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By Liam Hess, Corey Seymour, Chloe Schama, Keaton Bell, Taylor Antrim, Sarah Spellings and André-Naquian Wheeler
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2022 has been an exciting and challenging year for music. The journey has come back steadily, but for many artists it comes with a lot of financial and COVID-related frustrations. With an overabundance of post-pandemic primary releases, the festival for those most sensitive chart-topping venues (and urgent vinyl slots) is fiercer than ever. And as TikTok’s unresistible rise continues, the nature of pop songwriting has only bowed to its will.
But throughout, the most productive albums of the year served as an escape and a balm. From the return of pop hipsters like Beyoncé and Charli XCX to Rosalía’s genre releases and the archives of Sudan to the rock revivalists chosen from Drug. Church to Wet Leg has been an exceptional year for music, and there are still two months left.
Here, Vogue releases her favorite albums of the year so far.
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As a British millennial, I still don’t have a selection to love the Arctic Monkeys, but nothing about their sixth album, Tranquility Base Hotel.
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The trajectory of Bboth one House is radical basically because they never tried to be radical. On 8 albums, the band has released, like clockwork, a new album both one and two or 3 years, slowly evolving their dream pop and shoegaze. Cocteau Twins-meet-Mazzy Star logo in complicated and complicated increments along the way, never reinventing the wheel, but turning it in a new direction. And with Once Twice Melody, released in 4 “bankruptcies” throughout the winter of 2021 and 2022, the Baltimore-based duo showed off their widest panoramic view yet. it was one of the greatest sonic pleasures of this year, their sense of good looks imbued with reverberation as a summary of one and both, which makes them so brilliant. —L. H
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Renaissance was more than just a wonderful Beyoncé album. It was also a cultural indicator that it was time for all of us to dance together again…genuinely this time. There’s a strong line of jubilation and glee throughout the album, all the better for our post-Trump, post-COVID, post-everything landscape, with lyrics like “I feel like falling in love” and “Just vibe/Voting out 45, don’t get you. ” pasa de la linea”, sung with wonderful rhythms and ready to dance. What makes Renaissance album of the year for me is rarely how much I enjoyed it, but how much others enjoyed it too. TikTok is full of high production, weirdly conceptual and artistic dances to songs from the album. (There’s also this hilarious montage. ) Since its release in July, I’ve heard the album pop up in everyday life. It was a main business of NYFW. Brooklyn cars blast “Break My Soul” out of their open windows. A friend spent an entire verbal exchange yelling the memorable “Alien Superstar” refrain, “Unique!” me. And recently, in a Quentin Tarantino-themed apartment, a women’s organization propped a phone against a wall and recorded a gleeful TikTok dance to “Cuff It. ” The album is not only a masterpiece of creativity, but also a cause of it. Renaissance lives up to its name. —André-Naquian Wheeler, fashion columnist
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If Big Thief’s most recent albums have been independent mini-masterpieces, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You is exactly the kind of extensive pastiche (20 songs!), without barriers of experimentalism that pushes the band more in every way than before. . (With a name like that, can it be anything else?) For maximum productive effect: Repeat often. —Corey Seymour, editor-in-chief
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Few songwriters better capture the rush to fall in love than Carly Rae Jepsen. I challenge you to find a more emotionally concise lyric than “Before you came into my life, I missed you so much. “Proving that “Call Me Maybe” was No viral coincidence that Jepsen recorded some of the catchiest pop albums of the last decade. of love and lust. ” Surrender My Heart” is a pop record that ascends over Jepsen’s preference to let his guard down (“I paid to give the treatment a boost/She told me, ‘Soften'”), while the name The Track is a disco ballad dedicated to a lover who knows he is rarely very smart for her. Like all dance music more productive, there is an underlying sadness that causes it to persist. — Keaton Bell
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With Crash, the final album of Charli XCX’s contract with Atlantic Records, the pop artist said she was looking to encompass “everything a pop figure’s life has to offer in today’s world: celebrity, obsession and worldwide success. “Less of contractual legal liability than exaggerated rage to crown the era of her main label, Crash effortlessly synthesizes Charli’s publicity instincts with her more experimental impulses. Janet Jackson (on the name track) to New Order to Prince. If Crash is Charli’s so-called “out of stock” album, it’s a great way to faint. —K. B.
