2023 AOTY: Honorable Mentions
With the third installment we're finally getting into the actual albums of 2023 with the honorable mentions: the bottom twenty of the top fifty.
After two entries in the 2023 AOTY series - The Journey Begins (including the “2022 Misses”) and Singles With No Albums - we’re finally getting to the “A” in the AOTY moniker - the Albums themselves!!
In 2023 a total of 230 individual tracks made their way onto my 2023 Music Spotify playlist, each from an album deemed worthy enough to receive multiple listens and to be considered a candidate for my album of the year list. If forced to try and put a number on how many new albums I listened to over the course of the year, I’d guess it was in the 1,500 to 2,000 range. But that would include albums I made it halfway through before figuring out they really weren’t for me. Realistically, I probably listened to 300 or 400 albums in their entirety and winnowed that down to the 230 that received multiple listens.
It was, in short, another amazing year for music. Each year I wonder whether this is the year I’m gonna struggle to find music that I connect with. And it hasn’t happened yet. What does seem to be happening though, is that my musical tastes appear to be gravitating away from the consensus AOTY picks. This is only a theory, so I decided to compare my top 50 list with the 2023 Music Year End List Aggregate on albumoftheyear.org, which aggregates AOTY rankings from 90 different lists. I found that, of their top fifty, 37 had made their way to my 2023 Music list which means I listened and gave fair evaluation to almost 75% of the albums on their list. This doesn’t surprise me as there’s probably a fairly health overlap between the sources of AOTY’s aggregate list and the music sites that I visit (in addition to what I’m exposed to by Spotify’s algorithms). Essentially, we’re both drawing from the same limited universe of music websites, so there’s some selection bias inherent in this exercise.
Of the 37 albums on AOTY’s aggregate list that I actually listened to, 11 of them appear on my AOTY list this year, which at first glance suggests that I’m somewhat aligned with “the mainstream” (whatever that term even means nowadays). But digging in a little further, a disparity in rankings does emerge. Of the six albums on AOTY’s top 25 that appeared on my list, six were in my Honorable Mentions category, meaning they were in the bottom 20 of my list. Only four of my top 30 albums even appeared on AOTY’s Year End List, with my top 2 albums appearing in the bottom third of their list. When I checked the metacritic list of top albums (based on user score, but I also checked the metascore) the difference was even more stark. Only 9 of my top 20 albums (and three of my top 10, the top 3 in fact) even received the minimum of 7 reviews required to be on metacritic’s list. And the metacritic rankings (based on user score, so take it with a grain of salt) for my top 3 albums of the year were 96th, 106th, and 158th.
Full disclosure here: I’m not sure what I’ve written above even means! I’ve never dug into the data this way before (and what I’ve done above is anecdotal and based only on one year) and I have nothing to compare against for prior years. But it certainly feels like this year I see my taste in music less represented in the music review sites (and related AOTY aggregators) than I have at any point in the last decade. I exclude 2020 from that time period as it was dominated by issues related to the onset of the pandemic, a major personal health scare, and struggles with depression. Those challenges combined to completely redefine my listening habits and my AOTY list that year was all over the place.
Did you compare your top albums to the musical review sites this year? Did you feel like your listening habits were reflected by the critics’ darlings? Is this different than prior years? Do you even care?
Please leave a comment below, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
I think a few things are happening here.
The first is that I’m actively making an effort to be less influenced by the music sites and focusing on trying to mine more varied and disparate musical discovery sources. I used to be on several different music sites (stereogum, pitchfork, CoS, etc.) multiple times a week and now spend far less time on them. But while I’ve stepped outside of one echo chamber, I’ve potentially stepped into another - by leaning more into the Spotify algorithms. I am doing this with eyes wide open however, and also with a strategy of training the algorithms with a wider variety of inputs than I had previously. It’s noticeable to me that since joining Substack, thereby tapping into a whole new musical seam, Spotify has begun feeding me a more diverse array of music (particularly on my Release Radar and Discover Weekly playlists). Leaning more into Bandcamp for music discovery, and then listening to those albums on Spotify, has also helped in this regard.
The second is that there is just SO MUCH music coming out nowadays that there’s a an increasingly larger universe of content for music sites to review and rank and for AOTY lists to encompass. And, with my time a finite resource, there’s just no way I can listen to everything. Given that the gap between the music that’s available and the music I manage to hear is increasing, it’s natural that differences of opinions on individual albums will emerge and disparities in rankings will increase.
Lastly, I’m at the point in my life that I don’t care what people think about the music I like. As I look back to my earlier years, perhaps even within the last five years, despite the fact that I was a fully formed “grown-up”, I still cared what people thought about something that was as subjective as musical taste. I would often refer to certain albums as “guilty pleasures”, as if acknowledging that, “hey I know it’s pop music or it’s really cheesy, so it’s not “real” music but I love it anyway. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Don’t worry, I’m still cool, I’m still the badass that listens to music that nobody’s heard of”. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum.
