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The best albums of 2024 so far

Billie Eilish’s third is a triumph, Shabaka goes woodwind and Yunchan Lim makes the most thrilling piano debut of the decade … here are our music team’s picks of the best LPs from the first half of the year

Photograph: Cal McIntyre You can see why the Last Dinner Party attracted so much attention so quickly: behind the dressing-up box crinolines and the hype lurks a plethora of fantastic sparky – and indeed Sparks-y – songs, filled with hooks, unlikely musical shifts, wilfully OTT lyrics and solos that announce Emily Roberts as a true guitar heroine. Gifted with an unpretentious stream-of-consciousness style, the south London MC has a wonderfully unbounded approach to production that seems to mirror life and music in the capital, night-driving from clattering breakbeat ( Lost My Brain) to neo G-funk (Short Stories), symphonic trap ( Westfield), soft grime (265) and a Streets-worthy British classic in It’s Cold Out. Too good to be labelled a side project, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and jazz-rooted drummer Tom Skinner sound curiously at ease on Wall of Eyes, beneath the usual veil of disquiet and gloom: it contains some of the most inventive and thrilling music its members have made, but always feels purposeful, never like it’s trying too hard.

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