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22.
Jessie Ware: That! Feels Good!
The exclamation marks punctuating That! Feels Good! telegraph its spirit with lightning precision: Jessie Ware’s fifth album offers an enthusiastic celebration of pleasure. Deliberately avoiding the glassy surfaces that coated her previous work, Ware and producers James Ford and Stuart Price opt for an unabashed revival of the glory days of disco, eschewing electronic pulses for full-bodied arrangements that skew close to Chic’s classic thump. Although Ware sometimes sings with an obvious smirk—the litany of double entendres on “Shake the Bottle” flirts with camp—That! Feels Good! is the furthest thing from ironic pastiche. Its bright, bustling hedonism lives by the words Ware sings on “Free Yourself”: “If it feels so good, then don’t you stop.” –Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
21.
Julie Byrne: The Greater Wings
On The Greater Wings, an album of grief and gratitude that’s haunted by loss, Julie Byrne makes cosmic music that alters time. She notices things other songwriters miss—a spot of blood on a sheet, the faint hum of music through the wall—and makes you understand everything these fragments can convey, with words so well-chosen they deserve to be bound in a book. Her songs have an uncanny sense of scale: Drawing from decades of spectral folk, from Nick Drake to Vashti Bunyan to Cat Power, they begin with tiny fragments of memory and bloom into entire weather systems of emotion. –Mark Richardson
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
20.
Mandy, Indiana: i’ve seen a way
So many classic horror movies build to a climax where the heroine, fed up with being terrorized, becomes the tormentor herself. No noise band has put that feeling of brutal catharsis to music quite like Mandy, Indiana. By weaponizing techno and post-punk, the Manchester group has created a visceral reimagining of industrial music, all of it intensified by the cobra-strike intensity of singer Valentine Caulfield, who seethes, taunts, and rages over the rampaging noise. Their music is violent and vicious, yet i’ve seen a way makes it sound like justice. –Evan Rytlewski
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
19.
Kara Jackson: Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?
Over the 13 sparse folk songs on Kara Jackson’s debut album, love is a force of destruction, a precursor to loss, an opportunity to be taken for granted. And yet we keep grasping for it, prompting the question the Chicago songwriter raises in the record’s title. She acknowledges that we all crave recognition but also knows that another person’s perception of us can never match the way we want to be seen. She sounds triumphant on “dickhead blues” as she realizes she doesn’t need anyone else for validation: “I’m not as worthless as I once thought,” she sings proudly. “I’m useful.” –Vrinda Jagota
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
18.
100 gecs: 10,000 gecs
In confusing times, you have to live a little—order the Taco Bell, scream at the slasher movie, shed the skin of your former stuffy self. Ergo 100 gecs, who tore down the half-ironic “so bad it’s good” framework and rebuilt it into “so dumb it’s smart” post-irony. The duo’s major label debut lashes together computer-generated grunge riffs, 16-bit bleep-boops, frog sounds (!?), nonsense koans, and walloping percussion, and then stuffs it all into a malfunctioning sound system turned up to 27. 10,000 gecs is exhilarating anti-taste music, produced by two brain cells colliding into each other over and over until sparks fly. If a Victorian child survived listening to “Dumbest Girl Alive” over good headphones, he’d emerge fully conditioned for our dissonant, destructive, and stitched-together 21st century. –Jeremy Gordon
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
17.
Kelela: Raven
Raven is an uneasy sound bath of an album where soothing, ambient club tunes mask bitter realizations that standing in your truth is often lonely and destabilizing. But Kelela doesn’t wallow in despair. It’s an open invitation to everyone who seeks refuge in the bumping bass and kinetic energy of grinding bodies, who are reeling from implosive friendship breakups and dodging calls from parents back home: Take off your shoes, hang up your coat, and vibe. –Heven Haile
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16.
boygenius: the record
The debut album from boygenius asks: What is love, really? Is it taking someone else’s medication to see what it feels like; sharing Iron & Wine deep cuts and embarrassing stories; fighting without keeping score? Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus don’t just describe love in these many forms on The Record, but show it in full force. The album retains glints of each artist’s solo output—Baker’s steely, anthemic choruses, Bridgers’ spectral folk, Dacus’ precisely crafted poetry—with an alchemical ease born from mutual devotion. –Aimee Cliff
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
15.
