Favorite Albums of 2023

#15. Hannah Jadagu – Aperture

Since a lot of my music thoughts now are grumbling about how young people suck and have horrible taste, I wanted to single out Jadagu, who at age 20 is already making classic-style indie rock with some energy and personality. I’m fully in my old man guitar nostalgia phase currently so hearing a younger artist actually play some riffs feels huge. Jadagu’s songs are serious but never boring because she writes actual hooks and there is also an enjoyable lack of pretension here compared to the trend of millennials and zoomers thinking they’re philosophers in their boring artless music. The fact Jadagu didn’t get a major media push this year is mystifying to me and probably is an indictment of the entire music industry in some way.

#14. Shana Cleveland – Manzanita

Cleveland maybe gets more attention for fronting La Luz, but I really like the feel of her solo work, which has a throwback 60s psychedelic folk vibe reminiscent of Love. I think Cleveland’s biggest strength is how everything about her music feels like a direct reflection of her personality — it’s very easy to imagine who she is just from these songs, which have such a specific calm, spacey, California energy to them. I guess it’s possible I’m wrong and she’s a psycho who is constantly freaking out at people, but somehow I doubt it.

#13. Frankie Rose – Love as Projection

Rose has become one of my most reliable artists, as everything she does is sharply written and fun to listen to. Love as Projection carries on the synth pop route she’s been on with her relatively plain voice accompanied by shimmering electronics. Rose rises above the legions of people making this kind of music because she is experienced as a songwriter and a person. There is a certain level of professionalism in the craft here that I appreciate more and more, and the lyrics feel like they’re coming from a genuine place and aren’t just random text to fill in the pop songs.

#12. Beach House – Become EP

Beach House is growing on me every year, and while I majorly slept on last year’s double album, Once Twice Melody (mostly because it was so long), I was instantly into this EP. “American Daughter” feels like one of their best songs and shows how a band this deep into their discography can still explore new sounds without fundamentally changing who they are. Considering these are purportedly cast-offs from a double album, it’s remarkable how cohesive this release is and how good the songs are. For me, Beach House are getting in that discussion as an all-time great band given their longevity, consistency, and quality.

#11. a.s.o. – a.s.o.

The first album from a.s.o. exists in this perfect space between Portishead, Mazzy Star, Curve, and a bunch of other 90s signifiers while still finding its own lane. Singer and namesake Alia Seror-O’Neill has the vocal ability and charisma to pull this style off and the songwriting/production is also on point. Nothing here is exactly mindblowing but the execution is at a way higher level than I’ve become used to from these sorts of bands.

#10. Madeline Goldstein – Other World EP

This one is a totally left-field Bandcamp release that didn’t get much attention, but I was kind of blown away by the quality of Other World‘s production and the amount of believable drama Madeline Goldstein pours into these four songs. This is in that gothic, theatrical style that often crosses the line into being corny — I’d argue Other World basically walks up to that line and dances around it a bit without ever quite going over. The title track with its rumbling percussion and saxophone part was on repeat for me a lot this year along with “Edges of the Lines” which is also sneakily catchy and has similarly evocative lyrics.

#9. Seablite – Lemon Lights

Lemon Lights is one of those Just For Me albums as I feel like maybe the strongest proponent of this kind of light, jangly, fuzzy pop that is reminiscent of my beloved Tiger Trap. This is one of the better executed versions of the style I can remember, with “Hit the Wall” and “Melancholy Molly” jumping out as radio-ready guitar songs (in a world where good music was ever played on the radio). I can’t find a lot to analyze here but it’s a serious crowd-pleaser for people (me) who are into this style.

