2022 is the yr that music thrived again after years of lockdown. With live gigs and festivals making a full return to the world, many artists dropped long-awaited albums that served as soundtracks for what has been a crazy yr. Within the mainstream, superstars like Beyoncé, Rosalía and Kendrick Lamar returned with records that were well worth the wait, Alex G and Jockstrap delivered profession bests, and newcomers Ethel Cain and Two Shell left a long-lasting impression with their stellar debuts. Listed here are our 20 best albums of the yr.

After dropping “Mel Made Me Do It” back in September, Stormzy blessed us along with his eagerly anticipated album This Is What I Mean in November this yr. Described as “an intimate and sincere love letter to music”, it’s a melting pot of genres that features the likes of Sampha and Jacob Collier. Above all, the album is personal, vulnerable, raw, with lyrics that check with his newly-rekindled relationship with Maya Jama (“And I had your heart, that is the maddest part”) in addition to his old feud with Wiley (“I can’t war with no broken man”). 

The award-winning artist put it best himself in a letter he penned to fans to coincide with the album’s release: “I feel like I overshare, which makes me feel naked at times.” And it’s exactly this nakedness which makes Stormzy’s music – and This Is What I Mean specifically – so enchanting. (Serena Smith)

19. THAIBOY DIGITAL, BACK 2 LIFE

Back to life, back to reality, back to being a full-grown adult publically listening to Drain Gang. As things became a bit less socially distance-focused this yr, Thaiboy Digital’s latest album Back 2 Life, where the rapper mourns his past life in Sweden after reluctantly moving back to Thailand attributable to visa complications, has unfortunately grow to be the commuting soundtrack for sad adults having to pull themselves back properly into the office after getting used to working from home. It’s not likely the identical thing, but no less than this fashion we are able to daydream about what life could be like if Thaiboy really was Mr CEO. (Hatti Rex)

18. FKA TWIGS, CAPRISONGS

Until now, FKA twigs’ projects have been concise, not more than ten tracks long. So when Twigs gifted us Caprisongs, a sprawling mixtape of seventeen songs, with features starting from Jorja Smith to Rema, Pa Salieu and Daniel Caesar, it was clear change was afoot. ‘Papi Bones’ sees twigs and Shygirl ready for carni on a dancehall inflected banger, while the bratty, half-sung chorus of ‘Oh My Love’ is a rambunctious, energetic, flex. Lead single ‘Tears Within the Club (feat. The Weeknd)’ includes the yr’s most moreish hook in “I wanna get you out of my hips, my thighs/My hair, my eyes, my late-night cries”, nevertheless Abel casually rhyming “There’s no escaping me” with “let it out like therapy” makes for certainly one of his more terrifying couplets. But across this record, and its visual landscape shot by Aidan Zamiri, Twigs comes into her own: adventurous, often funny, and all the time hopeful. After the gut wrenching despair of 2019’s Magdalene, Caprisongs arrival is actually a tonic. (Elliot Hoste)

17. TWO SHELL, ICONS

Who’re Two Shell? It’s an irresistible mystery. The UK dance duo have spent the last couple of years bouncing anonymously around Europe’s most prestigious decks – their faces obscured by scarves and demon masks or squashed behind pairs of creamy nylon tights. Their cartoonish, pulse-raising sets are scattered with unexpected shards of Justin Timberlake, Sugababes and Alicia Keys, in addition to some uncanny TikTok-style narration. Are they piss-taking trolls “sending up” contemporary DJ culture? A rotating motley crew of imposters? A glitchy, early 00s web virus made flesh? 

