Our weekly podcast features in-depth analysis of the music we find great, exciting and just plain awesome. This week, Editor-in-Chief Puja Patel, Reviews Director Jeremy D. Larson, and Senior Editor Anna Gaca discuss the best albums of 2023, from Amaarae, ANOHNI, Sofia Kourtesis, Kara Jackson, SZA, and more. They also talk about some of the biggest disappointments of the year, including Lil Yachty's psych-rock experiment and Doja Cat's rap accident.
Listen to this week's episode and read an excerpt below. Follow along The Pitchfork Review here and check out all of Pitchfork's 2023 coverage here.
Puja Patel: Let's talk about SZA's album of the year warning signtechnically released in 2022 — Jeremy will have an aneurysm on the practicalities and logistics of that.
Jeremy D. Larson: I'm over it now. It was just hard for my slightly OCD brain to fit a 2022 album into a 2023 list, but it's just like a Grammy or Oscar eligibility window.
Patel: The TL;DR here is that anything released after our lists were published last year is eligible for this year's list.
Larson: Throughout 2023, Puja would say, “What's the album of the year?” and no matter what we talked about, at the end of all those conversations, he was like, “Does she compare to SZA?” And I said, “Not really.” SZA has been in pole position all year.
