Best Music of 2023

💿 Favourite Albums 💿

1. Jessie Ware – That! Feels Good!

Give yourself over to absolute pleasure. Jessie Ware isn’t the only one out there trying to recapture disco’s heyday in a series of immaculately produced pop records — hell, she’s not even the only white Englishwoman doing it. The difference is that Ware makes it look easy. That! Feels Good! comes hot on the heels of 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure? and echoes a lot of that record’s charm, but with a fuller sound, more confident vocal performances, and a sharper sense of humour. It flirts with camp but ultimately plays it completely straight, with Ware assuring listeners that “beautiful people are everywhere” in one moment and playfully teasing out how to “make her bottle pop” in another. There’s barely room to catch your breath throughout — apart from penultimate track “Lightning,” a slow burn that feels like an unreleased track from Ware’s decade-ago output. Despite that minor hiccup, That! Feels Good! is chockablock with the year’s finest pop hooks, most quotable lines, and most joyous instrumentals this side of the Chic and Boney M. hits it owes so much to. In Jessie we trust.

2. Sufjan Stevens – Javelin

“I Harvested carrots and sweet potatoes listening to this today.” So goes a comment left on the YouTube page for Sufjan Stevens’ cover of Neil Young’s “There’s a World,” a radically tender reinvention of the Harvest deep cut and the final song on Stevens’ latest LP, Javelin. In its simplicity it seems to capture everything precious and fragile about the singer-songwriter’s tenth album, one of his finest and perhaps his most deeply felt. Written in part as a tribute to Stevens’ recently departed partner, and only a handful of years after the death of his father during the pandemic, Javelin synthesizes the undulating electronica of Age of Adz with the confessional solo folk of Carrie & Lowell into a kind of heart-on-your-sleeves mission statement for Stevens’ whole deal. Its beauty is both effortless and remarkably self-aware, and the generosity and humility Stevens brings to each performance makes songs like “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” and “My Red Little Fox” feel neither maudlin nor saccharine but near divine. The album balances sorrow and hopefulness in a way that favours neither yet suggests that one ought to always follow the other — a hard won lesson for Stevens and for all of us.

3. Caroline Polachek – Desire, I Want to Turn Into You

From its instantly iconic album cover to the impassioned wail that christens its opening number, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You dropped only two months into 2023 and threatened to steal the whole year right then and there. Caroline Polachek, by this point an industry veteran and the former better half of the criminally underrated duo Chairlift, has waited a long time to get her flowers, and with Desire, I Want to Turn Into You it seems that people have finally gotten the hint. Taking inspiration from populist queens like Enya and Celine Dion as well as the music of the Caribbean and Latin America, Polachek’s approach is proudly maximalist and vibrantly colourful, showcasing her impressive vocal range and penchant for earworms. Rich in detail and abundant in quality, Desire is Polachek’s opus.

4. Danny Brown & JPEGMAFIA – Scaring the Hoes

It’s me, I’m the hoes! In all seriousness, calling Danny Brown and JPEGMAFIA’s long-awaited collaboration “scary” might be a bit reductive, but there’s no denying the visceral reaction the duo’s LP inspires: this is abrasive, difficult music, lean and direct and unapologetically aggressive. Both Brown and Hendricks are among the most daring emcees working today, and it’s clear this project gave them the freedom to push one another to the extreme: the bars here are inventive and irreverent, even by Danny Brown’s high standards, but the standout is Peggy’s idiosyncratic production, which begs the question: what if Death Grips went even harder? Scaring the Hoes is a grower, demanding repeat listens and close readings. The most challenging rap record of the year also happens to be the best, an album difficult to recommend but easy to love.

5. Olivia Rodrigo – GUTS

The Disney child star to pop musician pipeline is a tried and true one, though it doesn’t always feature the best quality control — make of that what you will. All of which is to say that Olivia Rodrigo’s rise to prominence may be the best example of the trend done right. While 2021’s Sour was a good-not-great debut with a couple of impressive highs, 2023 was a banner year for Rodrigo, featuring a better album, a better lead single in “Vampire,” and a career high-water mark in her December Saturday Night Live performance. The secret sauce of GUTS is how it pivots away (well, mostly) from teary ballads and embraces Rodrigo in rock and roll mode, channeling her beloved Alanis Morrissette on irresistibly cheeky tracks like “get him back” and “bad idea right?” Not to say that the quieter songs are bad by any means, but Rodrigo is most captivating when she embraces her more devil may care instincts, and hopefully she continues to embrace those strengths.

