the top albums/songs of the midyear - 2022

Full disclosure, this list feels weird.

Not that it’s not representative of how I feel right now and the hundred-plus albums I’ve covered, but more that it feels like there’s more that I just haven’t had the chance to get to… at last count, there’s at least twenty albums on that backlog! Now part of this is inevitable - I can’t get to everything, I have caveats attached to the midyear list every time I’ve made it, more than anything it’s a snapshot, and given that I’ve covered a little less overall this year, I’m still confident in my picks given that they’ve had time to really sit with me. But between phasing out scores altogether and moving more towards the short form format - except when I don’t and the album reviews wind up the longest to date - I feel like things might be unpredictable this time around, and are once again no guarantee how it’ll all fall out in six months time.

Granted, maybe some of this feels more weird because my expectations have been continuously challenged and uprooted in 2022, for both better and worse - and I don’t think I’m alone in that regard, as I’ve heard a lot of folks call this a pretty bad year for music. I would push back on that - the mainstream charts are pretty rough in 2022 and I’d argue outside of isolated songs pop has struggled, but venture even a step outside and you’ll find a wealth of indie music, a solid diversity of underground hip-hop, and even a nice turnaround for heavier music, metal and otherwise! And that’s not even to touch on country, which might be having one of its best years in recent memory mainstream or indie, where there are a solid six albums that would be contenders for this list that I just haven’t had a chance to properly cover yet! Initially I was prepared to call this a bad year, but I really can’t - it just feels a little different, pushes you out of your comfort zone, as it did me.

But I did have enough albums to flesh out a top 15 here and I still had to make cuts, so let’s start with…

15. Of all the albums to make this list, this might be one of the most surprising and strange. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted it for my own list, but there’s something about it that bends across peculiar times and spaces…

This is an album set in multiple places in time - in the now with its experimental blur of Celtic folk, post-industrial, and ambient music, conceptually set in the future in how it constantly tests a flow of energy between tension and release, where the steps off balance to come can be prevented and set right… and also nowhere in particular, because while I can pin down influences spanning Enya to Throbbing Gristle, I’m not sure I could place this album in any era! :ess structured than previous Kelly Lee Owens albums, it forces you to engage with its immaculately produced pulsating weirdness, and while I could rave about how these beats are some of the best mixed in electronic music this year, the entire project is a curveball that hit me regardless. Definitely weird and one that’s been slept on, but if anything I’ve described sounds intriguing, it’s worth your time; also for those curious, it sounds incredible on vinyl, just a friendly tip.

14. And speaking of albums that don’t seem to slot into a specific space or time, I’ve had a bit of an arc with this project. A band left in the lurch after the release and their frontman’s departure with a project that’s even more dense and theatrical than their first, and for as much as I loved it, it was a tricky one to place. So while it’s lower than you might expect here, that could all change in six months - I’d guarantee it.

14. ‘Ants From Up There’ by Black Country, New Road

Black Country, New Road’s sophomore album is paradoxical in so many ways. It’s more complex and warped than their debut, but it also contains their most direct hooks and song structures to date. It could easily enmesh itself in manic complexity but there’s a plainspoken, painfully earnest and unequivocably nerdy side that flies in the face of any post-punk or experimental rock abstraction. And whether it’s the settled relationship in flux or metacommentary on frontman Isaac Wood’s impending departure from the group, it’s a glorious genre pileup that’s a little bit Slint, a little bit Arcade Fire, and a little bit Broadway. Utterly demented with layers to spare - the critics are all over this, and I can’t blame them one bit.

13. Speaking of the critics, they aren’t all over this one - and yet in one of those years where it feels like they’re searching for great post-punk, they really should be!

Silverbacks was a Bandcamp find for me and an absolutely great one, taking a distinctly earnest Irish flavour to its post-punk with both male and female vocals to supplement its rich grooves and oblique writing, fitting somewhere between Gang of Four and Pavement but also willing to embrace more earnest melody than both would ever do. It’s also one of the few albums in this genre that bothers to be both fun and funny, with a darker sense of humour splitting workaday class consciousness with Gen Z frustrations to jab at petty trophies but still get why they matter. Endlessly charming despite playing low-key, if you’ve found a lot of post-punk this year to be derivative or too dour, this is a nice shot from the archive - absolutely worth hearing!

