![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
top (150) songs 2023
see also:
— top k-pop songs 2023↗
— top songs 2022↗
skip to:
— top 40 albums (scrollbox)
— selected non-english songs
— top 150 songs (playlist)
last.fm stats
1 jan 2023 to 31 dec 2023
1 jan 2023 to 31 dec 2023
scrobbles
23,215
▼28%
23,215
▼28%
artists
3,356
▼25%
3,356
▼25%
albums
5,154
▼28%
5,154
▼28%
tracks
11,785
▼39%
11,785
▼39%
most-scrobbled artists
-
daughter (630 scrobbles)↑1
-
newjeans (455)↑133
-
julien baker (402)↑769
-
parannoul (328)↓1
-
have a nice life (272)↓4
-
olivia rodrigo (243) re-entry
-
troye sivan (197) re-entry
-
ive (195)↑5
-
sufjan stevens (184)↑10
-
bilderbuch (151)↓4
well i currently have 12430834 tabs open (trying to write oscar primer + code stuff + sort my music spreadsheet at the same time, very fun) and i constantly keep hardware acceleration off to screenrecord things for nefarious purposes so needless to say my browser is a-strugglin'. exorcising this will be a big relief.... 😮💨
let me just get into it. tbh my last.fm stats are never really representative of what i think are the actual "best" albums of the year (although my top albums are still subjective and take into account personal taste/enjoyment, just to maybe a different qualitative degree), because i am often prone to certain & specific moods in which i replay songs based off total whims, or i'll get obsessed with songs that i don't think are that particularly amazing but are just Fun And Catchy. which there is of course no shame in!!! this was certainly an interesting year for music though... *__* for some reason i genuinely had a really hard time keeping up with albums properly, and after listening to nearly 20k unique tracks in 2022 it felt like a pretty big shame to fall all the way down to 11k, even if it's not even objectively that bad!!! ngl boygenius topping the aoty year-end list aggregate kind of speaks to why this wasn't that strong of a year for me music-wise, so it's maybe not Entirely My Fault, but i think i also just didn't listen to releases proactively enough and should have tried harder to discover new artists.
honestly every year when i make this post i get kind of embarrassed because i feel like my taste is super basic and generic, so i'm like: everyone already knows all these songs and what's the point of posting this even...!!! but at the same time i'm still going to like what i like, and i enjoy making sense of my liked songs on spotify and creating a semi-cohesive playlist for my own personal satisfaction, and sometimes (most of the time) it's just fun to talk about the things that bring you joy. even if my tastes skew toward palatable shoegaze, earwormy dance bops, mainstream neopsych, and occasionally snoozeworthy singer-songwriter folk gurlies. c'est la vie!
1. ALBUMS
i did such a piss poor job keeping track of my favorite albums this year that i had to retroactively construct a tracking spreadsheet in january to sort everything out properly, which is so dumb on my part and definitely a big reason i want to be better about inputting top tracks for every (good) album i listen to this year. i used to always note them on rym but i hate that your followers get notified of you leaving a "review" even when the review is just to write track names down, so it's probably better to have a running spreadsheet. well i could also make a private rym list now that i think about it LOL but spreadsheets are better for data + dwposting anyway *__*
without further ado:
some thoughts:
- Ult Bias Comebacks ❤️: despite being annoyingly pessimistic about music this year i was very grateful that my two favorite artists (parannoul & daughter) both released new studio albums in the first half of 2023, daughter especially since they hadn't released anything as a group in years!!! if you know me then you know that they're my favorite indie/dream pop band of all time; i think everyone has that one It's Not Really That Objectively Good BUT I CARE THEM band that they love a lot because they have a very specific emotional attachment to their music, and daughter has always been that one for me. like most people, i started listening to them in 2012 when youth.mp3 was all the rage in 8tracks playlists xposted on tumblr, but my listening persisted and also grew a lot throughout the years (elena tonra is my emotional support straight white british indiegurl!!!) so this album just..... yeah. Meant a lot to me T__T i bought a vinyl of both smg + atm, and then longinus randomly put out cassettes for atm like last month so i ended up getting that too lasfkdhlfdh. i've already cast most memories of the first few months of 2023 out of my mind at this point tbh but i just remember things being so hard and bad and tiring at the start of the year, and how much the pre-release singles rollout for smg helped me throughout all of it. music rly is healing <3 and i just think everyone needs to listen to into the endless night (live) (46:06) at least one time...
