The 20 Best Experimental Albums of 2024

Avatar photo
best experimental albums of 2024

We’ve revealed our favorite albums of the year, along with our favorite songs, plus the best in metaljazz, hip-hop and reissues. And we’re continuing our coverage of the best music of 2024 with deeper dives.

Today we introduce a first for our year-end list coverage: the best experimental albums of 2024. “Experimental” is a complicated field to survey, for a handful of reasons. One, a lot of the artists that are described as such object the term for a variety of reasons, chief among them that their music is made with purpose and intent rather than throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. That’s valid! The 20 albums on this list cover a broad spectrum of music that’s unconventional, avant garde, transgressive, improvisational, outré and often anti-pop—except when, sometimes, it isn’t. They all caught our ears in new ways and they’re all fantastic.

Blurbs by Brad Cohan (BC), Jeff Terich (JT), and Patrick Pilch (PP).

Note: When you buy something through our affiliate links, Treble receives a commission. All albums we cover are chosen by our editors and contributors.


Alora Crucible - Oak Lace Apparition
House of Mythology

Alora Crucible – Oak Lace Apparition

Toby Driver is one of the headiest sonic explorers pioneering the avant garde underground. In his boundary-crossing groups maudlin of the Well and the long-running outfit Kayo Dot, Driver deconstructed and reinvented the metal idiom through an ambient, prog-rock and jazz-leaning prism and in his solo work he’s delved into ethereal blackened folk stylings. Driver’s Alora Crucible, his trio with violinist Timba Harris and keyboardist Ana Cristina Pérez Ochoa, is on a whole other level where the mystical converges with exquisite beauty. The meditative soul-crushers that make up Oak Lace Apparition, Alora Crucible’s second full-length, are unequivocally sublime, each shape-shifting and lush sound impeccably arranged for maximum emotional effect. At the forefront of their majestic and explorative cinematic landscapes is Driver’s hammered dulcimer, a percussion-strings instrument that achieves such an otherworldly twang, it’ll warm–and ultimately break–the coldest of hearts. – BC

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


best experimental albums of 2024 - Beings
No Quarter

Beings – There Is a Garden

Beings is a supergroup comprising musicians from all over the sonic spectrum—Dirty Three drummer Jim White, guitarist/songwriter Steve Gunn, prolific bassist Shahzah Ismaily and free jazz saxophonist Zoh Amba—that just happen to come together in revelatory ways on their debut album, There Is a Garden. Fittingly, there’s no unifying direction for the music on this album; the group takes on gently dreamy post-rock one moment, ominous blasts of noise another, skronky bashing the next and plonky free jazz wandering after that. But don’t mistake that for directionlessness or a lack of cohesion. Beings follow their muse through a fraught obstacle course but always end up somewhere interesting in the end, which on a standout like “Happy to Be,” can sometimes be a beautiful breath of fresh air. – JT

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)


best experimental albums of 2024 - Bensin
Bloxham Tapes

Bensin – Detritus

There’s not much info to go on about Australian producer Bensin, though a statement accompanying Detritus offers some insight into their methods, including “shit synths” and “pretty good synths” and that it’s a “compilation of ideas.” And indeed, there’s a lot happening on Detritus, its direction shifting quickly and often, which isn’t something you’d necessarily expect from 27-minute drones. But within the two sides of this cassette release are moments of menacing distortion, heavenly ambience, austere organ tones and dramatic darkness. It’s noisy but never aggressive or hostile, amorphous but always with intent—and always with something new to hear. – JT

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


Marionette

Andrea Belfi and Jules Reidy – dessus oben alto up

The collaborative work between an Italian artist and an Australian artist both based in Berlin, dessus oben alto up brings together two veterans of experimental music on a record that’s loose and constantly changing its shape, but always accessible, at times even fun and joyous. Described alternately as “post-rock,” “electroacoustic” and “avant garde jazz” depending on the source, dessus oben alto up is complex and fluid, the two artists engaged in a beautifully spacious improvisational session that gravitates toward melody seemingly congealed from ether. These four tracks, each named for one word in the album’s title, are alternately meditative and vibrant, with a groove that might catch you by surprise. This is less a match of instrumental abilities than a warm conversation over coffee, brushed rolls of drums juxtaposed against gentle washes of guitar and a sense of comfort that sets in early and never lets up. – JT

