Variables is two albums in one. One album is a swingin’ jazzed-out affair, full of quicksilver rhythms and twisting post-bop inspired lines. The other album is a soulful hip hop record with a live jazz band, like an English Roots. It’s hard to say which is the better album. Perhaps they are both carefully balanced. Either way, you get the best of both worlds on here. Artists from the UK like Little Simz have been injecting the London jazz scene directly into their work for a while now; Alfa Mist is the perfect crossover between the two, capable of producing searing jazz numbers and bars.

Philly legend Black Thought goes exploring his own inner ocean, with punchy soul group El Michels Affair providing a smooth, smoky backing for his musings. HipHopDX called it a one-man show, the stage kind, and the more I listen to this record the more I think that’s exactly what it is: One Night with Black Thought. Each track is its own story, mostly about growing up in Point Breeze, in southern Philadelphia, and the breezy, neon-soaked noir that El Michels Affair conjure up provides the perfect soundtrack to them.

Being a doom metal band is a hard line to walk. On one hand, you have to be grim and ominous, because you’re playing walloping Sabbath riffs that are either causing stoners to headbang or summoning mid-tier demons from the stinking pits of Hell. On the other, you are playing walloping Sabbath riffs, an inherently ridiculous thing to do when you think about how many other bands are playing walloping Sabbath riffs. Go too far in one direction and your interviews start to sound like mid-90s WTF Morbid Angel encounters. Go too far in the other direction and you’re a Sleep-influenced Simpsons novelty band. England’s Pigs x7 walk the line perfectly, because they don’t take themselves overly seriously, but they also deliver the goods in a serious way. One of the finest stoner doom records in years. Also, it has to be said: the album cover describes the band’s music exactly.

You are, by now, probably aware of the Dessner twins, Bryce and Aaron. They are the musical engine behind The National (well, don’t sleep on Bryan Devendorf) as well as apparently industry besties with Taylor Swift, to the point where their fingerprints are all over Evermore and Folklore. Were you aware, however, that they have a sister? That would be Jessica Dessner, poet, dancer, and multimedia artist, one half of Complete Mountain Almanac. The other half – honestly, the more important half – is Norwegian composer Rebekka Karijord, whose voice gives life to the sturdy neo-folk compositions underneath and imbues them with a clear-eyed, reflective light. The album itself is a concept, one song for each month in the year, a metaphor for climate change filtered through Jessica’s battle with cancer. Aaron and Bryce play guitar and arrange some strings. I guess you could call it a supergroup, although that phrase tends to shove acts in a drawer when they might otherwise breathe freely. Complete Mountain Almanac is an album that deserves to breathe freely, shivering in the cold morning light.

A quieter year for English post-post punk after the blockbuster years of 2021 and 2022, but there were still several treasures to dig up and cherish. Living Human Treasure is a searing debut, bleak and abrasive, with a grim jauntiness like The Fall with a switchblade. Many of their contemporaries switch it up by displaying jazz or prog influences; Italia 90 go the opposite direction, laying out slab after slab of rough-cut concrete that borders on industrial at times. All the fury of an Idles, with a better sense of how to move.

Jason Dungan has a custom-built 48-string zither and he’s here to use it in the service of sending you on a journey wandering into the pastoral unknown. He made it while in a cabin in the Swedish woods, during a time where he was either making music or walking the dog. It sounds exactly like that, too: gentle ambient drone-jazz, waterfalls of zither notes with the hint of a clarinet here and there, the subtle breaking of a drum loop over the surface before it’s gone again, quick as anything. Sounds gather, converse, and recede, leaving you to watch the lowering of the sun on your own.

The term ‘anti-folk‘ has fallen out of style over the years, but I’m hard-pressed to find a more apt description for former Youth Poet Laureate of the U.S. Kara Jackson. These are not sweet folk songs. They do not revel in lush ambiance nor do they take a hushed, reverent tone. They are barbed, taking aim at her relationships and herself. Although her reflections on herself come around with her accepting herself (“I’m pretty top-notch” she says of herself at one point) her musings on love and grief are more downbeat, with the latter being skewed by capitalism. She is, of course, utterly correct on this score.

London’s HMLTD put out their first record, West Of Eden, a mere month before the plague swept over the world. It was a stylish, unabashedly queer record full of bile aimed at the downfall of humanity (timely). Fittingly, their second album is a prog-inflected concept album about a worm come to swallow England, in itself a metaphor for battling depression. Beyond the concept, the band stretches its legs and gets weird with it, melding black midi-esque prog-jazz freakouts with sweeping string sections to make an odd, medieval mutation of the sound they brought out the first time around. It’s strikingly theatrical, surreal, and surprisingly funny in places.

