The 30 Best Indie Folk Albums of 2023

Field Medic: light is gone 2

light is gone 2 is framed as a sequel to Kevin Patrick Sullivan’s 2015 debut album as Field Medic, but it was largely born out of an attempt to manipulate the musical approach he established on that first release. Sullivan has largely been a guy with an acoustic guitar and a boombox, but this record seeks to blend digital recording—replete with the attendant synth and drum machine accouterment—into his established palette. While certainly adding variation and, according to Sullivan, kickstarting a rush of creativity, it doesn’t fundamentally change what the project of Field Medic is at its core—a fact that can largely be attributed to Sullivan himself, a creator of such idiosyncrasy and personality that it almost overshadows whatever changes in technique or style he might attempt. If you’ve tracked the many moments of autobiography that run through Field Medic’s discography, then you’re likely aware that most of his aforementioned portrayals of addiction are now sung in the past tense. They are demons with receding shadows, half-remembered nights further blurred by the distance of time and personal growth, but the emptiness of their absence is not as freeing as one might imagine. The stuttering, percussive “everything’s been going so well” is drenched in the kind of guilt one might feel when they are, “too self absorbed and depressed to see everything’s going well,” a kind of self-imposed survivor’s remorse run amok. It’s not that Sullivan suddenly fears honesty, but, rather, the kind of disappointment that might come from everyone’s assumption that you’ve crossed some imaginary finish line. The light might still be gone, but for Sullivan, darkness and light are always relative. —Sean Fennell

Free Range: Practice

The debut album by Free Range—the project of Chicago-based singer-songwriter Sofia Jensen—feels like it’s always existed. “Want to Know,” one of Practice’s singles, exudes a familiarity based on Waxahatchee-esque acoustic guitars and muted drumming while obscuring a lyrical gut punch. By the time the song reveals a fuzzed out, country guitar lead and a strange, tight groove to wrap things up, the heartbreak becomes clear: “Don’t float back up without me / I don’t know how we’re supposed to talk.” Somewhere between the endless comfort of Wild Pink and the tight craftsmanship of those Adrianne Lenker/Buck Meek albums, Practice is an album that shows confidence from the first note. Beyond “Want to Know,” the rest of the record is just as exciting, from the campfire haziness of “All My Thoughts” and the double-tracked vocals on “Traveling Song” to the blurry pianos of “Keep In Time.” With Practice, Jensen takes the strengths of their inspirations (Elliot Smith, Scandinavian forests, David Foster Wallace) and applies them to devastatingly beautiful songs. —Ethan Beck

Greg Mendez: Greg Mendez

“Picking up the things you left / I never thought I’d be so upset” are the lines Greg Mendez uses to open his new, self-titled album. It’s a fitting entrance for the Philadelphian, as he spends the next nine songs putting back together the fragments of his own life—attempting to understand the absurdity of his own truth and what hard damage has met him on the road to clarity. Ever the master of his storytelling craft, Mendez makes a bookend out of imagery that can be plugged into anyone’s own correspondence with the world around them. Greg Mendez is one man’s vulnerable, open book made accessible to anyone who might find something courageous or trusting within it. From drug use to heartbreak to childhood trauma to houselessness, Mendez offers a loving embrace drenched with hindsight to his former self. In turn, the album is not a critique of his past, but an attempt at understanding how it informs his personhood in the present. He populates the tracklist with recoiling and punctuated stories that are as humorous as they are heartbreaking. —Matt Mitchell

Grian Chatten: Chaos For The Fly

The debut solo album from the Fontaines D.C. frontman, Chaos For The Fly is a brilliant, honest effort by Grian Chatten. Rather than feed into the biting arrangements that make Fontaines D.C. so blistering and raw, Chatten taps into the lighter side of his own grit. “Last Time Every Time Forever” is a subtle acoustic tune wrapped in digital backbeats, reverb and heavenly harmonies. “Fairlies” is an uptempo folk carving with jazz energy, while “Salt Throwers Off a Truck” is a strumming odyssey filled out with a buoyant spine of crooning strings. Chatten is miles away from what he and his bandmates did on Skinty Fia last year, but that’s what makes Chaos For The Fly so great. It’s a fresh, gutsy and mature first chapter for the Irish singer/songwriter that’s sure to become a bedrock of European folklore. —Matt Mitchell

