A belated (as usual) list of the best albums of 2023

I published the first of my year-end best-albums lists in early March of 2022, and sheepishly titled it “A belated list.” The next one was a little less late, landing in late February, and so that one was “A (somewhat less) belated list.” Well, the third edition is later than ever. It’s mid-March, 2023 has receded into a hazy medium distance, and I don’t even know who will want to read about the year’s best music anymore.

A bunch of reasons I’m late: I have more going on, between parenting, studies, and political organizing, than I have in years. With the mass trauma of a livestreamed genocide happening, I find everything harder. Everything feels like slow motion, like I’m working in some kind of translucent gel. I just can’t find the motivation all the time, can’t always convince myself there’s a reason to do this — even though writing about music is what keeps me sane.

And also, writing up 18 albums is a lot of work! When big publications do their year-end lists they assign a bunch of writers to tackle one or two blurbs each. Doing all of them is a lot, and takes time. It’s definitely a labor of love (though you’re welcome to buy me a coffee too!).

Last year when I joked on Facebook about how late I always am with these things, a friend said being late with a retrospective of the year in music is actually a good thing because it gives you time to digest and process all the amazing music that was released. That really resonated with how I operate.

So I’m making a choice to be easy on myself. A wizard is never late!

I don’t have much to say in advance about my taste or my methodology (if you’re interested, I did more of that at the start of the 2021 list). As always, music that’s more expansive is where it’s at for me. Shoegaze and ambient are among the running themes, along with electronic, avant-pop, and cosmic jazz. As I wrote these albums up, I often found myself describing their utility — the time of day or the season I like to listen to them, and the mood they put me in. The older I get, the more I realize that music really has a practical utility in this regard. Despite how obsessive I get about certain music, it’s also therapeutic for me — self-care if you will.

After the first three or four albums, which truly were my obsessive favorites, the order is somewhat arbitrary, and they might have been ranked differently on a different day. Some of the capsule reviews here are longer than usual, because I found I had more to say about some of the titles here. In general I think we’re living in a golden age of new music, no matter what all the other grumpy gatekeepers my age say.

I embedded a playlist with selections from these albums at the bottom (but if you don’t want to scroll, here’s the link).

1. Wednesday — Rat Saw God

In September, I published an essay about this almost frighteningly good “country shoegaze” album, in which I compare Wednesday to Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, R.E.M., and Bruce Springsteen; and talked about how much their Southern Gothic mythmaking meant to me in a year filled with personal tragedy and grief. If anything I think Rat Saw God is even more of an instant classic now than when I wrote about it. I saw them live here in Sydney last week, and not only were they as great as I was expecting, but lead singer Karly Hartzman dedicated her cathartic scream in the showstopping epic “Bull Believer” to Aaron Bushnell and the people of Gaza. It was one of the most powerful and heartfelt things I’ve ever seen.

2. André 3000 — New Blue Sun

I suspected André 3000’s ambient album was going to be good as soon as I heard about it, but I’m positively stunned at how great it is.

To be clear this is not a case of gosh, my man’s weird, self-indulgent, experimental ambient-jazz album is pretty good if you give it a chance. No, it’s gorgeous, an audacious masterpiece — one of the best albums of recent years, and one of the best of its kind that I’ve heard. Trust me from someone who listens to a lot of ambient music, and whose life was changed by the cosmic jazz of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. This is the shit, an epic contribution to both genres.

A friend who’s a veteran house DJ and producer called New Blue Sun a cross between Alice Coltrane and Boards of Canada. She’s not wrong, musically speaking, and also in terms of how soothing and uplifting it is, and how one of a kind it is. It’s right up there with Sanders’s collaborations with Floating Points in combining cosmic jazz with mind-expanding abstract ambience. As I sit here listening to it, it may even be even better.

It was like 3000 made this album for someone like me. If you’d played it for me without telling me who it was I would have wondered Who is this genius I’ve slept on???

And of course there has to be a backlash. I can’t believe people are clowning this beautiful creation. The assumption seems to be that 3000 is trolling his audience, tootling his flute on an unlistenable New Age album, that it’s all a joke. That idea collapses within the first few minutes of the first track, “I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a ‘Rap’ Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time.” The seriousness with which 3000 undertook this project and the passion he poured into it is obvious to anyone with ears to hear.

I don’t know anything about the flute, so it’s hard for me to judge 3000’s skill here, other than to observe that his melodies are consistently really pleasant and engaging. Even better is the way he makes his flute playing just a component of an unfurling tapestry of sound that’s sometimes gentle and pastoral, sometimes grand and cinematic. Jazz producer and percussionist Carlos Niño is 3000’s chief collaborator here, but a host of other musicians contributed to the project; it’s a rich, layered, surprisingly powerful sound. Though it’s freewheeling, sometimes coming across like a sound collage, or drifting into several minutes of near-silence, at other times it’s quite dramatic and thrilling. There’s a narrative quality to tracks like “That Night in Hawaii When I Turned into a Panther and Started Making These Low Register Purring Tones That I Couldn’t Control … Sh¥t Was Wild.” I listened to the whole thing while doing housework the other day, and by the end it left me feeling as if I’d watched a film or finished a novel. Taking it all in at once is a very moving and vivid experience.

