Craig Manning’s Top Albums of 2023

Sometimes, the things you love leave you. Sometimes, those things come back.

Musically, 2023 for me was a year defined by the things I got back. Six of the 30 albums listed below were made by artists or bands I thought would never release music again. All six were artists who played key roles in extremely formative moments of my life; then they all went dormant for extended periods of time. Three of the six had been out of action for a decade or longer; one’s been gone for 23 years. Getting all six back – plus a few other long-awaited returns not represented on this list – felt like a little gift from the music gods, and made 2023 feel so special. There’s a Dawes song I love that goes, “May all your favorite bands stay together.” 2023’s blessing, for me, was more like “May all your favorite bands get back together.”

2023 was also the year that I wandered back out into the live music world, after being extremely hesitant about doing so in 2021 and 2022. While that post-pandemic return to normal didn’t come without its costs – I definitely contracted COVID-19 at a Taylor Swift concert – it felt so wonderful and so life affirming to be a part of a deafeningly-loud audience again. Getting that sensation back in 2023 – and having a couple of my very favorite concert experiences ever along the way – was a gift of its own.

So, here’s to getting things back, whether that’s the bands you love or the kinds of communal live music experiences you weren’t sure you’d ever have again. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the past five years, it’s to never, ever take anything for granted, and I tried to instill that spirit into the making of this list. To quote yet another Dawes lyric, “Most people don’t talk enough about how lucky they are.” Most people also don’t talk enough about why they love the music they love, so here’s 30 albums from 2023 that I love – and more importantly, the “why.”

1. Kelsea Ballerini – Rolling up the Welcome Mat

16 minutes: That’s all it takes for Kelsea Ballerini to lay her marriage to rest, and to absolutely level you in the process. If you tack on a bonus track from a later re-release, Rolling up the Welcome Mat still only clocks in at just under 19 minutes. But despite the fact that Welcome Mat is brief, and despite the fact that I’ve always been hesitant about putting EPs on my end-of-the-year lists, there’s something to be said for an artist who somehow manages to say everything there is to say in such a remarkably compressed space. And, for my money, it’s hard to imagine needing more from Rolling up the Welcome Mat than what’s here. Over six tracks (again, seven if you’re counting the bonus song), Ballerini takes a broken marriage and puts it six feet under. I’ve always thought Kelsea was a bright, bright talent – ever since the first time I discovered “Dibs” back in 2015 and decided it was one of the most infectiously catchy songs I’d ever heard. But for all that I’ve followed and supported her career – up to ranking last year’s Subject to Change as my seventh favorite album of 2022 – I never thought Ballerini had something like this in her.

Throughout her career, Kelsea has often been considered as a singer or performer first and a songwriter second. But on Rolling up the Welcome Mat, Ballerini so thoroughly laps every other songwriter that got in the game this year – including all-time greats like Jason Isbell and Lori McKenna – that it left me having to reconsider her entire career. Half solo writes and half co-writes with a single other collaborator (a songwriter named Alysa Vanderheym), Rolling up the Welcome Mat is a potent and poignant examination of what happens when you get married at 24 and then watch as the entire thing crashes into the rocks before you even get to 30. No one ever plans to be at that point; marriage, after all, is supposed to last forever – as Ballerini’s own lovestruck 2017 album Unapologetically will attest. But sometimes, the fates just aren’t aligned, and the ties that bind just come loose. And so, on these seven songs, we get to hear a generation’s most underrated songwriter untangle herself from the mess, reckoning with the moment she realized it was all over (“Mountain with a View”), the trivial meaningless of the word “marriage” once it becomes nothing more than a legal contract (“Just Married”), the exquisite pain of calling it all off (“Penthouse” and “Blindsided”), and the soul-deep ache of wishing your ex well, even as you move on to a life without them (“Leave Me Again”).

I loved my favorite album of last year, Gang of Youths’ angel in realtime., in part because it sprawled out this whole canvas of grief and gratitude and joy and pain over the course of 68 grandiose minutes. Rolling up the Welcome Mat is the opposite of that album in a lot of ways – quiet, compact, restrained, spartan, and simple – but its ability to offer a full experience that is roughly as emotionally fulfilling is a massive accomplishment. It’s a reminder that great albums can still come in a lot of different shapes and sizes, and there is no doubt in my mind that Rolling up the Welcome Mat is a great album, even if it lasts for less time than some Pink Floyd songs.

2. Patrick Droney – Subtitles for Feelings

Not many songs have stopped me in my tracks this decade like Patrick Droney’s “State of the Heart” did the first time I heard it. That song, the opening salvo and title track from Droney’s 2021 debut, is all high-octane, blood-pumping adrenaline and bold, technicolor emotion, like an action blockbuster and an ‘80s teen movie had their DNAs grafted onto one another. How fitting, then, that Droney introduced his masterful sophomore LP with an album trailer that paired each of its songs with snippets from movies full of feelings. And really, those pairings do as good a job as I can here in explaining what makes Subtitles for Feelings so special. Back to the Future is a brilliant match for the ‘80s throwback “Shotgun Rider,” which bursts with all the possibility of a fast car that can do anything – maybe even travel through time. Elizabethtown and Cameron Crowe’s sappy, romantic earnestness are a dead ringer for “Caroline,” a steady crescendo of a song about a boy and a girl who meet “at the intersection of blind youth and a missed connection.” The scene in Gone in 60 Seconds where Nicolas Cage somehow leaps a Shelby Mustang GT500 over an entire construction site feels like the only right analog for “Go Getter,” a song that sparks with electricity and exhilaration. The other pairings prove that Droney not only has impeccable movie taste – selections include About Time, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 13 Going on 30, E.T., and Good Will Hunting – but also the thing I’ve always loved most about his music: The emotions explode from the songs in sharp relief, so vividly that you can almost see the stories he’s singing about in your mind’s eye, even when the songs themselves aren’t literal story songs. Droney billed Subtitles for Feelings as “an emotion picture,” and that’s a perfect description for this album, which feels like it charts a loose journey through a long night – one packed with adventure, possibility, passion, love, introspection, tragedy, and gratitude. Along the way, there are dizzying highs (big anthems like “Memories” and “Runaway” feel downright Springsteenian in scope) and poignant lows (it’s been a minute since I heard a song about lost youth that punched me in the gut as sneakily and savvily as “We Got Old This Year” does). No album from this year was as nuanced, as emotionally topographical, or as much of a complete, top-to-bottom work of art.

3. Matchbox Twenty – Where the Light Goes

What songs bring you the most joy? Some variation of that question became a viral Twitter prompt this past summer, and one of the very first songs that came to mind for me was “Friends,” the opening track from Matchbox Twenty’s first album in 11 years. Call it recency bias if you want, but from the very first time I heard “Friends,” it sounded to me like the sonic encapsulation of euphoria. The loud, youthful gang vocals that break the silence at the start of the track; the horn-led instrumental intro; the big-as-hell pre-chorus; and then, the affirmation of the chorus: “All my friends, all my friends are here.” What could be a more joyful sentiment than that? Where the Light Goes popped into the world on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend, the day before I ran my second marathon. When I lined up at the start line and the clock started, “Friends” was the first song on my playlist. The dopamine rush of that song set the mood for the best race I’ve ever run, and when I crossed the finish line at 2:34:16, all my friends were there to celebrate my achievement with me. This album became a snapshot of that perfect day, the kickoff to a brand-new summer, and the thing I came back to throughout the year any time I needed a little bit of extra elation in my life. Half a year later, Where the Light Goes still sings for me – this collection of rich, melodious, energetic songs from a band of old friends who sound so absolutely invigorated to be making music together again. Somehow, it both recaptures the essence of what I loved about Matchbox Twenty when I was a kid and brings something new and vital out of them for a brand-new decade. Here’s hoping the next album won’t take so damn long!

4. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit – Weathervanes

Even coming from a guy who has joked about writing the saddest song ever, Weathervanes is as heavy as an anvil. In the decade since his 2013 breakthrough Southeastern, Jason Isbell has written about his struggles with alcoholism, gotten extremely candid about some rocky patches in his marriage, contended with ghosts from his past, and sang about the political strife of the Donald Trump era. Somehow, though, even in the darkest moments of his catalog, Isbell has always seemed to find that little flicker of hope. That’s rarely the case on Weathervanes, Isbell’s eighth album and the first one where it sounds like our most insightful musical poet thinks the world might well and truly be doomed. These songs are dark, troubled, upsetting tales, fraught with addiction, poverty, violence, hate, family betrayal, and impossible choices. After adoring everything Isbell touched for a decade, I confess that Weathervanes was the most I ever struggled to connect with an album of his. Where I’ve typically felt either comfort or deep catharsis in Isbell’s songs, this album made me feel uneasy, on edge. But perhaps that uneasiness I’ve felt while listening to Weathervanes is a sign of its brilliance. There’s a reason “King of Oklahoma,” a piercing Nebraska-esque epic about addiction, desperation, crime, and heartbreak, doesn’t resolve with a happy ending, or even an ending at all. There’s a reason “Save the World,” a track where Isbell frets about sending his daughter out into a world fraught with gun violence, doesn’t offer up any sort of grand solution worthy of its title. And there’s a reason “White Beretta,” about a flame from Jason’s past who chose not to keep the baby they might have had together, hurts like hell even if Isbell is framing it from a perspective of empathy and gratitude. These subjects aren’t easy things to write songs about. They aren’t easy, period. They’re big, divisive issues that have confounded communities and stymied politicians, let alone songwriters. Isbell hasn’t ever been one to shy away from the hard conversations, but on Weathervanes, he’s playing the game on a higher difficulty level than he ever has before, and he’s still nailing it – even if the songs themselves get a little thornier as a result.

5. The Gaslight Anthem – History Books

Resurrection. If there was one theme to the music that dominated my world in 2023, that might have been it. A year or two ago, I made a playlist called “Famous Last Words,” cataloging 30 or so of my favorite “last songs on last albums.” I’m constantly fascinated by the way that bands or artists say goodbye, whether that farewell is intentional and planned (a breakup or retirement) or decidedly not planned (death, basically). The “Famous Last Words” playlist was predicated on the idea that there is special significance to the final song that bands put on their swansong albums. But this year, it seemed like the music gods were flipping through that playlist and saying, “Hold my beer.” Bands I never, ever thought I’d hear new music from again in my life came roaring back into the picture, often with vital work, and none of those comebacks was more satisfying to me than the return of The Gaslight Anthem. That resurrection, at least, wasn’t a 2023 surprise: The band announced last year that they’d be coming back together, and I even caught them on tour last fall. But the fact that History Books is as good as it is did surprise me. For me, part of the pain of losing this band was knowing that they’d gone out with an album that didn’t do justice to their gifts – though, that album, 2014’s Get Hurt, did feature an amazing parting shot in the form of “Dark Places.” History Books brings back the band I fell in love with on the remarkable 2008-2012 trilogy of The ’59 Sound, American Slang, and Handwritten, but not in a way that pretends time hasn’t passed. I was still in college the last time The Gaslight Album released an album I really loved. Now, I’m 33 and starting to feel that “time speeds up” sensation that everyone always warned me would set in as I got older.

History Books contends with all of that – with time and battle scars and mortality. “We circle ‘round the sun until someday we won’t”; “I was invincible many years ago when I was so much stronger”; “I wish I could do my life over, I’d be young better now.” Again and again on this album, frontman Brian Fallon sings about the burden of age and how it humbles you. Fallon writing about faded youth isn’t necessarily new, but it hits different when you’re pushing mid-30s than it did when you were 21, and it hits different when his voice sounds older, wiser, more weathered. There’s vulnerability here that wasn’t present on those earlier Gaslight albums – admissions of regret or pain or weakness that probably would have been anathema to the punk listeners who served as this band’s first fans. But The Gaslight Anthem don’t care about being “punk” anymore, nor do they care about running away from comparisons to Bruce Springsteen (who shows up as a duet partner on the title track) or about making sure every song works in the context of a rock ‘n’ roll concert (there are a lot of ballads here, and some of them – particularly “Michigan 1975” – steal the show). Brian once told me that he didn’t want to make another Gaslight album unless he could write songs that could stand up alongside the stuff on The ’59 Sound. On History Books, he somehow does just that…and makes it look easy.

6. Holly Humberstone – Paint My Bedroom Black

I can’t remember the last time I discovered an artist on the radio, but that’s how I first heard Holly Humberstone. Riding in my brother-in-law’s car early this past spring, her song “Scarlett” came on and forced me to pay attention. “I cried all the summer away/You left me waiting on a heartbreak,” Humberstone sings on that track. This was in March, but I was already earmarking tracks for my annual 40-song summertime mixtape, and “Scarlett” immediately made the cut. What I didn’t know then was how thoroughly Paint My Bedroom Black, Humberstone’s proper full-length debut (her previous album, last year’s Can You Afford to Lose Me, is a compilation of two EPs) would come to dominate my fall. While Bedroom wasn’t my favorite album of the year, it was maybe the most compulsively relistenable. It was catchy and vibey, approachable enough to put on for guests, elastic enough to play well for runs or work time or chill hangs at home, and built around this chilly electro-pop production that felt so fitting for crisp, cold autumn days and nights. Perhaps not so surprisingly, Paint My Bedroom Black quickly became my go-to album for the fall. Most times I listened, I listened to it twice in a row. It was, in a lot of ways, the album I had hoped Taylor Swift would make with Midnights – a true late-as-hell nighttime album that slots immediately into the late-night albums hall of fame, right alongside personal classics like Coldplay’s Ghost Stories, Carly Rae Jepsen’s EMOTION, Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, John Mayer’s Battle Studies, and The Horrible Crowes’ Elsie. Those albums don’t all sound alike, but they all share a similar kind of desperate, desolate, lawless loneliness that only really sets in when the clock doesn’t work anymore and you’re the only person awake for miles. “Am I the antichrist?” Humberstone asks at one point, before adding, “How do I sleep at night?” Paint My Bedroom Black sounds like an album written in the throes of many sleepless nights, and it’s all the better for it.

7. Jason Hawk Harris – Thin Places

Thin Places is the most heartbreaking album I heard this year, and in many ways, the most life-affirming. Jason Hawk Harris, an underrated, under-the-radar country singer-songwriter from Houston, composed the album in the wake of his mother’s death from complications caused by alcoholism. I use the word “composed” because Thin Places really does feel more like an opera or a song cycle than it does a traditional country record. There are still plenty of the trappings that you typically hear on a country LP – including a crackling band of musicians who give many of the songs such a lively atmosphere that you could almost overlook the heartbreaking lyrics. But there are also a bunch of classical flourishes: recurring lyrics and musical leitmotifs, hymnlike song structures, some of the most gorgeous string arrangements I’ve heard on a modern release. The album constantly seems to be doubling back on itself, circling around again and again to familiar images – flowing rivers, cavernous abysses, lights shining (or not shining) way off in the darkness – or little melodic reference points that stick in your head like glue. Those repetitions and reprises are extremely effective in simulating the patterns and cycles your brain goes through when you’re in the middle of crushing grief. You make it through one day only to wake in the dead of night hoping it was a bad dream. Then you realize it wasn’t, and you crash back to zero. You cry and you rage, you deny and you bargain, and every time you think you’re getting close to acceptance – to being okay – you’ll see a photo, or hear a song, or stumble into a memory that breaks your heart all over again. Countless albums have been written about losing loved ones. Some of those albums are on this list. One of those albums topped my list last year. But I can’t think of many records that capture every stage of grief quite like Thin Places does. Only once does Harris break from his own perspective, and fittingly, ingeniously, it’s on a cover of a Warren Zevon song – the last song Zevon ever wrote, in fact – that seems to serve instead as a surrogate for his mother’s spirit: “Shadows are falling and I’m running out of breath/Keep me in your heart for awhile/If I leave you, it doesn’t mean I love you any less/Keep me in your heart for awhile.” Harris has said he worked on this album “for almost five years, re-writing and re-arranging dozens of times.” When you get to that Zevon song and realize that even the cover is this deliberate little gut punch, you understand what all that time and effort bought. Thin Places is the kind of record where not a single note or word is out of place, and it’s a reminder of the blood, sweat, and tears that artists are pouring into the albums they give us. We owe them more than a shitty streaming music economy.

