A year of great music offers a reminder that more really can be more: more melodies, more breakthroughs, more art.
Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2023” coverage here.
Narrowing the options down to a list of 10 favorite albums was, in 2023, a tougher task than ever. The music industry has been beset by concerns about market saturation, caused by an ever-rising flood of new songs onto streaming services, overwhelming artists and consumers alike. But looking back over a year of great albums offers a reminder that more really can be more: more melodies, more breakthroughs, more art.
10. John Francis Flynn, Look Over the Wall, See the Sky
John Francis Flynn places classics of Irish folk music into the artificial now, shearing drinking songs of their merriness and burying fiddles under gray noise. The concept could make for a bad Ph.D. project, but his execution is all too humane. As Flynn repurposes the ballads of working people crunched by industrialization—such as “Dirty Old Town,” last popularized by the Pogues, the late Shane MacGowan’s band—he taps into cross-generational yearnings that modernity will never squelch.
9. JPEGMAFIA and Danny Brown, Scaring the Hoes
This thrillingly tasteless album opens with a battle cry: “First off, fuck Elon Musk.” It’s rapped by JPEGMAFIA, a lovable crank who’s disturbingly preoccupied with social-media beef. Meanwhile, his partner, Danny Brown, yelps virtuosically about real problems—agoraphobia, addiction. Their complementary forms of alienation alchemize with breakneck, berserk beats to jolt you off the couch and away from the villains on your laptop.
8. Zach Bryan, Zach Bryan
A lightly campy aura clings to this country heartthrob, who’s given to reciting beat poetry in a voice as marbled and juicy as pot roast. But his robustly written songs, arranged with a kind of burnt-parchment frailty, pursue an important project: rehabbing cowboy masculinity. Pop culture has conflated male introspection with nasty resentfulness for a while now, but Bryan’s a damaged searcher who has, he solemnly swears, “no hate in my heart for anything, anywhere, or anyone.”
7. Underscores, Wallsocket
Though superficially stuck on Y2K nostalgia, Gen Z is a cohort of originals, who have no precedent for their tech-mediated experience of global tensions. So they create albums such as this bold and mischievous epic of mutant pop, brimming with anxieties about money, identity, and gun violence. Zipping between emo, dubstep, and—this one really shocked me—evocations of Neutral Milk Hotel, Underscores’s April Harper Grey uses music production as a storytelling tool, dramatizing a world gone weird.
6. Olivia Rodrigo, Guts
Proclaiming herself the “all-American bitch” on the opening track of her second album, Olivia Rodrigo proves herself the queen of contradictions. With great finesse, her songs bridge binaries: comedy and tragedy, likability and petulance, singing like a caroler and screaming like a ferret. To her elders, Rodrigo offers a feast of references to alternative-rock songs last popular in the iPod era. To her peers, she validates the youthful feeling of every interaction being life-changingly important. Our society stays coherent with albums like this one, which offer a sense of rebellion that brings people together.
5. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Weathervanes
Jason Isbell continues to put forward a definition of “alt-country” that has little to do with genre or sound: He sings about the shadows in our national myths. Incalculable despair—the kind one has to suppress to survive—pulses in his songs about painkillers, mass shootings, and time’s toll on even the greatest love stories. But rather than make misery porn, he shows how to cope. The carefulness of his lyrics and the searching, swinging sound of his band support his message about seeking solace in others.
4. SZA, SOS
Choosing to release her long-awaited second album last December, after most critics had made their lists of the best music of the year, was one sign that SZA plays by her own rules. Her dominance throughout 2023 proved why she’s able to do so: She writes her songs stream-of-consciousness style, fills them with poisonous observations, produces them however suits her whim—R&B one track, pop-punk another—and still makes them sound like hits. As if her evil genius was in doubt, SOS’s biggest smash, “Kill Bill,” will have millions of people doing their holiday shopping with a serial-killer confession stuck in their head.
3. Caroline Polachek, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You
Caroline Polachek is easily pigeonholed as an intellectual’s pop diva, all lyrical abstraction and opera-trained vocals. But her warm and vulnerable second album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, is less about technique than emotion, tapping into pure moods that other musicians rarely capture. These are wide-eyed love songs, but the love is directed inward, toward the singer’s own sense of potential. She’s expressing what a museum curator might call “personal futurism,” and what the rest of us would call the hope that eventually we’ll get to live the life we’ve always wanted.
2. Wednesday, Rat Saw God
Nothing in this North Carolina rock band’s music is stable—not the drums that drunkenly lag and rush, not the guitars that seem to swing in and out of tune, not the porch-front warble of the vocalist, Karly Hartzman. With novelistic detail, she likes to sing about little accidents such as survivable electrocutions and Benadryl overdoses, and the attention to bad luck fits the music’s gothic intrigue. At any moment, Wednesday might relax into country prettiness, like on “Quarry,” or explode into screaming agony, like on “Bull Believer,” the most frightening few minutes of music released all year.
1. Amaarae, Fountain Baby
My most-played song of 2023 disses almost everyone in the universe: Ticking through the astrological chart, the 29-year-old pop singer Amaarae declares Tauruses to be teases, Leos to be spoiled, and “them Libra bitches horrible.” The conceit of the song “Co-Star” might seem to pander to generational trends in superstition. But with its breezy blend of harp and highlife, and a singer who sounds so vaporous she might as well be a cirrus cloud, the track still feels, after dozens of listens, mysterious. With every play, it sparkles in a different way.
On her second album, Fountain Baby, Amaarae offered a fresh fusion of clubby-cool hip-hop attitude and African rhythms, reflecting her upbringing split between the U.S. and Ghana. Her lyrics present her as a hard-partying badass, but when I met with her earlier this year, she emphasized that she’s fundamentally a music nerd who prefers the studio to the rave (so Cancer). This explains why Fountain Baby is such an addictive headphones experience; interlocking beats pan mesmerizingly in the ear. On loudspeakers, those same beats can get rooms of people moving—but in ways that, like fate, can’t really be predicted.
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