With our inboxes over flowing and streaming platforms crammed with thousands of new songs every week, it’s become increasingly hard for new artists to be heard. Here are thirty of my picks from the last twelve months, in no order apart from that they flow as a playlist, these are some of the songs I have returned to throughout 2023, added to my playlists or bought. For a longer playlist of 100 click here. Thank you for reading I hope you discover a song or artist to excite below. As always we urge you to support the artists and releases you love, in whatever way you can! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Body Type – Miss the World
Body Type returned this year with the superb Expired Candy album they delivered the raucous first single ‘Miss The World’. A razor-sharp garage pop anthem born of the COVID pandemic, with scurrying Batman-theme-like guitars and pummeling drums, laced with lead vocalist and guitarist, Sophie McComish’s urgent vocals, that are both an insidiously hooky lament and a spitting ball of frustration, swirling with the tumult of isolation, claustrophobia and the absurdity of our society and culture, raging at the “unquestioning compliance and the ascent of tyrants, told through pre-teen anarchists, bichon frises, and a drum beat based on a Gwen Stefani song.” For fans of the Breeders and Sleater-Kinney, it’s frankly fantastic!
Audiobooks – Burnt Pictures
audiobooks, the London duo of David Wrench and Evangeline Ling, returned with a new EP titled Gulliver this year. It included the previously released single ‘Tryna Tryna Take Control’, as well as a new track, ‘Burnt Pictures’, featuring OneDa. A charming cultural collision, this track marries impish Euro-electro pop with a slanted Talking Heads-like beats, Evangeline’s inventive, surreal, and witty flights of lyrical imagination, this time they are joined by MC OneDa whose freestyle adds a refreshing perspective. It’s another aural riot from audiobooks who constantly delight and challenge with every release.
Aderyn – I Wish I Had A Dog
Aderyn returned this year with ‘I Wish I Had A Dog’, the lead track from her debut EP, Sea Glass. A perky indie-punky-pop anthem, with a cracking almost doo-wop beat and jiving riffs, it’s laced with Aderyn’s withering(tongue in cheek) side eye at ‘the 20s’ and her own generation-an era of Instagrammers, influencers, dodgy landlords, nepo-babies and social media stars. It’s not only a cracking tune, riven with hooks and bittersweet singalongs, it’s a clever message delivered with a glint in the eye. It has the punchy effervescence of a movie soundtrack, and yet uniquely encapsulates the disenfranchisement of the 2020s. Cardiff’s Aderyn is the pop star we need!
Janelle Monae – Float
From future afro beats to disco, and reggae-flecked pop songs stamped with Janelle Monae’s experiences as a pansexual woman, The Age of Pleasure is Monae at her most liberated and personal. ‘Float’ has been stuck on my playlist for months, there’s a confidence and fun about this brassy groove and her effortless switch between confident boasting bars and an alluring chorus, that was clearly built for house parties.
Art School Girlfriend – A Place to lie
Art School Girlfriend crafts a beguiling atmosphere of electronica and dance music, with illuminating synth-textures, dappling trance, and breakbeat-inspired elements, combine into an engrossing, detailed tapestry. Polly Mackey’s songwriting craft and depth is matched by a voice of knowing, longing and experience, yet it has a comfort of a Tracey Thorn, but it is her own voice that wraps itself around you like a warm duvet as she’s dealing with emotional peaks and lows.
Slow Pulp – Cramps
Chicago’s Slow Pulp recently signed to ANTI- -Records and shared a new single, ‘Cramps‘ and it’s awesome! Big-hearted scuffed-up noise pop, that dynamics hints at bands from the ’90s like Celebrity Skin era Hole but keeps its eyes firmly fixed on the horizon. Fuzzy riff trailed, barreling percussion and fists aloft chorus lines, it’s both exultant yet also about searching for more in your partner, the anthemic squall of singer Emily Massey’s “I want everything” scream, is kickass; I love this!
Emily King – Medal
Showing off a dexterity of melody, percussion, and rhythm ‘Medal’ is an insatiable R&B-flecked pop song, that pops off into really invigorating directions. Lifted from New Yorker Emily King’s first album in four years Special Occasion. ‘Medal’ is all strutting beats, nimble guitars, handclaps and playfully dancing synths, laced with King’s addictive weaving harmonies, we stand in awe of her vocal presence ripe with fierce independence, empathy, and allure that’s striking.