Jana Horn: The Window Is the Dream

The tracks on The Window Is The Dream are still as dainty and minimal as ever, but, now, there’s a new edge to all of them. Horn doesn’t get too personal in her storytelling, but she doesn’t need to. The songs evoke visceral emotion through the architecture of her sonic vision. It doesn’t hurt that she has an incredible ecosystem of musicians around her, including Jared Samuel Elioseff, Adam Jones, Jonathan Horne, Daniel Francis Doyle and Sarah La Puerta Gautier. The Window Is The Dream is a bit more electric than Optimism was, thanks to Horne’s splendid guitar work. That aural upgrade pairs well with Horn’s hypnotizing soprano vocals, which are sharper than ever. Though it’s only been a year since Optimism was put back on all of our radars, Horn has grown exponentially between records, making The Window Is The Dream a small triumph at the beginning of—what will likely be—a long, winding career. —Matt Mitchell [Read our full feature]

Kacey Johansing: Year Away

Kacey Johansing’s fifth album is a thing to behold. Year Away came into my orbit earlier this summer, and it’s been in constant rotation. The songs are generous and familiar, as Johansing works through auspicious blends of Laurel Canyon folk rock and brisk, emblematic singer/songwriter. The rewards are exponential, as songs like “Not the Same,” “Old Friend,” “Last Drop” and “Daffodils” will worm their way into your soul and never leave. Johansing has made flying under the radar her hallmark, after years spent working closely with folks like Fruit Bats and Hand Habits. Her solo endeavors, especially records like 2017’s The Hiding and 2020’s No Better Time were lush and comforting; Year Away is her breakout into new and daring oases. —Matt Mitchell

Katie Von Schleicher: A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night

Katie Von Schleicher recorded A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night with Sam Evian and a crew of collaborators she had worked with on other projects, including Baroness bassist Nick Jost and Gabriel Birnbaum, her Wilder Maker bandmate, who did string arrangements here. The result is her most sophisticated and wide-ranging album and arguably her freest. Von Schleicher has the uncertainty she often feels while working on her albums, which sometimes manifests in taut, volatile moments in the music: the contrast between the explosive percussion and her somber vocals on “The Image,” from 2017’s Shitty Hits, for example, or the juxtaposition between her soft voice and the deep sense of anger in her lyrics on “You Remind Me,” from Cosummation. There’s little of that on A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night. These 10 songs feel easy, though they’re certainly not simple. If not for the melancholy tone, “Every Step Is an Ocean” would be breezy, thanks to a limber beat, airy synthesizers and Birnbaums’s string charts, which dart and swirl through the song. Elsewhere, she leans into a deadpan slacker-rock vibe on “Elixir,” which opens with her singing, “I wear becoming like a burlap sack.” A buzzy, 20-second guitar break early in the song gets a reprise of sorts toward the end when Von Schleicher turns it into a string of wordless vocals she sings almost without inflection, and the whole thing is punchy and droll. Toward the end of the album, “Ruby” is as buoyant a song musically as Von Schleicher has written, with blooms of keyboards rising through a metronomic beat, and string parts that come seeping in at the edges with cinematic flair. With lyrics that seem to have a sardonic, mocking edge, it’s not a happy song—Von Schleicher hasn’t reinvented herself or anything—but it’s a compelling listen. That holds true for A Little Touch of Schleicher in the Night as a whole. By some alchemical blend of age, accumulated experience or just the right collaborators in the right setting, Katie Von Schleicher has found a way to be comfortable with herself and her songs, and it shows—just like her sense of humor. —Eric R. Danton

Locate S,1: Wicked Jaw

Christina Schneider’s music has always been an oddity. Whether the subject of analysis is her litany of previous projects—with curious names like Jepeto Solutions and C.E. Schneider’s Genius Grant, or her current, most circulated project, Locate S,1—Schneider’s not one to simplify her music. Across two albums as Locate S,1, her striking admiration for pop music is apparent, but so is her need to wrestle with her intellect. On her last record, 2020’s Personalia, Schneider’s sonic palette was diverse but centered on variations of synth-pop, twisted and restrung with elements of punk, new wave and more. Now, on her third album, Wicked Jaw, the stylistic and subjective floodgates are wider than ever. “I was in hell…and loving it,” offered Schneider on the subject of her childhood. While the phrase “there’s so much to unpack here” is often uttered for albums that are, in actuality, narrow in scope, Wicked Jaw is an inter-dimensional trip through Schneider’s past, present and future. There really is a lot to unpack. All the while, her appreciation for all eras and approaches to pop music arrive through forays into bossa nova, doo-wop and soft rock—all with head-scratching complexity. Sophisticated, twisted embellishments to her pop hooks interrupt the sunshine with interjections of personal and generational trauma, all wrapped up with a healthy existentialism. Whether she is processing something from childhood or something that happened yesterday, she examines it best through intricate, pop-inspired sonic webs. —Devon Chodzin

