The 50 Best Albums of 2023

This year in music felt like a lot. With the industry in a discouraging state of decay for artists alongside their labels and publicists vying for any crumb of our attention spans in a chronically oversaturated space, it seems like no one has figured out a productive way to overcome these hurdles beyond throwing more “content” into the wild and hoping by some stroke of luck in hivemind critical consensus, publicity power, viral status, or the intimidating cult power of an artist’s stans, their album will make waves. There’s little to no breathing room before the new calendar year starts before release schedules begin ramping up (and if we are all being honest with ourselves, mid-late December has become the new January 1st) and the fourth quarter alone is a monster. In short, it was exhausting.

As a small music site, 2023 also posed a greater degree of difficulty in getting its words on the most interesting new music seen. Major social media sharing outlets are spiraling downward and becoming less relevant while apathy generally seems to have settled in from those who benefit from coverage to do more than the bare minimum beyond acknowledging major outlets. The best these pages can hope for is that it had even the smallest impact on music discovery with its niche audience and the artists and labels who haven’t lost sight on it being a community effort, because there was no shortage of great new sounds across the alternative spectrums of rock, pop, rap, and its experimental edges. We all lived to see another year, everyone. These are the 50 Best Albums of 2023.

50. Dougie Poole – The Rainbow Wheel of Death [Wharf Cat Records]

Dougie Poole and the grim reaper walk into a bar on The Rainbow Wheel of Death. Be it the wayward life in these times or being part of a generation gifted with millennial malaise, the Brooklyn cosmic country traditionalist has never shied away from finding a shred of humor in the most unfortunate circumstances. Grappling with its most morbid subject reveals as seriousness a side as can be in his novel approach to twisting a tried and true sound up in his own wry wisdom while giving his songwriting a push a few steps forward just as everything else feels like it’s stuck in a moment (or a recurring dream.) The comfort of Poole’s warm baritone as pedal steel waltzes through cemeteries and hears ghosts of past lovers buzzing inside neon synths makes it a tender reflection on everything ending, eventually, and in a funny way, always haunting us whether you’re dead or not.

49. DEBBY FRIDAY – GOOD LUCK [Sub Pop]

GOOD LUCK, the debut full-length from DEBBY FRIDAY, confidently smashes through club doors and pulls you into parts unknown within the self that are equal parts seductive as they are wicked. The energy the Canadian-by-way-of-Nigerian artist uncovers on the other side may use electronic music as its portal of entry, but unlocks something entirely alternative to that from within, seeing its way through like a hall of mirrors in sounds warped by reflective emotions. At her most brash, FRIDAY conjures forces that are menacingly confident in a clash of industrial and hyper-trance of IDM hedonism. At her most vulnerable, she’s flirtatiously swirling around the drain of a mercurial gothic R&B pool. It’s a freakish and boundless altered zone, and what you experience within its realm is what you take back into the world to make any minute feel as alive as any fleeting late night thrill.

48. Full of Hell & Nothing – When No Birds Sang [Closed Casket Activities]

Heaven and Hell are at an antithesis on When No Birds Sang, and yet not even purgatory makes for a suitable meeting ground on Full of Hell and Nothing’s collaborative effort. A dense body of work born from fierce collaboration showcase the Philly and Ocean City-based bands’ insatiable desire to explore even further beyond the depths of the void which they’ve already ventured in a 9/11 allegory where our beautiful, common human existence coexists with the weight of tragedy and the notion that our mortality is absolutely finite with a big, dark unknown following close behind. Nothing frontman Domenic Palermo and Full of Hell vocalist Dylan Walker’s respective lyrics are the fine tip pens etching in the album’s details, and on its sonic canvas, a truly modernized vision of what slowcore can be in 2023, ambient shoegaze, and everywhere else, abstractions of heavy experimental rock where it isn’t always the volume that jars you, but rather the voices of the unknown occasionally creaking out from within.

47. Tanukichan – GIZMO [Company Records]

Hannah van Loon’s relationship with music can be seen and, for that matter, heard as an outlet of escapism, and on GIZMO, her sophomore effort as Tanukichan, she challenges herself to find inspiration in good things in spite of heavier realities. With her meditations, she builds her own world where emotions sync into her mood board with deeper hues of color, creating a warping physical experience that feels like its changing something inside of you. Though the reality may ultimately be that escaping isn’t always a viable option, her sound allows these feelings to move through you like electrical currents, getting you even further in the long run.

46. Shamir – Homo Anxietatum [Kill Rock Stars]

There’s no need to rehash the past if you’ve been enduring with Shamir for the long-haul. Homo Anxietatum, his ninth studio effort, definitely converges at a fully-realized point in that story. After years of dodging labels, Shamir has found his way onto an appropriate home at Kill Rock Stars, the label that gave us two of his energy inspos in Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney. The resulting album is a polarity full of the pop-adjacent and counter-counter nuanced charm (millennial FM pop revivalism, bewitched dance-punk, and haunted folk) that has come to define his sound ever since flipping off guaranteed industry plant status in favor of full creative control. Homo Anxietatum unburdens his shoulders of bigger discourses on identity just as well while still acknowledging the anxieties that come with living through it. There’s no buzzy expectations to be concerned with, and yet he’s still standing here with probably the best thing he’s done inside and outside the metaphorical box.

