Best Albums of 2023

Jon Pareles | Jon Caramanica | Lindsay Zoladz

Jon Pareles

The Personal Is Powerful

Personal reflections, not grand statements, filled my most memorable albums of 2023. It was a year when many of the best songs came from looking inward: at tricky relationships, at memories, at individual hopes and fears. Yet in the music, introspection led to exploration: expanding and toying with sonic possibilities, enjoying the way every note is now an infinitely flexible digital choice. For me, there was no overwhelming, year-defining album; this list could just as well be alphabetical. Instead, 2023 was a year of artists going in decidedly individual (and group) directions to grapple with their own questions, risks and rewards.

1. SZA, ‘SOS’

Released in December 2022, too late for last year’s best-of lists, SZA’s “SOS” ended a five-year gap between albums with a sprawling collection of 23 songs. Across all sorts of productions, her melodies blur any difference between rapping and singing, in casually acrobatic phrases full of jazzy syncopations and startling leaps. SZA sings about relationships from multiple angles: raunchy, devoted, betrayed, spiteful, injured, supercilious, insecure, regretful, sardonic, blithely murderous. And she makes her insights sound as natural as if she’d just thought of them on the spot.

2. Karol G, ‘Mañana Será Bonito’

Karol G turns heartache into ear candy on “Mañana Será Bonito” (“Tomorrow Will Be Beautiful”), 17 songs that work their way through a breakup to find a new start. Her voice sounds utterly guileless as she sings about lust, betrayal, revenge and healing. With an international assortment of guests, the Colombian songwriter brings pop tunefulness to reggaeton and also makes forays into rock, Dominican dembow, Afrobeats and regional Mexican music — claiming an ever-expanding territory in global pop.

3. boygenius, ‘The Record’

Synergy reigns in boygenius, the alliance of the singer-songwriters Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. On “The Record,” they seem to dare one another to rev up the music and sing candidly, or at least believably, about the many ways relationships — romances, friendships, mentorships — can go sideways. Meanwhile, their harmonies promise to carry them through all the setbacks together.

4. Paul Simon, ‘Seven Psalms’

“Seven Psalms” comes across as a farewell album from Paul Simon, 82. It’s also an artistic leap, expanding his mastery of the three-minute song into an unbroken 33-minute suite that traverses folk, blues and jazz. Simon sings about mortality as a “great migration” and extols the presence and purpose of “The Lord,” as the biblical psalms do. He also ponders music, love, family and eternity. The tone is conversational and quizzical; the implications are deep.

5. Olivia Rodrigo, ‘Guts’

Adolescence is complicated enough. Throw in celebrity, social-media scrutiny, headline touring and musical productivity, and it’s remarkable that Oliva Rodrigo, now 20, has kept not only a clear head but a sense of humor. The songs on her second album, “Guts,” combine pop’s concision and melody with rock’s potential to erupt. The production riffles through decades of crafty allusions as she deals with self-confidence and insecurity, misjudgments and comeuppances, and the relentless, contradictory expectations placed on a teenage female star.

6. Feist, ‘Multitudes’

Feist explores sorrow, longing, solace, new motherhood and the future of the Earth on “Multitudes.” Her latest songs are mostly quiet, but not always. They can take startling dynamic leaps: between unadorned acoustic close-ups and forays into orchestration or electronics, between lullaby and clatter, between intimacy and mystery, always seeking a compassionate path.

7. Everything but the Girl, ‘Fuse’

Despite a 24-year gap between albums by Everything but the Girl, “Fuse” isn’t exactly a reunion. Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt have been married the whole time. But “Fuse” reawakens and revises what they created together on their 1990s albums: a melancholy wee-hours ambience, with electronics pulsing behind Thorne’s contralto, where yearning meets experience and there’s always a chance at an epiphany.

8. Danny Brown, ‘Quaranta’

Early in 2023, Danny Brown collaborated with the avant-hip-hop producer Jpegmafia on the bristling, manic, bawdy album “Scaring the Hoes.” But “Quaranta” is a reckoning with maturity; “quaranta” means 40 in Italian, and Brown is now 42. The tracks veer from relaxed and retro to head-spinning and abstract. Brown raps about growing up in Detroit, coping with the ups and downs of a hip-hop career, and dealing with gentrification and change. On “Quaranta,” he’s an unabashed hip-hop grown-up.

