The Best Songs of November 2024

Before we dive into our year-end season, let us bid adieu to the month of November and all of its musical splendors. Thanksgiving came and went, and we got a few great New Music Fridays to boot. Music releases are slowing down now, but last month remained terrific, whether it was the release of Kendrick Lamar’s new album, a Christmas song from Jack Antonoff, one-off singles from Daneshevskaya and Sun June or the returns of Sam Fender, MIKE and Squid. Let’s take a moment to celebrate the best of the best from these last 30 days. Here are our 10 favorite songs of November 2024. —Matt Mitchell, Music Editor

Bleachers: “Merry Christmas, Please Don’t Call”

“Merry Christmas, Please Don’t Call,” the “brand new” Bleachers song, has been kicking around for a good while now—as Jack Antonoff and his band have played it annually at his Ally Coalition Talent Show in New York. This week—a year after Antonoff posted a portion of the track online and called it a work-in-progress—the song has arrived and it’s really good. At first, the melody suggests a National impression, and Antonoff certainly does sound like he’s channeling Matt Berninger a bit here and there, but once the synth-pop tune kicks into full gear, there’s no stopping how downright catchy it is. Antonoff, in a submerged and slowed baritone, croons through swirls of electronics until Evan Smith’s saxophone cuts through the twinkling wisps. The way Antonoff sings “and the toughest part is that we both know what happened to you, why you’re out on your own” might be one of my absolute favorite vocal parts of the year so far, as he curls his voice into a tone I can only describe as “New Jersey twang.” “Merry Christmas, Please Don’t Call” is Bleachers at their tightest. —Matt Mitchell

clipping.: “Keep Pushing”

The second single off clipping.’s much anticipated 2025 cyberpunk-oriented record, “Keep Pushing” is arguably one of the experimental rap group’s most accessible tracks—the instrumentation is stripped bare, relying on a hyper-techno synth line that gurgles beneath Daveed Diggs’s effortless bars. “Try to keep the pulse and the tempo / Just ‘cause it’s automatic don’t mean that it is simple,” Diggs spits, in an even-keeled monotone. The lines feel almost meta, considering the deceptive simplicity of the track he’s rapping on—but no Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson production is ever truly simple. Featuring strings from John W. Snyder, the song sees the sharp synth buoying the verses dissipate into an easy progression of keys in the chorus, a light melody that adds a reflective tenor to the hook. Diggs’s lyrics are, as always, equal parts poetically haunting (“When it all got kilt / Saw all the faces gracelessly tilt / Saw all the places laced with green wilt / What a disgrace for all that they built) and brusquely clever (“Hop in the pot, then begged to get drowned, them / Wanna be sick, them bitches Munchausen” and “The world is a wasteland, the state is a rat trap / Cheese, unload the pack under the hood of the hatchback” are some standout two-liners). The currently untitled 2025 album will be the group’s first since their double horrorcore releases of 2019 and 2020, as well as their first attempt at a more cyberpunk-focused sound—but considering how good both “Keep Pushing” and the first single, “Run It,” already are, it seems clipping. fans have a lot to look forward to in the new year. —Casey Epstein-Gross

Daneshevskaya: “Scrooge”

Last year, I became captivated by Daneshevskaya’s music. Anna Beckerman’s debut album, Long is the Tunnel, was one of my favorite projects—thanks to her saccharine singing and impossibly magic melodies. Her work, to me, is like an orchestral nursery rhyme that is romantic in its briefness. “Scrooge,” her first new single since Long is the Tunnel, breathes in, out and through stages of serenity—it’s buoyed by its own lightness; turned warm by a wash of soft strumming and aching strings. Beckerman wrote the song about “making someone a villain so that you can accept that they don’t want to be in your life anymore,” positing an old flame as an Ebenezer Scrooge kind of figure. “You know you walk just like a baby, and you leave just like a sneeze,” she sings. “When I turn around, there’s nothing to see.” I hear this and I want to weep, as the lullaby of Daneshevskaya sets my yearning soul aglow. —Matt Mitchell

