The 37 Best Rock Albums of 2023

The year in indie rock, punk, singer-songwriter and solo guitar music, shoegaze, metal, and everything in between.

December 6, 2023

Clockwise from top left: yeule, Jeff Rosenstock (photo by Matt Price), Mitski (photo by Ebru Yildiz), Yves Tumor, and Wednesday (photo by Michael Grant). Image by Chris Panicker.

The best rock music of 2023 spoke loudly and directly. From the guttural screams of Wednesday’s Rat Saw God to the testaments to community on boygenius’ the record, there was no shortage of catharsis to be found on the record shelves. While raucous acts like Jeff Rosenstock and Tomb Mold took newly textured approaches to their typical attacks, the digital crescendos of yeule and the blown-out rallying cries of Ragana operated in favor of maximum devastation in every gnarled guitar chord. Below, find some of the year’s most striking rock releases.

Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist.

Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2023 wrap-up coverage here.

(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)

Secretly Canadian

ANOHNI and the Johnsons: My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross

From its opening moments, the searching existentialism of My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross takes root in your core. Inspired by Marvin Gaye’s profoundly funky 1971 touchstone What’s Going On, and spurred on by guitarist-producer Jimmy Hogarth, whose credits include Amy Winehouse and Estelle, along with an outfit of session musicians, the album simmers in the bittersweet grooves of classic soul. And ANOHNI has never sounded better at the helm, leading the way with ferocious optimism.

My Back Was a Bridge tempers righteous fury with operatic passages and spoken asides, moving between the two with the spontaneous grace of a dancer. ANOHNI croons over a cantering electric guitar on “It Must Change,” an outspoken paean for a better world you know won’t come, and wails amid a slow-building hailstorm of shredding riffs and percussion on “Rest,” the album’s jagged inflection point, decrying the eons of environmental trauma inflicted by mankind. She urges us to do better by every living being around us, generously suggesting that unbridled passion, not unlike her own, can make a path forward in a tumultuous world. –Eric Torres

Further Reading: “A Deep Dive Into Blacklips, the Queer Performance-Art Cult Cofounded by ANOHNI in the 1990s”

Bayonet

Being Dead: When Horses Would Run

Being Dead play a mix of catchy surf-punk and vaguely religious psych-folk, scattered with unpredictable passages of Vince Guaraldi-style jazz, la-la-la-la vocals, and guitar hooks built for Volkswagen commercials. They are platonic life partners who go by the names of Falcon Bitch and Gumball, who met in the Austin scene, or maybe in a long-past life as competing acrobats or 17th-century shoemakers (as they have been known to claim). And they sing about the wildest stuff on their exceptional full-length debut, When Horses Would Run: treepeople cults, a buffalo lying dead on the floor, Payless shoplifters who return to the scene of the crime. In “We Are Being Dead,” they even pay tribute to their own history together. While they may seem rough around the edges, Being Dead are big softies under it all. –Jill Mapes

New Deal / Verve

Blake Mills: Jelly Road

Jelly Road presents an oblique and surreal vision of singer-songwriter music. Rather than drawing scenes from everyday life, Blake Mills summons imagery whose meaning seems pulled from the subconscious: the sweet and sticky pathway of the album’s title, or the character who swears that all he needs to be happy is a collection of multicolored hats. If the writing can be challenging to parse, the guitar playing is not: whether joyful or melancholy, pensive or exuberant, Mills’ instrumental lines ground the music in undeniable human feeling. On the sidewinding solo that occupies a full three and a half minutes of “Skeleton Is Walking,” he says more with his instrument than plenty of other songwriters can muster with words. –Andy Cush

Further Reading: “Low-Key Superproducer Blake Mills on Working With Dylan, Joni, and His New Album Jelly Road”

