If 2024 had an unofficial colour, it was the vivid slime green adorning the cover of Charli XCX’s Brat. In a year of big pop records, Charli produced the most influential of them all with an LP that finally made her a star and, which, for a few dizzying moments over the summer, looked as if it might alter the course of American politics.

In the end, all those “Kamala is Brat” memes proved a false dawn for the progressive cause in the US, as Charli’s endorsement failed to give Kamala Harris enough of a bounce to carry her into the White House. But this was nonetheless the year of the Brat, as Charli’s self-consciously splurgy and shambolic take on 21st-century pop became a delightful phenomenon.

Brat was everywhere, even if nobody could quite define it – with Charli obviously coming closest when she described the concept as being “that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes”. The Collins English Dictionary offered a translation of its own when declaring Brat word of the year, saying it was “characterised by a confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude.”

Confident, independent and hedonistic were words that could also be applied to 2024’s other major pop break-out, Sabrina Carpenter. After years of dark and tortured pop music, Carpenter flipped the genre on its head and brought the fun back with her summer-stealing mega-smash, ‘Espresso’. Everything about it screamed fun and escapism – from the video where Carpenter danced on a surfboard to the song’s insistence on rhyming “Nintendo” with “Espresso”.

Yet amid the sunshine and bubblegum, there was still plenty of darkness in mainstream music this year. In April, Taylor Swift released her equivalent of a two-hour prog epic with The Tortured Poets Department – a sort of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon, if Dark Side Of The Moon was largely inspired by the supreme twattishnenss of The 1975’s Matty Healy (whom Swift briefly dated). Bleak and stormy, the LP divided Swifties – what, no bangers? – but with the dust having settled, we can see through the backlash and herald it as a slow-burning masterpiece.

Just as masterful was the Eras tour, which passed through Dublin in June and July and demonstrated that Swift was ready to take up the mantle from Bruce Springsteen as the definitive American songwriter of her generation. As with Springsteen, her career falls into distinct chapters, but she never sounds like anyone but herself – and, though there is an all-American essence to her, her music is universal.

A similar starkness was threaded through Billie Eilish’s third album, Hit Me Hard And Soft, which came back around to the woozy midnight pop of her 2019 debut to beautifully unsettling effect. A year of blockbuster releases also saw Beyoncé have fun with country music caricatures with the sprawling Cowboy Carter – a wide-screen celebration of her heritage as a daughter of Texas that doubled as a subversion of whiter-than-white country tropes by an African American woman.

Some wrinkled their noses at her take on Dolly Parton’s ‘Jolene’ – the complaint essentially being that it was too faithful to the original – but in the round, Cowboy Carter was a reminder that nobody does imperious as assuredly as Bey.

However, all of the above were arguably eclipsed by the surprise story of 2024 – Missouri singer Chappell Roan. Her debut album, The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess, may have been released the previous year, but it was in the 12 months just passed that she came into her own, amid beyond-sold-out shows, and an  MTV VMA appearance where she performed her hit ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ dressed as Joan of Arc – a pop-star-as-Medieval Saint-trope we need more of in music. If Charlie XCX doesn’t dress as St Francis of Assisi at least once in 2025, I want my money back.

Roan represented a new kind of stardom. She has sought to detach herself from the miasma of hype that had accumulated round her. Explaining she was not obliged to pose for selfies or say ‘hello’ when going about her business, she rejected the idea that musicians ‘owe’ it to their audience always to be available. Her forthrightness nearly burned the internet to the ground. Still, how encouraging to see an artist take a stand, and refuse to grin and bear out of a cynical wish to protect their “brand”.

Away from pop, it was a time of high emotions. Nick Cave sealed his transformation from red-eyed, Old Testament-obsessed, Elvis-tinged boogyman to a lightning rod for our unprocessed feeling about grief and loss with his extraordinary Wild God. It is a work of huge sweetness and generosity in which, still reeling from the death of two sons, he concludes that it’s okay to give sadness the weekend off occasionally and to seek the positive in the world – a point picked up on by no less a figure than Bob Dylan.

“Saw Nick Cave in Paris recently at the Accor Arena and I was really struck by that song ‘Joy’, where he sings ‘We’ve all had too much sorrow, now it’s the time for joy,’” Dylan tweeted in November. “I was thinking to myself, yeah that’s about right.”

As Dylan would no doubt agree, Wild God is up there with Cave’s very best work from the ’80s and ’90s. It was a continuation of a late-career imperial phase that has elevated the singer to the status of arena headliner (as Irish fans witnessed over two extraordinary nights at 3Arena, Dublin, in October). Likewise producing some of their best output in 2024 were Dublin’s Fontaines D.C., whose incredible fourth album, Romance, was a knock-out mix of heaving pop and cathartic nu-metal (if only it didn’t have such off-putting cover art of a grinning metallic heart).

Praise was also lavished on Robert Smith of The Cure. Fresh from confronting Ticketmaster over its scurrilous add-on fees and charges, The Cure released a majestic later-career epic in Songs Of A Lost World. Bringing a midlife melancholia to the dreamy angst-pop Smith honed on Pornography and Disintegration, it was an instant masterpiece.

Here was an album with winter in its veins – an early Christmas present for anyone who believes music is at its best wrestling with hefty themes and harsh truths about the importance of all things (including life – the LP having delved into the death of Smith’s older brother).

From Brat’s neon green to Smith’s midnight black rumination on human existence, the year encompassed multitudes. Above all, it was a reminder that even as the world seemingly falls to pieces, we can count on musicians to let the light in and to give us something to hold on to. What a thrill, what a comfort, what a joy.