Photo of Wet Leg by Hollie Fernando
As 2022 drew to a close, I received what was without a doubt one of the most exciting things to happen in my career as a music reviewer: an invitation to take part in the annual Uproxx Music Critics Poll. I used to be the kind of listener who could churn out a “top 10 albums of the year” list in my sleep, but COVID and the birth of my son in late 2019 were a big detriment to the depth and breadth of music I listened to in the first couple years of this decade. 2022 was already a year where I felt like I was finally coming up for breath, so when I got this assignment, I not only had a good start, but I dove in wholeheartedly, checking out over 100 new albums in the month of November to make sure there weren’t any great releases I had missed. I submitted my list, confident in how proud I was of it, and was excited to flesh it out into a bigger article for this site, with more entries and writeups for each pick.
Then, in mid-December, my mom died.
As you can imagine, this took the wind out of my sails completely. Just getting everyone else’s end-of-year lists was about all I could do and keep my head above water. But then a year went by and it was Uproxx Music Critics Poll time again, and the fun and excitement of putting together this year’s list had me pondering What Could Have Been with last year’s list. So I decided to write it up anyway. After all, there’s so much good music that comes out every year (every month, every week…) that surely even a year later there are things in this list that probably slipped past your radar. And trust me, dear reader, all 25 of these records are definitely worth your time.
Putting together my own list for the Uproxx poll was fun, but it was really interesting to me to develop my list in a vacuum and then see how much it had in common with the overall results. Three of my top 10, including my #1 pick, made the overall poll’s top 10, and four more made it into the top 50, plus two more (Gang of Youths, Sudan Archives) that just barely missed making my top 25. Their top 10 also included three albums that I feel like I should like but just couldn’t get into—I think I’ve decided that Big Thief and Bad Bunny just aren’t for me, and I like Beyoncé but didn’t connect with Renaissance nearly as much as everybody else did. Also, ever the wannabe iconoclast, I was happy to see that I was literally the only person who voted for one of my choices (#5 on the list below). And relistening to everything while putting this list together, I’m happy to report that there weren’t any changes or substitutions I wanted to make to the top 10. I got it right the first time.
So with all that self-indulgence out of the way, here’s my list, as objective as I could make it. Swing down to the bottom of the article and I’ve included a Spotify playlist with a track from each. I hope you like what you read, and what you hear, and please stay tuned for my fashionably late best of 2023 list coming…well, sooner than next year, at least.
Albums 11-25, in alphabetical order…
Brooke Annibale | Better By Now (Nettwerk)
Man, remember NoiseTrade? An experiment in fan-direct music marketing, NoiseTrade was a service where artists would offer up songs (or EPs, or live recordings, or even full albums) to download for free in exchange for your email address and ZIP code, allowing fans to get free music and bands to get priceless marketing info to direct sell to fans and plan tours, not to mention the great job the site’s staff did in writing enticing promotional blurbs and inspired RIYL lists for each artist. Unfortunately, NoiseTrade imploded alongside parent company PledgeMusic before being bought by Paste, who let the site run fallow until finally shuttering it last year.
I mention all this because NoiseTrade introduced me to all kinds of artists I likely would not have found otherwise, including Brooke Annibale, a fantastic Pittsburgh-born singer-songwriter, but thanks to NoiseTrade, I’m on her email list and still eagerly devour every new tune she sends into my inbox. On her latest full-length album, Annibale offers up ethereal folk music delivered in a plush, breathy, reverb-soaked coo, like Americana mixed with Mazzy Star. Better by Now is an album borne of the COVID pandemic, and that quarantine-induced distance is palpable, particularly on “Social Anxieties,” which I think every one of us who has forgotten how to make small talk over the last few years can appreciate.
