The best albums of 2023

30.

billy woods & Kenny Segal

Maps

(Backwoodz Studioz)

The invariably dense most lyrical of all MCs New Yorker Billy Woods connects with Los Angeles producer Kenny Segal on a geographical tour of duty.

Maps sees the duo reunite after their 2019 collaborative record Hiding Places, and benefits greatly from the thematic backdrop of life as a touring musician, with woozy raspy productions and rhyming vistas offering a time capsule of the touring life, of finding anchors away from home, and feeling the push and pull of life away from the everyday.

Guests include Danny Brown, ELUCID (Armand Hammer), Sam Herring (Future Islands), Aesop Rock, Benjamin Booker and more. Maps references green rooms, soundchecks and evokes lucid transitory states of mind and body.

29.

Sofia Kourtesis

Madres

(Ninja Tune)

The Berlin-based Peruvian producer’s debut album Madres, comes with a backstory involving the neurosurgeon Peter Vajkoczy, who the album is dedicated to, after he successfully operated on her mother’s cancer.

Vajkoczy became a sounding board for the album, and the pair even went to Berghain together.

This origin story imbues the album’s ten electronic productions with a nice backdrop, but the album’s warm-hearted electronica leaves a sustained impression regardless, and the songs here find kinship with the sort of fuzzy melodic sonics heard on the quieter end of a Caribou record.

28.

Cleo Sol

Heaven

(Forever Living Originals)

The voice of Sault tripled her solo record output in 2023 with two albums in September – Heaven and Gold.

Both records exemplify the artist’s neo-soul credentials and skill in creating relatively simple unadorned music (with help, of course, from producer Inflo) rich with heart-tugging sentiment, but Heaven just shades it in the long-songwriting stakes, and retro musical touches – 90s neo-soul, 70s soul fusion, jazz inflections and gospel folk music adorning its rich seams.

27.

Jessie Ware

That! Feels! Good!

(EMI / Universal)

I’ve always thought that the English singer Jessie Ware is at her best when she shuffles her tunes towards the dancefloor.

And, That! Feels! Good! is Ware’s best work operating under the disco diva spotlights, aided by production by James Ford.

The fifth album is chock full of sophisticated bangers like ‘Free Yourself’, ‘Freak Me Now’ and ‘Pearls’ with room for some swooning disco ballads like ‘Hello Love’ and ‘Lightning’, with throwbacks to classic sounds from Donna Summer, Evelyn Champagne King, Teena Marie and Chaka Khan.

26.

Young Fathers

Heavy Heavy

(Ninja Tune)

Scottish trio Young Fathers’ first album in five years doesn’t deviate from their established mode of raucous soul gospel hip-hop.

Young Fathers always pore their heart into their visceral communal work and fourth album Heavy Heavy is among their best, most dynamic work yet, once again creating an alchemy of cross-genre cameraderie that lifts the listener with joyous murky songs.

25.

Overmono

Good Lies

(XL Recordings)

The UK brothers Tom and Ed Russell have turned their years of club experience into a two-step, garage and bass music that can be writ large on festival stages all over.

Their debut album Good Lies loses some of the immediacy and club precision that made their early singles so hard to ignore (and some of their best work this year didn’t feature on the album), but underscores their ability to create sample-collage-imbued productions that shimmer and scratch a different itch across full-length collection of tracks.

24.

Queens of the Stone Age

In Times New Roman

(Matador Records)

The eighth studio album from Josh Homme and company is the sound of a band reinvigorated in wallowing in their spiky rock pyre.

In Times New Roman is a return to a bluesy racket, with Homme shaking off public personal turmoil (a fractious divorce, the death of collaborator Mark Lanegan) to arrive at a collection of songs intended to bludgeon things into submission.

It’s a self-produced collection of music, that sounds like Homme set up the band in the hallways of the studio as inspiration struck, removing any unnecessary faff, making for QOTSA’s strongest album of metallic rock bluster in quite a while.

