The 30 Best Rock Albums of 2023
Featuring The Rolling Stones, Bully, Wednesday, Ratboys and more.
Music Lists Best Albums
What constitutes a “rock” album in 2023 has never been more unclear. I’ve long been under the impression that it has something to do with guitar-driven, strong-beat arrangements. But even then, with the addition of new subgenres every passing year, the line gets more and more blurred. Luckily, Paste has quite a few more genre lists to put out this year, so narrowing down what’s this and what’s that is a much simpler task around these parts. For this ranking, we are looking at our definition of “rock music,” and our criteria is likely going to be inconsistent in some places. But if you’re wondering why punk, experimental, electronica, alt-country and art-pop albums aren’t on this list, well, you’ll be treated to something for those categories before 2023 is over.
And even then, narrowing this down to just 30 “rock” entries was a nearly impossible task. But we’ve assembled a list of more than two-dozen of the best guitar-driven, face-melting projects we could think of without stepping too far into the orbits of country, punk and pop—which means you’ll see familiar faces like Geese, Bully, The Rolling Stones and more in here. So, without further ado, here are Paste’s 30 best rock albums of 2023. —Matt Mitchell, Music Editor
Being Dead: When Horses Would Run
When Horses Would Run is a special record to behold. From the Link Ray guitar rumbles on opener “The Great American Picnic” to the closer “Oklahoma Nova Scotia”—which arrives like Neil Young and Daniel Johnston had a baby out of psychedelic wedlock—there is something on this album for everyone who presses play or shuffle. At 13 tracks, it’s all killer no filler. Even a short arrangement like “God vs. Bible,” which only contains two lines (If God owned the bible, he’d read it everyday) repeated three times, is lush and harmonious. Sandwiched somewhere in-between gospel music and Devo before Devo discovered synth-pop, Being Dead are cowboys getting their rocks off on mad-lib verses and drugged-out backdrops. There is discovery and curiosity at every turn, a swift detour from any of their rock ‘n’ roll contemporaries who fall into a lulling sonic familiarity with every new project. Being Dead expel all instances of psych-folk pretentiousness across this baker’s dozen of weirdo-concertos. When Horses Would Run is an authentic, dexterous, impressionable stroke of brilliance from three friends who can’t help but make awing music when in company with each other. In a past life, perhaps Gumball and Falcon Bitch met—as they like to joke—as chimney sweeps, shoemakers or acrobats, and that bond feels as mythical as it is touted to be. —Matt Mitchell [Read our full review]
Blondshell: Blondshell
Most of Blondshell was written at the genesis of COVID in 2020, as a result of, as Blondshell puts it, “not a lot going on and having a lot of big feelings that I need to talk about.” She sings like a classically trained vocalist while injecting her charisma with the bravado of Courtney Love and the pop likability of Avril Lavigne. As a songwriter, she instills a complexity throughout the record that perfectly mirrors her own humanity. She is vulnerable, funny, painfully honest and doesn’t hide behind vague language. Her work is a true foil to that of folks who love metaphors. No two songs sound alike, yet Blondshell is not a collage of subgenres. Instead, it’s Blondshell tinkering with her own renditions of sonic palettes previously mastered by the artists she got really stoked on during the pandemic, like Hole, Nirvana and Patti Smith. It’s indie pop fused with grunge, but it also, thoroughly, rebuffs getting lost among other ’90s alternative imitations. That’s all thanks, in most part, to Blondshell’s songwriting and compositional finesse, both of which allow her to attach a glaze of bubbly acoustic guitar and synths atop the heavy lyrical shit that might necessitate a litany of spell-binding distortion. Blondshell is a triumphant debut from the next indie superstar. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a project that’s more confessional, urgent or needed than this one. —Matt Mitchell [Read our full Best of What’s Next feature]
Bully: Lucky For You
