Top 100 songs of 2022.

There was such a flood of new music in the last two months of 2022 that I struggled to keep up with it, even slipping a couple of new albums on my best of 2022 list that I’d only listened to in their entirety in the last couple of weeks. It’s a good outcome, though, as 2022 shaped up to be a better year for new music than I would have said it was coming out of the summer, and I had more songs to put on this list than I could fit (and no, I’m not going past 100, this is work enough for something that’s not my actual job). You can see my previous years’ song rankings here: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012.

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100. beabadoobee – 10:36. Beatrice Kristi Laus’s second album, beatopia, refers to a fantasy world she created for herself when she moved with her family from the Philippines to London at age 7. It’s a clear step forward in her songwriting and gets her out of the lo-fi world of her first record. This was my second-favorite track on the album, although “Last Day on Earth,” her one-off single from 2021, isn’t on the LP at all.

99. Stella Donnelly – How Was Your Day? The Welsh-Australian singer-songwriter Donnelly released her second album, Flood, this spring to positive reviews. This track’s witty lyrics, revealing the hidden layers behind that innocuous phrase, and sunny indie-pop make it the album’s best.

98. Young Guv – Nowhere at All. Ben Cook of the Canadian band No Warning released his third album as Young Guv early this year and then followed it up with this one-off jangle-pop single that reminded me quite a bit of last year’s debut record from Chime School.

97. The Linda Lindas – Tonite. I’ve been a bit surprised that the Linda Linda’s debut album Growing Up didn’t appear on any year-end rankings or roundups of the year’s best music that I found, given the hype around the teenage punk band a year or two earlier – and given how good they sound for a bunch of kids. This is a great, vibrant young punk album, just angry enough about the right stuff. I admit it’s not breaking a ton of new ground, but tracks like this one are pretty infectious and point to a promising future.

96. Arlo Parks – Softly. The only music Parks released this year was this track, which brings some electronic music elements to her lovely vocals.

95. Bartees Strange – Wretched. Strange’s second album, Farm to Table, is his big coming-out as a songwriter, bringing him out from under the shadow of his influences (notably the National). This track was one of the album’s standouts, a slower, mournful song that offers thanks to the people who stood by him when he was at his worst.

94. Jungle – Good Times. One of two songs Jungle released this year ahead of an album that didn’t appear in 2022, although I imagine it won’t be that much longer now that their summer/fall tour is over.

93. SAULT – Money. SAULT released six albums this year, five of them at the start of November. One of those five was Today & Tomorrow, the band’s most rock-oriented record to date, even bringing in some punk influences. You can hear it here, where they channel the 1970s punk act Death.

92. The Cool Greenhouse – Get Unjaded. I know this style of very English art-rock music with talk-sung lyrics isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but where else would you find a couplet like “Googling questions like ‘Should I start microdosing?’/And ‘How come I’m standing outside Four Seasons Total Landscaping?’”

91. The Fashion Weak ft. Gruff Rhys – Welsh Words. I admit to some pro-Cymru bias here, but this song is both extremely catch and makes me laugh every time I hear it. Rhys is the lead singer of Super Furry Animals, who’ve recorded entire albums in Welsh, while the Fashion Weak are a new wave revival act whose second single, “Fly Fishing,” featured Miki Berenyi of Lush.

90. Superbloom – Falling Up. The first few seconds are sort of nonsense, the kind of thing the band will grow out of, but I like where the track goes afterwards as these over Nirvana fans expand beyond the well-crafted mimicry of their first album into something more original over the foundation of grunge revival.

89. Stars – Pretenders. Stars’ first album in nearly five years was typically lovely, if perhaps a bit unambitious, featuring plenty of back-and-forth vocals from the two lead singers. They bring an ethereal beauty even to upbeat rock tracks like this one, my favorite on the record.

88. All Them Witches – Hush, I’m on TV. According to Wikipedia, ATW released nine original singles in 2022 plus two covers, but no album. Anyway, I dig their heavy, stoner/blues rock sound, which settles in after the loud, layered riffing that opens this track before the buzzsaw hits in the chorus.

87. The Wombats – Everything I Love is Going to Die. The two best tracks from the Wombats’ 2022 album Fix Yourself, Not the World were both released in 2021, so even though the LP made my best-of-2022 list, this is the only song from the record on this year’s top 100.

