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The 50 Best Albums of 2022

With an industry in a constant state of flux, the battered-but-not-beaten album format still reigns supreme.

The year didn’t lack for extraordinary, boundary-pushing music across a spectrum of genres, from pop (Taylor Swift’s Midnights) and dance-R&B (Beyoncé’s Renaissance and Drake’s Honestly, Nevermind) to reggaeton (Rosalía’s Motomami and Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti) and Southern rock (Lee Bains & the Glory Fires’s Old-Time Folks). Established artists like Father John Misty and the Weeknd continued to reinvent their music and public personae, while newer acts—like Weyes Blood, Sudan Archives, and Black Country, New Road—released some of their best work to date.

This year also saw several veterans—such as Willie Nelson, Björk, and Neil Young—release music on par with their past canonical material, relying on traditional distribution strategies and old-fashioned word of mouth to reach audiences. But 2022 also further confirmed the importance of contemporary platforms like TikTok to the dissemination and success of artists of all ages. And a Swift-promoted federal investigation into Live Nation’s monopolistic business practices adds another layer of complexity to the future of live music following a turbulent few years.

With an industry in a constant state of flux, though, the battered-but-not-beaten album format still reigns supreme, no matter how you consume music. The 50 albums below represent the best of the lot. Thomas Bedenbaugh



Classic Objects

50. Jenny Hval, Classic Objects

Jenny Hval’s music has always been subversive, with her borderline-clinical dissections of love and identity favoring highly literate, complex lyricism over pop immediacy. On Classic Objects, the Norwegian singer-songwriter steps outside of herself to consider her position as an object of the intertwining systems of capitalism and patriarchy. While Hval muses on “the industrial happiness complex” and envisions life after its collapse from a characteristically askew perspective, her song structures, which introduce ambient drones and textured percussion with measured pacing, surprise and captivate as often as her lyrics. Eric Mason

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Un Verano Sin Ti

49. Bad Bunny, Un Verano Sin Ti

The scope of Bad Bunny’s 80-minute, 23-track Un Verano Sin Ti allows the Puerto Rican rapper-singer to explore the full breadth of his romantic and sexual proclivities. For the first several songs, the album immerses us in Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio’s restless lust, his love of ass, and unabashedly dirty passion for the female form, which he conveys with an undeniably winning charisma over cheekily mournful reggaeton arrangements. Rather than play culture vulture and attempt to embody an ascendant style disingenuously, Bunny doubles down on his heritage and cultural identity. He pays tribute to the Afro-Caribbean communities of Puerto Rico with samba drumming on “El Apagón,” before declaring his love for the island’s women, closing the track with, “Esta es mi tierra, esta soy yo” (“This is my land, this is me”). Bunny’s paramours are, in fact, the protagonists of Un Verano Sin Ti, living lives that are, as he depicts with a melodramatic anguish, just outside of his reach. Charles Lyons-Burt



Pompeii

48. Cate Le Bon, Pompeii

Diverging from the shaggy folk-rock stylings of her earlier work, Cate Le Bon’s Pompeii is new wave all the way. And while there are obvious classic touchstones here—Talking Heads, Berlin-era Bowie, John Cale—the album’s glassy synths, woozy grooves, and ethereal melodies build a dreamscape that’s all Le Bon’s own. It’s an album defined by dualism: music that’s as slick and poppy as it is arty and disorienting; lyrics that veer suddenly from the quotidian to the abstract; pandemic-inspired themes that can be understood simultaneously as deeply personal rumination and sweeping societal analysis. On the exquisite “Moderation,” she brings it all together: “Picture the party where you’re standing on a modern age/I was in trouble with a habit of years/And I try to relate.” Neither fully of the past nor the present, Le Bon exists in her own bewitching world. Jeremy Winograd



Hellfire

47. Weyes Blood, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow

Weyes Blood’s And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is strikingly similar to Father John Misty’s Chloë and the Next 20th Century. Besides both bearing loquacious titles, they boast archaic, troubadour-esque crooning and a jaunty, overly self-conscious classical pop style. The album’s narrative is rooted in our current moment, tracking a character’s desire to find love while “living in the wake of overwhelming changes.” These (post-)pandemic reflections are at their most incisive on songs like “The Worst Is Done,” in which the singer-songwriter pump-fakes with deceptively chipper acoustic guitar and almost Christmas carol-esque harmonizing. Then, puncturing the mood, she humorously and incisively sings about how, though we’re seemingly experiencing a collective bit of relief as we emerge from this whole ordeal, we’re actually more fucked than ever. Lyons-Burt



Old-Time Folks

46. Lee Bains & the Glory Fires, Old-Time Folks

Lee Bains has a uniquely inspiring and passionate voice for exploring the complexities of the South’s enduring legacy of racism and patriarchy. Until now, it’s just been hard to hear all that underneath his rip-roaring band’s overdriven neo-hardcore squall. For Old-Time Folks, he hooked up with Drive-By Truckers producer David Barbe, who wisely scales back the noise in favor of a warm, organic palette encompassing the full breadth of the Glory Fires’s Alabaman heritage, with elements of gospel, punk, Southern rock, country-folk, and even hip-hop coming to the fore. The cleaner mix puts a long overdue focus on Bains’s lyrics as he rails against right-wing conspiracy theorists (“Lizard People”), late-stage capitalism (“Post-Life”), chauvinism (“Gentlemen”), and so on. And on “Rednecks” and “God’s A-Working, Man,” he offers his own universalist, class-conscious path forward. Winograd

