Below is a list of the best releases from last year - be sure to let us know how many of the below you own:
10
Kim Gordon – The Collective
The free-associative nature of the lyrics on Kim Gordon’s second solo album – sports cars, sex, bowling trophies, “$20 potatoes”, each recounted in her charred, vengeful mutter – take on a dissociative affect, like waking up from a bad dream into a worse one and wondering what happened. Produced by Justin Raisen, the industrial, blown-out churn of The Collective is an intentionally abrasive strike against society sleepwalking its way into a convenience culture touted by self-styled disruptors, and a reminder that real disruption only comes from the margins: at 71, Kim Gordon stands at a frontier, agitating against the future with her massive, singular perspective. LS
9
Sabrina Carpenter – Short n’ Sweet
The first time most adults heard of Sabrina Carpenter was in the fallout from Olivia Rodrigo’s 2021 breakout hit Drivers License, which appeared to cast her fellow Disney star as the other woman. While Carpenter’s 2022 album Emails I Can’t Send toyed with perceptions that she was a “homewrecker … a slut”, her sixth record leaned all the way in, Carpenter adopting a bawdy bombshell persona that revelled in the idea of her as a threat. “Yeah I know I’ve been known to share!” she laughs on Taste (which spent nine weeks as UK No 1), one of Short n’ Sweet’s many comically, casually horny hits. It was a monstrously successful concept, rebooting the classic blond pop princess with a lacerating tongue and a withering attitude to men straight out of the Lana Del Rey playbook – and most winningly, a savage sense of humour that rightly earned Carpenter comparisons to Dolly Parton. Perhaps the embarrassing boyfriend of the amazingly weird country song Please Please Please should just … stay at home; “Come right on me – I mean camaraderie,” she winks on the falsetto-drenched Bed Chem. Rodrigo witheringly cast Carpenter as “another actress”, and on Short n’ Sweet, Carpenter convincingly played the role of Nashville warbler, disco revivalist, R&B temptress, each mode tied together by her sharp pen. Espresso positioned Carpenter as the girl of your caffeine-addled dreams; her versatility and nimbleness with a heel turn and a wink made very clear that she can also be the girl of your nightmares, if you want her to be. LS
8
Tyler, the Creator – Chromakopia
The sepia-tinged visuals for Tyler’s surprise eighth album made it look like a complete break from the globetrotting, pastel-hued luxe of 2021’s Call Me if You Get Lost. It turned out to share quite a bit of that album’s sound – the lush, swaggering G-funk and kaleidoscope of references – but stripped away at least some of its braggadocio to reveal the conflict beneath the fur hat: about commitment, parenthood, being doomed to repeat the sins of the father – and the shock reveal that maybe a figure he’d spent his whole life demonising wasn’t so bad after all. And if the sound was somewhat familiar, he made it newly disorienting, metal samples and lavish slow jams colliding into each other. Amid all the uncertainties, though, his supreme self-worth remained as magnetic and justified as ever, and whereas women were collateral in the Kendrick/Drake beef, here guests GloRilla, Sexyy Red and frequent interstitials from his own mother, Bonita Smith, spurred him to greatness. LS
7
Fontaines DC – Romance
The Irish band’s ambition gets bigger with every release, and with this fourth album they were aiming at arenas. Perhaps there’s something a bit too difficult – too poetic, yet too chippy – about them to make them cross over to the good-times crowds you need at that level; Liam Gallagher certainly isn’t a fan. But if you don’t get it, it’s your loss: who else right now has a four-album run like this? Even a sad ballad preposterously called Horseness Is the Whatness, tucked away on the final third, has a chorus you can’t believe no one’s written before, while Favourite genuinely is an arena anthem – something that sounds better with every beer you drink, until you’re flinging an arm around a stranger’s shoulders. BBT
6
Nilüfer Yanya – My Method Actor
The heartbroken protagonist of the British songwriter’s third album is hollow inside, bleeding out; soul awol, amnesia reigning. The beauty lies in how she makes this state of desolation feel as opulent as a ruined palace. The palette is febrile and close, as humid as the tropics or as Sade’s sultriest moments; Yanya’s sidling, furtive guitar suddenly obliterated by pockets of thrashing rage, her usually poised voice betraying every wound inflicted on her. It’s one of the best-arranged albums of the year: judiciously applied strings up the sense of suspicion and devastation, and the tension and transitions trap you right up there with her on the knife’s edge. “I’m hardly here either,” Yanya sang on crushed standout Binding, but the 29-year-old’s utterly unique voice has never had more presence. LS
