I have been obsessing about music for what I consider my entire life — meticulously crafting lists, debating song lyrics and marketing rollouts, reordering track sequences, and combing through blogs and thinkpieces and playlists for new songs. There’s a rhythm to it for me that’s practically circadian at this point, from the yearly cataloging of every album I hear for the first time to the annual playlists and roundups that I painstakingly edit and re-edit until my innermost critic is satisfied. In truth, I organize and categorize music as a way to clarify things for myself, as much as it also makes my days more enjoyable. There’s a Basquiat quote I enjoy that goes, “Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.” Consider the above a lifelong scrapbooking project for how I’ve been decorating my time.
Given that framing, ostensibly I use my end of the year albums list to also take stock in my life, and somewhat hint at how all of this (*gestures at the world burning*) has been sitting with me. It helps me to write things down. I can be opinionated and appreciate a good hot take as much as anyone, but often I feel like I’m unable to express myself to the best of my ability in real-time conversation with other people. My worst trait is thoughtlessness; the moments I have regretted most in my life are ones where I have misarticulated how I feel by speaking too quickly. Because of this, I often write things like apology notes and special messages via the notes app in my phone before committing them to paper. (It’s also likely one of the main reasons why I’ve spent so much of my life on music blogs and message boards. The ability to carefully order my thoughts and respond point-by-point to someone appeals to me because it allows me to avoid misunderstandings.) And writing about my life at the end of each year through the lens of art and music opens me up to be more emotionally connective, and ultimately more honest.
All of this is to say that perhaps the strangest thing about my yearly albums list is that over the last few years, I haven’t actually published anything. I’ve faithfully ordered dozens of records and even written about many of them, but I haven’t published an EOTY list since December 2018. Some of that can be chalked up to laziness or life events of course (moving, marriage, illness, business school). Other times it has felt too personal to share. My 2020 post was a series of personal music moments from the pandemic in lieu of a traditional ranked list. At some point, short personal essays on what 10-15 albums meant to me and how they stood out from the hundreds of other albums I’d heard for the first time that year stopped feeling like something worth chipping away at. I’ve become a perennial combination of out of practice and not in the mood.
So tonight I’d like to keep it simple and talk about a few spare moments, songs, and ideas from my favorite 2022 albums. They’ve been written in fragments and loosely grouped into themes that I noticed while writing this, which I guess reflects something about how I’m feeling now.
I. Take My Breath: Ambition and Fearless Artistry
Too often these days, I feel like I’m in a rut. While there have been some wonderful aspects to our collective shift to working from home (stolen moments with Kelly during the work day, increased vinyl spinning, not sharing an office fridge), I’ve also found my life to be a bit more monotonous upon emerging from the pandemic. A lot of this is the mundane realities of growing up and accumulating responsibilities — the list of things to buy and fix in our house grows longer every day — but there’s also a general malaise that comes with the experience of being constantly online and overstimulated. I’ve felt less connected to other people than I used to, and I sometimes worry that my social habits might be eroding. (That’s probably a bit melodramatic, but hey it’s late.)
This feeling is why I appreciated artists in 2022 who had the audacity to command listeners’ attention with the belief that they have something new to say. Amongst the endless deluge of new music, there’s nothing better than a cleared-throat declaration that you’re attempting something special, something that will resonate if given enough chances.
This can often take the form of subverted expectations. The Weeknd followed up his biggest album to date, the most streamed single of literally all time, and a massively successful Super Bowl Halftime Show (I think I have it in my Top 3 ever?) with the comparatively strange Dawn FM. It’s a left turn into city pop, new wave, and disco, all wrapped in the concept of purgatory as a traffic jam, with Jim Carrey narrating along as a cosmic radio DJ and spiritual guide. Abel used his cache to make something truly weird and built another world in which to escape. Its release in the cold January doldrums made for a fantastic way to start the year, and absolute bangers like “Less Than Zero” and “Gasoline” have kept me comically dancing in our living room a full year later.
It can also be satisfying when someone really swings for the fences and connects. My favorite album of the year, Gang of Youths’ angel in realtime., is the rare maximalist rock record that tries to be everything at once and succeeds with confidence and heart. It’s a grand, ambitious work that blends soaring hooks and emotional rawness. It’s also one of the great musical epics of the last decade: poetic and dense and self-referential and graceful. The album tells the true story of frontman David Le’aupepe’s complicated relationship with his deceased father, who kept his past, including a previous family and children, hidden from Le’aupepe until after his death. The Australian band crafted a series of songs that captures the full cycle of grief, confusion, and empathy that Le’aupepe experienced as he grappled with this revelation.
