The big album releases of 2022 happened very slowly, then all at once. After a big first weekend of unexpected rollouts in early January, the calendar laid mostly bare for weeks and weeks on end, with just the slowest trickle of movement — until this past month, when the blockbusters finally started bursting through the door at overwhelming volume and velocity, making up for lost time in a blinding blur of activity. And now here we are, already nearing the year’s end, even though it feels in many ways like things only just kicked off in earnest.
Most of those huge recent drops are represented in the list of our favorite albums of 2022 so far, major releases by major stars that dominated the headlines and blanketed the charts. But so, of course, are the albums that filled the time in their early absence; sets by old favorites still getting it done decades into their career, and by brand-new acts who we could’ve never predicted emerging in time to make some of our favorite music of 2022. They’re the LPs that proved that even when the A-listers take an extra few months to emerge from their hibernation, there’s no such thing as a slow year for great music.
The Weeknd, Dawn FM
Weeknd songs have a unique, refined aesthetic — a little bit John Carpenter, a little bit Aubrey Graham, equally concerned with doling out suspenseful discomfort and blending hip-hop and R&B with elements of popular genres beyond the pale. Following the breakthrough of 2020’s After Hours — where Abel Tesfaye tapped the ambient producer Oneohtrix Point Never to beef up the textures bolstering his darkly enthralling songwriting — Dawn FM expands the artist’s sound while honoring the syrupy sonics of beloved releases like House of Balloons, dipping slick 21st century R&B in a vat of expertly curated 20th century nostalgia. It’s still incredibly catchy but eerily urgent, ill at ease in its debauchery, like a horror-movie party scene.
Taylor Swift, Midnights
Midnights is a quintessential Taylor Swift gesture, an album that scores massive hits circling memorable moments in the singer-songwriter’s back catalogue such that it makes a great excuse to go out on the road and revisit the old eras alongside the new music. It’s a calculated return to the biting, romantic synth-pop of Swift’s mid-2010s commercial run in form and subject matter, but a work that benefits from her decade and a half on the job, with hooks as big as harvest moons and bars stuffed with vivid imagery and biting bon mots: “I gave you my world / Have you heard that I can reclaim the land?” “My town was a wasteland / Full of cages, full of fences / Pageant queens and big pretenders.” Lesser performers might collapse into self-parody traipsing through their creative and romantic pasts. Swift handles it with factory-like precision.
Beyoncé, Renaissance
Sneaky, savvy marketer that she is, Beyoncé tipped us off to the vibe of Renaissance, her seventh album, well in advance of the groundswell of rapturous claims about her new era reviving and revitalizing dance music, which we’ve felt since she stomped back into our lives draped in the coziest vintage threads, demanding that we part with deadweight and put happiness first. Last summer, speaking to Harper’s Bazaar about new music coming together in the pandemic, the performer said, “With all the isolation and injustice over the past year, I think we are all ready to escape, travel, love, and laugh again. I feel a renaissance emerging, and I want to be part of nurturing that escape …” She wasn’t fucking around: Renaissance is hedonistic and enveloping, a quick respite from the horrors of 2022 and a place where Black queer creators are celebrated. The throwback jams are spirited and unique, and the artist seems shiftless and limitless in the expression of her gift of cross-cultural, cross-generational synthesis.
Bad Bunny, Un Verano Sin Ti
Between competing in the WWE’s Royal Rumble pay-per-view in January and diving into his role as the Marvel superhero El Muerto in a forthcoming film, Puerto Rican urbano heavyweight Bad Bunny proves his mettle as a writer of wistful love songs and a genre-bending pop star with Un Verano Sin Ti, his fifth solo album. With a run time almost twice as long as 2020’s El Último Tour Del Mundo, Verano speaks on wounded egos and hometown pride, romantic pursuits and painful rejections, while Bunny and frequent producer-collaborators MAG, Tainy, and La Paciencia dabble in reggaeton, dembow, merengue, bossa nova, synthpop, reggae, house music, and more. Un Verano Sin Ti is a long, slow ride, and the absence of an easily identifiable dud in this hulking 23-song track list is further proof this artist is the total package.
Pusha T, It’s Almost Dry
As half of Virginia rap duo the Clipse, Pusha T shared chilling tales of cocaine salesmanship set to jarring, minimalist production from the Neptunes. Navigating a solo career since Malice, his brother and partner in rhyme, took a break from the game, Push has worked extensively with Ye. It’s Almost Dry, Pusha’s fourth solo album, brings both Pharrell and West to the table for a collection of songs that seat sinister, skeletal Skateboard P beats like “Call My Bluff” and “Open Air” alongside a batch of Ye tracks that run the gamut from bare-bones sample chops like “Diet Coke” to grandiose productions like “I Pray for You.” Push is at ease in every setting; It’s Almost Dry benefits from decades of history and refinement. The beats are cold, the performances are delightfully villainous, and Malice contributes a great verse to “I Pray for You,” a best-case scenario for an album from this dream team.
