The Best Albums of 2023

For Scottish folk musician Juliette Lemoine, the cello is not just a background instrument, filling in colour and texture to the sonic tapestry, it’s a protagonist in its own right, leading the melody the way a fiddle normally would. Her debut album, Soaring, is something of a manifesto for the cello, setting it free from the constraints of convention and letting it soar over the other instruments. Along with her contemporaries pianist Fergus McCreadie and saxophonist Matt Carmichael, Lemoine is throwing open the doors of Scottish traditional music, allowing it to breathe in the fresh air and limitless possibilities of jazz. Modulations carry the tunes to new territory and the untraditional timbres of cello and sax flood each piece with unexpected colours and moods.

Listen to Soaring on Bandcamp or Tidal.

Much like her 2019 debut Pang, Caroline Polachek’s 2023 album Desire, I Want to Turn into You is a collection of passionate, hooky and immaculately-produced experiments in pop music. But where Pang was glossy and slick throughout, Polachek’s follow-up album is a more eclectic tapestry. There’s the tingling flamenco guitar of ‘Sunset’, the bagpipe solo on ‘Blood and Butter’, the staccato minimalism of Polachek’s 2021 single ‘Bunny Is A Rider’, the whimsical, glittering ‘Butterfly Net’ and the 90s-flavoured dance-pop of ‘I Believe’, all before Polachek closes with the soft, choral cinematics of ‘Billions’. While it lacks the frictionless glide of her debut, Desire is an album of volatile creativity and wild, ecstatic passion.

Listen to Desire, I Want to Turn into You on Bandcamp or Tidal.

In 2021, Olivia Rodrigo was launched into pop stardom aged 18, with a versatile and emotive debut album, passionately detailing her recent heartbreak in songs indebted to Taylor Swift, Lorde and Paramore. Two years later, the potential promised by Sour is fulfilled on Guts, an explosive record that takes the rebelliousness, irreverence and wit of her debut and runs wild. Doubling down on the pop-punk sound that skyrocketed 2021’s ‘Good For You’ to the top of the charts, Guts is full of raucous, high-energy tracks that don’t take themselves too seriously. From opener ‘all-american bitch’ which satirises the squeaky-clean ideal of American womanhood, to the rowdy ode to social awkwardness that is ‘Ballad of a Home-schooled Girl’, the record finds Rodrigo playfully taking on different personas, rather than agonising over the same personal experiences. The piano ballads on the LP leave me a little weary, but it’s more than made up for by tracks like ‘Love Is Embarrassing’, an explosion of youthful joy and angst.

Listen to Guts on Tidal.

Throughout its eight expansive tracks, the self-titled debut record by Ursa Major Moving Group, a solo project by London musician Ursula Russel, seems ready to collapse in on itself. Russel’s vocals dip, strain, stretch and contort, as if bearing a great weight. The shadowy sound palette of piano, electric guitar and crashing drums and cymbals clash against one another like waves against rocks. On penultimate track ‘She Pixelates’ the shifting chords of the low grumbling guitar are like creaking tectonic plates, and on closer ‘Requiem for a Customer’, the ground is no longer steady at all, as the track slides and lurches. Alabaster De Plume’s saxophone is a heavy, brooding cloud billowing on the final track and ‘Goodbye George’, while ‘Welcome to the Noosphere’ with its glistening web of pin-pricked guitar and piano is the lightest, most whimsical track. But even here, Russel doesn’t let the song rest in its warm, blissful verses long, but takes it into a more mysterious, uncertain harmonic territory.

Listen to Ursa Major Moving Group on Tidal.

Every element in Museum, the third studio album by Icelandic musician Jófríður Ákadóttir or JFDR, is delicate and understated: the whispered vocals, the fluttering electronics, the crystalline piano notes and wiry guitar plucks. And yet, when layered together, in a pristine electro-folk tapestry, the overall effect is imposing and monumental, a still, icy soundscape, shrouded in mist. ‘Air Unfolding’ is a fragile constellation of pin-pricked piano and thread-like strings. ‘Sideways Moon’ is a track that just can’t get settled, its fuzzy synth chords sliding and subsiding eerily. ‘Spectator’ might be the record’s most exquisite set-piece, with its quivering brass, wavering synths and the hoarse desperation in Ákadóttir’s singing.

Listen to Museum on Bandcamp or Tidal.