23.

Water From Your Eyes

Everyone’s Crushed

(Matador Records)

The Brooklyn duo of Rachel Brown and Nate Amos debut album on Matador Records is fizzing with experimental sonic fun.

A self-expressed “swollen contusion of an album” Everyone’s Crushed was introduced to me through the angular guitar rock of ‘True Life and bobs around the experimental fringes with the game soundtrack of ‘Barley’, the radio static ambience of ‘Remember Not Your Name’, the soft orchestral synth pop of ’14’ and the minimal Max Tundra-esque post-punk of the title track.

22.

Joanna Sternberg

I’ve Got Me

(Fat Possum)

Idiosyncratic folk is the order of the day on New York songwriter Joanna Sternberg’s second album I’ve Got Me.

Their voice has drawn comparisons to Kimya Dawson, Joanna Newsom, Adrienne Lenker and Daniel Johnson.

Sternberg’s sweet croak isn’t for everyone, but these mostly piano and guitar-lead Randy Newman-esque jaunts shine with a sweet and bright innocence.

21.

Yves Tumor

Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)

(Warp Records)

Over the course of five albums Sean Bowie has moved from experimental art music curio to an interstellar rock god in the mould of his namesake.

Praise A Lord… comes after a couple of years of Bowie and his live band of glam misfits on tour, and there’s a sparkling immediacy to big cosmic songs like ‘Lovely Sewer’, ‘God Is A Sewer’, ‘Meteora Blues’ and ‘Heaven Surrounds Us Like A Hood’.

The album, featuring classic-feeling psych-rock songs writ large with a sensory rich sheen. The drums stand out for me but all the playing on it feels like pristine properly recorded 21st century rock – detailed and gilded, but also spacious and breathing.

19.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra

V

(Jagjaguar)

Fans of Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s lo-fi alt-rock style will love their fifth album V.

It doesn’t really stray too far from their established sound, but with new influences informed by time spent in Hawaii, where the largely New Zealand-based musician Ruban Nielson grew up and with Palm Springs, California also a source, there’s a palpable sense of Yacht rock, West Coast AOR and jazz vibes at play for the first time.

18.

Earl Sweatshirt, The Alchemist

Voir Dire

(Tan Cressida / Warner Records)

The collaborative rap album between the underground iconic rapper Earl and prolific producer The Alchemist  arrived via the Blockchain NFT streaming website Gala Music, with animated artwork for each song.

Unlike last year’s Mos Def and Talib Kweli’s Black Star record that was exclusive to a podcast subscription service, Voir Dire wasn’t gated for subscribers only and appeared on DSPs after a short stint.

Its 27-minutes have a dreamy curt quality to it that is less discombobulating that Earl’s regular style, with chopped jazz samples and Alchemist bringing in passages that are filled with vibes, man. Vince Staples and MIKE also feature.

17.

Sufjan Stevens

Javelin

(Asmathic Kitty)

The tenth studio album from Sufjan is undoubtedly informed by the death of his partner early this year (and his subsequent diagnosis of the auto-immune disease Guillain-Barré syndrome that left him learning how to walk again just as the album was released.)

Against that backdrop, and the unknown situation about his partner’s passing, Javelin finds Sufjan as he has so often done on past records, reaching for his faith and spirituality to comfort him like a blanket, wrapped up in the musician’s gift for orchestral folk-pop choral arrangements. These are devastatingly beautiful songs of heartbreak, loss and the enduring mystery of love that reach beyond the stars.

16.

Fever Ray

Radical Romantics

(Rabid Records)

The third solo album from the Swedish avant-electronic pop artist Karin Dreijer is a marked return to form after 2017’s Plunge.

Featuring the electro, synth pop and steel pan DNA of previous records, Radical Romantics flourishes it with new wave, industrial sounds and co-production by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and brother Olof Dreijer.

