Uncut's 75 Best Albums of 2023

London Brew is inspired by the legendary Miles Davis’ album, Bitches Brew. Recorded in December 2020 at The Church Studios in London, this three-day recording session brings together 12 London based artists, collectively known as “London Brew”: Benji B, Raven Bush, Theon Cross, Nubya Garcia, Tom Herbert, Shabaka Hutchings, Nikolaj Torp Larsen, Dave Okumu, Nick Ramm, Dan See, Tom Skinner and Martin Terefe. Produced by Martin Terefe and Executive Producer Bruce Lampcov, these original recordings celebrate the 50th Anniversary of Bitches Brew. Available as a 2-LP set, 2-CD & digitally. "It was a pleasure to record with such a talented group of UK musicians and friends, and to work with the producers on this amazing project. It was made more special by the iconic space we were in (Paul Epworth’s Church Studios). We were all so excited to make music together again during that time of lockdown. This session was special in so many ways and we poured all of it into the music.” - Nubya Garcia "For me, that's what Bitches Brew is. It's a bunch of musicians making music because of the love of making music, as a social force and as a social construct. They are creating something that expresses unity and motion. That's what it is to be alive… you know, you have unity, you have motion, and you have vibration. You don't get any more alive than that. That's Bitches Brew." - Shabaka Hutchings

There’s a haunting intensity and rare poetic beauty about Ryuichi Sakamoto’s blend of ambient sounds, stripped down to the bare essentials of melody and rhythm. And for all its simplicity, this is an album that is profoundly moving. His dozen pieces, created spontaneously in March 2021 during the early stages of convalescence from major cancer surgery, speak of life’s fragility and of music’s power to comfort, console, even to heal. It feels almost intrusive at first to listen to what originated as private musical thoughts, conceived on synthesizer and piano out of an innate need for the presence of pure, unadorned sounds. Sakamoto’s choice of 12 favorite sketches, each named for its date of composition, charts the stages of his recovery, from pieces infused with his labored breathing to a sublime final sequence of impressionistic miniatures.

Part of the fun of hearing a new Sparks album in 2023 is realizing just how deep their influence continues to run, whether through the meticulous theatricality of artists like Jack Antonoff (Fun., Bleachers) and Phoenix or the sheer overload of hyperpop. The imagery is still funny and immediate (the bored but overemotional protagonist of the title track, the baby trying to climb back into its mother’s womb on “Nothing Is As Good As They Say It Is”), and the music wound so tightly it sounds like its buttons are about to pop off (“We Go Dancing”). And while the brotherly duo’s blend of bitter irony and wide-eyed novelty might’ve seemed misanthropic 50 years ago, now it sounds like a familiar prognosis: Just listen to “Gee, That Was Fun,” where an ever-swelling din of voices lists off all the other things they could’ve done instead of being with you before a lonely Russell Mael concedes he had a pretty good time after all.

Ivorian-born Malian artist Fatoumata Diawara’s soothing, Grammy-nominated vocals have continued the magic of Malian music traditions since her debut, 2011’s *Fatou*. By staying close to her Wassoulou music style origins, the supremely cool superstar retains her pan-Africanness, but manages to incorporate new influences on her fourth studio album, *London Ko*. On \"Nsera\", shadows of Afrobeat icons Tony Allen and Fela Kuti grease the wheels for their fellow West African, who sings mesmerisingly in Bambara to open the show. English singer-songwriter Damon Albarn features here, while Ghanaian rapper M.anifest appears on “Mogokan”—reuniting Diawara with two of her collaborators from the 2012 Afrobeat album, *Rocket Juice and the Moon*. Elswhere, Cuban jazz pianist Robert Fonseca (”Blues”), African-American vocalist Angie Stone (“Somaw”) and Nigerian songstress Yemi Alade (“Tolon”) complete the clan with assured guest performances. Across the album, experiments with Afrofunk and jazz cement Diawara\'s status as an unmistakable genre-bender whose sound is nearly unclassifiable. But \"Maya\", a soulful ode that evokes memories of *Fatou* as it closes out the album, is a timely reminder that she is undeniable music royalty.

