2023 Halfway House — my top 200 albums of 2023 so far (Part 2)
Time for the next batch of albums to get their spot in the sun, as I continue my roundup of my top 200 albums of 2023, January to June. Monday’s instalment took us from 200 all up to number 101, and today we’ll explore the following 50 in a little more depth. Off we pop!
100: We Are Still Wild Horses (MF Tomlinson)
Australia-born London-based alt-country singer MF Tomlinson delivers his second full-length album, and it is a stunningly crafted one. The pacing of the album alone is worth a mention — four tracks, each increasingly longer than the last and culminating in the sprawling and exploratory 21-minute title track. But it’s not just the track lengths that make this album special, but what Tomlinson packs into them, and as the album progresses, Tomlinson goes from looking outwards to deep, sometimes uncomfortable introspection. That the album was written over a pandemic winter was no surprise — for all the lap-steel twangs and steady drums, the album manages to feel vast and liminal. Truly a journey.
Favourite track: the title track is a stunner, but the previous track (the celebration of unity and community that is ‘End of the Road’) takes the cake for me.
99: Life Under the Gun (Militarie Gun)
Melodic hardcore that doesn’t sacrifice its scrappy chutzpah, Militarie Gun’s debut full-length is a quick thing — 12 songs are over in under half an hour, with four of the tracks not even scratching 2 minutes — but a constantly enjoyable one. An astute eye for the world around him lends Ian Shelton a finger-on-the-pulse immediacy as a frontman and lyricist, even as his vocals tend to push the shouted end of the singing spectrum. Coupled with the band’s tight ensemble and Shelton’s knack for simple but non-standard production (multiple songs begin with a lone guitar panned completely to one side), you’re left with a genre-bending and fiercely unforgettable record from an increasingly unmissable group in their field.
Favourite track: ‘My Friends Are Having A Hard Time’, a rage-filled lament to just not being able to help.
98: PORTALS (Melanie Martinez)
PORTALS has ended up being a divisive album — though how much of the criticism levied at the album is really intended to be directed at its creator after 2017’s long-contentious allegations is hard to filter. Martinez’ music has always been delivered through a level of dissociation by use of the Cry Baby character — but here, PORTALS sees Cry Baby die in the first track, transfiguring into an almost mythological, spiritual persona for the rest of the album. The album’s lyrics are obtuse and crude at times, the production over-the-top in its use of vocal processing, sound effects and sequenced synths and drums, but it is perhaps the clearest crystallisation of Martinez’ brand of pop to date.
Favourite track: album opener and lead single ‘DEATH’ is in many ways the perfect summation of the whole project.
97: Every Acre (H.C. McEntire)
Each year there tends to be one country project that represents for me the perfect distillation of the best aspect of the genre, without any gimmick or asterisk to accompany it. This year, that album very well may be Every Acre, the third solo record from Mount Moriah vocalist H.C. McEntire. An almost archetypal country voice and a quietly-but-never-annoyingly intellectual lyrical style, McEntire sculpts beguiling vistas from the most universal of themes — love, loss, the land — with an assured pen and a fluid melodic touch. It’s a fairly restrained album sonically, but the understated production and quality songwriting leave it feeling as open and expansive as the title might suggest.
Favourite track: ‘Turpentine’, the tender duet to the passing of time with Georgia folk stalwart Amy Ray.
96: Get Up Sequences Part 2 (The Go! Team)
British indie outfit The Go! Team deliver one of the strongest showings of their polystylistic sound to date with the sequel to their 2021 album. From the (frustratingly-uncredited) Star Feminine Band feature on the opening track through to the album’s breezy closer, the group fuse psychadelic rock, funk, soul and more into one cohesive whole. Every track proves to be as catchy as the last — seriously, I’ve had motifs from this album pop up unwarranted in my brain for MONTHS now — and Ian Parton’s ever-growing roster of instrumentalists are a fitting counterpart to Ninja’s ever-charismatic vocal delivery. What results is one of the year’s most relentlessly upbeat and smile-inducing projects.
Favourite track: As mentioned above, there are lines from every song that refuse to leave my mind — but if I had to pick just one, ‘Stay and Ask Me In A Different Way’ makes me grin the widest.
95: MERCY (John Cale)
55 years after leaving the Velvet Underground, John Cale’s 17th solo album proves he’s not quite done waving the flag at the experimental end of the rock landscape. MERCY is at first a truly disconcerting listen — Cale’s voice is rarely heard clearly, layered and re-layered amid washes of reverb and dense, heavy-set electronic textures, while the lyrics often focus on the past and present with an anxiously pessimistic outlook. And yet, not once does the album ever drown you, even at the tail-end of its 71-minute runtime. Bleak though the album can sometimes be, it is refreshing to hear a musical great still pushing the envelope so long into his career, and so successfully at that.
Favourite track: ‘MOONSTRUCK (Nico’s Song)’ finds the album at the most touching and warm — though the Weyes Blood collab ‘STORY OF BLOOD’ may prove a marginally easier way in for some listeners.
94: 春遊 [Chun you] (Leah Dou)
Chinese singer, songwriter and producer Leah Dou grew up at a crossroads between Cantopop and Mandopop, thanks to famous parents Dou Wei and Faye Wong — but her time studying at Berklee brought with it a healthy dose of soul and alternative that helped define her style as she started to make music of her own. Chūn yóu, her first album recorded in Mandarin rather than English, is a delightfully refreshing take on Mandopop thanks to that fusional approach to genre — Dou’s casual vocal delivery and jazzy harmonies pair wonderfully with the detailed RnB-tinged production that encapsulates both lo-fi, down-tempo bedroom pop and more off-kilter, experimental dance moments.
