Favorite Music of 2023 (Entire Year)
Here's the comprehensive list of my favorite music for the entire 2023, with an announcement beforehand.
Welcome to the third Favorite Music issue! I understand that not everyone has the time to go through weekly nor monthly new music releases, so this issue is a way for me to provide a concise summary of new music that everyone should check out.
I’m listing my top singles and projects for the entire 2023 in no particular order (other than alphabetical). Similar to Monthly Music Recap, each issue might differ in terms of number of entries, as this will depend on the number of new releases. The number for this issue is 30 (thirty). If you’re reading this via email, I do suggest reading this on the website instead, or you can click “View Entire Message” to read the entire email (It’s very long).
In case you missed my favorite music for the first half of 2023, you can refer to it here.
Announcement
I’ll rip off the band-aid and say that this newsletter/blog will be going on an indefinite hiatus. I’ve been debating whether I should have done it when I initially cut off most of my social media presence, but I decided to give it another year or so.
Maintaining a newsletter may seem easy for many, but for me, I did spend quite a bit of time curating and discovering new music every week (even though this is a monthly newsletter) just to make sure I’m up to date on the releases. This is no longer sustainable for me and I’ve decided that I should quit doing things I no longer enjoy doing (since this is more of a hobby than my job).
This does not mean that I’m no longer interested in listening to new music, but rather I would want to do it in my own terms rather than being obliged to listen to it as soon as I wake up on Fridays (new music releases tend to happen on Fridays).
Monthly Music Recap
Here are the issues for each Monthly Music Recap for your reference and convenience, in case you missed them. I will use these issues as the base for the Favorite Music list. April & December 2023 are intentionally omitted as I did not publish an issue during those months, but do note that I have taken that month into account too.
Top Singles
I would mention that the singles are removed from consideration if the artist releases a project that includes the single by the end of December 2023, so if you don't see a worthy single that I should have mentioned, take a look further at the top projects where I might have listed the entire project instead.
Here are my top 30 singles for the entire year of 2023:
Top Projects (Albums, Mixtapes, EPs)
Here are my top 30 projects for the entire year of 2023:
And there you have it, my top singles and projects for the first half of 2023. Again, my intention is to provide a summary so that people can check out music if they don’t have enough time to do so. This list also gives you a taste of my favorite genres, and I hope you enjoy every one of them like I do.
Hopefully this is a satisfying conclusion to the newsletter. Thank you so much for reading and I hope nothing but the best for everyone’s future endeavors. If you would like to contact me in the future, please feel free to do so via Discord (le.land) or email (itisleland@gmail.com). You can also reply to this final newsletter and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
P.S. If you want to actually stalk what I’m listening to at any time, feel free to do so on my Last.fm profile here. You can also check out my Musicboard profile here, where I track my backlog (under Listen Later) and reviews for music releases. Don’t worry, the long reviews are here to stay and I do also crosspost the long reviews there too.
On a less music-related note, I have a Letterboxd account here in case you’re interested in seeing which films I’m watching along with my brief film reviews. I also have a Serializd account for TV shows here. If you're into reading, I have a LGBTQIA+ story published on Tapas, featuring an aroace agender character which you can check out here.