45. Cupid & Psyche – Romantic Music [Felte Records]

The return of Abe Vigoda’s formidable members in Michael Vidal and Juan Velasquez as Cupid & Psyche on their debut album, Romantic Music, makes for a more than satisfying epilogue-new chapter from the duo. Whereas Crush heard their sound veiled in darkness, Romantic Music isn’t fearful of sunlight, although it does inhabit its vampiric creature of the night tendencies naturally. Vidal’s vocals haunt themes of love and lust with forlorn desires and long sighs to be closer to another, as many a goth does, with deep-plunging guitar-pop, tripped out rhythms, and speckles of synthetic air swirling a euphoric spell around those emotions. The heavenly dour merges the past life of Vidal and Velasquez’s brooding post-punk into a different kind of gaze for those who prophetically dream up their downfalls in masochistic ways.

44. Slowdive – everything is alive [Dead Oceans]

In their post-reunion form, Slowdive have acknowledged those fingerprints but reconvene more concerned in pushing their sound forward and beyond. everything is alive, their the shoegaze cornerstone’s fifth studio effort, is another assured leap 30 years from their inception which presents their art as something once more evolved from it, and likewise, evolving what the definition of shoegaze can be by one of its godliest creators. The melodic emotional patterns outlined by lush crushes of guitars still exist beneath the surface, but where they once fully enveloped you to hypnotic effect, they stimulate a calming frequency through soft synths, fine-tip acoustics, and Rachel Goswell and Neil Halstead’s voices glowing from within. Romantic longing, sighs of grief, and the occasional capturing of a moment of perfection in our nature, they’re more in touch with the physical form her without departing the cosmos fully.

43. Yves Tumor – Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds) [Warp Records]

Yves Tumor’s mystique hasn’t worn away from their work as its become clarified with cleaner lines, verse and chorus structures, and — for a lack of better words — a focus on traditional instrumentation, as it did in the smolder of 2020′s Heaven to a Tortured Mind. Nothing ever does sound absolutely “traditional” from the brain of Yves Tumor, however, with their fifth studio effort, Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds), warping what we’ve come to know once again through their singular vision that synergizes dark fantasy, sex, lust and love, and the anxieties of today’s socio-political landscape into a new corner of the multiverse where an alterative rock edge, neon-hot R&B, and gothic electronic canvas inspire maximalist expression from energies that could otherwise become all-consuming.

42. Sprain – The Lamb As Effigy or Three Hundred And Fifty XOXOXOS For A Spark Union With My Darling Divine [The Flenser]

Impressing the limits of unorthodox ambition has always been at the forefront of Sprain’s creative process. This includes even when the Los Angeles quartet did so in a minimalistic frame on previous efforts, requiring an attention span for detail and silent spaces between explosions. There’s much greater demand here than even that, with the LP surpassing the 90-minute mark across eight tracks, none which dip below four-minutes and one towering up to 24 in length. That it destroyed the band for good is evidence of the artist being consumed beyond healthy limitations than most, though it fits their motif of the noise of humanity — corrosive, disruptive, elegiac, epiphanic, seriously satirical all at once — moving through instrumentation set for theatrical zest led by Alex Kent’s maniacal word-packed recitations, making the listen altogether one without any parallel.

41. Jana Horn – The Window Is the Dream [No Quarter]

Can we really be certain that the reality we experience is its true view? The Window Is the Dream, the sophomore follow-up from the Texan artist, connects poetry, observation, and the seeds of the subliminal mind within the same plane even if there are moments where it feels like the lines of time and space dissolve in its frame. There’s a transfixing quality to Horn’s carefully muted style of folkwork where her abstract guided musings and tranquilizing fingerpicking among orbs seemingly float above a subtle atmosphere and erase any boundaries between the physical and subconscious realms. It’s that occasional pinch to the arm that makes you wonder where the dream begins and ends.

40. MIKE – Beware of the Monkey [10k]

Grief isn’t out of mind for MIKE on Beware of the Monkey, but the Atlas-sized woe that glazed over the eyelids of the New York City underground rapper throughout 2020′s weight of the world and 2021′s DISCO! is slowly and surely starting to move its way away from him. Revealed is a luminescence in his latest collection of introspected rhymes set to some of the more vivid beats in his prolific catalog self-produced under his pseudonym, dj blackpower. Part of the process behind moving forward for MIKE is understanding its just that: A process. That these dazed breakthroughs are laid over a masterclass cool collage of R&B, funk, soul that warp into a new air feels like MIKE is allowing himself to breathe in fully with everything he carries in that heavy heart.

39. Parannoul – After the Magic [Topshelf Records]

After the Magic, the latest full-length effort from the enigmatic experimental shoegaze, Parannoul, explodes the diagram that touched the fuzzed-out bedroom ceiling atmosphere of their 2021 breakout, To See the Next Part of the Dream, into a listen that is expansively cinematic. Moving in and out of this Earth and the ethereal, the album places its emotional depths within a tangent orbit of anti-gravity rock like M83 and Sigur Rós while its digitally progressive approach to dream-pop maintains its glide with featherlight aerodynamics, albeit into alien terrains removed from the wash of our earthly distortion. “I’m always afraid when what I have now will disappear and when people will leave me. I think these are some kind of magic, that will shine bright for a while and then lights out, like nothing happened,” its creator said of its making. This is the album that assures Parannoul’s existence will live infinitely through all who its energy flows through.

