When there’s so many full-lengths and standalone singles to highlight during year-end list season, it’s easy to overlook the format that often serves as a middle ground, a kind of reset. Whether introducing a new artist or reintroducing the sound of a more established one, collecting leftovers or building a singular little world, there were plenty of EPs that stood out in 2024. Following our list of the best albums and best album covers of 2024, here are 25 of this year’s best EPs.
25. Mei Semones, Kabutomushi
Noodly, poppy, jazzy – these adjectives don’t often go together, but they all suit Mei Semones’ Kabutomushi, an ambitious blend of bossa nova, math rock, and jazz. It’s an approach she showcased on her debut EP, 2022’s Tsukino, but here she expands it with ornate arrangements – string players Noah Leong and Claudius Agrippa, in particular, trace Semones’ nimble guitar work in a dance that’s even more compelling than the seamless fusion of genres. Working with producer Kai Tsao, the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter sings in both English and Japanese throughout the EP, whose tone is both affecting and affectionate; it fills the air with lush warmth, but can leave a prickly feeling when you least expect it.
24. two blinks, i love you, ep2
two blinks, i love you songs can be blurry yet direct, aching yet vibrant. On Liam Brown’s first EP under the moniker, their bedroom folk quality reflected the singer-songwriter’s solitary and unfiltered process. With ep2, though, he tracked the songs in a studio with engineer Sophie Ellis, remaining spontaneous while widening his indie rock palette, stunning in both its hushed and energic moments. Influenced by his trip to New York – how a big city can both make you feel both fantastically alive and aware of your smallness – the record starts out charmingly conversational, picks up the pace, and lands in a more exposed and cathartic place than you’d expect, even given the confessional style of songwriting. “When I look back on my life/ I’ll scrape that barrel dry/ Say things that make me cry,” he sings, like he hasn’t already started. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with two blinks, i love you.
23. LEYA, I Forget Everything
Interweaving detuned harp, beguiling strings, and droning, operatic vocals, LEYA‘s music seeks to embody difficult feelings, often somewhere on the spectrum between ecstasy and uneasiness, without registering as difficult in itself. Their new mini-album I Forget Everything, arriving on the heels of extensive touring and collaborations with fashion houses, filmmakers, and choreographers, finds them recentering their approach of simplicity and experimentation. What pours out is a raw humanity that remains palpable yet elusive, a profound loss that cannot be named yet permeates their drifting tapestry of sound, warped as memory. Even if everything’s starting to fade, LEYA suggest, you might find bits of it in the music. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with LEYA.
22. Little Simz, Drop 7
The latest installment in Little Simz’s Drop EP series can easily be dismissed as a one-off. But it’s been so long since the last one – four years and two whole LPs – that checking in with the rapper at this point in time is a different kind of pleasure. Drop 7 feels immediately less claustrophobic than its lockdown-inspired predecessor, and way more confident: “Nothing left to prove ’cause I done enough,” the Mercury Prize winner declares on ‘Torch’, but she’s not resting on her laurels just yet. With production from Jakwob, the EP is leaner and looser, careening between moods as well as styles, from Jersey club to Brazilian funk. It may not be among her most urgent efforts, but it’s a captivating listen.
21. Greg Mendez, First Time / Alone
Greg Mendez’s first EP for Dead Oceans isn’t what you’d necessarily expect from an artist who’s just signed to a bigger indie label. Its unadorned intimacy is sparser and more fragile than his 2023 self-titled album – still the best introduction to the Philadelphia singer-songwriter’s sound – but just as inviting. Yet there’s also a weirdness to his approach that will surprise even longtime fans – the lack of guitars on ‘First Time and ‘Mountain Dew Hell’, the pitched-up vocals on ‘Pain Meds’. He wrote these four songs while recovering from intensive wrist surgery, which rendered his right hand temporarily useless. The most traditional track, by Mendez’s standards, is ‘Alone’ – another confession of lonesomeness, this time blanketed by a familiar warmth. “I’m a lonely winter away from giving in,” he sings, which leaves him not surrendering, but wanting more.
