Top 10 Favorite Albums of 2023
What an utterly bizarre year for music.
The mainstream slumped for no obvious reason. Taylor and Beyoncé dropped last year, as well as a number of other prominent artists, and nobody picked up the slack for one reason or another. As a result, country music that even its fans will tell you was aggressively middle of the road or outright shitty and offensive filled the void. There were pop hits, but few of them were massive, and the ones that were stayed around for too long. Nobody seems to know what happened. Yet.
It was also a particularly rough year for mainstream hip hop. Or at least that’s the way it seems. A lot of big artists dropped, but not the household names, and when they did they didn’t make as much cultural noise as they usually do. I’ve seen more articles and posts this year mourning hip hop than any other, and though there’s a part of me that wants to argue that there’s a pandemic fueled drought because everyone dropped last year, it seems like hip hop lost the throne.
Even my indie hip hop seemed to suffer. Or at least it seems like it did on the surface. Usually I have five or six rap albums on my list, but this time I only have two. Forgoing a qualifier or two about how I have some omissions that a lot of rap fans would consider nuts, it just didn’t seem like hip hop’s year. Or really, music’s year in general.
But you know what? I think that’s fine.
Of all the mediums I cover on this blog, music is the most consistently rewarding. It’s also the medium COVID hit the hardest in terms of ways to realistically make a living, and it spent the last two years working hard to recover. It’s allowed to have an off year.
Moreover, putting together this list was still impossibly difficult, and I made some choices I’ll deeply regret one day. In fact, because it’s tradition at this point, here’s a list of albums that were on this list at one point or another:
- billy woods & Kenny Segal, Maps
- HMLTD, The Worm
- Key Glock. Glockoma 2
- Lana Del Rey, Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd
- underscores, Wallsocket
- Wiki & Tony Seltzer, 14K Figaro
That’s a long list! And the honorable mentions list might be the longest it’s ever been! The point is that, contrary to popular belief, I think this was a fantastic year for music. I just think you had to squint a little to see it. The highlights are more genre specific, and maybe you had to leave your comfort zone a little to find something new. Whatever the case may be, you weren’t going to find what you were looking for in the mainstream. But since when has that been the best judge of anything anyway?
Runners-Up: False Lankum by Lankum and SAVED! by Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter
I usually don’t do ties, but this is a special case because I love these albums equally and for the same reason: They both do a spectacular job of mining their respective folk roots for the evil and chaos lurking within.
In the case of False Lankum, it’s Irish folk music, which is already a form that frequently lends itself to a particular kind of darkness, even after you get through all the jokes you may be inclined to make about alcohol. Take, for example, “The Maid and the Palmer” (first introduced to me as “The Well Below the Valey”) which sounds jaunty enough depending on the arrangement. But then you take a look at the lyrics and they’re about a woman who killed all of her children and has to spend seven years as a stepping stone. Or a song like “Carrickfergus,” which isn’t as deceptive in its musicality or its lyrical content, but it’s still a song about being on the brink of death, unable to find love while everyone you ever knew is already gone.
These are, of course, extreme examples. For every one melancholy death song, there’s another about getting drunk at the pub and meeting a red headed lass. (Also it’s not like I’m some expert in Irish folk songs.) However, plenty of Irish folk songs have a certain undercurrent of morbidity, one that doesn’t always register to a modern audience. Lankum, however, brings the darkness front and center by adding these off-putting drone sections that make each song sound chilling to the bone. Plenty of the songs start jaunty or quaint, but that’s rarely how they end. If you’re not paying attention to the lyrics of “The New York Trader,” you might not realize it’s a song about a ship with a murderous captain. But even if you don’t pick that up, you’ll know something’s gone terribly wrong the farther into the track you go.
Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter, formerly Lingua Ignota, goes for a very similar concept on SAVED!. However, instead of Irish folk music, she’s exploring Appalachian hymns, gospel songs, and American folk. She also isn’t going for electronic drone and ambiance, but instead, simply rearranging the songs she didn’t write herself to sound much more unnerving and shrouded in pure doom, matching the hell fire simmering beneath most of the lyrics. “Idumea” is your typical hymn about suffering in life and being rewarded in death, a theme running throughout most of SAVED!. However, the way it’s arranged on this album makes it sound not like a hymn to be sung by a choir, but rather a hymn being sung by a Christian death cult while they crucify you.
