20. Sun June – Bad Dream Jaguar [Run For Cover Records]

On their third album, Texan country-gazers Sun June did everything a little differently. After guitarist Stephen Salisbury relocated to South Carolina, some 1300 miles from home, he and band leader Laure Colwell collaborated remotely, sending each other songs both for, and about one another, as distance strained their relationship. The result is a record that aches with longing, and perhaps surprisingly considering its lonely creation, a hitherto untapped intimacy. Recorded in fits and starts, the majority of the record was made with Loma’s Dan Duszynski, and it might just be the band’s most deliberately pretty yet, walking the line between country and pop, the whole thing presented in luxurious layers of sound from the woodwind and drum shuffle of Moon Ahead to the plaintive piano ballad, John Prine, the band’s latest paean to the power of another musical act, following on from Karen O on the brilliant 2022 record Somewhere. A record on a precipice, Bad Dream Jaguar is an album that has one foot in and the other out the door, where the forces are pulling two people apart, but the flicker of a hopeful heart refuses to be extinguished.

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19. koleżanka – Alone with the Sounds the Mind Makes [Bar/None Records]

Kristina Moore the songwriter behind koleżanka, almost made a double appearance on this list, with their work as a member of Foyer Red on the excellent Yarn The Hours Away well worthy of your ears, yet it was ultimately the utter brilliance of Alone with the Sounds the Mind Makes that stayed with me as the months rolled by. A lockdown-era album, Alone with the Sounds the Mind Makes was conceived in Kristina’s Brooklyn apartment, diving into the thoughts and sounds of their past, as the noise and chaos of New York melted away in front of their eyes. Music, and food, became the structure Kristina needed, days filled with meal plans and songs to revisit, to keep the potential mental health pitfalls at bay. Recorded in the entirely different climes of Florida, Alone with the Sounds the Mind Makes is a wonderfully expansive whole, layers of airy electronics, cut through with the skittish drive of the drums and languid guitars, as showcased on the St. Vincent-like Slapstick and the anxious, urgent Cheers, with it’s repeated joyous refrain, “cheers to all the good times”, which belies its lyrical exploration of battling with cycles of trauma. Fittingly a record that begins at home, on the excellent Kozmary, also ends there on A River Rushing, a song inspired by a dream of Kristina’s childhood home, where they were surrounded by various versions of themself meeting up for the end of the world, from the initial guitar arpeggio the track builds on marching military drums and layer upon layer of haunting vocals, before it less ends and more melts into the ether, like flake of salt dissolving into warm water. It’s a fitting ending for a record that fills your ears with joyous sound and then worms its way into your being, lingering on your mind long after the sound has gone.

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18. Green Gardens – This Is Not Your Fault [Come Play With Me Records / EMI North]

An art-rock quartet based out of the Yorkshire musical hotspot of Leeds, Green Gardens are a sign of what a thriving music scene can do. Outside of playing in the band, you’ll find the various members playing in other projects, booking shows at Oporto, or pulling pints at The Brudenell Social Club. They’re part band, part embodiment of collaboration, creativity and a musical sharing of resources. Which is all great of course, and made even better by the fact that they’re actually a very good band as well. Their debut album, This Is Not Your Fault, was recorded with local production duo de-jour Jamie Lockhart and Rob Slater at Greenmount Studios and digs deep into themes of blame, guilt and the futility that often lies in both. Musically the record reminds me a lot of the late Noughties DIY scene, bands like Grammatics and Youthmovies, who fused disparate styles into something angular, and in a delightful way, rather awkward. Take a song like the fantastic Things I Didn’t Do, its jerky almost math rock rhythms, collide with fuzzy, chiming guitars and flourishes of jazzy saxophones, as the lyrics dissect ideas of the guilt that can follow the loss of a loved one – it’s a song that befits the chaotic, tumbling complexity of its themes. Elsewhere they dip into folkish influences on the air-clearing beauty of Akin To Sap and The Antlers-like campfire folk of A Cradling, while Oslow is like Big Thief with a West Yorkshire slant. The album is bookended by what could almost be considered ying-and-yang title tracks, the opening This Is My Fault is a self-deprecating slice of harmonic richness and slacker-folk guitars with an almost biblical plea, “you lay my children’s ugliness at my feet, for they are pure! And I am wretched”. Contrastingly titled it may be, but This Is Not Your Fault is not entirely a full circle moment of guilt melting away into the sunshine, it’s thankfully much more realistic than that. The song ends with a crescendo of noise, a musical howl, “I’ve lost it all, exhausted now”, strangely for such a beaten sounding lyric, it’s oddly cathartic as if this is as low as things can be and there’s only up now, where a crack of light is met with exhaustion not celebration, a feeling not that all is well, but just enough positivity to know that one day it might be.

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17. Samuel Nicholson – Birthday Suit [Self-Released]

A neuro-divergent songwriter from Edinburgh, Samuel Nicholson has become something of a fixture on the London music scene, both with his own solo output as a live performer backing the likes of personal faves Jemma Freeman & The Cosmic Something and Jeremy Tuplin. Birthday Suit, Samuel’s third album, was written as, “a dysfunctional self-portrait of my life at a time when I was falling deeply in love“. After experiencing severe panic attacks, Samuel was recently diagnosed with autism, and on this album, he attempted to make something, “as honest as possible“, an approach he also adopted with his relationship, “I loved the idea of writing an album that rejected the odd ritual we adopt of disguising our flaws and malice when we’re trying to find a soulmate“. The sense of emotional freedom is never more evident than during the title track that, introductions aside, opens the record, in languid free-flowing style, it’s Samuel’s this is me, take it or leave it plea, full of flaws, “stubborn and thoughtless, I think I’m an artist“, but honest as the day is long, with the closing shrug, “there you go, of little use in my birthday suit”. Elsewhere Black Dog Funeral is a cathartic goodbye to a relationship which you kept holding onto, even if it long ago ceased to function, “I didn’t leave until the love was already gone”, and ends in a joyous eruption of self-worth, while God Loves a Trier is a rare gentle moment, as a warm embrace of keys envelopes Samuel’s vocal as he repeatedly states, “I got love for you”, before the whole thing descends into a gorgeous twiddly guitar expression. Best of all, and indeed one of my favourite singles all year, is the fantastic West Coast Feeling, a song that as Samuel puts it, “has worn many outfits”, since he first wrote it, but is presented here as starkly as when it first hit him at 2am. It’s one of those tracks with a magic that’s hard to explain, it’s not revolutionary, just a man with a guitar letting it all out, the lyrics hint at a sense of unease, but dive little into anything specific, yet as Samuel howls, “I heard someone screaming, for a West Coast feeling”, it just somehow feels so vital, like a lungful of fresh air after a week indoors. Perhaps what shines most throughout Birthday Suit is just how honestly Samuel presents his music, in the best way this is a record that feels entirely the vision of its creator, there in his Birthday Suit ready for the world to turn their glance his way.

