Photo: Charlie Boss
I used the Pazz and Jop poll method to start this list: 200 points, spread across as many as albums as you can fit. It ended up being 28 of them once I started to desperately assign 2.5 points to albums that were better than a few singles but weren’t particularly cohesive, well sequenced, or immediately memorable. Rather than show all the point values, I’m simply assigning tiers: Top 11, Honorable Mentions, and Album Artists.
If you don’t see an album you liked a lot here, I’ll have a Singles list in a few weeks that will inevitably speak to the ability of the referenced artist to create a memorable album. I don’t think albums are everything; the best rapper of the last 20 years is still probably Andre 3000, and that’s all on singles and very, very bad albums (The Love Below, Idlewild). However, in the current streaming world of 1.5 hour albums (throws sideeye at every single major artist who insists on releasing b-sides jammed on the end of every project, or calls their projects “playlists”), I still have to stick up for projects with definite beginnings, middles, and ends and tonal consistency.
Top 11 albums of the year, in order, with a few ties
1. Rat Saw God, Wednesday
Country-rock from southerners who love melody so much that they drown it in extremely unpleasant noise. Call it a mitzvah: Instead of complaining about Jason Aldean, why don’t you listen to smart people who grew up in dumb small towns and moved to mid-sized college towns but still have lots of fun stories about sniffing glue? “Chosen to Deserve” is probably my favorite song of the year: sure, it sounds a lot like Neil Young circa 1973, but it’s not just about the trauma, it’s also about how it feels after you’ve gone to therapy and decided to tell some good stories about it. And sometimes you need to yell “Finish him!” for four minutes, and I enjoy it every time.
1. Maps, billy woods and Kenny Segal
You know billy woods is one of those tedious conscious rappers from his undercased name, just like you know JPEGMAFIA is way too much from the uppercase. Most of woods’ output is interesting without reliably holding my interest for long, but this one’s grounded in a concept and a narrative, and it makes his abstract flow and elaborate symbology finally make some sense. See, you can hint at pop and still make some radically creative music. Your stew needed a roux, and now it’s complex: bitter, sweet, funky, genius.
2. GUTS, Olivia Rodrigo
Sometimes things are popular because they’re good. They are very rarely both popular and good, because the skills of popularity usually come from big record labels that crush songs to death under layers and layers of rules (Swedish pop songwriting, classic American songbook, the EDM drop, etc.) rather than allowing them to breathe. It’s such a miracle that someone in line to make as much money as Olivia still employs a producer and main songwriting partner whose formative music experiences were in an emo band. Rodrigo knows every last songwriting rule from her child stardom, but in collaboration with Nigro she routinely breaks them in the service of being spontaneous, funny, and (duh) very emo.
3. Almost Healed, Lil Durk
A bunch of songs about trauma, again, and if there were only 10 like the Wednesday album rather than 21 this might be the best album of the year. It’s about as dark as the Noname album, but it’s also a lot easier to listen to since Durk is working in multiple modes: rapper, crooner, mumbler. There’s four bad features on here and four excellent ones, you can figure out which ones should definitely have been cut (one slant rhymes with Turgid Fucker) but what’s more impressive than “All My Life” or “Never Imagined” is that the best songs don’t have any features (“Pelle Coat,” “Sad Songs,” “Dru Hill”).
3. Home is Where, the whaler
A concept album about 9/11 and a gender transition. Nothing gives me more hope for the artistic achievements of Gen-Z than Ice Spice and this band, though I think they’re a little older than her, they’re still younger than me since they were in early elementary school during 9/11 and I was in middle school. Once I found out that this band was from Florida, I realized that they’re basically like if the little girl in The Florida Project made a band 20-something years later. Or if Laura Jane Grace was born about a decade later, and was really into Neutral Milk Hotel and Modest Mouse as a teenager in instead of Rancid and then got into Fugazi (Laura and Brandon are both really into Fugazi).
3. Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love, Kara Jackson
If Leonard Cohen could sing like Nina Simone, he’d make this album. It’s a little limited musically, but the lyrics are just killer after killer. There’s something very Chicago creative arts scene about this one, kind of like Jamila Woods. I had a spiritual experience listening to Jamila Woods at a music festival in 2021, and I suspect I’d feel simularly about seeing Jackson live. The Woods album this year was simultaneously too tossed off and too tense of a follow up for me to really enjoy, but the Jackson album is all first-novel ambition. And it’s really a novel: short, funny chapters to get you hooked, and then long, brutal stories about (mostly) bad men doing bad things.
4. El Comienza, Grupa Frontera
The best country album of 2023. Sad bastard songs about doing cringe things to get your girl back (“EN ALTAVOZ”), embarrassing yourself with a low cell phone battery (“un x100to”), and eventually just hoping the new boyfriend treats her right (“CUÍDALA”). Rebecca made the typically smart observation that Grupa Frontera is kind of like Richard Thompson in the mid to late 70’s: sure, he’s making unfashionably folky music, but he’s punk as fuck so you have to respect it. These guys were already huge in Central America before all the gringos who like Bad Bunny (me) got into them, and I know this because a Guatamalan student of mine tried to turn me on to them in 2021 and I was too stupid to understand how good they are. Don’t be like me in 2021.
4. Eye on the Bat, Palehound
It’s an almost ideal rock album: 10 songs, none over 4 minutes, some closer to 2, some closer to 3. Some of the arrangements get a little same-y, but the lyrics are smart and funny without being overbearingly so. I’d like to see them stretch out a little bit; there’s a raging breakup 7 minute breakup song in their quiver for sure, and I appreciated how Kara Jackson got full outer space on the back half of that album.
4. The Window, Ratboys
This is the less brutal version of the Wednesday album, but that doesn’t make it any less cohesive or ambitious. There’s much more of that space that’s missing from the Palehound album, but not quite enough lyrical density to make it as good as either that one or the Wednesday album. This is really the year of the she/them singer-songwriter using noisy guitars mixed with lyrical confessionalism to express how simultaneously angry and depressed they are.
5. Asake, Work of Art
I can’t quite get into Afrobeats overall, but ampiano is the future, and this is by far the best ampiano album I’ve ever heard. I love the innovations of DJ Black Low, but his songs end up being much more homogenous then these. Asake floats above the beats, winking and slyly suggesting that you join him in his generous gallery full of brightly lit cubist paintings.
5. Scarlet, Doja Cat
I neither know or care about how she’s edgy or messy or not media-trained, or who her producer is. I just know that “Wet Vagina” and “Fuck the Girls” are perfect, and the other songs are very good. She’s cares about rapping as much as people like Danny Brown and billy woods, but with 1000x the audience of theirs. There’s something Rodrigo-esque (but in a different lane) about what she’s doing with her immense power.
Honorable Mentions
Higher Lonely Power, Fireworks
If you liked early Sufjan you’d be down for this, maybe…what do you do when you lose all meaning and purpose in your life, but your template for how to be a person is filled with the particular color and texture that only Christian rock seems to give it? Make some indie rock that sort of sounds like Christian rock. I’m being carefully not to label this what it is, which is emo, because then you’d miss out of this, and that woud be a shame. It’s societally important to convince more evangelical Millenials to quit the church, and get more people to listen to emo.
Post-American, MSPAINT
There’s a whole lane of synth-y, almost industrial hard rock that Nine Inch Nails, DFA 1979, et. al haven’t made yet because Trent Reznor stopped making it and the synth-y bands from NYC all broke up. This is profoundly unfashionable music, since it’s not punk enough for hardcore and far too punk for dance music, but that doesn’t make it less innovative.
Parannoul, After the Magic
A lot of it sounds like airplanes taking off, and it turns out a lot of the lyrics are about walking through dark streets on the way to looking out windows at far away stars, so if Denis Villeneuve decides to make Blade Runner 3 he should definitely turn to the this guy.
Hard to Love, Moneybagg Yo
It’s southern like Three 6 Mafia or UGK, that is, not Atlanta, which makes it more interesting. Memphis still has a lot to say. Most of the content is about untrustworthy friends (rappers and romantic partners) and what he’s going to do to them (kill them or talk shit about them) but the production is consistently excellent and the flow has a crunchy, satisfying edge to it.