Section1

Blonde Redhead: Sit Down for Dinner

Though the title of Sit Down for Dinner comes from a Joan Didion book, the aesthetic sumptuousness of Blonde Redhead’s 10th album recalls another Gen-X voice: filmmaker Sofia Coppola. The band’s ’90s origins, with Italian twins Simone and Amedeo Pace meeting Kyoto-born Kazu Makino in New York, were once billed as a kind of Lost in Translation in reverse. Here, the star-crossed dream pop of “Kiss Her Kiss Her” and the dub-addled “Melody Experiment” evoke the romantic lushness of Coppola favorites Air. But the Didion that inspired this record is her memoir of bereavement, 2005’s The Year of Magical Thinking, and beneath the unhurried grandeur of “Snowman” or “Not for Me” lurks a creeping anxiety. –Marc Hogan

Further Reading: “Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino on the Music That Made Her”

Interscope

boygenius: the record

The debut album from boygenius asks: What is love, really? Is it taking someone else’s medication to see what it feels like; sharing Iron & Wine deep cuts and embarrassing stories; fighting without keeping score? Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus don’t just describe love in these many forms on The Record, but show it in full force. The album retains glints of each artist’s solo output—Baker’s steely, anthemic choruses, Bridgers’ spectral folk, Dacus’ precisely crafted poetry—with an alchemical ease born from mutual devotion. –Aimee Cliff

Further Listening: “Supergroup Therapy With boygenius’ Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker”

Merge

The Clientele: I Am Not There Anymore

The Clientele’s first album in six years makes for an ideal reintroduction to one of the great ’00s indie-pop bands. It asserts all their strengths while opening new pathways in their tranquil sound: romantic piano chord progressions intermingle with electronic breakbeats; dreamlike narratives arrive with snatches of a string quartet chopped and rearranged through digital sampling. Though the kaleidoscopic palette is often far removed from the austere arrangements of the English band’s early years, the overarching mood hasn’t changed much. This is music for solitary walks under streetlights, moments when the smallest observed details can open into expanses of memory or suggestions of possible futures. –Andy Cush

Saddle Creek

Feeble Little Horse: Girl With Fish

In the Kroll Show sketch “Pawnsylvania,” comedians Nick Kroll and Jon Daly play rival pawn-shop owner cousins in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, insulting each other in yinzer slang and obnoxiously thick accents. Sometimes I imagine a Pennsylvania indie rock version of “Pawnsylvania,” where the two junk-obsessed cousins are played by Philly’s Spirit of the Beehive and Pittsburgh’s Feeble Little Horse. This is not because there is a lick of animosity between the two bands, both signed to Saddle Creek, but because they feel cut from similar cloth: a mix of shoegaze, bedroom-pop digital effects, and noise that makes you wanna stick your head in an amp. In 2023, Feeble Little Horse won the fictional battle with their second full-length, Girl With Fish. Within these short, unpredictable bursts of feedback and delicacy are bored-disgusted observations I can’t unhear, like when singer Lydia Slocum describes a man as fucking like he eats, in the standout track “Steamroller.” Get comfortable in the grime, baby, this is western PA. –Jill Mapes

Further Reading: “Meet Feeble Little Horse, the Young Noise-Pop Band Repping Pittsburgh DIY”

Interscope

Feist: Multitudes

With its alien vocal layers, clattering digital percussion, and zigzagging structure, “In Lightning” is one of the most daring tracks of Feist’s career. The rest of the songs on Multitudes, her sixth album, are slower and sparser—no bad thing, as Feist does slow and sparse exceptionally well. But there’s a case to be made that the opening song’s compositional and sonic adventurousness carries through the rest of the record, albeit in quieter ways. Melodies take on the intuitive and surprising arcs of inner monologues. A multi-tracked chorus might suddenly grow outward from the lead vocal, evoking the prismatic array of Feists on the cover, and then snap just as quickly back into a single voice. The deeper you get into Multitudes, the more the explosive strangeness of its initial spark comes to seem like a statement of purpose. –Andy Cush

