Rob Sheffield’s Top 25 Songs of 2023

A darkwave Eighties psycho-sexual time warp that somehow fit right into 2023. Martin Gore and Dave Gahan made their fantastic Memento Mori a righteous tribute to the late Andy Fletcher, with this “Behind The Wheel”-style goth-club banger about posing in front of the mirror and scaring yourself by being too hot for this planet.

Bully’s Alicia Bognanno proves herself a grunge mastermind all over Lucky For You, especially in the fierce “Change Your Mind.” She piles on the air-guitar rock power, like she’s trying to cram all of Cheap Trick at Budokan into one song, pleading for validation she won’t get from an ex she won’t win back. Points for honesty: “I got a lawless love for you / And I got nothing better to do.”

That Mexican OT rides hard on his Tejano rap headbanger, a hilarious summer ode to drills and chains and cowboy style, from the Lonestar Luchador. (“OT” stands for “Outta Texas.”) He sips lean with pecan pie while his Cadillac does jumping jacks, boasting, “I’m just rhyming words, I don’t even know how to rap!” Houston legend Paul Wall drips all his candy-paint cool.

The Montreal folkie Helena Deland strums a hushed acoustic ballad about grief, from her poignant Goodnight Summerland, after the death of her mother. She takes a hike in the woods, where she feels her tiny life dissolve into the vast beauty around her, murmuring, “I don’t think I’ve heard this song before.” A quiet tune that grabs your heart in a massively loud way.

Two “Gen Z It Girls” on a mission, as Pink Pantheress and Ice Spice blend their voices via DM for a mega-smash club confessional. It’s fascinating to see drum-and-bass zoom through history into the lingua franca for today’s female bedroom-pop auteurs—not what anyone would have predicted back in the “Goldie composes a symphony” days. But this sizzles whether the boy’s a liar, a Leo, or Aaliyah.

The Stones’ excellent Hackney Diamonds is their best album since, well, their last one, the also-excellent 2016 covers session Blue and Lonesome. I love “Bite My Head Off,” where Mick Jagger taunts Paul McCartney into his nastiest fuzz-bass solo since “Think For Yourself” on Rubber Soul. But the sentimental fave has to be “Whole Wide World,” where Mick goes back to the most self-mocking Cockney schoolboy accent he’s dared in many decades. It’s the voice he used in 1960s Swinging London satires like Aftermath and Flowers, sneering at scenesters, poseurs, and socialites (“By the time you’re 30, gonna look 65, you won’t look purty and your friends will have kissed you goodbyyye”), but they’re all memories now, haunting his 80-something self. (Love how he complains about “lardy louts.”) Mick sings about feeling alone, bereft, vulnerable, and other emotions he’s never experienced in his life—and if he did, Stones fans would be the last to hear about it—but he sounds as gloriously bitchy as ever. The way he sings “nowhere” in the last verse is 60 years of time-travel in one word.

A self-esteem seminar from your life coach Flo Milli, with special emphais on “I’m the shit, I’m the shit, I’m the shit,” over that Young Fyre bass blast. Preach, Flo Milli: “Bae hit the spot, make me sing like the Bee Gees.”

The most summer-of-’93-sounding rocker of 2023: “Gone 2,” a slow-burn guitar gem from these lackadaisical Chicago-via-Wisconsin kids. Emily Massey sighs about a romance that isn’t falling apart fast enough. They recorded this tune while watching the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Scar Tissue” video on repeat, with the sound muted—an unorthodox creative process, but maybe one more bands should try? Surprisingly resonant line: “You shake it off but keep it in.”

The Go-Betweens’ rock poet goes somewhere new in “It’s Only Poison.” It’s a love song about chemo, inspired by his violin player, who’s also his wife of over 30 years, in her battle with cancer. He sings over an upbeat acoustic choogle, while she adds her harmonies: “It’s written on the bottle/The bottle on their shelf / It’s written deep in scripture that you can save yourself.” But it never gets depressing, or (ugh) inspiring—these two are glad to have today together, and they’ll save the mourning for when it’s time to mourn.