38. Sufjan Stevens – Javelin [Asthmatic Kitty]

Context can change everything, especially in the song writ of one Sujfan Stevens. Following the release of Javelin, we learned the heartbreaking news that Stevens’ partner, Evan Richardson IV, whom he later dedicated the album to in an Instagram post, had passed away this past April, and that Stevens himself had been diagnosed with the debilitating autoimmune disorder Guillain-Barre Syndrome. Life’s been heavy on his end, but in listening to Javelin, we’re not hit with the same harrowing devastation Carrie & Lowell held. Instead, Stevens’ latest batch of songs are otherwise an adorned creative arch bridging his solo folk kindling with the more whimsical avant-pop experiments, and in it, his music touches magic even in the dark. We’ve already heard Sufjan at his lowest, and Javelin — like the sport’s fete of Olympian form and strength as it is named — is Stevens’ enduring knowledge that sadness often exists only because of the light that came to us first.

37. Fiddlehead – Death Is Nothing to Us [Run for Cover Records]

Individual grief comes in all forms and has been the thread that has bound Fiddlehead’s music together, and in turn their relationship with its listeners. On the third chapter, Fiddlehead embrace the proverbial other side of this life no less darker — perhaps even all the more intense, and more profound. In accepting fates that which you cannot control, there’s an unstoppable freedom to be heard in Pat Flynn’s acknowledgements of it all, and this becomes the difference maker on this go-round the sun that comes not in the form of any critic-baiting directional shift, but rather a morbid celebration of being alive in lieu of what will come for us all, continuing to thrust Fiddlehead’s art into the thing of undying legend status by cementing themselves as among the most hyper-aware of the true modern human experience.

36. PinkPantheress – Heaven knows [300 Entertainment]

Maybe we’re not entirely at the moment in realizing how much influence PinkPantheress’ curation of hyper-pop with a millennium pop stickiness, plumes of bedroom pop, and futuristic R&B glow will carry forward just yet, but Heaven knows, the London-based songwriter and producer’s first proper album following the buzz of her 2021 breakthrough mixtape, to hell with it, establishes substance behind it. Victoria Beverly Walker explores a certain degree of canvas cleanup and calibration as collabs alongside producers Mura Masa, Danny L Harle, Greg Kurstin, and Cold Cobain as well as guest features from Ice Spice and Kelela reveal her next chapter. Whereas to hell with it spliced and taped its way through a neurodivergent mood board, PinkPantheress mediates her style with a soft focus where synth beat paces race steady rather than rush the emotions, and liquid dreams swirl around. It gives her just enough space to live out their desires and sighs out loud.

35. Earl Sweatshirt & The Alchemist – VOIR DIRE [Tan Cressida / ALC Records / Warner Records]

Be it his own grief or the sheer expectation mythicized from the rapper’s elusive nature, Thebe Neruda Kgositsile has succeeded in flow each time with ease with a continuous artistic evolution since his early years as a bedroom gloom sage and later on, a kintsuge-style rap innovator whose impression is still being felt within today’s rap underground. More recently, last year’s SICK! heard Sweatshirt embracing a new found lightness. That becomes all the more evident on VOIR DIRE, a collaboration with the Alchemist, that further clarifies Sweatshirt’s path moving forward. For the first time since forever, it sounds like he’s feeling easier in his introversions even if he’s still working through life’s big questions across the 25-minute listen which concentrates Sweatshirt’s focus behind minimal flash beats and soft soul production. In relaxing his prose through illuminated eloquence, he speaks clearly of a new kind of freedom in his approach to not just his art, but in his expression within it.

34. André 3000 – New Blue Sun [Epic Records]

André 3000 is following his creator’s spirit, not only reminding us why he is the original ATLien of sound, but a true visionary in pursuing passion with his first solo album, the 87-minute-long instrumental ambient collection, New Blue Sun. Created alongside a community of jazz and experimental artists including producer Carlos Niño, keyboardist Surya Botofasina, guitarist Nate Mercereau, keyboardist Diego Gaeta as well as V.C.R and Matthewdavid of the Los Angeles-based altered zone label, Leaving Records, he and his collaborators discover new movements and textures in cosmic jazz and experimental electronic sounds through 3000’s fascination with flute music, manifested in acoustic and electronic sounds where his novice acumen to the genre looks at its wavelengths in ways those who’ve spent their entire careers on the inside may have overlooked. It’s a beautiful, healing form of musical sublime amongst the discordance.

