AWKSD’s best of 2023

The most correct opinions on the best books, music, movies and TV of the year

Year-end lists are the exact antithesis for creating art. Nothing quite negates humanness and deeply-felt connections like turning art into a competition. 

Alas, we are a culture that thrives on ranking. How do we know if our opinions are valid if someone else doesn’t feel the same way? How can we appreciate an album if it doesn’t appear on a website’s year end list?  

Even though I like to pretend that I’m more enlightened than producing year-end lists, I’m still a hot-blooded human. I list, therefore I am. 

Music

With all due respect to music sites, who the fuck is going to listen to—much less care about—100 albums? Don’t they know we’re all just scrolling through to see who’s number one? Music sites, please calm down. (Except Treble, who is perfect and should never change). Every music list should have 10 albums. Tops. 

Here are my top five albums of 2023.

1. Liturgy - 93696

Ten years ago, Deafheaven’s Sunbather was my favorite album. I still remember its effect on me: a mixture of awe and fear. I had never heard anything like it before. In the time since, nothing has replicated that feeling. 

That is, until I heard Liturgy’s 93696. 

Liturgy has never been an easy band to listen to. Even among metalheads, their self-described “transcendental metal” rubs people the wrong way. But if you have patience, 93696 is—and I’m sorry for using this term—a journey. The band packs so much into each song (hip-hop, electronic, and prog) that it can feel overwhelming, but the result is like purification by fire. I don’t fully understand singer/songwriter Haela Hunt-Hendrix’s artistic statement, but for the past decade-plus, she’s been striving toward some sort of divinity through music, and with 93696, she comes damn close.  

2. Debby Friday - Good Luck

If you’ve ever wondered what Beyonce had an evil twin who collaborated with Nine Inch Nails, Debby Friday is your answer. Good Luck is full of bangers, but there’s an underlying menace to everything that sets it apart, turns it into something dangerous. You could put Good Luck on at a party and it would kill; you could also put it on at a goth night and it would kill. 

3. Militarie Gun - Life Under The Gun

Militarie Gun is music for compassionate punks, and it’s also one of the most instantly likeable albums I’ve heard in a long time. Scuzzy anthems for people trying to be happy, my catnip. 

4. blink-182 - One More Time

Ultimately, the story of blink-182 is a story of friendship. One More Time has the best songs that blink has written since 2003, but it’s also a love letter between Mark and Tom, and you’d have to be pretty stone-hearted not to be rooting for them. Amidst the raunch and simple eye-rolling attempts to sound immature, One More Time feels like a simple-yet-profound statement on adult friendships. 

5. Ratboys - The Window

The Window reminds me of the mid-to-late 00s music, when buzzy blog bands were blowing up. There’s an earnestness in Ratboys folk/country/punk that’s not very common anymore, which makes The Window purely delightful all the way through.  

Books

Favorite books that came out this year

Hot Springs Drive - Lindsay Hunter 

Hot Springs Drive is the most subversive true crime books I’v ever read. For the first half, the lurid tale of a suburban murder hits all the morbid buttons that we crave, but then the second half sinks us like lead shoes. It’s an indictment of how we consume and fetishize stories like these. It’s an incredibly smart (and sad) novel about men, women, mothers, fathers and children—a heartbreaking analysis of the family unit via murder. 

The Red Headed Pilgrim - Kevin Maloney

Still the funniest novel I’ve ever read. Read my interview with the author from earlier this year. 

Midnight Self - Adrian Van Young

Even as a horror-head, I find a lot of horror writing to be kind of dumb—like, YA-style plotting with more gore and written with the subtlety of a wrecking ball. Adrian Van Young’s writing is the opposite: elegant, literary, and frightening. I burned through Midnight Self, a wildly diverse and inventive collection, even though I felt like I had to take a shower after every story.  

Ducks - Kate Beaton

An epic comic memoir about the author’s experience working on an Alberta oil field. More austere than Beaton’s usual work, Ducks gives a sobering picture of the sexism, misogyny and assault the author faced while working in an isolated work-camp environment alongside a predominantly male workforce. It’s a heavy book (literally and figuratively) but Beaton manages to evoke humanity, humor and forgiveness in revelatory ways.  

The Shards - Bret Easton Ellis

I’m a BEE apologist. I like all his books (even Glamorama), and was stoked to dig into his 600+ page novel about a serial killer. The autofictional story follows young Bret Easton Ellis and his friends through their rich-kid LA, but when a new student’s arrival coincides with a series of murders, Bret’s identity begins to unravel. While still lurid and pornographic, The Shards feels like the first time Ellis has allowed himself to be truly vulnerable, eschewing the icy despondence and nihilism that often defines his work. 

Favorite poetry book

Blush & Blink by Ana Carrete 

The funniest poetry book I’ve ever read. Read my interview with the author here. 

Favorite book that didn’t come out this year

Deliverance - James Dickey

If you had told me that one of the most traumatizing movies I’ve ever seen was based on such a beautifully-written book, I would not have believed you. The prose is so confident and lush that it feels unattainable by today’s standards. I’d argue that if you’ve seen the movie or know what happens, it actually makes the snovel better since Dickey spends the first half of the book celebrating manhood and desire to shuck domesticity and return to nature, only to flip the stereotypical ideal of masculinity on its back to create a visceral horror show.

Here’s my reading list for 2023 

Movies

Barbenheimer - I loved both movies. The fact that the two biggest films of the summer were not from the MCU gives me hope. We should be thankful that we got two original, entertaining, and emotionally affecting stories with artistic merit. That people felt like they needed to take sides is yet another example of how capitalism exploits art and turns us all into walking advertisements. 

When Evil Lurks - Pretty sure Argentinian director Demián Rugna is a psycho—only an unhinged person could make movies as scary and vicious as he does. For the past five years, I’ve been touting his movie Terrified was the scariest film I’ve seen, but then he put out When Evil Lurks, which has at least three scenes in it that will forever scar me. Warning: his movies do not play nice with kids, so if you have issues with kids in peril, stay away. 

Beau Is Afraid - A three-hour panic attack of a movie may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I loved it. The first third of the movie, especially, has some of the funniest scenes I’ve ever seen. 

Skinnamarink - Haters gonna hate. 

TV

I can’t really assess TV anymore. It’s just a constant that washes over my eyeballs. I liked Succession. I liked the Mother God documentary. I finally finished and loved Better Call Saul. Besides those, it all just kind of bleeds into one thing. 

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