The song titles make it clear that psychedelic experimentation, altered mindstates, and, more broadly, spiritual questing are the overarching themes, and this is very true to the cosmic-jazz tradition. 3000 set out to take the listener on a journey and he succeeds.

But is there any of his beloved funky, playful persona here? Asking that is like asking whether Sun Ra’s or Miles Davis’s personalities came through in their music. Hip hop came out of the entire movement of Black experimentation in the 70s that ranged from orchestral soul to jazz-funk to spiritual jazz.

And honestly, some of the basslines are dope (I especially love the one on “93 to Infinity and Beyoncé”), and then you remember who you’re dealing with here. I also love the hints of house and drum & bass in the jazzy synths.

It’s more evidence of what we already knew, that 3000 is a genius, and that what made OutKast special was how adventurous they were and how their music was so much more than a given format (incorporating drum & bass on their commercial breakthrough; Big Boi’s devotion to Kate Bush; the entire existence of The Love Below).

I can’t believe we have to defend 3000’s right to make such an album — to experiment, to go where the winds blow him, instead of doing the obvious thing and doing OutKast: The Reboot, with a cast of superstar guests.

This is going to sound mean but the people clowning New Blue Sun are super basic. It reminds me of when people dismissed Andor because it’s “too slow” and doesn’t have lightsaber battles. Why does everything have to fit a format?

One thing that really strikes me is the way people seem to take it personal that this is his first album in 17 years and it’s not what they expected, like he owes us anything. Looking through the comments in various forums, some people actually seem angry about it, which is wild. Setting aside the question of 3000’s well-documented mental-health issues, what does he owe us as an artist but the best he has to offer, and whatever comes from his heart?

New Blue Sun is a blessing. It represents everything I love about music.

3. Lil Yachty — Let’s Start Here

Atlanta rapper Lil Yachty’s wildly ambitious fifth album was released a year ago and was the early contender for my album of the year, until it was overtaken by the two masterpieces above. I’m going to go ahead and admit I knew little of Yachty’s music before this (though the fact that he’s an object of scorn for old hip-hop heads who love to bitch and moan about the state of the music tended to put me on his side by default). So I couldn’t tell you much about where this jaw-dropping, beautifully unclassifiable album came from (though one article I read described Yachty’s earlier work as “bubblegum trap,” which sounds fun to me).

The one track I did know was his brilliant remix of Tame Impala’s white-soul epic “Breathe Deeper.” It turns out that’s a significant touchstone because Let’s Start Here could be considered Yachty’s “Tame Impala album.” It’s an epic creation of funky, melodic, psychedelic synth-rock that takes its introspective themes on a voyage into outer space. I also think of it as his The Love Below (speaking of 3000) — an Atlanta rapper busting out of the confines of the genre to give us an expansive, eclectic, weird, wonderful, highly personal essay on everything that modern Black music can be and then some. It doesn’t seem a coincidence that these two artists share space at the top of my rotation.

Yachty has obviously studied psych-rock as a genre. Some of the allusions to Tame and to Pink Floyd are rather direct (e.g. the nod to “The Great Gig in the Sky” on opening track “the BLACK seminole”). Yet you can’t pin what he’s doing here to one particular style or influence. There’s plenty of Silk Sonic-style soul and disco too (the vocal contributions from Diana Gordon and Justine Skye are crucial to how well it all works). I hear a lot of Frank Ocean too. Some of it nudges up against shoegaze, especially the drifting, soaring, achingly beautiful “WE SAW THE SUN!,” one of my fave tracks of the year. I listened to this album on the way to see Slowdive and that was perfect.

Many tracks are indescribable in terms of style and they just flow with their own abstract weirdness. There’s so much going on and so many ideas from one track to the next — some of them, admittedly, half-formed ideas — it practically shimmers with the adventure of it all.

It’s that thrill of freedom and discovery and total lack of concern for audience or market expectations that makes the best psychedelic music, from Sgt. Pepper’s to Parliament to Flaming Lips.

Yachty’s mix of rapped and sung vocals is great, and so are the lyrics (Sun coming out and I still feel numb / In the dark my secrets hide, I run / A few more drops upon your tongue / A night to remember that can’t be undone). But there are long passages that feature instrumentals or other vocalists, and my sense is that what he’s doing here is not so much foregrounding himself as a performer as it is directing a suite of music or an experience.

But despite how far afield the album wanders from conventional hip hop, it’s not like it’s less hip hop because of that. What’s worth noting is how well hip-hop works with this kind of freespirited sonic rambling. I already mentioned this above in regards to New Blue Sun, but Black psychedelia and experimentation is hip hop and always was. So Yachty is bringing things home in that sense. That’s what the gatekeepers will never understand.

Either way, as with New Blue Sun, it seems obvious to me that Yachty made this album not to chase a given trend, but because it sounded cool af to him and he didn’t care what anyone thought of it. That’s a great place to start.

My one beef with Let’s Start Here is the cover, designed by Jon Rafman. I think it’s supposed to be a joke about the ugliness of AI art, but despite its intentions it just has the same disheartening effect on me as the unironically ugly AI art that’s cluttering up our newsfeeds lately. I probably sound old saying this, but such a beautiful album deserves a beautiful cover.

