In times of chaos, music can be a place of escape or comfort. This year, favorite artists like SZA, Sufjan Stevens, and Fever Ray returned with reliably stunning releases, rising artists like Nourished by Time, Amaarae, and yeule pushed the boundaries with breakthrough releases that set the tone for where music might go next, and some of the year’s biggest surprises also happened to be just the thing we needed (hello, André 3000 flute album!). We listened to thousands of albums across every genre, from pop to folk to rock to rap to R&B to country to electronic to experimental. Here are the 50 best albums of 2023.
Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2023 wrap-up coverage here.
Note: This list includes albums released in December 2022. Anything that came out after we published our Best of 2022 list was eligible.
Listen to selections from this list on our Spotify playlist and Apple Music playlist.
(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.)
André 3000: New Blue Sun
Think of the qualities we associate with André 3000: his dynamite conviction, eagerness to channel moods around him, and that impish penchant for doodling way outside the lines. Does this not sound precisely like the guy who’d drop 87 minutes of prismatic flute improv, new-age synth washes, and ayahuasca growls? All those times you wigged out to “B.O.B.,” which Three Stacks were you lionizing exactly? No doors are closed but several windows have swung open, and the breeze—accented by floral notes of Yusef Lateef, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Laraaji, and the Leaving Records community he’s spent years trilling with—is blissful. New Blue Sun doesn’t need a single bar to get its message across: that side quests are often the most memorable part of the entire game. –Gabriel Szatan
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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
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Purelink: Signs
Purelink have never cared much for drama. Even when the Chicago trio flirted with the dancefloor, they favored stillness over momentum, peace over chaos. One early single felt like a statement of intent: “Maintain the Bliss.” Since then they’ve continued peeling off layers and slowing the pace of their foggy melodies and shuddering rhythms, a process that ultimately resulted in this elusive ambient album. Signs’ six tracks are deceptively dynamic, continually shifting from new-age gasps to the sorts of minimal glitches that scuffed up albums on Mille Plateaux in the early 2000s. Subtlety is the order of the day; it can be easy to miss their slight variations, like when a plush synth pad enters the mix. But gently insistent repetition makes each idea linger, like an image burned into an LCD screen. –Colin Joyce
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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
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Blue Lake: Sun Arcs
It’s no surprise that Blue Lake’s Sun Arcs started at a cabin in the woods. The latest album by multi-instrumentalist Jason Dungan has the gentle, unbothered pace of a week spent in nature: stirring with the sunrise, hiking in the forest, sleeping with the night air’s chill on your face. With his custom-built 48-string zither and a small mountain of supporting instruments, Dungan uncovers an acoustic-ambient sound that feels hewn from the spruce and pine that surrounded him when he conceived it. His lively playing, inspired equally by the open-ended explorations of free jazz and the homespun intricacy of John Fahey, breathes life into these compositions like wind through branches. –Brad Sanders
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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
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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
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Kali Uchis: Red Moon in Venus
A little over a decade since getting her start with a DIY trip-hop tape, Kali Uchis has blossomed into a consummate Latin torch diva. Red Moon in Venus, the Colombian-American singer’s third album of sultry, bad-bitch anthems and emotive reflections on growth, sees her vamp, whistle-tone, and murmur sour-sweet nothings into a lover’s ear. This bilingual, slow-burning ode to self-empowerment offers a guide to healing a broken heart while staying pretty, perfumed, and a little petty. Uchis isn’t afraid to be cocky about it, either: Musing on her ex’s new boo, she sing-raps, “At the end of the day, she’d eat my pussy if I let her.” –E.R. Pulgar
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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
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Sexyy Red: Hood Hottest Princess
