Records of the Year, 2023; 25–16.

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25. Killer Mike — Michael
Timing Is Everything

What’s possibly most curious about Killer Mike is that it took him “this long” to be discovered by the [inter]national eye. I don’t know how this man’s voice wasn’t in car speakers around the world before a decade ago when Run the Jewels showed up. Am I crazy? — This record shows hip-hop at the height of its powers, an entire genre culminating in not only self-affirmation but in forms of higher worship, in forms of storytelling, in forms of God, in forms of faith, in forms of standing on the shoulders of community. It interests me to know what the younger generation hears when they listen to this kind of music adjacent to the more modern trap music that stemmed from this genre. Both creation styles praise the ability to find rhymes within the spoken word, to have a vision within a given beat, to tell stories that glorify The Self and Accomplishment. But, as an Older Person, it feels like the level of quality is on a whole different tier when it comes to this style. It’s impossible to dispose of, whereas a lot of the younger creators seem to be prizing prolific and instant creation over works of labor like this. This joint is chockful of lessons, full of modern sermon. I think this is a record that holds a deeper impact the more you listen to it. As one takes a deeper drink of the music, the words take a deeper hold, the ink sinks deeper into the paper. I think this one will be one of the rap albums that has a longer life than lots of other stuff that’s come out over time. It’s a goddamn celebration. Sure. There are somber parts, memorials, laments. But as he talks about at the end of the track about missing his mother: great things, incredible things come from struggle.

Check Out: Shed Tears

24. Samia — Honey
Missives

I was (am) obsessed with the first song from this record. I’d heard it before the full record was released. It was stripped down to the absolute bare planks of what could be considered a ‘song’. It was (is) words pressed out of a woman in wispy and dreamy strips, lyrics deeply personal, conversational almost. The song discussed very personal details of very specific nights. When this whole record dropped, eleven tracks and just a flash over forty minutes, I wasn’t quite sure what I’d experienced when I first heard it. It took me two back-to-back listens to get a full idea for it. Coming out of it initially, I felt like I got a lot of the same taste from front to back, a lot of the same landscape, the same extending stroke from wall to ceiling. It wasn’t until I saw her live some months later that I started to understand a little bit more about what the shape of these songs was supposed to take. It could just be me, but I feel like this album is a collection of less than eleven ‘songs’ and more like half of that, with intersperses of streams of consciousness, directly from the heart of Samia herself of very specific jewels in time, captured snowglobes of frail moments; not the best, not the worst, but important from a very distinct perspective of a time which was very difficult to recreate or capture. It feels like a buried shoe box of folded notes, charms, flowers, photos that we’ve uncovered and get to relive with the very person who buried it. The record comes to life in fits and starts, but I’m not so sure that this record is about feeling alive.

Check Out: Charm You

23. Blondshell — Blondshell
Meet Sabrina

Something about this record feels like a phone call home. Not to the house I grew up in, not to the family or the folks. No, it feels more like calling (or getting a call from) a payphone where all of the people I used to see are gathered around it, shouting questions, shouting updates about all of the shit that’s gone down since I left. The lyric-writing is very down on the ground, very journaled, referencing lots of events, lots of specific people (though they aren’t named). As Blondshell runs through her tracks, the guitar clambers and shivers calmly as she bares her moment-to-moment confessions. The direct desperation-to-settling pipeline in the song ‘Sepsis’ is probably the best example I can give, but the follow-up, ‘Sober Together’ drives it home. Songs like these seem to bleed redemption and catharsis, and if these are meant to work as wishes whispered into cupped hands and released into the night out of a motel window, then I hope there’s someone out there listening. It’s not that the songs sound uniquely bleak, but instead that they’re so broadly relatable, and we can all use a little cry for help. I don’t think it ever really left, but I like that there’s a 90s grunge revival that doesn’t only involve dudes in flannels popping back up in the music scene. This album feels like it builds a lot around the edges for sure, but there is, without question, a sense of that chunky guitar, baggy jean aesthetic surrounding this entire release.

