Top 100 Music Albums of 2023 by 
Arthurknight 
I initially wasn’t super impressed with this year but there’s a few key standouts. The problem was you really have to dig for them this year as the major publications have found all new lows to reach for (demonstrated all the more by their abysmal EOY lists). Rock made a bit of a comeback this year and despite its turbulence independent artists continue to breakthrough on bandcamp, enough so that I even saw spotify recommending me fringe (and actually good) artists and labels who’re mainly releasing via the platform.
It was also a year of otherwise great artists and bands releasing some true duds (see below). Nobody asked for that redux Roger…
Top 100 Songs:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0pRznf1CunPZaCqGYb5Sue?si=e00ed77a3f7b45de
Top 10 EPs:
1. Building a New Town – Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan
2. Conditions – Chalk
3. Knocknarea - Maruja
4. If I Don’t See You in the Future, I’ll See You in the Pasture - Cole Pulice
5. Give me a moment - Dean Blunt
6. Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / in a room7 F760 - Aphex Twin
7. Personal Protocol - 8485
8. Today I Laid Down – bl4ck m4rket c4rt
9. Everything Perfect – James Ivy
10 INSAINT - Haru Nemuri 春ねむり
Other Reviewed Albums:
OZmotic ~ Fennesz – 6.5/10
The Music That I Make (Leah Senior) – 6.5/10
Calm Ya Farm (The Murlocs) – 6.5/10
Voir Dire (Earl Sweatshirt & The Alchemist) – 6.5/10
Prize (Rozi Plain) – 6.5/10
Weathervanes (Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit – 6.5/10
3D Country (Geese) – 6.5/10
I Am Not There Anymore (The Clientele) – 6.5/10
New Blue Sun (Andre 3000) – 6.5/10
Census Designated (Jane Remover) – 6.5/10
Heaven Knows (PinkPantheress) – 6/10
Destiny (DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ) – 6/10
Heavy Heavy (Young Fathers) – 6/10
Desire, I Want To Turn Into You (Caroline Polachek) – 6/10
Sadness || Abriction (Sadness & Abriction) – 6/10
Cousin (Wilco) – 6/10
This Is Why (Paramore) – 6/10
Did You Know That There's A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd (Lana Del Rey) – 6/10
Everything is Alive (Slowdive) – 6/10
PetroDragonic Apocalypse; Or Dawn Of Eternal Night An Annihilation Of Planet Earth And The Beginning Of Merciless Damnation (King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard) – 6/10
12 (Ryuichi Sakamoto) – 6/10
Sundial (Noname) – 6/10
Memento Mori (Depeche Mode) – 6/10
Isn't It Now? (Animal Collective) – 6/10
If We Stayed Alive (12 Rods) – 6/10
All Of This Will End (Indigo De Souza) – 6/10
In Times New Roman (Queens Of The Stone Age) – 6/10
Paranoia, Angels, True Love (Christine And The Queens) – 6/10
Get Up Sequences Part Two (The Go! Team) – 6/10
Unbecoming (Vyva Melinkoyla) – 6/10
Lahai (Sampha) – 6/10
Hellmode (Jeff Rosenstock) – 6/10
Ugly (Slowthai) – 6/10 (See my full review)
I've Seen A Way (Mandy, Indiana) – 6/10
Raven (Kelela) – 6/10
The Ballad Of Darren (Blur) – 6/10
Let's Start Here (Lil Yachty) – 6/10
The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We (Mitski) – 6/10
The Candle And The Flame (Robert Forster) – 6/10
How To Replace It (dEUS) – 6/10
Rat Saw God (Wednesday) – 6/10
Space Heavy (King Krule) – 6/10
Late Developers (Belle and Sebastian) – 6/10
Fuse (Everything But The Girl) – 6/10
Struggler (Genesis Owusu) – 6/10
Softscars (Yeule) – 6/10
Hackney Diamonds (The Rolling Stones) – 5.5/10
But Here We Are (Foo Fighters) – 5.5/10
I Don't Know (bdrmm) – 5.5/10
Bless This Mess (U.S. Girls) – 5.5/10
WON'T HE DO IT (Conway the Machine) – 5/10
10,000 Gecs (100 Gecs) – 5/10
Love + Pop (Current Joys) – 5/10
The Record (Boygenius) – 4.5/10
Red Moon In Venus (Kali Uchis) – 4.5/10
The Age of Pleasure (Janelle Monáe) – 4.5/10
Mercy (John Cale) – 4/10
Mirror to the Sky (Yes) – 4/10
A Reckoning (Kimbra) – 4/10
72 Seasons (Metallica) – 4/10
Guts (Olivia Rodrigo) – 4/10
Secret Life (Fred again.. & Brian Eno) – 4/10
Bless This Mess (U.S. Girls) – 4/10
Chris Black Changed My Life (Portugal. The Man) - 4/10
End of World (Public Image Ltd.) - 4/10
Disposable Everything (AJJ) – 4/10 [This album is aptly named]
Utopia (Travis Scott) – 3.5/10
Nothing Lasts Forever (Teenage Fanclub) – 3.5/10
One More Time (Blink-182) – 3.5/10
Every Loser (Iggy Pop) – 3.5/10
Fantasy (M83) – 3/10
First Two Pages Of Frankenstein United States (The National) – 3/10
Grapes Upon the Vine (TV Girl) – 3/10
Cracker Island (Gorrilaz) – 3/10
The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light (The Streets) – 2.5/10
Blanket (Kevin Abstract) – 2/10
Songs of Surrender (U2) – 2/10
Quest For Fire (Skrillex) – 2/10
ATUM (The Smashing Pumpkins) – 1/10
Rush! (Måneskin) – 1/10
The Dark Side of the Moon Redux (Roger Waters) - 1/10
Robed in Rareness (Shabazz Palaces) – 0.5/10
For All The Dogs (Drake) 0/10
- Chart updated: 03/29/2024 05:15
- (Created: 01/30/2023 04:03).
