ACTION POTENTIAL'S FAVORITE ALBUMS OF 2023

i did not have a blog in 2023, so im doing this now

Hello! It’s certainly not 2023 anymore and not yet 2024 list season, but I’ve been going back through some of my favorite albums of last year and wanted to share a handful of them here. While this is definitely a ranking of my favorites, I feel the purpose of a list like this isn’t so much to compare albums as it is to help people discover new music—and to try and distill your many, messy thoughts about an album into something concise. Also, I’m not under any illusion that I’m helping anyone discover artists like Chappell Roan.

There are a lot of albums I wish I could have included in this list, but I stuck to 10 albums with 2-3 paragraphs on each because it turns out writing little blurbs like this is quite hard, and I’m only one guy. But these are (at least at this moment) my favorite albums from last year.

If, for some reason, you want a playlist that has all of these albums in order, I’ve made that for you. It is more than 6 hours long. Embrace chaos.

10) High Loon! — Woody Goss

They don’t make dudes like Woody Goss anymore. A “mystical, whirlitzer-playing ancient man” (quoting Patrick LaBelle here), Woody Goss is the pianist of Vulfpeck and easily the member with the most interesting solo work. In a band full of loud personalities, Goss is a professorial, quiet figure whose most-telegraphed hobby is the meditative act of birdwatching.

That’s the inspiration behind High Loon! which Goss largely wrote while observing the yearly loon migration from Lake Superior to the Atlantic Ocean. Goss calls it a “music and visual guide to loon migration,” but that’s a bit facetious. High Loon! is certainly inspired by the birds—a fully instrumental album, its melodies are mostly played by keyboards that sound like mournful quacks—but it’s also a soundtrack to everyday life. Those quacky melodies sound almost like animalese, the fictional language that villagers speak in Animal Crossing, which also romanticizes life’s mundanities. Goss’ last instrumental album Rainbow Beach is also wonderful, but High Loon!’s combination of quiet funk and cutesy melodies give it a stronger identity. Both albums reveal how crucial Goss is to Vulfpeck’s cheery heart, but there’s nothing quite like either of them. It makes me want to buy a pair of binoculars and take up birdwatching myself.

Favorite tracks: threety three, keeper, can you please take tim out?

9) Ways of Knowing — Navy Blue

Somewhere in your 20s, a sense of mortality kicks in. Whether it’s the first twinge of knee pain or a relationship ending a year out from 30, the knowledge that there will one day be an end to all this begins to creep its way into every aspect of life. Time lost is easy to conceptualize; time to come is not.

Navy Blue spends Ways of Knowing trying to imagine and digest the runway ahead. From a sunken place cushioned with soft, enveloping bass, Ways of Knowing muses on generational pain, self harm, and failed relationships before flourishing into self-love. It’s a meditative, second coming-of-age that wrestles with where control over your future begins and ends while wondering if loved ones left behind would be proud of the person you’re becoming.

Favorite tracks: Kill Switch, Chosen, Window to the Soul

8) Intercepted Message — Thee Oh Sees

I can’t reasonably sit here and pretend to tell you what Intercepted Message is “about.” This album has clear anti-war statements, endorses anarchy, and dreams about tearing down “the system.” But those political notions are also mixed in with a fish that needs a bike, doing hard drugs, going goblin mode, and, and, and and and. Like its namesake, Intercepted Message is a chaotic and sometimes incoherent mix of half-heard messages that people who liked English class (guilty) can sit around and pretend to opine about all day as though they didn’t have to look up what the hell frontman John Dwyer is singing half the time.

What’s more important is what it makes you feel. I mean that physically—Intercepted Message is a frantic, feverish garage rock album that digs under your skin with itchy guitar riffs and panicky drums while computer bloops and electric keyboard give the album a colorful higher register.

Intercepted Message hits its stride with an incredible mid-album run from “The Fish Needs A Bike” to “Submerged Buildings” that houses some of its most ridiculous and earwormy vocal hooks. Now that I’ve caught Thee Oh Sees bug, I will never not be sick again. Someone get that fish a bike!