Check Out: Sepsis

22. Clark — Sus Dog
City Selective

I remember I was doing something, really making a selective curation for a friend when I sent him a link to ‘Clutch Pearlers’ and said, “Interesting album, def liking it a lot. Feels like Radiohead a little bit,” and realized immediately after that there’s an executive producer credit on this record to Thom Yorke himself, who not only has his hands in the business side of this record but also APPEARS on a track, ‘Medicine.’ Fuckin’ — oops. Embracing all of this information, I will say that this record does ring close to the Radiohead frontman’s solo records, but in a different way, a unique way that comes closer to the pure electronic genre, dragging in more influences of dance music. It’s got ambient elements to it, but doesn’t highlight the gloaming as much, it doesn’t rain the dreary nature of the world. It’s less mystic. There’s life to this record that feels like it’s a good time to see live, something that feels like Clark would alter the dimensions of his creations to decay more into distortion, would play up the beats some more, and we’d be entrenched in harder, heavier remixes to get the blood flowing. These are the core memories of electrodes, the basic elements of a grander theme. But within the examination of this 45-minute gem, you’ll find schematics that span a prism. Some tracks (‘Forest’) will feel like the soul of a concrete city that no longer houses humanity, some songs will feel like Alt-J has stripped back their percussive sound to lean instead of synths and turntables, some lighter vocals will even feel like Hikes have ditches guitars to gently croon over the keys. I’ve often spoken about how electronic music feels soulless to me, more preprogrammed and discovered than created. More generated than summoned. But when an artist is able to marry tech and spirit, when someone can instrumentalize a deus ex machina and make the nanodust resonate inside my human brain, my human heart… there’s something even more special there.

Check Out: Bully

21. Eleventwelfth — Similar
An Oasis For the Older Emos

This record is such a shoutout to a different time. In fact, when listening to it the first couple of times, I couldn’t tell if I was enjoying it because it was throwing me back to a different time in my life or if this was something I was still seeking. But the more I listened to it, the more I realized that regardless of genre or style, the cream still rises to the top. The complex mathy guitars are the things that stand out the most on the surface, matching beautifully with constantly shifting and morphing drums to compliment the dynamic musical style. Vocally, I’d say it lands somewhere close to Mae with gentle and smooth vocals listing across the top of the effervescent instrumentation. All of that being said, I do think there’s something to be said about how rarely records like this get a highlight over the last few years, as this sounds more like something that could have come out around the Midwest emo revival, even coming across at times as a celebration of Drive-Thru Records’ core pop-punk sounds (namely the vocal style). This album does its best work when the wheels come off and the song structures aren’t as limiting (specifically in ‘(stay here) for a while’) which sounds like it’s coming off of a Something Corporate record). Without getting too much more into the analogs we can draw to nostalgia bands though, this one dips into wildly impressive time signature changes, and trippy guitar work and even simmers into some light jazz work as the band settles into head-nodding grooves from time to time. I find it harder to ‘convince’ someone that this record is “cool” than so many of the other entries on this list, but this is one of those albums that broke the AT Field of my pretention, and was impossible for me not to fall in love with.

Check Out: The More I Try to Trace You Forthwith, The Less I Want to Know Where to Find You

20. Narrow Head — Moments of Clarity
Shoegaze For Any Timeline

Somewhere between Hum and Quicksand, this record kicks off with the same energy it ends with, something that has the same engineer-minded inertia as ‘Fazer’ off of the latter’s Slip. And throughout this record, there’s that big churning wave of distorted guitars creating an ocean of static. Vocals glide over most of the record in a relaxed and composed delivery, with little inclusions of background screams and desperately performed yells. I’ve listened to this record four or five times in the past few days trying to illustrate what made this album sing, what made this album work for me, and I just don’t have any way to capture the quality of it that makes it such an everlasting great record for me. And I think that’s it, right? I think it ends up bearing the standard of a record that could have been released anytime in the past 35 years and held up in the post-hardcore landscape. Going back to the ‘Fazer’ reference, if you listen to the two songs back to back, it’s tough to find the common thread between them, but the spirit is there. I think there’s just one distinct song that feels like it may have been written on the studio whiteboard as “Deftones Song” and that is ‘Flesh & Solitude’ which feels a little bit too on-the-nose but in an excellent way, in a way that even carries with it what sounds like the signature background vocals of Chi Cheng. To be honest, when a buddy first brought this record to my attention halfway through the year, I hadn’t even known they’d released anything beyond Satisfaction which came out several years before, and I can safely say I would have been sorely missing out if I let this one fly by without including it on the list. I’ll do anything I can to make sure no one else misses out on it.

