150 Best Albums of 2023

As the hottest year on record so far wound down to a holiday season portending what’s sure to be an even hotter and otherwise frightening on many fronts 2024, an article began making the rounds on what little social media I tune into wondering whether rock music is dead, over, kaput. In 2023, no less! Not only a week or two after the meme with the store endcap advertising “Magazines For Every Interest” all of which were har har about Taylor Swift, but also 37 years after Richard Meltzer recalled in a foreword to the Da Capo edition of The Aesthetics of Rock that (his italics) “Hey, it all died in ’68 (anyway)!…it certainly wasn’t very ‘alive’ by ’72, ’73.” Which latter was more or less the time frame he put out a book (Gulcher) instructively subtitled Post-Rock Cultural Pluralism in America (1649-1993.) He went on to estimate that punk (which he “willingly disbelieved…had anything to ‘do’ with rock, preferring to contend it in fact ‘wasn’t’ rock, it was ‘something else'”) had shot its own wad of relevance by “’79-’80 maybe it was,” so by ’86 he only ever listened to jazz and occasional dub (“Actually I don’t mind heavy metal,” he conceded. “I just don’t listen to it.”)

And yeah yeah yeah, that’s just cranky old Great Grandpa Meltzer, so antique that most whippersnappers writing about music nowadays probably never heard of him, so who cares what he thinks? But believe me, he wasn’t alone — not even close. Critics and other humans have been declaring rock deceased since long before Grandpa Me started officially writing about music in 1983 (1979 if college counts), so how is it a question people still seriously ponder a half-century-plus later? Best new book about music I read in 2023 (disclaimer: music is very low on the list of subjects I read books about these days) (second disclaimer: I wrote the foreword) was my friend Phil Dellio’s Happy For a While: “American Pie,” 1972, and the Awkward, Confusing Now, about a song that fostered nostalgia for The Day The Music Died, the music of course being rock’n’roll and the day being February 3, 1959.

Still, we must play the cards we are dealt, right? Tony Fletcher’s December 23, 2023 substack post “Rock Is Dead. Discuss,” initially inspired by a September New York Times magazine profile by Dan Brooks suggesting moderately successful and mildly glammy Italians Måneskin might be “the Last Rock Band” since for instance no song deemed “rock” has topped Billboard‘s Hot 100 since Nickelback in 2001, answered a few strawman arguments of its own (sorry, I know this is confusing): Yeah, the Rolling Stones and (supposedly) the Beatles put out new music in 2023 but that it got people excited only proves the best rock happened forever ago. Yeah, the Killers and Foo Fighters and Blur and Liam Gallagher had #1 albums in the UK but they’re all old too, and no rock bands have turned the trick in the US since the Red Hot Chili Peppers a year and a half ago. Yeah, “there is big money in the concert circuit” but it mostly went to yet more fogies, plus the closest to rockers among performers Forbes recognizes at 2023’s top ten concert grossers were Coldplay and Elton John. Who isn’t so much a “rocker” now as “a senior citizen who sits in rockers.” Okay, I added that part myself, but Fletcher made a similar point.

He does mention a couple newer bands younger people reportedly go for (Geese, Bobby Lees, Royal Blood), and goes on to discuss the (I’m sure valid) economic barriers to fielding a rock band in 2023. But eventually he gets around to stretching his oddest point, which is that rock must be on the endangered-genre if not extinct list since teens no longer identify with subcultures such as “mods, rockers, rockabillies, teds, hippies, skinheads, punks, suedeheads, ravers, goths” — at least half of which were always way more British than American in the first place. And “for those of us who grew up on such individuality, the only thing shocking about the vast majority of young people these days is… their normality. Perhaps rock’s rebellious creativity as a musical form and its tradition of visual cultural rebellion were always codependent, and one can simply not exist without the other?”

Which doesn’t convince, at least partly because it’s not that far from how olds have always dismissed youngs, plenty of whom I expect still consider themselves rebellious even if they seem conformist to me and you because every 20something cashier at the local Kroger has a ring in her nose. Every Monday, in what you might call my dayjob these days, I put together a Napster (née Rhapsody) playlist called Metal Monsters, which necessitates me perusing Billboard‘s Hot Hard Rock Songs chart, the radio-monitoring Mediabase Active Rock chart, iTunes’ Top 100 Heavy Metal Songs, and Metal Contraband’s Top 50 Metal Chart to determine what supposed metal is most popular that particular week, and let me tell you — there is still a whole lot of shitty loud rock music out there!

But the “shitty” part is irrelevant, nothing I wouldn’t have said at any time since the ’90s, at least. Maybe even the ’80s, which by January 1990 I was writing in Request magazine “really didn’t belong to rock at all; the decade belonged to disco and rap, to Latins and blacks and whites who wished they were,” at least in part because “rap and disco are the only musics where anything’s allowed to happen just for the hell of it anymore.” But 33 1/3+ years later, face-tatted, Doom Eternal-addicted (or whatever, you tell me) young fans who I don’t doubt for a second think of themselves as out-of-control or alternative or emo or at least somehow or other opposed to the normies have made stars at some level out of Sleep Token and Sleep Theory and Bad Omens and Bad Wolves and Kim Dracula and Ice Nine Kills and From Ashes To New and umpteen other deathcore or neo-nü-metal or Nintendogrind or screamosludge troupes that nobody over…what, 30? 25? 20? — has any right or reason to have heard of, much less tell apart.