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I first met Charlotte Adigéry in 2019 through “High Lights,” a smart, sexy, and intentionally ironic lament for her obsession with turning wigs into an electro-pop beat by snapping her fingers, before she was off the radar for a few years. It was exciting to see her return earlier in the year with her first album, produced in collaboration with Bolis Pupul, as well as Adigéry’s co-producers Soulwax, the Belgian DJ duo pioneering electroclash. Titled Topical Dancer, it’s a subversive skewer of racism and self-righteousness in identity politics, all at such contagious rhythms that they could be added to a CDC list. In “Blenda,” Adigéry sings “Go back to your country you belong to/Siri, can you tell me where I belong?” – But with its funky and skeletal bass line, you just need to dance. Where other pop artists seeking to integrate politics into their music seem hopelessly clumsy, Adigéry and Pupul’s absurd vision creeps in. like an icy cocktail. —L. H.
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Heard? Hardcore is going through for a while, or what’s rarely called post-hardcore: that is, large, emotionally highly spiced punk music that balances violent attacks with catchy takeoffs. Turnstile are the heroes of this scene, but I prefer Drug Church, a quintet from Albany, New York, whose fourth album, Hygiene, is the best ramp to the genre (as is their 2018 album Cheer). Listen to “Million Miles of Fun” or “Super Saturated,” Hygiene tracks in which Crystal’s transparent melodies are transmitted through crisp, garish guitars, songs that give you a high even if the lyrics evoke everyday discomfort. If you have a tolerance for noise, Drug Church is the angry, uplifting sound of the moment. —Taylor Antrim, Deputy Editor
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I come to every new Florence + the Machine record expecting the bombshell. I long to hear the sound of tambourines and the plucking of harps as Florence Welch laments elegantly on sex, love, violence and death. And Dance Fever, the baroque pop band’s fifth studio album, is sonically and emotionally grand. Welch was animated primarily through the medieval phenomenon of choreomania, in which load-bearing crowds in 16th-century Europe danced and swarmed to exhaustion (and, by some accounts, death). Many of the songs on this album sound like the soundtrack to a medieval dance scourge, while also containing some of Welch’s finest private songwriting efforts to date. Before the startling “Coreomania” erupts in a frenzy of applause and stomping, she opens it with a spoken monologue: “I panic in the middle of the street with all the conviction of someone who has never had anything really bad happen to her. ” . ” Dance Fever is an album to get lost in that also questions why we feel the desire to get away from it all in the first place. —K. B.
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Harry Styles’ third solo album, Harry’s House, is a sonic adventure through the psyche of the showman. It begins with an infectious funky dance party with “Music for a Sushi Restaurant” (a brass song that served notes by Huey Lewis), progresses to the synthesizer. and the sadness of the big hit “As It Was,” winds through melancholy and moodiness (“Little Freak,” “Matilda”), before returning to hopeful groovy (“Keep Driving”). M. Styles’ album releases are largescale pop cultural events, however, HS3, like Fine Line before it, proves that the publicity is well deserved. Whether it’s songs to explode or songs to cry about, once again, Styles gave us “something to dream about. “—Michelle Ruiz, Editor-in-Chief
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Whether or not you’ve heard of Ali Farka Touré, his son Vieux and/or Houston-based pan-world band Khruangbin, this album is a treasure: Vieux and Khruangbin pay homage to the Malian desert blues guitar legend through covers of 8 of their songs. , giving his own unique facility to the songs that helped delineate a genre, a region, and a generation. —Corey Seymour
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Put aside, if you can, M. I. A. ‘s surely crazy provocations has recently toured the world, and possibly enjoy the tantalizing sound productions he set in MATA, with layers of Tamil choir singers, a kind of spoken poetry, woodwind instruments, alto-tuned percussion rhythms and children’s voices. There’s some of the “paper airplane” magic in MATA with its wild and irrepressible pastiche, and it feels like a welcome return. —Chloé Schama, editor-in-chief
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The world of independent singer-songwriters is vast and diverse at the moment, but Painless stands out, the album of the perfect moment by Londoner Nilüfer Yanya. Yanya writes songs like the ones they grew up listening to Rihanna and Radiohead, Prince and PJ Harvey, and The 12 Songs of Painless have soul and temperament, as well as a sharp indie rock tension. Stars can simply be “stabilize,” “midnight sun,” and, fortunately, closer, “other life. “They all show Yanya in her most productive intimacy, her smoky voice. using boiling and burning guitar melodies. —T. UN.