#8. Elaine Malone – Pyrrhic

This Irishwoman’s solo debut has apparently been years in the making; Malone (who I was unfamiliar with) has been a part of DIY scenes and various bands for around a decade. Pyrrhic reflects an artist who has that experience and is confident in a variety of sounds, ranging from bluesy rock to dreamy psychedelia and folk. Some of these songs combine all of that in way that reminds me a bit of Emma Ruth Rundle with some Sinead O’Connor (obviously) thrown in. What I really sensed in these songs compared to all the others I would sample on Bandcamp was a sense of passion. Malone’s vocals and the instrumentals on here just hit harder and feel more real to me than a lot of other artists I listened to.

#7. Fever Ray – Radical Romantics

I go back and forth a bit on Fever Ray (Karin Dreijer). They have an extremely distinct style, and I instantly know when I’m hearing a Fever Ray song, which is the number one thing I need from music now. Since the first masterpiece Fever Ray album though, I’ve found Dreijer can often tip into that contrived try-hard artsy zone. Radical Romantics threads the needle well because it has relatively traditional songwriting, so there’s a mix here of something that feels completely unique, but is also still satisfyingly familiar and not reveling too much in being unusual just for the sake of it.

#6. Spellling – Spellling & the Mystery School

This is a slight cheat, as Spellling & the Mystery School is a collection of previously released Spellling (Tia Cabral) songs performed with her touring band. While the versions aren’t meaningfully better or worse to me than the originals, there is some new craft in the arrangements and sequencing. Mostly it’s here because Spellling is one of the only current artists who is making the kind of music that initially drew me into this world. She is keeping the Kate Bush/Bjork/PJ Harvey dream alive by being an independent, quirky, charismatic artist who isn’t afraid to be bold and personal with her work. She really stands out in this current indie climate where almost nobody has a shred of charisma or any new ideas.

#5. Jessie Ware – That! Feels Good!

Ware’s previous release, What’s Your Pleasure, was a better pop album than Thriller, and That! Feels Good! is a worthy follow-up. The traits that have made Ware one of my favorite artists of the last few years also end up being an indictment of contemporary pop music: she sounds like an actual human being instead of a corporate AI, her music is joyful and expressive rather than overly serious and pseudo-profound, and maybe most of all, she isn’t ashamed of writing pop songs. So while artists like Taylor Swift are churning out tedious fake folk music that everyone pretends is something sophisticated when it clearly isn’t, Ware is over here just making jams and seeming like someone who is invested in making the best possible version of this style of pop.

#4. Draag – Dark Fire Heresy

Draag’s pinned tweet is “not a shoegaze band,” and maybe that explains how they made my favorite shoegaze album of the year. This album has a lot of the familiar shoegaze signifiers but it also feels like it is approached from a totally different angle, with a focus on generating emotion and mood rather than simply recreating what others have done. One of the members, Jessica Huang, grew up in a religious cult, and the familiar noisy guitars and blurred vocals are repurposed here to represent the tension and confusion of her experience. So while rejecting the term, this band understands how to make shoegaze where the notes actually mean something and the sound feels like it is organically representing the story.

#3. The Keening – Little Bird

I always thought Rebecca Vernon’s previous band, SubRosa, existed in a weird space: they were promoted and toured as a metal band, but seemed to have higher aspirations than making standard metal that seems entirely focused on a familiar aesthetic that appeals to a certain die-hard fan (this probably comes off as insulting to metal but I can’t help it since I’ve never gotten into it due to how samey it all feels to me). Her debut as The Keening has some similar concepts as SubRosa (violins, lengthy songs with narratives, her voice) while adding some southern gothic flavor with a swampier sound and tales about death and murder. Vernon has cultivated her own style over the years and this is another album that feels totally different from everything else this year.

#2. PJ Harvey – I Inside the Old Year Dying

The nice thing about PJ Harvey is if you dislike one of her albums, the next one is going to be completely different. The noted musical shapeshifter’s previous release, The Hope Six Demolition Project, left me cold due to its obvious political-minded lyrics. I Inside the Old Year Dying maintains the folk-influenced sound of Harvey’s later work but is fascinatingly cryptic, with strange Elvis references and her native Dorset dialect coloring what feels like a dark fairy tale set in the forest. Like PJ Harvey’s best albums, this has an intense focus and feels entirely self-contained — it creates and lives in its own world. There’s just a level of commitment and craft here that is so far beyond what the younger generations of artists are doing.

