I don’t think I need to explain to you how this works. I listened to many albums that came out in 2023. These are twenty of my favorites. Don’t put too much stake into the placements, because by the time I finish writing this, they will probably be outdated. If something sounds cool to you, check it out!
20. Svalbard - The Weight of the Mask
Svalbard have been one of the best metal bands working for years now, and I’m very glad to hear that they haven’t lost any of their power upon jumping to a major label. Their signature combination of direct shouted lyrics, atmospheric trem-picked guitars that swirl and soar, and throttling hardcore drums is as motivating as ever. Great running album too, if you’re into that.
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Best tracks: Faking It, To Wilt Beneath the Weight
“Staring blankly in disbelief at pictures of me. I wonder, ‘who is this?’”
19. Model Actriz - Dogsbody
Sometimes I think that I’d like this record more if all the people trying to bring back indie-sleaze weren’t into it. Then I relisten and that I’d actually like it more if every song didn’t sound the same. Regardless, Model/Actriz have already found an exciting, dark, sexy, and unique sound on their debut. I can’t wait to see where they go with it.
Best Tracks: Crossing Guard, Amaranth
“He holds me with eyes that sing, I am not the man for him”
18. 100 gecs - 10,000 gecs
It’s gecs. You already like them or don’t, and I do. This album honestly felt insufficient to satisfy a four year wait, but I also had enough fun with it that I’m not too bothered. Even the worst song has the lyric “Anthony Kiedis sucking on my penis,” which means no proper lowlight. Like their debut, it’s of course quirky and noisy, and there’s enough hooks, heart, and ska to keep me coming back.
Best tracks: Hollywood Baby, Doritos and Fritos
“It doesn’t hurt me every day so I just let it get away. I’ll deal with it another day. I guess that day just never came.”
17. Mandy, Indiana - I’ve Seen a Way
This isn’t quite my favorite debut of 2023, but I’d say it’s the one I’m most excited hear followed up. Vocalist Valentine Caulfield has the perfect confrontational presence for the Manchester quartet’s blend of electronic dance and noise rock. It’s all the way down here because it’s frontloaded and a bit meandering, but the best songs are some of the most gripping I heard all year.
Best tracks: Drag [Crashed], Pinking Shears
“C’est trop décolleté ça, tu vas distraire les garçons. Cache ce corps honteux, tu vas distraire les garçons. Souris, souris, souris, souris, c’est plus joli une fille qui sourit.”
16. Wilco - Cousin
There’s a floor of quality with Jeff Tweedy’s songwriting on any project, but the gloomier and weirder textures on this album, along with a lot more memorable melodies and lyrics, make this my favorite thing from Wilco in a very long time. An excellent addition to an excellent catalogue.
Best Tracks: Soldier Child, Levee
“I woke up this morning, and I went back to bed. Ten dead, ten dead, now there are ten dead.”
15. Agriculture - Agriculture
In its best moments, this album is simultaneously beautifully vast, yet viscerally violent, and it’s occasional and brief excursions into folk and free jazz are also excellent. I reviewed it for Spectrum Culture, and I’ve only grown to like it more since I turned that piece in.
Best tracks: Relier, The Well
“It’s beautiful to accept you are part of everything with no control”
14. Kara Jackson - Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?
Kara Jackson’s debut is a consistently witty exploration of love, grief, and recognition with beautiful and lush folk production. But the best part is often how good her words sound as she says them out loud. I could listen to her say “Coyotes in culottes clawing for coffee in open-toed shoes” on repeat for an hour.
Best tracks: no fun/party, dickhe*d blues
“Don’t be sorry for missing the party, because somebody’s party is missing you too”
13. Me Lost Me - RPG
It would feel lazy of me to call this “art-pop.” A lot of the branding said “folk,” but that’s hardly the whole story. The instrumentation is mostly synths, winds, strings, and odd electronic percussion, underpinning Jayne Dent’s winding vocal melodies. It’s a one of a kind record that can be unsettling even at its liveliest and bounciest, and beautiful even at its most dark and menacing.
Best tracks: Eye Witness, The God of Stuck Time
“Thousands of men tumbling down to the bottom floor, forever”
12. Midwife & Vyva Melinkolya - Orbweaving
A new Midwife project has a more or less guaranteed spot on my list. I’ve loved her etherial “heaven metal” since I discovered Luminol a couple years ago. It’s so tranquil in a way that’s almost eerie, but I still always find it comforting. She expands her sound into a bit more traditional shoegaze and alt-rock on this collaboration, to great results. It’s a very brief project, but if there were a bit more to grab onto, this probably would have made my top ten. Read my full review on Post Trash.
