2022 Best of | Best albums | Best songs | Irish albums | Irish songs | Best Of Podcasts | Guest lists | Best New Irish artists
40.
Rosalía
SAOKO
Jazz and reggaeton slammed into each other. No one pulls off a thrill like Rosalía, and this immediate highlight from the Catalan flamenco/pop artist’s superb third album Motomami.
39.
Casisdead
Traction Control
Uk artist Casisdead had that great ‘Pat Butcher’ song in 2017, before last year’s collaboration with La Roux. ‘Traction Control’ came out on XL this year, and features a sample from Canadian experimental artist d’Eon. Those iced synths are the one.
38.
Fever Ray
Carbon Dioxide
The Swedish artist Karin Dreijer is to release Radical Romantics on March 10th 2023, the first album from the Fever Ray project in five years.
‘Carbon Dioxide’ is an electro-leaning song with Dreijer’s trademark vocals to the fore, with which Dreijer wanted to describe the feeling of falling in love and reference points span Henry Mancini’s ballpark standard ‘Baby Elephant Walk’ (Dreijer finds it to be the “happiest melody”) to 1 Corinthians 13:1 to Anne Morrow Lindberg’s 1955 essay collection, Gift from the Sea.
“Carbon Dioxide, a compound which, being defined by its bond with oxygen, seems to me like a neat chemical expression of the essential compassion that the conditions for life on our planet depend. Compassion and joy; happiness guarded from sentimentality by the absurd and the grotesque; the extra-everything of unconstrained Nature.”
37.
Braxe & Falcon
Creative Source
French Touch producers Alan Braxe and DJ Falcon have returned to fill the void of Daft Punk’s closure. The dance music royalty pairing have never worked together before and had me feeling all nostalgic with the release of ‘Creative Source’, an upbeat B-side that channels the vibe of the robots, and that samples ’70s disco funk group Creative Source’s ‘I’d Find You Anywhere’.
A-side ‘Step By Step’ featuring Panda Bear is more languid but equally as sheenful.
36.
Denzel Curry, Robert Glasper
Melt Session #1
Denzel Curry’s Melt My Eyez See Your Future opened with this capsule of famed jazz pianist and producer Robert Glasper providing the backing for what sounds like a celestial rap transmission.
35.
Boy Harsher
Autonomy (feat. Cooper B. Handy)
The electro duo Boy Harsher’s ‘Autonomy’ from The Runner softens the duo’s trademark darkness in favour of a lighter number which sounds like a Human League track with vocals by Cooper B. Handy of the band Lucy.
34.
Eliza Rose; Interplanetary Criminal
B.O.T.A. (Baddest Of Them All)
’90s dance synths and basslines combine with a hypnotic earworm on the breakout club hit of the year. The nostalgia is big with this one, whether you were there the first time round or not.
33.
Daphni
Cherry
Dan Snaith strength as Daphni is taking minimal elements and making something kaleidoscopic out of them, as he does here largely with a repeating tinkling synth line, filtered drums and an occasional underlining bassline.
32.
Earl Sweatshirt
Titanic
From Earl’s album Sick!, ‘Titanic’ is a wonky beat rap banger typical of the rapper’s high calibre output.
31.
Mount Kimbie; Dom Maker; KUČKA
f1 racer
Mount Kimbie’s double album MK 3.5: Die Cuts | City Planning is comprised of solo albums by Dom Maker and Kai Campos respectively.
‘f1 racer’ was produced Dom Maker, a typically wavy electronic beat from a Mount Kimbie project with more pop vocals than before via the English-born Australian singer/producer Kučka. Mount Kimbie excel at these late-night headphone excursions.
30.
Arctic Monkeys
Body Paint
An orchestral soft rock beaut from The Car’, ‘Body Paint’ finds Alex Turner in falsetto mode and sharpening his tongue with knowledge that his partner is a cheat.
For a master of deception and subterfuge
You’ve made yourself quite the bed to lie in
Do your time travelling through the tanning booth
So you don’t let the sun catch you crying
29.
Bicep, Clara La San
Water
Belfast duo Bicep dropped a few loosies this year, after their big summer of festivals. ‘Water’ is the one that most ably matches their best work from Isles, with vocals, channelling early Bicep energy along with synths that ape video game sounds.
28.
