A wonderful rundown! I enjoyed this format, very much a flowing essay approach. Balfe had a wonderful 2023 in quality and quantity, just about to the point of oversaturation. While teams of add'l music people and other collaborators are necessary in today's scoring environment, it's also true that they enable a much higher output and larger "market share" for certain composers. Whatever creative concerns some have for that, I'm more concerned with whether everyone's paid and treated decently, as laid out in the articles from the past couple of years!

(I kinda wonder if we as fans shouldn't make a policy of referring to scores as being by *composer* & co. in general, not to ghostwriter-shame but to acknowledge the collective talent and effort that goes into making the music we love, that it's more than the name on the cover.)

I've actually heard a decent chunk of the Balfe scores from this year for once. I heard one Life album and wasn't overly impressed, just decent RC-style nature music, but I may find greater enjoyment as I go through the albums. I heard one Wheel S2 album and enjoyed it, definitely like the wildly disparate genres and styles Balfe brings to the show. Luther was enjoyable in parts, but a 90-minute album was bananas for this kind of music (a 40-45-minute highlights presentation would have made a big difference). Tetris was a lot of fun, especially given my love for 80s-style synth music. M:I sounded nigh-identical to Fallout to me, albeit with less TDK energy (for better or worse); enjoyable, but not terribly distinctive and lacking a singular highlight cue, as you said.

(Also, a Chuck Norris reference in 2023 AD? Thought we'd collectively moved on from that circa a decade ago lol)

Love your writing so much, your thoughts are insightful and just plain fun to read!