We’re now a few weeks into the new year. At the end of last year I planned on making a year end list with all of my favourite albums and songs, all of them accompanied by a little text about the music and my personal connection to it. I started writing, but never finished it. Sometimes it just doesn’t really work. So instead I decided to just do a mini version of that: two reviews of records that are amongst my favourites of 2024, followed by a long list of all 2024-released music that I loved. That way, you can just check for yourself if there is something in there that you don’t know, that you might like, that you’ve missed out on or that has also been amongst your favourites. In addition, I have also updated my ‘some songs for you’ playlist with some bangers and beauties. Find it here:

Shovel Dance Collective - The Shovel Dance

Nine musicians from London, all with a profound love for folk music, crossed paths somewhere in the 2020s and naturally grew into a collective. Some of them have been playing folk music for years, others are musical descendants from other genres like indie rock, punk, or even just everyday instrument-playing-art-students. Regardless of their history and background, they connected and started Shovel Dance Collective.

Deeply rooted in ancient English, Irish and Scottish folk songs, they ignite new life into a genre that has surpassed generations. In December 2022 they released their first full-length album called The Water is the Shovel of the Shore. A wonderful record, showing off their broad range of instruments, several vocalists, room for experiment, respect for tradition and dedication to innovation in folk music. They examine contemporary topics in traditional music and give it a new musical guise. I briefly want to thank Sydney for putting them on my radar, for enthusing me in his typical manner. A wonderful recommendation, of which I don’t think it would’ve reached me in another way anytime soon. Thankfully, I gave it a chance and fell in love with the work Shovel Dance Collective makes.

Well, fast forward to 2024, Shovel Dance Collective released a new album called The Shovel Dance. Its intensity, the recording quality, the arrangements, the lengthy songs, all of it together makes for an absolutely stunning result. The first song, Abbots Bromley Horn Dance / The Worms Crept Out, starts off with a pipe organ laying down a melody which will soon be stripped down from the massive organ into an acoustic harp. From there on it builds, gently and elegantly, into a perfectly orchestrated and sometimes choppy instrumental that sets the perfect tone for the album to follow.

There’s twenty-five instruments featured on the record, as well as eight voices. As stated on their Bandcamp-page: the album revolves around their interplay and close listening, no matter how many members of the band play on a given song or how many instruments feature. [...] “Improvising, textural playing, and moving as one free organic organism are all part of the experiments we try and make in form”. Playing and recording as a collective might seem difficult and offer many bumps on the road, but Shovel Dance Collective somehow make it sound like it’s anything but that.

Every song offers something different to the ear. On The Merry Golden Tree (a traditional British folk song dating back to the early 1900s), Mataio Austin Dean sings the lyrics with his immediately recognizable voice over a meandering drone. He is beautifully vocally dubbed at selected moments, while the drone is gently building into a grander composition. Around the 6-minute mark the whole song continuously builds up and falls back down again, in waves full of horns, squeaks and crackles.

The following song, O’Sullivan’s March, sounds more like a couple of street musicians are performing while you ride your horse into the castle walls of a medieval village, welcoming you and making the day more pleasant for the hardworking citizens at the town square. It’s very light and warm. The album continues with the calm instrumental rendition of The Rolling Wave and the mega contagious and jiggy melodies of Kissing’s Nae Sin / Newcastle / Portsmouth (Come, Come, My Brave Boys). I can imagine the sailors jumping and dancing in the tavern.

Entering the last two songs of the album, the music takes a turn into a bit of a darker sound. Four Loom Weaver tells the tragic story of oppressed cotton weavers who own nothing and, by their labour, create the wealth of the world. It’s a modest rendition, leaving space for the imaginations and emotions of the listener.

On the closing song, The Grey Cock, Shovel Dance Collective create a frightful and uncanny soundscape in which the tale of Mary and Willie is told. Mary, full of heartbreak, gets interrupted in a good night of rest by the ghost of her true love Willie, only to have one last moment together before Willie’s ghost disappears back into nothingness, never to return.