Furling moves through the breadth of Meg’s musical fascinations and the environments around them—edges of memory, daydreams spanning years, loose ends, divergent paths, secret conversations under stars—all led by a stirring, singular voice calling experience and enlightenment, elation, and ecstasy into bloom.

Like any great takedown or scathing tabloid opinion, the beauty of Sleaford Mods’ self-described “electronic munt minimalist punk-hop rants for the working class and under” is how they turn their anger into fun. So if the band’s rise from fortysomething never-wases to bellicose fiftysomethings who reliably make the English Top 10 seems unlikely, consider that they’re less a product of post-punk or early rap than than of an online discourse that privileges quick draws and sure shots. Their crude melodies are catchy (“Right Wing Beast”) but not quite as catchy as their persistent omnidirectional yelling (“UK GRIM”). And because they’re adults, they have enough humility to ask their therapist why they feel like slapping all these posers (“DIwhy”)—even if the therapist tells them, “Because they’re fucking c\*\*ts.”

Sleaford Mods will return in 2023 with new album UK GRIM. Throughout their music the duo's poetic protest and electronic resistance has seen them consistency chart and call out their times with an eloquence and attitude that has made them one of the most urgent and unique voices in modern music. Hailed by the likes of Liam Gallagher, Seth Myers, Iggy Pop, Amyl & The Sniffers and a legion of loyal fans whose devotion for the band would rival most sports supporters. Continuing this sonic vocation on their new album, Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn's creative evolution now finds them capturing the atmosphere of their era too. Though no strangers to the dancefloor, the minimal yet immersive beats and grooves of UK GRIM's tracks – which include collaborations with Dry Cleaning's Florence Shaw and Jane's Addiction's Perry Farrell and Dave Navarro among them – add a new, physical dimension to Sleaford Mod's sound that makes their words more vital than ever. Music for body AND mind.

More than 25 years into their existence, Animal Collective is riding the momentum of 2022’s rejuvenating *Time Skiffs*, marking the quickest turnaround of new material since their ultra-prolific 2000s streak. There’s flickers of prior Animal Collective eras to be found here beyond the material’s direct connection to *Time Skiffs*, as many of these songs were written and workshopped during that album’s recording. Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox’s splashy drums recall the darkly shaded ecstasy of 2005’s *Feels*, while the proggy electricity that runs through these nine songs is not unlike the stridency of *Centipede Hz* from 2012. But despite these callbacks to the past, *Isn’t It Now?* feels like new territory for the ever-evolving Animal Collective once again, further cementing them as one of the century’s most iconoclastic and singular indie acts. Whereas its predecessor was the first time Lennox, Brian “Geologist” Weitz, Dave “Avey Tare” Portner, and Josh “Deakin” Dibb put together an album remotely, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, *Isn’t It Now?* marks a return to traditional studio confines for Animal Collective—and the result is a rich and lived-in feel that sounds as if you’re sitting in on a celestial jam session. The swirling epic centerpiece “Defeat”—at nearly 22 minutes, the longest song the group’s put forth on a proper record—builds to an all-in-it chorus before dissolving into a lovely morass of rumbling bass and Portner’s echo-laden vocals. Of course, the left turns are in abundance as well: Witness the thumping “All the Clubs Are Broken,” which sounds like their own take on MGMT’s paranoid psych-pop, or the squeals of classic guitar near the end of the nine-minute shape-shifter “Magicians From Baltimore.”

