The 10 best lyrics of 2023
As we approach Christmas, we must also turn a page for the new year. While poor chronophobic souls among us raise their blood alcohol levels, we must reflect on another year that has passed us by. Sadly, 2023 has borne too many teary goodbyes to remember. Among them were some of our most cherished songwriters, including Shane MacGowan, Tom Verlaine and David Crosby. But, as Alexander Graham Bell quite rightly said, “When one door closes, fortune will usually open another.” And it has done for the likes of Michael Nau.
Today, we take stock of 2023’s greatest lyrical accomplishments, celebrating both experienced and budding songwriting talent. In the modern day, an unremitting barrage of featureless pop fodder seems to force truly innovative and insightful artistry to the sidelines. Fortunately, provided you have the curiosity, inspired lyrics are never too hard to find.
Across a vast range of genres, from post-punk to folk, 2023 boasts some truly memorable songs with lyrics we’ll gladly take forth into the new year. It was encouraging to see Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten enter the top ten in the UK with his poetic solo album, Chaos for the Fly. Similarly, we were elated to hear profound lyrics from a throng of young, rising acts right off the bat.
Below, we have listed the ten greatest lyrical achievements of 2023. Whether it’s the ebullient avant pop of H. Hawkline or Mitski’s introspective Americana, we merit lyrics on thematic originality, imagination and inspirational efficacy.
The 10 best lyrics of 2023:
10. ‘Painting a Wall’ – Michael Nau
“Waiting for the morning at the end of the day
It’s an impossible life to get over.”
The music that Michael Nau gracefully offers up is a lubricant to the mechanical gears of the daily grind. His brilliant album Accompany stirred serenely at the end of this year, promising to be on heavy rotation forevermore. There is an effortlessness on display that carries over to the lyrics. Here, he offers up a little bit of life-affirmation that seems wholly all-encompassing.
Like the lilting music he orchestrates, there is such a lightness to it that if you aren’t listening closely, you might miss the profundity of it. However, it is a line – and a songwriter, for that matter – that humbly doesn’t seem to care too much. But once it has been flagged to your psyche, it announces itself as the sort of line you’ll be easily reciting in a decade from memory.
9. ‘Tuesday’ – Mary in the Junkyard
“I haven’t got used to it yet
The cosmos curled up in bed
An object of desire, the city burns
She looks at me, my head turns.”
So far, Mary and the Junkyard, the rising indie trio from London, have only released one single. If ‘Today’ is anything to go by, however, we could be in for a treat in the new year. The song lurches with inventive instrumentals with equally original lyrics. The poetic mirage takes us on a journey of longing and isolation in the urban bustle.
“I wrote ‘Tuesday’ when I was first experiencing life in a city and was feeling very small,” vocalist and songwriter Freeman-Taylor said of the single. “It’s so easy to be swept along with the bustle and noise and feel like a worker amidst thousands of others. I wanted to write about my yearning for chaos and realness – we all have wildness within us that we might be suppressing, and we shouldn’t feel like aliens because of it.”
8. ‘Norm’ – Andy Shauf
“And when the television’s silent
I speak into his dream
‘Stop these wicked ways
And I will lead you to
The promised land‘.”
In isolation, this verse might not seem to amount to much, but the context makes it one of the most stunning postmodernist moments in music this year. This inception-like invasion of dreams comes midway through an album dealing with a sketchy protagonist’s misguided ways of looking for love. He is presented with empathy as a mere unreliable narrator, with the sweet tones of the songs masking what are actually quite sinister words.
Suddenly, Andy Shauf steps out from behind the songwriter’s shadows in a manner akin to Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, and he urges his creation to “stop these wicked ways”. Somehow, this novelistic flourish is tied seamlessly into the melody and works as a subtle set piece, breaking up the record’s narrative. Simply put, it is as inventive as it gets.
7. ‘Spirit 2.0’ – Sampha
“Lying in reflections
Moonlight hits your skin
Safe in conversation
You question where I’ve been
Two bodies on this mattress (woo, yeah)
Save me as it sinks (woo, yeah)
Automatic self-protection (woo, yeah)
Like airbags in my limbs.”
In the closing verse of Sampha’s soothing ‘Spirit 2.0’, he croons in his distinctive jolting voice, “Shutting down is your default”. That’s a setting that many of us abide by. However, few of us put it under the microscope. On his latest release, Lahai, back in October, the south London songwriter delved deep into the burrows of mental health, and it proved to be a profound listen.
However, he also vitally kept things light, airy, and sparse so that the whole thing didn’t feel like a weighty psychiatric session. This is typified by this poetic moment of introspection. It feels autobiographical without oversharing any details, and there are great flashes of imagery in the mix too, as he conjures moonlight and the surrealist image of airbags in a domestic setting.
6. ‘Careful Of Your Keepers’ – This Is The Kit
“Careful of your keepers
Mindful of your healers
And the wooden structures
Creaking of the rafters.”