Some of the songs will lull you into thinking you’re safe, then they’ll hit you with samples of (what I think is) Kristin speaking in tongues. Many of the songs were recorded on old tape players, giving them an eerie quality of the past coming to haunt the unrighteous of the living. It is an album that explores the inherent and frequently unintentional horror rooted in Christianity. There are the righteous, but there are also the sinners, and for there to be sinners, there must be sin. There is heaven, but there’s also hell.
These are both, in many ways, about hell. An acknowledgment of the gloom lurking in the past and informing our present. Which one’s better? Who knows and who cares.
Favorite Songs from False Lankum: “Go Dig My Grave,” “Master Crowley’s,” “The New York Trader”
Favorite Songs from SAVED!: “All of My Friends Are Going to Hell,” “Idumea,” “The Poor Wayfaring Stranger”
10. Let’s Hope Heteros Fail, Learn, and Retire by Alice Longyu Gao
q[woeihrfpansjdckl apih423t89y4523-9hteripjndsaoiasdp9fhq349ht3qubesdapipoispvdifbgrpetiuht430[9u34[08ruuhfawiuhfspadnpapapndpuhasfpihsdpifuhaspsahuewr-98utwht452t54p98ht54p89hepwrhooqerirpuegwigohfufu84392t7yguwrefiduhfwwyugerfadhbscjwey89qiuoafbdhsjkjhdeowahdjsjhqfyguefah yes I know it’s an EP. irehfoireuhferifuhreoifuheroifurehfgoierhfoireuhfeoriuhferoiuhferoiufnerio fgeoigfuh eroigh erioufh erfuherfio erhfiou erfioe foiuhe
p39428ytgiorfqeuhfyt784grewbfhvjadsche2quiwbfhsdawijeiegvuowfijnqwij234irgowyebfjqwnji4u3p25hiorwbejeiu90r418u3iofgrwebhfvjiojqwfphibvadfjisnkdj ewjacsbjijewqbdioijwqfdvfsijeqwfokdoije23bedfjseik3ejqwcdmNSXLXLZZZZxkzczpszcxccizpkjjzphicpj[fespewt this album is completely batshit eooeijreo ifhrepu fhreoifuhrefoireuhgfoerohfgmreopigfjmreopfgijreopfgijmeropgfnijerfgiop huernfgpoe hupfg eopig rehpg hperfg pre pfger pfger pfer frefger f ieklirjufgpierqu 3pie rfhureifu reiufh refervoerqcpkjsandclkdsjbvdflk jnf er[oifqr[ifreq9treqpfhgrep ughreqpiugh repogh reqpog repfhpoerjferqiopjfrewqpoijf repofjerqiojferqp offpohieqrfpohre preqhporepougr eoigreopg reiugh reoigh repgh rhg preqohgoper reghregpoireg rgoprehgporeqhgpoqerg jpo
fwifjbrweiofuehw fiwhfpreqwufhre fpiurehfpo3 hw lienf oierf eorfu erofroeif eroifuireh fiorefhu eriouhfew ri I love it so goddamn much e;jrepof reojr ev
erv
er v
rwjk b
rtwjbrtepkjperjog
pejrfg
nperpnfep
fp
rep
rkpfnp[fnrperipfmerpfinerfpierjnfeprifnrepiferpifjrepifjrepifjrepfojreqpofjerpijferpijfrepjfgerpijferqp
joferpjfreopifreoihgfrep9iufgherqpiufherpgfhrepfhrpfouhrfghrepfoiuhrefpihrefpouhreohfrepfhreqofherouhfvero8493u508974t-9y348rtu9043y59780143yr-9348y-493yt-8h54-873gthbn280yh34-87ht-h348qng80139y48ut078gf5n4uhn5t498wt8jhf2-47h388=9htbpu2ipu
Favorite Songs: “Come 2 Brazil,” “Believe the Hype,” “Hëłlœ Kįttÿ”
9. Singles Collection 2022 by Lil Ugly Mane
I talk about more than a few different types of mediums on this blog. Mainly, film, TV, video games, and music. One day I’ll crank out something about the books I read or the graphic novels or some sort of performance piece. But I tend to stick to those four, and in my heart of hearts, I’m a movie guy first. Screenwriting’s the thing I want to do, and movies are the end goal. And TV I suppose, but movies are really what I care about the most. It’s also a medium in which artists are encouraged to box themselves in creatively.