Album highlights include the bouncy love-buzz of ‘Carbon Dioxide’, and ‘Even It Out’ which comes across like that scene in Tár when Lydia berates a small schoolchild for bullying her daughter, with the lyrics “This is for Zacharias / Who bullied my kid in high school / There’s no room for you / And we know where you live.”

The synth symphonic Radical Romantics explores definitions of love from the perspective of a nonconformist, with a particular emphasis on how love binds non-heteronormative romantic and family relationships.

14.

Lil Yachty

Let’s Start Here

(Quality Control Music / Motown / UMG)

One of the more leftfield pivots of 2023 was the Atlanta trap pop rapper Lil Yachty making a psych-rock album inspired by his love of Pink Floyd, and clearly influenced by modern psych rock like Tame Impala.

And the surprise was that it works. Let’s Start Here filled the barren void of January’s release schedule with a psychedelic pop-rock album filled with autotune and sweet melodies, R&B melded with rock.

Sometimes it feels like one of those homemade mashup albums of hot new rapper over classic rock instrumentals which has its own charm to it, but even when it’s meandering it’s engaging to a high degree because of the indulgent vibey arrangements whch include input from a cast that includes Mac DeMarco, Alex G, Magdalena Bay, Fousheé, Jam City, Patrick Wimberly, Unknown Mortal Orchestra bassist Jacob Portrait, MGMT’s Ben Goldwasser, Justine Skye and Diana Gordon.

13.

MIKE, Wiki, The Alchemist

Faith Is A Rock

(ALC)

Quietly released around the time of Earl Sweatshirt and The Alchemist’s Voir Dire collaborative work, Faith Is A Rock is another of the producer’s fine group output of the year.

NYC rappers MIKE and Wiki trade verses over instrumentals that sometimes barely even have beats, with the emphasis instead on swooning strings and chopped-up samples that sound like they’d come from an MF Doom vault. 

Don’t sleep on this one, Faith Is A Rock is a pensive and dream-like rap highlight of the year.

12.

Natalia Beylis

Mermaids

(Touch Sensitive)

“It was a rainy day at the recycling centre in Leitrim. There, amongst the tangle of discarded kettles and broken-down toasters, I first laid eyes on her…”

The Leitrim musician and sonic artist Natalia Beylis’ Mermaids is inspired by the sounds that the musician coaxed from a CRB Elettronica Ancona – Model: Diamond 708 E electric keyboard that was salvaged from a Leitrim recycling centre. The album’s other chief inspiration is an old family photo of her mother and two friends (which is also the cover for the record and informs the title).

“The sounds that come from her when I play always move me like water; swimming in rivers and floating in the murk beneath the surface,” Natalia said of the instrument.

The ambient release soars through its limitation with tracks like the opener ‘Afloat In Fog And Feathers’ offering a slow dive into a subaquatic ambient world, while the 17-minute title track repeated its synth notes yet, like the album rich with gentle detail, warm tone and siren call.

11.

Rozi Plain

Prize

(Memphis Industries)

The English folk singer-songwriter’s latest record expands a core folk sound with songs that have a hypnagogic psych-indie flavour.

The 10 songs on Rozi’s fifth album trade in small moments and small changes, with a tender dynamic that is imbued with artful and bucolic textures of synths and taut guitar sounds underpinning the gentle vocals.

10.

Noname

Sundial

(Noname / AWAL)

Five years since the Chicago rapper’s Room 25 album, the followup release came after a time where Noname threatened to never release another record.

Sundial finds Noname as a better rhymer, a more precise rapper, with more depth in switching her cadence and she’s all the better for it, but not neccessarily in a better place.

Using the same combative streak she has displayed in public discourse, Noname trains it on the personal and political, with herself as much of the target of criticism.

“Analyze the gumption, monopolise the landscape / She’s just another artist selling trauma to her fanbase,”. she raps on ‘Balloons’ the track featuring Jay Electronica, one of the guests on the record that also include Billy Woods, Common, Jimetta Rose, Ayoni and Voices Of Creation.