Favourite track: ‘狗熊’ [Gǒuxióng] is the album at perhaps its quirkiest, but something about this plodding, over-saturated musing on the weight of life keeps me coming back.
93: Good Riddance (Gracie Abrams)
Aaron Dessner’s fingerprints are all over Good Riddance. There’s nothing to be done about it, chunks of this album sound like Taylor’s folklore/evermore dualogy, that’s just how things like this work. With that out the way, it’s great to see Gracie Abrams’ songwriting mature so much from her debut EP. With the tracks looking further inwards, Abrams is able to coax out simple but effortlessly sympathetic narratives that succeed in communicating their emotional heart with no ostentation. The singing is whispery and fragile, but Abrams’ voice carries enough strength to highlight the crucial moments of her songs with an honesty that is difficult not to find yourself affected by. Some may write it off as ‘sad girl starter pack’ fodder, but it does what it sets out to do with grace and skill.
Favourite track: I wasn’t expecting ‘Amelie’ to enter my regular Spotify rotation in the way that it has, but the tale of an all-consuming youthful crush (that could stand for so much more) is beautiful and heartbreaking in the right balance.
92: MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO (KAROL G)
Karol G’s star continues to shine brightly as she releases her best collection of songs to date in MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO. Branching out from the strictures of reggaeton to bring in influences from pasillo, banda, dembow, pop-rock and house, La Bichota’s post-breakup bops never feel stale despite the formidable 17-song-long tracklist. The features on this album are many and varied — Sean Paul, Shakira, Carla Morrison, Romeo Santos and more all make an appearance — but it firmly remains Karol G’s show throughout, as her nimble voice weaves through the eclectic sounds she’s pulled together. Some of the tracks may be laced with venom from an emotional wound not yet closed, but the optimism in the title isn’t misplaced as Karol looks ahead both sonically and narrative to her future.
Favourite track: The Shakira pair-up ‘TQG’, an ultimate middle-fingers-up bop directed squarely at your ex.
91: Space Heavy (King Krule)
Archy Marshall returns with his fifth full-length album, and the fourth under the King Krule moniker, and it’s a solid continuation of everything that makes the project such an interesting one. His expected overbearing darkness lingers in every song, bleeding into the text and manifesting musically through bleary-eyed, unfocussed instrumentals and Marshall’s idiosyncratic drawl. But Marshall is a father now, things have changed; the endless relentless ennui of it all is tempered ever so slightly by an optimism left over from 2020’s Man Alive that isn’t quite ready to sign off yet. It’s still sombre and sludgy and dragging its satchel through the mud, but then again, it’s what Marshall does best.
Favourite track: ‘Tortoise of Independency’ ends up being a far more wholesome track than you’d ever expect, given its somewhat bizarre title.
90: Glorious Game (El Michels Affair & Black Thought)
Don’t hold me to this, but Black Thought just might be the best, or at least the most consistent, rapper working at the moment. During the Roots’ dry period, Tariq has embarked on a string of great solo releases, and this album, where he pairs up with Leon Michels’ eclectic soul project El Michels Affair, is one of the finest of the bunch. Over the smooth arrangements, many of which take as their basis samples of entire unreleased tracks penned by Michels, Black Thought’s incisive lyrical style (full of his trademark wordplay and deliberate, intricate penmanship) is allowed to unfurl in long, meandering verses, as he delivers broad-reaching and yet deeply personal narratives in every track
Favourite track: The tribute to Black Thought’s wife Michelle in ‘That Girl’ features not just great lyricism but some of the album’s grooviest backing tracks too.
89: A New Tomorrow (Zulu)
Los Angeles powerviolence outfit Zulu bring a swelteringly fierce debut album here, after two brilliant EPs. Sonically drawing from the history of Black musical artists across multiple genres, the group self-produced the raucous, defiant record, whose 15 tracks are over in only 28 minutes. The album’s themes are predominantly based around the notion of Black suffering — a notion that the group strongly refutes as the only way forward for accurate representation. The fetishistic writing-off of the Black community as a group without need of celebration is vehemently and repeatedly denied in every possible way — from guttural growls, courtesy of guitarist Anaiah Lei and drummer Christine Cadette, to the album’s interlude, with its layered spoken collage of “Must I only share my pain?”
Favourite track: The whole album rushes by so quickly, it’s hard to pick one from the others — but my favourite riff of the whole album is found in the gutsy bass of ‘Where I’m From’.
88: Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays The Beatles (Brad Mehldau)
Brad Mehldau will be a familiar name to many jazz-heads — both for his work with Joshua Redman and his solo/self-named trio releases since the mid-90s. One of Mehldau’s strongest suits is adapting popular rock and pop songs into his recognisably fingery and harmonically expansive style — Radiohead is a favourite of his — and here we see his skills as an arranger on full display with 10 Beatles tracks (and one Bowie bonus for good measure), performed as a single live set. His insight in deconstructing the composition of the classic songs allows him to emphasise architectural elements of them that might otherwise go unnoticed by the listener, and his fluency within his style results in a cover album as imaginative and engrossing as any of Mehldau’s others.
Favourite track: his 8-minute explosion of ‘Golden Slumbers’, a gorgeous but over-too-soon component of the Abbey Road side 2 medley, perfectly capitalises on the original’s tenderness and heart.
