I’ve had the placeholder copy at the top of this long list saved as “blah blah blah” for over a month now, partly because I find it funny, and partly because I’m not sure what to say about this year, in all honesty. Congratulations on making it through 2020 again, I suppose. I hope everyone had some fun on the way, interspersed with all the cosmic crawling horror that comes across our point of view every single hour of every single day. A constant refrain I hear from people is “it’s been a hard year for us.” I think that’s probably the best way to sum up 2023: A Hard Year. Not for everyone, of course, but for a disconcertingly large amount of people.

It hasn’t been all awful all the time, of course. Take your victories where you can and remember to love the ones you love as often as you can. As a certain lecher of an old father once said to his long-suffering daughter, the outside world will go to Hell all on its own, you don’t need to interfere. It’s over, after all. As I type this, the year is quivering on the edge of it’s end; in 36 hours it will be 2024, a date that seems much more suited to dystopian science fiction films than it does to the rather more boring dystopia we find ourselves in today. It’s easy enough to sit on the last two days of the calendar and dwell on all the terrible things that may have happened over the course of the last 363, but maybe this discounts the potential of the next 366 before they even begin. That’s a lot of days, after all, and in the end the good probably outweighs the bad in aggregate. I’ll spend them with my family, after all, and that’s most of the way toward heaven. Some better weather would push it all the way over. Maybe someone picking up a query, while we’re asking Santa for things.

Adam Duritz wrote once, too many years ago, that it’s been a long December but there’s reason to believe that maybe this year will be better than the last. Overplay via radio conglomerates has rendered that sentiment background noise but I always think of it around this time of year, as people make their New Years plans and write down their resolutions. There’s always reason to believe the next year will be better. We just have to fix that firmly in mind, and then move forward as we were. “There will be water if God wills it” sounds asinine on the surface – why trust in faith when there is nothing to affix that faith to? It’s rather powerful under that, though: you cannot change the things you have no control over. All you have control over are the things you can reach out and touch. Will climate change collapse civilization before your children have a chance to experience the joy and wonder of life? Will war and despair widen and swallow us all? Will the capricious winds of economic change carry you off into the wild, destitute? Can you change any of that, anyway? There will be water if God wills it. Not any specific deity, you understand. Just God as a stand in for the massive gap between you and your place in the universe vs. its overall size and complexity.

At any rate, my 100 favourite albums of 2023. A good year for music! The secret, of course, is that they’re all good years for music. This year I went a little more organized in tracking what I listened to, and how I responded to it. I’m hoping to get some honest-to-god data analysis up on it in the New Year, but again: there will be water if God wills it. I’m especially interested in stats on my ratings vs. record labels. I have some suspicions on which labels I tend to favour: Domino, Sub Pop, Fat Possum. All too often, at least in the social sciences, one’s inherent biases and the evidence gleaned from the data say two different things. So I want to make it a bit more scientific. Watch for it, some time in the end of winter perhaps. Either way, kicking it off with some ambient soundscapes about nuclear disaster, my top 100 starts below.

Featured image: Photo by SIMON LEE on Unsplash

Artfully composed ambient soundscapes brimming with strange ideas and dark corners. Bisengalieva’s native Kazakhstan provided the impetus for the recordings, specifically the area known as The Polygon, where the USSR conducted nuclear tests and exposed large swaths of Kazakhs to nuclear fallout. The results – sharply elevated cancer rates and horrifying birth defects – provide the backdrop of eeriness present throughout the recordings, both from the dark loops and from the composer’s multi-tracked violin recordings. But it’s not all grim; the sweeping bleakness that draws from the rugged Kazakh countryside is as beautiful as it is desolate, and the counterpoint between the two drives home the tragedy of the country’s history.

In which Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise, Coffee And Cigarettes) and longtime Jarmusch producer Carter Logan try their hand at heavy stoner drone. Jarmusch claimed in April that the film industry was “kind of gone” and, given that he’s 70, if he wants to spend his remaining years pounding out stuff like the apocalyptic “The End Of The World” then I’m on board.

