Carly Pearce's 29: Written In Stone is one of my favorite albums of the decade so far, and the first new single from her follow-up is suitably great, I don't mind that she's still getting some divorce songs out of her system if they're this high quality. It's not really a duet, Chris Stapleton mostly harmonizes on the choruses and briefly sings lead on the bridge, but it works well as a counterpoint to Pearce's voice. Here's the 2023 singles Spotify playlist I update every month. 

I'm really looking forward to Guts, and Olivia Rodrigo is already the first artist to with Hot 100 #1s on each of her first two albums since, I think, Camila Cabello (unless Cardi B puts one of her last couple #1s on her next album, I suppose). "Vampire" is interesting in how it starts like a ballad and then winds up in a totally different place. The MTV edit ("bloodsucker, dream crusher, bleedin' me dry like a ___damn vampire") sounds much better than the radio edit ("bloodsucker, fame______, bleedin' me dry like a damn vampire"), but I'm amused that the latter skips a beat to take out the "god" so that there's suddenly a measure in 7/8 in the chorus of this massive pop song.

For a few years it seemed like Gunna was rap's biggest star who had no real solo hit, anytime you heard him on the radio it was a feature or from his duo album with Lil Baby. And even after DS4EVER did big numbers, the only solo single "Banking On Me" wasn't nearly as big as the singles with guests. So I was surprised when Gunna, at a fraught moment in his career when he's been accused of snitching and many artists have distanced themselves from him, released an album with no guests, and wound up with "Fukumean" becoming perhaps the biggest song of his career. I thought maybe "Fukumean" wouldn't do well on radio after it blew up on streaming, but they just call the clean edit "Whatumean" and picked right up on it. 

Every time Paramore releases an album, it seems like there's a song I instantly love and pin all my hopes on them releasing as a radio single and then they eventually do, from "That's What You Get" to "The Only Exception" to "Ain't It Fun" to "Fake Happy" and now "Running Out of Time." The guitar tones Taylor York gets on this song are so cool, so many surprising little details and textures.

Maybe it's partly the name, but Chris Young is one of those country stars who always fades into the background for me, I can never remember which radio hits are by him and which are by some other semi-anonymous bearded guy, it surprised me to realize he has 8 albums, 3 of them platinum. I really like the lead single from is next album, though, great chorus.

I never really liked Tyrese's early hits (that one Da Brat song aside) and felt like it detracted from what little credibility he had as an R&B singer when he became a ubiquitous Fast & Furious/Transformers sidekick and a famously moronic social media presence. But Tyrese gracefully transitioned into becoming a a reliable adult R&B radio hitmaker with good 2010s singles like "Stay" and "Shame." And his latest is his biggest hit in years and one of the best songs e's ever made, a 7-minute psychedelic soul ballad co-written by Davion Farris (brother of SiR and D Smoke) with Lenny Kravitz ripping Ernie Isley-style guitar leads. 

Little Mix never quite caught on in America, although I suppose they did far better here than any other British girl group since the Spice Girls. But now they're on indefinite hiatus and pursuing solo careers, and I really like Leigh-Ann Pinnock's debut single, sounds a bit like a UK garage throwback but has a big Jon Bellion-penned hook and could definitely cross over internationally as well as PinkPantheress has. 

Chase Rice's I Hate Cowboys & All Dogs Go To Hell is one of my favorite albums of 2023, a total revelation from a previously undistinguished C-list mainstream country guy. Unfortunately, radio has been slow to play even one of the album's more accessible drinking songs, but it's a good one. 

Jason Aldean released "Try That In A Small Town" in May, and for two months it was just a largely unnoticed single by a major country star who's past his peak. In fact, it was shaping up to be the first Aldean single to miss the Hot 100 in 15 years. Then, Aldean released the song's video in July, people started to notice the BLM protest footage in the video and the gun-toting conservative rhetoric of the lyrics, and things quickly escalated to the point that the backlash and counter-backlash had pushed the song all the way to #1. And I can't help but wonder if we'd all be better off if people just continued ignoring this lousy song from a mediocre artist and it died a quiet death instead of becoming a culture war talking point enshrined in in Billboard history.