8. Trousdale – Out of My Mind

My favorite interview I did this year was with John Ondrasik of the piano-rock band Five for Fighting, who closed out his summer tour at Interlochen Center for the Arts, a prestigious fine arts boarding school and arts camp not far from my home in northern Michigan. At his show, Ondrasik invited three songwriting majors from Interlochen to open for him, and seeing that trio of young artists perform in front of a big crowd for a major touring act was a genuinely joyful experience. In our interview, Ondrasik spoke thoughtfully and openly about the trials and tribulations of being a young artist trying to “make it” in the industry, and about how the people who gave him a leg up early in his career genuinely changed his life. As a way of paying it forward, Ondrasik likes to extend the offer for young up-and-coming artists to open his shows. Such was the case at this concert at Interlochen, and such had been the case before, back in 2014, when he played the same venue.

I bring all of this up here because one of the songwriters who opened for Ondrasik back in 2014 was Lauren Jones – an Interlochen alumnus and now one-third of Trousdale, a dynamite all-girl trio formed in Los Angeles. Hearing about this band’s ties to northern Michigan made me curious enough to check them out, but it was their songs and their sound that got me to come back after the initial listen. With lush three-part harmonies and catchy, melodic songs full of personality and feeling, Trousdale spend Out of My Mind (their proper full-length debut) making a case for themselves as one of the most exciting new bands on the scene right now. And while gorgeous ballads like “If You’re Hurting” might make it seem like Trousdale belong in the folk-pop space, alongside bands like The Staves or The Wild Reeds, it’s their surprisingly huge-sounding pop songs – propulsive jams like “Bad Blood,” “Sometimes,” and “Go There” – that make me think they might be superstars in the making. Oh, and it’s also this NPR session from a couple years ago, which features (no hyperbole) some of the best harmonies and vocal blend I have ever heard. Bottom line, I have a feeling it’s not going to be very long before Trousdale is a household name.

9. Zach Bryan – Zach Bryan

Last year, Zach Bryan felt like a scrappy underdog. An underdog that released a 34-song, 122-minute triple album and notched a billion plays on Spotify, sure, but an underdog nonetheless. This year, he felt like a superstar. His album moved 200,000 units in the first week, he had a mugshot go viral after getting arrested over a petty disagreement with a police officer, and one of this record’s key tracks – a gorgeous duet between him and Kacey Musgraves called “I Remember Everything” – shot to the top of the Billboard Hot 100. It was a show of success I never expected until it was happening. I followed country music closer than any other genre between 2015 and 2020, keeping extremely close tabs on artists who Bryan counts as his top influences, like Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson, Tyler Childers, Chris Stapleton, and Turnpike Troubadours. The prospect of any of those artists topping the pop charts seems outlandish, even now. But then again, maybe other country and Americana artists are the wrong comparison for Zach Bryan. At his core, Bryan is an everyman. Where there’s a bit of a mysterious aura around all the artists I mentioned above, Zach has always scanned as down-to-earth, plainspoken, and impossibly humble. Pair that homegrown, salt-of-the-earth relatability with Bryan’s ability to whip a crowd into a frenzy at a live show – his concerts inspire the type of sing-alongs typically unheard of outside of a Dashboard Confessional gig – and it seems clear: Bryan isn’t an Isbell or a Childers; he’s a Springsteen. Over and over again, whether on big, heartfelt anthems like “Overtime,” “East Side of Sorrow,” and “Fear and Fridays,” or on stark, bare-bones ballads like “Smaller Acts” and “Oklahoman Son,” Zach Bryan has the songs to justify that lofty comparison.

10. Gracie Abrams – Good Riddance

At this point, we’ve probably had as many “next Taylor Swifts” as there were “new Dylans” back in the 1960s and ‘70s. Kacey Musgraves, Kelsea Ballerini, Maren Morris, Phoebe Bridgers, Olivia Rodrigo. Every year, the list grows a little longer, and now that folklore and evermore have been out for long enough, Taylor can claim a new heir apparent in the form of Gracie Abrams. Teaming up with Aaron Dessner of The National, a key collaborator on those 2020 Taylor albums, Abrams cooks up a similarly stripped-down, vibey set of folk-pop songs that sound absolutely stellar when set against the backdrop of cold winter days. Good Riddance has drawn some criticism for being a tad samey, or even for stealing Taylor’s cottage-core playbook and passing it off as Gracie’s own invention. While the loop-heavy arrangements on this album might be familiar from past Dessner productions, though, Abrams’ unique songwriting style adds a different dimension to the proceedings than what we heard on folklore and evermore. Where Taylor used those albums to flex her narrative writing style, Good Riddance is more internal and more stream-of-consciousness. “I’m a forest fire/You’re the kerosene/I had a life here before you/But now it’s burning,” she sings on “Full Machine,” one of the many lyrics on this album I just could not stop thinking about, all year long. On “Amelie,” the devastating line is “Why’d it feel louder/When everything went unspoken?” These are beautifully vague bits of poetry, specific enough to be chillingly relatable but open-ended enough for anyone to fill them with their own experiences. That’s Good Riddance in a nutshell: A deeply personal coming-of-age album that somehow transcends the personal to seem like it could have been written just for you. Taylor has always been a whiz at that kind of writing, and in Gracie Abrams, she has an exciting new protégé; no wonder Gracie landed an opening slot on the Eras Tour. And while Good Riddance is quiet and mellow on record, it was a pleasant surprise to hear just how well songs like “Difficult” translated to the stadium environment this summer. It bodes well for what the next chapter might hold for Abrams.

11. Boys Like Girls – Sunday at Foxwoods

In 2009, I saw Boys Like Girls live on three separate occasions, still the most times I’ve ever seen a band in a single year. That’s an interesting distinction for a band I’ve never counted among my all-time favorites to hold, but it also kind of makes sense: In a lot of ways, Boys Like Girls and their sugary, ultra-catchy brand of pop-punk were the soundtrack to the key coming-of-age moment in my life. The first of those three concerts fell during the summer between my high school graduation and my first year of college. The second happened on my college campus just a few weeks after I arrived there. The third was night two of a double-header weekend of shows that also included my first Bruce Springsteen concert. Perhaps most importantly, the band’s second album – 2009’s Bon Jovi-aping, Taylor Swift-featuring Love Drunk – leaked on the internet the day I left for college and was the thing I listened to over and over on the drive. Boys Like Girls made one album after that – 2012’s just-okay Crazy World – and then vanished off the face of the earth. It felt odd to lose them like that, because they’d been a formative band for me (they were also the opening act at my first concert ever, a 2006 Butch Walker tour stop) and I’d assumed they were going to be a part of my life for a long time.

