The 12 Best Albums of 2023

2023 in music felt more like a year of endings than of beginnings, even without taking into account the shadows of world events. There have been so many layoffs (completed or impending) and other bad portents across music platforms and publications, including Spotify, Bandcamp, and others. The declining sustainability of touring stopped seeming like a temporary post-pandemic issue and more of a permanent crisis for smaller acts, while some streaming royalty rates for niche artists seem poised to go from a pittance to nonexistent. Groups such as the United Musicians and Allied Workers and the Future of Music Coalition have done their best to fight for policies that would help alleviate these issues, but unlike the writers and actors in the movie business, who this year went on a successful strike for better conditions, musicians in 2023 operate under such a wide range of circumstances that effective action is far more difficult to organize.

Meanwhile, in the highest echelons of pop and in the most popular genre of the past decade, hip-hop, there’s collective disorientation and threatening stagnation. There’ve been hits but not trends, passing phenoms but few undeniable new stars. Those of us who love country music might have been thrilled another year to find it crossing over to top the pop charts, but in 2023 it turned out to be in ways that embarrassingly highlighted the genre’s worst reactionary tendencies (except for Luke Combs’ cover of “Fast Car,” a fine tribute that directed plenty of attention and cash Tracy Chapman’s way). And while the record-breaking stadium tours of Taylor Swift and Beyoncé were the year’s most gobsmacking success stories, ultimately they were cumulative victory laps by entrenched veterans, not any kind of fresh breakthrough. It’s as if popular-music culture in 2023 really needed to go to the doctor. And go to the mountains. And look to the children. And drink from the fountains. Was nobody paying attention during Barbie?

Usually, putting together my year-end lists, I’m inclined as a critic to seek a rough balance between my own preferences and a representation of broader significant currents. But given all of the above, I’m less inclined this year to bother with the latter. These are primarily personal calls. Whatever’s missing should be made up by the range and individual rude health of these three dozen albums, whose creative energy is the good news that even 2023’s worst bummers can’t entirely suppress.

A Dozen Top Albums of 2023

(In alphabetical order by artist.)

Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, and Shahzad Ismaily, Love in Exile

The André 3000 flute album New Blue Sun drew attention this past month to the oft-neglected but recently rising field of ambient music. For an example of the form’s finest possibilities, look to this ruminative but far from placid encounter between avant-jazz pianist Iyer, Urdu-singing vocalist Aftab, and lesser-known musical secret weapon Ismaily (who was profiled as “one of music’s most coveted collaborators” this year in the New York Times). The sounds swell and pool like liquids in an undulating subterranean cavern, conveying the listener through passageways that seem to circumvent space and time.

Boygenius, The Record

I had a contrarian impulse to list Boygenius’ post-album EP The Rest, which has a cut-gem precision, while the band’s first full-length outing wobbles in spots. Ultimately, though, the album is the landmark effort that permitted the previously ephemeral, tongue-in-cheek “supergroup” of indie songwriters Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker their incredible 2023. They conquered the world (arena shows, Saturday Night Live performances, internet ubiquity) with thoughtful charisma, at least one perfect single (“Not Strong Enough”), and the heretofore underestimated powers of triple-word-score queer-nerd friendship. Since my review in March, I’ve come to think that Baker’s the one who flourishes most in the group, giving it her best songs and unfurling her guitar-hero powers like never before. Will they each put their Clark Kent glasses back on now and return to their solo paths, or are there further twists to come in the Boygenius multiverse?

Jaimie Branch, Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die (World War)

In part, this album stands as a memorial to a great artist, a composer and trumpeter and vocalist and synth player and astounding live performer who could have done so much more if she hadn’t died in 2022 at age 39. But listen to it in its own right as a cavalcade of cosmically energized and politically engaged music that ranges across idioms of free jazz, Americana, punk rock, Latin music, and more. It’s one of the greatest musical journeys you could take in 2023 without leaving your room—but one that by the end will make you feel compelled to get out in the world and make something meaningful happen, the way Branch would.

