The five-star albums we missed in 2023 – from Jane Remover to Jalen Ngonda
Jalen Ngonda clearly has an intriguing story – how did a Washington DC native with a voice that sounds not unlike that of the late Marvin Gaye fetch up in Liverpool? – but his debut album doesn’t really require context. The work of someone possessed of an almost indecent amount of vocal talent – he soars effortlessly over subtly orchestrated arrangements, gritty enough to pack a real emotional punch but noticeably devoid of affectation – Come Around and Love Me is half an hour of untrammelled, joy: alternately breezily heart-lifting on the title track and If You Don’t Want My Love and brooding, lovesick, on Just Like You Used to or What a Difference She Made. By his own account immersed in the Motown and Philly soul he grew up with, you could argue that its sound slots neatly into the retro remit of his label Daptone – he has talked about his love of Fleet Foxes and Angel Olsen, which suggests that there could be a more left-field side to his music yet to be revealed – but equally, there’s a freshness and immediacy to his songwriting that sidesteps any sense of someone merely trying to recreate the past: both Come Around and Love Me and its author feel like a real find. Alexis Petridis
Pupil Slicer – Blossom
Fans expecting more meat-grinding mathcore on Pupil Slicer’s second album were surprised by an expansive universe of reverb, hooks, and (god forbid) clean singing. On Blossom, the extreme UK band more precisely harness the chaos of their 2021 debut Mirrors, allowing room for riffs to breathe and song structures to stretch into further realms of experimentation without ever feeling forced or bloated. Video game Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker was one inspiration behind the album, and the band adopt the game’s apocalyptic narrative in tracks like the post-metal influenced The Song at Creation’s End. Its introduction provides the album with a moment of introspection and respite, but pulls in elements of black metal, groove metal, and metalcore as it builds – a feat of balance which the Pupil Slicer of 2021 may well have shied away from. This band have always worn their influences on their sleeves, but although Blossom sounds like a million different things, it could only really have been made by Pupil Slicer. Rosie Solomon
Priya Ragu – Santhosam
The Swiss-Sri Lankan musician Priya Ragu named her debut album after the Tamil word for happiness, and Santhosam is a beacon of joy and hope in the face of personal challenges. Buoyant and jubilant, it’s a feat of musical worldbuilding, melding the punchy pop sounds Ragu grew up with in the 90s and 00s with the south Asian sounds she was exposed to at home. Hit the Bucket is a bass-fuelled body mover that pays ode to family music sessions, while gleeful Adalam Va! is packed with vivacious vocals and syncopated, upbeat rhythms.
It’s also deeply personal and defiant. Born to refugee Sri Lankan-Tamil parents in Switzerland, Ragu found herself having to assimilate into her physical environment in Europe while being expected to mould to the south Asian cultural norms upheld by her family. “How can I stay awake for somebody else dream?” she asks in School Me Like That, driven by a rolling tabla beat and zesty vocals. The album closes on the Tamil-language ballad Mani Osai, a heartfelt and intimate showing of her family’s closeness. Santhosam marks the arrival of a boisterous, charming and confident new pop voice. Aneesa Ahmed
Current Affairs – Off the Tongue
Emerging from the endlessly fertile Glasgow DIY music scene, Current Affairs marry agile new wave guitar riffs with a melancholic gothic attitude to create songs that refuse to be forgotten. Although Off the Tongue is their debut album, the post-punk band has existed in various iterations since 2016 and all four members are veterans of the UK music scene, including frontwoman Joan Sweeney, guitarist Sebastian Ymai, bassist Gemma Fleet and drummer Andrew Milk.
The current lineup met through the Spite House collective, a local initiative to promote queer and female-fronted musicians. (It’s also the band’s final lineup: they have announced that they are splitting at the end of the year.) Their politics careen through the heart of the record, turning each song into a call to action. On Right Time, Sweeney yelps confidently over an elastic, racing guitar riff: “We’ll be, ready, you’ll see, you got me / It’s the right time.” While they’re clearly influenced by post-punk acts such as Magazine and Siouxsie and the Banshees, they’re not overly derivative, and they venture outside their wheelhouse on softer songs such as Her Own Private Multiverse. Off the Tongue is an apt title: each lyric is spat out, every riff rolls from the tips of their fingers – the soundtrack to a justifiable anger that for now can only be danced away. Stephanie Phillips
Ryan Beatty – Calico
Ryan Beatty has spent a good chunk of his decade-plus career in limbo. Primed for teenage stardom as the next Justin Bieber in 2011, Beatty extricated himself from his label deal after two EPs then came out as gay. Collaborations with Brockhampton and Tyler, the Creator followed, while his first two albums – 2018’s horny, soft-pop debut, Boy in Jeans, and 2020’s fractured, electro-odyssey Dreaming of David – searched for both emotional and sonic stability.
