Hey, y’all! Zack here. 2023’s not totally over yet, but as new records worth hearing dwindle in number by the week, I’m comfortable with wrapping up my final list of favorites from this year with more wiggle room than usual before the holidays. I backpedaled in quantity compared to years past—I heard just over 200 current releases in 2023, in part due to moving, working on my latest EP (more new tunes coming your way in 2024, stay tuned!) and a pesky infection that aggravated my hearing for a few months back in the spring. That’s fewer than normal, but still a sufficient amount to round up my favorites and have the praise flow naturally; none of these top 50 feel like a stretch to compliment.
As usual, this list isn’t some claim of objectivity, either. I know some widely and critically-acclaimed records escaped my radar, but I want this rundown to be reflective of what I actually heard throughout the majority of the year, not just what I binged at the last-minute once it was almost done. There’s no shortage of publications for you to bounce recommendations off of, and now’s the time to compare, contrast, and deduce what might be up your alley. For better or worse, these are what were up mine, starting with a round of token genre honorable mentions and then running through my top 50 proper. Exact placements are largely arbitrary aside from the tippity top of the list, and there will be a Spotify playlist link at the end of the page for you to sample a recommended track from each entry if you feel so inclined. On with the show!
HONORABLE MENTIONS
POP
Bobbing – Year of the Newt
🇺🇸 Berkeley, CA – October 27 – Self-released
Gorillaz – Cracker Island
🇬🇧 London, England – February 24 – Parlophone
Lil Yachty – Let’s Start Here.
🇺🇸 Atlanta, GA – January 27 – Quality Control Music
HIP-HOP
Blu & Nottz – Afrika
🇺🇸 Los Angeles, CA & Norfolk, VA – December 8 – Nature Sounds
El Michels Affair & Black Thought – Glorious Game
🇺🇸 New York, NY & Philadelphia, PA – April 14 – Big Crown Records
JPEGMAFIA x Danny Brown – Scaring the Hoes Vol. 1
🇺🇸 Los Angeles, CA & Austin, TX – March 24 – AWAL Recordings
JAZZ
Jaimie Branch – Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war))
🇺🇸 New York, NY – August 25 – International Anthem Recording Co.
Jonah Yano – portrait of a dog
🇨🇦 Toronto, ON – January 27 – Innovative Leisure Records
Walter Smith III – Return to Casual
🇺🇸 Boston, MA – April 7 – Blue Note Records
ROCK
Cory Hanson – Western Cum
🇺🇸 Los Angeles, CA – June 23 – Drag City
There Will Be Fireworks – Summer Moon
🇬🇧 Glasgow, Scotland – November 3 – The Imaginary Kind
Tigercub – The Perfume of Decay
🇬🇧 Brighton, England – June 2 – Loosegroove Records
PUNK
Fiddlehead – Death Is Nothing To Us
🇺🇸 Boston, MA – August 18 – Run For Cover Records
moshimoshi – GREEN LP
🇫🇮 Helsinki, Finland – April 28 – All That Plazz
The HIRS Collective – We’re Still Here
🇺🇸 Philadelphia, PA – March 24 – Get Better Records
METAL
Burner – It All Returns to Nothing
🇬🇧 London, England – June 23 – Church Road Records
Liturgy – 93696
🇺🇸 New York, NY – March 24 – Thrill Jockey
Silent Planet – SUPERBLOOM
🇺🇸 Los Angeles, CA – November 3 – UNFD
FOLK
Glen Hansard – All That Was East Is West of Me Now
🇮🇪 Dublin, Ireland – October 20 – Plateau Records
Sangre de Muérdago – O vento que lambe as miñas feridas
🇩🇪 Leipzig, Germany – April 14 – Self-released
The Tallest Man on Earth – Henry St.
🇸🇪 Leksand, Sweden – April 14 – ANTI- Records
COUNTRY
Bonnie Montgomery – River
🇺🇸 Austin, TX – November 3 – Gar Hole Records
Slaughter Beach, Dog – Crying, Laughing, Waving, Smiling
🇺🇸 Philadelphia, PA – September 22 – Lame-O Records
Tyler Childers – Rustin’ in the Rain
🇺🇸 Paintsville, KY – September 8 – Hickman Holler Records/RCA
EXPERIMENTAL/MISCELLANEOUS
Full of Hell & Nothing – When No Birds Sang
🇺🇸 Ocean City, MD & Philadelphia PA – December 1 – Closed Casket Activities
Ryuichi Sakamoto – 12
🇯🇵 Tokyo, Japan – January 17 – Milan Records
Vivat Virtute – Hold Music
🇨🇦 Winnipeg, MB – February 22 – Self-released
REISSUES/REMIXES
Hopesfall – The Satellite Years 2.0
🇺🇸 Charlotte, NC – September 26 – Trustkill Records
The Replacements – Tim: Let It Bleed Edition
🇺🇸 Minneapolis, MN – September 22 – Rhino Records
Thrice – The Artist in the Ambulance Revisited
🇺🇸 Irvine, CA – February 1 – Miscellaneous Recordings
EPs
Anberlin – Convinced
🇺🇸 Winter Haven, FL – June 30 – Equal Vision Records
Better Lovers – God Made Me An Animal
🇺🇸 Buffalo, NY – July 7 – SharpTone Records
Maruja – Knocknarea
🇬🇧 Manchester, England – March 17 – Self-released
EP of the Year – BINGE – Toothache
🇬🇧 Manchester, England – April 1 – Self-released
Following the ugly dissolution of his seminal progressive rock band, Oceansize drummer Mark Heron went off the deep end: depression, a broken back, and subsequent addictions to prescription opioids rendered the man unable to play his instrument for a fair chunk of the last decade. Rehab was rough, but re-acclimating to his rudiments through brute force eventually paved the way for BINGE, a new project Heron formed with guitarist and producer Rob Sewell right before the COVID pandemic temporarily shut down live music.
In the interim, session footage offered glimpses of the duo’s groovy, meaty instrumental rock—as memorable for its restless aggression as the musicians were for their odd taste in headwear—but it took until this past spring for the pair to drop a studio release. By that point, most of Toothache had already been available in some form, but my familiarity with the material hasn’t prevented these six tracks from kicking veritable ass in a neat if overdue bundle. Keep the bangers coming, fellas.
Listen to: “Metatronian”
#50 – The St Pierre Snake Invasion – Galore
🇬🇧 Bristol, England – April 21 – Church Road Records
The St Pierre Snake Invasion frontman Damien Seyall was adamant during rollout that while Galore was an album about personal growth, it shouldn’t be interpreted as the product of pandemic-era introspection. The songs were around longer, their bottled aggression fermenting not through choice but necessity. While biding time, a diet of Meshuggah’s chaotic metal and Soulwax’s pulsating techno reportedly altered the music’s DNA.
Those two projects remain a distant relative to the lumbering, thick grooves TSPSI eventually released on Galore, but the throughline is apparent: the band’s slabs of erratic riffage adopt an ethos of repetition, their angular beatdowns whining and whirring like an assembly line with a vengeful mind of its own. Between the harder hitting cuts, shuffling, ominous experiments like the title track and “Apex Prey” prove the formula just as strong when they turn it on its head. If anyone’s in the market for an obscure, noisy dark horse this year, look no further.
Listen to: “Submechano”
#49 – BrokenTeeth – How to Sink Slowly
🇰🇷 Seoul, South Korea – February 23 – Poclanos
Concurrent with K-pop’s ascent in Western pop culture, an indie scene from South Korea termed the “Digital Dawn” has also gained a following on this side of the world, principally raising anonymous solo projects of shoegaze musicians to cult prominence. In 2021, Parannoul, the most famous of their legion, earned critical acclaim for To See The Next Part of the Dream, an album drenched in isolation, regret, and a complete disregard for volume control. Their follow-up this year, After The Magic, shifted gears, beaming shimmery optimism of the most unmistakable magnitude, and as much as I appreciated it, I appreciated the second album of their Digital Dawn contemporary BrokenTeeth even more.
How to Sink Slowly is, as its title implies, awash in a warm seabed of grand, rippling chords unraveled at laid-back tempos. Minha Kim’s vocal presence strikes the sweet spot of melancholy and comfort, channeling both with poise but mainly letting his post-rock guitar swells do the talking for him. Whenever I had a hankering for this collective’s output in 2023—and Digital Dawn artists played through my headphones on many winter walks at the beach towards the start of the year—BrokenTeeth was their act I circled around to most often.
Listen to: “Sunset Strike”
#48 – Holding Absence – The Noble Art of Self-Destruction
🇬🇧 Cardiff, Wales – August 25 – SharpTone Records
Is it possible to be nostalgic for a band who’s best days still seem to be ahead of them? Misguided as it may be, I feel that way when I hear Holding Absence. The quartet’s ultra-polished, heart-on-sleeve alternative rock recalls the strain of emo that dominated the airwaves when I was younger. That was presumably their springboard as well—on past releases and again with The Noble Art of Self-Destruction, the band play to established strengths: Ashley Green’s tight and driving drums, Scott Carey’s walls of reverb-soaked guitars, and, of course, Lucas Woodland’s captivating vocal control.
This album is admittedly short on surprises—it’s expected hook after hook after hook—but that’s its own reward when the teary-eyed balladry and hints of darker suspense are both fit to lead future stadiums in sing-along revelry. The record’s motif of kintsugi—mending cracks with gold—is oddly apt for Holding Absence’s position within the timeline of contemporary rock music: they’re taking passed-over craftsmanship and beautifying it for reuse.
Listen to: “Her Wings”
#47 – Model/Actriz – Dogsbody
🇺🇸 New York, NY – February 24 – True Panther Sounds
I no longer know what to call the reincarnation of post-punk that’s taking the 2020’s by storm, but across the pond and at home, thudding percussion, tinny guitars, and frontmen whose sole technique is gruff mumbling all seem to be what’s “in” in the indiesphere right now. Model/Actriz fit this bill too, but sample any track from the group’s debut LP, Dogsbody, and it becomes immediately evident there are weirder forces at work here: the rhythms are more like a demented take on new wave than a straight-faced adaptation of music college prog-isms. The noise is noisier, too: the band’s “riffs” screech like subway brakes in a skid, echoed from all sides of the subterranean labyrinth. It’ll make the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, and it’ll keep doing it over and over until the monotony becomes its own concerning character trait. And I haven’t even breached the abundant references to sex, blood, and primitive lust—hell, the cover is a beautified dildo resting in a crater of dented metal. You should have an idea what sort of mess you’re getting into here.
That’s kind of the pitch. The album renders its carnal desires intentionally desensitizing, kicking off with pure nightmare fuel and bowing out only once you’ve been beaten to the point of numbness. Can psychological horror constitute an album? Model/Actriz sought to find out and stuck the landing better than most of their peers.
Listen to: “Donkey Show”
#46 – Sampha – Lahai
🇬🇧 London, England – October 20 – Young
It’s been six years since Sampha Sisay made his full-length debut with Process, a heart-wrenching R&B album chronicling the musician’s loss of both parents to cancer. This follow-up, Lahai, arrives a few years after becoming a father himself, all but demanding close listeners view the two records as reflecting mirrors on a continuum about grief and renewal.
That’s helpful to keep in mind—when Lahai’s talk of flight and freedom is as frequent as it is (not to mention the inherited influences of West African traditional music like Wassoulou), the circumstances that led to its creation are kind of inescapable—but don’t let the backstory distract you from just how beautiful the songwriting is on its own. From his cozy, radiant crooning to a smorgasbord of subtle, sneaky production tricks and prismatic piano parts, Sampha fine-tunes every emotional crest to its fullest potential while providing ample downtime for your thoughts to return to center. These tunes are airy, spiritual, and yet effervescent, immersed in newfound comprehension and determined to beam their inner peace outward.
