Pitchfork's 37 Best Rock Albums of 2023

ANOHNI’s music revolves around the strength found in vulnerability, whether it’s the naked trembling of her voice or the way her lyrics—“It’s my fault”; “Why am I alive?”; “You are an addict/Go ahead, hate yourself”—cut deeper the simpler they get. Her first album of new material with her band the Johnsons since 2010’s *Swanlights* sets aside the more experimental/electronic quality of 2016’s *HOPELESSNESS* for the tender avant-soul most listeners came to know her by. She mourns her friends (“Sliver of Ice”), mourns herself (“It’s My Fault”), and catalogs the seemingly limitless cruelty of humankind (“It Must Change”) with the quiet resolve of someone who knows that anger is fine but the true warriors are the ones who kneel down and open their hearts.

Blonde Redhead return with ‘Sit Down for Dinner,’ their first album in nine years and debut for section1. Its title a nod to the often-sacred communal ritual of sharing a meal with those you love, this immersive, meticulously crafted album appropriately serves an expression of persistent togetherness, a testament to the unique internal logic Blonde Redhead have refined over their three-decade existence. Understated yet visceral melodies charge each song, creating a foil to lyrics about the inescapable struggles of adulthood: communication breakdown in enduring relationships, wondering which way to turn, holding onto your dreams. Ultimately, ‘Sit Down for Dinner’ lands as perhaps the strongest record in catalog that’s already as illustrious as it is varied. Blonde Redhead's 'Sit Down for Dinner' is out on 29th September 2023 on section1.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a description of boygenius that doesn’t contain the word “supergroup,” but it somehow doesn’t quite sit right. Blame decades of hoary prog-rock baggage, blame the misbegotten notion that bigger and more must be better, blame a culture that is rightfully circumspect about anything that feels like overpromising, blame Chickenfoot and Audioslave. But the sentiment certainly fits: Teaming three generational talents at the height of their powers on a project that is somehow more than the sum of its considerable parts sounds like it was dreamed up in a boardroom, but would never work if it had been. In fall 2018, Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker released a self-titled six-song EP as boygenius that felt a bit like a lark—three of indie’s brightest, most charismatic artists at their loosest. Since then, each has released a career-peak album (*Punisher*, *Home Video*, and *Little Oblivions*, respectively) that transcended whatever indie means now and placed them in the pantheon of American songwriters, full stop. These parallel concurrent experiences raise the stakes of a kinship and a friendship; only the other two could truly understand what each was going through, only the other two could mount any true creative challenge or inspiration. Stepping away from their ascendant solo paths to commit to this so fully is as much a musical statement as it is one about how they want to use this lightning-in-a-bottle moment. If *boygenius* was a lark, *the record* is a flex. Opening track “Without You Without Them” features all three voices harmonizing a cappella and feels like a statement of intent. While Bridgers’ profile may be demonstrably higher than Dacus’ or Baker’s, no one is out in front here or taking up extra oxygen; this is a proper three-headed hydra. It doesn’t sound like any of their own albums but does sound like an album only the three of them could make. Hallmarks of each’s songwriting style abound: There’s the slow-building climactic refrain of “Not Strong Enough” (“Always an angel, never a god”) which recalls the high drama of Baker’s “Sour Breath” and “Turn Out the Lights.” On “Emily I’m Sorry,” “Revolution 0,” and “Letter to an Old Poet,” Bridgers delivers characteristically devastating lines in a hushed voice that belies its venom. Dacus draws “Leonard Cohen” so dense with detail in less than two minutes that you feel like you’re on the road trip with her and her closest friends, so lost in one another that you don’t mind missing your exit. As with the EP, most songs feature one of the three taking the lead, but *the record* is at its most fully realized when they play off each other, trading verses and ideas within the same song. The subdued, acoustic “Cool About It” offers three different takes on having to see an ex; “Not Strong Enough” is breezy power-pop that serves as a repudiation of Sheryl Crow’s confidence (“I’m not strong enough to be your man”). “Satanist” is the heaviest song on the album, sonically, if not emotionally; over a riff with solid Toadies “Possum Kingdom” vibes, Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus take turns singing the praises of satanism, anarchy, and nihilism, and it’s just fun. Despite a long tradition of high-wattage full-length star team-ups in pop history, there’s no real analogue for what boygenius pulls off here. The closest might be Crosby, Stills & Nash—the EP’s couchbound cover photo is a wink to their 1969 debut—but that name doesn’t exactly evoke feelings of friendship and fellowship more than 50 years later. (It does, however, evoke that time Bridgers called David Crosby a “little bitch” on Twitter after he chastised her for smashing her guitar on *SNL*.) Their genuine closeness is deeply relatable, but their chemistry and talent simply aren’t. It’s nearly impossible for a collaboration like this to not feel cynical or calculated or tossed off for laughs. If three established artists excelling at what they are great at, together, without sacrificing a single bit of themselves, were so easy to do, more would try.

