The 50 best rock albums of the year... so far
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If you're looking for proof that rock has kept rolling throughout 2023, you've come to the right place. Six months into the year and there's no shortage of doozies.
There's been new collections from big hitters like Foo Fighters and Metallica. New favourites from old favourites like Jethro Tull, Rival Sons, The Damned and Iggy Pop. Youthful exuberance from Arielle, Those Damn Crows and Babymetal. Wisdom from Lucinda Williams and Taj Mahal. Unexpected Album Of The Year contenders from DeWolff, Avenged Sevenfold and Ian Hunter. Crown Lands made the best Rush album not made by Rush, Extreme roared back into action, and Def Leppard got themselves an orchestra. It's been great.
So here they are: the young bucks and the old stagers, the guitar wranglers and the prog noodlers, the blues greats and the mysterious religious types. All life is here, and it sounds good.
As 17 Top 50 UK singles and six million album sales worldwide testify, Mike Peters’ strength of character is matched by an unerring ability to create music that raises the spirits and stirs the soul. So while stadiumsized rabble-rousers Next and Whatever are delivered with trademark intensity, it’s when he drops his guard that Forwards really shines.
This album is the sound of a band with nothing to prove to themselves or anyone else. They’re not trying to challenge you, or to reinvent the wheel, they’re just conducting emotion, a raw feeling, and communicating it beautifully to their audience. And that’s why they slot in so neatly alongside the blues-rock giants that came before them – not because they’ve forensically studied and replicated their predecessors, but because they know instinctively that it comes from the heart, and that’s something that can’t be forced.
There are young ‘old souls’, and then there’s Arielle. A bone-deep analogue junkie with her own signature Brian May guitar, '73 is a pocket-sized Aladdin’s cave of 60s and early70s colour: all Stevie Nicks charisma and Allmans sunshine. ‘I was born with different roots,’ she sings. No kidding. That's Arielle's own 1973 Volkswagen bus on the cover.
Avenged Sevenfold - Life Is But A Dream…
Whether it’s the shimmering space opera of Cosmic and its dalliances with everything from Pink Floyd to Elton John, Beautiful Morning’s hazy, psychedelic pop crashing into grinding, Dimebag-esque riffs, or Easier channelling Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, Kanye West and, er, Space Invaders in less than four minutes, this is the sound of Avenged not just casting off their own shackles but also the shackles of modern metal itself.
Japan’s Babymetal have survived 13 years in showbusiness without any essential deviation from their extraordinary mission plan, although The Other One, their third album, sees the band refining their sound with slightly more thoughtful chord changes, contemplative voice-overs (“Maybe what you see is all an illusion”) and moments of harmonic progression, but not too many. This is the maturing of 'cute metal', and it’s still nuts.
Black Spiders - Can’t Die, Won’t Die
Wasting none of the momentum of their self-titled comeback album a couple of years ago, Can’t Die, Won’t Die is an effervescent love letter to rock’n’roll at its most joyous and uncomplicated. There’s a cheeky nod to Faith No More’s Be Aggressive on Destroyer, and an outbreak of shimmering, T.Rex-perfumed glam rock on Make Me Bleed – tasty Easter eggs hidden in among starbursts of gleaming, old-school metal riffs and timeless, feel-good hard rock attitude.
Black Star Riders - Wrong Side Of Paradise
The mood is mostly joyous, and the guitars chime on demand. Ricky Warwick remembers tough times in Glasgow and Belfast, even weaving the city vernacular into a love song, Catch Yourself On. His home base is Los Angeles, but the warrior sentiments are Celtic; the track Green And Troubled Land is a bristling rebuke to political doublespeak at home and the morbid hand of history.
Tales Of Time comprises the New Yorker’s most compelling live collection to date. 2021 album Time Clocks finally gets the airing it deserves, and at Colorado’s striking Red Rocks Amphitheatre, these songs radiate with bluesy majesty. Notches and The Heart That Never Waits are both irresistible with devil-may-care swagger and Bonamassa’s fiery flourishes.
Somewhere amid the turbocharged funk (Turn It Up), sledgehammer riff-rock (One And Only) and vein-bulging barroom boogie (Let’s Get Wild) you get the sense of a band revitalised by the months on the road. A meditative Pain, in which Todd sighs ‘Some would say I threw it all away’, offers a glimpse of the emotional consequences of the rock’n’roll lifestyle, but the joie de vivre returns for a raucous rendition of Bryan Adams’s salacious jukebox perennial Summer Of ’69.
