The word “experimental” is very much not an absolute term around here, because in itself, the sounds forming from it can oft feral as much as they can be soothing and ambient. For that reason, its definition for this list will likely always be in a state of flux evolution as to what it encompasses. If there are any conclusions to be made from the 2023 edition, cosmic jazz continues to expand within the music universe, electronic music remains its own evolving sonic superorganism, and you can never dismiss its rockist corners from being able to beguile either. They’ve come from other worlds to redefine the way we experience art. These are the Best Experimental Albums of 2023.

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.

Animal Collective – Isn’t It Now? [Domino Recording Co.]

Last year’s Time Skiffs was a return to form for Animal Collective, who — after segmenting off on their own individual pursuits for a minute while intermittently working as a fraction — regrouped in full-band form for the first time since since 2012′s Centipede Hz. The listen was one of their most chilled out iterations of their singular, psychedelic art-rock and freak-folk permutations, and assembled their kaleidoscopic vision with more focus than ever. Isn’t It Now?, the band’s 12th studio effort, thrives even more organically in the wild, going as far to include a 22-minute-long existential equivalent of Homer’s Iliad in “Defeat” moving along like a blink of an eye across the hour-long album. AnCo — now in their wiser, veteran status — recognize their own place in history and that they’re maybe closer to the end of this earthly voyage than they are looking forward to what it beholds. Still, it hasn’t made them any less adventurous.

Bruiser & Bicycle – Holy Red Wagon [Topshelf Records]

Bruiser and Bicycle are a reminder of what looking outside the box can and should sound like if you want to challenge the status quo. The Albany four-piece — led by the unconventional pen of multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Nick Whittemore –- are what one might besmirch as “record collector’s rock” for the mere reason that their debut full-length, Holy Red Wagon, is a cohesive yet amorphous collection of songs intended to be digested in a single sitting, and while it may fine do just that, it would not hurt to mentally prepare yourself to have your senses unspooled in zig-zag pattern. Whittemore’s voice often float about with descriptively scenic lyrical chaos like helium to air in excitable think bubble form. The sounds behind them trip psychedelically in color swirls, and any borders are rubberized to bounce its bash of freak-folk implosions and noise pop further upward.

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.

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.

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.

kay echo – montage [Self-released]

montage, the latest full-length from Philadelphia-based experimental artist kay echo (f.k.a. floated,) is an exercise in unspooling and rewinding one’s own complicated existentialism against the concept of “The Big Crunch,” a hypothetical universal scenario in which the fate of the entire universe is to collapse unto itself into “singularity,” turning everything into one and nothing at the same time. Whether the thought causes you dread or a peaceful release, kay echo sets to sound these divisive feelings in a deconstructed loop assembled from guitar –- be it eviscerated, melancholically emo, or awash in static -– and electronic parts that mediate a space between bliss and a droning void. What is revealed within her own single-take loop broken down in particle and reassembled into one incomparable, solitary shape is a pillage of scattered matter now floating in the air collectively with whatever happens ascribed to the unknown.

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.

R.J.F. – Going Strange [Self-released]

Ross Farrar has already lived through enough creative reinventions as the vocalist of hardcore-thrashers-turned-art-punks CEREMONY as well side-projects like the indie post-hardcore vehicle SPICE and ugly noise of Crisis Man. Left up to his own devices, we again bare witness to the very strange world that lives within his headspace channeled through a music medium that is equivocally peculiar on his debut solo effort under the moniker R.J.F, Going Strange. Pieced together like one continuous, 45-minute-long track spliced up into separate mental fragments along the way, Farrar sifts in and out of lucidity with skeletal guitar and bass lines, spectral synths and programmed percussion, and the bellow of his voice in both drawling and spoken prose. It sounds like a smoke spirit moving through the air –- a transcendental gothic séance in a sense that blurs the lines between impressionism and reality. A glimpse into the psyche of Ross J. Farrar that makes you wonder which world you’ve just lived in.

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.