Who better for the Barbie soundtrack than Barbie Dangerous herself? But “Barbie World” also hypes up Nicki’s subterranean connection with another timeless pop franchise—she refers to one of her favorite bob wigs as “the Bob Dylan.” (“I told Tae, bring the Bob Dylan out / The pussy so cold, we just chillin out!”) It was a surreal blast to hear Mr. Tambourine Man get shouted out on Z100 all summer on a Top Ten hit—but these two outlaws have so much in common. Goal for 2024: a Dylan/Nicki duet remake of “Truffle Butter.”

Yo La Tengo can do it all, but “Sinatra Drive Breakdown” is the kind of third-rail guitar groove they do better than any band ever has—a seven-minute psych-drone feedback rush up there with “Blue Line Swinger” or “I Heard You Looking” or “Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind.” (Or “International Airport,” if you happen to be a Dump freak.) It’s the perfect kick-off to their great This Stupid World, though they transform it live into a different beast every night. Ira Kaplan’s guitar rattles like a car with the muffler rusted out, skidding from lane to lane.

The música Mexicana anthem spent the year making history, trashing genre boundaries all the way to the U.S. Top Ten, with an unstoppable blast of requinto guitar, charchetas, toloche, trombone, and pure star power. Everybody sounds pumped to take on the world, from the group’s finesse to Peso’s sly rasp. A sierreño “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

Shoegaze make-out slow jam of the year, from the sensual streets of Pittsburgh. Lydia Slocum sure gets to the point: “I’m tired of faking, I’m the only one who sees me naked.” 

The Atlanta champ shakes off a turbulent period, in a year of legal tribulations for him and the YSL crew. But he rises to the occasion with this effervescent Top Ten summer smash. Statement of purpose: “Watch me jump right off the curb.”

Gina Birch has been on the cutting edge of punk her whole life. She became a rock legend with The Raincoats, four London women making their own racket. But she brings that same rebel spirit to this gleeful anthem, where she grabs her axe and urges you to make a little noise with your life. “Sometimes I wake up and I wonder, what is my job?” she sings, answering with a shout: “I play my bass loud! I turn it louder!” Real punks never turn it down.

MJ Lenderman is on a hell of a roll these days, a dirtbag rock & roll jester for our times, coming off his ace Boat Songs while playing guitar in Wednesday. The Asheville boy puts all his slack-ass wit into “Knockin’,” taking off from the Bob Dylan classic about a dying gunfighter, tricking it out with pedal steel and the woozy Seventies stumble-groove of Neil Young in honey-slide mode, so he can revel in his rockness while making fun of it. Also love the concert version on And The Wind (Live and Loose!), where it sounds like the crowd is too spooked to sing along. 

The year’s most reliable “today sucked until I put this song on” song. The K-pop queens Minji, Hyein, Haerin, Danielle, and Hanni ride the drum-and-bass flutter and the Powerpuff Girls theme for a secret-crush vibe designed to seduce you into the hallucination that you’re at the mall in 1998 picking out lashes at Claire’s before the next screening of Ever After: A Cinderella Story. 

Sad but true: His mom probably already knows her son sucks. His dad probably sucked too, right?

Best stage banter of 2023, courtesy of Mannequin Pussy firecracker Marisa Dabice: “This is dedicated to everyone who came to this show alone tonight. What does that say about you? It says that you came here because you know what you fucking like! And it’s not your fault that all your friends are normie-ass bitches!” So totally true. Mannequin Pussy have been my favorite rock band over the past decade, ever since they started trashing DIY spaces with the raw hardcore of “Clit Eastwood” and “Meat Slave 2.” But they just keep getting more ferocious. “I Got Heaven” brings all Dabice’s fire-breathing punk fury, with a theological query: “What if Jesus himself ate my fucking snatch?” It’s the first taste from MP’s upcoming album—one of the best reasons to look forward to 2024.