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Hellfire

45. Black Midi, Hellfire

The influences on Black Midi’s third album, Hellfire, are easy to spot but also fleeting. And while the band’s eccentricity suggests that of ’70s bands like Magma and Gong (or even early Genesis), they’ve managed to craft something unique with their latest. They seem to have spent an evening listening to Lotte Lenya, Charles Mingus, and Converge and decided to combine all these influences, mixing cabaret, prog-rock, jazz, post-punk, and other genres. Hellfire flirts with an apparent lack of control, eschewing conventional rock structures and songwriting, but the band’s music is carefully planned out and crafted, relying less on jamming or improvising and more on deliberate songwriting. The album rewards digging beneath its surface and influences, as it engages with rock’s history while simultaneously taking it in imaginative new directions. Steve Erickson



World Record

44. Neil Young with Crazy Horse, World Record

At times bucolic, at others desolate, Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s World Record gets as close as any that Young has recorded, especially in recent years, to realizing a sonic approximation of his conflicted feelings about “this old planet.” The harmonies on “Walkin’ on the Road (To the Future)” are every bit as warm, beautiful, and affecting as those on the rock veteran’s ’70s classics, while the colossal and contemplative 15-minute jam “Chevrolet” ranks alongside his most virtuoso guitar performances. The urgent environmentalism that’s so close to Young’s heart is unencumbered here by both the overt politics of 2015’s The Monsanto Years or the syrupy orchestral arrangements of the previous year’s Storytone. What’s left is Young’s preternatural gift for melody (most of these songs started as hummable tunes that popped into his head on his daily walks), Crazy Horse’s enduring chemistry, Rubin’s less-is-more studio hand, and, of course, the most important subject there is: this old planet. Sam C. Mac



Premonition

43. White Lung, Premonition

White Lung’s long-awaited fifth—and, sadly, final—album, Premonition, further refines the one-time hardcore punks’ wild thrash-pop. Throughout, Kenneth William’s sharp, icy guitar lines are drenched in chorus and flanger effects, while drummer Anne-Marie Vassiliou propels the songs with the same reckless fury that gave the band’s earliest releases their frenetic edge. Premonition’s cavernous, arena-ready production is a holdover from White Lung’s previous album, but the results are even moodier and more anthemic this time around. Synthesizers enhance the songs’ withering hooks, adding an extra emotional dimension to the band’s deceptively straightforward aural assault. Fred Barrett



Sick!

42. Earl Sweatshirt, Sick!

Earl Sweatshirt’s Sick! grapples with the isolating experiences of living through a global pandemic and the inequities that it’s exacerbated. Exploring how isolation affects one’s mental health might seem like fertile ground for an artist as creative, idiosyncratic, and introspective as Earl, and for the most part, the album delivers on that promise. At just 10 tracks and 24 minutes long, Sick! is an intensely compressed listening experience similar to Earl’s Some Rap Songs from 2018. But whereas the latter is a dense, fragmented collage of music and speech, Earl’s fourth album is comparatively more straightforward. He brilliantly blurs together the past, present, and future throughout Sick! as he attempts to come to terms with an increasingly detached and unjust world. Bedenbaugh

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age/sex/location

41. Ari Lennox, age/sex/location

Ari Lennox’s second studio album fully realizes the promise she displayed on her debut EP, Pho, and 2019’s Shea Butter Baby. The music on age/sex/location is sensual and intimate, but it exudes a melancholy that’s new to Lennox’s music. The album is rife with musical and lyrical nuances, and the lyrics are more introspective and downbeat, while the grooves on many cuts lay a sparse foundation for Lennox’s impassioned vocal runs. In the lead-up to the album’s release, the singer said that age/sex/location is as much about coming to terms with loving oneself, and the album’s title is a recognition of how depersonalized sex can be when one’s capacity for self-love has been deadened. Bedenbaugh



A Beautiful Time

40. Willie Nelson, A Beautiful Time

Like most things, mortality doesn’t get Willie Nelson down. On the bitterly funny “I Don’t Go to Funerals,” a track from his 72nd solo album, A Beautiful Time, he pokes fun at folks inclined to suggest that his number may be up. Death is a major character in these songs, but it’s not the dark harbinger we’ve come to expect from Nelson: On “I’ll Love You Till the Day I Day,” it’s a proud marker for a lifelong devotion to another person, and on “I Don’t Go to Funerals,” it’s an occasion for a “picking party” with Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, and Patsy Cline. Only now is Nelson’s voice starting to show some slight limitation in the high and low ranges, but he nails the big moments, like the octave-jumping falsetto on “Leave You with a Smile,” and the feat feels almost death-defying. That song, which ends Nelson’s best album in over two decades, offers up the big theme here: “If I could make my time with you stand still/There’d be no time that I would want to kill.” As much as Nelson is unafraid of death, he’s still enamored with life, and more inclined than ever to relish it while he can. Mac



Arkhon

39. Zola Jesus, Arkhon

Nika Roza Danilova, a.k.a. Zola Jesus, has pursued a unique and beautifully idiosyncratic vision of art pop throughout her career. On Arkhon, she once again weaves heady experimentalism into gorgeous, gothic soundscapes. Her droning, echo-drenched wail is by turns eerie, like on album opener “Lost,” and full of longing and vulnerability, as on the mournful piano ballad “Desire.” The latter sees Danilova rummaging through the ruins of a relationship, while simultaneously celebrating desire as a force that continues to push her into an unknown future. Sunn O))) producer Randall Dunn and session drummer Matt Chamberlain both bring their unique flair to the project, which makes the songs emotionally accessible in a way that Danilova’s previous, more insulated work wasn’t. And in spite of its pervasive darkness, Arkhon ultimately finds Danilova facing the future with courage and determination: “Now it’s like a myth/Crossing the abyss, into something new.” Barrett



