This list comes late because every year I sift through every other list I can get my hands on before finishing. This list is a result of that deep digging, that I love to do so others don’t have to. It’s also a result of some selective culling, there’s no need to reiterate albums on every other year end list (sorry Charli, Clairo, and Co).
In years past I’ve always done 100 albums but this year I went leaner. There isn’t an album on this list that will be a waste of your time if you have at least a passing interest in the genre. This list largely skips electronic releases because those were already spotlighted on another post this past week. Thanks to all who shared and commented and engaged with that list, it was amazing to see such reception.
In the last few years I stopped numbering and instead bucket albums into 3 categories. This list will follow that format also with Essential, Really Great, and Notable.
I’ve always made it a point to include some reference genres for each release on the site as that kind of orienting information isn’t alway as accessible. Genres these days are blurry things and it’s often hard to categorize when dealing with interesting music so I hope not to offend anyone with these quick categorizations.
I’ve selected a standout track from each album for a playlist on Spotify for easy discovery. This format inherently hurts most of these albums because they’re pieces of art meant to be consumed in full. However, these playlists are a sample platter that exhibit standouts from each album for those not interested in reading.
There is also a Buy Music Club page featuring everything available on Bandcamp. Most Natural Music content including monthly roundups live on the Substack Newsletter, if you aren't already subscribed you can get on the list here.
ØKSE's debut melds avant-garde jazz with razor-sharp verses from the Backwoodz crew (Armand Hammer & co) - freewheeling live breaks, spastic sax, and looping basslines like nothing else I can recall outside of Moor Mother.
The Body and Dis Fig find kinship in reimagining what it means to make “heavy music”. Their debut is the perfect synthesis of two forces, twisting melodicism and intoxicating rhythms, layering a dense miasma of distortion with intense beats and a soaring voice clawing its way towards absolution.
J. Their music embodies the parts of us that don’t know why we are. It gives a voice to the immutable things within us, the endless torment of self-loathing and self-loving.
GB's debut album is a collaged symphony of experimental music with a pop sensibilities where tracks bleed into each other, like videos in a feed, momentarily grabbing the listener's attention only to be forgotten again shortly after. Its makeshift compositions offer a 33-minute textural plunge into the melancholy of the infinite with lofi vocal delivery reminiscent of dean Blunt and instrumental flourishes sure to please fans of Tirzah or Vegyn.
'Barely Making Much' is a sprawling, ambitious album that's as sculptural as it is explorative, reaching through genre membranes and refusing to stay still for a second. Masaka Masaka drew inspiration listening to the sounds of Dean Blunt, Slauson Malone, Arca, Jpegmafia and Vegyn and you can really hear it (in the best way).
Explosive art-rock crafted to soundtrack thought-provoking lyricism and razor-sharp wit were the major thrusts that saw English Teacher transition from bubbling under to full-on main characters this year on their label debut This Could Be Texas. The Mercury Music Prize-winning album is an audacious and electrifying statement, combining a fearless sonic palette with a genre-defying blend of jagged post-punk, dreamy indie, and sardonic kitchen sink, working-class realism.
Chuck Johnson’s latest work marks a significant evolution showcasing his versatility, from patient, reverb-laden rock to intricate ambient compositions, culminating in an anthemic seven-minute distortion-fueled finale not unlike the soaring post-rock grandeur of bands like Mogwai and Sigur Ros.
Belfast trio Kneecap's "Fine Art" is a fearless second album that weaves Irish and English rap with biting social commentary and dark humor. A concept album of sorts alongside their breakout film of the same name,, we follow the lads on a meandering night out, replete with skits and interludes, on a no-holds-barred journey that builds on their signature style with ambitious production ranging from dubstep bangers to reflective collaborations with Fontaines D.C.
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Ambient, trip-hop, shoegaze, and dream pop, all polished off with a patina of damage and giving a heavy dusting of doubt.
Dawn Richard trades in her maximalist sound for an avant-garde take on R&B and ECM style jazz atmospherics on her second collaboration with Spencer Zahn. Through whispery vocals, orchestral textures, and minimalist piano compositions, she crafts a dreamlike meditation on trauma and healing.