None of which stopped Jacqueline Jax from fretting on Medium back in March that “rock music reigned supreme in the 2000s, but it has since vanished. Where did it go? The 2000s were a fantastic time for rock music.” By which she means not, say, the Strokes, White Stripes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs but “Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit, Evanescence, System of a Down, Slipknot.” You know — “music to make us feel alive, and not just for the moment but every time we turn on the radio,” “those classic rock anthems that will be sung long after our generation is gone.” Of course, to my jaded ears, the solid waste on those 2023 hard/active/metal/rock charts I just named sounds almost exactly the same as the rubbish she once loved. “I believe to older generation(s), Kiss, Scorpions and AC/DC were of the same caliber,” Jax theorizes.

But now, she wonders “is rock music dead” because Billboard‘s Rock/Alternative chart includes songs by Stephen Sanchez (“Until I Found You,” which opens imitating “Georgia on My Mind” then turns into a pale 2020s attempt at a 1950s doo-wop slow dance), grass-roots alt-country outlaw Zach Bryan, indie-poppish soulster Steve Lacy, sunroof salesman Nicky Youre and Mainline Philly confessionalist Liz McAlpine. If she’d checked out this year’s Hot Hard Rock charts instead, she might have seen country acts Hardy or Royale Lynn, or rappers Lil Uzi Vert or Megan Thee Stallion. But like Steve Perry sang, the wheel in the sky keeps on turning. Before long, it’ll inevitably be Bad Omens and Ice Nine Kills partisans yearning for “rock music to be what it was when I was young: raw, passionate, rebellious and loud,” as Jax puts it, not to mention “lyrics that are not only powerful but memorable and speak for me.” Like, you know, “Nookie.”

Skimming my own list of 150 favorite 2023 albums, I see about 40 that one could pretty undeniably classify as “rock” even if Joe Carducci wouldn’t (“Rock music is rock and roll music made conscious of itself as small band music. This, as opposed to a temporary grouping of session players” — Rock and the Pop Narcotic, 1990); in a checkmark for Team Rockisdead, none of those 40 rock albums make my top 20, though undoubtedly Carducci-unqualified Olivia Rodrigo (at least as rock to my ears as Jelly Roll, not far outside of the top 100 himself) just misses. That 40 includes 16 or so that one could pretty undeniably classify as “metal” even if Encylopaedia Metallum (which strangely disqualifies Treponem Pal and Kvelertak) wouldn’t — more than half at #115 or lower, but I still want to acknowledge them.

Looking over top 50 results from the 300-voter Uproxx music critics poll and the Album of the Year aggregate of music year-end lists, parsing rock bands is a lot harder, especially because I turn into Joe Carducci plus I admittedly haven’t technically heard several acts in question, so I’m partly going by descriptions I’ve read. I gather Yo La Tengo, Blondshell, Paramore, Bully, Militarie Gun, PJ Harvey, Blur, aforementioned UK alt-metal act Sleep Token, alleged shoegazers Hotline TNT and Slowdive and oh yeah the Rolling Stones would fit most taxonomists’ “rock” requirements, but beyond that your guess is as good as mine. Oh wait, I suppose Lil Yachty’s “psychedelic rock” move counts too. Boygenius, Wednesday, Ratboys?? I dunno, maybe.

Spot-checking Wikipedia pages, the genre I see assigned to the most surprising number of apparent 2023 critics’ favorites (besides “Irish”: Lankum, Grian Chatten, CMAT, Hozier) is “indie folk” (not even punk folk, or anti-folk, or freak folk: remember those?) or at least some combo of “indie” and “folk” — Boygenius, Sufjan Stevens, Mitski, Ratboys, Kara Jackson, Blondshell (who also gets called “grunge” and “Britpop” hence my presumed “rock” designation), Julie Byrne, Big Thief (no 2023 album but #15 on AOTY’s single of the Year list), on and on. As far as I’ve been able to discern, I don’t like indie-folk much.

“Indie” in general, observers observe, has been getting harder and harder to pin down. As my long-time-ago Village Voice intern Tom Breihan put it at Stereogum, “plenty of longtime Stereogum favorites rose to something resembling full-on pop-star status, while some actual pop stars continue to play around with sounds and aesthetics that previous generations would’ve associated with ashtray-smelling dive bars and handmade mixtapes.” In country music, two of the unprecedented-since-1975 four songs to reach #1 on Billboard‘s Hot 100 came from grass-roots performers who built their audience online (Zach Bryan over a few years, Oliver Anthony instantaneously but briefly) rather than on country radio. And meanwhile, Shaad D’Souza wrote an intriguing piece for the New York Times back in August that roped in occasionally (if that) pop-chart-skirting acts such as Ava Max, Sabrina Carpenter, Charli XCX, Carly Rae Jepson, Rita Ora, Kim Petras, Bebe Rexha, and Troye Sivan (a few of whom showed up on what’s still called Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rocking Eve last Sunday) as a “pop middle class” for whom “pop stardom isn’t a commercial category, but a sound, an aesthetic and an attitude.” And “their loyal fans, many of whom are women and queer men,” love them for it.