The creativity and bravura that this band puts into its music is special, perhaps even unique in a time when music is rarely being reinterpreted in such an innovative way. Following a more adventurous debut album, the more song-structured The Shovel Dance doesn’t hold back on it’s progressiveness. To round it up, I’m happy to say that this is one of my favorite recordings of music of the past year. Oh, did I already mention the album cover? I absolutely love the album cover.

Cameron Winter - Heavy Metal

Once August is over, the supermarkets in The Netherlands are flooded with pepernoten. The Dutch delicacy is traditionally eaten around Sinterklaas, which is celebrated on the 5th of December and in the weeks leading up to it. Nonetheless, the country’s bigger grocery stores are offering the pepernoten months ahead already. It’s a common complaint, where the snack loses its time-bound value when it’s available so early on in the year.

The same thing can be said about year-end-lists. As soon as the Gregorian calendar hits the 1st of December, music blogs, newspapers, magazines and all of such are firing their ‘Best Albums of 2024’-lists off into the world wide web. It’s the start of the end of the year, these lists. But it’s also a bit premature, isn’t it? Released on December 6, 2024, Cameron Winter’s Heavy Metal came a bit late to the year-end-party. Too late for many of the ‘official’ lists, which can simply be considered a shame. This album should have and most likely would have ended up high on those lists, creating room for everybody to discover its beauty.

Cameron Winter is a few things: he is the lead singer of Geese, he is a mega talented songwriter, he is a Brooklyn native, he is just old enough to drink and he is a man with a golden voice. My god, that voice. It’s an almost illegally present stand-out point of his work. But to say his voice makes his work so good is an insult to the general musicianship at display.

Going solo was not a conventional next step in Winter’s career. As he says, "I got a lot of advice that it was too early to ‘go solo’, probably because most people feel that ‘solo albums’ come once a band is basically over the hill and that they’re usually uninspired cash grabs, but rest assured, my solo album is unique, because barely anybody knows who my band is, I’m young and not afraid of living with my parents and I’m free to chase whatever ideas I want."

Unique it is, indeed. Addictive as well. The lyrics on the album show a portrait of a young man full of internal troubles, insecurities and a fear of his future self. It’s vulnerable but also full of mysteries. Winter doesn’t care if you believe what he says. He intends to create confusion and extends this mockery in interviews around the album. “God is real, God is real. I’m not kidding, God is actually real”, he sings at the end of $0, while adding he “wouldn’t joke about this”...

The often down-hearted lyrics are accompanied by light and tender compositions of piano, (acoustic) guitar and bass, while the percussion is more so formed by things like a shaker and a xylophone than by actual drums. This creates a smooth, delicate instrumental lay-out for Winter to sing his heart out. Sometimes subdued and gentle, sometimes exuberant, with vibrato and full of emotion. His vocal range is astonishing, to say the least. Towards the end of the song Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed) he shows off this range with a string of high notes, screaming for Nausicaä to reveal herself to him.

The duality of Cameron Winter also returns in the title of the record. Named Heavy Metal, it nevertheless has little to do with the genre. As Winter said in an interview with NME, he shifted through the lyrics of the album searching for a fitting title for it. When he stumbled across the line “I am full of heavy metals, I am a heavy metal man”, he “thought that would be a funny title”.

Altogether it is simply an outstanding debut solo-record. As the singer’s Bandcamp-page tells us, it’s “rumored to have been composed in abandoned basements, taxi back seats, and in impromptu jam sessions in public spaces”. According to himself, Winter has been banned from several Guitar Center showrooms since recording this album. It is up to you and me to decide what is fiction and what is real, but eventually it doesn’t really matter. Let’s just keep that smokescreen up and find ourselves lost in it.