David Yow hopped up on stimulants and screamingly horny: it’s not a perfect description of NYC’s Model/Actriz, but it’s damn close. After all, when Cole Haden moans about having a body count higher than a mosquito, things start to perk up. Things start to go red. That’s basically the album: Haden screams erotically, the band clatters and bashes everything in sight (‘everything is a drum’ bassist Aaron Shapiro once said), and you can feel the gay energy dripping off of everything. It’s basically like that moment in the club when the lights drop down to nothing and you suddenly realize you don’t know any of the people around you

Shimmering C-86 inspired pop songs about sad-sack losers, bands on the verge of breaking up, record labels going belly up. Glenn Donaldson is the patron saint of minor league frontmen and small town impresarios; you can practically feel the dreams running between your fingers between the notes of every track. Imagine Paul Westerfield or Craig Finn fronting the Wedding Present and you wouldn’t be too far off.

The Chicago institution known as Wilco have been self-producing since 2009’s Wilco (The Album) and while it’s consistently worked for them, there has been an ongoing sense of settling over the past decade and a half. It’s not as though the albums were ever bad, or even mediocre; the band has always had good output, but they’ve never really lived up to 2002’s highwater mark Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. For Cousin, Wilco brought in an outside producer – no less than Cate Le Bon. The results are a serious step up. That sense of freewheeling experimentation that permeated the early Oughts has returned, and while it still doesn’t live up to the album so nice Warner bought it twice, it’s certainly the best thing they’ve done since, including more recent gems like Schmilco and Star Wars. It’s amazing what a little collaboration can do for a band that might otherwise seem stuck in an eternal high gear.

Terrace Martin had a very busy 2023, and the peak of his prolific solo powers is the adventurous Curly. Named after his father, Omaha jazz drummer Curly Martin, it embodies the lesson he always taught to his budding musician son: You can be as technically proficient as you wish, but it won’t connect with people without soul and groove. Or, as others have put it: it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. Martin piles this lesson on to the slinky grooves that underpin the knotted lines of sax and piano he and others blow throughout, making the earth move always even as the mind freaks out. There’s a lot of killer jazz to unpack here, but the reimagining of Kendrick’s “How Much A Dollar Cost?” – which Martin had a hand in producing the first time around – is worth the price of admission all on its own.

Michael Gira and Co. return for the first time since 2019’s leaving meaning, bringing with them a creeping, crawling record of unsettling ambience recorded, like so many albums of the last couple of years, in the middle of lockdown. Like that album, it’s indirectly comparable to their 1989 album The Burning World, their first and only major label release. It’s a dense, droning form of Americana, the sort of music you’d imagine soundtracking the travels of characters in McCarthy’s horror books. It departs somewhat from leaving meaning by simply getting weirder with it, like on the more open-handed “No More Of This”, or on the suffocating 44 minutes of “The Beggar Lover (Three).” It’s amazing that a band as old as Swans – it’s always fun to remember that they were contemporaries of Sonic Youth‘s no wave era – can continue to put out release after crushingly beautiful release.

I grew up near London, Ontario (home of the oldest continuously used baseball grounds in the world) where we once upon a time had a minor league farm team for the Detroit Tigers. I am keenly aware of the environmental destruction wrought by human civilization. Imagine my delight, then, with “3800 Tigers”, which combines depressing tiger facts with a reference to Tigers legend Sweet Lou Whitaker, the “eat ’em up Tigers” chant, and an admonishment to beat the Sox. The rest of the album works for me as well, combining rough-textured guitar, starkly vulnerable vocals, and one of the most underrated drummers in the business in Alex Leonard. Post punk with a pulse.

Country music is at its best when it documents The Struggle. That’s why Same Trailer Different Park is great and Can’t Say I Ain’t Country is trash. Stuff your blue jeans and your dirt roads and your Busch where the sun don’t shine. Lydia Loveless knows The Struggle. She started writing the album in North Carolina and finished it in Columbus, Ohio, on the other end of a breakup and (there it is again) the loneliness that comes out of the pandemic. Loveless is no stranger to these kinds of things, of course – she began 2020’s “September” with the line “Happy birthday, make a wish / I know this isn’t really how you want to celebrate it / Withdrawl shits and gun fights on the lawn.” On previous songs, though, she always seemed like she was along for the ride, and now she’s working to make it through once the ride is over. This time around it’s more “I’m getting older and my jets are starting to cool / If I ever get sober it’s really over for you fools.” It’s a fine collection of country songwriting from a writer who only gets more barbed as she ages.

Hip hop turns fifty this decade and at some point in the nebulous past it had its teeth pulled. Once upon a time it was a dangerous cultural milieu that garnered FBI attention and felt like a freedom movement across the globe. Now its chart-topping mainstream music, the only thing you see next to pop on Billboard or at the Grammys, and it’s all the same thing. Hedonism, consumerism, norm-setting verses and sing-song choruses. Some noname MC named Kyprios once asked “When did hip hop become hypocrisy?” My snappy comeback to that was always “1995” – the year hip hop first took off on it’s extended Versace vacation – but really it was baked in from the start. After all, what was Grandmaster Flash ripping when he wasn’t performing “White Lines (Don’t Do It)“? Anyway, Noname. She’s loud, opinionated, incapable of holding back, unwilling to do anything more than double down when she’s made a mistake. She’s brilliant, but volatile. Unlike a lot of MCs, though, she’s no hypocrite: she calls everyone else out, but she doesn’t exclude herself. Imagine Dear White People as an MC.

