To offer more insight into the preteen perspective on music in 2024, my 11-year-old daughter—at her request—will be offering some color commentary throughout this post.
Fourteen of the 30 tracks below are either by a female solo artist, a band with a frontwoman, a male-female duo, someone who doesn’t subscribe to binary gender identifiers, or a Canadian indie-supergroup prominently featuring Neko Case.
A lot of people were talking about building walls in 2017, but the musicians I was listening to that year were all about breaking down barriers: deconstructing genres, combining genres, giving new life to tired genres, imbuing old songs with new meaning and, in some cases, directly questioning those who would divide us.
Even the shittiest of years can produce moments of musical transcendence. The tumult of 1968 gave us Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, Sweetheart of the…