Thankfully, at some point during the last five years, I arrived at the point where I don’t really give a fuck what anyone thinks of me (maybe a bit of a slow learner in this regard?). I do my best to be kind, gentle, and compassionate, and to treat people the way I’d like to be treated. If for some reason you don’t like me, or have a beef with me, that’s your business (as long as you don’t make it a problem for me, in which case we can talk about it). As it relates to what my musical tastes are, that’s so far down the totem pole of what defines who I am as to be almost meaningless. And, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what you think! That’s liberating in so many ways to a guy that spent most of his life as a people pleaser, always wanting to be the coolest guy in the room.
Okay, let’s get into the music!
Finally! Let’s get this entry moving in the direction most of you came here for!
In my first AOTY post I referenced how challenging it is for me to go from 80 albums to 70, to 60, all the way down to 50. There’s definitely a degree of humming and hawing, and some real “Omigod, how can I leave this album off the list!” moments. But while winnowing down to the top 50 is always hard, trying to rank the honorable mentions is impossible. Given how much my enjoyment of music relies on where I’m at any given point emotionally, the idea of ranking albums is generally a fool’s errand. That’s even more true for this batch of albums, the bottom twenty of the top fifty. At any particular moment, depending what’s going on in my life and what I need from the music, any one of these albums could feel like a top 20 album. And given further space, and infinite listening time, several of these could be in the top 10. What you see here is simply a snapshot of how I was feeling as November rolled into December.
I’ve selected one track from each album along with the accompanying music video. This may be the song that really resonated with me, or it may be the only song (or one of the few) from the album that actually has a music video.
Albums are sorted by release date.
SG Lewis - AudioLust & HigherLove
Released: 27-Jan-2023
Selected Track: Fever Dreamer
Paramore - This is Why
Released: 10-Feb-2023
Selected Track: C'est Comme Ça
Fever Ray - Radical Romantics
Released 10-Mar-2023
Selected Track: Kandy
Yves Tumor - Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume
Released 17-Mar-2023
Selected Track: Echolalia
Meg Myers - TZIA
Released 24-Mar-2023
Selected Track: CHILDREN OF LIGHT II
boygenius - the record
Released 31-Mar-2023
Selected Track: Not Strong Enough
Fruit Bats - A River Running To Your Heart
Released 14-Apr-2023
Selected Track: Rushin' River Valley
Fenne Lily - Big Picture
Released 14-Apr-2023
Selected Track: Lights Light Up
Everything But The Girl - Fuse
Released 21-Apr-2023
Selected Track: Nothing Left To Lose
Brandy Clark - Brandy Clark
Released 19-May-2023
Selected Track: Dear Insecurity
Bully - Lucky For You
Released 2-Jun-2023
Selected Track: Days Move Slow
Slowdive - everything is alive
Released 1-Sep-2023
Selected Track: kisses
Corinne Bailey Rae - Black Rainbows
Released 15-Sep-2023
Selected Track: Erasure
Roosevelt - Embrace
Released 22-Sep-2023
Selected Track: Luna
Bleach Lab - Lost In a Rush of Emptiness
Released 22-Sep-2023
Selected Track: Nothing Left To Lose
Blonde Redhead - Sit Down for Dinner
Released 29-Sep-2023
Selected Track: Snowman
Steven Wilson - The Harmony Codex
Released 29-Sep-2023
Selected Track: Rock Bottom
Alanna Royale - Trouble Is
Released 6-Oct-2023
Selected Track: Trouble Is
Crosses - Goodnight, God Bless, I Love You, Delete
Released 13-Oct-2023
Selected Track: Invisible Hand
Palm Ghosts - I Love You, Burn In Hell
Released 10-Nov-2023
Selected Track: Tilt
Did any of these albums grab you? Did any of them make your list this year?
The next post in the 2023 AOTY series is 2023 AOTY: 30 to 21, bringing us into the ranked section of this year’s list. Things are getting serious now! I’ll be trying my best to get the next three AOTY posts up in the next week (i.e., before Christmas) but life has a habit of getting “life-ey”. So we’ll see.
A closing thought: the holidays can be a challenging time for many. Be kind. Be patient. Be Loving. To others, but also to yourself . . .
Thank you for reading Joy in the Journey, I appreciate you being here! If there’s someone in your life you think may enjoy this post, feel free to share it.
I haven’t done a deep dive into your list yet, but I’m sure a lot of my faves will be on it! What I wanted to comment on was the idea of caring about what other people think about the music you like. I’d like to question that reasoning a little bit, or maybe it’s just semantics, but my feeling is that creating lists like this and posting them means that you do care on some level what readers of your list think. I know I do. That doesn’t mean that I want them to like what I like, it just means that I care, I want to feel a sense community and camaraderie. That’s very different than needing to get validation from other people on the music that you like. My sense is that we are on the same page, I just feel like phrasing it as “I don’t care“ sat with me a little uneasily.
Great list and a huge +1 to no longer caring what people think about the music you enjoy. It's quite freeing.
That Palm Ghosts record is fantastic! "Automtaic For The Modern Age" was one of my favorite songs to come out this year.