“SkeeYee” and “Pound Town,” those hooky anthems about street hollering and other vagaries of courtship, proved that Sexyy Red has enough charisma to carry a single. But the rest of her breakthrough mixtape establishes the St. Louis rapper as a talent who can easily match the brolic delivery and big-stepping beats of many Dirty South greats, including Three 6 Mafia's dearly departed Gangsta Boo. Her toughness and her horniness (or, more specifically, her delight in others’ horniness for her), and the freedom with which she expresses them, solidifies the self-declared “female Gucci Mane” as a sexually liberated young rapper to be reckoned with. She’s matter-of-fact about her coochie being eaten, feels great about her ass and yours, and is always on the prowl with gusto, sex-positive with a self-assured gait. Her love for Trump can go in the trash; everything else can stay. –Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
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Ryuichi Sakamoto: 12
It’s difficult not to consider Ryuichi Sakamoto’s final album through the lens of his death in April. He began recording it a couple of years ago, not long after receiving his second cancer diagnosis; he completed the last piece just two months before announcing that the disease had progressed to stage four. Yet these patient, contemplative, quietly rapturous studies for piano and synthesizer are not mournful—at least, no more than the rest of the composer’s gorgeously melancholy oeuvre, which spans more than four decades. Softly tracing repetitive figures and halting motifs that touch on jazz, Romanticism, and his own back catalog, Sakamoto uncovers moments of joy in changes that seem to move of their own volition, like leaves in the wind. He knew the piano inside and out, but was still finding chords that could surprise and delight. And though his days were numbered, he let these pieces unspool as though he had all the time in the world. –Philip Sherburne
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Liv.e: Girl in the Half Pearl
Liv.e’s second album roils with muscular, avant-garde R&B. There are the drum loops—clipped, frenetic, bouncing from wall to wall like supercharged particles. The synths—bubbling and chromatic, kinetic like ocean waves. The vocals—sometimes screaming, sometimes honeyed, always delivered with maximum urgency. Because this is music about love that hurts. “Ghost” is about staying up all night, alone with your thoughts. “Wild Animals” is a fuck you that places a smoky jazz piano next to a chaise longue. “I never got to tell you just how I feel,” she sings. She’s almost laughing. Bet you can guess what happens next. –Sophie Kemp
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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
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Lonnie Holley: Oh Me Oh My
Lonnie Holley’s fourth album is like a cosmic mixtape, placing the septuagenarian outsider artist’s ruminations on slavery, mortality, and intergenerational Black trauma in communion with a range of stylistic diversions and high-profile guests. While Michael Stipe’s world-weary croon enriches the title track, and Malian vocalist Rokia Koné’s untethered wail lifts up “If We Get Lost They Will Find Us,” Oh Me Oh My remains centered around Holley and his story of survival in a country that has long conspired to deny his humanity. He finds cathartic liberation in speaking his truth; as he intones on the penultimate track, these reminiscences serve “to pull myself free.” –Zach Schonfeld
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Pangaea: Changing Channels
On its surface, the abrasive mesmerism of Hessle Audio—the UK techno linchpin that electronic luminaries Pangaea, Pearson Sound, and Ben UFO founded in 2007—might seem at odds with the ticklish, shamelessly crowd-pleasing melodies that have come into vogue on post-pandemic dancefloors. But Pangaea’s first album in seven years mixes both, perking to life with meticulous beats before detonating hooks from the garish ends of house, rave, and speed garage. Listening through this uncommonly tight LP feels like losing your friends at the club and wandering, dazed, from room to room—the thrills coming fast, each climactic payoff well-earned. Rather than decide between indulging heads or showering the floor with a confetti cannon, Changing Channels dissolves the binary altogether. –Jazz Monroe
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Veeze: Ganger
In every high school classroom, there’s a mysterious kid in an expensive jacket somewhere toward the back. His voice—let alone his business—is unknown to approximately 97 percent of the student body, and when he isn’t looking at his phone, he’s muttering obscure jokes to himself. Ganger is what his secret rap album probably sounds like: studious without being geriatric, sinister without being off-putting.
