The 37 Best Rock Albums of 2023

Wednesday: The Rat Saw God

Although it is the Asheville quartet's fifth album, The Rat Saw God it feels like a debut. Singer Karly Hartzman mines her tumultuous teenage years to create an origin story and portrait of small-town dead-end life: sex shops off the freeway, Sunday school sessions taught while he's still fucked, a friend with his stomach stuffed. Those final scenes are from “Chosen to Deserve,” a country-rock love song where Hartzman goes through her most flattering moments as a way to say, “We were meant for each other.” But the album's most impressive moment goes to “Bull Believer”: Hartzman desperately screams that he sees someone playing Mortal Kombat in the first part of the eight-and-a-half-minute song, only to spend the second half shouting the game's tagline— “Finish him!” On The Rat Saw God, the band reaches shoegaze transcendence, screamo heaven and the kind of catharsis that leaves you exhausted in the most glorious way. – Jill Mapes

yule: soft scars

During the pandemic, Yeule turned to the poppy guitar-rock of their childhood iPods for comfort. soft scars melts a decade's worth of alt-rock gems into a phantasmagoria of tone and texture, with washes of red-red blood alternating with nectar, honey and glitter. In the lyrics, Yeule turns his wide-eyed gaze to the alien landscape of their bodies, mixing promises of intimacy (“You're never alone”) with the threat of endless surveillance (“I'm inside your phone”), committing to “keep you safe” in one song and “eat your face” in another. It's a surging neurochemical ocean, not unlike 2023's online life, but on “xwx,” Yeule lets out the pleasurable cry of someone surfing on top of it. – Jason Greene

Yo La Tengo: This Stupid World

Yo La Tengo's 17th album doesn't entirely shake their reputation as indie rock's most reliable purveyors of sonic therapy: The sublime “Aselstine” is delivered like a whispered prayer on an autumn walk, and “Fallout” swells with a heartfelt plea to leave. outside of our fast schedules. But from the droning guitar solos that introduce “Sinatra Drive Breakdown” to Georgia Hubley's relentless beat on the title track, this urgent, self-produced collection also seeks to raise a little hell out of the band's New Jersey studio space. They may sound comfortable, but they are certainly not complacent. – Sam Sodomsky

Youth Lagoon: Heaven Is a Junkyard

A great Youth Lagoon song is greatness in miniature, and those on Trevor Powers' comeback album play like a miniature village of empty Victorian houses. Lonely piano notes bloom like cones on turrets. Sam KS's drums hit with precision like shingles that come together at the seams. scale specimens peek out and climb the walls like vines. And Powers' voice, as quiet as ever, is the ghost that haunts the halls, screaming tales of family rot. Heaven Is a JunkyardIts heavenly wilderness is a sad scene, but its lasting note is happy and lasting. – Steven Arroyo

Yves volume: Praise a Lord who chews but does not consume. (Or simply, Hot Between Worlds)

Yves Tumor's God is such a tease: eyes wide open, looking down on creation, picking us up like a cat hitting its half-dead quarry. As rock'n'roll mystics, Tumor sift through the filth for divine spark – if their lyrics seem like they're circling a half-clogged drain, you're hearing them right. Amid breathless guitar riffs and volcanic drums, Praise a Lord takes Tumor's pent-up anthems higher than ever. God is unapproachable. all we have down here is the tangle of what each other means. – Sasha Geffen