The best of The A.V. Club: Our favorite pieces from 2024

We at The A.V. Club have spent the last two weeks of 2024 reflecting on the broader year, which, for reasons both heartening and dismaying, was another one for the history books (let’s hope we still have those in 2025). We concentrated on our purview—pop culture—and compiled the requisite lists of the best films, TV shows, games, and albums, as well as our favorite books, TV performances, and film scenes.  We also published incisive features that looked beyond the best-worst binary at bigger trends and shifts in the cultural landscape, like the return of the clever game show, some post-game analysis of the Drake vs. Kendrick Lamar battle, and the state of physical media. 

2024 also marked the start of The A.V. Club‘s rebuilding era, which has already seen the revival of A.V. Undercover—many thanks again to GWAR for kicking things off in their inimitable style—and the launch of new series, including Film Trivia Fact Check and Podcast Canon, as well as a miniseries on the history of Hindi cinema and our Film Editor Jacob Oller’s regular curation of the Criterion Collection. Naturally, we had to indulge in some nostalgia with 2004 Week and BoJack Horseman Week. We also redoubled our efforts to speak with all the great character actors about their Random Roles, brought back Bestcasts, and ventured back to Nathan Rabin’s World Of Flops. In between, we published oh so many reviews, interviews, retrospectives, essays, and even Primers to help enhance our readers’ (and our own) understanding and enjoyment of pop culture. And through it all, our readers (that’s you) continued to provide lively discussion—and constructive feedback—in our comments section. We can’t tell you how grateful we are that you’ve hung in there with us through the figurative (sometimes literal, via those error messages) construction dust. In 2025, we’ll continue to make our way into the future with the site’s core principles in mind, and, we hope, you at our side.

Now, as has been tradition here, The A.V. Club is sharing our favorite pieces of the year; the ones we’re proudest to have worked on and/or published at the site. We hope you’ll enjoy revisiting them with us or checking them out for the first time. It was another tumultuous year—why does that no longer feel like an adequate way to sum things up?—but we’re still here, and glad you are, too. Here’s to accomplishing great things together in 2025. 

Everything I know about The Sopranos I learned from Sopranos pinball (January 11)

The Sopranos (HBO) Graphic: Karl Gustafson

This might sound like a joke, but I’m being entirely sincere: Produced in between the show’s fifth season and its extended final sixth one, the Sopranos pinball table is one of the most info-heavy, spoiler-filled pinball tables I’ve ever played, attempting to incorporate as many plot beats, episode ideas, and sexually explicit boat antics as designer George Gomez and his team at Stern could reasonably fit into it. Certainly, it’s one of the only pinball machines that I know of that can get you dirty looks in a quiet arcade by activating a bonus mode where the game constantly spouts profanities at the player, or loudly spoils the fate of Steve Buscemi’s character on the show. As one of my favorite tables to play, it’s a gold mine of semi-random references that have now been permanently burnt into my head, giving me an extremely weird set of touchstones for the series—and I thought it might be worth exploring everything a dope like me can learn by taking their prestige TV entirely in pinball form. [William Hughes]

Jacqueline Novak on her comedy special Get On Your Knees and putting penis jokes into iambic pentameter (January 24)

Jacqueline Novak (Photo: Netflix)

“I get the most satisfaction out breadth, not depth. I can’t help it. I’ve posed this question before to an editor once when they were asking for depth, and I was like, “Wait, I’m not being sarcastic, but philosophically, why is depth better than breadth?” It’s just a different direction. You could drill down into the earth and come up either side, or you could circle the Earth over and over again. If anything, the circling is more infinite—maybe that’s why it becomes meaningless. But anyway, [to] be moving along and tracking these different things that to me, kind of connect laterally, and then sort of really jamming them together in the end, that just pleases something in me.” [As told to Mary Kate Carr] 

The white guy in Shōgun can’t help but fail upward (March 21)

Cosmo Jarvis (Photo: FX)