Veeze broke out of Michigan’s rap scene by melding familiar influences (Future, Carti, Lil Baby, etc.) into something alien and infective, marked by villainous whisper-speak and preternatural bars. No matter how quietly he enunciates them, his words—candid truths and scathing witticisms alike—are those of a lifelong student becoming the teacher. –Samuel Hyland
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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
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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
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Ice Spice: Like..? EP
When Ice Spice says she’s chose, don’t just take her word for it. The proof is in the ubiquity of 2023’s biggest young star, achieved through casually blunt disses, a trademark-worthy archive of selfies, and drill beats flecked with 2010s pop radio samples. The bouncy earworms she put together with producer RiotUSA for her first EP seal the deal. She may have a signature Dunkin’ drink and Taylor Swift’s number now, but the unfussy Like..? still sounds delivered from atop the “Munch” video’s Bronx basketball hoop: She’s lofty enough to make you feel lucky to kiss her feet, but close enough to the ground to step down and set a maddie straight. –Hattie Lindert
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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
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Avalon Emerson: & the Charm
All aboard the Avalon Express for a serene, 40-minute dream-pop voyage that stirs up faint memories against the backdrop of a glowing pink horizon. For her debut album, the techno whiz turns into a dance-pop singer-songwriter, delivering downy reveries that float on as her mind drifts back to California, old friends, and ice baths in Oslo. Her vocals are cool as lake water, the production light like a spring breeze. No matter what direction she takes next, you’ll trust her navigation. –Cat Zhang
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HiTech: Détwat
Detroit trio HiTech’s astounding sophomore album stretches elements of ghettotech, club music, and Miami bass into colorful, cartoon-like shapes. Their rhythms are pedal-to-floor relentless, splitting the difference between a sweaty nightclub and a blacklight painting come to life. Verses from members King Milo, Milf Melly, and 47Chops, along with an array of scattered vocal samples, keep things even more lively, turning annoyed calls for people to pay what they owe and messy asks for birthday sex into urgent koans to the dance gods. –Dylan Green
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jaimie branch: Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war))
In a time when hope can feel especially hard to muster, jaimie branch’s Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)) is full of it. On her final album as a bandleader, recorded weeks before her sudden death at age 39, the fire-breathing trumpeter, composer, and vocalist blasts the colonialist mindset over rapturous grooves, sings of liberation from drudgery in lilting folk song, and dismantles the segregationist framework of genre by incorporating vernacular sounds both global and homegrown. The album brims with joy and righteous anger, and illuminates the communal ties that underpin both. –Jonathan Williger
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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
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Laurel Halo: Atlas
On Atlas, her fifth solo album, experimental artist Laurel Halo weaves entire tapestries from scraps of piano, cello, voice, and synth; she tugs at each composition’s loose threads, sometimes unraveling the entire piece, sometimes drawing it tighter. Atlas’ contradictions are beguiling: It has a complex emotional core, a tender but firm existential pull that can be equally comforting and disquieting. It’s beautiful but not serene, dissonant but never harsh—gentle ambient music that discourages zoning out. –Dash Lewis
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Arooj Aftab / Vijay Iyer / Shahzad Ismaily: Love in Exile
Five years after they first performed an improvised set together, the wildly talented musicians Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, and Shahzad Ismaily took to the studio for Love in Exile, an LP they recorded in long takes with only light editing. Its six pieces unfold as immersive meditations, with the artists drawing from wells of jazz, Urdu poetry, and spirituality. Aftab’s vocals gesture at themes of love and loss, while Ismaily and Iyer surround her with fluid piano and softly undulating bass. Iyer has described Love in Exile as part of a deeper personal reckoning around South Asian culture and communion, and the trio’s mind-melding chemistry serves as a beacon of unspoken connection. –Allison Hussey
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Sofia Kourtesis: Madres
A song called “How Music Makes You Feel Better” could go wrong in so many ways, but on Sofia Kourtesis’ life-giving debut album, it’s clear that the Peruvian artist innately understands the healing properties of vibrating waveforms. Like all her work to date, Madres is built around house music’s celebratory thump, but the dancefloor is just the starting point for an expansive set of collages that fold in field recordings of Afro-Peruvian drumming, protests from across Latin America, and snippets of conversation with friends and family gathered on her travels around the world. If there’s a mournful undercurrent, it’s surely related to caring for her mother, who was being treated for cancer—and eventually recovered—while Kourtesis was recording the album. But that openness to pain is what makes Madres feel so emotionally cleansing: It’s a bittersweet dose of our deepest fears, a homeopathic remedy administered via sound. –Philip Sherburne
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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
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Jessie Ware: That! Feels Good!
