The general consensus seems to be that 2023 was a bit of an underrwhelming year for popular music. With no big, emerging new genres or breakthrough acts, few hits with much staying power, and the usual suspects topping the charts, a general sense of stagnation pervades.

It’s surprising to me then that the majority of my list of Best Songs of the Year are in the idioms of rock and pop. Though a couple are hits, most are not. Perhaps in the absence of catchy melodies coming from the radio, it’s left to the indie groups and art-pop auteurs to bring the tunes. Or perhaps it’s just where my listening has led me this year. But either way, infectious, colourful, singable melodies have come out on top. Here are some of the best.

By no means starved of praise is boygenius’ second single of the year ‘Not Strong Enough’. With three Grammy nominations including Record of the Year, the American supergroup’s track is among the year’s biggest indie successes. Rich, warm guitar chords are shadowed in reverb, creating a lived-in space flickering between light and dark, reflecting its themes of self-doubt and self-worship. Closer to the anthemic pop of acts like MUNA and Ethel Cain than the singer-songwriter records Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker are known for as soloists, ‘Not Strong Enough’ is a heady rush of golden, windswept Americana that has earned its accolades.

Zoë Randall and Steve Hassett of American folk duo Luluc conjure up atmosphere and texture in their songs in the way a novelist builds fantasy worlds. The hushed, shimmering cloudscape of ‘Diamonds’ is an organic, intimate world, lovingly constructed with shuffling, homemade percussion, murmuring saxophone and radiant chord changes.

Read my review of Diamonds by Luluc here.

Blur’s 2023 album, The Ballad of Darren, arriving eight years after their last offering, was a surprisingly earnest and focussed record. Grainy and unpretentious, it lacked any Britpop colour and certainly the catchy bombast of 2015’s The Magic Whip, with Damon Albarn focussing his energy instead on the song-writing. And it pays off, with lead single ‘The Narcissist’ the LP’s strongest melody. Crunchy drums and hard, unrelenting guitar lines are the backbone for Albarn’s introspective lyric. With backing vocals sensitively echoing his woes, there’s a reflective and even wistful quality to the song, and a sense of maturity from a band still creating some of their best work.

One of the more underappreciated entries on this list, ‘I Think About You Daily’ is the devastating final act of the Pretenders’ twelfth studio album Relentless. Closing out a late career triumph full of emotionally intense song-writing from the post-punk veterans, the track is laced with an exquisite string arrangement by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. Glistening threads of violin fly, twist, weave and intertwine into a celestial web over which Chrissie Hynde’s vocals, heavy with memory, trudge wearily into the future, burdened with the regrets of the past: ‘You never can get over / losing those you did unkind. / I think about you daily.’

A vertiginous holler, an unearthly siren call proclaims the beginning of Caroline Polachek’s second album Desire, I Want to Turn Into You. Opener ‘Welcome to my Island’ in its volcanic wildness feels like a microcosm for the whole turbulent record. The intricate synth groove makes way for a writhing guitar solo. A staccato monotone verse bookends the euphoric belter of a chorus, reflecting both the album’s restrained and untamed sides. Bristling with energy and contradiction, ‘Welcome to my Island’ is a breakneck introduction into the world of Caroline Polachek.

For Björk, the ecological and the interpersonal have always been intimately connected. There’s nothing incongruous or surprising then that a song released in aid of the campaign against a proposed industrial salmon farm in Iceland, would be a song about giddy romantic attraction. ‘Your mouth floats above my bed at night, / my own private moon,’ sings the Icelandic artist, her breathless, childish vocals marrying beautifully with the rounder, purer tones of Spanish popstar ROSALÍA. A song Björk wrote back in 1998 but kept aside for the right moment, ‘Oral’ is an elegant, orchestral illustration of fantasy that teeters just on the verge of reality.

Across the four singles preceding the release of her latest LP Bless this Mess, American musician Meg Remy, aka U.S. Girls, inhabited numerous musical styles. Metallic new wave grooves, exuberant choruses drenched in disco sparkle, and confessional piano balladry were all whole-heartedly embodied, then shaken off come the next track, as easily as trying on costumes. But something in the calm, reassuring sincerity of synth-pop cut ‘Futures Bet’ pierces through its immaculate veneer, making it more than a simple pastiche. Through gargantuan electric guitar chords, hissing, popping, sighing synths bubble up into a groove. Juxtaposing heavy distortion with featherweight vocals, the chorus feels like a revelatory off-loading of burden as Remy reassures us ‘nothing is wrong, everything is right. This is just life.’

Read my review of Bless This Mess by U.S. Girls here.

In Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd? Lana Del Rey presented her strongest set of songs since 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell. It’s also a collection of some of the most beautiful moments in music in 2023: the now almost legendary beat switch in ‘A&W’; the radiant final chorus of ‘The Grants’; the sensitive watercolour orchestration in ‘Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he’s deep-sea fishing’; and probably my most treasured few seconds of music of the year, the outro of ‘Margaret’ where fluttering piano meets softly burning saxophone. But from the sombre oceanic swell of its introduction, the title track is one long moment of sublime musical alchemy. A cinematic seascape of a song, glittering piano crests the rolling waves of deep, brooding strings, and hushed gospel vocals whisper in the wind.

Taylor Swift has been singing about break-ups since her teens. While it became a somewhat sexist cliché repeated by her critics that all she ever wrote about was the boys who left her crying, there’s no denying she has, like many of her peers of all genders, written liberally and passionately on the topic of heartbreak. So when, nineteen years into her career, she releases a song about the end of a relationship which makes every past breakup seem trivial in comparison, she is forced to paint her protagonist as nothing short of a completely non-functional social outcast following the goodbye. ‘I slur your name til someone puts me in a car,’ she confesses, ‘I stopped receiving invitations.’ But in all its pathetic ridiculousness, there’s enough fire behind the song’s rocket-powered chorus to make its sentiment hit home. You can keep your ‘Is It Over Now?’ and your ‘Say Don’t Go’; with its delirious helplessness and the almost painful nostalgia it exudes, ‘Hits Different’ is the Taylor Swift song that mastered the art of euphoric sadness.

A boisterous outlier in Feist’s understated sixth LP Multitudes, ‘Borrow Trouble’ is a great, churning, matted tangle of a song about the human tendency to stir up trouble in our own minds. ‘Even before you are awake, / your thoughts will find a clock to wind / and put dissent into your ear. / Even before your eyes are open, / the plot has thickened round your fear,’ the Canadian singer-songwriter reflects in the timid verse, before the elephantine chorus comes crashing in. With screeching strings and thuggish drums, the sheer heft of sound is an apt illustration of the burden of worry. The song culminates in a restless middle eight of writhing saxophone, agitated backing vocals, and Feist’s caterwauling cries of ‘trouble!’ It isn’t the monumental cultural milestone I chose for my song of the year in 2022, but ‘Borrow Trouble’ is a dense, bristling beast of a song unlike anything I’ve heard before.

Listen to Myriad Voices top songs of 2023 on Tidal.