Listen to: “Suspended”
#45 – Pile – All Fiction
🇺🇸 Boston, MA – February 17 – Exploding in Sound Records
It’s about time I checked out Pile—I arrived tardy to the classes this darling indie act has been teaching for the last 17 years, and although I’m glad I took a seat, All Fiction makes gibberish of the course syllabus. Prior buzzwords applied to the band include post-hardcore and noise rock, though only scraps of those genres’ characteristic blunt force remain on this latest project; its ten tracks float by like delirious ghosts wandering a fever dream, twanging and curdling lonelier than dusty drafts in a noir Western.
Most of the album feels legitimately formless; it undergoes lengthy lulls of disembodied tension, only to get punctuated at key intervals by band mastermind Rick Maguire’s yelps and stuttering rhythms. With one or two exceptions that dangle oh so delightfully into single-worthy territory (“Loops,” “Poisons,”), this is indie rock near its most mangled form, channeling existential crises through the unease of the arrangements as much as the lyricism. And as helpful as remedial lessons in Pile’s career arc might be in making sense of it, I’d prefer to stay lost in All Fiction’s ghastly grasp a little while longer—few efforts this year confounded me (in a good way) as much as this one.
Listen to: “Loops”
#44 – Jeromes Dream – The Gray in Between
🇺🇸 San Francisco, CA – May 5 – Iodine Recordings/Microspy
Jeromes Dream weren’t the first iconic post-hardcore band from the turn of the century to regroup with lackluster vitality and even less fanfare, and they won’t be the last—but they might be the first of those roadblock-hitters to go back to the drawing board and return with a second take on par with the ferocity of their original repertoire. The trio’s initial comeback on 2019’s LP was understandably maligned—”where are the screams? You guys helped define screamo”—and those criticisms were deftly heeded while working on The Gray in Between.
Founding guitarist Nick Antonopoulos may have left and made room for Loma Prieta stand-in Sean Leary, but rest assured: the crusty giants don’t innovate here so much as rediscover the essence of what makes their abrasive, eardrum-shattering cacophony such a rush: The Gray in Between jerks and convulses, pauses and pounces, all in service of the textural minutiae of screeching feedback and the visceral shock value doled out by the collision of desperation and dread. It’s just as menacing as it was in 2000, and why shouldn’t it be? Jeromes Dream practically handwrote the subgenre’s curriculum.
Listen to: “Stretched Invisible From London”
#43 – Narrow Head – Moments of Clarity
🇺🇸 Houston, TX – February 10 – Run For Cover Records
My father enjoys—and thankfully still has the capacity to ridicule—Greta Van Fleet’s Led Zeppelin mimicry. It’s kind of unfair to blame kids for copycatting a past era’s sound if they’re genuinely inspired by it and just weren’t born early enough to participate in its zeitgeist.
I feel much the same way about Narrow Head. From their tones to their fashion to their music videos’ visual aesthetic, these young adults are 90’s kids through and through. Their blend of shoegaze, post-grunge, and alternative metal runs the gamut of comparisons from Deftones to The Smashing Pumpkins to Hum to My Bloody Valentine, bringing next to nothing new to the table in terms of originality, but keenly understanding how their forefathers’ hooks, tones, and textures meld best together. Students of a game 30 years their senior aren’t at an inherent disadvantage; Moments of Clarity sounds familiar, but it also sounds resplendent and disarmingly earnest about who it idolizes. If, like me, you already adore the blueprint, Narrow Head precisely abiding by it can be its own reward.
Listen to: “Moments of Clarity”
#42 – Andrea – Due In Color
🇮🇹 Turin, Italy – March 23 – Ilian Tape
Since the release of their artist Skee Mask’s 2021 behemoth Pool, Ilian Tape has become a label DJs teem with excitement over. I’m perpetually behind the curve of electronic music’s hippest happenings, but with Due In Color, I’ve finally hopped aboard their hype train, too. Like most of my favorite stuff in the genre this year, the album delicately teeters between ambient and dance music, evoking contrasting senses in the same passages— the insect skitter of “Jaim,” for instance, thunders as loud as its reverb-drenched drums. Andrea’s textural work simultaneously evokes dry, mirage-prone heat and frigid, aquatic chills.
In that sense, there’s something for everyone: despite never tearing its cohesive fabric, the more you dial in on what makes each song tick, the more diverse they feel: “Am Der” fuses melancholic piano and Sigur Rós-like swells with tropicalia. A few tracks prior, “Chessbio” saunters with a Radiohead-ish bass line. “Remote Working” is contagious, upbeat techno, “Hazymo” a brilliant boom-bap sample that must’ve somehow escaped choosier producers’ ears. Generally, the first half is more conventionally structured, the latter half more atmospheric, but from start to finish, there’s nary a wobble (okay, the vocal bit in “Sephr” kinda sucks, but that’s the only one) across Due In Color’s hypnotizing hour. It whet my appetite for more jams in this vein, and even though some of the other electronic records I made my way to later in the year outshone it at its game, its grab bag of beats set a sizable benchmark for the competition to live up to.
Listen to: “Ress”
#41 – Steven Wilson – The Harmony Codex
🇬🇧 Hemel Hempstead, England – September 29 – Virgin Music
For years, the praise and criticism directed at Steven Wilson has been one and the same: the Porcupine Tree frontman had gotten too complacent, and his squeaky clean, Pink Floyd-indebted brand of progressive rock was now too safe. For better and worse, recent chapters of his solo career have reversed the details of those accusations: To The Bone and The Future Bites witnessed the singer-songwriter try his hand at poppier melodies and embrace electronica, but as he branched out, his albums’ internal workings suffered. He’s never been the most profound lyricist, either.
But Wilson’s new pursuits have finally crashed headfirst into his fortes on The Harmony Codex. The record is a stunning return to form that lends complementary balance to the man’s fondness for 70’s prog wizardry, his knack for materializing otherworldly ambience, and his latest cross-genre soul-searching. Its motifs of infinite staircases are evoked just as brilliantly by the songs’ winding, climbing structures as they are by his dystopian set pieces and snide remarks, while his true calling—an audiophile’s ear for production—sure doesn’t detract from the experience either. And when the puzzle pieces fully align—the Ninet Tayeb duet “Rock Bottom” or the spiraling tessellations of the title track, for instance—the results are nothing short of spellbinding.
Listen to: “What Life Brings”
#40 – Empty Country – Empty Country II
🇺🇸 “The Woods,” CT – November 3 – Get Better Records/Tough Love Records
As the accompaniment to many shattered securities, Empty Country’s self-titled debut sat in a class of its own atop the list of my favorite albums of 2020. I’d long adored Joe D’Agostino’s glittering, manic songwriting thanks to his previous act, Cymbals Eat Guitars, and the Empty Country moniker gave him an outlet to double down on his knack for storytelling with new sonic templates. Before, he relied on personal recollection and drew from punk and indie rock icons, whereas with Empty Country, crafted protagonists blur the boundaries of fucked up fictions and sour self-assessments, trading POVs between ne’er-do-wells, victims, and bystanders through goosebump-inducing turns of phrase. Its drugged up Americana matched the dour mentality perfectly.
True to its name, Empty Country II is an expansion of the first record’s worldbuilding, establishing concrete details to such an extent that it’s even bundled together with a stellar short story about a family of rural West Virginian clairvoyants. But the smeared lens doesn’t make the images any clearer: D’Agostino sounds completely untethered here compared to his feet-dipping on this album’s predecessor, both in regards to his jittery, slurred vocal style—an acquired taste in its own right—and to these songs’ lazily unraveled compositions, often spanning several minutes with no distinct hook other than the gravity of their poetry. Poetic they are, at least: at this point I consider D’Agostino one of his generation’s most astute observers, molding the macabre and mundane to rein you in despite (if not because of) his rambling, psychedelic arrangements. I’m gonna need more than a month and change to fully digest Empty Country II—admittedly, some cuts here haven’t fully warmed on me yet, but I expect they will sooner or later. Everything else the man’s written eventually has, and the ambition of this outing is commendable enough.
Listen to: “Dustine”
#39 – Great Falls – Objects Without Pain
🇺🇸 Seattle, WA – September 15 – Neurot Recordings
According to vocalist/guitarist Demian Johnston, Objects Without Pain is about starting life from square one after a messy divorce. I’ll have to take his word for it—his lyrics remain unavailable online as of this writing, and there’s no deciphering a good chunk of them on account of the ear-piercing din they reside in. Johnston sounds like he’s just stepped on pins, needles, and children’s Legos for the record’s entire length, bellowing in unrelenting agony over the Seattle three-piece’s grimy spillage of sludge metal and noise rock. Compare and contrast with Sprain’s The Lamb as Effigy, which came out just weeks prior and bewilderingly overshadowed this record: if that one depicts a (frankly? too) cerebral, post-doctorate psychosis, evasive more than it is haunting, Objects Without Pain is a train of explosives careening into your living room for nearly an hour on end.
You know how it goes with music this heavy: the gnarlier analogies you can construct around it, the better. So it goes with Great Falls, and while their song structures are full of surprises and the delivery lands with the nuance of a dropped bomb, the secret hero of this unsung release is its mixer: Scott Evans has handled technical duties for a number of beloved, aging West Coast hardcore-adjacent outfits as of late—most notably Kowloon Walled City and one of my favorite bands of all time, Thrice—but this record might set a new gold standard for the guy. It takes a seriously good ear to take music this full-throttle, this level in its brutality, and weld it into a twisting, riveting roller coaster ride instead of a land speed record run. As for the casual listener, nothing here resembles a hook—Objects Without Pain is devoid of hope, and that’s the greatest compliment I can give musicians who subject themselves to this aural onslaught willingly.
Listen to: “The Starveling”
#38 – Aesop Rock – Integrated Tech Solutions
🇺🇸 Portland, OR – November 10 – Rhymesayers Entertainment
You don’t just write album lists (for free! smh) ten years strong to a tiny audience without being a bit of a word guy, and you don’t be a bit of a word guy and not fuck with Ian Bavitz. To call him the most verbose rapper in the game isn’t even unsubstantiated opinion: science has demonstrated that his lexicon contains the most unique words of any prominent English-language hip-hop artist, a feat owed in equal part to his lateral storytelling techniques and the fact that all his releases near or breach an hour in length.
Raw data only explains so much, though: it doesn’t account for his preppy, clearly spat enunciations, his relatively recurrent flow patterns, or his mid-tempo, lax beats, all of which make his work a little easier to penetrate. Objectivity doesn’t hold a candle to Aes’ humor, either, and it shows up in spades on Integrated Tech Solutions, from an interlude pontificating about a Van Gogh painting to an adorable song about him meeting Mr. T at a restaurant as a kid. The tracklist’s range is exemplified by standout “Aggressive Steven,” where a hilarious standoff with a tweaker who broke into his apartment gracefully segues into dire commentary on America’s prison pipeline. Much like 2020’s Spirit World Field Guide, the album’s title promises more than it follows through on: Aes’ AI skepticism is too thin to construe the whole piece as a concept record, but that’s for the better, anyway: rotating around one single theme doesn’t play to his strengths as rap’s free-range shepherd. And I’m learning from him! Look: 25 years into this line of work, Bavitz / doesn’t have much left to prove beyond the fact he still has it / and that he does without the ails of age across ITS / such that it functions more like field day than like work at a desk / compiling eighteen newer anecdotes and meta-modern musings / while embodying his legend of loquacious verbal cruuuising. “Word guy,” I called myself. Don’t you fucking doubt me!