86. Preoccupations – Ricochet. The best song from Preoccupations’ fourth album Arrangements is this track, which fuses their typical post-punk/early new wave sound with elements of early ‘90s shoegaze.

85. Porcupine Tree – Rats Return. “Harridan” was my favorite song on CLOSURE/CONTINUATION, but this is a close second, less ambitious but highlighted by the best guitar riff on the entire album, a dark, minor-key line that infuses the whole song with a sense of foreboding.

84. Cory Wong – Power Station. Wong released two albums in 2022, Wong’s Café in January and Power Station in April, with this, obviously from the latter album, sounding like something discovered in Prince’s archives from the early 1980s, just with a better guitar solo.

83. The Afghan Whigs – I’ll Make You See God. The Whigs have always been able to rock, but this track goes 0 to 90 in the opening seconds and never lets up – enough that it ended up in the video game Gran Turismo 7. The lyrics appear to be total nonsense, but man, this sucker rocks.

82. Gojira – Our Time is Now. Gojira put out the best metal song of the year – and it’s the only song they released all year, although I’m hopeful we’re getting a new Gojira album soon. It’s not my favorite Gojira song ever, but it might be their most accessible, if that’s possible.

81. Black Honey – Heavy. I didn’t love their previous single, “Charlie Bronson,” but “Heavy” is more the Black Honey I know and love, indie-rock with a strong melody crossed with a harder edge.

80. Crawlers – I Don’t Want It. Barely over two minutes long, this little earworm from the Liverpudlian quartet Crawlers is their best track to date and one of two strong singles from their second EP, Loud Without Noise, along with “Too Soon.”

79. Sports Team – The Drop. I could have put as many as five songs from Gulp! on this top 100, but ended up with two, adding this track because the main hook is so memorable, and it’s one of the more interesting tracks on the album because of the one right turn it takes at the bridge.

78. Killing Joke – Lord of Chaos. Jaz Coleman is 62, and with his age and seven years passing since Killing Joke’s last album, Pylon, I figured we were done getting new music from the band. Killing Joke defy labels as much as any artist I can think of – I suppose people who know Sparks’ music would say the same, but I don’t know their oeuvre as well – so it was sort of a pleasant surprise to hear this track and “Total” follow in the same heavy-rock vein as that last album, which gave us the incredible single “Euphoria.”

77. Band of Horses – Warning Signs. Band of Horses’ best songs can be pretty great, like “Is There a Ghost,” but I find their albums nearly always let me down, and this year’s Things Are Great was more of the same. This was my favorite track, although I think that’s probably because it reminds me of the way I want Band of Horses to sound all the time.

76. Melt Yourself Down – Balance. I admit to ignorance on Melt Yourself Down, and I need to explore their discography some more, as I liked what I heard from this year as they released their fourth album Pray for Me, I Don’t Fit In. Their music doesn’t just blend genres from around the world, but it does so in a frenetic fashion that holds my interest even when the song doesn’t have a great hook (“Nightsiren”). This was the best track from the album, with three great hooks in the vocals, the saxophone line, and the guitar riff around the 1:30 mark.

75. The Mysterines – Means to Bleed. The Mysterines released their debut album, Reeling, in March, but it didn’t include most of the great singles they’d released over the previous couple of years, like “I Win Every Time,” “Love’s Not Enough,” “Bet Your Pretty Face,” or “Gasoline.” The album has the right vibe, just without the highlights, although this and “Hung Up” are solid examples of their sound and their potential.

74. Jack White feat. Q-Tip – Hi-De-Ho. The Jack White/Q-Tip partnership that first appeared on record with A Tribe Called Quest’s swan song We Got It From Here … Thank You For Your Service continued this year with Q-Tip’s guest spot on this track from the first of White’s two albums released in 2022, Fear of the Dawn. The result here, based on an interpolation of Cab Calloway’s famous scatting phrase, is wonderfully weird and catchy, and by now you probably realize I give 5 bonus points to any track including Kamaal the Abstract.

73. Kid Kapichi – Rob the Supermarket. I can’t avoid thinking of this as some sort of late-stage capitalist response to the Clash’s anti-consumerist “Lost in the Supermarket,” while also marveling at how Kid Kapichi have taken the mantle that Alex Turner dropped somewhere in the late teens.