“It’s unattractive for me to burden you with shame,” sings Alicia Bognanno about halfway through Lucky For You, her fourth album as Bully. She shouts the line with the kind of exhaustion and straightforwardness that we come to expect from Bully. With 2020’s Sugaregg, Bognanno turned her band into a solo project and pushed onward with a blurry collection of cathartic, tired songs. Three years later, Bognanno picks up where she left off with Lucky For You, another strong collection of anthemic post-grunge that doubles as Bully’s poppiest record so far. But this album’s catchiness runs contrary to Bognanno’s strongest suit, which is writing about varying forms of disappointment. Bognanno has always been an expert at pairing her chagrin to fuzzy rock songs, but Lucky For You likely has some of her most muscular tunes yet. In the explosive, shouted chorus of “Hard to Love,” the catchy bass lick of “How Will I Know,” and the pummeling drum intro of “Days Move Slow,” Bognanno clearly wants the smoldering, crunching textures of this record to ring out in the listener’s memory. Between images of black holes, shades of blue, and pledges to “never get fucked up again,” the most memorable thing here is her intensifying honesty and lyrical dexterity. Bognanno’s writing for Bully has always sat atop the balance of visceral and ephemeral. On Lucky For You, that tightrope balance is a beautiful achievement. —Eric Bennett [Read our full cover story]
Chris Farren: Doom Singer
Chris Farren has been thinking about movie endings. On his third album, Doom Singer, he shares his ideal conclusion: “Everything turns out great for me / There’s no discomfort or conflict.” It’s a fitting idea for the LA songwriter to be caught up in. Through his work in pop punk bands like Fake Problems and Antarctigo Vespucci, Farren has focused closely on chronicling situations of social and romantic discomfort. It’s on solo albums like Can’t Die and Born Hot where he’s anchored each lyric of clever self-deprecation in classic songcraft, wailing guitar parts and quieter songs that plainly display his feelings. Doom Singer stays true to those strengths, combining Farren’s bombastic power-pop instincts with a new round of concerns, situations, and effortless choruses. Doom Singer solidifies itself as Farren’s tightest release yet, building on his previous strong suits like unshakable choruses and memorable lyrical anecdotes. After a string of records this strong, it’s apparent that he deserves the cinematic ending he’s been hoping for. —Ethan Beck [Read our full feature]
Cory Hanson: Western Cum
As I lay on my couch and allow myself to be fully ensconced within the world Cory Hanson has built on his latest record, Western Cum, I am transported to an alternate dimension. It’s not just an ace title; this record turns me inside out. I stick a pair of devil’s horns up to the heavens as Hanson careens into a firewall of riffs and sings about sardine-sized submarines and cocaine taped to a set of balls. That in no way is meant to imply that Hanson is not taking himself seriously on Western Cum. In fact, the truth is wholly the opposite. The album is a meticulous, thoughtful ode to the guitar-forward rock ‘n’ roll that can make Baby Boomer dads quake in their own wetness and convulse into uncontrollable head-banging. From the very first lick, in a moment where the musical zeitgeist has never needed old school rock ‘n’ roll so deeply, Western Cum heeds the call. —Matt Mitchell [Read our full feature]
Cut Worms: Cut Worms
Cut Worms embodies traditional Americana in the purest form: It’s jangly, catchy, folksy and a little bit pissed off. Sprinkled amidst the twanging love pleas and swinging piano riffs are explorations of a real, endemic hurt which, for decades, the most talented and brave among us have disentangled from this country’s DNA and interwoven into art. Turn to “Take It and Smile,” a bouncy indictment against that special American hatred that seems to fill the air these days. “When it gets worse all the while, how can I just take it and smile? All the blind hatred so vile, all the pain, just take it and smile,” Max Clarke croons in a manner that is so upbeat that you hardly catch the gut-punch of what he’s saying. It’s a sneak-attack; a right hook to the temple on a gorgeous spring day. Similar worry is afoot on “Too Bad,” a gorgeously rich, guitar-based tapestry of discontent. Clarke sighs, “Deep inside the engine room, waves upon the frozen beach like a riptide. All control now is drifting so far out of reach.” That same upset, the anger that’s defined Clarke’s American world, slips in and out with so little fuss you hardly register its searing pathos. When you do, though, it adds a new layer to Cut Worms—one that’s tricky to pull off genuinely, and one which Clarke has become an expert at crafting. —Miranda Wollen [Read our full feature]
Diners: DOMINO
The latest record from LA singer/songwriter Blue Broderick—who performs as Diners—is set to be one of the best, if not the absolute best, rock records of 2023. Teased by singles “The Power,” “Domino” and “Someday I’ll Go Surfing,” DOMINO is a beautiful amalgam of everything that made power-pop chart-topping and accessible in the 1960s. But the sound doesn’t stop there for Diners, as the record is a lesson on shredding with a modern imprint. Broderick is one of the best singer/songwriters working today, and her finesse and penmanship on DOMINO. From beginning to end, there are no fractures. It’s a record glossed over with an immense bubblegum foundation hiding a dream-pop skeleton that’s shining inside. —Matt Mitchell [Read our full feature]
Geese: 3D Country