In developing its new adaptation of James Clavell’s Shōgun, FX specifically set out to avoid simply rehashing the “whitewashed” 1980 original, which starred Richard Chamberlain and was entirely told from the perspective of his character, John Blackthorne, an English seaman who gets shipwrecked in Japan in the 1600s and must learn their ways in order to survive (while also passing on his knowledge of English romance and warfare). This new take pulls back the focus to center on a larger group of characters and treats the saga as more of a historical epic than one white man’s adventure, which allows it to showcase more of the Japanese perspective and gives it a more mature and culturally coherent story. It also, intentionally or not, turns its new version of John Blackthorne into the most perfect putz, the most lovable dingus, and the most frustratingly endearing dorkus to ever set sail. [Sam Barsanti]

O.J. and me: The Bills, the murders, the Norm jokes, and growing up under the shadow of the Juice (April 15)

O.J. Simpson leaving court in Santa Monica in 1997 Photo: Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

I grew up in Buffalo, just a few miles from the apartment buildings where, as legend had it, a new-to-town [O.J.] Simpson first lived after being drafted in 1969 by the Buffalo Bills. The tailback from a hardscrabble San Francisco background, fresh off a dynamic Heisman season at USC, was ascendant, electric, a bounding, galloping barely-in-color highlight swirl of too-big shoulder pads. He could juke like Barry Sanders, gather steam like a freight, bounce off defenders or leave them in dusty belittlement, all in steamy aggression that was equally, violently upright and downhill. In nine seasons with the Bills, he was a five-time All-Pro and Pro-Bowler, he was a four-time league rushing leader, and he was the first ever to rush for 2,000 yards in a season. He was inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame three months after my second birthday. And then came act two. [Todd Lazarski]

Baby Reindeer dares you not to look away (April 25)

Richard Gadd in Baby Reindeer Photo: Ed Miller/Netflix

Baby Reindeer isn’t defending [Martha, the series’ antagonist]. But it is demanding we dig deeper into why we unassumingly judge people at first sight. Donny does it, too, when he looks at Martha, as he says in his narration. He felt immediate pity because of how she looked—lonely, frumpy, sad—when she first walked into the bar. It’s why he gave her Diet Coke and invited a years-long ordeal into his life. He could’ve avoided it, but Gadd’s reflections aren’t about that particular what-if. Instead, he bravely revisits a tragedy and dares us not to look away. And in the process, Baby Reindeer ends up not just subverting expectations but shattering them. [Saloni Gajjar]

That time Steve Albini recorded our band (May 9)

Steve Albini playing in Shellac at the Primavera Sound Festival in 2022 (Photo: Adela Loconte)

Steve Albini taught me to play poker. In the fall of 2007, the magazine I was working for was doing a feature on—if memory serves, as it’s a bit foggy—trying things out for the first time. So, one staffer would take on fronting a band at a club, another would give standup comedy a go. That sort of thing. I immediately volunteered to take on playing poker at a casino. The decidedly unglamorous ones of Gary, Indiana, were only a half-hour drive from Chicago, where I was living at the time. And besides, I knew a great teacher: Steve Albini. [Tim Lowery]

How The 40-Year-Old Virgin became Hollywood’s last great comedy poster (May 15)

Image: The A.V. Club

We keep using The 40-Year-Old Virgin poster because it’s a simple and effective way to put the vital information first. The characters and title are right in front of the viewer. “By and large, it’s created and meant to be read at 35 miles an hour,” Adam Fogelson, then-president of marketing at Universal, told The New York Times in 2005. “Our best hope is that people can perceive the title, and hopefully the date.” Those principles remain the same, except now they’re flying by as thumbnails on a streaming service, for which the poster appears tailor-made.

The success and originality behind the poster are rarities in today’s landscape, where budgets and schedules usually affect marketing first. Because of tight shoots, stars often don’t get booked for marketing photoshoots, and creative teams work off of on-set photography. The question “Why don’t they make comedies anymore?” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when the comedies that do get produced are sold with hand-me-down marketing materials. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Beyond Buffy: I Saw The TV Glow channels the melancholy magic of The Adventures Of Pete & Pete (June 12)

Left: Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Pain in I Saw The TV Glow (Photo: A24) Right: Danny Tamberelli and Michael Maronna in promo art for The Adventures Of Pete And Pete (Image: Viacom)

