The best albums of 2022 (so far)

Not many people knew who Charlotte Adigéry or Bolis Pupul were when "Topical Dancer" was released, but anyone lucky enough to have their ears blessed with this Belgian duo's hyperliterate electropop sound knows that they are soon going to become household names. Wildly accessible and casually confrontational, "Topical Dancer" is a record about racism, politics, and identity, all backed by abstract dance beats that are as irresistible as they are instantly memorable. Co-produced by Soulwax, "Topical Dancer" pops out of your speakers due to its neverending sonic surprises. "HAHA" takes Adigéry's laughter and chops it/rearranges it into fascinating new shapes that don't sound too dissimilar to legendary indietronica act The Books. "Making Sense Stop" is a loving and unexpected Talking Heads tribute, "Reappropriate" is a stark note about the importance of embracing one's sexuality, while the raw self-deprecating look at societal appearance standards that is "Ceci n'est pas un cliché" stutters, stops, restarts, and engages with the listener immediately. A dynamic record with a distinct identity and few immediate sonic peers, "Topical Dancer" is a hell of a topical album that demands you dance to it. Mission accomplished.

Nonbinary artist Robert Ouyang Rusli has made a career out of scoring films and occasionally dabbling in hardcore face-melting extreme rap music. When the pandemic lockdowns hit them while living in Brooklyn, Rusli used their OHYUNG moniker to unleash two wildly different albums: the extreme noise terror of "GODLESS" and the astonishingly warm, delicate, ambient masterpiece that is "imagine naked!". With song titles adapted from a t. tran le poem, "imagine naked!" is Rusli's first true attempt at ambient music, fulling exploring a style they were familiar with but hadn't fully approached prior. What's astonishing about "imagine naked!" is just how good it is, even when clocking in at just a hair under two hours. Rusli understands the power of tension and release, of genre-hopping and texture-changing, even within the framework of an ambient record. Minor key piano chords set a sad tone on one track, while warm billowing clouds of synths can wrap around you on the next. "imagine naked!" is a meditation, a journey, and an emotional diary all at once. There is no shortage of good ambient material released every year, but OHYUNG's masterwork loudly announces itself with soft, beautiful whispers. Harold Budd would be proud.

We hear it from the cultural bleachers every year: "Rock is dead!" Every year, the answer is always the same: no, it isn't -- you're just not looking hard enough. While the Travis Barkerfication of pop music has opened nostalgic doors to the sugary pop-punk inflection points of the early 2000s, the real rock craftspeople have been toiling in obscurity, making each new power chord sound more epic than the last. Boston's Pet Fox doesn't need flashy guests to make their point. Instead, they got into a studio and tracked the ten excellent songs of their debut album "A Face in Your Life" in a single room. Fans of the era may hear obvious influences like The Verve Pipe on tracks like "It Won't Last" or Creeper Lagoon on the beautiful mid-tempo closer "Slows Me Down", but Pet Fox is still very much their own creature. They know the power of solo'd guitar hook, a steady melodic bassline, and of lyrics rife with self-doubt. In fact, after hearing "A Face in Your Life", we aren't exactly sure if we're being transported to alternative rock's past or getting a glimpse of its storied future.

If Aoife O'Donovan had decided to retire at any point in the last few years, her legacy would've been more than secure. Having been in bands like Crooked Still, Sometymes Why, and I'm With Her, along with a go-to collaborator for folk/bluegrass greats like Sarah Juroz and Chris Thile, O'Donovan has racked up an impressive body of work that is impressive to the point of being insurmountable. Yet instead of resting on her laurels, O'Donovan presses on, and with "Age of Apathy", she achieves new songwriting highs. Swapping out longtime producer-in-crime Tucker Martine for Joe Henry, there's a warmth to "Age of Apathy" that stretches beyond its lovely instrumentation. While the ghost of Joni Mitchell has cast its shadow over her solo work for some time, "Age of Apathy" at times embraces it outright, as the dramatic title track could've easily fit on Mitchell's 1976 sprawling epic "Hejira". Yet O'Donovan's style has always been more than a mere summation of her influences, and on the heart-rendering reconciliation epic "Prodigal Daughter", her words cut right to the bone. "Prodigal daughter returns like a lamb to the slaughter / She yearns for the things that you taught her," she coos, and the effect is riveting. This "Age" is a golden one.

