22 Essential Albums of 2022
It's always a tough task to choose the best music albums of the year, but 2022 has seen some truly outstanding releases from both established artists and exciting newcomers. No genre prejudice, there's something on this list for everyone.
So sit back, hit play, and let the music take you away. :-)
Sudan Archives
Natural Brown Prom Queen is Brittney Parks’ liberation.
The Cincinnati-born, LA-based artist, better known as Sudan Archives, has always blurred the lines between the classical and modern; the delicate and brazen.
Her 2019 debut, Athena, was an ethereal, concept-driven album that found her oscillating between worlds and folklore, bolstered by her traditional West African fiddle and crisp R&B production.
But for her sophomore album, Parks strips away the abstraction and shows us the person beneath, free and unafraid.
Natural Brown Prom Queen
Weyes Blood
Natalie Mering’s majestic fifth record is a dispatch from the center of catastrophe—an idiosyncratic set of love songs and secular hymns with lushly orchestral arrangements.
Mering has said that And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, her fifth album as Weyes Blood, is the second chapter in a trilogy that began with 2019’s spectacular Titanic Rising. In her telling, that album had the snappy exuberance of classic pop; And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is more like a collection of secular hymns.
The rhythms are stately and unsyncopated. The arrangements are lushly orchestral. The songs are mostly around six minutes long, proceeding at the unhurried pace of guided meditations.
And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow
Yaya Bey
The prismatic, outstanding new album from the Brooklyn singer-songwriter moves gracefully through jazz, R&B, soul, and reggae. It’s a searching and specific exploration of connection, pain, and desire.
On Remember Your North Star, the resplendent new album from the Brooklyn singer-songwriter Yaya Bey, scenes of heartache and joy are both glimpsed through a prismatic lens.
Bey’s blend of R&B, soul, and jazz is bound together by the specificity of her lyrics, which recount conversational stories of sex and breakups and lend vivid color to her music.
Remember Your North Star
Big Thief
Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You
Big Thief’s ambitious yet unburdened fifth album is a 20-song epic of kaleidoscopic invention, striking beauty, and wigged-out humor, rambling far beyond the bounds of their previous work.
“What should we do now?” someone asks off-mic at the end of Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. “Blue Lightning,” the last song, has just ended, its homey folk-rock atmosphere made briefly uncanny by the entrance of cheap synthetic brass in the final minute, punching out a two-note fanfare that an ordinary band would have assigned to an actual horn section.
The speaker—presumably one of the three men in Big Thief who orbit singer-guitarist Adrienne Lenker—sounds dazed but satisfied. Clearly, they have nailed the take.
Makaya McCraven
For the last few years, Makaya McCraven has produced some of the most unique and exhilarating work in contemporary jazz.
In These Times is yet another fantastic entry in McCraven’s growing catalog. Full of dynamic, odd-metered compositions, In These Times plays with meter, leaving us with a body of tunes that are rich in melody, harmony, and texture while being driven by new and dynamic rhythms. The album’s eponymous opener is a slow and dreamy tune that warmly eases listeners into the proceedings.
Full of powerful musical ideas and tight playing, In These Times is one of the most exciting contributions to jazz in 2022.
In these Times
Alabaster dePlume
Alabaster dePlume is a lot of things—a saxophonist, a poet, an arranger, a social node in London’s jazz scene—but above all, he’s a person who wants you to treat yourself with more kindness, gentleness, and self-respect.
On GOLD, his second album for International Anthem, he applies self-love like an exfoliant, scraping off the old skin of cynicism and exposing the clean and vulnerable surface below. He is, as he says multiple times on this record, “brazen, like a baby,” and while that means the Mancunian musician born Gus Fairbairn is often agog at the fresh beauty of the world, it also means he’s uniquely attuned to its difficulties.
Even when it’s comforting, GOLD is not comfortable.
Gold
Hurray For The Riff Raff
Alynda Segarra’s powerful eighth album exudes a glorious irreverence. Their self-described “nature punk” songs are both intimate and immense, and they’ve never sounded more honest or self-possessed.
Segarra’s eighth album is titled Life on Earth, seeming to ask, by its final notes: How will you spend yours? They transform their sound with glowing synthesizers and sunstruck hooks to answer this call. Segarra has made powerful records in the past by working within vernacular traditions, or constructing autofictive characters and concepts, like on 2017’s The Navigator, where they sought to reclaim their Puerto Rican identity.
But Segarra has never sounded more honest or self-possessed than on Life on Earth.
Life on Earth
Black Country, New Road
Black Country, New Road return with their second album, “Ants From Up There”.