There’s a fairly clear way to read I Saw The TV Glow—one explored by this site’s former TV editor, Emily St. James, in a moving essay over at Vulture, and one that [Jane] Schoenbrun hasn’t been shy about endorsing, either: That Owen’s story in I Saw The TV Glow is about what happens to a trans person when the world makes the prospect of transitioning too terrifying to ever look at straight-on. Maddy, spurred on by the show, spends the whole film trying to encourage Owen to take the leap with her—even if, from a “rational” perspective, said leap looks like an act of profound self-destruction. And The Pink Opaque’s own embrace of magical realism is vital to embracing that mindset, because, like The Adventures Of Pete & Pete, it asks the question: What if the world really is as magical and mysterious as it seemed when you were a kid? What if you really could do, be, anything you want? [William Hughes]

Floating on and selling out: 2004 was the year “indie” lost all meaning (August 12)

The Killers (Photo by Frank Micelotta/Fox via Getty Images); Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse (Photo by L. Cohen/WireImage for KROQ-FM); Adam Brody in The O.C. (Image: HBO/WBD); Zach Braff in Garden State (Image: Fox Searchlight). Graphic: The A.V. Club

What had “indie” ever meant, if anything? Here I’ll ease my creaky bones down onto this gnarled tree stump and explain that, in the olden days, “indie” used to mean that your music was released on an independent label, whether by circumstance or some ethical choice. But by 2004, those distinctions had all but disappeared. It wasn’t just that The Strokes, The White Stripes, and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs had all signed to major labels. It was that the Internet was making labels themselves largely irrelevant. In the great, open-air bazaar of MP3 downloads, there was no longer any practical difference between an “indie” band and a major-label one. 

More abstractly, “indie” had once suggested a kind of hip erudition, the kind you had to work for by going to small club shows, scouring zines, or withstanding the withering condescension of a record-store clerk. But the Internet changed that, too. As LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy observed in 2001’s “Losing My Edge,” there was now an entire generation of “Internet seekers” who could torrent a band’s discography overnight. And in 2004, just about everyone had heard of Pitchfork, whose 9.7 review of Arcade Fire’s Funeral that September catapulted the Montreal group to overnight success, and anointed Pitchfork itself as a cultural authority capable of making or breaking bands with a single glowing endorsement or snarkily deployed GIF. [Sean O’Neal]

American Idiot was the protest album of 2004, but its message is timeless (August 15)

Images from left: Billie Joe Armstrong (Kevin Mazur/WireImage), Green Day (Kim Kulish/Corbis via Getty Images), Billie Joe Armstrong (Frank Mullen/WireImage)

If you’re only familiar with its singles—“American Idiot,” “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams,” “Holiday,” “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” and “Jesus Of Suburbia”—it’s easy to understand why American Idiot would seem primarily political. The first three singles are the most overtly political on the album. The fourth is a reflection about Armstrong’s father, who died when the singer was 10 years old, though it’s often mistaken as a direct response to 9/11. The last one is the outlier, but it got less radio play than the others, due to its nine-minute runtime. The vibes of the first four singles, if you don’t listen closely to the lyrics or have the context of the rest of the album, paint American Idiot as an album about George W. Bush, the titular American idiot, whose policies have made it so difficult to pursue the American dream that people just want to check out and retreat from the world instead. That sounds political. It is political. American Idiot is, in no uncertain terms, a protest album. But it’s also a document of how feeling left out of the political conversation, like you’ve been left behind and the system doesn’t care about you, can impact your life and your will to live. [Jen Lennon]

Menswear pundit Derek Guy draws lessons from classic sitcom characters’ style (September 4)

Left to right: Dick York in Bewitched; Bob Newhart in The Bob Newhart Show; Will Smith in The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air; Kelsey Grammer in Frasier

Social media provides a hotspot of reappraisal “every outfit” accounts for new and old fans alike to muse over characters like Seinfeld’s George Costanza (Jason Alexander), who has become a style icon in his own right—as has co-creator Larry David. Don’t just take our word for it, as The A.V. Club has called on an expert to get into the finer details of 20th-century menswear on shows like I Love Lucy, The Bob Newhart Show, Family Ties, and yes, Seinfeld.…  

Taking into account that there are over 1700 episodes of the nine shows we discussed with Derek Guy, this snapshot is still incredibly revealing about the cuts and silhouettes and how they read to a 2024 eye. Not only that, but these sitcoms highlight trends, what was considered elite dressing, and why some powerful political figures could take a page out of these characters’ style books.  

