MOJO celebrates the albums that meant the most in 2022.
Once again MOJO has polled our world-class team of writers and experts to provide what we hope is the definitive rundown of the best albums of the last 12 months. If there’s a prevailing theme that emerges from this list, it’s one of artists triumphing against the odds, working their way through various tragedies and adversities, and coming out on the other side: changed, resilient, in many cases making some of the most profound art of long careers. We hope there’s some of your personal favourites in here, that there’s some new discoveries and plenty of records to re-visit and fall in love with all over again. If you have a moment, please let us know what your best album of 2022 was by clicking the link below.
50 MOOR MOTHER
Jazz Codes
(ANTI-)
A layered and intellectually curious investigation of black musical history, Camae Ayewa’s eighth solo album as Moor Mother interrogated ideas of jazz, blues and rap without ever coming remotely close to nostalgic cliché. And while the Philadelphian’s uproarious instincts – seen so explosively in her free jazz group, Irreversible Entanglements – were still tangible, her poetics and theorising elided into something more amniotic, drifting closer to the nu-soul of Erykah Badu at her most abstracted.
Standout track: Evening
49 MIDLAKE
For The Sake Of Bethel Woods
(BELLA UNION)
Nine years after the Texans’ last album, and ten since the departure of original frontman Tim Smith, Midlake returned with a gentle assertion of their core values. The elaborate patchwork of the cosmic and pastoral couldn’t help but recall 2006 breakthrough The Trials Of Van Occupanther. But if that album summoned beatific West Coast canyon vibes, Bethel Woods tacked eastwards, to Woodstock, and the formative experiences of keyboardist Jesse Chandler’s father at the 1969 festival.
Standout track: Bethel Woods
48 BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD
Ants From Up Here
(NINJA TUNE)
A year of transition for the many-limbed post-rockers, who lost their frontman Isaac Wood and started reconfiguring an already complex sound. First, though, there was Wood’s last act with the band: Ants From Up Here, a second album which rapidly followed their debut (MOJO’s 14th best album of 2021) and added more indie-pop nous – Pulp, The Divine Comedy, even early Roxy Music were plausible reference points – to their Slint-gone-Klezmer foundations.
Standout track: Basketball Shoes
47 WORKING MEN’S CLUB
Fear Fear
(HEAVENLY)
The first teenage stirrings of Working Men’s Club, and their fulcrum Syd Minsky-Sargeant, suggested a precocious new Fall in the making. But this second album found the Calder Valley prodigy, now a venerable 20, and his latest associates building something significantly more monumental. Fear Fear leaned hard into a kind of imposing acid-baroque, ‘80s-tinged synthpop that picked up where New Order left off around the time of Low-Life.
Standout track: Widow
**46 CASS MCCOMBS
**
Heartmind
(ANTI-)
“I’m against extroverted personalities,” asserted this most stealthy of Californian singer-songwriters, who’d spent two decades compiling a tremendous discography on the quiet. Much of McCombs’s tenth solo album highlighted his breezy, accessible songcraft more than his more psychedelic tendencies. But like key antecedent Elliott Smith, sunny melodies harboured knottier subject matter: the classic song titles in Karaoke indicated a discussion of borrowed emotional valency rather than a stab at mainstream pop immortality.
Standout track: Belong To Heaven
45 ANAÏS MITCHELL
Anaïs Mitchell
(BMG)
Preoccupied for much of the last decade with the Tony-winning Broadway success of her Hadestown musical, Mitchell’s re-engagement with new music was uncharacteristically profligate: two albums in the Bonny Light Horseman trio; contributions to the Bon Iver/National Big Red Machine supergroup; and this first solo set in eight years. Solo album eight charted Mitchell’s relocation from New York to rural Vermont, via exploratory folk and an appealingly skewed, Rickie Lee Jones-like approach to meter.
