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This year was a great year for Australian music, with several outstanding debuts and confident sophomore albums released, alongside a surprise supergroup and big names returning to the studio. Below are our critics’ picks for the best Australian albums released this year, with a playlist of their favourite track on each album so you can have a taster – including the mellow nostalgia of Folk Bitch Trio and Way Dynamic, the energised one-two punch of Baker Boy and Ninajirachi, melancholy from Stella Donnelly and Tame Impala, and anthemic rock from the Belair Lip Bombs and Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers to sing out the car window this summer.
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Folk Bitch Trio – Now Would Be a Good Time
Top track: God’s a Different Sword
Folk Bitch Trio is a group of contradictions: a spiky, contemporary name for a group peddling sumptuous harmonies against a gentle folk backing, sounding right out of the 1960s. The Melburnians have been a mainstay on the local circuit for years and their long-awaited debut album showcases what they do best: timeless music with a subtle bite. The wise, sometimes cryptic lyrics to these songs stand alone as a sort of Gen Z poetry. That’s right – believe it or not, the trio are all still only in their early 20s: a sign that they might just be getting started. – Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen
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Ninajirachi – I Love My Computer
Top track: iPod Touch
The joyous dynamics of EDM, brostep and classic trance, where effervescent globules of electronic sound swell up, pop and swell again, are rendered with huge passion and verve by 26-year-old producer Nina Wilson on her three-time Aria winning debut album. It evokes a life lived from childhood with one foot in reality and the other online. Sometimes that relationship is bright and symbiotic: iPod Touch and Sing Good have fond reminiscences of old music production software. But there are moments of horror – Infohazard is about stumbling across a snuff film – and she explores the strange sexuality wreaked in the information age: Desire explores the “modern megadigital meta mating ritual” of thirst traps, while Wilson decides she wants to “fuck my computer” on a song of the same name, “cos no one in the world knows me better”. – Ben Beaumont-Thomas
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Tame Impala – Deadbeat
Top track: My Old Ways
Kevin Parker’s fifth album as Tame Impala split critics this year, but those who appreciate their beats with a side of melancholia found plenty to love. His ability to produce hits has seen him whisked away to work with the likes of Dua Lipa, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Kanye West and the Weeknd, a career high that seems to have resulted in so much of the gloomy loneliness on this album, with its lyrics about feeling racked with disgust for enjoying fame and living like “fucking Pablo Escobar” (Dracula), missing his children (Piece of Heaven) and even envying the structure of the nine-to-five (Not My World). At least you made a great album, Kev! – Sian Cain
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Stella Donnelly – Love and Fortune
Top track: Feel It Change
One of the most personable songwriters in Australian music, Stella Donnelly’s records always feel like a candid conversation with a friend. Her third album explores the harrowing experience of losing a friend, but the pain is balanced with pleasure through Donnelly’s sugar-sweet vocals and experimentation with form. From the angular guitars that kick opener Standing Ovation up a notch to the ambient soundscape of Baths and the addictive chorus of Feel It Change (probably my favourite song this year), this is an assured, generous and sonically adventurous album that grows with every listen. – GAN
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Bleak Squad – Strange Love
Top track: Safe as Houses
Bleak Squad could have been dreamed up in a lab by mad scientists: Adalita (Magic Dirt) out front of Mick Harvey (Bad Seeds), Mick Turner (Dirty Three) and Marty Brown (Art of Fighting). Thankfully, the chemistry is perfect. On their first album Strange Love, this new supergroup sound like they’ve been honing their sound for years. Each member brings their identifiable sonic signature, but the combination adds up to something new and distinctive. The material is first-rate, and Adalita has never sounded better. See them while you can – they’ve all got their own stuff going on, and there’s no guarantee they’ll ever do it again. – Andrew Stafford
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Thatboykwame – In a Matter of Time
Top track: sleeping pills
Having started making music when he was 16, thatboykwame – previously known as Kwame – is now a seasoned artist at the grand old age of 28, writing, producing, engineering, mixing, and mastering his second album In a Matter of Time by himself. His confidence is audible across this seven-track album that scrapes in just under 20 minutes, detailing heartbreak, uncertainty and a whole lot of growing up. “I was anxious but now I’ve got some patience, I’m sick of limitations / I used to scroll through the photos app and think ’bout what the past was / knowing that it’s better in the present time,” he raps on when? – SC
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Belair Lip Bombs – Again
Top track: Again and Again
Again, the second album by Frankston’s Belair Lip Bombs, doesn’t mince words literally or metaphorically: frontwoman and guitarist Maisie Everett writes with uncommonly cutting directness – “motherfucker, just say what you mean!” she intones on one track – pairing those lyrics with astoundingly punchy hooks that take their cues from early-aughts superstars like the Strokes and Kings of Leon. For Again, their first album on Jack White’s Third Man Records, Everett and the rest of the group – Daniel Devlin, Jimmy Droughton, and Mike Bradvica – dialled in their sound, adding oddball elements like mandolin without ever losing sight of their powerpop core. – Shaad D’Souza
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Way Dynamic – Massive Shoe
Top track: Miffed It