Although not providing many answers, their summer-released EP, Icons, no less than shows that they usually are not a novelty. Over five tracks, the pair immerse us of their warped, post-post-internet vision of UK bass music – a euphoric mixture of stuttering synths, hiccuping chipmunk vocals, and heart-racing syncopation. As you listen, there’s an urgent, unshakeable feeling that they’re build up to something – something big, daring and era-defining – and we are able to’t wait to see what comes next. (Dominique Sisley)

16. BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD, ANTS FROM UP THERE

Hailing from Cambridgeshire, Black Country, Latest Road burst onto the scene back in 2019 with their debut album For the First Time. Nevertheless it wasn’t until this yr with the discharge of their good sophomore album Ants From Up There that the band was launched into the indie rock stratosphere. Embracing the flute and violin as much as their Slint-inspired guitar riffs, and witty, sentimental and referential lyrics, the album firmly marked itself as certainly one of the more odd and heart-wrenching break-up albums of the yr. 4 days before the discharge of Ants From Up There, lead singer Isaac Wood announced his departure from the band, suggesting perhaps his writing references him breaking up with the band also. He leaves in his trail a very good album, one which maintains a supreme level of artistry with peak emotional payoff. (Louis Merrion)

15. YEULE, GLITCH PRINCESS

“My name is Nat Cmiel” begins yeule on the primary track of her second album, Glitch Princess. “I’m 22 years old. I like music, dancing, ballet”. From its opening note, yeule lays out the theme of her album: a burgeoning identity in flux. This becomes apparent over the course of the record. She’s bleakly honest on “Too Dead Inside” (“I can only get so close/ To looking like how I need to be”), and almost too relatable on ‘Friendly Machine’ (“I prefer to think I’m doing just nice/I like to go looking my symptoms online”). Listening to Glitch Princess appears like what it might be to inhabit another person’s brain – not only listening to their thoughts, but to physically be inside someone’s brain, to see all those glittering synapses and raw, shuddering nerves up close. In this fashion, yeule delivers a record that lives as much as its glitched-out name. (Elliot Hoste)

14. MARINA HERLOP, PRIPYAT

Marina Herlop’s third album, Pripyat, taps into musical textures and melodies that feel timeless. They might exist just as easily in precedent days before humans walked the Earth – or, even further back, on the glittering birth of the universe – as in a distant future where humans have left our home planet deserted, just like the Ukrainian city that lends the album its name. For those unfamiliar with its history, Pripyat was abandoned in 1986 consequently of the Chernobyl disaster; now, vegetation has overtaken the empty city and wild animals roam the streets. Any parallel between Pripyat and the disaster, or current events in Ukraine, was a “total coincidence” nevertheless, as Herlop told Dazed earlier this yr: “I normally select words based on how they sound – and I feel the sonority of this word could be very beautiful.” That being said, Herlop’s vocal contortions and quivering orchestration, on tracks akin to “Abans Abans” or “Miu”, would make an ideal soundtrack for brand spanking new growth in a post-human landscape. While reaching for something timeless, the Catalan musician has grasped the essence of our fragile times. (Thom Waite)

13. OLIVER SIM, HIDEOUS BASTARD

“Have I made you proud?,” Oliver Sim asks on “Fruit”, a song that recalls the emotional isolation and sexual longing that collects while being within the closet. It’s the penultimate missive on Hideous Bastard – Sim’s first solo album independent of The xx – which is scattered with frank and unvarnished lyricism like “I do know I’m destructive / And all my friends are like this / Haven’t left the home in days,” as he sings on “Saccharine”. Nevertheless it’s also stylish and brooding, his gloomy vocals layered with preternatural howls, harmonised synths, and Jimmy Somerville’s sub-nuclear falsetto. The entire thing compounds the horror and ecstasy in unpacking a lifetime’s price of shame: in the times before the record’s release, Sim shared a press release revealing he has been living with HIV since 17. “I see this, the entire means of exorcising this stuff, as embracing my little monster – the hideous – within the bid of feeling less hideous,” he said. (Daniel Rodgers)

12. MALIBU, PALACES OF PITY

Providing an unbearably beautiful soundtrack for the cold months ahead, listening to Malibu’s second EP Palaces of Pity is like drifting through the ocean and getting lost within the everlasting tides. Named after Daniel Schmidt and Gabriel Abrantes’s 2011 film, the French producer’s sophomore album features five ethereal tracks that ebb and flow with quiet intensity, while lush strings and countless reverb that suggest a vastness that may’t ever be reached. Malibu has described the record as a spiritual sequel to 2019’s One Life, which was inspired by the lack of a friendship. While still tapping into these universally felt emotions, Palaces of Pity appears like memories being pulled to the surface only to blur out of recognition, eventually drifting towards the nine-minute closer (aptly named after the traditional Greek epic poem “Iliad”), before eventually fading into nothingness. (Günseli Yalcinkaya)