Standout track: Bright Star
44 JOHNNY MARR
Fever Dreams Pts 1-4
(NEW VOODOO/BMG)
The 40th anniversary of the Smiths’ formation might have prompted retrenchment in less questing souls, but Marr’s energies remained resolutely on his own music: streamlined, precision-tooled 21stcentury electro-rock. Consumed as four chunky EPs or at once as an epic album, Fever Dreams was all turbo-charged forward motion, relentlessly focused on the event horizon even as it was constructed in the stasis of lockdown. Whatever happened to that other guy in the old band?
Standout track: Tenement Time
43 YARD ACT
The Overload
(ZEN FC/ISLAND)
From Leeds, Yard Act’s much-anticipated debut managed to be both furious and wry as it surveyed the debris of a post-Brexit Britain, where “all that’s left is knobheads morris dancing to Sham 69”. More rabble-rousing than most latterday post-punk bands, more temperamentally accessible than Sleaford Mods, Yard Act’s mastery of the zeitgeist was confirmed when a new version of Streets-like epiphany 100% Endurance emerged with an auspicious co-conspirator on piano: Elton John.
Standout track: 100% Endurance
42 ALABASTER DEPLUME
Gold
(INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM)
An unusually strong year for jazz poets, it transpired, as Mancunian Alabaster DePlume joined Moor Mother in the Top 50. Gold found DePlume mobilising the UK jazz community into a display of positive energy in the face of adversity, as the collective jams metaphysically visited Ethiopian, Jamaican, interior meditational soundscapes and beyond. Saxophone to hand, motivational warmth a given, DePlume proved a compelling spirit guide: as he winningly insisted, Don’t Forget You’re Precious.
Standout track: Fucking Let Them
41 LEYLA McCALLA
Breaking The Thermometer
(ANTI-)
McCalla’s old Carolina Chocolate Drops bandmate Rhiannon Giddens might have had the more prominent solo career, but that began to change with the singer/banjoist/cellist’s intricately-conceived fourth. Breaking The Thermometer dug into the archives of Radio Haiti to collage an evocative sequence of songs exploring the cultural, political and human connections between Haiti – the birthplace of her parents – and New Orleans. An enriching history lesson, where Creole folk and Crescent City soul intertwined.
Standout track: Dodinin
40 THE MARS VOLTA
The Mars Volta
(CLOUDS HILL)
Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala appeared to have shut down their frantically extravagant Mars Volta project in 2012; subsequent reunions were as a new group, Antemasque, and their oldest one, At The Drive-In. The Mars Volta were rebooted, however, for this surprising and excellent seventh album – one which largely replaced the hardcore prog derangement of old with glossier, funkier, Latin-tinged FM rock. The band's “Style Council moment”, claimed Bixler-Zavala.
Standout track: Blacklight Shine
39 ELVIS COSTELLO & THE IMPOSTERS
The Boy Named If
(EMI)
Some fine, mitigated retrospection from D.P. McManus in 2022, as he resurrected his first band, Rusty, to complete the album they never made in 1972. Solo album 32 The Boy Named If also drew on ’70s energies, with The Attractions – sorry, The Imposters – cranking up the rowdy garage rock, as if This Year’s Model had been recorded last week. A great band – Steve Nieve’s overdriven Vox Continental was on fire – but hearteningly great songs and vocal performances, too.
Standout track: Farewell, OK
38 TAJ MAHAL & RY COODER
Get On Board: The Songs Of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee
(NONESUCH)
The small matter of 56 years after their first band The Rising Sons split up, Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder reconnected to honour their teenage selves. While The Rising Sons were chiming LA folk-rockers, for Get On Board the duo defaulted to the music they grew up on – specifically the Piedmont blues of Terry and McGhee. An ultra-raw and unadorned good time, courtesy of two master craftsmen, plus Cooder’s boy Joachim on drums or bass.
Standout track: Packing Up Getting Ready To Go
37 VIEUX FARKA TOURÉ & KHRUANGBIN
Ali
(DEAD OCEANS)
Having spent 15 years trying to step out of the giant shadow of his father Ali, Vieux Farka Touré made the shrewd tactical move of radically inhabiting it in 2022. Two albums ensued: a straight Saharan blues guitar set, Les Racines; and this album of Ali covers with Texan groovers Khruangbin. The latter provided their customary dreamy ambience, relocating the tunes out of the desert and into a plush chillout zone, while not sacrificing any of their potency.
