The 25 Best Albums of 2022
Written & Designed by Nathan Evans
In a year that saw conversations around dance music, nostalgia sampling and the safety of live music, artists have created new documents that have defined their careers and will go on to define the future careers of others no doubt. KEYMAG celebrates the best albums of 2022, from confounding introductions to career peaks.
25: Beach House - Once Twice Melody
When Beach House purposefully released their double LP Once Twice Melody into four parts, they evoked another dream pop magnum opus in doing so. This Mortal Coil’s Filigree & Shadow consciously creates four individual journeys that form a unit experience, each one spreading Beach House’s sound out into a picturesque nebula.
24: Asake - Mr. Money With the Vibe
Nigeria’s Asake captured the sun itself in a mix of Afrobeats and Amapiano. But with the background hits of saxophone, violin and choral vocals, there’s almost a blues-iness to it, a spectre of gospel that gives these tracks a special warmth. It seems Asake summoned a powerful communal voice.
Rest in peace to Rebecca Ikumelo.
23: 454 - Fast Trax 3
The new mixtape from Florida plugg rapper 454 lends more credit to the assertion that he’s the Aphex Twin of rap. He does what Aminé’s TWOPOINTFIVE did last year on another scale - playing with mind-bending tempos and rhythms while his barrelling flows and malleable, prenatal voice makes the experiments as fun to joyride through as an acid-soaked PS2 platformer world. A collision of iridescent colours and Florida bass, it’s the most psychedelic listen you’ll have all year.
22: Shygirl - Nymph
Grabbing a distinguished set of producers that includes Mura Masa, Vegyn and Arca, whipsering party girl Shygirl has created a club music roulette wheel of a debut that makes it easy to feel sexuality as joyful and authentic. Glowing and pulsing blues and pinks, Nymph is a land where being goofy and cute is deified.
21: Weyes Blood - And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow
Weyes Blood’s And In the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is more cerebral than its majestic predecessor Titanic Rising, but comes from a place of greater wisdom. Her Karen Carpenter-like voice is wrapped in a botanic mix of baroque and new age tones. It’s a record of two halves - one that grieves about the distorted state of the world and the hidden barrier that has made humans so isolated; the other is about finding someone who numbs that pain.
20: Isabella Lovestory - Amor Hardcore
Isabella Lovestory’s second record Amor Hardcore sells sexuality as the fun we are all destined to have. Whether the Honduran artist is singing, rapping, whispering or purring on the mic, she wraps herself around each beat like a designer silk neck bow, opulent and ever the focal point. Pulling from a nostalgic, prime Daddy Yankee-era sound with minimal arcade-y electronics, see-saw bass and knocking rhythms, she has perfected the art of making salacious neoperreo that relishes being up to the thigh-high boots in sin.
19: Billy Woods - Aethiopes
The way Aethiopes flows from one track to the next is like turning the corner of a dark fantasy labyrinth. These aren’t just songs but basement rooms with rusted wear and dank in the corners. Perfect ground for billy woods to exert his scummy stanzas and monstrous imagery.
18: Roc Marciano & The Alchemist - The Elephant Man’s Bones
The Alchemist’s run of collaborative albums is so astounding that it hardly needs to be addressed that, yes, he managed to conjure another den of his dank, smoky world to make NY rapper Roc Marciano feel at home. But the crown jewel of The Elephant Man’s Bones is Marciano’s ice-stiff deadpan wit, from “if it’s trouble, then we shooting, it’s troubleshooting”, all the way through to “I'm channelling B.I.G without a spiritual medium”.
17: Ari Lennox - age/sex/location
The past few years has seen its fair share of female R&B song cycles that chronicle a love story from the likes of Lianne La Havas and Syd. With nods to multiple classic R&B eras and a seen-it-all-before attitude to love, Ari Lennox takes it to a more grown-up place. age/sex/location is a drama-filled episode in a saga of her journey through the world of modern dating.