Most people know this practice as auteur theory.
I think most people define it as simply the idea of crediting the director as the primary creative force behind the execution of a film. That is correct, but that’s also not the whole picture. Part of the basis of auteur theory is the focus on a director’s themes, patterns, and methodology, a practice, famously argued by Pauline Kael, that encourages directors to repeat the same ideas over and over. It’s an intellectual justification for why Wes Anderson movies have never really evolved post Royal Tenenbaums or why Fincher is frequently thought of as the guy who makes fucked up serial killer movies despite plenty of evidence to the contrary.
The other obvious reason for the typecasting of artists is our good friend commerce. It’s easy to sell a romcom to the romcom crowd or an action movie to the action crowd when you have experienced hands at both of those genres or any other at the helm. Art is the product, and the product must be sold. So what if it comes at the expense of the actual art or the artist?
This is why I find Travis Miller, or Lil Ugly Mane, or whatever name you want to call him, such a compelling figure. Simply put, he makes whatever the fuck it is he feels like making regardless of genre or expectation. Granted, I haven’t heard every song or album he’s put out under all his projects. But I’ve also never heard him repeat the same genre twice.
Singles, in this case, is essentially his lo-fi rock album, provided you’re writing a year end top 10 list and you’re trying to be concise so you feel the need to define the genre. (I said album, but it’s actually a compilation if you care about making that distinction. Also, to be honest, I can’t tell if it’s called Singles or Singles Collection 2022 because it’s listed in various databases differently. I went with the latter even though the former’s cleaner.) If I wanted to be shitty, I’d say that this is the Lil Ugly Mane album that has a track or two you may find in a Sofia Coppola movie. But in actuality, there are a lot of genres you could stuff this release into, but defining it isn’t the important part.
The important part is this: Singles Collection 2022 is electrifying, romantic, forlorn, and all in all, one of the more emotional experiences I’ve had in the music world of Travis Miller. Some songs will make you want to wreck shit and rock out, but some songs will make you want to slow dance with a loved one or simply stop and smell the roses. It’s a gorgeous album from someone who clearly has much to offer, and I’ll take whatever he has to give.
Favorite Songs: “Blue Sand,” “Split Ends,” “Unassisted”
8. Girl with Fish by feeble little horse
It took me a while to figure out why I’m as into this album as I am.
Indie rock and I haven’t been getting along in recent years, be it your fuzzy lo-fi releases or your massive sprawly indie epics, and I began to hit a point of diminishing returns. It’s not that I’ve completely turned on the genre entirely. Rather, there would be a few albums every year that people were going apeshit for and I couldn’t even come close to their level of enthusiasm. Alvvays and The Beths and certain Mitski albums and the like. Again, all great. Fantastic even. But I don’t know. I just wasn’t getting there.
Part of it is that I just don’t feel a sense of progression or evolution. The same kind of stagnation that arguably swallowed the whole of rock and roll at some point around nu-metal. The genres I stick with tend to change and evolve on a near constant basis. Mainly hip hop. (Or at least it did for a while. The issue of rap’s strange inability to move on from certain sounds is for a different article.)
For the record, I’m aware of the fact that I’m being shitty and reductive. Put an indie rock album from the early 2010s next to one from the 2020s and I’ll more than likely be able to tell you the difference. And if I can’t, I’m sure someone else could can. But even if they could, another part of it is also simple tonality. Indie rock isn’t a sound derived from what made me love music, so yeah, I may gravitate to some seemingly trashy trap album more than I would what many a Pitchfork reader probably finds meaningful. (Again, I know I’m being an asshole.)
Then I remembered an album called Beyond the Fleeting Gales by Crying, an album I put in the first top 10 list I ever made for this here blog. What I liked about it was that it took guitar hero rock that in any other hands I’d find corny and made it accessible by fulling embracing the dork factor.
Girl with Fish, I think, is to indie rock what Beyond the Fleeting Gales is to power rock. It is, in other words, self-conscious. It’s an indie rock album that understands its roots and why people like it, and it understands that the overlap between these two elements is a little played out. It communicates this by taking many of the sub-genres of indie rock, or sounds often associated with them, and tweaks them just enough so that they sound fresh.
