My Favorite Albums of 2022
by Dave Heaton

In 2022 most of my writing ambitions crashed against the tides of real life, but my listening exponentially grew and accelerated. That meant breadth at the expense of depth, or more like selective deep-diving while keeping one ear open to the ocean. Here are my favorite 10 albums of the year, give or take another hundred….

1. Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul – Topical Dancer (Deewee)
Music for dancefloors, nice, and with this level of humor and critical thought? This duo from Belgium – “club provocateurs”, The Guardian called them – are playful and clever over sleek sounds, dissecting language and what it does and doesn’t do for us, and the ideas, assumptions, prejudices, inherited systems. Music to provoke discomfort and comfort at the same time, like life in 2022.

2. Anteloper – Pink Dolphins (International Anthem)
Here the duo of trumpeter Jaimie Branch (RIP) and  drummer Jason Nazary pushed their playful jazz/electronics/beats blend further, into a new amalgamation that has free-jazz and hip-hop-oriented grooves, the messing-around-with-gadgets style of beat scientists, a punk-rock rebellious attitude and the loud immersive qualities of dub. As Branch herself wrote, “This is the shit that we want to be playing on big ass systems!” The ambling “Earthlings”, with Branch herself singing “we are not the earthlings that you know”, over producer Jeff Parker’s guitar, has rolled around my head all year like a personal anthem.

3. Rema – Rave & Roses (Mavin Records/Jonzing World)
Nigerian pop music has taken over the world – in 2022 a steady stream of singles hit high on charts across the globe, from an increasing array of superstars. Rema begins Rave & Roses with a birth story, imbued with the feeling that he’s destined for greatness. The next 15 songs are his showcase of that star quality – an edgy sweetness – within songs about love, broadly speaking (sex jams, songs of devotion, mantras of dedication), several starting with his tagline “another banger”. As much as it’s a star turn for Rema (with the mega-single “Calm Down” one of the jams of the year) it’s also one for Nigerian producer Michael “London” Hunter and a variety of collaborators, working within the over-expanding world of Afrobeats, with tentacles reaching out towards UK grime, US hip-hop, and more.

4. The Reds, Pinks & Purples – Summer at Land’s End (Slumberland)
The prolific indie-pop one-man act The Reds, Pinks & Purples (Glenn Donaldson) took his approach in a new, perfectly melancholy direction on Summer at Land’s End and its instrumental companion Mountain Lake Park. “You fell into a new way through”, Donaldson sings at one point, and he could be singing about death, or heartbreak, but his voice suggests some delicate hope to transition to something better. Song to song there’s that duality of deep sadness and a striving for something different and transporting.

5. Carly Rae Jepsen – The Loneliest Time (Interscope/School Boy/604)
 “After studying musical theatre for most of her school life and while in university…”, her Wikipedia entry starts. That theatrical angle to her emotional pop sound has never been clearer than on The Loneliest Time, which stands as a chronicle and dream-diary of the lovelorn and isolated. It’s her most diverse album, musically, like she’s changing sets and costumes with each song – starting with a statement of emotional courage (mantra: “I wanna be brave enough for everything….”) and ending with a fanciful Rufus Wainwright duet. In between are Western sojourns, a beach romp/dating app satire, the most perfect synth anthem to not hit the radio airwaves in the ‘80s, and so much more.

6. Porridge Radio – Waterslide, Diving Board, Ladder to the Sky (Secretly Canadian)
The Brighton, UK band Porridge Radio has the sort of building, driving sound that makes each song feel like an emotional journey leading to catharsis. This is the only kind of rock music I want to hear anymore, the kind where each word and sound is expressed like everyone’s life depends on it. On each of Porridge Radio’s albums, Dana Margolin and band have been constructing that approach (a kind of emo that’s actually listenable, and not whiny) – now it feels huge and stadium-ready even as the songs speak in an intimate way to everyone listening.

