2022 Mid-Year Review – The Best New Albums & Reissues So Far

Review of the year (so far)

It’s always kinda hard splitting up these mid-years into genre chunks.

After all, in an age where it feels like artists cross-pollinate their sounds with carefree abandon, narrowing something down to “indie-rock” or “dream-pop” or “evil evil dubstep” feels like something of a fool’s errand. Whereto the font of pure human expression? What for the age of innocence, when lineages begat invention rather than confined us like prisons?

… Or something like that. I’m going to be splitting up the year’s top records thus far by genre anyway, because there’s so much of it to talk about that I need to have some sort of arbitrary separation matrix in order to make sense of it all, but let the groupings below not be a barrier to your enjoyment – be it “post-”, “proto-” or whatever, there’s so much good stuff going on here.

Let’s start with the albums which have received fairly unanimous praise from across the staff pool these past six months. Speaking personally for a moment, one of the LPs which I’ve found best of all thus far in 2022 is Jenny Hval’s ‘Classic Objects’. Hval’s long been a favourite of mine, but even despite my admiration for albums like ‘Apocalypse, girl’, in the past I’ve tended to find that her LPs are so aesthetically dense that I need to be in the mood to sit down with them as a whole. 

‘Classic Objects’, on the other hand, is consummate whether or not you take it all at once or in little chunks. These songs bloom with brilliant patience or strike with lively immediacy, the deft art-rock stylings of their instrumentals lilting at the behest of some typically dynamic writing from Hval. Her lyrics fight through the thicket of thought to attain a new and powerful certainty which, on highlights like ‘American Coffee’ and ‘Year Of Sky’, are positively revelatory. 

I wrote a full-length spiel on ‘Classic Objects’ when it came out. Indeed, all of the records we’ve ordained with Album/Reissue of the Week crowns have had the same treatment, and should you be so inclined you can spend some happy minutes reading our thoughts by heading to our dedicated page.

Hval wasn’t the only solo artist making big moves these past months. While they’re rather different albums, Keeley Forsyth’s ‘Limbs’, Pictish Trail’s ‘Island Family’ and Andy Bell’s ‘Flicker’ all saw the musicians in question nudging the boundaries of their sound to create thrilling work. In Bell’s case, that made for a shimmering bedroom psych-pop set; for Pictish Trail, further explorations of the bug-eyed and noisy pop mode that has marked him out as one of our great idiosyncrats; Forsyth dovetailed with Ross Downes to create an avant-ballad album of imposing, almost Shakespearean beauty. Kurt Vile’s another one who’s come back strong this year, continuing to make hay from his Chillest Man In The Universe style on ‘(watch my moves)’, while old souls Bill Callahan & Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy collected their lockdown collaboration covers series into a reassuringly chunky set called ‘Blind Date Party’.

Callahan and Billy were among a few longer-in-the-tooth artists who have made hot comebacks so far in 2022. The first six months have been good to stalwart fans of ““indie music””, with stars of yore roaring back in various forms. Animal Collective broke a six-year duck with ‘Time Skiffs’, an album which came close to capturing the wacky brilliance of their late-2000s golden age; Beach House solidified their status at the top of the pyramid with the sprawling, gorgeous ‘Once Twice Melody’; Daniel Rossen, so long the mainstay of Grizzly Bear, proved he could do very well indeed on his own terms with the baroque ‘You Belong There’. Throw in a widescreen new Spiritualized album and stirrings from camp Radiohead in the form of The Smile’s ‘A Light For Attracting Attention’, and you’ve got yourself a pretty strong mainstage lineup right there.

Switzerland’s Meril Wubslin and Zimbabwe’s Gonora Sounds might not be artists who’d warrant top billing at Glastonbury or whatever, but the quality of ‘Alors Quoi’ and ‘Hard Times Never Kill’ will live long enough for us to catch them whenever we next get the chance. Both acts bring decades of experience to bear on their albums, and though sonically different – the former offering strange, cryptic campfire song while the latter uses guitars to craft propulsive sungura music – both records thrum with energy and invention.

Old heads on the noisier end of the spectrum have come back to school youngsters too. Loop hadn’t made a full length for more than three decades prior to dropping ‘Sonancy’ earlier on this year, but you wouldn’t have known it – the band’s spiralised, freaked motorika has proven a firm favourite amongst the Norman hivemind since it emerged in March. What Boris don’t know about volume ain’t worth knowing, but while the band did cook on gas at points of ‘W’ this was actually one of the more cerebral efforts in their long and vaunted discography, often splicing loudness with shoegaze techniques to puzzle rather than pummel the listener.It hasn’t just been the old guard making hay with their guitars this year, mind. Far from it – after reports of its demise had been greatly exaggerated (which was always nonsense tbh), it turns out that we live in good times for the six-string, actually. Cases in point from 2022 include Horsegirl’s ‘Versions of Modern Performance’, Porridge Radio’s ‘Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder To The Sky’ and Garcia Peoples’ ‘Dodging Dues’. All three are albums which very much know their history – Deadheads, for instance, should make a beeline for the latter – but after basing themselves in sounds of yore each artist spins out a series of delightful, distinctive tracks. Tess Parks may not have had guitars quite as much to the fore on ‘And Those Who Were Seen Dancing’, but the manner in which the album delivered rich psych balladry in the mould of The Brian Jonestown Massacre made it a fine addition to the modern rock pool.