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


best experimental albums of 2024 - Dan Blacksberg
Relative Pitch

Dan Blacksberg – The Psychic/Body Sound System

Dan Blacksberg is, presumably, the only doom metal trombonist in the experimental scene, spewing out a hellacious din that will shake you to your very core. The Philadelphia musician has wreaked skronky havoc with guest spots on records by sludge-metal duo The Body, including their most recent one, and back in 2013, avant-garde jazz titan John Zorn, via his Tzadik label, released Pillar Without Mercy by Blacksberg’s extreme music-meets-Klezmer group, Deveykus. On his new solo trombone slab called The Psychic/Body Sound System, Blacksberg has crafted his ear-slicing magnum opus—an all-improvised, all-live sludge-feast free of any overdubs or effects. He runs the sonic gamut in unleashing an apocalyptic rumble that invokes the blown-out volume of Sunn O)), rattles off piercing squeals that will shatter glass, blows Albert Ayler-esque screams and creates psycho-jazz noisescapes cut from the Wolf Eyes cloth. You’ve never heard such trombone sounds in your life. – BC

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


Joshua Chuquimia Crampton - Estrella por Estrella
Puro Fantasia

Joshua Chuquimia Crampton – Estrella por Estrella

Joshua Chuquimia Crampton’s Estrella por Estrella is easily the most emotive “rock” record, as loosely as it can be qualified as such, of 2024. These guitar-only tracks are transcendent, the instrument a tool and Crampton its expert manipulator. Estrella por Estrella doesn’t capture lightning in a bottle, this album is lightning in a bottle. “Sol, mi música siempre es un regalo para ti,” reads the liner notes on Bandcamp. “I hope you reach for this one when it catches your eye.” If you capture 99.86% of the Solar System’s mass, expect some compression. Joshua Chuquimia Crampton’s flourishes are crushing, pummeling flares of fat distortion, the sun and all its overwhelming mass siphoned into a wav file. The guitarist is a brilliant conduit of our lifeforce star, the terrifying, beautiful center of it all. – PP

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


best experimental albums of 2024 - Sarah Davachi
Late

Sarah Davachi – The Head As Form’d in the Crier’s Choir

Canadian composer Sarah Davachi crafts gorgeously glacial drone pieces that leave a gentle impression over a long duration, sometimes each one comprising a full LP side of gorgeously still arrangements of horns and organ. The Head As Form’d in the Crier’s Choir features a full 91 minutes of music, a heavy lift by any measure but entirely within character. And in this case, sometimes the longer the better, each piece given ample room for slow-motion transcendence, the atmospheric presence of each piece approaching the sacred. In particular, the 22-minute closer “Night Horns” is a breathtaking piece that over its expansive run increasingly feels like a communion with the divine. – JT

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)


Drag City

Tashi Dorji – We Will Be Wherever the Fires Are Lit

I saw Tashi Dorji open for Sumac several years ago, and even on a lineup of metal artists, this solo guitarist still very nearly was the most intense act of the night. On his latest album We Will Be Wherever the Fires Are Lit, Dorji takes on an American primitivist-like free improvisational approach that nonetheless retains his signature ferocity, the sheer impact of his picking of the strings often seemingly raucous enough for them to snap under the pressure. But there’s often a kind of dark beauty in its quieter moments, like the strangely gorgeous “Center Can’t Hold…” It’s a not-so-delicate balance of delicateness and discordance. – JT

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


best experimental albums of 2024 - Ex-Easter Island Head
Rocket

Ex-Easter Island Head – Norther

One might listen to the title of Ex-Easter Island Head’s Norther and determine that this sounds a lot like dance music, or at least the kind of folktronic production you might have expected from Four Tet on his early full-lengths. And it is, rife with accessible loops and a surprisingly deep groove. The Liverpool group might on paper seem like an abstract academic exercise—employing prepared guitars and percussion to create a hypnotic work equally inspired by Steve Reich and Kompakt Records techno. In practice it’s revelatory, meditative in its employment of repetitive belltones on a track like “Easter,” or layering vocal samples in an almost house-like exercise on “Magnetic Language.” Norther defies categorization not by embracing dissonance but harmony—a work that feels warm and unexpectedly beautiful, open to limitless possibilities. – JT

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)


best experimental albums of 2024 - Fred Frith
Week-End

Fred Frith – Fifty

Prolific guitarist Fred Frith has played on hundreds of records, both as a member of groundbreaking rock in opposition bands Art Bears and Henry Cow as well as playing with no wave groups like Massacre and Material, plus work with Brian Eno, The Residents, Naked City and too many other artists to mention. His debut solo record, Guitar Solos, turned 50 this year, and to mark the occasion the guitar innovator re-released it with a companion album made in much the same way he created the original, right down to using the exact same guitar he did 50 years ago. However, this is a new set of improvisations, the likes of which are dazzling and diverse, whether through the percussive chimes of “Dawns,” the scrape and drone of “Outer Order” or the backward effects and tuning tweaks of “Unterwegs (For Roman)”. A legend returns to his roots and unearths something new and thrilling. – JT 