The Amsterdam-based band has made an international name for themselves by mining Anatolian rock and roll from the 1970s and Turkish folk melodies for inspiration, but their last two albums have been heavier on the synth and disco trappings that everyone loved from that era rather than the ripping retro guitar sounds that made their first record such a stellar debut. On Aşk they go back, and then some. There are shades of space rock a la Hawkwind, and a maniacal motorik beat on many tracks that bring 70’s Krautrock into the sounds of hipster parties in Istanbul. That’s not to say they ignore the disco funk part of the era entirely now; “Doktor Civanım” is a synth funk banger straight out of Giorgio Moroder’s closet and “Leylim Ley” has that breezy yacht sound. Regardless, it’s a return to form, and a welcome one.

Frontman Judson Kolk told a NYC audience that they were the greatest band in the world. This is a stretch of the truth, of course, but as it happens he wasn’t completely delusional. They deliver noisy art rock with the best of them, including A Place To Bury Strangers and whatever Girl Band is calling themselves now. It’s post-punk textures by way of trance and VU-esque drone, and when they get into a groove they lose themselves – and you – in it for days at a time.

Ten albums in and Aesop Rock is an NYC hip hop institution, albeit one that has always seemed like a runner-up to better known Def Jux labelmates like El-P and RJD2. He’s been getting play on Backwoodz recordings now though, alongside guys like Quelle Chris, Danny Brown, and Earl Sweatshirt. Maybe this is why it feels like Integrated Tech Solutions is his best record in a long time. I mean, that Malibu Ken record was top notch, but in terms of his own solo work this is easily his best since 2007’s None Shall Pass. Second acts, and rappers over 40 making waves, really does seem to be a big sea change in underground hip hop, and who better to come back to the fold of modern listeners than the guy who was once identified as the wordiest man in hip hop?

Irish queercore so slash and burn that it already has the backing of punk rock luminaries like Kathleen Hanna and Henry Rollins. Named for the underground women-only speakeasies/lesbian bars that popped up in Ireland after the Second World War, Blouse Club takes aim at capitalism and patriarchy at the same time, crafting searing punk blasts that are equal parts riot grrrl and X-Ray Spex. As punk debuts go, this one feels awfully auspicious.

An unholy marriage of fuzz, free jazz, space rock, and crunching Seventies-tinged hard rock, Electrons libres du quebec reminds us that Montreal is more than just smug arty indie kids and bearded weirdos sampling train noises and grocery store announcements. It’s also a hot bed of dank, dirty rock and roll.

The fifth album in the Coin Coin series – and Roberts’ tenth overall – finds the saxophonist/free jazz experimentalist building more: more instrumentation, more sonic space, more depth of characterization and exploration. As a response to the ongoing political turmoil in the United States, Coin Coin Chapter Five‘s narrative centers around abortion, specifically a character study of an ancestor of Roberts who died in the course of an illegal abortion. The structure jumps back and forth between diary entry and sax-driven jazz freakouts, strung together with the phrase “my name is your name / our name is their name / we are named / we remember / they forget.” It’s an ambitious and fulfilling piece of essentially American art that sets the bar high for subsequent chapters.

The haters be damned: Jon Batiste’s concept album about a, er, world music radio station is one of the finest blasts of inclusive pop music to come out recently. Some publications came down on it for ‘collapsing the sounds of world music into the form of the American pop song, but they missed that the history of global pop music in the wake of Christmas Day, 1991 has been the infiltration of the American pop song into global music making. World Music Radio is just honest about it, that’s all. Besides, the domestic American pop song could use a boundary expansion.

There is no real way of telling what you’re going to get from Australian psychedelic overlords King Gizzard before the inevitable teaser comes out, or even the album. They change styles more than people change clothes, going from microtonal freakout explorations to metallic skronk to synth-laden pop bouncing to jazz jams, often within the course of a year. PetroDragonic Apocalypse is a return to the sound of 2021’s Infest The Rats Nest – that is to say, it’s Gizzard doing their take on thrash metal. Thrash is just the closest idea; there’s a glut of tribal drumming and staccato breakdowns in between the switchblade riffing, but there’s also searing guitar solos, played with the usual seeming effortlessness that characterizes all of this bands out-there journeys.

It’s tough to follow up a Mercury Prize winning album, but Arlo Parks managed to make a decent effort at it. After finding love and decamping to Los Angeles, it’s only natural that My Soft Machine absorbs both of those things The album is full of sunny, hazy melodies about the innocence and fragility of love, and in lesser hands it might have been a sort of sophomore flop. Parks does it with style though, marrying her intimate songwriting style with punchy, modern production and crafting the album in such a way that every song sounds like something you’ve heard on the radio, somewhere, on a station you may or may not remember.