Lanterns on the Lake – Real Life
Versions of Us was forged in a furnace heat of turmoil for Lanterns on the Lake. They lost their drummer Ol Ketteringham, and singer Hazel Wilde reflected on motherhood. The nine songs of Versions Of Us are epic existential meditations examining life’s possibilities, facing the hand we’ve been dealt, and the question of whether we can change our individual and collective destinies.
The big music sound of ‘Real Life’ is really bold and epic with huge reverberating drums and a soaring life-affirming chorus. It’s actually about admonishing oneself for standing on the sidelines and a hymn to seizing life, a theme that’s intensely personal for Hazel Wilde but it’s an anthemic moment that’s universal too.
Hot Wax – Treasure
Hot Wax are causing a commotion with their insidious sound that sees punky spasms collide with Riot Grrrl riffs laced with attitude-riven, insatiable vocal earworms. So much so that people were turned away from their Great Escape set this year, such was the demand! They are Hastings trio of singer/guitarist Tallulah Sim-Savage, bassist Lola Sam and drummer Alfie Sayers. The lead track from their new EP A Thousand Times, ‘Treasure‘ is a cracker, a whirling dervish of chunky riffs, vocals that buzz with bittersweet glory, the feeling that you have to treasure every moment because things could very well fall apart at any moment. The dynamic is fantastic with a cavalcade of bounding drums, screeching guitars, and hollered crescendos the line between pain and pleasure is a fine one. Frankly unmissable.
Bethan Lloyd – Aria
North Walian Bethan Lloyd recently released her excellent debut album Metamorphosis this year. She is a Welsh artist whose roots are deep. Her sonic exploration has taken her from training as a classical singer, immersing herself in Berlin’s experimental music scene, to learning with magicians, masters, and the ancient teachings of the natural world.
‘Aria’ is positively intoxicating, the classical influence pulses through this song as Lloyd’s vocals swoop with hymnal and tribal calls that reach for the deep roots of home, triggering electronic punches and atmospheric textures. It’s redolent of Bjork’s Medulla with its entwined vocal refrains or the abrasive electronic collisions of Homogenic. Lloyd is an artist of rare power and depth,
Mace The Great x Sage Todz – Welcome to Wales
‘Welcome To Wales’ is a storming collaboration between South Wales MC Mace The Great and North Walian bilingual rapper Sage Todz. Inspired by the injustice of recent events, it’s a visceral yet playful takedown of racism in Wales. Each artist takes turns to verbally spar above a looping beat as the pair vocalise the marginalisation of minority voices and the prejudice both men have experienced. The video is a collaboration of North and South and a bold representation of the burgeoning hip-hop talent in Wales right now. Here, the pair confidently perform the song outside the BBC Wales Broadcasting Centre in Cardiff.
This awesome collaboration was born out of the frustrations the pair felt after S4C was forced to apologise for what the broadcaster described as a ‘serious mistake’ when instead of a picture of Sage Todz, a photo of Mace was used on the Prynhawn Da programme. Sage Todz tweeted after the incident: “We have to do better than this” , exposing the bitter irony of the error. He pointed out that he himself was in the studio the previous week for the early evening show Heno.
‘Welcome To Wales’ references the debate opened up when Sage Todz announced his intention to pull out of National Eisteddfod due to the event’s strict Welsh language policy – and the racist comments he was subjected to on social media following that decision.
Sparkling – We are here to make you feel
SPARKLING just released their refreshing debut LP We Are Here To Make You Feel. Building on their experience touring with Metronomy, it’s a record replete with rambunctious choruses, danceable rhythms, big bright synths that spin like Catherine wheels, and jousting vocals. Inventive and wearing its heart on its sleeve, the title track is a riot of impassioned devotion and instruction, it’s an empowering jolt, riven with playful synths and big chant-along choruses, somewhere between the bright pop hooks of Junior Senior and the synth-pop moments of OMD. A life-affirming pick me up!
SPARKLING’s multi-linguality and experience of living and playing in different European countries remains key to their identity. The album itself was recorded across several different terrains and locations – mostly in Germany, Belgium, France and England.
deary – Fairground
A carousel of organs, oscillating ethereal vocals, and languid breakbeats, this is ‘Fairground‘ the first sublime and transportive offering from London duo deary released on Sonic Cathedral. A lullaby in technicolor they say it was “an attempt to replicate My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Soon’ but ended up somewhere in between Portishead, Felt Mountain-era Goldfrapp and early Saint Etienne.”