Then there’s electropunk comedians 100 gecs, praised by Jeremy Winograd at Slant among others for their “audacious and absurd hyperpop assaults” even if spoilsports like me think crossing Moldy Peaches with Mindless Self Indulgence is a self-consciously stoopid schtick that gets really old really fast. Lindsay Zoladz, in the NY Times last week, heard that duo, Olivia Rodrigo and Paramore all making pop-punk more attuned to the times than a classic-lineup comeback by her own erstwhile adolescent idols Blink-182; that she made it through an essay about women finally taking over pop-punk without once remembering Avril Lavigne, Ashlee Simpson or Skye Sweetnam was curious but perhaps forgivable, given how trend pieces gotta trend piece. (My own 15-year-old daughter’s current pop-punk obsession, if you want to get hip, is trans-male British YouTuber Noahfinnce.)

Some people even hear popular music opening up. “There is no longer a strict adherence to what’s allowed to be popular,” the staff of Flood magazine wrote in a 2023 wrapup. “In a year marked by a subtle shift from rap and pop high watermarks to the return of rock (eddytor’s interjection: wait…what??), baby, it’s become abundantly clear that the constantly morphing shape of viral culture has democratized what gets listened to, when it gets listened to, and by whom it gets listened to.” As evidence, they cite Boygenius on Saturday Night Live, which I’m pretty sure follows half a century of precedents but what do I know.

Al Shipley, on a blog that demonstrates him actually paying attention to the stuff, notes that “Top 40 radio is a real disparate hodge podge these days,” what with “proper pop” co-mingling with r&b and country crossovers, not to mention that “it’s a big contrast to look at mainstream rock and see bands from every generation since the ’60s competing with each other, to see the Rolling Stones, Depeche Mode, Blink-182, The 1975, and Måneskin all on the same playing field. It’s bizarre but kind of fun.” That latter in a post dedicated to the “20 Best Rock/Alternative Radio Hits of 2023“; i.e., the same chart Jacqueline Jax wishes rocked more.

Still, even Shipley’s refreshingly rose-colored vantage point affirms the seemingly prevailing assumption that most popular rock bands not named Måneskin have been around for quite a while. (Also, what’s with that massive Stones-to-Depeche leap — which is to say, where are the ’70s??) 2023 was clearly big on looking out music’s back door: “In a year of conspicuous, big-budget samples and career-spanning concert extravaganzas, pop music kept pulling us back to the past,” someone coincidentally bylined “Pitchfork” wrote you know where. “Industry titans like the Rolling Stones and Paramore returned to the studio, adding stunning new albums to their repertoires,” raved Bria McNeal in Esquire, and I’m probably some kinda caveman for thinking equating Paramore with the Stones is at least halfway hilarious. Even if Hackney Diamonds wasn’t as good as Emotional Rescue, Undercover, or Dirty Work, which it definitely isn’t. (A Bigger Bang? Eh, maybe.)

Jon Pareles, writing a few days ago in the NY Times (yes, I’m a subscriber, sue me) about artists retooling old music in 2023, has more use for Ed Stasium’s new makeover of the Replacements’ 1985 Tim than for Taylor Swift’s shrewdly income-minded redo coups of her Big Machine catalog or this year’s reworked editions of the Beatles’ Red and Blue anthologies (themselves already backlooks from the 1973 gitgo, and now featuring Shipley’s #19 2023 Rock/ Alternative song “Now and Then” — “it’s at least better than ‘Free As A Bird,'” he allows.) But I still don’t get why anybody who already owns the original issues would invest time investigating any of these releases. Same for Quebecois nuke-metal gods Voivod, who I love dearly, re-recording select tracks from across their career on 2023’s Morgöth Tales (rad new Public Image Ltd. cover though); at least Sodom’s 1982 EP redid songs from a presumably impossible-to-find prehistoric demo tape.

Perhaps this retreat into the past has something to do with the future feeling so scary, from inevitable climate disaster prompting unbounded migration toward the Land of Xenophobia to liberal democracy in hospice care while Catholic integralists and Bronze Age perverts plot a new Caesar to artificial intelligence making social media even uglier to conspiracy theories swallowing the old New Age to continued and potentially more brutal attacks on Gaza (etc.) and academia and public education and bodily autonomy. Matter of fact, I’m pretty sure a few of those horrors are what Voivod lyrics were about in the first place. “In times of chaos, music can be a place of escape or comfort,” Pitchfork’s editors reassure us, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that helps explain all the “indie folk” I lamented up above, or even the three experimental/ ambient albums by female composers (Lia Kohl, Elizabeth Klinck, More Eaze) on my own list. But it also helps explain the rearview mirror.

