There is so much goddamn music that comes out during all hours of every day that it’s impossible to imagine finding everything I would like which exists.
I have put a lot of effort into hearing as much of it as I can tolerate—between sampling everything Spotify gives me on New Music Friday and my Release Radar, trolling through new releases on Bandcamp, using the release calendar on Genius to find albums, and getting recommendations from social media. When I like a song enough to listen to the whole thing, I hit “like;” and so I have “liked” probably a hundred songs this month, collected in my playlist on Spotify.
A small handful of the songs and albums released so far in 2023 I think are worth returning to all year. Here will be described the six songs which made it into my Bump All Year 2023 playlist, and the three albums which I can see myself listening to many more times before the year is through.
“Pumpkin Seeds,” by Aesop Rock, Lupe Fiasco & Blockhead
This dropped at the start of December (becoming known to me thanks to my favorite hip-hop journalist, Justin Hunte, hyping it on his channel) and I was obsessed with it immediately. I knew it’s a song I’d have to hear hundreds of times—and so the very end of 2022 (when I was very busy) was not nearly enough time with it. I gave it the honorary position of starting my “Bump All Year 2023” playlist.
The instrumental is this airy, intricate thing with an oscillating drone at its core—this great going-nowhere key melody presiding above everything; long, lilting horns hanging in the background, and classic boom-bap beats as you’d expect Aesop to choose—but man, this one is so much less-obvious than what he usually appears on. I was immediately struck by how the music was hard to decode as the lyrics—and how that got me interested immediately in hearing it over and over again in a way that a more hyphy or obviously instrumental couldn’t have done.
The song’s hook and central theme is dedicated to the great Acid Thought—the unending unboxing that goes layer and layer down like a Matryoshka doll forever. “Inside of the box is just another box,” Aesop keeps repeating—and I can imagine the twisted grin on his darkened face as he looms over me, miming a box with his hands.
“Outside isn’t what it seems,” he starts his verse—right away creating a tone of unease and watching over-shoulder. “It seems like nothing up the sleeves, until it’s something loveless digging holes to cover up with leaves,” he says, and reflects a paranoia not uncommon to Aesop’s lyrics, but which he does a better job communicating then almost any other by finding ways to sneak feelings upon the listener verbally.
“One or one-fifteen PM when all you want is drugs and peace, all you get is waves and waves of uninvited company;” he puts you in this state of not quite being able to get to the comfort you’re actively chasing because of the constant onslaught of things to be wary of—”ranger, cleric, hunter, thief, druid, vandal, huckster, priest”—and so on.
Thru all of that noise, he finds himself hyper-attuned to anything musical (“the furthest needle drop (…) not that type of needle, dawg”). “It’s more than just a Funyun run that got him on that cut the locks,” he insists, about why he wants out; it’s because he can’t escape the feeling of being boxed in. This hit me in a personal way—after all, some of the oldest lyrics I remember writing are, “inside of outside—just one less door I’m behind.”
Lupe’s verse goes in a lot harder on the “inside of the box is just another box” motif, really bringing out the sensations of being trapped inside your mind—endlessly running down mental labyrinths and finding only even more space to traverse (“each subsequent layer has an inner and an orbiter; corridor after corridor; a never-ending meta-narrative that forever cabbages”). This imagery is so relatable to me it’s almost too-obvious—but also the kind of thing I needed someone to say all in a row like this.
He takes us through some odd food puns and metaphors, and teases how the more you try and examine his bars, the more you’ll realize that there’s almost an endless amount that could be interpreted from them; and that no matter how much you read into it, you’ll still be correctly recognizing the intent with which the bars were written. (“Let ‘em sink—you’re still in-synch the more you pry—you’ll find another five hiding inside.”) He also implies that you simply won’t be able to contain all the possibilities within the lyrics. (“ya strict discarder is outrunning your inner hoarder; the more you excavate it, the more it just absorb her”)
I’ve listened to this song maybe hundreds of times already, and read through the lyrics at least a dozen, and I’m still deciphering even a meaning out of some of these bars, much less finding all of the complex ways in which they interconnect; and I’m sure I’ll have fun continuing to do so, because it basically teases how you can do that exactly to your heart’s content and continue to be satisfied. Inside of the box is just another box—but everyone loves an unboxing anyways.