Let the Moon Be a Planet marks the first volume of Reflections, a new series of contemporary collaborations orchestrated by RVNG Intl., and documents an inspired exchange between guitarist and songwriter Steve Gunn and pianist and composer David Moore of Bing & Ruth. Conjured by a mutual curiosity, and appreciation, for the respective musician’s work, Let the Moon Be a Planet initially took form over a progression of remote sessions and ultimately harmonized when Gunn and Moore completed the album together in the bucolic surroundings of Hudson, New York. Let the Moon Be a Planet is an invitation to relive the intimate moments shared between two artists finding their way along a single path, and into a world where the most subtle of gestures can ripple for an eternity.

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.

During the pandemic, Fontaines D.C. singer Grian Chatten returned to Skerries, the town on Ireland’s East Coast where he’d spent his teenage years. One night, walking along the beach, something came to him. “It was when the moon conjures a strip of light along the horizon towards you, like a path to heaven,” he tells Apple Music. “And there’s the gentle ebb and flow of an invisible ocean around it.” As he looked to sea, new music seeped into his head—a sort of pier-end lounge pop played out on brass and strings. It didn’t really fit with the ideas Fontaines had been fermenting for their next record; instead it opened up inspiration for a solo album. There were, thought Chatten, stories to be told about lives being etched out in coastal areas like Skerries. “The whole atmosphere of the place, there’s something slightly set about it,” he says. “I’m really into fantasy, the Muppets movies and *The Dark Crystal*, or even *Sweeney Todd*, where they demand a slight suspension of disbelief of the audience in order to achieve, or embellish on, a very human emotion. I wanted to live the town through those kind of lenses.” By late 2022, as Chatten endured some heavy personal turbulence, the songs he was writing helped process his own experiences. “It was like, ‘How do I actually feel right now?’” he says. “Just by painting a picture of the darkness, I gleaned an understanding from it. I was then able to cordon it off.” Unsurprisingly then, *Chaos for the Fly* is as intimate as Chatten has sounded on record. Built from mostly acoustic foundations, the songs explore grief, isolation, betrayal, and escapism—but their intensity is a little more insidious and measured than on Fontaines’ sinewy music. Even the corrosively jaundiced “All of the People” is delivered with steady calm, Chatten warning, “People are scum/I will say it again” under a soft shroud of piano and precisely picked guitar. “There’s probably times on the record where it becomes almost self-indulgent, the personal nature of it,” he says. “It’s a startlingly fair reflection of me, I suppose. I didn’t really realize that was possible.” Read on for his track-by-track guide. **“The Score”** “I had a 10-day break in between two tours. I find it very difficult to switch off, and my manager said, ‘You need to go off somewhere,’ so I went to Madrid. I got antsy without being able to write music—the whole point, really, of me being away—and I actually asked Carlotta \[Cosials, singer/guitarist\] from Hinds if she knew any good guitar shops, so I could grab a Spanish guitar, a nylon. She sent me the name of a place that was just around the corner, and I had ‘The Score’ later on that day. When it comes to the second chord, I think that opens the curtain a bit. There’s a sort of subverted cabaret about it, which I really like. And there’s also a misdirection of the modalities of the chords. It goes to a kind of surprising chord. There’s a nice sleight of hand to the first few seconds of it. I really wanted that to be the tone-setter of the album.” **“Last Time Every Time Forever”** “This was inspired by the sound of these fruit machines and slot machines that I grew up with. There was this casino in town, called Bob’s Casino. It’s about addiction or dependence on something, and I’m not really talking specifically about drugs and booze or anything like that. I’m just talking about compulsive behavior and escapism, which are things that kind of shift my gears—I can relate to the pursuit of another world. It has that weird push that it does in the drums. I think it sounds kind of like stunted growth, like it’s glitching.” **“Fairlies”** “After Madrid, we went down to a town called Jerez, which was the birthplace of flamenco, I believe. We were going to go out to get a beer or something, myself and my fiancée. She was getting ready and I wrote that tune. There’s loads of bootleg recordings of The La’s, and I think they really affected me when I was slightly younger, when we were setting off the band. There’s a tune, ‘Tears in the Rain.’ There’s something about the way Lee Mavers does all that weird stuff with his vocals that really affected the way I write a lot of melodies. The snappy, jaunty, almost poke-y, edgy melody of the chorus, that was inspired by Lee Mavers. The verses are more Lee Hazlewood and Leonard Cohen, maybe.” **“Bob’s Casino”** “I heard the intro to ‘Bob’s Casino’ \[that night on the beach\]. Similar to ‘Last Time Every Time Forever,’ ‘Bob’s Casino’ is a tune about a kind of addiction and inertia and isolation. I wanted it to sound as beautiful as it sounds in the addict’s head, or the isolated person’s head, when they achieve those moments of respite. I think that’s a much more realistic picture than a tune that sounds scared straight or something. A play, or any good piece of screenwriting, is usually helped by the bad guys or the antagonist being relatable, or seeing a side of them that makes you empathize with them, or even love them, briefly. It creates this nice 3D effect. I enjoyed writing from that character’s perspective because I feel like I’m expressing something. I’m not saying that I am that character. But the character has a good chance of winning sometimes within me. The more I write about it and express it, then maybe the less chance that character has of taking over.” **“All of the People”** “This is probably my proudest moment from the album. I’m giving myself compliments here, but I think there’s a surgical kind of precision to it. There’s nothing wasted. I really like the natural swells. I like how it swells when the lyric swells. I really do feel that fucking shit sometimes, as do a lot of people. I’m grateful for that song, for what it did for my head when I wrote it. I can stand back and look at it now. It’s like I’ve blown that poison into a bottle and I’ve sealed the bottle, and now I’ve put it on a shelf.” **“East Coast Bed”** “‘East Coast Bed’ is about the death of my beloved hurling coach, who was like a second mother to me growing up, a woman called Ronnie Fay. The whole idea of the East Coast bed is firstly this refuge that she offered me when I was growing up. And then eventually, we laid her in her own East Coast bed when we buried her. The song is essentially about death. Not necessarily in a grim way, but in a sad, melancholic, moving-on way. That synth part that Dan Carey \[producer\] did sounds like the soul moving on for me. That was him exercising his great sympathy for the music that he works on.” **“Salt Throwers off a Truck”** “I remember the title coming to me when we were writing \[2022 Fontaines D.C. album\] *Skinty Fia*. There were lads on the back of a truck, salting the road outside the rehearsal space. I thought that was an interesting sight: ‘Oh, that’s a good title to have to justify with a good lyric.’ I like the fact that it scours the world a little bit. There’s New York in there and, although they’re not mentioned explicitly, other places too. The last verse is inspired by my own granddad’s death last year in Barrow-in-Furness. It’s different people at different stages. To me, it feels like when a director puts the audience in the eyes of a bird. There’s an omnipresence to it that I really like. It’s like when Scrooge is visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present and Future, and he gets to fly around, and visit all of these different vignettes, or all these different families in their houses.” **“I Am so Far”** “I wrote that one during the dreaded and not-very-aesthetic-to-talk-about lockdown. It was this kind of bleak and beautiful, ‘all the time in the world and nothing to do’ sort of thing that interested me then. That’s why there’s so much drudgery on the track. I wrote that on the East Coast again. It does sound to me a little bit like water, with light on it.” **“Season for Pain”** “I think it’s an abdication. It’s like cutting something you love out of your life. It sounds sad, and it is sad, and it is dark, but it’s putting up a necessary wall. It’s terminating a friendship or relationship with someone that you truly love. It’s not going to be easy for anyone, but it’s gone too far. I think there’s something about the production that slightly isolates it from the album. It feels slightly afterthought-ish, which I like. I like the end, which came from a jam. We’d finished recording the track, the tape was still rolling, and we just started playing, and then that became the outro. The song is about moving on and it sounds like I’m moving on at the end.”