Following on almost exactly a year to the day from the release of their acclaimed debut “For the first time”, the band have harnessed the momentum from that record and run full pelt into their second, with “Ants From Up There” managing to strike a skilful balance between feeling like a bold stylistic overhaul of what came before, as well as a natural progression.
With “For the first time” the band melded klezmer, post-rock, indie and an often intense spoken word delivery. On “Ants From Up There” they have expanded on this unique concoction to create a singular sonic middle ground that traverses classical minimalism, indie-folk, pop, alt rock and a distinct tone that is already unique to the band.
Ants From Up There
Japanese Breakfast
Korean-American musician and writer Michelle Zauner’s indie rock project Japanese Breakfast has been unquestionably guided by the invisible hand of her late mother, Chongmi.
Zauner’s debut, Psychopomp, which features Chongmi on its cover, and follow-up Soft Songs From Another Planet, are all informed by grieving maternal loss and trying to smile through the tears. Her latest offering, aptly titled Jubilee, is the sound of those small pockets of joy finally breaking through.
The atmospheric distortions that defined Japanese Breakfast’s initial sound are still intact. But Zauner was careful to not speak of this record as one that exists purely outside of her mourning. Instead, it’s one that works in tandem with it. These songs have a deep zest for life despite the knowledge of its fleeting nature. With Jubilee, Zauner honours her past and pushes forward, urging us all to do the same.
Jubilee
Florist
Recorded in a rented house in the Hudson Valley, and weaving together found sounds with spontaneous music-making, the quartet’s self-titled album is as much an audio documentary as it is a folk album.
In order to listen to Florist front to back, you have to take a retreat similar to the one the band took to make it. Instead of their usual routine, entering the studio with a batch of songs that Sprague had prepared, the quartet temporarily moved in together and embarked on a more collaborative process.
Because the interludes outnumber the actual songs, it is difficult to call this Florist’s most accessible album, but it is certainly their most physical. Had the tracklist been condensed, you might hear a great album by a deeply in-tune band recording in the woods. Instead, you get to explore each of those components: the band members convening, the songs falling into place, the woods themselves.
Florist
Beth Orton
Each track on Beth Orton’s eighth album—the first one she self-produced—feels prompted by a forecast: One a warm, rainy night; another a rocky coastline socked in by fog; or a gray countryside bracing for snow.
Funded by a personal bank loan Orton took out after she was dropped by her label, Weather Alive’s slow-moving atmospheric systems carry her memory back to times of grief, solitude, and unhealthy self-medication. (Orton summed up her album nicely: “It’s heavy as fuck.”) Amid a palette of muted trumpets, hushed drums, and dampened piano, Orton’s voice crackles and pops out of these songs, like little orange embers.
Nothing feels forced out or jammed together; it’s perfectly sturdy, and just a little creaky.
Weather Alive
Special Interest
The tradition of punks making unvarnished pop is vast, but no one has done it like Special Interest, tying in technoise textures, pop-house vocals, and rap cadences while putting hooks inside of screams.
On its astounding third full-length, the New Orleans band polishes and chisels its once-blistering sound into a force more palatable and anthemic, but also much more confrontational.
Endure is a fiercely original experiment, a world where pleasure and fight entangle into a liberationist menage of club fog, Telfar bags, and discomfiting truths demanding that we “burn it down to build it again.
Endure
Lucrecia Dalt
Lucrecia Dalt channels sensory echoes of growing up in Colombia on her new album ¡Ay!, where the sound and syncopation of tropical music encounter adventurous impulse, lush instrumentation, and metaphysical sci-fi meditations in an exclamation of liminal delight.
In sound and spirit, ¡Ay! is a heliacal exploration of native place and environmental tuning, where Dalt reverses the spell of temporal containment.
Through the spiraling tendencies of time and topography, Lucrecia has arrived where she began.
¡Ay!
Denzel Curry
Melt My Eyez See Your Future arrives as Denzel Curry’s most mature and ambitious album to date.
Recorded over the course of the pandemic, Denzel shows his growth as both an artist and person. Born from a wealth of influences, the tracks highlight his versatility and broad tastes, taking in everything from drum’n’bass to trap.
To support this vision and show the breadth of his artistry, Denzel has enlisted a wide range of collaborators and firmly plants his flag in the ground as one of the most groundbreaking rappers in the game.
Melt My Eyez See Your Future
Aldous Harding
An artist of rare calibre, Aldous Harding does more than sing; she conjures a singular intensity.
For Warm Chris, the Aotearoa New Zealand musician reunited with producer John Parish, continuing a professional partnership that began in 2017 and has forged pivotal bodies of work (2017’s Party and the aforementioned Designer).