16: Cakes Da Killa - Svengali
New York spitter Cakes Da Killa has been chewing clinically sharp flows since his pair of Muvaland EPs recorded during lockdown. But all the while, he had his tightly-packed artistic statement tucked under his Bottega belt.
Besides the glamour, Svengali runs deep into New York heritage, creating jazz-soaked house that Cakes tackles with wild agility and flaunting allure, “coming full throttle” as he says himself on the stroboscopic title track. Meanwhile, the record’s aesthetic and creative freedom serves to pay tribute to the Harlem Renaissance era with a narrative about cosmopolitan romance in NYC’s Greenwich Village. There’s more than one type of love running through this album.
15: Ravyn Lenae - Hypnos
Ravyn Lenae finds tunes in places few can even go. Her mousy vocals acrobat to amazing highs on tracks like ‘Inside Out’ and ‘Satellites’, and on her endearing debut album Hypnos, she finds a medium between satin-soft songwriting that’s still inquisitive. Lenae’s considered approach puts her racing up to the likes of Solange, Kelela and Kelsey Lu.
14: Toro y Moi - MAHAL
MAHAL is the loosest, jammiest album in Toro y Moi’s discography, to the point where reference points congeal into one. Wildflower-era Avalanches, psych rock, Panda Bear, slacker rock, jam bands, The Isley Brothers and Can all make up a percentage of the whole.
The record is fueled by an atmosphere of hot air (look to tracks such as ‘Mississippi’ and ‘Way Too Hot’), and guitars simmer like a heatwave melting on the horizon. But for Toro y Moi to go on such an analogue adventure after being the kingpin of chillwave and an indietronica artist the digital experience cannot be separated entirely. There are hints of it on MAHAL - an AI-generation vision of a psychedelic paradise. The heavy effect usage sometimes pulls you out of the VR headset briefly, like at the 1:32 mark on ‘Goes By So Fast’ or the 0:58 mark of ‘Last Year’. More to that, the album is filled with so many spare experiments that dissolve into your hands that it feels like we’re just getting a slither into this idyllic universe.
13: Melody’s Echo Chamber - Emotional Eternal
French neo-psych project Melody’s Echo Chamber’s third album is unquestionably an outside album. Cloud effects, rustic instrumentation and her slightly-whispered vocals tear away any early connections to Tame Impala. Moments like the regal strings and sax that glaze “Personal Massage” and solar flair that cuts through the blissful “Alma_The Voyage” begs you to be swept by its wind time and time again.
12: Brainwaltzera - ITSAME
Brainwaltzera’s second album ITSAME is a record that finds something beautifully familiar by combining opposites. Tracks like ‘(g)Raveyard tools’ sound like a coming together between mangled angels and growling demons. Mixing IDM, breakbeat, ambient techno and even grimey bass music, the Aphex Twin comparisons early on in the shadow-lurking producer’s career make perfect sense, even down to the placating melancholia Twin shyly uncovers now and then. But Brainwaltzera is flush with it, and his ear-grabbing sound warping and warm hues will never leave your attention.
11: Sudan Archives - Natural Brown Prom Queen
Sudan Archives’ Natural Brown Prom Queen is a psychedelic R&B record overflowing with colours and shades, but there’s one key inspiration that may not come as obvious. Between the inspired looping, exuberant hip-hop blends, volcanic bass and shifty structure that can throw in an extra piece of texture at any given moment, it feels indebted in spirit to the otherworldly era of Hype Williams, Timbaland and Missy Elliot. Where her trusty violin played a great part on her last album Athena, here it’s used as something closer to a rowdy horn to punctuate impacts than a sweeping string. Lyrically, there’s a cheekiness to how she almost cheats expectations of florid poetry by being so direct and frank, but there’s always something deeper planted waiting for you to find it. Sudan Archives has created something that’s as grand as it is playful.
10: Maylee Todd - Maloo
Presentation can change the outlook of an album entirely. Maylee Todd’s Maloo is a relatively simple extension of classic soul à la Anita Baker and Steve Arrington. But with sci-fi visuals and cloudy synths, Maloo scratches the same itch as Solange’s When I Get Home, itself a masterstroke of minimalist soul that makes earnest use of synthesiser bleeps and bloops. The two share a space-age aesthetic, but neither is a total escape of the present realm, instead something just about in-reach. Solange looks back to her home city, while Todd gazes ahead to a virtual future.
