January
jphono1: We All Belong to Something Else
Carrboro’s John Harrison is known for his prolific output, usually amplified, whether it’s indie rock with North Elementary, electronic improvisation with Ben Felton in Tacoma Park, or anything goes as jphono1. But his standout from this year centered on the acoustic guitar, an easy stroll through the woods with friends like banjoist Nathan Bowles, pedal steel player Nathan Golub, and flutist Rachel Kiel. The record has a relaxed and sunny vibe, gently psychedelic, like the Beach Boys on their way down and Pink Floyd on their way up, shaking hands in 1970. Richly simple and autumnally content, these friendly songs will follow you like faithful hounds, asking nothing, giving all. —Brian Howe
It would be a disservice to a great picker to say that Chatham County Line was improved by the exit of Chandler Holt, whose brightly percolating banjo propelled the band through its first two decades. Instead, let’s just call Hiyo, the group’s most unique and bewitching album to date, an example of evolution by subtraction. Filling in their newfound gaps with synthesizers, drum machines, and electric guitar tuned to become a futuristic banjo surrogate, the group offers a warmly progressive blend of bluegrass, rock, and Americana, leaning further into the voracious musical impulses that long have set the group apart. —Jordan Lawrence
February
The only thing more impressive than former President Obama including “Raleighwood Hills” by soul adventurer Sonny Miles on his Favorite Music of 2019 list was what happened, five years later, when the promising young North Carolina vocalist/guitarist channeled all of that unexpected attention into a textured debut album, Gamma, representing a composite confection of a holy Black musical canon. It’s a beguiling batch of love songs wandering through the tension of fear and conceit. The longing of “Can’t Swipe Away” and the luring of “Garden (Late Night Edition)” both comprise a lush palette of charmed melodies that would melt any live audience. Now, if only he can be encouraged to show off his gifts on more stages. —Eric Tullis
March
Gibson & Toutant: On the Green
Combining catchy folk-pop tunes and balky antique tech, Durham’s Gibson & Toutant (spouses Josephine McRobbie and Joe O’Connell) sound like Yo La Tengo in a haunted Radio Shack. The great thing about On the Green is that, however seriously you want to take it, it meets you there. Like the title—are we traversing a vast landscape, or just stoned? When the duo sings like a dial-up modem over a touch-tone phone, is this a theme on the mechanical erosion of humanity, or a funny way of saying the record is about communication? This whimsical invention and sly humor make the music even more unique than it first sounds. —Brian Howe
Fans of The Beths will find plenty to love in the hooks and harmonies of What’s Mine, the debut LP from Raleigh outfit Teens in Trouble. Throughout the release, leader Lizzie Killian explores time and relationships—sometimes in tandem—over punchy power pop fueled by righteous riffs and anthemic refrains, like the immediately infectious opener. Obvious ’90s alternative influences abound—the solos on “Autopilot” are reminiscent of early Weezer—while “In My Dreams” emerges from a psych-tinged haze into a guitar-shredding climax. —Spencer Griffith
Magic Tuber Stringband: Needlefall
There’s a strange point at which acoustic folk music, mutated by its travels through different technologies, turns into experimental music. Here’s a postmodern old-time fiddle-and-guitar duo that thought, “Why not just cut out the middleman?” Needlefall is like something you’d find in a Borges story, a crate of unlabeled ethnographic recordings from countries that never existed. A meadowy dance seems to warp like a magnetic tape loop in “Days of Longing.” The title track moves like a needle sticking and jumping in a groove. Any isolated moment might sound like ordinarily beautiful mountain music, but together, they fall in the uncanny valley. —Brian Howe
Behind the AI-generated listicles promising “Twelve Albums for Your Fall Vibe” lies an important truth: we experience music in relation to the seasons. Some albums are winter albums. Some songs do really sound like summer. Rosali’s Bite Down, released at the end of March, is the album of this spring. The opener, “On Tonight,” unfurls like a folded leaf from a bud: slow, tentative, delicately gorgeous. As the record progresses, Omaha’s David Nance and Mowed Sound lend a rowdier edge to Rosali’s warm rock melodies, as on “My Kind,” whose lively piano and crunchy guitars shake off any residual winter frost. —Tasso Hartzog
April
With Spectacles, Black queer poet and rapper Shirlette Ammons tackles, head-on, the ways that being a member of those marginalized groups puts her constantly on display: “Spectacles you think we wearing dancin’ shoes / The way they clockin’ every move,” the Durham artist observes in one of the album’s many incisive bars. Spectacles is made more affirming by how it flexes the community that helps give Ammons strength, pulling in talented collaborators such as the rootsy-rocking Phil Cook and the electro-folk-ing Amelia Meath, molding their signature sounds together into exciting new shapes. —Jordan Lawrence
May
This Chapel Hill trio stood out among brawny post-hardcore bands circa 2000 for their relative daintiness. While their songs had all the rushing highs and stomach-dropping plunges of their genre, they seemed to scamper around on pins and needles, desolately pretty, with a ringing melodic sensibility to rival indie-pop peers like Death Cab for Cutie. More amazing was that these sensibilities were still intact when they made an unexpected return this year, whisking us back to Y2K with every broken spring of guitar, every ropy bass line, every moony vocal that rises to a sing-along chant, then erupts in a scream as the bottom falls out in a lava flood of guitar. —Brian Howe
Rapsody: Please Don’t Cry | May