Needless to say, I was elated to hear that Boys Like Girls were making a comeback in 2023, and even more elated to discover that Sunday at Foxwoods is far from just an empty nostalgia play to cash in on the recent When We Were Young festival and the appetite for early 2000s emo it’s helped to reignite. Since the last time we heard from Boys Like Girls, Martin Johnson has been working with pop stars and amassing one of the finest collections of songwriting credits this side of Max Martin. The songs that bear his name – Avril Lavigne’s “17,” Betty Who’s “Glory Days,” Elle King’s “America’s Sweetheart,” Dan + Shay’s “Road Trippin’” – are some of the most joyful, propulsive bits of pop music I’ve heard in the past decade; let’s just say all of those songs are on my marathon playlist. Johnson also spent those years honing his skills as a producer and album maker by way of a side project, the ‘80s lovefest that is The Night Game. All those elements seep into Foxwoods, which probably boasts five of the 10 best hooks I heard all year. Never mind that Boys Like Girls don’t actually sound much like they did back in the day: Johnson sings differently now, for one thing, and the band has let most of the trappings of their Myspace emo roots fall away. Still, there’s something there in the spirit of songs like “Blood & Sugar,” “The Outside,” and “Brooklyn State of Mind” that isn’t so far from what these guys were cooking up on classic singles like “The Great Escape” or “Thunder” or “Love Drunk.” Those songs were great because they seemed to capture the unbridled optimism of youth and put it through a speaker; On Sunday at Foxwoods, Boys Like Girls are still making music that sounds impossibly full of life and possibility – they’re just doing it for an audience of wistful 30-somethings rather than a pit full of rambunctious teens. It’s a reminder that there’s a lot of good life left to live after your youth is gone.

12. Foo Fighters – But Here We Are

“You showed me how to breathe, never showed me how to say goodbye/You showed me how to be, never showed me how to say goodbye.” Dave Grohl sings those words on “The Teacher,” a sprawling 10-minute prog-rock epic that serves as the penultimate track on But Here We Are, the 11th Foo Fighters album and a record unlike any other they’ve ever made. Written in the wake of two incalculable losses – both the band’s drummer, Taylor Hawkins, and Grohl’s mother, Virginia, died in 2022 – But Here We Are is an open wound of an album that wears its grief proudly on its sleeve. It’s the greatest Foo Fighters album since the ‘90s, and there’s a fair argument to be made that it’s their best, ever. The songs themselves are instant Foos classics: the sunshiny “Under You,” which bathes its heartbreak in a power-pop chorus so good it could have been on 1999’s wonderful There Is Nothing Left to Lose; “Hearing Voices,” whose creeping, foreboding darkness recalls The Cure; the dreamy “Show Me How,” a gorgeous duet between Grohl and his daughter that sounds almost dizzy with sadness. Even as standalones or received in a vacuum, these songs would be excellent. The magic of But Here We Are, though, comes ultimately from the sheer force of the catharsis, which hits like bag of bricks when you listen to the album all the way through. One of my favorite music moments of 2022 was watching the Taylor Hawkins tribute shows and seeing Hawkins’ son Shane perform “My Hero” with the band. Witnessing Shane hammer away on his dad’s drums was raw and beautiful – a profound expression of rage and joy and love and utter heartbreak. But Here We Are is the same, an album that searches for answers and healing amidst the clash and chaos of rock ‘n’ roll, and finds them. By the end of the record, Grohl is promising to “Try and make good with the air that’s left,” knowing all too well how quickly the screen can cut to black.

13. Andrew McMahon In The Wilderness – Tilt at the Wind No More

Something Corporate re-pressed their albums on vinyl this year, and getting to listen to Leaving Through the Window on a fresh format with fresh ears crystallized something for me: Over the past two decades, no songwriter has chronicled the trials and tribulations of growing up better than Andrew McMahon. He started off singing about young love, high school drama, and teenage hijinks; now he’s singing about the dynamics of a lasting marriage, the fears and joys of fatherhood, and the surreal feeling of entering your 40s knowing that, maybe, you ain’t that young anymore. McMahon is the better part of a decade older than me, but the story he’s told – now spanning three bands and nine full-length studio albums – feels like a mirror to my life more than any other songwriter’s work ever has. Maybe that’s because I found those Something Corporate records as a freshman in high school and let them walk me through my angstiest seasons, or because Everything in Transit and The Glass Passenger then became perhaps my most crucial albums for coming-of-age and finding my way amidst the great big chaos of life. Or maybe it’s just because McMahon is interested in the same things I am – specifically, in how getting older casts your old memories and friendships in brand-new shades of light, allowing you to find new revelations in your own story the same way you do when you revisit a book you’ve read a dozen times. Tilt at the Wind No More is a record defined by that type of stock-taking. It’s about looking back and marveling at “how time can turn chaos and crime into magic,” as Andrew sings on album highlight “Little Disaster,” a beautiful song about how youthful recklessness was never really about the recklessness itself, but about the people you shared it with. But it’s also about looking around at where you are and what you have and realizing how much it’s worth. “A world without color is a world without you,” goes the bridge refrain of “Stars,” a magnificent song that bursts with gratitude over the marvels of life and love and family. It’s a song Andrew couldn’t have written when he was younger, but it still maintains a throughline with his past work, because McMahon has always had such a gift for shining a light on what makes life beautiful, even in his darkest times. Tilt at the Wind No More is all about that beauty, and it’s one of the most life-affirming albums of the year for precisely that reason.

14. Marvelous 3 – IV

After largely sitting on the sidelines of the live music comeback in 2021 and 2022, I got back out there in 2023 and saw some great fucking shows. From Butch Walker playing an intimate record store show in Livonia, Michigan, to Taylor Swift commanding a massive stadium crowd in Pittsburgh, 2023 will go down as one of the best live music years of my life. While it’s hard to pick anything but the Eras Tour as my top concert of the year, though, the most meaningful may have been seeing Marvelous 3 blow the doors off the House of Blues in Chicago in October. I became a fan of Butch Walker in early 2005, a few months after he released his second full-length solo album, Letters. By that point, Marvelous 3 – the band Butch fronted back in the 1990s – was a mere memory. I loved the band’s songs, when I finally got around to finding used copies of their out-of-print albums, but I never had any illusions that I might one day see the three of them play a show, let alone make another album together. The story Butch always told about the band was that they broke up due to major label neglect and mistreatment, and that – while they’d “stayed the best of friends” – they couldn’t get back together without causing some contractual issues with their old label. But like a long-dormant volcano suddenly erupting, Marvelous 3 roared back to life in 2023 – first with vinyl pressings of their old albums, then with the news that they would be releasing a new record and playing a series of tour dates in the fall. Across five sold-out nights in two cities – Atlanta and Chicago – these guys brought the noise like no time had passed since they scored their one minor hit in the late ‘90s. The show was absolute bliss – complete with a surprisingly impressive stage production and more than a few moments of emotional camaraderie – and while the band’s old songs formed the bulk of the setlist, it made the concert that much sweeter to have new Marvelous 3 music out in the world. Like the shows, IV winds back the clock to a different time, when power pop and rock ‘n’ roll still got played on the radio. It’s an album stacked with lightning-bolt hooks and bursting with the audible enthusiasm of three childhood friends elated at finally getting to make music together again: Just listen to “My Old School Metal Heart,” a funny, touching little song about clinging to the things you loved when you were young. And if you close your eyes during their euphoric take on “She Sheila,” a 1982 power pop classic by the band The Producers, you can almost see the three guys in the Marvelous 3 back in the garage again, where this whole thing got started. That’s what a years-in-the-making reunion album should do, and in a year where that type of album was suddenly all over the place, IV was one of the best of the form.

