Glide's 20 Best Albums of 2023

If anger really is an energy, Cable Ties’ third album could power a small city. You can feel the fury in vocalist/guitarist Jenny McKechnie’s taut, tendon-snapping riffs and the Krautrock-inspired rhythmic pummeling of bassist Nick Brown and drummer Shauna Boyle. McKechnie’s razor-sharp vocals and lyrics are especially cutting, as she rails against deficiencies in the health care system when treating those with addiction and mental health issues (“Perfect Client”), the shortcomings of the justice and welfare systems (“Silos”), and the fight to survive and overcome patriarchal trauma (“Change”). Elsewhere, themes of mental health are further explored on “Thoughts Back,” which features Boyle on vocals, while the tender “Mum’s Caravan” addresses the personal sacrifices McKechnie’s mother has made in order to care for others. Respite from the anger and frustration comes in the shape of “Time for You”—McKechnie singing of the safety and security she feels with her partner, even when the rest of her life is in a state of flux.

“I wrote it as a story,” Genesis Owusu tells Apple Music about *STRUGGLER*. “The album is pretty much what would this story sound like.” You can tell. The Ghanaian Australian artist born Kofi Owusu-Ansah’s second album is a surreal concept album about a protagonist—the Roach—fighting for his life in a kind of post-apocalyptic world overrun with constant physical and metaphysical threats. The antagonist, God, stops at nothing to try and bring the Roach down, to destroy him both inside and out. “The Roach character is a metaphor for we as humans,” he says, “and the God character is a metaphor for all these huge uncontrollable forces around us, natural and man-made, these systems we\'ve built around us that were supposed to make our lives better. But at some point, we started feeling like we\'ve been caged by them and they’ve slipped out of our control.” Owusu-Ansah’s story lays out three philosophical concepts that the Roach journeys through: nihilism, existentialism, and, ultimately, absurdism, the latter of which was inspired in part by the Samuel Beckett play *Waiting for Godot* and Franz Kafka’s *Metamorphosis*. The title and its character were inspired by *Berserk*, a legendary manga series by Kentaro Miura which features a character who “just gets dealt the worst hand in life”, he explains. “He has to fight through these forces so unimaginably larger than himself, to the point where it can\'t even be called a fight. The other characters call him a struggler.” Owusu-Ansah’s debut, *Smiling With No Teeth*, was a concept album as well, albeit a more personal one that explored his journey with two “black dogs”—personifications of racism and depression. “I’d poured so much of my life experience into it,” he says. “When it was time to make album two, I had to reconfigure which well to draw from and how to be inspired again.” It was that search itself—an existential hunt for purpose in a world that feels (and is) absurd—that led to the story of *STRUGGLER*. Like his debut, it’s still personal, but in a universal way; it’s a journey that Owusu-Ansah feels humanity as a whole experiences in its search for meaning, sense, and the will to live. It’s a particularly prevalent experience in 2023, while the world is reeling from a pandemic, successive environmental disasters, and a growing financial crisis. The music, recorded with a range of producers in Australia and the US, reflects those feelings: frantic and punky at times, slinky and languid at others—and the tracks with the darkest themes often have the smoothest, loftiest melodies. Read on to explore the story and concepts within this thought-provoking record. **“Leaving the Light”** “I just wanted to jump straight into it. I wanted it to be the tone-setter for the album. When I think of the story setting, it\'s almost post-apocalyptic, barren. When we started making this song, we wanted it to feel like the world was ending. There’s a huge wall of fire and debris and wind, and somehow you are trying to outrun that. That’s the pace of the opening chapter for the album.” **“The Roach”** “‘The Roach’ and ‘The Old Man’ are where I introduce and give context to the two main characters. ‘The Roach’ is the story of this flawed antihero character that\'s just trying to move through life at this pace, but starting to question what the point is. We get a sense of their mentality and why they\'re doing what they\'re doing. Some lines in the second verse: ‘Feeling like Gregor Samsa, a bug in the cog of a gray-walled cancer/I’m trying to break free with a penciled stanza/So are we human, or are we dancer?/I\'ma waste a life trying to chase an answer.’ It’s like they\'re moving through life at a survivor\'s pace because they have to or they\'ll get crushed. But in their mind, they\'re starting to question the point. It\'s indicative of how we can feel at our lowest. There\'s this absurd whirlwind of chaos around you, but you just got to keep stepping and get to the next day.” **“The Old Man”** “I think the verses of ‘The Old Man’ also give more context to the Roach character, but then the choruses talk about this looming figure up in the sky that\'s dealing the bad hands, trying to mess up your life. The passages at the end are where we get the context to what the God character actually is. ‘Your master is a system. Your master is a suit, a dollar. Your master is a planet. Your master is chaos itself. Your master is absurdity itself.’” **“See Ya There”** “You have your ups and your downs, your peaks and your valleys. This is the abyss. This is the character at their low point. They\'ve been struggling, running through and fighting to figure it all out, and it\'s like, ‘What is the point of all of this turmoil and struggle that I\'ve been going through?’ Throughout the album, the three main philosophies it touches on are nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism. This is definitely the point of nihilism. It\'s the scary and depressing realization, but the abyss inevitably comes before the transformation.” **“Freak Boy”** “This is stepping out of the existential crisis for a bit. This is the point where the character acknowledges they don\'t have the answers, they keep moving. Even if they don\'t have the answers, they don\'t want to fall into this pit of despair. The chorus goes, ‘Don\'t wanna turn out just like you, hating everything that you do/I hope I figure out a thing or two.’ On we forge. It’s almost a rejection of the abyss and all of that. It would be easy to want to close your eyes to everything that\'s going on around you and just live an ‘ignorance is bliss’ mentality, but maybe that\'s not the healthiest way to go. You gotta figure out how to do this right.” **“Tied Up!”** “I feel like it\'s easy to identify qualities when you put it into a character or a piece of fiction, but in reality, it’s all drawn from how I\'m seeing human beings. It\'s all of these qualities I see in everyday people that we don\'t acknowledge in ourselves every day. We don\'t give ourselves enough credit for it. ‘Tied Up!’ is a continuation of that. I feel like there\'s a point in giving up the need to feel in control of external circumstances and focusing more inward. Maybe, if I can\'t control the things around me, I can control my perspective of how those things look and how those things are. Maybe that will help me in my journey. Maybe there is some light somewhere, but maybe that comes from me first, not outside.” **“That\'s Life (A Swamp)”** “This one\'s kind of a journey. It\'s the two-part banger. I feel like it’s almost a step back into reality. With ‘Freak Boy’ and ‘Tied Up!’ you don\'t really get any conclusive answers; you never really will. I feel like it\'s the character trying different things to make their experience easier. ‘Tied Up!’ ended with the character being like, ‘Maybe if I can change my perspective on things, things will be easier.’ But that\'s a process that I feel puts a lot of onus and responsibility on you, and when the world is falling apart, I don\'t think you can really do that. That’s where the chorus comes from: ‘I said, baby, it’s not about me,’ and then in the second part, ‘My arms are tired from carrying the weight of your shit.’ It\'s a step back into the reality of the situation.” **“Balthazar”** “If ‘See Ya There’ was nihilism, then ‘Balthazar’ is existentialism. So ‘See Ya There’ was like, ‘There’s no meaning—oh *fuck*.’ Here, it’s like, ‘There’s no meaning. *Fuck yeah*, this is amazing.’ Maybe there’s no inherent meaning, but maybe all that means is we\'re not shackled by this predetermined thing we\'re supposed to do. Maybe that means we can make our own meaning. One of the first lines is about taking the power back into your own hands, and the second verse turns it into a battle against time. Maybe we can have control over ourselves and our destinies, but we gotta do it before time runs out. The second verse is almost paraphrasing a monologue from *Waiting for Godot*: ‘In one day we go blind… In one day we go deaf… We can fly, fall in love, waste aside, be the one.’ We can achieve or complete all of this in one day, and yet we choose to wait. Why? It opens up this idea where you can take control and do it now. Stop waiting. The time is now.” **“Stay Blessed”** “‘Stay Blessed’ is keeping on with this newfound empowerment through the realization that all of these things might have a negative side, but there\'s also a side of immense possibility, a ‘we\'re all in this together’ vibe. The Roach is everyone, and there are a million roaches out there because that\'s all of us. And that goes back to that line, ‘If you kill me now, you\'re gonna deal with roach number two.’ It\'s like, we can\'t be stopped. The song starts delving into that third and last philosophy of absurdism. Maybe there\'s no inherent meaning, and maybe we don\'t need to make our own meaning at all. We\'ve come this far in the journey, and we\'ve grown so much that maybe that\'s the gift itself. Maybe the fact that the sun rises and falls every day, and we get to see that from this magical distance where it\'s this giant ball of fire. It\'s far away enough where we get to feel its warmth, but it doesn\'t burn us to death. And we get to hug our friends every day, see cute little birds flying through the sky. It’s such a one-in-a-billion chance that this has all happened and we get to experience it. That’s absurdism to me. We exist in this world, and we can\'t buy or earn our way out of absurdity.” **“What Comes Will Come”** “It\'s a solidification of the journey so far. We go through these hardships and trials and tribulations, and maybe it\'s because of Hollywood media or just a naive sense of whatever, we expect the outcomes to be based on how good we are or how well we did. But we just live in this absurd reality. What comes will come, and that\'s not a bad thing. It\'s not a good thing, either. It\'s just a thing. Rollercoasters need their ups and their downs to make the full experience fun and exciting.” **“Stuck to the Fan”** “It’s not a happy ending. It\'s not a sad ending. It\'s not really even an ending. It\'s the point of acceptance. The Hollywood story arc is like, you climb the big mountain, and then there\'s a field of flowers for you to frolic in after your hard journey. In reality, you climb the mountain, and then there\'s another huge mountain waiting to be climbed. But the good thing about that is after you climb a new mountain, you become a better climber to get ready for the next big challenge and the next big hurdle. And I think that\'s just kind of indicative of life, which I wanted this story to be. I just wanted it to be an honest portrayal. Shit has hit the fan for so long that it\'s stuck there, and that\'s just the way it goes.”

Having exorcised their fascination with post-punk on 2021’s *Drunk Tank Pink*, shame evolves on their third LP—with an expansive mix of anthems (“Fingers of Steel”), rippers (“Six-Pack,” “Different Person”), and ballads (“All the People,” the Phoebe Bridgers-featuring “Adderall”) that, like the Pixies before them, delivers the twists and abrasions of underground music with the straightforward warmth of classic rock. To note that they wrote most of it in a couple of weeks (and recorded it live in the studio) would sound like a corny bid for the scruffy vitality of rock ’n’ roll, were it not for the fact that you can tell.

shame were tourists in their own adolescence - and nothing was quite like the postcard. The freefall of their early twenties, in all its delight and disaster, was tangled up in being hailed one of post-punk’s greatest hopes. In 2018, they took their incendiary debut album Songs of Praise for a cross-continental joyride for almost 350 relentless nights. They tried to bite off more than they could chew, just to prove their teeth were sharp enough – but eventually, you’ve got to learn to spit it out. Then came the hangover. shame’s frontman, Charlie Steen, suffered a series of panic attacks which led to the tour’s cancellation. For the first time, since being plucked from the stage of The Windmill and catapulted into notoriety, shame were confronted with who they’d become on the other side of it. This era, of being forced to endure reality and the terror that comes with your own company, would form shame’s second album, 2021’s Drunk Tank Pink, the band’s reinvention. If Songs of Praise was fuelled by pint-sloshing teenage vitriol, then Drunk Tank Pink delved into a different kind of intensity. Wading into uncharted musical waters, emboldened by their wit and earned cynicism, they created something with the abandon of a band who had nothing to lose. Having forced their way through their second album’s identity crisis, they arrive, finally, at a place of hard-won maturity. Enter: Food for Worms, which Steen declares to be “the Lamborghini of shame records.” For the first time, the band are not delving inwards, but seeking to capture the world around them. “I don’t think you can be in your own head forever,” says Steen. A conversation after one of their gigs with a friend prompted a stray thought that he held onto: “It’s weird, isn’t it? Popular music is always about love, heartbreak, or yourself. There isn’t much about your mates.” In many ways, the album is an ode to friendship, and a documentation of the dynamic that only five people who have grown up together - and grown so