And just like that... another year draws to a close, having gifted us a whole heap of new music.
From returning pop titans and curveball moments, to breakthrough stars on the cusp of future greatness, 2023 has offered up plenty to get stuck into; but the real question is, which albums came out on top?
With this being a top 20 rundown, the sad reality is that countless great records narrowly miss out on making the cut, and so before we get stuck in, honourable mentions go to Paramore's This Is Why, Raye's excellent debut My 21st Century Blues, Sampha's Lahai, and Jessie Ware's Mercury-nominated disco-pop record That! Feels Good!
So without further ado, allow us to shepherd you through the last 12 months of music with this, our top 20 albums of the year.
Oh, and if you're after even more top-notch music from this year, hit play on our mighty playlist of stand-out songs, below.
20. Overmono - Good Lies
One of the year’s biggest dance breakthroughs, Welsh brothers Tom and Ed Russell distill UK rave to its purest essence – though UK Garage is perhaps the strongest influence of all on their Doberman-fronted debut, there’s also a tougher touch of techno, and plenty of well-curated vocal hooks. Come for the cavernous So U Know (one of 2023’s biggest dance tracks) and stay for the fidgety Calon, and the acidic undertones of the title-track.
19. Chappell Roan - The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess
All signs are looking good for next big thing in pop Chappell Roan; her debut is co-written with go-to pop architect Dan Nigro – best known for his work with Kylie, Conan Gray, Caroline Polachek, and Olivia Rodrigo – and she’s set to support the latter on the North American leg of her world tour. A whole heap of fun, ...Midwest Princess is a riotous introduction: all yé-yé styled gang vocals, bold pop songwriting, and plenty of one-liners that straddle hilarity and horniness. “I f***ed you in the bathroom when we went to dinner/Your parents at the table, you wonder why I’m bitter?” she quips.
18. CMAT – Crazymad, For Me
God, wouldn’t it be handy having a much older and wiser version of yourself to quickly pop back in a time machine to warn you off that dodgy relationship early on, before the true heartache strikes? Loosely, this is the concept behind Irish singer-songwriter CMAT’s second album, a complete treat of a country-pop record with frequent psychy touches.
17. Cleo Sol - Heaven
Now confirmed (with my own eyes) as the lead vocalist of the enigmatic collective SAULT, Cleo Sol’s solo material takes a softer approach, drawing on warm washes of neo-soul. Lyrically, Heaven picks up roughly where 2021’s Mother left off; the title-track seems to be addressed to her child. Sonically, though, this is a much more diverse offering, with mellow piano making way for funkier influences.
16. Kylie Minogue - Tension
After effectively becoming the pandemic’s answer to Vera Lynn with 2020’s much needed tonic DISCO, Kylie continued her hard pivot to dance-pop with Tension; drawing on house, eurotrash, EDM, and campy synth pop. The ridiculously fun Padam Padam is the highlight here, along with the driving house pianos of the title track; but it’s dancefloor fuel from start to end.
15. Killer Mike - Michael
Though Killer Mike began his career solo, much of his artistic output in recent years has been as one half of Run the Jewels: his politically-charged, ridiculously fun rap project with El-P. With this in mind, Michael is a distinct change of gear, stripping away some of the braggadocio to explore his own origin story.
14. Fever Ray - Radical Romantics
As one half of Swedish electronic music duo The Knife, Karin Dreijer was shrouded in mystery, but their solo project Fever Ray offers up bright, colourful, and twisted takes on pop. In place of the zinging one-liners on 2017’s Plunge (“This country makes it hard to f***”) Radical Romantics mediates on queer love and family against a wash of warm, playful, industrial electronica. As well as featuring Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, it also hosts a mini Knife reunion: Olof Dreijer is a collaborator on the first four tracks.
13. Janelle Monáe - The Age of Pleasure
Alternative pop experimenter Janelle Monáe traded in sci-fi and dystopian allegories for partying on The Age of Pleasure, a continuation of Dirty Computer’s sexiest song, Make Me Feel. Drawing on a huge palette of Pan-African influences, ranging from reggae, Afrobeats, and amapiano to dancehall, Afrofuturism and Eskista, this joyful celebration also features Jamaican music icon Sister Nancy.
12. VV Brown - Am I British Yet?
Worlds away from VV Brown’s breakthrough single Shark in the Water, her comeback after a six year long hiatus from music is a rich collage of voices, exploring the nuances and contradictions of the Black British experience. Along the way, she enlists a number of poets – many come from rural towns and villages – to move the focus away from major cities, and she unearths a valuable perspectives in the process.
11. Romy - Mid Air
“Can you turn it up a bit more?” asks Romy Madley-Croft on opening track Loveher; her voice is barely a whisper, even as she’s asserting herself. It’s indicative of Mid-Air as a whole, a bright, vibrant treat of a club-pop record that skips bombast or showiness, and prefers to stick with the kind of intimate emotive heft Romy brings to her band The XX. Joy oozes out of every minute.
10. Corinne Bailey Rae - Black Rainbows
Up until recently, English singer-songwriter Corinne Bailey Rae was most readily associated with her breezy 2006 single Put Your Records On – the sort of mildly retro, feel-good indie pop song perfect for soundtracking an inoffensively summery cider advert. To put things mildly, Black Rainbows is ‘a bit of a curveball’ in comparison, making a hairpin turn into the world of experimental rock, and drawing on Afrofuturism, warped electronica, and marginalised figures in art history.