On the mainly acoustic Calico, Beatty, now 28, returns to his childhood home town in California and finds an anchor. Inspired by the James Taylor and John Denver records his dad would play on a loop, the album’s nine burnished, softly unfurling tracks riffle through his emotional baggage with pin-sharp self-reflection. Opener Ribbons, all plaintive piano and lilting strings, picks over a breakup (“It’s brave to bȌ nothing to no one at all,” he sighs, his crystalline voice front and centre) with devastating precision, while the hymnal Little Faith tackles deteriorating mental health with a deft touch.
Throughout Calico, Beatty and his band – augmented by Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon – make space for his richly rewarding melodies and intricate storytelling to breathe. The stately White Teeth, for example, balances on closely mic-ed guitar plucks and slithers of strings but feels vast, while Bruises Off the Peach finds Beatty extricating himself from a toxic relationship over an airy folk-pop confection. Patient, and rewarding of patience, Calico already feels like a classic.
Michael Cragg
Nourished By Time – Erotic Probiotic 2
The streaming age generated a new era of analogue fetishism, with dozens of musicians crusting classic sounds in sepia and static to dodge the piercing sharpness of life in high-def. Despite a good 15 years of now-entrenched hypnagogic tropes, Baltimore’s Marcus Brown manages to stir a totally original stew of sounds on their debut album, smearing tentpole genres from new jack swing to freestyle and soul at its most poised in a swaddling impasto haze. Their production is scrappy but opulent, a protective and defiantly regal cape for these songs about fighting fear, finding freedom in a capitalist society built off the back of enslaved people – “I can still feel the cotton / And the heat from the fields / Made the country so damn rich / Ain’t no way to heal,” they balladeer on Worker’s Interlude – and staying grounded when relationships falter. Their themes of sex, socialism and subjugation hit hard but never weigh heavy, couched in fuzzily buoyant, earwormy choruses that are almost as affirming as classic Lionel Richie or Barry White refrains. These are songs for the bedroom, the dancefloor, the protest, for the trip from the gutter to the stars: the arrival of a voice that’s unmistakable even through the decadent murk. Laura Snapes
Hifi Sean & David McAlmont – Happy Ending
It’s an unlikely but inspired coupling: Sean Dickson, singer of Scottish I’m Free hitmakers Soup Dragons, and David McAlmont, the glorious voice best known for his work with Bernard Butler. After initially collaborating for one track on Dickson’s 2016 solo album Ft, this full-length allows their ideas to reach fruition. It’s dreamily danceable soul – think Seal or Massive Attack circa Unfinished Symphony – which allows McAlmont’s sublime, yearning vocals to wander through gently insistent bass, tastefully understated percussion and Bollywood composer Chandra Jois’s swooping Indian strings.
Maybe and The Fever are classy pop constructions – the latter with shades of Burt Bacharach’s work with Dionne Warwick – while All in the World finds dancefloor euphoria. Elsewhere, there are curveballs. Aurora (Parts 1 & 2) is a hazy, almost psychedelic sound-voice collage while the superb The Skin I’m in draws connections between the rise of the Third Reich, Black Lives Matter and the murder of George Floyd: “Mama I’m fading fast, now the badge is on my ass with teargas / I nearly got a rubber bullet in the eye … They don’t believe I can’t breathe.” A thoughtful, emotional, postmodern gem. Dave Simpson
Lil Yachty – Let’s Start Here
Let’s Start Here is Lil Yachty’s fifth album, but the title makes clear that it’s a new beginning. From the opening guitar chords and pounding drums of first song The Black Seminole, Yachty’s intent is clear: he is no longer a trap artist, he is a psychedelic genre-hopper, capable of commanding high-quality session musicians. He’s not alone in making this shift – coupled with Lil Uzi Vert’s psych-inspired 2023 album Pink
Tape, it invites reflections on how their era, the class of 2016, have diverged into psychedelic new terrains while the genre’s elder statesman: Drake, Travis,
Cole and Kanye West plough the same lanes to diminishing returns. Might looking back to the sounds of the 60s and 70s inspire a new beginning for the genre? I expect a legion of imitators will answer the question before long. Sasha
Mistlin