72. Freddie Gibbs feat. Moneybagg Yo. Gibbs is one of the best technical rappers going now, and pairs it with consistently interesting and often weird backing music; this track, the best from the regular edition of Gibbs’s $oul $old $eparately, shows off his rhyming speed and rhythm better than anything else on the record.

71. beabadoobee – Talk. The best track from beatopia has a little harder of an edge to the music and mixes her vocals up accordingly to pair with the walls of distortion in the chorus, along with the album’s best melody.

70. Talk Show – Cold House. Talk Show, unrelated to the Stone Temple Pilots offshoot from about twenty years ago, released two EPs this year; Touch the Ground had six songs, including last year’s “Underworld” and this track that encapsulates their blend of post-punk, new wave revival, and dark wave.

69. HAIM – Lost Track. I’ve never gotten the hype for HAIM, but man this song has a hell of a hook in the chorus, and it’s the perfect length for a song of this simplicity.

68. FKA twigs featuring Jorja Smith and Unknown T – darjeeling. I love FKA twigs and I love Jorja Smith, so I’m clearly in the target audience for this track from FKA twigs’ album mixtape, and indeed it’s Smith’s vocals that elevate the track.

67. Tei Shi – GRIP. Big year for songs/albums calling out the music industry’s more exploitative practices. Tei Shi pulled her 2021 album La Linda from streaming services after Downtown Records refused to pay her the remainder of her advance two years aft, er its release. “GRIP” is her diss track against that label and the industry as a whole.

66. Editors – Karma Climb. I was a little underwhelmed by EBM, Editors’ latest album and first with Blanck Mass (Benjamin Power) as a member, but the chorus on “Karma Climb” is extremely catchy and I think a good example of their early Interpol-esque dark indie sound.

65. Greentea Peng – Your Mind. Greentea Peng’s eclectic mix of styles can be very hit or miss, missing on “Stuck in the Middle” but hitting here on “Your Mind,” which incorporates traditional soul, jazz, and some rock guitar lines. Both appeared on her mixtape GREENZONE 108 this September. I wonder if it’s more than a coincidence that this song’s length is 4:20.

64. Sudan Archives – Home Maker. The opening track from Natural Brown Prom Queen, my #2 album of the year, fakes you out with a minute-long intro that almost sounds like someone pressed ‘record’ before anyone was ready, but it’s all a matter of building tension before Britt Parks starts up with her mixture of rap and vocals, and by the two-minute mark she’s shipped you back almost fifty years in time with her classic R&B sounds.

63. Sky Ferreira – Don’t Forget. I had forgotten, it turns out, as Ferreira released just one song between 2014 and 2022, 2019’s “Downhill Lullaby.” This track is supposed to herald the release of her long-awaited second album, Masochism, although it’s still unscheduled; if this is where her sound has evolved after the long layoff, into a darker version of synth-pop, I’m all for it.

62. Sprints – Literary Mind. Sprints released an EP earlier in 2022, Modern Job, featuring the title track and “Delia Smith,” while this single came later and might be their catchiest song to date, without losing any of their signature garage or punk elements.

61. Automatic – Skyscraper. Automatic released their second album, Excess, in June, and this third single from the record was actually the first of their songs I’d heard, a pulsing, dark synth-pop track powered by a prominent, wandering bass line.

60. Dry Cleaning – Don’t Press Me. I’m very sensitive to how a vocalist sings, and often it doesn’t even make that much sense to me. I don’t love the vocals from Dry Cleaning, even though that flat, almost toneless style of sing-talking doesn’t necessarily bother me from other singers, just as I can’t stand Porridge Radio’s whiny, cracking vocals. “Don’t Press Me” is a rare example where the vocals on a Dry Cleaning song aren’t enough to deter me from an outstanding Wire-ish track.

59. Hatchie – Quicksand. I was a little … not underwhelmed, but maybe just whelmed by Hatchie’s new album this year, as it seemed like the Aussie singer/songwriter might be stagnating; the best track was last year’s “This Enchanted,” followed by this song, both solid examples of her particular brand of dream pop.

