The 40 Best Indie-Rock Albums of 2023

Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Margaret Glaspy’s songs have a rangy, improvisational feel that makes her best lines and sharpest epiphanies land with a unique offhanded power. The coiled, convulsive “Female Brain” begins with the line, “Don’t be a dick/I’m out here dodging stones and sticks,” while the crawl-paced “Irish Goodbye” is a devastating image of romantic disappointment in a New York bar. Glaspy’s metier here is no-frills guitar tumult, but with the help of her nuanced rhythm section, she can nod towards rootsy punk, blues, and jazz while never feeling locked in to any one sound. Album closer “People Who Talk” sounds like Cat Power by way of Bonnie Raitt. —J.D.

This Pittsburg band creates sweet, violent little sound worlds on their second full-length LP, mixing bright noise and tense, tender twee pop to create a sense of comfort and dislocation that makes every song feel surprising. On “Sweet,” the guitar static is almost symphonic, and tepid breakbeats rise up out of nowhere, while “Pocket” is a fragile power-pop tune that even comes with a playful rap interlude of sorts, before it evolves into bleary wailing worthy of an old Dinosaur Jr. song. —J.D.

“I want the rush of knowing that I did the right thing for once,” Lydia Loveless sings on “Do the Right Thing,” a standout from her sixth album. The Ohio singer-songwriter is great at mapping out emotional middle spaces — between bad decisions and hard realizations, between becoming the kind of person you hope to be and accepting the mess you are, between changing your life and going nowhere fast. She sets her hard-nosed confessionals to tough, rootsy rock and sings in a voice full of classic-country pathos, wringing huge metaphorical impact out of topics that can be archetypal (“Sex and Money”) or rooted in detailed moments of everyday stasis (“Toothache”). —J.D.

“I don’t mind if you stay tonight, it’s just another promise you never meant,” Greg Mendez sings on the opener of his self-titled album. “Like all those times you told me you don’t ever wanna see me again.” Throughout the nine vignettes on this instrumentally minimal record, Mendez’s severe lyrical specificity opens up entire worlds in which the listener can find themselves. Within a 24-minute runtime, we go from tales of addiction, searing portraits of a lovelorn narrator, and gutting confessions made in the throes of heartbreak. It’s at once a grandiose and understated work, as Mendez explores some of his darkest times while extending nuanced grace to the person at the center of them. —L.L.

“Desire’s free, but there’s a cost to action,” Patio warn here, and these three cerebral NYC women spend Collection detailing the high price of modern ennui. Four years after their swaggering 2019 debut, Essentials, this is a concept album about nervous twentysomethings trying to wake up all of their feelings that died during the pandemic. Patio inject a little vitality back into what’s left of their hearts (or yours), using the simplest tools — post-punk guitar blurts, moody beats, witty stream-of-consciousness poetry studded with one-liners. Inspirational verse, from “Epiphany”: “Desperate for affection/Unworn black dresses/Empty rooms too expensive to fill/I’m too expensive to fill.” —R.S.

On their 2021 debut, these Brooklyn indie rockers showed off a beyond-their-years mastery of New York rock history, from Television to No Wave to the Strokes, as well as a more expansive Radiohead-ish side. On 3D Country, the band goes big. The sound here can bring to mind anything from Parquet Courts to King Krule to Let It Bleed to Deep Purple to spaghetti Westerns. Geese sound like they’ve also spent equal time dipping into the Steely Dan side of the Seventies, with bongos, synth, strings, and smooth backing vocals faded way up in the mix. —I.B. 

Tomorrow’s Fire is indie singer-songwriter’s Squirrel Flower’s most outwardly rocking record. While her 2020 indie-folk debut, I Was Born Swimming, explored the restless growing pains of early-in-life transformation, and 2021’s Planet (i) dealt with climate anxiety and natural disasters, Tomorrow’s Fire fuses the two, offering a hard, unflinching look at an amalgamation of those stressors. These days, Williams is learning to stand up for herself and cut her losses, all while toiling away endlessly and living in the midst of global catastrophe. —L.L.