20. Ada Lea, notes
“Ideas flow from the tip of my pen/ And I flow like that, too, if I want,” Ada Lea sings on ‘come on, baby! be a good girl for the camera’, a highlight from her notes EP. This collection of unreleased tracks doesn’t represent everything the Montreal-based songwriter has written in that flow state, instead neatly packaging four songs that could’ve landed on her excellent sophomore record, one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden. They don’t tangle themselves the way the songs on that album, or 2019’s what we say in private, tend to do, but you get to hear different – sometimes simpler, sometimes a little blurrier – meditations on those same themes: home, love that keeps you waiting, an industry that feeds on your image. But notes is a portrait of an artist in real time, in between songs: curated, but true.
19. Gel, Persona
More and more bands try to inject real, swaggering hooks into hardcore’s visceral intensity, but few do it as efficiently as New Jersey’s Gel manage on their Persona EP. Produced by Jon Markson, the follow-up to their 2023 LP Only Constant – itself under 17 minutes long – doesn’t clean up their sound so much as accentuate the individual power of its parts, including Sami Kaiser’s Carl Jung-inspired lyrics. The title track even goes as far as to quote the Ingmar Bergman film of the same name: “The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed. Every inflection and every gesture a lie.” Gel dig deep into the subconscious here, making each corner feel big and unrelenting.
18. Verraco, Breathe… Godspeed
Verraco’s dance music is brilliantly detailed, evocative, and mind-bending; its most absorbing quality, though, is its devilish charm. The songs on Breathe... Godspeed whir, burble, and wink at the listener in unexpected ways: the Colombian producer and DJ violently stretch the push-and-pull of the opening track, ‘0∞’, to its absolute limit, while on ‘Godspeed >’ and ‘Climaxing I Breathe’, he’s so stoked on the thrill of building tension that the drop becomes redundant. The glistening, surprisingly melodic closer, ‘Sí, Idealízame’, smooths things off, but even then, the title suggests it’s not without the hint of a sneer.
17. Holly Macve, Time Is Forever
After Lana Del Rey, an inspiration to Holly Macve since her teenage years, followed her on Instagram a few years ago, the singer-songwriters met in person; following a difficult breakup, Del Rey then hosted Macve in her Los Angeles home and heard her new demos. There, they recorded ‘Suburban House’, the collaboration that’s at the heart of Macve’s February EP Time Is Forever, whose songs were then added onto her latest full-length, Wonderland. Though musically nostalgic in its evocation of an otherworldly past, Macve employs her wistful, breathtaking voice and lush instrumentation in a way that doesn’t linger on old memories so much as it reaches for a starry, beautiful future, one she can wholly call her own. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Holly Macve.
16. Yetsuby, b_b
b_b, the latest solo effort from South Korean artist Yejin Jang — one half of the electronic duo Salamanca — hardly comes from a place of tranquility. Yetsuby treats the EP’s ambient-leaning tones with bubbling curiosity, as each song builds upon its fantastical prompt, with titles like ‘Who Swallowed the Chimes at the Random Place’ and ‘If I Drink This Potion’. Sedated yet wondrous, the songs often recall the gentle immateriality of yeule’s most minimally gorgeous, liminal work, which doesn’t prevent it from glitching out of shape or bursting with colour, as in ‘1,2,3, Soleil’. With twinkling keys and soft horns, closer ‘The Sublime Embrace’ earns its name, which acts also as a summation of the whole record.
15. Joan Shelley, Mood Ring
At the outset of Mood Ring, Joan Shelley offers an unusual proposition: “Moody, let’s throw a party.” Grief seeps through the Kentucky singer-songwriter’s first release in two years, but even as she sings of dying relationships on the opening title track, longtime collaborators Nathan Salsburg and James Elkington cast a permanent glow. In fact, the promise of something everlasting illuminates almost every song: as natural as the creek’s song, as human as a long embrace. This is Shelley as tender and generous as ever, but after 2022’s more expansively arranged The Spur, she also homes in on an unspoken, almost foolish simplicity. “It’s sad in tone in hopes you’ll hear it,” she sings on and of ‘Fire in the Morning’, which is just her voice on nylon-string guitar. I hope you hear it, too – the song, sadness, and whatever other emotion it springs up.