Favorite tracks: Blank Chems, The Fish Needs A Bike, Goon, Chaos Heart, Submerged Building

7) That! Feels Good! — Jessie Ware

There’s a repressed sexual energy underpinning crooners that has always made me a bit uncomfortable. Crooning feels trapped in the same absurd cage as the 1950s-60s nuclear family, where overt expressions of sexuality and desire were considered crass and the height of lust was brushing against a begloved hand at the gala. It’s been satisfying to see Jessie Ware move away from those cliche roots and embrace a more sexual, outward persona on each project. If 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure was a first pass at giving air to those carnal desires, That! Feels Good! lays them completely bare on a glorious disco dance floor.

That! Feels Good! even gives new life to the crooner-esque stylings that started Ware’s career on “Hello Love.” It’s a liberating, dancey album with infectious disco grooves and grand piano, but Ware’s vocals do anything but play second fiddle. The refrain of “Let it go, let me dance/In romance, let’s just dance” on “Pearls” is just one moment that makes this album achieve liftoff. That! Feels Good! is an invitation to let go, be free, and satisfy your innermost desires. And it demands that you get up and god-damn dance.

Favorite tracks: That! Feels Good!, Pearls, Freak Me Now, Shake The Bottle

6) I’ve Got Me — Joanna Sternberg

I’ve Got Me feels like an album that’s been with us for decades. Based in Manhattan themselves, Joanna Sternberg draws inspiration from New York City folk revival legends but lands on a totally unique blend of childlike simplicity and folksy reminiscence. I’ve Got Me has a simple color scheme of strumming guitar, jangly piano, and Sternberg’s scratchy singing, with the occasional string section mixed in. Their shaking vocals don’t always land on the right note on the first shot, but that scrappiness adds to the album’s genuine energy and charm.

Simple melodies and lyrics make I’ve Got Me feel a bit like a children’s album, though it’s anything but immature. Sternberg spends the album processing a damaging relationship and wistfully longing for far away loved ones, giving an adult heft to its playroom soundscape. It’s an album for the inner child that none of us will be able to shake. Getting older doesn’t mean you shed the desire to be loved, to be comforted, and to love in turn. I’ve Got Me will be with us forevermore. Let yourself be sung to bed by the bricks of an old Manhattan brownstone.

Favorite tracks: Drifting on a Cloud, I’ll Make You Mine, Right Here, The Human Magnet Song

5) Desire, I Want To Turn Into You — Caroline Polachek

Caroline Polachek is a visionary. She’s a singular vocalist and producer who puts a totally inimitable fingerprint on everything she touches, and Desire, I Want To Turn Into You is her best album yet. Dense with otherwordly melodies and lyrics, Desire practices yearning as a full-body experience, twisting and writhing with a fiery compulsion to want, to need, to pine. But the yearner lives to romanticize their yearning. Desire that intense can ironically pull you inward, further and further away from its object and deeper into your own delusions. Polachek celebrates longing as much as she decries its violence—the way we crawl back to a hateful lover, the way we forget who we were before we warped ourselves for someone else.

Desire takes cues from world music, dancing from Spanish guitars to gamelans on its winding journey deeper into itself. Longing burns hot in us all regardless of geography, gender, or culture. But despite those clear influences, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything quite like this album. Polachek’s singing feels alien yet right in its place, and Desire leaves a gaping space between its lower and higher registers for you to sink into. Like trying to catch light with a butterfly net, It’s an album that feels impossible to boil down to a single takeaway. So I’ll stop trying.

Favorite tracks: Sunset, Fly To You, Blood And Butter, Billions

4) The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess — Chappell Roan

I’m not embarrassed to admit that I’m one of the people who caught on late to Chappell Roan. But now, the idea of a “best of 2023” list without The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess is like a solar system with no sun at the center. This album may have had a slow crawl into the popular consciousness, but it still hit like a meteor, leaving an imprint on pop music that will be felt for the next decade, if not longer. Roan is an emotive vocalist and near-peerless performer who delivers an infectious, barely contained desperation with every breath. The next half-decade of rising pop starlets will all take their shot at the vocal flips that define The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, punctuating the end of almost every phrase. Years and years from now, hints of Chappell will be heard across every genre.

And this is just her first studio album. That might be the most exciting thing about The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess: It’s only the beginning. Long may she reign.

Favorite Tracks: Red Wine Supernova, After Midnight, Coffee, Casual, HOT TO GO!, Pink Pony Club. Honestly the whole album.