Kendrick Lamar: “reincarnated”

I trust Kendrick Lamar because he is willing to corner his constituents with a matter-of-factness largely unparalleled in hip-hop. On “Mortal Man” nine years ago, he rapped “That n***a gave us ‘Billie Jean’ / You say he touched those kids?” about fans turning their backs on the people they once claimed to love, pointing a finger at accused abuser Michael Jackson’s fall from grace. Now, taking pointers from 2Pac and sampling the late rapper’s “Made N****z,” Kendrick has turned the finger at himself on “reincarnated,” performing a back-and-forth with his inner-self and wagering that he’s back in God’s good graces after uniting the Pirus and Crips gangs at his “Pop Out” concert in Inglewood in June (“I kept 100 institutions paid / Okay, tell me more / I put 100 hoods on one stage / Okay, tell me more / I’m tryna push peace in L.A. / But you love war / No, I don’t / Oh, yes, you do / Okay, then tell me the truth / Every individual is only a version of you / How can they forgive when there’s no forgiveness in your heart? / I could tell you where I’m going / I could tell you who you are / You fell out of Heaven ‘cause you was anxious / Didn’t like authority, only searched to be heinous”), boldly rejoices that he “rewrote the devil’s story just to take our power back” and likens his year to the Hebrew bible’s Isaiah 14 (a verse about the fall of Babylon and Israel’s great, prophetic restoration): “All I ever wanted from you was love and approval / I learned a lot, no more putting these people in fear / The more that word is diminished, the more it’s not real / The more light that I can capture, the more I can feel.” —Matt Mitchell

MIKE: “You’re the Only One Watching”

Last month, MIKE followed up his March record with Tony Seltzer, Pinball, with the very good and hazy stream-of-conscious track “Pieces of a Dream.” Cut to now, and the prolific rapper is casting an even wider net across his next chapter, releasing the incredibly sublime new single “You’re the Only One Watching.” The song comes as a part of an announcement of his new album, Showbiz!, which is set to arrive at the end of January via 10k. MIKE self-produced “You’re the Only One Watching” himself, under his dj blackpower alias. The backbeat is exactly what you’d expect—woozy and soulful, paired with a slow-burn flow from MIKE that unfurls beneath a stretched-out, pitched-up vocal sample. It’s a splendid, hypnotic two-minute trip. —Matt Mitchell

Perfume Genius & Alan Sparhawk: “Point of Disgust”

For Red Hot’s TRAИƧA compilation, Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas teamed up with Alan Sparhawk for a new rendition of his band Low’s “Point of Disgust.” Prior to the collaboration, Hadreas only knew Sparhawk from the music, but he’d written rather extensively about loving Low’s music and Mimi Parker’s voice, especially on songs she sang alone, like “Point of Digust.” Movement has always been so integral in every Perfume Genius composition, and Hadreas’s performance of “Point of Disgust” is nothing if not enriched by the act of motion—falling hard, falling fast. It’s like a ballet. “Point of Disgust”’s refrain—“Mercy me, never last”—lingers, and Hadreas and Sparhawk didn’t have to decorate it very much. Getting choked up, Hadreas recalls how the two musicians felt very emotional when working together, and that their collaboration made for a healing, holistic formula. “There is a real somatic quality to a lot of Low’s music,” Hadreas told me. “When I first heard it, when I was younger, it was like this weird mirror—aspiration—to where I know my body wants to go.” He explained that doing a cover song is hard, because you want to be faithful while bringing yourself into it, but that he “felt very emotional” before even getting to the studio with Sparhawk. “I have such an emotional attachment to the song, and I just wanted to have that all be in there—the love I have for them and their music, and what it’s done for me, and how much I love Mimi’s voice and the lyrics.” —Matt Mitchell

Sam Fender: “People Watching”