Are there guitars on Thank’s ‘Thoughtless Cruelty’? SCALPING’s ‘Void’? Well, yes, but you wouldn’t call either of them guitar music in the traditional sense. These records veer off from the noise-rock tradition, with a varying amount of techno influence heard on both. While the latter use EBM and coldwave tones to create something devilish and danceable, Thank splice synths into the mix with a more caustic edge, one which makes their debut LP reminiscent of artists like Liars and These New Puritans. Both are excellent opening salvos.

If those records teetered on the border of the dance, then there were several this year which went fully in. Another debut LP, HAAi’s ‘Baby, We’re Ascending’, spun the same techno tones flitting around the Thank and SCALPING records into something multifaceted, euphoric, and occasionally rather utopian. ‘Tilt’ also went hard, albeit in a manner which leaned more into the acid-flecked rave tunes of ‘Screamadelica’-era Primal Scream, in Confidence Man’s bid to cement their status as one of their generation’s premier party acts – and anyone who’s caught the ‘Tilt’ tunes live in the dance this year will be able to attest to the success of the Confidence Man project. 

Keeping it housier still were Soichi Terada and Shinichi Atobe. While the latter kept up his cracking recent run of deep, heat-hazed records with ‘Love of Plastic’, Terada broke a silence which stretched back into the previous Millennium, demonstrating that all the time away hadn’t robbed him of his knack for crafting harmonious, Detroit-school club fare with ‘Asakusa Light’.

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Now, away from the main list, we come to the honourable mentions. And many to mention there most certainly are. I’m not sure if it’s to do with artists having a surfeit of material two years on from the lockdowns, or if the cosmos has simply decreed this to be a particularly strong year, but it’s felt like every single week of 2022 has served up great music across the board.

Big hitters old and new have made strong statements. You’d have to have been living under a rock to have missed the hype around Yard Act and Wet Leg, two debutants whose combinations of propulsive grooving and spoken word deliveries took them to the upper echelons of the album charts. Fontaines D.C. also cemented their place at the top of the pile with the impressive ‘Skinty Fia’; Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever jangled their way back into our hearts and minds; Everything Everything returned with their latest set of leftfield art-pop innovations; and Sea Power dropped the “British” from their name without losing any of their wit and guile in the process. PUP’s ‘The Unraveling of PUPTheBand’ felt pretty inescapable at points, as did Black Country, New Road’s ‘Ants From Up There’, Melt Yourself Down’s ‘Pray For Me I Don’t Fit In’ and caroline’s ‘caroline’, three records which sounded as expansive as the lineups of the bands that made them.

The megastars have come calling, too, from Arcade Fire and Florence Welch to Charli XCX and ROSALÍA. Behind them we have a host of acts who were either already there or thereabouts or now look set to make the leap off the back of excellent recent showings – Mitski, for instance, who has reached the point where she doesn’t look out of place opening for Harry Styles, or returning juggernauts Warpaint and Cat Power.

Then we’ve got the cult classics, the artists whose fanbases will remain vast and devoted come rain or shine. I’m talking Eels, I’m talking Midlake; I’m talking Belle & Sebastian, I’m talking Calexico; I’m talking Spoon, who ended a five year absence in 2022 with the seductively-titled ‘Lucifer On The Sofa’. 

I’m talking the lone travellers pushing to attain similar status. A bunch of solo artists at the apex of their respective fields returned in 2022 to prove exactly why they’d got there in the first place. Cate Le Bon’s chops are beyond reproach at this point, but blending City Pop and art-pop techniques into her already quixotic style reaped dividends on ‘Pompeii’. Rising star Nilüfer Yanya presented a similarly wide-ranging listen in the form of ‘PAINLESS’, as did Fantastic Negrito with the strident ‘White Jesus Black Problems’. Tamara Lindeman, who has put in the work leading The Weather Station over the years, consolidated the success of last year’s ‘Ignorance’ with the comparatively stripped back ‘How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars’.

Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen have linked up in recent times, but ‘We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong’ and ‘Big Time’ reminded us that these two need no-one but themselves in order to succeed. Speaking of pairing off, though, peep the maturation of Let’s Eat Grandma on the multifaceted ‘Two Ribbons’, or the thought-provoking and danceable pop of Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul’s ‘Topical Dancer’ – surely one of the year’s breakout records.

It feels like we’ll be hearing a lot more of Poppy Ajudha off the back of ‘The Power In Us’, an impressively multifaceted debut from the London artist. Other up-and-coming solo acts have bright futures ahead – the returning Tomberlin, for instance, or Tomberlin’s fellow New Yorker Evan Wright – while new records from The Reds, Pinks & Purples, Hurray for the Riff Raff, Modern Nature and Yama Warashi were offerings from a quartet of band leaders who are a little longer in the tooth but remain committed to their cause (and surely you all know about the Guided By Voices shtick by now). On the count of comebacks, see also: Jake Xerxes Fussell’s first collection of self-penned tunes ‘Good and Green Again’; David West delivering a charmingly offbeat indie-pop LP called ‘Jolly In The Bush’; Molly Nilsson’s latest set of synthetic goodness ‘Extreme’; Ulrika Spacek member Rhys Edwards stepping out as Astrel K; Σtella’s delightfully winsome ‘Up and Away’; and the unusual country-flecked writing of Erin Rae’s ‘Lighten Up’.

As well as solo rockers, there are, of course, bands. New bands, old bands, big bands, small bands. Let’s start with the former – King Hannah, for example, impressing with ‘I’m Not Sorry, I Was Just Being Me’, or Los Bitchos bringing the retro-rock party on ‘Let The Festivities Begin!’. Dehd, whose confident sound has not little overlap with King Hannah, continued their ascent with ‘Blue Skies’, while Cowgirl and The Parrots kept the fuzz but aimed more for garage-y rock modes. If Fontaines D.C. are undoubtedly the biggest Irish band of the moment, releases from Sprints and Just Mustard and M(h)aol demonstrated that there’s a glut of great groups emerging from all over the country. Overseeing it all were old souls Superchunk, who had a party with their friends on ‘Wild Loneliness’.

Camp Cope would once have joined the massed ranks of the rockers, but with new LP ‘Running With The Hurricane’ the Australian group pitched for a distinctly more Americana-ish mode. Fellow Aussies Loose Fit, Tropical Fuck Storm and EXEK, however, did no such thing – the former’s buoyant punk-funk operation ‘Social Graces’ proved one of the funnest LPs to land in our stockroom, TFS artified their psychedelia on ‘Deep States’, while EXEK kept the groove but raised an eyebrow on the equally winning ‘Advertise Here’. The latter’s approach chimed with a band from much closer to home – Holodrum, a Leeds group featuring a few known figures whose debut LP made for a no-wave disco spectacular.

‘Holodrum’ wasn’t the only record to emerge from the north of England by a seasoned outfit this year – yes, 2022 also saw a new dispatch from camp GNOD and all the riotous noise that entails. Looking further north brought us the new set from Modern Studies, while moving down into the midlands meant we were very pleased by the return of The Soundcarriers, a group with Nottingham roots whose expansive post-rock will have struck a chord with those who also enjoyed the sound of new Tim Gane/Jeremy Novak project Ghost Power. As for that London? Why, a bludgeoning, bracing return from Crows should fit the bill nicely. And abroad? Check Lewsberg.

London, of course, has long been the home to innovators from across the broad church of those many and varied styles of “electronic music”. The Smoky Apple served up plenty of pleasing tidbits in this regard in early 2022 as well, and a broad range at that. yeule’s future-forward ‘Glitch Princess’ turned plenty of heads, Loraine James morphed into Whatever The Weather for a textured set of computer compositions, and Burial continued to etherise on ‘Antidawn’, the producer’s meatiest drop of new material since ‘Untrue’ all those years ago. Beyond the capital we could look to innovations from Large Plants and µ-Ziq (both with and without Mrs Jynx) on these shores, while excursions over the sea yield typically atypical delights from Bogdan Raczynski and Matmos.

Jazz, of course, is a global business. London’s a decent place to start these days – surely you’ve heard all the kerfuffle about the London Jazz Scene™ that’s been going on the past few years? No? Well try any of Don’t Problem’s ‘Liminality’, Alabaster dePlume’s ‘Gold’, Theon Cross’ ‘Intra-I’ and either of the records that Binker Golding has been involved with this year to see what the fuss is about – rather different albums, sure, but their variation is simply further evidence of the rude health of the city’s jazz cohort.