Throughout her career, Indigo De Souza has created a biting catalog of songs that say the quiet part loud. By feeling her feelings several times over, her lyrics are saccharine and sarcastic, full of righteous rage, yet endlessly loving. That streak continues on this year’s All of This Will End, a triumph of a record that finds De Souza adding a hint of lightness to the mix. “[It] used to be really sad and held a lot of weight. Now, I think it actually gives my life a lot of meaning,” she told Rolling Stone earlier this year about the acceptance of death and mortality she finds on the album. De Souza’s vocals carry a sense of earnest urgency, floating over wailing guitars and twinkling synths, delivering a calming message of surrender, but not without first getting properly angry. —L.L.

Krieger’s first album for DIY-scene standby Double Double Whammy is a stunner: Ten songs of heady philosophical meanderings packed with emotional dynamite. On “Nothing in This World Ever Stays Still,” she’s working at a sports bar in Southern California and thinking about impermanence. On “A Place for It to Land,” she’s in a Manhattan apartment, resigning herself to something that’s not quite love. She keeps going over her memories of loneliness and pleasure, trapped in the physical world and longing for something more. Krieger’s finely phrased lyrics have shades of Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, David Berman — pick any existential poet you like from the past 50 years and you’ll find them somewhere in here. —S.V.L.

New Pornographers are like if Cheap Trick was as quick-witted as Steely Dan, or the Romantics were as thoughtful as R.E.M. On their ninth album, a sense of crisis in Carl Newman’s songwriting is reflected in a more-subdued musical tone, making for an LP that delivers its vivid emotional payoff in subtle gestures. That doesn’t mean there aren’t big, splashy songs here. Mostly, though, the mood has changed. Hot guitar charge takes a back seat to studio pastiche, a wistful saxophone shows up prominently, and the tempos tend toward the reflectively drifty. —J.D.

A gorgeous song cycle about loss and renewal, from Mutual Benefit singer-songwriter Jordan Lee. Growing at the Edges is full of lavishly orchestrated meditations on starting over after different kinds of
catastrophe, both personal and global. With its stand-up bass and brushed drums, Growing has some of the late-night-introspective vibe of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks (an album Lee swears he’s never even
heard) or Joni Mitchell’s For the Roses. He sings about painful transitions in ballads like “Wasteland Companions,” “Little Ways,” and “Untying a Knot.” But he spends the whole album looking for signs of life, as in the title song: “Growing at the edges/Peeking from a seed/Where there once was a wasteland, something new.” —R.S.

Bar Italia rise out of the London rock underground with an enigmatic guitar buzz, with wry deadpan boy-girl vocals through a haze of Gauloise smoke — sometimes sleepy, sometimes sinister, always with a sexy sense of doom. They’re definitely not shy about their moody Nineties influences — a bit of Slowdive here, a pinch of Flying Saucer Attack there, a touch of Drugstore every-damn-where, plus the none-more-Nineties cult of Serge and Jane. (Not to mention naming themselves after a Pulp classic?) Yet there isn’t a lackluster moment on Tracey Denim, with special salutes to the heavy-breathing lust of “My Kiss Era,” where Nina Cristante coos, “I wonder what will happen if I just let go?” —R.S.

This Kansas-based trio deliver a super catchy version of the minimalist art punk of the late Seventies and early Eighties — the droll, droning bass lines, the cheap-o synth bleat, the parched, piercing guitar, the gothily stentorian vocals. They aren’t shy about wearing their influences like coveted old band T-shirts — from the Pylon tribute “Petit Four” to the X-Ray Spex/Lilliput saxophone on “Connoisseur of Salt.” But the best songs here, like “Erasure” and “You Shatter,” brighten up the lo-fi sound with hooks that are closer to the stuff of New Wave radio hits than late-night college-radio shows. —J.D.