Shifting from his electronic roots to piano-led baroque pop, Casey crafts a haunting, introspective album that questions the nature of remembrance blending minimalist arrangements with ambient textures as his tender falsetto guides listeners through it all.
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Touched By An Angel is a 90-minute experimental ambient odyssey that showcases her unrestrained creativity and unique sound. The album is a complex tapestry of sound collage, synths, and minimal orchestration, blending elements of free jazz, gospel, and avant-R&B. Its atmospheric textures are both grimy and beautiful, with a roughness that adds charm and depth.
In hotel rooms between shows and heartbreak, Ludwig Wandinger strips rhythm bare to craft beatless nocturnes that search for serenity, while guest vocals float through like midnight whispers questioning the nature of peace itself. Don't miss ‘Fire’, where Evita Manji transforms Lana's 'Young and Beautiful' into a spectral lullaby.
Tristwch y Fenywod's debut is a bewitching blend of ancient and modern, marrying spiky double zither with robotic drums and cavernous Welsh vocals. This Leeds trio conjures a uniquely hypnotic avant-pop that feels like Celtic darkwave dredged from a moonlit bog and infused with queer magic.
An album that haunts the space between dream and reality, where minimal arrangements of reverb-soaked guitars and vintage Casios create spectral Lynchian love songs. Yuching Huang's debut weaves spectral vocals through nocturnal soundscapes that feel like getting lost in midnight streets of an imaginary city.
Winged Wheel's "Big Hotel" brings together an all-star cast of experimental musicians to craft hypnotic krautrock grooves and cosmic textures. The supergroup, featuring members of Sonic Youth and Matchess, channels the spirit of Can and Neu! into a singular, pulsing journey through space.
Hypnotic DIY pop with Jessica Higgins' deadpan poetry drifting over dreamlike soundscapes. The Glasgow duo builds intimate collages where café ambience, primitive synths, and spoken word blur into something quietly mesmerizing. RIYL: Headache
Phil Elverum taps into the little universe he's created as Mount Eerie over the last 25 years for a double album that's among his very best. Leaving behind the minimally instrumented profoundly worded death songs of his last two releases he captures something larger drawing from rock, metal, drone and folk textures for the stunning Night Palace.
Laura Marling's "Patterns in Repeat" captures the quiet revelations of new motherhood through intimate folk arrangements wrapped in warm analog hiss. Her eighth album finds profound beauty in domestic life, where flutes, rustic strings, and her devastating voice turn everyday moments into tender poetry
If I Don't Make It, I Love U is a singular, genre-defying project that seamlessly blends elements of post-rock, math rock, and soul. The album's unconventional fusion of guttural, jazz-influenced vocals with spluttering guitars and stop-start drums occasionally seem to lock in before spinning off in a new direction.
Able Noise's "High Tide" warps post-rock foundations into something thrillingly new through meticulous tape manipulation and fractured rhythms. The Dutch-Greek duo builds vast sonic landscapes where violins, saxophones, and clarinets weave through the chaos with surprising grace. Even at its most experimental, the album maintains a magnetic pull - finding meaning in the spaces between noise and melody.
While known for her work in Chanel Beads (an essential 2025 listen), Maya McGrory also stepped into stunning new territory on her solo debut as Colle this year, weaving childhood memories into crystalline electronic landscapes; "characterised by expansive glacial synths and strings, while trip-hop and shoegaze-inspired beats push her music into an experimental realm of electronic indie-rock"
julie's debut "my anti-aircraft friend" reinvigorates '90s alt-rock with a potent blend of shoegaze, grunge, and slacker rock. Raw emotions burst through seas of atmospheric distortion and muscular noisy guitar work.
What Now is a thrilling mix of jazz, R&B, soul, house, and metal from former Alabama Shakes frontwoman Brittany Howard. It's a sprawling, sometimes chaotic, exploration of sounds and histories, not always hitting its mark but undeniably driven by a defiant and exuberant spirit.