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Goner / Urge

Gee Tee: Goodnight Neanderthal

Sydney, Australia’s Gee Tee communicate a few simple ideas on their 10-song, 18-minute album of organ-driven garage-punk rippers. Frontman Kel Mason cannot handle the stress of city traffic (see: “(I Hate) Drivin’ in the City,” ironically a great driving song). He’s got one of those Flintstones boulder phones and is desperate for someone to call him on it. There’s a vapid goofiness alongside the real emotions conveyed in Mason’s lyrics, and a bubblegum pop sensibility in the music—one that’s ’roided out and slathered in fuzz. –Evan Minsker

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Forged Artifacts / Devil Town Tapes

Greg Mendez: Greg Mendez

The self-titled third album by Philadelphia singer-songwriter Greg Mendez should restore your faith in squeaky acoustic guitar, whispery vocals, and confessional lyrics. Mendez’s similarity to Elliott Smith or Alex G at their most unadorned feels as remarkable as his blunt storytelling about addiction, love, and despair. The power of songs like “Maria” or “Goodbye / Trouble” lies not only in Mendez’s plainspoken charm, but also his craftsmanship, with winding folk-pop tunes that rattle around the mind long after his gimlet-eyed downtown vignettes punch the gut. –Marc Hogan

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Third Man

Hotline TNT: Cartwheel

This is a loud album. If it’s playing quietly in your headphones or you’re hearing it in the other room, it’s still loud because Will Anderson—the Wisconsin native behind the beefy power-pop project Hotline TNT—makes his music sound somewhere magical between absolutely huge and totally blown out. He manages this balance with an earnest little Midwestern heartache in his voice and lyrics, a ripped low-end that could smoke out a stoner metal record, and a gym full of guitars on every track. The natty and ratty opening track “Protocol” is the high-water mark, but the rest of the record rips just as hard underneath it. –Jeremy D. Larson

Further Reading: “Hotline TNT Filter Heartbreak Through Dizzying, Distorted Guitar Rock”

Polyvinyl

Jeff Rosenstock: HELLMODE

There’s a loose formula to Jeff Rosenstock songs: shouted choruses, rapidfire tempos, even faster strumming. But the DIY-punk lifer seems hell-bent on switching things up with his fifth solo album, HELLMODE. Even with shinier production and mid-tempo indie rock pivots like “GRAVEYARD SONG” and “LIFE ADMIN,” Rosenstock can’t help but make everything he touches hit hard. The adrenaline-junkie first half alone proves that Rosenstock still knows how to dangle the carrot—and it’s never been more fun to chase. –Nina Corcoran

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Mexican Summer

Jess Williamson: Time Ain’t Accidental

The fifth album by Jess Williamson is set at a distinctly Southern magic hour, embracing the transformations and messiness of nascent love. Her teardrop voice and audacious candor imagine Lana by way of Lucinda while sounding Texas to the bone. In these spare road ballads and cowgirl waltzes, Williamson reads Raymond Carver aloud by a pool bar, drinks with boys who worship Townes, and squints at an ex whose new girlfriends just keep getting younger. Released in the wake of her 2022 collaboration with Katie Crutchfield as Plains, Williamson and producer Brad Cook give her drum-machine-assisted cosmic country a new horizon. –Jenn Pelly

Fat Possum

Joanna Sternberg: I’ve Got Me

Joanna Sternberg’s songs seem inevitable: Of course that melody rises here and turns there. And how could “I lie awake and pray” lead anywhere but “I will be with you someday”? But don’t let this fool you into thinking there’s something effortless about I’ve Got Me. The familiarity arises not from unpracticed instinct, but Sternberg’s mastery of the traditions from which they draw, whether the folky candor of the singer-songwriter canon or the elegant formalism of the jazz standard songbook. For an album about heartbreak and self-blame, it’s more uplifting than you’d think. The words speak of despair; the music tells a different story. –Andy Cush

Further Reading: “The Real World of Joanna Sternberg”

