There's a tension in Alfred Hitchcock’s early films between misogyny and condemnation of the patriarchal suppression of women. The suppression was inherent in the original sources from which The Pleasure Garden (1926), Easy Virtue (1927), Champagne (1928), The Manxman (1929), Blackmail (1929), Juno and the Paycock (1930), and The Skin Game (1931) were adapted. 

From placing first in the Sarah Vaughan International Vocal Jazz Competition in 2019 to being a triple Grammy winner, Samara Joy’s rise has been nothing short of meteoric. Joy’s third album, Portrait – an astonishingly good collection which saw the vocalist, songwriter, arranger and bandleader reach ever greater heights of artistic expression – is my Album of the Year.

Born Horses remains as inscrutable as it was when it was issued in the summer. While it is about the search for enlightenment through journeying into inner space, much of what’s described – the album’s words are largely spoken – is allegorical, coming across as beatnik-style reportage documenting a form of psychedelic experience.

In many ways, 2024 has been a stellar year for New Music. There have certainly been plenty of albums released that could easily have gained “year’s best” status in recent times and would have buried those that actually did receive those plaudits.

Three Wishes for Cinderella (Tři oříšky pro Popelku) is one of Czech cinema’s best-loved pohadky, or "fairy tales".

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.