→ January 13, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 1/13/24.

I had two posts this week for subscribers to The Athletic – a breakdown of the Michael Busch trade for prospects and another of the Cubs signing Shota Imanaga. Somehow, this brought the Matt Mervis stans back out off hiding.

At Paste, I published a full review of the game The White Castle, my top new game of 2023. Fries are extra.

I also sent out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter earlier in the week. You should sign up, as I’m posting less to Twitter these days, although you can also find me on Threads, Bluesky, and Spoutible.

A light week for links, probably because I was on the phone so much working on prospect stuff that I was offline more than usual (at least twice because my eyes hurt from so much screen time)…

  • Nigerian megachurch leader TB Joshua, who was not a drag queen, tortured, raped, and abused many of his worshippers until his death in 2021. A BBC investigation found cases of all of the above as well as forced abortions and cult-like control spanning twenty years.
  • Are fast-food prices really going up, and if so, is it because of rising wages? It’s not that simple, according to this story on Vox. Input prices have gone up substantially in the last few years as well. Also, the $18 Big Mac story that went viral was about a McDonald’s at a rest stop with a captive audience.
  • Paste profiled SPRINTS as the Irish punk band released their first full-length album Letter to Self.
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→ January 10, 2024
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Rye Lane.

Most meet-cute films are little more than cute, and often they’re just cutesy to the point of being saccharine. They’re date movies, or “date movies,” assuming you care more about the mood you’re setting than the caliber of the movie itself. It’s just not a genre associated with quality, which is why Rye Lane, streaming now on Hulu, was such an incredible surprise: It’s a genuinely great movie on its own merits, even though you know from the start that the protagonists are going to get together, in part because they’re both so realistically drawn and well acted. (Thanks to Chris Crawford, who ranked this among his top 5 films of 2023, for telling me about it.)

As the film opens, we see Dom (David Jonsson) crying in a stall in the all-genders bathroom at an art exhibition, when Yas (Vivian Oparah) comes in to use the neighboring stall, leading to an awkward conversation where Dom reveals that his long-term girlfriend left him for his best mate. The two reconnect outside of the loo and end up walking through Rye Lane Market for a few hours, bonding over their recent breakups, eating at a taco stand for the film’s best cameo, encountering both of their exes, and engaging in more hijinks. The love connection hits a few snags, eventually breaking when it becomes clear that one of them lied to the other about something significant, setting up the finish where, of course, they get together for real.

The actual plot of Rye Lane follows the typical story arc of the meet-cute or any rom-com, naturally limiting its upside. For a formula movie to avoid being just formulaic, the characters have to be credible and the actors in the two lead roles have to excel. Jonsson and Oparah are both superb and have clear chemistry, with Oparah especially strong playing the harder-edged and slightly more complex character, as Yas has the longer back story and her character starts with the blank canvas. The script, by first-time film writers Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia, keeps the two characters believable mostly by avoiding unnecessary details – they’re not idealized, they’re not living high on the hog, they don’t have ridiculous lives or impossibly perfect traits. If anything, they’re both appropriately screwed up given what’s come before.

And on top of that, Rye Lane is very, very funny. It’s a screwball comedy wrapped up in a date movie, calling back to classic comedies of the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, throwing its two protagonists into a series of misadventures, some of which push the edges of credibility but all of which lead to hilarious results. The visit to Yas’s ex’s mums’ house, where the two women are having a cookout, is especially ridiculous and had me cringing in a good way from start to finish. The connecting thread is that one of them has a bad idea, and the other goes along with it (or is roped into it unwittingly), and then hijinks ensue. It’s hard to pull this off without turning the movie into a joke or just ending up with a bunch of unfunny situations. The script pushes the envelope without breaking it, and the two actors are so credible in their characters that the film never once goes off the rails.

A superb feature debut by director Raine Allen-Miller, Rye Lane really does the meet-cute as well as any recent movie I can remember. It’s a wonderful ride, even though you know the shape of the story arc, and where it ends is exactly right for its story and its characters. And in a year where best-of lists are dominated by some heavy dramas, Rye Lane is the perfect palate cleanser before your next three-hour watch.

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→ January 6, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 1/6/24.

I took a few weeks off from these posts around the holidays, but I did write one piece for subscribers to The Athletic over the break, looking at the Chris Sale trade and Lucas Giolito signing.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the games Daybreak, a cooperative game about fighting climate change; and Wandering Towers, the best new family game of last year. Both games were on my ranking of the ten best new board games of 2023.

My free email newsletter will return today (most likely). Several of you have pledged to support me if the newsletter were to go paid; I have no immediate plans to do so, but if that happens 1) I’ll give everyone a ton of notice and 2) I’ll move it off Substack.

And now, the links…

  • Writer Tom Scocca’s piece in New York about his sudden, unsolved medical mystery is the best thing you’ll read all week. It’s well-written, of course, and combines the deeply personal with an inherent attack on our broken health-care system.
  • The New Yorker looks at board games with serious themes, profiling Amabel Holland, a trans woman who co-owns the publisher Hollandspiele and designed the Iron Rails series of games.
  • Stuart Thompson of the New York Times looks at how anti-vaxx ghouls latched on to the death of a 24-year-old man, who showed no symptoms of myocarditis after his COVID-19 vaccination but whose parents think the vaccine gave him myocarditis anyway. George Watts, Jr., had an enlarged spleen – over six times the normal size for that organ – which is a sign of long-term heart failure, chronic inflammation in his brain, and signs of late-stage pneumonia in his lungs.
  • Why do pundits like Jonathan Chait and Nate Silver say outrageous things? Because it’s effective, at least when you consider that attention is their goal.
  • Overtime pay for NYPD officers working the city’s subway stations went from $4 million to $155 million between 2022 and 2023, reducing “major crimes” by 2% but primarily leading to more arrests and fines for fare-jumping. That’s a lot of money to fight a handful of skipped $2.90 charges.
  • Amanda Todd was 15 when she killed herself in 2012 after three years of cyberstalking by a Dutch man who blackmailed her with threats to send nude images of her to her friends and family. He was sentenced to 13 years by a Canadian court, but a Dutch court cut the sentence in half to match that country’s legal standards.
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→ January 4, 2024
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Match of the Century.

The World Chess Championship between Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky, the defending champion at the time, and American Bobby Fischer in 1972 was dubbed the “match of the century,” with Fischer winning after 21 games over 50 days to become the first American-born world champion in the honor’s history. Now you can relive this matchup – sort of – in the two-player board game Match of the Century, published in the U.S. by Capstone. It’s played with two decks of cards over a series of games to determine the champion. It’s a clever, tightly designed game, but unfortunately it’s very dry, and relies on a mechanic that both my opponent and I found very confusing. (My opponent was my father, who holds two master’s degrees, spent forty-plus years as an electrical engineer, and is one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.)

Each player has a small deck of cards that have two values, one for when the player is white and the other for when the player is black. Your hand size can vary from 5 to 7, and you also start each game by taking one to three pawns from the general supply. The board has four spaces for cards on each side, with a number from 1 to 4 in the middle row. The white player starts each game by playing one card to any of the four spaces on their side, and the black player must respond with a card. The cards’ values are compared – the white player’s card value for white against the black player’s card value for black – with each side adding up to two pawns to boost their strength. The winner gains those 1 to 4 points shown in between the cards, while the loser gets to execute the action or power on their card. A game ends when all spaces are filled, or when one player has gained enough points that the other can’t catch up. The winning player gains one match point; in case of a draw, each player gains one. The first player to six match points wins.

While the game isn’t from the same designer as the amazing two-player game Watergate, it has a similar look and feel, with asymmetrical decks and cards that can be played in several different ways. Watergate remains one of the most thematic games I’ve ever played – the effects of the cards tie so well to the characters and events from the actual scandal that I have always found it impossible not to get swept up in the story while playing, even though the actual third-rate burglary happened a year or so before I was born. Here, the theme doesn’t quite work as well, in part because chess is a game itself, and the game we’re playing here doesn’t look like chess at all – cards are labeled as knights, rooks, and so on, but it has no bearing on how those cards work. I thought far more of Battle Line or Air, Land, & Sea, two fantastic capture-the-flag games, than of chess, and I thought Match of the Century suffered a little in that comparison as well.

The confusion came about because you keep any unplayed cards from one game to the next (and unplayed pawns as well), so you have to flip your hand over when a new game begins, so your white cards become black or vice versa. I can’t tell you how often this screwed one of us up. Even if we both reoriented our cards, one of us would either play a card upside down (for the wrong color/action), or we’d play it correctly and then read the wrong side because of how they’re oriented on the board. I understand the intent, and I don’t see a better way to implement it, but in practice it was frustrating and detracted from the fun of the game.