7. Tapani Rinne & Juha Maki-Patola – Open (Hush Hush)
I imagine the last few years of turmoil has led more listeners than just me to have go-to albums of stillness, quiet, a sense of enveloping calm and restoration. In 2022 my go-to was perhaps a more unlikely source than the epic experimental soundscapes I’m drawn to. Open is an hour of meditative ambient jazz from two Finnish musicians with decades-long careers who connected online during the pandemic and recorded this in their separate home studios. The feeling is that of pure beauty, sometimes completely still and then other times with busier but still feather-light melodic action from Rinne’s saxophone and clarinet, against Mäki-Patola’s arrangements of piano, organ, synthesizers and guitar.

8. Omah Lay – Boy Alone (Sire)
Nigerian singer Omah Lay is in a singular state of mind for much of his debut album, and it’s a dark one – fighting off depression, inner demons and the addictions and temptations they spawn; suppressing the scars of childhood to try and show the world a happy face. The smoothness and tenderness of his singing is what makes the feelings hit even harder, over of-the-moment production by a host of Nigerian up-and-comers.

9. Asake – Mr Money With the Vibe (YBNL Nation/Empire)
The debut album of Asake, a rising Nigerian star who hit new heights in 2022, has a let’s get-down-to-business efficiency that matches the stylized punchiness of his songs. All 12 tracks were produced by Magicsticks, who expands the Afrobeats palette by incorporating other dance music styles (amapiano, for one) into the sound while keeping a focused sense of spotlight on Asake’s eccentric, generous musical personality.

10. Kalia Vandever – Regrowth (New Amsterdam)
On her second album, Kalia Vandever brings a soft touch to the trombone that resembles a centering, healing force within a fast-moving flow of energy. Her compositions have a compelling sense of melody and space; she and her cracker-jack ensemble light fire with their playing.

Other 2022 albums I love and wholeheartedly recommend (roughly by category):

Ambient-experimental-atmospheric: Anja Lauvdal – From a Story Now Lost (Smalltown Supersound); Astrid Oster Mortensen – Skaergardslyd (Discreet Music); Billow Observatory – Stareside (Felte); Carmen Villain – Only Love From Now On (Smalltown Supersound); Dania – Voz (Geographic North); Dawn Richard / Spencer Zahn – Pigments (Merge); Dominic Voz – Right to the City (Beacon Sound);Kali Malone – Living Torch (Portraits GRM); Oren Ambarchi – Shebang; Rachika Nayar – Heaven Come Crashing (NNA Tapes); Rauelsson and Tatu Rönkkö – Myriadi (Beacon Sound); Taranoya – Flying (Sound as Language).

Blockbuster albums everyone’s already talking about as best of the year, and should be: Big Thief – Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You (4AD); Kendrick Lamar – Mr Morale and the Big Steppers (TDE); Rosalía – Motomami (Columbia); Sudan Archives – Natural Brown Prom Queen (Stones Throw); SZA – SOS (TDE); The 1975 – Being Funny In a Foreign Language (Dirty Hit).

Country: Ingrid Andress – Good Person (Warner Music Nashville); Jillian Jacqueline – Honestly (self-released); Kelsea Ballerini – Subject to Change (Black River); Maren Morris – Humble Quest (Columbia Nashville); Willi Carlisle – Peculiar Missouri (Free Dirt).

Folk: Anais Mitchell – Anais Mitchell (BMG); Jake Xerxes Fussell – Good and Green Again (Paradise of Bachelors); Joan Shelley – The Spur (No Quarter); The Weather Station – How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars (Fat Possum).

Hip-Hop: Babyface Ray –FACE and MOB (Wavy Gang/Empire); Denzel Curry – Melt My Eyez See Your Future (PH/Loma Vista); Earthgang – Ghetto Gods (Dreamville/Interscope); J.I.D – The Forever Story (Dreamville/Interscope); Rico Nasty – Las Ruinas (Sugar Trap); Vince Staples – Ramona Park Broke My Heart (Motown).