Denzel Curry has always been a rapper's rapper. While his switching between numerous voices sometimes remained a polarizing element, Curry had a deep knowledge of the rap legends who have come before that true hip-hop heads always appreciated. While his 2019 full-length "ZUU" was his attempt at making a retro hip-hop club record, his recent Kenny Beats mixtapes have allowed him to stretch his sound into wild new directions. Thus, "Melt My Eyez See Your Future" is without question his most accomplished album to date and one of the year's best rap releases, hands down. While the guests are huge (T-Pain, Slowthai, Saul Williams, JID, Rico Nasty), the focus is always on Curry, who works with a cavalcade of producers to deliver some of his most potent tracks yet. He acknowledges his lack of mainstream success beautifully on "X-Wing": "All these beats go dumb in the stereo / But I'm just too smart for the radio / Masked up like a young Rey Mysterio / Mask off when I'm back in the studio." While the brilliant Kal Banx-produced "Walkin'" is perhaps his best standalone single ever, "Melt My Eyez" succeeds because even the dozen-plus producers credited, it feels like Curry's most coherent statement yet. If "ZUU" was his throwback party record and his 2018 breakthrough "TA13OO" was his personal tour through horror-trap, then "Melt My Eyez" feels like the first record that is fully, unabashedly the sound of Denzel Curry. We can't wait for more like this in the "Future".

Manchester's Everything Everything is a powerfully weird group, mixing arty dance-punk with Jonathan Higgs' rapid-fire yelps and high notes to create something that feels totally unique in the rock realm. After their early albums picked up some highly-regarded Mercury Music Prize nominations, their more recent material has branched into stranger, more ethereal directions, frustrating some fans who loved the band's sprightlier early days. The good news is that with "Raw Data Feel", Everything Everything is back in a big way. To help create an album that specifically addresses our current relationship with technology, Higgs' created an AI bot that would help write lyrics in real, feeding it everything from "Beowulf" to 400,000 posts from 4Chan to LinkedIn's entire Terms & Conditions page. Although Higgs only used a small fraction of the lyrics the bot-generated, the creative tension it inspired helps make "Raw Data Feel" pop in a way they haven't in years. "Bad Friday" shows the group fully in charge of the catchy brand of quirkiness, while mid-way track "Cut UP!" does an extraordinary job of folding the album's themes, titles, and characters into itself in a meta-club number that defies explanation. Everything Everything truly lives up to their band name with this record 'cos for all its propulsion and randomness, it feels like it captures the human experience of wanting to have everything, everywhere, all at once.

If you get a call from Robert Glasper, you make sure to pick up. Decorated in Grammys and Emmys, jazz pianist Glasper has made his way through almost every angle of the contemporary Black music experience. His collaboration-heavy 2012 album "Black Radio" found Glasper working with a litany of vocalists, rappers, and other musicians to put all working genres of Black music in perspective. After a rush-released sequel the following year, Glasper found his way working on film and TV scores, which makes his 2022 return to the "Black Radio" aesthetic nothing short of refreshing. The guest list for the third volume feels velvet-rope exclusive: Killer Mike, Q-Tip, H.E.R., Meshell Ndegeocello, Jennifer Hudson, Esperanza Spalding, Lalah Hathaway, Common -- the list goes on. The highlights are numerous, but hearing Ty Dolla $ign being pushed into balladry on closing song "Bright Lights" is a thrill, to say nothing of Yebba's star turn on the smooth, florid jazz piano rhythms on "Over". Launching as close as possible to the ten-year anniversary of the original "Black Radio", Glasper has created the rare kind of trilogy that you only hope expands further.

Prior to "Mercury", the last full-length album we got from James Hinton's The Range moniker was all the way back in 2016. While he managed to bring some collaborations into fruition and released a few EPs, one large reason for this delay between releases was Hinton's move from New York to Vermont. Going from the busiest city in the world to a remote mountainside was designed to get him focused on his work, but instead, the isolation sent him into a multi-year depression, which the COVID-19 pandemic certainly didn't do anything to help with. Thus, while some might expect "Mercury" to be a sad reflection on Hinton's journey, it's actually a propulsive, emotionally robust record, using his trademark vocal samples to bring a human element to his forward-thinking digital beatscapes. While the sample rap verses of "Urethane" touch on the inflection point of where society is at, tracks like the joyous "Cantor" radiate sunshine in a way that's not unnecessarily optimistic so much as it's earned and justified. There are many emotional layers to "Mercury", but just like the substance itself, it's clear that Hinton's career is on the rise.

