The Best of Q1 2024
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Today means something different to everybody. To some, April 1 is a fun day for goofs and gags; to others, it’s just another day we have to pay rent. To obsessive music writers, today marks the official beginning of “Q2” 2024. I know that makes me sound like a business bro or some hotshot market analyst, but I’ve found increasing validity in breaking up the year into four even chunks like this. Not only does this cadence make me more mindful of the passage of time, but it also acts as the perfect vantage point to look back and take stock of what has happened over the last few months.
Whenever I talk to people, even the biggest music nerds, a common sentiment is the feeling that it’s harder than ever to “keep up” with new music. I agree, but I also think that feeling means you’re putting too much pressure on yourself. Every week is an avalanche of new music, and it can be overwhelming to keep up with. Throw in the constant stream of new singles, music videos, tour announcements, splits, interviews, podcasts, and month-long album rollouts, and it’s no wonder why fandom can start to turn back on itself and feel like a job.
I’m of the mind that if you’re feeling that pressure, you need to reframe your relationship with music. New music will always be there, and you can’t possibly listen to everything. We here at Swim Into The Sound are passionate music geeks. We love sifting through press releases and keeping track of album cycles. We make playlists and try our hardest to check out new music each Friday. Sometimes, we take a month off, but it always comes back to our obsession and love for music in (hopefully) equal measure.
What follows is a collection of our staff’s favorite albums from the first three months of 2024. Each writer has selected one release that they’ve been gravitating towards, all in the hopes that you will find something new to love or check out. Thanks to a massive influx of new writers, our team, and our taste has never been so diverse. You’ll see everything here, from throat-shredding heavy metal to laid-back lounge fare, twinkling emo, and pastoral indie rock. Go check these records out, save a few, and check them out in your own time. No matter how well you’re staying “up” on the new stuff, we hope you find something here to adore as much as we have.
Cheekface – It’s Sorted
Self-released
As a Cheekface superfan, It's Sorted is not exactly the album I wanted… It's better than that. I think I wanted them to keep making the same irreverent indie rock album that made me fall in love with them (Emphatically No.) over and over again until it stopped hitting the same. Cult followings of indie artists can be a bit like stubborn children who don't know what's good for them. Instead, Cheekface gave me new things I didn't know I wanted: shiny pop productions to go with the big pop hooks, big vocal stacks, Metallica worship, a surprisingly vulnerable acoustic(ish) moment, and, "wait a minute, did you just trick me into liking ska?" Believe it or not, It's Sorted is the band's most cohesive record yet. The songs explore themes of identity in a country where we are often defined by our jobs (or something like that). While the production often takes wild creative liberties in different directions, it is always with purpose that serves the song (producers of songwriters, take note). The qualities that make Cheekface Cheekface are alive and well on It's Sorted. If anything, they are flexing (Mandy Tannen's basslines really are their largest muscle, haha) that Cheekface has gotten even better at being themselves. Ever since I found out that frontman Greg Katz has a degree in philosophy, I have been joking that Cheekface is like a modern Socrates. The band never really tells you what they think explicitly, but their lyrics will make YOU think, whether you like it or not. And I do.
Katie McTigue - @pacingmusic
Read our review of It’s Sorted here.
Faye Webster – Underdressed at the Symphony
Secretly Canadian
After a stint of TikTok virality that seemed to be handpicked by the Algorithm Gods themselves, part of me wondered if a Faye Webster pivot was on the horizon. I was painfully aware of the primarily teenaged crowd watching the show through their phone screens at Webster’s Brooklyn Steel show last October and was curious if there was a part of Webster (or the Business Folk backing her) that wanted to lean into this demo to take advantage of the moment. Luckily for us, that’s not the way things rolled out.
Webster’s Underdressed at the Symphony sees a seasoned jazz pop veteran lean into the niches that make her great—trance-like jazz interludes and conversationally quippy lyrics—while also widening her sound through heavy synth leans, vocoders, and lyrical repetition. The record is a collection of songs about losing yourself (“Wanna Quit All the Time”), finding yourself (“Feeling Good Today”), and what happens in the in-between (“eBay Purchase History”). Webster paints a picture of her ever-changing state of mind while simultaneously leaving listeners enough room to fill in the blanks for themselves through vague enough lyrics and uncrowded instrumentation. Webster’s lyrics feel like you’re a fly on the wall of her internal monologue: half are things she’d say out loud, and half are thoughts she keeps to herself (two of my favorite lines being “And I’m looking at you talk like okay / Your eyes are so pretty by the way” on “eBay Purchase History” and “I’m feeling good today / I ate before noon / I think that’s pretty good for me” on “Feeling Good Today”). Webster packs this record with things that shouldn’t go together but do: cutesy-bop interludes, jammy synth loops, full-blown orchestras, existential crises, a Lil Yachty feature, and that classic almost-Hawaiian guitar tone we all know and love. Truly something for everyone from the reluctant queen of mellow pop.