All ten tracks were recorded at Rockfield Studios in Wales, the album includes contributions from H. Hawkline, Seb Rochford, Gavin Fitzjohn, John and Hopey Parish and Jason Williamson (Sleaford Mods).
Warm Chris
Angel Olsen
Big Time is an album about the expansive power of new love, but this brightness and optimism is tempered by a profound and layered sense of loss.
During Olsen’s process of coming to terms with her queerness and confronting the traumas that had been keeping her from fully accepting herself, she felt it was time to come out to her parents, a hurdle she’d been avoiding for some time.
“Finally, at the ripe age of 34, I was free to be me,” she said. Three days later, her father died and shortly after her mother passed away. The shards of this grief—the shortening of her chance to finally be seen more fully by her parents—are scattered throughout the album.
Big Time
Jockstrap
When Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye make music as Jockstrap, the process and result has one definition: pure modern pop alchemy.
Jockstrap’s discography is restless and inventive, traversing everything from liberating dancefloor techno to off-kilter electro pop, trip-hop and confessional song writing; an omnivorous sonic palette that takes on a cohesive maturity far beyond their ages of only 24 years old.
They have cemented themselves as one of the most vital young groups to emerge from London’s melting pot of musical cultures.
I Love You Jennifer B
Mitski
In 2019, Mitski Miyawaki retreated from the public eye, removing herself from social media and most press obligations. Ironically, since then, her profile has only risen, though she still prefers to reveal herself via music only.
Laurel Hell, Mitski’s sixth record, is a straightforward but intimate breakup album, wherein she both accepts blame and acts petty, refracting each of the complex emotions of separation through a different musical prism.
Even though many of the songs sound lighter and poppier than her previous work, the signature Mitski bite never lets up: “I’ll show you who my sweetheart’s never met,” she intones on opener Valentine, Texas. “Wet teeth, shining eyes glimmering by a fire.”
Laurel Hell
Fontaines D.C.
There is a juddering uncertainty that seethes beneath the surface of Fontaines D.C.’s third album in four years.
The majority of the Dublin post-punk band had moved to London by the time they started making Skinty Fia, resulting in lead vocalist Grian Chatten considering his Irishness in a city that he often felt othered in. Themes of diasporic identity and politics sit alongside sepia-tinged songs about yearning and intimacy.
In all its raw, tangled complexities, Skinty Fia is a document of displacement but also resilience.
Skinty Fia
Shygirl
As you edge towards Nymph’s halfway point, somewhere between the cool seduction of Shlut and the cheekily sweet Coochie (a bedtime story), you’ll find Firefly. Bringing to mind the sun-kissed deep house, the song’s sonics aren’t exactly typical of Shygirl, who’s better known for beats that rumble rather than float.
However, it shines a light on the silky nature of her debut album. Nymph reveals the vulnerable soul underneath the bravado. “When will you see it from my side?/ I can have it all but I’m never satisfied,” she sings on vulnerable R&B album opener, Woe, setting the tone for a disarmingly intimate album that tells us more about the human beneath.
Nymph
Kokoroko
Could We Be More is Kokoroko’s debut album. This record is awash with a supreme confidence that reflects the young Afrobeat ensemble’s swift rise as part of London’s jazz scene.
Dancefloor-igniting bursts of energy sit side by side with luxurious, unhurried jams that sprawl to nearly seven minutes. Led by trumpeter and vocalist Sheila Maurice-Grey, each of the group’s eight members add their own unique touch to the album’s opulent sound: sharp, razor-wire guitar lines weave in and out of hot-footed polyrhythms on tracks like We Give Thanks; the relative minimalism of Age of Ascent spotlights the horns; and War Dance thrives on the strength of its rhythm section.
But it’s the group’s gift for melody that shines throughout, with many of the tracks’ toplines so well constructed, they’re filled with a familiar sense of warmth – even if it’s your first listen.
Could We Be More
Tim Bernardes
Four years after his standout 2017 debut, Mil Coisas Invisíveis invites us back into Tim Bernardes and his singular world of sound: warm, intimate, emotionally resonant, healing.
The album was primarily written while touring with his acclaimed tropicalia-indie group, O Terno. At the start of 2020, the new decade brought about a sense of change in Bernardes as he took a step back from touring and band life to focus on these new songs.
The resulting work connects the cosmic dots from Tropicalia and samba to contemporary indie and folk; it’s a generous and intimate moment, meditations of metaphysical transformation in the face of grave uncertainty.
Mil Coisas Invisíveis