From Eden Park stepping up to rappers stepping each other out, we look back at the best of music this year.
Read The Spinoff’s favourite TV shows of 2024.
We’re a very small team here at The Spinoff, but we’ve tried our best to up our music coverage this year. Every Saturday morning you can read local artists, from established names like Troy Kingi and Fur Patrol to rising stars like Mokotron and Wiri Donna, all sharing the soundtrack to their perfect weekend. We’ve headed out and covered as many gigs as we could, including all ages punk shows, sweaty pop spectacles, remorseful nostalgia tours, charming pub choir singalongs, all night sleep concerts and the most talked–about stadium shows of the year.
We’ve examined tour rumours with rigour and explored how Big Tech is impacting music, from the labels going up against TikTok to the pittance being paid to artists by Spotify. We’ve looked at why crowds are getting more unruly and even posited that they need to shut up altogether. There’s been plenty of room for nostalgia too, be it The Beatles in Aotearoa 60 years on, finding the unsung hero behind a primary school banger, or meeting the fans who still froth TrueBliss. But let us stay in the here and now, as we look back at our favourite music moments of 2024.
The holy trinity of pop girlies
I feel like every year since 2022 has been the year of the girlies, but 2024 was truly the year of the girlies — especially the ones of the pop persuasion. Charli xcx dropped the record of the year in Brat, Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess shot her to insane success and Sabrina Carpenter wrapped up her stint on the Eras Tour with the song of the (American) summer: ‘Espresso’.
Even if you weren’t one of the white tank top-wearing, cigarette-toting Brat girls, you probably found some solace in Roan crying “I don’t care that you’re a stoner!” or got swept up in Carpenter’s kisses, laces and bows aesthetic. They are the Bubbles, Buttercup and Blossom of the pop world. They are the saviours the pop landscape desperately needed. In the name of the xcx, the Carpenter and the Roan, amen. / Lyric Waiwiri-Smith
Princess Chelsea and the Dream Warriors – Forever is a Charm (Live at the Aotearoa Music Awards)
The music awards returned to a big venue after a few years of Covid-prompted downsizing and introspection, and having something like the whole music industry in a room again felt like a reassertion of its significance after a really tough few years. It was not without its challenges though: following a long period at Spark Arena, the width of the Viaduct Events Centre was hard to penetrate for most artists (though Stan Walker’s ‘I AM’, days after the passing of his father, was irresistible).
The night’s highlight came from an unexpected place – Princess Chelsea’s ‘Forever is a Charm’ was nearly two years old by the time she performed it, but became the most electrifying performance of the evening. She fronted the Dream Warriors, a band of outsiders transgressing in All Blacks jerseys, who took an event that sometimes veered into the safe and saccharine into a place of strangeness and magnetic intensity. Playing one song in front of a distracted crowd is always hard; she made it look like a moment she’d been building to, well, forever. / Duncan Greive
Fazerdaze returns with crushing dream pop
If you like your dreamy pop with deep lashings of melancholy, I highly recommend driving around some empty suburban streets during these long summer nights, listening exclusively to Fazerdaze’s second album Soft Power. Lead single ‘Cherry Pie’ feels both sonically and thematically like Naked and Famous’s ‘Young Blood’ grew up, chilled out, and started thinking a lot at 3am about their own mortality and the crushing passage of time. ‘A Thousand Years’ and ‘City Glitter’ contain flickers of Murray’s own experience of rebuilding her own life, an experience she shared when we chatted in November. “It was pretty ugly, but when my life fell apart was actually when it all started.” Useful mantra for 2025, perhaps? / Alex Casey
Auckland was finally allowed to use Eden Park
My colleague Toby Manhire rightly pointed out that Auckland’s big venue of the year was undeniably Go Media Stadium, in industrial Penrose. That was largely due to the huge draw of the Warriors, then the stupendous start of Auckland FC. But it was also because Pearl Jam were forced to take their pair of magnificent stadium shows away from Eden Park due to the hard cap of six shows a year – fully half of which were taken up by Coldplay.
