Sam’s Top 10 Albums of 2023
10. a.s.o. – a.s.o.
Label: Low Lying Records
Genre: Trip-Hop
a.s.o.’s new and first record is full of things that just work. The ‘My Baby’s Got It Out For Me’ bassline. The neon-washed synth on ‘Love in the Darkness’. That woodwind (sounds like an Armenian duduk) solo on ‘Rain Down’. The whole concept of going trip-hop and making it genuinely compelling in 2023. I could go on, and I will. The Bondian chord progression on ‘Cold Feeling’. The dry, slinky drums on ‘Understand’. Alia Serer-O’Neill’s droll, disaffected vocal, which paints each song in a timeless greyscale that matches the album’s cover art. The crystalline form that same voice takes on ‘True’. a.s.o. bleeds cool, and I suspect it will remain cool throughout the years, even when trip-hop returns customarily to the shadows of popularity.
9. Nídia – 95 MINDJERES
Label: Principe
Genre: Kuduro
I only discovered Príncipe, Lisbon’s most exciting electronic label, earlier this year. They are not a new entity, though, having been steadily releasing dance music from the Afro-Portuguese diaspora since the early 2010s. Over that time, Príncipe have cultivated their own community about as strongly as any label I could name. The brilliant cover art for every release is created by a lone friend, Márcio Matos, and browsing through the label’s discography you notice certain producer names over and over again. One of those names is Nídia, whose 95 MINDJERES album presents some of the most refreshing kuduro and batida you can hear in 2023. Chaos is intrinsic within these genres – layers of drum patterns in competing time signatures interlock to create loping grooves – but Nídia’s distinctly minimal approach sets 95 MINDJERES apart. The rhythms are busy and hypnotic, but her musical arrangements are charmingly spacious and subtly melodic. It manages to sound lively but never crowded, the kind of heads-up music that lends you a renewed appreciation for the natural world around you.
8. Niontay – Dontay’s Inferno
Label: 10k
Genre: Cloud Rap
Niontay has a few things going for him. His name, Niontay Hicks, is one of the hardest on the planet. His production (under the alias Sexafterchurch, potentially the hardest stage name on the planet) is intoxicating. He runs with the one of the strongest crowds in hip-hop, guys like MIKE, Earl Sweatshirt, 454, Mavi, basically anyone associated with the 10k label. And he has this distinctive, infectious way of rapping from his cheeks. It’s sort of hard to describe – listen to the start of Dontay’s Inferno and you’ll see what I mean. Niontay sounds like he raps with his mouth permanently stretched into a wide grin, as if he could burst out laughing at any moment. It’s hard not to get swept up by that kind of energy. Elsewhere, he interpolates ‘Hey There Delilah’ (of all songs) and makes it sound genuinely tender and sweet. Most importantly, though, the bars are top-notch (‘THANK ALLAH’ foremost) and the hooks are uncommonly sticky.
7. Tammo Hesselink – Beam
Label: Nous’klaer
Genre: Techno
Really quite simply, the best techno I have heard all year. Very Dutch, very precise, containing only traces of melody. Tammo Hesselink doesn’t try to hide anything about this album. Even its title, Beam, is immediately fitting – these songs are meant for those contemplative dancefloor moments just before the light begins to poke through the club windows. On many tracks, with about a minute to go, a warm, hopeful pad seeps into the mix as if it were the sun incarnate. Something like aural pathetic fallacy. Gorgeous.
6. Pangaea – Changing Channels
Label: Hessle Audio
Genre: UK Bass
I’m not sure a producer has ever done more good for the DJ collective in a single year than Pangaea in 2023. Changing Channels is a 7-song album with seven certified club smashes. Most of the time you’re lucky if an album of dance music produces one or two, even if that album is very good. Every single song on this record could be a landmark, crowd-unifying, dancefloor-filling moment in a set. ‘Installation’ has been the one so far, inescapable throughout the European summer (so I have heard; I was not there) and for fair reason – it's structurally sound but also giddy, cheeky, and downright delirium-inducing when those chopped up vocals come in. That said, you could lay down any other track and it would be just as raucously effective. If I had to spotlight one, it’s hard to go past the title track. The speed garage drums are delightful, but it’s those pulsing, turn-of-the-century house chords that really do a number on me, holding just the right amount of harmonic tension to get bodies really moving.
5. boygenius – the record
Label: Interscope
Genre: Indie Rock
I really didn’t think we were ever going to get the record. I thought the EP was a moment of spontaneous, solitary perfection. I thought Phoebe and Julien weren’t really friends anymore (I checked both users’ Instagrams). It had been five years. Imagine my surprise when boygenius turned out to be the runaway breakout stars of 2023. The band have gotten so big, so acclaimed and so fanatically beloved that some people are starting to get annoyed by them. Let that not draw attention away from the music, and more specifically the writing. This is an album devoted to the radiant love and hope offered by friendship, but the other side of both love and hope is fear, and boygenius ruminate on fear with rare tenderness. On ‘Revolution 0’, Phoebe turns a plea for connection into a whispered, inward lullaby – even when love is slipping from your grasp, sometimes the only thing you can do is go to sleep. Later, on ‘We’re In Love’, the record’s beating heart, Lucy offers gentle defiance at the prospect of a future without her two bandmates: “I can’t imagine you without the same smile in your eyes / there is something about you that I will always recognise”. And so boygenius proceed with steely, watery eyes.
