The 10 best albums of 2022

Getty Images Rosalía; Angel Olsen; Pusha T; Beyoncé; Matt Healy of the 1975

In a year that spawned the house-ification of pop (why yes, Robin S., we will show you love) and reminded us that rock is not dead yet, we were faced with some impossible choices while curating our favorite records. But after countless spins through so, so many great releases (here's to you, Harry, Taylor, and Abel), we've whittled our list down to the absolute freshest and finest. Here, the 10 best albums of 2022, from Big Thief and Big Time to Wet Leg and It's Almost Dry.

10. The 1975 – <i>Being Funny in a Foreign Language</i>

Being Funny in a Foreign Language explores love in peak 1975-style, pairing bleak lyrics with buoyant melodies. Among its '80s-inspired, synth-heavy highlights: "Happiness," in which frontman Matt Healy sings longingly of a girl whose "body's like a modern art" and "Looking for Somebody (To Love)," which takes on the perspective of an incel-like mass shooter (because terrorists, apparently, need love too). But it hits its soaring peak with "Oh Caroline," a heart-wrenching, high-energy ballad that will inspire dancing and — fair warning — an impulse to call your ex. With an assist from über-producer Jack Antonoff, the album proves, yet again, that you can never predict what the 1975 will do next. —Sydney Bucksbaum

9. Wet Leg – <i>Wet Leg</i>

Between scoring four Grammy nominations (including for Best New Artist) and an upcoming tour with Harry Styles (who covered them in May), longtime friends Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers haven't just made themselves known this year — they've made it big. The British newcomers' raucous, self-titled debut album is the sound of a sequin-toed boot kicking through the door. Over glinting post-punk guitar riffs, the duo nod to Liz Phair's deadpan tales of messy girlhood drama, taunting with innuendos about buttered muffins ("Chaise Longue"), scoffing at perverts ("Wet Dream"), and finally just confessing, "I don't even know what I'm saying" (the closer "Too Late"). It all makes for a perfect soundtrack for the latest crop of bored, disillusioned twentysomethings too clever for their own good. —Allaire Nuss

8. Pusha T – <i>It's Almost Dry</i>

The Shakespeare of cocaine rap is back, and he brought his friends. There's Jay-Z and Pharrell trading bars on the gooey, syncopated "Neck and Wrist"; a pre-insanity Kanye crooning on the slick Donny Hathaway redux "Dreamin of the Past"; Kid Cudi soaring over the low-slung bravado of "Rock N Roll." But Pusha's street-level lyricism is always and forever the main draw here; "Sometimes I wish my fanbase was more like J. Cole's," the artist born Terrence LeVarr Thornton laments (but not really) on the loose, ruthless "Call My Bluff." Who has time for pretty-boy crowd-pleasing when you're already sitting on top of the trap-tales empire you built, brick by brick? —Leah Greenblatt

7. Fontaines D.C. – <i>Skinty Fía</i>

Rock & roll might have faced its full extinction event in 2022 if it weren't for the saving grace of the U.K. While reckless youth with guitars and anything at all interesting to say seem increasingly like an endangered species Stateside, the Commonwealth keeps churning out great, spiky revivalists like Dry Cleaning, Wet Leg (see No. 9), and Fontaines. The Dublin fivesome deal in the kind of post-punk fatalism that any fan of Joy Division, Wire, and Gang of Four will recognize, but somehow the misery feels fresh on Skinty Fía. Spend a little time with standouts "In ár gCroíthe go deo" (the title is Gaelic, the lyrics aren't) and "Jackie Down the Line," and you may find your faith restored too. The kids are all right, even if they're not okay. —Leah Greenblatt

6. Plains – <i>I Walked With You a Ways</i>

On their first album as Plains, Jess Williamson and Katie Crutchfield (a.k.a. Waxahatchee) always seem to be walking away from love. They question their relationships, but more often they question themselves — what they'll tolerate, where they're going, which road they'll take to get there. Setting aside the indie folk of their solo work to return to their country roots (Crutchfield is from Alabama, Williamson from Texas), the pair spin straightforward but striking tales detailing just how mercurial they can be: "You know me, a cruel mystery," Crutchfield warns at one point. Yet even when they're messy ("A cigarette in a potted plant/Empty bottles, open hands"), they remain clearsighted and composed, swathing their woes in lush, creamy harmonies and breezy old-school production. The ride is easy; it's the journey that's complicated. —Jason Lamphier