The venue has had this cap for years, which severely limits the utility Auckland can gain from its biggest and most important stadium. That was true until a surprise November announcement doubling the number of shows it can take, a victory for the national interest over the resistance of a determined group of local residents. This year alone, Aotearoa has dropped off the map for tours by Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo. This by no means guarantees we get back on the schedule – but at least it gives us and our promoters a shot. / DG
New Nadia Reid soothed my soul
I’ll admit to being largely ignorant of Nadia Reid’s music prior to September of this year, but having listened to her three new singles in as many months, I am now eagerly anticipating her forthcoming album. ‘Baby Bright’ in particular, has stolen my heart. The opening notes will transport you straight back to Bon Iver’s self-titled album, but her assured and crisp vocals keep it in the present. I saw The Guardian randomly describe her music as “wise” but it really is. Listening to the soothing ‘Baby Bright’, I would believe it if you told me the song was released any year from 1980 to now. It’s now a summer playlist staple and I’ll be settling in for the full album experience on February 7. / Madeleine Chapman
Going to the NZSO rocked
Going to see a full orchestra is one of the best ratios of interesting sounds:money spent that you can get. I saw the NZSO four times this year, from the stunning percussion symphony Losing Earth (which has a movement called ‘Beast Mode’) to the twisting melodies of Copland’s Appalachian Spring, and each performance amazed me. There seems to be a perception that you have to have some kind of classical music education to fully appreciate the orchestra, and to distinguish a mellow viola from the arc of the second violins. But regardless of how much you know about Elgar or Bach, I think it’s hard not to enjoy the orchestra. Here is a group of dozens of highly trained professionals working in, well, symphony to tell a story with sound.
Without all the music being channeled through speakers, the effect is layered and 3D, and it’s incredible to realise that a violin can sound plaintive or like it’s making a joke. It’s fun to go to the pre-concert talks and read the programme about what the music might mean and the context it was written in, but it’s also possible just to show up with an open mind, admire the form of the instruments and way the musicians play with just as much wild abandon as if they were at a rock gig (even if the audience is more staid). I’m planning to go to the orchestra as much as I can next year – and if you’re interested in doing the same, this piece about classical music by Henry Oliver might be a good encouragement. / Shanti Mathias
Justice for The Tortured Poet’s Department
Spotify informs me that Taylor Swift was my most listened to artist this year, for the fifth year running, since she brought her music back to the platform. All but one of my top five songs (the outlier being Michael Cera’s ‘Clay Pigeons’ which I played nonstop for eight hours one night when I was depressed) were tracks from her double album The Tortured Poet’s Department, flamed by non-Swifties for being her flop record, and beloved by me for having more music to cry to.
With TTPD, you’ve got the Jack Antonoff cut (the first half of the album) with the pop bangers – ‘I Can Do It’ or ‘Down Bad’ – and the Aaron Dessner cut (the second half), with more stripped back ballads, such as ‘The Manuscript’ and ‘Peter’. There’s some career bests in there as well, like ‘Guilty as Sin?’ and ‘How Did It End?’. It’s one of Swift’s most misunderstood albums (is a woman on a record breaking world tour really a tortured poet?), but as someone who also went through a breakup with someone named Joe in the same year she did, I totally get it. / LWS
The Eras Tour made it down under
Speaking of Taylor Swift… Have you ever heard of The Eras Tour?? While the record-busting, three-and-a-half hour show never made its way to New Zealand, it was still undoubtedly the biggest cultural event of the year – and it felt like half of the country made the trek across the ditch to experience one of the seven shows in either Sydney or Melbourne. It was rare, I was there (twice), I remember it all too well. / Stewart Sowman-Lund
Double Whammy fills a small but also huge venue hole
The death of the Kings Arms was tragic, but also noble – it gave way for much needed apartments on the city fringe. It did leave a major gap in Auckland’s inner city venue infrastructure, one which was finally filled by the arrival of Double Whammy this year. It was created by taking the warren of spaces between Whammy Bar (which still lives!) and Wine Cellar (which also still lives, albeit now solely as a bar) into a 500 capacity concrete bunker.