The exclamation marks punctuating That! Feels Good! telegraph its spirit with lightning precision: Jessie Ware’s fifth album offers an enthusiastic celebration of pleasure. Deliberately avoiding the glassy surfaces that coated her previous work, Ware and producers James Ford and Stuart Price opt for an unabashed revival of the glory days of disco, eschewing electronic pulses for full-bodied arrangements that skew close to Chic’s classic thump. Although Ware sometimes sings with an obvious smirk—the litany of double entendres on “Shake the Bottle” flirts with camp—That! Feels Good! is the furthest thing from ironic pastiche. Its bright, bustling hedonism lives by the words Ware sings on “Free Yourself”: “If it feels so good, then don’t you stop.” –Stephen Thomas Erlewine
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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
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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
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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
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100 gecs: 10,000 gecs
In confusing times, you have to live a little—order the Taco Bell, scream at the slasher movie, shed the skin of your former stuffy self. Ergo 100 gecs, who tore down the half-ironic “so bad it’s good” framework and rebuilt it into “so dumb it’s smart” post-irony. The duo’s major label debut lashes together computer-generated grunge riffs, 16-bit bleep-boops, frog sounds (!?), nonsense koans, and walloping percussion, and then stuffs it all into a malfunctioning sound system turned up to 27. 10,000 gecs is exhilarating anti-taste music, produced by two brain cells colliding into each other over and over until sparks fly. If a Victorian child survived listening to “Dumbest Girl Alive” over good headphones, he’d emerge fully conditioned for our dissonant, destructive, and stitched-together 21st century. –Jeremy Gordon
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Kelela: Raven
Raven is an uneasy sound bath of an album where soothing, ambient club tunes mask bitter realizations that standing in your truth is often lonely and destabilizing. But Kelela doesn’t wallow in despair. It’s an open invitation to everyone who seeks refuge in the bumping bass and kinetic energy of grinding bodies, who are reeling from implosive friendship breakups and dodging calls from parents back home: Take off your shoes, hang up your coat, and vibe. –Heven Haile
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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
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Yaeji: With a Hammer
On With a Hammer, Yaeji forgoes the usual metaphors for change—the inexorable marches and slow evolutions—to explore her own vision of enlightenment: a total teardown where we finally get to build the future right. Balancing heart-racing garage rhythms and buzzing vintage indie rock with themes of social responsibility and creative transformation, the singer-producer’s full-length debut is whimsical like its synth-flute overture and totally serious, too. Her colorful, blobby style brings a hopeful glow to eternal human projects like processing anger and fostering community—and she begins by granting broad latitude to like-minded contemporaries including Loraine James and Nourished by Time. Like a great big tap on the shoulder, Yaeji’s smiling sledgehammer arcs across languages and generations to say: time to get to work. –Anna Gaca
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Olivia Rodrigo: GUTS
Boys suck. Modern society’s expectations of young women suck harder. So what do you do when you’re a 20-year-old girl navigating romantic disappointment and the perilous transition to adulthood while making one of the most anticipated sophomore albums of the decade? Rock the fuck out. On GUTS, Olivia Rodrigo teaches an AP course in Angry Girl Music of the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries, consulting a syllabus of foremothers from Courtney Love to Kesha on insouciant hot-mess anthems and somber ballads that explode into musical-theater showstoppers. Everyone from the Zoomers on TikTok to the Boomers at the Rock Hall is eagerly lining up to enroll. –Amy Phillips
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Noname: Sundial
On Sundial, Noname’s first album in half a decade, the Chicago-raised sage points her scathing wit and sociopolitical smarts toward everything from beauty standards for Black women to rappers and politicians not preaching anything worth practicing to music’s uneasy relationship with trauma and consumption. But the record’s most unnerving moments come from her willingness to see herself in the mess she’s critiquing. “She’s a shadow walker, moon stalker, Black author/Librarian, contrarian,” she starts on the album’s opening track, “black mirror,” amid a loungey instrumental and heavenly backing vocals. It sets the tone for an album that’s as confrontational as it is musically immaculate. Vulnerable and fearless, Sundial offers us the real Fatimah Warner in all her contradictory glory. –Dylan Green