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16. Frog – Grog [Audio Antihero]

One of the independent scene’s most heartening stories of 2023 was the universal small blog adoration of Grog, the first new material from Frog since 2019’s acclaimed Count Bateman. Courtesy of little more than a hugely enthusiastic record label and a series of really good songs, Frog seemed to hit a real nerve, and for a while felt like just about the most adored band on the planet. Grog was a record of life changing, as Daniel Bateman, the man behind the music, became a father and recruited his brother Steve to hit the skins, Daniel noting how there’s nothing more exciting than playing with the people you love. The resultant record is a musical grab-bag, like a greatest hits compilation from a restlessly creative mind, yet one that hangs together despite its eclecticism. From the lightly self-deprecating banjo led home town joy of New Ro, “take me home, north on the Anne Hutchinson, through the Bronx, back to the place where we’re from, where the girls they put out in a car and the pizza guys know where you are”, through to the disco meets Greek-legend of Black on Black on Black. Particularly wonderful is Ur Still Mine, a song about, “someone who screwed up at being a father and is trying not to hate himself for doing it”, while it is a song full of errors and self-doubt, it has also got a certain sweetness to it as he sings, “somewhere we’re walking out of time, you’re still mine and when we’re talking you’re so kind, you’re still mine”, before ending with a recording of Daniel’s own daughter singing Bah Bah Black Sheep and saying, “listen to the music daddy”. In some ways Grog was an album Frog probably could easily not have made, life is busy and hard, the world is wild and music for the vast majority can be pretty unrewarding. So thank you to the universe, the creative spirit, the heavens above, or whatever pulled Daniel Bateman back to the studio coal face once more, because making a record this good, this life-affirming, well that is always going to be worth the struggle.

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15. Raveloe – Exit Light [Olive Grove Recordings]

The solo project of Glasgow-based songwriter Kim Grant, Raveloe has been something of a fixture on this site since the excellent 2020 single, Abalone. After the well-received 2021 EP, Notes & Dreams, Kim descended on Glenwood Studios with producer Paul Gallagher and a rotating cast of excellent Scottish musicians to work on the tracks that make up her debut album, Exit Light. The title of the record is taken from the track Ghost Beach, inspired by the death of trees and the way the other trees around them continue to learn from them even after a tree has died, and how we can be inspired by that, “this idea extended out into how I viewed relationships with others and myself, relationships can “die” and then shift into something else, or still nurture, perhaps in a different way”. Throughout the album Kim confronts ideas of the instinct to run from difficulties or to stay and learn from them, it’s a theme explored in the tracks that bookend the record. The opening track Countertop starts with a literal departure, “the bus pulls out of the station the air was thick over the motorway suspended in a murky grey”, and lives happily with the uncertainty, “when I walk into the unknown I find it reassuring”, yet as the record reaches an end on Keep Count, there’s a sense of a place reached, “the sun has risen it’s a vision found in the last place you would look in”. While her words throughout are beautifully poetic, Kim is also not afraid to let the music speak for her, whether it’s Passing Place, a spectral slice of distinctly rural Scottish indie-folk Roddy Woomble or Lau would be proud of, or the haunting string-led wonder of Rustle In The Leaves that seems to be from an entirely different era as it lives up to the lyrical pronouncement, “a window into calmness in the wake of turbulence”. Exit Light is a remarkable record, and one of wonderful contrasts, moments of crashing intensity sit beside quiet contemplation, pain and beauty are bedfellows, loss and love, letting go and clinging on, all the grit and glimmer of a life, laid bare in its perfectly imperfect whole.

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14. Anna St. Louis – In The Air [Woodsist/Mare]

In her own words, “born of a thousand nights lost in a surrender to stillness and contemplation”, In The Air is the second album from Kansas-raised songwriter Anna St. Louis. After emerging in 2018 with the excellent, If Only There Was a River, Anna set out to do something different, leaving what has been behind, and reaching out to discover what could be. This period of outward exploration came at a time of personal isolation, Anna’s world becoming a one-bedroom cabin in the woods in upstate New York, her only trips outside, to work shifts as the desk clerk in a nearby hotel. This led to a period Anna describes as, “a slow harvest”, a period of fertile creativity but one which required patience, letting inspiration strike and then allowing her ideas the time and space to bloom. This intricate slowness was also brought into the recording sessions with producer Jarvis Taveniere, Anna experimented with what the studio, and a slew of collaborators, can bring, adding both a brightness and a flourish to her music like never before. The result is a record that seems to be falling in love with living in the moment, as tiny details become life-changing, from Morning’s reflections on, “letting love’s timing naturally unfold” or Phone’s weary plea for fresh energy to help an old connection, “well, the road up ahead is looking kind of long and I think sooner or later we’re gonna wear it down”. Particularly gorgeous is the Jess Williamson-like dewy-eyed country of Better Days, it’s a, perhaps unintentional, mantra for difficult days, which belies its tones of sadness with a message that’s quietly hopeful, “I’m up in my mind saying, alright, I’ll wait for better days”. There’s a fabulous flow to In The Air, the whole thing has the feel of a warm spring breeze, an awakening from a period of emotional hibernation, and as it drifts out on the gorgeous twang of Sea Glass, don’t be at all surprised if you find yourself reaching over to hit play once more, because time spent with Anna St. Louis, well that’s time very well spent indeed.