Yaeji: With a Hammer
On With a Hammer, Yaeji forgoes the usual metaphors for change—the inexorable marches and slow evolutions—to explore her own vision of enlightenment: a total teardown where we finally get to build the future right. Balancing heart-racing garage rhythms and buzzing vintage indie rock with themes of social responsibility and creative transformation, the singer-producer’s full-length debut is whimsical like its synth-flute overture and totally serious, too. Her colorful, blobby style brings a hopeful glow to eternal human projects like processing anger and fostering community—and she begins by granting broad latitude to like-minded contemporaries including Loraine James and Nourished by Time. Like a great big tap on the shoulder, Yaeji’s smiling sledgehammer arcs across languages and generations to say: time to get to work. –Anna Gaca
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
14.
Olivia Rodrigo: GUTS
Boys suck. Modern society’s expectations of young women suck harder. So what do you do when you’re a 20-year-old girl navigating romantic disappointment and the perilous transition to adulthood while making one of the most anticipated sophomore albums of the decade? Rock the fuck out. On GUTS, Olivia Rodrigo teaches an AP course in Angry Girl Music of the Late 20th and Early 21st Centuries, consulting a syllabus of foremothers from Courtney Love to Kesha on insouciant hot-mess anthems and somber ballads that explode into musical-theater showstoppers. Everyone from the Zoomers on TikTok to the Boomers at the Rock Hall is eagerly lining up to enroll. –Amy Phillips
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
13.
Noname: Sundial
On Sundial, Noname’s first album in half a decade, the Chicago-raised sage points her scathing wit and sociopolitical smarts toward everything from beauty standards for Black women to rappers and politicians not preaching anything worth practicing to music’s uneasy relationship with trauma and consumption. But the record’s most unnerving moments come from her willingness to see herself in the mess she’s critiquing. “She’s a shadow walker, moon stalker, Black author/Librarian, contrarian,” she starts on the album’s opening track, “black mirror,” amid a loungey instrumental and heavenly backing vocals. It sets the tone for an album that’s as confrontational as it is musically immaculate. Vulnerable and fearless, Sundial offers us the real Fatimah Warner in all her contradictory glory. –Dylan Green
Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
12.
L’Rain: I Killed Your Dog
With L’Rain, Taja Cheek collapses genres into smearing montages that are as alive and unpredictable as a fever dream. Her third album expands into spiky garage rock, lavish psych-folk, and misty dance-pop, turning toward romantic love as its primary subject. The sounds are more immediate and broadly appealing than ever, but Cheek hasn’t lost her restless ingenuity: The creature put to rest on its Auto-Tuned lullaby of a title track may be a cherished pet, or it may be the narrator herself. –Marc Hogan
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
11.
Lana Del Rey: Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd
Lana Del Rey’s ninth album pulls the listener close, as the 38-year-old singer-songwriter works through what it means to grow old and who’s going to help her get there. These big questions are presented nakedly and dramatically on songs like “A&W,” a winding metaphor about becoming more of a product than a person, both valuable and disposable. Her openness is particularly affecting on “Sweet,” when she stretches her voice high to ponder the mysteries of romance, on “Kintsugi,” which basks in the glow of familial love, and on “Margaret,” when she practically smiles through the microphone as she concocts a fake date for her producer and friend Jack Antonoff’s wedding. At the album’s core is a longing to be remembered—even if there’s no true meaning to who we are or what we do, she suggests, at least we can hope to live on in someone’s heart. –Matthew Strauss
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
10.
yeule: softscars
During the pandemic, yeule turned to the poppy guitar-rock of their childhood iPod for comfort. softscars melts a decade’s worth of alt-rock touchstones into a phantasmagoria of tone and texture, with washes of candy-red blood alternating with nectar, honey, and glitter. In the lyrics, yeule turns their wide-eyed gaze toward the alien landscape of their body, mingling promises of intimacy (“You’re never alone”) with the threat of never-ending surveillance (“I’m inside your phone”), pledging to “keep you safe” in one song and “eat your face” in another. It’s a heaving neurochemical ocean not unlike online life in 2023, but on “x w x,” yeule lets out the exultant scream of someone surfing its crest. –Jayson Greene
Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal
9.
ANOHNI and the Johnsons: My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross
From its opening moments, the searching existentialism of My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross takes root in your core. Inspired by Marvin Gaye’s profoundly funky 1971 touchstone What’s Going On, and spurred on by guitarist-producer Jimmy Hogarth, whose credits include Amy Winehouse and Estelle, along with an outfit of session musicians, the album simmers in the bittersweet grooves of classic soul. And ANOHNI has never sounded better at the helm, leading the way with ferocious optimism.
