The 10 Best Albums of January 2023

Featuring Belle and Sebastian, Margo Price, and White Reaper

Music Lists Best Albums
The 10 Best Albums of January 2023

There’s always a lull at the beginning of the year when it comes to new music releases, but once mid-January kicks in, the drip turns into a firehose of new albums. January got 2023 off to a great start, first with a surprise album from Belle and Sebastian and a long-awaited release from Margo Price and then almost too many to keep up with. We’ve narrowed the stacks down to our 10 favorite releases of the month. Here, in alphabetical order, are the 10 Best Albums of January 2023:

Belle and Sebastian: Late Developers
Scottish indie darlings (and former Paste magazine cover stars) Belle and Sebastian surprised us with their 12th studio album this week, following quickly on the heels of last year’s A Bit of Previous. The brooding opener “Juliet Naked” reaches back to mid-’60s psyche-pop and all the way back to that timeless theme of desperate love: “Fickle love / Nothing like the heavens above / It don’t add up,” frontman Stuart Murdoch sings. Things get much more upbeat from there with Sarah Martin singing about the “best of days” on “Give a Little Time.” There’s plenty of Belle and Sebastian’s hooky charm on Late Developers that will sound familiar to longtime fans, but there are also places where the group stretches itself into new territory. The first single from the album, “I Don’t Know What You See in Me,” is a straight-up ‘80s pop song. Co-written by Pete ‘Wuh Oh’ Ferguson, it shows a band not content to rest on its considerable laurels but still experimenting more than a quarter century after their electric debut. —Josh Jackson

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Complete Mountain Almanac: Complete Mountain Almanac
New music collective Complete Mountain Almanac is a collaborative project between Swedish musician Rebekka Karijord and siblings Jessica, Aaron and Bryce Dessner. Their debut self-titled record arrives at the end of January and finds the quartet contemplating climate change in a 12-song suite. Each track on Complete Mountain Almanac is titled after a month of the year and, last fall, the group teased the upcoming album with “May,” a beautiful track about giving back to Mother Earth. Earlier this year, listeners were gifted with “February,” the solemn, poetic tune about a body being taken apart in order to be saved. The band name stems from a book of poetry written by Jessica after being diagnosed with breast cancer, and imagery of mortality deeply, and often, intersect with the environmental themes on the album. —Matt Mitchell

H.C. McEntire: Every Acre
When Durham, N.C. native H.C. McEntire began her solo career after fronting the revered indie rock band Mount Moriah, she began to explore an authentic Americana songcraft that showcased her exemplary ability to tie nearly unexpressable emotions to nature. But on Every Acre, McEntire reveals that the soil we stand on may not be as solid as it seems. In the liner notes of the album, McEntire acknowledges that Every Acre was written and recorded on traditional territory of the Eno, Lumbee, Occaneechi, Shakori, Saponi, Tuscarora, Catawba, Sissipahaw, Tutelo, Adshusheer, and Cheraw peoples. On the pulsing and spectral duet with S.G. Goodman “Shadows,” McEntire contemplates this predicament weighing Southern traditions against the steps it would take to “make room” for a new way of life. Her poetic lyricism inspires a new perspective, one that zooms out of your limited vision, to understand the places we occupy in a grand existential sense. With minimal arrangements, McEntire and her small circle of musicians—which includes guitarist Luke Norton, bassist Casey Toll and drummer Daniel Faust—never rush or overwhelm with complexity. Instead, McEntrie and Norton’s warm and often tremolo’d guitars hum and converse with Toll and Faust’s laidback southern swing. Every Acre is a profound listen, one that reveals more wisdom the more you surrender to it. McEntire has discovered painful truths in the process, without ever letting herself or our history off the hook. —Pat King

