That's A Wrap On 2023

An album of the year list, plus some playlists and thank-yous

Year-end lists: You’re sick of them by now, right? Wondering which of this year’s 5 commercially and critically approved records is gonna take any given publication’s top spot, or wondering which lists will cheat and include a latecomer from last December as one of the best albums of “this year” (I like SZA’s SOS as much as the next guy, but this is the one arena where I’ll let myself be a stickler for the rules; that’s a 2022 album).

Anyway, here’s yet another album-of-the-year list. Yes, it’s got some of the usual suspects, because sometimes the hype is well-deserved, but there might be a record or two that went under your radar this year, and I’m always happy to assist in a new musical discovery. It sounds corny, but one of my favorite things about writing about music— especially smaller artists —is the idea that I could help somebody discover their new favorite band.

I’m not gonna pad this intro with some trite bullshit about the kind of year 2023 has been. I know you’d skip past it, and you’d be right to– you know what kind of year it’s been! You were there! I will however, say thank you to all who have subscribed to this newsletter, who have shared it, who have said kind words about it, who have been patient with me during my long stretches of inactivity (listen, it’s been a busy month/year/life). Not to be all ~big things coming~, but I’m working on some stuff for 2024 that I’m really excited about, and I hope you’ll all be there to celebrate with me (or send me a bunch of angry DMs about how mad you are at my terrible music opinions; engagement is engagement!). Either way, thank you to anyone who takes the time to read my work, I really mean it.  

I’ve included a couple playlists to round out the year; they’re at the end of the album write-ups. Now, without further ado…

MY TOP 15 ALBUMS OF 2023:

15. Yo La Tengo - This Stupid World

I genuinely believe that Yo La Tengo might be the best living American band, or at least the most consistent. I can’t think of another group that’s been together for as long as they have AND is as prolific AND still puts on mind-blowing live shows AND has as many great late-career albums, specifically. This Stupid World is my favorite of their recent records. The best parts of it are when they let themselves get a little lost in some extended jam that blossoms, unravels, and implodes. 

Favorite Tracks: Fallout, This Stupid World, Sinatra Drive Breakdown

14. Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter - SAVED!

A little over a year ago I was lucky enough to catch one of Kristin Hayter’s final performances as Lingua Ignota. An experimental musician and performance artist whose work often deals with themes of spiritual abandonment, framing her relationship with God as a borderline abusive one, she’s likened her live shows to group exorcisms. The show I attended involved a lot of communal screaming/crying/falling to one’s knees, one person even fainted– all stuff that looked eerily similar to the scenes from Jesus Camp of people being born again. Now, Hayter has shed the Lingua Ignota moniker and taken up the persona of a televangelist, preaching through crackly Christian folk music that’s every bit as God-loving, God-fearing, and downright horrifying. 

Favorite Tracks: ALL OF MY FRIENDS ARE GOING TO HELL, I’M GETTING OUT WHILE I CAN, HOW CAN I KEEP FROM SINGING

13. Underscores - Wallsocket

Wallsocket is an album by April Harper Grey aka Underscores. Wallsocket is also a small, economically depressed town in Michigan that Grey swears is real. Wallsocket follows the coming-of-age narratives of three girls living in and eventually leaving said town. Wallsocket is a rock opera on an invisible stage. Wallsocket is all the tropes of Americana pop songwriting and musical worldbuilding flipped on their heads. Wallsocket has a lot of references to horses, the concept of luck, and the number 11. Wallsocket is an album that I wish I’d listened to earlier in the year instead of letting it wait on my list of new releases I’d been meaning to get around to, and I’m glad I didn’t wait a minute longer, because this record is truly unlike anything else I’ve ever heard. 

Favorite Tracks: Locals (Girls like us), Cops and robbers, Johnny johnny johnny

12. Home Is Where - the whaler

Sometimes reality gets so nightmarish that all you can do is try to one-up it with the most surreally horrific imagery you can possibly come up with. That’s what frontwoman Bea MacDonald is doing with Mangum-esque lyrics about “kites and intestines tangled in branches,” rotting whale corpses, and reverse-transfigurations. “The end of the world is taking forever” might be the single most prescient line of this year, made all the more haunting by the way MacDonald sounds more bored and inconvenienced by the inevitable apocalypse than fearful. To paraphrase her hilarious reaction to getting a stellar Pitchfork review, the world is ending and we still have to go to work tomorrow.