#1. Kelela – Raven

Raven is an album I’ve wanted for a long time: something that combines the original spirit of soul music with forward-thinking production and unique charisma. Kelela zeroes in on a very specific style of sensual slow jams here, but Raven packs all these fascinating dualities into that simple framework. The sound feels classic and futuristic at the same time, giving it a timeless quality. There’s a delicate balance of hooks and pop elements with an authentic personality and actual complex ideas at play. The songs are about love and connection, but there is also a poignant solitary feeling to it, especially the bookend tracks “Washed Away” and “Far Away.” When the album does speed up and resemble more traditional pop, like on “Contact,” it still has such a distinct mood, and Kelela is human and expressive while also having some of the Bjork “alien on earth” vibe that I love. This was really the only album this year that felt like the whole package of having personality and being fun to listen to, while also being thought-provoking with a cool, original aesthetic.

Favorite Albums of 2022

This was the hardest list I’ve had to make, in part because no albums this year felt particularly great to me. So what follows is a list of good albums that I liked listening to, but the gaps between all of these are smaller than usual, I don’t feel particularly confident about the order, and I don’t feel like any of these are going to be releases I revisit constantly for the rest of my life. Next year we’ll see if I’ve just become a jaded old man or if there was just something missing with all of these releases. (Also, I likely straight-up missed out on some great albums, since I disconnected pretty hard from music writing/discussion this year).

20. Angel Olsen – Big Time

Let’s start with what will be a common theme in this list: I wanted to like this album more than I did. On 2019’s All Mirrors, Angel Olsen moved from mopey indie to the big stage, coming off as a star in sweeping, majestic songs that were dizzyingly ambitious and expressive. It’s hard for me to see the ironically-named Big Time as anything but a regression from that album, as Olsen retreats into what I assume is her more natural comfort zone of country-tinged indie folk. It’s still a good album, because Angel Olsen is singing and writing the songs, but it also signals that her most powerful artistic statement is likely going to end up being seen as an outlier rather than an arrival.

19. Cate Le Bon – Pompeii

This is the first Cate Le Bon album to grab me in a few years, though I didn’t get much deeper than enjoying the sound, the songwriting, and her weird charisma. It kind of exemplifies the 2022 feeling of the music being good but not mindblowing enough to want to write 9 paragraphs and shout to the heavens about its greatness.

18. Nina Nastasia – Riderless Horse

Nastasia’s first album in 12 years has about as dark of a backstory as possible, which is outlined on her Bandcamp page in fairly unflinching detail. She’s always specialized in spare, haunting folk, and Riderless Horse is in line with her other albums sonically and is as pretty and devastating as expected. Nastasia’s gritty authenticity and total lack of performative elements is what makes this worth recommending over similar dour folk, and there is enough life and humanity in the recordings that it isn’t purely an exercise in misery for the listener.

17. Peel Dream Magazine – Pad

In a surprising move, Joe Stevens abandons the fuzz pop of his project’s previous album (the great Agitprop Alterna) on Pad in favor of a more quiet, meditative style built around vintage organs and other pillowy sounds. The end result still owes a lot to Stereolab, with a touch of wispy Sufjan Stevens folk also, and over 15 songs it sometimes gets a little too quiet and repetitive for its own good. I continue to like all of the influences and ideas Stevens is playing with, but this fell a little short of my expectations as someone who loved the more up-tempo side of his work.