Cassidy Sollazzo - @cassidynicolee_
Flesh Tape – Flesh Tape
Power Goth Recordings
Flesh Tape’s self-titled record was the first thing that I bought on Bandcamp in 2024, and it’s endured as my favorite release of the year so far. It’s great, noisy guitar rock music that makes me wish I owned bigger speakers. Since this cassette came through in the mail, I’ve been listening to it front to back nearly nonstop while playing Madden, letting the massive wall of distorted guitars take me away as I throw interception after interception. I have some stuff from Nothing and Hotline TNT in a similar rotation, and I think Flesh Tape fully stands next to them as a band in that lane. In particular, the back half of this record is incredibly strong, with “Catalytic Converter” and “Sunny” landing as my two standout tracks.
Josh Ejnes - @JoshEjnes
Friko – Where we’ve been, where we go from here
ATO Records
Recently on Twitter dot com, I saw Jordan Walsh say that the new Friko album, Where we’ve been, where we go from here, would fit seamlessly with the early 2000s Saddle Creek catalog. As I’ve listened to this album over and over and over, I haven’t been able to get that comparison out of my head. The Chicago band’s frontman, Niko Kapetan, channels all the best parts of a young Conor Oberst’s urgency, loquacity, and recklessly wobbly vocals. At the same time, drummer Bailey Minzenberger drives the songs forward with fervor and no shortage of delightfully messy cymbals. Clever time signature changes keep tracks like “Crimson to Chrome” and “Get Numb To It!” fresh where so many folky-emo bands have stumbled into monotony, and the lullaby-like “For Ella” and “Until I’m With You Again” follow haunting piano melodies down to the band’s tender core. While Friko forge a sound undeniably all their own, strands of my youth’s bygone styles have tied this comforting, chaotic record up as my favorite so far this year.
Katie Wojciechowski - @ktewoj
Read our review of Where we’ve been, where we go from here here.
From Flowers to Flies – We Built This Machine
Broken Windmill Music
It’s only natural to occasionally wonder where the people you went to school with ended up. I often think back to my time attending my alma mater, Sonoma State University, and the people I walked the halls of our music building with fondly. To my surprise, earlier this year, I discovered that three of those classmates, along with another friend, started a band together and released one of the most engaging and complex records I have heard thus far in 2024. Across every second of its uninhibited 45-minute runtime, listeners can expect prog-rock sensibilities, improvisational brass solos, scream vocals, variations of the Dies irae (to my absolute delight), and so much more. When a handful of incredibly skilled, dedicated music majors get together in a studio, the end result is, unsurprisingly, one of the most versatile and detailed rock-fusion records you’ll ever hear. Jam-packed with subtle references to their countless influences and overlapping eras of music, We Built This Machine stands as a brooding, genre-fluid experience from the heavy-hitting newcomers to the DIY music scene, From Flower to Flies.
Ciara Rhiannon - @rhiannon_comma
glass beach – plastic death
Run for Cover Records
plastic death is a summer album. Who cares that it was released in January? This is the perfect soundtrack for a June evening, driven with the windows down while blasting this beautifully rambunctious album. The opening track, “coelacanth,” has my heart as it features a wonderful piano accompaniment, but the following tracks, “rare animal” and “commatose” are equally compelling. glass beach has done a fantastic job of expanding upon their previous album’s sound by pushing their technical and creative abilities, challenging the listener as they lead you through an hour of rhythmically complex and harmonically lush music. Whether you enjoy post-punk, shoegaze, fifth-wave emo, or an even more niche internet genre, plastic death offers all that and so much more.
Britta Joseph - @brittajoes
Read our review of plastic death here.
girlsnails – california kickball
Self-released
In a year of highly anticipated releases, the debut LP by girlsnails stood highest among them. After stumbling across their 2019 self-titled EP last spring, I was immediately enraptured and impatiently awaited what was next from the Surrey/Vancouver, BC band. Delivering equal parts math rock and emo, the album leans into those genres but also plays loosely at their edges. The vocal work and albums’ mathier moments feel like a cross between Laufey’s stylistic jazz melodies and the more technical pieces of the American Football discography. With papercut penmanship, the band embraces a confessional diary-style lyricism that veers gently into abstraction more than once as the earnest pangs of regret peal in almost crystalline purity. Whether it's the tumbling finger dynamics and clear, lilting vocals on “ramune” or the immense instrumental builds and vocals runs on “say square,” california kickball is a run of just quality, occasionally anthemic, and frequently beautiful, jazzy, mathy emo that’s just as technically impressive as it is pleasant. For long walks where you can see your breath or half cloudy days spent lying in the grass, girlsnails has you covered.
