I'd never heard of the Harrisonburg, Virginia duo Illiterate Light before I heard the Sunburned single "Light Me Up" on the local college station I listen to, WTMD, a couple times last fall, and that song just blew me away and made me an immediate fan. There's some good songs on their 2019 self-titled debut, but this album feels like a big step forward, there's still a folk/blues foundation to their music and Jeff Gorman has that kind of high creaky voice that makes me think of the previous generation of Neil Young disciples like Flaming Lips and Sparklehorse. But they've really blown out their sound into a big bombastic thing on this record that feels more individual and Jake Cochran is a fantastic drummer with a great flair for ghost notes. The penultimate song on the album, "Fuck LA," kind of starts out feeling like a troll or novelty song, but I like the little turn the lyric takes and the point the song eventually arrives at. I can't tell if "Feb 1st" has the same melody as The Police's "Wrapped Around Your Finger" on purpose but I still really like it. Here's the 2023 albums Spotify playlist that I will update throughout the year as I listen to new releases. 

Country music and EDM exist on such seemingly opposite ends of the spectrum of popular music in most respects that fusions of the two are rare, and tend to be self-consciously campy or shamelessly commercial -- I think of Rednex, Zac Brown's solo album, "Justified & Ancient," or that album Diplo did a couple years ago with Morgan Wallen and Thomas Rhett features. But the LA trio Cheat Codes have always had a mellower, more melodic approach to EDM pop, and I loved their one Hot 100 hit, 2017's "Promises" with Demi Lovato. One Night In Nashville matches country stars and twangy melodies with dance beats with a light touch that really works, Little Big Town and Jimmie Allen sound great, rising stars like MacKenzie Porter and Nate Smith take to the sound naturally, and the ever-adventurous Dolly Parton even puts in an appearance. 

When GloRilla blew up last year, there was a lot of interest around the other women in her crew, who also quickly signed record deals, although it doesn't seem like they have a group name, people just refer to them as 'GloRilla's friends' or whatever. Even on their current radio hit "Shabooya," they're all just credited as solo artists (Gloss Up, K Carobin, Slimeroni, Aleza, and the producer Hitkidd). But Gloss Up's solo project on Quality Control is really strong, she doesn't have as distinctive a voice as GloRilla but bar for bar she's probably a stronger MC. The hooks aren't necessarily the most imaginative (there's a song called "Eeny Meeny Miny Moe" and a song called "Head, Shoulders, Knees, Toes"), but the production more than makes up for it, the last 3 tracks are a really excellent stretch of songs. 

Margo Price has been a critical darling for four albums now but I didn't really hear enough of her stuff to get curious until the Strays single "Change of Heart," and yeah, she's pretty good -- don't love her voice but she's definitely a talented writer. I love that Mike Campbell of The Heartbreakers makes an appearance on "Light Me Up," I just think everyone should be itching to work with him since Tom Petty passed and his schedule opened up. But I think the best songs on here are the slower, more cinematic ones like "County Road" and "Hell In The Heartland." 

I absolutely loved some of Supergrass's early stuff, but I hadn't really kept close track of the band's later albums or their frontman's solo work until 2018's World's Strongest Man. But that record was great and so it Turn The Car Around. What's interesting is how often this album reminds me of Radiohead, which is not something I would've expected back in the '90s when Supergrass and Radiohead seemed like sort of at opposite ends of the British rock spectrum -- I suppose they're both pretty heavily indebted to The Beatles after all, though. 

While "Unholy" was a clear gamechanger for Sam Smith as their first #1 and a total musical departure, I have to admit that I preferred Smith's less heralded StarGate collaborations like Gloria's first single, "Love Me More." So I'm happy that the album allows "Unholy" to be a singular outlier that still totally works in the context of Gloria, instead of overhauling Smith's sound around it. This might be Smith's best album to date, despite no less than 3 songs with Jessie Reyez, whose voice has always been nails on a chalkboard to me. The gorgeous Ilya and StarGate tracks that bring out the best in Smith's voice, and Ed Sheeran writes a nice piano ballad in the vein of Smith's early hits.  

New Zealand singer Kimbra has a pretty solid career in NZ and Australia, but everywhere else, her pop profile consists almost purely of her appearance on Gotye's "Somebody That I Used To Know." There's nothing really wrong with being known for singing the second half of one of the most popular and acclaimed songs of the 21st century, but I do wish that it had done a bit more to boost Kimbra's solo work, which is pretty good (especially since Gotye himself pretty much stopped releasing music immediately after "Somebody"). Her fourth album A Reckoning is great, reminds me a bit of Bjork's '90s albums in the way Kimbra uses her voice, and the push and pull of pop hooks and weird leftfield electronics. 