Indie-Pop: The Beths – Expert in a Dying Field (Carpark); Crystal Eyes – The Sweetness Restored (Bobo Integral); Darren Hanlon – Life Tax (Flippin Yeah); Florist – Florist (Double Double Whammy); Flowertown – Half Yesterday (Mt. St. Mtn.); Fortunato Durutti Marinetti – Memory’s Fool (Bobo Integral); Free Time – Jangle Jargon (Bedroom Suck); Friendship – Love the Stranger (Merge); Galore – Blush EP (Paisley Shirt); Gordon McIntyre – Even With the Support of Others (Lost Map); Grace Ives – Janky Star (True Panther Sounds); Hatchie – Giving the World Away (Secretly Canadian); Lande Hekt – House Without a View (Get Better); Nervous Twitch – Some People Never Change (Reckless Yes); Pete Astor – Time on Earth (Tapete);  Seasoning – The Condensation EP (self-released); Stella Donnelly – Flood (Secretly Canadian); The Stroppies – Levity (Tough Love).

Jazz: Anna Butterss – Activities (Colorfield); Binker & Moses – Feeding the Machine (Gearbox); I Am – Beyond (Division 81); Immanuel Wilkins – The 7th Hand (Blue Note); Jose Arimatea – Brejo Das Almas (Rocinante); Leo Genovese – Ritual (577); Luke Stewart’s Silt Trio – The Bottom (Cuneiform); Makaya McCraven – In These Times (International Anthem/Nonesuch); Nduduzo Makhathani – In the Spirit of Ntu (Universal); Playfield – Stepping Out (577); Tommaso Moretti – Inside Out (Bace); Tumi Mogorosi – Group Theory: Black Music (Mushroom Hour Half Hour/New Soil).

R&B: Amber Mark – Three Dimensions Deep (PMR/EMI); Ari Lennox – Age/sex/location (Dreamville); Ella Mai – Heart on My Sleeve (10 Summers); Syd – Broken Hearts Club (Columbia).

Reissues: Ana y Jaime – Dire a mi gente (Munster); The Leaf Library – Library Music: Volume One (wiaiwya); Lining Time – Strike (Hot Salvation LTD/Shadow World); The Pyramids – Aomawa: The 1970s Recordings (Strut); The Stark Reality – …Discovers Hoagy Carmichael’s Music Shop (Now-Again); Tinariwen – Kel Tinariwen (Wedge); Travesía – Ni Un Minuto Mas de Dolor (Vampisoul).

Surprise ‘best album yet’ candidates by alt-indie types who’ve been around: Craig Finn – A Legacy of Rentals(Positive Jams/Thirty Tigers); The Mountain Goats – Bleed Out (Merge); Rhett Miller – The Misfit (ATO); Sharon Van Etten – We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong (Jagjaguwar).

Zigzag/ragtag list of more favorites: Beach House – Once Twice Melody (Sub Pop); Bruno Morais – Poder Supremo (Sony); Charles Stepney – Step on Step (International Anthem); Claude Cooper – Myriad Sounds (Friendly); DJ Travella – Mr Mixondo (Nyege Nyege Tapes); Dorian Concept – What We Do for Others (Brainfeeder);Hagan – Textures (Python Syndicate); Iceboy Violet – ­The Vanity Project; It Was All a Dream – Never Forget You Are Free EP (Some Other Planet); Kyle Kidd – Soothsayer (American Dreams); Moor Mother – Jazz Codes (Anti); Nancy Mounir – Nozhet El Nofous (Simsara); Phelimuncasi – Ama Gogela (Nyege Nyege Tapes); Pongo – Sakidila (Universal); Rae Morris – Rachel @ Fairyland (RCA); Raveena – Asha’s Awakening (Warner); Sault – Today & Tomorrow (self-released); Say She She – Prism (Karma Chief); Sessa – Estrela Acesa (Mexican Summer); Tekla Peterson – Heart Press (Geographic North); Waajeed – Memoirs of Hi-Tech Jazz (Tresor); Wizkid – More Love Less Ego (Starboy/RCA).