11. RAINY MILLER, DESQUAMATION (FIRE, BURN. NOBODY)

A well-known face within the North West scene alongside friends and frequent collaborators Blackhaine and Space Afrika, Rainy Miller is an artist’s artist, working alongside his peers to nurture homegrown talent on his Fixed Abode imprint. The Preston-born musician is an arresting force during live shows and can crawl and contort his body into uncomfortable shapes, banging his head against the decks like an altar as the group hangs onto his every move. This was particularly evident during his latest tour for Desquamation (Fire, Burn. No one), Miller’s second full-length release. Across ten tracks, Miller moves between various broken states, skewing traditional electronic and rap tropes with cold, mechanical production that stops and starts like broken gears. Miller’s voice is barely audible at points, with murmurs like “I need to go home” that schism into glitched-out breaks, like a panic attack unravelling in full. Breathtakingly intimate, raw and near unimaginable to look away. (Günseli Yalcinkaya)

10. BLADEE & ECCO2K, CREST

This sincere sonic ode to the friendship of Bladee and Ecco2k was so sweet that it doesn’t even feel prefer it could have even been released during this hellfire yr, and yet it was.  Dropped at the peak of Drain Gang’s world tour, the nine-track album captures the elusive group’s youthful nihilism through existential-lite lyrics and trancey synth lines: “We expect we exist, that’s why we suffer, can we not?” croons Bladee on “5 Star Crest”, a five-part track dedicated to their friend and producer Vattenrum, who died in 2019.

Crest makes more sense when you think about it an anthology of music celebrating their lighthearted kinship created over the span of just a few years, giving the remainder of us something to hope for whilst the world seemingly crumbles. Bladee and Ecco2k flirt with religious iconography and playful nihilism, as casual listeners that originally found light inside the angelic boyish falsettos unwittingly find themselves paying respects to the everlasting cult of Drain Gang. (Hatti Rex)

9. MEGAN THEE STALLION, TRAUMAZINE

If anyone can turn trauma into a very good time, it’s Megan Thee Stallion. While the botched release of her second studio album was traumatic in itself with alleged leaks from inside her label, the record was an illustration in how Hot Girl Meg’s talent all the time rises above the nonsense. Franker than her previous releases in its direct acknowledgement of the hardships which have really mounted against her despite – or possibly even consequently of – her stratospheric rise, Traumazine relies less on her roster of rap personas and gets personal about being a “bad bitch” with “bad anxiety”, coping with lost family members, fake friends, and constant criticism on the web, particularly in relation to the Tory Lanez shooting. “Fuck it bitch, I’m not nice,” she declares on “Not Nice”, deliberately embodying the “boogie-bitch” her haters wish to be petrified of on the Rico Nasty featuring “Scary” and effortlessly, audaciously stunting “Mugler suit in my meeting, Wagyu steak what I’m eating,” while her “pussy is the most costly meal you’ll ever eat,” on “Plan B”. An album to hype you up when the pressure is “Pressurelicious,” added pop hits like “Sweetest Pie” and delicious Jhené Aiko collab “Consistency” are a Megan Thee Stallion masterclass in methods to clear your enemies while having a fun and sexy time – because she’s her, her, her, her, her, her, her. (Vanessa Hsieh)

8. VIAGRA BOYS, CAVE WORLD

The pandemic undeniably sent us all scrolling down some weird online wormholes – and this is especially the case for Viagra Boys frontman Sebastian Murphy, whose third album Cave World plunges deep into the web’s darkest corners. On lead single “Troglodyte”, Murphy sings about an incel who dreams of becoming a shooter – “He says he don’t think in science/ He thinks that each one the news is fake,” he cries out – while “Return to Monkee”, a literal meme reference, turns a lens on the Theodore Kaczynski bros, as Murphy mockingly cries out “Leave society/ Be a monkey” against chaotic screeches of saxophone. 

