1. ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ – Chappell Roan
After a slow-burn start to her career, Chappell Roan’s breakneck 2024 can be neatly summarised by the fact her debut LP The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess is finally storming the album charts, but in the wake of the lead single from the next record. An equal part sardonic and heartbroken kiss-off to a female lover who refuses to see our heroine as anything more than a hookup, Good Luck, Babe! is queer synthpop par excellence, but really what makes it is the utter audacity of that skyscraping falsetto chorus – almost indecipherable on first listen, and suffused, I’d argue, with more raw feeling than every other song on this list combined.