When the African supergroup Les Amazones d'Afrique was formed, it featured a wide arrange of stars: Angélique Kidjo, Mariam Doumbia (of Amadou & Miriam), Nneka, and seven more. After the outfit released its debut in 2017, several lineup shifts left it so that only Mamani Keïta and Rokia Koné remained on board, Les Amazones soon rounded out its requirement of having ten members with eight new voices added to the lineup. While the outfit's daring attack on genre conventions by moving from hip-hop to dub to West African blues with beautiful abandon garnered them attention, a global pandemic hit shortly after the release of their sophomore LP. Rokia Koné, who had a hard drive full of material she was working on separately from Les Amazones, eventually got put in contact with Jacknife Lee, the rock superproducer who helmed latter-day albums by everyone from U2 to The Killers to his main squeeze: R.E.M.

Somewhat disillusioned by the direction his life had taken him and with not much to do during the lockdown, he was put in contact with Koné and soon immediately began bringing her song ideas into refreshing new light. Occasionally adding thundering drums and liquid synth pads, Lee worked with Koné to deliver an African pop album that didn't play by any standard rules. "Kurunba", for example, breathes lively club energy, while the delicate "Bambougou N'tji" finds a beautiful midpoint between Congotronix and contemporary Western ambient. Koné's vocals are beautiful throughout, but "BAMANAN" is a distinct meeting of worlds, escaping standard "worldbeat" expectations by becoming something wholly unique. One of the year's most fascinating discoveries.

"Psychedelic jazz fusion" may seem like a hard sell in 2022, but the kind folks in Seattle's High Pulp know exactly what they're doing. Formed out of a series of jam sessions, the multi-member collective features multiple keyboardists and saxophonists, all of whom love the bending, experimental side of the medium. Yet "Pursuit of Ends", the second full-length proper, isn't inaccessible. Tracks like "All Roads Lead to Los Angeles" ride skittering, and dexterous percussion while warm synths keep getting warmer, and the saxophone soloists have moments to shine while also coming together in beautiful flourishes of melodic unison. "Pursuit of Ends" is a trippy record that's as deeply indebted to Miles Davis' Quintet eras as it is Flying Lotus. "Kamishijo" rides a steady groove up to the point where it feels like it's about to collapse into itself, one synth solo behaving like a bird trying to get out of a sealed concert hall. Dexterously produced and mixed and featuring layers upon layers of instrumentation you'll find yourself returning to time and time again (to see if there's something you missed -- and there probably is), this is a truly worthy "Pursuit".

Many have called The Smile's debut album the best Radiohead side-project, and it's easy to see why. Formed during the pandemic, this quartet of Radiohead vocalist Thom Yorke and genius guitarist/composer Jonny Greenwood in conjunction with Sons of Kismet drummer Tom Skinner and longtime Yorke producer Nigel Godrich has resulted in an album that feels a lot like Radiohead. While there are easy compositional similarities between Yorke's main gig and The Smile, there are subtle changes to the standard Radiohead formula that helps makes"A Light for Attracting Attention" pop. Greenwood's years as a film composer have given his orchestrations a new edge, and to hear strings run side-by-side with the group's piano-lead pseudo-ballad "Pana-vision" is a real melodic treat. Skinner, an adept percussionist who is unafraid to change time signatures on a dime, calls in several of his friends from the alternative jazz world to give songs like the slithering "The Smoke" some surprising horn-driven passages of pure serenity (which serves in sharp contrast to the horrific lyrics). Acoustic laments, electronic experiments, traditional fuzzed-out angular rockers: The Smile has it all and is definitely attracting our attention.