Two years ago, the Brooklyn quintet—vocalist Cameron Winter, guitarists Gus Green and Foster Hudson, bassist Dom DiGesu and drummer Max Bassin—exploded onto the scene with Projector, a daring, awing debut that everyone in music circles became (rightfully) obsessed with—to some degree or another. With an artillery of post-punk, stadium anthems and energetic, Y2K garage rock, Geese perfected a sound that is as meticulous as krautrock and as titanic as cowboy chords set ablaze by 10-foot-tall amplifiers. Fast-forward to 2023, and the band’s second offering—3D Country—obliterates any notion of a “sophomore slump,” as the Brooklynites have crafted an ambitious, intricate and far-ranging LP of seismic proportions. Standout tracks like “Cowboy Nudes,” “Crusades” and “Mysterious Love” dazzle in how unbound to each other they are. Surfing between remnants of Squid and the Rolling Stones, Geese never linger too long in any artifact they may decide to hold up to the light. It’s all vignettes of brief experimentation that coalesce into a greater vision: No influence is off-limits, nor is what Geese may begin to transform their palette into. The centerpiece of the album is the seven-minute concerto “Undoer,” which combs through trash-rock textures, abrasive drums and soloing axes while Winter cuts glass with a piercing octave that is as noble as it is spell-binding to witness unfold in real time. All at once theatrical, vicious, heartfelt and daring, 3D Country is a brilliant, miraculous assemblage of stone cold rock ‘n’ roll. —Matt Mitchell [Read our full cover story]
Guided By Voices: Nowhere To Go But Up
With their third album from this year (and 39th overall), Nowhere To Go But Up, Pollard takes a lyric from an older song in the repertoire, “Fine To See You” (from the band’s Who’s Next-sized 2001 opus Isolation Drills). It’s interesting to consider the source, as the completion of that line in the song is: “You know that for I tell you.” In context with the absolutely unprecedented winning streak Pollard and the current version of Guided By Voices have been on, he wouldn’t be wrong in feeling that way with the strength of this collection of songs. It’s like he pointed to left field and launched a home run that connected with a U.F.O. trying to get closer to all of the beautiful commotion. The album is an unabashed, bombastic and unapologetic statement of purpose from one of America’s greatest living songwriters. Songs like “Puncher’s Parade” and “For The Home” are small triumphs in melody that provide sleight of hand over the building arrangements underneath. Before you know it, you’re humming along to the tune and pumping your fist rather than noticing just how many complex parts are moving all at once. —Pat King [Read our full review]
Home Is Where: the whaler
When the presence of destruction—from a pandemic to the creep of environmental decay to the tacit attempts at genocide of trans individuals—becomes prevalent, for some—it becomes background noise. Frontwoman Brandon MacDonald turns it into anything but with a repeated scream: “everyday feels like 9/11.” The cry pierces the midpoint of the whaler, Home Is Where’s ambitiously self-proclaimed “concept record about getting used to things getting worse,” but MacDonald’s performance argues that adjustment doesn’t equal complacency. It rattles the relative quiet surrounding either side of “everyday feels like 9/11,” like a moment of sudden lucidity about all the bullshit endured before the first wail erupts. This is where the whaler thrives: feeding off the same ceaselessly roiling possibility that made i became birds more than just another fifth wave emo debut. On the whaler, Home Is Where can be post-hardcore maniacs on “everyday feels like 9/11,” before quickly switching gears to the alt-country slide guitars of “daytona 500.” But it’s MacDonald’s commanding howls and yelps, alongside her jagged lyrical descriptiveness, that anchor each maneuver, complemented by guitarist Tilley Komorny’s fluid shifts in accentuating every disparate narrative. —Natalie Marlin [Read our full review]
Hotline TNT: Cartwheel
Over 30 years after that fertile era for shoegaze, Hotline TNT does justice to the genre’s communal roots. Their second album Cartwheel is a glowing achievement of what shoegaze is capable of. For the naysayers who tease the genre’s notorious introversion, Cartwheel is a fierce disproof. The record bundles together the distortion and crackle of classics like Loveless and Souvlaki with the ethos of community that has always been equally as important in the history of that misunderstood genre. The drum break into the chorus of “I Know You” smacks like the drummer is three feet away. “Maxine” basks in its layers of guitar that sound blown-out through small amps. “Spot Me” builds on a drum-and-bass beat until it smashes into what feels like the climax of a live set. In short, Cartwheel sounds like the best audio-engineered basement show you’ve ever been to. Outside of what Cartwheel means or represents in the shoegaze canon, the record does the trick that has made the genre so enduring for over three decades: It imbues each wave of guitar and pulse of sound with Will Anderson’s emotiveness. Shoegaze sounds huge because it feels massive, a maxim Anderson commits to all across Cartwheel. When he admits “there’s a lot in this song that’s not in my diary” on “History Channel,” it comes as no surprise. It’s right there in the way he plays. —Andy Steiner [Read our full feature]
