2022 AOTY So Far

I love the Taj Mahal/Ry Cooder album.

Real Lies - Lad Ash
Vitesse X - Us Ephemeral

^ this is a very bad description but the second one of those is vapourwave-adjacent dreampop meets 90s ravey stuff

Amber Mark - Three Dimensions Deep (P4k 8+)
Anitta - Versions of Me (RS BSF)
Anxious - Little Green House (SG BSF)

I assume P4k and RS is Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, but what is SG and BSF?

I think SG is Stereogum, and BSF means that the site included it in their “Best (of 2022) So Far” feature

ten I love: Mitski, Rosalia, Let's Eat Grandma, Nilufer Yanya, Adigery/Pupul, Girlpool, Billy Woods, Etran de L'Air, Tears for Fears, Amber Mark. and the 1/3 of Lad Ash I've heard, of course. also didn't get to Jazmine Sullivan or Tinashe last year so I've sorta been pretending the deluxe versions are all new.

New lists from NPR:

ALBUMS: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/28/1107438039/npr-music-favorite-albums-of-2022-so-far

TRACKS: https://www.npr.org/2022/06/27/1107322225/npr-musics-36-favorite-songs-of-2022-so-far

Factoring in NPR's list, here's how the top of my previous list changes:

Big Thief - Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You (10)
The Weeknd - Dawn FM (9)
Soul Glo - Diaspora Problems (9)
Rosalia - Motomami (8)
The Smile - A Light for Attracting Attention (8)
Earl Sweatshirt - Sick! (7)
Wet Leg - Wet Leg (7)
Kendrick Lamar - Mr Morale & The Big Steppers (7)

Here are the albums that are only on NPR's list:

Dan Romer - Station Eleven Soundtrack
Girl Ultra - El Sur
Guitarricadelafuente - La Cantera
Harvey Sutherland - Boy
Immanuel Wilkins - The 7th Hand
Jogging House - Weight
Jóhann Jóhannsson - Drone Mass
Kojey Radical - Reason to Smile
MUNA - MUNA
Peter Cocooma - A Place to Begin
Samm Henshaw - Untidy Soul
Saya Gray - 19 Masters
Shortie No Mass - here goes nothing.
Straw Man Army - SOS
Swsh - Goodboy
X Alfonso - Ancestros Sinfónico
Yeat - 2 Alive

a lot of these don't seem like AOTY material (DawnFM? Seriously) But maybe people don't really make those anymore. I figure Kendrick will top a bunch of lists and people will complain about it.

Dawn FM is pretty good! Lopatin worked some magic. Easily the most compelling stuff I've heard from The Weeknd since the initial EP mixtapes. Agreed it won't be many people's AOTY but there are always near-universally "liked" albums that bubble to the top in group voting exercises.

i checked, it's still Rema

Straw Man Army rules! Good job, NPR.

AOTY is going to be the new Soccer Mommy, based on the singles

― boxedjoy, Friday, 17 June 2022 16:03 (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

I was so right about this

you were!!!

wifigawd - chain of command

The 50 best albums I've heard so far this year.

Maybe it's not AOTY level, but I want to take a moment to rep for Flasher - Love is Yours which is, at the very least, a better post-punk-pop record than Wet Leg's debut (and I *like* Wet Leg). Their last one, Constant Image was my most-played album of 2018. This band is perennially under-praised, IMO.

That's a good list unperson, a few more I need to check out now and glad to see some love for that Ecstatic Vision record. I've been a big fan of them and I think the new one is one of their best.

The ILM outlier at the top of this list appears to be Soul Glo. The last post I found on the band was from 2019.

Soul Glo’s rise to hardcore heroism would be greater cause for celebration if it weren’t such a damning indictment of American society. Since forming in 2014, the Philly quartet has garnered modest acclaim for airing their righteous grievances against being both tokenized and ostracized as a Black punk band, all while sparing no detail on hypocrisy within their own community, our broken health care system, generational trauma, and the false promises of higher education and upward mobility. By the time Americans en masse were starting to admit that things were as fucked up as Soul Glo had been saying, they’d put out their first widely distributed release, Songs to Yeet at the Sun, in November 2020. The message hadn’t changed, but more people were actually willing to listen. Nearly two years later, none of Soul Glo’s calls for political action have been answered in a meaningful way. “It’s been ‘fuck right wing’ off the rip/But still liberals are more dangerous,” Pierce Jordan snarls midway through Soul Glo’s staggering new album, Diaspora Problems, a ticking time bomb hurled by a band tired of waiting on solutions and taking power into its own hands. - Ian Cohen @p4k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4vNQ3vEy24

The brand-new Kabza De Small album, KOA II, Part 1, is a likely candidate too.

