InRO's Best Albums of 2022

IN REVIEW ONLINE
BEST ALBUMS
OF 2022

TOP 25 ALBUMS OF 2022
It’s fitting that 2022 — as perhaps the first year that has felt in any way divorced from the Covid era we’ve all been slogging
through, one in which normalcy has reclaimed some purchase in the micro of our day-to-day and macro of our cultural
institutions — would be the year of the return. Queen Bey was back, in dialogue with the Queen of Disco herself, Donna Summer.
Kendrick dropped yet another masterful album of shape-shifting aesthetics, one that powerfully reflects the introspection that
captured so many minds over the past three years and channeled it into yet another sonic singularity. Drake sowed division
amongst his fanbase with a push into deep house, but still reclaimed his crown as the people’s narcissist of choice after king cringe
Elon became somehow cringier and Ye outed himself as a potentially lifelong Nazi apologist. Breakout favorite Black Country, New
Road delivered their sophomore album, only to immediately split with lead singer Isaac Wood; Big Thief resumed duties after a few
solo records made their mark last year; and mid-aughts Millennial favorites like Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Death Cab for Cutie proved
they’re still legitimate players in the world of rock. Sure, not all returns were great — Taylor Swift delivered a mixed product with
Midnights (though still an improvement on her irksome and remarkably overrated duo of folklore and evermore; note: this is not an
opinion shared by all or even most of InRO’s writers, but I’m the one writing this, so everyone else can touch grass); Machine Gun Kelly
obliterated any remaining goodwill he had from the pop pleasures of Tickets to My Downfall with the the whiniest album of the year;
and The Lumineers returned with… just kidding, we didn’t listen.
But rather than getting lost in a whorl of gloom, we at InRO choose positivity at this turnstile of 2022 and 2023, readying ourselves
for more welcome returns as we all collectively climb out of the basement of politicized pandemics and back into the light.
Over the past year, these 25 albums (plus some honorable mentions) have kept our glass half full. For that, we are thankful.
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#25 — DIFFERENT MAN
Kane Brown
In its very best moments, Different Man recalls nothing less than
Brad Paisley's watershed American Saturday Night -- for how it
traffics pop through a trad country landscape (lots of fiddle) and
for how songs like "Riot" and "Bury Me in Georgia" hint at
simmering contemporary sociopolitical tensions this genre
usually won’t touch. But Kane Brown is, in a word, "different": He's
not a genre innovator, not a conscious commentator; he's an
almost inevitable insurgent, very much embedded in modern
country, a practitioner of its forms and invested in its formulas,
but possesses a level of emotional intelligence that allows him to
elevate himself above country’s worst tendencies, trading
arrogant machismo for a masculinity founded on gratitude and
grace (principles that his wife reciprocates on their shimmering
duet "Thank God," and that he even somehow gets Blake Shelton
to credibly adopt on the album's title track). For this particular
Brown album rollout, the immediate standout was "Grand," which
isn't country at all, but rather a crystalline club-pop song with a
hairline fracture: "The voices in my head used to make me wanna
break down / Had me hella weighed down." As part of this
primarily country program, the song is more than just a “pop
experiment”; it’s an act of willful liberation from the stigmatism
that a biracial country chart-topper faces when he dares
embrace the full spectrum of his musical savvy.
Succeeding on strength and intuitiveness of craft across
different sub-genres is the foundational tenet of Different Man,
whether it's the funky, R&B-inflected "See You Like I Do," the
Brooks and Dunn-indebted (and featuring) "Like I Love Country
Music," or the way the tipsy bossa nova of "Drunk or Dreamin'" or
the interplay of EDM, hard rock, and a looped fiddle hook on "Go
Around" provide musical articulation of their respective lyrics.
Brown is capable of putting together a heartbreaker of a lovelorn
ballad with some self-dismantling honesty worthy of George
Jones ("I've never been a somber soul / But part of me ain't here no
more"), and on this album's best-written song, "Pop's Last Name,"
he can advocate with moving authority for families broken down
by the pitfalls of a nation that the thinking country music fan
could forgive him for loving just a little bit less. But as the
bookending "Bury Me in Georgia" and "Dear Georgia" lay bare, he's
full of too much gratitude (a worthy and underused word) for all
that he's achieved and all that he's earned to cede any of his
energies to bitterness. And that, too, is one of the very good and
different things about him. — SAM C. MAC
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#24 — STARS AT NOON (OST)
Tindersticks
Despite being their ninth collaboration (either as a full band or
individual members) with legendary French director Claire Denis,
Tindersticks refuse lassitude, and seem determined to craft a
distinct soundscape for each film. Whether it’s the lamenting and
haunting baroqueness of Trouble Every Day, or the violent and
oppressive synths of the score to the inexplicably dark Les
Saluads, Tindersticks have consistently managed to create a
sound that exquisitely matches the distinctive mood and style of
each successive film. Their latest work, the official soundtrack
for Denis’ new film Stars at Noon, is no different, once again
lending the impression of reinvention and often sounding like an
almost entirely different band to the one responsible for the
aforementioned film scores.
The Stars at Noon OST feels split into two styles: the first being a
languid style of lounge jazz that lands with remarkable calm,
while the second boasts a far more rhythmic flow that testifies to
the film’s scattered bursts of urgency. Centered in the middle is
the title track, the only sung instance of music on the record,
which gives the impression of a climax that the previous songs
may have been building up to. It’s an aching and melancholic
piece, in function playing over a scene where the film’s two
central lovers dance in a barren and dimly lit bar. It’s a sensuous
experience, vocalist Stuart Staples’ voice and lyrics bearing a
deep intimacy which invokes a flurry of emotions, even when
detached from the film’s images. More than that, Tindersticks
had this song — among others — ready for Claire to shoot the
film to; the characters therein are directly dancing to the already
existing music. Of course, the fact that the sonics and visuals
line up so perfectly comes down to pure luck in some ways, but
it’s also the thrilling result of a deep-rooted and artistic
collaboration where placing trust in another has become second
nature.
Like the film (also featured in InRO’s Best Of declarations), it’s
perhaps too easy to brush this OST album aside at first blush as
an inessential minor work. Yes, it’s mostly comprised of short,
instrumental jazz cuts that seem to drift by without much lasting
weight. But the album’s power comes from how intoxicating
these songs become, particularly in context with the film’s
considerable heft, turning into something that is incredibly easy
to return to over and over again. That’s especially true of the
record’s title track, which is easily one of the finest Tindersticks
songs of the past decade; it’s as raw and profound as anything
that has appeared on one of the group’s studio albums, and the
final complete project is enhanced by the text — visual and
narrative — that invigorates the final product.— OLIVER PARKER
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#23 — I WALKED WITH YOU A WAYS
Plains
The notion of “close harmony” is integral to many forms of
bluegrass and roots music, and it's an idea that seeps into
every aspect of Plains’ I Walked With You A Ways. It isn't simply
a matter of vocal harmony — though the intricacies of the
vocal arrangements on standout tracks “Problem With It” and
“Hurricane” are simply extraordinary — but of how narrative and
songwriting voices intertwine. While Plains isn't billed as a proper
supergroup or side project, such as the Allison Krauss & Robert
Plant collaborations, it's noteworthy that Waxahatchee and Jess
Williamson have approached this project as distinct from their
own solo careers. Ultimately, that sense of harmony makes I
Walked With You a Ways such a compelling listen that, in many
ways, surpasses the very, very good work these two have done on
their own.
Williamson’s writing is more direct than that of Waxahatchee,
who often deploys an ironic or narrative remove that insulates
her narrators. Here, there is nowhere to hide on “Abilene” (“I
remember the air when I drove out of town / Crying on the highway
with my windows down”) or “Last 2 On Earth” (“Can’t tell nobody
nothing, it’s a bright spark to ignite… You can take that sin to
battle, but you can’t make it fight”), because the narrators are so
blunt in their assessments of the failures they’ve either
encountered or perpetuated. In contrast, Waxahatchee’s
songwriting boasts a greater depth of detail than Williamson’s,
and it’s those details — “a pink carnation, a hand hastily played” on
“Problem With It,” or “a cigarette in a potted plant” on “No Record
of Wrongs” — that make the minor and major traumas of
these stories stick. For both Williamson and Waxahatchee, then,
their individual strengths and weaknesses interlock seamlessly
like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. They complement each other
in the best possible ways, and the album avoids the trap of
drawing too much attention to who contributed what because it
all plays like an organic whole.
I Walked With You A Ways is all the richer, then, for how an album
borne of collaboration and partnership emerges as a chronicle of
doomed relationship upon doomed relationship. The cheery
arrangement of opener “Summer Sun” belies the narrator’s
intentions to leave her partner (“Honey, we’re up against
something / Our love alone can’t fix”), while “Problem With It” is a
far more direct kiss-off (“If you can’t do better than that, babe / I
got a problem with it,” is the kind of line that leaves a welt). The
women given voice by Plains have all come to the realization that
their relationships were never intended to be more than
ephemeral comforts or distractions from deeper hurts and that,
having walked alongside someone for a while, it’s time for them
to move on to something more fulfilling. — JONATHAN KEEFE
#22 — GOD’S COUNTRY
Chat Pile
On full-length debut God's Country, Oklahoma City sludge metal
combo Chat Pile conjures nothing less than the political, social,
and economic demons of life in America. "Wicked Puppet Dance"
takes on drug addiction in the age of the opioid epidemic, while
"Anywhere" delves into the relentless national nightmare of mass
shootings. The quartet's songs are hellish vignettes of grief,
despair, and injustice, given release through apocalyptic blasts
of noise-laden metal fury. The tone of God's Country zigzags
between grim, heightened realism and bleakly funny hysterics,
like when a drug-fueled psychotic episode is interspersed with
visions of a McDonald's mascot on punishing album closer
"grimace_smoking_weed.jpeg." The album's reverb-y drums and
comically distorted walls of guitar are ablaze with a fiery rage
that seems at risk of veering into depressive detachment — not
exactly an unfamiliar trajectory for people living life in a
post-9/11, post-Trump, post-pandemic America. Consequently,
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lead singer Raygun Busch has no time for pretty metaphor or
smart-ass symbolism: "Why do people have to live outside? / In the
brutal heat or when it's below freezing / there are people that are
made to live outside," he ominously deadpans on the
anti-homeless screed "Why," repeating the titular adverb with
increasingly unhinged desperation as the song goes on.
day-to-day violence of the meat industry and the wider, and
often unseen, institutionalized violence that has marked
American life since its inception ("There's more screaming than
you'd think"). Aside from the vicious slabs of sonic aggression, the
band also trades in some quieter, more abstract atmosphere,
like on the eerie "I Don't Care If I Burn," which echoes Shellac's
#22 — GOD’S COUNTRY
Chat Pile
The band also confronts the sordid history of their hometown.
"Open the safe in the back before more people die," sings Busch on
"The Mask," chronicling a 1974 mass murder committed by Roger
Dale Stafford with disturbing fidelity. Sung from the killer's POV,
Busch likens the victims to animals, screaming for them to be
lined up like lambs to the slaughter. Speaking of, the horrors of
slaughterhouses themselves are given an especially haunting
treatment on the bluntly titled "Slaughterhouse." Recalling the
twisted, bloody Americana of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the
song not only gives voice to the animals who can't speak for
themselves, but also draws parallels between the horrific
infamous 2000 post-hardcore ballad "Prayer to God." Chat Pile
concocts from noise rock, sludge, and industrial metal a brutal,
crushing genre amalgam that, like the music that inspired it,
manages to be both repulsive and alluring, the heinousness of
the subject matter only offset by the group's own disgust at the
stories they tell. "At first your hand was in mine / There, smiling
and walking / Then the world split open / I think there was brain on
my shoes," goes the first verse of "Anywhere" — the hope for a
better world hasn't been extinguished yet, but if we’re to take the
word of Chat Pile, it seems to drift further out of reach with each
passing moment. — FRED BARRETT
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#21 — WET LEG
Wet Leg
Each of the last few years has had an album that is threatened to
be swallowed whole by the discourse over how that album was
written about in the popular press. In 2021, that was the fate of
Olivia Rodrigo’s SOUR, and in 2022, it’s the self-titled debut from
Wet Leg, who had the unmitigated gall to record the album in its
entirety before they’d ever played a single live gig, much to the
consternation of every remaining rockist who insisted that the
duo was nothing more than a studio creation. To which I say:
Thank God for the witchcraft of the modern recording studio and
the Gen Z rejection of all of the “right” ways to go about creating
music.
What’s remarkable about Wet Leg is that it’s the work of an act
who had very clearly put considerable thought and effort into
their artistic identity right from the jump, rather than growing
into that sense of self over the course of several albums or long
stints on the road. Culling the best parts of the indie scenes of
the ‘90s and aughts for their sonic palette, Rhian Teasdale and
“What’s remarkable about Wet
Leg is that it’s the work of an
act who had clearly put
considerable thought and
effort into their artistic
identity.
Hester Chambers demonstrate the kind of fluency with genre
that allows them to flaunt convention. There are overt nods to
David Bowie — “I Don’t Wanna Go Out” notably pulls the guitar riff
from Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World” to brilliant effect —
and more subtle homages to acts like Dig Me Out-era
Sleater-Kinney (“Chaise Longue”) and The Bottle Rockets and
Rock-A-Teens (“Loving You”).
The shifts in tone and aesthetic are purposeful and playful, and
they’re always fully in service to what works for a particular
song. It’s that playfulness that seemed to make Wet Leg so
confounding to the Boomer set; as with Rodrigo’s extraordinary
debut album, they just couldn’t reconcile their rigid constructs
with music that was so clearly not for them. And the album is,
above all else, fun. The non-sequiturs and Mean Girls quotes of
“Chaise Longue,” the well-rehearsed scream of “Ur Mom,” and the
ribald put-downs of “Wet Dream” are all delivered with such a
wry, arch tone — mostly by Teasdale — that it’s easy to
misinterpret the intention as Wet Leg not taking their music
seriously. But what actually makes Wet Leg so indelible is how the
duo clearly recognizes that their irreverence is very serious
business, indeed. — JONATHAN KEEFE
#20 — BAD MODE
Hikaru Utada
Life has done a lot of pausing in the last couple years. Most of
those pauses have been bleak, but Hikaru Utada’s Bad Mode is a
record that finds beauty and opportunity in quietness. Across the
LP’s tracks, Utada reflects on a search for purpose and the
delicacy of relationships over gossamer-light electronic
production. On the title track, they vow to stick around for a
partner even in their low moments, mixing offers to indulge in
simple comforts like ordering delivery with moving emotional