Raphael Bob-Waksberg on building BoJack Horseman to last (August 20)

Raphael Bob-Waksberg (Photo by Michael Tran/FilmMagic); Images: Netflix; Graphic: The A.V. Club

“When I pitched [BoJack Horseman], the two questions that I wrapped around it in my initial pitch to Netflix was how can a person be happy and how can a person be good? I connected those two things, even though they’re not always related, but that was to me the twin goals of the series, is BoJack struggling with those questions and figuring out how to answer them for himself. And I think what the show posits is, they’re the same—that you find some sort of, not happiness necessarily, but equanimity or peace, perhaps, by choosing to do the right thing and doing it, making that choice over and over again. I feel like the show is pretty unambiguous on that point, even though it is a nuanced show in other ways, and not everything’s a straight line and people can interpret what they will in it and take what they get out of it. But I think that it’s woven into the fabric of what the show is, that idea, even though the characters don’t always follow that.” [As told to Danette Chavez]

Sarah Connor redefined the female action hero forever (September 16)

Linda Hamilton (Photo: TriStar)

From the warrior goddesses of Ancient Egypt to Joan of Arc herself, there has never been a time in human history when images of powerful women didn’t exist in the public consciousness—a fact that’s worth remembering lest we perpetually reset the starting line with each new generation. But when it comes to female-led action movies as we know them today, there are two women who serve as the definitive godmothers of the genre: Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in the Alien franchise and Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in The Terminator franchise. And while there’s probably a case to be made that this column should’ve started with Ripley, who debuted five years before Sarah, I’m too much of a Terminator obsessive not to start there. (Much like the Planet Of The Apes series, I maintain that even a bad Terminator movie is still more entertaining than 90% of blockbusters out there.) [Caroline Siede]

Kaitlin Olson is the queen of chaotic comedy (September 17)

From left: Olson in The Mick (Screenshot: FOX/YouTube), Hacks (Photo: John Johnson/Max), and It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia (Photo: Patrick McElhenney/FX)

To talk about Kaitlin Olson’s comedic genius is to invoke, and attempt to describe, chaos. (It’s controlled chaos, for sure, as there’s little in her on-screen demeanor that suggests otherwise.) And to watch her on television, whether as part of the Gang in FXX’s long-running It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, in the Emmy-winning Max show Hacks, or even in her upcoming riff on the network procedural, High Potential, is to witness a performer who doesn’t so much relish diving headfirst into comedic mayhem as she enjoys being its central architect. For two decades, the Portland-born actor has honed a very specific brand of humor. You may be tempted to dub her the dirtbag queen of American TV comedy (the boys on Sunny might agree with that), but that still sells her short. [Manuel Betancourt]

Sebastian Stan can change, but not that much, in absurdly sharp A Different Man (September 17)

Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve, Adam Pearson (Photo: A24)

Much has been made of the downfall of the big, studio comedy in the past decade, but A Different Man is at home in an emerging trend of dark, surrealist works. The film invokes positive comparisons to Kristoffer Borgli’s 2023 films Sick Of Myself and Dream Scenario—the old-fashioned cursed wish fantasy, fitted to our capitalist, attention economy. While [Aaron] Schimberg skews a bit more empathetic to his characters than Borgli might, none of these films are interested in their characters being victims, nor are they straight punchlines. More often than not, we laugh with Edward—a hell of an achievement, given how many people set out to pity him. [Drew Gillis]

Spoiler Space: When you wish upon a Substance (September 24)

(Photo: Mubi)

The Mouse House is also stamped all over the aesthetic of The Substance, if you can catch it between the claustrophobic orange hallway and 2001-esque package center. Whichever woman is awake and in control gets to don a sweater spun in the exact shade of gold worn by Belle from Beauty And The Beast, and at the beginning of the film, Elisabeth receives red roses to let her know her time at the network is up. In both human and monster form—nay, beast form—Sue wears a poofy blue Cinderella dress for her New Year’s Eve show, and must hurry back home to stabilize herself lest she turn into a pumpkin and lose all her organs through the chasm in her back. All of cinematographer Benjamin Kracun’s fisheye shots also make Elisabeth/Sue’s fancy penthouse feel a lot more like Rapunzel’s cramped tower than anything resembling a real home. Sue is both helpless daughter and covetous stepmother as she skims what’s left of Elisabeth’s beauty to make her nasty spinal fluid Botox. Elisabeth is both Cinderella and jealous step-sister as she claws and tears at her own face before she can ever meet her prince. Both are trapped in a cold palace with a volatile beast. Neither can ever let down their hair. [Emma Keates]