Egyptian-by-way-of-Alexandria composer Nancy Mounir is deeply aware of her country's musical history. Despite mastering the bass guitar, the violin, the Theremin, and much more, her research into microtones and classic singing techniques has made her dig up multiple recordings from the 1900s. These often-damaged sounds of early audio-age Egyptian singers possess a haunting, tragic quality, so for her debut album "Nozhet El Nofous" (which translates to "Promenade of the Souls"), she decided to breathe new life into them. Leaving the original performances unchanged (and giving each of these deceased legends a prominent feature credit), she builds new orchestrations around each recording, sometimes even padding out her songs with synths and other unconventional instruments to give these documents vital new life. The result is an album drenched in emotion, as the ghosts of the past are dancing with the sounds of the present, creating one of the most dynamic, powerful listening experiences of recent memory. Almost impossible to properly describe, "Nozhet El Nofous" is without question one of the year's greatest finds and something we'll be listening to for decades to come. As clear an Album of the Year frontrunner as there's ever been.

On the second track of "It's Almost Dry", Pusha T's fourth full-length album proper, he refers to himself as "Cocaine's Dr. Seuss." He's not wrong. Featuring numerous productions from Pharrell Williams and his "Daytona" collaborator Kanye West, "It's Almost Dry" defies its hideous cover art to come down as one of King Push's best long-players to date. The beats are often gritty, sparse, and claustrophobic, making Pusha's voice all the more prominent in the mix. Despite guests verses by everyone from Kanye to Jay-Z to Lil Uzi Vert, the star of the show is always Pusha T, happy to spit some of his best bars to date. On "Rock N Roll" with Kid Cudi, he drops classic line after classic line: "I been getting at these coins as I'm breaking down a brick / Make the jump to each level, Super Mario exists!" While the beats can sometimes get haunting to the point of upsetting, Pusha's conviction never waivers, and "It's Almost Dry" proves that after all these years and all these beefs, he's only become more powerful. Unquestionably one of the best rappers in the game right now.

While Australia's anthemic rockers Gang of Youths have been gaining momentum for some time, nothing could prepare old fans and new listeners alike for the revelation that is "angel in realtime." Since 2017's "Go Farther in Lightness", lead singer David Le'aupepe's father passed away, and in digging into his possessions and learning more about his life, he discovered that his father lied about many details of his life, trying to protect his family from a cruel, intolerant world but at a strange emotional cost. "angel in realtime." has us watch Le'aupepe as he processes all of this information against gigantic, cathartic rock choruses. Le'aupepe's everyman vocal tone almost disarms you from the severity of the lyrics, which carry immense weight. "It'll torture me at first, then it'll hurt a little less / And I will pour through every piece of you 'til nothing new is left / Just your eyes in my reflection / And the heavy thing now beating in my chest," he croons on opener "you in everything". How the single "in the wake of your leave" didn't become a radio smash is beyond us, but any lucky soul who's been blessed by this "angel" knows that this album has a powerful, beating heart that pumps even stronger with each new listen—a rock masterpiece in an era with too damn few of them.

If you're looking to start your party this summer, you can do so with one easy step: put on the new Confidence Man album and let the magic happen. Musicians Clarence McGuffie and Reggie Goodchild remain masked while singers Janet Planet and Sugar Bones take to the stage to give us Ace-of-Base-by-way-of-The-B-52's-via-Deee-Lite goof-pop energy. While the outfit's 2018 debut "Confident Music for Confident People" radiated joyful bubblegum energy, their sophomore effort "Tilt" leans more heady dance grooves, full of chant-along choruses and synth horn stabs. The lead single "Feels Like a Different Thing" feels like an outright club anthem, but tracks like "Woman" feels like a candy-coated amalgam of Chicago house and techno-pop tropes that are as giddy as it is undeniably fun. Even more than their debut, Confidence Man finds new layers to their sound, keeping everything uptempo but mixing up the BPMs and styles with creative abandon. "Trumpet Song" is a trance time machine that sends you back to the '90s rave scene, and with everything going on in our present-day world, maybe a tonic full of laser-light nostalgia is just what the disco doctor ordered.

