The top 20 Columbus albums of 2024

Narrowing down a year-end list is always a challenge, but here are the albums I found myself returning to repeatedly over the course of the 2024.

20. Dom Deshawn: The Skylab Sessions

Dom Deshawn is usually drawn toward higher-concept projects, but he opted to strip away the veneer for this trio of EPs, turning out comparatively slice of life vignettes. Over the course of three EPs, the Columbus rapper unpacks the self-doubt that gnaws at him relentlessly, his desire for self-improvement, and the unflagging motivation that has kept him pushing toward a career in music for more than a dozen years.

19. Tha Audio Unit: Do You Remember the Day We Left Earth?

Uber-prolific Columbus producer Jack “Tha Audio Unit” Burton has endured an immensely challenging couple of years, beginning with an August 2023 car accident that left him confined to a wheelchair with a fractured spine. Of course, this has done little to slow down Burton, who has continued to engineer tracks for a range of Columbus rappers while crafting a stream of increasingly exploratory instrumental records. This includes Do You Remember the Day We Left Earth?, an album that finds the producer building space-age soundscapes that exist far outside the pull of gravity.

18. Abel: Dizzy Spell

The new album from the Columbus shoegaze band can exert a downward tug, with Isaac Kauffman singing about a world sliding deeper into chaos (“Rut”), the challenge of gaining a toehold in a system designed to hold us back (“Mantra”), and the existential sadness that can rise up and strike a person down out of nowhere (“Wanna”). And yet, things never feel dire, the band drowning out most of these negative forces with sheer volume. “I like noise because it’s something that takes you somewhere else,” Kauffman said in June. “And that’s something I want the audience to feel. I want to take you to a different space.”

17. Minnows: Foreign Moon

On their debut long-player, the Minnows bandmates delve into everything from the dizzying experience of watching the Jan. 6 insurrection unfold across social media (“Make Us Soldiers”) to their struggles with lockdown boredom (“Passion Thief”). “It’s undeniable. The reason [the album’s] called Foreign Moon is because it felt like at that time we were in another world,” singer and guitarist Sean Gardner said in March. The bandmates countered this pervading confusion by crafting riff-filled songs that move with a welcome sense of purpose.

16. Snarls: With Love

Snarls singer Chlo White said she used to fixate on romantic relationships in an unhealthy way – a tendency that occasionally bled into the songs populating the Columbus four-piece’s earlier records. But on With Love, the musicians imploded this idea, evolving to explore a range of platonic and romantic connections that flaunt a heart nearly as big as the glittering, ground-quaking riff that introduces the album-opening title track.

15. Ghost Shirt: Crayon Dragon

While other albums released this year dredged up the reality that my parents will one day die (hold tight a bit for that one), Ghost Shirt’s “Child of Illusion” had me considering my own death and the idea I would never again hold my children if and when it came to pass. And yet, the orchestral-pop collective’s latest consistently manages to metabolize these heartrending ideas into songs that acknowledge the pain but find beauty in pressing onward.

14. Winston Hightower: Winston Hytwr 

This compilation album traces the prolific Columbus musician’s evolution over the course of a decade, ping-ponging from celestial synth experiments (the chiming “TF”) to propulsive, breakbeat-driven turns such as “Blind Pig,” which plays like a fractured ode to the pioneering years of hip-hop. Then there’s “Hip Swayer,” a percolating, hypnotically rhythmic number that finds Hightower appearing to express a sense of love and/or admiration so strong that it almost renders him unable to function. “No matter how hard I try,” he sings. “I cannot breathe/Because of thee.” 

13. Rejoice: All of Heaven’s Luck 

The hardcore quintet could be a potent blue-collar weapon in the growing class war. Album opener “Temple of the Worm” takes aim at corporate interests and the wealthy overlords who kneel on the necks of workers, while the doomy “Bloodsucker” eviscerates capitalist greed. Best of all might be “Malevolent Deities,” nearly three minutes of slash-and-burn noise aimed at those who “kill us all and call it industry.”

12. Manic Splits: Manic Splits

Manic Splits singer/guitarist Joseph Bilinski wore a Jerry Wick T-shirt when we spoke via Google Meet in September – a perfect illustration of the band’s throwback garage-punk sound, which would have sounded perfectly at home in any number of long-gone local dives. Throughout, the songs ripple with self-doubt (“Pretty Freak”) and political/social disillusionment (“Yuppie Masochist”), but they’re delivered with a level of confidence that allows them hit like rabbit punches to the ribs.

