Top 20 Films of 2023

Most people agree that the big film event of the year was “Barbenheimer”, one of the canniest accidental-on-purpose marketing strategies I’ve seen in my lifetime. Their combined success is pretty breathtaking, with Barbie grossing over a billion dollars and Oppenheimer likely to cross that mark soon enough (incredible for a historical biopic). But what of their artistic worth? That will likely take a few more years to unpack, once the excitement and “hot takes” have died down. Me, I suspect the lustre of both will fade. Barbie is a fun film, with some big laughs and enthusiastic performances. But though I applaud Greta Gerwig for her efforts, I don’t think the charm of her earlier, smaller-budget films is quite translated into the mega-budget film arena. It made my list because fun, no matter how compromised, deserves to be acknowledged, but it’s unlikely to remain a favourite – the sloppily written parts really do compromise it.

As for Oppenheimer, well… Christopher Nolan is a good director. Of SPECTACLE. I think he’s a bad director of PEOPLE. The characters in his films only know how to interact in grandiose ways – I don’t think Nolan understands, or is interested in, the complexity of real-life humans and their interactions. Despite being a biography of a real-life, extremely complex human being, I don’t think Oppenheimer is any exception to that. There are some astonishing set pieces, which everyone is still talking about, and I admire it for that. The editing is dazzling. But I finished the film feeling I knew little more about Oppenheimer than the little I already knew, as well as baffled by why Nolan felt the last hour of interminable hearings was necessary to help us understand him – why was his loss of security clearance such a big deal, to Oppenheimer or to us? It wasn’t made at all clear. So all that remained were editing tricks and an ever-present Ludwig Göransson score insisting oh-so-loudly that everything happening onscreen was VERY IMPORTANT ACTUALLY. Overall I think it’s a visual marvel, but a bad biography, and a mediocre entertainment. Not good enough for an ostensible film-of-the-year.

For spectacle, I’ll take the latest Mission Impossible instalment over it, a suspense ride that has as little interest in people as Nolan, but zips along with impressive momentum where Oppenheimer chases its own tail in circles. Plus it delivers better set pieces along the way. But what do I know? I much preferred it to last year’s Top Gun sequel, and it did worse at the box office. Perplexing.

I’ll also take Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which some complained was too long, but I believe as a representation of one of the darkest chapters in American history wasn’t long enough – some of the historical context around the exploitation of the Osage by white businessmen (read: gangsters) got lost in the narrative thrust. But that narrative thrust made it very compelling, and as a journey into America’s heart of darkness painted with demonic visuals and performances, it struck me as another late-career triumph for Scorsese.

I was delighted to share my favourite film of the year with most publications this year, for the first time perhaps since Moonlight. Past Lives is not a perfect film, with some issues in the script department that betray Celine Song’s status as a debutante in writing-for-film (she worked in theatre previously). But it’s unbelievably good as an example of expressing below-the-surface-emotions visually, via background detail, camera placement, setting, an actors’ body language, etc., so that it did not at all betray Celine Song’s status as a debutante in directing-for-film. It was, in fact, the best directing I saw all year – subtle, plus visually and emotionally rich. Now it just remains to be seen if she can build on all that in future films, which might not necessarily be able to mine her own life experience for inspiration (the same goes for last year’s similar knockout autobiographical debut, Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun).

Here’s to another year of brilliant surprises.

(MAJOR CAVEAT: To my great dismay, I was unable to watch The Boy and the Heron in time for this list, because it hasn’t been released where I live. I’m a huge Studio Ghibli fan, and believe Hayao Miyazaki is one of the top four Japanese directors of all time (which puts him alongside Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Kenji Mizoguchi… whew!), so there is a high likelihood that it would’ve made this list. I may come back to change the list when I finally see it.)

1: Past Lives (dir. Celine Song)

Universally beloved debut feature, based on the director’s own past life/lives, that totally involves you in the childhood romance spanning into adulthood of a Korean man, a Korean woman who emigrates with her family to America, and the American man who becomes a third point in their love triangle by becoming her husband. Like a master filmmaker, Celine Song knows exactly where to place the camera to maximise audience emotional engagement and interest. Also like a master filmmaker, she fills the outskirts of each frame with a mise-en-scène that unobtrusively comments on the centred action: out-of-focus features like a random couple making out on the waterfront, a carousel spinning around like the thoughts of childhood in their head, etc., are crucial for working out what is not being said between Greta Lee and Teo Yoo. It helps that those actors are so superb at letting you into their secret lives – John Magaro as the husband too, whose central bedroom scene changes the dynamic of the film in a fascinating way, questioning the narrative and reframing it to allow for even more sympathy for him (we already like him quite a bit). But their skilled performances can also be credited to Celine Song’s empathetic direction as well. Believe the hype: everybody loves it for a reason.

2: May December (dir. Todd Haynes)

I’ve seen mixed reactions to this striking tale of a child abuse victim (Charles Melton) who marries his abuser (Julianne Moore) after she’s released from prison and raises a family with her, and the actress (Natalie Portman) who comes to study them in order to play her in a film. Mixed reactions are of course inevitable for a film so tonally strange: despite the uncomfortable subject matter, quite a few scenes are played for laughs. Me, I laughed at all the jokes (the “we’re out of hot dogs” line followed by dramatic music especially), cried inside at all the inner devastation laid bare (Charles Melton’s “graduation” to realising that all the women in his life have been abusing him especially), and laughed and cried inside at the same time during some scenes, such as when father and son smoke weed together on the roof (goofy, for sure, but combined with Melton’s “graduation” to realising that his actions in life might’ve accidentally fucked up his kid’s future). This film is many other things besides, including an essay on the mercilessness of actors, the vampirish way they observe and steal other’s personas for their own benefit. It all works like hell for me – but then I’m a huge fan of Persona and Mulholland Dr., and it appears that Haynes used those female-identity-blurring films to inspire this, perhaps his best one yet.

3: Killers of the Flower Moon (dir. Martin Scorsese)

A tale of American Evil in its purest form: the true story of the murder of Osage tribe members for their oil money in the early 20th century becomes a parable for all the evil committed by white Americans against indigenous populations before and since. Yet whilst evil in Scorsese’s older films was loud, aggressive, and in-your-face, with this and The Irishman, evil has instead become quiet, unflashy, and banal. Just as Robbie Robertson’s score hovers softly in the background for most of the movie, so does the presence of terrible evil, so that we gradually become accustomed to it; it becomes a fact of life as we’re watching. Until we’re confronted with Lily Gladstone, that is: a force and presence so strong that all of the characters in the film, plus the film’s very own director, and all of the non-Osage people in the audience, when faced with her are forced to confront their own complicity in her suffering, and the suffering of her people. She helps this to become an essential reckoning with the fundamental evil of America. There are many other outstanding performances besides, including career-best work from DiCaprio (it’s so difficult to depict stupidity without overdoing it or appearing condescending, but he nails it), and late-career-best work from De Niro (as the murderer who always comes with a smile).

4: The Fabelmans (dir. Steven Spielberg)

That the origin story of the world’s most successful film director fared so poorly at the box office (except for in France, the birthplace of cinema no less) shows that still, for most people, “art” is not a drug; they want entertainment instead. That’s fair enough and totally understandable, but those of us for whom the idea of art, making it and appreciating it, is a drug should be able to appreciate the complexity of how it’s scrutinised in this film. Art not only uncovers uncomfortable truths for Spielberg’s alter ego and other sensitive characters in his orbit, but it is also used as a means to smother those same truths. The spirit of John Ford is all over this, not least in showing how film’s printing of legends, time and time again, has managed to paradoxically uncover truths about themselves for attentive viewers. We often see ourselves in cinema’s artifice – but not always how we’d like to be seen. This is a penetrating film, decidedly mixed about whether the “magic” of cinema compensates for the great harm it can cause. That ambivalence, however, just makes the ending seem all the more genuinely magical: one of the best things Spielberg has ever done.