Elias Amini - @letsgetpivotal
Glitterer – Rationale
Anti-
I’m a little shocked to say that Glitterer’s third record, Rationale, is my favorite of the year so far, given I was never a Title Fight girlie. These songs sucker-punch punks with pop perfection. My favorite track, “No One There,” smuggles one of the best hooks of the year under the guise of a vocal cord-straining shout of the title. Not only are the songs catchy as hell, but the hooks are full of probing questions about how best to exist around each other. From the incredible one-two of “There I was again / making everything about me in the end,” which opens the album, to the life-affirming “this is what I’m supposed to do / nothing else I know is true / ‘cause passion is arbitrary” on “The Same Ordinary.” If you’re craving pit-stirring shout-alongs, Glitterer has you covered.
Lillian Weber - @Lilymweber
Gulfer – Third Wind
Topshelf Records
I’m starting to get the sense that emo music isn’t the coolest genre in the world. It's embarrassing, unsustainable, and not a label that many bands lean into or wear with pride. When I first discovered Gulfer back in 2018, Dog Bless quickly became a formative math rock release, an album that also felt like it capped off an era of emo in a way that is really only visible in retrospect. One pandemic later, Gulfer has released a self-titled record, a split, and a handful of sparkling singles that all built out the Montréal group’s precise sound. Turns out that was also the proper amount of time to marinate and mutate into something that pushes far beyond the restrictive realms of emo or math rock. Third Wind is a spectacular indie rock album that sees a band exploring the bounds of their influences to create something wholly unique in a space where that sort of exploration is not always well-received or rewarded. There’s so much to love here: the immaculate poppy sensibility of “Clean,” the autotuned articulation of the climate crisis on “Cherry Seed,” the hardcore outpouring of “Too Slow,” and the hypnotic repetition throughout “No Brainer.” How about the way lead singer Joe Therriault plays with his word choice on “Prove,” stretching the song's title out, lilting back and forth on the “oooooo” until it becomes completely unrecognizable. This is all backed by unparalleled instrumentation that, yes, has a background in emo and math rock, but also feels indebted to shoegaze and indie rock in a way that makes it feel far more than the sum of its parts. A new act for a band who already proved themselves to be some of the greatest to ever do it.
Taylor Grimes - @GeorgeTaylorG
Read our review of Third Wind here.
Hannah Frances – Keeper of the Shepherd
Ruination Record Co.
Hannah Flores has been releasing emotionally naked folk records for over half a decade, reckoning with the loss of her father across five projects, but her latest feels like a reintroduction. On Keeper of the Shepherd, Frances doesn’t grab your attention so much as she takes your face in both hands and holds your head to hers. Take the opening track “Bronwyn,” where a full rock band crackles and coils around her multi-tracked howls in an all-consuming whirlwind that calls to mind the best of fellow full-voiced powerhouses such as Weyes Blood or even Joni Mitchell. Repeated Christian imagery throughout the deceptively jaunty title track and “Vacant Intimacies” captures how truly distant the love of God can feel beside the fresh absence of someone whose love was tangible. Yet each of these seven songs comes with a personal revelation on how to live not just with loss but how to live as your own person. There’s a tendency in art to mythologize suffering, but Keeper of the Shepherd is a document of healing and moving forward. Hannah Frances knows that the most beautiful art often comes from a place of clarity and confidence that suffering cannot support, which is why on “Haunted Landscape, Echoing Cave,” even as she mirrors the climax of its bookend, she simply declares, “I am leaving.” We’d all be wise to follow her.
Wes Cochran - @ohcompassion
Knifeplay – Pearlty (2024 Remaster)
Topshelf Records
Knifeplay’s uniquely raw and emotional shoegaze is the perfect soundscape for quiet days inside, long car rides in dreary weather, and abrupt moments of self-understanding. Pearlty originally came out in March of 2019, only about 1,800 short days ago. In that time, Knifeplay has accomplished the difficult feats of releasing their 2nd full-length album, getting signed to a label, and remastering an already amazing album. The timing of the remaster is a bit poignant to me because I started graduate school around the time Pearlty came out. The album is so heavy with emotion that it could drown me if I let it. It’s sonically in the sweetest spot of ambient and active. My personal favorite songs to get lost in are “Suffer” and “Lemonhead,” both of which are just long enough to fully re-contemplate dropping out of school for the nth time. Pearlty’s remaster has given me some new perspective on my “life timeline” and has soothed months of accumulated burnout. It is a beautiful product of a band’s attention to the details of their craft, and for me personally, it is a signpost that says, “Five years down, you’re almost there.”
