Jeremy's 11 Favorite Albums of 2023

Boom, boom, boom, another year, another rankings. This is my lightest music year in a while, maybe since college. I didn't live in the city at all this year, so I was not walking around with headphones on 24/7, and a big, big chunk of my driving time was podcasts. I discovered this movie podcast called Screendrafts that has a massive back catalog that I have been steadily working my way through since the summer. But I do have a legitimate top 11, I'm not throwing albums on here for nothing, these are good ones.

11) Sufjan Stevens - Javelin

Sufjan Stevens has had a tough couple years: his partner died and Sufjan was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that has left him relearning how to walk. Not that he ever needed a reason to sound sad before, but you'd understand why he would sound downtrodden on this album. But honestly, this album isn't even that sad. There's a song called Will Anybody Ever Love Me? but it's not a bummer, it's pretty upbeat. This album is kind of a mixture of the sullen singing style from Carrie and Lowell and the bouncy strangely cheery electronics from The Ascension, it's like a perfect mix of those two albums. This album hits me a different way every time I listen to it, sometimes it doesn't do anything for me, and sometimes it completely captivates me. Like parts of this album are so light, and some parts are so heavy, it's a weird mixture for me. Anyway, that's why it's up here at 11.

Best Song: So You Are Tired

10) Knower - Knower Forever

I heard of this band/duo on YouTube. At some point in the spring, they started releasing videos for the songs on this album that are shot in their house, on phones. And the songs were all killer. There's funky bass lines on here, jazz piano solos, some of the songs have full on orchestras in the back. It's a fun album, but the versions on YouTube are more fun.

Best Song: I'm the President

09) André 3000 - New Blue Sun

Listen, I don't know what to tell you with this one. When André 3000, of Outkast fame, decides to make an instrumental ambient flute album, and then I come out here and put it at number 9, I can feel you rolling your eyes. "Oh Jeremy, so cool and unique, he really loves the flute album, isn't he such a special little flower who has so many cool interests?" I get it, but just trust me, put this thing on. It is legitimately enjoyable to listen to. The whole 82 minutes of it. One critique though, the song titles are long, which in and of itself is not a problem, but lord are they the stupidest song titles of all time. There's the very "profound" Ghandi, Dalai Lama, Your Lord & Savior J.C./Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy. And the worst title of them all, despite being the best song on the album: The Slang Word Pussy Rolls Off the Tongue with Far Better Ease than the Proper Word Vagina. Do You Agree? But you just got to move past that. Because the album is actually good. I didn't want to like it, out of fear of becoming a parody of myself, but here we are. Either it's good, or I'm Airplane!.

Best Song: The Vagina One

08) PJ Harvey - I Inside The Old Year Dying

Although PJ Harvey has been making music since at least the early nineties, the entirety of my experience with her discography is her 2011 album Let England Shake, but man, did I listen to that album a lot. This was right in the thick of my pizza delivery career, tons of CD time. It was in my Top 300 albums list I made when I turned 30. But anyway, this new album reminds me a lot of Let England Shake, like a lot a lot. So I like it.

Best Song: Lwonesome Tonight

07) Fever Ray - Radical Romantics

So that album cover is certainly unsettling, not my favorite to scroll upon when I'm looking for some tunes to play. Karin Dreijer is one half of The Knife (they were a duo notorious for having some sort of makeup or prosthetic on for every press photo of their career, as evidenced by the album cover), and this album is the closest thing to a proper The Knife album we've had in a long time. The other half of that group, Karen's brother Olof, is listed as a writer and producer on the first four songs on this album, it's basically a reunion. It's full of modulated singing and crazy ass electronic beats, but in like a deep, tribal suffering kind of way, not a hit the dancefloors way, but it's definitely the most accessible album they've put together since 2006's Silent Shout, one of my favorite albums of all time.

Best Song: Kandy

06) Caroline Rose - The Art of Forgetting

I liked some songs of Caroline Rose's first album, but did not get into her second one, at all, so I was a bit surprised to get sucked into this album, possibly the best album to sonically encapsulate depression, specifically the depression of getting dumped and all the stages that takes. The opening track Love/Lover/Friend is mostly acoustic guitar, but these waves of strings come through crashing in a suffocating way and then they disappear just as soon, until the end when it all comes together and Rose wails in pain over the instrumentation for a minute and a half. The chorus of The Doldrums asks, "If that was me then, who am I now?" as she faces an identity crisis without the person that she thought made her the real version of herself. That song's a real one.