9: 700 Bliss - Nothing to Declare
How do you make club-leaning music that matches the intense punkish poetry of Philadelphia's Moor Mother? The answer came just an hour away in New Jersey - DJ Haram bent hip-hop and outsider club rhythms to her whim to make something as experimental and thrilling confrontation as her lyrical companion in 700 Bliss. Nothing to Declare is a twisted, grey-stenched record that contains physical and verbal counterattacks on the powers that be, and adds to the pantheon of fierce political art born of club music.
On a personal note, this album marks my first Best New Music review for Pitchfork, something I consider a major milestone in my music writing career. You can read it for yourself here, and it says everything I need to say about this album.
8: The Smile - A Light For Attracting Attention
Is The Smile a side project of Radiohead or a life beyond it? A Light For Attracting Attention, Thom Yorke, Johnny Greenwood and former Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner’s first album as this trio, comes six years since Radiohead’s last album, and the world is still waiting for a follow-up. The pressure of adding to such a prestigious discography is a lot to bear, and there have been times when that has been felt in a forced desire to add new dimensions to it (see: The King of Limbs). But A Light For Attracting Attention blossoms with a free-flowing energy, unbothered by the weight of expectation or pressure to change.
Along the smokey art rock trail, the album crests and dips from Krautrock and afro-funk to post-rock and protest folk. It has Yorke’s magical pen that seems to make the odd feel natural and the feeble seem beautiful. But The Smile’s signature is the loose scratches of new-school UK jazz they receive in the form of Tom Skinner’s rhythmic drumming, Theon Cross’ tuba and his brother Nathaniel’s trombone. With a record like this, whether or not it means Radiohead is over doesn’t matter as much.
7: Rosalía - MOTOMAMI
The last few years since Rosalia’s breakthrough record El Mal Querer has taught us that her range cannot be contained in a succinct project. So, the Spanish artist’s next grand statement MOTOMAMI swerved that structure, instead having a compilation-like flow that presented ideas as well as fully-formed songs.
From modernising flamenco music to branching out into neoperreo, art pop and post-industrial, MOTOMAMI reads like a sketchbook that doesn’t separate worlds. Look at the relentless hurling of sounds on ‘DIABLO’, where she steers to exactly where you know it can’t go well, and pulls it off.
Fully-evolved songs such as ‘LA FAMA’, a flamenco duet with the Weeknd, and ‘Candy’, a brooding, atmospheric piece of R&B dembow, save the album from becoming a deranged mess. Moreover, they frame Rosalia as an extremely capable songwriter to match her production chops. On ‘COMO UN G’, she wanders lost over a piano that has flashes of Aphex Twin's ivory brilliance. Her voice takes many forms as she digs deeper into her despair at having no one to dedicate her ballads to, and the emotional swing she takes in the chorus is perfectly paced. MOTOMAMI darts away from the angelic image of Rosalía's previous work, stirring the cauldron to create an outlandish, genre-hopping revision of herself.
6: JID - The Forever Story
JID comes from a school of rappers who appreciated Lil Wayne as much as they do Yasiin Bey (Mos Def), and as soon as JID made his homecoming record DiCaprio 2, he turned his attention towards the family that brought him there. This was not just to secure their future, but to weave them into the tale of his oeuvre-definer, The Forever Story.
His twitchy, serpentine flows are in the best form they’ve ever been, and each genius verse adds to the story charting the journey of someone trying to cement the security of their family for generations to come. The production has been laboured to enhance the story’s scenes of action and reflection, from the boots-on-the-ground grittiness of crankers ‘Dance Now’ and ‘Surround Sound’, to gloomy cuts where JID strains relationships to misplaced priorities on ‘Sistanem’ and ‘Can’t Make You Change’. He injects layers of gospel, jazz-funk, spoken poetry, Southern rap both old-school and new, and more (“I ain’t rapping, this is spiritual”, he raps amongst the verbal blitzkrieg of ‘Raydar’).
