The Best Reissues of 2024
We’ve revealed our favorite albums of the year, along with our favorite songs, plus the best in metal. And now we’re continuing our coverage of the best music of 2024 with deeper dives. Today it’s the best of what was old(er)—the best reissues of 2024, including classic albums, compilations of rare material, box sets, archival releases and more.
Blurbs by Adam Blyweiss (AB), Emily Reily (ER), 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.
Broadcast – Spell Blanket: Collected Demos 2006-2009
Spell Blanket is the first new music from Broadcast since the untimely passing of the group’s vocalist Trish Keenan, as well as their first new music in over a decade. It’s also the final “new” music we’ll ever hear from the UK psych-pop group, arriving in the form of a set of unfinished demos of what might have been their fourth album. And yet despite that fact, it’s utterly glorious, a treasure trove of unheard music that’s every bit as strange and delightful as their proper albums, sometimes consisting of just a few stray bits of melody, other times arriving in the form of nearly finished and spectacular songs. Where “March of the Fleas” reveals the group in hypnotic pop sound-bath mode, “Roses Red” finds something off-kilter and unsettling in seemingly innocent sounds, while “Hip Bone to Hip Bone” feels so much vaster than one minute and 18 seconds would usually allow. Spell Blanket is both celebration and farewell, a tribute to the magic of this singular group and its leader, who left us far too soon. – JT
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
John Cale – Paris 1919 Deluxe Edition/The Academy In Peril
John Cale’s released a lot of music of late, including two new full-length albums in the past three years. Add to that these two welcome, long overdue reissues of Cale’s more experimental second album The Academy in Peril and, especially, his spectacular third album, Paris 1919. Both feature bonus material and expanded liner notes, including rehearsals, demos, alternate takes and the nine-minute 2024 reworking of Paris 1919’s title track, titled “Fever Dream 2024: You’re a Ghost.” Still, nothing compares to the main event, whether it’s the rollicking “Macbeth,” the majestic “Paris 1919,” or the lively “Child’s Christmas in Wales,” which has been a staple on my holiday playlist for years. – JT
Listen/Buy: Spotify (Paris 1919) (The Academy) | Rough Trade (vinyl)
Cocteau Twins & Harold Budd – The Moon and the Melodies
Sometimes the best reissues are those that have a wealth of bonus material, or an impressive presentation and revamped artwork, or a new mix (like, for instance, The Replacements’ late-’80s material being presented in a welcome new light). Sometimes, however, it’s just the fact of seeing a wonderful album back in print. Cocteau Twins’ 1986 collaboration with Harold Budd has been out of print for most of its existence, never given a second pressing until now, just a couple years short of its 40th anniversary. (It’s also on Spotify, sure…) A kind of companion to the same year’s Victorialand, The Moon and the Melodies is a collaborative work that emphasizes the group’s more abstract and airy sounds, occasionally veering back into their signature dream pop sound (“Sea, Swallow Me”), but more often drifting into a gauzy ether. – JT
Listen/Buy: Spotify | Rough Trade (vinyl)
Alice Coltrane – The Carnegie Hall Concert
Alice Coltrane released only one live album during her lifetime, 1978’s Transfiguration, which makes her something of an outlier among jazz giants of the same era (by comparison, her late husband John Coltrane released five while he was alive, and more than 50 archival live recordings have been released since). The Carnegie Hall Concert is a rare update to this otherwise thin corner of her discography, and a brilliant one at that. Primarily comprising pieces from her celebrated 1971 album Journey in Satchidananda, in addition to a take on John Coltrane’s “Africa,” the performance features Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp on saxophone as well as prolific jazz veterans Clifford Jarvis and Cecil McBee. And it’s a revelation. Once existing only as a bootleg, the 1971 concert is a rare glimpse into an incredible ensemble’s onstage chemistry, chaotic magic and hypnotic majesty. While the spiritual aspect of her music has been given rightful attention in recent years, here it’s the physicality that stands out, a dynamic force of nature that offers a look at a more complete whole of a legendary artist. – JT
Listen/Buy: Spotify | Rough Trade (vinyl)
The dB’s – Stands for deciBels (Remaster)
America in the first half of the 1980s was a nervy jangle-pop hotbed, as lots of awkward guys with a foot out the door of college were musically emotional well before emo music was a thing. You could argue that R.E.M. were the best to ever do it, but there’s something to be said for other musicians in their orbit geographically, on tour, and in the studio. Among these were Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple, and their NYC-by-way-of-North-Carolina band The dB’s. Their 1981 debut LP Stands for deciBels was remastered this year, reminding us how magical it could be to wail about love, parents, and sometimes even politics over clean guitar earworms and snappy drums. Their formula injects CBGB punk and post-punk (“Cycles Per Second”) and the jittery bar rock of Elvis Costello (“Bad Reputation”) into the album’s original 11-song lineup and bonus cut “Judy.” – AB
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp
Paul McCartney and Wings – One Hand Clapping
Scarcely a year goes by without some remastered Beatles material, and this year was no different. But the best Beatles-related material to come out of the archives in 2024 was the long-shelved One Hand Clapping sessions recorded at Abbey Road from Paul McCartney’s Wings. Recorded for a cinematic experience intended to parallel that of Let It Be, this live-in-studio session didn’t come to fruition quite as planned, but the resulting recordings are where, as John-Paul Shiver put it in his review of the project, McCartney “finds his swag, deep in the mullet.” These are tight, locked-in, high-energy versions of songs from McCartney’s post-Beatles catalog that range from the bombastic (“Live and Let Die”) to the richly spacious (“Maybe I’m Amazed”) to charged-up rockers like “Jet” and “Soily.” Above all this set of songs is loose and fun, a live album by any other name even without the audience—and one that would have been a gas to witness in person. – JT
