Rob Sheffield’s Top 20 Albums of 2023

This is Sexxy Red’s Pound Town, we just live in it. The St. Louis rap queen’s breakthrough mixtape is the least subtle “Been that bitch since I was in first grade” manifesto of this or any other year. All over Hottest Hood Princess, the “Female Gucci Mane” speaks out on cars (fast), ass (big), money (more), her pet peeves (“I hate a lame bitch with class”), her favorite wig (“30 inch with a Chinese bang”), as she salutes the Dirty South rap legacy from Three Six Mafia to No Limit. Pick hit: “Born By The River,” where she serves Sukihana a cocktail of Plan B and Hennessy.

“Desire’s free, but there’s a cost to action,” Patio warn here, and these three cerebral NYC women spend Collection detailing the high price of modern ennui. It’s a concept album about nervous twenty-somethings trying to wake up all the feelings that died during the pandemic. Patio inject a little vitality back into what’s left of their hearts (or yours), using the simplest tools—postpunk guitar blurts, moody beats, witty stream-of-consciousness poetry. Inspirational verse, from “Epiphany”: “Desperate for affection / Unworn black dresses / Empty rooms too expensive to fill / I’m too expensive to fill.”

The Brooklyn rockers celebrate their 20th birthday as one of the all-time great New York bands. On The Price of Progress, they stretch out in hard-luck tales of gamblers, drifters, junkie actors, or washed-up musicians. These characters feel like their whole lives are a gig where nobody showed up—as Craig Finn puts it, “The pesky problem of the tepid turnout.” The clincher: “Sideways Skull,” about a recovering metalhead in a halfway house, keeping her dreams alive by belting “We Are The Champions” with “a hairbrush mic and a fantasy band.”

Kelela flexes her avant-soul imagination all over Raven—six years after her otherworldly debut Take Me Apart, she swoops back in from the stratosphere like she didn’t even miss this planet. But she sounds right on time. Even when she hits the dance floor, in the club beats of “Contact,” Kelela sounds strung out on hallucinatory bliss, lost in the cosmos with only her most insistent desires to guide her.

A gorgeous song cycle about loss and renewal, from Mutual Benefit songwriter Jordan Lee. Growing at the Edges is full of lavishly orchestrated meditations on starting over after different kinds of catastrophe, both personal and global. With stand-up bass and brushed drums, Growing has the late-night introspective vibe of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks (an album Lee swears he’s never even heard) or Joni Mitchell’s For the Roses. He sings about painful transitions in ballads like “Wasteland Companions,” “Little Ways,” and “Untying a Knot.” But he spends the whole album looking for signs of life, as in the title ballad: “Growing at the edges / Peeking from a seed / Where there once was a wasteland, something new.”

Sleek Paris indie-pop, with flourishes of sax or trumpet over the shiny Gallic motorik beat, as Margaux Bouchaudon works her fetchingly jaded coo. Not an album that demands or even wants your full attention—just one to put on in the morning and groove away the afternoon. There must be some kind of emotional content here, but after months of heavy rotation it’s missed me, and if you think I mind, as Marcel Marceau told Mel Brooks in Silent Movie, “Non.”

Chappell Roan is the trash-talking big sister you always wished you had, spilling salty wisdom about modern romance. (“Never waste a Friday night on a first date”? Now you tell me.) A one-woman “Femininomenom” on the prowl for “super graphic ultra modern girls,” scorning “hyper mega bummer boys,” flexible about stoners if they’re hot, exploding with theater-kid sass, with Dan Nigro cranking up the pop blare she deserves. True, there’s the obligatory lesson in karma, but hey, I believe in a “pop stars having deep thoughts about karma”-free future and the future begins today.

Four bookish Dutch aesthetes from Rotterdam, with the essence of postpunk rhythm-guitar zone-out, like a dream lineup of the Velvet Underground where Mo Tucker is playing every instrument. Lewsberg have a string of LPs, cassettes, seven-inches, with dry wit and male/female deadpan vocals in high-speed grooves like “Left Turn” and “Six Hills,” but Out and About is their most playfully spectral music. An album to give you rainy-night shivers when it isn’t even raining. 