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13. The National – First Two Pages Of Frankenstein [4AD]

Across their twenty-plus years as a band, The National have had quite the journey. From the early years in the indie wilderness, through to first critical, and then commercial breakthroughs that saw them become one of the biggest alternative bands on the planet, and the near inevitable criticism that follows any band that comes crashing into the mainstream. Their ninth album, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, was met with the usual blend of adoration and scepticism, as the band slipped, raging and battling along the way, into a knowingly middle-aged phase. For me, The National have always been something of a foretelling of what comes next, a band that seem to exist ten years on from my own life like a guidebook of the thrills and pitfalls of growing older, and here as I started the next phase of my life they were just starting to see the cracks in their own. Matt Berninger’s struggles in the build-up to this album are well documented, the fact there almost wasn’t a new album at all a matter for the record, yet that doubt seems to almost work in the record’s favour, in their darkest spot, the band found a way back together and sounded just as good as ever. On a record littered with guest appearances from Phoebe Bridgers to Taylor Swift, the best of the lot is probably the opening track, Once Upon A Poolside, which finds Sufjan Stevens as an ethereal presence, floating behind Matt’s more grounded tones, as plaintive pianos dive and they note with a hint of resignation ask, “What was the worried thing you said to me? I thought we could make it through anything”. Perhaps the reason The National’s music still resonates with me, even in its stadium-sized ambition, is their focus on the small details, the way they note the tiny little moments and the way they add up to form a life, the way Matt sings on New Order T-Shirt of when “you cried at the beach and recovered in seconds and said “everything’s fine”, but I knew that it wasn’t” or notes, “I caught myself talking myself off the ceiling, I was suffering more than I let on”, on Tropic Morning News, to a brilliant tumbling of guitar notes matching the chaotic mind. This sense of forbearing is perhaps best expressed in the stunning Eucalyptus, it finds Matt digging into old memories for solace, recalling the shared love of The Cowboy Junkies and The Afghan Wigs, or the past glories hiding on undeveloped cameras. He almost seems to be dividing up the possessions in his mind, picturing heading back to New York, in search of a life that no longer exists, even though he knows, “it’d be so alone, without you there”. In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley invited us to see the monster inside ourselves, and perhaps in making First Two Pages Of Frankenstein, The National invited themselves to do the same. Throughout Matt’s words seem to dig into his most destructive tendencies, picturing the collapse before it arrives, imagining his life crumbling as the guitars chime and the drum clatter, an avalanche of little moments just waiting for a single clap of the hands to send the whole thing tumbling down.

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12. Joanna Sternberg – I’ve Got Me [Fat Possum]

New York is a city so mythologised in popular culture that it can be hard to remember it actually exists, that people actually live there amid the ever-changing skyline and the cavalcade of cultural reference points. One person who does is Joanna Sternberg, a former jazz scholar at Mannes College Of Music, whose family live on the 40th floor of a tower in Manhattan Plaza, a middle-income artists-only residence on 42nd Street. It was there that Joanna crafted the songs that would become their second album, I’ve Got Me, the follow-up to the well-received debut album, Then I Try Some More. I’ve Got Me is like a smoke signal from the tallest of towers, as the world seemed to be disintegrating in front of their eyes, Joanna turned to the building around her for influence, channelling the spirits of former residents from Tennessee Williams to Alicia Keys, as well as their own creative family which includes comedians, painters, opera singers and, “Yiddish Theatre Gods”. The result is a record that while it borrows from anyone and everyone that Joanna admires, is a curiously singular affair, an array of influences spun through a filter that is distinctly Joanna’s own, the sound of an artist becoming truly themself. From the Elvis Costello-like pianos of She Dreams to the anti-folk guitar brilliance I’ve Got Me, Joanna seems to always be in their own lane, from the swooping vocal melodies to the delightfully glossy production, it all just feels wonderfully thought out. Particularly spectacular are the moments where the music and lyrics seem to be dragging the listener in two completely different directions, as on the fabulous Stockholm Syndrome, the music is a whistleable shuffler, channelling a touch of Tracy Chapman, at one point Joanna even breaks out into the sunniest of la-la-la’s, all strikingly contrasted to a lyrical tale of co-dependency and controlling behaviour, punctuated by the innocence of Joanna’s questioning, “when you told me goodbye, you did not even cry, did you know all along that you would do me wrong?” By digging deeper into their own self, Joanna Sternberg found new depth, and with I’ve Got Me marked themself out as one of the most individual, creative and exciting voices music currently has to offer, and perhaps most excitingly, still felt like an artist who is only just getting started.

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11. Meagre Martin – Gut Punch [Mansions & Millions]

Formed in the Summer of 2021 Meagre Martin are a trio of Berlin-based Americans, fronted by African-American musician and songwriter Sarah Martin. A Boston native, Sarah moved to Germany after being priced out of New York living, where she met bandmates drummer Freddy Corazzini and bassist Max Hirtz-Wolf after the opportunity for a gig, which never actually happened, arose at the start of 2022. The connection was instant and the band descended on Butterrama studios in Berlin, where Freddy worked, and set about working out their debut album without the time pressures facing so many new bands. The resultant record bristles with energy and a certain lived-in quality that comes with a band really thrashing out the edges of their sound. Describing their sound as, “faux country”, Meagre Martin blend the edges of 90’s indie and Americana, recalling the likes of Neighbor Lady or Why Bonnie as they explore a sonic landscape equal parts American highway and European dive bar. The record is littered with highlights, from the masterful push-and-pull of Please Clap with its playful entwining of bass and guitar through to the vaporous, thankfully not an Oasis cover, Wonderwall, resplendent with gorgeous descending guitar lines and Sarah’s most pure and languid vocal performance. Perhaps the band’s blend of transatlantic qualities is best summed up by the penultimate track, Amerika, exploring, “our experience living in the US, and…some of the reasons we now live in Berlin“. To a backing of cascading guitar slashes and driving rhythmic acoustics, it confronts the difficult subject of life in modern America where you, “praise the lord”, “protect your own” and “work to the bone”, while never being expected to ask what you getting in return. Gut Punch is a record that lives up to its title, the sound of bursting onto the scene and instantly commanding your attention in the way that only a truly remarkable debut record can.