Alvvays | Blue Rev (Polyvinyl)
Alvvays’ third album was so highly ranked by so many of my compatriots (it made fellow Arts STLer Mike Rengel’s top 10, landed at #6 in the Uproxx Critics Poll, and was all the way up at #3 on Pitchfork’s year-end list) that I felt a twinge of guilt as the album slid out of my own personal top 10. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a very good album with some stellar highlights: “Easy On Your Own?” just might be the band’s best song, while the breakdown and cathartic release in “Belinda Says” is one of their prettiest moments yet. To me, the album doesn’t quite have the consistent end-to-end brilliance of their sophomore LP (2017’s Antisocialites) with some of the deep album cuts skating by without making as big an impression as the stellar singles. It still makes the list, though, because it’s wall-to-wall good with several tunes that earn great status, and I love that the band’s delicate vocals and crashing waves of shoegazey guitars have been augmented this time out with a little R.E.M.-style jingle-jangle.
Bloc Party | Alpha Games (Infectious Music/BMG)
With Arctic Monkeys firmly wallowing in their questionable lounge lizard period, it’s nice to have a British post-punk band still slinging agitated, anxiety-inducing angular guitar riffs like it’s 2006, which is just what Kele Okereke and company are doing on this, their first album in six years. But they aren’t just treading water; this album finds the band sounding as vital as they’ve ever been.
Cloakroom | Dissolution Wave (Relapse Records)
The kind of album that just washes over you, from crushing walls of distorted guitars (opener “Lost Meaning”) to the sort of soaring, echo-laden ballads that were Doves’ stock in trade (“A Force at Play”). Midwestern alt-rock heroes Hum are an obvious touchstone (and not just because their Matt Talbott guests on the song “Doubts”), but this isn’t a slavish recreation of that sound either, just further proof of the joys that come from blending melody and distortion in equal measure.
Danger Mouse & Black Thought | Cheat Codes (BMG)
An epic event five-plus years in the making, this thrilling half hour of power finds the Roots emcee and the superproducer/Broken Bells beatmaster operating at the top of their respective games, Black Thought spitting rhymes in his imitable, mesmerizing meter over Danger Mouse’s beats that twist old soul records into psychedelic cityscapes, as if 36 Chambers-era RZA transported to the modern day and his main influence was Tarantino instead of old kung-fu movies. The results are downright hypnotic.
Fousheé | softCORE (RCA)
There’s mixing musical genres and then there’s Fousheé, a newcomer who throws damn near every style of music against the wall and it’s shocking how much sticks. Fousheé grabbed my attention when her album announcement referenced influences like 100 gecs, Le Tigre, and Atari Teenage Riot—not normal fodder for someone who was a contestant on The Voice. The songs on her debut careen from riot grrl punk (“simmer down,” where Foushee manages to turn “simmer” into a six-syllable word as she gleefully wails “sim-m-m-m-m-mer down/ I know how to fuck around”) to fast, glitchy electro beats (the Lil Uzi Vert-guesting “spend the money”), from the Prodigy-esque techno beats of “stupid bitch” to the menacing hyper-pop of “scream my name.” Sometimes the genres collide mid-song, like in “i’m fine,” a gently plucked acoustic folk song that only runs one hundred seconds but features about eight seconds of guttural heavy metal wailing scattered throughout, or “bored,” where she slides from Ministry style aggro-industrial noise to soaring house diva vocals at the drop of a hat while tossing off couplets like “Right under my thumb, I do it for fun/ If it brings you pain then my job is done.” softCORE’s 12 songs blaze by in just 27 minutes, leaving you little chance to catch your breath before the album spins to a close and it’s time to hit play again.
The Happy Fits | Under the Shade of Green (self-released)
Sometimes it’s nice to just revel in the joys of a great pop song, something the Happy Fits have in spades. The New Jersey trio’s third album is packed with a dozen indie-flecked power pop tunes, all upbeat energy goosed by giddy guitars and drill-into-your-head melodies. This is a band sure to appeal to fans of Saint Motel or the Features, while singer Calvin Langman has a pleasing quaver that brings to mind Young the Giant’s Sameer Gadhia—oh yeah, and he doesn’t play bass, he plays cello, giving the band’s sound a flavor all its own.
Markéta Irglová | Lila (Overcoat Recordings)
The former collaborator of Glen Hansard (in the film Once and in the equally lovely band the Swell Season) returns with her first album in eight years, and it’s just as aching and beautifully sung as anything she’s ever done.