Everything But the Girl, Fuse

The married U.K. duo of Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt hasn’t been idle since their heyday as Everything But the Girl in the 1980s and 1990s, which had the dance-floor hit “Missing” along with a much deeper catalog of grooves and moods. Thorn made a series of excellent solo albums and established herself as a writer with several books that are just as good. Watt produced and DJed and did other solo projects. Their return at 60 seemed to surprise the couple nearly as much as their fans, with an album as supple, funky, and emotionally resonant as ever. I especially love closer “Karaoke,” in which Thorn’s raspy alto weaves through a woozy barroom crowd to seek out the heart of music itself: “Do you sing to heal the brokenhearted?/ Oh, you know I do/ Do you sing to get the party started?/ You know I love that too.”

JPEGMafia and Danny Brown, Scaring the Hoes

The most middle-aged of my musical tastes is in hip-hop, where I tend to seek out corny shit like lyrical flow and narrative as opposed to the contemporary ju$t-v1be*zz sensibility. Danny Brown (like Billy Woods below) is one of the rappers who still delivers those virtues, as on his solo 2023 album Quaranta. But in combining with rapper-producer JPEGMafia on this one, Brown immerses listeners in a noisier, more challenging and unsettling experience, with shades of the “hyperpop” of artists like 100 Gecs. While it’s probably not the sort of praise they’re aiming for, I do appreciate the shake-up.

Kirsty MacColl, See That Girl: 1979–2000

If there’s any upside to the gutting death last month of the Pogues’ guiding seer Shane MacGowan, it’s that perhaps it might help draw some notice to this new box set spanning the career of Kirsty MacColl, his duet partner on the biggest hit of either of their musical lives, “Fairytale of New York.” His death, of course, comes in the month that this 1987 drunken-Xmas song usually becomes inescapable; so did hers, 23 years ago, at only 41, in a terrible ocean accident in Mexico.* Most people only know MacColl for her collaborations with the Pogues, Billy Bragg, and others, but she was herself a brilliant songwriter; saucy, snarky, and heart-snapping by turns on sexual politics and a world’s worth of other matters, in uncannily perfect stacked harmonies. This collection has it all, from her early new-wave girl-group-isms to her later South American-inspired rhythms, including unreleased and live rarities for true fans. But if you’re new to her, go immediately to 1989’s Kite, which belongs on any roll call of the best music of that decade.

Megan Moroney, Lucky

While reactionary bros hogged the country spotlight this year, there were some hopeful signs. The growth of the Black Opry Revue, for instance, and the emergence of some new female country stars such as Lainey Wilson, who set chart milestones and, according to industry reports, is now the first woman to rank among the Top 5 most-played artists on country radio any year since the turn of the century. Hoping to join that company is Georgia-born newcomer Megan Moroney, whose romance-and-college-football-rivalry tune “Tennessee Orange” made the country Top 10 in the spring. More importantly, the rest of her debut album, Lucky, is damn charming from hat to boots, matching tradition with post-Taylor contemporary savvy. She nails witty conversational delivery (running down an incompatibility issue: “I sleep on my side, and you sleep with everyone”), but she can bring home “Sad Songs for Sad People,” too: “I want every word to hurt, like ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.’ ”

Lisa O’Neill, All of This Is Chance

If I were ranking the list, this would be No. 1. I should have known about Lisa O’Neill sooner—she’s been a fairly big deal in Ireland for years, and especially since she landed a couple of crucial soundtrack placements on Peaky Blinders. But I only learned of her through Will Hermes’ survey of new Irish music in the Times this spring. It also featured Lankum, a band whose excellent False Lankum album is showing up on many year-end lists. But fewer have picked up on O’Neill, whose world-class voice is at once pure as sheep’s wool and unmistakably individual, and whose songwriting melds tradition and innovation with a brilliance I haven’t heard since, dare I say, Shane MacGowan himself. Listen to “Old Note” and see if you’re not convinced. And if she shows up playing live anywhere near you, drop everything and go. It’s hard to imagine who else could have done justice to Kirsty MacColl’s part in “Fairytale of New York” at MacGowan’s funeral last week.