5: Anatomy of a Fall (dir. Justine Triet)

From the stark clash of the snowy alps and the blared steel-drum “P.I.M.P.” in the opening scene onwards, this is really a study of a terrible martial clash and breakdown disguised as a murder mystery. It’s also a disturbing account of one boy, who’s literally visually impaired, learning the terrible implications of the fact that we can never really know or understand what we can’t see. It’s not clear to him or us whether his mother killed his father – so we have to rely on composed narratives, guesswork, leaps of faith… or dogs instead. Ridiculously gripping and controlled until very near the end, where it seems to me that the film wants us to “see” a happy ending, despite the profound uncertainty beforehand as to whether certain characters deserve it. Nevertheless, the performances are as towering as the alpine peaks, including from the little boy.

6: The Eternal Daughter (dir. Joanna Hogg)

Writer’s block in an isolated hotel leads to “visions” and madness: this is The Shining but done with posh British people, which means there’s mildly ruffled feathers instead of axe-murdering. Joanna Hogg has a lot of fun playing with horror tropes and clichés in this semi-sequel to The Souvenir films, and Tilda Swinton has a lot of fun improvising with none other than Tilda Swinton, in the film’s first half. Swinton plays both mother and daughter, holidaying in the north of Wales in a house-turned-hotel that the mother used to live in. Creepily, Swinton often blurs the lines between the mannerisms of the two. Is the daughter turning into the mother, or the other way around? There are several crushing scenes involving the daughter’s realisation of how a certain big life choice has caused her mother, unintentionally, very great sadness – extremely well-played on both sides by Tilda Swinton – which upends the creepiness and turns this into a typically involving chamber piece character drama from Hogg. But the ever-creeping fog, the dark hallways, the sinister music, the Gothic architecture, and the slanted camera angles are all straight out of the Classic Hollywood Horror playbook, and the film is all the richer for them.

7: TÁR (dir. Todd Field)

You’ve probably heard about this one. In case you haven’t, Cate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who… Well, any more would be ruining the game. Talking about games, I must admit that not being a gamer, I had to look up the meaning of the film’s final scene. If you haven’t seen this film yet, you might be baffled by that sentence, which shows just how strong and surprising the ending is. It’s joined by a few other “what the hell…?” moments that steer this film away from the campy self-parody category. Whilst the film is too slow in its first half, it does set up a shift from adagio to allegro pacing in the second half, which works like a mouse trap snapping shut, and works very well. Is Cate Blanchett’s Tár the mouse or the trap? The film plays cleverly with the audience’s expectations about this, providing Blanchett with plenty of opportunity to flex her overacting muscles, including in a few egregiously overcooked scenes. But it’s the subtlety of the jokes that you’ll remember – the way that Mahler’s Symphony “No. 5”, which was to be the crown jewel of Lydia Tár’s career, comes to haunt her in a most unexpected way in a South-East Asian brothel, for instance.

8: Roald Dahl Anthology (dir. Wes Anderson)

I’ve seen a few end-of-year lists that have Asteroid City on them, but I don’t think I’ve seen any with any of the four other films Wes Anderson released this year, on Netflix (The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher, and Poison). I guess they’ve been overlooked because they’re all short films; if they’d been released as one anthology film, would it then have been correctly recognised by more critics as the best work that Anderson has done since The Grand Budapest Hotel? For Roald Dahl’s stories prove once again a perfect match for Anderson’s whimsy (yes, I had to use that word). By having characters narrate their actions straight to the camera, Wes Anderson dials up the self-conscious theatricality of his work even more than usual, and the results are sometimes fantastically funny (when the Great Yogi turns over his stool to make it look like he’s levitating in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar), sometimes surprisingly moving (the gentle sorrow in Ralph Fiennes’ eyes, as he narrates the ending to shocking bullying narrative The Swan, in one of the few moments of emotional nakedness in Wes Anderson’s filmography). Anderson for the most part maintains his pastel colour imagery and light, whimsical air, but goes suddenly off into horror territory (Ralph Fiennes’ physical transformation in The Rat Catcher) and macabre acts of violence (The Swan). He even manages to capture the full weight of colonialism’s horrors in the best of the anthology, Poison, which forces Benedict Cumberbatch into deeply unpleasant The Power of the Dog mode, and is filled with suspense the whole way through (before unleashing its venom in a way you weren’t expecting). Despite my knowledge of the dark undertones to much of Roald Dahl’s writing, and some of Wes Anderson’s filmmaking, I wasn’t prepared for these anthology films to be so upsetting. I give Wes Anderson full credit for not flinching from Dahl’s darkness, whilst keeping his slick entertainment machine still running.

9: Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (dir. Kelly Freeman Craig)

It’s something of a minor miracle that the only things that are twee and lame about this adaptation of the 1970 Judy Blume novel, about the growing pains of a group of 11 year old girls in New Jersey, are the Hans Zimmer score and a few of the too-neatly wrapped-up moments at the end. Elsewhere, the girls’ growing pains are communicated with remarkable effectiveness by the script and by the performances of the young actresses, who chant “We must! We must! We must increase our bust!” with the feral desperation of girls who feel their lives must depend on it. That the story ties body and self-confidence issues in with the growing pains of an American society still caught up in religious civil warfare, shown via the competing Christian and Jewish family members in Margaret’s life, makes the film all the more impressive as a portrait of its time (and our time – these growing pains continue on). You can feel that God’s silence, his lack of answering her prayers, is as exasperating to Margaret as her flat chest and failure to start her period – that it’s every bit as exasperating to her as it was to Ingmar Bergman. That’s strong stuff. Rachel McAdams and Kathy Bates also shine in strongly written roles as mother and grandmother, though the male roles, including Benny Safdie as the Jewish father, are underwritten. Never mind – this was a book proudly written for and about pre-teen girls, and the film follows that path equally loudly and proudly. Good for the film, and good for everyone involved.

10: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (dir. Laura Poitras)

She’s tackled controversial subjects before (Edward Snowden, Julian Assange), but here documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras turns to a subject that everyone can admire and love (well, everyone that matters): famed photographer and political activist Nan Goldin. It weaves together a dual narrative with skill. Roughly half of the film details Nan Goldin’s life story, from a tragedy-stricken childhood, to her rise as a prominent experimental photographer in the queer New York scene of the 70s and 80s, to the death of many of her friends and photographic subjects from AIDs. The other half shows her in the present day, leading an activist group called P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now) as they try to tackle the wealth and influence of the Sackler family, who became billionaires off the back of the highly addictive and often lethal prescription drug Oxycontin, and are overwhelmingly responsible for the opioid addiction crisis in America. Their campaign, targeting the prestigious museums and art galleries around the world who accepted donations and named wings for the Sackler family, is so successful, it has to be seen to be believed. Luckily you can see it here. The two halves of the film don’t seem to connect until the very end, where a key biographical detail reveals where Nan Goldin got her rebellious spirit from. At any rate, all of it is worth watching, not only to witness Goldin’s indomitable spirit, but also to witness the care with which Poitras has put the interviews, archive footage, and photographs from some of Goldin’s collections together.

11: How to Have Sex (dir. Molly Manning Walker)

Really excellent feature-length debut for director Molly Manning Walker. At first the three girls we follow who go on a post-exams holiday to the party resort of Malia just seem like typical teenagers: quite annoying to watch, hyperactive and full of inane chatter. But we are made to really care about one of them called Tara, played superbly by Mia McKenna-Bruce, as her insecurities are revealed to us and also are shown to be preyed on in the most foul, evil way possible by one of the “lads” they meet in an adjacent hotel room. There are a few contrivances that are a bit much, such as the “lads” having in their group a butch lesbian, just for the lesbian in the girls’ group to get with. But overall, this is very authentic-feeling about what teenagers are like on these sort of booze-n’-sex party holidays, and the close-up heavy camerawork cleverly makes the looming threat of over-pushy men at these places appear all the more intimidating.