2024 big long tall mega music list

As mentioned in the intro, here’s a list of my favourite music that came out in 2024. Sorted alphabetically, rated in stars:

✩ = good
✩✩ = better
✩✩✩ = best

Adrianne Lenker - Bright Future ✩✩
Alan Sparhawk - White Roses, My God ✩
Bar Italia - The Tw*ts ✩✩
Bassvictim - Basspunk ✩✩✩
Cameron Winter - Heavy Metal ✩✩✩
Charli XCX - Brat ✩
Chatterton - Fields of This ✩
Claire Rousay - Sentiment ✩
Clarissa Connelly - World of Work ✩✩✩
Colle - Montalvo ✩✩
CS + Kreme - The Butterfly Drinks the Tears of the Tortoise ✩✩
Daryl Johns - Daryl Johns ✩✩
Detente - Ghosts ✩
Elias Rønnenfelt - Heavy Glory ✩
Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru - Souvenirs ✩
Fergus Jones, Perko - Ephemera ✩
Fine - Rocky Top Ballads ✩✩✩
FOG - Fogesque II ✩
FOG - Fogesque III ✩
Frederik Valentin - ROCK N ROLL WILL NEVER DIE ✩
Future Islands - People Who Aren’t There Anymore ✩
Gastr Del Sol - We Have Dozens of Titles ✩✩
GB - Gusse Music ✩✩
Go Me - Don’t Forget To (Shake It) / Play Button ✩✩
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024, 28,340 DEAD” ✩
Good Sad Happy Bad - All kinds of days ✩
Gyeongsu, June - All to None ✩
haloplus+ - born to sing ✩
Hayden Pedigo - Live in Amarillo, Texas ✩✩
Helado Negro - PHASOR ✩✩
Helen Island - Last Liasse ✩
Hildegard - Jour 1596 ✩✩
Hommybird - Onder Een Kleine Ster ✩✩
Hovvdy - Hovvdy ✩
Ity - No Road No Problem ✩✩
Jawnino - 40 ✩✩✩
Jespfur - Pedestrians Of Bright Silence ✩✩
Johnny Blue Skies - Passage Du Desir ✩✩
julie - My Anti-Aircraft Friend ✩
Kali Malone - All Life Long ✩
Knee Deep In Custard - Deep Blue Sugar ✩
Mabe Fratti - Sentir Que No Sabes ✩
Merely, Malibu - Essential Mixtape ✩
Midwife - No Depression In Heaven ✩✩
MIKE, Tony Seltzer - Pinball ✩
Mikey Enwright - Bright Space ✩
Milan W. - Leave Another Day ✩✩
MJ Lenderman - Manning Fireworks ✩✩✩
Mk.Gee - Two Star & The Dream Police ✩✩✩
Moin - You Never End ✩✩
Mount Eerie - Night Palace ✩✩✩
Nala Sinephro - Endlessness ✩
NEW YORK - Rapstar* ✩
Nilüfer Yanya - My Method Actor ✩
Oliver Coates - Throb, shiver, arrow of time ✩✩
Parannoul - Sky Hundred ✩
Partynextdoor - PARTYNEXTDOOR 4 (P4) ✩
Rafael Toral - Spectral Evolution ✩✩
Serpentwithfeet - GRIP ✩
Shovel Dance Collective - The Shovel Dance ✩✩✩
Smerz, Allina - Allina ✩
Songs: Ohia - Live: Vanquishers ✩
Spresso - FAST SET CEMENT ✩
Still House Plants - If I don’t make it, I love u ✩✩
Sunchaser - Sunchaser ✩
Tapir! - The Pilgrim, Their God and The King of My Decrepit Mountain ✩✩
The American Analog Set - New Drifters ✩✩
The Crying Nudes - The Crying Nudes ✩
The Softies - The Bed I Made ✩
untitled (halo) - headbanger ✩
Yung Lean, Bladee - Psykos ✩✩

I hope there’s something in there for you to enjoy! If there’s music from 2024 that in your opinion is missing on this list, please send it through! I’d love to listen to it.

A big hug and ttys,
Jeroen