If you’ve thrown on any of Hiss’ recent live albums, you may have noticed the creeping inclusion of Grateful Dead covers into live sets. I feel like these were the key to predicting Jump for Joy’s thick heaping of warm, jammy, funky grooving (and more than a couple obvious Jerry-isms on guitar) on top of their usual Americana/Heartland rock sound. All Hiss is good Hiss, but chummy upbeat Hiss has a special place in my heart, which makes this my favorite album of theirs since 2017’s Hallelujah Anyhow.

For a prolific songwriter for some of the biggest names in modern country, Cobb’s solo output might sound unexpectedly low-key, often casually talk-singing on an easygoing, organ-heavy Americana/country soul sound. Southern Star in particular finds him basking in a laidback inner contentment, a warm glow that you can’t help share in when throwing it on. My favorite track (and one of my favorite tracks of the year) is “When Country Came Back to Town”, a charming love letter (and charming music video) to today’s vibrant crop of country artists, listing off a definitive who’s-who of the scene. You couldn’t ask for a better tour of the genre’s best than exploring the names dropped in this song—of course, as long as you remember to include Cobb himself.

Like Brent Cobb, Mills’ solo material might sound surprising after seeing the spread of his production work for big-name artists. I enjoyed the spare chamber folk of his 2020 album album Mutable Set, but it was really Notes with Attachments, his woozy, funky 2021 collaboration with Pino Palladino, that got my attention. Jelly Road feels like an infusion of that album’s creative oomph back into the sound of Mutable Set, creating an album that works as a low-key folk album on a surface/background level but, when given attention, reveals each track is rewardingly dense with ideas. I’m pleasantly reminded of Cass McCombs on multiple tracks (who fittingly turns out to have been a repeat collaborator).

Cactus Lee is a great example of the kind of artist I treasure Aquarium Drunkard for covering (a niche all other music publications are apparently sleeping on). I could go into detail about the classic songwriter and country-folk influences or the newly-ornate arrangements, the real appeal here is just the simple pleasures of a guy on a guitar cranking out some good songs, and with Caravan he’s made his best set of songs yet.

Note: he also quietly dropped a new album, Big Red, on Bandcamp with no description in late November, which I haven’t spent enough time with to write about yet, but there’s that too.

I love when an artist proves their wildcard capability to drop any weird concept album (like he did with Long Violent History, an almost all instrumental fiddle album, or the 3CD Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven? featuring mostly-previously-heard songs getting swallowed in dreamy gospel overdubs and eventually full-on dub remixes)—and decides to drop a completely straightforward album anyway. Childers described his writing process for this as imagining he was handing songs off to Elvis, which is also the best pitch I can give this album (I can imagine Elvis killing both the stompers and tender ballads here, but thankfully Childers kills them too). My only complaint is that it’s a tease at only 28 minutes.

After the bombastic 70s soft rock arrangements of Robert Ellis’ 2019 album Texas Piano Man, the follow-up after four years’ waiting is a complete turnaround: gentle, reflective songs intimately recorded and backed with nothing more than acoustic guitar and double bass.

I wasn’t super sold on indie folk phenoms Big Thief until their 2022 album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You (which ended up being my 2022 AOTY, to my own surprise), but even before then I loved solo member Buck Meek’s 2018 debut album, a charming, chummy, autumnal 24 minutes. Here on his third album, he’s going on strong and continuing to capture all the relaxed, chatty charm of his debut over a traditional full-length.

Goodnight Summerland feels like hands extended between modern indie folk and classic spare 70s folk songwriters. (Musically, I’d group it with the Shannon Lay and Le Ren albums in my 2021 AOTY post, though her higher voice lends it a different effect.) Lovely melancholy peacefulness.

While I credit Oneohtrix Point Never’s Garden of Delete for unleashing this particular wave of aggressive, maximalist sound design’d drill and bass (and I can still hear a lot of his sound here), I think Vietnamese group Rắn Cạp Đuôi has unlocked what a new chapter in the sound can look like. There’s a cohesion throughout the album’s chaos few people I’ve heard in this style manage to pull off (even OPN, who I love but also feel like he’s never mastered how to transition tracks unjarringly), and there’s a permeating sense of something sublime hiding under all the overstimulation (best put on display in my favorite song, the culminating, cathartic shoegaze-y fuzz of “Pressure”).

There’s a lot of styles in play here—IDM, breakbeats, some classic drum and bass and downtempo sounds—but the unifying element is the incredible level of detail and craft spent on every sound. Incredible headphone candy.

Coming off the electronic-subgenre-touring 1h43m monstrosity of 2021’s Pool, you might wonder if Skee Mask is relying on sheer spread to impress. Put on any of his 12” releases for Ilian Tape and realize, nope, he’s every bit as impressive in 22 minutes. This is his only 2023 release, so it was going to make this list anyway, but it still stood out as an infectiously-high-energy banger among his recent 12” releases to earn special mention. Did I mention I’m enjoying my new headphones?