Nas | King’s Disease III (Mass Appeal)
I hadn’t kept up with Nas since his 2002 banger God’s Son and this was clearly—clearly—an error on my part, as this latest album is as great an example of what the Queens-bred emcee is capable of as any other classic album of his I’ve heard. I feel like I need to dig into what else I’ve been missing in his discography.
Phoenix | Alpha Zulu (Glassnote Records)
I was a little wary about this one when the title track dropped as the first single with its weird mix of icy synths and quasi-African percussion, not to mention that clumsy “Woo-ha, singin’ ha-lay-LOO-yah” hook. Oh, but there are so many joys to be found on this album, from the Ezra Koenig-assisted “Tonight” (with Deck d’Arcy laying down one of the downright giddiest bass riffs of all time) to the sleek new wave of “After Midnight” to the hypnotic “All Eyes on Me.”
Placebo | Never Let Me Go (So Recordings)
Singer/guitarist Brian Molko and bassist/guitarist Stefan Olsdal hadn’t released a new Placebo album in nine long years, but Never Let Me Go finds the band roaring back to life as if not a day has passed. All the classic ingredients are there—the haunted, Cure-esque melodies, the propulsive bass and drums, the guitars that chime and roar and soar, Brian Molko’s one-of-a-kind nasal bray of a voice. Other than the addition of the lasery synths that cut through many of the tunes, this album basically just sounds like, well, a really good Placebo album. But after so long away, it’s hard to begrudge a band for proving that they’re still the best there is at what they do.
The Sadies | Colder Streams (Yep Roc)
The Sadies are one of the great unsung bands, with over a dozen albums to their own name plus collaborative albums with the likes of Neko Case (her excellent live LP The Tigers Have Spoken), R&B singer Andre Williams, head Mekon Jon Langford, and the late Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie. The final album completed with singer Dallas Good, who died suddenly at the way too young age of 48 shortly after the album’s completion, Colder Streams proves an excellent distillation of everything the Canadian quartet had to offer, with tightly composed tracks that explore the band’s love for trad country alongside a healthy dollop of 1960s garage rock and psychedelia.
Sloan | Steady (Yep Roc)
The four singer-songwriters that make up Sloan offer up another dozen-tune variety pack of strutting rockers, crunchy Beatles-esque power poppers, swirling psychedelia, and even their first real foray into country. The songs are sturdy and catchy as all get out, but with Sloan, what else is new? It feels weird to quote another critic in my own year-end writeup, but it’s hard to say it better than AllMusic’s Mark Deming: “If a new band made an album this good and joyously pleasing, they’d be hailed as heroes, and don’t let the fact Sloan are grizzled veterans keep you from celebrating Steady on a regular basis.”
Indigo Sparke | Hysteria (Sacred Bones)
Huge thanks to the National’s Aaron Dessner for producing Indigo Sparke’s new album and bringing her on tour with the National, because her sophomore album was probably my favorite out-of-nowhere discovery of the year, especially that voice, which I described as “powerful but gentle, lilting in your ear like a whisper that drowns out the cacophony of the world around you.”
Tegan and Sara | Crybaby (Mom + Pop)
It’s great to fall back in love with your favorites: Tegan and Sara were one of the very first bands I ever reviewed as a critic, and I worshipped everything they did between 2002’s If It Was You and 2009’s Sainthood. But the glistening electro-pop of 2013’s Heartthrob put me off so bad that I not only stopped following the band, I pretty much stopped listening to the old stuff too. But Crybaby is a huge return to form, as good as anything recorded in the Canadian twins’ heyday while still being a thoroughly modern evolution of their style.
The Top Ten…
10. The Weeknd | Dawn FM (XO/Republic)
I knew the Weeknd prior to 2022 from his many smash hit singles but had been sleeping on his full-length albums. Dawn FM showed me I’ve been missing out. Abel Tesfaye’s romantic yearning is obvious from just the song titles—”How Do I Make You Love Me?”, “Is There Someone Else?”, “Don’t Break My Heart,” “I Heard You’re Married”—but it’s the glistening ‘80s-style synths bouncing off the radio station concept album trappings that give it a flavor all its own, like living in a dystopia listening to one man’s romantic breakdown over the airwaves of the last radio station in the world.