Listen to: “Mindful Solutionism”
#37 – Tim Hecker – No Highs
🇺🇸 Los Angeles, CA – April 7 – kranky
You’d be forgiven for thinking Tim Hecker could take a victory lap; over 20 years and 10 albums deep into a career as one of indie’s leading sound manipulators, the Canadian-born electronic wizard has exhaled fresh life into the ambient genre more than just about anyone in his generation. Ask any fan of the guy what their favorite Hecker release is, and nearly every entry in his catalogue could be a justifiable answer. His latest album speaks to a more confrontational impulse—its press release presupposes it as a “beacon of unease against the deluge of false positive corporate ambient currently in vogue.” Even if you haven’t sought it out, you’ve heard what he’s getting at here: elevator muzak for streaming clicks, music for multi-tasking instead of mind exercise. In a roundabout sense, the soullessness of that stuff is “uneasy,” too, and No Highs rallies against that sort of BGM by exaggerating it, dwelling on the unspoken absence within it instead of maximizing its inverse image.
At its best, the album effectively feels like a series of “oh shit” moments experienced at glacial speed. Hecker’s grayscale panorama evokes a skydiver realizing mid-fall that their parachute won’t open, a driver on the verge of losing control of a hydroplaning vehicle, an empty hospital waiting room with flickering light fixtures, all rendered in foreboding, frame-by-frame clarity. And it does this without resorting to cliché; there’s no Jaws theme motif, no shot fired. Volatile, foggy, and downcast, like a sleep paralysis demon whose only tongue is the hum and static of supercomputers, the record’s pitch is in its atmospheric stranglehold, and all its quirks (the Morse code-like blips, the waves of binary particulates, Colin Stetson’s modal sax guest spots, etc.) serve that greater purpose with a precision that an artist like Hecker doesn’t earn by resting on his laurels. And for all my similes, the press release still says it better: No Highs is “a jagged anti-relaxant for our medicated age.”
Listen to: “Monotony”
#36 – George Clanton – Ooh Rap I Ya
🇺🇸 Los Angeles, CA – July 28 – 100% Electronica
For all my good faith and open-mindedness about music, I do hold on to a comfort zone of sorts. A decade ago, the internet’s burgeoning vaporwave movement resided outside of it; I looked on with chuffed curiosity at its nostalgia-coded surrealism, thinking it would quickly and quietly go the way of the dodo. In 2023, the craze surrounding vaporwave and its roots in chillwave has indeed been silenced, but through assimilation into broader cultural understanding rather than over-hunting. Most subgenres of modern electronic music can trace their roots back to its head waters.
So I may be late to the rave, but even I know George Clanton was partially responsible for that transition. His latest work, Ooh Rap I Ya, continues to nail the fundamentals while embracing forms of electronica that predated the vaporwave boom he rode in on. The album directs traffic at a crossroads between the genre’s various eras—its acid house drum machines and dizzying deluge of synths guarantee that no minute across this ten track project ceases spinning, but at each rotation of the centrifuge, a different inspiration rears its head; baggy and Madchester vibes one moment, the sheen of peak 90s Britpop the next, and for much of the latter half of the record, Clanton pushes the envelope to measure just how far he can stretch the swirling stupor. Yet at no point does it feel tacky or superfluous: repetitive as they may be in overarching mood, these arrangements bleed euphoria. Ooh Rap I Ya may not be its genre’s crowning achievement, but I can attest it makes an excellent introduction for the uninitiated and an even greater pick-me-up.
Listen to: “Justify Your Life”
#35 – The Hives – The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons
🇸🇪 Fagersta, Sweden – August 11 – Disques Hives
Entering their fourth decade of existence, you’d be forgiven for thinking The Hives might want to prove they can write (to put it in their terms) “mature rock ‘n’ roll”. Coming off a lengthy hiatus, they’ve taken every opportunity to decree the opposite is true: “Nobody wants that,” frontman Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist insists. “That’s literally taking the good shit out of it. Rock ‘n’ roll is a perpetual teenager.”
Well, credit where it’s due to these lads: The Hives are nearly pushing 50, and they still retain the vitality, enthusiasm, and humor of cornballs half their age, all while continuing to abide by the fundamentals of catchy songwriting. The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons, the title an ode to the band’s mythic (in other words, completely fake) fallen manager, is a half-hour of exploding endorphins and dumb fun channeled through hyper-contagious garage punk. The sillier, the better: subsequent listens reveal new favorite one-liners delivered with riotous sincerity, ranging from nonsense analogies (“I’ll hit the weekend like a cake shot out of a gun”) to complete word salad (“What don’t you wanna not don’t wanna do?” [sic]). There’s simply no contending with The Hives on anything but their own terms: give them an inch of your attention and they’ll steal all of it for the remainder of Randy Fitzsimmons’ runtime.
Listen to: “Bogus Operandi”
#34 – GridLink – Coronet Juniper
🇺🇸 Hoboken, NJ – September 15 – Willowtip
No music snob sticks their nose up more fiercely than a metalhead who’s into the extreme shit, so lest they somehow find this list and come at me for me plugging “the one grindcore band that even [huff] casuals know,” I’ll bypass that tired conversation entirely and get to the point: sample even two seconds of Coronet Juniper—any two seconds of it—and you’ll know whether or not the group’s signature supersonic headache is for you. I don’t expect it to be most people’s preferred taste, but if you’ve ever had any interest in the freakishly fast circus that is this niche subgenre, this band is top notch virtuosity all the way down, from Bryan Fajardo’s inhuman blast beats to Jon Chang’s fried throat noises.
And really soak it in if you like it, because the group is already no more, disbanding for good barely a month after this album’s release. The good news? GridLink went out on top, and it wasn’t a guarantee we’d ever hear from them again: Coronet Juniper comes a number of years removed from Takafumi Matsubara needing to completely re-teach himself guitar following a medical emergency that hampered his coordination. That he re-emerged with dexterity on par with his band’s acclaimed back-catalogue is downright mindblowing. Even if, as some have assessed, it’s not quite as unforgiving now, that just makes Coronet Juniper a more appealing gateway listen. Like most grindcore, it’s short, too: 11 tracks across 19 minutes, with high enough fidelity for you to dissect the pummeling assault’s intricacies instead of it amounting to an impassable wall of noise. But who am I trying to convince? You’ve either already written this off or know it like the back of your hand. With GridLink, there isn’t really an intermediate option.
Listen to: “Silk Ash Cascade”
#33 – Johnny Booth – Moments Elsewhere
🇺🇸 Wantagh, NY – July 21 – Self-released
Y’all know that Scott Pilgrim scene where Michael Cera’s like “I could eat garlic bread for the rest of my life, never stopping,” only to be reminded (or maybe told for the first time) that bread makes you fat? That’s me lately, but not with garlic bread; that’s me with whatever this semi-proggy, certifiably chuggy, dissonantly harmonic brand of metalcore is. It’s the perpetual snack of my musical diet; I’d prefer an underwhelming, generic slice of it most days to many nutritious meals I’d have to psych myself up to munch on. As a result, identifying its standout acts isn’t always a straightforward process. Johnny Booth, for instance, aren’t the first group to blend brutal breakdowns, nutty syncopation, and the whole kit and kaboodle of studio effects in pursuit of this…uhhhhh…whatchamacallit; nu-metalcore? And they won’t be the last.
But this year, even after sparing you a slew of bubble entries in this vein (really, here’s a non-exhaustive list of artists they bested: Invent Animate, Spiritbox, END, Joliette, yes, even The Callous fucking Daoboys) Johnny Booth milked replay value for days out of Moments Elsewhere. They may not have the widest name recognition, but this five-piece delivers the ferocity, finesse, and flexibility found at this junction of genres a cut above the standard representation of it, even if their strongest suit ultimately remains throwing down on some no holds barred 0-0-0-x-x-x-x-core. The songwriting is propulsive, the production crispier than a kettle chip. For any junkies of like mind, the record’s a total thrill.
Listen to: “Full Tilt”
#32 – PJ Harvey – I Inside the Old Year Dying
🇬🇧 London, England – July 7 – Partisan Records
Polly Jean Harvey didn’t set out to make this album. Through a musical dry spell, the cross-disciplinary creator prioritized the writing of her second book, an epic poem called Orlam, utilizing the nearly extinct dialect of her native county Dorset. A linear synopsis evades me as I haven’t yet gotten the chance to read it, but described as “part hero’s journey, part almanac, part ode to a lost tongue,” the story supposedly revolves around a 9-year-old girl from an isolated village beginning to witness the beauty and terror of the world, with guidance from an oracle in the form of a dead lamb’s all-seeing eye. A theatrical adaptation was planned and promptly scrapped. In its place, Harvey began recording short vignettes as songs—songs that would eventually become I Inside the Old Year Dying.
That is, if we can call them “songs.” Most of the album flits by as a formless fall breeze. It’s folky, but distinctly not folk music; there’s no communion here, just stark absence, several tracks consisting of only guitar, piano, or sparse percussion in quiet arrangements then hauntingly sung over and manipulated in real time on analog equipment by producer Flood and longtime Harvey collaborator John Parish. The ambience itself becomes a living, breathing organism in its world where anachronistic poetry combines the spectral and the corporal, the mystical and the spiritually vacant. Where else are you going to find nods to Pepsi and Elvis shrouded by archaic language and ominous portent? I Inside the Old Year Dying is a conundrum of an album: indecipherable without context, but incredibly easy to daydream into. My favorite records tend to inhabit their own universes. Say what you will about this one, but it undeniably does, too.
Listen to: “Prayer at the Gate”
#31 – Hail The Sun – Divine Inner Tension
🇺🇸 Chico, CA – August 11 – Equal Vision Records
If you happen to like it right off the bat, hey, good for you, but the offshoot of post-hardcore labeled “Swancore” can be a tough sell: high-pitched vocals, noodling guitar riffs, weird time signatures—basically a bundle of showy, technical attributes infused with poppier inclinations that often veer perilously close to over-dramatic theater kid malarkey. In my younger years, this stuff repelled me, not because its appeal was too foreign, but because it was so close to being something I would love that any inch it wandered from that path was an inch too far.
For some of you, Hail The Sun’s surface-level flamboyance will exemplify what I’m getting at, but as the years go on, I’ve begun to look back on some of these so-called Swancore acts with fonder second thoughts. This band in particular has weathered the boom and decline of their chosen fad and come out the other side sounding no less sharp-witted, fired up, and vigorous, and I respect the hell out of that. Divine Inner Tension does contain a slight lineup change—vocalist Donovan Melero committed to the mic this time, handing over his second role behind the drum kit to touring member Allen Casillas—but the chemistry between these dudes hasn’t suffered for it at all. The album’s dozen tracks toe that thrilling line between volatile psychic freakouts and sugary sweet sing-along refrains, even as the topics range from serial killers and church abuse cover-ups to broken hearts and ignored therapy advice. If they take a few spins to click…well, you’re not alone, but in the grand scheme of matters, Hail The Sun make a damn good gateway act for a dying scene—and a proud case that it wasn’t all as obnoxious as it first sounded.
Listen to: “60-Minute Session Blocks”
#30 – Rodrigo Ogi – Aleatoriamente
🇧🇷 São Paulo, Brazil – September 27 – Self-released
How YouTube Autoplay brought me here, I don’t know, but it seems predestined: Aleatoriamente quite literally means “randomly” in Portuguese, and that’s got to describe my exposure to it, ‘cause it sure as hell doesn’t convey the meticulous craft displayed by this album. Rodrigo Ogi’s latest offering is a tantalizing display of underground hip-hop, revitalizing cues from the 80’s vanguarda paulista movement through the throbbing punch of modern production. His bars—or what I can discern from machine translation, anyway—unfurl the seedy tribulations of a narrator chased by the devil through a night of debauchery, evoking the paranoia and disgust of horrorcore through frantic rhymes, macabre wit, and Kiko Dinucci’s tense, grinding samples and beats.
It’s a concise beast, too: twelve tracks crammed into 34 minutes, none overstaying their welcome or letting the tunnel vision escape from the reach of Ogi’s pen…that is, until a twist of fate throws the project on its head at the close of the final track. Up to that point, not even the thick atmosphere or language barrier can prevent these bangers from sucking me in. All hip-hop heads willing to give a non-Anglophone project a shot, you’d be remiss to skip over this one.