9. Speedy Ortiz, ‘Rabbit Rabbit’

Rock could hardly get denser or spikier than it does on “Rabbit Rabbit” from Speedy Ortiz, the band led by Sadie Dupuis. Guitar lines race, collide, tangle and distort; Dupuis lofts blithe pop melodies above them. The lyrics are sometimes cryptic, sometimes glaringly exposed, as she sings about trauma, power and growing self-knowledge about dark moments. But the momentum is exultant, noisily overcoming the past.

10. Vijay Iyer, Arooj Aftab, Shahzad Ismaily, ‘Love in Exile’

Ambient, jazz, world music: “Love in Exile” partakes of them all. Its three collaborators share South Asian roots and American musical practice. Their improvised pieces draw on deep traditions — especially the singer Arooj Aftab’s ancient melodies and Urdu poetry — along with Shazad Ismaily’s liminal synthesizer drones and penumbras and Vijay Iyer’s patient but mutable piano patterns. They start with simplicity, then listen to one another; things happen.

Another 20 worthwhile albums, alphabetically:

• 100 gecs, “10,000 gecs”

• André 3000, “New Blue Sun”

• Corinne Bailey Rae, “Black Rainbows”

• Geese, “3D Country”

• Margaret Glaspy, “Echo the Diamond”

• Irreversible Entanglements, “Protect Your Light”

• Hannah Jadagu, “Aperture”

• Kelela, “Raven”

• Mitski, “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We”

• Janelle Monáe, “The Age of Pleasure”

• L’Rain, “I Killed Your Dog”

• Nkosazana Daughter, “Uthingo Le Nkosazana”

• Noname, “Sundial”

• Peso Pluma, “Génesis”

• Raye, “My 21st Century Blues”

• The Rolling Stones, “Hackney Diamonds”

• Allison Russell, “The Returner”

• Jorja Smith, “Falling or Flying”

• Kali Uchis, “Red Moon in Venus”

• Water From Your Eyes, “Everyone’s Crushed”

Jon Caramanica

Listening Widely, Feeling Deeply

The excellent albums that expanded the sound and idea of what pop music can be this year came from all over the globe, in all styles, and in many cases captured the beauty and unexpected creative shocks of cross-genre optimism. And the excellent albums about feelings this year were uncommonly direct, sparse, unbowed and sometimes whispered.

1. Asake, ‘Work of Art’

The second album by the Nigerian singer Asake captures the sound of exultant celebration. Rooted in the South African dance style amapiano, and playing with a range of more traditional Nigerian styles, it is elegant, careful and precious; as crisp as sunshine hitting skin, a restoration and a renewal.

2. Ice Spice, ‘Like..?’

As a rapper, Ice Spice is sturdy, terse, poised, cool — a virtuoso of delivering tough talk with a whisper. This EP, her first, is a primer on how to reconcile drill’s pugnacity with the sweetness of pop — no one since Pop Smoke has done it better.

3. SZA, ‘SOS’

SZA sings as if she’s revealing confidences, viciously detailing how perceptible flaws lead to imperceptible holes that gnaw away at you until they’re filled. Her second album — actually released in late 2022, after list-making season — is an aching catalog of letdowns, recriminations and, ever so rarely, relief.

4. NewJeans, ‘Get Up’

The most modern, most progressive and most slick pop release of the year is this futurist delight of an EP from the Korean girl group NewJeans, who are adaptable to a host of styles, including sultry R&B and pop-jungle.

5. 100 gecs, ‘10,000 gecs’

The maligned, the overlooked, the caustic, the cheeky — 100 gecs loves them all, and builds undeniably jubilant songs from these deeply shattered parts. This is the duo’s second album, and trades some of the debut’s shock for a kind of twisted tunefulness. The punishment continues; morale improves.

6. Megan Moroney, ‘Lucky’

Don’t let the inherent perkiness in the country singer Megan Moroney’s voice fool you — she’s an acute conveyor of what it feels like to hold it together while your insides shatter. This debut album has plenty of moving heartbreak songs, but also a few that detail how the person most likely to let you down is … you.