11. Adam Remnant: Big Doors 

Side A of the Athens-based singer and songwriter’s latest kicks off with the piano-led “Here,” a relatively stoic, somber, earthbound instrumental, while Side B begins with the comparatively ethereal “Hereafter.” This shift from the earthly to the divine unfolds steadily throughout the album, with earlier tracks feeling compressed by gravity and the back half achieving a sense of weightlessness, as through the molecules in the songs are somehow able to expand and breathe as the band arches closer to the heavens. This is particularly true of “When You Get Back Home,” a heartfelt turn that counters the narrator’s dark mood and shaken belief system with music that practically radiates light.

10. Mery Steel: She’s Back!

There’s a brief moment at the onset of She’s Back! where everything appears okay. “It’s going good,” Mery Steel sings atop sun-kissed instrumentation. Then a beat later she adds, “We should break up.” And so it goes on a record where the musician is most often wearing her busted heart on her sleeve (“War”), shouldering the blame for a relationship gone to pot (“Bear in Your House”), or recounting the “mediocre blow” levied by a friend-turned-lover-turned-memory who talked shit behind her back before making themselves scarce (“We Both Know”).

9. Cellar Dwellar: In the Shape of a Swan

When we spoke in 2023, Cellar Dwellar singer Kade Weinmann said the lyrics off the band’s next album were largely informed by the supernatural, taking inspiration from the collected works of Philip K. Dick and “high strangeness” paranormal events. Despite these spiritual proclamations, blood and dirt course through the resulting album, In the Shape of a Swan, released in January, with Weinmann questioning who gets to author our stories when we’re gone (“Retcon”), tracing his declining faith (“Pollux”) and, on “The Grasshopper Lies Heavy,” nearing the point of complete breakdown, held together only “by the gravity in the center.” The music matches this fractured feel, with the bandmates crafting a shapeshifting, psychedelic soundscape that borrows from numerous genres and somehow feels wholly their own.

8. Golomb: Love

While Golomb can still build to a ferocious wall of sound (witness the climax of “Dare You to Cry”), the songs here have an undeniably tender core given shape and definition by the blossoming relationship between singer/guitarist Mickey Shuman and singer/bassist Xenia Shuman, who married early in the songwriting process. Mickey credited the emergence of this comparatively gentle side to multiple factors, ranging from his relationship with Xenia to a growing understanding that he doesn’t want his songs to wallow in sadness. “And I think that, in turn, asks for less psycho-noise freakouts and more of those soothing tones,” he said. Though there are still plenty of the former.

7. Trek Manifest: The Greatest Story Finally Told

With his latest, Trek Manifest turns the camera inward, the songs focused on the Columbus rapper as he makes peace with his inner-child, weighs the challenge of holding to faith amid turmoil, and unpacks the hard work required to build oneself back up brick-by-brick after being reduced to emotional rubble. When Manifest declares that “the old me is dead” as the album nears its close, the moment rings out as an acknowledgment that new beginnings are possible even in the aftermath of great loss.

6. Watershed: Blow It Up Before It Breaks

Blow It Up Before It Breaks is populated with narrators who soldier on amid heartbreak and regret, who linger on the hangovers rather than the good times that led to them, and who cling tight to rock ’n’ roll dreams well into middle age, the stage continuing to serve as one place that always feels like home. In other words, these are classic Watershed tunes, delivered with the same skill, wit and wisdom that the musicians have been bringing to their particular brand of power pop going on four decades now.

5. Villagerrr: Tear Your Heart Out 

A handful of the album’s shambolic, roots-indebted songs center on those almost imperceptible moments that can cause tensions in relationships, developing over time into yawning chasms. It’s a divide best evidenced by the album-closing “River Ain’t Safe,” on which a pair of onetime lovers find themselves on opposite banks of a deep, tumbling waterway, hearts filled with regret but no way to mend the fissure. “I remember the way it felt with you staring up at me,” Mark Allen Scott sings, later adding, “The great river that runs between us welling/It ain’t safe anymore.”