Rosalía, Motomami
Motomami — where Spanish singer-songwriter and producer Rosalía completed her transformation into an international música urbana star following high-profile collaborations with heavyweights like J Balvin, Ozuna, and Bad Bunny — is a toy chest full of jarring and gibing sounds and concepts. It slays on songs that play it straight, like “Candy” and “La Combi Versace,” two airy spring radio hits waiting to happen. It’s most intriguing when it’s fucking with convention, playing with the sound of the singer’s incredible voice and pulling from offbeat source material. “Diablo” plops a stately James Blake appearance in the middle of a track where the main artist is otherwise hosting a playful duet with her own sped-up vocal. The title track features production from Pharrell that borders on Nintendocore; “Hentai,” another Skateboard P team-up, is a sex ballad that sounds like the home around the bedroom’s being blown away in a hurricane. Study the credits even closer, and the presence of players like Michael Uzowuru and El Guincho (whose collective body of work includes production on records by Frank Ocean, Beyoncé, and FKA Twigs), and it starts to feel like Motomami is out to forge a kind of many-armed sound-straddling international scene. The questions about ownership that this raises are sensible. The optics are iffy, but the sonics are pretty.
Charli XCX, Crash
After a decade’s worth of forward-thinking albums that almost certainly gave her peers big ideas, British pop singer Charli XCX swan-dives into the ’80s revival on Crash, her fifth album. The big hooks and slick textures of the new album are a far cry from the delightfully eccentric homemade miniatures featured on her 2020 album How I’m Feeling Now. Crash feels built for dance floors in the same way How I’m Feeling Now seemed built for living-room dance parties. Production is plush and intricate; even the keyboards in the Eurythmics soundalike “Good Ones” seem beefy. The balance of cold synthetic textures and hot funk at the heart of songs like “Baby” and the syrupy robot pop of “Lightning” and “Every Rule” are convincing as replicas of the sound of ’80s radio hits, but also savvily in step with the time-traveling energy of recent Hot 100 phenomenons like Justin Bieber and the Kid Laroi’s “Stay” and the Weeknd’s “Save Your Tears.” Crash gets what those records got: Give us a cool vocal and a dab of heartbreak, and we fall every time.
FKA Twigs, Caprisongs
Recorded during the unexpected solitude of quarantine amid pangs of nostalgia for nights out with friends, Caprisongs — singer FKA Twigs’s first mixtape and the follow-up to her exquisite 2019 studio album Magdalene — accomplishes with sound what the star couldn’t manage in isolation, conjuring vital global nightlife scenes as it balances crystalline electronic music, bedroom R&B, U.K. drill, dancehall, and Afrobeats. Working with Spanish musician El Guincho, hip-hop beat-maker Mike Dean, Venezuelan artist Arca, U.K. rappers Unknown T and Shygirl, and vocalists Jorja Smith and the Weeknd, FKA Twigs checks in on friends across continents, finding everyone pining for the same simple, communal comforts.
Earl Sweatshirt, SICK!
While his Odd Future mates Frank Ocean and Tyler, the Creator spent the past decade working toward the cinematic majesty of sprawling releases like Frank’s Blonde and Tyler’s Call Me When You Get Lost, Earl Sweatshirt receded into the confines of his own mind. On I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside and Some Rap Songs, he rapped capably about grief, depression, and failing coping mechanisms over insular beats. With this year’s SICK!, a tacit reaction to an emotionally taxing year, Sweatshirt tries again to lift himself out of the doldrums. The music is a little lighter, though no less weary, a lot closer in its scope and mix to the pained narratives and surprising crispness of the rapper/producer’s 2012 major-label debut, Doris. It’s a trip watching a master of his crafts working out how accessible they need to be.
Blood Incantation, Timewave Zero
Colorado death-metal quartet Blood Incantation excels at winding, hellish compositions with daring twists. The punishing “Hidden Species (Vitrification of Blood, Pt. 2),” off the band’s 2016 debut Starspawn, turns into a shoegaze jam halfway through; “The Giza Power Plant,” from 2019’s acclaimed Hidden History of the Human Race, spends seven minutes devolving from chaotic blast beats into a long, psychedelic coda. On its third album, the band torches its own playbook. March’s Timewave Zero, named after philosopher and psychotropic explorer Terence McKenna’s unified theory of history, trades relentless riffs and abrupt changes for braying synths and heavy silence. Two sidelong compositions, “Io” and “Ea,” move with an almost wraithlike delicacy, conjuring a trek across a desert or a dive into the alien landscapes of Metroid.
