The best albums of 2022 so far
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Loading... - Robbe Jansens
- 27 Jun 2022
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Horace Andy – Midnight Rocker
Rocksteady and dub productions shepherded by Adrian Sherwood – with strings, melodica and harmonica – provide classy backing for a man who could claim to have most beautiful singing voice. His vibrato seems buffeted by the bass that surrounds him, a voice in total communion with its surroundings as he delivers sermons on the state of the world.
Bad Bunny
The world’s most popular pop artist, if we’re using streaming data as the measure, is also one of its most gifted. Even if you don’t understand, his vocal lines are so packed with poignancy that little romances and histories suggest themselves anyway. Hopping from trap to mambo to house to EDM to wistful pop to every pace of reggaeton, he evokes every possible mood of summer.
Big Thief – Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You
Folk-rock at heart but spanning bluegrass, squalling rock, scratchy trip-hop and more on this 20-track double album, songs continue to pour from one of the most prolific bands in the today. Even more amazing than their versatility and hit rate is their strength of feeling: Adrianne Lenker’s vocals and the band’s playing are suffused with struggles and utterly sincere love.
Axel Boman – LUZ
Dubby breakbeat house, smooth yacht-rock atmospherics, hip-hop: the first of producer Boman’s two 2022 collections is headily eclectic and a rare entity in a genre where tracks almost always trump albums: it repays listening from beginning to end, rather than cherrypicking songs for a playlist.
Cate Le Bon – Pompeii
“Raise a glass in a season of ash,” Le Bon sings on her sublime sixth album, written as she attempted to lean into the chaos of the pandemic and, inspired by the likes of Cabaret Voltaire, embraces curiosity instead of fear. Pompeii is rich with mercurial saxophones and a tarnished sense of dark glamour, as if someone had roughed up early Roxy Music. It’s cool, with a weird strut you couldn’t hope to emulate, but also distinctly vulnerable, with Le Bon offering up unvarnished humanity as a gesture towards hope.
Charli XCX – Crash
A rare example of an artist pulling off a perfect pop heel-turn. On her last album for – a fractious relationship – XCX decided to play them at their own game, leaning into the character of “major label pop star” and embracing blue-chip co-writes and radio friendly bangers. Crash works because it never feels weighed down by the concept, filled with instant songs such as Beg for You and Baby, and no small amount of emotion. It wasn’t just about breaking up with her label, but the conclusive end of her wavering long-term relationship and the loss of her late collaborator, Sophie.
Eric Chenaux – Say Laura
Permit some warranted hyperbole: the songwriter has one of the all-time great singing voices in popular music, an intensely romantic Chet Baker-ish instrument that seems to float with piercing direction, like a paper aeroplane thrown hard through mist. Backed with his equally distinctive burbling guitar, Say Laura is a perfect gateway to his oeuvre with some of his loveliest compositions – and There They Were may be his best ever.
Silvana Estrada – Marchita
The debut album by the 24-year-old songwriter brims with the specific sadness of not just one’s first breakup, but “mourning that first idea one has about love”, she has said. Estrada plays the cuatro, which creates a tender bed for her dramatic vocals. Inspired as a singer by jazz greats such as Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, she flinches with pain (Te Guardo), frays with anguish (Marchita) and can summon a precision as elegant and propulsive as the flutter of a bird’s wing (Sabré Olvidar). A captivating arrival.
Fana Hues – Flora + Fana
Hues’ dreamy second full-length album is R&B so liquid you could swim in it. As the musician attempts to come to terms with a breakup, she turns those languid depths into a prism refracting an endless wealth of seductive shades: Moscato is a vulnerable, acoustic plea from the bottom of an empty wine glass; High Roller a subtly psychedelic epic; Wild Horses a diaphanous bliss-out.
Father John Misty – Chloë and the Next 20th Century
A melodically stunning series of genre pastiches – easy listening bossa nova, swing band brass, John Barry soundtrack – over which Joshua Tillman spins one mordantly funny short story after another: misery memoir authors are cancelled, relationships rekindled by recently deceased pets, ill-advised sexual liaisons disrupted by car accidents. A songwriter at the top of his game. Read More...