“Grateful,” by Black Thought & El Michels Affair
I was excited immediately by the title of this song, given that I wrote “Stay Grateful” on my New Year’s party hat, and spent a lot of last year memorizing Black Thought’s verse in Yah Yah. His album Cheat Codes with Danger Mouse last year was fantastic (I only realized about it recently), and the jazzy, super-clean production sound of this new single teasing his album with the El Michels Affair band coming in April is even more in my wheelhouse—so not only has this become my favorite song of 2023 so far, but it’s the upcoming album I’m most-highly anticipating.
“Three for the money, two for the hustle and one for the nighttime spread over the city like a comforter,” is a bar I could imagine spawning an entire album by its realization. How did I not know that “one for the” could rhyme with “comforter”? The evocative lyric sets a visual tone and a particular attitude right away—nighttime hustling in the city through an artful lens.
The rest of the verse continues that vivid imagery through the underbelly of the city beneath this haunting flute whistle, and all these subtle, creeping sounds in the instrumental which balances against the fun, familiar samples, and Thought’s deep, grounding voice, rapping slow and heavy with weight on every statement. You really FEEL when he talks about the wannabe Carnegies with “big dreams to get rich quick that fail horribly.”
I love the way the beat hits a high point of almost comforted resignation, as Thought assures us that “winner take everything is still a regular theme,” and the hook sample comes back. When he charges into the second verse, he’s got so much more intensity in his energy that I thought it was another rapper at first. He sounds like he’s on the ground level of it all now—no longer describing the setting as a disconnected narrator, but embodying himself down in the thick of it and getting a lot more fiery as he goes. In the live version that released later in the month, you can hear that even in the first verse he’s flowing more energetically than on the recorded version—and thus ramps up to full throttle by track’s end. “Basically the moral is, any drink you pour me is a toast to the warriors who bit the dust before me, kid.”
“Fuck Tha World,” by Dreamer Isioma
I’ve never heard of this relatively-new artist before this song turned up on New Music Friday early in the month, and I fell in love with her voice and the sound of this single right away. It’s dreamy, psychedelic pop, with some lackadaisical guitar, a chilled-out backbeat, and a lot of background reverb that makes it feel as spacey as the album artwork—plus a really cool chord progression in the chorus. I like that the song has such an intense message and premise and so much swagger in its approach even though it’s such a relatively laid-back-sounding song.
“Fuck Tha World” is taken as a comforting approach rather than angry or spiteful (“saying ‘fuck the world’ gives me inner peace”)—but there’s still an obvious cutting edge to the statement, and some spicy seething in the verses. (“I don’t give a fuck when I’m on tour; used to give a fuck, not anymore. Technicolor lies used to keep me up at night—now I’m sleeping with a tech, don’t know how they are surprised. Keep playing with the kid, it won’t be no fistfight—I’mma pull up on your block with some fuckin’ sunlight (…) I’m a rainbow.”)
I love the inflections Isioma uses to sell the attitude thru this verse, and the turn to something soft at the end by pulling up with the sunlight (especially when I’m in my sunposting era.)
“For Granted,” by Yaeji
Such a structurally unique, pretty, fun, contemplative and meaningful song—it’s like nothing else I can think of, and is my other favorite song of the year so far. It opens on this long pensiveness, with a wavily-held note (carried with obvious digital effects used very effectively) singing, “when I think about iiiiiit, I don’t even know how it got to be this way—how it got to be so good—how it got to be—;” and I still remember the first time I heard the song, how I was on pins and needles waiting to learn which emotion the song was going to be about; and the surprise I felt when it took so long to get to “so good,” and how that was just kind of tucked into this little key-shift in the middle of the verse.
