The Best Albums of November 2023

With the thinned-out release cycle of December upon us, November was a great month of music all around. Though it didn’t quite have the star-power of June or October, it gave us some of the most unique and beautiful albums of the autumn thus far. The holidays are here, so let’s look back at everything the last 30 days had to offer. We got exquisite solo albums from living legends, brilliant underground projects and a gorgeous, show-stopping debut. From IAN SWEET’s marvelous latest to a left-turn benchmark from André 3000, here are, in alphabetical order, the 10 best albums of November 2023. —Matt Mitchell, Music Editor

André 3000: New Blue Sun

It’s been 17 years since OutKast put out an album, and they won’t be making another one anytime soon. Instead, André 3000’s debut solo record is here—and it’s a glorious left turn for one of the greatest MCs of our lifetime. The last decade has found André assuming the role as hitmaking guest performer, as he has featured on tracks by everyone from Frank Ocean to Drake to Beyoncé. We know what the 48-year-old can do behind a microphone, but we don’t know that much about his construction game. Until now. New Blue Sun is not the debut LP you’d expect from 1/2 of the greatest hip-hop duo of all time, and that’s part of what makes it so exciting. The album is entirely instrumental and each composition is centered around woodwinds. André called the work “therapeutic,” and he has since explained that he’s not rapping anymore because he doesn’t believe that he has much to say right now.

Folks have criticized that comment, explaining that many middle-aged rappers are still putting out work with good, meaningful commentary. But it’s easy to look at André’s decision to put out a flute album and scoff at his choice. How dare he not drop any more bars? Well, he’s already climbed the mountain and gifted us a lifetime of essential albums. What New Blue Sun does is showcase just how deep André’s pocket goes, and it greatly speaks to where he’s at not just as a performer, but as a human being. This new venture is a celebratory one. At eight tracks totaling over an hour in length, it’s clear that André holds no interest in curbing to the wants of his own fan base—and that’s how it oughta be. New Blue Sun is a grand achievement carried out by an artist who’s already acquired copious amounts of those. It’s a blessing to watch André 3000 work, no matter what lane he’s doing it from. —Matt Mitchell

Daneshevskaya: Long Is The Tunnel

Long Is The Tunnel begins fully submerged. Rain is the first sound on the album’s opening track, “Challenger Deep,” the drops falling to announce the coming of a gentle fingerpicking. Next comes Beckerman’s voice, an understated captivation that stuns with its soft strength. She sings “Will you wait for me / Where there is no later on? / Will you wait for me at the end, the end?,” drawing out each word, pausing between phrases—her voice arriving wrapped in silk but sung with desperation. There is a heaviness to her vocal, something substantive to grasp onto despite her lilting melancholia. She reaches her hand up through the water’s surface, begging you to reach out and pull her from her drowning.

Standout track “Bouganvillea” showcases even more sonic experimentation and excitement, and Beckerman’s voice slides gracefully and meticulously up and down scales—as if with each new word and syllable, the apparition of her tone is dancing across the keys of a piano. There’s a palpable back-and-forth puppeteering on the song; even the lyrics speak to a confounding cascade of emotions and thoughts, as she sings “I do not want to keep you alive but I do not want you to die / Why are you mad at me when I didn’t try to help you out at all.” The track closes in on itself, Daneshevskaya’s paradox of love and longing. Graceful violins underset the following “ROY G BIV,” as Beckerman sings optimistically of the world’s natural organization: “It’s all in rainbow order on the way down / It’s all in perfect order.” She had been inspired by her own dayjob (when she’s not singing, she’s a pre-school social worker in NYC), and claims to have been admittedly moved by how kids’ worlds “hinge upon small discrepancies.”

