MOJO's 75 Best Albums of 2023

Paul McCartney and Ringo speak to MOJO about the full story behind the last Beatles song, Now And Then. Plus, the best albums of 2023 and more!

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51.
by 
Album • Mar 03 / 2023
MPB Samba-rock
Noteable
52.
Album • Feb 03 / 2023
Singer-Songwriter Indie Rock
Popular Highly Rated

Angel Numbers is the latest studio album which was released on February 3, 2023.

53.
by 
Album • Jun 09 / 2023
Neo-Psychedelia Slowcore
Popular

Forget the mumbled vocals and air of perpetual dislocation—Archy Marshall is a traditionalist, albeit a subtle one. Like all King Krule albums, *Space Heavy* has its jagged moments (“Pink Shell,” the back half of the title track). But as a father on the cusp of 30, he seems evermore in touch with the quiet contentments that make our perceived miseries endurable: a long walk on a chilly beach, a full moon seen from a clean bed. His ballads feel like doo-wop without exactly sounding like them (“Our Vacuum”), and the broken sweetness of his guitars are both ’90s indie-rock and the sleepy jazz of an after-hours lounge (“That Is My Life, That Is Yours”). New approach, same old beauty.

54.
Album • Jul 14 / 2023
Chamber Folk Neo-Psychedelia
Noteable
55.
Album • Mar 31 / 2023
Smooth Soul
Noteable Highly Rated

In 2021, Eddie Chacon and John Carroll Kirby decamped to Ibiza for two weeks. There, they rented the island’s only Fender Rhodes from one of the local rave crews. John posted it against the plaster walls and concrete floors of their temporary home, which was set into a green hillside overlooking a beach called Siesta. As they worked on Sundown, Pharoah Sanders’s “Greeting to Saud” was a daily listen. Instead of emulating its sound, Eddie absorbed its deeper lesson – that simplicity wins out over virtuosity every time. They wrote the first half of Sundown during that Ibiza stay and finished it at 64 Sound Studios in Los Angeles, where they both live. Joining Eddie on vocals and John on production and keys were Logan Hone (flutes and saxophones) Elizabeth Lea (trombone), Will Logan (drums) and David Leach (percussion). “It feels like we’re building our dream house,” says Eddie. “With Pleasure, Joy, and Happiness, we poured the foundation and now we’re expanding into new rooms.” The two artists have worked together before, on Eddie Chacon’s 2020 album, Pleasure, Joy and Happiness. It was in 2019, when he met John Carroll Kirby – a prolific artist in his own right who’s collaborated with Steve Lacy, Frank Ocean, Solange, and many more – that Chacon considered a return to releasing music. Pleasure, Joy and Happiness was meant to bring closure to a music career that began when Eddie was a teenager playing in Bay Area garage bands, and peaked in the 1990s when, as one half of the duo Charles & Eddie, he topped charts internationally with “Would I Lie To You”, before deserting the business. Eddie didn’t expect much from Pleasure’s release, and was amazed to find it resonated widely, gaining him a whole new fanbase and reinvigorating his career. Eddie says that only at his age – 59 – could he have the life experience and quiet confidence to make Sundown. That this new record exists at all is a surprise to its creator. As Eddie says, “Sundown is the follow-up I never thought I would get to make.”