Favorite Tracks: yes! yes! a thousand times yes!, every day feels like 9/11, daytona 500

11. Greg Mendez - Greg Mendez 

Look, it’s not like there’s any dearth of quiet, confessional guitar-led folk music with whispered lyrics that are dark and deeply personal, drawing comparisons to Alex G and Elliott Smith. That’s like, half the press releases in my inbox. But Greg Mendez’s self-titled record about heartbreak, friendship, crime, addiction, and recovery is so much more than its elevator pitch. So much so that Pat Graham of Talking Kind closed his album It Did Bring Me Down (a commendable #23 on my long list) with a song about how every song Greg Mendez writes is “the best song you’ve ever heard” and how if everyone on the planet was literally Greg Mendez, we’d have world peace. 

Favorite Tracks: Maria, Goodbye/Trouble, Sweetie

10. Superviolet - Infinite Spring

A couple months ago, I visited Steve Ciolek’s home state of Ohio for the first time and drove across most of it. Very few records capture the weird, corn-filled expanse of the midwest quite like Superviolet’s debut, or the lush pastel sunset on its cover. It’s odd for a debut album to feel like a victory lap, but it’s hard not to see Superviolet as a project that’s risen from the ashes of The Sidekicks (beautifully immortalized in this tweet by Jenna, friend of the newsletter and host of my favorite college radio show, How I’m Feeling Now, Thursdays 4-6). It’s also what makes the in-joke “surprise release 6th album as the greatest rock ‘n roll band” one of the most memorable lyrics of 2023. 

Favorite Tracks: Overrater, Locket, Angels On The Ground

9. Black Belt Eagle Scout - The Land, The Water, The Sky

The word “ethereal” gets thrown around way too often in music criticism, but I don’t know how else to describe the way opener “My Blood Runs Through This Land” awakens through a fog of guitar fuzz, or the way Katherine Paul’s voice echoing the album title softly soars through album closer “Don’t Give Up,” or the way that their soft power is sustained throughout the record’s entire runtime. It’s a dreamy, vivid record, one that both grounds the listener and lifts them up to transcendent heights.

Favorite Tracks: My Blood Runs Through This Land, Don’t Give Up, Salmon Stinta

8. Mitski - The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We

Allow me to be an oldhead and play my “I Liked It Before It Was Cool” card just this once: I remember walking to class in the fall of 2016 and letting Mitski’s fuzzy, deranged shredding and yowling on “My Body’s Made Of Crushed Little Stars” bleed into my ears. Now, Mitski doesn’t have to worry about acing that interview– she hardly even does interviews anymore. Though Mitski hasn’t quieted her tempestuous relationship to art, work, and success (however you define it), it seems like she’s done trying to prove herself and instead, is using the resources at her disposal to make the music that she simply wants to make. And if it results in another accidental moment of TikTok virality, so be it.

Favorite Tracks: I’m Your Man, My Love Mine All Mine, I Don’t Like My Mind

7. Kara Jackson - Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?

This album simultaneously feels like it was written yesterday and like it’s existed since the dawn of time. It’s beautiful and emotionally wise and devastating but also at times hilarious– people don’t give Jackson enough credit for how funny she is! Language is like putty in Jackson’s hands; she molds phrases and twists words together with utmost specificity and care. When she sings, “I am pretty top notch,” you’ve got no choice but to believe her. 

Favorite Tracks: why does the earth give us people to love?, dickhead blues, pawnshop

6. Ratboys - The Window

All it takes is for me to listen to “Making Noise For The Ones You Love” or  “It’s Alive!” or  “Black Earth, WI” or “I Want You (Fall 2010)” and I’m instantly reminded of how lucky I am to be breathing air and walking around on God’s green earth, and if that weren’t enough, I get to do all that while listening to some GOOD ASS INDIE ROCK AND ROLL. I’ll chalk up the lack of public appraisal for their almost-as-excellent 2020 LP Printer’s Devil to early-pandemic bad timing, but I’m glad Ratboys are finally getting the love they deserve.

Favorite Tracks: Black Earth WI, It’s Alive!, The Window

5. Star 99 - Bitch Unlimited

Spiritual descendents of fellow Lauren Records signee Shinobu and the now-defunct pop punk bands of 2010s Tumblr and 8tracks (Chumped! Cayetana! Swearin’!), Star 99’s debut record is perfectly catchy and bratty with no time wasted and hooks to spare. Ten tunes that make you want to slam your door and scream about how no one’s allowed inside your room.

