The AP Names Top Albums of 2023

It was a blockbuster year across genres, but only a few could make the AP's list of best albums:

• Génesis, Peso Pluma. The year belongs to regional Mexican artists, who brought their banda, norteño, mariachi, sierreño, and more to geographies well beyond Mexico and the southwest US. Leading the charge is Peso Pluma, whose third studio album, Génesis, became the highest-charting regional Mexican album of all time. Across 14 tracks, Pluma marries contemporary swagger with traditional corridos tumbados, bringing the colorful and once-maligned music to the masses—and making it all his own in the same breath.

• GUTS, Olivia Rodrigo. In the two years since her tear-jerking ballad "drivers license" came in like a wrecking ball, Rodrigo experienced a lot of life in a short period of time, resulting in GUTS, her sophomore album. Across 12 tracks of big feelings balladry and riot grrrl-informed power pop-punk, Rodrigo expertly soundtracks the throes of fame—and the experience of entering your 20s.
• Lucky, Megan Moroney. Country music dominated this year. Megan Moroney's stellar debut album Lucky emerged fully formed and fully without the male bravado that punctuates much of mainstream country. Her swooning single "Tennessee Orange" was ubiquitous on country radio this year, but it's the whole of Lucky—and Moroney's position as a Gen Z songwriter with Taylor Swift-level acuity—that makes her one to watch.
• Hackney Diamonds, the Rolling Stones. The Rolling Stones hadn't released an album of original material in 18 years. (That was 2005's "A Bigger Bang," and a bigger bang it wasn't.) No one saw this album coming, as raw and rocking as ever: a collection of 12 crackling songs, their first since the 2021 death of drummer Charlie Watts, featuring Lady Gaga, and a rapturous addition to their already legendary discography.

• Raven, Kelela. On her sophomore album, the fluid R&B singer offers a masterclass in sensual breakbeats and experiences in queer Black motherhood. If pulling from UK garage, '90s house, and electronica has become a trend in 2023, Kelela does it with a restrained intensity—soulful vocals atop dance rhythms, hazy sunset music set in a vintage club.
• Mañana Será Bonito, Karol G. Even now, when reggaetón enjoys worldwide success, men dominate the conversation: Bad Bunny, Daddy Yankee, J Balvin, and Rauw Alejandro, to name a few. On Mañana Será Bonito, the Colombian superstar proves there's been some serious gender oversight. This album should be considered part of a modern canon for the explosive dem bow of "Ojos Ferrari," the dance-y "Ciaro," the breathy "TQG," featuring Shakira, the Afrobeats of "Carolina."
• New Blue Sun, André 3000. It's not a rap record, but the opening track is titled "I Swear, I Really Wanted to Make a 'Rap' Album but This Is Literally the Way the Wind Blew Me This Time." That one features California alt-jazz experimentalist Carlos Niño and sets the tone for the most daring release of 2023. For the first time in 17 years, André 3000—half of the best-selling hip-hop duo of all time, Outkast—has released a new album of original material. Across 87 minutes, he plays upward of 40 different types of flutes from around the world on this ambient jazz LP. It is a minimal, meditative listening experience.

story continues below

• Sundial, Noname. In a little over half-an-hour, Sundial jolts the Chicago rapper-poet's audience. The highlight, if just one, is "Namesake," a track where Noname targets Rihanna, Beyoncé, and Kendrick Lamar's ties to the NFL. "War machine gets glamorized / We play the game to pass the time," she raps, before flipping the lens on herself and her own shakable politics. Ideological quandaries—speaking truth to power and then highlighting the instances where that fails—abound, delivered in smooth packages.
• Rat Saw God, Wednesday. The most exciting band in contemporary indie rock is informed by Drive-By Truckers, delivering an alt-country rock sensibility where narrative storytelling is as much a part of the sonic fabric as lap steel or a poetic line sung out of key. Wednesday's fifth album is an album about the complications of Southern identity, the pride and grit and shame and particularities of American geography that come out in songs about machine guns, race car drivers, crickets, Dollywood, and Narcan. Evocative, to say the least.
• My Soft Machine, Arlo Parks. Parks made a name for herself in 2021 with her debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, and her acute understanding of writing early-20s ennui has only sharpened. Here she expertly navigates an incredible diversity of sound: the reverbed guitars and breathy vocals of "Purple Phase," the '00s pop-rock-meets-soul of "Devotion," the blurry retro "Room (red wings)," and the sweet love song "Impurities." She manages to weave sounds together that shouldn't quite fit together, finding congruency in her downy melodies and romantic lyricism.

(More best of 2023 stories.)