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10. Ava Mirzadegan – Dark Dark Blue [Team Love]

Based out of Philadelphia, Ava Mirzadegan is both a musician and a music person, having spent years sharing her own work under the Pen Palindrome moniker and releasing other people’s on the excellent Oof Records imprint. With the release of Dark Dark Blue, Ava made the decision to step into something more personal, charting the end of a pivotal relationship, and asking the question, “if someone falls apart in their room, and no one is around to hear it, do they still make a sound?”. Recorded with Friendship’s Michael Cormier, and mixed by Colin Miller, Ava’s work here bristles with intimacy, it has that feel of being in a room with someone, like a tiny gig with a spellbound audience, where you can hear a pin-drop and you half expect to hear someone awkwardly clear their throat at any moment.

The instrumentation throughout Dark Dark Blue couldn’t be any simpler, a lone vocal, an almost exclusively finger-picked nylon-string guitar, and a shed load of space, recalling the likes of Julie Doiron or Lisa/Liza, Ava is an artist who knows the importance of letting a song breathe. The album is like a series of snapshots, half-forgotten memories that drift in and out of focus, ideas blurred and unclear like two people’s memories of the same event. This is never more evident than on the brilliant closing track, Sleeping Through the Afternoon, a beautifully crafted piece, it chronicles a relationship, remembering the good, “November, December, back when we were happy together. We were sleeping through the morning, staying up ’til light”, and the bad, “don’t wanna let you take you under, wanna hold you make you better, but we’re sleeping through the afternoon staying up to fight”. One of the reasons Dark Dark Blue really shines is that it is a breakup record, but it isn’t a bitter record, for all the tales of messy incompatibility, much of it is presented with love and a sense of time, like a letter to your teenage self asking them to accept the wounds and doubts we all inherit and be kind to themselves. Take the fabulous Book Song, over sparse Josh T Pearson-like guitars, Ava offers first an affirmation, “I love you for sticking it out while I find my mind”, and then an apology of sorts or at the least an admittance of regret for the hurt caused, “I was meaning to pick you up before I moved on to another”. Sometimes there’s even room for a certain playfulness to Ava’s words not often found in such minimalist sketches, there’s a lovely moment in She’s Still, when she asks, “when we get older, will we still be messy”, almost sounding like she’s going to miss the difficult moments, a little scared by the idea of too much normality. We often mistake honesty in art as a form of expressing regret and pain, Ava’s version however seems, well, more honest than that, it’s full of the muddy parts of life, the silt that clouds the water, the dazzling sunshine and the corner it can’t quite reach, the mistakes we make, the reasons we make them, and the way we learn to move on from them, in sometimes quite spectacular fashion.

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9. Lewsberg – Out And About [Lewsberg Records]

Formed in 2016, Rotterdam’s Lewsberg have been doing a very good job of carving out their own fascinating niche on the thriving Dutch music scene, never more evidently than on the excellent Out And About. The band’s fourth album, Out And About was an attempt to explore another side of their sound, walking the line between the existentialism and black humour that has always underpinned their music and a more open-hearted naïve quality. Record with producer Yulya Divakova, it was also the first record to feature drummer Marrit Meinema and was at least partly inspired by their newfound collaborative spirit and each member’s own individual perspectives within that.

Lewsberg lift their name from writer and fellow Rotterdammer Robert Loesberg, famous for the 1974 novel Enige Defecten, and listening to Out And About their love of both literature, and more specifically the counter-cultural words of the 1960s and 1970s, is an influence they wear openly. Leaning even further into the sound of spoken-word, the band’s words seem to inhibit a deliciously dysfunctional weirdness. Take my personal favourite, the penultimate track There’s A Poet In The Bushes, musically it’s little more than a guitar arpeggio and some distant harmonies, yet it’s fabulously odd and surprisingly moving, we find the titular poet in the titular bushes looking for inspiration, “he’s been there for quite a while, it’s an unusual but harmless situation on the face of it”. From there they seem to explore the entire point of creativity, and our ability to create wonder out of nothing, “I am a poet, if I want the rose to bloom, the rose blooms“, yet within that they find the grey areas, “what is a rose for one person may be something completely different for another, some people like flowers, other like thorns, the poet had yet to find out, he was determined to find out”. Elsewhere the quasi-religious strains of Communion has a wonderful lightness of touch, courtesy of the wonderful simplicity of the lead guitar and the questioning lyric, “bless the lord my soul, just want to look him in the eye”, while the opening track, Angle Of Reflection finds the poetry in the laws of Physics and sets them to a meandering Beach House-like keyboard line, “all you have to do is to do it again, the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection, so there’s nothing new and I’m basically bored”. Across Out And About, Lewsberg seem to have really arrowed in on what makes them such a special band, they’ve trimmed the fat back and left the bare bones, skeletal songs that strike straight to the point and sing with intent, these new Dutch masterpieces might just be their best yet.

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8. Muriel – Self-Titled [Venn Records]

Beginning life as the recording project of Cardiff-based songwriter and tattoo artist Zak Thomas, Muriel has subsequently expanded into something of a collective, Zak joined by an evolving cast of friends and musicians who have taken his music from the bedroom to their fully formed and flourishing final form. While recorded and reworked over several years, largely in the oddly auditory setting of his tattoo studio, the bulk of the songs on Muriel’s self-titled debut were written in a short period. It was an intense time of personal landmarks, and the resultant record explores ideas of grief, spirituality, the realisation of our own mortality, and how it sparked in him a sort of intense connectedness, “in a surreal post-grief sense I was feeling very joyful”.