56.
Album • Jun 09 / 2023
Contemporary R&B Pop
Popular

“No, I\'m not the same/I think I done changed,” Janelle Monáe raps with a swagger on “Float,” the opener for her fourth LP, *The Age of Pleasure*. Over powerful brass—courtesy of Seun Kuti and Egypt 80—and heavy-lidded 808s, the singer-songwriter introduces listeners to another side of herself where she embraces the present. “Those lyrics for \'Float,\' I was like, I have to put this out now,” she tells Apple Music. “This is exactly, how do I honor how I\'m feeling and who I am now. I\'m not thinking about the future, but right now, because this is all we have right now.” Where Monáe\'s previous records were character-driven—set in a complex futuristic world filled with androids—and explored themes about power, race, and humanity, *The Age of Pleasure* highlights a new era of liberation that sheds her Afrofuturist persona in favor of an unmasked exploration of her own sensuality and deservedness to feel good above all else. Monáe creates a safe space within the album\'s 14 tracks where people can relax into themselves and express their queer identities, sexuality, and unapologetic Blackness. “We had an Everyday People Wondaland party, and I was like, *Oh, this is who I want to make music for*,” she says. “This moment right here, I want to make the soundtrack to this lifestyle. They get it. This is what we fight to protect. All of my work that centers around protecting my communities that I\'m a part of, from the LGBTQIA+ communities to being Black to all of that.” *The Age of Pleasure* is a love letter to the Pan-African diaspora. Monáe trades in her previous albums\' New Wave indie-electronic beats for an effortless fusion of jazz, dancehall, reggae, trap, and Afrobeats. The first half features tightly produced jazz- and funk-inspired tempos and rhythms over which she flexes her accomplishments (“Champagne Shit”) and proudly celebrates herself (“Float,” “Phenomenal,” “Haute”). The album\'s second half switches gears with midtempo, reggae-influenced sounds and Monáe indulging her carnal desires. “I like lipstick on my neck/Hands around my waist so you know what\'s coming next/I wanna feel your lips on mine/I just wanna feel/A little tongue, we don\'t have a long time,” she sings on “Lipstick Lover,” a seductive, summery groove that is a joyous celebration of queer Black sexual liberation. She uses water metaphors to underscore her euphoric pleasure-seeking on “The Rush” and “Water Slide,” while “Only Have Eyes 42” is an ode to polyamory, with more than one lover at the center of Monáe\'s affections. Ultimately, on *The Age of Pleasure*, Monáe taps into her “free-ass motherfucking spirit,” as she calls it, and delivers an album that honors the space that she\'s currently in—unabashed and proud of who she is. “My friends have gotten an opportunity to see a different side of me that nobody gets to see, and this album, this moment that I\'m having, I\'m allowing myself to show that version of Janelle that friends get to see all the time,” she says. “I want to own all of me and be all of me.”

