It’s time for the only year-end list that includes Ace Frehley, Drake, and Crazy Town. Our weekly Shut Up, Dude posts are paywalled to Stereogum members, but I’m making this annual countdown free for all so everyone can admire each other’s puns.

Now that we’re reviewed the past year in music, we turn our attention to 2024 the only way we know how — with a too-long list.

The dichotomy of 2023: we had an amazing year for music, in terms of listeners having access to seemingly endless troves of virtuosity and bangingness. We also had a depressing year for music, in terms of the environment in which that music is made. Following are eight of the worst developments over the year.

December is always a bit of a dead zone for big pop albums, unless it’s 2013 and your name is Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. So for this month’s column…

This year’s Gummy Awards winners are in. It’s our 19th (!) annual Stereogum readers’ poll highlighting the year’s best albums and songs.

In a year where tentpole superhero movies are scored by Haxan Cloak and third-world ambient-jazz woodwind opuses are released by André 3000, does the phrase “experimental music” even remotely carry any weight in 2023? As always, the answer is “Look, I clicked the link, please just tell me about some albums I can listen to at work.” Here are my personal picks for the year’s best in drone suites, improv throwdowns, archival treasures, alien soundscapes, modern classical and more.

Huzzah, the listpocalypse is upon us. Behold, the Black Market is here to confuse and annoy you with the annual list of our favorite metal albums. Column writers, past and present, once again voted for their most-loved releases of 2023. This top 10 is the result. Is your most-loved album here? It is not. Did we list any albums that normal people listen to? Again, probably not. Is this a list so frustratingly niche and packed with impenetrable metal that it asks why we’re even allowed to do this? Yes, of course. In fact, this might be one of our most infuriating countdowns, so much so that the metal powers that be have taken notice. As soon as I sent this list to the Stereogum mothership, I was indicted on 666 counts of poser fraud and must surrender myself to Metal Law authorities immediately. This is what we get for not listening to Tomb Mold.

2023 has been a transitional year for jazz. We lost one of the genre’s most brilliant composers and performers, Wayne Shorter; free jazz flamethrowers Peter Brötzmann and Charles Gayle; genteel pianist Ahmad Jamal; bassist, composer and Spike Lee’s father Bill Lee; singer Tony Bennett; trombonist Curtis Fowlkes; bassist Richard Davis; pianist and composer Carla Bley; saxophonist Mars Williams, known to some as a modern free jazz hero and others as the dude from the Psychedelic Furs; and some people I consider jazz-adjacent, like Brazilian singer Astrud Gilberto and guitarist Jeff Beck, who made a series of excellent fusion albums in the mid ’70s. And while Shabaka Hutchings is still alive, he announced his intention to quit playing the saxophone, and disbanded all of his current groups: Sons Of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming, and Shabaka And The Ancestors.

As the old saying goes, you either die a youngin or live long enough to see yourself become an old head. Speaking to Rolling Stone last month, Lil Boat aged prematurely when he complained that they just don’t make rap like they used to. “The place that hip-hop is in right now is a terrible place,” he explained during a chat with Tierra Whack. “It’s a lot of imitation. It’s a lot of quick, low-quality music being put out. It’s a lot less originality.”

Songs just feel more personal. Every December, after the Stereogum staff votes on the year’s best albums, we each submit a list of our favorite tracks from these past 12 months. Think of these lists as little mixtapes, customized guides to our most obsessive listening of 2023. The only parameters we set are that (1) a song cannot repeat on multiple people’s lists and (2) all songs chosen must either have been released in 2023 or, in the case of rollouts that stem back to last year, appear on an album released in 2023.

It’s time once again for our saddest year-end list, presented in the style of a televised awards show tribute. Whether they were around for 50 years or five years, all of this year’s In Memoriam acts made an impact, then decided 2023 was the time to close up shop and perhaps even be replaced by digital avatars. If you’re questioning whether some of these groups were real, that’s why they broke up.

From a certain perspective, the hardcore band of 2023 was one that hasn’t released any music since 2017. Baltimore bruiser brigade Trapped Under Ice have long loomed enormous over the underground landscape. Turnstile, now the most popular hardcore band that has ever existed, essentially started off as a TUI side project. TUI’s blend of elements — knucklehead swagger, metallic crunch, irrepressible singalong parts, hidden vulnerability — remain hugely influential; their style is all over present-day heavyweights like Pain Of Truth, Speed, and Never Ending Game. When TUI returned at the beginning of 2023, it was an event.