The tone for the record is set with the gentle arrival of the opening track, Blue Village, it seems to almost fade in, a skitter of acoustic guitar, wordless singing and splashy textural percussion, before resolving into the excellent Seaside Painter. A song, at least in one sense, about the anxiety of releasing songs, Seaside Painter explores the duality of wanting to share yourself with the world in your most honest form, while keeping something for yourself, as atop a percussive, whirring guitar line, Zak repeatedly sings, “I’ve got to be see through, I need to”. A particular highlight is the sublime Lavender By The Frames, a breezy blast of spring sunshine, propelled by the most luxuriously lovely guitar line and steady drum tick, it has a hazy, dream-like quality, winningly fresh in every sense imaginable. There’s a sense of light and shade present throughout the record, as shown by the track that follows, Relative. An achingly open-hearted number, it reflects on the moment Zak found out his father had died, perfectly capturing the overriding numbness that news like that brings. The whole track has a matter-of-factness as the fluttering guitar line accompanies words of potent realism, “one day you’re there, and then you’re not, I should have called you back, but I forgot”. While that moment is particularly stark, elsewhere the sense of light and shade repeats, the way I Hope It Won’t Hurt Me raises its guard, Zak’s thoughts and doubts cocooned in a blanket of gorgeous harmonies before it slides into the more awkward and anxious Body Of Light, a song that seems to question everything we know, inspired by a visit to the Sagrada Familia that left Zak with a realisation of just how little we know about the universe and our place in it. The record closes, rather fittingly with Walking Just To Walk, a song that seems to be about muddling through, grand gestures and emotional rollercoasters be damned, sometimes there’s joy and triumph in putting one foot in front of the other. When my own father died he chose a reading from a book by Laurie Lee on the same theme, “I walked steadily, effortlessly, hour after hour in a swinging weightless realm”, progress can be a vast leap or a single step, “walking just to walk” can become a bold statement, a mantra to keep going when the world weighs down heavy upon your shoulders.

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7. Lael Neale – Star Eaters Delight [Sub Pop]

In many ways, you can think of Lael Neale’s Star Eaters Delight, her second album for Sub Pop, as a direct reaction to her first. That album, 2021’s Acquainted with Night, was an attempt to find silence in the bright lights and bustle of Los Angeles, while Star Eaters Delight came on the back of leaving the city behind. Returning to her family’s farm in rural Virginia, Lael was surrounded instead by unbroken silence, and found herself, “compelled to break them with sound”, a record of, “reaching back out to the world, wanting to feel connected, to wake up, to come together again”. A natural minimalist with a 90s flip phone, Lael made the record with regular collaborator Guy Blakeslee and suggests no screens were involved in the creation of the record in an attempt to both switch off the world at large and to be more intentional in everything she does.

The record opens, rather boldly I’m sure you’ll agree, with probably the best song anyone released all year. I Am The River, is less a scene setter and more a Big Bang, a moment of powerful energy cascading outward and shaping everything that is to follow. It’s a song with touch points, The Walkmen-like intensity of the guitar, the shuffling LCD Soundsystem beat, the clipped PJ Harvey-like vocal delivery, yet it feels more primal than any of those, a sort of musical building block, a primordial soup of sound. “Remember dancing, remember magic”, she sings knowing everything the world had missed in our darkest days and everything we needed to start again, was present in a few chords and a drum machine. Thankfully Lael is sensible enough to not try and live up to that explosive start, and instead brings things down with the soaring hymnal If I Had No Wings, before putting her foot down once more on Faster Than The Medicine. A wiry, jittery number, it combines an Interpol-like bass line with searing quivers of omnichord and lyrics more West Country than West Coast as she gallops across rural England, “to reach you faster than the word of man, faster than the medicine”. The hugely confident front-loading of the record continues into the intriguing, anti-pop of In Verona, it’s the heart of the record in every sense, a sprawling sound collage, of eerie drum machines, pulsing pianos and Lael’s haunting, Patti Smith-like vocal delivery, which offer poetic slashes of hidden meanings, likening the division of the modern world to Shakespearian Verona and Biblical lessons, “the flower died, for the corpse bride, there is beauty, there are no sides, in Verona, in Verona, cast no stone, cast no stone”. On paper, the track sounds impossibly dense, a thick black cloud of murky, dirgy gospel, in reality, it’s one of the most remarkable and intriguing ways you can spend eight and a half minutes of your time. The swift changes between darkness and light are a key to Star Eaters Delight’s charms, like the oddly distorted black and white cover art, it has moments of what Tom Waits termed glitter and doom. The way the lightness of the bassy, near ditty of No Holds Barred, with its tale of love and sacrifice, “if this is is love, it’s too easy, all I have to do is give you everything, and you can have it no holds barred”, slides effortless into the swaying fuzz of Return To Me Now, and it’s repeated demand, “return to me now, just like a flower, who loves the sun”. The album closes, with piano led Lead Me Blind, a song, like so many on the record, that deals with perception and reality, the way we can be duped, like Little Red Riding Hood confronted by the Big Bad Wolf, into seeing what someone wants us to see, “you’re so lovely I can see no shadow on your wall, you’re so lovely I can see no shadow there at all”. When I thought of Star Eaters Delight, I initially thought of it as otherworldly, yet revisiting it, that’s not quite right, this is a record very much of the world, in touch with humanity, nature, and history, full of real feelings without the trappings of modern living that actually serve to disconnect us from all that truth that’s lurking waiting for us away from the screen.

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6. Sluice – Radial Gate [Ruination Record Co.]

Based out of Durham, North Carolina, Sluice is the recording project of musician/engineer Justin Morris. For the second Sluice album, Radial Gate, Justin lent heavily on his local connection, bringing in a variety of players who’ve performed with the likes of Tomberlin, Indigo De Souza, HC McEntire, and a whole host of others. Justin has suggested the record continues on themes of nature’s intersection with industry, as well as reflecting on more personal ideas of isolation, depression and how in community he found a way towards personal growth.