87: End of Everything (Mega Bog)
If this is the soundtrack of the apocalypse, it might not be as bad as we first thought. All jokes aside, Mega Bog’s seventh project is an alt-pop tour de force, even as her florid lyrical style of previous projects has been ground down into something much more plain-talking and unambiguous. The album’s overarching theme of the end of the world seems to bring out the dazed, confused and generally wary in Erin Birgy’s songwriting, but what hasn’t changed is her astute ear for coaxing the alien and ambiguous from within the most cliché of pop sounds — synth pads, acoustic guitars, a gently-ticking drum-and-cymbal — bringing to mind the great avant-pop chanteuses of the 80s with a distinctly 21st-Century nihilism.
Favourite track: the desperation seeping through the “It’s only downhill from here” attitude of ‘Don’t Doom Me, Now’ best captures the album’s oh-so-catchy take on weltangst.
86: All of This Will End (Indigo de Souza)
Another somewhat fatalistic record (but one that seems to be more at peace with the whole notion), Indigo de Souza’s third record realises the stadium-sized sound that’s been lurking under the surface of her music since the beginning. Pandemic slowdown, and the departure of her bandmates, led to a creative upheaval that saw the bedroom folktronica of her first two albums morph into a fuller-bodied, dream/psych-pop canvas that seems to stretch out further than before. The lyrics are sometimes achingly elusive, other times darkly comedic in how blunt and unapologetic they get — but the entire album is tied together by an aching sense of emotional reckoning that targets both de Souza’s self-opinion and those of the people and places that formed her.
Favourite track: Album opener ‘Time Back’ (and specifically its first half) is one of the most gorgeous minutes of music I’ve heard in ages, but the sheer catharsis of ‘Not My Body’ is inescapable.
85: Cuts and Bruises (Inhaler)
Ireland’s Inhaler have had an almost viral rise to fame, with their second album Cuts and Bruises carrying with it a not-insignificant amount of hype, and so it’s pleasing to report that it’s an album that deserves the attention. Perhaps it finds itself a little less punchy and immediately gratifying than the group’s first record, but that only indicates a development, a maturation for the band in the intervening years. Inhaler’s sound is comfortably indie rock, but it’s done well — and rather pleasingly Cuts and Bruises puts some distance between the band and the listener, as the lyrics have become a little headier, the sound a little noisier than the debut. Add to that Elijah Hewson, inheriting all the strongest attributes of his dad’s unmistakable croon, and you have a recipe for success.
Favourite track: ‘Valentine’, with its propulsive rhythm, might just be one of the best understated love songs of the year.
84: Under an Endless Sky (Dorothy Moskowitz & The United States of Alchemy)
The United States of America only released one album together in 1968, but that release quickly became a cornerstone of the burgeoning field of electronic rock. Fast forward to today, and the band’s vocalist Dorothy Moskowitz unites with Italians Francesco Paolo Paladino and Luca Ferrari for a new project under a similar name. And it’s in many ways apt — much of the same electronic experimentation that characterised the ’60s release is replicated here, taking the developments in alternative and synthesised music in the intervening decades into account, and Moskowitz’ unmistakeable reedy tone blends seamlessly with the sometimes-soft, often-harsh, never-boring electronic timbres that accompany it.
Favourite track: the second part of ‘Cut the Roots’, which feels like a dizzying field recording of some unknown fantastical temple.
83: UGLY (slowthai)
The hype surrounding the Northampton rapper’s best album to date was quickly muted following the sexual assault allegations that surfaced in May this year. It admittedly makes re-listening to the angry, noisy album a more unsettling experience than first hearing it upon its immediate release, but the sharp alt-rock palette crafted by producer Dan Carey still carries a lot of the album’s impact well. The bitterness and rageful frenzy on the record is balanced out at points with occasional nods to self-acceptance and even the odd moment of calm — but overall UGLY is perfectly happy to live up to its title’s surface meaning, as it blusters through the sexual frenzy and aggressive presentation that characterises slowthai’s persona. It’s still an arresting listen, even if now an deeply uncomfortable one.
Favourite track: ‘Sooner’ flips the angry nihilism of the album on its head, finding the lack of greater importance in life to be a freeing notion and offering a much-needed lighter point from the album.
82: Everything Harmony (The Lemon Twigs)
Longtime listeners of The Lemon Twigs will well know by now their fresh take on retro popular music, channelling not 80s synthpop nor classic hair metal but the jangly, reverbed world of 60s and 70s folk-rock and glam. Everything Harmony, the duo’s fourth studio outing, is much of the same — and yet the D’Addario brothers’ efforts seem at their most concise and crafted. Previous records were marked by a couple of stand-out hits (or in the case of 2018’s Go to School, a mildly unhinged premise for a concept album), but here, all that the album needs to mark itself is wall-to-wall solid songwriting, leaning into but never ripping off nor parodising its stylistic routes, coupled with solid performances from both brothers.
Favourite track: It’s difficult to isolate any one song from this tracklist, but ‘Any Time Of Day’, with its heartfelt meditation on mortality and the human condition, and the baroque-pop lushness of ‘What Happens To A Heart’ are personal favourites.
81: Follow the Cyborg (Miss Grit)
Margaret Sohn’s debut takes as its point of origin the all-too-familiar sci-fi trope — the Asian automaton — and pushes it into a fascinating exploration of cultural identity and ‘otherness’ in an increasingly techno-dependent society. Margaret Sohn’s sound is alternative pop for the anxious mind — stuttering synths and crunchy textures over reverberant drum patterns and a mix that at once feels claustrophobic and infinitely expansive — and the self-produced album never once feels like an element of its complex, paranoid production is out of place. The songs unravel rather than progress neatly, developing ideas in a way that feels natural — a keen juxtaposition with the cybertheme that pervades the lyrics.