Best tracks: NMP, Miss America
“No more pain, I promise to be good”
11. Trust Fund Ozu - Faye Doubt
Barely a year and a half after Tribute Summon, Trust Fund Ozu killed it again. Overblown, eclectic, and always incredibly heartfelt even in its absurd themes and stylistic shifts. I gave it a rave review for Spectrum Culture, and I stand by all of it.
Best tracks: SHINIGAMI, LET’S f*ckING GO!!!?
“f*ck you Netflix and f*ck you Spotify! I’m up in this bitch and I’m screaming trans rights”
Since Spanish Love Songs’ Brave Faces Everyone was my album of the year in 2020, I’ve been saying that they’re one of the best punk bands active right now. And I felt really let down by this one at first, because I can hardly even call this a punk album. But on further listens, taking this record for what it is, the songs are still stellar, and the brighter indie rock sound works surprisingly well against this band’s endless misery. The more I listen to this one, and the more its melodies work their way into my head. Even if it’s less urgent, it’s an incredibly powerful and impactful listen.
Best tracks: Pendulum, Clean-up Crew
“OH! You had me there for a second. I started to believe that we might make it.”
9. Linda May Han Oh - The Glass Hours
I listened to more jazz this year than ever before in my life, but that’s not reflected in this year-end list because it was mostly older records. If you’re looking for more new jazz, ask someone else who kept up better (or check out Apertures by Rajna Swaminathan and Alula: Captivity by Caroline Davis if you don’t know anyone who listens to contemporary jazz). Linda May Han Oh’s latest had me engaged more than any other 2023 jazz album. It’s not afraid to get into knotty and weird passages of cluster chords and convoluted rhythms, but it’s not too intellectual to be sparing and pretty too. Everything that can make jazz great is here- the live, kinetic playing, the dense complexity, and the genuine emotionality to be expressed through it.
Best Tracks: Chimera, The Glass Hours
“Sending our best and brightest soaring across the skies, for reasons so just and righteous. Who will catch these fallen stars?”
Darn tootin’ slap your gramma I put a country album at number eight! Drink the River is simply gorgeous. It’s Obama certified- if you’re into that man. The pedal steel and mandolin on the title track are practically glowing. “Even Jesus Got the Blues” has ripping fiddle. I know country music “StOrYtElLiNg” yada yada yada, but Lee’s lyrics are relentlessly compelling, whether on the eerie and mournful “Merigold,” the nostalgically homespun “Eveline”, or the tongue-in-cheek closer “Property Line,” where our libertarian protagonist gets beat up at a lesbian bar. If that doesn’t get you interested, then you probably don’t like country and that’s fine.
Best tracks: Drink the River, Merigold
“I went searching for a pot of gold. My dad always said I had a knack for digging holes. If faith were a shovel to any man of means, then why am I always standing with the dirt up to my knees?”
7. Haken - Fauna
Haken is so back! I’ve loved this band for many years at this point, but their last album left me pretty cold. After a few years of space from this band and prog metal in general, Fauna was a reminder of why I love them so much. It’s a tight and precise technical tour de force, but never to the point where compositions and melodies are sacrificed. All throughout, the grooves are wildly complex, but never to the point that it keeps me from bobbing my head. Ross Jennings’ melodies soar like a glider over a dense forest, providing a view from which all the intricacy can be truly beautiful. It may be Haken’s most eclectic project, with the tech-metal ragers from their last couple albums worked in with the quirky theatrical prog of their early records, and some anthemic poppy cuts for good measure. But it all works together when the heavy tracks are anthemic and weird, the anthemic tracks are heavy and weird, and the weirdest tracks, of course, are always heavy and anthemic.
Best tracks: The Alphabet of Me, Sempiternal Beings
“As we climbed to the mountaintop, you left your footprints in the sand. Immortalized, you’ll never walk alone. You gave me the power to dream.”
Rat Saw God is a hot record. Partially in the sense that every publication seems to have it at the top of their year end list. But also in how sweltering and enveloping the fuzz guitars sound. Every part of the sound is finely tuned to resemble the worst type of hot and humid day. Even the quiet and folky songs like “Formula One” feel kinda sweaty, and the poppier country-rockers are almost unbearably bright. Karly Hartzman’s descriptions of rain rotted houses, piss-colored Fanta, and race car drivers dying on TV are delivered in a way as to mix slacker-rock dejection and yodeling, and her letting loose and wailing at the end of “Bull Believer” makes one of the best musical moments yet this decade.
Best tracks: Bull Believer, Formula One
“Every daughter of god has a little bad luck sometimes”
5. boygenius - the record
Of all the Big Fake IndieTM that came out this year, this may have been the Biggest and Fakest Indie. They didn’t even name the thing! They’re too cool. I will never be this cool, certainly not with a Substack.