Standout track: Diarabi
36 JOCKSTRAP
I Love You Jennifer B
(ROUGH TRADE)
A second appearance in this year’s Top 50 for one Georgia Ellery, otherwise engaged as violinist in Black Country, New Road. For Jockstrap’s quirky but polished debut, Ellery turned singer and teamed up with fellow Guildhall School Of Music & Drama grad Taylor Skye, proceeding to swing artfully from discofied electropop to orchestral Scott Walkerisms, via all manner of techno digressions. A weird-pop puzzle, that hid not inconsiderable charm.
Standout track: Glasgow
35 YEAH YEAH YEAHS
Cool It Down
(SECRETLY CANADIAN)
Another band breaking a lengthy hiatus (nine years between albums), but unlike The Mars Volta, Karen O and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs doubled down on their M.O. rather than reinventing it. Hence party tunes as well as love ballads came couched in operatic levels of intensity: even Fleez, a song very ostentatiously declaring its love of ESG, combined skyscraping grandeur with basement sweat. Big synths, big tunes; big hearts, too.
Standout track: Burning
34 KENDRICK LAMAR
Mr Morale And The Big Steppers
TOP DAWG
An advance track – The Heart Part 5 – that rode a sample of Marvin Gaye’s I Want You proved to be a deluxe red herring. A week later, Lamar’s fifth album contained neither that track, nor much else resembling classic soul. Instead, the music was low-key, the focus remorselessly on the words of the most sophisticated and self-analytical rapper of his generation. Complementing the extraordinary flow, a notable and elusive guest – Beth Gibbons, of Portishead.
Standout track: Mother I Sober
33 JEFF PARKER
Forfolks
(INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM)
Chicago jazz imprint IA went from strength to strength in 2022, nurturing outliers like Alabaster DePlume and surfacing vintage Charles Stepney tapes while showcasing its hometown’s new breed. Room, too, for older heroes like Tortoise’s Jeff Parker and his subtle, ever-evolving music. Forfolks found Parker alone, bathing his guitar in FX, deconstructing jazz standards and Tortoise nuggets alike. Also this year, a killer live band set, Mondays At The Enfield Tennis Academy.
Standout track: La Jetée
32 ROLLING BLACKOUTS COASTAL FEVER
**
Endless Rooms**
(SUB POP)
Three albums in, the generously-named Australians now seemed less like revivers of supercharged jangle-pop, more like torchbearers pushing forward a grand tradition. On Endless Rooms, the cross-stitching between the three guitarist-singers became incrementally more elaborate, though no less punchy, to match a foregrounded political imperative. And if blood ties to The Feelies and The Go-Betweens remained explicit, their frazzled virtuosity could cut deeper too, right into Marquee Moon territory.
Standout track: Saw You At The Eastern Beach
31 OUMOU SANGARÉ
Timbuktu
(WORLD CIRCUIT)
Lockdowns and displacement provided an incentive for two fine Malian singers to spread their creative wings this year. Rokia Koné remotely crafted an electro album with producer Jacknife Lee, while the imperious Sangaré found herself marooned in Baltimore, adding dobro and slide guitar to her Wassoulou soul sound. Timbuktu’s genius, though, rested in how the American blues shadings melded so seamlessly into Sangaré’s groove: harmonious, rather than a Western commercial expediency.
Standout track: Wassulu Don
30 HURRAY FOR THE RIFF RAFF
Life On Earth
(NONESUCH)
From making New Orleans folk on the bohemian fringes of Americana, Alynda Segarra has travelled a long way these past few years. After 2017’s The Navigator reframed their Nuyorican heritage, this seventh HFTRR album was rooted in hyperreal eco-activism, where dewy synths gave a cosmic aspect to tales of earthly resilience. Amidst the New Age textures, though, Segarra’s knack for memorable songs endured, along with a handy new penchant for Lou Reed chuggers.
