Welcome once again to another year of coverage for Pitchfork Music Festival here on Faronheit! Every July, we spend one week diving into the various musical aspects of the Pitchfork Music Festival lineup. This comes in multiple forms. There’s the playlist featuring every artist on the lineup, which is what always kicks off the coverage so you can hear music from every artist performing and get a better sense of what you might like and who might be worth checking out over the course of the 3-day weekend. More on that in a minute. But other coverage will include day-by-day preview guides to give a little more context to the artists and schedule matchups that can cause some serious conflicts if you know and like multiple artists performing at the same time. Then we get into the daily recaps, which deliver a lot of the play-by-play looks at exactly what happened, what songs were performed, and what crazy thing that one artist did on stage. Whether you’re going and want to learn more about this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival itself, or aren’t able to attend but would love to hear about what’s happening in Union Park from July 19-21, this coverage will provide all of that and more.
As I previously mentioned, Pitchfork Music Festival week always starts with a playlist. Two songs from every single artist on the lineup. It’s arranged by date and set time, so for example Black Duck starts things off on Friday afternoon so they are first on the playlist, while Alanis Morissette closes out the weekend on Sunday so she’s last on the playlist. If you listen in order, you’ll journey through Friday, Saturday, and Sunday over the course of about five hours. Easy peasy. Jump into it, get familiar with a bunch of artists you haven’t heard before or have only heard a song or two from. A big part of this festival is discovery of great up-and-coming artists, so get started on that process right now with the playlist below. Sadly it’s only available through Spotify, so if you prefer a different streaming service you’re out of luck. But since most everyone I know has a Spotify account, hopefully it won’t be too much of a lift. Please enjoy, and come on back tomorrow for the start of the preview guides!
Well we have once again made it through another year. As such, the time for reflection and list making is upon us. Did you listen to a lot of new music this year? If you did, congratulations because 2023 happened to be a pretty great one overall in terms of pure artistry and quality recordings. Some years it’s a struggle to name 50 records that both held my attention and truly impressed. This one both came together with relative ease, and left me a little sad not everything I loved in 2023 could be included. 50 is a manageable number, plus another 10 honorable mentions because I can’t help myself. Even still, everyone from Jessy Lanza to PJ Harvey to The Armed to Lydia Loveless to Bar Italia all couldn’t quite survive the inevitable cuts and it breaks my heart.
One thing that fascinates me about year-end lists is how little true consensus there tends to be between them. It makes the moments when everyone actually IS in agreement so much more powerful, and a testament to the quality of something. Call it the Paddington 2 effect, or I suppose the Dolly Parton effect, because nobody actually dislikes either of those two things. My favorite song of 2023 falls into that “broad consensus” category. So many people and publications ranked it as their top track of the year that seeing another list fall in line like this one might induce another eye roll and a “here we go again”. But I can’t deny something that’s objectively true, as much as I’d like to be a contrarian. You’re of course more than welcome to disagree with me, along with the hundreds of other music writers who listed this as the #1 song of 2023. What’s wilder, in my mind, is how this 7+ minute track received no commercial or terrestrial radio placement, as far as I’m aware. Instead it just got a lot of organic, fully chosen plays across a variety of formats. If you know your music and have been paying close attention to year-end lists, hopefully my favorite song of 2023 won’t come as a surprise.
