Our Annual Report kicks off with our list of the Best Albums of 2023. As the year winds down, stay tuned for more awards, lists, and interviews about the best music, film, and TV 2023 had to offer. You can find it all in one place here.
If you follow music closely, you’ve probably heard the question a lot this year: Where have all the big albums gone?
There are a couple of ways to think about this. The first is simple: The best albums haven’t gone anywhere, you just didn’t hear them in 2023. That’s why you’re reading this list (thanks!). But that feeling — the broad sense that it’s harder to agree on music these days — might signal the death of the musical monoculture.
For a few odd decades following World War II, Americans mostly read the same news, watched the same movies and TV shows, and listened to a similar range of music. This shared political and artistic identity, sometimes called monoculture, probably peaked in the US in 1983, when 106 million people tuned in to the last episode of M*A*S*H. Things had changed dramatically by 2019, when the finale of one of the most popular shows on TV, Game of Thrones, drew 19 million viewers. The Ringer declared Game of Thrones “The Very Last Piece of the TV Monoculture,” and that might have been too generous; even then, most people’s attention was split elsewhere. Now we spend more time in front of screens than ever before, and the algorithms all but ensure no two of us ever see the same things.
But music had proved an exception. Beyoncé is an international sensation, BTS are breaking records set by The Beatles, and Taylor Swift is on target for the highest-grossing tour of all time. Granted, rock and hip-hop have both been healthier, but Kendrick Lamar is still headlining festivals and Bruce Springsteen is still selling out stadiums. Music remains universal — at least on the surface.
With apologies to a few BTS solo projects and Taylor’s Versions, none of those artists put out albums this year. And the military enlistment of BTS has left an even bigger hole in the ranks of Gen Z superstars. Ten years ago, Swift, Selena Gomez, Kendrick Lamar, Hayley Williams, Justin Bieber, and so many others had recently broken out. Olivia Rodrigo put out a great album this year, but what about her peers? Does she even have peers?
Perhaps this is just an odd time in music as a younger generation finds itself. Or perhaps we now get our music in too many different ways to agree on much of anything. It takes a big audience of agreeing people to create new superstars. And without big audiences, albums that “feel” big may be a thing of the past.
Then again, maybe that’s not such a bad thing. It ensures that lists like this are different from each other, and perhaps makes them better resources, too, as more of the greatest records come from less-known artists. We certainly didn’t mind; even with fewer household names, 2023 was one of the finest years for music we can remember. Check out the best albums of 2023 below.
—Wren Graves
Features Editor