Standout track: Rhododendron
29 FATHER JOHN MISTY
Chloë And The Next 20th Century
(BELLA UNION)
“Tillman Schmillman”, read the headline for MOJO’s review of Josh Tillman’s fifth set as Father John, highlighting a love of Harry Nilsson that had become more pronounced than ever. But even as Tillman concocted his own additions to the Great American Songbook, and sashayed round an old Hollywood orchestra in LA’s United Recordings studios, a pleasing new Misty emerged: an accomplished pasticheur now moving beyond archness towards a fastidious labour of love.
Standout track: Buddy’s Rendezvous
28 GWENNO
Tresor
(HEAVENLY)
On her third solo album, the Welsh/Cornish singer Gwenno Saunders confirmed her place in the spectral, kosmische-folk lineage of Broadcast and Jane Weaver. But while much of Tresor had an ethereal, synth-pagan air, the translated substance of Saunders’s Welsh and Cornish lyrics located her firmly in the real world: NYCAW being an acronym for “Wales Is Not For Sale”; the actual meaning of the album’s opening words being “Welcome, sit down/ Fancy a cuppa?”
Standout track: Kan Me
27 BEYONCÉ
Renaissance
(RCA)
If Moor Mother’s Jazz Codes tackled the semiotics of black cultural history, Beyoncé’s exhilarating seventh presented the evolution of dance music as liberation theology for diverse communities. Renaissance was a continuous, hedonistic party; a wrangling of disco, electro, house, bounce and beyond into a seamless whole, and a showcase for canonical influencers (Nile Rodgers, Grace Jones, a sampled Donna Summer). A pop blockbuster, for sure, but a work of meticulous dancefloor auteurship, too.
Standout track: Summer Renaissance
26 JOAN SHELLEY
The Spur
(NO QUARTER)
“There’s absolute beauty, and absolute pain, and I want to be in the middle of it all,” the singer-songwriter told MOJO, her sixth album rooted in the realities of her rural Kentucky home. The consolations and cruelties of nature, the impact of births, marriages and deaths, a Bill Callahan cameo – it all fed into The Spur’s artisanal folk-rock, with wisdom dispensed by Shelley in a voice that recalled Linda Thompson’s calm authority.
Standout track: Like The Thunder
25 GABRIELS
Angels And Queens – Part 1
(PARLOPHONE)
Few 2021 singles caused as much of a fuss as Love And Hate In A Different Time, Curtis Mayfield-ish symphonic soul heralding the LA-based trio as major new players. That promise was confirmed by this debut, or at least the first half of it (Part 2 is promised for March). The seven songs came draped in a churchy opulence, blessed with a cinematic grasp of gospel drama and a frontman, Jacob Lusk, with a mighty evocative falsetto.
Standout track: Taboo
24 PANDA BEAR & SONIC BOOM
Reset
(DOMINO)
Headline news might have been Time Skiffs, Animal Collective’s first album in six years, but Panda Bear also had significant extra-curricular activities in 2022. Reset cemented his friendship with the Spacemen 3 veteran, as the two cued up vintage 45 loops – Eddie Cochran, the Everlys, The Drifters – and built brand new retro-futurist pop confections on their foundations. Panda Bear nailed his Carl Wilson frequencies, Sonic Boom played post-millennial Joe Meek. Good vibrations galore.
Standout track: Edge Of The Edge
23 DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS
**
Welcome 2 Club XIII**
(ATO)
Recent Truckers albums expanded their purview, beyond the Dirty South to broader American iniquities. Their 14th album, however, was a rapprochement with their own past and present, Mike Cooley’s songs in particular at once rocking and rueful. Every Single Storied Flameout’s homily to a straying teenage son, set to brawny R.E.M. guitars, stole the show: “If I’d been my own example,” sang Cooley, unflinchingly honest as ever, “I’d be worse.”
Standout track: Every Single Storied Flameout
22 MAVIS STAPLES & LEVON HELM
Carry Me Home
(ANTI-)
Hard to understand why this barnburner sat on the shelf for 11 years, ever since it was recorded at one of Helm’s Midnight Ramble shows at his Woodstock venue. Staples and the punchy revue band’s song selections – Nina, Curtis, Dylan – provided an ongoing civil rights narrative. Showstopping poignancy, too, when a frail but unbowed Helm took a verse in the final communal take on The Band’s The Weight.