Fossora

38. Björk, Fossora

Björk’s Fossora is often outright ecstatic, with fiery gabber beats, proudly oblique brass, and lyrics celebrating interpersonal connection. Aesthetically, the album can feel intangible or obscure, but thematically it has many of the underpinnings of your standard pop album, in that it centers largely around love in various forms—romantic, familial, societal. Likewise, Björk’s feminist perspective, colored by decades of experience and a penchant for ecological imagery, grounds Fossora in real personal and political struggles when its sound grows eccentric, even by Björk’s standards. The title track is declaratory and headbanging in ways that evoke her work with Timbaland on 2007’s Volta, and, in stark contrast, “Her Mother’s House” is gorgeously ethereal. But while there are plenty of sonic and lyrical callbacks to Björk’s prior work, Fossora still feels like an evolution for an artist who refuses to rest on her laurels. Mason

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Being Funny in a Foreign Language

37. The 1975, Being Funny in a Foreign Language

Being Funny in a Foreign Language revels in finding coolness in the uncool. The 1975 embraces the emotional resonance of soft-rock, elevating what might initially sound like self-conscious genre pastiche. The album works by stripping away most of the band’s pretenses, finding honesty in the seemingly banal: “Tell me you love me, that’s all I need to hear,” Matt Healy sings on “All I Need to Hear.” The band sticks entirely to live instrumentation throughout Being Funny in a Foreign Language, giving the album an analog warmth. Jack Antonoff’s production keeps Healy and company’s music sounding human even at its slickest. The songs click almost immediately, but they’re subtler and pricklier than a first listen would imply, with unexpected twists like faint spoken-word samples and odd bits of distortion on guitar and piano. And the 1975 uses these textures more tastefully than much of the music that inspired them. Erickson



Warm Chris

36. Aldous Harding, Warm Chris

New Zealand singer-songwriter Aldous Harding performs with a splintered vocal style, modulating her tone so often that you might not realize that two of her songs, or even two verses within one song, were sung by the same artist. While some elements of that style are consistent throughout her fourth album, Warm Chris, the difference between, say, her high-on-helium cooing on “Lawn” and throatier delivery on “Passion Babe” is surprising and dramatic. By contrast, Harding’s creative voice is singular in its unexpectedly beguiling austerity. Her sparse and slyly suggestive lyrics, accompanied by pared-down instrumentals, telegraph both emptiness and defiant desire throughout the album, exploring the negative spaces around love and relationships: yearning, anticipation, and separation. Harding continues to exercise her versatility and restraint, delivering an album that invites close attention and rewards it with understated surprises. Mason



Natural Brown Prom Queen

35. Sudan Archives, Natural Brown Prom Queen

On her sophomore album, Sudan Archives (born Brittney Denise Parks) establishes herself as one of the most exciting and idiosyncratic voices in contemporary R&B. She hops between genres across the album’s 18 tracks, covering everything from contemporary pop-rap and ’90s neo-soul on “Selfish Soul” to experimental pop on “NBPQ (Topless).” There are sensual cuts, like “Milk Me,” that are only partly tongue-in-cheek, as Parks sings of a lover’s increasing desperation to be desirable to their partner. Her lyrical portraits focus on individuals who are simultaneously boisterous yet vulnerable as they navigate the complexities of fame, sexuality, and relationships as the world burns around them. An extravagant and singular ode to self-love and self-actualization, Natural Brown Prom Queen strikes a balance between Parks’s unique artistry and the sheer diversity of her musical reference points that, in lesser hands, could have easily devolved into an incoherent mess. Bedenbaugh



Asphalt Meadows

34. Death Cab for Cutie, Asphalt Meadows

Throughout Asphalt Meadows, lush melodies that Ben Gibbarb writes with disarming ease are subjected to the harsh sonic textures that the band has always relied on. The appropriately explosive “Roman Candles” sets the tone, its buzzsaw riffs simmering below the surface during the sweetly sung opening and gradually rising like a tide until Gibbard is completely submerged under waves of distortion. Loud-quiet-loud dynamics continue to play out on shimmering ballads like “Pepper” and the spiky “I Miss Strangers,” and maintain momentum through the spoken-word centerpiece “Foxglove Through the Clearcut” and the jangly “Wheat Like Waves.” “I’ve given up on aspiration,” sings Gibbard on “I’ll Never Give Up on You,” but that sentiment feels more like a cheeky humble brag than the dejected posturing it might have read as a decade ago. Asphalt Meadows is the realization of everything that this band has been building toward since Chris Walla’s departure in 2014—an improbable best-ever album for an indie band a quarter-century into their career. Mac