14. Wilco, Hot Sun Cool Shroud
Wilco’s last full-length, 2023’s Cousin, isn’t one I’ve revisited since its release, so I had no reason to expect Hot Sun Cool Shroud – a collection of outtakes released in conjunction with their 8th Solid Sound Festival – to win me over. But with the shorter format condensing the LP’s wide-ranging experimentation, the 6-track effort turns out one of the band’s most compelling and cohesive releases in years. It’s not the warmth that pulls you in so much as the ways they manipulate and dial it in – reaching a melting point on the opening track, sugary sweetness on ‘Ice Cream’, boiling fever on ‘Livid’. It’s meant to evoke a “summertime-after-dark kind of feeling,” according to Jeff Tweedy, and with that comes one final wisp of romance: “Once you’re born, a single drop of sun/ A ray of light holds you in its arms/ Once you’re gone, you shine on in your friends.”
13. Djrum, Meaning’s Edge
Throughout Meaning’s Edge, Djrum’s first release in five years, different worlds collide: genres, sure – techno, ambient, IDM – but also conflicting sensibilities. The 8-minute centerpiece ‘Crawl’ storms and hurls at you for almost its entire runtime, with the UK producer and DJ stacking glitchy electronics and a smattering of drum sounds flickering on the edge of chaos; yet, in the background of its third act, a soothing soundscape builds to encompass it all. Djrum introduces a new instrument to his palette here, the flute – switching between the bansuri, shakuhatchi, and the Western Classical flute – using it not as the main focus but rather another element he can distort and amplify at will. No matter how many times you replay it, this is dance music that’ll always flick you someplace new, whether filling a room or placed under the microscope.
12. Kassie Krut, Kassie Krut
On ‘Reckless’, the opening track of Kassie Krut’s self-titled EP, the trio – former Palm members Kasra Krut and Eve Alpert, plus producer Matt Anderegg – give themselves one hell of an introduction: “If you ask me who I wanna be/ I’ma spell it out so it’s plain to see: K-A-S-S-I-E-K-R-U-T-T-T-T.” Though the band has been putting out music under the moniker since 2022, Kassie Krut presents itself as less of a weird dance music project from one of indie’s premiere math rockers, but a statement of purpose: these are freaky, invigorating, and strangely affecting ragers that require no prior knowledge of Palm’s output. They somehow split the difference between metallic and melodic, hooking you in with rattling bass and spine-chilling synths before thinning it out into noise, or something akin to human emotion.
11. Saya Grey, QWERTY II
Saya Gray’s QWERTY landed on our list of the best EPs of 2023 on the strength of its dazzling, open-ended songwriting. This year, before beginning the rollout of her debut LP, the art-pop musician delivered the second installment of the series. It’s just as entrancing, a little more streamlined, yet still bugged-out, collaging together ideas that serve as “the ying to the yang of the first half.” ‘.. YOU , A FOOL’ retains the mania and constant hum of a love lost, while ‘DIP AD33 / W . I . D . F . U’ gives in to the escapist pleasures of a hollow affair. But as adept as Gray is at crowding a song with sonic and vocal layers, she makes room for stark confessions like, “I’ve been alone for so long/ You notice how it’s starting to show.” It’s no surprise her upcoming full-length is called SAYA; there’s clarity and self-definition amidst the madness.
10. Cindy, Swan Lake
Cindy’s songs need very few elements to draw you into their spell: a sweet guitar riff, vocal harmonies, bass, maybe a hint of percussion. The band’s last album, Why Not Now?, proved as much. With its follow-up, Swan Lake, singer-songwriter Karina Gil demonstrates they also don’t need more than a few songs to make a project worth revisiting. The 6-track EP untangles its magic slowly and beautifully: the smallest piece from any one of its contributors can shift the whole atmosphere. For Gil, lullabies are a form of hazy remembering: her lyrics are free-associative yet observant, cryptic yet full of feeling, wistful no matter her cadence. Her voice can make aloofness suddenly sound graceful. Dreamy music is often meant to drift into the background; Cindy’s makes you want to lean in and blend into the scene.
