Vanessa Wigfall (Editor-in-chief)

Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd by Lana Del Ray

With 16 tracks, Lana Del Rey’s new album was a smash hit among listeners. By being Del Rey’s ninth studio album, audiences felt this particular album to be a signifier for changing times for the singer. Each song featured on the album felt like meaningful and heartfelt letters to Del Rey’s younger self, signifying a more mature stage in her life. Through featured collaborations, song covers, and new usage of beats, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd is yet another example of how Del Rey is not afraid to experiment while staying true to herself.

Mr. Fahim Rahman (History)

Girl with Fish – feeble little horse

Despite the relatively short runtime, Girl with Fish is perhaps the most imaginative and texturally detailed album of the year. On this album, feeble little horse immediately confronts their listeners with fuzzy guitar riffs reminiscent of shoegaze and grunge music. However, Girl with Fish truly thrives in the lengths it goes to contrast these sounds. 

At moments, the band manages to successfully whiplash between jarringly distorted guitar riffs layered over breakbeat percussion and sweetly melodic acoustic guitars. Meanwhile, amidst the surreal and often uncomfortable sounds of the band’s instrumentation, the lead singer’s intimately recorded vocals offer a warm and solid grounding for listeners. Her lyrics are vivid and, similarly to the instrumentation, tow the line between innocence and distress, conveying the despondent and bitter feelings of maturation. 

The culmination of all this is an album that is unrelentingly compelling and never ceases to be ambitious. On Girl with Fish, feeble little horse offers their listeners a uniquely rough and dreamy experience, capturing the indefinable creative magic that seems to radiate within garages and college dorm rooms. 

Mr. William Kaskay (English, Ethics and Culture in Film)

Desire, I Want to Turn Into You – Caroline Polachek

Caroline Polachek’s sophomore solo record opens with a soaring croon and choral repetitions that immediately seize the listener, followed by the assertive lines, “Welcome to my island/ Hope you like me, you ain’t/ leaving.” 

Desire, I Want to Turn Into You, Polachek’s second project since disbanding the synth-pop band Chairlift, offers a lush tropical soundscape in its Spanish guitar and Dominican-inspired rhythms, but also finds inspiration in Dido’s early 2000’s radio pop and Celtic folk. 

The album art itself acts as a thesis statement for the album: Polachek, wearing over-ear headphones, embarks into her dreamworld on all fours, crawling through a London Underground train into a sandy setting just out of frame. 

Desire, more than other alternative pop releases in 2023, is arguably a declaration of the power of pop music, featuring collaborations with artists that inspired the album and a tribute to groundbreaking artist Sophie, who tragically passed away in 2021. In “I Believe,” the song dedicated to Sophie, Polachek belts, “I don’t know, but I believe/ We’ll get another day together,” a fitting representation of the album’s ascendant tone and high regard for the genre. 

Mr. Dan Waidelich (English, Creative Writing)

The Good Witch – Maisie Peters

Maisie Peters’ The Good Witch arrived this year in July, a few weeks after its scheduled drop date. The 23-year-old Brit joked with fans on social media about the delay, telling them the album “will be even better as a cancer.” Well, she was right. Cancers are unquestionably the good witches of the zodiac: sweet, nurturing, deep-feelers who get power from matching a vibe. They can also be moody and prickly on their bad days. 

All of that energy blends beautifully in Peters’ sophomore album, which is her first work to showcase her fae voice effectively and truly live up to the potential of her talent. This is an album all about living up to potential: the potential of a repaired heart finding new love, the potential of a young woman confident in her power, and the potential of pure pop music to spread joy. 

What is maybe most impressive is that, in a year about legacy (e.g. blink-182 and Gaslight Anthem reunions, two Taylor’s Versions), Peters chose to do something new. The result was the year’s best pop album. 

Mr. Andy Brown (English, Journalism)

Rat Saw God – Wednesday

Asheville, North Carolina’s indie-rock outfit Wednesday delivers a deep and memorable journey on their fifth studio album, Rat Saw God. Singer-songwriter Karly Hartzman guides listeners through themes of faith, love, and longing, traversing empty childhood streets, DIY tour vans, and the uncertainties of the “new South.”

Rat Saw God opens with a sonic explosion in the form of “Hot Rotten Grass Smell,” showcasing the band’s raw rock energy. However the following song, “Bull Believer,” the album’s first single, takes a different turn. This sprawling eight-minute track slows it down a bit. With MJ Lenderman’s guitar swirling melodically around Hartzman’s introspective lyrics on faith and doubt are on full display: “Comfort fools us into faith/Than fate pulls us away again/A corpse with a spirit/Got out of my bed today.”

