The 50 best albums of 2023 – 50 to 11
Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-thanromantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firmly clasped jewel. Laura Snapes
49Romy – Mid Air
Even if her lyrics remain pretty much the same as ever – I love you; you hurt me – and the trance-y backings (chiefly by Fred Again and Stuart Price) are well-crafted but rote, Mid Air is saved from feeling mid by the sheer character and authority of Romy Madley Croft’s singing voice. The xx vocalist lifts everything here, whether she’s being tenderly consoling on Strong, tempering the jaunty beat and saucy punning on She’s on My Mind with audible worry or giving terrified little quivers of vibrato on Twice as she realises the strength and certainly of her feelings. Ben Beaumont-Thomas
48Jaimie Branch – Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((World War))
In August, Branch’s death, aged 39, left the US jazz scene without one of its most forthright trumpeters and composers, heralded for both her fiendish intricacy and bright, big-hearted themes. This posthumous album is a stunning final statement spanning country songs, hip-hop breakbeats, free improv sketches, Latin funk, organbacked balladry and beyond, united by Branch’s zesty pronouncements and gorgeous trumpet tone. BBT
47Gina Birch – I Play My Bass Loud
A highlight of walking around London this winter has been seeing Gina Birch’s face everywhere, screaming out of posters for the Tate’s Women in Revolt! exhibition. The still came from a Super 8 video Birch made in 1977, the year that the visual artist also formed punk radicals the Raincoats with Ana da Silva. Forty-six years later, Birch’s spindly, dub and funk-flecked debut album proves just as vital, just as attuned to scream-inducing injustice and, maybe most miraculously, just as playful as those formative works. The song I Am Rage makes classic girl-group sweetness unbearable, with Birch adopting a deathly child’s voice.
In the coolly anthemic title track, the force of her bass playing has “rumbled your secrets”. At the same time, it’s full of the kind of wisdom you only get from ageing: “One day I stopped caring / On and on it went,” she sings on And Then It Happened, casual as you like – though the impact of her thought lingers like a scream. LS
46Hannah Diamond – Perfect Picture
Dressed in pink outfits and with a girlish voice to match, Diamond seemingly dares you to belittle her or view her pure pop project as ironic. Instead she is inspiringly sincere as she sings about wanting to be noticed and loved, and she ponders the gulfs between fame and ordinary life, between digital artifice and flesh-bound reality, with keen feeling. Her vulnerability and genuine ordinariness – so different from the performed relatability of big stars – is perhaps why she has not crossed over from the underground. But these songs (produced with Scritti Politti’s David Gamson) are true pop masterpieces worthy of any A-list singer. BBT
45Slowdive – Everything Is Alive
Made following the deaths of singer and guitarist Rachel Goswell’s mother and drummer Simon Scott’s father, the second album of Slowdive’s comeback bore a newfound clarity: their dense shoegaze haze had been lifted, as if with it youthful illusions about anything lasting forever. Everything Is Alive is barebones and contemplative, newly sharpened by chilly electronic touches yet still monumental in scale. Poignantly, its awareness of life’s cycle of endings and rejuvenation also attracted a new audience on TikTok, suggesting a pan-generational appeal for their hard-won perspective. LS
44Mandy, Indiana – I’ve Seen a Way
If Gilla Band’s Most Normal deconstructed rock Cronenberg-style last year, then Manchester’s Mandy, Indiana strip away the genre scaffolding altogether to deal in realms of pure, eviscerating texture. Their debut summons cold gusts whipping down wet warehouse walls throbbed by punishing techno; funereal fanfares evaporating into the ether; disembodied squalls and swarms. It’s fantastically nasty, a feeling enhanced by their unsparing approach to rhythm and Francophone singer Valentine Caulfield’s equally percussive, sibilant glee as she riffs on various abject horrors. While many artists created worlds on their own terms in these uncertain times, Mandy, Indiana, like Lankum, reverberated in the abyss. LS
43Yo La Tengo – This Stupid World
This Stupid World is a testament to the 40 years that Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan have been playing together (and 30 with bassist James McNew): the product of intentionally aimless improv sessions in their own space, closed off to the rest of the world, yet unavoidably guided by their distinct chemistry. Their humour lies in the unsettled dusky groove of Tonight’s Episode, which feels vigilant, playing its cards close to its chest; Until It Happens is just as quizzical and minimal. The distortion of the title track and Brain Capers is balanced out by Hubley’s sweet country song Aselestine, with its pedal steel lens flare, while the band’s innate sense of equilibrium combines in the dualities of Sinatra Drive Breakdown, as a cool motorik pulse calms sparking noise to brooding stillness. This Stupid World isn’t prescriptive about its outlook, but makes a good argument for tight community and understanding in the face of the idiocy outside your four walls. LS
42Jim Legxacy – Homeless N*gga Pop Music
