Follow all our Best of 2024 coverage (along with previous year-end lists) here.
A great cover song is hard enough to pull off. Doing it over and over again enough times to make a great cover album is something like a miracle. This year, miracles abounded. We awarded only the third or fourth five-star album in the site’s history. That’s our number one, naturally. But if we’d run a full review of our number two album, it might have gotten five stars too.
Our list includes tributes to everyone from Lou Reed to Low to Tom Petty—twice. It includes jammy experimental covers of ’90s alt-rock, fingerpicked guitar covers of Kraftwerk, and skankin’ ska covers of Weird Al. It translates Leonard Cohen into Hebrew and Talking Heads into Spanish. It honors Fleetwood Mac before Fleetwood Mac and deeper Bob Dylan cuts than you can imagine. (Seriously, imagine the most obscure Bob Dylan song you can. These are more obscure than that.) It was that kind of year.
Does the world actually need another countrified tribute to the Rolling Stones? We’ve already seen 1997’s Stone Country and 2011’s more alt-country focused Paint It Black, not to mention the myriad one-off covers stemming out of Nashville and Texas. (I dare say we mentioned many of them