Standout track: The Weight
21 CATE LE BON
Pompeii
(MEXICAN SUMMER)
A producer job on John Grant’s Boy From Michigan came before Le Bon’s sixth album – classic songwriting impetus, perhaps, for dialling back some of her handbrake-turn quirks on Pompeii. The album, however, retained a magical, quizzical otherness even as the synthpop became relatively conventional: Low and Tin Drum introspection (plus horns), composed on bass, deep in the Mojave Desert as if to ensure the maximum degree of pandemic lockdown dislocation.
Standout track: Running Away
20 BETH ORTON
Weather Alive
(PARTISAN)
Orton’s ’90s reputation pivoted on an idea of comedown folk: singer-songwriter craft that provided a beatific coda to a big night out. *Weather Alive, her eighth album, acted as a mature evolution of that aesthetic, where the atmospherics drifted towards Talk Talk zones and ghostly jazz while making room for reflective middle-aged uncertainty. Alabaster DePlume featured among the discreet supporting cast, but this was emphatically Orton’s own trip; her first self-produced album, too.
Standout track: Friday Night
19 MAKAYA MCCRAVEN
In These Times
(XL/INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM)
Another of International Anthem’s Chicago stable of virtuoso insurgents, drummer and bandleader McCraven was first sighted outside jazz circles with his 2020 album-length remix of Gil Scott-Heron. In These Times, though, was McCraven’s boldest statement yet, a sumptuous chamber jazz suite powered by his jittery beats and well-connected community activism. One to file alongside David Axelrod’s scores or, more recently, Kamasi Washington’s similarly ambitious epics.
Standout track: Lullaby
18 THE COMET IS COMING
Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam
(IMPULSE!)
The inexhaustible Shabaka Hutchings called time on one of his bands, Sons Of Kemet, in summer 2022, leaving the stage open for a third album from his frequently trippy sax/synth/drums unit, The Comet Is Coming. Hyper-Dimensional Expansion Beam captured a band literally and metaphorically peaking, as the ravey keyboard stabs became ever more ecstatic. And as ever, Hutchings’s ability to move in disparate environments and always retain his signature tone was impressive.
Standout track: Pyramids
17 KEVIN MORBY
This Is A Photograph
(DEAD OCEANS)
Makaya McCraven cropped up on Kevin Morby’s seventh, signifying a loosening of the Lubbock maverick’s sound. His songs still felt like nonchalant incantations inspired, at a remove, by Cohen, Dylan et al. Now, though, Morby factored in jazz musicians, glam, and even a little Afrobeat to drive his ambulations into newer zones. A recurring fascination with Jeff Buckley, and a paean to amour Katie ‘Waxahatchee’ Crutchfield, completed perhaps his finest album yet.
Standout track: Rock Bottom
16 RICH RUTH
I Survived, It’s Over
(THIRD MAN)
MOJO’s Best Album Of 2021, by Floating Points and the late Pharoah Sanders, made explicit a prevailing conversation between jazz and ambient music – one which extended into 2022. Among strong records by Jeremiah Chiu/Marta Sofia Honer and Revelators Sound System, this Nashville musician’s ravishing spiritual jazz took the plaudits: healing, richly-detailed meditations – at once reminiscent of Alice Coltrane and Jon Hassell – for a world cautiously re-emerging from trauma.
Standout track: Taken Back
15 WILCO
**
Cruel Country**
(DBPM)
The monolithic presence of a Yankee Hotel Foxtrot boxset, massively expanding Wilco’s most fêted album, could have overshadowed the new work of lesser bands, but Jeff Tweedy and co were up to the challenge. The 12th Wilco album played with notions of country – a term Tweedy traditionally eschewed – while reasserting the sextet’s bona fides as one of the most flexible, quietly radical rock bands of the 21st century.
