The Café

Music chat and ✨discourse✨, plus maybe some politics and tv/film/media stuff if I can be bothered.

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And finally rounding out the end of year lists, these are the 16 albums that I loved the most this year but couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to rank.

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Some tracks that didn’t quite make the cut (but honestly were pretty interchangeable for #50-#40).

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Jessie Ware makes the funkiest, horniest glam-pop, and it’s always just so much fun.

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Truly an incredible album, and a harbinger of bigger things to come - this stunning chamber folk album from Jackson is inventive, witty, hilarious and tragic, and really quite moving.

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This track keeps getting better the more I listen to it; Adrianne’s desperate outburst of frustration is the most entrancing, pure expression of a love most furious, both terrified and terrifying.

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The most visceral, intimately captivating performance of the year; this song feels like Cole Haden is grabbing my head with both hands and snarling into my ears, and all awhile the bass throbs like a pulse frightened into its fight-or-flight response. It’s a noise-punk cabaret that is unsettling and yet somehow impossible to look away from.

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The quintessential alt-hip hop of 2023. Hearing that Peggy and Danny’s team-up was happening created some of the most hype for any release this year, and the two batshit-crazy weirdos delivered HARD.

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In a track that feels like its own self-contained, magical snow-globe, Mitski takes us alongside her on a reflective midnight stroll, before her world is violently up-ended by the cacophonous finale, the snow-globe’s landscape obscured by a blizzard of snow and noise.

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Lau Noah’s timeless songwriting does a lot with its little.

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A devastatingly beautiful single from Sufjan.

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Hands down one of the coolest openings to a track on this list, and also one of the best opening tracks more broadly - this album is incredibly dear to me, and the chorus always manages to improve my mood. Phenomenal track.

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What a kooky, inane and captivating addendum to her triumphant album release earlier this year - Dang is Caroline at her purest, a cherry on top of an impossibly good cake.

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Mesmerising polyphonic soundscapes from the sax legend Colin Stetson.

(Full disclosure, totally still the format of this review from one of Pitchfork’s best albums article, I just liked the concept a lot)

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The apocalypse never seemed so horny.

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Otherworldly beats from El-P, absurdist poetry from Billy and Elucid - this is surely the quintessential alt-hip-hop single of the year (with one notable exception (more on that later))

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Some of the most enjoyable power-pop I’ve heard in a long time; CMAT is absolutely one to watch.

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If this were a list ranking best opening tracks of the year, the BLACK seminole might just have taken it. Sonically it represents a huge left turn for Yachty, and it also happens be really enjoyable.

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