The Best Music Videos of 2022

Is the music video dead (again)? This year, the artist who re-popularized the “visual album” refrained from releasing a single music video from her latest effort. And Pitchfork’s bizarre hodgepodge of the “Best Music Videos, Movies, and TV of 2022” only features one proper music video (which, for what it’s worth, also appears on our list).

There’s no question that the medium is continuing to evolve, largely due to digitally driven methods of production and consumption. The always-ambitious FKA twigs dropped videos for more than half of the songs on her Caprisongs mixtape, but they were uncharacteristically, if charmingly, lo-fi compared to her past visuals. And many of the clips that did make our list, like Mitski’s “Love Me More” and Pharrell Williams’s “Cash In Cash Out,” nod to video’s innovative past while continuing to push the form forward.

So, no, the music video isn’t dead. But its impact has arguably been diluted thanks, in part, to the democratization of content on apps like TikTok and Instagram. Of the 10 videos below, only Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” could be described as a “cultural moment,” reintroducing the singer and her wily pop bona fides to the world following two introspective folk albums released during a once-in-a-century pandemic. The rest, from Destroyer’s “June” to Kendrick Lamar’s “N95,” locate their cultural cachet and social import by confronting our world as it is today. Sal Cinquemani

A$AP Rocky, “D.M.B.” (Director: A$AP Rocky)

For a rapper who’s regularly criticized for his interest in art and fashion over music, A$AP Rocky successfully found a way to kill two birds with one stone in “D.M.B.” The kaleidoscopic visual oozes with pathos, finding the Harlem rapper extolling the many virtues of monogamous love. We bear witness to the countless times he’s bailed out of jail by his dream girl, Rihanna, before culminating in an impromptu wedding ceremony between the two star-crossed talents. He asks for her hand in marriage not by any verbal means, but through a shimmering “Marry me?” grill, to which she responds “I do,” in the exact same manner. As far as romantic gestures go, they don’t get much more genuine than this. Paul Attard

Björk, “Ancestress” (Director: Andrew Thomas Huang)

The video for “Ancestress” is a successor to, and explosion of, Björk’s earlier longform dirge “Black Lake,” not only in that it makes use of the richness and the starkness of the Icelandic landscape, but because it invites a community into the grieving process. On “Black Lake,” Björk internally mourned her marriage and lamented the impact of her divorce on her family, wandering volcanic crags alone. Here, she honors her late mother by staging a visceral and biophilic funeral ritual, one that requires many hands to support her. As the song’s final bell tolls, Björk looks up, and the camera tilts toward the sky, light streaming in between black rocks to provide a final image of comfort. Eric Mason

Destroyer, “June” (Director: David Galloway & Dan Bejar)

The first 120 seconds of Destroyer’s seven-minute “June” depicts—in stark, doc-style black and white—the preparation of a burrito by a short-order cook. The burrito is then transported via a Door Dasher decked out in a Daft Punk-esque helmet through the city on an electric unicycle. The order is left in a brown paper bag at singer-songwriter Dan Bejar’s doorstep, and a brief moment of awkward eye contact between dasher and customer conveys all of the isolation, social anxiety, and existential dread of our contactless modern life. Cinquemani

Hercules and Love Affair featuring Anohni, “One” (Director: Tim Walker)

A self-described “eco-femme battle cry,” the video for Hercules and Love Affair’s aptly titled “One,” featuring Anohni, conjures the creation myth of Adam and Eve as a story of power, freedom, and identity. An androgynous woman, played by Welsh drag star Salvia, is birthed from a jewel-encrusted mound of dirt and rules over her male counterpart, as Jan van Eyck’s singing angels watch from above, before she returns to the earth. The clip is both sensual and ethereal, a celebration of queerness, rebirth, and the supremacy of Mother Nature. Cinquemani

Kendrick Lamar, “N95” (Director: Dave Free & Kendrick Lamar)