3) The Window — Ratboys

It’s an entry point and an exit. A glimpse into another world. A two-way painting of our lives. The window is an obvious symbol, but the perfect one for an album as earnest as this. Ratboys looks back with sunny melancholy at the end of a long relationship and sorts through the uncomfortable changes that follow. It’s a tour through the stages of post-breakup grief: The Window opens with rumination on “Morning Zoo” and awakens on “Crossed that Line” and “It’s Alive!” before slipping into resentment on “No Way.” But like that track’s fade-out refrain, that angry reminiscence eventually gives way to something more honest on The Window’s title track. Planted right in the middle of the album, “The Window” is the pivot point where the (maybe inevitable) resentment of being newly single is tossed out in favor of a more honest remembrance of what the relationship meant.

This is a breakup album that is able to look back fondly enough to write a dreamy pop song about when the relationship started in 2010. And isn’t that a healthier, more mature way to process pain than a grand “fuck you?” We spend so much time thinking that we want high drama, that life is defined by our epic peaks and valleys. But as I get just that little bit older, I’m learning that what I really want is contentment. To find family along my way and walk down that sunny road together. The Window will be with me forever on that path.

Favorite tracks: Crossed that Line, It’s Alive!, The Window, Black Earth, WI, I Want You (Fall 2010)

2) The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We — Mitski

I first listened to The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We on a late autumn train ride into the Hudson Valley at the recommendation of a friend. The train was noisy, crowded, and a little too warm, but The Land Is Inhospitable swept over me like a gust of wind, transporting me into its desolate, frost-covered world. By the time the ride was over, a bursting contentment and love had welled up within me. Love for nature, love to be surrounded by friends, love to be able to love at all.

Mitski is one of the defining lyricists and artists of our time. The Land Is Inhospitable is a stunning, swallowing album that uses a powerful Americana soundscape to evoke images of a greyscale valley surrounded by mountains at the end of the world. And standing in that field is Mitski, whose lyrics play with masculine verbs to create a throbbing, muscular reckoning with loneliness and self-hatred. On songs like “I Don’t Like My Mind,” mundane moments of sadness like gorging on a whole cake are sung as tragic low points and motivation to divest from oneself. The Land Is Inhospitable is concerned with what we leave behind when we die and the chasm between our terrestrial lives and the great beyond. Mitski spends as much time clawing at the dirt like a dog as she does wondering about heaven and the existence of God.

But in the end, Mitski shines a moonbeam of love down on that lonely landscape. We will all die one day, and no one knows what comes after. The closest we can get to leaving a piece of ourselves behind is to pass on the love we’ve given and felt in our lives. The Land Is Inhospitable is Mitski’s attempt to do just that and light a hearth that chips away at that layer of frost that keeps us from connecting with the things that make us most human.

Favorite tracks: Bug Like an Angel, I Don’t Like My Mind, The Deal, My Love Mine All Mine, The Frost

1) Rat Saw God — Wednesday

In a 2023 interview, writer Tressie McMillan Cottom said “The ‘country’ conservatives sing about in country music hasn’t existed since the 1980s. You know what is ‘the country’ now? Dollar stores. Nobody’s got pride in that. It’s drug use and abuse and deaths of despair. And nobody’s writing that country music.”

Wednesday is writing that country music. Rat Saw God is a shockingly honest ode to the dying dream of Americana, where nail salon lights flicker, furniture is discarded along the highway, and people wretch in line at fast food chains. Its disconnected lyrics and Karly Hartzman’s weary vocals cast shadowy, southern gothic vignettes over a lifestyle in decay. Songs like “Chosen To Deserve” use catchy country rock riffs to disguise lyrics about overdosing on Benadryl and drinking on weeknights until you vomit. It is a fucking bummer. But that doesn’t mean it’s awful to listen to. Underneath all the grime, Wednesday has a pulsating sympathy for the people trapped in that state of decay, never casting judgement over the ugly reality inflicted upon them. Energetic guitars overwhelm its soundscape, and a layer of feedback adds an uncanny shimmer to its darkest moments.

Rat Saw God is the great American album. As Wednesday drives away from that life of decay on “TV in the Gas Pump,” images of the country haunt them along the road. A hopeful guitar part plays over the repeated lines “TV in the gas pump/Blares into the dark” before giving way to mournful guitar screeching, a reminder that there’s still life somewhere out there in the desolation.

Favorite tracks: Bull Believer, Chosen to Deserve, Turkey Vultures, TV in the Gas Pump

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Thanks for reading, pals. See you next week.