‘Fairground’ was produced by the band and deftly mastered by Slowdive’s Simon Scott. I can also hear the faint traces of the Cocteau Twins Treasure- era as singer Dottie’s sumptuous dream spins amidst the twinkling lights: at once soothing and disorientating, capturing the sensory overload and anxiety of London’s teeming cityscape, standing on the edge of being besotted, taking in the wonder of and wistfulness of it all. Glorious.
dust – Joy(Guilt)
Australian alt-punk dust have released their fantastic new single ‘Joy (Guilt)’ via Brooklyn based Kanine Records, off their debut EP et cetera etc. Skeletal post-punk fired by an irresistible scorched and laconic spoken word delivery from dual-vocalist Gabriel Stove as, ‘Joy ( Guilt )’ gallops across the Australian outback, with echoes of Birthday Party and Fontaines DC, meditating on the themes of mortality, family and social commentary with a hypnotic look inward that reflects the catharsis of aimless driving. Unstoppable.
Formed against the backdrop of the pandemic in 2020, the project of Awabakal land/ Newcastle-based dual guitarist-vocalists Gabriel Stove and Justin Teale, bassist Liam Smith, guitarist and saxophonist Adam Ridgway, and drummer Kye Cherry.
Onipa – No Commando
Onipa recently announced their new album ‘Off The Grid’ set for release on Peter Gabriel’s Real World Records this October, featuring an impressive cast of collaborators including Moonchild Sanelly, David Walters, Dele Sosimi and Theon Cross.
To preview it they shared the riotous single ‘No Commando’ featuring David Walters, with funky desert blues, and deep heady Afro- grooves, this foot-stomping track is rife with African folklore, reminiscent of that Congotronics (Konono No.1 / Mbongwana Star), the chanted refrains amidst a tapestry of found sounds, bashed pots and pans, recycled metals, are an absolute hoot, as they explain: ” A musical interpretation of the concept; One person’s rubbish is another’s treasure.”
This is the soundtrack to dancing across the continent and reconnecting with the roots. They say: “No Commando is about peace. A call for ‘oneness’ and a look at where ‘sources originate’. Seeing how the power of community can dispel fear and help us to express ourselves with ‘calm’ and ‘ease’.”
From Accra Market cassette tapes to London pirate radio stations, Malian blues to UK jazz, the twin creative forces behind Onipa. The twin creative forces behind Onipa — Tom Excell (Nubiyan Twist) and Kweku Sackey (K.O.G. & the Zongo Brigade) – together with Finn Booth on drums and Dwayne Kilvington (a.k.a. Wonky Logic) on synths.
Fenne Lily – Lights Light Up
UK-born but now New York-based artist Fenne Lily shared the tender and life-affirming lead ‘Lights Light Up’ from her album Big Picture this year. ‘Lights Light Up,’ a soothing, prophetic and insightful account of love at its temporary best. Invested with Lily’s delicate yet enveloping vocal that wraps around you like a big hug. It’s paired with simmering guitars, muted percussion, and gently burnished and forgiving production. Written partially as a conversation, it vividly tracks the details of a burgeoning relationship and recognizes the transitory nature of any shared thing; the bittersweet truth that you can only walk hand in hand with someone as long as you’re going in the same direction.
Chroma – Don’t Mind Me
Chroma are one of Wales’s best-kept secrets, this fearsome Welsh three-piece have been producing righteous bilingual noise pop for the last few years, powered by visceral riffing, pummeling drums, and Katie Hall’s powerhouse vocal performances. They signed to Alcopop! Records for their debut album Ask for Angela this year, and shared the single ‘Don’t Mind Me’ . Laced with chunky fuzzy bar chords, and twitchy drums, it serves as a platform for Katie’s incendiary vocals that chart her struggles with mental health, magnifying her personal experiences and raging at the unfairness of the mental health system, it’s a universal struggle and offers an “I’ve been there too” lifeline to many who have suffered with their mental health, especially since lockdown. “Oh my head is hazardous!” she exclaims repeatedly, over this most explosive chorus, ‘Don’t Mind Me’ hits hard in more ways than one!