“The trick is not getting cynical,” Craig Finn warns early in the Hold Steady’s excellent ninth album, The Price of Progress. The Brooklyn rock savants celebrate their 20th birthday as one of the all-time great New York bands, stretching out with a fresh sense of adventure in tough tales of gamblers, junkies, and fugitives. Pick hit: “Sideways Skull,” about a recovering metalhead in a halfway house, keeping her dreams alive by belting “We Are the Champions” with “a hairbrush mic and a fantasy band.” —R.S. 

After unleashing the gorgeously fervent Show Me How You Disappear in 2021, Ian Sweet’s Jilian Medford was ready to loosen up. Sucker, released in October, is simultaneously packed with irresistible synth-pop anthems (“Smoking Again,” “Your Spit”) and silky-smooth slow-burners (“Emergency Contact,” “Clean”). It’s Medford’s most fully-realized work to date, where she proves it’s possible — and certainly welcome — to make a happy indie-rock record. “I was just thinking about this genre of indie rock, whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean, [and how] people really want you to have had something traumatic to share,” Medford told us. “I started feeling that it was O.K. to have fun with it. It’s O.K. to not be the darkest, saddest girl in the room.” —A.M.

On the fifth Ratboys album, Julie Steiner’s well-observed, open-ended songwriting and the band’s heartland pop sound take a big leap, from bouncy early-Wilco jangle to the power-pop crunch of “Crossed That Line” to the eight-minute guitar jam “Black Earth, WI” to the country-rock wanderment of “No Way.” Former Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Chris Walla produces with the same clean, well-lighted heft he’s brought to great records by Nada Surf, Tegan and Sara, and others. What you get is an engrossing singer-songwriter record and a sharp, expansive guitar record that pays equal respect to the need to look inward and the desire to rock out. —J.D.

Dancing on the Edge is the first album from Louisville-based artist Ryan Davis under his own name, though you can see the through line from the “punked-up country gunk” he made as State Champion during the 2010s. These seven country-rock odysseys — all but one clock in at more than six minutes — have a breezy clarity, but are played with the kind of shaggy aplomb you’d expect from a group christened the Roadhouse Band. As a lyricist, Davis’ talents are immense: vivid imagery and clever one-liners pulling epiphanies from the sacred, mundane, and profane. To quote just one of the many memorable lines, “A steady drip falls from the ceiling to my forehead/The pitter-patter of my past mistakes/Yeah, I have these dreams where I’m hitting the road again/But the engine roars/And I’m right back awake.” —J.Blistein

Twenty-four-year-old Annie Blackman dropped one of the year’s best EPs last spring, like a flower rising up out of nowhere. This five-track album is an absolute killer, packed with sharp songwriting that will live on loop in your head for days. The highlights here are the title track (“I’m not your girlfriend/But I’m a lot of little things/Like the bug inside the bathtub/With wet wings”) and “The Well” (“You wanna fuck me, and I wanna read your palm”), but any of these songs makes it obvious that Blackman is sure to make it big. “Writing a good song is just solving a puzzle,” she told us in April. “Balancing the light and the dark makes it more interesting, and it’s hard. When I feel like I’ve done it successfully, it’s just so satisfying.” —A.M.

When Max Freeland of the San Francisco band Pardoner mumble-sings, “Wondering if I lost a piecе of my soul/Playing that old type of rock & roll,” the type of rock & roll he has in mind is vintage guitar mangling like Pavement, Yo La Tengo, Dinosaur Jr., Polvo, and the Grifters. The Nineties cosplay here is so on point there’s even a shambling jam where a hipster named Isabel imperiously informs her friends, “Die Kreuzen is out, and now Stereolab’s in,” and if you have any understanding of just how spot-on that period reference is, this endlessly fun record will have you mumbling right along. —J.D.