I am convinced that some songs are just made in a lab for me, and Sam Fender’s “People Watching” is the latest measure of that. The UK singer-songwriter blew the lid off rock ‘n’ roll across the pond three years ago, when he released his big, big track “Seventeen Going Under,” and now he’s back with a new album, People Watching, and its massive lead single title track. Fender made the song in London with Markus Davis and in Los Angeles with the War on Drugs’ Adam Granduciel—the latter of whom’s fingerprints are all over this track. “People Watching” is, sonically, a War on Drugs song with Fender’s vocals and gutsy songwriting injected into it—a combination I need about 10 or 11 more of. This is Fender’s biggest Springsteen moment yet, and he does it better than the other imitators whose attempts feel even more feeble or sorry in the context of “People Watching.” This is a song that will fill stadiums and keep sending Fender towards the stratosphere. “People Watching” is, according to Fender, about “somebody that was like a surrogate mother to me” passing away in November 2023. “It’s kind of ironic, because she was the one that gave me the confidence to go on stage,” he says. “Now an entire song (and album) connects to her.” When those horns kick in, so does Fender and the rest of his band. The guitars curl outwards and he lets it fly: “Above the rain-soaked Garden of Rememberance, kittywakes etched your initials in the sky. Oh, I fear for this crippled island and the turmoil of the times. And I’ll hold you in my heart till the day I die.” “People Watching” is set to be the last heavyweight SOTY contender of 2024. —Matt Mitchell

SASAMI: “Just Be Friends”

If you are in a situationship or any sort of tumultuous romance, do not, I repeat, do not listen to “Just Be Friends” by SASAMI. This pure pop confection transforms heartbreak into a heavenly daydream. “Just Be Friends” is tailor-made to soundtrack yearning looks exchanged across crowded rooms, or wistful glances over the shoulder as you walk away from your paramour. Taken from her upcoming album Blood On the Silver Screen (due for release on March 7, 2025 via Domino), this single sees SASAMI sidle into country-pop territory. She explains, “I love how country songs often tell a story. Longing, lingering, loneliness and lust. When I play this one live I always dedicate it to anyone ‘sad and horny’ in the crowd… if that means anything.” Unfortunately for many of us, it does. —Clare Martin

Squid: “Crispy Skin”

After a tumultuous season—which saw the cancellation of their Asia tour due to a serious accident in September—Squid have marked their triumphant return with a high-powered, twinkly spiral into paranoia called “Crispy Skin,” the lead single from their upcoming third album Cowards. Vocalist Ollie Judge was inspired to write “Crispy Skin” after reading Tender is the Flesh, a New-Age dystopian novel by Argentinian author Agustina Bazterrica, where cannibalism becomes the norm and humans become capital. “The track was written about how the reality of having a moral compass in these stories of desperation and horror would be extremely difficult,” he says. “If I was actually in that world, I probably would be the coward.” “Crispy Skin” sees these fears come into light, through Squid’s trademark piling basslines meeting with sporadic synths and escalating pianos, creating a heavy and masterfully dilapidated atmosphere. The accompanying video, an adaptation of Japanese filmmaker Takashi Ito’s 1995 short film Zone, adds to the unease with flashing scenes and explosive delusions of “a man without a face.” —Alli Dempsey

Sun June: “41 Dollars”

13 months after releasing one of the most underrated LPs of 2023, Bad Dream Jaguar, Sun June have returned with a non-album single from those recording sessions: “41 Dollars.” It’s a track about “be[ing] present but drifting off into your own world of concerns.” “Men are gonna talk,” vocalist Laura Colwell says. “Bop through it.” The song is better than anything on that record, a testament to Colwell’s writing talents rather than a mark against Bad Dream Jaguar. It’s a positively captivating song, with pedal steel woven into a silhouette of aching guitars and cosmos-splattered synthesizers. “89 days since you’re done drinking,” Colwell sings, and you can hear the reward in her voice. “Five long years but you’re still lost. Trying your best just to get even, now I’m listening to you talk.” —Matt Mitchell