANT”
It’s just a good song, innit.
Taylor Swift - “Lavender Haze”
The subject matter of the song may be out of date now - as I’m pretty sure Swift’s lyrics in ‘Lavender Haze’ were heavily in reference to her erstwhile, longest-lasting relationship to Joe Alwyn, and they’ve been broken up for a while now, so it’s a bit yikes to hear a song where you as a listener know the love of the subjects in the song was imminently doomed - but the feel and vibe of the song needled its way into my head, as did that one vocal refrain that sounds like the voice of Justin Vernon from Bon Iver working with Swift again, but which apparently isn’t him.
Yelawolf - “Till It’s Gone”
This song just goes hard as hell, I don’t know what else to tell you.
Apashe & Panther - “Battle Royale (VIP Mix)”
You may know this best, as I do, from the (absolute banger) trailer for John Wick: Chapter 2.
Rage Against The Machine - “Bulls On Parade”
Any given Rage Against The Machine song could be applicable to the sorry state of the world in any given year, since none of their output has lost its political potency or relevancy for over three decades. Great for the music… not so great for one’s sanity to think we’ve barely made any social progress in all that time, and if anything, we’re backsliding into becoming more stupid and more overrun by fascists than ever.
“Weapons not food, not homes, not shoes
Not need, just feed the war cannibal animal
I walk the corner to the rubble that used to be a library
Line up to the mind cemetery now
What we don't know keeps the contracts alive and movin'
They don't gotta burn the books, they just remove 'em
While arms warehouses fill as quick as the cells
Rally 'round the family, pockets full of shells.”
This song came out in 1996, goddammit.
The Glitch Mob - “Fortune Days”
There are two kinds of people: those who know The Glitch Mob’s ‘Fortune Days’ from one of the sequels to Step Up, and those who know it from Person of Interest: Season 4, Episode 11, “If-Then-Else”.
I'm among the second kind, and so I cannot ever listen to it without thinking of that brilliant episode, which cemented this track into my memory almost a decade ago.
Clark - “Corroded Hymnal” (from Rellik)
Remember Rellik? The BBC/Cinemax series from 2017, written and created by Harry and Jack Williams of The Missing fame, wherein Rellik told a murder mystery story entirely in reverse chronological order (hence the title - “killer”, but backwards!)?
I didn’t watch all of it, but I did see enough to like what I heard of the score by electronic artist, Clark, before buying the soundtrack EP on iTunes back then. This year, the grittily beautiful ‘Corroded Hymnal’ came back to mind for whatever reason, and I just wanted to hear its ethereal soundscape on repeat.
Alan Sparhawk - “Brother”
Alan Sparhawk’s bittersweet, experimental solo record - White Roses, My God - isn’t an album made for broad appeal, nor in many respects made for anyone but Sparhawk himself. It’s a self-described “hyperpop album about grief”. It’s spiritually akin to Radiohead’s Kid A, while its vocoder-heavy influences include Imogen Heap, Neil Young’s Trans, and Prince’s feminine alter ego, Camille. It’s a heavily electronic project almost entirely composed of synthesised instrumentation, and digitally manipulated vocals divorced from all humanity or naturalism. And it’s undeniably an album borne from Sparhawk processing the tragic death in 2022 of his wife, and second half of their band Low, Mimi Parker.
Music critics with knowledge of the album’s crucial contextual background were kinder to it than casual listeners coming into it cold. However, all that’s really important here is that White Roses, My God was never about what we may think of it, but rather about Sparhawk using the songwriting and recording process to exorcise his anguish, pitch-shifting his voice to the point it no longer sounded like himself anymore, which paradoxically allowed him to find his voice again.
Of all the songs on the album, the ones I returned to the most were the Boards of Canada-esque opener ‘Get Still’, the Thom Yorke-esque single ‘Can U Hear’, and the one song where his vocals are deepened instead of heightened, ‘Brother’, reminiscent of Bo Burnham’s ‘All Eyes On Me’, and Bon Iver’s ‘The Woods’.
Where ‘Brother’ shifts gears is in its mid-song switch-up that punctuates the meditative electronic soundscape with Sparhawk’s electric guitar, and the skin-prickling backing vocals from Nona Invie, Leah Sanderson, and Sparhawk’s daughter Hollis, building upon each other until all these layers of the song join forces for the soaring chorus’s repeated refrain: “Watch and wait.”
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - “BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD”
Canadian post-rock collective, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, have long been on the right side of history with the politics they’ve espoused alongside their musical output. This extends to their stances criticising Israel’s treatment of Palestine, long before such criticisms finally started hitting the mainstream over the last few years, with mountains upon mountains of photo and video evidence convincing more people than ever (though certainly not everyone) that Israel’s government and military is categorically and undeniably committing genocide against the people of Palestine.