15. Olivia Rodrigo – GUTS

The year’s most anticipated pop album, GUTS arrived like a little atomic bomb – first with the warning shot of “Vampire,” an audacious lead single that’s as much Bat out of Hell-era Meatloaf as it is zoomer teen pop; and then with the album as a whole, featuring 11 more tracks full of brutally-honest, gnarled poetry. Rodrigo was the rare pop phenom who seemed to arrive fully-formed, with her 2021 debut SOUR offering up a masterclass of both relatable songwriting and TikTok virality. Her ability to bridge the gaps between the last 20 years of youth culture – from early 2000s emo to Taylor Swift’s imperial phase, all the way to Gen-Z contemporaries like Billie Eilish – was preternatural, perhaps only eclipsed by her gift at delivering hall-of-fame-worthy F-bombs. GUTS is even better, lingering less on the T-Swift-style breakup ballads and spending more time in the company of very loud guitars. As just about everyone has said, the album’s rockers are (mostly) where it shines, especially the hilarious “Get Him Back!”, which ping-pongs between a massive chorus and talk-sung verses that ooze charm and good humor. But while the slower songs lose some of the attitude that makes Rodrigo such fun company – and while there’s probably at least one too many of them – those confessional tracks still give GUTS its beating heart. The album’s final three songs return us to a classic ‘90s trope – the “So, it turns out fame kind of sucks!” narrative – and they do it so deftly and in such interesting, heart-on-the-sleeve ways that I can’t help but feel like Rodrigo’s “rock songs only, please” critics overlook what makes her special. “The Grudge” is a “never meet your heroes” lesson captured in gutting breakup song form; you won’t convince me it’s not about Taylor Swift. The spacey “Pretty Isn’t Pretty” lifts some elements from Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979” for a frank and moving discussion about mental health and body image. And the aching “Teenage Dream” takes aim at the music industry’s fetishization of youth in a way that shows how that obsession damages even the people it helps lift to the fore. Swift took over the world with big, catchy, ubiquitous singles, but it was her ultra-personal, diaristic ballads that made her the voice of a generation. Rodrigo seems to be heading in the same direction.

16. Ruston Kelly – The Weakness

Ruston Kelly’s first album, 2018’s masterful Dying Star, is such a deeply sad listen that you could almost miss the light that comes breaking through the darkness at the end. And if you’re at risk for overlooking the uplift on an album that, largely, recounts the struggle to overcome addiction, you could easily come away from Dying Star – or its follow-up, 2020’s almost-as-good Shape & Destroy – without realizing how funny Ruston Kelly is. Bits of his sense of humor have cropped up here and there, but they’ve mostly been extramusical: his Twitter posts, for instance, or his insistence that his brand of country music should be labeled as “Dirt Emo.” The Weakness is the first album Kelly’s made that really puts some emphasis on how funny he can be. The obvious Exhibit A to that point is “Michael Keaton,” a song about getting accidentally and unexpectedly high off some sketchy CBD and then asking faux-profound questions like “What if Michael Keaton killed himself in Multiplicity? Would that be genocide?” Those little moments of levity crop up a few times on The Weakness: Take the way Kelly bellows “Fuck that guy, he’s just a piece of shit!” on the bridge of the title track; or how “St. Jupiter” begins with a description of flowers planted in the front yard “to discourage morning pissers,” but turns into an affecting treatise on loneliness. They’re not just there for shock value, either. Instead, the little moments of crass humor and stoner philosophy on The Weakness serve to underline its lineage of influence, which is less about country greats than it is about pop-punk heroes like Blink-182 or Green Day. A lot of these songs – particularly highlights like “Holy Shit” and “Breakdown” – feel like they’d work as well with big guitars and slick production as they do in the mostly-acoustic singer-songwriter mode that Kelly makes his bread and butter. Of course, the album also has plenty of weight to it, courtesy of poignant ballads like “Mending Song” and “Better Now” that feel like direct responses to Kelly’s divorce from fellow country artist Kacey Musgraves. This time around, though, it’s the poppier, more upbeat stuff that really works. Maybe Ruston Kelly should make a pop-punk album after all?

17. The Menzingers – Some of It Was True

“The older I get, the less I know/And I knew nothing then.” So goes the most striking line on The Menzingers’ seventh full-length studio album, a lyric that seems to sum up everything this band has been writing songs about since they first started writing songs. Perhaps more than any other band, The Menzingers are obsessed with aging, with the passage of time, with the ways the years change us, and with the joys and dangers of nostalgia. They named their breakout album On the Impossible Past, for god’s sake. But the above line, from this album’s uneasily anthemic title track, is somehow the best-ever distillation of the Menzingers’ thing – not to mention one of the most painfully apt lyrics ever written about growing up. Adults seem like fountains of wisdom when you’re young; then you become one and realize adults are, largely, fucking morons. Some of It Was True is an album about ping-ponging around in that no-one-knows-shit world and trying to make something meaningful – and yes, true – out of all the chaos and noise. “Sometimes, I can’t help but think/There’s no place in this world for me,” sings frontman Greg Barnett early in the album. That fear is all too easy to succumb to, and it’s what often leads us to find solace in the rose-colored rearview mirror that is nostalgia. But as Barnett sings later, “I’m so sick of playing pretend/Thinking everything was better back then.” The truth the album stumbles upon, I think, is that we undervalue our present by overvaluing our past. And while The Menzingers don’t promise to stop singing about the past, there’s something profoundly hopeful in how this album’s maze of rich melodies and thoughtful musings about time lead to the resolution of the closing track: “It’s so hard to be hopeful, but I promise you I’ll try/To always see the big picture, find faith in the future/To keep on running in the roar of the wind.” Amen, boys.

18. The Maine – The Maine

“We poured everything we have into this album, and it’s self-titled because, in many ways, it represents who we are as a band.” That’s what The Maine had to say about their ninth full-length album, and it answered a question I always have going into a self-titled record. With the exception of a debut, which seems like a natural time to name an album after yourself or your band, I always approach a self-titled LP with extra expectations. If a band feels the pull to go the eponymous route three, five, ten albums deep into their career, my assumption about the work is that it has to be some sort of exciting reinvention, culmination, or level-up. The Maine disappointed me at first because it is not the best album this band has ever made. That title still belongs to 2017’s masterful Lovely Little Lonely, a record so perfectly balanced in terms of pacing, sequencing, hooks, production, and thematic cohesion that it could have easily borne the weight of being self-titled. But The Maine is still worthy of that status, too, if only for how it takes this band’s sonic identity and jet-streams it into something that really, truly sounds like it could go supernova in the mainstream. Not since the heydays of early 2000s rock bands like The Strokes, The Killers, or Franz Ferdinand have I heard a rock record this legitimately danceable. Songs like “dose no. 2” and “leave in five” long for a dimly-lit club with a flashing disco ball and a jam-packed floor, so infectious are their rhythms and grooves. The album does lose some of the emotional punch of The Maine’s best work – though penultimate epic “cars & caution signs” feels like a nod back at their more “emo” days – but it is such a catchy little feast of sounds that it ultimately won me over regardless.

19. Turnpike Troubadours – A Cat in the Rain

“If you ever get the time, come on home/I heard Turnpike’s back together and they’re writing songs.” That’s a line from “East Side of Sorrow,” one of my favorite songs on the self-titled Zach Bryan album that came out this year. The lyric probably went over the heads of a lot of the folks who jumped on the Bryan bandwagon as his star exploded this fall, but it’s one of my favorite lines of the year for how it tips the cap to the broader tradition Zach is always drawing on in his songs. Released the same day as Zach Bryan, A Cat in the Rain is the first Turnpike Troubadours album in six years, and Zach’s style of Oklahoma roots music feels deeply indebted to what Turnpike has built over the course of their illustrious discography. The records Turnpike Troubadours have made – organic, handmade, honest, clever, musically accomplished, and connected by a web of interwoven characters and mythology – feel like the building blocks for a type of country music that has been niche for years but somehow started exploding outward in 2023. And while A Cat In the Rain didn’t sell a fraction of the copies that Zach Bryan did, it felt like it put this band and their bluegrass-meets-country tunes back at the head of a table where they belong. Frontman and songwriter Evan Felker, sidelined for years by alcoholism, rehab, and recovery, roars back into the game here with songs that are tender, reflective, and uniquely life-affirming. “If pressure makes a diamond, babe, I still might come out clean,” Felker sings on the melodically resplendent title track; I think he’s right.

