The Best Albums of 2023

spinnin' and grinnin' with new hits from old faves

I didn’t really realize it until I was making this list, but I wasn’t exactly drowning in great music this year, at least on an album level (would you believe that I usually have enough great albums to justify an Honorable Mentions section!). That said, maybe it took me so long to realize this because I was so busy spinning the albums I did like, and the fact that it was so difficult to rank this Top 10 speaks to how much I love each one. Hard to complain about a top-heavy year when the top is this heavy with hits!

10. Form Follows Function - Michl

I used to listen to Michl’s assorted singles (OUT OF ORDER!!!) a ton in college, but I honestly kind of forgot he existed until I saw he had a new album out this year. I listened to this one a lot in one very specific period before mostly moving on (even more specifically, I know for a fact I listened to like half of this during one visit to an H&M fitting room—cutting out the middle-man, so to speak), but anytime I do put it on now, it still glows with a synthy, cool-boy warmth.

Best Songs: Would You Believe Me, Deserve You, Holidays, Digital Parallax 

9. Javelin - Sufjan Stevens

My appreciation for Sufjan Stevens has always been twin-track: I appreciate that he’s capable of making music like Carrie & Lowell, and I appreciate that he’s capable of announcing a fifty-albums-for-fifty-states project and calling it after two. Way to know your limits, King! This (devastating) album falls into the former category, though it’s also excitingly shot through with some of the bombastic orchestration of Age of Adz and Ascension to make for something new within his prolific catalog. That he released it in a year when he suffered overwhelming personal loss makes it all the more crushing—and ultimately, all the more moving. 

Best Songs: Goodbye Evergreen, A Running Start, Will Anybody Ever Love Me, So You Are Tired, Sh*t Talk

8. Calico - Ryan Beatty

I knew Ryan Beatty mostly as a kind of vaguely-Bieber-esque YouTube sensation and as a Brockhampton-adjacent crooner, but this album basically knocked me out. It’s reductive to both artists to call Beatty off-brand Frank Ocean, but there are undeniable similarities in both their vocal tones and their penchants for expressive, stream-of-consciousness lyrics. Not every song on this album is a winner but the majority are, and its calm, strummy rhythms make for perfect summer-walk-in-the-park music.

Best Songs: Bruises Off The Peach, Cinnamon Bread, Andromeda, WHITE TEETH!!!!

7. Catching Rabbits - Genevieve Stokes

This is the first appearance on this list of what you might call my favorite sub-genre: Sad Girl Pop. When I mentioned how many of my favorite artists fit within that category to a friend, she asked me why I only like listening to women when they’re sad—which, hold on now.

Besides, I don’t like Genevieve because she’s sad, but because she sounds so good when singing her sad songs. This mostly straightforward EP is too short, but each song earns its stay, and none more so than “Habits,” probably/definitely my song of the year.

Best Songs: HABITS!!!, Can I, Mara

6. My 21st Century Blues - Raye

Raye was a discovery for me this year, and what a revelation—she has a little bit of everything in her genre-hopping arsenal, from Amy Winehouse, to Tori Kelly, to Imogen Heap, to 070 Shake. Over thirteen punchy songs, she glides easily across soulful choruses, hip-hop hooks, and gospel breakdowns. And if you need any proof of the unbelievable voice underneath it all, look no further than her stunning Tiny Desk Concert, easily one of the best of the year.

Best Songs: Oscar Winning Tears, Escapism, Body Dysmorphia, Buss It Down

5. Oppenheimer (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) - Ludwig Göransson

This is probably the first time an original score has ended up on my Best Albums of the Year list, but it’s also probably the first time a musician has made any legitimate attempt to steal the “Best Composer Named Ludwig” crown. He might have a ways to go on that front, but his work for Nolan’s opus is an achievement of its own, easily earning the title of “Best Music to Write To” and giving us a song in ”Can You Hear The Music?” that makes me feel like I could split an atom with my bare hands.

Best Songs: Can You Hear The Music?, Theorists, Kitty Comes to Testify, Oppenheimer

4. GUTS - Olivia Rodrigo

If you’re going to name your album after the best Nickelodeon G.A.S. show of all time, you better come correct. Olivia did, one-upping her impressive debut with gusto and giving us an album full of clever, catchy, at-times-regrettably-sing/rapped bops. Her songwriting is especially sharp here, full of lines that could’ve easily fallen flat without her well-honed wit, and the overall balance between screamy catharsis and melancholic introspection feels just about perfect for an album with an all-caps title and lower-case song titles. 

(Plus, Olivia unwittingly crafted the best imaginable album for road-tripping through the Scottish highlands, at least according to me and my friend Mike.)