7. Peso Pluma, ‘Génesis’

For the last few years, traditional Mexican music has been updating rapidly, with a legion of younger stars indebted to hip-hop’s swagger taking the baton. Peso Pluma is this generation’s truest synthesist, and this album is his most ambitious yet, a blend of woozy and proud.

8. Zach Bryan, ‘Zach Bryan’

Another year, another album of songs written with a disarmingly pointillist perspective delivered with the ease and beauty of a rumpled pile of brown leaves on a crisp late-fall evening.

9. Sexyy Red, ‘Hood Hottest Princess’

It’s uncanny how unfinished but inevitable the songs on Sexyy Red’s breakout album sound, as if the way to navigate the space between casual smack talk and rap’s biggest stages wasn’t a crazy leap, but a practically indifferent saunter.

10. Bailey Zimmerman, ‘Religiously. The Album.’

A bruising collection of post-Morgan Wallen/Luke Combs power country, Bailey Zimmerman’s debut album has the straight-faced grandeur of anthemic 2000s arena rock overlaid with heartbroken lyrics descended from multiple generations of young men, in various genres, given to shouting their feelings at top volume.

11. Olivia Rodrigo, ‘Guts’

A snarling turn for the most important new pop starlet of the last few years, “Guts” is the sort of album you make when you experience enormous success and immediately sense the hollowness within. These songs are salted with some pop-punk, a dash of riot grrrl and a withering opinion of everyone fame has put in her path.

12. Drake, ‘For All the Dogs Scary Hours Edition’

The rare case of a bonus edition of an album deepening the meaning of the original version. The six additional songs added to the deluxe collection make Drake’s most recent album less about midcareer meandering and more about throne-sitting

13. Tanner Adell, ‘Buckle Bunny’

A pop-oriented singer who has an easy way with twang (but doesn’t over-rely on it), Tanner Adell casually traverses oozy R&B, barroom country, tsk-tsking hip-hop and disconsolate balladry on this winning debut. Her take on country music is uncanny, provocative and — if only Nashville would relax its borders — feels somewhat inevitable.

14. Troye Sivan, ‘Something to Give Each Other’

The best and most assured album Troye Sivan has made is full of horny-on-main flirtation, high-viscosity production, and lyrics that reckon with the way that sweat on the dance floor can actually be a damp cover for tenderness.

And 10 more:

• Natanael Cano, “Nata Montana”

• Lana Del Rey, “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd”

• Jung Kook, “Golden”

• Le Sserafim, “Unforgiven”

• Mandy, Indiana, “I’ve Seen a Way”

• Saint Levant, “From Gaza, With Love”

• Skrillex, “Quest for Fire”

• Uncle Waffles, “Asylum”

• Morgan Wade, “Psychopath”

• Morgan Wallen, “One Thing at a Time”

Lindsay Zoladz

Smart, Stupid and Fully Alive

My favorite albums of the year tended to be acts of aural world building: finely detailed utopias (or dystopias) that invited temporary immersion into other psyches and sounds. Some of these reflected on the brokenness of the planet, others indulged in abstract absurdism. But all offered a needed respite from reality, using the musical imagination as an escape route.

1. 100 gecs, ‘10,000 gecs’

So much great pop music walks a tightrope between stupidity and brilliance. 100 gecs see that tightrope and, in the opening moments of their kaleidoscopically anarchic second album “10,000 gecs,” light it on fire. “If you think I’m stupid now, you should see me when I’m high,” the digitally manipulated voice of Laura Les sings. “And I’m smarter than I look; I’m the dumbest girl alive.”

100 gecs — Les and the producer Dylan Brady — are garbage collectors of modern cultural detritus who fashion pummeling pop-rock from the junkyard of our collective unconscious. (On one song on this album, they rhyme Cheetos, Doritos, Fritos, mosquitoes, burritos and Danny DeVito.) But as nonsensical as these songs appear to be — and on some level, absolutely are — meaning and emotion trickle through. What seems like a novelty song about a frog at a kegger becomes, somehow, a poignant plea to accept social awkwardness in others.

When Les and Brady released their self-titled debut in 2019, they seemed like digital-era jesters, thumbing their noses at good taste in their quest to make hyperactive music of the future. On “10,000 gecs,” though, they wisely look back to a seemingly dead genre — rock music — and enliven it with genuinely appreciative, sonically studious tributes to pop-punk, metal, gonzo alt-rock and yes, even ska. The result is loud, brash, jubilant and unsentimentally inclusive in a way that so much of the music from which they borrow was not. “10,000 gecs” is a 27-minute blast of joy that speaks the language of our broken brains. They’re even dumber than they sound. They’re the smartest band alive.

