Warm Visions’ Top 100 Songs of 2024

Moving right along with Warm Visions list extravaganza with my favorite songs of 2024. Like the last few years, I’ve listed 90 of my favorite songs below alphabetically and then ranked my top 10 favorites below that.

Commenting on my top 10 favorite songs, it seems like I had two moods this year: brainless belligerent and overemotional sap. There’s really no in between. Lots of songs that go really hard combined with songs that really cut me deep. It’s what we’ve been boiled down to in 2024, it seems. Not a lot of surprises elsewhere, I’d say this falls in line with what I’ve seen from other sites + friends music opinions. Less pop though. Even with Chappell Roan on the list. Included “Good Luck, Babe!” because it sounds like Miharu Koshi’s “Ryugujyo No Koibito”.

You’ll find a Spotify playlist to listen along with below, and remember to support the artists of songs you really love from this list.

Listen along with the Warm Visions’ Top Songs of 2024 Spotify playlist HERE.

ADRIANNE LENKER – “Free Treasure”
ALLEGRA KRIEGER – “Never Arriving”
AMEN DUNES – “Purple Land”
ANGÉLICA GARCIA – “Juanita”
A$AP ROCKY – “HIGHJACK (feat. Jessica Pratt)”
ASTRID SONNE – “Do you wanna”
BEN BÖHMER – “Hiding (feat. Lykke Li)”
BETH GIBBONS – “Lost Changes”
BIBI CLUB – “Le feu”
THE BODY & DIS FIG – “Dissent, Shame”
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BODY MEAT – “High Beams”
BOLIS PUPUL – “Completely Half”
BRIJEAN – “Laura”
BRUNO BERLE – “Tirolirole”
CAMERA OBSCURA – “Baby Huey (Hard Times)”
CARIBOU – “Volume”
CAROLINE SAYS – “Faded and Golden”
CASSANDRA JENKINS – “Only One”
CHAPPELL ROAN – “Good Luck, Babe!”
CINDY LEE – “If You Hear Me Crying”
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CONTRAHOUSE – “Streetcorn”
CORRIDOR – “Jump Cut”
CRUMB – “Side By Side”
THE CURE – “All I Ever Am”
DEHD – “Dog Days”
DENZEL CURRY – “Hot One (feat. TiaCorine & A$AP Ferg)”
DISCOVERY ZONE – “Pair A Dice”
DJ SEINFELD – “If U Like Me”
DUMMY – “Blue Dada”
ELKKA – “Air Tight (feat. Dot Major)”
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EMPRESS OF – “Lorelei”
ERIKA DE CASIER – “My Day Off”
FABIANA PALLADINO – “I Can’t Dream Anymore”
FAZERDAZE – “Cherry Pie”
FINE – “Days Incomplete”
FONTAINES D.C. – “Favourite”
GINGER ROOT – “Only You”
HELADO NEGRO – “I Just Want To Wake Up With You”
HIATUS KAIYOTE – “Make Friends”
HITECH – “SPANK!”
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HURRAY FOR THE RIFF RAFF – “Alibi”
IGLOOGHOST – “flux•Cocoon”
JAMIE XX – “Waited All Night (feat. Romy & Oliver Sim)”
JANE PENNY – “Wear You Out”
JERRY PAPER – “Scenic Route”
JORDAN RAKEI – “Freedom”
KEELEY FORSYTH – “Turning (feat. Colin Stetson)”
KELLY LEE OWENS – “Love You Got”
KELLY MORAN – “Don’t Trust Mirrors”
KIASMOS – “Sailed”
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KIT SEBASTIAN – “Metropolis”
KONRADSEN – “Michael”
LAWRENCE HART – “Hear Ur Heartbeat”
LEWIS OFMAN – “Highway (feat. Empress Of)”
LIP CRITIC – “Spirit Bomber”
MANNEQUIN PUSSY – “Sometimes”
MARIA CHIARA ARGIRÒ – “Light”
MARINA ALLEN – “Red Cloud”
MARY LATTIMORE & WALT MCCLEMENTS – “The Poppies, the Wild Mustard, the Blue-Eyed Grass”
MDOU MOCTAR – “Imouhar”
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MICHI – “There’s No Heaven”
MOIN – “Anything But Sopo”
MOLINA – “Organs (feat. ML Buch)”
NICK LEÓN – “Bikini (feat. Erika de Casier)”
NILÜFER YANYA – “Just A Western”
OPAL SUNN – “Elastic – Phase I”
PAYCHEQUE – “When You Are Around”
PEARL & THE OYSTERS – “Cruise Control”
PRESSURE HEAVEN – “Say Goodbye”
PRIORI – “Wake (feat. James K)”
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REYNA TROPICAL – “Lo Siento”
RITCHIE – “Dizzy (feat. Aminé)”
ROSALI – “Rewind”
SADE – “Young Lion”
SALUTE – “maybe it’s u (feat. Sam Gellaitry)”
SHABASON, KRGOVICH, SAGE – “Gloria”
SHANNON & THE CLAMS – “Real Or Magic”
SOFI TUKKER – “Guardian Angel (Stand By You)”
THE SOFTIES – “I Said What I Said”
SOPHIE – “Reason Why (feat. Kim Petras & BC Kingdom)”
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SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE – “1/500”
STILL HOUSE PLANTS – “MORE BOY”
THIS IS LORELEI – “I’m All Fucked Up”
TOTAL BLUE – “Jaguarundi”
TOVE LO & SG LEWIS – “HEAT”
TSHA – “Sweet Devotion (feat. Caroline Byrne)”
TWO SHELL – “Round (feat. Sugababes)”
VEGYN – “The Path Less Traveled”
WINGED WHEEL – “Sleeptraining”
ZSELA – “Fire Excape”