Ghostly International

Julie Byrne: The Greater Wings

On The Greater Wings, an album of grief and gratitude that’s haunted by loss, Julie Byrne makes cosmic music that alters time. She notices things other songwriters miss—a spot of blood on a sheet, the faint hum of music through the wall—and makes you understand everything these fragments can convey, with words so well-chosen they deserve to be bound in a book. Her songs have an uncanny sense of scale: Drawing from decades of spectral folk, from Nick Drake to Vashti Bunyan to Cat Power, they begin with tiny fragments of memory and bloom into entire weather systems of emotion. –Mark Richardson

Further Reading: “An Afternoon at Coney Island With Julie Byrne, Sage of Reason”

September

Kara Jackson: Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?

Over the 13 sparse folk songs on Kara Jackson’s debut album, love is a force of destruction, a precursor to loss, an opportunity to be taken for granted. And yet we keep grasping for it, prompting the question the Chicago songwriter raises in the record’s title. She acknowledges that we all crave recognition but also knows that another person’s perception of us can never match the way we want to be seen. She sounds triumphant on “dickhead blues” as she realizes she doesn’t need anyone else for validation: “I'm not as worthless as I once thought,” she sings proudly. “I’m useful.” –Vrinda Jagota

Further Reading: “Kara Jackson’s Mournful, Joyful, Unapologetic Guitar-Ass Music”

Thrill Jockey

Liturgy: 93696

What separates anguish from exaltation? Who can be sure they are distant entities in the first place? Such questions are often at the core of Liturgy’s work, particularly on their black metal opus 93696. These polarities have never existed more harmoniously in the group’s catalog; luminous choral interludes glide between vocalist Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix’s flesh-frayed shrieks, lilting flute traipses across punishing drum fits, sky-bound strings collapse into a pool of distortion. By examining pain and purity side by side, Liturgy posits that these extremes are integral to one another, and to the very essence of humanity. –Madison Bloom

Fire Talk

Mandy, Indiana: i’ve seen a way

So many classic horror movies build to a climax where the heroine, fed up with being terrorized, becomes the tormentor herself. No noise band has put that feeling of brutal catharsis to music quite like Mandy, Indiana. By weaponizing techno and post-punk, the Manchester group has created a visceral reimagining of industrial music, all of it intensified by the cobra-strike intensity of singer Valentine Caulfield, who seethes, taunts, and rages over the rampaging noise. Their music is violent and vicious, yet i’ve seen a way makes it sound like justice. –Evan Rytlewski

Further Reading: “Mandy, Indiana Combat Our Dystopian Hellscape With Menacing Post-Punk”

Joyful Noise

Marnie Stern: The Comeback Kid

In the late 2000s, Manhattan singer-songwriter Marnie Stern invented her own unique style consisting of firecracker finger-taps, ricocheting drum fills, and joyful yawps, like if Yoko Ono and Eddie Van Halen combined and led a friendly takeover of Sleater-Kinney. It turns out Stern still had plenty of Fourth of July explosives left for The Comeback Kid, her first album in a decade. After years spent focusing on a day job in the Late Night With Seth Meyers band and a burgeoning family life, Stern sounds as exuberant and creative as ever—and wiser, too. The Elliott Smith-referencing “Til It’s Over” reshapes her relentless optimism into an affecting statement of community: “This is what we do/We keep on dreaming.” –Marc Hogan

Further Reading: “Marnie Stern Still Shreds”

Dead Oceans

Mitski: The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We

Having moved from incandescent indie sad girl to art-rock emoter and ambivalently successful synth-pop hitmaker, Mitski arrives at a fittingly bespoke creative destination: a lonely film-noir landscape starring herself. Her animist imagery is more vivid than ever on The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, and if the orchestral finery is in timely step with kin like Weyes Blood and Father John Misty, there’s less Brechtian distance here; at times it’s hard to recall that Mitski ever recorded without strings and choir. And to judge from the striking success of the billowy “My Love Mine All Mine”—whose TikTok boosters include a jazzbo who collected 1.3 million views by laying a 1940s sax coda on it—Mitski’s widescreen flair has struck a nerve. –Will Hermes