Braden Allmond - @BradenAllmond
Tapir! – The Pilgrim, Their God and the King of My Decrepit Mountain
Heavenly Recordings
Somewhere in the confluence of centuries of myth and folk music is Tapir! (exclamation point required). After unfolding over the past couple of years, the London six-piece strives heavenward on The Pilgrim, Their God and the King of My Decrepit Mountain, their debut record presented as a three-act musical quest. The first two “acts,” released in 2023, fell under my radar, so I encountered the LP in continuity, not piecemeal — I encourage you to do the same. Not because Tapir!’s pastoral anthems can’t stand on their own, but because of the feeling that flows in as the final chord of the 7-minute closer “Mountain Song” rings out. The band recognizes the subservience of narrative to composition and allows the orchestration to speak for itself. Lore and lyrics capture equal aspects of the story being told; the group is wise enough to opt for balance over proggy density. As they swim through seas of sound and summit the grassy knoll, the listener is guided every step of the way by a comforting presence, ephemeral and silent. Get lost in the fantastic, knowing Tapir! will help you safely return from your travels.
Aly Muilenburg - @purityolympics
Read our review of The Pilgrim, Their God and the King of My Decrepit Mountain here.
Theophonos – Ashes In The Huron River
Profound Lore
Absolute societal degenerate type shit. Years-long diet of sewer rats type shit. Prison stabbing blood loss type shit. Seedy cult ritual docuseries type shit. Black tar cartwheel type shit. Scanners-level cranial burst type shit. Sludge-flooded dungeon type shit. Crime scene photo developer type shit. Wearing the skin of your enemies type shit. Kool-Aid Man Kamikaze piloting himself into the walls of the factory that made him type shit. Convicted criminal pump-up playlist type shit. Thinking about car bombing the DMV type shit. Nightmarish boss battle type shit. Hydroplaning into Hell type shit. Boot-stamping every proud boy in the tri-state area type shit. Laser removing a tattoo you got to cover up the scar of an unconventional piercing type shit.
Logan Archer Mounts - @VERTICALCOFFIN
Waxahatchee – Tigers Blood
Anti-
The sixth album from Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield, Tigers Blood, brings the singer/songwriter’s country sensibilities to the forefront. While it's not the first Waxahatchee record to draw upon Crutchfield’s Southern upbringing, the feeling is omnipresent throughout this album. Deep into her career, Crutchfield’s songwriting continues to get better and better. In addition to the wildly catchy singles, Tigers Blood is full of great tracks, one after the other. Additionally, Crutchfield’s phenomenal voice is aided throughout the album by the recurring presence of MJ Lenderman on guitar and backing vocals. We may only be a quarter of the way through the year, but Tigers Blood has set the bar high for 2024.
Nick Miller - @nickmiller4321
Yard Act – Where’s My Utopia?
Island Records
Everyone I know had a shit winter. Whether you’ve got SAD or are just sad, the lonely months seem to hit deep this year. All winter, I was grabbing for fuzzy comforts like Greg Mendez, Nirvanna The Band The Show, or the “Hell Naw” dog. I was trying to shake the doldrums, but nothing could get ‘em loose – until I listened to Yard Act’s riotous, effusive, and nimble new record. Plenty of punk-adjacent bands have made their dance records in the past few years (Turnover and Parquet Courts being the ones to commit the hardest), but nothing has been as wide-open, voracious, and filled with pure joy as this record. It’s the celebration of reinvention, an ode to the bloom. It’s filled to the brim with danceable hooks – like the chorus of “Dream Job,” which sounds like a sample from an iconic disco song that doesn’t exist, or the earwormy, ever-descending chorus of “Petroleum” – because, as spelled out in lead single “We Make Hits,” “We’re all gonna sink. And we just wanna have some fun before we’re sunk.” Where’s My Utopia? answers its titular question with a shapeshifting joy-spreader of an album. It’s an intellectual, physical, and emotional utopia that can only be found on the dance floor. An invitation to shake the doldrums while we still can.
Joshua Sullivan - @brotherheavenz
