One of the things I appreciate most about how Kendrick Lamar handled his Drake beef this year was that there wasn’t a lot of forewarning; K-Dot just rapped. While not hidden on Future and Metro’s collaborative album We Don’t Trust You, the lack of an officially listed “featuring Kendrick Lamar” on this “Everlasting Bass”–flippin’ trunk rattler added to the excitement of hearing Kendrick leaking this kind of venom from his pen. Without saying Drake’s name specifically, “Motherfuck the big three, n----, it’s just big me,” said all that needed to be said, and was the straw that broke the camel’s back on a beef that had been simmering since Kendrick said Drake’s name on his “Control” verse. Little did we know that the trajectory of hip-hop in 2024 was about to take a hard (and necessary?) left turn.

The best song to arrive from OVO incorporated in 2024 didn’t belong to Drake or have any connection to the suffocating beef the label’s cofounder engendered. “F a m i l y,” a deep cut from PARTYNEXTDOOR’s P4, is as perplexing as it is layered. 

Taken by its parts, “F a m i l y” might seem like a fairly typical song in the context of modern, hip-hop-adjacent R&B and the subterranean calling card that’s defined Toronto’s take on the genre since 2009’s So Far Gone. PND spins a tale about loss, jealousy, and the Mississauga loved ones he couldn’t take along on his rise from unknown songwriter to Drake’s most consistent lyrical lieutenant. 

But as with all things PND, the true beauty is in the performance. “F a m i l y” is awash in enough Auto-Tune to make large swaths of the song indecipherable. Over a beat that’s as regretful as it is surging, PND wails and warps his voice into a morose and intoxicating sludge. When PARTY sings, “Don’t know what I did to ya, but I’ll see ya,” to a departed brother, it’s a rare moment of barbed reflection for an artist often overly reliant on vibe-setting. There’s no strip club escape hatch for the singer, just a sense of gnawing loneliness and a sliver of hope that the pain of suffering and betrayal doesn’t last forever. 

Who would’ve guessed a song this mournful would appear on an album whose primary claim to fame is a woman’s substantial ass boldly emblazoned across its cover? If this is a possible direction for PARTY and Drake’s teased collab album, there might be hope for the north yet.

One of the biggest collective musical misses in 2024 was everyone missing out on making “Fisherrr” this year’s summer anthem. (By the time Tommy Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby” seemingly won that distinction, everyone was tired of Tommy Richman.) Cash Cobain, who describes his sound as “sexy drill music” and calls everything “slizzy,” has been having a moment. The lead-in to his 2024 release PLAY CASH COBAIN featured a string of slizzy anthems, from “Dunk Contest” to “Rump Punch,” Cash packed the anthems, but it was “Fisherrr” that felt like the biggest moment. Trading honey pack–soaked bars with fellow slizzy soldier Bay Swag is normal; doing that over a loop that doesn’t have a proper drop until the one-minute, 37-second mark? It’s one of those records that’s so freaky that Ice Spice had to hop on the remix, arguably creating her best song of 2024. Thank the Slizzy General for that one!

FKA Twigs has made a career as one of alt-pop’s preeminent innovators by balancing the primal and the ethereal. She tackles the most fundamental, excruciating feelings and, with her warbled soprano vocal, takes them somewhere otherworldly. And on “Eusexua,” the eponymous single off her forthcoming album, she takes it a step further by inventing a whole new emotion. “Eusexua,” a made-up word, is “the pinnacle of human experience” according to the song’s music video, and is also a moment of “pure clarity” where “your mind is elevated,” like when you lose track of time while dancing all night, according to Twigs herself. Whatever it is, she takes us there via a propulsive staccato rhythm as her voice sharpens and floats over the beat. But as always with Twigs, you know a comedown is imminent, and she delivers on “Eusexua” with a gorgeously spare outro in which she’s accompanied by just some Auto-Tune and a couple piano keys. “I was on the edge of something greater than before / But nobody told me,” she confesses. If the title track is any indication, Eusexua, which is due out in late January, is bound to be a highlight of 2025.

You gotta appreciate a simple pop song. “I want you to stay / till I’m in the grave” is some of the realest shit I’d ever heard in a love song before, primarily because … that’s all we want, right? Someone to be there until we aren’t there? And there are a litany of ways to craft that sentiment—it’s the stuff pop songwriters live for—but Eilish found a way to keep the track new wave-y and Netflix promo-ready without sacrificing what makes this a damn fine love song. It’s truly a timeless piece of pop; one of those tunes that will stay with you till you’re in the grave (or at least until awards season is done, as this one is primed to win all of the accolades).

Yes, there’s a lot of consternation around Mk.gee. 

How do you pronounce that name? Are the guitar skills overblown, or is his rise too annoyingly rapid? Of course he’s working with Justin Bieber now? In short, Michael Todd Gordon is a sick white boy on the guitar and we haven’t known how to discuss that with any semblance of sense or grace for decades at this point. 

And yet, none of that matters when “Alesis” (and his debut Two Star & The Dream Police) is as good and propulsive as it is. There’s an eerie kaleidoscope quality to “Alesis”—the haunting coos swim in and out of meat-and-potatoes drums. The song’s punch lines are either hilarious (“You’re not a poet, you’re a liar / I’m not a liar, I’m just high”) or so simplistic they border on quaint (“Why bleed when we don’t have to?”). It’s a track that’s undeniably pop despite its understated wonkiness. In essence, it’s a microcosm for why Mk.gee has enraptured a young fan base during a time when rock is culturally inert if not mostly forgotten. He always does just enough and never too much, all set to those crunchy, intergalactic guitar riffs. As far as hyperbolic guitar gods go, we could do a lot worse.