My pens paint people that I’ve proven wrong: An oral history of Get Up Kids’ Something To Write Home About (September 27)

All images courtesy of The Get Up Kids

Something To Write Home About’s legacy grows every year. If not for the Get Up Kids, would there ever be a Fall Out Boy or Title Fight? Would there ever be an Olivia Rodrigo? One shudders to think. Emo, as a genre, and its many satellite subgenres wouldn’t exist without the album—for better or worse. Without Something To Write Home About, there is no Vagrant Records, which established itself as the home for bands like Saves The Day, Alkaline Trio, and Dashboard Confessional. But the album speaks for itself. Pryor’s lyrics are confidently contradictory, cynical and sentimental, angry and loving, like a teen who doesn’t know how to process growing up, because who does? There’s a delicacy to his diary-entry lyrics that capture adolescent angst from a first-person perspective. As long as there are teenagers boxed in by their small town or the pain of a friend’s betrayal, the album will connect with listeners. [Matt Schimkowitz]

We pick the best, worst, and weirdest games from four decades of The Legend Of Zelda (September 28)

Original artwork and screenshots: Nintendo

At its most plush and satisfying, Zelda—which gets a new installment in this week, in the form of Switch title Echoes Of Wisdom—sets you down in a fantasy landscape that feels open and vast but places subtle, powerful boundaries to direct you through the quest. Shigeru Miyamoto, the foundational Nintendo creator that founded the series, defined this central tenet long before other creators like Eiji Aonuma took over its stewardship. “I wanted to create a game where the player could experience the feeling of exploration as he travels about the world, becoming familiar with the history of the land and the natural world he inhabits,” Miyamoto said in a 1994 interview. 

The series’ better entries leave you feeling like you truly are the hero—whether it’s of Time, Wind, Wild, Sky, or whatever noun its developers focused on for each entry’s distinctive mechanical and story theme. If you’ve cobbled together some kind of insane stone skateboard out of trees, rocks, and historical debris to soar over a chasm in Tears Of The Kingdom, or resurrected a long-dead flying chicken in Link’s Awakening to do the same, you know that feeling well. [Anthony John Agnello]

The Rebel Moon director’s cuts are a lesson in how not to start a franchise (September 30)

Photo: Netflix

Everyone projects either power or weakness throughout all variations of Rebel Moon, adopting a binary mode of good or evil that balloons into a climactic siege that may impress the senses, but also abandons the David vs. Goliath story as the importance of the characters and the size of their artillery grows larger. Because the Director’s Cuts are an act of clarification and not transformation, watching Chalice [Of Blood] and Curse [Of Forgiveness] becomes an exercise in renewed audience goodwill constantly bumping up against narrative misfires and impediments; even the most generous audience member must admit the director may not be capable of pulling this off—something that was implicitly sold to us with the promise of a definitive, “hardcore” version of the story. [Rory Doherty]

Troy Evans on facing down Steven Seagal and trying to be a badass for David Lynch (October 2)

Center: Troy Evans (Photo: Rodrigo Vaz/FilmMagic/Getty Images); Left: Evans in Bosch; Right: Evans in Twin Peaks

“It’s a long, long story, but the short version is, two or three years of extreme drunken jackassery and I ended up in Montana State Prison. And you don’t sober up overnight or over the weekend or even in a week. Your brain is foggy. So I’d been down in Montana State Prison about six months, and I woke up one morning and had an enlightened moment, and I went, ‘I bet I’m not gonna be president!’ [Laughs.] So, then I started thinking, ‘What will I do? Well, I can’t go back in the Army. I can’t be a police officer. I can’t own a bar. I can’t be a teacher. I can’t be an accountant.’ One day I went, ‘Oh! I’ll bet no one ever asks an actor if he has a felony conviction!’ 