declarations (“Even when it’s hard to believe that better days are
coming / I’m here for you”). The music matches these shifts
between worry and everyday intimacy on “Bad Mode”: the gentle
funkiness of the first two choruses gives way to a watery, spacey
interlude, then returns to the groove with the addition of playful
trumpets. “Hope I don’t fuck it up again,” they shrug in the closing
lines; not pessimistic, just used to uncertainty.
The transition in “Bad Mode” is prompted by the lyric, “How many
times did I question myself? / Is it this scary for everyone else
too?” Single “Pink Blood,” then, considers similar ideas of
personal growth and learning to trust yourself, as Utada
concludes, “I should stop working hard at something that doesn’t
serve me / I don’t need to show it to anyone for something
beautiful to be beautiful.” “Kimini Muchuu” and the bouncy “Find
Love” also tackle insecurity through this lens of romantic
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entanglement, and the music remains consistently beautiful,
tender, and restrained throughout. It will make sense to longtime
fans, as Utada is the sole songwriter for most of the project, with
co-production coming courtesy of Nariaki Obukuro, A.G. Cook,
and Floating Points (who is responsible for the record’s longest,
most hypnotic songs). Skrillex also shows up credited on “Face
My Fears,” though the Kingdom Hearts III theme song is
admittedly done a disservice in this context: its future bass
chorus feels out of place amid so much twinkly electropop, but
it’s worth noting only to state that the A.G. Cook remix is an
excellent substitute.
The album’s boldest musical statement is closer “Somewhere
Near Marseilles,” which remains remarkably down-to-earth
despite being an almost 12-minute epic. Utada plans a casual
hotel rendezvous — all they want is “a spot with easy access,” “a
room with a view,” and each other — while the music unspools
into a shifting arrangement equally as suited for dancing as it is
for laying around the house on a lazy Sunday morning. It’s a
thoughtful conclusion to a set of songs that balance patience
with conviction, as they explore when to work toward love and
self-worth, when to pull back from something beyond one’s
control, and when to commit it all in defense of the things that
give life meaning. On “One Last Kiss,” Utada sings, “I love you
more than you’ll ever know”—but even just trying to say it means
everything.— KAYLA BEARDSLEE
#19 — ASPHALT MEADOWS
Death Cab for Cutie
A venerable indie rock institution, Death Cab for Cutie is many
things to many people. For millennials of a certain vintage, they
are a conduit of CD-era nostalgia. For casual fans who still have
“Soul Meets Body” on their dinner party playlist, they are reliable
purveyors of earnestness and emotional acuity. And since the
departure of founding member Chris Walla, they have seemed,
increasingly, a platform for singer/songwriter Ben Gibbard,
whose breakup with Zooey Deschanel provided the subtext for a
couple of the band’s more languid affairs.
It’s been a while since Death Cab for Cutie actually felt like a
band, an entity whose sound is summoned from the chemistry
and interplay of its individual members, whose distinctions lie in
more than just the personality of their lead singer. That changes
with Asphalt Meadows, which is less a return-to-form than a
flat-out late-career renaissance. Their most engaging record
since Transatlanticism, Asphalt Meadows is vigorous, tense, and
visceral. When is the last time this band worked up a full head of
steam the way they do on the driving “I Miss Strangers,” or flirted
with abrasion like they do on the aptly-named “Roman Candles?”
When’s the last time they locked into a head-bobbing beat like
the one that powers the title song, or seemed as adventurous as
they do on the fractured “Foxglove Through the Clearcut?”
Asphalt Meadows is the work of a band that has long mastered
tone and texture, but here remembers how much fun it is to stir
up a ruckus together. Perhaps it’s inevitable that their newfound
vim is pent-up pandemic antiness, something that’s also
reflected in Gibbard’s lyrics. The album opens with a song called
“I Don’t Know How I Survive,” its off-handed despair setting the
tone for songs that are by turns nervous, wistful, and resolute.
“Rand McNally” is shameless in its nostalgia, and all the more
affecting because of it; meanwhile, “I Miss Strangers” reckons
honestly with the displacing effects of quarantine. And then
there’s the final song, which thumps, thuds, and lurches,
sounding wizened and confident. It’s called “I’ll Never Give Up on
You,” which offers a reassurance that the band’s wrestling match
with despair has concluded, at least for now, with some kind of a
truce. — JOSH HURST
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#18 — SHEBANG
Oren Ambarchi
There is a duality at the heart of Oren Ambarchi’s music. There’s
Oren Ambarchi the performer, a totally unique guitarist who plays
in free improvised settings with the likes of Keiji Haino, Jim
O’Rourke, Keith Rowe, and Stephen O’Malley. And then there is the
Oren Ambarchi of the studio, a sort of modern Teo Macero,
constructing these towering long-form works out of bits and
pieces recorded at different times by disparate ensembles. His
pair of releases this past year exemplifies that duality: there’s
Ghosted, a semi-improvisational trio performance with bassist
Johan Berthling and drummer Andreas Werliin that was recorded
live, in a single room, with minimal overdubs; and then there’s
Shebang, which features an extensive cast of guest performers,
recorded all over the world over the course of five years, and
meticulously edited into a 35-minute piece. Remarkably, both
sides of Ambarchi’s musical practice share a unified, easily
identifiable sound, but it’s fascinating that the respective
methods of arriving at that sound are completely opposed.
Ambarchi’s career arc also has a binary quality: we can divide his
solo discography rather cleanly into pre- and post-“Knots.” That’s
not a quality judgment (records like Grapes From The Estate
[2004] or In The Pendulum’s Embrace [2007] remain classics); it’s
just that all of his studio work in the last decade seems part of a
distinct lineage that can be traced back to the epic 33-minute
track that dominated his 2012 record Audience Of One. “Knots” is
built around the skittering ride cymbal work of Joe Talia, which
acts as an uneven pulse propelling the piece forward. From
there, Ambarchi layers various sounds — strings, horns,
processed voices — and gradually builds them into a massive
droning crescendo, with his own cacophonous guitar soloing over
the top. It’s fairly simple, but in Ambarchi’s hands, the effect is
completely mesmerizing, and it’s provided a basic formula from
which he’s worked out all sorts of variations.
If any single emphasis can define Ambarchi’s post-“Knots” work,
it’s a fascination with rhythm. Sagittarian Domain, Quixotism,
Simian Angel: each of these records is in one way or another a
sort of exploratory rhythmic study, investigating and expanding
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on ideas culled from Outside The Dream Syndicate to minimal
techno to Brazilian percussion masters like Nana Vasconcelos.
And along with the heavier and more Krautrock-indebted Hubris
from 2016, Shebang is probably his most rhythmically intricate
record. It begins with a lone electric guitar picking a wonky
pattern, though it soon splits into multiple voices, which weave
around each other in a way that recalls Pat Metheny’s
performance of Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint. As the guitar
layers continue to build gradually, along with some added bass
tones, Talia enters on drums, his colorful cymbal work
reminiscent of one of Ambarchi’s heroes, Jack DeJohnette. As
the piece unfurls, its complex rhythms gradually shifting and
evolving, it becomes something of a sequence of solo spots. B.J.
Cole on pedal steel, Chris Abrahams on piano, Julia Reidy on
12-string guitar, Jim O’Rourke’s synthesizer drone — they each
get a moment in the spotlight. And then, as the piece reaches its
climax, it sounds as if many (if not all) of the featured soloists
make their return, massing together to form a single, shimmering
cloud of sound.
Many of Ambarchi’s touchpoints — classical minimalism, ’70s and
’80s ECM-style jazz fusion, krautrock, and Berlin school electronic
— are genres and movements that feel firmly rooted in very
specific time periods, but he is able to bring those sounds into
the present in a way very few of his contemporaries can. For all
of its historical references, Shebang still manages to feel
downright modern. — BRENDAN NAGLE
#17 — AETHIOPES
billy woods
billy woods’ vivid, theatrical approach to rap storytelling reached
its apex this year with Aethiopes, a full-length collaboration with
producer and tour DJ Preservation. The record caps off a decade
of writerly exercises beginning with 2012’s History Will Absolve Me,
whose shrapnel-like soundscapes seemed to capture the end of
history while reckoning with its buried truths. woods’ releases in
the years since — comprising solo albums, a sustained
collaboration with Elucid as Armand Hammer, and an excellent
one-off with Moor Mother in 2020 — have mined similar subjects
with impressive results, though only occasionally crossing over
with non-rap listeners (as on 2019’s Hiding Places and 2021’s
Haram). Aethiopes mints woods as a mainstay among this fickler
indie crowd, while also positioning the rapper as an unexpectedly
persuasive nexus point between the past and present eras of
NYC rap music. Members of early-2000s record label Def Jux and
the Weathermen share space with newer rappers on the abstract
fringes, and boom bap hero Boldy James even makes a welcome
appearance. The record’s larger chorus lends woods the quality
of protagonist as well as author, and Preservation’s
sample-heavy smorgasbord weaves woods into Aethiopes’ other
voices and sounds, creating a diasporic tapestry of collective
identity.
Aethiopes announces its sweeping aspirations early with opener
“Asylum,” on which discordant piano and woodwinds soundtrack
an imaginative child’s theories about a neighbor in political exile.
woods’ usual attention to detail is especially pronounced, his
narrator (who may or may not be billy woods himself) tracking
daily routines next door and little changes in the crumbling
facade of normalcy. Aethiopes is peppered with moments of such
exactitude in identifying global dispossession, tracing not just
people but objects like Queen Elizabeth’s Ashanti gold necklace
(“Harlem”) and rooms full of Incan treasure (“Remorseless”). With
lyrics that abruptly transverse childhood and adulthood — and
imagine the far future on the grimy “NYNEX” — listening to
Aethiopes can give the impression not just of a work greater than
the sum of its parts, but one whose sheer number of parts
overwhelms. Yet Preservation’s cinematic backdrop ensures that
the clamor is never anything less than artfully unpolished,
enveloping the game of rapper hot potato “Heavy Water” with
searing percussion, and pairing woods’ diary scrawls with blaring
horns on “No Hard Feelings,” elevating the album highlight to
apocalypse-level urgency. Closing track “Smith + Cross”
concludes Aethiopes with a moment of poetic self-recognition in
a museum diorama, woods in effect identifying himself within
both his lineage and its historicization. Few other 2022 albums,
rap or otherwise, collected worlds within worlds with comparable
heft or grandeur. — MICHAEL DOUB
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#16 — SOS
SZA
Take a look around at some other year-end music lists and you’ll
quickly realize just how much there’s still an appetite for the type
of off-kilter, understated R&B that SZA nailed so perfectly on her
critically and commercially celebrated 2017 breakthrough Ctrl. So
give the last real star on Top Dawg’s roster some credit for having
the fortitude to record an hour-plus album this breathlessly
eclectic and inventive, this insistent on flexing its artist’s range
rather than playing in the pocket. The first proper song on SOS
sets the table, and anticipates a smorgasbord: “Kill Bill” is equal
parts sweet and squirmy, with fluttering falsetto and trips to the
farmer’s market sharing space with a chronically shifty drum
machine and multiple murder plots. It may have been Mountain
Goats mastermind John Darnielle who formally declared that his
2022 album was “inspired” by action movie plotting, but SZA’s
writing on SOS also draws heavily on the heightened emotional
and narrative stakes found in a broad range of genre films. On
the surface, the album’s tales of romantic misadventure, messy
breakups, and lingering jealousies may not be too far afield from
those of Ctrl, but the cinematic breadth of the production
punches up the drama, and
proves the perfect backdrop for the various narrator’s
sensationalized antics.
The girl on “Shirt” wears bloodstains from a run-in with a bitch
who got on her nerves like a badge of honor, while the one on
“Seek & Destroy” likens her lovelorn pursuit to “the art of war” and
is serious enough about it to have “missiles deployed.” Sometimes
we find even an ostensibly happy heroine, like the one of
“Snooze,” still “mobbin', schemin', lootin’, and hidin’ bodies.” That
the more aggressive songs here sit unassumingly alongside
swooning romantic gestures like Travis Scott duet “Open Arms”
and the gorgeous, countrified Mazzy Star homage “Nobody Gets
Me” speaks less to any incoherence of concept than it does to
SZA’s all-encompassing vision. The sprawl of SOS plays like a
whole summer season of blockbusters, and a few breakout indies
(the low-key character study of “Blind” being a major highlight),
stuffed into one uncommonly generous album. And even at its
most marquee-ready, SOS never sacrifices the idiosyncratic
approach to writing that endeared so many to this artist in the
first place. SZA’s feel for young women’s anxieties, insecurities,
but also their sources of strength, independence, and
individuality, is as strong as ever, and feels even more assertive
and culturally consequential in this wide-screen format than it
did on her debut. — SAM C. MAC
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#15 — BOAT SONGS
MJ Lenderman
On "TLC Cagematch," the third song on MJ Lenderman's
breakthrough album Boat Songs, the singer-songwriter
sorrowfully reflects on the passage of time while watching pro
wrestling in his living room. "I always believed it, every time you
said you're gonna be like our hero someday / Well, baby, all our
heroes now are dead, 'cause all things go," he sings, his lilt
drenched in the same melancholy that made Jason Molina an
alt-country icon. Much like Molina's early material as Songs: Ohia,
Lenderman fuses dusty country fables with sparse indie rock
production, although his rural vignettes also share a lot in
common with the arboraceous solipsism of Will Oldham's
numerous musical identities. After two firmly DIY releases —
2019's sprawling, self-titled debut and last year's hazy Ghost of
Your Guitar Solo — the Asheville musician's latest ascends into
higher fidelity, while still maintaining the homespun
straightforwardness that gave those previous records their
rough-around-the-edges coziness.
Boat Songs represents a sort of middle ground between the
ambitious opuses of his first LP and the Guided by Voices-esque
minimalism of his second, and whether his denim-and-flannel
drawl is tangling with laid-back guitar strums or pushing through
walls of distortion, Lenderman's gentle songwriting sensibility
lends itself just as easily to tales of NBA legends (allegedly)
playing through a hangover ("Hangover Game") as it does to
folksy aphorisms (the refrain of "Don't remind me, what I already
know" on the balladic album highlight "Under Control"). On the
fuzz-laden "SUV," he amplifies snapshots of post-breakup
awkwardness with punk rock urgency before ultimately planting
his sad sack in front of the TV just like he did two songs earlier.
The funereal slowcore of album closer "Six Flags" breaches
similar thematic territory to even more devastating results ("No
one could notice / I have never / felt alone / the way I did / at the
Six Flags over Texas"), Lenderman finishing the record off with a
tar-spitting guitar solo.
There is an immediate, uncomplicated beauty to Boat Songs, one
where the simple pleasures of Jackass aren't given more or less
weight than memories of happy summers spent getting wasted
and loafing around drained swimming pools. It's about going
through life, failing, falling, getting back up again, and finding
some happiness along the way. Fame, beauty, and youth all fade
eventually, but so does pain, and so does sadness. We're all just
trying our best: "And that's why we do what we gotta do to get
through / And I know life will make us crazy, I do." — FRED
BARRETT