Listen to: “Peixe”
#29 – Night Verses – Every Sound Has a Color in the Valley of Night: Part 1
🇺🇸 Los Angeles, CA – September 15 – Equal Vision Records
In 2017, Night Verses underwent a gutsy growing pain by letting vocalist Douglas Robinson walk away from the stage. It turned out to be a beneficial parting, though; the remainder of the post-hardcore band shifted their gears towards a rougher, increasingly technical template of progressive metal and boldly opted to not recruit a replacement singer. The following year’s From The Gallery of Sleep, the band’s first as an instrumental trio, flexed mastery of complex compositions, huge production value, and monumentally hooky lead guitar writing. That trifecta of strengths suggested the band would be an unstoppable tour de force, only perhaps let down by the album’s sheer length: over an hour of instrumental metal isn’t always the most palatable of propositions, but it was worth it, even as they effectively went radio silent after its touring cycle.
Until now, that is. And lo and behold, they’ve already addressed the length quibble: new album Every Sound Has a Color in the Valley of Night comes to us in two parts, the first of which dropped this past fall at a compact 33 minutes and the second of which will arrive sometime next spring. That unreleased chunk bears a handful of interesting guest announcements, but only one new name appears on this disc: aside from Tool bassist Justin Chancellor’s extremely smooth (and extremely Tool-like) contribution to closer “Séance,” Night Verses are left to their own devices on Part I, whipping up a flood of space gun riffs, psychedelic ambience, and rapid-fire drum work. It simply astounds me a three-piece can sound this massive. Last time wasn’t lightning in a bottle, and this time shouldn’t be either. Part II can’t get here soon enough.
Listen to: “Arrival”
#28 – Yves Tumor – Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)
🇺🇸 Los Angeles, CA – March 17 – Warp Records
Since ascending to indie prominence with the release of 2018’s Safe in the Hands of Love, an experimental electronic record by limitation, not by vision, Sean Lee Bowie, the artist behind the persona Yves Tumor, has looked elsewhere for sonic inspirations. The project gained a live band in 2019, and the year after that, Heaven to a Tortured Mind saw the singer step out of the shadows of anonymity by embracing glam rock, psychedelic instrumentation, and straight-up R&B. With each sonic exploration, the Yves Tumor project catalogued Bowie’s reflections on queerness, identity, and self-perception, distorting the divisions of performer and writer until the deeply intimate was presented as universal truth and vice versa.
Praise a Lord Who Chews… continues in that vein thematically, but the music finally feels like a three-dimensional vacuum as deep as it is wide, sweeping up every prior outing and underpinning the sum of the project’s touchstones with fresher, kinkier elements of dance music, post-punk, alternative rock, and synthpop. There’s no discreet homage here, no fixed direction; finally, Yves Tumor has crafted a pulsating, liminal world for Bowie’s ruminations on romance-turned-fetish-turned-divinity to rule over. It sounds sleazier and silkier at once, bathed in the two-faced complexity of these very large and very subjective topics. And as far as I’m concerned (not that I’m some dignified arbiter, just a cishet white dude), the hooks are leagues better, too. I’m finally seeing the hype, the hoopla: Praise a Lord Who Chews… is the synthesis of every Yves Tumor framework elevated by enough trial and error to bring each bustling rhythm, each breathy delivery, each genre-transcending guitar and bass phrase to the brink of androgynous, psychosexual oblivion. Better late than never—and honestly, this might not even stay Yves Tumor’s apex. Look out.
Listen to: “Heaven Surrounds Us Like a Hood”
#27 – Periphery – Periphery V: Djent is Not a Genre
🇺🇸 Washington, DC – March 10 – 3DOT Recordings
As a Periphery fanboy for basically the band’s entire existence, the question is rarely if new music from the progressive metal popularizers will land on my top 50 lists in eligible years, but where. They’ve been all over the spectrum, ranging from a relatively low guilty pleasure (2016’s Periphery III: Select Difficulty) to my Album of the Year (2019’s Periphery IV: Hail Stan), and watching these mad lads evolve has been a joy, even as their core sound of wanky leads, intense syncopation, and impassioned vocals remains similar from release to release. Some Periphery tracks make me feel like an astronaut basking in the glow of a bursting nebula. Others make me want to take a sledgehammer to glass, and then that glass to a nemesis’ eyeballs. Most manage to at least titillate both these extremes—and if you think they’re not smirking about it, look no further than their album subtitles.
On Periphery V: Djent is Not a Genre, the quintet leans on their facetious qualities to a risky degree, from interrupting their guns-blazing opener “Wildfire” with a lounge jazz interlude to placing rage cage “Everything Is Fine” next to pure-blooded pop ballad “Silhouette.” Coming off Hail Stan’s acclaim and recognizing it as their pinnacle, the band sound less eager than ever to live up to the same expectations, at times deliberately butchering ideal transitions and making these suites far choppier than they need to be for the sake of surprise. Do they think we’ll overlook it? The proof is in the album’s presence here; as much as I’m tempted to call their bluff, this somewhat stilted and nonetheless often stunning (hi, “Dying Star”) batch of songs is still genuinely more compelling to me than most of the music I heard this year. Newcomers shouldn’t start their Periphery journey here, but for those of us who’ve been on board with their shit-eating, video game-playing grins for a while, P5’s nutty performances transmit the band’s charisma as sparkling as ever.
Listen to: “Wildfire”
#26 – Paramore – This Is Why
🇺🇸 Nashville, TN – February 10 – Atlantic Records
Paramore’s ride to stardom was a quick one—signed as teenagers with a lot of growing up to do, label disputes, diverging beliefs, and frequent lineup changes plagued the band’s psyche behind the scenes, even as they raked in fans by the millions. Fronted by Hayley Williams, who critics often touted as a slier alternative to the ultra-commercial Kelly Clarkson or Avril Lavigne, the quartet-turned-trio also enjoyed greater artistic longevity than their reference points, urged at each fork in the road to respond to the internal drama at hand. These inter-album swings in vision weren’t blind leaps: their pop ethos remained paramount, juxtaposed with Williams’ feisty lyricism and refurbished window dressing.
How you categorize This Is Why, their first album in six years, says more about you than it does them: some have assessed it as Paramore’s most mature record to date, others as a backpedaled venture about whiny first world problems. Ask one person, it’s front-loaded and thin on replay value. Ask another, it’s a grower whose second half flatters the first. As “he said, she said” goss often goes, the truth lies somewhere in between: the band’s newfound fancy for post-punk—the funky, upbeat form of it, not the serrated knife dance it can devolve into—complements their alternative rock roots as the genesis for Williams’ inward interrogations, sulking with an oxymoronic pep in her step about doom-scrolling burnout, the cost of fame, and crippling self-doubt. Its opening run of singles aside, This Is Why’s hooks are subtler, its venting lent deeper layers the more familiar you are with the band’s tumultuous path here. But most importantly, its stymied frustration doesn’t feel choreographed, let alone gentrified. Anyone who identifies with its self-effacing gist (yes, you, reading this, raise your hand. I’ve raised mine) should have an arrow or two or ten strike closer to the heart than they’ll want to admit.
Listen to: “This Is Why”
#25 – Jessie Ware – That! Feels Good!
🇬🇧 London, England – April 28 – EMI
Jessie Ware’s mid-career rebirth couldn’t have been timelier: when the singer’s breakthrough, What’s Your Pleasure, dropped in mid-2020, lockdown fatigue had already settled in. Housebound busybodies who needed something new to unwind to, a seasoned, less Top 40-crazed take on funky fun, soon found an outlet through it, and considering the competition—Dua Lipa, Lizzo, and Kylie Minogue? Oof—it’s a testament to the album’s strength that its husky, supportive strides of liberation continued to keep Ware’s name in circulation once clubs reopened.
It’s an even bolder testament to her affectations, however, that That! Feels Good feels better than good, more like the record Ware was destined to drop all along: it’s even groovier, even catchier, and loads livelier, all while oozing confidence and charisma that the musician’s earliest work could barely muster the resolve to claim as her own. Hot button producers Stuart Price and James Ford are no strangers to disco revival, and their arrangements (brought to life by a who’s who list of jazz, funk, and dance heavyweights) give Ware free reign to sail through melody after melody of sexy triumph. The occasional one-liner may err on the side of cheesiness, but here more than on any of her material before, the diva seems completely in her element, reaching out to pull as many people as possible into her parade instead of punching down or playing hard to get. It’d take a dedicated curmudgeon to not feel good when these bops roll out the red carpet. The mat’s not reserved for just her. That! Feels Good! did it again.
Listen to: “Begin Again”
#24 – Home Is Where – the whaler
🇺🇸 Palm Coast, FL – June 16 – Wax Bodega
I can talk shit about algorithms all I want, but if (while desperate for outdoor exercise after weeks of living amidst smoky air) Spotify’s programmed megamind bestows upon me a band losing their collective shit at how inadequate our safety nets are, I’ve kinda got to hand it to them. I’d say it was fateful timing, but once disaster becomes the rule rather than the exception, doom stops registering as a matter of luck. Home Is Where get it, too. I had no prior knowledge of them when the whaler’s opener, “skin meadow,” greeted my ears on one of the few days of June I could breathe outside, but I was instantaneously hooked by its pessimism. “everyday feels like 9/11,” one track title here reads, establishing the concept connecting most of record, but “skin meadow” climaxes with a better zinger, one that’s stayed with me since that first listen: “I’m looking forward to looking back on this.”
Before you write off the woe as overblown hyperbole, keep in mind Home Is Where count trans women who live in fucking Florida among their members. Their struggle isn’t a punchline, an exaggeration, or even an epiphany, just another day of needless cruelty. But they don’t give up without a fight: the band’s counterattack pulls from a plethora of catalysts, ranging from the surreal, sinewy imagery, yodel-yelp vocal technique, and singing saws of Neutral Milk Hotel to the rock band-as-orchestra catharsis of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Drive Like Jehu’s prickly indignation and the noodly emo riffage of their fifth-wave contemporaries also play crucial roles in their sonic broth. Your first taste of it is perhaps the best one to savor; the whaler’s bitter, biting aphorisms have a way of wearing thin by record’s end, even if there’s a thematic justification for them piling up and Groundhog Day-ing back to the start, but until they do, Home Is Where will treat you to some of the most throttling, transcendent DIY punk in recent memory.
Listen to: “skin meadow”
#23 – The Gaslight Anthem – History Books
🇺🇸 New Brunswick, NJ – October 27 – Thirty Tigers
Drawing countless comparisons to their Jersey Shore forebear Bruce Springsteen has been a double-edged sword for The Gaslight Anthem, catapulting the rock quartet to underground success in the late aughts yet pigeonholing them as mere revivalists of The Boss’ everyman heartland rock. Eventually the pressure got to them: not long after mixed reactions to the band’s “divorce” record, 2014’s Get Hurt, they bowed out with a whimper, only reuniting briefly for anniversary tours performing older material. The flame had almost burnt out. Who better to reignite it than Springsteen himself?
The legend sings alongside Brian Fallon at his own behest for this album’s title track, one of many odes to the ephemerality of life on History Books. Like he woke from a deep slumber on the other side of the global shutdown, Fallon annotates the passing of time with surprise that he made it this far and a newfound willingness to bounce back, asking what he can do to steer himself towards a graceful, gliding demise instead of a smoldering, sudden one. Crises large and small—of mortality, of romantic flings, often times intertwined—cry from each horizon, no track straying far from The Gaslight Anthem’s hallowed ground between rollicking rock and roll sing-alongs and gritty indie jams. Everything’s streamlined, not from the band operating on autopilot, but because their heart doesn’t need any bells and whistles to move you. History Books’ past justifies its present. These musicians are just happy to be here, and I’m just happy to holler each of their newest refrains back. You never know which batch of them might be their last.