Favourite track: Lead single and title track ‘Follow the Cyborg’ is a perfect way into Sohn’s singular take on dance-pop, succinctly and catchily outlining the album’s core tenets.
80: The Reset (Macy Gray & The California Jet Club)
This album… was basically ignored by the press? And I’m not sure why? Macy Gray is one of RnB and soul’s most consistently high-quality artists (even if she has a habit of putting her foot in her mouth about certain issues), and ‘The Reset’ is another stunning addition to her long and impressive discography. Written in response to the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, and the COVID-19 pandemic, Gray’s first original release since 2018 finds her clamoring for societal upheaval in her iconic raspy tone — be it through provocative statements on police violence, racism, social inequality or just the death of national identity itself. But there is positivity and the power for healing woven through the record too — sex, dance and the power of love also abound.
Favourite track: Either the affronting plea for life in ‘Mr. Policeman’, or the ruthlessly infectious retro-funkiness of ‘The Disco Song’.
79: Strays (Margo Price)
Nashville chanteuse Margo Price’s fourth is a thorough and sincere reading of some of the big issues of the modern world — drugs, sex, alcohol, mental health, sexism and more. As always, her lyrical style perfectly treads the line between immediate impact and long-lasting, quotable bons mots, but here there seems an added sense of timeliness in parts, timelessness in others. Themes of memory, legacy and growth are common factors, no matter what specific topic Price is discussing in the song, and even as her sound veers further into Americana and retro rock territory, the heart behind the music is still fundamentally country. Strays very well may be Price’s best work yet — and certainly her most transcendental, personal, and universal.
Favourite track: The album’s two longest tracks, and also its most sombre, ‘Lydia’ and ‘Country Road’ are two aggressively unforgiving suckerpunches in the gut, and by god are they gorgeous.
78: The Hypnogogue (The Church)
Australia’s The Church have been going for over 40 years now, and they still find ways to push themselves. Case in point — ‘The Hypnogogue’ is the group’s first concept album, and they dive into it fully, dragging you along for the ride. A dystopian, Orwellian hell of mental experimentation forms the setting, as the group tracks the tale of a rock musician who falls in love with the mad scientist responsible for the titular device (a gadget which externalises all people’s thoughts as music). And while the story is a little ambiguous at points (to the album’s credit — nothing here feels like a mallet of exposition whacked over the head), it creates a thematic unity under which the band’s jangly guitars and psychadelic production form the sonic scaffold.
Favourite track: ‘I Think I Knew’ has an important role in the narrative of the album, but excised from it the track it still forms a poignant, if surreal, love song.
77: The Omnichord Real Book (Meshell Ndegeocello)
Neo-soul pioneer Meshell Ndegeocello’s 13th solo release is possibly her jazziest (the title pays testament to that) — but it is also so much more, as Ndegeocello also brings in ambient, funk, house, a cappella, and RnB into the mix. The resulting mix is quite unlike any other vision of post-RnB music out there, with the synth elements (including the titular Omnichord) integrating seamlessly in amongst the other instruments — including a whole jazz band in fragments, as well as Ndegeocello’s understandably first-rate bass-playing. The feature list is long, but used incredibly — the freestyle virtuosity of Ambrose Akinmusire on trumpet, or Cory Henry on keys, are just two of the noticeable names here — and only serve to compliment and further the album’s unparalleled projection of a new kind of jazz and soul.
Favourite track: another difficult one to pick a favourite from — but why not go with the 8:38-long ‘Virgo’, featuring harpist Brandee Younger and pianist Julius Rodriguez.
76: My Mind Wanders and Sometimes Leaves Completely (Lola Young)
Lola Young’s first big exposure may have come from the coveted John Lewis Christmas ad spot in 2021 (a veritable British institution at this point), but an admittedly pretty cover of ‘Together in Electric Dreams’ is not where her artistic identity really lay. Her more authentic, rough-around-the-edges sound, thick with her Estuary accent and emotionally vulnerable writing style, is a much more satisfying version of the artist, and it’s on full-display here on her full-length debut. Not pulling any punches against herself or her listeners, the album presents a raw and immediately recognisable portrait gallery of disenfranchised youth and their beautiful, uncomfortable everyday.
Favourite track: ‘Don’t Hate Me’, a not-quite-breakup-cos-we’re-not-really-going-out number, is Lola’s vocal highlight on the album — but I’m a sucker for good organs and hyperconfessional lyrics, and opener ‘Stream of Consciousness’ has them both in SPADES.
75: Good Lies (Overmono)
Welsh brothers Tom and Ed Russell come together for their debut full-length as Overmono, whose debut singles already garnered a significant reputation for inventive and surprising dance music. With the debut album, the pair craft an accessible-but-never-dull suite of songs that, unlike so many dance records at the moment, works cohesively as an album as well as a set of individual tracks. The vocal samples are processed pristinely (drawing from a wide range of pop and rap), the percussion is crisp, the harmonies are creative, and the pacing — MY GOD, the pacing of all these tracks is just perfect, everything building for just the right amount of time before reaching their inevitable releases at the perfect moment.
Favourite track: Lead single and 2021 post-lockdown summer bop ‘So U Kno’ is the album’s crowning achievement, choppy vocals and industrial percussion uniting in a minimalist masterwork.