Robert Stillman lives just outside of London, but his ‘What Does It Mean to Be American?’ record was a delightfully unusual innovation that more than merits a mention alongside the above. As its title suggests, Stillman originally hails from the United States, and the nation which birthed jazz of course served up mighty offerings across the board, from the funk-heavy soul-jazz of the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio to Robert Glasper’s ‘Black Radio III’. Eric Chenaux is from north of the border in Canada, but the now France-based musician once again proved that he can make lovely, somnambulant guitar music anywhere he lays his hat with ‘Say Laura’. Another player from his adoptive home, the prodigious Émile Parisien, led his sextet in fine fettle on ‘Louise’.

We all know that great and/or huge hip-hop records have emerged at a rate of knots these past few months. However, unfortunately, a lot of them aren’t eligible for inclusion here on account of either their vinyl pressings being severely delayed (looking at you, ‘Tana Talk 4’) or them simply not making it to wax in the first place. As such, don’t take this as a comprehensive roundup of the year’s comings and goings in rap – if you’re wanting a blow-by-blow account, then I find that Tom Breihan’s weekly ‘Stereogum’ column ‘Status Ain’t Hood’ is a pretty good place to start.

But what we have had through the stockroom has been class. My personal favourite discovery of the year has been They Hate Change’s ‘Finally, New’, a really great album whose rave-flavoured beats are so good that it would be tearing up the club even without the casual excellence of the MCing. I’ve also got a lot of mileage out of Wilma Vritra’s ‘Grotto’, which is one of those rare records that works in pretty much any situation. 

You can’t say the same about the abrasive offerings that Dälek and Model Home served us up this year, or Chris Crack’s sparky ‘Might Delete Later’, but if one of these things catches you in the right mood then it’s going to be pushing all the right buttons. As confrontational as those records were, though, the most sonically abrasive rap record we got in this year was quite possibly Ecko Bazz’s firebrand ‘Mmaso’. Indeed, put ‘Mmaso’ up against the traditional heavyweights of the metalverse and it could give anything in that sphere a run for its money.

And what of that there metalverse? Well, wheels turned across the board. A few massive names returned to the fray – Meshuggah, Napalm Death, Sunn O))) – but as pleased as we were to see them, some of the most impressive stuff of 2022 happened slightly lower down the pecking order. Cave In are hardly an unknown quantity at this point, but it was good to see the band both honouring the memory of their late bassist Caleb Schofield and also pushing into a new phase with the meaty ‘Heavy Pendulum’. We’ve also had strong comebacks from a host of bands across the spectrum – Drug Church, King Buffalo, Artificial Brain, Celeste, Earthless and Cloakroom to name but a few. Portrayal Of Guilt may have three studio LPs under their belt, but the way they’ve levelled up since the excellently varied ‘Christfucker’ emerged back in January (late 2021 digitally) has made them feel like the year’s big breakthrough in this field.

You know who else got heavy? A few people in the broad and varied realm of “dance music”. Nik Colk Void? Smashed it out, did the Factory Floor member. Jerome? Sometimes quiet, sometimes very intense techno on their album. Gábor Lázár? Been known to make some crazy music, as he very much did on ‘Boundary Object’. The Central Processing Unit label kept chugging away too, turning out tome upon tome of top-quality electro and machine-funk; Ibibio Sound Machine’s ‘Electricity’ was a lively one; Perhaps the year’s most bracingly danceable affair came in the form of Fulu Miziki’s ‘Ngbaka’ EP, an album which brought together home-built instruments with space-age production for a whirlwind of best-foot-forward rhythm.

But it’s not all intensity in the dance post-Covid. Some people have kept it more sensual amidst the chaos – none moreso, perhaps, than DJ Python, someone who already knew a thing or two about crafting delightfully deft DJ fayre even prior to dropping the excellent ‘Club Sentimientos Vol 2’. Skee Mask was in the pocket for plenty of the mammoth ‘Pool’, and Soul Jazz surveyed whole stratas on ‘Life Between Islands – Soundsystem Culture: Black Musical Expression in the UK 1973-2006’. 

Finally, there are the things we couldn’t categorise. The pirate radio collages of David Goren; the verdant blends of Laura Cannell/Stewart Lee and Steve Roden; Penny Rimbaud & Youth with another (r)evolution in sound, and Anna von Hausswolff just overloading us with the stuff. All highly individual works, all in dialogue with a multitude of other albums.

And that’s the thing really, isn’t it. Doesn’t matter if you’re strumming away like Dylan or banging a couple of rocks on the floor – good music is good music, genre be damned. Here’s to six more months of music before I do this all again.*

* If you are particularly keen on going even deeper on a particular sound, though, then do check out some of the quarterly genre-specific roundups we did back in spring

Heavy stuff

Jazz stuff

Dance stuff

Indie-rock stuff

Other rock stuff

Soundtrack stuff

The rest of the stuff