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


Jan Jelinek - Social Engineering
faitiche

Jan Jelinek – Social Engineering

The conceit behind Jan Jelinek’s Social Engineering is a somewhat silly one, particularly for an artist known for crafting such sublimely hypnotic soundscapes. In truth, this isn’t any less mesmerizing, but with a much more irreverent sense of humor. Each of the tracks on Social Engineering is built around text-to-speech readings of spam emails, with accompanying sonic backdrops that range from vocoder-driven ambient to chilly sonic architecture seemingly being built around each word in real time. The use of the digital garbage in his inbox is manipulated to different moods, at times surreal (“Permit me to inform you of my desire”) or funnily awkward (“Critical alert from Mi-CRO-soft”). A message about selling a kidney is punctuated with the message, “And if you are a Christian, happy Easter Monday,” and a blackmail porn threat turns ominous and threatening. If there’s a close comparison to be made, Social Engineering often resembles the plunderphonic folklorics of Matmos, but with fraud as its source material. It’s a clever and surprisingly rewarding commentary on the Internet’s evolution into a digital landfill, with some of its most obnoxious artifacts transformed into something worth preserving. – JT

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


Klein - Marked
Parkwuud

Klein – Marked

Marked, the latest album by London producer Klein, is categorized as “metal” on Apple Music. That’s not what it is—not in the blown-out noise-trap of “Blow the Whistle,” not in the hazy disoriented sound layers of “(breaking news)”, and definitely not in the Badalamenti waiting room jazz of “more than like.” But then again, this isn’t particularly friendly music to pop ears, and a significant chunk of the album is splattered with cacophonous guitar noise—in passing, you could certainly view this as metal in the same way that Sunn O))) is, particularly in the aggressive, distorted assault of “enemy of the state.” But Klein, whose body of work comprises ambient and glitch, cuts a figure here that’s much closer to the classic anything-goes industrial of Throbbing Gristle through a series of tracks that’s alternately hostile and quietly unsettling, sometimes assaulting with noise and elsewhere simply off-kilter and uncomfortable (that some of the abstract noise rock pieces here sound out of tune only goes to show how committed to dissonance Klein is). Is it metal? In aesthetic, perhaps not, but in attitude, this album goes ridiculously hard. – JT

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


Ideologic Organ

Kali Malone – All Life Long

It’s fitting that Kali Malone’s latest release arrives via Stephen O’Malley’s Ideologic Organ label, and features contributions from the Sunn O))) dronelord himself. Her music behaves in similar ways as that of the grimm-robed duo—moving, atmospheric, slow moving drone pieces—except they’re created through haunted long-held organ chords or brass arrangements rather than heavy walls of distorted guitar. All Life Long nonetheless tends to create a similar sort of out-of-body experience, its stark and austere organ tones fit more for a medieval church than concert hall, its nearly 80 minutes almost like a spiritual ceremony unto itself. There are moments when Malone holds the same note for a full minute, creating resonance through an unbroken wave of sound, only to turn that around with something more animated through the bright horn arrangement of “Retrograde Canon.” This is deeply moving stuff, even when it barely moves. – JT

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)


Palilala

Ava Mendoza – The Circular Train

Ava Mendoza is an avant-punk guitarist of the highest order who straddles the lines of jazz, blues, country, no wave and prog with free-thinking aplomb. Over the years, Mendoza has honed her craft alongside such luminaries as William Parker, Carla Bozulich and Bill Orcutt, just to name a few. On the The Circular Train, she flies completely solo, proving she’s just as lethal and downright arresting in going it alone. The Circular Train is proof positive of that, laying bare the all-encompassing guitar slaying repertoire Mendoza possesses in her deep arsenal. A travelogue of sorts (the conceptual pieces were influenced by and composed on the road in various locales in which she traces both historical and family lineage), the fretboard-hurdling heroics and emotive vocals Mendoza lets loose with on The Circular Train approaches such levels of sheer brutality and heartfelt beauty that’ll give you both whiplash and a spiritual reawakening. – BC

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


best experimental albums of 2024 - Orcutt
Palilalia

Bill Orcutt – How to Rescue Things

The best experimental and avant garde music prompts us to ask “what is this?” as much as “why is this?” On paper, Bill Orcutt’s How to Rescue Things does likewise, an album that pairs the prolific guitarist’s improvisational intensity with old recordings of orchestral and choir music. But then again, I once saw Orcutt shred in a church, so even in an abstract sense, it’s not that much of a stretch. In practice though? This is just gorgeous. “Accessible” isn’t a word that always applies with Orcutt, but this oddball pairing of elements—eerily pretty, ghostly and sublime—feels like being graced with the supernatural. Orcutt still lets loose when the occasion calls for it, but there’s a harmony between elements here that’s uncanny and haunting. True to its title, How to Rescue Things brings new life to outdated and often schmaltzy recordings by giving them new context—scuffing up their white picket fences and turning the profane into the sacred. – JT

