As 2024 rides off into the sunset to be replaced by the ridiculously futuristic sounding 2025 it’s time for us all here at Joyzine HQ to cast an eye back over the fantastic music, films, books, tv, art and podcast that illuminated our year. And there was absolutely loads of it! So much in fact that we’re having to split this article in two to fit it all in! Today we’re sharing top picks from the Joyzine writing team, check back on Monday for the thoughts of our editorial team – and while you’re here please let us know your favourites in the comments.
New musical discovery: CMAT
A new musical obsession crashes into my life every year or so, which means that some years lie a little fallow. There may not quite have been another Meilyr Jones, Ed Dowie, or Richard Dawson coming along and rewiring my brain in 2024, but nonetheless I’ve made the happy discovery that Dublin country singer-songwriter CMAT (Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson) is, to say the least, pretty darn tootin’ good.
She’s been named one of 6 Music’s artists of 2024 for good reason. Any regular listener over the last year will be familiar with her new single ‘Aw, Shoot!’, a wistful ballad about having a breakdown in a Paris hotel room. Sporting a classically plaintive prairie yodel which counterpoints just how wickedly funny her lyrics are, she berates her self-destructive tendencies with hilarious hangdog wryness. It’s as if Lee Hazlewood has been reincarnated as an angsty millennial woman (‘I put my jumper in the freezer just to find something to do’).
I’m particularly fond, though, of 2022’s ‘Peter Bogdanovich’, a surprisingly flirtatious ode to both the titular film director and his wife. If that wasn’t enough, the video sees CMAT fabulously dragged up in the role of Bogdanovich himself and throwing some serious shapes. Oh, and there’s a massive robot. What’s not to love?
Socials: Website / Facebook / Instagram
Book: 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left by Robyn Hitchcock
Beloved psychedelic singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock has long struggled to connect with others. In his 2024 autobiography, 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left, he attributes this to a cocktail of boarding school education, long-undiagnosed neurodivergence, and post-war parenting at the hands of emotionally repressed upper-middle-class intellectuals. (‘You’re like me, Robyn, you’re a solipsist,’ Hitchcock marvellously quotes his father as saying.)
Yet 1967 sees Hitchcock harnessing his introvert hyper-focus to make rock-memoir magic, giving us a very personal prism to view the Summer of Love anew. At any point in history Winchester College would be a peculiar place, but surrealist misfit Hitchcock luckily enrols just as its sheltered inhabitants discover psychedelia and the atmosphere’s matter-of-fact bizarreness reaches critical mass.
As he adapts to the ways of the hippies, a vision of Bob Dylan bobs around his imagination like a groovy guardian angel, while wizardly fellow pupil Brian Eno provides inspiration of an only vaguely earthlier kind. Tangent after tangent follows, including an endearingly rhapsodic ramble about the year’s most popular sandwich fillings (‘I suspect Eno would probably prefer a hybrid, like ham and cress, though I never ask him’). Give the audiobook a listen if you can: Hitchcock, narrating it himself, treats us to a panoply of plummy public-school voices.
Favourite TV programme: Bluey
It’s the mid-2020s, and preschool children’s TV juggernaut Bluey has been roaring along at unstoppable pace for a good six years now. Chances are you know somebody, probably but not necessarily a parent, who has told you ‘it’s really good actually, you should actually watch it’ on more than one occasion.
My favourite TV show of last year was Succession, so isn’t it a bit daft of me to spend 200 words raving about an already culture-dominating cartoon dog and her family? Well, at the heart of Succession is a lesson that underpins so much quality television – it teaches you exactly how not to be a father. Bluey, on the other hand, is that rare programme which does the inverse.
Bluey’s father Bandit Heeler, as much of an icon in his own lane as Logan Roy, has given a generation of confused young dads their own role model. There isn’t a drop of the usual kids’ TV condescension in Bluey. Each seven-minute episode brims over with sophisticated wit and thematic depth while still being perfectly comprehensible to a four-year-old, and what’s more, deeply sympathetic to the condition of parenthood. Prestige TV has, at long last, made its way to toddlers. Hooray!