9. Kendrick Lamar | Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers (PJ Lang/Interscope)
I feel like there wasn’t nearly as much buzz around Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers as Lamar’s 2015 instant classic To Pimp a Butterfly, which is odd because it might be even more groundbreaking. A therapy session in album form, Lamar lays all his foibles, faults, and insecurities on the table. The honesty can sometimes make for an uncomfortable listen—for every powerful positive statement like “Auntie Diaries,” where Lamar explores his fraught but genuinely loving relationship with his transgender uncle and cousin, there’s a song like “We Cry Together,” a frighteningly intense staging of a lover’s quarrel between Lamar and actress Taylour Paige that’s awkward and harrowing and painful in equal measures. The album reaches an emotional peak with the penultimate track “Mother I Sober,” a remembrance of childhood that Lamar delivers in a somber monotone over mournful piano, Beth Gibbons of Portishead floating in to sing the hook “I wish I was somebody/ Anybody but myself” with a gentle quaver in her voice that lands like an emotional gut punch.
8. beabadoobee | beatopia (Dirty Hit)
Fake It Flowers, the first full-length album released by Beatrice Laus under the name beabadoobee, was packed with chirping hooks and fuzzy guitars, like the second coming of Juliana Hatfield—in other words, right in the Jason Green sweet spot. And yet somehow I love Laus’ second, more adventurous album even more—there’s still crunchy guitar pop like “Talk,” but there are also so much more, from the twisted Tegan-and-Sara-ish indie pop “10:36” to the jazzy guitars and soft dance beat of the musical sorry note “Sunny Day,” from the gently picked acoustic guitars and twinkly piano of “Lovesong” to the bossa nova swing of “the perfect pair.” The sound of beatopia is much lusher and more varied than Laus’ early bedroom recordings, but it’s lost none of its intimacy.
7. Soccer Mommy | Sometimes, Forever (Loma Vista)
Sophie Allison’s previous releases as Soccer Mommy had their charm, but she really leveled up on her third release, with Daniel “Oneohtrix Point Never” Lopatin’s production giving Allison’s songs more muscle and grandeur. Allison’s songwriting is on point here, from the swooning, aching shoegaze of “Shotgun” to the malevolent “Unholy Affliction.” The beefed-up production only adds to the devastation of lyrics like “You make me feel like I am whole again/ But I think your heart could use a tourniquet/ ’Cause I’ve bled you out and patched you up again/ Far too much to call it love.”
6. The Beths | Expert in a Dying Field (Carpark)
The Beths make it all look so easy, dropping another ten or so perfect pop ditties every other year like clockwork. But even if their patented style (sugar rush tempos, exquisitely detailed lyrics, catchy choruses, giddy three-part harmonies) remains firmly in place for most of album #3, they only get better at their delivery. Case in point, the title track, which likens a relationship to a field of study and ponders what’s to be done with all the brainspace wasted on the knowledge of and memories with a soon-to-be-ex. It’s a clever conceit, sure, but also impressively honest and heartfelt in its execution. The Beths spent some time on tour with Death Cab for Cutie and you can feel some of that band’s mid-tempo melancholy creep into tunes like the stutter-step “Best Left” (“Some things/ Are! Best! Left! To rot!”) or the aching album closer “2am” (“There’s a song that never fails to make you cry/ So, we stared straight ahead for the whole time/ And the future never seemed to be as bright/ As it was in the glow of your headlight”).
5. Leona Naess | Brood X (self-released)
Brood X is the name for the infamous cicadas whose eggs lay dormant in the ground for 17 long years before reemerging en masse to haunt huge swaths of the country with their distinct buzzing song. Brood X, the album, is a similarly unexpected rebirth for Naess, who released a string of well-regarded albums in the early 2000s (her first single, “Charm Attack,” was an MTV2 staple, while her sophomore album I Tried to Rock You But You Only Roll is packed with should-have-been hits) before going silent following the sudden death of her father in a climbing accident in 2004, releasing just one album (consisting of stripped-down home recordings of songs written in the aftermath of her father’s death but not released for years afterwards) in the intervening 17 years.