74: Tête-à-tête (Ruth Anderson & Annea Lockwood)
Ruth Anderson and Annea Lockwood proved one of the most fascinating artistic pairings of the 20th and 21st centuries — a pair of kindred spirits artistically and emotionally. After Anderson’s passing in 2019, listening to this collection of two of her electronic works, paired with Lockwood’s recently-commissioned tribute to her, is a touching thing. As the album’s title might suggest, dialogue plays a central part in the works showcased — both Anderson’s ‘Conversations’ and Lockwood’s ‘For Ruth’ highlight recorded phone calls between the pair, set amongst sonic contexts that hold personal sentiment for the pair. And to start, the austere, minimalistic ‘Resolutions’ — a 17-minute a slowly-shifting, gradually-descending complex synth tone, and Anderson’s final completed electronic work — provides a contemplative opener to the whole thing.
Favourite track: All three works are stunning pieces of electronic music in their own ways, but ‘Conversations’ is clearly the heart of the album’s construction and sentiment.
73: I Play My Bass Loud (Gina Birch)
Gina Birch (bassist for the long-standing British post-punk outfit The Raincoats) goes it alone for the first time in her over-forty-year career, and perhaps the most surprising thing is just how much discontent she still is able to channel into her music. The riot grrrl icon vents her frustrations of the system and the people around her, whether she like them or not, in a brilliantly wry 11 tracks of righteous pissed-off-ness and vehement self-assurance. It doesn’t sound like a Raincoats project, mind you — the album is far too explorative, Birch too curious a songsmith, for it to stay still for too long — but that perhaps makes the cutting commentary dig a little deeper. There are drum machines and hyperpop vocals over here; a reggae beat over there; spoken-word, funk loops, and enough distorted guitars to serve as a nod to Birch’s long and luminous career.
Favourite track: ‘Big Mouth’ exploits all the disconcerting joys of contemporary vocal processing to gossip about herself en masse — it’s very silly, very weird and very fun.
72: Formal Growth in the Desert (Protomartyr)
Formal Growth in the Desert is a post-punk album, but you’d be forgiven for using any number of other genre-words to describe it. The Michigan four-piece’s typical blend of garage-rock and punk rock is still clear in Joe Casey’s vocal style, but the sound of the album has opened up more than before — shoegaze and dreampop are in attendance now, too, though when they make themselves known they form a backdrop to the crunchiest elements of the sound, rather than simply smoothing them out. It’s an album of contrasts, sometimes in the same song (as in the album’s admittedly weakest track, its opener), or sometimes paced out album-length — but Casey’s specific sense of time, place and thing, combined with the new sounds the band are incorporating, make this one of Protomartyr’s most intriguing records to date.
Favourite track: The Gertrude Stein-esque refrain of ‘Elimination Dances’ is a lyrical highlight, but best-in-show goes to ‘Graft vs. Host’, a crushing admittance of sheer numbness and one of the album’s most dark and melodic cuts.
71: Lonely House (Lucy Yeghiazaryan)
One of jazz’s richest voices working today (and honestly, one of my favourites of all time), Armenian-American Lucy Yeghiazaryan, backed skilfully by Michael Kanan on keys, brings together a concept album of covers, 11 tracks all focussed on that all-too-familiar pandemic feeling of isolation, loneliness, and wanderlust. Nothing on the track list ever really breaks a muted moderato — it comes with the style as much as it does the lyrical theme — but Yeghiazaryan’s voice is plenty dynamic enough to make up for it; her mellifluous tone brings out light and shade across the repertoire she’s chosen, resulting in a studied but enlightening interpretation of her setlist.
Favourite track: It’s 11 stunning covers of standards and classic songs — they’re all great — but if you really must have one, why not the Van Heusen/DeLange classic ‘Deep in a Dream’.
70: With A Hammer (Yaeji)
Yaeji has been such a consistent and noticeable figure on the experimental pop scene over the past seven years, it’s mad to think that With a Hammer is her first studio album proper (2020’s stellar WHAT WE DREW was a mixtape, apparently.). All the trademarks that make something particularly ‘Yaeji’ are here aplenty — the hushed, multilingual vocals, the detail-oriented productions, the pop sensibility dressed in leftfield house colours. But there’s something else that seems to form the skeleton of the album: a quiet, seething, expertly channeled rage, evident through the album’s title but bottled up and ever leaked out in the smallest of potent drops in any one go. It’s overall perhaps a slightly less dancefloor-ready project than Yaeji’s previous work, choosing to take a sparser route through some of the songs, but it’s no less groovy.
Favourite track: ‘I’ll Remember for Me, I’ll Remember for You’ reaches the widest by pulling in free jazz trumpet that becomes an uncanny third party in the track’s dreamy soundscape.
69: Western Cum (Cory Hanson)
The third solo release from Wand’s frontman is a weird one — an album with an inexplicably explicit title and a classic-rock sound that feels at odds with the sheer bizarro nature of the lyrics he ends up singing about. But that’s exactly what makes Western Cum so brilliant. Hanson is a disconcertingly gentle frontman for the album, which makes the swaggering instrumentals and absurd narratives that accompany him stand out all the more. Not that the lyrics are nonsensical — sometimes they can be deeply profound, or at the very least brilliantly imaginative — just that they’re not entirely ‘sensical’ either. You want a guitar solo? Sure, we’ll pop a five-and-a-half-minute one in the penultimate track cos we feel like it. Deal with it, and have a good time.
