2022 has been a musical rush of Albums released by talent young and old. Harry Styles goes retro, Kendrick Lamar gets personal, Weyes Blood channels Joni Mitchell, Mumford gets real about his challenging life. No matter what your tastes, any music lover is going to find something brand new to cherish, checking out these picks of the 2022 releases.
Harry’s House: Harry Styles
12 Father John Misty — Chloë and the Next 20th Century
Vivid portraits of flawed protagonists, beautiful melodies, lyrics imbued with romanticism, waspishness and ennui. All that, plus the wonderfully bizarre closing track, The Next 20th Century, on which strings and explosive guitar accompany a narrative featuring Val Kilmer, a Nazi wedding band and more. An album that is at once heart-on-sleeve and stubbornly opaque.
11 Elvis Costello — The Boy Named If
Costello’s 32nd studio album, rich in narrative detail and sharply drawn characters, mixes spiky punk, edgy pop, small-hours jazz and sepia-tinged balladry.
10 Taylor Swift — Midnights
On her tenth album Swift enlists a cast of characters — lovers, chancers, wasters and dreamers — whose lives are jolted by passion, nostalgia and regret. Musically, Midnights sits midway between the career-best Red and 1989. Swift’s vocals and lyrical twists give her songs real heft. When it comes to writing that’s at once forensic and guileless, nobody does it better.
9 Harry Styles — Harry’s House
Styles grows into his post-1D career here. A bona fide solo superstar, he’s having a ball. The Take on Me-aping As It Was was an accurate guide: Harry’s House is rooted in the period 1975-85, one minute conjuring up the sappy soft-pop of Andrew Gold (Late Night Talking), the next close-harmony Laurel Canyon acoustica (the lyrically siftable Little Freak, the tender Matilda).
8 Marcus Mumford — Self-titled
Marcus Mumford
Nobody saw this coming. The main Mumford man went solo to record a stark and beautiful outpouring of the most painful admittance — he was sexually abused when he was six and had not told a soul. The opener, Cannibal, details the abuse, while the last song, How, offers closure. In between, the singer sounds superb as he reckons with guilt, optimism, coping, forgiveness and how on earth he can tell his mother.
7 Black Country, New Road — Ants From Up There
Taking the chaos and energy of Arcade Fire and Bright Eyes and making it even more on-the-edge, this British collective recorded an emotional racket to make fans laugh and cry. “I was made to love you, can’t you tell?” sums up the anguish. Sadly, the frontman, Isaac Wood, left the band on the eve of the release. It was all too much. You can hear why.
6 Courtney Marie Andrews — Loose Future
On Loose Future, the Arizonan writes about negative patterns of behaviour and how she broke those cycles to arrive at a place of self-acceptance and openness, to an amalgam of scuffed Americana, country torch song and confiding, conversational melodies. The songs have the feel of an unhurried one-to-one, the vocals so up-close, Andrews might be in the same room.
5 Arctic Monkeys — The Car
If the softer and weirder sounds of Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino warned us, the follow-up cemented what Arctic Monkeys have become. Alex Turner is 36 now, so it feels strange to expect more stories of pool-cue fights. Replacing that youthful vigour is something rather beautiful. Body Paint could be a lost Let It Be song and the title track a song Elliott Smith may have written. A band majestically gliding into middle age.
4 The Smile — A Light for Attracting Attention
Did this year herald the end of Radiohead? Britain’s best band since the Beatles faded politely away as Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood formed the Smile. The reasons are mysterious, but the music is superb and sounds more 1990s Radiohead than they have since the 1990s. Ballads, jagged rock songs — a welcome curio.
3 Kendrick Lamar — Mr Morale & The Big Steppers
Personal and deeply political, raging and regretful, bragging and riddled with self-doubt: welcome to Kendrick World. Mother I Sober, a family reckoning that spares no one and nothing; the extraordinary Auntie Diaries, which details the tribulations of the rapper’s trans uncle and cousin; Purple Hearts, equal parts manifesto and moral inventory — three examples among so many here that reaffirm the depth, durability and incandescence of Lamar’s talent.
Let’s Eat Grandma
2 Let’s Eat Grandma — Two Ribbons
Written during a period when the near-lifelong friendship between Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth was buckling under the strain of success, separation, misapprehension and the loss of loved ones, the Norwich duo’s third album addresses the fallout and realignment with tenderness and hard-won emotional intelligence, to melodies at once beautiful and bereft. This is a set of songs whose contrasting textures and themes cannot obscure the album’s unity of emotional purpose and courage.
1 Weyes Blood — And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow
Our album of the year is a set of gorgeous, sweeping, cinematic ballads that delve into love and loss, but end up with buoyant hope. Natalie Mering, who performs as Weyes Blood, makes music that feels timeless, even though she recorded it during the pandemic. She captures the oddity of the past two years in a warm and inviting way.
“I felt the pandemic was like a pressure cooker,” Mering says from her home in Los Angeles. “It was exhausting — the whole world was sad and I was chiselling away at hard, gnarly stuff. But themes of isolation and feeling hopeless? There’s nothing new under the sun there.”
Give Weyes Blood a spin and the first thing that hits you is her voice — it’s like some angelic, calming cat purr. You may have heard it without knowing. She is on songs by the Killers, Lana Del Rey and John Cale of the Velvet Underground and, like a hot friend whom you invite to meet your new partner, Mering steals the show. How did the Del Rey collaboration happen? “She loved my voice.” The Killers? “They wanted a little Enya sprinkled around.” Cale? “He felt I had a Nico vibe.” Weyes Blood is a reference to the Flannery O’Connor novel Wise Blood.
Weyes Blood
She is 34, but sounds world-weary and soulful. “Her voice alone is worth preserving humanity for,” Uncut magazine wrote in its review; she is an artist who attracts such hyperbole. The album is full of songs of great length and experimentation — often Radiohead-like in texture — but it is the stories that anchor them, and invite the Joni Mitchell comparisons that come up a lot these days, but have rarely made as much sense.
Like Mitchell, she has a dark wit. On the upbeat The Worst Is Done, Mering admits that, in lockdown, she had “no one coming by to see if you’re alive”. Her videos and album art — Mary Shelley meets Blade Runner, she says with a smile — operate theatrically too. She is inspired by Kate Bush and Björk. “It’s important to never take yourself too seriously,” she says. “That can lead to tonal dissonance with the vulnerability and sincerity, and you can be too jokey, but I’m a giver. I want to give more than a hard exterior.”
When I tell her she has won album of the year, she gasps. “I can’t believe it!” But a hefty accolade has been a long time coming. Mering has been labelled a “millennial Joni Mitchell” and the “voice of her generation” and, on her fifth album, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, she sounds like she can be both.
And if your reaction is to just put on Mitchell again — I get it. I listen to Blue once a week as well. But, then, why not take five minutes to hear Mering’s latest standout, Grapevine, as well? Nobody else is making songs this epic and intimate. You may well discover some magic.