4. Paramore — This Is Why

I knew very little about Paramore before this album was released early last year, though my brother is a massive fan and so are numerous friends. I’m 20 years older than the target audience and I was never into pop-punk or emo (though as a teen I was into a bunch of the punk and alternative bands that anticipated emo, especially Hüsker Dü). Interestingly enough, what piqued my curiosity was an NME article about why Paramore have such a large and passionate Black fanbase compared to other white rock bands. This kind of cultural crossover and what it indicates about solidarity is something I live for. With this changed perspective, I listened to This Is Why and I was hooked. In many ways, Paramore’s great and unique ability to bridge the worlds of pop, rock, punk, postpunk, and soul defined the year in music for me.

I saw Paramore here in Sydney in November and they were excellent, as I was expecting; but one takeaway for me was that their new songs are actually better than their classics — more sophisticated, more melodic, more soulful, but no less powerful. On record, those songs are even better; This Is Why is so well-produced (by Carlos de la Garza) and well-played. Paramore have said they wanted to get away from the monochrome noise of punk and emo, aiming at a more expansive postpunk sound (they especially had Bloc Party in mind). They very much succeeded in this: there’s a cinematic quality and a focus on melody and nuance that tops just about any other recent rock record. I love all the details, like the opener and title track’s deft disco swing augmented by crunchy metallic chords on the chorus, their take on funk-rock sounding better than the Chilli Peppers have ever sounded; or the lovely woodwinds and synth stabs that elevate “Big Man, Little Dignity,” one of my favorite tracks of the year.

In describing lead vocalist Hayley Williams you end up falling back on clichés like “force of nature.” Her voice is so powerful and she has such control over it — a precision instrument built for the stop-on-a-dime riffs and lyrical snark, the way she playfully yet threateningly trills la la la little dignity in “Big Man,” and her rapid-fire syncopated Na na na na na na in “C’est Comme Ça.” Her voice transcends genres; the format happens to be rock, but she could just as easily have been a pop star like her buddy Taylor Swift, or indeed a country star. Paramore are from Tennessee, and to me Williams answers the question: what would it sound like if Reba McIntire fronted an emo band? There’s also a strong element of soul and gospel in her vocals, of course.

Williams’s lyrics are at once personal, playful, angsty and angry — it’s no wonder she’s such a hero for so many young women (who made up about 75% of the audience of 20,000 here in Sydney). She’s so good at nonchalant dismissals of abusive men (smooth operator in a shit-stained suit) and memorable turns of phrase (I feel like I’m living in a horror film / Where I’m both the villain and the final girl.)

If I have one gripe with This Is Why, it’s with some of its political overtones. The lyrics of the second track, “Turn Off the News,” kind of bug me with their helpless shrug about the state of the world (specifically the war in Ukraine). On the title track, Williams sings, If you have an opinion… might be best to keep it to yourself. There’s a feeling of urgency and alarm, but nowhere to take it and put it to use. That kind of demobilized individualism doesn’t really fit in a world where genocide happens in front of our eyes and the biosphere is collapsing. At the Sydney gig, Williams made it clear in her between-song banter that she was thinking of Gaza when she sang “Turn Off the News,” without actually mentioning Gaza or Palestine by name, and I thought that was lame. If you look at the comments on Paramore’s Instagram, you will see many fans pleading for Williams to take a stand on the genocide, the way she always has for LGBTQ+ rights, BLM, and other issues.

To be fair to Williams, I don’t think her lyrics are about being selfish or giving up. She writes about her own frustration and confusion and the horror of what we’re living through in an unflinchingly honest way that I can really relate to, despite the political shortcomings. Every second our collective heart breaks / All together every single head shakes / Shut your eyes, but it won’t go away / Turn on, turn off the news. I really appreciate that the title track is about the anxiety of COVID isolation, likewise the general sense of crisis that defines the album. That NME article about Paramore’s Black fans says that “everyone goes through an emo phase.” That’s true even of older fans like me, especially in alienating times like this, and I think that’s why Paramore spoke to me so much this year.

5. Flyying Colours — You Never Know

I’ve been obsessed with Melbourne’s Flyying Colours for a couple of years now. They play a muscular form of shoegaze, or “nugaze” if you will; and while that’s a convenient label, they do live up to it. They will definitely remind you of My Bloody Valentine, with their mixed-gender lineup and their melodic but huge sound; or of Ride, with their infectious jangle offset by squalls of psychedelia. On You Never Know, arguably their best, most ambitious and most cohesive album in what was already a stellar discography, it’s easy to feel like you’re listening to a classic instead of something less than a year old. Even the sleeve art, with its purple-hazey distorted rainy Melbourne cityscape, has a classic look.

But Flyying Colours are by no means a nostalgia act and they really transcend the shoegaze tag. As I argued in my essay about the resurgence of shoegaze, contrary to fans who police the boundaries of the music in online forums, I never thought shoegaze was an easily defined genre so much as it represented an expansive, psychedelic tendency in postpunk and indie, a tendency that could be stretched or shaped in almost infinite ways. Take the four most influential shoegaze bands of the 90s: Ride, Lush, Slowdive and MBV; they’re all among my favorite bands to be clear, but they’re so musically divergent it’s hard to say they have a great deal in common other than being indie guitar bands with a general commitment to diffusion.