In addition to its heart, angel in realtime. is also a thrilling musical rollercoaster, a triumph of ideas and the desire to make something great. These are brilliantly crafted rock songs, overflowing with sound design and filled with sing-along choruses that rival any U2 anthem in recent memory. The band seamlessly integrates Maori chanting and Steve Reich-ian string arrangements into the mix, literalizing the push and pull of Le’aupepe’s fractured understanding of his upbringing. And while the album narrative is intensely personal and specific — many of the lyrics read like a man talking directly to his departed father — it never misses a chance to connect on a universal level. It’s a testament to all the ways that love can bind a family together, and it’s rare to find an album so unabashedly sentimental in today’s post-modern landscape.
So many artists this year knocked me over with their fearlessness and confidence to try new things. Beyoncé has all the resources in the world to make straightforward pop hits, but instead she pulled together a dense compendium of black and queer dancefloor music, with grooves like “MOVE” shifting into completely different sonic territory for her. Maggie Rogers delivered some of the most ferocious vocal performances of the year; pogoing punk tunes like “Shatter” sound a complete 180 from the wanderlust pop ballads of her debut. I expected Pool Kids to release 12 simple pop punk tracks based on their Florida emo roots, but songs like “Comes In Waves” hint at post-rock and synth pop dreams that significantly widen the emotional range of their work. Chicago rapper Saba tore apart his celebrated sound completely, returning after a long hiatus with warmer, more soulful fare like “Come My Way” and an album about finding happiness in difficult times.
Leaps into the creative unknown like these are why my favorite artists’ latest releases are often the only ones I want to listen to, even if I don’t necessarily think they are their best work. I am still discovering new moments to love in Big Thief’s endless well of a double album from February, which has around 5 too many songs on paper but somehow also the exact right amount of music for me to faithfully disappear into for hours at a time. Recently, I’ve been looping this quiet run in the album’s third quarter, as the skittering flow of “Wake Me Up To Drive” leads into the whispered sunlit beauty of “Promise Is A Pendulum” and the lazy river drawl of “12,000 Lines”. It’s all the more wondrous because of how these songs (tracks 14-16 of 20) feel like beautiful detritus instead of filler, even as they lead into more obvious standouts like “Simulation Swarm.” The band trusts that every song is worth hearing, which stands so distinct from the endless deluxe editions of less assured artists. Instead of swinging wildly in search of a hit, they guide you on a journey and assure you that the long, strange trip will be worth it.
II. Love Language: Singing with Emotional Acuity
As you may have noticed by now, I tend to use lyrics as a crutch for expressing myself. For most of my life, it’s been easiest to reach for a snippet of verse as a stand-in for a response, mostly because I’ve always had some song fresh on my mind. I’m not sure if this associative tendency drives my loved ones crazy. Kelly will sometimes asks me to trace the route my brain is taking — why am I responding to her request to turn the heat up with a random Chris Stapleton lyric? — but hopefully it’s because she finds it endearing at this point. I don’t think I’m insanely different from how everyone else moves about the world, repeating facts they’ve absorbed from a podcast or a TikTok rundown. My referential vocabulary just happens to come almost entirely from music.
Happily, I have found new means of self-expression in so many lyrics from this year. Sentiments from all over the emotional spectrum have bounced around my brain, speaking for me whether or not they directly relate to my own life experience. It’s in the way Anthony Green captures the swirling chaos of a heroin high in the phrase “I don’t dance, the world around me spins like a tornado”, or Matty Healy from The 1975 makes “young folks drinking Aperol” sound like the most romantic thing in the world. There are echoes of my late nights in Wet Leg’s wry portrait of doomscrolling (“I went home all alone, I checked my phone, and now I’m inside it”) and shades of black joy in Dan Bejar of Destroyer’s absurd disillusionment with the world around him (“a snow angel’s a fucking idiot someone made in the snow”). None of these are me; all of them are how I feel at times.
Specificity anchors my favorite songwriting. Especially when I’m feeling disconnected or isolated, there’s comfort in the sense that a song’s sentiments could have only come from a single artistic voice. The details make it easier to identify with the humanity in them.
In that respect, it’s been so interesting and slightly disheartening this year to see how the TikTok-ification of modern pop music has led to a flood of superficial “sad bops” that communicate heartbreak via minutiae. While the songs that result are often catchy and shareable, they often feel like a copy of a copy to me. There’s no elegance. It sounds like the artist don’t actually own their experience, like they aren’t truly invested in the relationship or the emotions they are singing about. I can hear the capitalism instead.
Perhaps no one understood the importance of lyrical specificity in 2022 better than SZA, who’s redefined diaristic songwriting with a pen that draws blood — hers included. “Nobody Gets Me” is one of my favorite songs of the year, a beautiful slice of Mazzy Star heartbreak balladry that somehow also conjures an explicitly vivid image to set the scene: “You were balls deep, now we beefin’, had me butt naked at the MGM. So wasted, screaming ‘fuck that’, love me now but I’m anything.” (Not one I plan on repurposing.) It’s like SZA’s singing all the things she’s afraid to speak aloud. It’s the kind of emotional acuity only a great writer can unearth.