Noname is an artist who isn’t afraid to throw bombs at contemporaries like Jay Z, Rihanna, Kendrick and Beyoncé for playing the Superbowl, an event part-sponsored by the military industrial complex but she’s also not afraid to throw grenades in the mirror at herself for playing Coachella when she said she wouldn’t play to a predominately white audience.

“Go, Rihanna, go
Watch the fighter jet fly high
War machine gets glamorised
We play the game to pass the time
Go, Noname, go
Coachella stage got sanitised
I said I wouldn’t perform for them
And somehow I still fell in line, fuck”

Sundial’s lush jazzy live-band hip-hop (Slimwave, Saba, emil, R-Kay and Ben Nartley are among the producers) has a bit more insistence and presence than before, and they underscore these knotty songs exploring uncomfortable truths and the many hypocrisies inherent in the capitalist and artistic world.

9.

Andre 3000

New Blue Sun

(Epic Records)

In the end we got the Andre 3000 album we needed, not the Andre 3000 album we expected.

Aside from the fact that the Outkast rapper’s long-awaited solo album contains no lick of his voice on it, New Blue Sun is surprising, in how natural, beautiful and tranquil this music is, a spiritual and moving ambient jazz album with Andre playing flute and woodwind surrounded by noted players.

New Blue Sun was co-produced by Benjamin and multi-instrumentalist Carlos Niño, and features Nate Mercereau, Surya Botofasina, Deantoni Parks, Diego Gaeta, Matthewdavid, V.C.R, Diego Gaeta, Jesse Peterson, and Mia Doi Todd.

The jazz purists will tell you there’s better places to look for these kinds of sounds but I’d gladly spend much more time in Andre’s orbit if the music is always this immersive and evocative.

8.

Kojaque

Phantom Of The Afters

(Soft Boy Records)

Every week, when I write up 10 or so Irish tracks, there’s invariably at least one artist featured who identifies as an Irish-born London-based musician.

The second album proper from Kojaque, after 2021s Town’s Dead, and the 2016 Deli Daydreams mixtape, finds the Irish artist wresting with being one of the people who have “taken the soup”, and moved to London for art’s sake.

To “take the soup” in Ireland’s famine past, generally meant renouncing your Catholic faith in favour of English Protestantism in times of desperate hunger.

In a modern context, “taking the soup” is emigrating from Ireland for London for more opportunity. A chant of “Jackie took the soup” sets the album’s scene.

Wearing the alterego of Jackie Dandelion, a character named after the Fontaines DC song ‘Jackie Down the Line’ with the artwork modelled on bigoted depictions of Irish people in 19th/20th century Punch Magazine cartoons further underscores the theme.

Phantom Of The Afters is haunted by that very modern decision with track two ‘Larry Bird’ sticking the theme through a fever dream rap on the short flight over to Stansted.

Guests include Wiki, Biig Piig, Charlotte Dos Santos, Gotts Street Park and Sammy Copley with the razor-sharp production by Calvin Valentine, Tony Seltzer and Karma Kid.

London voices, observations and references are the backdrop to Kojaque’s ruminations on the physical, social and cultural disconnect of being Irish living in London throughout the album, touching on past relationships, childhood and wallowing in loneliness and homesickness through the modern immigrant lens.

“Think of me Ma and the guilt goes through me / These toffs don’t get my jargon.

Phantom Of The Afters speaks to the thousands of young Irish people who can relate to the volatility of starting a new life elsewhere, and the subsequent guilt, while feeling the invisible thread tethering you to your friends and family back home.

7.

JPEGMAFIA & Danny Brown

Scaring The Hoes

(Peggy / AWAL)

Scaring The Hoes is a speakers blown-out, messy, all over the shop glorious rap record.