- Chart size: 100 albums.
There are 5 comments for this chart from BestEverAlbums.com members and Top 100 Music Albums of 2023 has an average rating of 90 out of 100 (from 5 votes). Please log in or register to leave a comment or assign a rating.
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9/10
This is as good as the best stuff from Venetian Snares. *1 sounds like Glitch DnB stretched and drawn out into a slower and prettier space. Given the year we've all been slapped with, I have limited space for chaos in my new music and Rắn Cạp Đuôi have dialed in a correctly calculated dose of it. Pressure is mesmerising and Bugs Life is the best electronic song of this decade so far.
_ [First added to this chart: 12/25/2023]
This is as good as the best stuff from Venetian Snares. *1 sounds like Glitch DnB stretched and drawn out into a slower and prettier space. Given the year we've all been slapped with, I have limited space for chaos in my new music and Rắn Cạp Đuôi have dialed in a correctly calculated dose of it. Pressure is mesmerising and Bugs Life is the best electronic song of this decade so far.
_ [First added to this chart: 12/25/2023]
0
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8.5/10
I found Clanton's earlier music a bit dude-broey and uselessly 80s pastiche but these new songs just hit different for some reason. He's perfected the sound but also it just feels like it's coming easy to him on Ooh Rap I Ya. There's something reassuring about it which is nice when compared to the general try-hardiness of chillwave. I Been Young is my SOTY.
_ [First added to this chart: 09/14/2023]
I found Clanton's earlier music a bit dude-broey and uselessly 80s pastiche but these new songs just hit different for some reason. He's perfected the sound but also it just feels like it's coming easy to him on Ooh Rap I Ya. There's something reassuring about it which is nice when compared to the general try-hardiness of chillwave. I Been Young is my SOTY.
_ [First added to this chart: 09/14/2023]
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8.5/10
Off the walls madness + genuinely intriguing experimental rock. It’s not just people trying through brute force to make the ‘new’, everything feels intentioned and carefully crafted. The best from Isole records in a while.
_ [First added to this chart: 12/07/2023]
Off the walls madness + genuinely intriguing experimental rock. It’s not just people trying through brute force to make the ‘new’, everything feels intentioned and carefully crafted. The best from Isole records in a while.
_ [First added to this chart: 12/07/2023]
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8.5/10
I was as excited as the next person for a new Tim Hecker project, especially considering the collaboration with Colin Stetson who I have long admired. The result is at times beautifully dark ambient, at times tantrically meditative, and others actively unsettling. These dynamics are especially potent in the first half of listening, although Anxiety in the back half is an exquisite standalone track, with Hecker's adoption of building energy with musical repetition superb.
However, Hecker's lyric-less music is hiding a little more beneath the surface. No Highs is meant to target the so-called 'false positive corporate ambient currently in vogue,' quite clearly demonstrative in the title: No Highs, a.k.a. only lows.
No Highs means something more to Hecker though, and I'm not sure I'm utterly convinced by its integration at all stages. The project is meant to be an act of musical negation, or as it is referenced: an escape from escapism. Moreover, there is a clear thread thus far unacknowledged in mental health. some tracks titles include: In your Mind, Pulse Depression, the aforementioned Anxiety, and Sense Suppression. Indeed, as Hecker's album release information reveals: 'this is music of austerity and ambiguity, purgatorial and seasick. A jagged anti-relaxant for our medicated age, rough-hewn and undefined.'