This is pure anxiety on disc, in the best way possible. sprain’s blend of dissonant post-rock, totalist composition, noise rock, and just plain noise is so gratifyingly, brutally uncomfortable. Almost definitely one of the standout heavy albums of 2023.
A standout shoegaze album that thrums with delicate radiance and brightness.
A beautifully haunted record that slowly reveals itself and grows with each listen. Jabu explore abstract textures and echoing dub with deep bass lines and minimal, sparkly guitar lines for a modern take on bristolian post punk / trip hop.
Goat are back with their rollicking, blown out take on bluesy psychedelic biker rock.Featuring hedonistic funk, merciless fuzz, and hypnotic grooves that ignite alongside unexpected detours into free jazz, hip hop, and breakbeat action that showcase a band effortlessly straddling past, present, and future.
Clarissa Connelly weaves medieval mysticism and modern philosophy into ethereal folk explorations of labor and desire. Her haunting voice guides us through gothic ballads where church bells meet electronics, transforming personal longing into universal poetry.
An album of “head music” (according to the press release) with nine songs that should be listened to “as an album, not as individual songs”. The band, featuring Geoff Barry of Portishead, returns to the lo fi cosmic psych-post-kraut rock of their debut with an album released with no fanfare or press on a random Tuesday.
2K88's debut album “SHAME” is a sonic tapestry that fuses classic Polish rap samples with innovative soundscapes, blending ambient textures, dub basslines, and frenetic jungle beats. The album reflects on Poland's post-communist cultural evolution while pushing the boundaries of the country's vibrant hybrid club scene, creating a forward-thinking sound that acknowledges the past without succumbing to nostalgia.
A raw distillation of resistance and hope, GYBE's most vital post-reunion work transforms war’s horrors into orchestral swells that pierce like air raid sirens, while beneath the chaos, a defiant heartbeat urges listeners to choose love over despair.Each album written as the doomsday clock ticks closer to midnight – intense, uncompromising, and f*cking heavy as hell. Godspeed's panache in crafting apocalyptic rock and roll is due largely to the need for it, and the ongoing atrocities against the Palestinian people are as good a reason as any to write an album like No Title.
pink balloons "is about disruption. But it’s also about Washington, DC, queerness, partying, money, violence, difference, irony, and religion. And also: fuck you.The debut longplayer from Washington, DC-based Ekko Astral is a complex mesh of bubblegum noise punk and no-wave art rock that holds an elastic space for the knotty, tangled horrors of living in the imperial core.
The Essential Mixtape is a cleansing, water-like album that washes over the mind. Malibu and Merely’s music is swelling and stormy, navigating space to achieve resolution time and time again. Like all well-balanced ambient tracks, the celestial elements and vocals are articulated with rumbles, pulses, and waves of bass, delivering a heaviness and texture necessary to feel the release of music in its entirety. It’s invigorating and soothing, consuming without suffocating, providing air.- Julie Kim
Belgian producer Milan Warmoeskerken makes a hard shift into oaky, autumnal dream pop and neo-psychedelia with an unusual suite of twisted love songs poisoned by toxic desire with a heavy nostalgic '80s tilt.
Listening to A Lonely Sinner for the first time I was transported back to discovering Parannoul’s breakthrough To See The Next Part of The Dream. Similarly produced, samlrc recorded this project alone in her bedroom in Brazil at only 19 years old, but it has the emotional heft of something greater. J: The release oscillates between shimmering shoegaze and crushing post-metal with lo-fi acoustin/ambient stitches between. It’s a collection of dramatic but soft sounds that turn life into cinema. Samlrc captures flutter, apprehension, reflection, anxiety, delight, liberty, and all feelings in between to create the most precious diorama of moments.
tldr: like GY!BE for zoomers.
Sacre’s album here sounds like “like re-glued fragments, like a broken mirror that was re-composed but with layers this time.” This is slightly haunted headphone listening music for fans of Actress, Space Afrika, and the likes. It’s a thrilling swirl of lush breaks, beautiful piano bits, and heady textures which at moments (like on ‘substitutes’) is complemented by subterranean drum and bass.