Clutch - PA Tapes: Copenhagen 8/23/22
Slaughter Beach, Red Alert (Boss Metal Zone) and Nosferatu Madre represent the brand-spankingly fresh, while the deeper, older cuts make for a pleasant surprise. Escape From The Prison Planet kicks off the evening and we get Rats, Impetus, Green Buckets, 7 Jam and A Shogun Named Marcus. The band tear through the set with such fervour it feels like the wheels might fall off during the excellent double whammy of X-Ray Visions and Firebirds!. Sounds like one helluva gig.
Inspired by the Delta pioneers but not trying to mimic them, Voices is full of stories and oldworld darknesses, contrasts that haunt, move and entertain. Thematically it plants the genre in contemporary soil, showing that the blues needn’t be an exercise in pre-written nostalgia. Nothing But The Blues is an exhilarating update of the old ‘woke up this morning’ adage, while The Joy peers into the bittersweet passage of relationships – a bit like hearing Hendrix’s Little Wing revisited by Alice In Chains.
The record’s peppered with great songs, even their 18-minute opus (a word you feel they’ll enjoy) glides along beautifully, and the second half of the record pulls off some daring feats of pomp pop and rock. Dreamer Of The Dawn tears along with real panache, The Shadow has a wonderful, stuttering feel and a great overarching melody that is pure joy. Lady Of The Lake is prime Zeppelin at their woozy best, and The Citadel is lovely, lilting pomp complete with dreamy piano and a melody line that puts you in mind of early Queen.
Darkadelic is fairly breathless stuff. Captain Sensible is both savage and articulate on guitar, be it the Stooges-like blowout Follow Me, a merciless takedown of celebrity culture, or the ferocious Leader Of The Gang, a thinly veiled account of Gary Glitter’s fall from grace. All told, Darkadelic is a vital and reassuringly pugnacious return.
Comprising a trio of current and former members of Danger Danger – bassist Bruno Ravel and guitarist Rob Marcello always worked so well with Paul Laine, a singer whose voice was born to grace radio rock – it would be tempting to say The Defiants exist to fill a gap left by Danger Danger’s reluctance to create new music, but they’re much, much better than that. Each of these 11 tracks exude confidence, cockiness and character.
Def Leppard - Drastic Symphonies
Always diligent guardians of their catalogue, Leppard are enhancing it here. Some of producer Mutt Lange’s layers have been sacrificed in order to de-clutter and accommodate the orchestra, but there are additions too. There’s a new guitar backdrop to the timpani-fest that is now Animal. And when in the third verse of Too Late For Love (which briefly threatens to break into Carmina Burana), the Joe Elliott of 2023 duets with the Joe Elliott of 1983 it’s spine tingling.
DeWolff - Love, Death & In Between
At times feeling a bit like the Blues Brothers gospel choir scene, the songwriting chops on display are astonishing, not least during the 16-minute soul-’n’-rock opera that is Rosita, the album’s undeniable jewel in the crown. From start to finish there is zero filler to be found here, everything from high-octane opener Night Train, via the slow blues of Mr Garbage Man and Stax horns-flavoured Message For My Baby, to psychedelic closer Queen Of Space & Time is carefully considered and delivered with passion.
Less funk out, more crunching, brightly produced hard rock, matched with some very cleverly arranged vocal parts, that veers between pop and metal but never sounds misplaced. They rattle – the excellent X Out, the Velvet Revolver-like Banshee – and hum on tracks like the delicate Hurricane and the classic pop-ballad twist of Other Side Of The Rainbow.
When it comes to pedigree, Fake Names are the Best In Show rosettewinners of the punk world. Featuring Dennis Lyxzén of Refused and The [International] Noise Conspiracy, Brian Baker of Minor Threat/Bad Religion/Dag Nasty, Michael Hampton of SOA/Embrace, Johnny Temple of Girls Against Boys, and Brendan Canty of Fugazi/Rites of Spring, their second album is a blast.