Check Out: Gearhead

19. ††† — Goodnight, God Bless, I Love U, Delete
Black Neon Fluorescent

Once Chuck Doom left this band, it seemed like Chino and Lopez started coming out with material almost immediately. I don’t like when something in a creative work becomes easier when you subtract a member, especially a founding one, but in this case, it just seemed to be something where they were being either led down a more difficult path to the music they would have made OR they were just not getting the green light to make music at all. With the two remaining members finally freed of their invisible anchor, the songs began to flow and for someone like Chino Moreno, one of the most prolific performers in music in the past 30 years, that bounty was fruitful. With a few singles/EPs last year, and this full length, they’ve dropped over 20 songs, each of which carries a drifting and melancholic electronic buzz about it, very similar to a modernized Depeche Mode. From what I’ve heard about their live performance, it sounds like Lopez is the driving force, the musical engine that propels this machine, and his activity during those shows is something otherworldly, maximizing the sound beds, synthesizers and instrumentation beyond what is shown on the record. And of course, Chino provides such interesting and unique takes when it comes to the vocals. Reading the man’s musical influences has always felt a little bit like a classroom’s worth of music libraries, but with all of these fountains to pull from, the drink is always familiar, nostalgic, but unlike anything else we’ve heard before. It’s his ability to form hooks and memorably repetitive verses and marquis choruses filled with lucid-dreamlike lyrics, and his absolute consistency with his output. There is a distinct Chino style. And in this record it is everpresent.

Check Out: Invisible Hand

18. Lana Del Rey — Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd
Antithesis of a Passive Experience

I think a lot about the concept of ‘lore’ and its place in storytelling and creativity. It falls in line somewhere with my beliefs as far as sequels go. I believe you should be able to tell a strong story, a concise story, without requiring any background to complete the journey, nor any “longer runway” to tie off the entire plot. This is, somehow, the first rule that Lana breaks on this record, though it’s not her fault entirely. The “stronger” a fan of hers you are, though, greatly increases your ability to enjoy a record that falls later in her discography and I believe that this one is no exception. There is some connection that she’s created with her fans, some kind of kindship that’s been built across the noosphere which aligns us with her art. As she writes new music, so much of it is self-referential, so much closer to the pen in the journal, that without knowing where we were in Chemtrails Over the Country Club and Blue Bannisters it’s tough to know how we got here in …Tunnel…. It’s not that she’s deliberately telling a “story” per se, though the stronger the reference points, the more knowledge we have of the lexicon, the style, the ecosystem of the Lana-verse, the more that we can tie the weights on and wade into the depths. There’s a slang at play that isn’t in the words she’s using, but instead by the way she draws connections, the way that she places ephemera. So much of her work makes mention of the veneer of The Elite, of Happy Homes and more importantly, what lies beneath. It’s the perfect sonorous choir of the world built in Bret Easton Ellis novels where The People With the Money have made the world go around for so long that they can no longer see the toiling, heartbroken, coked-out women and children that no longer reach out for their hands but for their wallets instead. The “Tunnel” that she speaks of is exactly the type of lore that I’m talking about: it’s part of the Deep California Mythos, old stories that come out of Hollywood, and the place where the lizard people meet. I think it’s the shortcut referenced in Under the Silver Lake, another look at Hollywood’s buried parable, which speaks of things that could have easily been covered up when the country was controlled by The Few and people were so pilled that their eyes were gleeful to look elsewhere, anywhere else. It’s commonplace Americana, just as raw and real and ancient as The Jersey Devil, the body of Jimmy Hoffa. And the tunnel, the sealed Jergins Tunnel, is real… but sealed off and left for antiquity. It’s the type of thing that Lana lives for. Bygone and entombed American Dreams. It’s hard to find a song on a newer Lana del Rey album to recommend to an uninitiated, to someone who hasn’t already been indoctrinated. I feel somewhat the same about this record, where across its entire length, I don’t think I can find one song to share with someone to say, “If you want to listen to the whole record, simply listen to this. This is the one I’ll be taking with me.” Asking someone to listen to this record in full is a tough ask, as this is the second personal “rule” of mine that she breaks and I’ve turned a blind eye to: its length. Typically, once an album stretches beyond the 44-minute mark, I start to wonder how many of the songs on the recording could have been cut for b-sides, could have been reworked for a different record. Could have been scrapped entirely. And it’s this record that sits at a devastating 77 minutes, a full half-hour PLUS beyond what I usually feel comfortable sitting through, which seems to sing a complete note through and through, and while I don’t think any of them could be sliced out and put elsewhere, I also completely understand how, in its sprawling and uncondensed and nearly indistinguishable 16 tracks, one can find it to be anything but b-sides. But that’s the Church of Lana. The hour and seventeen minutes of this record is something that, when the time is right, is the only thing you are going to want to listen to. It’s going to be the ritual that you need to engage in to descend into the portal that can make things feel alright. It’s the frequency you’ll be searching for when the vibrations won’t sync up. It’s the phone call you need to receive. It’s the penance you need to perform. Even with its lore, even with its length… this is the only pill you need, and the only person who is going to prescribe it is Lana herself. Strangely, music like this is still relevant today, still something that someone wishes to create. I think this album is one that you have to put on deliberately. There is no random choice to throw on this enormous undertaking, at least in my mind, to sit with it and enjoy it as it passes in and out. This is an entire observation. An act. A ceremony.