But before we go any further, let’s shout out some songs from albums that will not make this list, but are pretty special and worth some attention all the same!

From Dawn FM, ‘Out Of Time’ by The Weeknd

From Fix Yourself, Not The World, ‘People Don’t Change People Time Does’ by The Wombats

From Rainbow Road!, ‘Life Is Glorious’ by 2nd In Command

From Laurel Hell, ‘The Only Heartbreaker’ by Mitski

From Lucifer On The Sofa, ‘The Hardest Cut’ by Spoon

And from Once Twice Melody, ‘Another Go Around’ by Beach House

12. …okay, I was hesitant to put this on this list, because I’m not sure it’s this band’s best like the running narrative has been - it certainly doesn’t have my favourite songs from them and I find the flaws increasingly obvious. But when you get a considerable step forward in writing and pile up enough bangers…

12. ‘Dance Fever’ by Florence + The Machine

The funny thing with Dance Fever is that while it has some of Florence Welch’s sharpest writing and biggest hooks, alongside a welcome moral ambiguity in its femininity that makes the framing considerably more interesting, I still think there are steps this band could take to expand their sound - Jack Antonoff certainly left enough space in the mixes for more melodic interplay! That’s probably why I’m hesitant to call this their best but it’s hard for me to disagree - it’s an album meeting all the ugly moments of 2022 in stride and throwing haymakers every step of the way, not as deep or complex in its reference points but a swing for populism will make it work in spades. Anthemic with feverish intensity, this is an album that feels needed, and also kicks a lot of ass; if you’ve been waiting to get onboard, there’s room for you.

11. And you know, while we’re on the topic of morally ambiguous, complicated framing…

There’s something serpentine about this album, how Pusha T bends around a jagged tapestry of samples and grainy, nasty production, where there’s plenty of venom to go around but he’s choosing his targets - if you don’t bother a snake he’s got no reason to bite, especially as he assesses his family legacy and traces his next steps in a world increasingly existing among horrors to which he finds commonplace. That’s not saying it isn’t flawed - a few production choices and guest appearances don’t quite resonate for me, and Push has set the bar so high with Darkest Before Dawn and DAYTONA that inevitably some comparisons might fall short, especially as this album doesn’t quite have the same urgency. But it also wound up as one of my go-to albums when weight lifting - pardon the pun - and for that, it works incredibly well. Great stuff.

10. The funny thing with some country albums is that they pull you into a different, specific place or time, where the setting is so fully realized that you have to respect the atmosphere. But then there’s the ones that simply paint a picture around a place we might already be… and wow, with this as my introduction to her, Jenny Tolman delivered!

10. ‘Married In A Honky Tonk’ by Jenny Tolman

On the surface, this is just ridiculously sharp neotraditional country music from a writer and performer who reminds me of a slightly more adult Kacey Musgraves in her sultry delivery and subject matter. But go a bit deeper and you find a writer who doesn’t just have a savvy eye for homespun detail that merges with the modern world remarkably well - and sardonic commentary that digs into the crevasses of the humans operating with those systems - but also an emotive richness that gives her honky tonk approach so much character. It reminds me in the best ways of Brandy Clark or the Pistol Annies, perhaps a little less rough around the edges but that’s because Tolman would give you a warm smile with her freshly baked cupcake infused with cyanide instead of a shotgun blast. Balanced out with so much warmth and humour, Jenny Tolman is the sort of indie country starlet that deserves so much more attention, please check this out!

But before we go on, here’s a few more songs from albums that won’t be making this list…

From Love Sux, ‘Bite Me’ by Avril Lavigne

From Crash, ‘New Shapes’ by Charli XCX ft. Christine & The Queens and Caroline Polachek

From Sometimes Y, ‘Hole In My Head’ by Shooter Jennings & Yelawolf

From Oxy Music, ‘Best Life’ by Alex Cameron

From Aethiopes, ‘Remorseless’ by billy woods

And from Diaspora Problems, ‘Spiritual Level of Gang Shit’ by Soul Glo ft. McKinley Dixon & Iojii

9. Look, in 2020 when this artist flipped every script on his career with the sort of make-or-break artistic statement that put him in a different class, I thought the relative commercial failure of it compared to his previous run of hits might have screwed him over. At the very least he’d go back to what Music Row wanted, play it safe, it’s not like critical acclaim would pay the bills. Instead, he doubled down, and we got this.