I’ve been a HUGE fan of every member of boygenius for years, so for this not to land here, would mean it was a great disappointment for me. Honestly, and I know it’s unreasonable, but I think anything short of album of the year makes this a disappointment. I don’t like that it insists on referencing classic rock constantly, not only in the lyrics but also the promotion. Like I know “Boys Don’t Cry.” I know “Revolution 1” and “Revolution 9.” I kinda know who Leonard Cohen is. I see how that photo they did is like the one of Nirvana.
I’m so f*cking tired of classic rock.
Now my job is teaching classic rock.
Why can’t we get anything new in popular rock music?
Is there no new way they could think of to put three “““alternative””” people on the cover of a magazine???
I have other small complaints, but I’ll stop complaining. Obviously I love this album, it cracked my top five. None of my nitpicks or other hipster bullsh*t could matter when “Not Strong Enough” and “Anti-curse” swell with joyous guitar layers. Or when Lucy Dacus can describe her friends in ways that feel so genuine and hilarious on “True Blue” and “Leonard Cohen.” Or how even the stripped back pieces like “Cool About It,” “We’re In Love,” and “Letter to an Old Poet” sound so powerful. “$20,” helped tremendously by its mid-January single release, ended up as my most streamed song of the year. The production is crystal clear, always supporting the songs, never getting in the way. Every song with drums benefits from them greatly, and every song without drums has no need for drums- perhaps that’s a low bar for praise, but know that it is not always the case.
I listened to this album a lot when it dropped, and it never fell out of my rotation all year. You can read my blurb for the Spectrum Culture year-end list where I managed to go 200 words without using the word “supergroup,” as I am simply tired of that word. Long story short, the hype is real.
Best tracks: $20, Not Strong Enough
“Leonard Cohen once said ‘There's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.’ And I am not an old man having an existential crisis at a Buddhist monastery writing horny poetry, but I agree.”
Is hyperpop still cool? I feel like it isn’t. Or at least it isn’t ahead of the curve-type-cool. It’s maybe mainstream cool. NYT likes gecs now, and NYT cannot be cool. Every time I go to a party, people are like “I like hyperpop” and I’m like “ye me too” and then all the men are just talking about Travis Barker-core pop punk with clipped drum samples, and the women are referring to pop music sung by someone bisexual. I’ve never gone outside and met a Black Dresses fan, but perhaps Black Dresses are really “glitch?” Are they the fabled, elusive ~bubblegum bass~???? All I know is I know nothing.
But I feel quite confident that underscores is cool. I know people that are friends with her, and I’m pretty sure she was at a house show I played over the summer. That’s cool! I did not talk to her, which is less cool. To say Wallsocket sounds cool would be a gross understatement. The sound design and production is often mind-blowing, with beats that shatter and shapeshift between rock, hip-hop, pop, and even country. Songs like “Cops and robbers” and “Old money bitch” are such absurd fun. “Duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” is heartfelt, “Shoot to kill, kill your darlings” is sharp, and “Johnny johnny johnny” is incredibly disturbing, but they groove equally hard and get stuck in my head constantly. “Geez Louise” is a noise-punk country adventure. “Horror movie soundtrack” is darkly cinematic like one of The Mars Volta’s acoustic pieces. I don’t know how she made it all work cohesively, or even work at all, but every experiment pays off and it all feels thematically coherent. Incredibly creative, ambitious, and fresh music all the way through.
Best tracks: Cops and robbers, Johnny johnny johnny
“My condition’s benign and as rare as it gets. They know what it looks like, but only God knows why it exists.”
I’ve been almost on board with Home Is Where for a couple years now. I liked I Became Birds back in 2021, but I didn’t quite get all the hype. I liked the Dissection Lesson split from last year, but I preferred Record Setter’s side. This album clicked immediately though. Everything about this album clicks. The absurd body horror of Brandon MacDonald’s writing, “skin meadows” “pulling weeds out of your spine” “teeth growing under teeth,” may be the band’s best asset, or at least their most distinctive feature. And Tilley Kormony’s wild guitar playing is a perfect instrumental complement to both her violent shrieking and rootsy deadpan singing.
Home Is Where always had a knack for bouncing between punk and indie-folk, but both sounds are more realized here than on past projects. The punk tracks thrash as hard as ever, and the folk tracks feel simultaneously rich and gloomy. The album alternates its vibe at least every song, but the writing is cohesive enough to not feel scattershot. The sounds of rage rooms and microwaved tape loops stitch every track together in a way too raw to be called seamless, but it all works in service of the album’s flow.