There was a lot of discourse about Chappell Roan in 2024, and most of it was worthless and awful, so let’s just skip over all that and get down to what’s important: Didn’t it rule to hear a hit pop song this year that actually had a real fucking chorus? Like, a soaring, anthemic, euphoric chorus that could have come straight out of She’s So Unusual? In this economy? Just when pop music desperately needed some new life injected into it, Chappell Roan delivered one of the biggest and best pop songs in years. 

And if Chappell’s superb inclinations toward big, brash pop music weren’t enough, her lyricism is just as stunning. “Good Luck, Babe!” is penned as a meditation on comphet and a send-off to an unfulfilled lesbian romance. There’s heartbreak in there, for sure—but it’s more complicated than that. Frustration is probably a more accurate word: “You can kiss a hundred boys in bars,” she dares a romantic interest who’s in denial of their sexuality. “You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling.” These words became monumental scripture for the anger and confusion that arises from a queer love that never really came to be. Then there’s that bridge: a devastating look into a crystal ball at a fate of unhappy marriage and regret. That “Good Luck, Babe!” tackles such intricate emotions so succinctly in a gut punch of pop perfection is exactly what will make it an enduring anthem in a time when so much pop music seems to quickly come and go.

Girl you walk like a bitch
When I was 10 someone said that

That’s half a story that manages to capture a core double standard of girlhood—be strong but not too strong—in two lines midway through Lorde’s guest verse on this Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat standout. It has played on repeat in my head since I heard it. Charli and Lorde work out the underlying tension in their relationship—one of vulnerability, jealousy, projection, and admiration—on the remix of the original, suspected to be about New Zealand’s favorite alt-pop diva until this update confirmed it. It’s equally exhilarating as a form of music, therapy, or insight into a celebrity relationship. It Girls have feelings too, after all.

One of 2024’s surprise hits was “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” a song from Shaboozey that flipped J-Kwon’s classic “Tipsy” for the country set that ended up tying Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” by sitting atop the Billboard Hot 100 for 19 weeks. The idea of a country song about some downtrodden guy drinking his pain away isn’t new, but using “Tipsy” to convey that surprised a large chunk of America, apparently (even if Shaboozey ended up being the butt of a number of jokes during the 2024 CMAs). As surprising as this feat is, it truly shouldn’t be during the year of Cowboy Carter. Beyoncé announced her eighth studio album’s country twang with a pair of singles released on the day of Super Bowl LVIII. As a proud Texan, Bey has country in her roots, so her effortless, banjo-driven, soulful bop felt like second nature. During a time when we can feel so separated from everyone, it’s comforting to hear the Queen craft a gem that blends soul music with an authentic country twang. My foot has been tapping under my desk for months.

It’s inane. It’s absurd. It’s grammatically incorrect. And it’s everything we needed this year.

For a while now, our biggest pop stars have been diarists, too. From Taylor Swift’s intricate self-mythology to Billie Eilish and Finneas’s homemade creations, the early 2020s embraced specificity and a kind of temperate vulnerability from the types of artists we usually look to for pizzazz and spectacle. Very demure, very mindful. Had we all just had enough? Enter Sabrina Carpenter, in 5-inch platforms, singing highly caffeinated, vaguely horny nonsense over a delicious nu-disco trot. Carpenter injects an objectively bizarre song with so much personality that it’s impossible to hear it as anything other than a tune destined to become what it was: the smash hit of the year.

After Kendrick said, “Fuck the Big Three” before declaring, “It’s just big me” on “Like That,” I knew Drake was going to pounce. Drake has been around the battle rap scene for a decade-plus at this point; he destroyed Meek Mill and was silenced by Pusha T, but the thought was that after Drake dropped “Push Ups” and his “Taylor Made Freestyle,” Kendrick was “on the clock” and wouldn’t be able to ante up. Eleven days after Drake’s double drop (a similar release strategy when you think about how Drake dismantled Meek), Kendrick released “Euphoria” and “6:16 in LA,” the former a reference to the HBO series Drake executive-produces and the latter sharing the naming convention of some of Drake’s most loved freestyles, both dismantling Drake’s ego. When Drake finally released “Family Matters” (featuring a video where, among other visuals, Drake seemingly crushes the van from the good kid, m.A.A.d city cover), Kendrick was on him, unleashing “Meet the Grahams” just 20 minutes later, where he sends pointed notes to everyone in Drake’s family about the “Hotline Bling” artist’s scandals (both real and unconfirmed) over a haunting Alchemist beat. Kendrick could have ended the feud on that. Nothing Drake could do, not even releasing “The Heart Part 6” on May 5, seemed to damage the accusations Kendrick lobbed at Drake, and he certainly couldn’t touch the song that Kendrick released on May 4, the Mustard-produced anthem “Not Like Us”—a record that’s gotten so big that Drake’s camp is suing Universal Music Group over the way he says they promoted the single that accused him of being both a colonizer and a pedophile. 

If you look at the four songs Kendrick released in this Drake feud, “Not Like Us” is what you play during your celebration while the credits roll. It’s the song the Avengers would be jamming to at the end of the Battle of New York. Mustard’s string-led loop has had the rap community either dancing or mad since its release; as an old rap fogy at this point, even I am not surprised that “Not Like Us”—which broke a number of streaming records, some of which Drake unsurprisingly held—took off the way it did. One of the greatest rap disses ever—“Fuck wit Dre Day (And Everybody’s Celebratin’)”—was certified gold, hitting no. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 with a video that stayed in rotation on MTV. Dr. Dre is one of Kendrick Lamar’s OGs; anyone who thought Kendrick wasn’t prepared for this battle needs to look back at how the West previously won the rap game.