Laura Groves – The Sky At Night
No, nothing to do with Patrick Moore’s TV show of the same name. It’s an illuminating track from Laura Groves’s wonderful album Radio Red released this year via Bella Union. A beguiling song ripe with wonder and trying to unpick the mystery of life between the lines. With illuminating keys and gorgeous dreamy soundscapes, Groves delivers a captivating vocal on this earworm ripe with wonder and longing for connection, that holds onto the comfort and escapism of lights at night. When she reaches that high note, it’s a thing of exquisite grandeur.
Lemfreck – Foreign
L E M F R E C K’s music skirts the lines of hip-hop, dub, and grime, influences grooves and gospel, carrying with it his unmistakable stamp and unique voice fired by his own experiences and the poverty and injustice in his community. There’s an intensity and laser-focused detail, at the core of his delivery, naturally shifting from flow to singing. ‘Foreign’ is a deep song riven with a reverberating bass beat and with Lem’s insight confidently pushes back on discriminatory narratives and the hypocrisy of racists who claim that you are “foreign” because you don’t look how they expect a Welsh person to look. Yet our entire consumer society is built on foreign goods and on the backs of the migrant community who have settled here and built a life here.
Blondshell – Salad
Blondshell’s (aka Sabrina Teitelbaum) self-titled debut album was one of my records of the year. Produced by Yves Rothman, Blondshell is like a chapter ripped from her scorched diary, and every track is a winner. ‘Salad‘ is a standout, a rollicking tune that rattles with barreling drums, chugging guitars and pianos, and quivering and cathartic vocals that simmer with rage before exploding. Echoing elements of Sharon Van Etten or The Replacements, but has an infectious sound all of its own and gives a sneak peek into her world. A vengeful fantasy about poisoning a sinister abuser that got off with a slap on the wrist. “Look what you did, you’ll make a killer of a Jewish girl,” she sings confessionally. It’s an earth-shaking, empowering anthem that turns trauma into triumph.
Hazel English – Slide
Australian musician Hazel English — who is now based in California, recently shared her version of Goo Goo Dolls’ 1998 alt-rock hit ‘Slide.’ “I want to wake up where you are/I won’t say anything all” sings English hauntingly, as she opens up the heart of this melody with her enveloping strum and golden, bittersweet melody, shrouded in a warm productional glow, this is a gorgeously lovelorn earworm for fans of Soccer Mommy and Phoebe Bridgers. Everything about it just sounds right.
Half Happy – Say this twice
Half Happy released their brand new single, Say This Twice this week and we are in love with one of their finest moments yet. With the awesome kick of drums and twanging distorted guitars opening the way for Rose’s spoken word it vividly sets the scene of a tale of a relationship that might be falling apart. This speaking/sung dynamic harks back to their previous single, ‘Runaway Girl’ yet depicts this exciting band quickly evolving their shimmery indie pop into new realms.
Rose starts by dishing out honest advice to a friend, which spins into an open-armed chorus. It’s a tale of love turned old. A different take on that relationship song that says all the things we all want our friend to hear. It’s a pre-break-up song.
Lael Neale – I am the river
Forged in isolation, Star Eaters Delight is a vehicle for returning, not just to civilization, but to celebration. A record concerned with binaries – country vs. city, humanity vs. technology, solitude vs. relationship – the intention is to heal our divisions and realise what matters most.
The album is her second for Sub Pop and sketches wider vistas in her sonic collaboration with producer and accompanist Guy Blakeslee, Neale’s is a voice that has known pain and experienced it but still holds onto self-compassion. The palette is more cinematic, still sparse yet riven with more detail. The trademark omnichord is still there on the excellent opening track. ‘I Am The River’ that’s minimal beat and tremulous guitar notes that splatter patterns across a canvas are like Suicide if they were given a wider palette. Framing Neale’s wonderful vocal, her melodic stream of consciousness reminds one of Patti Smith. It is at once personal and universal with a gifted warmth enhanced by a nagging ominichord, hoisted to new heights on the back of a repeated “ba ba da da da do na um” refrain that flows right through you. It’s bloody fantastic.