57.
Album • Jun 09 / 2023
Alt-Country Americana
Popular Highly Rated

In an interview just after the release of 2020’s *Reunions*, Jason Isbell said the difference between a good songwriter and a great one was whether or not you could write about a subject beyond yourself without making it feel vague. Ten years out from the confessional rawness of *Southeastern*, not only are Isbell’s lyrics ever closer to his ideal, but he’s got a sense of musical nuance to match. *Reunions* and 2017’s *The Nashville Sound* all blend anecdotes and memories from Isbell’s past with fiction, but *Weathervanes* tells a broader story with these vignettes, one with a message that became painfully clear to him throughout the pandemic: You can’t fully appreciate and acknowledge the good in your life without experiencing, and holding space for, the bad. “When I went into writing these songs, it started sort of at the tail end of the lockdown period and continued through our reentry into society; it kind of feels like a new world, for better or worse,” Isbell tells Apple Music. “A lot of these stories came from that, because when you start adding up the things that you\'re grateful for as somebody who tells stories, then automatically I think your mind goes to the counterpoint of that or the inverse of that. And you start thinking, \'Well, where could I be if I hadn\'t made the choices that led me to here?\'” This led to a fundamental shift in his approach to songwriting. “The more specific and the more intense something is, the more likely I am to come at that through a character,” he tells Apple Music. “If I\'m writing about love or death or having kids, I will go from the first person and it\'ll be me. But if I\'m writing about something like a school shooting, it feels like I have to say, \'Okay, this is how this affects me, and this is how this makes me feel.\' The only way I can be honest with that stuff is come at it from a character\'s perspective when it\'s a very specific topic like that.” Sometimes, that means creating these characters—or even reflecting on a younger version of himself in a difficult situation, as he does in “White Beretta”—and trusting them to lead the song down the path it needs. “So many times I didn\'t know what I was talking about until I got to halfway through the song, and I like it best when it happens that way,” he says. “I\'ll just get started and I\'ll say to myself, \'If I make a real person here and actually watch them with an honest eye, then after a couple of verses, they\'ll tell me what I\'m writing about.\'” Below, Isbell tells the stories behind the songs of *Weathervanes*. **“Death Wish”** “This is the kind of song that I have wanted to write for a long time. It\'s expansive from the production, but also you can tell from Jack White doing the acoustic cover that he did, it still feels like a broad, expansive sort of thing. That\'s a modern type of songwriting that I\'m really drawn to, but it\'s also antithetical to the roots-music ideal. And after \'Death Wish\' is over, I feel like, you\'ve hung in there with me through this sort of experimental thing. Now I can give you something that is a little bit more comfortable for your palate, something you\'re a little more used to from me.” **“King of Oklahoma”** “I was out there filming in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. There was a project that I had been asked to be a part of with Darius Rucker, Sheryl Crow, and I think Mike Mills, and a couple of other people. For a minute there, I was like, ‘Well, if I can get home in time to record with you all, that sounds like a really fun time. So I will do that.’ But I was never home in time because they kept changing my filming schedule, so I just missed it. But I wrote that song thinking, ‘Well, maybe I need some songs for this; I don\'t know if this is going to work for them or not.’ Eventually I thought this should be just a song of my own.” **“Strawberry Woman”** “This one\'s probably the closest I come to nostalgia on this record, I think, because there are a lot of moments here that are things that Amanda \[Shires, Isbell\'s wife and frequent collaborator\] and I shared together early on in the relationship. There\'s an undercurrent of the beginning of a relationship when you really need each other in ways that, if everybody\'s progressing like they\'re supposed to, you might not wind up needing each other in the same way 10 years down the road. And there\'s loss in that. It\'s a beautiful thing to grow as a human being, and both of us have, I think a lot, but then all of a sudden, at the end of that, you start trying to figure out what you still have in common. Even though you might not have the codependent nature that the relationship had early on, it\'s still something worth doing and worth working on, worth fighting for. You have to adjust your expectations from each other.” **“Middle of the Morning”** “After the experience of *Reunions*, Amanda and I took a little bit of a break from doing that stuff together. For the most part, I just sat and worked on my own until I got all these done. ‘Middle of the Morning,’ I don\'t know if she likes that song or not, maybe she does. That one\'s very personal as far as the perspective goes. That was a tough one to write and a tough one to sing, because I know there\'s some assumptions in there, and there\'s this sort of feeling of living in under the same roof through the pandemic and feeling so disconnected from each other.” **“Save the World”** “It was right after the Uvalde school shooting, but I didn\'t know that that\'s what I was writing about when I started. When I started, I was writing about leaving my wallet behind, and then I was writing about a phone conversation, and then all of a sudden I was writing about a school shooting. Once I realized that\'s what I was writing about, I thought, \'Oh, shit. Now I\'ve got to do this and handle it correctly.\' It took a lot of work. I finished that song and played it for Amanda, and she was like, \'I think you should write this again. You\'re not saying what you want to say. And at this point, it doesn\'t have enough meat, doesn\'t have enough detail.\' And I was like, \'Yeah, but that\'s going to be really fucking hard. How do you write about this without it seeming exploitative?