JID also gets to celebrate going from referencing Lil Wayne and Yasiin Bey to having them appear in fine form in the third act, something that you can tell he’s ecstatic about out of frame. But to the Atlanta native, the biggest success in his life is being able to buy his family land.
5: Danger Mouse & Black Thought - Cheat Codes
Black Thought’s recent Streams of Thought EP series has been a blessing to those who yearned for his unmatched technical rap ability unbogged by the conceptuality of the Roots. Yet the aimless freestyles perhaps leaned too far in the other direction. Flogged into focus by multi-genre producer Danger Mouse, Cheat Codes is Black Thought’s most complete project to date.
For Danger Mouse, it’s the first time he’s producing for a rapper full-time since the cult-classic 2005 Danger Doom collaboration with MF DOOM. He dusts off the cobwebs of the cartoonishness of that project, and instead uses flaky samples and sweeping soul orchestration to create a bluesy and, at times, abstract blueprint. ‘Aquamarine’ draws overtly from British group Sault, with its melancholic orchestration, ghostly background vocals and a contribution from Michael Kiwanuka. It’s also searingly excellent.
On the other half, Thought is as consistently sharp as ever, exuding a braggadocio he’s rarely exhibited until this stage in his career. The mobster character Thought immerses himself in allows him to create lucid scenes with single bars. “From a silhouette standing in the aperture / to a figurehead standing in the path of a killer”, he dramatises on ‘The Darkest Part’. That his flow is so unbroken while doing this is testament to his natural wordsmithery. Black Thought can already rest on an enviable history of GOAT-territory art. What’s so invigorating about Cheat Codes is how Black Thought is finding new ways to add to that.
4: Pusha T - It’s Almost Dry
As a trustable constant, the tide draws in and out, the bees will land on flowers, and Pusha T will find new and creative ways to rap about dealing coke. Long-teased as a joint Pharrell and Kanye-produced project, It’s Almost Dry is everything that that love triangle of excellence promised.
More than ever, Pusha has embraced the villainous character he was born to play, darting between the two hemispheres of his own dusted-up world. He takes Kanye through the ages with soul samples on ‘Diet Coke’ and ‘Dreaming of the Past’, and finds a newfound rowdiness (‘Let the Smokers Shine the Coupes’, ‘Neck & Wrist’) and circus freakishness (‘Call My Bluff’, ‘Open Air’) from Pharrell.
The 7-song experiment of Push’s last album Daytona brought fruitful results, and here, he essentially extends the premise to include Pharrell’s half. The principle is still the same - no room for error, dished out in quick fashion. The quick-in, quick-out pacing means that once a verse has ended, you’re only a solid hook away from another.
To Push, you get the feeling that the descriptions of drugs, parties, success and excess is him chiselling away at a grand Smithsonian artwork that shows the inner beauty of his dark world. “Extracurricular / Art buyer, eight twelve ‘Rari driver / Spent six just to make the roof Harry Potter” is a masterful line that could only come from decades of refinement. The way Push still manages to weald his pen inside a small circle of topics through wordplay is downright inspiring.
Side note: There are two tracks that are antithetical to every good thing about the album - ‘Rock n Roll’ and ‘I Pray For You’. Swap them out for ‘Come Back Baby’ and ‘Infrared’ respectively, and it’s perfect.
3: Denzel Curry - Melt My Eyez See Your Future
Melt My Eyez See Your Future shares a lot in common with one of the biggest albums of the year. Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers is similarly a therapy session put to tape, but as Justin Hunte pointed out, it’s an exceptionally-made record designed for rare listens. Tracks like ‘Auntie Diaries’, ‘We Cry Together’ and ‘Mother I Sober’ all deliver incredibly sobering experiences, but it could be argued that part of the effectiveness of a message is how it’s able to be digested regularly.