Happy new year, one and all….

by Dave Heaton

“I used to think the world was true and now I’m not so sure” – Katie Pruitt, “Searching for the Truth”

2020 was a horrific year and if we’re pretending otherwise, God help us all. It was hard to find time to write about music in a year when “hanging in there” became the default answer to “how are you?”. The end-of-year horse-race feels so irrelevant when friends, family and fellow humans are struggling, hurting, dying. When the very fabric of ‘ordinary life’ is crumbling around us.

Yet it was an extraordinary year for music, at least as good as any recent year I can remember.

Generalizing, from my POV, 2020 was:

• Yet another year where women made the best music but received less of the promotional/industry attention (in some genres especially).
• A year dominated, again, by forward-thinking jazz centered around Chicago, London, and a handful of other major metropolitan areas. Jazz, old and new, was one of the best balms during this rollercoaster year.
• The year of disco. The pulse of disco ran through several of 2020’s best pop albums. Was it the absence of in-person community this year that made music about physical, communal connection so attractive?
• A year to look beyond the US, for exploring new music. While my list, tastes and life are US-focused, I went down many rabbit holes of music from around the world – especially African pop music.
• Yet another year demonstrating how hip-hop has replaced rock as the underlying spirit beneath our musical language, across genres, globally. Even if I had fewer-than-usual straightahead ‘rap albums’ on my list, it’s in the air throughout the list.
• A year where I had less time for nonsense. The best music felt sharpened to its own point, connected at every step to its purpose, no matter the genre or style it came wrapped in.

My favorite 30 albums of 2020 are below, with short descriptions. Albums beyond the 30 are grouped together thematically, bringing the total to 141 if I did my math right. This is not an all-inclusive list, I cut a good 50-100 more favorites for the sake of ‘readability’.

I also haven’t taken the time to do a singles list in 2020, though a list of great songs not on these albums would also be incredibly long. (I’ll sneak in 5 songs for good measure – Suboi “Bet On Me”; Lil Baby “The Bigger Picture”; Pongo “Wafu”; Iris DeMent “Going Down to Sing in Texas”; 70 Shine x Nacho “Domino.”)

Albums:

1. Katie Pruitt – Expectations

Genre descriptions like singer-songwriter, folk, country, etc. will go nowhere towards describing: 1)how precisely written these heart-baring songs are 2) her stunning singing 3) the powerful, timely themes about societal repression of individuality and the way that’s internalized by families to horrific impact… 4) …and the way our systems and traditions reinforce all of that repression and lack of mutual understanding 5) how touching and tender the songs describe human connections in the face of that axis of repression 6) how self-analytical and perceptive songs on the verge of sentimentality can be 7) the rebellious spirit within traditional song structures 8) the way a great singer can feel like a friend, confidant, supporter during the course of a simple song 9) how forcefully it introduces Katie Pruitt as a star/anti-star-in-the-making (one can only hope).

2. Cindy – Free Advice

The San Francisco-based band Cindy makes patient, whispery pop that seems to be speaking its own language. Songs that feel wrapped in mystery, almost code-like, but underneath are simple observational stories and letters. Its music that seems easily dismissed with labels or comparisons (‘slowcore’ and similar) but spend much genuine time with it, and its charms and puzzles will win you over.

3. Mourning [A] BLKstar – The Cycle

A Cleveland Ohio collective probing the inherent injustice of America, and current end-times mood, within heady, murky soul-funk-electronics-etc workouts that also double as complicated love/betrayal songs. However you describe it, it’s powerful stuff doing deep work on listeners’ minds, bodies and hearts. They describe themselves as, “a multi-generational, gender and genre non-conforming amalgam of Black Culture dedicated to servicing the stories and songs of the apocalyptic diaspora.”