Based in Sydney, Australia and lead by the iconic Kel Mason, this band of maniacal rock n roll miscreants has been blowing drooly-punk minds for the past few years with a rash of out-of-print records and ridiculous videos that have bounced around the proper channels of the internet underbelly. A white hot set on the web-only Gonerfest 17 was greeted with cheers of joy, and ultimately re-issued as a cassette and LP. They made it over in full three-dimensional form for Gonerfest 19 and a completely unhinged US tour in 2022. Now Goner is proud to unleash their new album -- Goodnight Neanderthal -- ten blasts of the spazzy lo-fi attack you know and love, full of buzzy guitars, cheap synths and earworm hooks that demand to be sung in the shower. Or in your car. Or on your bike. Gee Tee rules. Get on board or get out of the way. Goodnight Neanderthal is now available for pre-order on Urge Records (Australia) and Goner Records (US).

제가 지금 누리고 있는 것들이 언제 사라질지, 언제 사람들이 제 곁을 떠날지 항상 두렵습니다. 모든 것들이 잠깐동안 밝게 빛났다가 아무 일도 없었던 것처럼 사라지는 일종의 마법이라고 생각합니다. 2집 발매 이후 제가 꾼 꿈들을 엮어서 만든 앨범입니다. 도움을 주신 전 세계 사람들에게 감사의 말씀을 드립니다. I'm always afraid when what I have now will disappear and when people will leave me. I think these are some kind of magic, that will shine bright for a while and then lights out, like nothing happened. This is an album that I made with my dreams I dreamed after my 2nd album. Thanks to people all over the world for the help.

“It was very easy to do,” Joanna Sternberg tells Apple Music of making their second full-length. “I was having fun and as comfortable as could be. It felt like the right thing.” Recorded over five days in the cartoonist/singer-songwriter’s native New York—with indie guitar hero Matt Sweeney producing—*I’ve Got Me* certainly sounds like it came easy. But Sternberg—a virtuoso musician who studied jazz, blues, and ragtime at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music—has a way of making difficult things sound simple and obvious, whether it’s self-acceptance (the huglike title track), resilience (“Mountains High”), or playing every instrument here. Yet, somehow, every line feels like it might weigh a ton, too. “It’s hard for me to get up the courage to show people one of my songs,” Sternberg says. “I have to really, really, really, really consider if I show people. I haven’t shown people a lot of them, but I have, like, 200.” **“I’ve Got Me”** “It’s kind of just about what it says it’s about—being very isolated and not having any friends. I think it’s kind of the theme of the whole album, because writing songs and stuff is what got me to have people wanting to be my friend. I mean, the song is about not feeling lonely—like I stopped being upset about being alone.” **“I Will Be With You”** “I just wrote the song while I was waiting for an orchestra rehearsal to start. I was at the piano, just having fun. I was trying to write an Irish love ballad. I wrote it in, like, three minutes; it was fine.” **“Mountains High”** “I was listening to lots of Cajun music with accordion in it, where they’re repeating accordion patterns. In my building, there’s a practice room in the basement because it’s artist housing. And after 11, you could go in as long as you want, so I would just go in and try to write songs. And I wrote this song in one of the rooms—just came up with the melody, and it kind of just wrote itself very fast.” **“I’ll Make You Mine”** “My mom wanted me to put that on the record, so I did. But that was one of the first songs I wrote, because I just kind of made it up on the piano. I don’t really like the song very much because it’s cheesy, but she said I had to put it on the record.” **“Stockholm Syndrome”** “I thought it kind of sounded like something that reminds me of middle school and the music everyone liked in middle school, and I didn’t like it. So, I didn’t think it was even good. But then all my friends were loving it. So, then I just forced myself to get used to it, and now I like it. I’m very lucky to play my songs, and I love to do it, but that song took a while to write because I thought it was really, really annoying and embarrassing. Then I just kind of accepted it.” **“The Love I Give”** “Sometimes, when I’m walking around, I come up with melodies. My producer Matt Sweeney really encourages me to take walks, so I can come up with melodies. So, that’s really, really helpful that he does that, because I forget to do it. I wrote that song while I was just walking to the train, and I just wrote it really fast. It was just about being around people who are hurtful to you, but you don’t want to change who you are.” **“She Dreams”** “I wrote that song when I was asleep. I wrote it in a dream, and I woke up, and it was all written. It was the only time that’s ever happened. And I think it was the first song I ever wrote. It’s pretty.” **“The Song”** “I kind of wrote it based on the first melody in Dvořák’s *New World Symphony*, of the English horn solo. It was a really nice melody, and then I just went off of that. That was all I needed to just write the whole thing.”

Since the release of 2011’s *Aesthethica*, Brooklyn’s Liturgy have positioned themselves as a kind of black-metal band for listeners indifferent to the conventions of black metal—a stance no doubt aggravated by the self-consciously obscure philosophies of frontperson Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix, who has done as much to poke the genre as she has to expand it. At 82 minutes, *93696* probably isn’t the kind of album you’ll listen to in one sitting, but its weird juxtapositions of flute fragments (“Red Crown II”), choral arrangements (“Angel of Sovereignty”), and black-metal comfort food (“Djennaration”) are provocative in any measure. Ambitious, but immediate, too.