Laced with distortion and supple synth notes, “Big Bird” aches through bursting percussion and Beckerman’s airy singing that thins out into a beautiful, angelic falsetto. “The biggest bird I’ve ever seen,” she intones. “I don’t know what the reason was. I can’t tell a dove from the biggest bird I’ve ever seen.” It’s an earworm melody that rises and falls and glitters, culminating in a field recording of birds flocking to some unknown destination. Long Is The Tunnel ends on a gentle, elusive and captivating note, as final track “Ice Pigeon” opens to twinkling piano keys—almost ironically so. It could soundtrack the opening to a music box of her own history but, firstly, it ties together the record’s surrealist charm—most emphatically when she sings “Everything that comes out of your mouth is gold / But it’s useless to me / Cause I know what it needs.” —Madelyn Dawson

Danny Brown: Quaranta

Quaranta, Danny Brown’s first solo album in four years, is the culmination of years of struggle with addiction, sobriety and mental health—and a shining reflection of his dedication to meeting his demons where they’re at. Over the course of the LP’s 11 songs, Brown sounds as if he’s in a zen state: He’s accepting of his past, mindful of his present and at peace with whatever his future may bring. “This rap shit done saved my life and fucked it up at the same time,” he laments on the album’s titular opening track, a song driven by smooth electric guitar licks and candid lyricism that sees Brown recounting his life’s journey, setting the scene for a number of emotionally vulnerable confessionals that dominate the project. “This that Black Lives Matter, still sniff cocaine / Paid for a therapist, but I still ain’t change,” he raps on The Alchemist-produced rock-heavy track “Tantor,” a frank allusion to the depths of his own personal complexity. But, as cliché tells us, sometimes truth is the very thing that sets you free. Brown sounds determined to clean the skeletons out of his closet on the synth-driven “Down Wit It” and is able to give his past selves a nod and a smile on transcendental standout track “Bass Jam.”

Quaranta also doesn’t shy away from social commentary. Whether Brown is ruminating on the consequences of gentrification on the stellar, Kassa Overall-featuring “Jenn’s Terrific Vacation” or discussing the lifelong impact of growing up in an underserved area alongside fellow Detroit rapper Bruiser Wolf on “Y.B.P.,” he demonstrates his keen perception and ability to translate the world he sees around him time and again. Quaranta is Danny Brown at his finest—and his most personal. It’s one of this year’s best albums: a no-skips project from an artist committed to stepping into the light and putting his best foot forward every day, despite the clouds that sometimes obscure the sun. “Probably never win a Grammy or chart on the charts / Should I still keep going or call it a day?” Brown raps on the meditative “Hanami,” a term borrowed from the traditional Japanese custom of appreciating the ephemeral beauty of cherry blossoms. For now, Danny Brown seems content to stop and smell the roses. It’s high time we give him his flowers. —Elizabeth Braaten

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.

The album leads off with a church bell and mellotron-aided stomp of “The Race Is On, The King Is Dead,” the most jubilant and immediate opener the band has released since the title track from 2018’s Space Gun. The song is another trophy fish Pollard can happily hang on his wall. But what is astonishing about this album is just how little it waivers from there. The tunefulness between both Pollard’s sturdy melodies and Gillard’s muscular riffs have worked in tandem to dizzying effect in the past, but the two haven’t complimented each other’s strengths this well in, perhaps, the entire run of this “new classic lineup” of the band—as they create the right balance of heft and hooks throughout.

Everything just fits, and there are only a few stop-and-start, proggy shifts in tempo that Pollard has enjoyed lately—all of which pay off beautifully here. 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

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.

Hotline TNT is the project of Will Anderson, who has been bouncing around DIY scenes in North America for over a decade. His interconnectedness in indie communities from Vancouver to Minneapolis to Brooklyn shows up on Cartwheel. This guy has some serious practice in the art of intimate performances. 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 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

IAN SWEET: Sucker

The strongest songs on Sucker arrive when central relationships experience death by a thousand arguments, where embarrassing memories and indignities culminate into sorrow and resentment. With an ambient-inspired guitar lead and woozy synths, “Comeback” reminisces about how poor it can feel to try and capture the attention of someone you love. Lines about playing dead in a pool reverberate through the whole song, giving it a haunting sensibility. On the title-track, with its slowcore acoustic guitars, Medford’s beloved spells her name wrong but it goes without mention. “Sucker” even manages to get away with pairing a burning hook melody with rote lyrics, one of the album’s sore spots. The closing ballad “Hard” has devastatingly simple language about having your thoughts occupied by someone bad for you: “Did you think of me on your way back to the city / While I was in the garden getting my hands dirty?”

