Last year when this site put together each of its genre lists, the catch-all of “Alternative Rock” felt, in retrospect, too broad and made for a longer than necessary list to make it easy for readers to draw parallels between music they might in a certain mood for. Rock music is a vast sea of sounds at that, and somewhere between its heaviest and most melancholy is the sonic arrest of music from the industrial, noise-rock, and post-punk corners that compliment one another in their matter.

The running joke in 2023 was that there was way too much post-punk music that sounded the same. That’s fair, but for the artists who reconstructed its angles and energy beyond cliché, their highlights gave their sounds extra juice inside their electricity. Elsewhere, industrial and noise rock were in a chaotic collision, often in a danceable patterns or with exhilarating momentum, that made being sucked into the universe’s vacuum at least a thrill ride. There was also noisemaking beyond definition. Parts unknown indeed. These are the Best Industrial, Noise Rock & Post-Punk Albums of 2023.

Big Bliss – Vital Return [Good Eye Records]

As we witness listeners coming of age to what is now considered a revival of “college rock”, post-punk and noise-rock influence in the amplified sounds of Sonic Youth, R.E.M., Hüsker Dü, Big Bliss returning to the fold with their first album since their 2018’s debut LP, At Middle Distance, is timely in multitudes, even if the circumstances that got the band of brothers in guitarist and vocalist Tim Race and drummer Cory Race alongside new bassist Rose Blanshei and guitarist Dan Peskin here were rife with misfortune and grief. It’s all documented with an unquestionable earnestness in Tim Race’s lyricism, and because the prism which rock refracts in their sound has the ability to awaken urgency and wash over you like the duality between bright light and warmer glows, there is an essence of purity in how these songs move through time.

Deeper – Careful! [Sub Pop Records]

Deeper transcend assimilation from their post-punk peers through articulation on the Chicago four-piece’s third album and first for Sub Pop, Careful! With their wavy electrical currents flowing fluidly rather than jolt jagged, the listen furthers their position as a post-punk band malcontent in retreading familiar territory as well as mankind’s tired trappings. Vocalist and guitarist Nic Gohl, guitarist, Drew McBride, bassist Kevin Fairbairn, and drummer Shiraz Bhatti interconnect guitar and rhythm-based amperage with synth-driven power lines, adding another dynamic layer to their sound. It’s their most luminous in spite of the darkness and isolation in confronting the reality that is modern existence’s increased technological simulation and rather meta in that respect, as they blur boundaries between their mechanical architecture of post-punk with frigid, synthetic waves predicted of futuristic currents.

FACS – Still Life In Decay [Trouble In Mind Records]

From the ether of experimental art rockers Disappears, Brian Case and Noah Leger have been shape-shifting a prolific new path in noise with FACS since 2018. On the Chicago band’s fourth album, Still Life In Decay, Case, Leger, and — in her final bow with the band — bassist Alianna Kalab strike the ear as a juxtaposition against everything that’s come before it, chronically pushing and pulling you into darker, physical matter. And yet, FACS remain unsurprisingly tactile as always, as the listen hears them most aerodynamic, oscillating around philosophical tensions of life with their arms of noisy zone outs, minimalism, and here, bolder lines that grasp the heavier elements the universe presents to us on this tiny blue dot in its ever-expanding sea of being, and ask even bigger questions.

Landowner – Escape the Compound [Born Yesterday Records]

The post-punk archetype can be a fickle one of familiar glum, but Landowner squirm their way out of it with a very anxious energy designed to zap your cortex and nervous system on the Western Massachusetts’ band’s fourth and career-best full-length, Escape the Compound. The Western Mass post-punk quintet exercise a kind of minimalist maximalism where instrumentation is lightweight, agile, yet the speed is turned up way past high, and it gets you thinking. Credit that to vocalist Dan Shaw who — alongside guitarists Elliot Hughes and Jeff Gilmartin, bassist Josh, and drummer Josh Daniel — is the embodiment of attempting to cram every intellectualized discourse of our modern day sociopolitical climate into a compressed dozen-track word and energy spill.

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.

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.

M(h)aol – Attachment Styles [Merge Records / Tulle Collective]

Throughout Attachment Styles, M(h)aol vocalist Róisín Nic Ghearailt is more than blunt, and often, her lyricism is presented through the art of repetition. There’s an intentionality behind the coarse energy flowing in and out of themes that bubble over the surface of each track on the Dublin noise-punk band’s sophomore album. Be it monologuing her boredom with men and their brash, toxic behavior, lackluster climax skills, and the trauma they leave behind in their wake on top of the anxieties (or physical pleasures!) of existing within the margins in the current state of our world, Ghearailt’s sharpened, wry writ always finds its way to heal over the frayed circuitboards — a gnarled clash of raw angles, searing rhythm and overheated electronics created by her ‘mates — that eventually find a solid connection.

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.

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.

The Serfs – Half Eaten By Dogs [Trouble In Mind Records]

Cincinnati’s The Serfs are a counter-offer to today’s background music electronic palette and the middling indie rock-traditionalism-as-punk posturing, and given its multi-instrumentalists in members are also in offshoots of psychedelic phreakmaking with the Drin, Crime of Passing and Motorbike, it’s safe to say that playing it unsafely in the underworld informs how an album like Half Eaten By Dogs merges sonic planes in mystique. Their brooding, post-industrial dance floor alchemy pulls you into its wonder of a noise bizarre equally informed by seminal home state experimental egg punks Brainiac as much as it is the glum synth austere of Joy Division and Skinny Puppy. This place the Serfs lead you into is a strange realm equally heathenistic as it heavenly.

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.

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.

Vulture Feather – Liminal Fields [Felte Records]

Consider Liminal Fields a new lease of life for members of Wilderness. Reemerging from the ether of the criminally underrated Baltimore post-punks as Vulture Feather, the trio featuring guitarist Colin McCann (now leading on vocals) alongside Wilderness bassist Brian Gossman and drummer Eric Fiscus, is said to be spurned by a near-death experience by McCann, supernaturally predicted in a dream by a friend a year earlier. An existential reawakening on his part after a period of creative dormancy led to his desire for connection and beholden to embracing silence, and from that silence came what we know as the sounds of Liminal Fields – a collection of eight affirming explorations on life through a new found focus of intentionality. The skeletal remains of Wilderness are apparent, yet Vulture Feather fleshes and blooms from the ribcage all the more organically to reclaims the sun once-elusive from them.