10. WAXAHATCHEE – “Right Back To It (feat. MJ Lenderman)”

The first song of 2024 I really loved. The vocal harmony between Waxahatchee + MJ Lenderman on the chorus never gets old no matter how many times I listen. One of those lowkey songs that doesn’t need to do too much to get stuck in your head, or feel nutritious to the music-listening soul.

9. CHANEL BEADS – “I Think I Saw”

Chanel Beads seem to conjure something much bigger than themselves, bigger than us as humans on this song. It’s the last song from their debut, saying more here than the whole record before it. Choppy strings steadily build momentum from the onset of the track, with more elements snowballing in to lift the listener out of whatever slump they find themselves in, ascending towards something euphoric, movement-making, mind-changing. Total main character track, hinting at the possibility of exploring avenues to achieve character development. It’s a beautiful piece, a brilliant closer, and leaves the door open for more Chanel Beads in the near future (I hope).

8. KASSIE KRUT – “Reckless”

This song seems intent on disrupting your equilibrium, and I intend to let it do just that over and over. Hulking flexes of bass and a loose-snare breakbeat assault the listener, sanding down a backdrop of harsh noise elements into pockets of ground-up feedback. The vocals and lyrics are cheeky, with a sing-song “gotta spell it out so it’s plain to see: K-A-S-S-I-E K-R-U-T, if you wanna be a freak like me, baby I could be your fantasy”. A track smugly grinning at you during a panic attack.

7. FCUKERS – “Homie Don’t Shake”

Do I care that that main riff in this song completely apes Beck’s “Devil’s Haircut”? No, because Fcukers already covered the song before putting this one out. They’re in on the joke. What I do care about is how many more times I’ll be able to absolutely lose my mind to this song live. I saw it performed five times in 2024, how can we get this live experience hooked into my veins more in 2025. It’s a party in a bottle, break in case of emergency. And oops, I’m dying for a good time.

6. KIM GORDON – “BYE BYE”

Put this song on your beefiest set of speakers, crank the volume, and get back to me. If you don’t have a noise complaint from your neighbors, please attempt once more. Then try and make a song about a packing list cooler than this one. Impossible.