Hurry: Don’t Look Back
The sonic palette of Hurry is a familiar one. Built upon the guitar tones of Gin Blossoms and the atmosphere of Teenage Fanclub, Scottoline’s songs exist in conversation with every band who’s ever tried to take the guitar pop of yesteryear and inject new emotions into them. There’s a little bit of the Byrds, a little Matthew Sweet and plenty of The Lemonheads to go around. Like every great power pop record before, there are guitar solos that duplicate a song’s vocal melody, vocal harmonies tinged with a chorus effect and ideally sludgy drumwork that leaves the hi-hat half-open. At certain points, it appears like the band is playing with a big dial labeled “power pop” and repeatedly turning it up. If you enjoyed their 2021 record Fake Ideas, you’ll find plenty of similar territory being tread here. But Don’t Look Back manages to sustain its vision for about 45 minutes, a minor miracle for a record with such familiar textures. —Ethan Beck [Read our full review]
King Krule: Space Heavy
The fourth LP from King Krule—Space Heavy—is, in no short terms, one of his very best. Tapping into a similar prolificness as he did on 2017’s The OOZ, Archy Marshall’s world-building is one of exquisite proportions. What’s most-beautiful about Space Heavy, however, is his attentiveness to the grace of love. On opener “Flimsier,” Marshall sings delicately unlike he ever has before; “Seaforth” zeroes in on finding hope amid a collapsing world; “That Is My Life, That Is Yours” finds him reckoning with longing. Space Heavy isn’t a stark departure from the place that Marshall was from on 2020’s Man Alive! No, it’s an expansion of soft reflections coupled with his complex, ambitious devotion to jazz-rock. Don’t let songs titled “Empty Stomach Space Cadet” and “Hamburgerphobia” fool you; Space Heavy is a benchmark from one of the greatest songwriters we’ve got. —Matt Mitchell [Read our full cover story]
Local Natives: Time Will Wait For No One
As its title suggests, Time Will Wait For No One is a reflective LP. Local Natives’ fifth record comes from a period of tumult for the group, one that nearly saw their dissolution as a band. COVID and a slew of personal metamorphoses left the decade-long friends in a place of near-implosion. The result is a sprawling, multivalent record tracking the band’s rediscovery of their sound – and their friendship. Through group therapy and socially-distanced jam sessions, the group clawed their way back toward each other and the sound they loved. That effort shines through on Time Will Wait For No One, a thoughtful, poignant track on young adulthood and the beautiful, tiny lacerations that accompany it. It’s Local Natives’ most meaningful, mature record to date. —Miranda Wollen [Read our full feature]
MJ Lenderman: And the Wind (Live and Loose!)
And the Wind (Live and Loose!) is a modern-day Live Rust. If you don’t like that comparison, I don’t care. In recent years, live records have lost their luster. For so long, they were not just merely companion pieces to more polished, audible studio albums. They used to be singular achievements that captured a distinctive portrait of a beloved artist on-stage. And much of that change comes via musicians preferring to track live projects in a stripped-down sense, attempting to breathe a much more discernible, acoustic life into songs that exist in more ferocious measures elsewhere. In MJ Lenderman’s case, (Live and Loose!) could standalone as its own unique release, and I say we oughta let it. All of these songs, save for the Wind’s cover of “Long Black Veil,” exist someplace else in Lenderman canon already. We’ve heard these tracks before and we love them all dearly, but an album like this casts a wide net of imperfections, tweaks and vignettes of finesse that could only truly exist in the confines of a live recording. Though it’s true that this is not a “new” record, it’s still a crucial addition to not just Lenderman’s discography, but to the compendium of contemporary live material altogether as we know it. —Matt Mitchell [Read our full review]
Model/Actriz: Dogsbody