Standout track: A Lifetime To Find
14 WEYES BLOOD
And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow
(SUB POP)
Natalie Mering navigated her Weyes Blood project through various iterations of freak folk and avant-noise before landing, serenely, on the uncanny MOR that made 2021’s Titanic Rising such a sensation. Designed as the second part of a trilogy, …Hearts Aglow stayed in that exalted zone, Mering’s creamy Karen Carpenter-meets-Joni vowels and lush arrangements striving to provide universal solace in a world on fire. “Yes,” she reassured, “we all bleed the same way.”
Standout track: It’s Not Just Me, It’s Everybody
13 SPIRITUALIZED
**
Everything Was Beautiful**
(BELLA UNION)
Notionally the second half of a double album that began with 2018’s And Nothing Hurt, the ninth Spiritualized album worked just as neatly as a sequel to their magnum opus, Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space. Blues, country, free jazz, systems music, garage rock: once again, Jason Pierce forensically channelled it all into his patented maximalist ramalam, with a renewed drive that ensured Everything Was Beautiful was his best in 25 years.
Standout track: Best Thing You Never Had (The D Song)
12 ALDOUS HARDING
**
Warm Chris**
(4AD)
The actorly range of Aldous Harding’s singing had never been greater. On her fourth album, she variously conjured Bowie, PJ Harvey, Vashti Bunyan, Neil Young, Joanna Newsom and at least three members of The Velvet Underground; all a little Welsh, in spite of her New Zealand roots. Harding’s gift, though, was to accommodate her shape-shifting in warm, minimalist settings, where her own idiosyncrasies were most prominent. Enigmatic music, but surreptitiously catchy, nonetheless.
Standout track: Fever
**11 THE SMILE
**
A Light For Attracting Attention
(XL)
First signs of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s new project indicated a post-punk unleashing of pent-up rock tensions. The reality of The Smile’s debut, however, was more appealing yet. Guitars took precedence, though the skittering beats of jazz-nurtured third wheel Tom Skinner were key, too. And the likes of Pana-Vision and Free In The Knowledge provided a significant treat: stately and fragile ballads to file alongside Radiohead’s very best.
Standout track: The Opposite
10 FONTAINES D.C.
Skinty Fia
(PARTISAN)
“I always dreamed as a teenager of making three great albums, like Nirvana had,” Fontaines D.C.’s Conor Deegan told MOJO. “Now we’ve done that, I don’t really mind what we do.” Skinty Fia marked three MOJO Top 10 albums in four years for the Dublin quintet, as they developed their post-punk sound into something unostentatiously anthemic, while never losing any of their relatability or poetic intensity. A model of how an old-fashioned rock band could grow in challenging times.
Standout track: Jackie Down The Line
9 DRY CLEANING
Stumpwork
(4AD)
As with Fontaines D.C., a high MOJO placing for Dry Cleaning’s second album showed how major talents were now consolidating out of the recent UK post-punk glut. Florence Shaw’s spoken word reveries continued to be weird, gripping and hypnotic – “People say, ‘You’re like the woman on the satnav’” – but the music was subtly richer, too, with warm Johnny Marr jangles to illuminate the Sonic Youth gridwork. Oh, and that extraordinary sleeve…
Standout track: Hot Penny Day
8 JACK WHITE
Fear Of The Dawn
(THIRD MAN)
A bountiful year for White fans saw two terrific new albums, with the rootsy and relatively conventional Entering Heaven Alive swiftly following this energetically eccentric fourth solo set. The wild ideas kept coming on MOJO’s preferred Fear Of The Dawn – rap-metal! dub! Q-Tip! William Burroughs and Manhattan Transfer samples in the same track! Even garage rock! But crucially, White’s fervid experimentation was tightly packaged too, aligned to some of his sharpest tunes in years.
Standout track: Morning, Noon And Night
7 BILL CALLAHAN
yti⅃aǝЯ
(DRAG CITY)
Longterm Callahan addicts will have adjusted to his late-flowering openness and beneficence by now, ushered in by 2019’s Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest. Still, his third album after becoming a father was striking in its stated aim to “rouse people”, as Callahan artfully transcended ruminative states – and added horns as he went – to produce genuinely uplifting songs like Natural Information. As skilled, wise and quotable as ever, but with bonus good vibes.
