All the Music I Didn’t Get to Write About This Year (Until Now)

I spent most of 2023 writing about major albums and stand-up specials and video games and cultural boondoggles, sorting through heaps of lyrics, archival interviews, debates, and essays, trying to chisel out a big-picture understanding of whatever hopefully prickly subject I’d chosen that week and maybe grasp at contextualizing the person or people behind it. I thrive on that cycle of absorption and expulsion, of disappearing into someone’s world and sharing what I’ve learned from a few dozen hours of monomania. I am the friend in the group chat who’s up at 2:30 a.m. getting cosmic. This was the routine before I wrote professionally, and I like to think of a piece as a kind of brief filibuster moment in a longer conversation, a different manifestation of the same impulse I get to try to synthesize and simplify a dispute outside of writing. But that’s not the only way I engage with music, and the critic’s life at the mercy of the roiling whim of the release calendar leaves a lot I’m interested in that doesn’t necessarily get mentioned in this space, which then surfaces in a year-end albums list juggling R&B and doom metal. Here’s a loose addendum to that.

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Albums that hooked me but didn’t make my Best Of

I want to call Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s V a psych record, but more specifically, it’s a buffet of melting, delightful tones too slippery to stick to a genre, touching on rock, soul, jazz, and reggae and peaking in mid-album gems like “In the Rear View.” Writing about Sampha’s Lahai put me in touch with Kwake Bass, drummer for the U.K. jazz outfit Speakers Corner Quartet, whose debut album Further Out Than the Edge balances beefy low end and breezy melodies, especially on “Can We Do This?,” Sampha’s most Stevie Wonder–adjacent vocal riff. Goodnight, God Bless, I Love U, Delete. from Crosses explores the sinister sultriness hinted at way back in 2005 with the Deftones’ cover of Sade’s “No Ordinary Love.” (See also: Godflesh’s Purge.) On Animals, Seattle rapper and drummer Kassa Overall astounded as both a wordsmith and a metronome with guests like Danny Brown and Vijay Iyer. The drumless version of Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories reveals hidden intricacies, highlighting how much rhythm is held in instruments other than drums in songs like “Lose Yourself to Dance.” It’s a buffet of genius-level session performances just waiting for the right sample whiz to get to work. It’s an unenviable task, though, filling the shoes of players like Omar Hakim and John JR Robinson.

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Books you should check

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Music-documentary obsessions

I really enjoyed Squaring the Circle: The Story of Hipgnosis, in which a series of classic-rock Mt. Rushmore shoe-ins revisits the sometimes strange circumstances behind the album covers of consequential ’70s releases. For example, I did not know Paul McCartney had a statue flown to the top of Mt. Everest for Wings Greatest. (Also, I feel like Noel Gallagher is wrong about the idea he floats in the film that the younger generation cares less about album art. We live in an era of pop-star deification, when fans pore over looks and photo shoots. Old habits always find new clothes.) I watched Wham! and came away wishing there were another hour dealing with the singularity of Limp Bizkit turning “Faith” into an angry-teen-boy staple the same year a cruising arrest outed George Michael. I’m also very slowly making my way through Reverb’s two-and-a-half-hour The Pedal Movie, which keeps setting off my impulse to freeze what I’m watching and vanish into related Googles for the rest of the night.

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Favorite EP that’s not Blackbox Life Recorder 21f / In a Room7 F760

I appreciate Ice Spice’s Like..? for the same reasons the earliest Cardi B and Azealia Banks music quickly resonated with me: That getting directly, uncomfortably to the point — “If the party not lit then why would I go?” “Why would I miss you when you was the issue?” — is what the city is really like is pure, unvarnished uptown.

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Favorite stress week of the year

In a lively stretch this summer, I took Sampha around some of my middle- and high-school haunts; pondered the infinite at Dead & Co.’s farewell tour; and moderated the Tribeca Film Festival’s New Jack City cast-reunion panel, which led to meeting RZA and Ghostface. As someone who has never passed up the opportunity to point out that Graham Court on 116th Street in Harlem is Nino Brown’s base of operations is Lil Wayne’s Carter, I was in my pinpoint-specific element. Shouts out Melvin and Mario Van Peebles.