Two rappers with an ability to go wild, bring energy and fervour to an album that’s erratic, industrial, discombobulating, disorientating and like few other rap albums in recent memory.

Most importantly, Scaring The Hoes is super fun and has got a sonic freneticism that isn’t present in many of its contemporaries.

6.

John Francis Flynn

Look Over The Wall, See The Sky

(River Lea)

The second album from Dublin folk singer John Francis Flynn Look Over The Wall, See The Sky marks a shift from his 2021 debut I Would Not Live Always, in that it takes very recognisable trad and folk songs like ‘The Zoological Gardens’ and ‘Dirty Old Town’, and lives up to the idea of true interpretation, recontextualising old Dublin-associated songs with modern techniques.

Flynn likes to follow the song wherever it takes him using his booming baritone to lead the way among instrumentation that has developed into a natural place where analogue tradition and digital experimentalism combine with a natural ease.

Flynn is joined by Brendan Jenkinson, Ultan O’Brien, Ross Chaney (Tascam tape loops), Caimin Gilmore, Davy Kehoe, Romain Bly, Seamas Hyland, Kaija Kennedy and Colm O’Hara.

Dips into creaking stringed instrumentation (and a pleasing higher register) on ‘The Lag Song’, the frantic psych-folk on his version of American anti-establishment folk song ‘Mole In The Ground’, the percussive bombast of ‘A Mile From Dublin’ and the woozy dirgey atmosphere on ‘Kitty’ are among its highlights, but Look Over The Wall, See The Sky is best listened from start to finish for its fully-realised vision.

5.

CMAT

Crazymad, For Me

(AWAL)

If the debut album – If My Wife New I’d Be Dead – from the Irish country alt-pop artist CMAT established her melancholy pop and wickedly funny lyric-writing bonafides, the followup album doesn’t deviate far from the template, but that’s no bad thing when the songs are as good as they are.

Crazymad, For Me is largely pre-occupied with picking apart an old relationship, with the benefit of self-confidence, self-worth and hindsight, an “abstract break-up” album.

The songs are slightly countrified and devastating in their intent or storytelling prowess that could make you laugh out loud and/or stare right into your soul, as Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson picks apart the toxicity and estrangement of how she was wronged, with a chipper melody, and a pop culture reference never far away.

It begins like the first album did with a song named after a mythical, but real American place, ‘California’ finds CMAT escaping a relationship to dream of a life captured on celluloid, before the quiet devastation of songs like ‘Rent’ explores the gaslighting and comparisons to other women.

“I found lashes on the DVD case, you said they were mine, said they were mine Never my style, but I didn’t wanna get on your wrong side.”

Highlights include the singles ‘Stay For Something’,  the John Grant classic-pop assisted ‘Where Are Your Kids Tonight?’, ‘Have Fun!’ and ‘Whatever’s Inconvenient‘, all of which benefit from the full album placement.

CMAT began her career describing herself ironically, as “a global pop star” but the excellent songwriting and vocal performances on Crazymad, For Me are further proof that punchline is increasingly becoming reality.

4.

Caroline Polachek

Desire, I Want To Turn Into You

(Perpetual Novice)

Desire, I Want To Turn Into You might be on paper, Caroline Polachek second solo album but with it, the artist brings two decades experience of creating pop-adjacent music.

The album features razor-sharp pop music with a seraphic voice that throws its sonic tapestry wide that draws on all sorts of sensibilities and sounds from the standalone hit of ‘Bunny Is A Rider’ to the Spanish-guitar-featuring ‘Sunset’, the spacious electronic choral of ‘Billions’, the morphing 80s arch pop of ‘Welcome To My Island’, the Grimes and Dido-featuring ‘Fly To You’, and the Danny L.Harle-produced ‘Blood And Butter’ with, and why not, a bagpipes solo from Scottish folk artist Brìghde Chaimbeul.

Polachek is a high vision artist, operating in a sphere adjacent to most pop music while deliverying big pop moments shot with artful euphoria. And the best part is, it feels like she’s only hitting her stride.