The general reaction to this game has been very positive, and I think I’m in the minority here. My dad and I both enjoy games and puzzles, but we actually called this one after seven games (he won, 4 to 3, with a pretty masterful parry to my last move on the fourth ‘flag’ of the last game) because it was dragging and neither of us was having enough fun to justify playing it to the end. I’d much rather play Watergate, or even Riftforce, another capture-the-flag game, both of which are published in the U.S. by Capstone.

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→ January 3, 2024
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The Holdovers.

Alexander Payne’s films often depict deeply flawed people in an empathetic way, almost challenging the viewer to root for them in spite of their awfulness – Miles Raymond in Sideways and Jim McAllister in Election come to mind. The Holdovers, Payne’s latest film and a return to form after Downsizing flopped, has a pair of these awful characters at the heart of its story, giving the viewer a window into each of them as they learn to develop empathy for the other – and for other people in general – that they’d previously lacked. (It’s streaming free on Peacock, or you can buy it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is a brusque, old-school instructor of Ancient Civilizations at the Barton School, a tony boarding school in Massachusetts, loathed by students for his ungenerous grading and general classroom manner. The headmaster, angry with Paul over another matter, assigns him to be the one teacher who stays over the Christmas break with the “holdovers,” five students who can’t go home for the holidays for varying reasons. One of them, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), was supposed to join his mother and stepfather in St. Kitts, but gets a last-minute call that she’s going to St. Kitts alone with her husband on a delayed honeymoon, so Angus must stay on campus, and he’s not happy about it. It gets worse, as the other four boys get to head off on a ski trip, but Angus’s parents are unreachable (or just ignore the calls), so he can’t get permission to leave, stranding him with Paul, the head cook Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), and the janitor Danny (Naheem Garcia). Mary recently lost her son, a Barton alumnus, in Vietnam, as he couldn’t get a student deferment, with a stark contrast between his fate as a rare Black student at Barton and his many white classmates.

Paul and Mary don’t know each other very well despite both working at the school for what appears to have been about twenty years, and neither knows Angus at all beyond his time in Paul’s class. Once he’s the only student left, Angus starts to act up, with comical and serious consequences, which helps the two get to know each other beyond the classroom. There’s a holiday party thrown by another Barton staffer, a Christmas dinner with just the three of them, an unplanned field trip, a definitely unplanned trip to the hospital, and more seemingly minor events that allow David Hemingson’s script to reveal more layers to each of the characters.

The film takes place over the winter break of 1970-71, a time when men were men, by which I mean they weren’t supposed to talk about or acknowledge feelings. Paul and Angus are cut from that cloth, and just getting to the points where they do reveal an emotion or two, such as Angus’s comments at the Christmas dinner, is a huge challenge for both men; for Angus, as a teenager, it could be seen as a sign of weakness by his peers, while for Paul, the gruff exterior hides some inner disappointment that the film only hints at later on. Mary is more open with her feelings, although they come out a lot more at the holiday party when she’s had a few, and early in the film it’s clear that neither Angus nor Paul is comfortable with even her modest degree of openness. The parting shot of the two men is brilliantly awkward, and dead on for their two characters, especially in that time period.

Randolph seems to be the favorite right now for Best Supporting Actress, and while I’ve only seen one other potential nominee (America Ferrera, for Barbie), it is a tremendous performance in a somewhat limited role. Giamatti was somewhat infamously snubbed for Sideways, earning his one Oscar nomination a year later for Cinderella Man, and while I could see him landing another nod this year, I’m also a little curious if he can play a character who isn’t fundamentally an asshole. I could see The Holdovers getting both of those nominations as well as Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay (GoldDerby shows it as the favorite for the latter), but I’m not sure how much credit here should go to Payne as the director versus the other contributors. The script itself is smart and witty and a great example of showing people developing empathy in a way that also gets the audience to empathize with them. All three lead actors are excellent. I wouldn’t take anything away from Payne here, but it felt to me like the best thing he could do was stay out of the way.

It’s that empathy bit that makes The Holdovers a superlative film rather than just a great one. Getting viewers to side with characters who are unlikeable in tangible ways is a real challenge for writer and actor – not just rooting for them like some anti-hero, but to embrace them as three-dimensional characters who have serious flaws and may not even like themselves. All three actors meet this challenge, and the script puts them in the right situations for them to show the audience who and what they are. Trying to do more would have ruined the magic.

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→ January 2, 2024
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Past Lives.

Past Lives is the first feature from writer-director Celine Song, and became a surprise hit at the U.S. box office, taking in just over $10 million even though it has no stars in the cast and much of the film is in Korean. It’s small and intimate, with only three real characters, yet manages to explore the nature of love and identity as we follow two of those people from their childhood in South Korea to a meeting in New York 24 years later. It’s a wonderful film that barely strikes a single wrong note even as it moves through territory that naturally lends itself to sentiment and cliché. (You can rent it on amazon, iTunes, etc.)

Na Young (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) are 12-year-old classmates and academic rivals when we first meet them, but just as they seem to be falling for each other, Nora’s family moves to Toronto, after which she takes on the name Nora Moon. Twelve years later, Hae Sung finds her via a page for her playwright/director father’s latest movie, and the two strike up a very intense relationship over Skype and messaging, one that seems to be headed for something more serious until one of them calls it off due to their careers and the physical distance between them. A dozen years after that, the two connect in person, but the window for them to have an actual romance has closed, and they both have to deal with the weight of their memories and the lost connection to each other.

The title of the film refers to a Korean concept, inyeon, where people are connected over their lives or even multiple lifetimes, to the point that fate or providence is pushing them together. Nora and Hae Sung spend significant time in the film debating whether they have inyeon and are actually meant to be together, although in the end it appears that they don’t, as one of them falls in love with someone else. It would be romantic if it were true, but even Past Lives doesn’t take it as fact and in many ways subverts the concept with what it does to its two protagonists.

Beyond the love story, however, there’s a powerful meditation here on national/ethnic identity and the difficulty of assimilation. Nora left Korea at 12, learning English shortly before their trip, and then emigrated a second time from Canada to the United States. She works diligently to fit into western culture, including taking on a “western” name that non-Koreans could more easily pronounce or remember, in a familiar look at the immigrant story where the younger generation becomes American or Canadian or European and loses some or all connection to their country of birth or their parents’. When Hae Sung appears the second time, by which point they’re 36, she’s moved on with her life enough that his visit throws off her equilibrium, and over several days she becomes more uncomfortable with her feelings and with this intrusion of her past life into her current one. At first, Nora’s the cool one of the two, as she’s married and looks at Hae Sung with some pity because he’s not and it’s clear that he hasn’t entirely moved on. The more they talk, and Hae Sung becomes more open about his feelings, the more it rattles her, dredging up something she’s tried to forget or bury, whether it’s him specifically or something broader about her past.

Lee is a revelation in Past Lives, carrying large portions of the film herself because her character is the conflicted one and we see more of her without Hae Sung than the reverse. I’d only seen her previously in some guest spots on the new Electric Company, but I can’t say I remember her appearances. So much of the communication between Nora and Hae Sung is nonverbal, and both Lee and Teo Yoo are superb at expressing their feelings through gesture or facial expression – the ambivalence Nora feels when Hae Sung visits, her anxiety when he and her husband Arthur (John Magaro) meet, the feeling of being stuck between two people who can’t communicate directly so she’s the translator despite her feelings for and about both men.

The script takes Nora’s perspective more than Hae Sung’s, giving her character more depth while leaving him a little harder to grasp, which would mirror the way she’d view him given the huge chunks of time between their real and virtual meetings. We see more of her life outside of their interactions with each other than we do of his, with Hae Sung’s scenes without Nora mostly times he’s out drinking with his buddies. The Best Actress field is incredibly crowded this year, so Lee may not end up in the final five, but it’s an outstanding performance without which the film wouldn’t be as effective or as affecting.

I’ve seen references to Past Lives as romantic, but I don’t think that’s the apposite word here – it’s about romance, but it’s far more realistic than romantic. A romance might have forced the two together in some unbelievable plot twist or sop to the audience. Such a conclusion would have done a real injustice to the characters and the story here of the sacrifices we make in life and the difficulties many people face when leaving one family, culture, or country for another. Instead, Song weaves a delicate tapestry around her two main characters, maintaining the credibility with the viewer so that we can spend time pondering the what-ifs of this pair, and the what-ifs in our own lives – the relationships, romantic or platonic, that never came to pass because life got in the way. It’s a simple, quiet marvel, and beautiful right through the characters’ anguish when they meet for the last time.

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→ December 27, 2023
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Sea of Tranquility.

Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven was a masterpiece, a beautiful novel of humanity set in the most despairing, hopeless setting – the onset and aftermath of a global pandemic that causes society to collapse. Her follow-up, The Glass Hotel, had the same sparkling prose and characterization, but the story fell apart at the end, undermining the entire work. Her most recent novel, Sea of Tranquility, brings back one of The Glass Hotel’s characters and the fictional town that served as its setting, with an entirely new story that delves further into science fiction than Mandel has ever gone – and this time, she sticks the landing with a conclusion that ties the entire novel together and brings the reader back to the sense of humanity that set Station Eleven apart.

Sea of Tranquility begins in 1912, as the disowned grandson of an English aristocrat arrives in Caiette, British Columbia, after his exile from his family. While there, he walks into the local forest, but has a mysterious experience where he hears a violin playing – despite there being no one else in sight – and the world around him seems to go black. Shortly afterwards, a visiting priest asks him about the experience, but it appears that the priest may be an impostor. The story then jumps ahead a hundred years, then nearly two hundred, then about two hundred more, and there’s very little in common between the stories except for that impostor-priest person, who appears in different guises in each story. What ties them all together is the mystery that guy is trying to solve.

Mandel’s previous two novels leaned quite heavily on her strength of characterization, but that’s the weakest part of Sea of Tranquility, which might only have one true central character who gets a three-dimensional rendering on the page – that guy, who at one point in the novel is known as Gaspery. Instead, Mandel’s exploration of humanity, both what it means to be human (and whether we have free will) and how we treat one another, comes through an inventive plot device that doesn’t reveal itself until at least halfway through the novel. (You might figure it out before then, but I’m trying not to spoil it.) Crafting a story like this requires a fine attention to detail and an ability to maintain plausibility in the face of automatic disbelief. Mandel couldn’t manage this with a simpler story in The Glass Hotel, where her main character made more than one irrational decision that didn’t sit well with me, given what had come before for her character. Here, her central character’s actions, while not always entirely rational, are at least believable, and thus don’t get in the way of the broader story.

So much of Sea of Tranquility recalled David Mitchell’s magnum opus Cloud Atlas, another book told in pieces separated in time by decades or centuries, leaving it to the reader to connect them. In Mitchell’s case, however, the connections were tenuous, and only there for the audience, while the novel succeeded because he wrote each of the six sections (five of which were then split into two) in a different literary style. He also loves to bring back characters from previous novels, even just for cameos, something Mandel did in The Glass Hotel with some minor characters from Station Eleven. Sea of Tranquility lacks the grandiose ambitions of Cloud Atlas, but it’s also far more focused on its core themes and more effective in asking its questions about them. I may not answer Mandel’s main mystery question in the affirmative, but I found it easy to go along for the ride as she explores it.

Next up: I’m about halfway through Nurrudin Farah’s North of Dawn.

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→ December 24, 2023
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The Mission.

If you’re like me and are fascinated by geography – I would pore over maps and atlases as a kid, always finding something new and interesting, as if they were telenovelas – then you may be familiar with North Sentinel Island and its residents, the Sentinelese, one of the last ‘uncontacted’ tribes on earth. The island is part of the Andaman archipelago in the eastern Indian Ocean, and is part of India, which patrols the waters around the island and prohibits anyone from landing on the island or trying to contact the Sentinelese, who have in fact been contacted, but very rarely, and in the last few decades only by sanctioned anthropologists … and one very deluded American.

John Chau was 25 years old and a rabid fundamentalist Christian who believed in the nonsense doctrine that anyone who had never heard the Gospel would be condemned to hell. He read about the Sentinelese people online – how he first learned about them isn’t entirely clear – and decided that God wanted him to go preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to them. The Sentinelese are extremely hostile to outsiders, and a few years prior had killed two fisherman whose boat drifted ashore on their island. Chau made several visits to the Andamans and approached North Sentinel Island several times, making contact with its people, before they finally killed him too – sparking mockery online of this idiot colonizer breaking several Indian laws to go shout, in English, to people who wouldn’t understand him, about his own superstitions, even though these people are well known to shoot arrows at anyone who comes near their shores.

The Mission, a new documentary from National Geographic, tells some of Chau’s story, exploring his life to try to answer the question of why a seemingly intelligent young man, raised in some privilege, would do such a profoundly stupid – and likely suicidal – thing. It’s riveting and infuriating, a severe indictment of the evangelical circles in which John traveled and the various people who enabled him to do this illegal, dangerous, and frankly inhumane thing, but I don’t think it adequately answers that fundamental question of why.

The North Sentinelese have good reason to fear and loathe outsiders. They were targets for slavers who saw the Andaman peoples, many of whom appear to be descendants of African migrants from several millennia prior, as chattel. British colonial authorities would take a break from subjugating what is now India and Pakistan to treat the Andamanese as a sort of circus freaks, with one measuring the sizes of their crania and genitals in the name of “science.” Any contact with people from beyond the islands also introduced the Sentinelese to pathogens to which they had no immunity. Since Partition & independence, India’s government has largely protected the tribes of the Andamans, some of which have chosen, in a way, to assimilate with broader Indian society, while the Sentinelese remain apart.

Where The Mission succeeds is in its depiction of the history of Christian missionaries trying to convert these ‘lost’ tribes, including an endeavor in Ecuador in the 1950s where the Huaorani tribe killed five white missionaries, but further efforts eventually led to the conversion of many tribe members and the subsequent deterioration of their culture. One of the experts who talks on camera is the linguist and former missionary Daniel Everett, who went to the Amazon to convert the Pirahã with his wife and children, but after several years lost his faith and became an ardent atheist, giving him a unique perspective on Chau’s religious mania and willingness to ignore all voices telling him not to do this terrible, dangerous thing. The film also interviews several of Chau’s enablers, including one group that specifically targets these uncontacted or low-contact tribes to spread the Gospel, regardless of impact on the people involved or risks to the missionaries, coming off very much like members of a cult. (Their leader claimed he posed no threat to the Sentinelese because we have antibiotics.)

Where The Mission falls a little short is in depicting Chau as anything more than a very naïve evangelical who started down this missionary path and didn’t seem able or willing to stop until he hit the bottom. His father is a psychiatrist who nearly lost his license for reasons that are only hinted at in the film, while his mother was the evangelical parent yet is barely mentioned here. It’s clear that at least some of his fervor came from his time at Oral Roberts University, one of the most evangelical and also one of the most homophobic/transphobic colleges in America, including one man, Bobby Parks, who was “Missions/Outreach Coordinator” at ORU until 2016 and still runs a nonprofit that uses soccer as a way to indoctrinate kids in refugee camps and other high-risk areas around the world. Parks appears to have been a Svengali to Chau, yet he declined requests to appear in the documentary or speak to its makers, so his exact role and level of influence is only implied. So how Chau went from a good student with a strong interest in the outdoors to a stark raving madman who hatched an intense months-long plan to invade North Sentinel Island remains unanswered.

I suppose my views on Chau and such efforts are quite clear, and I think he was both an aggressor and a victim here. I knew Chau’s story from this 2018 Outside story, which appeared in my links roundup on November 24th of that year, and which I think goes a little more into his own personal journey and at least asks more questions about how he got to that kayak in the Indian Ocean. (This Guardian story has more.) I know the documentary just left me fuming at how willing others were to waste Chau’s life, and how easily he fell into this downward spiral, where even his Christian faith, one founded on respect and love for one’s fellow man, led him to disregard the significant dangers he posed to the very people he was trying to save.

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→ December 22, 2023
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Top 100 songs of 2023.

This year’s top 100 was more of a struggle than most years, although by the end of the process I was still about a dozen songs over the limit; I just had to go back over a number of my monthly playlists and revisit some tracks and albums I’d missed before I could reach that point. I’m pretty happy with the outcome, though, and I think the top of the list is strong even if 2023 wasn’t a peak year for great new songs. You can see my previous years’ song rankings here: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012. I posted my ranking of the top 23 albums of 2023 earlier this week.

If you can’t see the Spotify widget below, you can access it here.

100. Griff – Vertigo. Pure pop greatness from Griff, who just doesn’t miss whether she’s going for sunnier sounds (like this track) or melancholy ballads (like her song way farther up this list).

99. Del Water Gap – Quilt of Steam. I am now old enough that my daughter is telling me about artists that end up on my playlists; I hadn’t heard of Del Water Gap, who has been releasing music on his own for over a decade and put out his second album for Mom + Pop Records this fall, until she mentioned him to me, after which Spotify served me this track on my Release Radar. Sometimes the algorithm works.