Bktherula, a.k.a. 21-year-old Atlanta rapper Brooklyn Candida Rodriguez, is an underground next-school power-threat MC, a gamer, a quantum-physics geek. Her whole LVL5 P1 mixtape is a trip but “No Adlib” is the killer, tapping into the astral plane over Maury Laurenko’s space bass, invading your head like Russian roulette. Best line: “I’ll eat a bitch whole-ass with a fork / I collect toys at this age, I’m a dork.”

Metal as hell. The 1989 vault songs are five of the year’s best—clearly, when Taylor was whittling down the album, she decided to bank (1) the really angry ones and (2) the ones about boats. These songs sound so close to Midnights, but especially “Is It Over Now?,” which blew up into a Number One hit in 2023 from a 2014 album about 1989. (The song it replaced at Number One? “Cruel Summer,” from 2019.) It’s the lost bridge between “New Romantics” and “Labyrinth,” as Taylor fast-forwards through 300 takeout coffees and God knows how many couches or blouse buttons or maidens’ beds or triggeringly blue dresses. It also feels like a stealth sister song to “Delicate” (her other “come here” invitation, and the song that does for “isn’t it? isn’t it?” what this one does for “is it? is it?”). That mind of hers—always flexing like a goddamn acrobat.

Ice Spice ruled 2023 from beginning to end, a Bronx queen who can’t lose because she’s already chose. Ice spent the year spicing up other people’s hits, yet she saved all her best lines for her own, especially “In Ha Mood,” where she sums up the “if I was bitches I’d hate me a lot” lifestyle. It’s already tough to imagine we ever lived in a world without her.

No two people have ever listened to each other the way John and Paul did. “Now and Then” is an unmistakably “real” Beatles song—John, Paul, George, and Ringo playing together in different decades, across the universe, all on the same tune. But it exists only because Paul refused to let his friend’s song die. So many people heard John’s bittersweet “Now and Then” fragment over the years, after his death, but Macca was the only one who heard exactly what John was trying to say, and recognized it as the Beatles song it needed to be. He spent years on his mad quest to bring it to life, when everybody else was willing to forget. You remember the scene in Get Back— John and Paul in the cafeteria, the mic hidden in the flowerpot, after George quits the band? Paul muses, “Probably when we’re all very old, we’ll all agree with each other. And we’ll all sing together.” That’s what “Now and Then” is. A tribute to friendship, to daft obsession, to the world’s greatest musical love story. 

Lana’s 7-minute suite is her California burnout epic, as she looks back on her fucked-up big-time life and raises a root-beer toast to the apocalypse. “A&W” feels like the musical equivalent of Lana’s selfie in L.A. traffic, listening to the Silver Jews outside the Hollywood Bowl, avoiding her own gaze in the rear-view. America is a dangerous thing for a woman like her to have, but she has it, and unfortunately it’s got her. Scariest line: “I’m a princess, I’m divisive, ask me whyyyyy I’m like this.” I hope the late great Shane MacGowan got to hear this song at least once before the parting glass.

It might be cheating to count “Kill Bill” as a 2023 song, since SZA’s masterpiece SOS was way up at the top of my albums list last year. But the song took on a life of its own as Solana Rowe’s surprise breakout hit, an ancient/modern murder ballad hitting Number One as a horrorcore doo-wop nightmare. By now it’s a modern standard, and the only question is how much room there is in it. So how long before we get to hear Sade sing this? Dolly Parton? Dionne Warwick? Streisand belting, “I’m so mature, I’m so mature”? Willie Nelson rasping, “Not the best idea”? Diamanda Galas? Patti LaBelle? Emmylou Harris? But maybe a ballad this extreme belongs to SZA and her alone. Either way, song of the year.