Unknown Mortal Orchestra

Annual Playlist: The Best Albums of 2023

Welcome back for another edition of (surely) everyone’s favorite end-of-year music list! We’re officially on Year 3 of this exercise, in which I do my best to keep up with as much new music as humanly possible without feeling like Steve Buscemi wandering the halls of a high school.

Again, this list is a mostly subjective, mostly comprehendible selection of the music that made my year. Hopefully I included your favorite 2023 album, or mention your favorite song. If not…well there was a lot of great music this year, and there’s always room to listen to more! For what it’s worth, I have 2023 as not quite as good as last year, but better than 2021 (although I am open to hearing arguments to the contrary). Regardless, I loved everything mentioned here, and a few things that didn’t make the cut.

Without further ado, let’s kick this thing off with a brand new bonus category!

Annual Playlist: The Best Albums of 2021

I spent an arguably unhealthy amount of time listening to music this year. According to the data from Apple Music (yes, I’m one of those people), I listened for 1,023 hours in 2021, and that’s just from that streaming service. Naturally, absorbing that much music is going to lead to likes, dislikes, and opinions ranging from “pretty agreeable” to “this is an insane person”. With the year coming to a close, I figured it’d be a worthwhile exercise to give my top ten albums, plus a few honorable mentions, for this past year. Please note: this is a totally arbitrary list, meaning I’m not entirely sure if it’s the ten best albums I listened to over the last 365-ish days, or my ten favorite, or just the ten I happen to be thinking about at the moment. Either way, here’s my year-end list for 2021. Hopefully you, my dear reader, will find something new that you might have missed, or be reminded of a great album from earlier this year that’s worth revisiting. On to the good stuff!