2. Caroline Polachek, ‘Desire, I Want to Turn Into You’

“Welcome to my island,” the art-pop auteur Caroline Polachek proclaims at the beginning of this twisty travelogue through her own musical mind, before letting loose one of the most towering choruses of the year. This follow-up to the underrated “Pang” from 2019 explores Polachek’s sonic obsessions including opera, flamenco, Celtic music, Y2K-era soft rock (Dido makes a fitting cameo) and the outer limits of experimental pop. Welcome to La Isla de Polachek, population: One.

3. Olivia Rodrigo, ‘Guts’

Olivia Rodrigo has a knack for capturing the visceral ache of growing pains, the physical recoil of cringe. It’s all over “Guts,” her chatty, triumphant “yeah, right” to the sophomore slump. Notice the way her voice breaks when she recounts her social faux pas or the romantic mistakes of her recent past: “How could I be so stupid?” she sings, practically retching that last word. Rodrigo may be a Gen Z heroine, but the irresistible rockers on “Guts” prove that the ’90s mean something more specific to her than mass-produced Nirvana shirts and borrowed nostalgia. If anything, she’s a home-schooled riot grrrl, waking up from the teenage dream and stumbling into an admirably messy young adulthood.

4. Lana Del Rey, ‘Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd’

Pop’s divisive princess swings for the heavens on her sprawling ninth album, and even at her most meandering, you have to admire the ambition. Throughout this dizzying, 78-minute swirl of the sacred and the profane, Lana Del Rey pays tribute to her own hodgepodge canon of Americana: Harry Nilsson, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, “Forensic Files,” John Denver, Angelina Jolie and — finally, provocatively, deservedly — herself.

5. Debby Friday, ‘Good Luck’

With perhaps the most confident and promising debut album of the year, the Toronto-based electronic musician Debby Friday creates an alluringly dark, industrial backdrop for her slinky self-mythologizing and galvanizing pep talks to herself. “Speak up, speak up, Friday Child,” she intones on the intention-setting opener. “Say what you came to say.” Does she ever.

6. Fever Ray, ‘Radical Romantics’

Karin Dreijer, formerly of the Knife, injects an enlivening jolt of vulnerability into their long-running solo project Fever Ray on this bold exploration of desire, seduction and midlife romance. “Looking for a person with a special kind of smile/Teeth like razors, fingers like spice,” they sing, summing up an album that sounds, thrillingly, like the world’s weirdest personal ad.

7. Water From Your Eyes, ‘Everyone’s Crushed’

Like Sonic Youth if it had been raised on memes, flavored vape cartridges and forced Zoom hangouts, the Brooklyn-based duo Water From Your Eyes (Rachel Brown and Nate Amos) mold dissonant guitars and deadpan vocals into hypnotic art rock that obliquely reflects the absurdity — and at times, the stubborn compassion — of the world in which it was created.

8. Jamila Woods, ‘Water Made Us’

On her third album, Chicago’s Jamila Woods, one of contemporary R&B’s sharpest observers, turns her gaze inward and — in a voice at once plain-spoken and poetic — charts the insight and self-discovery she’s gained in the process of her patient search for love.

9. Jessie Ware, ‘That! Feels Good!’

The British pop musician Jessie Ware continues her midcareer transformation into a liberated disco diva with a killer record collection — ESG, Grace Jones, Donna Summer — on this fizzy, appropriately exclamatory ode to the pleasure principle.

10. Anohni and the Johnsons:, ‘My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross’

For the first time in over a decade, Anohni reunited with her band the Johnsons, inspiring her to push her forcefully tender voice in a new direction and craft a loose, soulful and casually virtuosic album that updates Marvin Gaye’s classic 1971 query for an age of climate grief, selective listening and hardening hearts. Let Anohni melt yours.

And 5 more:

• L’Rain, “I Killed Your Dog”

• Sufjan Stevens, “Javelin”

• Mitski, “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We”

• Spencer Zahn, “Statues I & II”

• Jana Horn, “The Window Is the Dream”