Brett Eldredge’s new album is so endlessly fun it’s hard for me to turn away - part of it is the sheer audacity for him to keep going into country soul with infectious charisma and production that kept a lot of showmanship, but that would ignore how he delivered an album with a lot of dimensionality; yeah, the humour and heartfelt charm wasn’t going away, but I was shocked how many songs actually had some teeth this time, willing to let him play his songs about you with more complexity, not always the nice guy. Again, I don’t think his label has the slightest clue what to do with this - and in fairness it doesn’t have a knockout punch like ‘Sunday Drive’, which was my favourite song of 2020 - but if he’s going to deliver an entire set of songs about you, you could do a hell of a lot worse. Another one that’s getting slept on - y’all should fix that!

8. So this is more of a mixtape than a proper album - normally that would mean it would slip out of my view pretty quickly, as it seems to have for a lot of critics to my surprise. I’m going to push back against that - it might be her most accessible or ‘conventional’ project to date, but at least to me, it’s stuck the most.

This was the first truly great project from 2022, at least to me, and fka twigs proved that by playing to rougher, lower stakes, she could not only sound more comfortable, but also deliver a lot of textured, varied R&B that might not take all of the same chances but had more hooks and a different kind of depth. Her previous projects might feel studied and classically artistic, more to be watched and admired from a distance even as she put forward soul-rending humanity, but Caprisongs is fka twigs at her most relatable and flavourful, where the stakes are more intimate as she tries to trace an arc of self-possessed mindfulness. I was honestly surprised how well it translated and aged six months later where the ramshackle textures are a natural fit for the summer, proving that healing works in all seasons - you may have lost touch with this over the past half of a year, I think it’s worth the reconnection.

7. The next two projects on this list may be considered controversial, probably this one more than most because it’s the most obviously flawed. But understandably so - while many pandemic albums have been slow-burning meditations that run long and slowly parce out their introspection, this is more of a midlife crisis slammed on wax… and it’s the best thing Frank Turner has made in over a decade.

This is not a comfortable listen - and I say that with the expectation that it’s hardcore punk, it’s not supposed to be comfortable! No, this is mid-therapy session breakdown where you’re seeing Turner at his most naked and ugly, where lockdown forced him to fight buried demons from his childhood, his distant father now a trans woman, and a rather tenuous relationship with those online playing purity politics with a complicated punk whose had a messy relationship with the left since the 2000s! So it’s a midlife crisis, and Turner is lashing out, often uncomfortably… and yet when paired with his most abrasive production in years, his best hooks in years, and writing that’s often unbearably honest and with more than a few direct sequel moments to Love, Ire & Song, there’s a raw firepower that gets me every damn time. There’s a lot of good intentions here - and bad ones but framed properly because man he knows it - and if he wants to let loose a torrent of bile at the hypocritical pedants and keyboard warriors who would never dare expose anything real about themselves, I can empathize a lot. I don’t have expectations this is going to lead to a second wind - this feels like something Turner really needed to get out of his system at his darkest moment - but fuck this hit where it needed.

We’re over halfway through here… let’s go through a few more songs from albums not on this list…

From The Josh Ramsay Show, ‘You & I’ by Josh Ramsay ft. Fionn

From Familia, ‘psychofreak’ by Camila Cabello ft. WILLOW

From True North, ‘Mary Oliver’ by Caroline Spence

From Five Seconds Flat, ‘doomsday’ by Lizzy McAlpine

From Two Ribbons, ‘Insect Loop’ by Let’s Eat Grandma

And from Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, ‘Rich Spirit’ by Kendrick Lamar

6. And here’s the second one… and while I said it might be controversial, it’s less because of the album’s content and more because it’s been getting an odd critical reception, really divided a lot of folks. Some think it’s the most slapdash, stupid, pop concession this art rock band has ever made…. whereas I think it might just be their best to date.