Even though it’s self-aware, however, it still takes itself seriously when it wants to. For as many lines as there are that can make you laugh, there are more that’ll quietly break your heart. Yet it never fully leans one way or the other, and as such, it’s an experience that feels more emotionally rich to me than most of the indie rock experiences in the last… however long it’s been since I had an indie rock album in a list. And hey, it’s only 30 minutes!
Favorite Songs: “Freak,” “Sweet,” “Pocket”
7. Kara Jackson, Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?
I’m about to admit to some pretty embarrassing shit here. But hey, if you’re reading this, you’re that kind of person willing to read someone’s personal blog, and thus it’s fairly safe to assume that you’ve got some nerd in you as well. It’s all good. Anyway, I listened to this album for the first time during a pretty intense phase early in the year when I got really into Minecraft.
I was in a joint server with my friends, and it was still fairly early on in this server’s history. We built some stuff together, we did this, we did that, and at a certain point I just didn’t have a project to do, so I decided to just explore.
Part of why I got so into Minecraft is that it’s sweeping and huge, but also very quiet and intimate, and that can lend itself to a kind of sweet melancholy. Or you’re messing around with your friends and it becomes hilarious, but in this case, I’m focusing on the former. You’re the one with the power, but you’re the one with power in a world that makes you feel small. It also doesn’t hurt that I was playing with a raytracing mod that makes the sunshine warmer and the water shimmer.
So I got on my little boat with only the bear essentials, I picked a direction, and I just went. In this case, I headed south, and I encountered mass swaths of nothingness. Empty ocean space or tiny islands with nothing on them except a tree or two. But then suddenly, I would run into something huge. A massive system of forests with who knows what inside. Cave systems. Jungles. Snow covered mountains and lava filled pits.
All the while, I had the perfect soundtrack to keep me company. Music that perfectly mimicked what I was playing. Kara’s songs often start small. Just a simple guitar, maybe some light synths or strings in the background, and her sumptuous voice. Sometimes they stay contained, but often, they explode into these full orchestral soundscapes that blow you away if her lyrics haven’t already done so.
Listening to this album feels like going on a journey. Or more specifically, going on a journey by yourself. It’s lonely, sometimes crushingly so. But the melancholy’s necessary because it makes you appreciate breathtaking beauty, and good god is this album beautiful.
Favorite Songs: “no fun/party,” “free,” “rat”
6. Javelin by Sufjan Stevens
Look.
It’s a Sufjan Stevens album dedicated to his late partner that has a song called “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” on it. It was always going to be on this list. The fact that it’s the marriage of the more intimate acoustic Sufjan albums that speak more to me and the massive scale Sufjan works that I eventually came around to is just icing on the cake.
To be honest, I avoided listening to it for a while because I knew that, emotionally speaking, it was going to kick me right in the nuts. (Sufjan brings out my inner poet.) Sure enough, it did. Then, despite what I just said, I almost made it my runner-up because I wasn’t sure I had fully processed it. Then I listened to it once again, and my brain singled out the part that thought not putting it on the list was a good idea and kneeled on its windpipe.
Anyway, you probably know why this is here.
Favorite Songs: “Goodbye Evergreen,” “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?,” “Shit Talk”
5. Sampha, Lahai
I went back to my old 2017 top 10 list and reread my little write-up about the last Sampha album, Process. I spent most of that write-up gushing over the pure talent on display in seemingly everything Sampha does, ironically after gushing about the obvious talent of Anderson .Paak. (It makes sense in the context of the article. Kind of.)
There’s a part of me that wants to do the same thing here. To begin an article about how I began an article gushing about Anderson .Paak in a write-up gushing about Sampha and then spend another few paragraphs gushing about Sampha again. But I’ll try not to. And I’ll stop using the word “gushing.”
When I was arranging the list, I got a little preoccupied with thinking about why it was so easy for me to put Lahai over Javelin. On the surface, they don’t have a lot in common. Javelin is ultimately an album about the kind of emotions that will define your life, and uses a sense of scope in its musicality to match those emotions. Lahai, I think, is more about the day-to-day, and as such, it’s a lot more subdued.