Listen to: “Autumn”
#22 – Alfa Mist – Variables
🇬🇧 London, England – April 21 – ANTI- Records
Alfa Sekitoleko’s musical journey has always been steered by identity-mapping. On “Borderline,” the first vocal track from his latest outing, he summarizes his past environs with a race-weary punchline: “everyday trauma, normal life / three options: music, sport, or crime.” He chose the first one: as a teen, his interest in sampling and his locale’s blossoming grime scene suggested a “two birds, one stone” solution, but all his hip-hop programming instead directed his hands towards a more conventional instrument: the piano.
Since evolving into a proficient musician, all four of his records under the Alfa Mist name have contained work from both hobbies, dabbling in a bit of introspective rap while foregrounding themselves as passionate, relaxing nu-jazz, but Variables takes the cake as Sekitoleko’s most confident bundle of compositions to date. Anchored by a handful of six- to seven-minute suites, his pearly keys lay foundations for his crew to convey intimate longing with far more nuance than words can. Trumpet, drum, and jazz guitar enthusiasts, eat your hearts out: the trade-off solos of “Foreword,” “The Gist,” and especially the title track are on par with any canonized classic you could weigh it against. The interlude tracks are admittedly spottier, but they occupy so little of the core experience here their triviality is kind of a non-factor. If nothing else, they insinuate there’s still room for the steadily-climbing Sekitoleko to refine his album sequencing, and with highlights as numerous and stunning as Variables offers, it’s only a matter of time before every star in his sky aligns.
Listen to: “Variables”
#21 – Fireworks – Higher Lonely Power
🇺🇸 Livonia, MI – January 1 – Funeral Plant Collective
Originally announced in 2019 before numerous delays led some to speculate the entire album was a red herring, Higher Lonely Power finally greeted Fireworks fans as a Name Your Price New Year’s gift nine years in the making, though its lyrical content had been brewing even longer than that. There’s no narrative here in a linear sense, but every track congregates in kindred frustration, unpacking the aimlessness of simply trying to eke out a gratifying life under the twin devils of hardline Christian fundamentalism and late stage capitalism. Those are imposing and stereotypically American antagonists to tussle with, but frontman Dave Mackinder largely angles his bitterness through individual reckonings rather than stuffy didactics, not only keeping the band’s pop punk ethos in frame, but directing their disillusionment at wider, closer, and more omnipotent threats.
Every now and then, the grievances verge on sloganeering, but in both structure and form, the record spasms and collects itself back up, alternating between roaring arena rock aspirations and brooding, emotive slow burners. 80’s synth pads line the tracklist, connecting the two diverging sounds as much as the album’s unwavering weariness. Come hell and high water, the greatest hallmark of Higher Lonely Power is its striking amalgamation of catchiness and (for a once-pop punk band, anyway) experimentation: sure, Blink-182 kinda got their shit together this year, but could you imagine them constructing the glitchy, breakbeat nightmare of “Machines Kept You Alive,” the post-hardcore savagery of “God-Approved Insurance Plan” or the guitar interplay of “Woods II?” I couldn’t—though to be fair, nine years ago, I couldn’t imagine Fireworks pulling it off either. Turns out a lot can change in that time—maybe not, as Mackinder puts it, “our version of giving our youngest-born to the sun,”—but apparently enough to resuscitate a band on pseudo-hiatus.
Listen to: “Funeral Plant”
#20 – James Holden – Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities
🇬🇧 London, England – March 31 – Border Community Recordings
If you’re the sort of person who could spend a year or two of lockdown in a private studio tinkering with equipment and rekindling your creative ambitions, the prospect of seclusion might not seem all that daunting. You and James Holden would probably get along great: the producer’s break from clubbing turned his curiosities not just inward, but back in time. Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities expands like an infinite road that frames destinations as moods rather than places, taking cues from ambient house artists like The KLF, plunderphonic pioneers Negativland, and pirate radio broadcasts Holden remembered listening to in his youth.
The sum of these inspirations is bewitching; Holden dangles a fanciful flurry of live instrumentation over each track’s offset meters and arpeggiated loops, establishing the latter element so you can lock into the pulse and the former two so your mind can tread away from it. That constant push/pull tug-of-war amounts to a dreamier variant of rave music, something the DJ maintains an appreciation for as long as it’s not kitsch, and these offerings certainly aren’t: “Worlds Collide Mountains Form,” for instance, merges droning violins with funk bass; “Common Land” features wispy punctuations of sax, and even the more formulaic cuts here, like “Continuous Revolution” or “Infinite Fadeout,” embrace a microcosmic rush of levitated, synthy adrenaline. Holden bypasses the hippier connotations of new age entirely, crafting his own unique multiverse. You’re invited along, and whether you get on the floor with your feet or your noggin, you’ll be swayed to feel his rhythms somehow.
Listen to: “Continuous Revolution”
#19 – Billy Woods & Kenny Segal – Maps
🇺🇸 New York, NY & Los Angeles, CA – May 5 – Backwoodz Studioz
Fame can no longer elude Billy Woods: over two decades deep into the rap game, a string of underground successes granted the deadpan writer a career renaissance that’s seen him pair up with indie-credentialed producers and fellow free-thinking, freer-rhyming MCs alike. Whether under his own name or through his Armand Hammer partnership with ELUCID, the guy churns out two to three records per year these days. Maps, the more versatile and layered of his 2023 offerings, functions as a travelogue of a man too grouchy to enjoy the international hustle, but he’s making the most of it; even as his flows bleed together with grizzled fatigue and minimal punctuative guidance, the dexterity of his word association is mind-boggling ear candy.
All that said, I’m not normally a Billy Woods fanatic. I respect his emerging stature, and the dude can undeniably pen killer bars, but his lethargic delivery can take some getting used to, and rarely has a producer stepped up to the plate to hand him the sort of beats that complement his physical and narrative voice the way Kenny Segal does here. If Woods’ authorial finesse qualifies him as a capable pilot, Segal’s instrumentals are Maps’ beat-up, tried and tested aircraft; every track buoys nocturnal, narcoleptic weightlessness, soundtracking early A.M. city-crawling, jet lag, and kenopsia through form as much as word. In each shuteye-deprived crevice, instruments become ambient noise and vice versa: is that a tuba in “Hangman” or a boat horn? Is the nauseating, faint rattling of “Baby Steps” a phone vibrating or just fuzzy synths? Trebly piano licks become notification pings, boom-bap shuffles the strut of someone probably not caffeinated enough to think straight. Sometimes Woods doesn’t: he even breaks his stoic character on “Rapper Weed,” unable to keep himself from laughing at his own fluidity, but he pulls it and the rest of Maps together with expected composure, demanding his brilliant array of guest features keep up. Somehow, they all get to their destination: Maps do help with that.
Listen to: “FaceTime”
#18 – The Veils – …And Out of the Void Came Love
🇬🇧 London, England – March 3 – Ba Da Bing! Records
Though they’re currently based out of London, Finn Andrews’ musical project The Veils defies borders in physicality and spirit. There’s the spatial element—the band reconvened from all over the world in their birth country of New Zealand, tracking and putting out …And Out of the Void Came Love on their own dime—but more important is their unimpeded sonic arsenal, an extensive and ever-expanding wardrobe of Southern Gothic influences and sweeping singer-songwriter hallmarks that culminate in magnificent, existential tunes.
14 of the 15 songs that land on their latest release are originals (the outlier is a cover originally by Andrews’ own father, Barry, of XTC and Shriekback fame), but they sound ancient in composition and interstellar in audio fidelity, like a liturgical document held dear by rovers on Mars. The younger Andrews’ quivering baritone evokes a gruffer David Bowie or a silkier Nick Cave as he ruminates on a hectic handful of years that’s left him with a greater appreciation for the little bit of time we get to enjoy all we’ve been given. Fatherhood, spells of fevers and injuries, and a worldwide pandemic played no small role in the straightforward poetry of slow burners like “Time,” “Undertow,” or “Diamonds and Coal,” and they’re fancified by the ethnically ambiguous extravagence of “Bullfigher (Hand of God),” “The Pearl (Part II),” or “The Day I Meet My Murderer.” From the album’s first seconds, upscale, posh luxury collides with grim, corporal uncertainty, and the spell doesn’t wear off until long after …And Out of the Void Came Love ceases playing.
Listen to: “Someday My Love Will Come”
#17 – King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation
🇦🇺 Melbourne, Australia – June 16 – KGLW
25 albums deep into their genre-defying career and with no signs of letting off the gas, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have long passed the point of external comparison: the psychedelic ensemble has touched ground in communities where musical wells as diverse as synthpop, jazz fusion, indie rock, boogie-woogie, rap, and power metal find common ground, weaving storylines and allusions between albums as superficially unalike as they are spiritually unified. Suffice to say your mileage will vary depending on how far they fall down each unique rabbit hole, but I’ve long been partial to the band’s heavier output, and PetroDragonic Apocalypse is essentially a triumphant extension of their beefiest, silliest forays.
So fans of Polygondwanaland’s progressive rock and Infest The Rats’ Nest’s thrash riffery, rejoice! This record fuses the two high watermarks of their catalogue not just in composition, but in theme: it’s Gizz’s most unrelenting and scathing D&D-ification of the climate crisis to date, taken to campy, exponentially catastrophic extremes. Human fascination with “Motor Spirit” (oil, yum) starts a domino effect entailing habitat destruction, supercell storms, divining occultists, and reptilian biowarfare, each fallen slab escalating the planet from a mere dystopian nightmare to a rock in space devoid of life as we know it. As space station observers look on with horror and wiccans gloat over their prophesied end of days, PetroDragonic Apocalypse is a borderline nonsensical, inglorious bloodbath, potent doom lurking underneath the masquerade—and the band has never sounded like they’ve had quite this much fun bringing their crooked, “parody as wake-up call” vision to fruition.
Listen to: “Gila Monster”
#16 – McKinley Dixon – Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!?
🇺🇸 Chicago, IL – June 2 – City Slang
How much generational trauma can you exorcise in less than half an hour? For McKinley Dixon, one stellar jazz rap album’s worth isn’t out of the question. The Annapolis-born, Richmond-raised storyteller is out to defy the odds of racial prejudice on Beloved! Paradise! Jazz?!, painting personal tales of courage, grief, and hope with impressionist strokes that pay homage to Black cultural cornerstones laid long before his time. Devoted bookworms may be quick to note the album’s title is itself a reference to a trio of Toni Morrison novels, though the album’s opening prose reading, an excerpt from Jazz narrated by Hanif Abdurraqib, places the tribute in timeless context: “Nobody says it’s pretty here; nobody says it’s easy, either. / What it is, is decisive.”
Except, frankly and not coincidentally, Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? is an easy spin, and a pretty one, at that! Bearing smooth and I mean smooooooooth arrangements courtesy of a mélange of Richmond-area musicians (especially trumpeter and primary co-writer Sam Koff), tracks like “Run, Run, Run,” and “Sun, I Rise” meld roots as old as the Harlem Renaissance with an even more vibrant vat of nu-jazz, swelling and bobbing not so much within Dixon’s verses but around and before them, stretching their feathered limbs until the right draft catches the rapper’s slippery meter and the two take flight together. On behalf of its brevity, no session here completely dozes off, either: both Dixon and the band are quick to lay down some spunk whenever the baggage of these tales begins to bog down their resilience. With respects given to fallen friends and the cyclical nature of oppression, Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? doesn’t waffle with false positives or guarantees of a more stable future, just the insistence that hope isn’t extinguishable so easily. One third of the motif, the most important one, hits the nail on the head: what it is, is decisive—and it’s decisively my most revisited rap album of 2023.