Not only did the Lewisham producer-singer-rapper co-create the backing for the year’s biggest UK rap track, Dave and Central Cee’s Sprinter, he also put out this heartfelt solo album on which each brief song is instantly, inimitably his. Legxacy’s style is of earnest R&B singing about uncertain relationships, backed by cleanly plucked acoustic guitar lines, and with samples of drill, grime and other semivintage Black music playing in and out as if from a passing car window. The beats can be peppily high-tempo – the Jersey club of Old Place – but the mood always stays poignant, as if Legxacy is scrolling through memories of parties and loves gone by. BBT
41Fever Ray – Radical Romantics
Another trip through the back of the wardrobe into Fever Ray’s halffrozen, half-tropical sound-world. Karin Dreijer began developing it two decades ago with the Knife, their duo with their brother Olof, and by now it is populated with a thriving and very particular sonic ecology: bird calls, lupine howls and sudden lizard-wriggles of noise, with dancehall and techno their heartbeat. Dreijer is also one of the great enunciators in pop, luxuriating in the mouth-feel of their poetry: “Will you meet me, hocus-pocus? / On the other side of hyper focus?” (Meanwhile Olof’s own brilliant 12in release this year, Rosa Rugosa, took in the same scenery but from the very height of summer.) BBT
The spectral second solo album by the low-key R&B legend seemed to waft the veil between pleasure and pain, between having everything and losing it all, between life and the great beyond. Eddie Chacon and producer John Carroll Kirby stripped back the comparatively heavy keys of 2020’s Pleasure, Joy and Happiness for an album of slurred synths and flute solos barely of this earth, percussion that evoked rain dappling the roof of a Frank Lloyd Wright bungalow and melted funk designed to soundtrack a smooth shuffle on the carpet inside, cocktail in hand. Cast in a twilit hue and preoccupied with loss, Sundown nevertheless found the revivified Chacon at the outset of a stunning creative frontier. LS
As frontman Matt Berninger confronted a debilitating breakdown towards the end of 2019, the National wondered if they would ever even make another album. Then they made two, of which Laugh Track was the surprise second release this year – and which proved that they hadn’t just regrouped but revitalised. For the first time in several years, they sounded like five guys hunkered down in the engine room, smelting lean, light-headed epics such as Deep End and Dreaming, and leaning on a quarter-century’s worth of trust to get out of their own way, letting classic ballads remain unfussed (Laugh Track) and manic dirges untrammelled (Smoke Detector – maybe their best ever song). And almost losing it all gave Berninger’s lyrics a newfound clarity about what’s worth holding on to, most strikingly expressed in Space Invader, which conveyed a kind of panicked gratitude for having recognised love and pursued it years ago when it could so easily have dissolved in a letter that went unwritten, a subway stop missed.
LS
40Eddie Chacon – Sundown 39The National - Laugh Track 38Danny Brown – Quaranta
Danny Brown has long had two rap voices – a high-pitched wizened tone like a Disney crone dispensing profane wisdom, and a deeper, more serious cadence – but these poles have never been further apart as on Quaranta, his reflection on turning 40. There are still plenty of rude, zany punchlines and images; a rotary phone is used for one particularly vivid sex metaphor, unprintable here. But the downbeat moments are slower and lower than ever. The title track is a midlife crisis in real time; Down Wit It is a brutal too-late understanding of love for an ex-girlfriend, Brown’s voice splintering into static under the shame and sadness; and Bass Jam is intensely poignant as he reminisces about the music percolating through his childhood family home, giving the residents an outlet they didn’t otherwise have for their emotions. BBT
37The Lemon Twigs – Everything Harmony
That explosion of earnest yet psychedelic adult pop in the postBeatles US, from Simon and Garfunkel to the Beach Boys, the Byrds and even the hipper end of the Monkees, gets reanimated here in all its sumptuous Technicolor beauty. It would be inaccurate to say the duo transcend pastiche – you can almost feel the corduroy static against your ankles – but the songwriting is so ridiculously strong that were these songs released in the early 70s, the Lemon Twigs would still be on the cover of Mojo and Uncut at least once a year. BBT
36Loraine James – Gentle Confrontation
With four albums and three EPs following her 2019 breakthrough For You and I, it’s been astonishing how quickly and deeply London producer Loraine James has hollowed out her own particular grotto in music: connected to other underground sounds from electronica to modern composition as well as the deeper corners of R&B, hip-hop and jazz, but decorated with the flotsam of her own life and lit with a wobbling flame. Guest singers such as Eden Samara and George Riley are on hand here for soaring vocals, but James’s own more earthbound, conversational voice remains the most affecting of all, confiding family trauma with a stoic shrug.
BBT
35Water From Your Eyes – Everyone’s Crushed
As if emptying the contents of an overstimulated head on to a metal workbench, this triumph of art-pop is noisy, disorientating and full of possibility. The Brooklyn duo pick up punkfunk basslines, car-alarm riffs, plucked strings, spoken word, corporate chimes, pure noise and more, and hammer it