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


Rafael Toral – Spectral Evolution

Spectral Evolution is a work decades in the making—not literally, but in terms of all the years of instrumental exploration, innovation and artistic evolution that Portuguese artist Rafael Toral had to go through in order to get here. Toral’s primary instrument is guitar, but in the ‘00s he began a 13-year project he dubbed The Space Program that involved self-made instruments such as oscillators and sine wave generators. With Spectral Evolution, he pairs the improvisational approach with those inventions with that of his guitar playing, and the result is an album-length piece that opens like an electronic rainforest, all flutters and squeaks and eventually takes shape into a lush piece of guitar-driven ambience. It merges strange alien effects with warm sheets of sound, beautifully human instrumental performances with otherworldly synthesis, a nearly impossible to define piece of work in which no part of its 47 minutes isn’t strangely, curiously captivating. – JT

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


best experimental albums of 2024 - Byron Westbrook
Shelter Press

Byron Westbrook – Translucents 

Over the last decade and a half, sound artist virtuoso and electronics noisemaker Byron Westbrook has galvanized the experimental music underground with brain-scrambling and cathartic sheets of drones, tones and timbre. Westbrook’s mettle as an top-notch electroacoustic soundscapist is crystallized in utterly gripping and kaleidoscopic detail on Translucents, arguably the L.A.-via-New York musician’s crowning achievement out of his deep catalog but certainly his most sprawling statement. A 41-minute-long continuous piece, Westbrook’s Translucents is the epitome of tour de force. A sonic odyssey of sound-deconstructing immensity, Translucents is composed of unpredictable vignettes that find Westbrook knob twiddling and ultimately crafting a broad and hallucinatory canvas in which hushed tones, dizzying shards, mangled blasts and tranquil spatterings are seemingly suspended in air. – BC

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


white suns - dredging heaven
Decoherence

White Suns – Dredging Heaven

Part noise, part no wave, part electronic and 100 percent pure and unadulterated terror, White Suns—the trio made up of guitarist/vocalist Kevin Barry, guitarist/electronics twiddler Rick Visser and drummer Dana Ma—have trudged on, albeit splintered across the country, almost 15years after brutal-prog pioneer Weasel Walter put out their debut long-player. With Dredging Heaven, White Suns remain one of the premier dredgers of the gnarliest, noisiest, spazziest and bleakest hellscapes ruling the DIY rock and experimental roost. All of their head-combustible components are still intact and as fractured and aggro as ever on Dredging Heaven: the perpetually nervous speak-screams, the herky-jerky drums wallop, the jet-engine rumble of the electronics and the wiry guitar frenetics. White Suns just get better with age. – BC

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


Dustin Wong and Gregory Uhlmann
Otherly Love

Dustin Wong & Gregory Uhlmann – Water Map

Guitarist Dustin Wong has made an indelible dent in underground rock with his singular brand of hypnotically playful string wizardry with the bands Ponytail and Ecstatic Sunshine and via his adventurous solo explorations. On the delightfully warped Water Map, Wong has found his kindred guitar spirit in experimental musician Gregory Uhlmann, a fellow L.A.-based sound sculptor who is a vital cog of that city’s improvised music scene. You won’t hear a guitar duo as sonically trippy and glitch-heavy as this one, so much so that it’s hard to fathom the rainbow-streaked vistas they mold are even birthed from stringed instruments. The guitar loop effect splatter and synthesizer-like swooshing and swirling dreamscapes that the duo cook up are so breezy and blissed-out, you’ll find yourself in a trance-like state for days on end. – BC            

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp


best experimental albums of 2024 - Yellow Swans
Jyrk

Yellow Swans – Out of Practice I/II

Noise duo Yellow Swans began a lengthy hiatus over a decade ago, going out on what was their strongest album to date, Going Places. Their first two releases of new recordings in 14 years finds Pete Swanson and Gabriel Saloman in a similar state, delivering epic and mesmerizing waves of static and strangely melodic noise. At least in part, anyway—that best describes side A of Out of Practice I, where its b-side is a harsher and more assaultive take on the same piece, recorded at Oblivion Access. Out of Practice II—which they jokingly call their “covers” record, due to the placement of mangled recordings of 13th Floor Elevators and Suicide—is a bit more like Swanson’s solo material, tides of lapping noise that starts to resemble actual dance music, a rabid and feral thumping, whereas the flipside gradually and intentionally obliterates a classic punk ballad with sheer sonic annihilation. Damn is it great to hear this group again. – JT

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp (I)(II)


Treble is supported by its patrons. Become a member of our Patreon, get access to subscriber benefits, and help an independent media outlet continue delivering articles like these.

Scroll To Top