The Best Songs of 2024

Without any pretence of being exhaustive, and without trying to fully represent the editorial staff's rankings, we thought we'd share the playlists that best capture each of our own "musical year". The songs that stood out within a certain genre, the songs symbolic of breakout artists or major returning names – or, more simply, the songs that meant something to those of us who listened to them.

Gabriele Benzing

“Fuck the world”: in a world that seems a little more inhuman every day, how can you not agree with Vampire Weekend? But the line that opens the ride of “Ice Cream Piano” isn't just an outburst. It's a starting point for trying to shred into confetti that construction of our anxiety for control that we call the world. Because it's not possible to “give measure to the measureless”, to borrow the words of Edoardo Camurri in his Introduction to Reality. “Everything around us is so vast/ It skews the scale”, as Sam Sodomsky (The Bird Calls) sings amid the arpeggios of “Going Insane”, “And the best advice we’re given is don’t look down”.

Better to look down, to stare straight into the vertigo of being alive. And to choose which path to take: toward suffering or toward wonder, toward fear or toward splendor. Fear is the wall of our zone of interest, the screen behind which spreads the horror recounted by Little Kid in the climax of “Bad Energy”. But if we choose splendor, everything can change. We can discover the secret of a carefree life, “just happy watching the wide world go by”, chasing the rustic roughness of Felice Brothers. We can even try to dive beyond the threshold, in search of that “Sublime Eternal Love” evoked by David Lynch through the mirror of Chrystabell's voice. “Jump and trust”, Camurri invites us. “The way you trust someone when you love them”.

Marco Bercella

Paolo Ciro

Michele Corrado

There are so many musical genres and scenes, both global and national, that one can follow today, and so many treasures that each of these fields holds, that every passing year it becomes harder to put together a playlist that's both concise and satisfying.

The only way to tackle a mission like this is to set yourself strict rules. In my case, otherwise I'd never be done, I told myself: "okay, 2024, just 24 songs". That's how this erratic, uninhibited run of tracks came about, one that couldn't care less about genres and boundaries, and cares only about beauty and "stickiness".

I promise that next year I'll pick 25 tracks instead, and the year after that 26, and so on, until one day something stops me.

Valerio D’Onofrio

Giuliano Delli Paoli

Claudio Fabretti

Once again this year I tried to condense 12 months of listening into a wide-ranging playlist, the fruit of yet another omnivorous musical binge. From Chelsea Wolfe's explorations of the abyss between trip-hop pulses to the long-awaited return of The Cure, from the sure bets Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Primal Scream to the revelations Ductape, Melike Şahin and Allie X, from the driving rhythms of Gossip, St. Vincent and Juliana Gattas to the sophisticated acoustic ballads of Vera Sola and Johnny Blue Skies, here's my recap of the year just gone in thirty songs.

Alberto Farinone

Sixty songs in no particular order from this 2024. As usual, the hardest part was finding a criterion for choosing them. I tried to favor songs with more dynamic rhythms and artists I hadn't included in my annual albums ranking. It doesn't claim to be exhaustive. In some cases the tracks come from records that didn't fully satisfy me. Conversely, albums I loved a great deal aren't represented on this list. To give it some semblance of order, I tried to sequence them by affinity, but they can be listened to in any order.

In the end, a special tribute to our own country with 7 tracks by Italian artists.

More than ever this year, I found the '80s again in the songs I loved most - not necessarily the most obvious ones with the most predictable sound, but rather those from the end of the decade, which were starting to get a little grubby, shedding, not without effort, the glitter and the fury.

Fabio Guastalla

Vassilios Karagiannis

Albums and singles now follow completely separate paths for me. So my most-listened songs of the year draw in a totally random way from pop, dance and electro singer-songwriter fare, all strictly declined in the feminine. From the house euphoria of tracks like “thicc” by Shygirl, without a doubt the standout track of the year, and “Edge Of Saturday Night” by Blessed Madonna, we move seamlessly to the tongue-in-cheek pop of Sabrina Carpenter and the chart-smashing hit “Good Luck, Babe!“, landing on the Eighties nostalgia of Fabiana Palladino and the rubbery anthems of Magdalena Bay. Any sense to it? None whatsoever. Fun? Maximum. 

Claudio Lancia

Federico Romagnoli

Marco Sgrignoli

Where is rock in 2024? Some swear it's dead and gone, others see it as a sacred flame whose cult is now tended only by mythological priests, old glories whose comebacks are hailed as the sole glimmers of hope in an ever-darkening night. Yet things stand differently, and with this playlist I hope to at least partly prove it. The long first part of the selection surveys artists for whom rock is a fundamental ingredient - not necessarily the only one, but ever since the mid-Sixties we've understood that stylistic hybridization is the genre's true winning card, its elixir of long life. R&B, synth-pop, new “hypnagogic” drifts perhaps backed by a bedroom-pop approach (if not hyperpop): the range is wide, and revivalism is not its defining trait. There isn't only post-post-punk, in short: in fact, if creativity is what you care about, that's probably not the area to focus on.

Moving on through the tracklist, there's also room for a fairly deep dive into prog-rock - again putting original formulas at the center: Opeth are good, sure, but with the post-emo revolution underway, fixating on them would be pretty limiting!

But the fortune of this era lies in the plurality of genres to draw from, wide enough to have effectively stripped rock of what was once its undisputed centrality. So here's a second part devoted to electronic music, jazz as unorthodox as possible, straight-up pop, balancing names in the spotlight with discoveries from off the beaten path. Plus a final surprise, for anyone up for an immersive listen. If 2024 struck you as a year short on exciting releases, cheer up: it's only because you were looking in the wrong direction!

Martina Vetrugno

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08/02/2026