I tend to avoid bringing up identity things, because it can often feel like lazy writing, but I don’t think the fact that Home Is Where are a partially trans group out of Florida is incidental to this album. It’s a project that musically represents the combination of frustration and desensitization that feels so common amongst my peers, created by musicians facing the worst of what’s happening in our country right now. No moment demonstrates this better than right in the middle, with the 1-2 punch of the raging “Every Day Feels Like 9 / 11,” followed by “9 / 12,” a three-chord folk piece with only one lyric, “and on September 12th, 2001, everyone went back to work.” There’s nothing inconsistent about this album flip-flopping between screaming and bleak folk tunes, because we all find ourselves moving between anger and dejection. What can any of us even do?
Best tracks: Chris Farley, Daytona 500
“An all-knowing god doesn’t know what it’s like to not know anything at all”
I seriously considered this one for my album of the year. A new job and a long commute home a few times a week allowed this record to become part of my routine after its late October release. The sprawling opening combo of “bloodline” and “road” will always sound to me like walking to the Rockville Center LIRR station at night, and if I don’t resist the urge to start running at the triumphant peak of the former, I’ll be standing on the platform to hear “far” open up from it’s “Eye of the Tiger” opening palm-mute chugs into one of the year’s best indie-pop anthems. All throughout, the guitars weave around each other, with harmonized picking patterns reminiscent of Mineral and other 90s emo. The drums are complex and at times jazzy, without ever getting in the way of the songwriting. Even running nearly an hour, chaos never loses steam, with frantic moments like “redlight” creating excitement between slower post-rock tracks.
awakebutsttillinbed’s 2018 debut, what people call low self esteem is really just seeing yourself the way other people see you, is not only an album about depression and hopelessness, most known for the hook “I couldn't get my life back,” but an album that’s quite explicitly about frontwoman Shannon Taylor intending to kill herself. And my favorite thing about its follow-up is that there’s an undercurrent of hope to even its most downer moments. chaos takes the wheel doesn’t feel too sweet. The most frequently expressed feeling is exhaustion. It’s far too structurally complex to be a pop-rock album, outside of a couple tracks. But it’s so full of life, whether in the nostalgic imagery of “scramble suit” or the perfectly executed crescendo and key change on “streamline.” When Taylor yells “I want to be alone!” at the end of “passenger,” it’s not out of depression and avoidance, but because for what sounds like the first time in her life, she isn’t desperate for connection.
Best tracks: redlight, scramble suit
“I told my past to a woman on an airplane, and it felt like a whole different world. Because I couldn’t connect to the person I was describing, as if I long ago wasn’t me.”
AOTY had to be Sprain. What the f*ck even is this thing? I figured they’d have something impressive to follow up As Lost Through Collision, but nothing could have prepared me for their 97-minute behemoth sophom*ore outing, featuring two songs that break 20 minutes. Even if it were less ambitious, this album was going to be special for me, because not even a week after its announcement, I emailed my editor at Post Trash and got an advance copy. I ended up interviewing frontman Alex Kent, and you can read that here!
In that piece, I talked a lot about how The Lamb as Effigy sounds broadly, about its long dark songs and intense dissonance. I specifically praised the electrifying guitar chemistry between Kent and Sylvie Simmons, especially on the closer. I talked a bit, but in less detail, about the instrumentation and orchestration that makes a piece like the harmonium-led “Privilege of Being” so unsettling throughout, yet beautiful in it’s final moments. And I payed some passing praise to Kent’s experiments in operatic and theatrical delivery, like his wailing out of “idiot, idiot, idiot” on “The Reclining Nude,” juxtaposed to his manic screaming of lines like “MEN HUNG UP ON MEAT HOOKS IN A BUTCHER’S SHOP AND EYED BY OXEN DRESSED IN FUR COATS AND LEATHER HATS,” or my personal favorite “IMAGINE THIS: I’M THE GUEST ON SOME OBSCENE TALK SHOW … EVERY SIN I’VE EVER COMMITTED IS PUT UP ON DISPLAY BY SCREENS HUNG AROUND THE STAGE,
AND WE WATCH, WATCH, WATCH, WATCH!”
Ultimately, The Lamb As Effigy is not a perfect album; I think the two I placed below it are a bit more consistent. But it fully succeeds in both capturing the feeling of being overwhelmed, and being overwhelming as a piece of art itself. It’s crushing. It sounds like panic. It’s relentlessly bleak, even as it’s grand and colorful.
“Album of the year” for me is always a vibes-based decision. I could make a solid argument for giving it to awakebutstillinbed, Home Is Where, or any number of albums that were less personally affecting for me. But nothing surprised and impressed more this year The Lamb as Effigy. That’s my best reason for it being placed here, and I recommend it highly if you have the time to spare.
Best tracks: We Think So Ill of You, God or Whatever You Call It
“Would you not have me sing you softly to sleep?
I can’t sing if you're looking at me.”
Thank you for reading all the way. I plan on sending a few of these out a month, and if I publish myself saying that, I’m more likely to stick to it. I wish you the best in 2024, or whenever you happen to read this.
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