\' And so it took more than one stab.” **“If You Insist”** “This song is from the perspective of a woman, and I wrote it for a movie—I don\'t remember the name of the movie, and I wound up not using it for the movie. They had given me my own song \[\'Chaos and Clothes\' off *The Nashville Sound*\] as a reference, and so I wrote something very similar to that in feel. I just really liked the song, and whoever we were negotiating with for the situation with the movie, they didn\'t want us to own the master, but I said, \'Well, I\'ll just keep it.\' And so we just kept it and I put it on the record.” **“Cast Iron Skillet”** “I think for a lot of songwriters that are writing whatever ‘Southern song’ or outlaw country they feel like they\'re writing is to go into this idea of, \'This is all the stuff that my granddad told me, and it\'s this down-home wisdom.\' What I wanted to say was, \'There is an evil undercurrent to all these things that our granddads told us, and there is darkness in those woods.\' I don\'t mean to sound like I\'m better at it than anybody else. Sometimes people are aiming for a different target, but I get bored with songs that do the same thing over and over. I wanted to turn that on its head and say, \'Let\'s frame this with this nostalgic idea of our romanticized Southern childhoods—and then let\'s talk about a couple of things that really happened.\'” **“When We Were Close”** “This is about a friendship between two musicians, and a lot of people ask me who it\'s about, but that\'s not the point. It\'s about me and a whole fucking bunch of people, but it\'s fairly specific. I had a friend who I made a lot of music with and spent a lot of time with, and we had a falling-out, and it never got right. It was so severe, and then he was gone, and that was the end of that. There was no closure. I remember when John Prine died, I was very sad, but I was also very grateful that the grief that I felt for John was not complicated. You don\'t have to be angry and you don\'t have to feel like there are things left unsaid or unresolved. This story was really the inverse of that, because it was like, yes, I am grateful for a lot of the things that we did together and that person showed me and a lot of the kindnesses, but at the same time, it was complicated. I have to be able to hold those two things in my head at the same time. You could call that the theme of this whole album, honestly.” **“Volunteer”** “The connection that I have to my home is complicated, because I am critical of the place where I grew up, and also, I\'m very, very fortunate that I grew up there. But my heart breaks for small towns in Alabama, and those small Alabama towns are scattered all over America and all over the world. I go play music in a lot of them, and I feel welcome, but not entirely. I also feel like an interloper. This story is a narrative based on a character that is fictional, but it came from that idea of like the Steve Earle song, \'nothing brings you down like your hometown,\' that same thing. It\'s like, why can\'t I really feel like I have a strong emotional connection to this place where I grew up? And also, why can\'t they get it together? The older I get, the more I think I feel comfortable discussing that and discussing the place.” **“Vestavia Hills”** “It started as me writing about somebody else, but the joke was on me. I got about halfway through the song and I was like, ‘I see what I\'m doing. You asshole.’ Then I thought about, man, what would it be like to be an artist\'s crew member? Let\'s make our character the crew guy, the sound guy who has been doing this for a long time and really believes in the work and really cares about the artist, but he has had enough. Basically, this is him turning in his two-week notice and saying, \'I\'m going to do one last tour with you, and then I\'m going home, because my wife makes a lot of money. We have a nice house in a nice neighborhood and I don\'t have to put up with this shit anymore.\'” **“White Beretta”** “At this song’s heart there\'s this regret, and it\'s not shame, because I love the concept of extracting helpful emotions from shame. I feel like shame is kind of to protect you from really looking at what actually happened. I can look back and say, \'Well, yeah, it wasn\'t all my fault, because I was raised a certain way to believe a certain set of things.\' I didn\'t say, \'Don\'t do this.\' I didn\'t say, \'I don\'t want you to terminate this pregnancy.\' I was just kind of on the fence. But I was a teenager; I didn\'t know what to do, and I had been raised in a very conservative place, and there was a lot of conflicting emotions going on. A song like that is hard because you have to make an admission about yourself. You have to say, \'I haven\'t always been cool in this way.\' I don\'t think you can give an example to people of growing if you don\'t give an example of what you\'re growing from.” **“This Ain’t It”** “This is sort of post-Southern-rock, because it sounds very Southern rock, but the dad in this song is somebody who would completely, unironically love the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. The perspective is he\'s basically trying to sneak back into his daughter\'s life at a very inopportune time. It\'s another one of those where the advice might not be very good, but he certainly believes it, and it\'s coming from his heart. I\'ve proven what I need to prove about my tastes and about serving the song, and sometimes the song just needs to have a bunch of guitar on it and rock, and maybe even some fucking congas.” **“Miles”** “I kept trying to shape it into something that was more like a four-minute Jason Isbell song, and then at one point I thought, ‘No. I think we could just play the way that I\'ve written it here.’ I would have a verse on one page and then that refrain written out on a different page, and I had to go back through the notebook and figure out what belonged to that song. The approach was kind of like if Neil Young was fronting Wings. It was like a McCartney song where it\'s got all these different segments and then it comes back around on itself at the end, but also sort of with Neil\'s guitar and backbeat. It felt like I had a little bit of a breakthrough in what I would allow myself to do, because I\'ve always loved songs like this, and I\'ve always sort of thought, \'Well, you need to stop.\' When Lennon was out of the picture, McCartney was making \'Band on the Run\' and all this stuff. It\'s just one big crazy song all tied together with little threads.”