Listen to: “Run, Run, Run”
#15 – Origami Angel – The Brightest Days
🇺🇸 Washington, DC – June 16 – Counter Intuitive Records
If there’s one thing I love about music two generations deep into the internet age, it’s that genres seem to no longer constitute barriers of entry for most kiddos. That isn’t to say elder statesmen didn’t forge new trails of their own or that there isn’t a commercial incentive to still playing established norms straight, but the proliferation of music media over the past 30-odd years has all but completely shattered the notion of audiences as regimented cliques. The practical advantages of following your heart are numerous: not only do acts riding the cutting edge stand out more in an environment where anyone can voice their truth, but it also just seems more fun to push limits than to make safe art.
On The Brightest Days, Origami Angel—already my favorite pop punk act of the last half-decade or so—certainly seem to still be having fun, even if the mixtape’s lyrical content spells otherwise. Pandemic isolation fatigue, abnormally wet weather, and a few eerily prescient mentions of the Capitol insurgency (written before it even happened?) weigh on Ryland Heagy’s mind across The Brightest Days’ eight tracks, a veritable checklist of bummers that threaten to usurp the band’s uptempo, radically dorky traits. Caught in the crosshairs, diligently-studied surf rock and jangle pop motifs collide with Origami Angel’s prior calling card: a meatier, more technical, and yet lusciously-produced brand of tongue-in-cheek emo. If the duo had a stranglehold on that Phineas & Ferb-ass party rock before now (and they did. It helps that they can actually, you know, sing and play well), we’re gonna need new adjectives to describe where they take the gambit on this release. Contrary to Heagy’s central lament, the days ahead seem pretty damn bright for him and his pals.
Listen to: “Thank You, New Jersey”
#14 – Panopticon – The Rime of Memory
🇺🇸 Ely, MN – November 29 – Bindrune Recordings
As nearly all the coolest and truest-to-form black metal does, Austin Lunn’s music transports my mind to a vast, wintery wilderness that fluctuates between a blinding daytime blizzard and an “all is calm, all is dead” type of silent night. On past releases, the Kentucky-born Minnesotan transplant cut his teeth by melding the genre’s traditionally Nordic flair with Appalachian folk and bluegrass. Those days are largely behind Lunn, but while they helped put his name on the map as one of America’s most visionary black metal pioneers, his committed reiterations of the genre’s roots have yielded a strikingly consistent discography in their own right: every two to three years, fans of extreme metal music get a comfy, bleak treat from the one-man giant known as Panopticon, and there’s never any question whether or not he’ll deliver.
Even with that in mind, The Rime of Memory stands tall as a highlight in Lunn’s discography and the larger canon of American black metal, not by reinventing its formulas, but by maximizing its Romantic (note the capital) grandiosity and fiery, nature-oriented tenacity. Five sprawling, verifiably epic marches in subzero dread await, nearly all of them more captivating than the last, pushing the multi-instrumentalist’s sheer dexterity to the limit without coming off as shoddy showmanship: every sequence, every crescendo, every visceral growl is in service of the album’s greater flow, and the whole 75-minute package flies by in what feels like an instant to acquainted ears. The Rime of Memory’s thesis about the passing of time (and/or, per Lunn’s word, wilderness conservation in the face of climate change) is symbiotic with this dual-faced orchestration: irreversible moments aren’t sudden disasters as often as they are the sum of wasted seconds. So come, all ye metalheads: don’t let its late-year release be the reason it slips by you.
Listen to: “Enduring the Snow Drought”
#13 – Powers / Pulice / Rolin – Prism
🇺🇸 Columbus, OH & Oakland, CA – March 3 – Cached Media
Well outside my usual wheelhouse, this collaborative jazz record by hammered dulcimer player Jen Powers, her frequent musical partner and guitarist Matthew J. Rolin, and invited saxophonist Cole Pulice was a last-minute recommendation I’m delighted to have hopped on. With the frantic rush of the winter holidays bearing down on me, I didn’t even realize how much I needed something warm: Prism is a blinding shower of sunbeams over a spring meadow, each of its four improvised sessions radiating transcendental bliss. The label’s press release terms the trio’s style “American pastoral trance,” not so much a genre onto itself as it is a means of qualifying their take on ambient music as something beyond simple new age background noise.
And “something beyond” these tracks certainly are: each cut prods at different senses, but they stay cohesive to Prism’s light (in weight and hue) tonal center: “Melted Honey” is electroacoustic glaze, Pulice doubling their sax lines into a droning, bagpipe-like alarm over faint, percussive rumbling. It’s like watching a thunderstorm’s light show depart over the horizon, while follow-up “Hidden Nook” casts the sun’s rising glow into the bedrooms of sleep-deprived romantics waking with fond, fuzzy memories of the previous night. “Magic Meadow Mirror” is Rolin’s most prominent offering and epitomizes the trio’s atmospheric breadth in a concise 4 and a half minutes, while closer “Wind Whirl” takes a maximalist approach, unfurling for over 19 into a glistening, post-rocky daydream that might as well stretch to infinity and still feels like it ends too soon. Whether you digest it as active listening or a prolonged lullaby, Prism is a profoundly gorgeous treat for the ears and a hold-over until less dreary seasons cycle back around.
Listen to: “Magic Meadow Mirror”
#12 – Caroline Polachek – Desire, I Want To Turn Into You
🇺🇸 New York, NY – February 14 – Perpetual Novice
Desire, I Want To Turn Into You’s album art says it all, even if it says nothing: headphones on, eyes fixed on a cropped-out vantage point, Caroline Polachek crawls through a packed subway on all fours into a clearing of sand. The longer you gaze, the weirder the image gets: her garb is ancient, her headgear futuristic. The metro line map overlaps and doubles back on itself in illegible print. Fine details range from mundanely fleshy to squeamishly abstract. Polachek and producer Danny L Harle’s concoctions here operate in the same semi-lucid, sweaty environment. These songs trace their origins back to the singer’s pandemic escape to the Mediterranean, where under the watchful eye of a then-quiet Mount Etna, binges of 60’s Italian pop, UK garage, flamenco, and contemporary hyper-pop tugged the duo’s demos in a plethora of directions.
Part of Desire’s charm is witnessing how the influences crash in boisterous and unnervingly hushed moments alike, unleashing the heat of lust only to chase it down and re-attach the collar. It’s sultry art pop, but more sparingly decorated than you’d expect, often lavish through restraint instead of excess and preoccupied by deep, unresolved yearning. Anthems do appear here—indie-acclaimed hits like “Welcome To My Island,” “Bunny Is a Rider,” and the SOPHIE tribute “I Believe” cement Polachek’s rising status as a commanding pop songstress—but the record’s deeper cuts reveal her ability to properly enchant while waxing about self-perception, expectations, and love itself. It’s not vacation music in the hedonistic sense but the literal one, the soundtrack of an internal getaway, running down whatever ideals and horizons lie just out of reach.
Listen to: “Sunset”
#11 – Paul Simon – Seven Psalms
🇺🇸 Wimberley, TX – May 19 – Owl Records/Sony Music
At 81 years old and with failing faculties (his left ear is almost completely deaf now), Paul Simon is well aware he doesn’t have much time left to add to his artistic legacy. For all intents and purposes, Seven Psalms will probably be his swan song, but never say never: this record wasn’t planned either, but in early 2019, a voice came to the iconic singer-songwriter in a dream and told him that he was in the middle of a work with this name. Since he, you know, wasn’t, he promptly heeded the direction, getting acquainted with psalms’ scriptural foundations and habitually waking well before sunrise to jot down whatever thoughts came to mind.
The research and exercises eventually culminated in Seven Psalms’ continuous, 33-minute, seven-movement song, which Simon has refused to commercially compartmentalize as individual tracks. Composed of little else but his ageless voice, impressively nimble guitar phrasing, and a slew of acoustic and chamber overdubs (flutes, bells, timpani, yeehaw!), the album-track utilizes silence as an auxiliary instrument. The world-trekking musicologist of yore has had his day, and in lieu of that role, this release sees him try his hand at some of the only unwandered territory left: a meditative, seemingly improvised score about his own mortality.
But only “seemingly.” It’d be false to claim Seven Psalms wasn’t meticulously workshopped and just as inaccurate to suggest the record follows in the footsteps of David Bowie’s Blackstar, Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker, or even the recently-deceased Ryuichi Sakamoto’s 12, all of which were written in the knowing final days of their respective artists’ lives. Simon’s reflections still emit a spry spirit—they come to terms with the fact that someday soon, he’ll have to come to terms with death, but he isn’t ready for the croaking or the resignation yet. To be clear, Seven Psalms isn’t a worship album, either—“this whole piece is really an argument I’m having with myself about belief…or not,” he elaborates—but it is, in a sense, devotional, cognizant of the time he has left and sober-headed enough to gently curate one last swing for the fences. Its subtleties are its most arresting attribute, and while I didn’t revisit it particularly often, it’s a fascinating and fulfilling prayer-of-sorts nonetheless.
Listen to: “Seven Psalms”
#10 – GEZAN with Million Wish Collective – Anochi
🇯🇵 Tokyo, Japan – February 1 – Jusangatsu
The Japanese have an international reputation for wackiness, but it’s not entirely their fault. When comparing two communities, striking deviations overshadow the ways in which they’re similar, and because those differences stick out, we turn a blind eye to our common humanity. It’s sociology, and it’s marketable: bizarre game shows, niche robotics, and out-there pornographic subgenres may be some of the country’s primary cultural exports, but on their turf, they’re perceived as fringe frivolities, too. It’s likewise easy to misappropriate Japanese popular music as an industry far removed from the West’s own—subconsciously accumulated differences in rhythm and tonality matter less and less as the decades pass, and save for the language barrier, you’d be hard-pressed to find most chart-toppers from the Land of the Rising Sun unfathomable or hard to listen to. Still, every rule has its exceptions. This exception’s name is GEZAN.
Anochi lifts its title not from Japanese, but from the Hebrew-by-way-of-Egyptian “I AM” supposedly uttered by God himself. If GEZAN and their laundry list of backing vocalists, The Million Wish Collective, aren’t on his level, they eerily replicate a face-to-formless voice encounter with the unknowable great beyond. When I was a child, I loved films that had scenes where protagonists stumbled into a world utterly alien to them, ones where, even if the circumstances of their arrival were directly explained through song or dialogue, the overwhelming shock of the transition put you on edge. The Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz, the Oompa Loompas from Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, those sorts of montages, setting the heroes on the right path or warning them against evil but doing so with such odd energy you weren’t sure if you should trust their intentions. Nearly 3,000 albums deep into this lifelong pursuit of mine, Anochi represents one of those inordinately rare fish-out-of-water experiences, and I don’t just mean that because it’s unabashedly, unapologetically peculiar “punk music;” I mean GEZAN conjure that exact same chanted and enchanted atmosphere to the degree they seem like a cult.
It’s probably not a great thing, then, that their music has reduced me to tears a few times this year, for reasons I cannot fully comprehend, let alone explain in words. Look, none of this should work. Vocalist “Mahito The People” (???) practically rap-sings through seared nostrils, gracelessly squealing like a hemorrhaged balloon over dub bass, bagpipes, pianos, and a menagerie of exotic instruments littering the band’s hallucinatory marches, doing their damnedest to draw blood from every corner of the globe. It’s all in service of a slippery goal: to denounce war by denouncing groupthink, even as they seek to encapsulate all of humanity’s stress under one united rally cry of grief, reckoning, and eventual peace. The album’s first half simmers and foments until it erupts, not with one, or two, or three larger-than-life compositions that parody charity compilation medleys (there’s a song here titled “We Were The World,” I mean, come on) but four of them, all huddled together near the record’s climax and irradiated by Mahito’s freakish timbre. Despite the conventional turn-offs, the swells are just so grand, so vivacious, so… human, I guess, that they wrap right back around to supernatural, tingly-limbed awe. Anochi is ludicrous by any measure, but the frustration, passion, and hope it emulates makes itself felt. “I AM” is right. It sure fucking is…whatever exactly it is.
