One of my favorite end-of-the-year things to do is to give y’all my top musical picks (as I’m sure you all know). So let’s get to it! These are my five favorite songs from 2023.*

*Note that these songs are ones that I’ve discovered in 2023, not necessarily ones that were released in 2023.

Call On Me performed by SYNTHONY

Eric Prydz’ Call On Me has been one of my favorite songs since…whenever I first heard it (way back before 2009). Add an orchestra to it and you get this year’s top song. This has such an awesome energy and I LOVE how much you can hear the strings.
Freaking love strings.

http://www.nevergetoveryou by Prozzak

This is such a catchy song. I found this over the summer and my poor mom had to listen to it on repeat when I was down in Moscow with her, haha. I love how it uses the ICQ “uh-oh!” sound (which also happens to be my text notification sound).

Pompeii MMXXIII by Bastille and Hans Zimmer

Adding Hans Zimmer’s influence to anything automatically makes it better, but there aren’t a lot of songs that work as smoothly with that influence as Pompeii. I love what the orchestra adds to this already beautiful song.

Aquatic Ambience by Scizzie

So I mentioned this back when it was really popular on TikTok as background music for slide videos featuring pictures of 90s/early 2000s nostalgia. I didn’t know it at the time, but apparently it actually samples a bit of music from the song of the same name from the game Donkey Kong Country, which came out in 1994. So maybe that’s why it’s hitting the nostalgia button so hard? Though I’m sure I’d never heard that song before. Regardless, 0:15 evokes a feeling that is difficult to describe.

Variation 15 by Benjamin Wallfisch and Hans Zimmer

Even without the scene from “Dunkirk” that this music accompanies, this holds so much emotion, pain, and release. “Home” is definitely a close second on this soundtrack, but this one beats it out because of that build starting around 2:40.