33. Marnie Stern – The Comeback Kid [Joyful Noise Recordings]

Following a break from the recorded music world that found her juggling new found mom duties and on late night TV as part of Seth Meyers’ 8G Band, The Comeback Kid, Marnie Stern’s fifth full-length and first new music in a decade, is the subsequent equal or opposite reaction a boundless artist like her could only create: singular and signature in her skills as a fast, finger-tapping noise rock shredder who creates big vibrations alien against all other sounds in the independent rock universe. More than anything, the dozen tracks that zip through this 28-minute thriller are a spectacle to experience, like witnessing a long-lost space object reemerging and burning a hole into our atmosphere (in this case, the atmosphere in question saturated with melodic indie rock milquetoast.) She understood the assignment in front of her, in that she’s come back to this Earth inspired to change the shape of guitar rock by filling its voids.

32. Fever Ray – Radical Romantics [Mute / Rabid Records]

Though the language of sound which Karin Dreijer speaks to us as Fever Ray is oft alien, its movements in body and (e)motion are universally bound by the same substance of blood and flesh as ours. Radical Romantics, Fever Ray’s third studio effort, is very much a coagulation of that other-worldly energy writhing through human limbs, and in this instance, they approach a subject as over-wrought as love with an eccentric discourse that sees it in several very new dimensions. Dreijer is able to steer the grotesque nature of heartbreak through peril, rebound, the purely horned, the sapiosexually-stimulated, and a glow of rediscovering love through many portals designed by the heart’s electric pulse. The strobing bass frequencies and experimental pop magic they sing through are merely the medium in which we realize that same energy exists within us, too.

31. Full Blown Meltdown – Mollify [Self-released]

Nourished by a stack of PUP and Jeff Rosenstock LPs and Wi-Fi beaming glass beach into his veins, Will Green has found a strange comfort within the DIY emo and punk scene’s microdoses of creative chaos through his one-person punk outlet, Full Blown Meltdown. With his debut album, Mollify, he’s able to put it all together in one of the most synthesized screaming transmissions from its current state. Some people are simply built for this shit, and in Green’s case, he uses every setback in life to fuel his art’s purpose, be it his experiences as a reformed metalcore guitarist in a past life that ultimately left him jaded about industry mechanics, heavier matter that had him putting his instrument on the shelf for years, or the aged wisdom in realizing that the hits won’t stop coming even when you’ve already had more than your fair fix of bad days for a lifetime. In a sickening, celebratory way, Mollify celebrates that because really, what else are you going to fucking do?

30. Wednesday – Rat Saw God [Dead Oceans]

Karly Hartzman, the primary songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist of Wednesday, understands the power of biography and illustration when designing those finer details alongside guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis. With Rat Saw God, the Asheville rockers have defined a watershed moment for our next wave of rock reinventionists, their own individual thesis statement on the artform being of southern living and synesthesia flowing throughout its lifeblood in shoegazing over-heated and disorienting the air and slow motion alt-country decay. It’s an ugly-beautiful portrait of the mundane and yet, prolific in making everyday life into stories that make you realize how we’re all witness to our own biblical proportions with an inspired perspective.

29. Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter – SAVED! [Perpetual Flame Ministries]

As the former Lingua Ignota, the next chapter of Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter finds a new form of salvation in her given name as she moves away from her previous moniker and its more trauma-focused expressions. On Saved!, Hayter is wholly consumed by the holy spirit, though her approach here is one of reflection and deconstruction of the Pentecostal-Holiness Movement as a means to better understand her own transcendence. The listen carries the wooden weight of crosses bared on Lingua Ignota’s 2021’s epitaph, SINNER GET READY, through her continued resurrection of the stark, plain olde time hymnal formula adorned by her own voice’s mercy with modest, creaky instrumentation, and raptures of glossolalia distressed in 4-track tape. Hayter still remains apocalyptical toward a blind kind of faith, and all the more maddening in her art for it.

28. Ratboys – The Window [Topshelf Records]

Looking out on the world outside, Ratboys’ The Window captures the thrills of being alive through a panorama ranging from grief, comfort, anxiety, to a happy kind of sad. It’s also where the Chicago post-country rockers get their flowers in them properly. Working alongside former Death Cab for Cutie bassist and producer Chris Walla, the humble nature of their sound is still omnipresent, but in this view, everything feels bigger about it without necessarily losing any of the focus on their strengths. Julia Steiner’s songwriting delivers everything from arguably one of the year’s best songs and cry-alongs on “The Window” to a covert relationship origin stories surrounding their own narrative that would make Taylor Swift’s folk telling envious on “I Want You [Fall 2010]”.) When they go big, they do so without needing to dumb down the hooks — they just go for broke instead like they do on a sprawling epic like “Black Earth, WI”.

27. Hannah Diamond – Perfect Picture [PC Music]

Hannah Diamond saw the future of pop music and has seemingly been on a continuous pursuit to refine it of any flaw ever since emerging onto the scene a decade ago. Her second studio album, Perfect Picture, is where her vision is at its clearest, though, and all the more fascinating is the realization that the English songwriter, visual artist, and PC Music original is at her best when she accepts resolutions out of focus as she dissects what it is to place a metaphorical ring light against the expectations of ourselves and the world, only to arrive at a full rejection of the reflection in the mirror of anything placed beneath a poreless filter. Still, Diamond’s think bubbles remain a near-pixel-perfect rendering complimentary to her self-affirmations with its synergy of immaculately plasticine ’80s synth-pop, chorus-rich 2000s-era Euro pop, and the high frequencies of modern hyperpop.