French collective En Attendant Ana craft chiming indie pop with shimmering guitars, crisp harmonies (courtesy of singer-songwriter-bandleader Margaux Bouchaudon and multi-instrumentalist Camille Frechou), and the occasional peal of brass. On their second full-length, their hooks remain potent, but the songs have gotten knottier; the moodily taut “Same Old Story” pivots on a post-punk-y bass line, while the churning “Wonder” uses the wow and flutter of analog synth to underscore Bouchaudon’s anxiety over the idea of being “a good human being.” —M.J.  

A Wisconsin kid currently residing in Brooklyn, Hotline TNT’s Will Anderson brings shoegaze music down to earth, implanting those ethereal guitar swirls with the relatable heartache of a nice Midwestern guy. Songs like “I Thought You’d Change” and “Out of Town” swell up in wave after wave of distortion, but there’s a sense that they would sound just as good played in a living room on an acoustic guitar. Whether Hotline TNT are going for towering anthems (“I Thought You’d Change”), overheated power-pop charge (“Out of Town”), or dreamtime noise poetry (“Maxine”), the way this album combines big, bracing distortion and hummable tunes could make any Hüsker Dü fan smile. —J.D.

 The 12 songs on I Inside the Old Year Dying began as poems, so they don’t translate to verse-chorus-verse pop songs at all. Instead, Harvey composed folky mood pieces that capture the essences of her words, which she sings in unusual and often beguiling ways. The best songs tend to find a hypnotic groove and stick to it. “Lwonesome Tonight,” which pays tribute to Elvis, lopes along like early-Seventies Neil Young, with its fingerpicked guitar line and Harvey’s Young-like falsetto tones. Sure, much of the album may be hard to digest easily, and that is likely Harvey’s point: to make people listen closer. —K.G. 

Shamir has become one of the most prolific indie auteurs of the past decade, releasing nine superb records over the past eight years. It can be easy to take that kind of consistency for granted, but the singer-songwriter makes it impossible on Homo Anxietatem, a powerhouse collection of blissed-out guitar jams, hard riffs, deep grooves, and blues laments. See the sugar-rush hook on “Oversized Sweater,” or the spacey sludge pop of “Without You,” or the Nineties radio gold of “The Beginning.” It’s a remarkable midcareer achievement from a songwriter who’s only getting better. —J. Bernstein 

Indie songwriter Katie Von Schleicher’s latest album is a low-key revelation, with strings, horns, congas, and more swirling around her mixed emotions. “Honestly, my tight five needs work/To get past ’Hurts I’m alive,’” she sighs on the opening track — then spends the rest of the album tossing out one deadpan lyrical gem after another. “Am I just my own clown?” she adds a few lines later. “Or would anyone like some?” The arrangements highlight her understated wit, adding enough colorful flourishes to make every mini crisis feel like a midcentury-modern fantasy. It’s an album that fully earns the Harry Nilsson reference in its title, and one that marks her as a major star in sad-sack chamber pop. —S.V.L.

Bully’s Alicia Bognanno waits until the final song of her band’s fourth to fully express her ennui: “I’m tired of waiting for change and debating/What else is there to do when you can’t escape the news?” Those lyrics, delivered in a scream at the end of Lucky for You’s “All This Noise,” encapsulate the anxiety, uncertainty, and grief of the previous nine numbers, written after the death of Bognanno’s pup Mezzi. Some songs lean punky (“A Wonderful Life”), some poppy (“All I Do,” “Hard to Love”), but what connects them is a raw sense of anticipation. And it’s in that waiting where beauty and brutality of Bully’s music sounds best. —K.G.

New York singer-songwriter Keba Robinson has her own style of experimental DIY-rock cool. She began Crosslegged in an indie-folk spirit, with a gentle acoustic sound, but on her breakthrough, Another Blue, she expands her sound with synth waves and electro percussion. Her guitar is full of post-punk jitters, taking inspiration from the likes of Joy Division or Television, yet the expansive sound focuses on her powerfully soulful voice, which can range from Björk to Stevie Wonder in the same song. She hits a gospel-style fervor with the irresistibly openhearted guitar groove “Only in The,” where she pleads, “I ride on or I die with you/It’s in my blood.” —R.S.