However, they’re both on this list for the same reason, which is that I found myself swept away by their sheer beauty. By those standards, you can rope Kara Jackson into this debate as well, but I digress. Both have the same effect on me, and I wanted both. But this is an arbitrary bullshit top 10 list, and one had to go over the other.
Honestly, I was simply overthinking.
I try to think of reasonings and rationalizations that hopefully make me sound smart as to why I rank the things I do. But it’s not a deep answer this time. Sampha’s voice has the ability to turn me into a puddle, and deployed that voice over a quieter palette that I simply needed more in 2023. That’s it. List making is dumb.
Oops, this turned out to be a more roundabout way of gushing about Sampha’s talent again. Oh well.
Favorite Song: “Spirit 2.0,” “Suspended,” “Inclination Compass (Tenderness)”
4. SCARING THE HOES by JPEGMAFIA & Danny Brown
oih398h349hrf-934h39ieuhfeipfherifuherfohfr3wpofhu3fio3u4hfoi3hf3oifh3oifuhr3efoire3fro3iefr3oiriufejnisbfhvsdjiu92y4573giurthewfiu0989y7gt4uhirwevfhu0r894giryewvuojh…
Damnit I already did the keyboard smashing bit with Alice Longyu Gao.
This was my most played album of 2023, and it was made by two of the best rappers working so obviously I was going to love it. Also since it’s half a JPEGMAFIA album, it takes its obligatory spot on this list.
As far as what to say about it, I think there’s a case this might be Peggy’s best production work. I’m not sure where I’d rank it amongst his discography as a whole. Probably high. The same goes for Danny Brown as well.
Speaking of Danny Brown, Quaranta probably would’ve been on this list had I had more time to sit with it. But let us take a moment to appreciate the insanity of putting out this, one of his more off-the-wall albums, and Quaranta, his slowest and most openly despondent, in the same year. As I said in the Lil Ugly Mane section, I respect range, and nobody can say that Danny doesn’t have it.
So yup, another JPEGMAFIA and Danny Brown album, another year where one or both are this list. Honestly, at this point, I’m just crossing my fingers that neither of them go alt-right or get themselves accused of something heinous. Sorry to rain on the party, but it’s not a possibility we can rule out anymore.
I’m not ending like that. I played the song “SCARING THE HOES” at the picket line via this giant speaker I had more than a handful of times. Some hoes were indeed scared, but most people loved it.
Favorite Songs: “SCARING THE HOES,” “Orange Juice Jones,” “Kingdom Hearts Key”
3. The Omnichord Real Book by Meshell Ndegeocello
Take every album I’ve ever put on a top ten list. Now get rid of the rock. Not all the rock, actually. Just the faster stuff. The albums with more acoustic or electronic elements can stay, particularly if they’re a bit on the slower side. And also get rid of half the hip hop.
If you had to break down what’s left by percentage, the majority of it is going to be hip hop that’s on the more soulful end of the scale. Occasionally, there’s some crazier stuff, but my taste was developed by the Soulquarians, so that’s what grabs me the most. After that, it’s probably going to be jazz, soul, pop, and folk. I’m not sure how the pie chart would actually look. All I know is that hip hop gets the biggest chunk, but everything else will be divided up among those general genres.
The Omnichord Real Book is basically what you’d get if you took all those albums, put them in a blender, and made something new and delicious with them. It’s basically all the music I love, sans a large chunk of hip hop, in one album.
According to the Pitchfork review of The Omnichord Real Book, the album began with Meshell noodling around with an Omnichord in her attic during quarantine. An Omnichord, as I would soon learn from some quick searches on Google and Youtube, is kinda/sorta/not really like a mini keytar. Only instead of piano keys it has what is essentially a small ribbon controller, as well as buttons to control chords, a built-in drum machine, and a few other components. (Sidenote: I love the word “Omnichord.”) The review made mention of Damon Albarn being a fan, and sure enough, this is the same machine that produced the backing beat for “Clint Eastwood.”