Classic ambient house and breakbeat sounds tied together with Melati’s Indonesian-language vocals and other sound influences pulled from her upbringing in Jakarta. I’m trying hard to not say “lush” in every review, but.

Anders Jormin (bass), Lena Willemark (vocals, violin), Karin Nakagawa (koto), Jon Fält (percussion).

Traditional-folk-flavored jazz with vocals. Reading the members on this, there’s an instrument that jumps out: 25-string koto? Another international element is revealed in the tracklist credits with how each song adapts poetry from a grab-bag of different continents and millennia to set to music. In worse hands an instrument like the koto could come off as novelty, but the quartet weaves it into the sound as if there was never any doubt about a koto’s place in jazz. Add in the folky, very European sound of Willemark’s violin, combined with the traditional jazz grounding from Jormin’s double bass and Fält’s drumming, and together you have a new quartet sound that ends up unquestionably natural and obvious.

Sebastian Rochford (percussion), Kit Downes (piano).

An album in dedication to Rochford’s recently passed father (composed at his own piano). This context makes the album’s spareness and intimacy (and certainly the track names) quite touching (as well as the final track, performing one of Rochford’s father’s compositions). There are moments of lonely solemnity one would expect with that context, but the album feels more like a journey through different phases of processing, including warmer, healing moments, like on “Love You Grampa” with its suspended, floating drum groove reminiscent of later-Talk Talk.

Wolfgang Muthspiel (guitar), Scott Colley (double bass), Brian Blade (percussion).

Maybe an odd comparison, but while first listening to this, my first impression (after “hey this is a good one”) was thinking of those jazz-influenced folk artists of the 60s and 70s (think Pentangle’s Sweet Child), with its full drum kit, leading guitar, anchoring double bass, and detectable baroque, folk touches on the melody-driven songs (hell, there’s even an original song titled “Folksong”). And then I got to the end of the album and realized they were covering Joni Mitchell’s “Amelia”, an “ah ha!” moment for what they’re doing with the whole album (and if Joni love isn’t a sell…).

Ralph Towner (classical guitar) [solo].

Towner is an ECM legend, releasing his entire solo output on the label since his debut 50 years(!) ago. This half-century anniversary features him alone on classical guitar, and if that’s an instrument you’ve ever liked at all, you’ll enjoy throwing this on. This lively, dynamic playing across original compositions (and a few covers) does an honor to the instrument, and is more than a little surreal remembering it’s coming from an 83-year-old.

Jacob Young (guitar), Mats Eilertsen (double bass), Audun Kleive (percussion).

Strong smokey midnight jam session vibes here, with a restless energy from all three players (especially Kleive’s drumming, more upfront than the light drumming often heard on ECM).

Stephan Micus (a dozen instruments you’ve never heard of) [solo].

If unfamiliar with his 24 previous albums (woof), Micus isn’t a jazz musician but is a staple of ECM Records, creating soundscapes out of international traditional instruments he learns to play from their respective local musicians. (His music often lands in the unhelpful genre labels “new age” and “world music”, Rate Your Music goes with “tribal ambient” which is a little better.) This time, his theme is dedications to thunder deities, and the album is appropriately bookended with a pounding war drum, bellowing drones from the massive Tibetan dung chen horn, and the otherworldly trumpet sounds of the Siberian ki un ki (a six-foot stalk played by inhaling with no holes for pitch), creating an eerie intensity approaching a Colin Stetson album. It’s not all tension though, with much of the album’s middle featuring his usual tranquility, like the lovely violin Swedish nyckelharpa melody on “A Song for Zeus” and soft layered vocals and harp South African kaukas on “A Song for Ihskur”.

I can feel myself hitting a wall on how to describe solo jazz performances like this, so all I can say is that I immediately click with Thandi Ntuli’s piano playing. Carlos Niño (an artist I enjoy) is credited here, but his touch is minimal (and I feel like his credit is more of a kudos to encouraging the project). This is Ntuli’s show, and its her vocals and unique playing style that make this such a captivating listen.

This album, made of recorded-and-forgotten takes of solo electric guitar Metheny rediscovered saved on his laptop during tour downtime, is a perfect “night” counterpart to the “day” of Metheny’s last release, Side-Eye NYC (V1.IV) (a live recording released at the start of the same touring period). The nocturnal mood and instrumental spareness do the most to evoke Metheny’s first 70s releases more than anything he’s released in a good while.

Takami carves an interesting space: undeniably jazz, but with a new age-y digital instrument sound set and a speedy, MIDI-precise intricacy. Tracks like “As If Listening” give the impression of every note of an Eberhard Weber album (or similar) compressed into one song. I can pick out influences, but no one’s ever thought to blend them together like this.

As far as I can tell, for modern releases, the term “spiritual jazz” works as a shorthand for any artist who wears enough obvious love for Alice Coltrane, and such is the case here. An Ever Changing View feels floating and atmospheric wholly through its composition, no empty spaces. Actually, minus a few quieter interludes (with field recordings to really hammer the organicness), the music is stuffed with a dense accompaniment going on all times (including harp and kalimba), but the warm, upbeat vibe of everything makes it feel restorative and easy to throw on for repeat listens.