I dare you to find another act that more powerfully barrelled into 2023 than Brooklyn, NY four-piece Model / Actriz did on their February debut LP Dogsbody. At just a minute into opening track “Donkey Show,” the drums kick in and ignite a fire that burns strong until the last note. For bassist Aaron Shapiro, the principle guiding the group’s manic debut was simple: “Everything is a drum.” And sure, Model / Actriz is a post-punk outfit, but they distinguish themselves from their peers through sheer groove. The album doesn’t just rock, it throbs, every beat moving you closer to the next climax. Cole Hayden’s queer bravado is dripping with sinister eroticism. Listening to Hayden’s throaty and sneering delivery, you oscillate between being turned on and being terrified. He deadpans about the sexual activity of blood-sucking insects on single “Mosquito,” singing “Come pluck me out come pluck me out… with a body count / higher than a mosquito.” The group certainly has a flair for the dramatic, and the whole thing turns out like some sort of twisted dance punk rock opera—though I don’t know if I could bear to watch its brilliant ugliness on a stage. —Madelyn Dawson
파란노을 (Parannoul): After the Magic
The third LP from South Korean rocker Parannoul floated greatly under the radar for all of 2023—a fate that so many January releases often fall into. But, After the Magic is a bountiful project that never ceases to awe, no matter where that titular charm goes. “Arrival,” “Parade,” “Insomnia” and “Sketchbook” are among some of the most interesting rock music of the year altogether, and you can sense that the Seoul musician has a handle on textures that move him the most: synthesizers are a mattress beneath shoegaze tones draped in emo intricacies and bedroom pop syndication. After the Magic is practically undefinable, but it’s through these dense, climactic chapters that you can see just how crucial Parannoul is to the very fabric of the rock genre altogether. The MIDI present makes space for the shredding, while each song casts a larger-than-life emotional trance on listeners. For a record as monolithic as After the Magic, the next step for Parannoul can be in any direction he pleases. —Matt Mitchell
Ratboys: The Window
On The Window, Ratboys showcase, over and over again, their considerable skill for making songs that are emotionally raw and sonically polished, intrinsically rootsy and invariably catchy. “Morning Zoo” seems to burst from the speakers as Julia Steiner asks “How long does it take / To find the peace that I want?” against a heart-swelling, Wilco-style country-rock jam—while the heavily fuzzed-out “Empty” sports a brief-but-killer guitar solo and answers a different question: “What if Charly Bliss was part of the Elephant 6 Collective?” And opening track “Making Noise for the Ones You Love” kicks things off with a propulsive guitar riff that builds tension as Steiner first sings about looking through a window—a theme that will return throughout the album. Elsewhere, Ratboys alternate between sticking to their strengths (such as the spacious, sparkling “It’s Alive!”) and experimenting with, for example, programmed percussion on “Break” and dramatic violin parts on “Bad Reaction,” both of which would fit snugly and aptly on a Death Cab For Cutie album. Here, you can easily envision the world of new sounds and ideas that opened up to Ratboys when they met up with Chris Walla, and it’s worth noting that both parties did a good job of adding “stuff” to the mix, but not “too much stuff.” It’s the way the band has dared to sound all along, put forth by an unyielding vision from the foursome. Those are the kinds of choices that inevitably come up when a band is writing bigger and better songs, recording in new spaces, trying new things, pushing itself outward and its sound forward. Ratboys have done all of that and more on The Window. —Ben Salmon [Read our full feature]
shame: Food For Worms
On their new album, Food for Worms, shame tries to obscure the awkward fact that for a post-punk band, they’re not the best at post-punk. But their washed-out rock songs are outstanding, finding new ground between their melancholic indie rock tendencies and the undercurrent of angst that propels the songs forward. “Fingers of Steel” starts the album beautifully, anchored around a thumping piano and Charlie Steen’s snotty, empathic singing. “There’s a sun outside, but you don’t see it,” he sings, with the background vocals underlining the words “see it.” But the song really takes flight when the drums drop out for the chorus and atmosphere thrives solely on grandiose harmonies. Complete with a noisy guitar solo that compliments the song’s overarching feel wonderfully, “Fingers of Steel” is designed to catch the listener off-guard, even if at some points it’s more The National than The Fall. With Food for Worms, shame does manage to reach new heights on the closer, a winding, Glastonbury-sized anthem entitled “All the People.” Much of the song is buoyed by the moving instrumentation, as the lyrics lean towards being vague and silly. “All the people that you’re gonna meet / Don’t you throw it all away because you can’t love yourself” isn’t a particularly inspiring sentiment, but it’s the slightly untuned, scraping guitars combined with Steen’s lackadaisical vocals that makes the chorus touching. When simple drums and harmonies appear during the second verse, it transforms into a monumentally bittersweet song. But the band keeps pushing, sustaining momentum for nearly six minutes, finally arriving at the album’s single transcendent moment just as it ends: “When you’re smiling and you’re looking at me / A life without that is a life I cannot lead.” Placed at the end of an album that doesn’t ever fully cohere, “All the People” is the best song shame has released yet. —Ethan Beck [Read our full feature]
