The Best Albums of 2022 So Far

Are you a part of Anitta’s Algorithm Nation? On Versions of Me, a dazzling omnibus of pop digitalia, the 29-year-old Brazilian singer-MC-dancer goes door-to-door, trying to unite the people behind her surging campaign for Global Dance-Floor Booty Inspector. Burning brightest when micromanaging every market-tested and quantized musical detail with blissfully canny zeal, Anitta pinches your cheek while monitoring her streaming numbers. Like a social media feed in fidgety human form, she tirelessly bewitches even the surliest doomscrollers. Resist her at your peril! —C.A.

The beauty of Ivory, Omar Apollo’s magnetic full-length debut, is that even through complex production choices and rich sonic flourishes, it always feels effortless. The LP is a bountiful trove of genres and technique; crack it open and sharp guitar licks, celestial harmonies, aching soul melodies, and even touches of ranchera come tumbling out. Even when the album is splaying out in multiple directions, Apollo’s sense of maturity grounds the project, and the songs stay playful yet tender, free yet focused. Across all the terrain it covers, a central message shines through, popping out like a Magic Eye: Omar Apollo is a freaking star. —J.L.

Aṣa — the Nigerian-French singer-songwriter whose award-winning, self-titled debut album arrived 15 years ago — has left a trail of popular contemporary successors in her wake. Much to those artists’ excitement, she built relationships with a handful of them after traveling from Paris to Lagos to ride out the pandemic in early 2020. Her latest album, V, is the result of collaborations with artists like Wizkid and eclectic Ghanaian American Afro-fusionist Amaarae, with Aṣa winding her flexible writing and gentle voice around the production style and attitude of each act accompanying her, but it is her solo performances that make clear why she is uniquely influential. —M.C.

On Un Verano Sin Ti, Bad Bunny leans back and has fun with a loose, leisurely set of 23 songs, his longest track list ever. In interviews, Bad Bunny said he was thinking about visits he took to the coast of Puerto Rico as a kid, inspiration that informs some of the album’s Caribbean sounds and laid-back spirit. Bad Bunny’s carefree, seafaring approach works at its absolute best when he dives into the glowing waters of the alternative scene and brings the talent of indie luminaries such as Bomba Estereo (“Ojitos Lindos”), Buscabulla (“Andrea”), and the Marias (“Otro Atardecer”) to the masses. —J.L.

There comes a time when an artist has to assert their autonomy — and on Esquemas, ascending Mexican American star Becky G takes center stage, even when she’s collaborating. The result is her best music yet. As with her 2019 debut LP, Mala Santa, reggaeton and dembow are mainstay rhythms throughout. But a track like “Flashback,” featuring Becky G’s frequent Miaimi-based collaborator Elena Rose, is a welcome shake-up: It’s a kind of doo-wop duro, silky slow but simultaneously raw, with heavy rhythmic breakdowns. “No Mienten” is an experimental electronic track ready for a dance-floor remix. —J.J.

Imagine a 2022 version of the rustic harmony and song-splurge electricity of Bob Dylan and the Band’s  Basement Tapes, and you’ll have a pretty decent notion of what Big Thief are up to on their fifth album. Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is a 20-song double LP on which the much-beloved Brooklyn band chases its indie-folk sound all over the backyard in search of new wrinkles and revelations. A headlong, try-everything ambition is all over the place here; Big Thief revel in the old-fashioned, mythic, and arcane, but their music is at its best when they blur eras and historical map-points. —J.D. 

After a few records of palette expansion, the Black Keys’ 2021 album, Delta Kream, was a collection of Hill Country blues covers, a tribute to the music that got them stomping in the first place. The svelte, 34-minute Dropout Boogie — which came out the day before the 20th anniversary of their first album — keeps things similarly crunchy. To that end, they’ve looped in sympatico collaborators, including Memphis garage-rock savant Greg Cartwright, frequent Kings of Leon producer Angelo Petraglia, and ZZ Top’s almighty Billy Gibbons. The choogle and soul of a song like “For the Love of Money” feels as natural as a broken-in jean jacket. —J.G.

