It’s that time of the year again! After writing about 100 albums in 2022, the bar was way too high in 2023. So I didn’t, and ended up not publishing it at all. So let’s not do that anymore. Here’s my top five, plus 95 of my other favorites in no particular order.
Swedish singer-songwriter Daniel Norgren has quietly been releasing a considerable amount of albums over the past eleven years on his Superpuma Records. “Wooh Dang” – an “intertwining of analog instrumentation, live performance, and rural field recordings” is probably his most accomplished work yet. His brand of rural Swedish blues have never sounded this good, and it took us some deep thinking to pick up two of his songs for this week’s playlist.
Plus: new tracks by She Keeps Bees, Sevdaliza,Cate Le Bon, Pip Blom, Mavis Staples, Molly Tuttle, House and Land, Rose Elinor Dougall, Kevin Morby, Fat White Family, Altın Gün, The Yawpers, Drugdealer, Ari Roar, Doug Tuttle, The Long Ryders, Field Medic, The Tallest Man On Earth,Spencer Tweedy, Chris Staples, Tōth, Valley Maker, and Joe Kaplow.
This week’s highlight on Bolachas Now Playing is the new, superb Shearwater record, Jet Plane and Oxbow, perhaps their best album to date. So good we’ve put three songs off it on our playlist this week. But there’s more! We’re visiting other latitudes this week, through new tracks by Robbie Fulks, Suuns, Eric Bachmann, Luís Severo, Promise and the Monster, Gangly, Dawn Richard, Babyfather, Fat White Family, Massive Attack, and Made of Oak.