Best Albums of 2022

Today our co-authors lead you on a wondrous and mystical journey through the musical annals of 2022, showcasing their favorite picks from the year. This list spans genres and sounds with just a sprinkle of pretentiousness. Remember, if your favorite album doesn’t chart on this list, don’t worry, its because you are wrong and we are right. Let’s ride!

20. Pigments – Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn

Pigments is an aural meal, a stewing of invoked senses performed in imbricate movements and hand-tinted by reuniting collaborators Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn. Already practiced proprietors of collaboration, Richard (Diddy, Adult Swim) and Zahn (insert long list of recording/performing partners) mesh with a chemical understanding of life’s emotive colors, seasoning delicately with a pallet of auditory chromas. Returning with this anti-roygbiv record, Zahn—who also released a solo album this year—colorizes each track with jazzy blooms and compositions dyed with the colors they reflect, while Richard weighs heavily with open-air vocals and soul-searching lyrics. The result is an unbound homage to the musical spices that color and season the seasons of our lives. -AB

19. learn 2 swim – redveil

The 18-year-old Maryland rapper’s meteoric rise continued this year with his best project to date. Reminiscent of a more playful Earl Sweatshirt, redveil excels on learn 2 swim, layering his melodic flow overtop his self-produced beats with signature synth and piano. Redveil’s newest release solidifies his rising star status and creates massive anticipation for future projects from the PG native. -TM

18. SOS – SZA

Arriving just in time to be considered for Gone Gazing’s Yearly Gaze awards, is SZA’s much-anticipated follow-up to 2017’s darling, CTRL. An icon of sincerity and an inspiration for women musicians, producers, artists, everyday people alike—we now reemerge in SZA’s invigorating world with SOS, her second full length album clocking in at a grateful 23 tracks. Flourishing with her engrossingly catchy style and empowerment of the self, we exist for SOS’s duration within this devout love for individualism, humanity, life’s worn patterns, and return, forgetting the original words to Daryl Hall & John Oats songs.

Having gained the poets’ tool of irony and wielding it in flashy Wu-Tang style (of Mister courageous O.D.B), or like something out of “Kill Bill” (song), SZA—potent powerful poised—reflects with experience on love, love lost, self-love, much love, much more. R&B looks forward to artists of passion for its celebration and furtherment, and amongst the great many contemporaries releasing music this year, SZA respectfully impresses her utmost flair unto the genre with this record. -AB

17. Crash – Charli XCX

Charli XCX has skirted the line between pop hitmaker and experimental innovator for years, and Crash is the ultimate manifestation of that genius. She speeds through each track, revving her engine over glitching production that keeps each song teetering on the edge of a charting spot, just weird enough to blow prospects of selling out away. -TM

16. Shirley Hurt – Shirley Hurt

Every record has some story to share. We share briefly in this narrator’s story, a musical snapshot of their life; a life of someone who could currently be described as, “going through it.” Whatever the specifics of “it” may be for you, or them, or the storyteller in question, this “it” is a delicate state of existence that demands as much care and love and even beckons the same degree of respect given to smoother times in life.

The debut by Canadian artist Shirley Hurt demands these emotional wages be given time and attention. Finding romance in a hushed, yet unbridled voice, Shirley Hurt charges a state of calmness through the lower plumbings of a vocally freed world. The delicate sadness’s arising in the naturality of this person’s circumstance is accompanied by ever-loyal keys (and a backing band), played with the tentativeness of a practicing hand at piano, feeling its way through the motions and familiar missteps of this story’s dance. Whatever “it” is, may it find some comfort (and hope?) in this promisingly simple debut album. -AB

15. Stardust – Yung Lean

Sometime in 2022, I was targeted by a Drain Gang psy-op campaign that was convincing me to listen to Bladee and throw away my deodorant. Fortunately, I resisted, but was exposed to Yung Lean’s newest album in the process, a dizzying blend of experimental pop and hip-hop that stuck with me throughout the year. Uncharacteristically fun and characteristically Swedish, he breaks free of his “Ginseng Strip 2002” heyday with features from FKA Twigs, Skrillex, and the usual drainer lineup to lean into a new era of Yung Lean, crafting a unique and memorable sound in the process. -TM