Favorite Tracks: Girl, Cosmic Glue, Spit Take

4. McKinley Dixon - Beloved! Paradise! Jazz?!

I hesitate to call anyone’s album a “love letter” to anything, because it feels so hackneyed to do so, but I will say that every note and every word on McKinley Dixon’s latest album is imbued with a deep love– whether that’s for a friend he’s lost, for the art that inspires him, for those who have come before him and those who will come after. Through each dissection of fear, grief, and anger, at the center there is always love.

Favorite Tracks: Tyler Forever, Sun I Rise, Beloved! Paradise! Jazz?!

3. billy woods, Kenny Segal - Maps

billy woods is no stranger to an immersive, high-concept record, and the way he plays tour guide on this expansive, musical travel diary shows his pen game at its most clever, whether he’s zooming all the way out on human history on “Year Zero” or quietly coming home on “NYC Tapwater.” No matter what story billy woods is spinning, his listeners are always in good hands. 

Favorite Tracks: Year Zero, NYC Tapwater, Blue Smoke

2. Lana Del Rey - Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd?

“Look at us, you and me, back at it again!” Lana’s a fucking real one, and Ocean Blvd feels like an amalgamation of all the best creative decisions of her entire discography. It’s a miracle that in between her side hustles as a Waffle House waitress and a poncho model, America’s Sweetheart has managed to drop her most stellar record since 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell!, proving that she’s both one of the last living rock stars and a woman of the people. 

Favorite Tracks: A&W, Peppers, Sweet

1. Wednesday - Rat Saw God

You’ve heard everyone and their mom gush about how incredible this record is. You’ve heard ME gush about how incredible this record is. Just like the *Beanie Feldstein in Lady Bird voice* TITULAR RAT, I see God when the drums slow down and then pick up again towards the end of “Turkey Vultures,” when the lap steel weaves through shredding guitars on “Chosen To Deserve,” and on “Bull Believer” when Karly’s guttural shrieking shatters the boundaries between earth, heaven, hell. Of course this is my number one. 2023 baby, it’s the year of the rat!

Favorite Tracks: Bull Believer, Bath County, Turkey Vultures

For those who are interested in the long list, here’s a topster graphic of my 100 favorite albums of 2023:

Here’s a playlist of my 100 favorite songs of 2023:

Here’s a list of all my favorite music-related things that happened this year that aren’t songs or albums, but a secret third thing. This is my favorite list to make every year. In no particular order:

And just for fun, here’s my Everything Christmas Playlist— meaning it’s a huge playlist, meant to be shuffled, with every type of Christmas song. We’re talking Great American Songbook stuff that you can play for your grandparents, the hits that have been paying Mariah Carey’s mortgage for the past two decades that you never get sick of even though they’re inescapable each December, the ones about Jesus (most of them sung by Sufjan Stevens), new additions to the modern Christmas canon from artist like Carly Rae Jepsen and Beach Bunny, angsty punk carols that aren’t afraid to drop a few f-bombs in a Christmas song (shoutout Charly Bliss and PUP), songs that aren’t technically Christmas songs but are TO ME (Of course “Jesus Etc.” by Wilco is a Christmas song? What is the phrase “Jesus don’t cry” if not a beleaguered Virgin Mary’s attempt to calm her newborn?), the Bright Eyes Christmas album that’ll have your family saying stuff like “Can we listen to something a little less depressing please?,” and some ska covers of Christmas songs that’ll have your family saying stuff like “Actually can we go back to that Bright Eyes Christmas album?”

I’ve also made a playlist for what I like to call the Purgatory Days, meaning the days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve where you’re on this weird post-Christmas comedown where time doesn’t feel real and you don’t know what to do with yourself and you get all maudlin about the passing of another year and it almost feels like if you committed a crime it wouldn’t even count (don’t do this; as strange as it may seem, all normal laws are still in effect from December 26-30).

As a kid I used to find this time of year kind of depressing, but as I got older I came to find it weirdly comforting. Usually I’d be back home in New York, and there’d be a bit of a tourism lull, so I’d use those days to walk 20, 30, 40 blocks with no destination in mind, stopping only when I needed to pop inside somewhere to warm up. I’d check out the post-Christmas sales at various stores, I’d go to museums and movie theaters by myself, I’d reflect on the past year while texting friends to try and throw together some New Year’s Eve plans. It was a part of the year where I really appreciated having unstructured time alone. Here’s a playlist of songs that evoke those bittersweet limbo days:

And finally, a New Year’s Eve playlist to cap it all off:

I hope you all have a safe and fun holiday season, and thanks again for reading.