Slow Pulp: Yard
On Yard, Slow Pulp deploy those peculiar, harmonious sounds to unpack conflicting emotion—and their introspection is catchier than ever before. The album tracks the band’s ever-evolving relationships with isolation and collaboration, the fluctuating roles one plays as an adult whose independence grows more complicated year after year—offering the ideal soundtrack for any mid-20-something who is caught re-assessing their social role in those unwieldy years that immediately follow college. Yard sees the band toy with its sound playfully and freshly. Emily Massey pushes her vocals beyond the deceptively low-effort utterances that have become her trademark. Take “Cramps,” for example—a punk-leaning track with immersive guitars reminiscent of mall emo hits breaking only when Massey sustains: “But I want everything.” “Mud” is its closest neighbor, at times pummeling and at other instances crunchy, falling somewhere between pop punk and fuzz rock. The real outlier on the record is “Broadview,” where pedal steel greets the listeners into a folksy ballad and Massey boasts a striking, unforgettable affection and warmth. Yard is a genuine level up for Slow Pulp that reveals the band’s versatility—confirming that the band has extensive new sonic avenues to explore in depth moving forward. —Devon Chodzin [Read our full Best of What’s Next feature]
Squirrel Flower: Tomorrow’s Fire
Ella Williams knows how to keep our attention. On Tomorrow’s Fire, her delicate folk vocals—combined with production assistance from Alex Farrar—create the heavenly shoegaze sludge of Williams’s third Squirrel Flower LP. The Chicagoan leans into her heavier sound on the anthemic “Full Time Job”—featuring MJ Lenderman on guitar—where she sings, “Taking it easy is a full time job / One I’m tired of.” Even with her new sound, the lyrical angst Williams is known for is present in “When A Plant Is Dying,” opening with the verse: “Kick you when you’re down / Can’t get much lower now / I’m sitting in the drain / Can’t get much lower now.” The Springsteen-conjuring, Heartland-inspired “Alley Light” considers what kind of balance comes from longing for healing yet fearing change. Tomorrow’s Fire is the product of an artist who demands to be heard, as Williams captures how it feels to lose childhood innocence in a world riddled with overconsumption, climate change, pain and violence. She closes the album with the culmination of these anxieties on “Finally Rain,” singing: “If this is what it means to be alive / I won’t grow up.” —Olivia Abercrombie [Read our full feature]
The Armed: Perfect Saviors
Perfect Saviors, The Armed’s immaculate, relentless and accessible follow-up to their 2021 record Ultrapop, is a perfect montage of punk, glam rock and pop music. The band have long lived in the shadow of their own post-hardcore legacy, but Perfect Saviors is a buoyant artistic pivot that soars to the same echelons Deafheaven did on Infinite Granite two years ago. Yet, even in this new, glossy outfit, The Armed are still juxtaposing delicacy with their steadfast, hypnotic energy. Songs like “Everything’s Glitter” and “Sport of Form” are career benchmarks, but I have a feeling the large, still-expanding outfit has much, much more to give. But what we’ve got from then now, Perfect Saviors, lives up to its title: It’s exactly the haven of drama and hope and honesty we all needed this past summer. —Matt Mitchell [Read our full feature]
The Clientale: I Am Not There Anymore
I Am Not There Anymore is a continuation of the experimental bent the Clientele have taken on in the past decade. They’ve always been known to inhabit shadowy cracks and liminal spaces, feelings of unreality and floaty dissociation. Their new LP evokes these emotions in a 19-track mixture of bossa nova, chamber pop, dreamy indie and more. If the Clientele find themselves undefinable, it’s a confusion of their own creation. Lead single “Blue Over Blue” combines swirly drums and rhythmic, textured vocals that feel like an incantation or a trance; mid-record, “Chalk Flowers” flows sweet and steady like a piano-led stream. The album is vast and beautiful, a universe contained in sonic strokes and blossoming instrumentals. —Miranda Wollen
The Lemon Twigs: Everything Harmony
