The best albums of 2023 (so far)

100 gecs didn’t invent hyperpop, but they may have perfected it. In the years since their internet-addled 2019 breakthrough 1000 gecs rearranged the weirdo pop music landscape, plenty of kindred spirits and imitators have picked up the hyperpop torch and run with it, and it seemed like 1000 gecs might be destined to become a singular flash in the pan. But with their major-label follow-up 10,000 gecs, Dylan Brady and Laura Les have returned to show the pretenders how it’s done, embracing oft-maligned genres like ska, nu-metal, and pop-punk and delving even further into their world of wonderfully ludicrous post-ironic chaos.

Press-averse London trio bar italia step (ever-so-slightly) out of the shadows on their Matador debut. Pulling post-punk, indie-pop, and shoegaze into their own distinct lo-fi universe, bar italia’s Tracey Denim is an enigmatic, ineffably cool set of songs that sounds something like your hippest friend’s entire record collection attained sentience and taught itself to play guitar.

Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that underground hip-hop hero billy woods is on an all-time great run right now. Maps, his second full-length collaboration with Los Angeles producer Kenny Segal, is a travelogue that turns the triumphs and indignities of life as a successful touring artist into a dizzyingly discursive modern rap odyssey.

Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker are three of the biggest and best singer-songwriters in indie rock today, and they’ve only gotten bigger and better since they first joined forces as boygenius back in 2018. On their full-length debut album the record, they combine their considerable powers and their achingly lovely vocal harmonies, Voltron-style, to craft a note-perfect testament to the power of friendship and the spirit of collaboration.

Alicia Bognanno channels grief and loss into 10 razor-sharp pop-rock songs on Bully’s newest—and best—album, Lucky For You. Written after the death of Bognanno’s beloved dog Mezzi, it’s an emotionally affecting and melodically direct piece of work that hones the indelible pop edge of Bully’s ’90s-indebted fuzz-rock into something new and adventurous.

Caroline Polachek has been making music for well over a decade now. Old blog-indie heads still remember Chairlift and “Amanaemonesia” fondly, and as a solo artist, Polachek’s already snagged a bona fide TikTok hit with her 2019 single “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings.” But her new LP Desire, I Want To Turn Into You, Polachek’s fourth solo effort and second under her own name, still feels like an arrival of sorts, a supremely confident statement that functions like an entire avant-pop universe unto itself.

Singer-turned-actor Janelle Monáe’s first new album in five years ditches the Afrofuturistic sci-fi trappings in favor of something that might be even more radical: a utopian celebration of queer Black joy. Arriving just in time for Pride Month, The Age Of Pleasure draws on Afrobeats, reggae, and other sounds of the African diaspora to soundtrack an all-inclusive bacchanal for the ages.

That! Feels Good! Hell yes it does. After pivoting away from tasteful balladry and reinventing herself as a dancefloor diva on 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure, helping to kick off a welcome wave of disco revival in contemporary pop music, Jessie Ware is back and diving even deeper into her newfound disco diva status. That! Feels Good! is palpably euphoric, unapologetically sexy, and endlessly infectious.

“We don’t wanna hear that weird shit no more,” JPEGMAFIA raps on Scaring The Hoes’ title track. “What the fuck is that? Give me back my aux cord.” But that weird shit is exactly what fans want from JPEGMAFIA and Danny Brown, two of the freakiest MCs in the rap game, and that weird shit is exactly what we get on their first full-length team-up. Scaring The Hoes, produced entirely by Peggy himself, is hyperactive, unpredictable, and noisy as hell, and that’s exactly what makes it so great.

In astrology, a blood moon is said to bring chaos and disruption. But Colombian American pop singer Kali Uchis’ new album Red Moon In Venus is silky smooth and unfailing cohesive, an exploration of the ups and downs of love in all its forms through 15 exquisite R&B songs dripping in atmosphere and sensuality.

Kaytraminé, the duo of hip-hop-adjacent house producer KAYTRANADA and Portland rap goofball Aminé, recorded their eponymous debut album at a beach house in Malibu and debuted it at a wild rager with their friends. That should give you a sense of the carefree summertime vibes that the album is aiming for, the two collaborators’ palpable chemistry and charisma bolstered by guest appearances from big names like Pharrell, Freddie Gibbs, and Snoop Dogg.

The long-awaited follow-up to Kelela’s masterful 2018 debut, Take Me Apart, is the left-field R&B of Raven. It’s more insular and aqueous but no less forward-thinking. Centering itself on the rich history of electronic dance music in the Black queer community, the album plays like one long DJ set in a dimly lit nightclub, finding rebirth and transcendence in the baptismal waters of the dance floor.

A fitting companion to 2019’s stunning Norman Fucking Rockwell, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd finds Lana Del Rey pondering big questions about life, death, the afterlife, God, family, and motherhood. It’s Lana Del Rey at her most Lana Del Rey and Lana Del Rey at her best, a sweeping 78-minute sprawl of beautiful self-mythologizing melodrama.

Who had “Lil Yachty makes a freewheeling psych-rock opus” on their 2023 bingo card? The erstwhile SoundCloud rapper’s foray into vibey Tame Impala/Pink Floyd-inspired psychedelic pop might not be as revolutionary as he would have you believe, but it’s still a whole lot of fun, a fascinating left turn from an irrepressibly eccentric artist.

“Gardetto.,” the opening track on Liv.e’s Girl In The Half Pearl, fuses languid neo-soul with hurtling jungle breakbeats, immediately announcing itself as something special. An ode to growth in all its triumph and its messiness, the producer and singer’s sophomore LP takes listeners on a whirlwind journey through R&B, hip-hop, and dance music.

Mandy, Indiana filter dance music, post-punk, and industrial noise into their own idiosyncratic brand of sound and fury. The Manchester quartet’s debut album i’ve seen a way might be abrasive, disorienting, and intense, but the jagged churn—coupled with vocalist Valentine Caulfield Francophone chanting —always coheres into something hypnotically absorbing.

Water From Your Eyes have never met a contradiction they didn’t wholeheartedly embrace. Careening wildly from discordance to melody and irony to sincerity, the Brooklyn experimental duo’s Matador Records debut Everyone’s Crushed is a controlled explosion of pop music, deconstructing and building itself back up again according to its own appealingly deranged logic.

Rat Saw God is littered with details and images so vivid you can almost touch them, snapshots of Planet Fitness parking lots, rain-rotted houses, and rusty old can openers coalescing into an evocative portrait of small town life in a decaying American South. Fortunately, Wednesday’s music is just as tactile and visceral as their songwriting, full of bruised indie rock streaked with a rootsy twang that’s liable to erupt into fiery noise at a moment’s notice.

Yaeji is ready to smash it all down and build herself back up again. On her long-awaited debut album With A Hammer, arriving six years after she first burst onto the scene with instant-classic house bangers like “Raingurl,” the Korean American singer/producer/rapper/DJ breaks free from all the limitations holding her back. Wielding her anger like a hammer and moving past the club-oriented sound that she made her name on, With A Hammer is intensely personal and singularly original.

Yo La Tengo have never made a bad album, but on This Stupid World, nearly four decades into their career, the long-running indie-rock institution sounds more focused and energized than they have in years. Mixing noisy exploratory jams with beautifully tender moments like “Aselestine,” the bittersweet This Stupid World is ample proof that rock music doesn’t have to be a young man’s game.