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De Todas las Flores

33. Natalia Lafourcade, De Todas las Flores

Mexican folk-pop singer Natalia Lafourcade’s De Todas las Flores is a sneakily perfect complement to Rosalía’s Motomami. Where Rosalía’s approach to Latin music is magpie-like, flitting about breathlessly, Lafourcade prefers to nurture the land she stands on until a lush garden gradually crops up around her. Lafourcade’s tendency toward a disarming stillness, of favoring long songs that wind their way through extended orchestral intros and interludes, that strip down to genre-ambiguous a cappellas and gradually build up again to fleeting, baroque arrangements, comes from an impulse that’s not dissimilar from that which informs Rosalía’s frenetic collage aesthetic. Which is to say that De Todas las Flores is guided first and foremost by feeling, letting the emotional authority of Lafourcade’s expressive lyric soprano dictate how the music moves. Latin jazz, classical, cumbia, and bossa nova all shade this music, but Lafourcade also proves that she’s not a stuffy formalist by delivering the most compositionally iconoclastic work of her career. Mac



Antidawn

32. Burial, Antidawn

Even on a hot summer day, Burial’s Antidawn is liable to fill your body with a wintry chill. Gray and despairing, the EP communicates a degree of distance and abstraction, hinting at the lack of community and extremes of wealth and poverty in urban life without getting explicitly political. Its power stems from that reluctance to spell its ideas out too bluntly. Amid electronic drones and static hiss, voices poke out to mournfully intone phrases like “let me hold you for a while” and “I’m in a bad place.” While ditching the last remnants of dance music from Burial’s sound, Antidawn is structured around constant change while remaining carefully composed. Erickson



Stumpwork

31. Dry Cleaning, Stumpwork

Arriving only a year after their buzzed-about debut, Stumpwork finds Dry Cleaning rapidly expanding their sonic palette. Guitarist Tom Dowse is still whipping out taut, razor-like post-punk riffs, but his bluesy string-bending on “Driver’s Story”—and bassist Lewis Maynard’s funky wah-wah work on “Hot Penny Day”—reveal greater ambitions. If nothing else, these new sounds seem to embolden frontwoman Fiona Shaw to come further into her own. She not only endeavors to actually sing occasionally, but her voice sounds more confident, and her bizarre, observational found-poetry lyrics more stridently meta than before. Winograd



Lyfe

30. Yeat, Lyfë

While hip-hop certainly provided us with plenty of colorful characters in 2022, few sounded as truly off-the-wall as the ever-eccentric Yeat did on Lyfë. Things rarely let up, starting with the incendiary opening of the red-hot “Flawlëss”—where Yeat howls out that “you don’t exist” over a barrage of ear-splitting synths and clamorous drums—and all the way to the jerky, arrhythmic “Systëm,” which swiftly strings along a bunch of nonsense phrases like “glock with the switch, with the dick, with the big old clip on the burn’.” Largely produced by BNYX of Working on Dying, a production collective that’s helped shape such cult classics as Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red and Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atake, Lyfë is a dark, strange, and inebriating ride from one of the genre’s most exciting and idiosyncratic new voices. Paul Attard

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Honestly, Nevermind

29. Drake, Honestly, Nevermind

Drake has become such an unstoppable force within pop culture at large that it’s difficult to remember that his emotionally fragile presence felt like a much-needed breath of fresh air from all the po-faced mean-mugging that defined so much hip-hop in the late 2000s. Which is why the immediate knee-jerk reaction to Honestly, Nevermind, the most cohesive and clear-minded project that Drake has released since 2015’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, was a bit puzzling. Considering how desperately he needed to switch up what had become a successful yet diminishing formula, his embrace of house music became a much-needed break from his modus operandi. Honestly, Nevermind treats this creative reset as a monumental occasion worth celebrating. As far as artistic switch-ups go, few meet the occasion quite like Drake was able to here. Attard



Mata

28. M.I.A., Mata

M.I.A.’s Mata supplies both a steady stream of spartan, world music-infused beats and a procession of relentlessly catchy hooks and inventive melodies. The first few songs of the 33-minute set lean heavier on their unique production than they do on M.I.A.’s pop instincts, but starting with the moombahton-influenced “Beep,” Mata burns bright with one pop banger after another. The last few M.I.A. albums all carved out some space for at least one or two marquee features, but Mata is almost entirely propelled by the strength of M.I.A.’s vocal dexterity and ingenuity, and her arsenal of earworm-worthy flows. This is an album of exhilarating musical riches, triangulating sociopolitical commentary and personal identity in clever ways. Its songs offer savvy new articulations of the artist’s autobiography, collate various crises facing the world today into zen-like mantras, and advocate for a radical thinking that starts with a genuine sense of empathy. Mac



I Love You Jennifer B

27. Jockstrap, I Love You Jennifer B

The title of Jockstrap’s debut is apt because the album thrives in the liminal space between the broad and pinprick-specific, between a phrase like “I love you” and the acknowledgement of a personal connection. I Love You Jennifer B is filled with widely accessible musings on urban life and epiphanies spurred by lovers and considerations of mental health. English duo Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye, who self-produced all 10 songs here, cram their adventurous music with as many different sounds as they can manage. Fittingly, given the songs’ focus on dichotomies, they effortlessly combine analog and digital instruments. Each song is concocted to act as a delivery system for emotional revelations to match the way the narratives keep hinging on a sense of discovery. Lyons-Burt