Check Out: A&W

17. Heavenward — Pyrophonics
Distortion Eternal

It’s tough to write about this album without praising the record that the singer came from prior, Teenage Wrist. Namely, my favorite record of theirs, Chrome Neon Jesus. In all of its post-grunge, distortion pedal glory Heavenward has made a record that showcases heavy doses of its influences worn proudly on its sleeve. Every song is soaked in flannel shirts and droney and fuzzy guitars, with washed-out cymbal production which sounds freshly transported from the 1990s. You can feel the baggy jeans and trashed Vans, the long bleach blond hair and disconnected gazes. If you’re a child of that era or have somehow followed the path slowly toward bands that have revived the sound, this is a record that you will easily find a place for in your heart. The thing is, when this genre was at its peak, I don’t think hooks were being held in as much of a priority as they are now. So with decades on his side, Kamtin Mohager has melded the catchiness of pop with the balled fist of the bygone era and mashed them up to create something truly special. It’s easy to jam alongside this one, to half-headbang through the rest, and to get songs deeply caught in your skin. Of all the records on this list, this is one of the easiest to throw on at any time and be deeply pleased with the choice.

Check Out: Something Real

16. Yves Tumor — Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)
An Elevated Experience(s)

It’s hard to determine the right way to listen to this one. It feels like an Album Album, one which goes from track to track as a definitive and cohesive whole, with songs seeming to build and end in the way that they would in a concept album, but there is clearly a gap between tracks. And listening to it with that sense, it certainly does feel like each track sets up its tent, performs its act, then packs up and heads out. A little mid-aughts indie, a little modern R&B influence, this ends up being neither, instead a pop record at its heart with flourishes of grunge and rock as its flagposts that summon any and all comers to sample its wares. This is a record that rewards headphones-listeners as something to get surrounded in, to get engulfed in, but not in the standard fare of hi-fi audio quality (in fact, it doesn’t even seem to be that sharply produced) but instead because of how close it allows you to get to its canvas. You can see the brushstrokes. You can see the film grain. You can hear the splices in the 8mm tape. I think a record like this has the whimsy of an artist like Donald Glover (sorry, “ChIlDiSh GaMbInO”) but the quiet intelligence of Thundercat. There are so many layers to what’s being created here, both a raw creativity that doesn’t always have a home but also a concentrated and calculated vision that has been storyboarded, outlined, and executed brilliantly. The unhinged has been hinged. There are times when it feels like I’m listening to the intelligence of a TV On the Radio, times when it feels like I’m on a the-brakes-are-out-this-is-a-celebration Bloc Party ride. There are so many influences on this record, so many wild voices to wrangle that I can’t help but adore it. The restraint here is so exquisite, listening to Tumor’s voice balk and resist and tease is almost more powerful than allowing them to unleash it in full. It is armored and sheathed.

Check Out: Ebony Eye

|| To Honorable Mentions II || To Records 15–6. ||