#14 — IT’S ALMOST DRY
Pusha T
Virginia rap legend Pusha T's hotly anticipated fourth LP It's
Almost Dry opens with the ghostly keys of "Brambleton," a
Pharrell-produced introduction which sees the 44-year-old
rapper exploring the fractured relationship with his former
manager Anthony "Geezy" Gonzales. It's a deeply personal way to
open an album, especially coming from an MC most famous for
braggadocious bars about slinging cocaine. "It was sad watching
dude in Vlad interviews . . . Had a million answers, didn't have a
clue, why Michael kissed Fredo in Godfather II," spits King Push,
referencing his former confidant's infamous interview with DJ
Vlad. In spite of allowing himself some vulnerability, his flow
remains as assured as ever, and when he spins a drug-dealing
tale on the follow-up track "Let the Smokers Shine the Coupes,"
his presence becomes unmistakable. It's not just Pharrell who
gets to leave his fingerprints all over the record, however, as the
other half of the 12-song tracklist is produced by none other than
a pre-heel turn Ye, his collaborations with Pusha having proven
fruitful since 2005. Contrasting Pharrell's eerie beats with clipped
and pitched-up soul samples, "Dreamin of the Past" and the
engrossing "Rock n Roll" also see the controversial
rapper-producer make time to drop two verses of his own.
It's Almost Dry not only boasts an impressive sonic variety but
also a rogue’s gallery of guest MCs. Jay-Z, Kid Cudi, and Lil Uzi
Vert all feature on the album, adding some additional star power
to the proceedings. Jay-Z's verse on "Neck & Wrist" stands out in
particular for containing some of the New York rapper's best
rhymes in a long time ("I blew bird money, y'all talkin' Twitter
feed/We got different Saab stories, save your soliloquies"). The
LP's best moment might come at the very end, though, in the
form of album closer "I Pray for You." Produced by Labrinth and
Ye, the track's soul-tinged plaintiveness and organ-heavy
instrumentation make for a reflective, somber finale. Pusha raps
about his accomplishments with
lines like, "Rarely do you see the
Phoenix rise from the
ashes/Lightnin' struck twice on
four classics," celebrating both his
history and reunion with his
brother and former Clipse partner,
No Malice, who also appears on
the song (and refers to himself as
Malice for the first time since
2012). Even with his prominent
guests, it's clear that few rappers
can match Pusha's lyricism, and
his most boastful
rhymes make it clear that he is keenly aware of that fact
("Service with a smile when I hand out halos"). Still, it's the
moments of quiet doubt and lingering regrets that resonate long
after the album has faded into silence. — FRED BARRETT
#13 — CREST
Bladee & Ecco2k
Those in need of religion in 2022 could do no better than to join
the cult of Drain Gang. Despite being an outfit that appeals more
to a hyper-online Zoomer generation, it’s actually tough off the
top to come up with a more sincere project out there, the
collective’s post-irony leanings making for consistently gentle
records from the quintet of Bladee, Ecco2K, Thaiboy Digital, Yung
Sherman, and Whitearmor. Despite arriving at a similar cultural
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and artistic moment and occupying shared aesthetic space as
other SoundCloud hip hop cum hyperpop cum emo rap groups
like Goth Boi Clique or 100 Gecs, Bladee and co. have created
distance from those projects on the strength of their easy
ebullience and throwback peace-and-love optimism. Rather than
saturating their efforts in #sadboi hedonism or crafting them for
maximum wink value, Drain Gang consistently (and increasingly)
feels untethered from such trivial terrestrial concerns — they
may be in this world, but they’re not of it.
In that sense, then, Crest may be
the spiritual album of the year, and
intentionally so. But unlike the
album that angled for and indeed
took on that mantle in 2021, these
young bucks aren’t likely to out
themselves as Hitler apologists in
the coming year. That’s in no small
part because none of the toxic
dogma of Christianity rears its ugly
head on Crest, despite playing
loose with such iconography and
language on these tracks — “Gloria
in excelsis, Deo, Deo / Excelsior, we
excel everything and anything” on “5 Star Crest (4 Vattenrum)”;
“Everlasting / Flowers bloom / Never-ending / Story of my life /
Ballad for the sins” on “Girls just want to have fun” — and instead
the prevailing ethos is of a far more zenned-out Buddhist variety
(“We think we exist / that’s why we suffer”), celebrating community
and kinship, the pursuit of beauty and nirvana. On Crest, the fog
of abstraction is its own kind of heaven.
All of this psychedelic-tinged earnestness, spiritually descended
from the ‘60s folk scene more than anything, swirls within
Whitearmor’s twinkly EDM noodling, layered to the point of
appealing chaos, foregrounding the early house at its core when
it’s not fulling leaning into the sonics of anime soundtracking,
while at other times stripping things back to highlight the
influence of something like early-aughts, nu-hippie oddity
Nanook of the North’s The Taby Tapes. Of course, the collective
has been perfecting this formula for a decade at this point, their
interpolation of a more keenly observed spirituality becoming
increasingly refined with each successive effort (and it’s worth
noting that this likewise applies to Bladee’s solo effort this year,
Spiderr). But what stands out most in 2022 — a year that saw
some of the world’s biggest stars and clearest voices detour into
the history-rich world of carnal club music — is how truly pure
and redeeming this humble Swedish outfit is to our troubled
world. And all Drain’s people said, amen. — LUKE GORHAM
#12 — ANTS FROM UP THERE
Black Country, New Road
It’s quite exciting and a little surprising to take stock of how
young Cambridgeshire septette Black Country, New Road —
whose members are still roughly in their early 20s, though they
are now officially a sextette after lead singer Isaac Wood’s
departure — so naturally and briskly reinvented their music since
the release of their 2021 breakthrough debut record, For the First
Time. Without entirely disavowing the the core characteristics
and distinctive sounds of that impressive album, BCNR does
depart somewhat from that post-punk style and those Tool-ish
effects on Ants From Up There, embracing the much more
explicitly the prog rock influences of prominent British groups of
the ‘70s — a luscious hodgepodge of Gentle Giant, King Crimson,
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and Van der Graaf Generator, as well as so-called Canterbury
scene acts like Caravan and Soft Machine — and reinterpreting to
edgier and more modern effect: (“She had Billie Eilish style /
Moving to Berlin for a little while”). As much as the title of the
album itself suggests a certain surreal, maybe even Dadaist
quality (“So clean your soup maker and breathe in / Your chicken
broccoli and everything”), sometimes even recalling Syd Barrett’s
psychedelic dwams, when it comes to the group’s outlandish
lyricism, it’s as if random recollections of memory or scattered
excerpts from a diary have been plucked for us: “This staircase —
it leads only to / Some old pictures of you”). On the other hand,
BCNR’s poetic musings can also take more conceptual shape,
twining romantic concerns, fantastical reveries, and even
domesticity — “And every phone died then / And no-one had WiFi
inside your apartment, from “Bread Song”; “Concorde flies in my
room / Tears the house to shreds,” from “Basketball Shoes” —
which feels like a potential instance of our post-pandemic era’s
inclination toward blending mundane minutiae with sublime
beauty.
Extending this notion, it also seems that the album’s inflections —
especially when we consider how much Wood’s timbres are owed
to the singular vocal expressions and performances of David
Bowie, most notable in “Chaos Space Marine” — intend to create a
specific soundscape for listeners’ perceptions and imaginations
rather than necessarily convey any clear meaning: take “Snow
Globes,” for example: “A small nation of souvenirs / Make Henry
whole but porously / Oh, god of weather, Henry knows / Snow
globes don’t shake on their own.” As Wood’s vocals, alternately
placid and psyched-out from one song to the next, attempt to
extract the essential musicality of the words, the band’s
instrumentation delivers the most expressive and impressive
sounds as a canvas for listeners. It’s particularly remarkable to
hear Georgia Ellery’s strings, Lewis Evans’ flutes & saxophone,
and May Kershaw’s keyboards and percussions entwine the
tracks’ colorful emotions with expectedly more pensive post-rock
structures laid down by Luke Mark, Tyler Hyde, and Charlie
Wayne’s guitar, bass, and drum trio. And so, as kaleidoscopic and
unpredictable as Ants from Up There proves to
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Be (as only a sophomore record, at that), it’s tough not to already
be looking forward — given how artistically open-minded BCNR
has proven to be — to where exactly these curious rockers
choose to go next. — AYEEN FOROOTAN
#11 — PREACHER’S DAUGHTER
Ethel Cain
Ethel Cain’s debut album, Preacher’s Daughter, soared onto the
scene in 2022 (on the heels of her incredibly popular EP in 2021),
firmly entrenching her as a new indie darling du jour. Moving
beyond the world of TikTok stardom and late-stage bedroom pop
aesthetics, Cain rips into the heart of middle America’s
depressive tendencies. While such thematizing would feel forced
from a lesser artist, there’s a real camaraderie in these sweeping
sounds that primes the record to easily steal the hearts of
flyover country listeners in particular. There’s a tone of deep
knowledge that informs the emotionally resonant content, a dual
force that sustains the lengthy runtime of the album. Clocking in
at just under 80 minutes, it’s nearly a miracle how well this
works, succeeding so thoroughly with an approach that might
seem antithetical to the fast pace and limited attention span of
the artist’s core fanbase.
There’s always something bubbling on the edge of Preacher’s
Daughter’s tracks, tense instrumentals fusing with smooth vocals
so that it feels like the songs could explode at any moment. It
shows an immense amount of restraint to avoid following
through on that, but taking the long way around on the tracks
pays off immensely. Tracks expand far beyond what Cain’s typical
pop counterparts would choose, instead opting for sprawling
seven-minute takes that dive into the depths of what it feels like
to be alive. It’s an ambitious approach for such a new artist, but
refreshing within the sea of similarity to which the album was
dropped. Cain’s Southern Baptist upbringing created the
framework for the album’s various pieces: cuts here are sonically
reminiscent of hyper-religious ballads and contemporary praise
songs that are so common in Cain’s neck of the woods, but she
approaches this template with a vein of darkness: the impression
can often feel like a church service led
by Lana Del Rey. The lyrics are a foil to this facade of worship,
instead speaking with contempt about the American Dream that
failed so many around her, notably on the rare uptempo track,
single “American Teenager.” The systems Cain condemns have
failed the people that they were designed to protect, many of
whom reside in the small towns that the artist uses as
perspective on the album.
“… the impression can often
feel like a church service led
by Lana Del Rey.
Like the designed languor of a litany, Preacher’s Daughter’s
pacing affects the listener, making them feel as if they are being
consumed by the world and word. Cain offers a glimpse inside
the challenging reality of a nation torn apart by religious zealotry,
foreign wars, an ongoing opioid crisis, and crippling depression,
and asks listeners to sit inside this space. As the album
progresses, these forces build, and challenge the very notion of
artistic creation in such a world. Through the ashes, Ethel Cain
rises and razes, diving deeper and deeper into the crushing
nature of a late-capitalist society. While such an ambitious and
thrilling debut album will prove difficult to top, Cain consistently
proves across Preacher’s Daughter precisely how deceiving
expectations can be. — ANDREW BOSMA
#10 — MR. MORALE & THE BIG STEPPERS
Kendrick Lamar
Celebrity worship is out in 2022. At this point, we expect our
superstars to have a downward spiral after reaching the top. It’s
essentially written into the script. This year has seen a few
artists inflict critical damage to their own public image, to say
the least. But unlike the other guy, Kendrick Lamar is clearly
doing the work. Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers feels less like a
ticking time bomb, and more like the product of intense
self-reflection over his own sins, trauma, ego, and perfectionism.
Therapy, but make it art — in doing so, Kendrick proves why he’s
still the best lyricist in the game, not in spite of his flaws but
because of them. The result is the best lyrical rap album of 2022.
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Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers is largely a story about grace. The
pressure to be perfect has never been stronger than it is in
America today. In a nation where fifteen minutes of fame is just
one viral post away, anyone has the potential to be the hero or
villain of the day. The consequences for the villain are clear:
public outcry, humiliation, and pariahship. We can’t always cancel
the villains in our own lives, so we burn our celebrities in effigy.
The consequences for the hero are more complicated. We uplift
our heroes to godlike levels. We look to them as role models and
project our own personal politics and expectations onto them.
And when they fail to meet these expectations, or fit neatly into
our little boxes, the Internet is quick to admonish them.
“Kendrick’s deconstruction of
his air-tight public image
largely makes the project
such a challenging and
uncomfortable listen.
Kendrick has been lionized as the savior of rap his whole career.
College courses have been taught about him since good kid,
m.A.A.d city dropped. “But I am not your savior,” he says on Mr.
Morale. While artists have long made music in response to
negative criticism, this album feels like a reaction to the critical
adoration Kendrick has received for each project he’s released.
Kendrick’s deconstruction of his air-tight public image largely
makes the project such a challenging and uncomfortable listen.
We didn’t expect an album like this from the man who made To
Pimp A Butterfly and won a Pulitzer for DAMN. Kendrick makes