I wonder what Hecker is concerned with here. Is the so-called false positivity of ambient music today operating as a sedative? Is Hecker worried about the explosion of cognitive and mental health related diagnoses in the 21st Century and does he attribute this to something specific about our times as opposed to how they have been destigmatised? He certainly is explicit about tying his music to more than just sorrow when he evokes depression and anxiety, relaxants and sense suppression.
Regardless, Hecker wants us to face a certain philosophically pessimist horror, and he does so by equivocating between perhaps the aesthetic refuge from pain in music and the performative/symbolic refuge of medication. In other words, we aren't kidding ourselves about the agony of our individual and collective existences anymore -- that no longer works -- instead we're literally suppressing our cognitive ability to recognise it as real. To face the centrality of pain again is to become clean, no highs.
_ [First added to this chart: 04/16/2023]
I was as excited as the next person for a new Tim Hecker project, especially considering the collaboration with Colin Stetson who I have long admired. The result is at times beautifully dark ambient, at times tantrically meditative, and others actively unsettling. These dynamics are especially potent in the first half of listening, although Anxiety in the back half is an exquisite standalone track, with Hecker's adoption of building energy with musical repetition superb.
However, Hecker's lyric-less music is hiding a little more beneath the surface. No Highs is meant to target the so-called 'false positive corporate ambient currently in vogue,' quite clearly demonstrative in the title: No Highs, a.k.a. only lows.
No Highs means something more to Hecker though, and I'm not sure I'm utterly convinced by its integration at all stages. The project is meant to be an act of musical negation, or as it is referenced: an escape from escapism. Moreover, there is a clear thread thus far unacknowledged in mental health. some tracks titles include: In your Mind, Pulse Depression, the aforementioned Anxiety, and Sense Suppression. Indeed, as Hecker's album release information reveals: 'this is music of austerity and ambiguity, purgatorial and seasick. A jagged anti-relaxant for our medicated age, rough-hewn and undefined.'
I wonder what Hecker is concerned with here. Is the so-called false positivity of ambient music today operating as a sedative? Is Hecker worried about the explosion of cognitive and mental health related diagnoses in the 21st Century and does he attribute this to something specific about our times as opposed to how they have been destigmatised? He certainly is explicit about tying his music to more than just sorrow when he evokes depression and anxiety, relaxants and sense suppression.
Regardless, Hecker wants us to face a certain philosophically pessimist horror, and he does so by equivocating between perhaps the aesthetic refuge from pain in music and the performative/symbolic refuge of medication. In other words, we aren't kidding ourselves about the agony of our individual and collective existences anymore -- that no longer works -- instead we're literally suppressing our cognitive ability to recognise it as real. To face the centrality of pain again is to become clean, no highs.
_ [First added to this chart: 04/16/2023]
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8/10
One long song you should listen to loudly with headphones lying down in a park. Touch grass.
_ [First added to this chart: 09/14/2023]
One long song you should listen to loudly with headphones lying down in a park. Touch grass.
_ [First added to this chart: 09/14/2023]
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8/10
It’s nice to see Lankum breakout with this record. I love the way they blend together deeply experimental versions of classic irish folk music while taking those practices of modern/classic integration and applying them to new songs too. They’ve landed on a winning formula here and it’s a refreshing change for what is becoming an incresingly bloated ‘post-punk revival’ scene in the UK.
_ [First added to this chart: 07/13/2023]
It’s nice to see Lankum breakout with this record. I love the way they blend together deeply experimental versions of classic irish folk music while taking those practices of modern/classic integration and applying them to new songs too. They’ve landed on a winning formula here and it’s a refreshing change for what is becoming an incresingly bloated ‘post-punk revival’ scene in the UK.
_ [First added to this chart: 07/13/2023]
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8/10
Leaving Laurel embodies trajedy and death literally, but even if that context wasn’t underscoring this record I find this music almost a corrective to mortality. It’s not a refuge from that knowledge but seeks to render it as beautiful (successfully too!).
_ [First added to this chart: 12/06/2023]
Leaving Laurel embodies trajedy and death literally, but even if that context wasn’t underscoring this record I find this music almost a corrective to mortality. It’s not a refuge from that knowledge but seeks to render it as beautiful (successfully too!).
_ [First added to this chart: 12/06/2023]
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8/10
_ [First added to this chart: 12/07/2023]
_ [First added to this chart: 12/07/2023]
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8/10
In an out of nowhere splash Mckinley Dixon raps about home, urban life, contesting memories of childhood, lost friends and living communities.