Clocking in at just under thirty minutes, Radial Gate is a record that’s every bit as economical as that would suggest, it has the feel of no idea being wasted, no part overplayed, no section that isn’t perfectly judged for how it fits into the whole. In a similar mould to some of my other favourite American bands of the moment like Friendship or Field Guides, Sluice seem to be masters at scene painting, that age-old trick of presenting just enough detail for you to guess the context, and enough blurring of the edges to leave the listener to fill in their own personal blanks. Take the masterfully crafted Fourth Of July, atop a backing of harmonium-like drone and flittering acoustic guitar, Justin offers masterful lyrical brush strokes, transporting you to a swimming spot in the middle of a blazing summer, before dragging you back into the here and now, “I am nine years old in line for breaststroke, I am running to dad’s car, no I am here, I am 25 I don’t have 20 minutes for your bullshit”. These musical cross-fades are present throughout Radial Gate, a record that drags you through time and space at the drop of a brilliant one-liner, as on the Bonnie “Prince” Billy-like Acts 9:3, where the grandeur of Biblical revelation meets the grubbiness of living in the real world, as Jesus appears to him sipping beers, “eating tuna from a bag” , offering not salvation but prescription pain meds. The record first came to my attention via the majestic single, Mill, a fabulous paean to America’s blue-collar masculinity, that starts with a jaunty twang and ends in a full motorik-clatter as they dismissively ask, “what’s the problem man” , while hinting at all the tiny cuts that have led to the divided political landscape rearing its head the world over. The record reaches its come too quickly close on the excellent New Leicester, a quietly crushing and darkly comic song about tiny losses, “could you pass me a beer? Oh no it fell in the river, hey man that’s all right, good night”. There’s something gutsy about the music Sluice are making here, an earthy, honest record, big on reality, low on sentimentality, yet in its own way rather moving, beautiful like hearty home-cooked meal rather than a fancy restaurant serving, a cold beer with your favourite people after a long week grafting, and every bit as enjoyable as that sounds.

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5. Benedict Benjamin – Tunnel [Self-Titled]

If I had to pick out an artist whose 2023 output was deserving of considerably more attention than it seemed to get, Benedict Benjamin would be the first name on my list. On the excellent Tunnels, the former Mariner’s Children man distilled the difficulty of recent years into a magical record not just in its themes but in its unique sound. Deprived of his regular bandmates, Ben was forced to completely reassess how he makes music, while the logistics of being a father without an income also meant he was forced to take a full-time job. It left him questioning his entire relationship with music, why he makes it, and how he could carry on doing that in ever more difficult circumstances.

He started the process with probably the most tricky logistical question, drums, how do you create rhythm without a rhythm section? He dived into old jazz records, sampling complex drum solos, taking their irregular patterns and then reshaping them into something regular, and in doing so forcing himself to work outside of his musical comfort zone. This is evident instantly, on the mesmeric opening track Furlough Blues, one of my favourite musical curve balls of the year, atop a stop-start rhythm, rich in splashy jazzy symbols, lie propulsive bass and chiming guitars, a perfect accompaniment to Ben’s tale of an all too relatable struggle as he pleads for good news in a world that at the time felt unwaveringly dark, while all the time trying to stay strong for his family, “I’m drowning in time with no ending, hold it all together dear”. If that felt like a huge departure from previous Benedict Benjamin records, elsewhere he showed he’s still a master of the gently crushing, the beautifully bruised Hanging By A Thread which teeters on the edge of a breakdown, or Nursery, a particularly wonderful song about watching your child grow, the daily guilts and, “the small accepted heartbreaks that you must swallow down like bitter medicine”, that ends in blissful simplicity, “all of the pain that you must handle pales in comparison to the love in my heart”. However, really this was a record where the moments of musical progression really sung through, from the fuzzy distortion of Effort and Reward, a song of rebellious fatherly love as he can’t help but smile as his daughter boots her tormentor’s football over a wall, “other kids are such fucking dicks, they don’t deserve to breathe the air you do”, or the wiry energy of Despite, an anthem for those muddling through, “to everyone carrying on, still finding the strength left to smile, still playing your part shrapnel lodged in your heart, after trial after trial after trial”. Possibly the highlight here, and indeed one of my highlights of the year is White Noise, less a song and more a blast of pure energy, it has a certain North African feel courtesy of the lurching bass and fizzing, scuzz of the guitars, while much of the album deals with threats outside of the self, here Ben seems to ask us to see the monsters inside, “it’s all noise until someone starts singing from the heart, it’s all noise till you take a long look into the dark. It’s hard to take the blame when you’re not used to being wrong”. Raw and gently raging, Tunnel is a portrait of life at a low moment, a recording bristling with struggle, yet one that knew that life and love were things most definitely worth fighting for.

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4. Esther Rose – Safe To Run [New West Records]

If there’s one takeaway from Esther Rose’s fourth album, Safe To Run, it’s the fact that sometimes you’ve got to dive in feet first. Although originally from Michigan, Esther’s musical history is almost entirely wrapped up in New Orleans, it was there she began writing her own music, inspired by the city’s unerring creative spirit. However, like quitting a job you hate or ending a relationship that’s doing you no good, sometimes you’ve got to move along, and for Safe To Run, that’s exactly what Esther did, saying goodbye to Louisiana, and hunkering down in Santa Fe, embracing new environments, new sounds and a mantra to open her eyes and to write anything but, “another heartbreak song”.