12: Joyland (dir. Saim Sadiq)

Initially banned in Pakistan for depicting the country’s trans community, this turns out to be not a daring act of cinematic transgression but an Ozu-like family drama about two married brothers living with their disabled father that are trying to support their families. The trans character, played by Alina Khan, is really a supporting role, though Khan plays her with enough domineering force that she manages to seize control of the narrative, just as she seizes the attention of the younger brother (played calmly, like a cool breeze to Khan’s cyclone, by Ali Junejo). Lucky that debut director Saim Sadiq has the compassion of Ozu, so that his family drama makes a bid to understand all of the elements within the family, plus all of the participants in the love triangle that emerges as a threat to the familial structure. Sadiq stoops to melodrama more than Ozu, and only the use of colour and lighting in some scenes demonstrates a true cinematic sensibility. But this is a strong debut, one that needles its way under the surface of Pakistan’s society, to show the depressing burden of patriarchal and masculine expectations on sensitive souls.

13: Return to Seoul (dir. Davy Chou)

Park Ji-min gives perhaps the best performance I’ve seen all year as Freddie, a Korean adopted in France who returns to her “homeland” to find her birth parents. Incredibly, it’s her acting debut. Hard, cool, vulnerable; both attentive to and dismissive of people; she gives off so many contradictory vibes, yet Park Ji-min manages to make Freddie feel like a whole person, even when the film’s ruthless structure keeps jumping forward several years at a time. This does make it feel disjointed and hard work to keep up with. But that suits Freddie’s character, who threatens to ditch the men in her life at the snap of a finger, just as she was abandoned at the snap of a finger as a baby by her birth parents. The film keeps snapping its fingers; she keeps disappearing from our view for years at a time. The lesson is one about the fragility of human relationships, and it’s a haunting one.

14: Passages (dir. Ira Sachs)

A gay film director (Franz Rogowski) cheats on his husband (Ben Whishaw) with a young woman (Adèle Exarchopoulos) in Paris, which is only the native city for one of this surprising love triangle. That premise and the actor lineup should be enough to secure your interest in this already – if you’ve been following the art film world for the last decade or so, that is. If not, imagine if you will a scene where Franz Rogowski turns up late, on a rusty old bicycle and in a see-through crop top, for his first meeting with the young lady’s French parents. It’s 1000x funnier than anything in “Meet the Parents”. The film takes on this man going through an identity crisis, never forgetting the hurt that he causes others in his “explorations”: by making Rogowski a film director, is Ira Sachs admitting that this is something of a confessional? It doesn’t matter: the results are too entertaining to care about the extent to which it’s autobiography.

15: You Hurt My Feelings (dir. Nicole Holofcener)

Suitable that this stars legend of the small screen Julia Louis-Dreyfus, because it’s shot very much like a TV comedy-drama, with a simple camera set-up designed to best capture the actors’ faces. Also because, like Seinfeld, the film ends with no lessons learnt: the characters still telling each other multiple white lies a day, just to simply get by in life, and not risk offending other people. That’s the theme of the film: the white lies we tell, even to our families, and the unintended pain these can cause when unveiled. It’s kind of amazing to me that nobody before has really attempted to tackle that concept – it’s probably a big part of everyone’s lives. Yet here it is, if not perfectly executed, then perfectly conceived.

16: Elemental (dir. Peter Sohn)

Not widely loved, but I thought the concept of this, a world where elements can interact with each other, was one of the most fully-realised in Pixar’s recent catalogue. What’s more, there’s an unashamed romance at its centre, between a “fire element” girl and a “water element” boy, that might be Pixar’s sweetest since WALL-E. The scene where the two travel in an air bubble in a flooded station to view “Vivisteria flowers” is a magical, phantasmagorical animation sequence, like Aladdin’s “Whole New World” in an even more fantastical realm. And the couple’s dilemma, the fear that they can’t touch without harming one another, has exciting parallels to Frozen and Elsa’s dilemma: fear over intimacy with others is clearly the allegorical subtext in both cases. There’s another subtext as well, though less subtle: the fears about “elements” mixing in a big city is a commentary on America’s recent arguments over immigration (director Peter Sohn himself grew up in an immigrant family in 1970s New York). Like all recent Pixar films, it could do with a lighter touch and some more gags, but it’s nevertheless a poignant experience.

17: Saint Omer (dir. Alice Diop)

I was a bit taken aback at first because it was not what I was expecting – I’d been led by comparisons to Anatomy of a Fall to expect a similarly gripping legal drama. Instead, this slow-moving film, shot in long static shots, prefers to put some distance between itself and the audience’s expectations. It concerns a Senegalese immigrant studying in France who is appearing in court charged with the murder of her 15-month old child – which she doesn’t deny, but pleads Not Guilty to anyway, on the basis that she was the victim of witchcraft. It’s also about a writer and academic who comes to watch the trial, with the aim to write about it, but due to certain secrets gets more personally involved in the case than is probably healthy. It’s mostly a discourse on motherhood, about the connecting tissue that unites all mothers and daughters across the world; its interest in the court case tends to ebb and flow. So Anatomy of a Fall it ain’t (despite also being French and largely set in court). Well-made and surprising in its construction it is – just don’t expect a clear-cut ending.

18: Barbie (dir. Greta Gerwig)

Respect to Greta Gerwig for maintaining her trademark style (witty, fast-paced, full of smart talk) in a mainstream setting, and with such an unlikely subject. Respect also to the cast, who as in all of her movies, seem to be having so much fun. Less respect, a lot less respect, for the Mattel subplot, which panders to that company’s “feminist” view of itself, via Will Ferrell’s dim but likeable CEO who insists money isn’t everything (the film includes a few soft blows, as if the company wanted to prove they could take a joke). I was also a little disappointed by elements of the script, which drags in places, especially towards the end, and deals in too many platitudes. But that’s only when it’s not dealing in wit, which it has in spades. Love the colours, sets, hair, make-up, costumes, general world-building as well. Life in plastic? It’s fantastic. Dialogue in plastic? The jury’s still out.

19: Marcel the Shell With Shoes On (dir. Dean Fleischer Camp)

Inquisitive and charming, yet coated in a hard shell metaphorically as well as literally, Marcel is one of the most likeable screen characters in recent years. His charm, embodied by Jenny Slate’s voice performance, helps to propel the film through its weaker patches – as with Pixar’s films, I sometimes feel myself resistant to its blatant attempts to yank water from my tear ducts. Yet there’s meaning here: it’s a film about stubbornness, about resistance to change, and about documentary filmmaker’s reluctance to expose themselves, about the way they try to hide behind their subjects – as if going into a shell. The animation is cute, too.

20: Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (dir. Christopher McQuarrie)

The first 45 minutes or so and the last 45 minutes or so are the most fun I’ve had in a blockbuster film in quite some time: action sequences choreographed with joy and suspense (and humour – at one point Tom Cruise crashes through a train window at so precisely the right moment, it counts as an impeccable display of comic timing on the editing team’s part). In between there’s a lull, including some noodling about in Venice that would require an affection for the characters that we don’t have in order to work. But fans know it’s not the script or acting (though Simon Pegg is very watchable) that matter in this franchise, it’s the set pieces and stunts, and on those fronts this one delivers the goods. Plus, in having AI as the villain, it may prove to be the most prescient action film of its era.

Top 10 TV Shows of 2023

Last year I noted the fact that TV-viewing has become so atomised, divided into different streaming subscription packages that most people can’t afford or justify subscribing to every one, that it’s become difficult to make lists of the best TV shows. On top of this atomisation, which makes it difficult to truly guage consensus, there’s the obvious fact that TV shows are much longer than films or music, so I have never been able to get above 10 on my list for a year, and even that is something of a struggle to manage.

Why? Because I end up wasting a lot of time watching boring shit that comes highly recommended from various publications or other online sources (I do tend to follow Twitter hype when choosing what to watch, I’m afraid). I don’t want to be overly negative and list all the shows that I had to give up on, but if it isn’t on the list below and it was a highly-rated or -discussed show this year, I probably gave it a go.

I will mention one, though. The Last of Us. Maybe it’s because I’m not versed in the game, maybe it’s because I’ve never found horror particularly interesting or scary… Or maybe it’s just, as it seemed to me, it wasn’t good enough at character drama, it didn’t have great chemistry between the characters (Bella Ramsey was good in individual scenes, but I always felt her efforts fell a bit flat in the face of Pedro Pascal’s blankness), and that after an intriguing opening premise the story quickly ran out of juice. I didn’t particularly care about these people or their troubles. I tried watching it once and gave up halfway through the first episode. But after all the adulatory press, especially for the third episode, I tried again, made it to the third episode, didn’t think it was all that (an example of what a couple of gay friends of mine call derisively the “gay pity narrative”), and gave up again shortly into the fourth episode.