Before the recording of this year’s Please Don’t Cry, Rapsody had harbored thoughts of walking away from the rap game altogether to pursue filmmaking. Instead, in another Grammy-nominated effort—for the Erykah Badu–featured “3:AM” and the Hit-Boy-produced “Asteroids”—her approach to songs pivoted rather dramatically from the dutiful rhyme heroics to testimonial turf-swerving that grapples with parity, police brutality, infidelity, sexuality, and divine illumination. This time, Marlanna Evans chose peace and self-reckoning over the justice currently being sought today by some of the industry’s top dogs. This could very well be her second act. —Eric Tullis
Local music we loved this year
July
Fancy Gap’s self-titled debut album feels like a warm summer day, even in winter. Duo Stuart McLamb (formerly of The Love Langauge) and Charles Crossingham, alongside collaborators like Sharon Van Etten and The Foo Fighters’ Rami Jaffee, have crafted a polished country-pop sound that feels full-bodied and timeless. “Whispering Winds” stands out with its delicate acoustic twang, evoking John Denver, while “Magnolias” carries a darker, gritty mid-aughts-era nostalgia. A love letter to the South, radio, and love itself, Fancy Gap’s first release demonstrates their multifaceted sound with striking clarity. —Grace Yannotta
American Aquarium: The Fear of Standing Still
American Aquarium’s 16th album fulfills the band’s frequent comparison to a Piedmontian Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. The album opens with “Crier,” an anthem on emotional masculinity, and explores themes like alcoholism and generational trauma, not to mention reproductive rights in the aptly named “Babies Having Babies.” More than anything, The Fear of Standing Still exposes that there is one thing we all share: the inevitable passage of time. How’s that for the new generation’s dad rock? —Grace Yannotta
Jake Xerxes Fussell: When I’m Called
When I’m Called may be the definitive Jake Xerxes Fussell album because it’s the one that finds him making his chosen songs most distinctly his own. The Durham-based singer, arranger, and guitarist has, for five albums now, spelunked through nearly forgotten crevasses of American folk music, breathing new life into old essentials by performing them anew. He shuffled things up on When I’m Called by composing instrumentals first and then finding songs that worked with them. The results are stark, wistful, and deeply felt, proof of Fussell’s devotion to extending folk’s long lineage. —Jordan Lawrence
Nathan Bowles Trio: Are Possible
Composed of banjoist Nathan Bowles, bassist Casey Toll, and drummer Rex McMurry, this nationally acclaimed trio plays Appalachian folk with the harmonic sophistication of jazz and the steely force of classical minimalism. Are Possible achieves the almost impossible: Its long acoustic instrumentals don’t suggest the casual camaraderie of a pickin’ session, and it doesn’t make you think about landscapes. Well, it might, but the tension and drama are concentrated in the grooves, how patterns lock together, flex, swarm apart, and change, like minds. “The Ternions” is the centerpiece from which the album rolls out, not like mountains or rivers, but like something just as natural and wondrous: music. —Brian Howe
August
The Durham singer, songwriter, and bandleader Skylar Gudasz just dropped a new bit of merch: a bamboo fan emblazoned with her album title. It’s a perfect symbol for Country, which sweeps a refreshing breeze across the sticky Southern terrain it inhabits, musically and conceptually. Gudasz’s expansive songwriting and unhurried, involving voice hold down the likes of “Fire Country,” while sprightly arrangements bolster tunes like the irrepressibly bouncing “Mother’s Daughter.” The music might suggest a homegrown Kacey Musgraves or a laid-back Fleetwood Mac, but most of all it continues to calibrate the fine balance of iconic motifs and personal visions that Gudasz has claimed as her terrain. —Brian Howe
September
With their retro-futurist light show, kaleidoscopic polyrhythms, and occasional penchant for nighttime sunglasses, Durham’s Tescon Pol is the kind of band you might glimpse in a new-wave club in an ’80s cyberpunk movie. Ariel Johannessen and Mic Finger, who sings in an impressive Interpol baritone, put their synth fleet to work on The Longer Morrow, an acute-angled odyssey that takes in the robotic flutters of Autechre, the singing glitches of Aphex Twin, and the industrial ghoul-pop of Einstürzende Neubauten. Gorgeous and eerie, lined in pop neon yet not quite human, it’s a must for all your blade-running needs. —Brian Howe
October
Sijal Nasralla founded DUNUMS in 2009 after visiting family in Palestine. DUNUMS is a musical collective; “band,” is too static a descriptor of Nasralla’s sprawling multimedia project—it’s more dynamic diasporic cacophony; a joyful, noisy dinner full of voices. On this new release, that crowded table represents contributions from numerous local musicians and artists. Described by Nasralla in an INDY feature earlier this year as “toddlercore,” the album draws inspiration from Nasralla’s young daughter, Tasneem, as well as the creative resilience of several Palestinian children who survived a 2009 massacre by Israeli forces. —Sarah Edwards
With layers of psychedelic instrumentation, La Oprika is an ecstatic introductory album for avant-garde Raleigh-based duo Faun Tempol. It’s impossible to unpack La Oprika without focusing on opening track “Acting Like a Child”—at nearly 12 minutes long, it’s 20 percent of the album, a whirlwind of distorted vocals and reverb on top of a stabilizing bass line and catchy melody. Other tracks, like the ambient “Walls Were There” and the baroque “Soup du Jour,” offer a captivating mix of complexity and poppiness. As we leave 2024, I feel confident I’ll continue to unpack La Oprika into 2025. —Grace Yannotta
November
I loved telling Keenan Jenkins’s story in the INDY recently, but it didn’t leave room to stress just how choice the music is on his second album as XOXOK. Embracing heady, free-flowing R&B in a sort of neo-retro style, Jenkins perfectly matched his voice and guitar (which are themselves alike—cool, clear, silvery, fluid) with a sensitive band that trembles like a pool of touched water. The melodies and grooves build with exquisite patience, and arrangements are always whooshing up or falling away to keep us rapt. Rather than being carried by the music, Jenkins’s voice structures it like a trellis, seated in its elemental power. A real journey. —Brian Howe
To comment on these stories email [email protected]