26. boygenius – the record [Interscope Records]

The long-awaited debut full-length from the alternative pop-rock supergroup that is alto wordsmith Lucy Dacus, punk songwriter Julien Baker, and the ubiquitous pioneer of the modern sad girl aesthetic, Phoebe Bridgers, encapsulate an extraordinary moment within the popular music songbook. The trio’s friendship goals, kindred creative kinship, and the queer stan community championing their ascents from cult fav indie rockers to a pop culture reference point creates something much bigger of their music than what they imagined in merging, humbly, in harmony, a fine point articulation of their own respective folk-pop introspections, and equal shine for one another’s light. While the masses may have anointed boygenius as the unlikeliest of pop-rock star saviors, it wouldn’t be that without the spiritual experience that is channeled through their combined songwriting superpowers and earnest means to lift each others’ voices up.

25. Model/Actriz – Dogsbody [True Panther]

A certain tension that once existed in more graphic detail between a carnally sexualized kind of love story and the devastation it leaves when broken into pieces is reawakened in the physical arrest of Dogsbody, the debut full-length from Brooklyn noise-rockers Model/Actriz. Here lies a band whose electrical palette plugs into more visceral instincts of today’s industrial music landscape akin to their city peers YVETTE and equally caps-locked west coast heathens HEALTH, yet the performance art smeared across the currents by the four-piece, especially that of vocalist Cole Haden whose boy soprano contorts with a porcelain fragility, is what makes Dogsbody more of an arch story rather than one defined by tight-chest panic and thrusting movements between the dark and light. The loudest part about it is how after being torn apart, Model/Actriz find their way into sunlight and bask in it, battered heart and all.

24. Zulu – A New Tomorrow [Flatspot Records]

Like all music and culture created by the Black artists it celebrates, Zulu do just the same in their own image on A New Tomorrow. To say that the debut full-length from the Los Angeles band is merely hardcore despite Zulu very much being growing out of the pit would be a disservice. Then again, in these post-Turnstile times when anything goes, that’s very much the spirit emboldened in it from the very moments the listen sets in on “Africa” and clashes underground rap beats, soulful R&B think bubbles, experimental jazz interludes, and funky guitars against the expectant thrash and near-powerviolence from there on out. It’s a story that’s been writing itself far beyond the birth of punk music and from the dawn of mankind, fighting for visibility and credit while innovating the future, with Zulu ensuring their footprints in history are seen here on out by those who follow in them.

23. Yo La Tengo – This Stupid World [Matador Records]

On their 16th studio effort, This Stupid World, Yo La Tengo provides no shortage of slow burning familiarity to sort out even the darkest existential inquiry, with many paths preparing to stare down the path of mortality with grace. Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan’s vocals maintain their invitationally warm, consistent calm nature throughout, be it absorbed by the feedback-swelling underbelly rising from behind or a blanket of quieter reprieve. Longtime listeners will easily be able to connect the dots within the errant electricity here with the band’s classics, but that almost sounds too easy. There’s something safely daring entwined within the encroaching twilight of This Stupid World that makes you feel like it wants you to become comfortable with your surroundings, so that when it unfurls, it’s extraordinarily beautiful against this earthly mess.

22. Mitski – This Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We [Dead Oceans]

Rest and retreating from the spotlight was perhaps the best course of action for Mitski in the long run. The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, Mitski’s seventh record, hears the enigmatic songwriter stepping into a more balanced presentation of her relationship with music that instead of focusing on the shininess of her craft when augmented through pop and synthetic realities, wanders and wonders under a weathered night sky that sounds more at home with her introverted being. The irony here is how it fashions more than ever with preconceived cowboyisms, musically at least, as its slowburn of guitars, stirring drums, and humble orchestral arrangements sway and slow waltz their way through a grandeur of country traditionalism — or as she calls it, her “most American album” — that partners well with Mitski’s half empty glasses searching for a fill from the the exhaustion of life and her radical search for love.

21. Lana Del Rey – Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd [Interscope / Polydor Records]

With her ninth studio effort, Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd, Lana Del Rey formally submits her entry to the great American songbook. She hasn’t already proven herself capable of such fetes in the past, but with her 2019 through 2021 run of Norman Fucking Rockwell, Chem Trails over the Country Club and Blue Banisters, the beginning of her creative era with Jack Antonoff imbued a psychedelic grip over the culture as her style put her edges front and forward. They’re still apparent here in plenty of horny, drug-addled cursory innuendo to be heard stemming from the songwriter’s tongue, but compositionally across the the album’s 16-track, 77-minute long journey into the Del Rey Americana gaze, she, Antonoff alongside producers Drew Erickson, Zach Dawes, Mike Hermosa, and Benji wonder what a Lana Del Rey album would sound like if her fashion for forward pop did not need to exist mutually away from the standards.