20. Angie McMahon – Light, Dark, Light Again

For most of my music-listening life, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of the summer album. Records that sound like summer, or that capture its spirit in some distinct way, have this kind of alchemical magic about them for me. As I get older, though, and the endless possibility of youthful summers seems a more and more distant memory, I’m finding that I’m almost as invested at finding the perfect winter album. Living in a place where winter can last 4-6 months in any given year means making your peace with the snow and the cold and the limited daylight, and a warm, delicately beautiful wintertime mood-setter can certainly help. I bring all this up here because Angie McMahon’s Light, Dark, Light Again is a certified S-tier winter album. Sometimes as cold as frosty windows, sometimes as warm as a shot of Fireball whiskey, this album sounds like the world feels in the dead of December, when the world is blanketed in snow and all you want to do is bundle up in flannel shirts and fleece blankets and hibernate for the season…or at least until Christmas. The last song even presents a bridge that seems to tip its cap to the turning of the year. and to the once-more-around-the-sun journeys we all to celebrate as the world dips into its coldest, shortest days. “Time is supposed to run out, time is supposed to/Sun is supposed to go down, sun is supposed to/Like your mood, like your power, like your battery/Rise, fall, rise, life, death, life again/Sky, ground, sky, day, night, day again/Rise, fall, rise, life, death, life again/Sky, ground, sky/Light, dark, light again.” That bit is one of my favorite parts of any song I heard this year, and it’s a microcosm of what makes McMahon great: Not just the serene, icy beauty of her music, but also the rambling stream-of-consciousness poetry that makes up her lyrics, or the way the musicality of her songs lands somewhere at the cross section of Maggie Rogers’ intimate pop confections, Florence + The Machine’s brash boldness, and Phoebe Bridgers’ thoughtful storytelling. I have a feeling Light, Dark, Light Again is an album I’ll be reaching for a lot in the future, whenever those cold, short days wind back around.

21. FRND CRCL – Suburban Dictionary

Suburban Dictionary is the kind of album that sounds at least four times better on hot, sunny, sweaty summer days. A shame, then, that I’m finalizing this list and writing this blurb from the vantage point of northern Michigan’s first snow of the year, with temperatures crashing into the teens. I ranked this album at number 4 on my mid-year list, and that makes sense: It came out on June 30, I’d just gotten a negative COVID-19 test after spending two weeks of June laid up in bed (and after otherwise dodging the virus for three-plus years!), and the songs of FRND CRCL sounded like the promise of a perfect summer. This album lived up to that expectation: Just about every time I got into the car in July or August, Suburban Dictionary was the first album I dialed up. The hooks on songs like “No Bad Days” and “Fuck California” were built for windows-down drives on days when the mercury hits 90, while stuff like “Golden” sounded pretty damn idyllic set against the backdrop of a dusk-and-summer sunset. It’s not the band’s fault that their brand of ‘90s-flavored pop-punk is virtually not functional for crisp fall nights or long, grayscale winters. Just like their forerunners in Blink-182, these guys make records for the mythical, unobtainable endless summer vacation. So, even though I had to tuck this album away alongside the beach chairs, paddleboards, and other trappings of my favorite, fleeting season, I’m already looking forward to the day that Suburban Dictionary goes back into regular rotation.

22. Chris Stapleton – Higher

“If you want a cowboy on a white horse, riding off into the sunset/If that’s the kind of love you want to wait for/Hold on tight, girl, I ain’t there yet.” I adore that propulsive chorus from “White Horse,” the lead single on Chris Stapleton’s Higher and one of his best songs yet. So many singles from mainstream country dudes are all bravado and ego, all “I’m the right guy for you, babe” come-ons. On “White Horse,” Stapleton is admitting that he’s not quite the man yet that his lady deserves, but might get there someday, if she’s willing to invest some time. That humility – and the way Stapleton uses it to subvert the knight-in-a-shining-cowboy-hat myths that populate the so-called “boyfriend country” era – is a reminder of what has always made him one of the easiest guys in the genre to root for. There’s something down-to-earth and relatable about him that made the success of Traveller that much more magical to watch, and his willingness to keep his head down, do the work, and let the songs speak for themselves has been a steady throughline for his career. Higher, Stapleton’s fifth full-length album, is another testament to that steadiness: great songs, played beautifully and sung remarkably, with very few surprises or risks lurking around the corner. Sometimes, I find myself wishing that he would be more of a wild card, more of a loose cannon. What would happen if he fired longtime producer Dave Cobb, teamed up with someone more daring (a Blake Mills or Jack White, perhaps?), and made a louder, wilder, more experimental LP? If/when that day ever comes, I’ll be the first through the door to buy the album. But in the meantime, records like Higher remain a joy for just how expertly-rendered they are. On his strongest LP since the first one, Stapleton strings together songs that sound immediately timeless (“It Takes a Woman”), songs that do compelling things with well-worn country tropes (“White Horse” again, or alcohol-plus-heartbreak wailer that is “The Bottom”), and songs with vocal performances that will shake the rafters and send shivers down your spine (the truly breathtaking title track). Listening to it – especially on the impeccable-sounding vinyl release – it’s hard to want anything more from Stapleton than what he brought to the table here.

23. Caitlyn Smith – High & Low

Back in 2018, if you had asked me to bet on any artist, I’d have put my chips down on Caitlyn Smith. I named her debut album Starfire my album of the year that year – ahead of Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour – and mused in my end-of-the-year writeup about her someday, possibly, enjoying a Chris Stapleton-esque rise to superstardom. Just like Stapleton, she was a proven songwriter with a few notable cuts under her belt – she wrote the dynamite Meghan Trainor/John Legend duet “Like I’m Gonna Lose You” – and just like Stapleton, she had a gloriously big voice. But Stapleton might have skated under the radar had it not been for a televised performance with a certain former NSYNC member, and such has been the case so far with Smith. Another thing those two artists have in common? Smith has never quite lived up to the splendor of her debut, which felt like a true encapsulation of the idea that first albums are great because artists spend their whole lives building up their best material for that first shot at the belt. All this to say that High & Low is no Starfire, and maybe not even a Supernova – the follow-up Smith dropped on March 13, 2020, just as the world was shutting down. Still, it remains a joy to hear Smith sing anything at all, and High & Low is yet another terrific vehicle for her magical instrument. “High,” a big epic midtempo ballad previously recorded by Miley Cyrus,” is the perfect example. Cyrus’s distinctive raspy voice leant a unique character to “High,” but Smith’s version is vastly superior, giving the massive chorus the aerodynamics it needs to reach the heavens. That’s the thing about artists like Chris Stapleton and Caitlyn Smith: They write such fundamentally strong songs, with such obvious universal appeal, that anyone could record them and make them sound good. But then, once you hear either of them sing, you wonder how anyone else could ever dare to try their songs. That’s the case over and over again on High & Low, which feels stacked with potential country smashes (take your pick of “Dreamin’s Free,” “Mississippi,” “Lately,” “I Think of You,” or “Downtown Baby”) that would never be as good performed by literally anyone else. I’m hopeful that Smith’s next record takes a few more risks and fulfills the promise I heard in her five years ago. Even just operating in the mode of “sing good songs well,” though, High & Low is a joy.

24. Alana Springsteen – Twenty Something

“When no one knew what I was going through growing up/Taylor did.” That’s the punchline from the best song on Alana Springsteen’s ambitious, super-sized debut album, Twenty Something. And, if history rhymes as poetically as it sometimes does, perhaps that song will be the start to the next big country-to-pop success story? Just like Taylor Swift started her journey with a song named after another major mainstream country icon (the starry-eyed beauty that is “Tim McGraw”), Alana Springsteen (no relation to The Boss; believe me, I checked) writes the centerpiece track of Twenty Something about the songwriter that inspired her and a million other girls from her generation to pick up the guitar, leave their small towns behind, and try to make something of themselves. In a year where Swift seemed to dominate every segment of pop culture, Springsteen’s “Taylor Did” might have been the single most touching tribute to her success and all the empowerment and inspiration it’s brought. That influence is audible throughout Twenty Something, a kaleidoscopic mix of musical styles and emotions whose mega 18-song tracklist definitely shares some kinship with all-over-the-place Swift classics like Red and Speak Now. The album, unlike Taylor’s best, doesn’t quite earn that lengthy runtime, and at least five songs could have been left on the cutting room floor without hurting the record much. (I nominate “Goodbye Looks Good on You,” a duet with mainstream country hack Mitchell Tenpenny, who once had a hit with a song called “Bitches”; enough said.) But at its best, Twenty Something is a hook-filled delight that doesn’t shy away from messy vulnerability. The title track, in particular, is a striking warts-and-all account of coming-of-age in modern times, when it’s pretty damn hard to feel like an adult even when your driver’s license says you are one. “The candles on the cake say we’re growing up/We’re staying out late, and we’re throwing up/We know it all and don’t know nothing/At twenty something.” It’s a smart bit of songwriting from an artist who clearly has a lot of potential. I’ll be excited to see where she goes from here.