58.
Album • Mar 10 / 2023
Soul Ambient
Popular

Some years ago, there was a magazine piece wherein the writer meditated on the concept of the “Cosmic Southerner”: the late Pharoah Sanders, André 3000 and Col. Bruce Hampton (on whom the piece was ultimately focused) were all mentioned. Somehow, Alabama-born, Atlanta-based self-taught artist Lonnie Holley was left out of the piece. But Holley, 72, has improvised — nay, conjured! — ecstatic, baffling and heavy moments that can often only be described as “cosmic.” In a mere two lines of a song, Holley can zoom in on the pores of one’s skin and pull back to encompass the whole of the Milky Way. All that said, Holley’s music and visual art (for which he has shown at The Met, The Smithsonian and is represented by the illustrious Blum & Poe) is much more about our place in the cosmos than the cosmos itself. It’s about how we overcome adversity and tremendous pain; about how we develop and maintain an affection for our fellow travelers; about how we stop wishing for some “beyond” and start caring for the one rock we have. Holley has never delivered this message as clear, as concise and as exhilaratingly as he does on his new album ‘Oh Me Oh My.’ ‘Oh Me Oh My’ is both elegant and ferocious, sharpening the work contained on his 2018 Jagjaguwar debut ‘MITH’. It is stirring in one moment and a balm the next. It details histories both global and personal. Holley’s harrowing youth and young manhood in the Jim Crow South are well-told at this point — his sale into a different home as a child for just a bottle of whiskey; his abuse at the infamous Mount Meigs correctional facility for boys; the destruction of his art environment by the Birmingham airport expansion. But, as mentioned, Holley’s music is less a performance of pain endured and more a display of perseverance, of relentless hope, of Thumbs Up For Mother Universe. Intricately and lovingly produced by LA’s Jacknife Lee (The Cure, REM, Modest Mouse), ‘Oh Me Oh My’ features both kinetic, shortwave funk that calls to mind Brian Eno’s ‘My Life in the Bush of Ghosts’ and the deep space satellite sounds of Eno’s ambient works. There are also elements of Laurie Anderson’s meditations, elements of Gil Scott-Heron’s profound longform soul, elements of John Lurie’s grabbag jazz, and yes, elements of Sun Ra’s bold afrofuturism. But ‘Oh Me Oh My’ is a triumphant sonic achievement of its own. Acclaimed collaborators like Michael Stipe (“Oh Me, Oh My”), Sharon Van Etten (“None of Us Will Have But a Little While”), Moor Mother (“I Am Part of the Wonder,” “Earth Will Be There”), Justin Vernon of Bon Iver (“Kindness Will Follow Your Tears”) and Rokia Koné (“If We Get Lost They Will Find Us”) serve as choirs of angels and co-pilots, giving Lonnie’s message flight, and reaffirming him as a galvanizing, iconoclastic force across the music community. Holley reflects, “My art and my music are always closely tied to what is happening around me, and the last few years have given me a lot to thoughtsmith about. When I listen back to these songs I can feel the times we were living through. I’m deeply appreciative of the collaborators, especially Jacknife, who helped the songs take shape and really inspired me to dig deeper within myself.” ‘Oh Me Oh My’ is also an achievement in the refinement of Holley’s impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness lyrics. During each session, Holley and Lee would discuss the essence of the songs and distill Holley’s words to their most immediate center. On the title track, which deals with mutual human understanding, Holley is as profound as ever in far fewer phrases: “The deeper we go, the more chances there are, for us to understand the oh-me’s and understand the oh-my’s.”

59.
Album • Sep 08 / 2023
Art Pop House Electronic
Popular Highly Rated
60.
by 
Album • Jan 06 / 2023
Garage Rock Revival
Popular Highly Rated