Jaimie Branch was a New York trumpeter and composer, who died in 2022 at the age of 39. Following her 2017 debut album Fly or Die and 2019’s sequel Fly or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise, 2023 saw the release of the posthumous work Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)). A fierce, rip-roaring stomper of an album, it is a roughly textured scrapbook of tunes, dizzyingly irregular and unpredictable, yet densely and meticulously pasted together. ‘baba louie’’s pattering kalimba and fluttering woodwind give way to the galumphing trample of ‘bolinko bass’. The evocative organ and serpentine groove of ‘borealis dancing’ rub up against the frenzied, fricative strings of ‘the mountain’, over which Branch pleads desperately, ‘the future lives inside us, don’t forget the fight, don’t forget the fight, don’t forget don’t forget don’t forget!’

Listen to Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)) on Tidal.

The music of acclaimed Scottish trio Young Fathers is impossible to describe aptly. Throwing together snatches of rock, R&B, hip-hop and electronica, the group’s lo-fi concoction ends up sounding nothing like any of those genres. Their latest record Heavy Heavy is another feral jumble of colours and textures that cohere, almost miraculously, into vivid, catchy melodies. Opener ‘Rice’ is a percussive, celebratory tangle which gives way into the aggressively garbled vocals and elephantine bass-line of ‘I Saw’. ‘Tell Somebody’ has a soft hymnal warmth to it, while ‘Shoot Me Down’ begins a tempestuous friction of agitated beats and chopped-up vocals before subsiding into a dreamy sweep of soulful voices. This leads us to one of the album’s most exciting tracks ‘Ululation’, a song whose elated hollers and bright, jubilant piano exude a life-affirming optimism, quintessential to the record as a whole.

Listen to Heavy Heavy on Bandcamp or Tidal

If it weren’t for the slow, teasing method with which Gabriels drip-fed us their debut album Angels and Queens, I reckon we would be seeing it in the upper tiers of a lot more year-end lists. As it is, by the time the revered gospel trio released the album in its entirety, very little material was actually new, thanks to numerous singles and the release of much of the record as Angles and Queens – Part 1 in 2022. But as an exquisite, practically flawless, collection of each piece of immaculate orchestration and every fiery, soaring melody from the band thus far, Angels and Queens is invaluable.

Read my full review of Angels and Queens here.

Listen to Angels and Queens on Tidal.

While 2023 saw country music surge in popularity in the US, many of chart-toppers coming out of Nashville were bland and – in both the political and musical senses – conservative. But look beyond Billboard and you find Margo Price, twisting together Americana and psychedelic rock into a churning kaleidoscope of blistering fervour. With the crunching guitars and swirling organs of The Doors and Grateful Dead, the lofty, poetic wisdom of Patti Smith and the spirituality and elastic guitar lines of George Harrison, Price’s 2023 album Strays is indebted to the pioneers of the 60s and 70s, but rooted in Price’s present moment and informed by the trials and triumphs she has experienced. As she proclaims in the fiery opener, ‘can’t tell me nothin’, babe, and that’s a fact. / I have been to the mountain and back.’

Listen to Strays on Bandcamp or Tidal.

With seven studio albums to her name, Mitski has been a critical favourite of the indie rock and art pop worlds for many years. But it wasn’t until 2023 that I finally connected with her music. Where the artfully constructed rock of 2018’s Be The Cowboy was too calculated, and 2022’s brash synth-pop powerhouse Laurel Hell, gaudy and unfocussed, last year’s The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We is stormy and untamed, yet also exquisitely orchestrated, and effortlessly sung, balancing lightness and weight in a tantalising tight-rope act throughout.

Languid slide guitars grace dreamy, country-tinged numbers like ‘Heaven’ and ‘The Frost’, piano glints through the sinuous, lilting ‘My Love Mine All Mine’, and glassy synth motifs skate in and out of ‘Buffalo Replaced’. Yet this beauty is also dangerous, with the anxious urgency of tracks like ‘I Don’t Like My Mind’ and ‘When Memories Snow’ interrupting the blissed-out indulgence. ‘Star’ begins spacey and cavernous, only for the dazzling, glittering cloak of organ and synths to close in on Mitski’s vocal, leaving it adrift in the overwhelming brilliance. ‘The Deal’ plunges from soft acoustic guitar strumming to a trench of deep, gutsy chords and fraught strings, before grey storm clouds of heavy drums fog up the end of the song. With every moment of the album flooded with feeling, The Land Is Inhospitable is a rich, textured portrait of human emotion, painted in bold, impasto strokes of deep, intense colour.

Listen on Bandcamp or Tidal.