Album/EP: Kurtz – Rustbelt, or, Put your money where your mouth is: meet me at Fingle Bridge and make me evergreen – make me whole – because I can’t stand the thought of leaving
I still think the magnificently titled Kurtz EP ‘Rustbelt, or, Put your money where your mouth is: meet me at Fingle Bridge and make me evergreen – make me whole – because I can’t stand the thought of leaving’ is an incredible piece of work – not least because of the phenomenal musical journey they’ve been on. Joyzine caught up with the band here.
Socials: Instagram | Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple Music
Single: Bramwell – Theatrics
Is it possible to have a single of the decade, not just the year? Because if it is then Bramwell’s ‘Theatrics’ might just be the one. It is, as the kids don’t say, Supercalifragilisticexpialifuckingawesome and I can’t wait to see what they are going to achieve in 2025. They’re the band of the year as far as I’m concerned. Joyzine covered the single here.
Socials: Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram | Spotify
Gig: The Zombies at The Corn Exchange in Exeter
This was incredible. It’s taken me almost 30 years for the stars to align so that I could go and see them and they were 100 times more impressive live than I ever expected. Sadly it proved to be one of their last ever shows as Rod Argent suffered a stroke and retired from live performance only a few days later. I feel very lucky that I got to see them.
New musical discovery: pushbike
If there’s a band at the heart of the scene in my new hometown of Exeter, then it’s pushbike. Brilliantly exciting, with my second favourite single of the year in ‘Bet You Know’, they’re also responsible for giving me extensive hearing damage in my right ear. Joyzine covered the single here.
Socials: Bandcamp | Instagram | YouTube
Film: Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Gave me all the feels.
TV Programme: Masters of the Universe: Revolution
He-man forever.
Podcast: The True Story of the Fake Zombies
A great show for anyone that wants to discover the dark underbelly of the 60s scene and how members of ZZ Top once put on English accents to pretend they’d written very un-ZZ Top type music.
Single: Kim Gordon – Bye Bye
Only Kim Gordon could turn a packing list into a deliciously clanky groove interspersed with noisefest guitars – and make an earworm of it into the bargain.
Socials: Website / Facebook / Instagram
New musical discovery: Cuban Christmas – playlist by das on Spotify
Our soundtrack for Christmas dinner was a festive joy for everyone, including my elderly father-in-law and his guests. No Wham, Slade or Mariah Carey needed, and we’re still listening to it.
Book: Can I say Exhalation by Ted Chiang, even though it came out in 2019? Everyone should read it, if only for his exploration of what it means to parent AI, not just teach it. If I can’t, I’ll go for A Thousand Threads by Neneh Cherry, even though I loved Intermezzo as much as everyone else.
It wasn’t quite a book, and definitely not a new one, but I went to see David Mitchell talk about the twentieth anniversary of Cloud Atlas. You never how it’s going to go when you hear someone you idolise talking about their stuff, but he was delightful: thoughtful, interesting and interested in his audience.
TV programme: Slow Horses
Slow Horses is Apple TV’s dramatisation of Mick Herron’s novels about Slough House, a fictional home for terminally incompetent security service personnel. Gary Oldman is outstanding as the abrasive and unhygienic anti-hero Jackson Lamb, whose job is to make the best of the rejects MI5 serves him up when they can no longer risk giving them real work. The series takes Le Carré’s darkness and infuses it with humour, which sounds unpromising but is often hilarious, and sometimes poignant. I couldn’t wait for the next series so I listened to the audiobooks of all the novels and novellas – they add more to the characters than anyone could fit in a TV series.
Art exhibition: Mike Kelley – Tate Modern
I went for the covers that are on the cover of Dirty by Sonic Youth – and they were there. But what really stayed with me was in the next couple of rooms. Kelley drew on his understanding of the nature of memory, and our emotional ties to a pop culture often considered trivial, to create a series of works that explore Superman’s relationship with his home town (which was shrunk and stored in a bell jar he couldn’t release it from) and the idea that false memories carry as much of an emotional charge as memories of events that actually happened.
On my way through the Tate Modern to get to the Kelley exhibition I passed Thamesmead Codex, by Bob and Rosetta Smith. It’s a collage of lives, some alarming and some warming, all compelling. Don’t try and work out what I mean – just go and see it. It’s free.
Album: Assistant – Certain Memories
A couple of months ago, my usual Facebook feed of run boasts, birthdays and unwanted opinions was pleasingly disrupted by Indiepop UK’s announcement of ‘Song for Jil’ by Assistant. I had never heard of Assistant, but I knew immediately that I would love them. Something about the prosaic name and the picture of Jonathan Shipley taken from the gentle, hazy video. Listening to their new album Certain Memories was like finding a cassette in Rough Trade in 1986 – bafflingly ignored and your new (old) little secret.