25. Chad Perrone – What Would I Leave You With

“Every time I make an album, I always have worries in the back of my head like, ‘Is this the last record I’m ever going to make?’ I think I’ve always had a little bit of an identity crisis, as far as, what would happen if, tomorrow, I just stopped playing music and that was never a part of my life again? Who would Chad Perrone be?”

Independent Boston-based songwriter Chad Perrone said those words to me back in 2014, when I interviewed him about his then-brand-new album Kaleidoscope. For a long time, I thought that record would be Chad’s last foray into the breach. And while it’s easy, as a music fan, to get impatient with artists who take years to follow up great albums, I could never begrudge Chad the decision to step away. From the vantage point of social media, it looked like life had simply gotten busy on his end. He got married, became a stepfather, and moved into a whole new stage of his life. Perhaps most importantly, he seemed genuinely happy. I couldn’t help thinking back to that 2014 interview and wondering whether Perrone had decided to stop wondering about who he would be without music, and actually find out the answer. As it turns out, though, there was a lot more to Perrone’s story than what I saw on Facebook, and the result is What Would I Leave You With, his first album in almost a decade. On the eve the record’s release, Chad shared a bit about its genesis, explaining that, among other things, the album was inspired by a personal journey of self-improvement. “This past weekend, I celebrated a little milestone for myself,” he wrote on the eve of the album’s release. “It’s been three years since I touched alcohol. I have been relatively private about my personal journey, but it seems fitting that I share that part of my story right now, since so much of this record deals with the years I spent sad and lost and the efforts I’ve made to rewrite my story.” Perrone went on to explain that he’d developed a habit of digging a hole for himself – one defined by anger and frustration and self-pity. “Instead of looking for a way out, I played the victim card and sat cross-legged in that hole screaming that I had been wronged, all the while hurting a lot of people along the way,” he explained. What Would I Leave You With explores Chad’s efforts to claw his way out of that hole, and to adopt a new set of tenets for living a happier life.

The resulting album isn’t always happy, but there’s something about it that rings with a contentment I haven’t heard from Perrone before. Conversely, his past albums weren’t always sad, but they always felt to me like they were searching, yearning, aching for something. What Would I Leave You With is the sound of Chad finding that “something” – encapsulated most clearly, perhaps, in the penultimate track “Being,” which sounds like a wedding vow set to music. “I was on the other side of a screen feeling sorry for myself,” Perrone sings; “You were there with your head in your hands silently asking for help.” It’s possible, sometimes, for two broken people to find each other in the fog and make each other whole. But getting to that point requires resigning yourself to the winds of change and letting them carry you where they will. The rest of the album is a journey to find that acceptance, and the first track – literally called “Serenity” – kicks off the series of prayers and self-talk mantras that helped Chad get there: “Give me strength to listen/Patience to find grace/The words to express resentments and my role in them.” One track later, on album highlight “Doubts,” Perrone dispenses with his past desire to “control all the variables” by asking for perhaps the biggest bit of serenity one can have: “Let me be okay with doubts.” It’s a resonant sentiment on a moving album that feels like a little miracle; I’m so grateful to have it.

26. Lori McKenna – 1988

One of the most pervasive – and most damaging – falsehoods about music is that the best art is and always has been made by young people. This industry fetishizes youth, elevates the hot young thing, and obsesses over debut albums, often at the exclusion of older, more seasoned artists and deeper-catalog work. Lori McKenna is as good an argument as any for why those practices are foolhardy. Right now, McKenna is 54 years old and 12 albums into her career. Her breakthrough as a solo artist came on her ninth album, 2016’s The Bird and the Rifle, which dropped when she was 45. McKenna met her husband in third grade, married him at 19, and started writing songs because her children – all five of them – needed lullabies. Her songs are about all those things: lifelong love stories and aging and motherhood and domesticity and all the ways the world can break your heart in the course of living a normal life. It probably goes without saying that McKenna is not trendy, or buzzy, or popular. But she’s also one of our greatest living songwriters, someone who can tap into the human condition and capture it so deftly and empathetically in the space of four minutes that she makes everyone else look like a goddamn amateur. 1988 is yet another brilliant showcase of McKenna’s peerless gifts, with a few songs that are simply head and shoulders above what most songwriters will ever create in their time on this earth. Case-in-point is “The Tunnel,” a song about the way your upbringing can shape your entire life, often in unfair ways. “I don’t know how it works or how God picks who gets to get through/It just seems like a lot of life’s been mostly the tunnel for you,” McKenna sings in the chorus. It reminds me of kids I knew in elementary school who didn’t make it or ended up in bad situations, and how you could have seen the shape their lives would take just from knowing how they grew up – with too much strife at home or too little love from their parents, and with no one who was brave enough or smart enough or aware enough to stand up and save them from the darkness. Singing songs about these kinds of everyday tragedies isn’t how most artists choose to spend their time or their capital, but McKenna’s willingness to be a poet for the unsung and overlooked makes her a vital voice. I’ll listen to her music for the rest of my life.

27. Sufjan Stevens – Javelin

Speaking of aging artists delivering vital, emotionally wrenching work this year, let’s talk about Sufjan Stevens. Though the beloved indie singer/songwriter and I share a home state, I’ve long been a bit of Sufjan agnostic, struggling for years to latch on to his supposed masterpiece – 2005’s epic, quirky, orchestral Illinois. I was more taken with the tragic beauty of Carrie & Lowell, his 2015 tribute to his mother and the unusual, often sad relationship he shared with her. But I don’t know if I’ve ever been truly 100 percent in on a Sufjan album until now. Until Javelin. Stevens made his heyday albums when he was a late twentysomething wunderkind, and it’s audible how much records like Illinois and Michigan and The Age of Adz are the work of someone who has all the ambition and all the ideas of restless we-can-change-the-world youth. Javelin, Sufjan’s 10th full-length album, is not that. Instead, this record – which arrives with Stevens nearing his 50s – reckons with age and mortality in raw, painful, poignant, and beautiful ways. Sufjan wrote the songs as he was literally learning to walk again, after struggling with a rare autoimmune condition that affects the nerves in the feet, hands, and limbs. He also released Javelin just months after his partner Evans Richardson – who Sufjan called “the light of my life” – tragically died at the age of 43. And so, while the songs on Javelin still sound like Sufjan Stevens songs – with that deft balance between intimacy and maximalism that he could always strike so well – they’re shot through now with the vulnerability and mortality and the soul-deep sadness that comes with these kinds of losses. Songs like “Will Anybody Ever Love Me” and “Genuflecting Ghost” sound almost like Stevens is singing them through tears, so raw are the emotions. But Javelin’s emotional vulnerability is also offset with big crescendos, huge orchestral explosions, and cathartic choral bursts, all of which lend the sad songs with the epic, widescreen colors of a sunset witnessed from the top of a mountain. The result is an album that breaks your heart, but also somehow feels uplifting. It’s a mysterious dichotomy that sent me back to Javelin again and again.