9. Nourished by Time, Catching Chickens
Catching Chickens, Marcus Brown’s first release as Nourished by Time since signing to XL Recordings, builds on the uniquely genre-melding approach of last year’s beloved Erotic Probiotic 2. Few pop records invoking the terms “lo fi” and “retro” — which are fair, given that the EP was written and recorded in his home studio in Baltimore, diffusing the line between R&B, shoegaze, and artpop — harness the same vulnerability and agility. Brown glides between past and future, the personal and political, like it’s all in the air hanging in his bedroom. In lieu of answers, the artist drifts through and slickens the blur of memory: “A love will place you back in the past/ And then evaporate and leave you alone,” Brown despairs on ‘Poison-Soaked’. There’s something in the mist, though, as he captures it, that can keep loneliness at bay.
8. Amaarae, roses are red, tears are blue – A Fountain Baby Extended Play
Amaarae’s lavish, playful, shapeshifting R&B shines throughout roses are red, tears are blue, which the Ghanaian American singer has called “the final chapter” of 2023’s excellent Fountain Baby. Though it lacks the album’s stylistic experimentation, the EP’s more understated flow only accentuates the electric charge and fluidity of her own voice. It’s a space that allows her to both flaunt and soften her longing, even change its shape, without ever giving it up. It all leads into ‘THUG (Truly Humble Under God)’, whose prayerful earnestness lends the whole project a different kind of weight. “Say goodbye to sorrow, joyfulness will reign,” she declares. “While I’m waiting for the sun, dancing in the rain” Even as an introduction to Amaarae, soaking in red is well worth the effort.
7. Sex Week, Sex Week
Richard Orofino and Pearl Amanda’s visual inspirations, particularly the films of David Lynch and David Cronenberg, ooze out of Sex Week as strongly as its musical reference points (some of which can be traced back to that mixtape), from Wolf Alice and Judee Sill to Stevie Nicks and Don Henley. Even if you’re not familiar with either member’s prior work, you might have caught the music videos they’ve directed for New York artists we’ve featured in the past year – or seen Dickson on the cover of Katy Kirby’s Blue Raspberry. But in their own songs and videos, Sex Week already exude a unique energy: gnarly, messy, dark, even animalistic in some of their aesthetic and lyrical choices, but always bound together by intense vulnerability, beautiful melodies, and delicately intertwining vocals. It’s the sort of intimacy that can put an outsider in a slight state of discomfort, but even at its most extreme – whether it’s their take on love or indie rock we’re talking about – Sex Week pulls you in and hits eerily close to home. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Sex Week.
6. Moses Sumney, Sophcore
Sophcore, Moses Sumney’s first record in three years, radiates playfulness. It’s a pleasure to hear him exercise the sensuousness of his lithe voice, teasing out lust and sentimentality and embracing them not as conflicting impulses but equal mechanisms of yearning. He’s clearly having fun on these six tracks, which doesn’t stop him from digging into knottier relationship dynamics, moving from the expression of tender masculinity on ‘Hey Girl’ to the disarming self-awareness of ‘Love’s Refrain’: “We moved much too het to see/ Domesticity fantasies were there in each other.” Sumney may not be rewriting the playbook, but even at its lightest, his music remains an unburdening.
5. Man/Woman/Chainsaw, Eazy Peazy
Following a series of singles beginning with September 2022’s ‘Any Given Sunday’, which introduced Man/Woman/Chainsaw’s scrappy yet sweepingly chaotic sound, Eazy Peazy was recorded with Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox, who’s worked on similarly experimental, post-punky records by Sprints and Silverbacks. With their line-up solidified, the 6-track serves as an exhilarating showcase of a band not only toeing but exalting in the line between cacophonous and epic arrangements: ‘Ode to Clio’ is the perfect summation of their sound and the centerpiece of the EP, which softens and erupts in different directions on each end. As all their musical voices collide, however, you can hardly imagine Man/Woman/Chainsaw’s style converging toward any kind of middle ground; even as their dynamic settles, their ambition is only to keep evolving and ripping it open. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Man/Woman/Chainsaw.