clear on Mr. Morale that the crown he wears is heavy.
“I’m the biggest hypocrite of 2015,” Kendrick warned way back on
Butterfly’s “The Blacker the Berry.” It felt almost sacrilegious
coming from rap’s messiah. But every human being is a hypocrite
at one point or another. Grace isn’t about giving villains a pass,
but recognizing that no one fits neatly into a box of “good” or
“bad.” To live in a state of grace, you have to believe that “good”
people make mistakes and that “bad” people can change.
The past decade has seen a rejection of the manufactured
popstar image that was so prevalent in the late ‘’90s and ‘00s era
of sugar-coated teen pop. While we still place our artists on
pedestals, we don’t want them to feel like they’re all the way at
the top looking down. We want them to feel relatable. We want to
feel like we really know them. From Beyoncé to Billie Eilish, our
favorite artists have let us into their lives through documentaries
and social media confessionals in an attempt to make us feel like
they’re just like us — only richer, hotter, and better in every way.
In reality, the parts of themselves our stars allow us to see are
only based on a true story. What Kendrick does on Mr. Morale
feels far from fake. More than any other genre, realness is central
to the hip hop tradition. And this is the most real rap’s reigning
king has ever been. — NICK SEIP
#9 — THE LONELIEST TIME
Carly Rae Jepsen
Sometimes, a collection of great, loosely-related pop songs is all
an album needs to succeed, and few artists can be trusted to
express the joy and emotional clarity of pop music better than
Carly Rae Jepsen. Even as poptimism has become a more
conflicted concept in recent years, her music has remained a
vibrant escape from disillusionment. The Loneliest Time sparkles
with glossy pop production: the pulsing bass of “Bad Thing Twice”
and “Anxious,” the froth and fizz of “Shooting Star” and “So Nice,”
the explosive glitz of “Talking to Yourself,” the delicate ballad
arrangement of “Go Find Yourself or Whatever,” and more all add
up to some of the best-sounding tracks of Jepsen’s career.
Frequent collaborators like Tavish Crowe, Kyle Shearer, and John
Hill return, as well as Rostam Batmanglij for his first credits with
Jepsen since 2015’s “Warm Blood.”
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The Loneliest Time opens in familiar territory as Jepsen serves
up the type of bombastic synthpop she’s best known for.
“Surrender My Heart” begins the album with a passionate,
synth-soaked declaration that she wants to get closer; “I wanna
be honest with you.” Immediately after, “Joshua Tree” goes for
more minimal dance-pop, and there’s something classic about
the playful “Boys around the world” hook in “Beach House” that
brings to mind pop tracks from decades ago.
The first six songs are all 3 minutes or less — “Sideways” doesn’t
even clear 2:20 — which is one of the only concessions Jepsen
makes to the changing pop landscape around her. But it doesn’t
hinder the album: even when tracks like “Talking to Yourself”
move through verses at lightning speed, the music still feels
satisfying and well-resolved. Plus, as the tracklist progresses, the
songs relax and lengthen anyway. Some of the record’s best
moments come when Jepsen gives herself more space to unwind
in acoustic-leaning arrangements such as lead single “Western
Wind.” Maybe one day Jepsen will finally put out that
Transcendentalist album, but for now, “Western Wind” joins
Dedicated Side B’s “Now I Don’t Hate California After All” to tide us
over during the wait.
The most interesting recent evolution in Jepsen’s discography
has been the growth of her ballads. The slow songs on Dedicated
Side B were some of its best, but the ballads on The Loneliest
Time are even more gorgeous. “Go Find Yourself or Whatever,” in
particular, is a contender for best song on the album. Despite its
silly-sounding title, it’s a pensive track with a beautiful vocal
performance and perfect slow burn of an arrangement that
builds from a single acoustic guitar to delicate layers of strings,
piano, and backing vocals that swirl around Jepsen’s vulnerable
goodbyes: “You feel safe in sorrow, and you feel safe on an open
road / Go find yourself or whatever.” Bonus tracks “No Thinking
Over the Weekend” and “Keep Away” are a sultry, spiraling slow
jam and ’90s R&B-esque romantic slow dance, respectively.
For an album titled after solitude, The Loneliest Time often fixates
on companionship. The first track begins with Jepsen
giving her heart away; the singles reach towards a lover
(sincerely on “Wind,” exasperated with modern dating on “Beach
House,” post-breakup on “Talking to Yourself”); the deep cuts find
her memorializing a recently passed family member (“Bends”),
choosing her heart over her head and going back to a partner
(“Bad Thing Twice”), and asking for romantic reciprocation (“Far
Away”). Solitude becomes loneliness when you admit that you
wish someone else was there to fill the empty space: the songs
of The Loneliest Time may outline this space, but they do so while
looking at the silhouette of someone who used to occupy it, or
else searching for someone new to step inside. It’s a project
about Jepsen understanding herself that still makes room for
listeners to come in close and feel a little less alone, thanks to
her universal pop constructions. The last track of the standard
edition concludes, “I’m coming over tonight / Knock on your door,
just like before / I need that look in your eyes / Cause we’ve had
the loneliest time.” Having struggled through insecurity and
incompatibility but also having come out on the other side
knowing what she needs, Jepsen finally chooses connection. —
KAYLA BEARDSLEE
#8 — HYPOCHONDRIAC
Brakence
“I’ve made a couple of beats / Then the whole net started capturing
me / This shit’s so overwhelming / Mix self-expression with
self-obsession”: so vividly declares Randy Findell, the Ohio-based
singer and musician professionally known by his stage-name
Brakence, who gained a solid and dedicated cult fanbase upon
rising to fame from the SoundCloud scene in the mid-2010s.
What’s clear on Brakence’s Hypochondriac (even more so than on
previous efforts) is that the record possesses a very rawly
confessional and boldly confrontational artistic approach. It’s a
complete oddity that, through an eccentric mix of Midwest
hyperpop, emo rap, lo-fi indie rock, and glitchy electronica
(occasionally infusing powerful drum beats or airy guitarwork,
for example, in “Intellectual Greed”), crafts a prismatic sonic
experience that delivers one of the year’s surprising “love at first
listen” albums. In fact, what’s truly astonishing here about
Brakence’s work is the unique way he alternates and subverts,
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say, the molecular structure of a single song to melodically
constitute fresh chemical (or, perhaps more appropriately,
digital) compounds for each and all of the compositions. The
artist’s vocals, simultaneously familiar in their amiability and
singular, and embracing various modes and moods — from softly
autotuned croons and passionate whispers to vocals fierce with
energy and falsettos that can even feel mildly aggressive — find a
very delicate balance in order to arrange his quotidian and
melancholy lyricism within the protean sonic experience of
Hypochondriac. And all of this is capped off by the frequent
connective narrations which lend a certain storytelling depth to
the whole record.
Brakence’s most personal battles are here realized through
explicit symbolism revolving around God and the devil, angels
and demons; sobriety and drug use are accorded various
dualities — materialistic and spiritual, holy and hedonistic. It
makes sense, then, that Hypochondriac manifests as an always
morphing shape of sounds, constructed from crisp underlying
beats, sharp sounds effects, noise-fueled distortions, and
sudden tempo changes, all of which build to a
dopamine-inducing mixture of the copacetic and chaotic. And
there are the recurring lyrics motifs of sacrificial love (“I'm letting
go of all of my vices / I'll make the sacrifice / It's all I can do To
make me get over you,” from “Bugging”), various forms of pain
(“Screening my own headache for proof / The MRI was a misprint”,
from “Preparation Exercise No. 7 (Trembling)”), trippy
experimentation (“Then we vaporized ‘til our fates aligned / I think
we frayed the twine / Tethering space and time,” from “Venus Fly
Trap”), and constant existential musing (“Too excited about dying
and blooming,” from “Deep Fake”). Indeed, “head” and “brain”
might be the two most repeated words in Hypochondriac’s
lexicon, revealing the extent to which the record uses abstraction
and heady introspection to balance its clear emotionalism.
This parity extends beyond the conceptual, though: as much as
Brakence’s songs at once lyrically and compositionally in
conversation with one another (in the sense that they shape a
sort of loose concept album), they also succeed in entwining a
meditative serenity with expressive, often dreamy wildness on
the sonic front, rhythmically incorporating the chill of the
downtempo and thrill of the bouncy and frenetic. Similarly, it’s
interesting to see how Hypochondriac places an
ultra-contemporary milieu of interpersonal entanglement (most
evidently in a song like “5g”: “scrollin’ all night”; “he put me on a
pedestal and liked my tweets”) in contrast with its more mystical
fascinations for pre-industrial living (“And when I die, I hope I’m
buried in a forest”). Even after a first listen, it’s hard not to agree
with Brakence’s self-assessment in “Caffein”: he truly is “dope as
fuck” and undeniably “glowing up.” — AYEEN FOROOTAN
#7 — AND IN THE DARKNESS, HEARTS
AGLOW
Weyes Blood
Though the release of Weyes Blood’s 2019 opus Titanic Rising
already announced the singer-songwriter (born Natalie Mering)
as poet laureate of the downer vibe, the years since have further
reaffirmed the album’s prophetic qualities. Oriented around
modern-day-specific subjects like climate change, Weyes Blood’s
canny topical focus marked Titanic Rising not just as a resonant
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document of imperial decline, but one whose already ample
poignancy was set up to deepen as things generally get worse.
The first album in a planned trilogy about human species-level
concerns, Weyes Blood returned this year with second
installment, And In the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, a magisterial
record whose breadth and beauty exceeds even its prodigious
predecessor. Altogether more layered and lush, Hearts Aglow’s
renewed commitment to unhurried tempos and slow builds
testify to the confidence which results from having been
validated and awarded for it. Compared to Titanic Rising, Weyes
Blood’s latest release is less focused on disaster than the
fractious personhood which emerges in its wake, adopting the
individual and first-person plural perspectives of a despairing
populace yearning for contact. A “pandemic record,” the
observational acuity of Hearts Aglow provides a corrective to
typically vapid Covid-era commentary, and to a musical
landscape which can often lack for the album’s level of ambition
and sophistication.
productions keeps its reveries from sounding too sunny, with
shadowy edges providing a reminder of overwhelming change’s
encroachment. While grappling with such subjects can prompt
no small amount of despair in those who consider them, Weyes
Blood’s unflinching resolve, empathy, and wit largely keep Hearts
Aglow swaying in the light. — MICHAEL DOUB
#6 — RENAISSANCE
Beyonce
“I’m bout to explode!” Big Freedia first called for a “release” back
in 2014 on her incendiary track “Explode.” “Release your anger,
release your mind, release your job, release the time.” In 2022,
Beyoncé promised a “release” of her own with “Break My Soul,”
the debut single off her 7th studio album Renaissance. On it,
Beyoncé amplifies Big Freedia’s call for catharsis and reinvents
Robin S.’s house standard “Show Me Love” into an ebullient
call-to-the-dancefloor fit for 2022. In doing so, she established
the theme for her upcoming album: it’s time to let it all out.
The storytelling on Hearts Aglow occupies the internal realms of
its beset-upon narrators, describing psychologies shaped and
challenged by external circumstance. Opening song “It’s Not Just
You It’s Everybody” details the semi-universal experience of
feeling unseen at a party, before expanding outward to
acknowledge loneliness’ grip on our culture at large. Similar
attempts to situate oneself within a broader social fabric take
creative forms throughout the album; people in “Children of the
Empire” reject fear whilst scrambling to find a solid purchase for
themselves, while album centerpiece “God Turn Me Into a Flower”
frames transformation as another means of escaping oppression
and narcissism. Like the pop music songbook writ large, love
factors heavily in Weyes Blood’s transcendence, urging her past
her breaking point on the booming “Grapevine,” and providing
harbor from the storm on the album’s swooning title track.
Gorgeous arrangements elevate these diaristic musings from
inner monologue to full-blown sing-alongs, comprising a Laurel
Canyon-indebted suite of folk music characterized by its pristine
fidelity and widescreen wonder. If a successful historical
exercise in this musical regard, the warped quality of the album’s
Renaissance delivers on that promise. More than just a great club
album, it’s a full-on history lesson in dance music and celebration
of Black queer creativity. Sonically, this is Beyoncé’s most
singularly focused work since 2011’s 4. While 4 eschewed
contemporary pop in favor of intimate R&B and soul sounds,
Renaissance delves deep into dance music — and I mean deep.
Every sample, feature, and reference is intentionally selected and
seamlessly incorporated to show, rather than tell, the history of
dance music. Nile Rodgers’ trademark guitar playing on the
sure-to-be-timeless “Cuff It” roots the song squarely in disco
tradition, while feeling quintessentially Beyoncé. Right Said Fred’s
“I’m Too Sexy” gets its best interpolation yet on “Alien Superstar,”
transforming the goofy novelty hit’s melody into an otherworldly
ascending hook uplifting queer joy and uniqueness. “Pure/Honey”
puts ballroom front and center with its sample of drag legend
Kevin Aviance’s iconic “Cunty.” Beyoncé even closes the album
with “Summer Renaissance” — a tribute to forever-reigning
Queen of Disco Donna Summer through its sample of “I Feel
Love,” a track that laid the foundation for all dance music to
come. Beyoncé isn’t shy about her influences, and the album is
19