What Yaeji is overthinking in this song is whether or not she’s taking it for granted that things are so good in her relationship. She’s so worried about it you can feel a rising tension underlying the track throughout—until it all falls away, and Yaeji admits that trying to think about this isn’t getting her anywhere, so she “stop(s) the thinking and let(s) everything flow.”
After some sweet, echoey “let it flow”s, a heavy-ass 90s jungle beat blasts off with a sick rising bassline and Yaeji’s voice sounding awesome singing low over it. This part of the song came as such a surprise to me that I kept being blown away each time I heard it until I learned to anticipate its payoff to the rising tension of the entire first half of the song.
Compositionally, I think this song is fantastic, and also combines a really interesting and personally relatable slate of influences and emotions. It sounds like if Mindless Self Indulgence made a song with the sound palette of Bomberman Hero, and then had a cute Korean girl sing about her state of mind over it like she’s in the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex opening. It’s fantastic.
Yaeji has been one of my favorite discoveries of the year so far, with a pretty long list of tracks for someone that hasn’t been releasing music for very long. There’s a ton of variety in her discography of electronic experimental dance-pop and tons of worthwhile songs—but this single in particular has me hyped for her next album.
“Why Do We Go Out Like That? - Remix,” by Declaime & Madlib
I admit I’ve never heard of Declaime before checking out this album. Madlib is one of the most-beloved hip-hop producers in the business, but I’ve never been a huge fan myself; and so I was surprised how much I adore the sound of this album. It’s got that faded old sound from unique, tape-effected samples like you’d expect from Madlib, but this project has fuller-sounding instruments and more of a haunted, kind of hollowed-out sound compared to what he’s known for. It feels like production dedicated to nailing fundamentals on another level rather than flashy experimentation, and I really appreciated that.
Track for track, In the Beginning (Vol. 3) is one of the best albums to release in January, and the best hip-hop album of 2023 so-far. Declaime’s flow carries every short track without much reliance on hooks, bolstered by great-sounding punch-ins and just a great voice. This album could’ve released pretty much any time in hip-hop history and would’ve been enjoyable by any open-minded genre fan.
Ill Minded and Come With The Ill Grammar are both endlessly-listenable tracks with awesome instrumentals, but my favorite track on the project sits right in the middle—claiming to be a remix, although I couldn’t find the original song. Why Do We Go Out Like That? is straightforwardly about the need to stop black-on-black violence. It asks why these crimes continue from a stark, almost absurdist tone of voice. The second verse starts with Declaime dying in the cross-fire of a gunfight at the grocery store. When I was younger I was constantly afraid I’d die in the crossfire of a random drive-by shooting—and now I know that’s very unlikely for me, thanks to the fortune of my birth. Still, I see the world, and I have to ask—why do we go out like this?
“flouder,” by quinnie
I’ve never heard of quinnie, but whenever a song starts with a bunch of interlocking, arpeggiating folkish guitars, I pat attention. She’s got a sweet voice and folksy air in her music, but there’s also this undercurrent seething bite to it (she says shit after some buildup), which disperses in the massive melodic hook of the song where she decides to just ‘flounder.’
How do I describe the emotions of this? It’s a mix of resignation, comfort, cuteness, and blasé over-it-ness—like, ’I’m just gonna go on this as hard as possible as though it’s sincere, because sincerity is the highest form of irony, after all.’ The other songs of hers that I checked out were just a little more bitter than what I’m looking for in music right now—but this one really got to me with its plucky, upbeat take on… well, floundering.
Also, “money talks but I can scream,” is a lyric it’s going to take a while to top for me.