“When the present has given up on the future, we must listen for relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past,” the late British critic and “hauntology” buff Mark Fisher, aka k-punk, wrote in his 2013 trip-hop via ghostly blues (Blind Willie Johnson to Tricky and beyond) essay “The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology“; a decade later, John Wohlmacher opened his own long article at the Beats Per Minute website with the quote, then went on to discuss a newish genre he calls “futurismus” that he hears as “embodying various elements of post-punk, techno, no wave, industrial, noise and metal as origin points, while still angular and defying the standards of the marketable and gentrified guitar-sound that defined the indie-era.” Moral: There will always be an England! An England, no less, that has no qualms about starting with the early 20th Century Italian art movement futurism then affixing “a counter-intuitive and ominous ‘us’ to its tail end, signifying a shared experience of turmoil.”

Which “us” I have to confess gave me a much-needed chuckle (especially since I also kept thinking of the Seinfeld holiday Festivus — hey I read this in December — and I’d never heard of the apparently preceding “Windmill Scene” comprising “British groups who married interests in avant-garde compositions with post-punk aesthetics, finding genuinely exciting and at times prog-rock-adjacent forms of expression for themselves.” Who knew? I gather Squid and Black Midi, bands I do appreciate, are somehow connected to that.) Anyway, at least they’re trying. More than I can say for a lot of other stuff, acclaimed or otherwise. Of bands Wohlmacher cites, I can definitively reveal that Mandy, Indiana show potential. Naked Lungs, maybe not so much. Just hope none of the manifestos turn fascist this time.

I expect some would insist that r&b in 2023 was just as forward-looking, and they could well be right. “From Liv.e to Kelela and Amaarae to Pink Pantheress, modern R’n’B is shaping into one of the most unbound current day genres, debating the private within frameworks of the political and transcending all genre boundaries,” Wohlmacher’s fellow Beats Per Minutemen wrote in the site’s Top 50 Albums of 2023 introduction. Where  “rappers produced very few innovative or noteworthy projects this year,” Andscape’s David Dennis Jr. and Justin Tinsley posited (a fairly common verdict, as far as I can tell, even in the alleged 50th anniversary of the hip-hip artform — hey more looking backwards!), “R&B continued to evolve and we saw several singers drop classic music seemingly every few weeks.” 

Much clearer, there’s Alfred Soto: “I’m not coming to Jazmine Sullivan, Erykah Badu, Jamila Woods, K Michelle, or this year’s winner, Corinne Bailey Rae because I believe they value direct expression; some of the most fascinating uses of distancing strategies happened on many of these albums. Maybe that’s it: the tension between irony and directness attracts me to Black Rainbows and Water Made Us.” I can definitely hear some of that, and a few r&b albums do make my list — Nourished By Time. Eddie Chacon, Adi Oasis, Jayda G, Jamila Woods, Mayer Hawthorne, Jessie Ware, maybe a couple other borderline picks. If not for so much contemporary r&b’s attraction in the post-Frank Ocean/FKA Twigs era to tepid indie twaddle I never had any use for in its own right, there might be more.

But as anybody who has snuck a peak at my list may have grasped already, I’m generally looking farther afield for my innovation fix. To put it mildly, I have never put together a list like this before — though it might not be the last time I do. Counting “underground experimental music producer and DJ” (per bandcamp) ChrisMan by his Uganda base rather than his Democratic Republic of Congo birthplace, I count eight albums from West Africa (two each Niger and Senegal, one each Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Togo, Cape Verde); six from East Africa (three Uganda, one each Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya); five from Southern Africa (four South Africa, one Botswana); two from Central Africa (one each D.R. Congo and Zambia); and two from Northern Africa (both Tunisia).

23 African albums, total — most landing near the top of my list, most favoring the technological over the folkloric but frequently in ways that balance organic with electronic, and many if not most embracing the noisy and avant-garde in ways that most any likeminded clatter in the global north would sacrifice verve and swerve for. These don’t. If anything, Witch’s comeback-after-four-decades acid-psychedelic “Zamrock” and Skinflint’s seventh-album Botswanan-mythology war-metal are among the more conservative of concoctions on offer here.

Beyond that, I’m not sure how much more I can generalize, except to say that what I’m hearing out of Africa lately sounds a decade or more ahead of what I’m hearing from just about everywhere else. Who knows, maybe it always was. My favorite places on the Internet to find out about new music these days, for whatever it’s worth, are Pan African Music and the Brussels-based Rebel Up Nightshop; favorite record labels right now are Kampala’s Nyege Nyege Tapes (and its subsidiary Hakuna Kulala), Lisbon’s Príncipe (“most closely associated with a bouncy, staggered and sometimes roly-poly club sound—a syncretic blend of Angolan and Afro-Portuguese styles known as batida,” Resident Advisor puts it), and Geneva’s Les Disques Bongo Joe (“explores contemporary undergrounds to dig out extraordinary sounds and plows the furrows of time to unearth rare nuggets from here, there and everywhere” — bandcamp.) Not sure I could map out how exactly they interrelate, but it sure sounds like they do.