True Panther

Model/Actriz: Dogsbody

The debut album from dance-punks Model/Actriz brings the seven deadly sins to mind, conjuring glamorous, carnal feasts along with love that feels like a knife to the throat. The pendulum-swinging guitars and menacing drums give Dogsbody an air of danger, as its lyrics balance visceral vignettes and phantasmagoric visions from a fraying psyche. But the album offers more than deliciously hedonistic thrills: Thrusting us into their operatic world, this Brooklyn band makes peace with their dark memories and fleshly desires. –Margaret Farrell

Further Reading: “For Post-Punks Model/Actriz, Confrontation Is an Opportunity for Intimacy”

Convulse

MSPAINT: Post-American

Call it wasteland synth-pop or arthouse hardcore: MSPAINT was born from an instinct to burn it all down. On the Hattiesburg, Mississippi group’s debut album, vocalist DeeDee howls and barks over corroded synths echoing the early computer sounds of millennial childhoods, now rendered as a festering soundtrack for 21st century decline. Yet the joy of discovery is also palpable in MSPAINT’s music. Equal parts fun and furious, Post-American doesn’t wallow in destruction—it imagines a mutant future. –Ryan Leas

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Poclanos / Topshelf

파란노을 (Parannoul): After the Magic

Listening to Parannoul’s sparkling third album is like spending an hour in a deep dream: When it ends, you might emerge more vulnerable, more alert, more attuned to strange, messy feelings. The prolific, and anonymous, South Korean songwriter and producer combines shoegaze, post-rock, emo, ambient, and pop with bold originality—every song is a pixelated lightshow of live and electronic instrumentation. After the Magic is both haunting and invigorating, with an expansive emotional range that practically opens a portal to transformation. –Brady Brickner-Wood

The Flenser

Ragana: Desolation’s Flower

With icy sludge riffs and tectonic drumming, Ragana invites us to link arms, flip off the police, and carve out a better world. “Something so small can endure the cold,” multi-instrumentalist Coley screams on “Winter’s Light Pt. 2,” a highlight from the Pacific Northwest duo’s sixth and best album, Desolation’s Flower. Their slow-burning black metal moves with the grace of cathartic post-rock, and their lyrics are written to honor their queer forebears. In just seven tracks, Ragana assembles a cabin in a corner of the woods, where volume is a weighted blanket and precision is an expression of love. –Nina Corcoran

Topshelf

Ratboys: The Window

Chicago’s Ratboys whittle down their take on indie rock while donning a cowboy hat. With their fourth album The Window, they charm their way to a blue ribbon, too. Vivacious and confident, singer Julia Steiner leads these tales of grandparents in love and friendships in danger with the kind of delivery that would give even the most adamant pessimist a sliver of hope. In the warm haze of Chris Walla’s production, flashes of pop-punk (“Crossed That Line”) and alt-rock (“No Way”) grin with a cheeky twang. –Nina Corcoran

Orindal

Ruth Garbus: Alive People

Ruth Garbus’ latest album was recorded in front of a live audience, but you might not know it from listening. Few albums this year felt more silent and surreal. Like Joni Mitchell in the ’90s, Garbus is accompanied by sparse electric guitar and shimmering synth that draw attention to her conversational vocals and sophisticated melodic palate. The lyrics, too, convey an uncanny perspective on the world. After narrating an imagistic view of city life during the verses of “Whisper in Steel,” she concludes with this refrain: “It isn’t ideal/But the living is real.” Which is to say: quiet, complicated, and full of mystery. –Sam Sodomsky

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Sophomore Lounge

Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band: Dancing on the Edge

“I never asked to be born,” Ryan Davis tells us on his solo debut. “I was only wondering where the door went to.” A lot of the State Champion frontman’s observations emerge this way: a little bit of angst, a lot of curiosity, and a rare ability to twist expectations to land the perfect punchline. Like Silver Jews circa Tanglewood Numbers, Davis backs his insights with a ramshackle full-band sound that follows the same steadfast journey. Together, they amble along, patiently on the verge of a breakthrough—or is that a breakdown? –Sam Sodomsky

