Best of 2024 - Harman Burns

For 2024, the Cups N Cakes Network is approaching our year-end lists a little differently: we’ve asked some of our volunteers to tell us a bit about their favourite releases this year. Today, we kick things off with longtime Cups N Cakes volunteer Harman Burns’ Best of 2024.

This year, from February onward with a few exceptions here and there, I took a hiatus from writing for Cups N Cakes, so a lot of great Canadian releases this year pretty much sailed over my head. That said, a few cut through my mental static, running the gamut from indie rock to folk, experimental and ambient.

Aaron Charles Read, under the moniker ACR, put out my favorite EP of the year with his ecstatic and earnest Soapsud Clown. His songwriting is sharp, and he is almost frustratingly good at writing punchy melodies, punctuated by charmingly bizarre lyrics that range from the shyly romantic to pure Dadaist absurdity. For a release that quotes over fifty influences in the liner notes, it is deeply aesthetically cohesive; it’s Read’s world rendered in microcosm, reflected in the funhouse mirrors of his mind.

Following up his excellent 2022 album Dungeon Master, weirdo-rocker Gus Englehorn released a couple singles this year, leading up to his third album The Hornbook due sometime next year. While I found myself underwhelmed with his first single, “Thyme,” his second single included a three-part song called “One Eyed Jack pt. I and II (The Interrogation/The Other Side)” and “One Eyed Jack pt. III (Epilogue)” which saw Englehorn flexing his signature and brilliantly cryptic lyrical form. The first song is a slow-burner, rising in intensity and building into a powerful climax, and the second is a beautifully psychedelic ballad. It’s something of a different atmosphere for the artist, and it fits him like a glove.

This year also saw the release of Bird Brain, Sean Davis Newton’s debut album under his own name. With this release, Newton is fast carving out a niche for himself in the Edmonton music scene with his unique voice as a lyricist and songwriter, and here he found himself the ringmaster of a wide array of contributors, talented friends and collaborators. The result is an album that is big in scale, but it’s also, crucially, very focused, with Newton’s skill as both a producer and a composer ensuring the intimate moments are never overshadowed by the climactic ones.

I’m aware that I might sound dramatic when I say that a new album by Godspeed You! Black Emperor always feels like an arrival, a landmark—but I’ll take the risk. In a year marked by widespread horror and destruction on a scale that I can’t really touch on in this article, no band is better poised to be that lighthouse in the black sea. Their music has always been as political as it is profoundly emotional; it rides the currents of the apocalypse, but emerges from the wreckage with humanity, which is hope. Their monumental record “NO TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28,340” does the impossible: it reaches into that dark, burning coal of Evil, and emerges with music that is triumphant, exultant, holy. It is not only an artistic accomplishment, but a human one. Aesthetics fall to the wayside; like a post-1940s Rothko painting, symbolism burns up in the fire. All that’s left is sound, noise: a burning light in the expanse. It’s an unbelievable achievement, and, for me, the best release of the year.

Harman Burns is a Saskatchewan-born trans woman, filmmaker, sound artist and writer. Her debut novella Yellow Barks Spider came out this year.