The 50 best albums of 2023 – 50 to 41 | Pop and rock

Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firmly clasped jewel. Laura Snapes

Even if her lyrics remain pretty much the same as ever – I love you; you hurt me – and the trance-y backings (chiefly by Fred Again and Stuart Price) are well-crafted but rote, Mid Air is saved from feeling mid by the sheer character and authority of Romy Madley Croft’s singing voice. The xx vocalist lifts everything here, whether she’s being tenderly consoling on Strong, tempering the jaunty beat and saucy punning on She’s on My Mind with audible worry or giving terrified little quivers of vibrato on Twice as she realises the strength and certainly of her feelings. Ben Beaumont-Thomas

In August, Branch’s death, aged 39, left the US jazz scene without one of its most forthright trumpeters and composers, heralded for both her fiendish intricacy and bright, big-hearted themes. This posthumous album is a stunning final statement spanning country songs, hip-hop breakbeats, free improv sketches, Latin funk, organ-backed balladry and beyond, united by Branch’s zesty pronouncements and gorgeous trumpet tone. BBT

A highlight of walking around London this winter has been seeing Gina Birch’s face everywhere, screaming out of posters for the Tate’s Women in Revolt! exhibition. The still came from a Super 8 video Birch made in 1977, the year that the visual artist also formed punk radicals the Raincoats with Ana da Silva. Forty-six years later, Birch’s spindly, dub and funk-flecked debut album proves just as vital, just as attuned to scream-inducing injustice and, maybe most miraculously, just as playful as those formative works. The song I Am Rage makes classic girl-group sweetness unbearable, with Birch adopting a deathly child’s voice. In the coolly anthemic title track, the force of her bass playing has “rumbled your secrets”. At the same time, it’s full of the kind of wisdom you only get from ageing: “One day I stopped caring / On and on it went,” she sings on And Then It Happened, casual as you like – though the impact of her thought lingers like a scream. LS

Dressed in pink outfits and with a girlish voice to match, Diamond seemingly dares you to belittle her or view her pure pop project as ironic. Instead she is inspiringly sincere as she sings about wanting to be noticed and loved, and she ponders the gulfs between fame and ordinary life, between digital artifice and flesh-bound reality, with keen feeling. Her vulnerability and genuine ordinariness – so different from the performed relatability of big stars – is perhaps why she has not crossed over from the underground. But these songs (produced with Scritti Politti’s David Gamson) are true pop masterpieces worthy of any A-list singer. BBT

Made following the deaths of singer and guitarist Rachel Goswell’s mother and drummer Simon Scott’s father, the second album of Slowdive’s comeback bore a newfound clarity: their dense shoegaze haze had been lifted, as if with it youthful illusions about anything lasting forever. Everything Is Alive is barebones and contemplative, newly sharpened by chilly electronic touches yet still monumental in scale. Poignantly, its awareness of life’s cycle of endings and rejuvenation also attracted a new audience on TikTok, suggesting a pan-generational appeal for their hard-won perspective. LS

If Gilla Band’s Most Normal deconstructed rock Cronenberg-style last year, then Manchester’s Mandy, Indiana strip away the genre scaffolding altogether to deal in realms of pure, eviscerating texture. Their debut summons cold gusts whipping down wet warehouse walls throbbed by punishing techno; funereal fanfares evaporating into the ether; disembodied squalls and swarms. It’s fantastically nasty, a feeling enhanced by their unsparing approach to rhythm and Francophone singer Valentine Caulfield’s equally percussive, sibilant glee as she riffs on various abject horrors. While many artists created worlds on their own terms in these uncertain times, Mandy, Indiana, like Lankum, reverberated in the abyss. LS

This Stupid World is a testament to the 40 years that Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan have been playing together (and 30 with bassist James McNew): the product of intentionally aimless improv sessions in their own space, closed off to the rest of the world, yet unavoidably guided by their distinct chemistry. Their humour lies in the unsettled dusky groove of Tonight’s Episode, which feels vigilant, playing its cards close to its chest; Until It Happens is just as quizzical and minimal. The distortion of the title track and Brain Capers is balanced out by Hubley’s sweet country song Aselestine, with its pedal steel lens flare, while the band’s innate sense of equilibrium combines in the dualities of Sinatra Drive Breakdown, as a cool motorik pulse calms sparking noise to brooding stillness. This Stupid World isn’t prescriptive about its outlook, but makes a good argument for tight community and understanding in the face of the idiocy outside your four walls. LS

42
Jim Legxacy – Homeless N*gga Pop Music

Not only did the Lewisham producer-singer-rapper co-create the backing for the year’s biggest UK rap track, Dave and Central Cee’s Sprinter, he also put out this heartfelt solo album on which each brief song is instantly, inimitably his. Legxacy’s style is of earnest R&B singing about uncertain relationships, backed by cleanly plucked acoustic guitar lines, and with samples of drill, grime and other semi-vintage Black music playing in and out as if from a passing car window. The beats can be peppily high-tempo – the Jersey club of Old Place – but the mood always stays poignant, as if Legxacy is scrolling through memories of parties and loves gone by. BBT

Another trip through the back of the wardrobe into Fever Ray’s half-frozen, half-tropical sound-world. Karin Dreijer began developing it two decades ago with the Knife, their duo with their brother Olof, and by now it is populated with a thriving and very particular sonic ecology: bird calls, lupine howls and sudden lizard-wriggles of noise, with dancehall and techno their heartbeat. Dreijer is also one of the great enunciators in pop, luxuriating in the mouth-feel of their poetry: “Will you meet me, hocus-pocus? / On the other side of hyper focus?” (Meanwhile Olof’s own brilliant 12in release this year, Rosa Rugosa, took in the same scenery but from the very height of summer.) BBT