58. CVC – Good Morning Vietnam. CVC have been gigging in Cardiff (that’s Wales) since before the pandemic but didn’t start releasing music until this year, when they dropped a couple of singles, including this odd mélange of psychedelic rock and ‘70s soft rock with a funk-adjacent bass line. “Docking My Pay” is also worth checking out if you like this track, as we wait for CVC to drop a full album.

57. Yard Act – Pour Another. Yard Act’s debut album The Overload dropped in January and its best songs had already appeared, including the superb title track and the peculiar “Payday,” leaving this as the best song from the band in 2022. I’ll forever compare them to Gang of Four, although here there’s a more joyous, almost silly vibe.

56. Crows – Garden of England. The standout track on Slowly Separate, bringing punk energy to their particular brand of hard-rock-verging-on-metal. I’d fly to London tomorrow for a Kid Kapichi/Crows double billing.

55. MUNA – What I Want. MUNA’s self-titled third album made a few best-of-2022 lists, although it didn’t quite make the cut for me. I do like their unabashedly poppy approach; I just feel like they’re often a little short in the hooks department. This was the best track on the record for me, and unsurprisingly I think the most acclaimed as well.

54. shame – Fingers of Steel. shame’s sophomore album Food for Worms is due out February 24^th, with this the lead single. I see them tabbed everywhere as “post-punk,” but I don’t think it fits; they’re an alternative rock act in the clearest sense of the word, working with dissonant sounds and unusual rhythms that will probably always keep them out of the mainstream. I’m also in awe of the fact that they named a song “Baldur’s Gate” after my all-time favorite CPRG series.

53. John-Allison Weiss – Different Now. Weiss’ first new music since coming out as non-binary & trans in 2017, and first for Get Better Records, was this aptly titled song that doubles as a bittersweet breakup track.

52. Death Cab for Cutie – Here to Forever. DCFC seem good for one real standout single on every album at this point, such as “Gold Rush” from 2018’s Thank You for Today and “Black Sun” from Kintsugi. That may not quite hit the highs of Codes and Keys or Transatlanticism, but I’d say this is pretty good for a band approaching the 25^th anniversary of its first album, and singing about mortality and surviving.

51. STONE – Waste. This Liverpool garage-punk band signed to Polydor earlier in the year and ended it with a banger of a six-song EP, highlighted by this abrasive track that starts angry and ends up furious.

50. Sam Fender – Alright. A tremendous non-album single from the Seventeen Going Under sessions, included in a live version on a bonus version of the 2021 LP released this summer. You’ll notice I don’t include many slower-tempo songs on these lists, especially ones that aren’t acoustic, so that should give you some sense of how much I like this.

49. Foals – Looking High. I thought Foals’ Life is Yours was just a big ol’ mess of danceable fun, but it didn’t receive the plaudits I expected, with a lot of criticism over the lyrics – which has never been a strength of Foals’ songwriter Yannis Philippakis. (“I see a mountain at my gates/I see it more and more each day.” Shades of Keats and Shelley there.) This or “Wake Me Up” vie for my favorite track on the album.

48. GIFT – Gumball Garden. A five-minute opus that starts out in shoegaze territory and then shifts almost to power-pop territory before turning back around on itself. Their album Momentary Presence has a lot of that combination, bigger melodies and faster tempos mixed with shimmering guitars and synths out of shoegaze.

47. Lizzo – About Damn Time. You may have heard this song. Special lists twenty-five different people as producers, and somehow, none of them was Nile Rodgers. This track is so chic Rodgers might as well have produced it and played guitar.

46. Kendrick Lamar feat. Sampha – Father Time. Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers is certainly ambitious, but it’s too long and inconsistent, which led me to leave it off my top albums of the year list. “N95” is solid, and “Auntie Diaries” has a truly incredible and necessary sentiment (although it contains a word best omitted, despite the message). This song was the real highlight for me, thanks to the chorus from Mercury Prize winner Sampha.

45. The Head and the Heart – Shut Up. Every Shade of Blue had its highs and lows for me, which is how I pretty much always feel about H&H’s albums, although I loved this song and “Virginia (Wind in the Night)” from their latest.

44. SAULT – Above the Sky. The best track from the best of the six albums SAULT released this year (Today & Tomorrow), incorporating rock elements into the sound they honed on their first four albums, including a guitar solo with distortion and reverb that evoke Hendrix. Also, it’s kind of nuts that SAULT has released eleven albums in three and a half years.