Wilco delivered a welcome changeup on Cousin, working with avant-pop artist Cate LeBon, the first time they’ve brought in an outside producer. LeBon and Jeff Tweedy are a good match. Maybe because we’re all swimming in strangeness lately, even Cousin’s more abstract fusions feel utterly natural. On the opener, “Infinite Surprise,” tick-tocking percussion clocks a cardiac bass drum, as Tweedy freeze-frames two souls gazing into each other’s eyes (or maybe one nonbinary soul and a mirror) in a moment of uneasy, helpless communion, guitar noise, and synth detritus thickening and receding like wildfire smoke. Like a number of Wilco jams, it’s a perfect song about imperfection. —W.H.

After a five-year hiatus for the beloved Brooklyn band, First Two Pages of Frankenstein is a remarkable reassertion of their potency and shared commitment. It’s their shortest LP in 15 years, a cycle of patient and often quiet songs, completely stripped of the sharp-angle production flourishes that enlivened their recent LPs. “Eucalyptus” rejects the terms of a breakup on account of the shared possessions that it would unduly distress, and the album hits its peak with the dazzling Taylor Swift collab “The Alcott,” a late-night locking of eyes between two old flames. Nine albums deep, the National found new energy by conjuring not just a great, suffocating fog but also the far light that guides the way out. —C.P.

Joanna Sternberg’s second album solidifies the singer-songwriter as a generational cult-folk talent on par with forebears Daniel Johnston and Elliott Smith. The melodies are richer and the songs more carefully plotted out than the impressive word-of-mouth 2019 debut from the singer-songwriter whose knack for classic American songbook melody and plainspoken confessions on bruised heartbreak, self-doubting introspection, and woozy prescription-drug elation make these dozen songs feel like they’ve always existed. That they play every single instrument on the record, namely stately Randy Newman-influenced piano, is merely a bonus. —J. Bernstein 

The latest release from Palehound, the brainchild of queer singer-songwriter El Kempner, was inspired by the “apocalypse road trip” across the U.S. that the Boston band took mid-tour to get safely back home as the pandemic hit in early 2020. The songs can be big rockers (“The Clutch” is driven by bracing riffs that echo the “punch in the gut” feeling Kempner sings about as they describe a blistering breakup) or more subdued and acoustic. But every song is imbued with a sense of resilience that makes Kempner one of the most compelling indie-rock artists around. —M.G. 

“Let there be music/Let there be love,” Bonny Doon proclaim. The Detroit folk-pop band goes all-in on well-adjusted sad-guy sweetness, “la-la-la” whimsy, and bucolic beauty. Tunes like “Naturally,” “San Francisco,” and the title track can suggest a Midwestern version of Belle and Sebastian, or Stephen Malkmus as an early-Seventies mustache-pop poet. They weave guitars, they plunk pianos, they let their kind little melodies ease them through epiphany and crisis, and come out the other end with a genuinely wonderful record. —J.D

Seventeen albums into their run, Yo La Tengo remain giants of pastorale noise. This Stupid World has a mood that makes it feel distinct in the band’s esteemed catalog. As its title implies, it’s openly downcast, tinged with images of mortality and the struggle to make something out of whatever time we have while we’re here. “Prepare to die/Prepare yourself while there’s still time,” Ira Kaplan sings like an indie-rock grim reaper on “Until It Happens,” a tetchy acoustic song with a droning organ that sounds like a polite warning siren. But a record this beautiful makes easing toward the abyss feel a little less painful. —J.D.