Crest

26. Bladee & Ecco2k, Crest

During the early months of 2022, Drain Gang members Bladee and Ecco2K took refuge in a secluded cabin near the East coast of Sweden, where the unperturbed duo, along with producer Whitearmor, crafted Crest, an album concerned with life, death, spiritual consciousness, perpetual suffering, and the minor pleasures that come with everyday existence. It’s the album equivalent of an Ingmar Bergman film: a spiritual exploration of life’s unsolvable mysteries. (As it just so happens, the cabin Crest was recorded at isn’t too far away from where Bergman shot The Seventh Seal’s most iconic scene). But in stark contrast to the morose, ice-cold mood of, say, Winter Light, Crest radiates an intimate warmth across its nine hymn-like tracks. Songs like the heavenly “Faust” and equally harmonious “White Meadow,” with their scintillating synth lines and bountiful amounts of Auto-Tuned vocals, sound like otherworldly canticles from two artists searching for light in an increasingly bleak world. Attard

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Laurel Hell

25. Mitski, Laurel Hell

Much has been said about where Laurel Hell fits in Mitski’s oeuvre and whether it reaches the heights of her past releases, but in and of itself, Mitski’s sixth album is an emotionally charged look into her tumultuous relationship with her status as a public figure and yet another display of her adept songcraft. While “Valentine, Texas” will inevitably be compared to songs like “Geyser” and “Texas Reznikoff,” it’s not just a worthy successor but also a brooding and stirring start to an explosive and tortured album. Other highlights emulate the repetition and reckless abandon of ‘80s synth-pop to channel the fervent yearning that Mitski has so elegantly conveyed through the rock and art pop of her previous albums. Laurel Hell is also the first Mitski release since her debut not to feature a deeply despondent outro. Instead, she closes the album with the cry-dancing “That’s Our Lamp,” which magnifies the small moments of a dying relationship, leaving us with a simple, devastating, classically Mitski mantra: “That’s where you loved me.” Mason



Crash

24. Charli XCX, Crash

Charli XCX’s Crash extends the car metaphor of the British singer’s 2016 EP Vroom Vroom, kicking off with a bouncy, two-minute title track centered on the narrator’s full-fledged intention to wreck her vehicle. But while the album nods toward a propensity for self-sabotage, it sounds like Charli is more interested in reforming herself than reveling in chaos. This is mostly due to the album’s production choices, which are fleet-footed and less brash than those of 2020’s How I’m Feeling Now. David Bowie’s 1983 album Let’s Dance is a more fitting comparison point for Crash—an effective pivot to dance floor tropes from an artist known for being wholly original and daring but unapologetically content to swim in more conventional waters for a bit. Though Charli’s latest jettisons some of the sonic adventurousness of her past releases, it still finds the singer workshopping the reckless abandon of her persona. Lyons-Burt



Cool It Down

23. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Cool It Down

The fact that the only, albeit brief, tour that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have embarked on in the last nine years was in support of the 2017 reissue of Fever to Tell suggested that the band was starting to embrace nostalgia rather than continuing to try to outrun it. Fortunately, their fifth studio album, Cool It Down, just about puts that fear to rest. It’s a formidable statement of purpose, one that sounds unmistakably contemporary without ever veering into flavor-of-the-month pandering. In fact, the band sounds more comfortable in themselves than ever. Karen O and company don’t shy away from acknowledging how much both the world and they themselves have changed over the last decade. The album’s title, nicked from a Velvet Underground song, not so subtly references our overheated political and geographical climate, which clearly informs many of the album’s lyrics. Winograd



Expert in a Dying Field

22. The Beths, Expert in a Dying Field

The Beths’s third album, Expert in Dying Field, is an exhilarating power-pop tour de force, replete with bristling guitar riffs and bright, infectious harmonies. It’s also a devastating exploration of anxiety, insecurity, and regret—a reflection of how, in life, there can be no true joy without sadness. The album consolidates and builds on the band’s previous efforts, offering cracking rhythms and deft melodicism that still manage to accentuate, rather than obscure, singer Liz Stokes’s confrontation of her inner demons. Because the hooks just keep coming, Expert in a Dying Field never feels nearly as lugubrious as some of the lyrics might suggest. Indeed, Stokes’s melodic instincts are such that it’s sweetness, rather than gloom, that often comes to the fore. Winograd

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God Save the Animals

21. Alex G, God Save the Animals

Alex Giannascoli’s typically solipsistic blend of confessional and abstract lyrics finds new focus on his ninth studio album, God Save the Animals. The album finds the already ponderous singer-songwriter in a particularly inquisitive mood, and this willingness to explore isn’t just relegated to the thematic. There are numerous moments of wild sonic experimentation strewn across the album’s 13 tracks, as he extends his ever-expanding musical palette into previously unexplored territory. It’s an emotionally and spiritually rewarding effort that grapples with life at the cusp of 30, and the questions that open up once priorities and beliefs begin to shift in unpredictable ways. Giannascoli doesn’t know more than we do, but he’s happy to offer some comfort to those navigating life’s messy contradictions. Barrett



Preacher’s Daughter

20. Ethel Cain, Preacher’s Daughter

Twenty-four-year-old Alabama-based singer-songwriter Ethel Cain’s debut album plays like a rock opera version of an A24 horror flick. You can practically see the whole thing play out in sepia tones: Southern gothic romance; religious trauma; a gruesomely tragic ending. The deep-dark-woods Americana music on Preacher’s Daughter is clearly indebted to Lana Del Rey and, in a couple of pop-country-inflected moments, like the splendorous “American Teenager,” Taylor Swift. But Cain’s twisted torment makes the former’s shtick sound like mere teen angst by comparison. These nearly 80 minutes of oppressively slow-moving, increasingly sinister-sounding power balladry certainly aren’t for the faint of heart. Winograd