close, against all odds - can share. The title, Food for Worms, takes on different meanings when considered with the ten vignettes the band has painted for you across the record. That spirit of interpretation, to see yourself reflected within it, is conveyed through the cover art. Designed by acclaimed artist Marcel Dzama, whose style evokes dark fairy tales and surrealism, it’s suggestive of what’s left unsaid, what lies beneath the surface. On the one hand, Food for Worms calls to mind a certain morbidity, but on the other, it’s a celebration of life; the way that, in the end, we need each other. It also strikes at the core of shame itself. Since the beginning, the band has been in the business of finding the light in uncomfortable contradictions: Steen always makes a point of taking his top off during performances as a way of tackling his body weight insecurities. Through sheer defiance, they play their vulnerabilities as strengths. Reconnecting with that ethos is what hotwired the band into making the album after a false start during the pandemic. Without pressure or an end goal - just a long expanse of time - nothing would hold. Their management then presented them with a challenge: in just under three weeks, shame would play two shows at The Windmill where they would be expected to debut two sets of entirely new songs. This opportunity meant that the band returned the same ideology which propelled them to these heights in the first place: the love of playing live, on their own terms, fed by their audience. Thus, Food for Worms careened and crashed into life faster than anything they’d created before: a weapons-grade cocktail that captured all the gristle, fragility and carnal physicality that earned shame their merits. It was only right that shame would record the album entirely live for the first time. The band recorded Food for Worms while playing festivals all over Europe, invigorated by the strength of the reaction their new material was met with. That live energy, what it’s like to witness shame in their element, is captured perfectly on record - like lightning in a bottle. They called upon renowned producer Flood (Nick Cave, U2, Foals) to execute their vision. Recording each track live meant a kind of surrender: here, the rough edges give the album its texture; the mistakes are more interesting than perfection. In a way, it harks back to the title itself and the way that with this record, the band are embracing frailty and by doing so, are tapping into a new source of bravery. It also marks a sonic departure from anything they’ve done before. shame have abandoned their post-punk beginnings for far more eclectic influences, drawing from the tense atmospherics of Merchandise, the sharp yet uncomplicated lyrical observations of Lou Reed and the more melodic works of 90s German band, Blumfeld. In the past, their music had been almost clinically assembled, with the vocals and the band existing as two distinct layers. But Food for Worms, there has never been such an immediate sense of togetherness - and more than that, it was fun. Everyone chipped in on vocals; they made the unifying choice to sing, rather than the solitude that comes with a shout. Roles were not so fiercely defined, with Steen taking command of the bass guitar for the anthemic “Adderall”, devising a simple progression that bassist Josh Finerty would never dream of, pushing the album into new, unexpected places. “Adderall” staggers, feeling the weight of its own bones, evoking a certain desperation that comes with dragging yourself through an internal fog. Steen explains: “‘Adderall’ is the observation of a person reliant on prescription drugs. These pills shift their mental and physical state and alter their behaviour; it’s about how this affects them and those around them. It’s a song of compassion, frustration and the acceptance of change. It’s partly coming to terms with the fact that sometimes your help and love can’t cure those around you but, as much as it causes exasperation, you still won’t ever stop trying to help.” The album opens with “Fingers of Steel”, which is heralded with an airy piano section that plunges into nosebleed-inducing guitars like a mutant orchestra; it was completely transformed from its folk-indebted beginnings. It delves into the cyclical nature of friendship, which the title invites you to consider. “‘Fingers of Steel’ is about helping a mate and the frustrations that come with it,” shares Steen. “It’s coming to terms with the fact that people can’t be who you want them to be and sometimes there isn’t anything you can do to help, it’s their own thing they have to work out for themselves and you have to accept that.” But it wouldn’t be shame if there wasn’t a bit of theatrical flair, signed off with a smirk. “Six Pack”, with its psychedelic wah-wah