Favourite track: ‘Ghost Ship’. Yes, he did say balls. The cocaine was taped to the balls. Deal with it, and have a good time.
68: CACTI (Billy Nomates)
Here’s hoping that the Radio 3 douchedads’ response to Billy Nomates’ Glastonbury set isn’t how her 2023 is remembered, because CACTI is a remarkable album and the highest point in Tor Maries’ continually ascending discography. CACTI’s sound is perhaps the easiest of the three records— there’s more singing, here, and the productions tends to land a little on the more harmonious side — but none of Nomates’ lyrical obliqueness and scathing middle-fingers-up attitude is missing from the album’s most sardonic tracks. But with this blasé drollness, we get plenty of surprises — be it a brief foray into country or music-hall that throws the listener for a loop, or just a catchier-than-average synth line or sincere sad song to keep the listener second-guessing — that all serve to heighten the record’s charismatic post-punk charm.
Favourite track: Surprise honky-tonk piano on ‘same gun’ is one of the album’s most grin-inducing decisions, but ‘blue bones (deathwish)’ is the hit for a reason.
67: & The Charm (Avalon Emerson)
Avalon Emerson’s production work has gotten a lot of love in the past, be it her own DJ sets or avant-pop remixes of some of the left-field’s current greatest stars (her 6-minute rework of Robyn’s ‘Honey’ is a personal favourite) — and that love of all things pop has crossed over into her second full-length project. & The Charm isn’t trying to be to niche or heady — it’s 40 minutes of lush, ambient synth-pop, drawing from the soundworld of self-professed influence Cocteau Twins but with the ear for clear and layered mixing that garnered her such acclaim in her other work. But the familiarity is part of the schtick — the whole experience is meant to be nostalgic, giving you the feeling of those ‘guilty pleasure’ songs while bringing something crafted and considered.
Favourite track: ‘Karaoke Song’ is the album at its most meta and self-referential, and album opener and single ‘Sandrail Silhouette’ channels the 80s dream-pop vibe perfectly.
66: Odysseus (George Winstone, Ben Monder)
Saxophone and guitar isn’t the most popular duet formation in the jazz space, but just maybe it should be a little more so. The entirely extemporised album from British saxophonist George Winstone and American guitarist Ben Monder was only conceived of as an album long after the session in which it was recorded on the fly. But Winstone and Monder seem perfectly in sync across the album’s nine parts, even if a little post-recording track sequencing has helped shape the album into a convincing record. Monder’s guitar takes a more accompanimental role, built on drones and gently rhythmicised strumming, over which Winstone’s often-haunting, vibrant virtuosity is able to run free. The whole thing is intentionally a little distant, requiring some dedicated listening to really unpack, but that’s just the odyssey that Winstone envisaged the audience embarking upon.
Favourite track: this album is best enjoyed from top to tail, but particular highlights come in the vast, chasmic resonances of Part VI and the whirring, rousing final Part IX.
65: One Day (Fucked Up)
Fucked Up’s sixth studio release was something of an etude for the band — used to taking their time piecing together their records, One Day was, unsurprisingly enough, all recorded within a single day. It lends the album a sense of immediacy — a rough-and-tumble charm that only helps to further emphasis the underlying joie de vivre. The Canadian hardcore group excel in a brand of punk that pairs gutsy vocals, incisive lyrics, and a 60s’ jangle-pop approach to harmony and guitar-work, and One Day presents this fun, raucous and overall exciting sound seemingly concentrated to its essence. The speedy creation and upbeat mood doesn’t mean that the album isn’t still worldly-wise — Damien Abraham is a circumspect and down-to-earth kind of frontman, and Mike Haliechuk’s batch of lyrics are serious when they need to be — but those messages are bound up in the importance of using your time well (I see what they did there) and just loving the people closest to you a little more.
Favourite track: Album closers ‘Cicada’ and ‘Roar’ bring the heaviest emotions, while still leaving space for the band’s unwavering optimism.
64: Being (Baaba Maal)
Senegalese singer, guitarist, cultural ambassador and campaigner Baaba Maal is one of West Africa’s most important musical visionaries, and at 70 he continues to release excellent music with his fourteenth studio album Being. Typically lumped in with the wider nebulous genre of ‘worldbeat’, Maal’s combination of guitar music, pop, rock and folk tropes admittedly resists easy categorisation, and never more so than here, where the sound takes on a distinctly more electronic veneer. But this doesn’t come at the expense of the traditional instruments that form such a huge part of this tapestry of sound — sabar drums and the twang of the ngoni welcome us in the opening track, a keen reminder to look back as well as forward in this celebration of all that existence brings.
Favourite track: Lead single ‘Freak Out’ lives up to its title aptly, with a thumping bass, clattering omni-directional percussion and a wealth of vocal and instrumental timbres clamouring for prime position.
63: Radical Romantics (Fever Ray)
Karin Dreijer may be best known as one half of beaked Swedish electronic duo the Knife with brother Olof, but as a solo artist they let a stranger, more contorted and less forgiving side out. Radical Romantics, their third solo project under this moniker, takes as its starting concept love, but the depths it is plumbed to and the ways it is mutated make for startling listening. Whether it’s a parent’s love for their child that leads them to avenge all wrongs ever committed against them, or an all-consuming romantic passion, or just good old horny, Karin, aided by Olof and guest production spots from Nídia, Reznor/Ross et al., finds a way to make the whole thing sad, sexy, strange and supernal.