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L’Rain: I Killed Your Dog
With L’Rain, Taja Cheek collapses genres into smearing montages that are as alive and unpredictable as a fever dream. Her third album expands into spiky garage rock, lavish psych-folk, and misty dance-pop, turning toward romantic love as its primary subject. The sounds are more immediate and broadly appealing than ever, but Cheek hasn’t lost her restless ingenuity: The creature put to rest on its Auto-Tuned lullaby of a title track may be a cherished pet, or it may be the narrator herself. –Marc Hogan
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Lana Del Rey: Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd
Lana Del Rey’s ninth album pulls the listener close, as the 38-year-old singer-songwriter works through what it means to grow old and who’s going to help her get there. These big questions are presented nakedly and dramatically on songs like “A&W,” a winding metaphor about becoming more of a product than a person, both valuable and disposable. Her openness is particularly affecting on “Sweet,” when she stretches her voice high to ponder the mysteries of romance, on “Kintsugi,” which basks in the glow of familial love, and on “Margaret,” when she practically smiles through the microphone as she concocts a fake date for her producer and friend Jack Antonoff’s wedding. At the album’s core is a longing to be remembered—even if there’s no true meaning to who we are or what we do, she suggests, at least we can hope to live on in someone’s heart. –Matthew Strauss
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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
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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
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Fever Ray: Radical Romantics
Trace the path of Karin Dreijer’s glinting scalpel as they dissect the many mutations of love. On Radical Romantics, the Swedish pop provocateur’s third album as Fever Ray, Dreijer digs around in the viscera of relationships, whether they be sexual, estranged, or familial. The thrust and surrender of Dreijer’s voice on “Shiver” mimics the thrill of desire as a squirming synth phrase boomerangs around them. Their silvery whisper on “New Utensils” gives a primal instruction: “Pull up a skirt/Grind the beasts.” On the menacing “Even It Out,” Dreijer takes a PTA meeting into their own hands, threatening a boy who once tormented their kid in school. Like the muck of emotions, these different strains of devotion are liable to bleed into each other without warning—sharp electronics stab into a trembling vocal, brutal lyrics spur a slick pop hook.
Dreijer—along with a cadre of co-producers including their brother Olof, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and batida beatmaker Nídia—injects Radical Romantics with textures that are as sticky as sex, and as crackly as stockings snagging on dry skin. Their register bounds between ecstatic highs and a subterranean timbre, with their most sumptuous delivery slinking through “Kandy.” The song deals with lust in its slumbering state: “Can you bring me back?” Dreijer sings, their voice coated in a downy, fungal film. Their attention to detail feels both clinical and human, as if Dreijer has discovered the exact vibrational frequency of a forlorn voice, and decided to paint it rather than punch in the formula. –Madison Bloom
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Amaarae: Fountain Baby
Has getting money and bitches ever sounded as effortless or lush as it does on Fountain Baby? Amaarae’s second album makes a life of Henny-soaked hedonism and thotty trysts feel like a regular Tuesday. The singer alchemizes her Atlanta and Accra upbringing, melding Clipse samples, Japanese kotos, Afropop bliss, and bratty punk, binding it all together with her breathy, helium-high soprano. Fountain Baby obliterates any superficial understanding of what African—or pop—music is supposed to sound like. Queer bad girls of the diaspora will be gloating about sharing “matching titties” with their boos for years to come. –Isabelia Herrera
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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
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Nourished by Time: Erotic Probiotic 2
If it’s true that a musician spends their whole life making their debut album, you might wonder just how many lives Marcus Brown has lived. Written, recorded, and produced alone during the pandemic in his parents’ basement in Baltimore, Erotic Probiotic 2 heats up decades of music and lets it cool into something almost incredulously new. Its anti-heartbreak, pro-labor, loosely spiritual jams are made for the softest, loungiest club or doing the wavy-arm dance on your couch. Quad City DJs, Arthur Russell, and SWV are some touchpoints, but so is Prince, whose fastidious attention to detail and auteurist approach to R&B are Brown’s specialties.