Assistant socials: Facebook | Bandcamp | Instagram |YouTube
Single: Windser – Desert Song
Jordan Topf – aka Windser – has been ‘dreaming about a house in the desert, somewhere we can play hide and seek’. By the end of ‘Desert Song’, you’ll be resisting the urge to search for Californian real estate. ‘Wrap me up in your autumn sweater and I will dance around this room with you,’ he sings on a chorus so dreamily romantic that you’ll draw attention to yourself with your tears.
Windser socials: Facebook | Bandcamp | YouTube
Gig: Moss Grotto at The Artery Studios, Worcester
Worcestershire trio Moss Grotto are bringing Godspeed-sized soundscapes to middle England, and I’m here for it. Tracks with titles such as ‘The Storm Killed The Dog’ and ‘Music For the Wasp’ merged into a continuous, compelling work of unexpectedly inventive art at the suitably named Artery Studios. I can’t wait to hear their new album Crockerland, which will be released next year.
Moss Grotto socials: YouTube | Instagram
Festival: Worcester Music Festival
Apart from the pandemic blip, Worcester Music Festival has been happening every September since 2008 and, unforgivably, this year’s festival was my first taste. Over 250 acts performed in 23 venues over three days. I relied on interesting band names and my mate Al to narrow down my choices. My favourite band was Mantis Defeats Jaguar, whose Limp Bizkit/Rage/Led Zeppelin mash-up would have gone down a storm at the festival in Reading I’d been to a couple of weeks earlier.
Mantis Defeats Jaguar socials: Bandcamp | YouTube | Instagram
New Musical Discovery: Liang Lawrence
If Liang Lawrence had been born in, say, Toronto or New Jersey in the 70s, she’d be as big as Alanis. My introduction to her was the witty, catchy and stupendously lovely ‘(Not) A Love Song’ from last year’s brilliant EP Letters To Myself. She’s just finished touring the US in support of HONNE, and her new album What’s Dead And Gone has just been released. Get it now so you can lie to your mates that you found her first.
Liang Lawrence socials: Spotify | YouTube
Film: Inside Out 2
Films aren’t what they used to be, which is ironic, as there’s a character called Nostalgia in Inside Out 2, and she got the biggest laughs when I went to see it. If you think the Inside Out films are just big budget cartoons, you’ll be Sad and Envious of everyone who has enjoyed these hugely fun deep dives into what it means to think and feel.
Book: Ambush at Still Lake by Caroline Bird
What do you get if you cross The Shining with a Carry On film? Answer: a lazy review of Caroline Bird’s 7th poetry collection Ambush at Still Lake. It dances with the macabre, it’ll make you laugh, and the beautiful tributes to her partner and son might make you cry.
Caroline Bird socials: Carcanet Press
TV: Stranger Things
Like a fool, I only started watching Stranger Things this year. Like one of its many deadly baddies, I devoured all four series as fast as I could. It’s ET crossed with Nightmare on Elm Street, though it miraculously avoids parody. The plot twists and sheer utter nonsense are delightful, and I loved the world-saving characters so much that I wished they were my friends.
Podcast: Blindboy Boatclub – The Blindboy Podcast
Once again, I’m late to the party with this one. Blindboy Boatclub – aka David Chambers – is a late-diagnosed autistic man from Limerick who talks about things such as the mental health effects of Turkish arse lozenges and ‘how Hyper Capitalism has made Halloween more terrifying than its Pagan beginnings’. No wonder so many people find his softly spoken, fact-stacked monologues so irresistible.
Blindboy Boatclub socials: Spotify | Instagram
Art Exhibition: Fitzwilliam Museum – Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body
Competitive art seems a bit of an off concept to me, and yet ice skating exists, and Torvill and Dean’s 1984 performance accompanied by Maurice Ravel’s Boléro is sublime to anyone with sight. So, it was a revelation to me when, at the Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body exhibition at Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, I found out that competitive art was a feature of the Olympics from 1912 to 1948. I particularly enjoyed the exhibit about Eric Liddell and Harold Abraham, otherwise know as the chaps immortalised in Chariots of Fire.
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