4. Maruja, Connla’s Well
In addition to being the only EP to make it onto our list of the best album covers of 2024, Maruja’s Connla’s Well is also the year’s best EP that exists in the post-punk realm, one that also blends in elements of hardcore, jazz rock, and post-rock. But genre does much less to describe the Manchester four-piece’s sound than emotion, which bursts out of these songs over sweeping guitars, tidal drumming, and God, that sax. Anxiety, fear, and isolation wreak havoc throughout the record, but its meditative stretches and repeated hooks – “The truth, it hurts,” vocalist Harry Wilkinson howls on ‘The Invisible Man’ – stick with you more than the surrounding chaos. If we can try to withstand the pain, they suggest, we might keep it from controlling how we act upon others.
3. Bon Iver, SABLE,
SABLE, is more of a callback than a return to form for Bon Iver, though neither descriptor feels entirely right. A press bio opts for “retreat and reset,” which also feels more apt, if only for its slight ambiguity. There are ‘THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS’, Justin Vernon reminds himself, speaking to emotional layers, yes, but also the literal past that tumbles in meaning the further you move along. There are clear echoes of For Emma, Forever Ago’s unadorned intimacy, but the way he builds and dissolves these three songs is more in line with 2019’s i,i and his recent collaborative work. But no matter where it strikes a familiar chord, SABLE, regards Bon Iver’s own reflection in ways that are increasingly more revealing, without ever truly tying up loose ends. “I am afraid of changing,” he admits on the first song. But by the final song, change is a potentiality, a form of hope. “What can wax can wane,” he sings. “Things can get replayed.” And maybe, behind that, is the chance to be remade.
2. Grumpy, Wolfed
Heaven Schmitt recalls dramatically quitting music right as they were graduating, and they took up a job at a marketing agency, which relieved so much of the pressure of pursuing a music career that they did, in fact, pick up a guitar again. The songs Schmitt wrote during that time – sillier, weirder, and naturally more true to themself – ended up on Grumpy’s debut album, 2020’s charming and cheekily titled Loser. With Schmitt having since moved to New York, Grumpy’s current backing band – Austin Hans Seegers on drums, Lane Rodges on keys, Anya Good on bass, and Diego Crimson on guitar – includes a few exes, which was also true when they recorded their new EP, Wolfed. “I keep on writing you syrupy songs so that I don’t forget how it felt when you loved me,” Schmitt admits on ‘Flower’, offsetting its twee sensibilities with piercing honesty. For Grumpy, the line between ugliness and love, discomfort and catharsis, humour and vulnerability, isn’t just permeable but vital – a glue stitching the songs’ disparate elements into a raw, mesmerizing whole. Read our Artist Spotlight interview with Grumpy.
1. Marina Satti, P.O.P.
Unlike Måneskin, whose 2023 album Rush! currently holds a RYM score of 1.98, Marina Satti’s P.O.P. found a fervent international audience in spite, more so than because, of the artist’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest. On the heels of her biggest hit, ‘ZARI’ – the song she performed at the competition with choreography by Rosalia collaborator Mecnun Giasar (Satti owes more than a bit of influence to the Spanish superstar) – the Greek singer-songwriter and producer made the brash move of including it on an EP packed with diss tracks, posse cuts, and a lone ballad. I’m envious of those who can appreciate the record’s madcap production, its innovative mix of everything from deconstructed club to Balkan reggaeton, without the discourse that surrounded it in her home country. But as a native speaker, I’m struck just as much by the hyperspecificity and wide range of its references, as well as, more than anything, Satti’s giddily irreverent and incessant humour. Even the title is Greek for protected designation of origin, but the implicit joke is secondary to what we all have a language for: pure, unadulterated, head-spinning pop music.