3.

Rachael Lavelle

Big Dreams

(Rest Energy)

There’s probably no Irish artist on this list as adept at creating world-building magical castles in the sky as Rachael Lavelle.

Big Dreams makes good on the artist’s long-standing promise, as a singular talent, with an ability to create unique liminal spaces for her off-kilter yearning compositions and engulfing vocals, that nods to forebearers like Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush and a contemporary like Weyes Blood.

Big Dreams features the singles – ‘Let Me Unlock Your Full Potential’, ‘Perpetual Party’ and the title track. Self-help guidance is offered throughout from Luas light rail announcer Doireann Ní Bhriain, adding to the album’s literally transportive daydream feeling.

It is very easy to feel pleasantly unmoored in the album’s avant garde instrumentation, with Lavelle aided by close collaborator Ryan Hargadon, yet there’s plenty of real-life grounding in the emotive lyrics, with the singer seeking solace in a warm bath, a cold pint, the company of another, a chicken fillet roll, or escape from loneliness.

Like on the highlight of ‘Night Train’ – “come and fill the vacancy of hope / here lies the address / soften in sadness / Come and sing the Orinoco Flow.”

Like much of Lavelle’s work, it’s often a plea for a simple thing – intimacy, closeness, comfort – relayed in grand musical gestures with a Romantic-era sensibility.

2.

Kara Jackson

Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?

(September Recordings)

Chicago former National Youth Poet Laureate and singer-songwriter Kara Jackson’s debut album was a revelatory discovery this year.

Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? is a very lyrical album, these songs are bluesy folk numbers with an unconventional slant, avoiding regular song structures in favour of repeating phrases and patterns as it goes. The songs and title are informed by the grief that filled in the passing of her friend, and the questions that posed.

why do we show up on this world alongside one another? to love and to mourn? to curse each other out? to die working every day? idk im still figuring it out.

There’s a refreshing style that hasn’t coagulated into a set form or a predictable pattern and it’s all the better record for it.

1.

Lankum

False Lankum

(Rough Trade)

The Dublin trad-band’s Lankum’s fourth album picks up the darker threads of their previous 2019 effort The Livelong Day.

That album begins with ‘The Wild Rover’, a tense and dark growing thing. False Lankum begins in similarly epic fashion, with ‘Go Dig My Grave’ swelling to a deeper drone, with an intense cinematic vision to match its grief-stricken lyrics, lead by Radie Peat’s magnetising keening vocal performance.

False Lankum finds Cormac MacDiarmada, Radie Peat, Daragh Lynch and Ian Lynch (and producer John “Spud” Murphy) digging deeper into the dynamics, with world-building doom-folk that sinks into its mire on more than one occasion.

‘Master Crowley’s’ is the best demonstration of this idea, as a traditional song gets pulled into quicksand and an empty void of steel clanks and noise engulf the reverbed song in its entombed pit.

“We wanted to create more contrast on the record so the light parts would be almost spiritual and the dark parts would be incredibly dark, even horror inducing.

And that is what they have done really effectively throughout, as tracks like the Cormac MacDiarmada-fronted ‘Lord Abore and Mary Flynn’ and the Daragh Lynch-sung ‘On A Monday Morning’ bring a softness and new shade to the band (the album features 10 trad songs with two originals – ‘Netta Perseus’ and ‘The Turn’, written by Daragh Lynch).

These songs by the first-time Lankum singers are among the album’s highlights, surrounded by transportative tracks like ‘The New York Trader’ and the Radie Peat-sung ‘Newcastle’.

False Lankum has been called folk’s OK Computer, and compared to Godspeed! You Black Emperor and Scott Walker, and such high praise that suggests just how lauded Lankum’s music is increasingly becoming internationally. False Lankum is the sound of an Irish band stoking the fire of trad and finding ever-more illuminating ways to tell old stories.