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John Cale: Mercy
On Mercy, John Cale has once again opened himself up to collaborate with younger indie artists, which this time around includes members of Animal Collective, Weyes Blood and Laurel Halo. Their efforts only make “Noise of You,” stand out even more as the song is mainly Cale, on his own, laying his emotions bare for an unnamed lover. The billowing psych-synth backdrop feels like the fog surrounding Cale’s memories through which he tries to reach out for some solid details or moments to hold tightly to. What he finds is something equally as ephemeral and hard to grasp: the sounds that this person made padding across the floor or doing everyday things on the other side of the house or the timbre of their voice as they said farewell. — Elsewhere, “Story of Blood” is slow and eerie, using electronic drumbeats and quivers to maintain a slowly threatening feel. The track never stops moving, and features Weyes Blood (aka Natalie Mering) on accompanying harmonies. Synths create an uneasy atmosphere, and it’s hard to keep the hairs on the back of your neck from standing up. The lyrics work like a cryptic sheet of instructions, as Cale repeatedly asks the listener to “Swing your soul.” It is clear that, from his Velvet Underground days until now, Cale has never stopped seeking out new spaces to explore, experiment with and grow in.—Robert Ham and Rose Sofia Kaminski

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Juni Habel: Carvings
It’s tempting to describe Juni Habel’s quiet, folky new album as “pastoral,” but that’s not quite right. While the eight songs on Carvings are rooted in the natural world, they are less bucolic than they are explorations of wilder, more tangled landscapes. Though Carvings shares a sonic palette with Habel’s previous album, 2020’s All Ears, whispers of unease lurk at the edges of the Norwegian singer and songwriter’s latest. That surely has to do with the fact that Carvings finds Habel grieving the death of a younger sister in a car accident. The album isn’t overtly centered on that loss, but the weight of it lends a melancholy feeling to songs underpinned by a sense of impermanence that is at once wistful and matter-of-fact. The music here is austere, built around Habel’s fingerpicked acoustic guitar parts, but it’s no less absorbing for the spare arrangements. Habel’s voice is understated, ranging in tone from light and feathery to a little bit smoky. It arrives with an intimacy that feels almost like you’re sitting close together in the same room. Along with the mesmerizing musical arrangements, what makes Carvings compelling is the balance Habel finds between acknowledging the fleeting span of any one life, and her determination to find meaning in the transience. In that regard, Carvings is at once a eulogy and a celebration. —Eric R. Danton

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Margo Price: Strays
Margo Price earned the blanket title “Americana singer” some time ago, but she’s always been pure rock ‘n’ roll. On Price’s new LP Strays, the Nashville-based troublemaker leans fully into whatever rock ‘n’ roll dream she might have been chasing. The follow-up to 2020’s electric That’s How Rumors Get Started, Strays honors Price’s beginnings in American roots music while painting a psych-rock backdrop to her stories of redemption, survival and rebirth. Price collaborated with her husband Jeremy Ivey, who joined her at a South Carolina Airbnb to take mushrooms, listen to a stack of classic rock albums and work through what would eventually become Strays, and then recorded the album at Jonathan Wilson’s (Angel Olsen, Father John Misty) California studio. The result is familiar—it’s undeniably a Margo Price record—but a little extra fiery. —Ellen Johnson

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Nicole Dollanganger: Married in Mount Airy
To listen to Nicole Dollanganger, the project of multidisciplinary artist Nicole Bell, is to be swept into a universe of beguiling but damning beauty. Ever since her rise in the era of Tumblr and Myspace, the Canadian singer/songwriter has shared haunting alternative pop with a sadcore twist that resonates heavily with the soft grunge teens who’ve now grown up on her music. On Married in Mount Airy, her self-released seventh album released last Friday, Dollanganger joins longtime collaborator Matthew Tomasi to deliver mind-melding lyrics, frightening imagery and references to bygone eras that make her ballads feel like family secrets. Married in Mount Airy is as irresistible as it is devastating. Album standout “Bad Man” labors on the conflicting emotions confronted when shirking the company of an abusive figure and reclaiming life: “I wish he didn’t have to die / but he was a bad man / what do I make of the tears that I cried / over that bad man?” Discordant emotions, images, and sounds manifest in Dollanganger’s compelling lyrics, as on “Moonlite:” “He said, ‘I pray to God you know / I keep a piece of you locked in my heart / with memories I can bend into any shape / and I put you over the bed or I break you in half instead / sometimes you’re my girl, and sometimes, bitch, you’re dead.’” —Devon Chodzin