43. The Lathums – Say My Name. The Arctic Monkeys meet the Amazons? It’s anthemic, muscular rock, and I’m fine with that, even if it’s of a sort we’ve heard before.

42. Anxious – Call From You. It’s post-hardcore, emo, whatever, but with real harmonies, and that little guitar riff you hear in the intro is so unexpected from this subgenre that it has consistently brought me back to this song on a generally great album.

41. Just Mustard – Mirrors. So I’ve said many times I was never a My Bloody Valentine fan, even with their general critical acclaim and my own affinity for shoegaze, because I just hear waves of noise, not individual notes or chords. “I Only Said” is the exception, because there’s an actual melody to latch on to. If you made an even more accessible version of that song, you’d get “Mirrors.”

40. Danger Mouse & Black Thought feat. MF Doom – Belize. Of course, I had to include this track from Cheat Codes, as it’s probably the final recording to feature the late MF Doom (a.k.a Zev Love X), although it’s hard to single out any particular tracks on the generally excellent DM/BT collaboration.

39. Young Fathers – I Saw. The Mercury Prize winners will drop their fourth album, Heavy Heavy, early in 2023, and from the first three singles it looks like we’re in for even more musical experimentation. This was by far my favorite of the three, though, as there’s a hint of their rap origins and a rising sense of indignation as the song progresses.

38. Belle & Sebastian – Unnecessary Drama. I don’t know why people get upset when Belle & Sebastian rock out a little, or hit the dance floor, as long as their essential Belle-and-Sebastian-ness is intact. Stuart Murdoch’s wry, sardonic lyrics are still here, as are the band’s harmonies, so who’s to argue if they have a little more fun?

37. Gang of Youths – in the wake of your leave. I don’t think any album disappointed me more than angel in realtime., which had three incredible singles to tease it (“the angel of 8^th ave.” and “unison”) and nothing else of note. The rest of the record felt self-indulgent, even pretentious, and worst of all devoid of energy. But those three tracks … I’m not sure anyone has evoked early U2 so effortlessly.

36. Khruangbin feat. Leon Bridges – B-side. The collaboration that began two years ago with Texas Sun continued this year with Texas Moon, highlighted by this danceable, soulful, and of course jazz-inflected single.

35. The Beths – Expert in a Dying Field. The title track from my #1 album of 2022 is just a perfect Beths song, shiny and bright and poppy and just a little dark around the edges.

34. Sunflower Bean – I Don’t Have Control Sometimes. Sunflower Bean had a moment this year, pun intended, with “Moment in the Sun” appearing in the final episode of Netflix’s Heartstopper, and their latest album Headful of Sugar had a number of similarly melodic lo-fi gems, including this one, which hits you with the melody right out of the chute.

33. The Smile – Thin Thing. The more I listened to the Smile’s debut album, the less I liked it, finding it experimental in some ways but often exactly what you’d expect if you smushed Jonny Greenwood’s soundtrack work with Thom Yorke’s vocals and the drummer from jazz group Sons of Kemet. It turns out it’s not that interesting. This track has the most to offer, starting with that odd syncopated guitar line that opens the song and moves on through it.

32. Blossoms – The Sulking Poet. Good luck getting this chorus out of your head. It’s a bit of Lord Huron, a bit of Head and the Heart, a bit of the Kooks, and oddly American-sounding for a band from Stockport, England.

31. Everything Everything – Bad Friday. If you liked Everything Everything’s early work, like “Cough Cough,” “Kemosabe,” “MY KZ UR BF,” and so on, this would likely be your favorite song from their newest album Raw Data Feel. It’s their most frenetic, most freewheeling track on the record, and we get more of the falsetto vocals that show up on just about all of their best songs.

30. Megan Thee Stallion – Her. I think Megan Thee Stallion is in the uppermost echelon of rappers today when it comes to speed, flow, and verbal dexterity, but I don’t think she picks music that does enough to accentuate her skills – or at least to work with them to make better songs. Only this and “Plan B” really stood out to me from Traumazine as songs that worked on all levels, from rhyme to music.