4. Micah Schnabel: The Clown Watches the Clock

In interviews over the last couple of years, Micah Schnabel has repeatedly told me that part of his making peace with the current state of… well, everything (*gestures wildly at the surrounding universe*) has involved the abandoning of hope that things could get better. And yet, as a songwriter, Schnabel seems incapable of giving in, diving headlong into the chaotic swirl of sadness, hope, humor, resignation and perseverance that make up the 21st century American experience on his latest (and arguably best) solo album. Even at their bleakest, these songs radiate heart, while the album-closing “Fingers Like a Gun” finds the singer digging his heels in and pressing back against these dark forces. “This is my comeback phase,” he announces. 

“It’s like, okay, we’ve said all of these things, and these realities still exist. Now how do we carry that weight forward?” Schnabel said in May. “And that feels like a very honest statement of where I am right now. Here’s where I’ve been. Now here’s where we make the turn. And I don’t know what’s happening or where it’s going. But I’m trying like hell.”

3. Ebri Yahloe: Candid 

Producer Noah Bolte was the only other person in the room with Ebri Yahloe when she recorded this five-song EP. The rest of the space could have easily been taken up by ghosts of the past, with the Columbus rapper exorcising everything from a pair of childhood sexual assaults to her fears that she’ll inherit the worst parts of her parents. She blasts her father as a lying, manipulative cheat and expresses the concerns she once held as a younger person that she would follow in the footsteps of her mother, who gave birth to the rapper at age 15 and turned to alcohol as one means of coping with being a teenage parent. (The two have sense repaired their relationship.)

“Somebody asked me what the point of this [album] was, and my answer was that I hope it sparks conversations in rooms that I’m not in,” Yahloe said in a July interview, and I have no doubt these songs will find the people who need them most, precisely when they need them.

2. Big Fat Head: Bobo Rising

Nate Wilder started Big Fat Head because he felt like everything else happening musically in the city “was either too loud or too goddamn serious.”

The band’s sophomore album presented the crew a new challenge: Find ways to hold tight this chaotic spirit while also taking the music seriously enough to move it forward. The disillusionment brought on by this process fueled the self-lacerating “Pendulum,” one highlight on the excellent Bobo Rising, a deeply varied, endlessly kinetic record that feels like the sound of a band realizing what it could be. 

“I started it to be this cheeky little fun thing. And then people seemed to be hanging around, and it was like, ‘Well, I guess I want to say something real or make something that sounds awesome,’” Wilder said in May. “And to do that after successfully making something cheeky and goofy is easier said than done. Some of it started to feel like, ‘Oh, this is kind of like work. And I kind of hate this.’ … And then I started to second guess things. And I started to think, ‘Maybe there was no need for me to start this thing at all.’ … But I’ve done away with all of that negative thought. I think it’s cool. I think rock ‘n’ roll is cool. And everyone should do it.”

1. Hello Emerson: To Keep Him Here

To Keep Him Here, the lovingly realized third album from Sam Bodary’s band, Hello Emerson, took root in the years after he nearly lost his father. The record retraces these steps, beginning with a workday phone call from Bodary’s mother and then progressing through the tenuous days that followed, when Bodary’s father, David, remained hospitalized in Ann Arbor, Mich., his survival touch and go in the wake of a traumatic head injury sustained in a fall. In documenting his father’s accident and subsequent recovery, the musician tries and fails to find answers in religion (“Church”), wrangles with the temporary void created within the family’s routine amid the elder’s absence (“Dinners I”) and adjusts to a sudden role reversal when he finds himself escorting his dad to the bathroom for the first time (“To Keep Him Here”).

Despite the weighty implications, the revelations that arise throughout To Keep Him Here tend to be smaller and more intimate in scale. Even when Bodary’s father discusses the impact of his accident in one of a series of interview clips threaded throughout the LP, he refrains from any grand proclamations, saying only that the experience left him feeling like there is little about his life that he would change, in retrospect. 

“Even when people die or come close to it … you still have to figure out what you’re going to have for lunch, and you still have to keep walking forward,” Sam Bodary said. “And how my dad expresses, ‘Oh, I think I’m pretty happy,’ that coincides with how I feel approaching 30. I think I’m pretty happy, and I don’t know that in good conscience I could want for much more than I have right now. I get to do meaningful work at the library. … And I get time to make the kind of music I want to make and not have undue stress put on it. I could do this another 30 or 40 years. That sounds great.”

For all of us, really.