One thing we learned from our 2023 Song of the Year is that dental hygiene is important. Sure, the track’s actual purpose is more rooted in charity, and others may hear its title and think of something more risqué, but it reminded us that taking care of your pearly whites is paramount to a happy life. The song serves as an important nudge to visit your dentist at least once a year—every six months, if possible. Daily flossing isn’t a suggestion, it’s a requirement. Turning 26 and need your own health insurance? Obama’s Marketplace offers plenty of affordable dental options and discounts can be applied based on income. After all, you don’t want to have to hit pause halfway through our list because your molar is popping out.
Other songs on this list happen to touch on fanged creatures and colloquial terms for unsophisticated country folk who may be lacking in denticle architecture altogether. While the additional seven songs are a little more difficult to stretch the meaning of to meet this extended—no pun intended—bit, they serve this list’s more primary purpose of compiling the 10 songs we couldn’t help burying our freshly cleaned chompers into again and again. From bold and cathartic statements of newfound independence, to a proclamation of laying claim to a swath of land off the ocean on some Richard Branson shit, to more abstract imagery established to combat evil fish-farming practices, here are the most inventive tracks we heard in 2023. — Will Schube and Mike LeSuer
10. Bethany Cosentino, “It’s Fine”
The central epiphany of the 2012 memoir Wild arrives as Cheryl Strayed traces her ex-partner’s name in the sand. “I didn’t want to hurt for him anymore,” she realizes, “to torment myself with all the ways I’d wronged him. What if I forgave myself?” The lead single from Bethany Cosentino’s first solo album, Natural Disaster, is a similar milestone of personal closure. The sun-drenched anthem “It’s Fine” is Cosentino digging a resonant acoustic guitar into the sand and writing “Best Coast,” creating space for Bethany and no one else (OK, producer Butch Walker, too) for the first time since she was subsumed into the limelight at 22. “I am evolved / You’ve stayed the same,” she sings as the track relaxes into its mellow country-pop groove. The lyrics are open-ended enough to encompass multitudes—ex-partners, ex-bands, haters—and the sound is indebted to the country music lodestars Cosentino has long admired but never explicitly channeled. Some of the year’s best songs sought out new sonic vistas, but it’s also special to realize your true self for the first time. — Hayden Merrick
9. L’Rain, “5 to 8 Hours a Day (WWwaG)”
The enigmatic alchemy behind I Killed Your Dog—Taja Cheek’s revelatory latest LP as L’Rain—lies in its enchanting end product being a rich mosaic of arrangements that tickle both the brain and the soul in all the right ways. A perfect song for our present epoch, “5 to 8 Hours a Day” is a standout from the collection and the ideal for Cheek’s lyrical and instrumental creativity, a track that encapsulates her mellifluous experimental style across the LP. Floating on top of this single’s catchy melody is a flurry of abstract images of revolution, rebirth, and freedom. Underneath this imagery is a repeating arpeggiated suspended guitar chord that adds suspense and tension, evoking the feeling of possibility and grandeur. It’s a song you can get lost in, of course, in all the right ways. In a near-perfect album, it’s hard to pick a winner; “5 to 8 Hours a Day,” however, stands out by hair and is a great introduction to Cheek’s oeuvre. — Juan Gutierrez
8. Janelle Monáe feat. Seun Kuti and Egypt 80, “Float”
“No, I’m not the same,” Janelle Monáe sings at the beginning of “Float.” She used to walk into rooms with her head down, looking at the rug, but now she makes an entrance like a colorful arrangement of helium balloons. “Float” is a deceptively simple song built off a sturdy backbone of brass, but it’s a torch song for the flirty and thriving mood Monáe finds herself channeling for her latest R&B/funk odyssey, The Age of Pleasure. The Wondaland star drops all emotional baggage at the door here, and this song benefits with an airy softness and a main melody like little puffs of absolute zen. The accompaniment of featured artists Sean Kuti and Egypt 80 feels as plush as a goose down coat—Monáe’s breezy R&B flow combines quite well with her collaborators’ chill Afrobeat arrangements. The empowering lyrics tell us all to “float on ’em,” because you’re as “light as a feather.” Monáe is absolutely convincing as someone flying above the hate like a jet-setting queen. — Kyle Lemmon