14. Páthos – Conjurer

I am overly impressed, and slightly overwhelmed, by the swelling deluge of metal releases upturned this year, with more leering from roiling viscous pits of conception even as I dwell here. Amongst a concourse of wretched contemporaries, London group Conjurer stands brittle-boned, front and center upon a pyre of sorrowful splendor. Following a premonitory calm few seconds, Páthos heaps it’s long and torturous testimony at a chapped and blistering signature. All the essential fixings are here. You’ve got an appropriate amount of doom and gloom, a smattered earful of death and black metal fillings, and not too heavy a hand of sludge, just enough to congeal this amassed amalgam of styles into one remarkably thoughtful record. -AB

13. Beatopia – beabadoobee

After having one of her early hits illegally sampled and turned into a cringey TikTok sound, beabadoobee returned to win 2022 with Beatopia, a glittery swirl of bedroom pop and garage rock drawing on 2000s radio hits. Beating the sophomore slump allegation, Bea invites us into her childhood dream world, relishing in the back-and-forth between melody and dissonance, maturity and naivety. The intimate chaos inspires our own reflection, scribbles on a coloring book. -TM

12. Quality Over Opinions – Louis Cole

Studio album #4 from Los Angeles musician Louis Cole is this great, dazzling chrome-plated cornucopia of replaybility, brimming forth with electronically impassioned bliss and bewildering dance numbers. Quality Over Opinion opens with Cole reading jotted-down brainsplatter directly from some journal in the full kilter confidence of one having found their inner voice. Insecurities are dragged through the glitteringly encrusted mud of stylistic struggles, flaunting a gold forked sarcasm in the face of everything. The tender love for life is pervasive and not to be missed on the slower ballads, nor the techno freed boogie-on-downs Cole lurches into without pretense. It is a blurring ramble of some cool dude, making delightfully catchy pop-jazz music within the grounds of a frazzlingly self-aware mind. -AB

11. Expert in a Dying Field – The Beths

The definitive concept of the COVID era of music has turned out to be the breakup album. A time so driven by loss and longing forms a chamber so perfect for brewing in the storms of severance. The result of that simmer has most recently manifested on a spectrum from utter melancholy to feverish fuck-you’s, but The Beths provide a much-needed respite with Expert’s clever and cheery, awkward and amicable breakup letter. Frantic instrumentals and sharp writing power the group’s third album to be one of the year’s finest indie-rock releases, brimming with catchy riffs and much needed honesty. -TM

10. Shape Up – Leikeli47

Capstoning a trilogy of releases is Shape Up, the anonymous Leikeli47’s most recent ingenuity. Actuating a story of discussion and refinement for black beauty standards, Leikeli47 places us in the context of a young person’s tender growth and emerging realization of the self in this Beauty Series. Graceful in her flow, this is an artist who understands what the genre of rap means to her. Shape Up is the refined dedication to meditated time taken for oneself, as the Virginia/Brooklyn artist recently returned after a four-year break from releasing material. As a result, we have delivered here some of the best material released this year, surely one of the finest rap records and discography entries by Leikeli47 thus far—who has just recommenced what is certain to be an inevitably fascinating career. -AB

9. Reset – Panda Bear and Sonic Boom

The electronic duo spun together a beautifully nostalgic and mesmerizingly hypnotic 60s-inspired record that I already wrote about so go read it over there. This page is too long. -TM