It’s also the machine that’s produced a lot of ruminative electronic hums and echoes in a lot of music over the last few years. Probably the most famous use in somewhat recent memory are the waves of synths during the chorus of “Feel Good Inc.” (Squarespace doesn’t want to embed on a fixed time, go to 1:20 or 2:39)
It’s an instrument that’s capable of producing pure dream fuel, and when you put one in the hands of a genius like Meshell Ndegeocello, they might start fucking around with one in their spare time and then eventually make the most epic album of the year. It’s an interstellar journey through the history and subconscious of seemingly all music, and there’s something for what feels like everyone. It is, simply, stunning on every conceivable level.
It’s also the most slept-on album of the year, and we don’t appreciate Meshell Ndegeocello enough. As to the latter, I suspect it has something to do with the confluence of the era when she took off and the attitude of large swaths of the American public, then and now, about black queer women. Doubly so when their names are slightly harder than usual to pronounce. As to the former, it boggles the mind, as this is an album that should be on everybody’s list. Oh well. There are few times I can confidently say that I know better, and this is one of them.
Favorite Songs: “Good Good,” “Virgo,” “Hole in the Bucket”
2. Beloved? Paradise? Jazz!? by McKinley Dixon
You can take a lot of what I said about The Omnichord Real Book, sans all the stuff about the actual Omnichord device, and apply it here. The stuff about journeying through the subconscious of music. Granted, this album doesn’t have the same scope in terms of genre exploration, nor is it trying to. But it still has that same sense of sweep. It’s just that somehow he’s able to convey that range in thirty minutes, which is frankly just freakish.
That’s not why this album’s here though. It’s here because it’s one of the most emotionally fulfilling hip hop albums of this still-young decade so far.
Like most people, I first encountered McKinley Dixon with his 2021 album For My Mama and Anyone Who Look Like Her, an album that I probably should’ve had on that year’s list. Maybe it’s because I’ve been a hip hop fan for so long, but I’ve gotten better at recognizing when an artist has a transcendent album in them. However, you don’t need much of a radar to have been able to guess that from listening to For My Mama. (Also quick shoutout to his appearance at the end of last year’s Soul Glo album.)
I just didn’t think it would literally be the next album.
McKinley is a gifted rapper. He has a preternatural gift for not only description and wordsmithing, but also painting complex portraits of the people he raps about. He finds their humanity and communicates it vividly. The thugs from his neighborhood or his mother or his friends or whoever. Sometimes what he reveals about them is ugly, but there’s also a keen sense of the beauty and truth they have to offer as well. There’s a complexity at play here that’s more and more rewarding the more you engage.
On top of that, there’s the production. It wasn’t enough for McKinly to write as beautifully as he does, but he also has to rhyme over some of the richest jazz rap beats I’ve heard in years.
Both of these elements came together and made an album that from a palette standpoint, for me, felt like home. It’s an album with a direct lineage to the kind of music that captured my soul in my early days. That also makes it one of the least adventurous albums on this as far as my taste is concerned. But sometimes, I need to go home and collect myself before I head out again.
Favorite Songs: “Sun, I Rise,” “Run, Run, Run,” “Tyler, Forever”
1. HELLMODE by Jeff Rosenstock
One of my closest friends was laid off twice this year.
The first job was a work-from-home position. It wasn't a particularly inspiring job and as a perpetual people pleaser, she was often put in a position where she was the one picking up other people's slack. But it paid the bills and it didn't consume her entire waking life. Then some clients ended their contracts with her company, so they tightened their belts and sent her packing. She then took a role in the family business, which was launching a new arm. She became one of the managers of said arm, and though the work was exhausting and frequently psychotic, it clicked with her. It felt like things were finally on the upswing and that she had finally found her calling, or at least something that felt right. Then the money behind the operation arbitrarily decided the new venture wasn't making enough profit and pulled the plug. For the record, it was, but that doesn't matter now. She still has to start all over again.
Her boyfriend, another dear friend of mine, was also laid off this year. This was his third lay-off in a row. After this job fell through, he had a contract gig that lasted a few months, but that ran its course and once again he's on the hunt. He's never shown a lot of rage or despair over being tossed around like this, and I hope with everything I have that's because of his disposition. But if I'm being honest, I don't think that's the case. I think he's just used to it.