🎵 Favourite Songs 🎵

1. Lana Del Rey – “A&W”

Call it what you will: this generation’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” the dictionary definition of “mother,” the finest song ever named after a fast food chain (with apologies to “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell”). Whatever way you slice it, Lana Del Rey’s two-in-one 2023 track is one for the ages. The over seven-minute-long slow burn of “A&W” marks the fullest realization of Del Rey’s generational talent, a winking slice of Americana that allows the artist to self-satirize while simultaneously highlighting just what makes her one of the key artists of the moment. Was there a more armour-piercing line in any American song this year than “your mom called, I told her you’re fucking up big time?” Can you think of an utterance more quietly devastating than “I haven’t done a cartwheel since I was nine?” Del Rey is on another level here, matching gleefully inscrutable lyrics with two musical modes: gentle piano in the first half and trap beats in the second. It’s a why-not-both approach that the artist has more than earned, and it stands as Del Rey’s crowning achievement — no small feat in a career that also features such all-timers as “Video Games” and “The Greatest.”

2. Mitski – “My Love Mine All Mine”

The sleeper hit of the year and Mitski’s overdue introduction to the Billboard Hot 100, “My Love Mine All Mine” may well be in the running for her finest song: a tantalizing two minutes and change of pedal steel guitar and honky tonk piano set against the tenderest and most intimate vocal performance in a career chock full of them. Inescapable on TikTok and omnipresent on lovesick playlists and she just like me fr memes alike, “My Love” tapped into a sublime and almost ineffable level of longing that all of us seemed to be going through in 2023. That it serves almost as a teaser for one of the best discographies in the genre is just icing on the cake.

3. 100 gecs – “Hollywood Baby”

Since hitting the stage in the mid-2010s, multi-instrumentalists and enfant terribles Laura Les and Dylan Brady have come to inspire the kind of polarizing public opinion typically reserved for Emerald Fennell movies and pineapple on pizza. But for those with a touch of the ‘tism or the attention span of a goldfish — or even just a penchant for the crass and lowbrow — songs like “Hollywood Baby,” off the duo’s LP 10,000 gecs, are worth their weight in gold. The centrepiece of an admittedly uneven sophomore release, “Hollywood” channels pop punk with shades of career-best Weezer. Its trashy yet irresistible lyrics combined with its sugary hooks make for the aural effect of a cherry bomb in a high school bathroom. In a good way.

4. Kali Uchis – “Moonlight”

The opening line from “Moonlight,” the second single from Colombian-American musician Kali Uchis’ 2023 selenic record Red Moon in Venus, is a whole vibe. In fact the entire track may be one of the most joyful statements of love on any pop record this year: peep lines like “you always go out of your way to show me that I’m your priority” to see how healthy, mutually supportive relationships never go out of style. Uchis’ bilingual ode to romantic bliss is boosted by a bubbly bassline, shimmering synths, and a committed vocal performance, one of the singer’s best and most swooning. It’s the centrepiece to a uniformly strong third album, deceptively simple and super romantic. Me and who?

5. Joanna Stenberg – “I’ve Got Me”

New York singer-songwriter Joanna Stenberg possesses the unique talent of crafting songs that seem to have already existed as folk standards for decades, or were discovered in a half century-old time capsule. The timeless quality of their Tin Pan Alley-esque compositions is matched beautifully by their unpretentious vocal delivery, matter-of-fact and almost unbearably raw. The central conceit of “I’ve Got Me,” the namesake for and standout from Stenberg’s excellent 2023 sophomore release, could be seen as either a blessing or curse depending on your outlook (or maybe your diagnosis): no matter what, you’ll always have yourself for company, cogito ergo sum. If you’ve ever thought to yourself some version of the lyric “Why is it so hard to be kind and gentle to myself,” Stenberg’s knowing, aching balladry is something worth treasuring.