Now I’m a sucker for Esther’s heartbreak songs, but thankfully there was no need to worry, as shown by the record’s first single, Chet Baker. A lyrical flashback inspired by a, “do you remember me” type message Esther received on social media, Chet Baker finds her spiralling back to a dangerous weekend with questionable company, and feeling lucky to have survived, “that time of willful recklessness”. The song is a reminder that country was originally rebellious music, here the slide-guitar swaggers, the drums bounce and Esther’s vocals sound like the audio equivalent of dark shades and a leather jacket as she recounts her lowest ebb, “welcome to the end of your rope, well you know rock bottom shouldn’t feel this good”. It’s one of a string of album highlights that all find Esther exploring new sonic territory, the title track, a duet with Hurray For The Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra is a sparkling example of more-is-more production and the looming presence of climate disaster, while New Magic II is as close as she’s ever got an indie-pop song, with the delicious guitar chime and “hey hey hey”s it’s a wonderful moment of freshness, even if it does leave you longing to know what happened to New Magic I. There are also moments where Esther nods back to the sounds that made her, whether it’s the scathing emotional dump of Spider, that finds her, “searching for three chords and the truth”, and a final word you feel she probably never got to deliver in person, or the skiffling, shimmying Dream Girl, with its subtle dig at those who seek to diminish female achievement, “he said he made you what are, you were no one until he made you a star, a pair of eyes, a narrow view, he was lucky just to be in the room”. The record’s farewell is a particularly intriguing one, with the pulsing guitar rhythms and the twitchy, slightly unnerving high-end melodies of an instrument, the identity of which I just can’t quite put my finger on. Lyrically it touches on the way humanity can feel like it’s accelerating into an avertible disaster because of its own selfish desires, “come on Greta, you made your case and now we’re keeping you at arm’s length, you know we only want to save face, and take a selfie, go to lunch, eight-ounce steak”. The album ends with a rather crushing pronouncement of a society that doesn’t seem to realise the seriousness of its threat or the lack of a do-over, “you know life is like a video game, level up, big score, game over”. Safe To Run is the sound of an artist striving for new ground, finding new sounds and new things to say, perhaps it is time now for Esther to stop running because she sounds like she’s truly arrived.

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3. Strawberry Runners – Self Titled [Duper Moon]

A debut album well worth the wait, Strawberry Runners, the musical project of Emi Night, has existed for the best part of a decade, with the excellent 2017 EP, In The Garden, In The Night topping my list of that year’s finest releases. The subsequent seven years have seen Emi relocate to Philadelphia, and go through what for most people would be a lifetime’s worth of struggle, including breakups, the attempted suicide of a loved one and a period of homelessness. Thankfully through community and friendship Emi discovered in their new city, they were able to muddle through, and Emi soon found the inspiration to rekindle Strawberry Runners and begin piecing together the tracks that became, with the help of acclaimed producer Michael Cormier-O’Leary and a string of studios throughout the northeastern states, this most miraculous of debut albums.

Musically, Strawberry Runners is something of a departure for Emi, while their previous output tended towards acoustic tones nodding to acts like Fanfarlo or Fleet Foxes, here they are given a glossier, more electronic sheen. The transition in Strawberry Runners’ sound is evident on the opening track When I Walk, its warped acoustic intro sliding into glossy folktronica in the mould of Casiotone For The Painfully Alone or D.A. Stern. The line between glossy lo-fi pop and more atmospheric alternative tones is one Emi walks throughout, from Breakup 2, a song of pulsing keyboards and wonky percussive rattles, adorned with a silky smooth vocal melody, through to the Postal Service-like bleeps and beats of Look Like This. One of the record’s finest moments, and probably the closest to a possible hit single Emi has ever got is the brilliant Alison, described as, “a kind of love letter to a friend”, it’s a reminder to keep your chin up and your lowest ebbs, as the strutting Beck-like bassline accompanies Emi’s wonderfully odd affirmations, “you’re a typhoon, you’re a sandstorm, your heat could keep the great lakes warm, Alison”. The record closes, somewhat unusually with the record’s first single, the looping haze of Circle Circle, quite possibly the best shape-themed song since James Blunt went on Sesame Street singing about triangles. The song was written in the delirium of a fever, the repeated patterns of the music offering Emi a pillar to cling onto in the wild fever dreams. The track deals heavily in repetition, yet also constant evolution, the shifting instrumentation from off-kilter synths to meandering guitar solos drifting in and out like waves on the seashore, as Emi sings of the simultaneously miniscule and huge moments in a life, “circle, circle, circle us all, we’re all needed somewhere, though we’re all so small”. Though it’s presented as an almost stand-alone moment at the end of the record that proceeds, it’s perhaps the best summary of where Strawberry Runners’ music is right now, simultaneously small and personal, and yet vast and universal, little intricate details that add up to great chaotic wholes, an artist at the top of their game, just waiting for a deserved audience to come their way.

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2. Squirrel Flower – Tomorrow’s Fire [Full Time Hobby]

Ella Williams, the person behind the Squirrel Flower moniker, has always been influenced by place, whether it was the brutal Iowa winters casting a spell on 2015’s early winter songs from middle america, the distinctly American road songs of I Was Born Swimming, or the Mad Max-like desserts of the world boiling chaos of Planet (i). For her latest offering, Tomorrow’s Fire, Ella was inspired by one of her favourite places, the Indiana Dunes. A recently anointed national park on the shores of Lake Michigan, Ella was struck by the contrast of this expansive solitary beauty and the billowing industry of local steel plants and the glimmering towers of Chicago they produce.

Tomorrow’s Fire isn’t so much an evolution of Squirrel Flower’s sound, as it is a distillation, a concentrated blast of all the loudest, boldest tones, minimalism be damned this record is a storm with no eye, a raging tumult of fizzing rock songs that demand to be listened to loud. Intriguingly, the record opens with a re-imagination of a song from Squirrel Flower’s past, I Don’t Use A Trashcan, which was the first song Ella ever released. Originally a thing of fragile spectral beauty, now it has become a bolder statement of smouldering intent. The sense of self-expression tumbling out of every corner of Tomorrow’s Fire is perhaps the result of Ella taking the production wheels, working with engineer Alex Farrar and a collection of studio players, listening to the album, Ella perhaps feels more in control of her music than ever. It’s perhaps only fitting then, that the record also includes some of her most listless lyrical themes, a record bristling with the unease and struggle of being an artist in a world that doesn’t always seem to value art for anything other than its money-making potential. Take the stunning Full Time Job, atop the soaring thriving crunch of the guitar and the loose drum clatter, Ella’s words sound contrastingly hopeless, as she sings of how, “doing my best is a full time job, but it doesn’t pay the rent”, before ending the track almost begging for a break with the repeated refrain, “I’m on my knees now, yeah I’m on my knees now”. It’s a theme revisited elsewhere, on Stick, a battle cry for those who feel lost in the trapping of the modern world where over scuzzy guitars, Ella howls, “I had a light but you lost it” and on the stand-out moment When A Plant Is Dying, a showcase of utterly mesmeric guitar playing. The whole thing is almost one gently unwinding guitar-solo, it seems to explode out of Ella’s fingers, a cacophony of visceral emotion, and easily the match of anything Neil Young has ever put to tape. The record draws to a close on a moment of gentle clarity with Finally Rain, Ella casting herself as a modern-day Peter Pan as she rails against the mundanity of adult living, “if this is what it means to be alive, we won’t grow up, grow up, grow up”. It would be easy to see this record as an end-of-days record, a fire to burn it all down, yet like so much Squirrel Flower does, it’s more subtle than that. Tomorrow’s Fire is a story passed down the ages, to Ella from her great-grandfather’s short-story, to him via the Medieval French poet Rutebeuf and his quote, “tomorrow’s hopes provide my dinner, tomorrow’s fire must warm tonight”. Words that a century later struck a chord with Ella, and inspired her to light the fire as a tool to ward off nihilism not to embrace it. This is a record of the things we find hope in, the fire to make the morning seem okay, a light to keep burning and to show us the way forward in the darkest hours.