Sweeping Promises – Eraser
Kansas-based duo Sweeping Promises made up of Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug who met after a chance meeting in Arkansas, released a second album, ‘Good Living Is Coming For You’, this year. ‘Eraser’ is crammed with pointy-edged guitars and quick-fire, minimalist art punk, these tightly packed anthemic gems are riven with punchy twists and turns: Mondal’s visceral vocals – captured live – bounce off the walls and wrestle with existential themes. Each song was recorded semi-live in their bedroom studio retaining a scuffed-up grit and imperfect character. If you are a fan of early Sonic Youth, Blondie, Young Marble Giants and the B-52s you will find much to admire here. Each track on the record is delivered with a relentless energy and ultimately reflects being thrust into a severely unpredictable world.
Christine and the Queens – To Be honest
There’s such a haunting and contemplative atmosphere about ‘To be Honest‘ this throbbing and enveloping pop gem is ripe with regret, procrastination and isolation. Christine’s vocal performance is a striking thing of wonder, staring at the night sky and longing for more, emerging fully formed and with strength, from the smoke of the fog and the pulsing 80s echoing beats and rising synths, it’s outstanding.
billy woods and Kenny Segal – Soft Landing
Is it a road map, a travelogue, a sprawling concept album, or none of the above? Maps is the new album from NYC rapper billy woods and LA producer Kenny Segal, their first full collaboration since 2019’s Hiding Places. Woods delivers iridescent testaments that are intricate, poignant and painfully prescient riding a tapestry of woozy stripped-back hip hop decorated with samples, jazz sewn instrumentation and underpinned by chunky bass and a constant beat like the continuation of a life that waits for no man.
‘Soft landing’ is an astounding contemplation that’s stumbling lysergic beats, decorated by hazy guitar strums and riddled with streams of consciousness flow and fragments of singalong, as a form of beat poetry that tackles the contradiction of taking off from the life you knew, police incarceration and meditating on mental struggles, and the tensions of the America below. It is an album about trying to find your way home, after making your home wherever you lay your head.
Lips – Never Have I Ever
Idiosyncratic New Zealanders Lips came back this year with ‘Never Have I‘, the lead single off an upcoming new EP. Delivered in a heartfelt, poetic pop song that collects ‘never have I evers’ from fans, with vocalist Steph Brown reading off a list of witty lines juxtaposed with revealing with introspective truths (“I’m afraid I’m afraid of my heart pounding when I’m near you and I can’t breathe“). The accompanying lyric video highlights the confessional qualities of the song, in which handwritten notes give the impression of watching an exposed journal entry in real-time. It’s a superb bedroom pop anthem that you will want to sing along to and another installment of this off-beat pop collective led by a mysterious singer wearing big lips on her head.
Hibou – Night Fell
Under the moniker Hibou, Seattle-born Peter Michel’s latest EP Arc is a nostalgic journey through shoegaze and dream-pop. The spiraling guitars and luscious sweep of lead track ‘Night Fell’ are wonderful, framed in shimmering guitars and Michel’s sighing vocals that recognise the pain of the past, observing the moments of nature, that make the struggle of a life worth living. Consumed by the rush of love he surveys the vastness of the vista the soaring glorious chorus, its the sound of birds spinning across the sky as the sun sets. Reminding me tenderly of the mid-period lushness of M83‘s dream pop, or the anthemic ‘Regret’ by New Order. Fall under its spell.
El Perro del Mar – In Silence
El Perro del Mar is the alter ego of Swedish multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and composer Sarah Assbring, breathtaking track ‘In Silence’ was heartstopping. Assbring’s bewitching vocals, that reside with echoes of everyone from early Kate Bush to Gazelle Twin, blanket this nightmarish landscape of cinematic and undulating atmospheric instrumentation. As she hauntingly plunges us into the themes of grief, loss, mortality and darkness that intricately weave through the soul of Big Anonymous her new album out 16th February 2024, her first following her signing with City Slang.
These absorbing themes are reflected in the stunning accompanying visual, which is less a music video and more a piece of cinema lifted from a short art / horror film, written by El Perro del Mar, longtime collaborator, stylist and art director Nicole Walker and photographer Joseph Kadow.
Susanne Sundfør – alyosha
Five years removed from Music for People In Trouble, Norwegian artist Susanne Sundfør reconnects with her deep rooted personal mythology on the exquisitely drawn and soul-bearing album blómi “to be in bloom” in Norse and one of my records of the year. The stunning and timeless peaks of the epic ‘alyosha’ is a standout. Its tenderness is a cry for humanity. It’s another triumph from Sundfør, it’s an extraordinary piece of work.
I talk more about five of these songs on our latest podcast: Full 100 song playlist