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Noah Lennox, also known as the co-founder of Animal Collective, Panda Bear, and Pete Kember, aka Sonic Boom, the pioneering electronic musician who co-founded Spacemen 3, have known and painted in combination (primarily with Panda Bear maker Sonic Boom) for over a decade. , however, Reset is the first thing they put on an equal footing between the two artists. Even if you know the paintings of either (or both), you might be pleasantly surprised through this expansive concept: they necessarily tried and divided a handful of minor 1960s pop masterpieces, then added their own singular harmonies — drones, echoes, reverbs, and electronics — for a joyful and revealing reinvention. —Corey Seymour
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Even as a fully paid Rosalia fan, I had my moments of worry about Motomami’s chaotic preparation, singles feeling all over. But it turns out that chopped and fucked up spirit was precisely what would make Motomami so exciting when it completely dropped. Critics have compared it to the intentionally abrasive stop-and-start power of Kanye’s Yeezus and Frank Ocean’s Blonde: an experimental rollercoaster ride through Rosalía’s exclusive eclectic vision for Latin pop’s long-term. The debate over whether his prominence on the Latin music charts as a European artist is problematic, I’ll leave to others, but there’s no doubt that the wild, wobbly, carnivorous spirit of the Motomami genre is an exciting career that deserves all the praise he received. —L. H.
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Previous versions of Shygirl have cut through the alternate egos the London-based musician has embraced over the years, but with Nypmh, his debut album, he promised to tell a more private story, shedding the smokescreens he had used in the past. as part of its image. You’d think this would mean Shygirl remembers her signature lyrical filth (the previous songs titled “Freak,” “Gush,” and “Nasty” do exactly what they say on the tin), but instead, he sees her retain the component while turning it into something eerily sentimental. “story” and features a sweet lullaby-like melody; the charming, hymnal “Honey” sees her longing for “kisses written on me, smooth as honey” in sensual, pulsating synthesizers. It is an illicit pleasure and impossible to resist. —L. H.
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Who doesn’t love a self-taught, experimental violinist he controlled to make one of the catchiest songs of the year?(That would be “Selfish Soul,” at least it got my nomination. )This album feels like a birthday party and a rallying cry, an invocation to self-love without the sugary baggage the term has accumulated. It is rare that you meet an artist who feels really original, however, I count among them the archives of Sudan. I’ve been a fan since her debut album in 2019, but this one is more playful, dynamic and invigorating—a delight. —Chloe Schama
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I enjoyed 8 of the 10 albums Taylor Swift released and while I wouldn’t possibly reveal the two that are missing, Midnights is firmly on the list. hooks and bridges that rival the paintings of John A. Roebling. (This is a bad bridge joke. Sorry. ) —Sarah Spellings, fashion editor
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Six years after their last album, Heads Up, the 4 members of Warpaint have dispersed, relocated, expatriated, given birth, collaborated and gone solo, but they are still worried: still, happily, they form a single band under a harmonious rhythm. and their new album sees them do everything from diversification (“Hips”) to doubling down on their airy sound (“Melting”). —Corey Seymour
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I’m still not tired of it: their almost illegally catchy debut single, “Chaise Longue,” which garnered obsessive praise from Iggy Pop and each and every friend you meet. , riffs, old-fashioned vibe, and simple attitude. —Corey Seymour
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