Without pretensions of completionism, but not even that of giving full voice to the editorial staff's rankings, we thought we'd let you listen to the playlists that best represent each one's “musical year”. The songs that stood out within a certain genre, the symbolic songs of revelation artists or great confirmations – or, more simply, the songs that meant something to us who listened to them.
Gabriele Benzing
“Fuck the world”: in a world that seems a little more inhumane every day, how can you not agree with Vampire Weekend? But it's not just an outburst that opens the ride of “Ice Cream Piano”. It is a starting point to try to transform that construction of our control anxiety that we call into confetti world. Because it is not possible to “give measure to the immeasurable”, to put it in 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 between the arpeggios of “Going Insane”, “And the best advice we're given is don't look down”.
Better to look down, stare at the vertigo of living. And choose which path to take: towards suffering or towards wonder, towards fear or towards splendor. Fear is the wall of our area of interest, the screen behind which the horror told by the Little Kid spreads climax of “Bad Energy”. But if we choose splendor, everything can change. We can discover the secret of a life careless“just happy watching the wide world go by”, chasing the rustic roughness of the 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. “How do you trust someone when you love them.”
Marco Bercella
Paolo Ciro
Michele Corrado
There are so many musical genres and scenes, global and national, that today it is possible to follow and so many treasures that each of these areas holds, that with each passing year it becomes more difficult to produce a playlist that is concise and satisfying.
The only way to tackle such a mission is to impose stringent rules on yourself. In my case, otherwise I wouldn't finish it, I said to myself “okay, 2024, only 24 songs”. Thus was born an inconsistent and uninhibited string of songs, which doesn't care about genres and limits, but only about beauty and “stickiness”.
I promise that next year I will choose 25 songs instead and the next year 26 and so on, until one day something stops me.
Valerio D'Onofrio
Giuliano Delli Paoli
Claudio Fabretti
This year too I tried to condense 12 months of listening into a wide-ranging playlist, the result of yet another omnivorous musical binge. From Chelsea Wolfe's explorations of the abyss between trip-hop pulsations to the long-awaited return of the Cure, from the certainties Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Primal Scream to the revelations Ductape, Melike Şahin and Allie ballad acoustics by Vera Sola and Johnny Blue Skies, my summary of the past year in thirty songs.
Alberto Farinone
Fabio Ferrara
Sixty songs in no particular order from this 2024. As usual, the most complex part was finding a choice criterion. I tried to favor songs with more dynamic rhythms and artists that I didn't include in my annual album chart. It does not claim to be exhaustive. In some cases the songs are contained within works that did not fully satisfy me. Conversely, albums that I loved very much are not represented in this list. To give a semblance of regularity, I tried to order them by assonance but they can be listened to in random sequence.
At the end, a special tribute to our country with 7 songs by Italian authors.
Stefano Fiori
Never like this year have I found the 80s in the songs I liked most, not necessarily the most obvious ones with the most predictable sounds, but rather those from the end of the decade which were starting to get dirty, leaving behind, with a bit of difficulty, sequins and fury .
Fabio Guastalla
Vassilios Karagiannis
Albums and singles for me now proceed in a completely distinct way. So the most listened to songs of the year are drawn in a completely random way from pop, dance and electro songwriting, all strictly feminine. From the house euphoria of songs such as “thicc” by Shygirl, absolutely the star song of the year, and “Edge Of Saturday Night” by Blessed Madonna we move seamlessly to pop tongue-in-cheek by Sabrina Carpenter and others hits chart-busting “Good Luck, Babe!”, landing on Fabiana Palladino's Eighties nostalgia and Magdalena Bay's rubbery anthems. Sense? Any. Fun? Maximum.
Claudio Lancia
As it used to be done with cassettes to give to friends at Christmas, now it's done with playlists on Spotify. Here are one hundred songs, plus a few bonus tracks, which represent a selection of my favorite listens of 2024. These are the artists and some of the songs that have most accompanied my days over the last twelve months. A rather transversal sequence, which I hope will intrigue you and keep you company. Happy listening and Happy Holidays to everyone…
Daniel Moore
Federico Romagnoli
Marco Sgrignoli
Where is rock in 2024? Someone swears that it is no longer there, someone sees it as a sacred fire to whose cult only mythological priests are now devoted, old glories whose returns are hailed as the only glimmers of hope in a night that is becoming increasingly darker. Yet things are different, and with this playlist I hope to be able to at least partially demonstrate it. The entire long first part of the selection reviews proposals in which rock is a fundamental ingredient: not the only one, perhaps, but it has been at least since the mid-1960s that we have understood how stylistic hybridization is the true trump card of the genre , his elixir of life. R&Bsynth-pop, new “hypnagogic” derivatives perhaps supported by a bedroom-pop (if not hyperpop) approach: the range is wide and does not have revivalism as its fundamental trait. In short, there is not only post-post-punk: indeed, if you care about creativity, that is probably not the area to focus on.
Continuing the tracklist, there is also space for a rather broad thrust in the prog-rock direction – even there putting the original formulas at the center: Opeth are good, for goodness sake, but with the post-emo revolution underway, fixating on them would be quite limiting!
But the fortune of this era lies in the plurality of genres to draw from, vast enough to have effectively taken away from rock what was once an undisputed centrality. Here is therefore a second part dedicated to electronics, jazz as unorthodox as possible, pop done and finished, balancing between names at the center of the spotlight and discoveries outside the most popular countries. Plus a final surprise, for those who want to indulge in immersive listening. If 2024 seemed like a year lacking in exciting releases, rejoice: it's only because you looked the wrong way!
Maria Teresa Soldani
Ossidiana Speri
Martina Vetrugno
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