Favourite track: Dating-life dance-bop ‘Looking for a Ghost’ brings an upbeat, DIY-drumline sound to layers of chirruping noise, cycling loops of various synths, and one of Dreijer’s most charismatic vocal performances.
62: Elesa (Mze Shina)
Rennes-based Georgian music collective Mze Shina (named after a Georgian folk poem) have been performing and adapting traditional Caucasus voice-and-drum music (alongside other traditional musics from across Europe) for over 20 years. Their seventh album, and the first to be widely available on streaming, Elesa sees the group performing their core repertoire of Georgian folk music with panache. The fundamentals may be simple — nothing but voices, body percussion and goatskin drums — but the skill and dexterity of the lead singers (yodels and all), the perfectly-intoned vocal harmonies and the secure and vibrant rhythmic grooves laid down combine to form an explosive piece of cultural ambassadorship.
Favourite track: ‘Satchidao’ combines every aspect of the album’s (and the tradition’s) sound at its most fascinating — complex modal harmonies, pulsing drum beats and a quite frankly impressive set of caterwauling yodels that propel the second half of the track.
61: Bienvenue Au Pays (Robert Robert)
Québécois DJ and singer-songwriter Arthur Gaumont (aka Robert Robert) brings his endearing and off-kilter synth-pop to a new peak with his latest full-length release. Hyper it is not — the beats are more often than not steady and deliberate — but nonetheless, his background as a DJ afforts Gaumont a flexibility in his production style that leads to some truly interesting combinations of sounds. Part of his style feels almost accidental — the vocals can be so low-key they sound like he wandered into recording a song in the first place — but there’s also a quirky sense of exactitude at play, meaning the whole thing comes together into a convincing, if pleasantly hard-to-predict, whole.
Favourite track: ‘Alex’ is genuinely up there as one of the best songs of the year so far for me — the plonky piano is a great instrumentation choice, and the melody for this song is unfairly earwormy.
60: Live at Bush Hall (Black Country, New Road)
BC,NR were hit with the kind of shift that kills a lesser band where they stand, as frontman Isaac Wood departed the group four days before last year’s superlative ‘Ants From Up There’ was released. With Tyler, Lewis and May now splitting lead vocal duties, the sound and identity of the now-sixpiece was naturally going to undergo a shift, but with Live at Bush Hall any fears of a dip in quality are at the least abated. Comprising new material written after Isaac’s departure and recorded during a 2-day stint at iconic London indie venue Bush Hall, it’s a testament to the songwriting and performance skills of the group as a whole. The whole thing (album and concert film) feels overall tentative — it’s only been a year, after all — but it is a promising indication of the second phase of the band’s life.
Favourite song: the achingly self-disparaging not-quite-lovesong ‘Turbines/Pigs’, which serves as the nearly 10-minute-long centrepiece of the whole set.
59: 쉽게 쓴 이야기 [Journey] (Ahn Ye Eun)
Ahn Ye Eun has carved a different path through Korean popular music than many, choosing to focus on soft-jazz-infused, piano-and-voice songwriting, anchored by her strong and distinctive voice. Journey perhaps pushes this individual style to its furthest reaches, as the arrangements reach their most frenetic, the mood its most vaudeville, and the vocal lines their most agile and angular. But there also is a cinematic quality to the album that her previous records, on account of their dedication to the chamber-ensemble format, have missed — here, while the quietest passages still reduce to Ahn’s piercing mezzo-soprano and a keyboard, we also find strings and even the odd synth emphasising the most heightened emotional moments. It’s a bold and distinct project from one of Korea’s most interesting artists recording now.
Favourite song: Album opener ‘Heavy’ is a full-on jazz waltz with one of the most vocally athletic choruses I’ve heard in years, and Ahn’s characterful voice and the reliable instrumental playing help sell it perfectly.
58: PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation (King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard)
By this point last year King Gizzard had released two full-length projects and an EP, with 3 more still in the tank to come in October — so 2023 is turning out to be a slow year for them. Not to worry, though, because PetroDragonic Apocalypse has proven to be one of the group’s most fun and investing records in ages. Even if the band’s own view of the album’s theme may raise some eyebrows (Stu described the album as being in part “about witches and dragons and shit”), the music, which sees the band bring in a heavy metal flavour reminiscent of personal favourite Infest the Rats’ Nest, has a jam-band flavour that just seems to exude sheer glee in the fact it was even made. Is it a tad naff? Sure. Does it suffer for it? Not in the slightest.
Favourite Track: Ah, fuck it, let’s go for maximum crazy and choose ‘Dragon’, the closest thing the album has to a title track, with its 7/8 shredding and an offensively easy-to-remember chorus (any guesses as to the lyric?).
57: UNFORGIVEN (LE SSERAFIM)
LE SSERAFIM have been one of the most eagerly-followed K-pop acts following last year’s Fearless EP, and its followup Antifragile — but worry not if you missed them, three tracks from each form the first half of this year’s full-length debut, UNFORGIVEN. The five-piece girl group bring a fresh, sometimes experimental take on K-pop, wherein Latin rhythms can sit alongside techno-esque loops and … Nile Rodgers on guitar, apparently. Despite the piecemeal approach to the album’s tracklist, the first half of the album fits perfectly alongside the second thanks to the dreamy interlude ‘Burn the Bridge’, acting as a structural pivot for the album, and all five members of the group’s voices and personalities are on full show throughout. A promising debut and an inspiring take on the K-pop girl group formula.