5. Angel Olsen – <i>Big Time</i>

Coming off the kind of year that might have buried anyone — her parents died two months apart, not long after the painful end of her first queer love affair  — singer-songwriter Angel Olsen instead spun it into gold. The St. Louis native's sixth studio album is a gorgeous folk-rock tapestry woven through with supple, strummy balladry ("Big Time," "Right Now") and slow-burn cinematic anthems ("All the Good Times"). "Tell me how I should feel/How can this heart learn how to heal?" she asks plaintively on the hip-swaying lullaby "Ghost On." Maybe it can't, but these patient, tender songs find the beauty in breaking. —Leah Greenblatt

4. Big Thief – <i>Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You</i>

Big Thief crafted their fifth studio album at various locales — the snow-capped Rockies, the Sonoran Desert sand dunes, the California canyons — in idyllic isolation. We can thank drummer James Krivchenia for its concept and production, and for placing Adrianne Lenker's singular songwriting front and center. The result is an Americana-rock mosaic spanning 20 entrancing tracks, with Lenker conjuring metaphors as if plucking them from the ether ("Crystal blood like a dream true/A ripple in the wound and wake"). Dragon's songs are contradictory meditations on embracing change while longing for an escape. But within that paradox there's always hope, which floats through this dense, awe-inspiring collection like dandelion seeds after a private wish. —Allaire Nuss

3. FKA Twigs – <i>Caprisongs</i>

If FKA Twigs' 2019 album, Magdalene, was high on concept, her latest rips up the playbook to rove in the margins. The London auteur's 2022 mixtape hopscotches through gleaming hyper-pop, icy grime, and cocooning neo-soul, yielding some of her most instantly lovable music yet. In addition to shedding "Tears in the Club" with the Weeknd, she recruits rising Afrobeats star Rema for the seductive "Jealousy" and enlists salty U.K. rapper-singer Shygirl to distill dancehall to its waist-whining essence on "Papi Bones." And while she remains a master of the open-wound ballad, she's never been as unfiltered as she is in Caprisongs' VoiceNote segues, which offer informal takes on the effective interludes of recent releases from Jazmine Sullivan and Summer Walker. Silly and self-assured, they create deliberate fissures in twigs' artistic facade, serving as both a casual flex from an avant-pop mastermind and a peek into her private world. —Owen Myers

2. Rosalía – <i>Motomami</i>

"Una mariposa/Yo me transformo," the Spanish superstar Rosalía chants on Motomami's kinetic, clattering opener "Saoko." And she does transform, endlessly, over the next 42 minutes. But this butterfly also stings like a bee — moving effortlessly across a sonic jet stream that includes future-perfect glitch pop, avant-jazz skronk, reggaeton, flamenco, and soulful balladry. She is a sad bachata goddess on the sinuous Weeknd duet "La Fama," waxing lyrical on the emptiness of fame, and a blithe snack queen on the dizzy, horn-honking "Chicken Teriyaki." Her vocal dexterity, somewhere between Minnie Mouse and Maria Callas, is already legendary; listen to the way her tones shift from quavering falsetto intimacy on the sparsely pretty "Hentai" to boss-bitch breezy on the frenetic "Bizcochito." Motomami feels like what happens when pop stars get weird, in the best way — not through market testing or careful calibration, but sheer freaky artistry. —LG 

1. Beyoncé – <i>Renaissance</i>

It was already in the air, maybe: Dua Lipa with her glossy mirrorball bops, Drake and his Ibiza reveries. But when Beyoncé dropped Renaissance in the thick of summer, riding in on her incandescent horse like a disco Lady Godiva, the vibe shift crystallized. Pop music had fallen in love with club-kid BPMs, and this album, her seventh, would proceed directly to the dance floor —  a dense, shimmery deep-house rave-up mixed as seamlessly as a DJ set. Synths shiver and oscillate on the skittering opener "I'm That Girl"; the plush self-love anthem "Cozy" comes slathered in subterranean bass; "Alien Superstar" takes a giddy, elastic dip into ball culture. Renaissance also makes room for roller-boogie funk ("Cuff It"), featherweight Minnie Ripperton romance ("Plastic Off the Sofa"), and even a living legend, Grace Jones (that's her unmistakable contralto rasp on the slinking, Afrobeat-tinged "Move"). For the first time in Knowles' career, surprisingly, there were no snazzy, elaborate videos to go with the music. Somehow, though, the record felt bigger than any visual component or chart single: This was get-me-bodied therapy for the messy, broken, post-pandemic soul. —Leah Greenblatt

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