98. Ghost of Vroom – Still Getting It Done. Mike Doughty’s latest project is the closest thing he’s done to Soul Coughing since the seminal drum-n-bass group called it quits after El Oso, driven by his sung/rapped lyrics and music that’s a little more ornate (and funky) than SC’s but still driven by percussion and heavy bass lines.

97. Beck & Phoenix – Odyssey. These two artists released a one-off collaboration to kick off their joint summer tour, and while I don’t think Beck exactly extended himself here, it’s similar to Phoenix’s musical revival on last year’s Alpha Zulu, and bouncy like a good summer hit should be.

96. bdrmm – It’s Just a Bit of Blood. These guys were about three years ahead of schedule for the shoegaze revival, ending up lumped in more with avant garde noisemakers black midi than with their true brethren. Their second album, I Don’t Know, came out this year and was similar to their first one but a little more upbeat, perhaps with more major keys than its predecessor offered.

95. Etta Marcus – Smile for the Camera. A sultry sophisti-pop track from this 22-year-old London singer’s EP A Heart-Shaped Bruise. I’d recommend this to fans of boygenius but if you like your singers to really sing.

94. Bully – Days Move Slow. The best song you’ll ever hear about a dog’s death. Bully’s album made a lot of top ten lists, but I find her nasal vocals hard to take for more than a song at a time. This had by far the best guitar hook on the record and I think justifies some of the musical comparisons and Nirvana.

93. Queens of the Stone Age – Paper Machete. The top track from In Times New Roman… has a heavy guitar riff appropriate to Josh Homme’s oeuvre, although I found the album as a whole kind of lacking in the rougher edge that characterized a lot of his earlier work.

92. Killing Joke – Full Spectrum Dominance. Jaz Coleman & company have undergone many iterations over their 44-year history, but their final act appeared to be their industrial-metal phase and their incredible swan song LP, 2015’s Pylon. They’re not quite done, however, and have returned with the occasional one-off single, including this one, which certainly would have fit well on Pylon, ahead of their 2023 tour.

91. Brooke Combe – Black is the New Gold. The title track from this Scottish soul singer’s newest album packs some clever turns of phrase and a driving bass line, along with a little flute interpolation that calls back to the genre’s 1970s heyday.

90. SENSES – Drifting. This Coventry four-piece first promised their debut album Little Pictures Without Sound in 2021, after over a decade working together, but the pandemic and other factors delayed its release until April of this year. This is the album’s strongest track, sitting somewhere between the Oasis end of Britpop and the spacier sound of Doves.

89. The Lottery Winners – Worry. I didn’t love their sophomore album Anxiety Replacement Therapy as much as I did their debut, which was absolutely packed with hooks and full of general cheer. This track had the most in common with their first album.

88. Seablite – Melancholy Molly. I was a big fan of Lush in their 1990s heyday and enjoyed member Emma Anderson’s solo debut album this year, so Seablite’s music is catnip to me. I also love that they call themselves “odd pop.” It is poppy, and they’d have every reason to jump on the shoegaze bandwagon, but they appear to have chosen their own path.

87. The Kills – New York. God Games marked this duo’s first album and first original material in seven years, although it was hit or miss for an album that in theory they’d had several years to work on. They’ll never top “Sour Cherry” for me, but if you liked “Doing It to Death,” this track is in that vein.

86. Everything Everything – The Mad Stone. I preferred this to “Cold Reactor” of the two singles EE has released so far ahead of their upcoming album Mountainhead, although both have elements of the band’s manic art-rock style, including Jonathan Higgs’ rapid-fire singing.

85. Folly Group – Big Ground. Speaking of Everything Everything, this track from Folly Group, whose debut album Down There! is due out on January 12th, reminds me quite a bit of early EE, mixed with a little early post-punk in the chorus.

84. Screaming Females – Brass Bell. Screaming Females announced their dissolution earlier this month, about nine months after they released their eighth and presumably final album, Desire Pathway. I don’t know their discography well at all, so I can only say this is a pretty great showcase of singer/guitarist Marissa Paternoster’s voice and guitar skills, enough that I’ll be watching to see if she releases another solo album.

83. Courting – Throw. I can’t place that opening riff, but it reminds me of some other track I liked from maybe 20-25 years ago; the rest of the song is like a smarter, snarkier emo track, and the whole song has a great bounce to it. New Last Name comes out January 26th.

82. swim school – delirious. “swim school” is not an SEO-friendly band name, but this song rocks very hard, bordering on metal, with singer Alice Johnson’s voice a perfect foil for the crushing guitars. They put out a four-song EP this year and ended up opening for the Amazons, a British band known for giant guitar riffs, to close out 2023.

81. Public Image Ltd. – End of the World. PIL’s return this year wasn’t a surprise in and of itself, but the content was – first a touching song, “Hawaii,” about founder John Lydon’s wife, who at that point was dying of Alzheimer’s disease and passed away a few weeks after the song’s release; and then this banger, with a swirling guitar riff and Lydon’s voice as potent and angry as ever.

80. SPRINTS – Adore Adore Adore. I’ve been on the bandwagon for these Irish punks for a few years now, and we’re finally getting their debut album, Letter to Self, on January 5th, including this track, “Up and Comer,” and “Shadow of a Doubt.”

79. Ratboys – Making Noise for the Ones You Love. Many people whose taste in music I respect, including Blake Murphy of Sportsnet/The FAN 590, love Ratboys; I think most of their songs sound like Waxahatchee singing over a shoegaze band and it doesn’t work for either. The combination does work on this track, in part because of how singer Julia Sterner sings between the verse and chorus. (I had a similar but more pronounced objection to Wednesday, whose singer sounds like she’s whining and deliberately goes off key so often I have never made it through the entire album.)

78. The Mysterines – Begin Again. I loved the early singles from Lia Metcalfe’s band, but their debut album, Reeling, didn’t include any of their best songs, so I felt a little let down by the LP. This song, their only new material in 2023, shows off her deep, smoky voice, and has a slow burn to the melody, so while it doesn’t quite rock like their pre-Reeling offerings it’s pretty compelling. Also, this track is part of a sort of Easter egg on the top 100, if you’re paying attention.

77. Arlo Parks – Impurities. My Soft Machine may be the moment that Parks broke out into mainstream success, at least in Europe, as she turned just slightly in the direction of electro-pop without losing her voice or the sparse approach of her debut album. I loved just about everything on the album, but there were two tracks that stood above the rest for their melodies. This was one.

76. Dexys – I’m Going to Get Free. It was a good year for ‘80s bands coming back around; PIL appeared above, Simply Red put out a solid album, Depeche Mode issued their Memento Mori to eulogize the late Andy Fletcher, and Dexys returned with The Feminine Divine, seven years after singer Kevin Rowland appeared to say he was retiring from music. This track brings back the sound of Philadelphia soul with big brass lines and a giant, catchy beat, while Rowland’s voice is still as distinctive as it was on “Come On Eileen” some 41 years ago.

75. Bartees Strange – Tisched Off. Strange issued two tracks as part of a singles series from Sub Pop, with this indignant rocker, ranting about posers in the industry, the better of the two.

74. Noname – Namesake. Picking any tracks off Sundial, my #2 album of 2023, for a singles list was difficult because the album as a whole is such an immersive listen, but I did have two that stood apart enough that I might listen to them on their own (rather than doing the entire album straight through).

73. CHVRCHES – Over. The Scottish trio released this one-off single to commemorate their signing with Island Records and, in their words, to serve as a bridge between 2021’s Screen Violence and whatever comes next.

72. Corinne Bailey Rae – New York Transit Queen. Rae’s genre-hopping on Black Rainbows extended to garage-rock here, bordering on punk, in a song with very little in the way of lyrics beyond Rae chanting the title.

71. Fucked Up – Cicada. The rest of Fucked Up’s latest album, One Day, is much more in their typical vein of hardcore punk, but my God does this sound like a lost track from Hüsker Dü’s Warehouse: Songs and Stories. This is part two of four for that Easter egg I mentioned above. I won’t tag the last two, though.

70. Bombino – Alwane. I admit to having no idea who Bombino was until I heard this track on one of NPR Music’s weekly new music playlists, but that’s on me, as the Nigerien (as in, from Niger) singer/guitarist was the subject of a 2010 documentary called Agadez, the Music and the Rebellion. He’s also the first artist from Niger to receive a Grammy nomination (Best World Music Album, for 2018’s Deran). This track is from his latest album, Sahel, a tribute to the region where he grew up and, on this track, to friends he’s lost in the area’s many armed conflicts.

69. Creeper – Sacred Blasphemy. The first track I heard off Sanguivore is bombastic, theatrical, and throws back to the earliest stages of glam rock (think Mötley Crüe’s Too Fast for Love). Needless to say, it’s right in my wheelhouse.

