We have reached the part of the calendar where cultural pundits reflect on the first six months of the year. Congratulations! You won a retrospective! For music critics, this means doing an inventory of 2024’s most notable albums. “Notable” can be defined in any number of ways — artistic quality, commercial success, the anachronistic “water cooler” discourse factor — but taken together these attributes ultimately speak to how memorable a particular work of art is.
But I am not interested in the notable or memorable albums of 2024 — at least not at the moment. What I am curious about is the opposite kind of album. The sort of record that is not notable and not memorable, to the point where its very existence already seems open to question.
What I’m talking about is a memory-holed album. There are a lot of them this year. As a person who is professionally obligated to remember forgotten music year in and year out, I would assert that 2024 already has more memorably unmemorable albums than normal. And I want to figure out why.
To be clear: Hundreds of albums are released every week, and 99.9 percent of them come and go with zero fanfare. And yet those records do not qualify as memory-holed. For an album to qualify as memory-holed, it must have a shot at being remembered. Therefore, it has to come from an act with a large platform. A big record label is involved. A team of publicists is on the case. The media arrives with a bounty of takes. All these things ensure a reasonable expectation that the public will care about an album. Except the public doesn’t care. They don’t care at all, spectacularly. A memory-holed album isn’t necessarily a bad album. It’s just an album that is wiped from our collective consciousness soon after it enters the world. It’s not a matter of love or hate, only indifference.
I’ll illustrate what I mean: Imagine I am holding a gun to your head. And imagine the gun is loaded. And imagine that I am the kind of maniac who will murder someone over a hypothetical scenario. Would you stake your life on guaranteeing — with 100 percent certainty — that Green Day put out a record in first half of 2024?
If you said “yes,” I have good news: Your head presently is still intact. Green Day did put out an LP, Saviors, in January, though I’m sure you did not actually know this any more than you could possibly “know” that a coin will land heads or tails. This was surely a triumph of mathematical probability, not pop-punk knowledge.
Green Day is a perfect example of the “memory-holed album” phenomenon because they have put out so many of them in the past 20 years. Just try to name a Green Day record released after American Idiot. I’ll give you extra credit if you can name a single song from any of those records. (I might also ask if you are Billie Joe Armstrong in disguise.) For Saviors, music writers dutifully reported that Green Day was back to making “political” music in the style of American Idiot (which turns 20 this year) with a dash of the snotty, n’er-do-well charm of Dookie (which turns 30 in 2024). The album was talked about a lot during a slow time of the year for music releases. It certainly had an opportunity to be remembered. Nevertheless, here I am at the end of this paragraph and I’m having trouble recalling who I was talking about at the start of the paragraph. That’s what I call a good and thorough memory-holing!
I don’t want to pick on Green Day too much, as later work by legacy rock bands typically is memory-holed by default. You might be surprised to learn that Kings Of Leon put out a record, Can We Please Have Fun, last month. Harry Styles’ producer apparently worked on it, though I doubt even he could either confirm or deny it at this point. The Black Keys recently got an extra push for their memory-holed 2024 album, Ohio Players, though for the worst possible reason: Their arena tour in support of said album was canceled. People forgot the record, but they remember the shuttered tour. The music business, like life itself, is cruel.