For his 19th solo album, punk godfather and infamous Stooges vocalist Iggy Pop teamed up with superproducer Andrew Watt and an all-star band. Featuring appearances from Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan, Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith, Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard, late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, and blink-182 drummer Travis Barker—among others—the songs on *EVERY LOSER* are essentially played by famous musicians who grew up listening to Iggy Pop. “Andrew is very all-star-oriented in general,” Iggy says of the young producer. “It\'s like a fetish with him. Amusingly, he has an incredible collection of mint-condition rock star T-shirts. Once we started working together, he started wearing Iggy Pop T-shirts. Every day I got to see a new one.” Lyrically, *EVERY LOSER* sees Iggy seesawing from stream-of-consciousness bitch-fests (“Modern Day Ripoff,” “All the Way Down”) and love songs to Miami (“New Atlantis”) to reading the classifieds as a way to honor a decades-old suggestion from Andy Warhol (“The News for Andy”). The title of the album comes from a line in the social-media-inspired track “Comments” in which Pop says, “Every loser needs a bit of joy.” “Andrew suggested that whole line as the title,” he tells Apple Music. “If I was Pink Floyd, maybe I could get away with that. But I’m not, so I came back with *EVERY LOSER*.” Below, he discusses each track. **“Frenzy”** “There’s some name-calling there, but it’s just one particular dick and prick who gave me the ammo for those lines. No, you can’t ask who it is—but I’m sure he knows. It’s not a total rant, but it’s in the tradition of ‘Leader of the Pack’ or something like that. There’s some aggro there, but once it’s in motion you’re thinking about all sorts of things—the sharks in the sea that are out get you—but you’re also thinking about, ‘Shut up and love me, will you?’ Many things are ping-ponging in your mind. It’s a very tough little three minutes of rock music.” **“Strung Out Johnny”** “Andrew is a producer who’s also a top-flight musician and a good writer. When he sent me this song, he put a little provisional title on it—‘Strung Out Johnny.’ I thought, ‘I know something about that subject. I could sing on that.’ So we kept the title. I’m singing it to the archetypal Johnny, the universal young man. I wanted to sing to him about how it goes—step one, step two, step three, and then you’re fucked. But I wanted to put myself in there too, so the song would be a little warmer and more sincere.” **“New Atlantis”** “It\'s a love song to Miami and an homage to Donovan, who had a song called ‘Atlantis.’ Things are sinking here in Miami. I’ve experienced it because I’ve been here 24 years. But I do love this place. I’ve had the best years of my life here. I remember talking to Andrew about the song while he was on a boat in the Bahamas. I said, ‘You know Atlantis, the lost civilization, is right under you? Have you heard the song by Donovan?’ I don’t think he had. So he started blasting it out all over the sea on the boat speaker system.” **“Modern Day Ripoff”** “This came at a point in the record when I was starting to get cranky because I’m like 45 years older than Andrew and his energy doesn’t stop. I told him, ‘In The Stooges, we’d just do seven songs and an instrumental. Isn’t that enough?’ But no, he said we needed more, more, more. So, for the last three songs—starting with this one—I started writing bitchy lyrics. It’s just a standard middle-aged-white-guy-complaining song, but tongue-in-cheek. At one point it says, ‘Why can’t I do blow anymore? I can’t smoke a joint because I’m too paranoid? What the fuck?’” **“Morning Show”** “Andrew asked me if I was interested in doing a ballad, and I said yes. This was something he already had in his pocket. It’s like a Stones-type ballad. I never talked to him about it, but I’m guessing that was the inspiration. But I approached it more like a mature country singer would. A lot of people imagine it might be about, ‘Oh my god, I’ve got to wake up and be Iggy Pop again,’ but it’s nothing to do with that. It’s just about feeling down and depressed but putting as good a face on it as you can. Kinda like ‘Tears of a Clown’ by Smokey Robinson.” **“The News for Andy (Interlude)”** “When I was making *Funhouse* with The Stooges, we shared a motel with Andy Warhol and his entourage, who were making the film *Heat* at the time. At one point, Andy suggested to me, ‘Why don’t you just read the newspaper and let that be the vocal of the song?’ I never did anything about it, but I told the story to Andrew and he was dying. He said we should do it. So what I’m saying here is from three different advertisements that were in the free handout paper that was laying around the studio that day. You know, the local spreadsheet that’s sponsored by strip bars and usually run by leftists.” **“Neo Punk”** “Travis Barker is playing on this, and I guess he walked right into that one. But he plays so well on it. The way he plays on the choruses sounds like he listened to ‘I Got a Right’ by The Stooges. I’ve been fascinated for a long time with the way that punk started out as one music and then became many musics and then ultimately seeped into the fashion world, into ethics, sexual orientations, all sorts of things. And suddenly people are making very quick, very large money out of doing things in a punky way. That’s kind of what it’s about.” **“All the Way Down”** “This is another one of the songs where I was getting crankier during the sessions. The guitarist in my band had posted a little footage of me from our last tour. I was dismantling the mic stand and she titled it ‘Full beast mode.’ I was quite proud that I could still manage the full beast mode. So, the song is basically saying, ‘I’m gonna go full on, and then complain a little bit.’ Stone Gossard from Pearl Jam plays on this one. I opened some shows for them many years ago, and their fans weren’t interested. They just wanna see Pearl Jam.” **“Comments”** “The music has a beautiful, lonely vibe to it, but then the chorus is so happy. What makes me happy these days is getting a giant check for doing something easy. And the loneliness part, that comes from Zuckerberg and Musk. I will look at the comments \[on social media\] until I get a general picture, but then I just sort of feel like I’m going to puke. Even if they’re positive—because it’s just one after the next after the next. And it’s always ‘You’re great!’ or ‘You’re a piece of shit!’ There’s not much in the middle, generally.” **“My Animus (Interlude)”** “What I\'m trying to say there is that I have a certain pride in the idea that my front, when I want to put it forward, is not dependent on being some kind of multimillionaire, or chart-topper, or stadium king, or any of that. It comes from me, and it comes from what I think is just a healthy ability I have—and I\'ve maintained—to be able to seek out the important pleasures in life. That’s how I’d put it.” **“The Regency”** “There’s a very interesting relationship between the parking business, the banks, and the stadium business. The real money is in that parking lot. It’s a really big business. That’s sort of what this song is talking about. And Taylor Hawkins played on this and ‘Comments.’ He really makes them come alive. I had met Taylor when I opened for the Foo Fighters, and then he played me in the CBGB movie. His abs were the movie poster, presumably as my abs.”

61.
by 
Album • Mar 31 / 2023
Fula Music
Highly Rated

Pre-order the album before 5PM GMT on Monday December 5th to receive exclusive pre-sale access for Baaba's upcoming headline gig at The Barbican, London on May 30th, 2023. Pre-sale tickets will be live from 10am GMT on Wednesday 7th December, access codes will be sent by email on Wednesday 7th December at 9am, so please make sure to accept the request to be added to Baaba's mailing list at the point of purchase. No purchase necessary, for full terms and conditions please visit www.marathonartists.com/baaba-maal-preorder-tcs.

