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Released on 12/15/2023
My name is Amanda Petrusich,
and I'm a pop music critic at The New Yorker.
The third-best album of the year
is Again by Oneohtrix Point Never.
Oneohtrix Point Never is the alias
of the producer and composer Daniel Lopatin,
who you may know for his film scores for movies
such as Uncut Gems, and Good Time,
or for his work producing and writing for The Weeknd.
Again is Lopatin's 10th album as Oneohtrix Point Never,
and like all of his releases,
it's really concerned with ideas of time and memory,
and, in particular, the instability of time and memory.
One of the things I really like about his compositions
is that they always feel just slightly out of reach for me,
like I'm grasping to understand what he's doing.
He's also an artist
who I think is using artificial intelligence
in some really compelling and surprising ways.
[dramatic music]
It's a little slippery melodically.
It's a little compositionally challenging.
It's a little unpredictable.
You think his songs are one thing,
and then suddenly there's something entirely else.
Again is one of those albums that, for me, really exploded
and then rebuilt my idea of what music could do
or how it could make me feel.
The second-best album of the year
is Javelin by Sufjan Stevens
Some critics will talk about Javelin
as a kind of return to form for Stevens, but for me,
it really feels like an apotheosis of everything he's done.
It's a high point in his discography.
It is just stunningly beautiful, real, raw,
intimate collection of songs.
There's a track on Javelin called
Will Anybody Ever Love Me?
And you might hear that title and think, Yikes.
♪ 'Cause I really wanna know ♪
♪ Will anybody ever love me ♪
But at the same time, it's such a plaintive and bold
and courageous question,
and who among us does not reach a point
where they simply wanna know if they will ever be received
and cradled and held and seen and understood
by another consciousness?
And for me, Stevens' voice sounds really kind of thin
and high and hungry on the song.
And it's just so unpretentious,
which I mean in the kind of purest sense of the word.
It is entirely without pretense.
It is just really, really, really human.
♪ Hello wildness, please forgive me now ♪
Shortly after he released this album,
he spoke publicly for the first time about his private life,
and in particular, his late partner Evans Richardson
who passed away in April.
Javelin is dedicated to Evan's memory,
and it's really suffuse with grief and longing and shame
and questioning and searching,
but it's also such a hopeful record.
For me, it really sounds like someone choosing a future,
choosing to go on and kind of find light and love
despite all of the pain and loss they've endured.
The best album of the year
is My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross
by ANOHNI and the Johnsons
ANOHNI is one of my favorite contemporary singers.
And because her voice is so singular, so otherworldly,
so ethereal, so spooky,
her work always feels a little bit like a conjuring to me.
It's as if she's here with us on earth
to help us understand what's happening to us.
♪ It's just the way you were born ♪
♪ And in the society ♪
So for me, Scapegoat is probably the album's
single most devastating track.
It's sung from the point of view of someone
with a tremendous amount of hate.
You're killable, you're just so killable.
♪ You're so killable ♪
♪ And disappearable ♪
Is a line that seems impossible to sing
with grace and elegance,
but somehow ANOHNI does it.
She delivers it with empathy and with understanding.
You know, she herself has been a remarkable advocate
for queer and transgender rights.
There's a portrait of Marsha P. Johnson
featured on the album cover.
That's in fact where ANOHNI and the Johnsons
get the band's name from.
Martha P. Johnson was, of course,
a prominent figure in the Stonewall Riots in 1969.
But the appeal of this record isn't political really,
or it's certainly not exclusively political.
I found that these songs really kind of kept me afloat
during a year in which depravity and bloodlust
and spite and hatred felt like such inescapable forces.
And to respond to that,
to kind of teach listeners to respond to that
with love really feels like an incredible thing.
♪ My hate into your- ♪
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