- non-english music: i've been reflecting on non-english music lately and how as a child i had 0 familial exposure to popular english music, so my foray into illegally downloading my entire itunes library of various indie/pop songs in middle school was a conscious decision i had to make to broaden my american pop culture literacy. i guess this is an attitude i carried with me growing up (repulsion to pure playlist listening + need to download full albums en masse), and i think overall i try to make efforts when listening to new albums to not constrain myself to specific genres or languages, even if i still have a clear set of genre preferences that i often naturally fall back into. of course with languages it's also a little easier to listen to the ones you can understand, and there's music from certain non-english-speaking countries that more popularly enter mainstream/critical discussion, but... i feel like i fell off with these efforts in 2023 somewhat which is a bit regretful (definitely listened to wayyy less j-rock than i used to) so it's something i'd like to work harder on in 2024 if possible!
here is a less aesthetic but more comprehensive topster for posterity:
2. STATS
since i have 120 albums semi-properly logged in my spreadsheet, here are some stats re: language & genre, noting that the genres were pulled from rym and that each album can of course have multiple genres so there might be some unrepresentative overlap.
🗣 languages
- english — 86
- korean — 13
- japanese — 5
- spanish — 3
- chinese — 3
- german — 3
- finnish — 2
- portuguese — 2
- french — 2
- icelandic — 1
📁 genres
- singer-songwriter — 22
- indie rock — 17
- dream pop — 13
- shoegaze — 12
- neopsych — 11
- art pop, indie pop — 9
- indie folk — 8
- alt rock — 7
- art rock, dance-pop, indietronica — 6
- alt pop, synthpop — 5
- alt r&b, electronic, post-rock, slowcore — 4
- americana, bedroom pop, chamber folk, chamber pop, contemporary r&b, pop rock, post-punk, slacker rock — 3
i don't think i have the space/time to highlight any albums in depth, but to try something new here are a few specific songs in other languages:
[🇰🇷 korean] fin fior — 겁이나
i know i already did my k-music post but i realized i never talked about this song there even though it's one of my favorites of the whole year... the album itself is a little inconsistent for my tastes but i love this track!!! the vocal processing/mixing is just right and i love all the layered 난 겁이나s, genuinely sooo cathartic 2 me for some reason. 날 둘러싼 이 벽을 헐수 있을까?
[🇫🇮 finnish] lyyti — ennätyshelteet
such a lovely darling song... i tried to listen to a lot of finnish shoegaze this year but this album is just so charmingly constructed with some really fun orchestral sounds and it spoke to me a lot the moment i put it on!!!
[🇦🇹 german] bibiza - eine ode an wien + bilderbuch — aber airbags
this album is genuinely unhinged but so much fun to me LMFAO icb it manages to have 20 tracks with so few misses!!! admittedly the gist of half the album is What If We All Did More Cocaine, but that is not the point... i think opernring blues is probably his best objectively but imo this one has massive replayability. UND FALLS ICH STERBE LIEG ICH UNTER DEINER ERDE BABYYYY!
i can't resist a second because why did bilderbuch go platinum in my last.fm stats despite only releasing a tiny ep + single this year... this and bluezone were sooo good to me for no reason i truly do not understand why. there's just something so timeless and dreamy and satisfying to me about their sound it always hits!
[🇵🇪 spanish] sofia kourtesis — si te portas bonito
this is extremely predictable but i really do think this is just such a good and deeply exciting album!!! the manu chao sample on estación esperanza is also so much fun and she builds the track's energy around it perfectly, but there's something especially ethereal about her voice on this one that i can't get enough of.
[🇨🇦 french] bibi club — le feu
was tempted to pick mandy, indiana's pinking shears just because i sing JSUIS FATIGUÉE TU SAIS PAS CQUE JSUIS FATIGUÉE, CE MONDE DE MERDE M'A ÉPUISÉE to myself like every other day but let's try to be a little bit positive here. fun little tune for sure!
[🇧🇷 portuguese] terraplana — conversas
lichrally Amazing Chill Shoegaze ☝️
[🇹🇼 chinese] i'mdifficult — 28 (what you owe)
anyone else feeling a lil darling when you're 28 / 如果你还不知道你是谁 / everything starts to slip away / 因为你还不想 take a chance 🥲🥲🥲 extremely real, extremely chill, really lovely vocals and instrumentation... just a well-constructed and vibey track.
[🇯🇵 japanese] kuragari — i want to be one of your reasons for living
i think this and kinoue64's ep were probably my favorite japanese releases this year, though i feel like zzz^3 is really best enjoyed for the noisy landscape it is as a singular semi-indistinguishable album experience and not so much for any of its individual tracks LOL. i love parannoul cosplay though... (sorry)
3. SONGS
ok playlist time! i tried to organize things somewhat so that the tonal transitions aren't too jarring, but 🤷♀️ i dunno whether i did any of that successfully. basically this isn't ordered but it's also not not ordered, and it's still probably nicer to play through as-is than with shuffle... imo!
—
all right that's all from me let me stop posting for hopefully a long time now. my mind has been like 💥💥💥😵💫 lately but it is what it is... love you all thank you for reading etc. hope you enjoy and lmk what your favorite songs were this year PLEASE (if you haven't made your own music posts for 2023 yet that is) ❤️