6. ‘Raw Data Feel’ by Everything Everything

If you had told me in the past nine years that an Everything Everything album would be this high on one of my lists, I would have called you crazy - this is a band I always respected more than I actually liked, I never thought I’d be able to get over Jonathan Higgs’ voice, let alone the band’s wonky relationships with groove and melody. So maybe it took the art pop, alternative dance flourish for the band to really click for me, but they did, stacking terrific synthwork and propulsive grooves to the ceiling as they weave a tangled hall of mirrors and AI-cowritten lyrics to conceal deeply held trauma; frequently absurd but if you’ve spent enough time in the warped corners of the internet that should be no surprise! I think that’s what gives the album so much staying power and emotional clarity to me: it’s a particularly nerdy and warped strain of pop culture rammed through this band’s weird eccentricities, the album The 1975 have been trying to make for years, but unlike previous albums there’s a vulnerable core of humanity amidst the jumble; and hell, having some of the best hooks of the year thus far can’t hurt. I don’t think you’re going to hear much else like this in 2022, and I can’t guarantee it’ll work… but if it does, you’re in for something special.

5. The tricky thing when you’re following a landmark debut is following it up, especially when you swap out your critically adored producer for someone with fewer credits to their name. But at the end of the day, fantastic songwriting and a powerful central presence will carry over, and in a banner year for country, Ian Noe did it again!

5. ‘River Fools & Mountain Saints’ by Ian Noe

No, it’s not as dark and visceral as Between The Country, but in a funny way I’ve stopped minding that with this album - there’s more emotional diversity, a greater sense of empathy surrounding the characters of these stories amidst the passage of time that’s set to trample them underfoot from the coal mines to the backwoods. There isn’t much hope to be found amidst the rivers and mountains of Appalachia as fellow writers Cole Chaney and Pony Bradshaw or even Tyler Childers would mention, but Ian Noe paints their drive to live and cling to sanity with the sort of detail that it’s hard not empathize, be they in snapshots of melancholy, wry bits of workaday humour, or the darker edges for which he’s become known. Noe is probably the best in the scene at this point at crafting those emotionally nuanced, wide-angle shots, and dares you to find humanity therein - and he made one of the best indie country albums of this year. This one has been ignored by far too many, and you should hear it.

4. So as some of you might have realized by now, Kendrick Lamar is not on this list - and despite my forty minute review of Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, it wasn’t a particularly close decision either. Parts of the album have grown on me, some have gotten considerably worse with time, and while I mostly respect the project, I’m not going to be like some critical establishments and bend over backwards to give a pedestal to Kendrick that he doesn’t want. No, if there’s a rapper who doesn’t want the pedestal but deserves it more, it’s this guy.

4. ‘Melt My Eyez See Your Future’ by Denzel Curry

And to think I was highlighting the Kendrick parallels when I reviewed the album proper… but enough about that, this is easily my favourite rap album of 2022 thus far and it deserves all the acclaim for it. Leaping across subgenres spanning boom bap, trap, breakbeat, and more experimental textures, Denzel Curry finally took the added step to infuse his writing with the challenging depth that was always lurking behind his bangers and now is fully on display, with hooks for days and his own confrontation with being a leader in the modern rap game, less as the aspirational hero crushed by his morality and more as the antihero who has been to the edge of darkness and who knows the grim cost of walking that road. Coupled with his most lush and liquid production to date, stellar guest performances, impeccable flow between tracks and bars alike, this is Denzel Curry’s best work to date… let’s give him a little more of that acclaim, there’s plenty to go around.

And we’re almost at the end here… but before we finish this off, a few more songs from albums that didn’t make the cut!

From DEATHFAME, ‘Alive Ain’t Always Living’ by Quelle Chris

From Farm To Table, ‘Heavy Heart’ by Bartees Strange

From Ghostlight, ‘Sounds of Yesterday’ by Poets of the Fall

From CRUNKSTAR, ‘FALLING OFF’ by Duke Deuce ft. Rico Nasty

From Closure/Continuation, ‘Of The New Day’ by Porcupine Tree

And from Drill Music In Zion, ‘MS. MURAL’ by Lupe Fiasco

3. The last three albums on this list all floored me on first listen, this one probably most of all because I didn’t see it coming. In my review of the album I described how some sloppy, underthought comments did this album a massive disservice - and somehow they still keep popping up - but if I have to be the one to be the advocate at the pulpit for this… let me make my case.