29. Rina Sawayama – This Hell. Sawayama’s second album, Hold the Girl, sees the singer/songwriter leaning far more into her pop sensibilities, which means it lacks the edge or ambition of her debut record, but also has a few more mainstream-ready tracks like this one. It’s her most overtly pop song yet, opening with a trite callback to Shania Twain and passing through a number of popular catchphrases and allusions, but highlights her idiosyncratic blend of styles and ability to craft a memorable hook.

28. Kae Tempest and Grian Chatten – I Saw Light. A spoken-word track over a hypnotic, minimalist synth line that sees the English poet/rapper Tempest sharing the vocals with Fontaines D.C. singer Chatten. Tempest’s lyrics are superb – a song like this can’t succeed without that – and the sparse music behind them creates a forbidding mood without getting in the way of the two speakers.

27. Griff & Sigrid – Head on Fire. Griff is a rising superstar, taking home a couple of Brit Award nominations last year shortly after she turned 21 (including Best New Artist, which she lost to Little Simz … who won for her fourth album), while Sigrid is already a star in Europe, so it was a little disappointing to see this track, with its catchy-as-hell chorus, fare poorly on the charts even in their home countries.

26. White Lies – Trouble in America. A bonus track on the deluxe edition of As I Try Not to Fall Apart that should have made the record proper given how potent this chorus is. It’s one of my favorite tracks ever from White Lies, six albums in, with some tremendous bass work from Charles Cave.

25. Phoenix feat. Ezra Koenig – Tonight. The best track on Phoenix’s fun, straightforward new album Alpha Zulu, which had a few other standouts, including “All Eyes on Me.” This one features Vampire Weekend lead singer/founder Koenig, but I like it anyway.

24. Christine and the Queens – Je te vois enfin. The best track from Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue) recalls the dark pop sounds from his 2020 EP La Vita Nuova and even parts of his 2018 album Chris.

23. Soccer Mommy – Shotgun. My favorite track from Soccer Mommy’s acclaimed album Sometimes, Forever has some of her strongest vocals – I find her voice can be droning, but here it’s well paired with the music and comes off as more ethereal and dreamy than whiny.

22. Little Simz – Angel. Simz won the Mercury Prize in October for Sometimes I Might Be, my #1 album of 2021, and then released NO THANK YOU, a simpler album that excoriates the music industry,twomonths later. This opener is a six-minute polemic against the exploitation Simz faced over the last year-plus since her magnum opus was first released, although I found in general NO THANK YOU doesn’t have the same degree of musical ambition as the preceding LP.

21. Mandrake Handshake – Emonzaemon. This Oxford-based psychedelic rock band released their second EP, The Triple Point of Water, last month, with three songs that run a total of nearly 20 minutes. I could see them being big on the jam-band circuit with this sound and those running times, but that’s not to dismiss the great guitar lick that opens this track and carries it all the way through until the heavier guitars kick in for the last thirty seconds.

20. Lizzo – 2 Be Loved (Am I Ready). The best track on Special is the one that calls back to Prince both in title and in sound, which couldn’t have been more tailor-made for me.

19. Momma – Speeding 72. There’s a big Veruca Salt vibe to the vocals on this track, but mixed with fuzzier garage-rock production and some heavier bass work from a band that likes to employ the drop-D tuning more associated with metal acts.

18. The Reytons – Avalanche. Sometimes I just want a big, crunchy rock song that announces its presence with authority in the opening seconds and never lets up on the gas pedal until it’s done. So I give you “Avalanche.”

17. Sharon van Etten – Mistakes. As with Soccer Mommy, van Etten’s vocal style often grates on me – she sounds stoned or just disinterested on so many of her songs – even when I like her music. Here she belts it out on the earworm chorus, maybe the best hook she’s ever crafted.

16. Kid Kapichi feat. Bob Vylan – New England. Vylan is the perfect collaborator for Kid Kapichi’s style of bitter, sarcastic attacks on modern British society between the duo’s track “GDP” last year and Kapichi’s … well, their entire catalog to date. “You’re such a fool, Britannia” probably wouldn’t get anyone many votes but it’s certainly sums up the Brexiteers.

15. Wet Leg – Angelica. I know “Chaise Longue” and “Ur Mum” have earned more plaudits, and the former was a legitimate commercial breakout track, but this is their best song by a mile – it’s got a better hook, the sonic interplay between the two vocalists works far better here than on other tracks, and this time the lyrics are actually funny.