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Núria Graham: Cyclamen
Listening through Cyclamen, an arresting collection of piano-led folk adorned with lush horns and strings, you imagine how the Núria Graham of her debut album, pictured on the cover gazing into the distance with a bright red guitar dangling beneath her fingers, might feel knowing that she’d be ditching the instrument almost entirely one day. On the four albums in between First Tracks and her newest offering, the Catalan-Irish songwriter built a legacy as a reliable rocker, tumbling through nostalgic tales of friends and lovers in a six-stringed trance. “At Last/Ready to Fool You” feels like a proving ground for the album’s convincing reinvention of Núria Graham as a cinematic folk balladeer, but it’s surprising just how cohesively her first album-length vision within this format holds together. That the album moves quickly while maintaining a hazy sense of wonder is a credit to the remarkable chemistry between Graham and composer Helena Cánovas Parés. They’re certainly unafraid to pile on texture at the right moment—the swirling saxophone arpeggiations and plucked harp chords of “Yes, It’s Me the Goldfish!” might well be their finest hour, with the perfectly-timed sigh of the string quartet on “Gloria” a close second—but their approach is largely one of tasteful restraint, never letting sonics getting in the way of the narrative. Cyclamen is a bold reintroduction to Núria Graham, a confident demonstration that, nudged into fresh sunlight, experience can always blossom into beautiful new forms. —Phillipe Roberts

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R. Ring: War Poems/We Rested
Indie rock duo R. Ring, the collaboration of Ohio legends Kelley Deal (The Breeders, Protomartyr) and Mike Montgomery (Ampline), play in the familiar sandboxes of alternative rock with cunning twists on their long-awaited second LP, War Poems/We Rested. On tracks like “Hug” and “Cartoon Heart/Build Me a Question,” the duo cranks up the tempo, delivering fuzzy riffs that veer into power-pop territory. “Cartoon Heart/Build Me a Question” especially offers beguiling lyrics: “What’s the name of your favorite song/What’s the deal with your crooked leg?” More subdued but impactful tracks like “Lighter Than a Berry” feature a vulnerable Montgomery sinking into loneliness, with lyrics that grow more and more mournful: “Shouldn’t you reach for me when you feel hollow?” Deal and Montgomery take turns helming the band, each bringing their best foot forward and giving their preferred style of alt rock a personal touch. They sat on these songs for years while working other projects, and in the meantime, they collected poetry from buddies like Hanif Abdurraqib, Sadie Dupuis, Sara Jaffe, and so many more, giving this already cerebral project a literary component. —Devon Chodzin

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White Reaper: Asking for a Ride
White Reaper knows their strengths. After three slick garage rock records, the five-piece return with Asking for a Ride, another album filled with bracing guitar riffs, wailed vocals, and mechanical, solid drumming. The record also might be White Reaper’s most intriguing yet, split between their heaviest songs yet and the band’s secret weapon of strong pop instincts. Opening tunes “Asking For a Ride” and “Bozo” are built around engaging ‘80s hard rock chord progressions and blastbeat drums, but Asking for a Ride doesn’t really get going until the wonderfully cheesy, tuneful choruses of “Fog Machine” and “Crawlspace.” Vocalist Tony Esposito puts his heart into “When my phone rings, can’t wait to hear what you say” on the former, turning a throwaway line into one of the band’s great hooks. But Asking for a Ride is filled with more surprises: “Heaven or Not” tries out Def Leppard-esque balladry with the operatic corniness turned down, giving Ryan Hater’s synths and Esposito’s harmonies real pathos. “Pages,” the album’s closer that starts as a ballad and expands into a distortion-turned-to-ten classic, is an argument to not take White Reaper for granted. We might not always get steady, polished rock music from Kentuckians indebted to Cheap Trick and The Cars, but at least we have Asking for a Ride for now. —Ethan Beck

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