BABii flexes her Björk-level aptitude and penchant for deep world building as she enters something akin to Dante’s Inferno. It’s the pure unadulterated fun we all need sometimes and a comforting salve to those who felt pain listening through SOPHIE’s posthumous release (along with Toma Kami above).
Living somewhere between Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear, Black Country New Road, and Godspeed YBE, Tapir craft a beautiful and lush fusion of electronic, rock, pop, chamber, and folk instrumentation on this impressive debut. The album follows a three-act structure – telling the story of a solitary traveler, an ambiguous red creature known as The Pilgrim, on a journey across a mythical landscape of eerie forests, stormy seas and unholy mountains populated by beasts.
Blue Bendy's debut 'So Medieval' is a glorious contradiction – baroque pop flourishes and post punkish math-rock precision colliding with raw emotional voltage. Arthur Nolan's theatrical vocals dance through labyrinthine arrangements like a theatrical mad scientist, but there's genuine heart beating beneath the complexity. It's the rare debut that feels both wildly experimental and warmly inviting, where every sonic detour leads somewhere unexpectedly beautiful. Hailing from South London the band often gets swept into a pool with Dry Cleaning, Squid, or BCNR and if you’re into that sound this isn’t an album to miss.
Martha Skye Murphy's debut album "Um" is a stunningly original and diverse work of art pop that showcases her ethereal vocals set against meticulously crafted soundscapes that range from intimate ASMR to expansive synth architecture, blending influences from baroque pop to ambient experimentation. Think Slauson Malone meets Kate Bush.
FYILBW's debut is a whip-smart fusion of powdery ambience, low-key Americana, and tempered free jazz. Trumpeter Will Evans and multi-instrumentalist Theo Trump, childhood friends reunited, trade deep, memorable phrases alongside provocative found-sound experiments and brass murmurs into a haunting, picturesque tapestry.
This album diverges from Moin’s usually heady, rolling trip-rock sound. A majority of the tracks are collaborations with artists who introduce a brighter, more uplifting tone, with cleaner vocals reminiscent of Headache, Dry Cleaning, and The Guest. You Never End maintains the cool level-headedness of the Moin I love while dropping some sluggishness for a more wholesome, almost more innocent tone. Case in point, Sophia Al-Maria’s feature on Lift You opens with the remark “I just want to say, I really appreciate this cause nobody ever asks to use my voice for a track.” I do prefer the cough-syrupy albums of the past, but it’s fun to witness a band playing outside of their modus operandi.- Julie Kim
Every year I seem to come across a banging heady UK hip hop record that feels absolutely essential. Last year was Brother May’s Pattern With Force and this year it’s this album. S.T.A.R.V.E. brims with fearless post grime boom bap production and head spinning production alongside Cappo’s smooth accented bravado.
An album of heady, forward thinking pop music that might be described as freak folk by some. It’s sparse and quant at times but full of pleasantly unusual earworms with melodies that float around a room like on “What Doesn’t Work What Does” and “Woke Up With No Feet”.
A tour de force of experimental hip-hop, blending punk aggression with tender vulnerability showcasing Peggy's versatility, from abrasive bangers to soulful introspection, all underpinned by his always bonkers production. It's a complex, layered work that cements JPEGMAFIA's status as a boundary-pushing artist in contemporary hip-hop and his strongest offering since his breakthrough album "Veteran".
On ‘Bright Future’ Adrianne Lenker continues to enchant with her evocative storytelling and intricate guitar work, solidifying her status as one of the most compelling songwriters of our time. The album, recorded entirely on an analog tape deck, is a collection of twelve devastatingly beautiful folk ballads displaying her raw emotional and lyrical prowess front and center.
YATTA's 'PALM WINE' is a kaleidoscopic homecoming, where ancient West African storytelling collides with avant-pop experimentation. Born from five years of wandering between cities, the album weaves together sacred hymns and irreverent covers, traditional palm wine melodies and digital dreamscapes. It's a fascinating family legacy twisted into new shapes – YATTA's granduncle pioneered the palm wine genre, and now their descendant reconstructs it through a prismatic modern lens.