4. Jessie Ware – What’s Your Pleasure?

Disco ‘returned’ in 2020, — providing a virtual sense of body-focused, visceral community during a year lacking it – and this album from the UK pop singer Jessie Ware was its apex. Self-consciously in tribute yet fully, vitally living up to any standards those stylistic references might set. Transcendent, beat to beat.

5. Luke Stewart – Exposure Quintet

A quintet album wrapped up the language and philosophy of free improvisation, which delivers in a diverse and energetic manner all of the listening pleasures which that creative freedom sparks and offers. It starts amped-up and spreads out along the way, as if meant to demonstrate how far focused, creative improv can take us.

6. Shabaka and the Ancestors – We Are Sent Here By History

Saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings has been behind much of the best music of the past few years – this time leading his ensemble through Afrocentric, spiritual jazz oriented towards looking back at what’s been lost and forward at what’s possible.

7. Luke Schneider – Altar of Harmony

Steel-guitar ambient – taking sounds you think you might recognize and stretching them out to be meditative, beautiful, patient yet also impatient, unsettled, unsure.

8. Alabaster DePlume – To Cy and Lee: Instrumentals, Vol 1.
The best balm for anxious nerves in 2020 was this collection of elegant jazz reveries, inventive and surprising within a placid sunrise/sunset sort of atmosphere.

9. Little Big Town – Nightfall

Fleetwood Mac harmonies within sentimental, carefully crafted now-country sounds has been Little Big Town’s way for a long time now, but here they’ve reached an apex, transcending the intellectual and emotional limitations of their genre’s current state and displaying a well-rounded, almost-wisdom.

10. Fenne Lily – Breach

On her second album Fenne Lily expanded her sound far beyond the ‘indie-folk’ label she’s been given. A gorgeous album, with a layered pop sound. Lonely songs wrestling with anxiety, isolation, and memory — essentially the world we’ll all living in right now – handled with panache and guts.

11. Moses Boyd – Dark Matter

Led by drummer/producer/composer Boyd, another funky London jazz masterwork – this one especially eclectic, with big-band buoyancy melting into almost trip-hop club music. Moody poetry, electric guitar and complex rhythms are all in the mix.

12. Ariana Grande – Positions

The pop superstar’s latest – her best — is personal and playful, its erotic wordplay and subtly experimental melodic forms lending the album its own individual style. Trauma is woven throughout as a theme, the creativity a form of healing.

13. Keeley Forsyth – Debris

Debris is a title and a mood (opening lyric: “the streets are filled with debris”). Forsyth’s voice pierces in stunning but also unsettling ways, while the songs traffic in the same feeling, embodying and arising from depression.

14. Azana – Ingoma

The young South African singer Azana has an elegant way with pop/soul ballads evocative at times of ‘90s R&B, at others of something smooth like Sade. Ingoma means “song”, and beautiful songs, sung well, is the clear focus.

15. Angel Bat Dawid & Tha Brotherhood – Live

A raw, powerful live album, recorded in Berlin – channeling deep rage against racism’s pervasiveness, at home and abroad.

16. HHY & The Kampala Unit – Lithium Blast

The Uganda underground/electronic label Nyege Nyege Tapes’ releases tend towards beyond-hyper eclecticism. Lithium Blast is smoother yet at least as exciting – a futuristic vibe among vibes, and full of surprises.

17. Killah Priest – Rocket to Nebula

Beatless hip-hop, intergalactic meanderings from a cult hero and one-time Wu-Tang affiliate who is off on his own trajectory, always and forever

18. John Carroll Kirby – My Garden

Kirby has worked with Solange and Frank Ocean, among others; on his debut album the music’s perhaps more in step with ‘70s R&B that those two newer artists draw from. My Garden is sneaky in its persistence, the soul-jazz grooves that take a simple melody and mood and keep on it until it’s hard to shake.

19. Taylor Swift – evermore

Less of an ambitious showpiece than her other 2020 album Folklore, but low-key better, evermore is Swift at her most comfortable yet precise.  

