Rolling Stone’s Top 100 Albums of 2024 List Has One Metal Album and Very Little Hard Rock
It’s that time of year again where journalists have heard all the albums that are coming out for the year and start to put together their year-end best of lists and it looks like an old rock institution had some major oversights on theirs. Rolling Stone Magazine put out their list of “The 100 Best Albums of 2024” yesterday and, as our friends over at Metal Injection pointed out, there’s only one metal album on the entire list, and it’s a really weird one, too. The only metal album on the whole list is Kerry King’s From Hell I Rise which was, let’s be honest, just okay. And even then, Kerry King only came in at 93 on the list.
Nothing else on the list is remotely metal and there’s no hardcore either. Knocked Loose’s You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To is making some waves in the mainstream. Judas Priest’s Invincible Shield seems like a safe pick for a big-name magazine like Rolling Stone. Bruce Dickinson, Body Count, and Linkin Park all could have been really safe choices. But nope, it’s just Kerry King for some reason.
In fact, the long-standing rock magazine managed to put together a list that’s heavily loaded with pop acts, with few rock bands on the list and even fewer hard rock bands. Even some of the big name punk releases from this year like Green Day’s Saviors, Amyl and the Sniffers’ Cartoon Darkness, and frequent Rolling Stone feature Laura Jane Grace’s Hole in My Head were all absent from their list. The highest ranked punk album is Mannequin Pussy’s I Got Heaven which I thought was just okay as well.
Sitting at the top of the list is Charli XCX’s Brat. (Our friends at Metal Injection incorrectly reported that Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter as the top album on the list when that’s actually number 2, but they can be forgiven for giving up on scrolling through Rolling Stone’s annoyingly slow-loading website to get all the way down to the bottom.) Brat makes sense as it literally became a popular slang term this year, not to mention a meme. It’s not my cup of tea, but I’m willing to acknowledge that that album was an important cultural moment this year. But with Charli XCX, Beyoncé, Sabrina Carpenter, Billie Eilish, and Ariana Grande all sitting in the top 10, is Rolling Stone even pretending to be a rock magazine anymore?
You can check out the full list here but, like I said, it loads annoyingly slowly.