Pretty sure no albums on my list fall under the rubric “Afrobeats,” a seemingly vague designation whose recent American crossover success I probably erroneously trace back to Jidenna’s Nigerian-American 2013 “Classic Man” if not K’Naan’s Somali-Canadian 2009 “Wavin’ Flag” if not Akon’s Senegalese-American 2004 “Locked Up,” and a genre I’m surprised to learn from Wikipedia encompasses Amaarae’s top 20 in both Uproxx and the AOTY aggregate Ghanian-American 2023 Fountain Baby but (this is the surprise part) not Tyla’s top 20 Uproxx/top 10 Billboard 2023 single “Water” (also performed on the late Dick Clark’s latest New Year’s special), which seems to be amapiano instead, apparently because she’s from South Africa and Afrobeats is from West Africa (which also rules out K’Naan, I guess).

I’m fuzzy about whether amapiano also includes any of the South African albums I’ve listed, but I do love how Dave Moore explains the style: “The foundation is almost always a shaker playing sixteenth notes at about 112 BPM (though the accent of the pattern can vary, the shaker is usually steady and omnipresent), and each song then layers in its own palette of sounds and voices, everything in percussive service of the groove. .. . Amapiano artists will often take warm acoustic percussion and pretty, playful vocals—all of them bringing a soft swing feel, somewhere between dancing and swaying—and pit them directly against much harder four-on-the-floor house elements (synth blares, jagged squelchy bass hits) put off at a seeming distance, like the distant echo of a car alarm going off way down the street that happens to be in the same key as the song you’re listening to in your headphones…And there are tons of cool vocals in amapiano, hard posturing and playful posing becoming indistinguishable… And heck, sometimes you get a no-foolin’ xylophone, too, not even the thing most people think is a xylophone but is actually a glockenspiel. Or you get a synth that sounds like a vuvuzela. Why not?” He goes on to report that “South African house music has evolved recently and is continuing to evolve into a form currently called 3step,” which he breaks down to its component rhythmic elements just as precisely. Clearly I have only begun to explore what the continent offers.

And other continents, too. I’m just as fascinated by the writing Frank Kogan did on his blog this year about Brazilian funk carioca (for an example on my list see DJ Ws Da lgrejinha’s Caça Fantasma, Vol. 1), particularly a May post where he discussed, if I’m understanding right, how the genre’s rhythm often tends toward higher pitches where those of us who grew up in the US/UK/Europe/etc. generally tend to expect the opposite (which I suppose is why we call it “the bottom.”) To wit: “I tend to think of bass as the heart-beating body of music – ‘bass’ not only meaning bass guitar but sometimes tuba or cello or stand-up bass or a baritone voice or hollow cheeks or a deep drum or an electronic drum like an 808, etc., whatever is acting the part. But there’s a bounce to it, a roll, not just the thud or the bomb of a big drum or the whack of a snare. Obv. you can have good rhythm without it, even with just a voice and two spoons, but for me bass is the liquid in the soup. It’s the broth, the flow. But a good deal of funk carioca…is giving us a turnaround, the high pitch directing the rhythm rather than riding it – this is viscerally effective, while flipping the emotional sense: like snapping the towel in your eyes rather than tickling your feet. Dancing that feels like fighting.” Just for starters! 

Meanwhile, sometime late last year Elijah Wald answered an Eric Weisbard facebook query about Mexican “corridos tumbados (aka trap corridos)” going pop in 2023 thuswise: “Many of the new artists are playing and singing styles that come straight out of the West Coast banda/corrido waves of the last two decades, but present themselves in ways that place them alongside Los Angeles rappers rather than than provincial Mexicans. Lupillo Rivera started that in the 1990s, but it really took off with the artists grouped as the Movimiento Alterado in the 2000s, who are the direct precursors of the current wave. The older artists were trying to meld norteño and banda with a rap sensibility, but the new guys grew up with that blend and feel genuinely comfortable with it.” And I’m entirely oblivious to that stuff.

Hey, there are only so many hours in a year, you know? You gotta pick your battles, Beatles, beats. My top ten includes two compilations, one on a label that somehow splits its headquarters between Warsaw and Brussels and includes acts from Australia, Belgium, Bermuda, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, Peru, Russia and Uganda; the other bridging China and Argentina. Three more albums from Belgium occupy my long list. Further down my top 20 there’s a Venezuela-compiled “pan-Latin” sampler on a Swiss label. Some other countries represented: France (four albums), Portugal (five), Chile, Haiti, Indonesia (three-woman nü-ish metal band Voice of Baceprot), Italy, Jamaica (plus two Adrian Sherwood-associated deep dub reggae sets from the UK), Jordan, Norway, Serbia, Spain, more. And that doesn’t even include the two albums from Saint Abdullah, a pair of electronical brothers based in Brooklyn but with family and musical roots in Tehran.

On top of all that, I recently read an article by Matt Mullen from last January on the musicians’ website Musicradar about how possibly millions if not billions of Spotify and TikTok users prefer to listen to certain songs intentionally sped up “anywhere between 30% and 50%,” and playlists and hashtags prove this; apparently the trend started with pitched-up samples in turn-of-the-millennium Eurodance hits by German happy hardcore jumpstyle techno goofballs Scooter (which samples I’ve actually heard a lot), which in turn inspired a DJ duo from Norway to “invent” something called “nightcore.” Meanwhile “bubbing, a short-lived musical movement from the ’90s, saw Dutch DJs speeding up tracks in similar fashion, after DJ Moortje mistakenly played a 33rpm dancehall record at 45rpm.” And ’90s hip-hop producers accelerated vintage r&b samples into so-called “chipmunk soul,” and Todd Terry did it in house music even before that. And now it’s apparently big with the youngsters — just maybe because pop hits this century have so often been slow and joyless and needed to be sped up, though oddly the article doesn’t point that out.