grooves and frenetic guitarwork, sees Steen act as your spirit guide into a room where, within those four walls, your wildest dreams come true: “Now you’ve got Pamela Anderson reading you a bedtime story / And every scratch card is a fucking winner!” he howls. The song is a product of lockdown-induced cabin fever, and the absurd places our mind can wander when we are confined. It’s an anthem for newfound freedom: “You’ve done time behind bars, and now you’re making time in front of them,” Steen sings, with a showman’s grandeur. It’s time to make up for everything you’ve lost or wasted - and shame wants it all. Food for Worms also sees Steen deliver one of his greatest vocal performances which came from learning to lean into the vulnerabilities his lyrics portray, rather than deflecting them. “Orchid”, opens with the easy amble of an acoustic guitar, a different sound for the band which required careful consideration for how his voice would adapt to it. His vocal teacher, Rebecca Phillips, encouraged him to approach it unflinchingly. He recalls her telling him: “Anything that you’re singing is obviously personal, but a very male tendency is to detach from it and think of the melody, instead of what you’re saying.” It was this new technique that allowed shame to embrace the songs that dealt with a deeply personal subject: fear for a friend’s mental well-being. Steen’s voice paces with sleepless worry, guilt, frustration – and absolute tenderness. Closing track “All the People”, a great musical swell of brotherly love, haunts the mind the lingering words penned by guitarist Sean Coyle-Smith: “All the people that you’re gonna meet / Don’t you throw it all away / Because you can’t love yourself.” With that weight, there is a lightness to the song which captures the spirit of Food for Worms and all the thoughts that expression evokes, all that bittersweetness. And even if you can’t put those feelings into words, shame have found them for you.

“I feel like there are two sides of me,” says the Nashville-based singer-songwriter and guitar virtuoso known as Sunny War. “One of them is very self-destructive, and the other is trying to work with that other half to keep things balanced.” That’s the central conflict on her fourth album, the eclectic and innovative Anarchist Gospel, which documents a time when it looked like the self-destructive side might win out. Extreme emotions can make that battle all the more perilous, yet from such trials Sunny has crafted a set of songs that draw on a range of ideas and styles, as though she’s marshaling all her forces to get her ideas across: ecstatic gospel, dusty country blues, thoughtful folk, rip-roaring rock and roll, even avant garde studio experiments. She melds them together into a powerful statement of survival, revealing a probing songwriter who indulges no comforting platitudes and a highly innovative guitarist who deploys spidery riffs throughout every song. Because it promises not healing but resilience and perseverance, because it doesn’t take shit for granted, Anarchist Gospel holds up under such intense emotional pressure, acknowledging the pain of living while searching for something that lies just beyond ourselves, some sense of balance between the bad and the good.

A Wednesday song is a quilt. A short story collection, a half-memory, a patchwork of portraits of the American south, disparate moments that somehow make sense as a whole. Karly Hartzman, the songwriter/vocalist/guitarist at the helm of the project, is a story collector as much as she is a storyteller: a scholar of people and one-liners. Rat Saw God, the Asheville quintet’s new and best record, is ekphrastic but autobiographical and above all, deeply empathetic. Across the album’s ten tracks Hartzman, guitarist MJ Lenderman, bassist Margo Shultz, drummer Alan Miller, and lap/pedal steel player Xandy Chelmis build a shrine to minutiae. Half-funny, half-tragic dispatches from North Carolina unfurling somewhere between the wailing skuzz of Nineties shoegaze and classic country twang, that distorted lap steel and Hartzman’s voice slicing through the din. Rat Saw God is an album about riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano, past a creek that runs through the neighborhood riddled with broken glass bottles and condoms, a front yard filled with broken and rusted car parts, a lonely and dilapidated house reclaimed by kudzu. Four Lokos and rodeo clowns and a kid who burns down a corn field. Roadside monuments, church marquees, poppers and vodka in a plastic water bottle, the shit you get away with at Jewish summer camp, strange sentimental family heirlooms at the thrift stores. The way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness. It’s not really bright enough to see in front of you, but in that stretch of inky void – somehow – you see everything. Rat Saw God was written in the months immediately following Twin Plagues’ completion, and recorded in a week at Asheville’s Drop of Sun studio. While Twin Plagues was a breakthrough release critically for Wednesday, it was also a creative and personal breakthrough for Hartzman. The lauded record charts feeling really fucked up, trauma, dropping acid. It had Hartzman thinking about the listener, about her mom hearing those songs, about how it feels to really spill your guts. And in the end, it felt okay. “I really jumped that hurdle with Twin Plagues where I was not worrying at all really about being vulnerable – I was finally comfortable with it, and I really wanna stay in that zone.” The album opener, “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” happens in a flash: an explosive and wailing wall-of-sound dissonance that’d sound at home on any ‘90s shoegaze album, then peters out into a chirping chorus of peepers, a nighttime sound. And then into the previously-released eight-and-half-minute sprawling, heavy single, “Bull Believer.” Other tracks, like the creeping “What’s So Funny” or “Turkey Vultures,” interrogate Hartzman’s interiority - intimate portraits of coping, of helplessness. “Chosen to Deserve” is a true-blue love song complete with ripping guitar riffs, skewing classic country. “Bath County” recounts a trip Hartzman and her partner took to Dollywood, and time spent in the actual Bath County, Virginia, where she wrote the song while visiting, sitting on a front porch. And Rat Saw God closer “TV in the Gas Pump” is a proper traveling road song, written from one long ongoing iPhone note Hartzman kept while in the van, its final moments of audio a wink toward Twin Plagues. The reference-heavy stand-out “Quarry” is maybe the most obvious example of the way Hartzman seamlessly weaves together all these throughlines. It draws from imagery in Lynda Barry’s Cruddy; a collection of stories from Hartzman’s family (her dad burned down that cornfield); her current neighbors; and the West Virginia street from where her grandma lived, right next to a rock quarry, where the explosions would occasionally rock the neighborhood and everyone would just go on as normal. The songs on Rat Saw God don’t recount epics, just the everyday. They’re true, they’re real life, blurry and chaotic and strange – which is in-line with Hartzman’s own ethos: “Everyone’s story is worthy,” she says, plainly. “Literally every life story is worth writing down, because people are so fascinating.” But the thing about Rat Saw God - and about any Wednesday song, really - is you don’t necessarily even need all the references to get it, the weirdly specific elation of a song that really hits. Yeah, it’s all in the details – how fucked up you got or get, how you break a heart, how you fall in love, how you make yourself and others feel seen – but it’s mostly the way those tiny moments add up into a song or album or a person.

The wistful, slightly uncertain feeling you get from a Yo La Tengo album isn’t just one of the most reliable pleasures in indie rock; it practically defines the form. Their 17th studio album was recorded nearly 40 years after husband and wife Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley decided that, hey, maybe they could do it, too. *This Stupid World*’s sweet ballads (“Aselestine,” “Apology Letter”) and steady, psychedelic drones (“This Stupid World,” “Sinatra Drive Breakdown”) call back to the band’s classic mid-’90s period of *Painful* and *Electr-O-Pura*, whose domestications of garage rock and Velvet Underground-style noise helped bring the punk ethic to the most bookish and unpunk among us. Confident and capable as they are, you still get the sense that they don’t totally know what they’re doing, or at least entertain enough uncertainty to keep them human—a quality that not only gives the music its lived-in greatness, but also makes them the kind of band you want to root for, which their fans do with a low-key fidelity few other bands can claim.

Coming February 10: the most live-sounding Yo La Tengo album in years, This Stupid World. Times have changed for Yo La Tengo as much as they have for everyone else. In the past, the band has often worked with outside producers and mixers. In their latest effort, the first full-length in five years, This Stupid World was created all by themselves. And their time-tested judgment is both sturdy enough to keep things to the band’s high standards, and nimble enough to make things new. At the base of nearly every track is the trio playing all at once, giving everything a right-now feel. There’s an immediacy to the music, as if the distance between the first pass and the final product has become more direct. Available on standard black vinyl, CD and on limited blue vinyl.