Best Song: The Doldrums

Intermission: Wow, only five left. Six down. How about that flute album, wild. Also, why is this list coming out in March? Is there no order in this world? What could possibly be coming? What a mystery. Stick around, find out.

05) Damien Jurado - Sometimes You Hurt The Ones You Hate

Damien Jurado puts out an album every year, and two out of every three years, he ends up on this list. I don’t even know what to put at this point, I talk about him every year basically. It’s another short set of songs about regular people living the American life. One of the songs on here is called Neiman Marcus, with the line “My mother, she lost me in a Neiman Marcus, looking for her car in a sea of other cars.” Another song is called Match Game 77 (Episode 1097). Jurado hits a special somber acoustic guitar sound that doesn’t usually click with me with most other artists. And the dude keeps churning out album after album, every year.

Best Song: Match Game 77 (Episode 1097)

04) Kevin Abstract – Blanket

Kevin Abstract used to be the leader of rap boy band Brockhampton, but his first solo release since the unfortunate demise of that group is not a rap album, rather it's this indie rock album. It still has a lot of the indicators of a Brockhampton project, specifically the various modulations put on Kevin’s voice, which isn’t surprising since this album is produced by KA’s main creative partner from Brockhampton, Romil Hemnani, as well as multi-instrumentalist Jonah Abraham. I love the stab in the dark this album is, and I can’t wait to see what direction Kevin goes with the next one.

Best Song: The Greys

3) Sofia Kourtesis – Madre

Sofia Kourtesis is a Peruvian DJ, and she made this album about her mother, who survived cancer. Most of these songs are in Spanish, I don’t speak Spanish, so I can’t really connect with the lyrical content, but the beats on this album are so good, so addictive and surprisingly sunny. You’d be hard-pressed to find any year end list of mine that doesn’t have at least one house album on it, and I guess this is this year’s. But also, it has a sort of aesthetic that I don't hear a lot in house music, like the songs sound very open, like none of the sounds are coming from a computer. Maybe they're not, maybe all the sounds are samples of real instruments.

Best Song: Estación Esperanza

2) Khotin – Release Spirit

This album beings with the sounds of nighttime in a forest, and someone asking “Why are you recording again?” and the soft electronic music starts, but the nature sounds continue playing in the background. When we used to have those music channels in the 900s on cable, I’d always gravitate towards the Downtempo Electronica channel, and this is like the calmer version of that channel. Khotin releases his albums through Ghostly International which is the record label that Adult Swim gets most of its music for the commercial bumps, and his music has definitely been on one of those ones with a snowy landscape over a lake. This is a good calming album to listen to when it’s 7 AM and you are walking in the cold to catch a train from Joliet to Chicago. If you are ever doing that, remember I recommended this album for that exact moment. Or also, if you are trying to do a puzzle, this would be a good album for mental stimulation.

Best Song: Home World 303

1) Jpegmafia and Danny Brown – Scaring The Hoes

There are years where I go into writing this list not knowing what's going to be the number one album and I’ll just see where the list takes me. This is not one of those years, I have known for some time that this was going to be in the top spot. I’ve listened to it the most of all albums this year, and also, y’know….it’s fucking awesome. Jpegmafia and Danny Brown rap on this beast, and Jpegmafia made all of the beats. He actually made the beats in a sort of personal experiment on a sampler from the 90’s to see what it would be like to work without Pro Tools, and you can’t really tell from listening to it, there aren’t really any signs of the antiquated technology, which is a testament to Peggy’s producing chops. This album is a really good example of how strange the brain is because when it came out, it got great reviews, I loved the last Jpegmafia album, and the first couple times I listened to this one, I could not get into it. And then one time, I turned it on, and was like “Oh wait a minute, I’m feeling this now, wait, is this the best album I’ve ever listened to? It might be, definitely the best this year” and here we are. I play this album at least once a week, sometimes much more. And it doesn’t scare the hoes, the hoes actually like it.

Best Song: Burfict!

Thank you for reading this, I hope you listened to a song or two that you liked, maybe check some stuff out. Love y’all!