Lakecia Benjamin Phoenix 

And oh yeah, there’s jazz too. Which, for all I know, Richard Meltzer might still listen to, to this day. And even if he doesn’t, it never died! I count at least 16 albums on my list (almost 11% — exact same percentage as metal, if you want a horse race), including three (= 75%) of my top four and 10 (= 25%) of my top 40. Read the credits and you’ll deduce that I clearly have a thing for saxophones, which is not to suggest other lead instruments aren’t honored as well.

The top two, especially, are illuminating. 48-year-old Houston pianist Jason Moran’s From the Dancehall to the Battlefield and 69-year-old Long Island (mostly alto) saxophonist Allen Lowe’s America: The Rough Cut are both loaded with blues and rags — you can tell; it’s right there in their song titles. Hillbilly music, too. In other words, they update the rock’n’roll of more than 100 years ago. Highlights of Moran’s album, a tribute to 1881-born Black composer and bandleader James Reese Europe, include “Darktown Strutter’s Ball,” recorded by the Original Jazz Band in 1917 and later a vaudeville standard for Sophie Tucker, and “Hesitating Blues,” which blackface minstrel Al Bernard and his Goofus Five borrowed from the Victory Military Band in 1919 and thereby presaged Western Swing, old-timey country banjo instigator Charlie Poole marinated into “If the River Was Whiskey” in 1930, then the Holy Modal Rounders turned clairvoyantly “psy-cho-delic” on their 1964 debut LP. Allen Lowe’s band the Constant Sorrow Orchestra seemingly get their name from the 1913 Kentucky fiddle song famously revived in 2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?; key selections on their 2023 album include “Eh Death,” presumably based on the turn of the century Irish-then-Appalachian fiddle dirge “O Death” that Ralph Stanley bluegrassed in that same movie after post-Rounders psychedelic folkies Kaleidoscope freaked it on their own 1967 debut LP, and “Cold Was the Night, Dark Was the Ground,” an apparent inversion of Blind Willie Johnson’s sanctified 1927 blues where the night was dark and the ground cold instead, as they were in a 18th Century church hymn his title most likely came from.

Which is to say: What comes around goes around. And on that cue, it only makes sense to return back where I started. Toward the end of Tony Fletcher’s rock-is-dead essay, he wonders whether “rock is the new jazz,” answering “No, because nothing is ever really the new anything – context being everything in the first place.” (Tell that to university presidents testifying before Congress!) But as with jazz, he writes, “new artists will approach the form knowing that originality is not necessarily a virtue, and that success on the level of their cultural predecessors is not so much a dream, the way it was for me in my youth, as an impossibility.” Most of that is inarguable, though of course originality was never necessarily a virtue. But it’s interesting that in jazz, even a few decades further than rock from the days when it counted as the Western world’s primary popular music (though it’s possible neither genre was ever the primary popular music) guys like Moran and Lowe can take ancient material, from before bebop turned jazz into “art” music, and manage to transform it into a new kind of art regardless. I enjoyed plenty of rock in 2023, but on those terms I heard no rock that came close. African music, sure. But that’s different.

So anyway. “Usually, putting together my year-end lists, I’m inclined as a critic to seek a rough balance between my own preferences and a representation of broader significant currents,” Carl Wilson wrote in an intro to his Slate best-of-2023 lists last month. “But given all of the above, I’m less inclined this year to bother with the latter.” I have never bothered with the latter. I wouldn’t know how, and can’t imagine why anyone would want to me (or anybody else) to. Like Wilson’s, the 150 albums below “are primarily personal calls.” Except not just “primarily.”