Favourite track: Nowhere on the album do LE SSERAFIM push their sound further than on the sophisticated club-infused girl-power anthem ‘Eve, Psyche & The Bluebeard’s wife’.
56: Miracle-Level (Deerhoof)
Deerhoof’s first album to be recorded in a studio is also their first to be externally produced, AND their first solely in lead singer Satomi Matsuzaki’s native Japanese — but their bold adventurous spirit remains tapped to its fullest on this 19th full-length release. The change of scenario has served to refocus, rather than completely reform, the key playfulness and experimental charm of the group’s rock-adjacent sound, though the group have fun with the evolution of the sound — acknowledging in one song that it may sound ‘different from usual Deerhoof’. The album’s primary tenet is the ecumenical joy that creating music can bring, and in its mathiest moments, through to its calmest corners, the album itself seems to embody that message fully.
Favourite track: The softly-undulating guitars on ‘Poignant Melody’ quickly morph into something stranger and heavier, but the sense of wistfulness they introduce isn’t soon forgotten.
55: Spite Will Save Me (Cry Club)
Enough about queer joy and queer suffering — what about queer spite? The Wollongong-based pop-punk duo Cry Club bring plenty of bird-flipping energy on their second full-length project, modulated though it is through a healthy (and characteristic) dose of camp. Spite Will Save Me is, fittingly enough for its title, an angry, venom-spitting album, a marked change from Jono and Heather’s shiny, highlighter-coloured debut, but that anger has resulted in a ‘villain era’ record that tackles the realities of living a terminally-online, 21st-century queer life in the vernacular that best suits it. It’s noisy, it’s brash, it’s more than a bit funny, and it’s mad as hell — but true to the title, there’s an underlying determination to pull through that propels it forward.
Favourite track: ‘Mirrored’, where Heather’s vocals really shine out for the first time on the album, is an all-too-relatable tale of relationship anxiety and reciprocal toxicity.
54: catharsis (Covet)
Covet’s third album see Yvette Young and co. weaving yet more of their pleasing-to-the-ear, engaging-to-the-mind math rock, though here the aim seems for the first time to be on more than simply confounding the musically-insecure amongst their audience. By not forgetting the ‘rock’ part of math rock, Covet have undergone an important stylistic evolution into a group that prioritises the whole package, instead of merely the technical wizardry behind it. Not that the three-piece’s proficiency has been in any way muted — it’s as tight and clean as ever — but now it finds itself nestled in amongst a more widely satisfying project, where the joy, as well as the craft, of making music is the star.
Favourite track: It doesn’t really stand out until you hear it in situ, but the album’s ‘interlude’ introduces a rare glimpse of Young’s piano skill, with hints of wordless vocals and keening bowed strings, creating a brilliant half-way point of contrast.
53: Complete Mountain Almanac (Complete Mountain Almanac)
Take one Rebekka Karijord and three Dessner siblings and what do you get? One of the year’s most sprawling, enthralling indie-folk records. Complete Mountain Almanac (the name of both the record and the resultant collective, consisting Karijord and siblings Jessica, Bryce and Aaron Dessner (yes, same Aaron Dessner as before)) offers a quietly-shifting view of the world, with a clear focus on nature’s inherent gift at healing, and how humanity has driven it further and further into the ground. The seasonality is muted and subtle — don’t expect Vivaldi’s Four Seasons here — but Jessica’s poetry, Rebekka’s composition and vocals, and the brothers’ guitar work, fuse together for a meditative and mind-opening 45 minutes of music.
Favourite track: ‘August’ perhaps leans furthest towards the folk end of the indie-folk spectrum, but it works perfectly for the autumnal time-setting and the gentle melancholy of the lyrics.
52: Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? (McKinley Dixon)
One of rap’s most chameleon tongues is back for his fourth release, and Dixon proves one again why he is one of the most essential rappers of his generation. Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? may take the trappings of his genre a little on the nose, but in many ways it feels like no better title for the album could ever be constructed. It takes all the most alluring aspects of Dixon’s last album, For My Mama and Anyone Who Look Like Her — the jazz-rap swagger and the free, flexible flow of — but paradoxically, by tightening up the album’s construction and runtime, he prioritises giving these highlights more space to shine, resulting in an album that, though brisk, feels far more radiant and captivating overall.
Favourite track: ‘Tyler Forever’ is not the most lyrically adventurous track on the album — but that’s the point, as Dixon so helpfully alerts to us, in this determined, immediate ode to a murdered friend, so long as his Tyler’s name stays in your head.
51: ASAP inşallah (Ya Tosiba)
One of the year’s most wide-reaching albums sonically and conceptually, Helsinki-based Ya Tosiba bring forth a folktronica masterpiece on ASAP inşallah, the project’s second album. Inspired by singer Zuzu Zakaria’s Azerbaijani heritage and musicological studies, and incorporating a variety of Caucasian and Middle Eastern musical styles including texts drawn directly from folksong and meykhana, the project balances its conceptual themes of reality and fantasy, hope and pessimism. Even the album’s title speaks to this dichotomy — ‘as soon as possible, God willing’. It may take a few tracks to acclimate to for some, but the album’s reverence for its sources and the care with which they have been integrated shine through.
Favourite track: it’s hard to pick a favourite out of the brilliant suite of songs, but lead single ‘Mənəm’ is as good an introduction as any.
Only 50 more albums to count down now! I’ll be taking a break for a week, so I’ll see you at the end of the month for the next 30 on the list. As always, thoughts and refutations (of the more civil kind) are always welcome! Until then,
A.C.