5. LAURA MARLING – “Caroline”

Hmm this song can make me well up within the first few seconds. Marling has such a way with her guitar playing, imbuing so much feeling in her finger-picked playing. A heartstring-tugging story is narrated throughout the lyrics, with the metaphors flowing through a past relationship being defined by a once-beloved song, now hardly remembered: “it went: ‘la la la la la la laa, laa laa, something something, Caroline'”. Something about Marling singing the melody to this fading song, not able to remember the words but retaining the notes, voicing the character in this song, as a suite of immaculate strings swell around her, makes me so, so, so emotional. She is a master.

4. CHARLI XCX – “Girl, so confusing featuring lorde”

For the culture. This is also high in my list since I got to witness Charli and Lorde perform this song live at Madison Square Garden. I wasn’t even wrapped in the ongoing sage of discourse that preceded this song’s genesis and I still found it emotional and revelatory. Speaking of discourse, the brat discourse machine said enough about this already. You likely already know it’s good. I think it’s good too. Also Lorde really didn’t have to go that hard.

3. MK.GEE – “I Want”

“I Want” was the moment that kind of unlocked the Mk.gee album for me. I had already started getting into a groove with the two prior tracks, “Rylee & I” and “Candy”, and “I Want”‘s slower churn, gorgeous guitar work, and frankly more spacious soundstage allowed me to breathe and take in what Mk.gee is cooking up on this LP. Plus I mean, his vocal delivery on this track is just spectacular. He’d sounded good on other tracks on the record, but the dynamics he brings, along with the cathartic bursts near the end, really sell it for me. This was my second most listened to song of 2024, so clearly I couldn’t get enough.

2. JESSICA PRATT – “The Last Year”

Ideally this song can count as my “#1b”, rather than my #2. It was difficult choosing between this track, the closer of Jessica Pratt’s incredible Here In The Pitch, or “World On A String”, one of JP’s most beautiful songs ever. “The Last Year” made me cry upon my first listen, I’ve slow-danced with my partner in our apartment to this song, I’ve thought about my past, present and future to this song, and it’s instilled a sense of peace, a sense of hope, and a sheen of endurance within me. It is a perfect album closer. It’s time to open another chapter, but it’s still you and me.

1. CONFIDENCE MAN – “I Can’t Lose You”

To be completely honest, ranking “I Can’t Lose You” as my favorite song of the year feels like answering “what’s your favorite food?” with “ice cream cookie sandwich with hot fudge and it’s cookie dough ice cream and the cookies are M&M cookies”. It is a direct hit of pleasure, dousing my receptors with candy-coated electro-pop slime.

It wasn’t hard to crack the code of my brain’s chemistry; a secret password is the synthetic organ synth timbre utilized throughout the song – use that in a track and you’ll have me ball and chain. The song also STARTS with the chorus (talk about opening the door to addiction early), glazing my brain with sugar rush electronics sporting a throbbing candy rave bounce along with Confidence Man’s singer Janet Planet desperately pleading that she can’t lose me. A high-stakes romance (or brutal attachment complex) on the dancefloor. Further on, the verses (which, I’ll admit, are the weakest parts of the song, but still strong enough to vault it into this position), keep the blood pumping with a simple UK two-step shuffle beat and vocals from Janet’s male counterpart Sugar Bones.

This transitions into the addictive bridge, which really is the point of no return for this track. Once you hear Planet’s vacuous “oohh, aahh, ain’t no other way to say it” repeated a few times, as the chorus’ instrumental undulates and builds beneath her until it explodes back into the chorus, you’ve said goodbye to your brain. All this wrapped up into a funsize two minutes and thirty five seconds. At a certain point you’ll realize the dopamine isn’t firing like it used to with other songs. You’ll notice that you’ve likely repeated the song ad nauseam in your headphones, and are more likely to skip other tracks proceeding it. But we need this kind of pop. It’s a net good. As one tweet put it, “this year felt like being awake during surgery”. This song, along with every other one included here, as well as your favorites (ok woah maybe not THAT many of your favorites), all helped us get through this absolute hellscape. And we’ll need them once again in 2025, 2026, and beyond. Until we all fizzle together into one big happy scorch mark.

Reminder, you can listen to all these tracks on my Spotify playlist HERE. Thanks for reading!