ULTRA PARADISE, by Angel Electronics is a ridiculous album, but I can’t help loving it. I wrote about what I think it’s going to do to musical genre on this blog earlier in the month. There is absolutely a dorkier past version of me who would’ve run this into the goddamn ground in the course of a year. Currently, I find its clinging-to-life, begging-for-discovery tone a bit cloying, in the same way that I did Andrew WK’s Music Is Worth Living For; it just feels like music for people in a more desperate emotional state than I find myself. Still, I’m very happy it exists, and would love to hear this sound polished and taken BEYOND the rainbow.
portrait of a dog, by Jonah Yano is the most subdued and “normal” project that I’ve enjoyed this year, even though it’s a bit of a genre blend itself. When you start the first song, you’re greeted with a chilled-out math-rock riff that could convince you that you just put on American Football or Sunny Day Real Estate if the recording quality wasn’t so good.
After that, the album is a lot more jazzy—usually piano-lead, with some acoustic guitars, strings and vocals to back it, and never getting overly complicated or flashy, even as the songs weave fairly dense and emotive textures. It goes in a lot of directions, but always has this light, flighty feeling to it, like it’s not trying to be too dramatic, but still incredibly emotional and heartfelt. Where the sincerity and niceness of ULTRA PARADISE is blunt-force and at the end of great personal struggle, those qualities come naturally to portrait of a dog, and it feels meaningful when the songs build to crescendo.
There isn’t one song on this album so transcendent that I felt a need to put it in my Bump All Year playlist, and a few that I find skippable when I notice them playing. Jonah Yano’s barely-comprehendible singing is nice to listen to, but not amazingly charismatic; and there isn’t anything on this album that I’ve never heard before in one form or another. The particular way that all of those elements are combined to create the unique vibe of this album is what works for me as a carrier of atmosphere. It’s an album that’s just kinda easy to listen to—especially when I’m doing something else—which might sound like a backhanded compliment, but I mean it more to say that the natural tendencies of Jonah Yano’s songwriting and song structures—even when he isn’t trying to be flashy and using a pretty stripped-down sound palette—are appealing to me. I can easily see this ending up as one of the full albums I listen to the most in 2023, even if it takes a long time before any one part of it stands out enough to stick in my mind when the album isn’t playing.
2023 has been exciting for me on the music front so far. I loved discovering the weird trend of Brutal Euphoria Wave—even if there were only a couple of standout songs I loved enough to listen to more than a couple of times. (The two Rat Jesu songs I mentioned in that article got decent play, but I didn’t want to get sick of them on the Bump All Year playlist full of masterpieces).
I’m hyped up for the upcoming Black Thought album, hopeful that Yaeji is building to a full-length project, and still enjoying In the Beginning (Vol. 3) and portrait of a dog, along with all of the songs I just talked about, and plenty of other great songs from my liked list. The new Lil Yachty album came as a huge and very pleasant surprise, although I don’t know if I like it enough to listen to it over and over when I have a long list of great psych-pop and rock albums to return to (but maybe).
I will hopefully later end up talking about some of the stuff which I discovered through listening to all of this music in January. Alice Longyu Gao, for instance, released a fantastic new song that I didn’t quite love so much as to put in the playlist, but which led me down the rabbit hole through all of her amazing singles and the sheer wonder of her existence in general. I will definitely follow her output closely.
Fall Out Boy had a pair of strong singles drop this month, which is a win for Bird. I didn’t add Doritos and Fritos by 100gecs to the playlist because it came out deeper into last year and also is a song I don’t want to get sick of, but I only discovered it in January and think it’s one of the greatest songs ever made, possibly.
I also found out about TWINK OBLITERATOR from a song they put out in January, and I love the whole way they sound (my favorite tracks are from last year), but I’m waiting for a true masterpiece. I also greatly enjoyed the new songs released by The Go! Team, but not quite enough to listen to them hundreds of times.
I think that’s everything I have to talk about for now, so I’ll catch up again next month!