Feature / Music / Year End 2023
Pass The Mic: Artists and labels on 2023

It's been a long year, right? You may well find yourself examining the last twelve months and trying to remember what music got released so you can include it on your "2023 best of" and still look cool. But—disaster! You can't remember anything! Thankfully, SPB has got you.

We've reached out to our friends in the music community: bands, labels and other music-adjacent folks. We asked them to not only give you a quick summary of the best records of the year, but also to give you a headstart on 2024 with some tips on what to look out for from their band or label. Not only can you wow your friends with your encyclopaedic knowledge of this year's music, but you'll also be ahead of the game when it comes to next year too! You're welcome.

Use the menu to the right to jump between pages and see what the various artists/labels shared with us. But to kick things off, here's a taster:

"We're very mean to ourselves so when we see someone earnestly enjoying the music, it's a great reminder of why we play music at all. I mean...buy some merch too, but we can't sell enough shirts for us to quit our day jobs, so we'll settle for knowing you actually like our silly little songs."

– Heart & Lung

"The entire music-going populace has been trained into giving CREDIT to these walled garden sharecropping services that you rent your music from. They do nothing for you and they do even less for the bands, they are barnacles at best and vampires at worst. Direct support. Your favorite artists probably don’t live as comfortably as you think and the ones you dig but don’t know that well definitely don’t."

– Conan Neutron

"Recently, I've just been handing touring bands a $20 bill. I liked their set, I don't need another t-shirt, odds are I will probably only stream their music in my car. I like to think of it as buying all the streams I will eventually listen to."

– Shauners, Middle-Aged Queers