Lil Yachty loves to keep people asking “WTF is he thinking?,” but he really outdoes himself with the druggy psychedelic rock trip of Let’s Start Here, connecting the dots between “Broccoli” and “Astronomy Domine.” It’s a standout from Yachty’s craziest year, a baked detour that dares you to write it off as a Tales from Trapographic Oceans goof, yet he goes all the way into his crazy-diamond Pink Floyd void. Somewhere, Marc Bolan is smiling down on “Reach The Sunshine.” 

Bar Italia rise out of the London rock underground with an enigmatic guitar buzz, with wry deadpan boy/girl vocals through a haze of Gauloise smoke—sometimes sleepy, sometimes sinister, always with a sexy sense of doom. They’re definitely not shy about their moody Nineties influences—a bit of Slowdive here, a pinch of Flying Saucer Attack there, a touch of Drugstore every-damn-where, plus the none-more-Nineties cult of Serge and Jane. (Not to mention naming themselves after a Pulp classic?) Yet there isn’t a lackluster moment on Tracey Denim, with special salutes to the heavy-breathing lust of “My Kiss Era,” where Nina Cristante coos, “I wonder what will happen if I just let go?”

A flawless ride through the glamourous world of Victoria Monét, fusing plush R&B luxuriance, built-for-comfort soul, dub zoom, 1970s mink-coat suavery, 1990s velvet-ropery, Earth, Wind, & Fire horns, and an expert pop historian’s ear for the details. In “On My Mama,” Monét sums up her vibe as “permanent ecstasy,” and that says it all.

I’ve bonded with all Sufjan’s albums, a little or a lot, but Javelin is on a whole other level, just a total emotional heart-punch. He dedicates Javelin to the memory of his late partner Evan Richardson, who died in April. Sufjan mourns for the dead, but the nearly 9-minute stunner “Shit Talk” stands as a monument to the agonies of trying to find peace among the living.

“Every daughter of God has a little bad luck sometimes,” Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman growls in “Bath County,” and she makes that “sometimes” last for every song on Rat Saw God, the Asheville punks’ twang-and-slam gem. Hartzman looks back on her small-town Southern teen angst with a body count, without any rosy illusions about the future. You can hear that Wednesday are fans of Roger Miller the country storyteller (they covered his “Lock, Stock, and Teardrops”) as well as the Roger Miller who played guitar in Mission of Burma. “Be my baby till my body’s in the ground” is a line that another singer might treat as a romantic promise—but she screams it like a curse.

The Chicago rapper/activist put her music career on pause after her 2018 album, Room 25. But Fatimah Nyeema Warner comes back strong on Sundial, ready to make noise and make trouble. She takes aim at Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Kendrick Lamar in “Namesake,” roasting artists for collaborating with the NFL, declaring, “I ain’t fucking with the Super Bowl or Jay-Z / Propaganda for the military.” She says, “Go Beyoncé go! / Watch the fighter jet fly high!” Sundial has guests like Billy Woods, Ayoni, and Common. But Noname sounds like her own radical self.

“Nice belief system, man. Did your mommy make it for you?” With these gentle words, the West Coast rock boys of Pardoner sum up the spirit of Peace Loving People, with more wiseass quips per song than I can count. They win this year’s “you think it’s easy, but you’re wrong” award for effortlessly perfect guitar bangers. Pardoner spend the album dragging their pretentious hipster friends, assuming the outside world isn’t worth the effort. Best song: “Get Inside!,” where they try to figure out their miserable lives by obsessing over indie rock. Actual lyric: “She turns on her stereo to give her records a spin / But Isabel says Die Kreuzen is out and now Stereolab’s in / It was just last week she threw World of Echo in the bin.” (Their 2021 nugget “Fuck You!” had the lines “Malkmus, Springsteen, McCartney, MacKaye / Getting all my wisdom from a dumb old guy.”) They even get away with learning life lessons in a ditty called “Love Yourself and Others,” about how tough it is to be any kind of artist-not-creative in the 2020s: “Look at all the little artists / Listen to the pretty songs / Even when David played his secret chord / It somehow came out wrong.” Genius, obviously.