I imagine Flyying Colours would push back against the whole shoegaze thing themselves. I saw them live here in Sydney last year, at the launch party for this album, and not only was I struck by their intensity, but by their range and depth. At different times they reminded me of Sonic Youth, or grunge legends like Mudhoney, or even early Echo & the Bunnymen. On record there’s even more range. “Modern Dreams” has the feel of the baroque new wave of Simple Minds. The pulsating “Goodbye to Music” has a 2000s indie-dance feel. I swear, the way the massive wall of guitar noise hits on the chorus of “Long Distance” reminds me of Siamese Dream-era Smashing Pumpkins.

Like the best of their influences, they aren’t just drifting along on a cloud of trippy guitar effects; when you strip away the distortion and feedback you find wonderful songs that are actually about things. “I Live in a Small Town,” one of the best here, is a nervy uptempo rave-up about the urge to break out of your depressing surroundings. If it feels like something that could have been written and recorded 40 years ago in Thatcher’s England, I think it’s not only that Flyying Colours are worthy of comparison to their influences, but also because these social and economic issues have never been resolved in that time. It’s the difference between retro and timeless.

6. Kelela — Raven

The second album from Ethiopian-American singer Kelela, coming six years after her wonderful debut Take Me Apart, combines soul, electronic, jazz, and experimental ambience in ways that always soothe me and improve my day. Her music triggers highly specific memories for me: the nu-jazz, broken beat, and drum & bass of the era between 1998 and 2002, when I was a DJ and record-store clerk in New York. At this time, producers like Jazzanova, Roni Size, and 4hero, and labels like Nuphonic and Gilles Peterson’s Talkin’ Loud combined many Black musical forms in radical new ways. They also intersected with artists that reached closer to the mainstream, including the neo-soul school of Erykah Badu and D’Angelo. At 40, Kelela is old enough to have been directly influenced by this movement. I find it so refreshing that she’s older and just now hitting her stride as an artist; her maturity makes her visionary takes on electronic and dance music cut even deeper.

At times Raven makes me feel like I’m listening to new imports at Dubspot Records on East 12th Street in the summer of 2001. It’s a nice, warm, breezy feeling of being young, broke, and carefree in the city, defined by jazzy synths, mellow yet piercing soulful vocals, skillfully broken beats, and wicked basslines. But it’s no exercise in nostalgia; Raven is very much of the moment with its killer beats influenced by dubstep, bass, and other new forms I probably can’t even name; and its cinematic production by LSDXOXO, Kaytranada and others. If anything, it’s not so much a throwback to the turn of the millennium as a continuation of an unfinished project.

Kelela’s vocals are so good; like Sade, she demonstrates that soulful vocals don’t have to be overblown or melismatic in a showy way in order to move the listener. Her vocals on tracks like “Happy Ending” and “Missed Call” soar above the futuristic beats like a superhero in an Afrofuturist sci-fi flick. I think this impression is intended, given lyrics like The bass in my body, I’m sinking, it’s so wide / Time is surreal, now I’m floating in outer space. I especially love the ghostly layers of harmony vocals, echoes and other effects; the phrase that comes to mind is “Black hyperpop.” Her voice has a way of haunting me hours after I’ve turned off the music.

7. Slowdive — Everything Is Alive

Slowdive are one of my favorite working bands, but I have complicated feelings about them that take some explaining. As I said, they were arguably one of the four most important and influential shoegaze bands of the early 90s, along with Ride, Lush, and MBV. But I always considered them lesser gods in the shoegaze canon compared to those other three.

And yet somehow, as shoegaze has in recent years become more popular than ever among younger generations, Slowdive are now widely considered the greatest of them all. Check any online shoegaze forum and you’ll find the love for Slowdive far exceeds that of any other band, new or old. When I saw Slowdive here in Sydney last winter, younger fans outnumbered us oldies by 3 to 1. They’re absolute legends for these kids.

As someone whose life was changed by shoegaze the first time around, I find this amazing. After a brief couple of years at the forefront of indie in the early 90s, these bands were then mocked, marginalized, and largely forgotten as the music industry rushed to crown Britpop (ugh!) as the happening sound in the middle of the decade. Thirty years later the tables are turned, shoegaze is cooler than ever, and that feels like redemption for me, or even revenge.

Slowdive must feel like they’ve won the lottery, blessed with a surge in popularity and a whole new market after they reformed in 2014, 19 years after being dropped from their label and hanging it up. And I love that for them and their young fans. Seeing the excitement and devotion of the young crowd in Sydney gave me life — and they kicked ass that night, they’re an amazing live band. The whole fact that singer/guitarist/keyboardist Rachel Goswell has become this witchy goth icon in middle age is just so wonderful and cool.

It’s just that I find their 90s output, including their beloved LP Souvlaki, a bit overrated and anemic. It puzzles me that Souvlaki resonates so much more with younger generations than the work of their peers. I like it and all, but I don’t know how you could rate it compared to albums like Nowhere or Isn’t Anything or Spooky. Something about its implosiveness, and that it’s closer on the spectrum to dreampop, perhaps? I do love dreampop and spacey, drifting music in general, but I prefer my shoegaze to have a bit more kick to it, and Souvlaki never grew on me. I’m listening to it again now to make certain I’m not being unfair; and sure enough, about the middle of the third track is when it starts to flag a bit and I wish they would put it into another gear.