8. Miracle in Transit – Naked Flames

An atomized lushness seeps into your temporal lobes, bouncing vaporous stimuli off cortical regions and plying unabsorbed, dubstepped techno into greater feedback loops, catalyzing the inevitable digitization of your complete subconscious. Lose yourself in the hydrous slipstream of Miracle in Transit’s electric pulse, a warmth of in-touch club pacings, beating with a background hum of lite grooves and fibrous dance elements—absolution for built-up screen time guilt. Naked Flames wires together a morphing comfort album from the paradigms of classic house and electro music, Wii shop channel enthusiasm and various observed liquid states, easily enjoyable at full rave volume or study-soft drummed quietness. So, retreat with the long techno combers of Miracle in Transit next time you find yourself reeling under the internet’s indifference and soar instead across this digital ionosphere in brain spackled lightness. -AB

7. The Loneliest Time – Carly Rae Jepsen

In recent years, I’ve found pop to be a bit dishonest. Quality pop hits are a thing of the past, replaced by formulaic anthems of gibberish, soulless words, with stans at the ready to dox all detractors. Our Lord and Savior Carly Rae Jepsen rose again in 2022 to cleanse us of those musical sins, taking us back to a bye-gone age of straight bangers.

Jepsen lays out all her cards from the very first track, single-handedly reviving pitch changes and bridges in the genre, dancing along the way. The Loneliest Time is pure pop bliss, reminiscing on a time years ago when we could turn on the radio and hear “Call Me Maybe” for the hundredth time that day. It’s poetic that Jepsen dropped this the same day as Taylor Swift’s Midnights, which is…not on this list. -TM

6. Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers – Kendrick Lamar

In full confidence are we invited to participate in Kendrick Lamar’s most current venture Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, the final project to be released under the Compton rapper’s longstanding deal with record label Top Dawg Entertainment. Like labelmate and earlier member of Gone Gazing’s top 20 albums list, SZA, Lamar releases his longest project to date surpassing the deluxe edition of good kid, m.A.A.d city (which celebrated its 10^th anniversary this year) at an 18 song tracklist, plus or minus “The Heart Part 5.” It is within this bookending addition, extensively produced and wholly realized as always upon release, that we find Kendrick at his most introspective.

Sitting with a ruminating Mr. Morale we begin to grasp for a rudimentary understanding as to what this five-year hiatus has meant for the rapper’s career and personal growth. Admissions to guilt, trauma, pain flit about in confrontational acknowledgement on “Father Time,” “Mr. Morale” and “Worldwide Steppers” while a magnanimous respect for the self, the imperfect self, comes into focused celebration on “Count Me Out.” “Savior” shirks the martyrdom of rap, and “Rich Spirit” seeks a balance for personal beliefs in the face of criticism. This emboldened Kendrick is at a most accessible state of humanity, beknowing that “[he’s] been going through something,” battling an imbalance within the soul and eventually arriving at self-worth through experiences shared with us in his adept rap intricacies. -AB

5. I Love You Jennifer B – Jockstrap

The UK duo of Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye released their long-awaited debut album this year, a glitchy and orchestral artpop masterpiece. Ellery’s strings and piano trade-off with Skye’s EDM beats on each track, battling for melodic possession, each song ending across the galaxy from where it began.

Ellery’s voice stretches that distance with ease, transitioning from the sleeping lows to grandiose highs. Each track burrows her theatrical charisma amongst the orchestra before being ripped out and exposed to Skye’s harsh synths, holding her own as genres bend around her melodies. What’s most impressive about this musical achievement is Ellery doing it twice in one year, being the violin player for the six-formerly-seven-piece act that tops this list. -TM

4. Jazz Codes – Moor Mother

What better lesson in the culture and traditions of black jazz music than an actual jazz record exploring the richly clotted histories of the medium, taught by an artist with a certain proclivity for breathing new meaning into stories otherwise consigned to oblivion. Camae Ayewa is this conduit for Jazz Codes, a record tapping into the collective sum of experiences surrounding a community of early jazz, from its original conception to its traceried lineages, a legacy burgeoned under the vibrancy of its own lengthening tapestry. “The people in me, it’s magic, I let a song go out my heart, it’s magic…” from “Golden Lady” featuring Melanie Charles.

