What decade is this again?

It’s an appropriate question for 2023, which — improbably — saw new recordings by the Rolling Stones and The Beatles top the charts around the world. Equally improbable, fellow Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Brenda Lee, 78, this month topped the charts with “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” — 65 years after she recorded the song in 1958. (For good measure, Lee also joined TikTok this year, but that’s another story.)

Meanwhile, Cher, 77, became the oldest female artist to ever score a Top 20 holiday season hit in the UK, thanks to her Autotuned dance-pop ditty “DJ Play a Christmas Song.” And some of the notable hits on TikTok this year included Mary J. Blige’s 2001 hit “Family Affair,” The Cranberries’ 1994 hi “Zombie,” The La’s 1988 gem “There She Goes,” the Dazz Band’s 1982 dance-floor favorite “Let It Whip,” and — linking two bygone decades — Limp Bizkit’s 2003 version of The Who’s 1971 classic “Behind Blue Eyes.”

Following the lead of jazz saxophone great Charles Lloyd, who released three new albums in 2022, Taylor Swift released three albums this year — although two of them were remade versions of two of her previous albums.

Swift also had the top-grossing tour and concert film in history and was the first musician to be designated Time magazine’s Person of the Year. The jury is still out on whether she will top her remarkable 2023 by walking on water next year. (Relax, Swifties — I make this comment purely in jest. Honest!)

In any year, these 10 albums deserve to be celebrated.

1. Cecile McLorin Salvant, “Mélusine” (Nonesuch Records) — My favorite album of the year is sung primarily in three languages I don’t speak: French, Haitian Creole and Occitan, an ancient tongue from a region in Southern France. Triple-Grammy Award-winner Cecile McLorin Salvant — a 2020 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient who is the daughter of a French mother and a Haitian father— studied Occitan with an online tutor before making “Mélusine.”

The album, her seventh, is based on a mythological woman from the 14th Century who is weekly transformed into a serpent, from the waist down, but can also take the form of a flying dragon. All this may make “Mélusine” seem like an especially challenging mouthful. But the Miami-born Salvant, 34, is such a stunningly gifted singer that she can convey any emotion, thought or lyric with unusual warmth, clarity and a mesmerizing depth of feeling.

She wrote five of the nine selections on “Mélusine.” The other four include 12th and 14th century troubadour ballads and a selection from a little-heard 1978 Canadian rock opera, but none of these are period pieces. As daring and fluid musically as it is conceptually, “Mélusine” finds Salvant deftly drawing from torch songs, sambas, art songs, French chanson, jazz, Broadway show tunes, electronica and various Caribbean music traditions.

Only the title track is sung in English, but no matter. “Mélusine” is equally captivating in any language.

2. Nickel Creek, “Celebrants” (Thirty Tigers) — Part song-cycle, part concept album and part homage to Beach Boys’ mastermind Brian Wilson in his mid-1960s creative heyday, “Celebrants” is the most ambitious and rewarding album the San Diego-bred Nickel Creek has yet made.

There’s a dreamlike quality to some of these songs, and a foot-stomping verve to others. At its best, which is often, this Grammy-winning trio seamlessly erases the lines between bluegrass and chamber-pop, folk and neoclassical, shimmering psychedelic elegies and earthy barnyard romps.

Americana music champion Rhiannon Giddens won a 2022 Pulitzer Prize for her first opera. She performed in San Diego this fall with the Silkroad Ensemble, for which she serves as music director.

(Rick Loomis / for the Los Angeles Times/Rick Loomis / for the Los Angeles Times)

3. (tie) Allison Russell, “Returner” (Fantasy) and Rhiannon Giddens, “You’re the One” (Nonesuch) — As solo artists and cofounders of the acclaimed four-woman Americana music group Our Native Daughters, Allison Russell and 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winner Rhiannon Giddens have established themselves as first-rate singer-songwriters who defy easy categorization. Both shine in — and expertly blur — any genre they perform, be it country, soul, blues, gospel, folk, soul, pop, funk or disco. Both craft impassioned songs that are steeped in tradition but sound brand new. And they do so with such excellence and commitment that they make most of their contemporaries seem lacking by comparison.

4. P.J. Harvey, “I Inside The Old Year Dying” (Partisan) — On her first album in seven years, Polly Jean Harvey sets to music 12 of the poems from her 2022 novel-in-verse, “Orlam.” The intensely atmospheric songs that result are by turns spare and stark, eerie and electrifying, foreign and familiar, inviting and inscrutable. The result is a beguiling aural adventure that often makes its biggest impact in its most understated moments.

The band boygenius is shown performing on the Oct. 3, 2023, episode of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

(CBS Photo Archive / CBS via Getty Images)

5. boygenius, “The Record” (Interscope) — An indie-rock super-group, boygenius teams Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker. Their best songs address themes of love and friendship, self-celebration and self-doubt, passion and calculation. Witness such winning lyrical couplets as: I’m 27 and I don’t know who I am, but I know what I want; and You make me feel like an equal, but I’m better than you and you should know that by now. Whether performing lilting ballads or rocking out, the members of boygenius revel in their combined power. That not all these songs translate well to a concert stage — as evidenced by boygenius’ curiously diffuse July 2 San Diego concert with a full band at Snapdragon Stadium’s Thrive Park — is a challenge that, one hopes, will be solved by the time of their next tour.

6. Lankum, “False Lankum” (Rough Trade)

7. Wilco, “Cousin” (dBpm)

8. Metallica, “72 Seasons” (Rhino/Blackened)

9. Olivia Rodrigo, “GUTS” (Geffen)

10. Amaarae, “Fountain Baby” (Interscope)