all the better for it. In fact, it’s what makes Renaissance
Renaissance.
Lyrically, the album marks a departure from Beyoncé's previous
works. Whereas every previous Beyoncé album is first and
foremost about the life, love, and longings of its creator,
Renaissance concerns itself more with the listener. Far from the
autobiographical storytelling of an album like Lemonade, no track
on Renaissance is exclusive to Beyoncé’s experience. Rather,
each song allows its audience to place themselves into the
music’s narrative, taking the long-running self-empowerment
theme present throughout her career to its logical next step.
Beyoncé has always, in a way, acted as a vessel for the
aspirations and desires of her audience — someone we can see
ourselves in despite the enormous gaps in wealth and success
that separate us. On Renaissance, Beyoncé strikes a more
relatable pose. In the place of regular muse Jay Z, an
untouchable cultural and capitalist force, we get Uncle Johnny, a
more humble and grounded source of inspiration, love, and
family. This is an album for fans, especially the Black queer fans
who have championed her to this point. It’s no accident that this
album arrived without a single video or live performance to
promote it. We are, after all, talking about Beyoncé: music’s great
renaissance woman. Instead, each listener is given the liberty to
interpret and personalize each song on their own accord. Without
releasing a single visual, Beyoncé delivered a project that feels
completely alive and fully formed while standing on its own: the
mark of a truly great album.
Hearing Beyoncé let loose on Renaissance is refreshing,
engaging, and only gets more rewarding with each listen. After
two long years of social distancing and listening to music in
claustrophobic quarters, we all needed a release of energy. And
after decades of supporting one of pop’s greatest and straightest
monogamists, Beyoncé’s queer fans deserved recognition for
stanning her into the stratosphere. Renaissance is a love letter to
the fans and the music that made her. And frankly, it slaps. —
NICK SEIP
20