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Third Man

Snõõper: Super Snõõper

For an egg-punk band with a Pee-Wee’s Playhouse-ass live show (think oversized props and paper-mâché puppets), the trick is figuring out how to translate that energy onto a record. Snõõper went about it by moving at top speed. All but one song on their Third Man debut Super Snõõper comes in under two minutes, and the band rips through solos so fast you’ll swear you’re listening at 1.5x speed. The vocals and guitars blast with the energy of a band trying to cram 40 minutes of earworms into half the time. –Evan Minsker

Asthmatic Kitty

Sufjan Stevens: Javelin

The specific kind of intimacy Sufjan Stevens summons on Javelin is less about big questions or small details, but rather the act of pouring your heart into a vase that’s already cracking. Dedicated to his late partner, the album is a humble maturation that pulls together Stevens’ career trademarks in one sweeping motion: the lush folk arrangements of Illinois, the heavenly vocal harmonies of All Delighted People, the electronic grandiosity of The Age of Adz.

On opener “Goodbye Evergreen,” Stevens confronts the instinct to repress grief by bringing his favorite blurred line into focus—is this song about God or a queer partner? He falls to his knees from the weight of a broken heart, pleading for the solace of his past while trying to trust in what the future might bring. “I’m drowning in my self-defense,” he sings. “Now punish me.” But he won’t let the heaviness of his admissions crush him. Stevens is a ruthless optimist still marveling at the opportunity to live at all; diagnosed with the debilitating Guillain-Barré syndrome, he regards caregivers helping him relearn how to walk as “love in action.” His gratitude is infectious, especially from within grief. –Nina Corcoran

Further Listening: “Sufjan Stevens Is at His Intimate and Uplifting Best on Javelin”

Feel It

Sweeping Promises: Good Living Is Coming for You

Lira Mondal is playing one of the most satisfying bass grooves of the year on the title track of Good Living Is Coming for You when she urges you to brace yourself. “And here it comes,” she warns before unleashing a growled scream. The moment mirrors the broad terror that defines the band’s scuzzy, hooky rock music that takes aim at gentrification and homogeneity, settling down and domesticity. Sweeping Promises have made a rock album defined by their bold, unpredictable aesthetic decisions. It’s a lo-fi home-studio effort where the bass lines border on funky and the powerhouse vocals teem with punk rock bite. —Evan Minsker

Further Reading: “Sweeping Promises Make a Punk Home in the Heartland”

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

20 Buck Spin

Tomb Mold: The Enduring Spirit

After three albums of classically ground-bound death metal, Tomb Mold look to the cosmos. Though The Enduring Spirit is rife with clean guitar parts and discursive instrumental stretches, the Torontonian three-piece haven’t exactly gone prog: the pummeling “Servants of Possibility” and “Angelic Fabrications” show them in heavyweight form. Rather, like their forebears in Atheist, the band uses their considerable chops to shift the atmosphere of their hallmark sound. Drummer/vocalist Max Klebanoff maintains his wearied growl through even the dreamiest passages, giving an urgent cast to his ruminations on impermanence and the purpose of secrets. Like the band’s namesake, The Enduring Spirit is a peculiar organism blooming on the bones of old-school death. –Brad Shoup

Further Reading: “Death Metal Rebels Tomb Mold Choose the Path of Most Resistance”

Matador

Water From Your Eyes: Everyone’s Crushed

Brooklyn duo Water From Your Eyes’ first album for indie mainstay Matador could soundtrack the sort of surreal Adult Swim programming that merges stoner jokes and psychological horror: guitar riffs mutate through strange filters, pianos squelch erratically, drums pulse to unnerving rhythms. Humor and absurdity buzz throughout these carefully constructed art-pop songs, reflecting the preoccupations of their creators. Rachel Brown once wanted to write comedy for TV; Nate Amos insists that their music sounds like “the work of a crazy person.” On Everyone’s Crushed, they make insanity sound like a weirdly great time. –Nina Corcoran