Listen to: “Suiten (INTERSECTION)”
#9 – underscores – Wallsocket
🇺🇸 New York, NY – September 22 – Mom + Pop
In political science, the horseshoe theory propagated by Jean-Pierre Faye proposes that the far left and far right are more similar than they are different, establishing centrism not as the fulcrum point on a continuous axis but a distant bend away from two curves towards totalitarianism. That perspective has its supporters and detractors, but it’s a great thought exercise: can an attribute be so much one thing it comes inches away from being its ostensible opposite?
April Grey features the symbol on the cover of her second album as Underscores, Wallsocket, for that very reason: in every angle of its presentation—the chirpy production, the over-enunciated vocals, the permutation of genres ranging from bubblegum pop to crunchy hardcore to twangy Americana—the album’s alienated diatribes end up imbued with clarity and catharsis. The roller coaster hinges on the uncanny familiarity of the story’s setting: a fictional, backwater Michigan town home to a cast of unsavory adults and naive zoomers starved for self-actualization and primed for toxic co-dependence. With rollout easter eggs including but not limited to a web domain for a municipal board that does not materially exist, Wallsocket presents caricature as case study, its songs uncomfortably broaching topics like child grooming, financial fraud, sexual abuse, and suicide while caked in layers of disillusioned sass. Its hyper-pop glitches and self-talk samples make a mockery of the real sentiments and instrumentation beneath. It takes the long way around to get there, but the detached, cynical irreverence insinuates a more vulnerable understanding dictating everyone’s bad choices and worse consequences.
And there’s that horseshoe theory again: Wallsockets are everywhere in this country if you open your eyes and look. This one invites—nay, forces—you to examine the grime under the carpet, and it does so while being a peerless snapshot of suburbia’s seedy present as viewed through the future’s butcher-happy hands.
Listen to: “Cops and robbers”
#8 – Ben Howard – Is It?
🇬🇧 Totnes, England – June 16 – Island Records
While at his part-time home in Ibiza last year, Ben Howard experienced two transient ischemic attacks, or “mini-strokes,” about a month apart. Self-resolving, the fits left him temporarily speechless with his other senses heightened. TIAs don’t deal permanent damage the same way a conventional stroke does, but they’re caused by the same mechanisms, can be mitigated through the same means, and should be taken seriously lest untreated effects snowball into the full-blown thing. Since then, Howard’s quit smoking and let his wits come back to him patiently while recording Is It?, an album preoccupied with the aftermath of his medical scares.
Unlike most records inspired by brushes with mortality—a topic I’ve grown increasingly empathetic to thanks to my own chronic health diagnoses—Is It? isn’t a gloomy or even worried affair; “some days I’m walking backwards,” Howard mutters on the earworm of the same name, “[and] truth be told, I don’t mind.” The record captures his rehabilitation process not with frustration, but wonder, gaining new appreciation for small moments of peace: in gardens, watching the sky move, romantic excursions with his wife, and so on.
The singer-songwriter’s first pairing with producer Nathan “Bullion” Jenkins is a match made in heaven, too. In the past Howard’s ambling, non-committal voice has gotten lost within the lush ecology of his arrangements. On Is It?, the pair have donned a captivating garb of hypnotic folktronica, the body of the tracks held down by Howard’s repetitious, earthen melodies while their soul gets vaporized by Bullion’s stilted and pitch-shifted digital effects. Even as the lyrics discuss recovery, the sonic matter evokes the sense degradation of the mini-strokes themselves, replicating the oddly comforting, mind’s eye-opening, Biblically accurate angels’ beauty of not-quite-death.” “I don’t mind it, being in the darkness, baby,” sings Howard on the career highlight “Days of Lantana” —and if he can make it sound as inviting and illuminating as Is It? does, neither do I.
Listen to: “Days of Lantana”
#7 – Maria BC – Spike Field
🇺🇸 Oakland, CA – October 20 – Sacred Bones Records
I don’t want to preface Spike Field as if it’s some unsolvable mystery bereft of meaning, especially since Maria BC has been as open about the album’s recording process as any kindly artist can be, but for the classically-trained vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, words don’t flow out with ease. Per interviews, several songs here relate in some way to retraced history and grasping with identity, but their inner mechanisms and means of revelation are kept undisclosed. I can infer the discomfort of body and mind in “Haruspex,” the distance and concern of “Return to Sender,” but other snippets are harder to attach names, feelings, or universal truths to. Maria’s thoughts aren’t esoteric, per se, just elusive, at peace with being understood only by their writer. As for the rest of us? Well…
Spike Field takes its name from an architectural formation intended to encourage humans in the far future—far enough that we can’t guarantee their languages to remain intelligible with ours—to not enter radioactive waste sites. That its music possesses the same intimidating, seductive gravity is no coincidence. Maria is sometimes characterized in press as an “ambient songwriter,” which sounds at first like a contradiction, but make no mistake, Spike Field is still song-centric, even as its flickering, timid warmth gets swallowed up by lengthy passages of amorphous tension and disembodied whisper-talk. Acoustic guitars ring long and clear and piano keys creak in and out of pitch; sparse percussion occasionally creeps into frame, but not as acutely as sudden peaks of manipulated noise and the rattling resonance of chimes. For every human touch, disquiet ripples like indecisive winds through bare trees, stirring up dead leaves. If you’ve ever taken a walk in the late fall or winter woods and yearned to trespass into some parallel realm entirely, Spike Field is a quick way to facilitate that out-of-body experience.
What heat it gives off is faint, but perilously close, like a campfire whose embers crackle into your face even as it leaves your back braving the cold. Some cuts are a little more forthright on melody (“Amber,” “Still”), others defined more by wispy formlessness (“Lacuna,” the title track), but at no point does Maria BC snap back to some more conventional “reality.” Here in Spike Field’s dense, dusk-lit forest, it’s easy to get lost, but its sole resident has the route through ingrained in their muscle memory. If you follow, actually follow; you can gape at the mystical surroundings all you want, but don’t let the guiding hand through leave you behind.
Listen to: “Mercury”
#6 – Geese – 3D Country
🇺🇸 New York, NY – June 23 – Partisan Records
When Geese (not to be confused with Goose, who have been around awhile) dropped their debut, Projector, in 2021, it barely made a critical splash in the ocean. Right place, wrong time, I guess: the high school buddies’ post-punk purée had more attitude to it than the lowest common denominator take on the genre, but they put it out just as that sound began experiencing a boom of sulking, nondescript copycat acts. That’s not to say Projector didn’t find its footing—Partisan Records kept them on board for another release, clearly—but the band was swift about committing to shaking things up. Rolling Stones worship? P-Funk grooves? Circus theatrics? The self-absorbed grandiosity of Captain Beefheart? Fuck it, yes to all of the above. Say what you will about 3D Country, but the one thing it’s not is run of the mill.
Take “2122,” for example: vocalist Cameron Winter opens the album by proclaiming he’ll take down the “God of the sun,” the band exploding behind him with vintage psychedelic fury. The song lurches forward and halts half a dozen times, each set of rambling phrases lasting an indeterminate number of measures, refusing to cycle around when you first expect them to. The “chorus” (is there such a thing?) is nothing but a series of cartoonish huffs and grunts, and the bridge is full-blown anarchy. That’s the wildest the band gets here, but the record is no one-trick pony: “Cowboy Nudes” and “3D Country” hit the road with campy doo-wopping and tasteful alt-country. Motown and funk notes flash their pomp on “I See Myself,” the zany prog-isms of contemporaries Black Midi are all over “Undoer” and “St. Elmo,” and Geese even facelift their prior post-punk shrieking with the two-faced “Mysterious Love.” 3D Country’s thesis is clear enough: this band refuses to exist on just two planes. The question thus becomes: are Geese just taking the piss, or are they also watering the garden in the process?
I’ve been at this music-scouring pastime long enough to appreciate complete abandon when I hear it. On top of proving themselves shockingly adept songwriters for their age, what Geese present here is just plain fun. Winter’s vocal inflections are the product of someone who clearly can sing trying to ape someone who can’t, a possessed goofball fed a diet of Chocolate-Frosted Sugar Bombs and mythological fan-fiction. He’s the essence of Geese’s brilliance, or, if you’re less generous, their incorrigibility, single-handedly deciding whether or not the band will be “for you,” so to speak. As for me, the winding song structures, instrumental proficiency, and infectious giddiness all pull their weight to not let the guy with the mic run off with all the infamy. 3D Country is simply one of the wildest rock and roll records I’ve heard in years. Love it or loathe it, that statement should still hold true for you.
Listen to: “2122”
#5 – Young Fathers – Heavy Heavy
🇬🇧 Edinburgh, Scotland – February 3 – Ninja Tune
If Young Fathers have ever fretted about what people think of their music, they haven’t made it apparent. Quite the opposite, in fact: the 2014 Mercury Prize winners back-talked their own breakthrough award, complaining at the time that its paltry payout and brief industry attention wouldn’t meaningfully re-route the group’s trajectory. On that point, they’re only half-right: they couldn’t control who got word of their markedly border-averse fusion of soul, rock, hip-hop, electronica, and African traditional music, but they could retain control of their creative vision, and from it they have not budged, enamored with the happy accidents inherent to throwing all of those cultures in a blender and seasoning until satisfied with the flavor profile.
Even as Heavy Heavy duplicates past strides towards pop appeal, its sessions produced what I can only describe as unparalleled jubilation, if not in their repertoire, than certainly with regards to popular music in 2023. The band’s obfuscated subjects no longer sound distant and guarded, but imminent and holy. Thumping, tribal beats birth elated refrains and gang chants so massive they threaten to rumble the earbuds right out of your skull. The same way you feel bass signals shoot through your feet and into your gut at a concert, so too do you here: Heavy Heavy is ironically quite playful, nimble, and light in subject matter—it’s the sheer weight of the production that justifies its titular adjective.
And it somehow does this while soaring more often than it trudges. A trio of certified bangers opens the album, only for its temperament to glide gracefully past the noise of human commotion into the clouds. Some tracks detect pop gold and scoop it up posthaste. Others reinvent themselves by the minute. The best here do both; watch how “I Saw” morphs from a growled rap screed to molasses-thick crooning to celestial craze in the blink of an eye. “Shoot Me Down” likewise flings its Death Grips-esque sampling bonanza out the door for a killer falsetto anchor. For every straightforward bop like “Drum,” there’s a ridiculous experiment that pans out beautifully, such as “Ululation,” a track built from the ground up to encase a studio visitor’s candidly-recorded rant in Zulu. Heavy Heavy’s surprise isn’t so much that everything coheres, rather that no one else has capitalized on this Fusion to End All Fusions before now. But who else could? For any other act, it’d be a dare, a leap of artistic faith, a reach: for Young Fathers, it’s just their combined DNA at play, unchained and free as it’s ever been.
Listen to: “I Saw”
#4 – Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – Weathervanes
🇺🇸 Nashville, TN – June 9 – Southeastern Records
I’m ready to stop parroting the easy excuse: Jason Isbell is not (as many critics claim and I myself have restated in the past) the single savior of mainstream country music. Putting aside that we can dissect any part of that statement—the “mainstream part,” the “country” part, certainly the “savior” part—the fact of the matter is he’s the only songwriter of his kind in the ecosystem of greater Nashville I find myself wanting to listen to when I get a hankering for Americana. His penmanship is informed by keen observation and diligent empathy, fluctuating between intimate, often unflattering self-portraits and sympathetic half-fictions, stories that aren’t true to him personally but surely are to somebody, somewhere. Aiming to navigate the troubled waters of addiction, nefarious ghosts in our pasts, and corrosive traditions, Isbell sifts tirelessly for seeds of the human heart lying in the all too often untended soil.