But regardless of how hilarious Murphy’s takedowns of anti-vaxxers and Jordan Peterson bros are, Cave World doesn’t feel condemning – tracks like  “Ain’t No Thief” and “Punk Rock Loser” are self-aware accounts of Murphy’s own lousy behaviour. If anything, the album and its debauched strain post-punk function a commentary on how fucking crazy the world is at once. As Murphy told Dazed earlier this yr: “I feel there’s lots of inspiration just from the downfall of society and what’s been occurring on the planet recently and the divide between people and the extremely polar opposite ideas of how the world must be – and just this general feeling of chaos and destruction.” (Günseli Yalcinkaya)

7. JOCKSTRAP, I LOVE YOU JENNIFER B

Jockstrap’s debut album has been a protracted time coming. The experimental pop duo – made up of Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye – have been beloved by music critics since they first began collaborating at London’s Guildhall School Of Music back in 2016. Their classically trained roots and adventurous tastes come to the fore in I Love You Jennifer B, which – in typical Jockstrap style – is almost unimaginable to categorise.

Recorded with the assistance of an 18-piece orchestra, it looks to each the past and the longer term, with easy breezes of 60s-style songwriting colliding with choppy distortions and harsh, complex textures. More often than not, the genre mutates inside each track: soft acoustic strums fall into cascading shrieks (“Neon”); breathy vocals ricochet like a pinball into digitised chaos (“Concrete Over Water”); operatic wails jolt suddenly into erratic bubblegum pop (“Debra”). It’s a sound that shouldn’t work in any respect, yet all the time does – partly due to the sparkling chemistry of Ellery and Skye. “I actually have my very own feelings that I want to get out with my music,” Skye told AnOther earlier this yr. “It’s my feelings and Georgia’s feelings placed on top of one another.” The result is definitely essentially the most original mainstream release in recent memory. (Dominique Sisley)

6. ALEX G, GOD SAVE THE ANIMALS

God Save the Animals is Alex G’s ninth studio album and, beyond query, his best yet. For years best often called an ultra-DIY bedroom producer, the Philadelphia-based songwriter has capitalised on the chances afforded by his slow-burn success. From the start of his profession, his sound has often been described as ‘lo-fi’, but you would be hard-pressed to use that label to an album which is so wealthy, lush and expansive in its sonic palette. 

Fairly than a radical departure, God Save the Animals expands on the weather which characterised his previous work –  technical experimentation combined with a pointy knack for melody – and creates something which is each diverse and satisfyingly cohesive. There really is quite a bit occurring here, from the hyper-pop explosion of “No Bitterness” to the thoughtful folk meditation of “Miracles”. But nevertheless playful his approach could also be, it never feels as if Alex G is experimenting for the sake of it – there may be a consistent tone which unites these wildly disparate genres and influences. At times – akin to second single “Cross the Sea” – it reaches something approaching transcendence. (James Greig)

5. CHARLI XCX, CRASH

On August 15 2021, what looks as if a lifetime ago, Charli XCX tweeted an image of her own name etched across a tombstone, the date March 18, 2022 carved surreptitiously below. It was on this present day, the Crash era was born. Each a meta-narrative on pop superstardom and a treatise on self-destruction, Charli’s fifth studio album is a pulsing, pop tour-de-force, inspired by the 80s sensibility of early Janet Jackson albums. The concept for Crash was constructed around David Cronenberg’s 1996 film of the identical name, wherein characters are sexually aroused by automobile wrecks, and thru the album’s title track we’re transported into Charli’s Ballardian, psychosexual soundscape: “I’m about to crash into the water/Gonna take you with me” she chants assuredly, its menacing intent perfectly offset by a sparkling synth refrain. The record’s most delicious moments, just like the vocoded warble of Lightning’s pre-chorus, exist only due to Charli’s ability to satisfyingly scratch on the within your brain, proving a charming hook really is nature’s purest drug. On Crash, pop is at its most primal. (Elliot Hoste)