16. Alvvays – Blue Rev

This is where I might just be too picky: Blue Rev is one of the easiest albums of the year to like, and was raved about fairly universally for its addictive pop songs, bright production, and the classic indie pop vocals and lyrics of Molly Rankin. The thing I can’t quite get past with Alvvays is the lack of friction or messiness in their music. I enjoy listening to these songs, but there is also an impenetrable glossy sheen around them, as well as the underlying feeling that they’re focus-grouped to be played at an Urban Outfitters or some other vaguely hip destination. I’m still not going to turn down guitar pop that’s this catchy but I couldn’t quite get behind this as a great or special album.

15. Papercuts – Past Life Regression

An ultra-solid album from veteran songwriter Jason Quever, Past Life Regression has a timeless and familiar sound of 60s psych with some shogaze mixed in. There’s a studied, professional quality to the melodies and the sound, and I think I have a tendency to underrate albums like this that maybe don’t have tons of personality but are executed in an uncommonly smooth and pleasant way.

14. Gwenno – Tresor

A former member of the Pipettes, Gwenno now makes dreamy folk in the Cornish tongue; the Celtic flavor of Tresor helps make it stand out compared to a lot of similar releases, even if the lyrics are foreign. All of the vibes are familiar enough, and Gwenno’s singing is a bewitching presence that adds some mysterious intrigue to the songs.

13. Terra Pines – Downbeats

This Aussie band makes the kind of tightly-wound rock music I like, with driving rhythms and vocals that alternate between dreamy and intense.

12. The Gabys – The Gabys

Even though it’s only four songs and like 10 minutes long, I wanted to single out this EP as maybe the most perfect release of the year. The Gabys themselves are completely anonymous; I like to think I’m pretty good at digging up info on these bands and could find nothing. This means their music speaks for itself, and it’s about the most ideal recreation of early Slumberland indie pop possible, with the voices of the already-anonymous members buried beneath layers of pretty fuzz and warm melodies. There’s not a big audience for this kind of thing, but anyone who is into this sort of music should love this.

11. Widowspeak – The Jacket

Widowspeak can always be relied on for a good, if not necessarily exciting, album, and The Jacket offers more refinement of their classic sound and more heartfelt personal songwriting from Molly Hamilton. It’s hard not to feel like this band gets punished for their own consistency, as they’ve been churning out enjoyable albums for years now with not a lot of hype to show for it. But for listeners who have stuck with the band, there’s a satisfying reliability and comfort in these songs that has been earned over the years.

10. Melody’s Echo Chamber – Emotional Eternal

Melody Prochet’s previous album, Bon Voyage, was an all-time favorite of mine due to is delightful kookiness that captured imagination and joy in a very unique way. Emotional Eternal is back to being more normal, solidly-written dream pop, with Prochet’s vocals being the main selling point compared to other groups. Like a lot of 2022 albums, it’s an enjoyable listen, but also a bit of a regression after all the wildness and creativity of her last album.

9. Katie Bejsiuk – The Woman on the Moon

Bejsiuk used to record as Free Cake For Every Creature, which was one of my favorite acts of the last decade and one I still think should have been a bigger deal considering all the frankly much worse songwriters in a similar vein who get non-stop publicity blitzes. The Woman on the Moon is not too different from what she’s done in the past, with a quiet, reverby folk style that is accentuated by her whispery vocals and detailed personal songwriting.

8. Mitski – Laurel Hell

I’ve had a full annoying contrarian arc with Mitski: I was in on the ground floor as a fan of Bury Me at Makeout Creek in 2013, then she blew up with Puberty 2 and Be the Cowboy, albums that I didn’t find to be particularly remarkable relative to their hype. Now I’m back on board with Laurel Hell while others seem to be losing interest. This synth pop direction isn’t particularly original — in fact, it seems to be an ordained phase of every artist’s career now — but Mitski for the most part stays true to herself and I think it’s commendably honest when an artist who has gotten as popular as Mitski embraces their status with a poppier album instead of pretending to still be an outcast on the fringes of the industry. Just the existence of the haunting “Working for the Knife” makes this her best album, and it’s joined by some listenable pop like “The Last Heartbreaker” and the quirkier “Should’ve Been Me.” Top to bottom, this is her sharpest songwriting and a good example of an indie artist going poppy without losing themselves in the process.