Recorded with Andres Valbuena and Daryl Johns and mastered by Bug Sound’s Paul Millar, Everything Harmony is the best thing the D’Addario brothers have ever made. The D’Addario brothers have long possessed a potent stronghold on the architecture of pop melodies. Brian and Michael have been calling Everything Harmony their “Simon & Garfunkel record,” given how much they let these new songs breathe atop dynamic, orchestral and—mostly—acoustic arrangements. Lead single—and longtime setlist cornerstone—“Corner Of My Eye” is very Fate for Breakfast-era Art Garfunkel, as Brian splays an inquisitive falsetto over a sweet, catchy, plucky melody. It’s chamber-pop perfected to a T, which you can hear through a delicious wall of harmonies cascading at the 1:50 mark. And while most of the album is a perfect, idealistic rendering of mid-century, singer/songwriter bliss, “In My Head” and “What You Were Doing” tap into the glam rock ethos that still courses through the Lemon Twigs’ veins. —Matt Mitchell [Read our full feature]
The National: Laugh Track
Bryan Devendorf’s percussion emphasizes the throughlines of anxiety and forlorn across Laugh Track, especially on songs like “Turn Off the House” and “Space Invader.” His drum work on “Deep End (Paul’s in Pieces),” in particular, sounds like the technique he was embellishing on “Don’t Swallow the Cap” 10 years ago—which is a delight to become privy to as, in those moments, it’s as if the hushed arrangements of I Am Easy to Find couldn’t have been more of a one-off anomaly in the band’s catalog. “Turn Off the House” merges a hybrid of High Violet and Sleep Well Beast acoustic and string instrumentation with the lyrical deftness of a contemporary, internal cruelty. “Full body gentle shutdown, so many people to let down,” Matt Berninger hums. “Don’t even think about me.” It’s a standout among standouts, a track that arrives like an admixture of “Green Gloves” and “Quiet Light”—a formula that I will, admittedly, always feel beholden to. Laugh Track is a close-knit record, if only because the people hurt within it are never too far out of reach from everyone else. It’s hard to channel that kind of withdrawal into a work of spitting, caustic, uproarious melody—though a song like “Smoke Detector” is a good reminder of where the band came from, and it might be a signal as to where they’re heading next. But there’s so much despair and lonesomeness and erosion articulated through various depictions of interpersonal and self-destruction on Laugh Track that an old line like “I’m put together, but beautifully” has never felt more apocryphal. —Matt Mitchell [Read our full review]
The Rolling Stones: Hackney Diamonds
If you’re tapping into Hackney Diamonds and expecting the Stones to reinvent the wheel, you’re not going to be satisfied. If you’re tapping into Hackney Diamonds hoping to hear something on par with Sticky Fingers, you’re wasting your time. The treasure trove of this record resides in the fact that it emblazons what The Rolling Stones do best while resisting the temptation to turn the band into something they aren’t. “Get Close” employs the same percussion as something like “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” but the construction of the arrangements taps into a funkified bravado that you might hear on “Tops” or “Start Me Up.” James King’s sax solo on the track is gorgeous and sensual, and it melts into a delicious watermark guitar lick from Richards. Oh, and that piano part? It’s played by the great Sir Elton John—a generous and subtle inclusion that helps parts of the song flirt with power-ballad status, that is until Richards and Wood obliterate it with their six-strings, respectively.
Hackney Diamonds is worth returning to because of how confident Jagger seems to be throughout—a great shift from A Bigger Bang, where it felt like he was mostly phoning the whole thing in. Here, he’s not shying away from throwing the word “bitch” around like it’s 1971 (“Bite My Head Off”); he’s also pretty vulnerable about his own mortality, singing about still being too young to die and feeling hardened in the wake of his own interpersonal dependency (“Depending On You”). More than anything, Hackney Diamonds gets mad when it needs to, soft whenever it pleases. Sure, who would ever expect the Rolling Stones to sugarcoat anything? But, it is refreshing to hear these guys sing like they’re 30 years old again and sleeping with all of England—with the added, mature flavor of then, the next morning, still feeling a tad bit morose about how much closer they are to kicking the bucket. Imagine Exile on Main St. if its protagonists truly bought into the last days of their own destinies. —Matt Mitchell [Read our full review]
The Tubs: Dead Meat
London rock quartet The Tubs made one of the smartest rock albums of 2023, period. Not to mention, it was their debut album, too. Dead Meat is brash, relentless and catchy, pulling stems of post-punk, jangle-pop and stone-cold rock grooves. “That’s Fine” and “Sniveller” are two tracks I keep returning to 12 months after the album’s release. The work is downright maddening in how effortlessly punctuated it is, and The Tubs are most certainly on a mission to—through prismatic, ace guitar riffs—take us to places we haven’t been in a long, long time. Dead Meat is one of those debut albums that sticks with you purely because it sounds like a career triumph. To start off this hot from scratch, The Tubs are something else. —Matt Mitchell