I sent what they call a kite—that’s a written message in prison. You’ll hear people in movies talk about a ‘snitch kite.’ It’s a very dangerous thing. They have a box that you put the messages in, and if you’re seen putting a message in the box, it’s easy to assume that you’re snitching on somebody. ‘Scooter Bob has heroin!’ But I sent a kite to the warden, asking for a copy of Hamlet. I started sitting in my cell, reading Hamlet. And the rest is history: I became an actor.” [As told to Will Harris]

Network TV’s nostalgia bait seems to be paying off this fall (October 23)

Photos: Sonja Flemming/CBS, Ray Mickshaw/ABC, Ron Batzdorff/NBC

Viewers are evidently yearning for classic TV comfort food. And, as it turns out, network television is still cooking with gas, serving up newbies with old-school appeal, as well as returning hits like Elsbeth, Tracker, Found, and whatever Dick Wolf has got going on at NBC. Despite the rise of streaming giants, movie stars descending on the small screen, and the ability to binge-watch new seasons in a single day, there are apparently still reasons to not cut the cord to network TV just yet. After all, it seems like plenty of folks are willing to tune in live to watch Kaitlin Olson channeling Sherlock Holmes, a shrewd Kathy Bates pretending to be a naive old lady, or Joshua Jackson taking his shirt off during what Doctor Odyssey calls a “boys, butches, and bis” card game. [Saloni Gajjar]  

24 hours of horror with Robert Eggers (October 28)

The Innocents (Screenshot: YouTube)

“I chose old black-and-white Gothic horror movies. Castles, moldering mansions, flowing curtains, cemeteries, haunted moors, rakes, demon lovers, secretive housekeepers, forbidden rooms, hidden passageways, haunted ingénues with diaphanous gowns, with candelabras, and grave robbers, obsession, madness, sexual repression. And the fog machines never turn off. This is a kind of horror movie that I really love, and also it’s something that I am exploring in my Nosferatu.

Some of these films are old favorites that I’ve watched a lot, and some of them were me trying to do a deep dive to learn more about Gothic horror movies in the past 10 years. But all of them were things that I would just have on a lot. Almost as music, kind of watching them kind of not. Just being immersed in the atmosphere.” [As told to Jacob Oller]

Things you can’t unsee: Longlegs, Red Rooms, and the cursed aesthetics of true crime (October 29)

Longlegs (Photo: Neon)

In 2019, while on a trip to Los Angeles, I decided to visit the Museum of Death. I have a complicated relationship with true crime. It’s a morbid and problematic fixation, sure. But there’s a reason why it’s also a pervasive one. We all die, and most of us are terrified of the prospect. Some people run away from their fears. Others run towards them.

Personally, I run towards the things that scare me. But I found my limit that day, at the end of a sharply angled hallway across from a bunk bed taken from the Heaven’s Gate compound. It was a series of framed photographs where two people, naked and covered in blood, smiled as they posed next to the dismembered corpse of the man they just murdered. I remember a head in a plastic bin, although that might be my imagination. It was something I never should have seen, and it left a stain on my soul. [Katie Rife]

You probably can’t watch the political documentary of the year (November 5)

No Other Land (Photo: Cinetic Media)

The difference between No Other Land and the barrage of carnage shared every day online is that the film is bilingual, cross-cultural activism that is inextricable from its context but not reliant on it. It’s not a graphic image of a dead child, nor a dry history lesson. It is a Palestinian lifetime, a lifetime of repetition and rebuilding and struggle, condensed to an hour and a half. No Other Land does not need to give a crash course on the cruelties of the occupation. It’s plain to see, as bright and blunt as a bulldozer. The doc makes a conflict so often dismissed as “too complex” unavoidably simple. [Jacob Oller]

Doechii is rap’s rookie of the year (December 23)

Image: Doechii during an Apple Music interview with Zane Lowe (Screenshot: YouTube)

Doechii has a vision, and she’s doing everything in her power to make it come to fruition. She isn’t confined by restrictions, and she doesn’t rely on just one formula. She thrives on the infiniteness that performance art affords her, transforming and evolving while still holding tight to the influences that have molded her into the creative she is today. She’s resurrecting a feeling that hasn’t been felt in years, an earned confidence that’s backed up by hard work and ingenuity. Not only that, she’s exceptionally focused on bringing the connectivity of Blackness and meaningful, communal messaging back into hip-hop.

2024 belonged to one artist and one artist only: Doechii. [Kiana Fitzgerald]