62.
by 
Album • Mar 01 / 2023
Popular Highly Rated
63.
by 
Album • Sep 15 / 2023
Singer-Songwriter Indie Folk
Popular Highly Rated

“As I got older I learned I’m a drinker/Sometimes a drink feels like family,” Mitski confides with disarming honesty on “Bug Like an Angel,” the strummy, slow-build opening salvo from her seventh studio album that also serves as its lead single. Moments later, the song breaks open into its expansive chorus: a convergence of cooed harmonies and acoustic guitar. There’s more cracked-heart vulnerability and sonic contradiction where that came from—no surprise considering that Mitski has become one of the finest practitioners of confessional, deeply textured indie rock. Recorded between studios in Los Angeles and her recently adopted home city of Nashville, *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We* mostly leaves behind the giddy synth-pop experiments of her last release, 2022’s *Laurel Hell*, for something more intimate and dreamlike: “Buffalo Replaced” dabbles in a domestic poetry of mosquitoes, moonlight, and “fireflies zooming through the yard like highway cars”; the swooning lullaby “Heaven,” drenched in fluttering strings and slide guitar, revels in the heady pleasures of new love. The similarly swaying “I Don’t Like My Mind” pithily explores the daily anxiety of being alive (sometimes you have to eat a whole cake just to get by). The pretty syncopations of “The Deal” build to a thrilling clatter of drums and vocals, while “When Memories Snow” ropes an entire cacophonous orchestra—French horn, woodwinds, cello—into its vivid winter metaphors, and the languid balladry of “My Love Mine All Mine” makes romantic possessiveness sound like a gift. The album’s fuzzed-up closer, “I Love Me After You,” paints a different kind of picture, either postcoital or defiantly post-relationship: “Stride through the house naked/Don’t even care that the curtains are open/Let the darkness see me… How I love me after you.” Mitski has seen the darkness, and on *The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We*, she stares right back into the void.

64.
Album • May 05 / 2023
Soft Rock Pop Rock
Popular Highly Rated
65.
Album • Aug 11 / 2023
Post-Punk
Popular
66.
Album • Sep 08 / 2023
Chamber Folk Singer-Songwriter
67.
Album • Mar 24 / 2023
Vocal Jazz
Noteable Highly Rated

Mélusine features a mix of five originals and interpretations of nine songs, dating as far back as the twelfth century, mostly sung in French along with Occitan, English, and Haitian Kreyol. The new album’s songs tell the story of the European folkloric legend of Mélusine, a woman who turns into a half-snake each Saturday as a result of a childhood curse by her mother. Mélusine later agrees to marry Raymondin on the condition that he never see her on Saturdays. He agrees but is ultimately convinced by his brother to break his promise, piercing his wife’s door with his sword and finding her naked in the bath, half snake, half woman. When she catches him spying on her, she turns into a dragon and flies out the window, only to reappear every time one of her descendants is on their deathbed. “I think what I try to do is more akin to revealing secrets than telling stories,” Salvant says. “Revealing secrets is also the snake’s role in the Garden [of Eden]. The snake brings secrets, knowledge, pain, and mayhem.” She continues, “The story of Mélusine is also the story of the destructive power of the gaze. Raymondin’s sword pierces a hole into her iron door. His gaze does too. The gaze is transformative and combustible. She sees that he is secretly seeing her. Her secret is revealed. This double gaze turns her into a dragon. She can now breathe fire.” Salvant, whose parents are French and Haitian, says Mélusine is also “partly about that feeling of being a hybrid, a mixture of different cultures, which I’ve experienced not only as the American-born child of two first generation immigrants, but as someone raised in a family that is racially mixed, from several different countries, with different languages spoken in the home.” “‘Dame Iseut,’ the last song of the album, was translated into Haitian Kreyol with my dad from the Occitan, which is an ancient language spoken in the south of France. My grandmother spoke a little, and her brother used to teach it,” Salvant says. “This album combines elements from French mythology, Haitian Vaudoo, and apocrypha.”