68. Sampha – Suspended. Sampha’s voice really soars on this track off Lahai, one of the year’s best albums, as he sings about becoming a father over a light piano backing, with some staccato call-and-response to the verses that add texture and a little complexity to the song.

67. Black Honey – Cut the Cord. Black Honey’s third album A Fistful of Peaches was a departure for the Brighton indie-rockers, with some harder-edged songs (notably the 2022 single “Charlie Bronson”), but fewer of the big melodies than they had on their first two albums. “Cut the Cord” was never released as a single, but it was among the 2-3 best tracks on the album.

66. Jungle feat. Erick the Architect – Candle Flame. Jungle’s Volcano was my least favorite album from the English soul-revival duo yet, between the lack of interesting melodies and some experiments that didn’t pay off. Erick the Architect’s verses here are the best stuff on the album, and outside of the slightly annoying falsetto in the chorus, Jungle mostly stays out of his way.

65. boygenius – Satanist. I’m not a huge fan of the solo output of any of the three talented women in boygenius, primarily because of their singing style, which is more undersinging – they just don’t let it rip very often – and their tendency towards melancholy rhythms. This was by far the strongest track for me from their newest record, called the record, which netted them five Grammy nominations (two for the album, three for specific songs).

64. Cloud Nothings – Final Summer. Dylan Baldi & company signed to the punk label Pure Noise and released this new single in November, which … sounds just like Cloud Nothings, with a big hook to open it up and a tempo that makes you want to get behind the wheel and hit the gas.

63. DMA’s – Everybody’s Saying Thursday’s the Weekend. After their first two albums earned them comparisons to Oasis (which Noel Gallagher shat on, but Liam later endorsed), DMA’s shifted to a more electronic sound on their third album, then veered back towards the middle of the two genres on this year’s How Many Dreams?, failing to hit on either cylinder. They’ll never get back to the heights of “For Now” or “Too Soon,” I fear, but this sunnier track gets somewhat close with a hook and guitar work worthy of the Britpop comps.

62. The Japanese House – Sad to Breathe. Amber Mary Bain’s album In the End It Always Does was one of the year’s best, with two songs from it that blew me away back when they came out as singles in the spring. This one starts out like a mournful piano ballad about a lost love, then jumps from first to fourth gear around the 1:15 mark (I think that costs you several Heat cards) with an electronic percussion line and guitar that completely changes the texture of the vocal melody.

61. Blondshell – Salad. Another acclaimed album that just didn’t do it for me, as I don’t think Sabrina Teitelbaum’s melodies or voice are strong enough to support some decent rock hooks and thoughtful lyrics. This track has the album’s best riff and it plays perfectly against the angry lyrics.

60. Peace – Happy Cars. Peace self-released their latest album, Utopia, in the spring via a password-protected website, then issued it on vinyl in November. This single is the only track available via streaming sites right now; to hear the rest you have to purchase it, which the brothers Koisser told NME was “career suicide” according to their mates. I don’t know what to think of that – isn’t streaming killing the industry slowly anyway? Anyway, I love the melody here and have had this song in my head on and off for a month now.

59. Protomartyr – For Tomorrow. Formal Growth in the Desert was one of my favorite albums of 2023 and is an excellent distillation of what post-punk sounds like in its current incarnation, similar to Ceremony and more recent Thrice.

58. Yard Act – Dream Job. Yard Act released three singles this year, with a new album due out in March, and there’s some evolution in their sound already from their 2022 debut The Overload, with more musical elements and some electronic/dance ingredients as well. I also liked “The Trench Coat Museum,” but it’s eight minutes long and even I felt like it wore out its welcome by the end.

57. STONE – I Gotta Feeling. “Shout out to the writers of Peaky Blinders/You inspired a new age of wankers.” There’s a lot of punk to STONE’s lyrics and spoken-sung vocals, but musically they’re somewhere between alternative rock and hard rock, showing some of that range on their latest EP punkadonk2.

56. Slow Pulp – Cramps. Slow Pulp can rock a bit, harkening back to mid-90s alternative rock, and when they do I’m a big fan. Their album as a whole was a little disappointing, as so many of the songs were quiet and slow … I don’t know what I expected, really.

55. Deeper – Glare. The best track from Careful! still has that late ‘70s post-punk vibe, but it’s brighter and catcher, with a real earworm in the main guitar line.

54. Siracuse – Saviour. I compared this track to peak Charlatans when I put it on a playlist in April, and I think that holds, even to some extent to the sound of the vocalist, while the opening guitar riff still gets stuck in my head every time I listen to it.

53. Brad – Hey Now What’s the Problem. Brad’s final album, In the Moment That You’re Born, seems to have landed almost unnoticed this year, which is a shame because it’s both a fitting coda to the band’s unusual and diverse catalog, and a tribute to singer Shawn Smith, who died in 2019. The remaining band members, including Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard, completed tracks where Smith had recorded his vocals, including this funk-rock track that recalls Smith’s work with Pigeonhed.

52. BLOXX – Modern Day. The title track from BLOXX’s August EP is the best thing they’ve done since their debut album, 2020’s Lie Out Loud, another great pop-punk track with a solid harmony in the chorus.

51. Drums – Isolette. Annoyingly catchy, but with a serious undercurrent – the entire album, Jonny, represents Jonathan Pierce’s efforts to reckon with his upbringing in a fundamentalist Christian church, abuse he suffered, and being gay in a community that wouldn’t accept him.

50. milk. – I Think I Lost My Number Can I Have Yours? This Irish pop band put out a few EPs this year, culminating in a seven-track release called 3, the EP, that included everything they’d released in 2023, led by this lilting pop gem that recalls some ‘70s soft-rock icons like 10cc.

49. Altin Gün – Rakiya Su Katamam. One of my two favorite tracks from this Anatolian rock band’s album Ask, along with “Su Siziyor;” this one gets the nod for the top 100 because of that swirling guitar riff that pops back up throughout the song in slightly different forms. Altin Gün’s blend of psychedelia and traditional Turkish music sounds like nothing else I’ve heard, and they have a great sense of melody on top of that to put the Turkish lyrics (which I don’t understand) in my head.

48. Squid – Swing (In a Dream). Squid’s experimental sound generally leaves me cold, even though I respect the ambition and risk-taking; O Monolith, their second album, saw them rein in the sound just enough to introduce some more traditional sense of melodies, particularly on this track, which has a strong hook in the chorus but sees Ollie Judge finish his vocal lines with a little upturn at the end to keep the listener off balance.

47. Nabihah Iqbal – This World Couldn’t See Us. I don’t use the subgenre term “cold wave” very often, but it sure fits here – Iqbal’s album DREAMER spans many genres, but this track, my favorite from the LP, has that detached lyrical style and electronic music that feels dark and gloomy, fitting the themes in her lyrics.

46. Pynch – Tin Foil. “I’m saving up for the apocalypse/Cause there are gonna be deals” remains my favorite line of the year from any song. This London indie-pop quartet put out their debut album Howling at a Concrete Moon in April.

45. Hotline TNT – I Thought You’d Change. As much as Hotline TNT earns the shoegaze tag with their production and heavily distorted guitars, you can still discern specific guitar lines on most of their tracks, and here they’re quite pronounced in a way that feels pretty timeless – these are guitar sounds you’d hear in many rock genres in almost any era of music from the 1970s onward.

44. Sundara Karma – Wishing Well. I need to listen to this band’s latest album, Better Luck Next Time, as I have always liked their brand of guitar-driven indie pop, which reminds me in several ways of early U2. I love the way this track builds to the big guitar distortion in the chorus, which recalls My Bloody Valentine’s “I Only Said” (my favorite song by MBV and one of the few of theirs that I like).

43. Belle & Sebastian – I Don’t Know What You See in Me. Belle & Sebastian aren’t a pop band, and they don’t often veer into poppy territory, but there are few bands in the world who do pop better than these Scots do.

42. Pastel – Your Day. Credit to MLB.com’s Matthew Leach for posting about this song and introducing it to me. It’s very Big Pink, a little Britpop, muscular throughout yet still deeply melodic at its core. It’s the only track they released this year, unfortunately.

41. Geese – Cowboy Nudes. Geese’s 3D Country isn’t an album of singles, but more of a complete experience that bounces across an absurd number of genres and styles. If there’s a ‘hit’ of sorts here, it’s this song, which has a proper hook in the chorus on top of the experimentation beneath it.

40. White Reaper – Fog Machine. Is this “Detroit Rock City?” Maybe a little “The Boys Are Back?” It’s very ‘70s, a little less Maiden/Mötorhead than the rest of Asking for a Ride, so it stands a little more on its own. I really need to see these guys live at some point because it seems impossible that they don’t put on a raucous show.