Cherry

19. Daphni, Cherry

Oftentimes in criticism, significance is mistaken for greatness. But what makes Dan Snaith’s Cherry so remarkable, or at least what makes his Daphni project’s third album so fun on a moment-by-moment basis, is how effortlessly it flirts with greatness without ever needing to adopt an air of self-importance. Taking a “less is more” approach to arrangement, most of the album’s material sits somewhere in the two-to-three-minute range, contains one or two key compositional ideas, and usually eschews the most basic of listener expectations, like how “Always There,” with its wild Pungi instrumentation, keeps building to a drop that never properly materializes. Look no further than the jazzy “Cloudy” to get a sense of the plainspoken pleasures that Cherry readily supplies, which consists of a few basic piano loops stretched into a euphoric seven-minute long jam session and serves as the album’s most convincing evidence of Snaith’s adept skills as a producer. Attard



Midnights

18. Taylor Swift, Midnights

From Red to Reputation, each of Taylor Swift’s albums have afforded her the creative wiggle room to embrace a different sonic and visual aesthetic. With Midnights, Swift’s template is getting a little easier to pin down. Like Folklore and Evermore before it, the album boasts a matured temperament and highlights the stark intimacy of Swift’s songwriting, with the comparatively scaled-back nature of her sound serving as a natural extension of this methodology. Tracks like the minimalist “Vigilante Shit” also carry a more reserved demeanor than Swift’s previous call-outs to her supposed rivals. While her not-so-veiled threats aimed at internet rumor mills might sound extreme—“I don’t start shit, but I can tell you how it ends”—her vocals slyly hang over a series of echoing, muted synth lines and stray arpeggios. If nothing else, the album proves she’s unwilling to operate on anyone’s terms other than her own. Attard

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Wet Leg

17. Wet Leg, Wet Leg

On their self-titled debut album, Wet Leg quote Mean Girls and sophomorically chastise horny boys, all the while nicking directly from seemingly every strain of power pop from the last 50 years. Are we really supposed to take this seriously? In short, hell no. This is a hangout album in pure form, replete with silly sex jokes and acerbic, dorm room-style banter. But force of personality can only get you so far, and Wet Leg would probably grow tiresome if it weren’t bursting with lean, spiky guitar-pop that’s so simple yet so catchy. Winograd



Dawn FM

16. The Weeknd, Dawn FM

A sense of nihilistic dread permeates the Weeknd’s fifth album, Dawn FM: “I know there’s nothing after this/Obsessing over aftermaths/Apocalypse and hopelessness,” he sings on “Gasoline.” The artist’s music up to this point has been preoccupied with seeking escape from the harsh realities of life through sex, drugs, and other forms of debauchery—and, apparently, a fascination with the cosmos. Rather than looking outward or upward, though, Dawn FM is a woozy, psychedelic deep dive inside the artist’s famously twisted psyche. The album plays out like a series of radio transmissions from a transitory afterlife, with fellow Canadian Jim Carrey serving as disc-jockey-cum-spiritual-guide. Sal Cinquemani



Chloë and the Next 20th Century

15. Father John Misty, Chloë and the Next 20th Century

While sentimental traditional pop might not have been the most expected turn for a singer-songwriter best known for his sardonic worldview, Chloë and the Next 20th Century draws out Father John Misty’s longstanding romantic streak with some of his most playful and heartfelt songs to date. “Goodbye Mr. Blue,” which follows a bombastic big band opener, gracefully weaves together a breakup story, musings on mortality, and an elegy for a cat over a delicate country instrumental reminiscent of Glen Campbell. Elements like the aching warble of “Kiss Me (I Loved You)” and bossa nova of “Olvidado (Otro Momento)” flesh out the album’s retro palette and elevate what could have been a flat pastiche to a baroque and nuanced update of lounge music. Even with its measured pace and bittersweet nostalgia, the album is as gripping as I Love You, Honeybear, as incisive as God’s Favorite Customer, and as fun as any Father John Misty effort to date. Mason



It’s Almost Dry

14. Pusha T, It’s Almost Dry

For his fourth album, It’s Almost Dry, Pusha once again enlisted Kanye West along with fellow Virginia native Pharrell to create a paranoiac, vacuum-sealed atmosphere. The latter’s circular piano lines and hissing snares expand on Ye’s established palette, as Push offers his pun-filled verses with a measured, hypnotic confidence—never frantic or hurried, which is ironic given the effects of the powder he fixates on. These fable-like cartel yarns are treated by the MC as absolute, stone-faced realism (though there are wisecracks aplenty, like “Cocaine’s Dr. Seuess”), which fascinatingly heightens the sense that the posturing and tall tales are concealing a vulnerability that we’re never allowed to access through all of the perfectly composed artifice. “Tennis chains to hide all my blemishes,” Push spits on “Just You Remember.” Maybe one day he’ll reveal what those are, but the intricately constructed It’s Almost Dry is still part of a now decades-long roll-out attesting to his bravado—and we’re not complaining. Lyons-Burt