Mali Velasquez: I’m Green

The debut album from Nashville singer/songwriter Mali Velasquez, I’m Green, is a beautiful, triumphant first affair. Filled with songs written as odes to her mother, the material is intimate and cosmic and uniquely tethered to longtime connections, grief and old wounds. Songs like “Tore” and “Medicine” are dense mementos for the people we’ve lost and the people we’ve yet to meet. “In late October, when daughter Maria comes and she’s sitting on the edge of the hospital bed that you’ll leave us on,” Velasquez sings on “Bobby.” “And when it’s all over, will you forget what I’ve said? Whatever memorial is carved over Amy’s head.” The record is moving, visceral and generous, full of devastating stories that will transport you back to familiar places through sparse instrumentation and gorgeous vignettes of stunning folk-pop. —Matt Mitchell

Maria BC: Spike Field

Spike Field is a dreamy soundscape of the multi-instrumentalist’s inner conflict of past and future self. As a young artist who began the journey of Maria BC during the pandemic, self-reflection has always been deeply embedded in their work. Spike Field confronts the shame of their past to reconcile who they were to be comfortable with who they become. The ambient folk artist’s soft vocals float across the eerie landscape of the raw emotions of “Still” however, they soar in choral passion in “Watcher.” In an album wrought with potent imagery, the album’s namesake provides a quiet contemplation of human communication through the concept of menacing earthworks. The atmospheric album combines Maria BC’s talents as a poet and classically trained vocalist, all emphasized through their passion for experimenting with human sounds. In all its morose beauty, Maria BC provides honest commentary on the painful truth of the shame of growing up. —Olivia Abercrombie [Read our full feature]

Mitski: The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We

Mitski’s seventh album feels, all at once, like a much-needed course correction away from ‘80s-style synths growing staler with each use and like her lowest stakes release yet. The towering expectation and deafening hype that surrounded Laurel Hell seemed to have died down, leaving her free to exhale. The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We finds Mitski breaking new ground, building transcendent songs with the accompaniment of acoustic guitars, pedal steel, a string section and an entire 17-person choir. These resplendent pieces fit together to form fascinating, delicately arranged songs. One of the most striking things about the record is how it succeeds while sacrificing the reliance on melody that undergirds some of Mitski’s best songwriting thus far. There is nothing as electric as “Nobody,” nothing as distorted as “Your Best American Girl.” And yet, this is her finest collection of songs. There’s a beauty to her pastoral vignettes that resonates without the need for traditional pop hooks. It’s not music that’s suited to arenas, and maybe that’s the point. Mitski can do anything she wants to now, and we’re better off under her reign. —Eric Bennett

Mutual Benefit: Growing at the Edges

The latest album from experimental multi-instrumentalist Mutual Benefit, Growing at the Edges, sees Jordan Lee place a coda on a five-years-long effort in growth. The album is a lesson in opening the wounds of old questions and looking for better answers. The song “Little Ways” is a calm, country-driven acoustic track about growing up and out, a fitting intro to the album it rises from. It reads like a mantra, a last glance backwards before the slow trudge into the unknown gets underway. Unhurried and sweet, the track—much like the album altogether—rolls forward on the wheels of its own optimism. “Wasteland Companions” leans heavily into its own lush instrumentals, swirly and saxophonic. It’s replete with xylopones, violins, drums and dreamy piano, with Lee’s light voice riding atop the gentle multi-part wave of end ebbing and flowing backing track. It traces closure and forward-motion after grief and loss; Growing at the Edges is pop construction at its finest. —Miranda Wollen

Nicole Dollanganger: Married in Mount Airy

Canadian-American singer/songwriter Nicole Dollanganger’s latest LP, Married in Mount Airy, is her best work yet. It’s a record where her penchant for gothic folk storytelling and lo-fi, dream-pop textures converge brighter than ever, as Dollanganger takes her atmospheric, lush vocals and pairs them with tranquil, sublime acoustic instrumentation and synthesizer undercurrents. Songs like “Dogwood” and “Bad Man” and “Nymphs Finding the Head of Oprheus” are dynamic and stirring in their own interrogations of devotion, romance and traumatic, air-faded memories. What makes Dollanganger stand out from her peers, however, is how well she seamlessly guides listeners to conclusions through portraits of crushing familiarity, all told through subjects who are, all at once, harrowingly close yet so damningly distant. Married in Mount Airy doesn’t marr the lulls of heartache and uncomfortability, it embraces the cathartic of both and spins it into a darkness worth falling into. —Matt Mitchell