39. Momma – Bang Bang. Momma’s one original track this year is, uh, a banger, although I think last year’s “Speeding 72” was a little better. They seem like the direct descendants of Veruca Salt, with a little Breeders thrown in.

38. The Libertines – Run Run Run. I’m always surprised when the Libertines return because, well, I suppose that’s obvious if you’ve followed the band at all for the last twenty-odd years. They’ve put out two singles ahead of their upcoming fourth album, their first in nine years and just their second since 2004, including this and “The Night of the Hunter.”

37. Kid Kapichi – Let’s Get to Work. One of three new tracks from Kid Kapichi this year, along with “999” and the oddball “Tamagotchi,” which features some rapping that’s on the border of cringe for me but still has a banger of a chorus. They’ve become one of my favorite active bands over the last three years, a sort of working-class successor to the Arctic Monkeys for me.

36. Caroline Polachek – Blood and Butter. I liked quite a bit of Polachek’s work with Chairlift, including “Ch-Ching” and “I Belong In Your Arms,” but her solo work has been too weird for me, almost anti-pop in some ways, which often doesn’t do justice to her incredible voice. This is my favorite solo track from her so far, though, with several hooks in the vocals and the music to bring me back.

35. Corinne Bailey Rae – Erasure. If you saw CBR’s career detour into garage-punk that bordered on hardcore coming, well, hats off to you. I’ll be over here calling Paul Goldschmidt a platoon bat. Black Rainbows is a real tour de force, and “Erasure” shows her vocal range and gift for theatrics as well.

34. English Teacher – The World’s Biggest Paving Slab. That guitar line is just killer, and then you get to the wry, witty lyrics. English Teacher put out three songs in 2023, two of them strong (this and “Nearly Daffodils”), which I assume is a harbinger of an LP next year now that they’ve signed to Island Records.

33. Genesis Owusu – Stay Blessed. Eddie Murphy had a routine in Delirious where he referred to Teddy Pendergrass’s vocal style, mimicking him shout-singing “YOU GOT, YOU GOT, YOU GOT WHAT I NEED!” and saying he would “scare the (women) into liking him.” Owusu kind of sings like that, except here you feel his rage, and it is very effective.

32. Yves Tumor – Lovely Sewer. A great case of where critical acclaim led me to reassess an album; Yves Tumor has always been so hard to pin down musically that I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a good handle on his previous albums, but Praise a Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume grabbed me on a second (and third) listen. Even as he’s playing with genres and textures, there’s a foundation to most of his songs that compels you to keep going … and then he drops the drum machine for a brief piano interlude to throw you off the scene once again.

31. Slowdive – alife. Not the last Slowdive song on this ranking. I have become a bigger Slowdive fan in their comeback phase than I was in their original heyday around Souvlaki (a great album I appreciate more in hindsight).

30. Baby Queen – We Can Be Anything. Baby Queen’s album was a letdown after this strong lead single that recalls the avant-pop of Grimes’ Art Angels period.

29. The Joy Formidable – Share My Heat. That drum/bass opening gives you some indication of the pulse of the song, and then at the 45-second mark, the guitar riff arrives to knock you out of your seat. I gave you the radio edit here, not the 15-minute version.

28. Daughter – Swim Back. Daughter’s previous album was the soundtrack to the video game After the Storm, and you can hear some of that atmospheric influence here on this track off Stereo Mind Game in the layered synth lines.

27. The Last Dinner Party – Sinner. I couldn’t get on board with the praise for TLDP’s debut album, although it’s not about the excessive hype around the band – I don’t think their songs sound very finished, or their melodies polished. This is by far the best song on the album, and even in the chorus you can hear some of the cracks in the foundation. My glass-half-full side says they’ll produce something better with more time and experience.

26. Creeper – Teenage Sacrifice. They’re so gleefully over the top that it sells me, even though it sounds like Suede mashed up with Dokken doing a concept album about a modern-day vampire. “Can you live without your life?” is a funny one-liner, too.

25. Temples – Cicada. Temples will never leave the 1970s and I’m fine with that. The new album was less consistent than its predecessor, although this track with its spiraling synth hook is as good as anything they’ve done.

24. U.S. Girls – Tux (Your Body Fills Me, Boo). My friend Tim Grierson had U.S. Girls’ Bless This Mess as one of his top albums of the year, so I gave it a fresh listen earlier this month and while the album as a whole doesn’t work for me – I don’t think Meghan Remy can do slower material half as well as she does dance tracks – if the whole LP had been made out of (waves hands) this it would have made my top ten.

23. The Hives – Bogus Operandi. This is how you announce a comeback: With giant guitars and huge riffs bursting at the seams with bravado and testosterone. This track is right up there with peak Hives tracks like “Hate to Say I Told You So” and “Walk Idiot Walk.”

22. Speedy Ortiz – Ranch vs. Ranch. I like Speedy Ortiz for about three songs per album, which was true again for Rabbit Rabbit with this track, “Scabs,” and “You S02.” Sadie Dupuis’s songs always try to strike a balance between melody and their signature dissonant sound, thriving on the contrast when she gets that balance right.

21. Girl Ray – Everybody’s Saying That. Girl Ray’s album Prestige is a fun romp of disco/funk tracks that’s a little one-note, highlighted by this track and “Tell Me.”

20. Jorja Smith – Little Things. I love how this track starts out like it’s going to be a scat jazz song, then shifts into a jazzy R&B track without losing any of its energy. We had to wait a long time for her second album but it was well worth it.

19. Weakened Friends – Awkward. I wrote previously that I thought this might be a Sleater-Kinney track; the vocals here are obviously inspired by Corin Tucker, but it has a generally brighter vibe than S-K’s music.

18. flowerovlove – Next Best Exit. I think the 18-year-old flowerovlove is the youngest artist on the top 100 this year, and she’s already done some modeling for Gucci in addition to releasing an EP and a handful of strong singles, including this one, “Coffee Shop,” and the newest “Girl Like Me,” all of them warm, sophisticated electro-pop.

17. Noname feat. Common and Ayoni – Oblivion. Sundial is strong just about from start to finish on the power of Noname’s skills and incisive, brilliant lyrics, with this track the best on the album because of the beat and because Common isn’t hawking a free iPhone from T-mobile.

16. Grian Chatten – Fairlies. The lead singer of Fontaines D.C. surprised us all with his mostly acoustic, quiet solo album, highlighted by this trick with cynical lyrics over a shuffling Irish jig.

15. Griff – Astronaut. “You said that you needed space/Go on then, astronaut.” This gorgeous collaboration with Coldplay’s Chris Martin is Griff’s most intimate song yet, and I don’t know how it hasn’t become a huge viral hit already. It’s better than “Drivers License.”

14. Sampha – Spirit 2.0. Sampha’s second album, Lahai, is track after track of simple yet inventive music behind Sampha’s vocal acrobatics. This is my favorite song from the album, thanks to the contrast between the frenetic electro-beat and his softer vocals.

13. Charly Bliss – You Don’t Even Know Me Anymore. We got two new tracks from this Brooklyn power-pop band in 2023, their first new music since 2019’s Young Enough, and this is one of the best things they’ve ever done.

12. Slowdive – the slab. Everything Is Alive has been a triumph for these O.G. shoegazers, on par with 1993’s Souvlaki, boosted by the general revival around that niche genre from the early 1990s (so named because the musicians would seldom look at the audience, often looking at their effects pedals or, presumably, their shoes). And while their sound is still shoegaze at heart, there’s melody here, and production that keeps the various instruments and the vocals clear and distinct for most of the record.

11. Daughter – Be On Your Way. “So I’ll meet you on another planet/if the plans change” gets stuck in my head for days every time I hear this, and the various synth lines here come together to create a sense of vaguely unsettling sadness befitting the lyrics.

10. Cody Wong & dodie – Call Me Wild. I enjoyed Wong’s latest album, The Lucky One, with its panoply of collaborations, although Wong is nearly always the star of his own show with his guitar wizardry and genre-hopping. “Call Me Wild” is the one song here that’s a real pop single with funky guitars, a great hook, and vocals by English singer dodie.

9. Billy Porter – Children. A joyous, celebratory dance track about living your truth, from the Emmy & Tony winner’s first pop album, Black Mona Lisa.

8. Megan Thee Stallion – Cobra. Her only solo single of the year is a revealing look at her mental health struggles over the past few years – and an indictment of the hangers-on who didn’t notice or help her – followed by a killer guitar riff to wrap things up.

7. The Beths – Watching the Credits. I can’t remember the last time an extra track from an album’s deluxe edition was this good. “Watching the Credits” came out this spring on the deluxe version of Expert in a Dying Field, my #1 album of 2022, and it’s at least a top 5 track on the LP.

