Are end of year lists over?
This year it felt like end of year season came and went with minimal impact and minimal consensus. So why was that? Falling in the middle of a global crisis obviously doesn’t help, but even outside of the news context — and frankly that’s never stopped musicians tooting their own horns before — 2023’s parade of end of year lists really did feel like a damp squib.
On this guest-free episode of No Tags, we try to figure out why. Was it the lack of obvious big albums that everyone could get behind?1 Declining staff numbers at key publications? Listeners absorbing new music in different ways? Or was everyone just listening to shoegaze revival records all year?2
We also tackle the year’s objective stand-out hits (‘Sprinter’, ‘Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2’), the music that had a global impact but was ignored in most editorial lists (‘Water’, amapiano in general), the impact of NTS Radio on people’s tastes, dance music’s ups (Nikki Nair) and downs (Bandcamp), Chal’s #JusticeForPadam campaign, the post-millennial vibe shift, and some of our own favourite records, radio shows and films to come out this year.
Listen to the full conversation above or via your podcast app of choice and scroll down for a selection of some of our personal 2023 favourites. And to our readers and listeners: thank you! The response so far to No Tags has been enriching and reassuring, and we’ve already recorded a batch of episodes for the start of 2024. Don’t worry, these ones all have guests.
Chal's normiest-ever normie list:
Caroline Polachek - Desire, I Want To Turn Into You
Fever Ray - Radical Romantics
100 gecs - 10,000 gecs
DJ K - Panico No Submundo
Sweeping Promises - Good Living Is Coming For You
Laurel Halo - Atlas
Nourished By Time - Erotic Probiotic 2
Yaeji - With A Hammer
Hudson Mohawke & Nikki Nair - ‘Set The Roof’
yeule - softscars
plus: The Temptations catalogue
Reading:
Kieran Press-Reynolds on mashup culture for No Bells
Meaghan Garvey’s Scary Cool Sad Goodbye newsletter
Ed Gillett’s Party Lines: Dance Music and the Making of Modern Britain
plus: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing In The Streets: A History of Collective Joy
Films:
Killers of the Flower Moon
plus: Toni Erdmann
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
Stop Making Sense 4K
Tom’s tryest-ever try-hard list:
Voice Actor - Sent From My Telephone / Fake Sleep3
Evita Manji - Spandrel?
Jonny from Space - Heat Wave
Takashi Hishigaki - time
ML Buch - Suntub
baby bong - baby bong
Candyfloss Mountain - Escape from Candyfloss Mountain
Tomu DJ - ‘Bedroom DJ’
Kavari - Suture
NTS: Scary Things, Flo, Ross Allen, André Navarro
The Lot Radio: Kilopatrah Jones, DJ Voices, Sorry Records, musclecars
Films (2023):
Anatomy of a Fall
Past Lives
Aftersun
Scrapper
Tár
Films (non-2023):
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Broadcast News (1987)
Ash is Purest White (2018)
Italianamerican (1974)
Mangrove (2020)
Black Christmas (1974)
We did realise after recording this episode that in different circumstances, 2023’s consensus album pick could have been Roisin Murphy’s Hit Parade but well, you probably know how that one went.
We promise we recorded this discussion before Philip Sherburne’s excellent Shoegaze Revival piece for Pitchfork (and subsequent Twitter discourse), but it’s definitely worth reading for a more detailed look at that particular trend.
Voice Actor’s four-hour ASMR epic Sent From My Telephone was originally released in October 2022, but was re-released as a more manageable, condensed 16-track album titled Fake Sleep in October 2023.
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