Denzel Curry, on the other hand, managed to channel his therapy process into tracks that feel as much as they say, and influence the listener to be in line with Curry’s state of mind. ‘Walkin’ is as motivational as his sermon-like raps, ‘Angelz’ paints a lonely trail towards recovery and ‘The Smell of Death’ is a Thundercat-led vortex that looks at the harm Curry has caused. Moreover, the throughline of jazz running through the record - from the first moments on ‘Melt Session #1’ to the K-hole that is ‘John Wayne’ - illustrates how out in the proverbial woods he was, connecting parts of his life to see how he can improve his behaviour.
Melt My Eyez See Your Future is a hero’s journey of mastering his mental state by dealing with past trauma, present temptation, ego and systemic oppression. By ‘melting his eyes’, he’s gained heightened senses and grown a wider understanding about the world around him. Namely, to look beyond appearances.
2: Sam Gellaitry - VF Vol II
Sam Gellaitry’s new mixtape VF VOL II is a flurry of thrilling tonic synthpop. Making the switch from wonky beats to vocal-led electronica has accelerated Sam Gellaitry’s impeccable sound design - every guitar lick, every synth squiggle, every kick, every swoop and zip puts him leagues ahead of any producer out there.
His second full-length sees him layer a myriad of styles, from city pop, new wave, video game soundtracks and highland flute music, over his high-bounce formula to wondrous effect. Using the electrifying synthetic guitar borrowed from Human After All-era Daft Punk to pen a weary tune about the reality of being an up-and-comer in the music industry is a truly bodacious way to start an album. The album is airtight with moments of intense stimuli that taps into a digitised world that still hasn’t lost its humanity, still hanging onto the cheese of warm-tinted pop music.
More minimal and melancholic compositions expose the bare catchiness of this songwriting, such as ‘TRY’ and ‘SEROTONIN’. ‘PICTURE IN MY MIND (DEMO VERSION)’ lends us the raw idea of his recent Pinkpantheress collaboration, and even in its naked state, the nu-disco piano stabs still land with rays of gold.
The Scottish producer’s warmly automated vocals express casual angst wrapped in exuberance, but it’s his synthwork that is the most expressive character. They fan out into gorgeous arpeggios on “NO SIGNS”, splash into 8-bit droplets on “EUPHORIA (…OK!)”, slip around “ANGEL” and whizz into pretty curls on ‘Stuck’. These songs are the most morish confections of colourful electronica since Rustie’s Glass Swords.
1: The Weeknd - Dawn FM
The Weeknd has always been compared to Michael Jackson. He’s had comparisons thrown at him even before his identity was known, even offering a knowing cover of ‘Dirty Diana’ in the Trilogy era to feed the fire. But for Dawn FM to evoke Thriller so overtly, and to carry on its magnitude so accurately, is something no other artist truly has ever done.
Thriller isn’t an impactful album for its material as much as it is for what it represents - pop music at its most grandiose and perfected. The Weeknd manages to replicate that feeling without directly carbon-copying it, except for maybe the rock guitar on ‘Sacrifice’ resembling Jackson’s ‘Beat It’. It’s an album of disco crossed with synth-pop of the highest budget, surpassing even the expectations laid out in his GQ interview with Mark Anthony Green - “New. Sweaty. Hard. Drenched-suit, grinding-on-the-girl/boy-of-your-dreams party records.”
Continuing directly after the death at the end of the Weeknd’s last album After Hours, FM’s concept of a radio show trapped in purgatory not only allows you to suspend disbelief at the Weeknd clearly building off of the success of ‘Blinding Lights’, but gives the record a higher purpose. The ‘radio album’ has been done by the likes of Vince Staples and Oneohtrix Point Never in the past few years, but The Weeknd uses it as a medium for communication with the mortal world after death. It’s telling that the most impeccable vocal section on the album reads, “life’s a dream / cause it’s never what it seems”.
Poptimism is at its highest point in years, much to the dismay of sections of the underground. But Dawn FM is the best album of the year because it does what outstanding pop music is supposed to and, some may argue, does best - make you feel like part of something larger than life itself.