Maude is a high-performance reflective language and system supporting both equational and rewriting logic specification and programming for a wide range of applications, and has a relatively large worldwide user and open-source developer base. This paper introduces novel features of Maude 2.4 including support for unification and narrowing. Unification is supported in Core Maude, the core rewriting engine of Maude, with commands and metalevel functions for order-sorted unification modulo some frequently occurring equational axioms. Narrowing is currently supported in its Full Maude extension. We also give a brief summary of the most important features of Maude 2.4 that were not part of Maude 2.0 and earlier releases. These features include communication with external objects, a new implementation of its module algebra, and new predefined libraries. We also review some new Maude applications.