Fantastic Negrito - Grandfather Courage
Grandfather Courage, an acoustic reimagining of 2022’s acclaimed White Jesus Black Problems recorded with his touring band, re-tells the story of the love affair between his seventh-generation Scottish grandmother and AfricanAmerican grandfather in 1750s Virginia. Oh Betty is the biggest benefactor from this strippedback approach, its feverish howl of anguish ever more potent as a rootsy funk lament.
Samantha Fish & Jesse Dayton - Death Wish Blues
After her graceful gearshifts between blues and country, Samantha Fish’s hugely promising partnership with Texas renegade Jesse Dayton drags her further towards the dark side. This smoke-blackened courtship dance peaks on the honeyed crunch of No Apology, Fish drawling into the mic like a rodeo queen fallen on hard times.
Foo Fighters - But Here We Are
With But Here We Are, Grohl spends the bulk of Foo Fighters’ eleventh studio album battling to come to terms with Taylor Hawkins' death. Opener Rescued comes roaring out of the blocks as a stunned Grohl screams: ‘It came in a flash, it came out of nowhere/It happened so fast, and then it was over’, before hopelessly admitting: ‘I’m just waiting to be rescued, bring me back to life’. This is followed by the brilliant Under You, a song which sees the Foos revert back to the raw emotive sonics that painted The Colour And The Shape belter Monkey Wrench.
Ghost’s success is built on theatrical blasphemy, winking provocation and some blockbusting tunes. The masked Swedes’ third covers EP ticks all three boxes, even if the tunes belong to someone else. As always, singer and conceptual mastermind Tobias Forge has chosen five songs that fit his band’s worldview while fusing their musical DNA with his own.
Gov’t Mule - Peace… Like A River
Obviously there are riffs – where would Gov’t Mule be without them? – but more thought has gone into how the song will develop around them. The guitar riff on the opening Same As It Ever Was is perhaps the most melodic that Warren Haynes has come up with, coupled with a sublime descending bass line from Jorgen Carlsson. It expands into a Yes-style prog sequence with keyboards and drums piling in to create a glorious cacophony.
Hawkwind - The Future Never Waits
The central conceit here is that of mortality. And while that might seem simple enough, the band start with death and work backwards across two slabs of vinyl (or 10 CD tracks) to the wonderment of birth. Among the characteristic chugging rock of Rama (The Prophecy) and The End are three instrumentals that find Hawkwind stretching out.
There are harmonies from Todd Rundgren on the majestically Dylanesque Don’t Tread On Me, there’s a track featuring, impossibly, Taylor Hawkins, Billy Bob Thornton and Billy Gibbons, and there is the epic Angel, a ballad as good as anything Hunter has ever done, with the haunting line: ‘When we move, I hope we go to your place.’ Nobody but Hunter has the power, at this point in their career, to sound so fresh, so new and so exciting.
“Running a family farm is more rock than playing rock’n’roll,” claim this Gascony duo. And they ought to know, as they do both. Produced by Vance Powell, this ninth (specifically a searing The Outsider) sounds an awful lot like the activist rockers’ defining magnum opus.
Jason Isbell And The 400 Unit - Weathervanes
Isbell and his trusted four-piece band fashion a bunch of expert narratives that operate where country and southern rock intersect. Thoughtful, compassionate, heartbreaking and more (try the Townes Van Zandt-referencing When We Were Close), it’s a record that is, above all, deeply human.
What’s surprising is that Ian Anderson can kick up more menace with his flute than any number of hoarse roaring voices and thrashing guitars. RökFlöte opens – and closes – with some metal-sounding flute feedback that makes for a chilling atmosphere. On the opening Voluspo, that’s followed by a ponderous theme to underscore the portentous implications of the prophecy that lies at the heart of Norse mythology
Ayron Jones - Chronicles Of The Kid
Part Living Colour, part SRV Couldn’t Stand The Weather vibes, his latest album is a vibrant wall of guitar wrangling, musical loops and more colours than a sky full of rainbows. My America echoes Living Colour’s Which Way To America? in tone and attack, but he switches things in an instant with the heartbreaking Living For The Fall and its ridiculous guitar part, at once rueful then in the next instant capable of making you think that Jones is going to come crashing in through the window. Like the rest of this record, it’s truly remarkable.