I don’t think I’ll ever understand that series, but I realise that the fault might be my own, not the series’. Clearly a majority of viewers are crazy about it, something about it really touches them, and that’s great. It makes me feel disappointed not to be able to partake in a cultural phenomenon, even a minor one. So that’s why I try series again, and sometimes, BOOM, it works: I gave up two episodes into the first season of The Bear, but after it topped so many lists last year, I decided to give it another go before Season 2 came out. I still found it shouty and kind of annoying, but I liked Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri enough to continue with it. Lucky I did, because as you’ll see below, I fell hard for Season 2, in which they turned the hob down on all the shouting thank God (that did wonders for my interest in Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s character, cousin Richie), went more ambitious and pulled it off, and secured me as a viewer for as long as they want to keep making more series. I don’t think it’s as good as Succession, a comparably lauded series. But I can now see the attraction, can get on board with the hype, which makes me feel great.

The best show I saw this year though was a surprise out of nowhere, with only the ever-brilliant Steven Yeun’s name on it as one of the leads, and the fact that it was produced by A24, to signal its potential quality. A weird show with a weird premise, it ended up blowing me away, partly by becoming weirder than I could ever have possibly imagined in its wonderful final episode. No other show this year expanded the bounds of what TV series can do as much as this one. Read on below:

1: Beef (Netflix)

Road rage between two Asian-Americans. That’s it, that’s the whole concept. Not hooked? Well, how about if that road rage leads to acts of revenge, which become so intense and spiral so far out of control that their rage balloons out across space and time and winds up destroying everything and everyone in its path like a black hole? That’s the concept. It’s quirky enough to sound like light comedy, and it is funny – sometimes very (the intervention of crows near the end is an incredible cosmic joke). But it works great as drama as well, following characters marked by an inability to control their emotions, whilst somehow making their hysteria sympathetic: they have an existential angst that we can all share, to various extents. This is what makes the escalating attacks these road rage freaks perpetrate on each other so absorbing – we care about their lives and their fuck-ups. We want them to overcome their rage and forge meaningful connections with each other, and others. So the final entanglement between these two is not just done in a totally surprising and unique way, it’s also surprisingly moving. Credit the smart writing and directing of a host of Asian-Americans, led by Korean-born Lee Sung Jin (the show’s creator) for making the bizarre concept work so well. Credit also the cast, and not just the leads (Steven Yeun and Ali Wong – both outstanding): David Choe is not only hysterically funny as sketchy jailbird Isaac, he also provided the title card paintings to each episode, which are the perfect surreal mood-setters.

2: Succession (Season Four) (HBO)

Alas! The most entertaining show on TV is no more. The Rupert Murdoch-inspired inheritance drama’s final season went out with a darker, more sinister vibe to it than usual. And not just because, as you’ve probably heard, one of the main characters dies. In this series, youngest son Roman (Kieran Culkin, surpassing anything his previously more famous brother has ever done) cracked wise less, cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) spluttered about like a fish on dry land less – this season just wasn’t as funny. But because everyone fucked each other over just that little bit harder, as befitting a grand finale, it remained the most entertaining show on TV, whilst providing more evidence that boardroom meetings can be every bit as gripping as action sequences when written well enough to invest us in all of the characters and their snakelike motives. The reaction to the last episode online was very positive – mine was a little more mixed. I thought a certain last-minute twist wasn’t properly built up to or adequately explained, so that it worked as a short sharp shock, but not as a satisfying dramatic conclusion (like Game of Thrones, you know in Succession when a character’s in for a nasty surprise because it’s preceded by a rare happy scene for them – a “gotcha!” move that’s a little cheap and becomes predictable). But the acting was amazing throughout, just amazing from everyone. I wasn’t bored for a second the whole series. That’s how it goes with snakes – they’re mighty hard to look away from.

3: Heartstopper (Season Two) (Netflix)

Those who follow this blog will know that this show was of special importance to me this year. But it would be highly ranked here anyway, because it’s not only the most adorable show on air, it’s also one of the most meaningful. Following Nick and Charlie as they navigate their mid-teens and first love, this series at first seems to be about the difficulties of “coming out”. But then it becomes something else along the way: a celebration of the safe spaces created where you can truly be yourself, gay or lesbian, bisexual or asexual, whatever you want. “Coming out” therefore becomes of less importance, when these safe spaces are created, as they can truly be themselves in private bedrooms, exclusive parties, the streets and galleries of Paris… Or in the artworks they create, the books they read, the friends they choose to surround themselves with… Their families could be a safe space too, if they’re lucky. Perhaps the most ecstatic moments in this series are when the characters who threaten this sense of safety are shut out of the queer group’s self-created safe spaces. Most of all, when Charlie slams the door shut on a homophobe, denying him access to an LGBTQ+ party. The series works so well, it even creates the illusion of its own communal safe space, shared between the characters onscreen and the viewer; you feel safe yourself watching it. I adore that illusion – and can only imagine how great it feels to any LGBTQ+ viewers, especially young ones, watching.

4: Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence (Hulu)

Almost unbearable; an unspeakably shocking documentary about the victims of Larry Ray, a supposed Marines veteran who manipulated a group of his daughter’s student friends at Sarah Lawrence College into coming to live with him in his New York apartment, where they soon found themselves part of a vicious cult centred entirely around satisfying his whims. Things slide from bad to worse as he uses coercive control, bullying, torture, blackmail, and extreme gaslighting to get them to turn their backs on their families, leave behind their college degrees unfinished, do hard manual labour, enter sex trafficking, and in thousands of other ways have their lives ruined by his physical, mental and sexual abuse. Much of this is recalled in interviews with the victims (Larry Ray is now in prison for the rest of his life, thank God), but some of it (including real-life scenes of torture, it must be warned) is shown to us in video and audio footage recorded by Ray himself as part of bizarre “evidence” he was collecting to prove a vast conspiracy against himself by the FBI and Rudy Giuliani, apparently to destroy him and ruin his reputation. This is all even more harrowing than I make it sound, because the documentary’s mixture of live footage of coercive control techniques and interviews with the victims who are still left questioning their reality over a decade later, shows more clearly than anything I’ve seen just how irreparably damaging the result of such pervasive control is. That clarity is why, despite how harrowing this show is, I think it’s an essential watch.

5: The Bear (Season Two) (Hulu)

What an improvement! Half a world away from the first series, in terms of quality. This season of the Chicago kitchen-based drama was just bigger and better in every way, with longer episodes, more locations, a bigger cast, and more nuanced character development. In a sign that the acting world had cottoned onto this series’ potential before I did, a large number of celebrities signed up for cameos on this one, including Will Poulter, Olivia Colman, Bob Odenkirk and Jamie Lee Curtis. They’re all great, but those last two in particular deliver performances that eclipse the more popular roles they’ve done recently (in Better Call Saul and Everything Everywhere…) by allowing themselves to appear as real, harsh, damaged and unlikeable people. They really challenge themselves. The episode they both appear in is a one-hour Christmas special that obliterates the good-cheer such episodes usually bring with one of the most memorably disastrous family meals ever seen onscreen. But that episode is an exception to the general rule of the show, which despite aspirations to being accepted as a high-minded, serious drama, is at heart just a sentimental, cheesy tale about a Team Coming Together To Get The Job Done. But that’s ok – I mean, what quality restaurant doesn’t serve up a little cheese?

6: Planet Earth III (BBC)

Watching a Planet Earth series is to think “that might just be the most beautiful shot I’ve ever seen” for every single shot, over and over, episode after episode, until the series ends. Years in the making, this massive project presented all the usual problems for wildlife photographers, with some new ones presented by mankind’s interference in nature: a lot of the “behind the scenes” sections this time are about the crew deciding whether to intervene and help animals caught on rubbish, in fishing nets etc., whereas before they’d strictly adhered to not intervening at all. It seems reasonable that the crew should intervene in cases where human action has caused animal distress or potential fatality; but it’s the fact that we’ve come to the point where this question repeatedly needs to be asked that is so depressing. So of course this series is focussing more than ever on the human impact on the animal world through manmade climate change, over-fishing, poor waste management etc. etc. There is nothing as devastating as the “Walrus Island” segment of Our Planet to demonstrate this. But it’s there throughout the whole series, alongside all the usual amazing animals and stories (even if a lot of the animals will now be familiar to long-time viewers of Attenborough documentaries such as myself).