Runnner: like dying stars, we’re reaching out

On like dying stars, we’re reaching out, Noah Weinman is more open to connection but finds himself on the edge of language’s capacity to express emotional truth, reckoning with what he describes as “a signal loss between thought and speech.” His relationship to this uncertainty varies between frustration and tacit curiosity. The first line of the second track “i only sing about food” declares “i’m an idiot, i cried in your car when i couldn’t find the words i was looking for.” The outro of “raincoat,” meanwhile, asks “what’s on your mind? does it fit into language? will it change when you say it?” This act of reckoning also plays out in the record’s sound, as Weinman pulls from an incredible variety of sources to build a world for each track. There’s the hum of an air conditioning unit, the sound of cardboard rubbing against itself, the fuzz of an old voicemail. A current of vocal distortion suggests 22, a Million-era Bon Iver. These are woven together into a lush sound that references not only Weinman’s work with Skullcrusher but an inspiration from late-90s Madonna, creating an immersive terrain for his messages to echo onto. The deluxe edition’s new live versions approach the work from a different angle, peeling back the layers for something new and sparse that keeps the spaciousness intact. On the Yellow House Sessions version of “string,” for instance, careful synths from drummer Ellington Peet warble, adding an unearthly current to the acoustic lineup. The title like dying stars, we’re reaching out references a celestial body’s last rites: A dying star will often send out planetary nebulas in all directions, sometimes for thousands of years, towards the end of its life. This seems like a heady title for Weinman’s focus on earthbound problems, but it’s actually quite fitting, conjuring images of signals from solitary spacecraft. These are brief missives from outer space—most of the songs only last about two or three minutes, with the longest, “runnning in place at the edge of the map,” topping out at just over five. But in each, Weinman toys with ideas of the familiar and the alien, permeating the boundaries between the two. In “plexiglass,” the condensation on car windows turns into “ghosts at my fingertips.” In the music video for “i only sing about food,” extreme closeups of boiling water and grains of rice take on the appearance of explosions in foreign atmospheres. —Annie Parnell

Sarah Mary Chadwick: Messages to God

The key line in “Shitty Town,” the powerful first single from Sarah Mary Chadwick’s new album Messages To God, comes towards the song’s rousing finale as she belts out the words, “Yeah I know I’m angry / why aren’t you?” It’s a question for the ages but feels especially appropriate nowadays when there’s so much to be furious about and so few people seem to notice. For the protagonist of this song, though, it’s a cry of desperation as they lament their circumstances and the awful place they’re stuck in. The depth of feeling in the song is only made more powerful via Chadwick’s quavering vocal delivery, which often sounds like the trumpet blast taking down Jericho’s walls, and the woodwinds that gives the music its gorgeous ache. The rest of the record speaks to such a truth, as Chadwick is at an apex here, on her brightest and boldest entry yet—a true feat, given that her catalog is packed to the brim with envelope-pushing brilliance. —Robert Ham

Sufjan Stevens: Javelin

Although the album’s promotional cycle would have you believe Javelin is a straightforward extension of the gentle melancholy of Carrie & Lowell, that’s a slight misnomer. Rather, Sufjan Stevens’ latest blends the synth-driven freakouts of 2010’s The Age of Adz with his quieter endeavors. Most of Javelin concerns itself with past wrongdoings and the physical atonement, much of it self-induced, that its narrator undergoes as a result. “Give myself as a sacrifice / Genuflecting ghost as I kiss the floor,” Stevens’ opening couplet of “Genuflecting Ghost” goes, making immolation sound peaceful with arpeggiated acoustic guitars. Later in the song, he’s begging someone to “bind” and “insult” him as he “praise[s] your name.” This contrast of disturbing imagery and gorgeous, musical tapestries has long been one of Stevens’ strengths as a songwriter. The way he illustrates hopelessness is so affecting that, despite his quiet voice and instrumentation, his music refuses to recede into the background. It commands your attention in every conceivable way. —Grant Sharples