Best Songs: vampire, lacy, making the bed, get him back!, love is embarrassing, pretty isn’t pretty

3. the record - boygenius

It’s no secret that Phoebe Bridgers is far and away my favorite member of boygenius, and yet I’ve always felt that her solo music is some of the best music in the world only when I’m in the precise kind of funk necessary for me to enjoy it. As a group project, boygenius pulls off the magic trick of making the same kind of sad music somehow more-than-palatable to me regardless of mood. Maybe that’s because they’ve mixed in enough upbeat rock bangers to go with all the depression, or maybe it’s just the affable buzz of friendship that practically hums off of this thing, but either way, they’ve made an excellent record, front to back—and they put on a heck of a show this summer to support it.

Best Songs: True Blue, Cool About It, Not Strong Enough, Leonard Cohen, Letter To An Old Poet

2. Sunburn - Dominic Fike

Interesting fella, Dominic. When I first heard “3 Nights,” I thought, finally, a cool Jack Johnson!¹ Then he put out a debut album nothing like “3 Nights,” and I loved it for different reasons. Sure, there was an air of “Frank Ocean’s ‘Nights’ knock-off” about some of his beat-switchier rap stuff, but the guy knew his way around a hook, and his combination of hip-hop and Red Hot Chili Peppers-esque guitar-rock felt genuinely fresh. Then there was Euphoria, which launched him into another echelon of alt-pop stardom (maybe alt-pop celebrity), and I felt like I lost him a bit—if I heard about him at all, it was because people were making fun of his 12-minute performance in the finale. 

But then came Sunburn, a sophomore album composed of wall-to-wall slapperinos: beautiful pop melodies everywhere you look, framed and ornamented by unexpected genre digressions and weird production quirks. It’s been wild for me to see what little mainstream music publication coverage he has received tilt towards pat dismissal of his supposed Gen Z blandness, when I hear him as the exact opposite: in conversation with his fellow pop aspirers, sure, but with a saltwater originality all his own.  

Best Songs: Think Fast (feat. Weezer), Sick, 7 HOURS!!!, Bodies, Sunburn, Frisky

1. In the End It Always Does - The Japanese House

Amber Bain (aka The Japanese House) has been one of my favorite artists since her pre-album days, when the most fun a guy could have was listening to her umpteen singles on Spotify’s “This is The Japanese House” playlist. Her first album, Good At Falling, perfectly capitalized on those singles’ mix of synth-forward production and yearning, romantic vocals that notably maintained (and even heightened) their yearningness when the tempo ticked up toward danceable pop. 

After a long gap, Amber is back and better than ever with this sublime sophomore album, filled with all her trademark longing and sadness even as it bops as hard as ever. She shows her range, too, jumping from the banjo-orchestral twitchiness of “Spot Dog,” to the mournful minimalism of ‘One for sorrow…,” to the depression-on-the-dancefloor paradox of “Sad to Breathe.” It’s the kind of sophomore album in which the artist becomes more themselves than ever, not by calcifying but by evolving and expanding in all the right ways. It may not be the album to win over hordes of new fans, but for old fans like me, it’s basically heaven. 

Best Songs: Spot Dog, SAD TO BREATHE!!!, Over There, Boyhood, Sunshine Baby

Honorable Mentions - SINGLES EDITION

In lieu of more complete albums to recommend, I figured I’d share some of my favorite individual songs of the year (some of which aren’t new releases, sue me). Consider this a musical potpourri!

This is my way of sneaking Kahan’s Stick Season album onto this list even though it came out in 2022. I saw a meme the other day that attributed his breakthrough success to a society finally admitting to ourselves that we’re ready for Mumford & Sons Round 2. Well, I was unashamed in loving Round 1, and the fact that Kahan himself was the one who shared that meme makes me even more unashamed in loving Round 2. 

And this is my way of backdooring some Lizzie McAlpine-coded, musical theater-indebted sad girl pop into a year that lacked a new Lizzie project. This one is a little rockier than Lizzie tends to get, but just as sweeping and melodramatic (complimentary). 

Slap a vocoder on any song and I’m done for, but I especially like this rare blend of heavily filtered vocals and more upbeat pop-rock guitars. 

Just a masterpiece of a chorus, all cascading melodies and horns and pomp. 

Genre-mashups seem to be a trend in my tastes, so count me in for Dawson’s fascinating folk-R&B-indie-rock amalgam. And are those violins? Come on.

This is a nice sonic companion to the song above and has a similarly cool contrast between folk-sounding instruments and more modern vocals.

No full release from Dave this year, but this collab with French artist Tiakola pushes the British rapper into fun, dancier territory than usual. 

This is the third or fourth time I’ve mentioned Frank Ocean on this list, so maybe he should just come back. But in the meantime, this is a great approximation of “Chanel”-era Frank that nonetheless retains Apollo’s unique fingerprints. 

“Sneakers” - Knox

It’s fitting that I found this single through Instagram’s algorithm, since it sounds like AI’s idea of a Gen Z pop-punker. Too bad it rocks, and its embarrassing lyrics somehow only add to its guilty pleasures.

The fact that I don’t really know how to classify this song (and especially its beyond-cool, syncopated breakdown) is exactly why I like it so much. What can I say—I’m a sucker for overlapping vocals!

1. Jack Johnson is actually cool to begin with