Geordie Greep's solo debut pirouettes like a deranged carnival through brass-soaked Brazilian tropicália, prog jazz-funk and unfashionable Broadway excess. The Black Midi frontman's theatrical speak-sing delivery leads a 30-piece ensemble with cartoonish flair that's equal parts vulgar comedy and profound tragedy.
Rich Ruth's "Water Still Flows" is an unlikely fusion of meditative ambient and crushing metal that shouldn't work but emerges as something transcendent. The Nashville artist weaves together harps, roaring saxophones, and droning guitars with the precision of a jazz composer and the spiritual weight of a shaman. This is where American musical traditions collide and transform - a delta where heavy metal meets minimalism, krautrock flows into jazz fusion, all unified by Ruth's adventurous vision.
A rising star in the UK underground rap scene, known for his laidback flow and unique blend of grime, jungle, cloud rap, and dream-pop. His debut combines bass-driven beats with coolly delivered freestyles over warping breakbeats and airy synths. Nathan Evans of NUKG Monthly wrote a stellar profile on the anonymous artist for Crack thats worth reading if you vibe with the sound.
Alpha Maid and Mica Levi's 'Pretty Penny Slur' is a masterclass in controlled chaos – sixteen tracks of twisted punk squeezed into twenty breathless minutes. Like archaeologists with sledgehammers, they excavate '90s grunge and DIY punk, reconstructing the pieces into something thrillingly askew. Alpha Maid's serrated guitar work tangles with Levi's fractured rhythms, while hidden production tricks create deliberate glitches that feel like your record player is haunted. It's both a love letter to basement show energy and a subversive dismantling of it.
MIKE takes an exhilarating detour on "Pinball," trading his signature introspection for unabashed swagger over Tony Seltzer's psychedelic trap beats. The 20-minute collaboration finds the typically contemplative rapper flexing with newfound energy, while still weaving in his trademark existential bars. It's a joyous reinvention that proves MIKE can party as hard as he ponders.
Lip Critic's debut album sounds like the fucked up amalgamation of Death Grips, The Garden, Machine Girl, Model/Actriz, and Daughter. Noisy, twisted electronic garage punk madness that hits like a freight train with massive sub warping basslines but also surprisingly wicked hooks that claw through the barreling assault of noise.
In a remarkable year for folk music, Hannah Frances' "Keeper of the Shepherd" emerges as a stunning achievement. Her commanding voice soars over sparse arrangements that blend traditional folk with experimental flourishes, recalling Sandy Denny while carving out entirely new territory. Through abstract, deeply affecting lyrics about loss and renewal, Frances creates an album that feels both timeless and urgently contemporary.
Classical viola and detuned pianos collide with compressed percussion and dry 808s as Sonne's hushed vocals float like a spirit through the mix. It’s avant-garde R&B and bizarre pop reimagined as a fever dream, where every familiar element is twisted just enough to become thrillingly strange. The album lives in the greater orbit that is Denmark’s underground pop scene alongside innovators like Clarissa Connely (featured on this list), ML Buch, Molina, Fine, and Erika de Casier.
Cindy Lee's "Diamond Jubilee" is a haunting, genre-bending must listen masterpiece that blends vintage aesthetics with modern production. The album's dreamy ballads, funk jams, and ghostly melodies evoke a sense of longing and nostalgia for the the faded dreams of a bygone era, while its lo-fi style creates a fragmented, hypnagogic version of Americana.
A hypnotic debut that defies easy categorization as a striking document of New York's underground that rewards repeated listens, revealing new layers without ever fully giving up its secrets. It’s an album of pure earworms that masterfully flutters between whispered confessions and cathartic screams and I just couldn’t get enough of it this year. I don’t think the band has had an NYC show that hasn’t sold out and Shane Lavers is an absolutely enthralling live performer.
Jessica Pratt transforms her intimate folk into something grander on "Here in the Pitch," where her ghostly voice floats through baroque arrangements and noir-tinged shadows. While strings swell and bossa nova rhythms rumble beneath, her precise songwriting and otherworldly vocals remain the magical heart of these songs. It's a bewitching reinvention that feels both timeless and fresh - like discovering a lost classic from an alternate past.