20. Playboi Carti – Whole Lotta Red

Tongue-twisting hip-hop stylist with a vampire-punk demeanor amps up the gloom and the disavowal of convention, in service of playful nihilism. His music seems so dumb, until you realize the loss and emotion within the anger – which he only lets you see if you keep with him through each track of this uncompromising epic.

21. Eddie Chacon – Pleasure, Joy & Happiness

A ‘90s “one-hit” pop-soul singer I don’t remember returns close to three decades later with a stunning collection of stylish, strangely sci-fi songs chronicling human pain. “My Mind Is Out of Its Mind”, reads one representative title.

22. Lewsberg – In This House

This Dutch band lives in the VU-Feelies zone of a locked-in electric guitar groove that serves as a platform for their noncomformist, anti-rock sort of rock, tied to ‘small’ stories and musings about life.

23. Caitlyn Smith – Supernova

Heartbreak anthems and detailed portraiture, from a singer who marries songwriter-y precision to belt-it-out showmanship; country music, but always resistant to getting too comfortable.

24. Tan Cologne – Cave Vaults on the Moon in New Mexico

New Mexican bohemians playing UFO pop daydreams.

25. Tiwa Savage – Celia

Longtime, accomplished African singer breaks worldwide, on Motown, with a personal album (named after her mother) where the melodies and beats are light and bubbly, yet the subject matter goes deeper than is at first apparent.

26. Josephine Foster – No Harm Done

Mystic/folk singer with an extensive discography and fairytale voice records in Nashville, puts some gorgeous depth and form around her songcraft, tilting it in a grounded, almost-blues/country direction. One of her best.

27. Jamael Dean – The Ished Tree

Delicate almost to an extreme, this is a gorgeous solo piano jazz album teaming with not just skill but a distinctive, calming atmosphere of its own.

28. Koney – Koney

A crackerjack power-pop band (The ACBS) has turned into a creator of minimalist, enigmatic soft-pop.

29. Caleb Landry Jones – The Mother Stone

Pretentious art-rock s**t from a pretentious movie actor/bohemian. Nightmarish circus music that I love and then want to shut out of my mind forever.

30. The Growth Eternal – Bass Tone Paintings

The title says it all – bass that chases itself into a blissful oblivion, meditations on the world around us, messy as it is.

ALSO RECOMMENDED (in b.s. groupings vaguely by genre, topic or keywords)

‘AMERICANA’ [US mythology exposed]

• David Dondero – The Filter Bubble Blues
• Kahil El’Zabar – America the Beautiful
• Lonnie Holley – National Freedom
• ­Terry Allen & the Panhandle Mystery Band – Just Like Moby Dick

BEATS & RHYMES

• 42 Dugg – Young & Turnt Vol 2
• Boldy James and The Alchemist – The Price of Tea in China 
• Boldy James & Sterling Toles – Manger on McNichols
• Clipping. – Visions of Bodies Being Burned
• Denzel Curry and Kenny Beats – Unlocked
• Father – Come Outside We Not Gone Jump You
• Freddie Gibbs & The Alchemist – Alfredo
• Gunna – Wunna
• Mozzy – Beyond Bulletproof
• Polo G – The Goat
• Rico Nasty – Nightmare Vacation
• Roy Kinsey – Kinsey: A Memoir
• Shabazz Palaces – The Don of Diamond Dreams
• Rod Wave – Pray 4 Love
• Run the Jewels – RTJ4
• ShooterGang Kony – Red Paint Reverend
• Yhung T.O. – Jupiter

SHINY AND RUSTIC (country-ish)

• Ashley McBryde – Never Will
• Ashley Ray – Pauline
• Brett Eldredge – Sunday Drive
• Cam – The Otherside
• Hailey Whitters – The Dream
• Indigo Girls – Look Long
• Ingrid Andress – Lady Like
• Jaime Wyatt – Neon Cross
• Jerry David DeCicca – The Unlikely Optimist and His Domestic Adventures
• Joe Ely – Love in the Midst of Mayhem
• Maddie & Tae – The Way It Feels
• Taylor Swift – Folklore