The Suffers are a great band because they do whatever they feel like. While their large membership and active horn section, coupled with powerhouse lead vocalist Kam Franklin, has garnered a lot of comparisons to the late, great Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, The Suffers are very much their own thing. Sure, they can do throwback soul-pop, but they all are down with reggae, funk, and sometimes straight-ahead '70s rock vibes when the mood strikes them. Even the powerhouse opener "Don't Bother Me" from their new album "It Starts with Love" shuffles with enough cowbell and horn charts to almost move into full-bore Gloria Estefan territory. "It Starts with Love" tackles many issues and covers a lot of territory, tackling racism one moment and the parasitic nature of the music industry the next. Some '80s synth pads creep up in a couple of numbers, but The Suffers still make full use of their multi-talented membership to give every song a lively, full-band feel. This is a joyous record filled with layers of excitement, but our favorite track may very well be the samba-esque groove of "Be You", a surprising late-album cut that shows that The Suffers aren't bound to a certain genre or anyone's expectations: they will write a great song in whatever style they like, and our ears are all the better for it.

London's Poppy Ajduha is difficult to classify: is she pop? Is she contemporary soul? Is she electronic? Whatever the answer, Ajudha seems to delight in being a bit of a musical enigma, with her debut album "The Power In Us" unafraid to be overtly political and pointed while never forgetting to make her songs digestible and entertaining. While "Playgod" approaches the topic of body autonomy head-on, its smashing chorus pits hard rock guitars against stacks of wailing wordless vocals, making for a song that's as brave as it is cathartic. Clocking in just a hair over 30 minutes, "The Power In Us" covers a lot of ground, with the powerful rolling centerpiece "Mothers Sisters Girlfriends" evoking early-era Santigold to striking effect. Having grown up in London's jazz scene, Ajudha doesn't tackle her songs through conventional means, adding strings and hot-lick guitars to the mournful "Demons", creating a swirling psychedelic climax that proves to be just as powerful as her stunning vocals. "The Power In Us" feels less like a debut album and more like the start of something special. A "Power"-ful debut.

When Popstrangers' 2013 debut album "Antipodes" went live, it felt like something had shifted. A daring, dynamic record whose inspirations were equal parts Radiohead and The Dismemberment Plan, this trio of London-by-way-of-New-Zealand boys came roaring out the gate with what felt like an instant rock classic. Their sophomore effort, 2014's "Fortuna", came out one year later to a somewhat mixed response, and then -- nothing. The group pegged as rock music's next big thing still managed to tour but took several years off from their project, having only moved to the countryside to begin writing new material within the past few years. The result of their labors is "In Spirit", their long-delayed new album that rightfully remembers what made their debut so electric: the pointed weirdness. Keyboards drool and melt, drum hits go from amped-up to slow-shuffle at a moment's notice, and the guitar lines linger in dark corners, only occasionally striking with some amped-up fuzz. Songs like the dingy wanderlust number "Shine" feels like it's not a part of any specific rock decade, suspended out of time, while the rain-soaked synth number "Crack Track" feels like the work of a rock band who are protesting the very concept of what a rock song is. Strange sonic squiggles and fascinating ideas are baked into every layer of this "Spirit"-ed cake, and after listening to it multiple times, we're only hoping there's not an eight-year break for us to get our next serving.

Zach Cooper and "Sic" Vic Dimotsis come off as regular guys. Their press photo shows them decked out in plaid with paint covering their hands. You wouldn't think at first glance that they just won a Grammy for helping write and produce Jon Batiste's heralded album "We Are" or that they've worked with The Weeknd and SZA. Yet these two dudes are in such demand because they are true students of the great history of soul music in America. The group's debut under their King Garbage moniker was more of a beatscape experiment than an album proper, but their sophomore effort, "Heavy Metal Greasy Love", is nothing short of a revelation.

Obsessed with re-creating the garage sound of early Motown (which acts like Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, Durand Jones & The Indications, and The Marches have all tried to do on their own), "Greasy Love" marries spare drum taps with swinging horns and dusty Mellotron grooves. They're doing soul-pop on their own terms, never once running for explicit recreation so much as taking a specific sonic texture and repurposing it for the modern era. You could tell us that opener "Checkmate" was dug up on a Numero Records archive set and we'd believe you, but tracks like "I Miss Mistakes" marries era-specific vocal affectations to shimmering keyboards, making their album not sound like it's a part of any specific era. The music of King Garbage is its own creation, and we'd be hard-pressed to name an album that's come out this year that's as inventive or flat-out surprising as this one is.