28. The National – Laugh Track

I thought The National had lost me for good after their last album, 2019’s I Am Easy to Find. Despite a few truly great songs, that record got bogged down in dull interlude bullshit and a preponderance of guest vocalists – so many that the band got lost on their own damn album. I also wasn’t sure how the intervening years – and the fact that guitarist Aaron Dessner spent them becoming a key architect in Taylor Swift’s dual 2020 masterpieces, folklore and evermore – would help solve The National’s identity crisis. My fears were at least partially justified: The National released two albums this year, and the first one, First Two Pages of Frankenstein, had many of the same problems that Easy to Find did. Too many midtempo dirges, too little of the kinetic full-band energy that made early National records great, and too much real estate given over to guest vocalists – particularly a pair of uber-famous ones, Phoebe Bridgers and Taylor Swift herself, who took up all the oxygen in the room. Laugh Track doesn’t dispense with those things entirely – Phoebe is here once more, as are Bon Iver and Rosanne Cash. But the guests this time feel like they’re there in service of the band and the songs rather than the other way around, and the songwriting brings back some of that foreboding danger that used to make The National so exciting; see “Turn off the House,” a rich, dark little gem about pulling a disappearing act. Most importantly, after a few too many songs on Frankenstein relied on piano-led arrangements or simplistic Dessner loops, Laugh Track finally gives the guys in the band something to sink their teeth into again, especially on big, crescendo-til-you-explode epics like “Space Invader” and “Smoke Detector.” The result is the best album The National have made since 2017’s Sleep Well Beast, and a much-needed reminder that, at their best, they are still one of the tightest rock bands of this century.

29. Megan Moroney - Lucky

On her debut album Lucky, Megan Moroney reminded me a bit of the first time I heard Kacey Musgraves. Not that Moroney is the generational talent that Musgraves has proven to be; Lucky is no Same Trailer, Different Park, to be fair. But this Georgia singer-songwriter does have a few of the attributes that I flagged in Kacey right away: a similar lackadaisical charm, a voice that’s similarly adept at delivering both withering wit and aching heartbreak, a sharp pen that can hide double meanings and deceptive depth inside songs that are still catchy enough to move the needle in the risk-averse country radio economy. In a year where country music found its way back to the very heart of mainstream culture – thanks to the likes of Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs, Zach Bryan, and a few dog-whistlers I won’t name here – Moroney might have made the best down-the-middle mainstream country record of all of them. Just listen to “Lucky,” a razor-sharp anthem about backsliding with an ex, or “Why Johnny,” an imagined conversation with June Carter about how and why she put up with a restless, headstrong, hard-living music man when she could have easily had anyone else. If Moroney were Musgraves, the songs would push the envelope a bit more. For instance, the hit, “Tennessee Orange,” settles for being a clever track about dating a guy whose college sports allegiance runs counter to the family tradition; but surely there’s a more subversive version about the narrator’s new flame not only being a U of T Volunteers fan, but also…a girl? No matter: Even if it’s disappointing that this year’s buzzy country gal doesn’t take as many risks as the buzzy country gals were taking a decade ago, it’s still a relief to hear a record like Lucky and know that Nashville hasn’t totally succeeded in driving all the talented women away.

30. The Young Hearts – Somewhere Through the Night

Based on the logic (or lack thereof) of most major music publications, albums that come out in December count toward the following year’s lists – as if there’s not enough time in the year’s final month for a brand-new album to make a big impression. Here’s why that approach is bullshit: The Young Hearts released Somewhere Through the Night on December 10 and I didn’t personally hear it until the day after Christmas. But it didn’t matter: From the first time I heard this record, I knew I was going to need to find room for it on my end-of-the-year list. Simply put, The Young Hearts make music that hits so squarely in my wheelhouse that I’d be doing an injustice to myself, my tastes, and this band to leave Somewhere Through the Night off my 2023 ranking, even if I only got to spend five days of 2023 with it. These guys hail from the United Kingdom, but you’d have no idea based on the music they actually make, which is pure, yearning, heartland Americana rock ‘n’ roll. This album is loaded with the types of big, rousing anthems that have always been pure catnip for me – stuff that reminds me of all the drives I’ve spent listening to The ’59 Sound and American Slang on repeat, or songs that take me back to the first time I heard that pulse-pounding chorus kick in on The Menzingers’ “Anna.” So, if you’re like me and your interests consist of big hooks, bigger guitars, youthful abandon, and Bruce Springsteen, you need to hear Somewhere Through the Night, right now. I may have only gotten to spend five days with it this year, but I’ll always remember how the album closed out my 2023. I’m already looking forward to the first time the temperature cracks 60 degrees and I can take it for a windows-down drive along the water.

The 2022 Re-Rank

With a little distance, 2022 looks more and more like one of my favorite music years in recent memory. A few notable moves here – I didn’t go back to that Maren Morris album much this year, and spent a lot of time with American Heartbreak and Midnights – but the general shape of things is the same as it was a year ago. That Gang of Youths record is absolutely an album of the decade contender.

Gang of Youths – angel in realtime.
Jack Johnson – Meet the Moonlight
Zach Bryan – American Heartbreak
Matt Nathanson – Boston Accent
Butch Walker – Glenn
Maggie Rogers – Surrender
Kelsea Ballerini – Subject to Change
Ingrid Andress – Good Person
Taylor Swift – Midnights
Maren Morris – Humble Quest
Ken Yates – Cerulean
Anxious - Little Green House
Death Cab for Cutie – Asphalt Meadows
Dawes - The Misadventures of Doomscroller
The 1975 – Being Funny in a Foreign Language
Holly Humberstone – Can You Afford to Lose Me
Pool Kids – Pool Kids
John Fullbright – The Liar
Noah Kahan – Stick Season
Mandy Moore – In Real Life
Anais Mitchell – Anais Mitchell
Pale Waves – Unwanted
Red Hot Chili Peppers – Unlimited Love
Spoon - Lucifer on the Sofa
Bruce Springsteen – Only the Strong Survive
Dashboard Confessional – All the Truth That I Can Tell
Avril Lavigne – Love Sux
Sigrid - How to Let Go
MUNA - MUNA
The Midnight – Heroes

The 2013 Re-Rank

2013 often gets held up as an epically good music year, especially in indie rock circles. For a long time, though, this slate of releases was not something I looked back on fondly. I definitely remember loving 2013 as a music year when I was actually living through it; that might still be the year that I listened to the most new albums. But I also have a lot of not-so-great memories of 2013, when I graduated from college into a tough job market and spent months feeling like a failure. 10 years on from all that, it’s a lot easier for me to 1) cut 22-year-old me goddamn some slack, 2) focus on the many good things that happened that year, and 3) appreciate this pack of albums for what it was: terrific, game-changing, and pretty damn timeless. That said, I’m not sure I’ll ever find a list that shifts more on the 10-year re-rank than 2013’s, where my in-the-moment album of the year falls to number 6 and half the top 10 changes hands. A solid reminder that these lists are a snapshot of a moment in time and won’t always remain set in stone!

Jason Isbell – Southeastern
Dawes - Stories Don’t End
Kacey Musgraves – Same Trailer, Different Park
Charlie Worsham – Rubberband
The Civil Wars – The Civil Wars
Will Hoge – Never Give In
Sara Bareilles – The Blessed Unrest
Matt Nathanson – Last of the Great Pretenders
Haim - Days Are Gone
Jimmy Eat World – Damage
The 1975 – The 1975
CHVRCHES - The Bones of What You Believe
John Mayer – Paradise Valley
The Head and the Heart – Let’s Be Still
City and Colour – The Hurry and the Harm
Vampire Weekend – Modern Vampires of the City
The Summer Set – Legendary
Frank Turner – Tape Deck Heart
Donovan Woods – Don’t Get Too Grand
The Lone Bellow – The Lone Bellow
The National – Trouble Will Find Me
Sky Ferreira – Night Time, My Time
The Wonder Years – The Greatest Generation
Volcano Choir – Repave
Goo Goo Dolls – Magnetic
Logan Brill – Walking Wires
John Moreland – In the Throes
Night Beds – Country Sleep
Ashley Monroe – Like a Rose
The Dangerous Summer – Golden Record

The Year-End List Archive

I’ve been doing this “write a lot of words about my favorite albums of the year” thing for a long time, now. Here’s the archive, dating back almost a decade and a half.