The messy, fun isn’t particularly cheery, but producers Isaac Eiger and Alex Craig manage to supply Medford with an anthemicness that’s needed. Much of this comes with drum programming—it starts nicely with a fill—that adds a jubilance to the consistent bummer of the lyrics, recalling the danciness of later Kississippi or the lushness of this year’s record by waveform*. The clearest analogous act for what IAN SWEET is doing is feeble little horse, where lead singer Lydia Slocum adds knotty, sickly details to the band’s garbled, infectious noise-pop. If that textured, dense indie pop is dime-a-dozen these days, Medford knows how to create images that ensure these songs stick. —Ethan Beck

Jeffrey Martin: Thank God We Left the Garden

The loss of innocence is a theme that reverberates throughout Thank God We Left the Garden, which is Jeffrey Martin’s first LP since One Go Around in 2017. His latest is a stunner of a record, with songs that are stark in their simplicity, yet emotionally rich in a way that can catch your breath in your throat or leave your eyes suddenly damp. Most of these 11 tracks feature nothing more than Martin singing in a rumpled voice and accompanying himself on acoustic guitar as he gives life to characters reckoning with the innermost parts of themselves. He returns more than once to images of trees and gardens. “Better to eat the fruit than be blind here,” he sings on “Daylight.”

A couple tracks earlier, on “Garden,” Martin suggests that even if humanity somehow fell from grace, our mistakes are what shape us into who we are. “As if the mess that I’m making / Isn’t really a blessing,” he sings. Taken together, those lines define his outlook over the entire album. On “Quiet Man,” Martin takes as his subject the full scope of existence, singing in a full voice as he considers what it means to grow older, to search for love, to find a purpose—to be alive in the first place. It’s about as broad a topic as there is, but Jeffrey Martin handles it the same way he approaches every song on Thank God We Left the Garden: with an open heart, a touch of wit and melodies that linger, all tied together by his powerful imagination. —Eric R. Danton

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.

The album captures performances from Lenderman’s summer show at the Lodge Room in Los Angeles and his Pitchfork Music Festival afterparty in Chicago, two monumental gigs smack-dab in the middle of an equator-sized tour itinerary for Wednesday. For this project’s iteration, Lenderman recruited Jon Samuels and Colin Miller to join him and his Wednesday bandmates Xandy Chelmis and Ethan Baechtold. Karly Hartzman also joins in on the fun with some harmonies on “Toontown” midway through the set. And, to no one’s surprise, (Live and Loose!) was mixed and mastered by Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun Studios in West Asheville. Despite the tracks coming to life on stages in faraway, bustling cities, Farrar’s engineering imprint gives the record a film of dust that sounds like it was aged in a barrel for 20 years right at home. Lenderman’s propensity for bold rock ‘n’ roll sounds as raw and unpredictable on this effort as a Stray Gators show might have in 1973.

It’s a near-career-spanning compilation for Lenderman, who plays 90% of Boat Songs and adds in three tracks from his 2021 LP Ghost of Your Guitar Solo along with “Rudolph,” “Knockin’” and “Long Black Veil.” We didn’t review Boat Songs last year, but the magic of (Live and Loose!) is that the album is so good that it can, essentially, allow us to play catch-up on our oversights (even if it did appear on our year-end best albums list). That’s my endorsement of the star-power of these tracks; their timelessness shines through so greatly that, when crowd applause and hollers come ringing in at every fadeout, you suddenly remember that this is, after all, a live album. And each chapter from Ghost of Your Guitar Solo and Boat Songs was built with such freewheeling elasticity that, at any moment, Lenderman and his bandmates could turn each song inside-out with extended melodies, differently paced lyrics and impromptu sonic economics you might find on a Fillmore East recording from half-a-century ago. —MM