Standout track: Partition
6 SUEDE
Autofiction
(BMG)
Suede’s effective knack of transcending ‘90s Britpop nostalgia was reinforced by album nine, boldly trailed by Brett Anderson as their “punk album”. Autofiction, in fact, followed a plausible alternative trajectory they could have taken in the mid-’90s – an urgent, heroic and gothically-attuned take on guitar rock informed by PiL, The Chameleons and even The Cult. High drama ensued, of course, but with gritty verité detailing rather than pantomime self-parody.
Standout track: She Still Leads Me On
5 ARCTIC MONKEYS
The Car
(DOMINO)
“It’s definitely not just four people playing indie music anymore,” bassist Nick O’Malley told MOJO last month, emphasising the intriguing complexities of the biggest British rock band of their generation. Away from the festival moshpit, Sheffield flâneur Alex Turner and his cohorts continued to disdain riffery on their magnificent seventh. Instead: Curtis soul, Scott 4 drama, ravishing orchestrations galore and, from Turner, a droll, nuanced cinematographer’s eye for detail.
Standout track: Body Paint
4 HORACE ANDY
Midnight Rocker
(ON U SOUND)
The journey from Studio One in Kingston, Jamaica to Ramsgate, Kent, proved smoother than most would’ve anticipated, as reggae’s most seraphic voice conspired with UK dub don Adrian Sherwood for a timeless album of roots. Old Studio One sides were revisited, fellow travellers covered (Safe From Harm, a Massive Attack tune not sung by Andy), for Andy’s best album in 40+ years – and the dub version, Midnight Scorchers, was every bit as good.
Standout track: Try Love
3 DANGER MOUSE & BLACK THOUGHT
Cheat Codes
(BMG)
“We made this record for people from a certain place and time who identify with specific aesthetics,” Black Thought told MOJO – people, perhaps, with a profound love of rap but a wariness about its contemporary form. For his long-overdue return to hip-hop, super-producer Danger Mouse saturated Cheat Codes in vintage samples – Gwen McCrae, Hugh Masekela – creating the perfect soundbed over which Roots MC Black Thought could flow uninhibited. Old school reinvented, spectacularly, for 2022.
Standout track: No Gold Teeth
2 WET LEG
Wet Leg
(DOMINO)
What lurked beyond the Chaise Longue? Could 2021’s peculiar one-hit wonders turn out to be the breakout new stars of 2022? Wet Leg’s apparently effortless way of nailing the latter scenario hinged on this exceptional debut album, where their unforced Isle Of Wight surrealism and post-Breeders antics turned out to be just as much fun over 37 minutes. Sometimes poignant, too: there was a lot more to Wet Leg than buttered muffins.
Standout track: Too Late Now
1 MICHAEL HEAD & THE RED ELASTIC BAND
Dear Scott
(Modern Sky)
The history of popular music is rich in tales of triumph over adversity. Michael Head, however, has been a master of that narrative for 40 years. In his previous bands, The Pale Fountains and Shack, he overcame heroin addiction, grief, financial apocalypse and even the loss of an album's mater tape in a hire car to deliver a string of cult classics. But for Dear Scott, the Liverpudlian's second solo album without his guitarist brother John by his side, Head faced a new array of adversaries, including a broken heart and alcoholism. "That was close," Head told MOJO last month, "the detox almost killed me, but getting off the sauce gave me a chance." Clean and cover, he teamed up with producer Bill Ryder-Jones and alongside Head's youthful Red Elastic Band, crafted an album that's a summary of his songbook: all Bacharach-like melodies and smoky psychedelia with Head the pitch-perfect Scouse street-poet, drawing elegant pen-pictures from the inner city margins.
Standout track: Broken Beauty
Looking for even more musical quarry from across the past 12 months? Read the MOJO Editor's personal favourite albums of 2022, featuring 110 interesting and occasionally out-there records to delve into.
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