68.
Album • Mar 24 / 2023
Soul
Highly Rated

After Nearly 40 Years, Flying Dutchman Records Returns With The Stirring Protest Soul Of Billy Valentine & The Universal Truth Out March 17 Valentine Delivers Inventive & Stirring Vocal Performances Of Songs By Flying Dutchman Icons Gil-Scott Heron & Leon Thomas, As Well As Marvin Gaye, Eddie Kendricks, Curtis Mayfield, Prince, War & Stevie Wonder Album Features Accompaniment From Theo Croker, Pino Pallodino, Jeff Parker, Immanuel Wilkins & Many More After nearly 40 years of dormancy, Flying Dutchman Records — the storied imprint founded by legendary record producer Bob Thiele (John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Louis Armstrong’s “What A Wonderful World”) and known for releases by Duke Ellington, Gil-Scott Heron, and Leon Thomas as well as recorded speeches by Black intellectuals like Angela Davis and Stanley Crouch — will return with the March 24 release of Billy Valentine & The Universal Truth, a record that is in tune with Flying Dutchman’s musical and political legacy while charting a new path for the label’s 21st century rebirth. Bob Thiele, Jr. — the son of Bob Thiele — hand-picked his longtime friend and collaborator, vocalist Billy Valentine, to release the first record for the relaunch of Flying Dutchman and signed on to produce. Valentine began recording the album right before the coronavirus pandemic. As the sessions proceeded, the world erupted in protest after the May 2020 murder of George Floyd. “Making the album suddenly became very cathartic,” Valentine recalls, “The pandemic was one thing. Then to see what happened to George Floyd — that just broke my heart.” On Billy Valentine & The Universal Truth, Valentine reinterprets iconic protest songs, giving us his own spirited expressions of the boundless outrage, struggle, despair, and resilience contained therein. Backed by a veritable who’s who of modern jazz — Theo Croker, Pino Pallodino, Jeff Parker, Immanuel Wilkins and so many more (full credits below) — Valentine’s performances find new contours in these testifying renditions of message songs originally recorded and written by Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, Eddie Kendricks, War, Prince — and of course, Flying Dutchman stalwarts Leon Thomas and Gil-Scott Heron. Today, Valentine shares his powerful yet wounded take on Gil-Scott Heron’s “Home Is Where The Hatred Is,” the late artist’s rendition of a junkie’s lament. The track follow’s Billy’s prismatic and soulful version of Curtis Mayfield’s “We The People Who Are Darker Than Blue,” released last year and praised by Gilles Peterson as “incredible.” Billy Valentine’s musical journey has been long and varied. Born and raised in Columbus, OH, at 15-years-old he booked his first paying gig after sitting in with his brother Alvin during a performance at Leon’s Cocktail Lounge in Patterson, NJ. He spent years honing his craft at Leon’s, opening for bigger acts such as Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway, who would cross the Hudson after stints at The Apollo. After earning some on-the-road experience singing with the Young-Holt Trio and touring with the original road company of T he Wiz, Billy and his brother John were signed to a deal at A&M Records to record as The Valentine Brothers. While The Valentine Brothers never became household names, they did have some fairly successful R&B chart hits, including the Reaganomics- critiquing “Money’s Too Tight (To Mention),” and the crate digger quiet storm classic “Lonely Nights.” Following the duo’s dissolution in 1987, Valentine linked up with Bob Thiele Jr. (now the caretaker of Flying Dutchman) and Phil Roy, who as a trio began collaborating on songs that would ultimately go on to be recorded by Ray Charles, The Neville Brothers, and both Pops and Mavis Staples. Says Thiele Jr.: “It was Billy’s voice that sold our songs, making them irresistible to the artists who would cover them. Others caught on and Billy would become the secret weapon of nearly every songwriter in L.A. H is vocal performances on demos made their songs (and ours) irresistible to Bonnie Raitt, Joe Cocker, Bette Midler, and countless others. And yet, no one outside of the privileged few knew who Billy Valentine was.” Over the years, Valentine’s voice continued to pop up in surprising places, including television (as part of the soundtracks for shows as varied as (Boston Legal, Sabrina The Teenage Witch, and Sons Of Anarchy) and in pop hits by Nas (“Legit”) and Axwell ("Nobody Else")

69.
by 
Album • May 19 / 2023
Slacker Rock
Popular
70.
Album • Jun 02 / 2023
Gospel Afro-Funk
71.
Album • Apr 28 / 2023
72.
Album • Sep 15 / 2023
Country Americana Singer-Songwriter
Highly Rated
73.
Album • Sep 08 / 2023
Avant-Garde Jazz Jazz Poetry Spiritual Jazz
Noteable
74.
Album • Sep 29 / 2023
Funk Smooth Soul
75.
Album • Oct 27 / 2023
Soul Blues
Noteable Highly Rated