#5 — HONESTLY, NEVERMIND
Drake
Drake
has
always
been an
artist of
self-professed
superlatives.
He’s the swaggiest,
the richest, the
freshest. He has the
best flow, the most rides,
more women than he can
handle (and nobody misses
them more when they leave).
He’s the most misrepresented,
the most put-upon, and especially
the saddest, when it suits him.
Whatever list you’re looking at, he’s at
the top. This is by design: Champagne
Papi has spent the past decade and a half
goosing his own ego to unfathomable heights,
and that’s always been the appeal. He might not
be the most clinical narcissist in the game, but
he’s certainly perfected the performance of it better
than anyone.
Ask any two Drake fans what his best record is, you’ll get
two different answers. Same applies to three, four, five —
further testament to the myth of his own greatness. But after
the exercise in mid-ness that was Certified Lover Boy, which was
preceded by the fairly mid Dark Lane Demo Tapes and ever midder
25 21

Scorpion (not to mention those sub-mid mini-EPs; we’ll leave Care
Package alone), it would be fair for listeners to wonder about a
future trajectory: after all, CLB should have been the artist’s
return to the Spotify-approved, hitmaker style of album creation
that had worked so well for the rapper prior to his light
experimentation of the past 4 years. If a Drake album no longer
has a par excellence baseline, what are we mere mortals left to
believe in?
The course correction that likely no one expected was Drizzy’s
full right turn into danceable deep house, but that’s exactly what
he delivers with Honestly, Nevermind. Not only that, but the
perpetually shoulder-chipped Drake does so with an even more
impressive chip this time out — just look at that title — and a
triad of the first tracks (not counting the mood- and
aesthetic-setting “Intro”) work to deliver on
another Drake superlative: he’s the absolute king of pettiness.
There’s “Fallin Back,” which after a single long verse and a brief
break where Drake just shrieks “Me” — genius at work — he
proceeds into an autotuned, head-bob-encouraging chorus
where he repeats the phrase “Falling back on me” for over 90
seconds. This not only affords space for this new
house style to seep into listeners’ unconscious, an acclimation
tank of sorts, but does so while treating a Drakeism as mantra,
melding old and new, before wrapping the track with: “What
would you do without me? / I think you would lose everything.”
Honestly, Nevermind’s thesis has been set.
On follow-up track “Texts Go Green,” the rapper ends the chorus
with “I moved on so long ago,” which confirms another Drake
essentiality: he will always be the victor, even when he can’t stop
dwelling on shit. And then there’s “A Keeper,” where Drake truly
drops the exclamation point: opening with “I found a new muse /
That’s bad news for you / Why would I keep you around?”, he then
namechecks God — “God is okay with me, so” (immediately
recalling his immortal line from “Still Here”: “I gotta talk to God
think that He don’t hear me”) — before declaring: “Life of that
shade that you throw / I've seen you take it low / Limbo right under
that ho / Fuck out my face.”
More superlatives, you say? Sure. Drake is also still the horniest.
“Currents” features arguably the Drakest production yet: courtesy
of Black Coffee, GORDO, and 40, a woozy swirl of electronic
ambiance floats above an earworm beat that displaces heavy
bass in favor of a line of pulsing mattress springs. The first verse
ends with “We can move in slow motion if that’s what you want,”
and the springs, of course, switch to half-time. We then quickly
move into “Calling My Name,” which plays momentarily coy in its
opening chorus — “I'm countin' the days 'til you come / I'm countin'
the ways to make you” — before
abandoning all pretense and getting down to Drake business:
“Your pussy is calling my name / So come on baby, let’s stop
playing games.” That settled, we still have a glorious half an
album to go, including album highs “Sticky” and “Massive” (and
“Jimmy Cooks,” which felt out of place as a closer until it was
later recontextualized as an introduction to the impending
Drake/21 Savage collab).
The larger narrative surrounding Honestly, Nevermind, both
culturally and critically, is consumed with the rapper’s specific
aesthetic this time out, musing about motivation, narrativizing
the shift. It’s an understandable fixation, but of likely very little
lasting import to the success of the year’s bounciest record. After
all, Beyoncé deployed a similar maneuver this year, and while
Drake’s is predictably and undeniably the less studied of the two,
it’s also the breezier effort, and importantly this is as consistent
an album as he’s put out in a half decade at least, one that
reflects his known artistic strengths as much as it suggests any
future aesthetic roadmap. Between Honestly, Nevermind, and the
mixed but more experimental Dark Lane Demo Tapes, in context
with the failed revisitation of jukebox style with Certified Lover
Boy, it’s hard not to feel like we’re on the precipice of major-era
Drake. For now, call it Drake’s 808s and Heartbreaks. — LUKE
GORHAM
22