Now that I’ve no doubt annoyed all the Slowdive fans reading this, here’s the plot twist: their 2017 self-titled comeback LP is in my opinion their best album by far, and one of the best rock albums this century. It’s a truly stunning work that launches shoegaze into the modern age and makes it more relevant than ever, while at the same time sounding like the stone classic they never actually made. It makes Souvlaki sound wispy and half-baked by comparison. What other veteran band has managed this — to come back after decades apart and being relegated to obscurity, only to make their finest album and find a bigger audience than ever? The whole thing is a miracle.

So, fear not: I love Slowdive to death, their story arc is one of the most wholesome and joyous things happening in music; and in light of all this, thinking their most beloved album is mildly overrated is a good problem to have. That’s the thing about sharing a love of something with younger generations: they may not see things the way you do, and that’s actually nice.

Everything Is Alive isn’t as great as the comeback LP, but it’s really damn good. It combines the relaxed confidence of a veteran band with the excitement of one making sounds as vital as any band out there (it happens to be the first album of theirs to go top 10). It settles into a midtempo groove right away and stays there for the entire length of the LP, hazy guitar and synth melodies and melancholy, ghostly vocals washing over pleasantly thumping rhythms. Though most of it is played live (Simon Scott is such a good drummer), the boundary between shoegaze and electronic, which has always been porous, has never seemed so meaningless as it does here. The first thing you hear on opening track “Shanty” is a beautiful, drifting synth line (a 303 I think, which is amazing to hear on a shoegaze album!), followed by a plucked acoustic guitar, then a gently cascading storm of guitar noise with so many effects it might as well be an electronic soundscape. It’s clear that Slowdive are increasingly happy to make use of whatever tools are at their disposal in the studio to create their ultralush sound, and the results are gorgeous.

Like some of the best electronic albums, it seems designed as much for mood music as for engaged listening — and I mean that in the best way. This is especially apparent on instrumentals like “A Prayer Remembered.” Everything Is Alive got more plays out of me than just about any other album in the second half of last year simply because it always makes me feel good. Yet they are great songwriters too — like I said, better than they’ve ever been. Though in classic shoegaze fashion the lyrics tend to be lost in the shimmering layers of sound, the songs always feature terrific buildup/breakdown dynamics, infectious chord changes, and a kind of wistful drama. Neil Halstead’s vocals are deeper than when he was younger, with a pleasant rasp that comes with age, and that tends to ground the swirling psychedelia, giving it a folksy feel. The interplay between this earthiness and Goswell’s dreamy, ethereal harmonies is marvellous. I also love the way bassist Nick Chaplin brings out the postpunk in the sound with his Peter Hook-y basslines on tracks like “Kisses” — thanks to his and Scott’s brisk rhythmic pulse it never threatens to collapse into tedium (which is not true of their earlier work). All in all it’s a wonderful formula that doesn’t quit — dreamy postpunk-gothic-electronic-psychedelic folk? It’s like shoegaze is only just now reaching its full potential. No wonder discerning kids love it.

8. Joy Oladokun — Proof of Life

Oladokun calls herself “ur dad’s new favorite artist” in her Instagram bio. I can safely say that out of all the albums on this list, this is the only one I heard played at the grocery store. But that’s what I love about it. Oladokun is from Arizona and she makes a soulful kind of Americana that’s so much more interesting and infectious to me than just about anything else in that category. Though I was raised on and still love country, I’m not a huge fan of the halfhearted stuff that gets filed under “Americana.”

It’s really down to what an amazing songwriter Oladokun is. I think of her as a cross between Tracy Chapman and Courtney Barnett in terms of both style and the sheer magnitude of her writing talent. Her verses all sound like choruses and her choruses sound like greatest hits. The stories she tells are affecting and very country in their focus on working class and domestic themes like found a girl and found a job, just like they say good people do and home just ain’t the same without a roof over our heads and you at the table. I like to listen to it when I’m gardening.

But at the same time her songs aren’t cloying or heavy-handed (another fatal flaw of many an Americana artist); as with Barnett, there’s a kind of offhandedness and a slight bitterness to her songs that makes them sound fresh even after repeat listens. I like that there are electronic elements in places, and a guest rapper (Maxo Kream) on “Revolution.” Clearly Oladokun can’t be bothered maintaining the genre’s boundaries or the whole false idea of authenticity, and that says a lot.

I hesitated to make the Chapman comparison; I didn’t want to pigeonhole Oladokun just because she’s also a queer Black woman with an acoustic guitar… but I looked it up and it turns out Chapman was a massive influence on Oladokun from childhood. Sometimes my impressionistic comparisons are on point.

I especially appreciate how Oladokun makes mental health a running theme. “Taking Things for Granted” kills me every time I listen to it with its wry but wrenching story about how she invited her whole class to her eighth birthday party and none of them came, and how that relates to her feelings of alienation and anxiety as an adult. I find that so relatable. She also makes sure to place her anxiety in context of a world in crisis, foregrounding the climate emergency and Black Lives Matter on “Revolution” and “Changes” (but in a way all those dads can relate to: people yellin’ and the water’s rising sounds like it could have been written by a country singer twice her age). “Pride” is a lovely and quite devastating acoustic anthem about being queer that made me cry in my garden when I first listened to it.

