The Best Albums of March 2024

What of the generations of trauma from the cruelty of denigration as property, as capital to be used on plantations that sold cash crops that would one day become mass-market poison: the cigarette. Why, in 2015, does the Treasury celebrate the payoff of the loan used to benefit these slavers when the funds it used came from the people forced into servitude? Ayewa’s collaborators add incredible dimension to The Great Bailout as Ayewa spreads the archive open for all to see. “ALL THE MONEY” brings Alya Al-Sultani and Vijay Iyer into the fold on a visceral, sinister exploration of the terrors of trade from London to British port towns, where lives were traded as goods and where the British regime decides who they should allow to enter the UK as a refugee after fanning the flames of conflict in the global south. Repeating “so much money, all the money, so many contracts” while visiting places of worship and historic landmarks reinforces how pillaging built the crown as it presents itself. —Devon Chodzin [Read our full review]

Punchlove: Channels

Punchlove centers itself around an electrifying and buzzy sound that is always in motion: flexing, contorting, sauntering and sprinting throughout the tracklist of their debut album, Channels. They sing of the tumultuous journey into coming of age with a slow-burning agency; the journey of Punchlove as a band mirrors that of the genre itself, starting from a small and condensed bedroom project featuring only Olesen and Williams to an immense, sweeping sonic force. The transitions between songs on the album flicker and crackle like watching someone flip through TV channels at lightning speed, creating an enthralling and transitory kaleidoscope of varied sound that evokes the eclectic nature of early Sonic Youth. The throbbing ending measures of “Birdsong” mutates into a scattered and frantic beat that shifts into “Guilt” without hesitation. Despite the sonic contrasts between these sections, the transition is breathtaking. The seamlessness helps to create an incredibly cohesive and uniform album with a pervading fluidity and tightness in its quick pacing.

Tracks like “Apartment,” “Dead Lands” and “Elapse” continue to showcase Punchlove’s penchant for playing with texture and space. “Apartment” is adorned with twinkling guitar riffs laced with floating, feathery vocals that expand into a ragged yet grandiose cacophony of blooming, contorted instrumentation. The massive and looming intensity of the percussion pushes and shoves the track to its ending. “Dead Lands” alternates between sparse and dense passages enriched by delicate vocal harmonies and a ringing guitar solo, while “Elapse” is a bit heavier in its warped, grungy sequence that curves and snakes its way through tight, condensed phrases. —GN [Read our full review]

Rosali: Bite Down

Of course, any band worth its weight benefits from songs with a strong gravitational pull, and Rosali dishes those out in heaping helpings. Like No Medium before it, Bite Down is packed wall to wall with tunes that are unsettled but unhurried, generous with melody, wandering but never lost, and reliably steady despite the never-ending twists and turns of an earthly existence. But above all, they are beautiful, broken and built around the kind of raw emotional uncertainty that will resonate with anyone who has ever lived, loved and/or lost. To wit, these two stanzas from “Slow Pain,” an unabashed rocker that ends with a 90-second guitar solo and simmers with familiar frustration: “Have you seen my grief? / Hold it so I don’t spill out / Keep quiet and wait it out / My ghosts won’t let me be / Making faces you can’t see /Better go before you’re on to me.”

Elsewhere, the album’s highlights include “My Kind,” a kinetic, country-blues stomper that serves as evidence that Rosali is perfectly capable of a Waxahatchee-style arc if she chooses to pursue it, and “Hills on Fire,” a triumph of room-sound atmospherics and squirrelly guitar-isms that feels like watching a lightning storm crawl across a vast flatland, or perhaps childhood trauma streaking through an adult body. And while Bite Down has more approachable peaks, it ends with two tracks that echo both its stylistic range and its recurring themes of pain, self-reflection, healing and hope. First, “Change Is In The Form” builds a Crazy Horse-style crescendo around Rosali’s sing-song ruminations on the impermanence of life, which give way to “May It Be On Offer,” a quiet prayer for restoration and deliverance underpinned by long, droning tones. “There is hope upon me,” Rosali sings, with what sounds like fresh recognition in her voice. “There is reason to try.” Amen, indeed. That hard-won epiphany is the destination and Bite Down is the sound of the journey. We are fortunate Rosali has brought us all along for the ride. —Ben Salmon [Read our full review and full feature]