Rush! is dazzling proof that Måneskin are capable of writing rings around most modern riff monkeys. Exploring arena-friendly turf somewhere between Arctic Monkeys and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, it’s an album that bristles with swagger and sass. It’s also an album of great economy: none of the 17 songs waste any time getting where they’re ultimately going, with opener Own My Mind taking approximately three seconds to establish the frisky chug that underpins the Måneskin blueprint.
John Mellencamp - Orpheus Descending
Truth be told, Mellencamp appears to be on something of a songwriting hot streak, especially when he’s in a more contemplative mood; Understated Reverence, with its mournful violin and quiet reflections, might have appeared on Rain Dogs, while Lightning And Luck, a plaintive guitar part and a handful of memories and recollections, has its strength in simplicity, which is a welcome motif all record long.
72 Seasons isn’t an easy listen; it demands work. Ballads are absent and even big melodies are scarce, though that ensures they’re all the more striking when they do arrive. Jamming the slow-burning, 11-minute Inamorata on the end of an album that’s already passed the 60-minute is the work of a band seeing how far they can push things. Quite far, it turns out – Inamorata is one of the best songs on the album (it also ends with a much-needed chink of light lyrically).
Luke Morley - Songs From The Blue Room
Morley takes to the piano for the happy tramp of Damage, one of the poppier interludes on the album, woven around an incisive guitar solo. The swaying Nobody Cares casts its withering gaze at social media, while album closer Don’t Be Long is a song that you imagine Robbie Williams would have happily taken off Morley’s hands and turned it into a stadium barnstormer. You can almost feel the fireworks overhead as the last, sad piano chord is played.
Neverland Ranch Davidians - Neverland Ranch Davidians
Stoner psych gets its groove on in an irresistible fuzz-funk firefight that calls to mind a tight-but-loose, chitlin circuit-era Hendrix (Fat Back), elsewhere there’s the overdrive-pedal-tothe-metal freeway head-rush of Rat Patrol, swampabilly grunge (the powerfully wrought, George Floyd-inspired Knee On My Neck), and Cramps lurch (Aqua Velveteen).
Jared James Nichols - Jared James Nichols
An early highlight is recent single Down The Drain, a spindly, nihilistic, throatflaying alt.rocker with a riff the 90s grunge mob would have gladly claimed and a wah-wah solo they couldn’t have pulled off. Likewise Hard Wired, which opens with a sonic freak-out like Hendrix riding a giant hornet, before settling into acaveman clud that suggests an unhurried Bill Ward behind the drum kit.
Iggy’s on blistering, razor-sharp form throughout and, perhaps more than ever, totally himself. Previous solo career highs have seen him clearly indebted to Bowie or Josh Homme, but Andrew Watt’s production is only complementary. Flawless, and never casting shade across Iggy’s central performance. Every Iggy attribute features, yet subtle production discipline deftly sidesteps caricature.
Queens Of The Stone Age - In Times New Roman…
The titles may be punny, but the songs are deadly serious. Glam harmonies and Beatles-inspired strings cut through the motorcycle grease and bourbon, cigarette smoke and body fluids of the sleazy, spaced opener Obscenery, guitar tracks stacked high to the ceiling and swirling like a room at 4am after an evening of bad decisions. Malice seethes through Negative Space, Homme’s singular falsetto ghostly and full of bitterness.
Past Rival Sons albums have placed vibe and feel and energy over stick-in-the-head-and-don’t-shift melodies, but here, the shimmering Bright Light and Bird In The Hand with its glam-rock hand-claps offer an embarrassment of riches in that department. Even when they take things down a notch, as on the gospel-edged slow-burner Rapture, there’s still a sense that the furnace that powers it could become an inferno at any point.
Royal Thunder - Rebuilding The Mountain
Offering emotional candour and empowering melodies in place of stadium-sized riffs and instrumental grandstanding, it nonetheless still feels triumphant. On The Knife, Fade and Live To Live, subtly simmering instrumentals, suddenly swell into all-swallowing tidal waves, Mlny Parsonz’s powerhouse vocal still somehow towering over all. Not since Fleetwood Mac has a band so deftly turned turmoil and strife into such empowering, addictive ear worms, a subtle doom sensibility the only reminder that they came close to imploding entirely
Inspirations was a rather predictable exercise in paying homage to Saxon’s influences (Beatles/Stones/ Zeppelin), its successor is more rewarding. The artists and songs are mostly less obvious and even when they’re not, Saxon breathe new life into old dogs such as The Who’s Substitute, where Biff Byford is sneering bitterness incarnate, while they take a similar approach on We Gotta Get Out Of This Place to Joan Jett’s tumultuous assault on Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.