Dead Oceans

Wednesday: Rat Saw God

Though it’s the Asheville quartet’s fifth album, Rat Saw God feels like a debut. Singer Karly Hartzman mines her turbulent teenage years to form both an origin story and a portrait of dead-end small-town life: sex shops off the highway, Sunday school sessions taught while still fucked up, a friend having his stomach pumped. Those last few scenes are from “Chosen to Deserve,” a country-rock love song where Hartzman runs through her most unflattering moments as a way of saying, “We were meant for each other.” But the single most striking moment on the album goes to “Bull Believer”: Hartzman despondently croons about watching someone play Mortal Kombat in the first part of the eight-and-a-half-minute song, only to spend the second half shouting the game’s tagline— “Finish him!” On Rat Saw God, the band reaches shoegaze transcendence, screamo heaven, and the kind of catharsis that leaves you exhausted in the most glorious way. –Jill Mapes

Further Reading: “Wednesday’s Curdled Beauty”

Ninja Tune

yeule: softscars

During the pandemic, yeule turned to the poppy guitar-rock of their childhood iPod for comfort. softscars melts a decade’s worth of alt-rock touchstones into a phantasmagoria of tone and texture, with washes of candy-red blood alternating with nectar, honey, and glitter. In the lyrics, yeule turns their wide-eyed gaze toward the alien landscape of their body, mingling promises of intimacy (“You’re never alone”) with the threat of never-ending surveillance (“I’m inside your phone”), pledging to “keep you safe” in one song and “eat your face” in another. It’s a heaving neurochemical ocean not unlike online life in 2023, but on “x w x,” yeule lets out the exultant scream of someone surfing its crest. –Jayson Greene

Further Reading: “Logging Off and Rocking Out With yeule, Pop’s Internet Explorer”

Matador

Yo La Tengo: This Stupid World

Yo La Tengo’s 17th album does not completely disrupt their reputation as the most reliable purveyors of sonic therapy in indie rock: The gorgeous “Aselstine” is delivered like a whispered prayer on an autumn walk, and “Fallout” surges with a heartfelt plea to drop out of our fast-paced timelines. But from the rumbling guitar solos that introduce “Sinatra Drive Breakdown” to Georgia Hubley’s relentless rhythm in the title track, this urgent, self-produced collection also seeks to raise a little hell from the band’s New Jersey studio space. They might sound cozy, but they’re definitely not complacent. –Sam Sodomsky

Further Reading: “Forty Years In, Yo La Tengo Are Still Making It Up as They Go”

Fat Possum

Youth Lagoon: Heaven Is a Junkyard

A great Youth Lagoon song is majesty in miniature, and the ones of Trevor Powers’ comeback album play like a tiny village of vacant Victorian homes. Solitary piano notes flourish like the spires on turrets; Sam KS’ drums click with precision like shingles joining at the seams; pitched samples peek out and climb the walls like vines. And Powers’ voice, as quiet as ever, is the ghost stalking the halls, croaking stories of familial decay. Heaven Is a Junkyard’s celestial wasteland is a sad scene, but its lasting note is joyful and enduring. –Steven Arroyo

Warp

Yves Tumor: Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)

Yves Tumor’s God is such a tease: eyes sprung wide, staring down creation, picking at us like a cat batting its half-dead quarry. As a rock’n’roll mystic, Tumor sifts through grime for divine spark—if their lyrics seem to circle a half-clogged drain, you're hearing them right. Amid gasping streaks of guitar and volcanic drums, Praise a Lord lifts Tumor’s occluded hymns higher than ever. God is unreachable; all we have down here is the tangle of what we mean to each other. –Sasha Geffen

Further Listening: “The Subversive Power of Fever Ray and Yves Tumor”