4. ROSALÍA, MOTOMAMI

If, on the last album cover, Rosalía presented herself as a pseudo-religious figure – stood on the pearly gates, arms outstretched, swathed in white linen – then MOTOMAMI is what happens when the divine mother steps outside her margins – face obscured by a biker helmet, body covered only by acrylic nails and Rick Owens platforms. It’s a declaration she bears down within the opening seconds of “SAOKO” where she sing-raps “Yo me transformo” and “Fuck el estilo”. Throughout the album, Rosalía stretches herself across genres, shapeshifting between sultry melancholia and autotuned disaffections on “LA COMBI VERSACE” to the sassy and ridiculous sing-song quality of “BIZCOCHITO”. She meets dembow rhythms with seductive electronica on “CANDY”, clangorous cyberpunk with piano heartache on “CUUUUuuuuuute” and sings about riding her man’s “pistola” on “HENTAI” with such pathos that it evokes Etta James, Ella Fitzgerald. After which there’s her falsetto – mournful, pristine – that’s the psychic break in 16-tracks of elastic, adrenaline-charged hydraulics. (Daniel Rodgers)

3. KENDRICK LAMAR, MR MORALE AND THE BIG STEPPERS

From soundtracking the BLM protests in 2020 along with his track “Alright” to being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music for Rattling, Kendrick has already shaped the rap landscape immeasurably. So, when Kendrick shared his fifth album back in May, it marked a turning point within the rapper’s profession, not to say his final release under Top Dawg Entertainment, the label he has remained a figurehead for a decade. From the mammoth opening track “United in Grief”, it’s clear the rapper has modified his focus. The 18 tracks enterprise deep into Lamar’s psyche as we sit in on his therapy session and bear witness to the rapper at his most vulnerable and confessional, exploring his childhood, fatherhood and marriage. Sonically, he builds upon his previous albums, incorporating sounds of jazz and psychedelia into tracks akin to “Father Time”, alongside more contemporary trap bangers like “N95”. MMTBS is a real insight into the inner workings of certainly one of hip-hop’s most gifted artists and a superb curtain call for his time at Top Dawg. (Louis Merrion)

2. ETHEL CAIN, PREACHER’S DAUGHTER

Ethel Cain’s anticipated studio album Preacher’s Daughter is an expansive, atmospheric debut. Suffusing ominous southern gothic with perfect pop melodies, doom-laden metal and aching country ballads, Cain invokes the late-night longing of nostalgic Americana tinged with a menace that’s all her own.

Cain is the musical alias of Hayden Silas Anhedönia. Born and raised in a Southern Baptist household together with her deacon father in Tallahassee, she left the church at 16 before coming out as trans. Now 24, her first studio album explores the punitive, shadowy side of ecclesiastical life while retaining a certain romantic attachment to the potent symbolism of the church. Often drawing comparisons to Lana del Rey, Cain shares the queen of LA sadcore’s fetishisation of melancholy and her preoccupation with grand American narratives, but Preacher’s Daughter is undercut with something more incendiary. If del Rey is the prom queen, Cain is the subversive outsider, skipping prom to smoke cigarettes with the wild girls. (Emily Dinsdale)

1. BEYONCÉ, RENAISSANCE

Once you’re Beyoncé, what’s left to beat? You’ve already achieved icon status a thousand times over, so could be forgiven for resting on one’s laurels, relaxing within the knowledge that your work has made an indelible mark on the culture. Well, not this Beyoncé. When Renaissance dropped in the midst of an otherwise lacklustre summer, it felt just like the one thing on this cursed planet we could all agree on: she’d done it again. From the very first listen, the flagrant bombast of ‘I’m That Girl’ led to the strutting bravado of ‘Alien Superstar’, melding into the glassy flow of ‘Virgo’s Groove’, and on, and on, and on – a track-by-track masterclass in constructing a world of dance music influences, paying homage to the unique trailblazers and fashioning a path of its own. The one problem? Renaissance has been out for 4 months and, still, not a single visual in sight. Catch me on the gates of Parkwood Entertainment a la Eric Andre, screaming: release the tapes!!! (Elliot Hoste)