Best music of 2023

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/05/1211225533/best-albums-2023?utm_source=npr_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20231216&utm_term=9149999&utm_campaign=music&utm_id=62499856&orgid=&utm_att1=

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In certain Decembers, a list of the year's best albums feels like a fireworks display. 2023 may have been short on flashes and booms, but it was rich with smaller fires: no less intensely gorgeous, more approachable and built for heat, not spectacle. And while it might be tempting, as many have argued at many points in the format's history, to take this lack of consensus as proof of its diminished value as a popular art form, we look at things a different way. In a year short on albums that draw a mob, it's easier to see what might have otherwise been ignored for the treasure it is. (And at a moment when recordings lacking a critical mass of listeners have been deemed ineligible for royalties by a certain streaming service, that thought might be worth lingering on.)

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Here's our proof. In the following list, you'll find albums that have been celebrated widely, and others that we're pretty sure you won't see on any other year-end offering. Every single one of them is loved intensely by a member of NPR Music's team.

The 123 Best Songs of 2023

BEST MUSIC OF 2023

The 123 Best Songs of 2023

Talking about the best albums of 2023

ALL SONGS CONSIDERED

Talking about the best albums of 2023

In keeping with that vibe, we're offering this list of our favorite albums in a different wrapping this year. For the first time since 2015, our 50 best albums of the year aren't ranked, but listed in chronological order by release date. (You'll notice that the first came out in the closing weeks of 2022, though it lingered in our ears — and lodged in our hearts — far into 2023.) In case you need a bit more guidance and like to scroll, we have bestowed a special honor on a dozen of them: crowns to designate those we recommend to anyone looking for a spark, or a slow burn.

SZA, SOS

Top Dawg / RCA

SZA

SOS

RELEASE DATE: DECEMBER 9, 2022

Six years ago, SZA completely changed the trajectory of R&B and a generation. In an industry that runs on facades of perfection, Gen Z fawners have dubbed SZA "mother" for her blunt, sometimes-contradictory but always-gnawingly-honest lyrics set to lilting harmonies. Solána Rowe herself is no longer the second-guessing 20-something of Ctrl days, and her sophomore release, SOS, proves it by pulling no punches. She offsets a sanguine outlook on love ("Snooze") with odes to bloody revenge ("Kill Bill"), indie-pop angst ("Ghost in the Machine"), acoustic toxicity ("Nobody Gets Me") and bad bitch mood boosting ("Smoking on my Ex Pack") — every track is another jewel to her crown. Though SOS landed right at the end of 2022, SZA has bobbed and buoyed all 2023 with record-breaking sales, chart-dominating singles, an international arena tour and yet another wave of Grammy nominations. Altogether, this collection of melodic stunts brings a whole new meaning to the old adage of "Smooth seas never made a skilled sailor." —Sidney Madden

Stream SZA's SOS

The Latin Dead, Eyes of the World

The Latin Dead

The Latin Dead

Eyes of the World

RELEASE DATE: FEBRUARY 14

Nearly three decades after Jerry Garcia's death, interest in the Grateful Dead's songbook has never waned; in fact, it has only grown over time. Guitarist John Kadlecik, who comes from the post-Grateful Dead musical circle (Further, Dark Star Orchestra, Melvin Seals & JGB), teamed up with Oscar Hernández, a pianist/composer/arranger/producer and leader of Spanish Harlem Orchestra, for an innovative run through Dead's music that has been approached from all kinds of directions except this one. The Latin Dead's Eyes of the World is a collection of tightly arranged interpretations that reveal the nuances of melody and composition that sometimes gets taken for granted during long jams. For an Afro Caribbean music-loving Deadhead like me, this album is a dream come true. Bob Weir recently announced he would abandon the rock format to use a symphony orchestra to explore the band's music; in that light, The Latin Dead's approach adds another path on the long, strange trip that is the Grateful Dead. —Felix Contreras

Stream The Latin Dead's Eyes of the World

Tianna Esperanza, Terror

BMG

Tianna Esperanza

Terror

RELEASE DATE: FEBRUARY 17

Someone coming to Tianna Esperanza's music without knowing her story might think they've been transported through time. But the portal is unstable: Is this the croon of a cabaret singer in Weimar Berlin, all smoke and decadence? Or are we in one of the jazz clubs where Nina Simone staged her arched-eyebrow protests? At one point on Terror, her debut album, this young queer biracial woman raised in Cape Cod sings from the perspective of the Harlem bookstore owner Lewis Michaux, who was born in the last years of the 19th century, yet her "Lewis" has the patchouli scent of classic Erykah Badu. "Three Straight Bitches From Hell" somehow marries Gil Scott-Heron's flow with PJ Harvey's drive as Esperanza calls out the women who've broken her heart. The granddaughter of Paloma McLardy, drummer for The Raincoats and The Slits, Esperanza embraces the impiety that is her punk inheritance, but she also values the beauty of her burnished contralto and the funky lyricism she shares with her mentor, Valerie June. Like that Americana innovator, Esperanza reimagines the past in ways that feel almost futuristic — beyond categories, beyond eras. She makes her own space. —Ann Powers