The Maryland born artist, known most notably as Moor Mother, spreads her time across a multitude of expressive outlets, growing a musical career that blends poetry seamlessly into her solo and collaborative works, appearing as a performing member of jazz collectives and ensembles, all the while working as an assistant professor for the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music. It is out of her poetry that Jazz Codes sprung into being, originally meant to serve as an accoutrement to a collection of poems paying tribute to early blues and jazz artists. Now a full-length release later, crammed with recorded ontological accounts, Ayewa’s vivid verses and diverse guest features, the eighth studio record by Moor Mother exists as one of the artist’s finest to date. -AB

3. A Light for Attracting Attention – The Smile

If you thought Radiohead couldn’t get any weirder, think again. Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood joined Tom Skinner to form The Smile, a bid for the Radiohead creative duo to play bass without having to kick Greenwood’s brother out of the band. Unleashing Yorke on bass is something the world didn’t know it needed, tearing up old Radiohead ideas from Kid A and In Rainbows to produce echoing caverns of sound. His usual anti-establishment writing comes through amidst that humming flurry, with political jabs and pleas for humanity’s connection.

Greenwood’s virtuous mind populates The Smile’s universe, switching from guitar to harp to synth to piano and all in-between to power the currents beneath Yorke’s waves. Skinner’s eclectic jazz drumming forms the base for Greenwood to Yorke to radiate from, the first time they’ve had such a backing while working together. With more music to come, The Smile is one of the most exciting new prospects in alternative rock since, well, Radiohead. -TM

2. Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You – Big Thief

Drink full and deeply from the fresh crystalline streams that pool midst the lines of Big Thief’s lyrics. A record written by four nearly family friends, knit together on the road and purl stitched in languorous studio sessions, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You flies freely into our hearts. The dulled radiance glowing within Adrianne Lenker’s writing hums brighter and brighter, louder and louder through this record’s travel-worn sheen on each repeat listen, until, bursting in splendorous harmony it echoes off and fills the chest cavities of paltry, wayward listeners. More than a folk record, just as the band has become much more than a folk outfit, Dragon New Warm Mountain speaks out its innermost desires in countless tongues; grooved double bass(ings), silly psychedelia, a warm helping of blue rather than grass, parseltongue, and another Grammy slated Best Alternative record nomination, still resoundingly Big Thief. From an album’s standpoint, there is a profusion of consistently quality material here, with 20 gleeful tracks building to a height of 1 hour 20 minutes. There could be stuffing, but Big Thief neglected to prepare any for this feast. Instead, only the finest themes, licks, jokes, and ragtag folk are plated here today. Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is the best kind of record, one that feeds not only the senses but also the soul from a loving hand. Love is a rich delicacy that most people will sample only in morsels, yet Big Thief heaps exuberant servings onto your plate with ladles large enough for seconds, thirds, etc. -AB

1. Ants From Up There– Black Country, New Road

“All I’ve been forms the drone. We sing the rest.”

A line from the closing track of Ants From Up There that sums up how it feels to listen to the album For the first time. Black Country, New Road produced something seismic, whether they meant to or not. It feels like a holy text, a guide that shows us what music can be, and what music should be. Reflective. Playful. Reverent. A guide for being human.

These songs are near inseparable from each other. Hearing just a note of any opening chord requires another listen, each one a deeper dive into the mind of frontman Isaac Wood, who left the band just days after AFUT’s release in February, barring the brand from performing these songs live.

Each listen uncovers a new secret – soft fingerpicking in the bridge of “Concorde,” tapping piano in the wake of “Snow Globes” hurricane, the cymbals’ subtle embrace on “Bread Song.” Wood tarnishes his own throne throughout his lyrical expanse, name dropping Billie Eilish on two songs and retelling a wet dream about Charli XCX, but those quirks find a home amidst the AFUT Milky Way. Air Jordan colorways and soup recipes all contextualize Isaac’s suffering.

Some moments in history define a pre and post, a before and after. Ants From Up There is one of those. For the band, now forced to move on, and for its listeners, now forced to live with it. I can’t say I have ever heard anything like it before, and I am entirely certain I never will again. -TM