7: Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland (BBC)

A 5-part documentary account of “The Troubles” from the makers of Once Upon a Time in Iraq, which follows the same technique of only interviewing normal people caught up in the conflict, with no interviews of politicians or anybody else in power at the time. This follow-up to Iraq is therefore similarly lacking in detailed historical context, which makes it somewhat limited in its view. But it’s also equally as harrowing, containing interviews not only with Catholic and Protestant victims, but also with Catholic and Protestant terrorists, whose regret and mixed feelings today are tangible. It can be exhausting to watch tragedy after tragedy recounted, no matter how vital each one is in helping us to improve our understanding of the whole complex, awful situation. So it’s all the more surprising when the show comes to an end with a quite extraordinary tale of forgiveness and redemption, which has lessons to teach us all.

8: The American Buffalo (PBS)

Documenting the human history of America for the TV format has been Ken Burns’ great gift to the world. Yet this year he decided to turn away from humans and make an animal his subject. This is only partially true, of course, because any history of the “American” buffalo is also going to be a history of the Native American tribes, for whom the animal is sacred and was the supplier of the majority of their food and tools to survive for several thousand years. The first episode covers that sacred link between native people and buffalo, the care they took to honour the buffalo they killed and use every part of their body, and shows how it was broken by the arrival of white Europeans who introduced industrialised slaughter to the land and wound up nearly entirely wiping out the 10 million+ population of wild buffalo, just to skin them for hides and leave their carcasses to rot. The second episode shows how conservationists at the turn of the century managed to turn the tide away from extinction for the animal, not always (or even usually) for honourable reasons (the white settlers wanted to preserve them for hunting, taxidermy, sticking them in a zoo, and other profitable motives). So it’s a twisted redemption arc, in which white Europeans nearly wipe out an entire ecosystem for profit, and then attempt to rebuild it through national parks and federal laws – but only for the sake of further profit. The ending is rightfully uncertain: global warming isn’t mentioned outright, but the implication that our greed and lust for short-term profit could serve yet again to wipe out not just buffaloes but thousands of other great species besides hovers over it like a foul stench. You can trust Ken Burns, like Attenborough, not to hold his nose and look away.

9: Barry (Season Four)


I said of the previous series that it “turns jumping the shark into an art form”. And while I wouldn’t go that far with this one, the final series, it still has its moments. Former SNL comedian Bill Hader not only plays assassin/wannabe actor Barry, he also writes three episodes and directs every single one this time around. He wants to be taken seriously, to leave no doubt as to who the real auteur of Barry is. Which is interesting, because the main theme that emerges from the show is how people go out of their way to promote powerful images of themselves, which are often far from the truth (both in L.A.’s acting world and in the Chechnyan mob world). But I think Hader deserves to be credited as an auteur, because what appears to be his direction is unique and slick as shit: this show captures the minutiae of violence outstandingly well, and Hader has an intuitive eye for where to place the camera and how long to leave shots running to mount the tension and/or surreality of a situation. His understanding of people so far seems to be limited to just being able to sniff out their bullshit, and when Barry finishes with a very Scorsesesque touch showing how real-life violence can be received and rewired by the media and public, it doesn’t quite pull it off with the same subtlety as that master. But serious promise is certainly there in Hader.

10: Daisy Jones & the Six (Amazon)

I was torn, because I’m loath to give a place on this list to a show with such an appalling ending – so ghastly, so manipulative, so untrue to life. But I really enjoyed myself up until that point. This is the story of the rise and fall of a fictional Fleetwood Mac-type band, based on a 2019 novel. The show gets so well how warring egos in a band must pretend to get along in order to make music, and how so often that pretence can lead to real romantic sparks flying. Set in the 70s, the show nails all the period details from the costumes down to the hairdos; even down to the songs, which are a darned sight better than the usual fictional band stuff. But there are really only two reasons to watch this: lead actors Riley Keough and Sam Claflin. As the defacto leader of the band in its early years, Sam Claflin exudes an irresistible charisma, which is suddenly shattered by the label’s decision to put The Six together with lead singer Daisy Jones. Watching him try to put the pieces of his authority back together again following Jones’ arrival is the series’ greatest joy, its greatest source of humour and conflict. Riley Keough plays Jones as a whirlwind of energy who destroys as much as she manages to create a grand sense of opportunity for the band. The scenes where these two giant egos clash in the studio are priceless: they snipe at each other like vicious hounds off the leash. But just as hounds only fight because they’re of the same species, so it is with these two rock stars. They really are the same species. They only clash with each other because they know deep down it’s like they’re shouting at their own reflection in a mirror… And they can’t stand what’s being reflected back.

Top 20 Albums of 2023

I’ve been doing these lists since 2016 and not once has my favourite album been by a man, or by a male-led group. When will men get their act together and release something on the level of Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters, Beyoncé’s Renaissance or this year’s winner, Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts? I’m just not hearing the same urgency or insatiable need to express themselves musically in the male stars of today as I am in the women. That doesn’t mean there aren’t excellent male artists around, some of whom you’ll find in the list below (including an encouraging new contingent of country stars). But to my ears, for the last few years women have been ruling the roost in the musical world simply because they project more passion, dedication and care with regards to their projects, and are lifted to even higher levels by stronger lyrical content that’s probably the result of the industry cutting the bolts on female artists and allowing them to express themselves more freely than at any other time in the history of recorded music.

Whatever the reason, it’s a trend I’d be happy to see continue, if it results in the kind of quality of the above listed albums.

One trend that’s a lot less positive is the decline of hip-hop as the most exciting musical genre. In this, the year of hip-hop’s 50th anniversary, I would’ve hoped for better than just 3 new releases making my list, with one more genre-hopper that a case could be made for (Young Fathers). They’re all strong, but don’t trouble my top 5. The last time a hip-hop album was my favourite of the year? 2015’s To Pimp a Butterfly, after which I was telling everyone who would listen that hip-hop was the most exciting musical genre on the planet. What’s with the sudden lull? I could blame a number of things, most of all the negative influence of Drake and trap on the genre (leading to valorisation of whiny self-pity and being anti-beats). But it may just be part of the natural artistic/commercial rise and fall, or ebb and flow, that afflicts all musical genres. There will always be interesting hip-hop artists, but will hip-hop ever dominate the cultural sphere again, as it did in its first 50 years? I really hope so.

Meanwhile, in my list, an amazingly strong showing for country artists. Often sneered at for being “corny”, if talked about at all (most in the UK ignore the genre’s existence), for those in the know Nashville has long been an amazing powerhouse for producing exceptional singer-songwriters. This is perhaps because a lot of singers first get their foot in the door there by getting writing credits on others’ songs, and often continue co-writing for bigger artists to make their living profitable (see the indefatigable Lori McKenna, who appears on her own below but co-wrote on several other albums). The current Nashville roster seems to me the strongest in history, with outstanding command of songcraft becoming increasingly common. Their music is, for the most part, far removed from “corny”. Replace that insult with “down-to-earth”, “impassioned”, “unflinching”, “sharp”, and “witty“ and you’d be getting much closer to the truth.

So country singers and female pop stars seem to be overtaking hip-hop as the dominant artistic forces in the musical world, at least from my perspective. Yours may vary; do let me know what I’ve missed out and if I haven’t already listened to it, I promise that I’ll try.