Over the course of three albums and five efficient
years, Barcelonian pop musician Rosalía has pulled
off a remarkable transformation, dramatically
breaking away from the earnest, confessional
nature of her first two projects, and in turn,
refashioning herself as the glossy international superstar
MOTOMAMI. When Rosalía first emerged, she did so as
a folk artist, earning praise (mostly at home in Spain)
for her spare, acoustic flamenco ballads on
debut Los Ángeles. Her follow up, El Mal
Querer, would elaborate on this sound
further, building it out with an assist
from eclectic art pop producer el
Guincho to impressive, if not somewhat
staid effect. A concise epic at 30
minutes, El Mal Querer caught the interest
of American music media at the right
moment (i.e., just as they began to pay
attention to Spanish-language artists),
its ostentatious concept album structure
and slick synthesis of classical flamenco
crooning plus contemporary, club-minded
production made it an easy favorite
among that milieu and propelled Rosalía
to a level of superstardom that has her
working alongside the likes of Noah
Goldstein and Pharrell Williams.
#4 — MOTOMAMI
Rosalía
Leaving behind the more intimate
production dynamics of Los Ángeles
(handled exclusively by composer Raül
Refree) and El Mal Querer, MOTOMAMI brings
back the very-in-demand el Guincho while
inviting on Goldstein, Williams, and a host
of other major industry notables (Frank
Dukes, Michael Uzowuru) with an aim
toward streaming-era canonicity. A bold
play for this fresh artist that totally
works, her reconception of persona and
23 27

aesthetic is rather ingenious and one of the more exciting payoffs in music this year. While not totally abandoning her foundational
singer-songwriter stylings, Rosalía uses her third album and global visibility to launch herself in a number of directions that coalesce around the
MOTAMAMI figure, a genre-hopping, globe-trotting icon (and motorcycle enthusiast), informed, in equal measure, by anime and motocross culture.
A gleefully appropriative figure for better and for worse, MOTOMAMI was met with resistance from the critical community initially, but the very
memeable popstar’s purposeful aloofness attracted an obsessive fanbase who championed the album’s hyper, reggaeton anthems (the Daddy
Yankee-sampling “Saoko,” and the singsongy “Bizcochito”) on TikTok and the like, and in turn, flipped the general cultural consensus.
Undoubtedly one of the defining works of 2022, Motomami operates in a sort of deranged, melodramatic register befitting the tone of this past
year, a manic pop album that careens between hard hitting dance music, wistful piano melody (most notably on the stirring, fan-favorite “Hentai”),
moody R&B, and back around again, making time to duet with The Weeknd
and trade verses with Dominican rapper Tokischa along the way.
Boasting an undeniably expensive sheen provided by the elite squad
of producers assembled, and operating on an apparent yet
elusive internal logic, MOTOMAMI never derails even as it
veers into unexpected tangents and clashing sonic
stylings — as its assured orchestrator, it's obvious
that Rosalía is indeed the major artist she has
claimed to be. — M.G. MAILLOUX
28 24

#3 — DRAGON NEW WARM MOUNTAIN I BELIEVE IN
YOU
Big Thief
Hitherto, Big Thief has always seemed like a
band that does a couple of things very well: wispy folk
songs, gnarled chunks of country-rock. With their first double album,
they suddenly seem like a band that can do anything and everything.
Bizarrely, this band that has long trafficked in tightly-sequenced statements
seems to have found their focus by surrendering to sprawl; across twenty wild and
unpredictable songs, many of them dissimilar to previous Big Thief works and most
of them dissimilar to one another, the band taps into a deep reservoir of imagination and
vision. The cliché about big, messy double albums is that they might be a bit better with
some of the fat trimmed. But there’s nothing on this album that you could cut: nary a bad
song, never a dull moment, not a second that doesn’t deepen and enhance the songs that
surround it.
The Big Thief wheelhouse remains intact. Outside of Over the Rhine, it’s hard to think of a
band that could weave a tale of heartbreak as affecting as “Change,” using nothing but a
few short stanzas and a lilting country-folk melody. But that song is followed — to signal
their chaotic intentions — by the cling and clatter of “Time Escaping,” an oddball
junkyard of treated guitars and percussive effects, as experimental as anything
25 29

in the Big Thief canon. But even this dichotomy is a limited roadmap for the
adventures that follow; it certainly doesn’t prepare you for the mid-album suite of
‘90s-channeling alt-rock and trip-hop songs, nor for the two or three lickety-split
singalongs that could accurately be described as hoedowns.
This band is onto something good, and they know it: You can hear it in the breadth
of their vision but also in the depth of their humor. A year ago, none of us
would have imagined that this serious-to-a-fault group would rhyme “finish” with
“knish,” least of all in a song that prominently features jawharp and muses on the
impossibility of kissing one’s elbows. (Even the title, “Spud Infinity,” reflects a growing
comfort with warmth and silliness.) The record isn’t all fun and games, not by a
longshot: many of these are songs of loss and longing, and even the love songs feel
fragile and tentative. But there is nothing tentative about the album-ending
admonition to grab life by the rough as well as the smooth: “Can we make love, can
we hold fast? I really wanna try.” — JOSH HURST
26

#2 — GOD SAVE THE ANIMALS
Alex G
Alex G has always had an inclination toward the enigmatic. Even
going back to his teenage days, many of his earliest songs displayed a
mysterious quality that’s endured for over a decade — he’s able to write in a way that’s
emotionally evocative while letting broader “meanings” remain opaque. His aversion to analyzing his own lyrics has only fueled the
mystery, inspiring legions of online fans to flock to Reddit forums and the like to debate their own theories and readings. And while
this sense of ambiguity is present on God Save The Animals (look to standout single “Runner,” an irresistible earworm whose chanted
refrain beguiles with its cryptic undertone of violence: “Load it up, know your trigger like the back of my hand”), the record has a real
thematic consistency, a uniting clarity unlike his previous work. Despite Giannascoli’s insistence that he’s “not great at talking about
this stuff,” a brief explanation offered in a recent interview is as elucidating as anything a critic could muster: “A few people that
I’m close to became religious,” he told Pitchfork. “It made me wonder what they found.” Indeed, references to faith, sin, redemption,
even biblical allusions, can be found on nearly every song. But what really stands out is the yearning for meaning, for direction, the
search for a way forward and out of the darkness of one’s past.
27 31
These ideas are evident in the first words we hear: “After all / People come and people go away / Yeah, but God with me He stayed.”
Giannascoli’s voice is digitally modulated here, pitched up and warbly in a way that fans will recognize. At risk of being too
prescriptive, one sometimes gets the sense that his experimentations with vocal production serve to distance himself from the
voice narrating his songs, emphasizing that they’re characters; perhaps on “After All” he’s channeling the spirit of his friends and
their religious awakenings. More important, though, is the reflective tone — looking back on the “lost innocence” of youth, the years
passed by. These sorts of ruminations persist throughout the record, at times giving way to a deeper introspection that feels more
explicitly personal. Like on “Mission,” where his childish insistence that “I did good / I kept it on track” is answered by a chorus (sung,
pointedly, by his girlfriend Molly Germer) that’s sobering in its call for self-interrogation: “Hey, look in the mirror /Ain’t gonna right your
wrongs / With a stupid love song.” Later in the record, he continues to reflect on his chosen profession, wondering: “How many more
songs am I supposed to write, before / I should turn it off, and say goodnight?”