Madlib, Declaime
Bandwagon
From In the Beginning, Vol. 2, a collection of music made by old pals of producer Madlib and Declaime aka Stones Throw Californian artist Dudley Perkins rapping between 1993 and 1996 when they both lived in Oxnard, California, comes this easy across the ages classic-sounding rap track.
A third volume is coming in January which is a bit insane if it’s half as good as this.
27.
Billy Woods, El-P, Breeze Brewin
Heavy Water
Brooklyn rapper and Backwoodz Studioz label boss Billy Woods’ tenth studio album Aethiopes, produced by Preservation used Ethopian and jazz music as a backdrop, and made it spindly, spacious and supernatural, while recalling some of the best of the Def Jux label on tracks like ‘Heavy Water’ with one of the label’s originators – El-P.
Multi-verse Benzino
Rode back on a black pegasus
Medusa’s head in a sack
Senegalese twists snakin’ out the bag
I come bearing gifts, rat, fleas, cave bats, black exorcist
Clarence 13X had the white girls sick
Shimmy down the steps with a wink…
26.
Andy Shauf
Wasted On You
‘Wasted On You’ is a preview single from a new Andy Shauf record called Norm (February 10th 2023) which exemplifies Shauf’s gentle songwriting prowess and those cascading strings are a gift.
25.
CMAT
Nashville
Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson is one of Ireland’s finest lyric writers, and on her debut CMAT album If My Wife New I’d Be Dead opener distills her entire vibe into an intro song.
‘Nashville’ has country pop smarts musically, with pop culture references to K-pop and Anna Nicole among a song about depression imbued with a devastating pathos of a ruse of moving away to Nashville and leaving everyone behind.
“This sums up the whole album, a song that I wrote because I have really, really been a very depressed person. I was thinking about the fact that during the times of the most depression, just unable to cope with the world, completely struggling, I’m the most craic—I’m so funny, I’m the best, a good-time gal. I listened to a podcast called You’re Wrong About and there was an episode on the study of suicide. One of the hosts talked about a friend of his who planned his death six months in advance. For those six months, he was the best guy, so much fun, so excited about life. He told everybody that he was moving to California and had all of his friends go to a going-away party, and then took his own life. I remember thinking that that is exactly what I would’ve done if I had got to the point. And it was an instinctive thought of, ‘Oh, if that was me, I would’ve said I was moving to Nashville’, because everyone knows I wanted to move to Nashville. It’s a really difficult song to play to people because it makes me very self-aware of how bad I have been and how bad I was for a while.”
24.
ELIZA
A Tear For The Dreadful
UK R&B artist Eliza’s A Sky Without Stars album was released in September, and following on from previous features, there’s a tangible simplicity and verve to these productions – a quiet confidence that draws you in.
It’s a long way since the artist released ‘Skinny Genes’, when she was known as Eliza Doolittle.
23.
Beyoncé
Cozy
Renaissance celebrates black queer culture and its associated dance music and vogue balls through the use of carefully-chosen house music samples, as we discussed on a podcast episode this year.
‘Cozy’ might be the best single example of this execution. With a production by trans artist Honey Dijon, and Beyoncé referencing the colours of the progress pride flag, the song celebrates LGBTQ+, in a year that has seen yet another targeted American queer club shooting in Colorado.
22.
Jake Xerxes Fussell
Love Farewell
The North Carolina singer and guitarist Jake Xerxes Fussell’s music is informed from his time with his father Fred C. Fussell, an Alabama folklorist, curator, and photographer who took his son on the road while he was recording blues and folk songs and musicians.
In January, Fussell released his fourth album of bluesy folk music entitled Good & Green Again, and this lilting folk tune about love during wartime, takes its queue from traditional ballad ‘Come Philanderers’ by O.B. Campbell.
21.
Fred again.., Swedish House Mafia, Future
Turn On The Lights Again..
After ‘Danielle (Smile On My Face)’, ‘the trance-like neon synths of ‘Turn On The Lights Again..’ might be the most blunt instrument in Fred Again..’s stash of club tunes, a man who seems to have an ability to turn collaboration into a strength without losing his own sonic identity. When that bass hits on club speakers, its effects are colossal.
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Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005 . He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Cara Magazine, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, founder of Lumo Club, club promoter, event curator and producer of gigs, listening parties & events in Dublin.