This year’s best country albums list is presented in partnership with Don’t Rock The Inbox, the amazing country music newsletter run by Stereogum contributors Marissa R. Moss and Natalie Weiner on Substack. Check it out and consider buying a subscription.

2023 found humanity wandering back into a rut after a brief interim of post-lockdown joy. Over the course of the year, we were forced to confront systemic violence, economic uncertainty, ongoing challenges posed by the climate crisis, and, frankly, too much other shit to count on both hands. It seems like most people I know are ending this year feeling fairly downtrodden and nervous, myself included.

For the past few years, we’ve dedicated a list during our year-end coverage to shortform releases. There’s no grand through-line for these sort of lists — it’s just 25 EPs that got us hyped up from artists all across the board. There are young bands showcasing developing talents; established acts taking a much necessary breather between LPs or offering us some might-have-beens from their previous albums; splits and collaborations and one-offs that just wouldn’t make sense in a full-length incarnation. Their runtimes might be minor, but they feel major.

Stereogum started off as an indie rock-focused website, and that’s still our bread and butter. But it’s getting harder and harder to define “indie rock,” both as a genre and as a web of associations. In 2023, plenty of longtime Stereogum favorites rose to something resembling full-on pop-star status, while some actual pop stars continue to play around with sounds and aesthetics that previous generations would’ve associated with ashtray-smelling dive bars and handmade mixtapes. Context collapse is happening all over the place, and it can be hard to answer a seemingly simple question: What’s good now?

December 31st means it’s time to reflect on all the content we’ve experienced together this year and the clever things you had to say about it. Tomorrow marks 21 years since I started Stereogum (easy to remember because it has the same birthday as Ice Spice) so if you wanna get us anything here is where to sign up to become a paying member. On behalf of the staff, I offer a sincere thanks to everyone who has already done so — this site would not have lasted without your financial support. And shout out to everyone who’s been active in this community. It would be fecking boring without your tips and comments.

Every December, after we’ve published Stereogum’s best-of-the-year lists, we turn our attention to what’s coming out over next 12 months. When it comes to great music we are nothing if not greedy.

The polls have closed, the votes have been counted, and it’s time to reveal the results of our annual readers’ poll the Gummy Awards. It seems y’all still love indie rock very much, with just a pinch of big-budget pop sprinkled throughout. We only included one song per artist, and some reader favorites were excluded due to a split vote. Then again, all of the top tracks were by artists who piled up votes for multiple songs, so better luck next year, Grimace!

Midway through 2022, it seemed like hip-hop was bland and headed for a disappointing year. Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers confused people with its insularity and inherent selfishness. Gone were sweeping records about Black Americana; say hello to a record about choosing yourself in the midst of rising fascism and cataclysmic unhappiness. There wasn’t a DaBaby of the year, in other words, someone who was seemingly everywhere over the radio. Looking back at these past 12 months, nothing stands out, but there’s an abundance of quality. If there is a MVP of this year, it might be Baton Rouge’s YoungBoy Never Broke Again – the quantity-over-quality superstar whose fame comes from his music and also his sometimes bizarre antics.

In September, the shit really hit the fan(s). Brittany Aldean, wife of country star Jason Aldean and owner of her own fashion brand, posted a video of herself getting her hair and makeup done, and she punctuated it with some transphobic bullshit. She thanked her parents for not changing her gender when she went through her tomboy phase. Pushback was swift and merciless. Country singers Cassadee Pope and Joy Olakodun called Aldean out on her ignorance, but the most damning response came from Maren Morris, who tweeted, “It’s so easy to, like, not be a scumbag human? Sell your clip-ins and zip it, Insurrection Barbie.” In response, the former tomboy complained to Fox News, and non-country person Tucker Carlson slapped Morris with the sickest burn he could come up with: “lunatic country music person.”

For those who follow music closely, the landscape can look like a roller coaster. TikTok continues to tighten its grip on the industry, it’s becoming harder for artists to make a living wage, the algorithm rules all, and the goalposts keep shifting. This rocky, ever-changing environment makes for good years and bad years in music. But if there’s one thing that remains consistent, it’s the gimmick. Gimmicks came in many forms this year, some of which I’ve outlined below. Behold, the worst music trends of 2022.