And how great it is to have her back: Brood X is packed with lush instrumentation and Naess’s patented warm, inviting melodies, while her lyrics this time out (themed around love, parenthood, and grief) are her very best yet. It’s hard to think of a one-two-three punch on this list that lands harder than the bobbing bass and lilting melodies of “Call You By Your Name,” the swooning romanticism of “Name Across the Sky,” and the devastating yet hopeful “If a Song,” a softly beautiful piano ballad Naess wrote to her mother to maintain a connection as she slipped into the throes of Alzheimer’s. The whole album serves as a reminder of what Naess does best, and a gorgeous half hour of music in its own right.
4. Yeah Yeah Yeahs | Cool It Down (Secretly Canadian)
The only thing worse than a band you love dropping a disappointing album is having to wait nine long years for their redemption, yet here we are with what on some days might be my favorite album from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a band whose discography offers plenty of competition for that title. “Nine years was a long time to wait after the disappointing Mosquito,” I said in my review, “but the wait was most definitely worth it for an album that easily sits aside their very best while spending its entire run time exploring fertile new ground.”
3. Spoon | Lucifer on the Sofa (Matador)
Spoon has one of the most consistently great discographies of the 21st century, but their 2017 album Hot Thoughts just didn’t connect for me at all. (The title track was a bit of a breakthrough for them, so I’m clearly in the minority on that opinion.) By contrast, Lucifer on the Sofa captures all the things I love about Spoon into a lean-and-mean 38 minutes, from the Queens of the Stone Age-ish chug and clanging guitars of “The Hardest Cut” to the Stones-y swagger and big soul horns of “The Devil & Mr. Jones,” from the lighter-liftin’ love song “My Babe” to the anthemic piano ballad “Satellite.”
2. Wilco | Cruel Country (dBpm Records)
It feels a little weird writing this ranking up a year later with the hindsight that the following year Wilco would release another album (Cousin) that I’d like even more but (spoiler alert) end up ranking lower than #2 for the year. That said, I’ll still go to the mat that this is a great album, and a necessary reset after 15 years of songs that were purposefully experimental but often emotionally cold and (even worse) pretty forgettable. Instead, we have a whole suite of songs played on acoustic guitars that are soft and pretty and catchy and often a little melancholy but never come off as tossed-off or samey, and on balance the album feels as warming as a blanket on a cool autumn day. At 21 songs over 77 minutes, it’s a bit sprawling and hard to consume as a piece, though happily there aren’t really any obvious candidates of songs that should have been cut either. It’s great to have Wilco back at the top of their game, and even greater that they wrapped up 2023 batting two-for-two.
1. Wet Leg | Wet Leg (Domino)
Wet Leg’s debut single “Chaise Longue” feels like the kind of song destined to birth a one-hit wonder: it’s funny and catchy and a little risqué, but mostly it feels like the kind of thing that would either be tough to stretch out to album length or be really tedious if you did. And yet, somehow, the Isle of Wight-based duo pulled it off, crafting an album that album manages to be funny and catchy and risqué and also downright brilliant.
There’s a bit of ‘90s slacker shrug to the way Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers deliver their tales of being young and horny and stoned and exhausted by the men in their lives, and they continually find Daria-esque ways to slice through the tension with a cutting dig or a bit of well-placed sarcasm. Wet Leg is the most endlessly quotable album in recent memory, from the immortally slimy come-on “Baby, do you want to come home with me?/ I’ve got Buffalo ‘66 on DVD” to the cheeky “Is your muffin buttered?/ Would you like us to assign someone to butter your muffin?” to the tragically romantic “I feel like someone has/ Punched me in the guts/ But I kinda like it ‘cause/ It feels like being in love” to the epic downer “And now I’m almost 28, still getting off my stupid face/ A fucking nightmare, I know I should care/ Right now, I don’t care.” But the lyrics aren’t the only thing on-point: Teasdale and Chambers are also fascinating, highly unorthodox guitarists, pairing the occasional big ‘90s guitar crunch with interesting fluttering and chiming effects. Album closer “Too Late Now” is particularly a stunner, with sustained notes ringing out over a rubbery bass line by secret weapon Michael Champion. But that’s just one highlight of many on an album that’s strong from start to finish, easily my most-listened-to album of 2022, and up there in the most-played rankings for 2023 as well. | Jason Green