Chicago-area singer-songwriter Kara Jackson is a former National Youth Poet Laureate who blends country folk, Seventies chamber pop, and sparse folk strumming on her stunning and adventurous full-length debut, the grief-stricken Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? Jackson’s writing is both immaculately crafted and deeply funny: “Every man thinks I’m his fucking mother,” she sings on “Therapy.” With its series of five- to eight-minute songs, Jackson’s LP is one of the most daring singer-songwriter statements of the year. —J.Bernstein

Some of the ingredients that comprise U.S. Girls’ eighth album are new motherhood, Greek mythology, and the classic sounds of Hall and Oates, plus Carly Simon — but artist Meghan Remy makes her songs personal enough that they sound original. “Only Daedalus” could be sung by Michael McDonald just as much as Remy, but her chilled delivery of “Only Daedalus coulda thought of this” feels unique. “Futures Bet” boasts a fuzzy synth-pop vibe, and there’s even a song, “Pump,” about breast pumping. It all makes for a blessed mess. —K.G.

Since forming in 2016, Water From Your Eyes have paired noisy yet winsome music with winky, tongue-in-cheek lyrics. The Brooklyn duo’s latest hits a high point, making chaos work in their favor. “Everyone’s Crushed” finds Rachel Brown varying the phrase “I’m with everyone I love, and everything hurts” (also “I’m in love with everyone and everything hurts” and “I’m with everyone I hurt and everything’s love”) over more dissonant guitar loops that don’t quite match up with the rhythm. At times, it sounds like they couldn’t find the right vocal pitch with a compass, but you still want them to find their way and get there. When things come together, it can be quite stunning. —K.G.

North Carolina’s Wednesday delivered an indie-rock gem on their fifth album, rootsy and noisy in pretty much equal measure. If you’re a fan of boygenius or Big Thief, you’ll like singer Karly Hartzman’s fearless, anxious songwriting. And if you’re a fan of migraine headaches, you’ll love the band’s knack for busting out My Bloody Valentine-levels of refined amplifier torment. There’s a Flannery O’Connor story collection worth of Southern fucked-up-ness going on here. But Wednesday are just as interested in sucking you in with a walloping guitar banger as they are in delivering unsparingly honest snapshots of the rural-burban coming-of-age experience. —J.D.

Each track on Javelin, Sufjan Stevens’ 10th studio album and first since 2020’s sprawling The Ascension, begins delicately. He croons mindful ruminations over quiet acoustic arpeggios, evoking his much-beloved 2015 album, Carrie and Lowell, or the more hushed moments on albums like 2005’s Illinois, which established Stevens as a major indie songwriter. Then the songs swell — or rather, burst — into larger cacophonies of sound, as if to balance each point of introspection with an aural representation of its respective, unbridled emotion. The production is immense, yet every layered instrument and rackety beat feels meticulously deliberate, deepening the impact of some of the finest songs of his career. —L.L. 

Countless artists try to revive the Nineties, but few do it better than Sabrina Teitelbaum, whose debut is a stunning mess of emotional fury and female outrage à la Hole’s Live Through This and Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville (Teitelbaum even toured with Liz Phair this fall). Six of the nine tracks were released as singles (the excellent “Salad” and “Joiner”), but listening to the album in full is crucial to understanding Teitelbaum’s genius: She’s not just evoking another era, she’s reinventing it. —A.M. 

Mitski is a master storyteller — able to make music with a cinematic scope and novelist’s eye for detail. The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We is another evolution: a mix of quotidian-yet-elliptical lyricism, classic country accompaniment, daring orchestral movements, and the musician’s unique brand of storytelling. Mitski channels images of love, nostalgia, and the aftertaste of disappointment into a collection of impressionistic vignettes steeped in rural loneliness, like an arty singer-songwriter update of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. —B.E.

On The Record’s “Without You Without Them,” the boygeniuses harmonize, “I want you to hear my story and be a part of it.” The trio deliver on that wish with personal declarations of love (“I remember who I am when I’m with you,” on “True Blue”), cheeky sophistries (“Will you be a nihilist with me?/If nothin’ matters, man, that’s a relief,” on “Satanist”), and the simple confidence of being a boygenius (“You make me feel like an equal but I’m better than you,” on “Letter to an Old Poet”). Whether set against folky, grungy, or Simon and Garfunkel-y backdrops, each song maintains an intimacy that makes you feel included — and that’s the whole point, after all. —K.G.