On “Shiver’, the deconstructed remnants of a pop anthem, Swedish artist Karin Dreijer declares “I just want to be touched / I just want to shiver.” It’s the central idea of the album: the need for contact, for love. They’re on a search for meaning, and they’ve discovered one of the core truths of the human experience: meaning cannot be found outside of a shared context. You need to be able to communicate meaning for it to be meaningful. They are, in other words, on dating sites. This is a declaration of erotic intent in one fashion, which is no surprise in the context of their Fever Ray project. On the other hand, it’s more than queer expressions of bodies and language; they quote Corinthians at one point, the line “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.” Love gives meaning to the word; without love, the Word is merely duckspeak. Underpinning all of that are the songs themselves: warmer and more physically gripping than the Euro club deconstruction of The Knife, their classic collaboration with their brother Olaf Dreijer. This, despite a Knife reunion on the album’s first four tracks; their collaboration here brings that dizzying dichotomy of familiar/unfamiliar. The most notable track, though, may be the caustic doom-laden synth-punk “Even It Out”, which brings Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross in to layer a sufficiently post-industrial clang.

Indigo De Souza’s music has always been sort of preoccupied with death, so it’s not really a surprise to hear her lead of this album with the line “I feel like I’m leaving myself behind.” The surprise here is that maybe she’s not really referencing death here after all, or if she is it’s at an oblique angle. It’s an album about going through a period of loss and loneliness and emerging newly formed out of the remains of your chrysalis, stronger and wiser. Old friendships that have changed or that you’ve moved on from; the realization that the world you live in is fundamentally terrible and you don’t have any way of changing it; shedding old, toxic parts of yourself to try to be a better person, or at least a person you can live with.

The L.A. duo of Louis Pastel and Felix epitomize, at least in this uncertain year of 2023, punk rock ethos in hip hop. It’s all rough cut samples, punky synth lines, brash lines that straddle the gap between being deadass serious and trying to make each other laugh. They’re DIY rap nerds who cut their teeth doing shows at guerilla art shows and are fans of noisy pop weirdo King Krule. They offer a fresh take from mainstream hip hop, which has been stuck in a rut for years now, and the usual cast of underground weirdos like Death Grips, Brockhampton, and Injury Reserve.

Call it Uneasy Rider; the Wand frontman’s latest solo record is a ripping classic rock affair on the surface but underneath is none of the girls ‘n’ guitars superficiality of those old Zeppelin-chasing masters. It’s a complete 180 from his last album, 2021’s gentle, though dark Pale Horse Rider. It’s like Hanson decided to explore Neil Young’s classics from both sides, first the hippy-dippy side and then the Zuma-style riffage that appears throughout Western Cum. That heavy riff work is leavened with a lot of classic alt-country as well – Gram Parsons, the zippier side of the Eagles – making for a psychedelic head trip album that doesn’t let up until you arrive at your destination.

Occupying the midpoint between the Manic Street Preachers and Bruce Springsteen, Australia’s RVG make songs for modern life, whether that modern life includes decaying relationships, the absurdity of having to attend a virtual funeral in the pandemic era, or losing your mind to political conspiracy memes and not being able to ever get it back. They are an evocative group with smart pop sensibilities – watch for them.

The Scottish folkie and the Cardigans singer team up to create one of the best folk pop records in recent memory, combining gentle textures with natural settings and fly-trap melodies. It balances the painful and the pastoral quite well, with Persson’s vocals adding a sweet, unforced counterpoint to Yorkston’s rich voice. After the turmoil of the past several years, it was nice to find this in January, bobbing winsomely in the stream as it were, ready to put on and relax your muscles to.

Ten years ago, English producer Matthew Barnes released the seminal Engravings, an album that was recorded in between bouts of hearing problems. It was the watchword for surreal dreamy atmosphere in electronic music, and if it’s follow-up, 2017’s Compassion, didn’t land in quite the same way, it was only by comparison. The years between that album and his third, Bolted, have been filled with work in other mediums: ballet, video games, film. The return to the Forest Swords project is welcome, and it feels as though the time off was definitely well-spent. The atmosphere is tenser, the samples like snippets from some half-remembered dream. The percussion hits heavier than ever. It was recorded in a factory, so the surroundings are likely taken into account there, but like Engravings it was also recorded around instances of pain. This time, he’d damaged his leg, and the injury and subsequent treatment put him in “psychedelic amounts of pain”, as he’s put it in interviews. Whatever: if my dude needs to fall down the stairs to make a masterpiece, who am I to judge?

A massive two-and-a-half hour slab of glitch, weird samples, drum blasts, and pure atmosphere. Bridging the admittedly wide gap between neoclassical pomp and drugged-out savage breakcore, Katsuhiko Maeda throws in not just the kitchen sink but the entire kitchen, and a good part of the dining room as well. This maximalist approach to sound-making won’t appeal to everyone – Fantano infamously gave the album a 1 – but if you’re into wildly experimental craft that streaks across genres like a race car across the salt flats, Resistance & The Blessing is right there beside you.

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