The best songs and albums of 2022

Lists, essays and podcasts to make sense of a year's worth of wonderful chaos.

View this email online Dec. 17, 2022 by Jacob Ganz This week, we're sharing our lists of the best music of 2022. NPR More than any other year I can recall in the last decade-plus of making lists with NPR Music, trying to sum up 2022 felt like an exercise in trying to make sense of chaos. But it was also a great time. The 50-or-so people (staff, contributors and station partners) who gather near the end of each year to construct our lists of the best songs and albums across many different genres don’t approach lists as authorities, but as curious, invested and deeply enthusiastic, open-eared listeners. And, just as it happens every year, I spent the last weeks of the year getting knocked over, again and again, by some song or album I somehow hadn’t heard yet, not to mention the brilliance of my colleagues. We have been publishing the results over the last two weeks. Two lists are the headliners: The 50 Best Albums of 2022 and The 100 Best Songs of 2022. But the abundant fruits of our efforts would not be contained, so you can find more — lists, essays, podcasts and more — in NPR Music’s Best Music of 2022 package, collected on a beautiful, not-at-all chaotic page for your reading and listening pleasure. And in that spirit, if you’ll forgive me, I’d like to offer up one more list: 10 times across our package on the year’s best music when I read something that made me want to stop what I was doing and listen to some great song or album from 2022. In his list of the best classical albums of the year, I loved what Tom Huizenga wrote about a collaboration by the composer Caroline Shaw and the Attacca Quartet in which “trap doors abound”: “First Essay (Nimrod) introduces a lilting theme that soon gets twisted and tossed down a rabbit hole of surprising deconstructions. A solitary moment where strings, in extremely high register, dovetail in a chromatic haze, is alone worth the price of admission to this musical funhouse.” Andrew Flanagan’s description of Anna Butterss, from our list of the year’s best experimental albums, gets Butterss' inspiring, shape-shifting music just right. Butterss “seems to shadow-chop through her songs, finding weak spots in their otherwise sparkling walls to pound a hole for peeking through," he writes. Since reading that, I’ve been shadow-chopping my way through obstacles all week. Newsletter continues after sponsor message Sidney Madden on Yaya Bey’s coolly devastating Remember Your North Star, one of the year’s best R&B albums: “Like a finger tracing the scars of a gash left untended, the album glides across genres — reggae, jazz, blues, R&B — to deliver a dissertation about how often Black women are inadequately loved." In a feature essay about Bad Bunny, whose 2022 somehow topped his record-breaking 2020 and 2021, critic Isabelia Herrera nailed exactly what makes him the icon of the moment, at home in Puerto Rico and across the world: “This is who Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio is: both an irrepressible global pop star and political provocateur who collects streaming accolades with ease, but one who refuses to temper his idiosyncrasies or move to U.S. pop's center. His commitment to self-determination for the people of his island is strong; his unwillingness to sing in English is stronger.” In an essay published as part of a series of reflections on the year in jazz, our critic Nate Chinen, of Philadelphia partner station WRTI, described a January concert by Immanuel Wilkins as “among the first of its kind I'd experienced in the pandemic era: a crowded, swaying fellowship, wildly euphoric even from behind a KN95 mask.” “Friday Night,” from Beth Orton’s comeback album Weather Alive, was one of our 100 best songs of the year, and here’s Otis Hart summing it up perfectly: “Alongside the consoling shuffle of Tom Skinner's kit, Beth Orton (that voice!) details the devastation of lost love, the sort of sadness that keeps you inside and up late on a Friday night. Memory makes a merciless bedfellow.” Here’s Sheldon Pearce on Ice Spice’s “Munch (Feelin’ U),” another pick from our list of the year’s 100 best songs, which has been stuck in my head for months: “As drill beats go, this rumbling creation is nondescript, all itching hi-hats and growling 808s, … but the production’s city-leveling tremors clear out space that Ice Spice confidently promenades into. Her lyrics are snappy yet composed, but the magic is in that sneering hook, the piercing, eye-rolling disdain of its opening quip: ‘You thought I was feeling you?’ as if it’s an idea beyond human comprehension.” On our list of the year’s 50 best albums, Hazel Cills wrote that listening to Nilüfer Yanya’s album PAINLESS “sometimes makes me feel like I'm handling one of those self-defense trinkets designed for girls — a plastic comb that splits at the center to reveal a switchblade, a pretty, innocuous thing with grim intent.”  Here's Grayson Haver Currin on S.G. Goodman’s Teeth Marks, also on our 50 best albums list: “[I]n these poignant tales of friends lost to alcoholism and opioid addiction, or her flinty excoriations of capitalism's hamster-wheel machinations, there is … an abiding love for … home, expressed through the implicit demand that such places and their people be lifted up rather than so routinely put down.” To give NPR Music’s album of the year, Beyoncé’s glittering, house music-inspired opus RENAISSANCE, its due, we knew we had to go big. So Ann Powers got in touch with two more powerhouse critics, Danyel Smith and Daphne A. Brooks, and the three of them exchanged thoughts about the moments embedded within the album’s massive, overwhelming scale that sparkled so brightly. (Yes, I am technically cheating by counting these three quotes as a single entry, but what can I say? It was, as I have noted, a year of chaos and abundance.) Here’s Ann: “With RENAISSANCE, Beyoncé has given us something beyond her personal story, or even the wide-opening interface between that story and Black history as shaped by migration, racism and resistance. She's created a detail-rich panorama inspired by the living history of that sacred space, the club. It's her Sistine Chapel, and it deserves to be discussed that way — as a star-filled imaginary sky, and an origin myth that comes to life through its brilliant brush strokes. To really appreciate it is to focus on its remarkable design, the way it sounds and feels different depending on one's perspective.” And Daphne: “'All Up in Your Mind' is giving such good Gary Numan 1979 'Cars' eighth-grade vibes for me. I remember how ‘Cars’ was the only 'rock' song that my fellow Black schoolmates in my fraught integrated junior high experience copped to as being their jam. … I have no desire to go back to the 1980s dawn of the Reagan disaster, but I do love love love how this track leans into its own form of Afrofuturism culled from this era.” And Danyel on the universe Beyoncé is building in the album: “The lines I want hourly are ‘Worldwide hoodie with a mask outside,’ and ‘In case you forgot how we act outside.’ That's it. That's culture right now. We are thugging it out in these (still pandemic) streets, but we will be free. We will see each other and we will have community. We will blast music in each other's actual company. We will help each other live.” Here's to blasting music in each other’s company. Listen to your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to hear live radio from WUFT 89.1 (edit station). Need a new playlist? 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