There’s a Palehound song for every moment of my life. El Kempner is just the kind of singer/poet/guitar hero whose music is the soundtrack to everyday existence. (I can’t even shop in the produce aisle without thinking of “Feeling Fruit,” and don’t ask about “Sneakers.”) Eye on the Bat is their cathartic break-up album, yet way more exhilarating than miserable, as Kempner sings about having sour times in the car (“The Clutch”), in the living room (“Good Sex”), or in the lake where they went to watch the sunset (“Right About You”). But the title tune celebrates the joy of being a touring rock band in the van, yelling, “We’re the only people for miles around / And we’re headbanging to Paranoid!” 

A hip-hop concept travelogue about a rapper’s world tour, where the past is a black Rubik’s Cube that nobody can solve. Underground virtuoso Woods meets beatmaster Segal, four years after their collabo Hiding Places, roaming the globe without finding any place to feel at home. Woods is obsessed with hiding himself inside codes, from the trippy poetics of “Rapper Weed” (“Colorful packaging, pack ‘em in, fly on gold like Africans, cover my tracks with backronyms”) to the way he thwarts the FBI wiretraps in “Blue Smoke.” The beats give shrooms, with killer cameos from Euclid, Danny Brown and Aesop Rock, but Woods never lets up, right up to the heart-grabbing final lines at the playground.

New York songwriter Keba Robinson has her own style of experimental DIY rock cool. She began Crosslegged in an indie-folk spirit, with a gentle acoustic sound, but on her breakthrough, Another Blue, she expands her sound with synth waves and electro percussion. Her guitar is full of postpunk jitters, taking inspiration from the likes of Joy Division or Television, yet she flexes her powerfully soulful voice, which can range from Bjork to Stevie Wonder in the same song. She hits a gospel-style fervor with the irresistibly open-hearted groove “Only In The,” especially the final minute, where she chants “get up, get up, get up,” as her guitar gives her something to get up for. One of those ecstatic moments where you say, “Damn, music can do this?”

O-Rod rules supreme with a pop masterpiece packed with perfect flourishes, from “look at you, cool guy” to “dude, nice try,” from “maybe I can fix him” to “when am I gonna stop being a pretty young thing?” to “fuck it, it’s fine.” She rocks in high-wire ballads like “Logical”—“I was too young, I was too soft, can’t take a joke, can’t get you off”—as well as cheapo teenage kicks in “All-American Bitch” and “Get Him Back!” When Olivia sings “I wanna meet his mom, just to tell her her son sucks,” that is some zoomer-Joni level shit. (On Blue, Joni Mitchell has this conversation with Leonard Cohen’s mom, but in slightly different words.) Yet she avoids all the usual sophomore pitfalls. And Olivia’s refusal to sing about karma anywhere on this album is such an overall win for humanity.

Can a band as massively beloved as Boygenius still be…underrated? Exhibit A: The Record. Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker, and Phoebe Bridgers write their own rock-star fan-fic story, three radically different songwriters banding together, with a pass-the-mic spirit. I love how they flaunt their charisma and guile, because they’re willing to put in the work to make it really fun to be a fan of this band. So many great songs about being young and hot-hearted and pissed-off and lovesick and obsessed with music. It’s tough to even pick a favorite. (Just kidding—“We’re In Love,” not even close.) Back in 2017, when Lucy Dacus broke hearts with her classic “Night Shift,” she sang, “In five years I hope the songs feel like covers / Dedicated to new lovers.” Weirdly or not, that’s basically what happened, give or take a year. Boygenius spent 2023 conquering a whole planet full of new lovers. And The Record is one to take along into the future.