I don’t really want to talk about this year. Genuinely.

It’s been so horrific on the macro scale with deranged Fascism and the effects of rampant and undeniable climate change looming everywhere you look – and on the personal level I’ve been been bombarded with all the inevitable, arbitrary slings and arrows that life can muster, from multiple bereavements on down – that I’d very much rather just neck a load of tranquilisers and fine wines and resolutely enter my hands-over-ears, “lalalala can’t hear you”, era.  

I’ve known for some time that Ariel Sharratt & Matthias Kom’s Never Work is my Album of the Year. This lividly witty, no-filler take-down of workplace servitude arrived on vinyl in May. The creation of two Canadian indie-folkies (from The Burning Hell), it’s my most-played album of 2024, containing my most-played songs, the title track and the poignant, “The Rich Stuff”, the latter a call to revolution themed around The Goonies.

One big problem. I just discovered Never Work came out in 2020. Was it a vinyl reissue? Who knows!

Death of Music was created in Estonia. Despite the English lyrics, directness is absent. Take the title track. “Drop the music” exhorts Mart Avi over its pulsing five minutes. “Fight the music” he declares. The word “execution” crops up. There is reference to a “rope ladder.” The specific meaning of this torrent of imagery is unclear. Nonetheless, it is certain the untrammelled outpouring confirms Avi’s total surrender to the music.

The Christmas album is an American phenomenon that doesn’t really exist in British music. Dating back to Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley in the late 50s, it has long been a regular part of the business – with even Bob Dylan having a go in 2009.

By and large, most Christmas albums seem to fall into one of two camps. There’s either the lively poptastic soundtracks favoured at family or work celebrations, which generally feature plenty of sleighbells and a cover of something by either Slade or Wizzard, or the choral and rather more religious affairs of Aled Jones and his ilk.

There’s a lot of anger at algorithm-driven music discovery around – a lot of it justified, as the big platforms push the already-big acts and lowest common demoninator slop is aided in rising to the top. But we can’t talk about the topic without also acknowledging that it has provided some surprising opportunities for unorthodox music.

Amid the electro-rock crunch of “Sorry, Etc”, Lauren Mayberry spits out, “I killed myself to be one of the boys/I lost my head to be one of the boys/I bit my tongue to be one of the boys/I sold my soul to be one of the boys”. The singer for successful Scottish indie-tronic trio CHVRCHES says her debut solo album explicitly expresses her feminine/feminist aspect, while also embracing pop.

White Denim’s literally titled 12th album opens with the fidgety “Light on.” Drawing a line between electronica and Tropicália, it exudes sunniness. “Econolining” and “Flash Bare Ass,” up next, are equally peppy, as bright and similarly accord with the idea of pop as a mix-and-match grab bag – albeit from an off-centre perspective.

That Juggernaut is as good as it is seems in hindsight to have been a happy accident. Inspired by a bomb hoax on the QE2 in 1972, the producers fired two directors (Bryan Forbes and Don Taylor) in succession before hiring Richard Lester in desperation. His quest to salvage Juggernaut in a just a few weeks mirrors events in the film, its protagonists attempting to defuse a set of bombs planted in the bowels of a transatlantic liner.

Nothing and All at Once is the debut album from New Delhi electronica producer Jay Pei in his Panelia guise. Featuring a broad but seamless tapestry of electronica, beats and breaks, often with widescreen cinematic vibes, it veers from driving grooves to ambient atmospheres that seem marinated in leftfield 90s sounds.