NPR’s Best Songs of 2024 List Highlights Berklee Alumni

Arooj Aftab, Adrianne Lenker, Tiny Habits, and more made the cut on NPR’s roundup of this year’s top tracks.

Tara Bellucci

December 6, 2024

Adrianne Lenker performs on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert with her band Big Thief — Adrianne Lenker performing on *The Late Show with Stephen Colbert*.

Image by Scott Kowalchyk/CBS

‘Tis the season for year-end lists, and NPR just dropped one. The public radio institution picked 124 songs to include on their Best Songs of 2024 list, and several choices feature Berklee alumni.

NPR broke the songs into categories based on genres like pop, jazz, and “beyond”; favorites from partner public radio stations; and what they are calling the “best of the best,” a curated top 25 songs of the year.

Here are some of the songs by or featuring Berklee alumni that made the list:

Photo of Arooj Aftab — Arooj Aftab
Image courtesy of the artist

Arooj Aftab, “Raat Ki Rani”

The song “is a pure crowd-pleaser, as the Pakistani-American singer sets her atmospheric, decidedly Sade-esque yearning against sumptuous harps and a portentous piano line,” says Stephen Thompson of Aftab BM ’10.

Sabrina Carpenter, “Espresso”

Amy Allen ’15 has written some of the most iconic pop songs of the last decade, and Sabrina Carpenter’s summer smash “Espresso” is one of them. NPR named it a Best of the Best, with Stephen Thompson saying, “‘Espresso’ was the shot [and] ‘Please Please Please’ was the chaser.”

Deerlady, “Masterpieces”

Lars Gotrich says that “Magdalena Abrego’s [BM ’15] guitar solo at the climax of this beautiful and brooding indie rock song gurgles with molten life over crackling shoegaze riffs.”

Madi Diaz, “God Person”

Robin Hilton says that “this was the rare song that absolutely wrecked me this year.” The song by Diaz ’07 is “partly about finding joy and purpose in life’s smallest moments—time with friends, gazing at the sky or the ocean. But it’s also about realizing that maybe those moments are precisely where ‘god’ and the ultimate meaning of life exist.”

Adrianne Lenker, “Sadness as a Gift”

Ann Powers calls Lenker BM ’12 “to many, the most gifted of her own cohort of singer-songwriters,” and says the song “offers a breakup ballad ideal for a generation redefining the way ties bind: ‘You could write me someday, and I think you will.’”

Nourished by Time, “Hell of a Ride”

Marcus Brown PD ’16 “made a soaring, blissful ode to dissolution, a ‘better to have loved and lost’ anthem stripped of all cliché that also reads as a valedictory for late-stage capitalism, its consumerist focus and lack of third spaces,” says Sheldon Pearce. “Somewhere at the center of R&B and art-pop and post-punk lies Brown’s rousing voice, which is so compelling it can make even parting feel like a balmy, loving embrace.”

Tiny Habits (left to right: Judah Mayowa, Maya Rae, Cinya Khan)

Image courtesy of the artist

Tiny Habits, “Wishes”

"The intimacy of close harmony singing has rarely served a song the way this young trio’s blend does in this heartfelt expression of the human tendency to feel unmoored within one’s own skin,” Ann Powers writes about Tiny Habits’ Judah Mayowa ’21, Cinya Khan BM ’23, and Maya Rae BM ’24. NPR named the song a Best of the Best pick, with Powers adding, "Each member takes a verse, confessing sorrows with painful honesty; then, in the choruses, their voices gently connect, like fingers intertwining. This is what empathy sounds like.”

Chappell Roan, “Good Luck, Babe!”

Justin Tranter ’01, the hitmaker behind numerous chart-toppers, cowrote this larger-than-life pop anthem, recognized as a Best of the Best track. “Has anyone who’s nonchalantly muttered, ‘It’s fine, it’s cool,’ ever actually felt fine or cool?” asks NPR’s Elle Mannion. "Chappell Roan, this year’s biggest breakout pop star, is anything but low key."