JD Simo - Songs From The House Of Grease
JD Simo is shaping up as one of the great interpreters of old soul and rock‘n’roll. The Nashville-based slide man was drafted to play guitar for the soundtrack of last year’s Elvis biopic. Now, Simo’s power trio are evidently still running on mojo, rush-recording a cracking covers set whose free-form mastery means these five songs stretch to 40 minutes without anyone checking their watch.
Sparks - The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte
With appealing symmetry, the Maels have returned to Island Records almost 50 years since the label launched their mainstream pop career. As determinedly quirky as its title, The Girl is Crying In Her Latte is a very strong collection of vintage Sparks moods, plus a few new left-field twists. Arch, ironic, culturally rich lyrics underpin heavily mannered staccato vocals and punchy mini-opera melodies, from sarcastic new-wave blammers like Nothing Is As Good As They Say It Is to the waspish Morrissey-on-Broadway power ballad When You Leave.
Right down to daft New Generation and obligatory power ballad Flowers Of Fire there’s some Led Zep heft here, but mainly Kiss’s dumb fun (Johnny "Gash" Sombretto’s impressive roar has some Paul Stanley to it) and a dash of Roth’s party vibe too. Steve Vai keeps the guitars thrillingly, skilfully simple – big riffs and bigger choruses, with the occasional face-melting solo in there.
Mahal’s song choices are impeccable and his players beyond top-notch; the sweet and sour of the brushed drums and Evan Price’s violin is potent, while producer/pianist John Simon has a stunning wee-small-hours touch. But it’s the veteran’s session, and with that stentorian voice Sweet Georgia Brown and I’m Just A Lucky So And So are highlights that warm any room you play them in.
With Troublegum producer Chris Sheldon at the controls once more, Hard Cold Fire finds Therapy? crafting a solid collection of tracks that are both brutal and melodic. Opener They Shoot The Terrible Master comes out of the blocks hard and fast, firing off thunderous drum licks and raging guitar riffs, while Andy Cairns wrestles with an exhausting, post-pandemic world dominated by corrupt rulers.
Those Damn Crows - Inhale/Exhale
You can’t help feeling that the title of Those Damn Crows’ third album may have been informed by the seismic global events that have taken place since they broke into the Top 20 of the album chart with Point Of No Return in February 2020. Musically there’s an impatient feel to their best songs, which seem filled with a compulsion to seize life by the lapels – possibly a sentiment many others will be feeling after a stop-start couple of years during which traditional rock’n’roll thrills were severely restricted.
Whether it’s the poetic pomp of Hail The Sunrise, the rampaging, protometal cautionary tale of Hurricane, or the symphonic melodrama of the eightminute You’ll Never Be Alone, every one of these tracks has charm and substance to spare. More importantly, it all sounds exactly as one would hope some of hard rock’s greatest architects to sound, 50 years in: committed, passionate, bursting with ideas and absolutely not interested in stopping any time soon.
Lucinda Williams - Stories From A Rock N Roll Heart
She is joined on two tracks by Bruce Springsteen and Patti Scialfa, putting in the keen support. Songs like New York Comeback are joyous and undaunted. Her voice retains all the character and grit, and on Jukebox she yearns for the postpandemic, post-recovery charm of the local Wurlitzer machine stacked with Patsy Cline and Muddy Waters records.
Wytch Hazel are uniquely positioned to be the least annoying Christian metal band since Trouble. Since their debut in 2016, the band has delivered a fresh, bracing sound redolent of NWOBHM and ancient twin-guitar majesties like Wishbone Ash and Thin Lizzy. Lushly atmospheric and stridently catchy, IV is their best effort yet, with galloping epics like Future Is Gold and A Thousand Years that sound both folk-horror rustic and impressively sleek.
Mirror To The Sky was begun before The Quest was released, with the band on a roll and no immediate touring in prospect. Steve Howe has clearly been energised and has grown in confidence, allowing the stately title track to spread over 14 minutes after some fine introductory guitar and skedaddling bass runs by Billy Sherwood. Two other tracks nudge the nine-minute mark without any sign of padding.
