On New Year’s Day, Stereogum will turn 23 years old. (It’s easy to remember because we share a birthday with Ice Spice.) I spend enough time on social media to know that longreads about Ned’s Atomic Dustbin aren’t what’s setting the algo on fire these days, yet Stereogum’s audience is larger than it’s ever been, so thank you all for caring. We’re especially grateful to everyone who has been supporting Stereogum with a paid Membership, helping to keep independent music journalism alive in ’25. We have exciting things in store for next year and look forward to sharing them with you, the best music community on the internet. But first we must look back on things you wrote underneath our posts this year. Shut Up, Dude, this site’s long-running weekly best comments countdown, is one of our Members Only features, but I’m once again opening up the year-end roundup to all. Below, enjoy the best of Stereogum readers’ jokes and insights in 2024, and we’ll see you on the futuresport court in 2025.

“The album is god, period.” That’s Jack Antonoff on the And The Writer Is… podcast earlier this month. “There’s no brilliant artist that’s existed for a real period of time and changed things and has a real audience that isn’t based on albums. They don’t exist.” I bet you can think of some examples to dispute that claim, but we do love albums around here and probably you do too.

It’s time for another Stereogum tradition: itemizing our least favorite music trends of the year. And boy, did 2024 give us some big ones, some real heavy shit; this is gonna be a long one. Let’s kick things off with a trend that was brewing in 2023, but really popped off this year…

Don’t forget about EPs! We certainly haven’t. Although our resident EP czar James Rettig ended his historic tenure at Stereogum this year, the annual list of excellent EPs he once spearheaded persists.

For at least a decade now – since Billboard started counting music streams in its chart calculations in 2013, and probably before – the sound of pop music has been sharply bifurcated between the extremely online and extremely offline. The starlets you meme about on social media aren’t necessarily making the songs you hear 20 times on the radio on your commute, or in the coffee shop picking up breakfast, or out at the pool’s pumped-in speakers. 2024 had an especially sharp divide; compare the charts to the conversation, and you’ll see what I mean.

History doesn’t repeat, but its guitars sure do chime.

If you think about it a certain way, one of the defining qualities of jazz is earnestness. This is one of the reasons why jazz and metal have so much in common, and so often appeal to the same listeners. Both forms can be totally absurd. Think of the most lurid, squiggly fusion, or the blare of a thoroughly unsubtle big band record; aren’t they the equivalent of, say, DragonForce? But metal’s awareness of its own absurdity does not translate into ironic distance from what they’re doing. And the same is true of jazz. People will play the most ridiculous, over-the-top shit with a totally straight face. Even when a jazz group exhibits a certain amount of wit — think of the Bad Plus in their original incarnation, the version that covered “Smells Like Teen Spirit”; or Mostly Other People Do The Killing, and the way their sleeve designs imitated famous jazz album covers — it’s done out of love, not mockery.

Did you speak the words “very demure” this year? Can you spell Haliey Welch? Do you not only know who the Rizzler is, but you’re mad at Jimmy Fallon for disrespecting him? If so you may be afflicted with “brain rot,” Oxford University Press’s Word Of The Year. At MATES festival in LA, I caught up with indie musicians Claud, Jillian Medford of Ian Sweet, and Campbell Burns and Jake Johnson of Vacations to assess whether any of them should be diagnosed with the condition. (I have a doctorate in very online.) I also asked them all what “coworker music” was, but nobody knew. Watch the interview below and see a medical professional if any of it is familiar to you.

From the moment he popped out for a guest verse on Future & Metro Boomin’s “Like That,” 2024 belonged to Kendrick Lamar. After declaring and winning a war against Drake — and landing a couple #1 singles in the process — that much was clear. But Kendrick wasn’t the only rapper who came through in 2024, even if all his press and outright dominance makes it feel that way.

It’s time. Y’all have once again voted, and we have once again counted your votes. The results of the 2024 Gummy Awards are here.

Last month, Knocked Loose were musical guests on Jimmy Kimmel Live. Their performance was a spectacle: plumes of fire, a Poppy appearance, rain pelting down on the moshing crowd at the outdoor stage. Supposedly, at least one adolescent was frightened. Knocked Loose are currently the biggest band in all of hardcore, to the point where nobody can agree whether they’re a hardcore band or just an arena-metal band whose members are all hardcore kids. They’ve reached the point where they can stage that Kimmel spectacle, with all the attendant viral silliness, without coming close to compromising the ferocity of their music. That’s crazy.

Oasis, Acid Bath, ‘Til Tuesday, Northside, Foundation, Snot… These are just some of the bands who will reunite for shows in 2025. Nobody stays marding forever except the Smiths. So as you watch Stereogum’s annual awards show-style tribute to the groups that called it quits this year, keep in mind that they’ll all be back in five to thirty-five years.

This year’s best country albums list is once again presented in partnership with Don’t Rock The Inbox, the amazing country music newsletter run by Stereogum contributors Marissa R. Moss and Natalie Weiner. Check it out and consider buying a subscription.