NewJeans, Get Up EP

I am a perpetual K-pop dilettante, so I don’t know, maybe the whole field suddenly has gotten this good (if it pleases the court, witness Stray Kids). But this five-strong girl group has been pulling out of its pockets some of the purest pop imaginable the past two years, particularly on this year’s Get Up EP. “Super Shy” is the huge hit, but I’m equally taken with the song “New Jeans” (ever since the Monkees I’ve been a sucker for bands who sing their own names), and the songs named after handy everyday abbreviations, “ETA” and “ASAP,” which deliver its pleasures with the same efficiency. I hope they just keep making EPs and never bother with longwinded old albums. In fact, maybe I wish that for all of us in 2024.

Speedy Ortiz, Rabbit Rabbit

Sadie Dupuis, now based in Philadelphia, has been making impressive albums for more than a decade with this band as well as under her solo guise, Sad13. She’s a poet with an MFA, two published books, and a journal that she edits, but none of that gets in the way of rocking, which she does with a 1990s Helium or Liz Phair flair and a wicked hand at guitar. But Rabbit Rabbit strikes me as a level up in emotional expressivity compared to the past. I didn’t need to penetrate the lyrical koans fully to feel things right away, and I immediately wanted to put half of them on repeat.* I thought I was a latecomer to full-blown Speedy love, but then I hit a show in a smallish club in Toronto in September and the room was only half full. Where is everybody? Give Rabbit Rabbit to, say, the Boygenius fan in your life who needs to graduate from that fixation to a wider pool of smart, rocking female songwriters, who might wear their hearts less on their sleeves and more camouflaged under a chic but complicated kerchief.

Olivia Rodrigo, Guts

The greatest trick the devil ever played was coming on like Adele and then turning out to be the new Paramore. Well, not the devil—by all signs Olivia Rodrigo is a very nice young woman—but it was still very clever to make her name with vulnerable weepers and then quick-change to powerful ragers. Guts does exactly what it ought to, stepping forward in sophistication from Sour without sacrificing the wide-eyed appeal. I think “Bad Idea, Right?” is still my favorite of this set, though “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl” is great too, especially because it’s actually not a ballad. She can let those go altogether now, right? Right? … Fuck it, it’s fine.

Wednesday, Rat Saw God

If you’d told me Townes Van Zandt was going to return in the form of a 27-year-old woman in a really loud shoegaze-meets-country band from Asheville, North Carolina—well, I guess I would have said good for Townes. Karly Hartzman’s songs continue to draw on the images and aftermath of a dysfunctional Southern adolescence, citing St. Augustine amidst the wreckage of a druggy party on “Bull Believer”: “God make me good, but not quite yet.” Informed partly by her love of Athens, Georgia’s Drive-By Truckers (a narrative influence way more young songwriters should cultivate), and with guitarist (and fine solo artist himself) M.J. Lenderman and her other bandmates alongside, Hartzman tells some of the best, grimiest stories in music today, over beds of roaring feedback, and she’s still just getting going.

Two Dozen Runners-Up

(In alphabetical order by artist.)

Abstract Concrete, Abstract Concrete

Charles Hayward, of legendary 1970s experimental U.K. rock band This Heat, returns under a new guise but with the same brain-melting aims.

Amaarae, Fountain Baby

This Ghanaian American singer-songwriter’s sinuous second album is among the year’s best R&B.

Peter Brötzmann, Majid Bekkas, and Hamid Drake, Catching Ghosts

One of the final recordings by the great German free-jazz saxophonist, who died this past June, is this lovely, atypical trio with the supple Moroccan singer Bekkas and the hypnotic American percussionist Drake.

The Bug Club, Rare Birds: Hour of Song

This young British threesome is spilling over with catchy oddball-rock songs (à la early Hefner) plus spoken-word bits that summon their own fanciful/maddeningly twee world. But an hour’s a bit too long.