More specifically, the whole album is a Toni Morrison reference. The title invokes the 'Beloved trilogy' of Morrison historical fiction novels Jazz, Beloved and Paradise. If you haven't, read them, and not just because they will illuminate Dixon's work. Morrison's writing is the quintessential prose of contemporary America and its tangled traumatic history.
Though Dixon speaks of history, of how we are shaped by it and cannot place finality on its tectonic movements (that we could have such hubris to say history is past us), he is principally focused with themes of development and artistic solitude – the history here is a personal one where Dixon reflects on the memories in the lead-up to success. The opening track Hanif Reads Toni follows word for word an excerpt from Jazz and I think it is relevant in light of his many references to the city to continue on that reading a couple paragraphs forward in the chapter:
"Do what you please in the City, it is there to back and frame you no matter what you do... All you have to do is heed the design--the way it's laid out for you, considerate, mindful of where you want to go and what you might need tomorrow."
Perhaps the one thing that remains cloudy to me in this work is what Dixon's reading of Morrison is. He is certainly interested in how she represented the black urban experience in Jazz, however what else beyond that remains unclear. In some sense, there's a missed opportunity to interrogate the lasting and rather subtle implications of the trilogy's projection of Dante's Divine Comedy onto modern American racism. Morrison's writing is fundamentally about the unregulated system of sin and consequence which is inflicted with indifference onto African-American people, especially black women. Moreover, the revisionist historicity of Morrison's trilogy works to insert black women into a history where they are otherwise absent. Dixon offers little in the way of any direct inspection of these themes.
Dixon has definitely read Jazz though. In Dedicated to Tar Feather (the 'tar feather' here likely more a reference to torture tactics rather than Morrison's Tar Baby) he invokes the character Joe Trace's line "Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind." However, Dixon rejects the idea, using it to represent the loneliness of being an artist. The irony here, perhaps lost in the lyric, is that Trace himself is a fundamentally alone person. His mother left him without a 'trace' and his love expressed above is unrequited.
Maybe this is an over-reading of the album but I think Dixon is mostly adopting Morrison aesthetically. As Dante brought poetry to Summa Theologica, Dixon brings music to Morrison... Jazz!?
_ [First added to this chart: 07/24/2023]
In an out of nowhere splash Mckinley Dixon raps about home, urban life, contesting memories of childhood, lost friends and living communities.
More specifically, the whole album is a Toni Morrison reference. The title invokes the 'Beloved trilogy' of Morrison historical fiction novels Jazz, Beloved and Paradise. If you haven't, read them, and not just because they will illuminate Dixon's work. Morrison's writing is the quintessential prose of contemporary America and its tangled traumatic history.
Though Dixon speaks of history, of how we are shaped by it and cannot place finality on its tectonic movements (that we could have such hubris to say history is past us), he is principally focused with themes of development and artistic solitude – the history here is a personal one where Dixon reflects on the memories in the lead-up to success. The opening track Hanif Reads Toni follows word for word an excerpt from Jazz and I think it is relevant in light of his many references to the city to continue on that reading a couple paragraphs forward in the chapter:
"Do what you please in the City, it is there to back and frame you no matter what you do... All you have to do is heed the design--the way it's laid out for you, considerate, mindful of where you want to go and what you might need tomorrow."
Perhaps the one thing that remains cloudy to me in this work is what Dixon's reading of Morrison is. He is certainly interested in how she represented the black urban experience in Jazz, however what else beyond that remains unclear. In some sense, there's a missed opportunity to interrogate the lasting and rather subtle implications of the trilogy's projection of Dante's Divine Comedy onto modern American racism. Morrison's writing is fundamentally about the unregulated system of sin and consequence which is inflicted with indifference onto African-American people, especially black women. Moreover, the revisionist historicity of Morrison's trilogy works to insert black women into a history where they are otherwise absent. Dixon offers little in the way of any direct inspection of these themes.
Dixon has definitely read Jazz though. In Dedicated to Tar Feather (the 'tar feather' here likely more a reference to torture tactics rather than Morrison's Tar Baby) he invokes the character Joe Trace's line "Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind." However, Dixon rejects the idea, using it to represent the loneliness of being an artist. The irony here, perhaps lost in the lyric, is that Trace himself is a fundamentally alone person. His mother left him without a 'trace' and his love expressed above is unrequited.
Maybe this is an over-reading of the album but I think Dixon is mostly adopting Morrison aesthetically. As Dante brought poetry to Summa Theologica, Dixon brings music to Morrison... Jazz!?
