Mary Timony is a "real heads know" indie rock legend who never really got the credit she deserved for her work over the years. But it feels like she's started to get appreciated a little more thanks to her longevity, she's arguably gotten better and better with later records like The Shapes We Make, Ex Hex's It's Real, and now Untame The Tiger. I hear a lot of Television in this album on songs like "No Thirds" and "The Guest," albeit filtered through Timony's distinctive voice and guitar tone. Here's the 2024 albums Spotify playlist that I add new releases to throughout the year. 

J Mascis is another indie rock lifer that I'm really glad is still making great music today. Most of Mascis's music is in the familiar Dinosaur Jr. roar, but some of his solo albums have been quiet acoustic albums. What Do We Do Now a little different because it's mainly uptempo rockers with drums, but the rhythm guitars are all acoustic, and then the leads are electric, and he breaks out all the crazy distortion pedal sounds for the solos. The combination surprised me at first, but it works, and Mascis is a fantastic drummer so I always like hearing him behind the kit. I think my favorite is "I Can't Find You," I love that twangy lead guitar on the chorus. 

Madi Dias has been making albums for over a decade, but I only heard of her recently, she's been building momentum touring with Harry Styles and working with Kacey Musgraves, who appears on Weird Faith's "Don't Do Me Good." And the album grabbed me right from the first song, "Same Risk," she's got a great voice and some sharp lyrics. I don't always vibe with the newer generation of really self-aware confessional singer-songwriters, I roll my eyes a lot at the things the members of Boygenius write, but I like Diaz. I'm surprised "Girlfriend" wasn't one of the singles, that feels like a real standout track. "Kiss The Wall" is really catchy, too. 

The last time Usher released an album 8 years ago, Hard II Love staggered through a long, aimless promo campaign before finally landing awkwardly with cover art everyone hated and 3 days on Tidal before it was available everywhere else. By comparison, Usher had a great rollout for Coming Home, building momentum with the Tiny Desk Concert, the Vegas residency, radio hits, and then the Super Bowl halftime show the same weekend the album dropped. And yet, despite the very different optics, I think Coming Home and Hard II Love are pretty similar in quality and overall commercial performance, when you look at the lowered expectations for an aging R&B star. There are some minor irritating moments on Coming Home (The-Dream's cheesy lyrics on "Bop," the Billy Joel sample on "A-Town Girl") but there's a lot of great stuff too, from "I Love U" and "Please U" to "Kissing Strangers" and "Coming Home" 

Last year I met a musician I've admired for years and years, experimental pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn, to get a couple quotes from her for my High Zero Festival piece, and to profile her in a longer piece that will be in the first issue of a new zine called Rantipole later this year (I'll post here again when it's out). Alcorn told me about three upcoming albums she had in the can, including November's Canto, and Filament, which just came out a couple weeks ago as I was finishing up my article. Catherine Sikora plays saxophone, and she and Alcorn had just met before the live performance recorded for Filament, so it's got that interesting charge of two improvisors feeling each other out for the first time, I particularly like the second track where it feels like they start to loosen up and get louder. And in the last half hour, Sikora does some really cool rapid runs. 

I'm a huge fan of Scott Siskind as a vocalist and songwriter from his band Vinny Vegas as well as his two solo EPs, I felt very fortunate to work with him on a few Western Blot songs. He's so good communicating emotion and drama with his voice, in fact once or twice I had to ask him to lighten up his delivery, because I just don't write sad songs like he does. "Fresh Eyes" and "Tell Me Where I Am" on this EP are some of the best stuff he's ever done, I think

As I said a few weeks ago, I really like all the singles The Last Dinner Party has released over the last year, and they're all on Prelude To Ecstasy, but they're probably the best songs. And the way they reference the Red Scare podcast and have a song called "The Feminine Urge" makes me just feel like this band is too online in an obnoxious way, but I guess it all squares with the posh theatricality of their whole sound and image, which I mostly like. 

Ryan Leslie had a nice little run there with his first two albums in 2009, and writing and producing the first Cassie album, where it seemed like he'd follow Ne-Yo and The-Dream in being R&B's next big songwriter-turned-star. But then Cassie left Ryan Leslie for Diddy, something we know now had a whole dark side to it, and Leslie lost his major label deal and released a series of independent albums where he was rapping more and more, and it just felt like he got too far out of his R&B lane and it didn't work. But You Know My Speed, his first project in nearly a decade, is pretty solid. It kind of sounds like he could've made it in 2009. but that's not necessarily a bad thing, he was on fire in 2009. 

Mick Mars was always the odd man out in Motley Crue, the little weirdo who's about a decade older than the other members of the band, a relatively shadowy figure in a group full of glammy natural born rock stars competing for the spotlight. When the only guitarist in a hard rock band is its least famous member, you know something unusual is going on. That dynamic was really entertaining in the book Motley Crue wrote together, The Dirt, and you always got the sense that Mars was on his own musical trip and probably would make very different music without them. But Mars retired in 2022, and was replaced with a new guitarist in Motley Crue, and they've been embroiled in a public feud and lawsuit for the past year. So Mars finally had the time to make a solo record, promising "something weird, special, great and loud," and I was rooting for him to actually deliver something at least moderately novel, like C.C. DeVille's Samantha 7 side project. Unfortunately, The Other Side Of Mars is just a bland hard rock record with a couple of anonymous singers delivering boilerplate lyrics over Mars's occasionally cool riffs and solos. It's that same kind of brooding mishmash of hair metal and grunge that Motley Crue was making in the John Corabi era, and it's disappointing that Mars waited decades to make something like this. 

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