When you think about the biggest earworms of the past century, you might immediately turn to the top of the charts – immortal tracks in the pop pantheon like “Yesterday” or “Billie Jean” – or you may consider themes from historic blockbusters such as Star Wars or Ghostbusters. I would argue, however, that the melodies most universally known – and associated with the most immersive emotions of our collective cultural life – are from video games, a media form that is commercially bigger than sports or the music and film industries combined. Far from the discipline of “geeks” and “nerds” portrayed by nostalgia TV, in 2022 gaming is more widely accessible and uniquely beloved than ever before.

2022 started off really well. A bunch of great albums came out in January, including alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins’ The 7th Hand; bassist Luke Stewart’s The Bottom; the Matthew Shipp/Michael Bisio duo Flow Of Everything; 2 Blues For Cecil by the trio of trumpeter Enrico Rava, bassist William Parker, and drummer Andrew Cyrille; John Zorn and Bill Laswell’s first collection of duos, The Cleansing; and Historic Music Past Tense Future, an archival recording by Peter Brötzmann, Parker, and Milford Graves. I hosted a streaming event on New Year’s Day, the Burning Ambulance Festival, that included performances from bassist William Parker, saxophonists Muriel Grossmann, Rodrigo Amado, and Patrick Shiroishi, pianist Lisa Ullén, drummer Gard Nilssen’s trio Acoustic Unity (see the list below), and many other musicians from the worlds of jazz, avant-garde improv, noise, and electronic music. In February, my book Ugly Beauty: Jazz In The 21st Century, which I’d spent most of 2021 writing, came out. The year held incredible promise.

Here at Stereogum, one of our fondly held listmas traditions is eschewing a staff-wide countdown of the year’s best songs in favor of personal top 10 playlists of tracks that ruled our past 12 months. Could we flip it around and do personalized album lists while collaborating on a songs list? Sure, but “songs” feels like a broader and much more chaotic pool to narrow down than “albums,” and anyhow, tradition is tradition.

Welcome to the Black Market’s 2022 favorite metal albums extravaganza. As always, we’re sponsored by sleep deprivation, depression, and an insatiable need to hear heavy metal to make it all go away. We have 10 of the finest slabs of steel released this year on the docket for you today. But first, an intro that neatly sums up the state of metal and the years ahead.

As a music writer, I don’t actually sit around much comparing current years to previous years — I don’t even do that very much in life. I’m more interested in looking ahead to whatever is coming next. So when I do look back, it’s mostly just to savor standout songs and/or albums that came out X number of years ago, and there are always plenty of those, regardless of whether they came out last year or 30 years ago. This is just my long-winded way of saying that I love every year’s music output equally. That said: 2022 unleashed some damn good pop albums.

I’m never going to forget the feeling: Thousands of people, a sea of humanity, just losing its collective mind the moment that the “Holiday” riff kicked in. This year, Turnstile were everywhere: Taco Bell ads, Sunday Night Football ad bumpers, every poster for every big 2023 festival. Eventually, that omnipresence might dull the feeling. But when Turnstile toured huge venues in 2022, they proved conclusively that hardcore shows can work on a grand, world-altering scale. Looking around in the crowd at their DC gig, I saw plenty of people who were experiencing that sense of group catharsis for the first time. It was magical.

No genre list is easy to put together, but I have to imagine that electronic is among the harder ones to write. After all, where does one begin to draw the line with a style whose boundaries are so nebulous? Google “best electronic albums 2022” and you’re in for a truly disparate array of results: pop bangers from Charli XCX, Vegas-ready EDM by Diplo, heady ambient techno courtesy of Huerco S. Hell, even Kali Malone’s Living Torch comes up, and that album is mostly centered on neoclassical techniques and ancient tones.

Oneohtrix Point Never produces the Weeknd, A.G. Cook links up with Beyoncé, and Rosalía, well, sounds like Rosalía. Pop music sizzles with electronic noise, R&B holds the most wave-making avant-garde around, and contemporary rap music stretches rhythm like a putty no longer anchored to a pocket. All of which begs the question, “What exactly counts as Experimental Music in 2022?” The answer is, of course, “Who cares, the world is on fire, no one reads introductions to music lists, please just shut the fuck up and tell me about some good drone albums.”

For much of 2022, Mike Hadreas has taken Perfume Genius back out on the road, belatedly supporting not only his great 2020 album Set My Heart On Fire Immediately but also its successor, this year’s Ugly Season. (The latter was drawn from music Hadreas originally worked on to accompany Kate Wallich’s dance piece The Sun Still Burns Here.) But as much as Hadreas may claim to be clueless about pop culture, he’s often got his finger on the pulse, or at least some thoughts on the year’s detritus. So, just as we did way back in 2017, we caught up with Hadreas and asked him to review the year.