I have two other dear friends who weren't laid off themselves, but their offices were decimated thanks in large part to mergers and "standard industry practices." One of them works in TV and the other in video games. (I'll let you figure out whose office was effected by which.) They were close with the people they worked with, and then one day they were gone ("Thanos-ed," as one of them put it), and my video game friend agreed to write four letters of recommendation the day after. They both still have jobs, but in industries as unstable and uncaring as TV and video games, I doubt they need me to remind them of the sword over their heads, scraping their skin and constantly hovering.
I'm an aspiring screenwriter, and I spent six months this year on the picket lines with the WGA and SAG-AFTRA. I heard horror story after horror story from all these artists who came out to pursue their dreams, dreams I share with them, and in return, the industry conspired to rob them of fair pay, sustainable hours, and a future while working them like dogs and treating them like vermin. They even plotted in broad daylight to drag things out long enough to starve union members out of their homes. This industry that I'm actively trying to be a part of. This industry that will come for me once I join it. It makes me want to scream.
I can feel the fury and heartbreak over what's happening to my friends and peers eating away at me, and these feelings have grown harder and harder to contain. They've been seeping out and finding their way into other arenas of my life. I’ve been increasingly more judgmental of people’s life choices and other things that I have no right to be judging. It’s gotten to the point where I've spent most of my therapy sessions this year talking about it. My therapist constantly reminds me that none of this is in my control and that there's only so much energy I can and should spend keeping that anger alive. She's right. But that knowledge in and of itself doesn't feel like enough.
Hellmode is an album, at least in part, about the hopelessness that comes with the realization that all your dreams and aspirations are tied to capitalism. A system I spent this year watching destroy seemingly everything and everyone I care about. A system I have no choice but to avail myself of, as well as the pure burnout from having to exist within its confines.
But it's also an album about healing from that knowledge. About finding happiness and community within these walls. Cherishing the little moments where all is calm and you're able to recognize joy when it's right in front of you. The fact that the people in your life matter, that you matter, despite everything around you constantly shouting otherwise.
It's the album I needed the most in 2023. I'll probably continue to need it for the rest of my life, or at least what it has to say. And it certainly doesn't hurt that it's also a pretty fucking great pop punk album on top of all that!
Favorite Songs: "Liked U Better," "Doubt," "3 Summers"
Honorable Mentions
Aesop Rock, Integrated Tech Solutions
ANOHNI and the Johnsons, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross
Amaarae, Fountain Baby
Ana Frango Elétrico, Me Chama de Gato Que Eu Sou Sua
billy woods & Kenny Segal, Maps
Carly Rae Jepsen, The Loveliest Time
Caroline Polacheck, Desire, I Want To Turn Into You
Corinne Bailey Rae, Black Rainbows
Danny Brown, Quaranta
DEBBY FRIDAY, GOOD LUCK
Dessa, Bury the Lede
El Michels Affair & Black Thought, Glorious Game
Genesis Owusu, STURGGLER
George Clanton, Ooh Rap I Ya
grouptherapy., i was mature for my age, but i was still a kid
Haru Nemuri, INSAINT
hemlocke springs, Going…Going…Gone!
HMLTD, The Worm
Kelela, Raven
Janelle Monáe, The Age of Pleasure
Jessie Ware, That! Feels Good!
Key Glock, Glockoma 2
Killer Mike, MICHAEL
King Krule, Space Heavy
Knower, Knower Forever
Lana Del Rey, Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd
leroy, Grave Robbing
Lil Yachty, Let’s Start Here.
Lonnie Holley, Oh Me Oh My
Miya Folick, ROACH
Mon Laferte, Autopoiética
Nia Archives, Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against Tha Wall
Nina Simone, You’ve Got To Learn
Olivia Rodrigo, GUTS
Open Mike Eagle, Another Triumph of Ghetto Engineering
Paramore, This Is Why
Snooper, Super Snõõper
Teezo Touchdown, How Do You Sleep At Night?
underscores, Wallsocket
Wiki & Tony Seltzer, 14K Figaro
Yaya Bey, Exodus the North Star
Young Fathers, Heavy Heavy
Yves Tumor, Praise a Lord Who Chews but Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds)
Zach Bryan, Zach Bryan
100 gecs, 10,000 gecs
Would’ve Probably Been on the List if They Hadn’t Been Accused Of Or Said Horrible Shit That Changed My Relationship with the Artist and the Art
Sexyy Red, Hood Hottest Princess
slowthai, UGLY