Water From Your Eyes: Everyone’s Crushed
Everyone’s Crushed, the latest album from experimental indie-pop duo Water From Your Eyes, picks up right where their last album left off. Its cheeky opening track, “Structure,” shares the same name as the Brooklyn natives’ 2021 breakthrough record. It’s as if vocalist Rachel Brown and multi-instrumentalist/producer Nate Amos are world-building, expanding on the lore of their dense catalog. On their first album for the revered indie titan, Matador Records, Water From Your Eyes deliver on the simmering anticipation surrounding them. It’s another case that marks Brown and Amos as one of the most innovative, exciting creative partnerships of the moment. Their vision has become fully reified, merging pop balladry, Berlin techno and indie rock in methods that seemed unfathomable until they executed it. Despite that record’s elliptical abstractions, Everyone’s Crushed takes their collagist ethos a step further. Brown and Amos have thrown Structure out the window, given that most tracks on this album defiantly resist actual structure itself. Take the standout closer, “Buy My Product,” which flouts a conventional verse-chorus format in lieu of tumultuous crescendos and swirling, discordant layering. While Brown’s lyrics maintain their dissociative, surrealist mindset, it’s hard not to hear “Buy My Product” as a noisy lament about the inescapability of hypercapitalism. Everyone’s Crushed shines an incandescent limelight on Water From Your Eyes at the absolute height of their powers; it’s their best work yet. —Grant Sharples [Read our full review]
Wednesday: Rat Saw God
There’s something about the South that’s sort of impossible to explain. It has this je ne sais quoi that hovers like the sticky humidity-you can’t pinpoint it, but you can feel it in the air. It comes in flashes, the machine guns, crushed Four Loko cans, stock car races, Bible verse bumper stickers and awkward glances around the classroom when you get abstinence-only sex education, feel like heat lightning. It’s sacrilegious and sacred, it’s pregaming in a church parking lot before heading to the high-school football game. Wednesday, get it. They lived it. On Rat Saw God, they capture the off-kilter magic of one of the most confusing places. Lyrical precision is what makes the record shine, the fact that singer Karly Hartzman can recall the exact video game, in this case, Mortal Kombat, that someone was playing when her nose started bleeding at a New Year’s Eve party she didn’t even want to be at. There’s something striking in how sentimental the details feel, how she can weave these intimate narratives out of “piss-colored bright yellow Fanta,” and a Planet Fitness parking lot that makes their country-gaze so alluring. There are moments on the album where Hartzman’s one-liners serve as a knock-out punch. Whether they express it through private symbolism or get straight to the point, it doesn’t matter. Wednesday is the woman who thinks “America” is “a spoiled little child” but still gives out king-sized candy bars on Halloween. They’re the kids with crew cuts and the rest stop on the way to Dollywood. They’re the exhilaration of sneaking into the neighborhood pool and only going to school three days a week. They’re everything they document on Rat Saw God and more. —Samantha Sullivan [Read our full cover story]
Yo La Tengo: This Stupid World
This Stupid World, the Hoboken trio’s first proper full-length in five years (not counting the ambient lockdown quickie We Have Amnesia Sometimes), is very good indeed, a dreamy and reflective song cycle that welcomes us into Yo La Tengo’s private world while leaving ample mysteries unexplained and secrets untold. Like 2018’s expansive There’s a Riot Going On, This Stupid World bristles with a sense of uneasy quiet as the world outside rages and burns. At times, the noise explodes into the open, as in the seven-minute, motorik groove “Sinatra Drive Breakdown,” which recalls Ira Kaplan’s gnarled guitar workouts of the past, particularly 1995’s “Flying Lesson (Hot Chicken #1).” Yet much of this album is muted, condensing the restless, ambient-pop sprawl of Riot into compact packages like “Apology Letter,” a wry, self-deprecating tune about marital squabbles. Humor and sadness swirl together, as they often do in the Yo La Tengo extended universe. The title track (the band’s first ever) is a monochrome drone rocker, plodding along like some damaged White Light/White Heat B-side. As the song sputters to an end, the trio repeats the titular refrain like a mantra: “This stupid world/It’s killing me/This stupid world/Is all we have.” Maybe that’s what passes for optimism these days. Maybe, as Yo La Tengo has found, perseverance in a stupid world is its own kind of hope. —Zach Schonfeld [Read our full review]