As far back as 2002, the liner notes in Godspeed’s album, Yanqui U.X.O., described the opening track (‘09-15-00’) as “Ariel Sharon surrounded by 1,000 Israeli soldiers marching on al-Haram Ash-Sharif & provoking another Intifada”.
Then, in 2008, founding member Efrim Menuck said in an interview: “Whenever the question comes up I'll speak about it. As a Jew, I have big problems with the state of Israel, because whether I like it or not, with everything they do, there's a presumption that it's been done in my name. And what's going on there is an unbearable, untenable situation.”
And in 2021, Godspeed was among the 600+ musicians - including the aforementioned Rage Against The Machine - who pledged to boycott performing in Israel because of the state’s perpetual crimes against humanity, which had already been bad enough long before the attacks of October 7th became Israel’s ongoing retributional excuse to kill thousands upon thousands of Palestinians with indiscriminate impunity and cruelty.
Now there’s Godspeed’s latest album, chillingly named NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340 DEAD, explicitly in direct reference to the death toll of people in Gaza killed by Israeli strikes up until that date. (As of January 2025, the official confirmed total is around double that number, with nearly 70% of these killings being of women and children, but we still don’t know the true tally of deaths caused by Israel, which is likely to number in the hundreds of thousands, because they keep killing so many journalists who’ve tried to accurately report on what is clearly an all-caps GENOCIDE.)
‘BABYS IN A THUNDERCLOUD’ is the second track on the album, and across its fourteen minute runtime, its sound evolves from calm and plaintive, to explosive and mournfully beautiful, painting a vision with noise which I imagine as a picture of innocence and domesticity, that becomes relentlessly, explosively destroyed with fire from above, leaving nothing but rubble and heartbreak in its wake.
As the band writes of their work on this album:
“No Title = What gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall? What context? What broken melody? And then a tally and a date to mark a point on the line, the negative process, the growing pile.”
Chappell Roan - “Good Luck, Babe!”
A much-needed ray of light in a dark world. An immediate 5-star song upon first listen, giving me that exquisite frisson the best songs can trigger in me.
Rob Simonsen - “Safe Return” (from The Whale)
I did not care for The Whale, Lois. It insists upon itself, and is frankly insulting with how much it thinks it’s doing right by its subject matter, when in reality it’s no better than the Oscar-bait, self-congratulatory, so-liberal-it-circles-back-to-conservative cringefests of Crash (2005), or Green Book. And when Rob Simonsen’s music is heard in conjunction with the film it’s scoring, I hate them both.
Yet in isolation, I love Simonsen’s score as its own standalone classical album, which I choose to imbue with my own visual imaginings and emotional associations, rather than the ones Darren Aronofsky’s wretched film imposes on the viewer.
Nicholas Britell - “Succession - Andante Risoluto” (from Succession)
At the end of 2024, I was simply addicted to re-listening to this piece from the final minutes of the final episode of Succession. That piano melody! Those grand orchestral strings! Ugh, it’s to die for!
No spoilers, of course… but if you know, you know. And here, Nicholas Britell went full-on God Mode, just knocking it out of the park, and into the stratosphere with this one.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - “Red Right Hand”
And finally, the last song I had on repeat in 2024 was Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ perhaps most famous song, ‘Red Right Hand’, known to most people as the anthem of the Scream movies, and/or the anthem of Peaky Blinders.
The reason for its inclusion herein?
Because I performed a cover version of the song in December, as part of an annual fundraising event a friend of mine has run for almost 10 years, called The 12 Gays Of Christmas. Since I starting joining the festivities as one of the token straights in 2022, our fundraising efforts have been in service of the charity TransAidCymru every year, with those who make videos/songs for the occasion all working under a unifying theme.
In 2022, the theme was DUETS, so I made a cover from scratch of Low’s ‘Disappearing’, which was also in tribute to Mimi Parker:
In 2023, the theme was GENDER, so I made a cover from scratch of ‘Oh Woman, Oh Man’ by London Grammar:
And in 2024, the theme was COLOUR, so I chose ‘Red Right Hand’, and part of the process of covering it was intimately familiarising myself with the song through repetition, so I knew every lyric, every beat, and every moment by heart.
But, you see, if everything had been smooth sailing in the lead up to my allocated deadline of December 20th, I would have redone the whole song from scratch, making my own version of the instrumental as well as the vocals, as I’d done twice before. Except I ran into the slight snag of suddenly getting sick with a bad cold a few weeks before I was due to submit my entry, meaning that most of the time that I should have spent making the track was instead spent coughing and sneezing all manner of grossnesses out of my system, leaving me unable to use my laptop or MIDI keyboard for fear of ceaselessly splattering them with germs, and also unable to talk, much less sing, without involuntarily coughing.
Eventually, the ordeal subsided, and in a mad rush of a couple of days before the deadline, I cobbled together a cover of ‘Red Right Hand’ that used the original (superior) instrumental, while my only additions were my vocals (four layers of different overdubs in total).
If you haven’t seen it already, I hope you enjoy it…