PROGRESS (jazz)

• Ambrose Akinmusire – On the Tender Spot of Every Calloused Moment
• Anteloper – Tour Beats, Vol 1
• Asher Gamedze – Dialectic Soul
• Carlos Nino & Miguel Atwood-Ferguson – Chicago Waves
• Dezron Douglas & Brandee Younger – Force Majeure
• Gil Scott-Heron & Makaya McCraven – We’re New Again
• Irreversible Entanglements – Who Sent You?
• James Brandon Lewis Quartet – Molecular
• Jeff Parker – Suite for Max Brown
• Jeremy Cunningham – The Weather Up There
• Kamaal Williams – Wu Hen
• Makaya McCraven – Universal Beings Sides E & F
• Mary Halvorson’s Code Girl – Artlessly Failing
• Nubya Garcia – The Source
• Rob Mazurek Exploding Star Orchestra – Dimensional Stardust

MOOD (instrumental/ambient/experimental/etc)

• Asa Tone – Temporary Music
• Bing & Ruth – Species
• David Bird – Mirrors
• Ezra Feinberg – Recumbent Speech
• Frankie Reyes – Originalitos
• Gabriel Birnbaum – Nightwater
• J. Pavone String Ensemble – Lost & Found
• Jonas Munk – Minimum Resistance
• M. Sage – Blessing Redux (vivo relief)
• Pole – Fading
• Sarah Davachi – Cantus, Descent
• Sarah Louise – Earth and Its Contents
• Windy & Carl – Allegiance and Conviction

POP! (of various stripes)

• Andrew ‘Hotdog’ Kaffer – Head Band
• Anna McClellan – I Saw First Light
• Astrid S – Leave It Beautiful
• Chloe x Halle – Ungodly Hour
• Charli XCX – How I’m Feeling Now
• Demae – Life Works Out…Usually
• Dua Lipa – Future Nostalgia
• Ego Ella May – Honey For Wounds
• Georgia – Seeking Thrills
• H. Moon – Trustblood
• Haim – Women in Music Pt III
• Jessy Lanza – All the Time
• Kabza De Small – I Am the King of Amapiano
• Katie Dey – mydata
• Kelly Lee Owens – Inner Song
• The Legends – The Legends
• Perfume Genius – Set My Heart On Fire, Immediately
• Pia Fraus – Empty Parks
• Sarkodie – Black Love
• Terry vs Tori – Heathers
• Thibault – Or Not Thibault
• The Very Most – Needs Help

“ROCK” (or maybe these are still pop, I’m not sure…)

• 2^nd Grade – Hit to Hit
• The Beths – Jump Rope Gazers
• Gum Country – Somewhere
• Lee Ranaldo & Raul Refree – Names of North End Women
• The Mountain Goats – Songs for Pierre Chuvin
• Nana Grizol – South Somewhere Else
• Peel Dream Magazine – Agitprop Alterna
• Porridge Radio – Every Bad
• Shopping – All or Nothing
• The Stroppies – Look Alive
• Stutter Steps – Reeling
• Torres – Silver Tongue
• Wednesday – I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone

SONGS (“Singer-songwriter” aka intimate music by solo artists not already above)

• Adam Selzer – Slow Decay
• Allegra Krieger – The Joys of Forgetting
• Angelica Garcia – Cha Cha Palace
• Anna Burch – If You’re Dreaming
• Becca Mancari – The Greatest Part
• Christian Lee Hutson – Beginners
• Darren Hayman – Home Time
• Emma Kupa – It Will Come Easier
• Jeff London – Trouble Trust
• Jennifer Castle – Monarch Season
• Kath Bloom – Bye Bye These Are the Days
• Mac Miller – Circles
• Nick Cave – Idiot Prayer
• Squirrel Flower – I Was Born Swimming
• Sweet Whirl – How Much Works

HAPPY NEW YEAR!