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Topical Dancer

13. Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul, Topical Dancer

Belgium-based duo Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul’s debut album is a marvel that juggles several ambitious pursuits at once, accomplishing each with devastating ease. Topical Dancer is bursting with commentary about bigotry and feminism without ever feeling polemical or didactic, subverting its non-finger-wagging assertions with absurdism and non sequiturs. But most importantly, even while Adigéry is making memorable observations about consumerism, Topical Dancer never less than a delivery system for relentless dance-oriented grooves. Reminiscent of Lindstrøm and Christabelle’s Real Life Is No Cool—though the delineation between singer and producer isn’t as distinct here—the beats that Adigéry and Pupul cook up are elemental yet still as deliciously percussive and bass-forward. Most of the songs utilize a charmingly rudimentary combination of guitar, drums, and bulging bass, with the occasional appearance of what sounds like a Moog analog synth on tracks like “Mantra.” Topical Dancer is a brainy, ethically conscious survey of modern cultural norms that both deconstructs and rejuvenates clichés, questions why we police other peoples’ behaviors in the first place, and Trojan Horses it all in the guise of a collection of bops. Lyons-Burt



Life on Earth

12. Hurray for the Riff Raff, Life on Earth

Singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra (who uses both “she” and “they” pronouns) spends much of Hurray for the Riff Raff’s seventh album trying to outrun the past and embrace the present, admirably managing to find beauty in a fucked-up world. Segarra’s new perspective becomes glaringly apparent within the first 30 seconds of Life on Earth. “Go away from here, darling/The wolves have arrived at your door,” they sing on “Wolves,” as a silky midtempo electro-pop groove thrums around her. While there’s a lot to run from in the world today—some of which Segarra candidly confronts here—an entire album concerned with running away could quickly get exhausting. But Life on Earth is far from just doom and gloom. After the first few songs, Segarra seems to find themselves not just running from but running to some kind of spiritual enlightenment. Winograd



Painless

11. Nilüfer Yanya, Painless

British-Turkish singer-songwriter Nilüfer Yanya’s Painless is composed of 12 pristine jams propelled by brisk, understated electric guitar riffs that are infectious and addictive in their unassuming low profile. The production fleetly balances polish—there’s a new-wave panache to the synth work on tracks like “L/R” and “Shameless”—with more handmade textures that result in pleasurably vibe-y music about being disaffected and burdened with a host of little problems. Yanya’s vocals compellingly oscillate between breathy high and smoky low registers, as if she’s expressing different parts of her psyche, a one-person choir of conflicting emotions. Sometimes she multi-tracks her voice to toss off asides in the background; during the outro of “The Mystic” she masterfully yet subtly mixes vocalizations, intonations, and moods. But the guitar is always working to complement her sensory state, as found in the dissonant wails and tumult it exudes during “Trouble” as the singer acutely, bluntly describes her pain. Lyons-Burt



Ants from Up There

10. Black Country, New Road, Ants from Up There

Black Country, New Road’s stunning sophomore effort, released just under a year after their debut, For the First Time, is an artfully constructed and emotionally charged rock album that compresses its Arcade Fire-style cinematic sensibilities into the quietness and repression of a post-Covid existence. Between its rich instrumentation and (now former) lead singer Isaac Wood’s guttural vocals and candid, wise-beyond-his-years lyrics, Ants from Up There is explosively creative. The album reaches its emotional apex on “The Place Where He Inserted the Blade,” with Wood singing, “I’ll praise the Lord, burn my house/I get lost, I freak out/You come home and hold me tight/As if it never happened at all.” Mason

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Bad Mode

9. Hikaru Utada, Bad Mode

Perhaps the defining quality of Hikaru Utada’s 11th album, Bad Mode, is its sense of control. On the simmering, gorgeous “One Last Kiss,” Utada sings, “I’ll love you more than you’ll ever know,” and it’s something of a key for the album as a whole, which gives the impression of contained emotions that roil powerfully beneath the surface but are never quite externalized or fully unleashed. But that doesn’t make them any less soulful. And this is all set to backing tracks that similarly evince the artist’s mastery and taste. Like the very best pop albums, the album is scrupulously sequenced, spreading the wealth in terms of its hottest grooves and melodic peaks rather than front-loading all of the sure-fire bangers. Lyons-Burt



Big Time

8. Angel Olsen, Big Time

Not unlike Kehlani’s Blue Water Road, Angel Olsen’s country-inflected Big Time was inspired by the singer-songwriter’s coming out and, as with Kehlani’s album, you can hear her newfound liberation in the airy and unencumbered sonics. Take the title track, with its blithe acoustic guitar strums and carefree pedal steel. Olsen marries these easygoing, wistful sounds with lyrics about sacrificing parts of yourself in order to reach new frontiers: “And I’m losin’, I’m losin’, I’ve left it behind/Guess I had to be losing to get here on time.” Shedding past selves and embracing an adult, come-what-may flexibility is a running theme throughout Big Time. Olsen arrives at a particularly resonant conclusion on “Go Home”—“Forget the old dream/I got a new thing”—and realizes it with the quiet power and sneakily walloping, just-short-of-melodramatic pathos. With Big Time, Olsen proves that she’s just as adept a country torch singer as she is a punky rapscallion, scruffy indie rocker, or chamber-pop chanteuse. Lyons-Burt



Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers

7. Kendrick Lamar, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers

Kendrick Lamar has long established a reputation for fearlessly confronting his inner demons, wielding his music as a tool to purge his doubts and insecurities. But the rapper has never been quite as bracingly self-interrogating as he is on his fifth studio album, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. Dotted with the alternately nurturing and combative feedback of his partner, Whitney Alford—who begins the album urging him to “tell ‘em the truth”—as well as snippets of advice from spiritual guide and self-help author Eckhart Tolle, the album is an at times uncomfortable balance of self-evaluation and social critique. Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers can be emotionally ugly, even unpleasant, but it never feels less than completely authentic. Though the album isn’t Lamar’s most incisive work, it’s a gripping treatise on the codependent relationship between his inner turmoil and an ever-evolving cultural landscape, its bluntness a risky externalization of deep-rooted confusion spurned by political upheaval. Lyons-Burt