Black Star’s first album in 24 years is a concise and seamlessly flowing collection of insurrectionary rhymes and propulsive beats by one of rap’s most heralded duos. The centerpiece of this nine-song opus, entirely produced by Madlib, is the jazzily titled “The Main Thing Is to Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing.” It translates as a vehement deconstruction of self-help tropes and dorm-room-poster proverbs someone on Madison Avenue probably got rich off; Bey and Talib repeat “Everything is not for sale” as if it’s some populist mantra. The underlying motif is that material items are ephemeral, and art can’t be commodified. —W.D.

Nearly all of Blige’s 15 albums have a conceptual framework, but Good Morning Gorgeous feels looser than others. She has said the title is based on a positive affirmation she tells herself since her well-documented divorce. That puts her new album in line with the inspirational, self-help tenets that have guided her work ever since 2001’s No More Drama. Still, the album flips through moods and styles. There’s plenty of emotional tumult, but she carefully sidesteps the deep melancholy of her past. The music is mostly hopeful and lively, even when the sentiments belie it. —M.R.

Proof, the group’s latest release, is its most ambitious yet, but not necessarily in the way many would expect. Over a three-volume anthology, BTS not only chronicle their tireless, ultra-successful journey thus far, but also give listeners an intimate look into the hard work that has gone behind it. Finally, they’re letting themselves take a moment to stop and enjoy the view. There’s a reason disc three is hidden, only available on the physical album — this one is for the real fans. Filled with demo versions of existing BTS tracks and unreleased songs that never made the cut, the CD is in many ways one of the group’s most intimate offerings yet, laid out like torn-out pages from a diary nobody was meant to read. —N.M.

“Celia,” the first track on Familia, opens with trumpets that evoke her Cuban roots, as she sings about a lover who’s “fascinado embobado” with the beauty of her culture, and is ready to drink “tequila con papi.” As with her hit “Havana,” this album’s Latin-pop banger “Hasta los Dientes,” and lead single, “Don’t Go Yet,” showcase Cabello’s natural ability to make the sounds of her culture accessible to any audience, regardless of language. At times, the stylistic shifts can give the record a bit of a mod-podge feel, but the artist holds it together by keeping us engaged with her story. —T.M.

After several years of cutting their teeth in Melbourne, Australia’s underground scene, Camp Cope gained widespread attention outside their country with the release of 2018’s How to Socialise & Make Friends. Simultaneously brash and sincere, the album tackled heavy topics with an unrelenting aplomb. On Running With the Hurricane, which arrives four years after the group’s breakthrough effort, the trio of Georgia Maq, Kelly-Dawn Hellmrich, and Sarah Thompson have swapped punk fury for folky romanticism, channeling the brutal honesty that first endeared the band to audiences into an emotionally intimate collection of tender-hearted indie rock. —K.B.

Crash, her fifth and final album on Atlantic Records, is the glitziest, most maximalist version of Charli ever. But to be clear, she’s not exactly surrendering to the shiny allure of commercial fame. Crash works when it’s looked at as Charli seizing a pop conversation that’s already been happening, and it’s particularly exciting when she enlists rebel-minded artists like Caroline Polachek and Christine and the Queens for the soaring “New Shapes” and Rina Sawayama for the “Beg for You.” If she’s crashing the mainstream party, she’s taking all the left-of-center girlies with her. —J.L.

When Daddy Yankee formally announced his retirement from music, it made sense that the statement was tied to a new, and apparently final, album release. Only the Puerto Rican superstar himself could get away with naming his farewell full-length with a portmanteau as cocksure as Legendaddy. A big part of why Legendaddy proves to be his best album since his classic Barrio Fino is its tacit rejection of nostalgia as his primary strength. Tracks like “La Ola” and the trap banger “Enchuletiao” feel fundamentally contemporary, reminding us that he’s been part of the current Latin-music movement in a material way. —G.S.

The Vancouver singer-songwriter Dan Bejar has spent his career happily swerving between sounds and moods. Here more than ever, he just seems game to throw everything against the proverbial wall and see what sound it makes. There are synths that recall Eighties video games — or, perhaps, horny comedies like 1985 classic Weird Science — the silliness tamped down by Bejar’s deep velvet voice and less-than-sunny outlook. Take “Suffer,” for example, which despite rave-worthy beats (and robot voices!) reminds us, “No matter when/Don’t matter where/You’re gonna suffer.” Could be your feet, weary from dancing, or your psyche — by that point you’re too far gone to care. —B.E.