Sarah Shook & the Disarmers: Revelations

Revelations finds Sarah Shook and their bandmates tightening up and performing instinctive solos with a flourishing, raw-hemmed edge—all while restoring a life through memory in the present. It’s not a leveling out, it’s a level up for the North Carolinians. With the title-track breaking the whole record open, the band stares down the barrel of hard-won truths and time-worn circumstances. “Revelations” could be about exhaustion or societal expectations, but the clearest read is that it’s a song about the intersection of religion and mental illness and how both of those ropes tug at the philosophies of birthright. “I been in the state that I’m in since the day of my birth,” River sings, against a potent bevy of bluesy guitar, heavy toms and bass. “New beginnin’s, I’m done listenin’ when the old guard tells me what my word is worth. Hey, baby, I’m barely gettin’ through each day.”

When the multi-dimensional “Jane Doe” kicks in, River sings about a break-up disguised as a crime scene, deploring that “when you see me on the street, you’re just glad it ain’t you dyin’ out in the cold on dead man’s curve. You tell yourself little white lies, look me dead in the eye and say to me I got what I deserved.” The song patiently builds into a roaring, anthemic benchmark—River’s best-tracked singing performance of their career thus far—split open with a guitar solo that’ll make any venue room spin. Don’t overlook Foster’s drumming here, either. He’s the metronome of Revelations, and his pounding on “Jane Doe” is a particularly special feat. Led by River’s self-production, Revelations glows because of its cohesiveness. The Disarmers don’t reinvent the wheel here, nor did they ever need to. The grandiosity is firmly embedded in the talent, as River and their band inject some serious punk rock attitudes into a well-worn infrastructure of venerable country tunes. —Matt Mitchell [Read our full review]

Sheer Mag: Playing Favorites

Sheer Mag’s new album, Playing Favorites, begins on a more subdued note than their previous work, if that word can even be held in a conversation about Sheer Mag. Its title-track opener returns to some of their softer sounds, and lets the tenderness that comes from a decade of collaborating together shine. On “Playing Favorites,” guitar work from Kyle Seely and Matt Palmer glimmers as Halladay recounts packing up for another tour while reveling in the magic of getting this far. It’s a song that begs for a long stretch of highway, and like all great road trip tracks, it’s a reminder that the best part is the people on the journey with you. That journey takes Sheer Mag to fascinating new places. Playing Favorites is at its most experimental on “Mechanical Garden,” a six-minute disco groove that opens with a bang before giving way to string arrangements and a guest guitar showcase by Mdou Moctar. As in its title, the disparate musical elements here work surprisingly well together—and Moctar’s dreamy desert blues emerge as a kind of Eden after the track’s hard rock prelude, while the atmospheric lyrics chart a nightlife journey fresh off the Sunset Strip as Halladay considers both sides of losing yourself to the beat. “Watch the wounded flowers sway, watch them, watch them waste away,” Halladay calls, before landing on a nihilistic conclusion that seems straight out of a Sonic Youth song: “Everyone’s breaking down, it’s gumming up the works / I guess I’m gonna take a cab to the city.”

Playing Favorites also makes pit stops at more familiar haunts, like the dive bars and pool tables of “All Lined Up” and the arena rock kiss-offs “Eat It and Beat It” and “Don’t Come Looking.” But like its title track, the songs here have a reflective edge—a new hint of sadness or introspection that puts the heights they climb into sharp relief. Initially recorded during a difficult time for all four band members, the album comes from trying to rig sadness into joy and make both elements sing. As Palmer puts it, it’s the result of trying to “figure out how to have fun when you actually feel miserable.” That tension between fun and miserable is perfect for love songs, and the ones on Playing Favorites revel in it. —Annie Parnell [Read our full review]

Waxahatchee: Tigers Blood

Tigers Blood, in particular, is an album in-conversation with the past, seeking from it lessons that allow us a more peaceful present. On “3 Sisters,” Katie Crutchfield attempts to find alignment between two states—between her slower, smoother present-day and an unsteady past. Like with much of Tigers Blood, Crutchfield doesn’t find an easy middle-ground between the two, but she remains admirably committed to navigating the conflict with a radical, clear-eyed honesty. “Right Back To It,” Tiger Blood’s lead single featuring guitar virtuoso Jake “MJ” Lenderman, is the closest thing the new LP has in terms of a spiritual successor to the album it’s following up. Warm harmonies shared between Lenderman and Crutchfield—as well as pleasingly melodic banjo and guitar melodies—evoke the irresistible charms of Saint Cloud, while clearly baring the rangy, Southern tendencies of Lenderman’s Carolina influence. Despite lyrics alluding to a relentlessly restless mind, the song exudes inner peace, with the past becoming a source of comfort rather than consternation. If Saint Cloud and its lead single “Fire” captured the initial “pink cloud” of sobriety (and all the nervous anticipation that comes with it), then “Right Back To It” showcases the well-earned euphoria that comes from settling in to being clean long-term.

