Sometimes, the best music is a get-out-of-your-life machine. It can transport you to realms beyond language, impossible retro-futures, alien atmospheres, Mongolia-via-Brazil. Other times, music can make mundane places — the streets of D.C., the basements of Baltimore, a MARC train ride from one to the other — feel profoundly enchanted. You see where I’m going with this. Here are my favorite pop albums of 2023.
Instead of wondering if the guy on the mic (Wifigawd) and the producer at the controls (Gawd) originally came into contact by Googling themselves, let’s start wondering whether D.C. has ever known a rapper more stylish, more omnivorous, more stealthily tenacious than the District native we’re listening to right here. Over the distorted tick-tick-tick of “Pocket Watchin,” when Wifigawd rhymes about feeling as “high as Clark Kent,” he sounds fully aware of his abilities, even if the rest of the world is still trying to figure it out.
The year’s most talked-about ambient album — OutKast superstar André 3000’s new-agey surprise, “New Blue Sun” — may have arrived out of deep left field, but what about the year’s best ambient record? It comes from a fellow Los Angeles transplant, Laurel Halo, the reliable and detail-minded composer-slash-producer whose gentle dissonances on “Atlas” posit ambient music as something worthy of sharp focus and committed immersion.
After falling hard for this Philly punk band’s severe new record in the springtime, I finally had the chance to hear Poison Ruin perform live in the armpit temperatures of July, at which point its sound instantly scrambled my sense of time and place. Was I at a Wipers gig in Oregon circa 1980? Or inside some anonymous Norwegian black-metal band’s rehearsal space in 1994? Or, instead of decades, maybe we had all been shoved a dozen centuries backward. Or forward. Poison Ruin’s main lyrical theme is the dark ages — and not the medieval times that Western civilization has already survived. This was the future. This music is a warning.
A credit line printed on the back cover of Nourished by Time’s strangely sublime debut — “written, mixed, produced & recorded by Marcus Brown in his parents basement in Baltimore, MD” — tells us so much about how inventive music gets invented, or, more specifically, how visionary artists are capable of making highly original, artfully offbeat, hyper-evocative R&B jams in spaces that are hospitable, rent-free, within the broadcast radius of 92Q FM, and where the sun won’t shine.
Does Tirzah ride the bus? That’s the only way I’ve been able to make sense of this British songwriter’s deeply repetitive, wholly mesmerizing “trip9love...???,” in which nearly every song unfolds over a single drum machine pattern. Made with help from her go-to producer, Mica Levi of Micachu and the Shapes, the tempo of that artificial beat speeds up, slows down, occasionally stops, then accelerates again, evoking the zoned-out routine of a public transit commute. This bus might pass the same signs and buildings each day, but the mind is free to go wherever it likes.
Frequently maligned in the most conservative precincts of American hip-hop fandom, this outrageous new rap star utilizes the shouty deadpan of a burned-out spin class instructor to deliver some of the most vivid naughty-talk you’ve ever heard. And when those words aren’t extreme enough, she invents her own. Take “SkeeYee,” a standout track on the St. Louis native’s 30-minute juggernaut of an album, “Hood Hottest Princess.” According to the lyrics, the titular refrain means “pull up!” But it also means way more — something beyond obscenity, beyond provocation, beyond whatever ideas the most explicit words in the English language can contain. If that isn’t great rapping, what is?
This year, 24-year-old Peso Pluma became the world’s breakout pop phenom by singing traditional Mexican corridos — ballads that date back more than a century, defined by dramatic narrative arcs, sung in Spanish and with tremendous feeling — that somehow possessed the contours of 21st-century trap music. How did he do it? With a gnarled and knotty voice that sounds as timeworn and emotive as the folk tradition he’s now carrying into the greater pop consciousness.
When this Playboi Carti disciple allows the melodic tremble in his throat to warp his words, it shouldn’t be confused for emo affectation. Instead, the young Georgia rapper sounds like a lost cosmonaut crashing through exoplanet atmospheres, G-forces making his face wiggle. Credit where credit is due: Ken Carson’s otherworldly team of producers — Clif Shayne, F1lthy, KP Beatz, Lucian and at least 20 more bump-and-chirp maximalists — are the ones who made “A Great Chaos” the most flat-out exciting album released all year.
“This is not a fire drill. … This the real thing,” Veeze declares from atop this heap of discreetly spectacular rap songs. Or maybe “declares” is the wrong verb. Even when Veeze is trying to grab our attention, every syllable that falls from his mouth sounds blurred, mumbled, smeared — but keep your ears locked on that cool Detroit rasp and you’ll catch an abundance of killer jokes, high-precision metaphors and more. It’s not unlike Vaseline on the camera lens, or impressionist painting, or the way your vision goes fuzzy around the edges when you’re squinting into a telescope, trying to catch a glimpse of what’s real.
Extraordinary story, extraordinary music. Raised in a yurt in Mongolia, Enkhjargal Erkhembayar was a music teacher until a German jazz outreach program invited her to Munich, where she embarked on a singing career under the name Enji — first making an album with drummer Billy Hart, then another disc of her own songs and now this one, “Ulaan.” Her new ballads feature a drummer and a clarinetist from Brazil, allowing Enji to sing her native melodies with a bossa nova tenderness that’s practically paralyzing — the vocalist and her collaborators gently pushing toward the highest levels of empathy and cooperation that our humanity allows.
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