6. Arlo Parks – Blades. The perfect combination of Parks’s sweet, lithe vocals and her new shift into more electro-pop sounds on My Soft Machine.

5. Jessie Ware – Begin Again. Ware’s album That! Feels! Good! earned its way on to many best-of-2023 lists, and this samba-tinged track is easily the best on a record of unabashedly sunny pop material, although I will forever wish horrible things on whoever wrote the vacuous line “give me something good that’s even better than it seems.”

4. Pip Blom feat. Alex Kapranos – Is This Love? Not a cover of the Whitesnake song, fortunately, but a summer banger from this Dutch pop band and the lead singer/guitarist of Franz Ferdinand. It came out in May but has stuck with me all year, from the big arrangements behind “I wanna feel you in my dreams” to the disco/rock blend behind the two singers’ shared choruses.

3. Young Fathers – Rice. My #1 album of the year, Heavy Heavy, included this track and “I Saw,” which made my 2022 list but would be much higher if I re-ranked those songs now. (It’s an issue with songs that come out late in any calendar year – I actively try to avoid recency bias, and often keep those songs lower than they belong, or else I just haven’t had enough time to appreciate them.) I linked this in the albums post as well, but you have to see these guys perform both songs and two more live on KEXP.

2. The Japanese House – Boyhood. A lush, immersive dream-pop track elevated by Amber Mary Bain’s falsetto and her lyrics about the end of a relationship and the void that’s left behind.

1. Brittany Howard – What Now. The former Alabama Shakes singer/guitarist released this title track to her upcoming second album, due out February 2nd, and it is a lightning bolt of funk, blues, and righteous anger, culminating in the chorus’s final line, “If you want someone to hate then blame it on me.” I recognized Howard as a talented guitarist from her time with the Shakes, but this is another level of songcraft and a big shift from her first album, which was mostly blues rock and the odd synth-heavy track. With her follow-up single, “Red Flags,” it seems like she’s going in new directions with What Now. I can’t wait.

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Top 23 albums of 2023.

This year turned out to be a very good one for albums, better than last year, but worse for individual tracks, which I’ll talk about a little more when that ranking goes up. I was afraid I’d struggle to keep up my gimmick of doing a ranking as long as the last two digits of the year, which I’ve had to abandon every once in a while, but I ended up with plenty of albums to consider and spent a lot of time listening or re-listening to albums to make some of these final cuts – and to decide on the actual #1, which was very much a game-time choice. Get ready to read a lot about shoegaze and post-punk, although the very top of the list goes in a different direction entirely. Some honorable mentions include Cory Wong – Rocket; Black Honey – A Fistful of Peaches; Emma Anderson – Pearlies; Queens of the Stone Age – In Times New Roman…; Speedy Ortiz – Rabbit Rabbit; Brad – In The Moment That You’re Born; and, of course, The Baseball Project – Grand Salami Time.

You can see my previous year-end album rankings here: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, and my top albums of the 2010s. My top 100 songs of 2023 will go up in the next day or two.

23. Egyptian Blue – A Living Commodity. If I told you there was a band that cited Wire, Gang of Four, Radiohead, and Iceage as influences (which Egyptian Blue has), you’d probably imagine something a lot like this Brighton band’s debut album, which wears all of these influences but weaves them into something new enough that it avoids sounding derivative of any of them. There’s a tremendous energy here that powers the album, something I interpreted as the freshness of youth – but maybe that’s just because I’m old now – and that makes the album feel incredibly alive even though it’s underpinned by a sound that’s nearly 50 years old. Standouts include the title track, “Matador,” and “Skin.”

22. Deeper – Careful! The latest add to my list, Careful! only hit my radar a few weeks ago when WXPN music director Dan Reed tabbed it as his #1 album of the year. (His top ten was pretty solid overall.) Deeper’s last album, Auto-Pain, came shortly on the heels of the news that their former guitarist had killed himself, and the album’s darker content reflected that. Careful! is more upbeat, almost ebullient at times, which contrasts with the post-punk sound that they still maintain on this album – with a heavy dose of David Bowie, according to singer/guitarist Nic Gohl. Standouts include “Glare,” “Tele,” and “Build a Bridge.”

21. The Hives – The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons. The Hives’ first new album in eleven years found the Swedish band, down just one of their original members, rejuvenated, sounding as good as they did on their first couple of records nearly twenty years ago. They announce their presence with giant riffs on the opener (and best track) “Bogus Operandi,” and the whole album carries that same sense of bluster and grandeur. There’s plenty of the muscular rock we’re used to from the Hives, plus some diversions into hardcore (the one-minute “Trapdoor Solution”, or the slightly longer “The Bomb”), These guys can rock, and they’re not afraid to do so. I suppose the lesson is to lean into what you do well. Standouts include “Bogus Operandi,” “Two Kinds of Trouble,” and “Countdown to Shutdown.”

20. Daughter – Stereo Mind Game. This Irish trio’s previous album was the soundtrack to the video game Before the Storm, released in 2017, without so much as a single in the interim, to the point where I assumed they’d hung it up. (Bands come and go so quickly these days, and because I’m always trying to keep up with what’s new, I tend to forget even bands I liked.) Daughter’s sound was always ethereal and pensive, one of the few bands I liked who used mostly slower tempos, while here they expand their repertoire just slightly with some stronger melodies and even, dare I say, something a little upbeat like “Future Lover,” one of the standout tracks along with “Swim Back” and “Be On Your Way.”

19. White Reaper – Asking for a Ride. White Reaper’s first three albums were all pretty similar, hard power-pop records with a punk influence but an overriding sense of melody along with a good bit of obnoxious fun in the lyrics. On their fourth record, they actually go … metal. You can’t listen to the first two songs here and not think Motörhead or even some early Bay Area thrash, and even when White Reaper takes their foot off the gas a little bit on the album’s best track, “Fog Machine,” they just shift from early ‘80s metal to the late ‘70s metal sounds (think New Wave of British Heavy Metal bands like Maiden and Priest) from their previous records. Other standout tracks include “Pink Slip,” “Bozo,” and the title track. Also, if you’re into more serious metal, the best albums I heard this year in that genre were Wayfarer’s remarkable American Gothic, Horrendous’s Ontological Mysterium, and Myrkur’s Spine.

18. Grian Chatten – Chaos for the Fly. When I heard the lead singer of Fontaines D.C. would be doing a solo album, I assumed it would be something in the vein of his regular gig, something between punk and post-punk with a strong working-class edge … and Chatten instead delivered a thoughtful, meditative, acoustic record that’s mostly his vocals and a guitar. There’s a little rockabilly here in “Fairlies,” what I can only describe as lounge music on “Bob’s Casino,” and a mournful piano track on “All of the People.” Standouts include “Fairlies,” “The Score,” and “Last Time Every Time Forever.”

17. Belle & Sebastian – Late Developers. A surprise release from the Scottish icons, just eight months after A Bit of Previous, with their trademark wry lyrics along with sunny pop melodies with a dark undercurrent. I’ve been a little surprised to see it omitted from many year-end lists, to which I attribute its release very early in the year (January 13th) and the way we tend to take bands this consistent for granted. Standouts include “Juliet Naked,” “I Don’t Know What You See in Me,” and “Give a Little Time.”

16. Hotline TNT – Cartwheel. Hotline TNT’s second album hits during shoegaze’s big moment, a revival that I’m going to mention more than a few times in this list, and they’re one of the most authentic to the original sound, which dates to the late 1980s and early 1990s in England, led by bands like My Bloody Valentine, Lush, Slowdive, and Ride. Cartwheel borrows quite a bit from those last two bands, with a little Hüsker Dü thrown in for good measure, getting that shimmering wall of distortion sound that’s intrinsic to proper shoegaze. Standouts include “I Thought You’d Change,” “Out of Town,” “Protocol,” and “Spot Me 100.”

15. The Japanese House – In the End It Always Does. Amber Mary Bain wrote much of her second album in the wake of the end of a thruple that also included Art School Girlfriend (who is now in a relationship with Bain’s ex, Marisa Hackman). Anyway, In the End It Always Does showcases Bain’s lovely voice over a substantial amount of piano and keyboard work, grounding the record to support its little experimentations into electronica, dream-pop, and folk, although it always comes back to her vocals for me. Standouts include “Boyhood,” “Sunshine Baby,” and “Sad to Breathe.”

14. Genesis Owusu – STRUGGLER. The Ghanaian-Australian singer/rapper Owusu’s second album blends-hip-hop with sounds from the earliest era of new wave when that genre had just broken away from its punk origins, with songs that are rapped, shouted, and even sung in falsetto (the ironic “See Ya There”). It’s equal parts rage-rock and dance, buoyed by Owusu’s charismatic delivery. Standouts include “Leaving the Light,” “The Roach” (complete with Kafka references), “Freak Boy,” and “Stay Blessed.”