Listen/Buy: Spotify | Rough Trade (vinyl)
Talking Heads – Talking Heads: 77 (Super Deluxe Edition)
Uh-oh, love comes to town in a big red box. Instead of trying to continue celebrating the recent explosion of Talking Heads content with a middling tribute album, just keep going to the source. The largest iterations of this new archive of the band’s debut from 47 years ago include master-tape remasters on 12” and 7” vinyl, CDs and Blu-Rays with mixes for multiple technologies, and 80 pages of photos, writing, and ephemera. The original tracklist already had energy aplenty, but it’s supplemented with B-sides like “I Wish You Wouldn’t Say That” last heard on their greatest-hits comp Sand in the Vaseline, a freewheeling October 1977 live show from CBGB, and a fascinating series of “pop” mixes of songs like “Psycho Killer” that feel relocated from that stage to the stage of Saturday Night Live. – AB
Listen/Buy: Spotify | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
They Are Gutting a Body of Water – Swanlike (Loosies 2020 – 2023)
An album is to a pack as a box set is to a carton. But 22 loosies? You gotta know a guy for that. Luckily They Are Gutting a Body of Water’s got us covered. Swanlike hooks it up bodega style, serving up singles from whatever they’ve got cracked behind the counter. Cloudy breakbeats and hollowed out demos, heavy clipping and Parlies, Reds, and Golds. There’s always been a progressive variety and unique edge to TAGABOW’s music, but the sparks fly off Loosies like a welder’s first day. Swanlike is raw, comprehensive, and highly representative of the amorphous state of 2020s shoegaze. – PP
Listen: Spotify
TV on the Radio – Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes (20th Anniversary Edition)
TV on the Radio’s debut album Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes added a bit of physicality and human muscle to the darkly visionary genreless indie sounds that the group debuted on their 2003 EP Young Liars, and as singular a sound it was at the time, it’s aged amazingly. The swirl of woodwinds against the droning bass buzz of “The Wrong Way,” the hypnotic shoegaziness of “Dreams,” the dreamy a cappella of “Ambulance”—these songs felt like they were breaking the rules at the time, and two decades later, they only reinforce how ahead of their time the group was. For its anniversary, the album’s been expanded with bonus highlights like demos, the “New Health Rock” single, their Yeah Yeah Yeahs cover and so on. But more than anything what stands out most is just how powerful a record it was to begin with. – JT
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Turntable Lab (vinyl)
Various Artists – Congo Funk!: Sound Madness from the Shores of the Mighty Congo River
The always great Analog Africa label previously assembled essential mixtapes of regional grooves like 2021’s Cameroon Garage Funk. And Congo Funk!: Sound Madness from the Shores of the Mighty Congo River is another impeccable compilation of Afro-funk from Kinshasa and Brazzaville. It’s a diverse selection of deep cuts that comprise the bold and brassy (“Sungu Lubuka” by Petelo Vicka et Sol Nzazi), the impeccably cool (“Musique Tshiluba” by Abeti et Les Redoutables) and the energetic and immediate (“Ngantsie Soul” by Les Bantous de la Capitale). This phenomenally curated collection apparently took months of sorting through thousands of tracks, which offers the suggestion that maybe we haven’t heard the last Congo Funk collection from the Analog Africa camp. Here’s hoping, but in the meantime, this is a hell of a set of grooves from the archives. – JT
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)
Various Artists – Even the Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971-1996
Amid political upheaval and creative suppression, music still finds a way. Even the Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971-1996, the first compilation of Ukrainian music that spans Soviet rule and its aftereffects, is proof. From that sonically vast time period comes a surprisingly diverse mix of genres melding western and traditional influences, sounds that churned in city centers around Ukraine—the only places people could enjoy artistic freedom. Everything from disco to goth, house, post-punk and jazz are represented here. The group Cukor Bila Smert, or Sugar White Death, was part of the ethno-gothic underground music scene that took root in Kyiv around the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Their atmospheric offering, “The Great Hen-Yuan River,” shimmers with organs; Svitlana Nianio’s haunting vocals express isolation and emotion. The compilation is also an example of how Ukrainians subtly created their own underground and protest music. The Kyiv-based all-male group Kobza, whose song “Bunny” opens the album, used their own version of a bandura, which sounded similar to the electric guitar—an instrument decried by the Soviets. – ER
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Amazon (vinyl)
90 Day Men – We Blame Chicago
Between the late ’90s and early ’00s, Chicago’s 90 Day Men built a unique and strange sonic world of their own that yielded three great and increasingly more experimental records before their split—evolving from intricate math-rock to something more wildly psychedelic. Though underrated in their time, the group’s members only continued to build on that legacy, including Brian Case’s current band FACS and Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe’s electronic and film score work. We Blame Chicago compiles the band’s complete catalog, including rare and unreleased material, all of which is well worth exploring. Though it’s still in the stark elegance of records such as 2002’s To: Everybody, or the soulful psychedelia of their swan song, 2004’s Panda Park, where 90 Day Men’s intricate glory is at its best. – JT
Listen/Buy: Bandcamp | Rough Trade (vinyl)
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