CMAT, Crazymad, for Me

Ireland’s Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson continues to create charming tales of intimate misadventure in a country-folk-pop idiom all her own—Kirsty MacColl might have approved.

Charlotte Cornfield, Could Have Done Anything

This Canadian songwriter offers candid melodic miniatures on love, heartbreak, and going for walks (and to see “The Magnetic Fields”).

Iris DeMent, Workin’ on a World

One of my favorite country singer-songwriters ever returns with an album I find both galvanizing and uncomfortably earnest in addressing the state of the world.

Margaret Glaspy, Echo the Diamond

Out of NYC, a batch of solo electric-guitar soliloquies that simply feel like being alive with a brain that’s working a bit too well.

Kara Jackson, Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?

Unlike a lot of artists who get compared to Joni Mitchell, this 24-year-old Chicago poet’s folk-soul tunes bring the introspective wisdom and bruised-and-bemused humor to earn it.

Sofia Kourtesis, Madres

From Peru via Berlin, an album of post-house music that makes one wish more dance records had such specific personal voices and perspectives.

James Brandon Lewis, Eye of I/For Mahalia, With Love

Two irresistible outings, one chamber-ish and one (of course) gospel-ish, from a New York saxophonist-composer who’s gone from strength to strength the past few years.

Ashley McBryde, The Devil I Know

We should just be taking for granted at this point that every record by this Nashville maverick is going to be good-to-great.

Brad Mehldau, Your Mother Should Know

As my colleague Fred Kaplan said, a whole album of jazz Beatles covers and somehow it’s wonderful instead of awful?

The Mountain Goats, Jenny From Thebes

A “sequel” album is a risky prospect, and an unexpected one for the prolific, relentlessly forward-moving John Darnielle. But somehow the decision to turn a character from a song recorded on acoustic guitar on a boombox 21 years ago into the central figure in a nonlinear rock opera works out brilliantly, even proving trenchant on the possible dire consequences of social-worker burnout.

Meshell Ndegeocello, The Omnichord Real Book

This undersung titan of neosoul-or-whatever welcomes a whole host of guests from jazz (Jeff Parker, Jason Moran, etc.) and elsewhere into a modular suite of reflective music. 

Nourished by Time, Erotic Probiotic 2

A little Arthur Russell, a little Outkast, a little like-nothing-else from this emerging Baltimore artist.

Pere Ubu, Trouble on Big Beat Street

The tale of Cleveland’s essential mid-1970s art-punk precursors winds through the decades to a nearly 70-year-old David Thomas coping with chronic illness in Brighton, England, yet still set in his mission: If early Ubu perpetrated “the end of Rock,” he says, this one marks “the end of the Song.”

Cécile McLorin Salvant, Mélusine

Everything the greatest living jazz singer (Fred backs me up) does is indispensable, and that includes this mainly French-language song cycle based on a European legend about a woman cursed by her mom to turn into a half-snake every weekend.

Sexyy Red, Hood Hottest Princess

Hailing from St. Louis, this summer’s breakthrough rapper brings the raunch with a lot more zip and snap than … um, some I could mention.

Sonic Youth, Live in Brooklyn 2011

With Thurston Moore’s memoir out now, are we over the divorce and able to hear Sonic Youth again? Because listen: My god, were they good.

SZA, SOS

Actually from the tail end of 2022, yes, but can’t go unmentioned as next-level R&B-and-beyond.

Jess Williamson, Time Ain’t Accidental

Last year, this Texas via L.A.
country-rocker joined forces with Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee as Plains, on an album that made my list. This year she returned with a solo set of songs that all hover at midtempo but are too full of feeling and character ever to get repetitious.

Young Fathers, Heavy Heavy

When I put it on, this Edinburgh genre-stretching ensemble’s fourth album feels like it might be better than almost all of the above, but somehow that doesn’t quite stick.

Billy Woods and Kenny Segal, Maps

Woods might be more fluent in the mainline New York rap tradition than anyone else today, and he gets gorgeous beats from Segal here (but Woods’ latest with Elucid as Armand Hammer, We Buy Diabetic Strips, is similarly worthwhile).