5
Beyoncé – Cowboy Carter
Cowboy Carter was Beyoncé’s attempt to stake a claim for the Black history of country music, but it was no straightforward Nashville record. Instead, in keeping with the sprawling ambition of the auteurist albums she has been releasing for the past decade, it wrapped its arms around the entire American music vernacular. She wasn’t afraid to tackle country’s iconic moments, notably recasting Dolly Parton’s Jolene as a steely eyed warning shot, but it was her attempts to shape country in her own image and foreground its Black origins that felt especially fresh and thrilling: Parton and Willie Nelson made lighthearted cameos; more significantly, greater deference was afforded to Black country musicians. “They don’t know how hard I had to fight for this / When I sang my song,” she sings on Ameriican Requiem, about being snubbed by the country music industry in the past. The depth of knowledge and the conviction of performance on Cowboy Carter are a clear testament not just to Beyoncé’s fight, but her intimacy with the genre. Read more. Annie Zaleski
4
Clairo – Charm
Charm dwells in a world of attraction and desire. Giddy songs such as Second Nature, with its heartbeat pulse of piano and Claire Cottrill’s nervous laughter, exist in the magnetic forcefield between two people inexplicably drawn together. But with Clairo’s typical incisiveness, her third – and best by far – album is also about what happens when the spell wears off, and when closeness becomes cloying. Co-produced with soul revivalist and bandleader Leon Michels, Charm’s world is fleshed out by vintage Wurlitzers, flurries of brass and breathy woodwind recorded straight to tape. It’s far from the lo-fi intimacy of her breakthrough work – the kind of intimacy that is forced, rather than given. Read more. Katie Hawthorne
3
Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft
Culpability in a breakup and – as with the paradox in the album title – the impossibility of identifying the villain in a complex situation are the murky themes of Eilish’s third album: sometimes anguished, sometimes vindictive, always satisfyingly messy and candid. Rather than reflect generational angst (as her debut did) or the hell of teenage fame, Hit Me Hard and Soft is insular and intimate, right down to the fantastically prosaic lyric in Lunch – about her newfound desire to intimately acquaint herself with the fairer sex – where she’s “pullin’ up a chair” and “puttin’ up my hair” as she prepares to get stuck in. Lunch is an apt title: desire nourishes and depletes across these 10 songs, and by ragged epic The Greatest (as raw as any Sharon Van Etten rager), Eilish wails in frustration about “All the times I waited / For you to want me naked”, recriminating herself and her estranged lover from breath to breath. Read more. LS
2
Cindy Lee – Diamond Jubilee
Before you even pressed play, Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee took you back in time. When it was released in March, the only way to hear it (aside from a YouTube video) was to go to a GeoCities website – a relic from the 90s internet, complete with multicoloured Times New Roman lettering – and download the audio files via Mega, the filesharing service beloved of 00s music blogs. The music itself went even further back, and indeed sideways, into a parallel dimension of 20th-century pop: doo-wop, glam, folk-rock, Nuggets-y psych/garage, Velvet Underground-style art-rock, French chanson, classic soul, 60s girl-group pop, synthwave, rockabilly and ambient all feature, emerging through lo-fi production as if corrupted on its journey from this spirit realm. Read more. BBT
1
Charli xcx – Brat (and Brat and It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat)
Brat came wrapped in a blunt, lowercase rendering of the album’s title against a sickly lime green: intended as a snub to the “misogynistic and boring” assumption that a female artist should automatically appear on her own album cover. It turned out to be a masterstroke of branding far more pervasive than any glossy photo, even influencing the US presidential race. Its sound was brash and aggressive, early 00s London club music – electroclash, acid-y bloghouse, dubstep, maximalist rave synths – shot through a chattering, trebly hyperpop filter; “Club classic but I still pop,” as Von Dutch put it. Oozing self-possession and confidence, Brat seemed to swagger even as Charli confessed to insecurity or inadequacy, a cocktail of emotions that seemed to be at the album’s centre. Read more. Alexis Petridis
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