Stream Tianna Esperanza's Terror

Iris DeMent, Workin' on a World

Songs of Iris

Iris DeMent

Workin' on a World

RELEASE DATE: FEBRUARY 24

Political awareness often begins at the kitchen table, in the living room, even at the family piano. With Workin' on a World, Iris DeMent — steward of one of the most treasured and timeless voices inhabiting our moment — brings disinformation-addled listeners back to such intimate realms. Her stepdaughter (and album co-producer) Pieta Brown encouraged DeMent to shape songs from her anxieties and hopes about the current mess of global crises; they headed to Nashville and gathered a band that does full justice to music with the warmth of folk, the reach of gospel and the homespun sagacity of classic country. DeMent counters spirited calls to action like "Warriors of Love" and critiques like "Let Me Be Your Jesus" with golden insights into the beauty and pain of our shared inescapable mortality. In the gemlike, Chekhov-inspired "The Cherry Orchard," DeMent looks across the span of her 62 years at young political idealists and warns them against ideologues — yet sends them forth, to fight despite the odds. "The train has pulled into the station," she sings about the passage of time and the need to act despite its toll. "Don your cape, don your shoes." —Ann Powers

Stream Iris DeMent's Workin' on a World

Missy Mazzoli, Dark With Excessive Bright

Bis

Missy Mazzoli

Dark With Excessive Bright

RELEASE DATE: MARCH 3

The first album to showcase Missy Mazzoli's orchestral works proves that the composer, known for her operas and chamber pieces, is fluent in the art of creating lustrous symphonic scores. Her harmonies are fresh, often surprising and filled with color. In her Sinfonia, subtitled "For Orbiting Spheres," harmonicas in three different keys produce an ethereal chorus, a sound she describes as a "hurdy-gurdy flung recklessly into space." Dark with Excessive Bright, a concerto for violin and string orchestra, takes its title from a blind man's description of God in John Milton's Paradise Lost. The incongruity seems fitting for a 21st century piece inspired by centuries-old music that blends tenebrous strings with glistening, high-flying solos for violinist Peter Herresthal.

Mazzoli claims to have a tolerance for mystery and the unknown, which is an apt context for These Worlds in Us, based partly on a poem about a lost WWII pilot. Armed with an opening wistful theme and wheezy melodicas, the piece thunders with drama and closes with quiet pulsating whiffs of Indonesian gamelan music. Mazzoli is presumably working on her Metropolitan Opera commission (due in 2025), but with symphonic works as dramatic as these, we don't need voices to tell the stories. —Tom Huizenga

Stream Missy Mazzoli's Dark With Excessive Bright

Jordan Ward, FORWARD

Interscope

Jordan Ward

FORWARD

RELEASE DATE: MARCH 3

The St. Louis-bred singer-songwriter's debut ebbs and flows beautifully between R&B and hip-hop, employing vintage synth sounds and creating a harmonious space for his church roots and his background as a dancer to emerge. The title pays homage to his family name and declares the album as a sonic catalyst — Jordan Ward and his executive producer, Lido, recruited some of the most creative up-and-comers like Gwen Bunn and Joyce Wrice to participate. While the storytelling is inherently autobiographical, playing out the moments and experiences that have shaped Ward, there's immense relatability. This album creates a safe space for evolving 20-somethings to be seen and affirmed, no matter where we are on our life journeys, and makes complex and intangible feelings more concrete enough to grasp. There are also moments of lightheartedness and childish fun, showing an artist who fights to keep his inner child alive. If this is the foreword in Ward's book, there's no doubt that I'm committed to seeing the rest of his story unfold. —Ashley Pointer

Stream Jordan Ward's FORWARD

Watch Jordan Ward's Tiny Desk concert

Fever Ray, Radical Romantics

Rabid

Fever Ray

Radical Romantics

RELEASE DATE: MARCH 10

The music that Karin Dreijer makes as Fever Ray has a sort of otherworldly charm. Like beings out of movies like Under the Skin and Annihilation, it can feel as if something alien and curious is trying to approximate human behavior — or, more accurately, trying to activate the emotional spectrum, to experience profound feeling and the change that sets in. Fittingly, Dreijer has said that Radical Romantics, the artist's unnervingly mutable third album, is about "finding out what it is to love." No stranger to donning costumes and playing personas, Dreijer contorts into many forms, navigating an oddball pop of buzzing and wobbly synths. But beneath its charades are senses stirred by the personal history of a private figure — gleeful fantasies of getting back at a child's bully, the last lingering touches of a pandemic relationship in crisis. The sum of its sensations is an album that is as earwormy as it is uncanny, and as empathetic as it is unreal. —Sheldon Pearce

Stream Fever Ray's Radical Romantic

100 gecs.