Earl remains an oddball writer who parachutes into ideas from peculiar, oblique angles. Throughout the album, his lyrics evoke eruption and heat, images that cast his cryptic revelations as both painful and cleansing. It’s dazzling how purposefully he can rap, avoiding filler while still sounding commanding, playful, and spry. Earl never turns Sick! into a polemic, but it doesn’t feel accidental that on his most legible album, he’s actively engaged in dismantling what it means for rappers to go in, and to evolve as artists. —S.K.

On 2019’s Mirrorland, Earthgang conjured a stew of Black music idioms — trap, sampled soul, Southern blues, percussive polyrhythms — with audible joy. In 2022, Earthgang still sound like they’re spreading their wings to embrace the opportunities and challenges that life brings them. But they’ve also grown reflective, the result of the same political turmoil, pandemic disruptions, and increasing awareness of global injustice that affects everyone’s mental health. Even when discussing serious issues, their voices are tinged with optimism. —M.R.

Most listeners first got to know Empath through the joyfully anarchic, genuinely psychedelic noise of 2018’s Liberating Guilt and Fear cassette. Here, Philadelphia’s most intrepid inner-space cosmonauts toyed with a different approach. The album still sounds like Empath, only clearer, as though the mists surrounding their dream world had suddenly parted to reveal something even more radically inventive. Lead single “Born 100 Times” shows off Empath’s new emphasis on hooks, and mid-album highlight “Elvis Comeback Special” might be the best pop song Empath have ever recorded, with a swoonworthy vocal melody and lyrics full of romantic longing. —S.V.L.

Chloë and the Next 20th Century, his fifth and latest release, is his most un-Misty-like record yet. In the brief exchange he did with DIY  — technically his first interview in years — he even confirmed this to be true. “Your personal life just can’t go on one-upping fiction,” he said, later noting, “I can’t really make any kind of defense or case for the record. I can’t tell you why it should exist.” So allow us to make the case. Chloë boasts delicate, sprawling orchestral arrangements; characters that include Chloë, Simone, and a dead Turkish Angora; and an overlying theme of Hollywood — the very one he entered on 2012’s “Fun Times in Babylon” with open arms: “Look out, Hollywood/Here I come!” —A.M.

Fivio Foreign makes everything, even a threat, sound like a joyful improvisation. He’s loose (and jovial) with it, demanding, on his 2020 hit, “Big Drip,” “Send me the addy, I’m hunting him down,” as if his opps were brand-new acquaintances he’s already sending NBA2K invites to. Spur-of-the-moment bliss underscores B.I.B.L.E., the East Flatbush, Brooklyn, native’s debut. And Fivio builds on the sacrosanct themes he explored with his verse last year on Kanye West’s “Off the Grid,” which is one of Donda‘s highlights. Ye executive-produced the project, and, fittingly, it has an epic, gospel-tinged feel to it, providing a peculiarly catchy contrast to its vigorous big-ticket drill aspirations. —W.D.

The rawness of FKA twigs’ previous work is part of what makes the unbridled avant-pop on her new mixtape, Caprisongs, such an epic thrill. Twigs is still excising some pain, but she’s uninhibited and out of fucks to give, choosing instead to center herself, her friends, and her joy as she finds release in sounds pulled from cavernous clubs and euphoric dance floors from London to Jamaica. Throughout her career, Twigs has morphed R&B wisps and electronic abstractions into highly visual concept art, and although the music on Caprisongs is her most buoyant, she doesn’t sacrifice her creative nonconformity or intimacy. —J.L.

Dance Fever may be Florence Welch’s most ecstatically extra work yet. Just check “Free,” a titanic synth-rock banger in which she describes how epiphanies twist her mind and body like uncontrollable shocks (“Sometimes I wonder if I should be medicated,” she sings), or “Choreomania,” a dervish rush of catharsis that takes its title from the impromptu mass “dancing plagues” that swept Europe during the Renaissance. “Heaven Is Here” is a blast of swinging Celtic-folk hedonism, and on “Daffodil,” she sings about transcending generational torment with the “helpless optimism of spring.” —J.D.