9. 100 gecs — 10,000 gecs

Music that’s as artificial as possible has always been one of my favorite things in life, ever since I first heard the Human League on the radio at the age of eleven. I love synths as much as I love guitars. I love sampling, sound collage, and studio trickery as much as I love live performance — or if I’m honest, even more. I’m suspicious of notions of genuineness and realness, and always have been. One of the reasons the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill changed my life is it felt like my generation’s middle finger against the whole idea of 60s classic-rock musicianship and sincerity. You could take a Led Zeppelin beat, loop it, and rap about snatching gold chains, and it was genius — better than Led Zep themselves. A couple of years later when I got into techno, it felt like the most logical extension of that artificial, sampladelic aesthetic.

Of course, starting with their third album the Beasties decided that, like their musical forebears, they’d rather be more “real” or “sincere,” and they started playing their instruments instead of sampling. I’m always going to be in the minority of fans who thinks that was a mistake. They were always better when their sound was a kaleidoscopic storm of machine-made and otherwise detached sound — best exemplified on their masterpiece, Paul’s Boutique. I’m not going to say mean things about their efforts at being a middling white funk band; I actually think Check Your Head and Ill Communication are great, just nowhere near the same level.

Thirty-five years later, the generation that was raised on drum machines and samples has simply found new kinds of sincerity to moralize about — analogue synths instead of laptops, DJs who play records instead of files. Or, like the Beasties, picking up real instruments to prove yourself. The instruments have changed but the logically questionable distinction between “real” and “fake” is transferred to a new generation of grumpy gatekeepers.

This is why I love hyperpop in general, and 100 gecs in particular. Pop music that foregrounds and revels in its artifice — while being more inclusive and forward-thinking in the process — hyperpop represents a revolt against those notions of genuineness that’s as exciting and fun as it is culturally necessary. In hyperpop you can be as fake and plastic as you want — and this might have important implications about identity, as in the work of the late, great trans hyperpop artist SOPHIE. You can take Autuned vocals to crazy extremes and demonstrate that any machine, any software, any tool can be used to make great music. You can be anything you want to be and make any sound you want to make. Hyperpop speaks to me because it’s like living in the future that 90s techno and rave music anticipated (a future that most grumpy aging ravers ironically reject).

100 gecs (Dylan Brady and Laura Les; note that Les is a trans woman) represent the most satirical, most sarcastic manifestation of the hyperpop aesthetic. In a way their whole project is a performance-art project about what’s possible in pop music (and in their live shows they play up the satire, dressing like cartoon wizards). Some might find this hard to swallow. “Dumbest Girl Alive” is designed to be obnoxious or even grating to anyone who takes music too seriously, with its thudding big beats, its screeching synths, and its lyrics that come across like Mean Girls if it was written by a nu-metal band (Put emojis on my grave, I’m the dumbest girl alive).

There’s a specific reason I started out this review by talking about the Beastie Boys. 10,000 gecs does the same thing Licensed to Ill did for me: it feels like it’s rescuing me from all the boredom and stupidity. Whenever I feel like I’m going to lose my mind if I see one more sexist comment about how Billie Eilish is an “industry plant,” or one more nauseating tribute to the realness of Gen X music (including the Beastie Boys!), 10,000 gecs is there for me with its deranged cartoon aesthetic and its whirlwind of noise, sick beats, and constantly shifting styles. Like the Beasties, 100 gecs take joy in childishness, crassness and random dada shit. They sing or yell in squeaky, distorted tones about Doritos and Fritos and frogs on the floor and guns and smoking crack. Their lyrics tend to go like this:

’Cause shit’s so funny
I just killed your dad, and then I took his money
Queen of California, hot like the heat is
Got Anthony Kiedis sucking on my penis

Also like the Beasties, they are amazingly talented sonic architects. Everything about 10,000 gecs is designed to sound like a throwaway joke, like it was made by a bunch of jackasses smoking meth in the studio, but you have to be geniuses to make a sound this layered, this busy, this textured, this bangin. The album begins with the “THX sound” — you know, the awesome swelling orchestral sting you used to hear over the THX logo at the start of 90s movies. This is perfect because on the one hand it’s a dumb joke, but it also correctly indicates how cinematic this album is. The furious blizzard of sound effects and samples also includes the Sleng Teng riddim, the distinctive blaster sound from Star Wars, and bits from Reefer Madness, SpongeBob Squarepants, and Cypress Hill’s “Insane in the Brain.” The beats are dope, crashing and skittering like someone recorded a DJ set of hip hop and big beat and reggae and ska, and then took the recording and chopped and pasted it into random order. But despite this seeming randomness, 100 gecs have a real sense of melody, and the hooks will stay with you. It’s an incredibly fun, exhilarating sound, and it always makes my day.