Generation after generation, the youth of South-Central Los Angeles have been preyed on by those older, who have been through the wringer and have emerged to bring the kids through it. They get caught up in gang wars driven by OGs who can’t stop perpetuating the cycle. They get killed by other kids, by cops get lost in the drugs that they watched take their parents, their extended family, their friends. Midway through Generational Curse a house party gets shot up in the middle of an honest-to-God banger of a track; the narrator just seems resigned, like this is just how it is, you can’t expect any different. ICECOLDBISHOP has a steely eye for the truth of all of this, weaving lines that are at once vicious and world-weary. Like his fellow L.A. scribe Kendrick, he has the rare ability to play with a multitude of voices, both in writing and on the mic, and make it work time after time. As far as debuts go, it’s riveting. The features he’s done have hinted at his talent (like “Hot Water Tank” from that album Boldy James did with the Alchemist), but Generational Curse really drives it home.

The sadcore queen stylings of a Lana Del Rey (paid homage to on “Brittany”), blown up wide on a theatrical stage in three acts, underlined with that cool summer night Italians Do It Better production, and studded with guests ranging from STRFKR to Sean Ono Lennon to Rufus Wainwright. IDIB has waned in recent years but Glüme is one to watch to keep it afloat.

You know, the whole schtick about poptimism is starting to wear a little thin with every bloody storm-battered world-burning year that passes. It seems nauseatingly self-indulgent to celebrate Taylor Swift level excess in stereo from stadium to stadium across the globe. But then an album like Desire, I Want To Turn Into You and maybe for five goddamn minutes it’s possible to stop doomscrolling and just vibe. Every pop album is really something else, and in Caroline Polachek’s case hers is tropical yacht trip hop; glorious melodies like the clouds swooping across an impossibly blue sky, subtle but wild rhythms, and songs that come on like late 90s/2000s radio pop before revealing their much more interesting agendas. Someone called her this generation’s Kate Bush, and that’s as accurate a description as your likely to find.

For a sub-sect of alt rock in the late 1980s – one that more or less got steamrolled in the mainstream world by Nirvana and the rise of grunge – shoegaze has proved to be surprisingly resilient. Older heads like My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Ride, and Drop Nineteens get outsized media play when they infrequently drop new albums, and newer acts like Parannoul and Hotline TNT get more scrutiny than you might otherwise think. Which is not to say they’re not deserving; it’s just funny that shoegaze, of all subgenres, is the one that continues to produce brilliant results year after year. After The Magic is the South Korean artist’s third album, fourth if you include 2021’s collab album Downfall Of The Neon Youth, which you should because it made it pretty high up on that year’s version of this list. This is the first time he’s really stepped out of his own shadow, though, and the results are thrilling: hazy blankets of early-90s wall of distortion guitars run through with blissed-out modern textures and a pounding rhythm section that will put your head right through the wall if you aren’t careful.

Marnie Stern blew onto the scene in the late Oughts with some of the most searing guitar chops to be heard in a world still struggling with grunge’s dour aversion to technical proficiency. They were Van Halen level skills in a world moved on from Van Halen, but the way she married them to angular, weird indie kid songwriting made them suddenly cool and acceptable. Just as quickly she was gone, starting a family and taking a stable gig in the house band on Late Night With Seth Meyers. That ten year job ended last year and she returned in 2023 with an appropriately titled comeback album. It’s like the last decade never happened; suddenly it’s 2008 again, I’m sitting in a dingy apartment in Parkdale listening to the fleet fingers of a guitarist out of time but still somehow firmly anchored into the zeitgeist. The next time some aging late Boomer hair metal dork tells you no one can play guitar anymore, just slap them with a copy of this.

Over a series of moody, jazzy backing tracks, Memphis MC Lukah explores the horror of being black in America, drawing a line back to the minstrel shows and more overt racism of the early 20th Century to examine why nothing has ever really changed. It continues to astonish me how slept on Lukah is considering the raw talent on display track after track. He tells stories as well as Nas ever did, keeps the concept of his album grounded and coherent (especially with the Al Lewis clips woven throughout), and has a flow that equals if not betters guys like J. Cole. And yet: less than 10,000 plays on each of the songs on this album. Guess that’s why his bio calls him the ‘orator of the fringe.’