7. Tess Parks – And Those Who Were Seen Dancing

This is the third album by Parks, and they’ve all kind of been the same thing, but I’m a big enough fan of her voice and style that I don’t mind. Her raspy rock vocals are in prime form on And Those Who Were Seen Dancing, and it’s another collection of songs that is druggy and psychedelic while being powered by Parks’ unique charisma.

6. Weyes Blood – And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow

And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow never really separates itself from Weyes Blood’s previous album, Titanic Rising. It’s the same gorgeous, immaculately produced and performed pop, and the high points like “Children of an Empire” and “Grapevine” are significant enough that it seems worth placing near the top, even though I wish the whole thing felt like more of a progression.

5. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Cool it Down

This was a pleasant surprise for me, since Yeah Yeah Yeahs were one of the first indie rock bands I really liked and I had sort of assumed they were done making music. Cool it Down pretty much hits all of the high points of the band’s sound, and even has some extra pathos that has come with maturity from the group. As far as balancing expectations and going somewhere new for a band in this position, it’s hard to do a lot better than this, and Karen O being an actual charismatic rockstar really makes them stand out compared to today’s dull indie acts. The only real complaint here is that it felt like it could have used a couple more songs.

4. Vero – Unsoothing Interior

I kind of think Vero should be famous, at least on the indie scale. As far as personality-driven hooky guitar rock goes, I find this to be superior in every way to the much-ballyhooed Wet Leg album that came out this year, and I assume the biggest difference between the two bands is PR connections. The songs on Unsoothing Interior are full of catchy riffs and sass, and this is the closest anyone has come in awhile to capturing the energy of The Breeders.

3. Essential Logic – Land of Kali

Where did this album come from? The name Lora Logic may be familiar to people deep into the early days of punk — she was most known for her saxophone contributions to the pioneering X-Ray Spex, and later formed Essential Logic, which released one album in 1979 and a few singles. This all happened when she was a teenager; since then she’s made spare contributions to music while apparently getting into the Hare Krishna religion. All of this leads to the most unlikely comeback album of the year: 43 years later, Essential Logic is back with Land of Kali, and it’s got this totally off-kilter and loopy old punk energy that is hard to describe. The focus is mostly on the rhythms and Logic’s saxophone parts while the lyrics often have the Krishna spiritual element in them. The most surprising part of this album is how downright groovy and poppy it is — it’s very different from the dissonant, atonal style that I associate with bands like X-Ray Spex or The Raincoats, yet it retains the same free spirit vibe that makes early punk exciting. Very literally nobody has written about or discussed this album, which I guess isn’t surprising. It’s one of the only releases this year I found genuinely interesting and exciting.

2. Modal Melodies – Modal Melodies

This Australian duo (Violetta Del Conte-Race and Jake Robertson) is very reminiscent of one of my favorite bands, The Green Child; both are playing around with the same synth pop kind of influences while trying to take them in a more spacey and intangible direction. This debut feels a little more direct and less magical than Shimmering Bassett but it’s still a woozy and intriguing collection of songs that should appeal to Broadcast fans.

1. Björk – Fossora

I sort of settled on Fossora at #1 because it’s Björk, which means it’s going to be something unique, thoughtful, and compelling, traits that stand out even more than usual this year. This isn’t one of her best albums but it still feels like it’s on a different level of artistry than anything else I heard this year. It has all the Björky elements with her voice and the metaphorical nature themes, and it’s overall an album that is actually offering something to the listener that is worth thinking about and obsessing over. It is a little lacking in the pop hooks of her mid-90s work, but there still isn’t anyone making music like this and I’m going to keep treasuring any output I get from her.