Dog Show/Atlantic

100 gecs

10,000 gecs

RELEASE DATE: MARCH 17

The shopworn take on 100 gecs — that the hyperpop duo "sounds like the internet" — has always felt a little neat. Our modern internet presents largely as a lifestyle boutique, all rounded corners and yassified slogans; anything outmoded lives in back rooms on bottom shelves, and the default soundtrack is anonymous chillhop, playlist-ready and texture-free. Compare that atmosphere to "Doritos & Fritos," the sound of two friends playing stoner word games as they scroll every setting on an effects plugin, exchanging little-stinker grins. The difference is fun, a disarmingly pure kind that's retreated from online life since the Winamp and GeoCities salad days. 10,000 gecs is not an outright revivalist work, but it's born of genuine love for that messy moment near the turn of this century, when third-wave ska, seven-string rap metal, Myspace emo and Bushwick blog rock might have shared the same font size on a festival poster. The album's overture, a wholesale rip of the theater-rattling THX test sound that crash-lands into gender odyssey "Dumbest Girl Alive," puts its ethos in a nutshell: Like the best Hollywood blockbusters, what you're about to experience doesn't pretend to be high art, but rest assured it will matter. —Daoud Tyler-Ameen

Stream 100 gecs' 10,000 gecs

Lankum, False Lankum

Rough Trade

Lankum

False Lankum

RELEASE DATE: MARCH 24

As you scroll through NPR Music's list of the 50 Best Albums of 2023, you might notice a dearth of something that once felt ubiquitous — the band. There are myriad potential explanations for that shortage, including "it's hard to split $0.005 four ways" and "you can't fit the drummer and the bassist in a 9x16 crop." The way we listen (and swipe) simply isn't conducive to four or five talented musicians sharing equitably in streaming's spoils ... which is what makes Ireland's Lankum feel like a gift from the pagan gods. Radie Peat, Cormac Mac Diarmada and the brothers Daragh and Ian Lynch have not only defied the odds of 2023; the foreboding foursome is on track to become one of the greatest groups of the 21st century. False Lankum, their third award-winning album since 2017, takes their A24 update of Irish traditional music to unprecedented (read: Radiohead) levels. Who needs rock when you have the philosopher's stone? —Otis Hart

Stream Lankum's False Lankum

Watch Lankum's Tiny Desk concert

JPEGMAFIA x Danny Brown, SCARING THE HOES

AWAL

JPEGMAFIA x Danny Brown

SCARING THE HOES

RELEASE DATE: MARCH 24

Anarchy is not a word commonly associated with rap nowadays. Droning 808s and low-vibrational BPMs have long since lulled the genre into a sonic snoozefest of predictability. But JPEGMAFIA and Danny Brown are this generation's patron saints for making rap noisy again. As solo artists, they've clearly been about that life for a decade apiece. Both serve as unwieldy experimentalists in a field where going against the norm provokes the kind of condemnation illustrated by the album's hyperbolic title, SCARING THE HOES.

Yet this collaboration shouldn't work as well as it does. Pairing Danny Brown's frenetic, helium-pitched flows atop rapper/producer JPEG's high-octane, chaotic production style should clash like the titans. But they prove two weirdos are better than one, as they take sex, drugs and sacrilege to the head. "Fell on my knees when I caught a felony," Danny raps on the gospel sampling "HOE (Heaven On Earth)." "Tell me who there for me / Think I need therapy." The album's release was preceded exactly one week by Danny publicly announcing at SXSW his plans to go to rehab, but SCARING THE HOES feels like a sobering slap to a rap industry drowning in monotony. —Rodney Carmichael

Stream JPEGMAFIA x Danny Brown's SCARING THE HOES

boygenius, the record

Interscope

boygenius

the record

RELEASE DATE: MARCH 31

The term "polyfidelity" was coined at a commune in San Francisco called Kerista, where tight alliances formed under the name "best friend intimacy clusters." Contrary to rumors, the singer-songwriter trio of Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus is a professional collaboration, not a throuple. Yet the ecstatically beloved ensemble specializes in the thorniest aspects of best friend intimacy —