13. Protomartyr – Formal Growth in the Desert. This is actual post-punk, sometimes labeled post-hardcore, in 2023, and I’m being a little pedantic here because I think those labels have some real utility that’s lost when people just throw “post-whatever” on anything. (As opposed to Post Malone, whose music should just be thrown in the trash.) Vocalist and Tigers fan Joe Casey wrote some of the lyrics about his late mother and his grieving process, while other songs focus on existential dread or environmental crises, all over a stark, often detuned guitar-heavy backing. Standouts include “For Tomorrow,” “Elimination Dances,” and “Fun in Hi Skool.”

12. Altin Gün – Ask. I was not familiar with Anatolian rock, which blends traditional Turkish music with psychedelic rock from the late 1960s/early 1970s, until I stumbled on this Netherlands-based outfit and their fifth album, which had a similar effect on me as Mdou Moctar’s Afrique Victime: I was mesmerized by the translation of rock guitar into totally new sounds from other musical cultures. I can’t tell you much about the lyrics, but the music, which is always anchored by interesting and complex guitarwork, is enough to keep me listening even though I don’t know what they’re singing about. Standouts include “Su Siziyor,” “Leylim Ley,” and “Rakiya Su Katamam.”

11. Billy Porter – Black Mona Lisa. I knew of Porter from his work on Pose and at least by reputation from his stellar work on Broadway, but when this album appeared a month ago, it was one of the more pleasant surprises of the year, as Porter brings both his vocal talents and outsized personality to this record that mixes effusive dance numbers with lyrical introspection. The 54-year-old Porter had released four previous albums, but this is his first foray into popular music, a 12-song exploration of much of his personal history through dance, disco, and funk tracks – and it is just a blast to listen to. Standouts include “Children” (two versions), “Funk is on the One,” and “Baby Was a Dancer.”

10. Creeper – Sanguivore. Creeper’s second album, Sex, Death & the Infinite Void, was my #2 album of 2020, and while I think this one is a little less exciting overall, it’s still a very strong effort from this gothic post-punk act that, aside from one awful track, is the rare concept album that keeps you in its thrall from start to finish. (“The Ballad of Spook and Mercy” is just embarrassing.) There’s something extremely ‘80s about the whole endeavor – the opening bars of “Teenage Sacrifice” could easily be a hair-metal band circa 1987, while elsewhere they sound like they’d be on tour with Heaven 17 and the Blow Monkeys about five years earlier. Standouts include “Sacred Blasphemy,” “Teenage Sacrifice,” and “Cry to Heaven.”

9. Yves Tumor – Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds). Sean Lee Bowie’s fifth album melds psychedelic rock and shoegaze-esque guitars with electronica and funk for a record that’s theatrical, bombastic, and utterly compelling. It’s the album everyone thinks Lil’ Yachty made. Standouts include “Lovely Sewer,” “Heaven Surrounds Us Like a Hood,” “God Is a Circle,” and “Echolalia.”

8. Corinne Bailey Rae – Black Rainbows. Rae has moved a long way from the neo-soul sound of “Put Your Records On” and her acclaimed self-titled debut album back in 2006. Black Rainbows might be the most unexpected album of the year, inspired (according to Rae) by an exhibit on Black history she saw at Chicago’s Stony Island Arts Bank. Her voice is still strong and carries songs whether she goes loud or smooth, but the music here is all over the place, even veering into punk/hardcore and electronica, rather than the jazzy soul where she’s typically resided. It’s extremely ambitious and for the most part achieves its goals. Standouts include “New York Transit Queen,” “Erasure,” and “A Spell, A Prayer.”

7. Slowdive – Everything is Alive. Slowdive were darlings in the original shoegaze movement, with their 1993 album Souvlaki one of the peaks of the genre, but after they shifted their sound for 1995’s Pygmalion just as Britpop was exploding, they lost their record deal and broke up for 17 years. They returned to recording with 2017’s Slowdive, a majestic return towards their initial sound, and now have followed it up with an even better album that I think translates 1990s shoegaze through a 2023 lens. I’ve seen at least two stories on the current shoegaze revival from Pitchfork (which includes a lot of artists that aren’t really shoegaze) and Steregum, both of which highlight Slowdive’s place and the fact that they’ve reached new commercial heights since their re-formation. Highlights include “alife,” “the slab,” and “skin in the game.”

6. Sampha – Lahai. Maybe I just missed the boat on Sampha’s debut album Process, which won him the Mercury Prize in 2017, but I am all about this album, his long-awaited follow-up, which follows a theme you’ll see a lot in my top six albums – a real sense of restraint, with simpler and even minimalist arrangements that run so counter to contemporary pop standards. Sampha’s higher-register voice might be drowned out by louder or richer accompaniments, but the electro-soul sounds across Lahai tend to highlight and elevate his vocals instead. Standouts include “Spirit 2.0,” “Only,” “Suspended,” and “Jonathan L. Seagull.”

5. Geese – 3D Country. Geese’s debut album Projector felt like these then-teenagers had been locked in a room with nothing but records by Wire, Gang of Four, and Television for several months, so their follow-up record’s turn into an experimental mélange of post-punk, space country, hillbilly rock, screamo, and more genres that musicians this age have no business knowing so well was a huge surprise. Even more of a surprise was how well it works: 3D Country could have been one big joke, but even when you can hear Geese having fun, they’re still serious musicians and the craft here is evident. They get a lot of “jam band” labels, but I think that’s more about critics who don’t know how to categorize them. Standouts include “Cowboy Nudes,” the title track, and “Mysterious Love,” although I don’t think any three tracks could give you an accurate sense of the overall sound here.

4. Arlo Parks – My Soft Machine. Parks’s follow-up to her Mercury Prize-winning debut album Collapsed in Sunbeams sees the English singer-songwriter expanding her sonic palette to include more electronic elements and richer instrumentation, but her voice and lyrics remain the heart of her music. (She even credited some surprising influences, including shoegaze pioneers My Bloody Valentine and the 2022 album Skinty Fia by Fontaines D.C.) Standout tracks include “Impurities,” “Weightless,” “Devotion,” “Bruises,” and her cover of Jai Paul’s “Jasmine” for the album’s deluxe edition.

3. Jorja Smith – falling or flying. Jorja Smith is a god-damned treasure. The English chanteuse got a Mercury nomination with her 2018 debut album Lost & Found, then teased with an eight-song EP in 2021 called Be Right Back before returning this year with her triumphant second LP. Often miscategorized as just an R&B singer, Smith moves seamlessly across styles from soul to jazz to blues to trip-hop, but the unifying forces here are her vocals and her minimalist approach. Everything she does puts her voice front and center, and even when you know there must be myriad instrumental tracks, it sounds spare, giving the sense that you’re witnessing an intimate performance – a welcome antidote to the overproduced sounds of most popular music today. Standouts include the title track, “Little Things,” and “Try Me.”

2. Noname – Sundial. Noname appeared to have quit the music industry in November of 2019 and cancelled her sophomore album, Factory Baby, but returned to live performances in the summer of 2022 and released a new second album, Sundial, this past August. It’s a tour de force of modern hip-hop, with some of the most intelligent lyrics you’ll hear from any MC and a style that reflects the influences across rap’s fifty-year history, while the music over which she drops her rhymes ranges from R&B to jazz to alternative electronic. Standout tracks include “Oblivion” with Common and Ayoni, “Namesake,” and “Black Mirror.” I couldn’t put this album at #1, however, given the guest appearance of antisemite Jay Electronica, who even drops a reference to the Rothschilds in his verse and claims the Ukraine war is a hoax; Noname said she didn’t care what people said about his inclusion, but I don’t think there’s ever a good reason to platform someone who expresses hateful views.

1. Young Fathers – Heavy Heavy. I loved this album when it came out, then set it aside for much of the year, then revisited it for this list – and because of their stunning performance on KEXP – and fell in love with it again. It’s experimental, exuberant, explosive, and full of great hooks. “I Saw” made my top 100 songs of 2022, and would be in the top 10 this year if I hadn’t already included it last year, while “Rice,” “Geronimo,” and “Drum” are all standouts. The Scottish trio started out as primarily an alternative hip-hop act, but have expanded their sound over the past twelve years to include more elements of soul, indietronica, dance, and Afrobeat in their style. They won a Mercury Prize in 2014 for their debut album Dead, but that is now, at most, their third-best album after this and 2018’s Cocoa Sugar. Nobody sounds like Young Fathers because nobody could.

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