Now that the Stereogum staff has begun rolling out our coverage of the year’s best music, it’s time for you to officially voice your own opinions. Our annual readers’ poll the Gummy Awards is live. Below, you can vote for one (1) album and one (1) song from 2022. Tracks released before this year that were included on a 2022 album or made a significant impact on this year are eligible, so if you’re looking to hype up an early single from your favorite January LP or repeat Kate Bush’s Song Of The Summer success, go nuts.

Every year for the past 100 years I’ve put together an Oscars-style In Memoriam tribute to all the bands who broke up in the past 12 months. In this edition you’ll find some acts that you loved and some you’ve never heard of, but I promise they are (were) all real and had fans. Between the dismal touring economy, vinyl pressing delays, venue merch cuts, and TikTok’s oversized influence on young listeners, it’s surprising that more bands didn’t announce an “indefinite hiatus,” actually.

We’ve been publishing a year-end list spotlighting EPs for a while now, and they are not exactly conducive to mapping out any sort of trends. Below, you’ll find music of varying stripes: hardcore firestarters, star-making rap collections, a fair share of reliably consistent or exceptionally promising indie rock. The one thing I will note about 2022 is that there are more split EPs here than usual. Perhaps that’s a lingering effect of the pandemic, as bands are still recuperating to record their own full-lengths, or maybe the sense of forming a community over the course of a handful songs seemed more appealing than ever before.

In 2022, we couldn’t agree on anything. That statement probably applies more generally, but in this case, we’re talking about the Stereogum staff and the year’s best music. It’s never easy to put together a list of the year’s best music, especially when you’re dealing with a small crew of passionate writer types. Sometimes, though, a few overwhelming favorites emerge immediately. Sometimes, massive and generation-defining albums announce themselves in obvious fashion. That didn’t really happen this year. Instead, this year’s best albums tended to be passion projects — not just for the musicians who made the records but also for the critics who advocated for those records.

Tomorrow Stereogum turns 20 years old. Yes, we’re nearly as old as Billie Eilish. That’s a long time in the content mines, and I’m really grateful to all the readers who have stayed on this journey with us. This year we introduced a bunch of new writers, we started some new columns, and we launched our first-ever shop. The music world has a lot to look forward to in the coming months: Chloe And The Next 20th Century, Kendrick in the Super Bowl Halftime Show, a Number Ones column on the Grammy Award-winning 1999 hit “Smooth” by Santana feat. Rob Thomas, maybe even a comment edit button on this blog (so close, really). Thanks again for reading and commenting, especially those who read before they comment, and we’ll see you in 2022!

Our retrospective coverage of 2021 is complete — at least until 2031 😉 — and it’s time to look ahead to the 2022 release calendar. That’s right, Stereogum’s annual list of anticipated albums is here.

This past weekend, I saw Show Me The Body make a room full of people go nuts. They headlined a wild bill that also included Candy, Regional Justice Center, Tempter, and the debuting Earth To Heaven. I’m not totally clear on whether Show Me The Body count as a hardcore band, and I never really got their records. To me, they always sounded like King Krule if he was trying to sound like Unsane, and that shit was weird to me. In person, though, Show Me The Body made perfect sense. They threw themselves around the stage with absolute abandon, and they had kids losing their minds. Motherfuckers were literally hanging from the ceiling. A show like that is good for your soul. And shows like that can happen now. They are happening now.

Last year a bunch of bands broke up, and then when they couldn’t launch farewell tours, postponed their goodbyes until 2021 or 2022. That’s why after 12 years I skipped making one of these videos in 2020. But now that everything is 62% back to normal, musical groups are back to calling it quits, and this we must acknowledge with an Oscars-style montage. As usual I am excluding any acts who hung it up because of members that became problematic or dead, as this is supposed to be amusing. When a band dies, it is sad, but we’ll always have the music, and probably one day, NFTs. Let us know who you’ll miss, and who I missed, in the comments.

In 2021, the grand and majestic rap stars all let us down. Drake made another commercial megalith, an album that dominated charts to an absurd degree, and it was just OK. Kanye West made a vast weeks-long spectacle of his album release, and the album itself was just OK. J. Cole made a pretty good J. Cole album, which isn’t letting us down per se, but it’s not lighting anyone’s world on fire, either. Kendrick Lamar, once again, did not release an album.