The 1975’s latest album, Being Funny In A Foreign Language, is by far the record I spent the most time with this year. If you know my musical tastes at all, you are aware that I am fully in the tank for this band, and their lyrics have always been a major part of my fandom. After a somewhat successful yet bloated 2020 effort, their fifth album is an intentional return to form, a concise master class in threading the needle between sincerity and satire. The album title is apt, as dick jokes and global disrepair get equal attention. (Sometimes in the same line, as in the curtain-opening double entendre: “This’ll get bigger, if you know what I mean.”) There are so many different types of storytelling in these 11 songs, from the tongue-twisting self-taunts of “Part of the Band” to the home-for-the-holiday snapshots of “Wintering” to the wistful, broken remembrance of “When We Are Together”. The language of the Terminally Online laces every other song: cucks, cancellation, cringe. As always, the band creates a world of its own from self-references and in-jokes, including a reference to Healy resembling a flailing Muppet on stage during the album’s most straightforward love song.
Many will be baffled by BFIAFL‘s oscillating tone, or unconvinced by stream-of-consciousness lyrics like:
I know some Vaccinista tote bag chic baristas
Sitting east on their communista keisters
Writing about their ejaculations.
“I like my men like I like my coffee,
Full of soy milk and so sweet, it won’t offend anybody.”
Whilst staining the pages of The Nation.
But I believe these kinds of images are almost red herrings, surface-level aesthetic trappings that veil a learned empathy and an observing eye for detail. A mask-off moment arrives shortly after that quasi-nonsensical political screed, where Healy vulnerably counts off exactly how many days and hours and minutes it’s been since he’s last kicked heroin. Never before has the band’s audacity been so perfectly balanced by emotional honesty. “Don’t you know that I’m a human too?” Healy reflects later in the album, on its lowest streamed song. It becomes him.
At its root, the quality I appreciate most in song lyrics is how they are imbued with the personhood of the one singing them. The act of performance helps their words transcend the page, and the best artists make you believe them. I don’t have a kid, but the way Soupy from The Wonder Years sings about his children giving him strength to battle his postpartum depression cuts through our difference in life circumstances. (“And you’re brave, so I’m brave, or I’m trying anyway. Put the work in, plant a garden, try to stay afloat.”) I’ve never copped quarter pounds of coke in a black Ferrari the way Pusha T describes in “Brambleton”, but his menacing portrayal of new American outlaws is as intoxicating and cinematic as any Scorsese movie.
I’ve shared many examples of my favorite lyrics from this year, but sometimes simplicity can be just as effective. Lupe Fiasco is one of the greatest wordsmiths in rap history, an absolute alien who makes such intricate music that he’s literally teaching an MIT class on the underlying structures of rap. However, on his excellent album DRILL MUSIC IN ZION, he trusts his craft enough to write a closing verse that’s simply the phrase “Rappers die too much. That’s it, that’s the verse.” followed by 15 bars of dead air. The emotion soaks through anyway. There are so many different types of amazing lyric writing, but at their very best, they are a pure reflection of an artist’s soul.
III. Hold My Hand: Songs for an Uncertain Future
“There’s reason for heavy hearts,” Bartees Strange sings to open Farm To Table, a travelogue of his rise as a black indie rock star amid the murder of George Floyd and a world spinning off its axis. “This past year I thought I was broken.”
Are things getting worse? Is stasis even possible? I’ve been thinking recently about how a person born in 1910 would have ricocheted from the first World War to the Spanish flu to the Great Depression to the Holocaust to the atomic bomb. By the time they were my age, they’d have experienced so many disruptions in the world order that it would be hard to feel anything other than constant decline. Maybe pending annihilation, rising white supremacist insurgencies, and the stupidest kinds of political upheaval imaginable are simply par for the course in any long-enough period on a modern Earth.
It is so, so easy to work myself into a state of despair. I got slightly better at recognizing when I was doomscrolling Twitter this year, but my attention span has never been worse. The pandemic has made it so there’s always a screen in front of me, and to be honest, I haven’t done much to push them away. I take on relentless responsibilities and consume endless entertainments to distract myself. Truthfully, one of the reasons I’m writing all of this is to prove to myself that I still have the capacity. I find joy in expressing myself, even if it’s about some dark shit sometimes.
Many of the albums that resonated with me most this year conjured the feeling of living through a collapse. Denzel Curry’s opus Melt My Eyez, See Your Future surveys themes like gun violence and police brutality, offering a strategic retreat into a world of western samurai to confront a hostile reality. The Smile’s debut album reflects the anxiety of these times, with Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood dialing up the existential dread of Radiohead into something dark and ethereal, yet propulsive, with the help of jazz drummer Tom Skinner. Eerie, off-kilter blasts like “Thin Thing” soundtracked many of my late nights working this year, though my favorite song on the record carries a rare note of cautious optimism: “And this is just a bad moment. We are fumbling around, but we won’t get caught like that.”