At the beginning of the video for “N95,” Kendrick Lamar levitates over the ocean, his arms outstretched so as to evoke the Crucifixion. Moments later, he flinches as a mirror reflecting his image shatters. These contrasts are representative of Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers’s nuanced self-examination. In one moment there’s elegant grayscale photography, evocative of Lamar’s powerful “Alright” music video, with the rapper sitting at a piano and sipping drinks as modelesque women observe his musical genius. The next, we’re confronted by a full-color shaky-cam shot of Lamar running wildly from a small mob. In a song and an album about hypocrisy and fundamental human imperfection, these extremes cannot exist without the other. Mason

Mitski, “Love Me More” (Director: Christopher Good)

Just as Mitski reached new vocal highs for “Love Me More,” she pushes herself physically and emotionally for its oblique and theatrical music video. The clip, which matches the song’s fervor with quick cuts and spiraling cinematography, plays like a flipbook of strange metaphorical images, from an uncanny marionette of Mitski, to a toy bird sodden with black ink, to piano keys being used in lieu of keys to a door. These startling and often incongruous flashes of meaning contribute to a sense that Mitski is struggling for control over her love, her art, and her life, all underscored by the feverish choreography that defines her live performances. Mason

Rosalía, “Saoko” (Director: Valentin Petit)

“Yo me transformo,” declares Rosalía on the chorus of “Saoko,” and in the track’s accompanying video, she does just that as her wardrobe and general appearance drastically change with each of the clip’s quick edits, making it seem as if several versions of the singer are zipping around this barren milieu. The high-wired visual also serves as a tribute to Daddy Yankee’s international smash “Gasolina” and its own feral video, where Rosalía teams up with an all-female motorcycle gang to race through the streets of Kyiv. The video starts at an unassuming gas station and finishes with a high-speed police chase, which is all too appropriate given how the track evokes the delirium of inhaling a revving engine’s noxious fumes. Attard

Oliver Sim, “Hideous” (Director: Yann Gonzalez)

Part of a 22-minute musical short, Yann Gonzalez’s clip for Oliver Sim’s tribute to radical self-love, “Hideous,” is a playful, poignant pastiche of gay horror and monster movies inspired, in part, by the work of artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman. Sim plays a disfigured outcast living with HIV whose own self-loathing and shame prevents him from receiving love. The presence of Bronski Beat’s Jimmy Somerville, who sings on the track, as a guardian angel serves as a blunt reminder of a generation of gay mentors who were lost to the AIDS epidemic. Cinquemani

Taylor Swift, “Anti-Hero” (Director: Taylor Swift)

Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” marked a sharp pivot back toward a more characteristically tongue-in-cheek variety of self-deprecation for the singer-songwriter. The self-directed clip—which, at turns, evokes Michel Gondry’s sci-fi romantic drama Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland—sees Swift’s fears and insecurities play out as she’s haunted by her ghosts in a house smothered in garish vintage decor. A funeral scene in which the artist’s future family members—played by Mike Birbiglia, John Early, and Mary Elizabeth Ellis, who’s dressed like Swift circa 2009—squabble over her will is riotous and clever, with references to Swift’s penchant for “secret encoded message[s] that [mean] something else.” Cinquemani

Pharrell Williams featuring 21 Savage and Tyler, the Creator, “Cash In Cash Out” (Director: François Rousselet)

Pharrell’s “Cash In Cash Out” is reminiscent of the zoetrope, a cylindrical, pre-cinema invention that provides the viewer with the illusion of moving images. The outwardly GIF-like loops that the device produces are clean and simple, seen in the telegraphed actions of the leads’ animated avatars, at times bordering on primitive. The clip also calls to mind the stop-motion animation style of filmmaker Henry Selick, with lots of small, detailed clay figures running around the ensuing chaos (or, in the case of 21 Savage and Pharrell, driving around in a Tesla Cybertruck). The inventive video feels like a demented version of Toy Story, or what The Nightmare Before Christmas might look like with an unstoppable Tyler, the Creator as Jack Skellington. Attard