20. ISOLA – LP1 [Smartdumb]

When Ivana Carrescia, b.n.a. ISOLA, and producer Nick Sylvester (Yaeji, Channel Tres) journeyed to the foreground of the Vegas desert on their 2020 debut EP, EP1, a fusion of ambient electronic music and minimalist dance was born from its mystical air. What makes the project in its current status all the more beguiling on ISOLA’s first full-length, LP1, is that Carrescia is now based in the West Virginia farmlands and still manages to find discovery into other worlds from ones that look much like those you and I exist in. Carrescia sees dreams as tangible experiences in our real world, as she, with the aid Sylvester’s perfectionist instincts in reorganizing the chemistry behind techno music and inventing niche in the form of “microhouse,” are the canvas which the exploration of falling into, through, and becoming the feeling we know as love is a tempered euphoria.

19. Sweeping Promises – Good Living Is Coming For You [Feel It Records / Sub Pop]

Sweeping Promises are the reminder that angles need not be sharp or clean in order to shatter glass ceilings, or at the very least, erase the fortressed perceptions of the world around us. On the Lawrence-based duo’s sophomore effort, Good Living Is Coming for You, the band embrace the process of self-work and healing without dismissing what always looms closely, in turn further fortifying their sonic canvas with a heated compression of thoughts that charges through a retrofitted punk power bank, always surging in its current. From start to end, the album has an unlimited potential energy thanks to Lira Mondal’s siren vocals, the centripetal force of her basslines in tandem with the fissured lines of Caufield Schnug’s guitar, the strut of electric friction from vintage new wave synths, and pop hooks beaming anthems like ominous warning signs through a concrete wall.

18. Temple of Angels – Endless Pursuit [Run for Cover Records]

Temple of Angels are fully understanding of the dream on their debut full-length, Endless Pursuit. The listen acts as a sonically rich culmination following an extended play and coupling of singles that heard the Austin four-piece of vocalist Bre Morrell, vocalist and guitarist Avery Burton, guitarist Cold Tucker, and drummer Patrick Todd pushing through turbulent, psychedelic gazey swells where they now discover an alternative world outlined by a rush of new-found lucidity from the movements of pop architecture. It boasts an impression of feeling vivid within the subconscious, both a balm and spark to the senses. Sharpened punk guitars are Temple of Angels’ blades so that the lush melodies the shared space of vocalist Morell and Burton’s voices can send you through the clouds. This is the pursuit of a supernatural sensation.

17. Irreversible Entanglements – Protect Your Light [Impulse! Records]

Protect Your Light, the fourth LP from the free jazz band featuring Moor Mother’s Camae Ayewa, bassist Luke Stewart, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, drummer Tcheser Holmes, and saxophonist Keir Neuringer, is something more considered to Irreversible Entanglements’ approach: eight compositions throughout bending toward a semblance of structure without relinquishing their energy to anything beyond what feeds in through instinct. It’s as if what feeds its artisanal cacophony of imbued rhythm, crashes of realization, and pressurizing brass all ultra accentuated by Ayewa’s self-love prose are more so symbiotic with the human experience on a microcosmic experience rather than the depths of the universe and time to inform them.

16. Kelela – RAVEN [Warp Records]

Kelela’s 2017 breakthrough debut, Take Me Apart, was a masterful example of experimental R&B songcraft radiating from a fractured relationship. Ultra modern, sleek in its electronic design yet sizzling to the touch, even the remnants of broken emotions felt like they were still burning close to the surface. With RAVEN, her sophomore follow-up, Kelela simmers into a new form of matter by reclaiming her own personhood, resulting in a dualistic aura that recharges her impulses of lust and makes space for a quiet, balanced spirit. It’s a dance album that redesigns the club in her own visions of trance and garage and sees the self transcendent from it as well with her perspective as a Black queer artist searching for something beyond temporal fixes amid sudden ecstasy. When they dissipate, they soothe and renew.

15. L’Rain – I Killed Your Dog [Mexican Summer]

Experimentalist impulses are always on the threshold of what L’Rain creates, but with her latest effort, I Killed Your Dog, the presence of guitar rock texturizing her sound might might make it easy to smear her newest work as being subversively a nod to alternative music excavation more so than it did on the collage board of mood-driven rhythms texturizing her 2021 breakthrough, Fatigue. It may be that, but only in part as her third studio effort otherwise plays out like a cognitive deconstructive sequence of surreal synapses between past selves and present bodies of mind that distorts the finesse of contemporary pop and heady, cosmic jazz-R&B. Collectively, the interconnect between the disconnect of her own complex emotions surrounding pain — be it inflicted or absorbed — double as a sonic mirror piecing the experiences one endures together in a multi-facet.

14. GEL – Only Constant [Convulse Records]

GEL dare not follow any trends on their debut full-length, Only Constant, a reminder that hardcore is and will always be through and through a community-building effort centered around working through the heavy shit together in unapologetically feral fashion. The New Jersey five-piece leave it all in the pit nonetheless with an album made for listeners who need a pure outlet of aggression to tackle whatever negative energy life attempts to fuck them up with. The listen — 10 tracks in 17 minutes — is confrontational with the self and the burning world around them, as Kaiser shoves intrusive thoughts away from the conscious and warns any outside forces not to step to them just as well. Whether you seek this one out to rage through a workout after a rough day or exercise your right to thrash it out live in the flesh, Only Constant gives back to the scene honest, hyper self-aware hardcore where burning every shred of emotion into the floor until the boards disintegrate never goes out of vogue.

