Each day of December this year, I’m highlighting one of my favourite albums of 2024. Counting down the list, we start with #31 on December 1st and go all the way down until we’ve reached #1 on December 31st. Today, #14 on my Album of the Year list: Girl and Girl – ‘Call A Doctor’.

Me and Girl and Girl have some history. I saw the indie quartet perform during London Calling 2023 and, well, let’s just say I didn’t like it. Fast forward a couple months and after realising through single ‘All I See’ that this was actually quite a fun band, I suddenly became interested in the Aussies. What sparked this remarkable turnaround for a band I once dubbed ‘boring’ and ‘uninspiring’?

That’s actually quite an easy one to answer: it’s all in Girl and Girl’s debut album. ‘Call A Doctor’ is an album full of entertaining yet gripping songs. Not for the first time this month, we find ourselves in some kind of theatre play. In this case you could even go as far as dubbing it an indie rock musical. ‘Call A Doctor’ is pretty conceptual, since it all revolves around lead singer Kai James’s (mental) health issues. Due to the band’s jangly indie rock, this album is a lot easier to digest than your bog-standard concept album, even though it’s pretty much a personal drama. “Our story begins in the east wing of Wesley hospital, our young hero’s local emergency centre” we hear James speak on the album’s intro, before the title track rushes us through the narrow corridors of this Brisbane based hospital. A doctor is assessing the situation: “It’s critical that you tell the truth, is there really something wrong with you?” There’s 2 conclusions to pull from this song. Firstly, Kai James is probably a hypochondriac, and secondly, he’s a regular here. “Life’s pretty great until next week”, he ends on the album’s opener. I’m sure the Wesley hospital will be looking forward to his next visit.

From here on out, we pace through several of Kai James’s episodes. On ‘Hello’, he’s rings the hospital’s help line, not for the first time either: “I know you’re all too familiar with my little personal hell, so you probably won’t care”. Other notable songs on the album include ‘Maple Jean and the Anthropocene’, ‘Oh Boy!’, ‘Mother’, and ‘Our Love (Ours Only)’. It’s the storytelling in combination with the jangle pop that makes ‘Call A Doctor’ such an interesting debut album. It has the lyrical cleverness which the Australians tend to excel in (looking at the likes of Courtney Barnett) and combined with Girl and Girl’s signature sound, it’s one hell of an original album.