Future has proven himself capable of evolution. Only old heads that doggedly call him a “mumble rapper” can’t see that. But his changes tend to be subtle and made on his terms. On I Never Liked You he unashamedly indulges in his characteristic blend of misogynist impulses, reducing women to chattel to be consumed and dispensed with. Yet he also reveals how his relationships with the opposite sex affect him personally. He’s capable of drawing on deep wells of emotion, reasserting his primacy as a key (if not the key) figure in post-Weezy/T-Pain/Kid Cudi melodic rap. —M.R.

Forgiveness is the stunning fourth album from the Los Angeles duo. After opening with a one-two shock-punch of the glitchy drum programming on “Nothing Gives Me Pleasure” (opening couplet: “Do you even want me if I even have to ask?/Break it to me gently with your fingers up my ass”) and the harsh industrial sounds of “Lie Love Lullaby,” Forgiveness settles into a carefully balanced collection of textured electronica and writerly folk-pop. That balance — between what might crudely be defined as new Girlpool versus old Girlpool — defines the album. —J.B.

Horsegirl’s debut runs through the modern indie checklist. Guitars where you can practically hear the picks scraping against the strings, unlike the processed-sounding instruments in modern pop? Check. Guttural bass lines that swoop up and down with counterpoint melodies? Done. Voices half-buried in a cavernous mix, singing elliptical lyrics or, in one case, name-checking Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith’s first album? Mission accomplished. An overall, heady vibe that you’re standing in a crammed basement club circa 1993, immersed in beautiful sonic squalor? Yep. —D.B.

On Gifted, Koffee combines traditional reggae with modern flourishes and hip-hop sensibilities, reminding us that rap’s roots are richly intertwined with Jamaican music. While a song like “Lonely” could make the purest purist smile, “Defend” breaks out dusty boom-bap production, and “Shine” sets sunny guitars over tittering hi-hats and strong 808s. The album’s musical backdrops range from breezy to absorbing, but it’s Koffee’s performances that are consistently bewitching. —M.C.

On Matador releases like 2015’s B’lieve I’m Goin’ Down … and 2018’s Bottle It In, Vile seemed to set his sights on a higher tier of modern-rock hitmaking, with tightly crafted singles like “Pretty Pimpin” and “Loading Zones.” There’s not much of that ambition to be found on Watch My Moves — fair enough, since it’s harder than ever to know what a modern-rock hit even means these days. Instead, he stretches out and gets comfortable on his loosey-goosiest jams to date, handing out 74 minutes of mellow wisdom off the dome. He’s wisely stopped searching for the next level up, focusing instead on the beautifully unfocused be-here-now beatitude that’s always been his greatest gift. —S.V.L.

Despite literally presenting himself as Jesus on the album’s cover, we find Lamar in more fallible terrain than at any point in his career. Released as a double album, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers takes on an ambitious concept, guiding us through Lamar’s psyche, with his longtime partner Whitney Alford as narrator. The ever jazz-influenced artist is diligent in the sonic progression through his subconscious. The album finds a space between Donda 2-style hurriedness and intentional dissonance. Most songs are cut into one or three different beats, giving individual songs the kind of narrative texture you’d expect from a full album. —J.I.

Palomino, Lambert’s eighth solo album, is full of departures. Lambert and her collaborators (including co-producers Jon Randall and Luke Dick) wrote a multihued batch of songs about movement and characters who drift from place to place — sometimes because they want to, sometimes because they have to. There are numerous nods to classic rock throughout. Album opener “Actin’ Up” has a spaced-out riff that recalls David Essex’s “Rock On” before morphing into a ringing, Led Zeppelin-style chorus, while the haunting “Strange” sits somewhere between Nirvana and Neil Young. —J.F.

While Latto has been rapping in public since she was a teen six years ago, 777 feels like an introduction. It is, of course, the first album she’s released with a new moniker, growing out of her incendiary former stage name. But more important, her hunger for respect and her love of the game permeates 777, from her hardcore tracks, dark and urgent, to her shiny pop entries like hit “Big Energy” and “Sunshine.” Here, she indicates she can out-diva the bossest HBIC as well as out-freak the raunchiest rappers. 777 is vibrant and viscous. —M.C.