“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.

Dogsbody, the debut album by Brooklyn-based Model/Actriz (vocalist Cole Haden, guitarist Jack Wetmore, drummer Ruben Radlauer, and bassist Aaron Shapiro), is a coming-of-age album set between the hours of dusk and dawn. It is as much an exploration of love and loss as it is a sharp, piercing, and violent ode to the explosive joy of being alive - the overwhelming brightness of staring at the sun.

CONVR61 is the debut LP from Hattiesburg's MSPAINT, Post-American. While it may be tempting to pin MSPAINT down stylistically, with labels like "synth-punk," these attempts fail to capture a band that transcends the sum of its parts and the hardcore and punk communities it occupies. Most of the records we release critique the world as it is. MSPAINT go a step further. This record is a triumph because it presents us a future of connection and light and allows us all to imagine living Post-American. Canadians - do not order a copy of the LP from our Bandcamp or store - order at northernscene.net PRESSING INFO: FIRST PRESS 100 copies on White with Blue and Purple Splatter (Convulse Exclusive-only available at convulserecords.com) 100 copies on Yellow vinyl (RevHQ exclusive) 100 copies on Orange Vinyl (Northern Scene Exclusive) 200 copies on Purple Vinyl 300 copies on Bubblegum Pink Vinyl

For the last two decades, Sufjan Stevens’ music has taken on two distinct forms. On one end, you have the ornate, orchestral, and positively stuffed style that he’s excelled at since the conceptual fantasias of 2003’s star-making *Michigan*. On the other, there’s the sparse and close-to-the-bone narrative folk-pop songwriting that’s marked some of his most well-known singles and albums, first fully realized on the stark and revelatory *Seven Swans* from 2004. His 10th studio full-length, *Javelin*, represents the fullest and richest merging of those two approaches that Stevens has achieved to date. Even as it’s been billed as his first proper “songwriter’s album” since 2015’s autobiographical and devastating *Carrie & Lowell*, *Javelin* is a kaleidoscopic distillation of everything Stevens has achieved in his career so far, resulting in some of the most emotionally affecting and grandiose-sounding music he’s ever made. *Javelin* is Stevens’ first solo record of vocal-based music since 2020’s *The Ascension*, and it’s relatively straightforward compared to its predecessor’s complexity. Featuring contributions from vocalists and frequent collaborators like Nedelle Torrisi, adrienne maree brown, Hannah Cohen, and The National’s Bryce Dessner (who adds his guitar skills to the heart-bursting epic “Shit Talk”), the record certainly sounds like a full-group effort in opposition to the angsty isolation that streaked *The Ascension*. But at the heart of *Javelin* is Stevens’ vocals, the intimacy of which makes listeners feel as if they’re mere feet away from him. There’s callbacks to Stevens’ discography throughout, from the *Age of Adz*-esque digital dissolve that closes out “Genuflecting Ghost” to the rustic Flannery O’Connor evocations of “Everything That Rises,” recalling *Seven Swans*’ inspirational cues from the late fiction writer. Ultimately, though, *Javelin* finds Stevens emerging from the depressive cloud of *The Ascension* armed with pleas for peace and a distinct yearning to belong and be embraced—powerful messages delivered on high, from one of the 21st century’s most empathetic songwriters.

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.

Post-humanism was a passion and a coping mechanism on yeule’s breakthrough album, 2022’s *Glitch Princess*, art-pop that escaped into the simulation and drew raw emotion from its artifice. Their third full-length finds the shape-shifting musician regaining their bearings as a human being, and trading short-circuiting electronica for the fuzzy sounds of shoegaze and ‘90s alt-rock. The effect is that of an AI yearning to be flesh and blood: “If only I could be/Real enough to love,” they sing over downcast guitar chords on “ghosts” as their voice glitches into decay. On the bleakly gorgeous “software update,” yeule fantasizes about a lover downloading their mind after their body is gone, over a swelling, reverberating wall of sound. There’s a tactile quality to the album’s digital processing reminiscent of ‘90s Warp Records staples like Boards of Canada or Aphex Twin, shot through with the melancholy that accompanies nostalgia for a time that’s long gone and barely remembered.

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.

Like all great stylists, the artist born Sean Bowie has a gift for presenting sounds we know in ways we don’t. So, while the surfaces of *Praise a Lord…*, Yves Tumor’s fifth LP, might remind you of late-’90s and early-2000s electro-rock, the album’s twisting song structures and restless detail (the background panting of “God Is a Circle,” the industrial hip-hop of “Purified by the Fire,” and the houselike tilt of “Echolalia”) offer almost perpetual novelty all while staying comfortably inside the constraints of three-minute pop. Were the music more challenging, you’d call it subversive, and in the context of Bowie as a gender-nonconforming Black artist playing with white, glam-rock tropes, it is. But the real subversion is that they deliver you their weird art and it feels like pleasure.