All of This Will End, Indigo de Souza
If her last album sounded like Ani DiFranco, this one sounds more like The Blow, so: she’s moved into the 21st century, for good and ill. I liked how ugly some of the earlier songs sounded, but this one’s also more consistent.
Good Lies, Overmono
Melodic, intimate, textured electronic music. I’m sure that there’s more of this out there, but there’s also so much boring electronic music that I struggle with the genre as a whole. Throw me some more good suggestions, especially if it sounds like this!
Girl With Fish, feeble little horse
Bright nuggets of fuzz and cynical, snarling lyrics from Lydia Slocum: “Threw the towel in/I’m tired of baking/I’m the only one/Who sees me naked.” Imagine if Dinosaur Jr. was fronted by Kim Deal, I guess.
Sorry I Haven’t Called, Vagabon
This is the “pop crossover” album, and it’s not quite fully baked, but it’s better than a collection of singles. I’m really looking forward to the next one, when she merges the punk energy of songs from her first album with the most straightforward R&B of this one.
AUSTIN, Post Malone
The singles are probably better than the album, but I refuse to apologize for my love of this dude’s voice and his ability to integrate alternative/classic rock with rap. The songs are perfectly constructed jewels. I ignore the often dumb lyrics, and you should, too.
Heaven Knows, Pinkpantheress
Some of the songs are dime-store R&B and the others are perfect bedroom pop: it’s impossible to tell the difference between them, and it’ll take a few more years for her to get locked in on what makes her impossible to replicate (lord knows all the labels are going to try) and what makes her 22 and just not that consistent yet.
SCARING THE HOES, Danny Brown and JPEGMAFIA
Despite a retrograde understanding about why our current culture is afraid of artistic innovation (it’s not just because it makes women less likely to want to dance at your party), this is some actually innovative production and rapping, and we haven’t had much of that for a while–except, actually, from women making rap (see Doja Cat, Ice Spice, Rosalia, SZA). It’s frightening, unpleasant rap about how pleasure just creates more pain if your brain is already broken. It’s mostly a welcome return to form for Brown, whose last solo album was solidly mediocre after three genius level albums in a row (XXX, Old, Atrocity Exhibition).
And JPEGMAFIA cleared the Kelis “Milkshake” sample on “Fentenyl Tester.” Shit, not even Beyonce could do that!
Album Artists, but not quite Albums
Radical Romantics, Fever Ray
Karin Dreijer was radically honest back in 2003, and they’re still doing it now. Fever Ray has been a moodier, more atmospheric project compared to The Knife, but this one is pretty close to finally following up Silent Shout with something just as cohesive and powerful.
Heaven is a Junkyard, Youth Lagoon
Slight, maybe: the piano and ticking percussion often sound like a music box playing an obscure melody that Trevor Powers delicately whispers over, and it’s only 30 something minutes. All of the songs sound fairly similar, too. But it’s hard to make music that sounds authentically mysterious, and this does. It doesn’t quite fit neatly into any particular time or place. The closest analogue is maybe Sparklehorse, but it’s less hysterical than that, and less conspicously inspired by old movies and David Lynch.
Sundial, Noname
I don’t remember any of the songs after listening to it. Also, it’s the smartest rap out there and the jazzbo vibes are fun as hell. I don’t know how to reconcile these two things.
Yard, Slow Pulp
Are there diminishing returns to indie-rock that sounds like the 90’s and 00’s made by women? Maybe, but after decades of male dominance, we’re not there yet: I count a couple of meh albums from this year (they’re in the singles) but the hit rate on this stuff is outrageously high.
Perfect Saviors, The Armed
Nasty punk with some occasional nu-metal tunefulness. These guys aren’t following any trends. Maybe they don’t care because they’re from Detroit? Some of this sounds like it was made in the midst of an assembly line. Congrats to the UAW!
Jarak Qaribak, Dudu Tassa and Johnny Greenwood
Radiohead scores an bunch of covers of songs from the Middle East. I don’t understand a word of it and I can’t find translations anywhere, but I love it.
The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We, Mitski
No singles, just a very pleasant album with guitars and slide guitars and crooning. Fuck yeah, we’re back in Puberty Makeout Creek after a long detour into synth-pop land.