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1. Wednesday – Rat Saw God [Dead Oceans]

As a Brit with a knowledge of American geography that stretches to the biggest metropolises and a list of state capitals learnt mainly for use on Pointless, I must admit before Wednesday came along I’d never heard of Asheville, North Carolina. So its emergence as a hub out of which so many of my favourite records are springing up is something of a surprise, but then Wednesday have always been a band capable of changing the way I think. Since coming to my attention back in 2020, when the band teamed up with Orindal Records to release the sublime I Was Trying To Describe You To Someone, the band seem to be on something of a rocket-worthy upward trajectory. 2021’s Twin Plagues was the sound of a band coming good on a good chunk of their limitless potential for delicious noise. Despite my love for both those records, or perhaps because I’d actually listened to them and heard their seemingly a-commercial sound, I was still a little surprised when the band signed to indie-mega-label, Dead Oceans. This was a band that always sounded like the underground, suddenly thrust up a level, touring the globe and becoming instant critical darlings with people falling over themselves to throw praise at these most unlikely superstars. And within that came the tricky question, in reaching outside of their comfort zone, were they still actually as good as ever? The answer, thankfully, is an unequivocal yes!

Recorded over a week at Asheville’s own Drop of Sun Studio, Rat Saw God is a small town coming of age story, the seemingly inconsequential moments that become life-changing, whether that is “riding a bike down a suburban stretch in Greensboro while listening to My Bloody Valentine for the first time on an iPod Nano” or “the way the South hums alive all night in the summers and into fall, the sound of high school football games, the halo effect from the lights polluting the darkness“. There’s a wonderful grubbiness about the music Wednesday make, the rat if you will, this is music without a plastic sheen or a rose-tinted spectacle, instead, it’s the sound of small-town boredom, youthful misadventure and the feeling of a life that seems to teeter on the edge of disaster. The sense of impending calamity pops up throughout, whether it’s Got Shocked, a country-licked reminiscence of bad wiring and an electric shock at band practice or a Benadryl overdose and a stomach pump on Chosen To Deserve, there’s a palpable sense that it could all have turned out differently.

The other presence throughout Rat Saw God, perhaps more subtly delivered is religion, faith and in a way god. It’s present in the background of so many of the stories here, whether it’s faith wavering on the brilliantly anarchic noise of Bull Believer, as Karly sings of the powerful familiarity of organised religion, “comfort fools us into faith, then fate pulls us away again”, or the subtle sadness of Bath County’s comment, “every daughter of God has a little bad luck sometimes”, and the way it contrasts with a more humanity based faith in playing loudly the music of Drive By Truckers on the highway. Probably the congruence of this Rat/God battle is shown on Chosen To Deserve, quite possibly the year’s most weirdly delivered love song. The song seems to deal with the idea of letting your true self loose on a partner, “we always started by tellin’ all our best stories first, so now that it’s been a while I’ll get around to tellin’ you all my worst”. Karly then seems to run through a greatest hits of her lowest moments, “doin it in some cul-de-sac” in the back of an SUV, teaching Sunday School after a night on the tiles or skipping school two days a week, for nights on “watered down liquor”. Despite all these painful moments though, we get a flicker of moving on and growing into the arms of another, “all the drugs are getting kind of boring to me, now everywhere is loneliness and it’s in everything. Thank god that I was chosen to deserve you, cause I was the girl you were chosen to deserve”.

While the album undeniably features some of Wednesday’s most vivid storytelling, it’s never to the detriment of their ability to make a truly rollicking noise. Indeed Rat Saw God arguably sees the band distilling down all their previous highs into their most complete collection yet. The country twangs more, the cascading drums are harder than ever, and those walls of scuzzy, fuzzy, guitar wonderment are every bit as visceral and life-affirming as ever (see the brilliant breakdown at the end of Bath County or the Mother’s like racing squall of Turkey Vultures for irrefutable evidence). Perhaps the finest example of just how exciting a band Wednesday have become is presented on Bull Believer, the first material shared from Rat Saw God, which remains just about the most thrilling piece of music you can put near your ears (although maybe not too close if you value your hearing). Across eight-plus minutes, the song plays out like a deranged opera, sliding between sections that shift from driving grunge to squalling, shapeless noise. Particularly wonderful is the breakdown, where channelling the spirit of Mortal Kombat, Karly repeatedly sings, “finish him, finish him”, over a backing that seems to almost dissolve around her, as what starts oddly tender gradually becomes little more than a visceral howl and a pounding feedback coated drum beat, it’s rather beautiful in the ugliest way possible. Perhaps that’s Wednesday’s message to the world, to people, to life, to the rats and to the gods, we’re all beautiful, we’re all ugly, we all thrive and we all fall down, we’re the noise and melody, the light and the shade, and we’re perfectly imperfect just the way we are.

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