Back in June, the Winchester-born alternative folk group This Is The Kit released their sixth studio album, Careful of Your Keepers. As ever, the gentle, word-dense genre has served as a perfect conduit for imaginative lyrics. Bandleader Kate Stables has once again shown a distinct talent for vivid imagery, conjuring beauty from quotidian scenes – even in ‘Scabby Head and Legs’!
Frankly, we could have chosen a couple from this remarkable album, but the eponymous track held the longest tenancy in our ears this year. Like a tight poem, Stables’ lyrics hold the attention with a series of simple lines that accumulate throughout the song, sparking the imagination and inciting feelings of defiance and compassion.
5. ‘Mostly’ – H. Hawkline
“Peace comes for dinner
But I’m forever eating lunch.”
Quirkiness and simple honesty sit side by side in H. Hawkline‘s masterpiece, Milk For Flowers. Earlier in the song ‘Mostly’, the Welsh songwriter quips, “I wanna die happy / An empty glass / Knowing that I had sisters who loved me.” It’s a beautifully precise sentiment that wraps an arm around your shoulder, and then the next minute, the bastard is cracking a wee joke. Fantastic.
Together, both the earnest revelations and these illusive dining dates with peace create a clever patchwork filled with character and truth. Hawkline refuses to be ushered into a lane, frequently subverting subject matters with colourful asides that make things suddenly far less straightforward. On this occasion, though, the offbeats and sentimentality amount to something we can all relate to: the hope for an easy life.
4. ‘Mastermind Specialism’ – English Teacher
“Couldn’t make a decision
On mastermind specialism
No career, no religion
Another year, no precision.”
There’s always something perturbing when a “normal person” takes the hot seat on Mastermind. You wonder how on earth a 36-year-old PA with a young family has managed to amass such knowledge of the Gods of Ancient Greece. The slightly more sideways folks you can pass off as needing to get out more and bat off their 15-point round on Black Adder Goes Forth as a symptom of a troubled social life. However, the smartly dressed everyday Einsteins really add weight to the question, ‘What would my specialist subject be?’
When the answer returns that you simply don’t know enough about anything yet, it can be disheartening. This sorry disposition kickstarts one of the year’s finest songs. Lily Fontaine of English Teacher waxes poetical, in a deeply idiosyncratic way, about the dreaded uncertainty of a certain age. She does this with a flex of absurdity that seems somehow like a stream of conciseness, making for a track that is both vibrant and solemn.
3. ‘Salt Throwers Off a Truck’ – Grian Chatten
“The world was a yawn fingerprinted by night
Pro couples out running the leaves into kites
And out jumped the soul from his too-little chest
Was kited away along with the rest.”
In 2022, the Irish post-punk group Fontaines D.C. enjoyed runaway success with their third studio album, Skinty Fia. This year, the band took a little time to breathe, during which frontman Grian Chatten released his stellar debut solo album, Chaos for the Fly. As a poetically inclined individual, the release is positively teeming with memorable lines, but ‘Salt Throwers Off a Truck’ stands out for its vivid imagination.
“I remember the title coming to me when we were writing Skinty Fia,” Chatten noted earlier in the year while discussing the song. “There were lads on the back of a truck, salting the road outside the rehearsal space. I thought that was an interesting sight: ‘Oh, that’s a good title to have to justify with a good lyric.’”
2. ‘The Frost’ – Mitski
“The frost, it looks
Like dust settled on the world
After everyone’s long been gone
But me, I was hidin’
Or forgotten, the only one left
Now the world is mine alone.”
Mitski’s seventh studio album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, arrived in September as one of the year’s true musical highlights. The enrapturing instrumentals deftly produced by Patrick Hylandmeet fierce yet harmonious competition in the lyrical department with some of the Japan-born singer-songwriter’s finest words to date.
Although the album’s singles prevail in our memory as catchier moments, the eighth track, ‘The Frost’ deserves a special mention for its elegant, evocative lyrics. Obliquely, Mitski ruminates on feelings of isolation and frustration. Her world is full of beauty, but what good is it when there’s no one with whom to share it?
1. ‘Sober’ – A.S. Fanning
“I was thinking maybe I’d get sober
Take a trip up North embrace the cold
Lean into the loneliness, the solitude, the emptiness,
Because living young is getting old.”
Lockdown wasn’t just some passing thing that happened way back when; it was a great hunking curveball that derailed a couple of years of life. Few people, however, have ever mused about it in the arts. Then, A.S. Fanning delivered a line that dinged like the top answer on Family Fortunes in the mind of a generation: “Living young is getting old”.
The return of classical music and the boom of ambient ‘study sounds’ has proved, at least musically, they’re all a little fonder of slowing down these days. The modern world is a churn, and the notion of taking a trip up north is a gorgeous one. I, personally, was recently as far north as I had ever been, and it was freaking fabulous. Thus, when Fanning croons this exacting verse, there is a hefty dose of affirmation dealt with. Indeed, there is a pleasantness to pipe, slippers, and solitude and flirting with that fate is a healthy escape.