1: Olivia Rodrigo – Guts

The pop event of the year for me was pressing play on her new single “Vampire” the day it was released, whilst on a train on a visit back to England. It would be an exaggeration to say my jaw dropped – but only a slight one. Follow-up single “Bad Idea Right?” was nearly as good: “blah blah blah”? An ingenious hook. Then the whole album was released, and at first it didn’t strike me as hard as the singles; I felt a bit of sonic whiplash from the constant switch-ups between hard rockers and soft ballads. But here it is, many relistens later, in its rightful place at the top of my albums list. I adore everything about it now, from the gorgeous 80s pastiche “Pretty Isn’t Pretty” to the acoustic lament “Lacy”, by way of all those precious pop-punk moments, which make a person like me, whose ears tend to perk up at catchy-ass rock tunes, whoop and holler. I see her compared to Avril Lavigne a lot, but the truth is that Rodrigo is both harder-edged and more convincingly vulnerable at the same time – just plain better. A superior songwriter too – she nails the travails of being a homeschooled kid with such witty precision in “Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl” that there really never needs to be another song on the subject. And if she’s not the first person to notice the double meaning in the phrase “Get Him Back!”, or to build a whole song around it (“Wanna kiss his face/With an uppercut” etc.), then why is she the first one I can remember? Same goes with “famefucker” – how did nobody else think of that? To top it all off, with “Teenage Dream”, there’s the second great song from a teenager about the fear of aging to grace us in the last few years (after Billie Eilish’s “Getting Older”). What a show!

Inspirational line: “I wanna key his car/I wanna make him lunch/I wanna break his heart/And be the one to stitch it up/Wanna kiss his face/With an uppercut/I wanna meet his mom/Just to tell her her son sucks” (from “Get Him Back!”)

2: Boygenius – The Record

If you count them as a supergroup, they’re clearly the best to form since the Pistol Annies. Like that group, this one is comprised of a trio of female talents who work equally well together and apart, and are willing to both display their idiosyncrasies in separate songs, and work together to create hauntingly affecting harmonies that provide a unifying aural concept. They all write extremely well, and if I tend to lean more towards the wry humour of Lucy Dacus’ lyrics, at the same time I’m surprised to note that it’s the usually morose Julien Baker who seems to take them into harder-rocking musical territory on this album with “Satanist” and song-of-the-year contender “$20”, and it’s Phoebe Bridgers who appears to lift songs like “Not Strong Enough” into more ambitious arrangements, with such surprising about-faces as the “Always an angel never a God” scattered-drums segment. Which is to say, they’re all equally important on an album that, despite its general subdued folk aesthetic, can turn at a moment’s notice from wit to despair to murmured threats of violence. Subdued, depressive folkies they ain’t – or at least that doesn’t encompass all that they are. Nothing can encompass all of it in writing.

Inspirational line: “Will you still love me if it turns out I’m insane?/I know what you’ll say, but it helps to hear you say it anyway” (from “We’re in Love”)

3: Lewis Capaldi – Broken By Desire To Be Heavenly Sent

Probably the choice that will raise the most eyebrows. That’s because the very thing that has made Lewis Capaldi such a big hit in the UK has caused him also to be scorned by critics and “highbrow” music fans: his love of corny ballads. True, there’s a truckload of corn in his music, from the heartbroken woe-is-me lyrics, to the yowled vocals, to the icky key changes he likes so much. As if overblown was his only setting, there’s even an attempt at a “Purple Rain” power ballad, complete with stadium-ready guitar solo. And ok, he’s no Prince. But I love that “Purple Rain” ripoff anyway: its corn has gunpowder in its belly. And the more you investigate each element of the dude’s corn, the more you discover similar gunpowder burrowed within each song. The lyrics, for example, take well-worn themes about painful break-ups and imbues them with a sincere humility that can startle: I get misty-eyed when Capaldi sings “You’re the only one who doesn’t hate me, that’s enough” (“that’s enough” is the killer), or “when I said we could be friends, guess I lied” (“guess I lied” is the killer – he’s great at those tossed-off bonus clauses). The vocals get a little tiresome over the course of an album, with the trick of mumbled verses leading to belted-out choruses getting a tad repetitive. But he nevertheless yelps like a trooper, and with an eagerness to power through to the hoarse outer edges of his vocal ability that makes him more endearing than other ordinary-schlub male pop stars like Ed Sheeran or James Blunt. His songs might lack the delicious wit of his public appearances, but chorus after chorus will get stuck in your head anyway, which is simply another sign of his enthusiasm to endear himself to as wide an audience as possible. Endear himself he does: all in all, this is a masterpiece of ordinary expression.

Inspirational line: “I bring her coffee in the morning/She brings me inner peace” (from “Pointless”)

4: Robert Forster – The Candle And The Flame

The opener, with its lively guitar riff and “She’s a fighter/Fighting for good” refrain sounds like the Aussie songwriter (one half of the songwriting team behind Australia’s greatest band, The Go-Betweens) trying to write a superhero theme. The second track, “Tender Years”, makes clear that the superhero is actually his wife: “I’m in a story with her, I know I can’t live without her/I can’t imagine one”. Then the third track, “It’s Only Poison”, adds unbearable weight to those lines, revealing just why he considers her a superhero: “It’s written deep in scripture that you can save yourself/It’s only poison meant to drive you mad/It’s only poison and it’s all they have”. That poison is nothing less than the chemotherapy his wife and fellow musician, Karin Bäumler, started undergoing to treat her ovarian cancer, diagnosed in 2021. These songs were apparently written before that diagnosis, but they were recorded after, and that’s what’s crucial to the telling of their story. The lyrics have been reappropriated to combat the couple’s new life-or-death struggle, to give them the strength to battle on and beat the disease with the only tools they have: the literal “poison” of chemotherapy, and the metaphorical antidote of music. Bäumler appears on backing vocals on “It’s Only Poison” and several other tracks, plus contributes xylophone, and her presence at a time when she was undergoing treatment for the illness lends weight to the songs, deepens them, and makes clear how justified Forster’s awe for her truly is.

Inspirational line: “The body is a temple/The mind is a box/Your heart is like a river that no one can stop” (from “It’s Only Poison”)

5: Lori McKenna – 1988

More exquisite country tunes about home life and family from one of Nashville’s premier songwriters. It’s getting hard to distinguish between her albums because the quality is always so high. Put this on or her last one, The Balladeer, and you’ll hear something truly special though: down-home songs filtered through the pen and thoughtfulness of a wife and mother who knows the ups-and-downs of life, knows that “some days are dirt, some days are honey”, and knows how to illuminate the details in both the dirt and the honey to make them sound like epic deconstructions of life itself. The album is named after the year she met her husband, since when she’s been his “biggest fan”. But she doesn’t let him off the hook. She’s happy to call him to task for certain failures: “would it kill you to be happy?/‘Cause tryna make you happy/Tryna make you happy is killing me/Killing me” she sings in quiet desperation, the repetitions drawing circles around her frustration like a broken pencil in her hand. Other complications to life include a friend suffering from addiction, which makes her wonder “why couldn’t love be the wonder drug?”, and a lament about “Letting People Down” (“I do it all the time” she claims). That’s the “dirt” of life – the “honey” comes from a song co-written with one of her children called “Happy Children”, the music throughout the whole thing (especially the great bass work), plus a finale called “The Tunnel” which goes “There’s a light at the end, a light at the end…”, ending on an ellipsis, the repetition finally adding emotional uplift rather than heartbreak.

Inspirational line: “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” (from “The Tunnel”)

6: Young Fathers – Heavy Heavy

Defiantly hard to categorise as ever, this Scottish troupe’s fourth album encompasses hip-hop, soul, rock, gospel, and many other genres besides. They’re tremendous at all of it. Despite the dense mix, though, they ain’t heavy: they’re your brothers. The mood they conjure up is one of harmony and togetherness – though not in a stupid, unthinking kind of way. On the last track, for instance, they claim to want to take ten pounds of loving out of the bank (even adding a polite “please”), but they also want to shake up the bag a little, stick a needle in their eye: “All I have is mad/All I have is crazy”. Harmonising and brotherhood will only get you so far in this crazy-ass world, even in Scotland, often regarded as the kindest and most welcoming part of the UK. Violence and competition can be just around the corner for any young man, but particularly young black men in this still-racist world. In which case, “crazy” is just a means of survival. These youngsters embody such contradictions, embrace them even. And if they ultimately leave you with a sense of hope rather than despair, that’s mostly because of the warmth and maturity of their multiculturally-inspired music.

