The Worst Songs & Albums Of 2024
Gross.
The older I get, the less bad music I end up listening to. I just don’t have time to seek out most of the dreck that gets released throughout the year. I’ve limited myself to just 5 bad songs and 5 bad albums from 2024 on this year’s list, disseminated below for your reading pleasure, but definitely not your listening pleasure.
Worst 5 Songs Of 2024
“Not Like Us” was such an incredible killshot to the Drake/Kendrick Lamar beef that I wouldn’t blame you for forgetting Drizzy had a feeble clapback to it. “The Heart Part 6” makes plenty of claims, like Drake has a mole in Kendrick’s camp and he was the puppet master all along, but 1. It’s hard to take anything he say seriously and 2. To be this “calculated” after K-Dot is out there calling you a pedophile on public radio doesn’t make you seem any cooler or smarter. It’s made even more pathetic by the fact that Drake is currently suing UMG and Spotify, accusing them of artificially inflating “Not Like Us” streams. Just admit you lost Drake and let’s move on to the next beef you’ll inevitably lose. LISTEN
In a beef filled with extremely personal attacks and grade school level insults, “7 Minute Drill” sounds like the parent trying to take part while also reminding you they’re smarter than you. J. Cole is far too measured in his “takedown” of Kendrick Lamar, giving way too thought-out disses of each of Lamar’s records. If it sounds like he was struggling to be mean to K-Dot, he was, because Cole sheepishly removed “7 Minute Drill” from streaming services two days after he released it. It was the right move in the end, but it’s proof that there is no big 3, only a big 2 at most. LISTEN
genre: sadboy is mostly a poor mix of pop punk and trap music, but the worst offender on the entire thing involves neither genre. “struggles” is a summery indie pop “banger”, with plenty of “oh oh ohs” and whistles that sound SO out of place with mgk and Trippie Redd singing over it. The surface level lyrics about struggling with who cares what sound even faker when this dreadful duo delivers them, and nothing here fits any of the parties involved. Even more so than all the other crap on the EP. LISTEN
Years ago, Charli XCX released a song called “I Got It” with a repetitive chorus over a mind bending instrumental with a great rap feature. In 2024, Camila Cabello stole that exact formula and made it 100x worse. Any bit of creativity of the original is lost among things like the awful vocal delivery or lyrics that are perfectly vague enough to mean nothing at all. A grating, repetitive chorus that Camila described as a “happy accident” is truly just an accident, and Playboi Carti’s feature is just plain hard to understand. It’s a mess, and not even a fun mess at that. LISTEN
I am not a woman, but I don’t think it matters what gender you are, you’ll be offended listening to “WOMAN’S WORLD”. Every word of the worst song of 2024 is painful, patronizingly simple and not at all empowering like it thinks it is. There’s no nuance to verses like “She’s a winner, champion/Superhuman, number one”, especially when delivered in the mechanical tone Perry chooses here. The herky jerky vocals aren’t beating the “written & performed by AI” charges the entire album faces, and those lyrics sure sound like a computer generated summary of what a strong woman is. Plus, the entire thing is produced by Dr. Luke, who has a history of assault accusations against prominent female pop artists. It’s not a good look any way you shake it, and while “WOMAN’S WORLD” is low hanging fruit, it’s unquestionably the worst song I heard in 2024. LISTEN
Worst 5 Albums Of 2024
Saviors is full of pop punk songs that don’t bite, generic from beginning to end and full of melodies you swear you’ve heard Green Day do before. It keeps my personal theory alive that Billie Joe Armstrong and company haven’t made a good album since W was in office. But for as unremarkable as it is, it still has more bite to it than 2020’s Father Of All… had, and that is worth celebrating. For a new Green Day album to only rank 5th on one of my “Worst Of” lists is a monumental accomplishment. It still stinks though. LISTEN