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Nonbinding, unranked, momentary-favorite songs shortlist

SZA’s “Conceited” is a flawless, powerful pregaming anthem. PinkPantheress and Kelela’s “Bury Me” is satin-soft drill. Danny Brown’s “Jenn’s Terrific Vacation” paints a visceral picture of a neighborhood going to shit via gentrification. It remains hilarious to me that Sampha didn’t realize “Only” was the single when he wrote it. Skrillex’s “Still Here (With the Ones I Came With)” wrecks me most times I play it, which is, frankly, a good bit. I lost too many of my ones. Quest for Fire is a wild album because moments before that tearjerker there’s “Supersonic (My Existence),” a song containing a few of the synth tones that most made me want to punch a hole in the fabric of time this year.

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Songs I love on albums I wasn’t as crazy about

Living in Travis Scott’s Utopia gave me agita, but “My Eyes,” a rare moment of sincerity from someone who rarely stops cataloguing expensive shit to get to that, made it worth the slog. I was surprised to see Bad Bunny drop an album tapping into the grouchy, vacuous cool of the American rappers he smokes on the charts with Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana, but “Seda” — which will have you singing dick measurements in Spanish — and “Gracias por Nada” condense the balance of smooth melody and emotional coarseness of Bunny’s SoundCloud era into the new album’s highlights. I revisited Doja Cat’s “Demons” more than I thought I would as a “Girl fuck you,” not unlike “Big Difference,” the Pink Friday 2 highlight where Nicki Minaj expels all the hate she has absorbed like Bishop from X-Men.

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Video-game soundtrack that stuck with me

Scottish composer Grant Graham’s score for Ghost Song brings an alien world to life with waves of ephemeral synth pads and guitar drones that feel just as enveloping and evocative outside the game as they do in it. Racer-platformer Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is the Madelyne Pryor to Jet Set Radio’s Jean Grey; it brings a lot to the table but struggles to shake the shadow of the legend it bears a profound resemblance to. The music, some of which features Jet Set’s Hideki Naganuma, brings the twitchy funk and mutant hip-hop it needs to; “Condensed Milk” could fit on PinkPantheress’s album as is.

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Favorite song I Shazam-ed

“Kankeletigui,” by Djeneba Seck. I mostly use Shazam to ID dembow tracks I hear in NYC throughout the year. I could never live somewhere with no incidental dembow.

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YouTube music haunts

Captain Pikant makes videos transcribing and pontificating on notable feats of sequencing, like “Hunter” from Björk’s Homogenic, that feel like successors to the old Hal Leonard drum-pattern books. Chords of Orion and Jorb demos showcasing new bits of kit and time-tested approaches to music production hit me in the Bob Ross place. JonMakesBeats is a channel where rapper-producer Jonwayne documents the moment some intrepid noodling congeals into a more involved composition. Each time my eye lingers a little too long over an Elektron Octatrack it’s his fault.

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Best Reverb buy

I developed an intense case of gear brain this year — 2022 was a blizzard of grief, and setting my mind toward a new mountain put a little distance between me and the worst of that. I found an Electro-Harmonix Poly Chorus XO for $200 as part of a quest that began when I was 13 to understand everything Kurt Cobain was doing on In Utero. Relatedly, I dug the video where a guy got a few minutes with Skystang I, Kurt’s Fender, and meticulously catalogued every measurement. Crucially, my first task this year was interviewing John Cale, and I felt like you should have some audio experiments under your belt if you’ve been granted an audience with a member of the literal Theatre of Eternal Music. It turned into a massive learning commitment, but I’m having fun. But every week I now regret the lapse in practice and theory that made me forget my band-geek foundations.

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Best piece of merch I bought this year

The Mac Miller Swimming gradient hoodie goes hard.

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Show I most regret skipping

I had a ticket for the Las Vegas nü-metal festival Sick New World that I eventually got rid of. As much as I loved half the stuff on the bill, I was not that serious about sweating in a desert, and I’m now realizing that where I really fucked up was missing a window to see Geordie Walker in Killing Joke that will never show itself again. Life really forks off sometimes.

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Piece I wish I wrote

Any André 3000 profile. Notice me, senpai!