Inspirational line: “I foiled thе mission, no superstition, I am the vision/Young, black, gifted with ambition” (from “Drum”)

7: JPEGMAFIA & Danny Brown – Scaring The Hoes

Ignore the album title and much of the lyrics and you have the most forward-thinking hip-hop of the year. JPEGMAFIA shines more as a producer than as a rapper and his soundscapes are wild, eclectic and surprising here, rising to the challenge of Danny Brown’s famously oddball wordplay and wheezy vocal delivery. They do their best to outweird each other, but in a playful way, like a game of oneupmanship amongst freaky kids in a playground. Perhaps the most surprising thing, then, is that the album hangs together so well: it’s got flow, it’s got juice from start to finish, it never gets tiresome. From Nintendo samples to iPhone notifications to out-of-tune squawking brass to off-key keys, none of this should work or go together. But it all does.

Inspirational line: “She just took my soul up out my body” (from “Orange Juice Jones”)

8: Wednesday – Rat Saw God

To name your band after the most despised day of the week shows a kind of wicked perversity, which also happens to be evident in the noise-rock crash-and-burn of this band’s music. These folks don’t sound like how most people experience Wednesday: as a mid-week drag, an enervating blues. There’s not an inch of the blues in their bodies. They sound more like a Monday, on this, their fifth album: fresh and invigorated, ready to take on all comers. Or like a Sunday – see the leisurely rollout of the 8-minute “Bull Believer”, which gives lead vocalist Karly Hartzman a chance to stretch out, purr and mew (and eventually screech) like a cat. Or like a Friday, what with the energy of the guitars, which overcome end-of-week exhaustion with the loud promise of good times to come. They’re a band of variety, in other words: they encompass the tone of an entire week’s peaks and valleys. Except, that is, for the mid-week blues.

Inspirational line: “She says “America’s a spoiled child that’s ignorant of grief”/But then she gives out full-sized candy bars on Halloween” (from “Quarry”)

9: Noname – Sundial

Let’s get the controversy out of the way first: fuck Jay Electronica for his anti-Semitic verse on “Balloons”, and fuck Noname for doubling down and refusing to remove it from her album. It makes me feel uncomfortable about liking the rest of her album so much, but there’s no point in trying to write about popular music (with its shameful history of indulging just about every bad “-ism” you can think of) if you’re going to obfuscate your honest reactions. And in all honesty, this sounds as strong as Room 25 to me, filled to the brim with pleasurable jazzy loops, thick and warbly basslines, hi-hat drumming, slinky flowing rhymes, and plenty of references to the pussy that on the last album it was claimed wrote a thesis on colonialism. Racial and sexual politics are still on her mind a lot, of course, and she makes unique observations on both of them. Other moments will make you stop and go “hmm…”, though, like “People say they love you but they really love potential”, or when she calls out Kendrick, Beyoncé and Rihanna for supporting the “military industrial complex”. Complex she ain’t. But sometimes just making you go “hmm…” is enough.

Inspirational line: “Itty bitty titty committee/The world with me, your girl with me/And I don’t even really like pussy” (from “Namesake”)

10: Zach Bryan – Zach Bryan

Curiously downbeat and self-absorbed for someone who is unquestionably the Next Big Thing in country music, Zach Bryan managed to hit the top of both the Billboard albums and singles charts with this self-titled effort and its Kacey Musgraves duet “I Remember Everything”. His crossover success is incredible, but on paper it doesn’t make much sense – an ex-Navy officer who quit to focus on releasing an enormous number of softly sung, acoustic country songs, which somehow caught the zeitgeist and catapulted him to near-instant fame. The secret is in his vocals, which are drenched in romantic yearning and thoughtful sensitivity, a combination that can touch millions when perfected. People just love a sensitive soul. Plus, his songs’ quiet settings allow their lyrics to stand out, which in their un-sexist relationship complaints and carefully painted autobiographical details create the same kind of illusion of intimacy that once catapulted Taylor Swift out of the country music scene into the wider spotlight. He has an uncanny ear for who to collaborate with to enhance his subdued style as well, especially on “Hey Driver”, which wouldn’t be much of a song without the blinding backing vocals of The War and Treaty. There’s also his crazy work ethic: this one-hour album followed a two-hour one last year, and was followed just a few months later by a worthy EP that’s also worth checking out, Boys Of Faith. An indefatigable spirit with a knack for universalising his woes? No wonder he’s so big.

Inspirational line: “The sun’s gonna rise tomorrow/Somewhere on the east side of sorrow” (from “East Side of Sorrow”)

11: CMAT – Crazymad, For Me

Irish singer-songwriter whose music straddles genres – like a lot of the artists I’m attracted to, I’ve come to realise. Her voice has the clarity of a strong folk singer, helping you to focus on the words, but her musical arrangements are busier, interested in mixing pop-leaning melodies with her lively band’s rockier inclinations. Her great subject matter seems to be herself, and the useless fuckboys she somehow always ends up bedding and paying the rent for. She’s hardly alone there – dealing with useless fuckboys has become a well-worn theme in recent years for female musicians. But few of them have CMAT’s generous talent for dolloping her fuckboys in gorgeous and uplifting melodies, so that we rarely sneer at them whilst listening to her laments – we are invited to feel CMAT’s desire to kiss them, even as she’s kissing them off. Killer lines about late-20s misery abound, from “I’m sitting in an office paying 80 quid an hour to cry” to the song title “I… Hate Who I Am When I’m Horny” to “What’s left for me but poetry/And getting really old?” to “Why do I play your greatest hits?/Why do I leave myself in bits?”. So many questions! With so few answers. She’s young, fucked up and confused, after all. But she sounds totally mature and confident, musically at least.

Inspirational line: “I’m heading to California/Don’t say I didn’t warn you/I’m milking what I can from this grief” (from “California”)

12: Bob Dylan – Shadow Kingdom

81 years old at the time of recording, Dylan manages to reinvent himself again, for the seemingly millionth time, here. The “Shadow Kingdom” is an alternate reality, which sounds yet again like nothing else he’s ever done. On a mundane level, it’s simply a live recording made in Santa Monica during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic (July 2021). This means of course that there is no audience: what we hear is mostly just the man himself, with a few expert musicians joining him on a soundstage. The music is sparse and mysterious, acoustic and threadbare: a true shadow kingdom, suiting the times; the lack of an audience heightens the effect. There are moments where Dylan seems to be singing all alone, or with only the very quietest musical backing. This despite the intriguing fact that the songs performed mostly come from his 1960s to early 70s “rock n’ roll” era. That was a whole other kingdom, the kingdom of the rollickin’ past, where he had the heavy electric backing of The Hawks/The Band to giddy him up. Here, unruly classics from Highway 61 Revisited come at us in hushed tones instead. That just makes them sound weird and surprising all over again; a true reinvention.

Inspirational line: “Someday, everything is going to be beautiful/When I paint my masterpiece” (from “When I Paint My Masterpiece”)

13: Low Cut Connie – Art Dealers

In this year of fake appropriation of Jewish pride in order to excuse inexcusable war crimes, thank God, Yahweh, Allah or whoever it is you pray to for Adam Weiner: one of the songs here is cheekily titled “King of the Jews”, and his Jewishness is a key part of his on-record personality. Revelling in good-natured sleaze, reliving the gay bars where he honed his musical chops as a piano player in New York, and getting kinky when it moves him to (hello “Whips and Chains”), this is one “King of the Jews” who doesn’t take himself all that seriously. And thank God, Yahweh, Allah etc. for that too, because it makes him one of the last pure entertainers still working the rock n’ roll circuit. We need him. That much was clear on this band’s pandemic livestream covers album Tough Cookies, one of the warmest-hearted gestures of gratitude towards a fanbase in recent years. It’s clear again on this album of originals, which despite a few sluggish moments (Weiner’s falsetto-and-harp move on “Wonderful Boy” is a drag, rather than any kind of heavenly ascension), tends to rock out like a motherfucker, and gives Weiner plenty of chances to belt out his charming slip-and-slidin’ vocals whilst banging about on the piano.