A tantalizing 22-minute debut release of airy, bossa-nova-flavored ambient jazz and buried barely-there vocals (more like 15 minutes, since the closer is 7 minutes of field recordings). Keep an eye on this name.

It’s impossible to approach this music without a funereal weight, and I’d be dishonest to say you could put aside (or would want to put aside) its context to hear the music in a vacuum. The music actually is among the gentlest of Sakamoto’s last instrumental work (another interesting insight into his outlook during his public grappling with his cancer), but in case you tried to put it on for aesthetic qualities alone, you’d be reminded of the state of his body through the sound of his labored breathing on the piano recordings.

(I’m reminded of a song, “Curl to Me”, from Sakamoto’s album Disappearance with Taylor Deupree in 2013 that recorded Ichiko Aoba’s heartbeat to an intensely intimate effect. 12 isn’t ever as eerie or tense as that recording, but I wonder if the intentional recording of the body in this way stuck with him since then.)

A strong capstone to Sakamoto’s final decades of musical exploration that I’m glad he was able to give us, and a mainstay into the canon of art confronting the artist’s own tangible upcoming mortality.

Peaceful, gentle guitar and piano (no effects, this earns the “ambient” label just from its playing style). There’s an interesting element here for fans of Steve Gunn’s folk rock career hearing him play in such a different context, but it’s by no means necessary to enjoy his work here.

“Ambient”, but there’s an interweaving of ambient pop, Durutti Column-like guitar, acoustic jazzy adornment, and more than a touch of influence from Nash’s Gaussian Curve bandmate, Gigi Masin, that all comes together to make an attention-rewarding album for all of its surface gentleness.

There was no new Fuubutsushi (f.k.a. “Jusell, Prymek, Sage, Shiroishi”) this year, but thankfully we have solo releases to enjoy. M. Sage’s solo work could be described as Fuubutsushi with a lot more stuff going on. Every track has an amicable clutter to it (I’m sometimes reminded of Growing’s Vision Swim), and tracks will take more pronounced evolutions into new styles, but it all retains the strong organic quality and natural acoustic/electronic blending that Sage’s work in Fuubutsushi pulled off so well.

Compared to some of the dense, detailed soundscapes on other albums I’m listing, Cloud Suites has a refreshingly light, simple approach, conjuring the image of someone casually wiling away an afternoon on their keyboards on a nice day with the windows open, which is a good place to get transported to at will. (I also have to give points for the prominent acoustic piano throughout, always a bonus.)

When I preemptively made this section, it was exactly for when I heard an album like this and knew I’d need to fix my list. If you’ve ever enjoyed any country rock, ever, put this on. It’s stuffed with everything good about the genre and all the shapes it can take: you’ve got your Gram Parsons-style country rock, your psychedelic country-funk, your classic instrumental stompers, and your nods to the Allman Brothers and Grateful Dead. There’s a lot of obvious love for the genre and an authentic vintage sheen, but more importantly, these are just some great songs that easily stand alongside their 70s influences.

In an extremely fittingly named album, this is a soul-restorative recording of compositions for woodwind ensemble, basking in the ringing ambience of the church it was primarily recorded in. This has the fun selling point of covering two songs from Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, which do honor to the originals, but are also expertly woven into the careful gentle tone of the full album.

This album finds a balance in how to give a layered atmospheric, ambient jazz arrangement over something like a bedroom folk album without losing any of its intimacy. Organic, gentle music.

The vocal delivery sounds like the new chatty, slacker-y post-punk, but with a slide-guitar country rock chumminess, maybe throw a few classic Drag City songwriters in the mix also. The music’s content living in long grooves (only one song under six minutes), and half the album’s built on top of simple drum-machine loops. (Is this all just a long way to say “alt-country”?) And yet, among all those reference points, there’s such an inviting new blend here that’s led me to repeatedly throwing this on.

Sometimes you come across an album that’s committed to having a good time in a way that makes you wonder what everyone else is doing. There’s nothing fussed over to the sound here, just a straight dose of catchy vocals over classic synthpop, disco beats, funky basslines, and I think more than a little Yellow Magic Orchestra production love.

There was a point with Parquet Courts where I stopped grabbing each new album because I felt like I got the point. But I grabbed their 2021 album and was surprisingly into that, and then grabbed this solo album, and am now surprisingly into this. Huh! (Maybe I should grab this middle ones now…) There’s an introspective, observational tone to the lyrics and a melodic, Americana-tinged, easygoing musical backing that all click together.

I can’t predict when I’m charmed or turned off when a band transparently tries to replicate an older band. In this case, the band is early-70s Japanese folk/country rock phenoms Happy End. Thankfully for these guys, I love Happy End, I love folk and country rock, and Never Young Beach made a great album chasing the same thing.

A peaceful, contented instrumental album of something like jazz, something like folk, with dense arrangements that evoke Jim O’Rourke’s The Visitor and Bad Timing (a comparison I don’t whip out lightly).