Motomami

6. Rosalía, Motomami

Rosalía’s third album, Motomami, is a tour de force of genre hybridization. Throughout, the Spanish artist employs the sounds of reggaeton, R&B, flamenco, hyperpop, and hip-hop, among others, to create a collection of deeply personal songs in which she wrestles with questions of transformation, fame, and heartbreak. In taking bits and fragments from both her previous work and that of her contemporaries, Rosalía has fashioned an album rife with the contradictory sounds, lyrical themes, and artistic impulses of the past and present. Motomami’s cover art provides an apt visual summation of the album’s, and Rosalía’s, attitude toward its audience—acknowledging that she’s at once exposed yet enveloped by an air of mystery and danger that demands our attention. Bedenbaugh

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Once Twice Melody

5. Beach House, Once Twice Melody

Beach House’s music is defined by its crystalline production, melancholic lyrics, and singer Victoria Legrand’s smoky vocals. The Baltimore duo’s sound hasn’t changed drastically over their 15-year career, but their eighth studio album, Once Twice Melody, reflects their history while at the same time taking them in new directions. The album strikes a satisfying balance between Beach House’s melodic sensibilities and, though not as noisy as 2018’s 7, a willingness to take sonic risks. Whereas songs on the group’s past albums would often reach intensely emotional climaxes, the songwriting and performances on Once Twice Melody are more restrained and contemplative. Beach House’s hymn to the grandeur of relationships is, perhaps, the most musically diverse and thematically mature project the duo has released to date—an emphatic affirmation of life’s joys and sorrows. Bedenbaugh



Caprisongs

4. FKA twigs, Caprisongs

A stylistic departure from her customary brand of smoldering electronica and vulnerable art pop, FKA twigs’s first mixtape is not just a platform for exploring her various genre influences, but a display of the defiant, flirtatious, and witty dimensions of her personality. Caprisongs is a mercurial compilation of slick, radio-ready collaborations, from the Weeknd to Shygirl, and teetering experimental pop that shows off the full range of her dynamic creative instincts. Much like Rosalía’s Motomami, Caprisongs often feels fanciful and freewheeling, qualities best exemplified by its opener, “Ride the Dragon.” The song begins with a self-referential spoken introduction before bursting into a tittering and sensual R&B jam replete with touches of twigs’s glimmering falsetto and slicing sound effects reminiscent of her practice of swordplay. Just as twigs has picked up and mastered a wide array of talents, she’s also proven that she can deliver a protean body of work that feels distinctly her own. Mason



Blue Rev

3. Alvvays, Blue Rev

Canadian indie quintet Alvvays’s third album, Blue Rev, blends an incredibly diverse array of sounds, with frontwoman Molly Rankin and lead guitarist Alec O’Hanley continuously throwing different shades of alt-rock—from shoegaze to jangle pop to new wave—at the wall with increasingly sticky results. Recorded in a single day, the album is the result of two front-to-back takes, separated only by a 30-minute break. That approach, which recalls the Bad Brains’s legendary Black Dots sessions, is palpable throughout, and even as the band creates some of its lushest moments on tracks like “Tom Verlaine,” their playful edge never fails to bleed through. Still, it’s their most achingly melancholic material that shines brightest, and “Tile by Tile” might just be the most heartbreakingly lonely song that the band has ever written: “At night I take the calls from telemarketers in hopes of hearing your drawl.” Is there anyone living through our increasingly atomized times who can’t relate? Barrett



Renaissance

2. Beyoncé, Renaissance

Much like the propulsive, driving rhythms of her seventh studio album, Renaissance, Beyoncé’s solo output has unfolded as a delivery system for sumptuously crafted pop and R&B, rarely idling or stalling out in one mode for too long. The album cycles through and masters a range of dance floor-oriented styles, including the Afrobeats shuffle of “Heated,” the carefree disco-funk of “Cuff It,” and the 808-heavy gospel of “Church Girl.” Beyoncé even taps avant-electronic weirdo A. G. Cook to help produce “All Up in Your Mind,” whose groaning, massive bass and tangle of anxious synths may be the most confrontational sounds in the artist’s catalog. Due in part to its tonal variety and expert sequencing, Renaissance never feels monotonous, despite its near-relentless forward motion. Even the more subdued or seemingly substantive moments on the album are still raucous dance numbers at heart. Throughout, Beyoncé displaces us from both the past and the present and situates us in her unique ecosystem, where the beats seemingly go on forever as history and future collide. Lyons-Burt

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Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You

1. Big Thief, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You

Over the course of Big Thief’s career, the indie-folk band has mostly relied on a simple musical palette. But on their fifth album, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, they embrace a wider array of influences than ever before, including Americana and noise rock. The result is a sprawling double album that finds expressive power in its scope and experimentation. As is frequently the case with double albums, the question arises of whether the quality and scope of the songs justify the runtime. The answer here is a resounding yes. Bedenbaugh

1 Comment

  1. Where are Bill Callahan, Fontaines DC, and The Sadies?
    The saving grace here is having Alvvays’ “Blue Rev” at #3.

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