The description of who Ombiigizi are versus what their music sounds like maybe a jarring shift for some. The duo who make up the band are Adam Sturgeon and Daniel Monkman, Canadian First Nations people who have ancestry tracing back to the Ojibway Nation. Yet they are also regular guys who love rock music and are signed to Broken Social Scene's label Arts & Crafts, so they have an appropriately epic, powerful rock sound. Tracks like "Niiyo" radiate arena-sized choruses without having a single word in them, while the searching epic "Spirit In Me" features shouted lyrics about finding yourself within your past and your present. The group's distinct worldview informs their music, playing into indie rock tropes without falling into typical traps, as their reverent spiritual number, "Yaweh", mixes crisp acoustic guitars with light keyboards and what sounds like some First Nations People's changing being sampled in the background. OMBIIGIZI is unmistakably a thundering indie-rock record, but its character and nuances are what keep us coming back to it over and over again.

Can you smell it in the air? Yes, that's the scent of the alternative-rock revival: the '90s are cool again, in case you didn't hear. While the glut of pop stars turning to Travis Barker to go full pop-punk is its own lane, other acts like bebadoobee have been mining the works of Smashing Pumpkins and Imperial Teen to scope out a new type of rock sound in the disparate soundscape of the 2020s. For the young Canadian Hannah Judge, her fanclubwallet project was largely born out of the pandemic, dropping singles and an EP on the way to her full-length debut, "You've Got to Be Kidding Me". We would take any alt-pop confections nowadays, but what's so shocking about fanclubwallet is how incredibly well-developed her sense of melody is. Opener "Solid Ground" sounds like it could've been a mid-tempo stunner for peak-era Everclear, while the lithe "Toast" has structural nods to Wheatus' "Teenage Dirtbag" but lyrical notes on how introverts handled the pandemic ("I haven't learned a thing all damn year / It doesn't really matter since I disappeared"). "Gr8 Timing!" is a rocker so good it's surprising that Ben Kweller didn't try to steal it, but it's partway through this album that you realize all of these comparisons are just that: easy ways to try and frame the unique, deeply satisfying sound that Judge has crafted for herself. To make an album this good on your first go-round? You've got to be kidding me.

While the haunting and beautiful voices of indie-pop duo Lucius have been their main draw, singers Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe had a rough go with the promotional cycle for their long-awaited fourth album "Second Nature". While their vocal talents have been employed by everyone from John Legend to Sheryl Crow to Ozzy Osbourne, they caused quite a tizzy in the press for noting that despite singing the entirety of the chorus to Harry Styles' single "Treat People With Kindness", they never received a feature credit. They're right, of course: that's them on the chorus and trading off in the bridge, but for a song with that title, Styles still got top billing with no listed feature for the girls. Of course, nothing could derail Styles on his third album press cycle, and it's a shame too because it seems some people didn't notice that Lucius' "Second Nature" is quite the sonic treat. Moving further away from the country roots to go into the fully-embossed pop they have become known for, "Second Nature" features lush balladry and beautiful, lost-in-the-disco-lights midtempo dance tracks. While the '80s synth-rock number "Dance Around It" is a beautiful anomaly (featuring Brandi Carlile & Sheryl Crow no less), songs like the warm "Heartbursts" and the strutting torch-pop of "LSD" leap out the speakers with their joyous pop intentions. At this point, cranking out instant classic songs is just "Second Nature" to them.

What makes Miranda Lambert one of the best artists working today is that no matter what album she puts out, it will probably be one of the best country records of the year. Following her public divorce from fellow musician Blake Shelton, she put out 2016's emotional double-disc epic "The Weight of These Wings". Then, she formed the acclaimed trio Pistol Annies, dropped the instant-classic dusty throwback record "The Marfa Tapes" in 2021, and now, in 2022, drops the beautiful "Palomino". Per usual, Lambert plays by her own rules, bringing three of her "Marfa" songs into the studio limelight while also covering Mick Jagger's "Wandering Spirit" for extra spice. Yes, she really did bring in The B-52s to guest on "Music City Queen", but as is always the case, Lambert's songwriting is the star of the show. Her characters suffer from perpetual wanderlust, and she always makes them powerfully relatable, like on "Tourist", which has that instantly memorable line, "I'll take a couple memories but I won't stay behind / I'll never be a number on a population sign." Miranda Lambert is more than the most reliable artist working in country music today: she a rare idol who keeps getting better with each new release.