The best albums of 2023 (so far)

Kaytraminé, the duo of hip-hop-adjacent house producer KAYTRANADA and Portland rap goofball Aminé, recorded their eponymous debut album at a beach house in Malibu and debuted it at a wild rager with their friends. That should give you a sense of the carefree summertime vibes that the album is aiming for, the two collaborators’ palpable chemistry and charisma bolstered by guest appearances from big names like Pharrell, Freddie Gibbs, and Snoop Dogg.

The long-awaited follow-up to Kelela’s masterful 2018 debut, Take Me Apart, is the left-field R&B of Raven. It’s more insular and aqueous but no less forward-thinking. Centering itself on the rich history of electronic dance music in the Black queer community, the album plays like one long DJ set in a dimly lit nightclub, finding rebirth and transcendence in the baptismal waters of the dance floor.

A fitting companion to 2019’s stunning Norman Fucking Rockwell, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd finds Lana Del Rey pondering big questions about life, death, the afterlife, God, family, and motherhood. It’s Lana Del Rey at her most Lana Del Rey and Lana Del Rey at her best, a sweeping 78-minute sprawl of beautiful self-mythologizing melodrama.

Who had “Lil Yachty makes a freewheeling psych-rock opus” on their 2023 bingo card? The erstwhile SoundCloud rapper’s foray into vibey Tame Impala/Pink Floyd-inspired psychedelic pop might not be as revolutionary as he would have you believe, but it’s still a whole lot of fun, a fascinating left turn from an irrepressibly eccentric artist.

“Gardetto.,” the opening track on Liv.e’s Girl In The Half Pearl, fuses languid neo-soul with hurtling jungle breakbeats, immediately announcing itself as something special. An ode to growth in all its triumph and its messiness, the producer and singer’s sophomore LP takes listeners on a whirlwind journey through R&B, hip-hop, and dance music.

Mandy, Indiana filter dance music, post-punk, and industrial noise into their own idiosyncratic brand of sound and fury. The Manchester quartet’s debut album i’ve seen a way might be abrasive, disorienting, and intense, but the jagged churn—coupled with vocalist Valentine Caulfield Francophone chanting —always coheres into something hypnotically absorbing.

Water From Your Eyes have never met a contradiction they didn’t wholeheartedly embrace. Careening wildly from discordance to melody and irony to sincerity, the Brooklyn experimental duo’s Matador Records debut Everyone’s Crushed is a controlled explosion of pop music, deconstructing and building itself back up again according to its own appealingly deranged logic.

Rat Saw God is littered with details and images so vivid you can almost touch them, snapshots of Planet Fitness parking lots, rain-rotted houses, and rusty old can openers coalescing into an evocative portrait of small town life in a decaying American South. Fortunately, Wednesday’s music is just as tactile and visceral as their songwriting, full of bruised indie rock streaked with a rootsy twang that’s liable to erupt into fiery noise at a moment’s notice.

Yaeji is ready to smash it all down and build herself back up again. On her long-awaited debut album With A Hammer, arriving six years after she first burst onto the scene with instant-classic house bangers like “Raingurl,” the Korean American singer/producer/rapper/DJ breaks free from all the limitations holding her back. Wielding her anger like a hammer and moving past the club-oriented sound that she made her name on, With A Hammer is intensely personal and singularly original.

Yo La Tengo have never made a bad album, but on This Stupid World, nearly four decades into their career, the long-running indie-rock institution sounds more focused and energized than they have in years. Mixing noisy exploratory jams with beautifully tender moments like “Aselestine,” the bittersweet This Stupid World is ample proof that rock music doesn’t have to be a young man’s game.