If we’re going to live in anxiety for the foreseeable future (and perhaps that’s what is required of a globally conscious adult nowadays), I do believe that music can show us how to do it. Canadian singer-songwriter Ken Yates has written a definitive response to the moment, a collection of wonderful songs called Cerulean that track his journey through personal and existential crises in the patina of late night indie folk. Yates finds so many different shades of apprehension on this album, from “The Big One”, a love song set against the backdrop of the apocalypse, to “The Future Is Dead”, which reflects the nihilism of living inside an endless news cycle. At times he stews in the unfairness of the world, pessimistic and self-medicating. At others, he shows himself mercy and tells himself that things will be alright. The growth happens in real time — you can literally hear it over the course of eleven songs.
As with his last (also excellent) album Quiet Talkers, Yates’ music reaches a new level for me on the B-side. I have spun the back side of this record over and over again in the night, as a balm. The months leading up to the holidays were particularly difficult this year, and it was unexplainably helpful to hear music reflecting that in “Half-Clenched Teeth”:
And around Christmas time
I’ll lose my mind.
I get that way when it’s cold outside.
I’ll leave the house, out to the street,
Through fear and doubt
And half-clenched teeth.
I’ll find a way out of these bitter days.
My favorite song of the year is another of his, called “Grocery Store”. It turns a moment waiting in line at a grocery store into a snapshot of dealing with the breaking point, when everything you hold inside hits you at once. I have thought of printing out the lyrics on a notecard and handing it out on my own difficult days, saying, “Sorry. This is how I feel.”
Despite the album’s weighty themes, I’ve found comfort in its quiet strength, as well as the reminder that life is not only made up of your darker moods. Light peaks in — through love, through forced hope, through resilience. Yates doesn’t offer cloying affirmations or condescending instruction on how to navigate uncertain times. Cerulean isn’t a handbook; it’s a journal. Sometimes it’s enough to know that someone else is trying too.
There were other records and songs this year that shed similar light. Maren Morris’ excellent album Humble Quest was the soundtrack to two of my favorite memories of the year: Kelly and I played dusty love songs like “The Furthest Thing” and “Detour” on repeat as we drove around Joshua Tree without cell service, and Morris was in rare form at a spontaneous concert we attended at the Mann on a warm July evening. Alvvays returned with Blue Rev, a set of blissful power pop songs that conjured memories of a summer that had faded by the album’s October release, but that has kept my mind on the prospect of next year’s sunshine. Maggie Rogers’ “Begging for Rain” is a reminder that the world doesn’t have to be on fire, and that other people want to stop it as well. Gang of Youths’ transcendent “hand of god/goal of the century” is part prayer, part ode to life continuing after a terrible loss, whether you want it to or not. I could go on and on.
The last song I want to leave you with is Wild Pink’s “Hold My Hand”, an atmospheric piano duet with Julien Baker that stops me in my tracks whenever I hear it. There is a sad backstory to its subject matter, but you don’t need to know it to understand its message of love. It’s simple and universal, what I experience with the ones I love and the music that helps me feel alive. A mantra, a shibboleth, my own daily iteration: the only time I feel I might get better, is when we are together.
~~~~~*~~~~~
Matt Chylak’s 22 Favorite Albums of 2022
1. Gang Of Youths – angel in realtime.
2. The 1975 – Being Funny In A Foreign Language
3. Ken Yates – Cerulean
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4. Anthony Green – Boom. Done.
5. Wet Leg – Wet Leg
6. The Weeknd – Dawn FM
7. Maren Morris – Humble Quest
8. Destroyer – LABYRINTHITIS
9. Bartees Strange – Farm To Table
10. Alvvays – Blue Rev
11. Big Thief – Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You
12. Pusha T – It’s Almost Dry
13. The Smile – A Light For Attracting Attention
14. Lupe Fiasco – DRILL MUSIC IN ZION
15. Pool Kids – Pool Kids
16. Maggie Rogers – Surrender
17. Denzel Curry – Melt My Eyez See The Future
18. The Wonder Years – The Hum Goes On Forever
19. SZA – SOS
20. Beyoncé – RENAISSANCE
21. Saba – Few Good Things
22. Wild Pink – ILYSM
Thanks for reading about some of my favorite music and memories and various existential crises. (It’s probably just Kelly at this point lol.) If you’ve stuck around this long, here’s an end of the year playlist that I sequenced with another 15 hours of my favorite discoveries from 2022. All of the artists and songs mentioned in this blog post are included, along with plenty of other finds. (Please let me know if you find something you like, I really love that.)
Have a wonderful 2023 and please stay safe with the ones you love.
Context Blues 