The 100 best songs of 2022

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.

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.

32.

Earl Sweatshirt

Titanic

From Earl’s album Sick!, ‘Titanic’ is a wonky beat rap banger typical of the rapper’s high calibre output.

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.

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.

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.