If it wasn’t her full-length debut I’d be tempted to call it a magnum opus, a generational epic, melodrama ramped to heaven and hell, and content that brings all of the moral ambiguity of American idealism, disembowels it, and feasts on the entrails. And all of that would be too much, especially stretched over ninety minutes, if Ethel Cain wasn’t insanely gifted in producing such a textured, visceral world, first through gorgeous production and masterful command of groove, but also how she integrates more beyond just slowcore and baroque instrumentation and even some anthemic moments that could go for broke alongside anything else this year! It is awe-inspiring how much she was able to deliver on her own here, and while to many it’ll still be all way too much - I’ll use the Lingua Ignota comparison when it comes graphic content that’s just as applicable here - in the United States which is seeing more hideous shades of white Christian theocracy and hypocrisy, this album’s true heavenly resonance burns all the hotter.

2. So full disclosure, between this album and Ethel Cain it was basically a tossup, a borderline tie when it came to the music, they both struck such a deep chord for me and in ways I was not expecting this year. The only reason that I’m placing this here is because Preacher’s Daughter for all of its grandeur can be tough to revisit in one sitting; it’s a lot, you need to be prepared for it. This… I can play it any time.

The fact that Orville Peck took such a leap with Bronco this year just makes me overjoyed - and the fact that my favourite karaoke DJ has about half of the songs from this album available already because Peck is Canadian is all the more wonderful! But I’d argue it goes further: Orville Peck took a leap as a performer in moving beyond his inspirations to showcase one of the most uniquely powerful voices in indie country. His instrumentation and production got so much warmer and more varied, which has prompted a lot of folks to brand him as less country to get around covering the genre, or on the other side to dismiss his own credentials, and yet I’d argue there’s so many shades from said genre that I don’t know how you even can do that in good faith! Yes, it’s a little less gothic, but Orville Peck is aiming bigger and with the songwriting getting sharper and more focused in his queer storytelling, to say nothing of so many catchy standouts, it’s hard to complain! It is everything I would have wanted but never expected from Orville Peck, and while he might have been a curiosity before, now he’s a force to be reckoned with - and deservingly so, this kicks so much ass!

1. …the caveat I make with this choice is that in a different world where I reviewed its predecessor, I’m not sure I would have been as high on it, because I necessarily would have made comparisons and that album is an unsung classic of 2010s indie rock that for some reason I missed in 2017. But I also can’t deny that even if I would look more harshly on this in contrast, it’s still the best project I’ve heard all damn year.

1. ‘angel in realtime.’ by Gang Of Youths

Discovering Gang Of Youths properly in 2022 has been one of the biggest highlights of my year, not just Go Farther In Lightness but also angel in realtime, the Achtung Baby to that album’s Joshua Tree. But even that comparison doesn’t do this project justice, because you can easily make the U2 parallel this is not an album that embraces irony beyond one moment rightfully taking the piss out of a music industry demanding trauma be commodified! No, when Gang Of Youths embrace textures from the south pacific and breakbeats from the UK they’re doing so in the service of the world they’re fashioning, telling the story of a lost father where the complicated epic of his life deserves the wide angle shots and emotional stakes flung to the rafters. And I could go on about how the album is stacked to the brim with some of the best hooks you’ll hear in indie rock, or how despite the album’s length it never flags in momentum, or how flat out gorgeous the production is, or how Dave Le’aupepe is a frontman who can split the difference between Matt Berninger and Bono and wring out the best of both, or how ‘the kingdom is within you’ might just be the runaway pick for my favourite song of this year and we’ve still got six months to go! But if I want an album that can fill any voice at any time for damn near any mood, angel in realtime. is my answer, an album that makes you feel huge within a world that’s even larger for it. Best album thus far in 2022… if there’s anything that comes close to it this year, we’ll have something special indeed!

the top albums/songs of the midyear - 2022

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