Once again, here are my personal picks for the year’s best in drone slabs, free improv hangouts, android piano music, psychedelic noise tapes, footwoork jazz, field recording jams and more. That’s that me transgresso.

Let’s rip off the Band-Aid: This is the final Black Market. After 11-plus years and 140 columns, we’re finally packing it in. “Welcome to the Black Market, a new space at Stereogum dedicated to talking about and listening to heavy music,” Michael Nelson wrote in the first Black Market published on February 27, 2013. Well, we talked about it, and we listened to it, although that last part has been under considerable debate over the past seven years. But, similar to how a record will eventually need to stop spinning, the Black Market has exhausted its wax, and we’re no stuck groove. This is it, then, real-deal dunzo, because in metal, no one ever reforms for festival-backed nostalgia bucks and legacy-tarnishing diminishing returns. Nope. Never happens. Not even once.

If there is a single word that encapsulates the broad state of electronic music right now, it is “gauzy.” Reflecting on a period marked by long nights in futuristic spaces, I recall taking in more sets indebted to Basic Channel than Orbital over the last 12 months. Sure, there were exceptions, with dubstep, jungle, and progressive house coming back into vogue. For the most part, though, it seems as if the style’s mutual consciousness agreed to cater to moody lounging in 2024. The best releases of the year are overarchingly cerebral and echoing, suited for hermetic subway journeys and bouts of introversion.

It’s December, and a flurry of lists is descending upon us. Let’s add one more before 2024 slips away from us: The Gummy Awards, Stereogum’s annual readers’ poll, is live.

Welcome to Stereogum’s inaugural Best Songs Of The Year list. Typically in December, our staff members share 10 personal favorite tracks each — which we will still be doing, don’t worry — but after 23 years, we felt it was time to do a collective countdown. This year was stacked with memorable releases: legendary rappers dropped exciting records fueled by heated feuds, beloved bands returned with game-changing singles, and once-underrated pop singers became cultural fixtures with irresistible earworms. We had opinions and, since we kept track of the the best songs every week, we were prepared.

The death of the album has been proclaimed many times, and after decades of piracy and point-and-click listening, cohesive bodies of work have indeed lost some of their cultural stature. Yet the long player remains a meaningful art form, the gold standard breathlessly anticipated by fan bases across the genre spectrum. Even the most brainless stans are always screaming at their idols to “drop the album.”

It’s time for the only year-end list that includes Ace Frehley, Drake, and Crazy Town. Our weekly Shut Up, Dude posts are paywalled to Stereogum members, but I’m making this annual countdown free for all so everyone can admire each other’s puns.

Now that we’re reviewed the past year in music, we turn our attention to 2024 the only way we know how — with a too-long list.

The dichotomy of 2023: we had an amazing year for music, in terms of listeners having access to seemingly endless troves of virtuosity and bangingness. We also had a depressing year for music, in terms of the environment in which that music is made. Following are eight of the worst developments over the year.

December is always a bit of a dead zone for big pop albums, unless it’s 2013 and your name is Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. So for this month’s column…

This year’s Gummy Awards winners are in. It’s our 19th (!) annual Stereogum readers’ poll highlighting the year’s best albums and songs.

In a year where tentpole superhero movies are scored by Haxan Cloak and third-world ambient-jazz woodwind opuses are released by André 3000, does the phrase “experimental music” even remotely carry any weight in 2023? As always, the answer is “Look, I clicked the link, please just tell me about some albums I can listen to at work.” Here are my personal picks for the year’s best in drone suites, improv throwdowns, archival treasures, alien soundscapes, modern classical and more.

Huzzah, the listpocalypse is upon us. Behold, the Black Market is here to confuse and annoy you with the annual list of our favorite metal albums. Column writers, past and present, once again voted for their most-loved releases of 2023. This top 10 is the result. Is your most-loved album here? It is not. Did we list any albums that normal people listen to? Again, probably not. Is this a list so frustratingly niche and packed with impenetrable metal that it asks why we’re even allowed to do this? Yes, of course. In fact, this might be one of our most infuriating countdowns, so much so that the metal powers that be have taken notice. As soon as I sent this list to the Stereogum mothership, I was indicted on 666 counts of poser fraud and must surrender myself to Metal Law authorities immediately. This is what we get for not listening to Tomb Mold.

2023 has been a transitional year for jazz. We lost one of the genre’s most brilliant composers and performers, Wayne Shorter; free jazz flamethrowers Peter Brötzmann and Charles Gayle; genteel pianist Ahmad Jamal; bassist, composer and Spike Lee’s father Bill Lee; singer Tony Bennett; trombonist Curtis Fowlkes; bassist Richard Davis; pianist and composer Carla Bley; saxophonist Mars Williams, known to some as a modern free jazz hero and others as the dude from the Psychedelic Furs; and some people I consider jazz-adjacent, like Brazilian singer Astrud Gilberto and guitarist Jeff Beck, who made a series of excellent fusion albums in the mid ’70s. And while Shabaka Hutchings is still alive, he announced his intention to quit playing the saxophone, and disbanded all of his current groups: Sons Of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming, and Shabaka And The Ancestors.