14. Spiritualized – The Mainline Song. Everything Was Beautiful, the space-rock pioneers’ first new album in four years and only their second in a decade, came out in April, highlighted by this gorgeous, textured, melancholy song, the only flaw in which is that it could use some additional lyrics.

13. Let’s Eat Grandma – Levitation. I understand this band’s name (think “eats, shoots and leaves”) but it still kind of bugs me. They can write a pretty great synth-pop song, though.

12. Lucius – Next to Normal. One of the year’s best bass lines came on this funky track from Second Nature, Lucius’ first album of new material since 2016.

11. Metronomy – Good to Be Back. What a weirdly happy, bouncy song – it feels like someone slipped it into the TARDIS in the early 1980s, from the new wave-y sound to the sparse production, but that main synth line is so catchy it would fit in any era. The song is so good that Panic Shack’s punk cover of it works just as well.

10. FKA twigs feat. rema – jealousy. The best track from CAPRISONGS includes the Nigerian “Afrorave” singer Rema and has a swirling, Afrobeat-like backdrop to the vocals that feels immersive even with a too-short running time below three minutes.

9. Riverby – Chapel. Riverby is a punk act from Philly, but this song from their latest album Absolution is an absolutely gorgeous ballad that showcases lead singer/guitarist August Greenberg’s beautiful voice. I’d take a whole album made out of this, thanks.

8. Blossoms – Ode to NYC. The most Lord Huron-ish track on Ribbon Around the World also feels like the replacement for Ryan Adams’ “New York, New York.” As someone who grew up in the suburbs of the Big Apple, I was never not in love with New York City, but I’m also always happy to sing along with praises of my favorite place in the U.S.

7. Mattiel – Lighthouse. There are two great hooks in this track, both driven by the powerful voice of lead singer Mattiel Brown, from her new album Georgia Gothic. It reminds me a ton of Swing Out Sister’s breakout hit … uh, “Breakout,” from 1986, which I mean as a high compliment.

6. Jamie T – The Old Style Raiders. In a year when the Arctic Monkeys gave up on rock, we didn’t lack for artists stepping in to fill the void they’ve left behind, from the Lathums to the Reytons to Kid Kapichi, along with this track from British star Jamie T, whose 2022 album The Theory of Whatever hit #1 in the UK.

5. Sports Team – Dig! I loved Sports Team’s new album Gulp! and this is the song I keep coming back to. If I were a big-league reliever, I’d warm up to this track, which brings huge energy with the initial bass line and that three-chord riff, like someone put a cinder block on the gas pedal.

4. Sudan Archives – NBPQ (Topless). The best track from my #2 album of the year refers to that LP’s title, Natural Brown Prom Queen, and wanders through what feels like three different genres while always coming back to the tagline from the chorus, “I’m not average.” She’s anything but.

3. The Beths – When You Know You Know. If anyone ever asked me why I like the Beths so much, I’d just play this song, which has everything that makes them great: a big hook in the chorus, sunny vocals with a great harmony, witty lyrics, and jangly guitars. Almost all of Expert in a Dying Field is like this, but here everything comes together perfectly for the best song the Beths have ever recorded.

2. Spoon – Wild. Man, Lucifer on the Sofa did not live up to this single at all, but for three minutes it felt like we had peak Spoon again. That simple, sparing guitar line in the verse feels like a rubber band about to snap, and the song never quite lets out that tension. I liked the previous single, “The Hardest Cut,” as well, but the rest of the record was just filler after these two songs.

1. Bartees Strange – Heavy Heart. What’s the opposite of the sophomore slump? Strange’s debut album was solid, and promising, but also limited, and it seemed like he might just be another indie-rock singer/songwriter who had a distinct voice but whose music sounded like too much else from indie/college radio of the last decade or so – notably his primary influence, the National. Instead of continuing in that vein, we got Farm to Table, a wide-ranging, genre-skipping, guitar-driven record with sensitive, introspective lyrics, led by this song, which feels like two for the price of one, punctuated by that giant guitar break just after the two minute mark that I would bet brings the house down when he plays it live. I had Strange in the wrong category after the first record, figuring I’d respect his music more than I liked it. His growth as a musician and lyricist is one of the great stories of music in 2022.

Feel free to throw any of your favorites – songs, albums, EPs, mixtapes – in the comments!