While it is a fairly spare room, that makes it very composable – the first night I went a second space had been set up opposite the main stage, enabling continuous live music all evening (the juxtaposition of Brandn Shiraz with Phoebe Rings? Perfection). It’s even starting to open up to all ages shows, plugging another cultural hole in the city. Along with the arrival of Meow Nui to Wellington, it represents welcome new life out of the heavy times of the Covid era for live music. / DG
Aotearoa was the first to hear Cowboy Carter
Can you believe this happened this year?! We were all just minding our own business and going about our boring weekend chores when Beyonce dropped her country album Cowboy Carter and, thanks to timezones doing their thing, we were the first in the world to hear it. “Where to even begin?” I wrote in our group think review in April. “The soaring gospel of ‘Ameriican Requiem’ stripping right back to ‘Blackbiird’? The softness of Beyonce-as-mother in ‘Protector’ contrasted with the full operatic scariness of Beyonce-as-murderer in ‘Daughter’? Me suddenly developing a frankly illegal crush on Post Malone via ‘Levii’s Jeans’? The “oooooo–weeeeee–oooooo” of ‘Bodyguard’?!?!?” Proud to report I still feel this exhilarated by this album, and Post Malone, in equal measure. / AC
Katy Perry’s bomb of an album
The less said about Katy Perry’s 143 the better. But, it happened and I for one will never forget the first time I heard Woman’s World. “Sexy, confident. So intelligent. She is heaven-sent. So soft, so strong.” ChatGPT could only dream. / SSL
Jack White truly blasts the past
There were many bracingly old school elements to Jack White’s two shows in mid-December, not least that the gap between their being announced and him arriving on stage was a handful of weeks, versus the year or more which has become routine with big tours lately. There was also his deliberately choosing venues based on their quality rather than scale – hence the Powerstation on a Monday night. If he avoided the fiscal optimisation common to many tours now, the performance was even more of a throwback. He’s middle-aged now, but performed with the feral intensity of an unknown with everything to prove, blasting through a set of songs drawn from throughout his career, backed by a band supple enough to pick up a different set every night on this hastily arranged tour. It was 90 minutes of aggressive, howling, electrifying rock music – out of style, bang on time. / DG
The Drake v Kendrick feud took over the group chat
The period between March and May this year will go down in the group chat hall of fame forever. The bros and I were following the Drake and Kendrick Lamar beef like our lives depended on it, as if we were waiting for the new Messiah to reveal himself through the medium of rap. The day ‘euphoria’ dropped, we were analysing each bar and jab traded as if it were some ancient text and sending out predications like hip hop oracles. Then Drake dropped, then K Dot, then Drake, then ‘Not Like Us’ took over. God, there was something in the air in those months. We, as a society, will never feel so hype again. Obviously Lamar won, and the best lines remain: “beat your ass and hide the Bible if God’s watching” and “what is it, the braids?!” / LWS
Marlin’s Dreaming went out with a gorgeous sigh
Such are the vagaries of Spotify’s algorithm that artists regularly have new releases which feel overwhelmed by the continuing popularity of those that came before. So it goes with Marlin’s Dreaming, whose beautifully crafted HIRL came out in August, but barely rates in the band’s current top five songs, thanks to continued demand for 2017’s Lizard Tears. This might just be how it goes for the quartet, who’re now on long-term hiatus. Thankfully they leave behind ‘Earnestly’, a duet with Erny Belle which is among the prettiest, most delicate songs they’ve ever recorded. / DG
Tomorrow: The Spinoff’s favourite movies of 2024.