As the old saying goes, you either die a youngin or live long enough to see yourself become an old head. Speaking to Rolling Stone last month, Lil Boat aged prematurely when he complained that they just don’t make rap like they used to. “The place that hip-hop is in right now is a terrible place,” he explained during a chat with Tierra Whack. “It’s a lot of imitation. It’s a lot of quick, low-quality music being put out. It’s a lot less originality.”

Songs just feel more personal. Every December, after the Stereogum staff votes on the year’s best albums, we each submit a list of our favorite tracks from these past 12 months. Think of these lists as little mixtapes, customized guides to our most obsessive listening of 2023. The only parameters we set are that (1) a song cannot repeat on multiple people’s lists and (2) all songs chosen must either have been released in 2023 or, in the case of rollouts that stem back to last year, appear on an album released in 2023.

It’s time once again for our saddest year-end list, presented in the style of a televised awards show tribute. Whether they were around for 50 years or five years, all of this year’s In Memoriam acts made an impact, then decided 2023 was the time to close up shop and perhaps even be replaced by digital avatars. If you’re questioning whether some of these groups were real, that’s why they broke up.

From a certain perspective, the hardcore band of 2023 was one that hasn’t released any music since 2017. Baltimore bruiser brigade Trapped Under Ice have long loomed enormous over the underground landscape. Turnstile, now the most popular hardcore band that has ever existed, essentially started off as a TUI side project. TUI’s blend of elements — knucklehead swagger, metallic crunch, irrepressible singalong parts, hidden vulnerability — remain hugely influential; their style is all over present-day heavyweights like Pain Of Truth, Speed, and Never Ending Game. When TUI returned at the beginning of 2023, it was an event.

This year’s best country albums list is presented in partnership with Don’t Rock The Inbox, the amazing country music newsletter run by Stereogum contributors Marissa R. Moss and Natalie Weiner on Substack. Check it out and consider buying a subscription.

2023 found humanity wandering back into a rut after a brief interim of post-lockdown joy. Over the course of the year, we were forced to confront systemic violence, economic uncertainty, ongoing challenges posed by the climate crisis, and, frankly, too much other shit to count on both hands. It seems like most people I know are ending this year feeling fairly downtrodden and nervous, myself included.

For the past few years, we’ve dedicated a list during our year-end coverage to shortform releases. There’s no grand through-line for these sort of lists — it’s just 25 EPs that got us hyped up from artists all across the board. There are young bands showcasing developing talents; established acts taking a much necessary breather between LPs or offering us some might-have-beens from their previous albums; splits and collaborations and one-offs that just wouldn’t make sense in a full-length incarnation. Their runtimes might be minor, but they feel major.

Stereogum started off as an indie rock-focused website, and that’s still our bread and butter. But it’s getting harder and harder to define “indie rock,” both as a genre and as a web of associations. In 2023, plenty of longtime Stereogum favorites rose to something resembling full-on pop-star status, while some actual pop stars continue to play around with sounds and aesthetics that previous generations would’ve associated with ashtray-smelling dive bars and handmade mixtapes. Context collapse is happening all over the place, and it can be hard to answer a seemingly simple question: What’s good now?

December 31st means it’s time to reflect on all the content we’ve experienced together this year and the clever things you had to say about it. Tomorrow marks 21 years since I started Stereogum (easy to remember because it has the same birthday as Ice Spice) so if you wanna get us anything here is where to sign up to become a paying member. On behalf of the staff, I offer a sincere thanks to everyone who has already done so — this site would not have lasted without your financial support. And shout out to everyone who’s been active in this community. It would be fecking boring without your tips and comments.

Every December, after we’ve published Stereogum’s best-of-the-year lists, we turn our attention to what’s coming out over next 12 months. When it comes to great music we are nothing if not greedy.

The polls have closed, the votes have been counted, and it’s time to reveal the results of our annual readers’ poll the Gummy Awards. It seems y’all still love indie rock very much, with just a pinch of big-budget pop sprinkled throughout. We only included one song per artist, and some reader favorites were excluded due to a split vote. Then again, all of the top tracks were by artists who piled up votes for multiple songs, so better luck next year, Grimace!

Midway through 2022, it seemed like hip-hop was bland and headed for a disappointing year. Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers confused people with its insularity and inherent selfishness. Gone were sweeping records about Black Americana; say hello to a record about choosing yourself in the midst of rising fascism and cataclysmic unhappiness. There wasn’t a DaBaby of the year, in other words, someone who was seemingly everywhere over the radio. Looking back at these past 12 months, nothing stands out, but there’s an abundance of quality. If there is a MVP of this year, it might be Baton Rouge’s YoungBoy Never Broke Again – the quantity-over-quality superstar whose fame comes from his music and also his sometimes bizarre antics.