If anyone tells you 2024 was anything less than an absolute win for new music, they clearly spent the year with their head stuck in a bin. While the world outside might have been doing its best impression of a dumpster fire, our headphones have been blessed with an embarrassment of riches. From bright-young-things becoming even brighter to established faves finding new gears, the last twelve months have delivered more golden moments than we can count.

That's where this list comes in. Over the next few days, we'll be celebrating the very best tracks 2024 had to offer – from chart-destroying anthems to underground gems that deserve their moment in the spotlight. So grab your party hat, pour yourself something fizzy, and join us as we count down the defining songs of 2024.

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Victoria Canal's 'June Baby' turns bedroom daydreams into pristine indie-pop gold. Working with The 1975's Ross MacDonald and George Daniel might have added some extra shine to the production, but this is Canal's moment through and through. While most love songs either wallow in feelings or try to play it cool, 'June Baby' does both at once - turning those private moments of romantic overthinking into something that demands to be played at full volume. As the first taste of her debut album 'Slowly, It Dawns' (due January 17, 2025), it's a proper "hello world" moment.

What makes it special isn't just the gleaming indie-pop packaging - it's how Canal turns those butterflies-in-stomach moments into something that feels both deeply personal and totally universal. Sometimes the best pop songs come from letting your guard down and letting the feelings win. DAN HARRISON

Dua Lipa has, bizarrely, and despite dropping an album and spending the summer headlining festivals around the globe, had a bit of a quiet year. Flying slightly under the radar thanks to pop's new main characters taking over the summer, 'Radical Optimism's golden moment came in Q1, in the form of disco-pop ear worm 'Training Season'. It's a track which seems to pull the best bits of ABBA's greatest hits and stitches them together with classically Lipa lyrics and a flourish of Kevin Parker's 70s psychedelia. She chose it as the opener for her Glastonbury headline set this year, and with good reason. Commanding, dramatic, dreamy, a perfect extension of Dua's run of smash hits. ABIGAIL FIRTH

Falling deeply in love with country-inflected alt-rock was not on our bingo card for 2024, but we're very glad MJ Lenderman had other plans for the year. 'She's Leaving You' is one of the highlights of new album 'Manning Fireworks' and is a masterclass in beautiful phrases which feel torn straight from a postmodern American novel. Fragments of conversations about the lights of Las Vegas, sarcastic asides about Eric Clapton, and the overarching theme of a midlife crisis all hang together with surprisingly intricate instrumentals that complement, but never overwhelm, the poetic phrasing. A song to listen to while wandering a park in the Autumn, wistfully gazing into the rain, or….cheating on your wife in Vegas, we guess? JAKE HAWKES

In an empty car park at sunset, Margaret Qualley dances like nobody's watching — except everyone is. The 'Tiny Moves' video has racked up millions of views, but beneath its La La Land sparkle lies something far more fascinating: Jack Antonoff's manifesto on modern love. It celebrates the microscopic; those blink-and-you'll-miss-them movements that somehow manage to reshape entire worlds. "The tiniest moves you make / Watching my whole world shake" isn't just a lyric; it's an entirely new way of measuring emotional earthquakes.

Antonoff strips everything back to essentials. Each element — from the soft-focus synths to the heartbeat percussion — mirrors the way love actually works: not in dramatic declarations, but in accumulated moments of quiet observation. FELICITY NEWTON

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Joining the lineup of Pop Stars Who've Spent A Decade As Cult Faves And Are Finally Having Big Hits is Tinashe, who hasn't had a proper mainstream hit since 2014's '2 On'. After releasing albums of her neo-R&B-slash-pop independently for years, 'Nasty' enters the picture. The first single from her 'Quantum Baby' EP was a runaway success after being used in a viral meme video on TikTok in its infancy, so much so that it became the biggest song of the year on the platform. It's so infectiously catchy, its vulgarity almost passes you by, and so addictive even seeing it on every other reel can't stop you coming back to it. Can somebody just match her freak already? ABIGAIL FIRTH

'We Look Good Together (Big Words)' captures exactly what makes Courting different from most of their peers. They're a band who long ago stopped trying to fit any kind of indie box and just went for pure, unfiltered joy instead. It's what happens when you take everything good about pop music and turn it up until the speakers start to sweat.

Part of a theatrical album universe, it's a wider context that isn't necessarily needed in isolation, such is the raw joy on offer. This is Courting at their most free, their most fun, and their most irresistible. Pop music, but heightened, twisted, inverted and landed to a perfect 10. Sometimes the best things come when bands just let go and see what happens. Yet again, Courting prove the limits of expectations, templates and single-lane aesthetics only allow boredom in. By refusing to tether themselves to any single restraint, they're becoming standard bearers for how even the traditionally limiting world of domestic indie guitar pop can embrace a genre-free world and absolutely thrive. DAN HARRISON

Over the past couple of years, Fat Dog have evolved from a chaotic, if captivating, mess of noise, dog masks, and nonsense to... well, more of the same, actually - but with lyrics you can sing along to. Case in point: 'Running', which clocks in at over five minutes of honking sax, pounding dance beats, and screamalong words which are bound to leave you even more out of breath than usual from the omnipresent mosh pit at every Fat Dog gig. There was a real worry at Dork HQ that no recording could ever accurately capture the sheer primal chaos of Fat Dog live. We're very happy to end 2024 knowing that our fears were proved wrong. Long live Fat Dog - woof woof woof. JAKE HAWKES

Pop Star' is the sound of Lime Garden turning workplace misery into the indie pop anthem it always deserved to be. Written when vocalist Chloe Howard faced the crushing reality of returning to her day job after a studio session, it perfectly captures that moment when your dreams and your actual life refuse to match up. The track bounces between AutoTune and sharp guitars like it's trying to decide whether to quit its job via email or interpretive dance - "I don't wanna work my job / Cause life is short and this is long" the voice inside everyone's head during another endless Tuesday afternoon meeting.

What makes it special is how it turns that universal frustration into something that feels both defiant and joyful. This isn't another song about wanting to be a pop star - it's about that gap between who you are and who you want to be, delivered with enough wit and charm to make both versions seem equally appealing. Sometimes the best things come from life's most annoying moments. FELICITY NEWTON

Look, everyone has questions they would love to ask a partner but can't without admitting to extensively stalking their ex's Instagram. Luckily, Olivia Rodrigo does not seem to have any fear in that regard, and happily put all those questions to song with 'Obsessed'. A real jewel in the crown that is 'GUTS (spilled)', 'Obsessed' soundtracks those feelings with a dose of fevered, thrashing guitars and explosive percussion. It's unapologetic and fast-paced, with acerbic lyrics delivered with a guilty shrug made all the more satisfying in the scream-along chorus. 'Obsessed' is Olivia Rodrigo ascending to become every inch the rock star she's always been, begging the question of why it was ever left off the album in the first place. NEIVE MCCARTHY