1. Jason Moran From the Dancehall to the Battlefield (Yes)
2. Allen Lowe and the Constant Sorrow Orchestra America: The Rough Cut (ESP-Disk) 
3. Clairvoyance is the Dance Vol. 1 (Huveshta Rituals Belgium)
4. Lakecia Benjamin Phoenix (Whirlwind)
5. Los Mohanes La Tumbia (Moli Del Tro Belgium)
6. Faizal Mostrixx Mutations (Glitterbeat Germany)
7. Khalil Epi Romena  (Shouka France EP) 
8. DJ Finale Mille Morceau (Nyege Nyege Tapes Uganda)
9. Ria Treanor/Ocen James Saccades (Nyege Nyege Tapes Uganda)
10. Bié Records Meets Shika Shika (Shika Shika Collective/Bie Portugal)
11. Ndox Electrique Tëd ak Mame Coumba Lamba ak Mame Coumba Mbang (Les Disques Bongo Joe Switzerland)
12. Natural Information Society Community Ensemble Since Time Is Gravity (Aguirre/Eremite)
13. Ozferti Drum Language (Nubia Nova France)
14. Tia Maria Produções São Dicas (Tia Maria Produções Portugal EP)
15. Creation Rebel Hostile Environment (On-U Sound)
16. Guiss Guiss Bou Bess Drum’n’Mbalax (Hélico France) 
17. Coco María Presents Club Coco ¡Ahora! The Latin Sound of Now (Les Disques Bongo Joe Switzerland)
18. Gaïsha Ana Aïcha (Zephyrus Belgium)
19. Lenhart Tapes Dens (Glitterbeat Germany)
20. DJ Black Low Impumelelo (Awesome Tapes From Africa Europe)
21. Olivia Rodrigo Guts (Geffen)
22. Maloca, Vol. 2 (Maloca Belgium)
23. Lagos Thugs Chaos (Immensum) 
24. Belgrado Intra Apogeum (La Vida Es Un Mus UK) 
25. DJ Kapwanthi Digital Indigenous 04 – MP4MP3 (1000 Herz Poland)
26. Bas Jan Back to the Swamp (Fire UK)
27. Mito Y Comadre Guajirando (ZZK Argentina) 
28. Sourdurent L’Herbe De Détourne (Les Disques Bongo Joe Switzerland)
29. The Drin Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom (Feel It/Future Shock)
30. Dominowe State of Mind (Dominowe South Africa)
31. Tanith Voyage (Metal Blade)
32. Nídia 95 Mindjeres (Príncipe Portugal)
33. London Brew London Brew (Concord)
34. James Brandon Lewis Red Lily Quintet For Mahalia, With Love (Tao Forms)
35. BCUC Millions Of Us (On The Corner UK) 
36. Lokowat Elementos (Lokowat Portugal)
37. MIVOS Quartet Steve Reich: The String Quartets (Deutsche Grammophon Germany)
38. Isaiah Collier Parallel Universe (Night Dreamer UK)
39. Matana Roberts Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden (Constellation)
40. Jim (Black) & the Schrimps Ain’t No Saint (Intakt)
41.  Gavsborg 1 Hour Service (Cassette Blair Jamaica) 
42. Schroothoop MACADAM (Sdban Ultra Belgium)
43. Actress LXXXVIII (Ninja Tune UK)
44. Mendoza/Hoff/Revels Echolocation (AUM Fidelity)
45. Megan Moroney Lucky (Columbia/Sony Nashville) 
46. The Bloody Jug Band How to Train a Spooky Horse (The Bloody Jug Band)
47. During During (Chunklet Industries)
48. Duke Early Instrumentals (Nyege Nyege Tapes Uganda)
49. Hulubalang Bunyi Bunyi Tumbal (Drowned By Locals Jordan)
50. Aksak Maboul Une Aventure De VV: Songspiel (Crammed Discs Belgium)
51. Nourished By Time Erotic Probiotic 2 (Scenic Route UK) 
52. Chouk Bwa & the Ångströmers Somanti (Les Disques Bongo Joe Switzerland)
53. Nihiloxica Source of Denial (Crammed Discs Belgium)
54. Horrendous Ontological Mysterium (Season Of Mist)
55. Saint Abdullah & Eomac Chasing Stateless (Planet Mu UK)
56. Don Kapot I Love Tempo (W.E.R.F. Belgium)
57. Darius Jones Fluxkit Vancouver (It’s Suite but Sacred) (We Jazz)
58. Studio Shap Shap Le Monde Moderne (L’Autre France)
59. ChrisMan Dozage(Hakuna Kulala Uganda)
60. Tyvek Overground (Ginkgo)
61. Cumgirl8 Phantasea Pharm (4AD EP)
62. Eddie Chacon Sundown (Stones Throw)
63. Tamara Stewart Woman (Checked Label Services)
64. Voice of Baceprot Retas (12Wired Indonesia)
65. Giant Brain Grade A Grey Day (Small Stone)
66. Shit And Shine 2222 and Airport (The State51 Conspiracy UK)
67. Li’l Andy The Complete Recordings of Hezekiah Procter (Back to Wax Canada)
68. Lalalar En Kötü Iyi Olur (Les Disques Bongo Joe Switzerland)
69. Jpegmafia x Danny Brown Scaring the Hoes (Jpegmafia)
70. New Sector Movements These Times (First Word UK)
71. Cherry Bandora Back to the Taverna (Rumi Sounds/Rebel Up Germany)
72. DJ Danifox Ansiedade (Príncipe Portugal) 
73. Tyler Dial Electric West (Tyler Dial)
74. Civic Taken by Force (ATO)
75. Deena Abdelwahed Jbal Rrsas = جبل الرصاص (Infiné France)