I find it hard to believe that Imagine Dragons still fill a certain niche for their 61 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Every song on LOOM is a carbon copy, repeated and pasted nine times over to absolutely no effect whatsoever. You can listen to “Eyes Closed” and “Wake up” twenty different times and probably still get them confused. The only way you can differentiate the former from any other sloppy ID song is when you hear the version with J Balvin, a crossover nobody asked for and one that unsurprisingly doesn’t work. Even for Target-level pop music, this is bottom of the barrel. LISTEN
The artist formerly known as Machine Gun Kelly has been an affront to music for a long time now, and he continues his reign of terror with genre: sadboy. Trippie Redd, another artist who fundamentally misunderstands what it means to be sad in song, assists on an EP that can’t get out of its own way. The beats are monotonous and lifeless, mixing pop punk and hip hop into an ugly amalgam of both. It doesn’t help that mgk & Trippie fail to understand the appeal of emo music anyway, meandering through repetitive thoughts about drugs, suicide and annoying self-deprication. The rhyme schemes are at a kindergarten level, and yes, mgk’s voice is still nails on a chalkboard. An entire generation is going to look to mgk as their My Chemical Romance, and that’s just sad. LISTEN
Rarely does an artist who has reached the career heights Katy Perry has delivered an album as creatively bankrupt as 143. In a world terrified of what AI could do, Perry provides the perfect example, with some of the most robotic, lifeless pop songs you will ever hear. The patronizing “WOMAN’S WORLD” is the perfect opener for an album that’s lyrics feel like auto-generated summaries of emotions rather than actual feelings. From the aforementioned “celebration” of womanhood on the opener, to the remarkably unsexy “GIMME GIMME” (featuring some of 21 Savage’s worst bars ever, and that’s saying a lot), and the banal synthpop of “LIFETIMES”, Perry is operating at an impressively awful level. She often sounds like the “cool mom” from Mean Girls, desperately trying to keep up in a world that has long passed her by. Her producers do her no favors with beats that wouldn’t be creative in any era, and the features manage to suck all the personality out of artists who are full of them. How do you ask a rapper as vibrant as Doechii to assist and turn her into a Disneyland animatronic? 143 is concepts of a plan, a sorry attempt at a career revival that gets everything wrong about what made Katy Perry fun in the first place. LISTEN
When we look back at the death of hyperpop, C,XOXO should be prominently featured on the tombstone. The genre was born from low budget sleepers mainly made by kids in high school, and an artist with the clout of Camila Cabello naturally won’t understand what makes the sound fun. What we get instead is an album that mimics hyperpop but misrepresents it completely. “I LUV IT” is the worst offender, featuring all the elements of hyperpop presented in the most dull, annoying way possible. It’s a bad omen for the rest of the record, but a huge problem C,XOXO fails to correct its inability to just commit to hyperpop. “Dade County Daydreaming” mixes in several guest rappers that muddy the song’s pop intentions. Zombified tracks like “HE KNOWS” and “DREAM-GIRLS” just fade into unmemorable road bumps along a ride filled with potholes. The biggest pothole is directly in the middle of the album, where Drake does a lousy reggaeton imitation on “HOT UPTOWN”, then decides to just hijack the album with his own song! Seriously, I can’t believe there’s just a straight up Drake song in the middle of what’s supposed to be Camila Cabello’s big artistic statement. It’s the cherry on top of a truly awful record, one that I think is the worst of the year. Camila Cabello isn’t a bad person or an untalented one, but she’s woefully misguided to think she can step into another genre, not fully commit and come up with anything worth listening to. LISTEN
Now that that’s over with, we’ll get to the fun stuff!
Top 50 Albums of 2024: https://cfreemon.substack.com/p/the-50-best-albums-of-2024
Top 100 Songs of 2024: https://cfreemon.substack.com/p/the-100-best-songs-of-2024
2024 Honorable Mentions: https://cfreemon.substack.com/p/2024-honorable-mentions
Top 5 EPs of 2024: https://cfreemon.substack.com/p/the-5-best-eps-of-2024