10. Gina Birch — I Play My Bass Loud

One of the freshest albums of the year is the solo debut LP of a 67-year-old veteran, the co-founder and bassist of legendary UK feminist-postpunk innovators the Raincoats. It’s exactly everything you would hope from a solo Raincoat. I Play My Bass Loud has the feel of that glorious time in the early 80s when postpunk and no wave were borrowing from and crossing over with hip hop, reggae, Afrobeat, and disco; and artists like Tom Tom Club, Malcolm McClaren, the Clash, and A Certain Ratio were played on serious dancefloors. These sounds are still so relevant because there’s still so much to explore in the space between punk and dance music. I Play My Bass Loud sounds simultaneously like it could have been released in 1983 and like she’s right there with newer bands like Dry Cleaning. Birch creates funky or noisy soundscapes rather than songs as such, she lets tracks go on for a long time just building atmosphere, she does spoken word, she plays her bass loud.

It also reminds me of Kim Gordon’s stellar 2019 LP No Home Record, in that it’s the solo debut of a female bass icon starting a new chapter in her late 60s and not only kicking ass but creating work that’s more noisy and uncompromising than ever.

I love how political I Play My Bass Loud is from start to finish. Musicians often claim they don’t like to be overtly political, they let the music speak for itself, or whatever. It’s refreshing that Birch gets very overt and in our faces with tracks like “Feminist Song” (not an ironic title), “Stiletto” (literally about how she hates heels), and “I Am Rage.” If there was ever a time to be loud and direct about things, it’s now.

11. James Holden — Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities

I compare new music to older music a lot. Whether it’s a bad writing habit, or perfectly normal and justified for someone my age, I’m sure it gets tiresome, especially for younger readers. But when I tell you that electronic producer James Holden’s fourth album strongly reminds me of a really specific school of early-to-mid-90s leftfield techno and ambient by artists like the Orb, the Black Dog, the Future Sound of London, and Orbital, there’s a reason: it’s explicitly meant to. This was the era when electronic music was at its most expansive and psychedelic, the perfect soundtrack for the free-party movement in the UK, which set off a moral panic in the ruling class culminating in the infamous Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994. This was when raves were hippie-ish for all the right reasons (active rebellion against the cops and social norms, wildly productive experimentation in music), years before becoming hippie-ish for all the wrong reasons (willful obliviousness, destructive attitudes towards public health). 

I checked and Holden is 44, nine years younger than me — old enough to have been aware of all this, but not old enough to have been going to the parties. This would explain both his passion for creating a tribute to those times he missed out on, and the skill and detail with which he sets about that tribute. This is an exhilarating and gorgeous suite of music that does justice to that time while expanding the possibilities of the music today.

I make the comparison to the Black Dog because of the particular way Holden combines complex, often jazzy synths, densely textured sound effects, and beats that are truly wicked but which build up and break down in ways that seem more organic than the usual 4/4 business (especially on “In the End You’ll Know” and “Continuous Revolution”). It’s heavily influenced by jazzy Detroit techno (in other words it’s indebted to Black music, as is all techno), but with a particularly British mood of psychedelic experimentation.

The sound also reminds me at times of specific tracks by the Orb — the ones like “Blue Room” and “U.F.Orb,” which start out with spacey ambient collages of synths, dubby effects, and field recordings (I especially love Holden’s use of birdsong), and then evolve into something with an actual beat. The Orb influence seems especially strong on “Trust Your Feet” and “Common Land” (love the politically themed titles). This Is a High Dimensional Space is also delightfully reminiscent of some more obscure but no less treasured sounds from that era, including Ultramarine’s early folktronica and Ian O’Brian’s techno/jazz experiments.

One thing that makes it all extra compelling is that it isn’t always smooth or easy on the ears. The element of cosmic jazz, and the noise and dissonance on many tracks, ensures that it’s not just sleepy ambient but very engaged, dramatic music with a sense of narrative. Would I want to discuss vaccines with a lot of people in the target audience? Probably not. But the old raver in me can’t help but love this project, and it always elevates my mind, as it’s intended to do. The Moebius-esque sleeve art is dope too.

12. Caroline Polachek — Desire, I Want to Turn Into You

This album topped many critics’ lists at the end of the year. I don’t think it overpowered me as much as it did others, but it’s still really good and worthy of mention — sublime pop with lots of intelligence and detail in the production, and it brightened many an afternoon for me. Of course I’m going to be won over by the 80s-retro mode (as on lead track “Welcome to My Island,” whose chorus provides the album title, and which also reminds me of Charli XCX’s Crash). How amazing is it that the 80s have been over for 34 years but are still providing pop musicians with endless inspiration? There are plenty of later influences: “Hopedrunk Everasking” feels like a slightly more mainstream take on Björk’s Vespertine; there’s a pretty clear reference to Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” on “Pretty in Possible”; while the lovely “Fly to You” (featuring Grimes and Dido) is a throwback to the late 90s and early 2000s, when every alternative album had to have a drum & bass track on it. I dig the Latin feel on many songs too. If you asked I would tell you that yes, I want to live in a world where pop is this inspired and richly devised.