7. Big Thief, “Vampire Empire”
I’ll be honest, when Big Thief came through my city last April directly on the heels of what was essentially a double album, further tamping down a robust discography of should-be live staples, but devoted much of their stage time to in-progress and occasionally barely rehearsed fragments of songs with downright goofy (and mostly rhyming) song titles, I was not thrilled. As with just about everything this band does, though, the performance still wound up being impressive, and not even a year later one of these goofy-titled songs (one that’s very nearly rapped, nonetheless) was officially debuted on national TV where upon just one viewing it promptly burrowed deep into my brain for nearly six months until the band officially released it as a single—which, of course, has only abetted further burrowing. If Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You introduced Big Thief’s previously covert playful side in the deepest pockets of its 80 minutes, “Vampire Empire” streamlines that facet of their personality down to three minutes without forfeiting any of the powerful emotion and innovative instrumentation that marks all of their best work. — Mike LeSuer
6. Fever Ray, “Shiver”
Fever Ray’s third album Radical Romantics harbors the unique distinction of featuring two songs co-produced by Nine Inch Nails—but even more consequentially, it’s the one that saw Karin Dreijer reunite with their brother Olof, who prior to their split in 2014, made some of the most thrilling and visionary electronic music of the 21st century as The Knife. One of the tracks they crafted together, “Shiver,” is relatively understated by the standards of a duo who once made industrial-techno pipebombs like “Full of Fire” and an avant garde opera with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock. But halfway through the track, as layers of synths begin to intertwine against an echoing strata of beats, it’s unmistakable: This sounds like nobody else but The Knife. A song this vulnerable calls for a bit more restraint, however, as Karin Dreijer navigates the complicated contrast between desire and caution. Amid the anticipation of physical contact, Dreijer declares “I just wanna be touched” one moment, and asks “Can I trust you?” the next. It’s a curious gray area, a hesitancy that tamps down on the fantasy. The sound that the Dreijer siblings wrap around that uncertainty, however, is pure ecstasy. — Jeff Terich
5. MJ Lenderman, “Knockin”
MJ Lenderman’s voice is clear. His music is built on honest lyrics fixed in his own reality and a quick wit buoyed by fervent guitars and pedal steel. On last year’s “You Are Every Girl to Me” from his breakthrough solo album Boat Songs, the Wednesday guitarist’s token of love came in the form of airport merch and heartfelt words. On one of the few solo singles he released this year we hear more about that affection: “Her love for me is real / She gives me what she has to give,” he sings on his rendering of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”—not Bob Dylan’s timeless classic, but American flag apparel enthusiast and professional golfer John Daly’s. For Lenderman, it isn’t a shootout or a bad game of golf that has him rapping on those big, pearly gates. It isn’t even the DUI he alludes to in the first verse (“They took my driver’s license / But you still have yours”)—instead it’s his lover’s devotion. It’s the kind of love that makes a no-alternative demotion to the passenger seat feel like flying with newfound wings. — Margaret Farrell
4. Momma, “Bang Bang”
We sometimes use maturity as a compliment—to call someone “beyond their years” can be a way to promote a kind of stolid adulthood. The twin songwriting forces behind Momma, Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten, are not mature beyond their years, and they’re all the more invigorating of a band for it. Following up their 2022 breakout record Household Name, “Bang Bang” is everything you want from a Momma single: breakneck, grungy, and unapologetic. “Life is good between my thighs” they sing in a clear attempt to scandalize the squares in a way that’s refreshingly raw and unrehearsed. The ’90s-sourced Momma project is, by nature, an exercise in nostalgia, but they avoid becoming fully derivative due to the sheer force of their dual personalities, flames that singe the edges of their songs. 2023 may have been a relatively quiet year for Momma, but “Bang Bang” puts on full display why they remain one of the most exciting young bands around. — Sean Fennell