What jumps out first is his yawny baritone, full of phonetic anomalies, as if his words go through a wormhole somewhere between the back and front of his mouth. But his detailed arrangements and songwriting chops soon begin to glow, revealing a DIY pop star who turns every limitation into an asset. Brown is both careful and wild with his words: He’s been a cat, he’s been a dog, he’s the dot-connector, he’s the spot-corrector, he’s prayed to Jesus once or twice but “never heard a word back in plain English.” He’s a leading voice in the Life Sucks But It’s Chill school of philosophy. “I don’t have much money but I, I do what I want with my time,” he sings on “The Fields.” It’s an undercover mission statement, delivered with the casual confidence of someone serenading themselves in the bathroom mirror. –Jeremy D. Larson
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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
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billy woods / Kenny Segal: Maps
The rapper lifestyle has rarely sounded so unglamorous. On the brilliantly bleak travelogue Maps, New York’s indie-rap maverick billy woods floats around like a ghost—from the Netherlands to a Costco in the Midwest, from the backseat of a $300 Uber ride to outside Kennedy Fried Chicken—blowing dope and waiting until it’s time for his next gig. As ever, woods’ raps are stuffed with an overwhelmingly colorful blur of wordplay: “From up here the lakes is puddles,” he observes at cruising altitude, “the land unfold brown and green, it’s a quiet puzzle.” His words on NYC are so alive that you can practically smell the conch fritters frying up in the pan, taste the tang of city tap water, and see him breathlessly chasing down a Brooklyn bus. Sometimes the fortysomething father of two just bars out, like when he seamlessly weaves the titles of Cam’ron classics into a nostalgic verse about the days when he had nothing to lose. Kenny Segal’s beats are the backbone—switching between gentle and hard, kooky and sublime—and give woods the space to lay out the life lessons, sly jokes, and observations that make the mundane sound profound. –Alphonse Pierre
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Caroline Polachek: Desire, I Want to Turn Into You
Released on Valentine’s Day, Caroline Polachek’s second solo album drags a key through the Hallmark holiday polish and imagines a version of love altogether more carnal and consuming: desire as irrepressible as a volcano, improbable as a flower in winter, binding as a new tattoo. This is fertile emotional terrain, yielding music that feels bountiful and ungoverned. Polachek opens the album with an operatic caterwaul and fills it with wordless, intuitive melody and expressionistic images, her appetite for sounds and textures vast enough to metabolize breakbeats, bagpipes, 1960s Italian pop, and a dulcet children’s choir. Desire, I Want to Turn Into You is an album to get comfortably lost in, knowing there will always be some familiar motif that pops up to reorient you. It’s Caroline’s island, and we’re just walking circles around its wild and wonderful perimeter. –Olivia Horn
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SZA: SOS
SOS is an indulgence of the masochistic instinct to rage and break shit and deal with the consequences later. We all know this person: They’re unbearably funny and hot, with eviscerating comebacks for days; they’re good at trashing their ain’t-shit ex and quick to tell off a jealous opp; they’re amazing at articulating their mistakes but terrible at taking their own advice. They’re at the center of their own three-act-play. SZA embodies this person on SOS, dissecting love with the analytical and theoretical obsession of an astrology fanatic. It’s an approach to heartbreak that is so familiar and exacting that the album stayed at the top of the Billboard 200 album chart for ten weeks.
In the seven years since her debut album, SZA’s ability to wrangle self-destruction in her songwriting has grown to darker, pettier heights—even better, she’s decided to outright reject the idea that maturity is a prerequisite for growth. When the emotions inside you are at war, it’s more satisfying to taunt, kick, and sabotage yourself on the path to healing than to process your feelings under a life coach’s glare. Here she’s unsparing in her approach to self-soothing, and after being pushed by horrible exes, enemies, and public scrutiny, hasn’t she earned the right to exact vengeance? This is her vigilante era, and she’ll nonchalantly draw up a detailed game plan for murder and convince you to be an accomplice. She knows her fans have felt that same madness inside once or twice before.
SZA’s freewheeling spirit shines on SOS because of how easily her vocals flit, dip, and traverse through disparate genres and forms of songwriting. She proves that not only can she do whatever the fuck she wants, but she can do it better than most of her contemporaries. Make a pop punk song? How about a spare indie duet? Okay, sure—go off, we love it. Lyrically, she’s relentless and perfectly chill, treating flexing as a bloodsport and great sex as a necessary distraction from reality: “Stick it in ‘fore the memories get to kickin’ in,” she teases despairingly on “Nobody Gets Me.” SOS matches the range of its dynamic star, the kind of album where the aching reverb of a song about losing herself in a rocky relationship (“Gone Girl”) rolls seamlessly into the steely bars of an armored response to heartbreak (“Smoking on My Ex Pack”), before SZA ultimately resolves that maybe she’s her own worst enemy.
But the other side of heartbreak is the desperation to be loved; the need to chase a high so great, it might ruin you in its pursuit. The real hope is to find a moment of clarity about who you could be with someone else, without them, or in spite of them; the realization that something powerful remains after all the fear, anger, and resentment has been pushed aside. SOS reminds us that the journey of self-acknowledgement is beautiful and devastating at once. –Clover Hope
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