If you’re looking for an album to cheer you up on long drives this summer, don’tmiss this pleasingly tender and wistful folk-pop album from Dylan Young, a Melbourne songwriter who has a knack for writing tunes loaded with nostalgia. There are loving tributes to the Kinks, Beach Boys and Simon & Garfunkel – as well as acts from this century, such as Kings of Convenience, Ben Folds and Rex Orange County. The Talking Heads-esque Ibiza has the funkiest cowbell since Honky Tonk Women, but Miffed It was picked by Elton John as a favourite this year for a reason. – SC
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Baker Boy – Djandjay
Top track: Thick Skin
Djandjay is Baker Boy’s refusal to be pigeonholed. His irrepressible positivity remains, but Danzal Baker’s bars run straight with a new conviction, to speak out on colonial occupation’s ongoing ills; a task that too often falls to First Nations artists. If the movement for Indigenous rights is to add another standard bearer to its ranks, Baker’s artistic voice is impossible to ignore: Djandjay’s production has a blazing, at times angry intensity. The album is named after his grandmother, whose legacy as an Arnhem Land community leader is flowing down through the generations. Djandjay is the past, present and future. – Nick Buckley
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Mouseatouille – DJ Set
Top track: Letters
DJ Set takes its time sparking to life, like the first hours of a house party. But it settles in with warm, grainy stretches of accordion, clarinet and strings, then pleasingly fuzzy peaks and squalls subsiding into quiet intimacy. The closer, My DJ Set, recalls Big Star’s Thirteen when it deploys laconic cliches as aching understatement: “Walking ’round hand in hand / Teenage dream / High school band”. The album feels lived-in and familiar, studded with loose-limbed echoes of Broken Social Scene, Neutral Milk Hotel and fellow Melbourne act Good Morning. With nine regular members, Mouseatouille could be an unwieldy creature, but they’ve created a soulful, textural world for us to all be world-weary in together. – Caitlin Welsh
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Mallrat – Light Hit My Face Like a Straight Right
Top track: Hideaway
Pop does not always tend to prioritise emotional complexity: even the most successful artists tend to pick one feeling at a time to nail down in song. Which is precisely what makes the latest from Mallrat feel quite so radical. It’s a record filled with the aching mantra that defines both yearning and grief: that nagging, repeated cry of, “I wish things were different than how they are”. I can’t remember the last time a pop star tried to write a line as authentic as this one from Defibrillator: “You did nothing wrong, but I’d like to feel anger.” An essential, gorgeous record that knows exactly what you’re feeling. Perhaps even before you do. – Joseph Earp
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Shady Nasty – Trek
Top track: Hardstyle
On their brisk yet arresting debut album, Shady Nasty emerge as the new bards of suburban Sydney. In lesser hands, a 21-minute record that evokes tailgating in a V6 with a case of Monster in the backseat might play as pure gimmick. However, Trek frames the trio’s Mike Skinner-esque observations of everyday life in a wash of woozy, melancholic post-punk guitars, sharpened by production from The Presets’ Kim Moyes.
After calling Shady Nasty “literally my favourite band in the world right now”, international superstar Fred Again set up a collaboration on the dancefloor-ready Hardstyle 2. Yet it’s the album’s original Hardstyle that offers the truest expression of the trio’s bruised bravado. – Jack Tregoning
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Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers – Glory
Top track: Unscarred
The best named band in Australian music burst on to the Canberra music scene as highschoolers a decade ago, meaning their 2023 debut I Love You had a gloriously confident spirit when they were actually barely out of their teens. Where I Love You was scrappy, their second album is far more polished and grander for it, filled with punchy songs about knowing your worth in the face of doubters and debilitating crushes (“Hey, can I ask for your name / would you like a drink or the keys to my place?”) and the clarity that comes with being in your mid-20s. I can’t wait to hear what they do in their 30s. – SC
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Press Club – To All the Ones That I Love
Top track: Wilt
Amy Taylor from Amyl and the Sniffers is not the only blond, Melbourne-based lightning rod who has been ripping up stages (and eardrums) this year. Natalie Foster’s Aussie-accented sound and fury is all over the thrilling fourth album by alt-punk four-piece Press Club, which is awash with catchy choruses, searing vulnerability and guitars that shimmer like a horizon in a heatwave. Standout track Wilt hits like a southerly blast, while Vacate finds Foster “aching for the sun” in a song so steeped in nostalgia and regret, it could be punk’s answer to Don Henley’s The Boys of Summer. – Janine Israel
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Wet Kiss – Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse
Top track: The Gay Band
There was no presence in Australian music this year that was sharper or more dynamic than that of Brenna O, the brilliantly indefatigable frontwoman of Melbourne band Wet Kiss. Brenna’s gale-force stage presence needs to be seen to be believed, but Wet Kiss’s second album Thus Spoke the Broken Chanteuse, released on the underrated indie label Dinosaur City, does a pretty good job of conveying both Wet Kiss’s erratic, meticulously louche take on glam rock and the unreal star power of Brenna herself, who comes across on stage like one of Warhol’s factory stars. – SDS
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Skeleten – Mentalized
Top track: Viagra
Sydney producer Russell Fitzgibbon’s second solo album pushes through alienation, countering lyrics about a cold cityscape with a warm haze of trip-hop, fuzzy guitars and dream-pop vocals. Mentalized circles how restricting and odd everyday life can be; the disorientating whys that arrive in a supermarket queue (These People), during a city stroll (Love Enemy) or on a cocktail of medications (Deep Scene, Viagra).
As if to jolt you out of a daze, this down-tempo dance music is scratched with sci-fi synths and glitchy distortions. Skeleten’s red pill leads to the dancefloor, finding community in a sea of sweaty bodies on Bodys Chorus and Ravers Dream. – Jared Richards