Inspirational line: “Where can we go my love to get away/Be classy for a little while/We can change the menu everyday/We could glide across the tile” (from “Take Me to the Place”)

14: Corook – Serious Person (Part 2)

The kind of singer-songwriter, like Kimya Dawson, who writes in such disarmingly simple verse, and sings in such nursery-rhyme-like cadences, that you would think theirs were kids’ songs if you didn’t parse the lyrics, which strike surprisingly deep upon inspection. This sequel to a decent 21-minute debut shaves 7 minutes off that already sparse length, but doesn’t waste a second of the remaining time; it winds up even better. Starting with a statement of purpose about gender identity and sexual orientation that ultimately settles on the term “Alien” to describe themself, and ending with a therapy session about the haircut “underneath my haircut”, across the EP they cut to the quick of the matter of their inner struggles and make you care deeply for them in the process. And because of that childlike quality, whenever they swerve to less serious subject matter, such as who to invite to a party, it feels tonally correct and totally natural, like a fish to the water. This one is livelier than Part 1 musically; more complicated and childlike lyrically. Give them a Juno to write the soundtrack for NOW.

Inspirational line: “I’m not made perfectly, but I’m perfectly me/And I’m starting to love all the things that I am” (from “Alien”)

15: Morgan Wade – Psychopath

She’s moving up in the world – on her last album, uniquely for conservative Nashville, this country singer sang about fucking on the kitchen floor, now on “Losers Look Like Me” it’s “I fucked you on this hotel floor”. That she can now afford lovemaking sessions in hotel rooms might reflect the iota of success she’s seen since that last album’s single “Wilder Days” made the top 30 of the U.S. Country Airplay chart and recently went gold. Or it might just be that she needed a change of scene – she does come across as a bit restless or, as she put it herself, Reckless. At any rate, her appetite for sex has remained, and it’s all over Psychopath. But so has her appetite for lots of other things besides: 80s movies, roman candles, Alanis Morissette, romance with men from northern climes, and surviving the “27 Club” (thankfully she has done). Plus tattoos, which still feature prominently on the album cover, and as part of her projected persona. One of these tattoos is of a sad face emoji, another is of a rose. She wants the world to know that she’s wild, but not too wild, not so as she might come across as emotionally distant or out-of-touch to the millions whose hearts she wants to touch. Her music pulls off all of this near-perfectly.

Inspirational line: “I didn’t make the twenty-seven club/I’m twenty-eight/So, y’all ain’t gotta dig my grave” (from “27 Club”)

16: 100 Gecs – 10,000 Gecs

Electropop duo who are on a mission to exponentially expand the number of “Gecs” in our lives (their first album was called 1000 Gecs). If that sentence is bewildering to you, just try listening to their music: here you’ll find pop-punk, metal, industrial, hard rock, and ska tunes thrown in together with the purer electropop. As for thematics, how about a breakup song written to a removed tooth, “Doritos & Fritos”, the most wanted person in the United States, and the dumbest girl alive? Some have called this duo’s music “hyperpop”, and it’s certainly hyperactive, which means that it won’t be for everyone (I know a few people who find them really annoying). But personally, I’m all on board with their genre mashups and lyrical obsession with being fuckups – beneath all the noise and the autotuning, they come across as distinctly human and likable. Also, a link with Steven Spielberg: both celebrate the notion of a frog on the floor, and both ask us to leave the frog be.

Inspirational line: “Give him some space and let him do his thing/Make him feel safe and listen to him sing/Frog on the floor/Where’d he come from?” (from “Frog on the Floor”)

17: Billy Woods & Kenny Segal – Maps

It wasn’t a great year for mainstream hip-hop, but the underground is still bubbling healthily away. Here’s a good’un, a bicoastal collaboration between NY rapper Billy Woods and LA producer Kenny Segal, which like so much underground hip-hop leans jazzy and chilled-out in musical tone, brainy and narrative-driven in subject matter. Kenny Segal goes for midnight-hour movie soundtrack vibes, with haunting and lonely saxophone, an Aphex Twin sample, grumbly trombone, lower-octave piano playing – very atmospheric, very evocative of dangerous rainy nights in a big American city. Billy Woods goes hard over this sinister backdrop; he’s not like Tricky who melds into his music’s creepiness, no, Woods seems if anything to rebel against it. His rapping has urgency and projects force, so that he doesn’t sound like a helpless victim lost in the city at night. The central narrative is about adjusting to the international touring lifestyle post-lockdown, with Woods back on the road again and slightly bewildered by it all. The short song lengths give the sense of a jittery mind trying to hold it together whilst on the road. But again, he mostly projects strength. So ultimately, the album is a clash between what Woods projects, and what Segal offers us in terms of musical backing. That clash is what makes it so interesting.

Inspirational line: “Already knew the options was lose-lose/Baby, that’s nothing new/That just make it easier to choose” (from “The Layover”)

18: Tyler Childers – Rustin’ In The Rain

The title track is simply the best country song of the year: always on the verge of rock n’ roll and utter chaos, but always pulling back with slide guitars towards countrified beauty – and with a key change at the end which for once doesn’t make you want to punch the song in the face. Things get more relaxed from then on; extremely well-produced, though, with brilliant touches like the accordion heralding the end of the world on “Luke 2:8-10”, an electric guitar solo revealing the raunch behind the otherwise innocent-sounding “Help Me Make it Through the Night”, and honky tonk piano imitating the kicking legs of “Percheron Mules”. Childers’ singing is a stick of dynamite the whole way through, one which you’re never quite sure if it’s going to explode in your face or fizzle out into a quiet nothing at a moment’s notice. And then the album itself fizzles out, at only 28 minutes in length, with only the sickly sweet piano and cheesy-synths of “In Your Love” killing the mood a bit.

Inspirational line: “I have gee’d and haw’d/For you and it sure suits me” (from “Rustin’ in the Rain”)

19: Iris DeMent – Workin’ On A World

Creator of one of my favourite albums of all time, I won’t miss a chance to publicly sing the praise and try my best to promote this wonderful country-folk singer-songwriter. So though the politics in this avowedly political album are clumsily expressed (“I just wanna say thank you to those brave women in The Squad”, “I know a couple of Muslims and they seem like pretty decent folks to me”), I’m willing to overlook that in her case, because they’re yet more evidence that she’s a thoughtful, caring human being who’s open to the world and all of the people in it. Besides, that’s not all there is to Workin’ On A World, in which we can enjoy her usual careful musical arrangements and humane singing – plus a few oddball experiments that jolt you into amazement, like the creepily bleated hymn “Let Me Be Your Jesus”. And the mere fact of a country singer singing the praises of Muslims and The Squad is unique enough, kind of astonishing in fact, and reason to celebrate no matter how simplistically it might be expressed. That the songs are well-written enough to settle into your cranium and get fixed in your central hum cortex is an added bonus.

Inspirational line: “We ought not be condoning, bulldozing Palestinian homes/It’s an open-air prison there, a U.S. sanctioned, dead zone/I have a wealth of compassion for Jewish people and their plight/But I’ve not forgotten two wrongs don’t make a right” (from “Goin’ Down to Sing in Texas” – released before October 7th)

20: DJ Shadow – Action Adventure

Either much less electronic music is getting made, or I’m missing out on the action; at any rate, I’m thankful to this album for fulfilling my overdue quota of computer-generated musical goodness. General reaction to it seems to be mixed, with criticism focusing on the repetitive drum loops and relative simplicity of the song constructions. Yet whenever I play it I get drawn in by the delightful array of ear-catching sound effects, from the synth manipulated to sound like it’s saying “blah blah blah” on “All My” (pretty funny for a song where the vocal sample just goes “All my records and tapes”) to the warring male-female a cappella groups on “Witches Vs. Warlocks” to the fun-as-hell electric guitar on “Free For All”. Of course this doesn’t reach the level of Endtroducing…... But it’s absurd to hold him, or anyone else, to the standard of that cathedral of sample mixing and engineering, which stands as perhaps electronica’s finest hour. This one is catchy enough to tide me over until the next master beat manipulator comes along to shake up the game for everyone. If they come along.

Inspirational line: “Call me a treasure” (from “You Played Me”)