2022 Best of | Best albums | Best songs | Irish albums | Irish songs | Best Of Podcasts | Guest lists | Best New Irish artists
20.
Confidence Man
TILT
The Australian four-piece’s second album TILT is a collection of electronic pop bops, a finesse of the kind of fun they had displayed on their 2017 debut album Confident Music For Confident People.
The band retain the sass and vim, but imbue the album with deeper reflections of classic ’90s dance music – like Deee-Lite updated for the 21st century.
There are anthemic electro-pop thrills like the escapist ‘Holiday’, the body work of ‘Feels Like A Different Thing’, the celebratory ‘Woman’, the warm ‘Lovin U Is Easy’ and tracks where the band embrace sounding a bit silly, like the Venga Boys-esque ‘Push It Up’, the instrumental carnival of ‘Trumpet Song’ and the earworm piano-house pop of ‘Toy Boy’.
Confidence Man are bursting with infectious energy, it’s impossible to keep your cool around them.
19.
Earl Sweatshirt
Sick!
California rapper Earl Sweatshirt’s fourth album clocks in at 25 minutes, and its brevity of form and delivery is its great strength.
Filled with discombobulating and wonky beats and rhythms by a coterie of producers: the Alchemist, Black Noi$e, Navy Blue (listed as Ancestors), Samiyam, Alexander Spit, Theravada, Rob Chambers and Earl himself, Sick! features Earl’s densely packaged rhymes that dispense with structure or formula, and allude to self-acceptance and a new responsibility of fatherhood.
18.
Sudan Archives
Natural Born Prom Queen
LA-based Cincinnati rapper, singer and violinist’s Brittany Parks’ album Natural Brown Prom Queen‘s alt-R&B style was easily one of the year’s best.
Parks has turned her violin-assisted R&B into a fully-fledged expanse with producers MonoNeon, Simon on the Moon, Hi-Tek and Nosaj Thing helping out.
The songs on Natural Brown Prom Queen are concerned with race and womanhood, and Parks’ relationships with family, friends and her partner, some of who contributed lyrics and vocals.
Spinning a collection of largely-joyful music that moves between Afrocentric soul, disco, R&B and booming hip-hop bass, Sudan Archives celebrates the self, while embracing and platforming insecurities and vulnerabilities.
17.
Dry Cleaning
Stumpwork
Dry Cleaning’s second album Stumpwork, does enough to not feel like a carbon copy of the vibe of the brilliant debut New Long Leg.
By introducing fresh textures (brass, mandolin, recorder) and softer shades to the band’s art-rock and post-punk backing (which tends to be less distortion-driven than New Long Leg), Stumpwork allows Florence Shaw’s recitative half-spoken/ half-sung (now sometimes with a deliberate melody) to grace the corners of your mind, with impressionistic references to lost family turtles, “dog sledge people”, “my shoe organising thing”, and mixed-media art jelly shoes embedded in guts, along with fragmented conversations – “Are these еxposed wires all good?”, “It won’t do to cry about it,”, “Things are shit, but they’re gonna be okay,” and “This seems like a weird premise for a show / But I like it.”
Dry Cleaning seems like a weird premise for a band, but I like it.
16.
Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul
Topical Dancer
Belgian duo Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul’s debut album was co-written and co-produced with Soulwax, and released on their label Deewee.
Informed and addressing racism, coming from an immigrant background, cultural appropriation, political correctness, inappropriate male behaviour and using clichéd lyrics to make a banger, Topical Dancer is a collection of pulsing prismatic synthesizer jams.
15.
Gilla Band
Most Normal
Of course, Gilla Band’s (formerly known as Girl Band) third record is anything but their most normal.
The Dublin noise band’s album (Rough Trade), once again produced in-house by Daniel Fox, is their weirdest, most sonically diffusive record yet.
In between Gilla Band’s version of pop songs – thunderous tectonic songs that you can shout along to like ‘Eight Fivers’, ‘Backwash’ or ‘Post Ryan’, there are passages of ambient and crispy noise as heard on ‘The Weirds’ and ‘Gushie’, the Aphex Twin Come To Daddy levels of sonic harshness on ‘Bin Liner Fashion’ and the discombobulating vista of ‘Red Polo Neck’.
All the while, Dara Kiely’s lyrics vacillate between self-analysis, self-reflection and quotable life-absurd one-liners – “I can’t wear hats, I just get slagged”, “at the end of the day, that’s football”, “i’m just the same prick,” and “no one looks cool around a wasp”.
14.
The Mary Wallopers
The Mary Wallopers
When The Mary Wallopers released their debut EP in the summer of 2019, the two brothers Charles and Andrew Hendy were more well-known for making satirical hip-hop as TPM.
Then came lockdown, and brothers Hendy, along with their pal Sean McKenna made a name for themselves with their bright takes on aul lad folk songs, streaming from a pub they made in their house in Dundalk.
By the time their self-titled self-released debut album was released this October, The Wallopers had taken over, playing on national TV, selling out an Irish tour as a seven-piece and playing around the UK, the source of a lot of their singing ire.
The album, recorded with Chris Barry at Ailfionn Studios in Dublin, keeps up the decades old tradition of Irish folk drinking songs which bash the Brits, the rich and the guards while raising a glass of porter, while deferring to occasional solemnity on the emigration ballad ‘Building Up And Tearing England Down’.
With energetic verve, fine musicianship and Dundalk brogues, The Mary Wallopers captures the chaos and fun of these cheeky rogues’ performances. Whether its recounting the tale of a lock-in on ‘The Nights Gards Raided Owenys’, the quipping riot of ‘Cod Liver Oil & The Orange Juice’ or the bachelor anthem ‘Love Will Never Conquer Me’, the band bring a theatrical divilment to proceedings that keeps you looking for another round.
13.
Pusha T
It’s Almost Dry
The world’s best rapper with the preoccupation of selling cocaine continues to find new ways to elaborate on the trappings of the drug trade.
With Pharrell and Kanye West splitting the 12-track production between them, there are some of the best rap beats of the year on this thing, with Pusha lyrically dexterous as ever, with Jay Z, Kid Cudi, Malice, Don TOliver and Lil Uzi Vert adding some verses and vocal colour to Pusha’s bombastic mood pieces.
12.
Nilüfer Yanya
Painless
This one took longer to needle its way under my skin than Nilüfer Yanya’s debut did, but when it got there, it hooked on and refused to let go.
Cadence, control and nuance are central to the appeal of Yanya’s loping songs, which evade easy capture through short bursts of hooks and twisting instrumentation.
Recorded with collaborator and producer Will Archer, Bullion, Big Thief producer Andrew Sarlo, and musician Jazzi Bobbi, these sharpened songs feel like deep dives into the depths of emotional state of the Irish/Barbadian/Turkish artist, who writes lyrics and sings them like she’s processing her subconscious thoughts into fully-realised beautiful melodies in real-time.
11.
Loyle Carner
Hugo
English rapper Loyle Carner’s third album after 2017’s Yesterday’s Gone and 2019’s Not Waving But Drowning, is his most dynamic and searching work.
Featuring production and credits to Kwes, Madlib, Jordan Rakei, Alfa Mist, Hugo is concerned with identity, mixed-race roots and complex relationships with father figures in light of Carner becoming a parent himself.
Musically rich with largely live instrumentation, imbued with neo-soul and hip-hop sounds, and three urgent marquee singles in ‘Hate’, ‘Georgetown’ (with Guyanese poet John Agard) and ‘Nobody Knows (Ladas Road)’, Hugo is a cathartic, far-reaching career best.