But Tigers Blood doesn’t merely represent the natural progression from Saint Cloud or ring in a sober celebration. In fact, it reads as the triumphant culmination of every album Waxahatchee has released up until this point. Country and folk influences like Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams remain apparent here as they did four years ago, but also apparent are the rock stylings of Cerulean Salt and Out in the Storm. “Bored,” which is the most anthemic Crutchfield tune since “Never Been Wrong,” is dominated by a driving percusion courtesy of Spencer Tweedy and Nick Bockrath’s pedal steel guitar licks. After penning so many self-lacerating songs in the 2010s, there’s something unmistakably satisfying about seeing Crutchfield turn her frustrations outwards here. “I can get along, my spine’s a rotted two-by-four / My benevolence just hits the floor / I get bored,” she declares, somehow sounding both exasperated and above-it-all at the same time. —Tom Williams [Read our full review and full feature]

Yard Act: Where’s My Utopia?

Where’s My Utopia? very much brandishes the soul of a rap mixtape—featuring dexterous sampling and interludes that make this project scratch and soar in ways that few of Yard Act’s peers’ records have in recent memory. Where’s My Utopia? cracks open with MF DOOM-style sampling on “An Illusion”—which was, along with the entire album, produced by Gorillaz drummer and producer Remi Kabaka Jr. The song boasts a bluesy guitar riff and dreamy chords in spurts, but the soul of the instrumental is sparked by a droopy, wet bassline, choppy backbeats and James Smith’s mellowed-out portrait of dissonance. The funk and fun of “We Make Hits” is the band’s self-proclaimed “ode to friendship,” as the track arrives shot out of a cannon and aglow with revival riffs underscored by liquid bloops from Smith’s SP404 sampler. With an endearing energy of underscored companionship (“We make hits, two broke millennial men, and we’d do it again,” Smith yells out. “Every night on the back of the bus, you know it ain’t no fuss, we’re on the same wage and we ain’t afraid to get paid on the stage”), the song also stands in as a searing critique of everything from subletting flats to bands riding the coattails of dead torchbearers’ legacies to, yes, Nile Rogers.

Following a sublime sample, “The Undertow” checks in from a similarly mature place, considering the price of guilt through the colorless uniformity of labor. “Are we born for nothing if we die alone?” Smith questions. “Only God can answer, so where’s my telephone? Did someone snip the wire? Didn’t pay that bill? Well, you know God loves a trier and I’ve got time to kill.” The song flashes a bevy of strings from Zahra Benyounes, Guy Button, Francesca Gilbert and Maddie Cutter and calls it a day with a searing, robust guitar outro and a choir of high-pitched goddess wails from Angel Silvera, Adeleye Omotayo, Michelle Ndegwa, Petra Luke and Rebecca Freckleton.

Where’s My Utopia? is tongue-in-cheek and refreshingly introspective. It is one thing to lament the empire; it’s another thing completely to do so without considering our own complacency within it and how that can gnaw at us. And, often, our own self-referential despair is rooted in the world capitalism demands we live in. Yes, because of climate change we are royally fucked. But, what if we were royally fucked and had some pals by our side as the ship goes down? On “Dream Job,” a dashingly catchy and plentifully rapturous dance track that takes cues from LCD Soundsystem, Smith gets to the root of this imbalance. “Welcome to the future, the paranoia suits ya,” he sings. “And step into my office all night long. It’s ace, it’s class, top, let’s move.” There’s such a charming muscle being flexed here that you might not even immediately realize that, beneath massive hooks, Yard Act are performing an exorcism on the ever-so universal fixation creatives have on shit-talk outmaneuvering praise. —MM [Read our full review]

Check out a playlist of our favorite songs from these releases below.