If you read interviews or press releases, you’ll know that a lot has been
made of the recording process, with God Save The Animals being Giannascoli’s first
venture into a proper studio setting, as opposed to his typical home recording approach. And while
one can hear occasional evidence of the upgraded studio polish, ultimately there’s nothing radically different about the record’s
sound. Double-tracked acoustic guitars, some idiosyncratic arrangement decisions (the lead piano line on “Runner” stands out, a
subtly unusual choice that works beautifully), occasional diversions into hyperpop or other digital experimentation (“No Bitterness”;
“S.D.O.S.”) — but the classic Alex G sound remains very much intact. The real signs of maturation are found in the lyrics. And it’s not
just the religious themes, but how those ideas dovetail into more personal concerns. His questions about faith and spirituality reveal
deeper misgivings about family, purpose, the passage of time.
This all coalesces on penultimate “Miracles,” the album’s clear emotional centerpiece. “I see great waves coming our way / Beautiful
sunsets on lost and lonely days / Infinite futures become a single past / Everyone whimpers, nobody lasts” — again, we simultaneously
see attention cast forward and backward, hopeful notions of the future that remain haunted by a weighty past. Giannascoli’s voice is
unadorned here, soft and pensive, occasionally drifting into a light falsetto — he’s arguably never sounded better. If his vocal
manipulations on tracks like “After All” create a separation between himself and his characters, then “Miracles” feels direct, an effect
that is only amplified by the inclusion of details that appear autobiographical. In particular, the second verse finds Giannascoli
recalling a discussion about having children; a progression from hesitance (“Right now baby I’m struggling, we’ll see”) to acceptance
(“God help me, I love you, I agree”) feels like a leap of faith — faith in love, in his partner, in himself, in God, perhaps — and it’s all the
more moving when one learns that Germer is currently pregnant with the couple’s child (she also plays violin on the song). Much like
the album itself, “Miracles” is dotted with moments of optimism as well as doubt. And though the song ends on a note of
quasi-confidence, the more powerful resolution comes with final track “Forgive.” It bears a simple sentiment, but one that hits like a
genuine breakthrough given the uncertainties that came before: “Forgive yesterday / I choose today.” — BRENDAN NAGLE
28

#1 — BLUE REV
Alvvays
“Is she a
perfect 10? /
Have you found
Christ again?” What’s
a year-end list without
a little provocation and
(maybe) hyperbole? Blue Rev
is one of the best shoegaze albums
ever. Take a look at the competition:
Obviously Loveless dwarfs it, but it’s not a
stretch to say this is right up there with the
other standard-bearers of the genre, like Ride’s
Nowhere, Slowdive’s Souvlaki, and (if you expand the
shoegaze definition out just enough to encompass the dreampop
that some may be more comfortable categorizing Alvvays’s music
as anyway) Galaxie 500’s On Fire. Frankly, it’s a stronger front-to-back listen than
Cocteau Twins’ Heaven or Las Vegas, too, and leagues better than A Sunny Day in Glasgow’s
Ashes Grammar (to cite probably the last most recent entrant into the canon). And while both
Alvvways’ 2014’s self-titled debut and 2017 Antisocialtes were plenty buzzy albums on the indie circuit, the
Canadian quinet’s third album really registers a level of across-the-board improvement that’s nothing short of astonishing.
33 29

The
opening,
six-track run of
Blue Rev alone gives
most rock music in
2022 a run for its money,
so the nearly-as-stellar back
half (after the quirky coffee
break of “Very Online Guy”) puts the
album firmly in all-timer territory.
“Velveteen” takes flight as Rankin does her
best Ah Ha impression, channeling the romantic
longing of “Take on Me” with a falsetto that’s just as
tantalizingly out of reach, while “Tile by Tile” turns
down the guitars just enough to refocus on Rankin’s
evocative lyrics, as her narrator paces the floor of her
apartment, taking calls from telemarketers just to imagine it’s her
ex’s voice on the other line. The song resonates with the
claustrophobia of the quarantine era during which it was written – but
Blue Rev as a whole feels like a triumphant emergence from that time of
solitude. (A narrative that makes all the more sense when you read about how the
album was recorded in two takes, during a single day, the first time the band all got
back in the studio again together.) And lest you think the back half of Blue Rev goes soft,
the spiky, angular punk-rock of “Pomeranian Spinster” will make short work of that
impression. In a year full of fetching, data dump-style releases with plenty of isolated moments
of brilliance, and that have put up a good fight against the rockism that deserves to be outmoded,
the economical sprawl of Blue Rev still felt like a shot of nostalgia in the best sense – a dynamic 39
minutes that sustains both a tunefulness and sense of play; that still treats the album format as the site of
one seamlessly satisfying body of work. — SAM C. MAC
31

HONORABLE MENTIONS
ONCE TWICE MELODY
Beach House
“What Once Twice Melody suggests is that,
at this point, Beach House isn’t so
concerned about chasing after those who
are skeptical of tuning in, recent history
suggesting that these two have maybe
always been a little more ahead of the
curve than we’ve assumed.” — M.G.
MAILLOUX
KINGMAKER
Tami Neilson
“Kingmaker is an album about how
injustices and abuses function within
systems to inflict individual pain that then
informs each individual’s experiences and
relationships. Is it any wonder, then, that
Neilson shouts and wails and belts her way
through these dense — and, it must be
said, catchy as all hell — songs?” —
JONATHAN KEEFE
SKINTY FIA
Fontaines D.C.
“Easily [Fontaines D.C.’s] most adventurous
release yet… Skinty Fia continues the
band’s exploration of life under crushing,
globalized modernity, manifesting a
reluctant and thoughtful sneer that stands
in stark contrast to the scuzzy black
humor of Viagra Boys or the didactic
sloganeering of IDLES.” — FRED BARRETT
HYPNOS
Ravyn Lenae
“So peaceful that you’re in danger of both
forgetting you’re listening to [the tracks]
partway through and internalizing their
music completely into your being…
Describing music as lulling you to sleep
usually isn’t complimentary, but for the
hushed, meditative world of Hypnos, it’s
high praise.” — KAYLA BEARDSLEE
A BEAUTIFUL TIME
Willie Nelson
“Romantic, wise, funny — A Beautiful Time
is as rich an emotional experience as it is
a masterful work of craftsmanship.” —
SAM C. MAC
CAPRISONGS
FKA Twigs
“Having made a stirring spectacle out of
her wronged womanhood, Twigs now turns
celebratory, inviting fellow female artists
and friends to monologue about masculine
cruelty and indifference” — M.G. MAILLOUX
BIG TIME
Angel Olsen
“At no point has [Olsen] stuck the landing
as cleanly and emphatically as she does
with Big Time. It’s a record that feels like a
celebration in real-time, one that
understands the new Olsen epoch it
signifies even as it’s only just now moving
into it.” — ANDREW BOSMA
AGE OF APATHY
Aoife O’Donovan
“In some other corner of the multiverse,
[Age of Apathy] might have been rendered
with fusty austerity, and O’Donovan’s
melodies are so winsome that they
probably could have supported it.
Blessedly, she and Henry chose a more
generous route, populating these songs
with ear candies and sensual delights.” —
JOSH HURST
DANCE FEVER
Florence + the Machine
“With soaring vocals, engaging lyrical
pivots, a newfound palette of emotional
intimacy, and production that mostly
bleeds Jack Antonoff’s involvement of all
his annoying inclinations, Dance Fever is
a record easily poised to appeal to
long-standing fans, while also
(re)inventive enough to bring new ones
into the fold.” — ANDREW BOSMA
CRASH
Charli XCX
“Crash is a [move away] from the more
avant-garde inclinations of Charli’s last
album, focusing here on a glossier pop
sound. Thankfully, then, Charli’s ear for
melodies and riffs maintain a high floor,
making for an exciting listen all the way
through.” — ALEX CLIFTON
32

Photo Credits:
Cover - Nathaniel Goldberg; Page 1 - Elizabeth Weinberg; Page 2 - Christopher Polk/Variety;
Page 3 - Richard Dumas/Courtesy of the artist; Page 4 - Molly Matalon/Courtesy of the artist;
Page 5 - Bayley Haynes; Page 7- Jimmy Fontaine; Page 8 - Greg Clement; Page 10 - Blair Caldwell;
Page 11 - Charlie Boss; Page 12 - James Pereira; Page 13 - Courtesy of the artist;
Page 14 - Alex Ingram Page 16 - Andy Abeta/The Desert Sun; Page 18 - Juliet Wolf;
Page 20 - Parkwood Entertainment; Page 21 - Astral;
Page 23 - Daniel Sannwald; Page 26 - Alexa Viscius; Page 27 - Chris Shonting;
Page 28 - Cielito Vivas; Page 29/30 - Wyatt Lowery; Page 32 - Andy Witchger;
Back Cover - Joseph Okpako