4. Amaarae – Fountain Baby
Label: Golden Angel
Genre: Afrobeat
Without question or compare, the most fun album of the year. Fountain Baby is defined by incandescent queer joy and coloured by sumptuous, vibrant production. Amaarae flows effortlessly over various flavours of Afrobeat and opens up her sound to more contemporary R&B and alt-rock (on ‘Come Home To God’), even unleashing a breathless punk breakdown on ‘Sex, Violence, Suicide’. Her pop instincts are watertight, but nothing about the album feels laborious or calculated. The album revels in chaos and unbridled pleasure, never taking itself too seriously. On ‘Counterfeit’, she cheekily borrows the instrumental to Clipse’s ‘Wamp Wamp’ (2006) and absolutely fucking annihilates the beat. All over the record, she drops lyrical standouts like “I like my coffee with some head in the morning / two shots!” for the sheer thrill of it. It is a breathtaking experience. For forty minutes, Amaarae sets all inhibitions aside and asserts herself as a star before our eyes.
3. billy woods & Kenny Segal – Maps
Label: Backwoodz Studioz
Genre: Underground Hip-Hop
Kenny Segal’s beats on Maps – all wandering bass and curious space – are excellent, yet in writing this blurb I feel compelled to acknowledge him briefly and move on. That’s because billy woods’ dizzying, masterful performance is all I can think about when the album is playing and after it’s done. Hearing him rap in 2023 is a cinematic, transfixing experience. He moves through time, place and reference at a hurried pace, lingering on a scene every once in a while to let its emotion percolate. He returns to certain subjects – food, weed, and life on the road – frequently and in feverish detail. Even though he sounds audibly weary here from touring, the album flows with an unspoken intensity. Partly, this is because woods is in complete control of his craft, but that’s not really the whole story. “In the spot, I’m tense / I’m smiling like I’m not, I’m surfing through the set”, he raps on ‘Soundcheck’, capturing the nervous energy that runs through the record like a current beneath the surface. Sometimes it imbues his bars with urgency (‘Soft Landing’), elsewhere it tinges his words with sadness (‘Facetime’). On a few occasions, it charges an ambiguous line with a profound sense of unease. On ‘Agriculture’, there’s something in the way woods raps “cup bitter at the bottom, I had to learn to toss the dregs” that pangs with lost innocence. And on ‘Houdini’, almost prophetically, the hook seems to hang in suspended animation: “I was high all day, I escaped”. In these moments, woods’ words hit like quiet puzzles, ringing in your ear long after Maps has finished.
2. MIKE – Burning Desire
Label: 10k
Genre: Abstract Hip-Hop
One of my favourite ever records is MIKE’s tears of joy from 2019, an album devoted to his mother’s memory in the wake of her passing. It is hauntingly beautiful, but its title is a little misleading, for the album invokes tears that are not so much joyful as truly heartbroken. Those tears of joy are better reserved for Burning Desire, MIKE’s longest and most significant release to date. It arrives at a transitional moment, with more eyes on him than ever before following the glowing success of Young World 3, his homegrown festival, and his recent collaboration with the Alchemist and Wiki, Faith is a Rock. MIKE’s answer to this attention is the fullest expression of his art to date. On Burning Desire, MIKE looks forward and backward in equal measure, infusing his production with newfound warmth and radiance while reflecting on what the past years have meant for himself and his community. It is a casually stunning rap album with a defiant love at its core. “Mama told me about this curse, how I was not above it / I honour her with every word and never swap the subject,” MIKE raps on the title track. This time around, the name of the album feels entirely appropriate.
1. Wednesday – Rat Saw God
Label: Dead Oceans
Genre: Alternative Rock
It couldn’t be any other. There was a moment where sheer doe-eyed admiration for MIKE made me think that Wednesday might not take the number one slot, but in truth this is the sickest record I have heard in years. Rat Saw God is a swirling mix of 90s alt-rock, alt-country and slowcore that sounds like grassfires, rust and dehydrated piss. It is rip-roaring, gripping and deeply human. The album carves out space for both violence and tenderness, sometimes within the same song (see the mind-boggling ‘Bull Believer’), while Karly Hartzman mines the ugliest parts of the world around her for their hidden beauty. Her songwriting is magnetic and something to behold. Many writers spend a lifetime failing to pen a line as morbidly funny as “Every daughter of God / Has a little bad sometimes” from ‘Bath County’. She does it nearly every track. In some spots, she is also disarmingly sweet: “Thank God that I was chosen to deserve you / because I’m the girl that you were chosen to deserve,” she sings on ‘Chosen to Deserve’, 2023’s finest love song. Thankfully, Hartzman’s writing is matched only by her band’s mastery of rock songcraft. Every word, every riff feels momentous. You can’t look away from it. Rat Saw God is a triumph.
Below is a playlist of my favourite songs of 2023, unranked. Thanks for reading!
Sam Gollings
23 December 2023