I say an Oni album at the dinner table.

Everyone is weeping and you can't look at each other for the rest of the week.

Lil Yati album at the dinner table, everyone's getting super blazed.

Clearly, Amory album at the dinner party is going to be like an orgy, so you also will not be looking at each other for the rest of the week.

This is the pitchwork review. is The Pitchwork Review.

I'm Pooja Patel, the editor-in-chief.

So we just published our annual lists that run through our favorite music of the year.

And today we're going to talk about the 50 best albums of 2023, or at least some of them.

It was a year of brilliant releases across

indie experimental pop, rap, and R&B, and also a year of some highly anticipated albums that

completely missed the mark. To talk about it all, I'm joined by our own Jeremy Larson and Anna Gautza.

Hello. Hello, Good to be back.

Let's talk about very quickly the process of listmaking. It's our most red thing, but I think for a lot of the critics

involved, it becomes this kind of mind-boggling haze of like remembering so much music and listening to so much music and looking

at spreadsheets and it can become this kind of like massive overwhelming and like honestly like

blurryed task if you thought music journalism was just like hanging out with rock stars let me tell

you how many spreadsheets there actually is that goes into it. I always want to clarify that I think ranking a list

is not about saying this song is better than another song. That's actually literally what our list are.

Okay, let me say this. That is the two-dimensional idea of ranking. But I think of ranking in a three-dimensional

space. Of course you do. Of course I do. So the way I visualize it is that you were creating like a

curation in a museum. You're creating a space and you walk into the space and what is the

centerpiece? That's your number one album. That's the first thing you see. That's the big Van Gogh.

...