― butt-mooning is a polysemous word, hoss! (breastcrawl), vrijdag 17 juni 2022 10:18

no kidding

Wormrot are an amazing grindcore band from Singapore; Hiss, which came out on Friday, is their first album in six years, and it's definitely going to be on my year-end list. This video is for three tracks from the album.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVk_C_wp1j0

Sick video.

if you're excited by the prospect of Ron Trent making a gorgeous balearic album then you're in luck with his latest

Enjoying the Mr Fingers album, tis the season

try that Kabza De Small album next, you might like it

Cheers

I just don't keep up any more but I was dipping into Amapiano stuff last year and I'm very up for it

cool - the chances of you liking it have gone up significantly!

listening now - sold

not just sold, this is fire

Surprised not to see Nicola Cruz - self oscillation anywhere in this thread. Top ten for me for sure

ok that sounds great too

not just sold, this is fire

More vocals than I expected and it really works, whole lush vibe to it

The 5 best things I listened to in the past month:

01 Gavilán Rayna Russom - Trans Feminist Symphonic Music
02 Kali Malone - Living Torch
03 E L U C I D - I Told Bessie
04 yoo doo right - A Murmur, Boundless to the East
05 Extra Life - Secular Works, Vol. 2

damn didn’t realize there was a new yoo doo right album!

Ooh, given I love two of those, will make sense to check out the other three

I love the Taj Mahal/Ry Cooder album.
enjoyed the singles will check out

Real Lies and Big Thief made great albums but I mostly listen to selected tracks from them

enjoyed the Kurt Vile album but stopped listening to it after a while

other faves
Fresh Pepper - s/t
Charles Lloyd, Bill Frisell and Thomas Morgan - Trios: Chapel
Joan Shelley - The Spur

Really surprised to see so much critical love for Dawn FM. I've listened a couple of times and found it bland and sterile. Even OPN's input can't save The Weeknd from himself. And I'm a huge OPN stan.

Real Lies I also found very monochrome tbh.

I've been giving Big Thief and Cloakroom a go based on this thread. Both are really growing on me. I need to give the new Sharon Van Etten a proper spin too.

My picks so far:
Soccer Mommy
Horsegirl
Emily Wells
Charli XCX (not her best but still a banger)
Wet Leg

Oh shit and the new Beyonce of course. Can't see that not topping a shitload of year-end lists.

Holy shit this Yeule album is good. Missed it when it first came out. Can't stop listening now. Really surprised there's not more hype around this one.

Big Thief, Real Lies and this new Chat Pile album are going to be hard to top

here are some of my faves so far

https://stabscotch.bandcamp.com/album/prison-jar
https://vrsex.bandcamp.com/album/rough-dimension
https://extralife.bandcamp.com/album/secular-works-vol-2
https://craigfortnam.bandcamp.com/album/instrumental-music-1
https://scarcity-nyc.bandcamp.com/album/aveilut

see also: imperial triumphant, patricia taxxon (for 'visiting narcissa'), half man half biscuit, of montreal, sb the moor, fievel is glauque, elucid, holy scum, baby zionov, adigery/pupul etc etc

pleasantly surprised by horsegirl, lots of promise here, we needed a new swirlies tbh

do fievel is glaque have a new album out?

i meant the aerodynes ep, which is incredible but has been temporarily removed from streaming due to 'exciting developments'

https://thenativemag.com/best-african-projects-2022-so-far/

have only heard about half of these, so there’s some exploring to do, but they’ve got my number one and two *almost* right

Dunno if this will even end up in play for my EOY favorites, but right now I'm really loving it. Did a search and she's been mentioned in our jazz threads for several years, but this is the first time I've ever noticed Cécile McLorin Salvant. What a good fuckin record!

https://cecilemclorinsalvant.bandcamp.com/album/ghost-song

Just heard the new Lucius today. Not sure whether it's AOY material, but I really dig it. I love their aesthetic.

Posted this in the indie thread but fans of the Big Thief should also check out the new Florist s/t. More intimate and so maybe reminds me more of The Glow, Pt II but will appeal to the same crowd, I think.