The album reaches its peak on tracks five and six, “Chosen to Deserve” and “Bath County.” Here, Wednesday shifts from shoegaze-y rock to a more traditional alt-country sound, reflecting their North Carolina roots. These tracks, featuring the prominent lap steel of Xandy Chelmis, are both nostalgic and tender. Hartzman’s intimate, first-person lyrics evoke diary entries, as in “Chosen to Deserve”: “We always started by tellin all our best stories first/So now that it’s been awhile I’ll get around to tellin’ you all my worst/Just so you know what you signed up for what you’re dealin’ with/Just so you know what you’ve been chosen to deserve I’m the girl you were chosen to deserve.”

The closing track, “TV in the Gas Pump,” paints a picture of the open road – a familiar landscape for any DIY indie band. Its tender nature stands in contrast to the album’s more intense moments, capturing the mundane realities of chasing dreams. Hartzman sings of roadside scenes: “chain knockin against a metal pole in the wind/people standin’ with their arms crossed in the line at the Panera Bread at a rest stop.”

“Rat Saw God” is a complex journey, weaving through the messy realities of life, growth and love in the 21st century. While genre-bending can be risky, Wednesday navigates the chaos with a clear message, making this album a standout in the indie-rock landscape.

Christopher Ruiz (Editor-in-chief)

Retinal Bloom by The Scary Jokes

Four years after their third album, front person and sole creative vision behind The Scary Jokes, Liz Lehman returns to deliver another standout hit with Retinal Bloom. Since their inception, The Scary Jokes has been ramping up the strangeness and innovation, and Retinal Bloom resembles a proof of concept for how far one can stretch the limits of bedroom pop.

At times feeling more like a sonic experience than just an album, Lehman’s more abstract direction differs greatly from their previous concept albums, but remains familiarly dreamlike. Notably, the clever use of drum sequencers add rhythm and order to the moving drones and machine-like beeps and boops heard throughout the entire project. 

Very few artists can say they managed to innovate the genre of bedroom pop in such a boundary breaking way as The Scary Jokes has with Retinal Bloom. If you had one album to listen to this year from start to finish, it has to be this one.

Mx. Maddie Benson (English) 

Unreal Unearth – Hozier

On Aug. 18, the world changed, and we have one brilliant man to thank for it: Andrew John Hozier-Byrne. The Irishman unveiled his third studio album, Unreal Unearth, after having fans eagerly wait 1,613 days since his sophomore release. Unreal Unearth is an album that all with an English degree have dreamt of. Inspired by Dante’s “Inferno,” the album follows a journey through the circles of hell with a modern twist that reinterprets hell as the inescapable Covid-19 pandemic. An album full of agony, allegories, and angst, UU (as the fans call it) is considered Hozier’s magnum opus. 

From beginning to end, the album is a heartbreak you can not turn away from. The beauty of the album easily compensates for the anguish it causes. The album opens with “De Selby” (Part One and Two); two songs inspired by a character from a separate novel, The Third Policeman. De Selby is a scientist who believes that mirrors do not reflect what is happening at the same time as you look, but instead are lagging a few seconds. While the two opening songs are not directly inspired by Inferno, they do set the tone for the story to come. De Selby is reenvisioned as what it means to look at yourself and reflect on your character. Is it better to embrace the darkness within you or to ignore it and find the light? “At last, when all of the world is asleep / You take in the blackness of air / The likes of a darkness so deep / That God, at the start, couldn’t bear.” With the first songs having such broad, meaningful concepts, the tone of the album becomes clear. The audience realizes they need to brace themselves for the depths that they are about to jump head first into. 

As the album progresses, the journey into the circles of hell becomes doleful. The circles are increasingly violent and force a feeling of suffocating panic. The loss of hope is more apparent with each song and the listener can do nothing but listen to the perpetual despondency. 

To fully understand this album, it feels like you need a degree in English, history, archeology, and a masters in analysis of the universe. However, if that is not an interest of yours, just listening to the album without analysis is an intimate, beautiful experience. Hozier’s voice has such a range from the high notes in Eat Your Young to the depth in Abstract (Psychopomp) that reverberates in your chest. 

Miles Adams (Staff writer)

MegaTron 2 – BabyTron

A sequel to Babytron’s mainstream breakthrough, MegaTron. The “scam rapper” out of Detroit came out of his comfort zone to make an album that will be tied with his name forever. With songs like “Down, Up!”, “Yo Momma” and “#CERTIFIED”, Babytrom samples all sorts of music genres, and even a high school fitness test. This experimental side of the album was well received by his fans. MegaTron2 unites underground hip hop legends and mainstream icons. His song “Ice Cream” brings RiFF RAFF, Certified Trapper, YN jay and Souija Boy together for a memorable cypher. Tron delivers clever flows and rhymes for twenty eight tracks straight. The strongest tracks off MegaTron 2 are: “Beyond Turnt 2”, “Red Ring of Death” and “Trick or Treat.”