Though he can carry a tune solo, his backing band, The 400 Unit, is no small factor of why his songwriting resonates: be they with wailing fiddles and electrics or muted bass and brushed snares, the group tailors their talents to manifesting each song’s optimal operating level. So it’s been for album after album after album, long enough that I confidently regard Isbell & The 400 Unit among my all-time favorite artists, though that also leaves me short on new ways to praise each release. Weathervanes is ultimately just another chapter of these musicians’ classic status cementing itself in real time, though it does differ in a few distinct ways—not better or worse, just different—than the trio of Isbell albums preceding it. Most notably, it’s longer: 13 tracks clocking out at just over an hour of by-the-book alt-country and Southern rock. It also marks the first time in a dozen years Isbell self-produced his own material, parting ways with longtime and increasingly sought-after engineer Dave Cobb.
The differences these changes make aren’t always obvious—perhaps Weathervanes has a dustier, rustic quality to it, or perhaps I’ve already replayed it so much my ears can no longer hear it like it’s as new as it is—but they’re proof that this group has keyed into their strengths long before now and continues to play them straight. Not every wheel needs reinventing, especially when Isbell’s craft, wit, and transparency outrun those of his commercialized neighbors by miles. As long as his efforts keep resulting in stuff as railing as “This Ain’t It,” as tense as “Death Wish,” as vulnerable as “White Beretta,” as disarming as “Cast Iron Skillet,” as cinematic as “King of Oklahoma,” as lovely as “Strawberry Woman,” well…you get the point, and who am I to suggest he alter his standards? They’re clearly working: no matter where the winds blow, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit hold a steady course.
Listen to: “Death Wish”
#3 – Foo Fighters – But Here We Are
🇺🇸 Los Angeles, CA – June 2 – Roswell Records/RCA
As I’ve bemoaned before, you can’t help the shifting tides of cultural trends, but if you believe in some form of art with all your heart and have the platform to keep its flame alive, by golly, fan that fucker as hard as you can. The Foo Fighters have done just that for arena-filling, chest-pumping rock and roll for nearly 30 years, and I don’t blame them for working its structure down to a science; there’s still an audience for grit-hardened, approachable tunes in that vein, and they’ve had little reason to deviate from the course they established in their heyday with 90’s classics like Foo Fighters and The Colour & The Shape. Even so, too much of a good thing can water down its taste; save for 2011’s return to form, Wasting Light, the band has mostly coasted on good vibes and recycled glories for the past decade.
In 2022, their comfortable world was shaken. Longtime drummer Taylor Hawkins passed away while on tour, and later that year, frontman Dave Grohl’s mother privately said her goodbyes to this world as well. But Here We Are is directly indebted to each of them, but not in a mopey or morbid sense. For the Foos, laughter is the best medicine, community the clearest avenue out of depression. Their bombast makes every concert a reunion, and there’s no room for angst in what should be a celebration of life. Two star-studded tribute shows to their fallen friend (made viral by Hawkins’ teenage son, Shane, stepping in to play his dad’s parts on FF classics) all but confirmed that the band’s new material wasn’t going to—couldn’t, really—be too drastic a change of pace. To be loud and proud promoted healing, and healing is what the doctor ordered.
So, you know, here they are: this album is Grohl and co. as dramatic as they’ve ever been, barely tweaking their established formula and instead upping their quality control to unforeseen degrees. All ten tracks on this album frolic either with astonishment or absolution; they rouse and ring true, roping you in with immediate, blunt sentiments of unflinching conviction, daring any critics (and there have been some, mostly regarding the muddy production job) to simply turn the volume knob up until the righteous frequencies drown out any qualms. And goddamn it, they know what they’re doing: from radio-friendly rock gold (“Rescued,” “Under You,”) to sweeping ballads (“The Glass,” “Rest”) and even an envelope-pushing 10-minute behemoth, “The Teacher,” But Here We Are is a delightful gift to ward off the lingering ache of loss.
Listen to: “Rescued”
#2 – Lonnie Holley – Oh Me Oh My
🇺🇸 Atlanta, GA – March 10 – Jagjaguwar
From the perch of 2023, Lonnie Holley’s autobiography almost reads like an overwrought distillation of 20th century racism. Born in Jim Crow-era Birmingham, Alabama as the alleged seventh of his mother’s 27 children, Holley passed from foster home to foster home, working for a living as early as age 5, getting arrested before his teen years, and digging graves and picking cotton for chump change. Liberation didn’t come from the government or his fellow man so much as the raw materials with which he’s toiled for basically his whole life: he launched a successful, lengthy career in the visual arts, making assemblages of discarded junk and earthy paraphernalia. With exhibitions and galleries keeping his hands busy, he only started releasing music in his sixties, but better late than never, even if his capabilities aren’t the most conventional: the 73-year-old’s legend springs to his fingertips and out his wrinkled throat on Oh Me Oh My, his storytelling bridging the America of today with the America we all too quickly would like to pretend is a distant memory.
To be clear: it’s not. The scars of racial segregation remain with our elders, and for firsthand victims like Holley, they aren’t so easily forgotten. The album’s centerpiece, “Mount Meigs,” is a horrifying trauma episode scored to free jazz where he recalls the state-sanctioned abuse he suffered at the notoriously brutal juvenile corrections facility. “They beat the curiosity out of me, damned it out of me” he sputters, but evidently only for a while: the artist he is today wouldn’t exist if he gave in there, and the remainder of the record gleans a more optimistic tale, acknowledging but not succumbing to the slew of arrows that aim their sights on the marginalized. Holley fashions himself the wise, humble, rocking-chaired grandfather, his expressive vibrato and drawl-laced cadence narrating an ugly history as epitomized by his lived experiences and contemplating the potential of brighter days.
Still, Holley ascertains comfort from the depths of his soul more than he does from the turning tides of progress. “None of Us Have But a Little While,” with Sharon Van Etten’s background vocal piercing the ballad like an angel on high, makes peace with a hard life and the release death will eventually bring. “I Am A Part of the Wonder,” featuring kindred poet-activist Moor Mother, reaches for the divine internally, grooving like a fantastical initiation ceremony decked out with horns, marimba, and immaculate synthbass licks. Other guest spots on the album include Bon Iver, Rokia Koné, R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, and Tortoise’s Jeff Parker, all of whom supplement Holley’s enchanting deliveries by becoming instruments in his cosmic constellation, while producer Jacknife Lee is just as pivotal to Oh Me Oh My’s unlikely digestibility. In lesser hands, this freeform soundtrack of sorrows and spirituality would collapse under the burden of its heritage, but Lee pairs Holley’s chronicles with the exact atmospheres, rhythms, and textures necessary to propel the package forward without confining it to any era, fad, locale, or musical family. As long as you can understand the English language, Oh Me Oh My will transfix you like a thriller, educate you like a documentary, and stir your soul like comfort food, all while eschewing conventional musical boundaries. It’s one of a kind.
Listen to: “I Am A Part of the Wonder”
#1 – Sufjan Stevens – Javelin
🇺🇸 New York, NY – October 6 – Asthmatic Kitty Records
It’s insane to think there was once a time where Sufjan Stevens’ hype rode on the prospect of the man recording an album about each of the 50 states. Fast-forward nearly two decades and that experiment’s patriotic pageantry has long been supplanted by music as a means of therapy through an endless barrage of rough patches. Mania brought on by trial-and-error health diagnoses spawned the sprawling electro-pop sideshow The Age of Adz. The death of his mother and estranged father respectively resulted in the acclaimed indie folk masterpiece Carrie & Lowell and the largely overlooked, multi-disc ambient box set Convocations. Even 2020’s crystalline, bloated The Ascension grieved the nation’s paradigm shift towards perpetual civil unrest. Even if all these releases (and these aren’t even all his recent releases!) contained moments of ecstasy, whimsy, and celebration, their emotional range was more often drab and overcast, lending themselves better to the multi-instrumentalist’s apprehensive vocals and private public persona. Sufjan Stevens’ calling card these days might be sad songs about soul-shattering events, but he doesn’t milk drama where there isn’t any; his music professes deep insecurities with elegant earnestness.
In 2023, the leaky faucet kept running. Javelin comes to us by way of another loss, that of his partner, Evans Richardson IV, who passed away earlier this year at the age of 43. The public revelation of his death doubled as long-speculated but closely-withheld confirmation that Stevens himself was gay, and as if the ramifications of coming out that way weren’t enough on his plate, the summer months saw him hospitalized with the debilitating autoimmune disorder Guillain-Barré syndrome. Javelin was wrapped up between the two meteor strikes and came to us in October once the songwriter’s condition had begun to stabilize.
These events can’t be extricated from how the album launched—an artist so emboldened by empathy deserves at least some of ours—but make no mistake, Javelin’s ranking here as my 2023 Album of the Year isn’t a pity party for its own sake or a consolation prize for a consistent, beloved artist whose continued activity can’t be guaranteed. No, this record is a serious contender for Stevens’ best ever, and it’s indubitably the most concise and thorough synthesis of his career-spanning, disparate artistic visions. Its songs string together the rustic, intimate coziness of his stripped-back, acoustic eulogizing, the studio opulence of his busy, orchestral compositions, the aloof wayfaring of his atmospheric wanderlust, and the wonky extravagance of his electronic efforts, existing no longer as separate faces of the man’s ambitions but a cross-bred hybrid tailor-made to elicit the weepiest of hallelujahs and misty-eyed solidarity. In fewer words: Javelin falls graceful as a feather but lands with the momentum of a cinderblock flung off a skyscraper.
How could it not? Losing one’s parents is rough, but expected. Losing a lover, especially this young, is not an experience everyone anticipates going through, and as much as Javelin pays tribute to the light the relationship gave Stevens, it’s made approachable by foregrounding his returning internalized anxieties about being alone in the world again. Throughout the album, sexual love is just one of the emotion’s many forms held under the spotlight: all of adoration’s incarnations get questioned, from religious worship to discomfort at the prospect of Stevens replacing his romantic self-actualization with artistic self-destruction. Later, like on “So You Are Tired,” he even unearths the relationship’s sourest moments by obfuscating the boundary between survivor and fallen: “Rest your head / turning back all that we had in our life / while I return to death.” Jesus, dude.
And we haven’t even discussed “Shit Talk!” Javelin’s penultimate track is a masterstroke, encompassing each of the record’s overarching themes and instrumental excursions in the form of a standoffish hatchet-severing. At each verse’s close, Stevens again revels in double-meaning: “I will always love you, but I cannot live with you”—a hyperbolic turn of phrase until the irreversible day it isn’t. Then the angelic climax: as the guy’s shown before, nothing stamps a song in your brain like several minutes of mantras driving home a lynchpin line. “Shit Talk” has several: “Hold me closely, hold me tightly lest I fall,” “I don’t wanna fight at all,” and that aforementioned “I will always love you” circle through each other in rounds, each vocalization seeping into the next until the pile is washed away in the droning coda’s receding floodwaters. Stevens has written some of indie pop’s absolute finest delicacies, and this track blows all of them to smithereens. If Javelin as a whole isn’t his crowning achievement—and it’s only because his whole body of work is so esteemed that we can have this conversation—its effective climax certainly is on a song-sized scale.
He doesn’t even try to follow it with another original gut-punch: the album closes with a twee little interpretation of Neil Young’s “There’s a World,” which leaves us at Stevens’ hapless precipice: “There’s a world you’re living in / No one else has your part / All God’s children in the wind / Take it in and blow real hard.” From the pain comes purpose, and nobody has ordained that Sufjan Stevens’ reason for pushing on must be to continue subjecting himself to despair. Whatever comes next, at least the grief wasn’t worthless: Javelin is a lifetime of suppressed worry and delayed mercy (is that not the human experience?) condensed into a profoundly beautiful, bittersweet, and stirring 42 minutes. It’s about time this man won an Album of My Year, and with this one, he couldn’t have earned it more.
Listen to: “Shit Talk”
Thanks for reading. Have a great holiday season, and see you next year.
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