A Black Mountain side project that has taken on a life of its own, Lightning Dust dials art rock back to the Eighties and conjures up the spectre of Kate Bush, the Eurythmics, and 80s-era Heart. Like the White Stripes, the band is driven by a broken up couple existing uneasily within the structural confines of their musical project. Unlike the White Stripes, this isn’t the vanity ego project of an overwhelming personality – it’s a band, and they come together as one. You know all those moments of frisson that you get in old synth rock songs? Lightning Dust is built out of seemingly nothing but. It’s music to be played on humid summer nights, loudly, with the heat lightning flashing across the sky and someone to fall in love with next to you.

Manday, Indiana trade in music as disruption. On the surface it seems incoherent to the point of being some sort of intellectual satire. Burnt, melted dance punk fused with film soundtracks ranging from B-movie horror scores to Vangelis and Morricone. English post-punk guitars making post-industrial clang over warped VHS tape noises. Music that exhorts you to dance as awkwardly as you can while the singer channels French political firestorms. Maybe it is satire on one level, but it also works on a more visceral one. It’s uneasy, ultra-modern, and you can dance to it – what more do you need?

Like many, I’ve made my peace with disco. The anti-disco “Disco Sucks” movement was a backlash against the popularity of black-led musical forms in the Seventies, and it wasn’t until the English co-opted black house music into rave that anyone in mainstream North America started being okay with high energy dance music. Anyway, Jessie Ware: further proof that disco actually rules. Of course, it helps that she understands that disco was always just soul on cocaine anyway.

When summer is over, the light of the world grows dimmer. Night falls sooner, the cold creeps in faster, black cats and other assorted creatures walk the streets in shadow, avoiding the failing glow of the streetlights. Acts Of Light is ironically music made to soundtrack this exactly. To call it Halloween music is to do it an injustice; rather, it embraces the darkness of autumn dying into winter in the exact same way that Norwegian black metal did, without all the bullshit. Instead, groaning cello, double bass, and sounds played with in dark basements, on nights when even the moon is afraid to show its face.

Cartwheel exists in the middle of shoegaze and dream pop, consisting of twelve songs that have hard, savory cores of heavy guitar and edges that are gooey and then gossamer right at the end. There are a lot of bands that do this, of course. The secret to Hotline TNT is frontman Will Anderson’s ability to meld his heart into the middle of it, and wrap it in gorgeous melody lines that are as catchy as they are painful. His self-effacing lines about heartbreak would, in a much quieter band, have landed him in a midwestern American Football style emo setting. Here, though, the haze of the wall of sound guitars ascend the album into the clouds.

The four weighty slabs of somber twilight avant jazz that make up Travel, the Australian band’s 17th album, seem to speak to the exhaustion of the world, its unease, and ultimately the beauty that can be found within it. Largely improvised, its spontaneity offers proof of the creative spark wrought by human beings creating collaboratively. Let’s see a machine do that.

London Brew – a Who’s Who of London jazz musicians including Theon Cross, Nubya Garcia, Tom Skinner, Dave Okumu, and Shabaka Hutchings – originally came together as a group to do a series of concerts celebrating the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis‘ seminal Bitches Brew record. COVID got in the way of that and instead, in December of 2020, they gathered in a studio to jam out for days on improvisational work inspired by the album. The result is an hour and a half of thrilling, psych-tinged jazz that blasts off to explore the outer regions of music, while retaining just enough familiar trappings (like Hutchings’ one-note fury blasts) to remind you of who is on the other end of the listening experience.

A tale as old as time: a guy struggles his whole life in poverty, pursues his dream relentlessly, finally achieves success and the money that comes with it. Realizes that success and money don’t banish the demons, falls into addictions, spends all his money, comes out the other side broke and unhappy. Danny Brown is one of the lucky ones to have survived that: recently sober and 40, he made Quaranta as a somber reminder of that luck, and all of the problems that nearly took him out. The comparison to his breakthrough album XXX, recorded at 30, is obvious, and one makes himself. It’s not as high-energy as some of his previous work, or even his other work in 2023, but it reveals deep truths upon repeated listens. It’s one to ponder on, rather than to get fucked up to, and given the circumstances of its recording that makes a great deal of sense.

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