13. Armand Hammer – We Buy Diabetic Test Strips [Fat Possum]

We Buy Diabetic Test Strips flips the script and brings discomfort straight to the forefront of what Armand Hammer are doing. Elucid and bill woods’ way with words remains at peak technique in ruminating on the modern day absurdities of this life, yet it’s presented in a colder environment where minimalist industrial noise beat production primarily created by JPEGMafia and DJ Haram whelm those starrier clashes between their morbid humor and existential ponderings. The struggle may have always been hiding in plain sight in flashier efforts, but with We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, Armand Hammer make it more blunt and jarring for it. There’s no distractions from the grim of it all.

12. Strange Ranger – Pure Music [Fire Talk]

For Strange Ranger to call their third and final studio effort Pure Music risks everything to live up to its titular expectation, and yet the Philly-based experimental indie rockers have made a career-definitive album that exemplifies the relationship between our humanly sensory experiences and song. Following the multi-dimensional trajectory which their 2020 mixtape, No Light in Heaven, traversed, Strange Ranger go deeper out into their outer element. Particles of synthetic pop and deep house beats molecularlizing sound alien yet intimately designed in their ability to connect with feeling everything in the moment, while ambient solar waves sync into guitar-born electricity like memory synapses. In its most purest form, Pure Music is sonic plasticity whose form may have been sourced from a creator, but ultimately is defined by those who come into contact with it.

11. Mary Jane Dunphe – Stage of Love [Pop Wig]

Mary Jane Dunphe has, in past creative lives, lived in the tatters of Olympia’s punk scene with Vexx and Gen Pop, dreamweavers CCFX, and dancefloors as part of CC Dust before trailing her way to New York as part of the ragged post-country rockers County Liners. Stage of Love introduces Dunphe to the world as something altogether more singular, her vision of avant-pop smearing feelings of forlorn across heavy brush strokes of ’80s synth-pop, wild lines of amorphous guitar rock, and New Order-esque basslines that singe through the fascinatng listen’s harnessing of self-preservation energy. The constantly evolving movements and colors within her sound radiate intense insularity as well as an ecstastic exorcism from it where dreams, nightmares, and real human desire coalesce with a common intent: To be loved, one must learn how to be alone first.

10. Militarie Gun – Life Under the Gun [Loma Vista Recordings]

On the heels of the three extended plays that preceded it, Life Under the Gun is where Militarie Gun hinge upon perfecting their tick-tick-boom formula of heavy punk-pop and chunky riffed jams that accentuate the post-pandemic existential vibe. From the get go in its opening one-two punch, “Do It Faster” and “Very High”, shouting to anxieties allow frontman Ian Shelton’s inner aggression enough space to feel their way through the mellowed-out malaise of where things are at now and finding a sweet spot with the dark and light corners in life that aren’t mutually exclusive. New to Militarie Gun’s arsenal are resignations where Shelton’s sighs are as big as its chorus and harmonies all while the “pushing the boundaries of hardcore” tropes remain firmly in tact in their agility as an alternative rock band tempting many styles in their unwind.

9. Yaeji – With A Hammer [XL Recordings]

Maybe because of how cool-headed she has has moved through the current, we mistook Kathy Yaeji Lee as someone who could merely let any and all bad energy either flow through or bounce off her since the electronic music itself had the capacity to be like water. On With A Hammer, Yaeji’s first proper studio full-length, she strikes with a much different reaction to her surrounding nature, however, as it’s source of energy stems from an anger repressed and now acknowledged fully, be it her own upbringings, witnessing a rise in an aggression and violence against the Asian community as well as all other forms of hate against those marginalized. Though she has not necessarily departed her ability to create immaculately sleek, alien lite house dance movements, she delivers a more physical form of emotional processing manifested in her broadening prism of ambient and electronic tools. It’s Yaeji’s identity as her art wielded like a weapon.

8. Olivia Rodrigo – GUTS [Geffen Records]

Olivia Rodrigo is the seachange the modern poptimist landscape needs right now. GUTS could have done more of the same as SOUR and still managed to be a huge success, but instead, it finds the songwriter going beyond the safety net by smashing through the worlds of mainstream pop and alternative rock past and present through her lens as a star who is still finding her stability on her way up to the top. Deprecatingly so, at that. It’s still brutal out there, between dealing with loser exes, falling back into bed with them, life under the celeb magnifying glass, and creative imposter syndrome, but instead of sulking in her status like the lot of stan-worshipped sad-eyed songwriters, Rodrigo goes for broke in having a blast in this moment with the thought of it all crashing down at her own expense.

7. SZA – S.O.S. [Top Dawg Entertainment / RCA Records]

The delay lore and label drama only intensified the myth of SOS before we even knew it had a name. Whether that was intentional or not, the slow burn toward SZA’s sophomore effort was worth every bit of the pain, which compliments the cool of the hookup-and-breakup jams that saturate the 23-track listen. We don’t really need to hear Solána Imani Rowe proving herself a natural at going pop-punk or Swiftian, yet, when SZA zeroes in on her singular finesse in modernist R&B which she mystifies with hot takes on the holy trinity in ultra-honesty of sex, heartbreak, and esteem, there are very few artists out there who can reinvent the torch song as the ultimate end game in the tumultuous depths of love like she does.