13. Susanna Hoffs — The Deep End

This is a decidedly minor work — an album of covers that wasn’t even the most important project Hoffs released in the same week, which also saw the publication of her surprisingly good debut novel, This Bird Has Flown. True, I’m a Bangles superfan, but I found myself compulsively listening to The Deep End a lot for reasons that felt more organic than fawning devotion; the production by Peter Asher of Linda Rondstadt fame is ace, and it contains some of my favorite tracks of the year. Hoffs has always been a great cover artist, both in and out of the Bangles — one of the best at pouring herself into a song and making it hers, at least for the time it’s playing. And she retains the exquisite skill in song selection she’s always had; I especially love that she favors a lot of younger songwriters here, including Billie Eilish and Joy Oladokun. In fact this album is the reason I became a fan of Oladokun this year (see above). Thirty-eight years after “If She Knew What She Wants,” Hoffs is still influencing my taste in music. (Here’s my double review of The Deep End and This Bird Has Flown.)

14. Emma Anderson — Pearlies

It was melancholy to listen to the solo debut LP of Anderson, Lush’s lead guitarist, at the same time I was reading Fingers Crossed, the excellent autobiography of her estranged bandmate, Miki Berenyi. The book brings out the complicated and painful history of their lifelong friendship and partnership, which is now apparently over — the two don’t talk anymore. Of course it’s not fair to Anderson to consider her album in light of Berenyi’s absence; but given how important and iconic a band Lush were, for indie rock and for me personally, I can’t help it either. Two things to mention: the fact that Anderson did the majority of Lush’s songwriting is apparent, because the songs here are good, with heaps of that same lovely, ethereal atmosphere that any Lush fan has signed up for when they press play. But at the same time Anderson is by no means trying to recreate Lush. Tracks like “Xanthe” and “Taste the Air” have a more psychedelic-folk feel, while “Willow and Marrow” reminds me of the baroque 60s British pop that Saint Etienne has mined so effectively. Lush always defied shoegaze tropes and pushed themselves to evolve; it’s great that Anderson sticks to her guns instead of engaging in fan service. It’s a late-career solo debut that’s both ambitious and satisfying, and it especially made for wonderful listening on cool, rainy spring mornings.

15. Hello Mary — Hello Mary

16. Moody Beaches — Acid Ocean

One of my favorite Facebook groups is called Beyond Shoegaze — a space where the boundaries of the music are expanded rather than gatekept, and all of its many influences and tangents from psychedelic to grunge to electronic are explored. I love this approach so much that I’ve started to think of “beyond shoegaze” as a meta-genre of music itself. Two of my favorite “beyond shoegaze” albums this year were released by power trios made up of young women. Hello Mary (from New York) and Moody Beaches (from Melbourne) turned in two of the best, freshest, most searing, ass-kicking records this year. Both LPs are characterized by powerhouse psych verging on grunge, with noisy guitars, knotty rhythms and stomping drums. Both feature killer songs from start to finish, drenched in melody and drama. Hello Mary’s vocals and harmonies have that spooky droning quality of 60s psych; while Moody Beaches lead singer and lead guitarist Anna Lienhop is more full-throated in a classic grunge vein. Hello Mary are barely out of their teens and I just can’t believe how good they are already. Moody Beaches are more seasoned, with two albums under their belt, but it’s no less exciting to contemplate all the great things they’re going to do.

17. The Veldt — Illuminated 1989

I couldn’t leave this one out: despite being recorded 35 years ago, it brings together so many of my favorite things happening in music right now. The Veldt are a shoegaze and dreampop band from Raleigh, North Carolina whose body of work in the late 80s and early 90s stands as testament to how integral the Black contribution to those genres was from the beginning. Their albums Marigolds (1992) and Afrodisiac (1995) are considered underrated classics by shoegaze fans who know the deal (and were a big influence on later artists, especially TV on the Radio). But for all this time they’ve been sitting on their lost 1989 debut album, Illuminated, which was produced by the Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie, and featured backing vocals by Liz Fraser. The Veldt had toured with the Cocteaus in the late 80s and hit it off with them; Guthrie was always supportive of newer bands (he produced Lush’s debut LP around that time too).

Illuminated 1989 is a revelation: characterized by chiming, effects-laded guitars clearly influenced by the Cure and the Cocteaus, Daniel Chavis’s soulful vocals, and terrific songwriting, it’s a piece of long-buried treasure, an artifact from an era when the boundaries between rock, soul, funk and electronic were breaking down, and alternative rock was evolving into something much more expansive. This album just makes me happy and fills me with inspiration, and I’m glad it now finally exists in the world.

18. Courtney Barnett — End of the Day (music from the film Anonymous Club)

This one brings up the rear of this list, despite the fact that it’s from one of my favorite current artists, mainly because it’s a more utilitarian and lowkey effort compared to her proper albums. It’s the soundtrack to the well-received 2021 documentary about Barnett (which I haven’t seen, though I watched a rough edit at an early stage of its postproduction), and it’s made up of nothing else but instrumental guitarscapes. Barnett is in fact one of the greatest guitarists alive, so it’s no surprise that she makes this 40-minute suite of unaccompanied guitar worthwhile. Some of the tracks are more tranquil and ambient, some feature more jagged and dramatic chords. At various times it reminds me of Neil Young’s Dead Man score, or what Explosions in the Sky would sound like with no rhythm section. It’s certainly a lesser work in Barnett’s discography, but it’s quietly brilliant, and it’s quickly become a go-to for me to establish a certain relaxed and focused mood in the mornings — so that utilitarian quality is actually what makes it great.

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Feature image photo credit: Lil Yachty, courtesy of Variety