_ [First added to this chart: 07/24/2023]
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8/10
Just so fun. Clown Core adjacents Knower have thrown out the studio radio-pop production from previous projects and basically returned to the crummy DIY live recordings in the corridors of their house which garnered them attention online in the first place. Abyss is a standout.
_ [First added to this chart: 09/14/2023]
Just so fun. Clown Core adjacents Knower have thrown out the studio radio-pop production from previous projects and basically returned to the crummy DIY live recordings in the corridors of their house which garnered them attention online in the first place. Abyss is a standout.
_ [First added to this chart: 09/14/2023]
Total albums: 100. Page 1 of 10
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Top 100 Music Albums of 2023 composition
| Artist | Albums | % | |
|---|---|---|---|
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|
|
| Guided By Voices | 2 | 2% | |
| 파란노을 [Parannoul] | 2 | 2% | |
| Bendik Giske | 1 | 1% | |
| Loscil & Lawrence English | 1 | 1% | |
| Sufjan Stevens | 1 | 1% | |
| ALL HANDS_MAKE LIGHT | 1 | 1% | |
| Surgeon | 1 | 1% | |
| Show all | |||
| Country | Albums | % | |
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
40 | 40% | |
 |
19 | 19% | |
 |
7 | 7% | |
 |
6 | 6% | |
 |
3 | 3% | |
| |
3 | 3% | |
 |
2 | 2% | |
| Show all | |||
Top 100 Music Albums of 2023 chart changes
Up 76 from 100th to 24th| Biggest fallers |
|---|
| Down 2 from 24th to 26th La Baracande by La Nòvia |
| Down 1 from 26th to 27th Um Tijolo Com Seu Nome by Lupe De Lupe |
| Down 1 from 27th to 28th O Monolith by Squid (2020s) |
Top 100 Music Albums of 2023 similarity to your chart(s)
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Other year charts (from the 2020s) by Arthurknight
Top 15 Music Albums of 2024 by Arthurknight (2024)Top 100 Music Albums of 2022 by
Arthurknight (2024)Top 100 Music Albums of 2021 by
Arthurknight (2023)Top 100 Music Albums of 2020 by
Arthurknight (2024)Top 100 Music Albums of 2023 ratings
90/100 (from 5 votes)
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av = trimmed mean average rating an item has currently received.
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N.B. The average rating for this chart will not be reliable as it has been rated very few times.
Showing all 5 ratings for this chart.
| Rating | Date updated | Member | Chart ratings | Avg. chart rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 100/100  | 12/21/2023 10:34 |  ForegroundNoise | | 87/100 |
| 90/100 | 12/13/2023 05:48 | Exist-en-ciel | | 90/100 |
| 95/100 | 12/10/2023 18:09 |  LedZep | | 84/100 |
| 100/100 | 12/08/2023 15:58 |  Repo | | 100/100 |
| 100/100 | 10/15/2023 20:07 | jdizzle123456 | | 89/100 |
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From 
cestuneblague 03/26/2024 14:29
cestuneblague 03/26/2024 14:29
Lots to discover here, mercurial and eclectic mix in the best way.
Helpful? (Log in to vote) | 0 votes (0 helpful | 0 unhelpful)
100/100
From ForegroundNoise 12/21/2023 10:35
ForegroundNoise 12/21/2023 10:35
Stellar chart as ever. No idea how you find the time to listen to all this, but can always rely on you for a fresh take on the year in music!
Helpful? (Log in to vote) | +1 votes (1 helpful | 0 unhelpful)
90/100
From Exist-en-ciel 12/13/2023 05:59
After a break from music of almost a year, I decided to make my 2023 list at the very end of the year. I've only listened to 50% of the albums it contains, but your list, like all the ones you make, is very interesting and relevant. Good work!
Helpful? (Log in to vote) | +1 votes (1 helpful | 0 unhelpful)
95/100
From LedZep 12/10/2023 18:11
LedZep 12/10/2023 18:11
Thanks for the comment! Excellent chart and even better descriptions, a lot of the interesting albums I've skipped for one reason or another (Lankum, George Clanton...)
Helpful? (Log in to vote) | +1 votes (1 helpful | 0 unhelpful)
100/100
From Repo 12/08/2023 15:59
Repo 12/08/2023 15:59
Fantastic chart and notes! Excited to check a bunch of your recs out!
Helpful? (Log in to vote) | +1 votes (1 helpful | 0 unhelpful)
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A lot of hard work happens in the background to keep BEA running, and it's especially difficult to do this when we can't pay our hosting fees :(
We work very hard to ensure our site is as fast (and FREE!) as possible, and we respect your privacy.