6. Hotline TNT – Carousel [Third Man Records]

Hotline TNT has been hiding in plain sight over the last few years in a very DIY sense, self-releasing most of their early work and putting out their debut LP in 2021’s Nineteen In Love on the small, noisy indie label, Smoking Room. For the day ones out there, Carousel, their sophomore effort and first for Third Man Records, isn’t so much a surprising level up from the wistful daydream romanticism singed in dense layers of white hot feedback and peculiarly bent guitars that its sensory effects, but in becoming more comfortable in stepping in front of fuzzed out, lo-fi production, we’re able to hear just how singular frontman Will Anderson’s nebulous of noise-pop architecture is with a little just clarity recorded into its rock elixir. For that, his hindsight of swan diving in and out love becomes all the more vivid in its blur, and the hooks burst loud more so than they pop in colors and formations unmatched by his sonic peers in the modern shoegaze scene.

5. Caroline Polachek – Desire, I Want to Turn Into You [Perpetual Novice]

In the self-serious landscape of today’s art-pop, Caroline Polachek is its foil. The former Chairlift vocalist has been resolving for her own identity since the demise of the cherished indie pop buzz band, and with that have come many different faces to her muse, from sultry dance and R&B sophisticate, cooling the surface of electronic glass, to deconstructing her multitudes within hyperbolistic hyperpop. Desire, I Want To Turn Into Your You, is the most whole of that journey to date. Polachek focuses her powers as a romantic auteur through production-perfect transcendental pop which lusts, loves, longs and grieves in one sitting at maximum capacity in a polymath clinic that satiates past lives with future possibilities in her infinite vocal range. In a sense, it’s everything all at once, embodying what it is to become your impulses fully realized.

4. MSPAINT – Post-American [Convulse Records]

MSPAINT’s Post-American refutes the idea that this is the end of the world, as long as we’re willing to push back the dark and tower our own light over it. The sound behind the Hattiesburg punk band’s debut full-length is a synthesis of that energy, fusing the aggression of crusty hardcore with a wide awake frequency of synth-driven punk sans guitars, all catapulted into the conscious by frontperson Deedee who executes observation and truth in lyric with the punctual bombast of an underground rap sage. Culture is consumed into it, with tracks crushing down on societal decay through their own force of digital destruction. The power of the mindset busts through walls, finds its people, and touches grass on the other side.

3. Mandy, Indiana – i’ve seen a way [Fire Talk]

The nocturnal dance into the noise of the void becomes all the more widescreen on Mandy, Indiana’s debut full-length, i’ve seen a way. Consider this the fallout of the warning signs that came before it from them, with the Manchester experimental industrial-dance band becoming all the more masterful in crafting moments in sound straddling tension and rebuke, as if to celebrate the abyss if it so eagerly insists on knocking at our door. Valentine Caulfield’s tongue is her shield, a French lash whipping back fascism, inequality, and our dark daily existentialism, oft forcing into motion a wide display of sci-fi motoriks and experimental aggregations from the soundboard. Every encroaching claustrophobia created by human aggression is met by the band clawing their way out from it. Every attempt to shift balance into the wrong hands is met by them tweaking gravity controls to destabilize the axis altogether. When all meets its end, Mandy, Indiana’s strange anthem is defiant the entire way down.

2. billy woods & Kenny Segal – Maps [Backwoodz Studioz]

No matter who you have billy woods collabing with – be it more recently his Armand Hammer tag team partner Elucid, experimental poet Moor Mother, producers as varied as big hip-hop sound sculptor the Alchemist or the headier vibes of Preservation – the NYC underground rapper’s prose finds a way through every corner of life. Maps, his latest and second collaboration with the Los Angeles-based pristine collage producer Kenny Segal, may be his most zoned in state of mind yet, made all the more a fascinating flex in craft considering the context is that of the beguiling train of thoughts born from being a touring artist. That it’s arguably a more tangible theme for listeners to peer into is an assist in that impact and Segal’s soundboard smooths the topography being traveled across, rich with kaleidoscopic effects wandering through dazed textures and subsequent lucidity, but always crystalized in the moment woods lives in them.

1. Water From Your Eyes – Everyone’s Crushed [Matador Records]

On their late-blooming 2021 breakthrough, Structure, the Brooklyn experimental pop duo Water From Your Eyes challenged themselves to create sounds that were anything but abiding to that. In their own crack of meta wit, titling the intro track “Structure” on its follow-up, Everyone’s Crushed, doubles as a passage into their present expectation where, by all accounts, some semblance of form and “pop” cohesion actually does make itself visible. There’s symbolism in that. Rachel Brown and Nate Amos are holding a mirror more focused than ever against the self, the world (and its all-consuming, capitalistic uneasiness) and onto their sound, and so their art becomes a reflection of how our experiences begin whole but become broken by forces beyond control. Everyone’s Crushed in turn attempts to put each tiny shard of mirror back together, but as we all know, you can never truly put something shattered back into its original form. The pair know their art need not be perfect or gloss, though they certainly use that to their advantage here on Everyone’s Crushed. Rather, it finds the right consumer who considers their sound to be something no one else could create in this timeline.