3. Caroline Polachek, “Welcome to My Island” (George Daniel & Charli XCX Remix)
Caroline Polachek’s (alt-) popstar resume is irrefutable, and this year’s Desire, I Want to Turn Into You cemented her status as a genuine force. But with all due respect, “Welcome to My Island” is Charli XCX’s song now. Filthy, flirty, and thriving, Charli talks her shit all over this remix, daring the figure in her sights—who also happens to be the track’s co-remixer—to make his move. Her partner has seen her light side, she claims, so fuck it, here’s the dark. Will he stick it out, or bail like all the other party boys before? To make a song so direct with such a public relationship on the books was already ballsy, but having the literal man in question be the one behind the boards producing? That’s borderline psychotic, in the best way possible. Knowing now that this story concludes with a happy ending gives this horned-up interrogation even more depth. In other words, it’s Charli and George’s island, we’re just vacationing on it. — Dillon Riley
2. Baby Keem & Kendrick Lamar, “The Hillbillies”
“The Hillbillies” is an unusual song that starts with an unusual statement: “I don’t buy much,” Kendrick Lamar says seconds after the beat from producer EVILGIANE kicks in. But, as the first and only Pulitzer-winning rapper is wont to do, he then flips the script: “I buy land, bro.” The stated about face arrives from the revered Compton rapper in a decidedly nonchalant manner, but the rest of his latest collaboration with cousin Baby Keem is anything but quaint. Throughout the propulsive cut, which is built on a sped-up section of Bon Iver’s “PDLIF,” K.Dot and Keem finish each other’s lines with an apparent jubilee, seemingly relishing in the back-and-forth banter that includes boasts of lavish living, reports of sexual conquests, and multiple references to themselves as soccer superstars Messi and Neymar, respectively. Whether or not “The Hillbillies” is a jab at Drake (it seems to mockingly jack portions of the Canadian’s “Sticky”), it stands as another artistic declaration of independence. Perhaps Baby Keem sums it up best: “Famous, but I’m not for sale.” — Soren Baker
1. Björk & Rosalía, “Oral”
Before focusing on the lead artist on this single, and how an epic but nearly discarded track from the late ’90s about finding new love became the basis for a fresh single dedicated to fighting the power of foreign commercial farmers in Iceland, let’s discuss Rosalía for a sec. It’s nearly impossible to think of another vocalist as spectacularly melodramatic or rangy as Björk. Yet not only is Spain’s top candidate to meet this challenge the Icelandic vocal queen’s equal within the airy, wobbly framework of “Oral,” but she did such magical work a second time this year—the other track being her darkly dusky electro duet with one-time paramour Rauw Alejandro on “Vampiros.” Everyone snoozed on Rosalía in 2023, and doing so in the immediate future is at your own peril.
Whoever’s name came first on “Oral,” then, would’ve been fine. But the song is Björk’s, and she reaches back to her favorite topic—her homeland—while creating a sense of urgency and cause with the single’s surging, dewy string sounds and weirdly compressed electronic dancehall-meets-ska rhythms. While Rosalía lovingly duels it out with Björk in “Oral”’s introduction of “the dream and the real” (as well as in the physical world in the track’s video), the recording’s co-producer Sega Bodega gives the luxurious arrangement a tone of uplifted epiphany, something the Icelander’s most recent album lacks.
With that glamorous upswing and its production’s aerated vibe, “Oral” hearkens back to a Björk in her chart-topping past in a way she hasn’t allowed herself to be in ages (it helps, too, that this opulent production doesn’t sound far removed from what Rosalía does on the regular, albeit jauntier). Not typically an artist to look back through rose-tint, this new single recalls the era in which Björk’s “Hyperballad” and “Human Behaviour” competed for MTV airspace/human headspace. Only this time, her “mouth floats above her bed at night,” and her adored is those open-pen ocean salmon being cruelly farmed in her native country.
“Oral,” then, gives Rosalía something to crow about as a politicized and personal statement, while ushering in a newly reconfigured way for Björk to confront emotional lyrics with a rapturous (dare I say) pop sound. — A.D. Amorosi
