Perennial discuss their favorite albums of 2024
New England art punks Perennial released their new album Art History this year, and they recently announced their first show of 2025, happening in Hamden, CT on January 10 with Cinema Stare. In addition to being a great band, Perennial are clearly huge fans of music of all kinds, and that enthusiasm comes through loud and clear when they write about music. That’s also clear from the year-end list they made us, which includes an album of the year, a song of the year, albums of the winter, spring, summer, and fall, and a few other honorable mentions.
Take it away, Perennial…
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Perennial’s 2024 Year-End List
Album of the Year: Lunchbox – Pop and Circumstance
Lunchbox, the long-running project of Tim Brown and Donna McKean, followed up 2020’s perfect mod-pop masterpiece After School Special, with yet another perfect mod-pop masterpiece: Pop and Circumstance. An addictive 30-minutes stuffed to bursting with bright horns, effervescent electric organs, tambourines, fuzz pedals, reverb-drenched drums, 60s-pop hooks and retro-futurist style, Pop and Circumstance plays like a Technicolor collage of all the coolest, most effusive and stylish headphone sounds of the last 60 years of popular music. It’s the utterly engrossing result of a band with a killer record collection and the wit and imagination to use that endless cool in service of giant hooks and genius production.
Winter 2024: Stay Inside – Ferried Away
A brilliantly-written, beautifully-produced half-hour of inventive post-hardcore that recalls the “pop hooks + Fugazi angles” pleasures of late 90s/early 2000s Vagrant and Jade Tree Records. You get the sense that Stay Inside knew exactly the record they wanted to make: Ferried Away is one of the records that feels like it has its own absorbing world that unfolds with each spin, a record you can spend time in. Catchy and kinetic (think of all those times when Jimmy Eat World or Hot Rod Circuit would balance melody and snarl) Ferried Away arrived early in 2024 and remained a must-listen the whole year through.
Spring 2024: Ekko Astral – pink balloons
An instantly iconic debut full of sharp hooks, sharper lyrics, and a bombastic garage-fuzz sound that is electrifying and sonically adventurous in equal measure, pink balloons is quite simply a tour de force. Protest music you can dance to, with artful studio-as-instrument layers that come into sharper focus with each new listen. One is reminded of The Clash’s self-titled first album here: a band bursting into action with a wholly realized sound, aesthetic, ethos, and approach. pink balloons is already a classic — a galvanizing punk statement-of-purpose that we need profoundly.
Summer 2024: Annabel – Worldviews
The single best band of the 2010s emo revival, Annabel released two perfect full-lengths in 2012’s Youth In Youth (for my money, post-hardcore’s Pet Sounds) and 2015’s Having It All, then went on a near-decade hiatus. This year’s Worldviews is every bit the worthy third chapter in an impeccable trilogy of records. The melodies remain instantly memorable; the arrangements gorgeous; the lyrics poignant, witty, and incredibly piquant in their explication of the thorny process of growing up, which Annabel have always excelled at underlining is a lifelong process. Welcome back Annabel. Please keep making records.
Fall 2024: Bad Moves – Wearing Out The Refrain
A power-pop delight from a band you should be telling your friends about. Bad Moves write the sort of song where each section could be the chorus, only to be outpaced ever-so-slightly by the next, even-catchier moment. There’s bits of 70s glam, 60s girl-group pop, 80s new wave keyboards — ostensibly any pop ingredient that might light up your brain. Check out “Hallelujah” for example: a sugar-high blend of Buzzcocks, The Life Pursuit-era Belle & Sebastian, and Nick Lowe.
Song of the Year: Chime School – “Give Your Heart Away”
A stunning three minutes of daydreamy guitars and swirling electric organ, “Give Your Heart Away” finds Chime School offering an endlessly re-listenable illustration of their partly-sunny pop sound. One of the more fleet songs from their terrific sophomore LP, The Boy Who Ran The Paisley Hotel, “Give Your Heart Away” shimmers beneath one of Andy Pastalaniec’s best sets of melodies (and there is stiff competition already amongst Chime School’s excellent discography) and an impressionistic lyric that nicely sums up the San Francisco songwriter’s literary pop-art style.
See Also:
Outer World – Who Does The Music Love? (a terrific mini-album for fans of Broadcast, Stereolab, experimental pop)
P.P. Arnold – The First Lady Of Immediate (a beautifully-remastered reissue of P.P. Arnold’s 1968 soul masterpiece. You should listen to this record as soon as possible)
Various Artists – Having A Rave-Up!: The British R&B Sounds Of 1964 (a remarkably consistent boxset of groovy, scruffy UK garage rock)
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See many more year-end lists here.