Sun June: Bad Dream Jaguar

Bad Dream Jaguar is a collection of songs threading their way through the uncertainty. The Austin band made the album during a period of dislocation: guitarist Stephen Salisbury moved from Texas to North Carolina in 2020, changing the nature of his creative (and romantic) relationship with singer and bandleader Laura Colwell until she joined him in 2022. The dozen tracks on Bad Dream Jaguar seek to make sense of that distance, their solitude and, in an overarching way, a fractured nostalgia for what had come before—and the often painful work of letting it go. It’s a subtle album, built around gentle, dream-like musical arrangements that belie the tougher sentiments underpinning these songs. The narrators here are often trying to figure out where they stand, in relation to a significant other, themselves, the past, the future. “You were searching for a reason to be mad / Babe, I got plenty of them,” Colwell sings on “Mixed Bag,” her soft voice wrapped in layers of guitar, ghostly backing vocals and a piano vamp that lands just so between lyrics. Befitting an album that took shape around a long-distance relationship, there’s a lot of road imagery on Bad Dream Jaguar. Colwell sings about long drives and headlights in the distance, and the lyrics often play like the reveries that blossom between the highway lines on road trips. She lets her mind wander through remembered scenes and settings that have the feel of creased snapshots she found tucked away in the glove compartment. Colwell is fighting to stay awake behind the wheel, and true to herself, while singing along in the car on “John Prine.” On “Washington Square,” her narrator is remembering when she and a partner were young and foolish “back when all the things to come hadn’t yet,” while “Sage” finds her holding tight to glimpses of the past while staving off the melancholy of a solitary present. —Eric R. Danton [Read our full feature]

superviolet: Infinite Spring

Steve Ciolek has seen America many times over, but he’s content with staying in Ohio for as long as the state will hold both him and his buds. When he was fronting the Sidekicks—the Buckeye State’s beloved coterie of emo, power-pop sharks—hubs like Chicago, Brooklyn and Philadelphia were always destinations, but never fantasies of a possible forever. Infinite Spring, Ciolek’s debut album as superviolet, has the blood and hope of Ohio roaring through its veins. Ciolek’s best pal and longtime collaborator Zac Little—the frontman of fellow-Buckeye folk-rock legends Saintseneca—played bass, theremin, wind harp, solo freak and “digital goober” on the album, while his Sidekicks co-CEO Climer took to the drums, shaker and tambourine. Ciolek’s wife Kosoma Jensen provides harmonies and clarinet, and her cat Fry—which Ciolek has become the father of by adoptive proxy—meows and chews on “Good Ghost.” Ciolek is one of the best songwriters we’ve got, and him having a relentless curiosity is what makes Infinite Spring so refreshingly brilliant and poetic. The album works through the existential crisis that comes with falling in love, outgrowing your own band and living with your own mortality—all while trying to figure out who you are in a post-pandemic world. —Matt Mitchell [Read our full feature]

The Tallest Man on Earth: Henry St.

During the pandemic, Kristian Matsson, aka The Tallest Man on Earth, would take song requests online and flip them into his own renditions in mere minutes. He played everything from a banjo translation of Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You” to Vampire Weekend’s “Unbelievers,” fashioning them from shoegaze and pop rock into folk, Americana and bluegrass standards. For a small grain of time, Matsson was a beacon of community during a moment in history when community wasn’t possible—a perpendicular universe to what he’s constructed on his newest album, Henry St. Covering songs has always been familiar ground for Matsson. Sitting at the piano or plucking other peoples’ songs on the guitar is how he, like many of us, eventually vaulted into doing his own songwriting—no matter what it looked like. The team of musicians that Matsson assembled for the new album includes the Dead Tongues’ Ryan Gustafson on guitar, lap steel and ukulele, TJ Maiani on drums, Bon Iver’s CJ Camerieri and Rob Moose on trumpet, French horn and strings, Phil Cook on keys and Landlady’s Adam Schatz on saxophone. Overseeing the whole thing was Sylvan Esso’s Nick Sanborn, whose Durham studio Betty’s is where Henry St. came together. Every chapter and crosswalk on Henry St. looks and sounds different. It’s a kaleidoscopic pastiche of discovery: the stark piano of the title track melts into a ukulele dance on “In Your Garden Still”; the motivational drumming on “New Religion” quiets into a blanket of guitar and organ on closer “Foothills.” Gone are the days of guitar, guitar, guitar. Matsson’s music-making gift has never been so emblematic. —Matt Mitchell [Read our full feature]

Tiny Ruins: Ceremony

Since 2009, New Zealand band Tiny Ruins have been steadily making good, blissful indie rock. Led by vocalist and guitarist Hollie Fullbrook, the band’s first record since 2019’s Olympic Girls, Ceremony was catalyzed by singles “Dorothy Bay,” “The Crab / Waterbaby” and “Out of Phase” The tracks lean into water imagery and folk instrumentation that spawn atop a smooth, hypnotic arrangement. Fullbrook’s lyrics are evocative and wondrous, and her vocals are soulful and weightless. “By hook or by the book, I can’t explain / How I miss the flowers made from cellophane / Little hands and paws, they trial and train / Keep you sifting sand in the outer lane,” she sings on “Dorothy Bay.” Ceremony is a great reintroduction to a beloved, steadfast indie band that demanded to not get lost amongst the shuffle of early 2023 releases. —Matt Mitchell