9. Caroline Polachek - Desire, I Want to Turn Into You
On the sleeve of her second solo album since leaving the synth-pop duo Chairlift, Caroline Polachek crawls across the floor of a tube carriage with determination, her hands emerging onto perfectly beachy golden sand (clearly she’s not heard about the urine-based carnage that unfolded when a Lizzy line train got stuck for hours earlier this month). Sanitary concerns aside, it sets the tone for Desire, I Want to Turn Into You perfectly - this is a transformative, escapist howl of a record, filled with weird, curious pop songs like Bunny is a Ride, Sunset and Billions.
8. Victoria Monét - Jaguar II
Even if you’re new to Victoria Monét, you’ve definitely heard one of her songs before; the Sacramento-based singer and producer is a co-writer on every single Ariana Grande album, and has written songs for Blackpink, Fifth Harmony, and Travis Scott. Is it any wonder she knows her way around an instant pop banger in her own material? Just as 2020’s solo debut Jaguar was focused on feel-good hedonism, its sequel also lives for the party. Similarly, it drips with the sound that Monét has branded “elevated soul” – a glossy, 21st Century take on Motown.
7. Sufjan Stevens - Javelin
While this Detroit singer-songwriter is certainly a dab hand at experimentation, his music is often most effective when it heads straight for the emotional jugular. See: 2015’s exceptionally moving Carrie & Lowell, in which he laid bare his grief following the death of his mother. Cut from a similarly tear-sodden cloth is Javelin, which strips his songwriting back to its bare roots before subtly weaving in hints of lo-fi electronica, meandering ambient sounds, and grandly baroque pop.
6. Noname - Sundial
When Chicago rapper and songwriter Noname released her debut mixtape Telefone back in 2016, it was a bolt of lightning to rap, her low-key, gentle delivery pairing with infectious, occasionally surreal humour. And on Sundial, the artist’s first album in five years, that wit is finely sharpened, whether she’s using her pen to skewer Rihanna and NFL, a fluffy culture of constant positivity, or her own hypocrisies. “Go Noname go, Coachella stage got sanitized,” she raps on namesake, “I said I wouldn’t perform for them and somehow I still fell in line, f***!”
5. PJ Harvey - I Inside the Old Year Dying
Rock 'n' roll storytellers frequently search far and wide for inspiration, but PJ Harvey draws endless richness from the tattered tapestry of Britain. Though 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project cast the net a lot wider, traversing Kosovo, Afghanistan and Washington D.C, its successor I Inside The Old Year Dying brings the focus back to home turf, digging deep into Dorset soil, and layering traditional songwriting elements with flickers of trip-hop, Dorset dialect, distorted field recordings, and blunt-sounding, unpolished electronica. Though many of these songs are about the mundane details of childhood, they’re infused with a sense of magic.
4. Lana Del Rey - Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd
Thanks to Lana’s ninth album, a whole load of people now know all about the Jergins Tunnel – a sealed up slice of Los Angeles life which funnels city workers under the highway and straight to the beach after a long day in their gargoyle-encrusted, art deco offices. While it’s not always easy pinning down Del Rey’s metaphors, this one is straight from her usual playbook, filled with strange mythology, Stateside excess, and meta references to artistic legacy.
“Don't forget me,” she begs on the title track. While her last masterpiece, Norman F**king Rockwell was a collage of iconography, Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd is about as personal as Del Rey is likely to get, and standout track A&W is some of her greatest work to date, an unsettling, seven-minute synth folk epic of lost innocence and crushing expectation.
3. Troye Sivan - Something to Give Each Other
On 2018’s Bloom, Troye Sivan – who rose to fame with sweeping, dreamy tales of life in suburbia, and his desperate longing to escape it – showed early hints of cheekiness; the title track is a surprisingly emotive bottoming anthem, for crying out loud! Back then, it was all begging to be pushed so much further, with broodingly dramatic slow-burners still ruling the roost. Enter Something to Give Each Other, which embraces house music, queer clubbing culture, and a general sense of rampant horniness. From the relentless house beat and campy football chants of Rush (a song named after a brand of poppers, no less) to the truly ridiculous Bag Raiders sample on Got Me Started, it bursts with fun and personality.
2. Olivia Rodrigo - GUTS
With her 2021 debut album Sour, Olivia Rodrigo became one of music’s biggest rising stars, the scuzzy, punk edge of songs like Good 4 U influencing the direction of pop as a whole. In other words, a tough act to follow; but GUTS leans even harder into the angsty end of the spectrum. Cover up the artist name, and bad idea right? could easily be confused with a Wolf Alice song; other moments recall the snarling grunge of Liz Phair, Courtney Love’s band Hole, and the pogoing soundtrack of a Noughties rom-com like 10 Things I Hate About You.
1. Boygenius - The Record
Using their supergroup’s moniker, singer-songwriters Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus deliberately poke fun at the male-dominated history of rock’n’roll, and its tendency to make exaggerated icons out of its deities. Though their loftily titled debut The Record joins in with the fun at times (“I am not an old man having an existential crisis at a Buddhist monastery writing horny poetry,” quips Dacus on Leonard Cohen) it largely serves as a love letter to the creative sparks flying between the trio, each contributing distinct flair. Baker’s sharp wit is a brief distraction from just how deeply her incisive lyrics cut, Dacus succinctly brings ideas together with dark humour, and Bridgers’ memorable one-lines often end up being the ones that get bellowed back the loudest. Together, they’re a force.