PinkPantheress: Heaven knows

On “Internet baby,” an interlude that’s only five seconds shorter than full songs on Heaven knows, she rebuffs the expectations surrounding her debut. Across a classic PinkPantheress backdrop of computer-oriented nostalgia, she gripes with a dude’s obvious affection: “You’re a needy guy but I guess I kinda like that.” By the end of the interlude, she rejects the simp, but the sentiment is equally targeted to her audience. “I am not your internet baby,” she repeats. On her debut, PinkPantheress demanded to be taken as more than the thirty-second clips she’s best known for. Once any interpretation of PinkPantheress as Gen-Z’s chosen internet Baby-slash-spokesperson is released, Heaven knows can be taken for what it is: a superb pop star debut.

Heaven knows is a continuation of the break-beat, two-step, sample-heavy pop that PinkPantheress is known for—but with a bigger budget and a broader ambition. On her 2021 mixtape to hell with it, you can hear each individual component: the drum-n-bass beat, the keyboards that sound like they’re from an iMac booting up, PinkPantheress’s careful topline. But Heaven knows has more intricate songwriting and a wider scope. She reckons with a cruel lover on the emo-influenced “Ophelia.” “True romance” finds her crushing on an unattainable rockstar. PinkPantheress insists that she’s more than just an online hodge-podge collagist; she’s a songwriter and evocateur.

Frankly, no one sounds quite like PinkPantheress, and she relishes in her unique style and killer taste across Heaven knows. Organ, guitar and big-room synths blur like watercolor across “Another life” until the Nigerian rapper Rema shows up. “Nice to meet you” hops between a DnB, a tabla beat and Jersey club patterns. R&B-in-the-club artist Kelela floats over “Bury me.” Pantheress’s if-it-fits-it-ships approach is not new for her, but it’s a joy to hear her build on her own style with momentous confidence. —AS

Vyva Melinkolya: Unbecoming

Angel Diaz’s Vyva Melinkolya guise is a massive, surreal and kindred examination of memories, moods and human closeness. If Tumblr had been around when the distortion pedal was discovered, then you’d have Unbecoming. The entire LP feels particularly moody, but in a captivating, effortless and nocturnal way. Diaz’s vocals pierce through the walls of every track with crumbling, drowsy purpose and there’s a deliberate, confident mark of language running throughout.

Album opener “Song About Staying” is the spiritual foil to Carissa’s Weird’s Songs About Leaving, as Diaz lulls us into the project with a surreal amount of plainspoken lyricism and vocal nakedness. Considering how vivid and impenetrable the instrumentation becomes later on the LP, “Song About Staying” dares every listener to buy into what’s to come. “Leaving isn’t easy, staying’s twice the harm,” Diaz muses. “Everyone is begging me, why does it go so far?” Likewise, “I65” is a miraculous pivot that features audio clips of skateboarding at the jump. It arrives like the proper introduction to what Unbecoming is meant to be. “To the world, I’m a snake, but to you I’m just your dog,” Diaz sings. “God, why did you make me tall? Wanna be small, nothing at all?” The guitars are particularly heavy here, sagging beneath the submerged-in-water vocals like sludge dripping off the carcass of a dead animal.

There are shoegaze elements all throughout Unbecoming, but I’m hesitant to label Vyva Melinkolya a “shoegaze project”—namely because the energy here doesn’t suggest that Angel Diaz has her eyes locked onto her feet. No, this record transmits an aura that radiates grandiosity even at its slowest moments—as if Vyva Melinkolya is an entity that demands to be seen, not something that slips into the cog of the music’s machine. Perhaps that is the greatest trick that Unbecoming pulls off: It’ll force you to abandon all preconceptions and it’ll haunt your conclusions. The songs are gauzy, their fuzz swelling into an hour of sluggish, swampy guitars and spectral, divine singing that’ll swallow you whole. —MM