The 2016 XXL Freshmen cypher featuring Lil Uzi Vert, Kodak Black, 21 Savage, and Lil Yachty helped established them as four defining stars of a new generation of hip hop, and almost 7 years later, they're all still here and in one way or another hitting new career highs (Denzel Curry was also in the cypher and released one of my top ten albums of 2022, but he tends to get left out of the conversation, for better or worse, since he was never a mainstream presence in the same way). For a few years, it seemed like Lil Yachty was the one from that quartet most likely to fade from relevance as a relic of the Soundcloud era, the quirked up goofball who got less interesting the more he tried to make a hit, flopping with a single featuring Drake in 2020. But a few months ago, Yachty scored a fluke hit with "Poland" that emphasized his unique sense of whimsy, and then he released Let's Start Here, probably the most discussed and debated album of 2023 so far. I'm a little amused by how the passionate the discourse around this album is -- bigger rappers have more dramatic moves toward rock and guitar-driven music many times before, from Andre 3000's The Love Below to Lil Wayne's Rebirth and Kid Cudi's Speedin' Bullet 2 Heaven. But I will say, I like Let's Start Here more than those albums, or Yachty's previous albums that could feel a little boring and undercooked by mainstream rap standards. He's demonstrated some pretty good taste in how he's curated the sound of this album and his weird nasal voice is more suited to this material than a lot of the beats he was picking before, to his credit the album actually more good than it is 'brave' or 'interesting.'

Esperanza Spalding has probably been one of the most visible jazz musicians of her generation since winning the Grammy for Best New Artist in 2011. But my favorite work by her was when she drifted furthest from jazz -- I would argue that 2016's Emily's D+Evolution is one of the best rock albums of the past decade. She's maintained her footing in jazz all the while, though, and in the past few weeks she won a Grammy for a live album with Wayne Shorter and released another with pianist Fred Hersch. Alive At The Village Vanguard is a rare example of Spalding putting down her bass and working purely as a jazz singer, her and Hersch bouncing from song to song without a setlist, traipsing playfully through standards by Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and others. There's a moment on the opener "But Not For Me" that epitomizes the album, where Spalding sort of breaks the fourth wall to talk about how difficult to sing phrases dated phrases from the Gershwin lyric -- "and then some words I don't really understand, because it's like Old English, heigh-ho, alas, and lack-a-day" -- but it still makes musical sense as part of the vocal. She also manages to monologue at length about Tom Cruise movies and the economic sustainability of reusing fake eyelashes on a 12-minute rendition of "Girl Talk," a song written in 1965, and it's delightfully entertaining.

The primary distinguishing trait of Guided By Voices has always been Robert Pollard's exceptional speed and volume as a songwriter, even if he is a skilled and distinctive writer. GBV were considered one of the most prolific bands of the 1990s, a decade in which they released 9 albums (a number that wouldn't be considered extraordinary in the '70s, but was definitely above average in the '90s, and didn't even include several Pollard solo albums). But GBV started cranking out albums at a faster clip after reuniting the classic lineup in 2012, and slipped into an even higher gear around 2016 with the current lineup. La La Land is already GBV's ninth album of the 2020s, which means they've matched their '90s output in under a third of a decade. I was never a GBV diehard -- literally the only CD I own is the greatest hits album, Human Amusements At Hourly Rates -- so I haven't heard remotely all the albums to put this one in perspective, but it's pretty enjoyable absurdist jangle rock in Pollard's comfort zone, it only really goes off the rails once on one of the longer songs, "Cousin Jackie." 

Pitchfork doesn't do over-the-top takedowns of easy targets as often as they used to, but the Jeremy Larson review they ran a couple days ago was a pretty satisfying pan (my favorite line was "a band that sounds like a parody of an early aughts NME cover and whose whole vibe could best be described as Cirque du Soleil: Buckcherry"). Maneskin's biggest American hit and the main reason I have a negative impression of then, "Beggin'," was a cover, and I had a vaguely positive reaction the first time I heard "Supermodel." So in my eternally optimistic outlook, I thought maybe Maneskin's original material was far better than "Beggin'" and I should give them a chance. But yeah, this album is pretty foul, although I suppose it's interesting to hear a rock album from the kind of coked up Eurotrash (this is not slander -- at least 3 songs on this album mention cocaine) that has been running mainstream dance music for decades.

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