76. Sparks The Girl is Crying in Her Latte (Island)
77. Lauren Alaina Unlocked (Big Loud EP)
78. Lia Kohl The Ceiling Reposes (American Dreams) 
79. Idris Ackamoor & the Pyramids Afro Futuristic Dreams (Strut)
80. Wadada Leo Smith and Orange Wave Electric Fire Illuminations (Kabell)
81. Jason Eady Mississippi (Old Guitar)
82. African Head Charge A Trip to Bolgatanga (On-U Sound UK) 
83. The Nude Party Rides On (New West)
84. Henry Threadgill Ensemble The Other One (Pi)
85. Blood Ceremony The Old Ways Remain (Rise Above) 
86. Khalab Layers (Hyperjazz Italy) 
87. Meurtrières Ronde De Nuit (Gates Of Hell Italy)
88. Tanner Addel Buckle Bunny (Columbia)
89. Abstract Concrete Abstract Concrete (The State51 Conspiracy UK)
90. Treponem Pal Screamers (At(h)ome France)
91.  Bruce Cockburn O Sun O Moon (True North)
92. Megaton Sword Might & Power (Dying Victims Germany)
93. Uncle Waffles Asylum (Ko-Sign PTY Ltd South Africa)
94.  Chickasaw Mudd Puppies Fall Line (Strolling Bones)
95. Felo Le Tee, Mellow & Sleazy The III Wise Men (New Money Gang South Africa)
96. Surgeon Crash Recoil (Tresor Germany)
97. Benjamin Herman Nostalgia Blitz (Dox Netherlands)
98. Jlin Perspective (Planet Mu UK)
99. Squid O Monolith (Warp Europe)
100. Ana Frango Elétrico Me Chama De Gato Que Eu Sou Sua (Mr. Bongo/Risco UK)
101. Minor Science: Absent Friends Vol. III (Balmat Spain)
102. James Brandon Lewis Eye Of I (Anti-/Epitaph)
103. V/Z Suono Assente (AD 93 UK)
104. Legendry Time Immortal Wept (No Remorse Greece)
105. Nightingales Live in Balsall Heath (Tiny Global Productions UK)
106. Håndgemeng Ultraritual (Ripple Music)
107. Public Image Ltd. End of World (PiL Official)
108. Kabeaushé The Comming of Gaze (Hakuna Kulala Uganda)
109. Elisabeth Klinck Picture a Frame (Hallow Ground Switzerland)
110. Kahil El’Zabar’s Ethnic Heritage Ensemble ft. Dwight Trible & David Ornette Cherry Spirit Gatherer: Tribute to Don Cherry (Spiritmuse UK)
111. Blue Dolphin Robert’s Lafitte (Post Present Medium/Cleta Patra EP)
112. Jelly Roll Whitsitt Chapel (BBR Music Group)
113. Katawa Singers Digital Indigenous 05 – Katula (1000 Herz Poland)
114. Kelsea Ballerini Rolling Up the Welcome Mat (Black River EP)
115. Danny Brown Quaranta (Warp)
116. Ibex Clone All Channels Clear (Goner)
117. Adi Oasis Lotus Glow (Unity Group)
118. Burn on the Bayou: A Heavy Underground Tribute to Creedence Clearwater Revival (Ripple Music)
119. Ashley McBryde The Devil I Know (Warner Nashville)
120. Blood Lightning Blood Lightning (Ripple Music)
121. Andrew Mbaruk & Rhys Langston Affect Theory and the Text-to-Speech Grandiloquence (Black Market Poetry EP) 
122. Pigeon Backslider (Soundway UK EP)
123. Skinflint Hate Spell (Into UK)
124. Witch Zango (Desert Daze Sound)
125. Jayda G Guy (Ninja Tune UK)
126. Scúru Fitchádu Nez Txada Sk​ú​ru Dentu Skina Na Braku Fundu (Scúru Fitchádu Portugal)
127. Saint Abdullah & Jason Nazary Looking Through Us (Disciples) 
128. DJ Ws Da lgrejinha Caça Fantasma, Vol. 1 (Dalama Brazil)
129. Nuovo Testamento Love Lines (Discoteca Italica)
130. Jamila Woods Water Made Us (Jagjaguwar) 
131. More Eaze Eternity (Longform Editions) 
132. The Mike Jacoby Electric Trio The Long Haul (Mikejacobymusic)
133. Sexyy Red Hood Hottest Princess (Heavy On It)
134. Gatekeeper From Western Shores (Cruz Del Sur Italy)
135. Mayer Hawthorne For All Time (P&L)
136. Shadows Out for Blood (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)
137. Fanny Lumsden Hey Dawn (Red Dirt/Cooking Vinyl Australia)
138. Nana Benz Du Togo Ago (Komos France) 
139. Moussa Tchingou Tamiditine (Sahel Sounds EP)
140. Kvelertak Endling (Rise)
141. Peter One Come Back to Me (Verve Forecast Canada) 
142. Roadwolf Midnight Lightning (Napalm)
143.  Jessie Ware That! Feels Good! (EMI)
144. Mandy, Indiana I’ve Seen a Way (Fire Talk)
145. The Midnight Callers Rattled Humming Heart (JEM Recording)
146. Blockhead The Aux (Backwoodz Studioz)
147. Hot Spring Water Of a Morning (Music Abuse)
148. Old Dirty Buzzard What a Weird Hill to Die On (Rotten)
149. Leah Marie Mason Honeydew & Hennessy (The 13th EP) 
150. Lüger Revelations of the Sacred Skull (Heavy Psych Italy)